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.

Abhishiktananda (Henri Le Saux) is one of the most important and most interesting religious figures of our time and maybe the most profound Christian mystic since Eckhart and John of the Cross.  I say this fully aware that there may be some serious questions about some of his spiritual/theological proposals and claims, and at a later date I hope to go over in some detail the essentials of his spiritual/mystical teaching with all its “wrinkles.”  But here we will just look at the humanity of this great mystic—something which ought to be done with all our other historical holy figures who tend to become “unreal icons” of an unreal perfection.  When we lose sight of their humanity, we also begin to see their teachings at a further distance from ourselves than needs be.  Also, when we see the mystic in his true humanity we then begin to interpret his teaching in a truer, deeper way and avoid the pitfalls of becoming a “groupie” or a “fan club member” who simply does not question anything the mystic says.  As that bumper sticker proposes:  “Question All Authority”—even the mystic’s!

The first thing that hit me about Abhishiktananda is a comparison of him with Thomas Merton.  And here we have to add that one of the truly sad things, indeed even tragic things, is that the two never met. Merton does mention in his Asian Journal Diary that he had an intention of trying to find Abhishiktananda and visit him if he had the time, but then he tragically died.  But even with that, most mysterious is that both of them, being such incredible correspondents with so many contacts and tons of letters written all over the place, never communicated with each other via letter.  Something to ponder.

Both monks were filled “to the gills” with engaging contradictions that would endear them to their friends.  And both men were to a large extent self-aware of these contradictions and could poke fun at themselves.  For example, both rhapsodized about solitude and silence yet they both had a “gift for gab” and immensely enjoyed conversation with like-minded souls and both had a real need for human contacts and human affirmation.  One cannot picture either of these men sitting in a cave somewhere alone for years on end in total silence–yet they both idealized such folk. One of the key characteristics of Merton’s writings is that he could seemingly contradict himself so readily.  I mean if you consulted his published works, his journals, his letters and his class notes, you could pretty much quote Merton “against Merton.”  That is also the case with Abhishiktananda, though not to the same extent or the same degree.  But recall Emerson’s famous remark concerning contradictions in Thoreau:  “Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”  (Here we need to add that the contradictions spoken of here are not the same kind as in the case of Heidegger, for example, who had such profound intuitions about human reality and yet consorted for years with the Nazis; or consider even the recent case of Steve Jobs who just died and was lionized for being a “deep Zen practioner”—however, Apple under his leadership outsourced thousands of jobs to China and then allowed his Chinese producers and sources to pollute the environment and run practically slave-like work conditions.  One of the factories where Apple computers were made had so many worker suicides that people there were forced to sign “no-suicide oaths”—very bizarre, I mean what could they do to you if you broke the oath!!!?  But we are getting too far afield!  In any case, these are contradictions that open an enormous moral chasm that cannot be affirmed.  These are not just personal quirks or the desire to hold on to “both ends” of a paradox as one wrestles with a mystery.)

Take a look at this picture of Abhishiktananda:

It is cold in winter where he has his hermit’s hut in Northern India.  So he has a large overcoat and a sweater on top of his sannyasi garb. (Kind of symbolic I thought!)  At a certain point he has a stove, and an electric immersion heater to make hot chocolate and hot tea.  He is surrounded by books, papers, a typewriter.  Now this is not your typical sadhu!  And he often good-humoredly (and sometimes sadly) points that out.  He knows his physical limitations and humbly accepts them.

Another thing:  he owns the land on which he sits!!  Actually Panikkar bought it for him and put it in both their names.  Very untypical for a sadhu!!  The plot of land was large enough for a garden.  And at one point he puts up barbed wire around the garden to preserve his vegetables.  Now that’s a picture that has to make one smile–a sadhu stringing barbed wire around HIS property!!  He also has a small endowment of money given to him by a donor, which allows him to roam freely until that money runs out, and then he shows some real signs of insecurity when he has to live only on the royalties from his few published items.  Then another rich donor steps forward—again, very unusual for a sadhu!!  He is very endearing when he confesses that he feels  totally unable to go from door to door begging for his food(he only does that a few times during his time in India–not easy to do for a European from an upper middle class family or an American for that matter!

Actually he never stays for too long in his hermit’s hut—never more than a few months at a time, and then he is on the road again.  At first he had to shuttle back and forth between Shantivanam, the original ashram, and his hermit’s lair in the foothills of the Himalayas.  Quite a journey and quite taxing.  Eventually he develops friendships and contacts all over India, and his reputation as a teacher and spiritual resource pulls him here and there all over India.  He writes to one of his sisters who is a cloistered nun that his enclosure is all of India!!

He is a man of great humor–his friends say he is full of jokes, telling “even wicked jokes”–more often his humor is aimed at himself but he is not afraid to tweek even his close friends.  But the humor is never for its own sake, but it is always for the sake of that awakening toward which he always focused.  In writing to his closest disciple, Marc, when the latter first proposed that he wanted to take sannyasa, Abhishiktananda good-naturedly takes him to task:  “You need sannyasa in order to be recognized.  And why do you want to be recognized, except with a view to being accepted when you do something?  It is not the ten years of silence which are calling for the diksha, but the time afterwards when you feel that something awaits you; a need for an apostolate under a different name!  I am not blaming you, but I am the witness who smiles….  A small damper for you and for me, who are at times living a little too much in a dream….  I smile when I see you now so interested in giving a form to the formless.  That is just what cults, myths, theologies have been doing from the beginning…  You need a sign in order to possess your freedom!  Oh, the infinitely free man, who needs a sign that he is beyond signs!  Get away with you—you are still steeped in your University Seminary, and deserve to go back to it!”  Of course, at a later date, Marc does become a sannyasi in a beautifully documented ceremony.  But this shows Abhishiktananda as teacher, not afraid to tweek even his closest associate.

Abhishiktananda is a man who exudes humor, liveliness, warmth through every pore of his body and spirit, but he is also very capable of being gruff, abrasive and cold to those who seem to him to be wasting his time or misleading people or are pompous.  Although he had extensive communal living in France, here in India he seems to show a certain inability to live in close quarters with other people.  Mainly because he is set and determined by a certain vision and experience and he simply does not have time for anything else.  Although he had great fondness for Monchanin, Bede Griffiths and Father Francis–the other 3 important figures in India’s Catholicism at that time–and although he respected and valued each of their talents, for all practical purposes he could not live with any of them in any community setting.  They all in fact had a very different vision of what their role in India was, and there were moments of friction(at one time Abhishiktananda called Fr. Bede, “the fog of the Thames”!)   Abhishiktananda also had very strong and sensitive feelings, and in one gathering of Christian religious figures in the early 60s someone whom he respected not only disagreed with some of his ideas but personally called into question his integrity.  This really hurt Abhishiktananda and he practically never got over it.  For a long time he avoided this particular group of theological scholars, and one wonders if some of his harsh statements about theology in his later life does not stem from that wound.  Anyway, it is interesting that this man who spoke so much about “going beyond” the peripheral ego to the great I Am, still felt the hurt that ego experienced and more importantly still was not free of it.  In light of this one can see how some of those Desert Father stories take on an enormous importance and how they also in a very, very quiet way point to that Beyond in a very existential way without any “lofty mystical language.” More about that in a later posting.

Abhishiktananda’s vision of the monastic journey, so profoundly influenced by Hindu sannyasa, seems at times to “leave this earth.”  The word is “acosmic.”  At times the vision he articulates of sannyasa and the monastic charism leaves one seemingly outside all human concerns and human history—the sufferings, injustices, travails that so many people undergo.  It’s as if the mystical life and the pursuit of justice are two paths with almost nothing in common.  Now Merton was much more into a unified vision of the two and so today he still is the more useful spiritual guide for many people.  However, Abhishiktananda, in his real life showed a great sensitivity and a truly compassionate heart to those who suffered.  Something like Dostoyevsky’s Father Zosima he intuited that it is very “cheap and easy” to love humanity in the abstract, but very, very difficult to truly love concrete persons with all their shortcomings. That will take real sacrifice, and if you do it in a way that nobody sees it, so much the better.  Early on in his life in India he practically adopted this wretchedly poor Tamil family and regularly sent them money, a share of whatever he got, even when he was almost penniless at some times in his life.  He never forgot them.  His heart was in the right place, but somehow he could never articulate a truly “unified vision” of spirituality and mysticism and the pursuit of justice.  In a letter to his sister, this is about as good as he could get:  “The Church  is a life conformed to the Gospel.  Christians are those who love their brothers and seek to transform a civilization based on profit and egoism, which therefore is contrary to the Gospel.  Priests and religious are those who take seriously the instructions given by Jesus to the seventy-two disciples when sending them out on mission.  That is how the Church ought to appear.” (And there are other similar quotes from him.)

In light of the above, it is important to point out that Abhishiktananda never did show any grasp of the “Brahmin bias” of his advaita spirituality—advaita was upper caste spirituality in India, and although Abhishiktananda himself related to all kinds of people with the same openness, he somehow never showed any self-critical awareness in this regard(of which self-criticism he showed much in other regards!).  He fixed an almost laser-beam focus on advaita and never let go, even as there were so many other religious paths in India.  In his defense, one could say that he saw advaita as liberated from the limitations even of Indian culture.  More about this in a later posting.

Abhishiktananda had some interesting preferences in regard to Catholic religious life–most of his friends there were either Carmelites or Jesuits.  He seems not to have cared a hoot for either Trappists or Carthusians(too regimented, too organized, too external oriented), and he had little hope for his own Benedictines–he himself saw them as providing “cover” for him in India, but that was about it.  Jesuits he had a lot of dealings with because it was they who would shape the ethos of the Indian Church.  The Carmelites he really loved because they were simply and totally oriented to contemplative prayer, nothing else, not even the liturgy.  He thought the nuns’ grill was ridiculous but he found the Carmelite nuns the most receptive to his spiritual teachings.

Food wise he ate as far as he could what the poorest in India ate.  However, he recognized many times that he badly needed some “European food.”  At one point he says that after 60 you almost cannot survive in India without some “European food.”  Here again he shows discretion, common sense, and a humble acceptance of his limitations.  Speaking of which, “common sense” is very evident in a lot of his spiritual direction and guidance in letters to various people. Here he is in the great tradition of the Elders of Optina in Russia during the 19^th Century: spiritual direction characterized by a lot of common sense. To a housewife in Bombay who wrote to him with some questions, he responds to her real situation, her real vocation from God, not some dream or fantasy of some unrealizable situation:  “I would not know how to give a good answer to the question whether Christ is necessary for Hindus.  I only know that plenty of people who do not know his person have access to his ‘mystery'(not to his ‘concept’) in their inner deepening and also in transcending themselves in the love of their brothers.  The mystery of the Heart of Christ is present in the mystery of every human heart.  You have found fulfilment through music, through painting.  Art is also a way of access to the mystery, and perhaps–in poety, painting, music–it reveals him better than any technical formula.  And in the end it is this mystery–at once of oneself and of each person, of Christ and of God–that alone counts.  The Awakening of the Resurrection is the awakening to this mystery!…Joy to you, to your husband, to your children.  May it shed its rays on all!  And don’t worry about those who love the esoteric, who run around to ashrams and ‘saints’.  The discovery of the mystery is so much simpler than that.  It is right beside you in the opening of a flower, the song of a bird, the smile of a child.”  This is a TRUE spiritual master speaking, but, alas, poor Abhishiktananda does seem to get a bit lost with his close disciple, Marc!   (Recently I listened to a talk by a Sufi teacher, and he also stressed the importance of common sense in spiritual guidance. )

Prayer and meditation:  at some gathering on the theme of prayer and meditation various participants got into a discussion of  “how much” time to give to such “practices.”  Very often the various individuals pointed out how much time they were able to allot to this each day.  Abhishiktananda was greatly amused to relate that he spent less time on “such periods” than any of them.  The point is that he did not believe in cutting up the day into “spiritual practics” and then the “other stuff.”  He saw this as making that fatal mistake of superimposing spirituality on the rest of life–it was kind of another layer that you put on your life.  Rather,  even as periods of silent prayer are good and important but what is really important is that pervasive and constant silent attentiveness to the Presence in all you do and in all that happens.  Here we are getting much closer to what the old Hesychast Fathers meant by “continual prayer,” “pure prayer,” “prayer of the Heart,” etc.

Finally, we have to confront the dark, swirling rumors around the possibility of a homoerotic relationship between Abhishiktananda and his closest disciple Marc.  Of course no one really knows, and it is very easy to mistakenly evaluate certain language. (It is alarming and very disappointing that Marc apparently recopied the last years of Abhishiktananda’s diary and threw away the originals—so we really can’t be too sure how much of Abhishiktananda’s own thoughts we have in that diary for about the last 5 years.  And then Marc’s own diary became totally inaccessible to all, even scholars–a close friend of Abhishiktananda’s kept this diary locked up, but she recently died, so maybe this might become available, but I doubt it.  And then, Marc’s mysterious disappearance—was he killed by some fanatic fundamentalist Hindus; did he just disappear in some cave in the mountains and die there or is he still there!; or did he commit suicide in the Ganges, like this Hindu guru did whom he had admired deeply.  Looking at it from outside one can say that there is not too many “good vibes” there!) There is an emotional flavor to their discourse in that last  year of his life that is much more than just the usual guru-disciple relationship.  However, like I said above, Abhishiktananda  was a very affective and sensitive person and he would respond with much feeling when he was connecting with someone.  It is possible that Marc was the one person who most alleviated him of a great loneliness in not being able to share his deepest and most profound insights/intuitions/teachings/understandings, etc.  He often mentions how little people seem to understand him.  However be the case, I frankly don’t care even if he did have a homoerotic relationship with Marc.  In a sense it may have been very innocent–like Merton’s experience of human love with the student-nurse, and he may have gone beyond it like Merton did if  he had lived longer.   No matter,the ultimate thing is that there was power in his words and behind his words, power to open up the depths of people’s heart to the Ultimate and Absolute Mystery.   But he is also still, “the witness who smiles” at all our foibles and preoccupations.  Amen!

Our culture proclaims that it values the individual, individuality, and uniqueness.  However, like so much else about us, this is totally illusory.  What it really promotes is a kind of atomized individualism and a frenzied kind of self-centeredness, self-assertiveness.   It believes that by crying out “I am different,” that you establish your own individuality–or like that old pop song by Frank Sinatra, “I Did It My Way.”  However, true uniqueness is a deeply spiritual reality and cannot be had or found by simply asserting one’s own illusory ego identity in contrast to all other such assertions, etc.  It will inevitably require a “death” of that ego-centeredness—like the Gospel tells us: “Unless a grain of wheat fall into the ground and die, it will remain alone, but if it dies it will bear much fruit….”  And one of those fruits will be one’s true uniqueness and individuality.  The spiritual life is totally marked by paradox at every step of the way, and this is one such instance–one has to transcend one’s ego identity in order to find one’s true uniqueness.  And the still deeper paradox will be that this “individuality” will also be a communion with all others so that you will know their pain and their joy as your own.

In Jewish mysticism, among the Hasidim, there is the story of a very holy rabbi by the name of Zusya.  There are several variants of the story, but basically it goes something like this:  Zusya has a dream in which he has died and finds himself waiting near the throne of God for his final interrogation as it were.  He is really sweating it out as he worries that God will ask him why he was not Abraham or Moses or Joshua, doing the great and holy things they did.    He tries to prepare an answer, but God surprises him with the question:  “Why were you not Zusya?”  Indeed!  That may be THE only important question we need to consider!  But to be truly “Zusya,” to be truly “me,” means that I cannot live by any superficial social identity or even take on a copy-identity of a holy person.  You have to plunge into the gift of your own uniquness which is nothing what society or culture or even Church  tells you it is.   One of the problems even a spiritual seeker may have is thinking that God is more present somewhere else, in someone else’s life, in some other “better” conditions for a spiritual life, wishing that he were in Abhishiktanada’s shoes or Merton’s for example(!).  But it is you, in your totally and infinitely unique, irrepalaceable, non-interchangeable reality in which God has placed Himself.  No matter how many twists and turns your life has taken, no matter how many mistakes, your Heart is truly Paradise, the Abode of the Absolute, and there you walk with God as with a Friend.  He calls you by a name that you alone have from Him–no one else, and your spiritual task is to recognize that name and respond to it—because only you can do that—no one else will be able to respond to that name.  And furthermore, God has planted His secret name in your heart that you alone have and by which He wants you to call Him, and by which no one else can call him.  And the amazing thing is that these two names may very well be the same.  This is the true source of your uniqueness and the uniqueness of every man, woman and child that exists.  Your life is the field spoken of in the Gospel in which a treasure is buried and a man buys that field with all he has and claims the treasure.

Consider three very unique holy men from three very different spiritual traditions:

A. Benedict Joseph LaBre.  1748-1783.  Born into a well-to-do family in France before the Revolution.  He grows up during a period of great decadence and the peak of the enlightenment.  Right from his youth he shows a strong proclivity to prayer and living a life oriented totally to God.  He attempts to join both the Trappists and the Carthusians, but both groups reject him.  He strikes them as an “oddball” and perhaps a “mental case.”  Catholic religiosity at this time is very rigid, very formulaic, very external oriented, very institutional, very progam oriented, by the book kind of thing.  So you would think he was finished with that kind of rejection by those kind of folk!  Not in the least.  Benedict takes up a life hardly ever seen in modern Western Christianity:  the wandering beggar.  He lives a life of total poverty and total pilgrimage.  Officially he is nobody.  He spends his time mostly in silence and in continual prayer and in wandering from one church and one holy place to another.  He begs for his food, and he has only the clothes on his back.  In Eastern Christianity they would recognize him as a “fool for Christ”; among Hindus he might be considered as a kind of sannyasi, but where he was, there was no one like him!  Eventually he ends up in Rome where he sleeps in the ruins of the Colosseum and spends his days in the Churches.  He dies in Rome, and about a 100 years later he is canonized by Pope Leo.

B. Kabir  1440-1518  One of the greatest poets in Hindi and a mystic revered by Sikhs, Sufis, and Hindus.  Born in India near Varanasi, born into the lowest caste, he never learns Sanskrit, so all his poetry is in Hindi.  He is left parentless as a little child, and though coming from a Hindu family, he is adopted and raised by a family of Muslims.  He is another one of these people who is totally intoxicated with the reality of God.  You would think that such a one would take up being a sadhu, taking sannyasa, having a guru, etc.  However, he never goes beyond being a householder, marries, and is a weaver by trade.  His religious/mystical poetry is marked by intense experience, and even though he grew up in Moslem home his poetry   is replete with Hindu spiritual concepts, especially within the bhakti vein.  But he also spurned the Hindu caste system, and Sufi ideas can be found in all his poetry.  Considering how violent the Hindu-Islam encounter has been from time to time, Kabir is that unique expression of another way.  Legend has it when he died that Hindus and Moslems were arguing about how to properly deal with his body.  When they lifted the covering, there were only rose petals there.  So the Hindus cremated part of the petals as they are accustomed and the Moslems entombed another part of the rose petals according to their custom.  So today you will find both shrines to Kabir.

C. Han-shan  Chinese hermit. Taoist, Buddhist, Zen figure.  Lived during the great Tang period, around 650 AD.  He was a contemporary of China’s greatest poet, Tu Fu.  Not much is known about him, but he did leave behind a bunch of scribbled poems.  He also was not an “official monk” but more like a hobo.  A contemporary official who had heard of him from some early Zen master sought Han-shan out.  He discovered him living in a place called Cold Mountain, which is also the meaning of the name, “Han-shan.”  There was a major temple in a nearby town where Han-shan would come down to often.  He befriended the kitchen master who was also something of a spiritual adept.  Anyway Han-shan would get food leftovers from his friend and together they would often sing and laugh and joke around.  When the official first found him, Han-shan was with his friend in the kitchen, and the official came in and bowed to them.  Han-shan laughed and shouted, “Why has a big official bowed to a pair of clowns?”  The town people called him a “mountain mad man”—he was always singing, laughing, talking to himself, but the official commented that “everything he said had a feeling of the Tao.”  After Han-shan’s death several hundred of his short poems were gathered together, and very quickly he became one of the great legendary figures of early Chinese Zen.  In an earlier posting I had quoted from this poetry, and here is another sample–and it would be good to point out that “Cold Mountain”  refers simultaneously to his place of residence, to himself, and to his state of mind: (Gary Snyder’s translation)

Borrowers don’t bother me

In the cold I build a little fire

When I’m hungry I boil up some greens.

I’ve got no use for the kulak

With his big barn and pasture–

He just sets up a prison for himself.

Once in he can’t get out.

Think it over–

You know it might happen to you.

In a tangle of cliffs I chose a place–

Bird–paths, but no trails for men.

What’s beyond the yard?

White clouds clinging to vague rocks.

Now I’ve lived here–how many years–

Again and again, spring and winter pass.

Go tell families with silverware and cars

‘What’s the use of all that noise and money?’

Men ask the way to Cold Mountain

Cold Mountain: there’s no through trail.

In summer, ice doesn’t melt

The rising sun blurs in swirling fog.

How did I make it?

My heart’s not the same as yours.

If your heart was like mine

You’d get it and be right here.

When men see Han-shan

They all say he’s crazy

And not much to look at

Dressed in rags and hides.

They don’t get what I say

& I don’t talk their language.

All I can say to those I meet:

‘Try and make it to Cold Mountain.’

A. The anniversary of 9/11 is upon us.  Ten years ago, yet who can forget that horrifying and tragic day?  The sadness and darkness of that day is not only in all the lives that were lost in that attack, but actually even more in the truly tragic and insane response it provoked from us.  Right after the attack, the next day, most of the  world was actually with us in sympathy and in solidarity.  There were actually huge demonstrations, for example, in Tehran in support of the U.S.  There was a moment, an opportunity when we could have transcended the usual “eye for an eye” approach to policy and foeign relations, and we could have called the world together and said, “Ok, what can we do, what should we do to make sure this doesn’t happen again?”   Trust the goodness of people, of all people, to help us find a way to bring reparation, restoral, healing  and peace.  Instead we began to bomb.  Incidentally, we call ourselves a “Christian nation,” or some people do, but after 9/11 the spirit of  revenge and retaliation was stalking through the land—NOT the Spirit of Christ.  Consider this:  Jesus was tortured and murdered, but on the cross he seeks forgiveness for his killers.  More importantly, in the Resurrection, his first words are, “Peace be with you, MY peace…..”  The Risen Christ does not speak the language of revenge, retaliation, “pay back,” etc.  Who can sanely claim that we are a “Christian nation”?  On September 12, 2001, the Gospel for the day was Jesus’s command to “love your enemy”!

But there was also another deep wound inflicted that day—a deep wounding of Muslim/non-Muslim relations, in particular Western Christian/Muslim relations, understanding, respect for one another, and even a nourishing of each other.  Not that there was great mutual understanding or interest in each other before 9/11, but now  the  distinterest on  the part of  so many Western Christians has a tinge of hostility or at least suspicion of everything Muslim.  Ignorance, irresponsible mass media, and even more irresponsible politicians and leaders have all contributed to this.

Fifty years ago Thomas Merton wrote to a Pakistani Sufi friend of his:  “It seems to me that mutual comprehension between Christianity and Moslems is something of very real importance today, and unfortunately it is rare and uncertain, or else subjected to the vagaries of politics.”  Alas, that statement is even more true today.  But if we look at the deep past there are some flickers of hope. St. Francis with the Sultan–a well-known story.  Then, in the 14^th Century, before the fall of Constantinople, the great Orthodox spiritual theologian St. Gregory Palamas was captured by the Turks and held prisoner for quite a while.  During that time Palamas had many discussions with the Emir and his son.  The Emir had a great respect for this Christian theologian and mystic, and Palamas himself  became good friends with the Emir’s son.  Later when he was released, he wrote a letter to the Emir’s son and said that he hoped that “a day will soon come when we shall be able to understand each other.”  Indeed.  Then, the anonymous Christian classic, The Way of a Pilgrim, is quite explicit in teaching that in the absence of a starets or spiritual father, the Christian seeker may receive spiritual instruction “even from a Saracen.”  The reverse relationship can be found in  the spiritual friendship of the Sufi Ibrahim ibn Adham and the Orthodox monk Symeon.  All this points us in the right direction.  Finally there is this iconic image: the oldest continuously existing Christian monastery in the world, St. Catherine’s on Mt. Sinai, contains a mosque within its precincts.  This was built by the monks for their workers who are Muslim Bedouins.  This should remind us if we have a dominant role in a given society to give our minority brethren the freedom and ability to worship as they feel called.

B. Merton wrote this about one of the great Sufi holy men of our time,            Shaikh  Ahmad al-‘Alawi of Morocco:  “With Shaikh Ahmad, I speak the

same language and indeed have a great deal more in common than I do with the majority of my contemporaries in this country.  In listening to him I seem to be hearing a familiar voice from my ‘own country’ so to speak.  I regret that the Muslim world is so distant from where I am, and wish I had more contact with people who think along these lines.”

C. Speaking of Sufis, their connection to the events going on in Libya are not well known.  It appears that the rebels have overthrown Gaddafi, and this is another one of those events that is percolating in the Arab world.  No one knows for sure the outcome of this revolution or the exact make-up of these rebels, but something very interesting about them:  they are fighting under the old Libyan flag, the flag of  the pre-Gaddafi state of King Idris who was Libya’s king from 1951, when Libya gained its independence from colonial rule, until 1969 when he was overthrown by Gaddafi.  What is especially interesting is that King Idris was a Sufi, in fact he was head of the Senussi Sufi Order—he was in fact a “Sufi king,” like Plato’s “philosopher king.”  He governed a constitutional state that was  aligned with the West.  He built a modern Western-style university in Libya.  There was also a very good religious university run by the Senussi Sufis which Gaddafi closed in 1984.  Gaddafi rose to power in the 1960s when it was very “in” and popular in the Third World to be anti-Western, and so he was against the Sufis who were able to get along with Westerners who would not exploit their country.

Libya had been a hotbed of Sufi life for centuries, as in fact a lot of North Africa.  King Idris’s  grandfather was a founder of the Senussi Sufi Order as a branch of the Idrisi Sufis founded by the Moroccan Sufi Ahmad ibn Idris(1760-1837).  This religious leader was noted for his reforming concepts.  He called for the abandonment of the traditional sharia schools of Islamic law, and he was a critic of the ultra-fundamentalist Wahhibi movement(from which Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 terrorists spring and whose roots are actually in Saudi Arabia, from where we get so much oil and with whom we are such good friends!)  What is not generally known is that while Sufis are very peaceful they are not pacifists in the strict sense—they will fight against someone who invades their home.  Thus Libyan Sufis were prominent in the fight against the colonialism of France and Italy.  Many were executed by Mussolini.  Let us see if the present Libyan freedom fighters live up to the high standards of their distinguished ancestors.  For more information about these Sufis in Lbya here are a few websites:

http://www.islamicpluralism.eu/WP/?tag=senussi-sufi-order

http://sufinews.blogspot.com/2011/05/people-of-heart.html

http://fiercereason.com/2011/08/stephen-schwartz-the-sufi-foundation-of-libyas-revolution/

D. India.  What can you say?  There are so many different Indias!  Let us consider some examples.  First there is the India which has been in the international news lately because of a hunger strike conducted by a Gandhi-like figure, Anna Hazare, against widespread government corruption.  Sounds pretty straightforward, and how could you not support that!  But things are never simple in India(or here either!).  Consider this op-ed piece in a major Indian newspaer by Arundhati Roy:

   http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article2379704.ece?homepage=true

Roy is a major novelist, a social activist, and what we would call a “progressive.”  Reading her piece as an outsider, it is almost impossible to follow in its myriad details, but you get a sense of the complexity and enormity of India’s social problems.  But there is another India, the India of sannyasis and sadhus, the India of our Abhishiktananda.  Here is an amazing story illustrating the fact that this India is still there—barely maybe—but still there:

http://indrus.in/articles/2011/02/27/russian_hermit_to_be_expelled_after_15_years_in_india_12207.html

Now in what other country could this story have unfolded?  I think only in India.  However modernity is eating away at India’s body and soul and heart, and what of this India will survive remains to be seen.  It is really ironic that Catholic Indian monasteries and ashrams used to want to “do it in an Indian way” when now young Indians want to live like this:

http://www.vgnprojects.com/Brixton.aspx

Just a sample of tons of such housing developments going up in India all over the place.  With “six lane highways” close by!!    It looks just like here!  Exactly.    That’s one of the effects of modernity:  homogenization

And a final note on this:  a real physical symbol of what is taking place in India—the greatest and most holy river in India, the River Ganga, is dying.  Not only from the human corpses which have been dumped there for ages, but more from the sewage and industrial effluents going into the river now in unprecedented amounts.  Around Karpur over 200 tanneries discharge chromium-rich effluents and 80% of the city’s sewage is dumped untreated into the river.  Around Kolkata some 150 factories pour untreated waste into the brown water of the Hugli, a tributary of the Ganga.  Fish die and river water laced with toxins irrigates farmland, eventually seeping into food and village borewells to cause untold diseases.  Once the only liquid thought fit for an orthodox Brahmin, now is undrinkable.  But a radical “solution” of sorts is in store.  The Gangotri Glacier, which feeds the Ganga is melting and retreating at a pace of about 600-700 meters per year.  Eventually the Ganga will be waterless.  Will India be thoroughly modern then?

E.   One more note about 9/11.  The New York firemen who were the first responders to the attacked buildings had a Catholic chaplain.  His name:  Fr. Mychal Judge.  He was a Franciscan priest of many years.  He went into the buildings with his firemen to minister to anyone in need and to be “with his parishioners.”  He died with them when the buildings collapsed.  One more thing about Fr. Mychal: he was a gay priest.  He was a gay Franciscan priest who lived faithful to his vows and his calling.  Many New York firemen were later surprised to find out that their chaplain had been gay.