Cyber Spirit Cafe

As promised, here is the follow-up to yesterday’s post. Countless people have written and are writing on the topics I have focused on in my blog. Below is a selection of the books, writers and other resources than have been important and valuable for my thinking and writing over the years.

Church: The late Episcopal bishop, John Shelby Spong (1931-2021), created an “aha moment” for me when I read his 1998 NYT bestseller, Why Christianity Must Change or Die. My ministry changed from that moment. One of Spong’s goals, in this and many of his other books, was to bring to a general audience the scholarly discoveries undermining ancient Christianity that were well-known in academia, including seminaries, but not in the pews. Many in the church despised him for it or, perhaps worse, simply ignored him. That no one of his stature has continued his mission is a sign of a church stuck in the mud.

Richard Rohr (b. 1943) also writes and ministers from within the church, in his case as a Franciscan friar and Catholic priest. Rohr founded The Center for Action and Contemplation (CAC) in Albuquerque in 1987. The name encapsulates his belief that social change and spirituality must go hand in hand. Age and health issues have caused Rohr to pull back recently but he has been a prolific author and popular speaker, including several appearances with Oprah Winfrey. Among Rohr’s many books, his magnum opus is The Universal Christ (2019). When during an audience at the Vatican, Rohr presented a copy to Pope Francis, the pope startled Rohr saying, “I’ve read it!” I would also highly recommend Falling Upward (2011) and Immortal Diamond (2013). The CAC also distributes via email a popular daily devotional featuring writings by Rohr and similar teachers and authors.

Culture/society: The corruption and resulting distrust of so many social institutions, including the media, have made getting reliable information about events in our world increasingly difficult. One of my “growing up” experiences has been to realize that even my most revered publications are often prejudiced and/or “bought” or manipulated. With many publications in financial distress, the latter phenomenon has grown worse in recent years. Actual reporting is often replaced by lightly editing government and industry press releases. Lists have been made of reporters who essentially function as spokespersons for the Pentagon, CIA and the Israeli government, even within some of the most “prestigious” journals (here’s looking at you, NYT).

For nearly twenty years, I have been relying on a single website to pierce the fog of prejudice and misinformation. Naked Capitalism (“Fearless commentary on finance, economics, politics and power”) was created in 2006 in the lead up to the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) by Yves Smith, a Wall Street financial analyst who saw it coming. While Smith doesn’t hesitate to share her own, often sharp, opinions on issues of the day, the site is mostly about sharing the writings of others, on a wide variety of topics (occasionally even religion).

The highlight for me each day is a post called simply “Links”, which is a list of dozens of links to stories across the Internet, grouped by topic. If all you read was Links, you would be better informed than 99% of your neighbors. Of course, there are far more than any one person could read (every day!) but you pick and choose those that are of interest. Incidentally, since March there has been an almost daily post about the war with Iran, which has been giving a very different perspective than that of the mainstream media.

After each post (including Links) are reader comments. Many are mundane but many others are surprisingly insightful, as the blog’s readers include active and retired international experts (often semi-anonymous) in the fields the blog addresses. Incidentally, Klein diligently polices the comment sections and doesn’t hesitate to bounce out those who seek to manipulate or dominate the conversation—a rarity in the blogosphere.

By no means is Naked Capitalism light reading. But how could it be? Getting accurate and relevant information on the subjects entangling our distressed world is no small feat. Reading it even in small bites will leave you better informed and wiser than you were. Nonetheless, I very much understand those who say, “I really don’t want to know very much,” and just get on with their lives.

Spirituality: Until about a hundred years ago, spirituality was a rare topic in ordinary church circles. But from the early 20^th century on, it has attracted the attention of growing numbers, both within and outside the church. This has been due both to better understandings of Eastern religious traditions and a rediscovery and new appreciation of the Christian mystics. In that regard, here are just a few of the writers and teachers that have been especially important and helpful to me.

More than any other person, the Trappist monk Thomas Merton (1915-1968) brought Christian spirituality to the attention of ordinary Americans. Beginning with his 1948 bestselling autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, and for the next twenty years, Merton published a veritable library about the spiritual life. In addition to Catholic spirituality, Merton engaged with Asian traditions and the volatile social issues of the 1960s (the latter almost certainly leading to his murder in Thailand). In addition to his first, a few of Merton’s other books that have been valuable to me are New Seeds of Contemplation (1962), No Man Is an Island (1955), and Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander (1966). An excellent summary of his thought is Merton’s Palace of Nowhere (1978) by Merton student James Finley.

A contemporary of Merton who had a similar impact in the US was Alan Watts (1915-1973). Watts was born in Great Britain and emigrated to the US in 1938. He was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1945 but resigned five years later to focus on his real interest, Zen Buddhism. Like Merton, Watts was a prolific writer but his popular following came through his role as a public speaker, on radio and in person, in which he dubbed himself a “philosophical entertainer.” Watts’ books can be dense, but I would recommend The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966). Probably of more value would be to search his name on YouTube and be prepared for an avalanche of results. Many of his public talks were recorded by his son Mark, and many of these have become available in various formats, so much so that Watts is probably better known now than during his lifetime. Watts was indeed entertaining but he was also a transformative teacher.

Briefly, other Christian writers on spirituality I would recommend include (again) Richard Rohr, Matthew Fox, John Philip Newell, Martin Laird, and the late Thomas Keating.

In recent years, a number of popular figures have emerged who transcend Eastern and Western religious and spiritual traditions. Perhaps the best known is Eckhart Tolle, born (1948) and raised in Germany but now living in Canada. Tolle and his book The Power of Now (1997) shot to fame with his first appearance with Oprah Winfrey. Since then, he has given talks and seminars around the world and written several other books, including especially A New Earth (2005). Somewhat controversial, I think he is the real deal with much genuine wisdom and insight. Excerpts of his talks are easily found on YouTube.

Similar to Tolle in many ways is Adyashanti (meaning “primordial peace”), born Stephen Gray (1962) in California, where he still lives. Grounded in Zen Buddhism, he is essentially a nonreligious teacher of nondual spirituality. Mostly an in-person speaker, excerpts of many of his talks can be found on YouTube. Among his dozen books, I would recommend The End of Your World (2008) and Resurrecting Jesus (2014).

Finally, I must mention the world-renowned Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh (1926-2022). Known as the “father of mindfulness,” Nhat Hanh came to Western prominence as an opponent of the Vietnam War. Denounced and exiled by the South Vietnamese government, Nhat Hanh traveled to the US in 1966 where he became acquainted with Thomas Merton and Martin Luther King Jr., who later nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize. Nhat Hanh was a major influence in King’s 1967 decision to denounce the war.

In part due to its large Vietnamese population, Nhat Hanh moved to France, which granted him asylum. In 1982 he established Plum Village near Bordeaux, now the largest Buddhist monastery in the West and which receives thousands of visitors every year. Over time, the Vietnamese government granted permission for Nhat Hanh to make occasional visits to his home country. At his request, he returned to Vietnam in 2018 to live his last years.

During his time in France, Nhat Hanh became a popular international speaker and teacher, and the author of well over 100 books, most in English. Three that I recommend are Peace Is Every Step (1991), Living Buddha, Living Christ (1995), and Going Home: Jesus and Buddha as Brothers (1999).

Inevitably, if you explore these authors and writings, you will find some more attractive to you than others. More importantly, you will be led to other people and sources not named here which will touch and influence you in important ways. I think of life as an exploration, an adventure of discovery, traveling down some some paths which turn out to be dead ends, but others that open out into whole new ways of thinking and being. I hope these resources provide you some new avenues for growth and awakening. Have fun!

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this!

I have decided it’s time to step back from this blogging project of mine, at least for a while. I have been writing essays like these, usually in my congregation’s weekly newsletter, for about twenty years. After retiring, I continued my writing by creating this blog. In those 21 months, I enjoyed that writing and was rewarded in doing so, and I know many of you felt the same by reading them. For that I am deeply grateful.

While I continue to enjoy writing, recently I have had the feeling that, at least in this regard, I have pretty much said all I have to say. On several occasions, I have had a blog post idea in mind. But when I looked back at my previous posts and “Reflections” essays, I found I had already covered the topic and didn’t have anything new to add.

With that in mind, I’m going to look at the three main categories of my past writings and briefly summarize what I have been saying and thinking about them: they are church, culture/society, and spirituality. In doing so, I won’t be trying to say anything new but rather state my overall conclusions about them, and in most cases what my views have been for some time.

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Church: The church has played an enormously important role for me throughout my life. It was, of course, the center of my professional life. And it increasingly was the source of great frustration. With retirement, I created some distance from the church and found how little interest I have in it anymore. I’ve evolved and moved on but the church hasn’t. Or, if it has moved, it has been in a different direction than mine.

This is, of course, a very common story. As I have written many times, church membership and attendance have been declining for decades. You can find countless videos on YouTube by people explaining their withdrawal from church life, including many by former clergy. In the wake of the pandemic, even thriving congregations often report a permanent drop of 20% or more in their worship attendance. For marginal congregations, such a loss has been unsustainable. Churches have been closing in the US by the thousands every year, with no end to that trend insight.

In recent years, as I have read about churches, listened to clergy, or visited congregations, the well-worn saying comes to mind, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” Fundamentally, Christianity is an ancient and medieval way of thinking which has never adjusted to the modern world. It’s naïve scriptures and doctrines anchor it in the past. The meaning and power of its symbols have not carried over to this age.

The church’s essential problem is that it can’t explain anymore what being Christian means, let alone why it’s a good thing. The church itself knows this, which is why church life has become so anemic. Aware church leaders often say that, like Jesus, the church must die to be reborn. But that dying will be very real and will take some time. And what it will be reborn as is by no means obvious.

Culture/society: Recently, I found the first newsletter column I had written almost eight years ago for my Florida congregation. The topic was the climate crisis. I could have written it last week, except for one factual element. I quoted a report, new at the time, saying that an industrial era rise of 1.5 degrees C was the upper limit to avoid catastrophe and that it would likely be reached in 12 years. We actually have already surpassed it.

As I wrote a few weeks ago, the climate crisis is the elephant in the room. Everyone sees it but no one wants to talk about it. The much ballyhooed midterm elections are just two months away, yet this topic is the one no candidate will touch. Preachers want to talk wisely about stewardship of our planet but the time for that has past. Now it’s only the voice of the prophet that can speak honestly: disaster is coming and we have brought it upon ourselves. But we all know what happens to prophets.

The unwillingness to be honest about our most crucial issue has resulted in unreality permeating much of our society and culture. Out time is often compared to the crumbling Roman empire or pre-revolutionary France. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer, on a global scale. Though the “lifestyles of the rich and famous” get ever more outlandish and absurd, they are still held up as something we should emulate. Even though it is the single greatest source of our problems, we continue to fight over control of oil. Yet that struggle will likely soon be matched by one over a resource even more fundamental: water.

Of course, this sounds terribly gloomy, and on a large scale it is. But we don’t live our lives on a large scale, only a personal one. In Luke 3, John the Baptist rails at the crowd for their infidelities: “You brood of vipers!” Struck to the core, the people respond, “What, then, should we do?” Rather than lay out a program of national transformation, John responds on an individual level. “Whoever has two coats must share with anyone who has none, and whoever has food must do likewise.” Tax collectors should be honest; soldiers shouldn’t bully. And so on.

In other words, John is saying, you can’t change what happens in the temple or the governor’s mansion or the emperor’s palace, but you can control what happens in your own life. And that’s enough, because how you live your life does make a difference. Jesus, of course, carried on that message.

I recently watched a video by an artist who regularly comments on art and the artist’s life. Brian Rutenberg grew up in South Carolina and since graduating from college has worked in New York City. I had the pleasure of meeting him at his recent art opening here in Santa Fe. For Rutenberg, all art is a struggle and an affirmation that struggle is worthwhile.

A work of art should start with an obstacle so that the spectator doesn’t go straight through to the idea. For example, a dancer must overcome sore muscles and even gravity. A poet pushes against language. A filmmaker grapples with a camera and a composer combats time itself.

For me and you, we must deal with sticky obdurate oil paint. The key is to make the struggle look effortless. That’s why all art is political. The best way to say f-you to suffering and injustice is to make something beautiful and put it into the world. To make something beautiful is to acknowledge pain and the will to rise above it. Art can only be political. Beauty is the ultimate form of protest.

The key, of course, is to realize that each of our lives are works of art. We all have the potential to make of ourselves something beautiful. According to Genesis 2, that’s what God was doing in making the first human and all living things, like a potter, from the earth. And in Genesis 1, God’s first instruction to humanity is “be fruitful”, a wonderfully suggestive notion.

There may be little we can do to affect the ugliness in the world, but there is much we can do to create beauty in and with our own lives. And to help guide and inspire others to do the same. Paint a picture. Plant a garden. Write in a journal. Prepare a dinner party. Dress with flare. You might not realize it, but you are making the world a better place. And that matters. A lot.

Spirituality: I have written about spirituality more than any other subject. It shows up in nearly all my essays. Spirituality is simply the experience of discovering who we truly are. Unfortunately, we are usually given little direction or encouragement in this endeavor. Most institutions we deal with (family, school, religion, government, work, media) would rather tell us who we are than help us find out for ourselves.

Since ancient times, the ones who have tried to help people in this calling (for that’s what it is) have been known as mystics, gurus, sages, and wisdom teachers. I count Jesus among them and, like him, they often got themselves into trouble for their efforts. The fact is that society (whether religious or secular) would much rather control people than set them free.

Who are we? In the terms of Christian spirituality, we are incarnations of God in human form. How could we be anything else? Jesus, then, was not uniquely God incarnate but perhaps the most realized such person, trying to teach everyone that this is their identity. Unity is thus the ultimate truth and not separation and disunity. To cite again my favorite quote of the 14^th century mystic, Meister Eckhart:

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.

Eastern spiritual traditions are less likely to speak of God but, using different words, their teachings are much the same. Again, quoting Meister Eckhart, “Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language.” All these traditions agree that it is an imaginary self, created in our mind, our distraught and divided ego, that is the source of our suffering. Awakening is the discovery of this truth and of our true self, which is one with the “Ground of Being.”

And to experience spiritual awakening, all traditions agree that language is often more of a hindrance than a help. For the key to knowing ourselves and the Truth underlying all reality is not words, but silence. Eckhart once more:

There is a huge silence inside each of us that beckons us into itself, and the recovery of our own silence can begin to teach us the language of heaven.

To ask in the silence of meditation, “Who am I?”, can lead to the most profound and transformative experience we’ll know. Doing so, we do not get a verbal answer but a deep knowing beyond words. And with that, a deep and consoling peace “beyond understanding”, as Paul says. Guiding people to know peace, freedom, life, and rebirth are the repeated themes of the New Testament, yet how little attention they have been given during church history. No wonder so many today identify as “spiritual, not religious.”

Yet it is the “shadows” within us, as Carl Jung called them, which obscure our true identity from ourselves and lead to our suffering and alienation. Multiply that experience by the billions and the suffering of our world is no surprise. We can’t deal with the world’s problems until we have first found the source of peace within us. Spirituality isn’t navel gazing or going into hiding, but the practice which transforms the world by first transforming ourselves.

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The subtitle of this blog is “Reflection and Conversation about Life, Spirituality, and Religion”, corresponding roughly to the three categories above. What I have written here is the core or underlying principles of pretty much all my posts. I don’t think I have ever blatantly contradicted myself, although my emphasis has likely shifted over time. I hope I have given you enough to ponder that you, too, will continue to wrestle with these issues and be enriched and grow in the process.

I was going to conclude with a list of some of the most important resources that have guided my thinking and writing. They could, perhaps, be of assistance in your own life and spiritual journey. However, I soon realized that this would constitute a post of its own, so I will post that soon as a sort of addendum to this one.

As I said above, I do enjoy writing. So, if circumstances and the stars align, don’t be surprised if a post from me appears from time-to-time. Otherwise for the foreseeable future, my plan is to get back to reading outside the parameters of this blog, get out into nature more, and revive my painting practice. I hope to better live out Brian Rutenberg’s advice above to protest the ugliness of our world by bringing beauty into wherever I can. Or, to use the language of our Navajo neighbors here, to better practice “walking in beauty.”

Thank you for all your support. I look forward to hearing from you from time to time. Your friendships are of great value to me. (And look for the “Resources” post which will follow along soon.)

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this!

“Garbage in, garbage out” (or GIGO) is a computer saying from way back. It refers to the truth—not always obvious—that a computer with bad programing or bad data will not and cannot produce a good output. Computers are not magic. Their value is completely dependent on the quality of what is put into them. (And the same goes for AI, incidentally.)

Related to people, wisdom teachers and spiritual sages through the ages have said much the same thing. A life of meaning and satisfaction will elude us if our “software,” the operating principles guiding us, are flawed. We will not experience real happiness or accomplishment if the “data” we are taking in is erroneous, if what is regularly entering our head or our heart is illusory or excessively critical. This is the insight supporting the oft repeated urging of Oprah and other pop counselors to rid ourselves of negative people in our life. If they’re our friends, then we need to find new friends.

Similar ideas are found in the Bible. Perhaps the best known from Jesus is this saying in Luke:

“Your eye is the lamp of your body. If your eye is healthy, your whole body is full of light; but if it is not healthy, your body is full of darkness.”

Using the eye as a metaphor, Jesus emphasizes the flaw within us that lets in “bad” light. This idea is behind the related (and graphic!) teaching of Jesus to pluck out our eye if it causes us to stumble. Better to enter the kingdom seeing clearly with one eye, than stumbling with two. Jesus’ language certainly gets our attention but also underlines how seriously he viewed this matter. Recognizing the metaphorical meaning of his healings, it is no surprise that so many involve the deaf and the blind.

Filtering out the “garbage” is one of the most important spiritual tasks we have today. Previous generations often focused on avoiding “immoral” books, movies, music, etc. While not dismissing that concern, I think there is another kind of “darkness” clouding our hearts and minds that is more troublesome. It is not new but has taken on new destructive power, especially through mass and social media. This is the “bad eye” that causes us to see everything and everyone divisively: like me or unlike me, for me or against me, safe or dangerous, friend or foe, right or wrong, teammate or competitor, winner or loser, to be trusted or feared, to be protected or destroyed.

The ability to make distinctions, and to make judgements based on those distinctions, is one of humanity’s most important qualities. It allows us to manipulate our environment unlike any other creature, and it keeps us alive. When an animal is running toward us, we can’t sit down and consider the possibilities or just wait to see what happens. We need to decide immediately whether this is, for example, our dog running to greet us (get ready for a tongue bath) or a lion wanting us for lunch (run like crazy).

Yet over the centuries, spiritual guides and prophets have taught that what lifts humans to a higher plane is our ability to resist our dualistic tendencies and recognize a profound and essential unity or oneness that transcends all of reality’s divisions. It is this “good eye” which enables us to see that, beyond our differences, we are all part of a single human family. It helps us to recognize that we do not just live “in nature” but we are all part of a profoundly integrated creation, for which humans have unique responsibility. As Alan Watts said, at birth we do not come into the world, we come out of it.

Jesus reflected this vision throughout his life. He welcomed children as well as adults, women as well as men, the sick and the well, sinners and law abiders, friends and enemies, Samaritans, Romans, Gentiles, and foreigners of all types. For Paul, Jesus revealed the profound reality that all human differences are overcome by him: “We are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Our culture is now energized by division. Politicians and the media have mastered the art of manipulating our need for identity and for enemies. They know which buttons to push, and we all have them. Doing so requires our permission, however. We must allow their garbage in. And it is garbage because it is based on a lie: that what divides us is more real than what unites us. It is garbage because to believe and live by it inevitably invites our own destruction.

The first step to experiencing true peace, then, is to keep out the garbage. Turn off the news. Step away from the blogs and the talking heads. If you can’t shut down or redirect arguing and dualistic demonizing by your family, friends and co-workers, then just walk away.

Richard Rohr teaches that the contemplative vision enables us to see God at all times, in all places, and in all things. This profound realization overcomes the dualisms our mind wants to impose on the world and the people around us. God is manifest everywhere, even in our enemies, as Jesus provocatively taught.

When we embrace such a vision, society’s and the world’s divisions become false and unreal, and we lose interest in them. They are certainly unhelpful and not something in which we want to invest our time and energy. Frankly, however, many of these divisions have been our friends for a long time: race, religion, nationality, ethnicity, gender, political party, social class. But they’re not helping us. It’s time to find new friends.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this!

Near the midpoint of the 1962 blockbuster film Lawrence of Arabia, the title character, T. E. Lawrence, makes a harrowing journey across the Sinai wilderness to tell his commander in Cairo, General Allenbee, he had led an Arab force and captured the Turkish stronghold city of Aqaba. At last, an exhausted Lawrence climbs a sand dune and sees the Suez Canal before him. At that moment, a British sentry appears on a motorcycle on the opposite side. Seeing this strange figure dressed in Bedouin robes he calls out, “Who are you?”

If you know the movie or are familiar with the story of the historical Lawrence, you know this question hangs over his life and the film. An English intellectual turned soldier in World War I, Lawrence becomes the leader of the Arab struggle to expel the Ottoman Empire from their land. Even while following him, the Arabs are never sure what to make of this Englishman who has adopted their lifestyle as well as their cause. When later Lawrence begins to resist the secret Franco-British plan to replace the Turks as Arab administrators (the now infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement), his British commanders question whose side he is on. As the movie unfolds, it’s clear Lawrence himself is deeply conflicted about the question, “Who am I?”

That question, of course, confronts all of us at multiple stages in our life. Sometimes it is posed to us by someone else, but often we pose it to ourselves, usually at moments of indecision or crisis. The beginning of our uncertainty can be traced to the conflicting messages we received in childhood.

On the one hand, adults around us and the culture generally tell us who we are in all sorts of ways. We’re given names to both set us apart and join us to our family. We are told about our gender directly and indirectly by how we’re dressed, how our hair is cut, and by the toys we’re given to play with. We’re told how we should behave and are soon given labels: smart, pretty, athletic, talented, etc. and sometimes as many or more negative attributes.

But these provided attributes seem to be turned on their head when we start getting questions like, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” Our identity seems to go from something given to us to something we can choose. Which is it? Things get more complicated when we find that there are apparently right and wrong answers to the “what do you want to be” question. Even today, a boy who says he wants to be a nurse or a girl who says she wants to be an auto mechanic will at least raise eyebrows. Or a child that parents assume will be a doctor or lawyer says that they want to become a social worker.

Then suddenly we arrive at adulthood, and the identity question looks much more complicated. It now is obviously about more than just career or vocation. Things like lifestyle, sexuality, values, goals, and dreams all get mixed in. And behind these questions we become aware, perhaps for the first time, of another more fundamental and mysterious question, “Who am I, really? Who is the ‘me’ that’s making these choices?”

As with Lawrence, that question may follow us for the rest of our lives. Stereotypically, confronting this question is the core of the “midlife crisis.” We reach a point where the direction we’ve given to our life is no longer satisfactory or doesn’t make sense. It doesn’t feel like “me” anymore. We may say things like, “I need to redefine myself.” But rather than being a single turning point, such moments happen many times, to greater or lesser degrees. Dissatisfaction with a job or losing a job, ending a relationship, children leaving home, serious health problems, moving, and retirement are some of common turning points in our sense of identity.

Many people experience genuine liberation when they discover they can make choices to redefine themselves, especially if they felt that earlier choices were made for them or forced upon them, whether by authority figures or life events. Others, however, recoil from such choices. The energy to make them may seem too great. Or they fear making the “wrong” choice based on some external standard, or fear the risk of uncertain consequences of the choice they have an inner desire to make but lack the courage to do so.

What can make such choices easier is returning to the prior and deeper question above: Who is the “me” that’s making these choices? Eastern spiritual traditions have long taught that asking “Who am I?” is the beginning of wisdom and spiritual awakening. “Self-inquiry” as the practice is called, is the fundamental purpose of meditation in its various forms.

In contemplative silence, we come to realize that our awareness, or consciousness, precedes all our labels and thoughts about ourselves. As we deepen our experience of consciousness, we realize that all our thoughts, feelings, choices, and actions take place within it, yet consciousness itself remains unaffected by all of them. It simply is aware of them, knows them, and lets them be.

In Christian terms, consciousness is called Spirit and is our union with God. It is our experience of grace and our knowledge of being loved. Thus, no choice or decision we make, however good or disastrous, can affect our fundamental being, our true Self. Whatever happens, we remain forever free and forever loved. Luther’s counsel to “sin boldly” is solid advice then, where “sin” is to make free choices with uncertain outcomes. Whatever the outcome, we are preserved in grace.

“Who are you?” Our friends and family will have their views. The culture around us will evaluate you by its standards. And the voices of our ego will engage in a constant debate on the topic. But in silent awareness we discover that none of them ultimately matter. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus says to everyone listening, “You are the light of the world.” It was a message of assurance that our real identity is an inner Light that can never be put out and which we should feel free to let shine for all to see.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this!

The praise and accolades have been pouring in from around the world for Dolly Parton following her death this past Monday. And rightly so. She was universally recognized as a uniquely talented and remarkably good and generous person. Despite her seemingly perfect “Red State” pedigree—Appalachian roots and country music stardom—she genuinely transcended political divisions, embodying religious faith yet supporting gay rights, underwriting a COVID vaccine, and contributing generously to charitable causes, including her own Imagination Library.

It’s not surprising, then, that a word that has jumped into people’s minds to describe Parton is “saint.” I believe it was the German American theologian Paul Tillich who defined the life of a saint as “a window transparent to God.” By her own description, Parton was a person of deep faith yet was not publicly demonstrative of any particular religious beliefs, as The Christian Century magazine described this week.

Dolly’s faith never fit neatly into any standard denominational framework, but she talked often about God, Jesus, scripture, and prayer. Some of what she said would’ve been difficult to reconcile with the theology of churches she knew, but that didn’t seem to trouble her too much. When once asked how she practiced her faith, she resisted the verb: “I don’t practice it. I live it.” …

In 2016, Vogue asked her what she thought people saw in her. “I really like to think it’s God’s spark,” Dolly said. She then explained that every day she asked God to let her do or say something that mattered to somebody, to let some love pass through her.

The reason this struck people as so genuine and sincere is that Parton never tried to be anything but herself. She reminded me of what art teachers I know have said. Don’t try to guess what you think the public might want, they counsel. Paint and create what moves you and expresses you and people will respond. Parton knew this instinctively.

With her big hair and boobs and hardscrabble upbringing, Parton could easily have been a caricature, and many critics tried to make her into that. But Parton was always three steps ahead of them. What they wanted to mock and ridicule her for, she embraced, exposing their hypocrisy in the process. As The New York Times says, Parton’s jokes about herself were always better than her critics and stole their thunder.

In May, Dolly Parton made a cheery social media announcement that she was canceling a planned residency in Las Vegas because of poor health. She delivered the bad news in the form of a five-minute roast of herself, in which she made fun of her wigs, her kidney stones, her costumes and the size of her breasts. At the video’s end, she acknowledged that she wasn’t getting any younger. But, she added: “As long as there are plastic surgeons in this world, I’m not getting any older.”

Parton … knew the power of being in on the joke. From the start of her career, she was met by a nascent celebrity tabloid media that called her tacky, gaudy and fake — barely concealed euphemisms for working-class…. But nothing a columnist, critic or comic said about Parton could compare with what she said about herself. She stepped on all of their punchlines and took away their power….

She used self-deprecation as a subversive trick. The jokes were beneath her, but when she played along, she wasn’t actually debasing herself. She was reclaiming her body and aesthetic as a point of pride, vaporizing any implied insult of the Appalachian working class, and revealing her critics as fools even as she graciously allowed them to laugh with her….

The ridicule of her image allowed her to position herself as a constant revelation. “Some folks see my artificial look and think I have no depth,” she told Newsweek in 1977. “But my inner sadness and joy are as real as my hair and nails are fake. That’s what I like — looking like one thing and being another.”

The popular image of a saint is of someone who is “other worldly”, yet the truth is exactly the opposite. Saints are people who completely inhabit real life and are thus fully genuine. If you look carefully, you see that these are exactly the criticisms leveled at Jesus. He was accused, in modern language, of being an uneducated country bumpkin. The mocking question of Jesus, “Can anything good come out of Galilee?” could easily be reframed, “Can anything good come out of the hills of Tennessee?” With a powerful combination of honesty and humility, Dolly Parton said by her life, “Yes it can, and here I am.”

Through the ages, spiritual teachers have said that spiritual rebirth or awakening means the discovery of our True Self and then living by it, rather than by our false self, what we would call today our ego. The false self is the various identities we take on and masks we wear to fit in, to be acceptable, to “make it” in the world as we imagine it to be. Behind all these is the genuine person we are afraid to be, thinking it will be rejected as unacceptable by the world’s crushing standards.

The “miracle” of Dolly Parton is that she knew her true self to be the good and gifted person she was. Being that person and nothing more (or less) was exactly what her life needed to be. In doing so, Parton embodied one of Jesus’ most well-known teachings from the Sermon on the Mount.

“You are the light of the world…. People do not light a lamp and put it under the bushel basket; rather, they put it on the lampstand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”

As many have said, Dolly Parton made the world better and made them want to be better. They saw in her, as she called it, God’s spark. In doing so, Parton also wanted people to realize that they all had that spark in them, a light of God that shouldn’t be hid but was given to shine brightly for all to see. Dolly Parton’s life shone like the blazes, encouraging everyone to shine along with her by simply being, as she was, the person they had been created to be.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this!

Recently I watched two interviews with climate scientists discussing the heat waves that have stunned Europe this summer, as well as other parts of the world. Both said, in effect, “we ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.” These events are not anomalies, they said, but only an introduction to new weather norms that will only get worse, much worse.

It was obvious that both speakers wanted to be as blunt as possible. They were done with pulling their punches. And both identified the rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels as the culprit. One of them documented that rise from prehistoric times, where it remained remarkably stable, to modern industrialization when it skyrocketed and continues to rise. Further, he said that there is no gradual or half-way measure available to remedy the situation. Hydrocarbon burning must be drastically cut now to begin reversing our climate’s deterioration.

Of course, there is no prospect of that happening. Relative to power demands, advances in renewable energy and energy efficiency are only making a dent in the world’s fossil fuel dependency (which astonishingly are being reversed in this country). The reasons are simple but not ones we want to recognize.

Industry, with its focus on short-term profits, has no incentive to seriously invest in alternative energy sources. This will only happen if it’s directed to by government authorities. But as is now obvious, industry’s owners and economic elites have gained a near stranglehold on the political process, both from enormous campaign contributions and from control of the media. As former president Jimmy Carter declared over ten years ago, because of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling the United States is now “just an oligarchy, with unlimited political bribery being the essence of getting the nominations for president or to elect the president.”

And while the processes have varied, much the same development has occurred throughout the Western democracies. Unsurprisingly then, the less profit-driven economy of China has made the greatest strides in moving away from carbon fuel dependency. Yet even if all industrial countries followed China’s example, carbon use still wouldn’t decline nearly enough to avert climate disaster.

It is simply a fact that modern industrial economies depend on fossil carbon fuel. Some organizations have touted this fact to try to diminish the value of alternative energy sources. They’re right: they won’t be enough to maintain our industrial culture as we’ve known it. What these fossil fuel proponents won’t acknowledge is that, based on their own conclusions, the only alternative then is a dramatic change in our modern economy and the lifestyle it supports.

But that’s not happening spontaneously or voluntarily, and it’s not going to happen nearly fast enough. Reusing and recycling, switching to LED bulbs and Low-E glass, biking or driving hybrid cars are all steps in the right direction, but they are baby steps on a thousand-mile journey. Life as we know it has to change, yet we’ve hardly begun to imagine what that would look like or how we will ever go about making such change happen.

Since we will not make those changes on our own, the earth’s changing climate will make them for us. The heat waves, storms, fires, floods, droughts, water shortages, and crop failures that are now regular news stories will become the reality we all live with.

For some time, people concerned about the environment have focused on the question, “What can we do to live more responsibly?” That’s not irrelevant or without value, but the more immediate question we increasingly will face is, “How do I live as the climate crisis unfolds?” How do we live with purpose and hope as we experience the destabilizing consequences of climate change? How do we live in community and show compassion toward our neighbors in distress?

I’ve long thought that the fascination with Titanic is that many see it as a metaphor for the vague sense of doom that has been hanging over modern Western culture. It was viewed that way in retrospect when the catastrophe of World War I broke out a little over two years later, the war everyone was convinced would never happen. At the end of the 1958 film A Night to Remember, a surviving officer in a lifeboat reflects on the hype about the ship and the disastrous reality, “We were so sure….”

The 1997 blockbuster movie embodies that experience for our time. Perhaps the most telling scene occurs right after the iceberg collision as those in charge try to comprehend what has happened. When the ship’s architect unrolls the blueprints to demonstrate that Titanic will “founder”, the company representative protests, “But she’s unsinkable!” The wilting response is, “She’s made of iron, sir. I assure you she can, and she will.” And representing all those looking for a technological way out, the captain exclaims, “But what about the pumps!?” The unsatisfactory reply is, “They buy you time, but minutes only.” The sobering faces of those gathered around show the truth gradually sinking in.

As the various Titanic films unwind, the drama is not the ship sinking, despite the tension it creates. Rather, it is the stories of how passengers and crew all face the inevitable disaster with the knowledge that some will survive but not all, not even most. It’s the struggle of a thousand moral and ethical challenges all at once.

One detail the movies highlight is the playing of the ship’s orchestra musicians nearly to the end. Even in tragedy there is a need for beauty. I thought of them after reading a post by Australian blogger, Caitlin Johnstone. I have previously quoted her and her blunt, no-nonsense assessment of the state of the world. This post takes a different turn and is titled, “There Is Beauty Everywhere. Even In Dystopia. Even In Armageddon.”

One point I will always adamantly insist on is that it’s entirely possible to live a joyful and exuberant life in the midst of this abusive dystopia.

There’s a pervasive, unexamined notion throughout revolutionary politics that there’s some kind of nobility in being miserable. If it isn’t seen as noble, it’s at least seen as rational, because everything is so unjust and unhealthy….

But that’s rubbish. Nobody is helped by your misery. By depriving yourself of joy, you are only depriving the world of that much joy. Being more joyful makes you more energized, more helpful, and more useful to the cause, and it brings joy to everyone around you.

The perspective Johnstone takes here is very much like that of Jesus. Many want to portray Jesus as a kind of revolutionary or, at least, a guide to revolutionaries wanting to take down an oppressive system. I don’t think he was either of those things. Jesus knew very well how oppressive his society was and probably suspected some cataclysm was coming (as it did a generation later).

Rather, the wisdom Jesus taught was how to live in an unjust and suffering world which no one had realistic prospects of changing. We see this in the Beatitudes, his teaching about worry amidst the beauty of the lilies, and his countless admonishments to treat one another fairly and with compassion. However awful society has become, the world is still beautiful and life is still good, Jesus insists. Don’t be dragged down by following the misguided values of the rich and powerful. They are blind guides.

This is why it is so important to be honest about this time in which we live. Otherwise, we are yanked this way and that by political soap opera, by the faux dramas of celebrities and elites, false messiahs, and the scapegoating of an ever-changing list of “problem people.” All this keeps us in a whirl of unreality, as Johnstone says in another related essay, “We All Know This Civilization Is Doomed, But They Keep Telling Us Everything’s Normal” (she likes long titles).

Life in the 2020s comes with so much dissonance and dysphoria because everyone knows this civilization is doomed, but it’s not being acknowledged by any of our mainstream institutions. 

We can all see everything getting worse and worse before our eyes in real time, but our government officials don’t talk about it. Our mass media outlets don’t report on it. Our education systems don’t recognize it. There’s a giant elephant in the room with us at all times, and normal people are acutely aware of it, but the talking heads keep speaking as though everything’s going to keep ticking along normally into the foreseeable future….

We all know we’re in a completely unsustainable situation. We all know we are riding a bus with disintegrating wheels.

But it doesn’t get acknowledged by anyone at the top. The news reports are still about the latest celebrity gossip and whether the economy arrow is pointing up or down. The movies and shows are still about wacky and witty characters for whom capitalism is working perfectly fine. The politicians are still talking about culture war issues and the Evil Dictator of the Day….

I’m not saying we’re all going to die, I’m just saying this civilization as it presently exists cannot possibly be sustained. Immensely drastic changes are coming up around the bend whether we like it or not, either by a deliberate transformation or by some cataclysmic event occurring against our will. 

Life in the 2020s feels so spiritually dissonant because we all know this is the case, but all the sources we’ve been trained to look to for information and context are acting like everything’s perfectly fine. They’re painting a cheery picture over reality while every normal person is staring at the giant black cracks that keep appearing in the paint job.

Here, of course, Johnstone is sounding very much like an Old Testament prophet. Their job was not so much to predict the future as to describe truthfully the present time, which most wanted to pretend was something else. In other words, the elephant in the room, as Johnstone says. And this is where the prophets and mystics come together because both are dedicated to seeing life and the world as they truly are. This is what “waking up” is actually about—clearing our heads of the brain fog of cultural and self-delusion to genuinely live in the present moment.

But waking up, as Jesus said, is also learning to see the beauty of life and the world, for they are often hidden in plain sight. This takes practice, as Johnstone says, returning in conclusion to her earlier essay (and I encourage you to read them both).

Being joyful is a skill, and like any other skill it takes practice. But it’s something we all have access to if we want it.

Being joyful doesn’t entail hiding from the misery of the world or compartmentalizing away from the reality of what’s happening; quite the opposite, in fact. It entails opening yourself all the way up to what’s happening in each moment and feeling it all with the heart of a poet. It means becoming more sensitive, not less, because a stripped-open sensitivity is where ubiquitous beauty is found….

They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but that’s false. Beauty is in everything. The failure to see beauty is in the eye of the beholder….

Don’t waste your precious time here missing the beauty of each moment. This is more important now than ever, because we don’t know how long humanity’s adventure on this miraculous blue world will last. Tomorrow has never been guaranteed to any of us, but these days it’s not even guaranteed to our species.

Just keep bringing your attention back to what’s here and now, and keep looking for the beauty in it. I swear to you it’s there….

Learn to do this, and you can live the rest of your life knowing that even if it all comes crashing down one day, at least you’ll know you tried your very best to make sure you didn’t miss the miraculousness of your time here.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this!

In an early scene of Moonstruck (one of my favorite movies), Loretta (played by Cher) puts her fiancé on a plane to Sicily to visit his dying mother. As Loretta stands looking at the plane, an elderly Italian woman in traditional garb turns and vehemently says to her, “I’ve put a curse on that plane!”

She explains that her sister is on the flight and fifty years ago she stole the man the woman was in love with, a man she now says she never loved but only wanted to spite her. With angry satisfaction she declares, “That plane is going to explode and fall into the sea!” Unmoved, Loretta responds simply, “I don’t believe in curses.” The woman replies, “Meh. Neither do I,” and turns back to the window to watch the plane depart.

I think this little vignette could serve as a parable for how many people relate to God. They may not believe in God, at least not the traditional divine father figure in the heavens. Yet having a transcendent, listening, personality to direct powerful emotions towards, or to hear deep needs and desires, is beneficial to them.

This week I saw several videos taken during the earthquake in Columbia and heard multiple voices crying out to God. Did they believe those prayers would cause the earthquake to stop (as one specifically asked) or to protect them from falling buildings? Probably not. Rather, it was a spontaneous reaction in a moment of distress, fear, confusion, and helplessness. “Oh, God!”

Many people who leave religion identify the reality of suffering as a primary cause. If God really is God, why do people suffer so much? Why doesn’t God intervene to alleviate suffering? In response, Christianity has pointed to the crucified Jesus as evidence that God suffers with us. Apparently, the crucifix, a cross which includes the body of the dying Jesus, became popular in the Middle Ages when the first hospitals and sanitaria were opened. Large crosses or paintings of the crucifixion were hung in ward rooms to comfort the patients there.

Logically, the notion of a suffering God may not be persuasive to those struggling with the reality of human suffering. Psychologically, however, the story or image of Christ on the cross has brought comfort to countless people over the centuries. It conveys at least the hope that “someone knows what I’m going through.” For as painful as the suffering itself may be, often it is the feeling of aloneness and abandonment that makes it unbearable.

It is not only pain that we want to share, however, but also joy. “Quick, come look at this beautiful sunset!” We want others to share the moment and be excited as we are. We send photos of a newborn infant to distant friends and family to share the thrill and happiness, even though the pictured baby looks pretty much like all other babies. And isn’t it interesting that we may be just as likely to exclaim “Oh God” in response to distress as to awe and amazement, like our first experience of the Grand Canyon?

As I have been writing recently, I don’t think the important question is whether God exists, but rather what we mean by God, especially what our experience is that we call God. Many of us, of course, don’t think of God as an experience at all, or at best only a rare and fleeting one. Instead, God is more often an idea that we’ve been taught to believe, which I don’t think is very helpful at all. Then God does become something like Santa or the Tooth Fairy, which with maturity and experience we eventually dismiss. But God is not an idea.

Despite our much more skeptical age, prayer surprisingly persists, even if only as simple exclamations like, “Oh God.” Some may dismiss this with, “Old habits die hard.” But I think there is more to it than that. These spontaneous turnings toward God, regardless of what we think about God, tell us something about an inner inclination we all share to connect with a transcendent reality, especially in moments of great feeling and need.

The key to understanding this is recognizing that these deep emotions are expressions of our ego, our relative or “surface” self. This self, our personality, reacts strongly to two experiences: our sense of danger and our sense of being alone, which often combine, of course. God, then, is treated as our protector and companion. As the 23^rd Psalm says, “The LORD is my shepherd … I will fear no evil, for you are with me.”

But while this human experience is obvious, why do we assume God is there for us in such situations? There have been more benign or event malevolent understands of God, but none of them have taken hold. Why is that? Just wishful thinking? Or could it be that there is some sense deep within us that fundamentally we are neither alone nor in danger?

“Prayer” usually suggests talking in some fashion. Yet across the religious spectrum, nonverbal prayer is also common, typically known as meditation or, often in Christian contexts, contemplation or contemplative prayer. In such purposeful silence one seeks to encounter both God, the sacred transcendent, and our true self, beyond the ego, at the same time.

This is possible because our true self and God are fundamentally one. In the Bible’s language, this unity is known as Spirit. God breathes into dust to make the first human (“breath” and spirit are the same word in both Hebrew and Greek). Death is the moment when a person’s spirit leaves the body and returns to God. Thus, life is the experience of Spirit animating a physical body. This contradicts the church’s teaching that Jesus was the unique incarnation of God, when what Jesus was trying to show is that every person is an incarnation of God.

Are we alone? Are we in danger? Our ego often thinks so, which causes it to look for safety and companionship somewhere “out there”, including in a distant God. But our ego is a creation of our mind, finite and in constant flux. But the Self we know in our deepest silence is at peace and one with all reality. It never knows aloneness and is always secure. This is what Paul describes in Philippians as “the peace of God which surpasses all understanding.”

Verbal prayer isn’t going away, nor does it need to. It’s an understandable, often spontaneous response to countless experiences in life. But such prayer may be most helpful when, like the woman Loretta meets in the airport, it is to a God we don’t believe in. Then, prayer isn’t a hope to connect with “something out there”, but an expression of the sacred reality we’ve come to know is at our center, uniting us with everyone and everything.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this!

In my last post, I said that we are in a time of “do it yourself religion.” We can’t anymore rely on traditional institutional religion for our spiritual wellbeing, so we must take care of it ourselves. There are a couple of obstacles to that happening. One which I mentioned last time, is that it takes time and effort. The other is that we may not feel we have permission.

Most versions of Christianity (like many religions) have a concept of revelation. It assumes that God can’t be known by human beings directly, so God is revealed in the Bible, the sacraments, and through religious authorities. All this is under the auspices of the church. For that reason, in its most extreme formulation, it has been said that “outside the church there is no salvation.” In other words, if you’re going to connect with God, who is presumably the source of salvation, then you’re going to have to do that through the church.

All of this is antiquated now. A divine heavenly authority figure, doling out rewards and punishments, is simply unbelievable. Five hundred years of scientific discovery has, as it’s been said, left the ancient God both homeless and unemployed. In the universe of contemporary cosmology, heaven is nowhere to be found. And scientific theory and law have become the explainers of all of nature’s structures and processes, making superfluous a God pulling the universe’s strings.

More importantly, traditional religion’s God just doesn’t work for us anymore. First, we recognize the image’s origins in both the monarchs of ancient empires and the less-than-healthy models of pre-modern father figures. Further, unending existence in a heavenly amusement park (as Marshall Davis has dubbed the traditional notion of eternal life) doesn’t appeal to us as it may have to our medieval peasant ancestors. In short, the ancient world’s God and what he had to offer have both lost their appeal.

So, end of God? End of story? The nineteenth century’s bad boy philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, declared, “God is dead and we have killed him.” As far as he was concerned, it was the end. The God of the ancient world died with that world, thanks to the rise of modernism. And I don’t think it’s wrong to assign some of the blame for modernism’s inhumanity to God’s demise. For that reason, the conservative reaction to God’s “death”, in both religion and politics, is understandable.

But reviving the ancient world’s God is no more reasonable that trying to bring back the ancient world. Not only do we like antibiotics and indoor plumbing too much to give them up, but we are also now modern people. Humanity has changed and is still changing. And I am convinced that, despite the obvious problems we’ve encountered along the way, that change has been for the better. As modern people, we now have the freedom to live lives of our own choosing, and we have permission to find truth for ourselves. The ancient cultural authorities have been dethroned.

So, just as living in a democracy takes more work than living in a monarchy or dictatorship, so too is DYI religion more work than to be the trusting believer in an ancient God. Frankly, one of the things that religion takes advantage of is our laziness. “God? Don’t worry about it. We’ll take care of this for you.” The other thing religion uses is our lack of self-confidence. “I don’t know anything about God. How could I? I better rely on the experts.”

Both attitudes are beneath us and do nothing for us. They both assume God is some being external to us which is impossible for us mere mortals to reach or grasp. That people have such attitudes is understandable because it is what religion has taught them. After all, believing in such a God is what has kept religion in business. But what if this isn’t who or what God is at all?

And at this point, we need to think about this word “God.” I have been using it for convenience, but it has its problems. For people who have left traditional religion, the word God refers to a celestial supreme being, a “Sky God” as it’s been called, that is oppressive and which no longer makes sense to them. Using the word has become an obstacle to a new understanding. For people within religion but open to a new understanding, the same obstacle exists because it is very difficult for us to change a word’s meaning, even if we want to. Say the word “God” and an image or idea from our past will pop into our head, like it or not.

Thus, for many people, God is no longer a useful term. In that context, the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart’s startling declaration makes sense: “I pray God to rid me of God.” For Eckhart, the traditional God-out-there no longer made sense and was an obstacle to his spiritual maturity. For that reason, we need to find a new starting point. Instead of the idea of God passed on from ancient tradition, we need start with what is always most important to us: our own experience.

While it’s not what has been emphasized, knowing the sacred from our own experience is not foreign to the Bible. At the conclusion of the famous story of Moses and the burning bush, the voice simply identifies itself as “I am.” After Job’s encounter with the whirlwind, he declares that his idea of God has been displaced by personal experience: “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.”

The New Testament also affirms the intimacy of divine experience. When the disciples ask Jesus to reveal God to them, he responds, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father.” Paul says his spiritual transformation means, “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” Similarly, in Luke and the gospel of Thomas, Jesus declares that rather than being something distant from us, “the kingdom of God is within you.”

In a quote attributed to him in the book of Acts, Paul says God is “the one in whom we live and move and have our being.” Seemingly as an explanation of those words, Augustine declared that “God is nearer to us than we are to ourselves.” And another quote, so popular there is no historical agreement who first said it, says, “God is a circle whose center Is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.”

All of these are ways of making the well-known assertion that God is transcendent, omnipresent, unavoidable. But then we ask, “If that’s so, why can’t I find God?” The answer of theologians (including Martin Luther) has been that God hides, which would seem to be impossible. What if, instead, God is hiding in plain view. What if God is hidden only because we haven’t learned how to recognize God, or haven’t realized it was even possible, or were taught it was impossible?

At this point, we run up against the limits of language. But perhaps better, we might say we discover our language is limitless in pointing to this limitless reality. For what we are talking about is that which is the source and union of existence itself, i.e. all things and all of us. Religion, philosophy, science, and poetry have all contributed to this conversation: God, Brahman, Tao, Kingdom, Spirit, One, Mind, Energy, and Love are some of the most common terms.

The term which Meister Eckhart used most often was “Ground of Being,” a phrase that has recently gained new favor. But what sets Eckhart apart from conventional philosophy or theology, is that this notion was for him deeply personal. It wasn’t an idea one thought about but a reality intimately experienced. This is what he is pointing to in his famous quote that I used in my last post.

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.

For Eckhart, as the Ground of Being, the deepest spiritual truth is that God is one with all things, and therefore one with us. Where do we experience this oneness? In our “eye”, our seeing, our awareness, the consciousness which we experience when our mind falls silent, that which yields our experience of our own being, our “I am-ness.” Again, this doesn’t arise from deep thinking. Quite the opposite. It arises from the deep silence within us, often hidden and drowned out by our thoughts, yet always present. It is here that we “see God”, Eckhart says, and discover there is, in fact, only one seeing.

The Enlightenment philosopher Rene Descartes famously said the first principle of all knowing is “I think, therefore I am” (Cogito, ergo sum). But he was wrong. Prior to thinking is consciousness, our awareness of thinking, feeling, sensing, and of all experience, amd which yields our sense of being, our awareness that “I am.”

For at least a century, science has been trying to understand consciousness. Material science had focused on finding the part or function of the body, presumably something in the brain, that produces consciousness. So far, it’s had no luck. Theoretical science, however, especially physics, has said that’s looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Two of the founders of quantum physics, Max Planck and Erwin Schrödinger, both concluded that consciousness is not an end product but rather where everything starts. Planck stunningly declared,

I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness.

And in Schrödinger’s view:

Consciousness is a singular entity. What we experience as separate individual minds are not genuinely separate at all, but local expressions of a single universal consciousness that underlies the whole of reality.

While not unaware of the implications of their ideas, neither man was writing from a religious perspective. In both cases, their understanding of consciousness grew out of their scientific study. They realized, however, that what they were pointing to was what in the past would have been called God. Though with fits and starts, the supposed antagonists, science and religion, are aiming at the same thing, the ultimate reality from which all existence arises.

By its very nature, consciousness is something we all know. It is how we know. It is accessible to everyone. Thus, to continue using this word, God may be beyond understanding but is not beyond anyone’s knowing or experiencing. To start, Meister Eckhart says, we need to drop all our preconceived ideas about God. Then, prepare to be amazed.

Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things. Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God.

But most importantly, God is in us. While often forgotten, this truth is fundamental to Christianity. Jesus prays in John that his followers would all be one with God just as he is. And Paul reminds the Christians in Corinth,

Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?

The ultimate meaning and purpose of prayer, meditation, contemplation, is to experience and know this “ground of being” within us, this awareness that unites us with all reality. As consciousness, it is the core of our own being, known in the silent peace that is at our center. Eckhart says,

There is a huge silence inside each of us that beckons us into itself, and the recovery of our own silence can begin to teach us the language of heaven. 

In silence, God stops being a “thing” to have ideas about and to argue about (thus the meaninglessness of the poll question, “Do you believe God exists?”). Instead,the notion of God points to what is beyond words yet perhaps expresses for us what is our center, what we experience as our union with all reality, and what gives our life and all existence meaning and value. Returning again and again to that ultimate Truth within us, we come to appreciate who we are, why we are here, and what “this” is all about. We discover that, in the words of Meister Eckhart,

The most important hour is always the present. The most significant person is precisely the one sitting across from you right now. The most necessary work is always love.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this!

People today have become increasingly accepting of, and proactive about, taking care of themselves. Not like pioneer folks on the frontier. Rather, they are recognizing that many things previous generations assumed would take care of themselves, or were beyond their control, won’t or aren’t.

Career and personal finance, physical and mental health are areas of life people increasingly, even if reluctantly, realize they need to be the ones in charge. In the past, it was typically assumed such things just ran their course, or that professionals or social institutions would take care of them. Now people realize that in these and other areas of life, they need to be in the driver’s seat, even if that first means learning how to drive.

Two of the biggest factors driving this development are the increasing availability of information and a decreasing trust in professionals and institutions. Medicine is perhaps the most familiar example. We have moved from a time when a doctor’s word was “gospel” to a doctor’s instruction being the start of a personal research project.

After leaving a medical appointment with a prescription or recommended therapy or procedure, we head home to our computer to scan the Internet to get other opinions to support or contradict our doctor’s advice. Actually, we may well have gone into the meeting having already researched medical web sites and listened to online medical authorities for information about our health concern. Whatever the outcome, we know we have taken responsibility for our own wellbeing.

The downside to this approach, whatever area of life we are dealing with, is that being proactive often means a lot of time and energy. This is why letting someone else take care of it is so appealing. Whether it’s fixing our car or fixing our finances, we would much prefer to hand it over to “the pros” but we realize, sometimes after learning the hard way, that we need to get our hands dirty, too.

Knowing the kinds of things I write about, you may see where I’m going with this. I think the same thing is happening with religion and the church. Through most of Christian history, the institutional church and its professional clergy were unquestioned authorities on all things related to religious belief and practice. Church members mostly believed and did what they were told because they believed the assurances they were given about their spiritual wellbeing, i.e. they would be okay with God and get to heaven when they died.

That was then. Now, not so much. As with their parallels in secular society, the church and its clergy have sunk in public esteem, and with good reason. But we don’t need to rehash that here. More importantly, what traditional religion has had to offer, getting right with God and getting into heaven, have both lost their cachet. As a result, they don’t provide what people are really looking for: a sense of spiritual wellbeing.

For people of my parents’ generation and earlier, going to church is what you did. Doing so accomplished a variety of things, including providing opportunities for community and service to others. The religious component, experienced mostly in worship, provided that general sense of wellbeing. Even if one’s beliefs were kind of shaky, the experience left you feeling basically right with the Universe and with the human family. Your place within them seemed stable and understandable. From that centeredness, you found an internal strength to deal with the curves which existence was always throwing at you, especially suffering and death.

But now, traditional religion doesn’t do that very well anymore. It may still provide other things for some people, especially in the community and service areas I mentioned above. As a source for spiritual identity, meaning, and security—spiritual wellbeing as I’ve called it—religion today is falling short. So, as with our financial and physical wellbeing, responsibility for our spiritual health now starts with ourselves.

For those accustomed to traditional religion, this can be a hard concept to grasp. They may not even be aware of “spiritual wellbeing” as being a thing. Similarly, and ironically, people with no religious background are often in the same situation. If they have any awareness of spirituality at all, it’s often an amorphous blend of ideas like astrology and reincarnation and the warm feelings of watching sunsets or walking in the woods. Suggesting that spirituality is a fundamental dimension of life which you can and should do something about is likely to get a blank face and blinking eyes. “Say that again….”

So, what does “doing something” about spirituality look like? As with exercise, healthy eating, auto mechanics, or financial planning, the possibilities are endless. You could easily create a whole library on the subject. But that’s misleading because this isn’t about accumulating lots of ideas, it’s about experience. Ultimately, the answers aren’t “out there” somewhere but within you.

This is why spirituality of whatever kind, to turn practical for a moment, will almost always involve as a starting point some form of meditation, or simply sitting in silence. This is because in silence we meet true ourselves, which is often the last thing we think we want to do. Yet this is the essence of spirituality, much to our surprise and chagrin.

The good news is that we are not the chattering voices we hear when try to be silent. Rather, our true self is the deeper and true silence of consciousness, that which is aware of the voices, among many other things, but which is unaffected by them. It is our conscious awareness which is the boundary, or better the joining place of ourselves and ultimate reality, of the sacred, of God. This truth is stated in a quote I’ve used many times by the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart.

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.

Eckhart’s understanding of God is obviously not a white-robed man sitting in the clouds. Ultimately, Eckhart would agree, like all mystics and even the Bible, that God is unspeakable, beyond words, beyond understanding, but not beyond our experiencing and knowing. And this is what spirituality is ultimately about: experiencing this ultimate reality, using whatever name or word for it that you like, and knowing our unbreakable unity with it.

This is what Jesus tries to get at in an extended dialog in John 6, using ancient language and symbols which to us is mostly an impenetrable word salad. But even his own followers are confused and offended. In response, Jesus cuts to the chase.

It is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life.

The German Jesuit Karl Rahner was one of the most influential Catholic theologians of the 20th-century. His awareness of the need for the church to change to be relevant in the modern world led him to be appointed as a key advisor to the Second Vatican Council. One of his most famous, and to some irritating, quotes was, ““The number one cause of atheism is Christians,” highlighting people’s awareness of the disconnect between Christian belief and Christians’ behavior.

Looking ahead, Rahner knew that due to this and many other shortcomings, a fundamental change had to happen in what being Christian even meant. For that reason, he said,

“The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all.”

In saying this, I believe Rahner was not only responding to traditional Christianity’s failings but also to an awareness of a new world rapidly dawning upon us.

Belief and belonging, Christianity’s original pillars, are no longer enough. In the modern world, being part of a Christian community, a church, is no longer enough. Instead, the modern emphasis on the individual, our primary identity as persons, means that we now require our own experience of the sacred reality which undergirds all existence and our own selves. A knowledge of what Eckhart, and centuries later Paul Tillich, called “the ground of being.” But this can’t be knowledge from a book or a teacher but a knowing deep within us.

It takes no great awareness to realize that our world is deeply and dangerously troubled. Worse, our leaders, in whatever arena, have no ideas how to solve our problems and often are only making them worse. And individually we increasingly experience our lives and the world in which we live as confused, meaningless, and profoundly unsatisfactory.

Such experiences occur as the voices in our head and the pit in our stomach. They can be overwhelming. Spirituality leads us to another reality which does not deny our suffering, but transcends it with the awareness and experience of our true selves and our ultimate value and destiny. But the spiritual journey is not one that someone else can take for us and it’s not a guided tour. It’s all our own, started like all journeys by putting one foot in front of the other.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this!

“San Andreas Fault Has Gone Ominously Quiet” warned a recent headline in the Los Angeles Times. “Ominously” quiet? Shouldn’t quiet fault lines be a good thing? Not always, because faults need to move a little from time-to-time, otherwise they move a lot, all at once, and usually with disastrous consequences.

We like to think we stand on terra firma, solid ground, but our planet’s surface is anything but, as earthquakes repeatedly remind us. Earth’s seemingly continuous but relatively thin surface hides innumerable cracks, the edges of tectonic plates moving in all directions, against, over and under other plates. The earth’s surface, like a hardboiled egg that rolled off the counter and hit the floor, is a spiderweb of cracks. The earth is broken, and yet it’s doing just fine because that’s the way it’s always been.

A recent YouTube video describes this reality from a human perspective. “Everything is Broken: The Most Liberating Realization” gives an example used by a 20^th century Thai Buddhist teacher. Holding an ordinary drinking glass he says,

“Whenever you use this glass, you should reflect that it’s already broken.  Develop this kind of understanding. Use the glass, look after it until one day it slips out of your hand. Smash. No problem. Why is there no problem? Because you saw its brokenness before it broke.”

This sounds like nonsense, yet it expresses a wisdom found in nearly all the world’s spiritual traditions, including Christianity. It is why Jesus says that anyone who clings to their life will lose it but those who let go of their life will find it. They will find, if you will, the perfectly good egg beneath the cracked shell.

As the video explains, the broken glass metaphor points to a teaching at the center of Buddhism: the impermanence of all things.

The Buddha said that all conditioned things will pass away. Everything that rises will fall down again. Everything that is put together will fall apart. Everything that is born will die. And the suffering, the dukkha, this sense of unsatisfactoriness that we all have, doesn’t come from things changing. That comes from our resistance to the change.

It’s when we tell ourselves, this shouldn’t be this way or this should last longer, this thing shouldn’t have broken. But that is just reality doing what reality does. We cling and we grasp and we build our happiness on these things that are already heading towards their end. The Buddha saw this clearly. Desire and attachment keep us locked in this cycle where we’re constantly reaching for things and grasping and clinging and then suffering when those things end.

Today, the news seems filled with headlines like that one from the LA Times. Signs of impending disasters are everywhere, it seems. Current extreme weather events are just foretastes of worse to come. One misstep and regional wars could become global ones. The high-flying stock market is surely set for a crash. The next pandemic is just around the corner. The four horsemen of the apocalypse, it seems, are ready and waiting to spring out of the barn.

I don’t mean to make fun of any of this. In fact, it’s all quite serious. The question is how we perceive and react to these imminent threats, how we go about living on the world’s many human fault lines. The temptation, of course, is to run, to get away from these disruptions and threats of disaster. The problem with that strategy is that wherever we go, we find we are only back in a new fault zone. The ground under us will only start shaking again.

I came across a review of a book that has been on my “to-be-read” pile for some time. When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times is perhaps the most well-known book by Pema Chodron, a renowned American Buddhist teacher and writer. In the review, on an interesting Facebook page called “The Book Therapist,” the writer confesses to disliking very much what Chodron advises but then having a change of heart.

I am going to say something that might sound strange coming from someone about to recommend a book. I spent the first thirty pages of this book disagreeing with Pema Chödrön. I was desperately hoping that a Buddhist nun who has spent decades studying the human mind had somehow gotten it wrong. Because what she was saying, in the voice of someone who has clearly made peace with it, was something I was not ready to make peace with.

Here’s the sentence that started the argument. She says the things falling apart in your life are not a malfunction. That the ground was never solid to begin with; you were never actually standing on anything, you’d just gotten remarkably good at not noticing. She says the anxious, ungrounded feeling you’re trying so hard to fix is not a problem to be solved. It’s just what it feels like to be a person, accurately, for once, without the usual padding.

I did not want to hear that. I wanted solutions. I wanted five steps. I wanted someone to hand me the ground back. Pema, gently, yet infuriatingly, refuses. And it took me embarrassingly long to realize that refusal is the entire gift of this book.

This acceptance of inevitable change that Chodron teaches is at the heart of countless spiritual teachers over the ages, along with the inevitable anxiety and suffering that comes when we refuse such acceptance. It is the center of Jesus’ famous teaching in the Sermon on the Mount about the lilies of the field in Matthew 6. Avoid the anxiety about what might happen by living in the here and now. As Jesus says in conclusion:

 “So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”

The peace of this acceptance comes only by developing a new relationship with ourselves. By recognizing that our anxieties are triggered by a wounded and frightened ego created in our mind, but which is obscuring our true self which has never been hurt and is always at peace, the peace which Paul says, “surpasses all understanding.” To repeat last week’s quote from Alan Watts, this is the life of faith which transcends the futile search for a false security.

Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go.

Living by faith our greatest challenge but it is, Jesus says, the only way to experience real, “eternal,” here-and-now life. It is not, by any means, a life without pain or loss. But however much the ground beneath us shakes, such life somehow recognizes it is not ultimately threatened. We are like the wave reaching the shore: its form ends there, as it must, but its substance continues as the ocean which was always its true nature. Just as it is with glasses.

But what [the] teaching is pointing towards is subtler than just accepting that things change. It is about fully inhabiting that. It’s about really recognizing that things will come to an end, so that when the glass breaks, we are not shattered along with it. The glass is already broken. So, you can use it, you can care for it, you can enjoy it. But when the glass breaks, you can simply think, “Ah yes, that is what glasses do.”

You are probably familiar with the Japanese art form kintsugi, even if you don’t recognize the name. It is the practice of repairing broken pottery with gold. It is an expression of wabi-sabi, a philosophy rooted in Zen Buddhism that finds beauty in the natural, imperfect, and transient nature of life. Rather than hiding the cracks, this method highlights them, treating breakage and repair as a beautiful and valued part of the object’s history.

A kintsugi pot represents not just its own history but acknowledges and embraces the brokenness of reality itself. Cracks don’t need to be hidden, such pottery says. They are an inherent part of us and all things, and breaking is what we and all things do. Yet the gold reminds us that this broken reality has a timeless beauty all its own which it, nor we, will ever lose.

If you appreciate these posts, remember to “Like”, share, and subscribe, if you haven’t done so already. In the mystical world of search algorithms, this all helps “spread the word.” And add a comment, if you’re so moved, to be part of the conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support (see the “DONATE” box), which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this!