Marilyn McEntyre is a fellow at the Gaede Institute for the Liberal Arts at Westmont College who writes in the June, 2009 edition of Sojourners Magazine" an article she titles, "How to Read the Bible (Hint: The Gray Area is Holy Ground). Her discussion focuses not so much on the content of the biblical narratives, poems, speeches, songs, letters and visions, but on our approach to them. "How we read," she suggests, is immensely consequential."
McEntyre asserts that three basic questions are "useful" in approaching scripture, as well as other things written and read: (1) What does this text invite you to do? (2) What does this text require of you? (3) What will this text not let you do?
This is a wonderfully rich little article that I would encourage you all to read in its entirety. You can read it online at:
http://www.sojo.net/index.cfm?action=magazine.article&issue=soj0906&article=how-to-read-the-bible
If "double-clicking" this link doesn't work for you, you can copy and paste it into your browser.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Saturday, May 23, 2009
The Stories We've Come to Believe About Ourselves
Thomas Harris and the old "Transactional Analysis" school of psychotherapy used to talk about the "tapes" we play in our heads, reminders of both positive and negative things we think we have learned about ourselves. The "TA" folks talked about the voices of parents and teachers and mentors and ancient friends and enemies that continually insinuate themselves into our own self understanding. Theologians and scholars focused on religion (no, they are not always the same thing -- more on that another time.) don't talk about "tapes;" they talk about "myth." In this context, "myth" does not refer to something "fictional." Theologian and author Thomas Moore explains:
..."myth" doesn't mean falsehood; it refers to the the narrative that gives us an imagination of self and life, allowing us to live meaningfully and purposefully. A life-defining myth is not usually conscious to the people who are living it...We just assume our myth is mere fact, and our explanations for things the simple truth. We don't usually reflect deeply enough to understand that the world we see all around us is highly filtered by the myth in which we believe. (Thomas Moore, "Religion," in Imagine: What America Could Be in the 21st Century, Marianne Williamson, editor, p. 299)
We have cultural, national, and personal "myths," "stories we have come to believe about ourselves." Regarding your personal journey, what is "the story you have come to believe about yourself?" Not only the "biographical data" details about where you were born, where you grew up, what you did/do for a living, who you married, who you divorced, the number and names of your kids and grandkids, but also the "screenplay" that plays in your head as you watch yourself living your life. What are those core principles around which you almost unconsciously organize your life? Not only the "noble" stuff, but the secret, not-so-pretty, uncomfortable stuff that you'd just as soon not fess up to. Who are the people who have shaped you into the person you are? Not only the loved ones and mentors and teachers and models, but the ones who have betrayed, hurt, disappointed and abandoned you. How do those principles, those people, along with your "biography," continue to act as "filters" through which you view and understand the world?
..."myth" doesn't mean falsehood; it refers to the the narrative that gives us an imagination of self and life, allowing us to live meaningfully and purposefully. A life-defining myth is not usually conscious to the people who are living it...We just assume our myth is mere fact, and our explanations for things the simple truth. We don't usually reflect deeply enough to understand that the world we see all around us is highly filtered by the myth in which we believe. (Thomas Moore, "Religion," in Imagine: What America Could Be in the 21st Century, Marianne Williamson, editor, p. 299)
We have cultural, national, and personal "myths," "stories we have come to believe about ourselves." Regarding your personal journey, what is "the story you have come to believe about yourself?" Not only the "biographical data" details about where you were born, where you grew up, what you did/do for a living, who you married, who you divorced, the number and names of your kids and grandkids, but also the "screenplay" that plays in your head as you watch yourself living your life. What are those core principles around which you almost unconsciously organize your life? Not only the "noble" stuff, but the secret, not-so-pretty, uncomfortable stuff that you'd just as soon not fess up to. Who are the people who have shaped you into the person you are? Not only the loved ones and mentors and teachers and models, but the ones who have betrayed, hurt, disappointed and abandoned you. How do those principles, those people, along with your "biography," continue to act as "filters" through which you view and understand the world?
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Paradise Outgrown
Rabbi Harold Kushner (not the Rabbi Lawrence Kushner about whom we wrote a month ago, but , rather, the Rabbi Kushner famous for When Bad Things Happen To Good People) has written half a dozen or so very helpful little books. In one of them, How Good Do We Have to Be? this Rabbi Kushner suggests a completely different kind of reading of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
You know the story itself without looking – God tells Adam and Eve that they can have anything in the garden, except that they are not allowed to eat fruit (Genesis never says “apple,” by the way) from one tree, the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Well, this serpent seduces Eve, Eve eats some of the forbidden fruit, gets Adam to eat some, too, and all hell breaks loose. Suddenly, they both realize they are naked and create the first ever foliage-based fashion statement so they can cover their boy and girl parts. And then, that evening when God is taking God’s nighttime stroll in the garden, Adam and Eve hide. But God, being God and all, finds them, and they start spinning excuses and blaming each other and whatever else comes to mind. And then God punishes them and tosses them out of the garden, and burdens them with the hard realities of life – work, desire, pain, childbirth, aging, and the prospect of death.
And you know without thinking about it the classical response to this old story; all sorts of goofy stuff have become essentially articles of faith for entirely too many. A priori, women are to be regarded as sources of evil, vessels of sin and seduction. No matter what, this tradition says, disobedience and sin are carved into our genetic code (well, maybe not carved into our genetic code, because then they’d have to admit there was something to science and all that). God wants us to be perfect, but because of Adam’s and Eve’s disobedience, and because of what God does to Adam and Eve afterward, we can never be perfect. And when we are less than perfect, God will punish us. Talk about your “lose-lose” situation!
In How Good Do We Have to Be? Rabbi Kushner dismisses this traditional interpretation by first understanding the story as being “true” without being “historical.” And then he suggests that John Milton and others missed the point of the story. It is not about “Paradise Lost.” It is about “Paradise Outgrown.” “I see Eve,” he says, “as being terribly brave as she eats the fruit. She is not frivolous, disobedient or easily seduced, as later interpreters have insisted on describing her. She is boldly crossing the boundary into the unknown, venturing to discover what lies beyond the limits of animal existence, and reaching back to bring Adam after her…. Eve has given her descendants more than existence; she has given us life”
Rabbi Kushner argues in his very gentle, very sardonic way, that the act of eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil is the commitment to the complexity of human existence and that, because of this complexity, God simply would never expect perfection from us. He says that may of the things we have traditionally called “punishment” – work, desire, pain, childbirth, aging, and even death – are actually gifts of being truly and completely who we are supposed to be: “Work, intimacy, parenthood, a sense of mortality, the knowledge of good and evil – aren’t those precisely the things that separate us from the animal kingdom? Those are the sources of creativity, the things that make us human. They may be painful, but it is the sort of pain that leads to growth.”
And then he goes on to say that religion should not be “the carping voice of condemnation telling us that the normal is sinful and the well-intentioned mistake is an unforgivable transgression that will damn us forever.” Instead he says that it should be something like “the voice that says, ‘ I will guide you through this minefield of difficult choices, sharing with you the insights and experiences of the greatest souls of the past, I will offer you comfort and forgiveness when you are troubled by the painful choices you made.’”
Two things. One, from John Dominic Crossan who says this about the importance of knowing the original context of the Gospels: “ I am convinced that when we get the first century (that is when Jesus lived and the Gospels were written), we will get the 21st century right." Two, from the remarkable professor of world religions Mircea Eliade, who always argued that the purpose of creation stories in any culture has to do with what he called regressus ad originem, or "returning to the origins" to remind the culture of who they were/are intended to be. How would it change how we see ourselves if we could embrace Rabbi Kushner’s notion that the stories of the Garden of Eden had more to do with moving from animal to human, from infantilism to adulthood, than the angry, wrathful, fear-laden interpretations many of us were taught were the “God’s honest truth?”
You know the story itself without looking – God tells Adam and Eve that they can have anything in the garden, except that they are not allowed to eat fruit (Genesis never says “apple,” by the way) from one tree, the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Well, this serpent seduces Eve, Eve eats some of the forbidden fruit, gets Adam to eat some, too, and all hell breaks loose. Suddenly, they both realize they are naked and create the first ever foliage-based fashion statement so they can cover their boy and girl parts. And then, that evening when God is taking God’s nighttime stroll in the garden, Adam and Eve hide. But God, being God and all, finds them, and they start spinning excuses and blaming each other and whatever else comes to mind. And then God punishes them and tosses them out of the garden, and burdens them with the hard realities of life – work, desire, pain, childbirth, aging, and the prospect of death.
And you know without thinking about it the classical response to this old story; all sorts of goofy stuff have become essentially articles of faith for entirely too many. A priori, women are to be regarded as sources of evil, vessels of sin and seduction. No matter what, this tradition says, disobedience and sin are carved into our genetic code (well, maybe not carved into our genetic code, because then they’d have to admit there was something to science and all that). God wants us to be perfect, but because of Adam’s and Eve’s disobedience, and because of what God does to Adam and Eve afterward, we can never be perfect. And when we are less than perfect, God will punish us. Talk about your “lose-lose” situation!
In How Good Do We Have to Be? Rabbi Kushner dismisses this traditional interpretation by first understanding the story as being “true” without being “historical.” And then he suggests that John Milton and others missed the point of the story. It is not about “Paradise Lost.” It is about “Paradise Outgrown.” “I see Eve,” he says, “as being terribly brave as she eats the fruit. She is not frivolous, disobedient or easily seduced, as later interpreters have insisted on describing her. She is boldly crossing the boundary into the unknown, venturing to discover what lies beyond the limits of animal existence, and reaching back to bring Adam after her…. Eve has given her descendants more than existence; she has given us life”
Rabbi Kushner argues in his very gentle, very sardonic way, that the act of eating the fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil is the commitment to the complexity of human existence and that, because of this complexity, God simply would never expect perfection from us. He says that may of the things we have traditionally called “punishment” – work, desire, pain, childbirth, aging, and even death – are actually gifts of being truly and completely who we are supposed to be: “Work, intimacy, parenthood, a sense of mortality, the knowledge of good and evil – aren’t those precisely the things that separate us from the animal kingdom? Those are the sources of creativity, the things that make us human. They may be painful, but it is the sort of pain that leads to growth.”
And then he goes on to say that religion should not be “the carping voice of condemnation telling us that the normal is sinful and the well-intentioned mistake is an unforgivable transgression that will damn us forever.” Instead he says that it should be something like “the voice that says, ‘ I will guide you through this minefield of difficult choices, sharing with you the insights and experiences of the greatest souls of the past, I will offer you comfort and forgiveness when you are troubled by the painful choices you made.’”
Two things. One, from John Dominic Crossan who says this about the importance of knowing the original context of the Gospels: “ I am convinced that when we get the first century (that is when Jesus lived and the Gospels were written), we will get the 21st century right." Two, from the remarkable professor of world religions Mircea Eliade, who always argued that the purpose of creation stories in any culture has to do with what he called regressus ad originem, or "returning to the origins" to remind the culture of who they were/are intended to be. How would it change how we see ourselves if we could embrace Rabbi Kushner’s notion that the stories of the Garden of Eden had more to do with moving from animal to human, from infantilism to adulthood, than the angry, wrathful, fear-laden interpretations many of us were taught were the “God’s honest truth?”
Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Spring, Creation Stories, Albert Eintstein and Chief Seattle
FINALLY it seems to be spring! That, and the fact that our next face-to-face discussion on May 26th will focus on "Stories of Creation," has reminded me of things written by two very different, very great men.
The first is from Albert Einstein, who was arguing in 1945 (25 years before the first "Earth Day," so the argument can be made that he was a little in front of the curve) that caring for the created order was not a pleasant option but an absolute necessity:
"A human being is part of the whole called by us 'universe,' a part limited in time and space. The human being experiences him[or her]self, his [or her] thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his [or her] consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
The second, from Chief Seattle, in a letter to President Franklin Pierce in 1854, urging a different perspective on western expansion:
"We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of the land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes whatever land he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father’s grave behind, and he does not care. He kidnaps the earth from his children. He does not care. His fathers’ graves and his children’s birthright are forgotten. He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky, as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind a desert…
"You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of our grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we would have taught our children that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. If they spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.
"One thing we know, which the white man may one day discover – our God is the same God. You may think now that you own him as you wish to own the land; but you cannot. God is the God of all creation, and God’s compassion is equal for the red and the white. This earth is precious to God, and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its Creator. The white, too, shall pass, perhaps sooner than all the other tribes. Continue to contaminate your bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste."
I think, I hope, we are finally starting to get it.
The first is from Albert Einstein, who was arguing in 1945 (25 years before the first "Earth Day," so the argument can be made that he was a little in front of the curve) that caring for the created order was not a pleasant option but an absolute necessity:
"A human being is part of the whole called by us 'universe,' a part limited in time and space. The human being experiences him[or her]self, his [or her] thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his [or her] consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
The second, from Chief Seattle, in a letter to President Franklin Pierce in 1854, urging a different perspective on western expansion:
"We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of the land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes whatever land he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father’s grave behind, and he does not care. He kidnaps the earth from his children. He does not care. His fathers’ graves and his children’s birthright are forgotten. He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky, as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind a desert…
"You must teach your children that the ground beneath their feet is the ashes of our grandfathers. So that they will respect the land, tell your children that the earth is rich with the lives of our kin. Teach your children what we would have taught our children that the earth is our mother. Whatever befalls the earth, befalls the sons of the earth. If they spit upon the ground, they spit upon themselves.
"One thing we know, which the white man may one day discover – our God is the same God. You may think now that you own him as you wish to own the land; but you cannot. God is the God of all creation, and God’s compassion is equal for the red and the white. This earth is precious to God, and to harm the earth is to heap contempt on its Creator. The white, too, shall pass, perhaps sooner than all the other tribes. Continue to contaminate your bed, and you will one night suffocate in your own waste."
I think, I hope, we are finally starting to get it.
Friday, May 1, 2009
Tikkun Olam
The Mishnah is the first important collection of the works of rabbinic Judaism, and dates to the 200's of the Common Era. It is a profound and complicated, highly studied and debated and beloved collection of insights and debates that date all the way back to the destruction of the Temple in 70 of the Common Era. The Mishnah is the first place where the phrase (and the concept) of tikkun olam (Hebrew for "healing" or "repairing the world") appears in written form. Since then tikkun olam refers to the idea that among the tasks of the faithful if the repairing of our broken world. In modern times tikkun olam has become largely synonymous with the notion of social action and the pursuit of social justice.
In the 1500's, Rabbi Issac Luria was perhaps the most energized and widely followed teacher of Kabbalah, a term identified with a wide range of Jewish mystical practices (see press stories of Kabbalah's resurgence among celebrities). He talked about tikkun olam this way...
God formed the world by forming vessels of light to hold the Divine Light. But as God poured the Light into the vessels, the vessels were not able to contain it, and they shattered, and tumbled down throughout all creation. Thus, this world consists of an infinite number of shards of the original vessels that still have trapped sparks of the Divine Light. The great and noble task of humanity has to do with helping God free and unite this imprisoned and scattered Light, and, in the process, restoring the shattered world.
Do I think that Rabbi Isaac expected his students (or us) to consider take that teaching "literally?" Of course not. Do I think his imagery can help us get our imaginations around the notion of a very widespread Divine Presence occupying the same "reality" as a hurting and broken world?
You bet.
In the 1500's, Rabbi Issac Luria was perhaps the most energized and widely followed teacher of Kabbalah, a term identified with a wide range of Jewish mystical practices (see press stories of Kabbalah's resurgence among celebrities). He talked about tikkun olam this way...
God formed the world by forming vessels of light to hold the Divine Light. But as God poured the Light into the vessels, the vessels were not able to contain it, and they shattered, and tumbled down throughout all creation. Thus, this world consists of an infinite number of shards of the original vessels that still have trapped sparks of the Divine Light. The great and noble task of humanity has to do with helping God free and unite this imprisoned and scattered Light, and, in the process, restoring the shattered world.
Do I think that Rabbi Isaac expected his students (or us) to consider take that teaching "literally?" Of course not. Do I think his imagery can help us get our imaginations around the notion of a very widespread Divine Presence occupying the same "reality" as a hurting and broken world?
You bet.
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