Today I began reading an article about Pope Francis, and for the first time since I was eleven I considered that I might be able to have some  pride in being a Christian again.  I don’t mean a Christian in the sense that I believe I’ll wake up in a rich man’s garden when I die, or that I am going to believe that there is a personified all powerful puppeteer pulling my strings; that’s not going to happen.  I mean Christian in the sense that I both understand and appreciate the profundity and transformative power of the Christ consciousness as it originally entered and transformed the psyche of early Christians.

I left the church at eleven, the same year my intellect came fully alive.  I was an early reader and had found Homer’s poems in the attic of an apartment we rented in a dusty little Arizona town whose  only industry besides cattle and cotton was prisons.   Some previous tenant had forgotten them in the secret space, covered with undisturbed dust.  They were waiting for me at precisely the right moment, and I couldn’t put them down.  They came alive and spoke of the adventures of Ulysses and Odysseus.   The Bible had a certain gravitas, but for an eleven-year-old boy  it was no match for Homer.  Allowed to choose between the moralistic monotheism of the Jews and the emotionally resonant polytheism of the Greeks, I was by disposition inclined toward the latter.  I told my father I didn’t believe in god and didn’t intend to go to church  anymore.  He said,  “You have to think for yourself.”   

When church loses it’s magical thinking agreement it simultaneously releases its dogmatic hold, and after that,  whether or not you go has more to do with the people you meet there than with the dogma.   Do you want to hang out with them or not?   To hang out with people who have no more or less fascination with Jewish tribal lore than with Egyptian or Norse mythology, you may have to search out Unitarians or Swedenborgians.   If on the other hand you want to hang out with people who will go into a family sweet shop, do a little damage and harass the owner’s daughter to tears because he named the place “The Devil’s Pantry,” you could come to Prescott this weekend for the Christian Music Festival put on by “Extreme Faith Productions.”   It’s your call.  You have to think for yourself.

Which brings me back to the day when I was eleven, and went to church for the last time.

It was on the lawn of a conservative Protestant church, after Sunday school, that I told the man who was teaching it that I didn’t believe in god.   This really pissed him off.  I don’t remember what he said but I remember his twisting my arm behind my back to try and make me submissive.  He probably thought he was making me submit to god but he was the one doing the arm twisting.   Of course I never went back.  I went to  the library, where I could have the experience of exploring life’s mystery without personifying its source and director as a Jewish patriarch.  

I continued to treasure the stories I’d been taught when I was very young, in Baptist Sunday School, as I treasure all stories with an archetypal base.  But as I explored beyond the dogma I began to understand the original Christ energy not as a particular man, but as a spirit which permeated the early Christian groups.  In reading of the shift in consciousness around that time I understood it as evolutionary, and that the Christ imagio was a new archetype, portending the possibility of a new kind of man, one who is kind, forgiving, inclusive ...  somebody like Francis seems to be ...  

I don’t expect that church doctrine will change very much just because the lead singer has a new vibe going.  His backup group as always is “The Doctrinaires.”   I may not go back inside a church except in the same spirit as I go into a museum or an art gallery.   However,  my estimation of the Roman Church is shifting toward more positive territory now that Francis is the face and the voice of Catholicism.   

When he said  “Who am I to judge others,” I thought,  “The Pope is a Christian.  How did that happen?”   And when he said to stop putting dogma before love, I thought, “What a good idea.  Why didn’t somebody think of it before” 

But of course somebody did think of it before.  Nice to see it rise to the top every couple of thousand years.