Don’t Let Dogma Block Your Feelings
Q: I’m 42, divorced, getting ready to remarry in August. I was brought up a Christian but have searched through other religions as well. About two years ago, I went back to my Christian roots and joined a Christian Men’s Group, then went to a Promise Keepers meeting. Some of the men in both have started challenging the fact that I sleep with my fiancee. They say the Bible says I can’t and that’s that. It’s becoming very uncomfortable, so much so that I may have to leave the groups. I’m a Christian, I believe in God, I believe Jesus is my savior, but I’m not rigid like some of these guys. We’re all searching for meaning, as your column states. I love and respect my men’s group brothers, but I just can’t seem to talk to them. - Frank, Spokane
A: You’re not alone in your struggle. Many people right now - as they have throughout history - get caught between the Story and the Dogma of their religion. I sense that you love the Holy Story of Christianity, and the wonderful spirituality for worship, grace, belonging and salvation it provides you. I sense also that you do not need an unquestionable set of moral rules to follow in order for your spirituality to remain strong.
To worship, to belong, to care for their souls, many Christians need the dogma of their church as much as or more than they need the story of Christ’s life. I hope you will weigh in your life the importance of mythology and the importance of dogma and not give up the Christian story that guides your spiritual life just because some cannot live without the dogma.
Elsewhere in your letter you say, “I don’t want to increase the amount of teenage pregnancies around me, so maybe I should model abstinence by becoming abstinent.” If you and your partner should choose to abstain for the rest of your engagement, I hope you would do so because of an adult-adult moral decision, based in thinking about personal responsibility, rather than because an unexamined dogma orders you to do so.
Dogma is best when it is taught to children. A child needs to know exactly what is expected of him or her. Morality is all the more powerfully taught to children if parents, community and God all teach the same dogma. As the child matures, the same adults will, hopefully, help guide his natural questioning process so that he will end up an even stronger, freer moral being.
Dogma is dangerous in the search for meaning when it is forced on adults and they, in order to adhere to it, must become like unthinking kids. We can always tell when we’re faced by dogmatic people. They become like authoritarian parents, requiring us, if we are to belong to their group, to regress into parent-child psychology.
The discomfort we as adults feel when a dogma is forced on us is the emotional manifestation of something deeper: a wounding of our souls. For an adult to be fully mature, for an adult’s soul to breathe, the adult must examine, with free will, any dogmatic precept put forward by any person, politic or church.
A very spiritual woman once said to me, “I’ve had seven or eight bibles in my life. My most recent one is the ‘Course in Miracles.”’ Among others she listed the Bible, the novel “Siddhartha,” the books “The Feminine Mystique” and “Women Who Run With the Wolves.” Her journey through life has revealed to her many sources of wisdom. In each she found the truth appropriate for that time in her life.
In all her bibles, the Story was more important than the Dogma. Throughout her search, I knew her to be one of the most moral people I have ever met.
Your letter inspires all of us to search through our religion and spiritual paths for those ways in which we are adults and those ways in which we are so afraid of our life and changing society that we fall back on child psychology.
Would I sleep with my fiancee were I in your shoes? I did sleep with mine before I was married. Yet I see your point, too, about modeling. You have left me with important questions. Your letter has become a part of the Story of my life.
One thing I do know from reading your letter is that you are a thinking adult, and therefore you will make the right decision. In doing so, you will become a model for others, and they will be taught by you, not through your prescriptions, but through the questions you have asked, and the search they have sent you on.
xxxx
The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Michael Gurian The Spokesman-Review