By Their Fruits You Will Know Them—Elul 10

Hatred and condemnation, even of one’s own people, is an equal opportunity disease.

Anti-women violence by Haredi Jews: In the past years, chairs have been thrown at Jewish women praying in the women’s section of the wall in Jerusalem (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrvxaT6QIw0), screams of rage and insults have been hurled at the women, as I myself experienced in the fall of 2011, and fecal matter has been poured on Torah scrolls carried by women (http://www.phyllis-chesler.com/119/wailing-at-the-wall). (Read about Women of the Wall http://womenofthewall.org.il/.)

Anti-abortion and anti-women violence by Christians: On May 31, 2009 Dr. George Tiller was shot and killed by Scott Roeder as Tiller served as an usher at church in Wichita, Kansas; recently in the Roman Catholic church, the pope and the bishops have been trying to muzzle and chain the women religious because they do not parrot the “church’s” teaching as they go about their works of compassion.

Anti-Sufi-inspired Islam by Moslems: Recently in Mali, Al Qaeda and Al-Qaeda in the Magrebh and other Moslem fundamentalists transplanted from other countries have physically attacked Moslems in Mali who follow a gentler path of Islam, forcing over 90,000 people over the border into refugee camps in Mauritania, to escape violence at the hands of their own people. (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/19/world/africa/fear-stalks-malis-refugees-despite-escape-to-mauritania.html)

I write this not to condemn the condemners, but to reflect on what makes a person pious—pious Jew, pious Christian, pious Moslem—and to consider what repentance and forgiveness mean in our world today, especially during these Days of Awe.

In what may seem to many to be a great irony, I take as my guide Jonathan Edwards, the Calvinist whom people love to condemn for his fire and brimstone sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

Jonathon Edwards lived during the time of the Great Awakening, the great mystical revival in New England, and he himself was a mystic. In a time of so much religious fervor and division, with so many people claiming to have had religious experiences and to have become “true” Christians, superior to others who had not had their same experience, and condemning those who had not had them, he wrestled with the question of how one can know with certainty whether one’s neighbor’s or ones’ own religious experience was holy. The result is one of the finest treatises ever written, Treatise on Religious Affections (The Works of Jonathon Edwards. Volume 1. Banner of Truth, 1974, pp. 234-364.), in which he argues the following.

There is no guarantee that a person is saved, is holy, is chosen, is spiritual because of what visions or spiritual experiences they have had, or because of what beliefs or doctrines they hold. If this is the case, then what are the signs by which we can distinguish what are true and what may be false religious affections?

Edwards mentions many signs. Here are three that seem to speak to our situation today.

1. “Gracious affections are attended with evangelical humility” … [or] “holy humility.” (VI)

“And this may be laid down as an infallible thing, That the person who is apt to think that he, as compared with others, is a very eminent saint, much distinguished in christian experience, in whom this is a first thought, that rises of itself, and naturally offers itself; he is certainly mistaken; he is no eminent saint; but under the great prevailing of a proud and self-righteous spirit. And if this be habitual with the man, and is statedly the prevailing temper of his mind, he is no saint at all; he has not the least degree of any true christian experience; so surely as the word of God is true.”

This is a daring, radical conclusion: To believe oneself above others, and so certain in own’s superiority and the rightness of one’s judgment that one can condemn others and compel them to believe or feel or behave as one does is a sign that one is not as pious as one imagines.

This sign is well worth considering today in our stormy atmosphere or religion between, among, and within religious traditions: to judge another as unworthy is not to act in humility. In almost every religion, ancient and contemporary, true humility is a mark of communion with God or the sacred.

Tomorrow we’ll look at another sign Edwards mentions.

Loneliness: What Do You Do with Yours?

Solitude and seclusion give life to the spirit.  A life seeking and being sought by spirit is, even in the midst of community and action in the world,  necessarily a solitary and even lonely life.  How else to blunt the power of the many distractions that seem to consume us?  We are good at marshalling distinctions: solitude, being alone to the Alone,  is not loneliness, we say.  Distinctions are helpful.  But experience is never as tidy as our intellect would like it to be.  Deep meditation and prayer, that profound communion when one is present to the Presence that overwhelms as it embraces, is a kind of lonely experience. One might feel amazingly close, where one truly belongs, and at the same time, amazingly far—from others, from the daily world, from what—we cannot say.

Reflecting on the variety of our experiences of loneliness can be a helpful guide through this inner territory.  Howard Thurman,  a mystic rooted in the Christian tradition who embraced many traditions in friendship and co-founded the Church for the Fellowship of All Peoples, points the way.  In The Inward Journey, one of his many books of meditations, he writes about loneliness.  His words, written in 1961, seem even more apt for our age, caught up as we are in a social media feeding frenzy. 

#96.  Your Loneliness
What do you do with your loneliness?  One of the massive results of the invasion of privacy so characteristic of our times is the increasing fear of being alone. Loneliness is of many kinds.  There is the loneliness of a great bitterness when the pain is so great that any contact with others threatens to open old wounds and to awaken old frenzies.  There is the loneliness of the broken heart and the dead friendship when what was full of promise and fulfillment lost its way in a fog of misunderstanding, anxiety, and fear.  There is the loneliness of those who have absorbed so much of violence that all hurt has died, leaving only the charred reminder of a lost awareness.  There is the loneliness of the shy and the retiring where timidity stands guard against all encounters and the will to relate to others is tilled.  There is the loneliness of despair, and the exhaustion of the spirit, leaving no strength to try again, the promise of a the second wind can find no backing.  There is the loneliness of death when silently a man listens, one by one, to the closing of all doors, and all that remains is naked life, stripped of everything that shields, protects, and insulates.
     But there is loneliness in another key. There is the loneliness of the truth-seeker whose search swings him out beyond all frontiers and all boundaries until there bursts upon his view a fleeting moment of utter awareness and he knows beyond all doubt, all contradictions.  There is the loneliness of the moment of integrity when the declaration of the self is demanded and the commitment gives no corner to sham, to pretense, or to lying.  There is the loneliness in the moment of creation when the new comes into being, trembles, then steadies until the path takes them out beyond all creeds and all faiths and they know the wholeness of communion and the bliss of finally being understood.
     Loneliness is of many kinds.  What do you do with yours?  (130-131)