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.yiv6160179011mcnTextContent, #yiv6160179011 #yiv6160179011templateHeader .yiv6160179011mcnTextContent p{ font-size:16px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6160179011 #yiv6160179011templateBody .yiv6160179011mcnTextContent, #yiv6160179011 #yiv6160179011templateBody .yiv6160179011mcnTextContent p{ font-size:14px !important;line-height:150% !important;} }@media only screen and (max-width:480px){ #yiv6160179011 #yiv6160179011templateFooter .yiv6160179011mcnTextContent, #yiv6160179011 #yiv6160179011templateFooter .yiv6160179011mcnTextContent p{ font-size:12px !important;line-height:150% !important;} } Wrestling with the Christian “I Am” and the Buddhist “I Am Not”
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To Be and Not To Be:
Wrestling with the Christian “I Am”
and the Buddhist “I Am Not”
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| Essay by Joran Slane Oppelt
February 20, 2020
I AM?
I was corrected pretty quickly by the faculty at the Multifaith Storytelling Institute.
I had just finished standing in front of the class and telling a dramatic, yet what I thought to be comical, story of Moses and the burning bush. I had told it the way it was written in the versions of the Old Testament (and commentaries) I had read. The way I had told it many times before.
Moses stumbled upon a vision, a disruption of reality, a hallucination or maybe an angel. He was commanded to go forth into Egypt and to free the Israelites. As any of us would, he responded with shock and incredulity. Surely, there had been some mistake.
“When I’m marching in there making these demands,” he asked, “who exactly should I say has sent me on this mission?”
God, or Elohim, replied, “Tell them ‘I am’ has sent me to you.”
When I finished my story, I was informed that the original Hebrew phrase, “ehyeh asher ehyeh” actually means something closer to “I am that I am,“ or “I will be what I will be.” One of my Jewish friends even pronounced the word “ehyeh” with an exaggerated shrug of the shoulders, as if to say, “who knows?”
It was a much more open-ended and evasive response than the booming, declarative statement Christians have been told about for generations. One of the faculty even remarked, “There is no sense of the ‘I am’ in Judaism.” This is because there is no present tense of the verb “to be” in the Hebrew language.
Not only does this open up the “I am” (especially as a name for God) to questioning, it begs a larger existential question about agency and the spirit of theological inquiry and debate. Maybe God (or Elohim) did not stick a bolt of lightning in the sand and say, “I am” on that day. Maybe, he suggested -- and is suggesting -- that we open our minds to the process of figuring out what “being” means from this and each day forward.
I AM
With a background in Unity and the New Thought movement, the concept of “I Am” has played a central role in my religious thinking.
Unity founder Charles Fillmore once said, “If you can think of yourself as Spirit, as having all power and capacity … you begin to expand, and you go up to this high place in your consciousness ... You begin to realize that I am being lifted up, and as I lift up my I AM, why all of my thoughts are attracted to that high place because it is the magnet, it is the focal power of all ideas.”
Elsewhere, he writes, “Involution always precedes evolution. The I AM and its spiritual faculties must be sent down into the body consciousness before the evolution of the spiritual man can begin.”
In the Unity tradition, affirmations are preceded by denials — as a way to clear the interior space before filling it with new growth or intention. A denial may sound something like, “I am not limited by this body” or “I am not my past.” Affirmations are then declared in the positive, i.e. “I am Spirit” or “I am open to new growth and possibility.”
Further, when we say “I Am ...” we are saying “God in me is ...” or “God is ... through me.”
In a workshop that I host regularly, entitled The Art of Prayer, we practice something called “Three-Column Prayer,” which asks the participant to craft prayer requests using a three-column format and eventually transform those prayers into positive affirmations. An example might be “Father/Mother” (first column, name for God), “In the midst of us” (second column, location of God), “Guide me to the right place” (third column, prayer request). One possible affirmation then becomes “I / am / in the right place at the right time.”
Again, the “I Am” is simply another name for God.
In the Gospel of John, we read, “I am the door” (John 10:9) and “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12). In Thomas’ revolutionary Gospel we read, “Split the wood and I am there; Lift the stone and I am there.”
Martin Buber (pioneer of “dialogical existentialism”) wrote about this relationship of the “I” to nature, others and Spirit in his highly influential book, I and Thou (1923). He indicated that the “I” that is in relationship to people and the environment qualitatively changes when it is in relationship to God. He even went so far as to say that all moments of genuine becoming require a “thou” and that “through the Thou, a person becomes ‘I.’”
Emptiness is Form, by Scott Snibbe
I AM NOT
According to Buddhists, this I (or self) does not actually exist.
In the Pali canon (the sacred teachings of Buddhism) the “self” we can point to and describe is actually made up of a set of composites or “heaps.” They are called the five skandhas (aggregates of clinging and craving) known as:
- Matter (rupa)
- Sensation (vedana)
- Perception (samjna)
- Thoughts (sankhara)
- Consciousness (vijnana)
Suffering is experienced when one identifies too closely with (or clings too tightly to) one or all of these heaps. Suffering is relieved when one lets go of this attachment or somehow realizes the illusory nature of identity (and these cravings).
In his classic, God is Not One, Stephen Prothero writes, “The most astonishing thing about Buddhism, and perhaps its greatest contribution to the conversation among the great religions, is its teaching that the thing we are most certain of -- the self -- is actually a figment of our imagination. Descartes said, ‘I think, therefore I am.’ Buddhists say if you think carefully enough you will see that you are not.”
Furthermore, not only is the self an illusion made of indiscriminate heaps (like the thing we call a “city” that is actually made of buildings and roads and surrounded by an invisible border), but the heaps themselves are actually empty. All existence arises in this empty field (or sunyata).
It is this philosophy of being that is described in the Heart Sutra, “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.”
Buddhism is a philosophy that surely raises more questions than it answers. But, unlike Judaism where we are encouraged to wrestle with these “God” ideas, in Buddhism the idea of God is worse than a fruitless inquiry, it is the beginning of suffering.
According to legend, The Buddha himself was questioned by a student about the nature of being and the cosmos, the principle of cause and effect and the idea of life after death.
The Buddha replied, “Imagine you were shot with a poison arrow. Imagine asking all of the questions you desired answers to. Who shot you? Where were they from? What color was his skin? Which direction did they run? Was it a longbow or crossbow? What wood and feathers were made to craft the weapon? You have given the poison the time to do its work. You will die before any of these questions are answered.”
Vietnamese monk Thich Naht Hahn summarizes this teaching for us, “Life is so short. It must not be spent in endless metaphysical speculation that does not bring us any closer to the truth.”
All of our questions about God, creation and being are, according to the Buddha, like this poison arrow. They only lead to more questions, more uncertainty and inevitably more unhappiness. Pain is inevitable, suffering is optional. By skillfully disengaging the craving for inquiry -- and the clinging to the “self” -- we remove the arrow of suffering.
RESOLUTION / REVOLUTION
The radical idea of emptiness proposed by the Buddhist concept of sunyata will feel all too real to those familiar with the subjects of quantum physics and general relativity.
Modern scientists have discovered what the mystics have known to be true for centuries. Reality is an illusion. Atoms are primarily made of vast regions of empty space, objects are fundamentally non-objects but rather waves and shadow, and there is a continuous energetic exchange happening between you and those around you at all times.
And yet we continue to pretend that Newton’s laws are the only code that runs the world, that -- like Descartes thought -- the cosmos is a giant machine that is winding up or down, and that we are relatively safe from the theories and uncertainties of relativity.
We continue to act as if our “self” is a solid mass of thoughts and feelings trapped and arising within a discrete “body” made of muscle and mind. We continue to navigate those bodies (and minds) around the planet, bumping into one another as if they don’t cause unending ripples of consequence throughout our families and communities.
We continue to act selfish and make poor decisions based on our sense of self-identity. And, we continue to project this sense of self and sentience onto the world around us. From our anthropomorphic and anthropocentric attempts to shape the world in our image to the practice of pareidolia (those faces and figures we spot in the clouds and popcorn ceilings overhead) all we see around us are heaps of other “selves.”
Theologian Ilia Delio writes in her book, A Hunger for Wholeness, that the cyborg (cybernetic organism) is a key symbol for contemplating the “self” today.
“A cyborg body,” she writes, “is not bounded by the skin but includes all external pathways along which information can travel. In this respect, the boundaries between human and animal, organism and machine, physical and nonphysical have become imprecise, giving rise to a new understanding of social subjectivity. As we become hybridized with our technologies, we are refashioning our understanding of the body as a material entity and a discursive process; hence what counts as human is not self-evident.”
I fear we have become so “self”-centered that when artificial intelligence (cybernetic organisms and quantum computing) makes humanity subservient to its aims and protocols, issuing creeds about the Creative force that gave it (and all things) life, we will stare slack-jawed in wonder and disbelief, asking, “How dare you?” and “Don’t you remember it was I who gave you life?” Just as the Earth now stares incredulously at us.
And as the boundaries continue to blur between self and no-self, artifice and organism, matter and process, wilderness and technology, we will continue to seek the middle way and resign ourselves to the fact that, yes, in so many beautiful ways, “I am.” And at the same time, in as many inextricable ways, “I am not.”
~ Joran Slane Oppelt
Read online here
About the Author
Joran Slane Oppelt is an international speaker, author, interfaith minister and award-winning producer and singer/songwriter. He is the founder of the Metta Center of St. Petersburg and Integral Church – an interfaith and interspiritual organization in Tampa Bay. Joran is the author of Integral Church: A Handbook for New Spiritual Communities, Sentences, The Mountain and the Snow and co-author of Order of the Sacred Earth (with Matthew Fox) and Transform Your Life: Expert Advice, Practical Tools, and Personal Stories. He currently serves on the board of Creation Spirituality Communities and has spoken around the world about spirituality and the innovation of religion.
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Question & Answer
Q: By Fran
I often feel isolated, sad and afraid that the world is falling apart and that my grandchildren will not have a world to live in. And yet, I also feel hope; a feeling that this falling apart is connected somehow to a larger story in which humanity is being guided to change. What are your thoughts on this? How can spirituality guide us through these challenging times?
A: By Skylar Wilson
Dear Fran,
Thank you for sharing your process with us as it feels relevant to me and to what so many are going through right now. At some level we are all grieving this “falling apart” of ecosystems, education, socio-political systems, the criminal-justice system, religion, community, love etc. etc. These systems are breaking and are broken, the consequences of which are only growing louder.
And yet, it is my belief that these systems need to break down so that we can change them by changing ourselves. There are opportunities arising within this death-rebirth process and we need all hands on deck to help humanity to transition. I too have hope that when things fall apart there is a chance for something more aligned with natural law/life's intelligence to unfold and grow.
I’m happy that you brought up the idea of a larger story that’s inherently good and beautiful and coherent. Exactly! The idea that we are currently between cultural stories, stories about what humanity is here for, has been explored deeply by visionaries such as Thomas Berry, Joseph Campbell and others. Brian Swimme, Matthew Fox, Joanna Macy and others are guides who have helped so many to connect with the cosmic story that’s 13.8 billion years in the making...deepening internally and subjectively while externally diversifying and expanding. I believe that this emerging story has the power to guide us through these trying times as well as spiritual traditions and practices that are now being shared and invented for an awakening culture of changemakers to utilize to cocreate communities that are soulful and nourishing.
~ Skylar Wilson
Read and share online here
About the Author
Skylar Wilson, MA is the founder of Wild Awakenings, a conscious community of changemakers dedicated to the thriving of Earth, life, and humanity. He has led wilderness rites of passage journeys as well as ecological restoration teams for 18 years, specializing in creating sacred wilderness immersion experiences and interfaith ceremonies. Skylar is the cofounder and co-director of the Order of the Sacred Earth, a network of mystic warriors and activists dedicated to being the best lovers and defenders of the Earth that we can be. Skylar is the coauthor of the book by the same title as well as the co-host, with Jennifer Berit, of the podcast: "Our Sacred Earth" on Unity online radio. Skylar works closely with schools and organizations including the Stepping Stones Project in Berkeley, CA over the last 8 years while guiding organization-wide retreats, mentoring youth, group leaders, parents and elders. He also produces transformational events for thousands of people around the country including the Cosmic Mass, an intercultural healing ritual that builds community through dancing and the arts.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Origins of the Bible, Part XIX:
Micah, the Prophet Who Turned Liturgy Into Life
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
January 15, 2009
In my career as a bishop I have known churches that spent great time and effort on liturgy and worship. It was clearly the focus, the reason for being, of those congregations and their budgets reflected this priority. Altar hangings, clergy vestments and the garb of the supporting cast of liturgical characters were always coordinated. Sacristies, where the vestments and sanctuary coverings were stored, were orderly and reflected care and devotion. These churches also tended to invest heavily in music. A grand organ was generally an essential and, of course, one must have a grand organist to make the grand organ functional. Then there must be a professional choir since an all-volunteer choir might dissipate the beauty of both the organ and organist. Next, there must be a printed bulletin to guide the worshipers, for whom the liturgy was designed, through the Sunday process.
I do not mean to be critical of this. Liturgy that is well done does invite the congregation into the symbols of transcendence. It transforms worship from being the town meeting that it has become in many congregations. Town meeting liturgy is immediately recognized for it is dominated by announcements of coming events and a public listing of the sick, the recently deceased, the soon-to-be married, those celebrating birthdays and anniversaries. Sometimes these announcements are overt, while at other times they are camouflaged under the guise of prayer. These public displays serve to remind people that they are not forgotten and to massage delicate egos. I wonder, however, if either the liturgies of grand proportions or those of a town meeting understand worship, which means the act of investing infinite worth in God as well as in those who are gathered and in those that this worship will lead them to serve. Liturgy is not an end, but a means to an end. There was one prophetic figure in the biblical tradition who understood this better than anyone else. His name was Micah and to his story we turn this week.
If people have any conscious awareness of the content of the book of Micah, it is probably a vague recollection of his suggestion that the messiah must be born in Bethlehem, because part of the Jewish expectation was that messiah would be heir to the throne of David. This idea found its way into the birth stories of Jesus in both Matthew and Luke and thus gained familiarity by being repeated in Christmas pageants. Matthew, the scripture quoter par excellence, refers directly to this text in Micah when King Herod asks his scribes to search the scriptures to locate the place where messiah is to be born so that he can redirect the Magi’s quest to find him. Luke uses this Micah text indirectly to demonstrate the relationship of lineal descent between David and Jesus, when he states that it was by order of the Emperor, Caesar Augustus, that all the descendants of King David had to return to their ancestral home to be enrolled. While this is probably the best known quote from Micah, the power of this book is not found here, but is located in the drama he describes later in the sixth chapter of his small work.
Micah thought of himself as an expert in the law or the Torah. One gets the sense that he yearned to demonstrate his legal skill before the Supreme Court in Jerusalem, but that opportunity had never come to him. In chapter six, however, he fantasizes about a trial that was designed to be even more dramatic and universal than one that might have occurred in Jerusalem. It had to do with the proper role of liturgy. Under the skill of Micah’s pen he envisioned this trial as being conducted before the throne of God, who served as the ultimate judge. For Micah the mountains and the hills must serve as the jury. Israel was called to stand before this judge and jury as the accused. Micah cast himself in the role of the prosecuting attorney. The trial opens as Micah says to the people of Israel: “Arise, plead your case before the mountains and let the hills hear your voice…. for the Lord has a controversy with God’s people and God will now contend with Israel.” Court is open and Micah’s grand trial of the chosen people has begun.
The charges are then read out. God demands to be answered by the accused by asking, “What have I done to you? In what have I wearied you?” Why, God is demanding to know, do you not understand how to serve me? Then God recites the things that God has done for Israel throughout history: deliverance from bondage, raising up leaders like Moses, Aaron and Miriam, giving the Torah, the law, and protecting these chosen ones from their enemies. This significant list of divine benevolences has, however, clearly not gained for God the hearts of the people.
Israel, hearing these charges, feels the pangs of guilt and seeks to make amends. The response of the people, however, is to recite their faithfulness in religious observances and proper liturgies. Trapped inside this misunderstanding of what it is that God seeks, Israel says, “With what shall I come before the Lord and bow myself before God on high? Shall I come before God with burnt offerings and with calves a year old?”
>From God, however, comes only silence. The people respond to these charges as if God were interested primarily in religion or in worship. Wondering if their religious observances have been deemed by God to be inadequate, these people vow to enhance their sacrifices. If God is not pleased with the oil that burns the sacrifices or with the year-old calf that is their burnt offering, then maybe God would be pleased if they expanded their worship to new levels of magnanimity: “Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams or with ten thousands of rivers of oil?” Surely such heightened acts of worship would win for Israel the divine favor that they presumed God desired. God is still silent, however, and once again the people of Israel interpreted this silence to mean that their worship and their offerings were still inadequate and once again they sought to make their sacrificial liturgies more worthy of their disappointed God.
God, do you want us to offer our children, our most precious possessions? Would the re-introduction of child sacrifice satisfy you? That is the meaning of the words that Micah now places on the lips of the people: “Shall I give my first born for my transgression, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?” This dramatic scene reaches a crescendo before God finally responds and this response forms in my opinion the most dramatic and powerful words recorded in the book of Micah: “God has shown you, people of Israel, what is good! And what does the Lord require of you?” It is not beautiful liturgical words, burnt offerings, animal sacrifices or even ten thousands rivers of oil. It is not even the sacrifice of your most cherished children. The only requirement God lays on God’s people is “to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”
The trial is over. The verdict has been rendered. One does not please God with acts of worship. The only sacrifice that God values is the offering of lives lived in justice, mercy and humility. The people of Israel must understand anew what the meaning of worship really is. Worship is human justice being offered to God. Human justice is worship being lived out among men and women.
Micah then wrote down his words for the people and they were treasured by them at first simply as the inspired words of their prophet. In time, however, someone decided that in these words they were hearing the “Word of God,” so his writings were ultimately added to the sacred scriptures of the Jewish people and in that capacity began to transcend their original setting and to be read not only across the centuries in Temple and synagogue worship services, but pored over also by the rabbis. It was through Micah that the people learned that God requires from them not beautiful liturgy and sacrifices, but “to do justice, to love mercy and to walk humbly with God.”
God was never a static concept among the Jews. On the pages of the Jewish Scriptures, God was always evolving, changing and growing. In the writings of Hosea, God was defined anew as love. In the writings of Amos, God was defined anew as justice. Now, in the writings of Micah, the people learned that worship is not about form and ceremony. It is not about wearing vestments in a particular style, about chanting the liturgy in effective ways. It is not about a sacred prayer book or a grand organ. It is not about where the altar is located, the style of the liturgy or the nature of one’s sacrifices. Worship is always and foremost about living faithfully and ascribing ultimate worth to a God who is manifested in the fullness of human life.
Throughout the national history of the Jews, it was the prophets, who stood outside the sacred traditions, and not the priests, who stood within it, who again and again caused the meaning of God to grow. It was the prophets who slowly, but surely, transformed the tribal God of the Jews into a set of universal principles. It was the prophets who made Jesus of Nazareth possible. He was clearly in the prophetic tradition when he proclaimed that the love of God was not to be compromised by religion and that God was to be found in the recognition that there is nothing any of us can do or be that can finally separate us from this divine love. This was demonstrated by Jesus in episode after episode when he set aside religious rules so that the ultimate principle of justice, that no life falls outside this love of God, could become operative. That is what Jesus’ disciples saw in him and this insight drove them to assert that in the Christ experience, all human barriers fade. In Christ, said Paul, there is neither Jew nor Greek, male nor female, gay nor straight, baptized nor unbaptized, bond nor free. To assert this as the ultimate meaning of God is the essence of worship. So worship is, therefore, not about liturgy, but about life. Worship leads us not to build ecclesiastical institutions, but to humanize our world. Micah thus becomes the biblical “Word of God” by which all liturgy must be judged.
~ John Shelby Spong
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