Crisis of Faith?

The following post is an excerpt (slightly altered into blog form) from a chapter in my forthcoming book. I hope you enjoy it. If you do or you have a comment or a story you'd like to share, send me a message or comment. 

What happens when the spiritual eye opens, or when Christ Consciousness begins to emerge? Many things. For one, you start to see God in all—even in places you didn’t expect. Life and spirituality become more inclusive. Things are less black and white. This can sometimes feel like a crisis of faith, depending on how you have been taught. If you have always believed that X is good and Y is unequivocally bad, and suddenly you see God in Y, this change can create cognitive dissonance—or in other words conflicting beliefs, thoughts, attitudes. As a poet-shaman, and curious student of life, I have had many belief-altering experiences. I seem to have a high tolerance for this creative tension and paradox.

I choose to replace the word crisis with change or opportunity, because for me, these words are as true or more true. On the spiritual path are we not constantly having opportunities of faith? Are we not always evolving? And it is internal change that incites inner conflict.

I once heard this quote in church. I’m not sure who said it: “If you choose Christ, you choose to be changed.” Well that’s true, but the reality is, if you choose life, you choose to be changed. It’s something to think about. Imagine if you still had your baby teeth or you drank only milk. We all change, and a great part of it is pre-programmed into Nature’s plan for us. The rest is Life’s gift: choices. As long as we choose Life, we are given opportunities again and again to expand our consciousness.

I remember when I first realized Wow! God loves drunks! I was at an open AA meeting for an assignment. I learned that alcoholics and drug addicts were God’s beloveds too. Go to any Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and you will see it, maybe not at first, but soon, and may it forever change you.  

I witnessed my sweet daughter have a faith crisis about me when she was five years old. She asked me a question, and I said I didn’t know. She responded seriously, “Aren’t moms supposed to know everything?” 
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I laughed so hard I cried. The poor girl had to shift her whole world view, but luckily she didn’t throw me out with the bathwater. She still loved me and allowed me to be her mom—for a few more years—until she knew everything.

So what happens, or what do you do when you broaden your understanding of God and you are in paradox? For example, what if you read some of Jesus’s words and you get an inspired insight about what they mean, and it’s different than what your parents, friends or church leaders believed/teach? What does that do to your faith in what you were taught or in who taught you? Can you hold space for both meanings to be true on some level? The shamanic woman understands that there are more than seven levels of meaning.  

What if you started practicing yoga or meditating or joined an interfaith choir and found more serenity or connection with God outside of your church halls? This is shocking to many religious people. Many feel disappointed and conflicted by this.
What if you have entered a personal dark night of the soul and feel that your religion or spiritual leaders are not addressing any of your real concerns—that they don’t have what it takes to help you though?

First, you should know that you are not alone, and my guess is that you are right on schedule. If you didn’t know about this schedule, let me introduce you to Father Richard Rhor, who explains it best in his book Falling Upwards, The Spirituality of the Two Halves of Life:
 
"Sooner or later, if you are on any classic “spiritual schedule,” some event, person, death, idea, or relationship will enter your life that you simply cannot deal with using your present skill set, your acquired knowledge, or your strong willpower. Spiritually speaking, you will be, you must be, led to the edge of your private resources. At that point you will stumble over a necessary stumbling stone as Isaiah calls it; or to state it in our language here, you will and you must “lose” at something. This is the only way that Life-Fate-God-Grace-Mercy can get you to change, let go of your egocentric preoccupations, and go on the further and larger journey. I wish I could say this is not true, but it is darn near absolute in the spiritual literature of the world." (p. 65-66 emphasis mine)
 
Father Rhor’s book is a helpful map of what happens when we transition out of first half of life’s spirituality (which is very black and white, but necessarily so in order to help us build our foundation), into a second half of life spirituality or mature religion. What he is basically describing is the transition to becoming a spiritual elder… if we make it that far and don’t jump of the spiritual path altogether.

This “further, larger journey” is not usually discussed in churches. Most of the institutions of religion are not set up for the second half of life, and for good reason—it’s not their jurisdiction. They are helpful for the first half of life concerns such as sin management, teaching the basics of morality, grounding ceremonies and rituals, community celebrations, and the like. The larger journey is a personal journey that takes place in the landscape of the heart.

On this journey, we are often on our own, unless we are lucky enough to have an elder or mentor to help us navigate the new terrain and avoid the pitfalls. The problem is, elders are often on the fringes of our churches and of society, because they/we don’t fit in the world. So you may have to search for them. They are the ones that, in our first half of life, we might have judged as weird or not “all in.”

Just to clarify, the halves of life referred to here are not numerical—the larger journey can call people younger than 40, and some people don’t ever enter it even by 80, preferring to stay on the trivial surface of the material world. What calls people to the larger journey? I cannot say exactly. I believe the call is always sounding, but there is usually a prerequisite amount of “necessary suffering” to get people to wake up and “lose their egocentric preoccupations.”

This further and larger journey is replete with changes and therefore opportunities. As the paradoxes mount however, many people wonder what to do with their church membership at this phase, if they have one. Father Richard Rhor’s answers:

“You can belong to such institutions for all the good they do, but you no longer put all your eggs in that one basket… Don’t expect what [groups/religions] can’t give you. It will make you needlessly angry and reactionary. (P 141)
 
The answer of what to do is something that immigrants and minorities have always known and done. Essentially, we begin to have dual memberships. We will no longer fit in completely, so we must learn to get our needs met in diverse places. In Rescuing the Gospel From the Cowboys by Richard Twiss, Native Americans who become Apostolic Christian Pastors describe having difficulty reconciling these two very different cultures. Do they have to deny one culture/teachings or the other? As they go on the larger journey they learn they can coexist. They learned through study, through support from each other and sometimes support from mature pastors that Jesus was a shaman, and that their faith is stronger when they nurture all of themselves.

If you are a Christ Consciousness-Centered Shamanic Women, there is no doubt you are a special minority. So you will need to have a special community in addition to your other memberships. No one institution or group can meet all our spiritual needs. If you are looking for one to do it all, you’ll be disappointed and possibly angry.
 
Anger is not such a bad thing, when you recognize it is a phase of grief. Some may need to grieve this loss of their simple childhood religion/faith/community. Remember that the stages of grief include: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Not in that order. And not necessarily only once for each stage. Everyone has their own process. The hope is that at the end of the process, at some point, you emerge as an elder, with no rancor or agenda. I like to think of this a sacred emergence.
 
At this stage of life suddenly poetry will be make much more sense to you, and maybe you’ll relate to poets more. The poet Rilke said this about change:

"Be happy about your growth, in which of course you can’t take anyone with you, and be gentle with those who stay behind; be confident and calm in front of them and don’t torment them with your doubts and don’t frighten them with our faith or joy, which they won’t be able to comprehend. Seek out some simple and true feeling of what you have in common with them, which doesn’t necessarily have to alter when you yourself change again and again;"
 
“...Avoid providing material for the drama that is always stretched tight between parents and children; it uses up much of the children’s strength and wastes the love of the elders, which acts and warms even if it does not comprehend. (Letters to a Young Poet, p 43.)

If you are in the crisis now, here are some common mind games to watch out for. The ego would like you to never know the truth about who you are, because this will be its death, therefore, it wants you to keep running around in circles.  
 
Many people feel like because they have changed, they have to change everything else around them--leave their church, move to a new town, change their name. The truth is you don’t have to. Changing from the inside out one day at a time will still engaging in life has longer staying power and makes people happiest over time. The purpose of religion and similar institutions is to teach universal principles of morality, and they give people a community and a place to gather and celebrate and have ceremony. These are important things that should not be thrown out lightly. They can coexist with shamanic women.

You can watch and notice things one day at a time and if you need to make changes make sure that the soul is driving and not the ego. The soul is calm and gives suggestions not orders or urgent to-dos.

Here is another pitfall: When people awaken, they realize that some, if not all, of their friends are shallow, and they think that they should get rid of them.  I advise you not to throw all of your friends away, because then you will be going through all these changes lonely. There is a lot of value in a friend, even a shallow one, when you need to get out and go to a movie or have lunch with someone who remembers your name. Eventually, your friendships will sort out and you’ll make new ones and old ones may fade or flower in new ways.

The same is true for marriages. Many women email me because they have started to meditate and are having profound spiritual experiences and they feel their husbands are not close to where they are. They dream of a spiritualized marriage, or divorce. A lot of the pain caused by this mind game is caused by unfair expectations and the faulty belief that we can control or change other people. The truth is, we can change no one but ourselves, with God’s help. When a woman or man puts energy into themselves instead of trying to change their partner, then a marriage often takes care of itself. Divorce is not usually necessary or a satisfactory answer.
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If cortisol was your first drug, as it was for many of us who came from dysfunctional homes, then your ego might be creating drama to get an addictive fix. Many of us, even though we have been on the spiritual path for years, have addictions like these that we didn’t know about. If you suspect that’s you, get yourself to a 12-step program like Al-anon or Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous or Codependents Anonymous.
 
Just because you find something you don’t like or that feels contradictory about your religion doesn’t mean you have to throw it all out, unless you do have to, for safety or other reasons, in order to move on. We all have our own journeys. If you do walk away, do it with as much grace as possible and leave the door open for what you can still have in common with people.

I have found that when I am most annoyed with my own spiritual communities, it is because they have become so like my own family that it is easiest for me to judge them. When I am humble, the spirit teaches everywhere.

I have learned to take what I like and store the rest until I can understand it, transmute it, or discard it. Or course, there are certain meetings or gatherings I avoid. I have learned not to talk to certain people about anything deep. I know who I can talk to.

12-step programs are wonderful if you need a support group that uses spiritual solutions but where you can speak freely and choose to relate to a God as you understand God. I have seen God work for people that don’t believe in God, but believe that a power greater than them is at work in their lives: the ocean, nature, Great Out Doors, Good Orderly Direction. These are ideas that might have seemed like heresy in the first half of life-- but I have seen God/Love/Mercy/Krishna/HigherPower/Nature working by so many names that I have come to include it all. 

A shamanic woman understands that life is one big crisis/change/opportunity and that faith is part of that. So a crisis of faith doesn’t shake her. It makes her more aware that she is changing, and that there are opportunities all around her. I love the Irish poet and writer John O’Donahue who says: “The human person is a threshold where many infinities meet.” May you meet yourself again and again on the journey and may you treat yourself with kindness.