Why Marriage is Hard: Exploring Challenges and Solutions

Songs and movies create fantasies about romantic love, and the wedding industry creates even greater fantasies about marriage. However, romantic love is fickle, and marriage is hard. St. Paul wrote in scripture that those who marry will experience trouble (I Cor. 7:28).

       Humans are basically good but also basically broken, and therefore, while God meant marriage to be a holy and blessed state, if two broken people live day after day in the most intimate relationship in the world, that is, marriage, there are going to be problems.

       Besides spiritual direction, I do marriage counselling. All marriage experts agree there are four distinct stages of marriage: romance, disillusionment, misery, and seasoned love.

       Marriage normally begins with romance. When dating, everyone is on their best behavior and looks their best. You haven’t lived together, so it is easy to buy into the illusion that this person only has good points and will take care of all your needs forever.       

       After you move in together or get married, and the other person is in your face day after day, you normally start to notice things about them that bother you, and you may feel that only some of your needs are getting met. In this disillusionment or “reality check” stage, you lose the illusions of romance.       

       If you stay together long enough, you will normally go through misery at some point, where your partner’s good points seem to be totally eclipsed by their bad points, and you feel none of your needs are getting met. This misery stage is why, according to Statistics Canada, there is now about a 40% divorce rate for first marriages.      

       At this point, faith can be very helpful. In most religious weddings, the couple takes serious, sacred vows before God and other people that they are going to love their spouse “for better or worse.” When in misery, it is particularly important to remember this unconditional love commitment before God. Prayer and church-based organizations like Retrouvaille, which hosts healing weekends for couples in misery, can also help a lot.

       Misery can be as difficult as overcoming an addiction. Alcoholics Anonymous has been successful because its first tenet is to admit that your life is out of control, and you need the help of a Higher Power to overcome your problem.

       In a second marriage, faith can be even more crucial. People in second marriages are even more prone to fall into misery because there are usually also ex-spouses, lawyers, children from two marriages, and wounds from the first marriage to contend with. It is not surprising the divorce rate for second marriages is significantly higher than for first marriages. People in second marriages need to pray even harder and exercise even more the virtues that all churches teach: forgiveness, trust, patience, commitment, etc.                 

     However, there can be legitimate reasons for separation and divorce. If there was prolonged emotional or physical abuse or neglect, it probably was not God’s will that the two of you be together in the first place, and you should split up. On the other hand, often couples split up without giving their best effort to preserving the marriage. 

       Mutual spiritual growth is the purpose of any marriage, whether first, second or third. Difficulties can be seen as an opportunity to rely more upon God, to surrender your ego more, to pray more, to love more deeply. 

        If you can do all these things, you will eventually come through to the fourth stage called seasoned love. If you learn to accept your partner with all their flaws, remember your wedding vows and recommit yourself to the marriage, you will normally start to see your partner’s good points again, the bad points don’t matter because you are committed to the marriage anyway, and by then you have learned to rely upon God more than your spouse for getting your needs met. 

Bruce Tallman is a spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. brucetallman.com.

Effective Prayer: Seven Key Habits for Spiritual Growth

Most people who believe in God, whether Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Bahais, or Jews, pray at least occasionally. For many, prayer is central to their spiritual journey. However, like anything else we do, prayer can be effective or ineffective. 

       The key to prayer is desire for God. St. Augustine’s classic Christian definition of prayer is “lifting up our hearts and minds to God.” In this sense, whatever we do, whether working, playing, or even just walking the dog, can be prayer if we use it to connect to God.

       Another key to effective prayer is silence, both internal and external. It helps to pray in a quiet environment and to take a moment to still the constant cacophony of thought before beginning. However, God can be found in the midst of noise and chaos as well.

       Having a special designated place and time can be helpful, but where, when, how often and how long you pray depends entirely on your schedule and whatever proves fruitful for you.

       In preparing to pray it helps to get into a comfortable posture, whether sitting or kneeling, and then follow the A.C.T.S. formula: Adoration (instead of starting with requests bring to mind God’s glory: e.g. “Almighty God, source of all being, truth and life…”), Confession (examine your conscience, repent of and surrender to God all negatives such as unforgiveness and deceit), Thanksgiving ( remember all God’s blessings), Supplication (pray for the needs of others). 

       It is also okay to pray for your own needs, as long as this does not become the major focus of your prayer. As well, the Jewish scriptures say that if you pray for someone else’s need and you have a similar need, God will supply your need as well. You don’t even have to ask for it.

       There are seven habits of people who are highly effective at prayer:

       First, their prayer is based on their own experience of God, so they are praying from their heart as well as their head, not just mumbling prayers composed by someone else. 

       Secondly, their prayer is simple and direct. Good prayer is possible for anyone, not just the religious professionals. You don’t have to have a doctorate in theology to pray well.

       Next, their prayer is bold, strong, and durable. They boldly approach God because they know God as a God of compassion. They do not timidly address God as if God’s grace did not outweigh their failings. Also, their prayer gets stronger, not weaker, during the hard times.

       Fourth, their prayer is deep and loving. It involves a radical commitment to God and others, particularly their enemies. For them, prayer is broad and hospitable. It welcomes all human beings, all creatures, and the whole planet into their hearts. It is never just about their own little group.

       Fifth, they listen to God as much as they talk, and they take this listening attitude into their daily life. Throughout their day they are sensitive to the subtle promptings of the Spirit. In this sense, they “pray always” as St. Paul exhorted Christians to do.

       Sixth, their prayer is socially conscious. They are particularly aware of the marginalized, the people the rest of us often forget about because they drop through society’s cracks. Their prayer takes in the social issues of the day. It is never just about “God and me.”

       Lastly, their prayer is integrating. It integrates their faith with their life, their contemplation with their action. After they pray, they do something that addresses what they prayed about. As someone said, the person who is effective at prayer “prays as if it all depended on God and then acts as if it all depended on them.” They know that what the world needs now is effective prayer harnessed to effective social action.

Bruce Tallman is a spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. brucetallman.com

Exploring Dimensions: Angels, Spirits, and Our Quantum Universe

       There is more to the universe than meets the eye: scientists know that 23% of the universe is composed of dark (invisible) matter, and 73% is dark energy. That means only 4% of the universe is visible. Some astrophysicists also believe that our quantum universe is made up of 11 dimensions, not just the three we are used to, or four if you include space-time.          

       Perhaps angels, spirits, ancestors, and ghosts inhabit these other dimensions and have the ability to interact with our dimension. These beings are real, not just the figment of someone’s imagination, and have a real impact. John Geiger in his new book The Third Man Factor, writes about how people in desperate straits are often helped by a mysterious someone who shows them the mountain pass they must go through or steers their boat in a storm when they are too sick to move. 

       Many people believe in guardian angels, and the scriptures of the major religions are full of them. The Jewish and Christian scriptures describe angels guiding people in dreams, protecting them when they are thrown into a furnace or lion’s den, or liberating them from jail.

       It is not always clear what the difference is between angels, spirits, ghosts, and ancestors. 

       Directees (people in spiritual direction) often tell me about spirits appearing at the end of their bed when they wake in the middle of the night. Perhaps our unconscious mind is still open to the seven or eight other dimensions when we are in that hazy state between sleep and waking.

       Some of my Christian directees can see spirits or ghosts when they are fully awake, an ability they usually wish they didn’t have. One woman reported walking into the back kitchen in her old farmhouse and seeing four spirits sitting around a table. Another said she was at a funeral when she saw the spirit of the dead man being led through the chapel by another spirit who apparently wanted the deceased to know the grief he caused his family by committing suicide.

       Others have told me about an invisible someone preventing them from stepping in front of a car or hugging them when they were crying over a deceased spouse. 

       Some friends who immersed themselves in native spirituality were building a sweat lodge when they looked up and found themselves surrounded by spirits. Aboriginals throughout the world believe we are constantly accompanied by our ancestors. This is similar to the “cloud of witnesses” Paul wrote about in the New Testament, which later became the doctrine of “the communion of saints.”

       One of my directees read about a doctor who was driving in the middle of nowhere when a young boy appeared, who then led him to an overturned bus. The doctor was able to save several lives, but one of the deceased was the boy he picked up. When he got back in his car the boy’s baseball cap was still on the passenger’s seat.

       A long time ago I was lost on the prairies when my car broke down. It was January, and I was slowly freezing to death. Even though I was an atheist then, I shouted at the sky “God, please help me!” Out of the blue a car appeared, and a man poured antifreeze into my gas tank. When I asked who he was he said “I’m an angel of the highway.” I followed right behind him until we finally came to a town. He turned to the right and when I looked down the street there wasn’t a car in sight. I don’t know if he was indeed an angel, but in our strange universe I don’t discount any possibility.

Bruce Tallman is a spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. brucetallman.com

Transformative Loss: Finding Strength in Lent

Lent is a time of loss. The 40 days before Easter are meant to commemorate the 40 years the ancient Israelites were lost in the desert before coming to the Promised Land. Lent is also a time when Christians lose things, give them up, as a way of commemorating Christ’s great loss, the sacrifice of  his life on a cross.

       Lent is a time of repentance, of turning around, of turning away from things that may be addictive habits the rest of the year. Some give up chocolate, dessert, or that lovely glass of wine after work. Many go deeper and see Lent as a time to lose unholy attitudes: jealousy, self-pity, unforgiveness, adulterous thoughts, the internal sins that no one knows about except us.

       Some choose loss during Lent, and some have loss thrust upon them. Due to the financial meltdown, people are losing their jobs, homes, businesses, retirement plans, and peace of mind.

       Those who work in palliative care, hospice, and hospital emergency departments receive training in how a person’s “assumptive world,” all the assumptions they have about the way life will be, can implode in an instant: their son or daughter is killed in a car accident, their spouse learns they have cancer, has a stroke, or dies. The normal response is to feel like the ground under your feet has suddenly disappeared, you are falling, and your whole life is falling apart.

       The scriptures contain one of the most spectacular stories of loss ever recorded, a story that makes most of our losses seem small by comparison. Job was a man of God who had it all: great wealth, a wonderful family, and an outstanding reputation. Then he had a total meltdown: he lost all his money, his family, and even his health. His friends accused him of bringing all this on himself through some hidden sin, although he couldn’t think of anything he had done to deserve this. Even his wife urged him to “curse God and die.” However, despite all the absurdity, he continued to trust God.

       A time of loss can be a time of personal transformation. When people lose precious things, they start to realize that, despite their former assumptions, life is very vulnerable, dreams are fleeting at best, and one’s fortunes can suddenly reverse. The natural response is to ask, “What is really important in life?”

       In the face of all this loss, people search for a solid foundation for their life, something eternal and unchanging. People start to realize that the only lasting thing is God. Quite simply, it’s God or nothing. 

       It’s not surprising that church attendance goes up during individual or social meltdowns. Next to God, the church is one of the few constants in our civilization. It has been there through the collapse of the Roman Empire, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the advent of modern science, communism, two planetary wars, and the Great Depression. The church has witnessed many severe storms come and go.

       People who build their lives on the solid foundation of God know that, with God’s help, they can withstand any storm, crisis, or meltdown, just as the church has. They also know that God can bring a greater good out of any loss.

       Throughout the scriptures, God brings new life out of evil, no matter how great. Job trusted God and was vindicated in the end: everything and more was restored to him. As our human exemplar, Jesus trusted God and was resurrected so that all of us could reach the Promised Land.

       No matter how bad it gets, as long as we trust God, all is well, and as Julian of Norwich said, “All will be well, and all manner of things will be well.”

Bruce Tallman is a spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. http://www.brucetallman.com

The Absurdity of Atheism in Maher’s ‘Religulous’

 “Religulous,” a mockumentary, is a two-hour assault on religion. The not-very-subtle message is that to be “religious “is “ridiculous.” The title combines the words.

       Bill Maher, the host, delights in skewering the seeming absurdities in religion: babbling in tongues, silly hats, the manipulation by televangelists. I think Jesus himself would likely laugh or weep over our folly. Religions need people like Maher. He is like the court jester employed by wise medieval kings to point out when people were getting too pompous. 

       Maher also attacks the dangerous side of religion: the holy wars, suicide bombings, anti-science, and potentially self-fulfilling prophecies of nuclear end-times. Maher does religion a service by courageously showing us when it is absurd, mindless, and destructive. He mainly attacks Christianity and Judaism, but also dares to criticize Islam. 

       However, he does religion a disservice by presenting the extremes as the norm. There is a danger the uninformed might think this is all religion is.

       He conveniently leaves out when religious people live according to their true values, have a deep spirituality, found service agencies and hospitals, educate and feed the poor, protest war and injustice, promote the sacredness of life and marriage, and constantly remind us life is more than the unbridled pursuit of money and self-centered pleasure.

       He conveniently leaves out the many profound and very rational Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers: Abraham Heschel, Martin Buber, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Thomas Aquinas, Avicenna, and Averroes, to name a few.

       He conveniently leaves out the constant progression in religious thinking and that atheists are stuck in a time warp in their criticism. Sure, there were absurd things written in the scriptures 2500 years ago, and God was often portrayed as an angry despot. Sure, there were crusades, and the church condemned Galileo hundreds of years ago. However, most believers today have repented of those ways of thinking and left them far behind. 

       This is where Maher totally misses the mark. The inconvenient truth for him and other atheists is that most people in the mainline synagogues, churches, and mosques are not extremists but moderates who believe in a loving God, are in favour of rationality and science, and are themselves critical when their traditions become absurd and dangerous.

       Maher also conveniently leaves out that atheism itself may be dangerous and absurd. Without religion, people make up false gods, for example, absolute ideologies like capitalism and communism. Maher conveniently leaves out that atheists like Hitler, Stalin, and Mao killed 80 million people in the twentieth century, more than all the religious wars in all of history.

       He conveniently leaves out that it might be more rational to believe there is a Supreme Intelligence behind all the order of the universe than to believe it all just happened by chance. He conveniently leaves out that without God, life might seem ultimately absurd when you are suddenly downsized, become sick, or lose a loved one. He conveniently leaves out that God and religious faith may, in fact, be the only real answers to life’s absurdities and dangers.

       Thank you, atheists, for keeping religion honest and accountable, but please don’t try to convince people that religion is all absurdity and destruction, and please be as self-critical as you ask religious people to be.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. brucetallman.com

Understanding Spirituality: The Essence of Consciousness

    God is Mother as much as Father. God as Mother is welcoming, warm, and inclusive. Returning to God as Mother would be a return to compassion and wisdom as a way of life.

The most foundational thing in existence is not matter, atoms, or quarks, but consciousness or spirit. Ultimately, we live in a spiritual universe.

    The bottom line is not money; it is God’s love. So, reality is foundationally safe and benevolent. Ultimately, it is not a scary universe. 

    God does not love us because we are good. God loves us because God is good.

    Salvation is not perfect morality. It is letting the dance/wind/fire of God flow through you.

    True religion is humble, not judgmental. It says, “Maybe I am the problem here, not you.”

    Love is to recognize the oneness of all things. God is in all of us, I am in you and you are in me, and we are all in this together. 

    God is not a concept to be believed in. God is a reality to be experienced.

    God, who is infinitely perfect and blessed, in an act of sheer goodness, created humans to share in God’s blessed life. That is our ultimate purpose.

        All the world’s major religions have identified the main problem as the ego.

    All the world’s major religions have identified the main problem as the ego.

    We all need to stop focusing on which worldview or religion is superior and start focusing on inner transformation by letting go of our egos.

    The only way to let go of ego is awareness of it. Ego is unconsciousness, so awareness kills it.

    The foundation of all justice is that our equality is intrinsic and founded on God’s love, not earned. Through no doing of our own, we are all equally loved by God.

    A teacher imparts knowledge or techniques. A master teaches by his or her way of life.

    All the great spiritual masters say: wake up: God has a plan for the creation. The plan is that God be all in all. This is the ultimate purpose of the cosmos. Do not shut God out of your life!

    The rich person may be poor, blind, and naked in God’s sight. Or not. The poor person may be rich in God’s sight. Or not. Outward state is no indicator of God’s favor or disfavor.

    “Ten thousand difficulties do not make a doubt.” – John Henry Newman

    To have everything, desire nothing.

    The garden of Eden, paradise, heaven, and God are within us, and it is the knowledge of good and evil, and the judgmentalism that comes with it, that keeps us out of the unity of all things.

    Life has always been a struggle and always will be. The fact life is hard does not mean it is not good. If the universe was perfect, there wouldn’t be anything to do. God made life good not easy.

    If we accept whatever God gives us: honor or dishonor, long life or short, health or sickness, riches or poverty, then we are free indeed.

    God is the only true object of desire because God alone has all love, knowledge, truth, justice, peace, freedom, and wisdom.

Bruce Tallman is a spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. http://www.brucetallman.com

From Winning to Losing: Navigating life’s Challenges

The universe is all about loss – things are constantly becoming, that is, changing. Nothing stands still, so we are constantly losing the way things were. Loss is built into the very fabric of reality and is essential to all life. Every creature is born, grows, and then dies.

       The first half of life is about winning, getting, and accumulating. Most people gain an education, their first big job, a spouse, a house, and children in the first half of life. The second half of life is about losing: the children grow up and move out, friends start dying, your spouse may leave you or die, you may be downsized, you retire, you may move out of your house, and your health starts to deteriorate.

       Eastern societies had a way of coping with these losses. There were four recognized stages of life: student, householder, withdrawal from active life to contemplate your losses and death, and finally, leaving everything to become a holy man or woman. In Western societies, there is no conscious process like this – you are supposed to keep accumulating throughout your life.

       Therefore, it’s a shock when we start to lose, but contrary to what we all believe, we are more losers than winners in Western societies. Loss always begets sadness, and the rapid change in our culture means rapid loss. However, we have no structured life stages that can help us cope with this. This may explain why we have suffered an epidemic of depression, as witnessed by the high proportion of the population that is on anti-depressants.

       We believe we are a society of winners because the media emphasizes the lifestyles of the rich and famous. What it doesn’t highlight is the thousands of people who tried but failed at becoming an American or Canadian Idol, or the five hundred individuals who applied for one job and didn’t get it, or the team that lost. The media makes everyone who is not a superstar feel inadequate, and so, alongside the epidemic of depression, we also struggle with a plague of diminished self-esteem.

       All these losses have four main purposes. First, to gain wisdom. In the first half of life, you grow in knowledge and material things; in the second half, you are meant to grow in wisdom about spiritual things, a spirituality of subtraction. The second purpose is to gain compassion. You can only open your heart to the suffering of others to the extent that you have suffered yourself. Thirdly, all these small losses are meant to prepare you for the biggest loss of all, your own death, in which you literally lose everything. Finally, these losses are meant to motivate you to search for and find the only permanent thing, that is, God.

       In the face of financial meltdowns and all the other losses in our lives, the only real losers are the ones who have not gained compassion for the setbacks and struggles of others and the wisdom to know that all of us die and all things pass away except God.

       Christians believe in a man who was arguably the biggest loser of all time. He started his earthly life in an adoring family and was adored by wise men and angels. He ended his life on earth publicly humiliated and put to a grisly death by the secular authorities as a criminal and by the religious authorities as a heretic. He failed his divine mission, failed everyone, even God.

       However, Jesus clung to the bitter end to his faith that the one thing no one can lose is God’s love, and so God rewarded him for this faithfulness. Two thousand years later, he still has more followers than anyone in history, people who come together to adore the wisest and most compassionate person who ever lived and, therefore, the biggest winner of all.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion.. http://www.brucetallman.com.

Hypocrisy: not just religion!

People may refuse to attend religious institutions for a multitude of reasons, but in my spiritual direction practice, if I ask Christians if they belong to any spiritual community, they often reply they don’t go to church because churches are full of hypocrites. I imagine people of other faiths have the same reason for not going to synagogues, mosques, or temples. 

       What is hypocrisy? It’s pretending to be what you aren’t. It’s espousing high ideals (compassion and generosity) on Sunday, and then living by a different set of values (competition and greed) the rest of the week. Hypocrisy is the opposite of authenticity and sincerity.

        Non-religious people usually do not mind religious people who are authentic and sincere, who “walk their talk.” What they do mind are religious people who engage in hypocrisy. In this they are in good company. The only thing that made Jesus angry was hypocrisy. 

       Jesus handled hypocrisy in three basic ways. He used vitriol, blasting self-righteous religious people: “You hypocrites, you brood of vipers! You are like whitewashed tombs: beautiful on the outside but full of corruption within!” Or he got physical, clearing the temple of moneychangers and demanding to know why the religious authorities had allowed God’s house of prayer to become a den of robbers? Or he used humour: “Friend, why do you try to remove the sliver of wood in your brother’s eye, when you haven’t removed the log in your own?”

       I am often tempted to use humour in my practice: “Don’t let your idea that the church is full of hypocrites stop you from coming. There’s always room for one more!” Although I don’t use it, this joke might make the non-churchgoer think because it implies that perhaps they are not living in complete accord with their highest ideals either.

       The person who judges another as a hypocrite must have high ideals and be living up to those ideals themselves, or they have no right to make that judgment. However, our society as a whole, not just the church, is filled with hypocrisy. 

       We tell our children not to gossip or drink and then do it ourselves. We say we love our spouses in Valentine’s cards and then treat them badly the rest of the year. Unions say they are going on strike to serve the public better when it seems like their real motive is even higher pay. Corporate advertising is often deceptive. Politicians espouse high ideals and then fight for power.

       A helpful way to look at all this might be: hypocrisy and authenticity are on a continuum, and everyone, both in religion and society, is somewhere on the continuum. In both religion and society, the actions of some do not match their ideals at all, and for some, their actions and ideals are totally integrated. The latter are called “saints” in religion, and “together” in society.

       Churches, like the rest of society, do have hypocrites. However, no church I know of claims to be a society of the perfect. Going to church does not mean you no longer have human weaknesses and are not exposed to temptations like the rest of us. Most churchgoers I know are very aware of their imperfections and go because they need God’s help and the support of a religious community in living their faith. In other words, they go out of humility, not pride.

       In short, to those who judge churchgoers as hypocrites, I would only ask two questions: “Friend, where are you on the continuum?” And “Have you removed the log in your own eye?”

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion.

Christianity needs to befriend contemporary spirituality

Twenty years ago, Eckhart Tolle’s books, The Power of Now and A New Earth sold millions of copies, and more recently Tolle facilitated what was probably the largest classroom in human history: 1.2 million people simultaneously online. 

       This great spiritual teacher’s vast popularity has led to the predictable reaction of some conservative Christians who have branded Tolle as a threat to Christianity and a leader of what used to be called the “New Age” movement, which is really simply contemporary spirituality. This is unfortunate because first of all, Jesus said “those who are not against us are for us,” and secondly Tolle can give us fresh new insights into the depths of the teachings of Christ.

       A Rabbi once told me that many Jews believe that non-Jewish people who live by the Ten Commandments, whether consciously or not, are on their side. Tolle, while not explicitly claiming to be Christian, is certainly not anti-Christian. If anything, he seems to bring to light things in Christianity that have been buried for centuries.

       One could easily argue that Tolle is a latent Christian and capable of helping many people become latent Christians, in that he subscribes to many of the same values as Christians, such as peace and detachment from materialism and consumerism. Also, in A New Earth he quotes Jesus more than anyone else, and the endnotes are almost all references to the New Testament.

       Throughout The Power of Now you could replace the word “Now” with “God” and the meaning would not change. His basic message in the book is that we need to live in the present moment, the Now, not in the past or future. Jesus said similar things, for example, “take no thought for tomorrow,” that is, don’t worry about the future or past, live now. He also said the reign of God is “at hand” that is, here and now.

       In A New Earth Tolle engages in a brilliant analysis of how the ego causes all our problems and how we must let go of it to live fully. Jesus taught that if you lose your small self you find you true self, your self in God.

       Richard Rohr, one of the most enlightened Catholic priests in the world, believes that Tolle could be seen as part of the “Sacrament of the Present Moment” tradition made popular by Brother Lawrence, Francisco de Osuna, and Jean Pierre de Caussade hundreds of years ago. Rohr sees Tolle as no threat to Christianity because Tolle is not teaching doctrines or dogmas, he is teaching practices just as John Wesley taught methods, and Ignatius of Loyola taught exercises, meant to help people overcome their prideful self, the ego.

       Rohr also believes that, although Tolle never explicitly states his theology, he is not a pantheist (all things are God), but rather a panentheist (all things are in God). The few times Tolle does speak of God he says things like “God is the One Life in and beyond all forms of life.”

       Rohr further believes that Catholics, who have a much longer tradition and are more familiar with mystics like John of the Cross and Meister Eckhart, will more easily embrace Tolle than Protestants whose tradition began in the sixteenth century. Tolle in fact adopted Meister Eckhart’s name when he realized he was also called to be a spiritual teacher.

       If Christians want to be relevant, they need to respond to the “signs of the times” by engaging contemporary people who are SBNR, that is, spiritual but not religious, in dialogue. What is needed is intelligent Christianity, capable of sifting out the good wheat in the current “zeitgeist,” or “prevailing thoughts of a culture,”  and letting the chaff blow away. Otherwise, Christianity may miss the opportunity to understand its own teachings more deeply and seem irrelevant to millions of people outside the church. These people might be more interested in the church if the church was more interested in contemporary spirituality.

Bruce Tallman is a spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. http://www.brucetallman.com

Seeing God and Humans at Work in All Avoids Pitfalls

If you understand that God works with, in, and through things without violating their essential nature, you can avoid many contemporary pitfalls. 

    To begin at the beginning, God created laws of nature, such as the law of complexity/consciousness, which means God and nature constantly co-create more complex, conscious, and free creatures. 

    John Polkinghorne, a physicist and Anglican priest, stated in his “free-process defence” of the existence of God in spite of evil: God allows nature a certain amount of freedom because it is better to have a creative world free to make mistakes than a mechanical world ruled by a cosmic tyrant.

    Evolution is so full of false starts that it would be easy to conclude it is just a random process. However, it is a divine/natural process that, overall, is heading in a spiritual direction: from matter to life to thought to spirit. We can see this in the movement from our planet’s original chemical soup to plants, animals, humans, and religions. Sri Aurobindo (Hindu), Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (Christian), and Ken Wilber (Buddhist) all agree about spiritual evolution.

    The increasingly free natural world co-created with God free human beings. God made humans with free will because it is better to have a world with people who make mistakes than one of perfectly programmed machines. Robots cannot love. For love, you need freedom. This is the “free-will defence” of God’s existence despite evil.

    With nature, God co-created humans with the intrinsic law of love: a deep desire for absolute goodness, truth, beauty, and love. In other words, what everyone wants is God, whether they know it or not. It would be easy to get so caught up with all the sins of humans that you miss our overall goodness: most people want to love and be good. On the other hand, you could get so caught up with the goodness of humans, as the human potential movement often does, that you could naively miss our sins and need of God.

    Similarly, the writing of scripture is a divine/human process. God co-created the scriptures with the human authors without violating their freedom. On the one hand, you could get so caught up with all the scientific and historical errors in scripture that it would be easy to conclude it is all a human fabrication, as John Spong and Marcus Borg have done.         

    On the other hand, you could get so caught up with the divine inspiration of scripture that you make it infallible in all things and fail to see that, while it may be inerrant on matters of faith and morals, it is not a science or history textbook, it is a faith document. Believing in the absolute infallibility of scripture closes people off from science, makes them fundamentalists, and contributes to the rise of scientific atheism in our culture.

    Similarly, Jesus was and is a divine/human person. The Spirit never violated the essential human and divine nature of Jesus but co-created his life, death, and resurrection with him. It would be easy to get so caught up searching for the historical Jesus that you miss his overall divinity. On the other hand, it would be easy to get so caught up in his divinity that you miss his humanity and his message of social justice, as Christians have largely done until the last hundred years or so.

    Churches are also divine/human co-creations. No church, synagogue, or mosque is a society of the perfect. Even Christian saints, such as Peter and Paul, and Jewish heroes, such as Abraham and Moses, were as full of human foibles as present-day imams. You could get so caught up in church scandals that it would be easy to miss the overall goodness of churches and conclude they are just an all-too-human enterprise. Most of the time, churches quietly go about doing good, but this rarely gets in the news. 

    On the other hand, you could focus so fully on the divine side of churches that you become triumphalist and believe the church has all the answers and doesn’t need to learn from science, psychology, history, and other religions. God works with churches, letting them make mistakes, but also guiding churches, other religions, and people who are “spiritual but not religious” towards the reign of Spirit. 

    At this crucial time in human history, in spite of all the doomsday predictions about the climate and economy there also seems to be a massive outpouring of Spirit going on in peoples’ hearts and souls. So, we need to avoid the pitfall of despair, as if God was not involved with and through the whole process. Again, God does not violate our freedom to make mistakes and wise decisions. God draws and invites us rather than forcing and driving us. 

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director and educator of adults in religion. http://www.brucetallman.com