Theological Snapshot (Always in Progress)

I used to notice a certain kind of “feeling” after meditation when I would sit on my back porch above the garden late at night.  I could hear the sounds of the deer down by the creek in the distance, and on a clear summer night smell the pine and forest.  Today it’s more difficult for me to “enjoy” such a first person phenomenological experience as I bemusedly and ironically note my positionality while “it” all seems so harmonious and unified.  I still wonder what “it” is, the multifaceted flow of sensory experience, feelings and powers greater than myself that converge in the field of unlimited potential of those suspended moments of genuflection reductively labeled “meeting God.”

For me, I take a moment to relish in the unusual opportunity to use the first person pronoun, I AM, I I I.  OK.  Philosophically I rebel against Kantian dualism, the Cartesian dialectic, premodern simplicity, modern structuralism and even the postmodern sterility of intersubjective context.  I situate myself somewhere that includes all these epistemologies yet simultaneously rejects their absolutist arrogance.  As I gingerly step onto the stage of the Unity Licensure and Ordination process, I find myself wrestling with the ontological referents of Hasselbeckian metaphysics that reduces reality to a dichotomous universe bifurcated into Absolute/Relative realms where the God-Law Ideated me as a corporal moral agent who willingly chooses that which hits or misses the “mark,” the Highest Good- revealed merely by sitting in the Silence.  Kind of like being touched by that Sybok guy from Star Trek V and having an instant epiphany.  Neato.

My embedded theology has moved away from this kind of simplistic faith, that of the Catholic altar boy who ultimately graduated as the Valedictorian from the Jesuit-run Seminary for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles through years of academic training as a folklorist/cultural anthropologist and finally through legal training as an attorney and metaphysical training through various schools and ultimately at Unity.  All these twists and turns have helped me evolve through faith and doubt.  Simple first person phenomenology is blind to its limits and fails to take into account postmodern approaches that illuminate intersubjective contexts and cultural embeddedness of what speech-act theorist Jurgen Habermas calls the “philosophy of consciousness”- stretching all the way back to Foucault.

I know a spirituality that is the transcendence of forms in favor of a trans-essentialist, multi-contextual approach that includes whatever truth is to be had in any aspect- first person, second person, third, etc., as well as whatever perspectives about those positions can teach me.  I don’t do the question of evil, for me theodicy doesn’t exist- I assume a deep ontological connection between all experiences and anything to contrary is simple necrophilia.  I know a theology that is cognitive and experiential, of commitment and relaxation, requiring both knowledge and action.  I lightly hold an Augustinian and Unity view that assumes love is the backdrop of the play of life.  I know that any enlightenment state can be realized at any stage of development, and look for more of the same.