How a Lost Sheep Found Me

And brought me home to a place I'd never been before

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Rachel Held Evans (1981-2019) Photograph by Robin Rayne for the New Yorker, May 6, 2019

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God I miss her. Her books moved me and gave me a glimpse into a world I knew very little about. In the six years since her premature death I've often thought, I would dearly love to read her next book, and the next book after that, just to keep tracking her evolution from conservative Evangelicalism to progressive Christianity. It was such a fascinating transformation to witness—more than witness—Rachel Held Evans’s writing made you feel like you were at her kitchen table, drinking coffee in the morning, talking quietly about real things, things that mattered.

At the Crossroads

Over the last six years—and really my whole life—I've been on a journey of my own, but from the opposite direction. I'm an outsider to Christianity. Rachel was born in the bosom of the Bible Belt. I grew up without church or religion, where questions mattered more than answers. Rachel was raised in a fundamentalist culture where questions were unwelcome guests quickly shown the door.

As a secular kid, I found my fascination with comparative religion in college, via philosophy, and ended up majoring in religious studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Then I did graduate work in philosophy at San Diego State University. Since then I’ve been teaching world religions, Asian philosophy, and world mythology to community college students for over three decades. Throughout those years I set deep roots in the earth and groundwater of the Eastern traditions: Buddhism, Hinduism—especially Advaita Vedanta—and Taoism. To this day I draw sustenance from that soil, and water from those inexhaustible springs.

Rachel and I may come from opposite ends of the spectrum, but to my eternal bewilderment we somehow met in the middle.

The Long, Slow Thaw

My immediate resonance with Eastern philosophy arose alongside a groundless bias against monotheism and the Abrahamic faiths—I did not yet realize that it was okay to love it all. But the mystics of those Western traditions began to melt the ice: the Sufis of Islam, Kabbalah in Judaism, and the Christian mystics. Here I found kindred voices more interested in experience than doctrine. They sounded like Zen monks to me. Slowly my resistance began to fade.

Early in my religious studies education the seeds had been planted, mostly by the Christian mystics and contemplatives, ancient and modern: Hildegard of Bingen, St. Teresa of Avila, St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich, the unknown author of The Cloud of Unknowing, and especially Thomas Merton. When I read him, like when I read Rachel Held Evans, it felt like a reunion with a long lost friend, as though I knew them more intimately than I knew the people in my own life, and more deeply than I knew myself. The miracle of books, right?

And in the last years of his all-too-short life, Merton built bridges between his Christian contemplative tradition and the philosophies of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Taoism. To this day, his translation of Chuang Tzu (Zhuangzi) is my favorite. It became increasingly clear to me that the Christian mystics were experiencing the same things as the sages of the East, despite their differing conceptual frameworks. As Meister Eckhart wrote, “Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language.”

In the last years of her life, Rachel Held Evans found herself in an Episcopal church. She longed for authentic religious community, but couldn't be a part of any church that spent most of its energy excluding the "wrong" kinds of people and forcing rigid doctrine and narrow scriptural interpretation on everyone still in the room after the purging. Even though my life and backstory couldn’t be more different than hers, here is where we meet—in the bread and wine at the table—the Anglican communion of the Episcopal Church, the oldest of all Christian rituals, the participation mystique, where the everyday objects of the sacred meal shimmer with unfathomable depth, and where all are fed and known and joined together into one.

Like Rachel, I could never be a part of any religious community that practiced coercion, shame, and bullying of anyone deemed unworthy. Despite all my theological uncertainties, the Episcopalians let me in—because they let everyone in. No one was trying to convert me or tell me what to think. They just held the door open for me and for anyone willing to walk through, anyone who wanted to share in the mystery of this place, a mystery none of them really understood either. But they knew it was beautiful, and that it mattered, and that it was worth doing. They knew how to stay quiet, and how to leave enough space for the real to come through.

The Joy of Unlearning

It's endlessly fascinating to me that most of the opinions I held about Christianity turned out to be wrong. I lumped all Christians together; whatever the worst among them did, I generalized to all of them—guilt by association—and simply ignored the wide diversity of Christianities that existed. I mistakenly assumed that Christian life required complete submission to authorities and doctrines. I was wrong about that too. It turns out doubt is a highly-valued generative state that moves us deeper into the mystery—the mystery our certainty had hidden from us. What else had I been wrong about?

What surprised me most about my encounter with these searching and progressive Christian voices, both in books and in my local Episcopal cathedral, was the realization that it was possible to be a thinking a person, a skeptical person, a scientific person, a questioning person, and still fully participate in religious life. That was a revelation to me. I don’t know why it took me so long to understand that.

From my outsider perspective, I mistakenly believed that to be religious meant abdicating my freedom and falling in line. It was my deep reading in Christian mysticism that first showed me the error of that assumption. The story of Christian mysticism, or any mysticism, is the story of outsiders deeply at odds with the authorities and strictures of their own traditions. Like me, they loved probing questions more than pat answers. For them, faith wasn’t the same thing as certainty. Faith means living in the questions, not hammering out answers. In fact, it is precisely in the cloud of unknowing that real religious experience begins.

Spiritual and Religious

My gratitude for voices like Rachel Held Evans, Brian McLaren, Thomas Merton, and so many others knows no bounds. They removed the barriers that kept me away from my own cultural traditions. All my life I had been an SBNR (spiritual, but not religious), and on my worst days I even looked down on religious people as folks who gave up too easily and fell in line with someone else’s ideology instead of finding their own. I had read too much Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre to ever trust anything second-hand. I know right? The arrogance of youth.

So why did I weep when I stood in the ruins of Tintern Abbey in Wales, St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, Notre Dame de Paris, and Grote Kerk in Haarlem, Netherlands where my parents were married in 1946? Because something in me was shifting. In these hallowed spaces I felt myself swept up in a timeless presence beyond name and form. A wind blew through me and opened me up. This was something I couldn’t replicate—not exactly—on my yoga mat in the backyard, or in my study of the world’s scriptures, no matter how sublime. These cathedrals were windows through which new horizons became visible. Their grandeur, mystery, history, and visceral presence released the last remnants of my clenched resistance. Maybe I could find a place like this, a community like this, back home in San Diego. And I did.

The Three Pillars

The three pillars of Buddhism—Buddha, dharma, and sangha—claim that if you’re really serious about deepening into spiritual experience, you need all three legs of the stool: teacher, teachings, and community. Buddha is the teacher, the example, the one who shows us where to walk if we too want to awaken from the dream of separateness. Dharma is the teachings, the truth, the insights, and the methods that unlock our interconnectedness. And sangha is the family of pilgrims walking alongside you, there to support you, sing with you, suffer with you, celebrate with you, grieve with you, pray with you, meditate with you, think with you, laugh with you, eat and drink with you, and wash the dishes with you after the meal. I’ve always had a rich array of teachers and teachings from across the spectrum of the world’s wisdom traditions—that was never the problem. But the sangha? Not so much. I had not yet learned how to join, how to surrender, how to let go of control—how to stop being the captain of my own little boat in charge of everything, and doing all the rowing.

Episcopal Zen

Another essential teacher was Alan Watts. I devoured all of his books in my twenties. Later, when I taught my first Asian Philosophy class, I assigned his book The Way of Zen. Here was a voice I could trust. Smart, droll, erudite, witty, well-read, and effortless in his navigation of all the subjects that mattered: world religion, philosophy, science, psychology, mythology, and linguistics. And his humility charmed me. Despite years of teaching at prestigious universities, when challenged by an audience member at a talk he reminded them that he wasn’t a “real academic,” but merely a “philosophical entertainer.” (I think I might have finally found my most accurate job description.)

In his late thirties Watts left his native England for New York City to enter formal Zen training. He didn’t mesh well with the teaching style of his Zen Master and walked away entering instead a theological seminary to become an Episcopal priest. He completed his training, was ordained, but didn’t last, later writing that he was ill-suited to the regimentation and discipline of formal Anglican ordination. After serving as chaplain at Northwestern University for six years he resigned from the priesthood and headed west, drawn by the rich philosophical and religious diversity of California, especially the Bay Area. There he deepened his study of Asian philosophy, specifically Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, always hungry to integrate their insights into his native Christianity. As a result Watts became the preeminent interpreter of Asian wisdom for curious Westerners. His over twenty-five books and many hours of audio recordings—he had a long-running public radio program, snippets of which now serve as audio tracks for myriad YouTube videos with millions of views—shaped the San Francisco renaissance and the consciousness of countless spiritual seekers, even a kid like me who’d only been to San Francisco a few times as a tourist.

Just the fact that someone like Watts could exist, let alone be an enormously influential teacher, filled me with the conviction that all of the world’s wisdom traditions belonged together in one conversation. And I just had to be a part of that conversation.

Exvangelicals

I don’t remember how I found Rachel Held Evans. Probably online, maybe her blog. It was around 2019, right after she died. Her voice cut through the clutter. Simple, honest, direct, relatable; she disarmed me. What the hell was I doing reading a Christian writer? But one paragraph in I realized she was a Christian in crisis, deeply questioning her fundamentalist upbringing, and emboldening her fellow-exiles. I mistakenly thought no one ever left that world. Once again I was wrong.

Through her, or maybe through Amazon’s algorithms, I found Brian McLaren, another “exvangelical” as they sometimes call themselves, and here too I found a voice I could trust. Rachel and Brian were both exploring something that had captivated me for many years, even though I was miles away from their Christian orientation, namely, can one have conviction without certainty? Can one catch glimmers of truth outside the bounds of dogma? Can a skeptic long for religion? Can religion respect intellectual reasoning and uncertainty? Can images and narratives of God have more power as metaphors than they ever did as doctrines? Can you know nothing and still be wise?

Can You Be an Agnostic Christian?

Participating in a religion isn’t like joining a club or a political party. It’s more loose-knit than that. When you come into sangha you are simply saying, can we pray together? Can we meditate together? Can we sing together? Can we spend time in the silence? Can we eat? Can we doubt, love, grieve, and laugh together? Can we stand together in awe before the mystery that transcends all doctrines, scriptures, rituals, and concepts?

For me, being a baptized Episcopalian is an invitation, not a pact. I’m not bound by a contract, I’m drawn into a circle. I’m continually re-invited, moment to moment, to live more deeply, more humbly, more lovingly, more discerningly. I haven’t severed my Hindu-Buddhist-Taoist roots. Far from it. If anything, my engagement with those traditions is deeper than ever and profoundly enriched by my weekly communion and the liturgy of high church. It’s as if someone microdosed me with psilocybin mushrooms, not that I’ve ever experienced that—in my college days we adhered to a strict full-dose regimen and then some. And now, even though I’m skeptical about the literal claims more traditional Christians hold dear—the virgin birth, the resurrection, substitutionary atonement—I sing full throat the hymns and am frequently moved to tears by the communal rituals of the sacrament. I feel more than ever before. It’s as if all of my religious and philosophical sensibilities have been heightened. Can you be a Christian without conformity to dogma and belief? Hold my beer.

The Christian Resistance

In these darkening days when so much of what passes for Christianity is really just Christian Nationalism, it’s heartening to be a part of the Christian Resistance to that pathology. In a widening coalition of progressive Christian congregations—Episcopalians, Methodists, United Church of Christ, Disciples of Christ, many Lutheran congregations, many Presbyterian congregations, Unitarian Universalists, and so many more—a countervailing movement is finding its voice. Yes it’s important to say what you’re for, but it’s also important to say what you’re against. Resistance is love too.

If traditional Christianity has left you out in the cold, yet you still feel drawn to the virtues and values of an intentional community rooted in humility, mutuality, truth-telling, justice, and a lived commitment to the inherent dignity of all human beings and all life, know that there are communities all around you practicing those values and exhorting one another to live more deeply into their loving-kindness. Jesus may be the namesake and the paradigm for Christianity, but these values are universal—he was just the teacher bringing those universal values to life in his place and time. At least that’s how I’ve come to understand it.

If you’re curious about all of this, you should know that there are progressive churches who tell the truth about their institution’s complicity in structural injustice, who openly and loudly affirm LGBTQ+ people, and who boldly and from the pulpit call for a return to decency and dignity in the face of an increasingly dangerous and cruel Christian Nationalism that serves power and empire over people and community. There are churches all around you finding their courage, raising their voices, and joining together to constitute a Christian Resistance movement to the prevailing darkness. Don’t let the enormous gold cross hanging around the neck of the current White House press secretary fool you.

At its living, beating heart, Christianity was never about empire and power, in spite of countless examples of that distortion throughout history. The life and teachings of Jesus were all about serving people at the margins. Instead of building higher walls, we are called to build longer tables. Instead of ripping apart families for having insufficient paperwork—paperwork those in power refuse to grant them—we ought to be shaping all of society’s structures to better support one another’s families, regardless of their country of origin, faith, race, or orientation. That is our gospel vow.

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The gospel doesn’t need a coalition devoted to keeping the wrong people out. It needs a family of sinners, saved by grace, committed to tearing down the walls, throwing open the doors, and shouting, “Welcome! There’s bread and wine. Come eat with us and talk.” This isn’t a kingdom for the worthy; it’s a kingdom for the hungry.

In my struggle to find church, I’ve often felt that if I could just find the right denomination or the right congregation, if I could just become the right person or believe the right things, then my search would be over at last. But right’s got nothing to do with it. Waiting around for right will leave you waiting around forever.

The church is God saying: “I’m throwing a banquet, and all these mismatched, messed-up people are invited. Here, have some wine.”

~ Rachel Held Evans, Searching for Sunday: Loving, Leaving, and Finding the Church