[Dialogue] 8/05/2021, Progressing Spirit, Rev Matthew Syrdal: When Beliefs Kill Cultures; Spong revisited

[Ellie Stock]

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When Beliefs Kill Cultures
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|  Essay by Rev. Matthew Syrdal
August 5, 2021

Are our beliefs killing us? 

Beliefs are a funny thing to try to pin down. If we are honest, they are slippery and largely unconscious. When enough of them get mixed together in a large enough group they build up force like a gathering storm. It makes you wonder, are any beliefs actually rational? Perhaps. But they are also bound together with some powerfully energetic emotions. We have seen, quite horrifically, how our beliefs kill others. The horror of Indigenous genocide as countless unmarked graves are unearthed near boarding schools. Beliefs quickly shape-shift into things like attitudes, actions and behaviors. And when enough of them meet together in the back-rooms they can become things like policies and laws. Things like Manifest Destiny and the Doctrine of Discovery. Bigger shadowy beliefs can activate and manipulate smaller, more visible and energized beliefs. We think we have them, but sometimes I wonder if they have us.

In this age of reckoning and apocalypse, when everything buried under the layers of time is revealed with the melting of surface appearance, I find myself experiencing numbness at the sheer overwhelm of it all, the magnitude of suffering of the more-than-human world, whole communities of color, pervasive gender inequity, the discovery of the countless graves of indigenous children forcibly removed from their homes and tribes. I am tired of all the words, weighed down by the beliefs layer on the surface.

As a white man who was raised Christian, I move between feeling numb and a deep and pervasive grief that never seems to go away. Awakening to my own complicity on so many levels with many others over the astounding magnitude of an entire history of beliefs and practices in the Western World—and so the Church—that has functioned largely as tools for cultural appropriation, forced assimilation and strategies like the Interpretatio Christiana (the adaptation of non-Cristian aspects of culture and history—even the landscape itself—into the worldview of Christianity) that has led, or is leading, to the utter destruction of entire cultures.

“Wild” is a term that touches a deep place in a growing number of us in the Western world. Wild is more than a trending meme, it is a symbol of both a longing and an urgency in the present nightmare of our modern Western industrial culture. Even the word “culture” is a bit of a misnomer, pitted as it has become against life enhancing ways and Earth-based rhythms of indigenous wisdom. First used by ancient Roman orator Cicero in the context of the cultivation of the soul, or “cultura animi”, perhaps more importantly it offered an agricultural image for the development of the soul, the highest possible ideal for human development. For thousands of years men (sic) of philosophy, of religion, and of Empire understood “culture” from a teleological perspective, that it could move us toward attaining a perfection of virtue and overcome our original barbarism, and only then might we become fully human. 

We have seen the end of that fantasy today. Signs of cultural regression across the globe and a resurgence of what Riane Eisler calls “androcracy.” Escalation of violence, climate emergency, reactionary and oppressive patriarchal values of Church and State, the poison of white supremacy, and systemic racism. We have seen through the veneer of these stories of “progress”, of human or cultural achievement, down to a bone truth at a deep structural level: systemic racism, poverty, and climate catastrophe all point to our severance from Earth, our original wound as a species — a complete disconnection from “the wild” in nature and the human soul.

“Wild” comes from the Old English wilde, meaning the natural state, uncultivated, undomesticated and untamed — something like the born world (and Self) in its primordial state. It shares a root with an older Germanic word wald (from which we get wield) meaning to reign, govern, possess, especially in the sense of self-willed or self-ruled, to be self-possessed. The nature-based root, wald, originated in high lands covered with woods, forest.

When my colleagues and I birthed Seminary of the Wild, the big questions we began to ask ourselves were: what kind of liminal space in community is needed in our times to hold people as their old story unravels, when a new story has not yet been birthed? How can we offer a space of healing for the poison of Western industrial culture to slowly become extracted from the soils of the soul? “Seminary” comes from an old word that means literally, a wild seed bed. We began to ask ourselves what life ways might help us heal our deep split from Earth? What is needed to rewild the Self, what new wineskins might hold the good wine? How might we sift through the debris of our decomposing god-images to discover new seeds of possibility? Is it even possible to rewild Western culture, or has all been lost?

Is human culture necessarily at odds with wildness? Wildness perhaps defined as s life-enhancing way of relating to our own diverse and precious species, and the fragile and powerful beauty of the more-than-human world? Can we reclaim, or rewild “culture?” Culture originally meant the place we are called to care for, to till, and to serve, to worship, as in the root “cultus,” from where we get the religious depth in humanity. In the second creation myth in Genesis, we discover the Human One whom Adonai Elohim in-breathed with nephesh (breath, soul) — along with all the other beings in the animate world —  and placed in the Garden, planted in the Ground, the very depths of soul. It his here Adam received his name, from the ground. Adamah. It is here that Eve becomes the Mother of Life. Many indigenous peoples across continents remember the stories of their ancestors who emerged from under the Earth. This myth forms the basis of the original archetype of vocation for the Israelites, to till and to serve the Ground, the source of all Life. Myth returns the story of culture to its original roots in nature, and this re-binding is the religious function.

I do not believe that politics will save us. Our institutions are crumbling. There is no ‘mana’ left in our religious systems. The tyranny of the ‘thinking man,’ the legacy of the age of reason — cogito ergo sum — must topple over like a statue. Beliefs cannot get us there. The only hope we have in a possible future is a comprehensive change in consciousness, a rewilding of culture — that is to say, a return to the ground.

This return is, in a sense, a re-membrance. A holy re-membrance, that is to say a mystery. And so I have been musing about the old ways of Sacrament, the old sense of living in ceremony, with the seasons, cycles, powers — with holy Earth. I wonder about the Word made flesh, the flesh of the world in which we are embedded, in which we belong in this mystery of entangled reciprocity.

The poet and prophet Isaiah speaks to a sense of divine action, inter-being and sacred reciprocity:

             For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
             and do not return there until they have watered the earth,
             making it bring forth and sprout,
             giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater,

             so shall my word be that goes out from my mouth;
             it shall not return to me empty,
             but it shall accomplish that which I purpose,
             and succeed in the thing for which I sent it.
 
Perhaps we have lost the sense that we are food as well as eater. That death itself is a mystery that opens like a door from the halls of life. It seems to me that if there is any hope for rewilding culture, reconnecting culture with nature, then we need to revisit the sacraments.

What I call Wild Sacrament is a return to the sacredness of bodies. Human bodies. Bodies of color. Sensual, sexual and reproductive bodies. Bodies of astonishing biodiversity and staggering beauty. Bodies of land, of bioregion. Ocean and sky bodies. Sacrament trusts the wisdom of the body of Earth and the deeper divinity that undergirds emotion and even reason. Sacrament is not only a recovery of mystery, but of intimacy.

Irish poet John O Donohue writes, “The body is a sacrament… a visible sign of invisible grace. In that definition there is a fine acknowledgement of how the unseen world comes to expression in the visible world. This desire for expression lies deep at the heart of the invisible world. All our inner life and intimacy of soul longs to find an outer mirror. It longs for a form in which it can be seen, felt, and touched. The body is the mirror where the secret world of the soul comes to expression. The body is a sacred threshold.”

~ Rev. Matthew Syrdal


Read online here

About the Author
Rev. Matthew Syrdal MDiv. lives in the front range of Colorado with his beautiful family. Matt is an ordained pastor in the Presbyterian church (USA), founder and lead guide of WilderSoul and Church of Lost Walls and co-founder of Seminary of the Wild. Matt speaks at conferences and guides immersive nature-based experiences around the country. In his years of studying ancient Christian Rites of Initiation, world religions, anthropology, rites-of-passage and eco- psychology, Matt seeks to re-wild what it means to be human. His work weaves in myth and ceremony in nature as a way for people to enter into conversation with the storied world in which they are a part. Matt’s passion is guiding others in the discovery of “treasure hidden in the field” of their deepest lives cultivating deep wholeness and re-enchantment of the natural world to apprentice fully and dangerously to the kingdom of god. Matt is a coach and a certified Wild Mind nature-based human development guide through the Animas Valley Institute and is currently training to become a soul initiation guide through the SAIP program.
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Question & Answer

 

Q: By A Reader

If Jesus did not die on a cross to cover our sin, then what was the purpose of him dying? What was the purpose of his life? Was it to show us how to simply be "good people?"


A: By Rev. Irene Monroe
 


Dear Reader,

As a figure that has dominated Western culture and Christianity for over 2,000 years, too little attention is paid to Jesus' death. As Christians, we move swiftly from Good Friday to Easter/Resurrection Sunday.  If more focus were spent on the reasons for his death and the systems of oppression that brought about his demise, violence against marginalized people would cease to exist. However, without the contextualization and accountability of the violence enacted upon Jesus, the cycle of violence continues.

In the year 33 A.D., Jesus was unquestionably a religious threat to conservative Jews because of his unorthodox views and practice of Jewish Law. He was viewed as a political threat to the Roman government simply because he was a Jew.

As an instrument for execution by Roman officials during Jesus' time, the cross's symbolic nature and its symbolic value can both be seen as the valorization of suffering and abuse, especially in the lives of the oppressed.

For those of us on the margins, a Christology mounted on the belief that "Jesus died on the cross for our sins" instead of "Jesus died on the cross because of our sins" not only exalts Jesus as the suffering servant, but it also ritualizes suffering as redemptive. While suffering points to the need for redemption, suffering in and of itself is not redemptive, and it does not always correlate to one's sinfulness. For example, the belief that undeserved suffering is endured by faith, and that it has a morally educative component makes the powerful insensitive to the plight of others, and it forces the less powerful to be complacent to their suffering – therefore, maintaining the status quo.

The cross is the locus of redemption insofar as it serves as a lens to critically examine and make the connections between the abuses of power and institutions of domination that brought about the suffering Jesus endured during his time - to the abuses of power and institutions of domination that brings about the suffering which women, people of color and sexual minorities are enduring in our present day.

When suffering is understood as an ongoing cycle of abuse that goes on unexamined and unaccounted for, we can then begin to see its manifestation in systems of racism, sexism, classism, heterosexism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, to name a few,  in our everyday lives. With a new understanding of suffering and how it victimizes the innocent and its aborts the Christian mission of inclusiveness, Jesus' death at Calvary invites a different hermeneutic than its classically held one.

When the Christian community looks to the cross, we must see not only Jesus but also the many other faces of God crucified as God's people today. In so doing, we see the image of God in ourselves, the image of God as ourselves, and the image of God in each other. We then deepen the church's solidarity with all who suffer -those who are Christ in our midst. 

~ Rev. Irene Monroe

Read and share online here

About the Author
The Reverend Monroe does a weekly Monday segment, “All Revved Up!” on NPR's WGBH (89.7 FM). She is a weekly Friday commentator on New England Channel NEWS. Monroe is the Boston voice for Detour’s African American Heritage Trail, Guided Walking Tour of Beacon Hill: Boston’s Black Women Abolitionists. A Huffington Post blogger and a syndicated religion columnist; her columns appear the Boston LGBTQ newspaper Baywindows, Cambridge Chronicle, and the Boston Globe.
Monroe states that her “columns are an interdisciplinary approach drawing on critical race theory, African American, queer and religious studies. As a religion columnist I try to inform the public of the role religion plays in discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer people.” Her papers are at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College’s research library on the history of women in America. Click here to visit her website.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited


Examining the Story of the Cross
Part I: Analyzing the Details of the Crucifixion

Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
March 3, 2011
 The story of the cross is clearly the focal point of the New Testament with the last week of Jesus’ life taking up about a third of the content in each of the four gospels.  Next to the birth narratives, which are contained only in Matthew and Luke, the account of the Passion of Jesus is the most familiar part of the New Testament to Christian people. That familiarity is, however, not very well informed.  To put new understanding into this well-known narrative is the thing I will seek to do in a series of columns that will carry us up until Easter.

The final week in Jesus’ life begins with what we now call the Palm Sunday procession. It then moves toward the Maundy Thursday “Last Supper,” the betrayal in the Garden of Gethsemane, the trial before the Sanhedrin, the trial before Pilate, the introduction of the character we call Barabbas, the purple robe, the crown of thorns and finally the story of the crucifixion itself.  The first observation we need to make when we look at this material, is that what most people think they know is far more a blending and a smoothing over of real differences that mark the original separate biblical accounts.  This means that most readers have not yet embraced the fact that the story of Jesus’ passion is not literal history at all, but a pious interpretation in which even the familiar story of the end of Jesus’ life shows evidence of growth and development over the years as each successive writer began to fill in the blanks in imaginative ways and with the judicious use of the Hebrew Scriptures.  Today, in the first in this series of columns, I will seek to pull this seemingly foundational story apart and show how it was actually constructed over a period of about half a century in the writings of the New Testament.

Let me begin by stating clearly that, while I am convinced that there is literal historical memory at the core of this story, the details are not history at all, but legendary and interpretive accretions.  I will seek in this and subsequent columns to demonstrate both of these observations.

The central historical fact, which I find indisputable, is that Jesus of Nazareth was crucified during the reign and by the action of the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, who served in this office by appointment of the Caesar from 26-36 CE.  Beyond that central fact, however, all eye witness details seem to disappear to be replaced by the strategy of forcing the story of the crucifixion into the mold of messianic expectations through a study of the Hebrew Scriptures.  Let me now lay out the various details found in the story of the Passion of Jesus in the order that each was developed from the Jewish biblical sources available to the followers of Jesus.

Paul is the first writer of any part of the New Testament.  He wrote all of his authentic epistles within a span of years between 51 CE at the earliest and 64 CE at the latest.  The initial fact that we need to embrace in this study is that the work of Paul is as close to the events of Holy Week as we can get in written materials.  If Jesus was crucified around 30 CE, as most New Testament scholars now agree, then it was twenty-one years, or a full generation, before any words about the crucifixion that we still possess were written down.  Twenty-one years is a long time to pass down any recollection by word of mouth and have it be rendered accurately.

Paul refers to the cross of Jesus on seven occasions in his epistles and he uses the word “crucified” in reference to Jesus on ten other occasions.  In none of these accounts, however, does he give any narrative details.  In I Corinthians: 11, for the first time Paul makes a reference to the institution of the last supper and to Jesus being “handed over,” a word that later was translated “betrayed.”  That is the entire origin of the traitor story.  He does not, however, suggest either that the last supper was identical or even associated with the Passover or that the betrayal was at the hands of one of the twelve.  The name Judas, for example, never appears in the Pauline corpus.

About the crucifixion Paul says only that “he died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures.”  No other details are mentioned: no Garden of Gethsemane, no apostolic desertion, no arrest; no Pilate, no trial, no torture, no denial by Peter, no thieves, no words from the Cross and no darkness.  About the burial Paul says only, “He was buried.”  There is no mention in the writings of Paul of a tomb, no Joseph of Arimathea and no preparation of the body for burial.  About the Easter event, Paul says only this: “On the third day he was raised in accordance with the scriptures.”  There is no account in Paul of angels, no stone to roll back, no women carrying spices and no story of a dawn visit.  Paul does go on then to list those to whom Jesus was said to have “appeared.”  Cephas (Peter) was first, next the Twelve (note Judas is still included) and then he mentions an appearance to 500 brethren at once, about which we know nothing.  Paul continues this list by saying that Jesus next appeared to James, but he does not say which James and there are three in the New Testament story: James, the son of Zebedee, James, the son of Alphaeus and James, the brother of the Lord.  The consensus among scholars today is that it is the last mentioned James to whom Paul is making reference.  Then, continues Paul, Jesus appeared to the Apostles.  Who are they?  He has already mentioned the Twelve.  This seems like another group.  Paul ends his list by saying that “last of all he appeared to me,” that is, to Paul, and this appearance, he argues, was in no way different from the others except that he was last.   Paul’s conversion is set between one year after the crucifixion at the earliest and six years at the latest, so this appearance could hardly have been that of a physically-resuscitated body that walked out of the grave, making it a safe assumption that however Paul had conceived of the resurrection, it was not the resuscitation of a physically-deceased body.  Finally, we need to embrace the fact that these scant details are all the Christian community possessed about this climactic story of the end of Jesus’ life until the 8th decade of the Christian era.

Mark, writing somewhere between 70-73, is the creator of most of what has become the familiar story that surround the crucifixion. Judas Iscariot, for example, makes his first appearance in Mark.  Mark is also the first New Testament source to identify the Last Supper with the Passover, the first to introduce the Garden of Gethsemane, to give us details of the trial, to relate the account of Peter’s denial, to mention Barabbas and the first to record the story of the torture.  He is the first to put words into the mouth of the dying Jesus, suggesting that he said only one thing from the cross and that was what we now call the cry of dereliction, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”  Mark was also the first to suggest that on the day of the crucifixion darkness covered the land from noon to three p.m., and the first to give content to the burial story, including the introduction of Joseph of Arimathea.

Matthew writing in the 9th decade, somewhere between 83-85, essentially copied Mark’s story, but then added some other fascinating details.  It is from Matthew alone that we are told that the price Judas received for his act of betrayal was thirty pieces of silver, or that Judas repented, hurled the silver back into the Temple and went and hanged himself.  Matthew is also the first to suggest that an earthquake accompanied the death of Jesus or to tell us that a Temple guard was placed around the tomb of Jesus by the high priest.

Luke, writing near the end of the 9th decade or perhaps even in the first years of the 10th decade (89-93), expands the story in a still further direction.  For example, only in Luke is Jesus portrayed as praying for his tormentors, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Only in Luke does one of the thieves become penitent and asks Jesus to remember him.  Only in Luke does Jesus tell Peter that he will pray for him since Satan has desired him.  Only in Luke is Jesus tried separately before Herod.  In Luke Pilate becomes more and more a sympathetic figure and Judas a more sinister one.  Finally, Luke dismisses the cry from the cross, “My God, why have you forsaken me” and has Jesus say at the moment of his death, “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit.”  That is, I submit, a very different “final word.” Despair has been vanquished in victory.

When we come to John, written in the final years of the 10th decade (95-100), new details are added.  Only in John does the mother of Jesus appear at the foot of the cross.  That fact should surprise both Mel Gibson and the creators of what are called “the Stations of the Cross.”  John’s Jesus says three things from the cross, none of which have we ever heard of before in the earlier gospels.  They are, “I thirst,”  “Woman behold your son, son behold your mother” and, as Jesus’ final word, John has him say: “It is finished.”  John alone tells the story of the breaking of the legs of the thieves to hasten their deaths, a procedure which, he says, Jesus was spared since he was already dead.  John alone then adds the story of the spear being hurled into Jesus’ side, which makes this detail a 10th decade addition. Its details are drawn from II Zechariah.  John concludes this episode by noting that from that wound flowed both water and blood.  Finally, John mentions a character called Nicodemus, who appears in no other gospel.  In John Nicodemus is first introduced in chapter three and then re-introduced in the burial story, joining Joseph of Arimathea and together, we are told, they used 75 pounds of myrrh and aloes to prepare Jesus’ body for burial.

That is, in the briefest possible form, the way the story of the cross grew in detail from Paul in the 50’s to John in the late 90’s.  In future columns I will seek to put these changing and sometimes conflicting details into an interpretive framework.  I trust it will be a worthy and provocative study.

~  John Shelby Spong
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Do Christianity and Buddhism have Shamanic Roots?
 
In this Teach-In on August 13th and 14th, Matthew Fox and Isa Gucciardi discuss the roots of shamanic practice in Christian and Buddhist thought through the lens of the visionary experiences that are essential to shamanic practice. Saturday morning will be highly experiential. Students will have the opportunity to engage in the shamanic journey, an ancient practice used to establish contact with the unseen forces of nature, and will also participate in a practice that brings the Cosmic Christ alive in one’s Self.  READ ON ...  |

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