Moses, Jesus, Paul and Sacred Soundbites
What ‘Ol Abe Saw
Moses, Jesus, Paul, et. al. as motivator. Their words as marching orders for how to live and what is right to do.
Sounds good. Yet, as he watched the bloody carnage justified on both sides by Christian theology, Abraham Lincoln perhaps said it best:
“I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord’s side.”
Which side is the Lord’s side? Or is it that God plays for both teams? Or is it that human beings are condemned to action that may or may not be “right” until God (or Satan?) sorts it out?
Cherry-Picking and Sound-Biting
This contrast came home to me during the recent fight over gay marriage in the state of Minnesota, where I live. Progressive religious leaders took a long look at the reign of the religious right in politics and decided to counter it. We took the Christian message of love and inclusion to the statehouse. I knew that we had accomplished the goal when a conservative state senator said, “This is about more than religion.”
The worm had turned. And, indeed, the right to marry is now guaranteed in the state of Minnesota.
Many of my religious sisters and brothers believe that the loving and inclusive message of their faith traditions prevailed. Don’t get me wrong—I’m all for loving and inclusion. It’s the message of Moses, Jesus, Paul, et. al. that bothers me a bit.
Weren’t we progressives cherry-picking and sound-biting as crassly as our conservative opponents?
Where were the real Moses and Jesus and Paul in all this?
Perhaps our hearts were telling us things. Perhaps our sense of right and wrong was talking, on both sides. But these sacred thinkers weren’t saying anything new that the scriptures weren’t telling Abe Lincoln and Jeff Davis back in their days of choosing who to slaughter and why based on those old writings.
Using Our Own Little Heads
This gives me pause. Are we really best served as we make decisions in the Twenty-First Century by referring to old texts and deities that pretty clearly don’t do a whole lot of clear talking?
Or might we be better served “using our own little heads”?
That’s a phrase I learned from my fundamentalist Christian mother: “Use your own little head.”
By it, she meant for teenage me to “listen to my raisin’,” another catch phrase, rather than my peers. My mother was cautioning me to use my own head. Further, at least to my future-humanist ears, she was saying that reason, not the religion in my gut, should determine my actions.
Shouldn’t reason, not the religions of our various cultural backgrounds, serve as the arbiter of public discourse and our efforts at realizing a just society?
As a multi-faith leader, I spend a lot of time saying and showing that people of diverse religious faiths can find common ground. I believe in that work.
I’m also convinced that our common evolution as cooperative and rational animals trumps the overlays of religion and culture made since our common trek from the Rift Valley began.
We are rational animals.
After all, which would you prefer as a physician, someone who feels your pain or someone who knows how to stop it? Listening to the heart is a fine thing to do. And, there’s no doubt scriptures make great soundbites.
Listening to our own heads is the hard part.
When in doubt, choose the side of Compassion
The Thursday following the fundamentalist disruption of worship service at First Unitarian Universalist Church of New Orleans, a Pro-Woman, Pro-LBGTQ, Pro-Religious Freedom rally was planned for City Hall. It may not surprise you that the Unitarian Universalists showed up. Dozens of Standing on the Side of Love t-shirts, signs, and stoles were vividly on display. A small but exceedingly vocal counter-rally was staged on the hill above the rally by some who had apparently raced back to New Orleans from Baton Rouge for this very purpose. Even with the bullhorn, it was difficult to hear what was being said at the rally over the yelling of the anti-choice protesters.
And so a group of people, mostly UUs, turned toward the hill, forming a sound barrier between the those speaking their truth in the center of the safe circle and those screaming their truth from the hill, and began to sing (to the tune of Siyahamba, a South African freedom song,) We are standing on the side love, we are standing on the side of love. The singing continued until everyone had had a chance to speak their truth in the Pro-woman, Pro-LBGTQ, Pro-Religious Freedom space.
As the rally drew to a close, everyone not on the hill joined hands, forming a gigantic circle, and sang together: We are standing on the side love, we are standing on the side of love. Rev. Melanie Morel-Ensminger blessed us all, sending us off with the wisdom to “Go Now in Peace.”
The police were on alert and surrounded the park – subtly…We were allowed to protest injustice in peace. Our right to do so was affirmed by the community and by the powers that be.
Friends, that’s a privilege we have not extended to #Ferguson or the many communities of color protesting the extrajudicial killings of children and young adults. Please, before you say “they just need to calm down,” consider the humane and human need to protest injustice. May you tender the communities’ outrage with mercy, with compassion, perhaps even, with love and holy curiosity.
May you withhold your judgment. In times of grief, there is no room for our shoulda, woulda, coulda…. only room for compassion.
If you cannot find your compassion in this time, please still yourself until you can. And if you wonder where it went, spend some time thinking about how systems of oppression steal the humanity of the oppressor as well as the oppressed. If you cannot find compassion for the human grief of others, you may have lost touch with your own humanity. Beloveds, it is worth the work of undoing oppression to reclaim it.
The Spiritual Practice of Agnosticism
Wolf!
The Aesop fable about the boy who cried wolf has long been viewed as a cautionary tale about lying. The boy knowingly cried “wolf!” merely to disturb the villagers. The boy eventually pays the price in dead sheep when the villagers stop responding.
There is another and more dangerous way of crying wolf, however: continually calling “wolf!” because there might be one but there might not.
In this way of crying wolf, the boy is expressing his fears—his own psychodrama. He may even be utterly convinced that a wolf is threatening and nearby. He may even be imagining what a wolf attack might look like. Still, despite the boy’s true alarm, there is no wolf, and the villagers are wasting their time running to help the boy. Wasting time that would be better taken with other ventures.
It’s Not About Not Deciding
As an agnostic, I’m very aware that we agnostics are often seen as fence-sitters—the tepid ones choosing neither hot nor cold. Why can’t we just buck up and admit that we’re atheists? Or why can’t we admit that we have a soft spot for one god or another? Why can’t we just cry wolf or shut up?
Contrary to the cliche, agnosticism isn’t about not deciding. It’s about honestly facing what we know about knowing itself. It is, as the Victorian biologist, T.H. Huxley, who coined the term, said, “not a creed but a method.” (Athiesm is a creed because it is a belief, like theism.)
Agnosticism is a method that is, I believe, a spiritual practice like Christian Centering Prayer or Buddhist meditation.
When Huxley first used the word in print in 1889, he contrasted his confidence in human knowledge with that of the convinced believers. He said,
They were quite sure they had attained a certain “gnosis”—had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble.
So I took thought, and invented what I conceived to be the appropriate title of “agnostic.” It came into my head as suggestively antithetic to the “gnostic” of Church history, who professed to know so much about the very things of which I was ignorant.
Knowing and Thinking We Know
Gnostic in Greek means “knowledge.” In the Western world we know the term best from the early Christian movement called Gnosticism, which claimed esoteric knowledge of the workings of the universe. Such knowledge, Huxley pointed out, can be neither proven nor disproven. The Gnostics claimed to have “solved the problem of existence.” Huxley, however, wasn’t so sure of their untestable opinions. (Neither, it might be mentioned, was the Church so sure of their solution.)
In other words, Gnosticism wasn’t about knowing, it was about belief. Agnosticism is about how and what we know.
Boiled down to its simplest formulation, the way of agnosticism according to Huxley is: “do not pretend conclusions are certain that are not demonstrated or demonstrable.”
No matter how convinced you are that the wolf is near, don’t cry wolf until you see one.
This is not fence-sitting or vacillation. It is, rather, a commitment to the active search for what we can know. In this way it is much like the spiritual practice of via negativa, a method of removing those things that are not “god” in order to discover god.
Huxley, however, saw his method as a positive rather than negative path. He wrote:
. . . Agnosticism is not properly described as a “negative” creed, nor indeed as a creed of any kind, except in so far as it expresses absolute faith in the validity of a principle, which is as much ethical as intellectual. This principle may be stated in various ways, but they all amount to this: that it is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can produce evidence which logically justifies that certainty. That is what agnosticism asserts and, in my opinion, is all that is essential to agnosticism. (“Agnosticism and Christianity”)
It’s About the Questions
Huxley made it very clear that scientific materialists don’t have the answers either. No one does. All of us find ourselves improvising with as much information as we can scramble together—as have all people for all of human history. Agnostics are committed, however, to the common human project of learning more and more. Of knowing what is actually here, not what we only imagine. This commitment requires us to have active minds engaged in continual searching.
As psychologist Ellen J. Langer puts it in her book Mindfulness, “Just as mindlessness is the rigid reliance on old categories, mindfulness means the continual creation of new ones.”
The method of agnosticism is a way of being mindful. A way of being in the present moment and making that moment an open and creative matrix.
Agnosticism is a commitment to only crying “wolf!” when such a cry will do real good.
Because it is the Faithful Thing To Do
{Editor’s Note: Due to technical difficulties, this post, originally scheduled for August 19th, was delayed – posting now!}
I spent two weeks out of state, mostly away from the internet, TV, and newspapers – enjoying some much needed study leave. Returning to the news of the world on Thursday, August 14th was, I confess, quite an incredibly jarring experience.
The depth and the breadth of the systemic racism in Ferguson, Missouri revealed both in the shooting of an unarmed black teenager and the assault on the protesters demanding accountability for his murder at the hands of the law, the ongoing deaths in Gaza even in the midst of cease-fires, the President’s announcement that we are reentering Iraq, increasing violent deaths in the Ukraine, Syria, Honduras… and at home, the second weekend of August was an especially bloody one in New Orleans, as six shootings across the city left five people dead and wounded 11 human beings, including a 2 year old, a 4 year old and a 13 year old…
Dear Ones, today my heart is broken and I am trying to do the faithful work of making sure that it is broken open, to make room for more and more love.
…
In my time away, I finished reading Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder’s portrait of doctor and anthropologist Paul Farmer. Dr. Farmer is an extraordinary human being who has spent much of his life both among the most profoundly poor people in the world and in the halls of ‘the Brigham’ and Harvard in Boston. Haiti is where the organization he founded, Partners in Health, did its first work and where it still maintains its flagship project, the hospital called Zanmi Lasante, (Haitian Creole for Partners in Health).
As the book concludes, author Tracy Kidder “notes Farmer’s fondness for a particular phrase: “the long defeat.” At one point he quotes Dr. Farmer:
“I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory. . . . You know, people from our background — like you, like most Partners In Health-ers, like me — we’re used to being on a victory team, and actually what we’re really trying to do in PIH is to make common cause with the losers. Those are two very different things. We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it’s not worth it. So you fight the long defeat.”
Commenting on Kidder’s work, Professor Alan Jacobs of Wheaton College wrote:
“It seems to me that this philosophy of history, if we may call it that, is the ideal one for anyone who has exceptionally difficult, frustrating, even agonizing, but nevertheless vitally important work to do. For such people, the expectation of victory can be a terrible thing — it can raise hopes in (relatively) good times only to shatter them when the inevitable downturn comes. Conversely, the one who fights the long defeat can be all the more thankful for victories, even small ones, precisely because (as St. Augustine said about ecstatic religious experiences) he or she does not expect them and is prepared to live without them….”
Now I have been recently described as ruthlessly optimistic –and while I’m still not quite sure how I feel about that description — it did highlight for me the need to be explicit about our call to do the work of justice. Friends, we do not work for justice because we know that we are going to win. We work for justice because it is the ethical thing to do, the loving thing to do, the merciful, compassionate, and faithful thing to do.
If and when you feel overwhelmed by all the healing that must be done, by the sheer volume of injustice present in any one news cycle – I invite you to breathe in and breathe out. Remember that you are not alone. We who have only begun to imagine justice and mercy, let us not give up if we are comfortably devastated and can afford to despair. Let us be in solidarity with those whom the dominant culture treats as losers, let us join in the fighting the long defeat with love, compassion, courage and peace that passes understanding.
Together we bend the long arc of the universe toward justice that we may not live to see, but which we must struggle for because it is the faithful thing to do.
{PS – There is a gathering in New Orleans planned for September 26-28, 2014 for those wanting to live missional, justice-making lives and who are looking for a beloved community to connect with on the journey. Learn more here https://www.facebook.com/LifeOnFireTribe and here http://lifeonfirenola2014.wordpress.com/ }
Ferguson: Cynicism and a Smartphone
I have to admit that the recent events in Ferguson, Missouri have triggered mostly cynicism for me. In the US we have periodic paroxysms of piety triggered by events that happen every day but occasionally “go viral” in the media. Then, the outrage subsides . . . and nothing changes.
Allow me to relate an example that went viral for a few weeks.
I was born across the river from St. Louis, on the Illinois side, the industrial side of the river where African Americans and EuroAmericans have lived since the late Nineteenth Century. The fortunes of that swath of river bank have gone up and down over the years, depending upon armament manufacture, but for the most part the region has been poor and race relations tense.
The people—black and white—who moved to the area have been mostly from rural Southern backgrounds, and the culture has long reflected that reality.
If anyone is looking for a great place to film a documentary about US poverty, I would suggest East St. Louis. But then I know that every city in the country has the scenes available there. It’s just that East St. Louis is a small town.
On July 2, 1917 an event occurred extreme even by the standards of the southern third of Illinois. As the style was at the time, the event was called the East St. Louis Riot. It was, in truth, the East St. Louis Massacre. It was a pattern replicated all over the United States—an incident occurred; whites saw the incident as a perfect excuse to teach blacks a lesson; violence ensued; outrage about the violence ensued; calls went out for change; things went back to normal; nothing changed.
But that’s my cynicism speaking, isn’t it?
This appears to be what happened: after a triggering incident, whites gathered at the edge of an area called Black Valley, the neighborhood where African Americans lived. Whites turned off the water leading into the area so that fires could not be extingushed. Then, they set fire to houses and stores.
As blacks escaped from the fire, whites shot, beat, or lynched as many people as they could.
The Illinois governor ordered the National Guard to occupy the area. When they arrived the troops aided the rioters, joining in the setting of fires and using their superior firepower to kill more blacks. (I know this bit because a member of my family was there and told the story when I was a child, in the early 1960s—I heard many such stories.)
The massacre eventually stopped because the rioters got tired and went home.
No one knows how many people died, since Black Valley was left to bury its own dead. The death toll was probably around 200.
As in the case of Ferguson, marches of solidarity with the victims spread across the US. One political cartoon from the time says it best, perhaps. A black woman is pictured imploring President Wilson—famous for his insistence upon making the world safe for democracy—”Mr. President, why not make America safe for democracy?”
Good question. And a question that echoes down the years. Why is it that we don’t make America safe for democracy?
The methods of oppression used in the East St. Louis Massacre—which continued into the 1950s—do not play well on TV, so in the television era lynchings and mass murders stopped.
Notice that when similar pictures appeared from Ferguson, Washington got busy talking about at least perhaps maybe talking about the wisdom of selling military-grade hardware to local police. (This might even change, if a sufficient number of Americans remember the images long enough to continue talking about the problem.) Remember: my forebear used his government-issued rifle to kill the people he was sent to protect.
In the television era, oppression has been for the most part more isolated—a shooting here, a Rodney-King-style beating there. Sudden, overt, isolated, and constant.
And usually not displayable on TV.
The smartphone, however, may change that. The new technology brought about the Arab Spring, and it might—it could—begin to dismantle the current US system of black oppression.
Violence against this systematic oppression is not the answer. Neither is a brief paroxysm of national outrage. The violence will stop only when we the people catch the acts and put them on television and across the web.
Racists don’t like to see themselves in action on TV. (Or, rather—they don’t like to be seen by liberals on TV.)
I can’t speak for the people across the river in Missouri, but this white guy, a descendent of Confederates and white supremacists, would like to see an end to the violence and oppression.
Marcus Garvey, commenting on the East St. Louis Massacre, perhaps said it best:
“This is no time for fine words, but a time to lift one’s voice against the savagery of a people who claim to be the dispensers of democracy.”
Close to Home
It seems to me that the outpouring of emotion on the death of Robin Williams was not only for a beloved celebrity, although goodness knows he was that and more. His struggle with mental illness and addiction became an opportunity for the rest of us to talk about our struggles—with our own illness, or the illness of those we love, with our thoughts of suicide or our experiences of the aftermath when someone we love has taken their life. It all hits so close to home, and there are so few opportunities to talk about the pain that so often remains hidden.
Which makes me think about how we respond to the horrors going on in Ferguson, MO. Now, I certainly live nowhere near Missouri—I’m culturally and geographically thousands of miles away, in the liberal, integrated, diverse San Francisco Bay. A handful of BART stops away from where Oscar Grant was killed not so long ago. So close to home.
Now, you may think that “those people” are asking for police in riot gear—they’re rioting, aren’t they? But if the phrase “those people” has floated through your brain, then it is time to sit down and think. Because it is entirely possible that you have never personally experienced the police as a threat to your safety, rather than the essence of those who create safety. It’s possible that you have never been followed in a store or pulled over while driving because of the color of your skin. It’s possible that you have never considered your skin color to be a factor in getting a job or hailing a cab or renting a house. And if, like me, you have lived in the world of that privileged possibility, then the rage of “those people” in Ferguson, MO might seem very distant.
One of the common threads that I have noticed in the discussions of depression in the wake of Robin Williams’s suicide has been people who are or have been clinically depressed explaining that if you haven’t been there, you don’t know. You don’t know what it is like to have the disordered thoughts, the black hole sucking you down. And so you might be tempted to cheer the depressed person up, or blame them for giving in when they have so much to live for. Because you haven’t been there, and you don’t know.
And if, like me, you live within the comfortable bounds of white privilege, you might be tempted to think that the folks in Ferguson, or the growing number of people who are supporting their protest, should move on, should behave better, should treat the police as the friends and community supporters that you know them to be. Because you haven’t been there, and you don’t know.
But, as with mental illness, the fact that you might not suffer from it personally doesn’t mean that it dwells only in some distant land. Of course, it is possible that you have no family members of color, no friends, no co-workers—although I would find it hard to imagine. Certainly, in any case, you belong to this human family that we are all called to love and care for.
If it doesn’t feel close to home—the assumption that Black men are armed and dangerous, the notion that Black people need to be controlled and subdued, the premise that police in riot gear are here to “keep the peace”—if the reality of racism feels like someone else’s problem, or even a “race card” that people of color use to cover up their own inadequacies, well then it might be time to sit down for a moment. It might be time to remember that what you personally have experienced is not all that there is. It might be time to listen. It might be time to remember that in a world that we all build together, every struggle for justice is close to home.
The Rise of the Totally Awesome ‘Whatever’ God
“Moralistic therapeutic deism.” That’s the term sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton coined to describe the religious beliefs of the average North American. Rev. Robert Vinciguerra calls it “egonovism,” a neologism constructed of “ego” and “novo,” new. Rev. Rob claims that most Americans are Egonovists, even though most don’t know it.
http://revrob.com/society-topmenu-49/223-continued-observations-on-the-egonovism-of-american-society-and-dialogs-with-egonovists
Why are they saying such things? Here’s one reason: Something on the order of 80% of Americans claim to be Christian, but 25% of Americans believe in reincarnation and 20% believe in karma, decidedly UN-Christian concepts. Such statistics tell us that Americans have gone way beyond “cafeteria Christianity” in our “spiritual but not religious” zeitgeist.
A Wikipedia article summarizes the beliefs of moralistic therapeutic deism:
1. A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human
life on earth.
(NB: This point alone disqualifies the system as “deist.” Deists believe there
was a god who was the prime mover at the beginning of the universe,
but that god is now hands-off.)
2. God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the
Bible and by most world religions.
3. The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
(Rather a far cry from that old Christian hymn that intoned “such a worm as I.”)
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when
God is needed to resolve a problem.
(Apparently Jesus was confused about that numbering the hairs on the head thing.)
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moralistic_therapeutic_deism
Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Which is the first tip-off that something may be wrong here. How likely is it that the same god who smote the Egyptians is cool with whatever . . . and shoveling out favors?
Doesn’t this list sound like wish-fulfillment at its best—an ATM god who awaits our every whim and clearly loves the wealthy more than the poor, underwriting an unjust economic and social system that happens to be handing out bennies to lucky me.
And, while this god is reloading the ATM, I’m free to do as I like . . . as long as I’m nice.
As Rev. Bob’s “ego” in Egonovist points out, this theology has an “I” problem, doesn’t it? Whoever “I” am and whatever I’m doing is just fine with this god.
Past the Smiting
If you have read this far, it’s not likely you are a Moralistic Therapeutic Deist or even a Deistic Moral Relativist. After all, an Egonovist won’t be convinced by logic or reference to theology at all, because an important aspect of Egonovism is that it requires no pondering. No daily devotion. No sacrifice. The Egonovist god merely sits . . . or waits . . . somewhere, ready to dish out bennies to me.
None of that “straight is the gate and narrow is the way” stuff.
Sorry to sound like a Calvinist or something but am I the only one who’d like to see Jesus make himself a “whip made of cords” and do clearing of the temple here?
No, the moneychangers aren’t going to be getting their tables kicked by the Egonovists.
The admission price to Egonovism is self-satisfaction and good ol’ fashion hypocrisy.
How Likely Is That?
Don’t get me wrong: I think the moral theistic deist deity is as likely as any of the other gods human beings have thought up over time. Yet, I’m convinced that the point of religions is—and has always been—to stretch us, to call us to higher purposes than our basic lazy, selfish primate selves. Sure, religions also give teeth to social norms and underwrite whatever taboos a particular society has. Still, I can’t help thinking the various gods who have asked for a little effort have played some positive role in human affairs.
The Egonovist god, no so much.
Makes me glad I’m a humanist!
http://ferrelljenkins.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/balage_jesus_and_the_money_changers-t1.jpg
http://ferrelljenkins.files.wordpress.com/2011/12/balage_jesus_and_the_money_changers-t1.jpg
It’s Not Just Ferguson
When a toaster keeps producing burnt toast, we don’t blame the bread—we fix the toaster. When a dishwasher won’t wash the dishes, we don’t blame the dishes—we fix the dishwasher.
Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Ezell Ford (a young man in L.A. yesterday). All African-American. All unarmed. And all dead. The drum beat goes on.
In 2012, police, security guards, or self-appointed vigilantes extra-judicially killed at least 313 African-Americans. In other words, at least every 28 hours, an African-American person was killed by someone purporting to uphold justice, but acting outside the legal process.
In a country where African-Americans and white people use and sell drugs at about the same rates, African-Americans are about 3 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, and then to receive significantly longer sentences, compared to white people. This difference in arrests and sentencing means that African-Americans make up only 13.1% of the US population, but 40% of the prison population.
In Ferguson, Missouri, African-Americans make up 67% of the population, but 5.7% of the police department. Journalist Zoe Carpenter says, in “The Nation,” that, “in 2013, 92% of searches and 86% of traffic stops in Ferguson involved black people.” She goes on, “The skewed numbers don’t correspond at all to the levels of crime. While one three whites was found carrying illegal weapons or drugs, only one in five blacks had contraband.”
In 2014, open-carry white people can hang out at Chipotle with automatic weapons, but Michael Brown, an unarmed African-American teenager, can have his hands in the air, saying, “Don’t shoot,” and he will still end up dead—one is seen as a threat, one is not.
Our country promises liberty and justice for all. But we’re failing that standard. It’s not one person, or one event. It’s not even one police department, or one city. We’re all part of it–my prayers tonight are with and for everyone in Ferguson, Missouri. For peace and strength in the hearts of police officers, community leaders, clergy and teachers, mothers and fathers, children and teens. This isn’t about who’s the bad guy and who’s the good guy–I’ve talked with enough police officers to know how stressful their jobs can be, and how the stories of how they help in the neighborhoods don’t make the news. It’s about a statistically predictable pattern. About a system across the country that’s been producing injustice: different outcomes for the same behavior, depending on the color of your skin.
This is hard for a white person to see. Because, for people who look like me, things seem to work fine. It’s my lived experience that the system is working, that things are fair, and that the difference is in individual behavior. But we know that our individual experience of things is not the same thing as the facts of the world. That’s why it’s important to back up and look at the patterns, the outcomes, that the system produces like clockwork.
As protests in Ferguson, Missouri go on tonight, a lot of my white brothers and sisters are focused on how, in the short-term, to restore order. But the real question is how, in the long-term, to restore justice.
Trying to listen here. Trying to learn. Trying to see how I, and we, might help our country live up to its promise.
Spiritual but not Superstitious (Mystical Without the Mumbling)
“Spirituality” is emotion. Sometimes the spiritual emotion springs from a consciously adopted attitude toward the world we see around us. Sometimes it hits us unexpectedly. A “spiritual experience” can be anything from the warm-fuzzy feeling we get singing a song we love to the inexpressible “mystical” experience of feeling one with all that is.
Both great feelings. But not mysterious. Psychologist Daniel Khaneman in his groundbreaking book Thinking, Fast and Slow outlines how the head/heart and body/soul distinction actually functions. Fast thinking, which Khaneman calls System One, is our fight or flight selves. The visceral reaction. Slow thinking, System Two, is our reason and problem-solving abilities. We don’t think about System One. System Two takes discipline.
As we learn more about these systems, we see more clearly what techniques and technologies best trigger responses. For example, when the rhythm of the music reaches about 120 beats per minute—the average heart rate for mild exertion—we feel like dancin’.
For my money the most insightful writer on the subject of spirituality and mysticism is Jiddu Krishnamurti. Born into British-occupied India, a young Krishnamurti was taken under the wing of the Theosophists and trained in that mystical tradition. The Theosophists thought Krishnamurti would be the great “World Teacher” that they predicted would come to earth.
Krishnamurti eventually renounced Theosophy but did indeed become a great teacher, a synthesizer of spiritual and religious thinking from all over the world.
One of Krishnamurti’s gifts was a keen BS detector. Therefore, when Krishnamurti talks about spirituality and mysticism, I listen.
His key insight goes like this: “It is only when you listen without the idea, without thought, that you are directly in contact.”
Listening without preconception; without judgment; without the interference of ego; listening in order to hear, to experience—right now, with as little of the usual interference as possible. Unmediated experience. This listening pushes System Two down into System One.
This sort of listening requires presence in the moment. It requires us to be in the place of the breath and that mental space that is at once maximum concentration and maximum surrender. This experience may be achieved by various techniques, from mediation to fasting to merely looking up at the stars.
From the Centering Prayer of Christianity to Buddhist zazen to the various yogas, human beings have developed techniques for getting to this space. Since these techniques are designed to dampen System Two and trigger System One, they feel visceral, spiritual.
Woo Without the Woo Woo
“Mysticism” is a technique aimed at achieving a “mystical experience.” Again, this experience is a feature of brain function and has little to do with specific religious or philosophical practices, except insofar as all religions aim for the experience and have techniques for achieving it.
Some traditions are overt about it—Sufism, for example. Shamanistic practice. Transcendentalism.
Take, for instance this passage from Henry David Thoreau’s Walden:
In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.
The transcendental experience is being awake in the here and now.
It’s All About the Flow
Since spiritual and mystical experiences are a feature of brain chemistry, not specific religions, atheists and agnostics have no particular reason to poo-poo the idea. As a matter of fact, mystical experience doesn’t need a religious component at all, as demonstrated by the work of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who introduced the notion of “flow” experience. Csikszentmihalyi found “flow” in experiences as diverse as sports and video gaming. He lists the elements likely to bring on flow experiences:
1. intense and focused concentration on the present moment
2. merging of action and awareness
3. a loss of reflective self-consciousness
4. a sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity
5. a distortion of temporal experience, one’s subjective experience of time
is altered
6. experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as
autotelic experience
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
A flow experience sounds like a “mystical” experience, doesn’t it? Sounds nice, doesn’t it? Sounds “spiritual.”
There’s nothing mysterious about mystical experience. You can put yourself in the way of the flow experience by following very simple (and secular!) procedures.
The Extraordinary Is All About the Ordinary
I’m a writer. I’ve been writing for years. I learned early-on that if I was going to get writing done, I had to do it every day. As part of my daily routine. So, I get up early every morning, make coffee, and sit down to write. And write. And write. Writing is my spiritual practice.
Sometimes, everything clicks and I go into the flow experience. The mystical experience. Sometimes not.
Since I was trained in writing by Beat poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder, I took up Buddhist meditation as a daily practice too. This was part of the “mindfulness” that the writers who became Buddhists in the 1950s thought contributed to honest and deep writing. They passed that on to me.
Over the years, I have discovered that meditation and writing have the same effect: They bring my mind into the present moment. Remember Thoreau’s words:
I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and the future, which is precisely the present moment.
When we are not living in the present moment, we are living in memory or fantasy. We are out of touch with what is. We are kicked back and using System Two. And we are a long way from a spiritual experience!
There’s nothing mysterious about the mystical. Spirituality is a feeling. We don’t have to buy what particular religions are selling to access these feelings. It’s all in our heads.
What to Say?
A plane was shot down over the Ukraine, but I didn’t blog about it because, what after all is there to say about the fact that hundreds of people were killed by a missile that was really only intended to kill a few people? “People are not only brutal, they are also stupid” is hardly an uplifting message.
And my senior colleague actually asked me to blog about the influx of children crossing the border into the US, fleeing gang warfare in Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala. And surely there is something to say about children being stored in warehouses or deported back to life-threatening conditions. And certainly there is something to be said about the fear and loathing which so many people have expressed toward these kids. And there is, no doubt, something much better to say about the folks who are trying to find a way to make it work, to create a place of safety. But I hardly have any perfect solution to what to do with tens of thousands of frightened kids who have nowhere to turn. The best words I know on the subject you have no doubt heard already: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” Which, according to this one guy, is the sum of how God expects us to behave. But, like I said, you’ve heard all that before.
And Lord knows there is plenty to say about the conflict between Israel and Palestine, but somehow I find myself uncharacteristically reluctant to get into arguments with people on Facebook about who is right and who is wrong because, frankly, I think that anyone who ends up killing children is wrong, wrong, wrong. And don’t try to explain to me how your side is justified, because I just can’t get past the fact that you should not be bombing children. Ever.
And, of course, there are all the people dying of Ebola in Africa, and certainly the ongoing terrible news about climate change and the ever-deepening drought where I live are much on my mind. But declaring that we are all doomed is hardly a spiritual gift to present to the world.
So what is there to say? What doesn’t sound trivial in the face of so much suffering, especially when the vast majority of that suffering is of our own creation?
Knowing that humans have created so much horror, it seems like we should be able to make it better. But that becomes even more depressing, since it’s clear that the scope of the problems is far beyond what any of us can fix.
The only words I can come up with are in this poem, which I wrote a couple of years ago in the wake of one more horror that has blended in with so many others:
The Last Good Days
What will you do
with the last good days?
Before the seas rise and the skies close in,
before the terrible bill
for all our thoughtless wanting
finally comes due?
What will you do
with the last fresh morning,
filled with the watermelon scent
of cut grass and the insistent
bird calling sweet sweet
across the shining day?
Crops are dying, economies failing,
men crazy with the lust for power and fame
are shooting up movie theaters and
engineering the profits of banks.
It is entirely possible
it only gets worse from here.
How can you leave your heart
open to such a vast, pervasive sadness?
How can you close your eyes
to the riot of joy and beauty
that remains?
The solutions, if there are any
to be had, are complex, detailed,
demanding. The answers
are immediate and small.
Wake up. Give thanks. Sing.
