I'd just rather be a human

❤️

All my life, I have tried to follow in the way of Jesus. That hasn’t changed.

I think that some people would disagree with me about that, or argue that it isn’t true. Well, actually, I know this, because I’ve been told as much. And frankly, I’ve taken their criticism on as the frightened boy within believes them and white-knuckles the condemnation as holy, legitimizing years of “what-ifs” that have often felt as though they developed their way into full-blown pathology—noising out the voice within that calls me Beloved no matter where I go.

I have gone places. Touring was probably the start of it. You can’t leave and not change. You can’t bear witness to suffering and worlds outside of your own and act like magic words and right belief will fix it (or that there is something implicitly wrong about the meanings that others make of the world).

Or, I couldn’t.

I’ve studied outside my inherited religion, and found deep beauty there. I’ve seen God everywhere. I’ve seen high above and deep within myself, and discovered Love unparalleled by and un-predicated upon any ascent to a belief system, ideological perspective or doctrinal righteousness ever offered me. I’ve seen Christ in “Christ-less” people (as if such people exist). I’ve fallen in love with the way these people love Christ, and his religion (absent the religion constructed about him—merci beaucoup Howard Thurman, and perhaps a tip of the hat to Bonhoeffer).

For the past few years, the main invitation I’ve received from what I—with respect to my own inheritance—will call Jesus [if any of my own life experience and felt sense of what it means to be in the presence of the Divine is worth anything (and what good is anything if not to believe it is?)]—has been to, somehow, loose myself of the identity. Christian. And I don’t understand it and I can’t explain it and I’ve kept myself stuck trying to understand and explain everything. Trying to self-justify everything and all of who I am to anyone and arbitrary everyones so that I can be good and okay and safe and accepted and belong.

Recently, I realized that God seems to be the only one I am not afraid of anymore. So what am I still doing trying to hold it all together if it’s his invitation to let go of it in the first place?

I don’t know how to make this make sense to you or to me or to my family or to my friends or to all the people I think I have to make it make sense to but I know from experience and faith that stepping outside of one door isn’t stepping outside of Presence. Part of me gets to this point and feels silly writing anything because I don’t even believe in “in” or “out” anymore, and the faith that still sings to me has taken on a whole new meaning, but it doesn’t seem to care very much about what it’s called, and there’s still something inside of me that needs to write it out. That wants to share myself because myself is the only real gift I’ve ever known how to give in the first place. My process. My life.

And what will come of this? I don’t know.

I can’t keep on knowing, or pretending to.

There is a micro-managerial self around me, with such a thick shell that it has all but completely choked the life out of its seed and I want to receive the invitation to let it die.

I can be—and from that being, love—better (at all) from this posture, where defensive protectiveness doesn’t impoverish the root. Where (albeit imperfect) faithfulness beneath this umbrella is being transformed into what I hope and pray is trusting, co-creative wisdom that actually has the opportunity to participate in this life rather than perceive it all as a frightening threat against which to hold up right belief as a shield.

That shield became a wall. It thickened. And nothing could get inside of it anymore. It suffocated empathy and humanity and peace. No emotion. No compassion. No people. No God (till Absence spoke Presence, I suppose—that Great Magician).

I want to be touchable, and if faith now seems to involve some sort of letting go of my own knowledge of good and evil with the opportunity to sing inside the garden of life it becomes as undivided, so be it.

I think “deconstruction” is a developmental work of the Spirit. I also think it’s a bullshit brand. I think we could have called all of our deconstruction growth instead of finding infinitely new ways of infighting through which to further criticise and fragment from one another. Simultaneously, I understand that there is, still, no bridge for bypassing crucifixion. And yet—to borrow a bit of McLaren’s language—I am exhausted by this state of endless perplexity. Perhaps my brain will forever haunt me, but what of the intimations of my heart?

The more I move along what I’ve understood to be the narrow way, the more it opens up. I hope that someday we’ll look at history with an evolutionary lens and forgive one another for the pain we caused along the way, and allow one another to develop into maturity—into humanness—instead of calling it all “unfaithfulness.” Perhaps it is the exact opposite. I would never be here were it not for trust fall after trust fall (and I am not writing atop a pedestal as much as in a puddle).

Recently a buddy of mine told me that someone asked him, “Hey man, do you still fuck with Jesus?” I like that question. It’s a better question than, “Hey man, are you still a Christian?”

What does that word even mean? There are people in cages and our president made over one million dollars in royalties selling Bibles. Call me a conscientious objector. This empire doesn’t know how to take up its own cross and get hammered down with its savior, who didn’t seem to be all that attached to… anything—including his status as God—save the revelation of Love that he was for those with eyes to see it.

(I am not claiming to have 20/20 vision.)

Years ago, one of my therapists (a Christian) saw me, and offered to help me de-convert, saying, “I trust God with you.”

I didn’t know how to do it then, in part because I was afraid, and in part because I’m not entirely sure that’s what I’d have called what was happening.

The point is, sometimes I feel like I’m losing my whole world… and then I receive my soul. How apropos.

I’ve waited a long time to discover if I’d ever find a place from which I could articulate this that doesn’t feel like a reactionary pushing away. Is perfect clarity a thing? Certitude? My life tells me “no,” and so faith, hope and Love remain, welcoming a part of me into a bigger picture.

I’ve always been torn about how to articulate the loss of a label alongside the thanks that I have to give it, knowing full well that I would not be me without every me I’ve been.

I’ve brought this to my spiritual director a thousand times—some elated and some crushed and clamoring—asking, “How am I supposed to tell people that I feel invited to step outside of the only place I’ve ever been told was okay to exist within?”

I don’t know.

But I do know that Spirit is not absent and neither is Jesus or anyone or anything else, for that matter, and my job has only ever been to bear witness to the experience of my life, and this is it.

I can hear some voices say, “He’s lost his faith,” and I can hear some voices say, “He’s finally found it.” But life does not fit inside the conceptions that want it to, and the irony is that I find myself more freely able to love and live and respect and care for it all from here, where the most loyal of my soldiers can finally take off his armor, lie down, and rest.

This is not a fuck Christianity/Christians post. I have zero interest in that shit. I get why people do but for me, it has accomplished nothing in favor of the wholeness of life that I want and strive to live—

everyone welcome.

Paradoxically, from this place, I can better appreciate and hold with gratitude and openheartedness all that has brought me here in a way I can’t find as trying to uphold an identifier that seems always to have to defend itself against my reality within the exclusivity of walls constructed around what I believe to be the Universality of this Mystery, available and cloaked in whatever name (or namelessness) a person’s path takes them on in loving service as unto the Other.

Somehow, here lets me say, with a kind of genuineness and authenticity, “I love it all” and “Thank you”—which my favorite Christian mystic (like he’s on a trading card) Meister Eckhart says will have been enough if it is the only prayer I ever pray.

It’s all life, death and resurrection.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

And if you’re ever in Nashville then maybe I’ll see you at church on Sunday.

With love, your bundle of paradoxes,

Levi

P.S. For anything above that feels like rash generalization, forgive me. I am risking the belief that those of you who have come to know and trust my voice throughout the years will not immediately forget my deep (and present) care, love and longing toward a more unified and heart-shaped interdependence within a container vast and wide as east from west that can actually hold us, which is—I think—the Ground of Love that is our very Being beneath all of the border-walls we’ve constructed in the name of something far more Beautiful than they could ever be.

I am deeply aware of the limitations of language, and for all the words I’ve written, trying to articulate this in the privacy of my own process throughout the past four years (thousands upon thousands upon thousands upon thousands upon thousands), I cannot get it right enough, and I’ll think of every side quest, caveat and addendum I should have included the moment I hit “publish.” (Trust me, you don’t want those novels, anyway.)

And besides, this is the language I have. In some ways, it grows more full the more loosely I am able to hold it. Maybe it’d go over better if I wore an updated nametag that read Christian mystic or progressive or exvangelical, but man… my attachments are a slippery slope.

At the end of the day, call me what you want, but I’d just rather be a human. It’s all in here.

I’m a 36 years-young man who’s trying to be brave again, invited out/in by That Which meets me [t]here. This simply feels faithful to say. Let it be a moment, and thank God that—in the words of Uncle (head-nod, David) Alan (Watts)—I’m never “under any obligation to be the same person I was five minutes ago.”

I love you—in the weirdest of parasocial ways—very much.

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