spiritual genealogy

historical jesus

i haven't posted here for ages, but there is just so much being published now on the historical Jesus that I want to share.  I love anything that makes Jesus more real for me.

"Rabbi Jesus," "Rabbi Paul" and "Mary Magdalene" by Bruce Chilton make all this research eminently readable for the non-scholar, opening up a fascinating world for the christian and non-christian reader alike.

Highly recommend!

imagination & its (unacknowledged) place in religion

july 10, 2005

"my eyes look towards the hills, from whence my help comes"

when i studied theology, i learned that the early authors of the bible saw thunder and lightening on the mountain tops and believed that the life-giving rains were God's blessing to them.  Today, religious people quote this passage to express their sense of dependence on God in their lives.  But do they literally believe that God lives in the hills?  No.  It's a figure of speech.  It's a spur to the imagination.  It reminds us to 'look up.' In my more religious days I would definitely have interpreted that passage as meaning that when I needed spiritual help, for example, if I needed more courage or more faith or more love, I would have 'looked up' - to my higher nature, to the indwelling Holy Spirit, often pictured as a dove or as a breeze, both of which are celestial images associated with the sky.  I would have 'looked up' to 'God in heaven.'  When i was a child, and I prayed, i directed my energy to the third eye point, where a certain very positive energy seemed to reside.  Later, I would learn more about that in the kundalini tradition, with its mind-body maps.

my point is that religious language is the language of the imagination.  it deals in images: God is imaged as Father, as Mother, as Savior, as Pure Truth, as the Oneness of Everything (some of these images are at the bare edge of conceptualization.)  Paula, of Paula's House of Toast, wonders about applying the phrase 'the body of Christ' to a robin red-breast.  But in some theological traditions, all of nature is the incarnation of God, and someone like Jesus is the special exemplar of that truth.  (All of nature suffers, as did Christ - another parallel with the 'body of Christ' notion.)  In fact, when I was a little girl in a predominently Catholic neighborhood, the robin red-breast was considered to be a 'sign' or 'reminder' of Christ's passion,  because the robin made his appearance at the beginning of Lent, the church season leading up to the Passion of Christ (ie his suffering and death). 

I believe that religion is really all about imagination, personal improvement, and social structure.  I think the part about religion being about imagination causes confusion in many minds because...

...we think the imagination has to do with what is not real.  There are times when that distinction is useful, as for example, when we are trying to find out if someone only phantasized about robbing the vicarage, versus actually doing it.  But what gets lost in that distinction is something that cats like Augustine and Wallace Stevens seemed to know: that the imagination links us up to some deep stratum of truth.  Imagination links us with what is real. 

This is why, for people like me, saying that hoary bible stories are 'myths' does not make them less 'true.'  They are just not literally true.  Take, for example, the story of Noah's

Ark.

  There are people trying to scientifically prove that the Great Flood really happened.  Fine.  Maybe it did.  But it doesn't matter to me, because for me, whether there was a flood or not, a Noah or not, an ark or not, the story is still true: life is something precious that is floating in an ark (the earth) through an environment (outer space) that is fundamentally antithetical to it.  The Genesis Creation story really rocks on this level of interpretation.

You might think all of this goes without saying.  Perhaps you watched Joseph Campbell's 'The Power of Myth' years ago on PBS.  This is old stuff.  But I don't think so.  There are, apparently, lots of people who still believe that their religions are literally true.  This prevents them from seeing the truth in other people's religions.  This is very dangerous, because it brings us back to those hideous times and places when people actually killed each other over religion: actually, this is the present-day situation in many parts of the world. 

We all image God differently.  That's clear, even within religions.  We dream of ideals like peace, love, heaven, harmony, equanimity, etcetera, partly because we have experienced these things at different moments in our lives.  Our memories keep those moments alive in our imaginations, and we hope they'll guide us to find them again in our day-to-day lives, in the contexts of our families, our work-lives, our larger social realities.  So we go to our church, or temple, or mosque, and repeat 'magical incantations,' known as 'prayers,' such as 'may all beings be happy,' or 'forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,' and many other such prayers in the hope that these things will happen...again, ...or for the first time. 

These prayers are not different in intent whether they are uttered in English, Arabic, Sanskrit, Pali, Hebrew, Malayalam or Athabaskan.  Why can't we all pray together? 

                                                                        *

Here's a good example from 'The Zen Works of Stonehouse' (p.87):

See your nature become a buddha there is no other buddha
the ancients said it best
then you grab but nothing is there
don't be misled by words
despite the million kinds of fiction
all lead back to a single truth
this old monk is writing it down

school of christianity

I like to think of religions as schools, because the potential is there to learn a lot.  Also, like schools, some are better at passing along valuable information than others.

Today is Good Friday and also the Feast of the Annunciation, the day the Virgin Mary was visited by an angel and heard that she was to become the Mother of God. One of the things I learned at the school of Christianity that I was fortunate enough to attend, is that the Angel announces to each one of us that God is to be born within us. God is present within us like an egg. Once fertilized, our God-nature becomes gradually more and more apparent, at first appearing like a child and at last maturing into a fully grown human being. 

I attended several schools of Christianity during my earlier life.  The first one was Roman Catholicism in the 1950’s, and the emphasis there seemed to be on rules and social behaviors.  There were all sorts of competitions going on among groups and families in our community that revolved around church.  I didn’t get much out of that.  I’ve heard it said that religion exists to help society, but spirituality is about the individual.  As a child I was fortunate enough to experience the gift of spirituality, even in the context of this first school of christianity.  The annunciation (above) pictures what I personally got out of that first school: the sense that I could go within and meet God, the notion that prayer and contemplation were a valuable part of life.

My next school of Christianity centered on love, forgiveness and healing.  It was a school of reconciliation, for people who needed to forgive and be forgiven, for people who needed to heal.  It was right after the Vietnam War, the drug explosion, and the destabilization of society by the civil rights movement, so there was a lot of pain around.  Our group was especially focused on the Holy Spirit as guide and teacher and source of personal transformation.  Of course, there were members of our group who felt that people needed to comply with formulaic belief statements in order to be christians, but it didn’t take me long to see that those statements were not at all important, and what mattered was the intentions in the heart.  If a formula expressed how you really felt, fine, but I learned the difference.  Spiritual experience became the most important thing to me, because it seemed to me that everything we needed to learn, and to see, comes from within, if we can just listen attentively.  As for personal transformation, I saw our intent as bringing to us what we needed for changing ourselves, for becoming more who we really were, uniquely ourselves, designed by a loving God. 

The third school of Christianity I attended was centered on the suffering of Christ.  My earlier, first school focused on this a lot too, but in a different way.  The first school saw the suffering of Christ as God’s way of atonement.  But the third school saw Christ’s suffering as having something to say about our suffering, and the transformation that could come out of it.  This was the school of ‘a seed falls into the ground so that new life can spring up.’  This school helped people deal with the (perceived) failures of their lives.  Our American culture and society is very much centered on the concepts of success and prosperity.  But clearly not everyone is enjoying those, and even when we do, it isn’t necessarily going to last forever.  We are all going to have to face our eventual demise.  This particular school of Christianity is very compassionate, and wants to help us walk through ‘the valley of the shadow of death.’ 

It feels appropriate to review my schooling in Christianity on Easter Sunday. To express my appreciation.  I’ve moved on now to a university that seems like the perfect continuation of my education.  Within this university there is the vast and varied school of Hinduism, for one thing.  But my present school seems to have room for the whole world, so I won’t try to limit it with a name.  It’s Amma’s School, and Amma means Mother, so maybe her school is the mother of all kinds of learning.  It seems to be that for me.  I want to express my appreciation for all the wonderful schools of life and religion I've attended.

Wishing you Easter Blessings!  With Love, Karen

muslims forced to eat pork

The following is a story about my father, a life-long seafarer, who was already fifty-one years old when I was born.  He was a cancer survivor who’d lost the hearing in his left ear.  As a young man, he’d taught himself navigation, and rose up through the seamen’s ranks to become captain.  With English as his second language, and the condition known as ‘profoundly hard of hearing’, communication with my father was largely a non-verbal affair.  But he was nevertheless a master of communication, and despite his problems we had many long, intimate talks, with me mostly listening.  My parents friends used to say Niels could spin a yarn.

His fine blonde hair was turning gray, and thinning out on top, when I first knew him.  But he had the sea in his eyes, blue and gray by turns, according to his two chief moods, peaceful and slightly melancholic.  And sometimes the stars twinkled in those blue eyes, too.  He seemed to be nearly always good-humored, and there was some gentle knowingness in his face, which set people at ease.  I thought he was a remarkable man, and so did many others.  It was a privilege to know him, the old capt’n.

He used to point out the stars to me, from our wooden bench in the backyard, a small plot of grass behind a narrow brick house in Philadelphia.  The Seven Sisters was our favorite constellation, the Pleiades.  He explained how to use a hand-held sextant to navigate by the heavenly bodies.  He told me about the far-distant places he had seen, about South America, and the Middle East, Mauritius, and India.  I would go there with him in imagination, never dreaming that someday I’d stand in some of those same places myself.  He especially liked to talk about how varied the different cultures of the world were, and how there are many paths to the Divine, and we must treat the religions of other peoples with great, great respect. 

Even in his seventies he was still upset by an incident that occurred decades before, when he saw an instance of ‘man’s inhumanity to man’ in connection with diversity of culture and religion.  His ship was sailing in the Middle East, along the coast of Yemen or Saudi Arabia, during a famine in those lands. 

People were calling out to the sailors from the beach alongside the water, to please give them whatever food they could spare.  There was the usual language problem, but somehow they deciphered what the people were asking.  My father instructed that a launch should be sent ashore with whatever hard bread, flour and dried pease could be spared.  They could take these staples home and cook them for themselves.  But some of the men, laughing among themselves, went down to the galley, and returned with a sack full of chunks of cooked meat turning rotten.  They threw the sack onto the shore.  The people were so hungry, they began to devour the meat right on the spot, while the launch returned to the ship.  Once safely aboard, and underway again, these men shouted out to the starving Muslims, that the meat they were eating was pork!  As the ship pulled away from the scene, my father watched the desperate Muslims attempt to force themselves to vomit out the forbidden meat.  The pathetic sight made a deep impression on my father. He could never forget such cruelty, perpetrated by his own people, his own sailors.  He paid off the ship as soon as he could.  He didn’t want to work with that crew of men.  He was still affected by it, decades later. 

When I heard this story as a teenager, it deeply impressed me, and moved me toward the track I'm on at present.  I didn't want to be like those sailors, ridiculing the sacred tenets of others' religion & culture.  This was definitely a flagstone on my spiritual path, and a link in my spiritual genealogy.