values – Intelligent Christian Spirituality

THE DISASTER OF MODERNITY

The disaster of modernity:

since the Enlightenment, the intellectuals

in trying to grow beyond the mythic stage to the rational stage

killed the mythic God in the “death of God” movement

but in doing so they truncated their own spiritual growth

they did not go on to higher understandings of God

they repressed their own spiritual intelligence –

and the West has never recovered

modernism emphasized the intellectual and technological

and labeled our ancient/natural subjectivity as “superstition”

and this created a disconnect

between heartless individuals

and heartless institutions

and this created atheism – some atheists

have no religious awareness/strivings in them

have lauded/applauded humans so much they forgot God

have such a distorted view of God

they do not reject the God of the gospels

who they do not know

but rather they reject a caricature of God

who they have imagined

our western preoccupation with practicality

and means not ends

resulted in a total loss of values

and seeing life as a whole

so we became prisoners of urgency/

short-term consequences/

erratic/meaningless lives

non-dual thinking is the answer

non-dual thinking is both/and thinking

never either/or thinking –

it includes and honors all the previous stages

spirituality that ignores psychological dynamics

and psychology that ignores our spiritual nature

cannot be an adequate guide for people

who want to integrate

the quest for holiness

and the desire for wholeness.

LOVE AND SOCIAL RENEWAL

Maslow’s growth hierarchy of needs operates like this:

physiological needs must be met before we can pursue

safety/belonging/self-esteem/self-actualization/

self-transcendence needs – the need to move beyond self

into ever-expanding circles of care/consciousness –

this is the transpersonal/spiritual level

but the Enlightenment emphasis on separation

of religion and state made Christianity captive

to the financial values of the middle class

which then used religion to justify those values –

so we got stuck

at the physiological/financial safety need level

the middle class version of Christian joy

then became the synthetic “happy-making”

of going on a vacation cruise

whereas true Christian joy

takes you from the limitations

of what you had no choice to be born into

to the freedom of creatively loving

those who are strangers to you

for the soul this is all or nothing –

either we see God’s image in all people

or we don’t see at all –

love of enemies makes no logical sense

but absolute soul sense –

we can no longer exclude anyone

sometimes the “enemy” is the one you are married to

but conjugal love could become highly regarded

and bring about psychological/social/cultural renewal

if Christian couples focused not on money

but on committed/harmonious love –

divine love would shine thru everything –

“Seek joy in God/peace within yourself/love in relationships –

seek to rest in the good, the true, and the beautiful –

this resting is then God within you

loving God all around you – this is authentic social renewal.”

– Richard Rohr

FALSE PROPHETS, ATHEISTS, PEACE, AND WHOLENESS

Separation from the primal union with the mother,

the Garden of Eden, causes a lot of suffering, but is inevitable.

However, it is crucial to remember that there was

and there still is, a Garden.

The suffering of Jews/Blacks/Indigenous

has deepened them and elevated them

above the meaninglessness and triviality of the white man.

This is the secret spiritual heritage

of the United States of America and many other countries.

Between 1999 and 2009, the number of people

who identified as ‘religious only’ fell from 54% to 9%

and those who identified as ‘spiritual and religious’

grew from 6% to 48% – a ringing endorsement

of the value of spirituality.

Spiritual transformation normally results

in transformed relational virtues –

more honesty/compassion/forgiveness –

or it may mean you become a prophet.

Like any true reformer/prophet today

Jesus critiqued Judaism from inside Judaism

by Judaism’s own criteria and holy values.

Today, atheists who attack Christianity do so

based on Christian values, but they do not realize this

because western civilization has marinated in Christian values

for so long these values have become subconscious.

However, false prophets, unlike Jesus,

always attack from the outside – therefore

the Four Horsemen of the Atheist Apocalypse –

Dawkins/Dennett/Harris/Hitchens –

are false prophets – they have no real understanding

of the depths of the religion they attack.

In critiquing Judaism’s over-emphasis on Law/morality

Jesus helped us replace our one-sided emphasis on goodness –

we are good, you are evil –

with a healthier ethic of wholeness –

looking at both our own goodness and brokenness

and seeing both the goodness and brokenness in others.

When Christians do this – take the logjam out of their own eye –

they bring peace to the world.

PARADOX/CHAOS/RIGHTS

God, not just human decision alone,

is the author of sacred institutions like marriage

and this is vastly important because

God endowed sacred institutions with benefits and a purpose

that are important for the eternal destiny of the family

and for the peace and unity of the whole society.

But every major religion is full of paradox:

salvation is a free gift of God and yet

worked out by our own effort in fear and trembling;

salvation is bright and glorious and yet

often arrived at through pain/chaos/martyrdom.

All this paradox and chaos results in meaninglessness:

difficulty in making sense of life.

Meaninglessness is the absolute threat

to our spiritual self-affirmation

just as emptiness is the relative threat.

Meaninglessness is the background to emptiness

just as death is the background

to the vicissitudes of life.

More paradox and chaos:

Christians finding excuses for creating death.

Pope Urban II put severe restrictions on war:

only if absolutely necessary

and only in defence of Christianity.

But then this pope decided a Crusade

would unify Christianity/bring peace/end all war.

Perhaps today we are more enlightened?
We recognize everyone and everything

has “ground value” – all things

are works or children of the Creator.

In other words: everything and everyone

has “intrinsic value” and therefore rights –

animals have rights and all of nature has rights.

Nothing has merely “instrumental value” –

nothing is merely a means to an end.

In the past the end was the wealth and pleasure of the rich

with no respect for God or sacred institutions

and no respect for the common good or Creation’s rights.

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.

3 Big Ideas for April 10, 2019

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of “cosmic personalization” means that the entire cosmos is headed towards wholeness, complexification, consciousness, and love.
In 1961 at a General Assembly of the World Council of Churches, James Sittler, a Lutheran theologian, reminded the gathering that, according to Colossians 1:15-17, the Cosmic Christ is the foundation of all things and all things are united in the Cosmic Christ. If this is true, Christians have nothing to fear from other religions, philosophy and modern science since all these things are “in Christ” whether they acknowledge it or not. In fact, the values of materialistic scientists and philosophers such as the search for truth,could be a preparation for the acceptance of the gospel.
Since all institutions are relative and provisional, including churches, synagogues, mosques and temples, we must put our hope in the living God who alone can fulfill history. We must hope in God, not any religious institution.