Spiritual Teachers

Now that I am no longer a Minister of Word and Sacrament, but a Teaching Elder, I find myself ruminating on the folks whose writings and thinkings have guided me spiritually over the years.

As a child, that would have been Clive Staples Lewis, first as he lead me through the fields of Narnia, and then out of silent planets, and finally as I stepped into Mere Christianity.   As a fledgling, it was Fyodor Dostoevsky and Paul Tillich.  Oh, how I loved me some Tillich.  Must have been the dense Germanic sentence structure and the heady existentialism, all coupled with the use of obscure language.   I remember once looking up a word Tillich had used, because I had no idea what it meant.  In the dictionary was the definition, but as the example of how one might use the word, the dictionary presented...exactly the same sentence I was reading in Tillich.

That is some seriously epic vocabulary awesomeness.

Lately, I've been going to George MacDonald for spiritual guidance, and finding a remarkable amount of strength and grace in his words.  It's not for everyone, I'll admit.  But the past few years have often not been easy, and his ferocity of Spirit and his deep personal awareness of spiritual struggle come pouring out through and in between his writing.  On at least one occasion, he's stood between me and and spiritual disintegration.  Potent stuff, it is.

There have been others, many others, but I re-encountered one this last week who I'd not been in communication with for a while.  During the time of my coming into awareness of my call, I'd read her almost every day.  Her name was (is?) Deb Platt, and back in the mid-1990s she created an interactive online matrix of the most pertinent teachings of all of the mystics in all of the world's religious traditions.  You could read them sorted conceptually, by religious tradition (mostly Christian, but others), and sorted by religious teacher.  This was back when frames were cutting edge web-design, so it's been a while.

It was wonderful, grace-filled, and inspiring, and back when I was snarfing lunch at my desk at the Aspen Institute, I'd often move through the teachings she had intentionally compiled and presented.   It was half study, half meditation, and half prayer, in that 50% extra bonus sort of way.

Platt herself was consistently and utterly humble about her work.  She was not a spiritual guide, she'd say.  She was just a spiritually-inclined homemaker with some time on her hands, she'd say.  I'm not your teacher, she'd say.

But she was.

And then she disappeared.   Not raptured away, although that seemed a possibility, but as in stopped updating and building the site.  It sat for a while, fallow.  And then the account shut down, and all links lead to digiserve nothingness.  Emails got pinged back.

Years pass, but I haven't forgotten.  I'd search for her work, now and again, hoping it would resurface, finding nothing.

But then this last week, I found it on one of those wayback machine-type datamining sites.  It wasn't the last iteration, and the bleeding edge 1997 frames no longer really worked for navigation.  But the writings and ideas were there.

And so rise the stirrings of a possible next project, the one after my book is in final-ish draft, are born.  Because the Platt Mysticism Matrix would just rock as a deep, ornate interactive Prezi.  We'll see.

But whichever way, it'd be nice to do something that passes her work on.

Mysticism, Liberalism, and Post Modernity

Yesterday, as I walked to get dinner on a clear and beautiful Fall evening, I found myself inexplicably musing on a tension that exists between my own strain of flagrant and unrepentant liberalism and the liberalism of post-modernity.

I'm unquestionably a liberal, by any meaningful definition of that term.   I think the first response that any sentient being needs to have to an encounter with the new or the different needs to be openness, consideration, and forbearance.   That leads me to be open to gays and lesbians, open to people of other faiths, and open to individuals of varying political philosophies.  It doesn't extend to tolerance of intolerance, violence, and hatred, of course, but otherwise, we cool.

Underlying that worldview is a rather fundamentally mystic view of the nature of existence.  I believe that all things are interconnected, that I and you and everything are woven together in ways that we understand only through a glass dimly.  That sense of interconnectedness is itself undergirded and founded on my Christian faith, as I see my Creator's work all around me, and the potential grace of the Nazarene and the light of the Spirit in every human being I encounter.

Here, though, if I am honest, I think my foundation for liberalism diverges from that of secular post-modernity.

As I grasp that worldview, the underlying assumption is that all meaning is socially-mediated or derived from particular individual contexts.  There is no "truth," at least not with a capital "T", beyond those truths that we fabricate for ourselves.  What is good is what we individually say is good, and it is not possible to make any assertion of the good that extends beyond individual preference.

Within the context of that radically individualistic and particularistic worldview, tolerance of other perspectives arises from the assertion that if no perspective is normative for all, then no perspective is invalid.   We must accept all perspectives, because our own is just ours.

While both can yield acceptance of the stranger, one is an ethos of separation and difference, another, the ethos of interconnectness and union.

This, I think, may be one of the more significant distinctives between being a progressive person of faith and a secular progressive.  

Mystic Bling

Another of the ways that mysticism tends to get spun in our consumption-addled culture is as a means to the acquisition of more stuff.

Why should the mystic walk barefoot up the mountain, when they could instead float...on the buttery smooth suspension of their eco-friendly Lexus RX450h, their holy tushie coddled warm against the heated leather seats, as Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan serenades them through the astounding 330 watt Mark Levinson 15 speaker 7.1 surround sound system? Ah...such inner peace....

When you're connected to the universe in profound and mysterious ways, why shouldn't those connections result in the universe serving up some schweet, schweet schwag? After all, it's not what you know, it's who you know. And if you know the Creator of the Universe on an existential level, then why shouldn't you leverage your connectness, making Oneness with Being serve up some Oneness with Bling?

This approach to "mystic" faith can be found everywhere. It seems to have almost completely hijacked Kabbalah in the popular imagination, as folks traipse about imagining that the little red threads they wear somehow connect them with a future McMansion, or at a bare minimum will allow them to download Madonna's music for free.

This is, to use a delightfully archaic word, balderdash.

Though mysticism is earthy and practical and woven into the fabric of being, possessiveness is utterly alien to any true mystic. The desire to acquire is meaningless to those who yearn most deeply for God. As George MacD puts it:

The man who for consciousness of well-being depends on anything but life, the life essential, is a slave...

and:

But it is not the rich man only who is under the dominion of things; they too are slaves who, having no money, are unhappy from the lack of it.

and, here sounding remarkably like a Scottish mystic Yoda:

If it be things that slay you, what matter whether things you have, or things you have not?

The mystic renounces desire for power in all of its forms, be it economic or coercive. They simply cease to seem meaningful. The unsatisfied, ever-empty hunger of the consumer is unknown and unwanted. That doesn't mean living a joyless, stale, or austere life. It simply means a different way of standing in relation to creation, one that is far richer and more abundant. As MacDonald puts it:

He who has God, has all things, after the fashion in which He who made them has them.

Next to the touch of a breeze, or the smell of the honeysuckle, or the laughter of your children, or the bright moon on a clear Spring evening, the cloying cornucopia of consumerism seems a rather empty nothing.

The Practical Mystic

Mysticism is typically construed as being the faith of the esoteric, a faith full of odd chants and visions, of obscure dreams and convoluted ritual. Mystics are the folks who sit upon mountaintops wearing loincloths, muttering mantras in an ancient language as they delve into the stern and secret truths of the universe.

As I read through the writings of George MacDonald, I'm reminded again of how totally inaccurate that perception of mysticism is. Mystics are earthy folk. Thomas Merton certainly was, as was the delightful Jallaladin Rumi. For all of his passion and all of the depth of his engagement with Spirit, Christ, and Creator, MacDonald's deep sense of the reality of his faith does not pull him from connection with being.

Instead, it grounds and centers him, in both creation and in the practical needs of day to day existence. Take, for instance, the way he counsels those who are feeling distant from God:

"Troubled soul, thou art not bound to feel but thou art bound to arise. God love thee whether thou feelest or not. Thou canst not love when thou wilt, but thou art bound to fight the hatred in thee to the last...for the arms of thy Faith I say, but not of thy Action: bethink thee of something that thou oughtest to do, and go to do it, if it be but the sweeping of a room, or the preparing of a meal, or a visit to a friend. Heed not thy feeling: Do thy work."

As someone who has experienced many times that dark night of the soul, MacDonald has the way out quite exactly right. Don't anguish. Don't navel-gaze. Don't force it. Just do what must be done. It's an approach to faith that speaks to the here and now, to action in the meatspace reality of our being.

His delight in things as they are extended to his view of miracles. He doesn't reject them, mind you. He just sees such glory in the created order as to view all being as miraculous:

In all His miracles Jesus did only in minature what His Father does ever in the great. Poor, indeed, was the making of the wine in the...pots of stone, compared with its making in the lovely growth of the vine with its clusters of swelling grapes--the live roots gathering from the earth the water that had to be borne in pitchers and poured into the great vases..."

That fundamental wonder at all being is something that mystics of all religious persuasions seem to share. It is, once again, a pleasure to find a brother who shares my joy in experiencing the First Book.

Songs of Void and Emptiness

As I reflected on the violence of organic life yesterday, and how oddly incompatible it is with the love of God and enemy, I found myself looking upwards into the refracted blue of the sky and thinking about all that which is not life.

Creation itself is mostly nothing. Even I, as I write this, am mostly nothing. Yeah, I'm an organic life form. But if you drill down to the atomic and subatomic level, the physical form that is currently typing this contains far more emptiness than neutrons and electrons. The keyboard onto which this is typed, for all of it's clackity solidity, is also mostly nothing. But we miss this, because our perception is so limited.

As we look out into the immensity of the cosmos, that emptiness finally strikes us. It is at a scale that we cannot grasp, of a vastness of temporal and spatial measure that goes well beyond our ability to conceptualize. We can get a bit of it, through metrics and analogies. But the reality of it is well beyond the capacity of our minds to grasp.

And it isn't just empty of mass. It's empty of measurable feeling. It is, to us, both terrible and beautiful...but is completely oblivious of those categories. Love and hatred and loss and joy are not words that have any relevance to the lives of stars, or in the aeons over which a nebula dissipates. Though the mechanics of physics govern this immensity, and they can be grasped rationally, those natural laws are not themselves "reasoned." They simply are.

The resultant interplay of those forces also cannot be meaningfully described in terms of interpersonal or social morality. When tectonic plates shift, and a city crumbles or vast waves scour the land, and hundreds of thousands die, it is not malicious. Or cruel. Or hateful. It just is. When atmospheric conditions produce intense tornadic activity, and a town is razed, it is not that creation is feeling peevish, or is angry with the town for not being tougher on crime. It simply is what it is.

The vastness of the heavens and the interplay of matter and energy aren't moral or ethical. The music of the spheres is atonal, jarring, and disinterested in the needs of it's audience.

This poses an interesting paradox to the contemplative person of faith. Why?

Because when one spends time emptying self of self, and letting awareness of all things silence the endless internal jabbering of thought for a while, when you return from that peak state you return changed. But you are changed in a way that does not seem to reflect the great cool amorality of physics. Mystics are not hard-nosed pragmatists, or mechanistically utilitarian in their approach to other creatures. It has a rather different effect.

Confronted with creation's vast, near-chaotic dynamism, one becomes calm. Immersed in it's amorality, other beings suddenly matter more. After embracing that which knows no care or love, deep compassion for others is stirred. It is...paradoxical.

St. Augustine once famously called creation the First Book. As he and Calvin both affirmed, it's a nearly impossible book to read and comprehend...thus the need for our sacred texts to guide our understanding.

But perhaps it's not a book the way the Bible is a book, written in symbol. Perhaps it's more like a song, which is best understood not through analysis and deconstruction and debate, but by simply being still and listening.

Harmonizing

I encountered this delightful little video of scientists "singing" the praises of creation through the miracle of FaceBook, and felt obligated to pass it on after offering up the requisite tip o' the hat to Jeremy over at Master's Way. It's simple enough in it's own way, just another in a series of rather marvelous applications of Autotune. Lil Wayne hath wrought far more than one might have imagined.

After watching it, I drifted for a while into a reverie about that soaring place where science and faith almost...almost...meet. What I find fascinating about this video are two discrete but related things.

First, that it comes so very close to expressing the delight in the connectedness of all things that defines the experience of mystics within each of the world's religious traditions. Listening to this assemblage of scientists autotune their paean to the interwoven and interdependent structures of spacetime, I hear them harmonizing with Thomas Merton and Jacob Boehme and St. John of the Cross. Sure, it might be Carl Sagan, but with only minor tweaking it could also be Jalal'adin Rumi, or Chuang Tzu, or Thich Nat Hanh. The wonder they feel from their science is a close cousin to the wonder that the mystic intuits in those fleeting moments of union with all things.

Second, I found myself connecting connectedness to the core ethic of Christian faith. Folks of a radically atheistic persuasion will often argue that faith...particularly Christian faith, but they'll happily go after whatever you've got...is fundamentally evil. It's inherently irrational and opposed to science. Worse yet, it turns human beings against one another. Makes us hateful naaarsty peopleses!

But Jesus of Nazareth's message is a radical proclamation of orientation to the Other, a declaration of the fundamental unity of creation. We creatures are not separate from one another. We don't exist for ourselves alone, isolated from all other things.

Instead of focusing on our own interests, the central and defining fundamental of Christian faith is the ethic of love. That demands that we see ourselves not as isolated, separate beings, but instead calls us to understand ourselves in light of our relationship both to other beings and the One Who Is.

At its essence, Christian faith and ethics do not stand in opposition to the wonder many scientists feel at the intricate interweaving of ecosystems and cosmological constants.

It's a different spin, perhaps. But a harmonious one.

Polarities

As I continue to slowly digest my way through the theopoetic stylings of Jalal-a'din Rumi, I'm reminded of a strange paradox that occurs in our faith traditions.

That paradox occurs at the outer edge of the world's belief systems, where radically disparate theologies end up looking pretty much identical in practice. Islamic fundamentalists are really not all that different from Christian fundamentalists, who share many characteristics with ultra-Orthodox Jews, who aren't all that different from Hindu fundamentalists. Within all of these movements, the "other" is viewed with suspicion and/or outright hostility. Different traditions are a threat to the integrity of faith. Faith itself is radically dependent on tradition, whether that be in a sacred text or forms of ritual practice. That faith is viewed in radically binary terms, which is often framed by the language of conflict. Though the ultra-orthodox in every tradition would deny any meaningful spiritual ties with the others, they are, in terms of how the rubber meets the road, functionally the same.

On the other polarity of the world's faith traditions, there is an opposite but very similar phenomenon. As I've studied the mystical traditions in Christianity, what I find is that there is very little difference between someone like Meister Eckhardt or Jacob Boehme and someone like Martin Buber or Jalal-a'din Rumi. For the mystics, the divine is radically unifying, even outside of the bounds of their tradition. Their radical love for and yearning for God shatters not just the boundaries of the self, but also shatters the ways they categorically define "us" and "them." More striking, the experience of God that the mystics articulate is essentially the same. It is flavored by the language and concepts of the tradition from which the mystic comes, true, but the underlying experience appears to be something that transcends culture and language. Mysticism steers away from conflict, which is typically seen as a sign of spiritual failure. Instead, mystical faith finds that in seeking union with God, union is found with others. It is suffused with gentleness and grace towards the other.

It would appear, then, that among our many paths of faith there are two poles towards which we can be drawn. Both articulate, in their own way, an absolute. But one leads one way. Another leads the other.

GodSnack

As I continue to read my way through the poetry of Rumi, I pranged against an interesting spin on one of the more challenging things about a mystic approach to faith.

The poem is entitled "Chickpea to Cook," and its focus is a reluctant chickpea, which doesn't want to be part of the stew a cook is preparing. The chickpea has no desire to be eaten, to lose its sense of self and identity. It doesn't particularly want to be cooked, either.

The cook, on the other hand, thinks the chickpea is being selfish. "I'm giving you flavor," he says, "so you can mix with spices and rice and be part of the lovely vitality of a human being."

What Rumi is articulating is a desire that weaves through all of the mystic traditions within each of the world's great faiths. It's the yearning to lose oneself completely in God, to be utterly subsumed into the glory of the divine. As it's expressed in this wee bit of theological whimsy, Rumi articulates our purpose in being as giving God "...something good to eat."

This, I think, is the problem most human beings have with mysticism. There is nothing, nothing, nothing that we cherish in the world more than our own sense of self. We don't want to cease to be as we are. We cling to the unique assemblage of memories that form us, enfleshed in our uniquely patterned organic neural network. It is our existence. It is us. We don't want to let ourselves go.

When we conceptualize heaven, this is why we want it to be a place where we remain eternally as we are. Maybe a bit younger or a bit older, maybe a bit thinner, maybe with a full head of hair, but still us. This has never really appealed to me, or made any sense theologically. Here in creation, our "self" is a complex intermixture of genetic predisposition, experience, and memory. But moving into a direct and unmediated experience of God would seem to be something of a gamechanger for us as persons.

We know that individual experiences or events in our lives can have radically transforming impacts on our sense of self. After that first kiss, you are not the same person. After the first death of a dear, dear friend, you are not the same person. Why would we expect not to be utterly changed by God's presence, which is several orders of magnitude more intense?

If God is, as we faith-folk tend to say, both infinitely good and infinitely loving, why wouldn't we want to lose ourselves in God?

Compassion and Peace On the Planet of the Apes

One of the ways I tend to feel closest to God's presence in my admittedly rather feeble prayer life is by practicing self-emptying. Through stillness, song, or walking meditation, I try to still my endlessly nattering inner commentary. When that happens, which tends to be in little flickers here and there, I find myself feeling increasingly centered and deeply calm. I feel connected to that which transcends me, and to everything around me. Those moments are a delight.

The other day, after just such a moment, I found myself reflecting upon that state of being. In particular, I found my returning higher functions wondering if the silencing of my internal narrative represented a retrogression of sorts. When all I am is sensory inputs in the absence of any discernable thoughts, is that in some way analogous to the existence of "lower" forms of life? Creatures that exist in the absence of any language or symbolic forms of self expression must experience life in a similar way, being deeply and unreflectively in the moment.

Yet what struck me as peculiar about the act of meditation this week was that silencing my higher functions and seeking negation doesn't light up my...ah...more...um...animal self. I do not become more ferociously competitive, or hungrier, or so horny that me want to love you longtime. Those parts of me that are just a few genetic ticks away from having a bit part in Treachery and Greed on the Planet of the Apes aren't released when I let my "self" grow still.

I just feel more connected, more at peace and at one with others...and more compassionate. When faced with conflict or deeply troubled, these forms of prayer are where I go, and I come out of them not just mentally more level, but physically calmer. My body is involved in the process, and it is significantly impacted. But it is only when I still those higher functions, what I would typify as my reason or symbolic awareness, that I reach that elusive peak state of oneness.

This is a common understanding of the mystic wings of all of the world's significant faith traditions, yet it flies in the face of a common assumption. That assumption is the good ol' Cartesian split between mind and body. The idea...and it is a modern one...is that it is reason that balances and controls the snarling red-in-tooth and claw beast that lurks in our animal nature. Reason must be good. Our emotional and physical responses? They must be controlled and limited by reason.

But reason and intellectual rigor are not the answer. This comes as a great disappointment to my fellow Presbyterians. Both mind and body must be stilled, if we are to be opened to the self-emptying of a Christ-centered existence.