Rev. Gail Collins-Ranadive
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Introduction
It is our emergent human birthright that, even while living in the here and now of our everyday lives on this precious planet, we also experience breakthroughs into another dimension, one beyond our finite ego-selves that connects us with everything and everyone else, past, present and future, and then carries us into a sense of oneness with the cosmos.
Quantum physics has confirmed this reality that mystics across the ages and all religious traditions have experienced first hand: that state of grace that Charlene Spretnak describes as being aware
“of the unity in which we are embedded, the sacred whole that is in us and around us, the consciousness that perceives not only our individual self, but also the larger self, the self of the cosmos”(CS p24).
Mathematical cosmologist Brian Swimme describes this sense of expansiveness as tapping into an endless ocean of energy that increases rather than diminishes when shared.
In Myths to Live By, Joseph Campbell assures us that: “We may think of ourselves as the functioning ears and eyes and mind of this earth, exactly as our own eyes and ears and minds are of our bodies. Our bodies are one with the earth, this wonderful ‘oasis in the desert of infinite space’…and our minds, the earth’s mind, and the mind of the universe come to flower and fruit in this beautiful oasis through us” (JC p 253).
Emerson describes this experience of
“standing on the bare ground---my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space,--all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”
We are ALL of us capable of seeing the world the way Black Elk did while standing on Sun Mountain (Pike’s Peak):
And I saw that the sacred hoop of my people was one of many hoops that make one circle, wide as daylight and starlight, and in the center grew one mighty flowering tree to shelter all the children of one mother and one father.
What Black Elk understood intuitively…he was only nine years old at the time…was, as he told Neihardt, that
“anywhere is the center of the world.
And while I stood there I saw more than I can tell and I understood more that I saw. For I was seeing in the sacred manner all things of the spirit, and the shapes of all shapes as they must live together as one being.”
This brings to mind what the mystic Howard Thurman once said of Rabindranath Tagore, the mystic and Nobel Prize laureate who was often called "the poet of Asia" who soared above the political and social patterns of exclusiveness dividing mankind. His tremendous spiritual insight created a mood unique among the voices of the world. He moved deep into the heart of his own spiritual idiom and came up inside all peoples, all cultures, all faiths.
(For The Inward Journey, Howard Thurman)
So then, while using Huston Smith's book on World Religions as a text for opening up to the wisdom of other faiths, I am reminded that Smith gave a lecture in Berkeley while I was attending seminary out there. In it he pointed out that while you can put each of the faith traditions into parallel columns (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism) and examine their differences, you can then draw a horizontal line across the columns, a line on which sit the mystics of every tradition, each having had a similar experience of the sacred...an experience to be cultivated, named, shared.
Thus I will present a description of each of the major religious traditions and lift up the transcendent wisdom of each, rather than get bogged down in the rigidity that keeps any of us stuck in the Now Here inherent in the No Where.
The Wisdom of Hinduism
I begin with the premise that there is deep wisdom to be found in all religious traditions, that no one among them has a monopoly on Truth, and that ever newer insights about Ultimate Reality continue to evolve through our human consciousness.
And thus when I asked my Hindu-raised former husband what is the one thing he would have you know about this religion, he said, "start with saying there are many ways to reach nirvana, god, the goal, or whatever you care to call it; that the Mystery is too complex to be explained and understood by any one religion; and that Hinduism takes into account the complexity both of the Infinite and of the human mind." Hinduism survives as the oldest major world religion precisely because it has embraced the truths of the newer ones down through the centuries.
Ah, yes, we can learn a lot from Hinduism about religious tolerance, especially in this new millennium.
The challenge begins with our Selves, self with a capital S:
"the Divine Self that is buried within us, like a lamp that is so covered with dust and dirt that its light can't be seen."
The essence of Hinduism is to find ways to bring that divine Self into the world, to clean away your accumulated dust, those distractions that hinder the Divine from shining through. And there are as many ways of doing this as there are differing personalities, life stages, and life situations (Read More……)
In Hinduism, there's no way to hide from or find an excuse for not doing this work, which is the whole point of your human existence. For Hinduism teaches us that we each consist of
infinite being, infinite awareness, and infinite bliss;
a universal energy that puts on, lives in, and then discards human form over and over again; it is our task to uncover and recover and discover this divine essence in the process of living.
Thus we come into the world with certain predispositions to be developed and modified and lived out of. For as anyone who has observed two or more children in one family knows, each child is totally different, in spite of having the same parents and similar environment.
Long before we in the west caught onto the scientific idea of differing genetic makeup and stopped trying to make all children behave the same, especially in schools where, barely a hundred years ago, teachers did not dare to spare the rod for fear of spoiling the child, Hinduism wisely simply accepted different temperaments as various spiritual paths.
In fact, Hinduism describes four major paths, four ways to yoke the divine essence within yourself, where it is known as Atman, with the divine essence out in the world, where it is known as Brahman.
And this is done through the four Yogas:
knowledge, devotion, work, and physical action.
The way to god through knowledge, through jnana yoga, is the path for those of us with a strong reflective bent, who are always processing and making meaning and reading up on what's going on in our lives, thereby gaining wisdom, sophia or gnosis as the Greeks and Hebrews have named it.
The way to god through devotion, or bhakti yoga, is the path of choice for those whose lives are less powered by reason than by emotion, the strongest of which is love.
Hinduism considers Christianity as "one great brilliantly lit bhakti highway toward God" according to Huston Smith in his classic, The World's Religions.
For example, raised as a Christian, I believed my purpose on earth was to serve god through Jesus by helping people, and so I became a nurse.
Later, as a minister, I followed my more natural bent of serving the divine life force through the path of knowledge, by writing sermons and creating writing workshops.
The way to god through work, or karma yoga, is intended for those of us with an active bent: "throw yourself into your work with everything you have; only do so wisely, in a way that will bring the highest rewards, not just trivia"(HS p37).
Now, it is important to note here that one's work in the world can be informed by the other two yogas: i.e. either as reflective or affective, according to one's predisposition towards thinking or feeling.
Do you hear Carl Jung's ideas here...especially as they were developed by Isabel Myers and her daughter Katherine Briggs into a whole system for determining differences in personality types?
Perhaps the Myers-Briggs personality type indicator is just ancient Hindu wisdom coming to light within western psychology!!
The fourth way to god, through psychophysical exercises, is known as raja yoga, "'the royal road to integration,' and is designed for people who are of a scientific bent, and approach god through psychophysical experiments" (HS p41). The experiments, however, are on one's self, with its layers of body, mind, and spirit to be penetrated and understood
And so there you have it: four different paths for differing personality predispositions. But there's more:
Hinduism recognizes that we all go through the different stages in life, and so our spiritual paths and tasks change as we mature.
What a concept! A child once asked her teacher: "What's it like to be a grown up? Do you feel tall, fat, and all finished?" Well I don't know about you, but I expected to feel all finished, say, by the age of 21. And when I became 21 and didn't, I thought something was wrong with me.
It wasn't until my mid-thirties, when Gail Sheehey's book Passages was published, that I realized I wasn't supposed to be all finished, and that that was okay.
Maturity is a life-long process of struggle and growth and change; and there are specific stages we must all go through. Western psychology has finally caught up Hindu wisdom! For Hinduism has known this truth for thousands of years.
It teaches that in the first stage, that of childhood, we are students and meant to learn , but not merely encyclopedic facts. Rather, "habits are to be cultivated, character acquired, and information incarnated into usable skills" (HS p51).
The second stage is that of the householder, and usually begins with marriage. Here family, vocation, and the community are the primary areas of concentration.
And this is good. But it's not the end of it: there's more to adulthood than merely replacing ourselves and raising our offspring. Hinduism has always taught there's a third stage in human life. It comes any time after the arrival of the first grandchild, or the first gray hair.
It is the time when we have permission to withdraw from social obligations and can take time to read and reflect and relax and to ponder life's meaning without interruption.
In the west we call it retirement; it is the time for "working out a philosophy, and then working that philosophy into a way of life; a time for transcending the senses to find, and dwell with, the reality that underlies this natural world." (From Ageing to Sageing, p 53)
This may explain why Carl Jung claimed that virtually all the psychological problems he saw in his beyond mid-life patients were really spiritual in nature.
There is a fourth stage as well...the state of the sannyasin, defined in the Bhagavad Gita as 'one who neither hates nor loves anything'...."the one who has learned the art of keeping the finite self dispersed lest it eclipse the Infinite"..... in other words, the one who has reached the place where one's Divine Light is not longer hidden under layers of distractions and limitations: one is enlightened; nirvana has been reached.
Not many of us will get to that place in this life-time.
But it is our task to keep at it, by finding and accepting our true path, and following it throughout the changing stages of our lives. And this process is to be renewed on a yearly basis. Autumn is the season in which Hindus celebrate Durga Puja, which is essentially a rite of purification…purifying that lamp that has grown dim over the previous year.
It is no accident that this festival comes just before Diwali, the Hindu New Year, not unlike the coming together of the Jewish Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and Christianity's season of Lent that comes before the new life symbolized by Easter.
There is always the opportunity, the necessity to clean up the old to make way for the new, reminding us that our task here on earth is a spiritual one.
The story celebrated at Durga Puja and retold in modern terms goes like this: (in the words of Linda Johnson in Daughters of the Goddess, Women Saints of India.)
Self Discipline, Universal Love, Selfless Service and the other divine beings have been cast out of heaven, routed by the fiercest, strongest, most thoroughly diabolical warrior they have ever encountered: Egotism.
Ego disregards the promptings of Spirit and claims all he sees, living only for sensual pleasure and self glorification, aided by fawning minions such as Greed, Lust, and Anger. (You can add to this list your own character defects, sins of omission and commission, defense mechanisms, shadow stuff, shortcomings, fatal flaws, etc.).
The divine beings run to the greatest of the gods, Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, to plead for help. But when the Big Three realize who they are up against, they exchange worried glances. "This job is too much for the three of us," they agree. "In a case like this, there is only one recourse."
And sitting down for meditation, the gods concentrate their mental energy on her, the Supreme Goddess
Her response is instantaneous.
At the very moment that Greed and Lust are trampling the world, their attention is riveted by an extraordinarily beautiful woman seated quietly near a mountain top.
"She's incredible!!" they pant. "Ego must possess her!" And indeed when Ego hears about her ravishing beauty he sends his henchmen to her with a proposal.
"Submit to Ego and all the wealth of the world will be yours!!" the demons announce to this mysterious woman. "Become his slave and we will serve you forever!"
(Does anyone hear a parallel with the story of Jesus being tempted by Satan during his forty days in the desert...the story that Lent commemorates?)
Smiling shyly, the mysterious woman responds.
"Oh my, that's a very attractive offer. But--silly me--I took a foolish vow when I was a little girl that I would only marry the man who defeats me in battle. I'm afraid I cannot accept your master unless he conquers me."
Ego is enraged at this reply and sends his generals Fear and Revenge with their heavily armed divisions to take the mysterious beauty by force. As the demons reach out to grasp her, however, the delicate maiden begins to grow--and grow---and grow.
An extra eye swells from her forehead, numerous arms sprout from her trunk, and fangs erupt from her howling mouth. Swords, spears, cudgels, whirling discuses with very sharp edges--every conceivable weapon appears in each of her numberless fists. (if this boggles your imagination, I have pictures for you to look at afterwards.)
The tawny rock on which she has been sitting unfurls into an enormous, razor-clawed, ravenous lion.
"I think we bit off more than we can chew,"
Fear mutters under his breath as he leads the suicide charge against Durga, the Mother of the Universe.
A fierce and grisly battle ensues in which Egotism expends every means at its disposal to overcome the spiritual force within as it reasserts its innate sovereignty.
Finally, the point comes at which Ego can either pull back into the cocoon of contracted individuality, or offer itself completely to infinity.
If Ego surrenders, it wins; self finds within itself the Self of All. For Durga, as the Divine Consciousness, has invited us to engage her in a battle only she can win...when the blazing lightning of [divine energy] strikes, the self dissolves--------into everything. (pages115-117)
This colorful narrative figuratively shows what we are each called to do: surrender the small ego self into the larger Self that transcends time and death and the space between the stars.
I believe that this is the Oversoul Emerson referred to when he wrote: “Within us is the soul of the whole, the wise silence, the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related, the eternal One.”
Don’t forget that as a Unitarian minister in the early 1800’s, Emerson was reading the scriptures from all the world’s religions. We know that Hinduism had a particular fascination for him as is expressed in his poem Brahma:
Far or forgot to me is near; Shadow and sunlight are the same;
The vanquished gods to me appear; And one to me are shame and fame.
They reckon ill who leave me out; When me they fly, I am the wings;
I am the doubter and the doubt, And I the hymn the Brahmin sings.
In this poem, I hear echoes of the newest insights from quantum physics we learned about when we watched Down the Rabbit Hole together, the sequel to What the Bleep Do We Know. Is this perhaps the Observer Self that experiences and taps into the unified energy field we are all part and particle of….waves and particles to be more precise.
Thus it is good it is to have the wisdom of Hinduism to help us put things in perspective, in a world where the play of the divine "is a cosmic dance--untiring, unending, and ultimately beneficent with a grace born of infinite vitality." (HS p55)
The Wisdom of Buddhism
One of my favorite stories about the Buddha is as follows:
Once during the lifetime of Buddha, a disciple brought him a golden flower and asked him to preach the secret of his doctrine. The Buddha took the flower, held it aloft and looked at it in silence.
That simple gesture was the whole of his sermon.
Only one member of his audience caught the message: that Buddha’s doctrine lay not in words but in profound contemplation, in other words, in mindfulness.
By contemplating, by taking a long loving look at the reality of a flower, you can penetrate the secret of the universe, the secret that is this:
you and the flower are one.
Quantum physics has only quite recently been finding out how literally true that statement is! (Read more)
This truth, this reality is beautifully described in the writings of Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk who has been popular here in the west since the Vietnam War, for he is Vietnamese, and was exiled from his country during the last phase of that war because of his engaged Buddhism and peace activism. In fact, he was nominated for the Noble Peace Prize by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. As Nhat Hanh has put it:
The almond tree in your front yard
is itself truth, reality, your own self.
But then he goes on to ask,
Of all who have passed by your yard, how many have really seen your almond tree?
Can you grasp the truth, with Thich Nhat Hanh, thatwhen you look at a flower to really see it and see it really, it is real and you yourself are real, and it is real because you are real, and you are real because it is real.
Okay, so this is not as easy as it sounds. If you didn’t ‘get it’ when you looked at the flower, don’t despair:
the Buddha didn’t get it for a long time, either!
Let me tell you his story. He was born Siddhartha Gautama around 563 B.C.E.. His father was the ruler of one of the small kingdoms of India at that time, and summoned fortune tellers to discern his new son’s future. What they told him was that this was no ordinary child: if he succeeded his father he would unify India and become a world conqueror, BUT if he forsook the world he would become a world redeemer.
Now, because his father wanted him to grow up to be a ruler rather than a religious man, he strictly controlled his son’s environment: he even forbid him to leave the palace.
Instead, the father made sure Siddhartha had the best of everything, including three palaces...one for each season, servants to wait upon him, minstrels to play for him; he even had, in time, a lovely wife and beautiful son of his own.
But, and there is always a but, now, isn’t there!
But late one night the young Gautama summoned his old servant to saddle up his horse and then rode out into the world. For the first time in his life, he saw human suffering. He saw a man in the feebleness of old age. He saw a sick man, a dead man, and a religious Hindu who had renounced the world and starved himself to skin and bones.
Gautama returned to the palace, deeply troubled by the misery around him, until finally he decided he must go off, as was the custom among the Hindus (he was a Hindu), to learn for himself the truth about life. He paused at his wife’s doorway to gaze upon her and his young son in sleep.
Then he turned his back on his life of ease and went out into the world in the yellow robes of a wandering monk, begging for his daily bread.
(The World’s Great Religions, p 39)
He was then 29 years old. It would take him six long years to find the truth he was seeking.
First he joined five Hindu holy men who believed the way to truth was to starve the body. Gautama starved himself, until, pressing his stomach, he could feel his backbone. But this taught him nothing. Soon he began eating normally again, and the holy men left him in disgust.
That was one extreme. The other extreme, the life of riches and pleasure, had also left him hungry for the truth.
So he decided to try the Middle Way. He ate enough so that hunger did not occupy his thoughts. Then he sat down quietly under a tree....the sacred Bo tree.
For 49 days he meditated. In a vision he saw the armies of Mara, evil tempter of the world. They attacked him with storms, rains, rocks and blazing weapons. And the evil one offered the wealth of the world if Gautama would give up his search for the truth. But Gautama sat, unmoved (WGR, p40).
(Does anyone hear a parallel with the story Jesus being tempted by Satan for forty days, right after Jesus had been baptized in the Jordan and gone off to be alone in the wilderness to prepare himself for his earthly ministry?)
After 49 days of meditation under the tree, Siddhartha Gautama achieved the enlightenment he was seeking, the answer to the riddle of life. Thereafter, he was known as the Buddha, or “the Enlightened One” (WGR, p41).
For the next 45 years, the Buddha traveled up and down northern India, preaching the truths he had uncovered.
The Four Noble Truths are these:
1. Suffering is universal.
2. The cause of suffering is craving, or selfish desire.
3. The cure for suffering is to rid oneself of cravings.
4. The way to be rid of craving is to follow
the Noble Eightfold Path.
The Eightfold Path is depicted by a Wheel; in fact, a wheel with eight spokes is the symbol of Buddhism.
The eight spokes in the wheel stand for:
1. Right knowledge
2. Right intention
3. Right speech
4. Right conduct
5. Right means of livelihood
6. Right effort
7. Right mindfulness
8. Right concentration
These essential teachings of the Buddha eventually became two great schools of doctrine: Small Raft Buddhism and Large Raft Buddhism. Here the concept of raft is that Buddhism is for carrying people across life’s river.
Small Raft or Theravada Buddhism is so called because it exalts the individual enlightenment that the Buddha preached about on his death bed when he said to his followers:
Be ye a lamp unto yourselves; be your own confidence.
Hold to the truth within yourselves as to the only lamp
This is the world-renouncing way to Enlightenment. And because this is so very demanding and difficult, it appeals to a smaller number of devotees than Large Raft or Mahayanna Buddhism, which places compassion above wisdom, seeks help from others who are enlightened, and seeks to enlighten others. This is engaged Buddhism.
Thich Nhat Hanh is of the Mahayanna school. His is an active Buddhism, engaged in this world. Thus, while living in Vietnam during the war there, he founded and directed the School of Youth for Social Service, from which young monks went out into the streets each morning to retrieve the bodies of the victims of the previous night’s bombing raids.
It is this small sized, soft spoken Buddhist monk who traveled throughout the United States during our war in his country, trying to get us to see what was happening through Vietnamese eyes, and how issues could have been resolved through another way, a Buddhist Third Way.
We didn’t want to listen to him back then.
But now, these many years since the Vietnam War, Thich Nhat Hanh has become a major spiritual figure in this country.
I first read his book, The Miracle of Mindfulness, back in 1979, when I was teaching journal writing and spirituality, and his book was included in the course.
In it I read about how washing the dishes could be a spiritual experience if you do it mindfully. I reacted by throwing the book across the room. For I knew that when he finished washing the dishes, he got to go to Paris and give a lecture. And that when I finished washing the dishes, I got to go to the laundry room and wash the clothes...mindfully, of course. Something in that concept didn’t quite work for me then. I’m not so sure it does now, either...but now I know that’s a clue to my own spiritual underdevelopment.
You can also learn his deep wisdom by listening to his gentle voice on his lecture tapes. Better yet is attending one of his lectures as he travels throughout the country.
I have, and can tell you that being in his presence is a profound experience. He is a living Buddha; a Bodhisattva, centered and peaceful. And funny. Very, very funny...as funny as another famous Buddhist, the Tibetan Buddhist the Dalai Lama. And, like the Dalai Lama, Thich Nhat Hanh is filled with joy and compassion, a compassion that compels him to lead healing walking meditations with American soldiers at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C.
For his Buddhism includes the Doctrine of Mutual Arising. This doctrine implies that what is to happen in the future is the cause of what is occurring now; and, at the same time, what occurred in the past is also the cause of what is happening now. Everything, all the time, is causing everything else. Thus, enemies mutually arise: they are two parts of the one thing. You and your enemies; you and your friends: all parts of the one thing...”thing and thing, with no division”
(Myths to Live By, p 148).
This oneness of everything is the major message of Buddhism!
The Wisdom of Taoism
In many ways, Taoism is the easiest world religion for us to grasp; in other ways it is the most difficult.
On the one hand, Taoism has infiltrated Western life in myriad ways: our vocabulary includes such concepts as T'ai Chi, acupuncture, Capra's The Tao of Physics, Jean Shinoda Bolen's The Tao of Psychology, and Benjamin Hoff's two delightful books The Tao of Poo and The Te of Piglet.....all carrying forward the traditional wisdom to be found in following the Way of being in balance with the life-force of the universe, and the Power that comes from it.
On the other hand, Taoism is the most difficult for us, because our Western minds perceive the universe as divided energies, in a duality that sees things as either one or the other: black/white, light/dark, female/male, summer/winter, active/passive, positive/negative: all as opposite, in opposition to one another, rather than as two manifestations of the same energy, the same life-force. And more, after we Westerners assign things to one side of the dichotomy or the other, we then we judge them accordingly: good or evil.
May this brief explication of Taoism invite you to suspend your western either/or mind-set, and embrace another possibility. (Read more)
So let's begin with a story you may have already heard that demonstrates the differing perceptions of good and bad.
It's about a Chinese farmer whose horse runs away. The neighbors come by to lament with the farmer: "oh, that's too bad." To which the farmer replies: "maybe, maybe not."
Many days later the horse returns, bringing several wild horse home with it. The neighbors return to rejoice with the farmer: "what great good fortune!" "Maybe, maybe not," he says.
Then, when the farmer's son tries to tame one of the wild horses, he is thrown off the horse and breaks his leg. "Oh, my goodness, that's too bad," say the neighbors.
"Maybe, maybe not," says the farmer.
A few days later, emissaries of the Emperor arrive in the village to conscript all the young men into the army; the farmer's son is exempted because of his broken leg.
So then, what was good, what was bad here is not a matter of either/or, but rather both/and: the same vital life energy, the chi, flowing into differing forms and events, without the farmer trying to control it or judge it.....but rather just 'going with the flow,' so to speak.
"In the Chinese view, all manifestations of the Tao are generated by the dynamic interplay of these two polar forces," writes F. Capra in his 1985 book The Tao of Physics.
"This idea is very old and many generations worked on the symbolism of the archetypal pair yin and yang until it became a fundamental concept of Chinese thought. The original meaning of the words yin and yang was that of the shady and sunny sides of a mountain, a meaning which gives a good idea of the relativity of the two concepts:
That which lets now the dark, now the light appear is Tao.
Now listen to how the Taoist concept of not either/or, but of both/and came to be:
"From the early times, the two archetypal poles of nature were represented not only by bright and dark, but also by male and female, firm and yielding, above and below.
Yang, the strong, male, creative power, was associated with Heaven, whereas yin, the dark, receptive, female and maternal element, was represented by the Earth.
In the realm of thought, yin is the complex, female, intuitive mind, yang is the clear and rational male intellect. Yin is the quiet, contemplative stillness of the sage, yang the strong creative action of the king" (FC 106).
So here you see that the yin and the yang flow together within the circle of the Tao, the womb of the universe.
And it is this insight of flowing energy that became translated by the psychiatrist Carl Jung into his theories of introversion/extroversion, thinking/feeling, etc...
because we all have each of these seeming opposites within us: it is just a matter of how much energy it takes to move in which direction. For instance, an introvert can function in an extraverted way whenever necessary, BUT will become drained of energy in the process, while an extrovert will gain energy when in the same situation.
So, for all you introverts out there…and we know who we are….the society in which we live is basically an extraverted one. You may well have noticed this, but been unable to put a name to it.
For example, the industrialized west has a work ethic that goes non-stop through an 8, 10, 12 hour-plus hour day, with virtually no down time to regroup and renew.
How many of you get to take a nap after lunch? To even think of doing such a thing sets off the old Puritanical tapes of “you’re just being lazy! Shame on you!!”
At least that’s what I internalized, growing up in New England, needing a nap every afternoon, so that I can have two mornings. I remember in Nursing school: when afternoon lectures were held on the ground floor of the nurses’ dorm, and we would get a 15 minute break, I could race up the three flights of stairs to my room, throw myself down on my bed, fall into a deep sleep for 5 minutes, get up, wash up, and be back down the three flights in time for the rest of the lecture. Classmates thought I was weird, but at least I could pay attention for the rest of the afternoon.
Then, after marrying an Indian, I visited India, where EVERYONE takes an afternoon nap every day: shops close, people come home from work, everything shuts down for a couple of hours in the heat of midday. Wow!! Since then, and also because I’ve spent time in Latin America as well, where afternoon siestas built into the culture, I consider afternoon napping as the only civilized way to live.
So now, if you need a note to your employer authorizing an afternoon nap, just let me know. It’s a spiritual thing, because it is our human responsibility to align ourselves with the universal energy.
Philosophical Taoism describes how "to align one's life to the Tao, to ride its boundless tide and delight in its flow."
The basic way to do this is to perfect a life of wu wei.
An initial Western translation of this Chinese concept could be 'do-nothingness or inaction.' But that is not quite right. Better renderings would be 'pure effectiveness,' and 'creative quietude,' as described by Huston Smith in his classic The World's Religions I am using for this series:
"Creative quietude combines within a single individual two seemingly incompatible conditions---supreme activity and supreme relaxation. These seemingly incompatibles can coexist because human beings are not self-enclosed entities.
They ride an unbounded sea of Tao that sustains them.
"Wu wei is the supreme action, the precious suppleness, simplicity, and freedom that flows from us, or rather through us, when our private egos and conscious efforts yield to a power not their own."
Taoism instructs us "to get the foundations of the self in tune with the Tao and let behavior flow spontaneously.
Action follows being; new action will follow new being, wiser being, stronger being."
Or, in the words of the Tao Te Ching, the basic text, the basic scripture of Taoism: 'The way to do is to be.'" (HS 208)
The way to do is to be!? Now doesn't that just boggle our Western minds!! Picture it this way.
If you were an artist living in the orient, steeped in the traditions of the east, and you wanted to paint a picture of bamboo, you would instinctively, intuitively sit still and study real bamboo for a long time, until you became the bamboo you wanted to paint. Only then would you pick up your paint brushes, and, with a few quick strokes, recreate the essence, the rhythm of bamboo on your sheet of rice paper.
This is the way to do something by being, by becoming.
Another example I see of this is in how Taoism was founded. Legend has it that in 604 BCE, an old man called Lao-Tzu, a title meaning the Old Master or the Old Boy, climbed on a water buffalo to ride away from his homeland. At the Hankao Pass, however, a gatekeeper, sensing the unusual character of the man, tried to persuade him to turn back.
Failing this, he asked the Old Boy if he would not at least leave a record of his wisdom behind. This Lao Tzu consented to do. He retired for three days and returned with a slim volume of five thousand characters entitled the Tao Te Ching.
"It can be read in half an hour or a lifetime, and remains to this day the basic text of Taoist thought." (HS 197)
And while it may have been set down in just three days, a lifetime of living, of being, preceded the act of writing it.
Now the natural phenomenon that Taoists saw as bearing the closest resemblance to Tao and the prototype of wu wei was that of water. "They were struck by the way it would support objects and carry them effortlessly on its tide.
The Chinese characters for swimmer, deciphered, mean literally 'one who knows the nature of water.'
Similarly, one who understands the basic life force knows that it will sustain one if one stops thrashing and flailing and trusts oneself to its support. (HS 209)
For instance, has anyone had the experience of being caught in an ocean undertow, of struggling and becoming more and more panic stricken, until you became exhausted and just gave up and let go, and then found that the waves carried you to shore. You did not have to pray to a supreme being to save you; all you had to do was align yourself with the natural energy of the universe. That's Taoism.
And when we are in tune with the Tao, our intuition connects us with the underlying pattern of oneness with the universe. Or in the words of Jungian analyst Jean Shinoda Bolen: "It is as if we are part of the cosmic dance around the still point, hearing the faint hum of the music as we move--in tune with the Tao" (JSB 94). And being in this mental state of "humming along" (like Winnie the Poo?) opens us to the experience of synchronicity: the appearance of meaningful coincidences in our lives.
"People cross our path and events unfold, facilitating rather than hindering the course we are on. The sense of fullness and flow influences the sense of time; there seems to be enough time to do whatever we are here for; even parking spaces synchronistically materialize" (94).
This comes about because the universe is an inseparable web, whose interconnections are dynamic and not static. It is how a butterfly flapping its wings in China affects the weather in California.
It is what modern physics sees as a web of intrinsically dynamic relations, from which arise quantum theory and Einstein's Theory of Relativity.
No, I won't attempt to explain that connection here, but will refer you back to the Tao of Physics, in which Capra says:
At the atomic level, the solid material objects of classical physics dissolve into patterns of probabilities, and these patterns do not represent probabilities of things but rather probabilities of interconnections.
Quantum theory forces us to see the universe not as a collection of physical objects, but rather as a complicated web of relations between the various parts of a unified whole. This is the way in which Eastern mystics have experienced the world, and some of them have expressed their experience in words that are almost identical with those used by atomic physicists. (FC 138)
Call it whatever you would like: modern physics or ancient Chinese mysticism: it is the Tao, the Way and its Power. And its powerful energy can be facilitated either by expending it efficiently or by trying to increase its supply.
T'ai Chi, for instance, uses bodily movement to try to extract more energy (ch'i) from the universe and remove blocks to its internal flow. Acupuncture does this as well.
But how-so-ever you choose to approach it, it is there to be tapped into. But alas, as the Tao Te Ching tells us:
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.
The named is the mother of ten thousand things.
Ever desireless, one can see the mystery.
Ever desiring, one can see the manifestations.
These two spring from the same source but differ
in name; this appears as darkness.
Darkness within darkness; the gate to all mystery.
The Wisdom of Judaism
Let me begin with quoting a concluding paragraph from Thomas Cahill's book The Gifts of the Jews:
"We can hardly get up in the morning or cross the street without being Jewish. We dream Jewish dreams and hope Jewish hopes. Most of our best words, in fact-such as
new, adventure, surprise;
unique, individual, person, vocation;
time, history, future;
freedom, progress, spirit;
faith, hope, justice
-are the gifts of the Jews.
But what does that mean? And how did this come to be? (Read more)
In the ancient world of the middle east, that fertile crescent valley we studied back in school (Mesopotamia, remember?), as well as that of Greece, India, and America, the religious rituals and world-views were based on the cycles of the earth, the moon, the sun, the seasons, and on those of human life: particularly, for example, women's life cycles based on menstruation: i.e. maidenhood, motherhood, and menopause, that reflected the cycles of the moon.
The primary image we can relate this to is that of the wheel; the great wheel of life and death and regeneration, where what goes 'round comes back around again, forever; and there is to be no variation, for fear of disrupting the cosmic order on earth and perhaps also in heaven:
therefore, humans had to perform, for instance, fertility rites in springtime, and sacrificial rites in autumn.
The term for this was correspondence: human life corresponded to, and yes with, the cycles of nature.
And this natural cycle, like a circle, was closed, complete, prescribed, predictable; not unlike being a gerbil on a wheel, I suppose.
Karma is another name for it.
The Jews were (among) the first people to break out of this circle. It began with Abraham hearing a voice that told him
"Go-you-forth from your land, from your kindred, from your father's house, to the land I will let you see. I will make a great nation of you and will give-you-blessing and will make your name great......." And Abraham went.
As did Moses, half a millennium later, when that same voice told him to lead his people out of slavery in Egypt and back to the land promised to Abraham.
But this voice also tells Moses its name: the verb of the English consonants, YHWH, purposely unpronounceable, but which means "I-will-be-there,"
the God of gods, the God you can count on (GJ, p.238).
The circle, the static endless round, has been disrupted by the god of the journey, the god working to affect history. And everything is forever changed. As Cahill describes it:
This great, overwhelming movement, exemplified in the stories of Abraham and Moses, makes history real to human consciousness for the first time—the future is really dependent on what I do in the present. This movement is the movement of time, which, once past, becomes history. But the movement is not like the movement of a wheel, as all other societies had imagined; it is not cyclical, coming around and around again. Each moment, like each destiny, is unique and unrepeatable. It is a process--it is going somewhere, though no one can say where. And because its end is not yet, it is full of hope---and I am free to imagine that it will not just be process but progress. (GJ , p.239)
And thus does Western civilization come into being:
"The concept of an unknown future takes hold and from this insight the Jews evolve a new vision of women and men with unique destinies--a vision that thousands of years later will inspire the Declaration of Independence and our hopeful belief in progress and the sense that tomorrow can be better than today." (GJ, front jacket cover)
But this evolution of the personal I becomes both our blessing and our curse. For now, these many millennium after Abraham and Moses, when the human ego reigns supreme, we have conveniently forgotten the god-piece…the holy ‘other’ part of the equation. We have become the center of our universe with man as the measure of all things.
We have come to believe there is nothing that sheer human ability and will-power can't accomplish in either our private or public lives: mankind onward and upward forever.
Yet history suggests otherwise in the endless story of human conflict. As for our personal lives, well, almost anyone who has lived through mid-life has come to realize that ego-self control has its limitations. In fact, the psychoanalyst Carl Jung assures us that virtually all the psychological problems experienced in middle age have a spiritual basis.
And Jewish religious tradition invites us to remember this, especially at autumn of each year. Make no mistake: their High Holy Days are based on the old lunar cycle, which is why they can fall anywhere between September and October each year.
As with the ancients, the Jews still instinctively know that something must be done about the old to make way for the new, just as the moon dies is and is reborn monthly, the old vegetation dies off and makes space for spring’s growth.
We too know this in our bones, although today we no longer sacrifice a human or a goat to ensure that life will regenerate itself next spring. Instead, we have our own rituals of cleaning out our closets, our gardens, etc.
For the Jews, the ten days between Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year; and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, are a time for spiritual housecleaning. This period is set aside each year for repentance, soul-searching, and a return to god.
In Judaism, repentance in Hebrew literally means ‘turning or returning: to god, to the earth, to each other....
And atonement is at-one-ment. At one with God's will for ones life, coming back from brokenness, from alienation, back into connection.
Rosh Hashanah is a time for reflecting on how one has lived over the past year and on how one might better live during the coming year. One ancient custom is that of going to the nearest body of flowing water, turning out your pockets, and shaking out the lint and breadcrumbs and whatever else you’ve accumulated there.
It sounds so simple, this cleaning up the clutter of our personal lives in order to begin fresh and cleansed and ready for a new year. It makes good sense to rid ourselves of our bad habits, to cast them off, like old clothes…last year’s clothes that we find no longer fit when we haul them out of the back of the closet.
But this ‘turning’ is not as easy for us as it is for the leaves in this season, as we just read together responsively. We humans are always tempted to keep retrieving the old that we don’t want to let go of quite yet.
So we carry our excess baggage around with us, those old habits that weigh us down, physically, emotionally, spiritually. And we stay so frantically busy at this time of the year that we don’t have the time to do the inner work the season calls us to do: the turning over a new leaf, as it were.
Here, Judaism offers us another gift: the wisdom of keeping a Sabbath. Some years ago, when Al Gore announced he had chosen Joseph Lieberman to be his running mate, a cry of concern went up: would a Jew break the Sabbath in order to conduct government business?
Perhaps the real concern there was that if we had a role model for setting time aside within every day of our lives, we might all decide to keep a Sabbath, and what would THAT look like? Or to quote a colleague:
"Think of how radical it would be if, like Joe Lieberman, you said to all those who were demanding constant and instant access to your life:
'No, sorry, I'm sitting Shabbat today. My soul needs rest.' Boggles the mind, doesn't it.
For another word for Sabbath is 'Ceasing.'
No ancient society before the Jews had a day of rest. The God who made the universe and rested bids us do the same, calling us to a weekly restoration of prayer, study, and re-creation. In this study (or Talmud), we have the beginnings of 'the universal day of continuous self-education,'
Israel being the first human society to so value education and the first to envision it as a universal pursuit-and a democratic obligation that those in power must safeguard on behalf of those in their employ.
There is a democratic obligation for study and reflection, for a democracy depends upon an educated electorate. I
Oh, indeed, it is easier to stay super busy with our families and jobs and concern over our money market accounts than to be bothered paying attention to the larger picture. But democracy can not survive, let alone thrive, with citizens who mindlessly let the government make all the decisions about domestic and foreign policy.
It becomes our responsibility to stand up and protest when our conscience requires it, to vote for representatives who reflect our values, and then hold them accountable. In short, to take the time to become both educated and empowered participants.
Cahill continues his discussion on honoring the Sabbath:
The connections to both freedom and creativity lie just beneath the surface of this commandment: leisure is appropriate to a free people, and this people so recently free find themselves quickly establishing this quiet weekly celebration of their freedom; leisure is the necessary ground of creativity, and a free people are free to imitate the creativity of God. (GJ, p.145)
The ethics that are the gifts of the Jews are encoded in the Ten Commandments. How many of us memorized them in Sunday School some place back in our childhoods? Not killing, stealing, cheating, lying, swearing. craving, disgracing your parents or ignoring your god is a pretty good prescription for living. And if everyone lived according to this code of ethics, what might the world we live in really be like?
That human attitudes and actions CAN change is an integral part of our Jewish religious heritage. This is because saying yes to god's call to freedom from whatever bondage you find yourself in,......whatever personal gerbil wheel you're caught in.... is not just a call out of: it's also a call TO.
A call to what? To serve God, the Something Holy Other, and serving this God means to act with justice! In the words of God, spoken through the Prophet Amos:
"'I hate, I scorn your festivals,
I take no pleasure in your solemn assemblies, When you bring me burnt offerings...your oblations, I do not accept them and I do not look at your communion sacrifices of fat cattle .
Spare me the din of your chanting, let me hear none of your strumming on lyres, but let justice flow like water, and uprightness like a never-failing stream.”
The Prophet Micah continues this thought:
"He has already shown you what is right:
and what does the Lord require of you,
but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with your God?"
Thus this God of Western historical consciousness, whose still small voice broke through the old cyclical worldview, is the god of social change, and we are the change agents. It is our half of the promise, the covenant made on Sinai.
AND we DO NOT need to remain trapped even in the cycle of human history, as Thomas Cahill describes it in his introduction to his series on The Hinges of History, of which the book I’ve been quoting from is only one of the 7 projected volumes. HE WRITES:
“We normally think of history as one catastrophe after another, war followed by war, outrage by outrage---almost as if history were nothing more than all the narratives of human pain, assembled in sequence. And surely this is, often enough, an adequate description.
But history is also the narratives of grace, the recountings of those blessed and inexplicable moments when someone did something for someone else, saved a life, bestowed a gift, gave something beyond what was required by circumstance” In his series, THE HINGES OF HISTORY, Cahill means “to retell the story of the Western world as the story of the great gift-givers”------who,
“arriving in the moment of crisis, provided for transition, for transformation, and even for transfiguration,
leaving us a world more varied and complex, more awesome and delightful, more beautiful and strong than the one they had found.”
This is never easy, of course. For as Cahill's book continues: "Each of us has in our life at least one moment of insight, one Mount Sinai--an uncanny, otherworldly, time-stopping experience that somehow succeeds in breaking through the grimy, boisterous present, the insight that, if we let it, will carry us through our life.
The Wisdom of Christianity
Ahh, Christmas, the season when we sing and celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, and the beginnings of Christianity.
Yet, "studies made by historians, combined with clues found in the Bible, suggest that Jesus was born, not in the year 1 A.D., but in the springtime of 6 B.C, when the planets Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn were close together in the heavens, forming a triangle in a group of stars known as Pisces" (Edna Barth, Holly, Reindeer, and Colored Lights).
This grouping of three planets was probably what the wise men, astrologers all, were following...the so-called 'star' we sing about in this season.
Jesus was born into a world in which the Romans had begun worshipping the Persian God of Light, Mithra, and celebrating the winter solstice as "The Birthday of the Unconquered Sun," as the start of a new year.
In early Christianity, the sUn quickly became the sOn, when in 350 A.D., Pope Julius 1 set Jesus' birth date as December 25. And thus, ever since, has the winter solstice been known as Christmas, Christ's Mass, or feast day, in cultures touched by Christianity.
And there can be no doubt about it: we are continuously reminded that we live in a Christian culture, and we participate in it, whether we are Christian or not. (Read more)
So, now, Christianity: what is it? In the words of Huston Smith (The World's Religions):
Christianity is basically a historical religion. That is to say, it is founded not on abstract principles but in concrete events, actual historical happenings.
The most important of these is the life of a Jewish carpenter who, as has often been pointed out, was born in a stable, was executed as a criminal at age 33, never traveled more than ninety miles from his birthplace, owned nothing, attended no college, marshaled no army, and instead of producing books did his only writing in sand.
Nevertheless, his birthday is kept across the world and his death day sets a gallows against almost every skyline. Who was he? (p317) Smith continues:
Minimally stated, Jesus was a charismatic wonder-worker who stood in a tradition that stretched back to the beginning of Hebrew history.
The prophets and seers who comprised that tradition mediated between the everyday world on the one hand, and a Spirit world that enveloped it, from which they drew the power to both help people and to challenge them. (p318).
Jesus epitomized this tradition: he was exceptionally oriented to the Spirit world, which in turn empowered his ministry; he used his Spirit-derived powers to alleviate human suffering; and he sought to bring forth a new social order.
In his book The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James claims that "in its broadest terms, religion says that there is an unseen order and that our supreme good lies in rightful relations to it"(HS319).
Jesus was in right relationship with this other order, the intensely alive Spiritual world (Quantum world, if you will) that, though unseen, can be known. He came to know it through his initiation by John the Baptist, when his third or spiritual eye was opened, and he saw "the heavens open and the Spirit descending upon him like a dove."
Having descended, the Spirit then drove Jesus out into the wilderness where, during forty days of prayer and fasting, he consolidated the Spirit which had entered him.
Only then could he come back to the world, empowered to do his ministry (HS320). This power that emanated from him enabled him to influence the natural course of events: heal diseases, cast out demons, quell storms, part waters, bring the dead back to life....but there was nothing unusual in any of that: all charismatic, spirit-filled healers could and did do likewise, as can be seen in the hero-stories of many other religions.
What made Jesus different, outlive his time and place, and got him crucified, was the way he used his spiritual power not just to heal individuals, but to begin to heal humanity, beginning with his own people, the Jews.
Jesus was deeply Jewish; yet he created a tension within Judaism. For the faith of the Pharisees was grounded in Yahweh's code of Law, as given to Moses on Mount Sinai.
But Jesus taught about Yahweh's Compassion, God's Love that overcame the social barriers that the code of Law erected between people: the clean and the unclean, the pure and defiled, sacred and profane, Jew and Gentile.
Thus Jesus "parleyed with tax collectors, dined with outcasts and sinners, socialized with prostitutes, and healed on the Sabbath when compassion prompted doing so.
This made him a social prophet, challenging the boundaries of the existing order and advocating an alternative vision of human community" (HS322).
Let’s think of it this way: human consciousness is ever evolving, and as it does so, new insights and ideas push up against the old…those systems whose original wisdom has become static, rigid, institutionalized, and often destructive.
Jesus pushed against Judaism; Buddha against the Hinduism he was raised in; the Protestants against the established catholic church during the REFORMATION.
And how many of us have pushed aback against our childhood faiths…and it would appear that we are indeed hard wired to do so, as our consciousness evolves, beginning as teenagers within our families of origin!
So what did that evolutionary awareness look like in Jesus’ life and time? In the simple words of his disciple Peter,
"Jesus went about doing good." And this doing good, in the name of God's love, made the disciples realize that "if divine goodness were to manifest itself in human form, this is how it would behave: (HS324).
Yet it was not only what Jesus did that made his followers think of him in new dimensions: it was also what he said, and how he said it. Jesus spoke with authority:
He told us that we are not to resist evil but to turn the other cheek; yet our world assumes that evil must be resisted by every means available.
He told us we are to love our enemies and bless those who curse us; yet our world assumes that friends are to be loved and enemies hated.
He told us that the sun rises on the just and unjust alike; the world considers this undiscriminating: it would like to see clouds over evil people and is offended when they go unpunished.
He told us that outcasts and harlots can enter the kingdom of God before many who are perfunctorily righteous; the world thinks respectable people should get there first.
We are told that the gate to salvation is narrow;
the world would prefer it to be broad.
We are told to be as carefree as the birds and flowers;
the world councils prudence.
We are told it is more difficult for the rich to enter the Kingdom than for a camel to pass through a needle's eye;
the world admires wealth.
We are told that the happy people are those who are meek, those who weep, who are merciful and pure in heart;
the world assumes that it is the rich, the powerful, and the well-born who are happy. (HS326)
Not much has changed in the two thousand years since he told us all this! H.G. Wells was evidently right: either there was something mad about this man, or
our hearts are still too small for his message.
And what was and is this earth-shattering message?
The message of God's overwhelming compassionate love for humanity, and the need for people to accept that love and let it flow through them to others.
For instance, we are to give others our cloak because God has given us what we need. We are to go with others the second mile because we know that God has borne with us for far longer stretches. Jesus lived this message of God's love.
Jesus lived his life being Transparent to the Holy, the Great Mystery of the Spiritual world, what today might be termed cosmic consciousness.
The Wisdom of Islam
Several years ago now, I was called and installed as a settled minister at Channing Unitarian Universalist Church in Rockland, MA. At the front of the sanctuary was a pulpit and a communion table, above which were displayed a series of symbols from the world's religious traditions.
This, of course, is quite in keeping with our Unitarian Universalist tradition of honoring of the wisdom to be gleaned from ALL religions. So each Sunday, I would preach against the backdrop of silver discs that depicted Hinduism's AUM, Buddhism's wheel, Taoism's yin/yang, Judaism's star, and Christianity's cross. Conspicuously missing was Islam's crescent moon and star.
I wondered about this, and went to the minister who, while serving Channing Church many years before me, had commissioned the creation of these symbols.
"Why wasn't the symbol for Islam included," I asked him at a district ministers' meeting. "Was that just an oversight?"
"Oh, no! Not at all," he assured me, then went on to explain, in effect, that Islam is the one religion we can't interact with: it is fundamentalist to the extreme, and its sacred text, the Koran, can not effectively be translated out of the Arabic, so we can't really know what it says. Thus, he deliberately had not included Islam in the symbols for the sanctuary of Channing Church in 1972. So of course I set out on a campaign to get the Islamic symbol included in the sanctuary of Channing Church, which did come to pass before I left there. (Read more)
And after September 11th, I received an email from a member of that congregation, thanking me for being persistent, and for including Islam in my now yearly series on the world's religions.
For while Islam may indeed be a difficult religion for us to grasp, it is a psychological truth that enemies co-create one another through a series of actions and reactions, expectations, misinterpretations, assumptions.
(Am I misremembering, but back in the mid-80’s, during the war between Iraq and Iran, did we not arm and support Iraq, in reaction to our frustration over the Iranian hostage crisis of a few years earlier?)
While the German poet Goethe may have been wise in his insight that we are shaped and fashioned by what we love, my Peace Studies degree has taught me that we are also shaped and fashioned by what we hate, by what we fear.
And, given that Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world, perhaps, it is time to try to open our minds a bit and see what wisdom it might have to teach us. But let me be clear here: our fear of Islamic fundamentalists is well earned and deserved.
Yet ALL organized religious doctrines that are taken literally are dangerous, and betray the whole essence of the spiritual dimension of human life.
So what I am asking you to think about is the wisdom of the Muslim tradition, so as not to get bogged down with the extremes of how it is lived out by its literalists.
Thus let me begin with Islam's chief symbol, the one that finally found its place at the front of Channing Church: the crescent moon embracing a star.
In Islam, the crescent moon is an image that symbolizes opening and concentration, and it points to victory over death (for in ancient cultures, the moon was the place where souls went after death, to await final judgment).
Since the Crusades, those Christian Holy Wars, the crescent moon embracing a single star has been the emblem of the Islamic world in general.
For instance, in the Near East, instead of the Red Cross Society, there's the Red Crescent Society.....(and at the Red Cross World Headquarters in Geneva, you will find flags flying both the Red Cross AND the Red Crescent).
So, now, the crescent moon symbolizes Opening and Concentration: but opening to what, concentrating on what? On God, of course. Al Lah: as in this Lord's prayer of Islam:
In the name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful!
Praise be to Allah, Lord of the Worlds,
the Beneficent, the Merciful,
Ruler of the Day of Judgment,
Thee alone we worship; Thee alone we ask for help.
Show us the straight path,
The path of those whom Thou hast favored;
Not of those who have earned Thine anger
nor of those who go astray.
This is in translation from the Koran, so may not be exactly accurate. Because the Koran itself was a recitation by the Angel Gabriel to Mohammed, it was oral, and poetic.... and meant to be heard, rather than read, for Mohammed, a camel driver, probably couldn't read and write. The Koran primarily needs to be heard.
Listening to their leader recite the words of the Angel Gabriel, Mohammed's followers wrote them down using "scraps of parchment and leather, tablets of stone, ribs of palm branches, camels' shoulder blades and ribs, pieces of boards and the hearts of men." Soon after Mohammed died, these fragments were collected and made into the Koran. (The World's Great Religions)
Thus, something gets lost, not just in the translation out of the original Arabic, but also in written over recited words. No wonder we have trouble interacting with it: we have it at least twice removed from its original version!
And yet the Koran's message holds wisdom for us.
The word Islam itself means peace.
In Islam, this peace is what comes from surrender of ones ego-will to a higher power, God, Al Lah.
And the Koran describes/prescribes how to do this.
There are Five Principles, Five Pillars to be observed:
The First Pillar is Faith.....this is the focus on one God and the Moslem confession of faith, and Islam's creed "There is no God but AlLah; Mohammed is his messenger."
Now this focus on God and this notion that there is something more powerful than the human ego jars us in our western humanism that, since the Enlightenment, has asserted that mankind is the measure of all things. And this difference makes Moslems very wary of Western culture, indeed!
The Second Pillar is Prayer......five times a day:
"on arising, when the sun is overhead, in mid-afternoon, at sunset, and before retiring" (World's Religions).
This custom gave rise to the creation of beautiful woven prayer rugs on which to kneel and face Mecca each prayer time. (Do you remember seeing Anwar Sadat on TV...did you ever notice the dark spot in the center of his forehead? This was from prostrating himself in prayer five times a day every day of his life.)
Not a bad idea, this: this turning ones attention to the sacred amid the secular busyness of each and every day.
This praying is common in Christian monasteries today.
We could all do a lot worse than stopping five times each day to be grateful for our lives and to pay attention to the holy: it could help us keep things in better perspective!
The Third Pillar is Charity.....the Koran is explicit in this:
annually, two and one-half percent of ones holdings should be distributed to the poor....holdings, not just current income...but two and one-half percent of everything you hold/own, all your assets...that means what you've got in mutual funds, your IRA’s, pension funds, etc.
The Fourth Pillar of Islam is observing Ramadan.
This is a month-long fast that commemorates both the commencement of the Koranic revelations and Mohammed's flight from Mecca. It is a movable observance because it is based on the lunar cycles; we are increasingly made aware of this sacred time for the Moslems when our government monitors the end of Ramadan as a possible time to expect a resumption of terrorist activities.
On a lighter note: some years ago, I remember attending a December clergy luncheon during which the Moslem member sat and watched the rest of us eat. We offered our sympathy but he said he was grateful, because when Ramadan falls in the winter, the early darkness breaks the fast far earlier than when it comes in the summer. For the fasting is only during daylight hours.
While not unlike the Christian observance of Lent, commemorating Jesus' 40 days and nights in the desert being tempted by Satan, Ramadan is a bit stricter:
From the moment of dawn to the setting of the sun, neither food nor drink nor smoke passes their lips..... (HS)
What is the significance of this fasting? It makes one reflect. It teaches self-discipline. It reminds one of one's frailty and dependence. And it fosters compassion, for only the hungry know what hunger means. (H. Smith)
The Fifth and final Pillar of Islam is Pilgrimage: the Hadj.
Once during his or her lifetime, every Muslim who is physically and economically able to do so is expected to journey to Mecca, where God's climactic revelation first descended. The basic purpose of the journey is to heighten the pilgrim's commitment to God and God's revealed will, but the practice carries fringe benefits.
It is, for one thing, a reminder of human equality, for upon reaching Mecca, pilgrims exchange their clothes (which are status ridden) for simple sheet-like garments. The gathering also promotes international understanding. In bringing together people from multiple countries, it demonstrates that they share a loyalty that transcends national and ethnic barriers. (Huston Smith)
This is why when Malcolm X made his 1964 pilgrimage to Mecca, he discovered that racism had no precedent in Islam, and could not be accommodated to it" (HS). Islam stresses racial equality, and therefore continues to make advances in Africa. In fact, it is the fastest growing modern religion on the African continent.
Now, none of these Principles seem particularly threatening to the non-Moslem world, or at least not to me: there is much we can learn from each of them to inform our spiritual lives. For instance, Huston Smith, who wrote the classic The Religions of Man in 1958 and then revised it in 1991 as `The World's Religions', admits that he pauses for prayer faithfully five times each day as a spiritual practice he picked up from studying Islam for his book.
So then, why are we so historically/hysterically resistant to this faith tradition?
Our fear seems almost pathologic at times.
As an interim minister trained to look at congregations as family systems, I’ve found myself wondering whether it's a family dynamic thing. For Jews, Christians, and Moslems are all part of the same family....the family of Abraham.
Abraham's son Isaac was the patriarch of the Jews, the lineage from which Jesus was begat. But Isaac was Abraham's second son, if you'll remember.
When Abraham's wife Sarah couldn't seem to conceive, she instructed her husband to produce a child through her servant, Hagar. That child was Ishmael, Abraham's first-born son, and the patriarch of Islam.
Moslems believe in the creation story of the Jewish scriptures, and that Moses was God's prophet, as was also Jesus. Mohammed is God's final messenger: the Seal of the Prophets....needed because Christianity, with its doctrine of the trinity, had departed from the monotheism of Abraham!
Thus the God of the Jews is virtually the same God of the Muslims. So why is there such animosity between these traditions?
Perhaps it has something to do with the way Sara treated Hagar once her own son Isaac arrived: jealous, she had Abraham banish Hagar with her child out into the hostile desert. Hello!! That's not good family process, folks. Could set up resentment, and lead to fear of retaliation, all stuffed down into the collective unconscious of both races.
Of course, that's too simplistic, but still, you have to wonder….for the stuff down there in the collective unconscious gets easily projected upward and outward and onto the 'other,' as has historically happened between Christians and Moslems! For instance: when the Christians came into power in the Muslim-ruled Spain of the fifteenth century, they expelled the Jews and drove out every Muslim, or put all the sword, or forced them to convert.
This is why Michael Servetes, whom we claim as an early Unitarian, was so excited when he read the Bible first hand and found no reference in it to the doctrine of the Trinity:
clearly, there was no god-given reason to persecute those who believed in the unity of God, instead of a god in three aspects. Okay, so Servetes was burned at the stake for bringing this to the attention of the religious authorities.
No wonder then, Muslims look at Christianity and shudder.
"Who was it, they ask, who preached the Crusades in the name of the Prince of Peace? Who was it, they ask, who instituted the Inquisition, invented the rack and the stake as instruments of religion, and plunged Europe into its devastating wars of religion?" (The Worlds' Religions)
As it turns out, the Koran's definition of a Jihad, or Holy War, is virtually identical with that of a Just War in the Cannon Law of Catholicism:
both must either be defensive or to right a horrendous wrong. Yet as Mohammed once told his followers, upon their returning from such a battle,
"You have come back from the lesser struggle to the greater struggle." When they asked, "What is the greater struggle?" he replied, "The struggle within."
The struggle within! The struggle within, that, when mastered through practicing the Five Pillars of Islam, can bring about the spiritual world view that the Moslem Sufi mystic Rumi describes:
I am neither Muslim nor Christian, Jew nor Zoroastrian;
I am neither of the earth nor of the heavens;
I am neither body or soul....
This reminds us that each religious tradition has opposite ends in its spectrum of believers. Moslem fundamentalists are at one end. The mystics are at the other end.
In Islam, these mystics are the Sufis. Sufism has become very popular here in the west; I remember attending a conference back in the l980's in which Sufi Dancing was one of the spiritual practices being taught. You can find Sufi poetry in nearly any bookstore, and even in our hymnal, such as the these words by Kabir:
This clay jug, the god whom I love is inside pretty much sums up the Sufi focus less on the external jug and more on what's inside, less on the externals of Islam, and more on what's within. Love the pitcher less, they insist, and the water more. This is the essence, the essential of the human spiritual experience: while each of us is a particular manifestation of the cosmic energy come from ‘out of the stars,’ our ego evolvement/involvement not only differentiates us from the universal consciousness, it can also separate us from the primal/primary experience of that universal knowing.
Joseph Campbell describes this when he claims that we live in the Now Here and the No Where simultaneously; it’s just a matter of where you place the “W”…..they are one and the same dimension, but our awareness of it varies. In other words, the eternal life is here, now, not in some afterlife, after death, and we can tap into that sense of oneness, that experience of wholeness, through religious rites and rituals, and through disciplined spiritual practices… this is surely something worthy of being open to, in the original impulse of Islam’s crescent moon opening to embrace the single star….
The Wisdom of Indigenous People
Thanksgiving seems to be the one time of the year when we are most aware of being interconnected with the earth. While in fact all of the historical religions have an earth-based, seasonal-cyclical element, this is the time of each year when, as we consciously and gratefully consume the fruits of the earth, we might have a profound sense of inter-connectedness with the land, and with the original people of this land.
Of course, we already have psychic traces of a primary experience of the natural world as remnants deep in our unconsciousness....because this primary experience of nature was the basis of religions that were in existence 3 million years ago, while our historic religions are barely 4000 years old.
So the question arises: what do we need to reclaim of what got lost when our concept of god became that of the god of the journey, who led the Israelites out of Egypt, the god of the Pilgrims, the god of the Puritans, the god of the Pioneers who traveled across this continent in covered wagons, moving westward, ever westward?
How can an interest in earth-based spirituality move us forward, towards what must be re-envisioned of respect for the interdependent web, for the good of the world we would leave to our children?
So how do we go about doing that? We need only to look to the wisdom of the peoples native to this land. I for one am grateful that at least once a year we think about Native American Spirituality, if only when we buy napkins with Indians on them or cornstalks for Thanksgiving decorations.
We have so much to learn from these people about how to experience the earth as a sacred, spiritual entity. Begin with the very word land. When most of us hear that word, we also hear our musical renditions:
My country ‘tis of thee; sweet land of liberty, or
this land is your land, or
all over this land, or
land of the free.
Our idea of land is conceived of as Nation. It is an abstraction….a patriotic, political abstraction! And no wonder: we are all immigrants here (with one possible exception), on this continent where God Is Red, according to Vine Deloria, Jr. in his book of that same name.
For native Americans, this land is very concrete, a specific place on the earth, for examples: the North Atlantic coast is sacred to the Wampanoag’s; Niagara Falls is sacred to the Seneca of New York and Canada; the great serpent mound is sacred to the Hopewell of Ohio; the Great Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee are sacred to the Cherokee; the Rocky Mountains are sacred to the Cheyenne from Alaska to Mexico; the Grand Canyon of Arizona is sacred to the Hopi, to name but a few specific places.
This concept of place is also illustrated by a story Huston Smith reveals in the final chapter of The World’s Religions:
Oren Lyons was the first Onondagan to enter college. When he returned to his reservation (in upstate New York) for his first vacation, his uncle proposed a fishing trip on a lake. Once he had his nephew in the middle of the lake where he wanted him, he began to interrogate him.
“Well, Oren,” he said, “you’ve been to college; you must be pretty smart now from all they’ve been teaching you. Let me ask you a question. Who are you?” Taken aback by the question, Oren fumbled for an answer.
“What do you mean, who am I? Why, I am your nephew, of course.” His uncle rejected his answer and repeated his question. Successively, the nephew ventured that he was Oren Lyons, an Onondagan, a human being, a man, a young man, all to no avail. When his uncle had reduced him to silence and he asked to be informed as to who he was, his uncle said,
“Do you see that bluff over there? Oren, you are that bluff. And that giant pine on the other shore? Oren, you are that pine. And this water that supports our boat? You are this water” (H p371).
When you experience the land as part of your very being, and your very being as part of the land, you are less likely to destroy, exploit, pollute, or leave it.
So how might we too come to truly appreciate and celebrate and consecrate this land as part of our very beings?
The native peoples show us how. For the native peoples were grateful people. They gave thanks all the time, not just at the harvest season.
For instance, the Wampanoags of MA begin and end every day by giving thanks, as well as each spring and summer and fall and winter, and every season and every cycle of life.
But their giving thanks differs somewhat from the way we’ve been taught to do it: we give thanks FOR our food, friends, family, etc. Native peoples give thanks TO the food, hunted animal, etc. For instance, here are some words from an Iroquois Prayer:
We return thanks TO our mother, the earth,
which sustains us.
We return thanks TO the rivers and streams,
which supply us with water.
We return thanks TO all herbs,
which furnish medicines for the cure of our diseases.
We return thanks TO the corn, and to her sisters, the beans and squashes,
which give us life.
For you see, in their world-view, the sacred source of creation is present in all creation.
And as Joseph Campbell tells us, early hunters would prepare special ceremonies to thank the bear or deer or buffalo for giving its life to feed the people. It was felt that only if they pleased the animal, would it return to the earth and feed them again in the future. In short, they were in relationship with the natural world on which they depended for their very lives. They lived with radical respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which they/we are a part….and they expressed it by giving thanks.
Of course the Pilgrims had a connection to the earth as well. Remember, they were originally farmers back in England. But when they separated from the Puritans there, and fled to Holland in order to practice their dissenting faith in freedom, there was not much land to be had there...and what there was, was too expensive. So those who could worked as spinners and weavers of woolen cloth in order to feed their families.
When they finally arrived in the new world some ten years later, they must have been elated to get their hands back into the soil again. But it was New England soil, and their old-world seeds and their skills wouldn’t ‘make it.’
You know how the story goes...how one mild day in early March of their first spring in Plimouth, Samoset strode half naked into their midst, held up his hand and said, “Welcome Englishmen.” And how later Samoset, a Pemaquid from Maine, brought Squanto to meet the Pilgrims. Squanto, the sole survivor of the Pawtuxets from Plimouth, had spent several years in England, so he could speak their language. Then Squanto set up a meeting between the Pilgrims and Massasoit, the sachem, the leader of the Wampanoags who inhabited the whole South Shore area of Massachusetts.
It was Massasoit (his image now graces the MA state flag) who told Squanto to teach the pilgrims how to plant corn on twenty acres, enough to feed those who had survived that first horrible New England winter...which was a ‘god’-send: because the peas and barley seeds the Pilgrims were planting were not going to come up the next year; they couldn’t grow in that soil.
So Squanto taught them that the time to plant corn was when the oak leaves were the size of a mouse’s ear. He showed them how to hoe the earth into six-foot squares and heap it into little hills. Three or four kernels of corn were to be planted in every hill, with two or three fish for plant food.
The Pilgrims harvested a bumper crop of corn that fall of 1621, and, even if they hadn’t yet learned to actually like eating corn (for the cereal grain of the new world was unlike anything they’d eaten in the old) they knew that with it, they would survive that second winter. (Incidentally, people of Europe today still don’t eat corn: they use it to feed their livestock.)
So by growing and eating corn, the Pilgrims connected with the land...their new land.
Now here’s where things get interesting. Had our Pilgrim ancestors simply set aside a special day for giving thanks, it would have been a day for fasting, not feasting.
They were of Puritan stock, after all.
I had always been curious about that dichotomy, and while living on the South Shore of Massachusetts, not far from Plymouth, I did some research, and came across this quote from a 1996 book on Native American History by Judith Nies:
In October of 1621, Massasoit invited the Pilgrims to join the Wampanoags’ annual harvest ceremony, which became the holiday of Thanksgiving.
No wonder Governor Bradford never mentioned that so-called first Thanksgiving in his journal, Of Plimouth Plantation:
it wasn’t the Pilgrim’s party! It was the Indian’s!!
And why a massive, sit-down dinner? Here’s another piece of research I’ve connected with just this year: from Claude Levi-Strauss’ The Origin of Table Manners:
“The original purpose of manners among prehistoric peoples was to mediate their relationship with nature, so that humans did not upset the natural order of things. Modern civilization, being very human-centric, uses manners to emphasize status and differences between people, instead of providing guidance for acting respectfully toward the natural world.”
This week, most of us will sit down to a massive meal. Might we really make it one of Thanksgiving by giving thanks TO the food on our plates? For instance, how many of us will be having cranberry something:
cranberry sauce, cranberry juice, cranberry bread?
The cranberry is a plant that’s truly native to this country; the bogs are utterly beautiful at this time of the year
The Wampanoag’s used cranberry poultices to draw the venom from arrow wounds. The bright red cranberry juice gave them a dye for rugs and blankets. Cranberries mixed with dried venison and fat formed pemmican, a staple food that would keep over the long winter ( EBp90). The Cape Cod Indians called the berry Ibimi, meaning bitter berry. To the Pilgrims, the nodding pink blossoms of the plant looked like the head of a crane. So crane berry seemed like a good name for it. In time this name was changed to cranberry.
(Edna Barth, Turkeys, Pilgrims, and Indian Corn)
So how about this, when we consume something made with cranberries this week let’s say thank you TO the cranberry.
And why not? For as Loren Eisley tells us in his classic How Flowers Changed the World, it was only after flowers appeared upon the planet, and concentrated the sun’s energy into seeds and fruits, that warm blooded species could evolve: our high metabolic rate demands a heavy intake of energy in order to sustain body warmth and efficiency….such as the energy contained in cranberries.
Of course, buying them in a plastic bag at Albertsons, (using your Albertsons’ Community Card, or scrip if you buy them elsewhere), we probably don’t think much about them.
So let me invite you to imaginatively join me in an adventure. Living in rural New Hampshire, I found I could pick produce off right the trees, like apples, and off bushes, like blueberries and raspberries. And one day last fall, two members of the Vermont congregation I was serving fetched me on my day off. Come with us as we drive out to a distant pond. Then canoe the length of the pond, until reaching the far end. Now pull the canoe out of the water and hide it under the trees. Then hike about a mile through the woods, until we come to another, smaller pond…not accessible by boat from a road. At the edge is a bog that is boggy enough to suck your boots right off your feet. Wade deep into it, careful to avoid the fresh bear scat. (Don’t worry: you’re not on their food chain!) Now begin searching for cranberries. It’ll take a while to get the hang of it, to know what you are looking at and how to find the red berries hiding under the green plants.
The sun is warm and the sky is blue and the air is fresh, all making it easy to say a silent thank you each time you pluck yet another red berry and put it into a container, being careful to take only what you can use, leaving the rest for the bears that are bulking up for the winter.
Well, no matter how you acquire your cranberries for this Thanksgiving feast, do be mindful of what they represent: when you eat them you are eating a chunk of the sun! When you realize that you are taking the sun’s energy into your body, how can you not look at these cranberries and say, simply, Thanks Be To These!? Or to the squash, the beans, the corn, the potatoes on your plate. Or to the turkey, which ate the seeds and stored the energy in its flesh that we then consume.
A communion, of sorts, to be sure.
“Eat, drink. For this is my body, broken for you;
do this in remembrance of me,”
should sound familiar to many of us. Where do you think that concept originated? With the hunting, gathering, and planting peoples of the earth of course. Just go back and re-read your copy of James Frazer’s The Golden Bough.
So when you sit down at the table on Thursday,
mind your manners and say thank you to the sUn embodied in the fruits of the earth, especially those native to this land:
Let us do so as though our planet’s very survival depended upon it……….which it does. Amen
The Wisdom of Other Spiritual Sources
(to be included)
Conclusion
At the end of his priceless classic Myths to Live By, Joseph Campbell asks, “So what is—or what is to be—the new mythology?” Then he answers:
“It is-and will forever be—as long as our human race exists—the old, everlasting, perennial mythology, in its subjective sense, poetically renewed in terms neither of a remembered past nor of a projected future, but of now: addressed that is to say, not to the flattery of ‘peoples,’ but to the waking of individuals in the knowledge of themselves, not simply as egos fighting for a place on the surface of this beautiful planet, but equally as centers of Mind at Large - each in his own way one with all, and with no horizons.”
May it be so. Amen and Blessed Be.