In what follows, I want to highlight that I’m focusing on the sense of great risk and consequentiality that enters into the desire to do good and live well. I’m not overlooking the positive component of spiritual passion, which I think is primary.
You don’t have to be a hero to experience this sense of risk and consequentiality. For example, people who have insomnia over whether they’re on track with their lives – or whether they may have gotten off track – experience it. It feels like what we do with our lives really matters.
It’s this sense of momentousness, of risk, of something being genuinely at stake, which one would think that faith would put to rest. How can the things that we do and the way that we live matter that much if we have faith that, regardless, everything’s OK?
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Let me restrict the terms and sharpen the focus of the previous post:
When people have faith that life is ultimately meaningful, why is their desire to do good often so impassioned? Why does it often have such an edge, urgency – as if a lot were at stake?
Those whom most of us admire most lead their lives that way. And ordinary people will often risk their lives for complete strangers – like that man in NYC who, earlier this year, threw himself onto train tracks to save the life of someone who’d fallen from a seizure.
And lots of ordinary people become angry or depressed when they feel that they can’t do more to make a positive difference in the world.
In Christianity, this tension, real or apparent, between faith and the desire to do good, can look pretty stark. If Jesus Christ already did all the legwork, dying to save us from our sins, then why, for example, did Mother Teresa or Martin Luther King feel so powerfully called to do their work?
Do we have a contradiction? A paradox? Can you account for it?
In the previous post’s discussion thread, some of you suggested that to become highly spiritual/faithful is not to worry about things. I agree that spiritual development works against worry.
Consider:
Environmental degradation Human rights violations Poor people dying in the streets A sick family member Our own personal stuff, like whether to seek further education, get beyond our psychological issues… seek further spiritual development…
Is the full measure of spiritual development a state of undisturbed tranquility?
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Relax…
“And can any of you by worrying add a single hour to your span of life? And why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you—you of little faith?” (Mat 6:27-30)
Get Going…
“We must work the works of him who sent us while it is day; night is coming when no one can work.” (John 9:4)
At the end of the 19th century, the planet held about one billion people; at the end of the 20th, about six billion.
The Bible says "Be fruitful and multiply.” The whole world could put up a big banner reading "Mission Accomplished" and this time it would be true.
I’m no mathematician. But I do understand the concept of “finite planet.”
We can go as green as we want, but one finite planet plus one species with no competition that refuses to control its own population equals coming ecological disaster and human misery on an unprecedented scale. And, quite possibly, our extinction.
Politically, it’s impossible to talk about this. It would offend too many people who cherish life.
Kind of ironic.
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Recently, I received an email asking why “Original Faith” is the title of my upcoming book. I find the title works on at least two levels:
1. It’s about faith and other important aspects of who we are and who we can become more fully as known directly in our own experience.
2. Approaching spirituality and religion in this manner – setting aside beliefs and the questioning of beliefs to look squarely at what we can know first-hand – is an original approach.
For working definitions, let’s use the word “psychology” to point to our individual temperaments or personalities. This includes our distinctive styles or ways of expressing both our positive characteristics and negative attributes – those “issues” needing work.
Let’s call “spirituality” something like "our essential humanity at its best" in order to stay away from connotations this word has of immortal soul, non-materialism etc., which people differ on and isn’t the focus of this post.
Most people seem to see psychological gender differences. I find that if I try to articulate them, it isn't so easy.
Do you see psychological gender differences? Can you say what they are?
What about spiritual gender differences – any such thing?
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Thanks to those who inquire from time to time about how to purchase Original Faith. When it's available, this site will be modified and readers will be able to order the book here or at Amazon.com.
Oceanshamman, thanks for the citation on your recent post on blogs you like to read. Oceanshamman’s link is on the right under my blog roll.
I was surprised by the variety of comments to the previous post. While many commentators had negative experiences with proselytizers, others hadn’t felt uncomfortable at all and many had enjoyed such encounters. Below I’ve sketched two broad categories of how proselytizers may approach others that might to some degree account for our varying experiences.
However, I’d note that how we respond, especially to those who approach with little to no prior relationship with us, may depend a lot on circumstances. Do we happen to be at a point in our lives where we’re “searching for answers?” Are we rushed for time? Do we happen to feel like having such a conversation?
That said, here are two categories that occur to me:
Invitation: On the one hand, people can approach others with the orientation that here is something I've found of value to me and I'm extending an invitation to you to take a look at it if you're interested. I think of Sue's example of someone inviting her to visit their church. It seems to me this approach would be most genuine and effective when the inviter has a positive preexisting relationship with the invitee.
Intimidation: On the other hand, people can approach others with a threat, usually implicit, that unless you see things their way, you're going to hell and maybe have other things in your life go wrong along the way, or not as well as they could. The proselytizer’s assumptions here include "I'm right, you're wrong"; "I have God's Plan figured out, including that there's a place for people like you: hell”; and "I'm good, you're bad.”
In the most recent of my own limited experiences along these lines, someone from a health care agency came to my house. He was meeting me for the first time. Several minutes later, he asked out of the blue whether I’d accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as my personal Savior. His implication was pretty clear: if I’d do this, or do it to his satisfaction (employing, I guess, the correct turn of phrase), it would be to the advantage of my physical health. It was hard to avoid the impression that his assumptions probably included “You’re sick and I’m not because I’m in good standing with the Lord but He’s punishing you for not believing.”
Missionary zeal sometimes appears to me to have little if anything to do with real concern for others. The few times I've been approached by someone asking "Do you accept the Lord Jesus Christ as your personal Savior?" it was socially inappropriate – I think a child could have sensed that.
In each case, the person was barely acquainted with me and the reason we found ourselves in the same room had nothing to do with getting together to talk religion. We didn't have the relationship in which the attempted “conversation” - ? – made any sense. It had no context. It truly felt like it was all about them; that was the vibe…
What's your position on proselytizing? Have other people had experiences that were more positive?
To pursue a metaphor, it seems to me that Christians who choose to emphasize the New Testament verses about becoming “fishers of men” would have more luck using live bait instead of bright shiny lures that practically scream “artificial” when viewed from under the living water line.
Spiritual Blog Reviews: A Blog Fisher who’s the Real Thing
I’d never run across her site. It’s unique in my experience and looks like it could be a great resource – I’ll be checking it out further when making my “blogging rounds.” Darcy scouts around for thoughtful-looking blogs on spirituality, then reviews and links to them.
Often when I come across compilations of blogs or sites, they’re not real blogs; the sites often don’t take comments and are only about selling products. And often the site hasn’t been updated for a long time, so when you click on a link you might find that the last time the person posted was, say, eight months ago.
Looks like Darcy’s avoiding those pitfalls and using live bait!
It seems to me there's a contradiction between certain strong unifying and even universalizing tendencies within religious and spiritual traditions – for example, Jesus on love, the Buddha on compassion, and the emphasis on unity in Islam, e.g., its acknowledgment of Jews, Christians and Muslims alike as “people of the book” and as present in the Sufi tradition – and the way that religion is often institutionalized and practiced.
I think, for example, of the pope's pronouncement about Catholicism being the only true church. But this is only one recent example: Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Jewish, or Muslim, it seems that many adherents to religious traditions, especially in the west, view themselves as God's special people.
It seems to me that these two trends – a great hearted generosity and inclusiveness on the one hand, and “we’re number one” on the other – run in opposite directions. To me, the first sounds truly religious but it's hard for me to see the second, especially in modern times, as more than an expression of ego.
Each of us has the enormous power of being able to choose where to place our attention.
Let nothing come out of your mouth that is a verbal reflex. Think twice.
Any practice that regularly leaves us open to ourselves has power to transform us.
To grow is to find yourself becoming the kind of person you’d always hoped you’d run into some day.
Unless you always knew as much as you know now, how can you condemn someone for knowing less?
If you find yourself reacting to someone with anger or irritation which is out of proportion to any harm they have done you, try to understand what compels you to reject them so emphatically.
Be present to yourself and you will be undisturbed by others lack of presence.
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PS: "Enemy of the Republic" at Cruel Virgin (linked under My Greater Blogosphere at right) has nominated my blog for an award at http://www.bloggerschoiceawards.com/nominate. She didn't say for which category but there are some interesting possibilities. Just hope it's not for "Best Animal Blog" because "I am NOT an animal!" as somebody in some famous movie or other said, lol... Seriously, thanks ER --
The New Testament portrays Jesus as making many statements along the lines of "I and the Father are one." By such statements, the church – including those members of the first century church who wrote the NT – has for the most part understood Jesus to have asserted a special identity with God that no one else has. Jesus’ statements were understood in view of the church’s belief that he was resurrected, an event which it took to reveal his special and specific identity with God.
Traditions of contemplative prayer and meditation where people experience a sense of profound unity with what they usually describe as God, the universe, or nature, are found all over the world. They existed at Jesus’ time. Surely spontaneous versions of such experience preceded these traditions, led to them, and are as old as humankind.
During the Middle Ages, Christian contemplatives were sometimes put to death for talking about their experiences of a sense of unity with God, which was considered heresy. The church hierarchy considered that to speak in such terms was to claim the special sort of identity with God that they believed belonged to Jesus Christ alone.
Jesus
The NT refers to Jesus spending forty days and nights in the desert. People have often sought contemplative and meditative experiences in solitude with nature – think, for example, of Native American traditions of this kind. Buddha's enlightenment experience is said to have taken place in similar circumstances.
Of course we know next to nothing about the historical Jesus: the facts about his life, how he grew up, what he himself may or may not have thought of himself in possible distinction from those who would write about him decades after his execution. The NT is a faith document written by the first century Christian church and compiled by the church in the Middle Ages; its narrative about Jesus is interpretive and not a work of contemporaneous journalism or historiography.
Many NT passages suggest to me the possibility that Jesus, whatever we do or do not believe about him, may sometimes have been speaking from out of his own powerful experiences of the kind of religious unity that other people have also experienced. It isn’t such an easy thing to talk about; he would not necessarily have been well understood on this point. This would especially be the case if his followers and those who came after them later in the century to write the books of the New Testament themselves lacked first-hand experiences of this kind. They would not, so to speak, have had ears to hear.
Detachment doesn’t happen to be a word I use a lot but it may be the most convenient label to apply to the previous post’s topic. I first came across this word years ago while doing some reading on eastern religions, mostly Buddhism. In the previous post’s comments thread, there was a little confusion over the concept. I was confused by “detachment” too when I first came across it, which is probably why I tend not to use the word much.
It’s probably best to start by saying what it isn’t. Btw, I should mention that this is my own take on detachment. The reading I did in Buddhism was a long time ago, so it’s been assimilated into my own thinking.
The word sounds cold and clinical. I only speak English et la plus mal Francais, but assume something must have been lost in translation…
More Fun than it Sounds
Detachment refers to freeing ourselves from exactly the kinds of negative emotions and thoughts that are widely recognized in western psychological and religious contexts as detrimental to mental health and the life of the spirit. Letting go of our negativity liberates qualities like joy, love, appreciation of others, recognition of their needs, and distinguishing our positive strivings and desires from our compulsions and addictions.
When I think about it, what strikes me as possibly the main difference between detachment as I ran across the idea in Buddhism vs. western approaches is that Buddhism tends to be more thoroughgoing. The Eightfold Path is not only very systematic but digs deep. Anyone who Googles “Eightfold Path” should be able to get some idea of how systematic it is. The depth dimension is harder to wrap words around; for a short post, some of the words I wrote last time may be about as good as I can do.
In response to Sue in previous comments, it’s true that at least in the west, religious institutions seem to emphasize practices that promote detachment with monks more than with laity. To me, that’s unfortunate. In relation to having children, for example, detachment wouldn’t mean loving them less, but not over-identifying with them – not trying to vicariously fill one’s own unmet ego strivings through them.
And yes, as per Sue’s horse-riding analogy and Red M’s quotation, when we’re less attached to our small and narrow egotistical selves, it’s harder to be thrown off balance. We’re less reactive.
And Less Pain…
Hazzbuzz commented: “I remember coming to a point where I felt detached a long time ago but it was like a much needed break from being me and all that friction you talk about. Like seeing that… things had panned out the way they had because that's just how they are. I thought of it as a bit of a cop out afterwards but it helped me get through a bad patch.”
I do think detachment would include greater acceptance of things as they are. And I think I have an idea of what Hazzbuzz means by wondering if that’s a cop out. At one point I had similar misgivings until I realized that if there’s something bothering me that, for whatever reason, I’m not both willing and able to do something about, then hanging onto it – rehashing it in my mind – had no real-world effect except a destructive one on me. I basically decided that if it was a cop out to stop slapping myself upside the head from time to time for nothing, then it was time for me to cop out!
