By Judith Gayle | Political Waves
This is the week I went on an involuntary news fast. That old trickster Mercury, perfecting its skill at retrograde SNAFU, had me chasing my tail making calls to people I could barely understand in an attempt to revive my modem and get access to the net. At the beginning of the week it appeared to be all about the phone line, but after waiting for a tech to test DSL from the street — and next day repairs under the house with new wiring — I still didn’t have access. Another call this morning led to discovery of local power outages, necessitating a reconfiguration of the modem and then instructions to load a favorite page, so I hit the link to Huffy and got this ledeline, front and center: Blood Bath USA.
We knew it was coming. We were expecting our hearts to break in this succession of full moons, and here we go again, another direct hit. Yet another horrific event involving home-grown — and apparently lone wolf — terrorism, accompanied by conversations about arming or not arming campus police, bad actors versus those who are mentally disturbed, no gun restrictions versus sensible laws regarding weaponry. Blah blah blah, until we’re numb. This is, essentially, just another piece of our All American culture war, much of it tracked back to mistrust of government and tribal values. And wrap it all up with a fifteenth — FIFTEENTH! — address from this President asking when we concerned citizens will shake the nation into common sense with our collective outrage and sorrow.
Yet while it seems clear that a vast majority of us from both left and right are in favor of more stringent laws regarding guns, who gets them and how, a congressional body that within the last few days has doubled down on its purity tests to all things right-wing will approve no discussion of limits, here in the Wild Wild West. On any number of fronts — Oath Keepers, for example — full-out insurrection is not beyond imagination, and nobody on that side of the fence is going to allow (let alone pass, it might appear) a mental health screening, or allow an ATF representative to get more than half-way up their driveway.
I’m somewhat encouraged by the conversations on CNN (my only news channel, here in the Pea Patch) regarding stricter gun laws, with some anchors confronting the pro-gun folks, like Huckabee, demanding explanation of how MORE weapons will stop random murder. But the question is not so small and manageable as simply new gun restrictions. The problem has more to do with firearms as a part of our approved culture of violence than any legal sanctions can deter, and we all know it.
We must come to the place where we acknowledge the need for a shift in weapons legalities as a first step toward remediating this dark energy, followed by a very close look at issues of mindless militarization, zero/sum competition, violence as entertainment, nationalized poverty, family dysfunction, repressed sexuality, and all the ills of our struggling society, because — you name it — that pressure will eventually find release with a finger on the trigger somewhere. It already has.
No, the problem is not so simple, and the recent visit of the Pope brought the problem into perspective. It seems to me that while statistics show that much of religion is on the wane, we have dropped out of those simplistic traditions without finding an internal mechanism that keeps our humanity in balance, and many of us feel its loss. We created a void space upon which to feed our children, yet filled it with nothing.
In a culture dominated by consumerism and a brutal race to success that seems increasingly improbable, Mother Teresa was surely right when she told us that “The poverty in the West is a different kind of poverty — it is not only a poverty of loneliness but also of spirituality.”
It’s a no brainer to assume that feisty old Teresa was talking about Christianity when she said that, and Catholicism in particular, but the concept is so much wider, and so is the conversation. Especially AF — After Francis — I’ve been thinking about the concept of spirituality and the piece written by our Amanda Moreno, Sometimes I Hate The Word Spirituality.
I understand that the term has come to mean just another kind of religiosity, one without much ‘there’ there, but I’m not uncomfortable with the word or even the concept. Even if defense of spirituality has become tedious, as has a reliable definition, the concept is in the mind of the beholder, self-defined as is the experience — and that’s where it is not just authentic but alchemical.
Back at the time of Harmonic Convergence in August of 1987 — what the ascensionists call the Second Wave of awakening, the First being the expansive philosophy of the ’60s counterculture — it was clear that religion had become largely unworkable in American society. A spate of cults, from the mildly absurd to the dark and dangerous, had sprung up, including a growing movement within the evangelical churches to return to their roots in the primitive church. The schism that took culture wars to a new level had already established the right-wing church, determined to grab political power, leaving an easy-going spiritual movement still wearing flowers in their hair, hugging trees and listening to crystals.
On the right, Jerry Falwell had politicized the evangelicals into a Moral Majority that became activists, and gave us politicians like Newt Gingrich who made Bill Clinton’s life hell in the ’90s. On the left, those of us who were looking for the larger spiritual picture called ourselves Seekers. We were not organized, nor did we think we needed to be. There is little ‘hive mind’ on the left of the spectrum, which has always been something of an Achilles Heel in terms of getting and keeping political power for liberal causes.
As a well traveled Seeker in the ’80s and early ’90s, I loved ALL the trappings, the metaphysical stores, the retreats and trainings. I tasted, I delved, I perfected. I meditated, I channeled, I astral traveled. At some point before the end of the century, I discovered I was no longer seeking anything — I’d found myself.
It wasn’t that the answers had been outside of me, somewhere — it was that I’d asked the wrong question. It wasn’t, “how do I do this?” It was, “who am I?” And essentially, what the masters all tell us of the spiritual path is true, we will come to peace with our search as we live out the focus of our path, as we inhabit our truth, and as we come to recognize and love self, others, and the Great Mystery that connects us all.
Amanda wrote that the Wiki description reads that “Spirituality may refer to almost any kind of meaningful activity.” And I will agree, so long as that activity connects us not just to our heads but to our hearts. To be spiritual is to open ourselves to spirit — to an awe-inspiring experience of kinship with all that is, with all of creation, with one another. That experience brings our innocence back to us, the wonder of childhood and discovery, the outrageous beauty of life in its many forms.
Spiritual perspective carves away all the dross of learned behavior and erroneous belief. It melts away the complex to leave us with the profundity of what is simple. It puts us at the center of creation to delight in all we have made, or to change it according to the dictates of our heart-connection. It excludes nothing, includes everything, and does no harm, because the very experience of our spirituality is found in harmlessness.
Religion is the codified ritual that someone, somewhere, insisted we must duplicate exactly in order to have an experience of spirit. It comes with rules and absolutes and a hierarchy that found benefit in keeping us all smaller — hence, more tractable — than we actually are. When we hear about Christians condemning Muslims, or Pagans being discriminated against or ISIS killing off those who aren’t true believers, we can know that this is the worst misunderstanding humankind can hold about their purpose on the planet — and that their need to control for God’s sake makes them godless.
It is said of Mother Teresa that she questioned her belief at the end of her life. Although she wrote with a good deal of wisdom, many disliked her. She was something of a tyrant to those who worked with her, and certainly judgmental in terms of her own religious bias. And yet, looking at the work she did faithfully for a lifetime, I find it difficult to fault her.
Teresa leaned in, embracing the dying, offering kindness where little existed, and counted it good even as she lost faith in the absolutes of the tenants of the life she had chosen — and don’t we all? Somewhere on her path, an experience of spirituality took the place of dogma and put wind beneath her wings to complete her work. Perhaps she had an experience of my favorite Course in Miracles affirmation: “If you knew Who walks beside you in the way that you have chosen, fear would be impossible.”
We love because we are loved — and a spiritual experience of that opens our hearts. There is little else to understand. Experience of that will change everything, and that one stroke of spiritual brilliance filtered through an open heart can mend the world. Your world and mine. The one you and I came to — collectively — co-create. When we think about leaning in to embrace an alchemical principal, that is the one to hold close.
Love because you are loved, love because you ARE love. And so it is.
