If something is spiritual, it's unknowable. It's something words can't describe. It can't be touched, only felt. It can't be experienced with the senses, but rather leaves itself to be defined by words like "peaceful," "serene," and "awesome." It's the sense of knowing there's wind blowing, but not knowing where it's coming from.
On the other hand, the word authority implies ownership of a concrete realm of time and space. A master mechanic has authority on the intricate details of assembling an engine.
So, when someone claims to have spiritual authority, they are trying to box in something that is outside of space and time. They're trying to take something that was originally meant to create a sense of awe and wonder and manipulate it into something that fits into our worldview.
And, when a group of people attribute spiritual authority to one or two people, they are essentially giving that person power to take what wasn't supposed to be defined in the first place and to put our own, broken sense of what spirituality should look like onto it.
And, once this happens, another phrase results: "spiritual truth."
Once something spiritual is defined in human terms that make sense to sensible beings, truth claims can start being made.
The problem with this is, everyone who claims to have this insider's knowledge of what's spiritually true comes up with different measuring sticks to gauge it with.
And so, when we take the Gospels for instance, we have four differing accounts of Jesus' life.
What's true for Matthew, isn't true for Mark, isn't true for Luke, and so on. It's the nature of journalism and eyewitness accounts. Everybody witnesses things differently.
And, when we take U.S. history, we have differing accounts of what happened when the Pilgrims first made it to the New Land.
And, with the dinosaurs.
And, with every news report.
And, with every government scandal.
So, as a Christian who grew up with this idea that certain people had insider's knowledge to "spiritual truth," while the rest of us had to crawl around looking for the gurus, it's hard to listen to any lecture outside of a Ted Talk without experiencing the sensation of feeling manipulated.
I can only suspend reality for so long before I have to put my feet back on the floor.
I don't know if this makes sense to anyone, but it's my experience right now.
In order to even have a phrase like "spiritually true" exist in the first place, you have to be able to marry the elements of sixth-sensedness and sound, intution and touch, emotionalism and smell.
Or, "Taste and see that the Lord is good."
Basically, I feel like I've fallen for a God-shaped pyramid scheme.
Someone decided to write down what they thought God was like, and left to the devices of the fucked-up-edness of human beings, it became true. It became boxed in. It became law.
And the law determines who's in and who's out. Who gets into the God club and who doesn't.
I wonder what Jesus meant when he said "the truth will set you free."
Did he possibly mean something much simpler than the concept we've somehow turned into law - which is (flippantly and disgustingly unintelligible) "just believe in Jesus and you'll be set free!"
What if the "freedom-setting" truth he was talking about was the horrible idea (to the truth-dependent) of not trying to be so anal about what the truth really is?
What if this being set free that Jesus spoke of so frequently was not about grasping God with our hands and turning spiritual concepts into binding laws that put fences around the unknowable, but letting
truth be what we can grasp and spirituality be what can't be grasped (aka God).
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