Am I still a Christian? It's complicated.

Greetings from D.C.!

I’m leaving tomorrow for a retreat with John Phillip Newell to learn more about Celtic spirituality and I’m very excited.

I decided about a year ago to start learning more about my ancestors’ indigenous spirituality (I’m mostly Irish) and discovered Newell’s book Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul and was immediately hooked. Newell focusses on Celtic Christian spirituality, but there are obviously other forms.

I connected so strongly with what Newell teaches (which I will share after the retreat) that it felt like a coming home. He was putting so eloquently what I had felt but not found the words to express.

I wish that I had started making an effort to connect with my the faith and spirituality that was indigenous to Ireland sooner. I find it odd I didn’t think of it until a year ago. I can’t say what kept me from thinking of this except perhaps the fact that many white Americans don’t think there is any indigenous spirituality in their history, unless they are Jewish. It’s like we think history started with the Catholic Church or the Protestant Reformation, which obviously it didn’t.

I think what finally led me to this place is alienation from Empire Christianity. If you don’t know what that is, you are not alone. It is essentially Western Christianity as we know it today, which has been exported—often forcibly—all over the world. It was formed hundreds of years after Jesus died, when Christianty became the official religion of the Roman Empire.

I don’t think it takes much imagination to figure out what happens when a rag-tag and heavily persecuted religious minorty becomes the official religion of an Empire:

The emperor marked the Christian symbol of the cross on his soldiers’ shields. When he triumphed at Milvian Bridge, he attributed the victory to the god of the Christians. Modern scholars still debate the tale and whether Constantine’s conversion was sincere or a political maneuver.

The parts of American Christianity that have stayed more connected to pre-Empire Christianity have done so, in my opinion, largely because of Black Christian theology. As I grappled with my alienation from Christianity many years ago, ready to slam the door and never look back, my friend

Lisa Sharon Harper

told me: “Your problem is not with Christianity. It’s with white Christianity.”

Lisa directed me to the Black theologian Howard Thurman, who was a mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr. His eloquent writing and deep thinking affected me greatly, and I was pulled back from the ledge.

I’ve been yanked back many times since then, and yet I still keep finding myself precariously teetering there again.

People often ask me if I am still a Christian and the truth is I really don’t know. You might think that if I don’t know, then I must not be one, but that’s the all-or-nothing thinking that really limits Western thinking.

You are either all in our all out. Either/or. Pick a lane.

I’ve gotten to a place of accepting I’m in a liminal space regarding Christianity that possibly may never end. I know this kind of embrace of not knowing is triggering to many people and I’m okay with that. Some people want a full-throated embrace of Christianity while others don’t understand why I don’t offer a unequivocal repudiation of it.

People also ask me if I am practicing Catholic, to which I’d say: sometimes. For me, Catholicism provides rituals to connect spiritually that are meaningful to me, but I do not subscribe to the idea that the Catholic bureaucracy gets to tell me what to think about abortion rights or gay people (I support them) and I believe women should be able to be deacons and priests.

Kirsten Powers: The Pope puts a crack in the Catholic Church’s ‘stained glass ceiling.’

I have a conscience and there are Catholic teachings violate that conscience. Some Catholics might say I only think this because I’m not going to Mass and Confession enough, so I don’t have a “well-formed conscience.”

Well, I used to go to Mass every day and Confession every week and I still knew that women should have autonomy over their bodies and that gay people are perfect as God made them (not “intrinsically disordered”) as the Catholic Church teaches. I knew that the idea that women can’t be priests is what you get from men making up self-interested rules and enforcing them.

It’s called patriarchy and patriarchy will never not reinforce its own power.

To the extent that I’m Catholic, it’s the universalist Catholicism of Richard Rohr. It’s sad that “universalist Catholicism” doesn’t sound reduntant to most people even though “Catholic” literally means “all embracing.”

To the extent I’m Christian, I connect with the pre-Empire version of Christianity which adheres more closely to what Jesus actually taught and doesn’t invent theology around issues he never even mentioned.

These versions of Christianity allow space for embracing a wide array of wisdom traditions, as I do, from Buddhism to Hinduism to Sufism and more. They don’t require blind allegiance to religious oaths or a belief in One Way.

Conservatives will often accuse Christians who reject oppressive religious rule as just wanting to “fit in” with the broader culture. It never seems to occur to them that people simply don’t accept the notion of Jesus as an oppressor because it is so obviously preposterous.

That any portrayal of him as such is not consistent with the ethic he put forth. That the idea that Jesus wanted to start a religious cult of people who reject any other spiritual wisdom in the world that is not Christianity just makes no sense.

While I do want Western Christianity to be more inclusive, that is not actually my primary objection. My primary objection is that much of what is taught as the “definitive” Christianity is just not true based on what Jesus said and did and based on what early Christians believed before the religion became aligned with Empire and the interests that dominated that Empire.

I’m not really attached to using the label of Christian to define myself. I’m attached to being honest and transparent. If I get to the place where I can say I feel no alignment with Christianity ,I will be honest about that.

Until then, I can’t say that I have totally let go of it.

Have I ever mentioned how much I despise running?

I was on the cross-country running team in high school and midway through every race I swore I would never run again. If you have never felt your heartbeat in your teeth, you don’t know the Hell of trying to win a 5k race.

So, I’m not interested in becoming a serious runner again.

But I did decide that running is the most effecient workout while I’m traveling, which I’m doing a lot of this Fall. So, while I was in the Bay Area I decided to go for a run.

It was pretty horrifying.

I could only run about a quarter mile before I felt like my heart was going to explode.

The worst part is this happened despite my anemic pace. As I told my husband, “I was running as slowly as you can and not actually be walking.”

Turns out this is not bad!

Robert sent me a New York Times article announcing that “slow running” is the new hot thing:

“We’ve found that going for something like a two-mile run a few times a week gets you pretty much the full benefit of running in terms of lower mortality,” said Dr. James H. O’Keefe.

Another doctor told the NYT: “Even running for less than a mile — assuming a person is running at least a few days a week — is enough to meaningfully improve cardiovascular health and longevity.”

Finally, some good news.

Have you noticed how people suddenly have weirdly perfect teeth?

The first time I noticed this trend was when I was watching Once Upon A Time In Hollywood and Margot Robbie smiled.

Later, after a trip down a Google rabbithole, I found out that a set of chompers like that can run you $50-100k.

So, I would not be having perfect teeth.

Which it turns out, is also not a bad thing.

The Washington Post explains that replacing all your natural teeth with veneers is part of “hotness creep.” This is the problem of everyone getting work done to look so perfect they don’t even try to look real.

Hotness creep is about that algorithmic tug toward sameness. Hotness creep is aggressively bland. Hotness creep is to actual beauty what ChatGPT is to literature. Hotness creep is a body whose every facet has been “optimized” through a cosmetic, capitalist intervention, which is why its most high-profile practitioners look less like people than android-esque approximations of people, as if they are wearing a filter full-time. Hotness creep is why everybody traded in their natural bone structure for “Instagram face.” Hotness creep is a face that doubles as a proof of purchase. Hotness creep is why so many nepo babies look like yassified versions of their parents. It’s appealing the same way a McMansion is appealing — a house that does not look “good” but does look expensive and, crucially, like every other McMansion.

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