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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.

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.

 

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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.”

 

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Fixing worship

Fixing worship

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woman sitting alone in a churchI have been to many wonderful worship services. I like to think I’ve planned and led a few. Overall, however, I would say the quality of worship is declining because churches are increasingly uncertain what worship is actually for. But that’s only a symptom of worship’s troubles.

For most of its history, worship is the basket into which the church has placed nearly all its eggs. The popular phrase “going to church” says it all. Worship is what church is about, this saying assumes. Further, it’s an essentially passive activity. You go to worship, you attend a service, like you go to a movie or attend a graduation. You are primarily a viewer of the featured event.

With the rise of popular culture in the 20th century, churches began to realize worship was losing its hold on people. They recognized that they needed to do a better job of “connecting with their audience.” The Catholic church substituted Latin for modern vernacular languages and Protestants gave up King James English for more modern versions. Music became more contemporary. To get people more involved, communion became more frequent. A new emphasis was placed on lay worship leadership.

All of this remained, however, within the context of worship as “spectator sport” because that’s what worship is. Even if you’re singing, reading, dancing, or giving a communion cup, you’re doing it for the congregation, the vast majority of whom walked in, took a program, found a seat, and then followed directions. Sometimes they joined in the singing or liturgy but mostly they watched and listened to what was going on up front. Which is what they expected to do when they came.

All the time I was a parish pastor, one of my primary objectives was to “improve worship.” In my last years, however, I came to realize that such efforts were putting lipstick on a pig. Better worship changed nothing. More specifically, it didn’t change people.

Since at least the 4th century, Christianity has been largely a passive activity. That was its appeal: it was simple. Be baptized, go to church, believe a few things about God and Jesus, make some effort to be a good person, and you’re in. The church was a carrot-and-stick institution, wielding the threat of hell and dangling the promise of heaven to keep people coming. Worship was the main place that wielding and dangling took place. It was there that you got your ticket punched to eventually be admitted to the main event “upstairs.”

With the advent of the modern world, that scenario went into a long, steady decline. The carrot and stick stopped working. Worship became a feel-good act of nostalgia, supplemented with some contemporary entertainment and self-help advice. Coffee hour and potlucks became as much of a draw. Now, though, few remember or long for the church of yore, and thousands of congregations close in the US every year.

To cut to the chase, religion assumes an enormous gap exists between God and humanity. There are many explanations for why this is so (“original sin” is the most notorious), but it is religion’s job to bridge that gap for us. Worship is essentially an endless reiteration of the story of Jesus as the “gap-bridger.”

Spirituality, on the other hand, assumes that we are actually one with God, but we are blind to that reality and do not experience it. Here the culprit is our identification with an illusory separate self, created in our mind, often called the ego. This is the mask we wear, our persona (the Greek word for mask), which is actually hiding our true being. In Christian terms this is God’s own Spirit. It is our sense of “I am”: silent, imperturbable, and eternal. It is what Paul describes as “the peace that surpasses all understanding.” It is God’s own being incarnate in us.

This is why Jesus says that we must lose our life (ego) in order to find it (spirit). It is the essence of Paul’s experience of the risen Jesus, described in Galatians 2:

I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me.

Unfortunately, power brokers in the early church drained these teachings of their spiritual content and twisted them into a legalistic framework of sin and forgiveness. Jesus’ death ceased to be a metaphor and model of the ego death we must all undergo and became instead the God-required atoning death for human sin, whose benefits only the church could provide.

In the gospels, Jesus is the human face of God. Early on, official church teaching added and he is the only human face of God. But there are plenty of stories that contradict this. For example, Jesus says both that he is the light of the world and that we are the light of the world. Why do we hear so much about the first but little about the latter?

In the closing parable of Matthew, people are judged for how they treated “the Son of man” when they encountered him in the poor, sick, hungry, naked, and imprisoned. Jesus also says the kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed because it’s already here, within us and all around us. And Paul challenges his readers, “Do you not know your body is a temple of the holy Spirit?”

In its ancient and indigenous forms, worship renewed and celebrated people’s experience of the sacred in their lives and in the world. The church needs to rediscover that tradition. To do so, it will need to get rid of its carrots and sticks once and for all. It will need to drop the notion that people are coming to find God and realize instead that God arrives with every person who walks in the door.

In poetry and prose, spoken and sung, worship must find new words (and rediscover old ones) that open people’s eyes and hearts to the eternal spirit that surrounds and fills them. But just as importantly, worship must enable the most profound experience of sacred being, which is silence. For only in silence do we realize that we are not the ego’s endless chatter and thoughts. Only in silence do we recognize our true nature as boundless awareness and eternal peace. In silence, we know ourselves as God’s own spirit. Even the ancient Israelites are directed in the Psalms, “Be still and know that I am God.”

 

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.

God has left the building

God has left the building

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Intoned in a dramatic voice (by lead actor Kelsey Grammer), many of the episodes of the long running TV comedy, Frasier, concluded with the announcement, “Frasier has left the building.” If he had known the phrase, the iconoclastic 19th century German philosopher, Frederick Nietzsche, might have used it and declared, “God has left the building.” Instead, he famously (or infamously) said, “God is dead … and we have killed him.”

This Sunday is Trinity Sunday. It is an odd “feast day” because it is the only one dedicated to a doctrine. The Trinity has been argued about throughout church history. The meaning of it has never been clearly stated, so that Jews and Muslims both view it as a polytheistic heresy. Nearly every group that has separated from orthodox Christianity has done so, at least in part, over rejecting the Trinity.

Nonetheless, century after century, the church has clung to the Trinity like a life preserver. But as is always the case when we need to rise to a new level of maturity, it’s time for the church to let it go, and swim.

Typically, the problem with the Trinity has been with “persons” two and three: Jesus, as the Son of God, and the Holy Spirit. How could the human Jesus be divine? How can the Holy Spirit be a separate divine entity? But I don’t think that’s the real problem. The “problem” is actually with the first person, God the Father, because he’s the one that’s “left the building.”

When I was in seminary in the late 1970s, there was great controversy over “God language” and the maleness of God. “Inclusive language” should be used to refer to God, it was said, as God was not male or female. Or God was both. It was never clear which it was. Old prayers and hymns were revised to reflect this, and new ones were created. Even the Bible was retranslated. But the results of all this were often awkward and stilted.

What was rarely discussed, however, was who, or what, this God actually is. In other words, Nietzsche’s announcement from over a century ago was not part of the conversation. In debating God’s gender, were we actually talking about anything at all?

“God is dead… and we have killed him.” That second phrase often gets left off. What Nietzsche was referring to was the transition to the modern world. In ancient and medieval times, superhuman divine beings existed in a nearly invisible heavenly realm above the clouds. The three-tiered universe was like a layer cake, a lower realm or “underworld” of the dead and/or hell, earth was the middle layer, and above that was an upper realm called heaven. It was often believed to have several levels of its own, where God, or the gods, and various angelic-type beings all existed.

As I said in my latest video, all this, of course, was swept away by Galileo and his scientific successors. The being called God, or God the Father in Christian terms, disappeared along with God’s abode. How can there be a God if there is no place for God to be? That this is now universally accepted is demonstrated by the fact that no one is breathless waiting for the new Webb telescope, peering further into space than ever before, to discover heaven at the edge of the universe. God the Father has left the building.

The belief in God as a supreme being existing somewhere “out there” is called theism. To not believe in such a God is called a-theism. In American culture, it’s one of the most disreputable labels a person can be given. But that’s because it’s misunderstood to mean not believing in God, when it actually means not believing in the theistic being God-out-there.

Recently, pollsters have expressed confusion about why the decline in religious identity has not been matched by a rise in atheism, which remains in the low single-digits. That’s because many of these people also think atheism means “no god.” In reality, many of them likely are a-theists because they have dropped a belief in a God-out-there. But that doesn’t mean they don’t believe in God.

What do the “spiritual, not religious” believe in then? What are the alternatives to God the Father, to God-out-there? Not to be flippant, but it’s the God-right-here. Such an understanding of God is found around the world and throughout history. In fact, archaeology indicates such a notion of God has been around a lot longer than that of a God-far-off.

Early archaeology and anthropology were dominated by Christian Westerners. We still live with their prejudiced judgments. They scoffed at, what was to them, the primitive and clearly inferior animism and pantheism of prehistoric and indigenous peoples. Yet the notion that God pervades reality and that we live in a sacred, spirit filled world has been the a more common view than theism. Today, contemporary indigenous spirituality is viewed much more positively, often as something modern people can learn from.

There has also been renewed interest in the centuries-long tradition of Christian mysticism. To borrow the title of the popular 17th century mystical work of Brother Andrew, in simple terms mysticism is “the practice of the presence of God.” Mystics (who are present also in Judaism and Islam) generally have little interest in traditional liturgy and theology. They are usually not concerned about achieving forgiveness of their sins, but of knowing God’s presence within and around them, and of being awakened, enlightened, transformed by that experience.

What’s surprising to many is that such a description could also be applied to Jesus. In the gospels, Jesus shows little interest in temple ritual, believing rather in God’s presence within and around him. Unfortunately, the church got the notion that this made Jesus unique because he was the Son of God. Yet the case can be made (and increasingly now is made) that Jesus viewed himself as a child of God, like everyone else. His ministry was demonstrating a life possible for anyone who has been awakened by the Spirit to their true identity.

Today, much of the language of the Bible and traditional religion is too pious and antique for modern ears. Indeed, in the 1960s, the renowned Roman Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner, said the church should stop using the word “God” for fifty years because it had been so abused and misused! What we need to remember is that all words are metaphors and approximations. There is a valuable Buddhist saying that all words and teachings are like a finger pointing at the moon. We too easily get obsessed with the finger, when what we need to be looking at is the moon.

Surprisingly, and significantly, “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, or 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.

God the Father has left the building. Yet rather than being dead and gone as Nietzsche assumed, God is increasingly recognized as a sacred spirit, the unifying and energizing dimension of all reality, embodied must fully in human consciousness.

In the biblical story, this spirit brought creation out of chaos and the first human to life. At his baptism, the spirit awakened Jesus to his sacred identity. Knowing this spirit, he taught that the “realm of God” was not a unique place far off somewhere but here and now, within and all around us. Centuries later, that vision may finally be coming to life.

 

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 topic conversation. Finally, thank you for your financial support, which covers blog expenses and enables me to keep doing this.

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.