A Spiritual Autobiography

TL/DR: I arose with a Biblical bug up my butt. It’s a biographical thing. I blame…my college professors, Ugaritic love poetry…and some other people, places, and things.

A long time ago, before the Emergent Church, even before Grunge, I attended college in Richmond, VA. It was an historically Baptist institution. I went there mostly because my family had been going there for generations. The Baptist part was not a factor for me, though it would later be influential.

As I have shared before, I did not grow up in the church. I was baptized as an infant at St. James the Less, Ashland Va and we attended other parishes in the Richmond area when I was very small, but due to a variety of understandable reasons, we did not attend beyond the mid 1970s. So, I was not traumatized by youth group, lock-ins, or church camp. I never got into CCM. I was not given any particularly conservative or fundamentalist interpretation of the Bible. One could say I was raised to be a humanist. Religion was foreign to me in many ways.

During my childhood, however, the Religious Right was on the political rise. My father worked for the teachers’ union and was quite political. My maternal grandfather was as well. So, Jerry Falwell and his ilk was a constant and untrustworthy political adversary. His brand of Christianity was deemed to be a con, a money laundering industry at best. This was also during the time of the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention. My step-mother’s father, a Southern Baptist minister, had horror stories to tell about that. So, fundamentalism and evangelicalism: bad. Christianity: problematic at best. Religion: still foreign.

But, for me, God was real. Spirituality was essential. I and my friends even used the term “spiritual but not religious.” So, what’s a boy in the 1980’s to do? Read Bullfinch! Frazer! Play DnD. Learn about European mythologies. Read Matthew Fox and a lot of Joseph Campbell. I wore crystals for a time, but that didn’t suit me. Oh, and Richard Bach books were present, too. Not all of what I encountered served me. Some was shallow and disappointing. But I was free to explore and make up my own mind about spiritual matters. That saved me.

So, by the time I was in college, the pump was primed for my encounter with religious studies, music and music history, anthropology, and *gasp* a female Baptist minister who led the Baptist student union. Again, as someone who was not churchy, I didn’t get how big a deal this was in 1988.

(Also, the girls in the BSU were very cute. I should be honest about that.)

I spent most of my time with the BSU during freshman and senior years. The intervening years involved me failing a bunch of classes, spending inordinate time in the choir room, theater, the student radio station, and generally making a nuisance of myself. The only classes I did well in where my religious studies classes, vocal performance, and anthropology. I did take ancient Greek. That was a lot of fun. I didn’t suck there either. But, if memory serves, I failed five classes in college, and spent every summer making up for that by taking other classes to fulfill the requirements of an undergraduate humanities degree.

Back to the Bible.

When I first started taking my religion classes, there were a mix of us in the rooms. Some of us had been brought up in church. Some of us had not. Some of us had been brought up in very conservative churches. Some of us had not. Frank Eakin, the old testament scholar was brilliant. He would later become my academic advisor, and a mentor of sorts. He taught me literary and historical critical methods for reading the scriptures. He taught me to look for the people within and behind the narratives.

That’s where I started my study of the scripture. That’s where I started my devotional reading of the Bible.

I remember the first time I encountered the Gilgamesh Epic and Utnapishtim. It was so liberating. No longer did I have to ask if the Bible were factually true. We were discussing the flood narratives that exist all over the world. Historically speaking, peoples have made much theological and spiritual hay of natural disasters. Yet, the question can’t be, “was Noah real?“ That ends up being a silly question. It asks us to believe the impossible. Instead, we are invited to ask a question more like, “why would someone invent a story like this?“

Something happened. Something had to happen. Maybe it was a flood. Maybe it was just societal collapse. There are turtles all the way down, as the saying goes. Maybe the Earth is built on the back of a giant tortoise. Maybe the stars are the scattered remains of Tiamat. It doesn’t really matter so much that the story be historically accurate. Again, what matters is that we are being invited into a way of understanding humanity’s place in the cosmos. We are being invited into a people’s vision of what it means to be alive.

I was being invited to read the Bible in a way that made sense to me. “Believe or burn!” never worked for me. Being handed Chick tracts never worked for me. Being told to read the Bible as a science text never worked for me.

The year was 1989. My professors were not young evangelical Turks. They were middle-aged white men. Some of them had been raised in a conservative brand of Christianity. But not all of them. Not all of them were rebelling against the Southern Baptist Church. That was not part of the narrative.

The more I read the Bible this way, the more my faith grew. The more I was invited to look at the historical lineage of biblical interpretation as culturally situated, historically located, and as an expression of power more often than it was an expression of the common person’s engagement with the divine, the more my belief in Jesus the Christ grew. The more I read the Bible and encountered Christ the more I came to understand that the biblical witness is a radical social witness about the essential worth of humanity and all creation.

Maybe that’s counterintuitive. So, to the choir loft!

If my Bible Study was in the classroom then my devotional life was in the choir loft. I was in a traditional University Choir and the Schola Cantorum, a smaller ensemble. I sang with the BSU group as well as the University chapel choir. There was also this whole other thing with the men’s a cappella group. I was singing a lot.

But what that did for my faith is what I’m struggling to relate here. I have said in the past that I was evangelized by Thomas Tallis and William Byrd (All thanks to James Erb.). I cannot overstate their influence on my faith. Singing the theology and scripture of the church in polyphony absolutely opened me to their spiritual reality. Some of you may know Phyllis Tickle’s story about the Virgin Birth where the young person says, “It’s so beautiful, it has to be true.” This is not far from what I experienced.

The beautiful, good, and true…that’s what moved me from agnosticism to belief. I could wrestle with the more scandalous aspects of the Gospels through music. The, forgive me, sonic theology of the church transformed my thinking. For example, Byrd’s Ave Verum Corpus helped me see that Christ is present in the Eucharist. Sung in Latin, the music cascades around the space. Harmonies overlap, expanding and resolving with each faith claim. The music is so beautiful, that I believed what Byrd was offering. Every time I hit a conceptual road block (Resurrection, the virginity of Mary, the veracity of miracles, etc.), I found something beautiful, a musical container to put these claims in. That saw me through where my intellect often failed me.

Polyphony was a gateway into Gregorian chant. That tradition of singing the scriptures (especially the Psalms) and the language of the liturgy also served in the same fashion as polyphony. The physical act of singing would get me out of my head and into my body. The sound of “resonant truth” (Begbie wasn’t wrong there.) sustained me where my intellect often failed. It kept me free from twentieth century fundamentalism while offering a faith claim at the same time.

Music taught me, “Don’t follow the Bible. Follow the God the Bible points to.” Sing the faith. It is meant to be sung. Music is not some incidental soundcraft that is added to the faith claims of the tradition. It is not a laminate. It is, rather, an essential expression of the tradition itself. Sounds carry meaning in ways that words cannot. Music points at the truth differently. It caries the truth about God’s unending love for all creation in ways that our spoken or written theologies cannot.

Byrd and Tallis were just the beginning. The Gregorian was just the beginning. Rachmaninoff, Mozart, and even Bach have their place. Bluegrass, Old Time, Southern Gospel, jazz, and the spirituals all have their place in the theological soundscapes of my faith.

One last story…

I was 24? Maybe 26. I was living at Richmond Hill, the ecumenical residential community and retreat center in the Church Hill neighborhood of Richmond. We prayed the Daily Office…three times a day. I was awash in the Bible. I was awash in ritualized prayer. I was awash in intentional community. There was so much going on.

I was also singing with the choir of a local Richmond Episcopal parish, Church of the Holy Comforter. It was the Great Vigil of Easter, I believe. We had lit the fire, processed around the church, and the choir had moved up to the balcony. I was experiencing great doubt and frustration with my faith at the time. God and I were wrestling. But then we sang…”Bright morning stars are rising. Bright morning stars are rising. Bright morning stars are rising. Day is breaking in my soul.” Emmylou Harris, y’all. The light dawned and I found myself in the midst of sacred liturgy believing again. I wept. “Well, shit. Now I just gotta believe.”

One cannot, or at least should not, discount the power of the Liturgy to convert and sustain the faithful. Again, like music, rite and ritual are not a spiritual laminate. They are essential to how we come to understand the faith. They are essential in how we come to know God. Our faith is embodied when we gather in rite and ritual.

Being faithful or coming to believe is not only an intellectual endeavor for me. I have spent more time waiting for my intellect to catch up to my heart and soul than the other way around.

What, if anything, does this have to do with the Bible?

I cannot read the Bible in a vacuum. I rarely just sit down with a translation and pray with it. Maybe that is a failing on my part. But I need the rituals. I need the music. I need that sacred scaffolding to make sense of the text. I’m a man of my times. I was born in 1970. I am a white cis male American with a perspective that is far too narrow (as is anyone’s) to trust with the scriptures by themselves. I need other people. I need the liturgies. I need the music. I need intentional faithful community to help me come to understand the Bible.

What I have come to understand thus far is that the Bible is not a rule book. It is (cautiously) a spiritual guide. Maybe it is, at times, a moral text. It is certainly about spirituality, morality, economics, ethics, and cosmology. No question. But it is not a blueprint for those things. It is a conversation by various peoples maintained over millennia. It is inspired, but not by virtue of its authorship, rather by virtue of the relationships it catalogues. God is found in the relationships that the text remembers for us, not in the text itself.

Many are just discovering the radical nature of Christianity. It happens every generation.

The Hebrew people were not and are not proto-Christians. Women are essential witnesses to the faith. All people, gay, straight, or otherwise, are essential to the Biblical witness. The Community of God is larger than we ever imagined. And, finally, but certainly not a footnote, our spiritual ancestors and many of our contemporaries really fucked up by believing that race is intertwined with Church and God’s salvation. There is a reckoning there.

Many American Christians were raised in traditions that insist that the solitary reading of scripture as the inspired Word of God is the highest spiritual act one can engage. But many have also discovered that just isn’t so. Instead, they have discovered a larger Church reading with them. Many have discovered Paul’s “great cloud of witnesses” present in the text and in the community that calls itself faithful and that lived faith is a radical call to justice and love. They have discovered rite and ritual. They have discovered musics beyond the popular modes of the day and that the music itself matters.

These discoveries are often no more than an unearthing of what was already present, of what is already true. To say that these are new understandings is to misunderstand the history of the biblical witness.