The Error of Ego

There is a wisdom that only humility can teach. But it does not come in the form of some factual knowledge - some thing to be possessed or known - that the ego would love to grab hold of and claim as its own. Tis wisdom is merely an opening through which far more than the ego could imagine flows.

I cannot claim to know that wisdom, because my teacher has told me it is not mine to hold or mine to claim and name. It is something that only has existence in letting it go and in giving it away. This wisdom is quite simple in its message: that I am a human, like every other human on this planet. In learning this, through humility, one has to accept that what lives in the most wretched terrorist is also resident in me. It is easy to claim brotherhood with the mystics (and loads of fun for the ego to claim as his understanding!). But to know that I am no different - NO DIFFERENT - than the poorest of the nameless untouchables or than the foulest and most hate-filled zealot, is the humiliating (humbling) lesson.

But least I get ahead of myself, let me walk you through the steps of getting here. For whatever reason and by whatever means, I have been recently opened up to a new level of understanding and feeling emotions. And with that level of perception came the awareness of other people's emotions as well - not some people's emotions, not just my friend's emotions; all people's emotions. It is the one thing we all have in common, irrespective of circumstances, history, culture, gender or any other aspect of life. The bottom line of the human experience is that we are blessed or cursed with that region of our brain that produces emotions.

Now, truth be told, many are not aware of their emotions, or if aware of them, do not know how to access them, or may not know the full extent of what they are and how they work. But we all have them. That translates into something like seeing a picture of a Syrian father grieving the death of his child and knowing full well that you do not need to know his religion or speak his language to
understand his pain or well up with tears.

But if that is true - that we all are given the same capacity of emotion - it levels the playing field. It means that we are actually, on some level, all the same; created the same, evolved the same. We all bleed the same and die the same way. By placing myself apart from, or different from another human (which is what we do when we outcast them, vilify them and make them "them") I am living in the state of egoic superiority and denying my fundamental humanness. I guess I can no longer do that.

And now that I have painted myself into that corner, we are left with the question of what to do. I will try taking that on tomorrow.

Jumping Back in the Pool

I took a semester off last spring - the official reason being that I had a truck load of work to do. But that's what I call the pretty lie not the dirty truth. The dirty truth is that last fall's course in Systematics just poked me in the eye! I walked away from the experience feeling like I belonged nowhere. I could not claim my Lutheran heritage; I certainly wasn't Calvinist or Catholic; I didn't care for the otherness of the Jewish God and couldn't adhere to the "I'm not worthy" aspect of basic Christianity as I have heard it preached. The desert fathers had something as did the Gnostics, but modern theologies seemed to be coming unglued. Nothing fit. So I went on, what we call in Men's work, a walkabout. It is a kind of desert experience outside of the village walls - an emptying and listening time. And I took notes - here's what I learned.

I am most certain that I experience, have experienced and will continue to experience the presence of god inside of me and in, through and around everything outside of me. I am certain that the teachings of Jeshua of Nazareth (or Jesus if you prefer) are not only profound but totally misunderstood by the masses of those with whom I speak. Despite that, I find them (in the way I read them) to be compelling. But I am equally convinced of the truth of the Buddha and his legacy of teachers whose words simultaneously disturb and enlighten me. And most importantly, I am convinced of the universality of those teachings and others like them - that one and only one source could cause such diverse sources to have such a common cause and message.

I cannot deny that any more than I can deny my name... or my calling to stand among the next generation of teachers, preachers and laborers in the field of spirituality. And so tomorrow I shall jump back in the pool and see if I sink or swim. It is the only way I know right now.

Separate Truths

Commentary on Professor Prothero’s “Separate Truths” (with apologies for the length.

First of all, I cannot step over the need to express appreciation for Professor Prothero’s daring and well-informed essay in the Globe Ideas section (Sunday, April 25, 2010) – daring in its venture in to the un-vogue territory of recognizing and embracing differences (and in particular religious differences) and obviously well informed from the Professor’s years of study. Furthermore, I admit to not having read the full text from which his comments are taken. But unfortunately, from my personal perspective as a novice student of theology, the article fails on both the front end assumptions and on the concluding end of resolution.

The Professor points in great detail to the many differences between the world’s religions as the foundation of his argument and produces from that foundation the obviously related concept of their mutually exclusive goals, using as example the differing goals of various sports. Obviously earth’s many peoples and cultures have a plethora of differences. Why for example do roofs on Norwegian houses have a different pitch than those in the Sonoran desert? Why is the attire of the Inuit inappropriate in the Congo basin? Or allowing for the sport analogy, why must one relinquish the ball when tackled in rugby but cling tightly to it in American football, its second cousin?

The questions that might be asked are not how are these sports different in goals and rules, or why do houses and clothing differ, but rather why do humans play sports and games and why do they seek shelter from the elements? Do we as humans share a need to believe in something, and if so how do those beliefs evolve into group think, cultural mores, out-grouping and hate crimes or perhaps in a shared need to find commonality? While the professor sweeps aside Karen Armstrong’s earlier work, A History of God, he might do well in reviewing her more recent deep dive in The Great Transformation.

In this more recent work, Ms. Armstrong ties together not so much the tenets of some major world religions, but rather the socio-political and economic precedents to them. Evolving out of some common threads in world history and founded in what appears to be a universal human need to understand one’s existence, Armstrong makes a more compelling argument for the commonality of the human spiritual quest. The great sages that developed those religions she traces did so in an effort to make sense out of human suffering and tragedy. Our pains, large or small, personal or societal, are differently named (as our sports are) and so, in the dualism that follows defining one thing from another, the courses of action and thought processes that ensue are even more radically differing.

Humans appear to have a shared need to understand their existence, how they got here and to what end they are moving. Even atheists have an explanation to the why and what of existence (personally I love reading Douglas Adams’ brilliantly articulation of the atheistic point of view). The problem comes not from the religions, theisms and a-theisms, but rather from the very human act of meaning making wherein we all differ radically. Our brains have evolved to make sense out of the myriad stimuli bombarding us at each instant and to relegate some to meaning and others to irrelevance. The bulk of that happens through what psychologists call associative learning – “this is like that.” Since no two people (not even identical twins) share exactly the same perspective, our meaning-making begins to differ from the time we are born (and some would contend even before that). Thus when these somewhat to wildly differing meaning structures encounter human difficulty and the ensuing need to make sense of it, it is a wonder that there are not 6 billion religions on our planet.

But we talk to each other, and something as important and central to life as why we are here and where we are going frequently comes up, eventually rolling up to some commonly held themes as “our beliefs” – and the rest, as they say, is history. Additionally, along with the evolution of these beliefs and themes, our moral/ ethical processes also develop (some more than others). The Professor would no doubt be aware of the work of James Fowler, who outlines the stages of spiritual development from the undefined to universalized (an understanding level few ever get to). Parallel to the work of Kohlberg and Perry, Fowler found that development may stall out at some level, and as Perry found, under duress or challenge, people often regress to a lower level of understanding such as fundamentalism. There, life is simple once again – there is a right and a wrong and everything fits neatly into the package. To the fundamentalist, right comes from god and anything diverging from that is false, and therefore comes from the devil. Combining these aspects of human psychology with the evolutionary history of religions produces a vast array of religions and belief structures not only about morals, ethics and their source, but about who is or is not included and excluded from the defined principles and goals.
And to what point should this argument take us? Professor Prothero correctly points out that denying the differences is both ignorant and insulting. Whether fundamentalist or enlightened universalist, spiritual beliefs are closely held and sacred to the holder. Disavowing those individual beliefs, whether by exclusionary practices or pseudo-intellectual feints toward inclusiveness, is not just ignorant, it is morally wrong. Trying to make things fit neatly into our pretty little ethnocentric packages has virtually destroyed the environment, raped the land, justified wars and genocide – you name it. History should have provided enough evidence that such beliefs and practices don’t work.

But there is a pluralism that embraces diversity that may be a step beyond Dr. Prothero’s end point (which may perhaps be included in his book). Diversity requires our embracing differences as other component parts of the human condition. Not including the perspective of some Aboriginal villager in a world economic forum is as blind as not accessing the creativity of a person living with a mobility handicap when discussing a corporate strategic plan. Religious diversity is not adopting the “New Jerusalem” ideal that Stackhouse espouses, but rather making room at the table for every perspective in discussing our plight.

The problems of today’s world are more complex than ever and some might contend, are foretelling our demise. Unless we recognize that the solution is the unwieldy and awkward coming together of human perspectives, we may not be able to do anything about it. Adam Kahane outlined the process of creating resolutions to the complex and difficult problems presented at the Mont Fleur (South Africa) and in the Vision Guatemala discussions – both of which sought to include representatives of all elements in the discussions. Because religions play such a central role in the actions of peoples around the planet, they may (some would say should) have a role in working toward both a global peace and environmental survival. We as a people are suffering, and suffering, as Armstrong points out in her concluding paragraph of The Great Transformation, “shatters neat, rationalistic theology.” We need to let the pain of genocide in the Middle East, attacks like 9/11 (resulting in our retaliatory warring), and the suffering from natural disasters sink in and shatter the self-righteousness of exclusionary belief systems. We need compassion; a compassion that accepts others’ individual differences and that has room for differing beliefs. We need to follow the lead of Tony Blair and others who are attempting to call the religions of the world together in inclusive mutual respect (for our many differences) and, placing all the guns and knives on the table, begin the process of open and healing dialogue – trusting that somewhere in their respective practices love and compassion have a voice.

Another One Bites the Dust

For years I have been trying to get it right (whatever "it" is). It was a journey to perfection that I thought would refine my being. If I could only get this right or that perfect, then... Then what? I would be perfect, or right, or whole? I don't think I really thought much about the "then what" part.
But lately I have begun seeing that perfection is a false idol. It is idolatrous to pursue getting it "right" in the first place. God never tells us we have to get it right or perfect - not ever. Oh from time to time in the Bible there are human references to living the pure and chaste life. But those are man-made rules, not god-rules. God's rules are simple: "If and when you screw up, you get another chance - I am the reset button, just come to me and I will reset you."
What the quest for perfection creates, in reality, is separation. It creates a state of better than and worse than - a caste system of being and doing, if you will. Seeking perfection is seeking to rise above the masses, to get better and better and to reach a level of god-like-ness. It is trying to eat of the fruit of the Tree of Perfection.
But there is an alternative path that has been coming into view. When I let go of the drive for perfection,I begin to seek union, oneness and joining of the shredded and torn-apart life we live. Unity is embracing the "bad" with the good. It is the making whole from all of those parts I want to divorce from myself and pretend don't belong to me. Unity is god's commandment - but not just out there, in here as well. Unity demands that I embrace all of me, and do away with the distinctions of good and bad altogether.
And overarching all of this, the search for perfection is a search for certainty - the quest to know completely that this is it, the best, the fullest! In such a place there can be no doubt, and without doubt, there is no need for faith. And then where would I be. When I arrived at that thought - the thought that I would have no faith if I continued my quest for perfection, the wall came crashing down. And then the wall of divisiveness, came down, and then the insistence on good and bad, and me and other, each in turn fell. And one after another, as Freddie said, "Another one bites the dust, and another one gone, and another one down - another one bites the dust." Oh happy holy day!

Spiritual Discipline

Spirituality is a discipline not a concept, and of late I have been undisciplined. I have not been attending church services, I have not been praying at the beginning, end and/or the middle of my days, I have not been reading sacred literature. All of these practices and more are the disciplines of my spirituality, and I have become lazy and lethargic. Well it is not that I have become that - it's more like that is who I am and the disciplines take me away from my natural state.
I exercise every morning, and people always say things like, "Oh, you are so disciplined. I wish I could be like that!" That is not, I explain, discipline. I exercise because I have no other choice. Without exercise my left leg, orphaned by an athletic injury that cut off much of the nervous impulses that once went there, starts cramping up around 3PM or so. I HAVE to exercise!
But it appears as though my soul does not go into spasms if I forget to pray one day - and the next - and the next after it. It just withers and atrophies until one day I wake up all cranky without the slightest reason for why. My spirituality takes effort, routine and training. I believe the definition for discipline is a practice that shapes and molds the spirit. Without the regular rigor of those exercises, my soul looses shape - without the slightest hint. It just goes away.
Last night I did a whole mess of sit-ups for the first time in a while and my stomach aches today. It's a good ache, the kind I want to feel again in the pit of my soul.

Gifts

Least anyone reading my last entry (On Becoming An Elder) think me a depressive or negatively-oriented person, let me just add that life itself is a gift. Everything about is a gift - especially the present (time)! But do we really earn gifts or are they given, just because the giver wants to give? I think the latter, whether the giver is life, the cosmos, god, your best friend or a family member. Gifts are given, not earned.

Whizzing past 60 at relatively break-neck speed, celebrating its passage in living color, with family and a great many friends, but in celebration of life is how I would have wanted it - and befitting my attitude on life and living. This is all a gift. So much of my experience in life - the greatest percentage by far and away - is just given to me as a gift. I delight in every moment and even in retrospect have fully embraced the few lumps and bumps of my own screw-ups.

So if these gifts are not of my doing but the lessons of my failures are, then I can only lay claim to those. Oh sure - did I actually DO the accomplishments? Yes, I ran the Boston Marathon, yes I hiked the Himalayas, yes, I have DONE so many things of which I am proud. But these occur to me as the gifts of my privileged life - the gifts I have been given. Without the gift, they would not have been nearly as possible. So, yes, I did something with the gifts I was given. And when I messed up the opportunity - the gift - I learned, and grew, and gained. The gift never lost its giving properties.

So I seem to have talked myself into a corner here. Life is a gift (but only when I/we receive and do something with it), the lessons of failure, were sourced from a gift, that I could only receive after I got the lesson. So I either have to claim it all as mine, (given to me to do with and/or fumble as best I can), or recognizing them all as gifts, step back and be thankful for the abundance of gifts I have been given.

On Becoming an Elder

Well, it's official: I am now 60 years of age. It doesn't feel any different - really. Oh there are things like I can't life a refrigerator anymore and a solid day of construction makes me ache all over, but other than a few aches and pains, my mind still thinks I am something like 48, to pick an arbitrarily stupid figure.

But this number comes with some titles and labels, the main one of which that I would like to adopt is "elder." Now being or becoming an elder carries some trappings with it. For example, it is precisely twice the age we swore never to trust anyone older than, back in the 60's. It probably looks a tad silly for an elder to be rocking out to AC/DC, so my view of myself as a rocker may need some alterations. But most formally, an elder ought to be a mentor, not to anyone specifically, but to society and people in general.

So what is it that I have to give? On what do I offer my mentoring? All I really have to claim solely as my own are these scars - wounds from various battles - and lessons taken from really screwing up royally. But, you see, that is the wisdom of aging. We don't really learn much from our successes. We simply note it and say something like, "Cool, that worked!" But our failures - wow - we ponder them; we slice and dice and analyze them until we figure out where we went wrong and use the pain of the failure to make certain that the lesson sinks in so that we don't repeat the same mistake.

Several years ago I wrote an op-ed piece on what I called the "Shadow Resume" - the compilation, not of all our good accomplishments, but of our lessons taken from the crash-and-burn failures. That is what I have to offer today - I survived all of those tough, painful, don't-want-to-do-that again stuff. Perhaps it is all any of us really can lay claim to.

Unraveling The Threads

It is funny how this process works - this introspective thing, I mean. As I have been rapidly approaching the completion of six decades of residence on this orb, a date which is now less than a month away, I have been on a quest of unraveling the icon of self-ness which I have fabricated from the strands of memories, events, accomplishments and failures, to discover what lies beneath and beyond all of that. In two recent blogs I have peeled that down to the raw, naked "so what, now what?" However, that has all been about discovering who and what I actually am in my authentic self. But what then of god?
Following the same logic - that the concept of god is mostly a fabrication of myths and beliefs passed on to me by others, sewn together with experiences and reflections of my own - then what is or might be god that is not that when and if we are able to strip that away? The theologian John Ackerman makes the beautiful distinction between the god of our experiences and the experience of god. It raises the question of whether we can ever, really experience god's god-ness devoid of our preconceived categories and language for those experiences. Is it possible to have an authentic experience of the divine? I cannot speak for anyone else here, as I am certain to offend the righteous, the devout believers and he "faithful," so I will speak only of myself.
I have entered on a quest of discovery to seek the authentic experience of god without categories, words, theologies, epistimologies, and eschatologies (don't you just theo-babble!!). I choose to call this phase of spiritual development the Seeker phase (for lack of any better term). I feel like a Seeker. Armed with only a knapsack, a notebook (as it were) and nothing more, I have strapped on the proverbial hiking shoes and headed out into the wilderness of not knowing. These posts have been postcards from that trek, notes along the way as I continue to explore my unknown world. I would love to invite you along and ask that those of you who read these posts occasionally check in with me. Am I making sense? Do you take issue with these precepts? I will never know by myself, just as I will never know who I am without being in relationship with you all. Well? Is there anyone out there?

Undoing the Self

I think for the most part, developmental theories have it all wrong. Most believe that the tasks of growing, developing and maturing are learning what it is that we can accomplish and do with our lives. And while to an extent that is true, we make a critical error in assuming that is who we really are. As infants we make this discovery that we can grab and manipulate the things of our world. So as we grow we layer on that basic belief that the more we can do and control the more a unique individual we become. This, the theorists claim, goes on throughout our stages of establishment and generativity to a point when we can no longer sustain that level of output identified with our self concept. Thus in later years we are told we enter a period of decline and begin preparing to die! Erikson even says that we either get that as a level of acceptance or we fall into despair.

But what if our task as mature adults is not simplification and decline but one of recognition of the essence of who we really are? The complexity of the veil, the disguise we have concocted and used as the projected (false) self through all of those years, begins to unravel and be exposed for what it really is. Wisdom begins to recognize all of the actions and accomplishments as delusions and begins to detach from them in an effort to rediscover the true self that is already, and has always been, there. Simultaneously we begin to uncover the in-dwelling god that as well has been there all this time, from whom we have succeeded in distancing ourselves through all or our doing.

However, because we have such an investment in the idol we have constructed out of our accomplishments, this transition often does not happen without some significant disruption of the self, or more accurately, of the ego. Thus many only come to this realization after a near death experience, after a debilitating injury, after the body begins to fail. In the sadness that may fall into despairing over the lost trappings of our youth, we turn inward to contemplate (some for the first time) who we really are if we are not our doing-ness and our accomplishments. The great sages have been preaching this message for eons – that we are not what we do but how we are that matters. (part II to follow)

Of Joy and Suffering

I am preparing to run a series of workshops for the unemployed and soon-to-be-unemployed in our church and the first thing I think of is the emotional state that I hear everyone is in. But a thought came to me in this preparation that is a distinction I have not made before. Think of this: the nature of fear, grief and depression – of most “negative” emotions is aloneness. That is, we almost always experience those emotions uniquely and by ourselves. In fact, we most often feel that no one feels the same as we do, no one fears this or that thing the way we do at that moment. Who is comforted in the least by someone coming to you in your grief and saying, “I know how you feel.” Like hell you do! This is my grief, my fear, my depression and no one knows how it feels but me!

Now bear with me for a moment while we go to the other side. What about joy and passion and excitement? Who among you can contain those feelings; who, upon first feeling them, does not want to immediately jump up and find a friend or even a stranger with whom those feelings can be shared? Joy, passion, elation, excitement, and all of these “positive” emotions are made even better by sharing. They are public emotions where the downers are private.

But what if we have it backwards? What if we do not feel those emotions first and then have the public or private reaction? What if being alone is the source of fear, being abandoned is the source of grief, and being isolated is the source of our deepest depression? Contrarily, what if it incoming together that we first feel elation, if passion is the feeling only two or more can experience, and joy is only joyful when it is shared? What if?

I think our culture is suffering from a disease of epidemic proportions – the disease of individuation or individualism. We suffer from terminal uniqueness. We are so convinced by the harangue of advertisements and marketing that insist that we can “have it our way” – from form-fit clothes to designer drugs. But we humans were meant to be social creatures – to come together, not to move apart. In indigenous cultures where the norm is belonging, people are invariably described as happy and the incidence of depression is almost nil. Even their grieving is done collectively – but then it is over.

So this job search group will not be an individual experience. We will be in it together, to draw from the positive energy of being with our own kind, to share leads and laugh through mistakes and learn collectively. And in doing so, perhaps we can fuel the passion, and increase the joy, and revel in the success that can only come from working “with” instead of “against.”

Rock Concert

Last night at school I experienced a edu-nerd's delight. The class was set up to be a lecture and discussion with Max Stackhouse, one of the most prolific writers in the field of theology. Max's specialty is the ethics of globalization and creating "moral business." But Max brought with him one of the foremost legal ethicists to critique and cross-examine him. And following them were a cadre of Boston's finest theological and legal minds.

And just when we were getting seated, in walked another, and I should mention, unsuspected icon; Harvey Cox. I know that might not mean much to some of you, but for me it was like being at a Bruce Springsteen concert and having Jackson Browne walk on to the stage, just for fun, to jam with his old pal.

Now Max has written over a hundred books and is without question an authority, but none has ever made the NYT Bestseller list. Harvey has done it three times - The Secular City, Feast of Fools, and Seduction of the Spirit. I was in geek heaven! I got to listen and then ask questions of some of the greatest thinkers in my beloved field.


Interestingly one of my classmates asked me afterward why I had not challenged Max like I do so often in class - Was I worried or just respectful? My answer came from my dad - "when you are in the presence of a master, shut up and take notes!" I say, when you are at the concert with The Boss, listen and enjoy the music!

Rock on!