Wednesday 28th November 2012
Today I reflect on yesterday’s blog posting with the usual question what will I write about today? I think of my friend Barbara’s appreciative comment and thoughtful posting on facebook of Maya Angelou’s wonderful picture and reflection dedicated to my daily blog efforts. Thank you once again Barbara for your encouragement.
It was a struggle for me to be as honest as I was in yesterday’s post, but necessary I feel to strip away the mask.
We learn I think when we are young that it is not always profitable to totally reveal ourselves to others.
My own experience growing up was that it was not always wise to be totally open with people,and so a habit begins where not only we hold back, but we play games and pretend we are, what we are not, or perhaps we just remain hidden and neutral, never really taking risks, and so very often we endure the frustration of stagnation.
Also our world promotes competitiveness over co-operation, and so competition I think plays a part in the emergence of a false self. To survive in this world, means that to an extent we must don a mask and create a false self. This false self is forever restless and disconnected from one’s true origin, and part of the symptom of this disconnection is our continual distraction with external and visual stimuli. I once heard someone remark that if ever there was an anthem for our time, it was that song by Mick Jager, ‘I can get no satisfaction.’ St. Augustine expressed it in another way when he said ‘You have made us for yourself O Lord and our heart is restless until it rests in you.’
Back in 2007, I decided to do an evening course in a college close to where I live. It was a two year diploma in spirituality and the range of topics were fairly broad. We explored and asked the question what is spirituality. We agreed it wasn’t easy to give a single definition to such a broad subject, but one of the things I remember from that first exploration was a handout from an excerpt of Michael Paul Gallagher’s book, The Human Poetry of Faith:
“But when I risk staying in touch with my weakness or fear and even more so, if I can communicate what I feel to another person, shadows become thresholds of transformation.” (handout Chapter 3, Dive Deeper, Michael Paul Gallagher)
John Henry Newman, an Anglican Minister in the nineteenth century who converted to Roman Catholicism spoke of avoidance of our human wounds as the reason why our religious beliefs remain so unreal. In Michael Paul Gallagher’s book, he quotes a passage from a sermon given by Newman on this theme.
“We have each the same secret, and we keep it to ourselves and we fear that as a cause of estrangement, which really would be a bond of union.” Newman saw this fear of facing our shadows as the root of our shallowness, because we dare not trust each other with the secret of our hearts, our love is not enlarged and our religion, viewed as a social system is hollow.” Newman seemed to be implying that if God embraces all human woundedness in Christ, we too are invited into a surprising lowering of our defences.
This for me was an extraordinary discovery that a clergyman of the nineteenth century could be so advanced and enlightened in his thinking that he had the wisdom and perception to see that for many religion seems unreal, because of an unwillingness to journey into one’s centre.
Traditionally eastern religion and philosophy has been better at this, from the little I know through my encounter with yoga philosophy. Institutionalized Western Christianity has focused too much on externals and religious dogma, and dare I say also literalism. It is interesting to read one of the definitions of dogma given in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, is ‘an arrogant declaration of opinion.’ Also on that subject of literalism, during my studies at the Milltown Institute, I came across an interesting statement by a British philosopher called Own Barfield when he said ‘all literalism is idolatry’.
Traditionally we were told idolatry was the worshiping of false gods and we had an image in our heads of people worshiping stone idols, but this for me was a very interesting perception because what he was really saying was that our institutionalized religion had focused very often on stories that really were myths, but were perhaps pointing to a certain lesson or symbolism and so being encouraged to take these stories up literally, we were and are distracted from the true role of religion which really should be to create meaning, and put us in touch with not only our inner being but also with one another, our planet and eco system and to encourage us to share in a harmonious and just manner the resources of our world.
Our task is really to try and create a more intelligent and less destructive system, and the role of religion I think or indeed philosophy is to help us to see that this is an attainable goal. We are all ultimately seeking happiness, happiness that is deep and lasting, and if we want happiness that is deep and lasting, we have to look at life from a holistic perspective.
When God is continually presented as an external other who is male and a judge, it does not in my opinion help humanity in its search for truth and in the necessary search for self knowledge. God may well be the external other, father figure that he’s presented as, but if he exits he is also in all of the creation and all that he created including myself and there can be no knowledge of this God, this bliss, this felt oneness with all creation, until I come to a knowledge of self, and until I learn to drop what is not of God.
So this brings us to the further question, how can we say what is of God, and what is not of God? Can we even put a name on the unknowable? Again in the east, the wisdom of enlightenment and self realization says ‘he who speaks has not seen’ and ‘he who sees does not speak.’ God or the absolute as some prefer to call this creator cannot be contained and squeezed into some small narrow human perception of who he, she or it is. Again the wisdom of the east does not favour a faith system, but instead encourages one to explore and journey towards one’s centre.
We see this with the life of Christ that much of the miracles and healing he performed were preceded by his periods of withdrawing to a ‘quiet place’ and he through his life and death show us that his way, truth and life is a way of love far above and beyond the limitations of human love. It is expressed best as ‘the peace that passes all understanding.’
At times we are shown glimpses of this and sometimes we get a sense of it through certain people who radiate this aura of pure goodness, so much so that even after an encounter with such a person, we are in some way changed or affected by such an encounter.
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