Having finally completed reading McGilchrist’s The Matter With Things I can finally claim my allegiance to the something greater I’ve always intuited as that which makes reflection a fruitful endeavor, sometimes yielding insight and inspiration. I think ontologically primitive consciousness is a fine place to posit the mystery which has led to the universe we know as its ground of being and have called God by any number of specific names. I’ve accepted that “God”, if only as a placeholder name, is needed to refer to what is the source of all that is sacred.

Christianity does not embrace me as someone who merely holds God - who or whatever that may turn out to be - dear. It is a definitional thing. Those already inside the Christian tent decide what it takes to be one of them, and I’m unwilling to jump any hurdles: I won’t read the Bible and have no interest in the politics of brotherhood and even less interest in group think of any kind.

So as nice a person as Christ seems to have been and even though the parables are great exemplars for human interactions I do not seek to join the party. I’m content to be your barely tolerated gadfly who sits in the back and secretly harbors some holy envy for people who find themselves contained by an ancient wisdom tradition which reaches back through oral traditions to the beginnings of humanity.

I call myself a “whateverist” because of something Alan Watts wrote in The Wisdom of Insecurity:

“Belief … is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on the condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes.
Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be.”