the Western and Christian contemplative tradition, starting with Thomas
Merton in the 1960s. Now this new epistemology is exploding all over the
world, and in all denominations—helping us to so much better understand our
own metaphysics! What an irony and surprise.
Frankly, a new humility is emerging in Christianity as we begin to recognize
our many major mistakes in the past, especially our tragic treatment of
indigenous people in almost all the nations that Christians colonized, along with
our silence about and full complicity with slavery, destructive consumerism,
apartheid, white privilege, the devastation of the planet, homophobia, classism,
and the Holocaust. Our dualistic logic allowed us to justify almost anything the
corporate ego desired. Now we are a little less arrogant about our ability to
understand—much less to actually live—this “one, true religion” of ours. And
our critics are not about to let us forget our past mistakes. The harsh judgments
of humanity against the actual performance of Christianity are with us for the
rest of history. All people need to do is Google, and they will know what really
seems to have happened.
It is never a black-and-white story, although our dualistic minds (on either
side!) want to make it so. You can, however, know the dark side and history of
Christianity and still happily be a Christian. (I count myself among this group!)
But it takes a contemplative or nondual mind, which does not allow you denial
but teaches you integration, reconciliation, and forgiveness. You must build
your tent somewhere in this world, and there is no pedestal of purity on which
to stand apart and above. “Blood cries out from” every plot of land on this earth
(Genesis 4:10). It is only our egos that want and demand such superiority.
Religion tends to start with “purity codes” of one type or another, but it must
not end there.
Add to this knowledge of history a growing knowledge of human
development, stages of consciousness, unique cultural starting points, different
typologies, like the Myers-Briggs, Spiral Dynamics, and the Enneagram. All of
these are giving us a much more honest and helpful understanding of ourselves
and one another. When we stop our calculating minds long enough to look
critically at how we know, it is like putting a wide-angle, color lens into what
used to be a small, black-and-white camera. We can begin to understand that
the Christ Mystery is not something we need to prove or even can prove, but a
broad field that we can recognize for ourselves when we see in a contemplative
way, which often will seem more symbolic and intuitive than merely rational, a
more non-dual mystery than anything that offers us mere binary choices as a