I went to Vegas. Last week, last minute, I got called to take boxes and boxes of hats on a United flight to the National Rodeo Finals. On the flight there, I got hit like a Mack truck with some sort of sickness. So I was in Vegas within 6ish hours of being asked to go, and then sick as a dog in the Rio casino.

I lost 20 bucks about as equally as fast as if I had burned it, and some cowboy stormed into our hotel room at 3 am, singing “Bad To The Bone” on a harmonica. I trudged home on the flight the next day and have been sick in bed most of last week.

Outgrowing our theology

I’ve been thinking about the phrase “outgrowing our theology”. I had a spiritual mentor say that I will for most of the churches available to me — meaning they likely don’t have the education or even the educational rigor to support the kind of inquiry I’m on. And I agree. I don’t know many places that can hold my questions with the deep responses I require. And I am just getting going…

By that, I don’t mean becoming smarter than God; I mean becoming aware of the beliefs we’re already living by and realizing when and where they no longer hold. I mean having a rigorous process of inquiry that is not shy about challenging, and that requires freedom for the pursuit of truth. That values asking the question first and trying to untangle the answer, regardless of where it goes.

It reminds me of my continual call to put the spiritual and intellectual center back in the middle of our lives. Because even a quick Google search reveals how disconnected theology (and general philosophy, which I believe are intertwined and complementary) is from our everyday lives. If you are asking the question, what role does religion have in society?, you get an unseasoned chicken breast as a response. We are losing the battle for our souls.

Most people don’t have enough experience with theology or the divine to even bring their philosophy into cohesion. You have a theology. You have a philosophy. You must be cognizant of what it is. You don’t live without a philosophy, you live with an unexamined one.

Philosophy is the art of beginning with human reason and, through thinking and observation, asking what can be known about reality, truth, and living a good life. It’s all about living a good life.

Theology begins with divine revelation (it sits in the heart as the seat of wisdom) and asks what can be known because God has disclosed it. They intertwine because philosophy clarifies the questions and concepts that reason can reach on its own, and theology builds on that foundation by responding to those questions with truths that reason alone could not arrive at, without contradicting it.

We all live by something. But first, it’s about whether you’re cognizant of that, and second, if you can then put that into a cohesive narrative.

Most of society gets given one.

Not even realizing they’re eating from a silver platter of Descartes or Nietzsche, the Catholic Church, or that gender studies professor. Most of us are raised on the philosophical backbone of whatever stuck with mainstream culture at the time, co-opted by brands, and made pop culture with advertising.

The problem is, we’re so distracted by the “modern” way of life that we think theology and philosophy are something of antiquity. That it’s something we’ve already solved or outgrown, rather than an ongoing core foundation of our lives.

Modernism and attention

Modern life trains us to think speed equals progress. Newer feels better. Faster feels smarter. So anything old (especially theology and philosophy) gets filed away as tertiary, as though the map is already finalized.

But that assumption is false. And the lack of strong philosophical and theological inquiry in our society is killing us. I am harsh on this topic because we cannot look around at a world raged in war, pollution, mental health, suicide, child abuse, and corruption, and act like we have a core of our being that is stable and righteous.

Someone else has drawn you a map that is missing pieces. You are lost because you keep looking at it like it’s the truth, and it’s got Florida shaped like New Jersey.

What we’ve advanced in is technology, not wisdom.

We’ve optimized tools, systems, and convenience (everyone is in a bubble wrap of their own making), but the fundamental questions haven’t changed at all:

• What does it mean to be a human being?

• What does the longing in our hearts mean?

• What is worth sacrificing for?

• What is worth struggling for?

• What do we do with suffering, desire, and death?

Those questions don’t get solved by a college degree, YouTube doomscrolling, and a nice tech job. They get lived, wrestled with, transmitted. They are both embodied and studied.

I don’t think I’m saying anything that you don’t know, but this is also a calling to be called. To be uncomfortable. To not let someone else ask the hard questions because you think that's a job for someone else. To be moved by the light of something bigger.

Modern life is so loud, so saturated with information, novelty, and distraction, that it gives the illusion of having answers simply because it keeps us from sitting still long enough to feel the questions. What does the longing in our hearts mean?

Theology and philosophy require slowness, attention, and seriousness (but don’t forget to laugh too—everything is absurd). Because when we actually answer the questions, we have a moral imperative not to go back, and most of the world wants to stay the way it is, extracting your attention for their dollar and keeping you sick so you fund the system.

It will be a good problem to have when one day, as individuals, we outgrow our own theology, when the process of inquiry and contemplation sends us beyond the walls of any one institution or teacher.

I think about my own inquiry in three parts today:

1. The receptive, feminine, shamanic spiritual path based on indigenous wisdom

2. The masculine, ordered path of Christianity, for which I am called more and more to Orthodoxy

3. The core, a path of the heart and the body, which I find comes alive in relationship and will even more through motherhood

I do not know where this will get me, but I am inspired and fascinated nonetheless, and that is the place of possibility and potential I hope to sit in for the rest of my life.

If you can imagine the entire realm of human knowledge and understanding as a circle, the idea of this kind of study is to push that circle just a little bigger. This is what you do with a PhD. You get that one little dot on the edge of the circle, and by doing that, you push the whole thing just a little bigger, expanding the edges of human knowledge. Sounds a lot like the way the universe expands, too, if you ask me.

And when a culture stops taking those edge-expanding questions seriously, it doesn’t become neutral or enlightened—it just unconsciously absorbs its theology and philosophy from algorithms, incentives, and market logic rather than from careful reflection.

This is where we stay asleep, until we wake up one day pissed about the current state and find ourselves helpless to it. That is where hope goes to die, but that is when we must dig in harder.

Love,
Val

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