March 25, 2005

I'll Shut Up - Right After This

John Darling

They come together, these sacred leaders and seers, to feel their way toward a new spirituality, one that takes in some major pieces left out of religions for the last couple millennia - the earth, the feminine and the idea of universality, meaning I am not identified just with "my" religion, but see all humanity as very much belonging to the same spirituality.

Sound like some New Age neo-pagans? No, it's the people of Jewish renewal - and Saturday night at Ashland High School's theater, they asked themselves and members of other religions to talk about a "new cosmology needed for planetary healing" and also to do a candid report card on "what's not working" with their own religion and how it could change.

The main engine of Jewish renewal over the last half century, 80-year old Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi ("Reb Zalman") was candid, calling for a secular, not supernatural ethic. The earth is teaching us, he says. The cosmos is the body of God. We are becoming Gaian citizens (Gaia is the ancient Greek goddess of Earth).

"The only way we can get it together is together," he says. We're all cells in the totality of one body. Ram Dass and Timothy Leary gave us a gift - of losing our narrow, provincial experience, something Reb Zalman confirmed with his first LSD journey, he says, "seeing religion from the inside," seeing that every tradition has these "heart filled" visions.

Reb Zalman calls it a Gaian ethic. It's what's going to heal us. "What has happened is that we've been broken apart," he says, referring to the whole of humanity. Our social fibers have been shredded, we're in exile and we have things like nuclear families, single mothers, bastard children (no mother would use that word). "It's like a bad immune system," he says.

He's speaking gently, warmly, smiling in his white beard, saying so many new and radical ideas that you have to glance at your neighbor and suggest, did he really say that? But here he is, a respected patriarch of the Jewish community for many decades, the spiritual father of Ashland's Havurah, crying out for a new person on the earth - and modeling that person.

Patriarch, smchmatriarch. He relinquishes all father-right. We need matriarchs, not patriarchs, he says. The era of religious triumphalism is over. Wow, you don't need that term defined for you. You can feel it. Religious pride, the sense that you, in your major, organized religion, with a billion adherents, are chosen and have the inerrant word of God in your book.

And sitting on your pillow, meditating (alone), that's not going to make the necessary changes for the world, either, he says. How about more blessing of one another and of other and of the planet?

This man has to be the Martin Luther of the Judaic faith and he's not just nailing some theses on the door of his own temple, but of every temple.

Anne Bartlett has a hammer, too. She's the one who led her flock into creation of the downtown labyrinth, next to her church, Trinity Episcopal. We are hard-wired before birth, she says, for relationship with "Other," which means other people and God, this within a cosmos that she defines as "an ordered luminous web of interconnections, infused with divine purpose and plan," something that isn't about living in different, competing religions.

We (Christians), she says, have been in trouble with this triumphalism thing since Constantine opened up an era of genocide in the name of religion and "trampled on the souls of others," something that's not over yet. Christians, she notes, need to start listening, forgiving and practicing some humility. To big laughter and applause, she quotes Desmond Tutu, who said, hey, God is not a Christian.

What is God? "God is a mystery - and we need to understand Her as best we can," she says. Any Christian minister who writes a Good Friday sermon, should be required to run it by a rabbi first, she adds - to much laughter. Our hope, she concludes, is that God can be trusted to being new spiritual life out of a global situation of death and despair.

Sound dark and negative? It wasn't. You had to be there. The crowd (sold out) was loving it - and approaching it as a serious and menacing planetary crisis that we have the power to change, rather like citizens gathered to deal with a flood or plague. This is real. We're in trouble. It's especially grim now, in a nation pumped up about saving the world from evil, violent terrorists, all of whom just happen to be of a different religion.

"We've got to try and stop the spiritual blindness," says Agnes Baker Pilgrim, the local Takelma elder. We've got a journey to make, one of only 18 inches, from head to heart, so we can take on a role given us by the Creator, the care of all creatures created before us. She says it simply: think of community first - and the generations ahead of us.

We're not here to have a lot of material gain, power and prestige, but to learn the lesson of love, says Dr. Krishna, a Hindu. Love must come with respect or love is false love. We're speaking in the elemental building blocks of consciousness and values here, but it's so rare that we hear these things in this jingoistic consumer culture, that they sound novel, almost radical.

It's difficult to hold to the universal view that we're one planet and we are not alone, say Ashland's Tibetan Buddhist lamas, Yeshe and Pema. We have many lives to get it right and we do so by living simply, practicing contentment and harming no being. Calm down, says Pema, stay in the present, rest in the openness of your mind, don't be tyrannized by the compulsion to think and "all should go smoothly on the spiritual journey and you need not panic."

What we're being presented with here is the greatest sociological transformation ever known, one in which the economy can become a satellite to the "soul of the culture," instead of the other way round, says author-philosopher Jean Houston, now of Ashland. The "reset button of history" has been hit and we face the most profound task of any people who have ever lived.

You talk to people about this stuff and they all say they know it's happening. Life is a lot different than it was, say, at the end of the last century - and 9/11 plus the disputed 2000 election, while not earth-shattering in themselves, were two huge body blows that put all this on the table and greatly accelerated the process.

The sponsor of the weekend, Havurah's Rabbi David Zaslow owns that the direction pointed out by Reb Zalman, and followed by his own flock, is mystical, a loaded word that means, "It's not enough to serve and worship God. Renewal is the understanding that God resides in every one of us as a direct experience of the divine, a direct encounter."

The ecstatic experience of the divine, brought in by dance, song, prayer (and an inclusive view of world as cosmos) holds firm to the cultural identity, while letting go of what's dysfunctional in the religion - usually the negative role of women and outsiders and the lack of connection to nature. The emerging new trinity, Zaslow says, is self, Gaia (nature) and God - and you can't have one without the other.

Contact John Darling, an Ashland writer and counselor, at jdarling@jeffnet.org.