CALL FROM THE FUTURE

CALL FROM THE FUTURE
BARRY LOPEZ considers what is really being asked of us.
(O Magazine, April 2009, p. 156)

IT's NOT AS IF WE DON'T KNOW. EVEN
if we live in the inner city and can't manage
to get to the countryside, we understand
that reconnecting with what is subtle and
profound in nature can take some of the
burning out of our souls. And we know,
too, that global climate change is upon us,
indifferent to our fate and menacing on a
colossal scale.
The question now is no longer about the
old polarity between nature and culture.
The effects of nature and culture on us are
intertwined. Each lends something to the
other; together they sustain us. The better
question is: Where from here? How do we
react so smartly to the complex social and
natural threats before us that a stranger to
our planet, looking back at our history; will
be moved to call us a just, courageous, and
reverent people?
Establishing better ethical relations in
every quarter of our lives-political, social,
environmental-is arguably the starting
point, one that will require, first, an instinct
for reconciliation. Instead of the numbing
rhetoric of"us" and "them," we will have to
invent a new kind of "we." It's the "we" al-
ready welling up in many of us, born out of
empathy, out of genuine love for each other
and the Earth, and out of sober assessments
about our predicament. It's a grittier, less
jingoistic "we," born of hard work.
We hear too often now that times are
rough. Considering global climate change
alone, we can argue convincingly that, in
fact, we're in a far worse spot than those
who have come before us. There are threats
to our physical and mental well-being on
the horizon the like of which humanity has
known only in the most limited way. These
unanticipated developments -collapsing
ocean fisheries, the human disturbance of
viral ecologies, the accumulation of non-
biodegradable plastic- are, rather suddenly
a scary part of everyone's everyday life. And
our apprehension, too, is of a different order than, say,
the fears of Europeans during the spread of
the Black Death or of peasants throughout history;
living precariously before nature's forces and at
the whim of despots. It's an apprehension calling
for something untapped in us.
What we need is uncommonly mature
people. A kind of courage is required we've
not seen before, that "we" in us that wants
to make a simple bow of recognition, with-
out judgment, toward all other people
caught in the same travail, and then simply
to start the work. As individuals we can,
each of us, assess our own faiths and beliefs,
measure our stores of energy; take account
of our own pressing personal responsibili-
ties, and then respond, inventing together
another way of life, one less harmful, less
cruel than the one we have now
We risk trying one another's patience
when we put too fine a point on precisely
which threats we face as a species or make
overbearing claims about the divine attri-
butes of"nature." Simply put, the impact of
human enterprise on nonhuman systems
has created an unusual and strange urgency;
In a relatively short time, we're going to
learn whether we are indeed a match for the
various threats science enumerates. We are
going to find out whether we can actually be
as empathetic toward one another, as toler-
ant, as imaginative as we believe we can.
To develop less cruel and better gov-
erned societies, we're going to have to begin
by trading in the old questions about what
kinds of darkness are forcing us into the fu-
ture and ask instead another question:
What is calling to us? What lies buried in
our destiny that is calling out to us now?
I look at my own task as a writer and hu-
manitarian and know this one thing: With-
out other men and women, hard at work
devising a safer future for every life on Earth,
my task is like the song of a man living alone
in a box: beautiful, perhaps, but of no great.
help to humanity. I need these men and
women. Before long, each of us will be look-
ing to our right and to our left for eyes that
we can believe in. It is with these women
and men that we will initiate the work that
will impel those still to come, including our
children, to praise us-and to understand
the fierceness of our determination that
they not be born in vain because, facing
great threats, we fell down.
Barry Lopez has traveled to more than 60 countries and worked on international humanitarian projects with Mercy Corps and Quest for Global Healing.

Trinity Sunday

For Trinity Sunday here's a quote from page 72 of Why Go to Church: The Drama of the Eucharist by Timothy Radcliffe:

I do assent to various propositions, such as that God exists, even if I do not understand what it means for God to exist...But that is not enough. Aquinas points out that even the Devil accepts the truth of these propositions. Friendship with God changes how I see everything. The persons of the Trinity are not three 'imaginary friends', in the words of [Richard] Dawkins, three people with whom I can have fantasy conversations. Rather friendship with the Triune God reshapes my perception of the world. Believing in the Father, the creator of heaven and earth, I see everything with gratitude. Believing in the Son, I delight in its intelligibility and seek understanding. Believing in the Holy Spirit, I am thrown beyond myself in love. The doctrine of the Trinity, therefore, should not make me a bigot, intolerant of those whose faith is different or non-existent. It should fill me with gratitude for their existence, open my mind to them and help me to see them lovingly. Dogma matters. Orthodoxy liberates one from prejudice and petty-mindedness, and unlocks our hearts and minds.

Another way to come at the same understanding is to own that Trinitarian Orthodoxy is the outcome of a great adventure into the truth of existence, a quest at once passionately and exigently personal and at the same time communal. It is the crystallization of the most profound religious experience, wedding contemplative discernment of the highest order and the progressive development of revelation. And the frontier of this adventure is the nature of reality itself.

On the Ways

My profile for this blog identifies me as having made, at one point in my life, a commitment to the Buddha way, and tacitly (and correctly) implies that I have not repudiated that commitment. So I was interested, and uncomfortable, to hear one of my sisters in Christ suggesting last month that the recent nomination of a “lay-ordained” practitioner of Zen meditation to be Bishop of Northern Michigan in the Episcopal Church is a sign of the death of the church. I didn’t get a chance to follow up with her and find out more about what she meant—indeed, lacking any knowledge of the circumstances of the case, I just kept my mouth shut. When I got home I did an internet search and learned a little more about the controversy, which turns not to be a simple question of the fitness of a Buddhist meditator to occupy the seat of a Christian bishop, but also involves canonical issues about the manner of his nomination and election. Nevertheless, it is the Buddhist connection that raises the emotional temperature and makes for the eye-grabbing headlines, and the outcry (such as it is—so often these ecclesiastical fracases arouse passions in the few that one wishes were spent on causes of actual importance, and justified indifference in the many) has put me suddenly on the defensive, if only in my own mind.

Nobody has asked me for my opinion about this affair, but then again, why should they? Besides my overall obscurity as a junior clergyman in an out-of-the-way place, I don’t make a big show of my Buddhist credentials. Indeed, I don’t really consider myself a Buddhist anymore, if I ever really was. And because I was baptized some years after my initiation into the Bodhisattva way, my story could, one might assume, fit quite neatly into a narrative like: “I was wandering lost in the wasteland of false religion (Buddhism) until Jesus found me, and then I came home to a true and living faith (Christianity).” And, indeed, if you told my story that way you might not really be that far from the truth. But there are some crucial variables that determine whether you’d be right or not.

The first one is, what exactly was false religion about Buddhism for me? Was it that the Buddha and his successors have taught erroneous doctrines? Well, no, actually I don’t think so. Was it that Buddhist ethics, philosophy, psychology, ritual and discipline are incapable of producing wholesome transformations in persons and communities and leading toward the realization of the human spiritual destiny? No, not that either. I can’t speak for any one else in the world here, but Buddhism was false religion for me because I had unfinished business with Jesus, with God, with the Bible, with Judeo-Christian civilization and the Euro-American heritage that is my cultural, psychological, and religious blueprint. And in avoiding that business, there was a quality of play-acting about my spiritual intention and practice.

But that doesn’t mean I didn’t profit immensely from my seven years of concerted effort in the realm of the Buddha, and I still profit from it. It doesn’t mean that it was a waste of time or that I reject either what I learned from it, or the people who I learned it with, many of whom continue laboring in that vineyard. I know that there is profound and liberating truth to be found there because I tasted it, and that taste is what converted me, by the grace of God, to taking Christ seriously. It was the purification of intention, the studious application of the mind and body to the truth of each moment, the solid grounding in the rhythms of communal spiritual discipline that I found in the Buddhist monastery that broke through the hard covering cutting me off from God. The conviction that the way of Jesus had to be just as liberating and profound, and more so, because it is engages more of the totality of who I am, was my lodestar for many years. Because, truth to tell, that wasn’t always apparent to me from my experience. While I recognized immediately in my first forays back into church that I was returning home, it was a home I had never lived in, full of strangers. I held onto my intuition of the richness and meaningfulness of the Christian life by analogy with my Buddhist religious experience, and that kept me going until I began to recognize the distinctive gifts of the Holy Spirit in my life, and found my way to follow Jesus.

Which brings me to the second critical variable that confirms or invalidates the classic version of my “conversion” story—the part about a true and living faith. The way I see it, anyone can make an idol out of tenets of belief and fence them around with high walls of exclusivity, fortified with self-righteousness and a pitiless need for certainty. But that is different from a true and living faith, which is always a dialogue between the Truth as it is revealed and transmitted through the community of tradition, and the persons-in-community who are trying to live it and work it and pray it every day right now. And that dialogue is something organic and dynamic that thrives on doubt and questioning, on dismantling and rebuilding, on stretching and synthesizing. That was as true for Jesus and Buddha as it is for us. Their genius, from a human point of view, was that they were willing to radically re-think and re-work their religious traditions, so radically, in fact, that rather being seen as reformers of their respective religions, they come down to us as founders of something entirely new.

While I made a conscious decision in 1994 to leave Buddhism behind and apprentice myself to Christians, and I no longer venerate Buddhist icons or read Buddhist scriptures or attend Buddhist retreats, it wasn’t because I repudiated these things, but because I knew that I needed to learn the language of a true and living Christian faith the same way you learn any new language—by immersion. So I am still learning to pray the Psalms, to study and meditate on the Bible, to celebrate the Holy Eucharist and to proclaim by word and example the good news of Jesus Christ. At this point I feel at home here and know with excitement that this journey is taking me farther than I could have imagined when I started. Yet I have deep and abiding respect for the way I have come, and know that there could have been no shortcuts. My Buddhist years are a crucial, indispensible part of my spiritual autobiography, and not merely because they’re over. They continue to bless my life every day with their own particular gifts, and I would be a poorer person, and a worse Christian, without them.

So I think I’ll keep it in my blogger profile, that part about the being the lay Zen initiate, if only because it says something about the kind of Episcopal priest I am. Some would say “liberal”, even “unorthodox” because in their minds my refusal to repudiate that part of my past is a sign of a “watered-down” faith. But for me it speaks of a mystery, a divine mystery at that. The theologians and teachers of the Church have yet to really do justice to this mystery, and this may be because I’m not sure abstract doctrinal definitions and systematic categories can do much to explicate it. It is a mystery centered on the third person of the Holy Trinity, the Holy Spirit, and the Church (especially in the “West”) has never done a good job with Her. Our theology, forged in the fires of controversy and tested by erroneous doctrine, has tended to create a fortress/prison of positive absolutes, but the Holy Spirit blows where she will, and her work is hidden, only discernible in the who and what that happens, in the living, breathing dialogue of faith.

The mystery I speak of is the Wisdom and Providence of God in offering salvation to humankind in more than one way. Actually, that in itself is not a mystery—it is very easy to understand. The mystery is that God could send “His” only-begotten Son, the unique Incarnate God-man, Jesus Christ, the “only name under heaven given to mortals by which we must be saved” and that this could be completely true, and at the same time, there could be a path of salvation in the Buddha way, in the way of the Vedas and Upanishads, in the way of Islam, and yes, even in the path of the Torah. It will require more blog posts to entertain this question more fully, but I firmly believe that as Christians the most we can claim is that Jesus is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and that no one comes to Father except through Him, and that in this truth we have found saving grace and the forgiveness of our sins. We cannot claim on that basis that those who follow other paths are damned, or liars, or ignorant, because we have not followed those paths. To do so would be to twist the words of Jesus into a weapon he never intended to wield.

Through a glass darkly

20 Years from now

3 principal ministries:

1. Priest in congregation

Liturgical design and leadership

Teaching

Preaching

Spiritual direction of community and individuals

The mission of this parish would be congruent with, but not limited to, my two “outside” ministries.

2. Christian Spirituality teacher and retreat leader

Leading retreats for laity and clergy in retreat centers, seminaries, and parishes.

Writing poetry, books and articles on Christian prayer and life from catholic Episcopal-Anglican perspective.

Participant in ecumenical, interfaith and interdisciplinary conferences and dialogues on topics such as: Sacred Text and Silence, Chant and Meditation, Prayer and Social Action, Spiritual Anthropology and Cosmology, Universal Religion and Local Practice, Embodiment—Personal, Cultural and Ecological.

3. Spiritual Advisor, Public Thinker, and Organizer for decentralized, cooperative and inter-institutional network focused on local/regional sustainable economic development and cultural revitalization.

This effort would have no distinct institutional boundaries, so would be potentially global in scope of mission, but would focus on several nodes of connection and organizing:

• Revitalizing the public sector and grassroots democracy.
• Regional environmental planning and design based on principles of subsidiarity, sufficiency, precaution, human-scale and appropriate technology.
• Rural revitalization and land reform.
• Incubating worker-owned cooperative enterprises in agriculture, industry, housing, transportation and the service sector.
• Demilitarization and disarmament of state and society.
• Nonviolent civil action for structural change.
• Penal reform.
• Redefining state sovereignty for global cooperation, local and regional empowerment, and effectiveness and transparency of state institutions.
• Renewal of public education system.
• Fostering a new American ethos of non-violent global leadership, mixed ownership, ecological economics and restoration, integral personality education, community responsibility, multi-polar historical consciousness, unity in diversity, and focus on human needs, especially of the most vulnerable.

Weighing the torturers' defense

Any ambiguity about the significance of the newly declassified memos on torture is due only to the moral incapacity of the subservient media—these documents are incontrovertible evidence of conspiracy to commit heinous crimes. It is also a clear indication of the political corruption of our judicial system, and the crippling of constitutional restraints on executive power, that

Dick Cheney is defending his actions on Fox News rather than in a courtroom.

That being the case, it seems likely that this trial-by-punditry is the closest Mr. Cheney and his co-defendants will ever come to answering for their crimes (at least in this country), and as we the people are being appealed to, however cynically, to judge the case, we should be diligent in doing so. So I have three points for us all to consider that I haven’t heard made elsewhere. The first is that Cheney is not contesting his guilt of the crime. Rather, he is basing his argument on the so-called “necessity defense.” Defendants in trials involving crimes of nonviolent civil disobedience have used this tactic many times over the years, not disputing that crimes were committed, but that they were necessary actions to prevent far worse crimes. To my knowledge, no judge, at least at the federal level, has acquitted on the basis of this defense. Most often, evidence of the crimes--nuclear holocaust, genocide, etc. that protesters tried to prevent, was disallowed in the courtroom. Are we, then, to establish a legal precedent for a principle of necessity in the commission of war crimes and torture that does not apply in cases of trespass and destruction of property? The second point is that when Cheney and the other torturer masterminds were in power they sought to suppress evidence of their crimes, saying that it would threaten national security to reveal information about their techniques to those who might someday be tortured. It seemed a feeble and self-serving argument at the time. How curious it is that the same people are now crying out for the declassification of evidence obtained through those techniques, to build the case for their necessity defense. Never mind that common sense tells us that intelligence about the working of terrorist organizations, their members and methods, is of far more tactical importance to the anti-terrorist campaign, and has a far more legitimate claim to classification, than information about how it was extracted. It is curious to see so-called “hardliners” demanding that the wall of secrecy they erected be heedlessly dismantled in the hope of bringing exculpatory details to light. Finally, the torture apologists decry the President’s action in declassifying this information on the grounds that this helps terrorists resist torture. If the tortured know the limits beyond which the torturers will not go, they say, they are better able to maintain their psychological resistance to torture, and conceal information that could save lives. Leaving aside the question of the efficacy of torture as an interrogation technique, which, though highly pertinent, others are more qualified to address, I am prepared to concede that this argument makes sense. However, it only underscores the fundamental illegality of what Cheney, Tennant, and their lawyers conspired to do. The limits of humane treatment of prisoners under interrogation are not for CIA operatives, or the CIA director, or the Vice President of the United States, or the Office of Special Counsel, to decide. They are established by international humanitarian conventions, to which the United States is signatory, and further codified in United States statute and a massive body of precedent. The argument that the freedom to exceed those limits was expedient for the torturers in extracting information is no doubt factually true. It is also a naked admission of guilt.

Evolution Waterfall 98

Evolution Waterfall 98
Originally uploaded by dancgrn

I took this photo with a disposable camera with a panoramic format on a backpack trip with my dad in early July 1998. This is Evolution Creek running down to join the South Fork of the San Joaquin River.

Working Paper

This paper was written for a seminary class in 2005 on the work of the African-American theologian, mystic, and pastor Howard Thurman, who was Martin Luther King's spiritual director.

It's as pertinent now as it was then...

Throughout his written works Dr. Howard Thurman talks of the necessity for each person who seeks to live a spiritually committed life to have a “working paper”--a statement of one’s highest ideals, deepest beliefs, and guiding purpose, and how these work together to form a sense of what it is one is doing with one’s life and how one is going about it. So I would like to compose a paper with this wide sense, relating it to the “search for common ground” as it is operative in my life, and with an eye to the way that Dr. Thurman’s work sheds light on that search.

My aim in life stems from the hunger of my heart for belonging, a hunger that I believe I share with many people in the world today. It is a response to an urgent hope, but also betrays a hint of bitterness and disillusionment with those ways of belonging that modern mass society affords, ways that I feel are destructive to that innate human desire to know oneself and be known as significant, individual, as an “I”. Thurman speaks often of the power of this desire, but also of his faith that the very nature of human existence, and indeed of the cosmos itself, involves us in community. He implies that any idea of personal fulfillment that does not embrace the reality of the interdependence of life is a false hope when he offers this definition of “actualizing one’s potential”:

“The degree to which the potential in any expression of life is actualized marks the extent to which such an expression of life experiences wholeness, integration, community.”

--The Search for Common Ground, 4

Thurman writes eloquently in the final chapter of The Search for Common Ground of the problems raised for the individual, especially one in whom a religious conscience is active, in the modern context where the sovereignty of the nation-state is the comprehensive and definitive horizon of belonging. This problem is especially acute for those ethnic “minority” groups to whom full participation in national life is compromised or denied. I would add to Thurman’s analysis a further problem that recent decades have brought into sharper focus: what does it mean for the search for common ground when the institutions of the state are bent toward maximizing the interests of a small corporate-capitalist elite at the expense of the rest of the citizenry? This problem is more than a political one, as that same elite exerts ever more dominant control over culture and the economy, so that every aspect of social life from birth in the hospital to education to the disposal of one’s earthly remains at death has become a profit-making enterprise within the overarching system of global finance and market competition.

This corporate totalitarianism cloaks itself in the mantle of liberal institutions such as the “free press”, the university, and “democracy”, but its true nature is revealed in a variety of phenomena that are rarely held together and considered as parts of an interrelated picture. Yet if we are concerned about the common ground of life, we cannot avoid looking at the connections between rising global temperatures, genetic contamination of the food supply, resource wars and repudiation of international humanitarian law, Wal-Mart’s forcible invasion of local communities, the privatization of water, the epidemic of teen suicide and childhood autism, the growth of the prison-industrial complex, the new nuclear arms race and so on. My point is not that the world is going to hell, which it manifestly is, but that some kind of powerful conceptual shift in our understanding of where we belong and what is possible and desirable for human community seems to be in order.

During the era of the Cold War there was the perception of a grand ideological conflict, embodied in the two Superpowers and their respective blocs, which were contesting each other for the loyalty of the world’s inhabitants. On pages 87-88 of The Search for Common Ground, Thurman describes this from the point of view of the global “outsiders” as a choice of coming under that sovereignty which offers the most credible opportunity for the fulfillment of human potential. While the collapse of the Soviet Union vindicated the Western capitalist order over the Communist bloc, it remains an open question whether the sovereignty of the new global empire does in fact allow a free and supportive space for human flourishing. A relentless campaign of state and commercial propaganda makes the case that it does, but the real on-the-ground experience of most of the world’s people is of a steady erosion of the sovereignty of local communities and even of historic nation states under the onslaught of transnational corporate power, its client elites, and their allied military and paramilitary security forces.

What is rarely reflected on in the mainstream of public opinion is that the Capitalist and Communist systems were fundamentally identical in many of their key attitudes toward human community and the relationship of it to the larger web of life. The difference between public and private ownership of capital is of little consequence compared to the shared commitment to industrialization, urbanization, the suppression of cultural and linguistic minorities, and the collectivization of people into centralized systems of indoctrination, dependence, and control. In both systems, the rise of the modern state was achieved at the expense of the inhabitants of the places where the primary “resources” of industrial exploitation were to be found. Economies of scale in manufacturing and transportation, afforded by the temporary availability of abundant cheap energy as fossil fuels, drove the further process of moving vast populations off the land, making way for industrial agriculture and creating a cheap labor pool for expanding factories in the towns. From a society of communal small producers, both systems created societies of “autonomous” (that is atomistic and anonymous) wage-earners and consumers.

Too often consideration of these problems gets sidetracked into acrimonious fault-finding, and inaccurate accusations about seeking to “turn the clock backwards.” The prickly defensiveness of the modern urbanite covers a deep psychic vulnerability, however, that lies precisely in the area that Thurman summarizes on page 83-4 of

The Search for Common Ground:

“Our atmosphere is polluted, our streams are poisoned, our hills are denuded, wild life is increasingly exterminated, while more and more man becomes an alien on the earth and a fouler of his own nest. The price that is being exacted for this is a deep sense of isolation, of being rootless and a vagabond. Often I have surmised that this condition is more responsible for what seems to be the phenomenal increase in mental and emotional disturbances in modern life that the pressures—economic, social, and political—that abound on every hand. The collective psyche shrieks with the agony that it feels as a part of the death cry of a pillaged nature.

Nevertheless the importance of territory in the experience of community remains. Territory is one of the perennial guarantors supporting man’s experience of community. Man has to feel at home if he is to be nurtured; home means place and the place means territory.”

I believe that Thurman is speaking the truth in this passage, and it is a truth of the first importance. I would go further, in fact—the consequences of a life out of harmonious balance with the territorial or ecological community is not only psychically and aesthetically deadly, it tends toward social fragmentation, economic disintegration, and political chaos. A truly democratic polity, a political sovereignty, or a cultural identity that is not rooted sustainably in the ecological community with its compulsory disciplines of scale and its peculiar life-sustaining niches, is an empty abstraction that inevitably fails to provide any possibility of effective wholeness because its ultimate loyalty and actual power resides somewhere else in space and time. The modern world system is founded on a massive overdraft on a deposit of fossil energy that was fixed by a life-community that died millions of years ago. In a few short years that account will be closed, and humanity will be faced with the challenge of rediscovering its dependence on a living earth-system whose health and fecundity it has abused to the point of collapse. All the fantasies of technological wizardry notwithstanding, we will have no choice but to begin the long, slow regeneration of the earth. This crisis will also afford us the opportunity to rediscover our sense of wonder and gratitude for the amazing creative and adaptive power of the earth’s living systems. It will reawaken in us the spiritual, ethical and aesthetic satisfaction of a human cultural creativity that recognizes what it means to be located elegantly, intimately, and responsibly, with kindness and accountability to one another, to share a common heritage, a common purpose, and a common destiny.

This merciful necessity will demand a process of collective death and resurrection unprecedented in severity and scope. Prophetic voices have long been pointing the way, but the transformation that is demanded is of such magnitude that a powerful movement of resistance is already mobilized, led by those who have the most (as they see it) to lose, but operative even among those of us who know better, who obsessively cling to the consolations of an age that is ending. The spiritual benefits of embracing the new/old vision of harmony, however, are scarcely conceivable to us now, deeply embedded as we are in a materialistic and mechanistic worldview. The psychic disorientation involved in watching the pillars of modern bourgeois identity crumble one after another, and the courage and imagination required to forge new forms of community, new ways of relating, new spiritual, somatic, and aesthetic capacities, all will demand an unwavering fidelity to ourselves as beings grounded in God, in our common and diverse humanity, and in the hope of Earth’s future. The great religious traditions of humankind, engaged with a highly developed sense of “negative capability” (Keats’ term for the capacity to hold two mutually contradictory aspects of the same underlying truth in one’s mind at the same time) will be indispensable in this process.

It is for this reason that I am dedicating myself to ordained ministry in the Christian church. I feel that the Judeo-Christian heritage offers vitally important teachings for the times we live in, which must be drawn out of the fire of a death-seeking and Earth-hating apocalypticism, and offered at the table of the world’s wisdoms. Dr. Thurman has done an admirable job in The Search for Common Ground of bringing forward the continued relevance of the Biblical creation myth as an expression of the racial memory of life in harmony and kinship with the whole cosmic order. In Jesus and the Disinherited he offers a radical interpretation of the historical Jesus as a teacher of the spiritual path of nonviolent resistance and community survival under conditions of colonization and oppression. In Disciplines of the Spirit and The Creative Encounter he describes the inner dispositions and classic religious practices of the experiential “hunger of the heart” that makes the Divine presence a lived reality of worldly existence.

To these I would add three more properly sectarian dimensions, all of which bring into focus the remarkable interpenetration of the universal and the particular that I see as the fundamental Judeo-Christian insight. The first of these is the central motif of The Promised Land. In the Biblical tradition the ultimate religious goal, and the only final measure of spiritual achievement, is the establishment of an egalitarian and ecologically harmonious social order in the place which God has given to His people. This motif is developed in the New Testament tradition in a more universal direction, but the Kingdom of God and the New Jerusalem are symbols deeply rooted in the former image.

The second is the Trinitarian and Incarnational Christology of the undivided church. Liable as this theology is to doctrinal quibbling and arid metaphysical aridity, there is at the core of its synthesis of Jewish and Greek humanisms a stunning affirmation of the spiritual potential of personal human nature for dynamic and intimate communion with its own collective totality across time and space. This glorified humanity is capable of the most profound and creative expression of cosmic being, in conscious and unimpaired relation with the whole of creation and even with the uncreated and fecund abyss of the Divine essence, and all this in and through its concrete, embodied, earthbound existence.

Finally, I see this interpenetration of the universal and particular beautifully and powerfully expressed in the sacramental liturgies of the Christian community. Investing ultimate religious meaning in the mundane and elemental acts of forging human community—taking a bath, sharing a meal—makes a profound statement about the human encounter with the divine. These symbolic acts, which claim universal validity and significance, are nevertheless only possible within the gathering of a particular community in its own place, where they are sufficient to embody the life of the entire church across all time and space. Sadly, the full implications of this vision have been forgotten by the churches until the very recent past, and the recovery that is underway is still a long way from grounding the prayer and faith of Christians in living communion with the very water springs and wheat fields that are the elemental sources of their own particular saving mysteries.

Our semester-long conversation with Dr. Thurman has helped me to sense the possibility of integrating religious practice, insight, and community in such a way that it opens up the sacred dimension of life in all its aspects. I found him to be a trustworthy guide because he remained so resolutely faithful to the measuring rod of his own experience. It is this kind of religious leadership—disciplined, committed, humble, questing, ruthlessly honest, and always aware of the prior claim of life as one must live it day to day in one’s real context—that I think the world needs more of right now. I hope I can learn to be that kind of leader, at least a little bit. I believe Howard Thurman is one of the spiritual masters I will keep close by me and return to again and again for insight, encouragement, recollection, and friendship along the way.