Death or Life? A Meditation on Spiritual Becoming

What is more fundamental, death or life?

The warm water fades. Contractions begin…

In the context of some self work recently I was brought face to face with the fact that I had some very definite convictions on this question. And they were not at all what I tend to claim.

I knew this. I swear I did. But did I? Between, or better, through death and life we ARE.

But knowingly or not we strain towards one end or the other. I’m sorry, friend. You are, like me, but a child.

…who, for understandable reasons, does not want to be born.

At the risk of slaying the spirit with the word, allow me to unpack some of this. Fundamentally, I am talking about the development of the human spirit. In this case, my own. By “spirit” I simply mean the human capacity for self-transcendence, the ability to look back on oneself, to question one’s self and the conditions of one’s own becoming.

Our psychologist friends tell us that one of the early brain systems to develop is basically evaluative. Its job is binary and straight forward: determine if the the object of attention is “good” or “bad.” We do this throughout our life, btw. Its the first impulse that flashes through our mind when encountering anything new, and the way this deliberation resolves organizes our response from that point forward. Pay attention to your mind the next time you get an email from your boss, or a phone call from your mother at some unusual hour.

All animals have at least some analogy to this sort of mental processing. It’s obviously survival adaptive. However, humans go places with it that no other animal we know of does. A human does not stop at evaluating some external state of affairs. We have the unique capacity to generalize from concrete experience into handy mental abstractions. What was once simply an object that may be good or bad from an immediate survival standpoint becomes for the human mind a “stick,” potentially useful as a spear, a stake, or a special conduit to the life-powers of the forest itself.

We create for ourselves mental worlds.

In fact, from the standpoint of spiritual development, we become our mental worlds. Our answer to the question “who are you?” is likely to be exhaustively answered from within the context of this very human system of abstractions. My own work has focused on the religious aspect of this uniquely human practice. I have come to see that the way that we relate to our religious tradition can manifest in more or less self-transcending ways.

There are times in our lives when we evaluate ourselves and the world as good or bad almost exclusively through the lens of our religious tradition (or failing an explicit religious expression, at least the implicit moral traditions of our community). Many of us live our whole lives in this place. Yet, for whatever reason, some find themselves in a place where they no longer look through their tradition, but look at it.

This can be the beginning of a more mystical awareness. It recognizes that no human abstraction is ultimately adequate and that there are dangers in leaning too heavily upon our generalizations. One feels drawn back to the immediate and the particular with a renewed openness. The former system of abstractions and hardened symbols by comparison feels constricting and false.

We can get carried away with ourselves here. Old brain systems die hard. You see, the beauty of a mature mystical awareness is the way it interrupts our penchant for evaluating every experience as “good” or “bad” for a more compassionate “being with” experience. Yet it is quite easy for the old evaluative mind to, in the act of reflecting on its former lens, label that lens “bad.” Those who still inhabit that way of seeing are then all to easily seen as likewise “bad.” In my own case, this was extended all the way to myself. I was “bad” for having been involved in that way of seeing. Or, in seeing my own response, I am now “bad” for being unable to mystically transcend my own negativity. You might call this a reactivity spiral. I can be quite skilled at it.

The shift came in the context of cognitive behavioral therapy. I was encouraged by my therapist to try Kristin Neff’s self-compassion meditations. It was immediately clear to me that I did not like this. Why should I be compassionate to myself? Reality is not compassionate! I’m not interested in being merely instrumentally kind to myself. I want to be with what is real, but I have seen through the gods!

It has taken time for this to sink in.

It would seem that contrary to my explicit claims that my allegiance is to a love that develops and expands through undergoing a series of deaths to our old ways of seeing. I have for quite some time been emotionally nurturing something significantly darker. In much of my life I was not “being with” reality. I had picked a side. I was instead with my own deep evaluation. I had chosen death and was regularly engaging in heroic efforts to overcome what I feared could not be defeated.

It is this that I now sit with. For years I have struggled with the emotional consequences of critically reflecting on the religious tradition of my upbringing and community. In the process I have leaned quite heavily on the negativity of life to protect myself from false positives. “And soon we will die.” is a corrective that I am known to casually toss out whenever I get the sense that we are becoming a little too needful of a hopeful solution to life’s problems.

And yet, compassion is not itself an evaluation; it is a posture that quite naturally flows out of a mystical awareness. As a child in the womb might naturally assume that labor is an ultimate “bad,” I am learning more deeply that sometimes losing your world is neither good nor bad, but just part of growing up. And perhaps the best response echos that of countless mothers throughout the ages: “Come, dear one, draw close. I know it’s hard, but I’ll be right here the whole time.”

May we be with ourselves as we would wish to be with others.

Only Idolators Can Compare Gods: On Wheaton College and Dr. Hawkins

Do Muslims Worship the Same God?

If you can answer “yes” or “no” to this question, you’ve got yourself a problem. And that’s exactly where Wheaton College has found itself thanks to the words of one of its professors, Dr. Larycia Alaine Hawkins. In her attempt to love her Muslim neighbors, she affirmed (citing Pope Francis) that Christians worship the same God as Muslims. Obviously the stakes are high here, particularly for an evangelical institution that holds mission work to be central to its calling. So now a beautiful act of solidarity and compassion has been turned into a big problem (funny how often that happens).

In a certain sense, this problem can be easily resolved. In another sense, it can’t. The easy solution is a theological one (Miroslav Volf takes a fiery stab at the difficult problem here). Since it’s still rather early in the morning for me, I will content myself to address the easy one. The trouble is that this whole discussion has gotten off on the wrong foot. To be as blunt as possible (too blunt, in fact!):

Only idolators can compare gods.

The Christian tradition has always held that God is strictly incomprehensible, a consequence of which is that God is “ineffable,” that is, beyond superlative and therefore beyond our ability to speak of as we speak of created realities. This point bears directly on the problem we are examining. The moment that God can be analyzed as a concept and compared to other concepts of God, one has stepped away from the classical Christian tradition. One has, as it were, brought God out of heaven and made God a thing within creation: an idol. Depending on the heart of one’s piety, this may or may not be a problem (see this stunning story by the Muslim mystic, Rumi (thank you Adam!), for what I mean). Even so, idols are dangerous! Once we seemingly have God—the ultimate truth and power—within our conceptual grasp, those we deem as serving another god must be outside the truth of reality. If one happens to be of a compassionate disposition, one will attempt to convert them to one’s own concept of God, if not… well, we’ve seen where that has been going lately.

However, the alternative is not a necessary one. And this is true even in the face of the somewhat misinformed objection that Muslims are monotheists while Christians are trinitarian. Have we just run into some god concepts here? The non-catechized, non-theologian will be forgiven for thinking that we have. But in reality, we have just stumbled into strange linguistic world of theology.

When doing theology, that is, when attempting to think and speak about God, one is engaging in an impossible act. We use words that have their origins within creation to speak of that which is the “source” of creation (scare quotes here to warn the reader not to mistake the word “source” for our creaturely experience of things that have a source, like children and rivers. See the difficulty here?).

To make my point by way of an authority a good bit more vast than my own, consider this remarkable passage from St. Augustine (For those unacquainted, Augustine is perhaps the greatest patriarch of the Christian church in history). After going into some detail attempting to explain the nature of the Trinity, he says the following:

Have we spoken or announced anything worthy of God? Rather I feel that I have done nothing but wish to speak: if I have spoken, I have not said what I wished to say. Whence do I know this, except because God is ineffable? If what I said were ineffable, it would not be said. And for this reason God should not be said to be ineffable, for when this is said something is said. And a contradiction in terms is created, since if that is ineffable which cannot be spoken, then that is not ineffable which can be called ineffable. This contradiction is to be passed over in silence rather than resolved verbally. For God, although nothing worthy may be spoken of Him, has accepted the tribute of the human voice and wished us to take joy in praising Him with our words. (On Christian Teaching)

Likewise, Pope Francis never said that Muslims worship the “same” God (as if God can be compared!). At a celebratory gathering in Rome of fraternal delegates of churches, ecclesial communities and international ecumenical bodies, Pope Francis welcomed the attendants by saying, “I then greet and cordially thank you all, dear friends belonging to other religious traditions; first of all the Muslims, who worship the one God, living and merciful…” For Pope Francis, steeped in the Christian tradition as he his, “The one God” does not designate a god concept, in the same way that the Trinity does not cash out a god concept. These are words and formulas that have as their referent the all-embracing reality, beyond, within, and through our frail creaturely experience. We call that reality God, even while warning that in doing so we, with Augustine, release any conceptual claim and speak, instead, with joy and praise.

Finally, it is worth recognizing that these linguistic maneuvers are patterned after the the life, death, and resurrection of Christ. The divinity of Christ consisted in, not in entering the world as a god to confront all other gods, but rather, manifesting the divine in the act of giving himself away, without limit.

This is what I see Dr. Hawkins attempting to do in identifying with those who are being marginalized and threatened by the dominant culture. And that’s the sense in which this whole problem cannot be easily resolved. The deeper root is not linguistic, but ethical and tightly wrapped within the prevailing power structures. Perhaps Wheaton would retract their suspension if a more nuanced understanding of these words, indeed, these ethics(!), could be appreciated? We can and ought pray for it. May Christ be with them as he is clearly with Dr. Hawkins.