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The Second Great Awakening, which began at the turn of the nineteenth century, contributed to the eventual abolition of slavery.
The mind can only take pictures using the film with which it’s been loaded. Our inner myths determine what we do and don’t notice, what we consider significant and what we ignore. If we had had the openness of ears to hear the full gospel, we would have had the openness of eyes to see that slavery and sexism were significant.
The Lincolns of this world are people who have experienced what the New Testament writers termed metanoia. The word literally means “a turnaround.” It is a fundamental transformation of mind, normally brought about by personal suffering, great awareness, or Damascus Road experiences.
Other disciplines might speak of “insight,” “eureka moments,” “flow,” or “peak experiences,” but metanoia is always known to be a grace from nowhere.
The third awakening was not so long ago. It was the stirring that led to the labor and civil-rights reforms of the mid-twentieth century.
The ability to self-criticize and own our shadow side is a clear sign of health and interior freedom. A historian of social change once told me that Vatican II was one of the very few times in all of human history that a strong institution reformed itself from the top—when it didn’t have to and wasn’t forced to.
We felt that we had lost our boundaries in relation to secular culture, and we were trying to reinforce them by insisting that we were always right and had the full and total picture. This is called a “siege mentality,” which always emerges when a group has lost its former influence and feels that it is under attack.
Finger-pointing is usually just an avoidance of our own transformation. To continue to move forward calmly, with joy and confidence, is probably as clear a sign of God’s presence as I can imagine.
When we take an extreme position, we take part of the responsibility for pushing people to the opposite extreme.
I think of how often, during my talks, someone raises a hand and says, “I disagree with what you just said.” Eight times out of ten, they did not hear what I said. Normally, they don’t have the humility to ask, in a non-accusatory way: “Did I hear you correctly in saying ... ?” or “What do you mean when you say ... ?” The assumption is seldom that they could have heard me wrong. The assumption is usually that I am wrong. Such a mentality never encourages dialogue or mutuality.
Our assumption is usually: “I did understand you. I know your motivation. I know what you’re trying to say, and I therefore have the need and right to attack you.”
Opposition gives us a sense of standing for something, a false sense of control and power. Compassion and humility don’t give us a sense of control or psychic comfort.
The hunger for meaning and the need for hope in this deconstructed society cannot be satisfied by merely private choices. This is a real blind spot for most liberals.
As I have said since the early days of the New Jerusalem Community in Cincinnati, we cannot think ourselves into a new way of living; we must live ourselves into a new way of thinking.
More than directly fighting the system, he ignores it and builds an alternative worldview where power, prestige, and possessions are not sought or even admired. Such withdrawal of allegiance is finally the most subversive act possible because the powers that be can no longer control us, either positively or negatively (by getting us to react against them). We are no longer inside their reward-and-punishment system.
It seems we must begin conservatively—with clear boundaries, identity, and a sense of respect for our reality. Then, and only then, can we move out from that strong center, according to our education and experience.
The normal pattern that I find in mythology and story is that the healthy person always begins with idealism, heroism, and black-and-white worldviews, and then moves toward nuance, compassion, exception, patience, tolerance, and wisdom. We now have it backward: People begin with no boundaries or identity and then overreact by the middle of life and need all kinds of fundamentalist certitudes, clarity, order, and absolute authority!
Most of us are not free to say “yes” before we say “no.” Our first response is normally “no”: “I don’t trust that.
The word enthusiasm (en-theos in Greek) means “filled with God.” I’m not encouraging mindless enthusiasm, but the enthusiasm that is based on intelligence, wisdom, and the great gift of hope.
True faith, which always includes hope and love, is a predisposition to “yes.”
An awful lot of activists on the left and reactionaries on the right have no positive vision, nothing they believe in, no one they are in love with. They are just overwhelmed with what’s wrong and think that by eliminating the so-called “contaminating element,” the world will be pure and right again.
One day, the mainline Christian movement will itself recognize that Jesus was never into expelling or excluding—only transforming and integrating. In fact, you might say that, for Jesus, the very act of expulsion is the problem.
What the gospel, what true religion, what true mythology gives us is a cosmic and positive vision, inside of which the soul can live safely. That’s the only place from which lasting change ever comes. Jesus’s term for that totally positive vision—not against anybody or expelling anything—is the Reign of God.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1918–2008), the Russian writer, put it even more desperately when he wrote, “the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive.”
The only way out is through a new imagination and new cosmology, created by positive God-experience.
Only with such reverence do we find confidence and coherence. Only then does the world become a safe home. Then we can see the reflection of the divine image in the human, in the animal, in the entire natural world—which has now become inherently “supernatural.”
Humanism is actually a result of the gospel, but it is not the gospel itself, because it refuses the total seeing and foundation for absolute reverence. It tries to obey the second commandment without the first, and therefore is finally inadequate.
The postmodern mind has too little respect (re-spicere, “to look again”), too little ability to look again at what it has too easily dismissed.
With too little respect, the postmodern mind won’t see all the way through things. It’s the same with a lot of therapy and psychology: They’re right, as far as they go, but they stop too soon. Healthy religion pushes us all the way through.
Christianity, in its mature forms, keeps pushing us toward the necessary tragic: “the folly of the cross,” as Paul calls it (I Corinthians 1:18).
Normally, the way God pushes us is by disillusioning us with the present mode. Until the present falls apart, we will never look for something more. We will never discover what it is that really sustains us.
All of us hate suffering, yet all religions talk about it as necessary. It seems to be the price we pay for the death of the small self and the emergence of the True Self, when we fi...
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Allowing our always-unjust wounds to, in fact, become sacred wounds, is the unique Christian name for salvation. We always learn our mystery at the price of our innocence.
If there is one consistent and clear revelation in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, it is that the God of Israel is the one who turns death into life (see Deuteronomy 32:39, Romans 4:17, 2 Corinthians 1:9).
I have been crucified with Christ [the small and false self must die]. ... and I live now not with my own life [it feels utterly inadequate and now unnecessary], but with the life of Christ who lives in me [realization of an indwelling, gratuitous Lover].
The Eastern Tradition referred to this process with the daring word divinization.
This classic pattern of transformation into who we are in God is called the paschal mystery.
The Eastern religions speak of the yin and yang of things, nature religions simply speak of darkness and light, the Jewish people speak of slavery and deliverance, we Christians speak of death and resurrection. We are all pointing to God’s universal pattern of trust and transformation. This is rightly spoken of as being “reborn,” but has less to do with an emotional church experience than a realigning life experience.
Part of the great mystery of life is that it’s just as hard to see the ecstasy and beauty of things as it is to accept the crucifixion of things.
Romano Guardini (1885–1968) said something that I still don’t like. I wish he had not said it, but I know it to be true. He said, “The imperfections of the Church are the Cross of Christ.”26 It was the high priests, the elders, and the scribes who turned Christ over for crucifixion.
We’ve “churched” many people, both good, sincere people and people who simply like religious trappings and language. But real transformation into a “new creation” is seldom the agenda.
There are three common stances in religion: (1) the old self on the occasional new path, (2) the new self on the new path, and (3) the new self on the occasional old path.
What we hear when people have really met God is that there is no fear of the present because it is always full, there is no fear of the future because God’s in charge, and there is no fear of the past because it has been healed and forgiven.
When we encounter a religion that is preoccupied with security, fear, or maintaining a positive self-image; when religion is punitive and acts as if it can lead someone to God through threat and coercion, this is junk religion.
We only need to be “control freaks” when we don’t believe that God is in charge or when we can’t trust God to be in charge. Practical atheism is probably the most common way that we all live. I know I do, most days of my life.
David Ray Griffin writes of “transformative traditionalism,”29 as opposed to cheap traditionalism that often keeps us inside of our comfort zones under the rubric of loyalty and orthodoxy.
I’ve recommended to a lot of people Bill McKibben’s book, The Age of Missing Information.30
His conclusion is that the vital information that human beings need to survive spiritually is learned more in silence than on any possible television show.
All of this forms a foundational lie about the nature of reality, which is probably a simple definition of evil.
For the most part, I see conservatives avoiding transformation and I see progressives avoiding traditions. All of us lose the vital wisdom that is necessary for the soul to survive.
