My Faith Journey

I am hoping that by this time next month I will have more time to devote to this site. My readership, such as it is, has been silent and so I’m beginning to wonder if I’m beating a dead horse with my recent sociolinguistic posts. I’ll shake things up a bit today and write a post from the personal, rather than the abstract.

I’ve noticed on Bweinh, the Protestant site which consumes much more of my time than does my own site, that the Bweinhtributors have been posting about their faith journeys. As I’ve been thinking about my own faith recently, I’ll take a page from their book and share my journey.

Just over a quarter century ago, I was born to hard-working Protestant family in upstate NY. I came of age in the shadow of the variegated maples of the Adirondacks and the Vermont foothills. My infant dedication was held in the somewhat anti-intellectual branch of the Charismatic church to which my parents still belong. Born, so they claim, under a prophecy, I lived my life expecting great things from the Lord and I took the existence of God, redemptive history, and the bible as rock-solid ontological fact. I will say this for my upbringing—while it may have shied away from the codification of doctrine or the intellectualizing of the faith, it did instill in me the childlike simplicity touted by the gospels and recommended by the saints.

My father claims that he’d been fervently praying that he’d receive a second daughter and, so the story goes, was chided by the Holy Spirit. He was informed him in no uncertain terms that I’d be born a male and that the Lord had work set aside for me. I think I was perhaps six or seven when I was told of this and, as you can imagine, it stuck with me. Even during my youthful rebellions, I always had these words on the back-burner… wondering if they were true and what they might mean if they were.

I became increasingly involved in the life of the church. At age six I began attending their version of boy scouts (in which I continued until high school when it was disbanded). In middle school I was made an assistant Sunday School teacher. A few years after that I was made a full Sunday School teacher. Active in VBS and other volunteer programs, I spent a good many hours in that dusty old church. I will not say I was pious, exactly, but that I would go through the typical teen cycle of penitence and revolt—being reborn in frequent rededications like the phoenix of legend.

When I went to college—a Protestant college that was, despite strong liberal undercurrents, more than nominally Christian—I became involved with religious life on campus. My faith began to stumble under my new-found feminist extremism and my so-called enlightened notions. Thankfully during this time a much beloved mentor stepped up and concentrated his efforts on my proper education. In time I jettisoned my militant sexual politics and began to value tradition and formalized doctrine.

I started attending a Reformed Baptist church and delighted in its love of serving the Lord with intellect as well as emotion. In this time I also began developing a love for tradition and the ancient fathers. I felt that the Reformed church best embodied the holistic faith of the earliest Christians. I wanted my life, my morals, and my intellect to conform to the beliefs and values of those fathers who lived in the shadow of the Apostles. I wanted, in short, an historic faith… rather than an innovation whose birth could be traced to Azusa Street, circa 1906.

After graduation, I went on to graduate school and, through the fathers, began to see that the Reformed church was not where I needed to be. I began developing old-school values that did not fit with the mainstream of my church. I became too reliant on tradition for their liking, I became suspicious and then antagonistic toward birth control, I grew increasingly fond of the social and spiritual merits of more high church liturgical practices, I became increasingly sacramental and mystical in my understanding of the material world and its relationship to divine grace. Though I did not know it, I was becoming increasingly Catholic.

Around this time I became convinced of the importance of Apostolic Succession and the need for the true church to have an inarguable historic root to the Apostles (as understood in traditional terms and not in the mystery-laden spiritual root that my mom’s church claimed). This newfound belief, of course, ruled out all the Protestant branches save the Episcopal and so I began attending a church in the very traditional, very high church Continuing Anglican branch of the Episcopal community. From here I flirted with esoteric communities that claimed historic lineage to the Apostles such as the Assyrians, the non-Catholic Coptics, and even the Orthodox Church.

It was, I feel, the direct intercession of Mary that led me to Rome. In my journey my last obstacles were the cult of saints, the role of Mary, and icons. I had been, since my undergrad days, a staunch iconoclast—viewing them as a violation of the commandment against graven images. Within the span of two weeks, however, I learned that my entire opposition was based on a faulty understanding of the Catholic view of all three of these items.

The saints, I learned, are not prayed to in the same way as we pray to God. We do not worship saints. Instead, these venerable men and women are asked to pray on our behalf in much the same way that I might ask my pious living friends to pray for me. In fact, all who die in a state of grace become saints over time and so this was not an exclusive cast of characters. I, too, could be a saint… and was indeed called to live my life in such a way as to become one.

As to icons, I learned that these function in the same way as a cross—we use them as instruments to help channel our devotion and focus our prayer life. They are not graven images because we do not worship them… they serve us, not we them. There is no violation of the commandment at all because we do not put them above God. Just as the (for lack of a better term) Dionysian elements of the contemporary worship service soften our hearts into receptivity (see my earlier post), icons focus our intellect on the contemplation of holy things and holy men and women who we’d do well to emulate.

Mary, I admit, is a bit tricky to understand outside of Catholic epistemology. My reconciling of her as immaculate and Queen of Heaven comes exclusively from my bowing to the authority of the Church. This is, to be sure, a big obstacle for the Protestant and I fear I cannot do its defense proper justice. In many ways I took a unique entrance into Roman Catholicism—I was convinced that it possessed both the deposit of faith and the direction of the Holy Spirit to keep its dogmas free from error. Thus I conformed my beliefs to the Church’s teachings through the childlike faith of my youth—something which is entirely untenable to the individualistic nature of modern day Protestantism. While the teachings regarding Mary are not explicit in Scripture, I had long cultivated a deep respect for tradition—the same tradition that later spoke of Mary so glowingly. Like the Trinity, I took the implicit (or at least not contrary) teachings of Mary as the Spirit-led unfolding of true belief.

Moreover, when I was most anti-Mary, I learned that a Catholic peer felt that Mary herself was ardently interceding for me and mine. Even though I highly venerate Mary and feel a particular devotion to her (perhaps beyond the average Catholic’s), I know no one who gives her the worship due to God alone. She is so highly respected precisely because she so humbly submits to the will and service of her son. I see her as chief among the saints because she so unceasingly prays for us. She is the ultimate symbol of human obedience to God’s Messiah. I gladly and joyfully call her “Our Lady” for just as Spirit-filled Elizabeth informed her she is indeed blessed above all women (Lk 1:42).

And that, in a truncated form, is my journey. It was a linear path, I feel, from the emotions-laden soil of my youth to the increasingly intellectual and historic churches of the Reformed, Anglican, and finally Catholic Church. I have retained my conviction that the Charismata is alive and valid (both within the Charismatic branches of the Catholic Church and, as Vatican 2 affirms, within the Protestant churches of my youth). I recall my parents often saying (and indeed they say it still) that though they are for the most part anti-Catholic, the Charismatic Catholics they’ve met undoubtedly have the Spirit within them. I wonder what they will say when I confess that I have left the Protestant fold and have strived to become exactly that type of Catholic. I also wonder what they will say when I tell them that I am seriously inclined to view my dad’s prophecy and my recent spiritual growth as a call to a consecrated life—whether in a traditional priestly or monastic sense or in some lay capacity such as Opus Dei.

Identity Formation

I suppose I need to qualify my previous post. I do not wish to imply that I think identity is entirely the product of environment, without the body factoring in at all. I do think that society plays a very strong role in identity formation but I don't wish to come across as a Relativist. The best way to explain my perspective is that I see a certain level of cultural relativism at work across societies but I still maintain a belief in absolutes.

On the one hand you have to admit that social expectations are entirely arbitrary and that customs and taboos are not universal. On the other hand, you can establish universal standards for all cultures. If our standards' origins come from within the culture, we build our house on sinking sand. There's a bit of Heisenberg's Uncertainty when it comes to these things and we, as humans, cannot gain the cognitive distance required to set up universal law. But here is where my sociology ends and my theism takes over. It is exactly our recourse to an external arbiter--divine and natural law--that keeps the social scientific Christian free from true relativism.

Our identities may be the product of social forces acting on biological predilections, but all this means is that it's OUR responsibility to ensure that our society instills virtue rather than vice. If our society is corrupted, we are morally obligated to live counter-culturally and to resist. One of the ways we sin by omission is when we actively or passively participate in cultural elements that we know to be damaging. Thus we can't support abortion, an attack on the institution of marriage, etc. even indirectly. We are not afforded the luxury of saying that "we're gonna sit this one out." If we are not actively opposed to cultural sins (like the promotion of homosexuality or contraception) then we are collaborating. There is no such thing as apathy here--refusal to resist is active cooperation. it is one thing to love homosexuals and quite another to translate that love into burying our convictions for the sake of cultural peace.


To return to the question of gender, I stand by what I said: gender, as a sociological phenomenon, is arbitrarily defined by culture. It is, in this way, relative. But gender, in my mind, is not sexuality or sexual identity, per se. The difference between gender and sex is like the difference between meaning and truth. Meaning, as product of language and culture, can be a bit slippery and it defies the absolute. Truth, however, can be objectively defined. And just as meaning is a slippery, linguistic approximation of Truth, "gender" is a problematized representation of sex. There are two sexes but there are multiple genders. To bring semiotics into the mix, I believe in transcendental signifieds but acknowledge the limitations of signs. no matter how many words we invent to describe the gender alignments of our culture, there will only ever be two sexes.


As I say, we have many "genders" in our culture. This is because we are pulling away from the implications of a strictly male-female binary. We want other options. We want possibility. We swallow pluralism hand-over-fist until we vomit up new categories that are so far removed from the natural order that it's no wonder the ludic postmodernists have no recourse but insane laughter. The truth of the matter is that we are male and female--two complementary sexes. We cannot dismiss the biological truth of the matter--barring genetic aberration, we are either XX or XY. The laws of nature defy any other description.

In sum, I am descriptive when it comes to cultures and social networks. I am prescriptive when it comes to applying absolute standards. This is because these standards are rooted in a God who is untouched by culture (being, as He is, transcendent). I believe God made us communal by nature and I believe that one aspect of the Fall was that the social self became corrupted. We sin on both levels--the individual and the social--and thus we need to carefully monitor what we actively and passively support in our culture... whether that be in what we say, how we vote, what we wear, etc.

Pomo Sociology and Christian Interaction

While reading, of all people, Foucault and Judith Butler, I recently came to some interesting conclusions about the social aspect of Christian living. The books I was reading, oddly enough, were Foucault's "History of Sexuality, Vol 1" and Butler's "Gender Trouble." I am by no means a fan of either author (and I agree, for the most part, with one professor's labeling of Foucault as one of the "Four Frenchmen of the Apocalypse"). I must admit, however, that their arguments about social formation and personal identity seem to be, from a sociological, psychological, and sociolinguistic vantage point, fairly "spot on."

The argument, essentially, runs thus: humans have no discernible identity without the larger social environment. As infants we are born into the family unit which is, of course, saturated with expectations, social mores, language, and values that reflect (to varying degrees) the ideology/ies of our society.

This fits with the theories of others--sociologists like Erving Goffman, sociolinguists like Sapir & Whorf, psychologists like Skinner, culture theorists like Althusser, Gramsci, etc. We cannot conceive of a prelinguistic state that is anything other than alien. Language not only gives us the means to relate to others, it becomes so fully integrated that we cannot think (or imagine thinking) as preverbal entities. The human experience, as we conceive it, is NECESSARILY verbal. We may say, thence, that we are social beings at the most internal, fundamental level. This is, of course, basic sociolinguistics.

"Identity" is the mediating of social networks. The individual, as such, does not (appreciably) exist apart from society in anything other than the abstract. There is, I think, an ultimate discrete "self," but it is an essence that can only be understood in its relation to the outer world. This self (or "soul," if you like) is indivisible from the articulations of the neuro-chemical state. Indeed, our relation to it is as difficult to trace as is the connection between the brain and the mind.

Our knowledge of neurology being what it is, we can no longer say that there is a hard-and-fast dualistic split between body and soul. That being said, I do not think a Christian can be a strict materialist (for what would become of the individual in this system without the brain-state to define it?). Materialism requires a strict corporeality and the notion of a continued existence after death requires a spiritual essence apart from the body. So where is all of this leading?

We are composite selves--layered social beings, articulating ourselves in our myriad networks. The types of social environments we choose to occupy, therefore, become increasingly important. No one, to my knowledge, would claim that all networks affect us equally--but the ones with the most impact will be those which we feel strongly tied to. In other words, our sense of "primary identity" is going to be reflected in our core groups. Put yet another way, "bad company corrupts good morals."

We cannot claim that our social networks have no effect. We cannot be Christians if none of our friends are Christians. We cannot be men and women of faith if we forsake the fellowship of believers. We may eat with sinners and "tax collectors," but only if our primary identity is tied to a viable social core of like-minded theists. The Christian walk cannot be an isolated one. For this reason, the Church has always made the weekly gathering essential--to the point that Rome made Sunday mass obligatory and the forsaking of it a mortal sin.

Moreover, as neurology tells us, our memories and moods and most other aspects of our personality are influenced by (if not composed entirely of) the electro-chemical stimuli of the brain-state. The stray aneurysm or head trauma can radically shift our personalities. There are documented cases of people being entirely different after such incidents. Consider the Alzheimer patient. Consider the victim of stroke. The body changes the personality and this is not isolated to these extreme cases.

On a daily basis, our lifestyle shapes our character ON THE CELLULAR LEVEL. We condition our brains in the chemicals we ingest (e.g. omega fats being "brain food," etc.) but also in the habituation of social responses. We are what we eat, then, in the literal and the figurative. They types of social environments we choose to participate in and identify with will nurture certain mindsets which will be reflected in the neural mapping of dendrite and synapse.

I firmly believe that no human is a tabula rasa. We inherit certain biological predispositions and we are each of us born to certain familial expressions ideology/ies. But while our chemical make-up may predispose us to alcoholism or homosexuality or whatever other hot-topic socio-genetic buzz word, each of these predilections is either promoted or repressed by the social environs. It is not nature OR nurture because human nature, as discussed above, does not appreciably exist in a prelinguistic (i.e., non-nurtured way) and nurture (i.e., socialization) is invested on the neurological level.

What this means, at the end of the day, is that nearly every individual eventually reaches an age of personal "social accountability." We are born with certain genetic traits and we are born into ideologized settings. We cannot, however, become fatalistic about it. We become mature enough
to choose the soil in which we'll plant ourselves. It is our duty to surround ourselves with those positive influences which will promote virtue and curtail vice (particularly those toward which we are genetically inclined).

It is a moral imperative to condition the body into an optimal neurological state (as in St. Paul's beating his body into submission) and to also condition our social selves into an optimal state. Both the physical and the social influence the psyche and in so doing condition the soul. Habits are habits regardless of whether they are social, physical, or spiritual.

Social Formation of Nascent Belief

The Postmodern notion of identity formation—that we are constantly shifting identity layers and not cleanly defined subjects—has been simmering in my brain for a while. Lately I’ve been trying on the shoes of Postmodernity, seeing if they are really too small for me. For a long time I’d thought that absolute relativity was a necessary component of Postmodernism but now I am wondering if we can have Postmodernity (or something very much like it) while maintaining a dogmatic allegiance to absolute truth. Can we concede that “meaning” is a social construct and cling to absolute truth without speaking from both sides of our mouths?

I sincerely hope so. Linguistic relativity is a given. Cultural relativity is nearly a given. I think a group can perform actions which are objectively evil despite said act’s location within a culturally subjective milieu. Put another way, my culture can tell me that something is perfectly acceptable and I can never challenge that assumption… but it can STILL be considered wrong objectively. The ultimate standard of morality is the perfect morality within God Himself and it is His decision whether or not to judge us by that morality. The fact of the matter is, however, that the absolute standard exists. I cannot get around it (nor do I wish to).

Does this exclude me from Postmodernity? I agree wholeheartedly with the picture of subject formation described above. I agree that holism is preferable to restrictive categories. I posit connectivity. I feel a kinship with Postmodern social theorists.

We are constantly changing and have multiple layers. We use code-switching and role play all the time. Our adaptability is a result of our protean identity. A static notion of self does not fit neuroscience, sociology, or neuropsychology.

I’d like to think that a similar operation is present within the Roman Catholic Church. The analogy—and remember that analogies always break down under increasingly magnified scrutiny—of the Church as a body might allow for some interesting applications of subject formation theory.

One of the biggest Protestant complaints about the RC Church is that we have “added on” trivial and encumbering (and some would add “heretical”) baggage to the core of Christian belief. I have been told (and so I believe) that the Catholic Church doesn’t believe that revelation is ongoing. New teaching, rather, arises from the deposit of faith (i.e., Scripture and Apostolic Teaching/Tradition). Thus no teaching of the church—at least no dogmatic assertions from the Magisterium at the Councils—ever violates the Catholic understanding of Scripture and Tradition. And here there is a disconnect between the Catholic and his Protestant cousin. For the Catholic, the reading of Scripture is informed by Tradition… a Tradition which has the same source as the bible—namely the expression of God’s commands through his Apostles.

The Protestant understanding of Scripture relies on the individual as the primary arbiter of meaning. A conscientious Protestant will, of course, become learned in the history and (if he has time and desire) the biblical languages themselves. He will seek to become an “informed” reader. The Catholic, on the other hand, feels that he has an entire library of informed readers to compare notes with (in the rare event that he bothers himself with such a comparison). His trust in the Church Fathers is of a different order than the (average) Protestant. Those children of Luther who begin to put more and more faith in Reception Theory (and thus turn to the ancient understanding of the gospel) often find themselves convinced of Apostolic Succession and, as a result, join one of the so-called Apostolic churches—the Catholic, the Orthodox, the Anglican, or one of the many splinter groups (Coptics, Chaldeans, etc.).

I think that the notion of the Roman Catholic Church as a layered identity might be a helpful model. We Catholics do not believe that we’ve changed the core identity of the Body of Christ. We believe that the particulars of our faith were explicit or implicit within the original teaching of the disciples and are either derived from or (at the very least) are not in opposition to the Holy Scriptures. We are not inventing new revelations, we are developing nascent aspects of our identity that had always been there but are now articulated because of the surrounding culture. The Natural Law ethic, for instance, is not explicitly in the bible (or at least not all aspects of it are explicit) but it eventually found expression because of the historic moment. Also, Humanae Vitae was not a revelation from God but was, rather, the layer which surfaced during the sexually licentious cultural politics of our recent past.

I am sure that this model breaks down at places and that many Catholics would not favor it, but it at least (hopefully) illuminates our perception that Catholicism has not become “bloated” over time but has, rather, born the fruit of the seeds that Christ and the Apostles planted. I had planned on writing about why I became Catholic, but have decided to leave that to better minds. My case is similar to that of Cardinal Newman or to that of any number of the Huguenots that St. Francis de Sales converted near Geneva (or, even, to many intellectual converts today). The historic weight of the Apostolic Succession argument was not one that I could, in good conscience, ignore and (despite my attempts) refute. I will say that I explored many Apostolic churches before choosing Rome but it does not matter, ultimately, why I personally chose Rome. What is more important to me is that the misconceptions about Catholic identity be put to bed. We may have some new buds, but we are the same vine.

Post Script: Apostolic Succession implies that there can be no other church than the ONE church and this has kept the spirit of schism out (at least compared to the constant fracturing within the Protestant household). More than just the fear of losing connection to that Apostolic lifeline, however, is the cultural force of our so-called extraneous traditions. One reason we've remained relatively impervious to cultural change (the strict line we draw on contraception as a prime example, here) is precisely because our social markers (e.g., rituals) have given us our own culture. Protestants have a culture as well, but they seem less obstinate when it comes to "getting with the times" (e.g., the lack of significant outcry over Open Theism or this Emergent Church nonsense). One secondary (but nonetheless compelling) reason for my conversion was my approval of the Catholic Church's insistence on an Apostolic culture rather than a "relevant" one.

The Mind, The Body, The Faith

I lack authority (or desire) to speak for all Catholics and, like many of my Protestant friends, the intense piety-driven Catholic is much more the exception than the rule. Why is this? The answer, I think, is related to the questions provided in my last installment’s commentary. What does an informed holism mean for material devotion? Or, as Steve puts it, what does

“a faith that exists outside the ‘heart and mind of the subjective self’ look like REALLY, because […] we [might not be] capable of achieving a faith of the body that doesn't originate in the mind [?]” Can we make “a distinction between parts of our consciousness that are almost inherently unquantifiable [?]”

Material devotion, as I see it, encompasses both body and mind. Here we should pause and recognize that “the brain” is not entirely synonymous with “the mind.” As has recently been pointed out to me, there is an infinite ontological gap between a thought and the electro-chemical brain state. While this is fodder for more classically-trained philosophers, suffice it to say that even the most secular beard-stroker acknowledges the “problem of the mind.” But while the two are separate beasts, no one denies that the brain and the mind are intricately bound. In fact, the brain state is seen as a direct mapping of the thought in a point-to-point correspondence.

Thus the brain, as bundle of neurons which map the thought-world, blurs the border between the mind/soul and the physiological. Steve is quite right to say that the “distinction between parts of our consciousness […] are almost inherently unquantifiable.” I do not wish to imply that faith does not have subjective component or that the internal state is unimportant. Indeed it is just that internal state which legitimizes our material actions. Without *personally* ascribing significance to the material action, it becomes hollow ritual and is not religiously or socially efficacious… or, to qualify the latter, it is socially efficacious but not in the best sense.

The problem with most Catholics is that the once-meaningful rituals have been emptied of significance to the extent that most of those catechized within the past few decades have only the loosest understanding of the faith. Catholicism has become merely a cultural marker-- an inherited state. We go through our motions and they bring us a sense of communal identity in much the same way that the unique gatherings and group-specific motions of a yoga group, a bowling league, or any other micro-culture might. All, or at least most, of the significance has been ascribed to the action and not to the purpose of that action. In other words, many Catholics have the material but fall short of the devotion.

What I wished to stress in my last post is that we have to be aware of the body’s influence on the mind… and thus the strict dualism of the past is now untenable.

By over stressing the internal state we fail to train our body—which can be seen as a neglect of the brain/mind.

By over stressing the external state we fail to influence the mind—apart from the (in this case) accidental conditioning of the mind that comes through the environmental stimuli.

The first case seems to be a primarily Protestant problem and the latter a primarily Catholic one. This is likely because the first group stresses a more individual-steered faith (which inherently tends to privilege the mind) and the latter group stresses obedience to authority (which inherently tends to privilege the body rituals and is not as concerned with individual “ownership” of faith). Neither state, of course, is ideal.

To return again to Steve, he asks if an informed holistic view of faith is “impossible apart from a faith tradition that stresses physical sacraments.” Strictly speaking I am not terribly concerned with a Protestant articulation of material devotion, believing as I do in the beauty and the validity of the Catholic sacramental metaphysic. It is however, interesting to think about.

The Protestant can, without incurring the wrath of his betters, admit that the body influences the brain/mind. The Protestant can likewise safely claim that the body and its actions constitute a necessary part of devotion-- back in my Protestant days, we stressed how works and grace are not mutually exclusive and that a faith without works is dead. The argument could likely be stretched to include not only the social gospel, Good Samaritan aspect but also the intrinsic psychological benefits of altruism. The imagined Protestant retort would be that private instances of material devotion are inferior to those which help others (paralleling, perhaps, the New Testament’s insistence on the use of charisms within the fellowship for the good of the whole rather than privately for personal edification). So the answer to Steve is a qualified yes—material devotion is possible outside of a sacramental view but only if it is validated through social utility.

In closing I will go on a bit of a tangent and remind us all that many of the Catholic sacraments are socially-minded and so it is not the Blessed Sacraments themselves that I am here discussing but the extension of the sacramental mindset into the realm of personal spiritual development.

The sacramental metaphysic tells me that I’m not only reaping the “natural” benefits of material devotion (the habituation of pious living, the social-chemical conditioning into receptivity, the curbing of appetites through consistent denial of sinful lusts), I am also reaping the supernatural benefits. Grace, we believe, is transferred through the physical (e.g., in the Eucharist) and supernatural support is given in recognition of our physical faith (e.g., in the Rosary prayers and other manifestations of personal devotion/adoration/meditation). Even these material devotions, however, lose efficacy if they are just rote recitation (though this is not the case with the actual sacraments whose efficacy is rooted in Christ Himself and not in the officiating priest). Do co-opt a phrase from mass culture, "you don’t have to be sacramental to believe in holism, but it sure helps."

The (Spi)ritual

It seems that many Christian theists today are closet dualists. Protestants, in particular, often ignore or downplay the role of the material self when it comes to worship and devotion. Sola Fide and Sola Gratia, the Reformation's cures for the so-called "works-obsessed" Catholic argument have, whether consciously or unconsciously, enforced the old dualist split between the material self and the soul.

If salvation is the product of "faith alone"--that is to say a faith primarily located in the heart and mind of the subjective self--then emphasize is of course placed on the interior life. We do not know the hearts of our fellow believers, the Protestant claims, and so we cannot gauge their level of devotion. Discipline is an entirely internal struggle--even the seemingly physical act of fasting is in reality a symbolic representation of an interior desire. Much like the the memorial understanding of Holy Communion or the Protestant's non-sacramental take on baptism, the ritual acts of personal spiritual discipline are merely outward manifestations of the interior desire. Primacy in all of these examples is given to the subjective interior and the material aspects become secondary.

For the mystic, however, the material self is much more privileged. The traditional Catholic concept of sacraments is one of material devotion--the acts and ceremonies are not signs and symbols but are actual channels of divine grace. The Protestant eats the bread and sips the cup to commemorate the Savior's great gift. The Catholic approaches the table knowing that the transubstantiated host is the real presence of God. By partaking of the Eucharist, the Catholic is ingesting a measure of grace.

Mystics take the sacramental view and apply its anti-dualist argument to other aspects of life. Spiritual discipline becomes a type of physical training. It was not for nothing that St. Paul talked of beating his flesh into submission. The mystic sees that even the mundane can carry internal spiritual repercussions.

As an omnologist, I am inclined to apply the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to this discussion. Language, the two sociolinguists maintain, informs culture and culture informs language. This dialogic model is very useful. Our culture is embedded in our linguistic registry and, to a lesser degree, in our grammar itself. Our language, in turn, shapes our culture through our verbalizing of values and mores. Similarly, there is a dialogic aspect of the soul and the body. St. Paul discusses the flesh, the body, and the soul. The body is a neutral ground while the flesh is sinful. He seems to have not been a textbook dualist. He was aware that the body is malleable and can be shaped to the soul's benefit or its detriment.

We know from neuroscience and the increasingly biological turn of psychology that the chemical aspects of our brain greatly influence (or, according to some, dictate) our emotional responses. In other words, there exists a chemical bridge between the physiological brain and the socio-spiritual mind. Depression, anxiety, joy, and pain can be caused by imbalances or neuro defect. We must factor this into our understanding of the soul.

It was popular, about a decade ago, for Christian teenagers to be taught that their souls resided in a fallen "earth suit" and that their physiologies were not their true selves. The rational mind cannot except such pat dualism. We know it is more nuanced than that. We know that regular exercise will release endorphins that will make us happier. We know that getting the right amount of vitamin D form direct sunlight can stave off depression. We are told that certain foods (e.g., Omega 3 and Omega 9 fatty acids) can do wonderful things for cholesterol levels AND our brain functions. Our material selves are a very real part of who we are. Our characters are dependent on their biological nature.

It is not too much of a stretch, then, to see how an informed holism will greatly alter our perception of spiritual discipline. Many, alongside Dan Brown, openly mock the "ignorance" of men who mortify their flesh for spiritual ends. I am not prescribing flagellation or the wearing of a cilice, but we know that acts of mortification release endorphins. Some claim that the endorphins elevate the consciousness so that the individual is receptive to the spiritual. Before we dismiss the spiritual as a mere drug-trip (or dismiss mortification as "cheating"), however, we would do well to remember that the excited state brought on in the contemporary Christian worship setting does exactly the same thing. Different, perhaps, in degree but not at all different in kind.

A very real aspect of worship is its socio-psycho-chemical effect. Whether you prepare your heart for worship through a meditative state, through a rousing praise chorus, or by applying the whip, you are manipulating your body into a receptive spiritual state and thus you are proving the holistic/mystic argument. I do not see the chemical response to worship as a demystification of religion. On the contrary, I see the social and chemical utility of these rituals as evidence of the functionality of devotion. We worship in ways that make sense to our social and biological selves.

A major aspect of contemporary Christian worship is what Nieztche (in a very different setting) referred to as the Dionysian. In The Birth of Tragedy he describes the Greeks as dissolving their "principium individuationis" into the intoxicating frenzy of the communal. Whether or not the Greeks were actually Dionysian is not really the point--Nietzche is using the concept primarily to make an assessment of Modernity. It may well be the case that today's church has incorporated the drums and primal rhythms of the "Dionysian" because it is expressly a Modern church, but I think it is more accurate to say that the "Dionysian" has always played a part in corporate religious worship. It is not wrong of the church to "pull peoples' heart strings" through music. The book of Psalms is quite clear on the validity of music to channel the heart into worship. We Christians need to embrace this concept--though we would do well to alter its name from the pagan root.

The division between science and religion causes people to see the release of endorphins or the psycho-social aspects of the "Dionysian" as explanations for the so-called "religious social phenomenon." It is not the presence of the divine, they say, but merely the snapping of synapses, the excitation of the amygdala, and what sociologists call "groupthink" that causes people to feel a connection to deeper mysteries. In Civilization and Its Discontents Freud responds to a man who tried to explain the "oceanic feeling" that brings people to religion in terms of social phenomena. Freud's response was that he himself had never had such an epiphanic moment of perception. But Freud notwithstanding, humans in the main do feel this oceanic response. This is why we have so many religions. They can't all be True, but they can all be socially meaningful to the particular groups. They are, after all, the narrative framing of socio-biological aspects of life.

We cannot demonstrate the primacy of one faith using experiential testimony. For every Christian who claims a healing we will find a Muslim who claims an exorcism or a Hindu who claims prophecy. I am not by any stretch a universalist. In fact I am likely one of the most narrow-minded of Catholic exclusionists you'll come across. My point is not that experiential testimony is de facto invalid. I believe the power of the mind and even the power of the supernatural can bring about these miraculous events but that does not mean that their source is necessarily The Father. This is one of the reasons, albeit one of the minor reasons, that I left the Reformation fold and have come to Rome. Much of my faith had been based on what I felt or what others told me they'd felt or seen. Why should I privilege their testimony or my own when there are so many "true believers" out there whose faiths are different and (often) at odds with my own?

The Protestant obsession with subjective experience will not allow him to prove his faith in a way that can trump another's faith. If, however, one has a teleological view of history, the case can be made for the legitimacy of Christianity. In other words, the historic facts of the matter can show the probability of the religion's accuracy. This process is hindered, however, by the average Protestant's unwillingness to ascribe ultimate meaning to the external (e.g., to "tradition") and relying instead on the experiential knowledge inside him. But if the faith IS true then it can be proved through historic evidence. We do a disservice when we make the bible purely symbolic and apply our revisionist lens to it. The problem with liberal Christianity (on both sides of Luther) is that too many believers feel that belief ultimately comes down to subjective faith and that no appeal to objective reality (i.e. the historic evidence) will make much of a difference. The reason I am a Christian at all is not because I "feel it in my heart" so much as the preponderance of evidence compels me to believe. I am a Christian for the same reason I am a sociologist, a determinist, or a cultural materialist--I have justified, warranted belief in the concrete reality of things that is not contingent on how I feel about it.

Lest we stray too far from the topic at hand, let us return to mysticism. Fasting, for instance, is not an act of symbolism whereby we demonstrate to God that we hunger more for spiritual food than for physical nourishment. No! Fasting is the conditioning of the body into a receptive state through the avoidance of food. We change our physical constitution and thus we raise our perception out of the mundane and find ourselves in moments of spiritual clarity. We fast as Christians for the same reason we fast under a physician's instructions--to prepare ourselves and to return to a sense of spiritual and biological balance. The early church prayed multiple times a day (including in the middle of the night) not only to seek God but to train themselves into vigilance and to make the habit of the ritual shape their larger consciousness. Does Sola Fide have room for the social power of habit-formation? Perhaps, but it is not stressed in the same way that the Catholics stress it in their concept of physical faith, i.e. "works Christianity." One of my reasons for choosing Rome is that the belief system accounts for the physical self in a better, nuanced way. My Protestant background taught me to see the body as either a hindrance or an enemy but never as an instrument of worship... no, that pride of place was reserved solely for the spirit trapped in the earth suit.

The mystic trains his body.
The mystic trains his soul.
Between the two he sees no clear division.

Beginnings

Our dear friend Wikipedia defines Omnology as interdisciplinary studies, that is to say, as "the act of drawing from two or more academic disciplines and integrating their insights to work together in pursuit of a common goal [...] to develop a greater understanding of a problem that is too complex or wide-ranging [...] to be dealt with using the knowledge and methodology of just one discipline." This is a good definition as far as it goes, but to say that a study is interdiscipline when we truly mean metadiscipline is wrong-headed. Interdiscipline implies that our pursuit lies in the ether between the boundaries of concrete, substantive disciplines. Categories are useful and necessary but they are, of course, mere concepts--divisions abstractly foisted on reality to order it into discrete units. We use categories and disciplines to parse nature into manageable chunks, but we all know that it is truly an organic whole. Or, at least, we should know this.

Some seem surprised-- and others irate-- that the so-called Postmodern mind wishes to collapse the categorical trend and throw all the isms and ologies into one big methodological stew. This seems counter intuitive, they say. Here is a sad case of useful schema becoming reified to the point that scholars would rather see the simulacrum than the holistic unity of creation. Psychology informs sociology, linguistics informs epistemology, culture dictates memory & history, and biology informs them all. From physics to phonetics, we are dealing with the natural phenomena within ONE system. Omnology is not the stance of those who say that global warming is too big for one discipline and thus requires a "team effort" from everyone... Omnology is, rather, the belief that there is always only ONE discipline whose aim is the empirical understanding of the complexities of the natural order.

Postmodern social sciences seem to be heading in the right direction. Although piloted by that demon Relativism, the good ship Postmodern sails forth, the Magellan of her age, charting the increasingly unknown waters of identity formation. Neuroscience--particularly the case made by Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel--supports what Memory Studies has been claiming since Halbwachs and Nora; the act of remembering is an act of inventing narrative. Kandel and others
have located the cells within the brain that hold the "physical" aspect of memory and when these sites are activated, the brain reconstructs the memory through an imaginative process. Memory is more accurately "recollection"--we re-collect various likely elements of the past and knit them to that concrete distillation that is physiologically rooted in our brain (Kandel refers to this as the "kernel" of memory). Think of the grandfather who "fleshes out" the tale of Cinderella. He remains true to the facts of the tale, but he might change the color of the dress or the length of the hair in each successive telling. This is what happens when we recall the past. Moreover, the narrative we use is colored by the values of those groups to which we belong and from which we derive the greater part of our sense of identity. All of this is not to say that memory is necessarily unreliable or is invalid testimony. It is, after all, likely in the best interest of the individual and the group to recall an eventful moment ACCURATELY, that is to say, according to how it unfolded in real time. Thus memory, as a function of our social selves, is pulled by the two forces of objective truth/facts and subjective perceptions/interpretations.

What holds true for memory studies holds true for nearly all of the social sciences. The proximity of the observer to the observed is problematic and thus we see a sort of Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle at work. The observer is a social being and as such he will never fully comprehend the pervasiveness of those social forces which fall under the umbrella term "ideology." Lest we dismiss these "soft sciences" and cling, instead, to the more reliable natural sciences, we would do well to note that the social component has root in the biological. The contrast between socialization and environment--the infamous "nature v. nurture" debate--is only useful so long as the individual recognizes a difference between the two concepts. The individual is socialized but those very social processes arose from the natural tendencies of human behavior. The individual is not a tabula rasa but is the host of many ingrained bio-social acquisition devices that function akin to Chomskey's device for Language Acquisition. It is nature AND nurture, nurture THROUGH nature--socialization arising out of the natural and biological disposition of humans in groups. The particulars may be articulated differently, but the fact of the matter is that human societies look more alike than they do different when compared to other species. Only the peripherals change.

Omnology, then, is the study of life. The border-less approach makes it compatible with mysticism. We may seek to articulate certain miracles (both past and present) through the language of causation and science but this, for the mystic, does not detract from the divine origin of that miracle. God does not design a bicycle so that He may walk wherever He goes. The Deity works through the laws and substances of His creation. He may act outside of those laws at times, according to His divine prerogative, and thus His actions may be seen as "supernatural" but the indwelling of God in His creation--the "natural" communion of God with creation in the everyday--that is what resonates within the heart of the mystic.

I am both omnologist and mystic. I attempt, as Melville put it, to punch through the "pasteboard mask" of perceived reality in order to apprehend true reality. I am beginning to see how St. Francis saw the hand of God in nature and how that hand is, according to Scripture, obvious to mankind. We hide truth under layers of schema and if for one moment we could turn aside from our compartmentalization, we would fully appreciate how much like an organic system creation is. All components complement their fellows, all present methodologies are unnecessarily myopic, all of creation sings the complex beauty of a scientific God!