Wild Christianity

My God Story, Part 1

Wild Christianity

~My God Story

Part 1: Exodus

“Itchy trigger fingers are best tilling the dirt, being lifted up in praise, or engaging Creation in a way that obeys Christ”.   -Jarrin Jackson

I plotted my escape for much of my life.  As a young boy, I heard the mystic call of what I would now refer to as “Wild Christ”.  Most suddenly, outside the walls of the Polis, tent pitched, surrounded by rivers of Life, fish biting my hook, He would whisper in my ears a steady pulse of heartbeat stories from long ago. I have not forgotten. He came in loud and clear in those moments. I just didn’t know how to articulate these epiphanies to others very well at the time. I was a kid for crying out loud! Was I hearing things? Was anyone else being stirred by these restless whisperings? Having read the Bible cover to cover at the age of 7 and then again at 10, I knew “He” was Christ and I loved Him with my whole being. I was “just a kid” back then but this was first love, true love, I knew, not mere ‘puppy love’. A love that endured.

The Roman Church was a deadened tomb of lacklustre spirits, utterly dry, dusty bones of rituals, it seemed to me in those days, lacking in any genuine conviction of Christ.  Lukewarm. Not that rituals were themselves to blame, but the lifeless manner in which they were enacted felt anemic, bled dry. Perhaps I was mistaken...but the air in my Catholic church was suffocating me. This was not theology, it was a matter of life and death.

My favourite part of the mass was when we were jostled out of the stifling atmosphere for a few moments and we looked around to our fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, made eye contact across the pews and shook hands and said “Peace be with you”. I craved fellowship through Christ. And longed for fresh air and sunshine to infiltrate the sepulchre. In church worship we all seemed so disconnected from God and each other and creation but for this brief lapse in the service. I went to a Catholic school from kindergarten to grade 13.  Even though I was surrounded by Christians, everyone seemed to leave their religion behind after Sunday mass.  Something deep within the pit of my stomach was stirring to find Christ elsewhere. I heard the Call, and it was not within the church.

Funnily enough, many members of my family, school and church thought I had the makings of a priest.  A monk, I thought to myself, perhaps, but never a priest. How could I live with these contradictory feelings, love Christ, follow the Call and not let everyone down, including myself?  Something had to give.  Maybe everything…

The Living, breathing God that spoke to me out in the wild, while camping or biking in the countryside, or waking me in the middle of the night with frightening prophetic dreams, or the soft voice of God that would whisper to me in the midst of play…disrupted any habitual worship services that stuck in my craw during church. The Creator that created us from mud of the young  Earth, infused us with His life-giving Breath, this was a God I could worship:  Not only the glorious Creator of all creatures in the micro and macrocosms, but more-so, He who loved and died for us, who resuscitated us from certain death so that we could return home with Him; I rarely encountered Him in the church of my youth. Jesus Christ walking with us to the Father, through the Holy Spirit in the Way He originally intended in the Gospels and Acts never let go of me. But I buried Him deep within the folds of my sorrow. Before the hellish forge of the Fall had its cursed way with us, before the exile into self, He crafted us with utmost love.  He never intended for us to go down that dusty, parched road but true love requires freedom, and He gifted us with free will to decide for ourselves. Ultimately He wants us back from the scrap heap, broken pieces and all.  And like the broken sword of Elendil, in Lord of the Rings, we shall be forged anew to fight in this final battle for the Return of our King. Is there a greater expression of Love possible?  I think not.

...

Instead of graduating fully into post-mortem ‘Amnesiac Man’ however, as I reached young adulthood, with its shallow rituals of passage in a culture of somnambulant death, I continued to meander and track God’s footprints and fingerprints in the dust of my city streets and in forgotten old books marked for discard on library shelves. My heart and flesh longed to caress the fabric of a vibrant existence beyond the city walls again and break through into the jungles of His Creation. My faith began to flounder without real fellowship and my rebellious mind had limited me within the intellectual confines of solitary thought rather than expanding it with gifts He bestowed upon me. My mind would take me a far distance, visiting unknown vistas and landscapes unseen but it would be decades of philosophical waywardness and folly before I would finally track Him back within the living Word made Flesh.

So I had lost the original fragrance of Christ I experienced as a child and youth when I imbibed deeply on his breath. I had fallen away from the ‘God-spell’ of Agape. Little did I realize, as a meandering young man, that He never left my side as He masterly tracked me, a black sheep straying from the flock.

As the pressures of the World mounted, my rebellion against the demonic matrix increased while also capturing me in its nets through my unbridled passions and my rejection of Christ increased alongside it. I was in exile from God and the world. As I drifted, unanchored, I found my soul being pulled away from His Holy Presence, far away from the confines of the walled-in world of the City of Destruction.  I was like a renegade ronin, a spiritual warrior without purpose, cut off from my holy host wandering the lands, anticipating a final battle. I became a double-agent rebel without a cause, without a Christ.

The visible traces of the loss of God in this sad Sin City were visibly all around me in the forms of a lost and shattered humanity under an amnesiac spell, an uncanny ‘prison planet’ and the captive minds enslaved to it’s rebellious overlord.  Crass materialism, new age sophistry and stagnant spiritual regress were the wasteland I fled from. My extended family, whom I dearly loved, were far away from me, both physically and spiritually. Yes there were also traces of decency, beauty and integrity, the original blueprint of humanity, to be found everywhere, gems, rare fruits of the Spirit that were shared by kindred souls within the frail human family. But I had no lasting mentors, no compelling Fellowship and certainly no one I could fully trust to lead me back to Christ. Too many bad experiences with my elders in the faith led me away from the roots and trees of their bitter fruit. It left a rotting taste in my mouth and a cramp in my gut.

So many lost adults around me were too busy in the hustle of feeding the beast, and role playing being adults while suffocating spiritually working for the Man instead of for the Lord. This repelled my natural spiritual inclinations and my hunger for Truth lead me down a confusing road of suffering, contempt and pity for the lost human race. I knew no living heroes of the faith or saints other than from fading memories of scripture and tradition.  The presence of the Holy Spirit seemed faded. The humans I encountered were not paying  enough attention to the details...the presence and patterns of God’s incarnation let alone His transcendence to be found here, on Earth.  Yet they still echoed for me…like the resonant but fading church bells which were being replaced with speaker systems.  And for a time I washed my hands of humanity, in that time of self-righteous anger and sadness and retreated further into nature’s mysteries and man’s dusty books. I retreated further away from my home town on my epic bicycle adventures and fantastical mind voyages.  On these uncharted waters eventually l would shipwreck on the reefs of my own sin.

Little did I realize that the Holy Spirit had gifted me with the soul-specific skills and in-sights that I had abused for misguided adventures, a philosophical pathos of distance and intellectual pride which were supposed to be for use in my holy mission. I became antichrist in my thoughts and vainglorious philosophies, and a lawless wilderness dweller on the knife’s edge of both worlds.

In my own rebellion, I came to deny Christ much more than 3 times and despite the crowing alarm cock in my conscience, I rebuffed Him, time and time again.  I was truly a prodigal son wandering amongst the ruins of His creation, forlorn and a fugitive from Divine Justice. These gifts, in the way He envisioned for me, were wantonly squandered and I fell deeper under my own Spell of Forgetting.

God had a higher purpose still as always and under the ‘spell of the sensuous’ and love for His Creation, and exile into the literal wilderness, my self-assured destruction was forestalled. Eventually under the artificial lights of the ‘City of Destruction’ I made my getaway under the cover of darkness.

Once I left home, with its encrusted industry, sleep-walking peoples and tattered landscapes, I cast off and came to be marooned on the West Coast of Canada, mainly Vancouver Island. I became a hobo, a hermit and heretic...a broken saint of sorts.

The rich earthen tapestries of sensuous flesh, on the Big Island, gorgeous, delicate hues and majestic, wild beasts of the land, sea and air, the sublime diversity of plants, fungi, the hidden microbiomes...these fragments continued to call to me and recollect something forgotten and Edenic.

All the creative gifts of Creator abounded in this new Atlantis of supernatural exuberance, and islanders were in those days, more human and friendly even. Yet even here people were stifled under the violent rebellion of the World, fallen from original grace. A matrix of self, sin and inequity seemed inevitable for the whole God-forsaking place. Despite its natural beauty, the broken shards of humanity and Eden were to be found scattered all over this place as well.  There was no escape from the all-too-human. There was no “Heaven on Earth”. Genesis and Milton were right: paradise was lost and no human utopia could ever get it back…without God. The Truth of the Fall, which in my pride I attempted to deny for myself, was the inevitable conclusion I was hesitantly circling back to. Christ was not an option for me as yet…my re-entry was delayed.

I was called in from my self-exile, to find the route home again, the path into and through the wilderness, within the outer walls of the Garden of Eden that would lead me back to His tent, His tabernacle. I heard the call of the Great Sea, and set to sailing back to the undying Island of Love with the winds of Agape at my back. I cried out to the Lord in supplication. Christ was resurrecting within me again.  I could smell the anointing oils on the winds again.

I prayed foir the first time in decades: His will shall be done on Earth as it is in Heaven. The King of kings would save me and fallen humanity from our folly. He was the ONLY Hope. My squandered boho life would be redeemed and in my desperation I longed more than anything to return to the home of my heavenly Father.

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.”

-Sermon on the Mount

End of Part 1

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