In Emptiness and Rage, Wreck the Void and Raise Tumult

Wright Calm in Fire and Song

Religion and I have a Frankensteinian history. I grew up something called Anglican Catholic, which is like Episcopal, which is like Catholic without the Pope. I explained it that way, and usually attracted the responses that, I imagine, early explorers had to platypus. The truth of the explanation does little to mitigate the peculiarness.

My history got stranger. When I was eighteen, my family became Antiochian Orthodox. I didn’t know what it was either. Think Greek Orthodox — like in My Big Fat Greek Wedding — but instead of Greek roots, my religion has roots in Syria. (Yes, that Syria.) Perhaps unexpectedly, and definitely strangely, it’s a religion that jelled well with how I was raised. Though I experienced a culture shift. I went from a religion that has its roots in the Church of England to a religion that, geographically speaking, has its roots in the Holy Land. I learned how to pronounce “hummus.” I learned about beards — proper beards. It…yeah. New ideas about culture all over the place.

Then, when I was twenty, I had a job working for the priest at my church, and he had a grant to send a kid to school, provided that he could pick the school. The school he picked was a Roman Catholic seminary in Rome called St. John Lateran. It just so happened that St. John Lateran had a satellite campus two miles from my house. The kid he decided to send there was me.

I got kicked out of that school, but I got halfway through.

That would be weird enough, but it does not stop…

Insofar as you can be, my grandma is a student of American Indian Philosophy. She taught me it’s important to consider the possibility of the cyclic nature of time, the importance of natural harmony, the importance of dreams.

Then there’s my mum. I’m not sure what she’d say were her spiritual beliefs, but I do know that I got her an arrow once because she asked me to, because she said she wanted to work on her “huntress energies.” I admire her so much for it.

She had a brother, my uncle Mike, who regularly alienated himself from churches, because he agreed with the books but not with what he viewed as their displayed decadence and impropriety. I learned skepticism and shrewdness from him.

Which all had a significant impact on my spiritual landscape.

I wouldn’t say this next bit had more of an effect…

But I could never undervalue it.

Some piece of literature or other compelled me to begin examining Eastern Philosophy. Probably it wasn’t one piece of literature, but a collection of literature, though I don’t remember what inspired my interest. The collection starts with Star Wars and, most recently, includes Ip Man 2.

Whatever the literature, it inspired me to ask this question:

What are their tools of self sufficiency?

After a lifetime of curiosity, and several years of casual study, and several more years of slightly organized study, I would now consider myself at the lowest level of Taoist discovery. I’ve read some of the books. I’ve meditated a great deal on the ideas. I find them comforting and useful, and I think they’re true things.

I ought to be suffering from daily psychic ruptures…

I may never have laid this picture of myself out with such simplicity before.

Looking at this portrait of my soul, I’m trying to figure out why I’m not wrecked with the inconsistencies that these schools of thought ought to breed. I ought to be pulled in six directions and unable to function, if I’ve been taught all this. So many incompatible truths.

Right?

Most schools of thought are exclusive, and they’ll tell you that, to be part of the club, you have to reject the other clubs. As one book puts it, you can’t serve two masters.

Right? That’s how it works.

Not so, because of the thing they’ve all got in common. Although few religiophilosophic schools want to admit it, they all have one thing in common:

The human experience.

With varying definitions of “all,” “alive,” “we,” and “are,” all religiophilosophic schools agree:

We are all alive.

Fundamentally, and with a wide range of success and motivation, all religiophilosophic schools seek to explain what that’s all about.

If I’ve learned anything from cobbling together answers from all corners of the world, I’ve learned this:

Nobody’s figured all of it out. But everyone’s figured out some of it.

Which makes the whole experience valid.

Noted for his contributions to the already confusing art of being a writer

(see: the Hero’s Journey)…

Joseph Campbell read more things in his lifetime than any of us ever will. Fact. And he read those things with one purpose: to understand the human experience.

In his opinion, some of the inhabitants of our little globe have evolved past the need for religion — past the need for the Marxist-designated opiate of the masses. In Mr. Campbell’s well-read opinion, humanity has outlived the need for religion. In Mr. Campbell’s opinion, we are getting close to achieving a level of shared culture sufficient that we will soon be able to empathize with everyone — or at least share enough values to have conversations. In his opinion, we’ll fulfill our historic need for religion with empathy.

That’s possible.

I won’t claim to be more enlightened than Joseph Campbell. I’m certainly less studied. I’ve got an idea about something else that might happen in the future, or something that might happen as well.

In my vision of the future, somebody will catch on to the compatible parts of various religiophilosophic schools and start approaching each other to talk. In the subsequent talks, these people will start discovering the answers in opposing schools to questions they had never answered in their own school.

This will go on for hundreds of years. I firmly believe that all the best religions take hundreds of years to do anything.

At the other end of these conversations, I believe that something else entirely will emerge.

I don’t know what.

I don’t expect to be alive to see it.

Until then…

May the Force be with you.