This is how I see Christ now, as the Logos, the Word, the very blueprint, design, and destiny of all that is.  Christ is the alpha and omega point, the birth and final consummation of all existence becoming the full, free manifestation of God's infinite love.  He (Logos) is the evolutionary impulse driving life toward greater complexity and coherence.  She (Sophia) is the perceptive wisdom waking life up in ever-more expansive ways to the Christ mystery unfolding within us, before our very eyes. 

I've asked a terrible thing of God, to live a life of utter dependence on him.  I want to follow Jesus when he says he goes, does, and says only according to his Father - to proceed without reason apart from HIS reason.  I don't know if a person can submit a larger ask than that, and the cost of such discipleship - if my life is any indication - is absolutely everything. 

The manner God has answered the deeper longings of my spirit over the years can only be summed up as cataclysmic.  He doesn’t wave a magic sky wand that instantaneously remedies everything; neither does he sew patches on frayed fabric, nor pour new wine into old skins.  No, when it comes to the deeper, foundational things he's leveled the structure.

A singular desire has rendered me a simpleton in this dark night of the senses, and for once in my life I’m okay with this.  I used to hold God in my conscious thoughts like a possession, like a Rubik's Cube I could fumble around with and solve.  Having let Him go, he's ventured below the horizon where I can’t meddle with his work.

It’s no small irony that less than a month after posing the question hypothetically, a dear Atheist friend of mine asked me what difference God makes.  What need would she have for God when she's able to do all the things she does on her own?  That's not God, is it?  Or is it supposedly God, rather than her?  I was immediately reminded of God's answer when I asked that question myself.

I believe we’re predisposed to losing the best of all good news because it's so terribly hard to understand and even harder to accept.  To think we’re called to follow Jesus into this unitive mystery, to effectively become one with God and thus a unique embodiment of the same divine synthesis Jesus modeled, is challenging on so many levels it's impossible to innumerate in a single sitting.

I focus on silence because there's a shortage of it in our modern age.  We’re bombarded with noise: the incessant droning of both foreground and background information vying to invade our awareness most waking hours of the day.

I was recently cautioned about my Panentheistic beliefs, lest I start considering myself to be God.  This is sound advice; however, the risk of considering oneself God is no more threatening to the Panentheist than anyone else.  It's just more direct and obvious.

The way forward is down: the path of descent, of failure, of the cross.  Everything hinges on it.  In it and it alone is life.  In it and it alone can the prodigal return home.

I closed my eyes, focused my energy upon the crown of my head, and let go.  Immediately, the headache faded, and I felt a warm glow alight upon me.  As my attention shifted upward, this glow stretched out vertically, beyond my range of sight, and God said: Climb.  So I climbed.

I've written of shedding my identity, of freely handing it over to God and becoming one with him, but it seems my expectations are in need of substantial revision.  I sat on the porch the other day when God revealed just how substantial.

I am presently experiencing a divergence or evolution of what has come before, for the time for easy answers and clearly-marked features along the path has receded from view.  Perhaps the time for clarity will come again, but it's clearly not the season.

As the years go by, and the roller coaster of anticipation and disappointment relentlessly jostles my ever-tiring soul to its very core, I have finally come to that moment when life and death become real. 

I consistently maligned faith during my stint as an Atheist, but was terribly confused and ultimately mistaken during that season of my life.  It wasn't that I drew the wrong conclusion; more that I never really understood what faith really is.

I keep deluding myself, wishing this world is something other than itself.  I carry my cross, girded up with false hopes and promises that things will change - a fool's hope that some force much greater than this world or the flawed race in charge of its stewardship will swoop in and imbue it with sanity and conscience - but suspect deep down no such force will do any such thing. 

The spirituality of inner transformation, realization of the true inner self, and enlightenment or union with God is virtually universal - thus the term Perennial Wisdom (sophia perennis.) Whether it's Christian Mysticism, Sufi Islam, Kabbalah Judaism, Zen Buddhism, or Hindu Yoga, the wisdom paths are strikingly similar.

I confronted an old demon this morning.  Despite my promise to bury it, I think the unraveling of my ghosts has somehow uncovered it.  I can bury it no deeper.  There is no running away from it now.  It is inextricably linked to my communion with God, which is utterly intolerable.  I must vanquish it once and for all.

I've underestimated the creativity and freedom that lie nested in non-duality, waiting to be born when the time is right.  I did not appreciate the asymmetric perspective required of this process, but I confess I love it.

So when it came time to face the implications of Hell head on, whereupon it dawned on me that it couldn't be love, couldn't be right, could not possibly mesh with what I needed God to be, the primacy of love as I understood it eventually calmed the protracted cognitive dissonance and dismantled my faith.

The heart and the mind are not night and day, but more like sunrise and sunset.  Under the right conditions, you can hardly tell the difference.  Their stillness melds into one uniform experience, where the sun neither rises nor falls - a quiet, indescribable serenity where the difference no longer carries any meaning.

Baruch Spinoza once wrote: I believe that, if a triangle could speak, it would say, in like manner, that God is eminently triangular, while a circle would say that the divine nature is eminently circular. Thus each would ascribe to God its own attributes, would assume itself to be like God, and look on everything else as ill-shaped. 

Having lost my faith, I'm confronting an intriguing effect of this shift in mental frame. When one accepts the foundational premise of a given paradigm, one's secondary, derived beliefs about the world naturally gravitate towards predetermined points of least resistance most commensurate with the foundational premise.

If theists truly believe it is impossible for a person to not believe in God, how seriously could they have considered other options besides believing in God?  Have they ever given Atheism a fair hearing, providing themselves the opportunity to test this peculiar belief?

Having departed from my childhood faith - a keystone upon which so much of my memory and perspective rested - I've found that my search for God is also very much a search for myself. At this moment of infinite possibility - silently immersed in this vast and quiet field, this expansive mystical tabula rasa - it cannot be ignored or overcome.

Of this I’m certain: believing in this new God will require even more faith than in the one I cast away.  It's just so much easier to lose faith in a construct of one's own mind.  I have very little reason to have relationship with God now, for I no longer have any idea how to relate to him.

My March 20th entry has taken a severe toll on me, as the questions I raised have obviously hit a nerve and have sent ripple effects cascading outward upon my psyche.  My mind is mired in incoherence.  To make matters worse, I've taken on the shape of Oroborus, further discontented by my own discontent.  What did I have to gain from my curiosity?