Pentecostal to Pantheist

I guess some people figure they have it figured all out early but I’m still connecting a lot of dots at 41.

I understand my childhood religious trauma and the ways it affected my mind now. And I’m starting to see how my subsequent insatiable appetite for intellectual honesty actually did me a certain disservice: After discarding Christianity the concept of embracing any spiritual connections felt unauthentic, antithetical and adverse to my newfound academic knowledge.

But something happened to me during meditation.

Cognitive behavioral therapy introduced breathing and grounding exercises that bring me real and lasting peace. At first I examined this phenomenon from a purely psychological and scientific perspective: Breath regulation slows blood pressure and calms the mind. Meditation slows breathing and heart rate.

I am drawn most to meditations that guide you into a beautiful forest, or turn you into a tree. I love loving-kindness meditation that involves cultivation of empathy, compassion and connection.

Slowly I’m realizing the path to peace I’ve found is far from purely psychological but deeply and beautifully spiritual.

It’s the kind of spiritual that makes me feel like I’m not separate from this world.

Christianity convinces you you’re better than the world.

1 John 2:15

Do not love the world nor the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.

As Christians we were supposed to hate the wicked world and even to yearn for its eventual demise. We were supposed to long for this heavenly home with pearly gates and golden streets. Apparently we have been digging for shiny trinkets and claiming them as riches for ourselves for a long time.

My heaven would have beautiful, healthy, undisturbed, clean mountains with lush foliage, not the sediments deposited inside. My heaven would have oysters in the ocean where nature intended.

If only my world could be the same.

Our species, at least in some cultures, has just become absolutely blinded by greed.

Thankfully there are still some schools of thought that tie identity and individualism with recognition of our place on this planet, in this time, in these bodies.

Hindu concepts found within the Advaita Vedanta hold the belief that everything in the universe is a part of, or identical to, a single divine reality, the individual soul ultimately one with the cosmic consciousness, essentially making every living thing a manifestation of the divine.

Taoism doesn’t attribute divinity, but teaches that all living creatures ought to live in a state of harmony with the universe and the energy found in it, guiding everything in the universe. The Tao Te Ching provides guidelines for behavior and spiritual ways to live in harmony with this energy.

It’s exciting to find thinkers who made the same connections I have managed to.

In fostering these connections I’ve developed a profound love for my planet and burning passion to protect her. I’ve developed the perspective that dominion over animals means protecting them instead of exploiting them, acknowledging my injustices against my sister species. Becoming vegetarian cleansed my soul.

It’s not cute, it’s not a fabrication, and it’s not preachy. It’s my journey. Many individuals and cultures across history have embraced similar concepts.

Connection to each other and the Earth is real. It brings real peace and love. It doesn’t require suspension of critical thought. It doesn’t require internalization of twisted values. It holds no hidden political agenda.

It’s no mystery to me, the connection we feel to nature in childhood, drawn to dig our toes into the mud and to scramble up into the trees: the iron in that dirt runs through our blood. The oxygen produced by the trees let’s us breathe. We are One.

When you’ve embraced this perspective and spirituality, your heart breaks over the suffering of the planet and animals alongside the people. Your values inspire ecological practices, veganism, activism.

I am confused by people who struggle to wrap their heads around this version of morality. HOW can they barely blink about the demise of the Earth, or the horrific treatment of animals in the agricultural industry? Don’t they feel any connection at all?

Maybe there’s no room for such connection when you’re trying to connect to a god instead.

I can’t help but feel like so many religious people missed the point. They were given a belief system fabricated by people in power, and here we are centuries later still trying to get spiritual satisfaction from it.

I don’t think it’s working. People who subscribe to Christianity are among the most miserable and hateful people that I know. They’ve lost real connection to their world. They think they’re spiritual but they’re really anything but.

I wish I could explain that serotonin and dopamine can be found in forests and on beaches and doesn’t come with the baggage of the church if you’re seeking the chemicals there.

I’d explain that I remember the peace of Jesus rushing over me in warm waves. That I understand this effect was caused by psychological phenomena. Suggestions of the preacher. Droning music. Suspension of critical thought.

Meditation brings the warm waves too. They roll in bringing profound peace and clarity with each break. Eventually they smooth out the sharp edges of the brain causing real neurobiological changes.

They wash you up not to the foot of a Roman execution device but to the foot of a sprawling Oak tree, and deep into the Earth below, navigating the roots that ground and connect us all.

My connection to Mother Earth feels more real than my connection to Father God ever was. Even as a young child I had been fearfully aware of my secret animosity toward that angry old storm god.

 How I love my Earth mother! Her plants and herbs sustain me. Her sun keeps me warm, her trees give me breath.

I love her incredible history, the history of my species, evolution.

 “The feeling of awed wonder that science can give us is one of the highest experiences of which the human psyche is capable. It is a deep aesthetic passion to rank with the finest that music and poetry can deliver.”

Richard Dawkins

I’m here for this new (to me) spirituality.

I’m in good company with pagans and witches who looked to this Earth to heal us, rather than the heavens.

Men wanted their gods to be the antidote for what ails us but they failed miserably.

They didn’t invent spirituality. I can still find it.

Just gotta connect the dots. ❤️