The Case for a New Mythology

Column by Joran Slane Oppelt on 22 March 2018 7 Comments

It's clear that the mind of a child can comprehend the interconnected nature of man’s place in the world in its most simplistic form. When do we lose that awareness? What are we taught or told along the way to make us numb to or forgetful of the image of ourselves as not only part of our environment, but as protectors of it? What role models do we have that ensure we become the kind of person who will “watch out” for others bent on destroying or exploiting the Earth?

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Question

I wonder if fiddling around on the periphery on the issues
of gay and lesbian rights can ever yield what the Church
lacks: a compelling vision which, if received and fulfilled,
would improve humanity as a whole. Christianity has no
unique truth and its claims, like those of all various
religions, is that it must rest upon a "Thus saith the Lord."



My own view, an ever-changing one I admit, is that the
Church has no transcendent truth to offer and knows it full
well. If nothing you offer has self-evident merit and you
can't admit the truth and survive as an organization, then
you resort to either intimidating everyone within into an
orthodoxy no one sees the sense or benefit in obeying any
longer or you wander aimlessly about preaching inoffensive
feel-good messages that everyone agrees with anyway without
getting out of bed early on a Sunday AM. Both directions
lead to irrelevance and that is the crux of the matter. The
Church is irrelevant because truth is irrelevant to the
Church and it has nothing to offer that I can't get elsewhere
without having to abandon my common sense or individual
autonomy. It either demands orthodoxy in matters even school
children should know are primitivistic and silly or it
demands orthodoxy toward a nameless Care Bear worldview that
scarcely needs a Church to propose it. Primitive tribal
codes or anomie. Not much to choose between and not much to
justify buildings, clergy, tax exemptions, satellite
channels, etc. Jesus was either a deity or a lay preacher.
 



Either there is a Christian God whose moral judgment is
somehow clearer than our own and should be accepted, assuming
it will provide a better result than a life of our own
devising, or the religion is simply one of many religious
delusions and a childish self-indulgence that intelligent
modern humanity should leave behind. I don't see a middle
ground that withstands rational examination. Even ER
physicians know there is a time to stop trying to resuscitate
a corpse.

Answer

Dear Ron,

First I want to commend you for your articulate statement on the issues challenging religion today.  You express yourself very vividly and cogently and seem to me to be getting to the heart of the matter when it comes to religious belief in post-modern times.

I was reminded in reading your inquiry both of Rabbi Abraham Heschel who dared write about the “insipidness” of modern day religion (and refused to blame its failings on so-called “secular” culture or science but instead insisted on holding religion responsible); and of the late Catholic monk Thomas Merton who, like you, talked of the church as a “corpse” calling it “half dead” and calling Christianity a “formal cult of the dead Christ.”[1] And that was fifty years ago!

In my view the formal edifice we have come to call “Christianity” in the West is melting before our eyes.  One can talk of the failures of the churches to stand up to Hitler and the holocaust, the excessive rationality of modern-day theology, the patriarchal mindset of organized religion, the lack of educational imagination in seminaries and much more in looking for criticism of organized religion.  But I would just like to come back to one word: Experience.  Religion must first of all be experiential if it is anything at all.  And it needs to return to experience when it wanders too far from its source and origin.

The structures, dogmas, buildings and other edifices often erected in the name of one’s gods are not the essence of authentic religion: Experience is.  And here is where we come to grips with the distinction between religion and spirituality.  Spirituality is about the experiential side of religion.  “Taste and see that God is good” sings the psalmist.  That life is good.  That life therefore is a gift, a blessing.  Religion’s primary task is to lead people to say Thank You for the gift of life.  It is to invite one into the “cave of the heart” and to come face to face with a yearning to live and to be grateful for the gift of life, the gift of the universe and its 13.8 billion years of existence that have brought forth each of us and our species as a whole.  Such a Thank You is mysticism, an overflow of the heart for our existence.  This is why a great mystic like Meister Eckhart can say, “if the only prayer you say in your entire life is ‘Thank You,’ that would suffice.”

The late and very authentic monk Bede Griffiths, who lived in an ashram in southern India for over fifty years, reminds us that “all religion derives from a mystical experience, transcending thought, and seeks to express this experience, to give it form in language, ritual, and social organization.”  But true religion “springs from the depths where humans encounter the ultimate mystery of existence and interpret it in poetic form.”[2]

You speak of hanging around the periphery and I couldn’t agree more.  Spirituality represents the substance, the meat, the experience, the practice of the essential teachings and message of Jesus.  Unfortunately a lot of modern religion and its theologies put all their energy into a rational deconstructing of western religion but remain completely out of touch with the mystical and poetic dimensions of faith that can actually reconstruct a living practice.  There is a hint of this dualism in your letter.  One can be both scientific and poetically aware just as one can be in touch with his/her heart wisdom and an activist who stands up to injustice in its many forms.  In fact, we must be both/and and never settle for either/or.  “The prophet is the mystic in action” commented William Hocking early in the twentieth century.  Healthy religion calls people to be both lovers (mystics) and prophets (warriors defending what one cherishes).  And love very much embraces our struggles for justice.  Carl Jung commented that “only the mystics bring what is creative to religion itself.”  So when religion is on a downslide, spirituality (based on experience) is the medicine.

I think this is where religion gets redeemed.  Not only Jesus but Buddha and the other prophets of Israel were busy trying to renew their religions out of their in-depth experience or mysticism, a cosmic love that leads to social justice.  We can and need to do the same in our day.  Einstein proposed that the next religious stage for humanity will be a “cosmic religion” that transcends nationalism and tribalism.  One way to live a life of spirituality in preference to religious structures alone is to join the Order of the Sacred Earth which is catching on with many.  www.orderofthesacredearth.org.  More about this another time.

Good Travels!

~ Matthew Fox

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[1] See Matthew Fox, A Way to God: Thomas Merton’s Creation Spiritual Journey, p. 205.

[2] Matthew Fox, Christian Mystics, p. 260.

 

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