Category Archives: Progressive Christianity

Four Pitfalls of our Essential Freedom

Contemporary Religion, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2021

In this essay I am going to point out four of the most common forms of flight from our essential freedom and indicate with some poetry and stories how our essential freedom is being lived and/or fled.

We live in a Land of Mystery.
We know nothing about it.
We don’t know where we have come from.
We don’t know where we are going.
We don’t know where we are.
We are newborn babes.
We have never been here before.
We have never seen this before.
We will never see it again.
This moment is fresh,
Unexpected,
Surprising.
As this moment moves into the past,
It cannot be fully remembered.
All memory is a creation of our minds.
And our minds cannot fathom the Land of Mystery,
much less remember it.
We experience Mystery Now
And only Now.
Any previous Now is gone forever.
Any yet-to-be Now is not yet born.
We live Now,
only Now,
in a Land of Mystery.

Denying the truth of this poem can be called “rationalism,” the notion that the real is rational or that rational is the real.  The above poem is an attempt to point out that the real is not rational.  The very best of human reasoning is never anything more than an approximation of the real.  This is another way to say that the real is a mystery.

Rationalism

Fleeing in a personal way from our awareness of a permanent mysteriousness is the most common flight from our essential freedom.  And to where do we flee?  We flee to dogmas of the mind—whether dogma of science or dogma of religion or dogma of some other kind.  We can flee to current wisdom or obsolete foolishness—any rational formation that can provide the true believer with a supposed certainty.  Standing within the full awe or wonder of this All Powerful Land of Mystery, including its freedom, is a paradoxical sort of certainty.  If we allow the uncertainty of our aware freedom to rule our living, we find that such perpetual uncertainty can be our “certainty” and our openness.

We need  approximations of the real in order to navigate our lives within our natural and social environments.  The culture in which we live is a webwork or weave of these “approximate certainties.”  We grow up in a culture of particular approximate certainties that are being lived by us as if they were fully certain.

The maturity acquired through open living includes discovering that these approximate certainties of our culture are uncertain.  The life story of Albert Einstein is a story of awakening to uncertainties in his own inherited “normal” science—the science so deeply improved by Sir Isaac Newton.  Though it is true that Einstein’s wondrous imagination gave new vision to many of those older certainties, Einstein’s life story, even in the realm of his physics, involved making one serious mistake after another.  Along with the freedom and the creativity of other physicists, it was Einstein’ own freedom and creativity that was demolishing his own older certainties.  And while physics was never the same after Einstein got through with it, physics remains a set of approximate certainties that are still vulnerable to being overturned by better approximations of what is real.

Here is another story of freedom from certainty—this time from a religious luminary.  There was a man, an accomplished thinker, a strongly religious man, a loyal Jew.  He could read and write in both Hebrew and Greek; he traveled; he taught; he had a good reputation.  Then it came to him that he was hiding from his true being in the thoughtfulness of these two cultures of learning.  So he threw into the waste basket (symbolically speaking) all that accomplished education and religious thoughtfulness.  And after a month or so living in a sort of nowhere/nobody status, he took all that wisdom out of the waste basket and put it to work assisting others to participate in his deep discovery of that freedom is at the heart of Judaism’s sense of absolute mysteriousness.  His name was Saul. After his deep discovery, he changed his name. We remember him as Paul , a man who said that Christ had set us free.

In a series of letters Paul gave witness to his deep encounter with an enduring Mystery that transcended his culture, both his cultures.  We misuse his writings when we expect  them to be rational dogmas.  He established Christian theologizing as an ongoing probe into a Mystery than never goes away.  His words can also be viewed as describing the life of a permanent outsider (neither Jew nor Greek).  Here is my 21st century definition of “the pitfall into rationalism”:

Rationalism:  Hiding from Mystery in the thoughtfulness of our culture.

Moralism

Here is my antidotal poem for the pitfall of moralism:

Within this Land of Mystery
flows a River of Consciousness—
a flow of attention and freedom.
Consciousness is an enigma in this Land of Mystery.
Consciousness flows through body and mind like a river—
a moisture in the desert of things.
Consciousness is not our pain, pleasure, or rest;
not our desire, emotion, stillness, or passion.
These are like the rocks in the River of Consciousness
Consciousness is a flow through the body and with the body.
Consciousness is an alertness that is also
a freedom to intend and a will to do.
The mind is a tool of consciousness,
providing consciousness with the ability
to reflect upon itself.
But consciousness cannot be contained
within the images and symbols of the mind.
It is an enigma that mind
cannot comprehend – even noticing consciousness
is an act of consciousness using the mind and
flowing like a River in the Land of Mystery.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer read all of Paul’s writings.  He also studied intently those many years of interpretations of Paul’s letters.  He was especially conversant with Martin Luther’s  interpretations of Paul.  In his early twenties, Dietrich  became a prominent student and writer of edge Christian topics.  A topic that captured him deeply was the radical nature of the freedom for which, according to both Paul and Luther, Christ has set us free.  Dietrich saw that this essential freedom is our deep and given ability to respond.   We can enact a response-ability to whatever is happening in the history of our society and of our personal life.   In Dietrich’s day, Adolf Hitler was conducting total war on the world for the sake of an exaggerated grandeur of German culture—a type of nationalism that was also arising elsewhere, but seldom with Hitler’s degree of fanatic zeal.  Dietrich realized that he personally was free from Hitler’s kind of self created certainty.  In fact Dietrich could see that he was free from any kind of ethical certainty.   In his free responsibility, Dietrich and some of his close friends employed their freedom in an attempt on Hitler’s life.  They almost succeeded.  Dietrich did succeed in making a lasting cry for our essential freedom—a freedom that can be manifest in the midst of any set of cultural certainties in any moment of time.

Morality is a social process in every society and a necessity for having a workable social functioning.  Morality itself is not a pitfall for freedom.  In freedom, however, we can obey, disobey, and also improve the morality of our society.  Moralism is my name for a pitfall of freedom.  Just as ending rationalism is not a dismissal of reason, so ending moralism is not a dismissal of morality.  Moral order is the part of way that a society restrains the physical, emotional, and intellectual violences of the human being toward other human beings.  Society’s moral restraints are not moralism. Moralism means clinging absolutely or almost absolutely to some social law, norm, rule, or custom.  Social morality has never dropped-down from some divine absolute or been sourced-up from some natural ground.  Morality is invented by a social group.  Our essential freedom includes the discovery of our response-ability to create morality.  Here, then, is my 21st century definition of the “moralism” pitfall for our essential freedom:

Moralism:  Hiding from Freedom in the ethical certainties of our culture.

Determinism

Here is my antidotal poem for the pitfall of determinism:

Within the Land of Mystery
rises a Mountain of Care –
care for self, care for others,
care for Earth, care for the cosmos,
care that we exist, care that we suffer
care that we may find rest and fulfillment,
care that we may experience our caring
and not grow numb and dead.
It takes no effort to care.
It takes effort not to care.
Care is given with the Land of Mystery.
Care is part of the Mystery of Being.
We care, we just care, we are made of care.
Care is a Mountain because care is so huge,
so challenging to embrace, to climb, to live.
Care is a demand upon us that is more humbling,
more consuming, more humiliating,
than all the authorities, laws, and obligations
of our social existence.
Care is a forced march into the dangers
and the hard work of constructing a life that
is not a passive vegetable growth
nor a wildly aggressive obsession.
Care is an inescapable given, simply there,
yet care is also an assertion of our very being.
It is compassion, devotion, love for all that is given
and for all parts of each given thing, each being.
Like Atlas, we lift the planet day-by-day,
year-by-year, love without end,
in the Land of Mystery.

In 1952, when I first met Joe Mathews, he was a confrontational seminary professor who sometimes stood on his desk and reached for a sky hook to illustrate that we do not exist in a two-story universe, but rather live down-to-Earth in the here and now.  And within this here and now destiny, he taught that human history is not set to go this way or that way.   There is no automatic progress or automatic degeneration. We face options present to our freedom.  Though there are trends for better and trends for worse, we humans face forks in the road of time where we must choose to determine the course of our own lives and how we are going to participate in bending the course of history.  Joe himself found bending the course of history within the then fabrics of doing Christian seminary education to be too confining for him.  So, he left a very successful seminary professorship to bend history within an innovative lay-theological study community for college students that was later expanded to also train the general laity and clergy.  That structure of work also became too small for his imaginative spirit.  He and others founded a religious order of families that grew to about 1100 adults and their children.  With a group of these order colleagues, he moved into a Black neighborhood where this new religious order identified with the residents and assisted about two hundred of them with their reformulation of that neglected urban community.  He next took these reformulation methods to India, and his colleagues took them to many other places.  Along the way he did some extremely deep work on Christian theologizing and on religious practices, including some intense descriptions of profound states consciousness.  He died in 1977, still bending history in directions both social and spiritual.  His life illustrates for me what it looks like not to hide from our planetary responsibility in the fear of becoming guilty.

Living our essential freedom includes risking the guilt of doing wrong things, things we regret, mistakes we don’t want to make again.  The self-condemnation we feel for our serious guilt is a grief that activist humans will experience and will need to handle.  But instead of handling guilt with an acceptance of Profound Reality’s forgiveness and a fresh start in greater realism, human beings are easily tempted to handle guilt with some form of determinism. We can falsely theorize that  we had to do whatever we did — that some natural or social force made us do it.  Some have theorized that everything is determined and that we are just an observer of the flow of time, including our own behaviors.  Here is my 21st century definition of that pitfall of falling from freedom into “determinism”:

Determinism:  Hiding from the Guilt of our planetary response-ability

Sentimentality

Here is my antidotal poem for the pitfall of sentimentality:

In the Land of Mystery
there is a Sea of Tranquility,
a place of Rest amidst the wild waters of life.
The waves may be high, our small boat tossed about,
but there we are with a courageous heart.
It is our heart that is courageous.
We are born with this heart.
We do not achieve it.
We can simply rest within our own living heart,
our own courageous heart that opens vulnerably
to every person and all aspects of that person,
to our own self and every aspect of that self,
to life as a whole with all its terrors and joys.
This is a strange Rest, for no storm can end it,
no challenge of life defeat it,
No loss, no death, no horror of being, no fear
can touch our courageous heart.
We live, if we allow ourselves to truly live
on this wild Sea of Everything in the Tranquility
of our own indestructible courageous heart.
To manifest and fully experience this Tranquility,
we only have to give up the creations of our mind
that we have substituted for this ever-present Peace.
We have only to open to the Land of Mystery
flowing with a River of Consciousness
and containing a Mountain of Care.
Here and here alone do we find the Sea of Tranquility.
Here in the Land of Mystery that our mind
cannot comprehend, create, or control,
here beyond our deepest depth or control
is a Sea of Tranquility
in the Land of Mystery

Harriet Tubman was a Black women, a slave on a southern plantation before the Civil War.  I was deeply moved by the courage and joy of her life as depicted in Harriet, a 2019 American biographical film directed by Kasi Lemmons.  Harriet, while enacting a  plan of escape from slavery with her already freed fiancé, found that the plan had been foiled.  She chose to find her own way to the north alone, facing danger almost every step of the way.  She became a member of the Underground Railroad and subsequently made some 13 missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using a network of antislavery activists and safe houses.  During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army.  In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the movement for women’s suffrage.  Her magically intuitive and courageous daring never quit.  This film drama of her life was as gripping a portrait as I have ever seen about how an ordinary human being might simply lay down her life of her own free will for the people she loved.  She became simply uncanny about risking her life under the most threatening circumstances on behalf of rescuing others from their physical slavery as well as their spiritual bondage.  She is my model, along with Jesus, of how joy can be found in overcoming the terror of our own death.

Here is my 21st century definition of of the pitfall for our freedom that I will call “sentimentality”:

Sentimentality:  Hiding from Joy in the terror of our own personal death

These Four Pitfalls Can be Healed

While the whole human race can seem to be trapped in one or more of these escapes from freedom, the gift of essential freedom that comes with a devotion to Profound Reality is stronger than these four traps.  Our natural creation is a powerful righteousness that can accurately reveal the foolishness of all departures from realism.  And the strength of our authenticity is greater than the strength of our despair over our real circumstances.

“Rationalism,” “moralism.” “determinism,” and “sentimentalism” are words that we can use to indicate and summarize the millions of ways that human escape, hide, flee, or fight being our essential freedom.  Anti-“rationalism” does not  mean a contempt for reason, but a resistance to being separated from realism by getting lost in the word-worlds of thinking.  Anti-“moralism” does not mean a contempt for the moral structuring of human society, but a resistance to confusing essential freedom with some specific moral righteousness.  Anti-“determinism” does not mean a contempt for cause and effect science, but an affirmation of the essential truth of human capacities to bend history.  Anti-“sentimentalism” does not mean a contempt for feelings, but a refusal to replace our freedom-driven care with emotional fluff and the personal addictions that have captivated our sentiments.

Holy Spirit

The states of mystery, freedom, care, and tranquility summarized in the four poems above give elaboration to the Christian symbol “Holy Spirit.”   The “holiness” in this authentic “esprit” of realistic living manifests as an awe-filled resolve of our essential freedom to affirm the rightness of this Awesome Rightness that is powering our true lives.

Freedom and the Long View

Contemporary Religion, Existential Ethics, Political, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2021

Donald Trump does not have a long view. His view is limited to his own ego and therefore extends only until his own death. It does not matter to him whether industrial society is collapsing or not, whether a climate crisis exists or not, whether the U.S. has a long-term public-health service or not. His concern extends only to the short span of time between now and his death. He is concerned about being rich, about being able to do what he thinks he wants to do, about having a crowd adore him, about having a “high” place in the world pecking order. Even if Trump is somewhat concerned for his descendants or his peer group, that is also an ego concern. He is a poster boy for what it looks like to not have a long view—a view for humanity, or for the planet, or even for the U.S. nation.

To the extent that we are bound up with our own ego, we will also be without a long view. Even if our ego concerns seem to us better than Trump’s ego concerns, we can still be missing a long view—a view for something larger than our own selves or our own tiny concerns.

So Who Does Have a Long View?

The writers of the Old Testament had a long view. They reflected back hundreds of years and they reflected forward centuries as well—seeing their peoplehood as a servant body on behalf of all the nations of the world.

Jesus had a long view. In laying down his life for the people of Israel, he was laying down his life for the restoration of this servant people and thereby for the whole of humanity.

Paul had a long view. Augustine had a long view. Martin Luther had a long view, Paul Tillich had a long view. The priest and author, Thomas Berry, had a long view. He not only had a long view for Christianity, Berry promoted a next Christianity that has a long view for the whole of humanity. He viewed humanity as an integral part of the planet. He saw humanity as Earth’s champaign of deep awareness and joyous celebration on behalf of this wondrously unique planet that can sustain life, including human life.

The Battle of Two Regimes

We who comprise the progressive portion of the United States voters and activists need a simple and easy-to-teach narrative about where we are as a society and how the various types of Republicans and Democrats relate to some “big story” of our existing conditions and our possible futures.

Before the beginnings of the industrial revolution in about 1760, there was only one regime of governance headed by a King or perhaps by a Queen, or perhaps by a Royal Council. These high class members of the traditional caste system controlled both political and economic life. The rise of the industrial revolution assisted by colonialism enabled the accumulation of great pools of privately controlled wealth. This wealth-power had significance in both the economic and political governance over the course of events. The economist and author, Robert Heilbroner, called these pools of wealth “the regime of capital,” This second regime of governance initiated a tension with the regime of state —a fight between these two regimes of powerful governance.

As the regime of capital became more independent, the regime of royalty was weakened and social space was opened for the more democratic form of state initiated in the United States and elsewhere. The democratic state retained legal and coercive force, but the regime of capital with its powers of investments and conditions of employment also possessed a strong governing reality in the lives of people and in direct influences upon the decisions of the state.

These elemental dynamics of history are important for seeing clearly the historical options we face today in the United States and elsewhere. Here are five styles of governing that are being pursued in our world today:

option 1: This style of governing is illustrated by the Vladimir Putin type of control of both the regime of the state and the regime of capital—both regimes are in the hands of very wealthy oligarchs of which Putin is one as well as head of state. This is the option that Donald Trump and his cronies favored and still favor. They lie about their poorly hidden dictatorial direction for their governing. Lying, misinformation, and deception in order to assemble support is a characteristic of this option for governing. When taking this option, democracy becomes a social veneer that has no real power over the course of events. Option one policies seek support from the super wealthy and from the long-enduring forms of the caste system—racism, patriarchy, gender, and so on.

option 2: This style of governing is illustrated by those U.S. conservatives who are quite critical of various aspects of the reigning caste systems, but who insist that the regime of capital must manage the regime of the democratic state. The policies of this political constituency are crafted to benefit big business leaders and their corporations. They claim that “business friendly” policies benefit everyone with a “trickle down” of prosperity. Many anti-Trump Republicans hold this view. A number of Democratic Party leaders and thinkers also hold this view. The majority of the Democratic Party, however, now hold the view that the “trickle-down” of wealth is microscopic compared with the “siphon-off” going to the upper classes. Option 2 style governing persons are also typically uneasy about a “too powerful” democratic government regulating the regime of capital “too severely.” In the view of U.S. option 2 policy-makers, “small” government, which they favor in the regulations department, does not exclude, “large” outlays for the defense industry, or “large” tax give-aways to the fossil fuel industries, and other governmental perks to the existing economic powers.

option 3: This style of governing is illustrated by those who view the need for a strong regime of democratic governing that sets the rules and enforces fairly and strongly the rules that structure the economic playing field for the players of the regime of capital. Option 3 policy-makers expect the capital-owning forces to control the micro-economic choices, but they maintain that the macro-economic choices are to be made by a democratic government focused on serving all the people. The still valued regime of capital takes on a secondary role with regard to the basic ecological, economic, political, and cultural directions for the society. The regime of capital is expected to be obedient to these large-direction choices made by the representatives of a democratic government.

option 4: This style of governing is more aggressive than the option 3 style with regard to the role of democratic government in regulating the regime of capital. The option 4 style of governing applies especially to those portions of the society that are fundamental for everyone. Currently, these topics include healthcare, education, energy provision, water quality, soil quality, air quality, basic transportation, internet fairness, and the building of a whole new infrastructure designed to moderate the climate. Option 4 directions on such topics currently include specific policies like: Medicare for all, the Green New Deal projections, and the long-range energy polices that will compel oil companies to submit their business plans for how they are going to phase out their product from its current massive use to a mere trickle in the next three decades. According to option 4 voices, this huge, but necessary, energy transition cannot start someday; it must start now. Under this option, energy companies (such as oil, coal, and nuclear) would start now facing severe penalties if they do not assist rather than oppose these necessary directions of energy transition.

option 5: This style of governing is illustrated by those members of almost every society who support some form of the “dictatorship of the proletariat”—the style of governing that we now find manifest in China and Cuba. This option has a slim following in the United States, but we do find a significant amount of appreciation for the accomplishments of China and Cuba in their ecological policies and in their ability to sustain a solid social order that is not ruled by the regime of capital. The obvious downside of option 5 is the absence of an ever-deepening democracy. Concern for the working population does not make a dictatorship into a democracy. Even if we agree that a strong state government may have been required in China or Cuba to put a ruthless regime of capital in its subservient place and keep them there, option 5 still amounts to a revival of a strong economic caste system—a “new class” as some critics have spelled out, a new form of dictatorship that resists serious challenges to democratize.

Naming Some U.S. Names

Richard Nixon in the U.S. story might be viewed as a bridge person between options 1 and option 2 politics. While Nixon had a strong enough hold on democracy and on international affairs to remain an illustration of option 2 polices, he leaned into “the unitary executive” strongly enough to be a preview of Trump’s more thoroughgoing option 1 authoritarianism. Also, Nixon’s “southern strategy” was a move toward Trump’s more fully developed white-nationalist appeals. And, Nixon’s “tricky Dick” politics pre-stage Trump’s more incredible lack of respect for truthfulness and fair dealing.

Ronald Reagan is a good historical example of option 2 policy-making in U.S. politics. He consistently supported the regime of capital over the regime of the democratic state—viewing regulative government as a “problem” and democracy as a process that needs to be “managed” by big business experience and loyalties.

Option 3 policy-making has been given prominence by Barack and Michelle Obama, Nancy Pelosi, and in 2021 is being carried on by Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Whatever be the leanings that any of these competent persons have toward Option 4 policy making, Option 4 policy-making is better represented by Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ortega Cortez and an expanding “squad” of young women of color. Many other persons might be named as strong voices in one or the other of these two types of politics, but these well-known persons approximately define the trends of these two styles of policy-making.

Cooperations

Option 3 and 4 political styles can currently work together in their common love of a competent, strong, and thoroughgoing democracy—of, by, and for the people.
However passionate the differences between option 3 and 4 persons may be, they are currently able to cooperate on many measures of good government. They also cooperate well in their firm opposition to an option 1 autocracy laced with racism, patriarchy, or other forms of caste system.

The cooperation between option 1 and option 2 policy holders is much more strained than the cooperation between option 3 and option 4 policy holders. Indeed, following Trump‘s take-over of the Republican Party, those persons of option 2 leanings have become a much slimmer group of people. In fact, most option 2 Republicans are now conflicted between (1) their need for support from option 1 citizens in order to “manage democracy,” and (2) their reluctance to support option 3 and 4 lovers of a more aggressive democracy in their regulation of the regime of capital. Option 2 persons find themselves choosing between: (1) remaining a Republican voter in a Party that remains a Trump-ruled authoritarian body, and (2) choosing to become more strongly democratic, yet bringing some of their conservative leanings with them into the Democratic voting constituency.

If the cooperation between option 3 and option 4 remains strong enough to actually accomplish a large number of systemic changes, then a coalition of political power may come into being that remains in power for a very long time. However frightening large systemic changes may be to millions of people, not making these changes is becoming even more frightening to increasing millions of getting-wiser people. Also, realism in social affairs, however frightening, is also a source of joy and confidence—especially among the young, the oppressed, and the steady students of history. Reality in its Wholeness of Power is on the side of those who are living realistically. Though a tough taskmaster, Reality is producing our best case options. Fighting with Reality creates the maximization of our suffering, and realistic living, in spite of our setbacks, includes the benefits of more freedom and of simple joy.

Option 5 members within our U.S. society will, at least for now, tend to go along with options 3 and option 4 policies. But even for the long haul, I believe that the “dictatorship of the proletariat” will continue to be viewed by most U.S. citizens as a ditch of doom—an avoidable destiny almost as grim as the Trumpian ditch of doom. I do not believe that U.S. citizens will go along with or need to go along with the option 5 route.

“Democracy rather than authoritarianism” has become our core political conflict, all across the planet. “Capitalism versus socialism” has become less severe. Everyone is a socialist now, in some ways. And everyone is a capitalist now, in some ways. All realistically thoughtful persons are drinking water from both of these fountains of economic and political discoveries and action policies. Option 5 members of our U.S. society will do well to join the consensus building going on between the option 3 and option 4 democracy lovers, and forget any dreams they may have for a working-class dictatorship.

Ecological Democracy

If ecological solutions are to be forged and carried out for the big ecological challenges, a fuller and fuller democracy is the key correction that must be made in each society on the planet. Climate moderation is the biggest of the big matters among these ecological challenges. Without a solution to the climate crisis, we face irresolvable difficulties afflicting progress in all our other challenges. We have already delayed solutions to the climate crisis so long that many catastrophes are now unavoidable. But if we are to bet our lives on the emergence of possibilities for the survival of our species, we must now put the climate crisis first on our list of challenges and see every other challenge in that context.

I understand writers and teachers who recommend that we turn our attention to accommodating to the inevitable collapse of our current societies before the impending climate impacts. But instead of any mere accommodation to the collapse of current societies, let us imagine investing trillions of dollars in the search for ways we cannot yet see to replace these collapsing societies with better ways of doing human socializing. Several years ago I began advocating “building Eco-Democracy societies.” In order to be successful, building Eco-Democracies must not wait until after the current societies finish collapsing. Rather, we can take charge now of our collapsing civilizations—transforming the energies of these societies into opportunities for designing and building societies that are substantially better.

The great transition from hunter/gather societies to civilized societies took thousands of years. The transition from agricultural societies to industrial societies took hundreds of years. We now face the opportunity, and the necessity of doing our great transition in a few decades. In the next three decades, we might get half way there. Two hundred years form now, we may still be finishing up some elements of this transition, unless, of course, we have missed the turn with our further delays. This is a “long emergency” as David Orr calls it in his book Dangerous Years. We are being challenged to exercise our freedom in the light of this living now—to form right now a long view about which we can continue to be more specific.

Freedom and the Interpersonal

Contemporary Religion, Existential Ethics, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2021

Martin Buber’s book I and Thou introduced an approach to truth different from the scientific approach to truth. No matter how accomplished we may be with the scientific method, living closely with another person is a whole new game of ignorance and of learning. This also applies to the contemplative approach to truth. No matter how accomplished we may be with exploring our inner space, living closely with another person is a whole new game of ignorance and of learning.

Imagine yourself an accomplished high school science student moving into the wonder of dating, of initiating for the first time a serious interpersonal relationship in addition to your family of origin. Your science excellences do not help you discern the challenges present in your consciousness meeting with the consciousness of another person and continuing in this tangle of relations between him or her and me.

Scientific research is about knowing the objective world. We can call science the I-it approach to truth in contrast to Buber’s I-Thou approach to truth. Another human being cannot be appropriately or fully related to as an “it”—a status friendship, a sexual conquest, or a cog in the machinery of some project of my devising. Another person is another consciousness, like myself. To relate to the encountered reality of another person as I relate to the encountered reality of an “it” is to suppress a full experience of that person and of myself.

The I-Thou approach to truth also differs from inquiry into my own being. My inquiry into the contents of my own consciousness may help me relate to others, and others may help me become more aware of the contents of my own consciousness. But the I-Thou relation itself is not simply personal inquiry. Another person is another consciousness, not my consciousness. However mature we may be in the practice of meditation or in some other method of contemplative inquiry, we enter a different world of truth when we are engaged in a realistic interpersonal relationship with another person, or group of persons.

So, what is it about an interpersonal relationship that brings us into such a different universe of truth than the universes of truth we explore with our scientific quests or our contemplative inquiries? A few times I have met a stranger whose eyes met my eyes in a way that I knew that this other human being saw me, perhaps as clearly as some of my long-time friends. Such meetings are not about physical admiration or intellectual stimulation, or romantic possibilities. Such moments have to do with my conscious person noticing another conscious person who is noticing me.

We humans are an extremely capable social species. Most of what we know has come to us through contact with other humans. A child raised by wolves or in some other way separated from other humans in early life can miss out on extremely crucial aspects of human development. We are seldom fully aware of how deep a role has been played in our development by being with other humans—honest talk, dancing, physical play, singing, creating music, touching, hugging, and so very much more.

The “I-Thou” approach to truth can also be distinguished from a fourth approach to truth that I will call the “We-They” approach to truth. This fourth approach to truth has to do with politics; with sustaining, repairing, and replacing economic systems; and with preserving and enriching the systems of knowledge, life styles, and the media of art, language, mathematics, and religious formation. I will discuss freedom in relation to these social commonality features of our lives in other essays. In this essay I will focus on how freedom interfaces with the interpersonal relations of the I-Thou.

Freedom and the Interpersonal

Freedom may be even more obviously present in interpersonal relations than in scientific research and contemplative inquiry. In our interpersonal relations we are constantly responding to the ongoing experiences of taking in these other persons. We are experiencing the need for raw creativity in each response. Habitual actions or rote words simply will not do for the pursuing of a realistic personal relationship.

Choice, freedom, invention, initiative, resonance, wildness, are words that describe an interpersonal relationship. If I reduce the full wonder of an interpersonal relationship into an object of empirical science, I have lost the full reality of what is taking place.

Similarly, if I reduce the full wonder of an interpersonal experience to being helped by another with my interior life, or with my helping another with their interior life, I have again lost the full reality of what is taking place. It is not that our interior lives are missing or do not add to an interpersonal experience, but an interpersonal relation is something more than an enhancement of our contemplative experiences. An interpersonal relationship is an on-going whole-body, whole-mind, whole-consciousness, whole being process that calls forth a challenge to our raw freedom that we may not notice so vividly in our scientific or contemplative quests for truth.

Response-ability for the Inter-personal

So we find ourselves engaged in a responsibility for our personal relations with other humans. We can enhance our wisdom for doing this by taking advantage of the many great books on interpersonal relations. But simply reading these resources is not good enough. We have to apply our interpersonal thoughtfulness to actual interpersonal relationships. Learning to experience our interpersonal freedom comes into play when we are actually living together with someone, working together with someone, spending time together with other human beings who are spending time with us.

There exist in our culture many therapies, workshops, and retreats that include interpersonal learning for people who want to learn these skills. It may be a responsible use of our freedom to get our body to one of these events. If you and one of your interpersonal peers are struggling with the processes of your relationship, it may be a responsible use of your freedom to get the two of you to one of these helpful events. The time and money to do this kind of interpersonal work can be well spent if the wisdom learned is actually worked into our ongoing living.

And when two or more of us are attempting to live together, we will need to set aside daily and weekly times together that are specifically directed toward our interpersonal practices. We may also find helpful a committed membership in a weekly meeting religious practice that takes interpersonal realities seriously.

A Weekly Meeting Christian Circle

Excellent theological study alone will not spawn a vital movement of Christian renewal. Nor will the addition of relevant social activism be enough. A necessary third of this particular trinity of practices is a weekly meeting circle that knows how to practice the I-Thou dynamics of interpersonal relations with a profound level of consciousness.

The sociological fabrics of such a circle consist of having no one leader, priest, guru, or any other such “holy one” in charge of the group. No one personality needs to dominate this practice. Everyone sits in a circle, and symbols of human authenticity are placed in the center of the circle. The only leader is the Christ exemplar (or whatever other model of true humanness holds for this group the essence of being human in this particular religious practice). Perhaps a coffee table has on it three candles that hold the symbolism of the Christ presence. However symbolized, our leader symbolically “sits” in the center of the circle, and every person in the group can reach into that center and embody for a moment or a period of time the overt leadership of the group.

However experienced in deep awareness any one person may be, that person’s leadership capacity is limited, and is balanced with the leadership of others. Every personality quality has limitations as well as gifts. Every self-image is an approximation of our real humanity. All states of being are passing realities. The permanent essential humanness that is potential within each human being sits in the center of the circle as our only complete leader. This complete ending of hierarchical relations, does not make everyone in a group equal in any specific way. We are just equal before God. And each person becomes more aware that each of us who is dedicated to a Christian life is continually faced with this possibility of reaching into that center of the meeting for our moments of approximate Christ leadership.

In this symbolism, I see a primary vision of the future practice of Christianity. I view all those who choose to join a weekly-meeting circle of freedom-loving Christian practices as thereby being washed with a new sort of baptism and being ordained to a new sort of priesthood. We become pastors to one another. We become a co-pastorate to the community or the bioregion where we live, and to the planet on which we dwell. Such an interpersonal intimacy of Christian “life together” is step one toward a viable and vital contemporary Christian practice of renewed religion.

The details of what any group of us do together in our Co-paster Circle can be important as an illustration, but these details should not become a prescribed pattern for all Circles. The patterns for each Circle are only correct when they are decided through a true consensus of those Circle members. And each Circle needs to design some stabilities—stabilities that nevertheless come up for review on a regular basis, perhaps quarterly.

In the circle to which I belong, we open the meeting by lighting three candles and singing a triune song to a secular tune. We end the meeting singing the same song. while extinguishing the three candles. This ritual has worked well for us. We have kept this bit of stability for many years.

The overall drama of the evening is flexible, and evaluated each quarter, but a broad pattern persists: confession, celebration, and dedication are ritual activities that are done in that order. This order of nurture is also has an “inner flow” of conscious states described by these words: humility, gratitude, and compassion.

The first hour of our two-hour meeting is devoted to various exercises that provide content to the above ritual framework. These ritual components include singing, dancing, confession, absolution, celebration, and a personally grounding conversation on a small portion of poetry or scripture.

The second hour of our two-hour meeting is devoted to the study of a small portion of well-suited written material. We intend to become good students and teachers of one another, using methods that help each other become personally thoughtful about some of the best written resources that are accessible to non-specialists. Study of written material is our default pattern. Occasionally we see a video and hold a spirit discussion of it. Or we may conduct a workshop, hold a celebration, or do an evaluation of the quarter. If a video is the assignment of the evening, the screen sits in the circle with us. A guest from anywhere on the planet might visit us on that screen. Perhaps a film drama visits us. Perhaps a white board sits in the circle with us, and on that white board is a chart of the material we are studying or perhaps the brainstorming of some workshop.

The word “study” has a wide spectrum of meanings, but in our circle we require of each of us to be a good study facilitator who makes our study a spirit-deepening event or an ethical prioritizing event for the living of our specific lives. Good group processes are as important as good written content that is carefully selected for this purpose.

The details of this CoPastor Circle practice matter, but they do not matter ultimately. What matters ultimately is the quality of the interpersonal contact sought in each of these specific activities of these two-hour weekly meetings. This quality has to do with accessing our profound reality—our essential reality that is never absent, though we can be absent from our essential reality. Our aim for having a meeting at all is to occasion openings within our lives toward a return from our ditches of estrangement to our essential reality, and to learn how to live such realism in the temporal flow our lives.

The specific events of return to realism will differ for each person and will differ for the group each week of this practice. What endures is the basic aim of continuing openings within each of us to the call to becoming a Christian priesthood—assisting one another toward a deep realism. By choosing to attend this Circle, we are each allowing the ongoing process of becoming Christ-quality priests or pastors for one another and for our local community. We trust in our forgiveness and in the reality of our fresh starts upon this ever-opening journey into profound consciousness.

Conclusion

This description of the realism and freedom of these interpersonal meetings is only a sketch of this deep topic, but the freedom spoken about in this essay is understood to be an essential part of this interpersonal style of Christianity. Freedom means starting where we are in allowing that ever-deeper movement into where we Eternally are in order to be more creatively real where we temporally are.

These values can also apply to other-than-Christian religious practices.

 

Freedom and Aloneness

Bible Interpretation, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2021

Jesus walked this lonesome valley, he had to walk it by himself.
Oh, nobody else could walk it for him, he had to walk it by himself.

We must walk this lonesome valley, we have to walk it by ourselves.
Oh, nobody else can walk it for us, we have to walk it by ourselves.

Somewhere in Luther’s table talk, he mentioned that each of us have to do our own faith-ing, just as each of us have to do our own dying. Whatever Luther said, this will be my introduction to what I will call “aloneness,” and I will extend that word to mean “the intentional living of our solitary contemplative inquiries.”

“Contemplative inquiry” is the conscious viewing of the contents of our own consciousness. No one else can do this for us. “Contemplative inquiry” is also our thoughtfulness about these inward contents. This is essentially a solitary practice even though it can go on in group settings led by experienced persons.

For example, a contemporary Vipassana Buddhist retreat focuses strongly on a personally practiced meditation. This solitary practice entails getting used to a vibrant type of aloneness. This is quite different from a self-absorbed U.S. president rising at three in the morning to rage in his current defendedness and write tweets castigating his critics.

A Vipassana meditation practice focusses on the seemingly boring practice of carefully watching our own breathing—in-breath, pause, out-breath, pause for 45 minutes or more at a time, perhaps followed by a period of solitary walking, focusing on each step. What is going on here is an inquiry into the reality of our actual lives beyond the workings of our busy minds and beyond the always present impulses to think and do our established habits of living. This practice can be understood to be religious in the sense that it seeks to allow the happening of a realistic type of enlightenment of what it actually means to be a conscious human being. The interest that sources this practice is human authenticity. In doing this practice, we are not defending our current sense of self, we are watching those defenses come up and thereby preparing ourselves to be aware of the real me as something wondrously opposed to the self I think I am, wish I was, or hope to be.

We don’t have to invent or produce the reality of our own authenticity. Authenticity is simply Reality being Reality. It takes no effort to be authentic. It takes a sort of willing surrender not to be false. Meditation is a discipline of surrender that allows our authenticity to emerge into awareness from where it has been hidden among the replacements for authenticity that we have invented, defended, clung on to, and presented to the world.

Jesus practiced another solitary practice he called “prayer.” In Mark’s portrait of Jesus we see him going apart for hours of solitary prayer. This intense need for solitude dramatizes Jesus’ humanity, as well as our own.

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The Freedom to be Approximate

Contemporary Religion, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2021,

Whatever we know about anything is approximate. What the human species knows about physics is approximate. What the human species knows about biology is approximate. The current state of knowledge in every discipline of learning is approximate. And our own personal knowledge about any of the disciplines of learning is approximate.

If English is our home language, our knowledge of that language is approximate. And if we also know Spanish, German, and a little Urdu, we still know only a sliver of the thousands and thousands of languages that have existed. And mathematics? Even if we have moved beyond arithmetic into algebra, solid geometry, the calculus, and differential equations, the world of mathematics is much bigger. The scope of mathematics compares with the scope of all languages. Mathematics, viewed as the ordering capacities of the human mind, is almost boundless. And art? Each of us knows only a sliver of the art produced so far by the human species.

In addition, recall yourself walking through your house in the dark of a night, when you cannot see your hand in front of your face. You still have a sense of space and of time. You can still feel your way. This is a form of intelligence, a form of vivid knowing that you share with the owls, the cats, the reptiles, the dinosaurs, birds, and fish. These pre-symbol-using imagination capacities have been and still are unbelievably vast. Our language-art-&-math formed sort of awareness has only begun to probe what consciousness can know in our pre-language ways. Our knowledge of Reality in its fullness is indeed approximate, open to better approximations, and never complete.

Nevertheless, the Profound Reality that we are approximating can happen to us, can encounter us in its Mysterious Wholeness as a calling to be open to ever-better approximations. This admitted uncertainty in our knowledge is both a negation and an affirmation. It is a negation, for we are all security addicts, who are especially committed to being secure in our current opinions. If, however, we trust Profound Reality enough to be curious about being more realistic in our living, we are volunteering to be insecure in all of our opinions.

In spite of this ultimate insecurity, Profound Reality is also supporting whatever degree of approximations of Reality that we currently enjoy. Herein is the positive side of approximate knowledge: it is an approximation of Profound Reality. This enigmatic awareness of having valid approximations of Reality is an affirmation of support for humanity’s disciplines of learning. Though these disciplines of learning are journeys toward truth, rather than the “end-of-the-road” of truth, they are “journeys toward truth.”

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Science and Freedom

Bible Interpretation, Progressive Christianity, Realistic Pointers 2020

The conflict between science and religion with which we are most familiar has to do with scientific results like evolution and a literal interpretation of Genesis One. The resolution to that conflict is now quite simple—a better form of biblical interpretation—namely, a recognition that biblical truth is not about the ancient science of the biblical writers. The Bible is about something far more profound. The contents of the Biblical symbols are capable of evoking deep truth about our own human existence.

For example, we can view the first chapter of Genesis as about the goodness of nature and about the goodness of the essence of our human nature, rather than about how many days it took for the cosmos to arrive at its present state. Similarly, the virgin birth of Jesus as not about his literal biological origins, but about the quality of his relation with the Final Originator of all things, a type of “birth” that is possible for you and me as well as Jesus. As John’s gospel so clearly points out, those who can receive the truth that Jesus presents are also virgin born.

In this essay I am going to deal with a more difficult issue: what do we say to people who misunderstand the nature of science as support for their conviction that the cause-and-effect thoughtfulness so prominent in our sciences supports the notion that there is no freedom for which we could be set free by any means—by Christ, by psychology, or by the meditation practices of the Buddha?

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Freedom and Death

Progressive Christianity,

“No one takes my life from me, I lay my life down of my own free will.” John 10:18

The writer of the Gospel of John placed these startling words in the mouth of Jesus. In John’s stories, the statements of Jesus are about the essence of Christian faith within any human being. In the above verse, John is witnessing to the radical freedom of the Christian life in overcoming death in a way that is more radical than simply accepting death as part of our lives. The life of Christian faith includes intending our death for the causes that we alone choose to make “death ground” for the living of our lives.

So, if I am a person of faith, no ruling power of my society takes my life from me, because I lay my life down of my own free will. No power of nature takes my life from me, because I lay my life down of my own free will. No God or Goddess takes my life from me, because I lay my life down of my own free will.

This means that no oil company can take my life from me when I insist upon phasing out fossil fuels, because I am already laying down my life for the moderation of the climate catastrophe. No pharmaceutical or health insurance company can take my life from me when I insist upon a government administrated Medicare-for-All type of justice, because I am laying my life down of my own free will for an affordable healthcare provision for all persons in my society of responsibility, and also for the human species as a whole. If I make these causes my death ground, pubic health has taken on a meaning for me that no insurance company can intimidate.

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I Did It!

Progressive Christianity,

Somewhere in the rabbinical heritage, the following story is told about Moses. After the Exodus and several weeks in the desert wilderness, Moses went to God in prayer with complaints about the hardships of this environment and especially about the stubbornness of these people with whom he had to deal. Moses was especially distressed with how hard it was for these people to give up their Egyptian enculturation and learn something new in keeping with their devotion to the God who supported their delivery from slavery. At the end of these passionate complaints, Moses asked God, “Why did you lead us out into this dreary place?” God in this story is said to have answered, “Moses, it was you who led these people out of Egypt.”

This is just a story, but all we have about Moses is just a story. The stories we have were were first written down around 1000 BCE about an event that some modern scholars calculate happened around 1290 BCE. So a lot of oral telling took place for about 300 years before the Exodus event was put down in the written records we now see in the Bible. And the story telling about Moses and the Exodus continued to be expanded upon for several more centuries. So what really happened in a scientific sense is pretty murky. Nevertheless, what happened to this people as a revelation of lasting truth about Profound Reality is more clear, however controversial that revelation may be. Following are a couple of paragraphs on my view of some of the core truth of that revelation.

The Exodus from Egypt was not a work of the universe acting through the lives of a selection of humans; it was the vision of one solitary man put into action by sharing his burning-bush vision with others of his clan and then enacting that vision with them in the tough obstacles of real world history.

At root, Moses’ vision was about the nature of history, the nature of human life, and the nature of Profound Reality. Here are elements of that revelation that are most important to me: The life of a community of people does not unfold in some prescribed way. Social arrangements do not have to stay as they are. History itself is massively open to human agency. Such truths as these were seen by the Moses followers as more than wild-harried ideas swinging through the head of this imaginative Moses. I view Moses and his listeners as believing themselves confronted with fresh understanding about the way that historical reality actually works. The religious heritage that Moses shared with his Hebrew clan of slaves surely informed his interpretation of his “burning that did not consume.” Later writers called this a message from the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. With such a vision, Moses aroused his people to their freedom to live differently.

This simple but profound revelation of raw freedom has characterized the best disciples of Moses unto this day. As the old stories tell, Moses continued with his history-making free responses by laying down ten guidelines for how this wilderness society had to be conducted if they were to continue to be as a society built upon trust in this Profound Reality that gives to ordinary humans the freedom to determine the course of time. For 40 years, so the story goes, Moses made grim, but lively and realistic choices that produced a group maturity that enabled continuation after Moses’ death. Another charismatic leader, Joshua, lead this people into a wider destiny beyond this desert cradle of their social infancy. However crass the stories of Joshua may seem to our contemporary moralities, without this transition into that wider history, we would never have heard of the Exodus revelation. I see the raw essential freedom of our human essence as one of the awarenesses revealed in that Exodus event.

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Bending History

Progressive Christianity, ,

This essay is about bending history. It is not about controlling history, for humans do not have the power to control the course of time. We can make a difference in some of the directions that social history moves and in some of the directions that planetary development takes. Our choices do matter. We are response-able. We make choices. We select options. The entire course of time is affected by those acts of our freedom.

One human being’s efforts may matter very little in the broad sweep of historical consequences. But large groups of humans, activated by significant inspiration, can matter very much. This is true both when our human “mattering” means great benefit to key human values and when our “mattering” means huge and tragic consequences. We are now experiencing an era of human history in which we experience many matters of “big time’ mattering. We see a climate crisis so immense that we can barely stand to face it. We see a drift toward authoritarian government that threatens to undo all that as been done toward a viable and vital democracy. We see much to be done in solidarity with women’s efforts to deliver themselves from second-class oppression and and to deliver all of us from patriarchy. We also see racial and cultural minorities treated with practices of suppression, contempt, and cruelty that shock our sensitivities to the very quick.

Indeed, the consequences rendered by deeds of the human species have become enormous. We live in an era of human life that some now call the “Anthropocene.” This name takes note of the fact that the once tiny human species has become a key planetary force—melting arctic ice, raising sea levels, reshaping the climate, multiplying extinctions, polluting air-water&soils, as well as uprooting the distribution fabrics of our societies. Our everyday historical experience is challenging us to do a better job with our now vast history-bending capacities.

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Freedom and Politics

Progressive Christianity,

In this third decade of the 21st Century, we find ourselves fighting for democracy and political freedom against a planet-wide authoritarian backlash. At such a time, the mystery of freedom comes up for review. Especially important for our religious thinking is this question: How does the essential freedom of the human spirit differ from political freedom?

Consider this formula: political freedom is something granted by a human government to its citizens. Essential freedom is something granted by an “Eternal Governance” to its human beings. This is a big difference, but the two are closely related in real life.

Political Freedom

Political freedom is created by human beings. Political freedoms are “rights” allocated by human governments to their citizens. Political freedom can include the rights outlined in the U.S. bill of rights. Political freedom can also include the proposals of Franklin D. Roosevelt: the freedom of speech, the freedom of religion, the freedom from want, and the freedom from fear.

The degree and scope of our political freedoms depends on what we human beings struggle to achieve and institute in the form of laws and their enforcement by governments of our creation. In other words, we do not wait for our existing governments to become more benevolent. We build better forms of governing with our advocasies, protests, voting, and steady work of all sorts. We can and do build governments that grant, maintain, protect, and further improve our political freedoms.

Today we are adding to the older lists of political freedoms: the freedom from corporate wealth ruling our lives, the freedom to vote in a convenient way and have our vote counted, the freedom to have affordable healthcare, the freedom for women to have control over their own bodies, the freedom for everyone to have equality before the law, and the freedom to enjoy a fair share of our common economic wealth. These statements are currently aspirations that are yet to be achieved as the common practices of our society. These aspirations become political freedoms only when they exist as law—offerings articulated and enforced by the power of human government.

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