Many great souls live on the margins of society
so they don’t get hoovered up by it.
This can take hard forms:
monks/nuns/hermits/
poverty/chastity/obedience
or soft forms:
everyday believers
fasting from television/shopping/violence/
flaunting wealth/lust/rebellion.
This is not perfectionism –
religion that tells you that you must be perfect
for God to love you
forces people to deny and repress their sin
and so become hypocrites and inhuman.
Empty churches/mosques/synagogues come from
hypocrisy not secularization.
Dualistic thinking creates hypocrites
because it totally separates
good from evil/saint from sinner/soul from body:
an ongoing disaster for Christians.
I am my body – the body is no add-on
or afterthought to who I really am.
Not handling the body and sexuality well
results in the hypocrisy of sexual abuse.
Thich Nhat Hanh: Buddhists do not talk
about Original Sin but about negative seeds:
hatred/lust/racism that exist in us all
overcome by developing Buddha seeds
that also exist in us all:
love/purity/inclusion.
The key for any human, whether religious or not
is to be true to one’s
self/inner guiding light/conscience.
But no one can open and surrender to truth
unless they first feel heard and loved –
loving a person in all their sin/delusion/wrongness
is the only thing that opens their door to Truth.
And the self is always embedded in a community
hopefully a community of love, the Beloved Community
so life is not just self-realization
but also community-and-world-realization.
The Beloved Community is created by prayer:
true prayer is the Holy Spirit praying to God in us
often with a love too deep for comprehension
so our spirit becomes one with the Holy Spirit
one living Flame of Love.
Sitting quietly in prayer is practicing
under-doing and under-achieving
which gradually forms us into a human being
rather than a human doing –
prayer thus saves the world from itself.
But there can be politics to prayer:
the truly spiritual are always a threat to politicians
because what politicians tell us is real
the devout see as ephemeral and unreal –
wealth means nothing to those who come back
from near-death-experiences
who see the Big Picture
through God’s Picture-Window.
Neither politics nor science has all the answers –
science must be silent
on ultimate questions
because it must always be open to disproof
but our hearts and spirits still want
ultimate answers
and honesty means honoring this universal longing.
There are strong empirical reasons for believing
in things that cannot be proven
such as love and friendship
that give our lives meaning
and help us endure incredible hardships –
we are destroyed if we think “no one loves me”
and life is just
Shakespeare’s “tale
told by an idiot.”
Intelligent Christian Spirituality 