Our Inconsistencies

There is a notion in our society that Science and Religion are at odds with one another, constantly fighting for the soul of the people.  Science and Religion simply are reflections of differing ways of interpreting reality.  We want to put Science and Religion at odds with one another because it is easier for us if our lives make sense, if everything is consistent, so much work has been put into trying to make whole and complete worldviews that are entirely consistent in every regard.

Yet we are not consistent, in fact, we as humans are entirely inconsistent.  Think of miracles. If we were to go out onto the street and ask 1000 random people if they believed in miracles, i would have to guess that majority of them would believe in Miracles.    Now lets go out and do that again, this time asking if most people believe there is value in Science.  My guess would be that most people also believe in the value of Science.  Science and miracles do not play well together, they are seemingly incompatible, yet most believe or value both.   Our whole beings are no different, souls are a mis-mash of viewpoints and understandings of the universe that are not always cohesive.

Miracles offer us a way into ourselves, into our own inconsistencies.  Religion also offers us a path to explore our own inconsistencies and place them in the light of day.   Think of the miracles of Christ, raising the dead, walking on water, healing the sick, turning water into wine, his own resurrection.  But isn't one of his greatest miracles the fact that he accepts us and loves us through all our inconsistencies?  In religion we can come together completely aware of our own internal mysteries, in fact we encounter in God the biggest mysteries of all.  In church, in community we can explore the Holy Mysteries of God and Christ and the Word and the Spirit, but we can also explore the Holy Mysteries of ourselves.

Impermanence

The nature of the universe is change.  Nothing in nature, in the physical world, lasts forever.    

Yet in God we are promised eternal life, we are told in the Gospel of John that Christ existed before the world with God.  In the face of constant change it appears the only constant is God. 

When we engage in community we have to remember that it is in our human nature to try and hold onto things, to disregard the nature of the universe, to ignore the inevitability of change.    Although traditions and a link to the past are important, holding on to the past to tightly can be dangerous and even destructive.  We witness it in many mainline churches today, shrinking numbers, empty pews, yet there is still a resistance to change.  

For those on the left handed path, we are in a unique position to remind those on the right handed path of the nature of the universe, of the constant of change.  We should be careful not to destroy the faith of those on the right handed path, for this can be easy.  But we must be willing to hold their hand as they face change, remind them of the importance of their work.  

It can be like a dance, a dancer's art exists in specific moments, it exist in the movements, in the smells, in the viewers of the dance.  In reality all things are like this, everything only exists for a moment, but is it still beautiful no matter what, even if the dance only lasts a few moments, the beauty of it will remain in memory.   The church that existed will remain beautiful in the eyes of history, yet we must be willing to acknowledge its impermanence.  Change is scary, if nothing else we can offer comfort.

Abundance

Each of us has areas of abundance, each of us has areas of need.

This applies to nearly all things, whether it be financial, spiritual, physical, etc.  

To find balance with ourselves, we can give away some of the abundances we have.  In doing so we are more likely to find the things that will fulfill our needs.

This is not petty talk to get people to give money to charitable organizations, no this is a key part of long term spiritual health, of finding wholeness, or reaching holiness.

When we give our time to volunteering or serving, or our money to charitable organizations, or simply even lending our ear to someone who has something they need to be heard, we will recieve something back.

I can speak to my experiences working with homeless in New York City, or rebuilding home in the Greater New Orleans area after Katrina.  You get back when you put it.   Those that you are helping have something to give you.  Its not just a way of saying, well if i help these people know, someone else will help me when i am in bad shape, no, you are helped in that moment, you are brought to deeper spirituality, much as those that are being helped gain new perspectives on what is possible.

So go, offer your service, and open your heart to whatever it is you will recieve.  The more we can be aware of our own needs, the more we will be willing to give, the more we will be willing to accept, the deeper we will go in our faith journey.

Death

When Christ calls out to the daughter of Jarius to get up, everyone is convinced that the girl is dead.  Christ tells us clearly, "She is not Dead, only sleeping" (mark 5:39).   Death does not exist, at least not in the way we think it does.  This little girl was never dead, only perceived as dead.

What is death.

Fear of death can consume us.  If you have ever been around people as they are dying, there are typically two ways of reacting (massive generalization i know), but people in the throes of death, at least those that are in a position to have some awareness and physical/psychological ability to confront it, will either fight it with every ounce of their being, gripping on to life past their time, or they will face it with a kind of calm that eases the fears of all those around them.  Again there are many shades, but it illustrates a point.  Few can face death graciously, compounded by our society's treatment of death as a failure of "progress".

But I ask again, what is death?  An inevitability?  A failure?  An End?

Or is it a transition, marking the passing of one place to another.

Christ calls us past death, with the promise of eternal life.

Buddhism acknowledges our place in the cycle of samsara, and acknowledges enlightenment as escape from the vicious cycle of rebirth.

Death, in the way that it truly acts in our everyday lives, is nothing more than the fear of the unknown.  Fear is a creation of our minds.  It plays a role, but can lead to Sin.

When we come to terms with the fact that there is unknown things in the world around us, mysteries we may never understand, then we over come that fear, we escape death.

For those on the left handed path, death is ever present, with the risks that are taken leaving the comfort of village, death could be lonely, possibly building the fear that can grip us.    Many don't leave the village for the very fear of death.    Yet the village usually deals with death more than the individual on the left handed path.  The village witnesses the realities of passing, the suffering and pain that can be associated with it, the very real experience of holding a loved one in their final moments.

Yet those in the village do not always come to terms with their own mortality the way one on the left handed path tends to.

For both Death is present, and yet abstract.

Both need to confront the fears though, both need to overcome death, and at least within Christian Theology, the individual needs to be willing to die.  

If we are to appreciate death, if we are to overcome it, to recognize our understanding of it as false, that is a true journey in faith.

Mystery

Mystery is dangerous, particularly to those on the right handed path, in the village.  Those in the village want definition, those in the village seek out concrete answers.

Yet concrete answers can lead to more conflict and in turn tear the village apart.   

A role of the left handed path is to bring mystery to the village, to those on the right handed path.  There has to be balance, to much mystery, and things fall apart, too little mystery and things fall apart. 

Those on the right handed path seek concreteness 

Those on the left handed path seek out mystery

For those on the left handed path, there is an internal drive, a desire to seek the unknown, to see what hasn't been seen.   Those on the left handed path recognize the role of mystery, of the unknown, of not understanding, of only being able to grasp at it.  Those on the left handed path revel in the Tao, for the Tao that can be known is not the eternal Tao.  

But on the left handed path, alone, mystery is not dangerous, it is curiosity, it drives us further and further away from home, where we can learn and we can engage.

The right handed path needs some mystery, which is why the Village must welcome the traveller, the village, those on the right handed path, must embrace the traveller and listen to their stories so that the Village knows there are other ways to exist, not that they have to cease doing things the way they are doing, but must realize that not all is set in stone, that creativity is important, that things should not and can not be done just because thats the way it was always done, some problems need new solutions, some old ways need to be reanalyzed.  

In our current religious context, we are losing the mystery, at least within the Christian context.  Western Christianity has ignored the mystery of the trinity, the mystery of resurrection, the mystery of the eucharist.  To often we give concrete answers to questions that do not actually have answers, we have forgotten how to dwell in the mystery of the events that occurred in the life of Jesus, in the way God works in the world.  

Those on the left handed path, continue to seek mystery, those on the right handed path, do not be afraid to listen to the stories of those on the road.  

Why Tradition?

Why work from within a particular tradition? This is a question that many ask today.  Why does one have to root their spiritual life in community?

Richard Rohr, a writer I am particularly fond of, points out that the goal of religion shouldn't be to take claim as the only access to the whole truth, but rather the teaching of religion should be who a particular religion offers access to universal truths (he uses how religion teaches universal wisdom).  I think this is right on.  

If this is correct, and no one faith tradition offers unique access to God and Truth, then why pick one?

In the end i think this is a question that must be answered by the individual that is asking it, but i offer a few way points for exploring the question.  

When we are in the village, on the right handed path, it is clear that the community as a whole reaches towards God, rituals are shared, spiritual questions are asked in the midst of conversations and dialogues.    Having a faith tradition grounding all this is key.  It is important to point out that each community makes its adjustments to the larger cannon of the faith (and by cannon i am speaking of the entirety of the faith system), but it needs boundaries and guidance from the history of the tradition, from the wisdom of its forefathers and foremothers.  There is no reason to recreate the wheel with every new generation.

I can speak for the christian tradition, it took about 200 years for Christianity to emerge as its own tradition, still grounded very much in the much older jewish traditions and also borrowing heavily from greek philosophical thought.  In a way Christianity wasn't a new tradition, it was just a kind of Hegelian Dialectic created from Greek thought and Jewish thought.  There is in many ways no new religions, each is based on something older. The Christian Old Testament (or the Tanakh) borrows heavily from older traditions, and in some places borrows books nearly word for word (see Old Testament Parallels).    Traditions continue to evolve and emerge, but they are always linked (at least the ones that stand the test of time) to older traditions.  As they adapt to the community that surrounds them, they speak to the needs and desires and wants and fears of that particular community.    It is important to acknowledge that faith traditions can easily get off track and lose sight of their purpose and hurt more than help.  Commitment to tradition, while being able to listen also to the community that surrounds that tradition, can help with this, if we learn to remove our ego, we listen better, and are less likely to allow the tradition to become distorted to greed and power.

For those of the left handed path, those out on the journey, it is harder to rationalize a need for a tradition, but grounded oneself in a tradition will get you farther along.  The major religions all have mystic traditions that serve those on the journey well.  If you have a tradition that you grew up with, you can use the grounding in tradition from an early age as a catapult to spiritual maturity, if you did not grow up with a tradition, find one that speaks well to the environments you know best.

Religion so often because a reason not to engage in spiritual discovery, and often times it can be a huge hurdle to discovery, particularly when it has been distorted by power structures.  Religion and tradition are key to greater success, they keep one grounded and rooted in tradition.  At some point in the journey you will be able to move past your tradition, but in doing so you will become more rooted in what you already know in your heart.  If you have no tradition to move past, you create for yourself a difficult mountain to surmount, one that you may never be able to summit.

Again, the answer for why a religious tradition is so important is really only understood later on, and by the person that is doing the asking, no answer i (or anyone really) can give will be entirely sufficient.

Positive feedback loop

We may be familiar with a negative feedback loop, like feedback from putting a microphone too close to it's PA's speakers.  Of course guitarists have learned to use this sort of feedback to their advantage.  There are positive feedback loops too, present in many of the crucial life cycles in nature, like the carbon cycle or the nitrogen cycle, it works properly, it is self sustaining.

There is a positive feedback loop in spirituality.  The role of a village spiritual center (ie church, mosque, temple) is spiritual care.  There are two major types of spiritual care (maybe more), that of the individual and that of the community as a whole (the community can be broken into sub groups like families and meta groups like nations, but they are essentially the same sort of thing).  By engaging in individual spiritual care, the individual goes into the community to provide care to the community.  When the community is cared for, more individuals seek personal self care.

In our modern Christian church, community care is often defined as Mission or evangelizing, and personal self care is sometimes termed salvation.    We are sometimes led to believe that evangelizing is strictly going out to spread the word of God, to talk about Jesus, to turn people into believers, to get them to gain salvation.   Salvation is often described as going to heaven.  

Jesus often talked about the Kingdom of Heaven as being here on earth, we hear it in the Lord's prayer,  "thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven".   Salvation is recognizing that and caring for earth here, salvation comes in service to others, and its not necessarily about going to heaven, but in making heaven here.  If we work to make our communities healthier, with better schools, better hospitals, better public safety, we are doing the work of God, we are in fact saving souls, saving them not only from poverty and the cycles that exist there, but we are saving the rich from the cycles of greed and corruption that can easily occur.  The more people are comfortable in their communities, the more likely they are to have better personal spiritual health, it is a positive feedback loop.  We get "saved" and help others, and others get "saved" and they help others and your return is a community that furthers your personal spiritual health.   We may become "saved" by having someone help us, we may become "saved" through the act of helping others, we may become "saved" through putting in the work, or the necessary suffering that often needs to occur.

This is not a perfect explanation, but it gets at a central theme.

We have allowed our definitions of salvation and heaven to become things that are so unearthly that we can't relate to them any more -- except through disconnected models that close off the rest of the world. So many ask why our churches are shrinking, its because so many can see the detachment from anything real.  

If one is on the right handed path, get out into your community and serve!   If one is on the left handed path, get out and serve where ever you are.  Its so easy for a community to become disconnected, but through the basic act of helping someone, you may offer that needed "salvation".   It is not about what you say, it doesn't matter what you say, it matters what you do.    Christ wasn't calling us to be "Christians".  Christ was calling us to Love.

This is at its center a Christian understanding, using Christian words and theology, but it resonates at some level through all religions.  There is a central message that Religions form around, they each make  up there words for it, their terms their definitions, their rituals, but the central message is still there, somewhere, but it is so easy to lose track, to lose the central message, what it is God is telling us.   If you are not christian, fill in the terms that make sense to you, if you are atheist, you can't deny that at some level this still makes sense, love the community and individuals benefit, love individuals and the community can benefit.  

Lets get over the religious rhetoric about salvation and heaven, lets just get out there and do what we know is in our hearts, to spread love, whether that love is food or books or medicine or a listening ear or whatever it is, we have to spread Love, it is what we are called to do.

Surrender

The goal of religion is in many ways to get us to get over ourselves and get over are own ego and put our trust in something bigger than ourselves. It's been said that in the west our egos are too big, too tough, too hard to break though, like the rich man who turned away from Christ. The wealth we accumulate only pads our ego, making it harder to break.

For those on the right handed path, living in community, being humble with others, leads to diminishing ego, caring about others in the village leads to God in many ways.

For those of us on the left handed path our egos are broken in travel, during lonely nights during hard times, yet also when things work out when we never expected them to. Look back at your own journey so far, can't it be miraculous sometimes, doesn't it speak to something larger, whether it was the kindness of strangers or luck in stumbling across something immensely beautiful?

I think of the man who picked me up hitch hiking in the middle of no where Ireland and brought me all the way to Galway, at least at hour's drive. Or a jazz club in the basement of a bar in Paris that I stumbled across while following folks from the hostel I was staying in, where Parisians sang jazz standards at an open mic, or the sunset over the bayous of Louisiana, a place I never expected to live. In our journeys, if we don't let them lead us someplace we weren't expecting, someplace we never planning, often in absolute contrast to our best plans, then we never get to truly experience, we never get to be led, we spend our lives in our heads, and not out in the world. We have to overcome ourselves almost before we can do anything.

holding on

we can't hold on to tightly to the path we are on.  If we hold on too tightly to the right handed path, for those in the village, we close off to those that come from the outside and might have something useful to say.  At the same time, those on the left handed path are challenged in the same way.  If those on the left handed path hold on too tightly to the journey, and are unwilling to live within villages from time to time, to share our stories, then we fail to make the journey valuable, it becomes a selfish endeavor, in the same way villages wall themselves off.

We must constantly strive to share and to welcome others, particularly those we are not used to.

This does not mean we should try and convert the other, or to hold no respect for the other's view, even when we don't agree, we must move to something deeper, a place where sharing can occur, where both feel closer to wholeness as a result of the encounter, pride and self preservation must be set aside.

Only when we can allow ourselves to be removed can we truly begin to share and welcome.

Conflict

In our modern Christian Church we are experiencing schism over issues that tend to center around the notions of Gay Ordination and Gay Marriage.  Those on the affirming side, which i consider myself to be on, there is the notion that the church's call to radical inclusiveness overarches the few places in the bible where male homosexuality is condemned (only male homosexuality is condemned).  On the other side, there is strong feeling that affirming homosexuality in the way that allowing gay ordination, and even more so gay marriage, weaken the church and pull it away from the bible.  There is very much a hate the sin, but love the sinner approach to many on this side, but they are unable to affirm homosexuality in a way that counters their interpretation of the bible, in other words, the church must keep standards even if it is not always pleasant.  

It is not uncommon for the church to be divided on issues, dating from at least the second century there is clear evidence of schisms and strong handing by those in position of authority and influence.  Even in the letters of Paul (dating from as early as 40 AD) we see obvious signs of differing opinions on how to interpret chrisitainity.

Most schisms have occurred over purely theological concerns, where the arguments never leave the discussions of academics and church leaders, rarely affecting the day to day life of most believers.  There have been other times though when people were unduly affected by the controversies.  Notably, in paul we see discussions of the way to include gentiles, eventually including gentiles.  The arguments over abolition caused schisms, eventually sided with abolitionists.  I have to believe that the church will eventually side with gay rights, as it has in the past with other civil rights.  If we are truly a church that is reformed and always reforming, then we will gather a common understanding of the full inclusion of gay members.

That being said, schism and controversy are a central element of the christian church, and maybe all faith traditions.  We have to learn to be at peace with that schism.  When it comes to people's lives, i believe that the christian idea of inclusion will prevail, but when it comes to theological concerns, we will never all fully agree.

Christianity is really a collection of churches or villages, that each exist in a different set of realities.  A small rural church exists in a different world than a large urban church.  This is OK.  We as christians are allowed to disagree, we as different faith traditions throughout the world are also allow to disagree.  How to we truly draw lines in the sand, each village(church) must exist with itself, with all the diversity and all the reality it faces.

If we are on the left handed path we have to remember this, we have to remember that there is no one absolute way that will work for everyone.  There are archetypal similarities that exist amongst religions, and there are broad stroke themes that are crucial, but the specifics vary, regardless of denomination, culture or religion.  Our job becomes to listen and to discover, not so much as a complete outsider, but as a welcomed visitor, to discover what it is that is unique about that village(church) and why they believe what they believe.  Questions help people better understand their own traditions, the answers may not come easily, but if they are asked out of love, they can only help.  Asking questions though that lead a person to think a certain way are useless, they can only come from a genuine place of curiosity and love.   When we can gain a greater understanding of traditions, and why they exist, then we grow stronger in faith.