The Desert Fathers & Additional Matters

It is time to do a bit of reflecting on the Desert Fathers. I have mentioned them in passing quite a few times but never really stopped to focus on them or their meaning and contribution to our spiritual way. They are the “bread and butter” of the Christian “monk’s way”(but of course these guys would be horrified to hear any monk using butter on his bread!!) They are classically considered as the paradigmatic Christian monks, the founders of the Christian monastic movement. In one sense this is true; in another their story has become pure myth. They are the victims of a sweeping mythic reinterpretation that almost obscures what they were really about. When I was a novice monk, I was drawn to these marvelous figures but our formation was more focused on the “Benedictine tradition” which is already a reinterpretation of an interpretation of the Desert Father tradition. Someone will say, surely things do change over time, and yes that is true, but the question arises, exactly what role should they have in forming contemporary monastic life? It seems that the Church used the Benedictine tradition to “tame” monasticism, to control it, and use it as a cultural and ecclesial vehicle. Some of the results were good; many were not. I was told in so many words that these figures were too often “inhuman” and their stories “impossible” and their spirituality tainted with “gnosticism,” etc. Some of that is undeniable, but actually that is a superficial way of reading them and misses their meaning by “the width of the universe.”

Surely what I am leading up to is not merely “imitation”–that would represent another kind of misunderstanding and misrepresentation of what the Desert Fathers were about. I won’t spend more time on this now, but let me illustrate something of what I mean by reference to the West in American literature and film. There is the “mythic West” and then there is the real West of history. The mythic West appears in films and stories and reflects more the dreams and fears and hopes and hang-ups of their creators, right down to the present times(like the film High Noon from 1954 is a kind of allegory of McCarthy Era America where it took extraordinary courage to stand up to the bullying and threats of the “Un-American Activities” folks). The real West of history at times intersects with the myth and illumines the same reality, but at other times is completely different and shows actually a more interesting and deeper reality. Did you know, for example, that most cowboys did not wear guns, that in fact most men in the West did not wear guns(in the mythic West it seems that every man is carrying a gun and uses it readily!)? That foreign exploiters were behind the big ranches of the West? That corporate railroads pretty much ran the show once they came on the scene? That we killed Native Americans (people who were “different”) with great ease and frequency? That a few women were elected to a number of important positions, like sheriff, long before they even got to vote in the East? And so on. The real history of the West helps us to see the real problems better facing us today because in many ways they are the same. The myth can be very helpful, but it can also be used to obfuscate the reality in front of your nose.

Merton, not surprisingly, understood the Desert Monks quite deeply, and he knew that contemporary monasticism was only paying lip service to their reality: “If we were to seek their like in twentieth-century America, we would have to look in strange, out of the way places. Such beings are tragically rare.… Though I might be expected to claim that men like this could be found in some of our monasteries of contemplatives, I will not be so bold. With us it is often rather a case of men leaving the society of the ‘world’ in order to fit themselves into another kind of society, that of the religious family which they enter. They exchange the values, concepts and rites of the one for those of the other. And since we now have centuries of monasticism behind us, this puts the whole thing in a different light. The social ‘norms’ of a monastic family are also apt to be conventional and to live by them does not involve a leap into the void–only a radical change of customs and standards. The words and examples of the Desert Fathers have been such a part of monastic tradition that time has turned them into stereotypes for us, and we are no longer able to notice their fabulous originality. We have buried them, so to speak, in our own routines, and thus securely insulated ourselves against any form of spiritual shock from their lack of conventionality.”

Now Merton points to several interesting things here, somewhat indirectly. First of all there is the complex relationship of the Desert Fathers to their culture and society (and by the way although the term “Desert Fathers” usually refers strictly to the Egyptian scene of the 4^th and 5^th Centuries, I think we can include the Palestinian and Syrian scenes also ranging from the 2^nd to the 7^th Centuries—which came first and who owed what to whom we need not worry about here). On the one hand they are truly people of their culture and society and you will not understand them if you ignore that fact. But, and this gets very intriguing, they are also very much in “rebellion” against their society, “contra mundum,” and in a social order marked by frictions, competitions, vengeance, violence, and status-seeking, these folk present another vision and postulate another goal, another point to human life. Again, Merton: “With the Desert Fathers, you have the characteristic of a clean break with a conventional, accepted social context in order to swim for one’s life into an apparently irrational void.”

But insofar as this movement is also “part and parcel” with the times and strangely meets the needs of the times, it attracted a whole host of people, not all of them finding their way into spiritual depths or any kind of depths. There was also the problem of sexual perversity and violence among the thousands who went out into the desert–which usually meant going to the edge of the town or village in many cases. What we call the Sayings of the Desert Fathers is the distillation of a kind of wisdom and teaching that really only a few achieved, and so we have these people as true role models and bearers of a wisdom and teaching that needs decoding as it were. To understand how “different” our Desert Fathers were from the general mob that called itself “monks”, consider the following example. Hypatia of Alexandria was a great pagan woman philosopher around the year 400. She was a Greek Neoplatonist and an accomplished mathematician and head of the Platonist school in Alexandria—many men came to her to be her students and disciples. Well, she was a thorn in the side of Patriarch Cyril of Alexandria(St. Cyril of Alexandria !, a key figure in Patristic Christology). Cyril was a big fan of the monks in the desert, their big supporter, and he in turn was very much adulated by the desert dwellers. One day a mob of so-called Christian monks ambushed Hypatia as she was going about Alexandria and brutally murdered her. This enabled Cyril to turn Alexandria and all of Egypt into a totally Christian place—the irony of that is astounding! Of course there is no evidence that Cyril ever ordered her killing–he just saw her as a threat to the Church(!), and Catholic and Orthodox scholars have come to his defense on occasion, but it is striking that he never condemned the killing, and one of his bishops actually approved it. It might be said that Cyril never new what this mob was about to do—just like popes and bishops never seemed to know what their predator priests were doing to some children in recent years. At any rate, such were the times!

Another interesting thing about the Desert Fathers is that they are used in the cross-cultural interreligious dialogue as paradigmatic exemplars of a kind of universal monastic charism. That may be, but this also needs careful scrutiny about what is really going on and what is really being said on both sides of the dialogue. For example there is the comparison of the Desert Father figure with the Indian sannyasi–Abhishiktananda would allude to this in various places in his writings. At first glance this looks very promising, but there are serious limitations. For one thing the sannyasi is totally integrated in Indian/Hindu culture. No matter how radical his renunciation, the culture understands, accepts, approves and in fact supports his place within that society. When Sadashiva roamed naked along the banks of the Cavery, everyone understood and accepted what he was about. With the real Desert Fathers you have a bit of a fracture there, a kind of “No” to the given society, a real possibility of misunderstanding arising between society and these so-called monks. Although they did not carry a sign around that said “I rebel,” nevertheless there is a bit of that spirit in their lives as Merton alludes. Of course as time goes on in the later centuries the Church “tames” the desert monasticism into another ecclesial structure and this aspect of the Desert Fathers is almost lost—except always for that “unruly” hermit bunch appearing on the scene at various times and in various places! Today we really have something very, very different. Our society is almost totally without any religious vision or depth. The monk is totally not comprehensible in such a setting, and reading the Desert Fathers is quite a challenge. Recall that the sannyasi lives, breathes and thrives in a truly amazing and deep religious culture(though to what degree it can preserve this in the onslaught of modernity remains to be seen). The only thing even approaching that in the West would be 19^th Century Russia where there were literally hundreds of thousands of monks and hermits all over the place and literally millions of pilgrims on the roads(recall The Way of a Pilgrim).

Now we come to the heart of the matter: the Desert Fathers and this thing called “monastic identity.” At first glance you will note that so many of their sayings are in reply to some such question as: Who is a monk? How do I become a monk? What does it mean to be a monk? Etc. But it would be very wrong to take that word “monk” in their sayings and use it as if it meant/referred to/ or pointed at our institutional Catholic monks. What you really have to understand by their word “monk” would be something like “God-seeker,” “mystic,” “living with God alone,” etc. Here our Sufi friends can help us. They explicitly reject the notion of “monasticism” as institutionally practiced within Catholicism—although of course on an individual basis they can have true friends there (like Merton). The Sufis, and all Islam, says simply that they have no priests and no monks—every human being stands in an unmediated presence and relationship to God. Every human being is potentially a mystic; and one could say, every human being is potentially a “monk” then. Consider the following: Abu Sa’eed Abeel Khair, may God bless him, was asked: “What is Sufism?” (A very Desert Father kind of question—what do you do to be a monk?). And he answered: “That which you hold in your mind, forsake it; that which you have in your hand, give it; and that which strikes you, it is meant to be.” Perfect Desert Father tradition in every way! Note he doesn’t “wax mystical” about God, etc. This is something that a lot of modern people don’t like about the Desert Fathers–their language seems too dry, too laconic, too simple, and there seems to be nothing there about God! The language of our Sufi master here is truly existential and down to earth. Perfect Desert Father stuff. In its simplicity it actually is very deep and very hard. One has to go very far and very deep to live these words!

Now some people (like Panikkar among others) have wanted to “hold” all these different types in one grasp as it were: the Sufi, the Christian monk, the desert father, the sannyasi, the Zen monk, etc. They have proposed a kind of universal monastic archetype that is part of the structure of being human and which will get actualized in different ways and to different degrees by different people. I can see the value and the attraction of this approach, but I already have expressed my disagreement with it in a previous posting concerning Fr. Tiso’s comments on Panikkar and interreligious dialogue. A problem, indeed a temptation, that this doesn’t get you out of is that you will inevitably be circling around these questions of who is a monk, what makes one a monk, and answering them in an institutional way. I know from my own experience that in a former monastic life I spent way too much time pondering this monastic identity thing. Professional Catholic monks can become obsessed about where one “draws the line.” We all need to be liberated from this–both professional monks and laypeople who gawk at them as if they were some special people. Because what the Desert Fathers are saying(and what the Sufis are saying—and really Abhishiktananda was circling around this problem toward the end of his life, coming at it from the Hindu/Advaita direction), what all these people are talking about is being a “true God-seeker,” one whose whole heart is set on God, no matter what other conditions prevail in one’s life. To use Abhishiktananda’s words: are you willing to “totally surrender the peripheral ego to the Absolute Mystery”? If you say, Yes, count me in, then the Desert Fathers can be helpful and indeed only then will they begin to make sense. Their replies to this question underline in various ways that the cost will be steep, the way will seem difficult and dark and uncertain and lonely–this is the Pearl of Great Price in the Gospels, and the treasure buried in the field–it will take a lot “to take possession” of this reality, but as one of them put it, “Why not be totally changed into Fire?” Those inside the Desert Father world know what this language means!

Now let us digress a bit to 2^nd and 3^rd Century Syria, long before the Egyptian desert got populated with our favorite figures. There were movements afoot in Syria that smacked of radicalism, a truly radical following of Jesus. Figures that seemed akin to Indian sannyasis began to appear, wandering ascetics, and there were also bewildering communities or gatherings really of these radical followers of Jesus. The Syriac term for their way of life was: ihidayuta, which literally translates as “singleness.” Any one of them then was called an “ihidaya.” Sebastian Brock, the great Syriac scholar calls this the key term of Syriac Chrisitanity. You see, these people originally knew no other way; these are not “fringe” people on the edge of society and the Church. They live all over the place, including within towns and villages—much like the later Sufis! Sometimes they were also known as the “Sons and Daughters of the Covenant.” Now what is important is that this is what it meant to be a Christian to them….nothing less would do. For them our form of Christianity where the majority of the members of the church are “average people,” who try to be good, church going folk, but really are in effect “part-time God-seekers”—afterall there is so much else to do….and then there are full-time God-seekers, the monks, the religious specialists…. No, for the ihidaya folk this would be totally incomprehensible—there was only this one radical way that Jesus himself indicated. The ihidaya is a follower and imitator of Christ the Ihidaya par excellence…. Now this term, “ihidaya,” has various connotations that focus on one reality: singleness, uniqueness, single-mindedness, unified, alone, the only one–later it translates into Syriac the Greek word which becomes our word “monk”, monachos—in the creed this term also translates into Syriac what we say about Jesus when we say He is “the only begotten.” And so on. It also emphatically points in the direction of “not being married,” being celibate. And what is interesting is that this asceticism has nothing to do with a rejection of the body or a suppression of natural desires or anything like that. It is purely and simply a movement into the “already” of the Eschaton, the eschatological life, “when God will be all in all,” where there is no longer any point to sexual activity! Look at this from another standpoint. Sexual activity participates in the world of duality, and in its truest and most beautiful expression it symbolizes and manifests the overcoming of ALL dualities. However, once the Awakening has taken place, once Advaita is the “place of the heart,” then there is no more role for sexual expression and one is, so to say, “way beyond that.” Once one has received the Holy Spirit (and recall that the Holy Spirit is the key to Advaita) what is there to do but strip down, give everything up and wander like Sadashiva did along the Cavery. And what is the Eschaton except precisely the awakening to Advaita in its totality and fullness. So for these people the normal way of simply being a Christian, indeed just being human, was to be something like the Indian sannyasi, nothing less! Needless to say you can’t exactly build a society and a civilization OR a Church community on that basis, so the Church eventually transformed all that zeal into other channels and tamed this movement also. (I can’t imagine being a parish priest and start preaching this stuff—one would cause such an uproar….!) In the process, I think, the Church lost several very precious and very important things. It is this which Abhishiktananda was desperately trying to recover for the Church in India but I fear his message was not heard. And to conclude this section, I just want to emphasize that one of these “losses” was this sense that EVERY human being is to be “intoxicated with God,” and “lost in God.” Who is a monk and who isn’t a monk is almost a trivial concern in that light.

One concluding thought. Recall that I said that the Sayings of the Desert Fathers are littered with questions such as “How do I become a monk?” and “Who is a monk?” And as I have tried to point out that word “monk” in that context should perhaps be better understood as “God-seeker” rather than as some member of some group or institution, etc. Now to get a really good overall picture of what is going on in the Sayings, imagine an array of concentric circles as pictured below.

The whole array of Sayings can be seen as an enormous array of concentric circles , where each Saying/story is not so much as a “pointer” or a “direction,” a recipe or a formula, but as a circle around a mysterious center which seems empty. So some of the Sayings are far from that center; while others are very close; but they all form this pattern that leads one to focus on that mysterious center. And intuitively you will soon be able to pick out the sayings/stories which are nearer that center and which are farther from that center. One implication of that is that you do not isolate any individual saying/story as if it contained “the message.” It is the whole pattern that is most important and leads one to focus on that center. This pattern sets up a kind of “target” for the heart. But exactly what is at the center? Alas, that is why they did not “wax mystically”—there is only silence about that, because as the Advaitists and the Taoists would put it: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao,

The name that can be named is not the eternal name.”

We shall return to these great figures in greater detail later.

Foundations & Fundamentals, Part V: The Mercy & The Compassion

Leave a reply

Foundations & Fundamentals, Part V: The Mercy & The Compassion
by A Monk
Ok, this one is real hard also! Extra hard! But for quite another reason than the previous postings in the Foundations Series. The problem is the words are “nice”; everyone likes these kind of words, and everyone thinks they understand what these words mean and imply and what they point to. There is a psychological and social component here that everyone, or almost everyone, connects with and believes in and leaves it at that. However the deeper realms, what is properly called mysticism or the contemplative vision of this, remains largely unexplored. Just speaking for the majority of Christians! And that is a sad story when in fact every single human being has this knowledge in their heart. But what the Desert Fathers called “the world” tends to distract and preoccupy us. However, when “the heart” awakens it opens up on these infinite vistas which we normally call “Mercy” and “Compassion”–again I capitalized and used the article “the” because I am not referring simply to a “fellow-feeling” here but an aspect of that Ultimate Mystery which we call God.

So let us begin in an odd place–thousands of miles away as it were. In a Japanese Zen monastery, of the Rinzai School, during one of their sesshins. A sesshin is a retreat of sorts, a very intense period of practice where the monks and lay guests do walking and sitting meditation for more than 12 hours a day. Gary Snyder relates one such sesshin that he participated in when he was a student in Japan. It was at Shokoku-ji in Kyoto during the 1960s. He tells of how intense the experience was and describes one striking feature of the practice: during the long hours of meditation, the head monk, the Jikijitsu, paces up and down the rows of meditators with a wooden paddle. If anyone’s posture is slipping up or if they start nodding off, the Jikijitsu will whack them on the back with the paddle, some more, some less, but a real whack, enough to knock one off one’s cushion and depending on what was wrong. Snyder concludes his story:

“The sesshin ends at dawn on the eighth day. All who have

participated gather in the Jikijitsu’s room and drink powdered

green tea and eat cakes. They talk easily, it’s over. The Jikijitsu,

who has whacked or knocked them all during the week, is their

great friend now—compassion takes many forms.”

Indeed. A little parable perhaps! But by no means is this story to be taken as an endorsement of causing someone suffering. As a matter of fact the compassion and mercy we really want to think about and which is primary is not what we “do to our neighbor” but really the Mercy and Compassion of God. And here we have to enlist our Sufi friends again for here also they have gone the deepest. Their whole theology and spirituality is built on this foundation, and we can learn much from them.

Recall the opening lines of the Tao Te Ching:

“The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao,

The name that can be named is not the eternal name.

The nameless is the beginning of heaven and earth.”

For those of us in the theistic traditions this is a perfect summary of one aspect of that reality which we call God. It is the Absolute Mystery of God, totally transcendent, absolutely unknowable in its essence, totally nameless, beyond all knowledge. And yet we also affirm that this Reality manifests itself, and as it is truly the only Reality for there is nothing else real “next to it” or compared to it, thus it truly manifests itself only to itself; and within this manifestation our semblance of being arises. Our being has reality only because it is grounded in Reality and apart from that we have no reality, and so we are part of that manifestation and our purpose is to be a witness to this manifestation in all its aspects. Thus the gift of intelligence and freedom, and so we are able to respond to every manifestation in that classic triad of “to know, love and serve God.” This is the fundamental point of human beingness as even our catechism puts it.

But now we can push this further. So the Sufis (and we) affirm that absolutely everything is a manifestation of this Absolute Mystery: the drop of rain, the hawk circling in the sky, the smile on a child, the laughter of friends, the lovemaking of husband and wife, a kind word of a stranger, the snowflakes falling, the Black Hole at the center of our galaxy, a blade of grass, a delicious meal, the coolness of water, etc. etc. In a sense these are obvious, but what about the really bad and evil things. Someone like Abhishiktananda said toward the end of his life that he did not believe anymore in evil or suffering. I am not so sure about that as a solution–that is a kind of gnostic solution to the problem of evil where it simply vanishes when you arrive at a certain state of awareness. Dostoyevesky in Brothers Karamazov provides the definitive challenge to any gnostic solution to the problem of evil. The Sufis have their own way of dealing with this, but it does not mean denying the reality of suffering or evil. Simply that for the “person who knows” yes, he will see God even there–but you don’t preach that to people as if evil did not exist–it lies beyond our ability to explain the mystery of evil and suffering but for the Sufi “who knows the score” he will see God even there. As Good Friday approaches we may see the point of what they intend. At the crucifixion, Jesus says to the thief crucified next to him and who turns to him, “This day you will be with me in Paradise.”

In any case, the key thing for the Sufis is that “What Is” is a manifestation of that Absolute Mystery which we call God (Allah), but it is not a manifestation of His essence which remains totally transcendent, but a manifestation of His Love. The Sufis have this expression, “the straight path.” To be on “the straight path” is to be in harmony with “what is” as it comes from the Love of God. This does not mean negative passivity but knowing how to respond to every thing and every situation in a way that witnesses to the manifestation of God and attests to God’s Self-communication and Self-manifestation in every moment and in every situation and in every thing. This requires “purity of heart”–thus the importance of that expression for the early monks and mystics. What we all want to be is on the Straight Path with purity of heart!

Now we come to our two key words: “Mercy” & “Compassion.” Both are aspects of that one reality, Love, which manifests the Reality: God. Indeed, in the New Testament God is defined as Love. For most of us these words kind of blend into one sense or meaning, kind of interchangeable if you will. However for the Sufis these two words have a serious differentiation which is worth paying attention to. Muslims begin every invocation with the Basmalah, which can be found at the opening of the Quran, “In the Name of Allah, the Merciful, the Compassionate..”(Different editions have various translations but this is what is meant). They are not just being repetitious! “Mercy” is the ground of all that we call reality. It is the fundamental ground of every person and every thing. God’s Mercy is the fabric of all time and all creation. God Himself as the ground of all being is Mercy itself. This Absolute Mystery chooses to manifest His Presence as Mercy always and everywhere, and our task is to “know” that with an awakened heart, to serve that Reality in total surrender, to walk the “Straight Path,” and so to respond as a witness of that Manifestation. Now “Compassion” is a word saved for particular actions of God within historical time. The Compassion of God is in events. It shows itself in His intervention in particular events here and there. When Jesus cures a leper or opens the eyes of a blind person, these would be considered examples of God’s Compassion. Some such acts might be great and very public; others very small and in secret. But the Compassion of God is at work within history. Thus to walk “the Straight Path” means also to be in harmony with the Compassion of God, but recall that especially God’s “compassion takes on many forms.”

Now let us listen to Merton as he talks about this topic:

“So that is why it is important to know that God Who is Manifest

in creatures is manifest primarily as Mercy…. The Muslims place

an enormous amount of importance to the Names of God. See they’ve

got the idea that these Names are in God clamoring to the invisible,

unknown, absolute abyss of God for manifestation. And God breathes

on them and they are manifested in creatures. All creatures are not

manifestations of the Hidden Essence of God; they are manifestations

of Names of God. And the Name of God which is the top of the

pyramid (other than Allah) and which includes every other Name is

Merciful. God the Merciful. Allah the Merciful. And therefore one

seeks to ascend to the knowledge of God as Merciful in everything.

The Mercy of God in everything. And of course one of the chief

Christian Sufis of the last hundred years is Saint Therese. The Little

Way of St. Therese is Sufism. It’s a form of Christian Sufism, and it

is based on this particular attitude toward God, this idea of God.”

Ibn Arabi: ” If it were not for this Love, the world would never have appeared in its concrete existence.” Merton again: “In this sense, the movement of the world toward existence was a movement of love which brought it into existence. And not only the movement of the world into existence, the coming of everything into existence is an act of love, the development of everything is an act of love. Everything that happens is love and is mercy. Not that it always appears to be that way, very often it appears to be just the opposite. But everything that happens is love. And of course the ones in Islam who emphasize this the most are the Sufis, because the great thing in Sufism is Love…the Mercy of God in everything , but you have to know how to see it.”

And this is a particularly hard thing to discuss or reflect on, this “seeing.” A number of very deep spiritual concepts converge at this point: the awakened heart, purity of heart, prayer of the heart even, Mercy as the ground of all, and walking the Straight Path. This last one alone needs much more reflection in another posting because it doesn’t sound familiar to our religious discourse. In that regard it suffers the same kinds of distortions as Buddhist “detachment” used to suffer so much among Western commentators, who took it as this grossly negative, passive mode of being. Surely more words will not explain it or remove the difficulties, but at least some misconceptions can be spared and the significance of the Straight Path in relation to God’s Mercy can be indicated. Suffice it to say that it holds the key to “bringing it all together,” and perhaps as an example we could point to the Rule of St. Benedict as one methodology of walking the Straight Path. Certainly the Sufis prefer non-institutional approaches but at least it can be interpreted along these lines. Finally, the problems associated with walking the Straight Path and seeing the Mercy of God in everything are similar to the ones we encountered in reflecting on the self and the heart. Basically it is that very common illusion of ourselves as this solid entity which is separate from God and in charge of our own lives as it were. It is what Abhishiktananda (and others) called “dualism” but it has all kinds of ramifications. Let us listen to Merton again:

“And so the great sign of Mercy is that a person is able to see

the good in everything that is and go along with it…. To see that in

Everything That Is is the Mercy of God, and therefore to prefer

nothing else…that is the approach…. The average person who stands

outside the will of God…and looks in,…he does not understand that

really everything is willed by God and he makes choices, and…he

makes his own plans, and he submits them to God. His idea of the

the Mercy of God is that, he makes his plans, and then God, being

merciful to him helps him so that it pans out the way he wants…that’s

kind of a common thing…. The only basic thing that the Sufis say

about it is that a man who lives in that realm doesn’t really know

what’s cooking. He has the wrong idea of how things are set up. In

other words, he thinks that he is able to stand outside of all this, and

make plans, and size things up, and then submit them to God, and

then he and God are going to work things out on basis of appeal….”

But as Ibn Arabi says: “Those who are veiled from the truth ask the Absolute to show mercy upon them each in his own particular way.”

Merton continues speaking of such a “veiling”: [It]….”is the underlying of a basically insufficient concept of who we are and of how we function in relation to God, and this insufficient concept is the concept that we all have [my emphasis]. It is the basic assumption that we all start from. That we are all somehow or other completely a little world by ourselves and in the center of this little world of our own is our own mind down in there figuring things out. And if you stop and think, we consider ourselves more or less like sort of a turtle in a shell…there’s your turtle and inside this little shell, this little metaphysical shell, which is the self, inside there is the living being, hidden from everything, figuring things out. And we think that this living center, which is within the center of ourselves, is kind of walled off from everything else. And here we are, because this is what we experience, this is the only thing that we experience directly as reality, and we take this to be reality. We take the turtle inside our shell, which is there, the self, which down in there, we experience this as reality and we start from there. And we judge everything in reference to that, and everything that we see that we experience through the senses, immediately,…is the outside, and then way up behind the whole thing somewhere is God. And we say, ‘now look God, here’s me and here’s them, now fix it so that everything works out.’ But that’s not the way it is. It is not like that. It’s quite a different proposition…”

The actuality is that the ground of everything is within me and it is the Absolute, the Ultimate Mystery, God; and it is within everybody also. And there is one ground for everybody, and this ground is the Divine Mercy. Those “in the know” ask for the Divine Mercy to subsist in them and it does. Merton again: “This is a totally different outlook. It is the outlook whereby the Mercy of God is not arranged on the outside in events for me…but it is subsisting in me all the time. Therefore what happens is that if the Mercy of God is subsisting in me—and that goes to say if I am…completely united with the will of God in love [adding to Merton: meaning that I am “on the Straight Path”]–it doesn’t matter what happens outside, because everything that is going on outside that makes any sense is grounded in the same ground in which I am grounded. The opposition between me and everything else ceases, and what remains in terms of opposition is purely accidental and it doesn’t matter. And this is…a basic perspective in all…the highest religions.”

Now I grant you that this stuff is not easy to digest, may not make sense, and can be expressed in other ways perhaps. Like I mentioned before it is susceptible to the kinds of misunderstandings that Buddhist detachment and the Tao of Taoism underwent at the hands of Western thinkers and Christian apologists. It would be easier to write about methods of meditation and prayer, the role of poverty and humility, the value of ritual, etc.; but, alas, we are attempting to put something down on “Foundations & Fundamentals” and trying to find those elements which might be shared by more than one tradition. If this stuff doesn’t connect with you, no problem, set it aside, but don’t abandon it, and maybe one day it will light up in your heart. That too is being on the Straight Path; that too is an Awakening of the Heart; that too is grounded in Mercy. Better than pretending to understand some words…. Let us conclude with some more Merton:

“…and incidentally, these are the kind of perspectives that today are

not very much in fashion. This isn’t the sort of stuff that people are

getting wildly excited about, but it’s something fundamental. If a

person has a grasp of this kind of thing, he has the sort of thing that

religions exist to give to man and the sort of thing that we ask from

religion, because it gives a person an inner strength which nothing

can assail, a strength which is not based on some gimmick or other, it

is based on God. It helps the person to break through to the realm in

which he is in fact immediately united with God. And in which he is

directly supported by God, I mean, in which God cannot fail him.

The Sufis are the fellows who try to get down to this real basic level,

and one of the things that they claim about themselves is that they are

seeking purity of heart..the purity of heart of a Sufi is non-preference,

not preferring anything to What Is, taking What Is straight, without

adding onto it any other preference, without substituting something

for it…. The perfect Sufi [and the perfect monk: my addition] is lost

in God. He that is absorbed in the Beloved and has abandoned all else

is a Sufi [and a true monk].”

To illustrate Merton’s words let me end as I began, on a Zen note (though there is a Desert Father story which is almost an exact equivalent!):

A Zen monk was living as a hermit outside a small town. A young woman who got pregnant outside marriage tried to cover up her situation by accusing the monk of fathering the child. The townsfolk cursed him, and when the child was born they brought the baby to the monk and told him this was his and he should take care of it. All he said was, “Is that so? He took the child and took care of it with affection and compassion. Some time passed and the girl felt guilty and confessed that the monk was innocent. So the townspeople came to the monk and told him it was all a mistake, the child was not his, he need not care for it and can turn the child over to the mother. The only thing the monk said is, “Is that so?” and handed the child back to the mother.

There are unsuspected depths to these stories! Truly this monk was on the Straight Path!

Odds & Ends

Leave a reply

A. A Kind of Personal Inventory. It’s good to do this every once in a while– to list the authors who have helped, who have influenced, who have shaped you the most in your spiritual journey, and who have had the greatest impact on your vision of the spiritual path. I see that I really need three lists!

The first list is as described, and I will limit myself to the “top ten”:

Merton — certainly at the top of my list and probably so for a lot of other people.

The Desert Fathers, and the men & women of the desert tradition however named or unnamed — for me the sine qua non of Christian monastic life

The author of the Gospel of John

Al-Hallaj

Dostoievesky and his creation Fr. Zosima

Eckhart

Abhishiktananda

Han Shan

Ibn ‘Arabi

The authors of the Philokalia

So that is my “top ten” list! I think this covers a lot of bases, and it is interesting to see the differences here. I mean there are the “loquacious ones” who speak volumes about mysticism, like Eckhart and Ibn Arabi; and then there are the silent, terse ones, who are very down to earth, like the Desert Fathers and Han Shan. But I feel I don’t do justice to a whole bunch of other people who have been very helpful to me, and if I don’t put them on some list also it just won’t feel right!! So I have a “2^nd team” as it were, a back-up group who pinch-hit whenever needed, and here are they:

11.Chuang Tzu and Lao Tzu
12. Plato and his whole tradition
13. Karl Rahner
14. Rabia
15. Gandhi
16. Andre Louf
17. Thoreau and Edward Abbey
18. The rest of the New Testament
19. Kallistos Ware

By the way, I do not impute any significance to the numbering—there is no ranking implied except in the case of Merton, who would be #1 on my list. Now, a third list is more like a “to do” list—of people, of books, of lines of thought that I need to “hang out” with more than I have in the past. They are calling to me for a little more attention! And here is that list:

I. The Upanishads and Shankara

II. Hui-Neng

III. St. Isaac the Syrian

IV. John of the Cross

V. Titus Burckhardt and Martin Lings on Sufism

VI. Chinese and Japanese hermits and poets

VII. Tauler and Ruysbroeck

VIII. Russian theology and spirituality

IX. Hadewijch and Hildegard

X. A. Coomarswamy

XI. St. Maximus and St. Gregory Palamas

So be it. Surely there have been all kinds of other authors that have inspired or informed me, but these are the ones I connect with the most. So much for the inventory. Needless to say this list will change in a year or so!

B. The recent news from Afghanistan has been exceedingly sad. That soldier that went bezerk and shot up all those people, killing 9 children and 3 women among his victims, what an enormous tragedy. The root cause of this kind of thing is not one man’s mental state but a whole state of war. War will create these kinds of things. There is no such thing as a “nice war,” where atrocities do not happen. The US is very adept at pretending that it can unleash the violence of war and still somehow “control” it or contain it. It’s all part of the high-tech gadgetry we now use to kill people. President Obama is relying more on these Predator Drones to kill “our enemies” from the air, from way up there, so our hands our seemingly clean even as we say, “Ooops, sorry, we got the wrong house!” Or we kill American citizens without due process of law, like a trial where they could defend themselves. But of course this is small stuff compared to the fire bombing of a German city in WWII when we incinerated thousands of civilians, men, women and children. Or the nuclear holocaust of Hiroshima. The message is “if you attack us, somebody pays for it 10x, 100x, 1000x.” Today we try to sanitize the violence of war through our mass media, but then something like this happens and it is impossible to disguise. Needless to say even the burning of the Quran a few weeks ago was a hideous act, a sacrilege indeed. Already an indication how unraveling it all is over there.

So what are we doing over there? What is the point of this war—any war really? Both Democrats and Republicans are implicated in this war. Afghanistan is extremely rich in its hidden resources, but it is one of the poorest countries in the world today. Consider this: right now we are spending close to 10 billion dollars a month on this war alone. And only a couple of months of the war costs more than the whole GDP of Afghanistan for a year. Also, the cost of this war is hurting our own country real bad. Of that 10 billion, 40%, or 4 billion each month is borrowed money, adding to our debt. Just think what that kind of money could do for education or health care costs…..

President Obama says that he will be bringing the troops home…soon. Not soon enough. And the Predator Drones will keep flying….and trust me we will have a large military base in Afghanistan like we do in Iraq now and in dozens of other countries. The American Empire continues to grow no matter who is president….because ultimately we are run by the multinational corporations and do their bidding.

In another direction, but in the same vein, please read this account of Sister Dianna Ortiz:

http://www.truthout.org/shackled-memory-torture/1331589695

C. Mysticism. I have used that word a lot in recent postings, so I felt I should post an advisory about its various meanings or uses. It is not an unambiguous term, nor is it free of some dubious associations. First of all, the word has been appropriated by the New Age Movement, and there it has taken on meanings almost at complete variance from its original meaning. This is especially true of Sufi materials that have been lifted from their traditional matrix by New Agers and turned into something quite different, a real distortion. Even in general usuage the word has taken on colorations never really there in the beginning. Titus Burckhardt, a Sufi and a scholar, has this to say: “Scientific works commonly define Sufism as ‘Muslim mysticism’ and we too would readily adopt the epithet ‘mystical’ to designate that which distinguishes Sufism from the simply religious aspect of Islam if that word still bore the meaning given it by the Greek Fathers of the early Christian Church and those who followed their spiritual line: they used it to designate what is related to knowledge of ‘the mysteries.'” And the greatest of “the mysteries” is the “union of God and the human person,” or to put it another way, “the Presence of God in the Heart.” And there are other ways of putting it.

In any case, what must not be confused with mysticism in this proper sense is the panoply of phenomena which might be delusional, psychic, paranormal or just a kind of physical trick. There are people in all traditions who are engrossed with these kind of phenomena. Just like the good old word, “metaphysics” has been degraded in pop culture to weird things, so has mysticism.

There is one more bit of confusion to clear up. Often, especially in Christian circles, mysticism is connected with a kind of ecstatic devotional love whereas a cool intellectual demeanor is looked upon as “not mystical.” Let us borrow a few terms from our Hindu friends to help us out. The Hindus have this sharp differentiation between religious paths that are “jnana,” the path of knowledge; “bhakti,” the path of love and devotion; and they have a third which we won’t touch here, “karma,” the way of action and service(Gandhi would be a key example of this one). Now both Sufis and Christian contemplatives have similar differentiations except they are not so clearly or distinctly marked out–the lines can get quite blurred. So St. Francis would be a bhakti; while Eckhart and John of the Cross, a jnani. And among the Sufis Rumi, Rabia, and al-Hallaj would be in the bhakti camp while Ibn Arabi in the jnani camp. However all this is a bit facile, and actually the Sufis truly have a good understanding how both knowledge and love relate and interweave in any healthy mysticism. In fact they have a very deep theology about all that. It is never simply one or the other, and both are present to varying degrees and varying temperments. The important thing to note is that mysticism is never of “one color.”

D. This poem was brought to my attention by a friend. It comes from an 18^th Century Japanese Zen monk/layman, Gekka Gensho. He lived in a monastery for about 40 years, then left and lived in Kyoto as a layman:

Making the busy streets my home

right down in the heart of things

only one friend shares my poverty

a scrawny wooden staff;

having learned the ways of silence

amidst the noise of urban life

taking things as they come to me

now everywhere I am is true.

Truly profound. Beautiful. Right at the heart of what it means to be a monk, but not clothed with the credentials of monasticism. Now we can push this a bit further and ask: why “everywhere I am is true”? Why indeed? Each tradition, including the Zen one from which this poem emanates, has its own way of dealing with such a question, but I think my Sufi friends have the deepest insight(insight=”seeing into…). Simply put they live and breathe every breath with the knowledge that the ground of every place and every moment is Mercy and Compassion. This is not a matter of sentimentality; nor is it really an easy thing to say–in fact it can be in certain circumstances an outrageous thing to say. But for those who “know”…. But much more about that in our next Foundations Series!

Foundations & Fundamentals, Part IV: The Heart and The Awakening

Leave a reply

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amen!

Difficult Words

Leave a reply

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another Potpourri

Leave a reply

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.

Foundations & Fundamentals, Part III, The Self

Leave a reply

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.

Foundations & Fundamentals, Part II The Mystery & The Knowledge

Leave a reply

There is a book of Catholic theology by Karl Rahner with the title, Foundations of Christian Faith. One section of the treatise is entitled, Man in the Presence of Absolute Mystery. Very dense reading, and perhaps we would want to change “man” into “human being,” but otherwise truly marvelous. This sense of the Presence of Absolute Mystery is the essential and necessary foundation for all spiritualities and all mysticisms. Without this sense religion becomes glib, another sales pitch, full of pieties that tickle our ego self and allow it to look “spiritual.” Without this sense we succumb to the moralisms of “do’s” and “don’ts” that make us feel superior or at least different from others. Without this sense, we are simply “members of a club,” albeit a club with a lofty message and maybe beautiful rituals, but still only a club. Without this sense we may yet have an image of God as “our friend,” a “personal relationship” with Jesus, a comfort in praying to Mary or one of the saints for intercession, but we will have missed our deepest calling. The same Karl Rahner also wrote: “The Christian of the future will be a mystic, or he/she will not be at all.” This is what is at stake.

In the very early morning of December 6, 1273, Thomas Aquinas, Master of Theology, celebrated the Mass for the feast of Saint Nicholas. Something happened during this Mass because after it he was not even close to being the same person. Aquinas had written a lot, a real lot. He was not yet 50, but he had written about 100 works: commentaries on Scripture, commentaries on the Fathers, commentaries on Aristotle and Proclus, philosophical treatises, etc. He was in the middle of composing his definitive work, the Summa Theologiae. That day he stopped writing. And he never wrote again until he died about a year later. He stopped totally and abruptly–never finishing the Summa. All he did in the last months of his life was read and meditate on the Song of Songs in the Old Testament. Some people say that he suffered a stroke; others that he experienced a nervous breakdown due to exhaustion at his enormous workload. But his own secretary and friend relates that the only thing Aquinas told him was: “Everything that I have written seems like straw to me compared to those things that I have seen and have been revealed to me.” And the word “straw” here is a medieval euphemism for human excrement, which would not have been fitting to put on the lips of a holy saint. Now some modern and liberal theologians have taken this statement to mean that Aquinas was repudiating what he had taught and written. And they simply want to replace his words with their words. However, the truth is quite other. It was more a case of this brilliant mind having a disclosure of The Reality that is so far beyond any words that the only result/effect can be either silence or ecstasy. It was Thomas standing in the Presence of Absolute Mystery.

Now it is not the case that Aquinas had glib ideas about God. Even as he wrote voluminously and with great precision and care about the things of God and the human person, he also gave many indications that he understood the “beyondness” of this reality we call God. He shows a deep intellectual awareness of the mystery of God and that knowledge of God is not like any other kind of knowledge that we can have. Aquinas understands quite well that the mystery of God is not like any other mystery we encounter, which may or may not prove to be “solveable.” In the end, Aquinas is quite capable of speaking almost like a zen master in mystifying paradoxes. Note: “At the end of all our knowing we know God as something unknown: we are united with him as with something wholly unknown.” And this was all before his experience of December 6^th. With that, he encountered in an existential way that which is truly Beyond, and so his words, no matter how profound, fell totally apart.

Problem #1: Words. “God” as a word. We use this word an awful lot–especially if we are in one of the theistic religious communities. That is inevitable. However, in our loquaciousness about this reality (“God this” and “God that”) we tend to get the wrong impression that we really know what or who we are talking about. The sense of the Absolute Mystery begins to recede to an uneasy background that is not comfortable. Those of us in the Catholic tradition are even more prone to this because of our penchant for definitions, doctrines, dogmas, our focus on authority and certainty, on the notion of infallibility. None of this is wrong if deeply understood and properly nuanced. However, our Church is inclined to stress authority and certainty and clarity in a very human way that pushes the notion of mystery to the sidelines. The whole effort in pedagogy and catechesis tends to emphasize simple adherence to doctrinal formulations and moral behavior and, oh yes, perhaps, a “personal relationship” with Jesus. So the average Catholic(and this would be true of most other Christians) will utter words about God with hardly any sense of the great mystery behind those words. Words like: “Jesus is God.” “There are three persons in God.” The Trinitarian statement is especially so vulnerable—each word in that statement is in a very real sense problematic and beyond definition in its use in that affirmation. Words like that are uttered very glibly as if they were a statement of some fact within this very finite world–like: “the earth is round.” While each such statement can be said to be “true” in a very real sense, nevertheless each such statement’s meaning needs to be unpacked within an awareness of the Absolute Mystery one is dealing with. And just one sign of that is the presence of paradox as we unfold the meaning. The Absolute Mystery that God is does not fit into our limited categories. Everything in our world and our experience must be one thing or another, but God is both nothing and everything from the standpoint of our experience. God is both near and far, both transcendent and immanent, absent and present, both this and not this.

Problem #2: Images–both internal and external. Go into a medieval cathedral or a Russian Orthodox church or one of the great old Hindu temples in India, and you will be surrounded with remarkable religious art. In fact, the very architecture of the place, the layout itself, is symbolic and pedagogical–as is the case with the mosque which otherwise does not allow images of any kind. All of this is good and healthy and truly beautiful. It is meant to lead the person to somekind of religious experience, to a sense of the numinous presence of the Divine, to an encounter with the Ultimate Mystery. (Here we won’t even consider the more prevalent kitschy religious art that more people are burdened with and which distorts their spirituality in myriad ways.) But even with solid and profound religious images a problem can arise of being “fixed” by them and “fixated” by them. The devotee seems never to be able to go beyond what the image suggests. This is almost always related to interior images, ideas and concepts about God which the devotee hangs onto for dear life—because it is scary to let go. Here a person’s prayer life might become fixed in “saying prayers”–and such a person in sincerely following the only path they know may indeed have an unthematic sense of the Presence without at all being able to put into words what it is they are experiencing. But it is as Abhishiktananda put it, imagine someone being invited to a rich banquet, and then they are handed a crust of bread and some lemonade. The Church does not do its job of leading each person to that mystical awareness of the Ultimate Mystery which is each person’s gift. As Jesus put it in one of his parables: “Friend, come up higher.” Sadly this was true even for monks until recent years with a kind of rediscovery in the Christian West of the contemplative nature of the monk and in fact of the human person. Here is Abhishiktananda writing in the 1950s as he was just beginning his vocation in India:

“More than anything else indeed the Christian sannyasi ought to be contemplative. Contemplative life does not in the first place mean piety…or the endless recitation of prayers, even liturgical ones. In this respect, though the Benedictine Rule may usefully provide for the organization and development of the life of Christian ashrams, it is further towards the contemplative ideal of the Desert Fathers that the Christian sannyasi ought to tend, as it is embodied in the life and precepts of St. Antony, Arsenius, John Climacus.… The sannyasi is one who has been fascinated by the mystery of God…and remains simply gazing at it.”

So the health and depth of our spiritual life depends on our navigating around these kinds of problems and being open to the Absolute Mystery which is at the center of our being and surrounds us on all sides. The awesome nature of this Reality has been addressed in different languages in different times and in different traditions. In the Old Testament and in the Desert Fathers, for example, the term “fear” appears a lot, or usually it is in the phrase, “fear of God.” As in, “the beginning of wisdom is the fear of the Lord.” For the Desert Fathers this seems to have been a very important notion, almost summing up the whole spiritual life, but for us moderns the term may be problematical if we read it in a superficial way. The fact is that this “fear” is an abiding sense of that Absolute Mystery. When St. Benedict and the New Testament talk about “perfect love casting out fear,” that points us in the direction of mystical union or advaita if you will and then “perfect love” and that “fear” become one reality–or you realize that you ARE that one reality–you discover that the Absolute Mystery is now closer to you than you are to yourself(to borrow from Augustine). Furthermore, in the Old Testament it was common to hold that the Name of this Absolute Mystery was unspeakable, unnameable–one simply did not pronounce it. And it was also said that to “see God” would be death. So this language of “fear” and all such other language is supremely pointing to the absolute nature of this mystery regardless of our unease with such words. In fact, language not unlike that and troublesome in their own way can be found in modern mystics like Abhishiktananda. For example, he speaks of “being torn open,” “being torn assunder,” “being scorched,” of “being shattered,” of “explosions,” of “lightning bolts smashing into one’s consciousness,” of “annihilation,” and so on, and so on. Clearly this Mystery is not some little puzzle that we can play with or think our way through.

Given all that, what is now even more incredible, if that be possible, is that we are meant to “know” this Mystery and that this Mystery manifests itself in everything and everyone within and without. This is in fact getting very close to the very heart and center of all theistic spirituality and mysticism. And as we have been saying all along, this knowledge is not one of ideas or concepts or doctrines or rituals–it has to do with an unspeakable experience in the depths of one’s heart. This knowledge is more like something symbolized in the sexual union of husband and wife (why Aquinas loved to read the Song of Songs at the end of his life)—which by the way manifests the Absolute Mystery just as fully as any hermit sitting in his cave. In the company of mystics it is perhaps the Sufis who speak most eloquently of this Reality and our “knowledge” of it, which is both at the same time Absolute Transcendent Mystery and Unspeakable Closeness and Intimacy. Consider now this quote from St. Gregory Palamas, the great hesychast teacher:

“The supra-essential nature of God is not a subject for speech or thought or even contemplation, for it is far removed from all that exists and more than unknowable is incomprehensible and ineffable to all forever. There is no name whereby it can be named neither in this age nor in the age to come, nor word found in the soul and uttered by the tongue, nor contact whether sensible or intellectual, nor yet any image which may afford any knowledge of its subject, if this be not that perfect incomprehensibility which one acknowledges in denying all that can be named.”

But Gregory is also the great mystical theologian of human divinization and our participation in the very life of God— so how can that be:

“It is right for all theology which wishes to respect piety to affirm sometimes one and sometimes the other when both affirmations are true…. The Divine nature must be called at the same time incommunicable and, in a sense, communicable; we attain participation in the nature of God, and yet he remains totally inaccessible. We must affirm both things and must preserve the antimony as the criterion of piety.”

And this last sentence is the key for evaluating all spiritualities, all pieties, all mysticisms, especially within the Christian koinonia. St. Gregory writes further: “He is being and not being. He is everywhere and nowhere; He has many names and cannot be named; He is both in perpetual movement and immovable; He is absolutely everything and nothing of that which is.”

Abhishiktananda’s advaitic mysticism would perhaps put it even more radically, if you can imagine that, but we will leave that for another posting. This topic is so important that we shall be returning to it many times.

Let us conclude by giving the last words to one of the greatest and earliest mystical theologians, Pseudo-Dionysius (or in the Eastern Church, simply St. Dionysius or sometimes known as St. Denys the Areopagite):

“Trinity!! Higher than any being,

any divinity, any goodness!

Guide of Christians

in the wisdom of heaven.

Lead us up beyond unknowing and light,

up to the farthest, highest peak

of mystic scripture,

where the mysteries of God’s Word

lie simple, absolute and unchangeable

in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence.

Amid the deepest shadow

they pour overwhelming light

on what is most manifest.

Amid the wholly unsensed and unseen

they completely fill our sightless minds

with treasures beyond all beauty.

For this I pray; and, Timothy, my friend, my advice to you as you look for a sight of the mysterious things, is to leave behind you everything perceived and understood, everything perceptible and understandable, all that is not and all that is, and, with your understanding laid aside, to strive upward as much as you can toward union with him who is beyond all being and knowledge. By an undivided and absolute abandonment of yourself and everything, shedding all and freed from all, you will be uplifted to the ray of the divine shadow which is above everything that is.”

The Feast of the Baptism of Jesus. What happened?

Leave a reply

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.

Sleazy Swamis, Lascivious Lamas, Predator Priests, & Other Fake Folk

Leave a reply

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!

Monk's Way, Sannyasi Way, Human Way…

A journey to ultimate freedom, compassion and bliss

The Desert Fathers & Additional Matters

Foundations & Fundamentals, Part V: The Mercy & The Compassion

Odds & Ends

Foundations & Fundamentals, Part IV: The Heart and The Awakening

Difficult Words

Another Potpourri

Foundations & Fundamentals, Part III, The Self

Foundations & Fundamentals, Part II The Mystery & The Knowledge

The Feast of the Baptism of Jesus. What happened?

Sleazy Swamis, Lascivious Lamas, Predator Priests, & Other Fake Folk