Chapter 1

A Beginning

I am a retired United Methodist clergyman. A preacher.

And you might think you know what that means.

So do I.

But over time, I’ve come to suspect that what we mean by “religion” is both more – and less – than we usually allow.

So I’ve started to follow that suspicion.

Let me take a slightly off-the-wall example.

In the early 1990s, I wrote and published a fairly complex game on the Commodore 64. It worked. I was proud of it. I sold it to a software publisher, and people played it. It did everything a game is supposed to do.

When I told a friend, he said, “So… when are you going to start programming a real computer?”

I knew what he meant. By then, the Commodore 64 was a decade old and out of production. Old. Obsolete. Not serious. Not real.

But the machine didn’t know that. The code still ran. The game still worked. The judgment wasn’t about function. It was about status.

And that was the way it was when I began ordained ministry in the United Methodist Church. Not always said out loud, but present just the same: “So… when are you going to do something real?”

Not useful. Not meaningful.

Real.

We do this more often than we think. We sort parts of human experience into two piles:

• real (serious, factual, respectable)
• not real (stories, beliefs, religion, myth)

And once something lands in that second pile, we feel free to dismiss it.

Which brings us to a word that has been almost completely emptied of its meaning:

Myth.

We hear “myth” and think “false.” Something people once believed before we knew better. But that is a mistake of category.

Myth is not the opposite of fact.
Myth is the place where truth lives when fact is not enough.

Facts can tell us what happened.
Myth tells us what it means.
And meaning is not a small thing.

Every human being lives inside a mythological structure – whether we admit it or not. We inherit stories about who we are, what matters, what is real, and what is worth giving our lives to. Some of these stories come from religion. Some from culture. Some from the quiet accumulation of our own experience.

We do not outgrow myth. We only exchange one myth for another.

And that brings us to a second word that has been handled just as carelessly:

Supernatural.

We hear “supernatural” and think: ghosts, miracles, violations of the laws of nature. Things that “go bump in the night.”

But again, that assumption says more about us than it does about the word. “Supernatural” does not have to mean against nature. It can mean beyond what we have reduced nature to.

We have a tendency to reduce reality to what fits neatly within our grasp – five senses, four walls, three dimensions.

But even that last one should give us pause. Because there is at least one more dimension without which none of this works at all. Without it, nothing moves. Nothing changes. Nothing happens.

We call it time.

And even there, our experience is limited.

We do not see it.
We do not touch it.
We infer it through change, through memory, through anticipation.

So even in the most basic way we describe reality, we are already living beyond what we can directly perceive.

There is more to light than the eye can see. We call it infrared, ultraviolet, and a dozen other names, but the naming does not expand our sight. It only reminds us that our perception is limited.

And walls have an interesting quality. They define a space – but in doing so, they also imply something on the other side. Limitation always points beyond itself.

So if “nature” is defined only as what can be measured, tested, and repeated, then of course anything outside that box looks suspicious. But human experience has never fit neatly inside that box.

The question is not whether there is more than what we can measure.
We already know there is.

The significant question is this: what are we willing to call real?

Is meaning real?
Is love real?
Where is the consciousness that is reading these words?

None of these fit neatly into what can be measured, tested, and repeated.

Meaning does not fit there.
Love does not fit there.
Consciousness itself does not fit there, at least not very comfortably.

And yet, we would be hard-pressed to call any of them unreal.

They are not violations of nature. They are aspects of it we do not fully understand – yet.

So perhaps the “supernatural” is not a separate realm populated by strange beings and impossible events. Perhaps it is simply what appears when we stop insisting that reality must be limited to what we can measure.

Not another world.
But, rather, a deeper reading of this one.

This does not require abandoning a skeptical posture. It may, in fact, require a deeper skepticism.

Because the easiest position in the modern world is not belief – it is dismissal. We have become very good at explaining things away before we have taken the time to understand what they are doing.

So before we decide what is “real” and what is not, it might be worth asking a different question:

What if the categories themselves are too small?