The goal of the religious quest should be reality, not God. “God” is an idea someone else has given you. Instead, seek for that which brings you to life, widens your perceptions and deepens your connections to every other being.
An ever deepening sense of compassion will give you assurance you are on the right path. But, if you begin with someone else’s picture of God, you may walk obliviously right by the beloved every day of the rest of your life.
“The tradition of “turkey pardoning” in the US is a wonderful allegory for new racism. Every year, the National Turkey Federation presents the US president with a turkey for Thanksgiving. Every year, in a show of ceremonial magnanimity, the president spares that particular bird (and eats another one). After receiving the presidential pardon, the Chosen One is sent to Frying Pan Park in Virginia to live out its natural life. The rest of the 50 million turkeys raised for Thanksgiving are slaughtered and eaten on Thanksgiving Day. ConAgra Foods, the company that has won the Presidential Turkey contract, says it trains the lucky birds to be sociable, to interact with dignitaries, school children and the press.
That’s how new racism in the corporate era works. A few carefully bred turkeys – the local elites of various countries, a community of wealthy immigrants, investment bankers, the occasional Colin Powell, or Condoleezza Rice, some singers, some writers (like myself) – are given absolution and a pass to Frying Pan Park.
The remaining millions lose their jobs, are evicted from their homes, have their water and electricity connections cut, and die of AIDS. Basically, they’re for the pot. But the fortunate fowls in Frying Pan Park are doing fine. Some of them even work for the IMF and the World Trade Organisation – so who can accuse those organisations of being anti-turkey? Some serve as board members on the Turkey Choosing Committee – so who can say that turkeys are against Thanksgiving? They participate in it! Who can say the poor are anti-corporate globalisation? There’s a stampede to get into Frying Pan Park. So what if most perish on the way?”
Arundhati Roy
The debate over the existence of God is a good example of a symbol misunderstood.
In the original story, Moses is walking through a desert and sees a burning bush. A “voice“ speaks through the bush and reveals its name as “YHWH.” These letters are the root of the Hebrew word for all the possible variants of the verb “to be.” The word is untranslatable because it lacks the specific qualities used to define something. It has no tense, no number, no gender.
In my opinion, the key point which has been forgotten about this story is that God’s “name” is not a noun but a verb. This would mean the symbol is pointing not to an idea but to an experience.
Have you ever sat beneath the stars at night and felt them addressing you, sending pulsing coded information to you? Have you ever felt that we are all one shape shifting life which reduces to one common word- DNA? Have you ever looked into a baby’s eyes and felt yourself looking through the portals of eternity?
The symbol of God’s “name” is a touchstone to staying in contact with such personal experiences of our connection to the ground of our being whatever that is. But the word for God here is a verb, not a noun. So, the symbol points not to the a experience of a concrete person, but a personal experience of our common ground. The symbol points not so much to a discrete being, but to a profound experience of being itself.
I suspect more blasphemy happens on Thanksgiving in American churches than any other time of the year.
To thank God for our blessings as though heaven has favored us over the world’s poor is blasphemy in my book. God did not give us this land, we stole it from the original inhabitants and built this nation using slave labor. The church needs to stop claiming otherwise at Thanksgiving.
Heaven does not make anyone a billionaire. Underpaying workers and hoarding resources does that. The one prayer Jesus taught the church was to give thanks for “our daily bread.” The operative word in that phrase is “our” daily bread. Food, like the rest of the world, belongs to us all. If there are poor in our world it is because of human injustice, not divine favor.
If a prophet were to speak to the church today, I suspect his or her message would be for us to stop calling our stolen booty “God’s blessings” each year at Thanksgiving time.
Grassroots politics is based on the realization that we cannot trust friends in high places to deliver justice to us on a platter, we have to count on each other even more so. While I know many good politicians, it is very difficult for the just to climb the ladder of power in an unjust system. Even the best of leaders enter a fog when they reach a certain altitude. Their information is often brought to them by tainted sources. This is why citizens must take responsibility for their own government. Democracy is more than voting, it is sharing power legitimately among equals. So we must stay informed and communicate with our elected leaders, but we must also join grassroots movements that challenge the power system from the outside. We must eternally remind our leaders and ourselves that the highest office in a democracy is the office of citizen.
“Big Dams are to a nation’s ‘development’ what nuclear bombs are to its military arsenal. They’re both weapons of mass destruction. They’re both weapons governments use to control their own people. Both twentieth-century emblems that mark a point in time when human intelligence has outstripped its own instinct for survival. They’re both malignant indications of a civilization turning upon itself. They represent the severing of the link, not just the link — the understanding– between human beings and the planet they live on. They scramble the intelligence that connects eggs to hens, milk to cows, food to forests, water to rivers, air to life, and the earth to human existence.”
-Arundhati Roy
“When I fed the poor, they called me a saint. When I asked why the poor had no food, they called me a Communist.”
-Archbishop Dom Helder Camara
I had been in the ministry for almost ten years before I realized I was playing a pathetic game. I thought of myself as an ally for the oppressed, but I only did so within the official rules of that oppression. I never crossed the line because I was not willing to have anyone get mad at me.
One day I realized that the church would let me verbally oppose any injustice so long as they knew I wasn’t ever really going to do anything about it. I had laminated my words from the real world by treating injustice as an abstract intellectual topic in which good minds may differ. In so doing, I had dehumanized and made invisible the very real people being oppressed while I played footsies with the twin devils of sexism and homophobia. As soon as I had lifted an incarnate finger to actually help, the inquisitions began. But so did my real ministry, and my real humanity. I finally realized what it means to say the gospel of love can only fully be preached from a gallows. Every religion and humanist ethic has some version of this insight.
Not that I have suffered much. Besides personal threats and worrying caused by my own cowardice, my actual sufferings have been minimal. Mine has been a small and pale version of a life lived by much braver and nobler souls. Still, I have realized we are not fully alive until we know there that are things worth dying for.
The happiest day of my life was when I crossed the line.
“The Orient that appears in Orientalism, then, is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness, and later, Western empire.… The Orient is the stage on which the whole East is confined. On this stage will appear the figures whose role it is to represent the larger whole from which they emanate. The Orient then seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe.”
-Edward Said, (He is discussing how the “orient” is a concept that saw those living in Asia primarily in terms of how they differ from those in the West. “Orientalism” then proceeded from this caricature to justify Western exploitation of Asian people.)
Love based religion is a very different animal than traditional religions. Love based religion has no place for metaphysical threats like hell. It has no need for miracles to prove its claims, but is validated in loving real people, plants and animals. A religion of love does not bow before a God of power, but gives itself to the service of all out voluntarily of gratitude. A religion of love does not seek orthodoxy so much as adaptability to real need. It submits finally to no earthly hierarchy of political or religious authority. It does not seek to convert others, but wants them to actualize who they intrinsically are.