The past few days I've been thinking about St. Paul's admonition to pray without ceasing.
It occurs to me that in a world where everything is sacred we already do this, whether we realize it or not. Our every thought, every word, every action (or non-action) is indeed a prayer.
The important questions then become
Who are we praying to, and
What are we saying?
If we can figure that out then we'll know who our god really is.
It is not for us to know who or how many or in what way our actions will make a difference. If you need to know that, then as the great Saint Teresa of Avila would often say to her nuns, "You are not ready for the task. Go back to the kitchen and peel potatoes." To truly be of service, you must never judge what life asks you to do. Rather, see the sacred in all things and in the smallest detail of your life.
Far and away the most futile admonition Christ ever offered was when he said, ‘Have no care for tomorrow. Don’t worry about whether you’re going to have something to eat. Look at the birds of the air. They neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, but God takes perfect care of them. Don’t you think he’ll do the same for you?’ In our culture the overwhelming answer to that question is, ‘Hell no!’
This quote, based on Matthew 6:25-26, comes from the fascinating book Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. I've been ruminating on this one since reading the book a couple weeks ago.
Several thoughts have come to mind.
First, and perhaps most disturbing, is the nagging feeling that based on those two verses alone most of us who claim to "believe in Jesus" may actually be atheists without knowing it. For years I've been toying with the label functional atheism. I define a functional atheist as "one who claims to believe in Jesus but lives as if he doesn't". In that sense those two verses are a bit of a punch in the gut.
Another thought: What happens if we try to eliminate the anthropomorphic basis of the passage? I realize I'm taking liberties here, but lets take ourselves out of the story for a moment. What are we left with?
God cares for the birds.
God cares about birds.
Keeping in mind that I no longer see God as an old man on a cloud, allow me to slip back into old habits for a moment and ironically ponder just how pissed he's going to be when he notices we've been killing off his creations at an alarming rate. More to the point, and more in keeping with the way I currently see life, the universe, and everything, I wonder what happens to this finely balanced work of art that is the cosmos when we arbitrarily and carelessly destroy what was apparently important enough to create and care for.
One last thought for you. I've been reading those verses over in the context of a recent article by the Guardian's inimitable George Monbiot on consumption. Talk about a one-two punch. What Monbiot says shouldn't surprise us, but we still don't want to talk about it. Recycling is a nice idea, and it might be slowing environmental degradation marginally, but the fact remains, we are consuming too much. Of everything. Including those of us who have been told to consider the birds of the air.
Remember what I said in the original post. We create a problem, we outgrow a problem. More than ever I'm convinced that 2000 years ago one of the things Jesus was doing was tutoring us on how to survive as a species.
This morning I was contemplating events of the past week both around the globe and in my own little world, as well as what I'm coming to see as the neurological elements of salvation, which I briefly touched on in the previous post.
Out of all that came this brief thought:
LOVE is a choice, then LOVE is a habit, then LOVE is who you are.
We are never going to see this planet in a more intact and beautiful state and one of our jobs in this age is to bear witness to that beauty. And so that's my excuse anywhere to try and get outdoors any way I can and it helps me along. Look, there is going to be a lot of inescapable tragedy in the years ahead. We are going to see, as we've seen in the past year, record numbers of what we used to call natural disasters, what we no longer call that. Disasters where our thumb is very much on the scale, that aren't acts of God, they are acts of us. Things are going to be trying and difficult and horrible in many ways but are also going to be a constant reminder of the need to get away from the hyperindividualism that has marked our culture and the very practical urgent utilitarian need to discover neighbourliness, because it is neighbourliness that gets us out of fixes and lets us deal with those kinds of things.
Some days I end up spending time explaining different English expressions to my Chinese friends. That's when you start to understand just how crazy a language English is, but that's a discussion for another day.
Right now I'm thinking of this one:
All in good time.
Reading the McKibben quote prompted one of those mystical moments where everything clicks into place and you can see the big picture. Let me try to explain to you what I'm seeing.
First let me say that Bill McKibben is nothing short of a 21st century prophet. And yes, I mean that in the biblical sense, whatever that is.
Next, here's what I see, and why I say that about McKibben.
Take Jesus' admonition to love your neighbour, love your enemies - Let's just call it what it is: Love everyone.
It's a nice sentiment of course. Warm and fuzzy, a quaint notion from the land of unicorns and rainbows. Not that we would ever be expected to actually do it.
So for centuries the Christian world paid lip service to the idea, while we advocated burning at the stake, stabbing, shooting, bombing, and electrocuting those we didn't care for. Killing them, in other words.
Then a funny thing happened on the way to the current era. Empathy appeared as an emergent human quality.
The English word empathy has only been around since 1909, when British psychologist Edward Titchener coined it in an attempt to translate the German word Einfühlungsvermögen. That's a mouthful. That word in turn had appeared at the end of the 19th century to represent this new phenomenon being explored by German philosophers.
The above is one of those great RSA Animate videos giving a short summary (10:40) of a longer presentation by Rifkin. (51:45). Watch the short one at least. Quite simply if you can get your head around the long view of Jesus' message it will blow you away, as it did me.
So 2000 years ago Jesus told us to love everyone. Certainly a handful of people since then have managed the feat, at least on their best days. But as a species we have found it virtually impossible, so much so that we generally write off this command as one of those strange things Jesus tended to say but we need not feel compelled to do.
Let me suggest an alternative theory. Of course this might require us to push out the walls of our theological box a little.
When Jesus set us on this path of loving everyone, he was doing just that - setting us on a path, a curve, a trajectory. He knew where we as a species were heading, and he was giving us a head start. He was signifying a major point of transition on the curve of human history. A moral, ethical, and as it turns out, a neurological one too.
There is a plan. That to me is astounding.
Of course, I no longer use the word plan as I once did - in the evangelical, chess-piece sense of the word. I use it now to represent an evolutionary intention, a potentiality, which is every bit as sacred and wondrous as the notion that "God has a plan for your life." It's more than that. It's better than that. God has a plan for our species. God has a plan for our planet. And, I have to believe, God has a plan for the cosmos.
So following in the way of Jesus is getting in front of this thing. It's being on the front end of the curve, leading, as opposed to hanging on to the back end, being dragged kicking and screaming into the future.
It is not only a plan of personal salvation, which I no longer define as saving us from eternal punishment later but from living a pointless life now. It is also a plan of cosmic salvation. And that is good news indeed.
I've been working with the pieces of this idea for a while now, but they fell into place when I read the quote from McKibben.
There's a dark side to all this too of course.
The timing of the events along this curve are not coincidental. The reason Jesus prepared us, and the reason empathy is emerging now, is because we need it now. Desperately.
If we do not love each other we are not going to make it.
To paraphrase the great physicist Max Plank, problems are not solved, they are outgrown. And as Albert Einstein said, you can't solve a problem with the same consciousness that created it. (It sounds to me like one of them stole the idea from the other, but we will never know.)
Throughout human history we have been playing a game of "crisis leapfrog." Create a problem. Outgrow it. Create a problem. Outgrow it.
This hasn't been a simple linear progression though, it's been exponential. As we have grown the scope and magnitude of the problems we have managed to create have grown too. For the first time in human history we have created crises that are potential world killers. The solution to these problems will need to be equally dramatic and global.
And it is.
Love everyone.
It turns out it wasn't just a nice idea. Jesus was starting the process of saving us.
That's what I think, and it becomes more and more clear as I learn to really see.
Thoughts?
UPDATE: Over the past few days I've been reading accounts of extreme weather events from Facebook friends. It seems Bill McKibben's book Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet is an absolute must-read.
A funny thing has happened over the past few months with my blog reading. For some reason I've abandoned my RSS feeds, and have reverted more to email subscriptions. Which means if your blog doesn't have a Subscribe widget I'm probably not reading it.
I'm a little late to the discussion surrounding Tim Keller's recent comments around the issue of Evangelicals, homosexuality and gay marriage. I actually was prompted by my friend Andrew's post, which pointed me to Peter Enns' post, and down the rabbit hole I went.
It turns out the same lines caught all of our attention.
"You're going to have to ask them to completely disassemble the way in which they read the Bible, completely disassemble their whole approach to authority. You're basically going to have to ask them to completely kick their faith out the door."
Here's the thing: I've given this some thought, and I'm no longer asking anyone to do anything.
The gospel of Jesus is meant to be lived out. Instead, there's a danger that we turn it into an exercise in navel-gazing, and we couch such self-aggrandizing behaviour in vacuous calls for "unity", which are usually nothing more than thinly veiled demands for others to think the same way we do.
I'm a follower of Jesus with an evolutionary worldview. Simply put, I believe everything is changing, all the time. I'm vitally interested in the evolution of human consciousness as depicted by some of the current development psychology models--Spiral Dynamics, Integral Theory and the amazing work of Ken Wilber, etc.--and I do not believe that religious unity is a possibility at current levels of consciousness. Oh, it's coming, and some are already there, but there aren't enough yet to carry the day. We are in a period of transition.
Earlier I stated that I thought the gospel--the good news-- was meant to be lived out. To expand on that a little here is my current "statement of faith", marking where I am at the moment on my own journey. I shared this for the first time yesterday with the class from Bakke.
"The message of Jesus is predominantly about how to be a better human, and about how we live now, as opposed to how to be a better religionist, and where we go when we die, and why."
Trying to be a better human is tough enough. Trust me, I need a lot of work. I don't have the time to argue these points of religion that no longer strike me as important or relevant.
I have opinions, of course. The current debate over this particular issue saddens me. But going forward I'm going to spend my precious, limited time and energy on trying to live an ever-increasingly inclusive life, as opposed to trying to convince others that they should do the same. And even as I write those sentences it strikes me that the former exercise honours my LGBT friends for who they are - beautiful creations carrying the spark of the divine just like me, while the latter treats them as Exhibit A in an argument which was never about them in the first place.
So, no more.
And there's something else. Something in the quote that I started with caught my eye for another reason.
Lets take another look.
"You're going to have to ask them to completely disassemble the way in which they read the Bible, completely disassemble their whole approach to authority. You're basically going to have to ask them to completely kick their faith out the door."
And again, he's right. But here's the problem, as I see it.
The metaphor of disassembly is unfortunately appropriate. What kinds of things require disassembly? Things welded, or glued, or put together with nails and screws and nuts and bolts. Things that are fixed, that were never meant to bend, to shift, to move.
I said earlier that I hold to an evolutionary worldview, that everything is constantly changing. Not least of which, we as a species continue to evolve. Perhaps not so much biologically anymore, but certainly consciously. And as we grow, our capacity to grasp the enormity and mystery of the Divine expands, even just a little.
At the same time, science also continues to grow, to develop, to expand our knowledge base. Dark corners slowly get illuminated.
And as this happens, certain course corrections will most certainly be required. If religion is a map of the territory of the Divine, then that map will need correcting, updating, and refining as we come to understand more about the territory.
The potential problem here is an obvious one: Over time we have come to mistake the map for the territory. Or to throw another metaphor at you, we now stare enamoured at the finger, and have lost sight of the beautiful moon it is pointing to.
Take a look at this quote from the Dalai Lama, and as a mental exercise where he has used the word "Buddhism" insert "Christianity" in its place.
"My confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as in science so in Buddhism. Understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation: if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims."
That, my friends, is spiritual courage. That is faith in every sense of the word. Finally, for at least one practitioner, that is a religion that will never require disassembly.
So, I'm done trying to change anyone's mind. Instead I will concentrate my efforts on changing my own heart, and see where that gets us.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
~ Richard Buckminster Fuller
Irrevocable commitment to any religion is not only intellectual suicide, it is positive unfaith because it closes the mind to any new vision of the world. Faith is above all, open-ness--an act of trust in the unknown.
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