Interfaith Services of the Lowcountry

May we as a nation be guided by the Divine to rediscover the sacred flame of our national heritage, which so many have given their lives to safeguard;

Let the wounds of separation and divison be healed by opening our hearts to listen to the truth on all sides, allowing us to find a higher truth that includes us all;

May we learn to honor and enjoy our diversity and differences as a people, even as we more deeply touch our fundemental unity;

May we as a people, undergo a transformation that will draw forth individuals to lead our nation who embody courage, compassion, and hold to a higher vision;

May our leaders inspire us, and we so inspire each other with our potential as individuals and as a nation, that a new spirit of forgiveness, caring, and honesty be born in our nation.

May we, as a united people, move with clear, directed purpose to take our place within the community of nations to help build a better future for all humankind;

May we as a nation rededicate ourselves to truly living as one nation, “under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all;”

And may God’s Will be done for the United States, as we, the people, align with that Will.

Insights from Jefferson’s Bible
The Reverend Peter Edward Lanzillotta, Ph.D.

” I swear upon the altar of God, eternal hostility
gainst any form of tyranny over the mind of [humanity.]”

This quote lays the basis for one remarkable man and his valuable contribution to religious freedom and to our secular republican form of governance.
As a quote, it frames a lifetime of rare dedication, and serves us well as a lasting example of a personal faith that championed truth, reason, and freedom. These ideals formed the heart, mind, and soul of Thomas Jefferson.
As every school child knows, or should know, Thomas Jefferson was the third President of the United States. He was probably our most brilliant, literary, articulate, and visionary leader. As the first President espousing a republican viewpoint, which in those days meant peer representation and moving away from any monarchy or rule by a wealthy or privileged class. Jefferson’s presidency contributed the most to the progress and solidarity of the American character, it expanded not only its territory but sharpened its governmental ideals, and confirmed its religiously inclusive outlook.
Ironically, history seems to have thought more of his presidency than he did! He purposely left out any mention of presidency on his gravestone epitaph. Instead, it was inscribed to include what Jefferson felt were his most important accomplishments:
The gravestone at Monticello reads:
Here was buried… Thomas Jefferson… Author of the Declaration of American Independence and of the Statue of Virginia for Religious
Freedom and the Father of the University of Virginia
We can ask: Why such a glaring omission? To him, those years were but a step in a progressive life- a life that was dedicated to the pursuit of serving his guiding ideals.

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His intentional omission of the Presidency indicates Jefferson’s wary approach to privilege and to power and the need to direct ones energies towards the common good. Widely read in the classical philosophies, they left him incomplete, for they were too involved in self interest. As a consequence, and as a clear preference, he directly credits this caution to his understanding of moral teachings of Jesus, and to all the parables about money and power as having a persuasive ability to corrupt us, and how the desire for personal success and power can take us away from making sincere and lasting social and moral contributions to the betterment of our society and the world.
As Americans, and as serious students of both our country’s political and religious realities, I expect that you know the contents of the Declaration of Independence; maybe not by heart, although I would guess that it is at least familiar because of its famous, stirring Preamble that so many of us were assigned to memorize in grade school, along with The Gettysburg Address, and along with saying the Pledge of Allegiance on a daily basis. While a case can be made for such patriotism, or at least for greater political literacy, I will not ask that we recite it together this morning… However, I do think that an annual reading of its contents is a valuable exercise in reminding us of its lasting significance- and to recall how those guiding principles, values, and ideals that it contains greatly influences us still.
For Jefferson, the Statue of Virginia, the first such statue since the founding of Rhode Island by Roger Williams, was a cornerstone in his life. With the assistance of his fellow Virginian, James Madison (Remember, Virginia gave us four of the first six presidents, with the other two being from Massachusetts) together they crafted a statement that offered complete religious freedom to all citizens, regardless of their personal creeds or their dissenting convictions. Remember, at that time Maryland was primarily Catholic, Georgia Methodist, and New England Calvinist; Once this statement that became ratified, it was the first governmental statement that did not require any religious beliefs before being accepted as a citizen of a state.
The third most significant and lasting endeavor, was started when he was in his 70′s; This was to found the University of Virginia. …

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Jefferson, an experienced architect, agronomist, and philosopher; he designed all the buildings, its landscaping, horticulture, and he even influenced the recruiting of its first faculty ands the design of its first college curriculum. Remember, Jefferson was known to say that his whole life was in books! In fact, so extensive was his personal library- that after the library was burned by the British in 1814, he gave his library to his country-some 10,000 volumes- that donation became the first Library of Congress!
Because he was such a multidimensional man… Brilliant and flawed, futuristic and patriarchal, ideological and duplicitous, it would be foolish to try to give you a comprehensive biography… He is the subject of much ongoing research!
Besides, I know that I will return to him next Fall, as I am considering a sermon series on how U-Uism has had such an important impact on politics and the national character- so much so, that it has already provided me with definitive information that declares that we are not a Christian country… We are a U-Uist country! But more on that later…
Today, I will limit my focus on Jefferson as a religious reformer, and as a pioneer in creating what he called, “The Philosophy of Jesus” where he asserts, in no uncertain terms, that ethics in action is the true basis for a religion, not some obtuse theology!
For Jefferson, a person’s faith is not just what they believe privately or individually…
One’s faith, be it liberal or conservative, is best seen or revealed by how well they practice what they say that they believe, and how well they support its ideals, and how well they live it out in their choices and responsibilities on a daily basis…
As an astute public servant, letting his pen express his strong opinions, he also learned to be sensitive to the temperamental wind of politics, and the whims of religious controversy. As a man who prized reason above all assertions of faith, he never fully revealed his dissent from traditional Christianity until he left office. Yet, even with such decorum and discretion, he was unmercifully vilified by New England Calvinists, because he was such a strong advocate of personal and religious freedom.

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He was often scourged from the pulpit as depicted as a “corrupter of morals; as a virulent atheist who wished to undermine traditional religion! There is even a story of a baptism; Some Boston cleric refused to christen a child because he was named after Jefferson; to baptize a child named Thomas Jefferson was a blasphemous act!
As a retort, Jefferson once wrote: “[That any attempt towards religious coercion should be resisted, and any rule by guilt, fear, or ignorance are the avowed enemies of religious freedom and personal liberties. If coercive activities win out, because of a lack of support for liberalism, then there is a possibility that half the world will become ignorant fools, and the other half would become hypocrites!"]
You can see how popular he was with priests and prelates! By getting themselves “engrafted into the machine of government,” he said, the New England clergy “have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man.” Which clearly relates to the Religious Right today!
Because of the hot controversy surrounding him and his dissenting religious beliefs, his only recourse was to explain and expound on his convictions through a series of now famous letters to his friends; John Adams, James Madison, Dr. Thomas Cowper, Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse, Dr. Benjamin Rush, and Joseph Priestley…
In fact, it was Priestley’s book on The Corruptions of Christianity that inspired his own questioning and his further dissent from orthodoxy. His letters to Priestley, Waterhouse, and to Dr. Benjamin Rush, the father of mental health and Universalist minister, Jefferson revealed a religious outlook that was a profound and simple faith.
My colleague Wayne Arnason, formerly the long time minister at Charlottesville, VA near Monticello, once made these observations from the pulpit of the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Church:
“[The first thing we may say about Jefferson's Unitarianism is that he took very seriously.... The second thing we might say is that he was " a very conservative Unitarian." ... Earlier in life, he was a believer in God as the first cause, architect, and master builder... As he grew older, Jefferson moved away from Deism, to a belief in a God that is knowable through human love, through justice, moral perfection, reason, and expressed through natural beauty.
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While some would choose to dispute this because of his wide ranging and sometimes paradoxical statements, Jefferson did believe Providence or destiny and in an afterlife though he had no rational proof of it. Now some scholars looking at and
analyzing Jefferson's life say with compassion, that his beliefs reflected all the sorrows he personally endured. His wife whom he adored, died after ten years of marriage. Only two of his six children survived into adulthood, and only one outlived him. In one of his letters, It was said that his fondest hope, as he grew older, was that he might be united with his wife and children."]
In contrast, within his later correspondence, Jefferson stated that his religion was based on logic and not based on faith. It was, at its core, morality in action, and “salvation by character.” So the controversy rages on about whether Jefferson was a Unitarian… Witness a recent posting on the web site dedicated to the new book, Founding Faith by Steven Waldman, in the chapter on Jefferson: “The Pious Infidel”

*Mar 18, 2008 5:28 PM It’s no wonder that Jefferson admired Unitarianism. He had quite the distaste for organized religion, but an admiration for Jesus. Were he transported in time to the present, I’m sure he’d be disgusted with the Christian right, but I also think he’d view secularists as misconstruing his viewpoint. Ultimately, Jefferson wanted us all to be free to form our own beliefs, without … compulsion.
Modern conservatives who can’t bear to think that the Declaration of Independence was written by a Bible-defacer have spread the rumor that Thomas Jefferson created his own Bible as an ethical guide to civilize American Indians. … Actually, Jefferson’s editing of the Bible flowed directly from a well-thought out, long-stewing view that Christianity had been fundamentally corrupted -by the Apostle Paul, the Early Church, the great Protestant reformers like Martin Luther and John Calvin, and by nearly the entire clerical class for more than a millennium. Secularists love to point to the Jefferson Bible as evidence of his heathen nature; but that misses the point, too. Jefferson was driven to edit the Bible the way a parent whose child was kidnapped is driven to find the culprit. Jefferson loved Jesus, and was attempting to rescue him” Release him from all the mistaken creeds and pious and perplexing
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miracles attributed to him. He sought to recapture the moral teacher who had so inspired his character and who most consistently informed his conscience daily.
In a truly admirable, astute, and audacious way, Jefferson took up the challenge of writing a revised, ethical Gospel- a text that he believed would become universally regarded by all Americans as the text for civic and public morality, a basis for human rights, and the guidelines for personal conduct. Because he purposely excluded any texts or references to what he considered to be unreasonable and insupportable, he excluded almost every statement of faith or theological belief commonly held. Without saying, his ideas were considered to be vile blasphemy to the Calvinists, heretical to any pious Anglican, a travesty to any Catholic, an insult to any Methodist… And a refreshing, clear minded, and comprehensive account for any free thinking person!

Let it be known, that there is a serious attempt at revisionism trying to take place in our country today- where religious conservatives and fervent believers are trying to reclaim the Constitution and the Founding Fathers as pious men and devout Christians!
They use such lame evidence as they went to church regularly… As if that was some test of faith! Other than the effort of getting out of bed, it gives little credence to their claim… We all are familiar with the casual member, or the superficial identity, and throughout our lives we have seen ample evidence of those who “go through the motions” and look like they believe what is being said, and come to church only as a social convention… Jefferson, Washington, Franklin and many others did the same… Hardly a convincing tact because they knew their times… So they did not write to their friends or declare their objections publicly because of the political tenor and religious climate that would have easily interrupted any good they would do in the government!
It is also curious, ironic and a wonderful practice how the Congress, at least up to modern times, would award each new representative with a copy of Jefferson’s Bible, to be used as their ethical guide… I have to wonder if any of them have ever read it !

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Jefferson’s religious views, as given to us in his many letters, were the forerunner of liberal religion since he would repeatedly emphasize the superiority of reason over any doctrinaire faith. Following the Great Commandment, he also saw service to his neighbors and to the betterment of his society to hold an equal importance to any profession of beliefs- thereby allowing ethics and compassion to trump any dogmas and directives from an exclusive religious point of view. He called the results of his efforts, ” The Philosophy of Jesus” and what he actually did was this:
He had four copies of the New Testament, and a larger blank book… Excluding the Hebrew scriptures as being too archaic and too inhumane, and excluding the letters of Paul because he saw him as the first corrupter of the religion of Jesus, he focussed only on the Gospels and the words attributed to Jesus according to the best scholarship of his day…. Which is generous by the standards of the Jesus Seminar today…
He then proceeded to literally “cut and paste” separate quotations and collate all the teachings of Jesus that correspond most closely to a humanistic, liberal, and egalitarian point of view. He did this using the Greek, Latin, French, and English translations! With a painstaking precision, and with his investigatory editing, he produced a much condensed version of the Gospels that he felt would appeal to “the moral sentiments of a more enlightened populace”. Without going through all his edits, it is sufficient to say he saw Jesus as a moral teacher, as a man, and as the supreme human example of how to live, and how to treat other people…

Jefferson’s exercise, of creating one’s own set of texts, ideas, and resources that are most inspirational and meaningful to you would seem to be a recommended task for any U-U’s who seeks to identify themselves within our larger movement in a clear and comprehensive way. To me, it sounds like the best Adult Education imaginable!

For a few years, I subscribed to the Jesus Seminar reports and research and found it to be fascinating and complementary to my own investigations. Just to refresh you, The Jesus Seminar is a collection of progressive Biblical scholars, using the very best literary, archeological, and cultural context, sought to discover which of the words of the Gospel, did Jesus actually say- which ones were authentically his… To summarize the work, and following Jefferson’s example, these scholars found that only about 25% of the Gospel could be considered to be original or authentic… Which, for many of them, was sufficient to maintain their progressive faith as liberal Christians. Before returning to Jefferson, I would recommend that every U-U spend some time creating their own Gospel or set of ” Good News.” Each of us has the freedom to draw from World Scripture, philosophy, poetry, lyrics, science, art or any other source that you find to be inspirational, of lasting value, and worthwhile. The creation of your own Bible, your own personal or spiritual resource book, then becomes your enriching personal commentary or literary companion, and can act as an important pathway towards self discovery, inner comfort, acceptance, and peace.
It is my conclusion, after rereading various sources on Jefferson’s outlooks, that we need to look to giants like Jefferson, imperfect as they might be, for our best human and humane examples.
In fact, Jefferson was such an active, avid, advocate of religious freedom that he wrote , in 1822, to his colleague and friend, Benjamin Waterhouse, these words of fervor and conviction:
“I rejoice in this blessed country of free inquiry and belief that has surrendered its conscience to neither kings nor priests, and that a genuine doctrine of only one God is reviving, and I trust that there is not a young [person] now living, that will not die a Unitarian…

Overly idealistic? Of course! But there is no denying the strength, confidence or courage of his words! His earnest ideals sought to challenge public contentment and to energize social transformation.
It is my hope that this community will grow more Jeffersonian; To become as strong, as resilient, as prophetic and willing to add our names beside his… And I believe that such a goal is possible- As a congregation that actively and generously supports its mission, and as a community that will work to clarify, uphold and extend its foundational values.
Following in his example, may we become examples of goodness, truth, mercy, service and freedom… Not just for ourselves … But for all of us to know and see!
So Be It!

How not to talk about God: An interview with Karen Armstrong

The current debates about God’s existence hardly lift us up to transcendence. Karen Armstrong shares a vision of faith that is less about proofs than practice.

Karen Armstrong has met atheist Richard Dawkins a number of times. “He doesn’t like me, and I don’t like him much, but we are British, so we smile politely and exchange pleasantries,” she says. “We have been on panels together, but it’s absolutely pointless.”
Indeed it’s difficult to argue with the ideas she’s put forth in her new book, The Case for God. While her critics may say that she never “proved” her case, this is her point God isn’t a concept to be proved. She’s come to her understanding-or acknowledgment of her lack of understanding-of God over a lifetime of religious experiences. As a young Catholic desiring to experience God, she joined the Society of the Holy Child Jesus and spent seven years in the convent. She left disappointed and sick, and rejected faith. “I never thought I’d come back to religion, but what brought me back was the study of other faith traditions,” she says.

The author of more than 20 books, Armstrong says her spiritual practice is now study, which she likens to the practices of Benedictine monks. “When I’m sitting at my desk, I will get moments of awe and wonder and transcendence,” she says. But that experience doesn’t stop at her desk. Her study led her to launch The Charter for Compassion in November. Her goal, she says, is “to restore compassion to the central place of religious life.”

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How do people understand God in Western culture today?

The idea of God is treated as fact today. A lot of people see God as a discrete personality; God is a creator in the same way as you or I create something. ¨In the 17th century in the West and during the Enlightenment, scientists and philosophers such as Isaac Newton and Rene Descartes believed that they could prove God’s existence scientifically. They said science was the best path to all truth. The other ways of coming to truth, such as art or mysticism or ritual, were downplayed. God became a fact, pure and simple.

What’s wrong with seeing God as fact?
Theologians like St. Thomas Aquinas have said that God doesn’t exist like you or me or this chair. They said you couldn’t say God exists because exist is too limited a word.
¨That wasn’t meant to just put the kibosh on all discussion, but to acknowledge the inadequacy of speech about God and to make room for a sense of transcendence. One Catholic British theologian has defined theology as speech that’s segues into silence, rather than worthy statements and definitions asThe scientific “proofs” of God are being disproved. That could be a good thing because it could shock people out of this literal thinking, but they don’t always get much help from clergy on this. Clergy fell in love with science, too. We have developed a kind of lust for unsustainable certainty.

Science and religion are often cast as opponents today. How has the relationship between them changed?
Science and religion once were best friends. Seeking absolute certainty, churchmen and theologians made Newton’s God the original cause and all-powerful being that controlled creation through Newton’s theory of universal mechanics-central to their mission, later adding naturalist William Paley’s understanding of God as an “intelligent designer.” In the 19th century the one Enlightenment thought that evangelicals seized upon was Newton’s scientific proof of God.

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Then Charles Darwin found a natural explanation for life itself, and this threw religious people for a loop. They had no other resource to understand God except as creator so they developed defensive fundamentalism with a growing antagonism toward science that hadn’t been there before.

In the fourth century St. Augustine said that if a biblical text contradicted science, believers had to find a new interpretation of that text. That was the practice right through to the 17th century. Even at the dawn of the scientific revolution, a witty Vatican cardinal said that in the Bible the Holy Spirit is telling us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go.
In the past people knew that science and religion had different goals; they were complementary. Science can help you diagnose and treat your cancer, but it cannot touch the despair and dismay and terror you feel when you get the diagnosis, nor can it help you die well. For that people turn to religion, or more broadly speaking, to myth, the stories and beliefs that, when put into practice, answer our deeper questions about the more elusive, puzzling, and tragic aspects of our human predicament.

What happens to religion when you mix science and faith?

People thought that science would absolutely refute atheism, but once you have domesticated God and reduced God to a mere fact, atheism is only a matter of time. Religious language must always point beyond itself into the silence of transcendence. If it becomes an end in itself, religion becomes idolatry. ¨You can see that in the early modern scientists. Newton says he found proof for an omniscient, all-powerful, dominant force, who is, Newton claims, “very well skilled in mechanics and geometry.” This is clearly a projection of Newton himself. Mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler is said to have cried aloud in joy while doing his research, “O God, I think thy thoughts after thee.” That’s idolatry.

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What was the Catholic reaction to this perspective?
Catholic theology goes for the modern, scientific God, too. The 16th century was a time of turmoil. Society was changing so much that people couldn’t be religious as they were before the Middle Ages. The Reformation split Europe just as the first modern nation-states were forming. The so-called wars of religion were tremendously aggressive on all sides. Italy was overtaken by Spain, and Rome got sacked.
It was a jolly bad century, and the Council of Trent and especially the Vatican reflect a very defensive, hard-line church. Everything becomes more streamlined than it was before, more hierarchical and more hard-valued. They took Thomas Aquinas and turned his theology into a rigid system of thought that he would have found absolutely repugnant.

How were Aquinas’ ideas changed?
In his Summa Theologica, Aquinas starts out by saying we cannot define God. Then he gives five ways, as he calls them, to think about God, all variations on the fact that nothing can come out of nothing: the intelligent designer, the first cause that must have started the universe, and so forth. He ends each way by saying this is what everybody means when they say “God.”
Then he immediately pulls the rug out from under our feet, saying that we have no idea what such a being is or how it can exist. We can’t even say it exists. All we’ve proved is the existence of a mystery. If he were here today, Aquinas would be asking us to try and think of life before the big bang. He was doing cutting-edge science in his day, pushing reason as far as it could go.
But the Vatican later presented his ways as factual proofs and made people believe that you had to sign on the dotted line. It was a new hard-line orthodoxy. People were put to death over this.

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How did this development in theology affect people’s belief?
Belief started to be about ideas instead of practice after the scientific revolution, the Protestant Reformation, and the Council of Trent. Catholics never went quite as far as the Protestants in this because Trent was still very concerned with ritual-tidying up the liturgy and telling people to go to Mass.
Religion is a practical form of knowledge. You learn by doing it, like dancing or driving or swimming. You can’t learn to swim by reading a text; you just have to get into the pool and flap around until you acquire the knack. It takes years of disciplined, dedicated hard work before a dancer can move with grace, but if she works at it, she can take human movement into a new sphere.
Religion does the same, and in all the traditions you adopt a disciplined way of life and take part in rituals that teach the mind to go deeper than the rational level. Praying five times a day helps Muslims get beyond the preening, prancing ego. When you interrupt your work and point yourself in the orientation of Mecca, you’re reminding yourself of your true priorities.
In the ancient Benedictine tradition, you don’t just get it all in one go. It requires a monk to develop very slowly over years of practice. St. Ignatius, on the other hand, embraced the new efficiency of modernity. Ignatian spirituality is a crash course in mysticism. One 30-day retreat, and you’re set.
Religion is hard work. Above all it demands a compassionate lifestyle. This is the test of religiosity in every single one of the major world traditions. Most of our doctrines were originally calls to action.

How so?
Incarnation is a call to action. St. Paul says that Jesus was in the image of God, but he didn’t cling to that; he emptied himself of ego and took on the likeness of a servant and even accepted death on the cross, for which reason God exalted him. Paul introduces this concept by saying you must have the same mind as Christ Jesus: “Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves” (Phil. 2:3).
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Religious truth makes no sense unless you put it into action. It remains as dry and abstract as the rules of a board game, which sound incredibly dull and incomprehensible until you pick up the dice and play.

Are there other doctrines that could help us recover the sense of religion as practice?
We never really got Trinity in the West, but it was also a spiritual practice. In the early Greek church, the Trinity would be imparted not just as a jingle– “Three in one and one in three, oh, the noble Trinity”– but as a meditation after the transformative initiation of Baptism.
You swing your mind back from the three manifestations of God that we can sense, to the ousia of God, the one that we can never know, backward and forward. The doctrine is simply the end of the meditation.
You have to go through the meditation and keep doing it all your life to understand Trinity. It’s described very much as a transcendent experience. Ancient theologians were trying to remind Christians that it was impossible to think about God as a simple personality.

But Christians do think of God as having distinct personalities, including that Jesus is God.
To say Jesus is God is a partial expression of the divine. God is unnamable. You can never know the essence of the divine. But God has adapted this ineffable transcendence to our limited understanding and has come to meet us. So Christians have experienced God as Father, a sort of brooding, sort of caring presence; as Spirit immanent within us; and as Word, which is spoken in Jesus and in creation.
These are the external, like my gestures and my clothes and my words are me. But they don’t exactly define what “me” is. We know God’s external qualities, but we can never know his ousia or inner nature.

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How is the experience of transcendence connected to compassionate action?

You won’t get transcendence unless you are compassionate. To be compassionate is to dethrone yourself from the center of your world and put another there, to transcend yourself. You go beyond the selfishness and hatred that imprisons us and limits our vision.
Today we concentrate so much on defining what we’re transcending to– God –whereas in the past they concentrated more what we’re transcending from: selfishness, greed, hatred, all of which springs from ego.

But isn’t the goal of faith to get to heaven, “to meet our Maker”?
I’m not interested in the afterlife. When Jesus talks about the kingdom of heaven, he means something very earthbound. The kingdom, the reign of God on earth, is a Jewish concept, and Jews don’t go much for afterlife.
Paul says, “What no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor. 2:9). That is, he doesn’t know. If that’s good enough for St. Paul, it’s good enough for me.
If all religious life is reduced to getting into heaven, and all your good deeds are about getting up there, as it was for me as a child, this is no more religious than paying into a retirement annuity. Heaven is supposed to be about the loss of ego, not about preoccupation with its eternal survival in optimum conditions.
Also, if we do not experience a bit of the eternal now by hard, dedicated practice, it’s no good thinking we’ll get anything like that after we die.

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The Case for God responds to today’s militant atheism, like that of Richard Dawkins, but you also say in the book that you would welcome “an informed atheistic critique.”
I would, but Dawkins’ critique is not informed. Richard Dawkins on theology is frankly painful to read. As British literary critic Terry Eagleton said in his review, “Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology.”

I don’t like the regression of the dialogue on either side. It is uncompassionate, counterproductive, and all about ego. But an informed critique could help us rid religion of idolatry and see the ineffability of the divine. But now people are defensively hanging on to a concrete image of God, and once people get defensive, they can get aggressive, too.

How should we respond to atheism?
We need a rethink. We can’t reproduce the spiritualities of the past because we are 21st-century people, but we can learn from history and make the huge creative effort to translate its wisdom into our own time.
That’s going to be hard work, and people have gotten lazy about religion. They think it should be easy. They go in and sing a couple of hymns once a week at Mass and then return to their normal lives unscathed by the demands of the tradition. I think we need to reinstate the idea of religion as primarily practice.

What do you think of Pope Benedict XVI’s attempt to respond to the wider culture where Catholicism and religion in general is losing influence?
If he thinks all Europeans are going to become Catholic, this is just not going to happen. He has not been good with other faiths, either. I’d tell him, let’s go into dialogue prepared to be changed. That’s the only way dialogue works.

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Go into dialogue as you did in Socrates’ day, prepared in the end to realize that you knew nothing, to realize transcendence. No one can have the last word on God, and we can learn so much from other people’s insights.

What about the fear that this will lead to relativism? Is there value in each community pursuing its own path?
I think that’s the best way, even though I can’t do it.
Catholics in England have been so vile to me over the years that I don’t feel like I can go back to the church. I can’t become Anglican, though, because in England Catholics never feel quite English, and Anglicanism is a celebration of being English as far as I can see. Islam and Buddhism are out of my culture, too.
I don’t recommend my course to anybody else. This is just the result of my own personal, troubled religious history, and I healed myself by studying other faiths.
I think it’s best to stay with your own because all the religions teach the same thing — compassion. Stress those aspects of tradition that speak of compassion and practice and humility and openness.
I was with the Dalai Lama at an interfaith conference once when he told a woman that converting from Christianity to Buddhism was a complete waste of her time. All faiths teach kindness. My religion is kindness, he said, and as for the highest states of meditation, he said, don’t even go there.

The religions are not all the same. They each have their distinct genius, each their distinctive flavor, and each their particular flaws and failings. It’s best, I think, if you can, to remain with one but learn from others.

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What do you make of those who say they are “spiritual, but not religious”?
I can’t stand that. Spiritual often just means some kind of wishy-washy me-ism, where I’m having a lovely experience without much discipline. You know, designer Kabbalah in Hollywood or designer yoga.
Yoga is not about aerobic exercise or finding the lovely oceanic peacefulness about yourself; it’s about dismantling the ego. It demands hours of practice every day, not just a yoga class once a week. We’ve watered it down to be some kind of feel-good thing.
Some of the late medieval, early modern mystics who threw out all intellect in favor of spirituality were criticized for sitting around looking as if they had a bug in their ear because they only looked within themselves.
Spiritual can mean, “I feel very spiritual when I look at the sunset, but I’m quite happy to slag off Islam, and not to give any money to charity. I’m quite OK with the fact that we’ve messed up the Middle East and people are dying every day in Iraq- not just our soldiers but others who are dying as a result of our mistakes. I’m quite happy with the inequality of our social system.” That is not proper spirituality. ¨Feeling is neither here nor there. You’ve got to get deeper than feeling. We know in our own lives that feelings come and go. Like Aquinas said, you can’t feel God any more than you can know God.

If believe, feel, and know are out, what verb do you think best captures your relationship with God? Seek.
I seek and will seek forever without possibility of finding the clinching moment.

This interview appeared in the January 2010 issue of U.S. Catholic (Vol. 75. No. 1, pp. 24-28).

Bishop Spong and The Church;

A Question about The Prophetic/Justice Imperative contrasted to the Motives of the Institutional Church; The Love of God vs. Love of the Neighbor

Dr. Wallace from Pennsylvania writes:
“Our diocese has a linked relationship with one of the dioceses in southern Sudan. Terrible conditions. Our bishop and his wife visited the area (Kajo Keji) for three weeks several months ago. Our diocese has responded generously to pleas for food and other assistance. As it often happens, once caring people become personally exposed to conditions of millions upon millions in the developing world and have an opportunity to compare and contrast, the result – certainly by most Christians I have known – is a strong motivation to respond. In Swaziland in January, I guided our rector through a nine-day tour of conditions and the AIDS situation in Swaziland – same response. My bias as a Christian has been for many years that many faith groups place a significant emphasis and focus on the importance of belief as compared with the importance of behavior.

I recall a number of passages in the New Testament that cite Christ’s focus on loving God and our neighbors. From my personal perspective, love of a neighbor and all of its critical interpretations receives much less focus and emphasis in the Church than love of God. What usually occurs after a meaningful experience with poverty, loss of hope and inequity, there is a brief flash of sympathy, often action of some sort – some of which is indeed useful. But sooner or later there seems to be a return for our church leaders to fall back on what appears to me to be some fuzzy interpretations that occurred many centuries ago and would never stand active interpretation.

So, as I challenge church leaders, clergy and congregations, my question relates to how I can encourage them to review one of the essential mandates from Christ – his clear and emphatic emphasis on our responsibilities toward our fellow human beings.”

Dear Dr. Wallace,
You touch the ultimate question that always hampers the Christian Church. I am not sure Christianity would have survived for 2000 years had it not been institutionalized. I am not sure if it will survive the next 100 years because it is institutionalized.

Every institution places its ultimate weight on preserving its own life. That is why the Church emphasizes loving God over loving one’s neighbor. Loving God can be expressed through worship and liturgy, building stone monuments and in filling them with music as well as mystery. These are the emotions that build great cathedrals, vest clergy elaborately, decorate the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, create chorales and oratorios, all of which shroud God in mystery and wonder and draw people, who are always seeking relationship with the holy, into the Church’s orbit engaging them in worship. This serves the Church’s need for power that has always been its highest priority.

The push for justice on the other hand might be at the center of the Gospel but it also attacks the balance of power in the society. Since the rich always exploit the poor, to give the poor power, dignity and humanity makes them less pliable, less cooperative. Prejudices also cover human insecurities and so they always receive religious sanctions. The Bible portrays God justifying the hatred of the Hebrews for their overlords, the Egyptians. Otherwise, the story of the divine plagues aimed at the Egyptians at the time of the Exodus makes no sense.

White people cover their fear and insecurity against people of color by subjugating them as either slaves (later segregation and dehumanizing prejudice) or as vassal states to a colonial empire. Males cover their masculine sense of inadequacy by treating women as second-class citizens. Heterosexuals reveal their sexual insecurity by oppressing homosexual persons. It is interesting to me to see how throughout history we blessed our prejudices with sanctified quotations from Holy Scriptures as if to say God shares our prejudices with us.

The great biblical tradition says that loving God and loving one’s neighbor are not two separate actions but two sides of the same action. It was the prophet Amos who bore witness to the fact that divine worship is nothing but human justice being offered to God and human justice is nothing but divine worship being lived out. It was the First Epistle of John that warned us that one cannot love God without loving one’s neighbor and to suggest otherwise is to be “a liar.” It was Jesus himself to whom the words are attributed that his purpose is to bring life and to bring it abundantly. To be a disciple of Jesus means a dedication to being a life giver, a life enhancer to all people at all times and under all circumstances. Finally, in the parable of the Judgment in Matthew 25, the entire basis of salvation is said to be not the way one believes, that is to creeds, doctrines and dogma but whether or not one serves the Christ who is to be seen in the faces of the poor, the hungry, the naked, the imprisoned and the sick.

The task of people like you, Ned, is to call institutional Christianity daily to accept its vocation to follow its Lord by giving its life in the service of others. But lest you be disillusioned, you need always to be aware that the people who will hear the call of Christ and the call that you have so often heard and to which you have given yourself so courageously will always be a minority,

a saving remnant within the body of believers. However, that witness is essential to the life and health of the whole body. It is a fact that the great reformers of Christian history were generally regarded as troublemakers in their own generation. Only history applauds the prophet. The vast majority of those who share your generation, Ned, will be forgotten in a generation or two. But your work will be enshrined in the memory of the people you have served so deeply that it will finally enter the mythology of their culture. That is no insignificant contribution.

New Book From Bishop Spong Available Now!
THE SINS OF SCRIPTURE
Exposing the Bible’s Texts of Hate to Reveal the God of Love
“The Sins of Scripture challenges Christians to look beyond the myths of their faith into the heart of the matter.”
-Bill O’Reilly, anchor, Fox News Channel

The great Easter truth is NOT that we are to live newly after our deaths.. but that we are to live nobly, in the here and now- and that we live by the power of hope eternal, and by maintaining a faith in life and a love for others that resurrects us all…

Glory Be to God for dappled things- For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim; Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls;
flinch’s wings; Landscape plotted and pierced- fold, fallow, and plough;
And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things couter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle,freckled, (who knows how?)
With swift; slow; sweet; sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change: Praise Him!
Gerald Manly Hopkins

Easter is not a time to dwell on dusty, musty tombs of tradition and feeling… it is to be celebrated as a day that fans the flames of hope that rise out of the tombs of any despair- Easter is our day of days that proclaims unconditionally the glory and majesty of life-it proclaims that the Spirit of Life is eternal, and that She lives in us, among us and is forever a gracious Yes! Happy Easter!

Selected Reading: Easter Morning by Wallace Robbins (adapted)
In the Easter story according to St. John’s Gospel, at dawn, Mary Magdalene came to the tomb alone. She was reluctantly included among the people who surrounded Jesus or who were a part of his inner circle of believers. Yet, she was first; and it was to her, and not to the apostles, that Jesus first appeared.
Those who watched the crucifixion had hoped that Jesus would have demonstrated some divine power or holy wrath… But when he did not, some were disappointed… Others were relieved…. Mary Magdalene never asked for anything from Jesus; She just wanted only to give her thanks to a man- a man who lay dead either victorious or defeated- but a man when he was alive blessed her and released her from her enemies and exploiters.
Jesus might have been the only man she ever met who did not want something from her- the only one who saw into her heart, and then demonstrated to her that he believed in her goodness, and that she wasn’t beyond redemption or undeserving of his compassion. His ability to show mercy gave her the strength to believe that God could not be denied or wrestled out of existence by religious piety, moral indifference, or public apathy. Because of what he did while he was alive, she was simply grateful. Her darkness did not frighten him, and his dark death did not discourage her faith.
Until each of us is willing to face the tomb of our own deadly beliefs, the emptiness of limiting attitudes and belittling opinions, be willing to suspend our doubts to arrive with hope, and then acting courageous and compassionate toward others, acting in the unselfish power of love can do or achieve, only then will we ever begin to know how Mary felt on that first Easter morning….

From the writings of Miester Eckhart and the Creation Mystics

The day of my spiritual awakening, was the day when I saw God in all things, and all things in God….

When your personal Easter comes, know that I will be all around you, and that I shall move through and through you… and Then I will steal your body, and give it to your love… (alternative is: I will heal your body…)

When are we like God? I will tell you…
In so far as we are compassionate,and practice it steadfastly
In so far as we are just, and decide to live in accord with it
In so far as we are loving, and offer it freely

Then do we resemble the Creator/Creatrix who practices these things ceaselessly in us and for us…

What is the human soul? It is god with God.
This is why God says to the soul:
I am the God of gods, but you are the goddess of all creatures.
Stand by all the people ….
who bear my likeness for I am your soul….

How does God come to us?
Like dew on the flowers…
Like the song of birds!
Yes, God gives us beauty through all the creatures,
gives us God wholly to me! \
This is why I bless God in my heart without ceasing, and give thanks for every living thing…. And this is why God has given us a mouth- to offer praises, in common with all the creatures, with all that we do, and at all times….

I see humanity as one vast plant, needing for its highest fulfillment only love, the natural blessings of the great outdoors, and intelligent crossing and selection.

In the span of my own lifetime, I have observed such wonderous progress in plant evolution that I look forward optimisitcally to a healthy,happy world as soon as its children are taught the principles of simple and rational living.
We must return to nature, and nature’s god.
Luther Burbank