First broadcast 2 September 2007.

Rachael Kohn: Did you know that you can cross over a drawbridge and enter a castle, every day and every night?

Hello, I'm Rachael Kohn and this is The Spirit of Things, on ABC Radio National. In this month's edition of the Spiritual Classics series, we'll hear about the Catholic Saint, Teresa of Avila, and her most famous work, the Interior Castle, and what it means to one of the New Age's most charismatic spiritual leaders, Caroline Myss.

Then we leap 400 years hence, and find out about John T. Robinson's Honest to God, a book that made it to the front page of Time magazine after it was published n 1963. It became a watershed in the life of a North Carolina Anglican priest, Jack Spong, who since then has changed the way many people, not only Christians, think about God. The retired Bishop Spong will join me later in the program, and he gives a brilliantly lucid response to the fundamentalists and the atheists.

But first, Caroline Myss.

Caroline Myss: I cross the bridge into the silent bliss of my interior castle. I close the drawbridge, and forbid all outside influences from entry into this holy place that is my soul. Here in my castle I am alone with God. I embrace the power of prayer. I open myself to divine guidance and I surrender myself to become as a channel for grace, healing and service as God directs my life.

Rachael Kohn: That's just the beginning of a prayer by Caroline Myss. I first learned about Caroline at a Catholic Education Conference where I discovered her books were popular. I was surprised, because she's a leading figure in the New Age, and claims to be a medical intuitive healer, and her book, Sacred Contracts with the Universe seemed a tad out of place there. But as you'll hear today, her background is Catholic and she takes her inspiration from a leading Catholic mystic, Teresa of Avila. And that's who we'll be talking about today, particularly her famous work, the Interior Castle.

Caroline Myss: Teresa was a 16th century Spanish Carmelite. She was a great, great, great mystic, and she was a rare, rare, rare woman. She was a wild young woman, whose father put her in a convent to protect her from getting too wild. They never intended that she would be inspired to become a nun, but she was and she did, and by the time she was 19, she was in a Carmelite convent. And I'll fast-forward, and say that Carmelites are cloistered. Today most people would know that. I don't know if you have a lot of Carmelite convents here in Australia.

Rachael Kohn: Not many.

Caroline Myss: I don't think so. They are more typical in Europe and certainly there are Carmelite convents in America, Trappist, Carmelite, but in a Carmelite rule, the women or the men they take vows to live within a cloister, to not ever leave the monastery, and that's an important feature here. But anyway, Teresa was a Carmelite, and when she was 39 years old, she had what's called a conversion experience, and that's a critical part of her life because up until that time, she was just an ordinary nun. But when she turned 39 she had an experience of profound mystical awakening, in which she experienced an emotional psychic, spiritual soul connection to Christ. And in that moment, her whole life became a spiritually animated life.

Rachael Kohn: She was prolific.

Caroline Myss: She was prolific; she became the first doctor of the Catholic church, as a woman. She wrote her autobiography, she wrote Progress of the Soul, and she wrote her last great piece, which is called the Interior Castle. This book has been studied for centuries; what it is, is that Teresa had such a rich interior life that towards the end of her life her spiritual director said, 'You have to write about what it is you have experienced when you go under prayer, what is it that you have learned about the soul that is do extraordinary, because the rest of us want to know where you go when you close your eyes. By the time Teresa was in her 50s in the convent, not only did her sisters, the nuns that she lived with, realise that they were living with a saint. But the whole of Spain knew that, as well as Rome, the Vatican. Her experiences, her mystical experiences, had become famous, even though she was a cloistered nun. She had of course by this time, started other convents, she was an abbess.

But let me just give you an example: she would sometimes levitate.

Rachael Kohn: Levitate?

Caroline Myss: Yes.

Rachael Kohn: Other people witnessed this?

Caroline Myss: Oh yes. Now mind you, don't picture her around the ceiling Rachael. She would go into states of ecstasy where she would hover over the ground by 2 inches, or something like that. Now that's not unusual. I mean in the sense that Eastern mystics have been seen to do that.

Rachael Kohn: I've read that her face was illuminated.

Caroline Myss: Her face would be illuminated. She had a number of mystical experiences that were so profound that other people witnessed them, they knew that something of a great profound nature was going on between her and God, and so she wrote the Interior Castle. There are so many things about this book that struck me as being outstanding, not the least of which was that she said she had a vision of the soul, and she said the soul was like a crystal with seven mansions, and the fact that she said seven, when I have written Anatomy of the Spirit, years ago, I took a model, a template, trying to describe the relationship between the seven chakras, the seven sacraments, the seven levels of the Tree of Life, the fundamental seven levels of power, and our biology, and wove it together, taking the sacred traditions, all of which use the template of seven. You know, here I am 12, 14 years later, and I'm reading the work of Teresa that says, 'And now we go under the soul'.

Rachael Kohn: And the Castle is the soul?

Caroline Myss: Yes, she used the metaphor of the castle, and she said 'The soul is a castle, and it's the deeper part of your self that can only be accessed through prayer.' And what she was saying is that you have to pull away from your five senses, from your ego, and move deeply, deeply into your interior self.

Rachael Kohn: How much is that an intellectual exercise and how much is it something beyond that>

Caroline Myss: The intellect can't get to the soul, Rachael, any more than now I'm completely convinced that the intellect cannot help you heal. I am absolutely convinced now after working with Teresa's work for so long and working in the castle, and working with people, helping them enter the castle.

Rachael Kohn: And yet it is a book that she wrote, that you read with your intellect, so it's got to be -

Caroline Myss: Well but she addresses that. You know, she addresses that you will have a struggle here, that's why the third mansion is called the defeat of reason. One of the most difficult things, obstacles, to the entry into your soul, is to defeat the love we have of our own intellect, and I need to have everything in life be reasonable, to have a reasonable God, to have a reasonable force to make sense, this is the way we structure things, we say things like 'There must be a reason for this. I wonder what God was thinking. There must be a reason why things happen as they do because we actually think that this is a logical and orderly universe according to our personal map, Rachael. We actually think that.

Rachael Kohn: So is she elaborating another kind of map that one has to progress along?

Caroline Myss: Yes. Exactly. What she's saying is You have to get through your need to have an image of God, where God is a fair, reasonable being and get past that and begin to trust that there is a loving God that has your best interests at heart, and move into this idea, it's not an idea, God is not an idea, moving into an experience. I first had to state that Teresa was a mystic; she was a mystical theologian and a mystic is someone who experiences God rather than talks about God. And therein lies the first significant difference between how Therese understood the nature of God versus people who talk about the nature of God. Teresa experienced God. When she wrote the Interior Castle she wrote it as a map, preparing people for the experience of God, a map of illumination, through which prayer was a primary requisite.

Rachael Kohn: Now people thinking about that would say, 'Well Teresa of Avila was living in the 16th century, she was an abbess, she was within a monastery, what does it have to say to us today who are living in the midst of our lives?'

Caroline Myss: It's a great question.

Rachael Kohn: Is where your book comes in, in a way, to provide a segue from what she was saying?

Caroline Myss: Yes. It's a great question, wonderful. This is what I absolutely believe, Rachael, no matter where I go in the world, I think we're living in a mystical renaissance, I really do. I think we are living at a time where there is a mystical awakening, where people are being called to be mystics out of monasteries. You know, there was a time like in Teresa's time of Francis of Assisi, or any of the great mystics of the Christian Catholic tradition, or the great mystics of the Buddhist tradition, of the Hindu tradition, of the Islamic tradition, when they would be called to live within monasteries or ashrams, because that's what that time and in that era called for.

Today, the new mystic is someone like you and me who lives an ordinary life in the world with an extraordinary spiritual life. We have for the last 50 years a hybrid spirituality that we've created, we've combined health and yoga and vegetarianism, and relaxation and therapy, and we think that's been spirituality but it hasn't, Rachael. It's been a hybrid mixture and it's actually been the discovery of the self, but it's not the discovery of the soul. The journey into the soul is a journey of discovering God, prayer, reflection, contemplation and devotion.

Rachael Kohn: I want to ask you about the soul because a lot of people use that term.

Caroline Myss: And a lot of people don't.

Rachael Kohn: Well I certainly encounter it, it's probably an occupational hazard, but soul is thrown around, spirit, it's such a mysterious concept, it's hard to know whether it's a metaphor, whether it's real, how does one objectify the soul. How do you define soul and spirit?

Caroline Myss: Spirit is the ego's expression of the soul. The spirit to me is what someone talk about at the level of earth consciousness, you know, put your spirit into it. The spirit is either the soul is what Teresa would call a castle, the interior, deep self that is accessed through silence, through prayer, through withdrawing from one's personal agenda with God. It's why that metaphor of the castle to cross the drawbridge of the ego, and get to some place deeper within yourself, where you are able to sit in silence and say, 'Be still, I know I am with God' and leave a personal agenda at the drawbirdge and say, 'I have no agenda with you dear God. I don't even know how to speak to you, but I will begin with saying, I surrender, I have no personal agenda, and I will be still and wait and not chatter in my head, because I can't bear to have no sound in my head. And I won't talk to you like Santa Claus. Can I have ....? Will you take care of ...? Can I have more?' It's the spirit that chatters all the time. It's the spirit that has a Santa Claus list, and Can I have more stuff? And where's my stuff', and will you bless me and bless all my friends and family, and Can I have that job? And make sure that the job has a pension plan, and I need to be successful', and that's the spirit. The soul says I am here, I trust. There's the difference.

Rachael Kohn: She certainly captures the self-obsessed refrain that's so popular these days. Caroline Myss is certainly up there in the New Age stakes, with a number of works on self-empowerment and healing. But today she's my guest on The Spirit of Things, Spiritual Classics series here on ABC Radio National. And she's talking about Teresa of Avila's Interior Castle, which also inspired Caroline's latest book Entering the Castle. We'll find out more about her personal life in a moment. And do stay on for Jack Spong later in the program, who reveals something of his beginnings, and how the spiritual classic he's chosen radically changed him from a small town priest, to a world changing bishop. That's coming up later in the program.

But now, back to Caroline Myss, who was pretty critical of the me-me-me chatter of the new age.

Well I certainly hear a lot of the spirit chatter from a great many people in the New Age movement who actually do promise these things, that so long as you do the right affirmations and the blessings.

Caroline Myss: What's an affirmation, Rachael, but a bargain? I want, I want, I want, just say it three times, it's witchcraft!

Rachael Kohn: Well Caroline, it sounds like the seven mansions that Teresa of Avella had laid out for us are a much more difficult journey. How does one use it, how does one go through and is it possible for you -

Caroline Myss: I think the word might be authentic than difficult. But go ahead.

Rachael Kohn: Can you kind of summarise what that progression looks like.

Caroline Myss: Teresa says the journey into the soul is an exploration of self knowledge that has everything to do with your relationship to discovering God or your blockages to God. So that is a fundamental definition. So let's take it the next step. The mansions, the seven mansions of the soul, each one takes you progressively closer to an intimate relationship to God, or a progression of illumination, to become clearer in your capacity to carry truth within you. What am I talking about there?

When someone reads the work of great mystics, even Albert Einstein who qualifies as a mystic, eventually you will read somewhere their writings a reference to how painful, what they understand or how they understand the world to be is. Eventually, they will refer to the pain that they carry in their heart. Now the ordinary mortal will interpret that as some kind of private little emotional pain of being lonely. But that's not it at all, Rachael. What they're referring to is the pain of holding a truth, of being able to comprehend a cosmic truth, while still being in the middle mortal form, and the distance between that truth and this form.

When Teresa or any of these great saints, who organised a path of interior development, interior stamina, whether it was Ignatius Loyola or Buddha or any of them, what they are saying in the soul, because the mind can't do it, is you have to develop your soul step by step, and the reason you do it is because great truth gets revealed to you in meditation. Look at the cosmic, the actual cosmic power of forgiveness, and when that truth is actually revealed to you, it's revealed to you so that you start praying and carrying the pain of people who can't forgive. It's not about intellect, it's about what your soul is able to do on behalf of others. The mind is a jealous instrument, Rachael, the mind is not generous, and the mind is not capable of doing acts of generosity and love that the soul can do. But the soul has to be refined, and built and trained as an instrument of love.

Rachael Kohn: I want to ask you about that training because -

Caroline Myss: And that's what entering the Castle is about.

Rachael Kohn: I want to ask you about that training because the language of the soul has often been identified as prayer, and Teresa of Avila was very much a good Catholic, and she was very focused on prayer, one could say that the interior Castle was about developing prayer -

Caroline Myss: It was a map of prayer.

Rachael Kohn: Is that one of the things that attracted you Caroline, to Teresa of Avila, the importance of prayer. I ask you that because you write in entering the Castle about prayer, and about how the actual, almost the liturgical, well the Catholic mass for example, is a very important vehicle for entering the soul, and perhaps many people today have sort of cast aside things like prayer and have gone for affirmations and intuition.

Caroline Myss: That's lazy, that's just being lazy. They don't get - people have dismissed, have lost any sense, they have no comprehension of what prayer is, of what the sacred is, of the fact that the sacred needs maintenance, that you do have to take off your shoes when you're on sacred ground, we've gotten very arrogant, Rachael, and I'm not talking about Catholicism, yes, I come from a Catholic background and I've come full circle, and I'm not a practising Catholic in the sense of I'm not a conservative Catholic in the least, and I think the politics of the church are nonsense. I am a practising mystic and I am devoted to mystical teachings, whether in Catholicism, or in Buddhism.

Rachael Kohn: And does that entail prayer every day?

Caroline Myss: Oh, absolutely. But let me give you an example of a prayer. Teresa, for example, one of her favourite prayers, imagine that you go to bed at night and you're by yourself and you enter into this whole sense that you're in a cocoon and you quietly say 'Let nothing disturb the silence of this moment with you, dear God; let nothing disturb the silence of this moment.' And you remind yourself that 'I will not be afraid in this life', and as you look at your life, you dwell on this moment, and you say 'Let nothing disturb the silence of this moment, this day of my life will never come again. This day will never come gain, and I choose to spend my day, I choose to spend my evening and I choose to spend my night in complete safety and gratitude in your company. I will not let myself wander into any frightened thoughts. I will stay in my sweet cocoon with you, in this gentle truth, that this day will never come again, this night will never come again, and nothing will disturb the silence of this moment.' Now there is a prayer. Do I pray every day? You better believe it.

Rachael Kohn: Caroline Myss, what about you? I mean Teresa of Avila was a nun although she did live with the community and with the abbess of her community, and as you say she established many monasteries, I think about 17.

Caroline Myss: Exactly 17. Well done, and they're all active. Today.

Rachael Kohn: Well what about you, do you live the singular life as a spiritual leader?

Caroline Myss: I am single, but not because I'm a spiritual leader. I had a partner for eight years and he and I, I'm not sure yet where it's going to go, we're still in touch with each other so I'm not sure. But I don't see that a deeply spiritual life and a personal life are mutually exclusive at all. Not at all. I'm not a nun. I don't intend to live like that. Maybe I was once upon a time, but even as a creative woman or as a businesswoman, I'm also a writer and I'm a teacher, and I have a very deep interior life, all of the above are true. I'm very devoted to my friends and my family, and I buy wild clothes and I love jewellery. So all of the above are true and that is a wonderful thing to know about me because - and I'm a gourmet cook; I do great gardening, because the idea, the fear we have a tremendous fear that by having a deep spiritual life, we're going to be single. And celibate.

Rachael Kohn: Because it's so demanding, and of course Teresa of Avila's love was so focused on God, it seems like a substitute for other kinds of love.

Caroline Myss: Yes. what it is, the fact is if you are imbalanced and psychologically depressed, you're going to be single because you're so demanding. If you're an unforgiving bitter person you're going to be single because who wants to live with you? Does that ever occur to people? Whereas if you're healthy, loving, with a rich interior life, who wouldn't want to live with you?

Rachael Kohn: Caroline Myss has written Entering the Castle: An Inner Path to God and Your Soul, and she was my guest on this Spiritual Classics program.

John Shelby Spong is well-known to Australians where his message of a Christian faith that is not beholden to a 1st century mentality, has been welcomed by many. And they're not all Christians; people of other faiths also find his perspective refreshing and illuminating. He's a serious scholar, and his latest book, Jesus for the Non-Religious builds on more than a century of New Testament scholarship. Both his heart and his head are passionately entwined in his exposition of what it means to be a person of faith.

Jack Spong, welcome to Australia, it's great to have you back.

John Shelby Spong: Thank you so much, it's wonderful to see you again, to be back with you.

Rachael Kohn: Well you've been welcomed by many Australians; about 900 who have registered for the Common Dreams Conference. But you've had the usual cold shoulder from the Sydney Anglican diocese, which has accused you of emptying Christianity of its fundamental beliefs. You must be pretty used to this kind of dichotomy when you arrive on the scene.

John Shelby Spong: Yes, that's true. I've known Peter Jensen for a long time and he hadn't changed. This is not the first time he's done that, and I must say it's amusing to me that he would think I really want to speak in one of his churches.

My audience, Rachael, is the people that his kind of religion offends, and they leave the church and they yearn for something. So when he talks about gutting Christianity, what I'm doing I suspect, or at least what he feels I'm doing, is gutting his degree of certainty and his level of fundamentalism, which I think is easily guttable. Christianity was a first century religion. It shaped itself in terms of a world view of a three-tiered universe where miracles were happening every day. If you didn't understand it, you called it a miracle, where a sickness was punishment from God, all sorts of concepts that 21st century people have long abandoned, but they still live in the hearts of ultraconservative, fundamentalist and fundamentalist Christians come in both Catholic and Protestant varieties, so it's fairly common.

Rachael Kohn: Well that realisation that the world had moved on was already apparent to one of your mentors, John T. Robinson, the Bishop of Woolwich who wrote Honest to God, and it was published in 1963. Now what a year that was: the Beatles came out of their cave in Liverpool and sort of turned the world of music and youth upside down, and John T. Robinson wrote that book which ended up on the cover of Time magazine, and it fundamentally questioned the Christian framework. It called people to a revolution of faith. What were you doing at that time?

John Shelby Spong: I was a very young priest in a little town in North Carolina, and the first thing I noticed about that book, I didn't know John at that time at all, but the first thing I noticed is that people in my congregation had heard of the book and were beginning to ask me about it, and when a theological book gets to the people of your church before it gets to the local pastor, it means he'd better read it quickly. So I sort of put it aside and I'd read enough review of it and I said, 'Well, you know, it's sort of second-hand stuff', that's the way you put down original people, you say, 'That's all old hat'. He quotes Bonhoeffer, and he quotes Tillich and he quotes Bultmann. And I've read all three of those people, so this is nothing new.

And I put it on my book reading list, and we went to the beach in North Carolina that summer, and I read that book, and I read it again, and I read it - I couldn't put it down, I read it three times from cover to cover, and what he did was let the cat out of the bag; he put together all of the things that we had just sort of piecemealed, but they suddenly came together in a cohesive whole, and you could no longer say the things you used to say about God with integrity. Your consciousness was raised to a new dimension. And so I had to begin the process of re-thinking what I believed. Not because the experience was changed, but certainly the explanation of the experience had.

Now fortunately for me, it was in the summer that I read that book that I also moved from this little parish in Eastern, North Carolina, to Lynchburg, Virginia, which was a very different kind of church. And every time the minister moves he has a chance to recreate himself, because he doesn't live in the expectations. And so I decided that if I was going to continue as an Anglican priest, that I would have to teach the Bible the way it had been taught to me in theological college, and so I started an adult class in that church and I used Robinson's approach and I used the Biblical criticism approach that I'd learned in seminary, and I discovered a fascinating thing. Far from being offended, most of the people were very eager to learn that they don't have to be 1st century people to be believers. It was a freeing experience for them.

Now that didn't mean everybody likes seekers. For most people religion is a search for security not a search for truth and when new truths shatter their religious security they're very uncomfortable and so they want to leave. But I was determined that we would run one church in the city of Lynchburg that would be a place where people could come with their brains and could raise their questions and could not be told how dreadful and horrible they are. I got to know John in 1973 when I was still a priest when he came on a tour. And then in 1978 when I was a Bishop I met him at Lambeth and we were both so bored with Lambeth, there's nothing quite so boring as 500 bishops preaching last Sunday's sermon while they act as if they're in a debate, and so John and I began to take walks out in the woods of Kent. Every day we'd take a long 2-hour walk and we would discuss the New Testament.

It was one of the richest experiences I've ever had. And after that, we corresponded and became good friends and he was coming to lead a clergy conference for my clergy in May of the year he died in January, and he wrote me in the Fall to tell me he'd gotten this diagnosis, and he sent me a copy of the sermon he had preached I think at Clare Chapel at Cambridge, about what it means to know that you're dying and it's really a powerful piece. And he was probably one of three key mentors in my life and I do quite deliberately feel that I take up his mantle of leadership and play the role that he has played in the life of the church.

Rachael Kohn: John Robinson starts Honest to God with an interrogation of his faith, and particularly it's dominant metaphysical ideas, and the main one that he starts with is the notion of a God up there, which you find in the Gospel of Luke when you read about Christ's ascension into heaven. Robinson says that even if we don't accept a God up there, we at least accept a God out there. Was that an idea that you yourself were struggling with?

John Shelby Spong: I think it probably was. I think it's one I've abandoned. I don't think there's a God up there or out there at all. I think spatial images for God are simply irrelevant. The problem Rachael, is that most human beings don't know how to talk about God, we don't have a God language, we have only a human language. I say to people 'Can you imagine a horse describing what it means to be human?' How can a horse get outside the boundaries of horseness, and talk about what human life is? And we hear that, but when we begin to say Well neither can a human being get outside of humanity and talk about what God is, because all of our Gods wind up looking like great big human beings. That's just sort of inevitable. It was Xenophon, the great philosopher, who said 'If horses had Gods, they'd look like horses.' I think that all we can talk about is how we believe we experience God, not who God is, and I think any time you begin to talk about who God is or what God is, you've passed the boundary of human competence.

I do think God is real and I think people have experiences of God. Then they have to put those into human words, and what is an experience of God? Well it might be a delusion. That's what Richard Dawkins says, God is a delusion. I think Richard Dawkins is wrong, I think God is a reality but some people are quite delusional about their understanding of God, that's very true. But how do you talk about moments of expanded consciousness, moments where you transcend the limits, moments where time seems to stand still? I think that's the place we've got to begin to talk about, how we experience whatever we call God, the transcended, the holy, the other, whatever it is.

Part of the difficulty with most people's understanding of God is that for their security's sake, they need God to be a parent figure in the sky who can take care of them. Christianity does not encourage us to grow up, it encourages us to stay children to some heavenly parent. I think that's why the Christian church uses the phrase, 'You must be born again', because every time you're born again you're still a child, and what we really need is not to be born again, we need to grow into the maturity of accepting the responsibilities and being self-conscious human beings who live with the capacity of communing with the source of our life. That's what religion is.

Rachael Kohn: Well Robinson got a lot of his inspiration from Paul Tillich, who talked about that depth, that inexhaustible depth of being, the ground of being. Now that depth is what God means according to Tillich.

John Shelby Spong: I think that's right, again Tillich was my teacher, too. And I still resonate. I went back maybe eight or nine years ago and decided I would re-read all of Paul Tillich's work just to see how far I had been shaped by him. You know, after a while you think it's your idea, and what he's doing, and what John Robinson was doing, was to try to get away from the God understood theistically as a being, supernatural and power who lives somewhere above the sky, and periodically invades the world and does miraculous things. Now that's clearly the majority God in the Biblical story, that's the God who can split the Red Sea, that's the God who can dictate the Torah to Moses, on Mount Sinai, that's the God who raises a prophet. But there are also some minority voices in the Hebrew scriptures that I think we ignore. God is referred to as the wind that animates life, the ruach. God is referred to as love by the first epistle of St John, and people say Well that's not Jewish. Oh yes, the New Testament's a Jewish book too.

The Christian church didn't separate from the Synagogue until 88 of the Common Era, 58 years after the death of Jesus. It needs to reclaim its Jewish roots. And the Hebrews talked about God as a rock; that's a pretty impersonal symbol, and I think that's as close as the Hebrews could come to what Tillich meant by the grounded being, a rock is firm, you stand on a rock, it doesn't give way. What Tillich is suggesting is that the very being of God is that in which we are rooted and the more deeply and fully we become ourselves, the more we reveal the God who is the ground of all being. And I think that's what the Christian message ought to be concentrating on.

I think that to worship God says that you believe life is holy, to be a Christian I believe means that you say life is ultimately loved, and to talk about God this holy spirit means to me and that you are called to be all that you are capable of being because the Holy Spirit is always the source of life, the giver of life. Now those are sort of non-personal symbols, and yet they result in an intense and enhanced personal quality of life . You can't be a full human being if you don't love yourself, if you don't feel you're holy. You can't be a full human being unless you feel that the self you are with all your faults, is nonetheless loved, and you're called into transcending those limitations. And I don't think you can worship the God who is the ground of being without having the courage to be who you are.

Rachael Kohn: So what you're really doing is closing that gap between the individual and God. Can I ask you to read from John Robinson's Honest to God in which he quotes Tillich and then comments on him.

John Shelby Spong: I'd be happy to do that. This is on page 55 of his little book, which sold more copies than any book since Pilgrim's Progress in England, any religious book, a rather remarkable achievement. He says 'There are depths of revelation, intimations of eternity, judgments of the holy and the sacred, awareness of the unconditional, the numinous and the ecstatic which cannot be explained in purely naturalistic categories without being reduced to something else. This is the 'Thus saith the Lord' heard by the prophet, the apostle and the martyr, for which naturalism cannot account. But neither can it discount it merely by pointing to the fact that the Lord is portrayed in the Bible in highly mythological terms as one who inhabits eternity who walks in the garden in the cool of the evening.

The question of God is the question whether this depth of being is a reality or an illusion, not whether a being exists beyond the bright blue sky or anywhere else. Belief in God is a matter of what you take seriously without any reservation of what for you is ultimate reality'. That's straight out of Tillich, that's straight out of John Robinson, and that's the cornerstone of most of the things I write, so I really am the child of these two people.

Rachael Kohn: Jack Spong there revealing the theological tradition that informs his thought, including the spiritual classic Honest to God by the English Anglican Bishop, John T. Robinson.

Is this really the end of Theism?

John Shelby Spong: I think so. You know the English language is a funny language. When you say somebody is an atheist, you think that means that that person no longer believes in God. But that word really means that a person is no longer a theist, and theism is a particular definition of God. It's a God understood as a being, supernatural in power, dwelling external to this world, usually thought of as above the sky, and relating this world periodically by invading it with supernatural miraculous behaviour to accomplish the divine world, to answer people's prayers, whatever. And I think that God died years ago. I think what happened in the Revolution of Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Einstein and Hubble's telescope is that we destroyed the dwelling place of God above the sky. You know, we know that there's not a roof up there, that it's infinite space, we know that the earth is a tiny little planet revolving around a middle class sun and a galaxy of billions and billions of stars, and that beyond our single galaxy the Milky Way, there are billions of billions of galaxies, and it's infinite. So when God moves from above the sky to beyond outer space, God gets very, very distant, and I think both analogies finally have to be dismissed.

I think we've got to begin to think of God as a life force, that flows through the universe.

Rachael Kohn: A kind of ultimate reality that exists?

John Shelby Spong: That's right, yes. And I think you discover that God by living. I'm merely a person, I don't understand that kind of religion that squelches life that says you're a wretched miserable sinner and you need to be rescued and the only way God can rescue is to kill the divine son on the cross. I find those are really strange, barbaric ideas but the ypermeate the Christian faith. We've almost developed a fetish about the blood of Jesus. If you're a Catholic you drink it sacramentally, so you can be cleansed inside, and if you're a Protestant you get washed in it.

I think Protestants have more a sense of external sins and Catholics more a sense of internal sin maybe. But you know, those images are so barbaric and so gross and yet they permeate this story. I don't think that the cross is a story where Jesus pays the price for human sin, I think the cross is the place where a full human life reveals that you can give your life away totally in love if you possess your life, and that's what divinity means to me. It doesn't mean that you're a masquerading deity wearing human flesh and walking around in the life of this world. But that's the way we've thought of it. That theism is dying because atheism does not mean you do not believe in God, it's that you dismiss the theistic definition of God, which drives you I think, to try to find a different way to describe not God but your God experience.

Rachael Kohn: Well in Honest to God Robinson was wrestling with that idea with the very tenacious belief that Jesus is God and that the Apostles followed him because he was God, but Robinson argues that Jesus didn't claim to be God, and therefore what Jesus was really doing was demonstrating that God acted through him and this is an invitation then I think, that Robinson issues to everyone, that God can act through all of us?

John Shelby Spong: That's right. I think that's right. For John Robinson, Jesus is different from you only by degree, not by kind. John wasn't the first person to come up with that idea. I can find that in Meister Eckhart in the 14th century. It's always been a kind of undercurrent in Christian thinking, minority. I think it's destined to be the majority in the future, but you can't ever be sure about that. What we need to recognise is that for most people their religion is part of their security system, and it demands a supernatural being who can do all the things they cannot do, who can protect when they can't protect, and people feel bereft and alone if that theistic God is sort of challenged or taken away and yet when you look at life, that theistic God doesn't do very well.

If God has the supernatural power able to intervene and stop a hurricane and doesn't do it, is that because God hates the poor of New Orleans? If God has the power to stop a tsunami and doesn't do it, does that mean that God wanted those 350,000 people to die? It becomes a very problematic thing when you think of it in a broader pattern, and I think that God is quite unbelievable, but I think God whatever I mean by that, and I'm trying to struggle to find words, I see God as a life force flowing through all living things, but coming to selfconsciousness in human life. I see God as the power of love that I think also flows through the universe, everything from the photosynthesis of a plant that turns to catch the rays of the sun, to a mother cat licking her baby kitten. I think that's the presence of the love of God but they don't know it because they're not selfconscious and that love comes to selfconsciousness again in human beings, and we can talk about it.

Rachael Kohn: So then, was the point of the mythologising one finds in the New Testament, according to Robinson and Bultmann, who after all was the person who talked about all of these stories as myths, was the point of all that to show that there was a transcendent meaning to Jesus' life? That it was something bigger than ordinary life?

John Shelby Spong: I think that's what they're trying to say. I think that the power that you see in Jesus' life is the fullness of his humanity which is so rare, and the degree to which you are fully human I think they would be saying that which we call God can live in you and flow through you, so that they saw Jesus as sort of an ultimate revelation of God. But remember, we don't have other God language, we've got only a human language, and when you're trying to describe a God experience in human language, you have to use mythological words and you have to use expanded symbols, and I think what they do in the Biblical story is that they take the language that they know best and they expand it.

One of the things that I did in this book and I think that moves a step beyond where John Robinson was, I've gone back and argued that so many of the stories in the New Testament about Jesus are simply magnified Moses stories and magnified Elijah stories. The best illustration of that I know is the story of the Ascension which makes no sense in a space age. But if you go back and tread the story of Elijah you'll find that he ascended into heaven. And right before he ascended he passed on his authority to his single disciple, Elisha, and Elisha asked a final death-bed kind of request and Elisha said, 'I can't be your successor unless you endow me with a double portion of your spirit'. And Elijah says, 'Well I don't know that I can do that for you because that's not mine to give, but', he said, 'if you see me ascending into the sky then you'll know that your request has been granted.' And at that moment, according to this wonderful Hebrew story, a magical fiery chariot swooped out of the clouds, drawn by magical fiery horses, and picked up Elijah. You know, it's as if it was a stop on the bus route, and Elijah hops right on board and says 'Goodbye', and then God provides a whirlwind to propel this magical chariot into the sky and Elisha sees and he knows that he's going to be the recipient of a double portion of Elijah's spirit.

Now you fast forward in the Judeo-Christian story 800, 850 years and you have another life named Jesus, they called him Yeshua, if you were speaking in the Aramaic, and people began to believe that they saw a God presence in him that was greater than the God presence they'd ever known in any of the other heroes of their faith tradition. And this is not to say Christianity is superior to Judaism, it's to remember that these were Jewish people trying to incorporate this new Jewish Jesus into their ongoing faith story. And so Luke, who is the only one to tell us the ascension story, quite obviously has Elijah in mind and he portrays Jesus as newer and greater and larger.

Elijah needed a fiery chariot and fiery horses, and a whirlwind. Jesus has the power to ascend on his own. Elijah could only give a double portion of his human spirit to a single disciple. Jesus can give the infinite power of the holy spirit to the whole gathered community sufficient to last through all the ages. And Luke then takes the whirlwind that propelled Elijah heavenward and he turns it into the mighty rushing wind that fills the room, and he takes the fire from the chariot and he makes that the tongues of fire that dance on the heads of the people at the time of Pentecost. Now I don't think there's any question that Luke knew that he was magnifying an Elijah story. What happened in the Christian faith is that from about 125 on, there were very few Jews in the Christian faith any longer. He had become a gentile movement. And so from about 125 until maybe the last 20 years of the 20th century, the only people that read the Bible, the New Testament, the only people who wrote commentaries were Gentiles who were abysmally ignorant about the Jewish background and so they tended to literalise the stories and that's the problem that is happening.

Rachael Kohn: So actually what you're pointing to is that those stories and that mythology was understood to be in some sense symbolic.

John Shelby Spong: That's correct. Absolutely.

Rachael Kohn: And that makes me think that perhaps we will always be seeing these mythological stories as beloved and as our language for the transcendent.

John Shelby Spong: Well I think that's right, it's the only language we've got. Those are all attempts to explain the experience. You literalise the explanations and they become nonsense. You go through the explanations and try to touch the experience and it becomes life-changing.

Rachael Kohn: Well your work has been life-changing for so many people, and your latest book Jesus for the Non-Religious is, one could say, almost a culmination of some of the ideas that were laid out in John Robinson's Honest to God.

John Shelby Spong: Well absolutely. I see that book as bringing some of John Robinson's work to conclusion. John was treated in the Church of England very much the way any person thinks outside the box would be treated in Sydney or other parts of the religious world.

Rachael Kohn: As you are treated.

John Shelby Spong: Yes, but because they can't incorporate those thought into their narrow frame of reference. But if you don't get outside the box, the enterprise it seems to me, dies. John was never allowed to be more than a suffragan or assisting Bishop. Woolwich is an assisting diocese in Southwark. After a while, he finally despaired of his career in the church and so he resigned. And he went back to Cambridge where he had been a lecturer in the New Testament with a Cambridge PhD, and when he went back to Cambridge, they wouldn't restore him to the status he had before he was elected a Bishop. He was never appointed a lecturer. And so he lived the rest of his life in a fairly junior position as the Dean of the Chapel in that particular college at Cambridge, and he died very young it seems to me before his career was over.

But it was a milestone and the church ostracized him, the Archbishop of Canterbury said some fairly terrible things about him when Honest to God came out. In his credit, the Archbishop said that was one of the biggest mistakes of his career about 20 years later. Today in England, if you're going to do work at Cambridge on a PhD, on a 20th century Church of England leader, John Robinson is about 10 to 1 the people that are chosen. So he's come into his own. But that's the way it is with a prophet, you know, prophets are not popular, you don't want to volunteer to be a prophet because they don't have a good life expectancy. But John Robinson lifted the church to a new vision and the church has incorporated a great deal of that. I hope I will lift the church to a new vision. I don't expect to be universally popular because people are frightened about that new vision, but I'll leave it to history. I'm happy to have history be my judge and 50 years from now we'll see whether or not I made a contribution or not, I don't know that I'll see before that.

Rachael Kohn: Well I think you're breaking the rule of prophets dying young.

The retired Bishop of Newark, New Jersey, in the United States, John Shelby Spong and he recently celebrated his 76th birthday. With a mind like that, he could be going strong for the next 20 years! Critics beware!

If you missed any part of this edition of our Spiritual Classics series, with my guests Caroline Myss and Bishop Spong, you can listen again on our website.

So long from me, Rachael Kohn.