Tag: ethics

LIVING IN BABYLON

Major structural injustices in which we

live/move/have our being

create haves/have-nots

and are hugely immoral – but most religions

while preaching personal and interpersonal ethics

ignore systemic evil and most believers accept

massive injustice as “the way things are” never asking

“How can individuals be moral in an immoral culture?”

 

The typical response of Christians living in

our Babylonian culture, in exile, is:

try to be faithful husbands and wives

raise virtuous children who are

compassionate/contemplative/seek justice

and who kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight.

 

Catholics adopt Protestant practices:

daily Bible reading/speaking in tongues

and Protestants adopt Catholic practices:

praying the Divine Office and trying out

Benedictine/Franciscan/Ignatian prayer styles

and perhaps this is the Holy Spirit

weaving the entire Church together

so we all may be one

or maybe this is just rearranging

the deck chairs on the Titanic

as long as the structural injustices persist.

 

Hopefully, the Contemplative Way

will save and transform us:

because sometimes contemplatives

as they are liberated from all addictions/attachments

gain psychic powers/siddhis such as

telepathy and clairvoyance – genuine contemplatives

always hide these super-powers

but maybe they could use them to fight injustice?

 

In any case, the ultimate secret of the spiritual life:

“ever-present divine awareness” is not hard to attain

for anyone and is impossible to avoid

according to Lao Tzu/Shankara/Paul/Augustine/

Plotinus/and Teresa of Avila because it is always there

and awareness of the divine is the only thing

that makes living in Babylon bearable.

INTEGRATING THE GLOBAL SHADOW

By separating the contemplative/unitive thinkers

into monastic communities, Institutional Churches

were able to continue in their rationalistic/dualistic/modus operandi

and the status quo was preserved – no transformation necessary.

However now inter-spirituality is spreading –

world religions are sharing experiences of unity consciousness

an inevitable part of the world’s move

towards multiculturalism/globalization/the theosphere:

God as All in All.

Even political action can be spiritual:

elevating humans as daughters/sons of God

liberating them from the old gods of lust/greed/power/war –

the gods which toxic masculinity worships.

Toxic masculinity/patriarchy continues because:

homophobia prevents deep male-to-male relationships

men confuse spirituality with religion and flee from it

bar mitzvahs and confirmation are inadequate

rites of passage/initiation rites for males in the postmodern world.

The male unconscious is not concerned with moral injunctions

but does try to balance whatever is happening

in the conscious male, and soften his toxic masculinity:

a man who defines himself as a righteous male

dreams about a degenerate woman –

the unconscious is not telling him to avoid this type of woman –

it is telling him he is this woman – he and her are one.

If he owns his shadow, it softens his heart.

In the past, those promoting morals and ethics

were unaware of the power of the male shadow

and alienated it further by labeling it “evil.”

But in the new quantum/unitive theology

what morality consists in

is full integration of the shadow

all the way from the personal to the global –

the global shadow, not admitting

humanity’s brokenness yet oneness

results in war and climate change.

War will never cease, God’s good Earth will never turn green

till the Global Shadow/Patriarchy is owned.

THE INTER-SPIRITUAL GOLD STANDARD

Inter-spirituality – religions getting along

and learning from each other – is an ideal

like the ethical gold standards:

economic egalitarianism

abandonment of militant nationalism

nuclear disarmament

which are promoted by globalism

and multiculturalism.

Conservative spirituality needs to loosen up

its fixation on ethnocentric myth

and learn how the Spirit expresses itself

in worldcentric reason

and postconventional love.

The Church is both human

since it exists within time

and is subject to forces of history and culture

and it is also divine

because it resolutely presses towards

the final Kingdom/Queendom/Kindom of God.

“Christians must resolutely strive towards

justice in the real, ambiguous world

where grace and sin abound.”

– Reinhold Niebuhr

The idea of God/Christ/religion evolving

rests on the notion that humans evolve –

in fact, technology has become so pervasive

we have evolved into a new species –

techno-sapiens.

At the microlevel of subatomic particles

there is an unceasing flow of energy

too vast for our minds to comprehend.

The Universal Christ is this energy incarnate

in every church/religion/all humans/the universe –

the Universal Christ is the inter-spiritual

gold standard.

WORK OF THE HOLY SPIRIT

Few of us can run off

to the wilderness or hermitage

so the older religions

to break us out of 

our normal, comfortable, sleepwalking trance

help us get into liminal space

through pilgrimages, fasting, silent retreats

Lent or Ramadan.

You are baptized with the Holy Spirit

not by believing in the Holy Spirit

as a doctrine, but by drawing upon

the Divine Indwelling already within you.

According to Thomas Merton

the Holy Spirit is the Soul of the Church

so when the Holy Spirit prays within you

whether in public or private 

it is the Soul of the Church 

praying within you.

Bad things happen to good people

but the Holy Spirit is always present

prompting you from within 

to take care of your self

and comforting you from within 

when your health, work, or marriage  fails.

Quantum theology befriends and redeems

the pain, the dark, the chaos

by helping people see the interdependence of

darkness and light

pain and pleasure

sickness and health

death and rebirth.

The Holy Spirit shows us

there is a virtue to be practiced for every sin: 

pride/humility, anger/patience

avarice/compassion, lust/chastity

gluttony/sobriety

all the Enneagram

vices and virtues.

If you are engaging with those

who have not suffered

“rings of fire”

your attempts to explain

the reasonableness of faith

or prove God’s existence

will fail.

Systematic atheism insists

humans must be free

of any kind of God

as their author and goal

in order to be responsible 

for their own life.

Since YOU are your own author, goal and end

you cannot foist off onto God

responsibility for your own life.

Atheism relies upon science

but science believes only 

what can be physically located is real: 

cells, brains, stars.

So science scrubs the universe clean of

values, meaning, consciousness, ethics and depth 

since these things cannot be located in the cosmos

they are unreal fantasies/illusions.

What Alfred North Whitehead called

“the fallacy of simple location”

leaves us with a culture of superficiality.

We are like seed 

that falls upon gravel

and withers because it has no roots.

Merton studied the “archaic wisdom”

of Mayans, Zapotecs, Toltecs

to learn how to counter the efficiency, ambition

and triviality of technocratic society.

Science saps us of passion 

but Eros is the Holy Spirit in action – and passion 

deserves a home among spiritual people 

– passion for pleasure and sharing it

– compassion: awareness of suffering 

– passion for restorative justice

– all these are works of the Holy Spirit.