Returning from the Desert of Religion to the Heart of Spirit

When institutions gesture toward the heavens yet bind themselves to the world, it is time to heed a different calling

I did not choose mysticism. It chose me.

I did not choose the Christian mystic tradition either. It chose me. I never grew up with either Christianity or mysticism, but it was written into my heart from birth. I have experimented with alternatives from Kabbalah to Kundalini yogic practice to Hermeticism to Mahayana Buddhism, but none of these draw me into direct, exquisite relationship with spirit like this strange tradition called mystic Christianity. Its beckoning voice speaks directly to the reality of my own spiritual existence and its purpose. And I know this decision to follow the mystic spirit is fateful. Saints far loftier and more courageous than I have been martyred by their own churches for doing so. But I can no longer credibly protest. In the end, I cannot deny the Invitation, and I bow to my soul’s calling.

Matthew Fox, who popularized and developed the phrase “original blessing” (vs. “original sin”) to describe the human spiritual enterprise, portrays mysticism, and its contrast with institutional religion, in his book, Christian Mystics: 365 Readings and Meditations:

Change is necessary for our survival, and we often turn to the mystics at critical times like this. Jung said: ‘Only the mystics bring what is creative to religion itself.’ Jesus was a mystic shaking up his religion and the Roman Empire; Buddha was a mystic who shook up the prevailing Hinduism of his day; Gandhi was a mystic shaking up Hinduism and challenging the British Empire; and Martin Luther King Jr. shook up his tradition and America’s segregationist society… Deep down, each of us is a mystic. When we tap into that energy we become alive again and we give birth… Getting in touch with the mystic inside is the beginning of our deep service.

I believe that every one of us senses this mystic calling and knows we cannot avoid it, though we may avert it for a time. If we do somehow manage to deny our spiritual “core,” we are signing up for a life of estrangement. I have learned the hard way that it is far more preferable to experience possible rejection, expulsion, or misunderstanding by fellow human beings, than to deny the inherent calling of my own soul.

As I surrender to my soul, an adventure is emerging. The telltale metaphorical and actual villains, demons, and dragons that surround me are unmasked as broken and scared spirits. Heroes, too, come in strange new forms, taking on the guise of children, whose laughter reminds me powerfully of the humor, effervescence, and liveliness of our contradictory, beautiful world. Spirit and life itself offer all I need. I don’t need to add to them. I simply ask to reverentially and deeply PARTICIPATE and vulnerably offer who I am from my always-loving, always-creative, and never-fully-known essence.

A journey outward

As I have mentioned in earlier essays, I did not grow up Christian, nor mystic in a formal sense, though the latter was written into my life in my long adventures into the backwoods of our 35-acre farm. Exploring the ravines, tadpoles, mushrooms, trees, and shale brought everything alive. I spoke out loud with the spirits of the woods… and they responded and mentored me well. They waited until I had left for college to tell me that they were moving on, their job done. Their wisdom stays with me today in the midst of ambiguities that might psychologically disable a less well-prepared being.

My father, John Yiamouyiannis, was an iconoclastic theist. He believed in God, but his God was of a very peculiar form, partisan to his own emotional needs and wants. My mother, Natalie, was a blessed Mary in the form of a Wisconsin farm girl who met my dad when he was going to the University of Chicago and she was working as a transcriber typing up autopsy reports from the hospital next to the university. They met when her shower leaked into his apartment below hers. In many ways, they could not have been farther apart, he the son of upwardly mobile Greek and German immigrant spouses from the East Coast of the United States, and she the tomboy offspring of a rural Wisconsin teacher and farmer and a country housewife.

These two contrasting sensibilities and histories mixed in me. By her presence, my mother engendered an innocence, wonder, and sensitivity. My father’s example fostered a harder-edged critical-thinking and an ability to challenge establishment norms. Before moving our family out to the organic farm where we grew up, my dad left a corporate job with Chemical Abstracts over ethical contentions in order to start his own consumer health awareness organizations, Safe Water Foundation and National Health Action Committee.

I remember lying down on the ground of our farm, in the cold clear air after feeding the cows and sheep, and asking God how I might encourage such disparate parents to join each other and how I might reconcile their differences within me. How does any of us really know and love one another in a way that honors and does independent justice to the other’s very different sensibilities. The answer came to me in a voice: “They (and You) are never really apart to begin with (so there is no need to reconcile)” This voice was the beginning of my knowledge that each feared difference is, at its root, a gift arising from an eternal, blessed union. If we share and appreciate this essence, we don’t need to have our natures “reconciled,” for our natures come from a single Nature, to whom we all return. We are all inherently part of one spiritual “family” or “beloved community.”

I vividly recall growing up on the farm with an intense sensitivity to life. I would, for instance, release rather than kill a rat who had gotten stuck in the bottom of a barrel. I was particularly close to the deer of the woods. As I reached middle school age these deer were attacked by the same blood-lusting dogs that attacked our sheep. In a metaphor for modern civilization, bored and pent-up dogs from families moving from cities went on pack-driven maiming sprees, tearing apart and leaving animals half-dead but uneaten. I remember helping one particular fawn whose hindquarters were torn beyond repair by these predatory dogs. She lay gasping for breath, nearly drowning at the edge of the river that fronted our property. I lifted her up and out of the water and on to the shore. I stayed with her, soothing her with my touch and voice. I found a universe staring back at me when I gazed into into her innocent-beyond-innocent eyes.

The local sheriff was called to put her out of her misery. Just before he shot the young deer, I said to her, “It’s okay to go. All is well.” She struggled mightily to hold on to life in her last gasps of breath, and she showed a poignant fight for life amid her beauty and innocence. I looked for a place to bury her but found some African-American hunters on the way back and donated her tender body to feed them. Such is Nature and the nature of the universe… life ebbing and flowing, innocent and violent, but beautiful always.

*****

I remember initially being acquainted with Christianity from the Jehovah Witness comic books/pamphlets sprinkled through the laundromat where we washed our clothes. I was fascinated by the portrayals of angels and devils, heaven and the lake of fire called hell. I resonated with the human struggle toward virtue and was intrigued by its many renditions in these and other comic books like Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing (where I learned not only about the human condition, but deep philosophies and a love of language).

Swamp Thing’s character was a brilliant scientist who was “killed” by corporate crooks looking to steal his “bio-restorative formula” only to be resurrected as a plant creature after he fell into a swamp trying to get away. That theme of being virtuous and doing the right thing and being punished for it, and being reborn as something stronger, newer, and stranger, drew me strongly. It is a theme you will see in Jesus’ own death and resurrection, as well as the ancient myths of the Greeks and Egyptians. I have undergone many such spiritual deaths and rebirths in my own life, each leading me to molt and emerge time and time again from the imprisoning skins of my former selves.

One such rebirth occurred when I was invited to a Christian Young Life summer outdoor adventure in high school. On this adventure trip into the wilds near Colorado Springs, I was opened spiritually amid my beloved nature, and high-ropes adventure challenges, hikes, whitewater rafting, and the tragic death of one of our counselors who was snagged underwater on one such adventure. I attended Bible teachings in the evenings, and felt moved to proclaim my embrace of Jesus.

However, even then, in my public testimony and rebirth, I knew mine was a very different kind of Jesus. My Jesus was a not the bland corporate Jesus that takes on your sins and gives you a one-way ticket to heaven, but the mystic, activist, and rebel Jesus who proclaimed “blessed are the peacemakers, “ “love your enemies”, and “Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.”

I have never forgotten these values, advocating for the poor, disadvantaged, and cast-aside, often in a way that is contrary to my Christian colleagues. My advocacy for gay marriage and anti-racism put me at odds with so-called “conservatives”. My advocacy for women athletes against the invasion of “women-identified” men in women’s sports puts me at at odds with so-called “liberals,” as does my insistence on protecting children from medical mutilations designed to “solve” identity dysphoria. Being staunchly and publicly for bodily autonomy (in reproductive choice and against vaccine mandates) has left me stranded from pretty much every siloed identity culture. My promotion of freedom of speech in the face of left-wing cancel-culture and right-wing shutdown of criticism of Israel, has left me with enemies on both sides. But I will not stop speaking out in favor of human freedom, expression, and choice, even if it costs me professional opportunities.

A journey onward

My college years were a right of passage of sorts. I attended The Ohio State University and developed a consuming interest in philosophy, religion, and spirituality. Even as I was getting a B.S. in honors biology, I was far more interested in the ideas and movements of conscience, consciousness, morality, virtue, vice, public policy, and far less interested in atoms, elements, and chemical processes. I took only five hours of credits (out of 45) in my Biology major in my first four years. Instead I was drawn to a class on Existentialism and another entitled, “Conflicts in Judaism and Christianity.” Friedrich Nietzsche became my favorite philosopher. Martin Buber’s “I and Thou” became my favorite text. Its emphasis on the primacy of sacred “Thou” relationships as the basis for meaningful life still stands as a kind of motto for my life.

My ex-spouse found Buber’s I and Thou off-putting, abstract and too intellectual, rather than beautiful and compelling. Ahhh, next time I will listen when people tell me who they are!

I got a day job as a laboratory assistant in a physiological chemistry department at OSU, and I knew I was in the wrong place when the post-doctoral research associate came in all giddy over her gel columns being calibrated just right to allow a clean separation between the brownish xanthine oxidase and the greenish trimethylamine dehydrogenase. I needed to have that passion, and I left soon after to combine my two loves of learning and philosophy to pursue a philosophy of education Ph.D. at Syracuse University. I nurtured a latent love of loves— spirituality— through poetry and prayer and even training for and participating in a Buddhist performance piece called “SS”.

I eventually combined these experiences with my research work in gender studies, relationship, and self-esteem and with my interest in spirituality to publish a book, The Spiritually Confident Man: Pioneering a New Frontier of Co-Creative Masculinity, which sought to create a new man for a new world, It remains ahead of its time of harvest, waiting patiently for the sound and fury of gender wars and #MeToo to mature into constructive dialogue. I am confident that the time will arrive when the possibility of POSITIVE relationships within and between the sexes described in my book will find their desire and place.

Before publishing my book, I had explored (and flamed out of) a formal institutional religious route. For a year and a half, I attended two Central Ohio seminaries studying biblical Greek (which I loved) and survey classes on the running of a church (which I did not love so much). This led me to discover that seminaries have almost no interest in engaging my most dearly-held facets of spirituality: 1) Contemplation, 2) Jesus’s theology and practical moral teaching and examples for life, 3) My relationship with the divine and union with God, and 4) Service to others.

I did, however, love my fellow divinity students and receive great blessings and fellowship from them. Ironically, it was this love that ended up compelling my decision to terminate the formal religious route, and recognize once and for all incongruence between staid, lifeless, and corrupt religious institutionalism and the life of the spirit.

In this fateful chapter, I was trying to help Shaka, an older African-American fellow divinity student, and (to my mind) a real living saint who juggled hosting homeless people in her house along with raising children. She was having trouble with our Christian Ethics teacher, who was downgrading her on her assignments and even implying that Shaka was plagiarizing.

I took it upon myself to mentor Shaka on the annoying pettiness of academia by showing how one could simply type some key phrases into a search engine from the instructor’s self-generated supplementary videos and “spit back” her alleged wisdom with one’s own words. I figured it was a simple matter of teaching Shaka how to rephrase what the teacher wanted to hear and prove it back in her own words. HOWEVER… when I typed phrases from the instructor’s videos into the Google, I turned up a Unitarian website with an online class on Christian Ethics. As I delved deeper, I found that this instructor had outright plagiarized practically the entire class, including discussion questions, materials, checks for understanding, examples, etc. from that website, AND she had falsely (and illegally, in my assessment) copyrighted, dated, and self-name-stamped a whole series of videos she created with her face and voice, while reading nearly word for word WITHOUT attribution from the text of the Unitarian website’s Christian ethics class.

I tried the “restorative justice” route, insisting the instructor admit fault, repent, and change practices, using this breach as a lesson in humility. This was not to be. The entire administration including the academic dean, the president, and the board of directors all covered for her and tried to sweep it under that rug. And this was no typical “old boys club”. The offender and the academic dean were both “progressive” lesbians acting like stereotypical dominant, arrogant men from days gone by. It seems that modern pseudo-progressivism has only liberalized and made more inclusive who can be corrupted by power and be excused from violations of ethics and law. I summarily quit and spent a good part of the next months watching unlimited art movies at Gateway Theater for a 25 dollar per month membership that turned out for more ennobling and educative than a seminary upon which I had spent thousands of dollars.

Still to this day I find that most Christians want to be affirmed in their spiritual immaturity (“I am saved, not matter what I do”) rather than travel the adventurous but very challenging mystic road to spiritual purification, illumination, and union with the divine . The biblical Old Testament (Hebrew Bible) is used by the spiritually immature to assign a “chosen people” status to themselves, allowing one both 1) to be favored by God even amid manifold sins, 2) to adopt a double standard when judging others. The New Testament (Christian Bible) is used to proclaim that one is saved through grace (I agree) in a way that guarantees a first-class accommodation to heaven (I don’t agree). Without true regard to the way one conducts one’s life in alignment with the divine, in kind compassionate treatment of others, one will not be prepared for “heaven.” One will, upon death, I suspect, go through the requisite education in future reincarnated lives and/or in the afterlife to this life to cleanse the soul and open it to perfect love.

Again Matthew Fox from the introduction to Christian Mystics:

In the West the modern age— meaning the sixteenth to mid-twentieth century— was not only ignorant of but actually hostile to mysticism. As Theodore Roszak has put it, ‘The Enlightenment held mysticism up for ridicule as the worst offense against science and reason.’ Still today, both education and religion are often hostile to mysticism. Fundamentalism by definition is anti-mystical or distorts mysticism, and much of liberal theology and religion is so academic and left-brain that it numbs and ignores the right brain, which is our mystical brain. Seminaries teach few practices to access our mysticism. This is why many find religion so boring— it lacks the adventure and inner exploration that our souls yearn for.

A journey inward

“Launch out into the deep.”— St. John of the Cross, Christian mystic.

So now I am launching into the deep. Where will my spirit bring me? Where will it bring you? Certainly it brings me into the intimate surroundings of my spirit and soul. Over the past year and half I have experienced accelerated growth, spiritually, physically, emotionally, and mentally. Divorce has a way of casting all assumptions into productive doubt, and this doubt composts into spiritual soil, from which a flower springs in the greenhouse of the heart. I suspect the time is drawing near when I shall leave the deserts of contemplation and healing, journey again to the forests of spirit, and transplant this precious flower of new life back into the soul-soil of my youth.

Thank you spirits. You have served me well. Now it is time to serve you.

All blessings, Zeus