Home of the Wanderer

For years, I have avoided referring to Christ, because as a Quaker child attending a Catholic school that name came to be associated with suffering and division, with dead words in an old book whose stories were too often used to justify horrible things. Even after coming to an understanding of Christ that I thought I could embrace, I avoided using the word, because I always thought it would be misleading – that others would think I meant something else. More recently, having heard powerful testimony from Conservative Friends in Ohio about their experience of God, and their relationship with the Inward Christ, the Living Christ, I came to know that my sense of the Inner Light is not so different. I still wrestle with this as of this writing (September 2007), but I am far more comfortable now with talking about Christ Within.

The things that hold me back now are chiefly habit, learned aversion, and a concern about misleading others about my beliefs (given the common understandings of Christ, it would be all too easy for others to mistake Christ’s name for a sign of evangelism or fundamentalism). I’m not sure that concern is a particularly good reason for holding back, given that I might gain some opportunities to redeem Christ’s name from those who have been abusing it, but there it is.  This still feels really edgy to me – even more so than flag-waving to redeem the flag, for example.

For more about my relationship with God, see the page on Spirituality.