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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.

Voting in peace

Voting in peace

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Row of people at voting boothsThe media is full of stories about people in distress anticipating the results of today’s elections. Some can’t sleep or can’t get out of bed. Others are upping their meds. One doctor’s post I read said he had never seen so many patients with anxiety over this year’s election. Some act out in their driving or with other antisocial behavior.

Of course, our political rhetoric promotes this. Opposing candidates are demonized so that we are encouraged to imagine the worst possible outcomes if they are elected. Calamities of all sorts are feared if the candidate we support doesn’t win. And then there are fears about the electoral process itself—technical breakdowns, violence, endless recounts, lawsuits.

From anticipation and imagination come anxiety and fear. And so, the blessing and curse of the human mind appears again. One of the great advantages of our brains is that it allows us to predict the future with some degree of accuracy. This allows us to make plans to take advantage of good circumstances (rain and sun means plant crops) and prepare for difficult ones (cold and snow means grow enough crops to store for the winter).

But our ability to predict the future is actually very limited, often much more so than we realize. We can never anticipate all that the natural world will send us, including weather, disease, earthquakes, and the stray comet collision every few hundred million years. For a variety of personal reasons, including past experience, our imaginations can conjure of wildly unrealistic expectations about the future.

The primary factor in our distress about the unpredictable and uncontrollable future is, of course, our ego. This is the self we imagine our self to be. It lives somewhere inside of us, peering out through our eyes and registering neural inputs through our other senses. It talks to itself incessantly in our minds with our thoughts. A popular and simple definition of this self is our body-mind. It comes into existence at our birth, evolves and changes over time, and comes to an end at our death.

But let me just drop here a very different understanding of all this. It’s from the Anglo-American, 20th century philosopher, teacher, and entertainer (his word), Alan Watts.

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 that’s not you. By dying to yourself, finding you don’t exist, you’re reborn. Forgetting yourself, the universe flows on.

Watts is usually thought of as a Western interpreter of East Asian philosophy and religion. But he grew up an Anglican and was ordained in the US as an Episcopal priest. While what he says here may sound Hindu or Buddhist, in fact, it also reflects one of the most profound but usually forgotten (or ignored) teaching of Jesus. In all four gospels, Jesus tells his disciples enigmatically that they must lose their life in order to find it. He says in Luke, for instance:

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.

Watts also echoes the famous dialog between Jesus and Nicodemus in John.

Very truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God without being born anew.

By implication, in order to be born again, whatever was born the first time must come to an end. It’s in Paul, however, where this notion is expressed most explicitly. For Paul, this is the meaning of the cross, as he says in Galatians.

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

Paul’s experience of the risen Christ meant the death of his “I”, his ego, so that now Christ, the Spirit of God incarnate, was recognized as his true self.

But wait—didn’t we start all this talking about election anxiety? How did we get sidetracked by Bible and theology? It’s a sign of the sad state of religion today that this is seen as taking a sidetrack. For at their core, all of the great religions are concerned with this question: Who am I, really? And they all seek to expose the imposter in this quest, the ego.

There may be no other place where egos are more on display than in an election campaign. Modern campaigns promote the person of the candidate far more than their position on issues, and denigrate the person of their opponent. And this clash of egos then drags in the egos of the candidate’s supporters.

Our egos are inherently insecure because they really don’t exist! One consequence is that we easily attach ourselves to other egos we admire, seeking to somehow claim their attributes as our own. This is the force behind the celebrity culture that has exploded in modern times. And politicians are now, essentially, celebrities, along with TV and movie stars, musicians, athletes, social media personalities, influencers, the “royals”, and anyone media outlets think can be used to attract “eyeballs” to their productions.

It’s not today’s political egos that concern us, however, but our own. Our anxiety over the results of today’s elections needs to be seen for what it is: fearing the defeat of our candidate as our own personal “defeat.” Because our ego is a product of our imagination, it easily spins fantasy worlds in which to exist, 99% of which are in the past or in the future (living in a fantasy present is usually called psychosis).

Our increasing dependence on the media with its inevitably artificial view of reality, and our growing frustration with our circumstances and fears about the world in which we think we live, leave us increasingly susceptible to manipulation by leaders of all sorts. They play sometimes upon our hopes but mostly upon our fears, to draw us into a worldview in which they will protect us and deliver us from disaster.

The ego loves the past and future. It has great difficulty living in the present. Tomorrow and each day that follows, and whenever the election results are known, we will wake up and go about living our lives. Much of it will go “according to plan” but often it will not, as has always been the case. We may rejoice over or bewail the election results, but their consequences for our lives will also be largely unpredictable and almost certainly not what we have imagined.

These days I keep coming back to Jesus’ simple teaching in the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 6.

Which of you by worrying can add a single hour to your span of life? … Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.

Our anxious ego spins out countless fantasies of doom and disaster in our minds, which keep us unendingly entangled. Living in these fantasies, however, blinds us to the reality of the here and now, including the beauty of the lilies and countless other attributes of the world around us.

The world isn’t all lilies, of course. But as Jesus goes on to say, by ignoring the “troubles” of our fantasies, we will be able to handle much better the problems we actually encounter in the here and now. Because then we can respond out of “the peace that surpasses all understanding” of our true self, which only exists in the present moment, rather than out of the obsessions and anxieties of our imaginary ego.

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

No going back

No going back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A God of silence

A God of silence

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speaking a new language

Speaking a new language

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Pillars of Creation photo by James Webb Space Telescope
Photo of the Pillars of Creation by the James Webb Space Telescope (2022)

Recently I came across a piece of writing that stunned me with its clarity and wisdom. It was an essay I came across on YouTube by a young man who creates videos on spirituality and nonduality. Going by the online name ASCENDOR, he has no apparent religious affiliation but has learned much from the world’s various spiritual traditions and from life.

There is an intelligence that endlessly holds everything in perfect harmony. It permeates all that is, both seen and unseen. It is the force that guides the stars in their orbits and sets the planets to dance in precise order. Effortlessly, it orchestrates the rhythm of the universe – from the gentle ebb and flow of the seas to the winds that carry the clouds across the sky.

Within this intelligence, everything finds its place. The trees grow as if they understand the language of light, stretching towards the sun, knowing that their growth is part of a greater plan. The animals instinctively follow their nature, migrating, hunting, resting, creating a perfect balance in the web of life. The seasons shift in an eternal cycle, as if an invisible hand gently directs them, allowing everything to bloom and fade at just the right moment.

Even in the smallest things, this intelligence reveals itself. A tiny seed, seemingly insignificant, contains within it the blueprint of an entire tree. It knows when to sprout, grow, and bear fruit – not through thought, but through pure being, through the infallible wisdom of life itself.

Everything happens in harmony, as if the universe were a single, vast symphony, where each note plays exactly in its proper place. This intelligence is not distant or separate from us; it is within everything we are and experience. It is in our breath, in the beating of our hearts, in every thought that comes and goes.

You have never seen a sulking or despairing tree, questioning its existence or losing itself in thoughts of the future. Trees live in natural harmony, rooted in deep trust. They surrender to the flow of life, carried by an intelligence far beyond the grasp of the human mind. In the same way, you too can let go of your worries, for they are not needed to live a beautiful life. When the weight of your worries lifts, the search ends. The ego-driven energy dissolves, and in this newfound vastness, the entire cosmos – everything that exists – becomes your family. Or, more accurately, you recognize yourself in all things.

What is being talked about here? Life, existence, reality, being, and “an intelligence that endlessly holds everything in perfect harmony.” There is so much to be pondered and explored in these words. One word that is not used, however, is “god”, though anyone from a religious tradition would want to say that is what the “intelligence” spoken of here means.

For me, however, this essay supports the late Catholic theologian Karl Rahner’s belief that we should stop using the word “god”, at least for a long while. Regardless of one’s beliefs, the word has accumulated so many ideas over the centuries, and has become so rigid, that is hides more than it reveals. By avoiding the word, as is done here, we are forced into questioning and exploring, rather than assuming we’ve got “it all” figured out.

Yet religions have great difficulty with the idea that they haven’t each got it all figured out—and usually exclusively. Speaking in Singapore during his recent Asia trip, Pope Francis got himself into hot water by publicly expressing this inclusive viewpoint.

“Religions are like different languages in order to arrive at God, but God is God for all. Since God is God for all, then we are all children of God…. If you start to fight, ‘my religion is more important than yours, mine is true and yours isn’t,’ where will that lead us? There’s only one God, and each of us has a language to arrive at God.”

The pope’s conservative critics once again were horrified at his openness and broad-mindedness. A retired archbishop responded incredulously,

“To suggest, even loosely, that Catholics walk a more or less similar path to God as other religions drains martyrdom of its meaning. Why give up your life for Christ when other paths may get us to the same God?”

Of course, he completely misses Francis’ point. God is the universal truth, not any religion. But this bishop and countless others like him are so wedded to their religious institutions that they can’t make that distinction. Such ossified misunderstandings are dragging religion down around the world.

The growing numbers of the “spiritual, not religious” reflects an attempt to find new language for this universal truth, ultimate reality, ground of being, which religion traditionally calls God. One of its most commonly expressed beliefs is that this ultimate reality is not in some particular place far off but here and now. As it says in the essay: “This intelligence is not distant or separate from us; it is within everything we are and experience.”

In a recent blog post reflecting on the pope’s words, Christian nonduality teacher Marshall Davis affirms his declaration but takes issue with one aspect of it.

In this regard both Pope Francis and his critics go astray. Religions are not paths to God. There are no paths to God. Religions are not different paths up the same mountain. Identifying religions as paths to God assumes that God is somewhere else and we need to travel to arrive at God. 

God is not somewhere else. God is here now…. If religions are paths, then they are dead ends. They often serve as barriers to discovering God. They become God substitutes….  

God is not found by hiking a trail up a spiritual mountain but by discovering that there is no trail and no mountain. There is only the Divine here now. All we need to do is open our eyes. We need to get out of our own way. All we need is eyes to see and ears to hear.  As Jesus said, “The Kingdom of Heaven is within you.” 

Davis also just published a new video in his series on the spiritual awakenings of people in the Bible. This one is on Job. After chapters of talking about his sufferings, Job finally gets his meeting with God to find out what it’s all about. As Davis says, God doesn’t use theology or quote scripture. Instead, he gives a long speech about the wonders of creation. God is telling Job that he is never going to figure this out with reason. Instead, he needs to fully experience the world around him to discover his place within it.

This is the wisdom that this new yet ancient spirituality is appealing to, rather than the theology and rationalism religion has relied on for centuries. As ASCENDOR says in his essay,

There is an intelligence that endlessly holds everything in perfect harmony. It permeates all that is, both seen and unseen…. Within this intelligence, everything finds its place…. Even in the smallest things, this intelligence reveals itself.

Here are the seeds of a new creed for our time. The great medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas said that the first book of scripture is the universe itself. How was that wisdom lost? Or why was it never assimilated in the first place? I’ve come to believe that the church’s anemic response to the climate crisis is due to it never sincerely believing in the sacredness of creation. And yet all of us have experienced spiritual renewal spending time in our gardens, gazing at the stars, or walking in the woods.

As Paul says in Acts, “God is the one in whom we live, and move, and have our being.” Davis is right that there is no path to God. How could there be a path to where we already are? The “intelligence” at the heart of everything is here now, around and within us. We just need to be still, and look and listen, with our minds and our hearts.

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.

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.

Consider the lilies

Consider the lilies

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photo of liliesThe news today, whatever its source or format, provides endless sources of distress. Local events, national politics, international conflict, natural disasters, and predictions of future catastrophes all contribute to our sense of dis-ease: feelings of fear, anxiety, anger, hatred, frustration, guilt, depression, sadness, helplessness, and hopelessness.

Of course, people have been upset by distressing events long before there were news media. In Matthew’s Sermon on the Mount, Jesus addresses this in one of the most famous passages in the gospels.

“Therefore I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by worrying can add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith? Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear? For it is the gentiles who seek all these things, and indeed your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well. So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.”

On first hearing, Jesus words sound pollyannish. “Don’t worry. God will take care of it.” Worse, you may have heard such sentiments from people thinking they were being helpful. And Jesus can also seem annoyingly simplistic when he tells people on multiple occasions that they need to have faith, or that their faith has healed them.

But this text contains profound wisdom if we listen carefully. As he often does, Jesus tries to get his listeners to open their eyes to see the world as it really is, learn the lessons it has to teach, and re-frame our own self-understanding as a result.

Remarkably to us, perhaps, Jesus begins by noting that all life is part of an ecosystem. The seeds and bugs birds need are simply there for the taking. Lilies beautify the fields they occupy simply by being what they are. Yet while this is supposed to encourage us in trusting that we too will be taken care of, Jesus almost off offhandedly adds that the field that is so beautiful one day will, nonetheless, be cut down and tossed in the oven the next.

Jesus joins the Buddha here in teaching the most basic lesson: nothing is permanent, including you and me. An emotional reaction to distressing news is natural, whether it’s something happening right in front of us or halfway around the world. But when those emotions begin to overwhelm us and we can’t find peace again, then something else is going on. We are clinging to what can’t be held on to.

Buddhist priest Norman Fischer summarizes this Buddhist teaching.

Practitioners have always understood impermanence as the cornerstone of Buddhist teachings and practice. All that exists is impermanent; nothing lasts. Therefore nothing can be grasped or held onto. When we don’t fully appreciate this simple but profound truth we suffer…. When we do, we have real peace and understanding…. As far as classical Buddhism is concerned, impermanence is the number one inescapable, and essentially painful, fact of life. It is the singular existential problem that the whole edifice of Buddhist practice is meant to address.

Jesus is, perhaps, less systematic than the Buddha but his response to impermanence is essentially the same. “Seek first the kingdom of God,” Jesus says. That is, seek what is permanent and stop looking for security and peace in the impermanent, what is so pretty one day and tossed in the oven the next.

Now here, of course, we run into the problems of language and the corruption of language. For most today, a statement like “seek first the kingdom” drips with a cloying piety from generations of manipulative preachers and evangelists. Jesus’ concern isn’t with religion, however, but daily living.

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

We hear this expressed in AA as living” one day at a time” and in nondual spirituality as “living in the now.” Neither past or future are real; they are only ideas in our head. And those ideas are the source of most our distress, anguishing about what did or didn’t happen in the past or what might happen in the future. Real life happens only here and now. This is the meaning of existence and is our true being. Anything else is fantasy.

The medieval theologian and mystic Meister Eckhart said that God is “the ground of being.” That phrase was embraced in the 20th century by the German American theologian Paul Tillich and has grown in usage since. Being is the Really Real. “Ground of being” echoes the famous story of Moses at the burning bush. When Moses asks for the name of this God, he is told it’s “I AM”, Being Itself, speaking to him.

Mystics of all religious traditions have said that, in some profound way,  existence itself it the ultimate revelation and experience of God. Reality’s countless forms are expressions of existence, of Being, but they are all transitory, constantly changing, impermanent, forever coming and going.

To “seek the kingdom” as Jesus says, is to find and ground ourselves in the permanent, the timeless, the Really Real, and to let go of the transitory, that which is forever changing and impermanent. To do otherwise, Jesus and the Buddha both say, is to live in confusion and suffering.

How do we respond to the world’s chaos and crises? “Today’s trouble is enough for today,” Jesus says. Do what you can and are moved to do here and now: donate, write a politician, vote, volunteer, etc. But endless thinking, ruminating, fuming, stressing about this problem or that crisis won’t accomplish anything.

When these emotions get us in their grip and won’t let got, nonduality teacher Angelo Dilullo says it’s time to practice a type of meditation called self-inquiry. In this practice, we look inwards to find the underlying emotions that have been triggered by the event or events that have so distressed us. What painful experiences or negatives ideas have been opened within us? Often the question will be, what are we clinging to that we need to let go of?

The events and situations causing so much distress to people today are not trivial but often have little direct impact upon us. And in most cases, there is usually little we can do about them. Obsessing about them in response to our powerlessness, including feeling deep anger or depression, does nothing. This is the suffering that comes from clinging to the transitoriness of life.

Tying ourselves in emotional knots over the latest news story or headline disconnects us from living here and now. It closes us to the beauty of the world around us and to the opportunities we have to bring hope and healing to situations right where we are. “Today’s trouble is enough” to challenge our abilities and to create new possibilities of love and life, if we can be centered in the Really Real, the kingdom which Jesus says is all around us and within us.

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.

Finding Rabbi Jesus

Finding Rabbi Jesus

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Modern mosaic of Jesus and Mary Magdalene
A contemporary mosaic of Jesus and Mary Magdalene at the Magdalena Institute in Magdala, Israel, on the Sea of Galilee.

I’ve been writing about the near impossibility of knowing who Jesus really was: what he did, what he taught, and what his ultimate intention was, if he had one. Our earliest writings about Jesus are by someone who never knew him, the apostle Paul. The gospels are written decades after Jesus’ death, again by people who never knew him. What the sources were that the gospel writers used are unknown and we can only speculate about.

Reading the gospels, it’s obvious that their authors, like Paul, each had their own agenda, i.e. a particular understanding of Jesus they wished to promote. Complicating things even more, we have no original manuscripts for anything in the New Testament and it’s now accepted that many of its texts were later edited by unknown scribes, and not just for spelling and grammar.

In short, immediately after his death, Jesus’ followers struggled to define who Jesus was and what his message was. Why was this so? Likely because Jesus himself had laid out no clear agenda, or at least not one that fit with the expectations of the people of Judea. Personally, I think Jesus himself had a clear understanding of what he was about, but he did not have a programmatic agenda and his message was not easily understandable for many of his listeners. Jesus was thinking and behaving far outside the conventional Jewish box.

As a result, Jesus made use of symbolic stories called parables, symbolic acts of inclusion, especially meals, and healings—parables in action, if you will—to get his “message” across. And that strategy worked, at least in touching and changing many people. Jesus’ gracious welcome, and the sense that in doing so Jesus was acting on God’s behalf, seems to be the one thing universally remembered about him. In simplest terms, Jesus communicated that God loved everyone and people just needed faith to experience that love.

Unfortunately for his followers, Jesus left no organizational plan. And that was likely intentional: he just wasn’t interested. So no, Jesus’ goal was not to found a new religion. Not surprisingly then, the story of early Christianity is as disorganized and dysfunctional as can be imagined.

It’s unlikely, for example that “the twelve” was ever as solid an inner core as the gospels want us to believe—they can’t even agree on their names! Peter was supposedly the primo disciple, yet scholars now agree that it was Jesus’ brother James who was head of the Jerusalem church, and he seems to not have been an original follower.

After Jesus’ death, his disciples remained faithful Jews. But then Paul sailed in out of the blue, announcing that Jesus revealed himself to him and told him that gentiles were to be included in this new Christian community. The church’s split over this issue was not resolved until the center of Jewish Christianity was decimated by the first Jewish Roman war and the destruction of the temple in A.D. 70.

After that, Gentile Christianity became the norm but it existed in countless different flavors. Non-canonical gospels and other writings from the first centuries testify to the diversity of beliefs and practices of the early church. A centuries-long power struggle ensued leading to infighting, persecutions, and excommunications. This was mostly ended in the 4th century with establishment of Christianity as the new official religion of the Roman empire and the adoption of creedal decrees about the content of true Christian belief. Anyone who disagreed was now officially a heretic and beyond the pale.

As this process ensued, the historical Jesus of Nazareth became an ever-smaller dot in the church’s rear-view mirror. Today, thanks to archaeology and the techniques of critical scholarship, we know more about the historical Jesus than any of those gathered to thrash out the Nicene Creed in 325. It’s not surprising that the creed says almost nothing about Jesus’ life besides his birth and death.

We know more but, as I’ve said, we don’t know enough to construct a convincing, definitive picture of the historical Jesus. And our problem isn’t so much lack of information as it is having too much. It’s as if the pieces from multiple jigsaw puzzles have been (partially) poured into the same box. The question isn’t which picture is “right” but which picture do you want to (partially) put together from all those pieces?

The question of who Jesus really was will never definitively be answered. But we can answer the question of who we want or need Jesus to be. This doesn’t mean that Jesus is a blank slate. The early Christian writings establish discernible boundaries. And reestablishing those boundaries would help knock down the more outrageous caricatures of him that keep popping up: “We don’t know for sure who Jesus was but he certainly wasn’t that” (thinking of the Rambo Jesus recently on posters and t-shirts).

Besides the questions of history and the record of the first Christians is the question of our context today. For centuries the church was able to create the context. Life orbited around the church and was called Christendom. That time is long gone, though many in the church haven’t figured that out, or nostalgically long for its return. But it’s not coming back, no matter how many copies of the Ten Commandments get hung up.

In fact, religion itself is rapidly fading away. All the so-called “world” religions are well past their sell-by date. Rituals continue to be performed, texts continue to be studied, and people return to congregations in times of crisis. But religion can’t shake its pre-modern origins. That’s the world it was created for but that’s not the world we live in now. Today that’s obvious in Westernized societies for most people under 50, at least.

Even in its heyday, though, religion was not without its critics. The fluidity of Hinduism always allowed people to live outside its traditional boundaries, including its most famous wayward son, the Buddha. The most well-known and influential ancient Chinese writing, the Tao te Ching, has little to say about religion. The prophets railed again Israel’s corruption and denounced the hypocrisy of temple worship. And the embarrassing irony now highlighted by many scholars is that Jesus himself showed little interest in formal Judaism or in founding another religion.

Thus, the growing number of the “spiritual but not religious” can find ample support in the tradition of Jesus, as well as in the many other religious renegades that have appeared over the centuries. There is still much we can learn from voices of the past, so long as we realize it doesn’t require us to return to the past.

In a nutshell, Jesus the mystic and wisdom teacher has much to offer our distressed world today. Jesus the Messiah and savior from sin and hell does not. The Jesus who says that God’s kingdom is within and all around you, and that you must lose your life in order to find it, speaks in harmony with countless other voices down through the centuries who are part of what Aldous Huxley called the “perennial philosophy.” And the teachers and followers of nondual or unitive spirituality today follow in their footsteps. It is in recognition of this transcendent tradition that Meister Eckhart said, “Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world all speak the same language.”

Robert Funk was the brilliant founder of the Jesus Seminar, the multi-year effort to gain a clearer picture of the historical Jesus. In his book summarizing its work, Honest to Jesus, Funk says with typical humor and irony:

We must begin by giving Jesus a demotion. He asked for it, he deserves it, we owe him no less.

Funk believed Jesus has much to offer us today but we can’t see it because he has been swallowed up by centuries of religious titles and symbols. He needs to be set free. He needs a demotion, but only in the eyes of the church. In John’s account of the resurrection, Mary Magdalene initially mistakes Jesus for a gardener. But when he calls her by name, she recognizes him and says in Aramaic, “’Rabbouni!’ (which means teacher).” If rabbi/teacher was an adequate title for the one who was probably Jesus’ most devoted follower, it should be good enough for us today.

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.