"Religion without God" ... ?

Legal scholar/philosopher
Ronald Dworkin

That's the title of a book by the late teacher of jurisprudence and legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin, as discussed in a recent New York Times column, "Deeper Than God: Ronald Dworkin’s Religious Atheism," by Stanley Fish. Dworkin believed, says Fish, in "an underlying or overarching set of values in relation to which legal particulars are intelligible and have meaning." But he did not believe in a personal God who is "the source and definition of all that is good and true."

According to his own words, Dworkin believed that "inherent, objective value permeates everything, that the universe and its creatures are awe-inspiring, that human life has purpose and the universe order." Yet the “felt conviction that the universe really does embody a sublime beauty" was not the same for Dworkin as a need to affirm that the sublimity of the world requires a divine being to create it. Dworkin was a practitioner of "religious atheism."

With respect to how we as humans might react to the world's sublime beauty, Fish writes:

One form of acknowledgment might be the practice of theism — traditional religion with its rituals, sacred texts, formal prayers, proscribed and prescribed activities; but the conviction of the universe’s beauty does not, says Dworkin, “suppose any god” as its ground. Once we see this, we are on the way to “decoupling religion from a god” and admitting into the ranks of the religious those who are possessed by that conviction but do not trace it back to any deity. They will be, Dworkin declares, “religious atheists.”

“Decoupling religion from a god” is a notion I, as a Catholic, both do and don't understand. The part of me that doesn't understand the idea feels that the idea of "all that is good and true" necessarily resides in the same human brain cell as the idea of "God." The two are inseparable. If humans build on that notional dyad an elaborate theology, as the Catholic Church does, then dissenting humans are also able today to set that theology aside. Many do. Even if they do, though, it does not make any difference to the essential notional dyad. "God," by common definition, equals the fundamental source of "all that is good and true."

The part of me that does in fact understand Dworkin's decoupling notion now says, "Whoa!" There are clearly precedents for "decoupling religion from a god." One of these is Buddhism, which at least in its classical forms makes no mention of divinity. Another is the thought of the late myth-explainer Joseph Campbell, who has it that what we call "God" is but a mask of eternity, a metaphor for the utter incomprehensibility of the ground of all being.

Furthermore, "admitting into the ranks of the religious those who are possessed by that conviction [i.e., of sublime beauty, moral order, human purpose in the universe] but do not trace it back to any deity" is basically what I find myself longing for. I have urged, in this blog, that we today need to seek a "new awakening" of spirituality to thwart the descent into selfishness, sensuality, and violence that our culture seems to be beckoning us toward. In that regard, "religious atheists" à la Ronald Dworkin ought to be considered entirely welcome allies to Catholics and all other theists.

Fire U.S. Missiles at Syria?

President Obama

President Obama wants Congress to authorize a limited bombing attack on targets in Bashar al-Assad's Syria in retaliation for Assad's recent use of poison gas to kill over 1,400 civilians, including more than 400 children, in that country's ongoing civil war. The rationale is to punish, to deter, and to send a message. Ideally, Assad would feel chastened and henceforth stop using chemical weapons. In the face of America's demonstration of its firm resolve, other countries such as Iran would, we sincerely hope, cease their rush to develop their own weapons of mass destruction.

Would it work?

Syrian President
Bashar al-Assad

The anticipated U.S. strikes, said to be time-limited to about three days, would be on certain fixed targets in Syria, presumably including air bases, roads, and bridges, but will not include places where poison gas is itself stored. Hitting the gas-storage sites might cause gas to escape into the air and do exactly the kind of harm we excoriate Assad for doing. There is as yet no indication that the attack is intended to completely wipe out Assad's ability to employ poison gas again, though. So he might well defy us, not taking his medicine as we intend.

Then what?

The answer to that question is unknown. Are the president and his national security team thinking that far ahead? We don't know.

Is it even possible to think that far ahead?

Probably not. So no one truly knows where this would lead.

Is that OK, or not? Some would say yes, it's acceptable, because not to respond forcefully to what Assad has done would be an abdication of moral responsibility.

We had better all read this September 2, 2013, op-ed by Washington Post editor emeritus Henry Allen before we say that too loudly.

Washington Post writer
Henry Allen

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Allen, an ex-Marine, says this:

"The good war, the virtuous war. We believe in it. We have to believe in it or we wouldn’t be Americans.

"As John Updike wrote: 'America is beyond power, it acts as in a dream, as a face of God. Wherever America is, there is freedom, and wherever America is not, madness rules with chains, darkness strangles millions. Beneath her patient bombers, paradise is possible.'

"The United States doesn’t fight for land, resources, hatred, revenge, tribute, religious conversion — the usual stuff. Along with the occasional barrel of oil, we fight for virtue.

"Never mind that it doesn’t work out — the Gulf of Tonkin lies, Agent Orange, waterboarding, nonexistent weapons of mass destruction, the pointless horrors of Abu Ghraib, a fighter plane wiping out an Afghan wedding party, our explanation of civilian deaths as an abstraction: 'collateral damage.'

"Just so. We talk about our warmaking as if it were a therapeutic science — surgical strikes, precision bombing, graduated responses, a homeopathic treatment that uses war to cure us of war. 'Like cures like,' as the homeopathic slogan has it; 'the war to end all wars' as Woodrow Wilson is believed to have said of World War I. We send out our patient bombers in the manner of piling on blankets to break a child’s fever. We launch our missiles and say: 'We’re doing it for your own good.'"

And this:

"What better explains all of recorded history with its atrocity, conquest, pillage and extermination? Our love of war is the problem. War is an addiction, maybe a disease, the chronic autoimmune disease of humanity. It erupts, it subsides, but it’s always there, waiting to cripple and kill us. The best we can do is hope to keep it in remission.

"And yet Americans still believe in the idea of the good and virtuous war. It scratches our Calvinist itch; it proves our election to blessedness.

"Thus God is on our side. Strangely enough, though, we keep losing. Since World War II, we have failed to win any land war that lasted more than a week: Korea (a stalemate), Vietnam, little ones like Lebanon and Somalia, bigger ones like Iraq and Afghanistan. Ah, but these were all intended to be good wars, saving people from themselves.

"The latest target of opportunity for our patient bombers is Syria. The purity of our motives is unassailable. We would fire our missiles only to punish sin, this time in the form of poison gas. No land grab, no oil, not even an attempt to install democracy.

"Oscar Wilde said: 'As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular.' He didn’t foresee a United States that would regard war as virtuous.

"What a dangerous idea it is."

I admit to being somewhat captivated by that dangerous idea myself.

And, the president assures us, it will be three days and out.

Will it really work out that way?

We're all possibly about to find out ...

"Twerk" on MTV, Miley Cyrus Did

In 2013, 'twerk' was added to the Oxford Dictionary Online. The dictionary said the word had been around for 20 years, but the evidence for it to be included in the dictionary had tipped the scale when U.S. pop star Miley Cyrus gave a controversial and headline-producing twerking dance at the MTV Video Music Awards on August 25, 2013.

— Wikipedia          

The verb "twerk," says the Oxford dictionary, means "dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance."

Much debate ensued after Miley Cyrus "twerked" onscreen at MTV. Was her performance appropriate, the multitudes asked, or not?

Miley Cyrus on MTV

More Miley

I say not. My thought is that it extended a long-term trend a bridge too far. When I was in college at Georgetown in the late 1960s, the university enforced a rule against "public display of affection": no kissing or petting outdoors or in public view. The more general rule, at G'town and in society, was that sex is to be kept private. If it's sexual, hide it from public view.

The rule was coming apart at the seams even then. It had been doing so for decades, going back to the ending of the Victorian era of the final two-thirds of the nineteenth century. "Victorian morality can describe any set of values that espouse sexual restraint, low tolerance of crime and a strict social code of conduct," says Wikipedia. Strict restraints on sexual attitudes and behavior meant men and women wore clothes that covered all and that emphasized nothing that might arouse sexual feelings. Sex obviously happened, and a lot of it was downright illicit. There's no doubt about it. But it was done in private.

My generation was not the first to rebel, but in our own nineteen-sixties sexual revolution the gloves — and much else besides — came all the way off. Ample justification was given: that getting rid of repression and of hypocrisy would make society and its citizens all that much healthier.

Now we have a 20-year-old former child star looking to extend her something-very-like-a-career by a twerking display on TV. We have rampant sexual abuse in the U.S. military. "More than 70% of male Internet users from 18 to 34," according to Wikipedia, "visit a pornographic site in a typical month." Priestly child sexual abuse has racked the Catholic Church. Scandal after scandal has cut short a host of political careers and besmirched the memory of one of the most revered of college football coaches.

All because sex is, I believe, now more public than private. Not the act itself (at least for the most part) buts its hintings, simulacra, and accouterments.

You might think — and a lot of people actually do think — there's no reason why the loosening of nineteenth-century moral strictures that was supposed to make us saner would instead be making us sicker. You might think that between Queen Victoria's corsetings and Miley's MTV cavortings there ought to be a sweet spot which society can occupy, with only a few depraved outliers to either side of the sensible median strip.

It hasn't happened. The depraved outliers are everywhere. So I'd say we need to rein ourselves in. The only way to do that, I think, is to take sex back into the privacy of the boudoir an keep it under demure covers.

How might that happen? We need to start by shrinking the boundary of personal behavior that is considered appropriate. I have in mind, to begin with, a new reticence about stuff that really isn't all that naughty, in the grand scheme of things. For example: no posterior anatomy visible for guys with low-slung belt lines; no visible bra straps for gals. Start with tiny little things like those.

Start with making this taboo ...

... and this.

Whoa! I hear voices raised in protest already. These infractions are, to the extent they are sexual displays at all, very minor ones. They are matters of personal choice and free individual expression. Every generation since Victoria passed away in 1901 has shown more and more anatomy, more and more underwear, and where do you draw the line? Isn't this all just a Trojan horse for a thoroughgoing new Victorianism?

I hope not. But it isn't at all clear to me that there really exists a viable sweet spot between Victorian deprivation and no-holds-barred depravity — it has to be one that the bulk of us can hold to — unless it is also one that abhors (for example) hordes of us "sexting" up a storm or assiduously "tweeting our junk" at every conceivable opportunity. Such activities are not necessarily immoral but, as I hope we are learning, they straddle the increasingly invisible line between public and private. Which is why we all now know so well the name of former-Rep. Anthony Weiner.

So, no more "sexting." No more "tweeting our junk." No more peeking-out bra straps. No more visible vertical smiles. And no more of the many other "innocent" behaviors that put us on a slippery slope to less-minor infractions and then to much more that is far worse.

Notice that I am saying nothing about what can or ought to happen between consenting adults in their bedroom or boudoir. I make no claim to knowing what kinds of sex are quote-unquote bad, or, for that matter, good. All I am saying is give sexual privacy a fighting chance. Keep sex, its stand-ins, its simulacra, and its accouterments well out of public view, and we will see whether I am right and the abuses diminish.

A New Awakening, Part 18

I have in this ongoing series been investigating the wisdom of myth as it informs what I'm calling a new awakening of spirituality in our society. I take as one of my main reference points the book and PBS television series The Power of Myth, in which, during the mid-1980s, Bill Moyers interviewed at great length the scholar of comparative mythology Joseph Campbell.

Now that I've finally finished reading Fr. Richard Rohr's excellent book Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, I've been racking my brain trying to see how to sell its insights, along with a vaunted "new awakening" of myth-oriented spirituality, to a skeptical younger generation. In the middle of the night recently I awoke with an answer: the hero's journey.

Joseph Campbell cut his academic teeth in the late 1940s with the book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a comprehensive study of hero myths throughout the ages. He told Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth about the universal characteristics of the  "journey," actual or metaphorical, taken by the mythic hero. The hero sets out on a perilous quest, often in order to locate someone or something of great importance, such as the Holy Grail, that is lacking/missing/lost in the day-to-day world the hero knows. On his (or possibly her) journey, he undergoes many trials, tests, and ordeals; he may have close brushes with death; and, first with the help of wise mother figures and then of demanding father figures, he ultimately succeeds in his quest. After he wins, despite great adversity, he closes the circle of his journey, returning home with a boon in tow. The boon can be tangible or intangible, yet it must always be something beneficial to the hero's community. The benefit can be internal (spiritual) or external (physical, practical).

The latter sort of boon might be a sign that the hero has "performed a courageous act in battle or saved a life." The former kind is more subtle:

" ... the spiritual deed, in which the hero learns to experience the supernormal range of human spiritual life and then comes back with a message."

The Buddha

The beneficent "message" is like the one related by the Buddha, whose "journey" was partly geographic and partly a metaphorical one. After contemplating the true nature of reality while sitting under the famous Bo tree, he went around teaching others what he had discovered. Basically, the Buddha taught the various paths to a full "awakening" of the human soul.

* * * * *

A general description of the hero that Campbell gives to Moyers is:

"The hero is the one who comes to participate in life courageously and decently, in the way of nature, not in the way of personal rancor, disappointment, or revenge."

Another is:

"Even in popular novels, the main character is a hero or heroine who has found or done something beyond the normal range of achievement and experience. A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself."

The hero can be a woman. Campbell, for example, tells Moyers:

"Giving birth is definitely a heroic deed, in that it is the giving over of oneself to the life of another."

The boon which the hero-mother carries back from her "journey" into childbirth is, of course, the child itself. The new human infant as a female hero's boon is a tangible reality as well as a spiritual one.

* * * * *

Yet the mythic hero, male or female, is not one who seeks ultimate union with "transcendence," a desideratum which Campbell identifies as the final destination of the human spirit. Rather:

"The hero’s sphere of action is not the transcendent but here, now, in the field of time, of good and evil — of the pairs of opposites."

The pairs of opposites? Why are they important in this discussion? Campbell says:

"Whenever one moves out of the transcendent, one comes into a field of opposites. One has eaten of the tree of knowledge, not only of good and evil, but of male and female, of right and wrong, of this and that, and of light and dark. Everything in the field of time is dual: past and future, dead and alive, being and nonbeing."

So the mythic hero operates in the dualistic "field of time," rather than seeking blissful unity with the eternal source of being. He is participating in life's game, says Campbell — a game which Campbell insightfully calls "a wonderful, wonderful opera — except that it hurts."

* * * * *

Joseph Campbell with
his wife, the dancer
Jean Erdman

Parallel with the distinction between, on the one hand, the field of time and its pairs of opposites, and, on the other hand, the eternal source of all that has being, there are two distinct aspects of mythic aware­ness. Campbell says:

"There’s a fine saying in India with respect to ... two orders of myths, the folk idea and the elementary idea. The folk aspect is called desi, which means 'provincial,' having to do with your society. That is for young people. It’s through that that the young person is brought into the society and is taught to go out and kill monsters. 'Okay, here’s a soldier suit, we’ve got the job for you.' But there’s also the elementary idea. The Sanskrit name for that is marga, which means 'path.' It’s the trail back to yourself. The myth comes from the imagination, and it leads back to it. The society teaches you what the myths are, and then it disengages you so that in your meditations you can follow the path right in."

The first aspect, desi — as in "Here’s a soldier suit, now go out and kill monsters ... " — seems to me to match up well with Richard Rohr's first-half-of-life description in Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. Rohr even calls the transition to true second-half-of-life spirituality "discharging our loyal soldier," by which he means getting clear of that system of "impulse control" which has gotten us safely through the first half of life. Yet I think he misses, in this part of his discussion, the myth-hero aspect of wearing "a soldier suit" and slaying "monsters" which threaten the larger society.

Campbell does not miss it. He sees the value "for young people" of such soldier-suit heroism ... even if he, too, talks to Moyers more of the ultimate "trail back to yourself," or marga, that seems to me to correspond well with Rohr's notion of second-half-of-life spirituality.

* * * * *

My thought is that our churches and religions aren't teaching and supporting the "hero's journey" which our young people need first to set forth on, if they are ever to reach their "discharging their loyal soldier" transition into second-half-of-life spirituality. I believe (or so I suddenly find) that if religions did this, you wouldn't be able to keep the youngsters out of today's places of worship that are pretty much empty, or else filled with gray heads like mine.

Instead, the young are flocking to movie palaces to see the likes of Star Wars and Lord of the Rings, and The Chronicles of Narnia, and the "Harry Potter" series. All of these — and, I assume, newer films I have yet to see — are fundamentally about (you guessed it) heroes and their mythic journeys.

Some churches today are quite focused on teaching the (absent/not listening) youth "impulse control." By that I mean the traditional list of sins and taboos, sexual and otherwise. There's a very real place for that, of course, as necessary guidelines to keeping the hero's journey on track, rather than having it run off the rails. But "control" without "mission" is sterile; would-be heroes find it irrelevant to their needs.

* * * * *

Frodo Baggins

The mythic hero of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy is a Hobbit named Frodo Baggins. The Wizard Gandalf tells the diminutive Frodo that the land of Middle Earth is doomed to serve a power-mad, bodiless master of evil, Sauron, unless a certain golden ring is carried out of the Shire where the Hobbits have blissfully lived since time immemorial. The task falls to Frodo, who begins the story totally ignorant of any imminent danger. The danger now arises because Frodo's Uncle Bilbo had brought the One Ring back with him from his own youthful hero's journey.

The now-aged Bilbo knows full well he needs to relinquish the ring to his nephew, now that Bilbo is about to leave the Shire for the second time, to go off to Rivendell, elsewhere in Middle Earth, to write his memoirs. But somehow the ring keeps finding its way back into Bilbo's vest pocket — he hesitates to put it on his finger, because doing so renders him invisible to all but the maleficent Eye of Sauron. Gandalf has to remind Bilbo repeatedly to leave the ring behind.

The ring is a metaphor. It symbolizes, among other things, the psychological inertia that can keep us from crossing each necessary threshold into a new phase of life. Bilbo is about to enter the phase associated with old age, which, like all the successive stages of life, requires of him a new mindset. He will cultivate that mindset as he writes There and Back Again, recounting the tale of his first threshold-crossing when he as a young Hobbit set out on the hero's quest that Tolkien told of in his earlier book titled The Hobbit.

The One Ring
in Lord of the Rings

Once Frodo takes the ring, his own adventure begins. Accompanied by fellow Hobbit Samwise Gamgee, whom Gandalf adjures to keep watch over Frodo, and by two other Hobbits, Merry and Pippin, Frodo treks out of the Shire and soon has a near brush with death at the hands of the soulless Ring-Wraiths, who at Sauron's bidding seek to restore the One Ring to its evil master. To ward off his momentary demise, Frodo hastily puts the One Ring on his finger and disappears.This act, however, is the one thing Gandalf has told him he must never do, since it alone renders him visible to the archenemy.

This or any other use of the power of the ring, however well motivated, constitutes the equivalent of a sin; on this particular hero's journey, it is Frodo's taboo. Tolkien was a devout Roman Catholic, and although there is no reference to religion in Lord of the Rings, it is not hard to discern religious motifs just under the surface.

One such motif has to do with the self-sacrifice entered into willingly by Frodo, once it has become clear to him that he alone can carry the ring to the destroying fires of the Cracks of Doom, in Sauron's home realm of Mordor. Frodo ultimately succeeds in his arduous quest, but at the cost of losing his psychological ability to return to his home in the Shire and take up ordinary life there ever again. Instead, he goes off with the immortal Elven-folk as they retire from Middle Earth to the Undying Lands of the Valar.

The parallel in Christian belief is Christ's ascension into heaven. When Joseph Campbell tells Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth about the canonical adventure of the mythic hero, as found in all the world's mythologies, he includes Christ's birth, sojourn in the desert for 40 days, being thrice tempted by the devil, return to society with a message, death on a cross, resurrection, descent into hell to retrieve lost souls, and eventual ascension into heaven as an example of a mythic hero's journey.

Frodo can destroy the One Ring and save his Shire and all the other lands in Middle Earth only with the help of an extended band of heroes that include the four Hobbits; the Wizard Gandalf; Aragorn, the self-exiled King of Gondor; his steward Boromir and Boromir's brother Faramir; the Elf Legolas; and the Dwarf Gimli. This is the Fellowship of the Ring. Each member brings both weaknesses and strengths to what amounts to a mutually enabling "ring" of heroes who work together to destroy the physical One Ring, it's immaterial master Sauron, and Sauron's henchman, the turncoat Wizard Saruman.

The Eye of Sauron

So we have a symbolic contrast. The One Ring works to impede what might be called the soul's natural itinerary across life's thresholds toward ever greater consciousness, as Frodo finds when he learns one hard-to-accept truth after another over the course of his hero's adventure. His Fellowship of the Ring, by supporting him in his quest, nevertheless works to "unbind" all Middle Earth from the "One Ring to rule them all/And in the darkness bind them." Two "rings," as it were, exist: the first is a demonic parody of the life-affirming second.

The lesson here is that the greater conscious awareness each new life-stage brings — Campbell refers to it as an increased "experience" of being alive, and in the Bible we find the notion of attaining a greater "abundance" of life — is always paid for by some heroic sacrifice. Symbolically, when Aragorn's resumed reign at the end of the Lord of the Rings tale brings renewed joy to him and all his kingdom of Gondor, and when Sam Gamgee returns to the Shire to marry the true love who awaits him, it is due to Frodo's heroic self-sacrifice on behalf of all Middle Earth. The seeming distinction here between the hero and the beneficiary is, however, an arbitrary one. In actuality, just as we are all said to possess a "Christ within," we can likewise be said to possess a "Frodo within." Something old within us has to "die and go to heaven" each time something new is born.

A New Awakening, Part 17

I have in this ongoing series been investigating the wisdom of myth as it informs what I'm calling a hoped-for "new awakening" of spirituality in our society. I take as one of my main reference points the book and PBS television series The Power of Myth, in which, during the mid-1980s, Bill Moyers interviewed at great length the scholar of comparative mythology Joseph Campbell.

Fr. Richard Rohr's book Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life tells of a spiritual maturity that we gain only in, loosely speaking, the "second half" of our life. It is a fundamental change that sets how we act and think and what we are like apart from how we once acted and thought, and even who we once were. Yet first-half-of-life religion and second-half-of-life spirituality, however different they may seem on their face, are both absolutely valid and both equally needed.

That it is possible for us to shift gears spiritually, and that until we do so we never finally learn to do our own "sacred dance," is something of a riddle. In our early years — including much of our young-to-middle adulthood — we are, Rohr somewhat wryly says, understandably fixed on "externals, formulas, superficial emotions, flags and badges, correct rituals, Bible quotes, and special clothing, all of which largely substitute for actual spirituality." Only in our later years, if we have done our first-half task aright, does "this burning, this inner experience of God" become possible for us.

Richard Rohr

"Early-stage religion is largely preparing you," Rohr writes, "for the immense gift of this burning, this inner experience of God, as though creating a proper stable into which the Christ can be born." Put another way, "The first task is to build a strong 'container' or identity; the second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold."

Yet, oddly enough, says Rohr, "Most of us are never told that we can set out from the known and the familiar to take a further journey. Our institutions and our expectations, including our churches, are almost entirely configured to encourage, support, reward, and validate the tasks of the first half of life."

That phrase, "further journey" crops up again and again in Rohr's text. It might well have been the author's alternate choice for the book's title. And here's a key thing: Before we can embark on our "further journey," we have to experience "some kind of falling," says Rohr. There has to be some sort of "necessary suffering." Accordingly: "In legends and literature, sacrifice of something to achieve something else is almost the only pattern. ... In Scripture, we see that the wrestling and wounding of Jacob are necessary for Jacob to become Israel ... and the death and resurrection of Jesus are necessary to create Christianity."

In his sadly now-out-of-print book Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word, Jesuit father Thomas M. King writes of a "second baptism," not by water but by "fire and spirit." It typically follows, he says, a parlous "night of the soul" in which old verities collapse and crumble around us. This "dark night" comes only after the bright day of our original devotion to God on High ... or to whatever other "enchantment" we have aligned ourselves with or been captured by. Our baptism by fire and spirit accordingly comes only after we have first undergone an intermediate time of questioning and disenchantment.

This is a paradox. First must come an "enchantment" — our original fealty to a religion, cult, or philosophy — after which our continued growth toward full spiritual maturity demands that we undergo a "disenchantment": we must leave behind all that originally brought us certainty, comfort, and security. Here we undergo the proverbial hero's journey. We need to journey far out of our original comfort zone, and then find that the problem we are actually called to solve in life isn't the one we initially confronted. Or, rather, we may find that it is the same problem, but that it is now somehow transformed.

This hero's journey, with a problem that we are called on to solve — and actually do solve — has a twofold outcome. The internal, spiritual result is that we finally learn to do our own "sacred dance." The external outcome is that we return from the journey with a boon to offer our community, our society, our land. Our compatriots — in Jesus's term, our "neighbors" — can now live life more abundantly in an everyday sense because we are now capable of living life more abundantly in an inner, spiritual sense.

Lord of the Rings author
J.R.R. Tolkien

I consider this the import of what happens to Aragorn in J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy tale The Lord of the Rings. Aragorn is introduced as "Strider," a quasi-lowlife gifted in hunting, tracking, and living rough. It gradually becomes apparent that his present identity represents his fallen, "dark night" —or "dark knight"? — state, as he was born to be a king. He has for various reasons been dodging his destiny, but the quest of the Fellowship of the Ring to defeat the evil Sauron, along with his power-mad henchman Saruman, entangles Aragorn and elicits from him unstinting leadership and heroism. At the end of the narrative, he resumes his true identity and once more sits upon his rightful throne to rule his subjects in justice, abundance, and peace.

Aragorn's original "life problem" — whether and how to rule — can't be solved until he takes his hero's journey. When he comes home in triumph, the reality of his boon betokens that his original problem now has a solution, where it didn't before. Now he can reign over a peaceable kingdom that is no longer under dire threat from the forces of evil, personified by Sauron and Saruman.

All this sounds abstruse, stated baldly and without the candy-coating of mythical narrative. The mythical "hero's journey" — which Joseph Campbell ably documented in his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces — is, after all, but a metaphor. It symbolizes in narrative form the transition from first-half to second-half spirituality, from baptism by water to baptism by fire and spirit, inevitably by way of a dark night of the soul.

* * * * *

Clearly, Rohr considers his book to be mainly about second-half-of-life spirituality and the transition to it from the first half's distinctive preoccupations. Yet he does not short-shrift the first half of life. While we are young, he says, we must learn to "value law, tradition, custom, authority, boundaries, and morality of some clear sort. These containers give us the necessary security, continuity, predictability, impulse control, and ego structure that we need, before the chaos of real life shows up."

Put simply, our inner needs in the first half of life revolve around lawfulness. Rohr states, "Here is my conviction: without law in some form, and also without butting up against that law, we cannot move forward easily and naturally ... we have to have something hard and half good to rebel against."

This notion is indeed a subtle one. There has to be an authority figure who sets limits and boundaries for us, a set of rules, and a moral tradition that we take up in a respectful way. But we also must come to rebel against our society's "hard and half good" rules at some point.

Why the need for lawfulness and the need for rebellion, in proper sequence? Rohr says: "You need [to build] a very strong container to hold the contents and contradictions that arrive later in life. You ironically need a very strong ego structure to let go of your ego. You need to struggle with the rules more than a bit before you throw them out. You only internalize values by butting up against external values for a while. All of this builds the strong self that can positively obey Jesus — and 'die to itself.' "

What a conundrum! If what we ultimately seek, spiritually speaking, is to let go of our ego, how odd it is that we must start by creating a very strong ego in the first place. That clearly means we need to build our egos on something other than quicksand.

Writers on Christian spirituality
Richard Rohr and Thomas King
suggest they are all true,
in proper sequence ...

Yet we also need to, by acts of defiance and rebellion, chip away at the very foundation of our ego structure. That is what happens in our youth after we "butt up against" the norms of tradition that have been laid down for us by earlier generations. If we try to short-circuit the process by skipping over the crucial first stage, we will fail to gain the boon of the second stage.

Rohr states it this way: "In fact, far too many (especially women and disadvantaged people) have lived very warped and defeated lives because they tried to give up a self that was not there yet."

It seems that the full human "spirituality sequence" — the early preparation for our "hero's journey," the journey itself, and our ultimate return in triumph — is thus composed of a "baptism by water," early obedience to tradition, later rebellion, an inevitable "night of the soul," and then "baptism by fire and spirit" — at which point we have finally learned to do our own "sacred dance"!

A New Awakening, Part 16

I have in this ongoing series been investigating the wisdom of myth as it informs what I call a potential "new awakening" of spirituality in our society. I take as one of my main reference points the book and PBS television series The Power of Myth, in which, during the mid-1980s, Bill Moyers interviewed at great length the scholar of comparative mythology Joseph Campbell.

Diane Rehm of NPR

President Obama, before leaving on his recent tour of Africa, gave an address laying out new administrative policies to address climate change. The World Bank similarly called for concrete steps to combat global warming. I heard one reporter, Ruth Marcus, speaking on the Diane Rehm show on National Public Radio, call Obama's plans "the sleeper story of the week" — in view of Supreme Court decisions affirming gay marital rights but casting a shadow over minority voting rights, and of the Senate's passage of a comprehensive immigration bill.

Granted that gay rights, the voting rights of ethnic minorities, and immigration are issues of the first rank, why does the environment rate below them in prominence? Why does having the president finally sign on to controversial, long-awaited climate initiatives deserve a "sleeper" designation? Why is the environment always number eleven on the top ten list of urgent areas of political concern?

Is this "the environment"?
Where are we humans?

There are all sorts of contributory reasons, but I think the root cause is revealed by a careful scrutiny of the word "environment." The word suggests that the world is neatly divided into two parts: us, and everything around us. Everything other than us is "the environment," meaning something that is akin to a house that we live in, but are not of. We can modify our house at will to suit our likes and dislikes, or we can let the whole thing fall down around us if we want. After all, a house is just a thing.

Our instrumentalist view of the world is, however, just an illusion fostered by our religious orientation, Joseph Campbell tells Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth. They are discussing the ubiquity of snakes and serpents in various cultures' creation myths. In other cultures, Campbell says, the serpent represents “immortal energy and consciousness engaged in the field of time, constantly throwing off death and being born again.” The serpent in those cultures does not betoken evil.

But that changes in the Genesis account of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden:

Genesis 3:1: "Now the serpent was more subtil
than any beast of the field which
the LORD God had made."

“MOYERS: In the Christian story the serpent is the seducer.

“CAMPBELL: That amounts to a refusal to affirm life. In the biblical tradition we have inherited, life is corrupt, and every natural impulse is sinful unless it has been circumcised or baptized. The serpent was the one who brought sin into the world. And the woman was the one who handed the apple to man. This identification of the woman with sin, of the serpent with sin, and thus of life with sin, is the twist that has been given to the whole story in the biblical myth and doctrine of the Fall. ... The idea in the biblical tradition of the Fall is that nature as we know it is corrupt, sex in itself is corrupt, and the female as the epitome of sex is a corrupter.”

Our culture has, of late, done a great deal to X-out the traditional ideas that sex is corrupt and that women, temptresses all, are corrupters of men. But the Genesis idea that nature itself has been corrupted by Original Sin continues to encourage us to treat the natural world as a somehow tainted thing that we can legitimately scorn and at the same time exploit.

But this view of nature inherently distorts our understanding of who we are and what our life is all about, in Campbell's view. We as a species spring, via evolution, from what we now characterize as "the environment." Campbell says that the Garden of Eden, in a myth-aware view, symbolizes a state of being that is prior to the splitting of a primordial, eternal, timeless unity into a series of pairs of opposites: man and woman, life and death, good and evil, and so on. Thus do we live in a world where everything has its opposite. In our world of time, and of death following life, says Campbell, “the essence of life is this eating of itself! Life lives on lives ... .”

Chief Seattle
of the Duwamish Indians

The spirituality of cultures outside the orbit of the Book of Genesis, Campbell tells Moyers, encourages “the reconciliation of mind to [these] conditions of life.” Genesis, though, points us as Peoples of the Book — as Jews, Christians, and Muslims — toward a life outside this temporal world. It is a longed-for life, but it is one in which we can no longer say, along with Chief Seattle:

“The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man, all belong to the same family.”

If this world is not our true home, all of what Chief Seattle wrote is nonsense. But if our true home is right here in this Earthly Kingdom, we had better find ways of inflecting our traditional religions toward the urgency of saving and preserving our "environment." And that isn't going to happen, I don't believe, unless and until there is a new awakening of myth-aware spirituality in the land.

A New Awakening, Part 15

I have in this ongoing series been investigating the wisdom of myth as it informs what I call a potential "new awakening" of spirituality in our society. I take as one of my main reference points the book and PBS television series The Power of Myth, in which, during the mid-1980s, Bill Moyers interviewed at great length the scholar of comparative mythology Joseph Campbell.

What will it take to have a new awakening of spirituality — a devotion to a newly hatched myth of the society of the entire planet, precisely as the late Joseph Campbell envisioned?

Chief Seattle
of the Duwamish

To me, the answer is clear — or, rather, I see it intellectually, even if I don't yet live it spiritually. The answer is set forth eloquently in the famous letter the Indian chief Seattle wrote to the U.S. Government as a reply to its offer to purchase the land in the Pacific Northwest long lived on by the chief and his tribe of Native Americans, the Duwamish. Campbell reads that letter to Bill Moyers in The Power of Myth, having first stated, “Chief Seattle was one of the last spokesmen of the Paleolithic moral order.”

I take that to mean that we moderns of European descent have to cast our minds all the way back to the Stone Age — Old, not New — to locate our Old World ancestors who thought like Chief Seattle.

The Central Pacific's engine Jupiter
and the Union Pacific's engine No. 119
meet on May 10, 1869,  at Promontory Summit, Utah.

Seattle wrote his letter to the white man's government in about 1852, seventeen years before the first transcontinental railroad was completed and the hegemony of white men in North America was there and then cemented into place. But Chief Seattle, even if we weren't listening, had informed us:

We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the juices in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man, all belong to the same family.

Later in the letter, in these words, he elaborated:

Will you teach your children what we have taught our children? That the earth is our mother? What befalls the earth befalls all the sons of the earth.

This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

One thing we know: our god is also your god. The earth is precious to him and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its creator.

And finally:

As we are part of the land, you too are part of the land. This earth is precious to us. It is also precious to you. One thing we know: there is only one God. No man, be he Red Man or White Man, can be apart. We are brothers after all.

Thomas Harrison Matteson,
The Last of the Race, 1847

His key points are accordingly: that all of us are brothers (and sisters), the whole world round; that no people's God is more true than any other people's God; that there is a single web of life on this Earth that unites all people and natural things and makes them all sacred; and that if we despoil the Earth, we defile ourselves.

Well, we have despoiled the Earth. Look at any belching smokestack and say otherwise. Concomitantly, we have spiritually defiled ourselves: to wit, only a minority of us seem to care all that much about the despoliation of the planet.

I'm not even sure how much I myself really care.

How  too much CO₂
enters the atmosphere

After all, I look at that belching smokestack and imagine the coal that is being burned so that I personally can have the electricity I need to charge my iPad and run the computer I'm using to write this with. It bothers me that the CO₂ in the coal-fired smoke warms the planet and endangers Chief Seattle's (and our) delicate "web of life," a web in which my own life is but one single strand.

It bothers me, yes ... but it doesn't bother me enough.

I know intellectually that every part of nature connects to every other sacred part, but the reason that I don't know it spiritually is that I don't have — we don't yet have — a myth of the whole planet that informs us of that fact, deep in the marrow of our bones.