Category Archives: bible

Quotations of scripture and commentary

Meaning and Meaninglessness in Spirituality

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Richard Rohr writes powerfully and eloquently about the need to live in the domain of “duality” and recognize the specific relevance of the notion in the realm of spirituality. We do “see through a glass darkly” as the Apostle Paul once noted because this world we live in, which we daily imbibe (usually without any conscious awareness) is made up of infinite complexity, teeming with paradox stemming from this “duality.” One simple example is merely a favorite notion of mine, “We are not what we know ourselves to be. We are much more than that.” But being mere mortals, clothed in flesh, we have had to carve for ourselves an identity fashioned from the ephemeral so that we can function in this beautiful world, a world which…ephemeral thought it might be…is God’s creation.

As we pursue this path which Rohr and others suggest, we must “wrestle with words and meanings” (T. S. Eliot) and thus we dive headfirst into this maelstrom of ambiguity, confusion, doubt, and fear. This is because, here in this land banished from conscious awareness by our “common-sense” day-to-day world, we discover “meaning” and learn that “meaning” inevitably taunts us with “meaninglessness.”

Let me explain why with a simple philosophical maneuver. Imagine a world in which everything was colored blue. In that world, “blue” would therefore not exist for “blue” has no meaning without its complement, “not-blue.” Asking someone to pay attention to “blue” would be like asking a fish to see water.

And the whole of language lies in a similar matrix. However, I must insist that I don’t spent a lot of time wondering about the meaning of most words that I use! If I did, I would soon be swallowed up by an abyss and cease to be functional! I thank the good Lord for this neurological gift as some are not so fortunate. But some words I do deign to explore…to name just a few…god, love, truth, and “right”… and most importantly, in my case, deign to explore the word “Lewis”, the origin of Literary “Lew”. With each of these terms, which I have deemed significant, their complement (including opposite) has to be considered in order for the words to have meaning.

Let me close with an excerpt from W. H. Auden about this treacherous journey. The “Star of Nativity” is speaking his Auden’s Christmas Oratorio:

All those who follow me are led
Onto that glassy mountain where are no
Footholds for logic, to that Bridge of Dread,
Where knowledge but increases vertigo;
Those who pursue me take a twisting lone
To find themselves immediately alone
With savage water or unfeeling stone,
In labyrinths where they must entertain
Confusion, cripples, tigers, thunder, pain.

Thoreau’s version of, “Ye Must be Born Again”

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The first time literature spoke to me was in college when I was introduced to Henry David Thoreau. Thoreau voted with his feet that “modern” life was not accommodating to his soul, and so he retreated to the woods and sought authenticity, declaring, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

The notion of “not having lived” as one comes to the end of his life stunned me and did so because I saw its relevance to my life at age 21. And, I did not fully understand then why, but it immediately brought to my mind the famous words of Jesus, “What will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul?” The “not having lived” of Thoreau and the “loss of soul” that Jesus spoke of were one and the same, but I could not really explain it at that point. The insight was intuitive.

Thoreau recognized that modern life was increasingly alienated, that it increasingly cut man off from nature and from himself, turning him into a cog in an industrial apparatus. Thorough intuitively knew what we have come to witness more overtly, that Western civilization was producing a culture of consumers, people whose modus operandi was “consuming”, or “getting stuff.” (And, if he were alive today, he would marvel at how prescient he had been.!) Jesus too recognized that mankind in his day were overly invested in the “stuff” of the day, though rampant consumerism had not blighted human consciousness yet. But he recognized that mankind was missing the point, that they were guilty of the sin of “misplaced concreteness” even then taking for real that which was only ephemeral. When Jesus taught, “Ye must be born again” he was telling us, “Hey, there is another dimension of life that you need to tap into. What you see is not all that there is. You are not all that you know yourself to be. You are more than that mere concept.”

 

The Essence of Religion, Part Deux!

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In “The Essence of Religion” posted several days ago, I shared a lovely poem by Hafiz about what religion is always about.  To sum it up, in the Words of Jesus, “Love your neighbor as yourself” though Hafiz broadened this to include the whole of God’s creation.  And he noted that just about any religious passion, or ritual, or belief system is quite okay…IF…it facilitates the love of God’s creation.  It is so easy to “love god” and do so with “sound and fury” (often signifying nothing) but it does not mean jack if the whole of your life demonstrates a disinterest, contempt, or hatred for any part of God’s creation.  Someone has said, “It is not so important what you say as what you do.”  “Saying” is important, yes, but not without behavior to back it up.   Again I share one of my favorite bits from Shakespeare, “With devotions visage and pious action they do sugar o’er the devil himself.”  And here again I share the Hafiz poem:

 

Becoming Human

by Hafiz

Once a man came to me and spoke for hours about
“His great visions of God” he felt he was having.

He asked me for confirmation, saying,
“Are these wondrous dreams true?”

I replied, “How many goats do you have?”

He looked surprised and said,
“I am speaking of sublime visions
And you ask
About goats!”

And I spoke again saying,
“Yes, brother – how many do you have?”

“Well, Hafiz, I have sixty-two.”

“And how many wives?”

Again he looked surprised, then said,
“Four.”

“How many rose bushes in your garden,
How many children,
Are your parents still alive,
Do you feed the birds in winter?”

And to all he answered.

Then I said,

“You asked me if I thought your visions were true,
I would say that they were if they make you become
More human,

More kind to every creature and plant
That you know.”

 

 

“Beastly Little Treasures” of the Heart

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“Your defects are the ways that glory gets manifested. Whoever sees clearly what’s diseased in himself begins to gallop on the way.” (Rumi)

It is not fun to acknowledge our limitations, the minor ones and certainly not the major ones. Jesus noted that it is easier to focus on the mote in someone else’s eye than pay attention to the beam in our own. But spiritual teachers throughout the centuries have taught us that staring our demons in the face, “naming them”, is the way to deliverance. But, it hurts like hell! And, if you approach spiritual literature carefully, you have to wonder if one dimension of hell is living in the anguish that lurks beneath the surface when we refuse to “name our demon.” Or to phrase it differently, hell is refusing to acknowledge the anguish of our inner torments. This deliberate ignorance of these torments does not make them go away and probably makes someone near and dear to us pay for them.

I think it was Ranier Rilke who said that the heart has its “beastly little treasures.” In one of his essays…or poems…he said that if one has the courage to confront this “beast” face to face, stare in down, he/she will discover that beneath it lies the Pearl of Great Price.

 

Paean to Modern Evangelical Faith

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I am an ex-evangelical but one who avoided “throwing the baby out with the bathwater.” I am very comfortable with my non-evangelical faith and could never go back. BUT, my heart still lies with evangelical emphases, most specifically an appreciation for the Bible. And I take great heart to have discovered in the past year or so a lot of evangelicals on the blog-o-sphere who have found that they can make adjustments to the modern world and not jeopardize the basics of their faith. God does not need any of his followers to bury their head in the sand, refuse to approach the scripture and faith with intelligence and critical thought, and rely with hackneyed bromides like, “God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.”

Here I share from one of these bloggers who this morning was high-lighted by Cnn.com, and you might have to “cut and paste” into your browser:

My Take: The danger of calling behavior ‘biblical’

Hermeneutical Integrity

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One of my new friends in the blog-o-sphere sent me some interesting and provocative thoughts re my discourse of nakedness in the book of Genesis. He is well versed in Hebrew etymology and shared some nuances of the Hebrew word “naked”, noting that its meaning varies slightly from place to place in Genesis 2 and 3. If you are interested, I suggest you check out his blog, “Of Dust and Kings,” on WordPress.com. He is a very thoughtful young Bible scholar and pastor.

This gentleman’s observations remind me of why I love words—they are such treasures. And it is no accident that the Judeo-Christian tradition values so greatly the word and that in the Christian tradition Jesus was the Word incarnate.

I read somewhere years ago that words are “repositories of meaning.” As we focus on key words…especially in literature, and even more so in sacred literature…and begin to explore their hidden treasures, they can speak volumes to us. But, I must say, this is always an intense hermeneutical endeavor. It involves being able, willing, and humble enough to understand the hermeneutical enterprise and in so doing realize that we have to avoid the pitfall of mining the literature to merely prop-up our preconceptions and biases.

“The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility. And humility is endless.” (T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets)

The Illness that we Are

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In the book of Genesis the subject of nakedness is introduced to us.  Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit and felt naked, exposed, and God fashioned for them a fig leaf garment and hid their nakedness.  The Bible said that this garment hid them from their sense of shame.

Art in recent centuries, and movies in recent times, often includes the image of the nude woman, caught unawares, covering her breasts with an arm and/or her privates with a hand.  Most men also have had dreams or fears of that horrible feeling of being caught nude in public, being exposed, being vulnerable.

I think this fig leaf represents the function of the ego in human culture.  It is a contrivance that hides us from our nakedness.  It is a persona that we can present to our community and to the world and not have to show to them the frail, frightened vulnerable creature that we are in the depths of our heart.  And this ego consciousness is very important as without it there would be no “world” as we know it.  For without it, we would be teeming multitudes of quivering flesh and could not function as a culture.  We would not be a world.

But this ego consciousness has become a monster that is run amok and threatens to destroy us.  Instead of acknowledging our frailty and recognizing the frailty of others, we have organized into armed camps the purpose of which is to barricade ourselves behind piles of “stuff”.  Or, to allude briefly to one dimension of the problem, in our country we have isolated into ideologically-armed political camps, each camp unwilling to recognize its own vulnerability.  We are guilty of the sin of misplaced concreteness, “We chase the shade, and let the real be.” (John Masefield)

But as individuals we cannot correct the ills of the world. The only “illness” we are responsible for is illness that we harbor. But we can discover that as we address that illness in our own heart, as we “wage the war we are”, we will be a bit of an antidote to the collective illness that threatens us.

Get over yourself!

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There is a great story in 2 King 5 which I’ve always been intrigued with.  Naaman the leper wanted to be healed so he went to the spiritual guru of the day, Elisha, and asked for healing.  He was told to go down to the river Jordan, deep seven times, and he would be healed.  Naaman was indignant, feeling that a man of his prominence should be received more formally and a more elegant healing ceremony should be offered.  He walked away in fury.  Sometime later, he became more humble, followed through with Naaman’s advice and was healed.

This story is so relevant to the human predicament.  A man with an ailment wanted relief but he wanted this relief on his own terms. Elisha intuitively knew that a critical dimension of Naaman’s problem was ego and he knew that an appropriate step for him to take was to humble himself in some way.  And, he also knew that this relief needed to entail action. Elisha knew that going down to Barnes and Nobles and buying the latest self-help title was not enough.  Naaman needed behavioral intervention.  So, he simply sent word to Naaman to go and dip into the river Jordan seven times.  (By the way, he didn’t even meet personally with Naaman to send this message, a further “indignation” to this man’s ego. He merely sent word through a messenger.)

This is relevant to a recent posting re getting un-stuck.  Sometimes a person who is hurting might have to humble himself as part of his treatment and this “humiliation” can be as simple as reaching out and seeking help. It is very painful for some to deign to make an appointment with a counselor.  I’ve known some who will schedule an appointment hundreds of miles away merely to keep anyone from happening to see him entering a counselor’s officer.  This “humiliation” can be daring to surrender and seek help with a 12-step group or going to one’s pastor or priest or rabbi and sharing openly about one’s haunts.  It can involve accepting a diagnostic label. It can involve opening up honestly with one’s mate for the first time in the marriage.  In my clinical work I have even proposed what I call “tree therapy” to some clients, instructing them to go into the forest and talk openly to a tree just to verbalize openly about what is going on in their heart.  (When I assigned “tree therapy”, I always advised them to then seek another human being to whom they could “unpack their heart with words.” (Shakespeare)

One last note about behavioral interventions.  An often used maneuver for therapists is to assign a client the simple task of going home and planting a garden or merely getting a houseplant.  This is because a key element in any neurosis or any psychological/spiritual problem is a narcissistic streak.  The pain is so intense that it becomes all consuming. It can help to simply find the energy to take care of plants and nurture them and love them.

Boundaries and spirituality

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Boundaries are such an essential part of life. That is what I enjoyed about Lewis Thomas’ Lives of a Cell as he illustrates how boundary setting is so essential even on the biological, i.e. cellular, dimension of life.

I think it was Rollo May who likened the absence of boundaries to a river without banks. For, a river without banks is not a river any longer it is just a muddy bog, not useful for much if anything. Yet, if we set our boundaries too rigidly then we have merely imprisoned ourselves and again will not be very useful. We will be encapsulated in an autistic shell.

Martin Heidegger in Basic Writings made a very interesting observation about boundaries and spirituality. He said, “A boundary is not that at which something stops but, as the Greeks recognized, a boundary is that from which something begins its essential unfolding.” A boundary is a container that is necessary for spiritual unfolding, a vessel in which Divine purpose can be revealed. And if we don’t have boundaries, and if we don’t wrestle with boundary issues, our spirituality is going to pose real problems for ourselves and for others. I’m made to think of the Apostle Paul’s admonishment that “we work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.” “Fear and trembling” is just the anxiety that we experience as we wrestle with these boundaries.

My work as a therapist was merely about boundaries. My job was to help clients discover various boundary problems and to address these problems. And I might add that my work also involved a daily battle with boundary-setting myself.

One of my favorite verses from the Bible is from the Proverbs, “He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city without walls and broken down.” And we know what happened back then if the walls of a city was broken down back then—the enemy got in.

Charles Williams on “bibliolatry”

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One of the basic problems with biblical literalism is that its adherents often take themselves too seriously, so seriously that if you examine them closely it often appears to be all about them.  Sometimes they use their faith to bludgeon others into submission, into believing “right.”  As Goethe noted, “They call is Reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

People with this theological/spiritual stance transfer their activities from themselves as a center to their belief as a center.  They use their anger on behalf of their religion, and their morals, and their greed, and their fear, and their pride.  It operates on behalf of its notion of God as it originally operated on behalf of itself.  It aims honestly at better behavior, but it does not usually aim at change.  (paraphrased from Charles Williams, He Came Down from Heaven)

And this leaves their faith lumped with what the Apostle Paul called “the works of the flesh.”