I understand and better accept now the process I have been going through since February. This is to draw me closer to God, which has also taken me out of the church. Not a lot of irony there, given how far from God the churches generally are. The Christian tradition I was nurtured in, if it can be called tradition, was something quite radical. In many cases it could be called para-church, or even underground Christianity.
There was a lot of Pentecostal and Charismatic influence, with the baptism and gifts of the Holy Spirit being prominent in the collective experience of the Christians I was fellowshipping with. It was an already given that our earliest journey into the Christian life would begin with conversion, where we actually gave our lives to Jesus Christ in a spirit of repentance and often personal brokenness. This was of course the original and very beautiful experience that was flipped into the crass caricature of born-again Christianity. This was the open portal that brought us into a relationship with God, a sense of being clean and pure and innocent again. Often with tears, always with joy.
I cannot think of anything more beautiful than coming into a sense of closeness and right relation with God. But something so full of love and peace and joy would only naturally be a sitting duck for those in the church who would cynically manipulate the Christian experience, as well as the secular media just licking their chops to report as cynically and degradingly as possible on something so lovely. People experiencing genuine spiritual rebirth, since the mid seventies or so, came to be villainized and stereotyped as stupid fundamentalists, uneducated evangelicals, naive, and easily brain-washed and manipulated. They became rounded into the same camp or category occupied by right-wing politicians, homophobes, misogynists, pro-lifers, and even at times white supremacists.
There is unfortunately a lot of truth behind this stereotyping, and Christians have often unfortunately been unwittingly complicit in their own disparagement And progressive Christians in mainstream churches have been very quick at distancing themselves from their, shall we call them, awkward country cousins. But people tend to be intellectually lazy and very ready to dump others into broad and sweeping categories. Or, it isn't only the fundamentalist born-again Christians that are often guilty of black and white thinking. But this also became a sure and deadly move towards demonizing personal spiritual experience of the presence of God, since in order to experience God and the beauty of spiritual rebirth one would be assumed to have taken leave of their senses, or at least of their rational mind. And we all want to seem intelligent, progressive, reasonable and well-educated, don't we, Gentle Reader?
When I was a teenage Jesus freak, I remember being around a huge diversity of people, some well-educated and with doctoral degrees, others very working class, some semi-literate. What brought us together was a common experience of a God who loves us and through our powerful experiences of his presence in our lives that we could become vectors and channels of the divine love to one another and to others. This was something so beautiful that it seemed only destined to be undermined and destroyed by bitter and envious cynicism.
Of course, those times of intense spiritual renewal are always going to be episodic and temporary. Nobody can live forever in those sublime heights of ecstasy, nor are we meant to. But there remains a kind of banked underground fire that still smoulders in some of our hearts, and this very fire is but waiting to reveal itself again, and just as in the previous times, the love, power and holiness of God will be again manifested in our lives. Until then, it is pray, wait, hope and be faithful with what we already have.
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