Sacrifice

In today's Stillspeaking Devotional, Rev. Fitzgerald recounts the story of sixteenth-century Mennonite martyr Dirk Willems, who was incarcerated for his faith by the authorities. He managed to escape across a treacherously frozen river but turned around when the guard who pursued him broke through the ice. Willems saved the guard's life, was captured again and later executed. "It is a great story", comments Fitzgerald. "But it is a Christian story. Which is to say it has a cross in it."

Duly impressed with Willems' sacrifice, I continued my morning tour of the interwebs, only to stumble on this insightful little piece: a list of seven "habits of happy people". Most of those are common, wisdom-laden spiritual fare (embrace impermanence, don't crave approval, see rejection as guidance), but the first one got me thinking. "Happy people", the author boldly proclaims, "put themselves first". They take care of their own needs before they cater to anyone else's.

At face value, these two bits of writing seem to starkly contradict each other, and to sum up the range of options our culture provides re dealing with our own needs. On the one hand, there is the much-admired, but somewhat gloomy, Christian ideal of giving up our own needs for those of others. Which, as we all know, hasn't created spiritually mature people, but mostly suffocated, sour-faced killjoys and co-dependents. On the other hand, there is the sheer hedonism (or so it seems) of the me-first culture, which comes with materialism, selfishness, and a general lack of compassion and connection. 

Faced with these options, overall cynicism about the human condition would be the best response. But there is an alternative, namely, to realize that things aren't as simple as they look in superficial readings of both approaches. Let's go back to Willems' story. And let's imagine he had put his own wish to survive before the guard's. What would his life have looked like?

To answer this question, we must dig deep into the human condition and ask ourselves, "What is the deepest need we have?" Turns that out our deepest longing is not survival or even well-being, but meaning. As long as we can make sense of life, as long as it is meaningful to us, we can cope with almost any condition. And rarely do we encounter a suffering more agonizing than the absence of meaningfulness. All religion, philosophy, and much common sense as well as common nonsense, revolve around ascribing meaning to our existence.

Willems found his meaning in faith, and his faith was based on nonviolence, and radical love of God and neighbor. If he hadn't turned around to save the guard, odds are his life would have been meaningless from that point. He would have given up what was most important to him. He would have neglected his deepest need: the need for meaning.

His sacrifice, then, was not what we usually take that term to mean. He sacrificed his freedom and his life, yes: but not to suit some higher ideal or abstract faith statement. He sacrificed them for the sake of his own, deepest self. A self rooted in a reality more profound than the world in which we put survival and comfort above all else. We have to imagine that he was at peace with his decision: an all-encompassing peace, welling up from this deeper reality, which would have remained forever elusive had he chosen to run.

This is the true meaning of faith, and the true meaning of sacrifice. Any sacrifice that is not authentic, that is less than a completely truthful expression of who we are at our deepest level, is not an act of faith, it's an act of showing off. One of those Jesus warned against. 

And now it becomes clear that there is no fundamental contradiction between the Christian path of self-emptying love, and the contemporary insistence on pursuing our needs and wants. For in this day and age, meanings are no longer simply handed down to us. We have to find them for ourselves, and we have no place to start but ourselves. Therefore, our journey begins with taking even our sillier whims seriously. 

Craving pie, a burger, a trip to New Zealand? Don't dismiss those in the name of some misunderstood idea of spiritual discipline. Make them your discipline. Pursue them without mistaking them for absolute truth or final fulfillment. Look into them without judging them. Over time, they will reveal their fleeting, finite nature, and make way for deeper and deeper layers of longing: for they aren't your true goals, only signposts for the journey. They will evaporate,and you will become ever more authentic in the process. Eventually, you will encounter your own deepest meaning, and you will find that you'll have sacrificed your whims along the way. 

And no one can tell you what shape your particular sacrifice will take. Some of us who make the journey trade an all-too comfortable life for dramatic encounters with sheer existence. Others give up constant drama and impossible dreams for the peaceful routines of a life lived simply and humbly. Some experience both. Whichever form your path may take, one thing is true for all of us: ultimately, "sacrifice" is not giving up what is important to us, but living up to it. Thus, the true meaning of the term isn't to rid ourselves of who we are, but to let go of who we are not. To uncover the truth, the power and the glory which has been lying awake at the ground of our being since the beginning of time.

Evolution, awe and original sin (part II)

Apart from a rediscovery of awe, there are two other things we can learn from Marcelo's piece, and which I'll deal with in this post and the next one. First, we can use his little cosmological epic to inquire into the actual difference between science and religion. As you'll see, it's not about evolutionary timelines (or at least it shouldn't be), it's about how we think of our universe at the deepest of all levels. 

Notice how Gleiser presents his account in a language, not only of awe but of life. His word animate and endow with intention processes that are, strictly speaking, wholly material and non-intentional: "our father/mother the universe"; "the furious pace of hydrogen fusion"; "oxygen that protects life"; "animals struggling to preserve their genes". 

These aren't scientific statements. Which is obvious enough in the father/mother metaphor, but language can color our perceptions in even subtler ways. Stars don't feel fury. Oxygen has no intention to protect life, and animals don't know anything about their genes. Marcelo knows all that, of course, and if I asked him why he worded it that way, we would probably end up having a delightful conversation about the limits of language and imagination. We would talk about why humans have to resort to animistic metaphor to convey awe, and about our ultimate inability to escape our own anthropomorphic inclinations. Our paths would touch, or almost touch.

And we would only disagree about things when getting to their most profound. He would likely insist that these limits of our talking and thinking are by-products of our evolution as humans, and that there is nothing more we need to say about them. I would argue that the very fact that we are aware of these limits is a faint reflection of a reality which lies beyond both our scientific and religious concepts, and which I happen to call God. 

At which point he might ask me if I'm with the "intelligent design" crowd, and I would reply "of course not". And I would spend the better part of an afternoon explaining why: Because I think intelligent design is an injustice to the adventure and the uncertainty that is life. Because I've become convinced that God is much better thought of as the animating force behind all of evolution: omniscient and omnipotent insofar as He or She is uncreated, but groping and straining and pushing into the dark just as we are as regards Creation: with no guaranteed outcome and no predetermined goal, other than the distant assurance that everything will go back to Oneness eventually. 

And, no, I would reassure him (if he were to wonder): I'm not a New-Agey "heretic". Such lines of thought have a venerable history in Judeo-Christianity, from Eriugena to Cusanus, and all the way to Whitehead, Tillich, and Jonas. 

At which point Marcelo would probably excuse himself with a nervous glance at his watch. But the point would have been made: just because science and religion are different ways of knowing, they are not exclusive. It is only when we read their respective languages with exclusivist rigidity that they seem incompatible. In reality, they come together in our living, breathing, exploring existence, our constant being on the move in this world of cells and molecules, of awe and values. It is one world.

Evolution, awe, and original sin (part I)

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 

Now the earth was formless and empty,darkness was over the surface of the deep, 

and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light.

God saw that the light was good, and he separated the light from the darkness. 

God called the light “day,” and the darkness he called “night.” 

And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

Genesis 1 (NIV)

I have never understood the purported conflict between religion and science. Yes, on occasion there are clashes over divergent values--e.g. when scientists want to experiment on embryos and people of faith raise ethical concerns. But the same value clashes happen e.g. between scientists and secular animal rights activists, over the fate of lab animals. Or between religious people who have different life ethics such as "against abortion" vs. "against war".

So, apart from these very real issues that occasionally pop up, science and religion have been coexisting, for centuries, as complementary ways of knowing. And every now and then, their respective quest for truth leads them on paths that touch, or almost touch. This beautifully written piece by physicist Marcelo Gleiser is an example for that: a breathtaking vignette on the evolution of life. I'm quoting it at length here to convey some of its flavor.

Ours is an old story, starting some 13.8-billion years ago, when our collective father, the universe, came into being. (Maybe the cosmos should be a mother as well; it's up to you, dear reader.) (...) The first stars appeared some 200 million years after the Big Bang.

Recall that stars are balls of hydrogen, nuclear-fusion furnaces that make hydrogen into helium at a furious pace. That's where it all starts, with hydrogen, the simplest of all chemical elements, becoming all others, all the way to carbon to iron to uranium. (...) We carry in our bodies the products of this cosmic alchemy, forged in stars dead billions of years ago. We are the memory of this distant past, molecular conglomerates that assumed a form complex enough so that stars could remember.

In a choreography of cosmic proportions, gravity sculpts matter, making it flow here and there, spin around, take different shapes, spirals, elliptical, spherical swarms of millions to hundreds-of-billions of stars. (...) About one star per year is born in our galaxy; our sun and its planets appeared some 4.6-billion years ago.

Earth is a special planet. Just take a look at pictures of other worlds to see why. It's special because it's covered in water and it has an oxygen-rich atmosphere that protects the surface — and life thereon — from the constant hostility of outer space; in particular, from cosmic and solar radiation. We live in a blue womb, an oasis of life in a cosmos that is — at least as far as we know — lifeless, cold and hostile.

Earth's climate, warm and stable, allows for life to thrive, to explode into a bewildering diversity. A short stroll through a jungle or a coral reef and we are overcome by the ecological wealth, plants and animals that fight for survival, searching for food, struggling to preserve their genetic imprint (...). Life uses the present to create the future.

Wow. 

At this point, do yourself a favor. Go back to Genesis 1 and read it in its entirety.

Notice anything?

Exactly: this is the way Genesis was meant to be read. Not as a drab account of six literal weekdays but as a sacramental rendition of events of overwhelming magnitude in time and space. Of processes so completely out of our control, and yet so intimately woven into each of our lives, that we have to muster all our courage and all our capacity for awe to do them justice and read them the proper way. 

There is no fundamental conflict between religion and science unless we create one. Both are routes to insight and awe, each "according to their kind". It is our own hearts and minds that create problems from them: by succumbing to the temptation of seeking fault lines instead of surveying the landscape as a whole.

Owing nothing

"I am God, your God. (...)

I will not accept a bull from your house,

or goats from your folds.

For every wild animal of the forest is mine,

the cattle on a thousand hills.

I know all the birds of the air,

and all that moves in the field is mine.

If I were hungry, I would not tell you,

for the world and all that is in it is mine.

Do I eat the flesh of bulls,

or drink the blood of goats?

Offer to God a sacrifice of thanksgiving

and pay your vows to the Most High.

Call on me in the day of trouble;

I will deliver you, and you shall glorify me."

Psalm 50:7-15 (NRSV).

Mulling over her part hilarious, part depressing observations at church, a witness to the fumbling and clunky ways we humans attempt to pay tribute to God, writer Annie Dillard concludes:

God does not demand that we give up our personal dignity [i.e., immerse ourselves in clunky church experience], that we throw in our lot with random people, that we lose ourselves and turn from all that is not him. God needs nothing, asks nothing, and demands nothing, like the stars. It is a life with God which demands these things. (...)
You do not have to do these things; not at all. God does not, I regret to report, give a hoot. You do not have to do these things--unless you want to know God. They work on you, not on him.
You do not have to sit outside in the dark. If, however, you want to look at the stars, you will find that darkness is necessary. But the stars neither require nor demand it.

(from: Teaching a Stone to Talk)

God does care about us, of course. His healing power is woven into the very fabric of this world, always available to us as we heed its beckoning. On occasion, it even enters our lives, unbidden. But God doesn't require any particular ritual or faith practice. It is us who need those to know Him. 

Likewise, our gratefulness, our calls for help, our attempts to live a faithful life are not some spiritual tax we owe. Their purpose is to guide us into life abundant. Out of abundance, our songs of praise arise naturally.

Faith of experience, faith of practice

The other night, as I walked down the outside stairs of the building I work in, bathing in the red glow of the setting sun that reflected from the walls and illuminated the cityscape while blades of grass were shivering in the odd spring cold, I caught a glimpse of why I've (again) become discouraged with this blog.

What I've been doing here, mostly subconsciously, is try to share my experience of God in the hope of arriving at a way of thinking about God. Both has failed: for God cannot be captured or preempted in words. We have to experience Him in and through our lives: and experience constantly changes, it morphs, grows, and matures. On top of that, we all experience and think about God in different ways. What really matters is not so much what we say or think but that we integrate our experience, that we make it our home in Eternity.

In brief, what I've really been looking for was a way of practicing faith, and I may have found one. More on that later. In the meantime, may the Spirit be with you. He is there: in the splendor of morning's first rays, the darkening trek of clouds at dusk, the unrelenting heat of noon and the silence of midnight. All it takes to see is listening.