Anxiety Politics and Christ Consciousness

Seagoing vessels exist to transport people and goods in search of greater economic wellbeing. In stormy weather it’s prudent to remain safely in port or return to harbor to recover and make repairs, but the ship only serves its ultimate purpose when it sails upon the sea. This metaphor also applies to the spirituality nurtured in our faith communities in times of great anxiety. A congregation offers solace and safety for those who are traumatized or afraid, yet that is not its ultimate purpose; rather, it is to help prepare our community to take our mission to the world.  

A congregation offers solace and safety for those who are traumatized or afraid, yet that is not its ultimate purpose; rather, it is to help prepare our community to take our mission to the world.

We human beings make meaning and thrive within communities where we feel we belong. Humans flourish in smallish groups, no more than a few hundred people, where everyone knows your name, and you feel confident that you are appreciated and beloved. Healthy congregations care for those in greatest need. At the same time, together we hope to commit ourselves to a deepening connection to the divine mystery that strengthens us as we head out again to stormy seas: we seek to raise human consciousness so that our members are better able to live and flourish in response to their own circumstances or unpredictable spiritual journeys. In committed faith communities, people do better addressing challenges together.

Manipulating Hysteria

It is a truism of political science that the most successful political appeals meet people where they are, but in this age of partisan tensions and false narratives, where in fact are we? Every era is fraught in its own way with turbulent, important changes. Our times appear particularly focused upon issues of individual identity, personal freedom, and competing truths, as well as economic, spiritual, and psychological wellbeing. In a time of existential angst, politics can be manipulated to produce aggressive, emotional projections of the evils allegedly embodied by the other side, projections designed to scare the populace into adopting a more extreme kind of political response, potentially rationalizing horrific acts.

Can a person spiritually grounded in a healthy faith community, built around the traditional spiritual virtues of hope, joy, trust, and love, avoid falling into patterns of hate, dread, and electoral hysteria—and perhaps even help alleviate them? Most of the greatest spiritual teachers over millennia have said yes: it’s a matter of each of us raising our human consciousness so that we each become capable of addressing troublesome issues from our higher selves.

Journey of a Lifetime

Most of the time we do not or cannot—yet—engage the world from our better selves. Raising or developing higher degrees of human consciousness is the spiritual journey of a lifetime, best pursued within a healthy established community of faith and mutual support. In these smallish communities we can safely share and make sense of reality as we experience it, mediated by sacred texts and wisdom teachers, to recognize which consciousness perspective we bring to a problem. I would urge faith leaders to identify and seek to understand the various degrees or phases of human consciousness that might already be in their midst, each needing to be addressed on its own terms, as we accompany congregational members on paths to spiritual maturity and durability. Six spots along this consciousness continuum that I would like particularly to focus upon are:

• Primal Consciousness: Human beings are born with a primal sort of consciousness, unable to think coherent thoughts or even distinguish self from other; instead, they are entirely focused upon immanent survival. In our first couple of years of brain development, most humans transcend this primal state, but childhood trauma, abuse, or feelings of helplessness can sometimes lead years later to a reversion to this primal state and a loss of coherent thinking. In many cases, suicide or other horrific acts can result from this level of consciousness.

• Reactive Consciousness: People who feel little self-agency and few choices in life may react to their experiences through the lens of their pain and suffering, which can present as victimhood. A healthy faith community, while fully acknowledging the depth of a person’s suffering, can help them transcend this state of being by offering them a deep sense of welcome and belonging within a circle of love.

• Self-Centered Consciousness: People who have developed a strong sense of their own ego identity are often attracted to people and groups who celebrate their sense of belonging yet denigrate or deny the legitimacy of groups that don’t appear to share their values. This can provide a false sense of security until something disrupts and threatens their sense of being, then they are likely to react with righteous anger for what might be lost forever.

• Intellectual Consciousness: People with a deeper educational orientation, often with college or graduate school experience, generally anchor their sense of right and wrong in particular intellectual metrics. Their sense of wellbeing is reinforced by research and writings from sources they respect. They will go to great lengths to understand events according to their own intellectual horizons and resist information that does not conform to the worldview. Changing their minds can be quite difficult.

• Intuitive Consciousness: Most healthy faith communities assume that since we are all human beings, with deeply similar needs and desires if not roughly similar life circumstances, it is possible for each to intuit, perhaps with the help of doctrines and sacred texts, the righteous and virtuous path. 

• Christ Consciousness: This state of mind is also known as God consciousness, transcendental idealism, cosmic consciousness, Buddha nature, or enlightened being. It refers to a consciousness fully integrated with our spiritual beliefs, providing resilient and consistent ways to live our lives. Such a person has transcended fear of living or dying, suffering and pain, and the demands of the ego self. Through many years of studying, meditating, and making meaning from lived experience, while following organized spiritual practices such as mindfulness and a deepening care for others in our congregation and beyond, one can become a kind of benefactor dedicated to the continued health of the group—a confidant or mentor of compassion, skill, and wisdom, an “angel” or bodhisattva within the community.

Spiritual leaders, through education, in-depth study, and spiritual practices, are generally expected to operate out of an intuitive consciousness, with a few appearing to be grounded in some form of God consciousness. However, it is quite normal for many congregants to operate from a reactive, self-centered, and/or intellectual consciousness. Thus, to meet our congregations where they are consciously, it often requires spiritual leaders to tolerate and support reactive, self-centered, and intellectual mindsets within the membership even as we try to stay grounded, in authentic and pastoral ways as best we can, in intuitive and/or Christ consciousness. This is the paradox of consciousness faced by those who wish to spiritually lead a faith community. 

Every spiritual leader brings different spiritual gifts of discernment, compassion, theology, pastoral care, extraversion or introversion, drive for social justice, along with our own personal circumstances and needs. In a highly anxious time, or in a particularly anxious community, the spiritual leader is expected to meet each congregant at each person’s current level of fear and misgivings, with the blessed assurance that a higher connection to the divine mystery is possible and desirable. Within God’s house there are many mansions, within the body of Christ many parts: any of them can lead to a higher consciousness of God and the meaning and purpose of each of our lives. 

“We Need Not Suffer Alone”

People need hope to thrive. In a healthy community are some who might barely be surviving, who may be a danger to themselves, their families, the congregation itself. Ignoring such situations is unwise. Individuals who are responding to their own stress in judgmental and/or reactive ways need the focus of pastoral care so they can acknowledge their pain and if possible help them transcend their worries. Less functional communities, under stress, may devolve into ego and selfish states, and their members become preoccupied with “what’s in it for me” rather than a broader vision of generosity and generativity. Similarly, intellectuals can choose to employ their diligent study to transcend the fallen idols of their childhood beliefs, or they can distort the faith’s teachings and sacred texts to isolate themselves from the feared changes in society. 

We need not suffer alone. We need community. Transcending our suffering inside our congregation can become our source of salvation and wellbeing, how we become our truest and best self by trusting in God and each other. Congregations provide a safe harbor from the storm—with the goal finally of pursuing our higher purpose. Call it Christ consciousness, Buddha nature, or even transcendental idealism—in any case, community exists to help us discover, nurture, and achieve an at-one-ment or atonement with ultimate being. Surviving and thriving during an era of great disquiet can lead to a renewal of faith, hope, and joy. Blessed be. 

The Rev. Jim Sherblom ’77 B.A., a biotechnology executive before entering the ministry, is now a retired Unitarian Universalist minister after 12 years of parish ministry in Massachusetts. He is also a former board chair of Andover Newton Theological School (now Andover Newton at YDS), and author of Spiritual Pilgrim: Awakening Journeys of a Twenty-First Century Transcendentalist (Wise Ink, 2018).