Sunday, March 24, 2019
To grow toward love, union, salvation, or enlightenment (I use the words almost interchangeably), we must be moved from Order to Disorder and finally to Reorder.
ORDER: At this stage—our “first naïveté,” if we are granted it (and not all are)—we feel innocent and safe. Everything is basically good and has meaning. We have a seemingly God-given, unshakable, and satisfying explanation of how things are and should be. Those who try to stay here tend to refuse and avoid confusion, conflict, inconsistencies, suffering, or darkness. They do not like disorder or change. Even many Christians do not like anything that looks like “carrying the cross.” (This is the huge price we have paid for just thanking Jesus for what he did on the cross, instead of actually imitating him.) The ego compels each one of us to hunker down and pretend that my status quo is entirely good, should be good for everybody, and is always “true” and even the only truth. Permanent residence in this stage tends to create naïve people and control freaks. “Conservatives” tend to get trapped here.
DISORDER: Eventually our ideally ordered universe—our “private salvation project,” as Thomas Merton (1915–1968) called it—will disappoint us, if we are honest. As Canadian songwriter Leonard Cohen (1934–2016) put it, “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” [1] Your loved one dies, you lose a job, your children leave the church, or you finally realize that many people are excluded from “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” This is the disorder stage, like the “fall” Adam and Eve experienced in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3). It is necessary in some form if real growth is to occur; but some of us find this stage so uncomfortable we try to flee back to our contrived order. Others today seem to have given up and decided that “there is no universal order,” or at least no order we will submit to. Permanent residence in this stage tends to make people rather negative, cynical, angry, opinionated and dogmatic about one form of political correctness or another. “Liberals” tend to get trapped here.
REORDER: Every religion, each in its own way, is trying to move us to enlightenment, nirvana, heaven, salvation, or resurrection. Mature spirituality points to life on the other side of death, the victory on the other side of failure, the joy on the other side of the pains of childbirth. It insists on going through—not under, over, or around. There is no nonstop flight to reorder. To arrive there, we must endure, learn from, and include the disorder stage, including the first naïve order—but also transcending it! That is the hard won secret. Hold on to what was good about the first order but also offer needed correctives. People who have reached this stage, like the Jewish prophets, might be called “radical traditionalists.” They love their truth and their group enough to critique it. And they critique it enough to maintain their own integrity and intelligence. These wise ones have stopped over-reacting and over-defending. This is the real goal.
My Own Journey
Monday, March 25, 2019
One always learns one’s mystery at the price of one’s innocence. —Robertson Davies [1]
We all came into this world gifted with innocence, but gradually, as we became more intelligent, we lost our innocence. We were born with silence, and as we grew up, we lost the silence and were filled with words. We lived in our hearts, and as time passed, we moved into our heads. Now the reversal of this journey is enlightenment. It is the journey from head back to the heart, from words, back to silence; getting back to our innocence in spite of our intelligence. Although very simple, this is a great achievement. Knowledge should lead you to that beautiful point of “I don’t know.” . . . The whole evolution of man [sic] is from being somebody to being nobody and from being nobody to being everybody. —Sri Sri Ravi Shankar [2]
The journey from order to disorder to reorder must happen for all of us; it is not something just to be admired in Abraham, Moses, Job, or Jesus. Our role is to listen and allow, and at least slightly cooperate with this almost natural progression.
My life journey began as a very conservative pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic, pious and law-abiding, living in quiet Kansas, buffered and bounded by my parents’ stable marriage and many lovely liturgical traditions that sanctified my time and space. I was a very happy child and young man. That was my first wonderful simplicity.
I was gradually educated in a much larger world of the 1960s and 1970s with degrees in philosophy and theology and a broad liberal arts education given me by the Franciscans. I left the garden of innocence, just as Adam and Eve had to do. My new scriptural awareness made it obvious that Adam and Eve were probably not historical figures but important archetypal symbols. I was heady with knowledge and “enlightenment,” no longer in “Kansas.” Though leaving the garden was sad and disconcerting for a while, there was no going back.
As time passed, I became simultaneously very traditional and very progressive. I don’t fit in with the liberals or the conservatives. I found a much larger and even happier garden (note the new garden described in Revelation 22). I thoroughly believe in Adam and Eve now, but on about ten different levels, with literalism being the lowest and least fruitful.
This “pilgrim’s progress” was, for me, sequential, natural, and organic as the circles widened. I was steadily moved toward larger viewpoints and greater inclusivity in my ideas, a deeper understanding of people, and a more honest sense of justice. If God could include and allow, then why couldn’t I? If God asked me to love unconditionally and universally, then it was clear that God operated in the same way. This process of transformation was slow, and none of it happened without much prayer, self-doubt, study, and conversation.
It seems we all begin in naïveté and eventually return to a “second naïveté” or simplicity, whether willingly or on our deathbed. This blessed simplicity is calm, knowing, patient, inclusive, and self-forgetful. It helps us move beyond anger, alienation, and ignorance. I believe this is the very goal of mature adulthood and mature religion.
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