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Rediscovering our sacred world

Rediscovering our sacred world

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Red rock cliffs and mountains near Sedona, Arizona
Red rock mountains and cliffs near Sedona, Arizona.

In his New Year’s Day blog post, Matthew Fox shared his “one wish for humanity” in 2025. I think it’s marvelous and I want to share it with you.

If I could have one wish for humanity this year, … it would be that we could rediscover our relationship to the cosmos, for it is from that relationship that our generosity, our gratitude, our wonder, our sense of reverence and of the sacred are rediscovered and energized anew.

Today there is a steady stream of proposals for dealing with the climate and other environmental crises. Those that seem to have the best chance of success have little chance of being adopted. Those that can be or have been adopted are too meager to make a real difference. For those like Fox who come at these problems from a spiritual perspective, the answer can’t begin with legislation or technology but a change of heart. It’s our attitude towards the world in which we live that first has to change.

Fox relates that he was once told in a dream that “there is only one thing wrong with the human species today: You have forgotten the sense of the sacred.” It is our misunderstanding of the natural world that is causing us to abuse it, coupled with our projection of God, our sacred origin, out into some great beyond. He quotes Thomas Berry (1914-2009), Catholic priest, scholar, and self-styled “geologian”, to explain this idea.

We will recover our sense of wonder and our sense of the sacred only if we appreciate the universe beyond ourselves as a revelatory experience of that numinous presence whence all things come into being.  Indeed, the universe is the primary sacred reality.  We become sacred by our participation in this more sublime dimension of the world around us. (emphasis added)

Realizing the truth of the sentence I put in bold is the essence of the spiritual transformation the world needs. So long as God is “out there” somewhere, nature remains just “stuff” for us to use and abuse as we choose. But when we recognize the sacredness of all that is, and especially the world and everyone who lives in it, our attitudes and behavior have to change.

So, as ridiculous as it may sound to some, our environmental crisis is, in fact, a theological and spiritual one, and needs a theological and spiritual solution. But where is that to come from? Most religions today are absorbed with their institutional survival and defending their doctrinal version of “the God above”, who is presumably the source of their authority.

Fewer and fewer people, however, share that concern or belief. While the church was not receptive to Berry’s assertion that “the universe is the primary sacred reality”, this has become one of the central tenets of the so-called “spiritual but not religious”. And what is important to realize is that this is not an intellectual conclusion but a spiritual experience. God, then, is not known primarily through doctrine or holy books, but an awakening to the sacred presence that pervades all reality.

I’ve just come back from a short trip to Arizona, including a visit to Sedona. It’s red rock cliffs and mountains were even more spectacular than I expected. Yet I could not help being affected by their incongruous relationship to the ever-expanding town spreading up and down the valley. Above the roof tops was amazing natural beauty while at eye level was the tourist staples of t-shirt and fudge shops, stores selling soap, candles, crystals and bad art, and countless restaurants and hotels.

Of course, I only know this because I, too, joined in the tourist parade. But I left wondering how places like this lost the sacredness experienced by indigenous people of the past (and often of the present) and became such commercial enterprises today.

It does seem we are approaching a tourism tipping point. We’ve all heard the stories (and perhaps have our own to tell): Mt. Everest polluted by equipment cast off by climbers waiting in line to ascend, cities banning or reducing tourist flows, park facilities worn out by visitor use and abuse, the search in our shrinking world for evermore distant and exotic locations to visit, seemingly to be able to say, “Oh, I’ve been there.”

The early Renaissance poet Petrarch claimed to be the first person since ancient times to climb a mountain (1336) just for the view. While he boasted of this, today I think it’s hard not to see this as a step backwards. For our ancestors, mountains, rivers, lakes, valleys, and other natural phenomena were often viewed as places where the sacred was especially present. The Celts called them “thin places”, where the normal separation of the sacred and mundane could be crossed more easily and profoundly. They were visited not to take pictures or get a stamp in a passport, but to have a deeper appreciation of one’s place in the universe.

Tourism and souvenir collecting have become one of the odd ways modern people create identity and self-worth. “See where I’ve been and what I brought with me from there.” It’s said that the bullets had barely stopped flying before people raced across the Gettysburg battlefield to collect discarded hats, pistols, rifles, and swords, even off the yet unburied dead, to have some memento of the historic, grisly event.

Ken Burns’ PBS special on the National Parks tells multiple stories of early park proponents being just barely ahead of developers wanting to exploit the country’s natural beauty, and not always succeeding. The overdevelopment of Niagara Falls became the symbol of what the park system was designed to avoid. I have to wonder why the stunning valley in which Sedona lies did not get the protective park status is clearly deserved.

The world’s development and growing population are making trips to “status destinations” increasingly untenable. Like the environmental crisis in general, the need is not for technical solutions to “ration” the experience of the world’s natural marvels. Rather, the need is for a new relationship with our planet and a new understanding of what our experience with it provides us.

To encounter the sacredness inherent in nature, we do not need to go to the travel guide books’ “great places.” Nature’s spiritual marvels are all around us, if we can tune our awareness to recognize them. If we step into a local park or our own backyard and really watch a bee pollinating a flower or birds building a nest, we can have a profound experience of the mystery and wonder of life.

It’s said no one can be an atheist after seeing the Grand Canyon. Yet the play of the natural world around us, in any place and at any time, can just as easily open our mind and heart to what Berry calls the “numinous presence” that surrounds and fills us. The rhythmic waves on any shore contain as much mystery and can inspire as much awe as those on the beach of a five-star tropical resort.

Matthew Fox, Thomas Berry, and many others have said that our lives will be disordered if our relationship with nature is disordered. Knowing our true place in the world, and thereby healing that relationship, is the necessary first step to steering our culture’s course away from disaster. Indeed, we need to come to understand this is what culture is primarily about. Fox quotes Albert Einstein’s belief in this.

The most important function of art and science is to awaken the cosmic religious feeling and keep it alive.

Spiritual healing and rebirth are not solely the tasks of organized religion but life tasks and the ultimate goal of any society. We are far from that understanding, yet we also seem to be increasingly far from knowing true peace and contentment in our daily lives. Hopefully, that pain and discomfort is causing us to look in new directions for our life’s meaning and value.

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.

Getting out of your mind

Getting out of your mind

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Man sitting on bench under treeI have heard multiple stories of Thanksgiving dinners being upended by this month’s election. Some people are so upset that they have dis-invited friends and family members from their holiday feasts because their political choices were intolerable to them. Doctors have reported a significant increase in patients reporting debilitating stress because of the election, some experiencing breakdowns. And there have even been reports of suicides with the victims saying they could not live with the political change they believe the election is ushering in.

In response, various websites and channels I follow have been providing advice and methods for coping with stress and despondency. Many people are taking matters into their own hands by simply stepping out of the fray. A few I’ve heard about are literally leaving the country. More common, and more practical, are those reducing or eliminating watching, listening to, or reading news and political commentary media. A couple TV networks have already announced significant budget and salary cuts in response to a drop in viewership. I think this latter option is the healthiest one, and actually a hopeful sign.

It’s been over 25 years since Eckhart Tolle published his mega bestseller, The Power of Now. Boosted by an appearance on the Oprah Winfrey TV show, the book has since been translated into more than fifty languages and read by tens of millions. Its seemingly simplistic assumption is summarized in this quote.

Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be.

Why does that matter? Because where we seem to live is in our mind, and it focuses most of its attention on the past or future. That disconnect, Tolle believes, is the source of much of our misery.

Unease, anxiety, tension, stress, worry – all forms of fear – are caused by too much future, and not enough presence. Guilt, regret, resentment, grievances, sadness, bitterness, and all forms of non-forgiveness are caused by too much past, and not enough presence.

Most don’t realize that the past and present to do not actually exist. They are creations of our mind, just like our imagined self, our ego, which is obsessed with time. It’s occupied with reminiscing about or lamenting the past and looking forward to or fearing the future. What it can’t do is be in the present moment. That is the realm of our true self, our timeless conscious awareness.

Modern culture has mastered the art and techniques of getting into our heads. Political propaganda, commercial advertising, the entertainment industry, and media of all types tell us and show us what to believe, how we should think, how we should feel, what we should value, and how we should spend our money and our time. We are all manipulated far more than we realize or want to admit.

There is growing awareness of all this, however. Confidence in institutions of all sorts has dropped dramatically, often with good reason. Even sources of knowledge and information that used to be valued for their objectivity are now seen to be themselves manipulated or corrupted by outside political and financial interests.

In response, we cast about for new sources we can trust but usually come up empty handed. We do that because we have been mistakenly taught to distrust the one source we actually can believe in: ourselves. Our true self. Not the unending babble of conflicting voices in our head but the spirit that is our center, our conscious awareness with which we know ourselves and the world experienced through our senses.

The political world which seems to have taken hold of so many of us is a fantasy, a creation of our minds. None of us walk the “corridors of power” in Washington. Our experience of it is almost entirely through the media’s talking heads and other electronic or print sources. Such “experience” is then reinforced by conversations with others who mostly agree with our point-of-view. Our minds overflow with arguments and counter-arguments and the drama of conflict between our imagined political heroes and enemies.

When we turn off our TV and step away from our computer, we disengage from our mental turmoil and reality returns. The present moment, life here and now, beckons us to awaken to its truth and potential. As Eckhart Tolle says,

Realize deeply that the present moment is all you have. Make the NOW the primary focus of your life.

Our minds are wonderful things but they have never been more vulnerable to being hijacked by cultural forces and nefarious actors of all kinds. Our mistake is in believing that our mind is who we are, causing us to identify with the thoughts, feelings, and images spinning inside it. But it’s not. Our true self is what is aware of our mind and is unaffected by it. This is the shocking truth we need to discover, that there is within us a calm center free from the mind’s turmoil. This is what Paul described as “the peace that surpasses all understanding.”

Tolle warns about the danger of misunderstanding the mind’s proper role.

The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive. To put it more accurately, it is not so much that you use your mind wrongly – you usually don’t use it at all. It uses you.

As a result, our lives are deprived of the genuine and fulfilling experiences intended for all of us.

Love, joy, and peace cannot flourish until you have freed yourself from mind dominance.

Spirituality is not about having esoteric experiences. In fact, it’s almost the opposite. Spirituality is awakening to our true nature and our true self. It’s coming back to reality from the imaginary world created in our mind. In doing so, we discover that our identity is not any transitory attribute or social label but the unchanging awareness we simply call “me” or “I.”

The most common ego identifications have to do with possessions, the work you do, social status and recognition, knowledge and education, physical appearance, special abilities, relationships, personal and family history, belief systems, and often also political, nationalistic, racial, religious, and other collective identifications. None of these is you.

The dramas of life, including political ones, are very enticing. Our ego feels so good being right and being on the right side. But these dualistic conflicts—whether political, at work, in our family, or in our community—often, and quickly, balloon out of proportion to their real importance. The “combatants” become trapped, unable to disengage because they believe that their self-worth and sense of identity is now at stake in the outcome. But they’re not.

Our value is inherent in our timeless being, our “I am-ness”, which we share with everyone else and all other beings. The more aware we become of our being, and the more we center our sense of self in it, the more secure we feel and the more compassionate we become towards all who share it with us. When Jesus said, “Love your neighbor as yourself,” this is what he was pointing to. Our neighbors are, in fact, extensions of our self, because they too embody the Being of all reality, just as we do.

There is certainly much to be done and much that needs to change in our world. But as is obvious today, the political tempests of battling egos accomplishes little. To be of genuine benefit to others and to our planet, we must be grounded in our true self, which acts not out of fear or competition but the peace and compassion which recognizes our oneness 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.

 

 

 

 

Time for Luther to sit down

Time for Luther to sit down

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Scene from the movie "Luther"
Scene from the 2003 film “Luther”

Today is Halloween for most people. In church history, October 31 is considered the start of the Protestant Reformation in 1517. Tradition has it (the history is a little murky) that on that day, Martin Luther, an Augustinian friar, nailed a list of 95 propositions for debate on the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg, in the German state of Saxony. Soon, thanks to printers looking for excuses to use their new presses, copies of the 95 Theses (as they became known) were spreading across Europe, igniting a firestorm.

Luther’s list was the culmination of a running argument he had been having with church officials over the sale of indulgences. It had been sparked by the arrival in Luther’s neighborhood of perhaps the supreme indulgence seller, one John Tetzel. Let me stop here and say that if you have any interest in this affair, I highly recommend watching Luther, the 2003 biopic staring Joseph Fiennes (Ralph’s brother) in the title role. (Be aware that, by a weird coincidence, there is another 2003 movie called Luther which about a British detective.) The film also features Alfed Molina as a wonderfully twisted Tetzel, and Peter Ustinov, in his last film, as Luther’s protector, Prince Frederick the Wise.

The sale of indulgences was probably the epitome of the corruption and superstition of the medieval Catholic church. While the Renaissance and its new thinking was expanding, it was still very limited. Luther makes clear that 1517 Germany, and by implication much of Europe, was still mired in the Middle Ages.

Indulgences were essentially heavenly get-out-of-jail free cards. They were certificates authorized by the pope releasing the person for whom they were bought from a certain number of years in purgatory (more money = more years canceled). That purgatory was a thing, and that the pope could get your deceased relatives out of it, was part of the medieval world view which, like spinning plates in a circus act, was destined to soon crash to the floor.

In a touching scene in the movie, a young woman of obviously limited intellect, comes Luther to proudly show him the indulgence certificate she has just bought from Tetzel. We watch her smile drop as a crestfallen Luther tells her to save her money because the certificates are worthless. The message is clear. The church is taking advantage of people’s gullibility and anxiety to finance its various projects, which included the building of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome.

In truth, the church’s spin hasn’t changed much. Protestant propaganda is that the Reformation set people free from the crass legalism of the Catholic church. “We are saved by grace and not by works of the laws” is the classic formulation of this new/old gospel. But, of course, it wasn’t that simple.

For Luther, especially, salvation was something still dispensed by the church. The gospel was the church’s “true treasure”, so one had to be part of the church to receive this gift. So just show up and you’ve got it? Not quite. You have to be baptized, receive communion, and live a moral life.

Oh, and one more thing: you have to have faith. The full Protestant gospel formula is actually “we are saved by grace through faith.” And those two words have tied Protestant (and other) church leaders and theologians in knots ever since. What is “saving” faith? Basically, there have been two interpretations. One essentially equates faith with belief, an intellectual assent or conviction, which often meant having the right “beliefs”, as determined by church authorities. The other view saw faith as an experience, as a spiritual or interior “knowing”, not of doctrines but of a saving relationship with God.

In the first case, the question is: How do you know what the right beliefs are? The church will tell you. How does the church know? God revealed them in the Bible and to the early church leaders. But there are lots of churches and they don’t agree which beliefs are right. How do you know? We’ve got them right. Just trust us.

In the second instance, the question is: How do you know if your faith is real? Again, the church is the decider but not so clearly. Genuine faith wil “bear fruit” in tangible ways. You will “want” to go to church, read your Bible, do works of charity, etc. But again, whether those fruits were real or enough was open for debate. Here too churches differed in their understanding. More troublesome were the doubts in people’s minds: Do I really believe? What about my doubts? My sins? How do I know for sure that I am saved?

The history of Protestantism is essentially the story of the endless debates about these never resolved questions, and the repeated denominational divisions over them. In the meantime, Catholicism cleaned up the worst of its organizational abuses, and got involved in these debates to a degree, but essentially rested on its ancient history and tradition.

The church where I worshiped last Sunday observed Reformation Sunday, as Lutheran churches typically still do. The usual hymns and readings associated with the day were used to stir Lutheran blood, and even the Nicene Creed was dragged out (not typical for this congregation) in all its incomprehensible babble.

In her sermon, the preacher focused on a recent translation change whereby faith in Jesus Christ is now rendered the faith of Jesus Christ. It’s happened in a few places in Paul’s letters but in this case, it was Romans 3:22, “the righteousness of God through the faith of Jesus Christ for all who believe.” The Greek can be translated either way, but this version takes the emphasis off our having faith in Jesus and replaces it with Jesus’ faithful service.

The preacher (and presumably the sermon helps she was using) seemed to think this was a big deal. In the case of this passage, however, (or Romans generally) it doesn’t really help in understanding the theological word salad Paul has produced here. And there are other places where the meaning obviously is faith in Christ or God.

“Faith” is used in lots of different ways in the Pauline epistles. And it’s used differently again in the gospels—and not at all in John! Today it’s popular to say the faith should be rendered or understood as “trust,” which may be helpful. But that’s obviously not how it is always meant in the New Testament, nor in the teachings of the Reformation.

Yet none of this gets at the church’s core problem today, which is the meaninglessness of salvation itself. People just don’t care. They aren’t joining the synoptic gospels’ “rich young ruler” in asking, “What must I do to be saved?” Progressive preachers think its wonderful to declare that “salvation is a free gift!” But like a free subscription offer, most people are saying, “Thanks, but no thanks.” Free, discounted, or full price, salvation is a nonstarter for more and more people.

In short, the church needs to get out of the salvation business. Salvation was finished as soon as heaven and hell lost any tangible meaning. But even apart from that, biblical scholars and theologians have been saying for centuries that salvation is not the only lens through which to interpret the Bible, or the most important. Individual salvation gets almost no mention in the Old Testament. Nor is it obviously Jesus’ central concern in the gospels. The church’s salvation obsession is mostly based on its reading of Paul, and even that interpretation is now recognized as simplistic.

What “business” should the church be in? For an answer, the church needs to eat some humble pie and turn to another tradition, from about the time of the prophets but several thousand miles apart: Buddhism. For the first of the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths is the concern of all people: the reality of suffering. More fully: What is suffering? Why do we suffer? Can we keep from suffering? If so, how?

I agree with those who say, especially from a Western perspective, that Buddhism is more philosophy than religion, though that isn’t quite right. In any case, many modern Christians have found Buddhism to be a very compatible spiritual partner and ally. And that for the simple reason that suffering is a major theme of both testaments of the Bible, as well.

In the Old Testament, this is especially true of the wisdom books and the prophets. In the New Testament, it is a theme of Paul (believe it or not) but it especially jumps out in Jesus’ endless concern for people’s ailments and disabilities. Jesus heals everyone who seeks it, often adding enigmatically that it was “your faith” that healed them.

But perhaps it is in John where the alleviating of suffering is most clearly Jesus’ mission. Here Jesus repeatedly offers “eternal life” as the answer to the human predicament, not as something experienced someday in a great beyond but here and now. He promises peace to his troubled disciples, and in John 16 says,

“I have said this to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation [suffering]; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world.”

For the Bible, and especially for the centuries-long Christian mystical tradition, the end of suffering is not a promise in the by-and-by, not a theological doctrine to be believed, nor a social or political project. Rather, it is an experience of awakening and rebirth, the discovery of our true nature, and being set free from the endless turmoil of our egoic obsessions.

If we want to still use the word, “salvation” then is not from sin, the devil, or the wrath of God. Rather, the gospel is the we are “saved” by being set free from the delusions and suffering of our false self. We awaken to our oneness with God, to as Jesus says the kingdom of God within us, to our essential nature as Spirit.

In other words, Christianity has the seeds for its own rebirth. But as Jesus says in John, it has to let the old plants die for the new seeds to fall to the ground and sprout anew. Luther said he had to take a stand to reform the church. Today, it’s past time for him to take a seat.

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.

No going back

No going back

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I don’t read New York Times columnist Ross Douthat very much anymore, but when I do I can usually count on him to say something to make my blood boil. He accomplished that again last weekend.

It isn’t clear to me what commentary niche Douthat fills for the Times. Most of his topics fall under the categories of culture, politics, and religion, which is a pretty broad front. Religion, however, seems to be his special interest. Douthat, after a swing through Pentecostalism, became a convert to traditionalist Roman Catholicism. In other words, he leans much more toward JP II and Benedict than Pope Francis.

This weekend’s offending column was titled, “Is the World Ready for a Religious Comeback?” One of Douthat’s favorite topics is the decline of religion and the need to revive it. As he does here, he talks often about the sad consequences for society of religion’s shrinking importance.

Despite that concern, Douthat dismisses most movements for religious reform, whether from progressive Catholics or Protestants. And while he talks a lot about what society has lost with religion’s decline, rarely does he talk about that decline’s causes, like the sex abuse scandals, oppression of women, intransigence on moral issues, politicization, and generally clinging to an outdated premodern worldview. Douthat often gives the impression he would be very happy to return to the 1950s, if not much earlier.

There is so much wrong with this latest column of Douthat’s it’s hard to know where to begin. It’s a prime example of how if you don’t understand the problem, then of course you won’t say sensible things about solving it. He begins by recalling the best-seller popularity of various “anti-God” books published shortly after 9-11. Dubbed the “New Atheists”, these authors wrote high profile books about the anti-intellectual absurdity of religion, and the disastrous political and social consequences of fundamentalism, exemplified by the Al-Qaeda attacks.

Douthat mistakenly believes these books represented some dramatic turning point in modern religion’s decline. But their popularity actually showed the depth of a decline that was already well underway. No one read these books and thought, “Wow! I hadn’t thought of that before. I guess I’ll stop going to church.” Rather, most people read these books to have their previous doubts and disdain confirmed. And in that, the books were very successful.

Douthat begins with these 20-year-old books because the focus of his article are three new books showing, in his view, a way back to religion. The authors are all Christian neo-conservatives, like Douthat, who discloses he also has book along similar lines about to come out. Apparently, the publishing pendulum has swung to the other side.

I think Douthat’s biggest mistake is thinking that the crisis in Christianity is primarily an intellectual one. It does have such a problem to the extent that it clings to its ancient and medieval worldview. But that’s not primarily why people have been leaving the church. They’ve been leaving because Christianity is failing them as religion.

That’s not to say that people are leaving Christianity for some other of the world’s religions. As I’ve said before, all the world’s ancient religions are long past their sell-by dates. You can find neglected or abandoned temples and shrines everywhere. Religious revivals still happen from time-to-time, for mostly local reasons. But the fact is that for the vast majority of urbanized people, wherever they are, the traditional ancient religions simply do not connect with their modern lives. Yet people are still looking for spiritual meaning and direction.

Douthat blithely dismisses the rise of the “spiritual but not religious” as having peaked (based on one report out this summer). This is a good thing, in his view, since these spiritual seekers, unmoored from the guidance of religion, have been descending into all sorts of absurdities.

The decline of religious membership and practice is increasingly seen as a social problem rather than a great leap forward. People raised without belief are looking for meaning in psychedelics, astrology, U.F.O.s. And lately the rise of the “Nones” — Americans with no religious affiliation — has finally leveled off. So the world seems primed for religious arguments in the same way it was primed for the new atheists 20 years ago.

Douthat needs to get out of his evangelical academic bubble more often. There are no signs that churches are experiencing any kind of revival. Or that more people are finding “meaning” in psychedelics, astrology, and UFOs (!). Or that people are now “primed for religious arguments.” (Douthat is the type of evangelical who believes the answer to the church’s problems is to get more people to read C. S. Lewis.)

Despite its being disconnected from organized religion, the spiritual quest of people today is genuine and very much alive. It is necessarily amorphous and hard to measure. Those who study such things often dismiss it because it doesn’t fit into traditional religious boxes, but that’s a mistake. Something genuinely new is arising, even if its form is not yet apparent.

At the end of his essay, Douthat wonders “whether contemporary disillusionment with secularism is enough to draw people to the threshold of religion.” But why is religion the only option? Secularism was a response to the failures of religion. Yet religion’s flaws haven’t been fixed, so why would going back to it make any sense?

Today’s spiritual quest is not disconnected from the past but it is not a return to the past, either. It’s biggest difference, especially in relation to orthodox Christianity, is its dismissal of theism: belief in a divine being—God—somewhere “out there.” The bearded, robed man on a throne above the clouds simply can’t be reimagined in a way that makes sense in the modern world. Yet traditional Western religion simply cannot shake its attachment to this ancient, mythical figure. For modern people, however, it’s a nonstarter.

Yet the question which gave the initial energy to the great world religions remains at the heart of today’s spiritual searching: Who am I? In the 5th century BCE, the maxim “Know thyself” was inscribed on the Greek Temple of Apollo at Delphi. That goal has been a central pursuit of philosophy, religion, science, literature, and spirituality ever since.

In the modern world, difficulty answering the question, “Who am I?”, has been the primary source of popular anxiety and confusion. Religion used to provide a workable answer for us but doesn’t anymore. To say one is a “child of God” sounds reassuring until you realize you don’t have a meaningful understanding of who God is.

The essence of spirituality is the conviction that our being is spirit, and thus we are all divine, already and always one with God. While religion believes our goal is to find and connect with God, spirituality’s goal is for us to awake to the unity we already have with God. In the words of the French theologian and mystic, Teilhard de Chardin:

We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.

The primary activity of worship is the verbal expression of praise and prayer to the God beyond us. The primary activity of spirituality is meditation, the growing awareness in contemplative silence of our true nature as spirit and one with God.

Spirituality is not foreign to religion. Far from it. But it has almost always been a “minority opinion,” contained in monasteries or among desert recluses. Whenever it began to expand beyond those confines, it was usually suppressed by religious authorities.

Today, spirituality is again spilling out into the world. This time, however, religious authorities lack both the power and the credibility to contain it. Instead, as Douthat does here, it is simply ignored, in hopes it will just go away. They don’t understand that it may well be our world’s best hope that it spreads far and wide.

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.

A God of silence

A God of silence

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Hurricane Milton image from spaceIn the days before Hurricane Milton made landfall, I saw multiple Facebook posts appealing to God for protection from the storm. They often were not for personal protection but for some specific location or the whole state, and often in very assertive language. One such post said,

In the mighty name of Jesus, we believe that Hurricane Milton will dissipate and cause no harm to the state of Florida. In the powerful name of Jesus. Amen.

The post had a graphic with a set of praying hands amidst swirling clouds over the Gulf, next to an image of the state of Florida. Similar posts had pictures of Jesus calming a stormy sea from a boat or on shore. The post quoted above had over 800 likes and over 200 responses, the largest number being simply “Amen”, often with one or more hands-together emojis. (In the US, most assume they are “praying hands” but, having been created in Asia like most emojis, they actually represent the gesture accompanying the Hindu Namaste greeting.)

A few responders expressed skepticism about the prospects of any divine intervention. Some of them in turn got surprisingly strong, often judgmental push-back for their lack of faith. A common theme of the posts I saw, as well as many of the comments, was the notion of “claiming” supposed divine promises of protection. Many responses to the skeptics included citing biblical stories of God saving or protecting people in danger. He did it before, so he will do it now.

I recognized these assertive “claiming” prayers as common to a certain strain of evangelicalism, often of the megachurch and Pentecostal variety. They are based on the conviction that believing strongly enough some presumed biblical promise will result in God fulfilling it. The strength of your belief, and the numbers who share that belief, will determine God’s reward.

In a worship setting, such prayers are a combination of “positive thinking” and group-think, and are often used to bind worshipers together. That’s the reason these posts got so many affirmations and why the naysayers were so firmly reprimanded. The skeptics disrupted the group cohesion of the post.

When Milton initially seemed to be behaving in a less destructive way than predicted, posts appeared claiming this was in response to people’s prayers. But as the actual extent of the damage and suffering became apparent, those posts disappeared. Less storm surge was accompanied by damaging winds, flooding rains, and (surprise) fatal tornadoes.

During the heyday of his 700 Club TV show, televangelist Pat Robertson once claimed to have “prayed away” a hurricane threatening his Virginia Beach headquarters. This was quickly slapped down by critics pointing out that the hurricane’s turn simply resulted in suffering and destruction happening somewhere else.

On the flip side was the assertion by Jerry Falwell and others the Hurricane Katrina was punishment for New Orleans’ debauchery, especially its hosting of an annual gay festival. The fact that the vast majority of victims had nothing to do with their city’s supposed depravity was ignored.

The idea that God punishes the wicked and protects and rewards the righteous is found throughout the Bible and is common in the Bible-based religions. This belief is especially prevalent in the Psalms, which probably explains their continuing popularity.

What is often ignored, however, is that such a belief is regularly challenged by other biblical writers. The prophets, especially, reject the notion that God will automatically give his people protection if they ask for it. Going further, wisdom books like Job and Ecclesiastes reject the notion that righteous living and piety will result in God’s blessings.

The Bible never resolves the issue. An overarching and unanswered question of the Old Testament is why God’s chosen people suffer so much. The New Testament continues that conversation by embracing suffering and death as the path to eternal life. But even there such a notion is never fully satisfying.

To put it bluntly, the biblical tradition struggles with the question: What good is a God who doesn’t help us, and in a predictable and reliable manner? Evangelical “claiming” prayers seem more like magic than faith. Say the right words and get the desired outcome. They also seem to be trying to manipulate God. You said You would protect us, so You have to come through for us when we ask.

Why do we appeal to God for help? Crying out when we are in distress or danger is a natural and automatic response, though not necessarily to God. John Shelby Spong quotes a woman who didn’t believe in God but in a time of great suffering cried out to the Universe for relief. The effect for her was probably the same. It expressed her distress and deep desire for her circumstances to be different.

So is God like a therapist or close friend, listening and nodding as we recite our problems, responding when appropriate, “I feel your pain”? In the progressive Christianity of mainline churches that seems to be the case. Even though prayers are said during weekly worship for the world’s problems and the needs of members, no one can explain what they believe will result from those prayers. Some will say that such prayers make us more aware of others’ needs and perhaps motivate us to act in some helpful way. That may well be true, but what has God got to do with it?

God as a Supreme Being far above us yet watching over everyone and everything is no longer credible for most people, including many religious people. Yet progressive churches have done little to help their members imagine, let alone experience, God in a different way. Countless numbers of theologians of the past two hundred years, Protestant and Catholic, have done valuable and productive work in this regard. Yet their own churches, often while saying affirmative things about them, have largely ignored their insights when it came to reshaping their beliefs and practices.

But it seems now that theology is not the way to move Christianity forward. Rather than more words, it is silence that is opening the way to a new understanding and experience of the Sacred. And some theologians themselves have recognized this.

One of the primary theologians of Vatican II, Karl Rahner, said that Christians of the future will be mystics or they will not exist at all. The great 20th century German American theologian, Paul Tillich, declared that God does not exist, but rather is the ground of existence. This was an idea he derived from the preeminent medieval mystic, Meister Eckhart. God is not a being but Being Itself. Such an understanding has support in many places in the Bible but probably the most well-known is a saying attributed to Paul in the book of Acts: “God is the one in whom we live, and move, and have our being.”

The essence of the mystical experience is not the God far off, out there, somewhere. Rather it’s knowing God right here, right now, within and all around us. In times of distress, we don’t appeal for God’s help so much as center ourselves in the sacred presence that is at the center of our being. By a life of “practicing the presence of God”, as Brother Lawrence described it in the 17th century, we come to know our essential security by our oneness with God and all things.

And this is primarily known in silence. As the Psalmist says, “Be still and know that I AM God.” This is how we experience what Paul describes as “the peace that surpasses all understanding.” It is a peace not of the mind but of the heart, not of words and ideas but of the boundless, silent Awareness that is our True Self. In the words of Meister Eckhart,

The Word lies hidden in the soul, unknown and unheard unless room is made for it in the ground of hearing, otherwise it is not heard. All voices and sounds must cease and there must be pure stillness within, a still silence.

Making room in our overfull lives and silencing the chatter in our minds is today’s spiritual challenge. Only then will we realize that we don’t need to cry out to God to come closer, but rather awaken, again quoting Eckhart, to the God “who is nearer to us than we are to ourselves.”

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

The problem with stories

The problem with stories

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Flyer for event promoting Israeli and Palestinian understanding and peaceThis past Monday evening I attended a public event at the local United Church of Christ congregation, which was co-sponsored by a Reform synagogue. The worship space was filled with some 300 registrants. We had come to hear a presentation by two representatives of an organization called Roots, which promotes reconciliation among Israelis and Palestinians on the West Bank. (You can find an account of the event in the Santa Fe New Mexican, from which come the quotations below.)

The speakers were Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger, an American born émigré and Israeli West Bank “settler”, and Noor A’wad, a Palestinian peace activist and resident of Bethlehem. Schlesinger did most of the talking (A’wad said he couldn’t compete with a rabbi) but they both told powerful stories of their “conversions.” Each stressed how most Israelis and Palestinians have no contact with one another. In recent years, legal restrictions have made such interaction almost impossible, which makes Roots so remarkable. The organization’s main goal is to create opportunities for both groups to discover each other as human beings.

Both men also said that for most Israelis and nearly all West Bank settlers, Palestinians simply do not exist. That is, they are a “fake” people. There is no Palestinian state and never has been. They are Arabs who need to move to one of the other twenty-some Arab countries to live. And they need to leave because the land belongs to the people of Israel. For that reason, most Israelis also say there is no occupation. How can you occupy your own country? Israel is in the process of resettling its own land.

Schlesinger began by saying, ““We are here this evening to offer solutions — social, spiritual, educational and also political. We are here to light a candle in the darkness, the deep, gloomy darkness.” But the darkness of the chasm between Israelis and Palestinians described by Schlesinger and A’wad seems impenetrable.

Schlesinger was especially blunt in describing the situation. In his view today, both Israelis and Palestinians are peoples with legitimate claims to this ancient land. Until now, of course, both sides would have rejected such an interpretation, and most still do. In that understanding, one people can legitimately claim the territory as their homeland and other needs to get out.

Some time (probably not enough) was spent telling of Roots activities and programs, and its successes in creating new understanding and relationships between Israeli settlers and Palestinians. The realization Roots is seeking to create, as Schlesinger described his own experience, is to realize that “as glorious and legitimate as your story is, your people, your identity, there is another story out there, another people out there. And to mistake your story for the whole truth is very close to falsehood.” In the words of Ali Abu Awwad, who co-founded Roots with Schlesinger ten years ago, “You have to find a way to fit two truths into one heart.”

Despite the presenters’ best efforts, I left the event more pessimistic about the prospects for resolving this decades-long conflict. But perhaps that isn’t quite right. Rather, my appreciation of the intractability of this conflict was deepened by having a better understanding of what it was about. Bringing people together for mutual understanding and reconciliation is always of value. That doing so will lead to enough people learning “to fit two truths into one heart”, however, seems highly unlikely.

It was as Rabbi Schlesinger talked that I began to see the impossibility of his vision. A native of Brooklyn, Schlesinger is an unapologetic Zionist. In his view, Jews are a people of the land: a thousand years of residence followed by two thousand years of exile. And now they have returned. But—oops—someone else is already there. He has now recognized the injustice of just kicking these people out. Somehow, Israelis and Palestinians have to figure out a way to share the land and live in peace with each other.

But where does Schlesinger’s “story” come from? And why should everyone else accept what is essentially the story/belief of one religion? The story of Judaism is about as complicated a one as you will find. And it has only grown more so thanks to modern historical research. Much of the Old Testament tradition has been called into question. The two-thousand-year spread of diaspora Jews across Europe, Africa, Asia, and into the Western Hemisphere resulted in Jewish “identity” being a knot nearly impossible to untangle. To say modern Jews are “a people” only has meaning for those who claim such a designation.

But my point isn’t to criticize Jewish identity, or Palestinian, or anyone else’s. Rather, this week’s talk caused me to question again the purpose and value of the stories we tell about ourselves and the identities we claim based upon those stories.

As we all know, history is filled with accounts of wars, genocides, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, holocausts, and other kinds of destruction and slaughter inflicted by one “people” upon another. In most cases, those histories tell of divisions inflamed by power-hungry and self-serving “leaders”, often among groups which previously had been living with each other in relative tolerance and peace. Generational memories of evils committed by one group upon another can still be manipulated and stoked for political gain, as in the Balkans, Northern Ireland, India, and Rwanda, to name a few recent instances.

But where are these identities? Science can’t find them. There are no genetic markers for race, let alone ethnicity or nationality. And where are these stories? Only in our heads, implanted in our minds by our elders and by the culture in which we live.

National and ethnic identities are fast becoming a “luxury” the world can’t afford. The rise in global population means there is little if any vacant land for one group to go in order to avoid or end conflict with another. Similarly, many natural resources are becoming scarce, exasperated by the growing impact of the climate crisis.

Managing those shortages and ensuring fair distribution of resources becomes impossible when groups compete with each and rekindle past rivalries and animosities. It is acknowledged by many analysts, for example, that an underlying cause of much of the turmoil in the Middle East today is actually the shortage of water. National, ethnic, and religious rivalries distract from the actual problem and prevent its resolution.

As I’ve said, none of this is new except that such divisions are being dramatically intensified by our shrinking planetary home. Armed conflict today is too likely to spin catastrophically out of control for it to be a solution. But neither will diplomatic negotiation accomplish the compromises and cooperation needed so long as human separation is taken for granted.

One of the most startling quotations of Jesus is this portion of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5.

You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.

Many say that, however noble, this is Jesus at his most unrealistic. But that is because this statement and others like it are viewed as moral pronouncements. Jesus was not about creating a new moral code, however, though it is one of the most common ways of interpreting him. Rather, Jesus’ objective was to spark a new wave of human transformation through spiritual rebirth.

To claim to be a child of God has become an almost meaningless cliché in Christian circles. And while its pious overtones are now an obstacle for many today, Jesus meant it quite literally, as have countless spiritual teachers of all traditions down through the ages. Our true identity is divine. We are each one with the Source of all reality, the Ground of Being. Therefore, all human divisions are artificial and unreal.

Jesus says “love your neighbor as yourself” because it is literally true. We are one with all people. For the same reason, Jesus says here to “love your enemy,” because all our enemies are neighbors, as well. This, Jesus says, is what it means to live as children of God. And to drive the point home, he adds that God ignores the human labels of good and evil but pours life’s blessings on all people equally.

To the egoic self, wrapped in titles, roles, stories, and identities, all this is outrageous nonsense. But to our true self, the silent and formless Presence at our center, our conscious and peaceful eternal Awareness, such wisdom is the meaning of life: an eternal experience of grace and our union with the whole creation.

Is this really the path to peace in the Middle East? I have no idea. I do know that religion’s path of sin and guilt, law and morality, has not gotten humanity very far. It has tamed humanity’s worst inclinations but its capacity to do so in the future is in serious doubt. We don’t need more and better rules, commissions, and negotiating teams. What we need is a human awakening.

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.

Repurposing the church: conclusion (part 3)

Repurposing the church: conclusion (part 3)

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Storefront church
A storefront church in Toronto.

In almost any conversation about the church’s future, the elephant in the room, the thing everyone is aware of but no one wants to talk about, is God. Perhaps it’s because people take God as a given, needing no discussion, but I don’t think so. For some it may be that they would feel too awkward or embarrassed. But I think the main reason God is “off the table” is that people know it would open a can of worms. It would reveal that people are all over the map on who or what God is, and that few adhere to the church’s “official” position.

It’s been well over a century since the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “God is dead … and we have killed him.” Despite hysterical distortions by his opponents then and since, Nietzsche was basically reporting a historical fact: the notion of God common in the ancient and medieval world was no more. That God was “killed” by the creation of a science-based world that has no place for such a God. That God is now homeless and unemployed, since heaven has no place in the universe and the universe has no need for God to keep it going.

Are a scientific worldview and the idea of God incompatible? Well, yes and no. If God is a being in some extraterrestrial location called heaven, who intervenes in the operation of the universe and the affairs of humanity, then yes, you have to choose one or the other. And if you choose science, then no God. This, of course, is the fundamentalists’ assumption and the reason for their hostility to the modern world.

Yet most Christians (including most fundamentalists to a degree) want to have their cake and eat it too. They accept science and the marvels it has brought to modern life, yet somehow also want to keep a personal God existing somewhere out there. Thus, Christians live with their religion and their science-dominated daily lives in separate compartments, with interaction between them rare and, when it does happen, awkward, if not explosive.

Or at least, that’s how it’s been. For I think we have reached a tipping point where most people now find this an impossible and unnecessary juggling act. The one bond above all others which has held people to the church is finally dissolving, and that’s a belief in a theistic God, God as an extraterrestrial being somewhere out there.

I say both impossible and unnecessary because people are discovering that, despite the church’s age-old denial, there are other ways to understand and experience God. Furthermore, many Christians are discovering that within Christianity there have always been alternative viewpoints, expressed by the mystics but also more than a few theologians, not to mention countless ordinary clergy and lay church members.

The growing number of those identifying as “spiritual but not religious” is the most tangible sign of this movement. These are people who have abandoned the theistic deity of traditional religion yet maintain a belief in an essential spiritual and sacred dimension to life. As surveys have shown, many may still express a belief in God, but often this is not the God of the church’s creeds and doctrines. This is often a God of experience rather than of theological belief.

A few months ago I wrote a blog post called “God Has Left the Building” and discussed how spirituality is rapidly displacing traditional notions of religion like Christianity.

Spirituality is now in broad use to refer to the experience of the sacred and of mystery in life and in the world. Many teachers and authors of various religious traditions, and of no tradition, commonly use the term to identify this dimension of reality. Spirituality is being seen as a way to reestablish our connection with the natural world and stem our abuse of it. And, being a religiously “neutral” term, spirituality is also providing a new opening for interaction with the sciences, especially psychology and theoretical physics.

Unfortunately, traditional Christianity is largely left behind in all this. The church cannot let go of “the Big Guy upstairs”, with its hymns, prayers, and rituals still directed to this imaginary being somewhere “above” us, imploring his forgiveness for our misdeeds and intervention in our many problems. While such piety still has some appeal, it is shrinking by the day, as evidenced by the ever-increasing numbers of empty pews.

The biggest thing missed by today’s distressed church leaders is that the church’s decline is largely a rejection of worship and the theistic God worship is centered on. Shrinking worship attendance means that millions of people have realized that they can get along fine without it and its weekly reconnection to the God-out-there. This is the reason the pandemic lockdown was such a blow. Forced to stop their worship practice, many discovered they didn’t really miss it and found other things to do with that time.

The pandemic lockdown was a missed opportunity, for this was when the church could have recognized that worship’s time is over. As I go on to say in the post I quoted above, the problem with worship is the church’s problem with God. The theistic God in heaven, the “sky God” as he’s sometimes been called, or God as Batman as Sam Harris described him, swooping in to rescue us from disaster, simply doesn’t work in the world today. As long as it clings to such a notion, the church can’t say anything intelligible, let alone meaningful, about such a God.

As I have shared these ideas in various places and settings, I rarely if ever get any pushback. While some raised in the church still cling to its traditional notions, the vast majority of people, both inside and outside the church, have moved on. Yet the church has hardly budged. Especially in worship, its hymns, liturgy, prayers, creeds, and preaching still assume this yawning gap between God, reigning in heaven, and the world and each one of us.

Spirituality is the recognition that there is no gap. God, as Paul says in Acts, is the one “in whom we live, and move, and have our being.” Or as St. Augustine said, and many spiritual teachers have repeated over the centuries, “God is closer to us than we are to ourselves.” And as Meister Eckhart says, the man who 700 years ago spearheaded the greatest effort to redirect the church toward this orientation:

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.

Churches measure their vitality by how many people are in worship, yet it is worship that is dragging down the church. It is like an addiction, a habit the church can’t let go of. That many people, especially clergy, would be astonished, and even outraged, at such an idea shows how difficult breaking this habit will be. They don’t see that culture is breaking that habit for them, as churches close by the thousands.

No doubt many repurposed churches will retain a regular community gathering, though hopefully called something other than “worship”. But here is the great learning opportunity: let members reexamine church traditions and decide how they can be reimagined and repurposed, or that they just need to go. What opens us to recognize God’s presence here and now? How do we recognize the holiness of this time and place, of everyone present, and of the world around us? And how do we tell the story of Jesus, not as the Son of God, but as a child of God who lived to show that this is the identity of every person?

For this, finally, is what a repurposed church is about: following Jesus as the revealer of our oneness with God, of our true nature as Spirit, of each of our beings as a unique embodiment of God’s own Being. In that light, much of what has passed for “essential” church life will fade away or be radically reimagined. The church will no longer proclaim the “story of salvation” as Christ’s deliverance of the world from sin. Rather, the church will be a place to “experience salvation” as the awakening to our true nature, revealed in Jesus’ life and teaching.

A repurposed church will be a place to learn from spiritual masters of past and present, whatever their religious label. Here people will be guided to follow the “pathless path”, which leads them to where they already are by discovering they have never NOT been apart from God, but only lost in their egoic mind’s delusions of separateness. In a repurposed church they will be supported in a journey inward, to discover both their true selves and the God who is the core of their being. As Meister Eckhart taught,

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.

This may be the most difficult of the lessons a repurposed church must learn, but it is crucial. That after a centuries-long obsession with words—scripture, creeds, doctrines, theology, sermons, hymns, prayers, liturgy—God is not found in them. Rather, as Elijah learned at the mouth of his cave, God is in our silence. And in a repurposed church, silence will be its sacrament.

 

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.

Our hidden happiness

Our hidden happiness

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Sunlight shining through dark cloudsJessica Grose is an insightful New York Times columnist, writing about matters of culture and daily life rather than politics or news events. Her most recent essay asks the provocative question, “Are We Happy Yet?” She begins by telling of her experience monitoring her activities three times a day with a phone app from something called TrackYourHappiness.org.

The survey … asks me a series of questions about what I was doing the moment right before I take it, whether I wanted to be doing it, how focused I was on my task, how productive I was being and how happy I felt about it all. I measure my emotional levels with a little toggle that slides from “bad” to “good.”

The survey’s creators believe that the more focused we are on our activities, the more satisfaction we receive from them. Grose, however, found that her app responses were actually revealing how many necessary activities she performed (“folding laundry”) that she really didn’t want to do. But then the app itself became an issue.

As the weeks of survey-taking went by, I had another, more paralyzing thought: that this focus on my feelings was instilling a new kind of anxiety. Rather than just walking one of my kids home from school and contentedly listening to her chatter about sedimentary rocks, I was thinking about the survey’s infernal happiness toggle and where this experience ranked relative to the other moments I had tracked.

Grose’s point is that focusing on being happy is probably one of the worst ways to actually achieve happiness. Yet, as we all learn in grade school, our country was seemingly founded on the notion, because we all have the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And since Thomas Jefferson penned those words two-and-a-half centuries ago, our obsession with pursuing happiness has grown exponentially.

Apps like the one Grose used number in the thousands apparently. Countless books, courses, workshops, TED talks, diets, medications, websites, and YouTube videos all promise to lead us to happiness. And then there are the hope-filled experiences of visiting places like Disney’s Magic Kingdom, which claims to be “the happiest place on earth.”

One of the central tenets of all types of spirituality is that happiness is not found “out there” but discovered within us. As a result, many adopt mindfulness and meditation practices which are supposed to help us find that happiness, wherever it is hiding.

Yet, as Grose learned, studies have shown that such practices, along with others aimed at improving our sense of psychological wellbeing, are often ineffective. For those predisposed to mental health issues, learning such techniques sometimes leave them feeling even worse.

Most of the happiness optimizing programs and activities assume happiness is some “thing” we need to pursue, as Jefferson said. In our scientific age, we think we can quantify and measure it, whether in a laboratory experiment, population survey, or phone app. But Grose wisely concludes all this is barking up the wrong tree. Happiness is not something acquired but experienced, often mysteriously, in daily living.

The frenzied, overstuffed marketplace of happiness optimization will never be able to fix the fundamentals of the human condition or bring a lasting kind of purpose to a new generation. There will never be easy or straightforward answers to our most profound questions of existence, and ranking emotions feels like a diminution of their awesome power. I do not want to spend those daily walks home with my daughter wondering how they stack up against a morning run or dinner with a friend or any other moment in my day that might make me feel something. The user experience of being alive cannot be graphed.

One of the unfortunate misdirection plays of recent years has been the adoption of meditation as a technique for personal improvement, on par with exercise, dieting, or hiring a life coach. Meditation will raise your GPA and lower your blood pressure, improve your mental focus and your sex life, help you stay on task and propel you up the corporate ladder. Or so it’s claimed by one self-help guru or another.

Yet none of this has anything to do with the meditation that is at the heart of millennia of spiritual practice from around the world. While there is variation among spiritual traditions, they agree that meditation is not about acquiring or accomplishing anything. Rather, it is about a lifelong experience of seeing clearly and letting go.

A growing spiritual tradition today is nonduality, from the ancient Sanskrit word advaita, meaning “not two.” While originating in Hinduism, the belief in the unity of being can be found in almost all religious traditions, especially in their mystical expressions. Today nonduality is taught and practiced in both religious and nonreligious settings.

According to a nondual understanding, we lack nothing because our fundamental being is already complete. Suffering arises from blindness to this truth and our seeking satisfaction in what is impermanent, always changing, and ultimately disappearing.

Thus, nonduality says that happiness is, in fact, who we are. We are already happy by nature but this reality is obscured by experience. A couple years ago, our book discussion group read You Are the Happiness You Seek, by the English nondual spirituality teacher, Rupert Spira. According to Spira (and many others) there is no such thing as a “spiritual path” because there is no place to go. We’re already there! Meditation is the primary practice for this “pathless path,” as it is often called, as it facilitates our awakening to our true self, to our being as an expression of the one Self.

Our book group did get somewhat hung up on Spira’s use of the word “happy,” as often happens in discussions of this topic. While Jefferson seems to have meant the word holistically, today “being happy” is often understood more superficially, as in how we feel with a puppy in our lap or being at a Taylor Swift concert.

Broader terms like contentment or satisfaction probably come closer to the overarching experience we are seeking. But the best word is likely peace, which has a long usage in many of the world’s religions and spiritual traditions. Peace is more than an experience and is understood to be a state of being, or indeed, the nature of Being itself. Peace is a spiritual quality that transcends personal experience. We are unlikely to say that we are happy when we hit our thumb with a hammer, yet we could say that at the core of our being we are still at peace.

But whether you use the word happiness, peace, or something else is not the point. Rather, this is about the discovery of who we truly are and the completeness, the fullness of being, this is our nature. Our illusory separate self never genuinely acquires the peace and happiness it seeks. There is no such thing as “peace of mind.” The objects, experiences, relationships, accomplishments, status, etc. that we think make us happy all disappear over time.

What they do accomplish, however, is to briefly reveal, like the sun shining through a gap in the clouds on a stormy day, the happiness and peace that is already our true nature. When the clouds return, we think our happiness is gone when it is actually only obscured once again by experience. Awakening comes when we discover we are not our thoughts, feelings or experiences. Rather, we are the consciousness, or awareness, in which they occur, the Self which knows them but is unaffected by them.

For Spira, then, meditation is not an activity but rather the experience of Being and knowing of our Self.

Meditation is not an activity that you undertake in order to bring about a particular experience. The ‘I’ that you are is prior to the activity of meditation and cannot, therefore, depend on whether you are meditating or not. Meditation is to be knowingly the one you always and already are but may not have noticed due to your fascination with the drama of experience. Replace the word ‘meditation’ with ‘being knowingly your self’. Ramana Maharshi suggested that the highest form of meditation was simply to be…. Don’t make a distinction between everyday life and meditation.

The metaphor Jesus uses for peace and happiness is the Kingdom of God. His parables teach that finding it is often a surprise and in unexpected places. It also involves losing our supposed separate self to discover our true Self that is one with all. Yet it is available for everyone because the kingdom is all around us and within us, if only we have eyes to see and ears to hear. We don’t have to do anything to achieve happiness and peace because they are already closer to us than we are to ourselves.

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, which covers blog expenses and helps me to keep doing this.

Walking each other home

Walking each other home

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In my last blog post, I mentioned the name of Ram Dass as one who was an early proponent and practitioner of spirituality apart from religion. To many, Dass (1931-2019) was the quintessential 1960s/70s hippy, but he was also a serious thinker and writer and deeply compassionate.

Two sayings came to be associated with him, often appearing on bumper stickers and posters. The most well-known was “Be here now.” This is the challenge to the tendency of our minds to be focused on the past or future, or on what we imagine is happening somewhere else. Being in our heads someplace other than “here, now” is the primary cause of our distress and anxiety.

The other phrase, which I think is equally powerful, was, “We are all just walking each other home.” The meaning of this may not be as immediately obvious. Dass often used it in the context of being present with the dying, but he understood dying as a lifelong spiritual journey. To me it is one of the simplest descriptions of our spiritual life and of what Jesus (and others) saw as our calling in life.

The overarching theme of Jesus’ teaching was the kingdom of God. The meaning of this phrase was not obvious. It was not an idea found in the Old Testament, which talks instead about the political kingdoms of Israel and Judah, so it left most of his hearers puzzled. Jesus never gives a clear definition of it, preferring instead to describe it with metaphors and to tell stories about it through parables.

It seems that even Jesus’ most devoted followers never really understood him. At the beginning of Acts and just before the resurrected Jesus’ ascension to heaven, the disciples ask him, “Will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” One imagines Jesus shaking his head and thinking, “After all this, you still don’t get it.” Instead, what he says is that it’s not his decision to make, but hang tight for the coming of the Spirit. At Pentecost it’s made clear that God’s plan is for the whole world. But “the plan” always remains a mystery.

Jesus’ parables and other teachings make clear that the “kingdom” he is talking about is metaphorical. It is not a political or geographical entity, nor is it something to anticipate happening in the future. This is said most explicitly in Luke 17:

Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and he answered, “The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There it is!’ For, in fact, the kingdom of God is among and within you.”

In the noncanonical gospel of Thomas, Jesus says,

“[The kingdom] will not come by waiting for it. It will not be a matter of saying ‘here it is’ or ‘there it is.’ Rather, the kingdom of the father is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it.”

In a surprising story in Mark 12, Jesus is challenged to name the most important commandment. After responding, a scribe congratulates him on his answer and then expounds upon it in greater detail. Jesus in turn affirms the scribe’s response, saying, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” The words “not far” imply a spatial relationship, yet it is obviously not literal but metaphorical. The kingdom is somehow “present” but we may be at some distance from it.

Things lost and returning to where they belong is a frequent theme of Jesus’ parables. Of these, the most well-known is the parable of the prodigal son. The familiar story tells of a younger son who wants to leave home and see the world. So he travels to “a far country,” squandering his inheritance from his rich father in the process. Destitute, he realizes his family home actually has all he wants so he goes back and is rapturously welcomed by his father.

A second parable is ingeniously attached to the first. It tells of the elder son’s bitterness as his father’s welcoming back his useless brother. However, the story reveals that the elder son has never appreciated what he was blessed with living with this father. While physically present, he too was “lost” and far from home.

Meister Eckhart understood the message of these stories and what it means to be in God’s kingdom. He summarizes the human predicament in a quote I used last time. In this translation, however, the connection to the parable is obvious.

God is at home. We are in the far country.

Thus, according to Eckhart and to Jesus’ lost-and-found parables, the mystery is not where to find God but why have we left our true home where God has been all along. The “returning home” experience is summarized in a line from the popular hymns Amazing Grace.

I once was lost, but now am found; was blind, but now I see.

Now the deeper meaning of Ram Dass’ saying becomes apparent: “We are all just walking each other home.” To be lost and wandering is the human predicament. Our life journey is finding our way back home and helping others along the way to do the same.

But what and where is “home”? As I’ve said many times before, the corruption of religious language makes it hard to take the Bible and theology seriously. Ironically, the same was true in Jesus’ day, which is why he resorted to parables to communicate his ideas.

Home is where we belong because it is where we are from. We can rephrase Jesus’ response to the scribe as, “You’re almost there; you’re almost home.” The gospel of John, written for the Christian community decades after Jesus, sees Jesus as a symbol for home, the place where we are meant to “abide.”

I am the vine; you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit.

The turning point for the prodigal son is when he “comes to his senses.” Amazing Grace talks of being found and regaining sight. The most common description which transcends religious and spiritual traditions is “waking up,” from delusion to reality.

Where is home? It is all around us, and within us, Jesus says, if only we could see it. What is home? It is our true self, our being, experienced as pure silent awareness, but obscured by the made-up roles and identities we have accumulated over our lifetime, and the endless chatter in our heads.

To be at home is to know our oneness with the Source of all reality, the ground of being, with “God,” if that word works for you. This Oneness is beyond words, in any case. All we have are pointers and metaphors. But more important than words to describe it, is the experience of being home. Paul calls it “the peace that surpasses all understanding.” It’s the deeper truth of the saying, “Home is where the heart is.”

We are all on the journey home. It can be arduous and frustrating, filled with distractions and detours, but there are guides along the way. And it all becomes less stressful, and seems more doable, when we realize that we are all on the same journey, that “we are all just walking each other home.”

 

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Yes, but who are you?

Yes, but who are you?

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Sunrise in Santa Fe, New Mexico
New Mexico sunrise

The traditional meaning of Good Friday and Easter is that Jesus died for our sins and by his resurrection people are given eternal life. For centuries, this has been the church’s carrot and stick. Believe in Jesus and you will have eternal life in heaven. Don’t believe in Jesus and you will die in your sins and go to hell, or at least not go to heaven.

I think the stick part of this message has almost completely lost its credibility. Even very few religious people believe in a God who punishes human beings for their wrongdoing, especially for eternity in some place of torture. As one of my seminary professors wryly said, “I may believe in hell, but I don’t have to believe anyone is in it.”

But what about the carrot of life after death? My sense is that isn’t much of a carrot anymore because people either believe in it or not regardless of their religious beliefs. I have a friend who grew up in a Muslim household but has no religious practice now, and he told me emphatically that there is life after death.

For most people today, life after death is real or not regardless of one’s beliefs about God or religion. Some say, “when you’re dead, you’re dead”, while others, like my friend, insist our lives go on “beyond the grave.” What form that life takes is up for debate, of course. In any case, few believe anymore that life after death is something awarded to us, by God or the church.

The church’s reward-and-punishment message was always a self-serving distortion of Jesus’ teaching and what the Bible in general says. It was adopted because it got people in the pews and kept them there. The church got away with it because there is no clear and consistent biblical understanding of life after death. So, the church’s theologians could pick and choose the verses and traditions which supported the message of salvation which the church wanted to promote.

Biblical scholars agree that the notion of life after death was a late developing belief in ancient Judaism. There is little discussion of it in the Old Testament. God’s rewards and punishments are almost entirely this worldly, and more related to the behavior of Israel as a people than of individuals. The dead went to Sheol, the underworld place of darkness. Later, the idea of a personal afterlife was likely picked up from Israel’s neighbors but was never universally taught or accepted. It remains a minority belief among Jews today.

Early Christians apparently were among those who did believe in life after death. In the gospels, Jesus clearly takes this position in a debate with some Sadducees. Yet Paul has to defend the idea of the dead being raised in 1 Corinthians in order to justify a belief in Jesus’ resurrection, so apparently it was not universally accepted among the first Christians.

In that same letter, Paul gives his most detailed discussion of resurrection and what he says would startle many Christians. Paul says flat out that “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God.” Likening death to the planting of seeds, he says, “It is sown a physical body; it is raised a spiritual body.” Thus, Paul would have scoffed at the later gospel stories of the resurrected Jesus’ with a body that could be touched and felt and even eat!

Paul never defines what he means by his seemingly contradictory phrase “spiritual body.” But another statement he makes does point in a helpful direction. Using the idea of Jesus as the “second Adam” (i.e. God’s restart of humanity), he says, “Thus it is written, ‘The first man, Adam, became a living being’; the last Adam [Jesus] became a life-giving spirit.”

The divine spirit, often imagined as breath or wind (the words are the same in Hebrew and Greek), is one of the most important but underappreciated ideas in the Bible. The creation story in Genesis 1 begins with “a wind from God” blowing over the watery chaos from which the universe is made. In the creation story of Genesis 2, God creates the first human out of dust and “breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

Spirit, God’s own breath, is what makes us alive and is the energy of all creation. Death is the departure of that spirit from the body. All four gospels describe Jesus’ death in those terms. Mark, Matthew, and Luke each say Jesus’ death was when he “breathed his last.” Before this moment, Luke has Jesus say, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” And in John, Jesus’ death comes when he “gave up his spirit.”

But in talking about life after death, we rarely ask who or what it is that might continue to live after death. Who is the “I” that we think will go on? This is the source of our confusion because we fail to ask the most fundamental question: Who am I? Ignorance of our true identity is the primary cause of our misery according to many of history’s great religious and spiritual traditions.

This has become a crisis in modern Western culture. Society emphasizes the individual personality and its free development, i.e. “finding” or developing ourselves. Yet we know that all our qualities, abilities, talents, and accomplishments are ephemeral—they won’t last. Am I more than these qualities? If so, who is the “I” that has them? Who am I besides the roles I play, my ever-changing physical qualities, or my mental and physical abilities?

While much religious language has become antique, the word “spirit” has remained meaningful and powerful. I believe this is because it points to what is unchanging and eternal, deeply felt and intuited, yet otherwise unnameable. It is spirit, according to ancient wisdom, that is our true nature and identity. And being spirit, we are then one with God.

In modern times, this was perhaps most clearly summarized by the 20th century French anthropologist, priest, and mystic, Teilhard de Chardin. In describing our true nature, he said,

“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.”

Is there a way to understand spirit in modern, even scientific, terms? Increasingly, spiritual teachers and scientists are finding common ground in the idea of consciousness. The study of fields as diverse as quantum physics and near-death experiences (NDEs) are causing scientists to recognize that consciousness needs to be seen from a new perspective. Many are beginning to speak of it in ways that echo the teachings of Eastern religion and Western mystics.

Earlier this month, The Guardian published an in-depth story titled, “The new science of death: ‘There’s something happening in the brain that makes no sense’.” Among other topics, the article shows how our confusion about consciousness is impeding our understanding of both living and dying. The author quotes the bold prediction of Sam Parnia, an acknowledged expert in the fields of resuscitation and NDEs:

“I think in 50- or 100-years’ time we will have discovered the entity that is consciousness,” he told me. “It will be taken for granted that it wasn’t produced by the brain, and it doesn’t die when you die.”

Other scientists are going even further, asserting that consciousness is not how we perceive reality but where, in fact, reality starts. In his book The Case Against Reality, UC-Irvine cognitive psychologist Donald Hoffman says of this new perspective, “Conscious realism makes a bold claim: consciousness, not spacetime and its objects, is fundamental reality.”

How do we experience consciousness itself? For centuries mystics around the world have said this is the purpose of meditation. Through the practice of sitting in silence we develop the ability to become aware of awareness itself. This is our true self, such teaching holds, before any particular experience or thought. It is the self which knows such experiences and thoughts, is aware of them, but is not the experiences or thoughts themselves.

Not only is consciousness our true self, spiritual traditions have said, but it also Consciousness, or Awareness, our experience of our oneness with God, the one Self of all reality. This is why so many religions teach that knowing God requires a dying, a giving up of our ego, our false self, because it obscures our experience of our True Self. As Jesus says, we must lose our life in order to find it.

Alan Watts was a British-American clergyman who helped modern Westerners discover the Eastern religious traditions. Appreciating both the Bible and Eastern spirituality, he wrote:

You don’t really exist. That is, as an ego, a soul, a separate will. When you realize this, you’re liberated…. Ego is an abstraction…. So is one’s self. There’s a happening, but it’s not you. By dying to yourself, finding you don’t exist, you’re reborn. Forgetting yourself, the universe flows on.

This was the essence of Paul’s experience of the crucified and risen Jesus. In this letter to the Galatians he writes, “I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.”

In his video, “What Happens After Death? A Nondual Explanation”, retired Baptist pastor and author Marshall Davis comes to this conclusion.

What happens after we die? The individual human consciousness comes to an end. No more me. But the universal eternal consciousness that is expressed as me, in me, through me, that consciousness that we call God, continues…. [W]e are one with this divine consciousness. This consciousness is the universe, is the nature of the universe, and this consciousness is always, and it continues. In that sense we continue after death because this is who we really are. The good news is that this divine consciousness can be known now. When I die, I expect that this divine consciousness that I know now will continue, although my individual personal consciousness will end.

A phrase I have not used until now is “eternal life.” It is so often misunderstood. Eternal life is not just life after death. The word “eternal” means “without beginning or end; lasting forever; always existing.” In John, which uses the phrase more often than any other  book of the Bible, Jesus teaches that “eternal life” is not something given later but known now. How could it be otherwise if it is eternal? In other words, our true self has no beginning or ending. Not only will we not die, but we were also not born, because our true self is the eternal Spirit of God.

One of the mystical metaphors that is especially helpful is that of waves on the ocean. Each of us is such a wave. It exists only in union with the ocean. The wave’s substance is entirely that of the ocean. When it reaches the shore, it comes to an end, even while other waves are following behind. Nothing “dies” when the wave ends. Only its form has changed while its true identity as ocean continues on unchanged.

Discovering this truth is the experience of salvation. In John, it is what Jesus means, in his conversation with Nicodemus, by being born from above or born again. In many religious traditions it is called awakening. It is seeing clearly, for the first time, who we are, and what life and reality truly are.

It is to be set free to live in the “eternal now”, without regrets about the past or fear of the future because neither actually exist. It is to be able to love life and our own existence, and to realize how literally Jesus meant it when he said we should love our neighbor as ourselves. It is to recognize our eternal oneness with God, or whatever word we want to use for the One that is the ground of existence, as Meister Eckhardt says. It is to recognize our oneness with everyone and all things. It is to know that our truest and most important identity is expressed in simply saying, “I am,” and to know that we always will be.