Secularization, Good. Religion, Good

Let me be clear from the start: my goal in creating space between secularism and fundamentalism to talk about God is not to argue against secularization and for religion or vice versa. What I am opposed to is secularism,, the closed view that the finite world we perceive with our senses and grasp with our intellects is all there is, and , fundamentalism, the closed view that one’s God is the only true God and that one’s sacred text, which has one and only one meaning, is the only true text. My assumption is that both secularization and religion are valuable, in fact necessary for existence in the twenty-first century. Let me give you a sense of what I mean by these terms.

One of the best outlines of secularization is given by John E. Smith in the epilogue to his book Experience and God. Here is his answer to what secularization means.

The answer can be given in its most concise form by means of five outstanding traits that not only mark life in the most highly developed nations of the West, but which now fire the imagination and spark the wills of countless millions in those lands we have come to describe as underdeveloped. These traits are autonomy, expressed individually as freedom and ethnically as national independence or the right of self-determination; technology or industrialization which means science transformed into human power over the environment and even man himself; voluntarism, with its closely associated individualism acting as the drive to control recalcitrant forces both in the inner depths of man and the temporal stretches of human history; temporalism, or a sense of urgency expressing itself with sharp focus on present existence and the immediate, and a corresponding lack of concern for the abiding, the time-spanning, and the long-range goal.
The fifth trait, which is closely connected with the preceding, is one for which it is difficult to find an adequate term; the basic feature is a concern for art, for the senses, for free self-expression, coupled with a feeling of relief wherever it is possible to break out of conventional patterns. This trait may be called “aestheticism” if the term is not understood in a basically derogatory sense, and If it is taken to include the two elements that must always be comprehended in art, namely, an appeal to significant sensible form and an expression of “free play” indicating that the system in which we live has relaxed its demands upon us. (pp. 181-82)

These five traits structure and determine individual spirits as well as the spirits of nations and peoples, he says. They can be misused and indeed are often found in degenerate forms, as in the exploitation of the earth without regard for the autonomy of the earth, and the capitalist greed that drives technology without regard to its consequences to the earth and its inhabitants. But these traits of our secularized society are not, in themselves, the enemy of religion or any concept of God. They have, indeed, brought great good to the world, including for religion. We have a public space to talk about our various religions with respect now, for example. And, as Smith points out, it is the Western religious tradition that spawned secularization.

The question is, given that this is the secularized society we live in, what is the response of religion to that world? We may judge secularization’s abuses and deformations, but we cannot reject it out of hand and go back to a pre-secularized existence. Also, we have to ask what secularization has to teach religion about religion’s abuses and deformation? What does it have to tell us about religious traditions that use authoritarian tactics, running roughshod over the autonomy and free expression of its adherents? What does it have to tell us about religious traditions that force outmoded concepts and images of God on people who no longer even understand well what they mean? Or insist on a notion of God and humankind as the image of God that leads to the exploitation of the earth?

Today, if we are going to avoid social and natural disaster, religion has to be in conversation with the world we live in; it can’t stick its head in the sand and pretend we’re still living in the first or seventh or sixteenth or eighteenth or whatever century has been identified as the “pure” age for that religion’s expression. This is the world we live in, a secularized existence. How do we respond to that?

Making Space for Questions Between a Rock (Fundamentalism) and a Hard Place (Secularism)

Everyone’s so sure these days about God and religion and spirituality. The religious fundamentalists know God, they know the name of God, they know the ways of God, they know the judgments of God, they know who the chosen people of God are and aren’t—self-appointed messengers, they are the voice of God. The atheist fundamentalists know God isn’t, they know the names of all that exists and does not exist, they know the ways of the universe, they know how to judge all—infallibly—in the light of reason, they know anyone who is religious is not a member of the chosen, the enlightened ones—self-appointed iconoclasts, they are the voice of Reason.

But if everybody’s talking (shouting really), who is listening? Listening to other people, to other theories of human existence, to reality itself? To listen requires humility. And that is what is lacking, the humility that recognizes one does not know, that instead of filling up the void with words, a hedge against anxiety, one must sit still and listen. Religious and atheistic fundamentalists, as well as many artists who specialize in ironic distancing, share the same disease: a feeling of absolute certainty about things that cannot be known, a feeling that makes them feel superior to all who do not see or hear or feel reality in the same way they do, whose limited view does not match their limited view exactly.

I have lost all patience with all this absolutism and misdirected chatter incessantly coming from all sides. People are hungry for meaning. They thirst for new ways to imagine and interpret their lives, ways that nourish them and sustain them as they search for ways to live good and meaningful lives. With all this noise and heat coming from the fundamentalists, where is the silence and the light that will show us the way to a new understanding of the complex and mysterious existence we have been born into, a reality that is—whatever you call it—multi-dimensional, at the very least both material and something more than material, something that goes beyond the merely physical?

Let’s stop all the shouting and mutual condemnation. Let’s stop wringing our hands in despair at the state of religious discourse today. Let’s stop taking the easy way out in irony, winks and witticisms that reveal how bored, how above it all, how past it all we are. Instead, let’s get busy and start making space for uncertainty and questions, a space where we befriend silence and practice listening.

Maybe if we can clear a space like that, a place of openness and opening, there will be room for food to grow and springs to burst forth that will nourish the hunger and slake the thirst of those of us who know we do not know and find our way in seeking.
So that’s what I want to do—declare a pox on both their houses, the religious and the anti-religious fundamentalists, and start clearing a space where we can breathe freely, open or eyes, our hearts, our minds in asking questions, genuine questions, about who we are why we’re here, what matter is, what “beyond matter” is, what people mean when they say “God,” what it can mean to say “God” or “spirit” in 2012.

I will try. And I will begin by clearing away some obstacles. I want to dispel certain notions of God that have been dead for centuries but act as if they are still viable. Call them zombie notions of God. Before we can even start listening, we have to rid the world of religious discourse of these zombie ideas and images that suck the life out of every conversation, stop them dead in their tracks.

A Simple Practice: Eat Your (Spiritual) Vegetables and...

Ghazali often quoted this Persian proverb:
"Eat the vegetable wherever it comes from, and do not ask where the garden is."

He quoted this, for example, when counseling people how to fight demons (The Marvels of the Heart). Why get caught up in origins, ontology, and metaphysics, asking what world demons come from, what level of being they occupy? The main thing is to conquer their temptations in your heart, with your heart so you can walk uprightly in this world, with love, justice, and humility.

But this proverb also expresses Ghazali's view of truth. He pulled his writings and teachings (which influenced many Jewish and Christian theologians) from many different sources, the Qur'an, al-Farabi, Ibn Sina, colloquial sayings, Greek philosophy, and much more.

This practice and understanding of wisdom is a welcome one in our current situation, in which fundamentalists (among all religions) and militant secularists (from among all religions) have crowded the stage, pushing all people of faith seeking understanding off the stage, calling us "rebels" or "infidels" for holding a view of God with which they do not agree, or "idiots" for trusting in God at all.  Both these dogmas, as different as they seem to be, share a belief:  that the origin of an idea contaminates or purifies it.  For religious fundamentalists, any idea or image of God that does not come from the one true source that  their group identifies (the Hebrew scriptures, the Christian scriptures, the Qur'an, or others), as interpreted by them is not only suspect but false.  For the materialist or secular fundamentalists, those who reject any possibility of the reality of God, any idea or image  of God, especially if it comes from an organized religion, is false because it is nonsense, meaningless. For them, any statement that is not objectively verifiable, that does not originate in scientific thinking, must be false.

For both these varieties of fundamentalism, faith and reason are mutually exclusive. For the religious dogmatists, whatever does not come from (their) faith comes from human reason and is therefore deception (because human reason is clouded by sin and it is only pure revelation that can be trusted).  For the secular dogmatists, whatever does not come from (their notion of modern scientific) reason comes from faith and is therefore self-deception (because human beings are weak and childish and want an illusion of something greater than they are to depend on).

I am reminded here of the logical fallacy called "poisoning the wells." One identifies the one pure source of truth as the well one drinks from, and claims that all other wells, and everything springing forth from them,  every word, thought, idea, practice, is, by necessity, contaminated. Thus, they drink only from their wells.  They eat vegetables only from their gardens.

Ghazali's proverb can show us another way. "Eat the vegetable wherever it comes from, and do not ask where the garden is."

Faith and reason are not mutually exclusive.  Throughout history, in all religious traditions, western and eastern, there have been thinkers and communities who have not been afraid to recognize truth no matter what its source.  Not just mystics and radicals, but people at the heart of religious traditions have recognized and absorbed truths that came to them from outside their tradition or culture.  Philo, Jews returning from captivity in Babylonia, Augustine, Ghazali, Ibn Arabi, Maimonides, John Calvin--the list could go on and on.  It was the medieval Christian theologian Anselm who gave us the common motto for this approach, faith seeking understanding.  But the approach knows no historical, cultural, or religious bounds.  Trusting in the Oneness and infinite wisdom of God, they strove to recognize truth whenever and wherever it appeared, even if that truth came from Greek philosophy, Persian religion, or the best science of the day.  For them, to reject a truth simply because one is unfamiliar with its source is to be ungrateful to the One; it is to reject the Oneness, infinite wisdom, and overflowing abundance of the One and the gifts that flow from God.  When one recognizes a truth, one sees that its ultimate origin is in God, not another person or community.  That is why one accepts it if one does.

So let's be discriminating, yes.  Don't eat cardboard or rancid meat.  Know what you're eating.  Seek out nourishing vegetables. And when you find them, don't subject them, or their growers or deliverers, to a long inquisition about the garden they came from, the mineral content of the soil, the rain levels, the integrity of the gardeners, and so forth.  Did this truth grow in the garden of faith?  No matter.  No reason to condemn it.  Did it grow in the garden of reason?  No matter.  No reason to reject it out of hand.  Let's move beyond the false dichotomy of faith or reason and start talking about what truths nourish us and that we share with others.

We could die of spiritual starvation in this desert of fundamentalism before all the garden questions are raised and answered.   The practice is simple and profound:  Eat your vegetables; and leave the garden, Pardes, paradise, which is more glorious and abundant and various than we could ever imagine, to The True.

Welcome to the conversation!

Everywhere today God’s name is invoked. Yet there are so few places to have a genuine conversation about God, a true I-Thou dialogue in which the participants are present to the depth and complexity of the reality we call God, aware of the limitations of their own concepts, assumptions, and perspective, and able to see and hear the others as they are. Conversations that are dialogues are not arguments in which opposing adversaries compete for the one single truth. Nor are they sales pitches for the best product or tradition, or bids for confirmation of one’s position. True conversations are more like this: navigating an ocean with a group of strangers who are unlikely travelling companions, each one boarding the boat in a different place, each one speaking a different language, all working together as a crew along the way to keep the boat afloat and moving forward, each one disembarking at a different place—yet each traveler arriving at a new place, a place different from where she or he began, a place they have not been before, everyone transformed by the journey.

This is the kind of conversation about God I crave. Am I capable of it? I hope so. At least I aim to try, with the wisdom of Samuel Beckett to guide me: “Fail. Fail again. Fail better.”

I invite you to board the boat and join me on this spiritual adventure. What I’m interested in is seeking spiritual insights that can revive and refresh spirits weary of arguments and images that were once fresh in their day but have now worn thin. When the ancient Hebrew prophets had a question about what was happening in their community, they would go “inquire of the Lord” for a fresh word to bring to their new experience. We live in the twenty-first century. The Enlightenment has been over for 300 years, and we’re still in a quandary about how to talk about God in a way that makes sense to intelligent people who want to deny neither religion nor science and philosophy. So let’s talk inquiring.  I’ll offer questions, reflections, or suggested readings as catalysts. Let’s start talking and see what kind of journey we create together. As the theologian Nelle Morton says, “The journey is home.” As Rabbi Hayyim teaches, this is how we journey together:

In the month of Elul when the people prepared their souls for the days of judgment, Rabbi Hayyim was in the habit of telling stories to a tune that moved all his listeners to turn to God. Once he told this story: “A man lost his way in a great forest. After a while another man lost his way and chanced on the first man. Without knowing what had happened to him, he asked the man the way out of the woods. ‘I don’t know,” said the first man. ‘But I can point out the ways that lead further into the thicket, and after that let us try to find the way together.’ “So, my congregation,” the rabbi concluded his story, “let us look for the way together.” (Buber, Tales of the Hasidim II:213)