All tables at McDonald's this morning were occupied. Rain was falling steadily outside. With no wind, the drops were just falling as though someone was pouring water from the sky above. There is no trajectory to the raindrops.
The weather has always provided infinite curiosity for men and women throughout the centuries. Anxious for their crops to grow and survive until harvest time, l tried to divine the workings of nature. The earliest records of religious artifact concern their attempt to propitiate natural laws and invite abundant herds for hunting. Vegetables and meat comprised from earliest times human food.
The Pentateuch's Genesis tells the story of Cain, a farmer, killing his brother, Abel, a shepherd after Yahweh accepted the meat offering instead of the vegetables. Thus animal sacrifices became the norm at the Temple in Jerusalem. It was only after the Babylonians destroyed the Temple and took the people of Judah to Babylon that Jews started to meet together in smaller groups and the synagogue was born. It was their tragic misfortune that remodeled their faith, now called Judaism after the Kingdom of Judah that King David ruled, and made it more civilized.
In his book, Where God Was Born, third in his bestselling series on the Hebrew Bible and biblical times, Bruce Feiler, was as usual eloquent and perceptive. Attendance at churches and synagogue may be falling, he wrote, but "Americans in particular took their freedom from institutional religion and set out on their own to reengage traditional texts."
This is the first time I've seen a description of the social phenomenon variously called "the death of God" that made sense. When I started exploring religious cultures in the mid-1980s, many
Americans I interviewed already refused to think of themselves as religious. They preferred to call their religious practice spirituality. Back then, speaking of spirituality sounded like a renaming that didn't have substance. To rename religion was to deny its power on human lives and cultures through the centuries. Religion, to me, was a word fraught with another meaning. It was the bond between men and the divine, between the human world and the intangible kingdom that was barely invoked in ancient times but in modern times was more visible as studies in psychology, comparative mythology and philosophy advanced our understanding of the religious impulse.
I can now finally declare that I don't believe in a personal god like Yahweh or Jesus or Allah. To be able to do this took decades because not to believe in a father-like divinity that acted like a man, got angry like a man, forgave and held resentments like a man, went against the strong grain of such a belief. It was probably the appearance of the One God that galvanized peoples and led to the widespread growth of the monotheistic religions. People could relate more intimately with a god like themselves and one such god could command the affection of people much more easily. Monotheism, along with the political and social developments of the times, led to the appearance and growth of modern nations and states.
After cementing my lack of belief in a personal god, I turned my attention to studying alternative religions. Back then New Age was big and I met many people who were drawn to New Age religions as well. New Age was the American follow-up to the introduction of Asian religions to American society. Yoga, channeling, holistic thought linking body and mind, holistic healing, naturalistic healing, etc became components of what really was a development in how Americans were rethinking religion. They were becoming like the Indians of old: each person was developing his or her own religious ideas and practices in dealing with life.
Religion was reborn in my life when I experienced a little satori at a nine-day vipassana retreat in Barre in 1986. That ended my dalliance with New Age. I had been studying other religious systems and already growing away from New Age when the vipassana experience occurred. I read about Sufism, Hinduism, Yoga and the writings of Christian and Muslim mystics. My experience at Barre moved me so because for the first time in my life I felt a kind of peacefulness that we prayed at the end of mass when I was growing up: "The peace of God which passeth all understanding keep your hearts and minds in the knowledge and love of God and the blessing of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost be upon you now and for ever. Amen." That was the peace I felt. It was real.
Thence I drew away from American Buddhist groups and began studying the Pali scriptures even as I continued to read about reinterpretations of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Before the Reformation, Christians depended on priests to tell them what their Holy Book said. Gutenberg's printing press allowed for the printing and dissemination of copies of holy texts. Europeans groew prosperous from their conquests in the Americas and Asia and educational attainments grew. People could read the texts in earlier and earlier translations. The Christian New Testament was being studied in the Greek "originals" (the Aramaic originals had gotten lost). I followed with fascination the debate and made my own assertions about Christianity and "God" from the secular, humanist point of view. I don't even know when I let go of the childhood belief that the Bible was "God's Word." I saw too many inconsistencies and inaccuracies to support such a view. All sacred scriptures were the product of human thought. People resonated with some of these writings because of the charisma of their writers or of the leader the writings documented. I believe those founders and initiators experienced "sacredness" in mind states that people nowadays can still experience and the route is through what we call mysticism in all its varieties as found in all religions.
Feiler's book is a fascinating story of a modern American Jew re-interpreting his Jewish heritage through a re-reading of the Bible. He remains, he writes, firmly believing in God and how the Bible can guide men and women towards a more enlightened communal life of compassion, kindness and generosity but he no longer takes what the Bible says as "the whole truth and nothing but the truth." Along with many modern Jews and Christians, he sees the Bible as written by men and the process of collecting and writing them a human enterprise. Like other human enterprises at best it shows the best knowledge that the writers had of nature and themselves.
Two things have always fascinated me: religion and "god," and this consciousness and personhood I call "I." I've long wanted to write a book for publication but could not decide which of this I would limit myself to studying to write something intelligent and systematically coherent. Maybe I should simply combine the two. After all the evolution of "I" went along with the knowledge and experience I gained about religious systems, the various ways humans have dealt with life's challenges through intangible ways, through their intellect and will (what scriptures often refer to as heart).
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