Religious Scholar

What will happen to our secular society if religious leaders dictate how legislators create laws and how judges interpret them?

And yet religion gives heart to the mechanics of law.

We cry out for more technology, finer tools to express and communicate our thoughts. But most of the great ideas of the world have been written with feathers dipped in ink by men and women sitting in candlelight.

The Don Imus controversy, in which a “shock jock” radio host was fired for egregiously racist and sexist language, is giving rise to a world of conversation and controversy. People interested in religion or spirituality (two very different things, though not mutually exclusive; see the earliest journal entries at this site) can find fine fodder for rumination as the fiasco unfolds.

Most religious traditions place a high value on words and language, esteeming them more highly than does the culture at large. In Judaism, the name for God is so powerful it may not be uttered. Christians value the Logos or Word as tantamount to the very essence of the Deity. Buddhists consider “right speech” as part of the path to Enlightenment, and Hindus include respectful language as part of the yama-niyamas, or foundation practices of the eight limbs of Yoga.

Secular humanists may defend free speech, but often embrace civility. Otherwise, many grade-school classrooms would ring loud with peals of profanity, by teachers and students alike. Radio, TV and print media—already roundly criticized for lowering their standards and pandering to our insatiable appetite for sleaze—would sound or read like an executive I reported to in the 1980s, who could not utter a single word without following it with a string of oaths involving bodily functions. Even worse than the routine vulgarities are ethnic, sexist and homophobic slurs, sometimes unleashed by alcohol or drugs, but just as often, I think, rising like a rich steam from the compost of dark and stagnant souls.

We can’t legislate the evolution of these souls from darkness to light. All we can do is be vigilant: watchful of ourselves, our colleagues, our leaders and the media. We must dare to be unhip, one of the deadly sins of the Age of Entertainment. We must look into our own souls, turgid and troubled though they may be, and squinting in the darkness, see and seize the slightest flicker of light. This is hope. This is what we cultivate whatever our religious or spiritual conviction. This is the foundation of the dignified, ringing-true response of Coach Stringer and the Rutgers team.

Words matter. Words sting. And words, such as “I forgive” and “I will change” can bring healing to a world and individuals in pain, confusion and despair.

A few months ago, I was talking with a very scientifically minded CEO. As soon as he heard about this Web site, his mind snapped shut, like a live clam tossed into a pot of boiling water. Religion! Bad! I knew that talking to him further was an exercise in futility and would serve only to frustrate us both.

To many people, religion means prejudice, but those firmly grounded in the material world have prejudices of their own. The CEO mumbled something about the dangers of people who despise the “real” world in favor of an afterlife that may not even exist. It was clear that he took the “Bomb in a Backpack” view of religion!

But what if scientific and religious seekers are using different vocabularies to describe the search for the same phenomenon? There are not only many intriguing commonalities among the world’s religions; there are also shared goals and values among the scientific and the spiritual.

Seekers along both paths deeply desire an understanding of essential truth. As high-energy-particle physicists plumb the mysteries of quarks, quasars and cold dark matter, rational religious people seek to know the source of life through prayer, reflection and meditation. The spiritual path adds compassion and love. The scientific path contributes measurement and accountability. Together, they offer perhaps the optimum path for people of integrity, intellectual curiosity and responsibility to live lives of purpose, discovery and service.

Mathematicians and scientists who have gone as far as these disciplines can take us marvel at the perhaps unknowable mystery at the core of the universe. This mystery is the object of contemplation among religious mystics of all traditions. To paraphrase the German theologian Meister Eckhart (1260-1328), true awakening comes not in the sacraments of a particular faith, but in what happens when we pass through those sacraments, have burst the boundaries of all the forms of knowledge and come face to face with naked Reality. I think that not only would a Hindu or Buddhist agree with this assessment, but also any scientist who had explored, at the micro-level, the endlessly complex world of subatomic physics, and at the macro-level, the DNA-like spirals of time in an infinite universe.

In this life and possibly beyond, there is the Core, and whether we are spiritual or material people, we are drawn to it with wonder and awe.

The scriptures of all major traditions abound with scenes in which holy men impart their teachings to large groups of people, sometimes to huge crowds meeting outside the city limits. When I read or hear these accounts, my mind’s eye twitches. When I try to put a face to the gathering, I can’t focus. I keep receiving an incomplete picture, like a scrambled message from an alien planet (which is probably an apt metaphor for the past).

Men, men, men. What’s a post-modern woman to do? Everywhere we look in the sourcebooks of spiritual development, men are “the finger pointing to moon,” to use a Buddhist phrase, and, for the most part, men are the elect who hear the message. How can people today relate to this? If, as we learn in so much of Eastern thought, eternity exists only in this present moment, what does it mean to be heirs to traditions that exclude half of the human race?

For my own part, I engage in a little poetic license. Sitting in church, hearing the thrilling words, I imagine the rapt desert wonderers consisting of women as well as men. Women with shining eyes, some taking notes, perhaps, on a 4^th century B.C.E. version of a PalmPilot. I envision some priests with beards, others with breasts. I create a mental mural that is distressing in its political correctness, but a possible way in which autonomous people, who equally share the modern world, can look back without anger.

So-called inclusive reworkings of scripture occasionally may stretch the boundaries of what we mean by “translation;” but I think it is the lesser of two evils when we couch the sublime old messages in language that 100 percent of modern people can hear. I embrace all the world’s major faith traditions in essence, and my own tradition in practice, but cannot with any shred of conscience accept a worldview that progresses to the present day exclusively through the paternal line. Certainly, focusing on gender distracts us from the core message of all religions: tolerance and peace, compassion and love. These qualities know no gender and are mechanisms for our salvation in the distractions of daily life. Let us pursue them, each of us, man and woman, as we look within and into each other’s eyes in the one world in which we are living, now and possibly forever.