Ordained

I recently asked an individual I deem one of my close spiritual advisors if they would officiate my wedding. Shocked, they replied “Oh, no. No, no, I’m not ordained. I know someone who’s really good that I could send your way, how would that work instead?” and I knew I’d have a task on my hands in convincing them, the gatekeeper of presumed expertise standing before me. I demurred at their offer, indicating my fiance had a childhood pastor of their own they wished to go with, a different compromise that I had already accepted. It seems the church’s orthodoxy would have it’s way, through one avenue or the next. 

Raised by modern Scots, I never grew up with any relationship to The Church. Nothing more than an historical institution that upheld outdated tradition, it played no role in my life, as relevant to me as the political machinations always turning in the halls of academia – not a jot. When I moved to Texas, I would spend Saturday night at a sleepover with a friend who lived across the street, and the next morning his parents would take us to church. Held in a local middle school while the church raised building funds, I spent most Sunday mornings my first year in America hearing the whole-congregation short service, and then the kids’ lessons in Sunday school, sitting in a social studies classroom hearing the stories making up the New Testament. I heard of the conversion of Saul, the courage of Daniel, the many wonders of our Messiah Jesus Christ. 9-years old, I just took it all in, my parents only took note when I came home with great wonder. “Mum, Dad! Did you know I can kill somebody, and all I have to do is ask for Jesus forgiveness and it’s totally okay?!” We moved houses not much later, and like so many young friendships, it fell off, and my days of attending church finished up. 

Latently underlying throughout middle school and intensifying in the latter half of high school as I prepared for college, I came to see the church through the typically teenage lens of oppression and bigotry. The 00’s and early 10’s church spoke most vocally with hatred and bigotry, fighting tooth and nail against so many values I deemed natural human rights. Foaming at the mouth over gay rights, so quick to denigrate women, always seeming at the defense of the harmful anti-science ways, how could I as a thinking person tie myself to such hate? As I dove into philosophy to fulfill my degree requirements, as my dad died and I struggled for my place in the world, and as my foundational ideas fell apart to reveal underneath either nothing or faith, I came to understand many of the more underlying virtues of faith. I came to understand the power of the good book to offer calm in the storm, and as I developed deeper in my progressivism I came to understand more fully the majesty of the story of Jesus Christ’s crucifixion; the universal language underlying it all began to open up in moments in my hand. 

Hermitage gave me the ability towards finding answers, and more importantly to find the better questions to ask. All answers being illusions that only led further down the road, the higher up the mountain I walked the more I bore witness to the lay of the land beneath me, and began to find peace in the climb. Using the tools of millenia, taking all seekers into my honest consideration, I denied nothing as help on my journey. Such inclusivity relieved old struggles while bringing new challenges in synthesisation, and thusly the climb continued on ever up. I came to think that while the experience of the journey is our own, we do none of us climb the mountain by ourselves. In some form or another, we carry others with us on the climb, but the nature of their philosophical composition can determine the weight they add to our climb. 

I have to stop myself here from getting too carried away in a metaphysical explanation, as that’s not the point of the essay, but it is nuanced and beautiful and takes time at understanding, mercurial and beautiful in its essence. Suffice it for now to say that Carlo Rovelli introduced me to God as much as St Augustine, Plato, or Martin Luther (King Jr.).  It is an understanding that I have come to believe cannot be reached while in the shadow of the leader. Institutional understanding is corruption, for it is script based, both prescriptive in its solutions an approach and proscriptive in its intent. These are indicators that say “be wary” for as long as any beings profit off of your existence, theirs is a questionable intent. Just because people discover the truth, it does not mean they use it to enlightened aims. Sometimes enlightenment opens to some the draw towards self-aggrandizement. When I discover that inside my space-defined, temporal, and mortal body there exists an infinite God, I oscillate between raging impotence and grand impressions of my messianic beauty. Of course I am the modern christ, at least in potential. Anyone who understands this understands this. Oh, don’t we love the tautological, but isn’t the universe in some guise all tautological in the beginning/end? I often think so, but then again I think many things of two minds.  

Many of the greatest thinkers have understood the common truth. From Socrates, Descartes, through Jefferson and Gladstone, through the baptist revivalist tradition of the American South, the New Age movement, all have known the common man had access to enlightenment and should be trusted to guide his own moral direction. When trusting in others, we trust in unknowable intent, and the collective unknowable, collectivized intent found in institutions is thus exponentially more worthy of skepticism than that of any lone wolf. How many institutions begin with a lone wolf’s intent that has grown and taken on the many heads of others individual motivations? 

So now as I embark upon the great spiritual journey which is the combining of my individual life fully with that of another’s in the aim of fully eliminating that unknowable intent within each other, we seek now to follow in the tradition of holding a formal ceremony to induct with intent on a single day the transition from ourselves as individuals into an acknowledged greater We. Why would I invite corruption into our house to pour it’s foundation?

I asked an individual I have spent longer in spiritual dialectic with than anyone beside my betrothed partner, and as I do not hold with the idea of either of us conducting the induction ourselves since we are the recipients, I thought this individual would offer up the next best thing. They more than any other understand our two souls, they too understand our perspective in more accordance, and as an individual are in possession of a deeper spiritual maturity and understanding than most of the popular spiritual would-be leaders of our times, and of all times, and so what more could we ask? Tradition only holds power if we understand the underlying intent behind the actions, and if we carry that intent forward while altering the nature of the actions to more accurately fit our modern sensibilities, why can we not shed needless orthodoxy? 

Institutions answer our deeper fear that maybe we’re wrong. By putting our confidence in something that others before us, others around us, and others in our imagined future put their confidence, we manage to trick ourselves out of hearing the doubt that’s still there. A thousand voices singing together can no more silence the doubt than one voice singing alone, it just takes less courage to join with the chorus. It’s scary singing alone, it’s scary being a first follower, it takes little effort to follow the masses. I question the intention of most institutional actors, and even the good actors get corrupted beyond worth of consideration by the level of their willingness to compromise with the bad. 

I feel like we have still not fully internalized the intention that drove 95 theses into the door of a Medieval German church door, that the nature of a person’s soul can be known only to God. Why do we continue to rely on these arbiters and self-professed teachers of understanding? Sure, they can tap into the universal with often greater eloquence than ourselves and things we ourselves seem to barely understand, but this does not mean they are actually privy to any greater grasping on the inside. Through our interactions, we all of us know the true hearts of others, beneath our veneer of polite denial, and we also know charlatan tactics abound. 

Much is lost in the search for what’s real, it can seem sometimes that everything might be fake in the end, and so I cannot afford to allow myself to get distracted by others. In our search for the truth, we often seek validation, and followers can provide that in abundance. Followers bring also power, and power, as a rule, corrupts. Christ is the Messiah, because as he got followers, he gave them up and died when they reached the level that his death would most matter. Any more followers, and his execution would be instead assassination, but the King of Kings as a poor man could not have that, the requirements for redeemer don’t then add up. These are truths I have only come to understand as they developed internally and over time, but they took great suffering, loss, abandonment, and then the successive revelation. I tapped through the muck into the vein of God as only one can through dialectic, open-minded seeking, and accepting all answers. Matters of the spirit differ from matters of the mind as they transcend our awareness and reason-based sense, leaving behind the purely rational for the ephemeral world of poetry and faith.