Gregory Thorn

Is religious tolerance enough

I recently watched a documentary movie about the Dalai Lama. Among the many interesting things the Dalai Lama spoke about was the idea of religious tolerance. However I wonder if religious tolerance is enough; both amongst religions but also in relationship to secular society. Tolerance is a somewhat passive notion and doesn’t mean that we move from the more insidious religious behaviour of religious bigotry. As well as tolerance I think that we need to actively embrace our differences and function in ways that transcend petty (religious) ideologies so that the goodness of our communities might indeed enable all people to have a share in the fruits of life.

The heart of the unconscious

I haven’t always found the construct of the unconscious in psychology theory particularly useful to understand human beings or as a construct for human anthropology. It comes across as a kind of waste basket idea that can be used to explain much of what we simply don’t understand.

In the ascetical traditions of Christianity, carrying through themes from it’s Hebrew heritage, comes the idea of heart as both the centre of human being and the fullness of human being. In this it is, and we are, an anthropological paradox.

Science seems to have little tolerance for paradox, especially when science tricks itself out for consumption through salable theories.

Heart is our all and we are all heart. The tongue doesn’t taste itself and we can’t experience the heart …we can only be it … and be healed as it.

Is sin sinful?

We are, by habit, rather self-focused creatures, we human beings. Not so much that we don’t consider the welfare of others or have others as important parts of our lives but more that we don’t know ourselves; to the extent that we have limited ability to actually be in charge of our impression on the world and those around us.

I’m reminded of the 7 deadly sins of Western Christianity. A list of ‘to be feared’ moral disasters. They came, of course from Christianities heritage from the East and the eight ‘thoughts of Evagrius of Pontus. Changed a bit by Western appropriation, they are: gluttony, lust, pride, sadness, acedia (kind of despondency), anger, vanity and sadness.

What interests me in these ‘thoughts’ isn’t that they are criteria for human failure but that they are representative movements or energies from our depths that impinge on our consciousness and move us to behave in relatively self-destructive ways.

So rather than berating ourselves as woeful sinners when we experience the above, (Perhaps a post-reformation self indulgent angst behaviour), when we experience these distortions to peace, we meet them as windows to the hidden mystery of who we are and use them to heal the damaged ecology we know as ‘ourselves’.

Can religion make you happy?

One of the problems for ‘church’ when it adopts a secular marketing metaphor to promote it’s activities and, at the end of the day, it’s ‘product’ is that the ‘product’ is not really that appealing to the public as a whole.

I recently came across a description of contemporary consumer culture as eudaemonistic. A great word, isn’t it and I suppose ‘hedonistic’ could probably be attached as well.

Within context, one could ask, “What’s wrong with that?”

Nothing I suppose. However if the general populace is eudaemonistic and, by association, hedonistic, ‘church’ has a real marketing task ahead of itself because, by and large, the core business of ‘church’ does not produce happiness as secular society expects it. Belonging, meaning, purpose … yes but not bottled happiness.

Still if the cosmetic industry can persuade us that wrinkle cream works perhaps the ‘church’ can persuade society that it has the fountain of happiness on tap.

What is spirituality?

What is spirituality? Many things to many people I suspect!

I don’t wonder if at the heart of spirituality is prayer – if we can know what prayer is and why we engage it.

And then clustered around this practice of prayer are things like acsesis (Disciplined simplicity), epiktasis (A sense of growth and spiritual development), a sense of sacrament, the appropriation of virtue, making meaning of theodicy (the rule of God: why do things happen the way they do), nepsis (watchfulness/mindfulness), theosis (deification-the goal of the spiritual way), belonging, having a workable anthropology, cosmology  and ecology.