Steps Unto Heaven: A Historical and Personal Search

By Jaime A. Giordano

My father was a Southern Baptist pastor. In his sermons he followed the usual language and most of the tenets of his fundamentalist church. I started very early in life conversing with him about these matters up to the day of his death. I was encouraged to see that he always tried to give me intelligent answers squarely beyond common clichés, and that he displayed a deep and sometimes contentious interpretation of the scriptures. He believed that the Bible was essentially right as long as it wasn’t read literally. These dialogues with my father are the point of departure of these reflections. It is a trans-denominational critical effort outside the temples, trying to tread the way towards the divine realm step by step.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: May 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483429168

Book preview

colores!

FIRST PART:

TESTIMONY

1

AWAKENING

Disguised since childhood,

Haphazardly assembled

From voices and fears and little pleasures,

We come of age as masks.

Our true face never speaks.

(Rilke, The Book of Hours)²

On the day of our birth we emerge to a world unknown. Our true face rests among the shadows. We are foreign to the echoes of the earthly abode into which we are brought to reside. We look around in astonishment unable to understand amidst such silence and fury.

This is our first awakening. Soon we are wearing masks imposed by beings foreign to us.

Suddenly, our dreams become focused. We ask questions through incoherent babble; later we pour our souls in a streaming flood of words we pretend to understand. We listen to what it is said around us and we take every single statement as evident truths; but a confusion of echoes still separates us from the real. We are drowned by alien discourses. Incomprehensible languages spread a veil of darkness over our faces. We put our trust on unreliable voices; an authoritative gibberish flows upon our mind like polluted gusts. Talking becomes a cursory device that disturbs the passing of angels among us. At best, some fancy words may display a momentary satisfaction before the dawn of our individual consciousness. If we are fortunate, we may survive inside a bubble protected from the unknown.

Some years later learning to read becomes a giant step forward. Reading has a distinctive timing. It is a slow and patient undertaking and an acquired skill. We naturally come to believe everything we read. Through other people’s writings we stride further along in our way to the logos and we spread our minds throughout history.

Writing! Writing has the power of the incarnated Verb. It becomes the best path to be trodden by those who seek to learn. It naturally evolves into devotion and prayer becoming the most effective way of studying and tracing our deepest thoughts by our feeble minds. It is an enjoyment for which the Talmudists are well known. Through the Verb we listen to unseen teachers. We keep at it for decades until we begin to vaguely comprehend the universe. Only then we start to live a conscious life of our own.

2

STARTING THE SEARCH

We jump now to 2013. I wake up now and after reading on a blackboard that I keep since my childhood the words: Sleeper, awake! Rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you (Ephesians 5:14), I proceed to take care of some basic needs. After that, I drag my feet toward a computer and start reading and revising my own words, usually poetry which I consider my dialogue with the unknown, and then the revising and re-revising of these pages which have become my dialogue with God.

I envy many of my acquaintances who have made up their minds on the subjects I endeavor to explore: they are true believers. In many ways I would love to be like them. They don’t need to hassle in this interminable search. They are seldom bothered by doubts or challenges that could force them to further seeking. By writing these words I feel a peculiar peace of mind. Adult people of my age should be pacified by a set of beliefs or un-beliefs, and that is their passport to keep on living with security and closure. The expectation is that they know enough to survive without further ado until their final days.

Certainly, I don’t desire that those who nowadays have appropriated the term Evangelic (a word that was dear to me when I was a child) to fall into the uncertainties of wanting to know more. I don’t want anybody to fall into depression, or to experience the tragic death of Doctor Faustus. Their blessing is that they feel born-again. The reading of selected fragments of the sacred scriptures over and over may serve them enough to sustain their faith, as well as the perusing of those innumerable books available through the profitable Christian market.

Some others have decided to ignore these matters, mostly because they do not believe that knowing is possible or because they are happy with the Christian satisfaction of their good works.

And then you get those know-nothing postures…

The exciting progress of our human exploration of the universe tempts us to calm or cancel altogether the audacity of our ambitions. Religion may appear as lack of patience to wait for the scientific answers without mentioning the hesitations and obstacles that precedes them. I grant these persons the right to see religious visions as premature forms of knowledge; but I think I have little time left on earth to waste it, and that I should move ahead and explore as much as I am presently capable of. There is plenty that we have been told already, so to keep waiting for proofs or human answers is not an option to me. Intelligence is by definition anticipating. I am too impatient to keep grasping blindly into the future. So I welcome personal insights, intuitions, visions, illusions, utopias and so on. I despaired when I read the last sentence in Sigmund Freud’s The Future of an Illusion: an illusion it would be to suppose that what science cannot give us we can get elsewhere.³ We are here to defy this curse.

I must add that I am not prepared to accept the voluptuous and cowardly surrendering to an impending final tribulation when some believers chosen by God (144,000) expect to be raptured to the clouds. The objectivity of reason should be complemented by the courage of imagination and faith, so we are due to remind everybody that the Book of Revelations has a splendorous happy ending. It is imperative that if this book is to be read should be read right up to the last chapters. I find that the silence about this is outrageous and utterly suspicious. So far, I have never heard the last two chapters of this book quoted or commented in Sunday sermons.

Essentially, what I am trying to say is that this present endeavor (my writing) is basically a long search for understanding, and that I don’t expect nor really want a final closure. It is a meek devotedness to study and prayer, observing and listening. I would miss this enjoyment if I submit myself to compromise with any of the creeds and tenets available in the present times.

As a consequence, it should be clear that I don’t want necessarily to persuade: these words have not been planned as a rhetorical work of conversion, or a literary or an academic artifact. Therefore, I ask for generosity, especially by not taking statements out of context as is frequently done. To take paragraphs, phrases or words out of the places where they belong is dishonest.

I don’t write for younger generations since I have found out that a subjective, partially Gnostic, partially TV-like liturgy is taking them over; although I cannot say that this is entirely a sorry development. I am sure this is not a phenomenon that occurs only in the island where I am spending my posthumous years.

I see everywhere the divinity of feelings and senses substituting for any transcendental belief. The name of Jesus is upheld as a superstitious talisman. As I have witnessed, most of those that prefer to invoke Jesus more than his Father privilege a holy spirit that entertains them or chocks them into euphoria or numbness. However, I give them the benefit of the doubt, and the words of the prophet Joel come to my mind: "your old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions" (2:28b), so I do not dare to judge them. Everything that surrounds them, from schools to television, internet, and a kind of church whose emphasis is to provide entertainment, simple notions and dogmas, is educating them this way. I don’t expect much from my own children: they are busy doing their own search and playing their own games. I very much doubt that I can be of any further help to them. I only pray that they meet the right people and find their own true way in life.

On the other hand, my suspicion is that what motivates humans to join groups, denominations, gatherings is a primitive (primeval really, even animal) need to cluster together no matter what the subject is: religion, poetry, politics, games, parties, or else. Living inside bubbles may give us comfort… until they explode in the inevitable progress of the tree of life. If that is what humans need, then I am utterly alone.

My basic experience, a sort of axiomatic point of departure to which I always find solace in returning to is contained by the personal (ich / du) relation between me and God as explained by Martin Buber⁴. This may be arrogant, but in a narcissistic era like the present one, who can throw the first stone? That simple link to a superior thou is the bottom line of my religious experience.

Lastly, I am not going to explore any possible practical purposes my individual existence could have, because I don’t think I have come to life as a tool for something else no matter how grandiose it might be. I will not boast about being an instrument of the divine. I will just be concerned with restoration, redemption, healing. Not only other’s, but also mine. Not only the celebration of the prodigal son’s but of the brother who did not claim in advance their inheritance. Creation has not been completed, and we need both brothers to continue it.

3

TEMPLES

The list of my beloved temples is short. I spent my first twelve years in a manse next to a monumental Southern Baptist church in Concepción, Chile, which managed to survive the great earthquake of 1939 but had to be demolished after the bigger one of 1960. I hold dear the church in Temuco where I was baptized. In my 24 years in New York I found solace and spiritual encouragement in the Episcopal Cathedral-Church of St. John the Divine in the Upper West Side of Manhattan. There, I used to watch the Eucharist in awe, but without partaking in it. I enjoyed this mystical experience (almost as a real transubstantiation) for the first time in Catalonia in the Basilica of Montserrat. Later, in the Emmaus experience in the Salesians Seminar in Aibonito (Puerto Rico highlands) I was astonished by the sensation of fullness that you fell by sharing communion and fellowship with others. For almost five years I felt the real presence at the lively vernacular services of the Evangelical Lutheran temple in Cataño. The solemnity and fellowship of an interdenominational church in Punta Las Marías was extremely beneficial to me and my family during our first years in Puerto Rico. Out of nostalgia, I have lately attended service at the First Baptist Church in Río Piedras because the temple and their sincere devotion remind me the one where I was raised. In most cases, pastoral conviction and religious sincerity have been my main drawing forces.

However, during all those years, I did not embrace in fullness their dogmatic creeds, adjusting myself to what I consider the essence of Christianity to be found in a variety places and not necessarily inside any particular temple. There is an aura of familiarity that permeates all of them. I like to come back to them, and to think of this search for God inspired churches as a pilgrimage, not a mere drifting. When you feel that your Christianity is trans-denominational it is not a surprise that you become an alien in all of them. It has not been an easy pursuit but it has had its own peculiar joys.

4

EASY GRACE

My first obscure and fragmentary life memories go back to that earthquake of January 24, 1939: I see myself in the process of being saved by my parents who are running along the streets, avoiding rubble and dead bodies, escaping towards the house of my grandparents twelve blocks away because they did not trust the church structure next to the manse where we lived. This was my first hazy experience of salvation, an utterly concrete one. I hugged my saviors and felt deeply their warm embrace.

Years later, I asked myself how or from what peril or danger anybody would wish to be saved. Certainly, salvations would not come from concepts above the possibility of comprehension of a child; from notions as absolute, abstract, and universal as the ones that were offered to us by my Baptist congregation along with those funny stories that got repeated over and over again. These concepts were alien to me and certainly I did not feel their arms around me to save me from any existential calamity. The small religious market available at that time didn’t help, although I must recognize that I was fascinated by the beautiful illustrations that were sent to us from El Paso, Texas.

How can we achieve a believable sense of value that could satisfy not only our pride but our self-respect at the same time that we had been cowardly surrendering ourselves to the lazy comfort of the family bubble into which we were born?

I had the suspicion that there was something else other than what made me comfortable. How can we circumvent the impulse of just renouncing to the particular shield that protected us?

Those were serious questions that a child could not answer. Did I have a true Father other than my progenitor as was implied on some of the sermons I listened to?

I may have thought that coming from an established Christian family and a strongly evangelical church was enough privilege to grant sense to my life. Inside that circle of love, I wasn’t aware of anything that needed to be restored in me; no sins to be redeemed; really nothing from which I needed to be saved. I took divine grace for granted. As long as I saw my mother smiling at me, I felt that grace without any need of a universal motherhood.

I got accustomed to watching the outside world as a stranger peeking through the windows of my church where I used to spy on people passing by. The flow of time was something external to me, and I was not supposed to interfere in it. I had been born with a certain vague assurance of having fallen from a paradise that I knew it must have been beautiful: it was a matter of visualizing a place without bombs and earthquakes; without hunger and misery. A refuge surrounded by a protective wall like a mother’s womb.

These memories were soon to be broken by my first personal encounter with life’s treacheries. There is no need to comment on them: it is enough for everybody to remember their own.

5

CHRISTIANITY BEYOND CHURCHES

As I grew up I couldn’t but start noticing that the easy grace that I received was fading. The eventful year I spent at a boarding school, the Colegio Bautista of Temuco (Chile), at the early age of 13, was to me the beginning of a long personal and mysterious journey that still has not quite found its closure, and –to be honest— I expect it won’t. Frankly, I have to confess that I enjoy living in such an open and unsecured world. I gather that that is the real world. I am afraid that if I get to know everything, I will be alone with no need for the divine thou.

My decision to become baptized while in Temuco was an effort to assert my attachment to the church into which I was born. It ended up being a sort of Christian bar mitzvah with no better purpose than to recognize myself as belonging to a community that I deemed depositary of the truth, a truth that was not my concern. It was like joining a secular club or association, no matter that the expectation was that this was a contract for the rest of my days (a contract for life signed by a 13 year old child.)

I was disappointed that this had occurred in such a trivial manner, in such a shallow way that it could not carry any major significance for me other than a public commitment to something abstract and, in the case of the Southern Baptists, foreign. I think now that for that matter I could as well have been baptized as an infant and have it over with. Certainly, as a young Baptist I did not notice in me any cleansing of a particular sin, and certainly not an original sin in which we did not believe and of which we never talked about except when making fun of the Roman Catholics. I did not think that my parents committed any sin when begetting me; by the contrary, I am sure that they did the right thing and that they enjoyed it.

I kept being a loyal Baptist albeit the constant renewal of my cynical observations about the motivations of the people involved in la obra (the mission) as we used to call our Great Commission of which I was told it was our great particular purpose in the world, our niche where we could hide hearts and brains. I soon realized that the Evangelical Baptist church was not a universal entity, and, worst of all, not even a congregation of unanimous souls. I felt the value of the congregational spirit as something no different from what I sensed toward my neighborhood, the community, the barrio, the school, the local soccer team, and, certainly, my native city; that is, forms of association which may give us a pleasant sensation of being alive surrounded by a sense of familiarity, but that separate us from the rest of humankind. By the contrary, soon enough I started to see those associations as terrifying and, perhaps, diabolical forms of exclusiveness, probably the most appropriate thing that could deserve the status of original sin: keeping ourselves attached to our dark subterranean origins.

I discovered something that was to become important for me throughout the rest of my earthly existence. Far from the repetition of universal notions and empty absolutes, I resume my religious learning by appreciating the value and the testimony of simple individuals dear to me, mostly but not necessarily within the church: the fisherman who help me pluck sea-snails from the seaweeds stems during low tide coasting about the sea waves on a tilted boat; the shameless folk who was an eloquent street preacher and as such the envy of the Pentecostals whose church was right in front of ours; the old Sunday school music director who shuffled the hymns presiding over the confusion of everybody; the choir contralto whose shrilling voice could be heard several blocks away; the thin squalid gay youth whose jokes made us laugh our hearts out; the beautiful and tender Sunshine girl who was to be the partner of my first kiss; the wives of the coal miners in strike to whom my mother once ordered me to carry a (very heavy) pot of chicken casserole in solidarity with their toil, all those were in their unredeemed singularities real universals, individuals whose intrinsic value seemed to connect me to a reality beyond my limited existential sphere even if they were doomed to disappear in the anonymous web of existence. Many of those people were in disgrace within their churches or communities, but this was not an obstacle to my admiration: for the first time I felt that I was in the presence of something objectively sacred.

This was the time when my father left temporarily the ministry and entered missionary work throughout Chile as a Secretary General of the Baptist Convention, and I frequently accompanied him to a net of small and generally poor churches. We left the big church where I had spent my first 13 years, and started a fascinating pilgrimage that broaden my view since my father also preached in churches of other denominations.

It was my first intuition of a certain triviality inherent to the absolute truths (the plural is intentional) proclaimed in most churches. The numinous value of the singular and unpredictable was a far more convincing source of devotion. I had my first vague suspicion that the so called Christian church was not the same as the ecclesia.⁵

6

THE GREAT ECCLESIA

In literature

I expanded my view of what a real Christian ecclesia could be when I found certain admirable characters in the literature I love; in the narratives of Victor Hugo, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Stendhal, Benito Pérez Galdós, Herman Melville, John Steinbeck, Maxim Gorky, Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Joseph Conrad, Halldór Laxness, Mariano Azuela, Roberto Arlt, Manuel Rojas with all their marginal and frequently outcast humanity. I saw them attaining the statute of icons, authentic living human personae; people that I could imagine living around me; they were believable in their reality even if it was impossible to fit them into patterns. Those fictional people in their uniqueness opened me the way to a universal quality of being without the mediation of any particular classification or artificial branding. I perceived a sort of divinity within the singular individual (real singularities) lost to our