Advent.  In Western Christianity, tis the season of waiting and expectancy. The divine incarnates. For most of my adult life, this was a season of hope.

I’d no idea a graduate degree in theology would be the program that would excise the story from my religious imagination and shatter it into unrecognizable pieces.  Critical scholarship has a way of reducing the mystery of incarnation to a sort of anthropological analysis in which the sacred becomes an object of rational inquiry.

While the inquiry stoked my curious mind, it left my spirit disoriented and lost. I had lost my Christian belief at a time when Buddhist theory and practice was making more and more sense.  I remember a Christmas during that time that was a painful practice in pretending it didn’t matter that I’d lost a precious piece of myself.

I look back at that Christmas and now know I was dancing the sometimes awkward pairing of religion and spirituality in which one partner progresses more quickly than the other.

That was then and this is now.

The old story is changing and a new story is taking its place.  I realize now that I was sitting under a vast galaxy of stars, which contained the secrets of the Christian story.  Yet, I’d not realized the Dominant Story of Christianity had been created by mostly powerful, celibate men who foregrounded but a few of those stars based on their own lens of perception.

They called this one limited constellation, this one cosmovision, “Christianity.”  The story was passed through generations until it became the orthodoxy.

Countless stories were left untold.  Countless jewels in the sky were backgrounded. If a community pointed to other stars…to other components of the story…they were labeled heretics.

Yet, orthodoxy and story grow stale if it no longer answers the deepest questions of the time. Science and pluralism have turned the Dominant Story on its ear.  People are shifting their location of authority from outside themselves to inside themselves and allowing an Alternative Story to emerge.

Perhaps the most significant realization is that the historical Jesus and the Christ of timelessness invite Christians to awaken to stars they had not seen because they were blinded by the one constellation that was the Dominant Story.  It invites them to widen their perspective and see their own story as part of the emerging Story.

We now are invited to sink deeply into the question Jesus asked in countless encounters: “Who do YOU say that I am?”  We are called beyond over-reliance on authorities, systems, and the traditional interpretations of ancient texts embedded deeply in our psyches.

We must surrender the easy answers and false dichotomies that demand we think in either/ or, this way/ or that way.  We must examine our tenacious identifications and our biases.

We’re invited to create structures we’d never considered in order to find holding containers for the multiplicity of Christian experience.  What will it look like?  We really don’t know.  The answers will unfold from the very act of opening ourselves to the Ground of all Being while allowing the coming phase to emerge from the field of the unknown.

I once read, “We turn to God when our foundations are shaking only to find it is God who is shaking them.”   What if we recognize the shaking foundations as necessary shocks to wake us from the coma of the Dominant Story?

The Alternative Story: Facticity is Not Synonymous with Truth

The Alternative Story holds a space for historical Jesus scholarship, the insights of powerful feminist perspectives on scripture, the insights of science and the evolutionary perspective of contemporary cosmologies.  Yet, it need not throw out the baby with the proverbial bathwater.

The bathwater is the inner experience of a religious narrative, which tells of a living Christ living and breathing through each of us.  It is a recognition that Jesus’ life provides a template for human transformation.  Facticity is not synonymous with truth.   Spiritual surrender to Something greater than our limited selves does not require we check our rational minds at the door.

The life of Jesus can be interpreted through countless lenses, but I do know this: one cannot assess Christianity from the outside as it makes no sense. Christianity is an interior individual and communal experience.

As we step into this experience, the lens through which we see can evolve.   It can hold the tension of the opposites. It can hold paradox.  It can hold the wisdom of the Buddha, the ecstasy of Rumi, the wordless wonder of nature mysticism, the incantations of the Vedantic texts, the healing rituals of shamanic journeying, the erudite demands of devout atheists.

It can hold the Christ from an evolutionary lens.

In this season of hopeful expectancy, we recognize that the journey takes us into our shadow selves, our luminosity, our powerlessness and vulnerability, our fullness and completeness as we awaken to the non dual realization expressed by the Christ that was given to you and to me: “I and the Father are One.”

We don’t get to the greater Reality by looking out there or in here.  Rather, we participate, brothers and sisters.

In this time of Advent hope, we are blazing a new trail on an ancient path.  Let us stand in a state of “wondering” as Richard Rohr suggests which requires at least three things:

Stand in disbelief.
Stand in the question itself
Stand in awe before Something.