Reflections on Spirituality and Religion

My last reflection was on Faith, Belief, and Spirituality drawing on the work of theologian Harvey Cox in his book, The Future of Faith.  I want to follow up on that with thoughts and reflections by theologian Diana Butler Bass from an interview on the CBC program Tapestry.   The episode is entitled, Finding god in HGTV: a spiritual revolution http://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/finding-the-sacred-in-unexpected-places-1.3765363/finding-god-in-hgtv-a-spiritual-revolution-1.3765366

Diana Butler Bass looks at Spirituality and Religion as they are manifest today and raises a number of interesting questions and comments. 

Bass first poses the question, is Religion keeping up with the longings and questions of and for the 21^st Century e.g. What are people longing for – compassion and companionship/neighbourliness.  How do we embody compassion?

The God of 100 years ago – hierarchical remote was manifest in the establishment and practice of religion.  This is a God who is a being sitting on a throne somewhere in outer space.  This is contrasted with a God who is imminent, creative, with us; a God who is compassionate.  Do our hymns and architecture need to reflect that?  Is it enough to just reflect this in our theology and sermons and teaching?  A tension between the memory i.e. an idealized view of a golden age of Religion which can be just a few decades ago in some of our lifetimes when Sunday Schools were overflowing and church services were standing room only versus the apparent yearning for something beyond the materialism and competition of Western society today.  

What is missing for the way the 21^st Century does religion?  Concepts of science e.g. the Big Bang – all matter created some 14 billion years ago – we are stardust – what has been happening since is the rearranging of the matter – is this God’s plan?  What might this be leading to us to – perhaps a future like one envisioned by the Omega Point of Teilhard de Chardin.

Is Spirituality opening the door for individualism?  A charge by those who primarily care about religious institutions, that the spiritual movement is a base about self-indulgence.   How does religion connect with what people are longing for?  Does spirituality allow you to sidestep those things that challenge you?  Short answer, yes.  But organized religion is no guarantee that doesn’t happen in a church community. 

Bass proposes that one manifestation of spirituality today can perhaps be seen in the popularity of HGTV.  People are longing for home.   Bass notes that when she refers to her little home in her back yard where she does her writing and puts a picture of it on social media.  She is inundated with requests about where they could get the plans for it.  It is a sign of the desire for a ‘Room of one’s own’ to use the phrase by Virginia Woolf who wrote about it almost a hundred years ago. 

In reflecting on this, I am left with the question of the viability and future of a spirituality that is amorphous and all-inclusive that it means everything and nothing at the same time.  Can region in its structure and practice include and incorporate the aspects of spirituality which will enable people to explore and develop a mature spirituality that will bring them closer to the God which they are seeking.

 

After the Scream

Last week, I listened to the CBC radio program Tapestry which was discussing an exposition of The Spiritual Impulse in art, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/tapestry/mystical-landscapes-1.3842067/the-spiritual-impulse-in-art-from-van-gogh-to-monet-1.3842081.  It gave wonderful examples what could be described as mystical art by artists such as Van Gogh and Edvard Munch.

One example that engaged me on a deep level was the painting by Munch that directly followed his most famous work – the Scream which has that iconic image of a man in agony; a portrait of existential dread.  Munch was, not surprisingly, challenged by mental instability and spent some time in an asylum.  When he was released, he produced a work that expressed absolute radiance and joy – the absolute opposite of the anguish and despair of the Scream.  From his depths came the explosion of another kind – one is absolutely opposite in feeling and effect.  Rather than agony what was brought into being was  “The Sun”.  From the depths of darkest despair depicted in The Scream we travel to the heights of brilliant bliss of The Sun.

 

     
                                                    Edvard Munch. The Scream 1893
 

                                                   Edvard Munch. The Sun. 1910-13.

These two pictures are a wonderful exposition of the mystical journey or The Mystic Way as it was called by Evelyn Underhill.  As noted in the Tapestry program:
The Mystic Way (was) described by Evelyn Underhill as a five-part journey in which light periods alternate with dark.  It begins with an awakening, followed by a period of purgation, which can be seen as dealing with the shadow side of the psyche.  Then you come to a period known as illumination, where you start to see things in a new and perhaps original way.  For some this can be followed by the dark night of the Soul where there seems to be the absence of the divine.  The final stage is unity in which you understand that you are one with the divine.  Underhill understood this to be analogous to the artistic creative process.

For me, The Sun is an illustration of the beginning and the end of that journey – the alpha and the omega.  The image captures the essence of the journey which is the return to the beginning as described by T.S. Eliot, “We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.”

The image in the Sun is the explosion at the moment after creation - the Big Bang, when the universe was brought into beginning by the Word and began that Mystic Way.  It is also a final return to what Teilhard De Chardin called the Omega Point.  When all is joined in the ultimate unity. 

My you be blessed on your Mystic Way.

Our Time is Not God’s Time—Yes But?

Richard Rohr is one of my spiritual guides.  I find much of what he writes to be meaningful for me and to contain deep wisdom.  I subscribe to his Daily Meditations which arrive in my email on a daily basis as the name suggests.  I would strongly recommend and can be found at https://cac.org/sign-up.

Recently one of the daily missives was entitled Giving Birth to God (Richard Rohr's Daily Meditation January 28, 2015).   This meditation spoke of God’s creation as a process which is still happening or ‘winding up’ in Rohr’s words.  This is an understanding of creation that is attractive to me and one in which I generally believe.  Others such as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin have spoken of a process of cosmic evolution in which all of creation is still evolving and therefore is, in our terms, improving and which will lead to the evolution of consciousness in which the human species will become closer to God.  This view holds that God intends that God’s creation reach what Teilhard terms an Omega Point.  Liberals (of the theological variety and other varieties) will maintain that the world is progressing and becoming better.  They can look back and see how the human race had progressed; slavery has been eliminated (at least officially), science and technology have made our lives much better and more livable than people in previous millennia, medical science has brought us wonder drugs that will cure many diseases and brought us hip replacements and other medical miracles.  In many ways our lives (at least some of our lives) are much better than if we lived a thousand or a hundred or even fifty years ago.

In his Meditation Rohr speaks of what I understand to be the inevitable progress of history, “There is no doubt that history, like the biblical text itself, goes three steps forward and two steps back”.    He is proposing that although there is inevitable progress it is not a straight line—there are ups and downs, hills and valleys in the journey:

Even though we see violence, war, genocide, and stupidity, and we see religions and factions circling the wagons around their own tiny identities, yet always it happens that something like Vatican II, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, or Pope Francis comes out of seeming nowhere!

I am, as I noted, a believer in the evolution of human consciousness and the cosmos.  I do acknowledge that evolution and progress is not a straight line it is indeed three steps forwards and two back as Rohr notes. However, looking at events today I have to question whether the evolution of humanity is inevitable.  We have the obvious rise of terrorism in this century which seems to arise from forces from the collective unconscious of civilization and with it occurrences of slavery, torture, rape, murder, religious intolerance.  The predictable reaction against this in the West is increased intolerance and restriction in freedom (in the name of protecting those freedoms).  The consciousness of humanity does not seem to evolving but seems just as caught by these unconscious forces as they were in the past.  In addition we see the failure of science and technology as the panacea which will solve all our problems.  The diseases we thought had been eliminated are raising their ugly heads a la measles due to wilful ignorance and carelessness.   Bacteria are becoming more and more resistant to miracle drugs apparently through their God-given power to evolve.  The ecology of the planet is heading for the seemingly inevitable tipping point which will cause mass destruction and harm to much of this part of God’s creation—again through wilful ignorance as well as materialistic greed and short-sightedness.  On reflection, I do not believe that progress or evolution is inevitable—at least for the human part of God’s creation.  We may well destroy ourselves as our capacity to create for worst as well better out strips any evolution of consciousness which may be occurring.  If we do destroy ourselves God’s plan for creation will continue in perhaps a different part of creation or perhaps begin again in this world but there is no guarantee that that this iteration of humanity will be a part of it. 

My perspective may be nothing but my limited perspective—it is indeed limited.  My time is definitely not God’s time.  My understanding is not God’s understanding—thank God.   However, God has given us free will to do with this world and ourselves what we will—for better and for worse.  Let us make it for better. 

Readers of this blog might enjoy my book The Ego and The Bible.  It is available on Amazon.ca:

 http://www.amazon.ca/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=THe%20Ego%20and%20the%20Bible%20z

 It is also available on Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/Ego-Bible-Stories-Divinely-Intended/dp/1500759155/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419870942&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Ego+and+the+Bible