Cyber Spirit Cafe

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!

This past Sunday’s gospel was Matthew’s version of the familiar Parable of the Sower. Unfortunately, most people (well, most preachers anyway) want this story to say more than it does. It actually has a simple message, yet profound in its own way. The parable is one of the few that appears in all three synoptic gospels. Here is Luke’s somewhat more concise version.

When a large crowd was gathering, as people were coming to [Jesus] from town after town, he said in a parable: “A sower went out to sow his seed, and as he sowed some fell on a path and was trampled on, and the birds of the air ate it up. Some fell on rock, and as it grew up it withered for lack of moisture. Some fell among thorns, and the thorns grew with it and choked it. Some fell into good soil, and when it grew it produced a hundredfold.” As he said this, he called out, “If you have ears to hear, then hear!” (Luke 8)

Whether Jesus actually told this parable, we’ll never know, but it is plausible. The dramatic setting of a lakeshore crowd is probably Mark’s creation (who first told the story). The “explanation” of the parable which follows a few verses later most scholars agree was a later, early church creation. But the theme of that explanation is likely the parable’s purpose: to interpret the public reaction to Jesus’ ministry.

One of the problems with understanding this parable is the setting created for it in the gospels. A “large crowd” has gathered to hear Jesus, so large in Mark and Matthew that Jesus has to preach from a boat to avoid being pushed into the water. And indeed, throughout the gospels, Jesus apparently attracts a mass following.

Yet the parable seems to more likely explain the reverse situation: why so few people are responding to his message. Only John gives a hint of this when, at the end of chapter 6, Jesus’ teaching has alienated most of his followers, so that only “the twelve” remain with him. Another inconsistency is the Passion Story, when “crowds” hail his entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday but then crowds shout for his death on Good Friday. Where did everybody go?

Whatever the historical reality, in this parable Jesus seems to understand that, regardless of how many hear him, few will respond positively to his message. Most just won’t get it. But for those few who do, the result will be abundance.

Because of Christianity’s moralizing tendency (which, again, is especially true of preachers), as soon as something is described as good or bad, it is piously assumed that we should strive to be one and not the other. The problem in doing that with this parable is that we are talking about dirt. Dirt is what it is. Now a farmer can make his dirt better in various ways but there is nothing about that in this story. Instead, there is a sower throwing his seed here, there, and everywhere, with predictable results. Some seeds sprout and grow; most don’t (which, of course, is entirely consistent with nature).

Who we meet in this parable is, I think, Jesus the realist, the pragmatist. He isn’t looking for or expecting a crowd. Mostly, his teaching and preaching fall on deaf ears. But a few do genuinely hear him and for them it is transformative. The gospels give a number of examples of this in what often are their most moving stories. The healing of the Gerasene demoniac is one instance but perhaps the most well-known is the story of Mary Magdalene. In that light, it may well be true that most of those still with Jesus at the end were women, who seem to have had more of an ear for what Jesus was saying.

The way it’s told in the gospels, however, I think we also encounter in this parable the romanticism and frustration of the early church. As it’s told decades after Jesus, we hear the echo of early church leaders: “Our message is so wonderful. Why aren’t they listening to us? Why aren’t they following us? They must be ‘bad dirt’.”

That frustration may have played a large part in the early Jesus movement becoming the religion known as Christianity. Jesus’ primary concern seemed to be to bring about a spiritual transformation in the people he encountered. But that’s a slow, one-to-one process without, as the parable implies, any certain outcome. Some people respond; most don’t.

After Jesus’ death, however, his followers shifted gears. Jesus the mystical prophet with a life-transforming message became the Jesus the Messiah who, by believing in him, would save people from their sins. The church that followed recruited people to believe in the idea of Jesus Christ rather than encounter Jesus of Nazareth, Jesus the person, through the message he embodied.

And for reasons that are still debated, it worked, at least so far as growing this new religion into the global phenomenon it became. Today, however, as the dark side of Christianity’s story is acknowledged and with the church in freefall, it is easier to recognize that the church founded in his name is a far cry from anything Jesus ever intended.

So, to return to the parable, in my view, and contrary to most preachers, Jesus isn’t talking about farming, literally or metaphorically. The sower here is the anti-farmer, throwing his seed willy-nilly, with most of it going to waste. This is how Jesus viewed himself and, as we’ve dubbed it, his ministry. He was not “results oriented.” Yet he persisted in “throwing his seeds” in the faith that a little of what he said and did would find “good soil” and result in a transformed life.

Recently, I came across this quote by Alan Watts, the great 20^th century self-dubbed “spiritual entertainer.” It points to both what Jesus was about and what the spirit-filled life he was pointing to is about.

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

Jesus was the epitome of such faith. And it was to a life of such faith that Jesus invited people. Yet, he did so knowing most would respond, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Taking “a plunge into the unknown” is not many people’s idea of a good time. We do cling to our beliefs. But occasionally something causes us to question those beliefs, and sometimes they even crash and burn. Then, paradoxically, we become “good soil” for a different message, to hear a new calling, to consider another way of living. Then, Jesus says, our lives may expand “a hundredfold” in the faith, hope and love of the Spirit, in a life of letting go.

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 retirement, my worship attendance has become increasingly less frequent. And each time I do go, as I did this past Sunday, I’m reminded why.

Like most churches of my denomination (ELCA), the one I attended maintains the Lutheran practice of starting each service with a “confession of sins.” For some reason, this time left me more depressed and frustrated than usual. As such confessional rites go, this one was not especially harsh. In recent decades, more moderate denominations have moved away from the old mea maxima culpa, beating-your-breast language that was typical of the confession. Sins confessed these days are often more collective than individual, often more about omissions in our daily living than commissions of evil deeds and thoughts.

But what even these more modern confessions still can’t avoid is the notion that there is some Being-out-there that we need to plead with to get its approval. I realize that such a sin-forgiving God is what many people want. I essentially dropped the practice at my last congregation, with little reaction except from a handful of traditionalists. When I retired and an interim pastor took my place, that little group made a beeline for him and convinced him to put a weekly confession back in the service. Some still love their guilt, but most of us are over it.

Here is what we said on Sunday (bold print is the congregation’s response).

CONFESSION

Let us approach the throne of grace to receive mercy and find grace to help us in our time of need.

God of all mercy, we have sinned against you, our neighbors, and your creation. We have gone along with prejudice, warfare, and greed. Help us to face up to ourselves, repent and return to you. Forgive us and restore us for lives of compassion and courage through our Savior Jesus Christ. Amen.

ASSURANCE OF PARDON

Jesus says, “Come to me … and I will give you rest.” In Christ, we are met with grace, not judgment, with mercy, not condemnation. We are forgiven, renewed, and invited again into a life of freedom, love, and peace.

Thanks be go God. Amen.

Where is the felt need to do this coming from? Of course, it goes back to the ultimate conundrum of modern biblical religion: God. Where do we get the notion that there is a Being-out-there who has thoughts and feelings about us and who, if we do something to offend (as we inevitably do), needs to be placated so we will receive, as this liturgy says, an “assurance of pardon”?

While I know she meant well, the minister who led this portion of the service, to me, only compounded the problem by introducing the “Pardon” section with words to the effect of “Now hear this wonderful news!” But it’s only wonderful if the alternative is truly awful. What happens if we aren’t pardoned, forgiven, restored, renewed, or receive the other things this ritual promises? Why, to put it in black and white, do we need God’s forgiveness? And what does that even mean?

The crack I’m pushing my finger into here is that the whole sin/forgiveness motif just doesn’t work in modern non-fundamentalist Christianity. We don’t really believe it because we don’t believe in that kind of God anymore, yet we keep using the language.

I was struck how often in this Sunday’s liturgy the word “savior” was used to refer to Jesus. Again, what are we being saved from? What might surprise Christians, especially fundamentalists, is how rarely “savior” actually shows up in the Bible, including the New Testament. Only two of the gospels use it (John once and Luke three times, all in his introductory “Christmas” portion), and it appears only once in Paul’s authentic letters (Philippians). Yet some Christians give the impression that “our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ” tumbles out from nearly every page.

The problems with the ideas of God’s forgiveness and of Jesus as our savior have been obvious for generations, yet churches have been loath to touch them. “It would be so complicated. It would mean changing Christianity!” Exactly. But even with churches shrinking and closing by the thousands, apparently we can’t do that.

Does forgiveness have meaning or value today? Of course, but not because it comes from a Sky Father looming over us, based upon some celestial accounting operation. Forgiveness is the answer to one problem: guilt. And where is that guilt? It’s not in God; it’s within ourselves. We are the ones that have to do the forgiving because we are the only ones who can forgive ourselves. If it’s done nothing else, modern psychology has certainly shown us that.

Yet God isn’t out of the picture, if we can modify our understanding of God. Numerous modern theologians have tried to do this, but the church hasn’t been interested in their ideas. Today, what might be more persuasive is the renewed awareness of the teaching and experience of the mystics of both biblical and Asian traditions. For them, God is not a Being-out-there but the ultimate reality or “ground” of existence (as I quoted Meister Eckhart last week) which surrounds and fills us and all creation. Or as Paul is quoted saying in Acts, God is the one “in whom we live and move and have our being.”

How do the mystics say we know or find this God within and around us? It is only possible if we can find silence within ourselves, as Evan Gill explains in a short video, Why Silence Was the Only Thing Mystics Pointed To.

If you allow your mind even for just one moment to fall into a restful state, let your body just sink into presence, you begin to sense a kind of being that isn’t filtered through the mind. There’s no story narrating it. Without all of that noise and chatter, there can be a raw authentic encounter with what I like to call divine reality. I personally believe that this is what … all spiritual teachers were pointing to for thousands of years….

And what’s interesting about mysticism, … is that while they do use the word God, they often point to silence as a sort of doorway into this state of undivided presence. Teachers like Rumi, Meister Eckhart, St. Teresa of Aila, they all point in this direction. Silence is one of their greatest teachings. As St. Teresa said, “Settle yourself in solitude and you will come upon him in yourself.”

Or as the Desert Father Abba Moses told an inquiring monk, “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”

Where is God? Not “out there” but right here, the Eternal Now, as our true essence. God is, in fact, our true self, which the Bible calls Spirit, metaphorically breathed into earthly matter at the creation, Genesis says. We are all, to use a popular metaphor, waves on the ocean. We come from the ocean, last a short while, and then disappear back into the ocean, but are never actually separated and never anything other than the ocean.

So where is this guilt that so often torments us? Not in our true divine self but in our false self, what we usually call our ego. This is the identity we have created over the years, the accumulation of ideas, stories, and feelings acquired from our experiences and interactions with other people and the culture around us. It’s expressed through all the things we call our personality, for good or ill. It is the triggered reactions we have to people and experiences. And it is the voices in our head, expressing an unending stream of opinions and judgments about events, other people, and especially ourselves.

It’s in the midst of all this that our experience of guilt is found, especially those voices. But as I said above, this is our false self. Those voices aren’t actually ours. They are spontaneous creations of our mind. Our true self is our awareness, which the voices think they are talking to but is actually an unaffected depth of silence and peace. It is the space between our thoughts. It is what we know when we experience our “I am-ness”, our awareness of our being.

So how do we free ourselves from our sense of guilt? Not by reciting the list of misdeeds a liturgy writer decided we should feel guilty about this week, so that we can be absolved by an invisible Supreme Being. That might have helped in the Middle Ages but not now. Freedom comes, as Jesus himself says in John, when we know the truth–by knowing our true identity, our unity with the sacred essence that upholds all reality and is our very center.

So, guilt isn’t absolved but seen through. It’s recognized as an attribute of a make-believe me, an idea in my head. But the real me is a silent presence of pure sacred being. And of course, we can only know that silent presence by being silent ourselves. We many never get rid of all the accusatory voices in our head, but we can calm them and learn to hear them differently and with a fully justified skepticism.

Ancient practices of meditation and self-inquiry, modern practices like psychotherapy, and disciplines like AA can all help unmask those voices as the frauds that they are. Putting our ego in its place, in biblical language, is what Jesus describes as losing our life in order to find it, and what Paul describes as dying so that Christ can live in us. All these can help us realize our true being and calling, to live in the Now in peace and freedom, manifesting in our lives the sacred Being which unites us with all those around us and the whole creation.

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!

If you have read this blog very often, you will know that the contrast between religion and spirituality is a favorite topic of mine. That distinction, and the failure to understand it, goes to the heart of the modern crisis of traditional religion. It is the explanation for the growth in the number of people saying that they are “spiritual but not religious.”

And what is the difference? Recently, I found a YouTube “short” which explains it, I think, as concisely as it can be explained. Rebecka Celastrina, a young Italian spirituality teacher, does so in less than two minutes,. I’ll reprint the whole transcript since it is so short.

Before my own spiritual awakening, I didn’t really understand the difference between religion and spirituality. I thought they were essentially pointing at the same thing in just different costumes, and with some being more new age and some being more ancient or more traditional. But there’s a distinction that I’ve come to see as fundamental.

A religion asks you to believe. Spirituality asks you to seek. And those are not the same movement.

Belief at its core means accepting something as true that you haven’t directly experienced. And you accept it as true because an authority told you so. It can be a parent, it can be a tradition, a priest or a holy book, or even culture itself. The source of the belief is external, and it comes from the outside and moves inwards.

But a genuine spiritual process moves in the opposite direction. It starts with a question, not with an answer. It treats experience as more trustworthy than doctrine. It is willing to dismantle everything it thought it knew in service of finding out what is actually true.

On a spiritual path, you are always a seeker. The moment you stop seeking, the moment you have found the answer and settled into it, you have actually left the path. And this requires something that most of us aren’t comfortable with: the willingness to hold uncertainty, to not need a final framework, to let the truth be the only authority, and to stay honest about how much of it you still haven’t found yet. That for me is the beginning of real wisdom.

For quite a while, I viewed religion and spirituality as being in competition with each other, almost opposed to each other. If you were one, then you weren’t the other. But the distinction Celastrina makes here is helping me see them differently. Now, I realize that you can be one or the other, or both, or neither.

I’ve been very critical of contemporary religion for its lack of spirituality. But I’m starting to wonder if that isn’t like criticizing my dog for not being more like a cat. As Celastrina implies here, perhaps religion isn’t about spirituality, and spirituality isn’t about religion. “A religion asks you to believe. Spirituality asks you to seek.” Those are indeed very different “movements.”

In recent years, it’s been popular to claim that the Latin origin of the word “religion” means “to bind together.” Apparently, there is some doubt about that, but the point is still made. Religion is a social “movement” (to use that word again) which binds people together around a core of common beliefs. Thus, religion is about creed (Latin credo = “we believe”) and ritual, the group’s actions which help unite them.

For millennia, religion was the social glue which held communities, tribes, ethnicities, nations, and empires together. Religion gave such groups a common understanding of life and the world which supported shared myths, values, ethics, morality, behavior, and culture. This almost always involved belief in God, gods, spirit(s), or some non-visible dimension to reality.

Religion provided answers to fundamental questions about life and existence: why are things the way they are and how should we live because of those answers? The answers usually came in the form of stories, often preserved in sacred writings of some kind, and repeated and celebrated in rituals and festivals.

Spirituality, on the other hand, is solitary rather than communal. It also seeks answers to fundamental questions, but from personal awareness and reflection rather than external authority. Teachers and “gurus” are not authorities in and of themselves but share their own experiences and thoughts. These are of value only if they guide you to a personal “awakening” to your true nature. Knowing one’s true nature then leads to a deeper understanding of life and being, resulting in acceptance and peace.

It’s taken a while, but what I have come to realize—and accept—is that most religious people are not interested in spirituality or awakening. Conversely, many, perhaps most, people on a spiritual path have little interest in religion. Neither is better than the other; they are doing different things. But that hasn’t always been obvious and has resulted in confusion and conflict.

Perhaps most confusing is that many, if not most, of the so-called founders of the world’s “great” religions were actually spiritual seekers and teachers, and not intentionally religion creators. This is especially true in Asia. Neither Confucianism, Taoism, nor Buddhism have explicit religious content, but religious practices developed around them over time. This is especially true of Buddhism, resulting in it being common, especially outside Asia, for people to follow Buddhist teaching but not its religious practices.

Now I’m going to go out on thin ice and say that I believe the same is true of Jesus and Christianity. The Bible in general has an ambivalent attitude towards religion. In the Old Testament, religious practice is accepted as what people do, but without enthusiasm. In the founding story, for a long time God refuses to have a temple built for him but Solomon finally goes ahead and does it anyway. When it is destroyed by foreign invaders a few centuries later, God doesn’t seem particularly upset. In fact, the prophets, who often rail against Israelite religion, interpret it as God’s judgment on the nation’s apostasy.

Today, Jesus is often described as having been a faithful Jew. I’m not sure if that’s true, but I’m also not sure what it means. For one thing, there was not one way “to be” a Jew. The gospels tell us he went to the synagogue (a new institution then) a few times but almost always caused a commotion. He also went to the temple but predicted its destruction and symbolically shut it down with his money changers’ table-turning incident.

According to the gospels, Jesus most common religious practice seemed to be to go off by himself to pray—the common practice of mystics. Similarly, in Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, Jesus counsels people to go into their closet, close the door, and pray in secret. He is regularly denounced by the various religious authorities for his irreligious practices and teaching. Apparently, Jesus had no formal training yet is popularly called a rabbi who teaches “with authority” unlike that of the officially designated teachers.

In other words, Jesus behaved very much like a spiritual guru. He showed little interest in either the temple-centered or synagogue-centered religion of his day. His goal was neither to preserve Judaism or reform it. But neither did he seem interested in starting something new. The gospels, of course, try to tie Jesus to the movement which became Christianity, but those attempts seem concocted and don’t fit with the rest of Jesus’ ministry.

Today, few if any scholars believe Jesus intended to start a new religion. That role is now more often given to Paul. But I’m not sure even that works, as Paul basically viewed the world to be nearing its end with Christ’s imminent return. He had no long-range plan. But his theological ideas, integrated with such practices as baptism and the Lord’s supper, did provide a framework for the Christian religion which followed when, awkwardly, the world kept on going.

The result was a religion with a very formal structure of authorities, doctrines, and practices but centered on an ancient teacher of spiritual life and personal fulfillment. Followers of Jesus and followers of the church have been at cross purposes ever since.

In its first centuries, as the church became an urbanized cultural institution, spiritual-oriented Christians (who became known as the Desert Fathers and Mothers) left the cities for the wilderness of Egypt. From that point on, such Christians, typically identified as mystics, had a tenuous relationship with the church, barely tolerated and often persecuted.

Perhaps the greatest of these was Meister Eckhart (1260-1328). Remarkably, he was acknowledged as a great teacher of church theology, but his spiritual teachings were more than church authorities could bear. Conveniently he died on the brink of excommunication, or worse.

In modern times, as the church came under increasing criticism, the Christian mystics were rediscovered, both within and outside the church. A great example of this involves the renowned Catholic monk and writer, Thomas Merton. He attributes his own spiritual renewal to being introduced to Eckhart by a Zen Buddhist teacher, D. T. Suzuki. Eckhart was also an important influence on the prominent Protestant theologian, Paul Tillich, and is cited frequently by the popular Franciscan friar and best-selling author, Richard Rohr.

So, what’s going on? I’ll share some thoughts but I believe this subject needs much more study and reflection than it’s been getting.

Traditional religion everywhere has fallen on hard times. The great religions have not figured out how to adjust to the modern world. Their ability to create community and give life meaning has been undermined by science, nationalism, political ideology, and consumerism. And yet, religion still has genuine appeal. Churches, temples and shrines are still attended, though in much smaller numbers than in the past. Shared story and ritual still have value in creating community and meaning, but are often overwhelmed by modern materialist culture. As I’ve said before, we can’t turn back the clock or un-know what we know. We’re never going to find God on a mountain top or in the clouds.

Yet it would seem that, in the case of Christianity, the great stories of the Bible, and the rituals and festivals based on them, can be reimagined, not as guideposts to “salvation” but as a framework for living with meaning and purpose, individually and collectively. In other words, Christianity needs to figure out how to be a religion again, to figure out what religion means in the 21^st century, rather than be the countless other things it has tried to be recently because they seem more “relevant.” Christianity will never play again the role it had in the Middle Ages, but it doesn’t need to. We’re not in the Middle Ages. It needs to figure out what role religion can and should play today.

Spirituality, as I’ve said, is an individual path. Its goal is not to create a new worldview to place oneself in but to answer from experience the question, “Who am I?” I believe the spark for the growing interest in spirituality is the hollowness of the roles people are given today as paycheck collectors and consumers. There is also an increasing dissatisfaction with all the proposed identities the modern world has to offer, whether from economics, politics, biology, psychology, or the remains of medieval religion.

Finally, and perhaps the most influential cause, is the building suspicion that all the past answers to our identity questions have fallen short as we watch the building crisis of human civilization. Not only are we spiraling towards ecological disaster, humanity seems to lack the ability to even begin to address the problems we have created. So we wonder, “Who are we that we are bringing such a cataclysm down upon ourselves?”

But in order to answer that in the plural, we are realizing that we first have to ask, “Who am I?” And for that answer we need to look, not to past or present authorities, but to our own deepest sense of being. This is the spiritual path.

Teachers past and present can guide us, the silence of prayer and meditation opens us, and the crucible of daily living peals away our delusions and illusions. Together they move us into the depths of consciousness and awareness, of “isness” as Meister Eckhart called it, of pure being. When Moses asks who he should say has sent him, God responds, “Tell them, ‘I am’ sent you.” When Jesus identifies himself in the gospel of John, he says, “Before Abraham was, I am.” The spiritual path is the journey to discovering that that is the real and most important identity we all possess.

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!

Among the “must see” sites that we visited in France last month was the Palace of Versailles. Over-the-top in its size and opulence, it was, frankly, kind of ridiculous, and even depressing. As I wrote earlier, seeing it made the mob that dragged away the king and queen in 1789 completely understandable.

The most dramatic of the palace’s countless rooms is the Hall of Mirrors. It was a reception room designed intentionally to intimidate anyone there for an audience with the king. After the revolution, in addition to being a museum, the Palace and the Hall have been used for various public and state occasions. The banquet for last week’s G7 meeting was held there, for example.

Most famously, the Hall was the site in 1919 for the signing of what became known as the Versailles Treaty. When we were there, I was puzzled to find no mention of what was one of the most important events in modern European history. Our guide said the table used for it was off in another room, but we got lost and never found it. Then, last week, I think I got the explanation for the silence.

I found on YouTube a recently re-released BBC documentary on World War I. The seventh and last part was about the aftermath of the war. One historian after another gave scathing judgements of the treaty officially ending the conflict. Their verdict was that none of the primary negotiators understood how much the world had changed due to the war. This new world faced enormous challenges but rather than meeting them, the treaty only exacerbated them. No wonder there was no mention at Versailles of the treaty that bore its name. The less said, the better.

The documentary, titled simply “The Great War” and narrated by Judy Dench, focuses less on the history of battles, generals, and politicians and more on the war’s effects on ordinary people, especially soldiers and their families back home, and the civilians caught in the fighting and impacted by the war’s devastation.

The physical destruction and financial losses were unprecedented. An appalling 20 million died in the conflict, split about evenly between soldiers and civilians. About the same number were injured/wounded or went missing. Countless more died of hunger and disease after the fighting ended. National debts would take decades to pay off.

Of course, those who began the war had entirely different expectations. They planned for victory on the battlefield, naturally, but also new opportunities to expand their borders and their economies. No one expected the cataclysm that followed. Well, no one in authority, anyway. And the victors who signed the treaty at Versailles thought they had just fought “the war to end all wars.” Their era of peace lasted just twenty years.

As I continue to read history, the more saddened I become realizing how “normal” warfare has been through the ages, and the enormous toll it has taken. I just learned, for example, about pitched battles the Romans fought over a period of centuries in southern France with tribes from the north. I had no idea they fielded such large armies back then. Casualties were in the hundreds of thousands. Today, there is no sign of those battles, or their victims.

War and its suffering are the stuff of ancient literature, including the Bible. The Iliad and the Odyssey, epic poems centered on the Trojan War and its aftermath, are over 4,500 years old. While warfare seemed to be a constant of the ancient world, there was expectation that the rise of Christianity would temper that. And there was some restraint for a while.

It wasn’t long, however, before Christians were fighting non-Christians (e.g. the Crusades) and each other just as savagely as before. The Reformation (1517) sparked nearly a century-and-a-half of savage warfare, culminating in the Thirty Years’ War which caused up to 8 million deaths, mostly civilians. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) finally diffused religious tensions, only to begin the growth of conflicts between nation-states, which we are still dealing with today.

In Gone with the Wind, when Scarlett’s family, scraping to survive in the ruins of their plantation, learns that Lee has surrendered and the war is over, one of her sisters cries out, “Why did we ever fight?” Scarlett, on the other hand, gets a gleam in her eye and says to herself, “The price of cotton will go sky high! We’ll plant more cotton.” In pre-modern times, warfare was typically for the personal glory of rulers and generals, or an expression of religious fanaticism. In modern times, however, war has increasingly been about money.

After the Great War’s enormous cost with such little benefit, cynicism and despair gripped much of Europe, but such feelings crossed the Atlantic as well. One of the most bitter takes on that war, and modern warfare generally, was a speech turned into a small book (1935) by a retired decorated Marine Corps major general, Smedley Butler, titled War Is a Racket.

War is a racket…. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

Smedley spoke from personal experience. Before the US entered World War I, he participated in multiple foreign miliary operations that got little attention at the time.

I helped make Mexico … safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street…. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.

Historians have found documentary evidence showing how arms manufacturers and related industries promoted the miliary buildup prior to World War 1. Furthermore, many such businesses, on both sides of the conflict, profited handsomely from it afterwards, while many other businesses were ruined. And the same was true for the Second World War. Many of those businesses, or their descendants, are still going concerns, with their names found on popular products.

As he was leaving office, President Dwight Eisenhower gave perhaps his most famous speech, coining a phrase still used decades later.

“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

In another speech as he began his presidency, having witnessed the costs of total war firsthand, in his new civilian leadership role Eisenhower was able to speak plainly about what those costs truly meant.

“Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

But that thievery has only continued and grown, for Eisenhower was trying to close the door long after the horses had run out. Today, our bipartisan cynicism knows no bounds when it comes to the scamming and fleecing by that “military-industrial complex.” Pentagon budgets always grow, are never turned down, and even have unrequested projects added which benefit congressional constituents and donors. Right now, contractors with ties to the current war with Iran has seen their stock prices skyrocket.

While not on the scale of last century’s world wars, wars are nonetheless still being fought around the globe. Every year, thousand are killed or injured, military and civilian, billions are spent to enable those wars, and billions are lost in the destruction they cause. Almost every one slowly grinds to a halt in a stalemate, achieving little if any of what was promised by those who instigated it, and then is quickly forgotten when a new conflict flares up somewhere else.

Unfortunately, I don’t now of any political or other strategic solution to this sorry situation (and I apologize if you’ve read this far expecting one). And I’m not really sure one exists. But I do believe that in a real sense, this war-making world exists within each one of us. That these conflicts have their roots in the ongoing conflicts within ourselves. And that we won’t take seriously the world’s battles until we can look honestly at the struggles going on inside us.

Caitlin Johnstone, the Australian commentator I mentioned just recently, wrote a blog post this week about how her in-your-face reporting meshes with her spirituality. For her, they are inseparable, because honesty in one instance has to be matched by honesty in the other.

The overwhelming majority of what people call “spirituality” in our society is really just glorified escapism. It’s about avoiding reality by focusing on good vibes, nice feelings, and comforting stories about the nature of the cosmos….

And this happens to align nicely with the whole of mainstream culture under the western empire; our entire civilization is built upon psychological compartmentalization and avoidance of uncomfortable truths….

Authentic spirituality moves in the exact opposite direction to all this. While false spirituality is about turning away and avoiding, true spirituality is about turning towards and facing. Turning and facing all the uncomfortable realities about yourself, your internal dynamics, your trauma, your maladaptive coping mechanisms, your belief systems, your interpersonal relationships, your community, your society, your nation, and your world.

Soon, the country will engage in much flag waving and band playing to celebrate its 250^th anniversary. There’s nothing wrong with that. Enjoy the fun. But with age, they say, comes maturity, and I would say, a new measure of honesty. As a nation, we’re lagging in both those departments—and there are elements who want it that way.

To remedy that, we need to take our spiritual maturity to a new level. We need to take our own personal spiritual maturity seriously, not to meet some earthly or heavenly requirement. But rather because that is the only way we can come to the truth, the truth, Jesus says in John, which will make us truly free. And we will not experience peace on earth until we know the peace in our hearts which Paul says surpasses all understanding.

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!