Category Archives: Religion

#20 God: only four short steps away

28 Tuesday Apr 2009

Posted by in God, Prayer, Religion, Spiritual Exercises, Spirituality

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

,

dreamstime_4843913Stuff in books can help us pray.   The monastics prayed through divine reading – in fact, a twelfth-century Carthusian monk by name of Guigo II worked out the four-step process that’s been in use ever since.

And what are those four steps? Reading, meditation, prayer and contemplation. 

You’ll want to select a passage—a paragraph from a book, a short poem, or a few verses from Scripture.  You can choose a favorite passage or one that you find challenging.    

Before you start, take a few deep breaths.  Now you’re ready to begin.

First, reading.  Read your passage slowly several times, paying attention to the words, how they fit together, their rhythms, their meanings, their themes.  If you’ve chosen a ‘secular’ poem or piece of prose, you may wish to rewrite it to turn it into a prayer.  If you’ve chosen a theological or scriptural passage, rewrite it (if need be) to make it fit your theology.  Or you can use the text as is—whatever works best for you.

Take this stanza from “Ode to the Table” by the Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda. The words in bold are Neruda’s originals; I added the italicized text to turn Neruda’s stanza into a prayer.

Oh God,
You made the world a table
“engulfed in honey and smoke,
smothered by apples and blood.
The table is already set,
and we know the truth
as soon as we are called:
whether we’re called to war or to dinner
we will have to choose sides,
have to know
how we’ll dress
to sit
at the long table,
whether we’ll wear the pants of hate
or the shirt of love, freshly laundered.
It’s time to decide,
they’re calling.”
Help us make the right choice, oh God.

Second, meditation.  Which words or passages catch your attention?  Sit quietly with them.  Let them sit in your mind like stones in your hand, smooth if comforting, rough if challenging.

How would this work?  If you used the Neruda example for your text-based prayer, you could reflect on the juxtaposition of honey/apple with smoke/blood.   Or you could focus on the image of the world as a table—what would it mean to imagine the world as a place where you eat, where life is a meal—what would nourish you, what would make you ill, what would make you hunger for more?  How about the idea that in times of war, we have to make a decision?  If you had to choose sides, which would you choose?  You could consider whether one side is always the side of hate and the other the side of love, as Neruda suggests.

Third, prayer.  Respond to the meditation by praying, not intellectually, but by speaking (aloud or in your head) your own words directly to God.  

Fourth, contemplation.  Set all words aside if you can and enter into the space created by the word-prayers.  This is a time of simple focus on God, a time of resting in God.

If you carry out the spiritual practice of divine reading at the same time every day, it will become a habit.   An hour is ideal, or half-an-hour in the morning and another at night.  This may sound like a lot but the mind often takes a while to settle into quiet receptiveness.  Also, you’ll want to choose comfortable clothes and a comfortable place where you won’t be disturbed or distracted. 

Four short steps.  Try them.  They just might work.

References:  Pablo Neruda, “Ode to the Table,” in Odes to Common Things, trans. Ken Krabbenhoft, 19-21 (Boston:  Little, Brown, and Company); Alister E. McGrath, Christian Spirituality:  An Introduction (Malden, MA:  Blackwell Publishing, 1999), 84-87.  (For more suggestions on how to turn texts into prayers, see Post #9, Build-a-prayer-workshop.)  

 

#19 Theology is to spirituality what honeycomb is to honey

20 Monday Apr 2009

Posted by in God, Philosophy of Religion, Religion, Spirituality, Theology

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

,

dreamstime_75720833

For some, spirituality trumps theology any old day.  For those who call themselves ‘spiritual’, the word ‘theologian’ brings to mind self-styled intellectuals who have stepped into a self-made ivory tower from which they engage in a fruitless search for knowledge of God.  Too bad these theologians look for God in abstract commentaries written by other bookish-types rather than in the vibrant, pulsing life so obviously going on around them (if only they’d look up from their books!).  The stereotypical theologian has a clear preference for the subtleties of his or her own imagination (theory) rather than for doing useful works among ordinary folk (praxis).  He or she relies on reason and distrusts feelings.  A sad head-shake for these poor theologians is appropriate right now—if you’re ‘spiritual’ that is.

Unlike theology, spirituality (the ‘spirituals’ explain) is interested in love and personal experience.  The reasons of the heart are closer to God, they say, than the reasons of the head.  Spirituality trusts love and distrusts logical arguments.  And anyway, the best ideas are the ones that help people, the more directly the better.

Although the tug-of-war between theology and spirituality may seem like a contemporary phenomenon (the word spirituality is an 18th century invention), the same struggle took place in Western Europe as early as the Middle Ages.  Elected Chancellor of the University of Paris in 1395, Jean Gerson, criticized theologians for lacking in common sense and failing to base their study in love.  That didn’t stop him from also making the case that as long as they didn’t ignore the world, they had valuable contributions to make.  He summed up the situation with this helpful analogy:  Just like viscous honey needs a honeycomb, spirituality needs theology.  Just like honey needs the structure of the honeycomb, spirituality needs to be structured by a thoughtful and organized mind.  On the flip side, theology needs to be filled by spirituality because “the ideas of the mind must also warm the heart and lead to activity in the world.”  Gerson tried to unify spirituality with theology while preserving the integrity of both.

Gerson’s analogy illustrates the fact that spirituality without theology is a puddle of sweet goo; it can’t be handed over (except in extremely messy form) to other people or to the next generation.  Likewise, theology without spirituality is a lovely structure made of bland wax most people don’t want to eat.   

The Renaissance humanist, Pico della Mirandola, agreed, pointing out that although “we can live without language, although not well, but we cannot live at all without the mind. “  For him, the person who is untouched by poems and novels and other people’s stories may not be humane, but the person who is untouched by logical inquiry and understanding is no longer a human being.  Sounds harsh, maybe.  But Mirandola was on to something. 

We can’t be spiritual in a generic way.  Our spirituality is tied to our beliefs about the human being, about ethics, about meaning, about God.  To understand what those beliefs are takes more than a contemplative practice; it requires mindful reflection.  Questions like “does God care about me?,” and “what did God mean by the command to love one’s neighbor?” call out for our attention.  They call out for us to try to answer them, at least provisionally, by studying alone, or in groups, or in conversation with great thinkers through their books.  Theologians ponder the most fundamental of the fundamental questions about the human and the divine.  At times, these questions may appear overly subtle and specific but that’s going to the case any time answers are being pursued in the most serious way.  And besides, to learn to love, we need not give up logic; to lead a life of simplicity and good deeds, we need not trump every question put forth by the intellect . 

Spoken like a true theologian, don’t you think?   

HNFFT:  Must we choose between spirituality and theology?  Or can the two be integrated?  

Reference:  Steven Ozment, “The Spiritual Traditions” in The Age of Reform 1250-1550:  An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe, 73-134 (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1980). 

#17 Out with the old God, in with the new

06 Monday Apr 2009

Posted by in God, Philosophy of Religion, Religion, Religious Philosophy, Theological Ethics, Theology

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , ,

dreamstime_8393599For Jews, Passover is supposed to be historically real.  The Haggadah (the text that sets the order of the Passover meal) commands Jews to consider themselves to have gone forth in exodus from Egypt.  The Haggadah emphasizes this absolute demand lest Jews be tempted to reduce it to the level of a metaphor.  “The authority is clear,” writes the Jewish theologian, Arthur A. Cohen (1928-1986).  Each Jew is to tell him or herself, “I was really, even if not literally, present in Egypt and really, if not literally, present at Sinai.  God contemplated my virtual presence then, thirty-odd centuries ago.”

At the very least, Cohen’s description of Passover signals to non-Jews that even if they celebrate something they call Passover, set a table no Orthodox rabbi could fault, prepare a kosher and hametz-free meal, and say all the right prayers from a Jewish Haggadah, their Passover is NOT a Jewish Passover.  Only Jews can comply with the absolute demand to go forth in exodus from Egypt.  Jews remain the chosen people no less today then when they were the people chosen by the Nazis for termination.  Cohen tells us, “the death camps ended forever one argument of history—whether [the Jews] are the chosen people.”  Chosen for departure from Egypt or chosen for the death chambers, “they are chosen, unmistakably, extremely, utterly.”  Certainly, others are able to contemplate this history. For the Christian and for the non-Jewish secular opponent of racism, the exodus is a paradigm of liberation from slavery, and the death camps are a paradigm of human brutality.  But the simple fact remains that they cannot share these historical events with Jews.

In the post-holocaust era, many ask (and if they don’t, they should!) how God could have witnessed the holocaust and remained silent.  The question persists, and rightfully so:  why was God silent—here, silence means “inaction, passivity.” But silence can also mean, at its worst and most extreme, utter and absolute indifference. What kind of God, worthy of the name, God, remains indifferent?  What kind of God stays silent “when speech would terrify and stay the fall of the uplifted arm?”  As millions of Jews were murdered in Europe, where was the God who had not hesitated to use miracles to liberate them from Egypt?  Where was the “Interruptive miracle, that the sea open and the army of the enemy be consumed?”  Unacceptable, of course, are any claims that the holocaust figured in God’s providential plan. 

For Cohen, the “interruptive model” of God is an ancient model of God.  This ancient model treats God as a “respondent;” God responds to situations of extreme hardship.  Under this model, the greater our need for God, the greater the certainty God will assist us.  Under this model, we assume that “the world is never independent of God.”  While Cohen agrees that the interruptive model of God undermines our freedom to do evil, he worries that it also undermines our freedom to do good.  If we could count on God to intervene, what would prevent us from slipping into moral passivity and quietism?  If we could count on God to intervene, what would prevent us from abandoning the hard work of becoming more moral people?  What would prevent us from shirking the sacrifices we’re called to make to help others have better lives? 

What we need, Cohen concludes, is not the interruptive God who is “the strategist of our particularities or of our historical condition.”  What we need is a new model of God.

Not content just to call for a new model, Cohen proposes one.  For him, God is not the cause of historical events.  God does not alter history.  But neither is God “wholly other and indifferent to the historical.”  Cohen understands “divine life” to be a “filament within the historical”–a filament of something like tungsten (tungsten is the metal used in electric light bulbs; when heated by electricity, the tungsten filament becomes incandescent and causes the bulb to glow).  As a filament, the divine element of the historical is a fragile conductor always intimately linked to the historical—its presence secures the significance of events while remaining separate from them.  Although we know that the filament exists in history and that it’s in continuous community with us, we don’t know its exact location.  Because we don’t know its exact location, we can’t manipulate it for our own purposes.  Ever elusive, God remains God.  This elusiveness preserves the historical as the realm where human beings are free to act.  This elusiveness also means that, at all times, even in extreme situations, it’s up to human beings, not God, to provide the current to heat the tungsten—it is we who either make the filament incandescent or burn it out.

Yes, the Passover Haggadah commands the Jew to consider him or her-self to have gone forth in exodus, liberated by the interruptive God.  But Cohen argues that God is “not ever interruptive even were the sea to part and close or the earth of Auschwitz to open and the murderers to fall in.”  God is not the “strategist” of our particular situations or of the particular age in which we live.  Instead, God (for Cohen) is the mystery of our future possibilities.  If we begin to see God less as the God who interferes whenever interference is welcome (i.e. when it accords with our needs) and more as the immensity whose reality prefigured our existence and whose fullness and unfolding are the hope for the future, then, Cohen promises, “we shall have won a sense of God whom we may love and honor.”  We shall have won a sense of God whom “we no longer fear and from whom we no longer demand.”  We shall have won a sense of God who is, for Cohen, the actual God.

HNFFT:  Is your model of God an interruptive model?  If so, as someone living in the post-holocaust era, how do you make sense of God’s silence?  How does the interruptive model impact your freedom?  Does Cohen’s filament model work better for you?  If yes, why?  If no, why not?

Reference:  Arthur A. Cohen, The Tremendum:  A Theological Interpretation of the Holocaust (New York:  Crossroad, 1981), 11, 23, 92-7.

#15 The battle of the gods

22 Sunday Mar 2009

Posted by in God, Philosophy of Religions, Religion

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, ,

dreamstime_1568537We expect monotheists, who believe themselves to be worshipping the one and only true God, to have difficulty accomodating gods or even conflicting views about God. 

Although David Hume (1711-1776) has sometimes been derided as an armchair-anthropologist, he was one of the wisest observers of human behavior and of religion.  When discussing monotheism in his book, The Natural History of Religion, he lucidly noted that when “one sole object of devotion is acknowledged, the worship of other deities is regarded as absurd and impious…as no one can conceive, that the same being should be pleased with different and opposite rites and principles; the several sects fall naturally into animosity, and mutually discharge on each other that sacred zeal and rancour, the most furious and implacable of all human passions.”

And what about polytheists?  Are they less likely to perpetrate violence on those with other gods?  By virtue of its multiple gods, polytheism can, in principle, incorporate or absorb other gods without stripping them of their attributes.  In Hume’s opinion, “the intolerance of almost all religions, which have maintained the unity of God, is as remarkable as the contrary principle of polytheists.”  His view matches the romantic views of contemporary Westerners who often believe that non-monotheistic faiths are, par excellence, inclusive and hence, non-violent.  But are they?

History mostly supports Hume’s conclusion.  Take the Hindu state of Gujarat in India, for instance.  During its cosmopolitan trading history of some 5,000 years, it assimilated the religions of those who settled on its shores. 

But on September 27, 2002, 58 Hindu train passengers died after Muslims set their train on fire during a stop in Gujarat.  This intra-Indian violence was perpetrated by Muslim monotheists on Hindu polytheists.  Given that Islam acknowledges only one object of devotion, the world might not have been surprised (except for its cruelty) at such monotheistic-polytheistic enmity. 

Except that the supposedly tolerant polytheists were not to be outdone violence-wise.  As the province’s Hindu chief minister intoned (quoting Newton’s third law):  “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”  According to Robert Kaplan, Hindu mobs quickly organized.  The day after the train fire, they attacked the Muslim quarters in Ahmedabab (the city where Ghandi established his ashram) and in other cities.  Hindu men “raped Muslim women, before pouring kerosene down their throats and the throats of their children, then setting them all on fire.  Muslim men were forced to watch the ritualistic killings before they, too, were put to death.  More than 400 women were raped; 2,000 people, overwhelmingly Muslim, [were] murdered; and 200,000 more [were] made homeless throughout the state.”

And there’s more.  Martin Marty reported how, in 2008, Hindu militants forced Christians living in the eastern state of Orissa, to deny their faith, flee or die.    

We could, of course, argue that religion has oft-times been harnessed to serve various political and nationalistic agendas.  Then again, we could, just as easily, counter-argue the reverse—namely, that religion has oft-times harnessed political and nationalistic institutions to crush resistant, competing religions and assert its hegemony. 

Let’s ask, instead, whether polytheism can co-exist with monotheism.  By its very nature, monotheism recognizes only one God, and its God is jealous of all other gods.  Clearly a my-way-or-the-highway kind of God won’t share the road with other gods.  But what happens when a monotheistic God refuses to join a polytheism’s pantheon?  We need only recall how it came to pass that the Jews were exiled from the land of Palestine in the 1st century CE.  Their God refused to leave his bachelor pad in heaven for the gods’ group-living arrangement on Mt. Olympus.  

The so-called ‘New Atheists’ would no doubt propose that India eliminate all religions whether theistic or polytheistic.  Get rid of God and gods, and the Federation of no-God will surely be (finally and permanently) established on earth, bringing with it peace, justice and prosperity for all.  Okay.  Fine.  But what should India do as it waits for the New Atheists’ armchair-proselytizing to begin bearing fruit?  

A crassly utilitarian yearning for order may be key to peace in India.  The threat of déjà-vu anarchy, the memory of partition’s chaos and destruction, could entice cooler heads to prevail.  After all, without domestic tranquility, the blessings of prosperity remain out of reach for Hindus and Muslims alike.  Let’s hope the battle of the gods finally becomes a thing of the past. 

References:  David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, New York:  MacMillan Publishing Company, 1992), 39-41; Robert D. Kaplan, “India’s New Face,’ in The Atlantic, April 2009, vol. 303, no. 3, 74-81, Martin Marty, “Monotheism, Polytheism and Violence,” in Sightings, October 20, 2008, bi-weekly subscription e-newsletter available through the Martin Marty Center of the University of Chicago. 

#14 Rescued from the iron cage of guilt

15 Sunday Mar 2009

Posted by in Ethics, God, Philosophy of Religion, Religion, Religious Philosophy, Theological Ethics, Theology

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, , , , ,

dreamstime_22640121

If you don’t have an ear for the music of Christianity, it may be hard to make sense of why the Lenten days tracking the Gospels’ accounts of Jesus’ journey from freedom to arrest, crucifixion, and resurrection are so important to Christians.

The answer partly lies in the doctrine that Christ liberates, or saves, human beings from bondage to sin.  

But what’s this about freedom from bondage to sin? 

Here’s an existential way of thinking about sin or wrongdoing.  If we reflect on the past twenty-four hours, a clear-eyed inventory of what we did, said, didn’t do, didn’t say, either leaves us with a comfortable feeling or it leaves us troubled.  Our consciences are a built-in mechanism that detects some (not all) of the gaps between what we consider to be the good and right thing to say and do, and what we actually did say and do.  When the gaps are wide, we feel bad—our conscience bothers us.  We call that feeling guilt. 

To do guilt is part of the human condition.  True, some people proclaim they ‘don’t do guilt’ as if ‘doing’ guilt was a bad thing and nobody should ever ‘do’ it.  But should Chris really not feel guilty about smacking the beJesus out of Rhianna?  Those who claim they ‘don’t do guilt’ probably mean that they ‘don’t do self-loathing.’  Although we may have been taught otherwise, the anguish of a guilty conscience need not result in self-loathing.  In fact, the anguish of a guilty conscience can prompt us to make some positive changes. 

There’s a difference worth noticing between self-acceptance and self-approval.  Guilt helps us keep the difference straight.  We might accept ourselves as we are, but a guilty conscience reminds us we’re a ways off from the acts and intentions that are in keeping with out-and-out self-approval. 

Back to guilt and sin.  Shall we agree that nobody (except a masochist) likes doing guilt?  Guilt feels bad.  Downright awful.   The problem then is what to do with our guilt.  Live with it?  Make amends to the injured party?  Ignore it?  Suppress it and make it ‘disappear’?  Deny it?  Feel sorry for yourself?  Take it out on other people?  Ask the wronged party for forgiveness?  Ask yourself for forgiveness?  Ask God for forgiveness?

We, human beings, always carry hope and despair within us.  On the despair end, most of us have a low tolerance for the despair of the iron cage of guilt.  We are trapped, bound, imprisoned.  We want release from guilt, some way to feel better, some way to heal the hurt and be reconciled with ourselves. 

Many Christians hand their guilt over to God in prayer or in ritual with the hope that God will hand back forgiveness.  Many Christians believe that thanks to Jesus’ suffering and death on the cross, God forgives their wrongdoings.  The way this forgiveness works differs according to the Christian tradition.  Lutherans, for example, place their trust in Christ and, thanks to that trust, believe themselves forgiven by God (they know they’re still messing up as much as any of us, but they’re forgiven).  Roman Catholics confess their wrongdoings to priests who assign them works of contrition and forgive them in Christ’s name.  In all these Christian traditions, the key to forgiveness is Christ.  Thanks to the crucifixion, the doors of the iron cage of guilt spring open and the Christian is restored to wholeness.

Wholeness!  Stepping out of guilt’s iron cage!  Sounds great.  But if, for us, Jesus was not the Christ, then we must find other ways to seek forgiveness for wrongdoings and soothe our guilt.  Going directly to the party we have harmed and asking forgiveness is one way.  But what if they’re no longer alive, or we don’t know where they are?  

Helpful ideas, anyone?

#13 Giving up Me-Centrism for Lent

05 Thursday Mar 2009

Posted by in Ethics, God, Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, Religion, Religious Philosophy, Spiritual Exercises, Theological Ethics, Theology

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

, ,

dreamstime_14845884Think you’re number one?  Who doesn’t?  Are you a narcissist? Hey, who isn’t? After all, our interior world is most vivid to ourselves.  Who could possibly know and care for our well-being and happiness better than ourselves?  A tidy amount of Me-Centrism is desirable (we Americans prefer to call it self-esteem), but in sloppy-sized doses, it turns into self-absorption.  Result:  lack of interest in, and lack of concern for others.  Not you, you say?  When was the last time you stepped out of the internal monologue a-buzzing in your head or the fatigue from a long day‘s work to look the checkout clerk at Dominick’s in the eye?  You know, like he was a real person worthy of your attention (which, of course, he is)?  And did you say, “Hello, how are you today?”  And were really interested in the answer?  Or did you look away before he finished telling you? 

A little thing, sure, this saying hello, how are you.  But imagine how different our every-day would be if we stepped out of our heads and shook off our tiredness just long enough to treat each other like each one of us mattered.  Imagine the ordinary wonderfulness of a simple “after you” as we stepped onto the bus or walked into the elevator.  Or letting a car (or two) merge ahead of us on a clogged freeway, or smiling at the stranger on the street for no good reason, or paying our frenenmy an unsolicited compliment, or turning off our cell phone to give a friend our full attention.  With all that free-flowing kindness, especially in these hard economic times, who knows what we could achieve?  Our quest for meaning could literally end.  We would all find peace of mind.  Messianism would have come to pass.

The great religious faith traditions ask their followers, at some point during the year, to step-out of their daily routines and orient themselves toward something greater.   To demonstrate that they mean it and are 100% committed to the exercise, these followers are asked to sacrifice something—in other words, to give up something they value, like a cow, or money, or food.  The act of having given up something serves as a prod of sorts, a powerful reminder (lest one slack off) to reflect on one’s relationship with the divine.   This giving-up takes place in community so that one gets swept up in a great shift of life-as-usual.  The new normal is a common life focused on God.   Whether one is taking part in the one-day fast of Yom Kippur or the month-long fast of Ramadan or the surrendering of something of one’s choosing for the forty days of Lent, the giving-up has a definite time-table with well-advertised and ritually-marked start and end dates. 

But what about those who aren’t followers of such traditions but want to engage in a similar kind of spiritual exercise (exercise in the sense of an intentional and disciplined activity)?  Yow!  That’s harder.  After all, you’ll give up something without any kind of communal or ritual help.  That’s like deciding to give up cigarettes without a support group and without nicotine patches.  Still, for those who are up to the challenge, it could be even more rewarding.  

So let’s dare to give up something for Lent.  How about Me-Centrism?  Give up Me-Centrism until April 12 and orient yourself toward God.  The phenomenologist and ethicist, Emmanuel Levinas, taught that we might, in the act of treating others as human beings instead of objects, discover a passageway to the extraordinary, the infinite, the transcendent.  No promises though.  Hopefully, even if you don’t find that passageway, the gift of a simple human interaction is gift enough.  And should the checkout clerk or the passenger on the bus respond to your friendly gaze by looking at you like you’re crazy, or looking past you like you don’t exist—well, you’ll know you did your part.  And no one can ask more than that.

Reference:  Emmanuel Levinas, Nine Talmudic Readings, intro. and trans. Annette Aronowicz (Bloomington:  Indiana University Press, 1990).

 

#12 God without clothes: what would s/he look like?

26 Thursday Feb 2009

Posted by in God, Philosophy of Religions, Prayer, Religion, Religious Philosophy, Theology

≈ 4 Comments

dreamstime_3677269

Is God unknowable, beyond the possibility of the human mind to comprehend? There are plenty of good reasons to be intentional about keeping God abstract.  To preserve the one God as a word of appeal for every person, regardless of whether that person is male or female, is most easily achieved by denying that God has either male or female characteristics.  Even so, if we’re honest, we usually find ways to give that concept some human-like characteristics.  We, human beings, prefer gods that look, talk, feel, and think like us.  Because if God doesn’t have something in common with us, exactly how are we supposed to relate to God?

In technical-speak, we anthropomorphize God—we give God human characteristics.  When we want a personal relationship with a personal God, our god will have something in common with us.  Christianity’s god-man, Jesus, offers the possibility of such a connection.  So does polytheism’s many gods.  If we’re female, we might find it more comfortable to talk to, or pray to, a god we visualize as female.  Or if we’re feminists (male or female), we might consider females to be superior to males and God will be female.  Or maybe we simply prefer a god who is mother-like, with all of the stereotypical attributes of the perfectly matronly-matron:  you know, warm, unconditionally loving, benevolent, concerned, tender, soft, gentle, etc.  Imagine a female god who’s like the mother we have (or wish we had) but even better—mother-gods never, ever get crabby! 

So powerful is the urge to imagine God as female that Jewish rabbis, in spite of Judaism’s resistance to anthropomorphizing God, sometimes used the name Shekhinah for God in the Talmud.  Shekhinah is a feminine form of the Hebrew root-word meaning “to dwell” and so, the name Shekhinah denotes “God’s indwelling presence.”  After the exile of Jews from the Holy Land and the destruction of Jerusalem’s Temple in 70 CE, the rabbis taught that the Shekhinah shared the people’s suffering and grieved with them.   As for Christians, during the Middle Ages, they turned to the Virgin Mary in ever greater numbers, looking for comfort and solace during a time when Church doctrine made Christ less of a concerned intercessor and more of a retributive judge.  Mary continues to play an important role; for some Catholics she’s almost a fourth person in the godhead.

But the burning question remains—if we insist that God is radically unitary, do we resist the urge to anthropomorphize God or do we decide we’re okay with God having male or female attributes? 

If we really must anthropomorphize, then we can have our cake and eat it too by following the lead of the Talmudic rabbis.  They recommend qualifying our metaphors for God with the phrase:  “if it were really possible [to say such a thing]”.  We would then talk about how God is like a mother “if it were really possible to say such a thing.”  Granted, this phrase gets clunky, especially when praying.  Or we could follow the approach of the 6th century Christian theologian known as Pseudo-Dionysius, and adopt the habit of negating any positive, or concrete, thing we say about God.  How does that work exactly?  Like this:  “God is a mother and isn’t a mother. Such a linguistic device indicates how God is not only beyond motherhood but God is also beyond non-motherhood; God transcends all predicates.

Whether God is male or female or neither (if it is really possible to say that God is either male or female), may God bless you (if it is really possible to say that God blesses).  

Reference:  Louis Jacob, “God:  God in Postbiblical Judaism,” in Encyclopedia of Religion, 2nd ed., 3547-3552 (New York: Macmillan Reference USA, 2004), 3548. 

#11 What’s in a name? God, G-d, G*d

19 Thursday Feb 2009

Posted by in God, Philosophy of Religions, Prayer, Religion, Theology

≈ 12 Comments

dreamstime_64650281A quick glance at a few different faith traditions shows just how many ways there are to speak about the divine.  For example, some traditional Jews won’t say the word God because they believe that it is too holy to pronounce. One is forbidden from making any representations of God—even in speech.  When reading the Bible out loud, one is to replace the Hebrew word for G-d with the word Adonai, meaning Lord.

Sister Nancy Corcoran, a Catholic nun, argues against using the word, Lord, although it is a common word in Christian prayer as well as Jewish prayer.  For her, the term Lord does make a representation—of a male God (notice, though, how the adjective “male” had to appear in front of the word, God, to indicate God had a gender).  Sister Corcoran is an advocate of the name for God developed by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, a Professor of Divinity at Harvard University Divinity School.  Taking a similar approach to that of Orthodox Jews, “Schussler Fiorenza prefers the spelling G*d because it suggests that, as humans, our ideas of and names for God are ambiguous and inadequate.  It also allows for a God without male or female characteristics.” 

How does Fiorenza pronounce the word G*d?  This word looks as un-pronounce-able as the symbol used as a name for three years by the musician Prince.  Unclear also are the reasons why, for Fiorenza, the word God necessarily suggests male or female characteristics.  Certainly, many theologians and philosophers throughout the ages have not associated male or female characteristics with this word (like Fiorenza, they’ve also argued that our ideas of God are ambiguous and inadequate but, unlike her, they did not argue we should abandon the word).  Okay, sure, the Bible refers to God as Him, but today, pronouns are often eliminated by sensitive theologians and philosophers (even if this sometimes results in awkward sentences).  Take, for example, the sentence:  “God wants you to love others as much as you love yourself or God’s Self.” 

Just like we use the single word, actor, to refer to either a female (formerly known as an actress) or a male actor, the single word, god, can refer to a female god, a male god, a god without gender, a god with both genders, etc. (in the last two cases, the analogy with the word, actor, fails!).  Unlike the word, Goddess, which does imply gender, the word, God, does not.  Thanks to its plasticity, it is the superior choice.  So why mess with it?

HNFFT (Her Nakedness’ Food for Thought):  What do you call God?  Does it imply has a gender?  Can it serve as the word of appeal for anyone, male or female?

References:  Nancy Corcoran.  A Multifaith Guide to Creating Personal Prayer in Your Life (Woodstock, VT:  Skylight Paths, 2007), 119.

#10 God, will You be my Valentine?

10 Tuesday Feb 2009

Posted by in God, Religion, Theology

≈ 1 Comment

dreamstime_72297991

On this Valentine’s Day, or any other day, do you find yourself alone, fingers pressed against your lower lip, whispering breathlessly, “Would only that He would kiss me with the kisses of His mouth!  Would that His left hand were under my head, and His right hand embrace me!  Surely, His love is better than wine.”  Are you longing for God?  Pining for God-the-lover?  Yearning for the divine lover?  

Love-longing, love-pining, love-yearning for God is as old as the Bible itself.

How laced the words of mystics have been with the raw language of desire for God, the beloved lover:  “Please God.  Please let me see Your face, let me hear Your voice; for Your voice is sweet, and Your face is lovely.”  No, nothing new here.  So far, most of this post’s longing, pining, yearning phrases have been lifted right from the Hebrew Bible’s Song of Solomon, also called the Song of Songs.  For many Jews, this sensual love song is an allegory for God’s love for Israel, but Christian mystics like Bernard of Clairvaux have interpreted it as a sizzling tale of betrothal (made and lost) between a person and God.  The twentieth-century Jewish philosopher, Franz Rosenzweig, drew heavily upon the Song of Songs as he sought to understand his personal relationship with God. 

Indeed, for some, love for God is imbued with passionate ardor. Take Mechthild of Magdeburg, a medieval mystic. Her spiritual life unfolds in several stages and the last stage is–yes, a night of love. Burning with desire for God, trembling with longing, Mechthild ascends towards God, moving ever closer in a “flight of love”, until she, at long last, reaches the One she seeks and unites with Him in a supreme moment of ecstasy.  Face to face with this wonder, she “forgets the earth”; she embraces Him, becoming one with Him “as water mingles with wine”;  she wants nothing any more except to remain in God’s embrace until her last breath, joined to Him without end, without measure, without pause. 

Although, for many mystics, it is the human who is restless with love for God, Mechthild “introduced the anguish of desire in God.”  God is sick with love for her.  God burns with desire and looks upon her soul as “a stream in which to cool His ardor.”

As if the prose hasn’t yet been hot, hot, hot enough, Mechthild’s love-sick soul pleads with God to “Cover me with the cloak of your long desire,” “for where two burning desires encounter, there love is perfect.”

Sadly, Mechthild’s rapturous ardor fades away.  For her, the way of love with God “is transitory in this life.”  She observes, from bitter experience, that “This cannot last long.”  

And since there’s nothing new under the sun, there’s a passage in the Song of Songs where the fiancee, abandoned by her lover, seeks, in tears, the one she still loves.

Questions:  Do you love God?  Do you love God erotically?  If you texted God a love note, what would you say?

For those of you who would make God your Valentine, may your pursuit be short and your romance long-lived.

As a Valentine’s Day gift, this post closes with Peter Gabriel‘s lyrics to the song “In Your Eyes,” lyrics about his love for God.

“In Your Eyes”

love I get so lost, sometimes
days pass and this emptiness fills my heart
when I want to run away
I drive off in my car
but whichever way I go
I come back to the place you are

all my instincts, they return
and the grand facade, so soon will burn
without a noise, without my pride
I reach out from the inside

in your eyes
the light the heat
in your eyes
I am complete
in your eyes
I see the doorway to a thousand churches
in your eyes
the resolution of all the fruitless searches
in your eyes
I see the light and the heat
in your eyes
oh, I want to be that complete
I want to touch the light
the heat I see in your eyes

love, I don’t like to see so much pain
so much wasted and this moment keeps slipping away
I get so tired of working so hard for our survival
I look to the time with you to keep me awake and alive

and all my instincts, they return
and the grand facade, so soon will burn
without a noise, without my pride
I reach out from the inside

in your eyes
the light the heat
in your eyes
I am complete
in your eyes
I see the doorway to a thousand churches
in your eyes
the resolution of all the fruitless searches
in your eyes
I see the light and the heat
in your eyes
oh, I want to be that complete
I want to touch the light,
the heat I see in your eyes
in your eyes in your eyes
in your eyes in your eyes
in your eyes in your eyes

References:  Emilie Zum Brunn and Georgette Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics in Medieval Europe, trans. Sheila Hughes (St. Paul, MN:  Paragon House, 1989), 48-9.

#9 Build-a-prayer workshop

05 Thursday Feb 2009

Posted by in God, Prayer, Religion, Theology

≈ Leave a comment

dreamstime_7260924Your views on God (your theology) affect what you say when you pray.  Not sure what to call God when you pray?  Not sure how to start your prayers?  Not even sure how to pray? 

Here are three steps to help you come up with your own prayers and discover your theology at the same time.  Yup.  You get two for the price of one.

1.            In the list below, circle all the words for God that most appeal to you.  This list mostly duplicates one developed by Sister Nancy Corcoran (a Catholic nun).

The All-Compassionate, the All-Merciful, the Absolute Ruler, the Pure One, the Source of Peace, the Inspirer of Faith, the Guardian, the Victorious, the Compeller, the Creator, the Maker of Order, the Shaper of Beauty, the Forgiving, the Subduer, the Giver of All, the Sustainer, the Opener, the Knower of All, the Constrictor, the Reliever, the Abaser, the Exalter, the Bestower of Honors, the Humiliator, the Hearer of All, the Seer of All, the Judge, the Just, the Subtle One, the All-Aware, the Forbearing, the Magnificent, the Forgiver and Hider of Faults, the Rewarder of Thankfulness, the Highest, the Greatest, the Preserver, the Nourisher, the Accounter, the Mighty, the Generous, the Watchful One, the Responder to Prayer, the All-Comprehending, the Perfectly Wise, the Loving One, the Majestic One, Breath of Life, the Resurrection, the Witness, the Truth, the Trustee, the Possessor of All Strength, the Good, the Appraiser, the Originator, the Restorer, the Giver of Life, the Taker of Life, the Ever Living One, the Self-Existing One, the Finder, the Glorious, the Only One, the One, the Satisfier of All Needs, The Gracious One, the All Powerful, the Creator of All Power, the Expediter, the Delayer, the First, the Last, the Manifest One, the Hidden One, the Protecting Friend, the Supreme One, the Doer of Good, the Guide to Repentance, the Avenger, the Forgiver, the Clement, the Owner of All, the Lord of Majesty and Bounty, the Equitable One, the Gatherer, the Rich One, the Enricher, the Preventer of Harm, the Creator of the Harmful, the Creator of Good, the Light, the Guide, the Originator, the Everlasting One, the One Who Is Present and Has Always Been and Always Will Be Present, the Inheritor of All, the Righteous Teacher, the Lawgiver, the Patient One.

2.            Add other words for God that appeal to you but don’t appear in the list.

3.            Rewrite the following three prayers by substituting the words for God with the ones you prefer (and also by changing phrases as you see fit).  Or choose other prayers, even ones whose theology strike you as vastly different from your own.  The effort of rewriting different kinds of prayers will help you discover your theology because it’ll help you figure out what ways of talking to God work for you and which don’t.

Prayer A:            O God whom humans have called the unknowable, whom they have sought in unfamiliar ways of thought and have come back empty-handed, let us see how much You are the God of common things and of every day experience, the God who is near and not far off.  For surely, You are not only the end of the quest but the beginning, not the reward of life’s pilgrimage alone but its companion hope.  Help us, if we cannot see You in the splendor of the sphere to see You in the miracle of every flower that grows, and when we need the strength and solace of Your love, let us seek it in one another.  (prayer written by the Unitarian minister, Rev. A. Powell Davies) 

Prayer B:            O God, You have called us into life, and set us in the midst of purposes we cannot measure or understand.  Yet we thank You for the good we know, for the life we have, and for the gifts that are our daily portion: 

For health and healing, for labor and repose, for the ever-renewed beauty of earth and sky, for thoughts of truth and justice which stir us from our ease and move us to acts of goodness, and for the contemplation of Your eternal presence, which fills us with hope that what is good and lovely cannot perish.  (Jewish Reform prayer)

Prayer C:            God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, Thou who has brought us thus far on the way; Thou who has by Thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path, we pray.  Lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met Thee, lest our hearts drunk with the wine of the world, we forget Thee, shadowed beneath Thy hand, may we forever stand, true to our God, true to our native land.  (often called the African-American anthem, prayed by the Reverend James Lowery at President Obama’s Inauguration) 

For more naked chat about prayer, visit this post,  #8 Prayer:  getting intimate with God.

References:  1) Nancy Corcoran.  A Multifaith Guide to Creating Personal Prayer in Your Life (Woodstock, VT: Skylight Paths, 2007), 119;  2) Prayer A:  A. Powell Davies, The Language of the Heart: A Book of Prayers by A. Powell Davies (Washington, DC:  All Souls Unitarian Church, 1956), 114;  3) Prayer B:  The Gates of Prayer, The New Union Prayerbook (New York:  Central Conference of Rabbis, 1975), 670; 4) Prayer C:  James Weldon Johnson, “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” Hymn #149 in Singing the Living Tradition (Boston, Beacon Press, 1993).