Thoughts on the church, a religious journey and real hippies

Disclaimer: This is just an attempt at understanding my own spiritual process through bloggishness...I fully understand I'm no expert on the development of the Church.

The modern church seems to lack a spiritual wildness and passion that I feel is soul based. Why? To me it seems a great majority of Christians, protestant and catholic alike, practice a mentally-based rational and predictably dogmatic religious lifestyle that is marked by a studied weariness and stoic suppression of their emotional being. They think this is how the Bible instructs them to live and they have been taught that emulating this lifestyle is a sign of virtue, chastity, humility and piety. I think non-denominational churches were a reaction against this “be dead to the world” religious dogma. They practiced a more emotional oriented Christianity and taught followers to love and live freely, conquer the world for Christ and worship a God of abundance. Unhappily, the result was a materialistic superficiality that manifested itself in socially organized and entertainment oriented mega church corporations, an explosion in television evangelism and the selling of popularized Christianity in politics and the marketplace.

The other side of that coin was the birth of charismatic and later apostolic churches in which personal, emotion filled spiritual experiences with the Holy Spirit were held as higher truths than biblically based theology and ecstatic revelations of charismatic leaders alone set the course for the church. This movement had some positive effects on Christianity as it brought the Gifts of the Spirit back onto the playing field. The negative results of this movement were a tendency towards addictive desire for psychologically induced “spiritual” ecstasy, reliance on a type of controlled mass hysteria, lack of accountability resulting in decisions based on faulty or irresponsible sources and worship of and abuses by certain charismatic leaders.

Maybe the new resurgence of interest in the early church manifested in certain church based organizations and the home church movement offers a simpler and wilder heart/soul based community to a body of believers longing for a more dynamic relationship with Jesus, God and the Holy Spirit. I hope so. I haven’t been a part of this kind of group long enough yet to know.

I just returned from a long journey.

My relationship with Jesus started when I was a child. Looking back I can see that my early commitment to Christ was an anchor that held strong through the storms of another spiritual journey that started 15 years ago when I stopped going to church. In my 29th year, I had begun to doubt the validity of my belief in God. I felt I was just substituting a spiritual high for true spiritual realization at the charismatic church I attended. I also didn’t like the superficiality and judgmental attitudes I saw in the church, I felt I had been indoctrinated as a child and did not own my belief and I didn’t feel women were highly valued in the churches I attended. I thought I left the Christian church because I wanted to find the Truth. I think the main reason I left was because I was ashamed about some other life choices I’d recently made and I couldn’t face living a lie.

During this period I retained a belief in God and an oddly rational interpretation of spiritual reality. I'm not sure what I was searching for but I was curious and open to different beliefs. What I felt were indoctrinated ideologies began to fall away and I stopped fearing, judging and condemning those who believed differently than I did. Being a poor student and a singer I needed money. Through various connections at the college I was hired to sing at churches (Unity, Religious Science and Christian Science) which I believed were cults. I was afraid of these people’s possible evil influence. I remember when I first walked in the door of the Religious Science church my heart was beating like a drum. I soon discovered the people were genuinely friendly and accepting. They didn’t judge or condemn me. Most of them lived simple lives, felt they were on a spiritual journey and spent more time than most of the Christians I knew in meditation and service to others and their church community. Many of them were artists and intellectuals and so I eventually felt quite comfortable spending time with them and learning about their views on life and God. After about a year of performing at these churches I saw the flip side of these religions and realized the Truth I sought was not to be found there. My feeling was these were religions based essentially on reason, materialism and intellect and the spirituality I sensed was not filling but left these believers with a hunger and a longing they didn’t fully understand.

I wasn’t surprised New Age spirituality proved to be insubstantial. What I did take away from that experience was a loss of my compulsive childhood dread and fear of death, sin and hell. I no longer lay awake wondering if Christ would return and I’d be left behind because of some unknown defect in my character. I no longer felt an amorphous guilt or saw God as wrathful. These religions spoke of a God that was kind and a spiritual reality that held endless possibility. I felt as if the burden of fear I had suffered from as a child was lifted off my shoulders.

During this period, and earlier during three years when I lived in the mountains, I also tried to understand God rationally. I read different philosophers, took comparative religion courses and read the holy books of the major religions. I studied myth, history and the cultural evolution of World religions and religious practices. I debated with friends and acquaintances to try to understand what they based their various beliefs on. I believed that if I could stretch my mind far enough I could understand the concept of God and then I would find the Truth and be able to truly believe in spiritual reality. In the end, I realized I couldn’t understand God rationally. Back to square one.

Eastern religion began to interest me because of its antiquity. By chance my boyfriend at the time had a sister who was a devotee of a Hindu guru. This woman happened to be visiting from India on the same weekend we were performing in the Bay Area, so we visited the ashram at the sister’s insistence. We participated in the main ceremony, her devi bava, which was very beautiful with flowers and incense and a lot of singing. I felt as if I had gone back in time a thousand years. There was an ancient primal earth energy in the room that did seem to have real power. At the time I thought the amazing thing about this guru was that she sat for hours until each person in the room has a chance to go up and embrace her and receive her darshan or blessing. I ended up visiting the ashram several times and once even did a weekend retreat. I wanted to see what was true there. It was on the weekend retreat that some of the children began filling me in on the reality of the situation…out of the mouth of babes. My friend who is East Indian and was raised a Hindu also later expressed his disillusionment with and disbelief of modern gurus and felt this brand of Hinduism was being blatantly marketed to a naïve American clientele.

What attracts people to Hinduism is that there is a real spiritual energy in devout Hinduism, Hindus are basically good and gentle people and the Hindu lifestyle is very healthy. In regards to the spiritual power one feels, I suspect is it is a world based power. The focus in Hinduism, as in Buddism, is to again use the power of the mind to defeat the limitations of the mind and body and thereby reach a state of detachment that allows the body to be an open vessel to universal energy and ultimate self-realization…emphasis on self, but also loss of self. This spirituality inherent in Hinduism is of the world because God is seen as being both the world and the underlying force that animates the universe. I think the primary difference between Christianity and Hinduism then are their concepts of God and God’s relationship to man; 1) Christianity claims God as creator became man in order to be one with man. Man can be one with God by submitting his will to God and thereby accepting God’s free gift of redemption from sin through Christ and 2) In Hinduism man reaches toward an impersonal God, manifested as creation/universal energy, in order to be one with God through man’s purification of his self (freedom from attachment to sin) through right living and meditation. “The self-controlled person, moving among objects, with his senses free from attachment and malevolence and brought under his own control, attains tranquility.” Bhagavad Gita II.64. I gained many positive things from my experiences with Hinduism including a desire for true compassion and service to others, a deeper interest in mysticism and a broader consideration of the nature of God.

I just finished Donald Miller book "Blue Like Jazz" and he talks about hanging out with hippies, claiming it was a cool, freeing experience. I appreciate his perspective but I don’t think he lived with them long enough or deeply enough to really know what that lifestyle is about. I even kinda wonder if the guys he hung out with were really hippies. Who knows. First of all, most of the real hippies from the 60’s and 70’s became disillusioned, “sold out” and are now CEO’s of their own companies. Those old timers who still live the true hippy lifestyle are few. Yeah, you see people dressed like hippies now but it’s a trend.

I have a friend who is a real hippy and lived in a type of transitional commune when I met him. In my experience my friend’s brand of hippy has many good points but isn’t what I'd call “cool”. In fact most of the real hippies I’ve met are not especially happy campers. They say they were happy in the 1960’s and life was cool then but it’s not cool now. Yes, hippies are really laid back, truly value peace, create incredible gardens, help their brothers and sisters in need, live simple, healthy and “green” lifestyles, value mother earth, are generally artists, some of them engage in interesting intellectual conversations and they're generally pretty darn accepting of others. The downside of hippy lifestyle, as I saw it, was most of the folks who lived in the commune 15 years ago existed on the margins of society because they worked only to subsist, many were on welfare and most lived with some anxiety about tangling with the law or government over certain questionable activities they or their friends were engaging in. By necessity and choice they lived for the moment. I guess that can seem “cool” on the surface, and one could even argue it's a more biblical lifestyle ie. "consider the lilies of the field...", but reality bites especially when you can’t afford health care.

In regards to religious beliefs, many, though not all, of the hippy folks I met had an ephemeral and rather superstitious sense of spiritual reality and, when pressed, didn’t seem to feel confident in their belief systems. But they were honest about what they did and didn't believe and were open to discussion. I enjoyed visiting the commune and I admire them for having the courage to live an alternative lifestyle. Real hippies are trying to realize an ancient dream in a society that becomes less human every day.

So, it’s been a strange journey...

I've come full circle. God was patient, waiting while I chose the long road back. The journey has left me grateful I can see my belief with new eyes, and now that God has taken me back into his arms, even more grateful that I can truly say, and only by His mysterious grace, I believe what I profess.