Category Archives: Christianity

Bigotry, Racism, & Extremism

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“True Believers” are always scary because they are idealogues, believing in ideas over reality. Sure, all humans have ideas and respect them as they allow us to communicate and to get things done in a group. But idealogues do not see ideas as merely a means to an end; they worship their ideas, seeing them as an end in themselves. Now they do have an hierarchy of values on this matter, having designated some ideas as “really important” and then assigned designations to them such as “god” or “truth” or “right” or as I like to sum it up, “truth, justice, and the American way.” These really big ideas are so important they will fight for them and in extremes they will kill for them and will often proudly announce they are willing to die for them.

Now I too believe in “god” and “truth” and “right” and value the American way of life. But since I’m not an ideologue…being in recovery from that malady…I see those words as being sounds we utter to refer to phenomena that lie beyond the grasp of words. “God”, for example, is a label we use to refer to that which is the Ungraspable, that dimension of life which we cannot wrap our head around but some of us feel very strongly is present…or Present…in this Mystery that we are encompassed by.

But my thought about God, as well as the rest of these thoughts and the whole of this blog posting, will be described as “straight from the pits of hell” by all idealogues as they cannot, or will not, handle ambiguity. They are horrified with the notion that life is dynamic, that there is a flow or fluidity to life as the notion threatens their illusion that they are in total control of their world. To understand this approach to life, to understand with the mind and with the heart, would require faith and there is no room in their heart for faith. Of course, they proudly announce that they have faith and they know that they that they do have faith because they know that they do. Our world has an object lesson in this blight on human consciousness with the Taliban, and now with Isis, and also the extreme right-wing of the American Republican party.

Yesterday Salon.com offered extensive excerpts from a recent book that addresses this issue with its analysis of racism and bigotry. The book is, “The Bigot: Why Prejudice Persists“ by Stephen Eric Bronner.   The Salon.com excerpt is entitled, “This is your brain on racism: Inside the mind of modern bigotry” and here is the link:

http://www.salon.com/2014/07/27/this_is_your_brain_on_racism_inside_the_mind_of_modern_bigotry/

Here are some highlights in the Salon.com excerpt that I want to share:

The bigot has always felt queasy about transforming the visible, the ineffable into the discursive, and the unknown into the known. Observation and evidence, hypothesis and inference, confirmation and validation are thus selectively employed by him to justify what Cornel West has termed “the discursive exclusion” of those who are different and what they have to offer.

(The bigot) is always primarily concerned with proving what he thinks he already knows. He insists that the answers to the problems of life have been given and he resents everything that challenges inherited wisdom, parochial prejudices, and what he considers the natural order of things.

Other than his prejudices, he has no core beliefs. The bigot likes it when his interests are being served, when people of color are exploited, but he dislikes it when he feels disadvantaged.

Competition is good when it works for him. When it doesn’t, the bigot will insist that his competitors are cheating—and that they cheat because it is a trait of their ethnicity, nationality, or race.”

To summarize, the bigot is guilty of what Sartre called “bad faith.” “Bad faith” is a bogus faith in that it goes under the name “faith” but if subjected to scrutiny, is only egotism run amok, an ersatz spirituality which the Apostle Paul would have described as a, “work of the flesh.” But the bigot will not allow any questioning of his motives and in a sense has no capacity to do so for his heart has long sense been darkened by Darkness so that he sees only darkness and, of course, calls it Light. And, to employ the same circular reason offered earlier, it is then “Light” because he knows that it is “Light” whereas if he would allow that “Spirit of God” that he often purports to worship to visit his heart, he would see that he only at best sees faint glimmers of Light and can at best see “only through a glass darkly.” That experience would then allow him to tolerate more the possibility that people different than him have intrinsic dignity and deserve respect, that all of us have only a finite perspective.

 

To quote Goethe once again, “They call it reason, using Light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

The Peace of Wild Things

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A blog-o-sphere friend of mine shared a devotional she has recently written after a return from another country, a trip which aroused in her lots of fear and anxiety. And she honored me with use of a couple of thoughts I have shared here recently.

I too have traveled abroad some and always experience the same hyper-vigilance that she described, terrified on some level with the knowledge that I am a “stranger in a strange land.” I always enjoy the experience of being outside of my native land, thrilled with the experience of “difference”, delighted to note how these beautiful people have carved out for themselves a life so different than my own and how it works just as well as does life in my culture. But, nevertheless, there is the under current of fear and anxiety as I’m not in the comfort of my “hearth and home” and don’t have the security provided by my “stuff”, including the commonplaces of day to day life certainly including my native tongue.

Regarding her anxiety, my friend referenced the beautiful observation of Jesus about the birds of the air and the flowers of the field, “how they toil not, neither do they spin” yet are marvelously taken care of. This brought to my mind a beautiful poem by Wendell Berry that often comforts me, particularly his observation that he finds comfort in the midst of despair with “the peace of wild things” who “do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.”

I have used this “taxation” idea so many times in recent years, often in reference to my two beloved dachshunds, Ludwig and Elsa, who always appear so much at comfort inside their own skin, not having any need to “tax their lives with forethought of grief.” They are simply present…in the moment…following the advice of Ram Dass to “be here now.” (I bought for them the doggie translation of Mr. Dass’s book though I felt ripped off as every word was translated as “arf.”)

Now I realize that the deck is stacked in Ludwig and Elsa’s favor in that they don’t have this neo-cortical machine that is always whirring, plotting and scheming to accomplish the desires of an ego. The good Lord has blessed/cursed us with this contrivance though I feel strongly it can be a blessing if we follow the advice of Jesus and remember these beautiful birds and flowers that are present as a prompt to adjust our focus when the stresses of life buffet us.  As always, we must remember, “This too shall pass.”

THE PEACE OF WILD THINGS

BY WENDELL BERRY

When despair for the world grows in me

and I wake in the night at the least sound

in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,

I go and lie down where the wood drake

rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.

I come into the peace of wild things

who do not tax their lives with forethought

of grief. I come into the presence of still water.

And I feel above me the day-blind stars

waiting with their light. For a time

I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

 

Jesus Taking on the Religious Establishment

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Yesterday, I paraphrased the teachings of Jesus as simply, “Get rid of your stuff!” Today, I’d like to elaborate on that theme a bit, hypothesizing about his view on the human race.

You see, what happened was that Jesus came down here and pretty soon found this a bewildering place. Often in his youth he would exclaim to his parents, “What the hell! This can’t really be happening! Why don’t these people get their heads out?” Mary and Joseph would often roll their eyes as they watched him grow up and periodically express his frustration with the human race. Much later when Jesus’ frustration became more intense they began to worry and once Mary even anticipated the mother of Hamlet and said, “Oh what a noble mind is here o’er thrown.”

It took a few more years of maturity but it dawned on Jesus that the problem was that people invested in the material world to the exclusion of the spiritual world. Even worse he realized that this was also true for the religious establishment of his culture, that the Jewish religious tradition was nothing but pomp and circumstance, summarizing one visit to Sunday School when he was 13 with the words, “Yada, yada, yada.” (You see, Jerry Seinfield was not the originator of this expression.”)

So decades later Jesus saw the potentates of the religious establishment together in the village plaza and overheard their conversation enough that he understood them to be sincerely discussing ways in which they could improve attendance each Sunday at the synagogue and also trying to be subtle in their comparison of the size of each others phylacteries. (Yes, Jesus did note that this probably had Freudian overtones.)

So Jesus was in a pissy mood that morning and decided just to saunter up to this august group in which he had no standing in the first place. “Hey guys,” he said, “Just a thought here. I see you guys are having a good time with this religious thing you got going on here. You really get a charge out of this ‘holy’ thing and you succeed in teaching your congregations to drink the same kool-aid. But may I suggest that you simply get over your self which will require getting rid of your stuff, certainly including this religious falderal which amounts only to the dissonant racket of ‘sounding brass and tinkling cymbals.’ If you don’t catch my drift, I’m saying your worship services and spiritual practice have become simply a lot of noise which provides you and yours a whole lot of satisfaction but does nothing for the world outside of yourself. Now forgive me, but I can’t help but liken this particular little tete-a-tete you are having this morning as reflective of the circle-jerk that I see at most of your Sunday morning dogma-fests.” He paused a moment and listened to the deafening silence and noted the apoplectic visages. “Anyway, just a thought here. Excuse me. Carry on. Talk amongst yourselves as you were doing. Oh, and have a nice day,” and he walked away.

So Jesus resumed sipping privately on his cup of latte as he watched these religious elders out of the corner of his eye. He saw them intensely discussing something and he knew it was him, he knew that he had put a bee in their bonnet; but he didn’t care. Occasionally he would catch a furtive glare from one of them as they continued to angrily discuss what he had said and they were gesticulating wildly. He occasionally heard words like “bastard” and “son of a bitch” and something about “probably was born in Kenya”, a reference which Jesus, even with his omniscience, did not understand.

After a few minutes, he saw them coming his way and he thought with amusement, “Uh oh!”

They approached him and the leader of the group announced, “Jesus, we don’t appreciate what you had to say and no one had asked you say anything in the first place. We are left with only two choices—a)ignore you and let you continue in your lunacy or b)to vote you off the island.”

Jesus interjected, with a wry smile, “And let me guess which one you have opted for!”

 

 

 

Jesus Said, “Let Go of Your Stuff!”

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My “literary license” has here been employed but I think that “let go of your stuff” is a good paraphrasing of the teachings of Jesus.  For example, this was conveyed in his observation that it would be easier for a rich man to enter the eye of a needle than to enter the kingdom of heaven.  And in another place, he responded to a query re what one must do to have eternal life with the response, “Sell all that you have and give it to the poor.”  Now, I don’t think these words were to be taken literally but were merely his ways of pointing out how deeply attached humans are to their possessions, their “stuff.”  And his teaching that we find our self only in losing our self is another example of the same them.  This detachment from the material world was, and is, a motif in Eastern spiritual teachings as eastern thought reveals less of an investment in the object world.

 

In my culture, interpreting the teachings of Jesus as “Let go of your stuff” would real ring dissonant with most people.  For, we are very attached to our “stuff” and attached to such a degree that we can’t understand the notion.  Asking anyone to see this attachment is like asking a fish to see water.  And this attachment issue also pertains to spirituality for in the West we tend to approach faith as just another item in the category of “stuff” and so we glom onto it and proceed to exploit the hell out of it just as if it were like any of the rest of the “stuff” that we are so attached to.  And, in most cases it is!  And this is actually just a form of addiction and even if the object of our addiction….the substance is something purportedly noble…it is still an “addictive substance” in our case and thus is used to avoid reality.  And this is the reason that so much of modern day religion appears to be absurd to anyone with a capacity for critical thought as they can readily see that it has nothing to do with anything other than practitioner himself.  This is what Karl Marx had in mind when he described religion as “the opiate of the masses.”

 

Shakespeare understood this sin of misplaced concreteness so well, that sin of taking for real that which is only ephemeral.  He saw that our investment in “stuff” reflected a disregard for our subjective experience…our heart…in preference for an inordinate investment in the object world.  His conclusion was “within be rich, without be fed no more.”

Here is the entire Shakespearean Sonnet:

 

Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,

Thrall to these rebel powers that thee array?
Why dost thou pine within, and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?
Why so large cost, having so short a lease,
Dost thou upon thy fading mansion spend?
Shall worms, inheritors of this excess,
Eat up thy charge? is this thy body’s end?
Then soul, live thou upon thy servant’s loss,
And let that pine to aggravate thy store;
Buy terms divine in selling hours of dross;
Within be fed, without be rich no more:
So shalt thou feed on Death, that feeds on men,
And, Death once dead, there’s no more dying then.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tolle’s “Pain Body” and the Unconscious

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The blog-o-sphere teaches me so much! Just several days ago I came across this quote from Eckhart Tolle which just grabbed me and shook me, even though I’ve read it before and understood the notion of the “pain body” already:

Whenever you are in a negative state, there is something in you that wants the negativity, that perceives it as pleasurable, or that believes it will get you what you want. Otherwise, who would want to hang on to negativity, make themselves, and others miserable, and create disease in the body? So, whenever there is negativity in you, if you can be aware at that moment that there is something in you that takes pleasure in it or believes it has a useful purpose, you are becoming aware of the ego directly. The moment this happens, your identity has shifted from ego to awareness. This means the ego is shrinking and awareness is growing.

Relevant to this subject, I am now part of a serious reading group of the work of Karl Jung who approached a relevant issue nearly a century earlier with his focus on the unconscious. In our present reading, (“The Roots of the Psyche”) Jung shared that he had discussed the unconscious with one philosopher of his day who candidly admitted that he could not acknowledge the presence of the unconscious; for should he do so would be opening up Pandora’s box—it would mean acknowledgement of subterranean forces in his heart which were beyond his control. Likewise, when we are in the grip of this “pain body”, we resist acknowledging its power over us for to do so would mean that we are powerless in some sense in the depths of our heart and make really bad choices that we cannot help. It is like we deliberately bury our head in the sand, choosing to live in our anguish rather than break free and tippy-toe into what one poet described as our “ever lasting risk.” As is so often the case, Shakespeare nailed it centuries ago when Hamlet noted that we prefer to “cling to these ills we have, than fly to others that we know not of.”

Well, how do we break free of this pain body? How do we escape the grip of the unconscious? Well, technically we don’t but with simple awareness we can lessen its tenacious grip on our heart. If we can dare to “name the demon”…so to speak…the monster that is wreaking havoc on our life will have a battle on its hand. Tolle teaches that simple awareness of this “pain body”, and acknowledgement of its influence, is the beginning of gaining freedom.

And since I began this process of honesty, I have found freedom from some of these monsters but admittedly there are more to face. And I think that is probably part of what the Apostle Paul had in mind with his admonishment for us to “work out our salvation with fear and trembling” (i.e. emotional duress) for he saw “salvation” as a process just as people like Eckhart Tolle today present spirituality.

Now, I can’t fail to kick my own faith in the shins on this issue, my faith being Christianity. So often people use religion as a denial system, approaching it only with their head and using doctrinal creeds and dogma to insulate themselves from life, from spiritual, mental, emotional, and physical life. Instead of exploring Holy Writ and spiritual tradition to find its meaning in the warp-and-woof of their life, they have been taught to use it as a repetition compulsion which serves as a mechanism to keep their “pain body” at bay. And, of course, their “pain body” is then seen outside of themselves in other people who need their intervention, at times in the past even at the point of the sword. Now, how do I know this is true? Well, I don’t. But I do know that it has been true for me nearly all of my life AND I suspect that it does have relevance to many other Christians. There are many other writers and thinkers, Christian and otherwise, who are honing in on this issue right now, one of note being Richard Rohr.

Life is painful. But it is more painful when we don’t accept the pain when it comes, discovering that it can wash over us and not lodge in our cognitive machinery…and behavior patterns… and keep us prisoners. Scott Peck said decades ago in his very astute book, “The Road Less Traveled,” that “Neurosis is a substitute for legitimate suffering.” Neurosis…and worse…can be viewed as maladaptive patterns of thought, emotion, and behavior that we have adopted in response to painful moments in our life, overt pain and even perceived pain. But the only way to get beyond the pain is to go into it, to own it, to “embrace it” as Stephen Levine teaches and discover that its grip will begin to lesson. We have to “feel” our way out of the morass. “Thinking” alone will never suffice.

Poetry is Dangerous!!!!

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Yes, it will wreak havoc on your life; so, if poetry beckons, just turn around and go the other way or at least give it a wide passage for if you let it come to close it will insinuate its way into your heart and then, katy-bar-the-door, your life is over! Your are a dead man….or, at least, the man (or woman) you think you are is going to die.

Let me explain. I was in my early thirties and had quit teaching school and was beginning Dante’s venture into a “dark forest.” And then a young man who purported to be a friend had the audacity to give me a copy of Shakespeare’s sonnets and the Collected Poetry of W.H. Auden and I was almost immediately on the road to perdition. To make it worse, about the same time I discovered T. S. Eliot and his “Four Quartets” where I learned that words were ephemeral, that words “break, slip, slide, decay with imprecision, will not stay in place….shrieking voices always assail them.” you deign to venture into words to the extent that suddenly you awaken and discover that you are knee-deep in…ahem…the Word!

And since that point in my life, poetry has continued to worm its way into the depths of my heart, relentlessly delving into the secret corridors of my inner most being where I have discovered that, just as the Apostle Paul said, it is “quick and powerful, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.” Wow! Wow, wow, wow! That poor friend had no idea what he was doing to “literallew”…but, on the other hand, perhaps he did. He was a very astute soul.

But, how can “poetry” do this? Well, “poetry” as such does nothing. But poetry is a process, a dynamic process which is an expression of life, and if it happens to present itself to a heart that is ready to discover “penetrable stuff,” magic can unfold.

Why was I so ready? Well, the first clue was my fury at literature in high school and those dear schoolmarm teachers who would deign to force me to answer the question, “What does that mean to you?” I reacted with mute anger, dutifully trotting out whatever I thought they wanted, not daring to tell them what was really on my heart, “It means just what it says!!!!” Certainly, I did “protest too much”; and, yes, Shakespeare was my worst nightmare at that time as he just would not speak plain English, and certainly not Arkansas redneck, “po white trash” English.”

But now I swim in poetry…though I cannot write even an inch of it! As my wife told me not long after I met her and was obsessively quoting poetry (ncluding Auden’s note re Yeats, “Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry), “Mad Arkansas hurt you into other people’s poetry.” That was a veritable “word fitly spoken.”

Poetry is the Spirit of God at work, tearing words apart and allowing their hidden meaning to flow. Poetry is the word, broken….crucified, if you please…which allows its innermost depths to burgeon forth. This reminds me of a note by Gabriel Marcel, that words have meaning, or value, when they “burgeon forth into a region beyond themselves.” The literalist will not permit this as the “words” they use are concrete and will not be permitted to “break” and that is because the “ego” that they are will not be allowed to “break”…or, as Jesus taught, “die.”

 

Opening up the “Closed Canon”

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One of the bedrocks of the conservative faith of my youth was the “closed canon.” This meant that the Bible was the “final” word of God and must be taken completely and used as a rule book. This gave rise to a popular bromide, “God said it, believe it, that settles it.”  This mind set left no room for heart felt, intuitive interpretation of the scripture as the Bible was not seen as literature but as “fact.” This approach to “the Word” was static, allowing no dynamic flow of spirit to take place and preventing the Pauline “Word” which is “quick, and powerful, and sharper than any twoedged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of the joints and marrow, and is a discerner of the thoughts and intents of the heart.

This belief presents a Word which is only a word, a mere “object” and not a dynamic process. Furthermore, it reflects the belief in a static, objectified god who is not really a “God” but a mere “thing” among other “things.” This belief also reflects the materialistic drift of our culture for the past few hundred years in which mankind sees himself as separate and distinct from the world, not realizing that in this uncritical approach to his faith he is seeing and experiencing himself as separate and distinct from God. “God” is not a “thing”. I am not a “thing.” I am a process and even here, at this moment, I am merely discoursing about another “process” which I prefer to describe as a “Process.” As W. H. Auden noted, individually and collectively, we are but a “process in a process in a field that never closes.”

But, alas and alack, I suddenly find myself up to my halo in still another blasphemy—relativism! When you begin to see the Word of God as a dynamic process that can never be “closed”, you have opened Pandora’s box and various dimensions of “uncertainty” make their escape. The doubt, anxiety, and vulnerability that begins to seep into the heart explains why the certainty was so rigid. It kept the “demons” at bay. But, until these “demons” are released, they live in the hidden recesses of our heart and inevitably lead to projections onto the outside world. Our beliefs reveal as much about our own heart as anything else. When you see a “true believer”, you are face to face with a scared little child who is terrorized by the fragility of his little life. He has glommed onto dogma and can never let it go without experiencing some of that terror which predicates his existence in the world.

The Peril of “Disembodied” Faith

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True godliness don’t turn men out of the world but enables them to live better in it and excites their endeavours to mend it… Christians should keep the helm and guide the vessel to its port; not meanly steal out at the stern of the world and leave those that are in it without a pilot to be driven by the fury of evil times upon the rock or sand of ruin.

I just read this on FB and was stunned to see that its author was William Penn. But then, why was I stunned? The Quakers with their “Silence” really had, and have today, a valuable perspective on faith in general and specifically the Christian faith. The version of faith I imbibed as a child was that Christians were “separate” from the world and in fact were commanded to “Come out from among them and be ye separate” and to become a “peculiar people.” Now, I might add that on that latter note, my little sectarian faith succeeded far more than they intended on becoming “peculiar” and, even more so, I carried that matter even further!

I was presented with a “dis-embodied Word”, one in which transcendence was emphasized to the exclusion of immanence. And those who worship a “disembodied” word are always scary and potentially dangerous, i.e. the Taliban. They are ideologues, worshipping the idea instead of “that” to which the idea has reference to. (I place that in quotes because the Ineffable is not a “that”, it is a “No-Thing.” it is a Presence.) And never waste your time with a die-hard ideologue. Their mind is made up. As Emily Dickinson noted, their “mind is too near itself to see itself distinctly” and thus there is no room for meta-cognition.

And on this vein of thought I always recall the insight of William Butler Yeats, “Oh God, guard me from those thoughts men think in the mind alone. They who sing a lasting song must think in the marrow bone.”