On Christianity — Joe Perez

Self-confidence: a sign that you have arrived spiritually

May 18, 2012 By Joe Perez

Self-confidence is a sign that you have arrived spiritually, according to syndicated columnist Norris Burkes. In “Spirituality: Be your own person,” the Air National Guard chaplain writes:

Jesus … flat out ask[ed] his adoring crowds, “Who do people say that I am?”

The throng fired back some wild-eyed guesses, as some even said he was the ghost of an old prophet.

Others said he was a lunatic, but Jesus brushed those speculations aside and turned to those who were important in his life, his students, and asked, “Who do you say that I am?”

Peter stood and set it straight. “You da man!”

OK, he didn’t exactly say that. Peter said, “You’re the Christ.”

Jesus responded to this astute conclusion with an astounding command. He told them to not tell a soul.

Why would Jesus ask for such anonymity? Some scholars say that he was trying to avoid being crucified prematurely.

I think it was much more.

I think Jesus had arrived at the moment in his life where he knew that he didn’t need to “proclaim” who he was.

His walk, his breath, his talk exuded the confidence of one who was truly different.

He knew his purpose, and he knew he was the only one who needed to feel contentment in that purpose.

Read the whole thing.

World Spirituality suggests that Burkes has identified an important principal of enlightenment, that moment which he says you stop trying to proclaim who you are and just put your effort into being who God wants you to be. Of course, there are many different ways of interpreting what God wants, and I am using this expression as another way of pointing to the Thou in the I/Thou relationship we all have with All That Is.

Norris says of Jesus: “His walk, his breath, his talk exuded the confidence of one who was truly different.”

Or … He exuded the confidence of one who was truly himself, fully realized in Unique Self.

Photo Credit: Andy Houghton

Joe Perez is an author who has published books on Gay and Bi Men’s Spirituality.

Filed Under: All Posts, Awake, Alive & Aware, Gay/LGBT Spirituality, Integral Spirituality, On Christianity

Where Americans import conservatives from overseas

May 4, 2012 By Joe Perez

By Joe Perez

In certain places in America, conservatives are so scarce they’ve begun to import them from abroad. Specifically, in Tampa, Florida, where 1,000 delegates gathered for the United Methodist Church’s General Conference. While liberal American Methodists pleaded for tolerance for gay people, conservatives from overseas compared homosexuality to bestiality.

A report on Huffington Post:

Gay rights advocates in the UMC viewed the compromise proposals as the best chance to advance their cause at this year’s General Conference, which convenes every four years. On Friday, delegates are expected to debate the church’s bans on noncelibate gay clergy and same-sex marriage.

With nearly 8 million members in the U.S., the UMC remains the country’s largest mainline Protestant denomination. But United Methodism is shrinking in the U.S. and growing in Africa and Asia, shifting the balance of power to overseas conservatives. Nearly 40 percent of the delegates gathered in Tampa live outside the U.S.

Thursday’s debate put the denomination’s wide diversity on display — as gays and lesbians pleaded for recognition of their “sacred worth” and an African delegate, speaking through an interpreter, compared homosexuality to bestiality.

The conservatives won the day, proclaiming publicly that “homosexual acts” are “incompatible with Christian teaching” in the largest mainstream Protestant denomination in the U.S.A. Of course, it’s their right to run their church as they see fit and nobody is forcing anybody to be part who doesn’t find a welcoming home there. And of course, many of us would much prefer that if the conservatives can’t at least be willing to agree to disagree, then they would stay quiet.

But then again, we aren’t really the folks the Methodist leaders are speaking to. They say they are speaking to the world, but they are really addressing only those willing to listen, mainly their flocks which are increasingly hailing from the developing world and less so North America and Europe. Thus, the fate of gays and lesbians in the “first world” is tied to the fate of gays and lesbians everywhere. There is no progress on the LGBT dignity front in America if the LGBT folks in places like Bangladesh and Uganda and Argentina are left out.

Thus, religion is providing a uniting thread linking the fate of persecuted minorities everywhere. Today there are Methodists in every country, or almost every country, where there are Christians. And where people share a common religion, if their religion leaves them out, they will share a common persecution. Fear will rule over love when love grows too weak.

Our fates are linked because in the final analysis We are Them and They are Us: there is only one True Self, and it expresses itself (sometimes in beautiful or expaseratingly crazy ways) through homophiles and heterophiles, heterosexuals and homosexuals, and in all the ways that Love does its thing, same-to-same or same-to-other or what have you.

And our fates are linked because we cannot know Love unless we also stand in the unknowable, the Fear which does its own thing, other-fear or same-fear, homophobia or heterophobia. As each of us heals our homophobia, one by one, Spirit releases a bit more Fear and evolves a little closer to an even more radical expression of Love.

Ultimately gays will find liberation only in the most difficult, blessedly difficult, of paths: by linking gay/human rights to the quest for recognition of their “sacred worth” in every religion in every land. Until then, we can expect conservative religionists to gain clout not only abroad where they are more abundant, but also in the U.S., where their leadership is imported by groups like the United Methodists with deep international linkages.

Religions which intertwine internationally link people deeply and profoundly towards a common goal on the human adventure. The news about the United Methodists may suggest that this is a bad thing, that somehow foreigners have a veto over the collective consciousness of American Christians.

But the reality is more complex. The internationalization of spirituality is a good thing when it lifts the boats of people in distress, requiring religious adherents in privileged countries to work on behalf of international development, forcing those invested in the gay rights struggle in one country to seek universal human rights worldwide.

World Spirituality participates in such global linkages, helping to build the bonds which one day can be tunnels for human liberation to emerge out of fear. An Integral approach to gay rights requires a global view, invested as it is in expanding the degree to which we are all more deeply accepting of our humanity and sexuality.

Photo Credit: Religion News Service

Joe Perez is an author who has published books on Gay and Bi Men’s Spirituality.

Filed Under: All Posts, Awake, Alive & Aware, Gay/LGBT Spirituality, Integral Spirituality, On Christianity

Researchers probe relationship between analytical thinking and religiosity

April 30, 2012 By Joe Perez

According to a story in The Raw Story, a group of Canadian psychologists has concluded that directing test subjects to think “analytically” lowers their level of religious belief. Their research was published in this week’s issue of Science. A look at the study’s methodology, however, reveals misguided assumptions.

Test subjects were given a problem-solving test, shown a picture of Rodin’s famous sculpture “The Thinker,” and given a questionnaire asking participants how much they agreed with statements such as “I believe in God.” When these subjects were compared to control subjects not given problem-solving tasks, and presumably not shown a picture of “The Thinker,” the group subjected to the problem-solving tests were less likely to admit to having religious beliefs.

The Raw Story says:

Psychologists have long believed that humans rely on two different cognitive systems, one “intuitive” and the other “analytical,” and previous research has pointed to a link between intuitive thinking and religious belief.

“Our findings suggest that activating the ‘analytic’ cognitive system in the brain can undermine the ‘intuitive’ support for religious belief, at least temporarily,” study co-author Ara Norenzayan explained.

Philip Ball, Ph.D., a freelance science writer, responds in Nature, noting that the study uses an inadequate definition of religion. Ball:

The authors state that they “focused primarily on belief in and commitment to religiously endorsed supernatural agents” — they examined beliefs in God, the devil and angels. That, of course, already assumes a Judaeo-Christian context, but there are plenty of devout believers who have no need of angels or the devil, and some who perhaps have no need of a belief in God in a traditional or Christian sense (Max Planck was one such example).

This hints at the key problem, which is (or ought to be) as much a quandary for religion itself as for scientific studies of it. Almost all of the questions in Gervais and Norenzayan’s study related to religion as a literalist folk tradition — an aspect of lifestyle. This is how it manifests in most cultures, but that barely touches on religion as articulated by its leading intellectuals: for Christianity, say, philosophers such as Thomas Aquinas, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and George Berkeley. The idea that the beliefs of those individuals would have vanished had they been more analytical is, if nothing else, amusing. Gervais and Norenzayan’s findings should help to combat religion as an indolent obstacle to better explanations of the natural world. But it can’t really engage with the rich tradition of religious thought.

Ball’s point is a good one, though from a wider perspective even his objections don’t fully identify the limitations of the study. For starters, there is not only the problem that belief in God is a “Judeo-Christian” belief as opposed to, say, Buddhists; there is the issue that there are many different levels of belief in God, or many different stations of life in which belief in God expresses itself. There are child-like forms of religious belief, mature and immature adult forms. Ball notes that religion is filled with intellectuals with highly refined analytical skills (he doesn’t take this a step further to note that there are different structure-stages of religious expression that ought to be considered separately).

Another issue with the study is that while the authors may only publish narrow findings about the difference between analytical and intuitive psychological types, their study is likely to be interpreted narrowly as a test of whether religious people are stupider than non-religious people, and to reinforce the idea that spirituality is dumb. I’m not quite sure why this study is considered non-offensive when a study examining whether people of different races or socio-economic statuses are more analytical or intuitive.

Spirituality expresses itself in a myriad of ways, and an Integral perspective includes both intuitive and analytical types, and has room for believers with a philosophical or non-philosophical bent. Tests seemingly designed to show that spiritual people are dumb are insulting.

Filed Under: All Posts, Awake, Alive & Aware, On Christianity

Faithful, expansive perspectives on Easter as a super-natural event

April 11, 2012 By Joe Perez

On the If Darwin Prayed blog, Bruce Sanguin asks himself good, tough questions about belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ. He says:

Recently, I heard biologist, Elisabet Sahtouris, offer a great analogy that helps me to interpret the Easter story. Noting that physicists talk about sound vibrations at various frequencies as constitutive of the universe, she employs the image of a cosmic keyboard. Science deals with the low and mid-range frequencies, matter and electro-magnetic energy. Religion plays on the higher part of the keyboard in the realm of Spirit. Spiritual folk tend to make sense of the world by starting at the top end and working their way down, while scientists tend to start at the low-end and work their way up. But for decades science and religion got stuck, playing only one part of the keyboard and making the claim that only the music that came from their part of the keyboard was legitimate. To dance well and sing on key, we need to hear the music of the the whole keyboard.

But the “key” point is that there is only one cosmic keyboard. Nature is One. Reality is a single-story universe of infinite depth and height. The Easter story is not the story of a supernatural God, who intervened in Jerusalem 2000 years, suspending the laws of nature with a supernatural miracle. Rather, it is a story that encapsulates and catalyzes the story of a resurrection impulse that is active at all levels of creation, cosmological, biological, social and spiritual. Science is particularly focused on the first three. The spiritual frequency is a dimension of Nature/Reality that eludes easy measurement. If you intend to hear it, you need to spend time training the ear of your heart.

Read the whole thing, including Bruce’s answer to the question, “Do I believe that an iPhone camera pointed at Jesus on Easter morning would have captured him rising up?”

If Bruce’s question sounds familiar to my readers, it’s because I give three different answers to this question at different stages in my spiritual autobiographical chronicle Soulfully Gay (three different answers at three distinct periods of time). Without spoiling too much of the book’s surprise ending, I will add that my final response is different than Bruce’s, although we both affirm a belief in Christ’s resurrection. My belief was grounded on an actual physical visitation of a spiritual being who I came to identify with the Christ, and of which the book is eyewitness testimony.

Today, my belief in the resurrection is not dependent on assent to any particular notion of the transmigration of souls or belief in the Hindu tales of gurus who reappear to their flock following death. World Spirituality does not throw out the baby (abiding mysteries of Spirit, uniquely and irreplaceably expressed in religious gnosis) with the bathwater (superstitious or uncritical belief) in making space for pre-modern traditional knowledge.

Instead, it is grounded in my experience of a Unique Self which exists beyond the distinctions of space, time, and thought. From this abiding personal essence, I know of an awareness of a Self existing beyond the boundary of death, however imperfectly I am able to express this belief in words such as “resurrection of Christ.”

Filed Under: All Posts, Awake, Alive & Aware, On Christianity

Towards a new theology of gay marriage

March 4, 2012 By Joe Perez

In “Out and Ordained,” Brett Webb-Mitchell tells of his journey as a gay Presbyterian pastor and offers his prayers for the Church. In 2011, the Presbyterian Church formally allowed openly gay and lesbian ministers. Now, there are new challenges ahead:

Webb-Mitchell writes:

In order to become more inclusive, there are many “next steps” to be taken in righting past wrongs. For example, as more states permit LGBTQ people to wed, churches will need to craft a theology of marriage that includes LGBTQ congregants.

To this, I offer my prayer that theologians in the Presbyterian communion realize that their work is not to be done in isolation, looking mainly to the Bible and the Westminster Confession.

We live in times in which people in every religion are awakening to see their sacred texts as historically conditioned and requiring much discernment to see how their authority can be reconciled with recognition of the dignity of gays and lesbians and others.

A theology of marriage must not rest content with looking to old texts to seeing how they have been misinterpreted; we must be willing to see our knowledge of God evolving over time in the fullness of history. A theology of marriage inclusive of gays must be one which acknowledges spiritual evolution, or it will only be a stopgap, an ethnocentric adjustment made at a time when what is most needed is a worldcentric transformation.

Affirming the sacredness of gay marriage isn’t about people embracing diversity for diversity’s sake, but finding in committed same-sex partnerships a new and essential expression of the Divine Love.

That’s why the perspective I staked out in Soulfully Gay is so relevant to the future discussion about the sacramental worth or sacredness of gay marriage.

In my book I take a step beyond the “diversity for diversity’s sake” rationale offered by postmodern religionists for affirming gay marriage, staking out an argument for gay marriage based on a philosophical and spiritual anthropology (that is, a vision of human nature) which describes how understanding the proper nature of gay love is essential to understanding the nature of God’s love for creation.

Theologically, affirming gay marriage is an evolutionary step forward in humankind’s understanding of the nature of Divine Love, a gift from God for all people, not just a tiny minority. The love of Same to Same is viewed as theologically distinct from the love of Same to Other, one giving us a mirror to self-immanence and the other a reflection of self-transcendence. Heterophilia gives us a picture of how humanity loves God; homophilia gives us a picture of how God loves humanity.

Such a vision is not merely a Presbyterian theology or even a Christian vision. It’s a philosophical-spiritual statement about human nature that can be affirmed by integral Christians, integral Jews, integral Muslims, integral Buddhists, integral Hindus, and even — by looking at self-immanence and self-transcendence as biological drives situated within a general theory meta-theory of evolution — integral secular humanists.

Filed Under: All Posts, Awake, Alive & Aware, Gay/LGBT Spirituality, Integral Spirituality, On Christianity

The stunning rise of “I’m BOTH spiritual AND religious” in America

February 18, 2012 By Joe Perez

Photo Credit: cmiper

A fascinating analysis of data on American religiosity today shows the rise of a new ethos in the United States: a stunning 48 percent of Americans now describe themselves as BOTH spiritual AND religious, with another 30 percent preferring the “spiritual, BUT NOT religious” formula.

Now here’s the stunner: only 13 years ago, a majority of 54% of Americans described themselves as religious BUT NOT spiritual. If these surveys are correct, we are witnessing a hidden sea change whereby Americans have now largely accepted a divide between the religious and the spiritual, and the spiritual is winning in spades.

Author Diana Butler Bass sees the day coming when religion in the U.S. will virtually come to an end. In the Huffington Post today, she writes:

In a 2008 survey, Pew research found that one in 10 Americans now considers themselves an ex-Catholic. The situation is so dire that the church launched a PR campaign inviting Catholics to “come home,” to woo back disgruntled members. There was a slight uptick in Catholic membership last year, mostly due to immigrant Catholics. There is no data indicating that Catholics are returning en masse and much anecdotal evidence suggesting that leaving-taking continues. Catholic leaders worry that once the new immigrants become fully part of American society they might leave, too.

She does not talk about the developing world, however, where there are few signs of secularization. After describing the American decline of Protestant denominations as well as Catholic, she continues:

The religious market collapse has happened with astonishing speed. In 1999, when survey takers asked Americans “Do you consider yourself spiritual or religious,” a solid majority of 54 percent responded that they were “religious but not spiritual.” By 2009, only 9 percent of Americans responded that way. In 10 years, those willing to identify themselves primarily as “religious” plummeted by 45 percentage points.

In the last decade, the word “religion” has become equated with institutional or organized religion. Because of crises such as the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the Roman Catholic abuse scandal, Americans now define “religion” in almost exclusively negative terms. These larger events, especially when combined with increasing irrelevance of too much of organized religion, contributed to an overall decline in church membership, and an overall decline of the numbers of Christians, in the United States.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: All Posts, Awake, Alive & Aware, Integral Spirituality, On Christianity

Quote of the Day: Joe Perez on the Sacrament of Eucharist

February 18, 2012 By Joe Perez

Eucharist

Not everyone’s path to God follows a straight line through the religious tradition in which they were raised. And if you were raised with a strong traditional faith in Allah or Jesus Christ or Yahweh or Jehovah … well, God blesses your path of integrating all that you know to be true and holy with Truth wherever you can find it, be it science or postmodern criticism or something else.

Joe Perez in Soulfully Gay, a journal entry written when I was 34 years old, on February 19, 2004:

I had a dream this morning where I am composing a poem. I am writing “This is my Body, This is my Blood” over and over again, and in many different languages. I am thinking as I write: “Hey, I’m writing in German. I must be dreaming. This is cool. I don’t even know German.”

I am talking to a Roman Catholic priest, a closeted homosexual. I live in his parish, but I’m a lapsed Catholic. He has received orders from Rome. They have told him it’s his job to “get the homosexuals out,” and he has called on me to help him out.

“Me, why me? Don’t you know that I’m gay?”

I’m puzzled. I don’t understand.

Now I am arguing with a conservative Catholic. He is explaining that all Catholics who disagree with the pope’s teachings should leave the Church.

I reply thus: “I think that’s a great idea. Why don’t you start? Since the Church teaches the primacy of conscience and you seem to reject that teaching, I think it would be a fine idea if you left the Church and started a new church called the Conservative Catholic Church. And by all means, why don’t you take all the conservatives with you and shut the door on your way out?”

Sometimes I pray Catholic prayers. Sometimes I long to take part in the sacraments. And these impulses arise from a deep place within, whence the dream comes. Spiritual seekers often discuss faith as if it were strictly a matter of rational choice and preference, like they are consumers shopping in the supermarket aisle of religions. And religious conservatives often discuss faith as if it were strictly a matter of reasonable belief or unbelief, admonishing those who dissent from dogma to make the rational choice of leaving.

I am finding that faith is more complex than that. Leaving the Roman Catholic Church is easy to do with my feet but harder to do with all of me. These impulses are in contradiction, and for now I’m okay with that.

My quest at that time in my life was for a spiritual path that I could step into with ALL OF ME, not one foot in the door of a religion that taught intolerance and one foot off the edge of a cliff. In the 14 months chronicled by that book, I got more than I ever dreamed.

Joe Perez's Soulfully Gay

Today, I can’t remember how many years it’s been since I walked through the doors of a Roman Catholic Church. And yet I have not lacked for spiritual fellowship of a deep nature, communion with Christ in an intimate way, or guides along the path to a fullness and vitality of life. Mine is a World Spirituality which includes the best of my Roman Catholic tradition while being open to truth wherever it can be found.

The door is always open for me to return for a visit, but it will be a different ME who walks through the doors. Christ dwells within ME now, a truth that the Catholic Church officially teaches in certain seldom-opened pages of its catechism but which in practice it does not want people to know. If more people knew Christ dwells within them, they would know they are a spark of divinity that is a God-like consciousness awakened on earth, free to usher in the Kingdom of Heaven with every act of service, free to speak with the voice of a Prophet with every utterance.

That’s a dangerous message to some religious officials. They will tell you it is because it’s heresy or (if they are being candid and speaking off the record) because the people in the pews are too stupid and incapable of handling such deep spirituality. They might confess that the notion of having a direct relationship to God sounds too Protestant, too much an invitation to bypass the authority of the Magisterium in Rome.

When you answer “Who am I?” with “I am GOD,” you’re in for a bumpy ride.

February 17, 2012 By Joe Perez

Kevin, a reader of Awake, Alive & Aware, writes:

Spirituality? Questions? Who am I? Yes. Yes. And yes. I would add the search for meaning and a willingness to risk change. Getting anywhere with these very personal matters requires a very personal approach. For me, real, concrete and life changing answers come by way of letting go of who I think I am and what I think I know. I’m a thinker. It’s a preference for sure. But I believe it’s in my genes. And it’s become a honed skill. So when I became conscious of my spirit and the spiritual path it was by way of thinking and rationality. To make a long story short my conscious journey on the spiritual path began as an effort to make sense of my life and find sanity. But it quickly became a quest to integrate thoughts, feelings and relationships. Twenty-seven years later I feel I’m beginning to make some progress. Today, one question I struggle with concerns individual and personal conscience and society’s structures and moral codes. It feels like religion is saying the seat of morality is personal conscience which is experienced as God’s still, small voice. But religion demonizes and lionizes people based on what religion judges to be moral and immoral not by what people say their conscience compels them to do and advocate.

Thanks Joe. What’s been your experience?

As you say, Kevin, these are highly personal matters and no one size answer fits all. Spiritual autobiography is a key practice of World Spirituality. I’ve found the enlightenment teaching of Unique Self so valuable to me: it suggests to me not only that you and I may each be approaching our search for meaning in unique ways, but that uniqueness is essential to Who We Really Are … which is paradoxically distinct but not separate.

But to elaborate on this answer… “Who am I?” first became a pressing question in my spiritual life around the time of my 30th birthday (12 years ago). At the turn of the Millennium (it was September 1999), I experienced the most bizarre and unbelievable spiritual experience of my life. (I wrote a memoir in which I tell about what happened in the book’s twisty final chapter.) For the first time, I had no idea who or what or when or how I was. It was a total upheaval of everything that I took to be real.

My experience in 1999 was not my first mystical experience, but it was the first time that I really encountered the limits of the rational mind in terms of providing an explanation of or way of integrating the experience. As a young man in my 20s, I found that I could experience God directly or experience a powerful and abiding and non-cognitive realization of Bliss … at least on occasion. But I was torn between relating to these experiences through liberal Christian theology, the psychological study of religion (e.g., William James’s pragmatism), or atheistic scientific materialism, or any of a variety of other intellectual paradigms.

I could not integrate these mystical experiences in my 20s because I had found no way to honor the truth in such a diversity of conflicting, antagonistic perspectives about mysticism. It seemed for a long while that I was doomed to a perpetual agnosticism, and perpetually keeping the profound depths of the spiritual experiences away from my consciousness.

But it was also true that none of my wrestling, no matter how sincere, really penetrated to the depth of the question: “Who am I?” I felt alienated, not at home in the world. (The image above is of the Archangel Gabriel as portrayed by Andy Whitfield in the movie Gabriel, a depiction of a spiritual being lost in a strange, surreal purgatory.)

Eventually, my Millennium experience forced the question to the front of my consciousness. I knew from reading the writings of mystics and sages (and of the psychologists and religion scholars who studied them) that almost universally these people encountered themselves as indistinct from God or Spirit or Divinity or some Absolute Reality however they defined it. They basically answered the question, “Who am I?” with “I am GOD.”

Long story short, it wasn’t an easy ride, but eventually I began to find my own way of owning my mystical realization. The world today doesn’t exactly make it easy for people to go around saying, “I am God.” You can get locked up for that. You can lose friends and jobs. Even people in your religion will be frightened or angry by your discovery of inner divinity, if they have not also understood their own lack of separation from the Divine. Fortunately, there are more skillful and nuanced ways of talking about spirituality that don’t quite sound so crazy.

So yes, Kevin, like you, my path has been one of letting go of who I thought I was and being willing to embrace more of the mystery of life. And it has at times brought me into conflict with those parts of religion which have become fixated on condemning people who didn’t fit into the mainstream rather than embracing God’s presence directly, transforming lives, entering the Kingdom of Heaven, or realizing enlightenment.

Filed Under: All Posts, Awake, Alive & Aware, Gay/LGBT Spirituality, Integral Spirituality, On Christianity

How a Christian learned to see God in all things…from a Hindu

February 8, 2012 By Joe Perez

Swami Vedanta (Photo Credit: charityfocus)

Hinduism saved David Henson’s Christian faith, according to his new post on Mike Morrell’s blog. Basically David is a journalist by training and Calvinist Protestant by upbringing, and his encounter with a Hindu teacher was very eye-opening.

Henson writes:

When I met Swami Vedananda for the first time at the, I told him I had brought the Hindu scriptures and asked him to suggest some readings in it to start off our time together. He smiled wryly, his kindly face bathed in an earthy orange glow from his monk’s robes and wool cap. “Which Hindu scriptures?” he asked.

The look on my face must have betrayed my confusion as I fumbled through my book bag for the texts and handed them to them with a feeble, “Um, these Hindu scriptures.”

Vedananda chuckled good-naturedly as he thumbed through the book, its spine uncreased and the price sticker still on its cover. Not every religion, he said, viewed their holy scriptures the way some Christians do – as the first, foundational and sometimes only needed ingredient for a proper understanding God and the faith. Hinduism, he explained, was not only ancient, but rooted in a culture that sometimes doesn’t translate readily or easily to other modern cultures, and I probably wouldn’t get much out of reading the Upanishads or the Bhagavad-Gita. It would be much better, he said, to begin to learn about Hinduism from experience or at least the experiences of a Hindu teacher, rather than an ancient book that can’t talk back. During most of our first talk, Vedananda held the book of holy writings in hand, close to his chest, seemingly holding its truths outside my reach. At first, I felt irked. He seemed to imply I wasn’t able to grasp what the scriptures taught without some handholding. But, I was seminary student at the time of our meeting after all, and I had made a few As.

“Hinduism is not an acceptance of a certain set of beliefs. It is a path,” he explained warmly.

Then the dim bulb brightened, and I began to understand him. My mind scurried form one topic to the next, trying to keep up with Vedananda as he spoke extemporaneously and eloquently about the Divine, seamlessly weaving the words of the Upanishads with Christ, Buddha and Swami Vivekananda, who founded the San Francisco-based society. Though it took him years to get around to reading Christ’s teachings, Vedananda seemed to hold a better opinion, in general, of Christianity than I did, perhaps a reflection on his training as a monk and mine as a journalist. He focused on the good in Christianity, holding up mystics like St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross. I focused on the bad, mentioning people like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and the Church of Christ, the sect of my birth and childhood. I asked him how a Hindu could see good in these things that seem to repress the spirit rather than give itwings. His answer surprised and pierced me. He said one should look for and treasure the eternal truths each teaches and disregard the temporal fallacies. While I hate to admit it, I have too easily demonized these elements of the Christian faith and refused even to consider whether they do perform some good in pointing to or revealing the Divine.

The ability to see the good, the actual Divine in everything is the most striking, the most attractive and most challenging aspect of Hinduism, particularly for someone brought up in an uber- Calvinistic tradition. The doctrine of Original Sin, though I have had no particular affinity for it recently, still echoed inside my head when Vedananda said the Hindu believes that a human’s true nature is good, that humanity and the world is Divine and that one should strive to see not only that the Divine is in everything, but that everything is the Divine. The two positions seemed at odds. The emphasis on Original Sin in the Christianity seems to impress on the human soul a pessimism, where humankind and the world are broken, fallen from grace and in need of redemption that won’t be truly complete in this life.

Read the whole article.

Whether he knows it or not, Henson’s openness to discovering divinity in all things and goodness in all religions is a key part of the emerging World Spirituality movement.

As is his intuitive sense that his spiritual path is a story of development, and the latest chapter of his development is his rising awareness of the unity and interdependence of all things. He shows one way of grasping these wonderful connections, and in his case he did not leave his Christian faith behind.

Everyone’s path is different, and not everyone will have the same experiences with inter-faith dialogue. But David’s story can be a source of insight for us all.

Filed Under: All Posts, Awake, Alive & Aware, Integral Spirituality, On Christianity