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“So many people have found themselves on the outside of all
they once knew related to church and religion and often are
treated like misfits, heretics, and backsliders. It can feel lonely and
disorienting, with no one to talk to along the way. Rachelle MeeChapman is exactly the right kind of guide on the journey toward
spiritual freedom. Her vulnerability, honesty, and wisdom offer
hope, challenge, and encouragement for those who have left the
confines of organized religion but long for a vibrant, tangible faith.
With experiential exercises, powerful stories, and creative ways for
readers to connect with their own soul, Relig-ish is a much-needed
tool in the ever-changing world of faith.”
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— Kathy Escobar, co-pastor of The Refuge, spiritual director,
and author of Faith Shift: Finding Your Way Forward When
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“Several years ago I spoke with Rachelle over the phone because she
was doing something I was doing: facilitating an online community
for people going through major transitions in their spiritual lives.
We are on a similar mission: to walk with those who struggle with
organized religion. I respect her courage, her integrity, and her
honesty. I believe, as she admits, that she’s ‘a person who is deeply
concerned with the state of the soul.’ Let this book feed you.”
—David Hayward, nakedpastor.com, artist, writer, and
founder of The Lasting Supper
“You’re religious, mad, and human! Fortunately for you, this book
can fix the first two—the third you’ll have to live with.”
— Jim Henderson, author of Jim and Casper Go to Church
“I have been privileged to know Rachelle from the very early days
of her remarkable story, carving her way forward with integrity
and curiosity through dark times and in times of delight. This
book captures that journey and offers so much room for hope.
Practical, hard-won wisdom is discovered and imbedded in the
sacred ordinary moments and spaces of each day. Rachelle comes
as a sage guide and invites us to discover and honor what we value
so that we can join the Force that is already on the move.”
— Kelly Bean, author of How to Be a Christian Without Going
to Church, and co-founder/director, African Road
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“Rachelle Mee-Chapman is a spiritual soul sister. Whether you’re
dealing with a case of post-traumatic church syndrome or looking
for your own tribe, Relig-ish will help guide you along the way.”
— Reba Riley, author of Post-Traumatic Church Syndrome
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“Reading Relig-ish is like sitting down with a sage friend. Rachelle
Mee-Chapman has taken the conversation about being spiritual but
not religious to a refreshing new perspective. She helps waywardformerly-churched souls determine how to create spiritual practices
that are right-fit and authentic. Relig-ish is for those of us who didn’t
really lose our way after we stepped away from institutionalized
faith. We just wandered into a great big wilderness full of mystery.
Relig-ish is a helpful guide to have for the journey. “
— Pam Hogeweide, mixed-media artist, blogger, and author
of Unladylike
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“Although I don’t subscribe to any one religion, I’ve always felt a
deep connection to something greater than myself. And I’m not
the only one. I’ve met many other seekers over the years, just
like myself, who felt the divine but just didn’t get the feels for
organized religion. If you’ve ever felt that way too, then Relig-ish
from Rachelle Mee-Chapman is the book you’ve been waiting for.
The author shares her own story of leaving the church and defining
her spirituality on her terms. She encourages the reader to examine
their beliefs, redefine what spirituality means, and find their own
individualized path too. With provocative questions, thoughtful
practices, and wise advice, Mee-Chapman delivers a powerful book
that will help all seekers live a sacred life in a way that is unique to
them alone. If you are questioning your path or have already begun
a new spiritual journey, Relig-ish might just be the wise guidebook
to keep by your side as you move forward.”
— Theresa Reed, author of The Tarot Coloring Book
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“My work is filled with women seeking ‘community,’ ‘belonging,’
and ‘home’— words that church often filled for many of us, or those
who came before us, but that don’t seem to fit anymore. As Rachelle
gives voice to those hungers, and so many others that humanity
still needs even if we’re not religious, reading this book was deeply
comforting and enlightening. Comforting, because she validates
and says out loud the thoughts, fears, hopes, and questions that
bounce in our hearts and minds; enlightening, because she stretches
how we think, shines a light on possible next steps, and grants a
permission most of us didn’t even know we have been waiting for.”
— Shasta Nelson, founder of GirlFriendCircles.com and
author of Frientimacy: How to Deepen Friendships for Lifelong
Health and Happiness
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Relig-ish
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For my daughters,
who deserve to live in a world
that acknowledges their goodness
and connects them to endless inspiration.
Relig-ish
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SOULFUL LIVING IN A
SPIRITUAL-BUT-NOT-RELIGIOUS
WORLD
RACHELLE MEE-CHAPMAN
Copyright ©2016 by Rachelle Mee-Chapman.
All rights reserved. For permission to reuse content, please contact
Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA
01923, (978) 750-8400, www.copyright.com.
Cover art and design by Jesse Turri.
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ChalicePress.com
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Print: 9780827203020
EPUB: 9780827203037
EPDF: 9780827203044
Printed in the United States of America
CONTENTS
Welcome xi
Introduction: Are You Relig-ish?
1
Section I: The Relig-ish Toolkit
9
Speak Dialog
10
2. Embrace Mystery
13
3. Get Curious
16
4. Abandon Beliefs
5. Identify Values
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1. 19
22
26
Section II: The Deconstructive Process
31
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Practical Practices for Identifying Core Values
6. Old Bones
34
7. Self-Harming Theologies
38
8. The Shadow Side of Servanthood & Sacrifice
41
Section III: The Reconstructive Process
45
9. 47
Why You Miss Church
10. Discovering Your Creed
52
Practical Practices for Writing Your Own Creed
58
11. Self-care as Soulcare
61
12. Living Rituals
66
13. Not Disciplined, But Practiced
74
14. Reconstructing Community
77
Practical Practices for Saying Good-bye
87
15. Sacred Spaces
91
100
Section IV: Permission Granted
103
16. The Artist Formerly Known as God
108
17. Right-Fit Sacred Texts
110
18. The Problem with Prayer
114
19. Blessed to Bow
116
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Practical Practices for Tabletop Spirituality
Acknowledgments119
Need More Support?
121
About Rachelle
123
Notes
125
WELCOME
We are all just walking each other home.
—Ram Dass
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If you’ve never been to church . . .
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This book is for creative thinkers who want to develop right-fit
spiritual practices for themselves and their families without going
to church. Most readers who come to these pages will have some
kind of religious background. But not everyone who seeks a new
way of being soulful in an increasingly post-religious world, is in
fact, post-religious. You, for instance, may have never crossed the
threshold of church (or temple or mosque.)
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If you are coming to these pages with just the lightest bit of religious
background or with no religious background at all, welcome! This
book will be helpful to you on your “relig-ish” journey. The JudeoChristian influence on Western society is invasive—a part of our
cultural DNA. Even if you were not raised in a cathedral, you still
discover religious assumptions and moral messaging living deep
in your bones. These influences will need to be unraveled, tangles
combed out, so you can see what beliefs, practices, and priorities
are yours and which are religious leftovers you’ve unconsciously
acquired.
Unlike those of us who grew up in religious settings, your first steps
on the relig-ish path will not be as tremulous. With less to unpack,
you will be able to pick up new discoveries with greater ease. You
will deconstruct faster and reconstruct sooner. Fear will be less
xi
likely to snatch at your collar and haul you backward when you
try to take a step forward. In fact, fear may not bother you at all!
If you grew up in a pew . . .
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If your family went to midnight Mass or gave up chocolate for Lent,
this relig-ish exploration comes with a different set of curiosities
and challenges. If you’ve worn a True Love Waits ring or left room
for Jesus on a date or tossed out all your secular music, there’s a
lot more to unpack. Lapsed Catholics, Recovering Evangelicals,
Previously Orthodox readers, and anyone else who is post-church
will find in these pages a place to laugh over shared stories, rage
over common injuries, and joyfully explore new ways to “live and
move, and have our being.”1
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I wanted to take just a moment to acknowledge that if you are
coming from an especially conservative religious place, this journey
you have set out on can be frightening. There are family ties to
consider, your own deep traditions, and quite possibly—if you are
in a church or parachurch employment— your livelihood could
even be at stake.
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So before we go any further, let me write a few things in these first
pages to encourage you, shore you up, and dose you with a shot
of hope.
When I first began my faith shift, I stumbled upon the documentary,
Who Does She Think She Is? It is a film about women artists and
how they have had to blaze a path without many mentors to guide
them. One of the artists, Angela Williams, a stage performer who
was also the cofounder of a church, said something that made me
gasp with recognition. She said:
“I am in the middle of the forest. There are no paths.
I have no companions. And I hear wolves.”2
This feeling of unknown and unaccompanied exploration was
familiar to me. It might be familiar to you, too. For most of us
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Relig-ish
who grew up steeped in church, the process of de-constructing
and re-constructing faith takes not months, but years. For me, it
took nearly a decade, and doubt and fear often howled like wolves.
But in the pages of this book, you will find you are not alone. The
guidance found here is gathered from the collective insight of wise
friends and thoughtful clients and the generous and compassionate
members of my online community.
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You can ask a question and share your story on the Relig-ish
Facebook page (facebook.com/becomingreligish), or share
more privately in our online community for women, Flock
(rachellemeechapman.com/flock). We stand, perhaps, a few steps
ahead of you on the journey, beckoning you on, shining a light
on the path and serving as your travel companions.
Let’s hold hands and walk each other home.
With warmth,
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Rachelle Mee-Chapman
Welcome
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INTRODUCTION
Are You Relig-ish?
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In her essay “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,”3 author Anne Lamott
tells a story in which her friends tell her she is Christian in the
way that some people are Jew-ish. You know, those lucky secular
Jews who get all the cultural goodies—the traditions, and meals,
and lighting of candles—with none of the squishing themselves
into beliefs that don’t really fit. But Lamott says she is not like that.
She accepts the whole thing on faith. She’s 100 percent Christian.
There is no “ish.”
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But what if there were something in between secularism and the
religious institutions of Christianity? What if you could have a
saint’s icon next to your little goddess statue? What if you could
hum “How Great Thou Art” while in a yoga pose? What if you could
have the rituals, and the values, and the passing-on of meaningful
traditions without the dogma, and the creed, and getting up on
Sunday mornings?
What if you could be relig-ish?
Me? I’m relig-ish. I grew up attending church services and parochial
schools. I spent years getting a master’s degree in theology. I fought
to become the first woman to be ordained in my denomination,
blazing a trail for others. I lived thirty-plus years in the church,
and served for fifteen years at one particular, beloved church. I
put in long hours writing sermons, hosting small groups, running
children’s programs, and leading devotions.
Then, like outgrown clothes, the religion that once felt so
comfortable began to pinch around the middle. The creed grew
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harder to say with conviction. Practices that once watered my soul
became obligatory and brittle.
After several years of struggle, I said good-bye.
In doing so I lost everything I knew—tribe and tradition, rites and
rituals, sacred texts and guiding hymns, paychecks and credentials.
Everything I had been steeped in, everything I had trained for was
seemingly left behind.
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Yet I am, at my core, a person who is deeply concerned with the
state of the soul. I was raised on ritual. I tend toward the mystic. In
dark moments, guidance comes to me in the form of remembered
hymns and sacred songs. One simply doesn’t go about seeing
oneself as a soulful creature for decades and then suddenly, full stop,
leave it all behind. A void needs to be filled. Soon I found that by
both desire and necessity, I was required to create something new.
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While in the midst of my rebuilding process, I read Sue Monk
Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees. After consuming it in one giant gulp,
I spoke with a friend about the spirituality woven within the story
line. I admired the wailing wall one of the characters created in
her backyard as a way to process her grief and marveled at the
way a ship’s figurehead became a symbol of the Divine for a group
of sisters in the story. Both acts felt so raw and daring, so full of
feminine know-how and power. I mentioned it to a friend, a newly
converted Catholic so devout she’d legally changed her name to
that of a favored saint, and she nodded knowingly and said, “You
know, I’ve always been a little bit witchy.”
Witchy. There’s really nothing more antithetical to traditional
Christian faith than to say you are a little bit witchy. This woman
belonged to an institution known for burning women at the
stake. And here she was in broad daylight acknowledging her deep
Catholicism and her witchy roots—claiming a hybrid way of being
in the world.
It was a kismet moment. To witness this synthesis of ideas. To be
invited by story and friendship into hyphenate faith.
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Relig-ish
To some, this pick-and-choose spirituality, where you can be a
little bit witchy and very heavily Catholic, is called smorgasbord
spirituality. This term is used to mean that you are taking a little of
this and a little of that to fill your soul’s plate. The term is usually
used derisively, meant to infer a lack of commitment, a laziness of
the inner life of the soul.
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This kind of vocabulary is emerging to describe a religious
phenomenon that is happing because our culture is going through a
tremendous shift. A shift in which an increasingly large percentage
of the population is living post-church—that is, they live outside
the four walls of institutionalized faith. The religious institutions
that once served as our connective tissue no longer have the same
unifying bond.
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Once, when almost everyone went to church or synagogue, our
membership in places of worship created common bonds between
us. Religion created ideological bonds through a commonly held
Judeo-Christian belief system. Our presence at church or temple,
week after week, created a physical bond. And commonly held
religious practices formed a spiritual or energetic bond.
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In a more homogeneous place and time, this worked splendidly.
For generations we organized around our common beliefs, codified
as religion. We sang from the same hymnal, heard sermons from
the same holy book, shared liturgies. This repetition of belief
and practice was our bedrock. It helped to orient ourselves in the
world. It gave us direction. The church steeple was literally a point
of orientation, rising up in the middle of our neighborhoods like
a road sign pointing to a key destination, a compass pointing to
true north.
In recent generations, that bonding process has changed, or even
evaporated. A globally connected world exposes us to the beliefs
and experiences of other cultures. In turn, this exposure—when
met with a willingness to learn from other perspectives—shifts
our ideological bonds as our understanding expands. As our culture
puts increasing value on busyness, the demands of work, school,
Introduction: Are You Relig-ish?
3
and extracurricular commitments compete for our calendars,
and religious meetings are often lost in the bid for our time. This
weakens our physical bonds as we no longer follow the steeple
and gather together in houses of worship. At the same time, the
religious disciplines we typically practice have failed to adapt to
the spiritual-care needs of our current culture. As disciplines loose
their relevance, they become not tools for effective living, but
habits that must be adhered to out of a tradition and obedience.
This lack of efficacy becomes increasingly difficult to commit to,
and spiritual bonds weaken.
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Because of the way culture is shifting, some of us—many of us—
have experienced a corresponding faith shift. For some it’s a mild
ripple, like a truck rushing past too quickly as we stand on the
side of the road. For others, it’s an earthquake, shaking us off our
foundations and scattering all we hold dear.
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From this rattled place, we have begun to pick up the pieces of
our former faith. We look for the pieces of our religious past to
find those that will still shore us up. We identify which values will
give us the most relevant, flexible foundation. We choose only the
practices that will heal and nurture us in our ever-expanding world.
We begin to reconstruct the life of the soul with pieces from this
and parts of that. And in this piecing together, those “smorgasbord”
terms are born. Smorgasbord Catholics. Buffet Christians.
It’s not a bad metaphor really, if you say it with kindness. If you
recognize the work, thought, and bravery that goes into creating
your own right-fit faith. Unfortunately, these terms are used by too
many to diminish and dismiss—to identify this blending of beliefs
and practices as the work of the dilettante, the dabbler.
I don’t see it that way.
Eclectic spirituality is not lazy or misguided or weak of will. It is
not Buffet Faith. Learning to curate and choose, to explore and
discover, to become curious and creative, is not spiritual laziness.
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Relig-ish
You are not a lazy person abandoning your faith.
You are a clever person, making a mindful and
appropriate response in an expanding world.
You are becoming relig-ish.
Relig-ish is a playful term for people who are spiritual but not
religious—the so-called Nones who can’t tick off any one box on
the survey when it asks about religion. And because it is new, we
get to make up a definition—you and I.
Being relig-ish might mean some or all of these things for you:
•
Being interested in the life of the soul and how that
impacts your way of living.
Wanting to pass your core values on to your children.
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Believing in the power of affirming practices, rituals,
habits, and traditions.
•
Seeing the Divine or Spirit or Mystery in nature, art,
music, and motion.
•
Respecting the teachings of many religious paths and
celebrating our commonalities.
•
Following teachers who preach inclusion and justice.
•
Falling in love with sacred spaces.
•
Practicing your spirituality outside of the institution.
•
Connecting with a soulful, but untraditional tribe.
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•
I am all of these spiritual things, but I do not fit anywhere that is
currently established. I’m a misfit. A heretic. An accidental rabblerouser. And I am person of faith. I am relig-ish.
I think you might be a little bit relig-ish too. Even if you don’t like
the term (and you don’t have to use it), I think you are living on
the spiritual fringes here with me.
•
Are you formerly churched—someone who grew up
in the institution and stayed until it started pinching
around the middle?
Introduction: Are You Relig-ish?
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• Are you an edge dweller, living on the outer
boundaries of church or temple, staying for the tribe,
but struggling with the creed?
•
Are you SBNR—spiritual but not religious—a soulful
seeker who declines organized faith?
•
Are you a hybrid—Catholic-Buddhist, Wicca-Baptist,
Jewish-Yogi or some other kind of spiritual hyphenate?
You, my friend, are relig-ish too.
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Ever since I left the institution—and in truth for some time before
I took my leave—I’ve been building a relig-ish life. I’ve been
practicing that life together with like-minded souls—both through
my work as a life coach and spiritual director, and in my online
soulcare community, Flock. And in those years of life together, this
is what we’ve discovered:
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You can create a set of right-fit spiritual practices
that are rooted in your history,
authentic to who you are today,
and creative enough to grow with you.
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You can build a spirituality that fits. Not only do you already
have permission, but you also have the wisdom, the right, and
the motivation to do so. Moreover, now, with this book in hand
and the people behind it, you have a community to rebuild with.
This book is for you and the many, many people like you: the
growing group of so-called Nones. The spiritual but not religious.
The seekers and the soulful. The relig-ish.
Together, page by page, conversation by conversation, we will
gather up our people. We will hear their voices.
So you don’t feel afraid.
So you know you are not alone.
So together, we can shape our world.
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Relig-ish
I believe the institution doesn’t get to call the shots.
I believe you can pick your own values.
I believe you can create your own rituals.
I believe you deserve a spirituality that fits.
What about you, friend?
Are you ready to curate your religious past?
Can you create your relig-ish future?
Will you construct a right-fit life?
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(Welcome home.)
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I think you are.
I know you can.
I hope you will.
Introduction: Are You Relig-ish?
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SECTION I
THE RELIG-ISH TOOL KIT
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You’re done with the religious life. Or at least, you are starting to
feel uncomfortable with it, and you are curious about your options.
Or you’ve never been part of a spiritual practice, but you’d like to
now, and you’re pretty sure anything that’s already pre-packaged
is probably not going to work for you.
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So now what? How do you find something that connects the
dots from your religious past to your relig-ish future? Becoming
relig-ish comes in two overarching stages—deconstruction and
reconstruction. Most people can engage pretty intuitively in
the deconstruction process. The reconstruction part is a little
more trial and error. But for either you’ll need some new gear—
a relig-ish tool kit.
The tools in this section will allow you explore your relig-ish
options with openness and ease. They will let you release fear,
and step into confident ways of deciding and knowing. They will
empower you as you curate your religious past and build your
relig-ish future.
The first tool in your kit—a brand-new (to you) language!
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1.
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SPEAK DIALOG
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For most of us, whether we realize it or not, our primary language
is Debate. Whether it’s because we were part of a religion with a
mission to convert people or because the commercialism of our
culture encourages us to live in a permanent state of competition—
the language we are best at is one of convincing. From a young age
we’ve been taught not to listen and converse, but to debate and
convert. This leaves us camped out in one kind of truth, trying to
pull others to our side. Like any first language it is what we are
most familiar with, so we default to it without even realizing we are
doing so. With Debate as our mother tongue we listen only long
enough to figure out if we agree or disagree with the life of another.
In a relig-ish world, where we are expanding our understanding
and adapting our practices, we need to do more than hear and
debate with one another. Exploring new spiritual pathways is
conversational in nature. In order to converse, we must greet any
topic with a listening ear, and engage with it as an exchange of
ideas. If we speak Debate while in the midst of exploring ideas about
our spirituality, our process becomes less of a conversation and more
of a wrestling match. We act like members of a college debate club,
perceiving conversations not as explorations, but as arguments.
We pick a position and build a defense around it, listening to the
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other only in order to pass judgment and launch attack. As I once
heard writer Patti Digh say, “You cannot both judge and learn at
the same time.”4 And so, with Debate as our primary language, our
ability to expand our understanding is severely curtailed.
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The other way Debate hobbles our spiritual growth is that it defaults
to a binary orientation; that is, it assumes there are two sides and
one must choose between them. The tendency to see everything
as binary isn’t surprising if you’ve been steeped in the language
of heaven/hell, saint/sinner, good/evil. And because these options
are “good” or “bad” at either pole, exploring other ways of being
soulful can appear at first to be not a harmless, inquisitive journey,
but a dangerous one. With “bad/wrong/condemned” being one of
two results, people with binary mind-sets often see Debate as an
act of both love and protection.
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With Debate as your mother tongue and binary assumptions as
your orientation, you may have little to no experience standing
in a place of nonjudgment—a place where ideas and experiences
can simply be. As someone who grew up religious, I had to adopt
a language to describe this listening, open space. I sometimes
describe it as “being in the both/and,” or “holding two ideas in
one open palm.” It’s an unfamiliar posture. And like learning a
new language, it takes practice.
To become relig-ish, you must be able to curate your past, learn
from your present, and stay curious about your future. And in
order to do this you must learn a new language—the language of
Dialog. Unlike Debate, Dialog allows you to exchange ideas and
solve problems. Without the immediate need to judge, you can
move away from the idea that everything is binary. Instead, you
can embrace the healing and freeing idea that a soulful life can be
multifaceted, with many options that allow each of us to access
different aspects of truth. By entering soulful explorations without
looking through the lens of judgment, you can leave behind the
motive to convict and convert. In doing so you will become more
open to the reality that any idea or practice or truth might have
in its keeping some piece of knowledge that will serve you well.
Speak Dialog
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A pastor-professor friend once told me of talking with his Muslim
neighbors, “If I’m going to have a true conversation, I have to
enter into it with the possibility that they might in fact convert
me.” This was a shocking new idea to me! Having been raised with
the evangelical assumption that my tradition held all positive
knowledge, I was led to believe that any conversation with someone
who held a different way of living had no value for me, only for my
potential convert. When stepping into true dialog we must begin
to acknowledge that others may also be the caretakers of valuable
and important truths that we need to hear.
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On the relig-ish path you must come to
conversations about faith and belief,
values and practices,
with the possibility that you yourself
might be convinced of a new way of being.
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Furthermore, you must be prepared to accept that even if you are
not well served by that idea, belief, practice or truth, it could also be
true that someone else is, and therefore you do not need to convert
that person over to your way of being.
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Letting go of Debate as our primary language and picking up the
language of Dialog is no small task. It involves shedding a lifetime
of assumptions about how truth works. It asks you to learn, perhaps
for the first time, how to truly listen. And it invites you to stand
in the space of unknowing, holding two ideas in one open palm,
and accepting that sometimes the answer to the question of which
path is right is both.
What will help us learn the language of Dialog? Two ingenious
travel companions—Mystery and Curiosity.
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EMBRACE MYSTERY
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There is a story I just love, that the postmodern director J. J. Abrams
tells from the TED stage. As he speaks he stands next to a mediumsized cardboard box, marked with nothing but a large balloon-like
question mark. He begins to tell a story about how much he loved
magic when he was a kid. His grandfather would take him to the
Tannen’s Magic Shop to buy the tools that a budding magician
would require. Among the hand buzzers and disappearing ink, one
shelf in the magic shop was lined with mystery boxes, each with its
bold question mark. You had to buy them sight unseen, then take
them home and open them to see if you got your money’s worth.
On one of his visits with his grandfather, young Abrams decided
to choose one of these intriguing boxes. This mystery box, Abrams
explained.
He had never opened it.
At the time of this talk, J. J. Abrams was best known for being the
writer of the wildly popular television series Lost. This now iconic
show held so many mysteries, only the most die-hard fans could
keep track of them all. Story lines crisscrossed each other with
dizzying complexity. Polar bears lived on a seemingly unpopulated
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tropical island; there were also the remains of a statue, just one
giant foot; and later a whole town was found hidden in the forest
beside the cave of a mysterious monster.
In truth, the creators of the show were making it up as they
went. There was no pre-mapping out of the story line, water tight
and consistent, error free on some giant white board in a studio
workroom. They had no end game, no exit strategy. There was
only story and mystery and the trust that the characters would
find their way through the jungle.
PL
E
I knew this about Lost, and the way Abrams worked. So I was
especially charmed when he put his hand on the box in the middle
of that TED stage and explained why he’d never opened it. He said,
“Sometimes, mystery is more important than
knowledge.”5
SA
M
This Abrams truism is an excellent tool to have in your kit as you
practice your new language of Dialog, because it allows you to
explore without racing to an answer. This lengthy exploration
requires you to listen with curiosity—and not resolution—as your
aim. You have come from a religion, or at the very least from a
culture, that encourages everything you believe or practice, or rely
upon to be logical and tidy. One part of the story must fit seamlessly
with the other, like interlocking pieces of a laser-cut puzzle. Biblical
time lines must align perfectly. Conflicting passages of text must
be tortuously interpreted to keep them watertight. There is no
space for gentle unknowing, for trusting the process, for exploring
possibilities. There is no room for doubt.
But in the relig-ish life, we embrace mystery. We see doubt as a
perfectly okay bunkmate—even if he does sometimes steal the
covers! Through mystery, we learn to hang out with what artist
Sabrina Ward Harrison calls “the true and the questions”6 and
let them resolve themselves in their own sweet time. Mystery
holds space for something fresh to come up, for something new
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Relig-ish
to be born. It keeps wonder alive and feeds curiosity—and this
in turn keeps us learning about something as vast as Divinity
and as complex as faith. Sometimes, we don’t need to know why
something works, or where we are going. Sometimes, mystery is
more important than knowledge.
SA
M
PL
E
One of those times is now.
Embrace Mystery
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