The Rigor of Love

By SIMON CRITCHLEY

AUGUST 8, 2010

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.

Long before he embraced Christianity: received Baptism and attended the rituals of the Church, my friend and mentor, the late Dom Bede Griffiths had an experience, the force and import of which remained with him for the rest of his life. As a youth he came upon a scene , in the presence of which he heard the birds singing,  a hawthorn tree blooming and a lark descending to the meadow as the sun sank on the horizon – all of which as though for the first time. While not a believer, it was for him as though even the sky was a veil before the face of God.

In the 1960s as a teenager, years before I found my way into the Christian Church, when stationed as an employee for Hunt Oil Company, so far into the remote Australian Outback that only a small party of surveyors had ever been before me – in 1936. Out there, beyond the Warburton Ranges, and further still than the Blackstone Ranges in the Great Victoria Desert, I was struck by the silence of the days and the infinite immensity of the starry night sky. Like Bede Griffiths before me I experienced what no religious faith, to that point, could have influenced me as deeply. Yet, like my mentor, these experiences of Nature broke, as Bede wrote in his autobiography The Golden String, “through the daily routine of life” and thereby “may be a message bearer to the soul… We see our life for a moment in its true perspective in relation to eternity… Freed for a moment from the flux of time, we see the underlying  eternal order that underpins it all; we see ourselves as parts of the whole, elements in a universal harmony.”

For Bede Griffiths, it took thirty years for the full import of what he’d been through as a youth, to become clear. He realised That mysterious Presence of which all the forms and beauties of Nature are but passing reflections. As a young man he learned Plato’s description in his Symposium of the soul’s ascent to love; how we should pass from the love of fair forms to the love of fair conduct, and thence to the love of fair principles,  until we finally come to the ultimate principle of all and learn what Beauty itself is. But in his lifetime Bede learned what he said Plato could never teach him, that the Divine Beauty is not only  truth but also Love. This discovery came for him, as I suggest it does for us all if we wait long enough and reflect deeply enough and are open to the message-bearers of the divine, as a recognition that this spirit of Love is everywhere and in everyone. My old friend asserted again and again that though the differences between people of different faiths, and no faith at all, are, on the scale of multiplicity, far from each other. But the deeper we move into what lies at the core – that is its foundation in Love, the more we come together. Indeed, under such consideration it is entirely possible that those who do not share in the Christian idea of Baptism, Church ritual and Government, may have a knowledge, and experience of God that is just as real, significant and valid. Thus I have found Simon Critchley’s essay of interest as I tease out where I stand in the matter of faith that, as he wrote, seeks to “have it done [for me, according] as [I] have believed.”

Can the experience of faith be shared by those unable to believe in the existence of a transcendent God? Might there be a faith of the faithless?

For a non-Christian, such as myself, but one out of sympathy with the triumphal evangelical atheism of the age, the core commandment of Christian faith has always been a source of both fascinated intrigue and perplexity. What is the status and force of that deceptively simple five-word command: “you shall love your neighbor”? With Gary Gutting’s wise counsel on the relation between philosophy and faith still ringing in our ears, I’d like to explore the possible meaning of these words through a reflection on a hugely important and influential philosopher … : Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55).

Paradoxically, non-Christian faith might be said to reveal the true nature of the faith that Christ sought to proclaim.

In the conclusion to “Works of Love” (1847) — which some consider the central work in Kierkegaard’s extensive and often pseudonymous authorship — he ponders the nature of the commandment of love that he has been wrestling with throughout the book. He stresses the strenuousness and, in the word most repeated in these pages, the rigor of love. As such, Christian love is not, as many non-believers contend, some sort of  “coddling love,” which spares believers any particular effort. Such love can be characterized as “pleasant days or delightful days without self-made cares.” This easy and fanciful idea of love reduces Christianity to “a second childhood” and renders faith infantile.

Kierkegaard then introduces the concept of “the Christian like-for-like,” which is the central and decisive category of “Works of Love.” The latter is introduced by distinguishing it from what Kierkegaard calls “the Jewish like-for-like,” by which he means “an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth”: namely a conception of obligation based on the equality and reciprocity of self and other. Although, as a cursory reading of Franz Rosenzweig’s “The Star of Redemption” — one of the great works of German-Jewish thought — could easily show, this is a stereotypical and limited picture of Judaism, Kierkegaard’s point is that Christian love cannot be reduced to what he calls the “worldly” conception of love where you do unto others what others do unto you and no more. The Christian like-for-like brackets out the question of what others may owe to me and instead, “makes every relationship to other human beings into a God-relationship.”

This move coincides with a shift from the external to the inward. Although the Christian, for Kierkegaard, “must remain in the world and the relationships of earthly life allotted to him,” he or she views those relationships from the standpoint of inwardness, that is, mediated through the relationship to God. As Kierkegaard puts it emphatically in Part One of “Works of Love”:

Worldly wisdom thinks that love is a relationship between man and man. Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between: man-God-man, that is, that God is the middle term.

The rigor of Christianity is a conception of love based on radical inequality, namely the absolute difference between the human and the divine. This is how Kierkegaard interprets Jesus’ words from the Sermon on the Mount, “Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye.”(Matthew, 7:3) The log in my own eye does not permit me to judge the speck in the other’s. Rather, I should abstain from any judgment of what others might or might not do. To judge others is to view matters from the standpoint of externality rather than inwardness. It is arrogance and impertinence. What others owe to me is none of my business.

This is why it is very hard to be Christian. And maybe there are not as many true Christians around as one might have thought. Kierkegaard writes, “Christianly understood you have absolutely nothing to do with what others do to you.” “Essentially,” he continues, “you have only to do with yourself before God.” Once again, the move to inwardness does not turn human beings away from the world, it is rather, “a new version of what other men call reality, this is reality.”

The address of Kierkegaard’s writing has a specific direction: the second person singular, you. He tells the story from the Gospels (versions appears in Matthew and Luke) of the Roman centurion in Capernaum who approached Jesus and asked him to cure his servant or boy, the sense is ambiguous, “sick with the palsy, grievously tormented.”(Matthew, 8:6) After Jesus said that he would visit the boy, the centurion confessed that, as a representative of the occupying imperial authority with soldiers under his command, he did not feel worthy that Jesus should enter his house. When Jesus heard this he declared that he had not experienced a person of such great faith in the whole of Israel. He added, and this is the line that interests Kierkegaard, “Be it done for you, as you believed.”

Love is that disciplined act of absolute spiritual daring that eviscerates the old self.

This story reveals the essential insecurity of faith. Kierkegaard writes that it does not belong to Christian doctrine to vouchsafe that you — “precisely you,” as he emphasizes — have faith. If someone were to say, “it is absolutely certain that I have faith because I have been baptized in the church and follow its rituals and ordinances,” then Kierkegaard would reply, “Be it done for you, as you believed.” The point of the story is that the centurion, although he was not baptized as a Christian, nonetheless believed. As Kierkegaard writes, “in his faith, the Gospel is first agospel.” The New Testament Greek for “gospel” is euaggelion, which can mean good tidings, but can also be thought of as the act of proclamation or pledging.  On this view, faith is a proclamation or pledge that brings the inward subject of faith into being over against an external everydayness. Such a proclamation is as true for the non-Christian as for the Christian. Indeed, it is arguably more true for the non-Christian, because their faith is not supported by the supposed guarantee of baptism, creedal dogma, regular church attendance or some notion that virtue will be rewarded with happiness if not here on earth, then in the afterlife. Thus, paradoxically, non-Christian faith might be said to reveal the true nature of the faith that Christ sought to proclaim. Even — and indeed especially — those who are denominationally faithless can have an experience of faith. If faith needs to be underpinned by some sort of doctrinal security, then inwardness becomes externalized and the strenuous rigor of faith evaporates.

What sort of certainty, then, is the experience of faith? Kierkegaard writes, and again the second person singular direction of address should be noted: “It is eternally certain that it will be done for you as you believe, but the certainty of faith, or the certainty that you, you in particular, believe, you must win at every moment with God’s help, consequently not in some external way.” (Emphasis mine)

Kierkegaard insists — and one feels here the force of his polemic against the irreligious, essentially secular order of so-called Christendom, in his case what he saw as the pseudo-Christianity of the Danish National Church — that no pastor or priest has the right to say that one has faith or not according to doctrines like baptism and the like. To proclaim faith is to abandon such external or worldly guarantees. Faith has the character of a continuous “striving … in which you get occasion to be tried every day.” This is why faith and the commandment of love that it seeks to sustain is not law. It has no coercive, external force. As Rosenzweig writes, “The commandment of love can only proceed from the mouth of the lover.” He goes on to contrast this with law, “which reckons with times, with a future, with duration.” By contrast, the commandment of love “knows only the moment; it awaits the result in the very moment of its promulgation.” The commandment of love is mild and merciful, but, as Kierkegaard insists, “there is rigor in it.” We might say love is that disciplined act of absolute spiritual daring that eviscerates the old self of externality so something new and inward can come into being.

Faith is a subjective strength that only finds its power to act through an admission of weakness.

As Kierkegaard puts in earlier in “Works of Love,” citing Paul, “Owe no one anything, except to love one another.”(Romans, 13:8) It sounds simple. But what is implicit in this minimal-sounding command is a conception of love as an experience of infinite debt — a debt that it is impossible to repay, “When a man is gripped by love, he feels that this is like being in infinite debt.” To be is to be in debt — I owe therefore I am.

If sin is the theological name for the essential ontological indebtedness of the self, then love is the experience of a countermovement to sin that is orientated around a demand that exceeds the capacity or ability of the self. Love is shaped in relation to what, in my parlance, can be called an infinite demand. Kierkegaard writes, and the double emphasis on the “moment” that finds an echo in Rosenzweig should be noted, “God’s relationship to a human being is the infinitizing at every moment of that which at every moment is in a man.” Withdrawn into inwardness and solitude (“If you have never been solitary, you have never discovered that God exists,” Kierkegaard writes), each and every word and action of the self resounds through the infinite demand of God.

At this point, in the penultimate paragraph of “Works of Love” Kierkegaard shifts to auditory imagery. God is a vast echo chamber where each sound, “the slightest sound,” is duplicated and resounds back loudly into the subject’s ears. God is nothing more than the name for the repetition of each word that the subject utters. But it is a repetition that resounds with “the intensification of infinity.” In what Kierkegaard calls “the urban confusion” of external life, it is nigh impossible to hear this repetitive echo of the infinite demand. This is why the bracketing out of externality is essential: “externality is too dense a body for resonance, and the sensual ear is too hard-of-hearing to catch the eternal’s repetition.” We need to cultivate the inner or inward ear that infinitizes the words and actions of the self. As Kierkegaard makes clear, what he is counseling is not “to sit in the anxiety of death, day in and day out, listening for the repetition of the eternal.” What is rather being called for is a rigorous and activist conception of faith that proclaims itself into being at each instant without guarantee or security and which abides with the infinite demand of love.

Faith is not a like-for-like relationship of equals, but the asymmetry of the like-to-unlike. It is a subjective strength that only finds its power to act through an admission of weakness. Faith is an enactment of the self in relation to an infinite demand that both exceeds my power and yet requires all my power. Such an experience of faith is not only shared by those who are faithless from a creedal or denominational perspective, but can — in my view — be had by them in an exemplary manner. Like the Roman centurion of whom Kierkegaard writes, it is perhaps the faithless who can best sustain the rigor of faith without requiring security, guarantees and rewards: “Be it done for you, as you believed.”

Simon Critchley is chair of philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York, and part-time professor at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He is the author of several books, including “Infinitely Demanding.” His new book, “The Faith of the Faithless,” is forthcoming from Harvard University Press in 2011.

The Renewal of the Contemplative Life

by Shirley du Boulay

Shirley du Boulay and I met in Oxford where she then lived. Since then we have become friends. Shirley faithfully recorded some of my memories of my friend and mentor, the late Dom Bede Griffiths whom I had known since 1977. She selected some of these and included them in her massive biography of Bede – “Beyond the Darkness: A Biography of Bede Griffiths”, first published by Rider. I am delighted to post this article by Shirley from the Bede Griffiths Trust website: www.bedegriffiths.com

Bede Griffiths was often consulted by people seeking spiritual guidance. A young woman still remembers asking his advice, and … what he said: ‘I can only tell you one thing – meditate.’ Bede’s life was held firm on the rock of his meditation practice; everything else faded into insignificance by comparison. In meditation he found the still point beyond the world of duality, the reconciliation of opposites for which he longed. The regular practice of meditation was the single thing that most attracted people to Shantivanam; the effect that years of meditation had on Bede was what drew people to him.

How then, did he come to practice meditation? Had it been part of his life since his first steps towards God? As a young man he had powerful experiences in prayer, living through a turbulent period that brought him close to breakdown. He would stay up all night in prayer, knowing that it would leave him weak and exhausted and driven into further confusion by considering Hindu and Buddhist mysticism. Was God a person, as Christians believe, or could he be conceived impersonally, like the Hindu Brahman? Was Absolute Reality a state, like Buddhist Nirvana? His mind was in chaos; he thought he was going mad.

Finding his vocation as a Benedictine monk brought him stability and comfort, but though he valued the meditative reading of the Scriptures and the Fathers, increasingly he found that this was not enough. In fact he never found his ideal of contemplation, a direct experience of God in prayer, in the monastery, eventually realising that this tradition had been obscured by the emphasis on philosophy and theology. For him true meditation was not an exercise in discursive reasoning, its aim should be ‘to pass beyond the limits of rational consciousness and awake to the inner life of the Spirit, that is to the indwelling presence of God.’

He was also saddened that western Christianity gave scant attention to the position of the body in prayer and indeed that so few Catholics taught meditation in the sense in which he was coming to understand the word. He was deeply in sympathy with all who felt the need for contemplative prayer, recognising that they were no longer satisfied with theories about God, they longed for direct experience, longed to learn a method of meditation, a way to reach the centre, the point beyond thought. He was impressed by people like Thomas Keating, Basil Pennington [and their work for Centering Prayer] and most of all his fellow Benedictine John Main; indeed it is largely thanks to their influence that a Christian contemplative life is now within reach of all.

What then, was his own method of prayer? He would sit outside his hut for at least an hour in the morning and again in the evening, his practice being the repetition of the Jesus Prayer, (‘Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the Living God, have mercy on me, a sinner’,) which, after many years, he had come to find ‘goes on almost always when my mind is not otherwise occupied.’ He explained his own practice of meditation with great precision:

‘To answer your questions 1) My meditation period is normally an hour in the morning & an hour in the evening, but it is sometimes shortened slightly (3/4 hour) & sometimes lengthened to 2 or 3 hours, but not commonly.

2) I find that the words of the Jesus Prayer normally repeat themselves. Sometimes it goes on rather mechanically, the mind wanders; sometimes it seems to gather strength & one prays in a concentrated manner.

3) Sometimes the words ‘fade out’, but rarely completely so. They seem to go on in the ‘heart’. One may not notice them, but one finds them going on, as it were.

4) If thoughts really intervene and cut off the prayer, then I renew the mantra again – or it renews itself, as soon as I realise what has happened.

5) Yes, I regard the concentration on the person of Jesus as very important. I feel that it puts one in touch with the concrete reality of his person, & ‘focuses’ the mind. To me this is the difference between Christian & Buddhist & Hindu prayer. Christian prayer reaches the Centre in & through Christ.’

Towards the end of his life Bede’s great desire and vision was the renewal of the contemplative life. He felt we needed both small groups that meet regularly and centres where people can go for longer periods. He also wanted to found lay communities and drafted documents on the life he envisaged. He suggested that the people meditating in the tradition taught by John Main were setting an example, as groups of meditators, usually meeting once a week, were established all over the world. Bede wanted to take this idea further, forming small communities of men and women, married and single, secular and religious, dedicated to a common life of prayer and meditation while continuing to work in the world. He envisaged independent communities with no central authority, united in some kind of network. They would be primarily Christian, though open to visitors of any tradition and having contacts with a wide variety of religious organisations. Most important was that members of these communities should recognise a transcendent reality, which he saw as the greatest need in the world today.

‘Unless human life is centred on the awareness of a transcendent reality which embraces all humanity and the whole universe and at the same time transcends our present level of life and consciousness, there is no hope for humanity as a whole. The aim of every community should be to enable its members to realise the transcendent mystery in their lives and communicate their experience to others.’

Bede Griffiths died in 1993 leaving us his inspiration. Now it is up to us to bring his vision to reality.

The Author:

Shirley du Boulay is a free-lance writer living in Oxford, England. She was for many years a producer for the BBC, first with radio, then in the Religious Department of Television. She is also a contributor to various collections of articles and to the International Catholic magazine The Tablet. Her books include biographies of St. Teresa of Avila, Desmond Tutu, Dame Cicely Saunders and Father Bede Griffiths – “Beyond the Darkness: A Biography of Bede Griffiths” 2003. O Books, Hants. UK. Her most recent book is The Cave of the Heart: The Life of Swami Abhishiktananda, Orbis Books, Maryknoll, NY 2005

“I came then to where the sun was setting over the playing fields. A lark rose suddenly from the ground beside the tree where I was standing and poured out its songs above my head, and then sank still singing to rest … I remember now the feeling of awe that cam over me. I felt inclined to kneel on the ground, as though I had been standing in the presence of an angel; and I hardly dared to look on the face of the sky, because it seemed as though it was but a veil before the face of God.”

Bede Griffiths, The Golden String, p. 9

Bede Griffiths encouraged all visitors to the ashram to remember the past, especially the times when we became conscious of spiritual depths. Typically he supported people when they shared with him how they recalled joy; favourite possessions; significant adventures, and; favourite fantasies. He saw recalling the past as a way of bringing positive influence into the present and future.

Early memories of childhood tend to focus around my maternal grandparents’ farm. This place, and the people who lived there, provide me with my roots. I agree with Simone Weil who said that, “To be rooted is perhaps the most important and the least recognised need of the human soul.” This farm is still memory-fresh with familiar “presences” of the wider family connections: grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins. Certain rooms within the main house I remember more than others. Secret places in the bush; dead, fallen trees that I turned into castles or spaceships; listening to bird sounds, and animals; the extensive garden where I used to play and make-believe – is the soil in which originates my personal and spiritual roots. They are among those things that form the ground, or a kind of “golden string,” enabling me, when thrown back on the world or surrounded by darkness, to find my way to the light of meaning and self-transcendence.

Someone once said there is nothing more wholesome and good for life in the future than some good memory, especially the memory of childhood, and of home. People talk a great deal about education, but some good, sacred memory, preserved from childhood, is perhaps the best education. If a man or woman carries with them many such memories into life, they are safe to the end of their days.

In the last few years I returned to that place in the country, “Wensleydale Farm” in the South West of Western Australia, and recorded it in my journal.  Memories are true, that is, they are memories and not inventions or fantasies. Whether they accurately represent past events or not, however, is irrelevant; the process of construction of the meanings of those events is the focus on memory work.

I was excited by the prospect of seeing those old walls of a house that was, from time to time, my childhood home. An entry in my journal of the visit to our old farm follows:

Upon entering the farmhouse, which was in the Australian Federation architectural style, I noted that the ballroom is now a home for birds, lizards and mice, which make their nests in the dried leaves. I wanted in particular to visit my favourite place of retreat; the tiny music room with its ‘English Roses’ carpet and deep, disappear-into lounge chairs. Although relatively tiny, it was the main room in which my grandmother stored the presents before Christmas. I recalled old monotint photographs, a small table with figurine and tall glass lamp, such as the one I carried to bed every night. There were also the high walls on which hung oil paintings in the style of the day: of cranes and white swans on mystic lakes with bull-rushes and distant mountains. Such items evoked a feeling that there was a larger world to be explored beyond the outer fences of the farm.

Looking down, I dropped below the line where the floor once was, into the weeds. That cool, dark, wood-polish-smelling refuge, silent in summer days and glowingly warm in winter’s crisp coldness, was now a floor-less husk of mildew-blooming walls. As a once-upon-a-time place of Christmas wonder, it had all but crumbled away, though, for a while, the main body of the house would continue to support the little shrine it held. For “the old place”, as we used to call it, there was no escaping its future of decay and eventual disappearance. I knew that as long as I had the power to remember those bright, happy family Christmases, this place and its people would not be forgotten, and that they would continue to be always real and enduring.

My early years were coloured by a number of evocative themes. For instance: the sense of connection to extended family and friends; the sense that there was always more than what could be seen or talked about with ordinary sight and limited rational perspectives; experiencing the solitary human need to be bodily and spiritually refreshed in silent spaces; the desire to explore beyond the boundaries; the sentiment of seeking out, being in, and needing to hold memories of safe, familiar friendly places; the sense that some places more than others, are safe and draw us because of the heart-skills of those who created them; the struggle to make sense, and the realisation of life being in inevitable and continual change; the attendant lesson that life brings us all sooner or later – of the necessary and personal realisation in one’s life of letting go and surrender.

Bede Griffiths found no words to really get to the heart of and convey adequately his experience on the playing fields of his school days. He could only point in the general direction and “suggest what it meant.” But he is sure that it was one of the decisive events of his life, for up to that time he “lived the life of a normal schoolboy, quite content with the world as he found it.” From this event on he became aware of another world of beauty and mystery that he thought existed only in poetry. With reinvigorated access to his physical senses he describes his new perspectives: “The sight of a wild rose growing on a hedge, the scent of lime tree blossoms caught suddenly as I rode down a hill on a bicycle came to me like visitations from another world.” As well as the physical senses being awakened, his emotions were also overwhelmingly enlivened, so that Nature began to wear a kind of sacramental character for him, the result of feeling “the presence of unfathomable mystery … [that was] drawing me to itself.”

Bede constantly returned to this theme in the course of his spiritual direction to ashram visitors. He reminded people to be open to the often hidden moments of grace in their everyday lives. To not attend to these is to lose them. He regarded these moments as a kind of “golden string” of grace which is given to everyone, but only if they don’t let the “old habits of thought reassert themselves” and the world returns to its so-called normal appearance. By recognising the “golden string” of these everyday grace-filled moments we are “freed from the flux of time and see something of the eternal order that underlies it.” We are, he writes in his autobiography, “no longer isolated individuals … [but] parts of a whole, [and] elements in a universal harmony” and urges us to keep this in mind when “we are thrown back on the world, to live in its light and shape our lives by its law … is to find our way out of the labyrinth of life.”

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I have a number of spiritual tours to India that included visiting Saccidananda Ashram at Shantivanam in December 2010, and then in January and February 2011. If you would like to know more about these, please visit my Tours page in this website, or email me, Dr Meath Conlan: meath@diversejourneys.com

I am also available to present retreats and workshops / seminars on Bede Griffiths and his contemplative vision. Please send for a form if you wish to discuss with me about this possibility for your organisation or region, or advise me if you would like to receive my periodic newsletter.

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BEDE GRIFFITHS: FRIEND & GIFT OF THE SPIRIT

Dom Bede Griffiths, Saccidananda Ashram. 17 December 1988 - Photo taken by Dr Meath Conlan

ISBN – 087243270X

ISBN-13: 9780872432703

A Spiritual Journey with Meath Conlan

From the Australian wilderness to the tropical landscape of South India, Meath Conlan traces his spiritual journey under the guidance of the late spiritual master Bede Griffiths. He shares with us a fascinating and intimate portrait of this humble and holy man, who was not only a mentor but friend and confidante. Bede’s conversations and wisdom come to life through Conlan’s recollections and vivid pictures which chronicle their years of friendship. The twenty-eight full color photos from the author’s private collection include public celebrations, interfaith meetings with world religious leaders, as well as private moments of contemplation and worship.

“What a unique and sacred school of learning . . . Since, as Bede Griffiths insists, God’s call to contemplation is universal, everyone should find practical and profound guidance in these pages.” From the Foreword by Sister Pascaline Coff, OSB

Meath Conlan has represented the Holy See’s Secretariat for Non-Christian Religions to the People’s Republic of China and at the invitation of the Dalai Lama, lectured on Christian Spirituality to Tibetan Buddhist monks and nuns in the Himalayas. In addition to his publications, Dr. Conlan has a private practice as a spiritual director.

Paperback

128 pages

EXCERPTS: “The search for meaning and self-transcendence is a significant human experience that requires description. It is my hope that the following memoir vignettes will provide sources of reflection for people who find themselves at spiritual crossroads. I hope those who knew Father Bede will enjoy revisiting their friend through the following incidents. Finally, I trust this book will be an encouragement for seekers, who, without having met him personally, have been inspired by his life and thought.”

“But quite honestly I believe that any serious accident, disease, or loss in life can be a means of breakthrough. One lives in one’s world in the family and at work in personal consciousness. Everything seems happy enough. But then, suddenly one is overtaken by tragedy, which can be a means of transformation. Everything seems appalling and fearful at the time. But if one accepts it as Providence and surrenders to the process, one finds the emerging of the deep Self. One looks back on the event, and sees that at such a time there seems to be a spiritual power entering, a kind of enlightenment and healing . . . It takes different forms for different people, but underneath the seeming tragedy, there is always the spirit of Love operating in and through it all for the good of the individual.”

Review by Professor Lawrence S. Cunningham

When I was in graduate school, I happened on The Golden String by Bede Griffiths. It described his conversion, first, to the Christian life and then to monasticism, a form of religious life, usually conducted in a community under a common rule.

After nearly two decades as a Benedictine monk in England, Griffiths left for India to embrace a life that would link monastic living to the model of the Hindu ascetics. Over the decades, he gained a worldwide reputation, not only as a prolific author, but also as a champion of interreligious dialogue.

Meath Conlan from Australia, wrote to Griffiths about his own work in the desolate outback of Australia, and from that initial correspondence sprang a long friendship, including a sabbatical Conlan spent with Griffiths in India. Later, Conlan invited the old man to lecture in Australia, which happened to coincide with a tour by the Dalai Lama and led to their meeting [ their second meeting in 1992].

Conlan has written Bede Griffiths: Friend & Gift of the Spirit, not a biography but a series of vignettes about Griffiths gleaned from their time together in India and Australia. Each of the brief chapters includes photographs pertinent to the subject Conlan is describing. The book is easy to read, and in addition to its biographical elements, it includes a brief analysis of the thought and spiritual practice of Griffiths. First-time readers of Griffiths may find this the perfect introduction to the master’s works. Conlan also supplies a brief bibliography of Griffiths’ works in print.

Lawrence S. Cunningham is the John A. O’Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.

Available in Australia through: www.mosaicresources.com.au

“I had been used to ordinary kindness and family affection, but I had never known a charity that which was based on principle and pervaded the most ordinary acts of life… Here … was that kind of courtesy and grace … that had its source in the Rule of St Benedict: ‘Let all guests who come be treated like Christ himself.’ …This was the sign for which I had been looking.”

Bede Griffiths, The Golden String, p. 132-133

Bede Griffiths shares his birthday cake with hundreds of guests. Shantivanam 1988

In the mid nineteen-sixties I entered a Hindu Temple in Singapore. It was during my first journey overseas; one that introduced me to the riches and depths of The East, beyond the pages of my books. Just as I moved through the crowd of devotees pressing around the entrance to this place, a bare-chested Brahmin priest raised a fresh coconut above his head and then dashed it to pieces at our feet. It was a startling occurrence.

Years later, I was to find that same ritual enacted at Saccidananda ashram – the Ashram of the Holy Trinity. Its significance was symbolic for me at this time and Bede Griffith’s explanation of the nearby village temple bridged the years:

At the entrance of the temple is the figure of the god Ganesh, the elephant god… his fundamental characteristic is his power to remove obstacles… whenever (devotees) want to undertake a journey… they pray to Ganesh to remove the obstacles. So on entering a temple they break a coconut before the shrine of Ganesh… a beautiful action. A coconut has a hard, rough exterior, but inside there is a white substance and sweet milk. The outer nutshell is the external self, the ego. (i.e. Devotees) break their ego. Inside is the pure white substance, the sweet milk, symbolising the divine life within. So they try to remove all obstacles from the mind and make it open to God.

That is the first stage of opening the heart, of embodying spirituality, and of transforming one’s own heart, as well as potentially touching others’ hearts.

Following daily rituals and movements, I settled into a rhythm, made possible by the lifestyle and inner-directedness of the ashram community. Together the community created an environment that honoured the individual’s journey to the true Self, the Self that is deeper and more essentially oneself than one’s ego-consciousness. During my time at the ashram I was to invite within myself a gradual breaking of the outer shell of the ego, of selfishness and superficiality.

My experience of meditation and communication with Bede Griffiths helped my sense of returning to the centre. At the ashram the sense of meaning is everywhere: in symbols and in specific experiences, though the meaning attached to them is often not easily articulated. Among these experiences are those of believing in God, and maintaining personal values. I see the search for meaning as one of the fundamental issues of our times. It becomes manifests in such questions as: what is life all about? What does my job mean? What does this relationship mean for me, and why remain committed? Why am I studying for this diploma or degree? What does it mean to be me? What does it mean that I am going to die one day? The reasons people seek for answers are not merely rational, nor are they wholly emotional. People have, it seems to me, an innate sense of wanting to move to find value and that element of “something more” in their lives.

Bede would often refer to several contemporary scientists’ views. He spoke of Newtonian science that draws sharp distinctions between the observing ‘subject’ – the individual, and the observed ‘object.’ He posited that there is little place in Newton’s physics for mind or consciousness, or, as an example, for the human struggle to find meaning and endurance, and to rise above negative circumstances and transcend limits. Newtonian philosophy speaks of a deterministic, objective universe in which everything is governed by the iron-clad laws of motion and gravitation, rendering everything predictable and without the element of surprise. In this ‘mechanistic’ world-view human persons are pushed around as helpless bystanders, as isolated, passive cogs in a clockwork machine. Bede’s point was that such a ‘mechanistic’ view of the world ignores the insight that human beings are ‘more than the sum total of their parts.’ Mechanism, he asserted, reduced the individual to the status of ‘fragmented object’ in a senseless, though highly organised, predictable cosmos. Ultimately death is also viewed by many as terrifying, because of the lack of any meaningful context within which to place the natural ending of this life with grace and peace. Bede enjoyed, and often read from the works of the British author D. H. Lawrence, who in his poem Healing addresses this situation:

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.

And it is not because the mechanism is working

wrongly that I am ill.

I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep

emotional self

and the wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only

time can help

and patience, and a certain difficult repentance

long, difficult repentance, realisation of life’s mistake,

and freeing oneself

from the endless repetition of this mistake

which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.

Many of the visitors who came to the ashram brought their wounds with them. Under his guidance Bede helped many begin to recover their wholeness. Each was given according to their need, of Bede’s kindness, patience and compassion. Western visitors who found their way to Shantivanam discovered that their path was a journey to the centre. The very design of the ashram spoke of the progressive nature of this Journey. The road of life was symbolised by the long dusty track leading from the main road to the front gates of the ashram. The lotus covered water tank near the temple symbolises the cleansing of oneself from sin. The temple bell is a symbol of the sudden wakening of the inner consciousness. The great banyan tree near the centre of the ashram is the symbol of that Eternal Tree with its roots firmly planted in heaven; and the lush gardens that led one by circuitous routes to the heart of the ashram, together with the temple, are a sign of the gardens of paradise, which are here and now if one stops to look and take time to appreciate the beauty all round. All of these elements come together, said Bede, so as to bring the Journeyer to a central point:

The garbha griha, the ‘house of the womb,’ the source of life, or the mulasthanam, the inner sanctuary, which is always dark. The meaning of this is that God, the ultimate mystery, dwells in darkness, beyond the light of this world. In the little temple in our ashram we follow the same pattern: the inner sanctuary is always kept in darkness with only an oil lamp burning before the tabernacle. So going to the temple means leaving the outer world behind, going through purification, uniting with all the powers of the cosmos and finally entering into the inner shrine of the Self where God dwells in the darkness. At that point one experiences union with God.

The patterns that emerge from a regular life of quiet prayer and reflective work often clarify and guide as well as instruct in the way forward. I was always aware of abundant synchronicity in the day-to-day activities of the ashram. Often individuals in the community itself, building on the daily program and ambience, would, through a word or conversation here or there, or by an example of prayerfulness for instance, be the means whereby other individuals found an answer or a sign-post for forward movement. The old landscape would sometimes buckle in ashram life. Familiar perspectives would recede. Shantivanam became a place where people might find ‘the will of God.’ Bede would advise that one can only know this will “by trying and making mistakes.” Reassuringly he reminded us that over time one would discover that one is in fact receiving guidance. He referred to one of the central activities of life at Shantivanam as meditation. In this important activity the meditator is “guided to meet the right people, to go to the right place, to do the right thing, and you see that you are not managing your life just by yourself. God is acting in you … We are part of the rhythm of the universe. Once we tune into it things begin to happen … if we are attentive and watchful and flow with that rhythm, then we do [what is] right and are moved by the Spirit.”

I have a number of spiritual tours that included visiting Saccidananda Ashram at Shantivanam in December 2010, and then in January and February 2011. If you would like to know more about these, please visit my Tours page in this website, or email me, Dr Meath Conlan: meath@diversejourneys.com

I am also available to present retreats and workshops / seminars on Bede Griffiths and his contemplative vision. Please send for a form if you wish to discuss with me about this possibility for your organisation or region.

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Spread over a lifetime I have gathered some wonderful memories of places visited and friends made.

Meath Conlan sketching in Snowdonia, Wales

Speaking of places, I include Snowdonia in Northern Wales where I have wonderful cousins in the Steele-Mortimer family at their beautiful estate called ‘Golden Grove’. India, where, for over a century of my paternal ancestors lived, still claims my hearty attention and annual presence – a culturally diverse country to which I love bringing small groups of friends on spiritual journeys. I also have a special attraction to many places in North America, New Zealand, and of course, my own country of Australia – all made wonderful by their unique beauty and the friends who live there.

Memories are true, that is, they are memories and not inventions or fantasies. Whether they accurately represent past events or not, however, is irrelevant; the process of construction of the meanings of those events is the focus on memory work. Memories, forming as they do, by their various little knots, the fabled ‘Jewelled Net of Indra’, give us opportunities of coming again to sacred places; special, holly-bush groves and rest-stops along the journey. Each knot comprising this infinite cosmic net, according to Hindu legend, contains a tiny pearl in which every other pearl is reflected, ad infinitum. They are, let us suppose, outcrops of potential meaning in a landscape that must be mapped and re-mapped to understand the depth, nature and significance of life’s experiences.  What I perceive today may not in fact be what is really there. That is, until I bring to the map that deeper eye, some call it the eye of non-duality, the eye of oneness and wholeness, which sees all as unified and meaningful in its seeming chaos.

Wherever I go, I take with me, sketchbooks, pens and inks, paints and pastel chalks. Yes, I seek to record places of special significance on my journeys, but more essentially, through art I seek to explore the inner world; as Aristotle is supposed to have said: “ The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance”. I remain an amateur artist, yet it is to this pursuit that I keep returning again and again; a landscape, however ‘ordinary’ and to many perhaps even uninspiring, I sense the eternal; it is this sense that I seek to record and make visible through my images. But it’s not so much the eternal ‘out there’ in some conceptual sense, it’s the very essence of who I am that I manifest in my paintings and drawings. In his book, “Of Time and The River”, Thomas Wolfe wrote:

At that instant he saw, in one blaze of light, an image of unutterable conviction, the reason why the artist works and lives and has his being – the reward he seeks – the only reward he really cares about, without which there is nothing. It is to snare the spirits of mankind in nets of magic, to make his life prevail through his creation, to wreak the vision of his life, the rude and painful substance of his own experience, into the congruence of blazing and enchanted images that are themselves the core of life, the essential pattern whence all other things proceed, the kernel of eternity.

My friend Barry Heerman who lives in Monterey, California, once encouraged me in my desire to continue painting. He took from from Michele Cassou’s book, “Life, Paint, and Passion” in suggesting that the occupation of painting as such, has power. This power lies not in the end product, but in the process itself; as Cassou wrote: “in the creative energy it releases, in the new perceptions it brings, and in the deepened connection with one’s self it fosters – that is, the heart of the desire to paint. . . . Once this groundwork is established, something deep within relaxes and the real life-transforming work can begin.”

I listen to the inner voice and I exercise my human urge to explore and experiment with the ever-new and the mysterious, hidden magic I know is within me. To sketch and draw I can start right where I am. I need nothing more than an instrument with which to make markings and a surface on which to work. The act of creating is to move into the “unknown”, the mystery of my self, and so, to release my own memories, buried perceptions and feelings. Such acts of creating bring me alive and free me to be myself. At least, this is my experience. As Cassou says elsewhere in her book: “Creation is never about changing yourself; it is about meeting yourself, probing deep into your own core. . . .  Nothing is a mistake, everything is an extension of your being. . . . You step into the middle of yourself and move from there.”

Happily, I am able to share some elements of my artistic exploration with guests who come on spiritual journeys with me, for instance, to India. If you think you would like to know more of Diverse Journeys’ photographic and art journeys, ashram journeys (to Bede Griffiths ashram at Shantivanam), or art retreats, please visit the Tours Page of this website. We have spiritual tours proposed for October through February. One in particular features an exploration of the Apostle Thomas’ journeys in Kerala, South India.  Your guides will be myself and New York photographer Jim Nicholls (www.nichollsphotography.com). Overall these spiritual journeys are unique opportunities that may be just what you are looking for at this time. I’d love to hear from you and explore, with you, how I might assist.

You can contact me, Meath Conlan, at: meath@diversejourneys.com

The Jesus teaching in a nutshell

© Cynthia Bourgeault, June 2008

(excerpted from Chapter 8, “The Great Identity Theft,” of my book on Mary Magdalene, forthcoming from Shambhala Publications, July 22, 2010)

As we set out to consider the teachings of Jesus as an integrated spiritual method, we are entering territory that is both familiar and unfamiliar. Most people growing up in the Western cultural stream will have had some exposure to these teachings (if only as ethical precepts), but the apparent familiarity of the subject matter can blind us to its radical strangeness and difficulty. Perhaps more than any other spiritual teacher, Jesus requires a real beginner’s mind, a willingness to unlearn what one already presumably knows and start with a completely clean slate. In this spirit, then, I would like to begin by describing what seem to me to be the three constitutive elements of the path Jesus discovered;  then, on the basis of these characteristics, I will propose to identify what branch of the spiritual stream it most properly belongs to. I will of course be making use of not only of familiar reference points in the canonical gospels but also the new resources opened up in the Nag Hammadi gospels that we began to explore in Part I of this book.

These three constitutive elements are kenosis, abundance, and singleness.

Kenosis

Kenosis comes from the Greek verb kenosein, which means to empty oneself. It was Paul who first applied this term to Jesus. In a moment of intuitive brilliance he grasped the essential element in Jesus’s methodology, and described it in his immortal words of Philippians 2:9-16:³

Though his state was that of God,

yet he did not deem equality with God

something that he should cling to.

Rather, he emptied himself *

and assuming the state of a slave

he was born in human likeness.

He being known as one of us

humbled himself obedient unto death,

even death on a cross.

For this God raised him on high

and gave him the name

which is above every other name

So that at the name of Jesus

every knee should bend,

in heaven, on earth, and under the earth.

And so every tongue should proclaim

“Jesus Christ is Lord!”

To God the Father’s glory.

(*  this is the place where the verb kenosein appears)

As Paul so profoundly realizes, self-emptying is the touchstone, the core reality underlying every moment of Jesus’s human journey. Self-emptying is what brings him into human form, and self-emptying is what leads him out, returning him to the mode of glory. The full realization of his divine selfhood comes not through the concentration of being, but through a voluntary divestment of it.

We have already seen this same self-emptying motion described in that brilliant “divestment” metaphor of Logion 21 in the Gospel of Thomas. When asked to describe his students, Jesus responds:

They are like small children living in a field not their own.

When the landlords return and demand, “Give us back our field!”

the children return it by simply stripping themselves

and standing naked before them. ⁴

“Stripping oneself and standing naked:” this is the essence of the kenotic path. And it is, in fact, is precisely the strategy that Jesus employs during the famous temptation narratives of the canonical gospels. In each case Satan asks him to take (feed yourself by turning stones into bread; display yourself by drawing on your divine powers; advance yourself by letting me set you up as ruler of the entire world). Jesus responds by simply letting go of the bait being dangled, being content to rest in his emptiness.

It is also the methodology he will reaffirm during his ordeal in the garden of Gethsemane (“Not my will but yours be done”), and which will carry him through the crucifixion, the harrowing of hell (if my reading of Dialogue Three in the gospel of Mary Magdalene is correct), and the final forty days of his time on earth following the resurrection.

Kenosis is not the same as renunciation. Renunciation implies a subtle pushing away; kenosis is simply the willingness to let things come and go without grabbing on. For all intents and purposes it is synonymous with non-clinging or non-attachment. But unlike a more Buddhist version of this spiritual motion, kenosis has a certain warm spaciousness to it; to the degree one does not assert one’s own agenda, something else has the space to be.  The “Letting go” of kenosis is actually closer to “letting be” than it is to any of its “non-” equivalents (non-clinging, non-attachment, non-identification, etc.); its flow is positive and fundamentally creative. Between the “let it be” of kenosis and the “let it be” by which biblical tradition envisions Creation itself as having come into existence, there is a profound resonance.

Abundance

This second pillar of Jesus’s teaching is often seen but rarely recognized. The kenosis Jesus has in mind is not a stoic stance against a pitiless reality; rather, it is a direct gateway into a divine reality which can be immediately experienced as both compassionate and infinitely generous. Abundance surrounds and sustains us like the air we breathe; it is only our habitual self-protectiveness that prevents us from perceiving it. Thus, the real problem with any constrictive motion (taking, defending, hoarding, clinging) is that it makes us spiritually blind, unable to see the dance of divine generosity which is always flowing toward us.

In this sense, then, kenosis is first and foremost a visionary tool rather than a moral one; its primary purpose is to cleanse the lens of perception. Letting go is not in order to get something better (the point Paul misses in the second half of his Philippians hymn); in and of itself it is the something better. For it immediately restores the broken link with the dynamic ground of reality, which its very nature flows forth from a fullness beyond imagining.

Since this point is so fundamentally counterintuitive for our anxiety-prone minds, little wonder that Jesus takes every occasion to hammer it home. In virtually all his teachings the fundamental leitmotif is an “over-the top” generosity that leaves its recipients not only satisfied but bedazzled. Think of all those well-loved gospel stories— the prodigal son, the good samaritan, the loaves and fishes, the water turned into wine, the woman with the alabaster jar, the fishing nets cast in the Galilean Sea—and you’ll see what I mean. It is not a question of “adequate,” or “barely enough,” but of a fullness “filled up, pressed down, running over” (Luke x:xx).

In exactly the same measure, his implacable stance against any kind of greed or hoarding is because these motions lead to constriction, or in other words to spiritual and physical death.  Life is an exchange, and in this exchange the Mercy of God is made real (I am indebted to Helen Luke, in her marvelous book Old Age, for pointing out that the linguistic root of the word “mercy” is in fact the Old Etruscan merc, which means “exchange” ⁵). The modern spiritual teacher Michael Brown succinctly summarizes the core principle at the heart of Jesus’s practical teachings: “‘Giving and receiving’ is the energetic frequency upon which our universe is aligned. All other approaches to energy exchange immediately cause dissonance and disharmony in our life experience.” ⁶

To experience abundance is essentially to see from oneness. It is to know, intimately, the wholeness that underlies and belies our surface impression of separation and scarcity. In the Eastern traditions this realized oneness is known as nonduality, and while Jesus knew it by another name (we’ll see what it is very shortly), he was clearly familiar with the state itself and yearned to impart it to his followers. “Do not be afraid, little flock,” he urged (Luke 12:32)—“it is my father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom!” But this gift can only be received in a state of deep inner emptiness, for any grasping and self-assertion will shatter the unity of which abundance is the mirror. Between kenosis, abundance, and oneness there is in Jesus’s methodology an unbreakable connection.

Singleness

This unitive realization of the fullness ushers a person into a state which Jesus calls “singleness.” In the canonical gospels the term does not stand out, but a whole series of teachings in the Gospel of Thomas (5, 15, 18, 22, 23, 61, 75, 84, 106, 114 makes its meaning indisputably clear. It is Jesus’s term for the attained state of nonduality. Logion 5 succinctly describes this state, in which one sees from the wholeness and lives from the abundance:

Come to know the One

In the presence before you

And everything hidden from you will be revealed…⁷

It is fascinating how closely this idea resonates with what the Eastern traditions would call “enlightenment.” Breaking through the egoic mind’s compulsive need to divide the perceptual field into paired opposites (inside and outside, male and female, subject and object, and so forth), consciousness simply coincides with its source and looks at the world through a single lens of wholeness. To be able to “make the two become one” in this fashion is to reunite with the creative principle of the universe itself:

When you are able make two become one,

the inside like the outside, and the outside like the inside

the higher like the lower,

so that a man is no longer male, and a woman, female,

but male and female become a single whole…

—then you shall enter in.

(Logion 22)

When you are able to transform two into one,

then you too will become “Sons of Man,”

and it will be possible for you to say to a mountain,

“Move,” and it will move.

(Logion 106)

In the Aramaic language of Jesus’s immediate followers, one of the earliest titles given to hims was Ihidaya, “ the Single One,” or the “Unified One.”⁸ In context, it speaks unmistakably of this state of inner oneness; it designates the anthropos, the fully realized human being: the enlightened master of Eastern tradition, or the monad or “undivided one” of hermeticism.

The “great identity theft” to which the title of this chapter refers is that in remarkably short order this term which was so clearly intended to designate Jesus’s attained state of inner oneness should come to be interpreted as “singleness” in the sense of being unmarried, “the celibate one.” ⁹ (This is not, of course, intended to argue the case one way or the other as to Jesus’s marital status, but simply to insist that the primary reference point for the “singleness” described by the Aramaic ihidaya and Greek monachos refers to a state of unitive, or non-dual consciousness and not a state of voluntary celibacy).

“Silence is God’s First Language”

by Rev Cynthia Bourgeault

“Most religions consider a practice of ‘intentional silence’–such as centering prayer–essential to spiritual awakening”.

Rev Cynthia Bourgeault

I first met Cynthia Bourgeault in Snowmass, Colorado in the early 1990’s. I’d been with Abbot Thomas Keating for ten days sitting in contemplation. She struck me as having a firm grasp on spirituality – especially in her own practice, which I found to be very deep – and the fact that while an ordained Anglican priest, she was also a hermit, and lived in great simplicity as a hermit in Maine.

I have not, I must confess, been a good correspondent, but in recent years have, thanks to the urging of another friend – Raimon Panikkar while with him in Spain, re-discovered her writings, especially her book, “Centering Prayer and Inner Awakening”. In the following excerpt from this book, we can read her insights into the many layers of silence in the practice of contemplation.

“Silence is God’s first language,” wrote the 16th-century mystic John of the Cross. And silence is the normal context in which contemplative prayer takes place. But there is silence and then there is silence. There is an outer silence, an outer stopping of the words and busy-ness, but there is also a much more challenging interior silence, where the inner talking stops as well.

Most of us are familiar with this first kind of silence, although we don’t get enough of it in our spiritual nurture. It’s the kind of silence we normally practice in retreat times and quiet days; sometimes you’ll hear it described as “free silence.” With a break from the usual hurly-burly of your life, you have time to draw inward and allow your mind to meander. You may pore over a scriptural verse and let your imagination and feelings carry you more deeply into it. Or you may simply put the books away and go for a walk in the woods, allowing the tranquility of the setting and the relative quieting of external pressures bring you more deeply in touch with yourself. You listen carefully to how you’re feeling, what you’re wishing. In this kind of work, the free association of your mind provides the key to the renewal, and silence furnishes the backdrop where this work can go on.

But there is another kind of silence as well, far less familiar to most Christians. In this other kind of silence, the drill is exactly the opposite. In free silence, you encourage your mind to float where it will; in this other, sometimes called “intentional silence” – or to use the generic description, meditation – a deliberate effort is made to restrain the wandering of the mind, either by slowing down the thought process itself or by developing a means of detaching oneself from it.

Intentional silence almost always feels like work. It doesn’t come naturally to most people, and there is in fact considerable resistance raised from the mind itself: “You mean I just sit there and make my mind a blank?” Then the inner talking begins in earnest, and you ask yourself, “How can this be prayer? How can God give me my imagination, reason, and feelings and then expect me not to use them?” “Where do ‘I’ go to if I stop thinking?” “Is it safe?”

Since centering prayer is a discipline of intentional silence, dealing with this internal resistance is an inevitable part of developing a practice. In fact, I’ve often said to participants at centering prayer introductory workshops that 90 percent of the trick in successfully establishing a practice lies in wanting to do it in the first place. So let’s consider that question first.

The Art of Awakening

Perhaps the most powerful argument is the one from authority. Virtually every spiritual tradition that holds a vision of human transformation at its heart also claims that a practice of intentional silence is a non-negotiable. Period. You just have to do it. Whether it be the meditation of the yogic and Buddhist traditions, the zikr of the Sufis, the devkut of mystical Judaism or the contemplative prayer of the Christians, there is a universal affirmation that this form of spiritual practice is essential to spiritual awakening.

When I talk about “transformation” and “awakening,” incidentally, I should make clear that I am not using New Age terminology. I am speaking of: “You must be born from above” (John 3:7 NRSV), or “Unless a grain of wheat fall into the earth and dies, it remains just a single grain; but if it dies, it bears much fruit” (John 12:24), or perhaps most pointedly: “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for me will find it” (Matthew 16:24-25). Among the worldwide religions, Christianity is surely one of those most urgently and irrevocably set upon the total transformation of the human person. And while it’s true that we don’t have pictures of Jesus teaching meditation practice exactly-this can be read between the lines fairly easily on any number of occasions and more important, derived theologically.

Like most the great spiritual masters of our universe, Jesus taught from the conviction that we human beings are victims of a tragic case of mistaken identity. The person I normally take myself to be-that busy, anxious little “I” so preoccupied with its goals, fears, desires, and issues-is never even remotely the whole of who I am, and to seek the fulfillment of my life at this level means to miss out on the bigger life. This is why, according to his teaching, the one who tries to keep his “life” (i.e., the small one) will lose it, and the one who is willing to lose it will find the real thing. Beneath the surface there is a deeper and vastly more authentic Self, but its presence is usually veiled by the clamor of the smaller “I” with its insatiable needs and demands.

This confusion between small self and larger Self (variously known in the traditions as “True Self,” “Essential Self,” or “Real I”) is the core illusion of the human condition, and penetrating this illusion is what awakening is all about.

Beyond Ordinary Awareness

But why is intentional silence so important to this process of awakening? One of the most effective ways of getting at this question comes through a simple bull’s-eye diagram created by Father Thomas Keating. It’s called “Levels of Awareness.”

The outer circle is called our “Ordinary Awareness.” This is the mind as it usually thinks, and our sense of self tied to that way of thinking.

As human beings we are gifted with what is known as “self-reflexive consciousness”: the capacity to stand outside ourselves and look upon ourselves in the third person. Because of this unique capacity of the mind (as far as we know, we’re the only species so gifted), we are able to experience ourselves as unique persons, made up of unique qualities, capacities, and needs. The subject/ object polarity built into the way the mind works sets up the impression of “having” a distinct identity, informed by certain attributes and imbued with certain gifts that need to become fully expressed if my personhood is to be whole. That sets up a good deal of expectation-and also a good deal of anxiety.

If one really follows closely what thinking and selfhood feel like at this ordinary level, it is not a pretty picture. Into our head, out of nowhere, pop random thoughts, memories, associations, and sensations. Sometimes they are stimulated by the environment; more often by the environment triggering a memory or triggering a reaction or chain reaction.

I remember testing this for myself once. I had read somewhere that without spiritual training the human mind is unable to concentrate on anything for more than two minutes. Surely this must be wrong, I thought; with a Ph.D. and a couple of books under my belt, I figured my powers of concentration must be considerably better than that. So to test this theory, I set myself the task of noticing everything red in the next five-mile stretch of highway I was driving.

What a humiliation! I did all right for the first 30 seconds or so, until the next red thing that popped into my path happened to be a Dairy Queen. When I “woke up” again, several miles later, I realized I had been completely lost in a long reverie touched off by childhood memories of ice cream at the beach. So much for my superior powers of concentration!

The Buddhists smilingly call this “monkey mind.” The little beast jumps from one tree limb to the other, taking the whole of us with it. And we would probably not be able to abide the inner chaos were it not for that stable sense of “self” created through the subject/ object polarity. At the center of all that orbiting chaos, an apparent solidity is given by that self-reflexive “I,” with its constant set of self-referential questions with which it probes and measures the universe: “How well am I doing?” “Is it safe here?” “What did she mean by that?” “Am I okay?”

Another name for “ordinary awareness” is “egoic thinking.” It is the normal functioning zone of the human mind. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a Ph.D., a bishop, a nuclear physicist; how brilliantly intellectual or intensely devout you may be. Without special spiritual training, your sense of the world and your sense of yourself will be formed at this level of awareness. Even the so-called self-awareness tools of our times, from psychotherapy to Myers-Briggs personality typing to the enneagram, spend most of their effort merely resorting and clarifying the characteristics: “I am an INFP,” “a gut-centered type,” “a five,” etc. This may yield insights into the workings of the personality, but it’s still ordinary awareness.

. . .

Deeper than this, in every single one of us though unbeknownst to most of us, is the level that Thomas Keating describes as our “spiritual awareness.” “Awareness” might be too mental a word to describe it, however; the sensation is much more visceral, more like that tug I experienced as a child in Quaker meeting, drawing me down into my depths. You might picture it as a kind of interior compass whose magnetic north is always fixed on God. It’s there; it’s as much a part of what holds you in life as your breathing or your heartbeat. And its purpose, just like a compass, is for orientation.

The problem is that most of us are not in touch with our spiritual awareness (or at least, not deeply and consistently enough in touch with it), let alone having any idea of what it’s there for or how to use it. It comes upon us only rarely, sometimes in a moment of overpowering emotion, such as suddenly being moved to tears by watching a sunset or receiving the Eucharist. That “nostalgia for the divine” sweeps over us and we are left trembling before the presence of a Mystery almost more vivid and beautiful than we can bear. But ordinary life does not encourage such moments, and the impression fades, to be revisited only in our dreams, the usual repository of our spiritual awareness.

But spiritual awareness is actually a way of perceiving, just as ordinary awareness is a way of perceiving. And as with ordinary awareness, there is a sense of identity or selfhood generated through this mode of perception. The big difference between them is that whereas ordinary awareness perceives through self-reflexive consciousness, which splits the world into subject and object; spiritual awareness perceives through an intuitive grasp of the whole and an innate sense of belonging. It’s something like sounding the note G on the piano and instantly hearing the D and the B that surround it and make it a chord. And since spiritual awareness is perception based on harmony, the sense of selfhood arising out of it is not plagued by that sense of isolation and anxiety that dominates life at the ordinary level of awareness.

The Divine Indwelling

If we have within us a compass pointing to the magnetic north of God, does this mean that God dwells within us, as the center of our being? Is that what the bull’s-eye of Thomas Keating’s diagram is all about-what he calls our “divine awareness”?

Cautiously, the answer to this question is “yes.” I say “cautiously” because Christian theology makes very clear that the human being is not God and that the innermost core of our being is not itself divine. And yet theology has always upheld the reality of the “divine indwelling.” As we move toward center, our own being and the divine being become more and more mysteriously interwoven. “There is in the soul a something in which God dwells, and there is in the soul a something in which the soul dwells in God,” writes the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart, the subtlety of his words reflecting the delicacy of the motion. In our own times, Thomas Merton describes this “something” in a passage of astonishing clarity and beauty:

At the center of our being is a point of nothingness which is untouched by sin and illusion, a point of pure truth, a point or spark which belongs entirely to God, which is never at our disposal, from which God disposes of our lives, which is inaccessible to the fantasies of our own mind or the brutalities of our own will. This little point of nothingness and of absolute poverty is the pure glory of God written in us, as our poverty, as our indigence, as our son-ship. It is like a pure diamond blazing with the invisible light of heaven. It is in everybody, and if we could see it, we would see these billions of points of light coming together in the face and blaze of a sun that would make all the darkness and cruelty of life vanish completely. I have no program for this seeing. It is only given. But the gate of heaven is everywhere.

Notice how deftly Merton navigates the tricky theological waters here. His words are bold, in that he claims-to my knowledge more clearly than any other Christian mystical writer-that at the center of our being is an innermost point of truth which shares not only the likeness, but perhaps even the substance of God’s own being. And yet, following the bent of Christian tradition, he makes it absolutely clear that access to this center is not at our command; it is entered only through the gateway of our complete poverty and nothingness.

The divine indwelling is the cornerstone of contemplative prayer. Thomas Keating refers to it as “our personal big bang,” for it reveals the Source of our own being-the explosion of divine love into form which first gave rise to our personal life. It also reveals the direction in which our hearts must travel for a constantly renewed intimacy with this Source. As we enter contemplative prayer, we draw near the wellspring from which our being flows.

Anchoring the Mind:

Instructions for the Practice of Mindfulness

The word “anchor,” in this context, comes from the Late Latin anachorīta, and from the Greek anakhōrētēs, from anakhōrein, meaning ‘to retire, withdraw from khōra, a space.’ Thus an anchorite (or anchoress) is someone who deliberately retired, withdrew from the usual worldly concerns and life-style to pray and meditate. One of the most famous and spiritually productive of these in the Western Tradition’s Middle Ages was Julian of Norwich, whose book “Shewings” has been of great and continuing influence till modern times.

To some extent, most, if not all people require some deliberate form of daily withdrawal, to be alone, to reflect, and, if you will, to pray, though it is also certain that many people utilise “time alone” to create works of art and music, or simply to work in a focused way in their profession.

As a spiritual practice, becoming ‘present’ to what is, now in this moment (after all, it is the only one we have), is a deliberate and daily choice – one that, according to Philosopher John Henry Thoreau, many people don’t choose; for him “the only life worth living is the deliberate life.”

So now, to the practice of mindfulness – one that has its roots in ancient times: for example, in Buddhist vipassana (insight) teaching. For those who are interested, I also recommend an exploration of the yoga sutras of Patanjali, and the West’s “Desert” Tradition of Late Roman Antiquity. The Philokalia is also an excellent resource for people wishing to grow in contemplation.

To commence: sit in a chair or on a cushion on the floor, keeping your back as straight as you are able – even if its up against a wall. Relax with a few deep breaths. Allow the body and mind to become relaxed while remaining very alert and attentive to the present moment (be attentive to the sounds outside and inside the room, and perhaps, within your own body. Try your best to feel the areas of your body that are tense, and the areas that are relaxing. Let your body follow its own nature. Try not to force, alter or ‘fix’ anything.

Be calm: let your mind be soft, and sensitive. Allow a “spacious awareness” to wash, sift and sigh gently through your body.

Sitting

Simply feel the sensations of such things as sitting. But sidestep your mental tendency to image your body, to interpret, to define or think about it. Just let such thoughts and images come and go without being unduly bothered by them. Be sensitive to the bare sensations of sitting.

Body Awareness

Feel your body with an awareness that arises from within your body, rather than from your head. Awareness of the body provides an “anchor hold” for your attention – in this present moment.

Gently, calmly sweep your awareness through your body. Feel the sensations with no agenda, no goal. Allow your body to anchor awareness in the present moment by staying mindful of these moment-by-moment sensations.

Sound Vibrations

After some time, shift your awareness again to the field of sound vibrations. Sound-awareness has the potential to create openness, spaciousness, and receptivity in the mind. Be aware of both the pure sound vibration as well as the space or silence between the sounds. As with body-sensations incline your awareness away from trying to define the sound, or thoughts about the sound. Simply attune to the sound as it is.

Natural Breathing Process

After some time of awareness of body and sounds, bring your attention sensitively to your natural breathing process. Patiently locate the area where the breath is most clear. Once you find it, let awareness lightly rest there. For some it is the sensation of the rising and falling of the abdomen. For others it may be the sensations experienced at the nostrils with the inhalation and exhalation.

Mentally Noting

You can, if you wish, use a sacred word or syllable, or, if you prefer, use very soft mental labels to guide and sustain attention to the breath. “Rising/falling” for the abdomen and “in/out” for the nostrils. Let the breath breathe itself without control, direction, or force. Feel each breath – from within the breath, rather than from the head. Feel the full breath cycle from the beginning through the middle to the end.

Receptive Attention

This breath-awareness is sensitive: a sort of combination of light, spaciousness and receptivity. It’s like listening while being alert, with attentive presence. With such breath-awareness you can touch the actual texture, shape, and form of sensations.

Surrender

Surrender everything else, or, merely let it be in the background. Let the breathing “breathe itself.” Relax in you feeling of mindfulness, with the sensations of the breath.

Gently Returning to the Mental Noting

As soon as you notice the mind wandering off, as it often does, lost in thought, be aware of that with non-judging awareness. Gently connect it again to your anchor – the sacred word, or breath-awareness. Simply ‘feel’ from within the stream of sensations.

Returning Gently to the One Thing

Toward the end of your sitting, be aware of not striving or anticipating, not pouncing on sensations in the present, not bending back to what was just missed, or reflecting on what just happened. If you can, patiently keep inclining yourself to the totality of the present moment – grow in the feeling of wholeness. Keep anchoring easily, gently and patiently: remember – one breath at a time – mentally noting this, or repeating the sacred word.

Compassionate Insight

You will find, in time, that mindfulness of breath begins to collect and concentrate the mind. Your initial distractions: thoughts, emotions, sensations, and sounds, all soon become objects of awareness themselves! Increasingly you will grow in sensitivity and compassion toward yourself. As a consequence, insight is gained into the true nature of the body and mind.

Openness to All Sensations

As your concentration grows, the daily practice of mindfulness opens to the entire “flow” of body/mind experience through all the sense doors — sights, sounds, smells, tastes, touch and mental/emotive.

Your seeing things “as they are,” moment-by-moment – this is the beginning of untangling the knots of attachment, fear, and confusion. The addictive behaviour patterns of craving for pleasure, aversion from discomfort and pain, and tuning out from the neutral experience will be seen for what they are – automatic patterns that need not be the ultimate ground of your daily life. Once the fruits of our addictions become clear – as attachments, fears and confusions – you will, if you choose be able to live more from a place of joy, compassion, equanimity and wisdom.

Guest House, by Rumi

This being human is a guesthouse.
Every morning a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they are a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still treat each guest honourably.
He may be clearing you out for some new delight.
The dark thought, the sham, the malice
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

Dry Bones

WHY RELIGION CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT MYSTICISM

Luke Timothy Johnson (from Commonweal Magazine)

The great religious battle of our time is not the one being waged between believers and unbelievers. To be sure, that is an important and certainly a noisy conflict—never before have the voices of religion’s despisers been more numerous, loud, or confident than those of our proselytizing atheists today.

More significant even than that struggle, though, is the clash occurring within religious traditions. The battle within each of the three great monotheistic religions is between the exoteric and esoteric versions of each. In my view, the contest is already so far advanced as virtually to be decided. But that is getting ahead of ourselves.

As the name suggests, the exoteric focuses on external expressions of religion. Its concern is for the observance of divine commandments, the performance of public ritual, and the celebration of great festivals. In its desire for a common creed and practice, its tropism is toward religious law, and it seeks to shape a visible and moral society molded by such law. To form a visible community publicly obedient to divine command requires an explicit social vision, and exoteric religion is overtly political. The goal, after all, is the realization of the kingdom of God as an empirical reality; the point is religion in its public dimension.

The esoteric, in contrast, finds the point of religion less in external performance than in the inner experience and devotion of the heart; less in the public liturgy than in the individual’s search for God. The esoteric dimension of religion privileges the transforming effect of asceticism and prayer. It seeks an experience of the divine more intense, more personal, and more immediate than any made available by law or formal ritual. The esoteric element in religion finds expression above all in mysticism. Mystics pursue the inner reality of the relationship between humans and God: they long for true knowledge of what alone is ultimately real, and desire absolute love for what is alone infinitely desirable.

Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are all best known as exoteric traditions, each with the full array of formal worship, religious law, sacred books, and codes of morality. Yet each has also contained, from the beginning, a strong element of mysticism. The Judaism that formed in the second century on the basis of a strict interpretation of Torah, demanding observance of all the commandments, including dietary and purity regulations, also expressed itself mystically through the heavenly ascents accomplished by the adepts of Merkabah Mysticism, riders of the heavenly throne-chariot. The earliest Christian books contain a powerful visionary composition (Revelation), while Christian mystical impulses found early expression both in Gnostic literature and among the desert fathers and mothers; and in Islam, the Sufi movement, dedicated to the quest of God through renunciation and prayer, grew together with the exoteric framework of the Shari’ah, the system of Muslim law and observance. It is among the Sufis where we find the passionate pulse of early Islam, as in the words of the female saint Rabi’a al-’Adawiyya (d. ca. 801):

“I love thee with two loves, love of my happiness, and perfect love, to love thee as is thy due. My selfish love is that I do naught but think on thee, excluding all beside; but that purest love, which is thy due, is that the veils which hide thee fall, and I gaze on thee. No praise to me in either this or that. Nay, thine the praise for both that love and this.”

Exoteric and esoteric religious impulses coexist in tension with one another: the mystic’s tendency to derogate the visible can lead to neglect of external forms in the name of purity of heart, while the lawyer’s concern for common standards can encourage the suspicion and even suppression of private devotion. The great monotheistic religions have not found it easy to reconcile their exoteric and esoteric sides. The Gnostics’ esoteric religion posed a direct challenge to the early institutional church, and Irenaeus, the second-century bishop and theologian, responded with Adversus haereses, attacking the “heresies” of such groups with an argument for a public Christianity based on creed, canon, and the apostolic succession of bishops. Eventually the extreme forms of Christian mysticism fled to a more congenial home in the new religion of Manichaeism. The mysticism of the desert fathers and mothers, in contrast, was thoroughly orthodox, and the mysticism that so invigorated medieval Catholicism gladly embraced the exoteric forms of the Christian faith.

Like Christianity, Islam early on faced the challenge of a radical esoteric movement that threatened the authority of the Shari’ah. The earliest Sufis were adventurers of the spirit who sought immediate union with Allah, and some issued statements that pushed the implications of ecstasy to the limits. The Sufi Mansur al-Hallaj was executed for his claims of union with the divine, which outraged the fundamental conviction that Allah has no partners. “I am al-Haqq,” he is reputed to have said, “I am the Truth.” Reconciling the esoteric and exoteric within Islam was the monumental intellectual labor of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (1058–1111), a man whose absolute devotion to the Sufi way—he said it saved his soul—was matched by his commitment to the Shari’ah as the framework of true devotion: “I saw that Sufism consists in experiences rather than in definitions, and that what I was lacking belonged to the domain, not of instruction, but of ecstasy and initiation.” Al-Ghazali held that the mystic’s knowledge did not consist in new revelations, but in an ever deeper penetration of the truths disclosed by the Qur’an. This principle, once established, helped Sufism flourish at the heart of Islam, becoming at times the dominant expression of the religion.

Of the three great monotheisms, Judaism has proved most successful at harmonizing exoteric and esoteric expression. The masters of the heavenly throne-chariot were among the greatest scholars of the early rabbinic tradition, and demanded of the mystic the punctilious outward observance of Torah. The medieval German chasid Eleazar of Worms (d. 1230) declared, “The root of love is to love the Lord. The soul is full of love, bound with the bonds of love in great joy. The powerful love of joy seizes his heart so that at all times he thinks: How can I do the will of God?” Similarly, practitioners of Kabbalah from the twelfth to the twentieth century assumed as the ground for their speculation a total immersion in the practices common to the community of faith. The early Hasidic movement aroused concern for its apparently antinomian tendencies, yet quickly became integrated in the exoteric tradition, and is found today among the strictest of observant Jews.

The benefits of the exoteric to the esoteric forms of religion over the ages have been clear to see. The framework of law and worship, creed and Scripture, provided both a social meaning and shared social practices that enabled individual mystics to thrive. They shared with their nonmystical fellow believers the public practice of prayer, the study of sacred texts, and the deeds of charity. Their passionate quest for the experience of God through prayer was the more secure because it pursued the God proclaimed publicly in synagogue, church, and mosque. Their asceticism was not an exception to, but rather an intensification of, the strict rules of behavior followed by the exoteric community. Mystics were able to swim freely, and dive deeply, in an ocean bounded by public profession and practice.

In return, mysticism enriched the outer tradition, providing a medium for impulses of passionate devotion, producing generations of saints who represent the best within each religion. By recognizing all visible forms as less than ultimate, mysticism challenges the claims of religious law to total control over humans, and stands as an anti-idolatrous witness within exoteric religion. It makes clear that religion is not simply another version of politics, but a form of faith that in its essence seeks to serve the living God; and that religion’s efforts to stabilize the world are not solely about the assertion of human power, but about the service of humanity. Because everything in religion must be measured by God, mysticism insists, and because God is not a controllable or even a fully knowable entity, religion must always be measured by a reality beyond definition. Asserting the ultimate reality and power of this invisible presence, and willingly sacrificing pleasure in this life for the sake of a future life with God, mysticism reminds the exoteric that it too is called to a service larger than itself.

This positive affirmation of the heart’s devotion, and the accompanying critique of external forms, has made mysticism a powerful force for regeneration and reform. In Christianity, despite the excesses of exoteric control—inquisitions, crusades, battles over the papacy—the great mystics served as the measure for what the religion was really about. Their personal lives bore witness to the reality of transforming grace, and their protests pushed prelates to reform. Above all, their writings gave vibrant testimony to a God whose transcendence was beyond comprehension and a Christ whose closeness never exhausted reflection.

Consider how barren Christian literature would be without the writings of mystics, from The Cloud of Unknowing through The Interior Castle to The Sign of Jonas. Consider also how Christian imagination was expanded through Francis of Assisi’s mystical experience of Christ crucified, and Julian of Norwich’s astonishing illuminations:

“And in this he showed me something small, no bigger than a hazelnut, lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed to me, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with the eye of my understanding and thought: What can this be? I was amazed that it could last, for I thought that because of its littleness it would suddenly have fallen into nothing. And I was answered in my understanding: It lasts and always will, because God loves it; and thus everything has being through the love of God.”

In Islam, the Sufi fellowships, dedicated to poverty, contemplation, and the renunciation of desires, gave credibility to the Muslim claim of being more than just a way to order society. Despite the violent split between Sunni and Shi’a, wars between contending caliphs, and corruption within caliphates, the Sufi movement asserted that the heart of Islam was the human relationship with Allah. Sufis understood “Jihad in the way of Allah” not as the conquest of infidel nations, but rather as submission of the entire self to the will of Allah, expressed by the constant effort to act in the name of “the compassionate, the merciful.” Sufi mystics generated an astonishing amount of devotional literature depicting such a life of sanctity and summoning others to it.

From Ibn al-’Arabi’s esoteric readings of the Qur’an and Hadith, to Julaladdin Rumi’s powerful poetry, the mystics of Islam pushed the limits of language and the symbols of the sacred text in their efforts to stretch the self toward the truly real, producing literature of surpassing depth and beauty. Rumi declares:

“I died as mineral and became a plant, I died as a plant and rose to animal, I died as animal and I was man. Why should I fear? When was I less by dying? Yet once more I shall die as man, to soar with angels blest; but even from angelhood I must pass on: all except God doth perish. When I have sacrificed my angel soul, I shall become what no mind e’er conceived. Oh, let me not exist! For Non-existence proclaims in organ tones: ‘To Him we shall return.’”

By so creatively fusing exoteric practice and esoteric passion, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam asserted that the deepest meaning of public practice was the transformation of the individual soul and the quest for the living God. Yet recent centuries have witnessed the steady diminution of the esoteric in these traditions. Bit by bit Christianity has succumbed to the worldview of modernity, which rejects and even ridicules the notion that a life of renunciation can be a pilgrimage toward God. With the collapse of a miracle-saturated world comes the loss of a robust sense of future life counterbalancing our present “Vale of Tears.” In the eyes of modernity, the very concept of self-renunciation appears as a form of psychopathology. The late “turn to the world” of a Thomas Merton, for instance, is celebrated precisely because it privileges the active over the contemplative, the political engagement over the monastic retreat.

Contemplative houses barely maintain their existence; religious orders must have an “apostolate” conceived in expressly social terms. The marginalization of the mystical within Christianity reaches its epitome in movements like the social gospel or liberation theology, for which the esoteric life of the mystic is at best a form of self-indulgence and at worst counterrevolutionary.

In Islam, the expulsion of Sufism has been still more severe. The “reform” movements initiated in eighteenth-century Saudi Arabia by Muhammad ibn Abdul al-Wahhab, and in nineteenth-century Algeria by Muhammad ibn ’Ali as-Sanusi, began by questioning the centrality of Sufism. Al-Wahhab in particular, a former Sufi, viewed mysticism as a distortion of authentic Islam, condemning it as otherworldly, individualistic, and dangerously casual about external forms. His reforms shifted emphasis from spiritual leaders toward the establishment of an Islamic state, jettisoning the Sufi’s spiritual understanding of jihad in favor of a political one. No longer would the esoteric, mystical reading of the Qur’an taught by the Shaykhs dominate Islam, but instead the “original” exoteric, political program of the prophet. Thus, the frequently stated axiom that one can be truly Muslim only in an Islamic state—a conviction utterly at odds with the spirit of the Sufi.

Judaism, as I have suggested, has more effectively held the esoteric and exoteric together. And mysticism, because it remains a fundamental and ineradicable way of being religious, continues to attract people associated with all three religions. Yet removed from the great exoteric traditions, mysticism suffers a perhaps inevitable trivialization. Kabbalism of the sort favored by Madonna and other celebrities is unrecognizable as an expression of the wisdom of Torah, and indeed is almost completely removed from the convictions and practices specific to Judaism. The Sufism popularized by Idries Shah (1924–96) and Inayat Khan (1882–1927) is a form of mind-mastery divorced from the Qur’an and Hadith, and propagates itself as a form of universal wisdom. In Christianity, the “new Gnosticism” espoused by devotees of labyrinths and self-realization workshops eschews the dogmas of Christianity as “underevolved.”

Such deracinated forms of mysticism remain oddly superficial precisely because they draw no nourishment from the great exoteric traditions. Kabbalism apart from Torah-observance is playacting; Sufism disconnected from Shari’ah is vague theosophy; and Christian mysticism that finds no center in the Eucharist or the Passion of Christ drifts into a form of self-grooming. In a paradoxical fashion, it was the exoteric frame that enabled the esoteric to dig into deep soil rather than float off into vaporous fantasy.

Less visible but no less significant is the negative effect on the exoteric when the esoteric life of individual transformation goes unacknowledged. A system of law unconnected to inner piety is simply an instrument of social control, a form of politics pure and simple. Whether it be an Islamic court issuing a Fatwah to punish someone who has insulted the Prophet, or the Vatican removing a theologian from a university faculty on suspicion of an inadequate Christology, the point is the same: control exercised through coercive force rather than through instruction, exhortation, and example. Islamic fundamentalism echoes Christian fundamentalism in this respect, demanding an absolute outer conformity to specific points of belief and practice, while paying little explicit attention to the intricate and difficult process of individual sanctification. The more Catholicism resembles the Islamic state, and the more Islam resembles every other form of politics in the world, the less reason there is for anyone to grant these religions an exemption based on the supposition that they represent a transcendental value or supernatural vision.

Seen in this light, the exoteric may appear to have won, yet its victory may only be prelude to the defeat of the tradition as a whole by secularism. Insofar as Christianity and Islam are defined by this-worldly goals and seek to accomplish them through the political instruments of coercion and repression, both traditions are vulnerable to the challenges of secular critics, who ask whether the vision of human society envisaged by these religions has anything special to recommend it. If religion is for this life only, then it must compete on an even plane with other worldly ideologies. And it is not unthinkable that such ideologies can offer a better and more humane society than that proposed by a religion that has been emptied of the transcendent, and lacks any room for the spirit that soars toward God.