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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.

 

 

 

 

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.

Going Out of Your Mind

Going Out of Your Mind

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Young man sitting watching a mountainous horizon

The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.  It will not be like the covenant … that they broke…. I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts…. No longer shall they teach one another or say to each other, “Know the Lord,” for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, says the Lord.

This passage from Jeremiah 31 is like a peek behind the curtain. It’s slipped in by an unknown scribe to show the real point of Jeremiah’s futile saga. Jeremiah (like all the prophets) was doomed to fail from the start. Judah’s political and religious leaders were never going to listen to his call to repentance and to return to the Lord’s ways. Jerusalem’s destruction was baked into the cake.

In fact, this text, like others that pop up here and there in the Old Testament, blows down the house of cards that is the saga of God’s chosen people. The dramatic Mosaic “take off” story of the people of Israel, with the exodus from Egypt and the giving of the ten commandments and establishment of the covenant at Mt. Sinai, was always destined to end with a fatal crash landing. These texts are like a Greek chorus, helping the audience to recognize and understand the tragedy that is unfolding before them.

These few verses are the center of the book of Jeremiah and, in effect, declare the failure of the project of religion. Whether in the political form found in most of ancient and medieval history, or its politically independent form typical today, religion will never bring about its goal of creating a humanity in harmony with God, the One, our Divine Source. The “covenant”, the external form of people’s relationship with God, no matter how sincerely adopted, how cleverly written, how strictly enforced, will always fail in the end, will always be “broken”, as Jeremiah says.

So, what’s the answer? Is there an alternative? Formal relationships with God, whether chiseled on stone tablets, written on paper, or digitized on a computer drive will always fail. They make our relationship with God into an idea which, as with all ideas, eventually blow away like leaves in an autumn wind.

But neither we nor God are ideas. While its mythical stories and language sound antique to us today, nonetheless the Bible repeatedly gives priority to human experiences of God. The formulation of ideas about God always takes a secondary role. Yet the biblical religions have put their emphasis on concepts, expressed in theology and doctrines and enacted in rituals and liturgy.

When I was in seminary, I worked part-time in our library. With over a million volumes, it was the joining of three different Christian traditions and one of the largest theological libraries in the country. I later came to see it as symbolic of Christianity’s preoccupation with words: endless rows of centuries of dusty books, filled with words about God.

I went to church recently, for the first time since Easter. During the service I heard four Bible readings, multiple hymns, lengthy recitations of liturgy and formal prayers, and, of course, a sermon. My experience for that hour was words, words, and more words.

But this is exactly what this passage from Jeremiah says needs to change. Teaching people about God doesn’t cut it. Instead, the prophet says, rather than being taught about God with words people will know God by having God’s Word written on their hearts. God isn’t an idea to be taught and learned but an experienced reality within us.

What is the “heart”? Where is our deepest center? It isn’t our mind, with its endless stream of words and ideas, especially ideas about ourselves, called our ego. Our inner being has been called different things over the ages. Today it is most often identified as consciousness, our deepest awareness of our self and our being.

This is the true Self that is aware of our egoic self, aware of our thinking and feeling, but it is not them and is unaffected by them. It is, as Paul describes it, the source of the peace that surpasses all understanding. Christianity has said that it is Spirit, God’s own presence within us.

Religion is the quest to find and understand God. Spirituality, however, says God doesn’t need to be found but is already here, within and around us. God, as Paul is quoted saying in Acts, is the one in whom “we live and move and have our being.” In Galatians he says, “it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.” In the gospel of John, Jesus’ last prayer for his followers is that they would all be one, “as you, Father, are in me and I am in you.”

The primary activity of religion is worship, directing prayers and praise to “the God out there.” In the spiritual life, the primary activity is meditation (in Christian circles often called contemplation or centering prayer), which opens us to our true Self and liberates us from the confusion and pain of our ever changing egoic self.

So, for example, in meditation we may still hear voices in our heads of self-judgement, anger, frustration, anxiety, relentless demands, etc. But over time we come to realize that those voices are not us. We, our real selves, are the ones listening to those voices, which, once recognized, gives us the freedom to choose how to respond to them, or (often the best course) to just ignore them.

I am not my mind any more than I am my heart or my lungs, which are all largely out of my control. Going out of my mind is not a path to insanity but, on the contrary, the path to my true self, the path to freedom and true peace and happiness. It is the path to God.

Today, religious language seems antique and much of it has been corrupted by centuries of abuse. About the time of Vatican II, one of the Roman Catholic church’s top theologians, Karl Rahner, said we should stop using the word “God” for fifty years since its meaning had become so distorted. The rise of the spiritual but not religious is due not only to a rejection of religious institutions but religious language, as well. For them, “religious-speak” is neither helpful nor meaningful.

But for those who remain within establishment religion, it is all the more important to see how, over the centuries, many religious texts and authorities have been well aware of religion’s limitations. It is a thread that runs throughout the Bible and the Christian tradition, especially among the mystics. For them, reality is not dualistic, requiring that we strive to span an enormous gap between us and God. Rather, the challenge is to awaken from our confusion and blindness to know our oneness with God and all that has been created.

One of those mystic authorities was the medieval German theologian, Meister Eckhart. His understanding of our oneness with God was clear and profound and still speaks to us today of the peace and joy of that experience.

“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.”

 

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.

Why worship?

Why worship?

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Church interior with people sitting in pewsMy last blog post crossed what would traditionally have been a theological “red line.” I came out, in essence, as a (qualified) a-theist. As I said, I do not believe in a divine being existing someplace “out there.” In the context of the Trinity, I rejected “God the Father” as an ancient concept that makes no sense in the modern world.

And what was the response? Silence. Well, mostly silence. I did get a few positive comments but nothing in disagreement. No one unsubscribed. One person made a donation. But the truth is that a statement which through most of Christian history would have been viewed as heresy, with possibly dire consequences, got nods of agreement or, perhaps, yawns of indifference.

Now I know that my audience is not a representative sample of the population or of Christians. Certainly, some Christians reading my post would have a fit. But I think it’s significant that this group of mostly mainline Protestant and progressive Catholics were open to what I said, either as a new idea or as confirmation of something they already believed. I don’t think they are unusual.

In the seven months since we moved, I have been to a church worship service six times, the last on Easter Sunday. The two nearby congregations my denomination don’t work for me at all. There are a few churches of other denominations I like, yet after worshiping at them I haven’t felt any real desire to go back.

After I left their services, my reaction was that they were just too much. Too much what? Too much talk, mostly. Paraphrasing the emperor’s criticism of Mozart in Amadeus, there were just too many words: hymns, prayers, liturgy, readings, sermons, and assorted miscellaneous commentary.

In the last years of my ministry, my goal was for a Sunday service to not last more than forty-five minutes. This past Advent, I attended an Episcopal service which lasted an hour and forty minutes! I couldn’t help but think of Jesus’ admonition in Matthew 6: “When you are praying, do not heap up empty phrases as the gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard because of their many words.”

Increasingly I have wondered, “What is worship for?” Traditionally, Christian worship has been very theistic. Its various actions have been directed towards the God-out-there: praise, prayer, confession, lament, etc. Creeds and hymns usually presume a theistic God.

More recently, however, worship has become increasingly directed towards the congregation, with a wide range of entertainment and self-help components, plus the clergy’s inclination for chit-chat (yours truly included). The intention is to make worship personal, relatable, relevant, accessible, casual, etc. All of which is an admission that traditional worship is now failing most people.

So, what should worship look like if, as I wrote last week and I think many people intuitively believe, God isn’t “out there” but right here, within us and all around us? If, as Paul is quoted to say in Acts, God is “the one in whom we live, and move, and have our being”? Let me use again a quote I cited in a recent video. It’s from the story in John 4 of Jesus and the Samaritan woman at the well. She asks Jesus whether the Jewish temple or the Samaritan one is the right place to worship. Jesus replies,

“Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem, … when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth.”

What does “in spirit and truth” mean? From the rest of John, as well as from the other gospels, I don’t think Jesus has in mind anything to do with sitting in a building in rows of seats, focused on the action on a stage up front. In fact, this story is the only place in the gospels where Jesus actually talks about worship, and in its traditional sense, he essentially dismisses it. Jesus shows little personal interest in worship and rarely, if ever, directs anyone else to worship.

Traditionally, worship was done for God because presumably that’s what God wanted. Nearly everyone worshiped at their local congregation because that’s what you did. You might have opinions, pro or con, about the minister, the building, the music, etc. but it had nothing to do with deciding whether or where you were going to worship. Today, as I said above, the focus is on what the congregation wants. Where people worship, or if they worship at all, is very much dependent on what they like and whether they are “getting anything out of it.”

There is a story told about a medieval stonemason creating an intricate carving for a high and inaccessible space of a cathedral. He was asked why he was putting so much work into something no one would see. “God will see it,” was his response. He was almost certainly sincere but I can’t imagine anyone having such an attitude today.

To “worship in spirit and in truth” is much like Paul’s admonition to “pray without ceasing.” It isn’t about reciting prayers, performing rituals, or attending a weekly event called worship. Rather, it is a life stance, an attitude, an orientation. It is to live with a constant awareness of the sacredness of life: of ourselves, of every person, and of the world around us. This is the meaning of spirituality.

There are, of course, what are typically called “spiritual practices” which help develop and maintain such an awareness. Their purpose is not to “please God” but to awaken us to God’s presence within us, as us, and all around us. Meditation, or contemplative prayer, is usually seen as the basic and essential practice for spiritual awareness. But again, rather than something to be done, most spiritual teachers agree that ultimately meditation becomes simply part of who we are and how we are present in life.

Traditional worship is not about this. Worship is about fulfilling a religious task. In worship, some may experience moments of spiritual awareness, but they are not assumed or expected. Nor is it assumed that worship will lead to metamorphosis, to transformation, which is what both Jesus and Paul mean by salvation. It will not awaken us from the illusion of duality and separation to the fundamental truth of our oneness in God with all creation.

In a recent church newsletter, the pastor said that the single most important reason their church existed was to provide the space and time to worship. I have no doubt many or most pastors believe this, as do many of their churches’ remaining members. Unfortunately, fewer and fewer people share that interest, and for good reason.

Today, people don’t want to go through religious motions but to know spiritual truth, as Jesus says to the woman at the well. They want to know “the peace that surpasses all understanding,” the silent sacred presence that is at the core of our being. People no longer want to imagine a God out there but rather, they want to know the God within.

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