[Dialogue] 9/27/18, Progressing Spirit: Matthew Fox: Moral Issues and Ethics; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Sep 27 08:51:10 PDT 2018
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Moral Issues and Ethics
Column by Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox
September 27, 2018
A number of years ago a rabbi approached me and said to me: “You Christians should let the ten commandments go. These were given to us at a particular period in our existence and they belong to us. Instead, we Jews and millions of other people around the world are waiting to hear what those two commandments are all about that Jesus supposedly taught you.”
And of course we Christians know that those two commandments are the sixth and ninth (i.e. all about sex).
Joking aside, those two still little known commandments go something like this: “You should love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your mind.” And, "you must love your neighbor as yourself.” (Mt 22.37-39) I think it would behoove us to take the rabbi at his word. How do we love God with our whole heart and soul and mind and also love our neighbor as ourselves? And how are we doing at it? Love of God is about loving life in all its expressions and occasions, and love of self is essential for love of others.
To love self then surely requires that we know ourselves and that means certainly our true self and our deepest self as opposed to our false self or outer self, the masks we wear to please others or to fit in or to avoid knowing our true self. Thomas Merton wrote extensively about our “true self.” He said we are “at liberty to be real or unreal…be true or false, the choice is ours.” If we fail at this we live under a mask and develop an “itch with discomfort” that we must eventually pay “a psychiatrist to scratch.”(1) It is down deep that we find our capacity for love because “if the deepest ground of my being is love, then in that very love itself and nowhere else will I find myself, and the world, and my brother and Christ. It is not a question of either-or but of all-in-one.” In this unity we encounter an equality of being and we learn “Meister Eckhart’s Gleichheit (equality) which finds the same ground of love in everything.”(2) It is in this “ground of our soul or of our being, a ‘ground’ which is …enlightened and aware, because it is in immediate contact with God” that we find what the Buddhist D. T. Suzuki called the “True Self” or the “original mind.”(3) I call this “original blessing.”
To love oneself truly is also to love others—not only because we are societal animals and need community to serve, laugh, offer criticism, assist, but also because we literally can’t survive without others. And by others I don’t mean just other two-legged ones but the others who are of different species—the plants and the animals, the sun and the moon, the waters and the winged ones and the insects and the planets and the supernovas that burst and spread the elements that render our existence possible, etc. etc. Who is our neighbor? Well, all these beings are.
Consider the air that we breathe—what is more intimate than air that we breathe in with every breath? That means the air is our neighbor—are we loving it–or are we taking it for granted? Are we protecting it for our own health and that of our neighbors and our children to come—or are we ravaging it with pollutions and polluters? If we are in denial about climate change (which half of our political machinery is at this time in the US), then we are not loving our neighbors—or our descendants–and their need for healthy land and soil and food and well-nourished bodies and minds.
Love in the Biblical tradition is not sentimental. It is not soap opera love—it is about justice. Therefore balance; therefore sustainability. “Love means justice” said Meister Eckhart in the fourteenth century working out of the Jewish tradition about justice. The word “maat” in African languages means something very similar, our capacity to bring balance back, homeostasis in today’s scientific language (along with “sustainability”). Such love requires strength and perseverance and co-operation and solidarity and standing up to injustice which is its opposite.
Bishop Spong stresses that rules will not save us and are not the last word when it comes to ethics. He is correct. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century chose deliberately not to build his ethics on rules or commandments but on virtues (as did Aristotle, his mentor). Virtues are good habits that allow one to respond to the moral exigencies of one’s time when one cannot rely on rules and rule books and rule enforcers. Courage is such a virtue; and ingenuity; and creativity.
Civil disobedience, which is the method for love and justice that Gandhi and Martin Luther King employed so successfully, is about developing a virtue of non-violence or non-retaliation, not returning violence for violence but rather returning love for violence and being willing to pay the price for doing so (King went to jail 39 times for his disobedience and Gandhi also went to jail often for his).
It is notable I think that it took a Hindu to put Jesus’ teachings of love as non-violence into an ethical practice that was effective. Gandhi was standing up to a so-called “Christian nation,” namely the British empire, to wage a crusade of love and not war and retaliation. Then a generation later a Christian came along, King, who learned the practice from Gandhi and implemented it to oppose the racism, segregation and hate in the USA, also eager to label itself a “Christian nation.”
Jesus’ teaching in Matthew 25 that when you “do it to the least you do it to me” is another way of grasping compassion, justice and love as norms to live by. “Compassion is where peace and justice kiss” remarks Meister Eckhart. When one sees suffering one sees the Christ, one sees the crucifixion all over again whether one is talking about the victims of police violence or women who are abused in work places or children growing up needlessly without health care and basic food, or the homeless, or the ravishing of the rainforests that are needed not only for the purifying of the air they accomplish for us and all living species on the planet, but also for their own unique selfhood. Do humans make rainforests? No. They are a once in a lifetime event. They too are our neighbors.
To speak of love and justice is also to speak of darkness and immorality and evil. We, especially Americans, can wrap ourselves so snugly in our life blankets of rhetoric and militarism and national anthems and materialism and consumerism and the gods of comfort that we shield (or imagine we shield) ourselves from the mayhem of evil. The kind of wars that have been unleashed in the Middle East beginning with America’s invasion of Iraq need to be meditated on for the lessons to be learned. One lesson is that the reptilian brain—and an “eye for eye” mentality—does not solve human conflicts. As Gandhi warned, those who follow an eye for eye and tooth for tooth doctrine may well end up both blind and toothless. We can do better and this is what Jesus taught. Forgiveness matters; letting go is possible; moving on can happen.
There is a powerful true story of a mother in LA whose 17 year old son was murdered in a drive-by killing and when they found his killer who was a 19 year old and put him in prison she visited the young man who killed her son; then she visited him again; and again. He had had no mother. They became friends. Love is possible and forgiveness is possible. Redemption is possible.
Thomas Aquinas teaches that when a critical moral issue arises you cannot just turn to a book or a list of rules for the answers. Rather, he advises, take counsel from a person of conscience and then do your own soul-searching and let your conscience decide.
Today is a time when conscience must wake up and speak up and stand up. Whether we are talking of treating immigrants as “the least among us” and therefore “other Christs” or the oceans or the rainforests or the animals, so many of which are going extinct, or women or gay people or people of a different race or religion or ethnicity from ourselves, it is time to see all as “other Christs.” Not as other. It is time to stand up and fight; to get in touch with the capacity that we all have within us of moral outrage (to be found in the third chakra) and tap into that anger using it as energy to make love and justice happen.
This is what the prophets did—they tapped into moral outrage and then spoke up and acted up and did what Rabbi Heschel says all prophets do: They interfered. True love needs to interfere. And who are the prophets today? You are; I am; we all are. Heschel says “there lies in the recesses of every human existence a prophet.” We must plummet our recesses—seek for our true self—and operate out of there. I believe the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality name the recesses vividly for us: Our awe, wonder, joy and gratitude (Path One: The Via Positiva); Our silence and our suffering and grief (Path Two: The Via Negativa); Our Creativity (Path Three: The Via Creativa); and Our powers of Compassion, Justice Making and Healing (Path Four: The Via Transformativa). These constitute our deepest resources; they are the birthplace of the mystic/prophet in all of us.
An ethical person therefore is both a lover (a mystic) and a warrior or prophet (one who interferes with injustice). If it is true, as William Hocking says, that "the prophet is the mystic in action", then it is very clear that we must all tap into our mystical depths to find the loving self which is our true self (Paths One and Two are the mystical self). Out of that mystic self there derives the prophetic self (Paths Three and Four). New Testament scholar Dominic Crossan observes that for Paul you cannot be a Christian without being a mystic.
This is the path of love that Jesus called us to: The love of the mystic and the love of the prophet, the love of our true selves that reach out organically to love all the other creatures we share life with and with whom we share a love of life. Isn’t that just about everyone and every creature? Aren’t all creatures striving to love life in their own way? And therefore God?
~ Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox
Click here to read online and to share your thoughts
About the Author
Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox holds a doctorate in spirituality from the Institut Catholique de Paris and has authored 32 books on spirituality and contemporary culture that have been translated into 69 languages. Fox has devoted 45 years to developing and teaching the tradition of Creation Spirituality and in doing so has reinvented forms of education and worship. His work is inclusive of today’s science and world spiritual traditions and has awakened millions to the much neglected earth-based mystical tradition of the West. He has helped to rediscover Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas. Recent books include The Lotus & The Rose: Conversations on Tibetan Buddhism and Mystical Christianity with Lama Tsomo; Naming the Unnameable: 89 Wonderful and Useful Names for God...Including the God Without a Name; new paperback version of Stations of the Cosmic Christ with Bishop Marc Andrus. A Special Eckhart at Erfurt workshop in June, 2019.
With young leaders Fox is launching a new spiritual (not religious) “order” called the Order of the Sacred Earth (OSE) that is welcoming to people of all faith traditions and none and whose ‘glue’ is a common vow: “I promise to be the best lover of Mother Earth and the best defender of Mother Earth that I can be.”
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(1.) Cited in Matthew Fox, A Way To God: Thomas Merton’s Creation Spirituality Journey (Novato, Ca: New World Library, 2016), 185.
(2.) Ibid., 44.
(3.) Ibid., 34.
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Question & Answer
Q: By A Reader
Can this (Christian) faith create a new institutional form that fosters a truth-seeking, universal community?
A: By Joran Slane Oppelt
Dear Reader,
I don’t believe that any one spiritual tool, practice or teaching will satisfy the needs of everyone on the planet. A universal community under the umbrella of one religion is a Utopian ideal.
Pluralism and religious diversity increasingly allows for the inclusion of many voices and has shown us the promise of a world where those voices live side-by-side. Conversely, the corruption and abuse of power within the ranks of Catholicism (universal church) has shown this and future generations the dangers of gathering too tightly under one umbrella and ceding our values to a powerful few – something Jesus himself warned against.
Secondly, if by “truth” we mean the domain of the empirical and verifiable facts, then we have miles to go. We have now entered the era of “post-truth,” where all opinions are valid and all perspectives may be politicized. Seeking the “truth” means that we must agree the truth exists – that we can both look up at the sky and agree that it is blue based on testable data. The post-truth era has already caused seismic change in things like science, media, ecology, climate, social justice, race/gender studies, women’s rights and religion.
The “enlightenment” of the 17th century allowed us to separate and integrate the value spheres of beautiful, good and true. It allowed us to speak three different languages, from three distinct perspectives (I, We and It). It protected and preserved the realms of spirituality, law and science. It has kept people like Robert Mapplethorpe and Rob Bell from being burned at the stake and it has allowed things like natural science, astronomy and philosophy to flourish.
But, seeking a personal “Truth” is a dangerous proposition in post-modern times. White Christian males (those who have long held political and religious power) are being threatened by diversity and are crying out that they are the ones being victimized.
If Christianity – the full spectrum of religious experience and expression, its institutions, teachings, writings, sacraments, icons, saints, symbols, etc. – expects to survive postmodernism, it must let go of the “universal” idea and embrace the pain and discomfort of transformation.
~ Joran Slane Oppelt
Click here to read and share online
About the Author
Joran Slane Oppelt Joran Slane Oppelt is an international speaker, author, interfaith minister, life coach and award-winning producer and singer/songwriter. He is the owner of the Metta Center of St. Petersburg and founder of Integral Church – an interfaith and interspiritual organization in Tampa Bay committed to “transformative practice, community service and religious literacy.” Joran is the author of Sentences, The Mountain and the Snow and co-author of Order of the Sacred Earth (with Matthew Fox), Integral Church: A Handbook for New Spiritual Communities and Transform Your Life: Expert Advice, Practical Tools, and Personal Stories. He serves as President of Interfaith Tampa Bay and has spoken around the world about spirituality and the innovation of religion.
He has presented at South by Southwest in Austin, TX; Building the New World Conference in Radford, VA; Parliament of the World’s Religions in Salt Lake City; Embrace Festival in Portland, OR and Integral European Conference in Siófok, Hungary.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Lamb of God: Jesus for the Non-Religious, Part III
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong on March 29, 2006
In this series, to which I am returning periodically through the year, I seek to draw our attention to the person of Jesus before the creeds were formed and doctrines were created. I even want to get to who Jesus was before the gospels were written. My goal is to understand the original “Jesus experience” and perhaps even to enter it. It is important to note first that at least forty years had elapsed between the end of Jesus” earthly life and the writing of Mark, the first gospel, and at least seventy years between the end of Jesus” life and the writing of the last gospel, John. In that period of 40 to 70 years interpretive data drawn primarily from the Jewish scriptures were added to Jesus that formed the portrait that the gospel writers simply assumed. In the last article in this series I sought to demonstrate that the gospels reveal a Jesus who had already been intertwined with the content of the Jewish Scriptures, shaped by the liturgy of the Jewish people, and interpreted through the lens of Jewish messianic expectations, none of which could have occurred except inside the synagogue. Christians are not generally aware that the Christian Church did not separate from the synagogue until the final years of the 9th decade. Before that date, the disciples of Jesus, like Jesus himself, were regular participants in its life. Support for this conclusion is present on almost every page of the four gospels.
In what is now the third column in this series, I want to examine a familiar Jewish symbol, “the lamb of God,” that the disciples of Jesus obviously used to interpret his death at the dawn of the Christian movement. It is a symbol that comes directly out of the synagogue liturgy for the Day of Atonement, called Yom Kippur. The fact that Christians have used a lamb as a symbol for Jesus and that we refer to Jesus in liturgical worship today as “the Lamb of God” reveals this connection. In addition familiar evangelical phrases like “Jesus died for your sins or my sins,” or those times when Christians speak of being “washed in the blood of the lamb” are also related to Yom Kippur. Yet despite these clearly borrowed references, most Christians, knowing little or nothing about Yom Kippur, or the way in which that Jewish holy day has shaped the language of contemporary Christianity, continue to use this symbol, sometimes in ways that are strange and even bizarre to the original Jewish meaning. So I begin this column by introducing the meaning of Yom Kippur and its influence on Christian practice.
On the Day of Atonement the Jews were personally required to concentrate for a 24-hour period, on their understanding of human life as sinful and alienated from God. The dimensions of that day are spelled out in the Torah (see Lev.16: 1-28 and 23:16 ff). It is a time for fasting, penitence and seeking the forgiveness of God. The Yom Kippur liturgy required the taking of two animals (goats or lambs, but later tradition has made one a lamb and the other a goat) from the flocks to present to the High Priest. These animals were required to be young, healthy males without a spot, blemish or broken bone. Physical perfection was of the highest importance. Since human beings were not thought to be able to enter God’s presence in their alienated state, they sought to gain access to God by offering a perfect offering. Physical perfection was part of that. In time this lamb also came to be thought of as morally perfect. Animals do not have freedom of choice so it was presumed the lamb could not choose to do evil. It was, therefore, seen as a perfect symbol to be offered to God in place of the imperfect people.
One of the creatures was then chosen by lot to be sacrificed. After being slaughtered the blood of this “lamb of God” was placed on the mercy seat in the Holy of Holies, the spot in the Temple where God was thought to dwell. The blood of the perfect lamb thus covered people’s access to God. They went to God only through the blood of the lamb.
The second animal was then brought to the High Priest. Holding its horns and bowing over it, the high priest began to confess the sins of the people. The symbol here was that as the high priest confessed, all of the evil inside the people came out and landed on the head and back of this animal, making it the “bearer of their sins”. The newly cleansed people celebrated their purity, by pronouncing curses on this sin-bearing creature and calling for its death. However, this animal was not killed at Yom Kippur, instead it was run into the wilderness bearing the sins of the people with it. The Book of Leviticus called this creature, “The Scapegoat.”
Using the Yom Kippur symbol for Jesus entered the New Testament first in Paul who related it to his death. In I Corinthians (15:1-6), Paul asserted that the death of Jesus was not purposeless, since his death, like the death of the sacrificial lamb, was “for our sins.”
Mark, the first gospel, (ca.70 C.E.) added to this Yom Kippur connection by interpreting the crucifixion as a “ransom” offered for many. Jesus, like the sacrificial lamb, paid the ransom required, making further punishment unnecessary.
The identification between Jesus and the sacrificial lamb was complete by the time the 4th Gospel was written (95-100C.E.) when the author portrayed John the Baptist referring to Jesus with words taken directly from Yom Kippur: “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the Sins of the World.” Liturgical Christian churches use these words, now called the “Agnus Dei” at almost every Eucharist, while in evangelical churches these words created the idea that is called the substitutionary theory of the Atonement, which asserts that though you and I deserve to be punished for our sins, Jesus has absorbed that punishment for us, freeing us from our sins.
Looking deeply into the gospel tradition, we discover more subtle influences of Yom Kippur in those texts. When John’s gospel tells the story of the legs of two thieves being broken to hasten death (19:31-38), he notes that the legs of Jesus were not broken. That was not literal memory at work. It was rather an attempt to preserve the symbol of Yom Kippur in the portrait of the cross. The new Lamb of God must, like Yom Kippur’s lamb, be physically perfect.
When the gospels record crowds calling “crucify him, crucify him,” they were making it clear that Jesus had been identified with the sin-bearing creature of Yom Kippur to whom words were also shouted calling for its death, the fate of all sin bearers.
The story of Jesus” crucifixion was thus seen and interpreted through the lens of these Yom Kippur rituals. Jesus, like the animals, was a young, healthy male with no blemishes or broken bones. He also came to be understood as the morally sinless one. Under the pressure of this interpretive symbol, it was said of Jesus, he was “tempted in all things and yet without sin.” His death was thus said to be like the death of the sacrificial lamb. His perfection covered the imperfections of the people and gained for them access to the presence of God. People began to talk of being “washed in the blood of the lamb.” The Jewish disciples of Jesus understood this identification as a symbol of the human yearning to be at one with God. It was their way of saying that the death of Jesus was not a tragedy, but was a free and complete act of human self-giving. In offering his life without the need to protect, defend or preserve his selfhood, they were saying that in the death of Jesus they had caught a glimpse of who and what God is. They had experienced in Jesus life fully lived, love wastefully given, and the ground of all being giving them the courage to be themselves. The death of Jesus was thus originally interpreted as an act of ultimate self-giving that greatly enhanced life by draining from human beings all their sinfulness that served to separate them both from God and from each other. The self-giving act created in its recipients a response of wholeness. When the Gentile world, into which Christianity had moved by the end of the 1st century, received this symbol, the concentration was no longer on the unfettered gift and the willing sacrifice that love always makes, it was rather focused on a legal concept. The fallen world deserved punishment. God was obliged to provide that punishment so justice would result. The punishment due to sinful people was, however, more than human beings could endure and so Jesus absorbed it for us. God laid on him the punishment deserved by all. Salvation understood as undeserved restoration became the dominant note of Christianity. Justice was served. Debt was paid. Life was rescued. We were washed in the blood of the “Lamb of God.” When this contract was literalized, it was not life and freedom that resulted but gratitude and indebtedness. This is how Christianity became so totally identified with our understanding of human wretchedness and with the use of guilt as the emotion of control. From that day to this, Christianity would never be the same. Guilt always distorts life and unrelieved gratitude ultimately issues in chronic dependency, a combination that has never enhanced life or increased love for anyone.
What once had been a Jewish liturgical symbol, expressing the human yearning to be at one with God, was literalized and a distortion of Christianity immediately began. Its marks are everywhere. Why do we baptize children? To wash away the stain of the “fall” into which we are hopelessly born. Why do we celebrate the Eucharist? To reenact the sacrifice of Jesus who rescued us and filled us with dependent gratitude. Why do we sing of God’s Amazing Grace? Because it “saved a wretch like me.” Why do we in worship say such things as: “Lord, have mercy,” “we are miserable offenders,” unfit to “gather up the crumbs” from beneath the Lord’s table? It all derives from Yom Kippur legalistically misunderstood by Christians. Christianity, which began as a call to new life, was transformed into a religion of guilt and control, sin and punishment. That is the direction in which most Christian doctrines finally flowed. To reclaim the promise of life, this theology of sacrifice, death and sin must be first raised to consciousness and then banished, for it is not compatible with the Jesus who claimed that his purpose was to give life and to give it absolutely.
~ John Shelby Spong
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