My Crisis of Faith

For a while, I thought a lot about Jesus. It was seven years ago at Christmas that I decided to drop into a church service. I was inspired by meeting a Catholic man with whom I had so much in common, I was curious to know if we could be considered divergent based solely on our separate spiritual paths.

I attended a slew of masses in a centuries’ old mission in Santa Barbara, built on the backs of all but enslaved local Native Americans. I had been following this mystical Mayan prophecy for so many years, I sank into the pews feeling like an ancient indigenous person broken by colonial Catholicism. I had been alone on my path – other than the online circuitry of Resonant Truth – for such a long spell, I was relieved to practice a faith with others. Like an original Mayan, in my imagination, receiving a Biblical teaching for the first time, I chose to share a concept of god with other humans instead of standing alone as a nearly sole survivor of an esoteric spiritual discipline. I thought seriously of conversion and became enamored with the most basic Christian message of devout love and connection. It really didn’t resonate as different from Natural Time: I am another yourself.

I had, through years following wavespells and categorizing people by their Mayan birth astrology, found a way to be encompassing and accepting, of recognizing the valid differences between people as well as feeling connected by that foundational Natural Time adage that you are my other me. I could absolutely embrace and appreciate rigorous Catholics and was drawn in particular to the Franciscan monks who resided at the mission and made Christianity their entire life’s framework in a way that mirrored my passion for the Mayan cycles. I relied on their austerity and rigor to enhance my own spiritual growth. And I did have my mind blown by Christian rituals and the aura of Christ pervading every stanza of the New Testament. I loved him, this old mythological hero that etherically dwells in every believer. I felt him next to me, a constant companion, and then within me, embedded in my heart.

The man who had instigated my foray into churchgoing told me that my Mayan prophetic inclinations went against Biblical tenets and teachings, was dangerous to his spiritual constitution. I didn’t see him anymore. But I kept going to daily morning mass, trusting that he was a messenger pointing me towards unity with the one of the most universal religions. Meanwhile, he fell into great personal disarray in the same window, and I suspected that the closed mind of some Christians disallows them from being seekers, too stagnant in their spiritual principles. I couldn’t cite in Biblical terms where his study of Christianity had stymied him into suffering, but I could tell, from the Mayan perspective, that he as a White Planetary Mirror was caught in endless self-sacrifice, prone to have his heart gutted in the most public way, unless he embraced the opposite Tzolkin archetype of Yellow Star: a fearless devotion to natural beauty as it shines in the heavens – uncomplicated, everlasting and available to every open eye, the world around.

True Christianity is very Yellow Star. The cross looks like a glinting spangle, and Jesus’ birth was hallmarked by ancient magicians who traveled under the celestial span to welcome his arrival. He was himself a superstar, his bright legacy transcending millennia and crossing both continents and oceans, overtaking other religious dogma, inspiring offshoots that both muddy his teachings and crystallize them. He was a carnal god, a fallen star that stayed aflame and lit ways to walk on this earth. I can’t think of a better way of being human than his.

I took a long time away from ResonantTruth.com because humanity as it expresses itself in the Internet world is very hypercritical and egocentric. I sit before a machine and announce my various proclamations to the world, enthroned in my own perspectives and encouraging you to follow. My opinions are paramount, as are visual images of my life’s unfolding. See me, hear me. I started to feel infantile in how I showed up in the world. I took a long break.

I needed the time to discover if I was truly a disciple of the Mayan cycles, or if I were more broadly just a seeker. Since the message across all the lines of spirituality I’ve encountered is the same, of love, could I forego this commitment to an almost lost mysticism and be in the mainstream with the nearly world-dominant Christians?

No. I discovered no, I couldn’t. Because the foundations of cultural Christianity – the way it manifests in churches and in many personal practices – is not that different than typical Internet expressions of opining and oversharing. I need more quietude and active humility than much of church-going Christianity inspires. I like to think of Christ the way he was, trekking through empty desert expanse between townships of terribly sick and lost sufferers, with that magickal ability to heal, work miracles. I just love his essence, and I do so like a celebrity-worshiping teenager: gaga, in a mania, because he has something star-like that burns through my darkness.

But I need the Mayan cycles to be anything like him: forgiving, accepting, seeing, persevering, courageous, vitally alive, in love with life’s unfolding. I need to feel the godliness in everything, and I have to also be open to the ungodliness that fights against divinity, reviles it. The Mayan teachings identify the shadows that are cast by light. We each are blindness and clear sight, but it’s when I am lost in the dark that I need truth-telling to assure me that it’s just night time, the sun will rise, the godhead return to warm my heart.

Christ understood suffering. He embodied it. He claimed to be taking on our suffering so we could be released of it. I haven’t tried hard enough to turn my own pain over to god. I still wear it many days like a mantle. When people go into a spiritual temple and see a castigated hero hanging from a cross, memorialized in an anguishing death, I believe they – like me – say: there I am. His pain is a gateway to his prophecy. I arrived in church these recent years and sat in the pews long enough to understand that Christ died in anguished martyrdom over a few days of a lifetime, but he served and was strong for all the others. His message is of vitality, grace and the power of faith. In the house of his holiness, I healed my broken heart that had nothing to do with that Catholic man, or any human failure. It was a heart shattered by sacrifice, such as the Mayan ritual on a White Mirror day. I learned to limit that scope of suffering to such a small percentage of my life as Jesus, and to make spirituality the spine of my daily existence, as he suggested.

But I choose or was chosen to express that spirituality in the language of the lost Maya – lost like Christ, therefore immortal, available for resurrection in my beating heart. It’s a lonely road. His was, possibly. I don’t expect or have any need for Natural Time to be the next New Testament. I think it’s more likely to be dying out than ascending into prominence. But it’s alive in me, and I express the magic and mysticism it brings me as an act of gratitude, an offering of art. I don’t like the Internet part, even though it connects us now, and I’m not sure I am even at ease with my own human proclamations of the Mayan calendar cycles – certainly I’m in a pulpit or on a pedestal in many moments when I would rather be as humble as Christ and his best disciples.

I feel called. And if you’ve read this long treatise, you’ll know that I am integrating nowadays one of the world’s grandest and notable religions into my daily dreaming of the Mayan calendars. Unification and integration are concepts I wish to embody: In Lak’ech.