Recapture the Rapture: Rethinking God, Sex, and Death in a World That's Lost its Mind

by Jamie Wheal

Let the Mystery Stay the Mystery. The more you plumb the depths of the Mysto, the more you realize that it isn’t something to be mastered or mapped.

“The answer is never the answer,” Ken Kesey once said. “What’s really interesting is the mystery. If you seek the mystery instead of the answer, you’ll always be seeking. I’ve never seen anybody find the answer, but they think they have. So they stop thinking. But the job is to seek mystery, evoke mystery, plant a garden in which strange plants grow and mysteries bloom. The need for mystery is greater than the need for an answer.”

80/20 Awoken to Broken.

F*ck Your Journey. Or as Saint Paul put it more encouragingly: “Love keeps no record of wrong.”

Show us how much you’ve grown. But, dear God, please stop telling us.

Do the Hard Thing.

“Fortune,” Louis Pasteur observed, “favors the prepared.” Or as Mark Twain said, “If it’s your job to eat two frogs, eat the biggest one first.” If you want more flow, bliss, or grace in your life, tackle the gnarliest shit head-on. The Stoics were right about this one, the Obstacle is the Way.

Never Lose the One.

You can go anywhere you want and think anything you want as long as you can make it back to the last known point of consensus reality—the One. So get funky, tweak it out, riff freely, but be sure to stick the landing.

And It’s Not That Either! Whenever we think we’ve found It, we get a huge dopamine hit of pattern recognition and a sense of certainty that it’s all overwhelmingly true—for us, in that moment.

You can no more become fully enlightened than you can become fully educated.

Practice Resurrection. Tibetan monks spend their entire lives meditating so at the moment of dying they can stay awake in the Bardos and step off the wheel of reincarnation for good.

Psychedelics, meditation, breath work, sexuality, martial arts, and extreme sports—all can become death practices. So practice resurrection. Die to all of it. And see who we are on the other side.

Above All, Be Kind. This one comes from Aldous Huxley, on his deathbed, on 200 micrograms of LSD. He held his wife Laura’s hand and delivered four words: “Above all, be kind.”

How do we strike the balance between liberation and structure in our relationship to the central experience of the Ineffable?

If you strip out the cultural specifics, most ritualized sacraments serve three functions—they work as metronomes, tuning forks, and training wheels.

Sacraments offer us something simple: an experience of being on time, in tune, and in balance. The place we all started. A place we can return to. A place from which we can begin again.

Psychologists at Princeton’s Social Neuroscience Lab, for example, have found that people who read narratives develop stronger social cognition than those who don’t. When scanned, the brains of bookworms show more Default Mode Network activity in the area devoted to empathy. We’re kinder and wiser when we can imagine the lives of others.

Cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley calls stories “the mind’s flight simulator.” We get to learn and practice what might be unforgiving in real life. We can harness the power of our imaginations to prepare us for what the world will inevitably throw at us. This is true of all narrative, but it is especially true of those that speak directly to our deepest yearnings.

Whether you call it a transcendental humanism or a rational mysticism, it leaves that “god-shaped hole in our hearts” safely vacant. But we’ve come this far. We should follow our query to its inevitable conclusion.

If media theorist Marshall McLuhan was right and “we become what we behold,” we should pay attention to what we behold. Everybody worships, after all. The only question is what.

Like many classic constructions, the story of Job was started at one point by an original author and then added to and modified over time. What we take as Job’s seamless narrative was actually cobbled together over the centuries.

before we got Dante and the Romantics merging Lucifer with Satan, Beelzebub, and all things big-time baddy, S’tan meant the Adversary, or the One Who Opposes. Think of him more as a plot device than as evil incarnate—Satan doesn’t appear anywhere in the Hebrew Bible in the way we think of him today.) So the story of Job Author #1 had a plot problem—if the God of Abraham was simultaneously all-powerful and all-good, then why on earth would He do all these horrible things to poor old Jobey?

Everyone from Saint Paul to Saint Augustine to Immanuel Kant and David Hume wrestled with it. They had to do backflips to explain the inexplicable.

“Greeks who worshipped such gods had no need for Satan since their prophets never claimed that their gods were unequivocally good,” Pagels explains

“For if we believe that an all-powerful God created a ‘very good’ world, what happened to it?” Pagels wondered after she lost both her son and her husband to tragic deaths in the span of a year. “While the Buddha declared as his first noble truth that ‘all life is suffering,’ Jewish and Christian theologians speak of ‘the problem of suffering’ as if suffering and death were not intrinsic elements of nature but alien intruders on an originally perfect creation” [emphasis

that simple move—cleaving good and evil neatly into two separate camps—gave us the seeds of late nineteenth-century mystical New Thought, which begat Norman Vincent Peale and the Power of Positive Thinking, which begat the New Age, which kind of brings us to our present Conspirituality moment, where growing numbers of us are stitching together outlandish mythologies in place of meaningful responses to a world going off the rails.

“There is no way to suppress change . . . not even in heaven,” Lewis Hyde wrote in his book Trickster Makes This World. “Those who panic and bind the Trickster choose the [path of control and cataclysm]. It would be better to learn to play with him, better especially to develop skills (cultural, spiritual, artistic) that allow some commerce with accident, and some acceptance of the changes that contingency will always engender.”

“We shape our tools,” Marshall McLuhan went on to say, “and our tools shape us.”

Our gods may have shaped us, but we also shape our gods. We may be in their image, but invariably they are also in ours. And if we forget to imbue our gods with a Trickster’s sense of humor, to remind us that life is equal parts tragic, magic, and comic, the joke will inevitably be on us.

I realized that despite my relentless study of everything non-European—Taoism, Buddhism, Sufism, and Native American culture, I was irrevocably steeped in the Judeo-Christian tradition. My mother was an Easter and Christmas Anglican, my father a reluctant atheist who tagged along to church when he had to. After leaving England as a kid, I’d been dumped in Catholic school, so I’d spent ten years observing their strange customs too—from First Communion, to Confession, to the macabre Stations of the Cross.

No matter how low a regard I held it in, all of my experiences, all of the coming-of-age stories I loved, from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest to Cool Hand Luke to Stranger in a Strange Land, were steeped in the idiom of the tragic, sacrificial hero. It was the dominant motif of Western scripture, art, and music for two thousand years of history. I couldn’t escape it if I’d wanted to. If we’re honest, none of us can. Believers or not.

realized that the Buddha was too transcendent to ever fully grab me. Effortless, graceful, inscrutable, he was like the Roger Federer of enlightenment.

Lao-tzu, the mythical Taoist sage, seemed like a dim legend. He arrived in those tales fully formed—a laughing mystic, with no particular details on how he got to where he was. Like the Dude in the Coen brothers’ film The Big Lebowski, Lao-tzu just abides. Timeless. Steeped in the Way. Any suffering in this world is merely a lack of alignment to the Tao. All grace comes from surrender to It. As much as I still find Taoism indispensable while chasing flow in the mountains and oceans, I found it less helpful as a guide through the nitty-gritty of my own confused life on the flats.

If Buddha and Lao-tzu felt too transcendent and ahistorical for me, Muhammad felt too immanent and historical. He was a warlord, a general, and a brilliant strategist, after all. Like Sherman on his Civil War march to the sea, Muhammad’s armies decimated their opponents.

Because what Pagels showed was that there really wasn’t a singular and definitive historical Jesus. Our understandings of him and what he represented were irreducibly mediated through human interest and historical context.

Was he the divine Son of God, sent to earth to free us of our Original Sin? Was he a mortal man who became enlightened? Or a regular dude who didn’t? Was he a fictional construct—a convenient grab bag of Middle Eastern solar gods and mystery cults? Or was he a cipher, an allegory cloaking a mystic’s initiatory instructions? Was he really ever here at all? So much blood and ink have been spilled trying to litigate these questions—typically with far more certainty and less curiosity than is helpful. But what if we’ve all been fundamentally missing the point in our striving for certainty, pro or con?

Because what is beyond doubt is that the idea of Jesus, the Jesus Meme, which includes all versions—god, man, and myth—has shaped the last two thousand years of human history more than almost any other human who has ever lived. That ...

That was the other thing I learned from reading Pagels—the prospect that buried underneath two millennia of all-too-human bureaucracy, dogma, and politics lay a hidden tradition of personal illumination.

The Gnostics, alight with passion and I-I, and I-Thou experience of the divine, ran a somewhat unconventional growth strategy. They believed in the maxim “by their fruits ye shall know them” and membership was self-selecting by the light in someone’s words and deeds. Women were often leaders and preachers. Art, music, and even sacred sexuality were common. They were mystic seekers, not institution builders.

let’s face it—Christianity has some god-awful branding problems.

For the faithful, there’s still some meat on that bone. But for the unchurched, twice shy, or followers of different faiths? It’s slim pickings trying to gin up enthusiasm for a Christian revival. It would be a mistake to even try. But it would be an even bigger mistake to scrap it entirely. The Jesus Meme has been virally replicating for two thousand years. It’s created a tremendous amount of momentum, resonance, and shared reference points recognized around the world.

I’ve ended up reading most of the Bible, but in snippets from Shakespeare to Dante to Dylan. Samson and Delilah. Lot’s wife. Cain whacking Abel. Abraham and Isaac down on Highway 61. Palm Sundays. Last Suppers.

So, if the bad news is, we’re almost out of time in a world devoid of Meaning. The Good News is that some of the answers have been right in front of us all along. We’d be crazy not to make the most of that fact.

The idea that a flesh-and-blood mortal could feel a burning truth inside them, and seek to share it with the world, despite the betrayal and ridicule of those they were trying to help, while having to face personal doubt, despair, and uncertainty alone? That sounded more like the human experience we all have to live through than any of the more transcendent tales I’d found elsewhere.

Pema Chodron, the Tibetan Buddhist nun, writes in When Things Fall Apart, “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. . . . To live is to be willing to die over and over again.”

Leonard Cohen, a Zen Jew, writes in his song “Anthem,” “Ring the bells that still can ring / Forget your perfect offering / There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.” Those lyrics gave me goose bumps. Instead of waging war on the broken parts of myself, Cohen offered permission to celebrate the woundings.

The Japanese have two related terms that speak to this sense of redemption within imperfection—Wabi Sabi, “flawed beauty,” and Kintsugi, the art of repairing broken pottery with golden glue. Wabi Sabi is a philosophy of the imperfection and impermanence of all things, and how life is made even more exquisite by that realization.

Alice Walker, a sometime Buddhist and unrepentant pagan, writes about how marginalized African American artists used to greet each other in Jim Crow Atlanta. “‘All those at the banquet!’ they’d say and shake hands or hug. Sometimes they said this laughing and sometimes they said it in tears, but that they were all at the Banquet of Life was always affirmed.”

One of the most interesting examples of a truly global mythology comes from renegade Jesuit priest Teilhard de Chardin. He felt compelled to bridge the worlds of faith and science but so thoroughly upset the Church fathers that they exiled him from his native France to China.