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Prologue
I truly wish not to offend anyone of the variations of the Christian persuasion, but I consider myself a survivor of many years of indoctrination in evangelical fundamentalist Christianity. For me, it was an extended spiritually troubling and misguiding experience. I have since found spiritual healing and peace. From that spirit, this text is a mollified distillation of a much lengthier, rather strident personal story.
I suspect that there are many stories of spiritual recovery much like my own, troubled by years of doubt, guilt, and spiritual disappointments. Hopefully, by sharing my recovery process, I might shine a little light on a path to your recovery. After reading the following, if you feel you might find some personal catharsis from a more detailed account of my experiences in the evangelical Christian sub-culture, I would be pleased to share with you my full twenty-four-page saga.
You can contact me at
lifecoachchuck@gmail.com.
My Spiritual Recovery
The greater part of my story revolves around my struggle with and eventual recovery from my personal experiences with evangelical fundamentalist Christians. As you read on, please understand that I am concerned that you might conclude that I am anti-Christianity. I am not. But I admit that I have held a deep resentment for the Christian sub-culture I grew up in. It was much like those persons who might be inclined, in some of the most peculiar situations, to opportunistically interject into a conversation, “I’m a ‘Christian’.” Whenever I hear one of these curious declarations, I always have the same questions. What is your point? What is your motivation behind such a declaration? Is it intended to indicate some sort of superiority, some special qualification? Is it a password for some kind of exclusive God-granted privilege? I feel the urge to quizzically reply, “Ah! Yes, and I’m a member of Mensa”.
I apologize if I may seem a little annoyed with professing “Christians”. I admit that as a result of my painful past experiences I come from a biased perspective. For twenty-five years, I too was a dutifully professing Christian. I now come from a broader spiritual perspective, and I am convinced that I am not alone in my hypersensitivity. There are many other people who share the weight of similar experiences and have yet to resolve their feelings about those experiences. I hope that by sharing my transition from my troubling past to my present spirituality, I might help others discover a sanctuary of common identity and find some support to move on to a place of healing.
Earliest memories of my religious indoctrination begin at a vulnerable young age. My lingering childhood impressions extended well into my adulthood. Unfortunately, those impressions are unpleasant. It was not a spiritually nurturing influence. Instead, it was for many years a covert manipulative through relentless fear and guilt that conditioned an unpleasant reflex accompanied with considerable resentment. The symptoms are akin to a form post-traumatic stress disorder. Even today, when I am caught off my guard, blithely thinking, “I’m over it”, confrontations with presumptuous professing “Christians” can trigger surges of adrenalin accelerating my heart rate and blood pressure into a nasty headache. I feel the threat of impending manipulation and coercion. I vacillate between urges of fight and flight.
Unfortunately, my childhood experiences that conditioned my weariness of all things “Christian” also created lingering unjustifiable guilt. I struggled with that guilt for many years. Gratefully, I have found spiritual healing, and each day I feel more at peace, and thus, the courage to publish this story. It is my hope that by sharing my spiritual recovery you might discover there are empathetic hearts that understand and share your desire for recovery from similar experiences. Perhaps I might provide some solace for those persons still struggling toward purging their religious infection and healing their spiritual lesions.
From my early childhood, I had had so many disappoints with “Christians” and evangelical fundamentalist churches, at thirty-five years I stopped attending church all together. I stopped professing Christianity. For the first time in my life I lived without my “Christian” façade. It was simultaneously unsettling and liberating. For the next ten years, I participated in nothing religious or spiritual. I needed a rest, a reprieve. I wanted no religious conditions, no ideological constraints, no pretentious facade. I had to heal my guilt, find my true self, and learn to love myself as I was.
I had had a long history and deep underpinning in studies of Jesus and the message of Christianity. I was well grounded in the Bible, Christian doctrine and beliefs. For nearly twenty-five years, I had studied all about Jesus’ life and teachings. I had attended Sunday school and Sunday services nearly every week. I had read several Bibles. I had read hundreds of assigned lessons. And I had memorized numerous Bible verses. While I was in college, I was required to attend chapel services five days a week. I was required to take six semesters of Christian studies including Old Testament, New Testament, Christian Doctrine, Apologetics, and Prophecies. I taught college level Sunday school in a Baptist Church.
But my religious orientation had been based on appeasing a judgmental and wrathful God who condemned all the “unsaved” to eternal damnation. And I grew increasingly disappointed in the lack of integrity of my fellow “believers”. I gradually became gun shy of those people who opportunistically declare “I’m a Christian”, as if differentiated from anyone who might say it or spell it or profess it in any less authentic way. I grew especially suspicious of “Christians” that took a hard line on their ideologies and were convinced that their belief system was the only spiritual path to God. I grew weary of those who profess to have the only true interpretation of the Bible or profess to read it without interpretation. I had serious doubts about the absolutism and literalism in the teachings I had been exposed to. I needed to resolve these feelings in order to find my own spiritual identity and peace.
My Recovery
Around 1990, I began to explore other spiritual paths. I looked in many different directions. Out of curiosity, I attended a Unitarian church, a Unity church, a Lutheran church, an Episcopal Church, and a Catholic church. I studied Native American spiritual concepts. More recently, I studied Buddhism, and other eastern philosophies, including mysticism. I’ve studied numerous “new age” spiritualists and philosophers. Recently, I initiated the creation of a small local men’s spiritual sharing group that includes several different spiritual perspectives with no direct allegiance to any organized religions or formalized ideologies. Our focus is on exploring and finding our own spiritual path.
I have begun to find a deep spiritual peace and resolution through what I believe to be a new emerging spiritual consciousness from within.
Some might dismissingly stereotype this as just another of one of those “new age” religions. No matter what you call it, by its very nature, it is not “religious”. It is too individually mystical to be confined to a set of limiting doctrinal ideologies or organized conventions. It is a new “awareness spiritual”- a new paradigm of our universal connectedness, love, and optimism. It is a restructuring of how we understand our spiritual selves, our relationship to our ego, and our relationship to the Source of everything that exists. Some of the important illuminators of this new spiritual awareness are authors and teachers such as Eckhart Tolle, Wayne Dyer, Michael Bernard Beckwith, Esther and Jerry Hicks, Brian Weiss, and Neale Donald Walsch. I encourage you to read their words to most accurately express this renewal of human spirituality. Tolle’s books, The Power of Now and A New Earth are two of the most important chronicles of spiritual insight into this new awareness.
I continue to find renewed resolution and peace with the doubts, conflicts, and guilt I felt for many years.
I believe that we are all of a one universal Spirit and that Spirit lives in all of us, no matter what we think of or believe about Jesus. Some of us have found more peace in our spirit than others have found. Some are very separated from the Spirit that already dwells within. Some have not yet found their optimal peace. We all have our own journey to the source of the Spirit within us. But I see daily evidence that collectively we are on the cusp of a great awakening.
Our Spirit is eternal. Our physical form and our spiritual growth are continually evolving throughout this life, many lives that preceded, and many yet to come. There is no hell in the afterlife. We make our own hell and our own heaven right here, right now. Our hell is our separation from the source of the Great Universal Spirit (GUS!) that dwells within us.
Many people are looking for a meaningful, lasting, and deep felt spiritual recovery from a traumatic loss or event that challenged their spiritual wellness. Others may be seeking recovery from the damage of a harmful religious past. Some of us are simply awakening to a new spiritual consciousness. Many of the already spiritually enlightened say we are on the wave of a new collective awakening, a shift in universal spiritual consciousness. I have found within the Source of my own healing and my personal path to spiritual recovery.
There are many, many more like me who have shared a similarly unfulfilling, spiritually distressing religious past, who are seeking spiritual awareness, spiritual recovery, spiritual peace. Chances are if you are reading these words, you too are on your own quest for spiritual peace, perhaps for spiritual recovery from a harmful religious past. If so, you have a willing partner in your quest. I offer no spiritual authority. I do not consider myself a spiritual guide. Each day I continue to grow and find greater peace and fulfillment. I offer to share with you my discovery and recovery, and perhaps help you find your own .
Footnote
A wonderful and invaluable friend who generously and patiently noted that in my reference to the “Great Universal Spirit” I may have coined a new acronym for God, “GUS”. I was both amused and intrigued with the apparent coincidence. And so, if you need a more “user friendly” link to your own Spiritual Source, just look within, and enjoy your Tuesdays with “Gus” (or any other day of your choice).
Chuck Jennings
Life Coach Chuck
Spiritual Recovery : Surviving Fundamentalist : Surviving Evangelical Christian : Spiritual Awakening :
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