Baptist Boy: A Spiritual Autobiography
My mother's grandfather donated land for a Baptist church down the hill from his house in central Alabama, where her father and mother, were pillars of the church and sustained a one-room school, also on family land. Grandaddy worked road maintenance in addition to farming to send my mother to Montevallo, the nearby women’s teacher’s college.
Mother and Daddy were the first college graduates in their families. Both became teachers and settled in Auburn, Alabama. I grew up in a house just a few blocks from the university and within sight of one of the best public schools in the state. Daddy had converted to Baptist after they married, and both were deeply committed to Christianity and each other. I have letters Daddy wrote home in 1945 when he was a captain in the German occupation.He complains that fellow officers drank and gambled when off duty, so he spent evenings alone in his room, writing home and reading his Bible. My parents communed across the Atlantic by studying the same books of the Bible together.
When I was eight, the First Baptist Church gave me a copy of the King James Bible, and for the next ten years, not only did I attend Sunday School, Training Union, and preaching every Sunday--plus the RAs (Royal Ambassadors) and Vacation Bible School--but did "daily Bible readings" at bedtime. These were half a chapter every night as listed in the Training Union manual. “Have you done your daily Bible reading?” was the inevitable question before a kiss goodnight. Yes, I had. Always. By my teens, the gospels in the King James translation were hard to read because I could predict the next words. (Even today, if you start a popular proof-text quotation, I can finish it.)
But by then there were other troubles.
In my early teens, I became a junior scientist, and by sixteen I had evolved into a junior intellectual and poet. The college bookstores in downtown Auburn were full of paperbacks for college courses, and I spent money from my summer job at Hitchcock Electric to build personal library of science, literature, anthropology, history, philosophy, eastern religions--anything that promised new and different answers. It didn't take long for the doctrines I'd heard from the pulpit to sound like a little box of naiveté hiding out from the great questions of the world. Every statement from the pulpit, I rapidly discovered, clearly begged three more questions that nobody at Auburn First Baptist cared to answer--or even seemed to know existed. I had believed as a little child, and when I became a teen, I put away childish things. Religious belief was one of them.
I lost my faith. It was like a divorce. My life had been wedded to the faithfulness of the Old Time Religion, all taken pretty literally in what I now know to call a post-Enlightenment mindset--very little acknowledged myth or mystery in the mix. Christian doctrines were like facts in a geography book. The Streets of Gold were almost as prosaically real as the sidewalks of downtown Auburn. Death was like a bus trip to a posh resort in the sky where, still completely Billy Green with all his ego and scuffed shoes intact, I would luxuriate for all time. I lost faith in all of that, and it hurt. It hurt like hell when I saw Old Time Religion as probably untrue--at best unproven and forever beyond proof.
My moral and logical problems with childhood religion multiplied, and reading Bertrand Russell didn’t help. One biggie: why should I respect, much less worship, a self-aggrandizing bully so insecure that he said, "Worship me now or I'll burn you alive forever." Also, if God was almighty, why didn't he just forgive sins, bing, without all the brutal psychodrama of dressing up as a human, killing himself, and then taking it all back. And what about all that blood sacrifice? If Reverend Jeffers really believed blood sacrifice was necessary to forgive sin, why didn't he make blood sacrifices--not to save all mankind like Jesus, of course--but for lesser purposes such as rain. If ordinary mortals can forego blood sacrifice, obviously an omnipotent God can. And saying that Jesus’s sacrifice eliminated the "sacrifices compulsory" rule once and for all was just goofy. A rule strong enough to bind God almighty wouldn't suddenly change after AD 32 or any other time? Isn’t God outside time? But every Sunday, sermons hacked away at this nonsense, never even trying to explain or resolve the the self-contradictions.
And on and on. Many logical stumbling blocks created by literalism.
Oddly, I never questioned the core teachings of Jesus or lost my love for the gospels, but non-moral theology from Paul on made no sense. Not to my literal mind-set. I kept attending church most Sundays for several years, but the baseless, illogical faith of the Baptists began to feel toxic to me, so I took refuge in the Episcopal Student Center, even hung out with a clique of guys with priestly vocations. I took a class in Koine Greek that the rector taught for the would-be priests until they all dropped out and the course was cancelled. I still miss it. Interestingly, I observed that unquestioning true believers at the Baptist Student Center seemed much happier than I was, as if stoned on the opiate of the proletariat, but I couldn't go that way. I could envy their bovine peace of mind, but I couldn't insult God with a lie, and to me the worse kind of lie was to assert that something was true when I had no evidence for it. Blind faith was sacrilege.
Here I was, turning 20 in Auburn, Alabama, with a problem. I’d lost, not so much my faith, but my faith in that faith, and was teetering on the terrifying brink--not so much of Hell as of an unfathomable abyss. The solution, such as it is, has evolved over the next half century. Friends tell me that Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest, explains all my difficulties as our culture's inability to understand myth, legend, and narrative, the toxic literalism of the Enlightenment. But in the 1960s, no such guru existed, and even Rohr offers nothing to restore the old gold-brick certainties—rather, he counsels getting used to uncertainty rechristened as transcendence. Anyway, I followed ambiguous signs out of the darkest woods, but never into the old light.
My self-assigned teenage reading program included all the great epics, major philosophers, and major poets, I read the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads as well as Vedanta for the Western World, and introductions to Zen Buddhism and world mysticism. In these I met a God, or at least a divine presence, who is immanent as well as transcendent, a God said to be knowable deep within us. This seemed more plausible than the Mosaic-Calvinistic Sky King. Putting it simply, I reread the Christian call to salvation through belief as a way of saying we're lost because we don't see the divine transcendence inside us, and when we see it, we are saved. I remember one night driving on a highway (maybe in my mid-20s) and happening on a radio sermon by a rural preacher whose message that was that all you have to do is know Jesus in your heart to be saved, and it hit me like the car roof falling in that, except for trivial differences in proper nouns, this was a Hindu sermon. The fiery pit of the ego-tripping old sky-tyrant dissolved into an inept metaphor for the pain of life trapped in a hungry human ego blind to its innate transcendence.
Even classical mythology helped. Homer's epics, I learned, were the main scriptures of a sophisticated civilization for centuries. Reading them, I read a multiplicity of ageless co-existing but contradictory meanings in stories that were profoundly meaningful while not being literally true. The ancients were not that stupid. And I read in the psychology of Carl Jung how God (and even the gods) parallels psychic realities inside us, archetypes that are both individually and collectively real. An archetype has an unlimited number of possible manifestations. The hero has a thousand faces, and so must God, the greatest archetype of all, the symbolic source of all being.
This, of course, was, to my fearful loss of faith, an explanation as unnerving as it was explanatory. Jung offered a day-to-day experience with a true God but no death insurance policy. The swan-winged ego looking forward to golden streets was disappointed, left at best with the promise of peace and wholeness now by getting over all that and embracing immanence.
More than forty years ago when my wife led me to Catholicism, I read with delight the intricate if sophomoric Saint Joseph Baltimore Catechism. Even at its most simplistic, the Church wrestled with its beliefs and opened them to argument. When these beliefs were nonsense, the Church admitted it—something Baptists never did—and called them "mysteries." The Mother Church included wild mystics, visionaries, and open schisms. I read twice through a scholarly book on Christology, that traced the radically evolving views of the church fathers on the nature of Christ. I read G. K. Chesterton and saw the Church as a great flawed mother faith, complex and ancient, with many mansions. When I did not agree with the mother church (pretty damned often), I dissolved her into myth, trusted and waited. Only after my wife and I heard a radical rejection of love from a succession of Virginia pulpits in 2012 did we look for another church. Catholicism was hostile territory for man with a gay best friend, son, and grandson.
Along the way there were other elements of growth (or at least expansion) I can only list--friendship with admirable and humane priests, eleven years in an intimate spiritual discussion group, transgressing the bounds of ego in decades of theatre, reading dozens of volumes about Buddhism, yoga practice, knowing a wonderful Tibetan Monk, and the deaths of parents and friends. And time.
The old faith is gone, in its place an immanent and transcendent I-AM with no face and many faces, maybe no more than a mood that passes and returns again--and a willingness to read scripture, liturgy, and theology as I listen to orchestral music, seeing as absurd the question, "Is this word or phrase true?" Surely, almost none of it is true in the plain sense that I am lifting one finger, not two. But it may be a set of visible signposts toward the same invisible Jerusalem, pointing different directions because they are planted different places. It makes no sense now to question, say, the virgin birth or the multiplication of loaves and fishes. I've abandoned religious truth as I was taught it a child. In that sense, I’m not even an agnostic. I’m thoroughly convinced that my childhood Old Time Religion was a well-meaning crock, at least as a set of verifiable facts like baseball scores or the time of sunrise. It is, at its best, a flurry of gesticulations toward wholeness in life and death.
I remember my exasperation as a teen when my father said he was a Christian because his Methodist father was the best man he ever knew. My silent response: So? That proves nothing. Can't a good man can be wrong on a point of fact? Papa Green was not, like Lazarus, an eyewitness to life after death. He was no student of comparative religions. Nothing about his personal virtue proved Christianity to be theologically true or even best. For all Daddy knew, there was a better atheist in Boston, a better Buddhist in Osaka. But, of course, if Daddy's goal was merely to live a good life in 20th century Alabama, Papa Green's life as a signpost pointing down that road.
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