AN IRONICALLY-SINCERE METAMODERN EPISTLE

An Excerpt from 'GOSPEL'

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Salutation

1 To my dear friends in the metamodern communes—those at Sky Meadow, White River, Hilltop; at Onion, Maple, Willow, and Good Earth—and to all my brothers and sisters out in the world-wide diaspora: a hardy hello! and the warmest love from all of us at Eastershine.

2   We hope you’re doing well, in spite of everything. Obviously, things are challenging for everyone right now, Eastershine included. We read the signs of the (NY) Times as you do, and share the world’s worries—believe me.

3   Still, for all the chaos percolating past the hills, we take solace in another good harvest—thank the Earth!—and we wanted to extend our open invitation once again: please, friends, help yourselves to it!

6   Don’t hesitate then, truly, to ask for anything. We will help in any way we can, now that some of you are facing hardship.

7   In these lean times, that’s what we’re called to do. Love calls, in fact, more than ever.

The Sacred Style

8   What means all this? Friends, you must imagine me as I’d have you do: laughing beside the garlic in my purple vest, sitting on a pumpkin, plucking my broken banjo under Vermont summer sun, and bubbly-shaman, all-guffawing, “Come! Haha! Come in!”

9   I’d have this letter work as psycho-active sacred literature, true to form. It’s not enough to simply say the truth; you know this. (And its corollary: to say it simply is to say too much.)

10 “The real reality,” writes Hanzi, “resides at the crossroads of fact and fiction. It is born precisely at the point where our imaginations, the stories we tell ourselves, meet the facts of the world and put them into context.”

11 Call this “the metamodern mask.” It aids in telling truths we’d be performing.

13 And so we must embody “the sacred style,” as Layman Pascal calls it—a style both ancient and timeless.

15 So please, allow me some pretense. The form instantiates what’s said, and gives you space for drawing close—through distance.

16 In which case, I would ask you all to fathom me best a letter-writer from a far-off pumpkin patch, sending my edifying missives out like paper planes to the ends of the world—toward the beginning of a new one.

Recent Tensions with Christians

17 So, to task! I wanted to address some of the unfortunate tensions you’ve been sharing in our forums and gatherings and calls: namely, the rebuke you face from many Christians.

21 The first thing I’ll reiterate: Remember: They are still our family, too!—our (half-)brothers and sisters in God. Love them, then. For in doing that, we reveal our kinship—even if many of them refuse to see it.

23 Are we not a sort of Christians ourselves, after all—believers, that is, in the God of Love they say they worship? We shouldn’t emphasize division, then, but unity.

25 Treat them instead like brothers and sisters, then and embrace them as ourselves—to whatever degree they will allow it. We celebrate a beautiful Spirit of Love and all Creation, and that should make us Christians.

27 You’ve heard me talk at length about this before, I know. Some of you take issue with the notion. “I’m no Christian!” you are quick to say. “I don’t embrace their Jesus!” — “My spirituality looks nothing like theirs!”

28 That may be true enough. Yet there are many Christians among us, certainly, no?

29 Am I myself not a Christian? Perhaps Christians today wouldn’t accept me as such. That’s fine. But I embrace a Christ, His message of Love, forgiveness, peace, and openness.

30 Indeed, though many Christians would refuse to call me one, am I not Christian through-and-through? Was I not raised in the church? Did I not commit myself to years of studying the Bible? Can I not speak in the religious language of my mother tongue as fluently as any pastor, priest, or theologian?

31 By saying this I am not boasting. Why would I boast to be so strong a Christian, when Christ is no longer sought by so many Christians?

32 I would much rather follow Christ out of the fold than stay within it to my shame.

33 No, like you all, I would much rather follow Spirit, which moves where it pleases, regardless of titles and labels—but always toward Love.

34 Yes, the Spirit, incarnate in Creation, the God of Love and muse of Nature—this is open and available to everyone, no longer just to “the religious.”

35 This, you know, is our good news: God has expanded the “covenant” further! always further!—to encompass all humanity.

36 We are no longer called to believe as Christians but to love as humans, and to reverence as conscious beings.

37 For God is now beyond all belief. God having died, Religion can say nothing about Him. And through this glorious annihilation, God has freed us from Religion, liberating (through Her imaginative rebirth) a co-created Spirit of Love for all living things!

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On Spirit Being Open to All Through Nature

1   Of course, Christians have heard us say such things. They say we blaspheme; that our crossing out of God is atheism, not worship; that we are being too presumptuous—too open, too liberal with our sense of covenant.

2   Don’t the believers in prophecy see that this was prophesied in their own scriptures?

3   Allow me, if you will, a little go at exegesis. I will sing a sermon for you, and a little Sunday catechism for a metamodern Christian.

4   Look, surely St. Paul was the forerunner of our good news. And what he sowed, we now are harvesting.

5   In Nature, he himself argued (to poetically paraphrase), we see God manifest everywhere among us.

6   It is there, we feel, in the glorious complexity of ecosystems, in the sublime expansiveness of the skies; it awes us from the Milky Way’s glow, and shines through wonder in a child’s giggle.

7   This is true today just as it was millennia ago!

8   Indeed, even then, Paul wrote to the Romans and made note of how this sacred naturalism has always been open to the world, regardless of “religion.”

9   (The divisions of his day were different, of course—“Jews” or “Gentiles,” “pagans” or “Christians”—but the point’s the same):

10 “For since the creation of the world,” says Paul, “God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20)

11 Nature moves all hearts, just as then, to awe and wonder! to joy and appreciation of the world! It is the sense of the Sacred vibrating from the core of things.

12 It is the hum of some spectacular Mystery moving just below the surface, and which has been moving us for thousands of years to wonder, worship, meditate and praise!

The Limits of Language to Express the Sacred

13 But there’s a problem. For, once truly experienced, this sacred sense is so profound, so touching to our very marrow, that the experience of It is not possible to adequately capture in words.

14 The Sacred is a potent power within us. But ask us to express it, and we find ourselves stumbling over lim-lim-limitations of our language, concepts, and our powers of expression.

15 Still—we cannot help ourselves! Struck by the ultimate awe and wonder, we ache to communicate, and speak of Spirit and our transcendental inklings.

16 This forces us, of course, to at least try to name it, paint it, tell it.

17 So is it spoken of, in languages that differ, with words that only barely convey and metaphors that mostly fail.

18 Indeed, it seems we’re left with only two options in our ineffable impasse:

19 Some choose to appreciate the Mystery’s vastness and uncatchableness by refusing form. They want to get at its expansiveness by letting it be – free – open in our imaginations, so that we never feel we can actually grasp the Sacred in some supreme and utter semblance.

20 But while this is most appropriate to Its ineffable superfluity, it is itself a limitation. For in refusing to imagine God at all, we mortals have nothing to focus our aching praise and wonder on, nothing on which to direct our aspiring gaze—to heavens, or Empyreans…

21 We therefore run the risk of praising nothing in our piousness.

22 And so, instead, others have chosen form—to focus on some single element, idea, or image, and use it as a symbol, icon, a gesturing-toward.

23 How else could we embodied and material creatures celebrate It, they might say, if we didn’t have at least a spark expressed in something that’s material?

24 In this vein, many different images have been used the world over, substantiating its different workings, in order to make talking about Godstuff a little easier, and help us wrap our hearts around it.

25 This is how we make God out of God.

Religion as Idolatry

26 Unfortunately, the danger of doing so—of using images—is that people can forget that God is not God, not image, not representation, and so confuse the sign for what it signifies.

27 To the text! Is this not what Paul laments when he talks about “idolatry”?

28 People get lost in their own fixed idea! In their own fixation on some form of God, they mistake the finger for the moon it’s pointing at.

29 When they do, they cease being open to whatever else God might be. They think they’ve grasped the Mystery in its totality—but, in fact, by thinking that, show they don’t really grasp it All at all.

30 “For although they knew God,” Paul continues, “they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images… (Romans 1:21-23)

31 The Deep Reality intuited numinously in Nature is forgotten. The image stands in for the Totality. God becomes God, and God becomes an idol.

32 Crossing out “God” is thus a more sacred act for us, since it shows we understand that any word or image or idea is never God, only, at best, a useful idol, a helpful image.

33 With this, people can reveal the deeper reality of the Sacred—that healthy spirituality doesn’t become fixated on some image or idea, but rather taps into a deeper, vaster truth at the core of the world.

34 That deeper truth can be appreciated by all, even when—or, especially because—they lack the Tradition’s fixed symbol.

35 “Indeed,” wrote Paul, “when Gentiles, who do not have the law, do by nature things required by the law, they are a law for themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the requirements of the law are written on their hearts, their consciences also bearing witness, and their thoughts sometimes accusing them and at other times even defending them.” (Romans 2:14-15)

36 In short, one doesn’t need some certain set of rituals, commandments, creeds or Gospels. To nourish your spirit, the stars will guide you to that same Sublimity; to commune with God, all you have to do is look around and within you.

37 Even for Paul, no religious person—be they Jew, Christian, or pagan—was better off than others in this regard, since, for all of humanity, the question is not about Religion—that is, about fixed images: custom, tradition, rites, or norms.

38 A person is not a Jew who is one only outwardly, nor is circumcision merely outward and physical. No, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly. And true circumcision is not merely obeying the letter of the law; rather, it is a change of heart produced by Spirit. (Romans 2:28-29)

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Paul’s Prophecy Fulfilled Today

1   What, then? Are we not Christians? Do we not read our Gospel? Do we not embrace the Spirit (if not the letter) of Paul’s message?

2   Indeed, I see our communes and our metamodern spirituality as the very fulfilment of these prophetic words!

3   As theologians will tell you, it is the nature of biblical texts to have provided one meaning in an ancient context and quite another meaning to a later context. History and hindsight provide the key.

4   Christians have long read the Hebrew Bible in this way, calling it the “Old” Testament to their “New.”

5   New communities ever see themselves addressed by old traditions.

6   Are we not Christians too, then? For we also appeal to Gospel. The spirit of Christ’s message (and Paul’s) is also ours: reject the idols of your religious fixation and turn inward—to the Spirit of Love and Life and Light that speaks its sacred naturalism to all!

7   In this way, what Paul spoke to then now comes to fruition through us: God reveals God’s Self still deeper, always deeper: fulfilling Scripture by exploding it.

8   By this, God frees us from all Religion as mere idolatry. For God will not be bound by limits Religion sets It.

The Evolution of Spirit

13 Indeed, all of these viewpoints have their value, and reflect the truth in partial ways.

14 And, indeed, an understanding of the highest matters—call them ultimate concerns, religious ideas, or simply Spirit—unfolds in a similar manner.

15 New perspectives build upon the old, offering new vantages and prospects.

16 In this way, our collective understanding of Spirit itself evolves.

17 The more we come to learn about the world, the more our minds become opened to the dynamics of Reality, the more our concept of Spirit—its nature and its modes of operation—changes.

18 The idea of Spirit is thus evolving…

19 But Spirit is, indeed, idea. It is a pattern of consciousness, a complex mental formulation. It manifests within our minds, and our minds make it manifest.

20 As we evolve in our manifestation of Spirit, then, Spirit evolves in turn!

21 As we develop through stages of higher and higher levels of awareness, Spirit develops, too.

22 Now, this development can be seen from different angles.

23 To us, it looks like personal and cultural development. But we are limited in our scope of this, knowing only the present and (reconstructions of) the past.

24 To Spirit, it looks more like a flower’s blooming, a telos becoming realized, an aim being achieved.

25 The two are one, ultimately. For we are Spirit’s mechanism of development—its means, its vehicle in the world.

26 Spirit rides the phenomenal unfolding of human development like a train rides a track.

27 As it is written:

“God, as well as being primordial, is also consequent. …The completion of God’s nature into a fulness of physical feeling is derived from the objectification of the world in God. He shares with every new creation its actual world; and the concrescent creature is objectified in God as a novel element in God’s objectification of that actual world. …God’s conceptual nature is unchanged, by reason of its final completeness. But his derivative nature is consequent upon the creative advance of the world.” (A. N. Whitehead)

28 The metamodernist is all too keenly aware of this syntheist understanding of God: not the God who was, “in the beginning,” but the God who shall be, the God that is coming into being, the becoming-realized God we are helping to manifest through developing Spirit.

30 The Gospel we read is not a magic text handed down from the primordial God; it is instead a poetic text gesturing toward the consequent God that may yet come to be.

31 In this way, every new interpretation moves Spirit forward.

32 It offers a rail, a path, a turn for Spirit to take on its journey of development.

35 Two thousand years ago, a man named Jesus of Nazareth offered Spirit a new track to follow. And Christian mystics and theologians and philosophers have been laying new track along its lines all the centuries since.

36 A principal route was set down by the early writers and then the canonizers of old scripture all those years ago.

37 But that route is now forking yet again.

38 Today, each of us is capable of forking God’s lightning; each perspective adds its voice to the holy choir of circling seraphim.

39 The Spirit moves where it pleases—but uses us to move It, shape It, form It, realize it.

40 God is a coming-into-being that we are aiding. It develops as we develop.

42 The same Spirit that once forked Christianity is still evolving…

A Stumbling Block for Christians

45 But, as ever, the old, wide path remains well-trodden, and exercises its influence on Spirit’s evolution still—like a wide track carrying the water, even as new channels form.

46 The ghosts of Geist Past still haunt the world like vestiges of relic skin the Ouroboros has abandoned.

47 And so it is, that our message of Love and imaginative theology has become a stumbling block to many Christians.

49 Custom stops its ears to new communities.

53 What then does their Christianity mean? when the mere words of their religion are taken for Truth? when their signs for the ineffable are confused with What they signify? when images are taken literally?

54 Religion becomes an idol. So some come not to worship God, but a Book; words, not the Word.

55 Look! Who claims to have been liberated from death by Christ, but is still enslaved to his Crucifixion? Who claims to have been forgiven their sins by Christ, but is still burdened by their Atonement (for which and with which they do great sins)?

57 But have the “apostates” they judge rejected Love? By no means! Today, is it not so often the witch, the humanist, the atheist who shows the greatest care to those in need?

58 Are not those damned by Christians far more liberal in their Love?

59 What then do we say? Abandon Christianity and follow Christ? For today, it seems, so many Christians have abandoned Christ. Yea, Christendom has crucified Him.

60 But God is risen! And She has appeared to those who follow in the path of Love and growth and life.

61 She asks no greater burden, no baptism, confirmation, and no creed. Just love and wonder, and She is with you—God’s Spirit, God’s Nature, working in you.

A Third Dispensation

62 And so it is. “Behold! I am making all things new!”

63 His Glory has departed from the Temple and goes to desert places.

64 God has left the Church, infested with idolatry, and lighted on a new community—one whose central tenet is a pliable and welcoming Love, open to new forms and novel images for Spirit’s turning in Creation.

65 So was it prophesied by Isaiah, fulfilled by Christians first, and now by us:

     I have been found by those

          who did not seek me;

     I have shown myself to those

          who did not ask for me.

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Living Out God’s Will and Testament

1   Paul brought a message of good news to the world, to those who, even though they were without God’s written covenant, still acted according to its spirit by their ethical living and reverence for the invisible Sacred in Nature. So was the covenant expanded in his days.

2   Whenever this happens, though, the old community reasserts its claims. They denigrate new freedoms, and seek to shackle with the law they know—with their old Testaments, their Rules, with their old Dogmas and their settled “Gospel.”

3   But do not let yourselves be burdened with the demanding legalities of creeds and scriptures, of custom’s worn idolatry!

4   God has freed us from religion. How?

5   He has died.

6   “Do you not know, brothers and sisters—for I am speaking to those who know the law—that the law has authority over someone only as long as that person lives?” So Paul declares in Romans 7:1.

7   With this, he prophesies our freedom.

8   For God has died. As it is written: “God is dead. And we have killed him.”

9   Indeed, with God died all idolatrous religion, from which we are now free, as a widow from her marriage contract (Romans 7:2-3).

10 So is the prophecy of Christ fulfilled.

11 For Christ had died to save humanity from sin. But God has died to save it from the very idea of sin.

12 So is it in our scripture. So runs the good news of this, our newest Gospel.

13 For those of us, us Christians, who struggled under the burden of Christianity—the burden to reckon ourselves sinful in order to be saved; the burden of needing to damn all those who do not believe this dogma; indeed, the burden of belief itself—for all of us, we can take heart.

14 The old God has died, delivering us from Himself!

15 And from the tomb in which we buried Him—the relegation to imagination—there now springs forth a grander, freer Spirit!

16 God, cocooned in Idol, now comes butterflying free! open to the infinitudes of our imagining! (GOD, Canto 20) 

17 The guilt and shame of our debt to God, our debt to Christ for taking it on, our debt to the law of Christianity—all, all these have been erased!

18 And in their place, the joy and wide expansiveness of Love. Love! Love!

19 Yes, Love remains.

20 And so the words that Paul spoke are fulfilled: Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. (Romans 13:8)

21 Is this, then, what some call a “new religion”?

22 By no means, really. It is as ancient as Christianity itself!

23 It is Christianity, fulfilled at last.

24 And anyone—Jew or Gentile, pagan or Christian, man or woman, straight or queer, whatever form and wherever from—anyone who would open their arms wider and wider to the ineffable and untamable Love of the sublime Mystery of Existence is free to partake.

25 Good news! Good news! Rejoice!

26 “The old is gone, but look: The new is being born!”

Final Messages and Greetings

27 But, ah, the strawberries call. I’ll leave it there for now.

28 I look forward to seeing you all in a few weeks’ time. This year’s Harvest Dance will be a revel to remember!

29 Make sure Tree remembers her accordion, and the Earth Band their flare. Hilltop, your beer is eagerly anticipated, and Onion, we’ll be ready for your antics! (but, if possible, no “dunking” this time?)

30 My love to you all, and love from all of Eastershine.

31 May the Spirit of All Creation grow within you and through you, that God may be all in all.

32 Peace.