ISBN: 9781620950289
To my parents, Robert and Ethel Markham, who endured many hardships while raising four children during the depths of the Great Depression.
Many thanks to Deborah Brown, Roy Cozad, Stuart Crampton, Deborah Edson, Richard Ford, Leanne Jewett, Janet Keep, Joe Kobrel, my wife Donella Markham, Thomas Mikelson, Paula Orlando, Wayne Powell, Henry Thomas, Linda White, and my siblings Mary Coverdale, Philip Markham, and Elinor Myers. All made helpful comments and suggestions on drafts of my essays. In particular, Janet Keep was a faithful mentor and advisor, meeting with me many times and making valuable suggestions when I was writing an earlier version of my book. I’m especially grateful to my daughter, Amy Markham, who read every essay with a critical and constructive eye, pointing out many ways to vastly improve the manuscript. Debbi Wraga has been very helpful throughout the publishing process, and Jill Drummond skillfully helped me with publicity. I’ve benefited greatly from the contributions of all those who’ve been of assistance, but take full responsibility for any shortcomings in my essays.
I first experienced the mystery of why anything exists at all when I was eleven years old, and it altered my outlook on life forever. Over the years, my experience of this and other mysteries led me to be skeptical of any dogmatically expressed assertions. If all existence is wrapped in mystery, how can anyone be absolutely certain their perceptions and visions mirror reality? If the ultimate reasons for existence are beyond human ken, how can religious or secular believers justifiably claim to have the only path to Truth?
Ideologies of all varieties can inform or inspire without followers making excessive claims for their convictions as many do today. Major world religions express much wisdom and many insights into the human condition, but none can legitimately claim to be favored by God. For example, the Christian Bible contains hundreds of passages which comfort, and many others which challenge us to think about the values we live by, but I question the claim by fundamentalists that it communicates the literal word of God.
I contend that we are living at a time when discord among Christian, Islamic, and secular ideologies are becoming increasingly prevalent, pronounced, and dangerous. I believe awareness and acceptance of the ultimate mystery of existence could ameliorate the intensity of conflicts and promote a greater sense of community, living as we do on such a miniscule planet in a universe that is incomprehensibly vast.
My essays highlight mysteries which suffuse each moment, argue that the ultimate mystery of existence undermines dogmatic thinking, offer interpretations of Christianity which contrast with those of fundamentalists, show how Christianity is relevant to contemporary issues, and suggest a path to meet the challenges of our troubled times. An opening essay describes my journey toward arriving at these conclusions.
Preface
PART ONE
1. Journey
2. Mysteries
3. Mysteries, Absolutes, and Relativism
PART TWO
4. God as Ultimate Mystery
5. Radical Jesus
6. Redefining Heaven and Hell
7. Sin and Salvation in a Different Light
8. Soul?
9. Thoughts on Christianity
10. My Interpretation of the Lord’s Prayer
PART THREE
11. Interpretations of an Ancient Theme
12. Of Lust and Love
13. Three Kinds of Power
14. Injustice and Justice
15. Toward Individuality with Community
PART FOUR
16. Why Mystery Matters
APPENDIX: THREE SERMONS
Dreams, Realities….Hope
Community
By God Transformed
BIBLIOGRAPHY
I’ve long been fascinated with the ultimate mystery of why anything exists at all and by the many mysteries which suffuse every moment of our lives. My awareness of mystery led me to be skeptical of all dogmatic convictions, including those of fundamentalist Christianity. Describing my personal journey will provide a useful context for subsequent essays which elaborate on the implications of the ultimate mystery of our existence.
I grew up on a farm located a mile outside the center of a very small Kansas town of 250 people, having only two grocery stores, a café, post office, hardware store, saloon, leather repair shop, two service stations, and a high school with 55 students. There were two Protestant churches in the village, and my parents made sure the family attended Methodist Church services every Sunday. My father read the Bible frequently, my mother sometimes led Sunday School classes, and both genuinely sought to live good Christian lives. Each member of our family offered simple prayers before every meal, honored the Sabbath, and celebrated Christian holidays with most others in the community where we lived. All of these activities laid the foundation for a lifelong respect for Christianity, although I would gradually begin to challenge fundamentalist interpretations of the Bible.
I first heard Bible stories during Sunday School. Divided according to age, The “Bluebirds,” “Busy Bees,” and “Livewires” met in the basement prior to the regular church service. Respected local women conducted each class, offered a brief prayer, read stories from the Bible, and led the singing of hymns. I don’t recall any of the teachers inviting questions; children simply were expected to accept the truth of each story. I wasn’t especially moved by any of the stories. In fact, I didn’t particularly look forward to going to church; it was just something I did because my parents didn’t offer any other option.
Following Sunday School, most people stayed to listen to sermons from preachers, some of whom were just starting their ministry and others nearing the end of their careers. None of them had a very long tenure in the little church, but did their best to convey their understanding of Christian messages. Some conducted evangelical revival meetings every night for a couple of weeks in the summertime. Although my parents never went forward to be “saved,” one of my friends was once so moved that he joined others at the altar, and I did so as well but not with much conviction. I also attended summer church camps and went regularly to Methodist Youth Fellowship meetings on Sunday evenings unless my friends and I decided to skip out. With my family, I attended and enjoyed church ice cream socials, the annual church bazaar, and other events that helped establish a feeling of community among members of our congregation. All of these activities constituted my introduction to the rudiments of Protestant Christianity, and helped me feel part of something larger than myself.
Living on a farm can give a child many opportunities for reflection. Perhaps that is why, at age 11, I found myself wondering “Why am I here?” “Why is anything here?” “What would it be like if there were nothing at all?” In retrospect, I believe this experience contributed to my seriously beginning to doubt some of the stories from the Bible. For example, how did God create everything in just six days? If Adam and Eve were the first humans and had two sons, who did the sons marry? How could anyone live to be hundreds of years old? How did God write the commandments on a stone tablet and how could Moses have carried that heavy burden down the mountain? How could God have parted the waters to allow the Israelites to escape Egypt? How did species coexist on Noah’s ark, what did they eat and drink, and why didn’t they prey upon one another as is their natural inclination?
Later on, as a teenager, I had questions about stories from the New Testament. How could a virgin give birth to a child? Did Jesus really perform all those miracles? Was he really resurrected after death? If he was a spirit, how could the apostles have materially seen him days later? What does it mean to say that Jesus died to save us from our sins? All of these unanswered questions weakened my Christian tendencies and paved the way for secular voices to gain influence.
As a young adult, findings of modern science intensified my misgivings about central Christian themes. I was astonished to learn the universe is incredibly, incomprehensibly vast, limitless in extent, having no absolute beginning nor any absolute end, and that there might even be other universes in different dimensions we can’t experience. Courses in biology and geology taught me millions of species have come and gone, the remaining millions constantly change, and human beings are integral parts of nature with no guarantee against extinction.
I also became somewhat familiar with 20th century Biblical scholarship. For fundamentalists firm in their Christian faith, the Bible has always been considered the Word of God and is not to be questioned. They assume that those who wrote down the words of the various books of the Old and New Testaments were directly inspired by God. But Biblical scholars during the last century have found that passages within books of the Old Testament were written by different generations of writers, that some of the passages were drawn from different oral traditions, and that other stories appear to have been taken from non-Jewish and non-Christian sources. In the New Testament, the gospels were not written until decades after the death of Jesus by men who didn’t personally know him. Furthermore, there are inconsistencies in the gospels and the selection of texts to be included in the Bible was the subject of great debate in the formative early centuries of Christianity. Many valuable sources, among them the gospels of Judas and Thomas, were excluded from those eventually chosen. Finally, the many translations of the Bible over many hundreds of years cast further doubt on the notion that the Bible constitutes the undeniable Word of God, unsullied by human minds.
The viewpoints of modern science and Biblical scholarship did not entirely quash the Christian elements of my being. I continued to believe in God and in Jesus as the inspirational leader of Christianity, and found solace in reading passages from the Bible when discontent. For example, in the summer of my freshman year in college, a girl I’d grown fond of broke up with me and I began losing weight, nearly overwhelmed with sorrow and self doubts. I turned to the writings of Norman Vincent Peale, a popular Protestant minister, who stressed the power of positive thinking and the rewards of living a Christian life. His books, and others stressing the same themes, provided support and helped me get back on my feet.
Two years later, I developed a strong relationship with a girl who eventually would become my second wife. The summer after my junior year, however, I received a letter from her saying she “didn’t love me anymore” and that she would be dating others in the fall. Again, I became despondent, wondering what was wrong with me I had tried not to come on too strong, not to express my love too quickly, not to suffer another loss. Alone in my brother’s apartment one evening, I came across a televised sermon by Billy Graham, the renowned Christian evangelical minister. As I listened, Reverend Graham seemed to be speaking directly to me as he encouraged his audience to let go of all their sorrows, cares and doubts, and accept Jesus into their lives. At the moment of surrender, I dropped to my knees, felt a burden had been lifted, and experienced what it apparently meant to be “saved.” The heaviness of my loss was diminished and I became more joyful in the days that followed, feeling that all would be OK if only I would let Jesus into my life. I vowed to become a good Christian and began reading the Bible daily. However, the potency I experienced wore off when I returned to college with its customary round of secular activities. No one else seemed particularly religious or inspired and I didn’t want to be seen as a bit weird. Although my “born again” experience didn’t fully take, I remember it vividly to this day.
The internal tension between secular and religious perspectives continued during my 20’s and 30’s. A course during my senior year in college introduced me to books by predominantly secular authors like Erich Fromm (especially Man for Himself and Escape From Freedom) who described how conformity can be one way of avoiding_loneliness, and who argued that there’s a side to human nature that fears being free. I roamed the stacks looking for books providing analyses of contemporary culture, and was fascinated by C. Wright Mills’ The Power Elite, and later, David Riesman’s The Lonely Crowd, both of which were critical of contemporary social trends and the established order. They resonated with me because, although I did my share of conforming, I wasn’t proud of it and wanted to do something with my life that was more special and significant. While satisfying my draft obligations in the Coast Guard, I purchased a set of the Great Books of the Western World, read several of the novels, selections from philosophers, and took a correspondence course focusing on ancient history. Later, after my first marriage and in a graduate program at the University of Minnesota, Mulford Q. Sibley introduced me to the history of philosophy and political thought, and I became fascinated with Plato, Aristotle, St. Augustine, Machiavelli, Rousseau, Kant, and others. They made me more aware of philosophical and religious issues and I was impressed with their systems of thought even though their perspectives differed from one another.
Later, while teaching high school history courses, my self-confidence was shaken because I wasn’t as successful as I hoped I would be. I developed many self doubts and began searching for answers that might help me understand myself. While searching for insights, I was greatly influenced by Karen Horney’s Neurosis and Human Growth, marking passage after passage that seemed applicable to my own experience. She pointed out how a child’s shaky self-image can lead to constructing an idealized self to compensate for immediate negative experiences, and how the resulting self-image can interfere with being in the moment and at one with others. A good friend introduced me to the field of general semantics, and I was fascinated to learn that language, although freeing humans to communicate, create, and innovate, can, when its limitations are unrecognized, facilitate creation of boundaries among individuals and groups. This insight reinforced what Karen Horney had to say and contributed to my being disinclined to accept unquestioningly different systems of thought. In subsequent essays, I’ll describe further the significance of these books for me.
These secular influences were counterbalanced by religious influences, especially as I became intrigued with authors introducing elements of Eastern thoughti. I was influenced by the notions that all things are changing and transitory, that a spiritual dimension is present within all of existence, and that one can get in touch with spirit through meditation. Along with many others of my generation, I became suspicious of all organized religions, believing their members had lost touch with the original inspirations of their faith because beliefs had been formalized into hardened doctrines and rituals.
Throughout the 1970’s, I largely abandoned Christianity, and attended church at Christmas and Easter only because my wife wanted our children to learn about the religion that meant so much to her. I seldom talked about religion but, when I did, found myself proclaiming the possibility of a mysterious, spiritual dimension to all of life. Predominantly under the influence of secular thought during this decade, I made a detailed study of writings in philosophy, psychology and education, especially books by John Dewey, Jean Piaget, B.F. Skinner, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. While having a deep respect for historical philosophical systems, Dewey offered a “reconstruction of philosophy” that would take into account the findings of modern science. Piaget explored the biological foundations for ways of knowing and described stages of intellectual development from birth to adulthood. Wittgenstein acknowledged the limits of knowledge and the presence of mystery, and his later work showed how perceptions and assumptions are a function of the language one speaks. All of these books, and others, sought to find natural explanations for human behavior rather than thinking of humans as children of a Supreme Being. Under their influence, I became comfortable just accepting that all species are interrelated and that all of them, including homo sapiens, had evolved from simpler forms of life.
By age 45, my philosophical orientation was a mixture of lingering Christian themes, a strong dose of secular ideas, frequent experiences of mystery, and a latent awareness of spirituality. I was aware of the contradictions among these strands of thought, especially the tension between religion and science, but hadn’t yet made systematic efforts to come to my own conclusions on the issues.
Then, out of the blue, I received a call from the woman who, twenty three years earlier, told me she no longer loved me and with whom I’d had no contact for over twenty years. Now a woman with four children, she told me she no longer had confidence that her alcoholic husband was ever going to change, and called “just to see if I was happy.” I responded “I guess I have to say I am.” While realizing the risks of rekindling our relationship, I nevertheless asked for her phone number and address. I convinced myself there was no harm in our just being friends. I knew we might be embarking on dangerous territory, but plunged on anyway. There followed nearly two years of voluminous correspondence, occasional phone calls, and three brief meetings, after the last of which we decided to leave our marriages, and live the rest of our lives together.
Deceit, hypocrisy, excitement, guilt, fear, rejoicing, reservations, sadness. These are only some of the emotions we experienced during the many months we kept our contacts secret from others. But they paled in comparison to the devastation, disappointment and embarrassment our families experienced after the shock of hearing our fateful decisions. I deluded myself by thinking my wife would be better off without me because I felt I’d never been the kind of husband she had hoped for. I convinced myself that my two children, both of whom were in college, would soon get over the shock. I couldn’t let myself know the full trauma my family experienced, and made it through this period by continually telling myself I had made what I called a “deep down, long run” decision.
The turmoil of these years prompted some deep soul searching. I turned to several 20th century theologians who offered new and stimulating interpretations of Christianity. Paul Tillich’s booksii revealed the depth and sweep of Christian thought and he showed how powerful its themes could be without interpreting the Bible literally. Nikolai Berdyaev’siii passion for freedom and creativity made me aware of the vitality of Christian themes and the radical nature of Jesus’ life. From Thomas Merton,iv I learned the value of silent, contemplative prayer. These books and others vastly increased my appreciation for the richness of the Christian tradition, and reinforced my intuitive sense that there is a mysterious dimension to all of creation.
After announcing my decision to leave my marriage, and feeling the need to further explore Christianity, I began attending a Congregational Church and went back to reading the Bible, especially the Psalms and prophets in the Old Testament, the gospels, and the letters of Paul, Peter, and John in the New Testament. I became active in the church, holding several leadershipthvviThe Case for GodThe SpiralStaircase