One of the central goals of my life has been to live the teachings of Jesus. I don’t know where the goal came from, but it has been with me for as long as I can remember.  I wrote my honor’s thesis in college on Paul’s concept of human nature. According to Paul, man the sinner became a new person when God renewed his mind. (Romans 12: 2) I believed then that Paul came to this understanding as a result of his revelatory experience on the Damascus Road.  When approaching the city, he was suddenly encased in light and divine love. (Acts 9: 3-6)

I spent years in pursuit of such a divine encounter mostly through prayer and meditation. I asked God in prayer to renew my mind, to heal my Jungian shadow with divine love so that I could do a better job living the teachings of Jesus. Nothing happened. I also spent hours in meditation with the same goal of the big experience. While meditation for me was a helpful practice for self-therapy, the big experience never came. It was all rather puzzling. I thought God would have had an interest in my living differently.

One of my favorite commentators on religion is Karen Armstrong who had a similar religious journey. (1) She entered a monastery to become a nun with the express purpose of giving her life to God. Her goal in life was to be taken over by the big experience of God’s goodness and love. At the monastery, she devoted her life to meditation and prayer. It didn’t work for her either, and her failure eventually led to despair and her leaving the monastery. As irony would have it, she did have the big experience not long after renouncing her vows as a nun. Her conscious awareness was taken over by a deep experience of love. The problem was that the experience did not come from divine revelation but rather as an epileptic episode.

A similar set of circumstances could explain Paul at Damascus. He may have had an epileptic episode or a near-death experience. Both events fill one with a sense of deep love and can have the effect of changing personality. If God is really all about love, why was Paul treated so differently from most of us? Why was it so easy for him to acquire a renewed mind and, as a result, live the love demanded by Jesus’ teachings? It doesn’t seem fair.

Any God who is somehow behind this magnificent universe could have made it easier. It could have been like it was described in the first Genesis story. (Genesis 1:1 -2:4) Written by an author from the Priestly tradition in ancient Israel, God created the world in seven days. Because God was the creator, everything God created was good, including human beings who were made in the divine image. Unfortunately, scientists tell us that humans emerged through an evolutionary process involving millions of years.  This process has resulted in humans being ruthlessly self-centered. Our brain was given to us by reptiles 500 million years ago, whose primary purpose was survival. Our reptilian ancestors were interested in what neuroscientists label as the four Fs—feeding, fighting, fleeing, and engaging in reproductive behavior. Over many centuries a new section of the brain developed which provided humans with reasoning power which has helped moderate these more primitive instincts. (2) Unfortunately, the four Fs remain a central part of human consciousness which has made living the teachings of Jesus a real challenge.

On this website, you often read criticisms of original sin. This criticism makes good sense when one looks at how the idea is developed biblically. On the other hand, if the root meaning behind the idea is that humans are born with a deeply entrenched self-centered perspective, I plead guilty.

Why did God make it so difficult? There is no answer to this question. In the book of Job, God inflicts pain and suffering but refuses to explain why. God is a profound mystery, transcendent, beyond human comprehension. So what does God give us? Instead of the big experience described by Paul, we get brief glimpses into a reality of goodness and love. We label this reality divine because it is experienced in awe and wonder. We sense in the brief encounter a reality that is so much greater than our self-centered perspective. This happens when an event occurs that fails to trigger the extensive defense mechanisms embedded within human consciousness, thus opening awareness to a new level of consciousness. Deep encounters within the natural world, falling in love, holding a newborn baby, and responding to a person in need with compassion are the kind of events that provide us with glimpses into God’s world.

We need to be careful with these brief glimpses into God’s world, however. They are never pure experiences. They are filtered instead through the minds of limited human beings. The result is that everyone experiences an encounter of divine love differently. There is no such thing as universal religious Truth with a capital T. God remains an unsolvable mystery.

A good way to test these ideas on the divine/human relationship is to ask ourselves if Christianity is having a positive impact on life in contemporary America. Are people becoming more caring and forgiving? Is society becoming more inclusive, more just economically, more open to seeing immigrants as neighbors and not as a threat to a white majority in America. As Jesus was fond of telling his followers, “You will know them by their fruits.” (Matthew 7: 20)

Sadly, I don’t see much evidence of a positive impact of the Christian religion on American life. Let’s assume the country is made up of fifty percent of believing Christians. Most of these Christians identify with the Republican party. The person leading this party is a convicted felon, a convicted rapist, a person who built his company by defrauding banks, a serial liar, a person who lashes out at immigrants and members of the LGBTQ community, a man who threatens to wage war against his political opponents. Supporting Trump means paying little or no attention to the teachings of Jesus. “You will know them by their fruits.”

Looking at society at large, a significant percentage of Americans have now come to believe in the science of climate change, but few seem willing to change their lives in a way to make a more sustainable future possible. Polls indicate that Americans are consumed by the threat inflation poses on their living standards, but few have an interest in the achievement of economic justice. I don’t hear of many Christians who are concerned about a national security strategy that relies on nuclear weapons which if deployed would cause irrevocable damage to the majesty of God’s world.

I could go on, but I think the point has been made. The question now becomes why. For me, the answer goes back 1900 years when the first century church hijacked the message of Jesus. The historical Jesus preached a message of the coming of God’s kingdom to the land of Israel. This would happen when Jews loved their neighbor, reconciled with their enemies, shared wealth, and created an inclusive society.

The first century church proclaimed a Jesus who promised salvation in heaven for those who believed in him. The teacher of love and forgiveness became the preexistent God of the second arm of the Trinity. The purpose of this new religion was eternal life in heaven not the creation of a new society centered around God’s love. Salvation in heaven was a free trip. All that was required was correct belief.

The free trip to heaven is religion made easy, and its promise is very appealing. The problem is that is not how the divine/human relationship works, at least as I understand it. We don’t come to know God by believing his son died for our sins so that we might be saved in heaven, but rather by acting in ways that help us transcend ego, by acting in ways that calm our defense mechanisms so that awareness is expanded. You find God in your life by how you live. You make yourself into a new person by the hard, disciplined work of performing acts of kindness. True religion is in essence a way of life. There are no shortcuts like the big experience or the free trip to heaven.

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Dr. Rick Herrick (Ph.D., Tulane University), a former tenured university professor and magazine editor, is the author of six published novels and two works of nonfiction. His latest books are A Christian Foreign Policy, A Man Called Jesus, Jeff’s Journey, A Second Chance. and Moving Beyond Belief.  His musical play, Lighthouse Point, was performed as a fundraiser for the Martha’s Vineyard Museum. Herrick is currently retired, living in Bluffton, SC. He is married with three children and seven grandchildren. You can find him at https://rickherrickauthor.com.

1. See the wonderful account of her spiritual journey in The Spiral Staircase (New York: Anchor Books, 2004).
2. Karen Armstrong, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (New York: Anchor Books,2010), pp.13-14.