I first set out to locate my religious community when I was partway through fourth grade, perhaps somewhat earlier. I have since been enlightened, endarkened, emboldened, embarrassed, embraced, and embroidered... not to mention besmirched, betokened, bespoken(ed), and beguiled, but not particularly bothered or bewildered. I have come to know my navel like the back of my hand, and beyond the Veil is my backyard.
I pursued all of the conventional exploratory processes, such as: reading (loads of sacred texts, histories, mythologies, biographies, philosophies, and the like); attending various services in person (typically at the invitation of friends and their families); engaging in related courses of study (such as, “autobiography and religion,” “ethnography of speaking,” and “Silva Mind Control”); and meditating on a mongrel mix of mysteries across a diverse collection of inspirational settings (both individually and in terms of mysticism as a cornerstone). I have flipped through record albums filed under “New Age,” “Old Age,” and “all the small assorted Cratchits” (Scrooge, 1951).
Some individual articles of faith have draped well enough, but no ensemble has ever fit off the rack. And of course some items do not conform at all; for example, although I tried in earnest (just in case), mine is never going to be an atheist’s reality.
Inevitably, this plot resembles Mike Resnick’s, “Will the Last Person to Leave the Planet Please Shut Off the Sun?” I want to know if there is a group of people with whom, after having endured that sort of winnowing process, I would end up sharing some planet of like-faithed people. This discovery would help to reduce my sense of isolation, and (one might hope) present an opportunity to move beyond the basics; that is to say, while I enjoy finding out about someone’s fundamental assumptions, I would like to find a community where the basic material already matched closely enough that we could meaningfully engage in some additional exploration. That said, it would be very nice to just experience the sense of community even without further discussion.
So, with that goal in mind, here are my basics...
There are a few conclusions about which I am confident. At base, I am a mystic, in the sense that I do enjoy a personal relationship with the light or Spirit, whom I approach as a loved one. For me, that person is still (and might always be) the Christian Holy Spirit, but that mileage will necessarily vary for others (and might not define my eventual community). While I enjoy exploring further, I do not expect (nor do I need) answers beyond that intercession. This is my faith. And I don’t feel any desire to force it on others.
I feel a solid kinship, then, with pluralist Quaker Universalism, and additionally align well with their fundamental values: Simplicity, Peace, Integrity, Community, Equality, and Stewardship (note that their fellowship acronymizes as SPICES). Clearly, I am still working on simplicity.
And I am one of over 20 million ministers in the Universal Life Church.
Many other related debates are not important to me. There are so many possible explanations for everything, that there is simply no confident way in which to select among them through some reasoned process of logic. How many is the Spirit of God? How (un)like us? How (un)fathomable? How (in)effable? How (omni)potent? How (omni)scient? How (anthropo-, gyneco-, hermaphro-, ?-)morphic? Any answers are just guesses, so I am just as happy to let them lie. Of course, many people are fixers, and it can be challenging for them to leave some things alone.
I believe that the Spirit has (or is) something that humans are used to interrelating with as identity, but chicken vs egg is not important to me. Humans interrelate with identities in a personal manner, and they tend to do something similarly personal when interrelating with any Identity in whom they have faith. That interpersonal “prayer” could be meditation, reverence, invocation, pleading, worship, swearing, waiting, spellcasting, love, and so on. Some people are similar to one another specifically in ways that bring their forms of “praying” to likewise be similar. Such people are more likely to agree with one another about related spiritual issues without debate. When that happens, they seem to find it easier to enjoy a sense of communion. In other words, people who approach Identity in similar ways are more likely to get along with each other in a religious community.
In theory, it is possible that two people might be significantly similar only in terms of the nature of their faith. While they would be entirely sympathetic when it came to their religion, they might find each other to be utterly exasperating in regard to everything else, such as politics, environment, morality, and so on.
It’s possible, but seemingly not very likely.
Which means that in looking for my religion, I might also be looking for people who are like me in other ways, namely highly-sensitive, healthy-schizotypal, high-assertion introverts (with some version of Mansfield’s Autism).
Yeah, I know: “Good luck with that.”
So, given a group of folks who would overlap whatever fundamentals of my personal, Christian-y, pluralist universalism (flavored with SPICES)... whence?
Adding “Tolerance” would be SPECIST, and of course the synonym “Xenophilia” would be no better, à la SEXPICS, so I can understand why they limited their list as they did. Wise choice. After all, I just found out that an anagram for my name would be, “a cataclysm end informer.” If I were an eschatologist, then that would be spooky. Of course, another would be, “a cameraman scrod flinty,” so, yeah, there ya go: a reason to wax nostalgic over the old joke about the pluperfect subjunctive (and to write that moving obituary for cameraman Scrod Flinty).