judaism – Intelligent Christian Spirituality

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

THE COSMIC MASS & OTHER GREAT EXPERIENCES

Some powerful spiritual experiences happened to me in 2023.

At Queen of the Apostles Retreat Center in Mississauga in March, Ronald Rolheiser gave a series of talks based on his book Wrestling with God: Finding Hope and Meaning in Our Daily Struggles to Be Human.

Rolheiser said that our basic problem is not so much sin as the complex way God made us – psychologically, emotionally, socially, and sexually – that can tempt us to sin. He gave many examples of this and then some “counsels for the long haul:” we need to constantly purify our concept of God; honour our complexity and sexuality: both eros and chastity; befriend our “shadow” – the things we try to hide from others and ourselves; grieve our wounds; and forgive ourselves and others often.

In Chicago, in August, at the Parliament of the World’s Religions (which promotes interreligious understanding) there were about 7000 participants from every spiritual tradition: Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, and Confucian. The Sikhs fed lunch to everyone who came to them every day – often thousands of people. This is part of Sikh tradition called “langar” – feeding the hungry. There were workshops on every imaginable topic, keynotes by Antonio Guterres, Secretary General of the U.N., Nancy Pelosi, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Rev. Jesse Jackson.

The biggest highlight for me was the Cosmic Mass led by Matthew Fox. The Mass was structured according to traditional Catholic and Anglican ritual but also according to the four “vias” of Meister Eckhart, a Catholic theologian and mystic from the 13^th century.

The “Via Positiva” involved about a thousand people holding hands and dancing in a circle while cosmic images from the Hubble Space Telescope played on a large screen in the darkened hall. The “Via Negativa” had us get down on our hands and knees with our foreheads to the ground (after we were given time to reflect on sorrowful things in our lives) and wailing out our grief – I’ll never forget that cacophony. The ”Via Creativa” involved spiritual leaders from every major world religion gathering around a huge altar and reciting prayers of peace from their tradition. The “Via Transformativa” saw the religious leaders encourage everyone to go forth and spread love, justice, and interreligious cooperation to the world.

Another spiritual experience came from the “Mystic Summit” (mysticssummit.com), an online course consisting of thirty-five interviews with mystics from every tradition.

There were readings of mystic poetry from Mirabai Starr; interpretations of Rumi, the great Sufi mystic; a discussion of Revelations of Divine Love by Julian of Norwich; the Kabbalah, a profound treatise of Jewish mysticism; Brian Swimme talking about science, religion and cosmology; expositions on grace, paradox, and non-dualism; a discussion about guardian angels in various traditions; the life of Padre Pio, a Catholic mystic who suffered from stigmata, the five bodily wounds of Christ; Joseph of Cupertino, another Catholic saint who was known for his ability to levitate; interviews with shamans; the life of Bede Griffiths, a Catholic priest and Benedictine monk, who lived as a Hindu and founded a Christian ashram in South India; A Course In Miracles, a modern interpretation of the sayings of Jesus, was mentioned by several mystics; and finally a discourse on Paramahansa Yogananda’s great work Autobiography of a Yogi.

In short, the Summit was a spiritual cornucopia rounding out a year of fresh insights, and I found that Richard Rohr’s biblically based idea of the Universal Christ provided a sense of unity in the midst of all the religious diversity of these retreats, parliaments, rituals and summits.

THE POVERTY OF THE RICH

Biblical salvation is about liberation –

the Book of Exodus is the prototype

of God liberating us

but people often prefer the security of slavery

to the uncertainty of freedom –

God meant the Israelites to be a beacon of light

to the world – a liberated community

dedicated to peace and justice –

but their need for “security” is undoing them

we could be secure/happy/content

with God’s grace and the life God has given us

but in our culture we need approval

which comes from having truckloads of money –

if you are poor, capitalism excludes you –

you are excommunicated

from the heavenly banquet of western culture

but the poor have a spiritual advantage over the rich

since the rich can take away their pain too easily –

they can fill their emptiness with travel

distract their loneliness with shopping or fine dining

whereas the poor must face their poverty

and learn its lessons

the “Fifth Buddhist Precept: Mindful Consuming”

reminds us to not ingest toxins like

violent movies/mindless television/

numbing netsurfing/cynical books

in the 1960s, just as Asia ran headlong

into the craze for money and industrialization

Asian meditation poured into the West

because westerners were desperate

for things of the spirit

but the West has always had its own mysticism/mystics

which organized religion largely ignored

and so churches have emptied to the East –

more people practice yoga/meditation than go to church

although some spiritual experiences happen

as random insights or miraculous encounters

most experiences of God come through prayer –

prayer is a way for westerners to find God

and become liberated from their spiritual poverty.

THE CHRIST-MIND OF BUDDHA

The nuclear physicist David Bohm clearly explains

how a “particle view of matter”

harms all the sciences

as well as how we think and live

and therefore harms society and its future.

The universe is not a static framework

of separate particles – therefore if Jesu

is the Christ and alive today we need a Christology

that is organic/interrelated/dynamic/cosmic.

Buddhists have this with their cosmic lineage

of wonderful/interconnected/universal Buddhas –

when they say they believe in the Buddha

their faith is in this lineage not in the one

historical Buddha – Gautama – of our era.

The Buddha-mind or Buddha-nature

can be compared to the Image of God within us

or having the mind of Christ (1 Corinthians 2:16)/

being one spirit with Christ/the Cosmic Christ within.

This Buddha-mind/Christ-mind/Image of God within

integrates Buddhism/Christianity/Judaism –

we are all talking about the same thing.

A key concept for Meister Eckhart was conformity

to the mind of Christ/conformity to God/deiformity –

this union with God within us transforms our knowledge

of God/births God into the world/transforms the world

so that “our hands become gloves for the hands of God”

– Frederick Buechner

But John of the Cross and Ignatius of Loyola agree:

mystics open themselves to cosmic forces of good

and evil – many locutions and visions from the devil

are similar to those of God, therefore

constant discernment of spirits is necessary:

is this ecstatic rapture from the Holy One

or from the Father of Lies

and Deception?

EVERGREENING LEVELS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

The ever-expanding consciousness of the Israelites:

God is transcendent – available to all –

not just their Hebrew tribe –

and God is personal

all came to a head in Jesus

and a new level of consciousness was born

and continued in the Church.

A still higher level of consciousness

came in the 20^th century with the discovery

that the human person is not a random accident

but the arrow of evolution – the constant movement

towards greater consciousness/love/freedom/creativity.

And a still higher level of consciousness is emerging:

being Christian not only involves taking care of earthly life

it discloses the true meaning of life on Earth

going beyond humanization to divinization –

God divinizes us – we share in God’s divinity.

The insights that connect us to the Holy One

do not come from discursive thinking

but from radical awe and wonder

and our awareness of mystery and the ineffable –

this is where great things happen in and to the soul.

As Christians we come to truth not just thru our minds

but also thru our bodies when we begin to trust

our own experience/our own intuition/our own heart.

This is because the real religion of human beings

is spirituality – indeed we all secretly know this –

that the spirituality of mystics

is the origin of all the world’s religions.

And so the beat of Jewish consciousness goes on

and this ever-growing consciousness is ‘tikun olam’ –

the constantly evolving/never-ending/evergreening

‘healing of the world.’

THE TRANS-PERSONAL MESSIAH

For the past 500 years, the scientific lens

in which everything is rational and testable

has been robbing us of the wonder

of the former magical/mythical era.

We should have integrated science and religion long ago

since they are both foundational to our makeup

of both body and spirit.

Immanuel Kant was on the right track –

he refused to let religion be reduced

to objective scientific explanation

because he demonstrated subjectivity

cannot be reduced to objectivity

and he was an enlightened Lutheran who believed

what contemporary theologians believe –

we are in a dynamic/trans-personal relationship with God.

Quantum theology today focuses on

‘sin’ as ‘missing the mark’

which implies a dynamic process of seeking

and flexible/multiple ways of arriving at the ‘mark’

rather than rigid/dualistic/mechanistic notions of right/wrong.

Scientific research shows three broad arcs

to human psychological growth:

pre-personal/pre-rational/pre-conscious

to personal/rational/conscious

to trans-personal/trans-rational/trans-conscious.

Scripture is tran-spersonal in Second Deutero-Isaiah

where we first hear that Yahweh is not just God of the Jews

but of all people, and we first hear of the Messiah

not just as the ideal king of the Jews

but as the Universal Ruler over all people.

The only way Buddhists and Christians

can keep Buddha and Christ alive today

is for their followers to live their teachings –

Jesus needs Christians to thoroughly practice

his central teaching, the Beatitudes

for, as Teresa of Avila said:

“The only feet/eyes/hands

God has are our feet/hands/eyes” –

The trans-personal Christ is mediated to the world through us.

FRESH AND GREAT REVELATIONS

St. Gregory of Nyassa wrote that the contemplative life

cannot be lived in secular society

but St. Basil claimed it is possible while you work

to pray with your mouth/heart/mind.

At the monastery, Thomas Merton learned:

– how to pray while working as a laborer

– how to be a member of the human race

– that every other human being is no more crazy

and ridiculous than he claimed to be – than we all are.

Merton also learned and contemplated:

– fear is the awareness of one’s own finitude

– the possibility of one’s own nonbeing

– that anxiety is natural for mere mortals.

All these were great revelations to him.

Today extreme theological traditionalists

try to overcome anxiety by ignoring the past two centuries

while extreme theological progressives

subordinate Christianity to worldly philosophies.

The former flounder like fish-out-of-water in contemporary culture.

The latter flounder like fish-out-of-water in the church

and, despite their protests, are not Christian –

you have to draw the orthodox line somewhere.

The years when the religious right ordains

fundamentalist presidents always result in religious disaster –

alienating all young Americans

who hold completely different values

about women/homosexuality/poverty/climate change.

According to the great Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel

the problem for both extreme right and left is: no awe.

After all, radical amazement lies in all reality:

not only in amazing things I can see – like the Milky Way –

that filmy white night banner overhead – but also in the fact that:

– I can see

– I can reflect on my ability to see

– I have a self that can reflect on things

– that this self is part and parcel of all that was/is/will be.

All these were great revelations to Heschel

and revelations always light up our footsteps on the path to God.

ENLIGHTENMENT IN ALL WORLD RELIGIONS

“The enlightenment you seek in other religions

has been present in Christianity from the beginning.”

– Richard Rohr

The word “mystical” is often equated to “magical”

in secular/scientific contexts and so easily dismissed

but true mysticism – direct experience of God –

is the essence and starting point of all world religions.

And awe in the face of mystery

is the starting point of science.

Our God is an awesome God

who indwells everything – in the lab and in the temple.

Jesus lived as the spokesperson for Temple and Torah

the all-powerful symbols that the transcendent God

dwells within Israel and orders Israel’s life

the two most central and never-ending Jewish beliefs.

The Second Vatican Council (1962-1965) –

a meeting of 2500 Catholic bishops for four years –

the largest and longest meeting of Church leaders ever –

had only one goal – to carry forward the work

of the Jewish man/God, Jesus the Christ

who came to rescue not judge

to give witness to the Truth

to serve and not be served

to give his life as a ransom for many.

When your little “I am” becomes “We are”

you know instinctively: life is not about you

you are about life. You are here to serve like Jesus:

“I live yet not I, but Christ lives in me”

– St. Paul in Galatians 2:20.

“To dare to do what is right,

to not float about in the realm of possibilities

but to seize what is real and to take action,

this is true freedom.”

– Dietrich Bonhoeffer

and this is the true fulfillment of religion whether

Christianity/Judaism/Islam/Hinduism/Buddhism –

to not be so heavenly bound

you are no earthly good.

If there are no charitable works

there is no enlightenment in any religion whether

Christianity/Judaism/Islam/Hinduism/or Buddhism.

EVERYDAY MYSTICS AND MARTYRS

Internal morality expands from

biocentric (my only concern is my bodily needs)

to egocentric (my only concern is my ego)

to sociocentric (my only concern is my group)

to worldcentric (my only concern is all humans)

to World Soul (my only concern is all sentient beings).

Circles of love expand too

from self-love to loving others

to being aware of God’s Love

to loving God.

“Being loved by God and loving God

can only be experienced on the basis

of self-acceptance” – Otto Rank

You first have to accept yourself

with all your flaws

before you can accept that God accepts you

with all your flaws.

By this spirituality of imperfection

and by applying what the mystics know

to your everyday mind and heart

you may discover your ordinary life

can be a ‘way of the mystic’ –

it’s all a matter of perception with the eyes

and integration of the heart.

The ways of one ordinary monk

became the ‘Rule of St. Benedict’

which governed the life of all monasteries

from 516 AD till now.

The Rule is based on Christian non-dualism:

“All the believers were one in heart and mind.

No one claimed their possessions were their own

but they shared everything and there were

no needy persons among them.” – Acts 4:32-34

Communal sharing of all things

gradually waned in Christianity

but the ideal was kept alive

in convents/monasteries/religious orders.

In organized religion, the leaders

whether priests/ministers/imams/rabbis

tend to be dualistic, either/or thinkers

because to lead they need

clarity – if someone blows a muted trumpet

no one responds – religious leaders need

clear authority – which black and white thinking

easily lends itself to – you are with us

or against us – in or out.

In any case, any ‘no’ must be preceded by ‘yes.’

The ‘no’ of the biblical prophets

to militarism/animal sacrifice/self-serving priests

came from a previous foundational ‘yes’

to God/life/the Beloved Community.

However, the rituals of organized religion

can be life-giving – the Tea Ceremony

in Zen Buddhism like the Eucharist

is about oneness – no longer any class distinction

between noble and commoner – all are one.

The goal of Zen – not that Zen has goals

is the knowledge and perfection of Original Being.

The Original Being of a woman

is to be a mother – an unconditional lover.

In women’s initiation from girlhood to womanhood

that is, childbirth

women become more independent

a person in themselves

and someone more important in the eyes of society

that is, a mother.

Men’s initiation makes them more dependent –

they lose their independence from women –

they realize their true purpose

is self-sacrifice for women and children

to keep humanity going – the most noble calling

along with motherhood.

On a higher level both women and men

sacrifice themselves for God.

The Jews were always incredibly brave

many were martyred for God’s Law –

the Zealots submitted to torture

rather than call Caesar ‘Lord’

on top of Masada Mountain

both women and men committed mass suicide

rather than submit to the pagan Romans –

they became everyday martyrs.

INTERFAITH PANDEMIC LESSONS

INTERFAITH LESSONS FROM A PANDEMIC

In Falling Upward Richard Rohr talks about the “spirituality of subtraction,” the value of letting go. The first half of life is about gaining: an education, job, home, marriage, and children. The second half is about subtraction: the kids move out, we downsize our housing, retire, start to lose our health, friends or spouses die, etc.

In a spirituality of subtraction, we learn four main spiritual values: humility, gratitude, simplicity/poverty and solidarity/community. A number of spiritual leaders from various traditions have noted that a crisis can speed up this process.

Humility. The former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, stated in a talk in our city a year ago, that we all tend to be “cultural snobs,” that is, we think our culture is superior to all others. There may have been famines, wars and plagues throughout history, but this couldn’t possibly happen to us because we are so scientifically superior.

The point was to not get too self-assured. My priest in Winnipeg, Fr. Firmin Michiels, similarly told the congregation “Don’t pray for success, pray for strength when everything falls apart.” This is a frequent theme in every religion. “When people say ‘peace and security,’ then sudden destruction will come upon them” (I Thessalonians 5:3). COVID-19 has subtracted the illusion of our cultural-scientific omnipotence.

Gratitude. Omar Ricci, an imam at the Islamic Center of Southern California, gave a talk titled “Thank God for the coronavirus.” Not that God caused the virus, but we should thank God for this reminder we are not in control and always depend on God. Thank God for this reminder to be grateful for all things, particularly things we take for granted like groceries and good health. Thank God for reminding us life is fragile and “we had best appreciate the miracle of life God has given us.”

A rabbi at Chabad Lubavitch, a Hasidic community in Bozeman, Montana, noted that “Jews have always said that for every breath we take, we should thank God.” In light of the respiratory problems caused by COVID-19, “it’s become very real.”

The Buddhist attitude of gratitude towards any crisis has been summed up in four words by the well-known monk Thich Nhat Hanh “No mud, no lotus.”

Simplicity/Poverty. In Hinduism, the goal at the end of life is to become a “sannyasin,” a holy man or woman who renounces all the trappings of society and chooses to be reduced to nothing but his or her relationship with God.

All this stripping away is mirrored in Christianity in people who take religious vows of poverty, chastity and obedience. Jesus himself emptied and “humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death – even death on a cross” (Philippians 2:8).

The spirituality of subtraction is about emptying the ego of self-centered pride so that God can fill you. In general, a good day for the ego (a day of gain) is a bad day for the soul, and a bad day for the ego (loss) is a good day for the soul. Subtraction is meant by God to edge the ego out, reversing Wayne Dyer’s definition of “ego:” “edging God out.”

Solidarity/Community. Churches are experiencing what they have always given intellectual assent to – that the church is not buildings but the “ecclesia” – the community. They are reaching out online far beyond their normal congregations. Adam Ericksen, a United Church of Christ minister in Milwaukie, Oregon has noted that “the role of the church in this moment is to make sure no one falls through the cracks.”

Beyond churches, mosques and synagogues, God’s work is going on everywhere, in every single person who makes the decision to love their neighbor as themselves: health care and grocery workers and everyone sacrificing themselves in inconvenient self-isolation in order to keep others healthy.

This time of subtraction will hopefully continue to be a time of great spiritual growth.

Bruce Tallman is a London spiritual director, marriage preparation specialist and religious educator of adults. brucetallman.com