Soul Survivor

Section Internet Links	Wayne's Notes	Jock"s Notes	Back to Index
Wayne. Introduction to this course, to the Holy Manners tradition and a Personal Perspective on Soul Survivor. Over the past number of years, we have recognized as one of the key characteristics of our adult studies a keen attention to the theme of "Holy Manners." We have made some effort to describe, in previous introductions, what we mean by that term. Jock borrowed the "Holy Manners" theme from a presentation by Marion Pardy, a former moderator of the United Church of Canada. She advocated it as the way people in the church should engage each other in all that we do. We try to apply "Holy Manners" to our adult studies. Tonight, I would like to present this simple design as a way of viewing our class theme:HolyManners,HolyMentors,Holy Moments. It is our hope that - as we engage Philip Yancey's Soul Survivor which focuses on staying in the church when you feel like leaving in anger and disgust - we will do so in a spirit of holy manners; using holy mentors; in anticipation of serendipitous holy moments along the way. Holy Manners Guidelines: 1. We want to keep God at the centre of all we do. 2. We wish to encourage the full and equitable involvement of all participating. 3. We hope to listen carefully to each other without interruption. 4. We like it when people venture to share what it important to them. 5. We welcome the conflict of ideas as a natural outcome of the engagement. 6. We would like participants to anticipate and expect "ah ha" moments along the way. Soul Survivor Course Goals: 1.To become familiar with the key ideas of Philip Yancey in his book Soul Survivor. 2.To discuss, debate, learn together and support one another in a community that practices authentic hospitality, holy manners and relational learning. 3. To distinguish between spirituality and religion; to discern the good and the bad of both. 4. To integrate a personal spirituality with a workable faith (experiencing important "ah ha" moments of discovery and developing "a theology that fits"). 5. To combine quality content sessions with group discussion (in plenary and small groups). 6. To see all this as part of a process of life-long learning and growth in faith. Characteristics of this Course: 1. The book focuses on how an intelligent, perceptive Christian evolved from using an "early faith paradigm" to what Marcus Borg calls an "emerging paradigm". We want to keep asking ourselves and each other "how does what I am learning apply to my life?" 2. We believe, with Yancey, that God provides teachers and mentors to help us find the way when the faith struggle grows difficult. 3. While the book is written by an American evangelical author, with roots in the South, our task is to apply his wisdom to our own particular lives and Christian communities. 4. Notes, quotes and more extensive resource links from our presentations and class input will be posted to the website so people can keep up with what is going on here. Introducing Soul Survivor as Autobiography Made Personal I first read this book three years ago and now, reading it again, it is as renewing and regenerating as it was the first time. Yancey has a very special gift of writing, that draws you into his own story very easily, even if you do not share his experience, exactly. I will not focus on his new preface, wherein he updates his material to connect to his 9/11 experiences in New York. (You may wish to comment on his new preface later, during our discussions). Here are some phrases and paraphrases that stand out for me as I read Chapter One, our focus for tonight. "I have spent most of my life in recovery from the church... " "The church has mixed lies with the truth...religion has done both harm and good..." "How could I fit together my religious past with my spiritual present?" "I became a writer to sort out words used and misused by the church of my youth..." "To unearth the Good News, I had to scour the original words of the gospel and discover what the Bible really means when it uses words like 'love,' 'grace,' and 'compassion.' " "I came to value the freedom enhancing quality of the written word...and I am but one person among many on a religious search." "Why am I still a Christian?... I am a person who absorbed some of the worst the church has to offer, yet, I landed in the loving arms of God." "I decided early in my career to scout out people I could learn from; people I might want to emulate... and, I found some positive role models. The 13 people noted here made a difference in my life." "I would ask you to think about similar mentors in your own life... and how they too might help to restore for you the hidden treasures or God. " Mentors Who Were Not, and Mentors Who Were As I reflect on these lines, I see something of myself here There were times when my relationship with the church was very much in doubt and where my experiences were gut-wrenching. But my challenges were never so much doctrinal as ethical. For me, I found it very hard to come to terms with the fact that persons in roles of responsibility - for me - pastoral roles - could appear to be so theologically correct and yet so morally perverse. I have come to understand, over time, that quite often, these leaders did not even realize the duplicity they were living. They were, in one way, not bad people, just badly misled people. Unfortunately, that was what made them dangerous. I also came to see that some of my best spiritual guides during those times of my despair were people who never even realized they were being my spiritual guides. My father and mother were such people. They had long ago concluded that - once I had gone off to university, then seminary, then graduate school in Europe, then doctoral studies - I was a much more 'spiritually advanced person' than they. How little did they realize what significant mentors they still were! I have had many well-educated and well-published mentors in my time, but some of my most important teachers were ordinary folk who simply tried to live good lives and depended on God to do the rest. Two Special Kinds of Guides Jock is going to mention some specific writers who influenced him during important times in his faith transformation. I am going to avoid individual names and simply mention groups of people, some writers, some not, who helped me. People who helped me think outside the box of my own specific church tradition. I believe that one of the important decisions I made early in my life was that, as much as I loved and respected my particular faith heritage, I would not confine myself to it, or to learning from it. I have never been a Lutheran 'true believer.' I have learned much from that tradition and from its teachers. But I have never been satisfied to simply repeat what I was taught about Lutheranism. The family of God, I soon discovered in my life, is much greater than any one church or denomination. I first made hesitant, uncertain steps to find myself mentors from other Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox backgrounds. In time, I found I was quite comfortable with that. I never stopped accepting my original Christian heritage, but I grew into so much more. And that was one of the things that saved me when my church let me down. I did not have to leave Ôthe church'. I simply came to understand the meaning of 'the church' in a much broader, richer way. People who helped me think outside the box of my own specific faith tradition. I came to a point in my spiritual questing where I seriously doubted the validity of Christianity and spent a lot of time, energy and attention struggling with traditional Native spirituality. I learned a great deal from aboriginal spiritual mentors in Canada, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. I began to see that what we as white, western Christians had done - in so much of our colonizing and missionizing around the world - was to demonstrate great arrogance about our faith. We were right. They were wrong. I have moved beyond 'white vs red' thinking, but I am very grateful for that experience in my life. Stated simplistically, but with a desire to appreciate a remarkable perceptual change, I believe that non-Native North American Christians have gone through four distinct phases of addressing Native spirituality since first contact. Carol Higham's book Noble, Wretched and Redeemable (University of Calgary Press, 2001) provides the structural framework for this overview. I add one more term to her trio - 'Respected'. Noble Early in the encounter, Natives were viewed by Whites as idealized citizens of the natural world - untouched and unscathed by old country contaminations. The 'noble savage' was commonly believed to exist beyond the ordinary. He was, in reality, a creative figment of the White Man's imagination rather than a real figure. Yet, as Jenkins avers, Euro-Americans have always been creating Native Americans in their own image rather than recognizing them as they really are. This, he asserts, has been a major iniquity inflicted by Whites upon Natives. Wretched Reality set in. With time, negative aspects of the encounter became entrenched. Christian religious authorities continued to interpret the situation through their prejudices. 'Wretched' became the way sincere but culturally biased missionaries and and the majority of Euro-Americans viewed Natives. Indeed, most believed first peoples to be primitive savages, lacking in developed cultural attributes. In this state, they inhabited a world of superstition and idolatry. They lacked convincing indicators of a higher religion. Sincere, well-intended folk sought to rectify this perceived inequity and expended great efforts to civilize and Christianize the Native peoples. Redeemable 'Redeemable' represents the way dominant Christians related to their now -christianized Native brothers and sisters in more recent decades. Human rights and justice issues resonated strongly from voices within the churches. Disadvantaged First Nations people needed recognition and justice to guarantee them equality within the larger nations. At the same time, spiritually arrogant Christians and other humanitarians began, for the first time, to more humbly attend to Native understandings of spirituality and justice. Gradually, Native people have been naming and claiming their own voices after years of being victims of spiritual, cultural and political colonization. Respected We now enter a time when Native American spirituality is 'respected' for what it is, says Jenkins. This respect is still plagued with misunderstanding and undermined with abuse (such as the appropriation of Native spirituality by New Age 'wannabes' and entrepreneurial opportunists both within and beyond the Native communities). Still, the end result of this new era of respect acknowledges the need for restitution of cultural losses and a recognition of land rights. 'Respect' implies a redefining of the traditional meaning of religion and acknowledging First Nations peoples and their spiritualities as valid in themselves as living faiths alongside the other great world religions. The emergence of this fourth stage bodes well for the future. I am grateful for those who have helped me think outside the box of my church tradition and my Christian faith tradition. I believe it is possible to remain essentially in the tradition within which you were raised while at the same time moving considerably beyond it. That, I would say, is what has been happening in my spiritual journey. And that, I believe is one of the underlying messages Philip Yancey has for us in his book Soul Survivor.

Jock. Books have provided my mentors also. The themes that Phillip Yancey raises are very much the themes of my spiritual experience. I was raised in a conservative baptist church and like Yancey, I attended and met my wife in a bible college. I was not as he was, subjected to blatant intolerance and prejudice, but merely experienced a community that was excessive on the terms of inclusion and the terms of exclusion. There were many more terms of exclusion. I have never felt injury by the church as have others, but only a deep abiding sadness that the sunshine i encountered outside the dark cave of the church is such anathema to its occupants As I went down the road of my life, I found many other Christian and religious and secular travellers. Many of these became mentors for me as happened for Yancey and so for many others. What a marvelous thing are books. CS Lewis was the first new voice. He was a lay person, and that was remarkable thing for me. The second that he was easy and fun to read. And so I thought I had found a bridge to my non-churched friends. Nope. Still irrelevant in their eyes - amusing perhaps, like children's stories. Then I discovered the SCM book club which offered really cheap (as little as 50 cents - this was the 60's!) good books by mail from Toronto, and whose monthly sale sheet was an international and interfaith fair of ideas. And while I never found stuff my non churches friends were interested in, I found ideas to nourish my own faith. It was wonderful to read Paul Tillich and Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And then it came a little torrent of Christian challenge - which was met both with enthusiasm and confusion and hostility. Like today. And now these trees are bearing fruit. There was foremost, Bishop John Robinson the Bishop of Woolwich. His Honest to God opened a debate that Bishop John Spong continues. There was Secular City by Harvey Cox that celebrated the modern age and deeply considered new roles for the modern church. And there were the Death of God group of theologians that rather outrageously and rather unsuccessfully tried to get the church to notice that Bonhoeffer was right and that irrelevant religion and its notion of god was dead and something new was replacing it. It seemed not unlike when the early Christians were accused of being atheists. Well I loved all this theology, but rather strangely, I had no religious people in my world that would understand it, or who would receive it as other than heresy. This theological effort was not helping debate with my secular friends either, who thought that it was no great thing to give up the study of angels in order to study the meaning of the ground of being. So it was that a few gentle adversaries came on the scene. The paragon of these was Bertrand Russell whose funny essay "Why I am not a Christian" led me to his works on philosophy and ethics. He was a conundrum to me. A most respected man in mathematics and philosophy whose opinions on marriage and social action were more honourable and sensible than any Christians I knew. An atheist - not even an agnostic! And Pierre Berton, who was bravely commissioned by the Anglican church to criticize them. His "The Comfortable Pew" was both an indictment of general church society, and a challenge to them to make effective response to the message of Jesus that was in their keeping. Then there was Science Fiction. Always a student of science, I became enamored of this genre. I went through this oyster pile of terrible literature in search of the few pearls of wisdom they do contain. For their formula is a morality play - given some assumptions about future circumstances of science and society, what would life be like, and what would be different (better - worse) than now? Is a better future actually possible? Then there was the New Age. I had always had a cursory interest in the paranormal, but like Houdini felt there was more hoax and foolishness than value in the occult. Then a curious thing happened. The Calgary Public Library had a collision in its numerical category system between computers and crazy things. Next to a book on database 3 one might see a book on the Ghosts of Saskatchewan. So I read my way through most of this nonsense. At the end of it, I felt I knew the shape of the god-shaped-hole in humankind that Sartre spoke of. These are mentors of a different kind for they suggest some new direction of religion. Religion has historically accommodated the spiritually sensitive and directed their charity. It is a most strange thing to me that the religious establishment in all traditions whatever its tolerance might be for other religions, has no tolerance for that more primitive aspect that has caught the attention of the human race from the beginning. New Age is really Old Age. Those perspectives predate "civilization" and have always been an undercurrent within it. And how sad it is that the few million people who have had a near-death-experience find no help or consolation from the "religious" people (professional or lay) in exploration of their being at the "gates of heaven". Or that the few million that feel they have been abducted by aliens have no sensible means of understanding their experience in modern times. And in recent years there has been an explosion of new authors and books - to challenge and to continue this mentoring process. The members of the Jesus Seminar are paramount among these. John Spong, Marcus Borg, Bob Funk, John Crossan, Karen Armstrong. Books have ever been my mentors. But there have also been people in my life who despite having a different spin on the bible than I have come to, have led such lives of service that I have never lost respect for the tradition I grew up in. Long ago my mother taught me that faith should be the sustenance that encourages, enables and requires service in society. This then is the church for me - a fellowship finding purpose and direction in the daily complexity of their lives and finding in the faith community their sustenance. Yancey says that his mentors have helped restore to him the "mislaid treasures of God". Indeed.

	Clicking the icon left will activate the e-mail on your machine and direct your comments to us. Comments are welcome and will be posted with usual editorial courtesies.
EMAIL