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Sunday, April 24, 2011

Sacrificial Celebration

Jesus was crucified. He hung on a cross by the bones of his wrists and his ankles, the nails placed closer together than the natural shape of his body would allow, bending him into a convex and uncomfortable position, forcing his body into shapes that were never meant to be.  By putting his weight on his legs, he could make just enough space in his chest to allow breath to enter his lungs. When his legs gave out from the strain, his wrists held him in agony, burning the breath from his lungs, the flesh from his hands, and the life from his body. It is a long process of humiliation and torture- most of us are at least familiar with the basics by now.
This is the physical pain he was in that is well described in the gospels. What is harder to explain is the mental and religious anguish.
According to his words on the cross (as reported by Matthew 27:46 and Mark 15:34- interestingly, in slightly different tenses), Jesus is abandoned by G-d, who, he notably does not call Abba at this point.
His relationship with G-d is strained or gone. For this moment, he is an exile. He is fully alone and abandoned- he is human.
I spend much of my time calling “eloi, eloi, lema sabachthanei?” I feel as if I am hanging in torture, and abandoned by the only thing that gives purpose and meaning to the pain. This quotation is left in the Aramaic by Matthew and Mark, making it more probably a direct quote.  In Aramaic, the loss and abandonment of Jesus is translated into Greek for the listeners of the New Testament, but Jesus’ disillusionment on the cross is the deepest connection I feel to divinity.
Passover was last week- the celebration of salvation for the Jewish peoples. In it, we narrowly escape the punishments of the wrathful G-d of early Judaism by sacrificing a lamb and marking the doors of our homes with proof of our sacrifice. We celebrate this today with symbolic Seder meals that provide hours spent contemplating and celebrating the opportunity given by G-d to spare the first born in Jewish homes. Judaism has a strong basis in disaster and finding ways to avert it- from exile to exile, we are the chosen people- chosen to be shaped by the fire of pain, loss, and sacrifice.
Jesus’ exile is ideological, and the Jewish exile is political. Jesus’ exile is personal as the Jewish exile is collective. Is this a side-effect of the tighter focus we have been building in our lives? Is this the first step toward Twitter and Facebook?
Being given the opportunity to be spared because of being chosen- whether as an individual or as a community- is an incredible celebration! We are spared because we follow the law, follow the traditions, and re-enact the salvations of the past. In Passover as with Easter, we are saved from a certain death by our relationship to G-d.
According to the Christian traditions, instead of following a law to achieve salvation, we simply need to follow in the footsteps of Jesus. He came to show us the way- beyond the laws and traditions (which had been building up then and are exponentially larger now)- and into a new world of compassion and understanding for our enemies as well as our loved ones and the members of our tribe.
We all have the opportunity to make sacrifices on the road to salvation and redemption. Perhaps making important sacrifices in our own lives IS the road to salvation and redemption.

Friday, April 15, 2011

Definitions I

Religion:  NOUN 
1. beliefs and worship: people's beliefs and opinions concerning the existence, nature, and worship of a deity or deities, and divine involvement in the universe and human life
2. system: an institutionalized or personal system of beliefs and practices relating to the divine
3. personal beliefs or values: a set of strongly-held beliefs, values, and attitudes that somebody lives by
4. obsession: an object, practice, cause, or activity that somebody is completely devoted to or obsessed by
"The danger is that you start to make fitness a religion."

I have always considered religion to be the governing body of spirit: a code of rules and regulations to lead the uninitiated to a sense of greater peace and understanding in a community we have created for ourselves where there is a shared understanding of the deeper aspects of life. This would be the man-made aspect of the spirit- trying to tame and control the mystical otherness into a process that can be repeated and fostered to teach the uninitiated.  To me, however, Religion with a capital “R” has become a more and more rigid method of following rules and regulations, going through the motions of what used to inspire people, simply because it is a tradition. Religions vary understandably from community to community, growing larger and more militant as our communities do.
Religion also implies the large organizations which purport to act with the will of God, and yet oppress, kill, torture, and destroy. I am not alone in my belief that this type of religion is a painful part of human history, and is a necessary end to having the bureaucratic hierarchy attached to what amounts to be a personal spiritual exercise. The more regulations there are to a dogma, the less I want anything to do with it. That may be some part of my rebellious skepticism; my resistance to being told what to do, but it is also a healthy distrust of power.
"All power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. All great men are bad."
-Lord Acton, 1895

Even the power that is given in the church, and sometimes especially the power that is given in the church, corrupts. As Timothy Keller notes in The Reason for God, the church is the place for those who understand and have fallen victim to sin, who know what it is to be lost and saved, not a place for perfection. In fact, it is much like a rehab center for sinners. Taken in this vein, powerful members of the church can be just as trustworthy as the politicians whose power is entirely man-made.
With or without my own personal bias against organized religion, there seems to be some element of agreement involved- in order to make it something built out of community, we are almost required to have something in common to build upon. There is a need for an initial pact between people in order to build the eventual bureaucratic madness.
“Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow.”
-William James, Lecture II, "Circumscription of the Topic"

If we were to follow the ideas of William James, religion is the over-arching form of the spirit- rather than something experienced in a community, religion is a personal connection and understanding of what lies beneath the realities of the world. Whether you were to understand those realities as painful or ecstatic, the realities are still a cover for something else- something that each person can only define for himself.  To mesh the two ideals, religion is the feelings, acts, and experiences agreed upon in community to have value regarding what is understood to be divine.
How did religion morph from a personal experience (since I think Jesus, Moses, and the Buddha would all agree with William James on this one) to the large construct of Religion?

Saturday, April 9, 2011

The Reason for God

There are too many topics in this book to respond without writing a book of my own, so I will have to pick and choose the most beautiful and most painful aspects and flesh each one as it comes. I fully expected this book to be as pedantic and inane as several of the other Christian propaganda items that have been recommended to me over the years. Instead, I found myself wrapped up in the battle between wholehearted agreement with the disillusionment that accompanies the lack of spirituality and the foregone conclusion that Christianity is the only answer to everything- that Christianity will save the world. Other than his conclusion, Timothy Keller’s treatment of Christianity from the inside blew me away- he does not fall back on the clichés of Christianity, like the man who once patted me on the head and said, confidently; “You’ll find the truth”. That pillow of faith which is supposed to explain all lacks in logic is never used in the book, which I appreciate.
Keller acknowledges the pain and disillusionment of the “Me Generation”. As entitled, self-centered adults raised on the concept of self-esteem, we have supreme faith in our own reasoning abilities and moral capacity, whether founded in reality or not. As scientific minds of the new millennium, we look for reason and logic to explain anything that can be definitively said to be “true”.  When we are confronted with a world that does not do what we want, does not react the way we feel is fair, and is somehow beyond our abilities to understand, we rebel. Somehow we did not achieve the goals we set for ourselves, and there is a void remaining in the middle of our souls even if we DID find what we thought would create happiness. In our frustration, many of us have left whatever churches we once called our own- professing that we have been failed by the establishment rather than exploring the possibility that we have failed ourselves. Keller’s church is made up of the skeptics and doubters of New York, whose voices have screamed that frustration in the face of Keller, his church, and Jesus Christ Himself.
Between this and the Varieties of Religious Experience, I feel like the loneliness and disillusionment are over-classified and therefore belittled. The sick soul, as William James calls it, experiences pain in order to find the divine, and would not have found the final peace without the conflict and depression that inspired it. Keller talks about the three major reasons for doubt, which seem to embody all of human experience- intellectual, personal, and “having the right people”, or community-based. I could invent different categories that spanned the whole of my experience, but these will do. However you classify them, each person’s pain is individual and unique, and deserves to be treated as such. I have a sick soul according to William James, and my wrestling with God has lasted most of my life, and I expect no answers. Truth in the divine world is something we can never accomplish, no matter what the objections are. My questions are universal and, to Mr. Keller, it seems they are also childish and common. No matter what the frequency of my arguments, the arguments remain valid in my eyes, and in my heart. God finds me in the questions rather than in the answers.
"[O]ne can never wrestle enough with God if one does so out of pure regard for the truth. Christ likes us to prefer truth to him because, before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms."
Simone Weil

Having survived his own crisis of faith, researching avidly, and, after finding peace, having consoled enough souls to fill his own church and begin several more, Keller is certainly qualified to guide us through the twists and turns of Christianity. I was swept away by his straightforward explanations of such difficult concepts as the triune God, the divinity and resurrection of Jesus, and the “loving” God of discipline and wrath.
My central issues with Christianity are the only pieces that are required for membership in the club- and I am sure that I am not alone. Jesus being “God”, his resurrection from the dead, and the three gods wrapped into one (Triune God) are simultaneously the most important and the most difficult aspects of the creeds.  If I can think of Christianity as being about compassion, about fulfillment and service to humankind and to the world as a whole, I am a dedicated Christian. Of course, if I think of it that way, I am also a dedicated Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist, and many more.