The Spiritual Middle

Surfing the Wave

I watched my first “surfing movie” last night, Thicker Than Water, thanks to our friend N.C., who comes from a surfing family in Donegal.  Not much in the way of plot, but deeply calming—mellow music and image after image of surfers finding stillness and poise in the midst of intense, dramatic waves.  I’m sure that children would benefit from watching something like this, instead of cartoons, video games, or the Wiggles.  After all, we come from water, and I’m sure that we remember it at some level of our being.

Wondering when surfing was discovered, I suddenly had this thought:  a surfer is the fulfillment of a wave's nature.  For billions of years, waves have presented themselves, over and over again, as if waiting for someone to discover their potential, someone to dance with them, someone to accept their extraordinary offer.  My partner Andrew said, "the surfer is the wave becoming conscious of itself".

Religious Education

In the U.S., the religious right wants to bring religion--particularly one religion--back into the public educational system.  The left is terrified of any mention of religion in schools.  They are concerned that religion will be promoted, or that one particular religion will be promoted, and that this will jeopardize our fundamental freedom of religion.  In order to preserve freedom of religion, the left seems to want freedom from religion.

But I suspect that they are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, for the lack of religious education in schools means that children are not being taught at all about what is perhaps the biggest influence on the values and decisions of most of the world's people.

In the U.K., religious education is part of the curriculum, all the way through school. The RE curriculum is well thought out, creative, and age appropriate.  Children learn about the beliefs and values of many different traditions, without the promotion of any particular religion.  What this achieves is not religious obedience, but religious tolerance and interfaith understanding.  It also means that children are having thoughtful discussions about values.

If children do not have classes in school that cover religion and/or philosophy, how do they learn how to reflect, think for themselves, ascertain their own values, or appreciate other peoples' values?  If children are only taught skills and facts, then they become grownups who are not particularly deep or reflective.  They become technicians, who apply their technology onto the world without much self-awareness.

A middle position, it seems to me, would be to create a space in which the world's religions could be studied and explored as if they really mattered, where children could discuss their own beliefs openly, without fear of ridicule, and without facing the charge that these beliefs are inferior for being unscientific.  In other words, a) teach science in the science classes, b) make room for learning about faith in other classes, and c) make sure that this covers all faiths, not just one.

Faith and Fear

Most public criticism of religious fundamentalism seem to come from the secular left.  But I'd like to hear more such criticism from the millions of moderate (and modern) religious people out there.  (Three cheers for the United Church of Christ's anti-fundamentalist ad campaign:  God is still speaking.)

Are moderate religious people afraid to distance themselves from fundamentalists?  Are they afraid that they would be cutting themselves off from their core?  I hope not.  No religion with a living, spiritual heart has anything to gain from fundamentalism, and in fact has much to lose.

Religious fundamentalism is often seen as an attack on 'Godless' secularism.  But it is also an attempt to deny people a living, evolving relationship with their spirituality. Fundamentalism relies on old doctrines rather than active engagement.  Afraid of growth and change, and above all, modernity, fundamentalism is a regressive attempt to replace living experience with willful ignorance.  But if our faith rests on fear, then where's the faith?     God has nothing to fear from modernity.  God is certainly not afraid of our doubts, our questions, or our evolution.  God has nothing to fear, period.

Gratitude (and the Alaskan wilderness)

In the U.S. Senate debate on drilling for oil in the Alaskan wilderness, Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, showed pictures of a caribou and polar bear, saying, "To me this is a God-given environment".  (The New York Times)

Now, I have heard some very interesting arguments from a Republican friend about why it’s better to be drilling in Alaska than somewhere on the other side of the globe.  (At least Alaska is home turf, where Americans might take more care and have to deal with any unpleasant consequences of our consumption.)  But it’s not my intention here to debate the pros and cons of this particular bill.

It’s just nice to see green-minded Democrats talking about the earth as sacred.  To me that’s a more appealing and unifying notion than the rational calculation of impending doom.  I would go one step further than Boxer does, however, and say that every environment is God-given, not just the Alaskan wilderness. Surely there is a strong religious argument for loving the Earth, and it would be great to hear more religious groups talking like that too. 

An Interfaith Pow Wow?

Here's my vision:  A residential retreat in which people of different faiths (or no faith at all) come together to explore diverse forms of spiritual practice.   Instead of lectures and panel discussions, we would practice together, opening ourselves through many different ways and means, traditional and modern, and focusing on spiritual experience, rather than belief.  We might discover what different traditions have in common, and what they can teach one another. 

Any suggestions?  Please comment.

If you'd like to be on a mailing list, please email me (I won't give your email to anyone else):

interfaithpowwow[at]becomingme[dot]com

Truer Truth

From David Mitchell's novel, Cloud Atlas:

"Occasionally, I glimpse a truer Truth, hiding in imperfect simalucrums of itself, but as I approach, it bestirs itself & moves deeper into the thorny swamp of dissent."

I want this blog to be a place where people coming from different sides of the swamp can reach for that truer Truth.  Can we approach it? Can we meet there?  I honestly don't know.

The political middle

The question for me is not what’s between the left and the right politically, but what’s bigger than both?  What is the truth that both left and right are seeing, although from different sides?  And what is the truth that both sides, in their partialness, might be missing?

This short poem came to me one day, many years ago:

We on

Two sides

Of the

Same Thing.

The Spiritual Middle: Why this blog?

I was raised in a family of "devout atheists".  We were liberal, ethical humanists, trying to save the world from within that narrow band of reality called the "rational mind".  So even when I began to question some of these assumptions, as a teenager, and look for something more, I didn’t turn to religion. 

My spiritual search developed via introspection, meditation, yoga, psychotherapy, breathwork, and experiments with altered states.  My friends on this path were a loose assortment of independent seekers whose lineage was more Beat or Woodstock than Church or Temple.  I was hostile to organized religion, and scoffed at the way most religious people spoke of “God”. 

But then, after many years of looking within, I was overwhelmed by several dramatic spiritual experiences that felt like direct revelations of the mind of God, reaching through the skeptical walls of my reason.  This was not the angry, jealous God cited by Bible-thumping preachers, but a God beyond boundaries—a pure intelligence, a limitless field of love.  Prompted by these experiences, I wrote a small book, Becoming Me, a creation story as told by the Creator.

When Becoming Me was published, I figured it would appeal mostly to fringe spiritual types like me, as it doesn’t quite fit into any one particular religious tradition.  Like most things mystical, it’s beyond all that.  It’s a bit Jewish, a bit Christian, a bit Hindu, a bit Sufi, a bit Buddhist, and a bit Native American, to name a few. 

What do I mean by the middle?

For many people the "middle" implies the worst of both worlds, an unhappy compromise between opposing passions.  But I mean the middle in a different way--not the muddy middle, a gray and lifeless place, but the transcendent middle, a new perspective that unites old oppositions into something bigger.  Not between boths sides, but beyond them.

This idea is best conveyed by the yin/yang, the core symbol of the Chinese philosophy of Taoism.  According to Taoism, in our normal consciousness we see the world strictly in terms of opposition.  Everything is either this or that, black or white.  But it’s also possible to step back and see the bigger picture, to see that black and white create each other, and that we can’t know one without the other.  Instead of seeing things in terms of either/or, we begin to see things in terms of both/and.

This stepping back, seeing how each side of the conflict is creating the other, and then getting the new idea, is transcendence.  It's a very hard thing to do, particularly when you're convinced that you're right.  But that's the middle I mean.

Schiavo and the Boundaries of Life and Death

In any right-to-die case I'm struck by how ignorant we are about the boundaries between life and death.  We see things in terms of life OR death, but I believe that there are many realities in between these two.

Our religious leaders know how to quote teachings on life and death, and are accomplished at conducting ceremonies for the dying or the deceased, but they are not practical experts in what happens in-between life and death.  As science extends the boundaries of physical life, our lack of understanding at what happens spiritually and psychologically in these in-between states becomes more apparent. 

What if our religious leaders were true psychopomps (guides of souls)?  What if they could, like shamans (medicine men and women) journey to the subtle, angelic realms for us, and with us?  What if they could help us to discern--in a convincing way--the actual intentions of someone caught in a coma?  What if they could help her make a peaceful decision? 

And what if religious practice could help us become more aware of these realms, and more wise about our own place in them?