Inner and Outer: The most important choice

Teaching Junior High Sunday School is always a challenge, and one that I truly enjoy. But how to get across the seriousness of personal spiritual development to kids in early adolescence where they are just beginning the "separation" stage is tricky, but crucial. Most have already begun questioning authority: parents, teachers, church, rules, etc., and it's only going to get more intense as they become fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen. This is normal ages-and-stages development, so our job is to give them the tools to get through this stage safely and to enter adulthood with integrity.

That's why my teaching partner and I are emphasizing their inner selves and their outer selves, the inner being that quiet silent place where one listens to and connects with their Creator, and the outer being everything else including emotions, beliefs, physical selves, relationships with people and, actually, with the whole world around them.

What many don't seem to understand is that the inner awareness of God can be enhanced and nurtured to grow and develop as we journey through life, or it can be put down, denied, and shrunk to the point that it is no longer recognized. This is the choice, and it is the most important choice the kids will ever make in their lives, the one that will drive every decision they ever make as their inner God-conscious self intersects with the outer world in which we must live and function.

Many, and maybe even most, people recognize the good vs bad nature of the life we have been given even though they don't actively nurture God-consciousness within themselves. That doesn't mean it's not there. God works through them and loves them just as they are. It is not ours to judge the relationship that others have with their Creator, only to recognize for ourselves that God dwells within each of us to the extent that we allow His presence to grow and guide our choices, attitudes, and actions.

To help these young adolescents see what the intersecting of the inner and the outer looks like, we are showing that incredible movie, The Hiding Place as it demonstrates so well the various attitudes and actions that people take to survive when overwhelming evil threatens their lives and their faith.

If you haven't seen the movie, you might want to rent it sometime and watch.

Sounds and Silence

Last week in his Galilee Diary column, Marc Rosenstein talked about the power of sound.

Shorashim is located on the west-facing slope of a shoulder of Mt. Gilon, [he wrote,] overlooking the Hilazon Valley. Across the valley, less than a mile away, is the Moslem village of Sha'ab....

....the muezzin's call to prayer in the mosque is amplified, and carries clearly across the valley, five times a day. Within our first year here we had already "stopped hearing" these sounds, in the sense that they had just become a normal part of the environment, often blotted out of our consciousness by other stimuli – not waking us up or disturbing us. The other day I happened to be awake at 4:00 in the morning. It was a clear, cool morning, there was a bright sliver of a moon in the eastern sky, and the nasal, mournful chant of the muezzin drifted across the valley, and it occurred to me that this was a beautiful moment, and that actually I like hearing the muezzin; it has become part of what defines home for me – a part of the landscape like the olive trees that carpet the valley.

During the day or early evening, I guess I really have stopped hearing it; and if I happen to be in a village at prayer time, it is often rather a nuisance, like a low flying jet – you have to stop conversation for a minute or two until the noise subsides. But in the pre-dawn silence, attenuated by distance, it seemed somehow comforting. Often, the muezzin's call wakes up the jackals that live down the mountainside, and they add a backup chorus of howling that seems just right. It's interesting how sounds become a part of the landscape.

In the Turkish period, the municipal boundaries of a village were defined by the reach of the muezzin's call (unamplified) – so sound actually did define the landscape. I imagine that my response to the muezzin's regular call is parallel to the feelings aroused by church bells for those who live in small towns in America – or big cities in Europe. On the other hand, the dominant and frequent sound that seems to characterize the landscape of most big cities today is that of the sirens of emergency vehicles echoing through urban canyons. People who come from the city to spend a night in the Galilee comment not only on the muezzin, but on the silence before and after.

When you experience silence you become aware of the impact of constant background noise on your quality of life. If you think about the "Shofarot" section of the Rosh Hashanah liturgy, which catalogs the references in the Bible to the sounding of the shofar and its meanings, it seems that we Jews too have placed a strong emphasis on sounds that fill and define the public space. The shofar is not an instrument for drawing-room chamber music concerts; it is the ancient middle eastern version of church bells and amplified muezzins. Like those public sounds, it is designed to wake us up, penetrate and interrupt our mundane consciousness, to call us to attention, to bring us together.

So I noticed and appreciated the muezzin's call, and then drifted back to sleep, to be awakened to start my day an hour later by my clock radio playing the advertisements before the morning news.

A reader on the Reform Judaism website had this to add:

Your message today evoked a whole host of thoughts and feelings. I remember the first time I heard the call of the muezzin. I was on the balcony of my room in a hotel in Jerusalem. I was stirred profoundly by the call echoing throughout the city.

And today I live on the sixth floor in a suburban New York county and can see the rooftops of the Greek Orthodox church a few blocks away, and magically I can hear the carillon in its tower, each time moving me to a sense of spirituality.

And the opposite is silence. The Cristo on the mountaintop in Rio de Janiero is surrounded by silence once the human babel is tuned out, and something about this man made marvel high up on the top of a mountain is amazingly moving, creating, even to an avowed Jew such as myself, a sense of peace and order.

What can I add?

Mysticism 101

Dorothy's message on the abuse of mysticism by people who have no idea of what it's really all about got me to thinking.

First of all, the general dictionary's attempted explanation doesn't really give an adequate answer, so don't go there if you want any understanding. Mystics who have lived throughout history share some common traits. They are deeply internal men and women, so aware of the whole of creation that they have developed a very strong sense of the spiritual, so strong in fact that they sometimes receive revelations that don't seem to be available to those around them. Spirituality is, in fact, available to every person, but most of us don't develop the depth of awareness that mystics have allowed in themselves, and many people even deny the presence of the CreatorSpirit within themselves to the point where it shrivels up and is barely noticeable anymore.

Famous mystics recognized as such are Moses, Elijah, Siddhartha Gautama, Jesus, Teresa of Avila, the poet Rumi, Teilhard de Chardin, Gandhi, and Mohammad. There have been many others all over the world and in all eras of time.

The revelations are universal and have to do with love, compassion, justice, and awareness of what our Creator wants for all of us. Being a mystic is not a pleasant experience for those who also become prophets and speak out against the spiritually unacceptable behaviors of people and societies in their locale. These mystic/prophets often suffer hatred, persecution, and even sometimes assassination.

Yet, it is incumbent upon each of us to develop and enhance our awareness of God as we move through life's journey. Only then will we be able to answer God's many calls to us throughout our lives and to discover what God-consciousness really means as we fulfill the will of our Creator in this, the only life we are given.

Have some respect

When did we start thinking it was respectful or even acceptable to claim other people's religious traditions as our own? The recent "sweat lodge" debacle in Arizona got me thinking about the gross cultural imperialism that some of the most sensitive Americans adopt.

My advice to those looking for a deeper mystical experience is to seek it first in your own cultural and religious traditions. It is there for all of us if we let go of our own personal arrogance and presumption.

The following is from the web site "New Age Frauds and Plastic Shamans." The site is run by a consortium of Native American aid and activist groups, including a few based here in New Mexico. New Mexico has a large indigeneous population as well as being a magnet for all kinds of wacky lifestyle experiments.

Do you think you are "Indian at heart" or were an Indian in a past life? Do you admire native ways and want to incorporate them into your life and do your own version of a sweat lodge or a vision quest? Have you seen ads, books, and websites that offer to train you to be come a shaman in an easy number of steps, a few days on the weekend, or for a fee?

Have you really thought this all the way through? Have you thought about how native people feel about what you might want to do?

Please think about these important points before you take that fateful step and expend time, money, and emotional investment:

Native people DO NOT believe it is ethical to charge money for any ceremony or teaching. Any who charge you even a penny are NOT authentic.

Native traditionalists believe the ONLY acceptable way to transmit traditional teachings is orally and face-to-face. Any allegedly traditional teachings in books or on websites are NOT authentic.

Learning medicine ways takes decades and must be done with great caution and patience out of respect for the sacred. Any offer to teach you all you need to know in a weekend seminar or two is wishful thinking at best, fraud at worst.

Another of the many faith traditions that have been plagued by opportunists and celebrity "seekers" is the Kabbalah, a mystical strain of Jewish scholarship. I was taught that Kabbalah should not even be attempted before the age of 40, after years of Torah and Talmud study. According to the Judaism 101 website:

Kabbalah is one of the most grossly misunderstood parts of Judaism. I have received several messages from non-Jews describing Kabbalah as "the dark side of Judaism," describing it as evil or black magic. On the other end of the spectrum, I receive many messages wanting to learn more about the trendy doctrine popularized by various Jewish and non-Jewish celebrities.

These misunderstandings stem largely from the fact that the teachings of Kabbalah have been so badly distorted by mystics and occultists. Kabbalah was popular among Christian intellectuals during the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods, who reinterpreted its doctrines to fit into their Christian dogma. In more recent times, many have wrenched kabbalistic symbolism out of context for use in tarot card readings and other forms of divination and magic that were never a part of the original Jewish teachings. Today, many well-known celebrities have popularized a new age pop-psychology distortion of kabbalah (I have heard it derisively referred to as "crap-balah"). It borrows the language of kabbalah and the forms of Jewish folk superstitions, but at its heart it has more in common with the writings of Deepak Chopra than with any authentic Jewish source.

I do not mean to suggest that magic is not a part of Kabbalah. There are certainly many traditional Jewish stories that involve the use of hidden knowledge to affect the world in ways that could be described as magic. The Talmud and other sources ascribe supernatural activities to many great rabbis. Some rabbis pronounced a name of G-d and ascended into heaven to consult with the G-d and the angels on issues of great public concern. One scholar is said to have created an artificial man by reciting various names of G-d. Much later stories tell of a rabbi who created a man out of clay (a golem) and brought it to life by putting in its mouth a piece of paper with a name of G-d on it. However, this area of Kabbalah (if indeed it is more than mere legend) is not something that is practiced by the average Jew, or even the average rabbi. There are a number of stories that discourage the pursuit of such knowledge and power as dangerous and irresponsible. If you see any books on the subject of "practical kabbalah," you can safely dismiss them as not authentic Jewish tradition because, as these stories demonstrate, this kind of knowledge was traditionally thought to be far too dangerous to be distributed blindly to the masses.

It is important to note that all of these magical effects were achieved through the power of G-d, generally by calling upon the name of G-d. These practices are no more "evil" than the miracles of the prophets, or the miracles that Christians ascribe to Jesus. In fact, according to some of my mystically-inclined friends, Jesus performed his miracles using kabbalistic techniques learned from the Essenes, a Jewish sect of that time that was involved in mysticism.

I'm not even going to get into my own feelings about those who sign up for weekend monastic experiences without buying into the rigorous teachings of the Catholic Church. That trend is relatively inoffensive and brings in some much-needed cash to Catholic religious communities. Sort of like the stripper who loses nothing by letting lonely men look, and comes away with money for her college tuition.

The Wizard of Oz movie was right: "There's no place like home." If your church is boring or overly accessible, look within your own heart for what makes you unreceptive. Then join the liturgy committee and help your own community address its weaknesses. In the meantime, have some respect for other faith communities.

Borrow practices that go along with your own beliefs, but don't pretend that makes you an authentic member of that community. Join another tradition if it inspires you, but join all the way. Religious traditions are not Disneyland, and they lose all their power if they are trivialized. At best, you fool yourself and disrespect another group of people. At worst, you harm yourself or others in a made-up ceremony.

There is nothing spiritual about that.

Okay, I Have to Add My Two Cents

I think this is probably the story to which Halleson referred in her last post. It points out the ways that the companies issuing prepaid cards appear to be exploiting the cards' users. There are a lot of people who do not use credit cards or checking accounts, but rely on what cash they have on hand to pay their bills. In our increasingly electronic society they are shut out of many everyday transactions.

According to the William J. Clinton Foundation, "28 million people do not have bank accounts. The typical unbanked worker can spend $40,000 cashing paychecks over the course of a career. For a nation already affected by economic inequality and poverty, the economic downturn has made it harder for families and individuals to get ahead financially."

My colleague describes them as "people with low credit ratings or those who are too lazy to choose careful money management over convenience." The people I know who use cash over traditional credit cards -- and who have to use money orders and prepaid cards for transactions that don't allow cash -- are exceedingly careful in their money management. They are so careful that they do not spend money that they do not have in their pockets. They are families who budget carefully, and do not incur worries about two different people on a joint checking account writing checks to draw from the same money.

Halleson is right that the profit motive is no excuse to overcharge people and trick them into fees they don't understand.

I'd like to weigh in as a former salesperson. The fact is, particularly in commission sales, it is your repeat customers who make you most of your money. You have a relationship with them, and they come back to you and send their friends and relatives to you because you have shown that you care about their interests. A good lingerie saleswoman spends time getting the customer into foundation garments that make her look better in the clothes she puts over them. A good cosmetics saleswoman tells a customer honestly if her skin looks better with a little soap and water instead of thick make-up and expensive creams.

Especially when you make your money on commission, it is in your best professional interest to keep people happy and provide value. Otherwise your customers will just sneak in on your day off and return everything. Those return figures are deducted from your commission, by the way.

Selling is not in and of itself an immoral way to spend your life, and being successful at it is no reason for extra trips to the confessional. My guess is that the companies who are overcharging and cheating people with prepaid credit cards will have to change their billing structure just like cell phone companies did when better deals became available. This is where competition could be helpful.

We don't need to get rid of prepaid cards, just give people less usurious options.

If Nobody is Watching

There seems to be no end of ways that human beings seek to profit from another person's ignorance or loss. Today's New York Times talks about the pre-paid debit cards that are sweeping the nation enticing people with low credit ratings or those who are too lazy to choose careful money management over convenience. Banks are charging hidden fees for the use of these cards that saps the balance that the consumer thinks remains on the card. See http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/06/business/media/06adco.html?th&emc=th for details.

It's all about the marketing game, the selling game for its own sake and for maximum profits to the company.

I tried this once. I was holding a garage sale and wanted to get rid of items that I could no longer use, so rather than standing passively by allowing potential customers to choose what they might want, I decided to try the selling game. When customers seemed to hesitate, I turned on the charm and pointed out the value and the usefulness of the items. It was fun. I could see how some people walked away from that sale with items that they might not have bought, had I been silent.

I've thought a lot about that little experiment of mine, and have wondered about the ethics of it.

Later as a marketing manager for a company and trying to honor what the company needed in enticing customers to what it was offering, I changed my tactic. First, I made sure that the product was good and had value. Then I advertised only those attributes that were absolutely true, and never used deceptive advertising created for promotional purposes. This was a company with integrity, and I was careful not to give the public any reason to believe otherwise. With this as the core of my marketing strategy, I was able to be creative in many ways that brought customers to examine its products and to purchase them.

A person who lives by faith in God and who tries to honor Jesus's command to "love thy neighbor as thyself" doesn't have to deceive people in order to accomplish his goals. Greed and pressure to perform may be ever-present, but we'll do a better job in the long run by dealing with people honestly.

When a secular writer looks at prayer.....

Zev Chafets, a reporter for the New York Times, wrote a feature story about prayer that appeared in Times magazine last week. To me, what was most thought-provoking about the story was its complete lack of depth. After visiting with a number of representatives from various faith traditions, and quoting them extensively, Chafets ended his piece with an account of his visit to an Assembly of God congregation in West Virginia. He was touched, as would we all be, by the simple, uncomplicated faith of the children he met there.

All Christians -- and most likely serious members of other faiths as well -- understand the request Jesus makes for us to come to him "as a little child." It is, as a matter of fact, against our religion to over-think matters of faith. This is the reason that Catholics (especially those with Jesuit educations) often feel the need to pray for obedience, and why the quotation from Mark 9:24, "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!" is significant to so many people.

The downside of this attitude is a prevailing anti-intellectualism, the search for easy answers and the fear of intellectual engagement. Do you have to be stupid, or uneducated, or thoughtless, to be a good Christian? I think not.

A former colleague of mine who teaches religion at a Presbyterian high school has a wonderful lesson that he gives as part of his New Testament class. In it, he talks about what the early Christians must have looked like to their neighbors. Many of those around them would have been puzzled, even horrified, by the insistence of this small Jewish sect that their slain leader was actually the son of God and the savior of all people. The leader they were so attached to, after all, was known to have been a condemned criminal. "I always have trouble with this part of the lesson if there are students in the class from evangelical churches," he says. "I've had them burst out crying in class, interrupt me when I'm speaking, and complain to the head of school that I am being disrespectful, that I'm calling their lord a criminal. They not only miss the point of the lesson, their early religious teaching makes them see it as blasphemy."

The story's conclusion appears to be that faith and prayer are for the simple and credulous, and that intellectual engagement should be left to the nonbeliever. The fact is, any religion worth following has more to it than easy, accessible answers. Here are some excerpts from the Times story that stood out for me:

[Marc] Gellman is a Reform rabbi of liberal theological leanings, the former head of the New York Board of Rabbis, a scholar with a Ph.D. in philosophy from Northwestern University and a celebrity. He and his friend Msgr. Tom Hartman are the stars of a long-running cable show called “God Squad.”

“Evangelical Christians, Pentecostals, they go to church to pray,” Gellman [says]. “Why else would they be there? But Jews are different. People come to temple to identify with other Jews, or socialize. The writer Harry Golden once asked his father, who was an atheist, why he went to services every Saturday. The old man told him, ‘My friend Garfinkle goes to talk to God, and I go to talk to Garfinkle.’ There’s a lot of that.”

“In the old days cantors made the women cry. Now they just want to do performance pieces. And congregational singalongs aren’t the Jewish way of praying. Our prayers are meant to be chanted rhythmically.”

“I’m saying that techniques can make a difference,” Gellman says. “Like wrapping yourself in a prayer shawl if you want to shut out the world. But really, when you come right down to it, there are only four basic prayers. Gimme! Thanks! Oops! and Wow! Wow! are prayers of praise and wonder at the creation. Oops! is asking for forgiveness. Gimme! is a request or a petition. Thanks! is expressing gratitude. That’s the entire Judeo-Christian doxology. That’s what we teach our kids in religious school.”

“What about adults who want to learn to pray?” [Chafets inquires.]

“I tell them to start with prayers of Thanks! That’s what Christians call ‘grace.’ Everybody has something to be grateful for.”

...Rev. Bob Osborne, pastor of the Presbyterian church and head of the Morgan County [West Virginia] Clergy Association, [says] some show up [to Easter services] for social reasons — the local equivalent of going to shul to talk to Garfinkle. On the day I met him, Osborne expected a full house. But he admitted that he has been losing members to local evangelical churches. “They aren’t burdened with liturgy or a tradition that demands intellectual engagement,” he said.

What are you focusing on?

This past August, I attended a conference on bilingual liturgical music in Tucson. We shared the hotel with a group of families who were bringing their children -- mostly sons, but there were some girls competing -- to ride in a BMX bicycle competition. Each time we called the elevator to go up to our room or down to an event or workshop, we weren't sure if we would be sharing the space with a Spanish-speaking grandmother and her guitar, or a group of boys in mohawk helmets and their bikes.

We ended up taking the stairs a lot, but both groups turned out to be good company. The BMX contestants looked a little outlandish, but they were polite and helpful, often getting off and going down the stairs rather than crowd out the musicians. They had little patience with the slowness of the elevators, which were not synchronized, so they would all come at once and then none would come for several minutes. The kids were cheerful about it, though, and seemed to prefer the stairs to waiting. (Quick and impatient are probably useful qualities in a BMX race.)

Although the staff and volunteers from the Tucson diocese did a wonderful job, there were a few glitches. None of it was worth grousing over, and it would have been hard to stay irritated through the next session of music, prayer and practical advice anyway. The group from my church learned lots of new music, and got some great tips about making our music more prayerful and inclusive for the congregation.

This morning's Washington Post ran a story about a gospel choir competition. To quote from the piece: "A gospel choir sing-off isn't like a typical arena concert....Nia Pree, of [the choir] Rejoice, pointed out that, unlike other talent competitions, this one was jitters-free. 'When you focus on God, there is no stress,' she said."

Blocked

Things get in the way.

When I find myself restless and unable to settle down and accomplish something (or so I perceive), I've learned that there is usually something that blocks my way, some one thing that is weighing me down, something that I don't want to do or face.

Only when I focus on WHAT that block might be, can I overcome that one thing that is preventing me from moving forward. I can usually feel it building, the frustration, the inability to stick to any given task for very long. The most recent was the stack of papers on my office desk that needed to be attended to. I was sure that there were some difficult and time-consuming items among the papers that were going to take forever to straighten out.

Finally, I said to myself that I was not allowed to do the thing that I really wanted to do until I faced the stack on my desk and completed whatever tasks were in that mysterious pile. One morning (This can go on for days) I got up, poured myself a cup of coffee, sat down, faced the pile, and began at the top. The two items that I thought were going to be awful, I put at the bottom of the stack. When I finally got to them, I walked around the house for a bit and then sat down again. Surprise! I was finished with them in about ten minutes.

No matter how many times these blocks have occurred to me throughout life, I still seem to let them build up and bother me until my restlessness reaches a critical mass, and I can't move on without self-examination.

There must be a lesson in there somewhere. I'll have to think about what it might be. Comments would be helpful. . . .

A New Earth

Eckhart Tolle's book "A New Earth" has been around for awhile and once was an Oprah pick. I just finished it, and would say that it has changed the way I view the world.

Although it was written in an easy style, I had to read it in bits and pieces because it was hard to absorb. The first half of the book outlines the insanity of the earth and the way we live our lives totally focused on the desires of our ego. Yes, I could see that. It's pretty obvious actually.

The second half lets us know how to bring about a new earth, filled with kindness and compassion. Can it be done? Well. . .it would certainly take some work.

What really caught me, and where I gained the most benefit was Tolle's integrating the vernacular of the various world religions to show that the message that each brings really is the same even though we use different words to express it. For example, the word "salvation" used in Christianity is very misleading when seen in the context of all the myths that have grown up in this religion over the years. If we believe as many of us have been taught that heaven is a place to which we "go" to be with God forever, then salvation likely has, for us, the nuance of getting there when we die.

Tolle's explanation makes a lot more sense. Salvation is not that cut and dried as being an achievement that we cash in on after death. Instead it is the process of working toward setting aside our ego and becoming present here and now in this life with the presence of the spirit within us. It's the acceptance of God and God's purpose for us, individually and corporately, and living completely out of a spirit-filled life.

Can I personally do this? I've been trying for a long long time, and only now do Christianity's words that point in that direction make any sense for me.