To Put God in a Box

I was sixteen years old. Sitting in my car, scanning the yard to make sure no one else was around, I turned up the volume and sang along to these words:

You are my desire

No one else will do

'Cause no one else can take your place

To feel the warmth of your embrace

The words belonged to a then-popular contemporary Christian band, no doubt referencing what they deemed as the comfort found in God's presence. However, I wasn't taking part in an act of Christian worship. I was apprehensively singing the words while thinking of her...my first real "girl crush" (think dramatic, unrequited high school love). My heart was pounding. I desperately kept pushing out the word that threatened to invade my consciousness: blasphemy. Not only was I thinking about the words of a Christian song in reference to something other than God, but to a forbidden, homosexual lover at that. I distinctly remember saying to myself, "You're going to go to hell, Danielle."

Flash forward five years. My mom, my sisters, my girlfriend, and I were at a mega Christian conference, geared specifically towards teenagers. It was time for the first speaker of the conference and the topic he was bringing was a doozy: "Being Truly Committed to God in a World that Has Fallen Under the Rule of Satan." As the speaker began, the lights dimmed and the air in the auditorium gradually got cooler. I halfway expected thunder sound effects to start playing in the background. As I rolled my eyes and tried to stifle a groan, I peered down the aisle at my youngest sister, who was twelve years old at the time. Her eyes were wide, her lips tight, her brow furrowed––I could tell that the speaker already had her full attention. This, of course, worried me but I decided to see how things played out. About two-thirds of the way through the "sermon"––as I was starting to taste blood from biting my tongue so hard––the speaker caught my attention. He practically shouted, "You kids these days are so caught up in your own interests that you have neglected God." Then, the low blow. "All you girls care more about One Direction than you do about God!" My heart sank. I looked to my sister, a hardcore "Directioner." Her face immediately went pale and her lower lip began to tremble. I had a "déja vu" moment, seeing in her eyes the same fear I had felt in my car five years earlier: blasphemy. A few uncalled for, melodramatic accusations later, the speaker wrapped it up with the classic "altar call," beckoning all the teens who needed to "make God number one" to close their eyes and pray the "sinner's prayer."

God, I am a sinner.
I know I deserve punishment but Jesus died
on the cross to save me from that.
Now I ask Jesus Christ to become my personal
savior and lord of my life. Amen.

I listened to hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of teenagers recite that prayer. I glanced over at my sister and saw her repeating the words with tears streaming down her cheeks. My face flushed and my jaw tightened. After the prayer was over, the speaker prompted everyone who had prayed that prayer to come to the back and speak with a counselor. My sister, bless her heart, who was crying so hard she had the snuffles, began walking that way. Naturally, I followed. I stayed with her and let her talk with me. As I held her in my arms, she cried to me, saying, "I'm sorry I love One Direction so much. I don't want to go to hell." The genuine remorse and borderline terror in her trembling voice was positively heartbreaking. How dare someone make my twelve-year-old sister feel contemptible and terrified because of her simple fondness for a boy band? To make matters worse, a couple of counselors essentially kidnapped her from me, forbidding me to come with them because they needed to "be alone with her" to get her "real story."

I was absolutely livid. As I stood there, fuming, my girlfriend rubbing my back in an attempt to calm me down, I watched the dialogue taking place between the counselors and my sister. I couldn't hear what they were saying but I watched her expression morph from afraid, to confused, to defeated. After they finished talking, she walked over to me, her shoulders slumped.

"What is it?" I asked.
"I have to get baptized," she mumbled.
"Do you want to get baptized?"
"Not really," she admitted bashfully. "But I guess I have to."

I spent the next two hours trying to repair the damage that had been done to my sister's understanding of the Divine, assuring her that she was not a horrible person because she liked One Direction, and that there was absolutely no reason why she should get baptized unless she genuinely wanted to.

Recently, I have read a couple of pieces that served to partially inspire my thoughts on this subject. One was, "A Baptist Meets the Buddha, Part One," by my friend, the Reverend Dr. Marc Boswell. The other was "After God's Birth, Play," by my friend and former professor, Dr. Hollis Phelps.

In Boswell's piece, he discusses the perpetual internal tug-of-war he has faced since young adulthood between his Free Will Baptist background and his proclivity towards the teachings and practices of Buddhism. Boswell reflects on the feelings of shame and anxiety that he experienced when he first discovered his appreciation for the Buddhist tradition, as well as the ways in which he has come to reconcile that tension, now finding "spiritual sustenance provided by these Buddhist traditions."

In Phelps' piece, a commentary on LeRon Shults' Theology After the Birth of God, he considers, among other things, what it looks like to explore religion and theology creatively, suggesting that we should "play with religious and theological concepts the way that a child plays with a disused object, without regard to where it came from and for what it was/is originally for."

I can deeply relate to both Boswell's and Phelps' sentiments. I have often found far greater solace in the Buddhist tradition than I ever found in Christianity (at least, that is, the brand of Christianity to which I was exposed). I was long afraid to embrace that solace for fear of retribution from the unmerciful and exacting God to whom I had been taught to fully submit. What's more, I believe that very fear stemmed from the skepticism with which Christianity had taught me to regard my creative exploration of the Divine. Why do so many religious traditions do this? Why is striking fear into our children through guilt and threats of damnation our method for teaching them about the Divine? Why have so many of us been taught that when it comes to dealing with the subject of the Divine, we should mistrust our imaginations and immense capacity for creativity? In teaching this, we rob our children (and ourselves!) of the full richness and beauty that spiritual creativity has to offer. Imagination is, I think, the very essence of theological and spiritual thought.

A guy in my neighborhood has a bumper sticker on his car that says, "God is too big to be confined to one religion." I agree, but I think it must be taken even one step further: God is too vast, too enigmatic, too complex, to be perceived in an unimaginative way. To put the Divine in a box, to over-define it, to reduce it to one solitary, fixed perception, is to do ourselves, the Divine, and all of Creation a grave injustice.

It is my sincere hope that our society will strive to break down the abundance of barriers that imprison the imaginative nature of the Divine. In doing so, we can move towards a spirituality that expands our minds, fosters a sense of community and a respect for diversity, and galvanizes us to be revolutionary pioneers of love and justice.