Among the Sufis perplexity is a very important notion and a critical stage in spiritual growth.  My perplexities are not that kind of thing….a bit more mundane but still quite significant.  Here’s a few of them:

A.  Recently there was a story on CNN about the Holy Grail!  And relics in general.

https://www.cnn.com/holy-grail-leon-spain-valencia-genoa/index.html#:~:text=In%20Europe%20alone%2C%20there%20are,them%20and%20pray%20over%20them.

It appears that there are something like 200 churches in Europe that claim they have the Holy Grail (and how many heads of John the Baptist are there?)!  And somebody said that if you added up all the wood that is claimed to be from the Holy Cross, you would be able to build a house.  It seems that in Late Antiquity and in the medieval world there was quite a “relic industry.”  People wanted relics and mementos; people got what they wanted. (Today the tourist business thrives in places with this kind of stuff.) There is a very popular kind of religiosity that seems to be almost centered on relics, “holy sites,” miraculous saints, etc.  I don’t understand this; it is, at least to me, a big puzzle.  

When I was a little boy, I collected baseball cards.  It gave me a feeling of “connectedness” with those guys whom I idolized.  So I kind of get that.  Then, when I was a novice monk, my novice master gave me a relic of St. Sharbel, the Lebanese hermit whom I admired.  And a friend gave me a small rock which he  had brought back from Mt. Athos.  These also gave me a sort of reassuring “connectedness,” but they were not even a small theme in my spirituality.  But it appears that these kind of things seem to be so central to many people. This feels like a crypto  superstition.  So, instead of focusing mind and heart and one’s whole being and life on that one reality which we call God, folks obsess about miracles, “incorrupt bodies,” speaking in tongues, possessing or seeing relics of “holy people,” “holy sites,” paranormal phenomena, etc.   I am totally bewildered what that spirituality is all about.

B.  The election uncovers another bunch of awful puzzles.  Consider this:  a remarkable number of Christians, mostly Protestant Evangelicals, support Trump.  And not just support but believe that he is somehow “God’s chosen one” to protect us from “satanic forces.”  Here is an NBC News story about this:

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/christians-swarm-washington-pray-america-turn-god-electing-trump-rcna175162

I am totally dumbfounded!  One wonders what is  going on!?  Makes one sympathetic to atheists! 

C.   I identify with the Catholic community, so you might think that I feel smug and congratulating myself that I am “not like them,”  the folks above.  Nope.  Can’t do.  There was a poll taken at Notre Dame University among the students, and it turned out that the majority of students preferred Trump.  Catholic voters in Pennsylvania are polling in favor of Trump, etc.  Here’s another recent story:

https://www.ncronline.org/news/catholic-voters-favor-trump-most-battleground-states-according-new-ncr-poll

 Also, so many figures in the Trump camp, like Vance, claim to be committed Catholics.  At the very least don’t these people know something of Catholic social thought?  Odd.  General Milley, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs during the Trump years, recently said that Trump is a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous man” to the welfare of this country.  Things like this do not seem to bother these Catholics.  I really wonder what constitutes the religiosity of these people, what is their spirituality all about?  

One could say that the issue of abortion holds sway here, and I think that may be partially true.  But one issue does not explain this phenomenon.  And I am afraid there is a darker truth here.  Again, not the whole story but definitely it  is  there as a factor.  Over the years you will find a strain of Catholicism that is inclined toward authoritarianism, both in Church and State.  There is this need to impose, even by force, one’s notion of Christianity, indeed, even of Catholicism  itself, one’s notion of social order, one’s notion of patriotism, etc.  These folks have never been comfortable with how messy democracy can get.  Like the monarchist Catholics in France who yearn for some kind of “restoration” of the “old order,” these people look at the pope as s kind of king, and the bishop in his diocese as a kind of king within that realm; and the Church is a Kingdom.  The celebration of the Feast of Christ the King is no longer a redefinition and transformation of power into servanthood, but a theologically warped celebration of religious power.   It’s not hard to see  how that kind of Catholic would be attracted to someone oozing with aspirations to be a “strong man,” a dictator in effect if not in name.  Given all this, I am still puzzled by how warped the Catholicism of some Americans is.  If only they could recognize the distortions within their religiosity……

D.  American history.  I love reading  that stuff and pondering what I learn there.  Inevitably one runs up against a “brick wall” of understanding….it’s impossible to figure out the rationale for some things….because there isn’t any.  Among  the most prominent of these, I think, is slavery.  

The fact is that most Southerners in the pre-Civil War era did not own slaves.  I have seen various estimations that range from 10% to something like 30%.  But the other fact is that the “Southern cause” enthralled the overwhelming majority of Southerners.  Most of those men walking into the fierce Union firepower at Gettysburg…Pickett’s Charge…did not own  slaves.  What were they willing to die for?  For a small minority to be able to own slaves?  Probably not.  Some Southern historians put it this way: for loyalty….to their  land…they were mostly farmers…most of the Southern economy was agrarian…the land which was invaded by the “industrial” North.  Also, loyalty then to their way of life, loyalty to their State, loyalty even to Robert E. Lee.   Insane and delusional.  Thus the myth of the “Lost Cause” rose up, the myth that the South was engaged in a “noble cause.”  It was a lie and a delusion then, and so it is today, no matter what some historians are saying.  It didn’t matter that so few actually owned slaves….the fact is they all tolerated slavery.  After their defeat in the war, the South worked as a whole to structure their society in a segregationist way….not to mention the Klan, vigilante groups, and brutal police forces that terrorized Black people.  Today the South and the border states are peppered with various mementos that valorize this delusion and maintain a remnant of a deeply enigmatic attitude of the  heart, and there is a strong resistance to taking down the statues or renaming some institutions, etc.

  But lest the North get sanctimonious about it, we need to remember that the phenomenon of segregation was prevalent also in the North even if it was not totally institutionalized.  How white people considered black people was a national tragedy that to this day affects us all.  In the Old South this enigma that I am pointing to is the desire not just to see certain people as inferior but even more so to turn another human being into a commodity, a property that I can own.  This goes beyond “not liking” someone, hating them, even seeing them as an “enemy.”  Where does that come from?  Incidentally, slavery in the ancient world was not racially based….usually it meant that you were on the losing side of a war or some conflict.  In the U.S. it was deemed that a whole class of people by nature were somehow less than human or that a whole class of people  can be turned into a commodity because of their very nature.

A religious angle to all this:  where were all the Christian churches in all this?   Apparently all over the place…..from the few that supported the Abolitionist Movement and the Underground Railroad to the many in the Deep South who exemplified a deafening silence about how all this should look to a follower of Christ.  One should also add that a number of religiously grounded colleges, even in the North, benefited from trafficking in slaves.  But what really gets me is that the Jesuits in Maryland owned slaves.  How these ecclesial elites, well-trained in religion and secular studies, endorsed such a practice totally bewilders me.

E.  Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus.  Love the Latin…so succinct!  Usually translated as:  Outside the Church there is no salvation.  First enunciated in this form by St. Cyprian of Carthage in the 3^rd Century, early patristic period.  I forget when but at some point it was declared as an infallible doctrine of the Roman Catholic Church.  I suppose by now one can see a “little” problem in all this!

For centuries, until the Vatican II Council in the early ‘60s, this statement was taken literally.  In part this explains the strong missionary push by the Church, and you can also kind of see how the European colonists looked at the people of the New World…..a part of the “massa damnata” that was doomed to hell.  So even coerced conversions were for their own good!  There were some remarkable exceptions like the few Jesuits who made it to China and India in the  17^th Century.  They were overwhelmed by the beauty, the power, the depth of the religious consciousness they found there.  They tried to adjust their Christianity to fit in but the Vatican put a stop to all that.

With Vatican II the Church softened its view of the other great world religions, but the theologians could not do away with an infallibly declared position.  So there was a problem!  They came up with various solutions, like looking at all these other religions as a good preparation for Christianity and therefore as somewhat “salvific” in a sense; or looking at other religionists as “anonymous Christians,” and so on.   Catholics who had real and deep contact with authentic religious practitioners from the other world religions found these solutions inadequate at best or even totally wrong.  Merton simply ignored this dilemma in the last years of his life and continued exploring the depths of Buddhism and Islam.  The actual lives of these people spoke to him more than the limitations  of some doctrinal conundrum.  Abhishiktananda is even more  interesting because more radical.  In the last years of his life he simply rejected all this.  For him Christianity, the Church,  was “incomplete” without the presence  and insights of the other great world religions.  Our understanding of Christ and who we are is deficient in a serious way without  the vision of the other great religions.  Needless to say doctrinally this does not fly!  At least in any official sense.  And to me it seems that it presents an even deeper enigma…..but one in which I feel much more at home.

I am sitting by a campfire, lively breeze blowing through  giant pine trees, granite cliffs on one side, distant snow-capped mountains on the other; a stream flowing downhill over pebbles and boulders can be heard in the distance; at night the pitch black sky lights up with seemingly endless stars, somewhere far off an owl hooting….  I make a cup of coffee over the fire and converse with this wilderness…. 

Mostly we don’t think of that starry sky as also a wilderness, but it is that.  It is “wild” in the root meaning of that word, not humanly controlled or manipulated, not running by human wisdom, but by its own inner wisdom which the ancient Chinese called the Tao.  I look at the Milky Way, that fuzzy white spread of millions of stars like our sun, our galaxy, and millions of other galaxies out there whose light takes millions, even billions of years to get here….it is all so incomprehensibly and unimaginably vast, and yet in a very real way it is all our home.  Every atom of every fiber of our being was made in those stars billions of years ago…and so with everything we touch, we breathe, we eat….  In the deepest sense there is nothing “out there” that is alien to us.

“Nature is not a place to visit. It is home.”

                                                           Gary Snyder

“I greet the breeze that happens along,

                  and lift a cup to offer to the vastness….”

                                                    Su Shih

BUT, there is a sad story to tell: 

I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating—we, modern humans, experience different kinds of relationships to what we call wilderness:

1. Wilderness is seen as a resource for wealth….lumber, metals, farmlands, land for development, land ownership(privatization of wilderness land), etc.  In other words, wilderness as another commodity.
2. Wilderness as a context for recreation….simply another theme park….
3. Wilderness as an obstacle, a challenge….  The first Europeans who came  upon the Grand Canyon cursed it because  it was getting in their way on the search for the fabled “Seven Cities of Gold.”  Today people jack up their Jeeps and trucks with massive tires and love to ride over the wild terrain.  
4. Wilderness as a context and a kind of boundary for religious/spiritual engagement.  This one is fascinating in its various convolutions:  The early English colonists in North America saw the wilderness as “dangerous,” where the devil had free play, where the “heathen Indians” lived.  Two centuries later, the whole thing flips around in the American Transcendentalist Movement with Emerson and Thoreau, where the wilderness is the locus of spiritual growth.  Similarly with the ancient Christian monks in a not so obvious way.  Wilderness as “opening an inner door” to a Mystery of Wholeness.

Nothing really new in all this….in many ways these four have been with us for a long time…..but it was not always looked on as “wilderness.”

The root of the word “wilderness” is of course “wild,” and this word has taken on so many different shades of meaning over the centuries. “Wild” signifies processes and dynamics that are not human guided, human controlled, human originated, etc.   Millenia ago, during the period of hunter-gatherer cultures, what we call “wilderness” was simply “home.”  There was not this distinction, this dichotomy.  And even in recent ages for some indigenous cultures which had not been touched by the great civilizations of Europe or Asia, this was still true.  Chief Luther Standing Bear:  “Only to the white man was nature a ‘wilderness’ and only to him was the land ‘infested’ with ‘wild’  animals and ‘savage’ people. To us it was tame. Earth was bountiful and we were surrounded with the blessings of the Great Mystery. Not until the hairy man from the east came and with brutal frenzy heaped injustices upon us and the families that we loved was it ‘wild’ for us. When the very animals of the forest began fleeing from his approach, then it was that for us the ‘Wild West’ began.” 

 

Gary Snyder:  “Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and nonliving beings flourishing according to their own sorts of order. In ecology we speak of “wild systems.” When an ecosystem is fully functioning, all the members are present at the assembly. To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness. Human beings came out of that wholeness, and to consider the possibility of reactivating membership in the Assembly of All Beings is in no way regressive….  The wild-often dismissed as savage and chaotic by “civilized” thinkers, is actually impartially, relentlessly, and beautifully formal and free. Its expression-the richness of plant and animal life on the globe including us, the rainstorms, windstorms, and calm spring mornings-is the real world, to which we belong.”

                                                                     

An ancient Chinese poet wrote:  “The nation is destroyed; mountains and rivers remain.”  The poet was Tu Fu (often written as Du Fu), one of China’s finest poets and a giant figure in world literature.  He lived during the great Tang Period, around 750 CE.  This line is taken from a poem written during the end of that period when the cultural, religious, and technical achievements of the Tang were destroyed through a brutal civil war.  Tu Fu’s poetry is suffused with a quiet sadness at the  impermanence of all human constructs, all human endeavors, all that is human….and he engages a kind of awestruck consolation in contemplating the natural world….a theme much favored by many Chinese poets and artists.  From this evolves the awareness that human beings are simply a part of a great community of Being of which  each member, whether it be a blade of grass, a butterfly, a human being, a star, a kitten,  a mountain, a river, etc., unfolds in being through a hidden inner dynamic they called Tao.

Many, many centuries later, a new awareness unfolds,….a modern Japanese poet imitated this line but in reversal:  “Mountains and rivers are destroyed, but the State remains.”

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”

                                                     Aldo Leopold

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence . . .”

                            Wallace Stegner

We get the message!

The fact is that the wilderness has been attacked, abused, exploited in all cultures and in all ages, more or less.  In the Critias, one of Plato’s Dialogues, one of the characters laments about the clear-cutting on the outskirts of Athens which caused serious soil erosion.  Gary Snyder says that as a young man he thought that he had  found in the Japanese and Chinese world, cultures that lived in harmony with nature.  When he went over there he found  that picture was only partially true and more complicated than he first realized.  And so it is everywhere…… Snyder also said that in his opinion the last humans to live in a fully harmonious and true relationship with nature were the neolithic hunter-gatherers.  The moment you have the development of settled communities in agriculture, you begin the process of urbanization and civilization, and then somehow humans lose a certain sense of their place in the great scheme of things and their interactions with the surrounding natural world are largely negative.  (They are tossed out of “Paradise!”)  All the great urban civilizations of the past, Babylon, Athens, Rome, Jerusalem, Xian, etc. have shown destructive tendencies and ignorance of who and what they are  The landscapes of Europe, China….are nothing like what they were 5000, 10,000  years ago.  And modern civilization is way past that point where we can even imagine what that awareness was like.  Mother Nature seems to be trying to get our attention through climate change, but does it really look like we “get it”!?  In modern civilization we find ourselves in this technological/electronic cocoon where wild nature seems alien to most of us, something “out there,”  something maybe set aside for us, for our recreation or perhaps exploitation….  What is  needed here is not some “good intentions,” but a real  transformation of consciousness/awareness that we are a real part of this wild nature and it is truly part of us.  In other words a new, deeper sense of our place in the Community of All Beings.

You would think that religion would help in this regard.  Can only speak for my own Christianity, and this is a truly muddled affair!  There have been environmentalists who have put the whole blame for environmental degradation on a certain mindset that Christianity brings.  They point to Genesis and that mandate to “subdue the earth” and hold dominion over all its creatures…..that this kind of language leads us to see ourselves apart from the natural world, superior to it,  and to activity that is simply for our own gain.  Then, when the first Europeans came to this continent, they came armed with this mindset to the nth degree!  They saw before them a vast wilderness, that which was not civilization as they knew it,  that they could “subdue” and hold dominion over.  Much more troubling, however, were the people who lived in this wilderness, whose very humanity could be questioned; well, they were “wild” in this scheme of things, so they too could be “subdued” and put under the newcomers dominion….if they managed to stay alive…..  The rest of this history is too awful to think about…..

Modern Christian theologians and thinkers have tried to correct this view.  They claim that such an interpretation of Genesis was a distortion of the meaning in the creation story…that humans are charged with a kind of stewardship of the natural world, and the “good steward” is an emphatic scriptural trope.  Pope Francis has reminded us of all that.  That may well be the case; but there still is a problem.  That  mandate is at the very least ambiguous, but more importantly even this “stewardship” thing creates a framework of dualism when you look at wilderness/the natural world.  There is you, the human, and there is the “other,” wild nature; and how do the two “meet” and what transpires in that meeting?

 “Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

                                                                            Aldo Leopold

But there are hints and resources within Christianity for a much different kind of vision, something beyond and deeper than stewardship.  Consider Francis of Assisi, even Isaac the Syrian, or take a look at a fictional representation of a whole tradition in Dostoevsky’s Father Zosima.   And various modern Christian voices like Thomas Merton’s….one of Merton’s favorite lines from the Old Testament was Job 39:26:  “Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars….”  It doesn’t sound like we “own” that hawk!  There’s a Zen  koan in here somewhere!  He called it a pure Zen insight, but that whole “speech” of Yahweh is harmonious with what the ancient Chinese mystics called the Tao.  And then there is the very committed modern Catholic writer, Wendell Berry:

“Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest – the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways – and re-enter the woods. For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence. Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world’s longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it. Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in – to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain. His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them – neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them – and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.”

Very sound and deep,  theologically and spiritually!

And, in concluding our story:

“Pull down thy vanity, it is not man

Made courage, or made order, or made grace,

Pull down thy vanity, I say pull down.

Learn of the green world what can be thy place.”

               Ezra Pound, Canto LXXXI

“The sun shines not on us but in us. The rivers flow not past, but through us. Thrilling, tingling, vibrating every fiber and cell of the substance of our bodies, making them glide and sing. The trees wave and the flowers bloom in our bodies as well as our souls, and every bird song, wind song, and tremendous storm song of the rocks in the heart of the mountains is our song, our very own, and sings our love.”  

                                   John Muir