by Randall S. Frederick

In the Northeast part of Pennsylvania, tucked away in the dense forest of Pocono Lake, my in-laws have a farm where they stay for the majority of the year. Part of their year is spent in New Orleans, visiting grandkids and hosting parties. My mother-in-law is a retired minister, her husband a retired heart surgeon, and so you can imagine there is a constant stream of lively conversation with my addictions counselor mother, retired accountant father, executive assistant wife, and myself, a college instructor.

Though my mother was a missionary and her father before her a pastor, I am not a spiritual person. At least, not anymore. Growing up in Evangelicalism, I witnessed off-putting expressions of spirituality that eroded that part of who I was. When I went to seminary in 2011, I was determined that I could change things from within the institutional Church. By the time I graduated in 2014, I had become convinced that leading a church was no longer something I wanted to pursue. It felt fruitless, like a withering tree, and so following the example of Jesus, I remember praying for just a few more seasons to see if things might turn around. After the 2016 election, I came to realize that Evangelicalism and the expressions of faith I had grown up with were entirely dead to me. Like millions of other Americans, I was aghast at the ways Evangelicalism salivated over their proximity to power, the ways they traded their claims to morality, ethics, and spiritual authority for a morally bankrupt panel of candidates. In the years that followed, I did a considerable amount of self-reflection. Like survivors of abuse and manipulation, I came to accept that the curious things I had been part of were actually harmful. It is a process of recovery that I am still working through as I write these words. Saying that I am not a spiritual person still feels painful, like an admission of defeat. Even praying, the simplest of spiritual exercises, feels nauseating because of the ways prayer was weaponized and how this became normal for me, so routine that I was in my late twenties before I questioned it.

Still, religion fascinates me. Theology sets my mind ablaze. Liturgy comforts me. But spirituality scares me. The closest I have ever come to actually embracing my spirituality was at seminary, where — notice this — I took a class in spiritual expressions. Observing and studying? Putting those expressions into a historical and cultural context? Thoroughly enjoyable.

Here are a few examples of what I mean.

In Roman Catholicism, congregants are encouraged to venerate saints. There’s a quiet debate over this, but praying to the saints is commonly accepted. To the non-religious, those who are neither Catholic nor Protestant, this seems a benign expression of belief. What’s the harm, someone will ask, in praying to a saint? It doesn’t hurt anyone and who knows, maybe there’s something to it. For the Protestants, however, praying to a saint is unforgivable. It places the dead on the same level as the Almighty and, in this way, violates scripture. The person who prays to a saint, even those too stupid to know what they’re doing, are doomed to eternal damnation by a jealous God who will never, ever forgive them for this insult. Even as a child growing up in Evangelicalism, I felt the anger and animosity of Protestants and other Evangelicals was a bit excessive. It spoke to repressed issues, dormant hostility that could become violent, and encased religious prejudices in claims to the legitimacy of scripture. Yes. I thought this when I was a child in the fourth grade. Though my father had grown up Catholic, he had become convinced that his mother and grandmother were burning in Hell because they were led astray from the purity of scripture. Their dying prayers to St. Jude, the patron of lost causes, were a testament to the evil they clung to unto death. To me, my father’s anger towards Catholicism felt misplaced, like maybe his own spirituality — Evangelical — had given him an outlet to express the anger of loss and depression, rather than doctrinal purity.

In 2007, the first church I worked for began to fall apart as a result of the pastor committing a “moral failure”, coded language for “he had an affair.” The staff were called into a special meeting where the pastor tearfully admitted his sins. He had tried to rape one of the members of the congregation, the youth pastor’s wife as it happened. But then he continued to confess his abuse of drugs, that he had been unfaithful previously, that there had been as-yet-undetermined sums of money that had gone missing, and on and on. He stepped down as pastor and entered a “rehabilitation program” with the denomination, which insisted that he remove himself from the leadership of a church for two years and spend that time recommitting to his marriage. Six months into the program, he returned to the church claiming that God had told him in prayer that he no longer needed to abide by the rehabilitation program. He convinced enough members of the congregation to vote on his reappointment to leadership, a loophole in the denomination’s edicts concerning rehabilitation for his “moral failure.” When the church voted against him, he simply left the denomination and started a new church across town. By this point, it had been revealed that he had raped two of his nieces and had several affairs at a previous church. These experiences, he claimed, were “forgiven by Jesus” and forgotten “under the blood” of Jesus, a popular expression for Evangelicals avoiding responsibility for their actions. As for the meeting where he confessed to the staff? Well, in that case, he didn’t need forgiveness or for anyone to forget because “it never happened.” The entire staff was lying because we were, presumably, possessed by the forces of evil and aligned in a cosmological battle against him, trying to prevent him from “building God’s kingdom.” There was nothing to forget because the meeting, he claimed, never happened.

Around this same time, as I was finishing college, a friend of mine from FCA — the Fellowship of Christian Athletes — told me about a “revelation” he had concerning Heaven. In Evangelical teaching, people die and go to one of two places. Sinners go to Hell, where they are burned alive forever. Death is too good for them. Whether they stole a trinket as a child or whether they brought about the genocide of millions, sinners will be punished in the same way with eternal life where they will suffer and continue suffering forever, without hope of death, mercy, or forgiveness. But Heaven, my friend told me, would be a chance for the “good” people who had obeyed God in life to visit other planets, to create new forms of life like humans and animals of the imagination. We would become gods. Interstellar travel would lagniappe, a bonus to an already sweet retirement package. This revelation sounded a lot like post-mortem Mormon theology to me and I told him this. He became angry immediately, telling me that I didn’t understand God. No, I gently pointed out, I was simply saying that there were notes of familiarity in what he was saying and what I knew of Mormonism. Was it possible I didn’t understand him? No, he insisted. My mistake was not with him, or understanding what he was saying. I had misunderstood God. Doubling down, he became sullen and ended the conversation by telling me I needed to repent and open my mind. He would be praying for me. We never spoke again.

Brushes with the spiritual were not all negative, however. Many of them were amusing, sometimes flattering. At other times, they were curiously awkward. One time, a minister pointed to me in the middle of a service and said my life was plagued with demons. I’m not sure I would disagree; things were pretty chaotic at the time. Another time, a different minister said I would change the world. There have been a handful of women who claimed God had told them I was supposed to be their husband. One was already married and had two children when she told me this. Another time, a woman with “the spirit of a deer” leaped across a sanctuary during the music part of the service. I don’t mean she jumped or even hopped. Let me be clear, the woman leaped four or five feet with every stride and in this way moved through all sides of the sanctuary for the six-minute duration of a popular worship song, “As the Deer Panteth For the Water, So My Soul Longeth After You.” Once, a visiting musician to the church ended his set with a breathy sigh of “Daddy”, an uncomfortable twenty seconds of silence, and then another breathy sigh of “Thank you, Daddy.” Once, during an especially painful time of poverty when my mother and I rationed a package of crackers for a week, a member of a church approached me with two of her friends and gave me a $10 bill. “God told me to give you this,” she smiled. When I saw how much it was (not enough for a meal at Burger King for myself, much less for my hungry mother and brother), I gave her the money back and told her if God had told her to give me money, it wasn’t “something this small.” By then, I had become tired of the ways spiritual people claimed God had given them “words” in prayer, visions and dreams and auditory hallucinations all pretty tame to the circumstances. A woman at one church had the same pronouncement every Sunday, the same confusing staccato utterance that is commonly called “speaking on tongues.” Each week, the same vocalization would be “interpreted” in a different way. Even now, I can repeat the consonants and vowels in the same order because her “message in tongues” to the congregation was the same lift and fall of gibberish every week — something that sounds like “see curiosity undulala shee, see shee sue curiosity undulala shee.” That was it. The same message repeated every Sunday for years, yet interpreted differently each week. Sometimes, these words were translated as support for then-President George W. Bush’s war on terror. Another week, it meant “be still and know I am God.” In another month, it might mean that those who wanted to be pregnant would soon be pregnant. The same words, the same intonation, the same speaker, but translated differently each weekend. At no point did anyone stand up and stop this strange and off-putting theater.

In Evangelicalism, anyone can claim God spoke to them. Which is great, right? The Protestant Reformation began with a couple of core ideas and an important one was that you do not need an intermediary between yourself and the divine. Martin Luther and his fellow Protestants had some very simple but compelling ideas here: Everyone has access to the divine. Anyone can access the divine at any time. And, yes, this looks different for each person.

Martin Luther wasn’t pulling this idea out of thin air, mind you. He was naming a reality that had long been recognized by Roman Catholicism, the Greek Orthodox Church, Judaism, and Islam. The Church had, over time, begun to try and define what that looked like though, to establish ways to corroborate visions and revelations of the divine. St. Francis of Assisi believed God could be found in simplicity, even poverty. This was an objectionable idea for a Church that accumulated wealth and power and one they needed to oversee thoroughly. In one story that appears early in the Bible, a donkey talks to the prophet Balaam. Before we wonder about this and ask ourselves if it is even possible to hear the divine voice from an animal, let’s be quick to acknowledge that Balaam is considered a “false prophet” in the Bible. That didn’t stop my first-grade Sunday School teacher from telling me and other children in our class that God loves animals and we can talk to them just like we talk to God. In African churches across America, especially Pentecostal churches, some congregants will literally run around the sanctuary in religious fervor. Some speak in tongues loudly. Others speak in tongues, quietly. These experiences are classified as a kind of religious ecstasy when we are so caught up with religious fervor that we are no longer entirely ourselves. Our actions, even our speech, are evidence that we have been “taken” by God. In another congregation, like the ones I have sometimes been a part of, someone might begin to shout in tongues and then wait for another person to “translate” the random vocalizations into a “message” from God. Not confined by church buildings, I’ve known several people who claim to have “met God” on a yoga mat, or a sunset. In seminary, a woman admitted to the class that she felt God most clearly when she had an orgasm. When I visited the Grand Canyon, I was humbled by the immense enormity of the chasm before me in a way I can only explain as spiritual. Astronauts who have looked down on the world express a similar feeling. When William Shatner, the actor famous for his role as Capt. James T. Kirk in Star Trek, was given the chance to visit space, he returned to Earth in tears. Experiencing space on a movie set for decades had not come close to the real thing, which was overwhelming and ineffable to him except through tears. I’ve known several people who claim they are able to “access the divine” through creative arts like painting. One of my in-laws says they feel the divine through meditation and has even set up an altar of sorts with photos of their family members who have died. A Jewish author I was reading a few weeks ago wrote that he grew up believing one could always talk to God through prayer, but one could only “hear” God while studying. That resonated with me deeply. I’ve never had big, public experiences with God. “Revelations”, when they come, have often been through books or — and I sharing something quite tender and personal here — at 3 am while tossing and turning in the midst of a depressive episode.

The point here is that there is no defined way to locate God in spiritual expressions. If any kind of God truly exists in this universe or the next, we cannot limit them to a predictable routine, behavior, or fixed address. God, the Bible teaches, is continually moving around and can only be seen and noticed after the fact, when we begin to notice patterns.

Right now, I am in the middle of working on a collection of essays about how nature is presented in media, arguing that there is a “divine presence” in nature. Nature, when it is written about honestly, is unpredictable. Nature is healing and restorative as often as it is adversarial and exhausting. Take, for example, the way nature appears in the Bible. In the Book of Exodus, Moses ascends a mountain to hear God. If we were to leave the story there, we might be left with the belief that God can be found in nature. By the time the Quaran is written, Muhammed is already receiving visions and revelations from this same God in the same desert. In caves, Muhammad is visited by angels and visions of the Almighty. Of course, a cursory glance at a map reveals that when this happens, Muhammad is not the only one who has seen or heard from the divine realm. The Christian apostle Paul received some of his revelations from God in the same desert.

Again, we are inclined to see that God visits people in deserts. Except there are missing elements to what is being presented here. God does not speak to Moses from the desert itself, but from a bush at the top of a mountain. This is a curious reversal since the first people — Adam and Eve — hid in the bushes when they feared God’s anger. They explained themselves, speaking from a bush, when God visited them. Now some unaccountable number of centuries later, do we notice the reversal? God is the one hiding in a bush, explaining Themself to this lowly human, Moses. Anyone who has visited the mountains of the desert, specifically the deserts of the Levant, notices that the desert is an expanse of nothing. In the middle of the nothing, the mountains accumulate. So does Moses speak to God in the desert? Or on the top of the mountain? We need to be specific here if we are to understand something about spiritual expressions, visions, and how best to speak with the divine. Not to be eclipsed, we see this story changing again after Moses liberated the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt. After their exodus from the empire of Egypt, the people find themselves in the desert which Moses knows quite well. As the Bible recalls, Moses has spent some four decades traversing the dunes. Yet Moses seems incapable of navigation and the people find themselves stuck between nations in the nothing. Curiously, God-in-the-bush is with them. God is now hidden in a pillar of fire at night and in the clouds during the day. Again, what might we extract from all this symbolism? Bushes and columns of fire, clouds and caves, deserts and mountains all point to something. But what, exactly? What measurable statements can we make from this disparity? Further confusing the matter, while each of these men saw, heard from, spoke with, or learned from the divine in the expansive nothing, we must not forget that Jesus, the supposed son of God, has a very different experience of desert places. Jesus is said to have met Satan, the Evil One, in the desert and experienced his greatest temptation from, by, and for evil there in the desert. While many readers might be inclined to make summary statements about the caves and clouds, deserts and mountains, wildfires and earthquakes, concluding that God can be found in nature, we have a contradictory experience here that also deserves attention and, perhaps, dissolves the very notion that nature and God are copacetic. If goodness dwells in the mountains, where does evil reside? In the experience of Moses, the empire was evil. The cramped quarters of industry were evil. Liberation was found in nature. Not so, in the experience of Jesus who spends a considerable amount of time inside city walls and most clearly experiences evil in the desert.

Taking a break from the question of nature as a spiritual experience, I began to discuss these stories with a friend who pointed out something obvious. Have you ever noticed how in the scriptures men are always going up into the mountains to commune with the Lord? Yet in the scriptures, we hardly ever hear of women going to the mountains. The women were too busy keeping life going. Women were not allowed to abandon babies, meals, homes, fires, gardens, or any other responsibility to climb a mountain.

Cheryl Strayed’s 2012 memoir Wild follows her 1,100-mile hike along the Pacific Crest Trail where “on the trail alone, and fleeing the demons of divorce, heroin, and the untimely loss of her mother to cancer” she is finally able to discover herself. Many women loved the work for that reason — because women are so rarely “allowed” to find themselves apart from the responsibilities placed upon them.

As my friend pointed out, “In the Bible, God comes to women wherever they are,” doing the ordinary, everyday work. In the Christian Scriptures alone, the divine presence meets women at wells, in their homes, in their kitchens, in gardens, sickbeds, and outside the cities as they mourn, when they give birth, and when they care for the sick, and remarkably even when they are preparing bodies at tombs. In seemingly mundane, ordinary tasks, women find divinity.

Each of these expressions and experiences is valid and brings delight to me. Yes, even the deer woman, although I still have questions years later. Yes, even the lying pastor. Yes, even the suggestive “Thank you, Daddy.” Each expression, alongside the hundreds I have witnessed and hundreds more I have heard or read about but not personally experienced, is valid. God will meet us anywhere. I want to believe that. I’m not inclined to lend them credibility or authenticity, but even a lie is indicative of something at the core of the human experience. Which is to say, while Joseph Smith follows the example of Paul and Muhammed in the 19th Century and supposedly receives a revelation from the angel Moroni, I can differentiate between what he claims happened and why he would claim it in the first place. Since I am not a Mormon, I don’t have to believe Smith’s claims to legitimacy any more than a Jewish person is required by the laws of Spirituality to mentally assent to all of the claims Christians make about Jesus. However, a Jewish individual would be overlooking something important if they merely dismissed the teachings about Jesus as hogwash. It turns out, while Jews don’t accept Jesus as the Messiah, they still accept that the claims about Jesus being the Messiah are claims with which they agree and continue believing to the present moment. The Messiah will liberate the people of God from empire? Agreed. Stop senseless violence? Agreed. Bring peace and healing to the world? Wholeheartedly agree. That Jesus died? Yes. That he was resurrected three days later? Enh, maybe — or maybe he never actually died at all. But that Jesus made a difference? For sure. No disagreement there.

There exists a tension or cyclical unity in each of these expressions between us, the individual, and the divine, that collective energy or vibe. There is something about the human condition that peeks through our spiritual experiences, real or fabricated.

Some may feel that my friend’s comments are evidence of an ancient patriarchal society whose harmful views continue to shape our understanding of the world today. Women then, like women now, are often bound by obligations that do not similarly encumber men. I wouldn’t argue with that. Women deserve more from life than domestic responsibilities and limited social mobility. But while that may have been the attitude of an ancient culture, it’s also one I recognize apart from issues of gender and religion. Women deserve more than the conditions that continue to restrict them. Then again, like the narrative about the Exodus, I also agree that if we — male, female, trans, gender fluid — were to “flee the empire” of capitalism, we would be lost for a few decades as we established a new way of living. I fear we, like the Jewish people, would only replicate the oppressive system of empire again and, as they did, call it “holy.” So while there is something telling about the ways we discuss spirituality and spiritual experiences, ways that perhaps are visionary as well an indictment of the current systems in which we find ourselves, it is also possible that we’re overanalyzing or shoehorning meaning into a woman sitting at a well on a sunny day. Or someone who experienced a hallucination as a result of dehydration.

Cont. in part II (coming soon)