A Finger Pointing at the Moon

Transcription

1 BEYOND THEOLOGY A Finger Pointing at the Moon (Program #101) Host: Have you heard the one about the finger pointing at the moon? Stay tuned, and you ll see what I m talking about. Announcer: Production funding for this program has been provided in part by the Shumaker Family Foundation promoting social and environmental justice, education, spirituality and the arts. Host: What s happening with the world today? Things seem kinda crazy to you? So much change and uncertainty and not so much confidence in where we may be heading. Maybe it s always been like this. Things are always changing. That s just the way it is. But does it seem like there might be something different about the type of changes taking place today? Some people think we re passing through a transitional phase in which our most basic views and assumptions about life are going through a kind of metamorphosis. They contend that the underlying myths and images that guide our lives are evolving into something new and fundamentally different. That s the main focus of this series of programs exploring the nature of this transitional period we re passing through and reflecting upon the characteristics of the emerging worldview. We begin with a few brief observations from the people who ll join us as we take a journey beyond theology. We re not leaving theology behind just seeing it as a finger pointing to the moon. Sister Joan Chittister (Speaking to a large audience): The important thing to remember is that religion itself any religion is really meant to be only a means to sanctity, not an end in itself. Religion is at best a finger pointing at the moon. When we stop at the level of religious rites and rituals, religious robes and parochial rules, and call those things religion, call those things our things absolutes, we stop far short of the Divine. We miss the moon entirely. Joan Chittister (Benedictine Sisters of Erie): We re at a very serious crossover moment or point in history right now. A whole worldview is declining, is dying, as we talk. And the bridge, as it was before in the 16 th century and then in the 13 th century, has

2 always been science -- meaning new understandings of the nature of the world and ourselves itself always lead us to a new understanding then of creation and God. John Shelby Spong (Retired Episcopal Bishop): And the things that have made it difficult for the old patterns to prevail are that we live in a space age. We understand the dimensions of space. We live on the other side of Copernicus and Kepler and Galileo, to say nothing of Albert Einstein and Steven Hawking. And so we live in this vast arena, and we ve destroyed the dwelling place of God. There s no podium up there in the sky where God is looking down on you all the time. Dr. James Forbes, Jr. (Senior Minister Emeritus, Riverside Church, New York City): God is invisible. God is broader than our conceptualization. God is almost more frequently not able to be verified by those who would not believe it, but internally one gets intimations of that source still continuing to be a guiding and an enabling and an empowering presence. Narrator: As these progressive, American Christians speak of the need for us to expand our notions of God and to connect with our own inherent divinity, others speak more specifically about the current transition in terms of the evolutionary process through which human consciousness has emerged over the course of time. Peter Russell (Author & Futurist): Consciousness has been there all along. So people say talk about the evolution of consciousness -- it isn t that consciousness suddenly emerged with human beings; it was already there -- all creatures were conscious. What happened with human beings is new things started appearing in consciousness. The contents of consciousness have become a lot richer, and this sense of self has emerged -- self consciousness, though what all the mystical traditions say is ultimately that sense of self is an illusion. But I think we re in this partial midway stage of evolution. We ve developed a sense of self -- an apparent sense of self -- and what the mystics and saints have done is gone deep within and explored that sense of self, and in doing so, realized it s actually just another construction in the mind and there s something there s a much more deeper, profound truth which they discovered. And so I see that s where we re evolving towards -- is towards the understanding, the consciousness which the great mystics and saints and yogis have achieved from time to time. And I see them as sort of the beacons shining out through history of where humanity has the potential to go en masse. Karen Armstrong (Mythologist): And I think theology should be like a springboard and mythology, too, that should pitch us to the divine. But there s always a gap, the great theologians said, between what we think of as God and the reality itself, which we can never encapsulate in our minds. Narrator: In the series called The Power of Myth, which aired on PBS in 1988, Joseph Campbell spoke with Bill Moyers about the personal and cultural role of mythology, referring to such mythological images as the hero s journey. 2

3 Joseph Campbell: And what all the myths have to deal with is transformation of consciousness that you re thinking in this way and you have now to think in that way. Bill Moyers: Well how is the consciousness transformed? Joseph Campbell: By trials. Bill Moyers: The tests that the hero undergoes. Joseph Campbell: Tests or certain illuminating revelations. Trials and revelations are what it s all about. Karen Armstrong: Unless you re prepared to be changed by a myth and let it affect your behavior, you re not going to find out whether it s true or not. And these myths are powerful they ve grown up in different cultures, because they ve been found to work. They ve been found to be effective -- to help us unlock the heroic potential; to help us face up to death, something that human beings find very difficult. How to live a fuller, richer life, firing on all levels of our humanity, instead of just operating on the surface. Narrator: Joseph Campbell skillfully demonstrated how mythology influences our daily lives and the course of world affairs as it has for millenia. Not to be confused with the type of myth that we equate with falsehoods, these myths provide us with the images we have of ultimate reality, whether we call it God or the Great Spirit or something else. They convey notions about good and evil, darkness and light, how we should live our lives and where we go when we die. Such myths may also be referred to as grand narratives the stories that frame our view of the world. At times, older, more traditional narratives are rejuvenated when new ones don t seem to work so well. Harvey Cox (Professor of Religion, Harvard Divinity School): I think one of the reasons why, for example, in Muslim countries the Islamic grand narrative has been retrieved is that the modern myths have not paid off. And many of the Islamist protest movements really started as educational movements and have now become political or even to some extent a few of them, only a few, violent they started in protest against these modern grand narratives -- the modern myths. Narrator: What we call modern myths generally involve notions about progress, which is associated with the advancement of science and technology and the marketing of the good life. Traditional values and customs are often overwhelmed by powerful and pervasive forces that change the cultural landscape, whether it be in the Islamic world or in our own country. Robert Bellah (Emeritus Professor of Sociology, U.C. Berkeley): And in a way, it's modernity itself that's part of the reason. That is, the modern economy, modern politics, modern military involvements turn people's lives upside down all the time. And people need stability. They need a sense that the future will be secure. And when there's a sense 3

4 that everything is vulnerable, then people need to reach out and find some kind of meaning. Rabbi David Rosen (Speaking at A Congress of the World s Religions): Israel sees itself as vulnerable in a sea of Arab hostility in which Palestinians are a fifth column. The Arab world sees itself as vulnerable and disrespected on the part of western power. Rabbi David Rosen (International Jewish Committee for Interreligious Consultations): In a way, it s the passion of my life is this tension between tradition and modernity because I m part of both. And I don t see one as negating the other, but I see them as hopefully constructively complimenting one another. And that s the real challenge of our times. It s the real challenge especially in relation to Islam and the modernity -- this question of finding one s balance between those interests. And we all have a stake in that issue because we re either all going to fall because of a failure or we re going to have a future for our children and grandchildren because we ve learned how to be able to be true to our heritage and to feel that we are genuinely rooted in a tradition of our fathers and mothers and yet at the same time able to function within this diverse, pluralist, modern world. Karen Armstrong: One of the good things about our current world is our pluralism -- that we are beginning to discover for perhaps the first time in history, the profound unanimity of the religious quest. Underneath all the revealing and significant and interesting differences, people are at one, whether they re Buddhists, Christian, or Jewish, on many of the things that matter that we can t talk about God, nirvana, Brahman, or the sacred; we can only experience it. John Shelby Spong: I think we need to recognize that theology is always human and it s the experience that s always divine. Alan Wallace (Buddhist Scholar & Translator): If we come back as William James proposed and I think frankly nowadays the Dalai Lama is proposing and here's my little voice to pitch in with the great ones -- and that is if we come back to experience, spiritually, religiously -- hold your beliefs, cherish your beliefs but when you're speaking across disciplines, throughout cultures, let's not hammer each other with our beliefs but let's come back to experience and see where is there shared experience? Benedictine Sisters of Erie (morning devotional): Glory be to the creator and to the redeemer and to the sanctifier. As it was in the beginning. Joan Chittister: The God experience at least for me has not been an erratic one. The presence living in the presence of God, feeling the presence of God, becomes a way of life. That is what spirituality is all about. Benedictine Sisters of Erie: And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. 4

5 Diana Eck (The Pluralism Project, Harvard University): One of the great new questions -- new and old question, but an important question for every Christian today is how we actually understand religious difference. How we understand the presence and power of God -- the one we call God -- in the lives and faith of people of other faiths. And that s a question that s not only ours as Christians, it s a question that Buddhists ask, it s a question that Muslims and Jews and Hindus ask as well because we live in proximity to each other. We don t live in self-contained units. We live in a world in which people of faith are continually asking questions about their own faith in relation to science, about their own faith in relation to violence and about their own faith in relation to the reality they can observe of faith outside their own tradition the reality of religious diversity. Huston Smith (Emeritus Professor of Religion, Syracuse University): And that poses a new problem, namely how can one be faithful to one s own tradition, preferably even deepen one s grounding in one s own religion, while yet being open to other religions. John Shelby Spong: And my hope is that my Jewish brothers and sisters, my Islamic brothers and sisters, my Buddhist brothers and sisters, my Hindu brothers and sisters, are walking the path available to them. They re walking into the very heart and depth of their tradition. They re separating their essence from all the compromises they have made. And if we journey far enough, then I think we will come together around a circle because God is one. And if you get to God, you ve got to get to the same God. And the religion of the future will not mean that any of us compromise or give up our essence, but we can take on the holiness of others and bring something together that s more wondrous than we ve ever seen before. That s a vision I have -- an interfaith future. And think we either discover that or we re gonna commit genocide because religion is at the bottom of every conflict. That s why we kill each other. We ve got to get beyond that to our sense of what it means to be human and what it means to have God manifested in and through our humanity. Dr. James Forbes, Jr. (Speaking to a church gathering): When you become space for grace, then God uses your multiple gifts and your multiple competencies to help make the world a better place. Dr. James Forbes, Jr.: We are desperately in need of another great awakening. I think we have come to what I call the advance stage of secularization in which the culture has lost the sense of transcendence, has lost a sense of the importance of the sacred, is so into the material acquisition or into the power and pride of particular people that something has to remind us that this is God s world, that God has not vacated the world and that we need to look for contemporary signs of God s presence in a fresh way. John Shelby Spong: To talk about God beyond the category of theism is something that I ve only come to in the last 5 or 6 years. And I ve come to it because theism is a definition of God. It is not God. It s a human definition of God. And yet, that definition has so captured the mindset of people that our language says if you aren t a theist, the only alternative is to be an a-theist. And I m suggesting that there s got to be a God 5

6 experience beyond all of the definitions of the past, including the theistic definition. And by theism, I mean that view of God that says God is a being -- sometimes called The Supreme being. Supernatural in power dwelling somewhere outside this world and periodically coming into this world either to accomplish the divine will through some miraculous activity or to answer prayers so that, you know, the world gets to be the way the person praying wants it to be. And I think that God is the traditional God of the Western religious world the traditional God of the Christian faith. But it s not a God that I think can live in a post-copernican, post-newtonian, post-darwinian, post- Freudian, post-einsteinian world. Karen Armstrong: When I wrote my book A History of God, one of the things I wanted to show was that all the great theologians -- the greatest theologians in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all made it clear -- yes, you can think about God as a personality. That s fine and it s an important way of thinking, because it helps us to value the sacredness in our own humanity, which is made in God s image. But God transcends personality, as God transcends all other human categories, including male and female. We re talking about not a personality up there organizing the world as you or I might organize a television program or organize our business and oversee things. This is still thinking of God too much, as though He, ridiculous pronoun in itself, were just like us up there tweaking. This is another level of reality. Joan Chittister (speaking to audience): When we stop at the level of denominations; throw up dogmatic drawbridges; and fill the moats between us with theological acid (audience laughter) on a planet of peoples made plural by our creating God, we fail the Creator for having made this babelled manyness but who is nevertheless always, always one then we make our religions God and our God puny then we make religion dangerous. Joan Chittister: Religion is at the base of a lot of wars. Religion has done as much to create war as it has to resolve war or to bring peace. And until there is a mutual respect and a mutual understanding and a strong common voice, we have no way to bring new life to that. At the present time, I work on at least three major interfaith groups who are active around the globe, Hindus and Buddhists and Jews and Protestants and Catholics and Muslims together, all monastics or all religious figures of some type bonding in a spiritual way to say to the globe there is nothing in any of us that knows that God s will is for anything but peace on earth. Narrator: The problems we re facing in this century are monumental and potentially cataclysmic. Some believe that we re approaching the Apocalypse, when final judgment will rain down to separate the virtuous from those condemned to eternal damnation. Others prefer to concentrate on finding ways that we can begin to reverse the destructive tendencies of our species and learn to live together in peace and mutual respect. Religion has always played a key role in human affairs, and the growing level of threats we face magnifies the significance of our tendency to distance ourselves from each other. 6

7 Dr. James Forbes, Jr. In a world like ours, we ask when there are bombings, why do they hate us so? That question cannot be asked cavalierly. We have to have the courage, and it takes a lot of courage for us to stop and wonder what somebody else might have against us. We have to stop and ask that question seriously. And if we discover that the differential of resources is a continuing provocation to, as it were, assault against us; if arrogance causes us to look with contempt upon others; if our pride forces us to dehumanize others since we are the apple of God s eye, it s possible that we could address some of our fears by reducing the causes of antipathy and hatred on account of pride, arrogance, greed, et cetera. Karen Armstrong: And sometimes I think that in the first world, with our technology and our richness that seemed to sort of insulate us from suffering and from want, we sort of forgot that pain is part of the human condition. But if we turn our backs on the world, the world will come to us as it did on 9/11 in a terrible and distorted form and bring pain into our own lives, so that but this we should see it as an opportunity, because pain our own pain, then helps us to say Well, think of the people in Lebanon or Africa -- people for whom that suffering on this scale has been a daily fact of life. Joan Chittister: As Shylock says as Sojourner Truth said: they hurt, they bleed, they desire, they want, they feel for exactly the same things we do. John Shelby Spong: And that s where I think we ve got to find God in the enhanced consciousness and the enhanced ability to live and to love and to be. And I think if you can translate that into this world, you find people eager, eager to have something that is meaningful to them because they know full well that the old stories just don t cut it with them anymore. Joan Chittister: My image is a simmering globe -- that everywhere, everywhere the globe is simmering, things are changing, ideas are emerging, new peoples are rising, awarenesses are different and that somehow or other is an image of the work of the Holy Spirit at a moment in time when we must make a successful transition from one worldview to another. Host: No one can say what will come of all the changes we re experiencing and all the challenges we re facing. We don t know what cures or catastrophes will come along. We can t predict the future. The notion that we re passing through a transitional period of mythological metamorphosis may or may not prove to be true. But we re going to proceed as if it were and see if we can learn more about what might be waiting for us beyond theology. I m Charles Atkins, Jr. Thanks for being with us. [Box in upper right-hand corner during credit roll] Narrator: What s the problem with reciting a prayer at a high school football game? Why can t the Ten Commandments be displayed in a county courthouse? And what did our founding fathers have to say about the role of religion to our government? 7

8 Diana Eck (Harvard University): One of the real gifts of the Constitution and those who framed it was they did not frame it explicitly as a Christian document. Robert Wuthnow (Princeton University): What we re facing right now are huge questions about what shall we do with respect to church and state, especially as we become a more diverse society? Host: Find out more about the relationship between church and state in America on the next edition of Beyond Theology. Announcer: Production funding for this program has been provided in part by the Shumaker Family Foundation promoting social and environmental justice, education, spirituality and the arts. Topeka Copyright