Christianity: Why Should We Bother?
Bruce McBeath
©March 14,, 2010 @ UU Society of River Falls


Unitarian Universalism’s relationship with Christianity has seemed to me to be more negating and dismissive than to other religious traditions.  I imagine this is in part the consequence of  UU member’s early negative experiences with what is culturally identified as the “Christian Church” and with individuals who claim a Christian identity while spreading bigotry and hate. I’ve a noticed a general distrust, even ridicule, of Christian beliefs demonstrated at times within this society. Indeed, I was asked to offer this presentation after informing our program committee about specific occurrences of what I viewed as  “Christian bashing” within a couple of our services. But more to the point, UU’s often seem leery of being tainted as  “stupid” or “just not getting it” when they make any positive comments about teaching or practice within the Christian tradition. 
 
This is a complicated topic because Christianity is a complicated tradition. What, exactly, do we mean by “Christianity”, or by referring to someone as “Christian”?  In this short presentation I want to offer some personal impressions drawn from an over 30 year practice in depth psychology in which I was frequently engaged as a “ministers psychotherapist”, and from my personal experience as a occasional student of Christian spiritual practices. I’ll attempt to briefly tie what I see as the value of these Christian teachings into our ongoing life as a UU congregation.
 
Christianity beyond Kindergarten
An early experience with what I would now call authentic Christianity occurred while I was participating in a healing meditation retreat for “helping professionals” in a monastic setting long ago.  Among the dozen or so participants was a Catholic sister, who I found to be one of the freest and most spirited people I had ever met.  She demonstrated a remarkable presence, focused, clear minded, and totally engaged. Her entire “job description” assigned by her religious order, was to “contemplate, meditate, and pray.” And only this, entirely on her own, when and where she choose.  I had heard of such vocations, but had yet to come face to face with someone carrying this as her entire vocational responsibility. Our group of physicians and psychotherapists included several, like me, practiced in some school of meditation. But as we struggled to stay focused and alert through long hours of meditation and contemplation and fought off sleepiness, she was notable for her incredible energy and sustained enthusiasm for each task put before us.  I marveled at how she did it, and talked with her about her life every chance I got (and I had to fight for time to do that – we were all enthralled). 
 
The background of my own exploration and practice had not been drawn from Christianity. I practiced Kundalini Yogi, followed by a couple of strands of Buddhism.  My professional training and experience within the depth psychologies of Freud, Jung, and later Existentialism had impelled my study of Eastern spiritual practices since the 70’s. I knew least about Christianity, and had no interest in pursuing a tradition I only associated with the child like “God talk” emanating from so-called “Christian” churches.  Those messages I found to be often toxic to the inner development of people with whom I worked. 
 
Serving for a number of years as a clinical psychologist and psychotherapist with a ministerial health program afforded me insights into the lives of a large number of Protestant and Catholic clergy. Here, too, I found the Christian teachings carried by these ministers did little to aid in their psychological development and often did much to stifle it.  But my experience with that Catholic sister opened my eyes.  Over a long number of years I tried to keep them open as I worked and collaborated with a small but growing number of other religious professionals, especially those from monastic traditions, who seemed shinning examples of “God’s love in the world.” They presented an altogether different version of Christianity than what I had witnessed or even imagined before. 
 
A constant challenge to the “false doctrine of the self.”
I learned, over time, something about what I would term “Christianity for grown ups”. These teachings present us with the most challenging demands that can be made on our inner life, and from my point of view, the most essential.  It begins with the teachings within Christianity that recognize the destructive “evils” of an ego-centered life.  Here the personal ego is accurately seen in its complex and subtle dimension, and the daily struggle to release it are recognized and affirmed in these teachings. At the center of Christianity is the knowledge that who you think you are is fundamentally quite different than your “true nature” (or, put another way, the ego is not the self).  Indeed, our continuing attempts to control or “manage” our experience of “who I am” stands as a direct barrier to real self-recognition.  The personal ego is rightly viewed as a “false god” that wishes to supplant any authentic experience of a true self and relationship with God. 
 
At its root, Christianity issues a “call to attention” with the goal of dismantling, piece by piece and over a long period of time, this false god identified usually as “myself.”  The kind and quality of attention described in Christian teaching and practice parallel that within the deep meditative traditions within Buddhism.*  The Christian injunction to “pray without ceasing” is a call to stay awake to what is actually occurring in present time, and is precisely targeted to interrupting and releasing the powerful hold of the ego.
 
The requirement of sustained inner work
Christian teaching and practice recognize human beings as comprised of two natures: animal and divine.  For most of us humans, the pathway from selfish self-interest to genuine compassion involves considerable struggle and is achieved by and through the development of inner awareness and self-examination (Socrates and Plato’s early descriptions are relevant here).  The “real nature of life, of love, and of the world beyond” cannot be seen or experienced without the development of “soul” which functions and is strengthened as a dynamic experience that grows out of this kind of inner work, sustained through time. Thomas Aquinas’s definition of “adequatio” (that the “eye of perception must be adequate to understanding what is to be perceived”) catches the essence of this.
 
Perhaps I can illustrate something arising in the beginning phase of “soul making” with this example:  In some of the Christian teaching with which I am familiar, the soul is identified as the “mind working in the heart.”  But where is the heart?  Not the muscle that pumps blood through the body, the heart is located further inside. How are we to locate it? One spiritual practice for doing just that is the Jesus prayer, the simple seven work repetition “Lord Jesus Christ, have mercy on me”. Spoken as a mantra over time, the heart is revealed through progressive inner experience. This is where inner awareness and self-examination reside inside us as principle features of our ongoing “soul work.”
 
Out of the inner work demanded from these Christian teachings, the soul is strengthened enough to receive and sustain the natural outpouring of God’s love. The experience of the radiating love of God is then accompanied by a “felt insistence” that this love be expressed in relationships with others. The commandment “to love my neighbor as myself” becomes now a natural expression of our inner experience of God’s love.  These traditions clearly recognizes that without sufficient “soul work”, carrying love into the world cannot be maintained through time, ultimately becoming corrupted and willful rather than a natural flowering of God’s love for all. As a result, action in the world becomes corrupted by ego and falls apart. Without doing the inner work to support the outer expression of that work, we too often end up only creating a trail of messes for others to clean up after us.
 
Love as the primary calling and challenge
The meditative traditions from the East are of enormous usefulness in dismantling the ego, but authentic Christian teaching demands more.  The commandment that “I am my brother’s keeper” calls the follower of this tradition into the service of the other, be they friend, foe or stranger.  The consequence of this call is an ever present awareness of responsibility for the other that leads to a  “shattering of the ego”, humility, and unknowing into mystery.  We can stand anchored in the unremitting love of God in our inner experience, but we are unremittingly unresolved in our relation to our outer world (which includes thought and emotion as “objects of the ego”).
 
I’ve glimpsed my own lack of development and inability to meet this challenge many times, often right in the most mundane moments of life.  A few years ago I was driving along the highway on my way to my office in St. Paul.  I was only slightly behind schedule, driving a jeep I’d recently purchased that still carried that “new car smell.”  The morning was overcast, with intermittent rain.  Ahead of me, on the shoulder of the road, I noticed an older person wrapped in a raincoat held together by duct tape, carrying what appeared to be a large bag.  He or she, I couldn’t tell which, looked briefly at me as I went by, and then quickly away.  I instantly “knew” what I was called to do, and just as quickly was flooded by a series of rationalizations that stopped me from doing it.  “They didn’t beckon me to stop”, “I’ll be late for my first appointment”, even I’m reluctant to admit, “this is a new car – God, the mud, and I’ve no idea what’s in the bag.”  As I caught what was happening in me, and took the off ramp, then circled back to give myself another, redemptive, chance, s/he was gone.  The experience still lives in me, however, as a mocking challenge to my egoic self-absorption. 
 
The secular validity of Christian practice within depth psychology
Shorn of the religious language, I know these “revelations” of self and world to be accurate to my (and others) experience within depth-oriented psychotherapy.  These Christian teachings are a faithful description of a secular process, but Christianity takes it further into relationship and out into the world through social action. A “divine yearning” or” holy desire” for unity with God, or the “organizing principle of the universe” if you prefer, shows up often in a person’s life amid considerable periods of self-questioning and self-exploration. This yearning impels one to move beyond meditation and psychotherapy into some form of compassionate engagement in the world.
 
Christianity within a UU context
In my view, and perhaps obvious from these very partial descriptions of the roots of Christian teaching, there is no such thing as a “Christian Church,” and not many practicing “Christian” people (excepting perhaps in some monastic communities).  Given the history of organized religion in general, it seems unlikely that such a church could ever exist.  It perhaps exists today as suggested in the biblical phrase,  “where two or more are gathered together in my name”.  I have known such momentary “churches” with friends who share a deep bond, are pretty consistent self-examiners (soul workers), and have occasional moments of enlightenment that arise when probing an important life question together. But then we lapse back into egoic delusions of our own power and ability, and our brief experience of “church” dissolves.  Some authors within the traditions I describe have applied the label “pre-Christian” to those individuals and organizations that call themselves “Christian” within Western culture.  Indeed, our own early experiences with so-called “Christian” churches were doubtless actually of the “pre-Christian” variety.
 
And what of “professing UU’s”?  Why should a UU society be open and inviting to authentic Christian teaching and practices, and to Christian people (assuming, of course, that we would be able to find any and entice them to participate with us?)?  Because, I submit, we need what these would bring: a greater focus on deeply penetrating and ego shattering self-examination; a disciplined engagement with the inner work of soul building; and powerful examples of how love radiates outward in compassionate service with even the most bothersome of strangers.  With no expectation of sustained inner work ourselves, we UU’s are prone to dangerous and damaging ego distortions, and can easily see ourselves as gods.  Convinced we know who we are and how the world works, we are compelled by egoic delusions of grandeur without the inner awareness needed to catch and interrupt them.  Without a deep and sustained experience of God’s love, our efforts to radiate love and “save” the world grow feeble and feel burdensome.  When peace and love are not in us, we can only be a burden in the world.  That is in the Christian message, and it would help us to have it around more.
 
But encouraging Christian teaching and its practitioners to participant within a UU community may also be troublesome.  Would they poke at our distorted thinking and find the quality of our connections to the “strangers” in our midst flabby and ineffectual?  Probably.  Would we, in egoic exasperation, want to crucify them?  Perhaps.  But the Christians I describe are familiar with attempts to silence them.  They would see this as a manifestation of the false god of the ego, attempting, as it always does, to keep the upper hand. I believe that it would be a great and discomforting blessing to us if they would enlist with us in our on-going search for truth and meaning, and help us make real what we draw from the very heart of our Universalist tradition: Gods love, without exception, available to us all.
 
Bruce McBeath
3/14/10
 
* Although many Buddhist practices focused on self-awareness and self-examination parallel or compliment some Christian ones, there remain important distinctions between practices within these traditions. Importantly, Christian practices with which I am familiar seem more nurturing of interpersonal relationships, and place different value on these relationships, than those Buddhist traditions I’ve encountered (perhaps a topic for further discussion).