The Great Stone Face

The Sabian Symbol for the 29th degree of Pisces is The Great Stone Face. I was recently researching the Sabian Symbols of the degrees of Pisces as Saturn has just entered this watery sign. Sabian Symbols are a set of 360 phrases, one phrase for each degree of the zodiac, intuited and recorded by medium Elsie Wheeler and astrologer Marc Edmund Jones in San Diego, California in 1925. When I picture this Great Stone Face, it gives me pause. It's quite an ambiguous image.

What kind of face do you imagine? I picture a giant masculine face carved out of gray granite, silent and expressionless. While I love stones and crystals, a stone face evokes aloofness. A lack of emotion. Unchanging, in a stubborn sense of the word.

This stone face being a symbol within the sign of Pisces, I naturally think of the context of spirituality, and that's when the church comes to mind, specifically the church in the United States.

If I have ever encountered a Great Stone Face in my own life, it would have to be the church. If there was ever an institution that represented an unchanging, unwavering, stone-cold aloofness to my own suffering, it was the church. For those born and raised in the church, the church can feel like a sort of parent figure, a higher authority over one's life. This was powerfully alluring to me, as I grew up feeling alienated, like I just didn't belong, and I went looking for love in all the wrong places, as they say. The church knows how to speak all the right kinds of words about love and forgiveness and grace, but as my life began to unfold as a young adult, I began to feel those words less and less. What does "I love you" really mean if you can't even feel good about it? What does, "Praying for you!" really mean when you know it's being used as a salutation? As a gay Christian struggling to live within the suffocating confines of the closet - or, as I like to call it, "hell" - I became very well acquainted with expressions of "love" that felt like subtle knives through the heart.

Perhaps this isn't surprising given the church's tendency to denounce all feelings as coming from some suspicious source, instead of one's own heart and soul. Feeling good is suspicious, even though Jesus suffered and died to free us from that exact kind of burden where we must feel bad in order to be saved. The church will tell you to open your heart and let Jesus in, and then tell you that you can't trust yourself, especially if you're LGBTQ. What kind of spirituality and personal relationship with Jesus can exist if you can't even trust yourself? Since when did Jesus ever tell his followers to not trust themselves? Never. This is just one of the many unspoken, lackadaisical heresies of the church in the United States.

There's very little room for growth within the average American church, whether that growth is spiritual, mental, or emotional. Stones don't do much growing. The church still barely even acknowledges the realm of the mind, continuing to downplay human psychology as some kind of dark art.

And The Great Stone Face always refers to the Bible to justify all of its beliefs, even when those beliefs contradict new knowledge and understanding about our world. As if the Bible is the end-all of knowledge itself. As if there is nothing left to be learned about God or the spiritual path that Jesus laid out. As if there is no more time or room for growth as human beings. As if the best we can all hope for is Armageddon. We can thank Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins for that one. But that's the problem with the Great Stone Face: there's no capacity for change, and we live in an ever-changing world as ever-changing beings.

The Great Stone Face is a church that, 500 years after the days of Martin Luther, is still trying to keep the average parishioner in the dark about the all-encompassing, radical freedom that Christ brings through the Gospel. Jesus is still scandalizing the church! Skandalon! Back then it was by means of keeping the Bible in a language foreign to the general populace. Today it's by means of fearmongering about LGBTQ people, correlating salvation with heterosexuality, marriage, and traditional gender roles, which is heretical to the nines, and enforcing cultural conformity versus seeking personal authenticity through a relationship with one's Creator. It's shocking how much of the Gospel is still flying over the heads of church leaders. "We're not a part of today's sinful culture," say our most public church leaders. Church, you are today's sinful culture.

The Great Stone Face has told the same old stories for far too long. Stories about the world, stories about people and society, and stories about itself. These stories must change in order to continue telling the truth because we live in a changing world. And it's not the truth that is changing, but our understanding and perspective of it. God will never change, but our perspective most definitely will, because we're constantly evolving.

I'm saddened by the incredible displays of disempowerment by many churchgoers throughout America. Everything is labeled as "demonic". Anything new and unfamiliar is deemed "Satanic". New believers are especially prone to this behavior of reacting towards the world and other people with outright fear and judgement. Just look at Kevin Sorbo. It's like they walked out of church with the spirit of a Pharisee instead of the Holy Spirit. It's like the message of the Gospel was completely missed. It's like the church failed to actually teach the peace and love that Jesus lived out for us. And Christians see this on display in public and say nothing. Too many Christians look like they're flailing around on open waters, hoping that if they can successfully organize everything and everyone into categories of "good" and "bad", they'll be safe. Safe from what? An all-loving God who is secretly feared to be all-condemning? It's a tragedy.

It's a tragedy because the entire point of Christianity is supposed to be about the profound freedom found through Christ in a world fraught with oppression. Fear of everything "demonic" is not it. Celebrating the resurrection of Jesus every Easter Sunday and then fearing Satan the rest of the year is not it. Judging whole swaths of people as criminals and "sinners" because they appear different is not it. Sitting in your bedroom imagining yourself being persecuted by "non-believers" is not it. But this is what I see far too often among Christians.

And yet, the Great Stone Face will never hear or feel or empathize or know. And that's something I've had to reckon with. I can't change stone. But I can, and I must, release my grip on that stone in order to experience the living, breathing, growing spirituality that I've always craved, with a God who isn't constantly angry and damning. I've learned that I can choose where to place my focus, my energy, and that I can turn away from these "stone faces" that promise so much and deliver so little.

It was hard. I wanted this institutional parent to love and accept me and reward me for my good work. To fill the void of acceptance I felt growing up. And I had done everything right. I had followed all the rules. I had served the church wholeheartedly. But stone doesn't care, and the law, the law which Jesus came to fulfill for our sakes, also doesn't care. In a church of stony legalism, it doesn't matter what you've done right. If one thing is wrong, it's all wrong. It's the exact reason Jesus came to earth to save us, per the Books of the Gospels and the Epistles.

The Bible provides a sort of blueprint though for just such situations. Time after time again, the Bible depicts stories of God choosing the most unlikely of outliers and giving His greatest gifts to those who would be considered "unworthy" by society. None of the heroes of the Bible came from the "mainstream". None. The church in America has forgotten this. So, let The Great Stone Face do what it's always done. And God will do what He's always done: find a living face and an open heart, regardless of that person's identity within society.