Belief Makers

My mom was raised in South Carolina in a strong Southern Baptist tradition. My dad grew up in Finland with a father who was a Lutheran minister that traveled the world starting Finnish speaking churches. I grew up with a mixture of these traditions and in high school decided that I wanted to be a minister.

At eighteen, I went to college as a religious studies major. Although my focus was Christianity, studying the bible and learning Koine Greek (the language of the New Testament), I also studied other regions and belief systems. When I was nineteen, I wondered into an Assemblies of God Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts that totally changed my concept of worship.

Led by God
Rather than sitting in pews in an audience configuration, chairs were arranged circularly so we all looked at each. The service seemed to evolve without any clear leader. One person would start singing and everyone else would join in with beautiful harmonies. It would get quiet and another person would read something from the bible. People would pray. Some spoke in "tongues", which to me sounded like accented gibberish or a pseudo foreign language. Others would interpret what had been spoken. It felt as though the spirit of God were leading the service.

At one point, the pastor stood up and delivered a sermon. We closed with some more singing and prayer. And then, two and half hours later, we were done.


I fell in love with the experience. It felt fresh and pure to me. I deeply involved myself in the church working in street ministries, playing music, helping people in need, and studying the bible. It's still one of the most memorable periods of my life.

Spirit in a Bottle
Over time, members of the church started thinking of ways to capture the wonderful experience that we had during worship, taking what had been totally impromptu and spirit-led, and routinizing it. Slowly services evolved to something more organized and formal. The worship changed, and so did the people.

Out of this loose affiliation of like-minded people emerged a hierarchical organization replete with politics and power struggles. There was a subtle yet pervasive shift in motivation from simply worshiping and serving God to doing things because they were "right" or "good" or "just" or "correct".

Tipping Point
Years later, I ended up as the church's music director. While meeting with the pastor one day, he brought up the fact that several of the choir members smoked cigarettes and that they were setting a "bad" example that he didn't want to endorse. He told me to ask them to either quit smoking or to leave the choir.

I was dumbfounded, but not speechless.

I mentioned to the pastor that I saw no prohibitions against smoking in the bible. I pointed out that there were, however, prohibitions against gluttony and that several of the people in the choir were fat (the pastor's wife being one of them). So, if we are going to set a good example from a biblical perspective, we should ask all the fat people in the choir to either lose weight or leave the choir. It seemed the logical conclusion.

The pastor withdrew his request and then the next Sunday during his sermon brought up the fact that there were members of the congregation demanding that he preach "logic" rather than "the word of God".

For me, that was the tipping point. I left the church and never looked back.

Starting Over
After leaving the church, I decided to start over, from scratch. I tossed out everything I ever believed and began looking at other religions and belief systems with an openness that I'd never had as a Christian. I started looking for themes, attitudes and beliefs that were common to all or many religions and belief systems. I developed my own set of beliefs that work for me.

Today, I would describe myself as a happy existentialist. I believe that we're simply here; whatever meaning we find in life is up to us. In particular, I find the conceptualization of a conscious god or gods (from the all-powerful, monotheistic god of western religions to the multiple gods of eastern religions to the new age concept of a universal consciousnes) to be decidedly dis-empowering. These concepts, while helpful when we're feeling weak or helpless, also contribute to our feeling week and helpless.

All that said, I love many of beliefs, attitudes and concepts of various religions. I love "spiritual" experience. Contrarily, I think that religion (whether based on the spiritual or the material), is the root cause of most of the conflicts we face as humans today.

When My Mom Died
Several years ago, I got a call from my brother telling me that my mom had had a stroke and was in the hospital. At seventy, my mom had still been teaching aerobics classes; we anticipated her to recover quickly.

It turned out that the stroke was the result of her blood having thickened due to an advanced state of pancreatic cancer. She died within a few weeks.

As we prepared for her memorial service at the church in which she'd invested so much of her later years of life, I received calls from different people who wanted to say or sing something at the service. I decided, why not? So, we opened the service to anyone who wanted to say or present something.

When we arrived at the memorial, the church was full with more than 300 people. What might have been a solemn occasion became a remarkable celebration of my mom's life. People told stories, people sang songs. I still get chills thinking about it.

After the service, countless people approached me to tell me about the time my mom showed up at their house unannounced to help them with this or that simply because she'd heard that they needed help. I found out that for at least the last decade of her life she'd managed to prepare a meal every day for someone who "might need a meal". She'd then send my dad out the door to deliver it.

Although my mom still had some beliefs that were more religious and judgmental than they were spiritual, she'd managed to not become religious. She simply wanted to serve and worship God in the best way she could.

Rethinking Religion
These stories moved me. Up to that point, I'd been quite resentful of religious people. I'd felt lied to and used. I'd felt that religion was simply a tool by which a very small group of people could manipulate and control a very large group of people. I changed that.

Today, I'm of the mind that we as humans have developed wonderful systems by which we explain the unexplainable and manage the unmanageable. I believe that, in their pure forms, any of these systems can serve us remarkably well. I find beauty and spirituality in all of them.

I also believe that, when we convert any system of beliefs to a system of truths, we undermine them and transform them from something beautiful to something, well, ugly.

Food for Thought
What are your spiritual beliefs? Do they stem from a tradition that you grew up with or are they something that you came to later in life? Are you religious about them? If so, why? How is being religious serving you? Is it serving you?

Perhaps you've walked away from the beliefs of your youth or your tradition. If so, is it the beliefs themselves or the religion that boxed them? Have you looked at the beliefs in isolation from the formal religious structure? Perhaps it's time to revisit them?

Happy New Year, Teflon

Labels: all blogs, mark tuomenoksa, philosophy