| CAMERADO CHRONICLES PART ONE APPENDIX A Letter to Jesse Banks, 8/7/2004 Dear Jesse, I’m so sorry this response has taken so long. Your letter warranted something much more prompt, being as thoughtful and searching as it was, but most of my energies writing-wise have gone into a combination of getting this laptop equipped for wireless internet access (which was not easy, but now it’s here and it’s smokin’ fast when I’m parked in the right position) and a short series of rather long emails involving something not pertaining to the Chronicles (not directly anyway, everything in my life seems to be revolving around this endeavor now). I also needed to spend some time searching God for the right way to answer some of your questions, in a way that would reach most deeply into the experiences that I’m having and feeling, basically because you are the first reader to posit some of these questions so precisely. It did take some time to figure out how to best answer them. I am very encouraged, however, that after reading the initial chapters you would still call me a “brother in Christ!” I accept this warm greeting and extend it right back! I know by talking with you, hearing your thoughts about Katie and watching the way you interact with people in the Upper Room that you are living a 100% authentic experience in Christ and have devoted your life to listening and learning what this means. Whether you do this from a strictly Biblian perspective, or a place where you incorporate Biblical teachings with the similar and diverse observations of God-seekers worldwide as I do, it does not matter one bit, as long as the experience is authentic and there is always room to grow –you can’t put a box around God, and you can’t continue to grow with God if you put yourself in a box and refuse to come out when called because it is comfortable and secure. I think we both agree that scriptural revelation is only of value when we submit it contemplatively to the direct and immediate counsel of the Spirit and let Him discern for us and internalize the distilled “message” that we call the Word of God. But that is where the rift began for me, what eventually grew into/revealed itself as the dividing line between what I’m calling Biblianism and Christotheism (and it is heartening to me that you would describe the exploration of the differences between the sides as “tender,” for it is meant to be tender and done with the utmost compassion for everyone, so that’s a sign that it’s being done right). I spent a lot of time going to various churches, and finding that they all spoke to me partially but none completely. There were always things in the sermons or in conversations with folks that the Spirit would not let me digest –symbolically I’d have to spit them back up! The epitome of this was when Aubray and I actually lived for a while within a community in Vermont that is trying to live out an authentic experience in Christ based upon the model of the 1st century church in Jerusalem (as described, however briefly, in Acts; meaning they live communally, work together in cottage industries and share everything, theoretically, in common). However they are also extremely fundamentalist in their approach to Christ and adhere to a very strict, literal interpretation of the Bible (which I came to see as a strange contradiction –the 1st century church didn’t have a New Testament! What made them so zealous for Christ???) It became pretty obvious that we didn’t belong there, so we left and moved to Massachusetts, and didn’t attend church for a while; I think we felt a little burned out (we dabbled with a Unitarian church in town, the exact opposite of the community, but they were so wishy-washy that nothing stuck). Then we came to Ashland, found the Upper Room and started attending ACF, and the rest is not history –it’s the living present. Even at ACF though, where I’ve come to appreciate and love so many different people, the official teachings have left me feeling that I did not belong there spiritually. I go because I love the people and want to show love and learn to serve them , and be among other people who want the same. But in order to maintain this connection, I feel compelled not to accept some of the core tenets of the Calvary Chapel Church as gospel and align my spiritual practice with them. (I imagine the Chronicles themselves are illustrating these issues well enough that I don’t need to reiterate them here) Most of them, I gather, are matters of interpretation…but not all. There are some not-too-small areas where the Scriptures say “black” and the Spirit tells me “white.” And then people like Steve Bright would counsel me about how if you are a Christian, then you accept the Bible as the “Word of God,” and if you do that then you must accept the whole Bible as the Word of God, not cut out the parts you don’t like as Thomas Jefferson supposedly did. And if internal contradictions arise from accepting everything in the Bible as the Word of God albeit contrary, in some cases, to your direct inclinations of the Spirit, well that means you haven’t “opened up” to the Spirit of God enough yet, you still got some learnin’ to do, and you should say to yourself, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.” This worried me for a long time. I felt that I was not a true Christian. And I also knew that I could not make myself a true Christian, that if this indeed is what being true Christian is then God was not calling me in that direction. You can probably imagine the distress this would cause, sitting there every Sunday morning and Wednesday night, wanting so much just to drop all concerns and pretensions and LOVE these people, but feeling that acute sense of separation come back every time your beloved pastor would say something that grieved your Spirit and the people all around you nod and say “Yes” or “Uh- huh” and you CAN’T. (And if you’ve read chapter…I think it’s 6, where I wrote about my reaction to one of Pastor Mark’ s old tapes, the one about people outside the church being “spiritually dead,” you get a good taste of how hard I’ve had to fight within myself to not actually become hostile to the church at times.) But getting away from the ACF environment for a while proved to be the best thing that could have possibly happened. One day, before moving into my rig, Aubray asked me, during a fairly unsettling phone conversation when we were still pretty unsure of what God hath wroght in our lives by separating us like that, why I decided to get baptized. I had a very weak answer for her at the time, and I was a little humiliated by my frailty at not being able to answer a simple question like that without any gusto. I did know that, despite my differences with its dogma, I wanted to be baptized at ACF, and I wanted Pastor Mark to do it; when I was not feeling defensive about my own status vis a vis the Christian church, I saw past the theological differences I had with Mark and could recognize him as a wonderful, humble man and seeker on an authentic walk with Christ, as well as a gifted communicator and truly caring soul. Who better to be there for me in the symbolic gesture of being washed clean of the mistakes of the past and beginning a new life in Christ? Was I being baptized because the Bible tells me I must do it in order to be born again? No. That would make it an empty gesture of obligation. All I could really say is that I felt drawn to do it by the Spirit, that the Spirit would have been grieved if I went away from ACF to my new job without it, and that the Spirit who was instructing me to do this was Christ Himself. And that’s when it hit me, and I rushed to put it down on paper: “I do not believe in the Bible, but I believe in Christ.” This was going to be my answer to Aubray’s question. Then, as you read, I knew I had to take steps to clarify that I was not saying I thought the Bible is a lie –only that I do not put my faith and devote my life to it. I put my faith and devote my life to Christ, directly, with no intermediary. The rest of the lines all just started to fall into place. When we call the Bible “the Word of God,” we are equating it with Christ (“In the beginning was the Word” etc). We are deifying a book, and all I could see in terms of a reasoning for this is that it makes Christ more tangible; Jesus of Nazareth left this world in body a couple thousand years ago, and His followers needed something else that was tangible to stay in “contact” with Him so to speak. There is nothing intrinsically wrong with this, especially when it is put to use to bring the attention of people trapped in destructive worldly patterns to spiritual solutions (as I tried to express in the section about using the Bible to reach inmates at Pelican Bay prison). Tangible can be good. UNTIL YOU MAKE YOUR TANGIBLE “GOD” INTO AN IDOL. We ridicule the worshipers of Baal in the Old Testament for trading the infinite, omnipotent Almighty God for a tangible but finite and not-too-potent statue, but my point is that Bible-believing Christians tend to do the same thing today --not all, and not entirely, but enough so that, for the same reasons God warned the Jews against idolatry of “other gods,” I believe the “God said it, I believe it, that settles it” approach to the Bible is detrimental to the Spirit. It becomes a comfortable box. Or an uncomfortable one. If your primary connection to God is through the words of a book, and that book constantly comes under attack by people who don’t think the same way, you might find yourself spending your whole life defending that book, vehemently at times, instead of living out its principles….which brings us back to the worldly mentality that we turned to the book for redemption from in the first place. There is nothing more worldly, nothing more frankly prideful, than going around telling people “I’m right and you’re wrong,” or “I’m going to heaven and you’re not.” If Christianity is going to have any validity as a faith, it has to teach us to rise above that mentality. It’s not up to us who goes to heaven and who doesn’t, only to walk the path we’re given with reverence and gratitude, and trust that it leads us Home. (And even here, I’m going to give you a great example in a future Chronicle of how a faith based upon verbal, written promises from God –ie. the Christian belief that the end times will be exactly as described in Revelations—is not a faith at all, but a very weak substitute. I’ve seen this first-hand at the community. It’s too long a story to include here though.) So, if Christotheism (and I’m far from settled on that term) has a definition to discern from these writings so far, you could say that it is the quest for the direct and immediate experience of and supplication to the manifest God, both within and beyond creation, that we call Christ. A Christotheistic religion, therefore, in a practical sense, would be one that is open to accepting revelation of Christ in any form in which it may be presented, and the dedicated honing of the discernment of the Spirit I mentioned above so as to bring one’s own life into accord with the Spirit. After starting the Chronicles, I was delighted to find out that this is what people of the Quaker faith have sought to do since the 1600s, and it made me think that if I have a spiritual home within any existing church, it is probably there. For now I am enjoying being a free agent, a “loose canon” devotee of Christ bound to no man’s interpretations or opinions of His reality (including, of course, my own). As such, I don’t need to ask if there is a primary revelation of Christ, because to me the strength of the evidence of Christ comes from within, and is corroborated by not just one book, not just by one culture’s revelation of Christ, but by all of them. As just one example, if you read the Tao Te Ching by the 6th century BC Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, as a follower of Christ it would be very hard to miss that the “Master” of which he wrote is exemplified by our concept of who Jesus was, and is. In many ways, Lao Tzu seemed to be more in touch with the essential nature of the coming Messiah than his Hebrew contemporaries. And many contemporary Taoists are similarly attuned to these qualities, in ways that some modern Christians, if they are honest enough, would want to emulate. Does that mean the Taoists are right and the Christians wrong? That Lao Tzu was right and the Hebrew prophets of his day wrong? Of course not. No more so than Christians consider Moses wrong for bringing the revelation of I AM to his people without the further disclosure of a triune God existing as One. The Bible takes the revelation of Christ many steps further by addressing the needs and social responsibilities of those who would dedicate their lives to following the way of the Master, whereas Lao Tzu’s program could be followed by a hermit. (If this subject interests you to investigate further, Janet probably still has copies of an excellent book called Christ the Eternal Tao, written by an Eastern Orthodox monk. I don’t agree with all of his conclusions –he holds firmly to the idea that the Christ was a person who has appeared once and only once in human history (so far), whereas I don’t—but the insight he gives to this connection between the Word (Greek Logos) and the Tao is fascinating and very eye-opening. In fact, I’m going to whet your appetite even more by also forwarding a letter I wrote the other day to some good friends back East, both of whom are Jewish, on the issue of whether or not Christotheism has any relevance to a Jewish audience that is not interested in accepting the person of Jesus of Nazareth as the Messiah. I quote pretty extensively from Christ the Tao at the beginning, and it will also offer some further insights into the thought process of describing Christotheism that has yet to be covered in the typed Chronicles.) I think that should be about enough to take in at once. Did I answer all your questions? Well, I guess as I look back at your letter, on the matter of should we follow the scriptures….follow the Spirit of Christ and you will never be in conflict with God. I think you will also find that you are rarely, if ever, in conflict with the scriptures –maybe with some groups’ interpretations of the scriptures, and usually played out in the political arena rather than the spiritual. (For instance, I have no problem with gay marriage, and if anything I would be an activist in favor of allowing it rather than abolishing it, because Christ tells me that their sin is no larger than mine, and no one tried to jump in with a court order saying I couldn’t marry Aubray in a New Age church [with a lesbian minister no less!]; and anyway, why should church law dictate to those who don’t subscribe to it? This would be a very unpopular view in most churches, perhaps even ACF, but I’d debate anyone who tries to suggests it is unscriptural) But you are not the type of person I am concerned about, Jesse my brother! You just need to keep on keepin’ on, and love the eternal Spirit that you already know is so in love with you! The Western Orthodox Church (as I’ve started calling the Biblian bloc of mainstream Western churches) has failed many people, sometimes miserably, both inside and outside of their fold, and I feel it is my God-given responsibility to reach out to these people, through the Chronicles and stories like P&K. But you are not one of them. I write to you because you are my great friend and comrade-in-Christ, and I have a feeling that where many in our own church would right me off as a crank, or worse, for these writings, you’ll understand. May God always continue to bless you and lead you as He has so well! Your friendship brings me great joy. Keep an eye on the flock out there too wouldja, especially my dearest one. I hope that she is always doing as well spiritually as she portrays to me, through these strange but exciting trials of our separate lives. Ours is not to understand I guess, eh brother? Peace and love raining upon you from the Ole South (Georgia), J.Pedro |