This installment about my blended path describes some of the early stages in my growth from someone who would once not even read Harry Potter books to someone who consorts with witches.
As I said in the first installment, my first step outside of my comfort zone and expanding spiritually was with tarot cards. I told how explaining to my wife Kristin was one of the hardest things I have had to do in recent years. I first had to see for myself that the using the cards could be compatible with the Christian life, something not necessarily used for fortune telling or forbidden practices, but able to carry wisdom and even God’s Spirit like books, movies, music, and art. I created a website where I linked every tarot card to a biblical concept and I discussed the cards with others in an online forum. The next step came as I began practicing a little yoga and meditation. I listened to the music of Tibetan singing bowls and to guided meditations online, and I listened to songs containing the Heart Sutra and the Gayatri Mantra. I even learned a few mantras and chanted them while walking for exercise through the trees around our house. gate, gate, gone, gone paragate, gone beyond parasamgate, altogether gone bodhi, svaha! O what an awakening! In a local bookstore, I came across a book called Sophia Rising, in which Monette Chilson describes how she blended her Christianity with a love for yoga and the divine feminine. She seems to have gone through a few phases, just as I did. At first, she says she just tacked on Bible verses or renamed yoga poses to please church people, but later found that her beliefs intertwined and complemented one another. On the yoga mat, she felt a mystical connection to the divine feminine, which she found described in her existing faith as the wisdom of Sophia, the dove of the Holy Spirit, and the mother heart of God. She discovered yoga to be a bridge between faiths and cultures, and describes her overall blending in this way: “I could say that I subscribe to Buddhist philosophy (detachment, awareness, etc.), practice yoga (all eight limbs), and put my faith in Jesus who illuminates and embodies the perfect grace of Sophia.” She adds, “Contextualizing a specific faith in a larger world view is inherently difficult.” Somewhat emboldened, I made up a Goddess wheel of the year, picking freely from the many names and faces of the divine feminine, printing out their images and pasting them around the rim of the wheel. The hub at center of the Wheel represents Dea or Goddess as the white light, which sprays outward to the rim, as through a prism, all the various colors that we see though our human filters and cultures. The facets around the rim can also represent seasons of the year, stages of life--Maiden, Lover, Mother, Crone--or the four elements--Fire, Water, Earth, and Air. Kristin was patient with me burning incense and meditating, but when I ordered some meditation beads around Christmastime, she began to get nervous and said these words, which came out like bullets: “I hope you are taking these captive to Christ.” To be fair, I know now she was feeling nervous because I was not talking about the changes I was going through, even though she could obviously see the effects. I was in a lot of cognitive dissonance myself. But finally something happened that gave me a needed breakthrough of peace. It happened in church one Sunday. Before attending that morning, I had prayed for a sign that I was on the right path. The sign came through a drawing a child was making during the sermon. The pastor’s wife held up the picture at the end of the service. At the top of the picture was a circle around the word GOD with and arrow connecting it to a bigger circle below that had GOD written inside five times. Along the left side were some smaller circles with Xs crossing through them. The pastor’s wife explained that the child had told her the smaller circles were mistakes, and that she was so touched that God loves us as children in spite of our mistakes. I, however, was completely blown away as the picture seemed to be a message bringing peace to my cognitive dissonance. Like the analogy of the prism and colors or the hub and wheel, the picture immediately spoke to my heart of the transcendent realm of God, the transcendent Brahma or transcendent YHWH—represented by the upper circle—as well as the realm where we see many aspects and faces of God—represented by the lower circle. And those crossed out circles showed me that we probably often get things wrong entirely. These were some of the first steps and phases I went through as I began walking this blended path. As Monette Chilson writes, “Contextualizing a specific faith in a larger world view is inherently difficult.”
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March 2021
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