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| The Dalai Lama & Archbishop Desmond Tutu |
Today we are marking the beginning of the secular school year and the Church school year, but the two don’t always mix very well.
A little girl named Martha was talking to her
teacher about whales.
The teacher said it was physically impossible
for a whale to swallow a human because even though it was a very large mammal
its throat was very small.
Martha insisted that Jonah was swallowed by a
whale.
Irritated, the teacher reiterated that a
whale could not swallow a human; it was physically impossible.
The little girl said, 'Well, I’ll ask Jonah
when I get to heaven.'
The teacher asked, 'What if Jonah went to
hell?'
Martha replied, 'Then you ask him'.
This is a funny little story, but it has a bit of an edge to
it when you think about it. We all start out, like Martha, taking the Bible –
and everything else – literally. The
capacity for more sophisticated ways of interpreting our experience of reality is
a much later cognitive development. It
is a real leap from “Dick and Jane” to Macbeth,
from simple addition to advanced calculus, a distance that takes many years of
patient learning to traverse. We invest
a lot in our children’s education to ensure that they make that leap
successfully. Our culture values and
rewards intellectual development, and we willingly make sacrifices for it, especially
for the sake of economic security.
It seems to me that we don’t invest nearly as much in
spiritual and moral development. Some
people never move beyond a grade school familiarity with the Bible and
theological traditions, what James Fowler calls the mythic-literal stage of
faith development. Children receive our
faith tradition readily. Faith
traditions provide a foundation for spiritual and moral development: stories,
rituals, and symbols, a language that allows children to express and reflect on
their spiritual and moral life. Christianity
is one such religious language, providing the basic building blocks upon which
later spiritual growth is built.
The problem with remaining at the mythic-literal level of faith
development is that we confuse our religious language’s mapping of reality with
reality itself. Like little Martha, we
don’t even realize we are using a map. For
us, the map is the territory. We see
life in very black and white terms.
Those who do not accept our map are ignorant, obtuse, or positively
evil. They can go to hell for all we
care.
Most of us come to realize that our religious language isn’t
the only one; there are other ways to map reality. Once we wake up to the reality that ours is
not the only religious language, this can lead to a kind of crisis of
faith. We may become disillusioned with
our faith tradition, or double-down on its truth claims. Some learn a second language, converting to
another faith tradition, or decide that all religious languages are equally
valid or pretty much equally garbage.
Many who reach the point of critically evaluating their
native religious language become skeptical and feel they we must make up their own
language. They become “spiritual” rather
than “religious.” Faith is what I make
of it; a little bit of this and a little bit of that or nothing at all.
I’ve noticed that by midlife, however, people tend to become
open to re-embracing their native religious language. They recognize the limits of logic and
instrumental reasoning, and acknowledge the paradoxes of life, the Mystery that
can only be intuitively known. Life
experience has humbled them. They realize the Mystery isn’t something they can
comprehend. At this point, they have a
renewed appreciation for the sacred stories, rituals, and symbols of their
native faith. They want to go deeper in
their connection to the Mystery, and engage with the practices and community
their tradition makes available to foster this connection, preferring to master
their native tongue rather than dabbling in a surface level pastiche of various
religious patois.
We obtain to a truly universal faith as we engage particular
religious languages in depth, persevering in the work of spiritual growth. Such
people are recognizable by the way they selflessly serve others with awareness
and compassion, without the usual doubts and anxieties plaguing the rest of us.
They are secure in their identity, no longer needing to define themselves over
and against anyone or anything else.
They have nothing to lose, nothing to protect, no need to compete or
compare. They are free. In the language of Christianity, we call them
saints.
Perhaps in our day, a picture of Archbishop Desmond Tutu and
the Dalai Lama laughing together illustrates what I am talking about far better
than my words. Here we have an icon of
sainthood: compassionate, joyous, free
human beings in service to the world. What
if we equipped our children to become saints, much as we equip them to become
doctors or lawyers or scientists or venture capitalists? Given the violence of our world in its
current clash of cultures, driven by religious and secular fundamentalists
stuck at a mythic-literal level of spiritual development, can we hope for
anything less?
While I was not surprised to see white supremacists marching
in Charlottesville, I was taken aback by how many of them are young, white,
middle class college students. How could
they be so privileged with regard to their economic and educational status, and
so very poor with regard to their spiritual and moral development? Did they have just enough religion to ruin
them, and not enough to move beyond such ignorance and evil?
The hope for our children’s future is not to be found in
technological innovation, or unlimited economic growth, or the false myth of inevitable
progress. It is to be found in the
lives of what Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. called transformed
non-conformists: people capable of
transcending the limitations of their cultural conditioning. Such people persevere in the work of spiritual
growth such that they realize reality exceeds their map of it, and that the
Mystery in which we move and live and have our being is ultimately experienced
as a unity of wisdom, love, and bliss. This experience transforms our consciousness
and our ethics.
This is what St. Paul refers to when he writes, “Do
not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your
minds, so that you may discern what is the will of God-- what is good and
acceptable and perfect.”[1]
He goes on to say that this transformation of consciousness is evidenced by
both genuine humility, in which we no longer think ourselves better than anyone
else, and authentic community, in which we share our gifts and abilities for
the sake of the common good.
Collectively, we become the body of Christ, transparent to the presence
and power of the Mystery we call God.
And we offer ourselves, in sacrificial love, as an offering to God for
the healing of the world. We are all
called to be saints; not because we are perfect, but because we are loved and
have been fitted to mirror that love.
Commenting on this passage from Romans in one of his most
famous sermons, Dr. King said,
I’m sure that many of you have had the
experience of dealing with thermometers and thermostats. The thermometer merely records the
temperature. If it is seventy or eighty
degrees it registers that and that is all.
On the other hand the thermostat changes the temperature. If it is too cool in the house you simply
push the thermostat up a little and it makes it warmer. And so the Christian is called upon not to be
like a thermometer conforming to the temperature of his society, but he must be
like a thermostat serving to transform the temperature of his society.[2]
Are you a thermometer or a thermostat? Are you ready to turn up the heat? Transformed nonconformists make us
uncomfortable. They challenge us to see
truths that we’d rather ignore, like the pernicious persistence of institutional
racism and the calamity of global climate change. Saints are not nice people. They are people who tell us the truth because
they actually love us.
Archbishop Tutu once said, “Children are a
wonderful gift. They have an extraordinary capacity to see into the heart of
things and to expose sham and humbug for what they are.”[3] Maybe that is why Jesus said we must become
like children to enter the kingdom of heaven:
we must see through our conditioning, like children do, before they have
been forced to internalize it. In a way,
the end of the spiritual journey is to find ourselves where we began, embracing
a second naïveté.
Equipping our children to become saints is difficult. It takes an entire faith community, not just
parents. It challenges us to be role
models of moral and spiritual maturity who are fluent in speaking Christian;
not because it is the only religious language worth speaking, but because it
can be the means whereby we transcend the limitations of our cultural
conditioning and conformity to its violence, greed, and exploitation of people
and planet. The way of Jesus is a path
to real freedom. Are you a thermometer or a thermostat?
What the world needs now, what it needs most, is more
saints.
[1]
Romans 12:2.
[2]
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Transformed Nonconformist,” sermon delivered
November 1954, Montgomery, Alabama, accessed at http://okra.stanford.edu/transcription/document_images/Vol06Scans/Nov1954TransformedNonconformist.pdf
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