Prologue

One day I made a conscious decision to get up out of the pew and see if God would follow me out the door. Ridiculous assumptions abounded in my head after decades of church attendance. Half of it with the Catholics and the other half with the Protestants. I had an urge to go exploring upriver to see if there was a place faith could still be found. Something beyond the two great camps of Christianity where I had spent my life. Hopefully I wouldn't wind up in Utah.

Way up the river of faith, there are no maps. You feel very alone. It is just you making your way up past the denominational dams, the vested politics of faith, the clergy, the great engines of good, the endless routine, shrill electronic evangelism, stained glass and revisionist religious history. Leaving all that behind you wonder if this is still a river of faith. You leave behind the world of ready answers. In the popular mind, legitimate faith. Easy signage. Convenient locations. Most seem comfortable downriver in that highly managed religious world. I am sure many wonder if can you leave all that and be a believer. Probably not. I was going to take a chance on exercising my curiosity.

There was much about contemporary Christianity that I didn't believe. I was becoming a seeker. A new concept for me. The brand of Christianity that I was leaving was information driven. Information is easier to manage. And I had been trained well to sit and listen. Through grade school, the teacher taught and I listened. In high school I continued to sit and listen. And college more of the same. And now I was looking into a lifetime of sitting and listening to the pastor or priest. Believing wasn't that hard for me, it was just really boring. The organized church it seemed didn't expect much from me. Jesus talked about the shepherd leaving the 99 and going after the one. I had left a few churches in the beginning of my search. No one ever came after me when I left the congregation. I doubted I would be missed.

I had an encounter with God. It got me started thinking about things beyond religious convention. It was something outside my normal experience in life. Something below the surface. A notion far greater than myself, a belief in something invisible, a Spirit. God as a spiritual Father, Creator. I saw the irrational life of Jesus as a wonder, a holy paradox. I believed. My church-going moment, while connecting me with God, ensured my membership with a local church. After the backslapping and the hallelujahs, my "call" they told me, was to attend church, work hard, tithe, subscribe to rules of membership and volunteer. Following this course I became not only a good member of God's earthly kingdom but the foundation was laid for the making of a good capitalist. Max Weber puts it best. In his Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism he writes "..but the emotion [spirit, my interpretation] once awakened was directed into a rational struggle for perfection". Reflecting back on those early years I had to wonder in my "rational struggle for perfection" if I had been following the spirit of capitalism rather than the spirit of God all these years.

After leaving the church, I fumbled around for a few years. I experimented with the externals of faith and aspects of gathering together, trying to scratch the Sunday itch in new ways. I soon discovered deeply held, goofy, unfounded ideas in me of how things worked spiritually, learned behaviors that were inhibiting my journey upriver. I was conditioned for the managed river, not the wild river. The river of faith I had been on for most of my life was safe. There was a well managed social current of membership, and well timed routines. To fight the monotony, the challenges presented by the church were as calibrated as an amusement ride at Six Flags.

The religious world and the civil world neatly paralleled the society I lived in, lock step with the educational system.   Even support was tax deductible. The path to good citizenship was a ladder that when church attendance was included, heavenly citizenship was almost automatically included. Church divisions were neatly accommodated. Church authority blended harmoniously with civil authority. But all this civil harmony had left me bankrupt spiritually. My intuition ached for something more. But what? I decided to spiritually strike out on my own and see what was out there. In a river context, I was like the farmed salmon that escape the rational world of the pen and find their way into the natural river. I wondered just how “natural” Christianity could be. The farmed salmon in a natural river wreak havoc. Many of them are diseased. They prey on their own species and they generally bring disorder to a highly ordered natural system. They bring the ways of the "pen" with them. They have only swum in circles in a confined space. Humans have fed them huge amounts of manufactured food on a timed basis. Even their color has been artificially added for presentation not mating. They have left a very controlled environment for a very "wild" environment. They have no developed instincts for this new world and they eat everything in sight. But they yearn mightily for the natural river. It is the essence of who they are.  

So it was with me. I had to learn a new sense of order that was alien to me. Those who still subscribed to the rationally ordered world of Christianity called this type of order, chaos. The only way I could make sense of my Christian journey was to frame it in something I could relate to, salmon and rivers. I had to develop a new frame of reference for the scriptures. As much as we tout the Bible as being sacred, the words in it have as many different meanings as there are denominations. For myself, I seemed to have absorbed an enormous religious vocabulary during my time in church without any real sense of its spiritual meaning. I decided to see what the river and the occupants of it had to say about spirituality and the nature of God. I wanted to rediscover this river of Faith, make my way past the denominational dams, the vested politics of faith, the clergy, the great engines of good, the endless routine, shrill electronic evangelism, stained glass and revisionist religious history.   I believe we all yearn for the River of God as passionately as those farmed salmon.  But there is grace for us to learn His ways and His holy turbulence that is the force of the river itself.  

With all the frustrations I encountered I didn't abandon my primitive Christian experience. Now, I wasn't after great discovery, I didn't want to start a new religion, or find utopia. I wanted greater personal satisfaction for my efforts. A more authentic spiritual experience. A real journey. But what do you use to find your way? What is your compass? Most Christians point to the Bible. However, western logic is now the true north of sacred scripture. This perspective works great as a foundation for the rule of law and building civilization. It has been interpreted for use in the modern religious organization. In America this perspective has helped homogenize Christianity, making it efficient, convenient and powerful. This interpretation has built great institutions at the expense of the individual Christian quest for meaning. National statistics seem to support this notion.

But this kind of thinking labels you the grumpy guy. The reactionary. Not content with his lot. The man who ignores his call in society and defies established authority. But I didn't want to react to where I had been. I had done that with bad results. I wanted to respond to where I was going. Upriver. I needed guidance. A modern narrative to let me know what I was in for. A prophetic parable. My dismay with modern Christianity and all of its foibles, should have a parallel somewhere in our recent American history. If contemporary Christianity was as temporal as I was suggesting, the problems I was experiencing should be evident somewhere. It would have to be a big dilemma. Leviathan sized in the meaning department. America has bushel baskets of big problems. Many of them created through shortsightedness, which have to be corrected down the road. I didn't have to look far.

In the heart of Darkness, young Marlow looks at a map of Africa in a window. "But there was one yet - the biggest, the most blank, so to speak - that I had a hankering after…….It had become a place of darkness. But there was in it one river especially, a mighty big river, that you could see on the map, resembling an immense snake uncoiled, with its head in the sea, its body at rest curving afar over a vast country, and its tail lost in the depth of the land." That geographic mystery draws Marlow upriver to a place beyond reason where he meets the mad Kurtz. Upriver has signified a place beyond reason. The irrational in our popular culture. It is a place of mystery and adventure, the source of meaning. For Marlow it was as much an exploration of the human heart as it was exploring the heart of Africa. The river with its great meandering reveals itself slowly, yard by yard, narrowing as he goes farther. He discovers there is as much life beneath it as there is above it, with just as many wonders and terrors.  So it is with the unknown in our lives, it is a journey up a river of God's creation that He reveals turn by turn. So like Marlow,  we feel the call to the unknown, the unexplored in our lives.  It is the pull of the Spirit drawing us into a confrontation with ourselves and God Himself.     

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