Results tagged “Spirituality” from People So Bold!

Wisdom is not like knowledge.   One can read all sorts of books, and take many examinations that test one's aptitude for doing tests, and get degrees from the best Universities and have no wisdom. Wisdom is acquired by practicing balance in a tipsy topsy world and sanity in the face of insanity.  Wise people seek justice  when confronted by inequities and outrages, and become peacemakers in the midst of conflict and violence.

Wisdom is learned by people who take their life work seriously, not because it will look good on a resume, and allow them to be noticed by the movers and shakers, but because this is the work that they have been given, and honest work is an expression of an honest person.

Thoreau said he went to the woods because he wanted to learn what the woods could teach him about living.   But it is important to note, that he went back to society,  he re-engaged in the world.  And when the time came to choose between conformity to an unwise war, or to wisely stand on principle--Thoreau choose to take a stand.  We judge the wise one not by the seeking but by the doing.

Wisdom not knowledge is what we need in our leaders.  I am less interested in how many facts the leader can conjure up, I am more interested in the leaders ability to laugh at themselves. We have seen the consequences of unwise leaders in recent years.  The present incumbent of the oval office has a degree from Yale, and another one from Harvard.  He got good enough grades for all that matters.  He is clearly an accomplished school goer.  Yet,  we hesitate to call him wise.  We have unwise leaders in abundance,  so I can don't have to pick on one party.

Wise leaders do not introduce rapid and violent change into another a society and then seem dumfounded when that society resists their well intended invasion.  Wise leaders do not lie,  and manipulate their constituents,  and then become disappointed when their supporters turn away.  Wise leaders do not demonize their opponents and then wonder why the public thinks that they will do anything to win.

Wisdom is acquired not from experience,  not tenure of doing the same thing over and over. there are many so called experienced functionaries who continue to be fools,  or  unthinking bureaucrats. No wisdom arises not from longevity of activity , but from the awareness brought to practice.

Wisdom is a set of spiritual quality and a spiritual practice, and like all spiritualities it is acquired by conscious practice, such as holding oneself accountable to standards, by doing honest work for the sake of honest work, by caring for the earth and her creatures because the earth and other creatures have cared for you.  Wisdom is recognizing that if we would have change in the world,that we must be the change we seek.

Contemporary North Americans are a people who like to fill their minds with facts and their lives with things.  Our culture of achievement urges us to hurry from activity to activity, to fly jet planes to cities so close that take off and landing  makes up most of the trip, our culture of consumption teaches to acquire more and more commodities, and convinces us that personal security  is achieved by risking our fortune on a volatile market, and Thoreau tells us to simplify,  simplify, simplify.  Yes, simplify if we wish to live, by which he means to live with deliberation, with awareness, then we must live without being enslaved by time and things.

Thoreau echos ancient sages and prophets.  For example, Socrates challenges his students to look beyond the artifacts to the ideal, he argues that the unexamined life is not worth living, to live with wisdom is his ideal,  seeking riches or power are a diversion.

The Palestinian Rabbi Jesus also makes makes a Walden like point in the Sermon on the Mountain.

This is how he puts it,  "Therefore I say to you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink; nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food and the body more than clothing?  Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet the Source of All provides for them. Are you not as worthy as they?  Which of you by worrying can add one inch to his stature?
 

So why do you worry about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; and yet I say to you that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is, and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will He not much more clothe you, O you of who trusts so little?
  

The Buddha tells us that all suffering stems from attachment, to relational objects that are transient.  We cling to the thing, or to the form of a relationship, and invariably there is change.  We hug the object of our devotion,  hoping that it will be with us forever,  and the object disappoints us,  instead Buddha advises us to pay attention to being present to the moment  and to do that we must live with wisdom the eight fold path constituting giving us practical advice of living lives that enable deep reflection. awareness and wisdom.

There are thousands of prophets, and poets,  and who that similar stances, and while their cultural contexts vary, and while their cosmological references may be diverse, the wisdom traditions of the world,  weave this common theme:  that which is important in life is found in the living  not not the accumulating,  the meaningful life, is found in being aware of what is present and what is given rather than seeking after that which is fleeting and not yet attained,  and that which makes life purposeful is found in the power of relationship, the being with,  rather than the power of mastery, or control, the being over and against.

Wisdom traditions, with their wisdom teachers and students of wisdom all exist in societies of men and women who are make livings, and raise children whether the society be an indigenous sustainable community or consumer society caught up in commodity fetishism, whether agrarian or urban,  and whatever their technological achievements, or status as a world power stand in variance to dominant culture's standard's of success.

There were 500 plus nations in North America before Columbus, many more on the southern continent. Languages as different from one another as Korean is not the same as French. Different forms of social organization. Theologies and spiritual practices radically different from one nation to the next. Yet, we continue to hear of Native American spirituality as if there were an identifiable practice under patent to the "race."

For some years I have kept my Cherokee background close, only talking about it with friends. It was part of me, but to share it among UUs caused folks to approach me gushing about their spirituality. When I heard their story it seemed to be some sort of bird watching thing. My grandmother spoke Cherokee, had her distinct set of practices, and was a nominal Presbyterian.

I recoil from the term Native American if I detect that the speaker (or writer) is writing as if this term designates a definite group of people.

(I used to like the terms First Nations, or First Peoples - they had a plural ring to it. For a collective term I prefer American Indian, and then when designating a particular group of people say Cherokee, I use Cherokee Indians.)

The Rev. William Sinkford, President of the Unitarian Universalist Association recently wrote about worship, the following is a selection:

In many congregations I visit, the sense of awe, the sense of reverence, are growing with the sense of celebration. And my sense of excitement is growing as our worshiping communities live out the promise of what our faith can be.
Sinkford refers to Unitarian Universalist communities as worshipping communities, and we often think of our congregations from that frame of reference. In this essay, he is arguing that there is a revival in the quality and excitement of the worship experience in many of our congregations, and change makes us stronger as worshipping communities.
Has religious community always been this way? Is this a permanent fact of religious community. Sinkford asserts:
Worship is the central act of the religious community-not committee meetings or coffee hour, despite jokes to the contrary. The root of the word worship is the Anglo Saxon for worth, and worship is the way we celebrate what we hold worthy. We UUs together hold many values worthy, so the emerging common elements in our worship may simply be the way we express our faith community's common ground.
Is our common worship actually the way we express our common ground? Is that why Sinkford asserts that it is the central act of our religious community? We are living in a time of unprecedented social and cultural change. Will worship continue to be the central act of religious community in the world that is emerging?
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Organizing worship as an activity is not a universal characteristic of all human communities. Native American scholars agree that Eastern Woods indigenous peoples had no worship services before the conquest (before 1492.) The villages had rites of passages and celebrations, but no time was set aside to praise God, or celebrate that which is worthy. There are plenty of stories of Native people finding the notion of sitting down for an couple hours on a special day to relate the Holy absurd. "We live with the Holy," they replied, "every day and every activity is spirit filled."
Young men and young women were expected to have "original revelations of the divine" as part of becoming adults. The rite of passage that the conquerors culture has chosen to call "the vision quest" was not a search for a personal spirituality. It was a way of knowing essential for participation in the common life of the community. To be a wise woman or man was to be a spirit-filled person. Those who were not spirit-filled were not to be trusted--not trusted with the hunt, not trusted with care of the household, not trusted with community governance, not trusted with relations with other communities, not trusted in war.
Worship was the not the central act of the various communities of Eastern Woods indigenous peoples, but they were not less "religious" for their lack of worship ... at least not as we intuitively use the word €˜religion.'
However, the indigenous peoples of the Eastern Woods lived in societies that were not divided into rich elites and impoverished laborers, and which did not distinguish between sacred and profane. These societies knew no patriarchy. (All of these innovations the native peoples came to know after 1492, and it was then that they began to set aside time and places for worship.)
Let us think about the long history of the homo sapiens. I would suggest that for most of that history the spiritual life of human beings in community has had more in common with the indigenous peoples of this land than with peoples who organized "religious communities" separate and apart from the society as a whole.
Religious communities organized as voluntary organizations separate from society as a whole assume societies in which religion is contention with secularity, and/or with alternative ways of being religious.

When I was a relatively new minister,  I had lots of confidence that if someone articulated a particular theology then what they said they believed would affect their attitudes and their behavior.  So I was teaching a new members class and I outlined several different orientations toward "the purpose of religious community."  Some examples included:  religious communities that aim to change people from one way of being to another;  religious communities that aimed to help people grow their own inner potential and religious communities that aimed to change the world.  Included on my list, was a suggestion of what I thought was a very un-Unitarian Universalist way of being religious community, a place that offered people refuge from the world, a place to find some kind of peace.

I had used this schema at Arlington Street Church and in Indiana, and my new to Unitarian Universalism students were all agreed, the purpose of church was to help people grow, and to support efforts to transform the world.  My members were choosing the expected options,  and coincidentally these options are what the ministerial fellowship committee uses to define ministry.  It wasn't until during my third year in ministry that a number of more senior members of the congregation began to take my class.  They had heard from the newer members that it was worthwhile, and they felt they needed this experience as well.

When the topic of the purpose of the church came up in our class, these elders were bold enough to say why they came to church.  And more than a few of them said refuge, sanctuary, respite.  I was taken aback.  These were pillars of the congregation.  They were Religious Humanists in the Manifesto II sense of that word, and dutiful social action advocates.  Surely they came for intellectual and ethical growth and to advance the liberal social agenda.  As we discussed their point of view,  it became clear that they supported the mission of the congregation, that they were interested in personal and intellectual growth, and while they were suspicious of the word "spiritual" they were seeking to become more open, more generous, more aware and more connected to themselves, to other people and to the cosmos.

Knowing that they claimed that they came for refuge, and knowing that nothing in their theology suggested escapism, gnosticism, or monasticism,  I began to observe these elders more closely seeking an answer to my puzzlement.  I was reading  "Four Spiritualities: Expressions of Self, Expressions of Spirit : A Psychology of Contemporary Spiritual Choice" (Peter Tufts Richardson) at the time.  Peter Richardson a long time Unitarian Universalist minister had studied how personality shapes and forms our spiritual choices using Jungian psychology as his guide.  Peter suggested that introverts may share the same world view as Extroverts but they will approach it in an introverted fashion.  And it dawned on me, the introvert might experience religious community as a place that they can be introverted, a refuge from an extroverted world.  I saw my own extroversion in context, most Americans are extroverted, and while I may have major criticisms of the dominant world view, I share this relational dynamic.  The minority introverts might have cause to experience my presumptions as oppressive.  They needed time to re-energize before going into the world.  We all have an introverted side as well as an extroverted side, but some of prefer going out to world, or going inside ourselves. In my worship planning I should appeal to both,  I should become more conscious of both the extroverts and the introverts (as well as the sensors and intuitives, etc.) in worship, and in teaching.

The UUA President, William Sinkford speaks of worship services in which "sermons about real-life issues are becoming more common, appealing not just to our minds but also calling us to be our best selves as we go back out into the world and face another week."  I don't experience our worship services as a respite from the world,  but I am not an introvert (although Bill has made that assumption about me.)  I don't think Bill has a different understanding of church than I do, but I need the world in order to think,  but he needs some time away from the world to regroup.  For a different take on Bill's statement read TheLivelyTradition.

Rebecca Parker writes in "Love First" as sermon given at the Opening Convocation of Starr King School For The Ministry in September 2005. 

"We must learn again to live with reverence. Reverence is a form of love. It is a response to life that falls on its knees before the rising sun and bows down before the mountains. It puts its palms together in the presence of the night sky and the myriad galaxies and recognizes, as poet Langston Hughes tells us, "beautiful are the stars, beautiful too are the faces of my people." Reverence greets all humanity as sacred. It genuflects before the splendor of the grass and the magnificence of the trees. It respects the complexity, beauty, and magnitude of creation and does not presume to undo its intricate miracles. Instead, it gives life reverent attention, seeking to know, understand, and cooperate with life's ways.

Reverence for life has to be learned. It is not just a feeling; it is a way of life that is manifested in more than an isolated moment of appreciation for nature or awe before its destructive or creative power. Reverence involves full-fledged devotion enacted in deeds of care and responsibility. It involves knowledge, study, and attention."

Reverence for life is a spiritual attribute, and spiritual attributes are acquired through practice, by what has been called spiritual discipline.  Unitarian Universalists has experienced an increased interest in spirituality, but the interest appears to be stronger than the willingness to commit to a discipline. Parker argues that reverence for life involves knowledge, study and attention.  Acquiring reverence for life requires practicing deeds of care and responsibility for our earth and for animals and plants of our earth.  It requires practicing deeds of care and responsibility for human community, for seeking not only ways to aid each others immediate needs, but to seek ways to overcome oppressive systems that restrict the full unfolding of life.  This may require the theological task of overcoming an oppressive world view.

Parker continues:

"Our society is currently guided by a worldview that is insufficiently grounded in reverence.  Religiously, it is  a worldview that regards the world itself as trash-a planet that God is soon going to discard in a plan to wipe this world away and create a new one.  Economically, the dominant worldview regards human beings as self-interested individuals, motivated only by their personal desire to consume.  And scientifically, it sees existence as devoid of value, atomistic, disconnected, and mechanistic.  Such inadequate views are tearing our world to tatters by lack of regard for the communal character of life."

Parker argues throughout this sermon for a connection between what we do in the world, and our spiritual, theological and intellectual understanding of that world.  Reverence for life must be learned and that learning involves transformation, taking on a new identity and a new worldview.  Transformation to becoming a person who loves life in practice is more than a simple matter of doing some non controversial projects of aid to the less fortunate, or thinking some good thoughts.  It takes practice, and theological work. 

(This raises a question for me, why did the UU World cut Parker's sermon just at the point where she critiques the current religious, economic and scientific worldview?  Is it because her critique is a challenge to the views of many Unitarian Universalists who are content to spin feel good religion on top of the dominant worldview?  It can't be because of space, there is much they included that is incidental to her main point.

Yesterday, I was talking with a retired minister about Florida.  The subject drifted from native plants to native people, and what we knew about Florida before 1491.  I expressed my opinion that "indigenous wisdom" has much to teach us, and he expressed surprise.  "You mean that you think there is something behind all that superstition," he said, "aren't you romanticizing the past?"  The liberal clergy have had a love affair with modernism, and many continue to suffer under the prejudice that all thinking by pre - Enlightenment people was irrational and not worth serious consideration.

I have been thinking a lot about "indigenous wisdom" lately.  The Six Nations (Iroquois) told stories about the "three sisters" which were corn, squash, and beans.  They told how these three food plants were gifts to the people, how the people learned to care for and cultivate these together, and the stories told the people that the cosmos was broken when three sisters were not grown together.

Superstition?

We now know of that corn, squash, and beans provide complimentary proteins, provide a balance of fibers and complex carbohydrates, and planting them together provides a natural nitrogen depletion and renewal cycle thus contributing to a sustainable agriculture.

The so called science advanced by modernism is based on reductionism,  breaking things into smaller and smaller mechanism.  But the observations of the indigenous people led to wisdom, because it was based on seeing connections.

The illustration is from Cooking with the Three Sisters.

I am one of those old fashioned religious liberals that has a high regard for the teachings of Jesus and a low regard for many of the teachings of the historic Christian Church. It occurs to me that Jesus was more interested in getting "heaven" into people, and while the Church has made getting people people into heaven central to its mission. Heaven was for second Temple Jews a mystic state of "being in God", and it became in the centuries that followed a place to go after we died. While followers of Jesus yearned for the realm of God, where the beatitudes would be realized in human interrelatedness, the Church saw fulfillment is an eternal bliss to come.

American Universalism was born in the context of the American revolution, and it rejected the notion an aristocracy of souls who had already been selected for salvation. God's love included all, and all would be saved. But the 19th century Universalists did not wrestle with the nature of salvation, to be saved was to go to heaven, and heaven was in the words of that old wobbly song "we'll have pie in the sky, in the sweet bye and bye."

Its otherworldly visions of salvation have had less appeal among religious liberals in the twentieth century than they did in previous centuries. Unitarianism which placed ethical living central to becoming "whole" created a way of being religious that is a modern version of "putting heaven into people." But eventually, Unitarianism with its "salvation by character" has revealed its shadow; self reliance became relationship denying self sufficiency, and progressive character development has became the self indulgence of self help fads and the novelty of new "spirituality's." Religious liberalism is being renewed by an emphasis on "salvation through quality relationships ." Can we be saved, that is can we become "whole" alone?

William Schultz writes: We affirm that every one of us is held in Creation's hand - a part of the interdependent cosmic web - and hence strangers need not be enemies; that no one is saved until we All are saved where All means the whole of Creation.

I find Schultz's affirmation to contain a new vision of Universalism, one that goes beyond the works righteousness of 19th century Unitarianism, and the problematic "pie in the sky" promise of 19th century Universalism. Creation's promise is yearning to be fulfilled.

Carl Jung gave us the terms extroversion and introversion,  and people have been misusing the terms ever since.  Being aware of the world and of people outside of oneself and at the same time being in touch with our inner lives of ideas and emotions are dual components of living a life of wholeness.  If one were a total extrovert one could not stand to be alone, one could not think outside of a conversation, one would have no inner resources to handle the difficulties that humans are prone to encounter.  Similarly a total introvert would have no relations with other people,  and would be oblivious to their environment.  Most of us balance introversion and extraversion, living both in the outer world of people and things and inner world of ideas and feelings.

When we use the term "spirituality" we are usually refering to our inner, and personal religious lives.  Some of us have a spiritual practice, for example prayer, or  mediation.  Unitarians and Universalists had their own particular spiritual practices, such as journaling, and walking in nature.

When we use the term "religious" we are usually referring to our practices in the world, or to the practices of a particular faith community.

When people tell me that they are spiritual but not religious it reminds me of the misuse of the terms introversion and extraversion.  Can one really be spiritual (seeking the inner and personal) and have no practice in the world?  Can one find "inner meaning" and wholeness with no regard for the wisdom of the world's spiritual traditions (a.k.a. the world's religions.)

I think what these "spiritual but not religious" people are actually saying goes something like this: "I am aware of my need for a spiritual life, and I am oriented toward enduring values, but the organized religions that I have experienced are too dogmatic, authoritarian and/or hypocritical.

And they want to confess that to a Unitarian Universalist.

When Matthew Gatheringwater posted his essay "Tipping Points" over at Coffee Hour, he identified himself as a religious humanist.  He referred to an essay by Mason Olds for a definition of religious humanism.  When I read Olds, I believed that the Olds definition was too narrow, and that a broader definition might include some Unitarian Universalists who would experience themselves as excluded by the more narrow definition offered by Olds.

Today, Shawn Anthony at Lo-Fi Tribe offered a description of religious humanism this morning, prompting me try to draft something that reflects my hope for an inclusive, yet bounded definition. 

Since all theology is autobiographical, I will share my personal perspective. I have been a Unitarian Universalist since the merger, having been raised a Unitarian with a liberal Christian take on Unitarianism. I have been formed by Cherokee spirituality.  I would define my own stance as Christian humanist and profoundly "earth centered."  One might gather from the above that I am suspicious of the hyper-rationalism and advocacy of a brave new world free of superstition attitude that is too often associated with humanism.

My take on religious humanism.

Human beings in relationship with other human beings created the religions of the world as responses to their experience of awe and mystery of the cosmos, and their experience of enchantment with the earth.  Through their religions; human beings articulated stories, developed symbols, established institutions, and elaborated codes of right relationship for both their social order and for their individual lives.  Thus the religions of the world are the gifts of the generations of the past, and it is each generations responsibility to both benefit from this wisdom and contribute their own wisdom to the future.

Images of God, the Abyss, the Sacred Other, the Holy and other ideas concerning the divine are products of the human imagining, and human beings have a responsibility for those images.  Many religious humanists believe that these images point toward a reality beyond themselves, and many other religious humanists are skeptical of such claims, but religious humanists unite in rejecting the dualism that divides the cosmos into supernatural and natural.

Idolatry, for the religious humanist is worshipping that which human beings have fashioned as the holy, and too often results in the use of that manufactured god image as a tool to gain power over other human beings.  Religious humanists are critical of images of the divine that dehumanize other people, that devaluate the natural world, that justify oppression, that elevate images of one way of being human over others to divine status, and that insist that divine has uniquely revealed truth to one religious group over others. 

A critical stance has been central to the humanist orientation since its inception, religious humanism incorporates this critical way in its approach to religion. But criticism must also be directed at science and scholarship itself, which has too often been used as a tool by privileged and powerful elites to rationalize their own points of view.  Scientism is a form of idolatry.

Many religious humanists believe in committing themselves to a particular religious tradition, and that engaging in its spiritual practices deepens and enhances their spiritual life. We know of religious humanists who participate and contribute to Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and other historical wisdom traditions.  Other religious humanists have committed themselves to a religious journey that seeks to be open to many sources of wisdom, these religious humanists shape a spirituality that is unique to their own experience.