More Blasphemy!

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As I increasingly find comfort using my literary license to approach Holy Writ, I find that I’m leaving behind almost daily the carcass of sacred cows. And it dawned on me recently, as “literal lew” whispered to me again, that my view of faith appears to invalidate that of the people I grew up with. In the childish mind of “literal lew,” those people are “going to hell” while “I am saved because I believe the ‘right’ way.” For in that mind set, there is only one way to believe, one way to think, one way to feel and if you don’t comply you will immediately find yourself banished to the prison of “them,” not allowed to bask in the comfort of being one of “us.” In other words, you won’t have the comfort of belonging to the tribe.

But I don’t think that Jesus had in mind rigidly carving the world up into categories like “good”, “bad”, “us”, “them”, “saved” and “unsaved.” Jesus came to tell us that we were free and always had been as He was “the lamb slain before the foundation of the world.” He was the embodiment, the “en-fleshment”, or incarnation, of a freedom that had been written into the depths of the human heart from the very beginning, a freedom that at that moment was finding an expression in terms of time and space. So, Jesus said, “You are free but freedom is very risky and takes a lot of courage. In fact, you will have to die. You will have die to your pre-conceptions about everything including your faith. But you don’t have to and I won’t make you. You are free to do as you choose. In fact, you are free to take my teachings and turn them into another version of the same bondage you are under now if you wish…possibly even under my name…but that is your choice.”

The conservative believers that gave rise to “literarylew” were and are just as saved as he is. The story of Jesus is that we are all forgiven, we are all free, but that freedom finds expression in our life only if we are willing to die, only if we are willing to allow His Spirit to loosen the grip of our ego a bit even in the area of our faith. But when the ego is threatened, it is very skilled at calling in reinforcements and fending off the assault as disillusionment is too painful. As W. H. Auden noted, “When Truth met him, and held out her hand, he clung in panic to his tall belief and shrank away like an ill-treated child.”

NOTE — See I have blasphemed again! “Universalism” is verboten in the faith I was presented with as a child.

“Closed canon” equals a “closed mind/heart”

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n the “closed canon” reflects a refusal to venture beyond the confines of one rational consciousness, or even to consider the possibility that such an enterprise is possible. Emily Dickinson beautifully described this encapsulated, endungeoned mind/heart in the mid-nineteenth century with the following poem:

The Soul selects her own society,

Then — shuts the Door —
To her divine Majority —
Present no more —

Unmoved — she notes the Chariots — pausing —
At her low Gate —
Unmoved — an Emperor be kneeling
Upon her Mat —

I’ve known her — from an ample nation —
Choose One —
Then — close the Valves of her attention —
Like Stone —

Her choice of words describing selective attention– “closing the valves of attention like stone”— is intensely vivid and cold. This is the quintessential person that Eric Hoffer had in mind when he wrote, “The True Believer.” These people live in a hermetically-sealed prison and will probably gravitate toward a social/denominational group in which people of a similar persuasion are similarly ensconced 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 collected lie.”  (W.H. Auden) This is the “group lie” or “group think” which sometimes is described as “epistemic closure.”

This rigid certainty has infiltrated to conservative right of the American political spectrum which is replete with hyper-conservative religiosity. This close mindedness gave rise to the ludicrous phenomena in 2012 of running a presidential campaign whose slogan, upon close scrutiny, was simply, “We hate Obama.” In in the budget battle of last fall, more than one of them were quoted saying, “We are right” on the issue and in a key Republican committee meeting on the issue they concluded with prayer and a spontaneous singing of the hymn, “Amazing Grace.” And it is no accident that this wing of the party is vehemently against scientists’ warning of global warming and are anti-science in general. They might well be saying, “God said,I believe it, that settles it.”

Life is uncertain. No matter how much we try to deny it, we are extremely vulnerable little critters whose biblically assured “threescore and ten” might prove considerably shorter at any moment. But it is this vulnerability that makes us alive, that reflects a “quickened” spirit, which is what Jesus had in mind with his observation that to find our life we must lose it.  As Norman Brown put it, “To be is to be vulnerable.”

 

 

 

 

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.

Karl Jung: Our Life is a “Flimsy”

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This move to Taos, New Mexico has been every bit the adventure I had anticipated…and more. Yes, the “adventure” has been intense at times as I found that “literallew” is very much alive and kicking in the depths of my heart and does not like change. I wish that rascal would go away! (But, not really! He is a key element in my heart and always will be.)

One of the first discoveries I made out here was a Jungian study group that was being organized by a Jungian analyst who was trained at the Jungian Institute in Zurich. My wife and I joined the small group and proceeded to explore several chapters of Jung’s Tavistock Lectures. This experienced as renewed my interest in exploration of archetypal energies present in my own life and in life itself. Jung had a tremendous ability to explore the depths of the heart, having explored his own even to the point of nearly suffering a “nervous breakdown.” Jung believed that dreams were very revealing about what is going on in our life and will announce what our hidden issues are and will continue to do so until we address them. But in the current reading I have now discovered that he felt that life itself is but a dream, that even our conscious life is the playing-out of our unconscious fantasies and is itself a “fantasy” of sorts. This is what Shakespeare had in mind when he said that “our life is but the stuff that dreams are made of.”

Now of course, Jung was not nuts and realized that “reality” is just that, “real.” But he felt there was more to this “real” world than what most people realize but that most people prefer to live life on the surface, not daring to look beneath that surface and begin to explore those subterranean depths where monsters and ghouls roam about at will. But as Jung noted, “What we resist, persists” and so the hidden dimensions of our life always find expression “out there” in the world, usually in other people. My favorite example of this projection is what I call the Chicken Little phenomena, “The sky is falling, the sky is falling!” I grew up in a sub culture in the American South where impending doom was a basic assumption of life, where “the judgment of God” was always imminent, where “the sky is going to fall” was a constant fear. I now see that this subtle assumption of that culture…and primarily its religion…reflected a deep pessimism about life and an awareness of just how precarious our grip on life was. This belief system reflected a deep-seated existential insecurity which always requires the compensation of rigid belief systems. The more uncertain you are in the depths of your heart, the more fiercely are you certain about your belief system. And to consider that someone else’s belief system might be equally valid would threaten this certainty, requiring that other belief systems must be opposed or demonized in some fashion.

Here is the full context of the Shakespearean quote above, from “The Tempest”:

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on; and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.

Flight 370: An Existential Observation

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I’ve read some speculation in the press about why we are so “obsessed” with the flight 377 disaster. On this note, I always think of Aesychlus observation thousands of years ago, “The gods send disaster so that mankind will have something to talk about.” That is a cynical viewpoint but certainly worthy of consideration. However, our fascination, i.e. “obsession,” goes much deeper than that, reflecting a deep-seated connection that we feel with each other in this precarious adventure we are all immersed in, one from which there is “No Exit” as Sartre once noted. But I believe a story like this taps deeply into our individual and collective unconscious and stirs a sense of vulnerability that we all carefully avoid each day of our life. The notion of floating innocently through the air and being suddenly sucked into oblivion by the caprice of circumstances is a metaphor for the fragility of our life.

Here is a short poem by Eugene Mayo which beautifully captures this existential predicament:

THIS WIND
By E. L. Mayo

This is the wind that blows
Everything
Through and through.

I would not toss a kitten
Knowingly into a wind
That blows like this
But there’s no taking

Anything living
Out of the fury
Of this wind
That we breathe and ride upon.

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.”

More on Ego-Ridden Faith

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Yesterday I addressed dualistic thinking and the “saved” vs “unsaved” emphasis of some religions, portraying that emphasis as merely an expression of an “us” vs “them” approach to life. This expression of faith is very guilt-ridden and must have very rigid boundaries and often appears to be searching daily to find things “that we don’t do that others do” which “make us good, and them bad.” Looking back on my life, I realize that my tenuous identity was explicitly based on this false premise and consisted of a relentless list of “thou shalt nots” which I religiously sought to adhere to to compensate for a deep-seated self-loathing. And even though I was a professing Christian, that approach to spirituality was intrinsically antithetical to the teachings of Christ who said that He accepted us “as is.”

Now, in this “second half of life” (to borrow a Richard Rohr term), I find that spirituality is letting down some of these rigid boundaries and acknowledging some of those unsavory impulses, a process that Karl Jung described as “embracing your shadow” or “withdrawing your projections.” For, as Jung also pointed out, “What you resist, persists” and is therefore created in your outside world. To illustrate, the notion of “saved” would not have any meaning, would not even exist, without its complement of “unsaved” much like “green” would have no meaning or existence without “un-green.”

But recognizing this spiritual subtlety is antithetical to the interest of the ego who, should it recognize this ambiguity, would have its authority in jeopardy. So usually when an ego-bound person encounters teachings like this, they will respond with something like, “Of the devil” or “straight from the pits of hell” or “damn New Age stuff.” Thus the ego continues merrily on its way, smug in its faith, not listening to Shakespeare who noted, “With devotions visage and pious action they sugar o’er the devil himself.”

Ersatz, Ego-ridden, Spirituality

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I’ve shared here several times that Richard Rohr steal’s my thoughts. He continues to do that and is rich and famous and I am still poor and unknown. Life is just not fair! In today’s email he again chides Christians for their “dualistic” thinking and points out how the ego is hard at work in this process. It is really unnerving to realize that something as personal as one’s faith can be little more than an ego function, an escape from life, and not the expression of the Divine that one purports it to be. And that is what I’ve had to learn and am continuing to learn about my own faith. But when this truth began to sink in, the first faint glimmer of light dawned in my soul allowing me to see the darkness in which I lived. And I still live in this “darkness” and will always do so even as that “glimmer of Light” brightens each day. For, I now know…and feel…more clearly what the Apostle Paul meant when he declared that “we see through a glass ‘darkly’”.

Let me explain just one facet of the ego’s presence in the spirituality of my early life. One of the first things I learned as a child was the distinction of “saved” vs “unsaved”, a distinction which paralleled the infinite variety of other distinctions I was learning as my innocent world was being carved up into various categories. And, of course at some point I learned that I could recite the correct syllogism, the magical words, and presto I would join the club of “the saved.” This bifurcation of the world followed me through the first half of my life as I hid behind the facade of being “saved” and from that subjective prison lived and felt separate from the whole world, radically disconnected. Now, I didn’t know about this disconnection as I participated in a “saved” culture which daily reassured me that I was “one of them” because I spoke the right language and lived the right life…at least out in public! However, there was always unrest in my soul, an unrest which in the middle of my life began to grow and became a veritable tumult which is now blossoming fully in my life. But this “tumult” is merely the experience of life unfolding in my heart as it opens up and becomes, “filled with penetrable stuff” as Shakespeare once put it.

Rohr presents spirituality as a “personal” phenomena, not an ideology. Spirituality is not a mind-set or a template through which we are to view the world as “out there” and needing to be made like me. Spirituality is the process of letting boundaries down and seeing the connection between “me and thee” and between the whole of God’s creation. And the process never ends. We never “get it” as there is nothing to “get”. It is a process. “Saved” and “unsaved”???? Well, the concept does exist in Christianity and most religions have some way of setting themselves apart and reassuring its followers that they are “special.” I now feel that the only “saving” I am responsible for is the saving of my own soul…a life long process which always involves relationships with other people…and which the Apostle Paul had in mind when he instructed us to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.” This “fear and trembling” is the tumult I alluded to earlier.

Here is Rohr’s observations for today:
DUALISTIC THINKING

Resistance to Change
Friday, March 21, 2014

Sadly, the mind trapped inside of polarity thinking is not open to change. How else can we explain the obvious avoidance of so many of Jesus’ major teachings within the Christian churches? Jesus’ direct and clear teachings on issues such as nonviolence; a simple lifestyle; love of the poor and our enemies; forgiveness, inclusivity, and mercy; and not seeking status, power, perks, or possessions have all been overwhelmingly ignored throughout history by mainline Christian churches, even those who so proudly call themselves orthodox or biblical.

This avoidance defies explanation until we understand how dualistic thinking protects and pads the ego and its fear of change. Notice that the things we Christians have largely ignored require actual change to ourselves. The things we emphasized instead were usually intellectual beliefs or moral superiority stances that asked almost nothing of us—but compliance from others: the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth, the atonement theory, and beliefs about reproduction and sex. After a while, you start to recognize the underlying bias that is at work. The ego diverts your attention from anything that would ask you to change, to righteous causes that invariably ask others to change. 1 Such issues give you a sense of moral high ground without costing you anything (e.g., celibate priests who make abortion the only sin). Sounds like an ego game to me.

Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go. Split people split up everything and everybody else. By the second half of our lives, we are meant to see in wholes and no longer just in parts.
1. Adapted from The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, p. 94
2. Adapted from Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life,
p. 151

 

Ego-Ridden, Ersatz Spirituality

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I’ve shared here several times that Richard Rohr steal’s my thoughts. He continues to do that and is rich and famous and I am still poor and unknown. Life is just not fair! In today’s email he again chides Christians for their “dualistic” thinking and points out how the ego is hard at work in this process. It is really unnerving to realize that something as personal as one’s faith can be little more than an ego function, an escape from life, and not the expression of the Divine that one purports it to be. And that is what I’ve had to learn and am continuing to learn about my own faith. But when this truth began to sink in, the first faint glimmer of light dawned in my soul allowing me to see the darkness in which I lived. And I still live in this “darkness” and will always do so even as that “glimmer of Light” brightens each day. For, I now know…and feel…more clearly what the Apostle Paul meant when he declared that “we see through a glass ‘darkly'”.

Let me explain just one facet of the ego’s presence in the spirituality of my early life. One of the first things I learned as a child was the distinction of “saved” vs “unsaved”, a distinction which paralleled the infinite variety of other distinctions I was learning as my innocent world was being carved up into various categories. And, of course at some point I learned that I could recite the correct syllogism, the magical words, and presto I would join the club of “the saved.” This bifurcation of the world followed me through the first half of my life as I hid behind the facade of being “saved” and from that subjective prison lived and felt separate from the whole world, radically disconnected. Now, I didn’t know about this disconnection as I participated in a “saved” culture which daily reassured me that I was “one of them” because I spoke the right language and lived the right life…at least out in public! However, there was always unrest in my soul, an unrest which in the middle of my life began to grow and became a veritable tumult which is now blossoming fully in my life. But this “tumult” is merely the experience of life unfolding in my heart as it opens up and becomes, “filled with penetrable stuff” as Shakespeare once put it.

Rohr presents spirituality as a “personal” phenomena, not an ideology. Spirituality is not a mind-set or a template through which we are to view the world as “out there” and needing to be made like me. Spirituality is the process of letting boundaries down and seeing the connection between “me and thee” and between the whole of God’s creation. And the process never ends. We never “get it” as there is nothing to “get”. It is a process. “Saved” and “unsaved”???? Well, the concept does exist in Christianity and most religions have some way of setting themselves apart and reassuring its followers that they are “special.” I now feel that the only “saving” I am responsible for is the saving of my own soul…a life long process which always involves relationships with other people…and which the Apostle Paul had in mind when he instructed us to “work out our own salvation with fear and trembling.” This “fear and trembling” is the tumult I alluded to earlier.

Here is Rohr’s observations for today:
DUALISTIC THINKING

Resistance to Change
Friday, March 21, 2014

Sadly, the mind trapped inside of polarity thinking is not open to change. How else can we explain the obvious avoidance of so many of Jesus’ major teachings within the Christian churches? Jesus’ direct and clear teachings on issues such as nonviolence; a simple lifestyle; love of the poor and our enemies; forgiveness, inclusivity, and mercy; and not seeking status, power, perks, or possessions have all been overwhelmingly ignored throughout history by mainline Christian churches, even those who so proudly call themselves orthodox or biblical.

This avoidance defies explanation until we understand how dualistic thinking protects and pads the ego and its fear of change. Notice that the things we Christians have largely ignored require actual change to ourselves. The things we emphasized instead were usually intellectual beliefs or moral superiority stances that asked almost nothing of us—but compliance from others: the divinity of Christ, the virgin birth, the atonement theory, and beliefs about reproduction and sex. After a while, you start to recognize the underlying bias that is at work. The ego diverts your attention from anything that would ask you to change, to righteous causes that invariably ask others to change. 1 Such issues give you a sense of moral high ground without costing you anything (e.g., celibate priests who make abortion the only sin). Sounds like an ego game to me.

Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go. Split people split up everything and everybody else. By the second half of our lives, we are meant to see in wholes and no longer just in parts.
1. Adapted from The Naked Now: Learning to See as the Mystics See, p. 94
2. Adapted from Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life,
p. 151

My “Call to Preach”

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I recently started a second blog in which i am deigning to “preach”, explaining in my prefatory remarks that the notion of “preaching” brings to my mind the popular expression of the Valley Girl days, “Barf me with a spoon.” Though I have tried to avoid it, I’m sure that here from time to time as I’ve “held forth” I have ventured into a “preachy” mode in spite of myself. It is just part of who I am; and, fortunately, I approach the subject now with more humility have no pretensions to have any ultimate truth to offer, only my feeble, often self-centered, interpretation of Ultimate Truth.

In my youth, I got the “call” to preach when I was sixteen years of age. Now, of course, this was no surprise to anyone, including myself, as everyone knew that it was in my future. It was a role that had been proffered to me from early on…even from before my birth…as I learned that my mother had promised God that if only He would give her a boy, she would give him to God. Those of you who are clinically minded can immediately see the overwhelming issues that I was presented with even before I had any awareness of what was going on in this bewildering world.

This is such a complicated story but I will be brief. When I “surrendered to the call” at age 16, it really was good for me in some way as finally I had an identity. For, I was not a jock, not even close to being a “BMOC” (Big Man on Campus), and had my hands full carrying myself with the dignity that I did manage to muster forth. But, suddenly I was a “preacher” and I knew who I was. But now, looking back, I see so clearly the problem that I was dealing with on some level in my heart though not consciously at all. For, with this “surrender” I had addressed an ego need but spirituality and spiritual leadership is not about fulfilling our ego needs. I was the “Hollow Man” that T. S. Eliot wrote about though at that age only a “Hollow Boy” who would eventually grow into a “Hollow Man” and spent most of my life in that empty house.

In my early twenties, especially after a year in a hyper-conservative cemetery…I mean, seminary…I knew I had to listen to the tumult in my heart and quit this ersatz ministry. But, at that time, I had no awareness of just how ersatz the whole of my spiritual life was, only that I was very unhappy with it, and needed to escape. So, with great shame and even humiliation, I “renounced” my call to the ministry.

Forty years later, this “call” is still present as in some fashion it was my lot in life. But it no longer is the immature “call” of my youth and I’m not even for sure that “call” is the right term. That ego-laden spirituality of that era of my life is maturing and I’m so delighted that it leaves me with no need to “convert” anyone or to argue with them about spirituality. There is a Presence in this world that I like to call “God” and it/He/She is quite capable of doing any “converting” without any help of my manipulation or intimidation. God is a personal phenomena and if we do the bidding of the Apostle Paul and focus on “working out our own salvation with fear and trembling” we will have our hands full and not have to project out on others our own spiritual inadequacies.