Back From "Vacation"

Well, okay, it wasn't a real vacation--just a posting hiatus while I struggled with other projects. In this interim I discovered a splendid book on the Christian spiritual life by Cynthia Bourgeault, a hermit-priest in the Episcopal church: The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming an Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart (Jossey-Bass, 2003). Bourgeault's book is an account of her own spiritual practice, which is very much in debt to the Benedictines' combination of physical work, lectio divina (slow and prayerful reading of Scripture), and contemplative prayer--in Bourgeault's case, the preferred form is Centering Prayer, first taught by Fr. Thomas Keating some thirty years ago.

Bourgeault sees these practices as Christian expressions of a timeless, or at least very venerable, tradition she calls Wisdom, and which other writers call the esoteric path. ("Esoteric" here means something like "inner and individual," not "weird and occult.") Bourgeault argues that western Christianity once championed ways and means for the individual to come to intimate knowledge of, and even union with, God--but moved away from this approach toward an exclusive emphasis on piety, morality, and good works. Catholic and Protestant mystics, of course, kept the more direct path to union alive, as did the theology and practice of the Eastern Church--and so, in their own way, did the Benedictines. 

In the West, however, seekers of this stripe always had to be on their guard against running afoul of ecclesiastical authority and the official theology of the church--which, from the 13th century on, was the highly rationalistic framework created by St. Thomas Aquinas. Mystics were an exception to these rules, always a bit suspect, even if some, like Saint Teresa of Avila, were eventually venerated. And as for a wisdom tradition that brought the possibility of mystical union within reach of ordinary believers, well, it was nearly eradicated.

Bourgeault's book pointed me toward a more radical one, Richard Smoley's Inner Christianity (Shambhala, 2002), a history and an informal theological study of esoteric Christianity in many forms: the Christianity that mainly concerns itself with consciousness, and with the relationships among body, psyche, and spirit in the quest for union with God. As someone who loves the inner traditions of India, I found the parallels in this tradition between Vedanta and Christ's message quite thrilling, and I will have more to say about them next time.

Springfield

Please check out Linda Leicht's article about How to Believe in the Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader. Linda is the journalist who led me to two of my favorite interviewees, Victoria Queen and her husband Alan (whose name I misspelled in the book, to my chagrin), and she did a followup interview with them, and with me, after the Queens got a chance to read about themselves. I've posted the article as a comment to this post, so click to read.

Daily Planet Weighs In

I just noticed that the Twin Cities Daily Planet, an ambitious online news source sprung from the fertile brain of journalist/philosopher Jeremy Iggers, reviewed How to Believe a month ago. Click at right and have a look at the assessment, basically positive with some reasonable reservations, by John Herlinger, a Master of Divinity candidate at Luther Seminary in Saint Paul.

Austin and Atheism

We're back from two reading/signing events in Austin, Texas--one at Saint Andrew's Presbyterian, the church of How to Believe interviewee and pastor Jim Rigby in North Austin, the other at Follett's Intellectual Property bookstore near the University of Texas campus. The church event drew some forty enthusiastic and interesting people; at Follett's we had only a trickle of attendees, but, hey, every soul is precious in God's sight!

At the bookstore I reconnected with Bob Jensen, of the University of Texas journalism department, a Saint Andrew's parishioner and the impetus behind the whole Austin visit. Bob is a veteran man of the Left, and he had just come back from New York with Jim Rigby, who had addressed a convocation of Marxist intellectuals at Cooper Union on the values and virtues of faith. ("He wowed 'em," reported Bob, who had organized the gathering.) Bob suggested that the issue of religious faith is being taken more and more seriously in "progressive" circles, and not simply as a problem.

He also drew my attention to Terry Eagleton's rejoinder to Richard Dawkins (the prominent neo-atheist writer) in the London Review last year (see the URL of the article at right). It's a powerful piece by a leftist theorist who is impatient with what he sees as Dawkins' caricature of Christianity, and who goes on the attack with all the wit and firepower one associates with British intellectuals.

I am in sympathy with the points Eagleton makes--particularly his reminder that much neo-atheist critique is leveled at simplistic versions of Christianity, bypassing the far subtler and more powerful arguments made by the best theologians, past and present. At the same time, I am rather weary of polemics on this issue, whether I agree with them or not. The very rhetoric of advocacy-and-rejoinder, point-and-refutation-of-point, mires us in what my interviewee Richard Rohr calls "the calculative mind," the left-brain zone where both subtle theology and sharp rationalist critique are done.

Eagleton points out that traditional theology asserts that belief in God is reasonable but the idea of God cannot be exhausted by reason. Amen. And the idea of God can only be taken so far by the rhetoric of argument too. That's part of the point of How to Believe--that narrative is as powerful as, or perhaps more powerful than, argument, in making the case for at least an opening to faith. And the most powerful support for faith transcends rhetoric entirely--it is being-present in mystery, silence, and awe. This state of mind and soul is very real for nearly everyone, at least at certain moments, and the calculative mind is incapable of coming to terms with it. Another mind must be brought to bear. When this other mind is allowed to form and flower, one has a glimpse of something beyond argument, rhetoric, storytelling--even beyond thought itself. This is not dangerous irrationalism, it is peaceful and loving trans-rationalism.

Nobody should force us to understand this state of soul in the exclusive terms of a given religion, but reasonable people ought to be open to the fact that healthy religion has been designed to come to terms with it, to articulate it, to give thanks for it, and to make it communicable. Religion is a flawed but usable tool for making sense of a state of mind and soul that is simply too large for rationality and even psychology. Scripture is a vivid record of how this state of soul has been understood as conveying primary realities about life and the world, realities that are themselves too large and complex to be explained by the calculative mind. And the primary reality that cannot be explained rationally--but may be approached spiritually--is "why is there anything?"

Off to Texas

My wife, Laurie, and I are headed to Austin, Texas, tomorrow to do two reading and signing events behind How to Believe. For me it's a reunion with my interviewees Jim Rigby, a Presbyterian pastor who stands up for the full spiritual and ecclesiastical equality of gay people, and Gerald Gafford, a gay man in Rigby's congregation. One of the most interesting elements of Gerald's story, at least to me, is the fact that although the small, Biblical-literalist, conservative evangelical sect in which he grew up rejected him when he came out, the same sect had infused him with the idea that only the Holy Spirit--and no authority figure--could guide his reading of the Bible. This radical Protestant freedom under God allowed him to interpret scripture in a dynamic way: God had made him the way he was.

I am always astonished that people who condemn the "gay lifestyle" as if it were a choice of clothing or a bit of self-indulgent folly cannot or will not understand the raw, searing emotions that usually accompany coming out--the sense of final authenticity, of standing before humankind and God as one truly is, and the acceptance of risk that it too often entails, even now. Gerald risked everything, lost a lot, and thankfully gained a great deal when he finally told the truth of his heart, his pulse, and his body to the world.  How can anyone live a spiritual life on the basis of a lie about the heart?

Yes, Saint Paul had bad things to say about same-sex relations as they were misunderstood two thousand years ago. But as Jim Rigby told me, we are not Paulians, we are Christians. Show me a single place where Jesus Christ (the man whose name is on the religion) condemns gays (or anyone else except religious hypocrites) and I will eat my words.

BookPage Praises HTB

In a roundup of recent Christian-themed books, the magazine BookPage has kind words for How to Believe. Check out the review by clicking the link at right.

Dogmatism

I'm glad to be back here posting after a too-long hiatus; time management is not something I put on my resume.

Thanks to Kyle for a very thoughtful comment in response to the responses to him. He acknowledges the vastness of the mystery of existence, but suggests that mysticism and faith are "dangerous substitutes" for a straightforward acknowledgment of that mystery--because mysticism and faith can, and often do, lead to dogmatism.

 That this danger exists is of course quite true. Closed minds breed pestilence and death as well as simple intellectual stagnation, and when a mind is closed around a religious or spiritual tenet, this can create a special kind of self-righteousness that can turn quite literally murderous. Christian history is spattered with blood on this account; even ostensibly peaceful religions like Buddhism have much to atone for (the Zen sect was not only closely associated with Japan's brutal samurai class, but it was the quasi-official religion of Japanese nationalism in modern times, supplying a "spiritual" rationale for the subjugation of Asia and the brutalization of her people).

Several things can be said, however, about the singling out of "faith-based" dogmatism for censure. To my way of thinking, dogmatism is an equal-opportunity employer. Minds have closed around Jesus and Allah and Sri Krishna, but they have also closed around science, producing horrors like eugenics and Nazi racial theory; and they have closed around history and the class struggle, producing institutional Communism with its Stasis and KGBs; and, to choose a milder example, they have closed around my political faith, left-liberalism, producing various kinds of PC prudery, elitism, and smugness.

Now let's go the other way. When minds open around left-liberalism, you get the New Deal in all its anti-elitist vigor and strength. When minds open around history and the class struggle you get the penetrating critique of monarchy, authority, and capitalism that stretches from the French Enlightenment to Michel Foucault. When minds open around science you get not only the only real science, but a science open to mystery, which Kyle rightly praises.

And when minds open around Allah you get the glories of Arab science, the philosophy of ibn al-Arabi, the poetry of Rumi and Attar. When minds open around Yahweh, you get the wisdom books like Job, and  Philo, and Maimonides, and a stunning list of Jewish mind-openers that continues to this day. (You could include Jesus in the list.)

And when the mind opens around Jesus, you get the Fathers of the Church--who first brought Greek philosophy into dialogue with Christian revelation--and Aquinas, and the emphasis on individual judgment and conscience in the Protestant reformers, and Teilhard de Chardin, and contemporary prophets like Richard Rohr. In these people and movements and spirits, faith is the opposite of mind-closing--faith blows the doors of perception off their hinges because it posits a wider, deeper world. The fact that it does so in line with certain scriptures and traditions means that it is experience shared and added to previous experience, experience undergone and recorded by some of the most brilliant and truly open minds in human history--rather than merely private experience. 

Whenever thought, experience, and insight are institutionalized, there is an opportunity and a danger. The opportunity is what I alluded to above--a church, or a scientific institute, or a department of comparative literature, allow experience to be shared, interpreted, added to a common fund. This is the only way real wisdom is created. Wisdom is impersonal, shared, "corporate" in the non-capitalistic sense. The danger is that the institution becomes, in the eyes of its caretakers and beneficiaries, more important than the thought, experience, and insight it was formed to foster.

And that is when dogma--the set of shared beliefs that, say, Christianity upholds in order to pass on the spiritual truth and good it has inherited--turns dogmatic. That is when the spirit of science--openness to reality in all its aspects, and devotion to a humble and careful method of inquiry--becomes scientism, the prejudice that the rather feeble senses of a certain animal, homo sapiens (augmented by instrumentation), can measure all of reality, and should be the ONLY measure of reality.

I am passionately opposed to religious dogmatism, whether it is Papal authoritarianism crushing Catholic inquiry (my heroes Hans Kung and Tissa Balasuriya being muffled by Rome), or creationism (the astounding idea that God cannot express God's self via evolution), or Biblical literalism (the equally astounding idea that the impoverished form of truth called the literal meaning of words--which was only promoted to its current dignity in the eighteenth century--is the only tool to use in reading scripture). But I love and admire Christian dogma, not because I believe it exhausts the truth about God--it doesn't claim to--but because it is a set of brilliant koans, paradoxes (the two natures of Christ, the simultaneous immanence and transcendence of God) that the mind cannot resolve, and which catapult the mind elsewhere. Only, of course, if they are not clung to in a simple-minded fashion. 

The challenge is always to maintain a balance between the necessary institutionalization of ideas and insights and their life and life-giving qualities. But the mere fact that institutionalization can bring dogmatism and stultification is not sufficient grounds, in my mind, for condemning the ideas and insights themselves.

Book news: I will be traveling with my wife, Laurie, to do two book signings and readings in Austin, Texas, on March 18 (Saint Andrew's Presbyterian Church) and 20 (Follett's Intellectual Property bookstore). A reading-signing in Saint Paul, at Garrison Keillor's Common Good Books, will follow on April 13.