Category Archives: fundamentalism

Truth and the NAR

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Truth is a dangerous commodity. I think it visits us on occasion as a momentary experience of Grace. But the experience is so profound, so intoxicating, so compelling that we have to own it and so we reduce it to the conceptual. And at that moment, it has become a true commodity and is immediately on the market.

Then there comes the human tendency to feel that he/she owns this “truth” and must convince others to see it and experience it the very same way. Thus comes the advent of conversion-oriented religions and non-sense like the New Apostolic Reformation movement of present-day. Movements like this consist of leaders who feel they have really seen the truth, not in the limited way that others have, and that they must bludgeon the world with it. And there are always millions of mindless lemmings who are willing to subscribe to ideology of this sort

I feel that truth is a process. It is something that we intuitive experience on occasion but it is never anything we own. At best, “we see through a glass darkly.”

And here is an interesting thought I just ran across on the net.  This is so important:

There is no truth that cannot be turned into a lie if you just take it seriously enough.  Anitra l. freeman

spiritual technocrats

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A college history professor, teaching a class on American religion, once noted that in the frontier days the men who often got the “call to preach” were those who couldn’t do anything else.  They were the wastrels, the ne’er-do-wells, those who were floundering with their life when they suddenly realized, “Hey, I could start preaching and immediately I will have a job, and respect, and a place in the community.”  (I suspect that a neurological conflagration also played a part in many of those “calls”, especially those that appeared to be of the “got a wild hair up their backside” variety)

I think that so many of our clergy today are assembly-line, mass produced, machine-produced men and women.  They are spiritual technocrats, adept at trotting out a good sermon, propping up the congregation’s pretenses, flashing that Christian (or otherwise) ivory here and there, and going their merry way.  They are, as a friend of mine once wrote, “heroes of spiritual contraception who have long since despaired of rebirth.” (Charles “Chuck” Dewitt)

They have been enculturated into Christianity and thus are professional ministers, preachers, priests, rabbis, mullahs, or what have you.  But they have nothing to offer from beyond the pale for they’ve never been there themselves.   These “spiritual technocrats” reflect our culture which also has long-since “despaired of rebirth.”  Our culture’s only frame of reference is itself and that, as noted earlier last week, is mental illness.  These “technocrats” have never experienced the “Dark Night of the Soul” (St. John of the Cross) or “The Cloud of Unknowing” which would then empower them to offer a prophetic word.  They have never done their “time in the desert” like Jesus did.

Conrad Aiken once noted, “We see only the small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which lies the darkness.”  The clergy that I’m upbraiding here have never been outside of that “small bright circle”.  To do so would entail an encounter with intense anxiety and despair.  It is easier for them to stay within the cozy confines of this “circle,” thus mirroring the culture at large which has done the same, which has “made for ourselves a life safer than we can bear.”  (W. H. Auden)   This phenomena has been addressed in history and sociology as the church in “cultural captivity.”

“Wind me up and watch me be…”

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Last week I posted re this Shakespearean note:  With devotion’s visage and pious action we do sugar o’er the devil himself.  I then paraphrased this wisdom into, “Wind me up and watch me be pious.”  I’m going to elaborate a bit.

This “wind me up…” concept can be applied to the whole of our life.  We are all “wound up” with a core identity and the verbal/ideological template that goes with it.  For example, I am again today saying with my thought and behavior, “Wind me up and watch me be…for want of a better term…a liberal.”  Many will be similarly wound-up today.  Then there are the conservatives.  “Wind me up and watch me be conservative”.  There are many of them too.

For, we are all “wound up” with some core identity, some template that we impose on the world and this template is usually not given any attention because asking someone to pay attention to his/her “template” is like asking fish to see water.  And then we have the human tendency to affiliate ourselves with other groups who subscribe to some similar template, thus shoring up our otherwise tenuous identity.

This problem is so apparent in our government.  Our leaders seem to be very smug, very rigid, very sure that the other side is wrong.  There is limited, if any, capacity to realize that the perspective of the other side deserves respect.  And corresponding with this arrogance is the all-too-human tendency to demonize those that view the world differently than ourself.  So, today go watch the news and watch the dog-and-pony show continue—-people saying, “Wind me up and watch me be Democrat” or “wind me up and watch me be Republican” or “wind me up and watch me be a Tea Partier.”

This is a deadly trap and this is a spiritual problem psychologically/emotionally.  And ultimately this is a Spiritual problem.  This reflects a fundamental problem with our culture.  We are all “wound up” and cannot, or will not, consider the possibility that all we have to trot out each day of our life is a mere perspective, it is not the ultimate grasp of reality.  Those people that we heap into the category “them” deserve a modicum of respect at least.

I conclude with the relevant wisdom of two of my favorite poets.    Conrad Aiken noted, “We see only the small bright circle of our consciousness beyond which likes the darkness.”  Our challenge, individually and collectively, is to venture “into the darkness” and offer respect to someone else today.  And W. H. Auden accused us of dwelling safely “on the heath of the agreeable, where we bask, agreed upon what we will not ask, bland, sunny, and adjusted by the light of the collective lie.”

Warren Jeffs and mental illness

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Warren Jeffs provides us with still another object-lesson in madness.  His private delusional system eventually was confronted by the world outside of himself and he was found guilty.  It was interesting to note that even as the hand of justice came down on him, his only defense was to recite his self-serving interpretation of FLDS holy writ.  He still didn’t get it.  And, he won’t get it.  His delusional system is too rigid.

Jeff’s delusional system was mirrored by a somewhat larger delusional system, the sectarian religious culture that he had lived in for his whole life. But that sectarian world-view was not mirrored…eventually…by the world at large.  And the “mirroring” by the world at large is what separates a sect from non-sectarian religion

We all have private belief-systems even apart from religious/spiritual beliefs.  That is to say, we all have our own private world that we live in.  But the issue is always the boundary-region between that private belief system and the world at large.  If the belief system is too rigid, if there is no permeability with the world-at-large, then madness reigns.  Mental illness is a reference problem.

The more rigid the private world view, the less permeable it is and the more likely it is that an “us-them” paradigm will emerge. Those ensconced in such a paradigm tend to be paranoid.  And, of course, the more paranoid one is the more likely one is to see “them” as being intrusive and aggressive, even threatening.  This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as the paranoid individual’s attitude, speech, and behavior eventually lead to intervention by “them.”  (For a provocative analysis of this phenomena on the group level, see Richard Hofstadter”s Paranoid Style in American Politics.)

Groups such as the FLDS are always in-bred in the sense that they are their own private reference system.  Being “in-bred” like this, it is no accident that incest and child-abuse takes place.  For incest…speaking now in terms of family-system theory…is always an illustration of a family or group feeding on itself.

Christian social grooming

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CNN over the weekend posted an article about “talking Christian.” The author, John Blake, describes this as the Christian habit to obsessively regurgitate various words and phrases, sometimes having little idea what is really meant by them. The author had stolen my thunder! I was at that moment preparing to blog on the subject of what I call, “God talk.” To illustrate my version of this phenomena, let me describe another “talk” of the same genre—“car talk.” This “car talk” is chatter, usually between men (young and old) about the intricacies of the automobile. (I can’t do this glibly for I don’t know how to do “car talk”.) But it involves lots of discussion of the subtleties of carburetion….”four-barrel Holly” comes to mind. And there are the complexities of engine compression and possibly the desire to bore out the cylinder and install larger pistons to get enhanced power. And I remember “glass pack mufflers” being the rage. And there were details about “the struts” and “the cam shaft” or perhaps the fear of “throwing a rod.” Now, if I knew how to “car talk”, I could tie all the above…and more…into a meaningful conversation which would constitute an example of “car talk.” AND, there is absolutely nothing wrong with this “car talk.” It is one example of human engagement, it can be thought of as “social grooming”, much like chimps in a cage picking fleas off each other. ( Another example is “talking baseball” which I can do very well!). This social grooming is an essential part of day to day life.

Now though I am a “mal-adept” at car talk, I can recall being very adept at “God talk”, especially the hyper-conservative variety. It involved “well worn words and ready phrases” (Conrad Aiken) such as, “Jesus is my savior” or “I have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ” or “He’s on the way back this very moment” or “I’m just a sinner saved by God’s grace” or “Why weren’t you in Sunday school yesterday, Brother Lewis?” or “Well, let’s remember to pray about it”. These and others are worn into a tapestry of routine conversation, the point of which was that each would recognize each other as a Christian and as a particular type of Christian. One would fit into the social context, one would be able to “offer a convincing performance” in that social context. And, once again there is nothing necessarily wrong with this variety of “talk”; for, religion does have a social dimension and this example of Christian “social grooming” has its function.

The problem lies when Christians, or persons of other faiths, never go beyond the social dimension of their glib expressions and search-out the hidden meanings. Failure to do so means that one has merely imbibed his/her faith, or the verbal trappings of his/her faith, from the social context. The words and phrases have only superficial meaning. They are “shop talk”. They amount to “chimps picking fleas off each other.”

Isolated soul

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The soul selects her own society,
Then shuts the door;
On her divine majority
Obtrude no more.

Unmoved, she notes the chariot’s pausing
At her low gate;
Unmoved, an emperor is kneeling
Upon her mat.

I’ve known her from an ample nation
Choose one;
Then close the valves of her attention
Like stone.

by Emily Dickinson

 

My take on this is the soul’s tendency to isolate itself, to select from the world what is most comforting to it, and to shut out the rest.  We tend to believe what we want to believe and quickly relegate everything else to a trash heap, to attribute it to “them”.

 

Truth has us

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A fundamentalist pastor in my past once quipped, “And the truth shall set you free…but first it will make you miserable.”   I still like that.  “Truth” is out there but we are so far removed from it and we carefully guard against its intrusiveness.  Hell, “Truth” when it visits just scares the hell out of us for it makes us aware of our finitude and our tendency to be utterly self-absorbed and smug.   W. H. Auden put it this way:

And truth met him,

And held out her hand;

But he clung in panic to his tall belief

And shrank away like an ill-treated child.

And, yes, I’m still “shrinking away” daily.  BUT, I do believe Truth has me….as it does us all…and it is patiently doing its work on me.  Though I don’t have “truth”, I do have confidence that “Truth” has me and has all of us.

And I conclude with the wisdom of Leonard Cohen:  Oh bless this continual stutter of the Word being made flesh.

 

losing god

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Donovan in the 1960’s made famous a zen koan:  First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there is.  This is a pithy note about object loss, one important step in the road to emotional and spiritual maturity.  The mountain first exists as a concept, then the mountain is lost, and then it is again.  The experience of “mountain” is transformed in this process—the concept becomes infused with emotion…one might even say with spirit.  Now this idea can be applied to any notion, including even one’s very identity or conception of self.  But, I want to apply it to “God.”  Therefore, to make a long story short, I am saying, “First there is a god, then there is no god, then there is.”  One first learns “god” as a concept but at some point in one’s life it is important that the conception becomes spiritual.  But this must entail a period of “loss”.  Now for some people, this “loss” is dramatic such as with the Apostle Paul on the Damascus Road.  For most of us this loss is much less dramatic, often appearing as an identity crisis, a period of doubt and confusion, even depression and despair.  But the experience can deepen our faith, taking it into the domain of the “spirit of the law” rather than the domain of the “letter of the law.”

 

If one never undergoes this loss of god, his/her religious expression will merely be whatever he/she happens to have been indoctrinated with.  And even though this indoctrination might be with a very noble ideal or spiritual leader, it will still merely be an idea and one will merit the description “ideologue” or, even better, “fundamentalist.”  Fundamentalists are in love with ideas, mistaking words and ideas for the “thing in itself.”  The “thing in itself” always lies just beyond our reach as words and ideas cannot be wrapped around it.  Or, to borrow a Buddhist line quoted last week, “The finger pointing to the moon must not be mistaken for the moon itself.”

“spirit vs. letter of the law”

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Last posting concluded with the notion that faith required “losing sight of the shore” at some point.  The issue here is going beyond the mere conceptual dimension of spirituality and addressing the finitude of existence and even the finitude of faith itself.  It is to reach that point in one’s spiritual development that he/she recognizes emotionally that “we see through a glass darkly’…no longer is this merely a biblical bromide to trot out…. and that there is a definite limit to the function of intellect in spiritual matters.  For most of us, to reach this point in spiritual development is to encounter anxiety/depression to some degree.  To some this experience amounts to what D. W.  Winnicott described as a “psychic catastrophe.”  I would apply that clinical term to the Apostle Paul’s Demascus Road conversion.  I would use the same term to describe Eckhart Tolle’s spiritual crisis when he was aged 29.

 

But it is easier and more comforting, in the immediate, to keep our spiritual experience confined to the conceptual or rational.  There we can find “true belief” or religious fundamentalism.  (See Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer)  Another way of addressing this issue is the distinction made in the New Testament between “the letter of the law” and the “spirit of the law,”—-the conceptual is the “letter of the law” and that which transcends the “letter of the law” is the “spirit.”   And I think it was the Apostle Paul who noted that “the letter killeth, but the Spirit maketh alive.” (2 Corinthians 3)  In the 20th century Paul Tillich noted, “A religion within the confines of reason is a mutilated religion.”

 

And Tillich was certainly not recommending the irrational.  He speaking of the need of balance, that persons of faith recognize that their intellect does not give them command or control over God, that there is another dimension which must be given attention.  There is a Buddhist aphorism that is appropriate:  The finger pointing to the moon must not be confused for the moon itself.  Words are not the “thing in itself”; words are merely pointers.