I've been thinking about how to be a heretic.
The Roman Catholic monk, poet, and spiritual guide, Thomas Merton once wrote:
If the you of five years ago doesn’t consider the you of today a heretic, you are not growing spiritually.
Heretic is commonly used as an accusation against someone who resists conforming to an established set of rules or some well-regulated body of truth. But Merton is suggesting that we must be heretics in order to continue moving further into what it means to live deep and purposeful lives. If I'm stuck where I was five years ago, the person I was then is applauding me for my fidelity and willingness to cling to the familiar, no matter how well-worn it has become. But if I’ve grown at all in these years, the person I was five years ago is wondering what happened to my faithful, compliant self, how I went so wrong.
I locked on to the word heretic, wondering if and how Merton’s strange description might be a mirror to see how I’m living my life. Certainly my past five years have brought change, but nothing like the most dramatic period of transformation, which happened between twenty-two and twenty-eight years old.
In six years, I...
graduated from college (June, 1963)
got married (September, 1963)
finished three years at Princeton Seminary and was ordained a Presbyterian minister (June, 1966)
got my first professional job as a pastor in Lawrenceville, New Jersey (July, 1966)
welcomed our daughter (born September, 1967)
got a second Master’s degree in theology at Princeton (June, 1968)
welcomed our son (born February, 1969), and
moved back home to southern California where I took a new pastoral job in San Marino (July, 1969)
Clearly, the me I was at twenty-two would hardly recognize the twenty-eight-year-old heretic I’d become. In this winded sprint, I left behind the remnants of the fundamentalist faith I grew up with and turned into a theological liberal and leftist social activist. I left behind a faith full of certainties for an ambivalent faith full of questions.
I moved out of my parents’ home and into our very tiny dorm room with Becky and, equally transforming, into a new experience of intimate love and a fresh definition of family. I left behind the privileges and independence that made being a student so carefree into a massive sense of responsibility to care and provide for two children and a wife who, at least in these earliest of our family years, was a full-time mother.
All of that was decades ago and seems, in retrospect, quite typical; we often think of profound change as the province of the young. But that's not what Merton says at all. He says we must continue to be heretical if we’re to live fresh and authentic lives. So what about these past five years, from seventy-six to eighty-one years old? Were they heretical?
Stained glass window depicting a man holding a book entitled “Hereses” under the foot of St Thomas Aquinas, in the Cathedral of Saint Rumbold in Mechelen, Belgium
I’m pretty much past caring what other people think of me, so if I’m a heretic in anyone else's eyes it has no impact on me. I’m happy to be who I am now, living from the inside out, wandering into tomorrow with my intellectual and affectionate eyes wide open. My view of myself is tested less and less by the opinions of others and more and more by whether I’m authentically expressing myself with little or no reservation. There are certainly occasions when I let myself down, but they are fewer and fewer as the years pass, and less serious than the self-betrayals of earlier in my life.
After sixty, I could no longer use any derivative of the word young to define myself but, I convinced myself, I was not yet the O word. Instead, through my seventies I considered myself in late middle age; being "old" was still far out in front of me. But when I turned eighty I gave up the pretense. I acknowledged that eighty is not the new sixty, it’s the new eighty. So now, at eighty-one and counting, I own the obvious: I’m old. I’m helped by my granddaughter’s teasing reminder: You’re old, and you don’t have any hair. Ah, the painful wisdom of children! Like her, in the past five years I accept this formerly heretical truth and am growing more comfortable with it.
I spend as much time as possible with my Beloveds, and I’m better at it than I was five years ago. I've stopped being self-protective in these relationships, a move that the me of five years ago would have found dangerous. As I’ve grown more comfortable with myself I am more candid with my family and friends. We talk and listen well, and none of us needs to impress the other with some b.s. that doesn’t matter but only flatters us, or some slimy gossip that is a waste of time better spent becoming more intimately attached. We’ve stopped trying to prove ourselves to one another and instead enjoy the simple pleasures of eating and drinking, frequent and transparent conversations, arguing on occasion but more often sharing new insights or uncertainties from books we read or films and plays we see, sharing whatever wisdom we uncover as we prod one another to continue leaning forward.
I am certainly a heretic to the spiritual person I was five years ago. At that time, I was curious about the rapid disappearance of God from our national life as the religious pluralism, increasing secular forces, and disgraced church leaders in our culture left a whimpering remnant of a once robust common faith. I'm no longer interested in any transcendent deity or some absolute truth that, as recently as five years ago, I still felt obligated to bow to. I now believe in what is sacred in every person and in the holiness of our efforts to connect to one another.
I am certainly a heretic to the spiritual person I was five years ago. Many of the foundations of the faith I had five years ago, which were diminishing even then, are now gone. I have certainly become a religious heretic to the person I'd always been.
“The Kiss of Judas” from Giotto’s fresco cycle depicting the life of Christ in the Scrovegni Chapel (c. 1305), Padua, Italy
I now define myself spiritually by my devotion to Jesus of Nazareth, the Jewish rabbi whose blazing intellect, compassion, and courage stand before me as models for my own authentic life. I also honor and adopt truths from a variety of other spiritual resources, to none of which I give a nod as the superior or one true faith. I have a longtime friend who is a mystic and a medium, who introduced me to ways of being spiritual I've never known before. I'm close to agnostics and atheists who live full, authentic, moral, and meaningful lives without reference to any form of spirituality. Many of the foundations of the faith I had five years ago, which were diminishing even then, are now gone. I have certainly become a religious heretic to the person I'd always been.
Five years ago, I had a decades long teaching gig at the large church we’ve belonged to for forty years. It ended four years ago. The following year I finished writing the second of the books I’ve published and, mentally and spiritually exhausted, spent a few months letting my brain and imagination cool off. But before long, I realized I missed the refreshment of teaching and writing, of getting up every morning with some new thought to pursue, some half-finished story to complete, all of which required me to stay intellectually and morally curious at the constant risk of seeming foolish.
What came out of these stirrings is this project you’re now part of as a reader. Writing each of these posts lights me up. I plunge in and think and feel and wrestle and allow myself the most unexpected notions, which are new rain on a budding plant. As much as anything else, this project has given me a renewed sense of purpose as I've found myself able to explore and share with you truths about me - like the ones in the previous paragraphs - that I've never been able to admit even to myself. Heretical indeed!
I know my end will come, but it will be the end of what is, even now, an especially full, gratifying, and heretical life. What I see in Merton’s mirror is that fresh ideas, beliefs, and commitments will turn my later years away from what the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas called the dimming of the light toward a continuing illumination of what it means to be me.