The Tumult of My Heart

By Jason Spencer

Once your eyes have been opened, it's difficult to close them again. The Tumult of My Heart is a personal journey through the beliefs of my upbringing, as well as the hardships, emotions, and experiences that resulted from them. It is also a book about arrival; about finding peace in a different way of looking at God, human beings, and the universe itself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jason Spencer
• Release date: Jul 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9798223399513

Jason Spencer

Jason Spencer writes both fiction and non-fiction works shaped by intention, introspection, and imagination. He resides in Akron, OH, with his wife and three children. He also enjoys writing reviews and creating content for his music website, The Prog Mind.

Book preview

An Introduction

I confess that I had a difficult time naming this book.  I’ve been working on it for several years, and even in that span of time, I’ve changed dramatically.  This book has been edited and rewritten many times, and even now as I write this introduction, I plan to edit it heavily again.

The Tumult of My Heart has been a passion project for me, but the angle has changed at various points.  At one time, this was meant to be a full-blown scholarly work with citations, ignoring the fact that I don’t quite have the credentials or knowledge to create something like that.  At another time, this book was an anger-filled rant, a rage against the machine, so to speak.  I realized, however, that neither of those angles is really who I am anymore; neither can fulfill and satisfy the yearning and expression within my heart for what it is I have to say.

I think it is important to confront, from both the inside and the outside, the harmful beliefs that I was taught as a child.  That is exactly what this book is, in fact; this is me as I confront my old ways of thinking using the religious language and framework I would have understood back then.  Even though I now prefer to understand reality outside of religious trappings, I still feel that it is valuable, like Paul did in his letter to the Romans, to engage my old system of thought and defeat it on its own turf.  It has been eye-opening to learn how wrong I was about so many things, based not only on secular logic, but also on the very biblical texts that I was taught to honor.

Approaching myself and my past in this way pays respect to my experience, I believe, but also solidifies my mind on a new and more productive path.  Therefore, much of this book utilizes religious language because I find it useful, and because I know there are thousands of religious people out there who find themselves dwelling upon the edge of the knife of doubt.  They are the people I want to reach the most, and it is important to me to show them that they may have been lied to or misled their entire lives, as I was.  I think people are smart enough to take that information and come to their own conclusions, whether they end up agreeing with me or not.

But this book is more than that, too.  Not only do I engage my old beliefs using familiar language, but I also want to show that religious terminology in general has become outdated.  Additionally, I want to show that religious language, especially that of the ancients, pointed towards many of the things we know and theorize today in quantum physics, science, and philosophy.  The ancient mystics spoke towards something that physicists today also recognize, and I believe that puts a whole new framework in place concerning how we should read and understand ancient religious ideas.  There is surely a direct connection between ancient religious and philosophical ideas and the science and wonder being unveiled today.  Perhaps it is time to abandon a literal interpretation of the ancient texts.  Perhaps it is time to look for the bigger picture towards which so many thinkers throughout history have grasped, meditated, searched, and hoped.

You’ll find that this book is full of questions and catalysts for thought, but not full of definite answers.  Questions are the primary means by which I engage any sort of information or data, and I lean towards systems of thought that can answer the most questions satisfactorily.  It’s a basic numbers game in that way.  I don’t believe in certainty as a requirement anymore, and I’m not writing this book to convince anyone of anything, but I do want to ask questions that may unearth many more.

Let me emphasize something: this is not a scholarly work.  This book is not meant to be a definite opinion on these matters; in fact, much of this is a stream-of-consciousness piece of writing.  I am still questioning, still learning, still evolving.  The purpose of this book, then, is to detail my faith transition over the last 10-15 years, and to share the many tumults I have experienced in life and in my evolution as a human being.

I hope those that are curious can find something in my experience that is relatable, something that might spark their own journey of discovery and deconstruction.  Such a voyage is not easy: it took me through some of the darkest years of my life, and so I can understand why some might ignore the doubts in their heart.  I can understand why someone might choose to stay safe and comfortable where they are and where they always have been.  It can be warm inside the lies we were taught as children.  For me, though, that is not an option, and so journey I have through some places and ideas that I never imagined.  I was searching for peace, not necessarily certainty.  That is what I hope to encourage within others, too.

Chapter 1

More Human Than We Wish

I was browsing in Books-A-Million recently, and I was struck by how many books about religion are available in just that one store alone.  Another thing I noted was the diversity of opinions in the Christian section.  I could see books ranging from scholarly to devotional, from left wing to right wing, from old to brand new.  The breadth of opinions and biases, especially political, is really something to behold.  How could one religion spawn so many different, even contradictory, ideas and opinions?

We are all human beings.  We are imperfect.  We are subjected to many forces in this world, ones we may not even notice, even.  We really are tossed to and fro by the waves of so many ideas and moods, whether direct or indirect.  We each experience different highs and lows, different stressors and joys, different upbringings and family cultures.  It’s no wonder that so many people come to very different conclusions.  We are feeble in this way.  No matter how much we try to deny it, we will always be more human than we want to be.

If you remember anything about this book, at least remember this fact that has helped change my perspective on many things: the way we communicate is completely bound to who we are as human beings, both collectively and individually, in our times and cultures.  Another way of saying this would be that all of us are subjective beings, as opposed to objective. This is true both on the receiving end as readers or hearers, as well as on the delivery end, such as how writers and speakers express themselves.

I think this is an idea worth a full book itself (many of which have been written already), and I also think it is a fact that we often forget in our day-to-day lives.  Whether we are fighting someone on Twitter or reading an immersive new book, we can often forget to be aware of the filters and biases that drive all parties involved.  No, I don’t think people are defined by these things, per se, but it is wise to consider this psychological element in every situation.

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I know it is a difficult thing to admit our own subjectivity.  I had to wrestle with this notion myself.  We are human beings.  We cannot escape that fact.  No matter how objective we think we may be, we are still influenced by many things, from how much sleep we had last night to what kind of family traditions we had when we were kids.  If you cannot admit this, that itself is indicative of certain types of forces that have worked upon you in your life.

Individually, we can be influenced by our upbringings, our scars and pain, our socioeconomic status, our friends and family, our coworkers, and the people we admire.  We may even be influenced by what we had for dinner last night, or maybe the full moon, as the legend goes.  Maybe Disney subliminally taught us something, or maybe it was Marvel or George Lucas.  Maybe I secretly wanted to be decisive like Indiana Jones or resourceful like Alien’s Ripley.  Maybe I wanted to be courageous like The Rocketeer, generous and daring like Robin Hood, regal like King Arthur, or capable of empathy like Bilbo and Frodo.  Maybe I wanted to be wise like Gandalf or strong like Aragorn.  Even those concepts of being, however, were received from those stories into my brain through filters I had already put in place even earlier in life.  As I lived my life, my various experiences were also filtered through my adoration of those fictional character ideals.  Yet, I was just as influenced by the bullies at school, the burnout boss who took it out on his employees, or the corrupt CEO who put it all on the line for momentary pleasures.  Everything influences us.  Everything becomes part of us in one way or another.

Collectively, we are influenced by our cultures, histories, languages, scientific mindsets, and our religions.  Some call this our cosmic context or geography.  We may not even know that we are being influenced, either, and therein lies great danger for exposure to propaganda, indoctrination, and other means of directing the course of our society.  We may take things for granted that other people cherish greatly, or vice versa.

All these things influence and endanger new information that may go against the grain of what we already know and believe.  You’ve heard of the Mandela Effect, I assume?  That would be the anomaly wherein groups of people collectively remember something that never actually took place, such as the death of a celebrity, the look of a certain company logo, or just about anything.  For example, many people swear that Sinbad was once in a movie called Shazaam in the 90s.  They say he played a genie.  This movie, however, does not exist, despite many people remembering it, even down to remembering specific scenes.  The opposite can happen, too, where we decide something is true, such as the flat Earth theory, and then we filter out all new information that would harm this belief.  I’m no psychologist but suffice it to say that the human brain will protect itself, and we battle new ideas that may invade our safe spaces.

I’ve become hyper aware of all this lately, especially regarding religion.  Our interpretation of religious ideas is always going to be tempered and filtered through what we already believe, who we are, and what we are hoping to accomplish.  This goes right down to our DNA.  Reading the Bible, for example, can be an enterprise with vastly different results, all depending on your perspective.  It’s unavoidable.

Recently, I heard Wil Gafney on Peter Enn’s podcast The Bible for Normal People.  She pointed out that we all have different adjectives'' that we should place before our theologies.  In our Western society today, we often call white theology just theology", and then place adjectives in front of other kinds, such as womanist, African, Asian, progressive, etc.  We forget that we have our own adjectives, and many times we wouldn’t even be able to identify them.  I still struggle to understand my own adjectives, but the first step is, of course, admitting that you have them in the first place.

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This realization changes so much for me.  It doesn’t just affect how I intake new information, but also how I communicate with others.  I think this is one of the most important things I ever learned, especially when it comes to processing the Bible and what religion in general has to say.  As objective as I want to be, I’m mostly subjective and my communication is subjective, too.

I learned these objective and subjective realms of thought have more complex names.  Objective thought can be called ontology, and subjective thought can be called phenomenology.  I’m not a big fan of ologies, but these two I believe are important.  Let me explain why.

Ontology is the study of the nature of being.  It is part of metaphysics, so it can be used to understand things about the fabric of our reality and existence.  I’m not really going that deep here.  However, it helped me to understand it refers to things as they actually are, things as they are in their deepest, most truthful sense.  Ontology is all about reality and the deepest fountain of being, what something is in essence, regardless of perspective.

As finite human beings, it can be difficult to get to the ontology of anything at all.  I could say, for instance, that the sky is blue, but someone else could see a different color, or a scientist could explain why it only appears that way, or another scientist could tell us how our eyes process light and help us see various colors.  Is the sky actually blue, then?  Technically, the sky is any color but blue because of how light waves work.  So, from a certain perspective, yes, the sky is blue because that is how I see it in a casual glance.  That would not be ontology, though.  From other perspectives, no, the sky is not blue in the deepest sense.  It is only my perspective that makes it blue.  So, the sky is ontologically not blue, and scientists can explain why that is.  It might be difficult to accept this since our experience screams blue!, but sometimes we must stretch ourselves.

Some of these philosophical concepts never really have any final say or absolute truth that we can grasp because many ideas are not so simple as the color of the sky.  That can be frustrating for humans, as evidenced in the thousands of books written on many potent topics over the last few thousand years.  Ontology is usually full of exacting language, scientific and philosophical proofs, and sweeping ideas that change everything down to the minute details.

Phenomenology, on the other hand, has to do with our consciousness, perspective, or experience.  Instead of being about absolute truth, it seeks to find its own truth, which is still a truth that I believe has value.  In fact, in living our lives, it can often be the most important truth for our relationships, loves, and common sense.  So, it is just as important to understand communication about things as they are experienced, felt, and expressed.  Phenomenology is subjective, emotional, and may use lots of words that don’t mean exactly what they may say.

This is important especially for someone like me, who has always had difficulty expressing myself in conversations and social situations.  I’ve learned through the years that what people express might be true subjectively or from their perspective, but it does not necessarily mean that it represents absolute objective truth.  Again, subjective truth can be just as important as objective, depending on the application.  I have often found myself taking something literally that was only meant to be taken figuratively.

My wife and I try to employ these ideas in our relationship.  There may be moments (too many, actually) where I say something that hurts her.  From my perspective, I was not trying to harm her, but the way I stated it produced in her a very different understanding.  We’ve tried to encourage each other to recognize when this is happening.  We like to stop and say, I just want you to know how that made me feel, whether it was words, tone, or gestures that might have triggered the disconnect between us.  When we do that, we are loving each other, and we are trading perspectives for a moment.  It honestly helps so much.

In learning to apply this to relationships, I’ve learned to apply it to everything, even the biggest issues of all.  We have been told that God is Love, right?  That is an ontological statement because it describes the absolute nature of God, what God truly is.  Love is God’s very essence.  On the other hand, though, we tend to make phenomenological statements about God, too.  We might say something about God having a certain gender, God changing his mind, God losing her temper, God having a sense of humor, and so on.  We say these things flippantly and casually.  We may project our own feelings and cosmic geographies onto God, and then treat those feelings as ontological truth, instead of as the phenomenological expressions they are.

My understanding of