In our “Foundations” series this is easily my favorite topic–and quite difficult as it engages the previous three parts in new depths. Thus we will be revisiting them as we go along. Let us review where we have touched base: Part I, The Real; Part II, The Mystery & The Knowing; and Part III, The Self. One thing to note immediately: the use of the word “The” in front of each noun is not just a stylistic move. We are not talking about just any “mystery,” but the mystery, the Ultimate Mystery, God. In each and every case the underlying reality is the Divine Reality. Or as Abhishiktananda once whimsically whispered to his dear close friend Murray Rogers, “Mooory, perhaps there is only God!” Already we are swimming in deep waters! So what do you want to awaken to? This question describes the essence of the spiritual journey.

Let us begin in an unusual place– with two religious women of the modern era whom popular piety has made into extraordinary role models: Therese of Lisieux and Mother Teresa of India. We are not going to look at their extraordinary lives or example, but at something quite different: both shared deeply in an experience that was termed by John of the Cross as the “dark night.” It is well documented through their letters, through their writings and through what people close to them heard from them, that Mother Teresa during a period of over 2 decades and Therese for the last year of her life suffered incredible interior desolation. This is not just a case of feeling lost or having made mistakes or dejected by failure, etc. This is a desolation beyond any description. It is a case of a deeply and intensely religious person losing all sense of God, and even more the very idea of the existence of God and faith itself seeming as a mirage—like a person dying of thirst in the desert and grabbing for a handful of sand…. This could be crushing to a person’s psyche no matter how short such an experience (and indeed some psyches do break down and succumb to drink or some other relief and our age is very tolerant and plentiful of such “reliefs”), but imagine Mother Teresa having to endure this for decades and still continue in her work. And it appears that even on her deathbed she never came out of that tunnel in this life.

Whether such experience is a prerequisite to all mystical journeys is not clear. Western Christian mysticism is replete with such accounts(even with poets like T. S. Eliot), and Sufi masters also report many such similar experiences. In fact it was once thought that John of the Cross “stole” some of his ideas and language from some great Sufi mystics, but now we recognize that both sides have their own version with its own integrity. Now someone like Abhishiktananda who drew so much from the Advaitic mysticism of Hinduism seems to be totally free of such experience, but then we don’t really know what would have happened if he had lived longer. In any case, not all journeys are the same and one has to take that into account. And we have to avoid at all costs the kinds of evaluations, comparisons and “rankings” that make one prefer this tradition of mysticism to that one. Trust me, when you are real, there is no choosing, no “shopping” for a spiritual way, no copying of another’s way. It’s either real with you or it isn’t, no matter what anyone says in any book. And incidentally Eastern Christians also tend to deny that such experiences are part of their mysticism, but I wouldn’t be so hasty. Recall that other spiritual giant of the 20th Century, Staretz Silouan of Mt. Athos, or now St. Silouan. His mysterious words, those words which he heard in his heart: “Keep your mind in hell and despair not”—these words may be interpreted precisely as a harbinger of that “dark night” for indeed what is “hell” but the very absence of God. Silouan, that great hesychast, entered the great dark emptiness and made his home there night after night in prayer because…..

Ah, but let us not jump too far ahead of ourselves. So what does all this have to do with our topic, the heart and the awakening? Here Merton (in speaking of Sufi mysticism) will help us out:

“The basic thing in Sufism then is…the awakening to total awareness and to a real deep sense of the Reality of God. Not…a sense of God as object, not a sense of God as thing…not that we see God over there or out there or up there…and it is even to a great extent beyond this I/Thou dichotomy, because I would say that one of the characteristic things that affects mystical awareness of God is that it is somehow subjective. That is to say, an awareness of God as Subject, an awareness that God is within my own subjectivity, that He is the root of my own personality so that I do not see Him as somebody else entirely and yet He is Totally Other.” Now the really important part for us at this moment is the first half of his statement. What happens to people who have a very strong religious will that has been educated to focus on God and to “please” God is that inevitably they place God somewhere “out there.” The Reality of God is another object in the world of objects that vies for their attention, albeit through religious language and symbolism and involving a very sincere and heartfelt piety, that vies for their attention among all the other objects of what seems like reality. So God “becomes” their friend, their brother, their lover, their liberator, etc, but truly they do not yet know and love God as He calls them to an unspeakable intimacy beyond all intellectual distinctions and symbols. These metaphors and images are good and serve a useful purpose in a life of piety and service, but the true seeker is called to something far beyond–to a knowledge and a love that will entail a kind of death. The Sufis call it “fana,” extinction!

So at some point for the prayerful and true “seeker of God,” who already feels the “gravitational pull” of the Presence, it may happen that the “gushing spring” of their piety suddenly dries up. Their religious life that has been under the control of their ego self, even unconsciously and unbeknownst to them as they are probably very used to speaking the language of renunciation and spirituality and maybe monasticism, that religious life has to die; or perhaps to put it better, it has to be liberated from the ego self, from its grasp and control. But something even more important will also be taking place at this time. All notions of the reality of God will vanish and seem unreal. What is happening then is that the senses and the intellect are being weaned away from those “mirages” of God’s Presence which we so ably construct, even subconsciously and sometimes with much feeling and thought and energy and will-power. What is happening is, in Eckhart-like language: we are “losing God” in order to “gain God.” What is happening is that what is truly Real, what is the Ultimate Mystery, is now our sole reality; and because it can never be limited or fully symbolized or ever be simply an object out there, even as a friend, as another “Thou” somewhere “out there,” everything in us and about us will feel an unspeakable emptiness–and maybe for a long time. Because truly there is nothing, (or as some would put it) no-thing, “out there”—meaning that which is of ultimate concern to us is not a “something” or even a “someone” somewhere out there, and that means even within our own intellect and psychology and its feelings and emotions. What is happening is the person discovering his/her true heart and its awakening, a truly different reality–which is not possible as long as we objectify “our heart,” our relationship to God, and God Himself. But the darkness of the awakening is only the paradoxical emergence of a “Wholly Other” Light that is still somehow our light but which cannot be objectified.

So finally we have come to our topic: the heart! The best sources for understanding this topic come from the Christian Hesychasts and the Islamic Sufis with a hefty portion of Abhishiktananda’s Advaitic mysticism thrown in. To be sure there are examples and insights in other traditions that may run very deep and true, but we are already in danger of being too scattered! So what is the meaning of any discourse about this reality of “the heart”? Let us listen to the hesychast scholar and bishop-monk, Kallistos Ware: “It means that the human person is a profound mystery, that I understand only a very small part of myself, that my conscious ego-awareness is far from exhausting the total reality of my authentic Self. But it signifies more than that. It implies that in the innermost depths of my heart I transcend the bounds of my created personhood and discover within myself the direct unmediated presence of the living God. Entry into the deep heart means that I experience myself as God-sourced, God-enfolded, God-transfigured.”

And Merton again: “Sufism looks at the human person as a heart and a spirit and a secret, and the secret is the deepest part. The secret of man is God’s secret; therefore, it is in God. My secret is God’s innermost knowledge of me, which He alone possesses. It is God’s secret knowledge of myself in Him, which is a beautiful concept. The heart is the faculty by which man knows God….” And so here we add the notion of self-knowledge. An Arabic word that often stands for “Sufism” in the texts is ma’rifah which simply means “knowledge” or “recognition”—but this is a very deep and special knowledge, not one gained from books or just the intellect. This kind of knowledge that both the Sufis and the Hesychasts talk about demands knowing one’s innermost deep self, and this so-called self-knowledge is a prerequisite for knowing God. Here again, it will not be a simple knowledge of subject-object which makes up the world of the ego self. However, a direct knowledge of self and God will flow freely when there is purity of heart. “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.” And so what you awaken to can also be expressed in another metaphor as in Eckhart’s words: “The eye [of the Heart] with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.” End of duality! Indeed, and actually then you see all of reality that is truly “out there” very differently. Consider the following words of a modern Sufi master, the Moroccan Shaikh ad-Darqawi, who relates this experience during one of his prayer sessions:

“I was in a state of remembrance and my eyes were lowered and I heard a voice say: ‘He is the First and the Last and the Outwardly Manifest and the Inwardly Hidden.’ I remained silent, and the voice repeated it a second time, and then a third, whereupon I said: ‘As to the First, I understand, and as to the Last, I understand, and as to the Inwardly Hidden, I understand, but as to the Outwardly Manifest, I see nothing but created things.’ Then the voice said: ‘If there were any outwardly manifest other than Himself, I should have told thee.'” [emphasis mine] Recall Abhishiktananda’s words to “Mooory.”

But let us take a few steps back now. Kallistos Ware, commenting on a Macarian Homily: “‘There [the Heart] also is God’: the heart is the place where created personhood becomes transparent to the Divine, where God the Holy Trinity is at work within me. ‘All things are there’: the heart is all-inclusive, all-embracing, a symbol of wholeness, integration, and totality, signifying the human person as an ‘undivided’ unity.” Thus the whole spiritual life and the very meaning of so-called mysticism rests on this “awakening of the Heart.” But listen to Eckhart:

“A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don’t know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox’s or bear’s, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.” And almost every tradition has something similar to say, and we will have to discuss this in another blog posting. But the Sufis put it most profoundly, I think, when they say that we need to “break all the idols” that we carry within ourselves. This is part of the function of a “dark night” experience. (It is not the experience of intense ecstasy or any other physical manifestation that insures the truth of what is going on within ourselves or measures what we might call “progress”; and any attempt to detour self-knowledge is delusional) It is only then that we awaken to the Divine Indwelling in the Heart.

So the Heart has to do with truly knowing and loving God through a very deep and profound self-knowledge. One can and must say that also and at the same time one can only know one’s true self in the light of God. So the two are concurrent, and this is part of the Awakening. As Merton put it in the quote in the beginning, the Awakened Heart will no longer know God as object or even as “another Thou”, but for the Awakened Heart the Reality will spring up from within one’s own “I am.” The “I AM” of God will be within the “I am” of my own subjectivity. Recall Augustine’s famous words:

“God is closer to me than I am to my own self”; and St. Paul’s, “I live now, not I, but Christ lives in me.” These point us in the right direction of what is at stake in the Awakening of the Heart. An additional point: And the Sufis are real strong on this–that the God whom we find in unspeakable communion with our being is not just some “generic God,” but precisely because we find Him in the depths of our own subjective being, there is something very deeply personal about this relationship. Sounds even odd to speak that way, but that’s why those evangelicals who speak of a need to “have a personal relationship with Jesus” are really not far off; they are on the right track, only they have Him too far away as it were and too locked into an image of a friend, a brother, etc. I don’t know how to relate all this to the Upanishadic vision or to Zen; and people who tend to follow those routes, like Abhishiktananda, are not real strong in this regard. We shall discuss this another time. Anyway, for the Sufis and the Hesychasts what is important here is that each and every person (and indeed every being) is called by God by a name known only to God, and our whole life and our whole being, our whole existence is a saying of “Here I am.” And each and every creature is saying that as it exists, and because it is being called into existence by Love, so each and every person’s proper way of responding, “Here I am,” is by love–and here again we shall discuss this later. Now at the same time, in the depths of our Heart, we have an infinitely unique name for God by which we call Him. It is the Name by which he has become “My God,” not just a generic ruler of the universe! And the marvel is of course that He himself has placed that Name in my Heart, and the name by which He calls me and the Name by which I call Him become one Name in Love, and this constitutes my truest and deepest uniqueness. Merton again: “The desire of God is tied up in our hearts with this deep sense, the deepest thing in our nature, not that He is a god, not that He is God or the Supreme Being, but that he is Our God, that He is My God. When Jesus says on the cross, “My God why has thou forsaken me?” it isn’t just God, it is “My God.” Sufism is a particular way of realizing that “Yes” in a total love, a total surrender of ourselves to God.” And in another place, Merton again: “…the Sufis have this beautiful development of what this secret really is: it is the word ‘yes’ or the act of ‘yes.’ It is the secret affirmation which God places in my heart, a ‘yes’ to Him. And that is God’s secret. he knows my ‘yes’ even when I am not saying it.” This is that “Here am I” that I was referring to. And in a sense this is the key to what the Hesychasts call Prayer of the Heart, but about that also another time.

So it must be emphasized that it is in the very ground of one’s own being and subjectivity, one’s deepest sense of “I am,” that it is in this true nothingness we become the very ground of God’s Presence and Manifestation and Love–again, like Moses’s Burning Bush, or the Desert Father “becoming all fire.” This requires a deep plunge into the depths of one’s self because we are not speaking here of the ego self’s “I am” that we broadcast to the world with all its credentials–but it is true also that the deep self is always there at our fingertips as it were, as we are washing the dishes or taking a walk or bandaging someone’s wounds, etc.–we are always grounded in Ultimate Mystery, surrounded by Ultimate Mystery, facing Ultimate Mystery, and without any need for any words or formulas. That’s why I think there are some very deep mystics among us who don’t even realize what their sensitivity means, but that’s ok. Abhishiktananda summed up the whole spiritual journey in one phrase: the total surrender of the peripheral ego to Absolute Mystery. Another of his profound contributions in this area is his criticism of any spirituality that would “superimpose” the Reality of God on the rest of life, which was extremely common for the religious of his time and even now. With the Awakened Heart there is nothing that we do that is not the ground of realization and mysticism. Abhishiktananda said that the most contemplative religious he ever knew was that busy nursing sister, Mother Theophane, who was his friend at Indore and who took care of him as he was dying.

Let us conclude this mere introduction to our topic with the words of a great modern Sufi scholar, Seyyed Hossein Nasr:

Through quintessential prayer, within the framework of an orthodox tradition, one reaches the inner heart, where God as the All-Merciful resides, and by penetration into the heart-center, man moves beyond the realm of outwardness and the domain of individual existence to reach the abode of inwardness and the universal order. In that state his heart becomes the eye with which he sees God and also the eye with which God sees him. In that presence he is nothing in himself, as separate existence. He is but a mirror whose surface is nothing, and yet reflects everything. In the heart, the spiritual man lives in intimacy with God, with the Origin of all those theophanies whose outward manifestations constitute all the beauty that is reflected in the world around us. He lives in that inner garden, that inner paradise, constantly aware of the ubiquitous Gardener. On the highest level of realization, man becomes aware that all theophanies are nothing but the Source of those theophanies, that the house itself is nothing but the reflection of the Master of the house, that there is in fact but one Reality which , through its infinite manifestations and reflections upon the mirrors of cosmic existence, has brought about all that appears to us as multiplicity and otherness, and all the apparent distinctions between I and thou, he and they, we and you. At the center of the heart, there resides but one Reality above and beyond all forms. It was to this Reality, far beyond all individual manifestations, that Mansur al-Hallaj was referring when he sang:

I saw my Lord with the eyes of my heart; I asked Him, Who are Thou? He said, Thou.

Amen!

Recently on the CNN website there was an interesting little reflection on the Bible. The author was trying to illustrate the “messiness” of the Bible and how there is a religious culture out there that has been too successful in “sanitizing” the language and the ideas in that remarkable book. The author is Steven James, and here is the link to the reflection:

http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2012/02/25/my-take-stop-sugarcoating-the-bible/?hpt=hp_c1

Very well put, but I don’t think the author goes far enough or deep enough. Certainly it is worthwhile to bring to the fore the rough edges of the people of the Bible and the fact that they are not “prayer-card saints.” But the author only hints at a much deeper problem and dilemma for the true believer, if only he/she opens their eyes or perhaps we should say open their ears for the Word of God is meant to be heard.

All of us in the Christian tradition consider the Bible the “Word of God,” but what we exactly mean by that can vary quite a bit and what authority we attribute to this text can also vary. I am not going to discuss all that, but what I want to point at is a problem regardless of your place within the Christian tradition or how much you rely on the Bible as the “Word of God.” There is this little problem that in the Bible God seems to condone, indeed even orders, some “unsocial behavior,” like pillaging and stealing, like genocide and murder, and a host of other rather nasty actions. Consider the following: If the parents of a son find his behavior reprehensible and find him disobedient, they can bring him to the elders of the town and say: “This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a drunkard. Then all the men of the town shall stone him to death.” (Dt 21:20-21). No unruly teenagers then!! “Tommy if you don’t clean up your room we are going to take a walk to see the elders!” Sorry, couldn’t resist that one….. Now the real problem here is that this is presented as the Law of God, as the law given to Israel by God. Conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists who believe that every word in the Bible was actually dictated by God should have a real problem with this kind of passage—except that they usually don’t; they just ignore it because it would create anxiety about their “theory of inspiration.” Liberal Protestants and most Catholics who have a more nuanced idea of divine inspiration say that you need to read such passages within a larger context in order to understand what is really going on. In other words, don’t get lost in minute details that may in fact have very human limitations, but look at the larger story of God’s call and promise, etc., etc. Ok, that sounds nice, but it leaves me wondering. There are just too many such passages, and I can’t get over that the Book PRESENTS God in that way. Another example: “A man or a woman who is a medium or a wizard shall be put to death; they shall be stoned to death….” (Lev 20: 27). Just an aside: God is presented as very liberal with the death penalty. “When the daughter of a priest profanes herself through prostitution, she profanes her father; she shall be burned to death” (Lev21: 9). And then this: “When the Israelites were in the wilderness, they found a man gathering sticks on the sabbath day. Those who found him gathering sticks brought him to Moses, Aaron, and to the whole congregation. They put him in custody, because it was not clear what should be done to him. Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘The man shall be put to death; all the congregation shall stone him outside the camp'” (Numbers 15: 33-35).

Now all the above pertains to so-called God-given laws concerning individual actions. But there are even more troubling things yet! When the Israelites are liberated by God from Egypt, they are directed again by God to enter this particular land and make it their own. Only one little problem: there are people there already. Not to worry, just listen to the Lord: “But the Lord said to Moses, ‘Do not be afraid of him; for I have given him into your hand, with all his people, and all his land. You shall do to him as you did to Sihon of the Amorites….’ So they killed him, his sons, and all his people, until there was no survivor left; and they took possession of the land”(Numbers 21: 34-35). And then there is this lovely moment in salvation history: “The Lord said to me, ‘See, I have begun to give Sihon and his land over to you. Begin now to take possession of his land.’ So when Sihon came out against us, he and all his people for battle at Jahaz, the Lord our God gave him over to us; and we struck him down, along with his offspring and all his people. At that time we captured all his towns, and in each town we utterly destroyed men, women, and children. We left not a single survivor. Only the livestock we kept as spoil for ourselves, as well as the plunder of the towns that we had captured”(Dt 2: 31-35). But then we reach a kind of crescendo of “justified” genocide in this remarkable passage: “When you draw near to a town to fight against it, offer it terms of peace. If it accepts your terms of peace and surrenders to you, then all the people in it shall serve you in forced labor. If it does not submit to you peacefully, but makes war against you, then you shall besiege it; and when the Lord your God gives it into your hand, you shall put all males to the sword. You may, however, take as your booty the women, the children, livestock, and everything else in the town, all its spoil…. Thus shall you treat all the towns that are very far from you, which are not towns of the nations here. But as for the towns of these peoples that the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance, you must not let anything that breathes remain alive. You shall annihilate them–the Hittites and the Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and Jebusites–just as the Lord your God has commanded….”(Dt 20: 10-17).

Enough of these wretched passages! Now some may be saying that I am totally ignoring the New Testament; that’s where the “good stuff,” the “real stuff” is…. Fair enough, but has anyone recently read the Book of Revelation. A very violent text, and it seems written by someone on a bad acid trip or having ingested some bad peyote! Educated Christians will tell you that this language has to be read symbolically. (And indeed there are problematic texts in all the major world religions and something similar is usually deployed in order to “save the text”.) Not bad for an answer, but you have to admit there is something jarring about this language that makes it not seem in accord with the major thrust of the New Testament. Of course that is so true of such a large part of the Old Testament as we have indicated above. And so the Christian tradition has developed various strategies for dealing with this, and one of them is the “spiritualizing,” the “allegorizing,” the “symbolizing” of the problematic texts. The Church Fathers and the medieval monks were especially masters in this art. I mean you had to be if you were a monk and had to chant all those psalms every day, more so than we do today, and deal with all that violent language that seemed so much against the grain of the Gospels. So you turned that language into a message about something else.

This kind of strategy works up to a point, but there is one serious flaw that people tend to overlook. That kind of language tends to infiltrate one’s subconscious, one’s heart and mind, one’s worldview, etc. And it lives there alongside the language of the Gospel, not displaced by it. Inevitably it rears its ugly head in various ways through the centuries. There is a famous speech by (St.) Bernard of Clairvaux, the great Cistercian monastic leader, rallying French Christians to one of the crusades, and the language and spirit is right out of that early Biblical world. He urges them to slaughter the Moslems and liberate Jerusalem. And that language was already used against the Albigensians even earlier, living right there in France. And just think of all those heretics which the Church led to torture and burning, thousands upon thousands. And Protestents who think that was a “Catholic problem,” please take a look at Protestent Switzerland and the Puritans in colonial America and Oliver Cromwell, etc. And then there were the Serb Christians who massacred their own Moslem neighbors just a few decades ago. I suggest it is that language and imagery lurking in the Christian subconscious mind that at least assists and empowers such evils. Incidentally, the genocide of Native Americans started in colonial America, both in the Protestant Puritan colonies and in Catholic Spanish areas, and how the early accounts are couched in religious terms! Even our secular spirit of “American exceptionalism” as our leaders like to term it, which seems to give us immunity to commit war crimes and wage wars, has its roots in that old Biblical blindness.

Needless to say this Biblical problem is not unique to people of faith. Genocide, violence, etc. can be found quite easily in secular ideologies like communism or fascism to an almost unimaginable degree; and its manifestations are also present in all the major world religions. So it is, first and foremost, a human problem; but it is very important to see how the Bible is implicated and ensnared in this. Now let us see how we can pry open a door just a little bit to maybe get a glimpse of a way out of this dilemma without trashing the Book.

We have already mentioned the “spiritualizing” approach and its serious limitations, but there were some earlier attempts also–that failed also.

One attempted way out was proposed in early Christianity, as already many Christians felt uneasy with some of these elements in the Bible. It was proposed that you simply separate the Old Testament from the New Testament in a rigid way and simply reject the Old Testament as a mistake or failure of sorts. You dumped the Old Testament in the trash can. This was deemed a heresy by the early Church. You simply can’t do that because the writings of the New Testament depend on the Old Testament, are connected to them, and see themselves as grounded in the Old Testament. But even more importantly the very person of Jesus did not reject the Old Testament. And here we come to a crucial point. It is actually in the very person of Jesus that we find a way to transcend our dilemma. Jesus arises out of the whole messy and bloody context of the Old Testament, and he is totally and culturally connected with it and its language and its history, but the amazing thing is that even given all that he subverts that history and language, deconstructs its dark messages, and overthrows all notions of God that are limited and colored by that history and language. He does all that from within its own parameters, without as it were “cleaning the slate and starting fresh”–which would have indicated him as a kind of “outsider” to the human condition.

Consider the following: In the Gospel of Matthew, in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus is presented as a new lawgiver, in the mode of Moses. Read it carefully and you will see that while the framing of the discourse is well within the “Moses tradition,” the “Moses language” is being turned inside out, emptied out, vacuumed out, washed out, and then something wholly new is put back in its place with an amazing feel of real continuity with the old stuff. When you get to the end of the Sermon, you sense that something new has taken place here, replacing the old. It is labelled a sermon, and Jesus is presented as a teacher with authority–he is not just spinning ideas from the top of his head but this is coming from somewhere deep within him. Recall that this Sermon takes place immediately after the Baptism narrative and the period of trial in the desert. As we have said in earlier blog postings, Jesus comes out of these experiences with his new found sense of identity as “Son of God,” as one with Yahweh in an unimaginable intimacy. Thus he speaks with authority, but the authority is used in a very interesting way—certainly not to lord it over people but actually to be divinely subversive. I recall when I was teaching school in the early 1970s that one of my favorite books on education theory was a book with a title something like: Teaching As A Subversive Activity. The idea was that at the bottom of it all the teacher’s main job was to empower his students to unmask the various ideologies that impoverished their hearts, their minds, their lives. In this sense we can say that Jesus was practicing “Preaching as a subversive activity”!! And this is only one example. No wonder they put him to death! After this sermon, if you really take it in, you cannot read the Old Testament the same way, not even its nice passages. Even when the Law reads nicely, the very idea of the Law has been deconstructed and “re-visioned” so that a whole new dynamic is present. Yet Jesus is still presented as a traditional law-giver–so both continuity and discontinuity are present in Jesus.

Another example: Consider in the Gospel of John, chapter 8, 1-11, the woman caught in adultery. What an amazing scene! The woman has been caught in adultery, and the law of the Old Testament is very clear that she should be stoned to death. The Taliban, among others, still practice such things today. In any case, note how Jesus does not argue with the accusers—he is NOT a lawyer! He is not trying to get her “off.” He does not reject the law or its context or its history. Neither is he attacking the law itself or any interpretation of the law. This is so remarkable! Again, a sense of something new emerges, something new unfolding, a new reality. It is so amazing that it makes the old law impotent. The accusers cannot act. The old law has been subverted, deconstructed, replaced in such a quiet way that you don’t even realize it. Don’t get fooled by the simplicity of Jesus’s words—they are not simple, and there is so, so much buried in them.

Now what is going on in these kinds of passages, what is really at stake here: it is our very image of God, our vision of the Mystery of God, our very sense of God is being redefined from within the tradition. Nothing less than that. And the climax of all that is of course Jesus on the cross. Those of us in the Christian tradition believe in the ultimate value of this vision and what it reveals about God. (Incidentally that’s why I believe the crucifix as religious symbol is so far superior than just the cross.) So, so striking that Jesus is crucified for blasphemy. The Law would have had him “only” stoned, but the Romans added their touch. So this is the ultimate subversion of that Law— when we see Jesus on the cross we see where THAT can take us. Jesus on the cross throws us into a world “beyond Law,” and it reveals all law in its human limitations (and thus also the Book, which contains the Law, and thus also the Church which claims the Book.)

The Jerusalem religious elite turned this Jewish man over to the Romans because in their historical situation only the Romans could do what the law demanded: execution. (Incidentally, there is something eerie about the parallelism here because the Church authorities during the Inquisition never executed any heretics–they always turned them over to the state authorities for that unpleasant job–so some church apologists want to excuse the church from the horrors of the Inquisition.) Thus veneration of the Cross on Good Friday is especially significant ( and so subversive)–gaze on it with your heart’s eyes. But there is even something more remarkable if we consider this moment “from God’s side” as it were. In Jesus on the cross, God comes to join ALL the victims of the Law! Recall that old Black Spiritual, “Were You There When They Crucified My Lord?” In Jesus on the cross, God says YES I was there when they tortured and burned each and every one of those children of mine deemed as heretics; Yes, I was there with my Moslem children as they were slaughtered by the Christians; Yes, I was there when the Native Americans were being massacred. And so on. And so on. No need to make a catalog of nightmares. And if you still want an explanation for all that, I will simply refer you to the most unusual spiritual master, Dostoyevsky in Brothers Karamazov, for he understood Christianity and the human heart better than all our church leaders ever did. So at the end of this tunnel lies Good Friday. And a vision of that Ultimate Mystery which we call God that in Jesus on the cross makes us transcend all our laws, all our books, all our ideas. Beyond that is a silent waiting for something even yet more astounding, but here only real silence is possible. And maybe pancakes!

A. The war drums are beating. Various elements here in the US and elsewhere are trying to lure Iran into a war. And there are crazy elements in Iran quite eager also in the folly of going to war. The leadership in Iran is NOT good, maybe even can be said to be evil, but do not trust what the mass media have to say about Iran. Most of it will be propaganda–just like it was before the Iraq war. Nobody in the newsmedia questioned all those crazy claims of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq. Somehow Iraq got turned into a threat to the US. Something similar is going on with Iran. Very few voices of clarity around to point out what is happening. One of them, as usual, is Noam Chomsky. Thanks to the Huffington Post and TruthDigger we get his refreshing clarity on Iran and the whole Middle East:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/noam-chomsky/us-iran-israel_b_1278865.html

B. This is from SNAP, the Survivors Network Against Priest Abuse–they have vigorously been pursuing church abusers of young people for over a decade, but the Church has been fighting back. Here is the latest from them, read and weep:

“In October, SNAP Director David Clohessy was served with a subpoena in Kansas City by church defense lawyers. They demanded emails, correspondence and other records (some going back 23 years) including deeply private conversations with victims, their names and the details of the abuse they suffered.

Last month, Clohessy and SNAP Outreach Director Barbara Dorris were hit with more subpoenas, this time from the St. Louis archdiocese. Naturally our first concern was, and remains, the privacy of victims, most of whom never have or never will speak publicly or take any kind of legal action. We also quickly realized, however, that these wide-ranging demands also sought communications between SNAP and thousands of other individuals we help: family members,witnesses, whistleblowers, journalists, therapists, concerned Catholics and law enforcement officials. Our first duty is to those who seek and sought our guidance. For that reason, we fought tooth and nail to keep David from having to testify. Ultimately, we lost that fight. David was deposed. But he adamantly refused to give any names or private details about victims. And we’re refusing to turn over any documents with similar information.

The ramifications of these actions have already hit SNAP hard. Owing to massive legal bills which we cannot pay at this time, we have been forced to ask our attorney in Kansas City to withdraw from the case. The fact is we can no longer afford to pay him and still keep the lights on. We are seeking pro-bono help as the case moves forward and will update you as to our progress. Meanwhile in Kansas City, attorneys for the Catholic Church have moved forward with a “Motion to Compel” SNAP Director, David Clohessy to reveal private information about members and victims connected with SNAP and the case against Father Joseph Tierney. We will not reveal any of the information the church is requesting. The privacy of our survivors and members is absolutely paramount! So, David is preparing himself and his family as he faces jail time if necessary.

Over two decades ago, we in SNAP pledged ourselves to protect and help victims, witnesses, whistleblowers, police, prosecutors, journalists, in fact anyone who was working to stop and expose child sex crimes and cover ups. That promise has not and will not be broken, no matter what forces are arrayed against us. The fact that we have been so successful is the chief reason that we now find ourselves in this painful and threatening situation. However it is one we shall win.

Your support has been critical in our accomplishing our mission and is even more essential now. We, therefore, ask that you consider making a donation in order to help us meet the unprecedented challenge which faces us. In order to donate, simply go online to our donate page. Alternatively you can or mail it to SNAP: P.O. Box 6416, Chicago, Illinois 60680-6416 or call our Development department at (312) 455-1499. Meanwhile,. I want to assure you that SNAP remains as committed to end clergy sex crimes and cover ups as ever. These are difficult times, but we will prevail together. ”

Amazing stuff. Note how on the one hand the Catholic Church says it is so sorry for what happened to the victims and says that it wants to help them, but in reality it is seeking to intimidate, threaten and silence anyone coming forward with what must have been a truly horrible experience that can ruin a life. Hard to go to church after reading this.

C. The social, political and economic situation in the US is getting ever crazier(never mind that Europe is not far behind!). Corporations and corporate money are gaining more and more control and totally corrupting democracy. Democrats are extremely weak and are easily bought with corporate money. Republicans worship at the corporate idol. And their election rhetoric is so insane that I have never seen it so bad in my lifetime. The top 1% own the political process “lock, stock and barrel.” We do not live in a democracy but a plutocracy–rule by the wealthy.

Republicans practically go apoplectic at the thought of raising taxes on the rich. “How dare you punish ‘job creators!'” Well lets get this real straight. One big fat lie or piece of propaganda is that the rich are “job creators.” They are nothing of the sort. Job creation takes place when there is a demand for goods; the manufacturer then hires more people to make more goods and deliver them because he sees an opportunity to make money, but no one starts out by saying, Let me see I will hire so many more people. There is no hiring if there is no demand for goods. And the people who buy the most goods are the so-called middle class: the lower middle class and the higher middle class. This group of people are being squeezed real bad by the economic and tax policies of the Republicans. Thus the incoherence.

Then, another thing:

The rich pay an awfully low percentage in taxes. Corporations sometimes pay absolutely nothing even though they make billions. There is a profound incoherence in the tax code—the product of both Dems and Republicans. Now consider this, Obama is called a “socialist” because he wants millionaires to pay at least a 30% tax rate AFTER their first million of income. But during the Eisenhower years, those same rich people paid a 91% tax rate!!! And we were a booming economy and a growing middle class. Finally consider this whole debt problem. The Republicans have made it a big issue and Obama has bought into it. What’s shocking is that so many of our political leaders, and Republicans especially, have their eyes set on Social Security, Medicare, and other so-called entitlement programs–anything that affects the common or poor American, as if these programs were the cause of this debt. Hey lets take a look at the Defense budget. They are barely trimming the Defense budget–it is a “sacred cow” or I should say a “cash cow” for so many people in Washington. Why do we have these trillion dollar wars? Why do we have military bases in over 80 countries? And then there is this enormous national security apparatus that nobody really knows much about and how much money goes down THAT toilet. After WWII (and maybe earlier) these people realized that there was enormous money to be made if we had adequate “enemies”—I mean we have to have enemies for the sake of this industry, so if the enemies are not naturally there, we will go and make them appear either through our propaganda or even better through our actions make someone into an enemy. It is absolute insanity, and this is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Another thing: this pipeline thing the oil companies want from Canada, cutting through the whole U.S. from north to south. There are a lot of problems with this pipeline and the way this oil is being extracted, but opponents of the pipeline are being shouted down as being “anti-American,” not caring about Americans getting oil, the price of oil going up because we don’t have this pipeline, etc. However, as it turns out this oil would NOT stay in the US anyway but would be refined and shipped out. In other words it would be sold to other countries for the profit of the oil companies. Did you know that gasoline is our #1 export? As a matter of fact most of the oil drilled in the US and Canada does not stay in North America but gets sold and shipped out. Most Americans don’t realize that. Also, we have a surplus of oil in the US at this time–the demand for gasoline is the lowest since 2007. But shouts for the pipeline keep coming because it will mean greater profits for the oil companies.

The incoherence and insanity of it all will collapse the whole economy eventually—I will be rooting for that, but unfortunately there will be suffering too before something more rational can be rebuilt. In any case, this is truly the Age of the Hermit; like the old Chinese hermits it’s good to “lie low.”

D. Here is a chart that shows statistics of military spending by all the top countries in the world. Note where the US is! It turns out that the US spends as much as ALL the other top countries COMBINED:

E. In another vein, and more uplifting: There is this lovely Sufi saying by Ibn ‘Ata’illah al-Iskandari:

“Behold what shows to thee His Omnipotence, (may He be exalted): it is that He hides Himself from thee by what has no existence apart from Him.”

A lot there in that saying!

F. Two words: fakir, and dervish. Again we are in the Sufi element. “Fakir” is the Arabic “faqir,” and “dervish” is the Turkish pronunciation of the Persian(Iranian) “darvish”. Both words are very close in meaning. “Faqir” is simply the Arabic word for “poor man.” While the roots of “darvish” are not as clear, it seems to come from a term that means “standing by the door.” In both cases the emphasis is on spiritual poverty, which is an extremely important value for the Sufis.

When the Mughal Empire ruled in India, the term “fakir” began to be applied expansively to non-Muslim yogis and ascetics. When the British conquered India they inherited this terminology and thus Churchill called Gandhi “a naked fakir”–fro Chuurchill it was a term of derision.

Possibly only the Russian Orthodox holy figures–the monks, hermits, fools, and pilgrims—had anything even close to the kind of emphasis on spiritual poverty and that quality of a self-emptying kenosis that the Sufis developed.

G. Speaking of Gandhi, James Douglas, the well-known teacher of nonviolence and peace activist and friend of Merton, has written a new book with the title: “Gandhi and the Unspeakable.” It is about Gandhi’s last days and about his assassination. A few years back Douglas had written a book about the Kennedy assassination with a similar title: Kennedy and the Unspeakable. A short but cogent review of the Kennedy book by Oliver Stone can be found here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/oliver-stone/jfk-and-the-unspeakable_b_243924.html

The Gandhi book may be important for several reasons: for a better understanding of Gandhi himself, and for a better appreciation and understanding of how very dark forces can be circulating even in a country and a culture as religious as India.

H. The current issue (#100) of the magazine Adbusters is an absolute must read. These are the folks who literally invented the “Occupy Movement,” and even though the movement is largely powerless and almost irrelevant in the larger scheme of things, it has provided an opportunity to voice the pain many people feel in this economy. Adbusters has been the only thing out there in the mass media to deconstruct the current economic ideology in a creative way and to offer some possibilities of alternative visions.

I. You would think that the well-to-do, not having to struggle for a livelihood, would be more likely candidates for expressions of compassion toward their fellow human beings. You would think that the rich, being free of the natural anxieties of how to make it from day to day, would have “spare room” in their hearts for the needs of others. As a matter of fact that’s not the way it really is–just the opposite. A recent study by some social psychologists at UC Berkeley came to the conclusion that the poor have more sensitive hearts and more likely to exhibit compassion toward their “neighbor.” Here is a brief write-up on this study:

http://imos-journal.net/?p=4443

It seems that wealth is truly a burden on the heart, even as it facilitates

physical existence. Recall what Jesus said about the “rich man” who

tries to enter “the kingdom of heaven,” and also what he said about

the other kind of “burden” that we should take up, which is “light and

easy.” Of course this is a psychological study, and so it has its

limitations. But spiritual masters from many traditions would say,

“We Told You So!!”

J. Clarification of thought. Dorothy Day prescribed for her Catholic Worker movement, a moment called “clarification of thought.” Whether it took place on a weekly or monthly basis, the members of the community would get together and discuss some social issue at hand or, better, have a knowledgeable speaker and then have a communal discussion. So, may I propose such a moment here because I hear a certain confusion running amuck in the land: “conservative” or “right wing”. These terms are being used sloppily and interchangeably but they refer to something very different. Of course considering the level of political discourse in our country and in the mass media, perhaps there is no hope for clarity. Today’s Republican Party labels itself as “conservative” when in fact it has nothing or very little to do with that distinguished political philosophy. It is purely and simply “right wing” and on the road to being true fascism. Conservative philosophy in the U.S. was very leery of foreign wars and “foreign entanglements”; it distrusted central banks and big business just as much as big government. It had an intuition that all these “big” entities could be corrosive to the person. It certainly had no love for the “military-industrial complex”. True conservatives believed in the values of community; not that of Ayn Rand and “rugged individualism” where the highest value is of individual autonomy no matter what. True conservatives were also among the first environmentalists—afterall they believed in “conserving” and not in exploiting. True conservatives were also fiscally responsible, while pseudo-conservatives like Reagan borrowed more money than ALL previous presidents combined. And the Bushes doubled that–to support their crazy wars. Now the “right wing” leans toward authoritarianism, toward an easy approach to war, toward rampant exploitation, etc., to idolizing corporate structures. In fact, “right wing” is a step on the way toward fascism, of which the essence is the merger of corporate and government power. This is what happened both in Italy and Germany in the 1930s. And it can come dressed in religious garb and religious language. Both “conservative” and “right wing” are slippery terms, so be careful to note how they are being used and with what intent.

K. There is a recent study by a professor at the University of Wisconsin that seems to indicate that the American “right wing” is becoming more and more “Catholic.” The so-called “religious right,” which traditionally was mostly Evangelical Protestent, seems to be taking on a Catholic presence. The religious right, which also contained many classic conservative values, has now imbibed almost the whole of the American “right wing” agenda. This blending of the two is troubling, and there are enormous and serious issues underlying this development. In any case, here is the professor speaking for himself:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/howard-schweber/the-catholicization-of-th_b_1298435.html

L. Recently saw a young Native American with a t-shirt that had the following words:

“FIGHTING ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION SINCE 1492”

Perfect! Felt like buying that t-shirt right off his back!

M. Let us conclude with some Sufi sayings:

From Shaykh Sidi Hamza el Qadiri el Boutchichi:

When GOD loves His servant, his qualities are covered with the Qualities of his Lord. It is as if a king invites us into his company and we find ourselves without clothes which are suitably clean and fitting to be in his presence, the king clothes us in his clothes and introduces us into his presence.

Love all creatures, whatever their religion might be or their race and opinions. Everyone has his place in the divine pattern. It is not for us to judge.

Rabia: If I adore You out of fear of Hell, burn me in Hell!

If I adore you out of desire for Paradise,

Lock me out of Paradise.

But if I adore you for Yourself alone,

Do not deny to me Your eternal beauty.

al-Hallaj: Between me and You, there is only me.

Take away the me, so only You remain.

In a certain sense this is the most difficult and most complicated topic among the “Foundations” of the spiritual/mystical life.  It not only involves and recapitulates some aspects of our previous two topics, but also many of the ones we have yet to reflect on.  It is best to insert it here, even though we shall be coming back to this topic in various ways again and again as we go forward through the other “Foundations.”  Some very important aspects of this topic having to do with the Trinity, the heart, and community will need elaboration later on in their own sections of “Foundations.”

Another cause of difficulty is that this topic is very close “to home” as it were.  I mean we may be quite ready to acknowledge that God is a Mystery, but everyone seems to at least implicitly believe that they are an “expert” as far as their own self goes.  However, this usually proves to be quite wrong in that what we take as our “self” is only a mask, an illusion, a surface of an unreality–so insubstantial it is.  In a very real sense the meaning of the spiritual life can be found in  the “discovery of the true self.”  The question, “Who am I?” resounds through almost all the major spiritual/mystical traditions.  And it can be found both in the beginning and at the end of each and every spiritual journey, as the person descends deeper and deeper into the abyss of this mystery we call “the self.”

In a lovely concurrence we are, in the Catholic tradition, at the beginning of another Lent with Ash Wednesday.  The “repentance” we are called to during this season is precisely the shucking off of false identities and discovering our true self so to speak.  For too many Catholics Lent is this negative thing of “giving things up,” etc.  The essence of this season is lost or at least obscured by superficial penitential exercises.  When the priest puts that smudge of ash on our forehead on Ash Wednesday, we are reminded of how many masks we wear, of how truly insubstantial we really are even underneath the masks, in effect of how truly “unreal” we really are.   We already have gone over some of this ground in a previous posting, so instead of repeating a lot of stuff, I will simply refer to it.  It was Feb. 12, 2010 blog post.

So first of all let us separate our topic into two distinct stages:  the first is the problem stage and this can have at least 3 parts, and the second stage is about the mystery of our true self.  Let us begin with our simple empirical ego self.  This is a given of our existence–just as much as our lungs, our hair, our eyes, etc.   In fact a healthy ego self is important for our overall well-being.  In this we can agree with modern psychology, but in what this “healthiness” consists might be described quite differently by all the great spiritual traditions.  Whatever modern psychology tells us, it is all limited to a kind of ability to function in our given society in some harmonious way.  (In some cases to “function in a society in a harmonious way” could be a sign of a very diseased sense of identity.  Afterall most Germans in 1938 were “functioning harmoniously in their society.”)  The fact is that for the purposes of a spiritual/mystical journey this is not even scratching the surface.  The fact is that the ego self will have to be transcended, or as some traditions might put it, you will need to be liberated from it.  In the Gospel, Jesus talks about “denying onself,” “dying to one self,” etc.  Among the Sufis we find discourse about “annihilation,” “extinction,” etc.  Why such strong language?  And what does this language point to?

Now a contribution from the Moroccan Sufi, Shaikh ad-Darqawi, pointing us in the right direction:

“Extinction also is one of your attributes.  You are already extinct, my brother, before you are extinguished and naught before you are annihilated.  You are an illusion and a nothingness in a nothingness.  When had you Existence that you might be extinguished?  You are as a mirage in the desert that the thirsty man takes to be water until he comes to it and finds it to be nothing, and where he thought it to be, there he finds God.  Even so, if you were to examine yourself, you would find God instead of finding yourself, and there would be nothing left of you but a name without a form.  Being in itself is God’s, not yours; if you should come to realize the truth of the matter, and to understand what is God’s through stripping yourself of all that is not yours, then you would find yourself to be as the core of an onion.  If you would peel it, you would peel off the first skin, and then the second, and then the third, and so on, until there is nothing left of the onion.  Even so is the slave with regard to the Being of the Truth.”

But we have some “nitty-gritty” stuff to cover before we get to the “lofty” things.

Part 1 of the problem-stage: the ego-self is self-referential.  Or as the saying goes: “It’s all about me.”  This is where “my” and “mine” come from—those strange boundary lines of our existence.  It’s all fictional and unreal, and yet it is all so reinforced socially and psychologically that this dynamic seems as solid as the earth.  It is inevitable that we live within such a matrix of boundary lines that each ego self  and each collective entity of ego selves (like a nation) establishes, but it does not mean that the spiritual person who has discovered his true personhood is going to be controlled by this dynamic.  Desert Father stories abound, and Zen stories and Sufi stories also and others too, that show the holy person totally disregarding these boundary lines, treating them like a temporary illusory reality that they are.  So the holy man will be shown helping the thief load up the goods from his cell, for example….  So for the Catholic monk the sword of wisdom in this case will be known as “the vow of poverty,” and with that he/she will challenge that ego drive.  For St. Francis this was almost the highest of all values.  Of course like all swords it must be wielded with care or else it becomes either a mere verbal formula that is as unreal as the possessiveness of the worldly person or else it can even be turned into another ego credential even in dispossession.  This indicates that we have to go deeper.

Part 2 of the problem-stage: The so-called “healthy” ego self labors under the illusion of its own atomized reality, as if it were totally separate from all other such ego selves.  Furthermore, it labors under the burden of its self-sufficiency, autonomy, independence, solidity.   At a certain psychological  and social level these are valid truths, but at a deeper metaphysical and spiritual level this kind of façade has to be broken through and transcended. What that means practically is that you will see yourself and the world around you differently.   The ego self will no longer be the source of all kinds of masks and superficial or false identities which we carry.  These become “credentials” that we exist, that we are “someone,” that we are worth something, that we are “different” from others, etc., etc–this can even be spiritual credentials, such as being a monk, a person of standing in the Church, etc.  Abhishiktananda relates the story of one of his early Hindu friends:

“One day he decided to take sannyasa.  He bought a length of coarse

cloth, and cut it into two strips.  One piece he put round his waist,

and the other he used as  loin-cloth.  Then he went over to the ashram

and cast himself at the feet of the Maharshi and told him that he had

finished with everything and abandoned the world.  From now

on he was a sannyasi.

‘Aha!’ said Ramana, when he saw him.  ‘The body has taken the dress

of a sannyasi.  But has the heart done likewise!’

And the ‘Bengal Tiger’ had sadly to admit that, despite all his

devotion for Bhagavan, desires continued to make themselves

violently felt in the depth of his heart, and that he was still far

from having truly renounced all.

‘So you see,’ went on the Maharshi, ‘It is no use taking sannyasa, if

it means that now you are enjoying the thought–and also are happy

to inform other people–that henceforward you are a sannyasi.

When you were young, you said ‘I am a student’; then you said ‘I am

a revolutionary’; next ‘I am a married man, the father of a family, an

industrialist.’  Now you say ‘I am a sannyasi.’  In all this, what

difference does it make in relation to that which really IS?  It is

useless to change the attribute so long as the subject remains intact.

It is this subject, the I, that has to disappear when the Self is

revealed.  What you have to renounce is the I, not any particular

state of life.’

In the same vein Bose told me the Maharshi’s reply to someone who

was singing the praises of a certain disciple who spent 8 to 10 hours

daily in meditation.

‘Oh!’ replied Bhagavan; ‘so he meditates, he eats, he sleeps!  But

who is meditating, eating, sleeping?  What advantage is there in

meditating for 10 hours a day if in the end that only has the result

of establishing you a little more deeply in the conviction that it is

you who are meditating.'”

Those of us on the monastic path are thus just as prone to create false identities, credentials, convenient masks as our so-called worldly brethren.  Only in this case these may come decorated with the sweet smell of incense or the deep texture of religious symbols.  There is no escaping credentials; there is only the transcending of them, and each tradition has something to

contribute in that regard (and each tradition has also its weak points in this regard).  But modern capitalist consumer society is especially good at manipulating this ego drive for its own gain and profit.  False identities are its “stock and trade.”  Credentials?  The more, the better.  The ego self becomes like a Christmas tree decorated with all these identities and credentials.  But  the  deep down nagging question(and anxiety) lurks:  exactly who am I underneath all this?  What if I lose all these credentials(and in death I certainly seem to)?

Now we come to Part 3 of the problem-stage: “I” want to be like God!   You may be saying, What is wrong with that?  Isn’t that what it’s all about?  Not exactly!  Not in that way.  There is a kind of “divine inclination” structured in every fiber of our being including the ego self.  That is why we really don’t want to die—divinity implies immortality.  Also, more importantly and more interestingly, there is this “infinite dissatisfaction” in the ego self which nothing can satisfy, at least nothing finite.  The horizon of satisfaction and meaning always seems to be receding, just beyond our grasp.  So the desire “to be like God” seems inescapable, one way or another.  But the catch is that this Reality is already there, and how much “there” is delineated differently by different traditions.  Now what is striking in the account of the Myth of the Fall in Genesis, Eve is tempted precisely in this regard.  She is tempted with what she already has, only she doesn’t yet realize it to a full extent.  Afterall, in mythic language, she IS in PARADISE, and she and Adam “walk with God” in this garden.  In other words, Adam and Eve , made in the image of God, share communion with God.  Their life would be an unfolding of this amazing mystery.  Now the existential manifestation of all this in the awareness and consciouness of the ego self being “outside Paradise,” is a drive toward all those accumulations of masks and false identities (the animal skins that Adam and Eve begin to need) as mentioned above, and a drive for power and control to whatever extent imaginable and possible.  There is then a dynamic toward what might be called “self-divinization” and some “medicine of forgetfulness” for the reality of death.

Any kind of spirituality has to address these kinds of issues one way or another.

Let us consider Jesus for a moment.  The Temptation in the Wilderness, which is the theme for the 1^st Sunday of Lent.  Jesus has, just like you and me, an ego self.  Thus he is able to experience that temptation to anything which endows it with “god-like” powers.  Thus he is tempted to “turn stones into bread”; thus he is tempted with “you will not die” if you throw yourself from the pinnacle; thus he is tempted with “all the kingdoms of the world.”  But he has awakened to his true identity and his oneness with that Ultimate Reality which he calls, “Father.”  He overcomes these temptations; he lives from an “I” that is deeper than the ego self.

Now we come to the really hard part, the second stage, the mystery of our true self, that which is deepest in us, what some traditions call “the heart”(about which we will devote a separate blog posting):  who are we in the depths of our being?  In most authentic traditions, to find that is to first “lose” something.  Primarily it is the phenomenal ego self as determinative and controlling of one’s identity.  The Sufis speak more brusquely and call it “fana”–extinction.  Reza Arasteh, the Iranian psychotherapist and Sufi who impressed Merton greatly writes:  “It is the experience of ‘fana’ in which those experiences, which obstruct the revealing of the real Self, are annihilated.  In essence, the Sufi’s task is to break the idol of the phenomenal self, which is the mother idol; having achieved this aim his search ends.  Empty-handed, empty-minded and desire-less, he is and he is not.  He has and he has not the feeling of existence.  He knows nothing, he understands nothing.  He is in love, but with whom he is not aware of.  His heart is at the same time both full and empty of love…. He is no longer an observer of life, but he is life itself.”

And here Abhishiktananda, writing to a nun with some spiritual counsel:  “Take possession of your total freedom, not so much as regards external laws, habits or rules, but as regards that ‘mask’ which seeks to impose itself on you–and all too often succeeds in doing so–and in fact finds allies in very deep strata of your personality.  Discover your real ‘I’….  This ‘non-born’ refers to what is beyond all time, all place, all circumstance; in it alone you have an insight, a glimpse, a certain experience already of the Absoluteness of God.  We have to cut the bonds, the knots of the heart, as the Mundaka says, which bind us to the mask deep within us.  It is a painful business.”

Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a Sufi scholar:  “…the person who aspires to reach God must break all the idols in his heart and sweep away everything in it so that God alone can be present therein.  God is one and therefore does not manifest His Presence where there are idols.  Alas, the heart of how many  even believers is like the Ka’bah during the Age of Ignorance, full of all kinds of idols.  Those who seek to follow the spiritual path in Sufism are taught…when first embarking upon the path, that they must reserve their heart for God alone, for He alone is the master of the house of the heart.  As the Arabic poem says, in response to someone knocking on the door of a Sufi’s heart:  There is no one in the house except the Master of the House.'”

So the Absolute Mystery abides in the Heart, but it fills the whole person–only the ego self is unaware of this.  The whole person is like the Burning Bush in the Book of Exodus–it is “on fire” with this Reality, and thus the whole person and each person is really transformed into Absolute Mystery—recall the Desert Father story, “Why not be totally changed into fire?”  You cannot say they are “two”; you cannot say they are “one.”  There is no numbering here.  There is only the Absolute Mystery and it unfolds more and more as we descend deeper and deeper into the self.  But there can be in all this a deep experience of a “dark night” as John of the Cross put it; a deep disorientation and sense of loss as we no longer count on the ego self to find our way; a sense of a vast desert in which there is nothing to satisfy one or quench one’s thirst, one’s vague desire  if for nothing else but life.  Listen to Abhishiktananda:  “In the desert I have lost myself, and I am no longer able to find my way back to myself.  And in the desert I have lost the God that I was seeking, and I can no longer find any trace either of him or of myself.  God is not in the desert.  The desert is [emphasis mine] the very mystery of God which has no limits, and nothing either to measure him or to locate him, and nothing to measure myself and locate myself in him, in relation to him“[emphasis mine].

A favorite hadith, much beloved by the Sufis, has Allah saying the following:

“When I [Allah] love my servant…, I become the hearing with which he hears, the seeing with which he sees, the hand with which he grasps, the feet with which he walks, the tongue with which he speaks.”

Michael Sells, an Islamic scholar comments:  “For the Sufis, the condition indicated by this hadith cannot be attained as long as the Sufi is seeing, hearing, walking, touching and speaking for and through himself.  Through a quest for a life beyond egoism,…the Sufi arrives at the taming or “passing away” of the ego-self.  When the ego-self passes away, the divine sees, hears, walks, touches, and speaks, through the human faculties.  Divine names (such as ‘the seer,’ ‘the hearer’) are no longer ‘predications’ of an exterior deity but realizations that occur at the moment the duality between human and divine is transcended.”

For those of us in the Christian tradition, we have to orient ourselves in this regard in relation to Jesus and his experience of God.  As mentioned above, Jesus in being truly a human being and not just a “mask” for divinity has a true ego self.  He has the usual identity matrix.  He is of a certain nationality and locality  and of a certain religion, etc.—he is a Jew who worships Yahweh, the absolutely transcendent realization of God and so transcendent that His very name cannot be pronounced and someone who is conceived as totally other.  However, Jesus awakens to a deeper sense of self in his heart.  The ego “I” rests on a foundation as it were of a much deeper “I”.  What is “beyond words” and what can only be related in myth and symbol is how that deep “I” is in a profound and indescribable communion with that Absolute Mystery which we call God.  The Baptism narrative in the Gospels may be a mythic representation of that awakening.  In any case, Jesus is portrayed as hearing those words: “You are my Son,” or “This is my Son.”  This marks a new sense of identity, beyond the limitations of the ego self.  It indicates an intimacy and a communion that would be unimaginable to the normal worshipper of Yahweh.  Jesus is a person who has totally discovered, realized his mystery.  As Abhishiktananda so insightfully points out, “Abba, Father” is the Semitic version of the advaita experience.  In discovering the Father, he has not found an “other.”  And so Jesus can say:  “I and the Father are one.”  Note, Jesus does not say, “I am the Father.”  This would be a reductionism to what religious philosophers call monism.  But neither are they two!

Jesus discovers the very I AM of God (recall the Book of Exodus and the Burning Bush) within his own deep “I am”.  His whole self now rests on a foundation of Absolute Mystery, and his very “I” is bottomless so to speak, and so the deeper he plunges into it, the more of the Mystery unfolds.  Thus Jesus is portrayed as having said to some hostile Jews, “Very truly I tell you, before Abraham was, I am.”  No wonder they tried to stone him!  Something similar happened to al-Hallaj who said something similar and this got him tortured and crucified also.

Now in the death and resurrection of Jesus, his “I am” is totally liberated from any and all limitations of any ego self with its identity matrix–being a Jewish male of the 1^st Century Semitic culture.  He is now the Mystery of  the Christ, and as we awaken to our “deeper self,” our true “I am,” we awaken at the same time to the Risen Christ in our hearts in whom and through whom we find the “I AM” of God in the depths of our own limited being.  In fact the spiritual journey will bring us to the realization and the awakening that our deepest “I am” and the “I am” of the Risen Christ are one in an unimaginable and indescribable unity.  That’s why we have nothing to be afraid of and nothing really to lose—not even death can take away that who we truly are—it is the house built on rock, not on sand.   And we can say with St. Paul, “I live now, not I, but Christ lives in me.”   And the Absolute Mystery addresses us also: “You are my child.”  For most Christians this is metaphorical language, a nice saying of sorts; but truly it is an existential and mystical knowledge that should be operative at every level of our being–not just an idea in the head.  With this selfhood we plunge into the very Mystery of the Trinity and our participation in Jesus’ communion with the one he calls “Father.”   But this is an unfathomable  mystery that takes infinity and eternity to unfold–and endless unspeakable bliss.

A few more comments from Abhishiktananda:  “In awaking to himself at the center of his being, Jesus, the son of Mary, also awoke to the Father.  But this child of a Jewish maiden is pre-eminently the representative ‘Son of Man,’ and therefore the whole of mankind rightfully shares in everything that he does and in all that he achieves.  When deep within himself Jesus awoke to God and learnt by direct experience that he ‘comes from the Father and goes to the Father,’ then all his brethren were taken up into this awakening; as he soars up to his Father, no member of the human race is left behind.  To use another metaphor, it is as if waves radiated in every direction from the fine point of his spirit, gradually filling the whole universe…. The simultaneous awakening of Jesus to himself and to the Father at the center of his being includes also every man’s discovery of himself in the apex of his soul and at the same time his awakening to the Father….  Every person who awakes to himself is therefore called to share in the experience of Jesus as the Son and to sing with him to the Father the ‘Abba’ which fills eternity.  This participation of course takes place at very different levels of awareness, ranging from the soul’s first wonderment at glimpsing on the horizon of its thought its own inner mystery to the final rapture of the Christian mystic born away by the spirit to the heart of the mystery of God.”

In conclusion, a critic might argue: All this talk of “self” smacks of New Age spirituality and American individualism.  What about community, the Church, and your fellow human being?  Truly a good point, and there is a great danger lurking here if we misunderstand.  We will have to address these issues in another posting, but suffice it to say that the deep self, the heart, is the foundation for a true community and real communion.  The ego self can never be that by its very nature.  You might be able to “pen” people together through fear (as in “eternal damnation”); you might be able to hold people together through rules, beautiful rituals, or various antidotes to the isolation of modern life; but none of this is real communion and community.  A church that offers only externals and “gimmicks”—and oh yes they may very well be dressed up in pious and beautiful language–such a church will ultimately not be able to gather a community and open people up to real communion.  In any case, we will give Merton the last word.  This is from his account of one of the key moments of his life, of a mystical experience if you will, of an epiphany that happened on a visit to Louisville.  And this was long before his extensive Asian studies and encounters, but already he had been studying the Sufis and al-Hallaj—there is a veiled reference to that in the account.  It illustrates how an authentic inner discovery is always related to a manifestation of one’s “connections” to one’s fellow human beings:

“Yesterday, in Louisville, at the corner of 4^th and Walnut, suddenly realized that I loved all these people and that none of them were or could be totally alien to me.  As if waking from a dream–the dream of my separateness….  Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes….  Again, that expression, le point vierge, (I cannot translate it) comes in here.  At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and by illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will.  This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God in us.  It is so to speak his name written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our dependence, as our sonship.  It is like a pure diamond, blazing with the invisible light of heaven.  It is in everybody, and if we could see it we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely….  I have no program for this seeing.  It is only given.  But the gate of heaven is everywhere.”

Amen.

The first problem to face is that for so many Christians the feast of Christmas is number one on the calendar. Not surprising if we look only at the secular calendar and the secular celebration–a plethora of good feeling, sentimentality, good cheer, lots of buying and selling, a time of relaxation and perhaps reunion, a time of donating food to the poor and hungry, a time of soft, vague religious messages–don’t want to get too carried away because the poor and hungry will have to go back to their starving lives after Christmas, etc. From the liturgical/theological/spiritual angle, this centrality of Christmas is a pointer, albeit a small one, of how really lost we are. From the Christian perspective the Paschal Mystery celebrated at Easter, or to be more precise, during the Triduum, the time of Holy Thursday to Easter Sunday, this is the number one feast on the calendar. Now what might surprise even more people is that Christmas, according to the ancient tradition of the Church, is not even the second most important feast. Let us look at a bit of history.

For the first few centuries of Christianity there were three major liturgical moments in the life of the faith-filled community: first, Easter, the celebration of the Paschal Mystery, the death and resurrection of Jesus; secondly, the time of preparation for this celebration and for initiation of new members, now called Lent; and thirdly a feast on January 6th called Epiphany or in the Eastern Church, the Theophany–primarily this included the visitation by the Magi, and the birth of Jesus, and even the baptism of Jesus as an adult by John the Baptist in the river Jordan. There was no “Christmas”; no focus on the “Baby Jesus” and so forth. It was about four centuries later that the feast of Christmas emerged, the celebration of the birth of Jesus, and it took the place of a pagan Roman feast on December 25th. And in fact the feast always kept a kind of lowly “3rd place” in the list of feasts involving Jesus. So far, so good! But with the split of the Church into East and West, the Western Church, in both its Roman Catholic and Protestant versions, started elevating Christmas higher and higher. One might add that this was done with the help of some outstanding saints too! In any case, Christmas seems to be the very top feast today, and especially from the secular standpoint as that has modified the meaning of this feast with all kinds of secular rituals. Easter, by contrast, hardly gets a squeak from secular society.

Now returning back to the Eastern Church, Orthodoxy, we find that it has kept very faithfully the oldest traditions. Of course it celebrates Christmas jubilantly as the feast has separated itself out from the celebration of January 6th, but in terms of solemnity and importance, the Theophany ranks higher. This is the second most important feast in the Orthodox calendar. And it has a different focus than this same day in the Western Church. “Theophany” means the “appearance of God,” the manifestation of God. The Eastern Church, following the tradition of the early church originally included the birth of Jesus in this feast but saw the first great moment of that “theophany” primarily in the Baptism of Jesus by John at the Jordan–the first manifestation of the Triune relationships within God, but also at the same time it kept one eye as it were on the visitation of the Three Magi. The feast kind of blended these moments into “the Theophany.” Later on as we said the birth got its own feast, but it was never considered as important as The Theophany. In the West what was left got separated out into two distinct and different feasts: the Epiphany, and the Baptism of the Lord; and neither of these feasts has any kind of stature within Western Christianity compared to Christmas. So things went in another direction.

With various liturgical reform movements, especially with Vatican II, there was an attempt made to bring these feasts into a kind of liturgical/theological coherence–with the addition of another very quiet feast that is simply a “Sunday in Ordinary Time” but which has great significance(and yes, again, in the Orthodox Church!)–The Wedding at Cana. So in the Catholic calendar, at least, there is this theological unity from Christmas to about the 3rd or 4th Sunday in January which comprises then Christmas, Epiphany, the Baptism of the Lord, and the Wedding at Cana. The unity consists in this dimension of Theophany. Here is how one online authoritative source puts it:

“The Baptism of the Lord has historically been associated with the celebration of Epiphany. Even today, the Eastern Christian feast of Theophany, celebrated on January 6 as a counterpart to the Western feast of Epiphany, focuses primarily on the Baptism of the Lord as the revelation of God to man.
After the Nativity of Christ (Christmas) was separated out from Epiphany, the Church in the West continued the process and dedicated a celebration to each of the major epiphanies (revelations) or theophanies (the revelation of God to man): the Birth of Christ at Christmas, which revealed Christ to Israel; the revelation of Christ to the Gentiles, in the visit of the Wise Men at Epiphany; the Baptism of the Lord, which revealed the Trinity; and the miracle at the wedding at Cana, which revealed Christ’s transformation of the world. ”

Ok. That’s not bad. However, if you look, this year you will not find any celebration of the Baptism of Lord on any Sunday in the Catholic liturgical calendar. They actually regard it as so inessential that if it doesn’t fit their manipulation of calendar feasts, it simply gets dropped to an almost invisible weekday celebration–this year on January 9th.

I protest!! Ok, you may be asking yourself, why is he getting so worked up about this?! Truly it is not a big deal, but there is something important at stake in all this. Here I am with Abhishiktananda in “placing on a pedestal” this feast. He actually considered the baptism of Jesus the central and signature moment of the Gospels while the death and resurrection of Jesus become only somewhat secondary in his Christology. I am not quite ready to go THAT far with Abhishiktananda; and his Christology, especially as articulated in his last years, may be seriously critiqued from the standpoint of Christian tradition. I mean there is a legitimate question: is he breaking with something core to Christianity or is he profoundly and radically reinterpreting it? We will discuss that at another time.

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of Abhishiktananda’s understanding of the Baptism episode, let us look at least at some scriptural descriptions:

“In those days Jesus came from Nazareth of Galilee and was baptized by John in the Jordan. And just as he was coming out of the water, he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him. And a voice came from heaven, ‘You are my Son, the Beloved; with you I am well pleased.'” (Mark 1: 9-11)
Matthew’s account is similar but less spare and more wordy, but finally he gets to the same moment: “And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him. And a voice from heaven said, ‘This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased.'” (Mt 3: 16-17)

Just one note: when in Mark’s account it says that the heavens were “torn apart,” that is correct—some translations wanting to even it out with the other versions make it the more mellow, “opened.” But Mark is more emphatic, more dramatic, more intense.

Now look at what one semi-official source says about this episode:

“At first glance, the Baptism of the Lord might seem an odd feast. Since the Catholic Church teaches that the Sacrament of Baptism is necessary for the remission of sins, particularly Original Sin, why was Christ baptized? After all, He was born without Original Sin, and He lived His entire life without sinning. Therefore, He had no need of the sacrament, as we do.
In submitting Himself humbly to the baptism of St. John the Baptist, however, Christ provided the example for the rest of us. If even He should be baptized, though He had no need of it, how much more should the rest of us be thankful for this sacrament, which frees us from the darkness of sin and incorporates us into the Church, the life of Christ on earth! His Baptism, therefore, was necessary–not for Him, but for us.”

This is awfully lame stuff, and I wish I could put it more strongly! But so much of Catholic catechetical and pious literature has this kind of language. It’s as if Jesus is “play-acting,” going along and doing various things, setting us “examples,” and inventing these things called “sacraments.” Jesus shows up at a wedding at Cana, and whammo, you have the sacrament of marriage. Jesus touches the water and the water becomes holy. Hey, Jesus pees in the Jordan, does that make it a sacred river? And he poops behind a bush—is there a sacred bush out there, certainly more than one….? Sorry for these absurd statements, but this kind of catechetical language does not take the humanity of Jesus seriously, and it needs to be exposed for what it is, official or not. It does not take seriously the all-important proclamation of John 1:14: kai ho logos sarx egeneto, and the word became flesh. And this means the full depths of the human condition, its samsaric condition, if you will, always vulnerable to maya—thus the temptation in the desert. We can readily admit that Jesus was “sinless” if Church teaching calls for that, but “sarx” here implies also anxiety, fear, doubt, uncertainty, the pull toward screwed-up human identities, etc., etc. Jesus is truly one of us in our basic condition and struggle, and most importantly and most controversially, the need to discover who he is, his true identity.

Given all that, Abhishiktananda’s interpretation of the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan as depicted in the Gospels is, I think, a very profound intuition of the very deep mystery that is being revealed there. Let us quote some from his writings:

“Jesus experienced such a closeness to God–probably the very same as is revealed in the advaitic experience–that he exploded the biblical idea of ‘Father’ and of ‘Son of God’ to the extent of calling God ‘Abba’, i.e., the name which in Aramaic only the one who is ‘born from’ him can say to anyone. But the term ‘Son’ is only imagery, and I fear the theologians have treated this image too much as an absolute, to an extent that becomes simply mythical. In Johannine terms Jesus discovered that the I AM of Yahweh belonged to himself; or rather, putting it the other way round, it was in the brilliant light of his own I AM that he discovered the true meaning, total and unimaginable, of the name of Yahweh. To call God ‘Abba’ is an equivalent in Semitic terms of advaita, the fundamental experience…. It seems that in his Baptism he had an overwhelming experience; he felt himself to be Son, not in a notional, Greek, fashion, but that he had a commission given by Yahweh to fulfil; and in this commisssion he felt his nearness to Yahweh….”

“Jesus’ experience at the Jordan impresses me more and more. And in the concept of Father/Son I now see not so much the relationship of derivation (which even so is not denied) as the relationship of ekatvam [oneness]….”

“The baptism of Jesus was for him the fundamental experience on which his whole life depended. He had the experience of being possessed by the Spirit of God, this Spirit of Yahweh that the Old Testament had announced (Isaiah 11,2). ‘On him the spirit of Yahweh rests.’ He had the experience in the same time of being the Son of God and the expereicne of God the Father. The baptism gives nothing to Jesus, yet it reveals to him who He is.”

“Jesus recognized himself as Son of God, beyond all the devas, beyond his being and beyond the universe—and beyond his religion also. And in this re-cognizing he recognized Yahweh in his real greatness.”

“Jesus is a person who has totally discovered, realized his mystery…. His name is ‘I AM,’…. Jesus is savior by virtue of having realized his NAME. He has shown and has opened the way out of samsara, the phenomenal world, and has reached the guha, the padamk beyond the heavens—which is the mystery of the Father. In discovering the Father, he has not found an ‘Other’: I and the Father are one. In the only spirit, he has discovered his non-duality with Yahweh; it is the Spirit that is the link, the non-duality.”

And then from Shail Mayaram commenting on Abhishiktananda:

“There is a profound intertextuality and interculturality to the life and work of Abhishiktananda. He clearly universalizes the discourse of advaitic spirituality and sanyasa or renunciation. He uses it to understand, as he states, the deepest truth of Jesus’ baptism as the moment of ‘awakening’ to the recognition of the non-duality of being. Abhishiktananda notes that in Mark’s Gospel, when Jesus came up out of the waters, he saw the heavens ‘rent asunder’–thus indicating that the separation between heaven and earth, between man and God, was abolished–while the Spirit ‘descended’ filling the whole of space. Jesus then heard a voice that said: ‘Thou art my Son,’ and he responded: ‘Abba (Father)’.”

“As Abhishiktananda prepares for his disciple Marc’s diksa, he refers to Jesus’ ‘awakening at his Baptism,…, and the need to celebrate the awakening of everyone to aham asmi, ego eimi, I am.’ Baptism is the recognition of ‘advaita with Abba-Yahweh that he shares with everyone.’ He writes of Jesus as ‘I Am,’ as one with the Father: ‘In the only Spirit, he has discovered his non-duality withYahweh; it is the Spirit that is the link, the non-duality.’ He also mentions that when Jesus sees the heavens torn open, hears a voice and sees the dove, the voice reveals to him that he is the child of Yahweh.”

So much for the quotes—there is an awful lot in them! But just to summarize the main point: the Baptism of Jesus in the Jordan by John the Baptist is to be interpreted as THE AWAKENING, and the paradigm for all awakening to the deepest mystery within one. Jesus awakens to a realization of an unimaginable intimacy with the one that his culture called “Yahweh”–and here you have to recall how absolutely transcendent this Yahweh was in the Old Testament, how absolutely “other,” how supreme and utterly “beyond” he was, how “unnameable” he was, etc., etc. And so the unspeakably radical and revolutionary nature of Jesus’ ability after this to speak of this Yahweh as “Abba,” points us, as Abhishiktananda indicates, in the direction of a Semitic-Christian version of advaita, of non-duality with the Ultimate Reality. What this means for each of us, then, needs theological and spiritual-mystical elaboration and unfolding that may take us into unexpected places, may scare us, may leave us dangling on the edge of a religious precipice so to speak, may lead us into controversial and paradoxical realms, etc. More about that in forthcoming posts, but let us conclude with just one more note: Abhishiktananda’s laser-like focus on the Holy Spirit as the “sign” and instrument of Christian advaita. This coheres well with the fact that in Western Christianity the Holy Spirit was less and less in focus as time went on; and so Western Christianity became more and more dualistic, preoccupied with externals, institutions, authority, laws, rules, morality, seeing Jesus as this exemplar, a model for imitation, God as someone “out there” to please, etc., etc. Interestingly enough, one of the greatest of the modern saints of Eastern Christianity, St. Seraphim of Russia, said, in contrast, that the whole point of the spiritual life, the whole point of it all is to “acquire the Holy Spirit.” Indeed. “To have the Holy Spirit” is to hear within one’s heart the call of your true identity: “thou art my child.” It is to stand now within the advaita of the Divine Trinity.

All this is at stake in this feast that is now relegated to an uneventful weekday Mass where in most churches there were only be a few devout persons, most of them little old ladies who come to Mass every day; and in other churches the doors were simply closed and no Mass was celebrated. Interesting.

Lets face it—religion has its problem people. Lots and lots of them. I don’t think we know what to make of this phenomenon. It is so prevalent that it is shocking if looked at closely. Many would rather not talk about it; even ignore it. Recent disclosures about child sexual abuse at Penn State and Syracuse has some religious people breathing easier–“At least it’s not us!”–but that’s an unfortunate view. One lesson from these scandals is the need not to hide the reality; not to cover it up in order to “protect the institution” or the image at stake. Nor, and this is really the worst, to think that the problem is really a small thing, a “wrinkle on the surface of religion,” a few “rotten apples” in the bushel.

No, really the problem is quite enormous and puzzling and disturbing for a number of reasons. In a posting a long time ago I had addressed a bit of this by way of looking at a particular scandal at the Zen Center in San Francisco. This was just one incident, but it opens a window on a whole range of issues. It’s time to revisit this whole mess just a bit. And not only because there’s so many issues to be aware of, but especially since I have started this series on “Fundamentals & Foundations” with all that “spiritual talk”—it’s necessary to keep one’s feet on the ground and deal with the actual messy religious situation of our time.

Now the first interesting thing to emphasize is that every major religious tradition is afflicted. There is no one immune from these problems. And the second thing is that “the problem” can be broken down into perhaps three parts:

1. There is the problem simply of the fake or fraudulent spiritual person–the one who acts a role that is traditionally identifiable, like pastor or guru, and who is actually a fake, living a lie, etc. Like raising money for a worthy cause and then siphoning off a good chunk of that for a cushy lifestyle. TV evangelists in the US and Catholic priests have been notorious in that regard.

2. There is the problem of a segment of a whole tradition being vitiated because of its compromises with the culture in which it lives. Zen in Japan, for example—how many of its “enlightened” teachers either looked the other way or even approved of the Japanese massacre of the Chinese people in the 1930s. They performed the tea ceremony impeccably as others were being butchered. Some even called for the killing of Chinese. Frauds, everyone of them!

3. Finally, we have the simple, straightforward sexual predator, and a real lot of these have turned up over the years and these are the ones who have been getting the headlines and rightly so! As a matter of fact, all three parts of the above can be and usually are wrapped up in one individual. It is not often that they actually separate out as distinct parts. Let us consider just three major traditions and see how this has unfolded in recent years:

Christianity

In Catholicism, the stereotype of the priest who lives a lavish lifestyle at the expense of his people is almost age-old. I guess this is something that will never go away, but there is something about the way the priest is looked at that almost creates the conditions for such behavior, a kind of veneration of “specialness” that needs to be questioned. And today you have a new variant of that–not just the parish priest siphoning off a bit from the Sunday collection for his own luxuries, but priests who champion religious causes, like anti-abortion movements, raising a lot of money then siphoning off millions perhaps. Protestant TV evangelists have been bilking people for years with their pseudo-miracles and their impassioned rhetoric and their turning of Christianity into a “gospel of success.” But it is not just money that is at stake here, but misleading people about the very nature of Christianity and religion itself.

Then, of course, there are the sex problems, and there certainly have been a lot of those. Not just your standard sex problems, again age-old, of a priest having a mistress or a minister visiting a prostitute, but much worse in child predation, in the sexual abuse of young people. In the Catholic community, where this hit like the proverbial ton of bricks, the official line is that yes, this was really bad and “we are very sorry” and so on, but really “it involved a very, very small number of priests.” The actual number of priests involved in sexual abuse of all kinds in the last few decades probably is not too large, maybe somewhere around 5% of the total priest population. A large number, indeed too large a number everyone will say, but alas, that still leaves the overwhelming majority as basically sound. Only if that were true!! Because, as horrific as this abuse was, as evil and sick as it was, it actually was NOT the final worst thing about this whole episode so that now we can “move on.” The whole institution of the church has been revealed as wrapped in darkness and sickness. Yes, I do mean exactly what I am saying! From the get-go the Catholic Church has been: • A. first denying the charges; • B. then covering-up the problems, trying to “sweep them under the ecclesial rug; • C. fighting real compensation to the victims.

You will read in the newspapers about bishops and pope saying how sorry they are for what happened to the victims, but at the same time they have hired high-priced lawyers to make it as difficult as possible for victims to get compensation for their suffering AND to keep all knowledge of these incidents locked up and in secret–so that people would not know how really bad it was. Fortunately some of the victims got good lawyers of their own, and the Church has to begin to pay at least something; and fortunately there has been some good investigative journalism done. But the church fought it every step of the way. So this “We are sorry” stuff is so hypocritical it staggers the imagination. So many bishops and the last two popes at the very least have been trying to hide the problem in order to “protect the Church” from looking bad. One more thing: the culture of secrecy within the church is part of the problem. One reason why the child predators were often hidden within the church is that there was already an antecedent culture of secrecy, and it has to do with the very large number of gay clergy and religious. Now, let me be very clear about this: Gay people are NOT a problem or even close to being part of this problem. But the fact is that such a large number and such a large proportion of clergy are gay that a kind of secrecy culture developed—after all the church’s official policy was and is very negative about gays. Then a priest who openly admitted he was a gay risked problem with his bishop (who probably by the way was himself gay) and with his parishioners. So a culture of secrecy of gays, by gays, for gays developed within the church. Then on top of that, only a small proportion of priests, gay or straight, lived out a life of celibacy as called for. This created the need for more secrecy. So the child predators could hide in the midst of all this and feel quite secure in that secrecy. In addition they had “authority,” image, status, etc. If you want to get a more complete picture of this, don’t read the official documents, which are the instruments of a cover-up, but read an authority like Richard Sipe, a former Benedictine priest and licensed psychologist who has been studying the sex problems of priests for decades:

http://www.richardsipe.com/Miscl/2011-10-15-mother_church.htm

Hinduism

Onward to another very sad story. India is rightly seen as a culture rich in religious traditions and spirituality. From the legendary rishis of old who gave us the Upanishads to contemporary holy men who still dwell within that fast-changing culture. Usually when you mention “problem people” in Hinduism this refers to a number of fake gurus who came to the United States and Europe and made a big splash. The interesting thing here is how so many so-called sophisticated modern Americans and Europeans got taken by these people–both money-wise and sexually and as so-called “teachers.” Even today you will see all kinds of ads in “spiritual” magazines where “Asian teachers” of all kinds are hustling this or that. In a materialistic, superficial culture as ours, where Christianity itself seems to live on a superficial level also, these fake gurus and swamis appeared to fill a need. What made them seem “spiritual” and with “authority” was that they very cleverly brought the trappings of India with them. Then their top disciples took up the mantle as it were and took on an Asian appearance. “Look like a guru,” well, you just might be a guru then! “Sound like a guru,” and heck yes, you really are a guru! (Actually some of the lamas and Zen masters, speaking of another tradition, were quite knowledgeable about Buddhism and could impart some real knowledge of its spirituality, but they were still fakes and frauds in the end–just like some priests who had a serious and deep theological education but who were sexual predators.)

What enabled this fakery to flourish is something that was in the culture of India itself. It’s not that just “some bad apples” came over here, but that the Mother Country has a real problem with lots and lots of these people and some of them have migrated here. This is only speculation, but it may have something to do with the confluence of modernity and India’s rich religious culture because the problem seems to be growing in India. Beginning in the 19th Century and exploding with an amazing force and rapidity in recent decades modernity continues to have deeper and deeper influence on Indian society and its effects are truly mixed to say the least. Something for someone to investigate. In any case, Indians themselves have begun to realize they have a problem in their own backyard.

Here are just a couple of examples: The first is from a blog by a former member of the controversial and now notorious Sai Baba community: http://robertpriddy.wordpress.com/2010/03/06/sex-scandal-in-indian-media-nityananda-and-forerunners/

The next one is from an IBN(India’s CNN) program: http://ibnlive.in.com/videos/111129/ftn–indias-blind-faith-in-godmen.html?from=tn

Or take a look at this strange story of an Indian swami who had great success in the US:

http://scene-india.blogspot.com/2010/05/swami-rama-enlightenment-and-alleged.html

And this is only a very small sample. Google “fake godmen” and you will get a ton of websites from India lamenting the presence of fake spiritual figures. What’s almost funny is that a few sites are actually by frauds themselves who pretend that they are against “fake godmen”! The situation is that bad. In India itself, the various media (print, TV and internet) no longer ignore or hide the problem the culture has. As an IBN newsman put it: “The fundamental question is why has there been such a huge increase in cases related to the holy men in our country.” Then he begins to question the whole mythology of the guru. In this case perhaps modernity is shedding a bit of light on the situation. Now whether modernity itself is also an enabler of the problem is something that needs to be investigated.

Finally, let us consider Buddhism.

I won’t go over ground that I covered in reflecting on the SF Zen Center scandal and on the scandals of so, so many so-called zen masters and Tibetan lamas in the US. Some of them were/are very knowledgeable about the contents of their tradition and lineage, but there was/is a tremendous disconnect between that and their actual lives. At the risk of sounding very arrogant, one can only say that they missed the essence of Buddhism by the width of the universe!

At this time let us take a brief focus on what is probably the most Buddhist country in the world today: Thailand. Buddhism is the state religion, and there are thousands of monasteries and temples and thousands upon thousands of monks and nuns. Oddly enough, it is also one of the most corrupt places on earth. Granted, such a statement smacks of rhetoric more than hard fact—because how can you measure “most corrupt”—but I do mean to point to a “tiny problem,” if you will. So for a starter, Thailand has a flourishing, thriving, bustling sex trade. Whole plane loads of men fly in from all kinds of countries, like Japan for example, paying group rates, cheaper that way, for a week or weekend of unlimited sex, no questions asked. But that’s just a starter. If someone wants to have sex with an underage girl OR boy, hey come on over to Thailand—it is all-available, no questions asked. Oh, yes, it is officially “not allowed,” against the law, etc. but business is business and it’s really big in Thailand. Also if you got the money and the resources, if you want to buy a boy or girl and take them home, well, that can be worked out also. I remember reading about one of the predator priests, that he would take vacations in Thailand….verrrrrry interesting as they say….. Somehow I don’t think he was going to study meditation over there.

So what do all those Buddhists in Thailand say about all this. Well, not very much. In fact, a few of them, alas, participate in “the trade.” To end this depressing account, here are two websites. The first one is from a blogger who has collected a sampling of news stories about the problems in Thai Buddhism from Pacific Rim sources:

http://www.strippingthegurus.com/stgsamplechapters/thai.asp

And the next one is from someone who has lived and worked in Thailand, and has written sympathetic articles and books about Buddhism in Thailand:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/justin-mcdaniel/thai-buddhism-magic-money-murder_b_1016115.html

So what’s the point of all that depressing stuff above? Human weakness is human weakness, and perhaps one just wants to say that this is simply the human condition–we should not be surprised. That is true. But we still should seek to deal with these problems, and that doesn’t mean ignoring them or pretending they are minor. Also, those of us “in religion” want to avoid being judgmental at all costs. However, to allow fraudulent religiosity to flourish and to look the other way is not only naïve and simplistic, but it leads to people getting really hurt. Let us recall that the only people Jesus was unrelentingly tough with, the only people he was really hard on were those who had abused religion for their own gain, whatever that gain consisted in. For his own disciples he called for a completely different mode of presence. No need to tell me it hasn’t worked out quite that way!!

In a real sense there is no actual solution except the practice of authentic religion in the truest way possible. But we can point to some things that might help in “disarming” false religiosity. For one thing, we should consider “deconstructing” spiritual/religious leadership. By that I don’t mean getting rid of it. It simply needs to be “re-visioned”—actually Jesus does that in the Gospels. Various kinds of leadership roles in any religious community or tradition are real and necessary, but they have been endowed with such specialness that this opens up a world of problems and gives power to people who become entangled with it in unhealthy ways.

Priests, monks, ministers, spiritual practitioners, have a strong inclination to attach themselves to this “specialness” label. And this gets really big if the person is a spiritual father/abbot/ guru/ master/teacher/spiritual director, etc. That “specialness” can be very intoxicating and particularly hypnotic. One can almost begin to believe that one is “special.” And the person coming to spirituality perhaps for the first time becomes mesmerized by this “specialness aura.” As I suggested when I discussed the SF Zen Center problem, why not put a moratorium on all these “special labels and titles.” I realize that this presents peculiar difficulties for those in the Hindu tradition because the guru and one’s relationship to the guru is such an integral part of that tradition. Don’t quite know how to address that one, but I think as modernity goes deeper and deeper into the Indian psyche and heart, this thing will evolve to where the guru will become more like a spiritual friend—which is really all we ever need. Not an object of veneration, but a friend who may have more experience on the journey we are on, but still someone to whom we listen to without sacrificing our critical faculties. Even within Christianity the real “Father Zosimas” of the world are truly rare and so it would be more real and sane and more healthy if you called no one your master, your teacher, your father, but every one is your brother, your sister—no more, no less. Incidentally, the Desert Fathers are a perfect lesson in this. Among those who are eager for mysticism and the deep things of God, these figures seem to hold little interest—they are dry as dust and ordinary as dirt. In fact they seem to speak very little of God or ultimate reality or anything of that sort–more likely about humility, anger, poverty, silence, patience, how to treat others, etc. That’s what makes them our paradigmatic teachers, our very best teachers. They did have a title, “Abba,” father, but this was merely a place marker and distributed widely, primarily an indicator and a sign of experience in the desert. If anyone attempted to “cash in” that title for prestige or gain, he would immediately be recognized as a fraud.

As a further step in “disarming” the spiritual way, why not dress in utter simplicity—ordinary clothes. Do away with “special clothes” no matter what your tradition has used in the past. Everyone just wears simple ordinary clothes–nothing special about your appearance. I think you would be amazed how effective that would be in emptying out that “special image” people carry within themselves once they start being “spiritual.” In other words, don’t try to stand out as someone special. The special clothes work as a kind of gimmick at first. I mean when you begin you put on these different clothes, and it’s a sign of a new life, a new way, etc. It kind of reinforces the feeling that you are up to something different! Ok, but how quickly this goes haywire! It becomes another uniform and maybe soon you are thanking God that you are not like those other folk!! A small point perhaps, but every little bit helps!

There are two principles which underlie the dynamic I am pointing to. They are in an intense paradoxical relationship to each other, seemingly almost canceling each other out. The first principle is that the spiritual life is utterly and radically simple. Its simplicity is beyond description. You have everything you need in your heart for the whole journey. Doing the dishes is as holy a moment and as close to God as hours of meditation in the solitude of a cave or as the most sacred of rites. You need not go to any special place or any special person or find some special conditions. It is all there in your heart and in front of your nose. Waiting for you as it were. The “treasure buried in the field.” If you accept that, then no “spiritual teacher” will be able to mislead you or abuse you or gain power over you. You have treasure that no thief can steal; no rust or moth can eat away. On the other hand, the second principle is that the spiritual life is truly very, very hard. Very simple; but also exceedingly hard. After all Jesus spoke about some kind of “death” and “dying”–very vexing metaphors for some process within oneself indeed! Doesn’t sound like fun! Doesn’t sound like something you can buy. A true Sufi teacher said that of all the people that come to him who are on the spiritual journey maybe only one in a thousand “go all the way.” But that’s ok because however far you go, it will be much better for you and benefit you more than not having taken the journey. As a matter of fact we all finally “go all the way,” except then it’s called death! Maybe this is where we begin to want some guidance. Maybe a wise word from a spiritual friend; maybe a bit of “handholding” during a crisis; maybe all we should be are spiritual friends to each other. In an environment like that the one who wants to wield power over us will be readily manifest for what he is. A radical education reformer used to say that the main purpose of education should be to develop within the student a finely tuned “crap detector.” In other words he can recognize BS no matter how “authoritatively” it comes dressed. Such I would say is also the key to a healthy religious/spiritual culture. In such a culture, the spiritual seeker will become empowered with a “spiritual crap detector.” It’s obvious that we are not quite there yet!

Preliminary Remarks:  We will begin a long series of reflections on what could be termed as the “foundations and fundamentals” of the spiritual life.  These will be spread out over a series of postings during several years—there will certainly be other postings of other material interspersed throughout, so things will not proceed in a rigorous sequence, but I will number the parts as we go along.  Furthermore, once a posting has been made and some “Part” has been established, it doesn’t mean that we can’t return to that Part and posting to add some more material as we go along.

Some cautions:  My commitment and orientation is to the Christian mystical tradition, but I have learned much and have benefited greatly from my exposure to all the other great religious traditions, and it will be readily apparent that my approach to “foundations & fundamentals” has been thoroughly influenced by Sufism, Buddhism, Taoism, and even certain forms of Hinduism.  I do not believe that it is any longer possible for anyone to truly and deeply understand his/her spiritual tradition in isolation from all the others.  This I take as one of the major “signs of the times,” of where we are as a human family right now and which sets us apart a bit from our ancestors–maybe.   Furthermore, I believe that the one I call God is revealed and is accessible in and through every authentic spiritual tradition.  As a methodological principle all this certainly can be debated, but that is a question for another time and another posting!

These postings will be nothing more than reflections, notes, pointers, indicators, “road signs,” etc.  They are definitely not meant as a “recipe,” formula, program, map, agenda, a “to-do” list, etc. Nor a final definitive statement.  There ain’t no such animal in the zoo–as far as the spiritual life goes!!  Nor are these reflections meant to be just more words to add to all the other words that already are in your mind.  Hopefully they may help in the unveiling of a deeper significance to what you already know in your heart.

Another point:  there seem to be real differences in spiritual experiences.  Not too many spiritual writers acknowledge that fact.  The usual thing is to say that all differences are in “words,” “language,” “ways,” etc., but the core experience of the core reality is the same.  So they say, but I don’t think it’s that simple.  And here I am referring to not only the spiritual paths of the great world traditions, but actually even within one and the same tradition, there can be people with quite different spiritual experiences.  Thus even within Christian mysticism we can find some very different looking “mysticisms.”  Our “foundations & fundamentals” is not meant as a kind of reduction to “one flavor” for all, nor is it meant as a kind of evaluation of a particular approach to mysticism as being “higher” or “lower.”  There is an irreducible uniqueness to each person’s life with God, but we may find some common notions that may be helpful to those who feel the call to go beyond just living a “good life.”

Final Prelim:  Mostly in the spiritual life we get lost, and what is important is what we do with that lostness.  When someone hands you a flashlight on a dark moonless night, that may be helpful but it doesn’t mean “we have made it home.”  Merton is one of those “flashlights”– let us conclude this section by listening to him a bit:

“One of the most important things in the spiritual life and in the life of prayer is to let a great deal go on without knowing quite what is going on, and without messing with it, without interfering with it.

“You can’t be helped in the best parts of the spiritual life.  If you could be helped it wouldn’t be worth it.  There is a great deal of the spiritual life where God alone helps you, and you don’t know that He’s helping you and you can’t tell that He’s helping you…but you have to believe this.  Learning to trust when you don’t see what’s happening.

“You make a breakthrough, and what you do is you break through into a deeper level of yourself…. You find a deeper truth that’s really there, in you, but it’s not yours, it’s God’s, and it’s not something that you have accounted for, it’s something that He has accounted for.”

So let us begin:

Part I   The Real

“Lead me from the unreal to the Real….”  So runs a prayer in the Upanishads.  This is a prayer that anyone in any of the great spiritual traditions of the world would be able to pray.  This may be the most fundamental prayer that anyone can make.  For those of us in the theistic traditions, there may be a surprising connection with some other equally ancient and fundamental words:  the so-called 1^st Commandment.  Let us recall its several wordings:

from Exodus 20:  “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.  You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.  You shall not bow down to them or worship them….”

from Deuteronomy 5:  “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me.”

from Deuteronomy 6:  “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.”

And then there is the restatement in the New Testament.

from Mark 12:  “Jesus answered, ‘The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart….”

And from the Quran we have this critical clue to the meaning of all of the above.  These are the most important words in Islam and actually they hold for us also if rightly understood:

“La ilaha illa’Llah”   There is no god but God

This is the most fundamental affirmation a Moslem and a Sufi can make, and there is a second part to this to which we shall soon come.  As with almost all religious truths, we can understand all of the above, including the line from the Upanishads, in a kind of surface, superficial way or maybe in a very literal sense, or yet again in the true deeper sense that reveals a whole new world of meaning.  This would hold for the rishis of the Upanishads, the Sufis of Islam and the Christian mystics.  What we shall do now is quote extensively concerning that fundamental Islamic statement of faith which will then illuminate the profound connection between Christian mysticism and that wonderful prayer from the Upanishads.  Our quotes will be from a lecture by Thomas Merton to his fellow monks and novices, and from an essay by a Sufi scholar by the name of Reza Shah-Kazemi.

Let us begin with Merton:  “The whole religion of Islam is extremely simple.  And it is all contained in one or two basic formulas, real basic formulas.  And the most basic one is a thing called the shahadah–La ilaha illa ‘Llah–Muhammadan Rasulu ‘Llah–which is the famous statement, There is no god but God,   (there is no god but Allah) and (Muhammad is the one who is really sent), Muhammad is His Prophet.’  The way this is usually translated is ‘There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet.’  Now, of course the way that is usually interpreted is in terms of a kind of orthodoxy, but that’s not the way the Sufis look at it…. It is not confined to that…if that was all they were saying, they wouldn’t have got very far….  Actually, what you’ve got in the two parts of the shahadah, you’ve got tanzih and tashbih.  The first part is tanzih and the second part is tashbih.  The first part…begins, as some of these Sufi commentators say, with a denial.  The first part says, ‘There is no god.’  It starts with that, ‘There is no god,’ and then it says, ‘but there is, and He is Allah.’  So what this statement is, then, is a negative and then an assertion.  That there is no god and it also means there is no reality, so what this is saying is nothing is real…except Allah.  He alone is Real.  And then, and this is your tanzih statement, there is this infinite hidden reality, and this is The Reality, but then comes up the question, What about everything else?  Well, it’s real too insofar as it comes from Him….  How do you get that out of ‘Muhammad is His Prophet’?  Well, as the Sufis interpret this, the first part is about God, the second part is about the world.  And the world is that which has come forth from God…and into which He has sent the prophets, and especially Muhammad….  Muhammad doesn’t just simply mean this one particular prophet.  He stands in a certain sense for man, insofar as he is considered by Muslims the perfect man.  Muhammad was the one who ‘made it.’  Everybody else should seek to some extent to approach the knowedge of God which Muhammad had.  Everybody should try to be to some  extent a kind of prophet…and what man ought to be is a person who knows that Allah is the One Reality and that everything else is a manifestation of God.”

And now from the Sufi scholar Reza Shah-Kazemi:  “What is meant by the phrase ‘metaphysics of oneness’ is the metaphysical interpretation given by the Sufis to the fundamental message of the Quran, the principle of tawhid, expressed in the credal formula: La ilaha illa’Llah—no god but God.  Whereas theologically the statement is a relatively straightforward affirmation of the uniqueness of the Divinity and the negation of other ‘gods’, metaphysically  the formula is read as an affirmation of the true nature of being: no reality but the one Reality.  Kashani comments as follows on one of the many verses affirming the central principle of tawhid, namely, 20:8: ‘Allah, there is no god but Him’: ‘His unique essence does not become multiple, and the reality of His identity derives therefrom, and does not become manifold; so He is He in endless eternity as He was in beginningless eternity.  There is no He but Him, and no existent apart from Him.’  We have here not only an affirmation of the oneness of God to the exclusion of other gods, but also, and more fundamentally, the affirmation of a unique reality which is exclusive of all otherness, or rather in relation to which all otherness is unreal….

“The shift from ‘theological’ tawhid to ‘ontological’ tawhid is one of the hallmarks of another great representative of the school of Ibn Arabi, Sayyid Haydar Amoli, in whose works one observes a remarkable synthesis between Shi’ite gnosis and Sufi metaphysics.  He refers to the ‘folk of the exterior’ who pronounce the formula La ilaha…. in the sense conveyed by the following Quranic verse, an exclamation by the polytheists of the strangeness of the idea of affirming one deity: ‘Does he make the gods one God? This is a strange thing.’  This monotheistic affirmation is, for Amoli, the essence of the tawhid professed by the folk of the exterior, and is called ‘theological’ tawhid.  In contrast, the ‘folk of the interior’ negate the multiplicity of existences, and affirm the sole reality of divine being; their formula is: ‘There is nothing in existence apart from God’….

“…in the Quranic perspective, every single thing, by dint of its very existence, ‘praises’ and ‘glorifies’ its Creator; its existence constitutes its praise.  Every created thing bears witness to, and thus ‘praises’, its Creator; the existence of every existent ‘glorifies’ the bestower of existence.  But, more fundamentally, the existence of every existing thing is not its own; this existence ‘belongs’ exclusively to that reality for which it serves as a locus of theophany; there is no ‘sharing’, ‘partnership’, or ‘association’ in being…. Thus we return to the metaphysics of oneness; nothing is real but God.  Each thing in existence has two incommensurable dimensions: in and of itself a pure nothingness; but in respect of that which is manifested to it, through it, by means of it–it is real.”

So, these two lenghty quotes point us in the right direction concerning the first principle of the spiritual life.  Both the fundamental Islamic creedal affirmation and the 1^st Commandment of the Judaeo-Christian Scriptures admonish us against idolatry.  But both with the Christian mystics and with the Sufis we are to understand this in a much deeper way than simply making an image of some critter and worshipping it.  Idolatry means making some existent into an independent reality existing “alongside” God as it were.  This has enormous implications.  For example, popular piety might hold that there you are and here I am and then there is God.  It is as if God were the “third” element in a series of existing things.  But that is to misunderstand grossly the reality of God and our own reality.  This not only puts God somewhere “out there” but it also makes my reality and your reality kind of independent self-existing realities.  It also creates this illusion of a distance between oneself and the one we call God, THE REAL.  This is truly the beginning of idolatry.

First of all, every single thing exists only because God calls it into existence and His call is also His very presence.  In other words, every single entity is connected to and related to God or else it does not have existence. Reality is from God; reality manifests God. Whatever “realness” any entity has, comes directly and depends directly on the Reality of God—apart from that there is nothing.  Look into the eyes of your pet and you will see the Presence–the “catness” of the cat, the “dogness” of the dog are on fire with the reality of God, manifesting the One Reality.  Every blade of grass, every little ant, every galaxy, every human being, every single thing is the Burning Bush filled with the Presence of God or else it doesn’t exist.  That’s why everything is truly “holy ground.”  Apart from God, everything, absolutely everything is pure nothingness.  But precisely so, it is impossible “to be” and “to be apart from God.”  To view things this way is to enter a state of delusion.  However, our state of blindness or delusion can be so serious that we can actually consider ourselves and our world independent of the reality of God.  This was the view, for example, of the 18^th Century deists in the West—God as the Great Clockmaker, creation as a great clock which God winds up and puts down and it runs on its own.  This was never the view of the mystics.  If we look at the world that way, we will be entering idolatry–attributing being to things that have no being of their own– and affirming that nothingness as a something.  The roots of nihilism and despair and delusion.

The story is told that one day a very devout Sufi came to the great Rabia, a Sufi woman mystic in Iraq, and said to her, “I have never sinned before God.”  And she answered him, “Your very existence is the greatest sin there is.”  And of course she is cutting through the crap of this piety by getting to the root problem, which is not really pride or hypocrisy or some other words like that–a superficial way of approaching the problem which Jesus noted also.  The fact is that underneath all our so-called “sins” lies that fundamental idolatry of self, that view of ourselves as something substantial and not dependent, something  more than nothingness and independent of God, possessors of our own being, our own reality and then negotiating with God, pleasing God, placating God, etc. as if we could stand independently “outside” God.

In the Gospel, in Luke 18, it says:  “A certain ruler asked him, ‘Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?’  Jesus said to him, ‘Why do you call me good?  No one is good but God alone.'”  Here Jesus addresses the same problem as Rabia, but from a slightly different angle.  Yes, there are commandments to carry out and virtues to practice but none of this “goodness” has any reality apart from THE REALITY—they simply manifest this Reality.  However, if we look on these as something  WE “achieve,” “accomplish,” “do,” etc., as if this “goodness” had its own independent reality, which we then bring before God for “reward,” and “approbation,” then we are slipping into idolatry and making the nothingness into something–even with our piety– and in effect “consorting with Satan”–recall, “Get behind me, Satan! to Peter’s proposal, and to the tempter in the desert a firm rebuke as Jesus is offered a seeming reality(a seeming good) that is independent of God, apart from God.  And that was Eve’s problem in the Garden also…etc.

Another look at this:  Recall this parable from Luke 18 also:  “Two men went up to the temple to pray, one a Pharisee and the other a tax-collector.  The Pharisee, standing by himself, was praying thus, ‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people: thieves, rogues, adulterers, or even like this tax-collector.  I fast twice a week; I give a tenth of all my income.’  But the tax-collector, standing far off, would not even look up to heaven, but was beating his breast and saying, ‘God, be merciful to me a sinner.”  We know what Jesus said, and we can guess what Rabia would have said, but another thing here is that the tax-collector is the paradigmatic figure for the Jesus Prayer tradition.  And if we get at the root meaning of the word “sin” as “separation from God,” then we meet this paradox.  The one who is proclaiming and admitting that he has been acting and living his daily life as if he were separate from God, as if his being had its own reality, this one is “justified” because he can only acknowledge that fact if he already recognizes his own nothingness and the “Allness” of God–in other words, that very acknowledgment, when it is sincere and true, is only possible when someone recognizes his own nothingness and God’s Presence in all that is.  On the other hand, the guy who brings forward “his own virtuous life” is doomed to delusion and idolatry, the land of the unreal,  because “only God is good” and he does not recognize the real meaning of a “good deed.”

Somewhere in his diary Abhishiktananda writes:  “Perhaps there is only God!”  One can almost see the twinkle in his eyes as one reads these words!  They are sentiments that usually upset the orthodox devout, make others nervous, and leave some purzzled.  To say that only God is Real and that we and all else have even less substantiality than a wisp of fog, a trace of morning dew seems outlandish, even heretical, etc.  Accusations of pantheism will arise; accusations that one is importing alien non-Christian ideas, etc.  A lot of this is a problem in language and as long as this is presented in an abstract academic fashion as it were, then serious misunderstandings can take place.  However, the moment one begins to “taste” God(as the Sufis would say), with even just a glimmer of the reality of the Divine, then one begins to easily proclaim one’s nothingness.  Such has been the unbroken witness of countless Christian mystics also.  Too often their language has been taken as being “negative,” “morose,” “self-rejecting,” or just plain metaphorical, a manner of speaking, etc.  But the deeper the experience of God a person has, the more zealous he/she is about proclaiming their “nothingness.”  For the reality of God is such that all else truly fades into emptiness and there is only the Divine Fullness.  And so with the rishis of the Upanishads we can pray:   Lead me from the unreal to the Real….  More and more so.  Deeper and deeper.  Beyond and still beyond….  To the Furthest Shore….    With the great Sufi mystic, Mansur al-Hallaj, we will then say:

“I saw my Lord with the eyes of my heart;

I asked Him, Who art Thou?  He said, Thou.”

Amen.

These are the reported last words of Steve Jobs.  His sister said that he repeated this phrase three times while staring into space just before he closed his eyes and stopped breathing.  Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow.  I repeat this phrase not out of sarcasm or irony, though I was no fan of Jobs as my oblique reference to him in the last posting shows–but now quite the opposite, I am not sure any mystic could have done any better, except for an improved vocabulary maybe!  To be frank, we of course cannot know for sure what his meaning was, but the moment seems to lean in this direction:  he was beginning to recognize the infinite and absolute Love that was surrounding and filling his life and him and all those who had gathered in his room.  The pop vocabulary of this pop icon is almost touching.  But the gist of this is definitely not “pop”.

Oh wow, some people said, when they first saw the now-classic MacIntosh computer almost 2 decades ago.  Oh wow, others said, when they saw Apple outsource its production force to China and all that implied.  Oh wow, still others said about the man’s 9-figure fortune by the time he was 30 years old.  He could have gotten a much greater “oh wow” if he had given away most of that money and alleviated the misery of at least some people.  It seems the Gospel calls for that.  I mean, really, I don’t see how you can ever justify a great fortune with the Gospel—and those of you from other traditions can use your own yardsticks—it simply calls for a divesting, no excuses, compromises, “ifs,” “buts,” “ands,” “ors,” etc., etc.  But where Steve Jobs was at in that moment it was too late for all that, and the infinite absolute Love, which is a totally unimaginable and incomprehensible mystery to us in our samsaric existence, took Steve by the hand and took him “through the eye of the needle”.  We sometimes call it “death”!  And Steve had to let go of Apple, of the 9-figure fortune, of even his identity as Steve Jobs, genius.  As he realized that, there was only one response, “oh, wow.”  Not bad.