[Draft of a book introduction]
Say “Religion” in this strange new world of ours, and I see a game of musical chairs. The music stops – that promiscuous Pied Piper world beat that got Catholic priests dancing with Buddhist monks, Israelis with Palestinians, Southwest tourists with sacred kachinas -- and everybody scrambles for their chair: their church pew, synagogue seat, prayer rug or meditation cushion. And in the silence, dotted with distant gunfire, I’m left standing there. Without a chair.
Looking around, I see others here and there who are still standing – or even, in the chilly silence, defiantly dancing. But we seem far fewer, those of us who loved the dance – loved weaving together different beats, swapping steps with strangers – and we’re suddenly self-conscious. America and the world are retribalizing, choosing up sides as if for some final showdown. It feels as if everywhere we go we’re stopped at a checkpoint, met with a barked demand for our identity badges: Declare yourself! What are you? Which side are you on? Where do you belong?
Well, let’s see: I’m Jewish, and proud of my heritage, but I don’t keep kosher, go to shul, or light Sabbath candles. Oh -- and I should mention that I love Jesus. But I’m not entitled to love him, because, among all the other things I can’t get myself to believe (virgin birth, bodily resurrection, eternal hell if you don’t believe it all), I can’t accept that he is the only way to God. What about the Buddha? He shone his light on a path every bit as demanding and redeeming as Jesus’. My karate practice walks barefoot on that Eightfold Path. The only thing I miss on it is the intimate passion for a personal God. But I’ll stray off any of these high roads to visit “all my relatives,” as Native Americans call the ones with the roots and wings and whiskers. Where do I belong? On earth.
Not an answer that would pass muster at a border checkpoint, I’m afraid. Rummaging in my soul’s pockets, coming up with driver’s licenses and lottery tickets from several states of mind, I would have been shot by now.
Terror and Tradition
It’s no accident that my metaphor has morphed from festivity to martial law. So have our lives, even if weeks and months now go by when the menace only mutters in the background: Code Yellow, threat level chronically elevated. Like some brief thaw between ice ages, the post-Cold War party of the late 1990s ended for good on September 11, 2001. On that day, religion, of all things, reared up from its science-sedated tameness and revealed itself to be a matter of life and death. Ever since, religious faith at its most starkly sectarian has riveted our attention—and riven our world and nation -- whether we’ve greeted its revival with belief or disbelief.
Who would have believed, a few decades ago, that fringed and bearded rabbis, cloaked imams, and hellfire-and-brimstone preachers would claim center stage? Long dismissed as living fossils by the “cultural elite,” they are now the only ones to whom the world makes perfect sense. Fundamentalists may be in denial of 21st-century reality, but denial has freed them to seize the day and reshape that reality, while freethinkers founder in a quagmire of nuance. Lacking images anywhere near as powerful as Mel Gibson’s flayed Christ on the cross, the secular, “spiritual,” and agnostic people who shaped the culture for over thirty years were almost envious. The reaction of some Hollywood executives to “The Passion’s” smash box office comically captured the Zeitgeist: “Medieval! Sadomasochistic! How do I get in on this?”
At first I thought it was strange that in the aftermath of September 11, a tragedy caused by religious extremism, so many people would become more, not less, traditionally devout and assertive about it, almost flaunting the kippot (skullcaps) of observant Judaism and the ashen crosses of Lent. But on second thought, maybe it’s not so strange. Conservatism is a natural response to threat. Thrust into new, bewildering, and dangerous circumstances, most creatures retreat to the security of familiar behavior patterns, even when novelty and creativity might offer a better chance to survive. Horses will run back into a burning barn because, in their terror of the fire, the barn is the only refuge they know.
This homing instinct for domes and steeples, however, did not suddenly kick in on 9/11. That was just the tipping point. The trend had been quietly gathering force for over twenty years. And the threat that originally awakened it came not from abroad, but from within: the sense of chaos caused by too-rapid change and too much freedom.
You could feel a tide turn in American culture as far back as Ronald Reagan’s election. Around 1980, two decades of experimentation and excess reached low ebb, and a chastened reappreciation of traditional religion and moral codes crept in. It wasn’t just the “silent majority” backlash against frightening hippie freedoms, or the more sophisticated conservative critique of the cult of Self tearing families and society apart. It was many of the weary seekers themselves, crawling back from the exotic edge and the all-too-vivid void, grasping for a sturdy life preserver. It was young people raised in an amorphous liberal sea and longing for limits, for terra firma. It was baby boomers beginning to have families and realizing that they couldn’t reinvent the moral wheel. And later, it was baby-boomer parents reaping raging, metal-studded, drug-besotted teen-agers, the mutated fruit of the “liberation” they’d sown when they were young.
Maybe, after all, it was the very stodginess of the Fifties – built deep into boomer psyches like the calcium in our bones – that had gotten most of us through the Sixties in one piece. Maybe it hadn’t been such a bright idea to throw out all the time-honored safeguards against the dark side of human nature. Tradition might come in quaint, prescientific packaging, but at least it offered clear, confident ethical standards to impart to your kids, and authoritative answers to your kids’ (and your own) questions about death, sex, and evil. And it offered the comforts of community and continuity in an ever more rootless, disconnected world.
Structure, guidance, belonging: boom times may flatter us that we don’t need these things, but hard times humble us into admitting that we do. In the affluent, manic late ‘60s and late ‘90s, we really believed we had the power to reinvent ourselves. New ideas, new freedoms, or new technologies were going to bring forth the new, improved human at last. Then we woke up from that dream on recession’s morning after and found ourselves stuck with the same old, same old: greed, lust, wrath, envy, pride, gluttony and sloth. Almost as fast as Woodstock had turned to Altamont, the Internet turned into a huge hard-core peep show. (“Porn More Popular than Search,” read a Yahoo Technology News headline in 2004.) The paradisal wealth of the ‘60s had been built on war, the Utopian profits of the ‘90s on fantasy and fraud. The “old Adam” of theology was still way too much with us, unscathed by all the latest therapy and gadgetry; maybe only wised-up theologians, like old cops, could take him on. Tough times foster the belief that only traditional values are tough enough to do the job.
These days, with the dot-com bubble’s oblivious Astrodome shattered and the dark wing of terrorism sweeping overhead, God’s mighty fortresses look like good cover. It’s hardly surprising that so many people have sought shelter in tradition. The surprise is that quite a few still have not. Why aren’t we all sorted into our hardened bunkers with the cross, the star, or the crescent overhead? Who are those unaffiliated fools still wandering around out in the open while the air-raid sirens wail their call to prayer?
Spiritual Nomads
Perceptions can be deceiving. For decades, the media’s voyeuristic love affair with the cultural edge obscured the fact that a majority of Americans (and of the world’s citizens) remained traditionalists. Now that the spotlight has swiveled onto hard tradition, it would be just as wrong to overlook the sizable minority who remain seekers outside of organized religion. The collective mood has changed dramatically, but the actual numbers have not – at least, not yet.
Gallup poll figures for 2003 were much the same as they had been throughout the 1990s: nine out of ten Americans say they believe in a personal God, universal spirit, or higher power. (Only about 5% are confirmed atheists, and another 4% aren’t sure.) But only two-thirds are members of a church or synagogue – a striking 25% gap between belief and belonging. Over sixty percent say religion is “very important” in their lives; almost twenty-five percent, perhaps trying to distinguish between capital-R Religion and a less regimented reverence, say it is “fairly important.” Sixty percent consistently say that religion can “answer all or most of today’s problems,” while twenty-six percent counter that religion is “old-fashioned and out of date.”
However you slice it, that’s a solid quarter of us who face the same moral, mortal, and parental quandaries as our church- and temple-going peers, yet who resist the siren call of organized worship, trying instead to find our own way by the light of wisdom from many sources. Even as the mortar rounds fly between fortified civilizations, one-fourth of the population is on this unscripted pilgrimage beyond the walls. But are these nomadic seekers the wave of the future, as they once passionately (and presumptuously) believed? Or are they just the dwindling remnant of a naïve, narcissistic past?
One thing’s for sure: they – we -- are under fire as never before. The scoldings about spiritual dilettantism, the exhortations to turn back – the root meaning of “Repent!” and of baalei teshuvah, the term for newly Orthodox Jews – now come from family and friends, as well as from forceful voices in the pulpit, politics and culture. Tradition is “in,” with all that word’s cozy connotations of security and superiority; so-called spirituality is fast on its way “out” – on the fringe, in the cold -- and its devotees are increasingly viewed as flaky navel-gazers. The nontraditional quest has almost become a synonym for self-absorption, as if to opt out of organized religion were to reject God Himself and make a god of yourself.
“Enough About Me,” declares a 2004 headline in Publishers Weekly, the trade magazine and trend-tracker of the book industry, followed by the subtitle, “Spiritual memoirs refocus on classic traditions.” “A year and a half ago, the interior-journey category predominated,” reports contributor LaVonne Neff. “[W]riters seemed to be migrating in droves from the faith of their fathers to the faith of somebody else’s ancestors or, sometimes, to a spirituality uniquely their own, examining their feelings at every step of the way. By contrast, current . . . memoirists locate their personal stories firmly within the larger story of a religious tradition. . . . Open-ended seekers are passé; . . . ancient traditions are coming back into favor. Books in the ‘why I left my faith’ category are being supplanted by books telling about rediscovered strength and beauty in familiar places.”
Long gone are all those warm bodies that once thronged the self-congratulatory rock festival of the open road. Today’s pilgrims, writes Neff, “want their journeys to end in a destination.” Doubtful and dispersed, spiritual questers are doing their time in the wilderness. And in this harsh climate, their ranks may start to thin for the first time in two generations, as more and more give in to the drumbeat to find a nice congregation and settle down.
Others, however, will find that they can’t make that choice even if they wanted to. Tempting as it may sometimes be to trade in their lonely load of questions for a ready-made community and cosmology, it’s too late: a hatched chick might as well try to get back in the egg. When they do venture into a place of traditional worship – out of nostalgic yearning, or just for somebody else’s wedding or funeral, baptism or Bar Mitzvah -- their ears can’t unhear the primitive superstition and tribal jingoism all mixed up with the timeless wisdom of the scriptures. I don’t know how many times my heart has been warmed by the deep familial glow in a synagogue, only to sink into my shoes as the Bat Mitzvah girl stumbled uncomprehendingly through some recipe for animal sacrifice from Leviticus. As “Donaldito,” born Catholic, posted on the popular website Beliefnet: “I consider myself a seeker, and returning to the place that started me on that journey feels pretty good . . . until I actually listen to a lot of what's being said.” Now that the free-form quest is no longer in fashion, it’s your gut that will tell you whether you’re a spiritual refugee, homesick for the right roof over your head, or a spiritual nomad, at home in the open.
It’s for you hard-core wonderers and wanderers – my scattered tribe – that I want to send up a flare, pitch a tent, put out some desert rations. I don’t care what faith you were born into, what you call your higher power, what spiritual disciplines you do or don’t practice: if you viscerally resist having your religion organized for you, if living with your questions is the only form of worship that feels honest and alive to you, you’re one of us. Like many of our biblical forebears, we postmodern pilgrims answered a call to leave the houses of our fathers and strike out for an unknown future. We’re deeply convinced that that call came from the Spirit, and we’re not turning back. But right now a lot of us feel lost, with no promised land in sight. Tradition’s new triumph is our crisis. That means, of course, that it contains both a danger and an opportunity. The danger is that we’ll slowly lose our convictions, or watch them splinter into a thousand consoling little niche cults. The chance, the challenge, is to become fully conscious of those convictions for the first time.
Stars to Steer By
In our adversarial – no, gladiatorial -- culture, I know I am now expected to spend the next 100 pages bashing that old-time religion. I’m not going to do that, because it’s not that simple. I have a close relative and a close friend to whom faith is everything, and I’ve watched it transform their lives. I can’t deny that my Orthodox Jewish cousin and my Pentecostal minister friend -- both repentant secularists -- have much more purpose and joy than before their conversions. And while much of what they do and believe is alien to me, there’s also much that I admire and even envy: marriages that don’t shake with every wayward flutter of the heart; communities as all-embracing as the Amish in “Witness”; children so radiantly polite you’d think they were from a better planet. These are fruits of the Spirit that require pruning of the self, and that therefore flourish best in the orderly orchards of tradition. It may be the strongest argument (short of the inarguable “God wants you to”) for submitting to an organized faith. When I look at my cousin’s and friend’s choices from this point of view, instead of “How could they do that?” I ask myself, “Why can’t I do that?”
The answer, it turns out, is, “Because it’s . . . against my religion!” I didn’t know I had one. And I don’t, of course, in the literal sense. But when I really questioned my own heels-dug-in determination to stay outside the fold, any fold -- even if blesséd community and boundless love beckon from within – I discovered that underneath my no there is a yes. The demands of tradition that I cannot force myself to accept for any reward – demands to disdain the world, exclude the Other, and believe the unbelievable – are clues to a coherent worldview I share with other spiritual nomads, one we hold fast to even though it isn’t fully articulated yet. In its essence, it is a worldview of the here and now, rather than of a thousand or two thousand or five thousand years ago.
These are scary times largely because of the yawning gap that has opened up between our beliefs and our reality. Traditionalists look back to the cosmologies and moralities of a vanished world for a clear and comforting order – at the price of perpetuating old fears, myths, and hatreds along with the wisdom. Spiritual nomads face ahead into the tumult of science, technology, and globalization, trusting that out of the whirlwind of the new an intrinsic order will emerge – at the price of risking chaos till that order comes clear. Fortunately, I think we’re further along in that labor than we know. A cosmology for the 21st century will be one that fuses spirit and science: in the wonderful words of my friend Marc Barasch, “Now the views from the Hubble are our stained-glass windows.” A morality for the 21st century will be rooted in insight, not fear, firm without being rigid and flexible without being adrift. Pieces of this new understanding are already being lived -- searching, open-hearted ways of reaching out to the cosmos and to each other. To be explored in Part One, “Soul in the Open,” eight of them are:
1.) God, By Any Other Name
2.) Open Tribes
3.) Open Questions
4.) Natural Miracles
5.) Many Mansions
6.) Communities of the Body
7.) Life is the Practice
8.) If Not Now, When?
It’s not that we’re arrogant enough to imagine we can live without, or improve on, the eternal truths revealed through the great religious traditions. On the contrary, I think that the gravity of the times, and personal experience of the failure of too much freedom, are driving spiritual nomads back to those uncompromising truths -- to the recognition, missing from so much recent “spirituality,” of just how much the Spirit demands of us. (Ask not what your universe can do for you . . .) There’s a real sense in which the party’s over – that premature celebration of oneness and abundance and liberation – and we’re back to the hard work of being human: the struggle between the primal instincts that make life vital and the profound insights that keep those drives from being lethal. Never over, and never easy, that battle now has to be fought in the middle of a hurricane. Buffeted from within by desire and fear as we always have been, we’re now buffeted from without by unprecedented temptations and stresses, tearing us apart from the people closest to us and throwing us together with people from the other side of the planet. We can either crawl back inside an old authority structure that will tell us exactly what to do, or we can find stars to steer by and learn to navigate through the storm. Those stars, for spiritual nomads, are the core truths of the whole world’s wisdom. Part Two, Multitraditional Values, will focus on eight great spiritual discoveries from different times and places that light our way through the choices and challenges of today:
1.) The Golden Rule (All Traditions)
2.) The Law of Karma (Hinduism, Buddhism)
3.) All My Relatives (American Indian)
4.) L’Chaim! (Judaism)
5.) We Are Loved (Christianity)
6.) Submission to the Will of God (Islam)
7.) Honor Your Ancestors (Africa, China)
8.) Equality of Women and Men (No Tradition)
Keep going...
Posted by: Tamar | February 07, 2005 at 02:57 PM
Impressive. A personal and imaginative sociology of religion. I think you're onto something. Especially the last bit about the hard work of being human in an increasingly stressful world. Almost got Hannah Arendt's Human Condition on me.
Posted by: MrProliferation | February 07, 2005 at 03:13 PM
Hi Amba
re: "It’s for you hard-core wonderers and wanderers – my scattered tribe – that I want to send up a flare, pitch a tent, put out some desert rations."
Thanks for the flare, I love the rations.
I encounter God (or what ever one might want to provisionally call it) by disregarding all my beliefs about her, including my insistence that she must exist. So far she has not seemed to mind one bit what I think.
Anytime I want to dance, "she" says "Let's dance."
Love,
Raymond
Posted by: Raymond Sigrist | February 08, 2005 at 12:26 PM
There was some segment on the evening news a few years ago that set my head spinning -- Peter Jennings, I believe. The segment was about the power of prayer. Apparently, some scientists had been studying the effect of prayer on the human condition, with the usual tests of groups who pray versus those who don't. The report showed how those who pray are healthier and happier, perhaps even living longer.
What struck me was how the news people went right up to the edge of saying the following, without actually doing so: "Prayer, as a way of communication with 'God' -- if there is a god -- is probably bunk. It's simplistic and based on outdated religious notions. But as a health therapy, prayer is very positive. Prayer is like meditation, which relaxes the body and enhances internal physiological balances. Scientists approve of prayer because it is healthy and reduces health costs, not because it means anything beyond what can be understood by science."
Like I said, Mr. Jennings didn't go as far as to say that. But the segment was dripping wet with the idea that religion is at best a sweet, well-meaning activity that at worst has ghastly side effects -- wars, ignorance, stupidity, pro-lifers and brainwashed kids selling crosses.
You said:
"Fundamentalists may be in denial of 21st-century reality, but denial has freed them to seize the day and reshape that reality, while freethinkers founder in a quagmire of nuance."
Indeed. Faith leads; rationalizing follows. But we must be careful. Go back to the year 1400 and it was faith that ruled the world, sans rationality. And not always for the better. The Enlightenment happened because clergical orthodoxy was a yoke on humanity. Classical liberalism has evolved quite a ways distant from those days. It has made us who we are, though its current incarnation has corrupted so much. We should not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
You also said:
> These are fruits of the Spirit that require pruning of the self, and
> that therefore flourish best in the orderly orchards of tradition. It may be
> the strongest argument (short of the inarguable “God wants you to”) for
> submitting to an organized faith. When I look at my cousin’s and friend’s
> choices from this point of view, instead of “How could they do that?” I ask
> myself, “Why can’t I do that?”
Why can't you do that? It might be because something's not coming from deep within -- it's either not there (unlikely) or it's blocked (likely). Me too.
In my case, my dad converted to Catholicism in 1955, and became the classic convert. He was and remains very religious, and has more than embraced the Church in his life -- he's practically become a maniac about it -- church everyday, rosary everyday, reads nothing but Catholic literature, etc. I was sent to Catholic school, where we kids joked about 'toilet plunger religion' classes. By the time I was a teenager, relentless rote religious indoctrination filled me. Clearly, God was a bureaucrat, Who would punish me for not going to church on Sunday. Clearly that was a bunch of crap. Catholicism killed my sense of spirituality for a long, long time. I went through the usual paces of religious detoxification in my twenties and thirties.
My dad found and embraced the Church. He didn't go to Catholic school. I am expected to carry his flame, the one he found and picked up. Implicitly, that means he had a choice that I am forbidden. He doesn't understand this in the smallest way.
Now I am at the point where I yearn for the symbolic, simple aspects of my religious youth, if only that could be separated from the more notional aspects of it. And my wife and I have a daughter, who turns one year old in a week. I have been worried about what to do with her as she gets a little older, with respect to faith.
Do I believe in God? A qualified 'yes.' Do I believe in an afterlife? A qualified 'maybe -- sounds nice, why not?' Do I believe in Jesus Christ, God's son? A qualified 'I like his teachings, dunno if he's God.' Do I believe in the Ten Commandments? A qualified 'yes' -- except for Commandment #4, keeping the Sabbath holy. I just don't. Do I think God is love? Yes -- yes, yes, yes.
How do I shut down the qualifications and just believe? Honestly, I look at believers very admiringly. How do they do it? No, I don't think they're stupid, or duped. I think they have gone to a higher plane than I inhabit, no matter how many essays I write for Winds of Change. I can write a thousand bibles worth of text, and not get to that plane. I know that.
This irregular, bland, qualified pseudofaith of mine will need to come up with some answers for my very young girl soon. And like you said, I note that religious children can be radiantly polite. I was one such child. I remember my grammar school years with God very fondly, and it genuinely helped provide structure and purpose for the boy Cicero; I remember the nitty-gritty blueprint catechism in my high school years, that drew me away from the Church. As though they literally talked me out of faith. How tragic.
For some reason, I have no desire to join some other Christian sect, positive as they might be. It would devastate my family, for starters. But beyond that, I'm not really interested. It's Catholicism or nothing. I think I am looking for a resolution with the Church -- some kind of rectification of what it made me, versus who I am, and what the Church is. That is still in the works. I need to be sure that I don't make my daughter into a pawn of my need to set right my own past.
Anyway, that's a bit of a rambling response to your essay. Thanks for being Jewish -- I have found a lot of congruencies between myself and my Jewish friends. Very similar conflicts of the soul. Thanks for writing me, and best of luck with your book.
Posted by: Marcus Cicero | March 14, 2005 at 11:47 AM
Fantastic Fantastic writing and I too feel I am a spiritual nomad. Just want to point out that really (fundamentalist esp) Christianity can ALSO be about submitting to the will of God, not just Islam. But anyway, wonderful blog keep up the work it's beautiful and insightful! WoW!
Posted by: PhoenixFireWalker | March 16, 2005 at 05:24 PM
oh my goodness, have i been looking for you for a while! i got to your site through the mighty middle, and i am glad! i have been yearning for someone like me for so long, it seems like i have only found people very far in their faith or very far out of their faith.. and then the people on the fence like myself don't want to ask any questions or delve into what they are feeling at all! i am so right there with your thoughts.. i wasn't raised christian, so it is really hard for me togo to a church service and listen to the crazy thing they say that don't seem to have ANY connection to the life i live, besides the basic moral message underlying, which you can get many other places.. at sixteen i started studying zen and really liked it, but my inquisitive mind goes farther than 'just sitting' too often.. please let me know when your book comes out, for i am an avid reader and would devour it! thanks for the flare!
peace..
Posted by: kinome | June 13, 2005 at 10:13 AM
Your book rocks, amba. Look, this tradition thing is not going to persist forever. Once we have defeated or substantially weakened radical islamist terror, people will come out of their holes. To me believing that God is benevolent, cares about me personally, and is fair and just is sufficient. I don't know why people feel the need to retreat back to the holes. I've gone back to church for family events on several occasions--and while I like Christmas Carols and the decorations etc.--I hear them recite the creed, and I'm like, "Jesus Christ (pun wickedly intended), when the hell are they gonna update this thing? Haven't they read the latest scholarship or perused the gnostic gospels?" That's what gets to me, I feel sometimes that Jesus himself would have a hard time getting them to change their theology if he came back down. They'd probably call him an impostor and cite Bible verses against him. It's like these people could care less about the facts and would just like to stay in their cocoon perpetually.
I am an eternal optimist and we will prevail amba. I'm almost 24, and us youngins' won't let you down. Fer chrissakes, look at our company. Jefferson proclaimed that he was, to his knowledge, in a sect all by himself. Einstein had similar leanings. In fact, look at Jesus and Buddha: they took on the superstitions of their religions, Judaism and Hinduism respectively. Remember Jesus's 40 days in the desert, remember Buddha's temptation by Mara. We will prevail.
Don't let your "ambivalence" drag you down. You've said that we don't think we can improve on the truths of past religions--where's your ambition, girl? Of course, we can improve on it. It can be some stunningly beautiful synthesis of the best of all relgions, science, and philosophy brought together by stunning new insights.
I view this as akin to radical centrism. It strives to go beyond stale democrat vs republican, and we're on a similar endeavor here. We can do better!
Hell, if you believe that God had something substantive to do with prior founding of religions, we may just be ripe for another divine infusion to bring us nomads together. Now, that may sound totally loony-toon, but we've gone an awful long time since a Mohammed or a Buddha or some major event. Certainly, we have to be very careful about not falling prey to those who would exploit such a sentiment, but if you honestly believe that there is some higher plan, even if faintly known, you can't rule it out completely. Even without that, our future is bright.
You have before talked about sadder but wiser. You crazy girl, the real sage sees beyond the maya and illusion and realizes infinite bliss, wisdom, and awareness which is the only true reality. Now, this all may be over the top, but I felt you needed a bit more of a "missionary spirit."
Best wishes and good luck.
Posted by: Adam | July 20, 2005 at 08:04 PM
Thank you, Adam, it was a jolt of YOUTH that I needed!!
When I say we can't improve on the core truths discovered by the great religions, I didn't say we can't reinterpret them and combine them!! And yes, add to them, why not -- it's about time for a new revelation. (I have a sense that this time it may come collectively -- democratically, if you will -- instead of through one single prophet.)
That's what I'm up to -- how do we today understand the Law of Karma? How do we understand "submission to the will of God"? Our
understanding of these things has changed in the light of science. It has become less cruel, fearful and superstitious. Science has allowed us to make our lives somewhat easier and more pleasant, and that has given us a less cruel view of the universe. But who gave us the ability to develop science?
If you want to privately send me a real e-mail address, I'll send you the first intro I wrote to my book-in-the-works. It was written soon after 9/11 and I think had more of that missionary spirit you miss. (It's in my old computer so I'll have to switch over.) The publishers and agents told me 9/11 was receding and I'd better recast it.
Thank you for the marvelous comments, the encouragement and fellowship.
Posted by: amba | July 20, 2005 at 11:44 PM
I'd be happy to send you my email address. I would add that I think traditional religions provide communal support, so that people are gaining comfort from other people and millenia of tradition and faith, in addition to support from God. However, the spiritual nomad's task is much more challenging, because the support is primarily coming from God. We have few crutches to rely on. In many ways I feel this is what Jesus was doing in the desert and Buddha during his encounter with Mara, not only were they overcoming the evil tendencies within themselves they were forging their own personal connection with the divine. So I view Buddha and Jesus as sort of the great spiritual nomad examplars, finding the way on their own, going beyond the traditions in which they were raised. I think a very negative tendency of western religion is to constantly refer to the lowliness of humankind and to the blasphemy of equating oneself with God. Eastern religion takes somewhat of an opposite tack of taking one's attention off the failings and seeking to expand the inner divinity. That is the whole purpose of Buddhism and what I hold to be the true purpose of Christianity, though that has degenerated into a worship of his person than a following of his ways: to become a Buddha or to become an annointed one--i.e. a Christed one. That's why Hinduism is a lot more helpful in that if everything is God you don't feel embarrassed by proclaiming one's own divine nature. I view today's Christianity as kind of a scary fast-food Americanized religion. All you have to do is believe in Jesus, but woe be unto you if you don't. As opposed to the Buddhist mandate of becoming fully a Buddha, but you're given as many chances as it takes. It's both more challenging and more forgiving.
I've been mulling over traditional practices and your comments about polite children etc. Although before I had a sort of jihadist mentionality vis-a-vis tradtional religion--the extremes of youth, what can I say?--I think that it would probably be disastrous if suddenly everyone became a spiritual nomad in that traditional religions are the most powerful force to reign in moral excesses today, provide a framework for instilling virtue in children, and provide a comfortable way for people to connect to God. I think probably the best advice to give to traditionalists is to admonish them to not be afraid to loosen up a little on their theology, base their faith on personal experience with God, and still maintain the traditional rituals and the broad parameters of their faith.
That is not at all to say we shouldn't set up flares to unite the nomadic community--they know who they are--but as you say, to prevent a gladitorial approach, as well as conceptualize how nomads can help the traditionalists.
To return to a theme, if you think of it, many traditionalists gather around a religion founded by nomads. I've mentioned Buddha and Jesus, but Mohammed was rejecting the polytheistic and animist trends of his times as well. And you could argue that American traditions were in part crafted around nomadic thought such as Jefferson. I believe that none of the first six presidents were traditional Christians, and neither was Lincoln. Bottom line, we nomads have a lot of forerunners, and in many ways nomads are the vanguard of a dawning realization whether it be in government, science, philosophy, art or religion. So take heart.
Posted by: Adam | July 23, 2005 at 02:40 AM
Regarding the equality of men and women:
Though I am not a member, I know that a basic tenent of the Bahai Faith is the equality of the sexes, as well as the races, spritual traditions, etc.
Posted by: Richard | August 13, 2005 at 04:14 PM
It's been a while so I thought I'd stop in and see if anything's changed.
Allow me to say that I am religious but am not at home with any religion. I will also say that I have absolutely no doubt about the existance and essential benevolence of God. I wrestle with the rest.
A couple of things to consider: The two dominant sects within Roman Jewish Palestine were the Saducees, who promoted Jewish identity but had enough trouble with doctrine that some of them were agnostic at best, and the Pharasees, who promoted priestly Judaism and reincarnation. What is so often overlooked about Jesus was his radical view for that time and that place of the possibility of human connection to the divine- that God is not impossibly separated from us. For many humans, even many Christians, it is very difficult to grasp a God who would allow us to not accept him. Instead, this God wants us to want to reconnect with him but at the same time realizes that for us to truly be filled with faith we must chose to approach him. God offers; it is humanity that won't accept the offer and, often, is suspicious and hateful towards the offer. God practices an extreme version of the "if you love someone, set them free" idea. God cannot force us to believe in him if he wants us to truly believe. God doesn't try to win us over though he wants reunion. He has set us free and waits for us to come back. And from this comes the true source of "sin," which is all the blocks we put in front of ourselves to deny God, not sex which seems to mess up so many fundamentalists. We get angry with God for setting us free because we make so many mistakes. We despair over God's existance in times of trouble. We blame God for natural disasters. We see the evil acts of people and demand that God do something about it all. In short, we show ourselves to be petulant adolescents wanting others to be controlled but not ourselves, physical sensations of all kinds without consequences, freedom without any responsibility.
Jesus' foremost message, and it is one that has been mangled and corrupted by human beings since his time, was for individuals to face God and deal with an overwhelming welcoming love, one that invites acceptance. Brush away the doctrines, push aside the petty human resistance, put down demands that God prove himself...and see through the eyes of a child.
Posted by: Richard | September 26, 2005 at 02:49 AM
As many times as I have stopped by your place, this is the first time I've seen this defining piece. Well organized, eloquently expressed. There are so many parallels with a long one I've been working on for a while, working title: "Foundations". I too pitch my tent variously from time-to-time, and sometime sleep out under the stars. It often feels like "stranger in a strange land". Thanks for your work!
Posted by: Winston | October 27, 2005 at 07:10 AM
I see you haven't had any recent posts, so I'll be the first for 2006! I want to start by saying that I have logged easily a 1,000 hours (if not more) internet time researching spirituality on my own. Yes the internet has soo many venues for so many perspectives. This has been a very long progress for me, this journey I'm on, but in the last few years it has been full steam ahead. I knew I was not exactly a Christian (I was raised in an Evangelical Church going single mother with no self esteem's house...deep breath heehee), nor was I exactly a Gnostic, Hinduh, Buddhist, Scientologist...the list goes on, but by GOD, I was and am something. 1,000 plus hours, weeding through religious beliefs, conspiracies and mind sets had failed to "label" me. I felt as though I belonged nowhere, yet I'm entitled to be anywhere/everywhere. I was/am wandering, not aimlessly, but seemingly so, through the varying spiritual schools of thought and dogma. I'm still scared of Hell on some level, and still want more than anything to belong to a congregation of fellow believers, and you ask "Not how can they, but why can't I?" and I cried when I read this. PERFECTLY stated, not asked really, because we know the answer, once your eyes are open, it's hard to shut them again for any length of time. Now to conclude this rambling of a post I just want to thank you from the warmest, deepest and loving..est (teehee) part of my heart for giving me the "label" my humanity was craving. Loud and Proud... I am a spiritual Nomad.
PS: could you email me to let me know when the book comes out? I am so looking forward to it.
Posted by: Amy | January 26, 2006 at 12:54 PM
So here's another spiritual nomad stumbling upon you.
Most excellent piece of writing. I'm very happy to have found this section of your blog and I will be back.
Just so you know, I got here today by way of TGB and her link to the 'bottle' picture. :)
later...
Posted by: kate | February 27, 2007 at 10:41 AM