A word about the genre I have named “musings”: Where do musings come from?  What is their nature?  Some of them come full blown, unbidden as it were, as I sit with my journal to write what Julia Cameron calls “morning pages.”  I think of it as a process of opening myself to my deeper wisdom, and letting it flow onto the paper.  This is highly subjective, very right brain – and sometimes the product is worth sharing.  At other times a topic nags at me and wants me to read about it and think about it and, finally, write about it.  This process is more objective, using the left brain, and the product is likely to be more systematic and reasoned and organized with a kind of linear logic.   Right brain musings, on the other hand, may swoop and swirl and loop back upon themselves with a kind of poetic logic.  Each form of writing makes its own demands on the reader, and the response reveals as much about the reader as about the writing.  So be it.

As this Musing emerged, it took on a complexity that seemed to defy my attempts to keep it focused, and, for the first time, I passed it along, in draft, to a few close friends for their comments and suggestions.  Sure enough, they told me it lacked focus, and they advised me to clarify my thesis, to prepare an outline and follow it, perhaps to separate it into two or three essays, but not to lose the content, some of which is right brain stuff.  In other words, to organize with the left brain the material that flows from the right brain.  The advice has been accepted, and here are the results.
 

Roman rulers, Jewish Temple authorities, and Greek modes of thought dominated the world in which Jesus lived.  The people with whom he lived and to whom he spoke were victims of that domination.  What he said to them, and how he lived, has implications for how we identify, and how we relate with, our present-day systems of domination.   This Musing will explore one of those systems, Consumerism, and responses to it by three contemporary authors.

Jesus didn’t teach about salvation from sin (that was Paul); Jesus taught his followers to overcome the domination systems of his day by finding within themselves God’s dominance-free order.  His followers didn’t understand this lesson because they were deeply immersed in the expectation that a new King would come to release them from bondage, just as God had brought their ancestors release from bondage in Egypt.  They looked for a Messiah who would overthrow and/or replace their oppressors.

Jesus taught that the Kingdom of God, God’s dominance-free order, is egalitarian and just, open to women, foreigners, gentiles, tax collectors, those suffering from disabilities, and all others who were shunned in accord with the prejudices of the day.  Thus he challenged another of the systems of dominance – the day-by-day assumptions with which the people “protected” themselves from danger, real or imagined, by limiting the scope of their relationships.

In this teaching about the realm of God that is within, Jesus taught that the wholeness of reality extends deeper than that which is experienced by the senses and the emotions, deeper, that is, than the pain and frustration and humiliation of being victimized by dominant forces.  He taught, as have leaders of the other religions of the world, that reality consists not only of body and mind but of spirit as well.  He told his followers that they have access to a realm, within themselves, in which they could not be dominated by political or religious authorities, a realm in which they were with God, because God is spirit rather than the humanoid warrior God that their ancestors had told them about.  The martyrdom of Jesus, and the stories of his subsequent resurrection, provided the disciples with evidence that spirit survives the most ghastly of deaths by transcending body and mind.

At the same time that Jesus was teaching, and demonstrating, what it was to be invulnerable to the threat of domination, he was teaching not passive resistance but a very practical method of active, non-violent confrontation, a way of “speaking truth to power” that Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. have used successfully during my lifetime.  Thus Jesus offered both an inner source of being that defied earthly powers and a strategy that could effectively transform those powers.

This teaching of a dimension of spirit is universally applicable.  It directs us to be as aware of the internal as we are of the external, of the invisible as well as the visible, of depths of meaning beneath the surfaces, of spirit that underlies all events and phenomena.  It teaches us to find the sacred in the ordinary.

In Walter Wink’s book, The Powers That Be: Theology for a New Millennium, the contemporary powers of domination are portrayed as existing in every social reality – corporations, governments, bureaucracies, sports teams, (he doesn’t mention families, but I do), etc. – and each of these has about it the invisible as well as the visible, the (potentially) spiritual as well as the material.  And he notes, as we have in earlier Musings, that modern physicists, though rooted in the empiricism and rationalism of the material world, yet come out into a world of spirit, and that we, too, can find the soul in every part of everyday life.  This is, of course, not easy in a world so hooked on immediate gratification, consumerism, the global market, and instantaneous communication through the world-wide web.

Richard Friedman, inThe Lexus and the Olive Tree: Understanding Globalization, portrays the planet as having moved in a ten-year period from “wall to web.”  A symbol of divisiveness and separation, the Berlin Wall, has been replaced by a symbol of connectedness, the world-wide web.  This change in perspective has the potential for moving us toward the integral worldview of yin/yang, Native American religion, Jesus, the Buddha, the new physics, Carl Jung, Teilhard de Chardin, Matthew Fox, Brian Swimme, Thich Nhat Hahn, the process theologians, and an increasing number of others.  That worldview is, as I understand it, holistic, not dualistic.  It moves us away from definition by contrast and exclusion and invites us to see all apparent differences as encompassed in a larger whole.  We are asked not to choose up sides and root for the “Surfaces” or the “Depths” but to embrace them both, not to play the winners-losers game, but to create the win-win dance that is accessible at the level of spirit.  (If that mixes too many metaphors, put it down to muser’s license.)

Let’s put our holism to the test of identity.  Who am I?  Where am I rooted, grounded?  If I look only to the visible, material world, I may find myself to be primarily “consumer” or even “victim.”  If I understand myself to be primarily a spiritual being, then I may be “citizen of the universe” or “embodiment of the divine.”  Do I find my identity in the material goods – the toys – that I possess (a human having), or is my identity primarily taken from the work that I do (a human doing – a kind of middle ground), or am I primarily the person that I know myself to be in the most loving of my relationships (a human being)?    But to ask that question is to slip back into the “either/or” way of thinking.  Rather, ask whether my best self is expressed through the things that I own and the work that I do.

Peter Russell, a scientist who studied with Steven Hawking, in Waking Up in Time: Finding Inner Peace in Times of Accelerating Change, notes that addiction to the values of Consumerism locks us into a competitive, exploitative mode of consciousness.  It leads us to produce things we don’t need, to seek shortcuts in the name of financial expediency, to limit planning to the short term, to care too little for the earth, and to interfere with the processes of nature.  He sees us as involved in a cosmic intelligence test, a race between reliance on external things and development of inner consciousness.  He expects that the pace of change in each area will increase very rapidly over the coming years, and he believes that there is a strong possibility that inner awakening will evolve more quickly that material change, and we will welcome our freedom from attachment to things.  Harking back to Buckminster Fullers’ rewrite of the Lord’s Prayer, he quotes, “Love is metaphysical gravity.”  I think the relevance of that insertion is to be found in the inevitably and irresistability of gravity

Extended in another direction, we enhance our wholeness as persons by enlarging the scope of our ways of learning.  An integral worldview calls for us to access knowledge that extends beyond the reach of the tools of materialism – the senses and the rational mind.  The inner world, our connection with the depths of spirit, is accessed through intuition, dreams, imagination, and meditation, not as substitutes for empiricism and rationality, but in an effort to use all the tools at our disposal.

Similarly, ethical action may be informed from surface considerations alone, or from both surface and depth.  We may act, individually or corporately, either for our own immediate gain or with a view to long-term consequences.  Again, globalization provides an interesting example: as the free market system becomes world-wide it carries with it the underlying assumption of classical economic thought that players will act from enlightened self-interest, and that in the long run all will benefit.  However, as we can see in our own experience with the free market, those who have riches tend to get more, our natural resources are depleted, and some people fall through the cracks into poverty and homelessness.  Such a system, while it may be better than any other, needs political and social safety nets to protect the victims of “the invisible hand” of the market.  An integral worldview would seem to call for all self-interest to be sufficiently enlightened that the consequences for all of earth’s creatures would be considered in every economic and political transaction.  If that seems unrealistic, then at least people who are spirit-based need not only to live compassionately with their neighbors but also to work for social programs to alleviate the unfortunate consequences of what Marcus Borg calls “systemic evil.”

Abraham Maslow developed a hierarchical model of human motivation in which higher needs, ultimately the need for self-actualization, can only be met when the lower needs for food, clothing, housing, and security are fulfilled.  That is to say, outer needs of the body must be satisfied in order for inner needs of the spirit to be met.  As an ethical imperative, then, if we wish to have a world in which spirit rules, i.e., a world in which individual and corporate decisions are based on a concern for the general welfare from a long-range perspective, then it is in our own best interests to do all we can to eliminate homelessness and hunger and disease.

Churches are not immune to the difficulty of maintaining a spiritual perspective as they try to balance the demands of matter and spirit.  Wink, in The Powers That Be, reminds us that when the Roman emperor Constantine became Christian in 321 CE, “ . . . the church ceased being persecuted and became instead a persecutor.  Once a religion attains sufficient power in a society that the state looks to it for support, that religion must also, of necessity, join in the repression of the state’s enemies.  For a faith that lived from its critique of domination and its vision of a nonviolent social order, this shift was catastrophic, for it could only mean embracing and rationalizing oppression”  (pages 149-150).  Prior to Constantine’s conversion, Christians had refused to engage in war; shortly afterward, Augustine, drawing upon Cicero’s rationale for Roman imperialism, declared that Christians have a loving obligation to use violence if necessary to defend the innocent against evil.  This belief became the rationale for the Inquisition, a justification for the Crusades, and support for the idea that has served nations in nearly every war – that God is on our side.  (She isn’t, of course.)

Religious and governmental authorities have sought alliances of dominance throughout history and never, I suspect, to the spiritual benefit of their constituencies.  The Vatican, state-churches, the efforts of the Prohibition movement early in the twentieth century and of the Religious Right now to enact their agendas into legislation – these are just a few of the examples that come to mind.  Wink notes that churches have never agreed that domination is wrong.

Fundamentalism, in addition to its efforts to become politically dominant, violates Jesus’ teaching in just about every other way.  To cite one other example, in its commitment to scriptural literalism it sides with the surface rather than the depths, with the letter rather than the spirit, with the superficial meaning of words rather than the deeper meaning of metaphor and archetype and parable.

I also see churches, liberal as well as conservative, struggling with issues of matter and spirit whenever they engage in a building project or fund-raising for maintenance and operation of the physical plant, or, for that matter, with dwindling membership as is the case today with many of the mainline denominations.  Is it a peculiarity of mine that I find an obsession with tithing or pledge drives or building a diversion from the spiritual task of the church?  Perhaps there are people for whom these activities are spiritual exercises and if so, I willingly leave such matters to them and free myself of the guilt trip that accompanies my lack of participation in such efforts.  Actually, I simply absent myself from church during times of special financial emphasis, and I have never favored efforts to win converts.  George Fowler, in Dance of A Fallen Monk cites these and other preoccupations of “church managers” as reasons that he left the Trappist Order, the priesthood, the Roman Catholic church, a Wesley Foundation directorship, and why, finally, he severed all other church connections.

One further failure of churches to heed the teaching of Jesus about the divine inner realm: If God is immanent and therefore directly accessible through meditation or contemplative prayer, then there is no need for a church, or Pope, or clergy of any kind as intermediaries between God and humankind.  And so the mystics, with their claims of a direct relationship or identity with God, were seen as enemies of the faith and were repressed as heretics.  And if humankind is understood as the incarnation of the divine – Salt of the Earth, Light of the World, Imago Dei – rather than the embodiment of original sin, then there is no need for the church as facilitator of the process of salvation and redemption.  Did the church create the doctrine of fall/redemption, of sin/salvation, in order to give it an essential role in the lives of believers?  I find scriptural support for a positive view of human nature in the Gospels and for a negative view of human nature in the writings of Paul and his followers.  Both views were propounded in the early church, but Augustine prevailed over Pelagius (one might say that on this issue Paul prevailed over Jesus), and the doctrine that required the ministrations of the church and its functionaries was the winner.   And just as mystics were silenced and excommunicated for witnessing to direct contact with the divine, so was Matthew Fox silenced, then excommunicated, for teaching “Original Blessing” in place of Original Sin.  The church finds ways to establish and maintain a dominant role in human affairs.

And yet, and yet . . .

 

(Copyright 2000 by C. Grey Austin, all rights reserved.)

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