worldview – Intelligent Christian Spirituality

LOVE IN EAST AND WEST

In Buddhism, Warrior-Boddhisattvas

(those who delay entering Nirvana

to help others on Earth get there)

train in: interdependence –

if I hurt others I hurt myself –

it is love not aggression that will save the planet –

others are not different from themselves –

we are all one –

and they train their hearts to open

in increasingly difficult situations

getting in touch with our True Self/God within

enables Boddhisattvas and us to listen/speak/act from the heart

“For without compassion all religious beliefs and practices

are useless and empty” – Albert Nolan

we now have so many tools to help us be compassionate

such as the Enneagram which exposes the hidden worldviews

we have been unconsciously operating out of our whole lives

and thus helps couples to view

their partners foibles more compassionately

and their own foibles more critically

in previous cultures

belief in God had nothing to do

with the modern obsession with weighing evidence

for the existence of God –

God must laugh at our attempts

to weigh God in the balance

as if our thoughts or intellectual choice of doctrines

determined whether God existed or not –

in previous cultures

belief in God

was like a marriage vow –

“I do” commit myself

to love and serve you, my God

mindful presence

spent with the one we love

is the fullest expression of True Love

and mindful generosity

is the greatest gift

we can offer our loved one –

the gift of our True Presence.

REVOLUTIONARY WORLDVIEWS

Copernicus (1473-1543) upset two worldviews:

the Earth was not fixed in place but rotated

and the Sun was the center of the cosmos not Earth

Duns Scotus, Franciscan theologian, upset another two:

“Our predestination to glory precedes by nature

our tendency to sin” – we are original blessings

not original sinners – and “The goal of perfect love

is the perfection of love, therefore Christ

would have come to Earth even if there was no sin

and therefore no need of redemption”

Meister Eckhart upset a fifth worldview:

God is not “out there,” but rather

“The soul is the deepest/truest part of being human

and the place where we are united with God

who creates us in every moment”

the spiritual and physical are united –

the Father/Son/Holy Spirit are in our heads/hearts/guts

Jacques Ellul’s theology upset both the capitalist and Marxist

world-views: “Christian social action must put the emphasis

on individual humans not the collective masses

nor on the technological means of production –

a human being is not a cog in mass machinery

nor a tool to be used by the professional politician”

another upset of the modern worldview: sex is healthy not “dirty”

“Evolution continues through humans only to the extent

that we are conscious of the integral wholeness of love

which includes healthy sexuality. In other words

healthy sexuality is a key to evolution’s progress”

– Teilhard de Chardin

but there is a major problem with males and females:

we can see our shadow and the shadow of others

much more easily in our own sex than in the opposite sex

we overlook the shadow of the opposite sex

which means that men see their own shadow

in other men, fight them, and create wars

and women are jealous of other women

overlook the flaws of men

and make seriously bad choices

in whom they fall in love with and marry.

PARADOX AND PAROUSIA

Paradox allows us to understand realities too complex

to be explained from a single point of view –

it allows us to speak the whole truth by juxtaposing

two seemingly contradictory statements –

Jesus is both fully human and fully God

it is paradoxical that through deeply living/looking into

our own religion we become free/able

to deeply look into/listen to other traditions

and see the beauty in both

our worldview is not just a system of thought

but a way of imagining the world –

how it is and how it ought to be –

and it is prescriptive – it informs/is informed by

our actions in the world

“Nothing is just a part or a whole –

everything is both whole in itself

and a part of something bigger –

a ‘holon’ – an integral system” – Ken Wilber

you are whole in yourself yet part of society

your religion is whole in itself yet

part of the world which is whole in itself yet

part of the solar system/galaxy/universe

although science is just beginning

to understand integral systems

the idea that everything is interconnected

has been around in mysticism

in every major world religion for millenia –

science is finally catching up/catching on

to religion – science and religion are becoming one

the New Testament writers did not run wild

with their interpretations of Jesus –

rather there was a gradual deepening of insights

into his Message and who He was

the “Parousia” – the coming “kindom” of God

is already here

just not fully developed yet –

we are in a time of decision and choice –

do we get the Message of Paradox

or not?

INTEGRALISM A WAY OUT OF POLARIZED WORLDVIEWS

It goes without saying that debate is polarized today. The left is convinced they are right. The right know they have the truth. Going beyond both into underlying worldviews might create understanding and help alleviate the conflict.

Currently there are three predominant worldviews at work in our society: traditional, modern, and postmodern. Each has its own strengths and pathologies. A fourth approach, integralism, takes the best from those three and lets go of the negative stuff.

People in the traditionalist worldview hold positive values like fairness, honesty, duty, honour, patriotism, making sacrifices for the greater good, and traditional religion. These are the good people who voted for Donald Trump, not because they liked him personally but because he spoke their language about tradition. He was going to restore things to the way they used to be, and “make America great again.” They felt it would be hard to bring this about and so they needed a tough guy like Trump to make it happen.

The pathology of this worldview is that it tends to be ethnocentric. It focuses on “our group” being totally right and everyone else being wrong. It is an “us versus them” mentality. This can result in racism, homophobia, and xenophobia, that is, fear of strangers or anyone different than us. So, it is not surprising that it is against having a never-ending influx of immigrants. People here can get stuck in rigid law and order.

The second worldview, the modern, also has many positive values, mainly about independent thought and empowerment of the individual. The modern worldview is in favour of science, rationality, freedom, democracy, capitalism and global markets.

The shadow side of modernism has been an insensitivity to minorities and those who through no fault of their own cannot keep up with the competition. It is marked by over-consumption of the world’s resources and resulting environmental degradation. And as the individual triumphs, there is no sense of community and the greater good.

The postmodern worldview began around 1968 according to Richard Rohr, Ken Wilber, and others. On the positive side, postmodernism is obsessed with human rights and the absolute equality of all people, particularly women, blacks, indigenous people, people of colour, LGBTQ and the handicapped. It is sensitive to minorities and the marginalized. People who hold this worldview tend to be world-centric not ethnocentric. They want to include all groups, including the natural world, and so are extremely environmentally conscious. People who believe in progressive religion would fit in here.

The pathology of this approach lies in the tendency of every new level of development to be overly-critical of the worldview that preceded it. So, postmodernism tends to be anti-modern. It is anti-capitalism, ignoring all the good things capitalism has brought us. It is wary of all hierarchies that could create inequality and believes there are no absolute, objective truths. In a post-truth world, people can get stuck in chaotic relativism and disorder.

Those who hold the integral worldview try to live by Wilber’s dictum of “transcend and include.” This means that you keep developing, constantly working on transcending your previous worldviews, but also try to include all the positive things from each earlier stage of development.

Integralists try to escape rigid order and chaotic disorder and bring about a healthy reordering of things. There are many people who are trying to do this such as Jeff Salzman with his podcast, The Daily Evolver,and Steve McIntosh with his book Developmental Politics. In religion, besides Rohr, there is Catholic bishop Robert Barron with his Word on Fire podcast, Brian McLaren, a major Protestant thinker with books like A New Kind of Christianity and Pope Francis with his “integral ecology” outlined in his 2015 encyclical “On Care for Our Common Home.”

What the world needs now is to respect and include the positive values behind others’ worldviews, let go of the negatives and learn to work together to bring about a new post-pandemic reordering of society and life.

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

3 Big Ideas for May 1, 2019

The modern worldview is that because our universe is so old and so vast, humans are totally insignificant. A more helpful and meaningful approach is that because of our intelligence and creativity, which it took the universe so long to produce – 13.7 billion years – we can say again, as people did before astrophysics, that humans are not only significant but central to the entire universe.
Georges Lemaitre, a Belgian physicist and priest, first postulated that, as in Genesis, the first book of the Bible, there must have been a beginning to the universe. Then George Isamow, an American-Russian physicist, postulated the Big Bang Theory, the current view among scientists. Since scientists have proven that everything is expanding outward, if you go back in time far enough, it must have all begun from a single point. Science has to be materially based, it can’t start with spirit, and therefore Isamow further theorized that the universe came from a tiny particle. However, this idea that all the matter of the universe as we now know it was somehow packed into an infinitely small particle seems absurd and is an untestable hypothesis. As such it is a myth. I am not anti-science, in fact I think science is an incredible tool that reveals even more of God’s glory. But I also believe it is important to understand that science is based on this myth. It is just as logical, in fact I believe more logical, to say that the whole universe came from an Almighty Creator.
Ignatius of Loyola invented the prayer method of inserting yourself imaginatively right into scenes from the Bible. For example, you are in a boat with the disciples in a raging sea. You feel the rocking of the boat, the spray of the waves, and then you see someone walking on the water. You feel the fear of the disciples who didn’t recognize it was Jesus and thought they were seeing a ghost. You feel amazement and relief when Jesus calms the wind and sea and gets into the boat with them. Many people have found that this method of imaginative contemplation leads them beyond “head-knowledge” to “heart-knowledge” of God and emotionally transforms them through a direct experience of God.