2021.10.10 Can Spirituality Trump Morality?

Sin, by one definition, happens when our own needs cause us to disregard, incorrectly assess, or fail to consider the needs of others. When this happens, individuals, as well as systems, fall into sin. Moral condemnations are made. What happens to Spirituality, that profound inner connection to Soul?

Even ancient biblical writers pondered this question. In the beginning God created everything in perfect order, hunky dory, with only one proviso, one moral restriction. Don’t mess with the tree that will give you both good and evil knowledge. You’ll fall into sin.and your life will be full of both good and evil. You will always be free to choose the good, the evil, or some mixture thereof. Oh, you won’t like the rules and the moral rectitude you think you need to live by, yet you will discover that when you get rigid about this moral effort, you risk losing your own soul’s health, your deep connection with the Love that created you and still re-creates you daily. So good luck. Take with you these clothes to protect you  from the elements, and remember that love triumphs over sin. 

All of us fall into sin, lose “Eden.”  All of us lament, all of us protest, and all of us struggle to re-create “Eden.” All of us hurt ourselves and others in this process.

My first husband and I struggled to be good spouses and good parents. We did what we thought was the right thing, the moral thing, according to the rules of the day and the promises we had made. We tried to stay married and to be good parents for twenty years. Over time we both broke promises, hurt the children, hurt each other. We grabbed for what I am calling our spirituality, our freedom-of-being. The “eden” of our whole loving family fell into sin.

While fulfilling my moral commitment to be a good mother, I’d neglected my own needs. Such imbalances may not be strictly immoral, but they are surely spiritual sin. The tremors from this loss of trust echoed for years. Over years I have been able to make amends, share tears, and make amends. Amends do not correct or re-create, but they can reconnect and heal. 

Institutions, too, fall into sin. The sin of the Institutional Church-Mama, all religions really, has always been the tendency to narrow access to God with rules and moral rigor. Spirituality, the soul-needs of the faithful, gets neglected. Worship does not entirely fill that need or heal that inner longing to know and trust God—Love itself. 

Spirituality can trump morality in the human heart. 

*  *  *  *

“There are as many paths to God as there are souls on earth.” Rumi. 

Rumi (1217-1273) was a Persian poet whose full Arabic name is too long to manage. He was Iranian, and identified as a Sufi Muslim—deeply, mystically committed to the Oneness of God and consequently the oneness of being:  

“On the seeker’s path, wise men and fools are one.”

“In that faith, Muslims and pagans are one.”   

A favorite Sufi parable tells about blind men washing an elephant, each one washing a different part, and each one concluding that the whole elephant can be described and defined by that one part.  We all know how misguided such narrow knowledge is, and yet Rumi compared it to the ways of institutional religions—each one posing as the best, each one too narrow. Rumi, a teacher, spiritual guru, poet, and theologian, did, nevertheless, give primacy to Islam and the Q’uran. A popular saying in Arabic apologizes: “Love, however, has its own many other dialects.” 

American religious scholar/philosopher and one-time professor of religious studies at UC Berkeley, Huston Smith (1919-2016), was born in China and raised in a Methodist missionary family. He devoted his study and life work to bringing the world’s religions together in order to promote understanding, justice, and peace. He said: 

“If we take the world’s enduring religions at their best, we discover the distilled wisdom of the human race.” 

Although a Christian, Smith had no aversion to taking his “vitamins” from other religions. He wrote: 

“Institutions are not pretty. Show me a pretty government. Healing is wonderful, but the AMA? Learning is wonderful, but universities? The same is true for religion. Religion is institutionalized spirituality.” 

This feels harsh, yet I can see how institutions, even small systems, become fearful and rigid. Families, societies, businesses, nations, religions get corseted by their need for moral rules and regulations, to such a degree that the beauty of personhood itself, not to mention Nature and her ways, gets stifled if not lost. Overbearing moral regulation stifles Love. Morality trumps spirituality. The system falls into sin. 

But do we not need organization? Even Yoga and Twelve Step Recovery are organized. The idea is to pay attention to the rigor, and by your own heart keep it from exploiting those, including yourself, seeking spiritual wholeness. 

  *  *  *  *  

Jesus is remembered as liberator and reformer of systems, both political and religious, that had fallen into sin. The love of God in and for all creation was gasping for air in stifling systems. When Jesus asks a rich young man, sincerely moral and devoted to his faith—upstanding and ambivalent—to give away his wealth to the poor and the hungry, he was calling for systemic change. He was asking for less morality and more spirituality—not chaos without organization, but living breathing space for all Creation.  

All we creatures, great and small

are the heirs of sacred wealth,

and we all, together, live

by the other’s Lasting Health.     (Michael Hudson. Songs for the Cycle, 2004)

2012.09.12 Back To Basics

 I met Joan Chittister, OSB, up close and personal over a bathroom sink at Regis college where she was about to deliver an address to hundreds of fans—hers and Godde’s. She was frantically searching the sink bowl for her contact lens. I told her to stop up the drain and secretly thanked heaven this wasn’t a toilet bowl.  We peered in, groped about, seeking a tiny transparent flap of plastic, essential to Sister Joan’s full vision. We saw nothing.

THERE IT IS! she suddenly shrieked with the joy of a child, scooped it up gingerly, indelicately slapped it into her eye, gave me a hug, and whisk! she was gone—at a near gallop, still a filly at 75.  

Her talk was swoonable: classic religio-spiritual themes of love, justice, peace for all, the Godde-given power of women to transform the world and church, disloyalty as obedience, feminist theology, and a God who delivers the goods with the help of good men AND good women.

Here is Joan Chittister as a newly minted nun with the Benedictine sisters of Erie PA. The photo is old, her face and body young, and her soul eternal. Her proclamations and vision are the same yesterday today and tomorrow, even though the traditional nuns' habit has been replaced by civvies and her eyes need contacts to see—but not to have vision.

Text:  I do not believe that just because you're opposed to abortion that that makes you pro-life. I fact, I think in many cases your morality is deeply lacking if all you want is a child born but not a child fed, not a child educated, not a child housed.       And why would I think that you don't?       Because you don't want any tax money to go there.   That's not pro-life.  That's pro-birth.  We need a much broader conversation on the morality of pro-life"                  -We the People

INDEED WE DO.  SAY IT SISTER.   

(Myself, I'm pro-life—all life . . . AND pro-choice.)











 

2012.05.23 How Should Things Be? A God's Eye View.

How ya gonna live your dash? These words startled Fred Allen out of a breakdown and into a breakthrough.  The dash is what falls between a birth date and a death date on one’s tombstone.  The question has a flavor of the eternal in it.

Allen had been working as a member of a tie-down team in the death house of a Texas prison. His job was to make sure an inmate was securely strapped onto the gurney before a lethal injection was administered. The tie-down job could be compared with the ancient work of nailing down (securing) criminals to crucifixion crosses in ancient times. No one should  have to such a thing.

Fred Allen had officiated at 125 executions until one day he strapped down a woman, the first to be thus executed, and something happened.

I heard Allen’s story in Werner Herzog’s documentary film, “Into the Abyss. A Tale of Death, a Tale of Life,” a film that chills and warms simultaneously a story fraught with contradictions.

Herzog, with skill and compassion, interviewed everyone affected by a violent crime in which three people were murdered. The crime had no defensible motive (stealing a car); it was perpetrated by young and undeveloped brains out of control; two 18 year old young men were found guilty; and it happened in a “gated” community. 

I heard the voices of the murderers and their families, families of the victims, the prison chaplain, and law enforcement officials.  Some years had passed but they spoke as if it were fresh though not emotionally immediate.  Capital punishment is legal in Texas, but no state can afford to wear the self-righteous badge on this issue.

Herzog’s documentary, however,  was not polemical. Rather it sought to unveil the inner story from the perspective of ALL the participants. It was like a play, each interview a scene, the script coming from the hearts of all of the principals who together made a whole story, a parable that challenges but does not tell you how to think or what exactly to do—like most biblical parables.

This drama of the human soul—territory of the unexpected—unfolded in uncanny and utterly unpredictable ways. Listening, I could almost get a God’s eye view into the spiritual innocence of the bared soul.  I wondered if I could know God through what should happen or through what shouldn’t happen—or both?

Michael Perry, 28, was executed on July 1, 2010 for the murders.  Perry’s co-defendant, Jason Burkett, in a separate trial, received a life sentence. 

Was it a fluke or an injustice that Burkett got a lesser sentence than Perry? Shouldn’t he too have been executed?  Perhaps, but his life was spared because of the not too late confessional testimony of his father. With  uncharacteristic humility, Des Burkett, a hardened criminal softened. From prison he spoke of his own criminality and lifelong drug addiction. His son never had a chance at a life, he said, because he never had a father. Two women jurors wept.

What if we could interview all the players in Jesus’ execution trials:Pilate, Pilate’s wife, Herod, Peter, Mary, Barabbas, crowds? What if we could get the inside story?  We try feebly but we really can’t explain it forensically. But Jesus had a father, too, a spiritual one by whom he felt abandoned and to whom he cried out. Like Burkett’s earthly father, Jesus’ Heavenly Father intervened to make sure His son didn’t die forever —as intended. Should he never have died, or should he never have been raised?  Mary Magdalene wept.

Its easy to say I’m against capital punishment. It’s not easy to see the issue made flesh. I couldn’t play either/or. Morality went out the window.  I had to participate in a God’s eye view‚ even though I should have felt disgust, shouldn’t have felt empathy with “bad guys” when my heart had melted listening to the grief of the woman who had lost her mother and her brother, “my whole family in one fell swoop.”

At one point Herzog, joshed with Perry about fate and faith, allowing as how the Old Testament would have been in favor of capital punishment, but Jesus probably wouldn’t have favored it, right?  He fed Perry his line and split divinity in half—a serious theological error that should have been cut.  Still, it was endearing. The interview must have been difficult for Herzog, too.

Michael Perry, dark-haired, young, handsome, leaned into his words. He was mere days away from death yet he spoke with hope. “Ya never know,” he said with a shrug and a smile. He wasn’t a monster, simply a child. I’d never been able to separate the sinner from the sin, more than in my head, until seeing this film.

At the end Perry said his last words: "I want to let everyone here who is involved in this atrocity know they're forgiven by me.” Was he trying to emulate Jesus? Who should be forgiving and who forgiven?  He sobbed briefly, mouthed "I love you" to his mother, and twice whispered, "I'm coming home, Dad." I don’t know if he meant God or his absent father.

The lethal injection took nine minutes. 

Fred Allen strapped and watched. He had spent time with the death row inmates, most of them men. He had provided amenities, like a solicitous mother.  He took orders, served a last meal, maybe chatted. He made sure they were clean and dressed in their own clothes, no prison garb. Then he escorted them to their death. It was his job; it provided a fine pension. He should  do his civic duty.

Nevertheless, when Allen had to strap a woman he soon broke down.  The woman had been calm, accepting. Allen shook and sobbed convulsively. This shouldn’t happen to a woman.

“I just couldn’t control myself at all,” he said. “This thought came to me, how ya gonna live your dash? I’m gonna stand still and watch the birds. How come there are so many humming birds? Ever notice?”

Fred Allen retired early—and forfeited his entire pension.

Jason Burkett is serving his second 30 year sentence. He married in prison and his wife is now pregnant even though they were never allowed to touch each other. Parthenogenesis or sperm as contraband? Burkett will soon be a father.

How ya gonna live your dash?  How should ya?