Christian Existentialism

Rethinking religious experience

Camino de Santiago, Northern Spain

---

Is Christianity a club you join to receive special prizes, or is it a long walk through undiscovered country where the beauty of the path is the destination?

No really, I’m being serious. That is a real question.

Is religion a destination or an aspiration?

An arrival or a journey?

A walled community in which to plant your flag, or an evolving process driven by a wordless longing beyond concepts and doctrines?

The first formulation never appealed to me. Why would I want to have anything to do with a tribe that definitionally placed itself above and outside the world and everyone in it?

Growing up I had zero interest in salvation because the entire notion of damnation seemed ludicrous to me. I didn’t know what God was—still don’t—but the idea that every single human being on earth is born exiled from the sacred source of being was a ridiculous doctrine on the face of it. I have no time for obvious nonsense—still don’t.

When I fell in love with philosophy and religious studies in college I gravitated to the non-dualistic traditions—Vedanta, Buddhism, and the like—for one simple reason: their portrait of reality matched my experience. Blame it on Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and my nascent white boy Romantic understanding of Native American spirituality gleaned entirely from books, but I had no patience for any philosophy that did not in some way resonate with my own inner voice. If you spend enough time in the Pacific Ocean, the Mojave Desert, and the Sierra Nevada Mountains as I did, and if you read “Song of Myself” from Leaves of Grass often enough it takes root—that feeling in your bones that everything, every fiber of being around you, is part of you, no, is you. And once you taste universal oneness there’s no coming back. Non-duality becomes the lens through which you experience the entire universe.

“Reexamine all you have been told. Dismiss what insults your soul.” ~ Walt Whitman

It all flooded through me yesterday as I was giving a lecture on the Gospel of Thomas, fresh off the heels of my lecture on the existentialism of Albert Camus two days earlier. As so often happens, you don’t really learn something until you try to teach it.

And after thirty-five years of teaching on and off campus some things are finally taking shape. I am not an expert. I am simply a lifelong student. As I tell my students, your college professors are just big nerds who loved college so much they never left. I cannot claim knowledge or wisdom, but I can claim proximity. I have lived with these ideas for 50 years—since my teens, and that’s a long time for tea leaves to steep.

It took a while, but the essence of these wisdom traditions has worked its way into the fiber of my being. Which makes it all the more frustrating that I am still essentially a fool fumbling my way through life—you’d think that by now some of this wisdom would’ve rubbed off on me and shaped my decisions and actions, but you’d be wrong. Living with wisdom traditions doesn’t mean that your actions perfectly express their abiding principles. But at least your internal compass has a decent chance of pointing north.

The Gospel of Thomas

Discovered in the Egyptian desert in 1945, the Gospel of Thomas, not in your New Testament, is the one with no narrative. It is just a collection of the wisdom sayings of Jesus, which makes it more like the Dao De Jing of Laozi or the Analects of Confucius than the canonical gospels. And with the narrative gone, there goes the virgin birth, the incarnation (Jesus as God), all of the miracles, including the linchpin—the resurrection. And with all that gone, Jesus isn’t God, and his death on the cross doesn’t save you. No damnation, no salvation, and no worship. Instead, Jesus tells us that if we come to understand these teachings (attain gnosis), we would become him and he would become us—a very Buddhist take on Jesus, and one I was hungry for. I didn’t want to hear about someone’s religious experience from thousands of years ago—I wanted to have my own religious experience. The Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas invites us to experience God-consciousness as our own. In the mystical frame the duality of God and humanity collapses. As Zen Master Matsuo Basho put it, “Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise men of old. Instead, seek what they sought.”

So as I was leading a group through excerpts from the Gospel of Thomas I couldn’t help thinking of Camus.

Albert Camus

Albert Camus was born in 1913 in French-controlled Algeria on the African coast of the Mediterranean Sea. He never met his farm worker father, who died on the battlefields of World War I. His deaf and illiterate mother did the best she could raising him alone.

Camus studied philosophy in college, as many of us lonely folks do, and he wrote his Master’s thesis on the third-century Neo-Platonic mystic Plotinus, and the fourth-century Church Father Augustine of Hippo, the greatest philosopher of the Christian tradition. Just before World War II Camus moved to Paris where he befriended Jean-Paul Sartre and Sartre’s lifelong partner Simone de Beauvoir.

Sartre and Camus were fans of each other’s novels, plays, and short stories, and they bonded over their mutual love of theater. But the Nazi invasion and occupation of Paris made ordinary life impossible. And it was the horror of the war that spurred their philosophical investigations to electrifying heights.

Suddenly philosophy was no longer a luxury—it was a necessity.

What is Existentialism?

Existentialism (a label they both tolerated and came to detest) is less a coherent philosophical position and more a response found throughout the work of a disconnected wave of writers and artists—more a literally movement than anything else. But at its core was this one simple idea: human beings have no “nature” or “essence”—instead, we constitute our lives through the choices we make. Existence comes before essence, as Sartre said. We are the product of our choices and actions. We cannot blame our human nature because we haven’t any. We cannot blame our parents, our culture, or our conditioning. Yes of course we all have a past, and we are shaped by it and the world around us, but in this next moment we are radically free.

For Sartre, there was no God or soul. We were entirely responsible not only for our own lives, but for the collective choices made at the societal level. No one is coming to rescue us but ourselves. You can see this two ways—as utterly terrifying, or utterly liberating.

Camus’s existentialism has a slightly different flavor. He’s not exactly a theist, but he isn’t a Marxist materialist either like his friend Sartre. Camus’s immersion in the mysticism of Plotinus and Augustine must’ve stuck with him because despite the horrors of the mid-twentieth century Camus describes a beautiful world full of mystery and something, something worth living for.

The Absurd

For both Sartre and Camus reality was absurd. Sure, who hasn’t muttered that word under their breath, but for them it was a serious metaphysical assertion, a technical term. Their lived experience on the streets of war-torn Nazi occupied Paris convinced them that the whole world had gone mad. Western civilization, the bastion of reason, law, and self-governance, had fallen to a fascist authoritarian death cult hell-bent on exterminating entire categories of people. The technology and industry of modernity that was going to liberate us all was being wielded to enact large-scale industrialized murder at the hands of the state. All of the big banks and industries were complicit in the Holocaust providing capital, steel, and Zyklon-B to exterminate women and children at Auschwitz. Cutting edge scientific research that was to deliver us into a wonderful new world, curing every disease, and solving every problem morphed instead into the atomic bomb, turning to ash in an instant 150,000 civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

None of this makes any sense. It never can. Humanity is, uh, a bit of a disappointment. Absurd is the only word that works.

Existentialism then starts here: Into this vacuum of meaning we are born, rise up, and are tasked with carving out a life. Don’t look to religion, or higher education, or science, or industry, or the state for any answers—they’re all just as lost as we are. If your temperament runs more to the bleak side, Sartre’s your man. If, in spite of everything, you somehow retain a glimmer of hope within, Camus might be a better fit.

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”

~ Albert Camus

Existential Christianity

All of this poured through me as I led that group through a study of the Gospel of Thomas yesterday, and words began to flow from my mouth. No I can’t tell you exactly what I said, but it was something like this:

So what does it mean to be a Christian? Is it about personal salvation? Or is it about transformation? Does calling oneself a Christian simply mean that you’ve joined a club with special perks? Is Christianity just an elaborate afterlife reservation system? Or does being a “Christian” mean turning your life in a certain direction and trying to live in a way that comes as close as humanly possible to the teachings of Jesus, not as a “savior,” but as a teacher?

Is “salvation” a private advantage, or a universal imperative?

Jesus gave us two commandments: love God, and love your neighbor. No footnotes, no exceptions. When the Pharisee asked Jesus, “Who is our neighbor?” Jesus didn’t answer. Instead he told a story about a wounded man left in a ditch stripped and bloodied by highway bandits. A Priest passed him by, and a Levite passed him by, but the Samaritan stopped to help, salving his wounds with oil and wine, and lifting him onto his donkey and bringing him to a nearby inn where he cared for him with no thought of what he might gain in return.

“Which of these three was a neighbor?” Jesus asked the Pharisee, and the answer arises in all of our hearts and minds simultaneously. Jesus’ parable is a radical and seditious assertion that shatters all tribes, all hierarchies, and all excuses. We are all responsible for our own actions and for the world we create together, here and now, not in some imaginary hereafter. We are to love others regardless of the color of their skin, their language, their ethnicity, their sexual orientation, or their immigration status. We are to treat the stranger among us as our equal, for we were once strangers in a strange land. Thoreau, who spent time as a Civil War nurse, wrote, “I do not ask the wounded person how he feels, I myself become the wounded person.”

Oneness, not pity.

And there is the deeper secret of Jesus’s love-everyone philosophy. If love is the bedrock name of our unseverable oneness, then there are no others—there’s just us. I am not my brother’s keeper—I am my brother.

Framed this way (and it seems that if anyone is to frame Christianity it ought to be Jesus), Christianity is not an exclusive tribe, or even a religion really—it is a way of life, a way of being in the world. It is a road we walk, like the road to Jericho trod by the good Samaritan, like the Camino de Santiago walked by pilgrims for a thousand years through the rolling hills of northern Spain, like the long journey of the United States of America from its violent origins toward the one-day fulfillment of its highest ideals.

What if wisdom is an aspiration, not a destination? A direction, not a place?

That’s why when people ask me if I’m a Christian, I hesitate. My verbal fumbling is probably perceived as muddled thinking—our culture has conditioned us to expect answers. For most of my life I had an aversion to Christianity. But five years ago I was baptized into a progressive Christian community that lets me pray with them. They don’t make doctrinal demands and leave me be to work it out for myself. They’re simply willing to walk with me. I like the way my friend put it best. Having been a Christian his whole life, when people ask him if he’s a Christian he says, “I don’t know. Ask my neighbor.”

That’s the only kind of Christianity that interests me—the kind you don’t need to announce, the kind people can discern through your actions. Like existentialism teaches, your choices and actions define you, not your labels, no matter how loudly self-proclaimed. Don’t tell me your religion—show me.

Walking the Christian road, or any wisdom road, keeps leading you through new terrain, hopefully learning along the way. The point is not to join something and then stop. The highest purpose of religion is to challenge us to become fully human. And that possibility is what excites me to try.

“There is a journey you must take. It is a journey without destination. There is no map. Your soul will lead you. And you can take nothing with you.” ~ Meister Eckhart