Spinning Plates and Souls: Salvation and Christianity

When I was a youth back in the early to mid sixties, I (along with my family) would watch the Ed Sullivan Show. While I did not care much for the singers, I was fascinated by the magicians and acrobatics he would have on.

One of my most memorable stunts Ed had on was a man who was fast with his hand and on his feet. This individual claimed he could place a plate one a stick, give the plate a spin and keep the plate balanced and spinning on the stick by moving the supporting stick under the plate in a circular movement. What fascinated me more was that this man said he was going to try and get twenty or more plates spinning on their sticks at the same time. However, as he started more and more plates spinning on their sticks, he had to constantly return to the early plates to add more energy to the sticks to keep the plates spinning or, as the slowed in their motion, they would shatter as they hit the floor.

Even though this individual was fast with his hands and feet, after he had set the twelfth plate spinning, the earlier ones would began to wobble and many fell off their sticks breaking on the floor. Although he got about twelve plats spinning, the rate of plates slowing to a wobble, losing gyroscopic balance and breaking as they hit the floor increased until he reached a point where he was just (pardon the pun) breaking even.

Like the plate spinner on the Ed Sullivan Show, evangelical Christianity is spinning “souls” on the stick of faith though emotionalism and the illogics of theology called dogma. Just as in the first two Great Awakenings, evangelical Christianity is constantly proselytizing souls for the Kingdom of God only to have many earlier souls looses their spiritual momentum, began to wobble in their faith and, if not pumped back into some gyroscopic spiritual sensationalism (though revivals or some other momentous hype spun by their particular sect or apologetics) they mentally break as they hit the floor of reality.

What is interesting here is that as evangelical Christianity races about to apologetically pump sticks of the faithful to regain lost spiritual gyroscopic energy, Christianity is itself changing or evolving as the spiritual realm moves closer to bridge the gap between it and the secular world (see my post on : The Fabrication of Religious “Truth”).

But in the world of faith, Christianity has an apologetic explanation. From the Protestant perspective, those souls who are able to ignore the secular world (either thought denial or some form of so-called Scriptural Separation) are usually labeled Calvinist. Those who wobble in their faith and mentally break on the floor of secular reality are considered as either “never saved” or, as the followers of Jacobus Arminius would put it: “They lost their salvation”. But at the very least, when the Christian mind is no long able to support the real conflict between the dual spiritual and secular mental perspectives, the saved soul is cited as “having lost the joy of their salvation”.

It is in just such a world and a decade after the death of one the major spiritual pillars and plate spinners known as Mother Teresa (set on a fast track for Catholic sainthood) that we will find many more spirituals plates began to wobble and fall. Though Mother Teresa was heralded by both Catholics and Protestants as a spiritual giant, her letters reveal a soul tormented by doubt of the divine to the point where she began to sound in like a “neo-atheist”.

In the end, this major spiritual plate spinner privately confessed that she came to accept and love her “godless spiritual darkness”.