Category Archives: fundamentalism

Shakespeare Visited Me This Morning!

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Oh I love Shakespeare! He is one of my best friends, often visiting me in the middle of the night with memories of a finely-coined expression or phrase which plums the depths of my heart. But oh how I loathed him when in high school for he refused to speak plain English and then my teachers so often demanded that I memorize passages from his plays and, even worse, interpret them. The interpretation really frustrated me and even angered me at times making me want to cry out, “It means just what it says. There’s nothing more to say about it, damn it!” My attitude stemmed from the biblical literalism that I lived in at that time, its hermeneutical style being best expressed as, “God said it, I believe it, that settles it.”

But decades later Shakespeare and his ilk began to penetrate the pristine literal citadel in which I was imprisoned. And what devastation it has brought me! All things felt most certain are now seen as ephemeral and I am often left with doubt and anxiety with despair lingering not far behind. But I would not go back for all the money in the world as life is to be lived not to be escaped from with “well-worn words and ready phrases that build comfortable walls against the wilderness.” (Conrad Aiken)

For, the “devastation” I refer to has merely been the disillusionment I have had to encounter as my pretenses have been shattered and I’ve been left with nothing but naked reality. And, T. S. Eliot was right, “Humankind cannot bear very much reality.” In the “devastation” I’ve lived in for thirty years plus, structure has evolved but it has been fashioned out of Hope, setting it apart from the specious, fear-based ego contrivance that I was enconced in the first half of my life.

My life now features an openness that I used to avoid with a passion, an openness that Richard Rohr has described as “The Naked Now.” This openness can be described as a Presence which allows me to more fully accept the world as it is with less of a demand that it conform with my preconceptions. I no longer have the comfort of pretending I have no preconceptions.

Franz Kafka said that a literary work must be an ice axe which breaks the sea frozen inside us. That “ice axe” which first came my way in my teens has found me a challenge…and still does…but like any literary work, I’m an unfinished product; and we are all a “literary work,” a tale being told. Yes, perhaps one that often appears is being “told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.”

I “Discovered” America!

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Yes, in 1952 I “discovered America” although I also soon realized there were a lot of other “Americans” here already! Edgar Simmons once wrote, “We rattle the world for our babies” and early in 1952 the annual “rattle” took place and I fell to the earth in the sticks of central Arkansas.

It was a “discovery” and adventure; and continues to be. This is an amazing world that we live in. For example, at this very moment I am sitting in what I call my “bird theater” and watch junkies, sparrows, titmice, cardinals, and two or three varieties of woodpeckers raucously queue up for their moment at the bird feeders, cavorting about in the blowing snow as they wait their turn. Suddenly I am a child again and can “feel” on some level again the marvelous beauty that the world has for children before they get fully ensconced in the mundane. That was the time when my heart was still made of “penetrable stuff” and had not been “bronzed o’er” with the “damned custom…(that is) proof and bulwark against sense (or feeling).”

Now, of course, I employ my “literary license” here to recall these moments as there was no cognitive apparatus there to “remember” them with. That contrivance would come later and with it would come a more routine, mundane appreciation of the “beauty” I saw…and felt…at that time. And I use the word “felt” deliberately for early in our life we are a “feeling state” and are constantly soaking up the impressions which will stick with us for life and which will formulate the core of our identity, the roots of that unconscious domain that shapes our life. And, now, I do sense that I have some awareness of that phase of my childhood, some intuitive grasp of how the world appeared back then.

And on that subject, I don’t think I really liked much of the world…or at least the “human” part. I found all “those rules” baffling and overwhelming and preferred to stay safely tucked away in my little uroborus. I mean, there were so many of “those rules” and how could I ever get them “all” right; and, of course, being a budding narcissist, I had to get them “all” right, didn’t I? And, I might add that I’ve spent my life trying furiously to accomplish this goal but have found enough Grace in recent years to give up the quest, to humbly realize just how silly, vain and “narcissistic” it was in the first place. I really think that I felt so “judged” by the world I was discovering, and judged so disapprovingly, that I had to be “right” to compensate and the only way I saw that I could do this was to master all of the rules. Meanwhile, I was also immersed in a Jesus culture in which I was nearly almost daily about God and His mercy and forgiveness; and though I came to say I believed it all, I actually didn’t believe a word of it, did I?! The only way I felt I could be forgiven was to “be right” and that meant to follow the “rules.” When that facade began to fade decades later, I referred to it as the loss of my, “ruined, rural righteousness.” And, I might add, that in spite of what I was being “taught” by my “Jesus culture”, the subtext of that teaching was a dictate to do just as I was doing—Be Right!

Come to think of it, there is another character flaw—I’ve always had a hard time focusing on what was going on, preferring to focus on what was going on beneath the surface, in the “subtext.” I almost wonder if I had some version of ADD?

A Real Fine Blog on Fundamentalist Craziness!

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I have met so many wonderful people in the blog-o-sphere these past two years and i would like to tell you about another one of them.  She is Clotildajamcracker (http://clotildajamcracker.wordpress.com/2013/10/30/choose-sanity/) and the lovely lady just does not think right, she does not see the world right and I always love anyone I run into like that for I feel validated with my own Gary Larsen-esque view of this crazy world we live in.  In the link I offered here re sanity, she describes growing up in a conservative Christian environment much like the one I grew up in and she describes it with wit and sarcasm I am not capable of.  This woman is talented!  I don’t know anything about her and wish I did for she is one incredible human being who has escaped the madness she was born into and is able to shed light on that madness and on the madness that the rest of us are inevitably caught up in.  Do check her out.

 

 

 

 

 

Russian Sect lacks “Moderation in all Things”

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I love sectarianism, especially when it has a religious flair! How could I not as I grew up in a very conservative religious sect in the American South; and, though I have assiduously attempted to throw that damn baby out with the bath water, I must admit that it will always be present in my heart. Of course, now this “sectarianism” is carefully ensconced in liberal thought! (http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/roads/2013/08/leo_tolstoy_s_doukhobors_the_culture_of_this_remote_pacifist_sect_in_georgia.html)

The on-line publication, Slate, today has a fascinating story of a Russian pacifist movement which is now facing extinction as that monster modernity is about to devour it. That monster is the same one that beset my childhood sect, a monster which received much opprobrium from our pulpits best summarized with the Old Testament admonishment, “Remove not the ancient landmarks…”

This Russian sect became a “pet” of no less a luminary than Tolstoy back in 1890’s who attempted to defend it from the wiles of the encroaching state. These “Doukhobors” are centered in the Republic of Georgia and now have dwindled to a mere 500 after three hundred years of tenaciously clinging to their version of “ancient landmarks.” Their name means “spirit wrestlers” which was given them in derision but was wryly appreciated by the group, taking it as a virtue to be known as a group who “wrestled” with spirit.

Every culture has its conservatives and its “hyper-conservatives”, the latter seeing any change as tantamount to surrender to oblivion. This reminds me of something a mentally ill man once told a well-meaning but misguided friend, “You argue to make a point but I argue to stay alive.” These hyper-conservatives are entrenched in their belief system, and will relentlessly dig themselves further into it, because they perceive the only alternative as fragmentation and ultimately the threat of annihilation or death.  And, this should give all of us pause, even those of us with our “noble” and liberal ideas–anything carried to its extreme becomes problematic. As they Greeks said centuries ago, “Moderation in all things.”

Do We Dare Let Go of Guilt?

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Huffington Post offers a very insightful article about dealing with guilt and escaping its clutches. (Huff Po =— http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/07/01/dealing-with-guilt-iyanla-vanzant_n_3472594.html)

How do we let go of any emotion that has tyrannized us such as guilt has. Sure, I accept the notion of the forgiveness of God offered in the story of Jesus, for example. But that comes to us first as a rational, conceptual “idea” and does not necessarily burrow into the depths of the heart where the “real” guilt abides; for the “real” guilt is in the affective domain which controls how we use our rational mind. Thus, our guilt can make us “guilty” believers of any stripe which will always make us so fanatical and legalistic that people who come across us will want to put up the “sign of the cross” when we approach and run away. For, guilt-ridden faith offers no “human” quality and therefore has no “godly” quality to it. It is just an “idea” devoid of any experience; or, better yet, it is an “idea” devoid of any Spirit, as in the “letter of the law killeth but the Spirit maketh alive.”

Guilt so often is so intrinsic to our being that we can’t fathom living without it. Letting it go would make us feel like a duck out of water or a fish on dry land. It would be scary and even fatal in a sense in that our ego would definitely be threatened by the loss of this core element which allows it to cohere. My dear friend, brother, spiritual mentor, and soul mate, Bill Shakespeare said it so eloquently, noting in Hamlet that we would prefer to “cling to those ills that we have, than fly to others that we know not of.” Our guilt is so comforting because it is the only thing that we have ever known. And, we are validated daily for living in this guilt as it is guilt (and shame) that binds our world together in the dog-and-pony show that the Hindus’ call Maya and fundamentalist American Christians call, “Well, it’s just the way things are.” And many faiths depend on guilt as without guilt attendance of their churches, synagogues, and mosques might decline, worship palaces fall into disrepair, clergy go underpaid or unemployed, and its constituents left with the challenge of dealing with Reality…which always requires faith in a Beyond which I often label our Source. And, I am of course referring to a transcendent deity who is, paradoxically, immanent; and the appreciation of this powerful truth requires ability and a willingness to hold contradictory notions in the mind at the same time. In other words, this notion “ain’t makin’ no sense” to many people and it never will!

But, there is always “method to our madness,” individually and collectively. The best we can ever do is muddle through and believe fervently that there is a “wisdom that doeth shape our ends, rough hew them how we may.” (Last two quotes from “Bill”)

 

“Say it Ain’t So, Buddha!”

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Buddha must be turning over in his grave this morning. The New York Times has a story about “radical Buddhism” in Myanmar (Burma) which reports re an anti-Muslim movement in the country spearheaded by Ashin Wirathu. To illustrate his extremism, he recently described a massacre of Muslim children in one city as a “show of strength,” declaring, “If we are weak, our land will become Muslim.”

Of course, I know enough about religious history to know that extremism finds its way into all spiritual teachings, Buddhism included. But this is the most flagrant example I remember in my life time of Buddhist extremism. And this current “flavor” is merely another rendition of a favorite theme of all small-minded people of any persuasion, “us vs. them” with “them” always being a catch-all category for people who we disagree with or do not like. We must always remember that when we are captivated by an ego need to categorize our world, we will inevitably find ourselves comfortably ensconced in the luxurious confines of “us” while someone else is always banished into “them.”

This is binary thinking, the spawn of ego-mindedness run amok. Instead of using Reason to find common ground, to search for inclusiveness, this gift is used to carve the world up into pieces and always leaves the “carver” in isolation. Or to look at it slightly differently, this “carver” is horrified by his own isolation and misuses the God-given Reason to perpetuate that isolation. As Goethe noted, “They call it Reason, using light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

 

Southern Baptists and “The Wisdom of Humility”

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Terry Mattingly reported re a recent discussion with leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention re decline in baptisms, reflecting a decline in “conversions.” I here provide a link to this article so you can see how the SBC is attempting to explain this decline. (http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2013/jun/14/terry-mattingly-baptists-with-fewer-baptisms/)

But, having been a Baptist myself, I have an opinion which I shared weeks ago after a newspaper article reported about a new demographic category, the “nones”, people who now selected “none” when asked about which religion they are affiliated with. (https://literarylew.wordpress.com/2013/04/13/an-open-letter-to-the-clergy-re-the-nones/)
I feel that Baptists err in that they adhere rigidly to the “letter of the law” even while preaching against this very thing. But by taking the Bible literally, they fail to see the nuances of the Scripture and fail to appreciate the layers of meaning that it offers. They fail in exercise of hermeneutic discipline.

I here would like to share a paragraph by a professor of religion in San Antonio, Glenn Hughes:

…there are those who try to hold on their sense of the divine by tenaciously attaching themselves to religion in a quite uncritical manner—in a closed-minded manner that renders the world of everyday responsibilities, and the awareness of historical complexities, more bearable though massive psychological reliance on intense, unexamined feelings evoked by religious symbols, rituals, and texts. Thus is forged an attitude of intransigent certainty that one is in possession of the sole and absolute truth about divinity. And thus the full complexity of the challenges of existential self-making and of responsibility for history is sidestepped, to some degree, by ignoring the problematic fact of the transcendence of divine transcendence—that is, its profound mysteriousness and its unavailability to direct or substantive human understanding—that the former child’s sense of the nearness of the divine absolute becomes transformed into an inflexible, dogmatic, and (as we all know) sometimes murderous conviction that the intense feelings evoked by one’s own religious tradition are infallible guides to absolute, exclusive religious truth.  (A More Beautiful Question:  The Spiritual in Poetry and Art)

If the Gospel is to be meaningful, it must be refracted through a heart in which meaning is present. By that, I mean a heart that is “petal open” and full of “penetrable stuff” (Shakespeare’s term) not one that’s keeping human frailty at bay with rigid, compensatory certainty. In other words, a heart that is humble. And, as T. S. Eliot noted, “The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility. And humility is endless.”

Being “Right” is a Pyrrhic Victory

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I’ve had a life-long battle with “being right.” It is certainly not unrelated to having been born and bred in “right-wing” social, political, and religious culture in the deep South of the United States where “rules” predominate. And it is always “rules” that makes one “right,” or allows him to think that he is. I think very early on I had a heart like most people but then I was offered a bargain, “Hey, you forgo that tumult in your heart where emotion and reason are doing battle, give in to reason and let it reign, and you will have the consolation of being ‘right.”’ So I spent the first two decades of my life assiduously striving to live according to the rules, failing to see just how closely this life-style approximated that of the Pharisees who Jesus upbraided so often. Since then, the “ruled” life has slowly given way to the burgeoning power of emotion, a process that received a boost in my mid-thirties when I discovered poetry. Now, nearly three decades later there is some indication that this warfare is getting closer to resolution as emotion and intellect are working much more in tandem than ever before. Now instead of using my intellect to rigidly carve up the world…and myself…I use this gift to seek common ground with others believing that there is a Unity that underlies this world of multiplicity.

And having those two dimensions of the heart working in tandem should be our goal. When “flesh and mind are delivered from mistrust” (Auden), we are witnessing something akin to the Spirit of God being present though the “Spirit of God” certainly needs more discussion than I choose to give it now. Reason, without the balance of emotion (or heart) is just an effort to stay in control, to tyrannize one’s own self and simultaneously try to tyrannize those around him. Therefore, Goethe was astute when he noted, “They call it Reason, using Light celestial, just to outdo the beasts in being bestial.”

Now occasionally the old demon of “being right” will surface again. Recently it teased me briefly and then I took the bait slipped into the “being right” mode. It was a veritable black hole for a while until I managed to right myself and escape its clutches. For, there is no end to “being right”. We have the Taliban as one example of this but we have similar expressions of the same dark force present in our own country. And, yes it got me recently. It will always be a temptation for it is so wonderful to “know” that you are right and to “set someone straight.”

I offered a snippet of Auden’s observation about this matter earlier. Now I will share the context:

If…like your father before you, come
Where thought accuses and feeling mocks,
Believe your pain: praise the scorching rocks
For their desiccation of your lust,
Thank the bitter treatment of the tide
For its dissolution of your pride,
That the whirlwind may arrange your will
And the deluge release it to find
The spring in the desert, the fruitful
Island in the sea, where flesh and mind
Are delivered from mistrust.
(W. H. Auden “The Sea and the Mirror)

 

Don’t Throw that Baby…!

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Beginning in adolescence, it is very typical for children to begin to rebel in the effort to achieve autonomy. This rebellion can come in simple forms like dying one’s hair purple, sneaking around and getting a tattoo, dating someone that parents disapprove of, and (of course) having sex. But, sometimes the need for autonomy is more fundamental and the adolescent tends to “throw the baby out with the bath water,” and reject everything his parents and community taught him. This rebellion also can serve a purpose but it is a more dangerous pathway as it can lead to severe behavioral and emotional problems as living “beyond the pale” of the cultural mandates one was offered can be very painful.

I was raised a conservative Christian in Arkansas, in the South of the United States. It was not until about the age 20 when I started my rebellion and it took me about 15 years to completely forego my fundamentalist Christian roots. But, fortunately I never threw “the baby out with the bathwater” and so, for example, never considered myself an atheist or even agnostic. And now I’m very glad as decades later I am discovering my Christian faith very meaningful and realize how that the roots of this faith are very instrumental in helping me find this meaning. Yes, I finally have the courage to interpret scripture and religious tradition for myself and can do so in a way in which they are “meaningful” to me. And, I have found…fortunately…that my approach to the matter is not isolated–many others approach the subject in a same fashion and I have even found me a community of faith in my community. This is important because there is danger when one interprets religion in such a fashion that he isolates himself, even if ensconced in a very isolating, sectarian, exclusivist group.  (This isolation reminds me of an old bromide, “He who lives by himself and for himself will be spoiled by the company he keeps!)

I’m going to share with you another blog from Richard Rohr which addresses this very issue of “throwing the baby out with the back wate”:

 

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All-or-nothing reformations and all-or-nothing revolutions are not true reformations or revolutions. Most history, however, has not known this until now. When a new insight is reached, we must not dismiss the previous era or previous century or previous church as totally wrong. It is never true! We cannot try to reform things in that way anymore.

 

This is also true in terms of the psyche. When we grow and we pass over into the second half of life; we do not need to throw out the traditions, laws, boundaries, and earlier practices. That is mere rebellion and is why so many revolutions and reformations backfired and kept people in the first half of life. It is false reform, failed revolution, and no-transformation. It is still dualistic thinking, which finally turns against its own group too.

 

So do not waste time hating mom and dad, hating the church, hating America, hating what has disappointed you. In fact, don’t hate anything. You become so upset with the dark side of things that you never discover how to put the dark and the light together, which is the heart of wisdom and love, and the trademark of a second half of life person.

 

 

Neuroscience Trying to be God!

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Neuroscientist, Kathleen Taylor, argues that religious fundamentalism is an illness for which there will eventually be a cure as it can be explained neurologically. Well, that is fine with me because “they” are “them” and I love it anytime I can “them” anyone! But, alas and alack, I happen to know that Taylor and her ilk also argue that spirituality itself can be explained in terms of neurology and the mythical “god spot” in the brain and therefore she has me in her sights also. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/31/kathleen-taylor-religious-fundamentalism-mental-illness_n_3365896.html?utm_hp_ref=mostpopular)

However, I thoroughly appreciate the neurological research and find that it actually deepens my faith. Yes, I do feel that my spiritual imagery and even the impulse itself has a neurological component. Everything that I “know” and “feel” has a neurological component and even these very words that I write, even the motivation to write them, even this “meta-cognition” being employed has a neurological dimension. This knowledge keeps me from retreating to the perspective of my youth when I felt that objectivity was possible and leaves me with the simple mystery of life and of my own human experience. And it leaves me with the conviction, foolish perhaps, that what I feel and think are important are worth “tossing out there.” Now what happens when they are “tossed out there” is beyond me and is not even my business. As T.S. Eliot said, “We offer our deeds to oblivion” in that we do not know what their outcome will be.

The dilemma for neuroscience research is that it often fails to overlook the obvious—beneath the realm of neurochemistry and “science” lays absolutely nothing. I like to use the philosopher’s term “nothingness” or a primordial void that lies at the root of our existence. I like to call it “Nothingness” or even better, “No-thingness.” And when anyone deigns to venture into that domain of human experience, he/she is pretty close to entering the realm of the “spiritual” for there is where we meet “Otherness” to which some of us assign the term “God,” or “Source” or “Ground of Being” or “I am that I am”, the latter also translated as “the Being One.” But, when we get there…if ever…the only thing we get for the “effort” is the simple knowledge of our being which I like to term “Being.” We have “am-ness” and that is it. And Eliot termed this experience “a condition of complete simplicity, costing not less than everything.” And, it has been my experience that awareness of this “simplicity” grants me a tad more humility than I was born with, allowing me to seek for inclusiveness with others, including those that disagree with me. “Where is our common interest?” I like to ask and it is always there in some finite respect and Ultimately there in that we are all simple Be-ings, “strutting and fretting our hour upon the stage” and prone to taking ourselves too seriously.

This nebulous approach to spirituality is strangely akin to quantum physics. And, in the realm of scientific research, there are individuals who do seek to find common ground between science, religion, and other approaches to life. For, they realize that “science”, like religion, is merely one approach to the incredible Mystery of life that we are all caught up in from which we cannot escape. We can attempt to “explain it” and therefore have the smug belief that it “makes sense” but history teaches us that the “absolute truth” of any particular era….the “god”…always ends up in the dustbin. Science, religion, literature are only a means to an end and not an end in themselves. Or as the Buddhists like to say, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”