More Spirituality

What's a good Jewish boy doing in a place like this? How did I get to be a Non-Theistic, Zen, Heterodox Christian born to a good Orthodox Jewish woman from Scranton, Pennsylvania?

It was a long road. To be clear. By the time I was in high school, I had already abandoned my mother's version of Judaism. To her, even the rabbi was insufficiently Jewish. Even as a teenager, that kind of superstitious adherence to illogic no longer kept my allegiance. As a Boy Scout, I had no trouble eating bacon and eggs for breakfast and sopping up the pork sausage gravy with my southern biscuits.

Not that I ever abandoned my love of kosher dill pickles and hot pastrami on rye. But early in my Air Force days, under the influence of a chaplain, I became a Christian. It did trouble me to have to know that my mother was bound for hell because she was not Christian, but that is what my conservative mentor taught me.

My travels from Corpus Christi, Texas, where I was born and grew up through years in Japan, first in the U.S. Air Force and then university, followed by seminary in California, New York, language study in Washington, D.C., urban studies in Chicago, death squads in Brazil, friends tortured and killed by the Brazilian military, teaching and studying in Akron, Ohio and so much more, have taken me through a spiritual journey as well. But my travels through my heart and mind have been even more drastic.

Let me parse out the spiritual description in the second sentence. I'll start from the end.

• Christian: Does not mean a follower of all the traditional Christian creeds, dogmas, and doctrines. It simply means someone who tries to follow the model and example of Jesus and our best guess as to his words and actions. (The best guess is probably from the work of the modern New Testament scholars like those of the Jesus Seminar.)
• Heterodox: Means counter-orthodox. It means not being bound by orthodoxy. Kind of like Jesus, who found himself and his disciples being hungry on the sabbath and picking ears of corn, even though the "law" said not to "work" on the sabbath. From "Heterodox" arises my only dogmatic statement. "Absolute statements of 'truth' are always wrong, including this one."
• Zen: More difficult to define. Discovering non-duality. Recognizing "suchness". Finding that subject-object is only a convenient shorthand. Meditation.  Much more. Please note: Not Buddhism. Though I am very appreciative of Buddhism and have much to learn from it, I do not embrace the Buddhist language and vision.
• Non-Theistic: Realizing that there is no supernatural deity "out there". Unlike most atheists the Non-theist may use the word "god" as a symbol of something otherwise indescribable like the spirit of all community or greater unity of all beings including perhaps, the non-sentient beings. This gets pretty fuzzy. Perhaps the "panentheist" understanding of "god" is a good choice. God is in everything and everything is in God, but everything is not God. Okay. We're still working on a good explanation.

I have come to understand that all words are but pointers to reality. They have no real meaning in themselves. Sometimes a few human beings come to a tentative agreement on the meaning of a word, so we use that word. Words are all we have to communicate with. But we make a great mistake if we take too certainly the idea that we really agree. Even with common objects, our understandings of words differ. I was taken aback when I asked someone the time. His answer was "1730". Of course, having been in the Air Force, having flown as a private pilot and having lived in Japan, I quickly realized that he was using 24-hour time and when I later looked at the time on my cellphone, it said "5:47pm". But most people on hearing that would take longer, if they ever did understand.

It is so with spiritual reality, but even more. Each person has experienced spiritual reality in her different way. Some even blanch at the use of the word "spiritual" because it connotes something distasteful or even untrue to them. At best we have to use words. They are the only tools available.

I do use the word "god" because, despite the joke, if I used the word "dog" it would really be confusing. (Except to a handful of us dog lovers.) But, again, I certainly do not mean some supernatural god out there who created all of the universe. I do mean the confluence of nature and humanity which brings feelings of awe to me on a misty spring day. And much more.

I am uncomfortably comfortable with the word "prayer". It means, for me, self-talk reminding me of my intentions or exclaiming my sense of gratitude. Not gratitude to a supernatural god, mind you, but gratitude still. My discomfort bells start ringing when someone insists we pray to "God" for deliverance from something unpleasant--illness perhaps or victory in sport or natural disaster.

Another word is "miracle". On a purely rational level, when I consider my replacement knee, I think it is a miracle. The miracle is not supernatural or outside of natural laws. Still it is amazing that science and medicine have collaborated to create this device which relieves the pain with which I lived for so many years.

But when two parents pray for their children to be healed from a brain-tumor--a real example for me--then one is healed and the other dies. I can't simply say, as some can, "God moves in mysterious ways." That certainly is an explanation, but it makes God into a monster. If God heals one and not the other, God is not a just God. After all, both children were equally worthy of life. Too young to have committed serious moral wrong, the injustice is blatant. On the other hand, if God isn't the source of healing, then God is not worthy.

Then what is spirituality. If not God, then what? I go back to Camus. The spiritual quest is the search for something on which to found one's life. The great Christian theologian Paul Tillich invented the phrase, "Ground of being." The aim of spirituality is two-fold. To discover a ground of being (GOB), somewhere to stand in life. And it is to find a way to express both awe and gratitude. 

In a future blog entry, I will go forward and explore spirituality itself; perhaps some useful pointers for pursuing it as well. I'm not sure that a person who does not search for a GOB (Ground of Being) can be emotionally and mentally healthy. More later.