Let’s consider an extreme example, a stark instance of the decision between doing something and talking about it. The abolitionist John Brown, fed up with the endless wrangling and political maneuvering over slavery in the early Nineteenth Century, decided to take matters in his own hands. He led a group that attacked a US military arsenal with the intention of seizing the weapons—Sharps rifles, which were a state-of-the-art weapon of the time, and arming slaves. Brown was captured, and, in the case of the State of Virginia Versus John Brown, Brown was charged with murder, incitement to riot, and treason. Brown was hanged for his actions.

But that’s not the action I want to consider.

One of the financial contributors to John Brown’s violent plan was Henry David Thoreau. Nowadays Thoreau’s reputation is mostly as an individualist and a naturalist. But in his own time, he was seen by many as a fiery abolitionist and as an anarchist.

There was never any doubt that John Brown would be convicted and hanged. The debated question—and it is still alive in American popular culture—is whether or not John Brown was crazy. (Look at the pictures and portraits of Brown sometime to see what I mean.)

Slavery sympathizers insisted that Brown had to be crazy: No white man in his right mind would arm slaves.

Abolitionists, on the other hand, insisted that the horror of slavery had driven Brown to this extremity, and that, the longer slavery existed, the more Browns there would be. Thoreau went on a lecture tour in support of this view, presenting everywhere he could a lecture that became an essay called “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” There Thoreau says,

I do not think it is quite sane for one to spend his whole life in talking or writing about this matter, unless he is continuously inspired, and I have not done so. A man may have other affairs to attend to. I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable. We preserve the so-called peace of our community by deeds of petty violence every day. Look at the policeman’s billy and handcuffs! Look at the jail! Look at the gallows! Look at the chaplain of the regiment! We are hoping only to live safely on the outskirts of this provisional army. So we defend ourselves and our hen-roosts, and maintain slavery. I know that the mass of my countrymen think that the only righteous use that can be made of Sharps rifles and revolvers is to fight duels with them, when we are insulted by other nations, or to hunt Indians, or shoot fugitive slaves with them, or the like. I think that for once the Sharps rifles and the revolvers were employed in a righteous cause. The tools were in the hands of one who could use them.

Dangerous words in 1859. Thoreau the anarchist appears in these lines:

The only government that I recognize—and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army—is that power that establishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice. What shall we think of a government to which all the truly brave and just men in the land are enemies, standing between it and those whom it oppresses? A government that pretends to be Christian and crucifies a million Christs every day!

Clearly, Thoreau believed that working for justice includes direct action and taking to the street.

While the John Brown affair clearly energized Thoreau, it put his friend and supporter Ralph Waldo Emerson in a bind. Though Emerson was a leading progressive intellectual at the time, and friends or acquaintances with most of the leading abolitionists, Emerson had been very careful in his words about the abolition of slavery. Emerson did not put much faith in political solutions. Or politics, for that matter.

When news of the capture of John Brown reached him, Emerson wrote to his son, ”We are all very well, in spite of the sad Harper’s Ferry business, which interests us all who had Brown for our guest twice . . .  He is a true hero, but lost his head there.”

No, neither Emerson nor Thoreau thought much of governments in general or of democracy. They were individualists and elitists. Emerson once said, “Democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.” He might nowadays rephrase that as, “Democracy becomes a government of bullies manipulated by media.”

The question was what to do about it. Thoreau said take direct action; Emerson said sit back and think about it, what we might call the “the pen is mightier than the sword” approach. These two had a clear choice: contemplative or activist? Scholar or reformer? Bomb thrower or navel gazer?

This tension has long plagued religions and the religious. Here’s what Thoreau thought about that, speaking of John Brown:

Emerson and Thoreau are good examples of the antipodes, the opposites, of those who think and those who do. Consider: Emerson and Thoreau lived before psychoanalysis. The word “narcissism” wasn’t coined until 1899. Emerson and Thoreau never heard the term “mental health.” Or “introvert” or “extrovert.” But Thoreau knew he had to get outside his own stuff—that he had to stop navel gazing—and get to work saving the lives of those Americans who were suffering injustice.

It’s easy to think Thoreau was right all along, now that we know how it all worked out. Thoreau didn’t live to see how it all worked out. He died in 1862. He never had a chance to put his values to the test in the war. He never saw slavery abolished.

In that way, Thoreau was like the rest of us: we may never see the outcome of our struggles for justice. Thoreau is here to remind us that that is not an excuse.

Buddhism had been known in the United States since the mid-Nineteenth Century, but really came into its own with the return of Pacific War vets who had spent some time in Japan. (The creation of Red China insured that Chinese Buddhism would not be generally available to the Western World for some time.) One of the aspects of Buddhism that attracted post-War interest is that it is based more in psychology than in theology. Buddhism—at least in the Zen form that came back with those vets—is about practice, not theory. The practice is learning to watch one’s own thoughts and the realization that these thoughts can be changed.

Zen Buddhism might have remained just another exotic thing that came back from the war, something like samurai swords, if not for what was already beginning to happen in Western thought—the suspicion that religion and psychology are more or less the same thing, working the same ground. Monotheist religions can give you salvation; psychology can give you . . . self-actualization. And this idea was coming from different directions at the same time—not only humanists were making the argument. Reformed Rabbis agreed. As did many mainline priests and preachers. And then there was the capitalist angle taken by Norman Vincent Peale with his bestselling ideas about positive thinking.

Take for example the work of the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, a survivor of not one but four of the Nazi death camps. Frankl said, “We give suffering a meaning by our response to it.” Yep: that’s Buddhism. Frankl condemned what in the death camps had been called “give-up-itis.” In the death camps, Frankl realized that those who had the best chance of survival were those who found meaning in the suffering and kept on going. Furthermore, Frankl didn’t push a particular path to meaning. The meaning is personal. Again, a bit like the difference between duty and responsibility—a personal choice made without being pointed in a particular direction by outside authority.

Buddhism had long drawn a distinction between suffering and pain. Pain is what happens to you—it can’t be avoided. Wounds happen. But suffering is what you think about the pain. “This is happening to me because . . .”  “This always happens to me because . . .” “You are doing this to me because . . .” All of that is negative meaning making. Those are ways of catching a bad case of give-up-itis.

“Salvation” is a hackneyed word. Better to ask, “What will save me?” “What is the source of my suffering and what can give it meaning?”

It’s a truism in looking at prospective seminary students to wonder if they are recent converts to Twelve Step programs. Or newly divorced. Or have recently encountered some other trauma. Are these people signing on to be Karl Jung’s “Wounded Healers.” I’m certainly not saying that’s a bad thing. It’s a natural human thing: Here is my wound; here is my suffering; where is the meaning? Then: How can I help others who have been through what I’ve been through and worse?

And here’s the biggest paradox of it all: just as meaning and responsibility are choices arrived at from individual lives, they are about sharing. Sharing with other human beings.

Isn’t it amazing that—no matter what may happen to us—we can be confident that there are people who will take care of us? This is confidence in the human spirit. It is a religion (if you will) not of victimhood and suffering but of creativity and compassion.

Buddhist wisdom says there are three ways we naturally approach anything—desire, aversion, or indifference. For the sake of convenience, I call them, “yum!” “eeeeewwww” and “zzzzzz.”

I see a slice of cheese cake. “Yum!” I love cheese cake. So, I desire the slice of cheese cake. I grab it. Five hundred calories down my gullet. I see a squirrel that’s been hit by a car. Eeeeeewwww! Aversion. I look away. Then there’s indifference: trees along the route to work, for example. Those tchotchkes around the house that you haven’t dusted in months. Indifference. You just don’t see them. “Zzzzzz.”

I swallow the cheese cake before I even have time to enjoy it. I’m too caught up in my aversion at the sight of the wounded squirrel to help. I don’t bother looking up to see the gift that simple things like sycamore trees or a souvenir from long ago can bring.

Desire. Aversion. Indifference. These are the reactions we naturally have when our brains are on autopilot. And Buddhists say these lead to our suffering. We go through our thoughtless lives wanting, rejecting, and ignoring. And it’s always about me, me, and me.

How can we get out of that cycle?

Buddhism teaches that we have to find a place of equanimity—calmness; composure; evenness of temper.

But how can I keep evenness of temper when there’s cheese cake around? How can I stay composed when I experience disgusting or frightening things? How can I be composed when I’m staring absently out the window and don’t even see what’s in front of my nose?

Equanimity is about being mindful—aware—no matter how tempting, disgusting, or boring something is. Equanimity is about living in the here and now fully. Fully in touch with what surrounds us, without saying “yum!” “eeeeewwww” or “zzzzzz.”

Equanimity is clearly a way of bringing our aspirations into our actions, of bringing what we wish we did and what we do into closer relationship.

Easier said than done! But that’s how it is with religious thinking: it is always about either paddling upstream—against the currents of human nature—or it’s about how human nature is OK after all, at least in certain circumstances.Things like war, murder, torture, xenophobia, oppression. That sort of thing.

Sigmund Freud, no fan of religion, argued that culture does much the same thing as religion. It functions to mitigate the fearsomeness of nature; to reconcile us to the randomness and cruelty of fate; and to explain why culture itself makes so many problems for us.

It seems to me that both culture and religion (perhaps because the separation of church and state is a modern invention) are pretty good at creating duty, because both contain carrots and sticks. They create duty but not necessarily (or commonly) responsibility, which is a personal choice unaffected by carrots or sticks. Antoine de Saint-Exupery put it this way: “civilization rests upon what it exacts from its people, not from what it furnishes them.” The same can be said of most of religion.

Responsibility is a personal choice. A choice arrived at (or not) by each of us. How we get there depends upon the lives and circumstances we experience. Responsibility is a personal ideal. We live up to it.

Which brings me back to equanimity. It, too, is an ideal—we’re always going to default to “yum!” or “eeeeewwww” or “zzzzzz.”

Equanimity. The Buddhists think it’s a good way to act. It’s what made the Stoics stoic.

Source: Neoclassical_Velocity.JPG: Unitfreak

Equanimity. It’s a choice.

Here is the beautiful truth—saints and sinners are the same from the start.

Hsu Yun, Chinese Chan Buddhist (freely adapted by me)

As a young writer, I read everything I could find on the subject of writing. One of the books that impressed me at the time was written by novelist John Gardner called Moral Fiction. If my memory serves me, it is in that book that Gardner argues that every writer has a wound which drives his or her writing. By “wound” Gardner meant a psychological trauma so devastating that the writer revisits and seeks to re-write this trauma constantly in her or his work. (This theory predates the concept of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD.)

It’s not surprising that Gardner should have developed such a theory, since he had suffered a severe trauma in his own life. John Gardner grew up on a farm and, as is often the case, he drove tractors when he was quite young. One day Gardner was driving a tractor with his brother riding on the back. His brother fell off and was killed by the implement the tractor was pulling.

For the rest of his life, Gardner replayed and replayed in his mind the image of his brother falling. He blamed himself for his brother’s death. He never stopped asking himself, “What could I have done?”

Gardner himself eventually died in a motorcycle accident.

As I made my own attempts at writing, I discovered that the old cliche “truth is stranger than fiction” is partially true because writers can’t help attempting to make sense of the random happenings of the world. The human mind can’t help trying. Creative writing is, if nothing else, an assertion of the self in the face of what often appears to be a completely random reality. It’s the human need to create meaning that makes fiction less strange than truth.

But it is not true that only writers have wounds. Sure, some people become writers because of the need to process trauma. But the fact is, as the Buddha observed long ago, life itself is loss. We suffer because nothing is permanent except change.

Think for a moment about something you are hanging onto. Something that you just can’t let go. Something that makes you cringe when you think of it. Something that you replay, like an old movie in your head.

Now. Allow me to ask a very simple question: what do you gain by hanging on to what you are hanging on to?

Pain makes us individualists. As Shakespeare put it,

I will be flesh and blood,

For there was never yet philosopher

That could endure the toothache patiently,

However they have writ the style of gods

And made a push at chance and sufferance.

I think that Shakespeare is driving at the insight psychologist Carl Jung had when he coined the phrase “wounded healer.” It isn’t that therapists or ministers or anybody else have the answers to life’s wounds. It is, rather, that dwelling on those wounds drives many of us to be therapists or ministers or philosophers.

And the insight we find, when and if we find it, is that pain makes us individualists, but the cure for pain is reaching out. However we write the style of our gods, we must accept our flesh and blood and dependency on others before healing begins. This is perhaps not an entirely reassuring insight. We would rather see our healers as experts. But that attitude, too, is a fall into individualism. The answer is in reaching out.

The Chinese Chan Buddhist Hsu Yun said it simply:

 Here is the beautiful truth—

saints and sinners are the same

from the start.

This coming Easter morning, many people will rise and look east. Some will go to a Christian church for their only visit this year. Many will be reminded by priests and preachers that this one day is not enough. Those strangers to churches will be telling the oldest of religious truths: it is the people, not the priests, who make the gods.

“Easter” we call the day, namesake of a deity of the Northlands, Eostre, goddess of the dawn. English speakers still call the direction she arises from “east.” She is the goddess of new beginnings and of fertility, her day celebrated as the earth comes back to life after a long winter.

The holiday (holy day) called Easter is a movable feast, tied to both the cycles of the sun and of the moon—Easter occurs on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the equinox.

Religious holidays are celebrations of recurrence. Children in the Northlands have been searching the wet, awakening grass for eggs on Easter morning for thousands of years. The celebration has spread to other lands; to other religions. To the far corners of the planet.

Nineteenth Century German philologist Jacob Grimm reported that in some remote German villages of his time people still celebrated Eostre with sword dances, bonfires, and the baking of “heathenish pastries.”

It’s difficult this time of year—at least in the top half of the Northern Hemisphere—not to think of new beginnings. Difficult not to dance just a little bit. The iron grip of the deathly ice is finally broken and life is emerging from the long-dead earth again.

This is one of only two days the so-called “C and E” (Christmas and Easter) Christians—also known as Chreasters—fill churches. There are something on the order of eighty-five million Chreasters in the United States.

Statistics indicate that less than one-quarter of US Christians attend church even once a month. But Easter brings ‘em out—even more than Christmas or Mother’s Day(!). Why? Might it be because Easter is such a blend of religious traditions?

Reflect on the potpourri of religions and cultures that make up the concept of Easter as it is celebrated in the United States today. We have a fertility goddess from Northern Europe who survived the invasion of a Southern European tradition, Christianity, based on a Middle Eastern tradition, Judaism, itself an amalgam of religious thinking from the earliest agricultural civilizations of Mesopotamia with a pinch of Zoroastrianism from a certain Babylonian captivity thrown in.

All those ideas added up to create a lunar holiday celebrating a solar god in a myth echoing human sacrifice that originated in Egyptian mythology concerning the god Osiris, a metaphor for the planting and growth of vegetation in the Nile delta.

All that adds up to Easter brunches. And chocolate.

Why Easter? Why is Easter Christianity’s greatest hit?

“Syncretism” is one of those ten dollar words that permeates theology. The word describes the human propensity for combining religious ideas from various traditions.

The poet Wallace Stevens—an atheist by the by—made a very good point when he said, “The people, not the priests, made the gods.” Yes. The people, not the priests, meld ideas to create their religions.

Reflect on one of the greatest failures of human history. In 1231 the Roman Catholic Church opened its Office of Inquisition, nowadays known as the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith. Yes, it’s still in existence. Yet, after nearly 800 years of terror and cajoling, there are more heresies now than ever.

Wallace Stevens continues to be correct: the people, not the priests, make the gods. And we the people continue to vote with our feet. And the more information that flows on our nets and our webs, the more people are going to . . .  well, what are we people going to do?

Some will become Cheasters. Some double-belongers. Some nones.

Return to the case of the goddess Eostre. The story goes that Pope Gregory the Great was walking one day in a slave market in Rome. This was in the 600’s CE. Pope Gregory saw a couple of blonde slaves and asked his handlers where blondes came from. The handlers said they were Angles, which at the time meant either the English or Northern Germans. The pope was so taken with these blondes that he decided to devote his life to converting the Northlands to Christianity.

In 601 CE Pope Gregory instructed the missionaries he was sending to England with these words:

. . . the temples of the idols in those nations ought not to be destroyed; but let the idols that are in them be destroyed; let holy water be made and sprinkled in the said temples, let altars be erected, and relics placed.

For if those temples are well built, it is requisite that they be converted from the worship of devils to the service of the true God; that the nation, seeing that their temples are not destroyed . . . may the more familiarly resort to the places to which they are accustomed.

Syncretism. Gregory’s order was an act of genius. It was a strategy that led to a Christendom that included the far North. But it also introduced a blue note; a note of mystery. Were those people out in the country—“paganus,” pagans, which means “villagers” or “rustics” in Latin—were those pagans, were those people of the heath, those people of the wastelands, those heath-ans—were those away from the centers of power, away from the army and the police of the king and pope and bishop—were they really Christian? Or were they going to their old temples for other reasons?

No one ever knew for sure. And we never will know. But is it a coincidence that the largest concentration of atheists on the planet today . . . happen to live in those Northlands that Pope Gregory Christianized?

Syncrenism. The people, not the priests, make the gods. In computer speak, it’s called Open Source: people with different agendas; different talents; different points of view, all have access to a program. And the result is a better program than those developed through controlled access. Maybe that’s why Easter is Christianity’s greatest hit.

The people, not the priests, make the gods. Religions are the oldest open source software.