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.

 

Letting God Out of the Box

Is your God - or I could say, your idea of God – safely inside a nice comfortable box?  This is probably a rhetorical question because I think if is inevitable that we either consciously or unconsciously put God into a box to contain our idea of God.

Now, at this point you might be asking, what about atheists?  They don’t believe there is a God.  Now I could interject and quote psalm 14, “Fools say in their hearts, ‘There is no God.’”  However, that would be unfair and what would be the point is quoting scripture to an antsiest.  To stay on point, saying there is no God is actually a way of putting God on a box which is labelled no God.  As I recall from my grade 10 or 11 math a null set is a is a subset of every set (or something like that as grade 10 was a long time ago).   Another way of responding to an atheist is, tell me about the God you do not believe in. 

Some boxes that a person can put God into can be very well defined.  It might be that God is in a box that is defined by the Old testament - a God of judgement that can strike down enemies of the builder of the box.  Another box might have walls that are defined by love.  Another might be a God that set things in motion and then sat back and watched creation unfold according to the laws God established at creation without getting involved any further.  Other boxes may have very expandable and rather nebulous walls such as the God of Teilhard de Chardin who saw God as the omega point or the God of process theologians who saw God evolving along with God’s creation.  This is a box that seems to allow for a God who is both immanent and transcendent – which is another pair of boxes we can put God into.

So, given that we can have boxes in which put our version of God, does that really matter?   Does the God we believe in affect the way we live or is it the other way around?  Is who we are – the type of person we are (I could say how God created us to be but that would be a bit circular), determine the type of box we construct to put God into?   I can’t say that I have reached any conclusions on that.  However, perhaps what I am suggesting today is that it is useful to consider the box that you have put God into and to consider what happens if we discover something which may be from God that don’t fit that picture we have about God.

Perhaps exploring this could produce something worthwhile – bear some good fruit. 

Blessings on your journey.

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.