Taken from God, Sex & The Search for Lost Wonder by Mike Starkey

For all their talk of transcendence, eternity, the spirit and sacredness, some contemporary spiritual gurus say nothing about God, an alarming omission from the perspective of historic Christianity. It means that the one central Reality that can give us bearings in the search for spirituality, identity, and wonder is left out of the picture. We are left with what theologian David Wells calls the "weightlessness of God."   Instead of being opened to the Mind behind the universe, we are left shut up inside the universe of our own mind. The gods of the new spirituality can inspire no wonder. They are as controllable and safe as the Pillsbury Doughboy, a projection of our own consumer preferences.

C.S. Lewis, in his classic Miracles, expresses well the tremor that passes down the human spine at the suspicion that perhaps God might be real, that he might be more than mere projection.

"There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (‘Man’s search for God!’) suddenly draw back. ‘Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that!’"

Lewis underlines the vital Christian insight that there is such a thing as truth, and this truth is a Person. The discovery of truth comes neither from navel-gazing nor from abstract contemplation. It forces us outward, into an encounter with One other than ourselves. Moses is confronted with a burning bush, Saul is thrown from his horse and blinded, Isaiah collapses in a gibbering heap, crying. "Woe to me!" The biblical meeting with God is no comfortable spirituality. It is a terrifying and awe-inspiring encounter.

In the New Testament we read of Jesus’ disciples, together in an upper room:  

 

I sometimes picture that as Peter and the others dashed downstairs to shout out to the world what had just happened, a distant ancestor of the psychologist Carl Jung (1875-1961) remained upstairs and speculated on which archetype had just surfaced from the collective unconscious. But Pentecost was no archetype. It was people experiencing the raw, unleashed power of a personal God, a God beyond all their petty projections, preferences, and pieties.

 

In Pentecost we see the true basis for Christian Spirituality, the intimate presence of the Holy Spirit of God, who along with the Father and the Son

makes up the Trinity. The Christian response to spirituality (small s) is Spirituality (capital S), life charged up with the personal Spirit of God and lived out in the world.   When Christians await Sunday morning with bated breath and trembling excitement, filled with awe and wonder at coming into the presence of a living God, then perhaps the watching world will stop playing at spirituality and join us.

"Does anyone have the foggiest idea what sort of power we so blithely evoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it?... It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews." (Annie Dillard)

 

Identity
Today’s free-for-all spirituality might feel like a victory over older, dogmatic images of God. It might feel like a liberation from the creeds and definitions that plagued theologians of earlier centuries. It soon becomes clear, however, that our victory is hollow and brief. Liberation from the "constraints" of God means liberation from the roots of human identity.

 

Worship opens us outward. It is an antidote to self-centeredness.	To be made in the image of God is to be made for relationship with him. God is no projection of our own ideals, values, or preferences. We are not made to be alone or to find our ultimate reference point in ourselves. Over against inward-looking
spirituality, Christianity insists that we can discover truth only by looking beyond ourselves to God himself, the God who is really there and who is Other. God made us for an encounter, for intimacy with himself.

 

The Hebrew words for worship, hishtahawah and abodah, mean "bowing before" God and "serving" him with our lives. Worship opens us outward. It is an antidote to self-centeredness.

 

This is why the Old Testament prophets denounced the worship of idols. It is not that in making substitute gods the people of Israel were breaking some arbitrary law, but they were being unfaithful to a relationship. Like today’s "spirituality," the idols of the ancient world were the products of human introspection. But God is personal and Other, no mere projection of our own preferences. He alone is real and can bear the weight of human identity. To settle for less is to chase a reflection of our own selves.

 

monotheism produces good worship, just as monogamy produces good sex

Monotheism—fidelity to the one God—is to religion what monogamy is to human relationships. The natural human impulse, particularly in a consumer society, is to keep all options open. But the paradox is that it is only when we finally choose to

shut down all other options that we discover the truth: Christian monotheism produces good worship, just as monogamy produces good sex. It is the expression of a relationship of complete trust with one who is Other than myself. Consumer spirituality, like sexual promiscuity, condemns people to perpetual frustration, because they are never able to climb out of their own heads long enough to experience the wonder of real encounter.

 

The Distorted Self
Faithful encounter is much harder than promiscuous self-centeredness for the simple reason that encounter, with the true God or with another person, involves a living subject and not a passive object for personal pleasure. And this opens us up to something most of us find very difficult: being shown where we are wrong.

 

This hazard is not encountered in contemporary spirituality, because there the self is never wrong. Some spiritual gurus say that the sign of the soulful life is that we know and accept ourselves. Any sign of self-criticism is a sign of a personality that is not integrated, that has failed to honor its "shadow" or darker side.

 

"If people are so good, how did societies get so bad?" (Dr Paul Vitz)	It seems extraordinary to me that when critics of Christianity attack it, their first target is the part of Christianity that is self-evidently true: its doctrine of sin. When I was in my early twenties I spent some time reassessing my religious faith. For a while
belief in God seemed impossible and I had no choice but to see myself as an atheist. But even in my time of deepest questioning I never doubted Christianity’s claim that there is something fundamentally wrong with the human heart. Malcolm Muggeridge wrote that the only part of Christianity that can be demonstrated from the morning paper is its doctrine of original sin.

 

For decades society has worked on the assumption that human beings are naturally good, that our only hindrances are external, and as we pursue our personal freedom and self-realization utopia will be just around the corner. But the result of our greater freedom and our throwing off external hindrances has been unprecedented levels of divorce, unparalleled levels of addiction, and a lower level of psychic well-being than any society in history.

 

Paul Vitz, professor of psychology at New York University, asks the question that fashionable me-ology is desperate to avoid: "If people are so good, how did societies get so bad?" His own conclusion is that the Christian doctrine of original sin contains the clue: there is a fundamental distortion in human nature. We need not so much self-realization as detoxification. Not individuation but salvation.

 

Consumer spirituality is superficially appealing, but on closer inspection its deep-seated selfishness turns out to be part of the problem. Christian spirituality seems initially harsh and demanding, but its demands are the demands of relationship with a person, a person who tells us the truth about ourselves—even the truth we do not like to hear. It is only when we admit we are sick, as individuals and as a society, that we can begin to ask for healing.

 

Wonder Restored

"I have bought so many identities I no longer have a clue who I am."	We ask, "Who am I?" The shopping mall says, "You are a consumer; buy an identity." The humanist says, "You are an individual; sort yourself out." The best-selling writer on spirituality says, "You are in need of self-realization; go deeper within."
We reply, "I have bought so many identities I no longer have a clue who I am. I participate in a culture of selfishness so screwed up that I can do nothing to change my world. I have gone deeper within and found only emptiness. My inheritance is to be a person of no fixed identity in a world with no wonder."

 

 

The small child looks at the universe with wide-eyed wonder. It is a world where even the oldest things become new, because the child is looking at them through her own new eyes. The journalist who has just escaped a near-fatal car crash looks at the universe with wide-eyed wonder. It is a world where even the familiar things become an astonishing gift, because that journalist looks at them with a new gratitude.

 

It is puzzling that the Christian church is so defensive and self-conscious about the one unique thing it has to offer the world: a promise of rebirth. All the consumer spirituality, all the humanist psychology, all the paganism in the world does not possess what one tacky revival tent, a wobbly organ and a preacher in a bad suit can possess: the key to wonder restored, death to selfishness and a world screwed up by human sin, rebirth into newness, intimacy with God and each other, resurgence of the vision of an earth renewed in glory. It is a hope of freshness and wonder that a whole generation longs to hear.