Spiritual Literacy Blog

Frederic and Mary Ann Brussat read the "book of the world" for spiritual meanings.

Donna Schaper, a UCC minister and one of our Living Spiritual Teachers, uses the much publicized encounter between Harvard African-American professor Henry Louis Gates and Cambridge Police Officer Crowley as a launching pad for a thought-provoking meditation on racism, the blame game, immigration, and hate speech. She goes on to make a plea for a new story of toleration, empathy, and reconciliation. President Obama has called the Gates incident "a teaching moment," and we agree. Here's a quotation from Kahil Gibran that sums it all up nicely: "I have learned toleration from the intolerant and kindness from the unkind; yet strange, I am ungrateful to those teachers."

Dean Sluyter is a very smart and playful Buddhist writer (The Zen Commandments) who uses the rash of celebrity deaths (Michael Jackson, Walter Cronkite, Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett) as an occasion to ponder the mysteries of death, the afterlife, and their legacies. He saves his best commentary for reflections on David Carradine whose depiction of an exiled, half-Chinese Shaolin priest wandering through the Old West was "a bridge between East and West, the exotic and the familiar." His TV series, Kung Fu, touched many lives in positive ways and that is as good a legacy as one can leave behind. Sluyter ends his meditation with "Enjoy life, enjoy death, let be."

In Resurgence magazine, Leila Dregger reviews Grace: Pilgrimage for a Future Without War by Sabine Lichtenfels, a theologian who has been developing models for peace and education for more than 25 years. She is co-founder of the peace research center Tamera and the Grace foundation. Responding to the talk of war with Iran in 2005, she began a series of walks through Germany, Switzerland, Italy, and Greece talking about peace and the fear that lies behind wars and violence. Most interesting is Lichtenfels' leadership of a group of 50 people on a peace pilgrimage through the West Bank. In her book she writes: "I believe more deeply than ever before that just thirty people can change the world: thirty people who are fully committed to renew their internal course can prevent war."

Joel Osteen, one of the foremost preachers of the Prosperity Gospel, still believes in his message of positive-thinking and self-empowerment -- even in times of record-high unemployment, individual debt, and growing foreclosures. One would think that the recession would turn believers away from this philosophy. Not so, according to Clint Rainey. He claims that entitlement mentality is as American as apple pie. Wealth accumulation is also seen as a tool of evangelism among those who ascribe to the postmillennialism's promise that 100 years of Christian dominion will precede the Second Coming.

Osteen's claim that "God wants to make your life easier" has found great resonance among people who are hurting financially. He says that's because he's preaching hope. Certainly his own prosperity continues to grow. Rainey reports his church, Lakewood, generated $76 million last year.

On her blog, writer and editor Betsy Robinson reports on a meeting in Manhattan of an organization called Stay Inspired. They gather periodically to share ideas on how to remain inspired during hard times. One of those in attendance is Nipun Mehta, the founder of the Smile Project, which suggests doing acts of kindness and leaving a card encouraging the recipient to do something helpful for someone else. Betsy assembles some of the group's suggestions for sustaining inspiration into what she calls Inspiration Stew. The recipe includes: Listen to the inspiring stories of others. Look for the beauty in everything and everybody. Practice the daring activity of being present for others.

It is good to know that people are actively seeking sources of positive energy in these times of resource depletion and economic hardship!

In this timely essay, Debbie Ford, author of The Dark Side of the Light Chasers and a featured Living Spiritual Teacher at Spirituality & Practice, wakes up in the morning with an uneasy feeling about the possible negative fallout from her using a newspaper headline "Pop star Michael Jackson admitted sharing a bed with a teenage boy" on a trailer to her recent film The Shadow Effect. But suddenly, her fearful feelings move on to a more positive evaluation of her work to help people come to terms with "their unhealed and unexamined shadows."

Ford makes a case that the experiences of this pop superstar can serve as a warning for all of us to deal with our shadows: "Let's make known to every man, woman and child today that we have a secret part of us that we try desperately to hide, repress and lie about that needs the light of our awareness to heal. Let's help those with great talent and fame and those with little visible gifts know that it is okay to have a shadow, it's human to have a shadow, and that in fact it is our spiritual promise to have a shadow."

In a fascinating article written for On the Commons and reprinted on Alternet, David Bollier laments how digital communication tools (email, cell phones, text-messaging, voicemail, Facebook, Twitter, and the World Wide Web) have radically dis-connected us, scrambled our brains, and fostered thinking that is rapid, productive, and short-term rather than deep and deliberative. Even worse, leisure has given way to a 24/7 schedule and an emphasis upon fast-time activities, thus upping the ante so that the most important thing becomes to prolong one's productivity and efficiency.

Bolier notes a recent article in The New Yorker about people using "neuro-enhancing drugs" to boost their cognitive performance. He refers to David Levy's call for an "information environmentalism" to help educate people about the manifold forms of mental pollution including advertising, telemarketing, junk mail, radio, TV, and various digital media. Hucksters now talk about seizing "mindshare." In response, Levy suggests: "We need the equivalent of old-growth forests and marshlands in our mental lives." That means more contemplative spaces and quiet zones in our cities. Here is a contribution that could be made by churches, synagogues, and mosques.

In this exquisite blog post, Nazia Mallick ponders the spiritual practice of silence. She notes that in our fast-paced and frantic everyday world, many are still uncomfortable with quietness and much prefer the noise and energy of constant activity. Mallick sees silence as an opportunity to come home to ourselves, to listen more carefully, and to enter our intuitive mind. We can learn more about this sacred art by encountering it in nature, in the telepathy of lovers, and in the calm minds of others. She closes with lyrics from "Sounds of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel.

Satish Kumar, the editor of Resurgence, questions the morality of people in Brazil, South Africa, India, and China following in the consumerism of Americans and Europeans. He prefers simplicity which "requires less ego and more imagination, less complication and more creativity, less glamour and more gratitude, less attention to appearance and more attention to essence." Think of a Shaker chair that is simple, well-made, and lasts a long time. Kumar believes that the economic downturn and financial crisis offer us a chance to re-examine the obsession with fashion and consumer goods, a wasteful lifestyle that lies behind the environmental crisis, the social crisis, and poverty.

At the age of 29, Writer Pico Iyer was at the pinnacle of success as a commentator on world affairs for Time magazine, an apartment on Park Avenue in New York City, and a chance to travel around the world. Now he lives in a two-room apartment in Kyoto and has chosen to live without a car, a cell phone, or a television. This simple lifestyle enables him to walk around the neighborhood, play ping-pong every evening, write long letters, read what he wants, and eat tangerines slowly in the sun. Iyer concludes: "Perhaps happiness, like peace or passion, comes most freely when it isn't pursued."

Journalists Bill Moyers and Michael Winship point out the rash of killings in America involving guns: the guard shot to death at the United States Holocaust Museum, the doctor who performed late term abortions who was killed at his local church, the shootings at an army recruiting office in Little Rock, and the 13 people gunned down in Binghamton, New York, and the other multiple murders across the country this year. Moyers and Winship state that the two political parties have not been able to muster enough power to take on the National Rifle Association which just managed to get its Congressional supporters to attach an amendment allowing concealed weapons in national parks onto a popular credit card reform bill.

Moyers and Winship lament this timidity on the part of politicians and conclude: "There are already some 200 million, privately owned firearms in America. Every year there are 30,000 gun deaths and in some years more than 400,000 non-fatal, gun-related assaults. The next time someone wades through a pool of blood to sidle up and champion the preservation of firearms, can't we just say, no thanks? Enough's enough." Amen.

Matthew Fox, one of our Living Spiritual Teachers, pays tribute to theologian and ecologist Thomas Berry, author of The Great Work, The Dream of the Earth, and other books, who recently died at the age of 94. He sees him as "a new Moses" leading religious people out of "bondage of a land of anthropocentrism to a land of cosmology and ecology." He salutes Berry's call for Eco-Justice and his challenge to all of us to make our contribution to "the Great Work" of saving the planet. Fox is convinced that this mystic taught us much about wildness, awe in the presence of nature, praying outside, connecting cosmos and psyche, helping us name the vastness of our souls, taking seriously the yoga of study, demonstrating what it means to be an elder, and modeling for us a deep ecumenism which includes all the wisdom traditions and science as well.

Fox concludes that Berry was a prophet imbued with "the spirit of Teilhard de Chardin, the intellect of Aquinas, the eros of Hildegard, the humility of Francis, the science of Einstein, and the courage and imagination of Jesus."

We wish we could have been at the University of Portland to hear environmentalist, journalist, and author Paul Hawken give the commencement address. He tells them that written in code on the back of their diplomas is this message: "You are brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring." Civilization needs a new operating system and "you are the programmers." Hawken is pleased that there are a multitude of caring people working right now to save the planet and nonprofit foundations dedicated to solving the huge problems of our era. Then another startling images: "Literally you are breathing molecules this very second that were inhaled by Moses, Mother Teresa, and Bono. We are vastly interconnected." Hawken concludes: "Nature beckons you to be on her side. You couldn't ask for a better boss."

We know a group of people who would have been thrilled to hear this earth-cherishing message: the Kogi tribe of elders in northern Columbia who for years have been calling upon the wealthy nations to take up the task of being guardians of the earth.

In this article by Leonardo Boff, one of our Living Spiritual Teachers, this theologian and member of the Earthcharter Commission, salutes the U.N.'s designation of Earth Day, April 22, as the International Day of Mother Earth. Acknowledging the rights of nature, of the eco-systems, and of Mother Earth offers an alternative to the long-standing Western contention that the earth is simply an instrument, a pile of resources to be used and exploited for human consumption. The plants, the animals, the rivers, and the wind all deserve to exist on their own.

Boff also suppors the suggestion that the U.N. should release a Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth which would include the right to life of all living beings, the right of the Planet to the regeneration of its biocapacity, the right to pure life (free of contamination and pollution), and the right to harmony and equilibrium with and among all things.

We agree with Boff. Spiritual people need to do everything in our power to help more people abandon their view of humankind as having dominion over Mother Earth and other beings. Instead we need to practice reverence for the Earth and acknowledge that she, too, has rights.

Anne Marie Valinoti, an internist in northern New Jersey, begins this piece in The New York Times with the story of a young man who came to see her with a 103 fever, red-eyed, shivering, and coughing. She told him to go home and go to bed, but he said he had to get to his Wall Street job, and off he went spreading his illness to anyone he came in contact with that day. "I see the foolishness of this bravura," she writes, "And I confront it almost daily in my primary care practice. No one can miss a day — a minute, even — of work, carpooling, volunteering, vacation, anything. 'I don't have time to be sick!' my patients wail. Everyone must soldier on, leaving sick days to those with less important things to do." Valinoti also talks about the cavalier dispensing of antibiotics by doctors as a way of helping patients carry on with their work even though evidencing symptoms of the flu or colds, which are caused by viruses.

When we read her piece, we thought of what taking a sick day means in the spiritual life. Taking care of your body, a temple of God, is always a good thing. Slowing down, savoring life, is also good. Some spiritual teachers even suggest making the most out of a sick day by turning it into a personal retreat or 12-hour period of silence. Of course, not spreading your sickness to others is also following the universal spiritual mandate of doing no harm.