Recently, the junior high kids in my church were having a discussion about the story of Noah and the
ark in their Sunday School class. Their teacher reported to me that they were intrigued by God's
detailed instructions, down to the nearest cubit, of how Noah was supposed to build the ark. Why don't
people get such detailed messages from God these days, they wondered? One of them, a kid named Sean, observed that today we are so bombarded by messages, electronic and otherwise, assaulting us from so many directions, that "if somebody got a message from God, they might think it was spam and ignore it!"
I've been meditating for the past week on Sean's wise words. Just how do we sort out divine messages from the "spam" we make up in our own heads, much less from the "spam" sent to us by others? It's an old problem that won't go away. Early Christianity had a very difficult time distinguishing worthy expressions of divine Spirit from those which were not. There were lots of Christians who claimed to deliver messages from God, and there was no institutionalized means of determining whether these claims were valid or spurious. St. Paul devoted much ink to this vexing problem in his letters to the first churches, warning against charlatan preachers and false doctrines.
Later, once it consolidated its centralized authority, the Catholic Church simply declared the era of direct
divine inspiration to be over. Any message seeming to come from God that wasn't channeled through Rome was declared "spam". This worked up to a point. After all, there was plenty within the bounds of Catholic dogma that did have the ring of divine truth to it. The authority of the church canonized and preserved the Bible with all its spiritual riches. The doctrines of the church had at least some basis in the practical religious experience of everyday people.
But by the late medieval era, the Catholic hierarchy became dreadfully corrupt, hypocritical, and thoroughly at odds with its own stated purposes. It began to smell more and more like a "spam" factory
itself. In time, people began to install the spiritual anti-spam software of the Protestant Reformation onto their religious hard-drives.
One such anti-spam program was called the Wesleyan Quadrilateral. John Wesley, founder of what we now know as the Methodist Church, said that the way to discern whether or not an inspiration was authentic was by comparing it to four "sides" - the teachings of Jesus, of his disciples, and of the Bible, and the experience of Christians over the millennia since the Bible was written. In its time, the "quadrilateral" was a very progressive idea. It injected a bit of democracy into faith. It left room for questioning the supposedly divine utterances of the church, to see if they "squared" with the good common sense and practical life-lessons of everyday people. But Wesley's glimmer of openness and religious evolution in the 18th century was too radical for many Christians, then and now.
The new Pope's biographer, John Allen, was quoted in the SF Chronicle as saying that Ratzinger "believes that the best antidote to political totalitarianism is ecclesial totalitarianism. He believes the Catholic
Church serves the cause of human freedom by restricting freedom in its internal life, thereby remaining clear about what it teaches and believes."
If it is a true characterization, the new Pope Benedict's ideas resonate with the words of the early
American, William Penn, who said that "men will either be ruled by God or by tyrants". Many of the "founding fathers" of this country believed similarly. They thought that unless the inner person was subject to the spiritual monarchy of God, the outer person would be incapable of engaging in democracy. Unless the soul was protected from spiritual spam, the body politic would be hopelessly infected with deadly political viruses.
It seems to me that we have evolved, albeit haltingly, from that condition. We've practiced democracy enough on the outer dimension so that it has taken root in our inner life. I believe that it is now possible for us to practice spiritual as well as social democracy. We don't need a religious or moral absolute "monarchy", whether a Bible or a church or a Pope, to tell us definitively what is right and wrong, what is
acceptable and what is not. We can be liberated from church dictatorship and be liberated from political
dictatorship, as well.
Spiritual democracy is what happens when we convene an assembly within ourselves to examine carefully whether or not we have really heard the voice of the selfless, loving God, or just the voice of our selfish, egoic selves. Spiritual democracy is what happens when regular folks share their spiritual experiences with each other and subject themselves both to encouragement and to skeptical scrutiny. Spiritual democracy is what happens when people listen to each other's stories of divine encounter, and give each other honest feedback about whether or not it is pseudo-spiritual spam or the real thing. A church can be such a spiritual democracy, where we share our best lights, and respond lovingly but honestly to each others' perceptions.
Popes, and even Protestant preachers like myself, may have valuable things to say now and again. But better yet to be part of a spirit-centered community of peers, one including all sorts of people with many
points of view, in order to get help in sorting the real soul-food from the spam.