Category Archives: fundamentalism

Get Over Yourself!

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Jesus spent thirty years roaming around the little corner of the globe he happened upon, noting the complete insanity of its inhabitants, and then spent three years admonishing them…and I summarize (and use my “literary” license)…to “get over yourself!” And then he provided specifics about how to accomplish this self-abnegation, which are eloquently described in the New Testament and then later summarized by W. H. Auden (or was it Leonard Cohen?), “Climb the rugged cross of the moment and let your illusions die.” Yes, dying to self ultimately means being disillusioned and seeing yourself as you really are, just a “poor bare forked creature” (King Lear) “pelted” by the same “pitiless storm” that has pelted us for eons.

In that moment of humility, i.e. humiliation, one can then choose to affirm with belief/action what his/her ultimate value is and then be guided toward that end. But one is then shorn of his/her grandiosity and realizes that he/she is a mere human, a human be-ing, and has that station by virtue of the simple but illimitable and marvelous grace of God. For, “by him all things cohere”; yes, even the simple be-ing of my day to day life exists and “coheres” by the grace of God. Therefore, I don’t have anything to prove, I don’t have to persuade you to subscribe to my creed, I merely have to be. And as I “be”, the Grace of God will flow through me; and the universe…and His will…will unfold. But if I stubbornly adhere to my own agenda, to my own ego-driven demands….”enlightened” and “Christian” as I might assume them to be…then the “flow” cannot take place, at least through me.

Yes, the meaning of the Cross is to “get over yourself.” It is easier to invest in the gore of the Cross and to self-flagellate with an emotional anguish. It is much more difficult to “get over yourself”, to die to the ego and do so daily as Paul admonished, and then engage more fully and maturely in the human enterprise.

Sin, Words, and Grace

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“Speak words that give shape to our anguish.”  This poet recognized the power of the spoken word to provide a container to human experience, to impose a limit to what would be otherwise unbearable.  Another poet put it like this, “To name the abyss is to avoid it.” There is a profound difference in the raw, unmediated, emotional, pre-symbolic (pre-verbal) experience of the abyss and the concept of “the abyss.”

Let me share an anecdote from clinical work many years ago.  I had young male for a client who was very addictive and functioned very poorly at times.  He had no history of religion and church.  He stumbled upon the phenomena of “religion and church” and found himself attending a formal, non-evangelical church fairly regularly.  He told me several times of how comforting the liturgy was to him, particularly that portion where he acknowledged, by the spoken word, that he was a sinner.  As we explored this experience of his, he recognized that by conceptualizing that he was a “sinner” he was able to articulate a deep-seated feeling of “badness” and “darkness” and “shame.”  He was able to apply a limit or boundary to the experience.

There are some whose life is sin articulate.  Their life is raw, unmediated, unmitigated “hell on earth.”  And I’m not talking about “sin” as it is usually taught.  I’m talking about sin as the experience of being separated from one’s Source and separated in a radical fashion. It takes a quantum leap for the individual so confined to say, “I am a sinner” and in so doing escape that “hell on earth”,  that world which Paul Tillich described as “an empty world of self-relatedness.”

This is actually a conversion experience and is a quantum leap from one sphere of existence into another.  It involves the experience of discontinuity, what St. Augustine described at his moment of conversion as “that moment when I became other than I was.”  This is not simple compliance with a syllogism

Let me close with the marvelous sonnet of John Donne:

BATTER my heart, three person’d God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o’erthrow mee,’and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to’another due, 5
Labour to’admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely’I love you,’and would be loved faine,
But am betroth’d unto your enemie: 10
Divorce mee,’untie, or breake that knot againe;
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

No need to convert you!

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I have realized that my blogging career has paralleled a newly-found, complete disinclination to convert anybody to anything. Here, I do hold forth and usually about things which I take very seriously and believe in very strongly. But, these beliefs are only my perspective and are not therefore eternal truth that you must subscribe to. Now I do believe they are relevant to “eternal truth” but are not eternal truth itself and the degree that they are relevant is probably less than I am wont to believe.
I believe that spiritual truth must be personal, that it must be woven into the warp and woof of our day to day life so that it is very casual and natural. If so, any “converting” that needs to take place will be in the very capable hands of God. He does not need me to argue for him, to reason for him, to intimidate, manipulate, or browbeat. My faith is not something I wear, like my Sunday best clothing, it is just an important element of who I am; it is my “highest value” and will be apparent to those who know me best.
My newly-found approach to faith emphasizes ignorance. I just don’t know a whole lot. Oh yes, I am well educated, well-read, and very verbal—I am very adept at throwing 35 cent words around for nickel ideas. But I don’t know a whole lot. I don’t have objective knowledge of anything, certainly not God and His wisdom. I only at best “see through a glass darkly” and I always come to realize that my class was more “darkly” than I had previously thought, But I see this limitation as being merely my human-ness and something I must live with. And it keeps me more humble than I would be otherwise; it keeps me from needing to “convert” you!
I would like to conclude with a lengthy and insightful quote from Henry Miller from his lurid novel, Sexus:

The great ones do not set up offices, charge fees, give lectures, or write books. Wisdom is silent, and the most effective propaganda for truth is the force of personal example. The great ones attract disciples, lesser figures whose mission it is to preach and to teach. These are the gospelers who, unequal to the highest task, spend their lives in converting others. The great ones are indifferent, in the profoundest sense. They don’t ask you to believe: they electrify you by their behavior. They are the awakeners. What you do with your life is only of concern to you, they seem to say. In short, their only purpose here on earth is to inspire. And what more can one ask of a human being than that?

To be sick, to be neurotic, if you like, it to ask for guarantees. The neurotic is the founder that lies on the bed of the river, securely settled in the mud, waiting to be speared. For him death is the only certainty, and the dread of that grim certainty immobilizes him in a living death far more horrible than the one he imagines but knows nothing about.

The way of life is towards fulfillment, however, wherever it may lead. To restore a human being to the current of life means not only to impart self-confidence but also an abiding faith in the processes of life. A man who has confidence in himself must have confidence in others, confidence in the fitness and rightness of the universe. When a man is thus anchored he ceases to worry about the fitness of things, about the behavior of his fellow men, about right and wrong and justice and injustice. If his roots are in the current of life he will float on the surface of life like a lotus and he will blossom and give forth fruit. He will draw his nourishment from above and from below; he will send his roots down deeper and deeper, fearing neither the depths nor the heights. The life that is in him will manifest itself in growth, and growth is an endless, eternal process. He will not be afraid of withering, because decay and death are part of growth. As a seed he began and as a seed he will return. Beginnings and endings are only partial steps in the eternal process. The process is everything…the way…the Tao.

The World of Jesus

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Thomas Cahill in his book, Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus, paints a very human picture of the culture into which Jesus was born and into which Christianity took root. We usually make the very human mistake of assuming that the world of an earlier era, any particular era, was just like ours and try to impose our values and belief system on that era. Cahill, if you will use your imagination, will help you get a very grasp, a very human grasp, of what the world was like in the time of Jesus.

Cahill gives us a feel for the world of that day–politically, spiritually, and socially, and it often was not pretty! And Jesus deigned to question most of his world’s fundamental values, synthesizing various and sundry “heresies” that were being bruited about the Mediterranean world at the time. And, of course the most basic “value system” he assailed was religion and anytime one questions that he/she is volunteering for crucifixion! (I remember an old bromide from my youth, “Remember, if Jesus came back today, it would be the Christians who would nail him to the cross.”)

Do not assume that with Cahill you will get the definitive view of the worldview of Jesus’s day. Remember, he was not there! But we have a lot of information about that world and if one is willing to approach that information intelligently and imaginatively one can get that “feel” for that world by reading Cahill. We often forget that Jesus was human; or, better yet, we choose to neglect his humanity, preferring to “glorify” him in such a lame, immature manner that we do him no Glory at all. Remember, we purport to teach that in addition to being transcendent, He was immanent! “The Incarnation” literally meant “the enfleshment.”

Mass hysteria besets us!

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Tacitus noted, “They terrify lest they should fear.”  He had in mind fear-mongerers who were always espousing the latest doomsday scenario, reflecting the fear that their own hearts were consumed by.  And then Aescychlus noted that “the gods send tragedy so that men will have something to talk about.”  Modern media fuels hysteria with “breaking news” and such. And we thrive on it. Sometimes I think we need to get a life.  Ok, I’ll admit it  Sometimes I think I need to get a life!

Life is inherently full of fear and tragedy strikes all too often . It could hit any moment, even to myself!  But I’m not inclined to live in terror of it.  I’ll deal with it when it happens. “Sufficient unto the day will be the evil thereof.”

e e cummings and misplaced concreteness

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when god decided to invent
everything he took one
breath bigger than a circus tent
and everything began
when man determined to destroy
himself he picked the was
of shall and finding only why
smashed it into because.

I read this e e cummings poem 25 years ago and have had it in my memory ever since.  It is very complex and even beyond my comprehension on some level.  Yet, I love it and it sticks with me and this fact reveals that it has great truth for me. This poem speaks to me.
I will forego the first stanza as that is beyond me.  But the second stanza deals with mankind’s fallenness, his sinfulness, his bondage to the time-space continnum, and his inability/unwillingness to venture out of that domain into freedom.  The essence of this 2nd stanza is man’s inability/unwillingness to escape the cause-effect mind-set, very much related to the time-space continuum.  And cummings realized that as long as we live there, as long as we are rooted there, we ensconced in a world that will be destroyed as it is an ephemeral world.
I have read enough in quantum physics to understand that scientists see the cause-effect domain as something that is perceptual in nature.  In fact, they would say everything is perceptual.  Some loudly protest at this point, announcing with vehemence, “Oh no, they are nihilists, saying that nothing is real.!”  I don’t think that is necessarily the case and it is certainly not the case with me.  It is just that there is a Real beyond that which we take for “real” and that Real is known only by faith.  Those who mistake the common-place world, the everyday world, the physical world as “real’ are guilty of the sin of misplaced concreteness,“chasing the shade and letting the Real be.” (John Masefield)
I just can’t wrap my head around this, however.  I believe this, and know it intuitively, but cannot understand it completely.  But the very desire to “understand it completely” is the fallen mind at work, trying to grasp and own its own spiritual nature as if it is something we can objectively apprehend.  But our “spiritual nature” is something we are…one might say “Someone” we are…and not something that we can apprehend.
Now a caveat is very important.  I am not advocating rejection of the cause-effect world.  That would be lunacy and the attempt to do so would be even more lunatic.  I am suggesting that meaning and value is given this cause-effect world when we intuitive recognize and respect…and surrender to…the Real which lies beyond the grasp of our rational mind.  And, all we have to do is to learn our own ignorance and recognize the Intelligence that graces this void that we live in, an Intelligence that has visited us on occasion.
I close with an excerpt from “The Habit of Pefection” by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

ELECTED Silence, sing to me And beat upon my whorlèd ear, Pipe me to pastures still and be The music that I care to hear. Shape nothing, lips; be lovely-dumb: 5 It is the shut, the curfew sent From there where all surrenders come Which only makes you eloquent. Be shellèd, eyes, with double dark And find the uncreated light: 10 This ruck and reel which you remark Coils, keeps, and teases simple sight.

Hell on Earth

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Shakespeare’s sonnets might be his finest work. He could put into just a few words volumes of knowledge of the human spirit. In the following sonnet he grasped the essence of hell, that waste land of desire of desire, hunger for hunger, that endless quest for the “lost object” (if I might speak Freudian!) I’m not for sure where this quote came from but someone described this person as “pursuing the object which recedes from the knowledge of it.” This person is portrayed in mythology as the ouroborous, the snake swallowing its own tail.

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy’d no sooner but despised straight;
Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,
Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,
On purpose laid to make the taker mad:
Mad in pursuit, and in possession so;
Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;
A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;
Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

And I conclude with the quote from the Ibsen play which I used just days ago about the self-intoxicated self:

Its here that men are most themselves, themselves and nothing but themselves sailing with outspread sails of self. Each shuts himself in a cask of self, the cask stopped with the bung of self and seasoned in a well of self. None has a tear for others woes or cares what any other thinks….Now surely you’ll say that he’s himself. He’s full of himself and nothing else, himself in every word he says himself when he is beside himself…Long live the Emperor of Self.  (Ibsen, Peer Gynt)

And yet, we are so wont to pontificate about the horrors of hell in the hereafter when if we were honest enough, discerning enough, we would recognize that this hell abounds in our day to day life. Perhaps we should seek salvation from this hell.

Churches and “group think”

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The origins of my recent concern with spiritual incest lie in my youth when I was raised in a very cloistered denominational environment. I would like to elaborate as it would help shed light on my observations.

My first year out of high school I spent in a very conservative seminary.   This seminary taught formally and rigorously themes which I had already imbibed in my church upbringing.  For example, there was pronounced emphasis on the Pauline admonishment to, “Come ye out from among them and be ye separate.”  This meant to be morally upright so that the community would clearly know that you were different because of your faith, that your Christian testimony was unsullied by the temptations of the world.  But this same teaching was applied to ecclesiastical teachings as we were taught that our churches also should be “set apart” by our doctrinal purity and by our hard-line stance on moral issues of the day.  Furthermore, we were taught that this moral and doctrinal purity had set us apart throughout history, even back to the time of Christ, as we had been the only church which had been “stead fast in the faith” even as other churches routinely departed from the “faith once delivered unto the saints.” And another dimension of this teaching was that we were the only true church, the only church with historical continuity back to the original church that Jesus had started when he noted,  “Upon this rock I will build my church and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

We did allow that there were people in other denominations who were saved…somewhat… provided that in some shape form or fashion they had “accepted the Lord Jesus as their Savior”;  but by virtue of not belonging to the “true church” they would not be part of the “bride of Christ” when they got to heaven.  This “bride of Christ” was an exalted status that would be given to the true church that had steadfastly held to the foundations of the faith throughout history.  However, there were many who were not saved and who would spend eternity in hell,  among them being Catholics, Jews, and Mormons and that is not even counting the hordes in other cultures who had not even heard of Christ.

Now, one example of the “historical scholarship” alluded to already needs to be further explained.  Great emphasis was placed on tracing church lineage back to the time of Christ as the only true church had to be able to prove historical continuity back to the time of Christ.  This was done by painstakingly researching church history and ascertaining which religious groups and movements adhered to cardinal teachings of the faith, one of which was “believer’s baptism”, meaning rejection of pedo-baptism (sprinkling of infants).

I could go on and on with an endless litany of beliefs and practices which set us apart as special people.  And, indeed it was often noted that the Bible taught that God would create a “peculiar” people (and, oh my Lord, were we ever “peculiar”!!!!), a people “set apart”, a “chosen people” who had the task of representing the Kingdom on earth.  Furthermore, we had the task of “standing in the gap” and acting as a deterrent from the onslaught of the evil forces that always beset this “wicked world.”

Now, so much of this dogma has a place if taken with moderation and with humility.  For example, I think that persons of faith will stand out and be conspicuous by simply representing quality and by seeking value in their life.  But they will not have to flaunt it!  And they certainly will not have to announce it with pride and arrogance!  They will not have to be ostentatious with it.  It will not have to be a response to an impoverished identity;  it will not have to be a fig leaf that hides them from their existential nakedness.

And this “incest” label is admittedly heavy-handed and is not exclusive to sectarian religion.  All religions, and indeed all groups, tend to be self-serving and tend to set their boundaries too rigid.  All groups tend to err towards “group-think” in which their primary purpose becomes the perpetuation of their own dogma and the exclusion of those who are threatening.  I recently quoted W. H. Auden on this note, where he described the individual who would deign to question conventional wisdom, diving into

…the snarl of the abyss
That always lies just underneath
Our jolly picnic on the heath
Of the agreeable, where we bask,
Agreed on what we will not ask,
Bland, sunny, and adjusted by
The light of the accepted lie.

More on spiritual incest

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Continuing the theme of spiritual incest, an old bromide from my youth was, “He who lives by himself and for himself will be spoiled by the company he keeps.”  This is relevant to groups and certainly to churches and denominations.  A church that overly emphasizes  the “come ye out from among them and be ye separate” theme can find themselves pathologically alone to the extent that they have no relevance to the world at large.  They are suddenly lost in “a world of empty self relatedness.”  (Paul Tillich)  And since mental illness is a reference problem, they technically are mentally ill.  A case in point is the infamous Westboro Baptist Church of our present day world.

I would like to offer a quote from an Ibsen play, Peer Gynt, which so eloquently illustrates this “empty self relatedness” that Tillich mentioned.  This is the superintendent of an insane asylum describing the constituents of his facility:

Its here that men are most themselves, themselves and nothing but themselves sailing with outspread sails of self. Each shuts himself in a cask of self, the cask stopped with the bung of self and seasoned in a well of self. None has a tear for others woes or cares what any other thinks….Now surely you’ll say that he’s himself.  He’s full of himself and nothing else, himself in every word he says himself when he is beside himself…Long live the Emperor of Self.

The language is a bit stilted, being centuries old, and it describes individuals.  But the lunacy portrayed here is also relevant to groups who have so isolated themselves, so turned in upon themselves, so violated the law of exchange with the outside world, that they have essentially sold their soul to the devil.

Dangers of Spiritual Incest

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Incest was a common theme in the clinical word that I did as a counselor.  The incest always reflected pronounced family dysfunction, always gravely influencing each member of the family even if they were sexually abused themselves . Incest is about power and control and often occurs in families who are isolated in some respect from the local community, be that a perceived isolation or something more concrete such as geographical or socioeconomic factors.

But incest is also a term that can be applied to groups as a whole.  Some groups can function as an incested family and be similarly inverted, turned-in on themselves with minimal reference to the outside world.  Usually this internal reference is perceived as a virtue and in fact reference to the external world is not only discouraged but is often demonized.  The world is perceived as dangerous and threatening, “evil” if you please, and contamination by this world is a constant peril.  (I feel strongly that this is often an element in the home-schooling movement though certainly not in all cases.)

I would like to focus briefly on what I call “spiritual incest.”  By this I mean the tendency to isolate ourselves in groups who believe just as we do and to discourage any dissenting beliefs.  In groups like this “doctrinal purity” is inordinately emphasized.  And there is nothing wrong with purity of any sorts but when it becomes an obsession it always leads to problems.  For example, when the “doctrinal purity” demon is unleashed, it tends to never end.  Once there is a “house-cleaning” and the miscreants are expelled or “churched…to use an old frontier term…the demon remains.  So, a few years later, there arises a new doctrinal dispute and once again another “house cleaning” is necessary and the ritual is enacted again.  For, this is tremendously rewarding to be on the side of the pure and know that you are “cleansing the temple”, that you are “standing firm for the truth that was once delivered unto the saints”, etc., etc.  I know.  Been there.  Done that.  Gosh it was fun.  I felt so pious.

Oh the shame of motives late revealed, and the awareness of things ill done, and done to others harm which once we took for exercise of virtue.  (T. S. Eliot “Four Quartets”)

(HISTORICAL NOTE: Historians have noted that this quest for doctrinal purity, especially in the 19th century on the frontier, created our “denominational society” as churches routinely split over picayune doctrinal disputations, giving rise to new churches and denominations)