tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-71228761792238389072024-03-08T12:43:03.357-08:00Off The GridThoughts from off the grid.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger5125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7122876179223838907.post-73872256060914875182011-03-23T08:29:00.000-07:002011-03-23T08:31:15.073-07:00Letter from JohnFrom: john<br />Subject: e-mails and a question<br />To: maustinsxsw@hotmail.com<br /><br />Marilyn:<br /><br />Thanks for continuing to share your thoughts -- always appreciate hearing from you.<br /><br />Hey, I was thinking this weekend about something you said at that Christmas gathering we had in '09. If I remember correctly, you said (and I may be weak on some of the fine points) people generally don't go to church for spirituality, but rather for social interaction and a feeling of connectedness. Tough to argue with that one. My question: why go to a church for those things? Why not just join a social club, meet friends at the mall or a restaurant, or gather in one another's homes? Would be interested in your take on this.<br /><br />John<br /><br />* * * * * * * *<br /><br />John, I don't mean to disparage social interaction and a feeling of connectedness. We’re human because we’re social creatures and being connected is essential to everything else we do. True spirituality and true religion for that matter must begin with what it means to be human in all that that entails. Religion is a corporate experience wherein we acknowledge and celebrate our common values and affirm our experience. <br /><br />But spirituality is personal, not something we can share with anyone. It's what makes us who we are in our relationships with others, with ourselves, with God. Fact is, we seldom learn spirituality in church although the church is supposed to supply us with the classical resources of our traditions in order that we may learn the pathway of spirituality. We first learn that pathway from a number of sources, beginning with our parents and relatives and extending to friends, teachers, colleagues etc. <br /><br />At some point perhaps we are perceptive enough to discover that something is missing in our learning and experience. We have questions with no satisfactory answers. We sense injustice and pain in the world. We feel a need to express our gratitude and we need help in our struggles. We want to know more about who we are and why we are here and what is required of us. Then we look to religion to help us answer those questions.<br /><br />Problem is, religion as commonly practiced often fails to give us much help. Religion is concerned with outward forms and traditions and with conventional manners and morals Too often our religious institutions are primarily places for social purposes. A pastor frequently has no more concern, ability or education than the members of the church, especially if the pastor lacks seminary training which is not a requirement in many conservative denominations. In the best of worlds, training or no, the church is primarily concerned with transmitting an ancient tradition in the same form and using the same words that have been used for hundreds or thousands of years with no consideration that our world has changed. We think differently, we have a different understanding about ourselves and the world, a different world view. We recognize the need to take science seriously. The situation is changing very slowly, but we are a long way from a church that takes our new knowledge and world view seriously.<br /><br />The church is not creative. BUT . . . . the passing on of a tradition is certainly not without merit. It's usually not possible to creatively move on to a new area unless one knows where one has been previously, with some degree of familiarity with the past. That is why genuine education will emphasize the study of Latin, history, the classics IN ADDITION to science and mathematics. The ancient traditions of the church have much to offer us but they must be reinterpreted in light of who we are and what we know now. The classical spirituality traditions, however, remain largely intact because they deal with human nature, not science or theology. The church is a repository of the best of the classical spiritual tradition, but someone must guide us to it. The church ignores the classical spiritual tradition for the most port because the institutional church usually has a different agenda, maintaining order and control.<br /><br />Classical spirituality is learned from a master teacher. A guru, yogi, shaman or spiritual master in the Western tradition. It's not easy to find a spiritual advisor in Western tradition because very early on in the history of the Christian church, the church all but abandoned spirituality in favor of doctrine. It was all done in a spirit of desire for organization, control and power. Spirituality can't be controlled and, furthermore, spirituality is actually against those things. But spirituality in all the great religious traditions has a central core that is difficult to master and is a work of a lifetime. It has nothing to do with doctrine or history or organization. <br /><br />Basically, spirituality consists of relinquishment of the ego, learning to love and forgive our enemies, mastery of our emotional impulses, relinquishment of materialism, abstinence and celibacy. That being said, obviously for most of us we are going to be reluctant to become celibate hermits living in cells in the woods, although that is the classical stance for someone who REALLY IS SERIOUS. But we understand the importance of self control, living in moderation and leaving a small carbon footprint.<br /><br />Most of all the spiritual life is a struggle to master the ego. Ego stands in the way of most of the other stuff. Now ego is a good and necessary thing up to a point. It's what drives us to excel in our endeavors, master a trade or discipline, invent and create. So these are good things. But the ego that can exceed only at the price of putting someone else down, or gaining power over others is what we're talking about. We never hear much about the Seven Deadly Sins the church once taught, but those are the impediments to spiritual development. Pride, Anger, Envy, Lust, Greed, Gluttony and Sloth.<br /><br />So back to the church. The church is like school. It's the starting point for the spiritual life. Unfortunately, most people give up after confirmation or catechism or when they get old enough to intimidate their parents into letting them stay at home. So their education ends around Jr. High.<br /><br />Or, for most other people, they never have any training at all in the classical spiritual or religious traditions of their culture. Neither they nor their parents have any religious or spiritual memory. We have up to three generations of those people now. I leave it to you to decide how society has been helped by that.<br /><br />Let's lay aside the empty notion that anyone is "saved" from declaring that they believe in an empty set of words such as, "I believe I am saved because I believe in Jesus and that I'm going to heaven and anyone who doesn't is going to hell." Well, saved from what? to what? for what???<br /><br />Salvation is a hugely misunderstood and misused word. Not denying it's relevance, but only after intense parsing. I was hoping that when Pope John Paul II declared that "heaven is not a place and hell is not a place but those are metaphors for a relationship with God" that the matter would be put to rest. <br /><br />But the need to believe is stronger than the belief itself.<br /><br />Spirituality is not about believing in anything. It's about how we live, how we walk the pathway. About relationships.<br /><br />So I think everyone should go to church, or synagogue or mosque or whatever. And take the kids. Tell the kids that their religious training is as important as their education at school when they object, as most of them do in our self-indulgent culture. They also make up excuses to stay home from school if we let them get away with it. And after they are grown they can decide for themselves what to do next. BUT until then, they are going to be trained in the basics which is what raising children is all about. Without that training, they won’t be in a position to decide anything because they won’t know what’s out there.<br /><br />If a person attends one of the mainline denominations that hasn't completely given itself over to the pop culture "church lite" trend, if they attend a church that takes the liturgy seriously which means the whole monte including the traditional scripture readings (there are four in the Christian church) and basically ignores the sermon (unless the pastor is particularly gifted at oratory) over the course of the first 18 or 20 years of their life they can get a pretty good start at mastering the "basics". (The sermon is the least important thing that happens in a classical liturgical service.) You can explain to the kids that Adam and Eve and all those good stories are metaphors. Their relevance lies in looking for meaning, not in actual fact. Spirituality is concerned with meaning.<br /><br />If every parent understood this necessity, maybe some of the people who have quit the church because it is failing to update itself would stay around to kick butt and challenge their pastors and seminaries to do a better job. And withhold their tithes if they don't. What if parents gave up on public education. Yeah yeah yeah, I know. Many of them seem to have done just that.<br /><br />Nemaste,<br />MarilynUnknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7122876179223838907.post-2865050129386734172011-03-03T08:38:00.000-08:002011-03-03T08:40:48.868-08:00God in the Age of ScienceThere is a scene in the film “The English Patient,” where a young women steps outside her door in the evening and glances down to find a small lamp at her feet. When she looks up she sees a trail of small lights leading off into the distance. Intrigued, she follows the lights until they lead to an open door. She hesitates a moment before entering for an encounter with her lover. <br /><br />It’s an enchanting, wordless moment that that only a medium like cinema could capture. Some things defy description, like first love, or holding your newborn child, or experiencing a night sky filled with stars or hearing Bach’s Christmas Oratorio for the first time. These are things which so fill our hearts that we experience far more than we can say or understand. <br /><br />Encounters, epiphanies, experiences above or outside of ordinary time, we try to remember them. So we write poetry or music, or we paint, or we tell stories. Ordinary telling won’t work for us. The telling has to contain something of the magic of the moment so we use poetry, metaphor.<br /><br />In a world that science has so thoroughly demythologized, there seems to be very little poetry left. In fact, the whole genre has pretty much gone out of style. People used to sit around in smokey cafes for hours on end listening to poetry. Prizes were given and poets were idolized and medialized. <br /><br />In ancient times, bards, traveling troubadours were welcome guests at feasts and other public gatherings and they not only preserved the lore of the culture in preliterate societies, but were the sources of the news of the times. And they delivered their messages in verse, in metaphor. The history of poetry and public recitation to capture the imagination of the hearers and to preserve and immortalize human events goes back as far as the beginning of human language.<br /><br />In a world with so little leisure, so little time, so little awe, so much mechanized, so much mundane, so little consolation, so little contact with the deep enduring things of life, we want our news fast and to the point in thirty minutes between commercials. We tire quickly of Victorian novels with endless descriptions of pastures of Queen Mary’s lace and musing about the meaning of a dropped handkerchief. <br /><br />But with our technological proficiency, our material well being and our instantaneous communication with ever evolving hand held devices, we can’t help but feel a sense of loss, of being disconnected and anxious. There is little to console us, either in the news, or at the office, or in the world at large. And modern cinema which is so filled with violence, speed and impersonal sex so often reflects our inner anxiety and fear .<br /><br />In former times, although life was brutal, short, and much more at risk, there still were consolations. For many, the quiet evangelical purity of domestic life, an intimate acquaintance with seasonal change in farming communities, neighbors one could count on, long evenings at home with no where to go so people shared more of their lives with each other. And, there was the consolation of religion. The assurance of permanence in a hereafter no matter how difficult life could be where a reward awaited those who persevered and endured and a reunion with those one loved. No such assurance today. Science has effectively dismantled heaven and hell and it seems we are left to our own devices and on our own in our struggles. <br /><br />In a democratic society, as long as we have our youth, our health, our job and adequate insurance, we generally feel pretty good about this. But somewhat shaky. We’ve lost the glue that once held communities together. We have lost our stories. And along the way in our disenchanted world, we seem to have lost God along with hope of heaven or fear of hell. And in a mobile society where we move because of the job every few years, or flip houses in an overheated housing market, we’ve lost our neighbors and sense of community. We have lost the sense of anything permanent. <br /><br />Would it be fair to say that we may suffer a loss of hope? Hope is the convection engine of life. That in spite of everything, tomorrow is another day. Someone or something will be there. That in spite of everything, when there is no way out, there will be a way through, or over, or around. And at the end when the lights go out for us, or for the ones we love are gone, there will be God, the ultimate source of hope.<br /><br />Hope is a trail of lights leading off into the unseen distance with a promise at the end. Have we traded hope for anxiety? Because in a world where noting is permanent, what constitutes the ground of hope? How do we find God in a disenchanted world that has lost all it’s stories, all it’s poetry, all it’s sense of place? Is God anything more than a figment of an immature imagination? Is there anything permanent, anything we can trust?<br /><br />Well, for many of us, in spite of all, God is still there. There still is hope and wonder. There still is that newborn child, that sky filled with stars, music, love, things we experience far more than we can understand. There still is that string of lights leading us off into the unknown in hope. Into the things we most value and cherish.<br /><br />But the stories we’ve told about God have changed. We can’t do with virgin births, miracles outside the natural order of things, third day resurrections or reincarnations or the Red Sea partings. We can’t do with a god that favors one group of people over another or sends catastrophes that disfavor others. Those gods are too small and unreliable.<br /><br />No one has a clue what God is. To understand God we rely like the poet on clues and metaphors. And yet, God must at least must be reality as we understand it. Wherein we do not know, therein we may not speak, except in symbolic language.<br /><br />But what we can do is to understand that all human language, even scientific language, is poetry and metaphor at best. There is a necessity at the heart of all knowledge, a need to know, whether the knowledge is formulated around a primitive campfire or in a laboratory. So we use what tools we have available to us. We use models and metaphors to explain what we experience. The difference is that in the modern world we understand that all models are subject to testing, to revision, to new understanding. Often we only have a story but our stories must evolve as our experience evolves.<br /><br />“Can’t you see I’m doing a new thing?”<br /><br />Physics may have eleven different string theories, (stories) but experience is reliable. An experience that is verified by the experiences of others. A hundred years ago, physicists gave up trying to understand “what” subatomic particles were and instead began to focus how they worked. Experimental physics took over the field from descriptive physics. This was huge! Philosophers and theologians had spent 2000 years or more focused exclusively on What something was. What are the elements? What is an atom? What is energy? What is God? What is the nature of Jesus, divine or human? <br /><br />Holding that newborn, gazing at that starry sky, having our first love, we don’t have to ask “What is it?” We say, “Behold!”<br /><br />We know what we value.<br /><br />What we can “know” about God comes from deep within ourselves and only through what we ourselves experience, not from anyone else’s experience or observation. Like the new quantum mechanic physics, it comes from the “observer-participancy” kind of knowing. It’s as close as our skin. It’s evolved with us. It’s a string of lights that illuminates a pathway of hope. And it consists of at least three things.<br /><br />It begins with that newborn, who has evolved to reach in hope for the breast and to smile in love at recognition of her parent’s face. And in the wonder and excitement of that child exploring his world with his first step and with each new discovery. It bursts into song running through the park and laughs at the antics of a puppy.<br /><br />Second, the “knowing” continues in the experience of community. In love, forgiveness, compassion, generosity, hospitality, helping others, being cared for by and in caring for others. In learning how to trust.<br /><br />Third, through our experience with a natural world that never ceases to amaze us. A miraculous world increasingly revealed to us by science and discovery in and through human community. “A world that reveals no beginning and no end.” Where each new area of knowledge opens up vast territories for the wonder of new discoveries.<br /><br />The real world of human experience is where we find God. With all we know and all we have yet to discover beyond our wildest dreams. God is love. God is what we value. God is a string of lights luring us on to what we value. We might say, God is the lure to value present in every living thing.<br /><br />If there is a God, then God is the the name we give to the ground of being of all that is and the future and the harmonious reconciliation and consolation of everything we value. God is the highest thing we can possibly think. And much much more.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7122876179223838907.post-29376214308688402232010-02-06T12:13:00.000-08:002010-02-06T12:17:13.152-08:00A New VisionIt’s been said that Eastern religious thought turns inward. To know oneself and to seek to live in harmony with what is given. With the Tao, or the Way of things.<br /><br />Western religion on the other hand is said to be outward looking. Seeking a new vision for how things could be in a new world order, or for redemption for the community. It’s the entrepreneurial spirit as opposed to the introverted spirit. Both are important. Both seek different ends.<br /><br />Whether one is religious or not, this outward looking redemption seeking is common to western thought. Thus, it is the west that has birthed the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, the ecology movement. In Biblical narratives the prophet Isaiah counsels the people to seek a new vision in order to restore the people to well being. In this sense, there is a kind of merging of the two areas of thought. In order to accept a new vision, people must change the way they think. They need to know themselves.<br /><br />When cultures are in transition, there always is difficulty for many people in accepting the new. Most of us try to hang on to what is familiar for as long as we can. We don’t want to leave our comfort zones. It’s an important survival instinct. Change is physically unsettling and emotionally disquieting so we often resist it until we’re forced to accept it. Eventually, we may discover that the old way just isn’t working for us anymore.<br /><br />Music is a good example. We love the music of our teens because that music helped define us. But eventually the music the new younger set listens to and loves is different. We don’t always make the transition to the new music with them. We say we can’t understand why people want to listen to that awful music. Our response to music is largely emotional, even though in time we may become more skilled in our selection of the music we prefer.<br /><br />Now a lot of new music really is awful for the same reason a lot of books or art or other things that people make are awful. Their creators are not skilled. And many of the people that enjoy this music, or read these books are not very skilled either. Not educated in the genre we might say.<br /><br />But from a standpoint of style, there really is no such thing as bad music whether it’s rock or blue grass or rap or country or classical. And there is no reason anyway why a person shouldn’t enjoy awful music or badly written books. We can go so far as to say that there are no wrong reasons for enjoying anything. <br /><br />But there ARE wrong reasons for NOT enjoying a thing, such as a new kind of music. Preferences are fine. But we can’t reasonably condemn the music people enjoy. When we condemn something new just because it’s different, we are letting our prejudices show.<br /><br />Prejudices are not the same as preferences. Churches fight these losing battles about music all the time. Old timers think that the traditional hymns are the only ones appropriate for worship. The younger set wants newer music and turns their noses up at anything traditional. <br /><br />Well, both need a new vision.<br /><br />In the Lutheran hymn tradition, many of the tunes that Luther made into hymns by writing new lyrics once were drinking songs that were sung in taverns. There probably were plenty of people who objected to them also. <br /><br />And time has weeded out badly written hymns from those that were skillfully written with lyrics that really spoke to people’s hearts. Good music hangs around and eventually is regarded as “classic”, like the songs of the Beatles for example whereas we never listen to some of the really popular music groups of the 50’s.<br /><br />We need a compromise that acknowledges different preferences and hire musicians who are skilled in selecting really good music, new or traditional for our use.<br /><br />I used music as an example in this meditation, but the principles apply to a lot of things. We all are guilty of clinging to myths when it comes to evaluating and trying out something new. These myths get in the way of understanding and change, especially in the realms of religion and politics. Political myths loom just as large in the public mind as religious myths and both hinder progress. That’s why we often hear people say that they don’t want to discuss either religion or politics in social settings. It’s because of unexamined prejudice. <br /><br />We wouldn’t mind discussing our preferences.<br /><br />So the question to ask ourselves is the same one we keep coming back to. How is that working for you. Is the position I’m defending really doing the job?<br /><br />Are we shutting a class of people out of our lives or out of our places of worship or out of the political process because we can’t accept their ideas? <br /><br />Can we really win by eliminating all our opponents?<br /><br />Or do we need to step back, take a deep breath, and listen to what they are saying? <br /> <br />Do we need to try to change the way we think? Or at least, give them a chance.<br /><br />Is it possible that we might stand to gain by this process?Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7122876179223838907.post-42092655807259559152010-01-28T06:33:00.000-08:002010-01-28T06:41:33.315-08:00Changing the Way We ThinkAfter several years of nagging by my daughter, I finally learned how to “text message.” I don’t like it. It’s not how I communicate with sound byte and abbreviated words. I don’t do it any more often than I have to, which is when I want to get hold of her.<br /><br />My family loved to engage in long philosophical and political discussions. I grew up with a strong emotional investment in interesting conversations so I don’t get along well with texting. I want to see the person I’m talking to and to be able to read their body language in order better to understand what they are saying. <br /><br />“Texting” is not just a convenient new technology. There’s a possibility it may radically change the way we experience relationships. Communication is what makes us human and communication is visual as well as aural. Texting may be convenient in a frantic world with too little time but I worry about what we may lose in the process. But to some degree, I’ve been forced to change the way I think to fit in.<br /><br />I’ve had a computer and used email from the earliest time they were available. Many people of my generation, including my sister, still refuse to get with their tech. It’s very frustrating. One of my best friends, an Episcopal priest, absolutely refused to use email. I would get a long handwritten letter from her once or twice a year. Finally her bishop ordered all his priests to get email. So she had her secretary get email.<br /><br />Why are we so resistant to change? Change is usually accepted by younger generations but resisted by older ones. It’s always been like this. The longer we live with an idea or a certain way of doing things, the more emotionally invested we become in it. Younger generations often lack these strong emotional investments so they are more open to change. <br /><br />We live in a world where being uprooted and relocated has become the norm as opposed to an older time when communities and extended families remained intact for generations. As a result, we have fewer emotional investments than before in certain things. Even so, as humans we become emotionally invested in ideas as well as technologies. Especially so if those things have to do with our security and well-being. <br /><br />It doesn’t really matter if those technologies and ideas no longer make sense in the larger context of our life. Emotional attachments to things come about long before ideas about things. In religion, in our psychological makeup, in politics, we can become so emotionally attached to an idea that the prospect of having that idea challenged is extremely unsettling. If you’ve believed all your life that the salvation of your soul depends on believing, like Alice in Wonderland, in six impossible things before breakfast, or that a particular form of political “ism:” is the only hope for the nation, you’ll believe in that thing on a torture rack, no matter how much circumstances or your intelligence may suggest otherwise. If as an adult you believe that maintaining a destructive relationship is necessary to your survival, you’ll resist all effort by friends and family to counsel and help. <br /><br />It’s hard for anyone to evaluate new evidence that contradicts long held opinions. Even scientists struggle with this problem, especially when the work of a lifetime on a particular problem that is believed to be solved is suddenly challenged by some young upstart with a Blackberry. Einstein refused to believe in the claims of the new quantum mechanics which is now accepted theory in physics because, in his words, “God doesn’t place dice with the Universe,” Well, it appears that She does.<br /><br />Relationships that we want to protect are those that give meaning and bring joy to our life; relationships with people, relationships with our work, relationships with our ideas. But time and changes in circumstances can render even good relationships less meaningful, less joyful, even destructive or contrary to our best interests. <br /><br />There is a necessity at the heart of what we believe and know. But everything is transient, temporary, an idea that is very hard for us to accept.<br /><br />A Zen Buddhist aphorism says, “Everything is a trap.” <br /><br />Dr. Phil says, “How’s that working for you?”<br /><br />My grandmother was a devout Southern Baptist. One day she came home from church excited about a lesson in her Sunday School class on Genesis, the first book in the Bible. Dr. Henry Kincaid, her pastor who taught the class, had told them that they might regard the creation stories in Genesis as parables. Now this was in the 1950’s, before the conservative literalists had hijacked her church. <br /><br />“Isn’t that an interesting idea?” she said. There was nothing wrong with parables in her belief system. Jesus did all his teaching in parables (stories that were intended to give people a different perspective on an idea) and no one was expected to regard parables as literal accounts of events that had taken place. Rather, the point was to be found in the meaning of the parable, not in its literal interpretation. The parables were based on ordinary events in life that everyone could relate to in some way or other. The idea was to discover the meaning in the parable that could apply to one’s life in some way or other.<br /><br />Her pastor had given her an important new tool for evaluating her religion. He had given her a vision of something new that could shed light and reveal meaning.<br /><br />She was a remarkable woman who not only was very intelligent, but who exhibited in my opinion the best that her Christian faith had to offer; a gentle kindness for everyone and a deep compassion for those less fortunate.<br /><br />I struggled intellectually with my faith, even as a youngster. Eventually I joined the Unitarian church. It was a coming out time for my brain although I later returned to the Christian faith I was brought up in, but with a totally different perspective. I liked to tell my Unitarian friends that it was my Southern Baptist grandmother who made a Unitarian out of me.<br /><br />In her small town, there was a disreputable old fellow that died, who never darkened the door of a church and stayed drunk most of the time inflicting misery on his family. When he died, seemingly unrepentant, she was sure that he had had a death bed conversion experience. In her compassion, she had no intention of assigning anyone to hell. She always tried to find some sort of “out” for them.<br /><br />People in primitive “dark” Africa who had never heard of Jesus? Well, she said, they were still in a state of grace with God because of their unintentional ignorance the same as children. Not a very politically correct idea but this was in the 1950’s. I decided then and there that if my grandmother was so forgiving and compassionate, God surely couldn’t be any less so. Somehow, there had to be a universal “out” for everyone, and a universal “in”.<br /><br />As we grow older, the ability to change the way we think becomes harder and harder because our investment in what we think becomes larger and larger. Usually it takes something out of the ordinary, perhaps even catastrophic to impel us into significant change.<br /><br />A new vision.<br /><br />Compassion.<br /><br />Our own pain.Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7122876179223838907.post-80368957510400973742010-01-19T07:32:00.000-08:002010-01-19T07:33:51.710-08:00How do we know what we know?I learned a new phrase recently that describes something I'd already suspected. The phrase is "digitally stitched panorama". There are a lot of them on the web these days. People e-mail these “amazing, you won’t believe this” pictures to me all the time.<br /><br />There is a great web site, "Astronomy Picture of the Day" with a new photo of some astronomical feature each day. The picture for the other day was described as a "digitally stitched panorama," one that has been constructed out of more than one photo.<br /><br />I'm glad to have it correctly identified. Yes, it's beautiful and amazing, but I still like to be able to distinguish art from reality whenever possible. I prefer to know when something has been "crafted". <br /><br />I appreciate the picture as "art" but I don't confused it with “reality”, whatever that may be. Saying that, we still can understand that art can present us with a different kind of reality that may not be realized as such in the natural world, but which is true for us nevertheless because it is something we think or conceive. Art deals in metaphor, in ideas. Metaphors can be real in the sense that they present a thing to us in such a way that we sense an identity or “see” a thing in an enhanced new way. As humans, we attach meaning to such things. Things that deeply stir our emotions and our sense of meaning are best expressed through art, poetry, music, metaphor, or a story. Like Augustine, we experience more than we can understand.<br /><br />A metaphor of course doesn’t MAKE a thing true. But when many others share our reaction to the metaphor over a long period of time then we are pretty safe in assuming that something important has been communicated. This is how religion emerges. Unlike philosophy, which is often appreciated only by a few, and studied by fewer still, religion emerges out of the hopes and experiences of ordinary people. It emerges as art, metaphor, poetry, as a story. Digitally stitched together from many sources over a very long period of time.<br /><br />We all know from television crime shows that several people can witness the same event and come away with different conclusions about what happened. That is because when we “see” something, we don’t just see with our eyes. We also “see” with our fears, hopes, desires, degree of education, prejudices, experience and many other facets of who we are. <br /><br />Over time, our shared experiences can take on a narrative that takes on a life of its own. Take for example, the Parting of the Red Sea as described in the Bible. It’s quite possible that many people witnessed and survived a cataclysmic natural event of such a nature that it made an enormous impression. It could well have been that the event occurred in a time frame approximate to a migration of people away from an oppressive regime and the two events merged in memory as a “stitched panorama.” As a result, over time a story emerged that was so important it became the foundation story for one of the great world’s religions. The story was important because it spoke to meaning, to hope and aspiration. That’s what good stories do.<br /><br />We’ve learned in our time about the natural events called tsunamis and we have scientific instruments strategically stationed in the oceans where these events are likely to take place to measure the undersea earthquakes (which we can’t see) which create tsunamis and to hopefully provide advance warning to people who might be affected when one occurs. We’ve witnessed the powerful destructive effects of tsunamis on television and how water can retreat from a shallow bay area for a period of time before it comes rushing back to overtake and drown everyone and everything for miles inland. <br /><br />We’ve also learned that the part of the ancient world the Hebrews crossed on their way from Egypt to what was to become their homeland is an area very likely to have been subject to an event of this nature.<br /><br />How do we know what we know? We can scientifically measure the magnitude of events like earthquakes. And, believe it or not, from our measurements a story emerges. Science is also a story, using metaphor, that attempts to describe what we have experienced. What is 7.0 on the Richter Scale? It’s only a number with no intrinsic meaning. But it’s a rough calculation of the amount of damage that can be done to property and lives when such an event occurs. Physics also is a metaphor. No one really knows what a photon is. A model is built, a metaphor, a story is told to shed light on what we’ve come to understand about the nature of electricity. But the story is not “the thing in itself.” Science knows that from time to time long standing “metaphors” or models have to be modified when understanding is increased by further experience and research.<br /><br />But we are unable to measure the magnitude of a story that gives hope and meaning to a people. We retell the story again and again until time and experience provide us with a better story. Some stories hang around for a long long time. With good reason. Even stories we readily identify as metaphors, or tales. There is a necessity at the heart of all knowledge; a truth that helps us understand things.<br /><br />A story that must be told. As humans we are hard wired to want to understand what we experience so we put events through the filter of what we already know and draw conclusions. We all know what we know from this process, from babies to physicists. As time goes by, we refine this process by seeking to acquire more knowledge about the things we “know” and perhaps we learn to “see” things, understand things in a different light.<br /><br />Perhaps, to change the way we think.<br /><br />I’m using these two illustrations, the Astronomy Picture of the Day and the Parting of the Red Sea, (which no one was able to photograph either, by the way) to illustrate what I want to say in this meditation, and to set the stage for what I hope to say in this new set of meditations on my web site, taochrist.org. This new set of meditations in “Off the Grid” is set apart from the first set because I want to push the envelope and go further with the same ideas presented earlier.<br /><br />The ideas of the original set of meditations were these:<br /><br />(1) To explore the nature of spirituality that is common to all the great religions.<br /><br />(2) To present a new, yet old way to reimagine and practice our faith in order to recapture its true universalist vision.<br /><br />What I want to do now is to explore some of the conditions that are necessary in order for religion to be able to speak to us in light of the times we live in, in what has been called “a new paradigm,” a new way of seeing and understanding the world we live in. For religion to be relevant for us it has to speak to us within the context of our experiences in the world we live in. Within the context of what we now “know.” <br /><br />Many thoughtful people who are concerned about “truth” have abandoned religion. I’m not claiming that religion as previously understood or practiced can or should be preserved. But religion has shaped culture even as it has emerged from culture. It has always been the underpinning of our value system, the rudder of our ship. We can’t live successfully in this world or in any other without a system of commonly shared values and goals. Religion has been able to provide this system because it has had “authority” that has been granted to it by the people and culture from which it has evolved. Religion consists of a set of metaphors that have arisen out of the hopes, needs, aspirations of a community. Unfortunately, the authority which underpins religion has too often become authoritarianism. True authority is never forced. It is recognized and bestowed.<br /><br />Our world no longer appreciates authority. People often now rely on individual experience to shape their value system. But this presents great difficulties because individual experience is limited, has need of maturity, varies widely, often is unreliable and can lead the person into mistaken or self-destructive directions. <br /><br />If not religion, then what can take it’s place? We may have to start calling it something else in order to escape the stigma the modern world has attached to it but whatever takes its place will still need to function in the same way. It must provide a story, a metaphor for our commonly stitched together memories of what we value, of what gives meaning to our existence.<br /><br />It just can’t be business as usual in regard to religion, faith and values. We’re seeing powerful and disturbing forces in our society that are undermining our security and our future, especially the future of our children because these destructive forces are attacking our historically shared values and goals. We are experiencing the loss of community, the loss of respect for people in leadership positions, the loss of the voice of authority. We are presented with huge ethical challenges that we lack the tools to deal with. Chaos and institutional failure often are the result. <br /><br />Let’s return to the idea that there is a “necessity at the heart of all knowledge.” <br /><br />One of the problems with trying to read ancient texts, like the Bible or Upanishads, for example, is that in those times people didn’t have the tools such as science, technology, sociology, history etc. to understand their experiences but they had the same necessity to know. Why, How, What? When a body of water suddenly empties and later a wave twenty stories high comes rushing at you out of nowhere and inundates everything in sight, WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING ON?<br /><br />The stories they told attempted to answer these questions. The basic questions haven’t changed. When two airplanes come out of nowhere on September 11th and crash into the World Trade Center towers, WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING ON? If my child gets a measles shot and later develops autism, “WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING ON.”<br /><br />There is a necessity at the heart of all knowledge.<br /><br />So I want to name some things that I see as necessary to understanding who we are, what is the nature of our world, where do we find common values, and WHAT ON EARTH IS GOING ON. And in defense of religion as it has been delivered to us, when it comes to things like value and ethics, they pretty much got it right because religion emerged out of the exact same set of conditions that we find ourselves in. <br /><br />THE NEED AND NECESSITY FOR COMMUNITY. THE NEED TO MAKE SENSE OUT OF WHAT IS GOING ON. What we need are stories, metaphors that work for us.<br /><br />Happily, we needn’t look very far.<br /><br />The need and necessity that caused religion to emerge in the first place are still with us. The big questions. Why am I here? What is asked of me? Why do bad things happen to innocent people? Why suffering? What on earth is going on? These are the things I want to write about. These are the questions that religion or whatever takes it place must take seriously and somehow find a metaphor to describe if we are to survive in our civilized state. Or if not, then where can we look for direction for a future that we can all agree upon.<br /><br />These things.<br /><br />First, we live in a disenchanted world. We no longer believe in magic. We must take science into account in our belief system. That said, we also need to understand that scientists will tell you that science is also metaphor, a model to describe as best as possible the world of experience. But with strict guidelines.<br /><br />Second, we live in a world that is multicultural and multi religious. Culture and religion have necessarily evolved in harmony with what a people know and how they know it and different cultures have experienced the world differently. But we all have the same questions.<br /><br />Therefore, religion must be understood as metaphor. And we can take metaphor seriously. We just don’t enshrine it. There are some distinct guidelines.<br /><br />Fourthly. And this will perhaps be most difficult for many to accept, especially many Christians. Values and ethics have evolved out of the needs of community rather than as a fiat from a supernatural source. <br /><br />What we need is a story for our times. And there are many stories in our time that ring true for us . Stories that speak to our hearts and sense of value, that give us hope, that spur our creative imaginations. Stories that can help us recapture community.<br />The old stories did just that and so do many of the new stories. They just lack the ring of authority and are not commonly shared.<br /><br />But if we can change the way we think if we can reexamine the old stories that have been handed down to us over hundreds, perhaps even thousands of generations, if we can see these stories as metaphors. We may be able to learn from them once again. We may be able to learn that the world hasn’t changed that much after all and that people are not really very different from a few thousand years ago in spite of our technology. We may learn that many of the values we individually hold to be self evident, important, were shared by earlier people in earlier times. <br /><br />Of course many things have changed. Culture has evolved. But in the context of experience and meaning, all our hopes, values, fears, dreams, needs are much the same. We’ve all been telling basically the same stories all along. They have authority because all peoples, all religions, all cultures, tell basically the same stories for the same reasons. <br /><br />These stories have made community possible. Have made it work. And they can again.Unknownnoreply@blogger.com