Religious Scholar

Photos from Beijing, China, taken while attending the"Beyond Thoreau" Conference sponsored by Tsinghua University and the William J. Fulbright program in October 2008 (please copy and paste into your browser):

http://bejingchinaoctober2008.shutterfly.com/

I was impressed by the public displays of spirituality at all of the "three traditions" shrines I visited (Confucian, Buddhist, Daoist). Despite its reputation as a Communist nation with an official policy of atheism, China permits the personal spiritual quest, though shying away from large-scale demonstrations of piety. I was surprised to find that most of the worshippers I encountered were younger people. (See images halfway through the Shutterfly Web site link above). Actually, this is not so unusual, since these individuals' parents and grandparents lived in a time of greater restrictions and hostility toward old religious practices. One could even say that China is undergoing a spiritual revolution, turning to its own religious and philosophical heritage for inspiration, sustenance, and meaning.

I’m glad Intolerance is not a religion, because I am becoming very intolerant of it!

I’ve tried to steer clear of politics in this blog, celebrating the commonalities our various belief systems share. However, observing the pre-election revels in Denver and Minneapolis-St. Paul has stretched this blogger’s endurance level to the breaking point.

Anyone with a bias toward compassion, community, spiritual inclusiveness, and respect for all people and the natural world has to be frozen with horror watching some of the sight and sound bites emanating from Minnesota this first week in September. Intolerance might as well become a plank in the platform of one of our illustrious political parties.

Doesn’t the First Amendment of our Constitution prohibit infringements on the right to religious freedom and freedom of the press? And aren’t these two freedoms being mocked by the rhetoric of the extreme right? Spitting in the face of the Constitution, certain forms of Christianity are held up as an absolute for all people in our nation. Conservative leaders qualify terrorism with the word, “Islamic,” vilifying a religion with one of the highest numbers of adherents worldwide (second only to Christianity, according to Adherents.com).

A candidate for one of the highest offices in our land shows scorn for the natural world by ruthlessly killing animals for sport and supporting unfair hunting practices, while at the same time supporting coerced pregnancy and the teaching of a specific form of fundamentalist Christian creationism in tax-dollar-funded schools. We won’t even go into the issues of diversity and gay rights, core realities of a world which virtually every major religion holds is the work of a benign divine creator spirit.

Yes, I have become intolerant of intolerance. Intolerance is the one attitude that can uproot and destroy lives, nations, even our world. Don’t shout it from the rafters with glee and thunderous applause! Instead, proclaim tolerance and prevent the infiltration of tenets from specific religions from determining government policies and laws. All religions deserve our respect and tolerance. No religion deserves a place in American government.

Being simple is no easy thing.

We know it’s important to simplify our lives, our thinking, but we’re not sure why.

Everything in Western culture cries out for complexity. We judge a person by the complexity level of their education and career responsibilities, the extent of their expert knowledge. We may reward single-minded entertainers and athletes with fortunes and celebrity, but the greatest status is achieved by those who have mastered the bewildering complications of science, technology, communications and business. Degrees from elite universities are the crown jewels of our society.

And yet simplicity cries out to us from every side. The folk hymn, “Simple Gifts,” Thoreau’s cry to “Simplify, simplify,” the title of a popular magazine, Real Simple, the satirical reality TV series, “The Simple Life”:  all these point to the enduring significance of simplicity, while not providing a clue as to what it is and why it is important.

To find out what it is and why it matters, we can state some of the things simplicity is not. Words and phrases that come to mind include:

• Simple-minded
• Simpleton
• Superficial
• Taking short-cuts
• Dumbing down

Positive images associated with simplicity include:

• Radiant clarity
• Seeing the obvious
• Grasping core concepts
• Streamlining
• Living holistically, in touch with the natural world

Ron Olson, author of American Zen, has a trademark concept called “simple sense.” He believes we miss the boat by burying the truth under big words and elaborate theories, that truth can be encountered and expressed directly.

Obviously, there is a place for complexity. Mapping the human genome was no simple matter. Would you want to have brain surgery performed by someone who didn’t know the complexities of neuroscience? At the same time, science and technology is most effective when it is governed by simple concepts:  the scientific method, for example.

And not only scientific matters benefit from a simple approach. Good home cooking is based on simple ingredients and processes. Two- and three-dimensional design relate to the same simple shapes:  square and cube, circle and sphere. Complexities spin off from these essential elements, but are rooted in timeless consistencies.

Think of music.  A work as infinitely complex as Beethoven’s Ninth fundamentally rises from simple principles of balance, harmony and structure. What tune could be more simple than the theme of the final movement?

The antithesis of simplicity is not so much complexity as confusion and clutter. This accounts for the surprising success of feng shui in recent years in the West. The emphasis on natural circulation of air and energy, the abandonment or giving up of confusion and clutter in design, in fact, the whole way we think about our surroundings, leads to an organic simplicity out of which our creativity can flow. In photography and video, clutter is called noise; in electronics, static. We have this annoying chatter, this raspy twitching in our own brains, sometimes when we can’t sleep at 3 in the morning, other times during the day when we lose our focus and can’t concentrate on a problem or concern.

Simplicity is not rushing, not hurrying. It is stepping outside of time. The TV network Turner Classic Movies has a weekly program titled, “The Essentials,” about motion pictures that are basic to our understanding of film. The essence is what we seek. We crave to know the essentials of life. Complexity is adornment, explication, development. Simplicity is the original design.

Simplicity is the ability to see the principles of the whole system without being lost in the particles, whether the distant galaxies of space or the infinitely deep recesses of molecules and atoms.

Some are attracted by the complexities of religious teaching.  Some are repelled.  Dogma, ritual, elaborate commentaries are all expressions of spiritual understanding. But not essentials.  Each faith tradition has its spin on basic truth, and the core truths, revealed in all their simplicity, are often surprisingly in sync with those of other pathways. The Ten Commandments, Five Pillars, Four Noble Truths, Great Commandments, Eightfold Path, Eight Limbs of Yoga, and other formulas for living the good life, have more in common than we would have imagined when we strip away the complexity and get to the core.

Beyond this, through stilling the mind, cultivating the ability to think and to see unrestricted by distractions, confusion and clutter, we meditate on the Good and in simplicity come to an experience of the One.  It may sound goofy to some, but in reality, this level of deep simplicity can lead to a healing sense of unity and a safe pathway to the discovery of life’s richest and most essential treasure.

The two quotes that appear at the beginning of this Web site use the masculine pronoun in reference to the Divine. Thoreau and Eckhart did not view God as specifically male, but rather used the language conventions of their time. However, in our own time, the default to male terminology and iconography in reference to spirituality is under attack, and rightly so.  All of the great religious traditions hold that Spirit is without gender. By expressing Spirit in exclusively male terms, girls and women for millennia have been relegated to a second-class status in the world of organized religion. This is not a good thing, but I am not convinced that a 180-degree turnaround in which the Divine is perceived exclusively as female is necessarily the solution.

A dozen or so years ago, the idea of the Divine Feminine moved from theological circles into American popular culture. Running with wolves, Sophia, wise women and other female-centered expressions of spirituality conceptually entered society's religious dialogue. Certainly, the Divine Feminine was not an unfamiliar concept.  In the West, the Blessed Virgin Mary and many Catholic and Orthodox saints have inspired worship and served as role models for hundreds of years. Museums display pre-Columbian fertility goddesses from Central and South America. Female deities and saints from India, Africa and Eastern Asia are depicted in decorative arts as well as in textbooks on religious diversity.

One can understand the resentment many women, myself included, feel at being marginalized by the religious mainstream. However, I am not convinced that a completely female-centered spiritual consciousness is the answer for all women. The Mother Goddess' appeal is rooted in the presumption that women have positive memories of their own mothers.  Sue Monk Kidd, the author of The Secret Life of Bees and a writer on religious themes, writes about Tillie Olson's short story, "I Stand Here Ironing," in which a mother wishes that her daughter could have a better life. But not every mother is self-sacrificing and encouraging. For every mother who says, "I will help you become everything you want to be," there is one who shrieks, "Give me that book! You're going to take care of me, you miserable little bitch!" For every mother who urges her daughter to go to college, there is one who rips up the college application and snorts, "Over my dead body!"  For every mother who takes a child to the library, there is one who smashes her child's possessions and slaps her awake in the middle of the night screaming that the daughter and her father are conspiring against her.  There is a reason we have books like Sybil and Mommy Dearest.

Indeed, for some women, the only escape from the horror and control of matriarchy is through the intervention of a completely different sort of person, perhaps a teacher or guidance counselor.  Just as a person may have more successful treatment with a psychotherapist of the opposite sex,  a girl or woman who has lived under the thumb of an oppressive mother may find herself drawn to male role models.  Images of a female divine being may not appeal to such women, who associate female authority with repression and pain. What is more difficult to understand is how males seem to prefer masculine depictions of the deity and to profess profound love for a God who is an authoritarian Father and a self-sacrificing Son. In cultures where male independence is prized and where male love of males has until recently been looked on with suspicion, isn't it strange that men's passionate expressions of love and longing have been focused almost exclusively on masculine depictions of the Formless One? Wouldn't it make more sense for males who have not had a problem with an overbearing mother to worship the Divine through female images such as Mother Nature, Mary, Kuan Yin or Saraswati?

But I am not a psychologist, and leave such ruminations to experts in that field.  The subject of the Feminine Divine is larger than psychology or theology for that matter, and affects all who have an interest in thinking about the ways in which we make the genderless spirit into something comprehensible to our bodies and minds.  For many people, the very word "feminine" is problematic. Women who grew up in my generation invariably learned that masculine was good, feminine was bad. As a young girl, my passion was music. Music referred to as feminine was weak and insipid. Music needed to be powerful and virile, even in its softest expression. The music of Chopin, for example--a composer known for his physical frailty, who played the piano so softly that listeners had to strain to hear the notes--this music was characterized as masculine, robust, powerful. The greatest composers--Beethoven, Bach--were towers (masculine term) of virility and strength.  Not weak, withdrawing, recumbent, all characteristics of femininity.

About 25 years ago, I volunteered to be interviewed by a middle-aged psychology student for her project on women's self images. The interview proceeded smoothly until she asked me if I thought I was feminine.  Images of pink toenails and poodles sprang horribly to mind!  "No, of course not!" I protested. "  I could tell she was intrigued.  After all, I sat before her in a pastel skirt suit, my hair neatly brushed, wearing lipstick, pantyhose and earrings. I was married, had a child and spoke softly. Yet inside was a creature who balked at the charge of being weak and withdrawn.  My self-image was associated with words such as "power," "achievement," "independence."  Call me anything, I seemed to say, but don't call me feminine!  Such was the impact of society's debasement of the meaning of "feminine" in the early 1980s.

Whether because of this distaste for images of feminine insufficiency or because they had a negative experience of maternal authoritarianism, many women dissatisfied with the religious status quo nonetheless shy away from embracing the Goddess.   Some have embraced pagan traditions such as Wicca which offers a God-Goddess combo.  Others have rethought the Christian Trinity to be the Father, Mother and Holy Spirit, or some other permutation (I like the Parent, Child and Holy Spirit).  Yet others have elevated the notion of Sophia or Wisdom, a tradition which predates Christianity in both the classical Greek and Jewish traditions.  It is even possible to view Christ as an androgynous Being. You know the type: a slim, long-haired youth who plays a flute and pets the rabbit. (All that fuss about the moneychangers could have been invented to make him more appealing in a macho culture.) I know of one church which has a small statue of Christ that looks like a Ken doll (Barbie's consort), though I think this is taking the idea a bit too far.

Clearly, there is no one solution for women seeking to know the Divine through an image they can relate to.  But there are options and alternatives. For myself, I do not want to bond with a group of naked people of either sex in a cave in New Mexico under the first full moon of autumn, nor do I want to have anything whatsoever to do with drumming. On the other hand I have color postcards of the smiling Kuan Yin on my office corkboard. The Feminine Divine has a well deserved place in world spirituality, though like everything else, Her influence and impact on individuals is not uncomplicated.  A(h wo)men!

The East and the West aren’t that far apart in their views of the Afterlife. In the East, it just takes longer to get there.

Take Christianity and Hinduism. Both traditions promise eternal bliss basking in the light of the Divine for those who lead righteous, devout lives. The difference is that Hindus believe you have to be reborn in this world time and again until you “get it right.” Only then will you be ready for the promise of heavenly joy.

The notion of reincarnation may not be that far from the concept of purgatory which many Christians accept. Purgatory is a transitional state in which the soul works out the kinks and knots that prevent it from fast-tracking into Heaven. What if rebirth in the World is the mechanism for purification and preparation for union with God? Interesting concept, and possibly (but not necessarily) what Jesus meant when he said, “You must be born again.”

There are those who believe Jesus picked up some of his ideas during undocumented travels during his early life. Stories about visits to France, England, China and India abound. While not verified by any historians of the first century, some of these tales could be true. Certainly, ancient wisdom traditions in China and India suggest that few people are ready to pass from the World directly into Ultimate Holiness. Perhaps a return to the human state is the best way for the soul to prepare for eternity.

Westerners tend not to take reincarnation too seriously. First, there is no scientific basis for such an idea, although it is true that Physics holds that energy cannot be destroyed. In a way, Physics is saying that Death is an illusion, that everything is (or is in a process of) transformation with no end in sight..

The second objection raised to the viability of the reincarnation theory is that it encourages people to be lazy and indolent, since they can always come back and do things in a better way at a later date. This isn’t a very sound argument, though.

Speaking for myself, I am so appalled by the degeneration of our environment, the pollution, endangerment to species, increase of frenzied, religion-driven intolerance and violence in our world, I would very much NOT like to return to it when conditions are even worse! Imagine coming back when the hole in the ozone layer is larger, when fanatical religionists are raising large families of warrior children while sensible people, out of respect for the environment, are having few or none.

In this view, reincarnation is not a license to party, but rather a purgatorial injunction to shape up. Ultimately, though, East and West are on the same page. There is a higher state of being, and all believers would like to get there. Whether it takes one lifetime or a billion, our thoughts, responsible actions and compassion will determine whether we get there or not.