Hooray for Joy!

When I was a young man and left home for college, I left behind the Pentecostal church of my youth. Parts of it, like its insistence of an inerrant literal interpretation of the Bible and its fear based message of either accepting Jesus Christ as the one and only means of salvation or burning in hell, I gladly dumped in the dumpster labeled “Irrational Beliefs”. 

However, parts of my Pentecostal experience would never fully leave me.  One was the unshakable feeling that I had experienced an ever present God of Power and Might and Love, and the deep feeling of joy that came with that.   Our worship services were filled with joyful uplifting songs and music.  The messages were passionate and loud and peppered with calls from the congregation of “Amen!” or “Hallelujah!”  There were periodic outbreaks of glossolalia.  Prayers were fervent with hands lifted in the air and voices loud in praise and prayer. Prayers for healing were affirmative and especially impassioned.

After wandering in the wilderness for fifteen years, exploring other religions and spiritual traditions, especially their mystical branches, I decided it was time to reconnect with my Christian roots and so began to visit other Christian denominations, looking for a church more in alignment with my liberal views. What I found at first was dull, boring and lifeless.  Where was the joy and the praise and life that I had experienced in the churches I grew up in? 

And then I discovered Unity in Austin, Texas.  Back then, in 1983, it was the only Unity church in Austin and it filled up in two services and overflowed to the outside deck where the service could be watched on a large screen television.  The singing was joyous and the message was uplifting.  I felt and experienced God. And joy was there.

Webster's Dictionary defines "joy" as "the emotion evoked by well-being, success, or good fortune or by the prospect of possessing what one desires." I hesitated to write about joy in this blog. Theology (“thinking” about faith) seems to be the polar opposite to joy (a feeling or experience of faith).  However, I remembered that in John 15:11 Jesus said that what he taught was taught so that his joy would be in us and our joy would be complete. I also believe that my Metaphysical Christianity is very much an integration of “head” and “heart” and joy is a keystone to its theology.  Metaphysical Christianity affirms well-being, success and attaining the desires of our heart. It affirms our connection with Spirit and each other.  It affirms the infinite faith, strength, power, wisdom, zeal, life, love, imagination, understanding, will, order and peace available to all of us as a result of our oneness with Spirit. For me this is a great vision.

In his book, Glimpses of Truth, Rev. Dr. Thomas Shepherd asks the question,
“If a greater vision of life captures the mind, empowering people to live more effectively, does this not provide the strongest of all religious systems, i.e., a comprehensive worldview integrating heart and head?”   I think it does and joy is its evidence.

Theological Snapshot

This is my first blog which I am doing as part of an assignment for a Metaphysical Theology class being taken at Unity Institute in Unity Village, MO. as I work on completing a Master of Divinity degree.  The assignment is to write a brief description of my beliefs as of today.

My most basic theological belief is Oneness--- One Presence, One Power, One Spirit, One Mind, and One Life.  Although simple, it has grown in depth and richness over the sixty some years of my life.  Raised in a Pentecostal church, I was taught and believed in one triune God.  While this God was transcendent, it was also immanent and fully present.  Within Pentecostalism there is a special emphasis placed on having a direct personal experience of God through the baptism of the Holy Spirit.   This emphasis is one in common with mysticism, which I eventually gravitated to after parting from the Pentecostal church and its insistence on a literal translation of an inerrant Bible and the belief that Jesus was the only way to salvation.

While the departure from the church of my youth was abrupt, the process itself was one of “deliberative theology” where during my preteen and teenage years, I carefully reflected upon my embedded theological convictions and found them wanting.  My early belief of a “God out there” was slowly transformed by my readings of theologian Paul Tillich and his teachings of God “as the ground of being” and “the eternal now”.  When I left home for college I read voraciously about other spiritual paths and especially mysticism which I saw as a common thread running through all religions. In mysticism there is a sense of unity, totality, timelessness and sacredness which can be experienced but not adequately put into words.

This intuitive sense of connectedness, of being part of something larger, of not being isolated from one another or from the earth and the life on it was further strengthened and confirmed by my studies in quantum physics---a quantum world where seemingly solid matter is nothing more than energy waves of potential existence, observer and the observed are really interdependent and the world of local interactions within space and time is not real; we are really in a realm where all things are non-locally united in an indivisible whole. As quantum physicist and Nobel Prize winner Neils Bohr stated, “we are in a living universe of consciousness and intelligence, evolving, ongoing, connected, eternal………. (our) purpose is to learn how to live in eternity.”

With this foundation I discovered Unity, feeling an affinity with Charles Fillmore, one of the founders of the Unity movement who was also considered a mystic. Speaking of Divine Mind in The Revealing Word, Fillmore says, “There is but one Mind, and that Mind cannot be separated or divided, because, like the principle of mathematics, it is indivisible.  All that we can say of the one Mind is that it is absolute and that all its manifestations are in essence like itself…….The connecting link between God and humankind.  God Mind embraces all knowledge, wisdom and understanding and is the source of every manifestation of true knowledge and intelligence.……The individual mind is a state of consciousness in the one Mind.”

I live and move and have my being in this one Power in the universe and in my life…..this Omnipotence, Omniscience, Omnipresence, Alpha and Omega.  Ironically, I find that there are parts of the Bible that I do take literally such as Jesus’s words, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.” Matthew 25:40 and “You shall love your neighbor as yourself”, Mark 12:31.  This is a theology that moves me beyond my own self interests. Connectedness implies certain responsibilities.  If we really are connected and one, then any injustice we do to others we do to ourselves.  Any lack of compassion to others is a lack of compassion to us.  Any failure to feed the poor is failure to feed ourselves. My awareness of these responsibilities creates my value system.  May I live up to it.