Friendship endures copious texts, changing beliefs

I met a friend for Saturday morning coffee, continuing a conversation we’ve had going forever, shaded in various colors over the years.

At times, our stances have been dramatically different, of the “I’m right, you’re wrong,” persuasion. Somewhere along the way, those contrasting beliefs created borders and fences that neither of us crossed, in our anger at each other’s plainly mistaken ideas.

Perhaps our differences first surfaced many years ago, walking through the Vatican, while touring Europe. The place was dripping with hoarded riches and I ripped the Catholic Church for pillaging.

Wealth like this, I thought, could have better served humanity, not mere idolatry. “This makes me sick!” I said.

My friend looked at me as if I’d just mooned the Pope.

Around that same time, I was deep into psychology and comparative religion, reading a boatload of Freud, Jung, Fromm, Maslow, Piaget – you name it, I read it – along with texts from all the major religions, including the Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tao Te Ching (and yes, the King James, too), along with contemporary takes on it all.

I particularly liked Thomas Merton, had a brief fling with Rudolph Steiner and Teilhard de Chardin, then came across a renegade Catholic by the name of Matthew Fox.

“This fellow,” I said to myself, “is the real deal. Where’s this kind of Christianity been hiding?”

And so, on to the Christian mystics, Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, and to the Gnostic Gospels and feminine (or feminist) theology.

And so it went and so went our conversations. Fox, my favorite Christian, particularly appalled my friend. Soon enough we parted ways.

For a time I was a spiritual carpetbagger, enchanted with the East, in clear danger of a New Age-y prison of my own to match his opposing fundamentalism.

I eventually pretty much chucked it all, both East and West, saving my highest disdain (no doubt because I grew up with Christianity-flavored milk) for the highly edited, selectively picked, authoritarian-inspired version of the Bible.

None of these studies, the good and the bad alike, were wasted. All of it was great preparatory reading for my real home, the largely secular musings of the entire Western philosophical tradition, which eventually moored itself in a new, scientific way of looking at the world.

That one’s got its problems, too, but at least it has the decency to change its mind when reality slaps it in the face. (Well, sometimes, as its failings may cause our extinction. I hate it when that happens.)

In any case, I’ve changed, my friend has changed, and our conversations eventually continued. His medium is now a liberal Catholicism, mine a liberal humanism/agnosticism which still includes a strong rejection of that Big Guy or Gal, the always-popular personal God. Which, in some way, my friend embraces as much as ever.

But you know what? The edges have mostly disappeared, so much so that the talk is all lost and found (as artists say), foggy perhaps, with many undefined shapes and unclear passages. But also without those borders and their high fences.

He agrees with me on Matthew Fox these days, and I still disagree with him on the afterlife, whatever the cuss that might be. Nothing for me, everything for him, but neither of us cares too much.

He might be going to heaven, I might be going to hell, and for all I know they’re both the same. I like the world better in those shades of gray.