The dog’s curly tail
It is said that Swami Vivekananda used to tell his disciples that devoting time to healing the world is like trying to straighten a dog’s curly tail. No matter how much one may try to straighten a dog’s tail, it will always revert back to being curly.
There are times when Vivekananda’s words sound to me like an invitation just to let the world go on its own course and not to wear myself out striving to do the impossible. I hear the words as advice to take care of my own spiritual well-being, let others take care of theirs, and hope for the best. At other times it sounds more like an invitation to keep tirelessly at the task of trying to make things a little better and never to wipe the dust off my hands and congratulate myself for having completed the task. After all, the fewer people there are who make an effort to make a positive difference in the world, the less the chances the world will spontaneously straighten up and follow a course of wisdom and justice. On the other hand, a great deal of what has gone wrong in the world has come about precisely because of some people zealously applying their solutions and trying to save a world whether the world wanted to be saved or not. The pendulum of my attitudes toward activism sways slowly back and forth, showing no signs of finding a stable resting point.
There are profoundly discouraging signs that the dog’s curly tail will yield to no efforts at all to straighten it. Senator Dodd proposed a bill in the US Senate that would put limits on how high the interest rates on credit cards can be until such time as new regulations take effect. The bill died before it could even be debated, reportedly blocked by Republicans. No spiritual tradition in the world recommends usury; most prophets and philosophers throughout history have condemned it in no uncertain terms. And yet Senators, probably fearing a loss of campaign funds from banks and other financial giants, side with the wealthy and powerful rather than with those who are suffering from the usurious rates the giants are charging.
Cardinals, bishops, priests, ministers, rabbis, imams, swamis and lamas should be making it abundantly clear that the inaction of the senators is a shameful betrayal of every religious tradition in the world, and the followers of those religious leaders should be informing their representatives in no uncertain terms that politicians will not be getting the vote of sincere Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists until they liberate themselves from their addiction to the backing of major corporations and return to the business of providing legislation designed to promote the welfare of the people.
That the politicians are not being denounced by religious leaders for betraying their promise to serve the people is a sign that religious leaders themselves are betraying their promises to care for their flocks of believers. A silent pulpit in a time of injustice becomes part of what makes that injustice possible. There are, to be sure, people making themselves heard. But there is nothing like the quantum mass of outraged voters filling the streets that it takes to bring about change in a country the size of the United States. There are nothing like numbers it took some decades ago to bring an end to racial segregation and the unconscionable war in Vietnam. The hounds of heaven, those who afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, are sleeping on the porch. Perhaps they have themselves become dogs with curly tails.
In times like the ones we are going through now, it is mighty tempting to become a quietist, to retreat into the comfort of isolation and solitary prayer and meditation. It is tempting to focus on another world, a better world to come along when one has been released from active duty in this one. It is tempting to visualize heavenly realms and pure lands and distant paradises while the world outside rots and stinks. It is even tempting to retreat to a peaceful valley somewhere and to wait until the times have changed, thinking, “When the parade comes along, I will join it.”
If no one marches now, then when and where will there be a parade to join?
Those who would continue robbing little people by tempting them into debt, and then by charging exorbitant rates to enslave them, and then by forcing them into bankruptcy—those robbers are counting on you and me to give up the struggle for achieving a fair and just world. They are counting on us to shrug and say, “Oh well, I guess some dogs just have curly tails, and I should just learn to love curly-tailed dogs.”
Can they count on your support?
Religious pluralism
In the first of his lectures on Pragmatism, delivered in Boston in 1907, William James suggests that there are two kinds of philosophical temperament, which he calls the tender-minded and the tough-minded. The tough-minded are those who have a tendency toward empiricism. They trust their senses. They are content with a variety of sensations and with a plurality of fields of inquiry, each with its own questions and theories. The tough-minded feel no strong urge to arrive at a single “theory of everything.” The tender-minded, in contrast, gravitate to the intellect rather than the senses, and they seek unifying theories and a single metaphysical principle that unites all the varieties of beings and sensations. The tender-minded are also inclined to dogmatism and to a sense of discomfort with what cannot easily be fit within their unifying frameworks.
In the final of the eight lectures on Pragmatism, James turns his attention to Pragmatism and religion. Again, he notes two prevailing trends in religion: a tendency to absolutism in some contrasted with a tendency to religious and moral pluralism in others:
So we see concretely two types of religion in sharp contrast. Using our old terms of comparison, we may say that the absolutistic scheme appeals to the tender-minded while the pluralistic scheme appeals to the tough. Many persons would refuse to call the pluralistic scheme religious at all. They would call it moralistic, and would apply the word religious to the monistic scheme alone.
It is not merely that the tender-minded prefer absolutism and dogmatic certainty, says James. The very idea of pluralism is repugnant to the tender-minded.
There can be no doubt that when men are reduced to their last sick extremity absolutism is the only saving scheme. Pluralistic moralism simply makes their teeth chatter, it refrigerates the very heart within their breast.
Pluralism is closely associated with Pragmatism. The heart of Pragmatism is the notion that true differences in opinion must result in differences in action. If two people have a disagreement on some issue but would act the same way no matter how the dispute might be resolved, then the dispute is merely a logomachy—a war of words only. Rather than using the words “true” and “false,” Pragmatists prefer to speak of propositions as having or failing to have agreement with reality. What it means for a belief or proposition to be in agreement with reality is just that if the belief is acted upon, then it will have expected results. If I am thirsty and drink the contents of a cup and my thirst is slaked, then the belief that the contents would slake my thirst was in agreement with my sense of reality. Beliefs, propositions are instruments by which a person gets from one experience to another. Given that there are often several beliefs that have the capacity to serve as instruments for successfully getting to an expected experience, it would make no sense to say that there is only one belief in agreement with reality; it makes little sense, in other words, to say that there is only one truth.
When Pragmatism is applied to religious doctrines, it turns out that not only are there many paths to salvation, but there are also many goals that can be described as salvation. So while it may be the case that many religious traditions promise some kind of salvation, it does not at all follow that all religions are promising the same salvation. The beatific vision described as the salvation for which Roman Catholics strive may not at all appeal to the Buddhist striving for nirvāṇa, and one Buddhist’s nirvāṇa may not appeal at all to another Buddhist. The religious pluralist is not in the least bothered by this, for he has no expectation that all people should have the same ultimate goal.
I am both a religious and a moral pluralist. It is probably this fact that makes me quite comfortable with both Quakers and with Buddhists, and with several varieties of each of these. It is my pluralism that makes it possible to call myself both a Quaker and a Buddhist. I have no wish or need to convince others that this approach to life makes sense. Given one’s temperament, religious and moral pluralism either makes sense or it doesn’t. James was probably right in saying that for some the very idea refrigerates the hearts within their breast. Perhaps the most one can ask of such people is that they at least recognize that they are sharing a planet with people whose mentalities are constructed other than theirs and that there is no evidence that this fact is plunging the human race into disaster. If anything is proving unworkable and disastrous, it is the conflict that comes about when those whose dispositions incline them more toward absolutism and dogmatism attempt either to impose their wills on others or to rid the world of those who have other absolutes or those who have no absolutist tendencies at all.
Sint Pieterskerk
On October 3, the people of Leiden celebrate the end of the Spanish seige of their town in 1574. It is a day of tremendous celebration, for the ousting of the Spanish was eventually followed by the liberation of the entire Netherlands from Spanish rule. It is a day for celebrating freedom.
This year’s Leidens ontzet (Leiden’s relief), as the festivities of October 3 are called, was a time for celebrating America. It was four hundred years ago, in 1609, that a group of English dissidents moved to Leiden, after spending some time in Amsterdam. Most of these people worked in the cloth industry in Leiden, which was at that time a major center for manufacturing textiles and for shipping them out to other places throughout Europe. The English textile workers lived in Leiden until 1620, when they embarked for Delfshaven. There they purchased a ship called Speedwell to sail for the new world. The ship proved not to be seaworthy, so it was traded in England for another ship called Mayflower and that ship made it to America on November 21, 1640. The pilgrims, as they came to be called, celebrated their freedom in the new world with a feast. The Dutch point out that the feast was modelled on Leidens ontzet and that what Americans came to call Thanksgiving is a Dutch holiday imported to America by the English pilgrims.
The decision to make the journey to America was made at a church in Leiden called Sint Pieterskerk. That church, built sometime around 1100, was already five hundred years old when the pilgrims worshiped there. Buried under the floor of that church was John Robinson, who played a key role in helping the pilgrims make the decision to leave the Netherlands for America but was unable to make the journey himself. Also buried there are relatives of some of the pilgrims who did make the journey. The gravestones are still on the floor of the church, but the bodies were removed and placed in a cemetary some time ago.
On October 3, 2009 my wife and I attended a thanksgiving church service at Sint Pieterskerk. It was a moving experience for me, because at least three of my ancestors worshiped there during their years in Leiden. Two of my ancestors, Francis Cooke and William Bradford, were Englishmen who lived in Leiden and took The Mayflower to America. Another ancestor was Moses Symonson, a native of Leiden who eventually went to America, but not on the Mayflower.
As I listened to the church service, all in Dutch, and struggled to understand what was being said and sung, I could not help wondering how my ancestors had felt as they worshiped in that same place. What went through their minds? What did they believe? (A clue is what is written in the Mayflower compact.) What would they think of all the people in America who are their descendants? If they had been able to see into their future and see our present, what would they think of what America has become? Perhaps if I could understand Dutch better, my mind would have been more on the sermon and less on my own wandering fantasies and imaginings.
Leiden was also visited in the 17th century by George Fox and William Penn, two of the early Quakers. I am not descended from either of them, but I am a Quaker and therefore regard myself as a spiritual descendant. Not a day goes by when I do not think about the fact that I am probably walking along streets well known to the pilgrims and the Quakers who were here. In the greater scheme of things, of course, it is meaningless, but in the small world of my own mind these things take on a significance that I don’t expect anyone else to share.
With the exception of special services on holidays such as Leidens ontzet, Sint Pieterskerk is no longer used as a church. It is a secular building now, a venue for concerts and other cultural events. Like so many of the grand cathedrals and basillicas and churches in Europe, it is a relic of another age, a time that modernity has buried, both for better and for worse.
Just a few meters from Sint Pieterskerk is the building that served as Leiden’s jail. In the courtyard outside the jail public executions used to take place, often to the delight of onlookers. Capital punishment is a phenomenon that modernity has left behind for the better. People are no longer executed in the Netherlands; perhaps someday they will no longer be executed in the United States. What modernity has left behind for the worse are windmills, sailing ships, and machines that were driven by human muscles instead of coal and petroleum and uranium. In Leiden, more than anyplace I have lived before, most people get around on foot and on bicycles rather than in automobiles. Perhaps someday people in the United States will rediscover the power of their own muscles to do whatever work is really necessary to do.
Frankly, I have never been much giving to praying for things. But in Sint Pierteskerk on October 3, 2009, I prayed that America will someday become the place the pilgrims dreamed of when they set out for Leiden on their way to Plymouth rock.
To learn more about the pilgrims visit the Pilgrim Archives website. To learn more about the Mayflower and its passengers, look at the Pilgrim Hall Museum website.
Cathédrale Notre-Dame de Paris
Huge cathedrals and basilicas always plunge me into a complex web of conflicting feelings. On the one hand, I almost always find myself feeling peaceful and serene in the vast spaces under the vaulted ceilings, and I usually feel appropriately inspired by the iconography. If a cathedral is very old, I invariably feel a connection with the dozens or scores of generations of worshipers who have been there before me. All those feelings are just what magnificent cathedrals are meant to evoke.
On the other hand, there is a part of me that rebels against the possibility of being dependent on externals for any kind of religious feeling. After all, I come from a long line of Protestants who were so wary of external symbols that they sometimes physically destroyed them. The actions of those iconoclasts, of course, betrayed a deep attachment to abstract ideals that was every bit as pernicious as the dependence on concrete externals they so feared. I am fully aware of that, and that awareness blunts the the edge of the sword of my instinctive rebellion against institutional structures.
Less easy to moderate is the sense of uneasiness I always feel around anything grand. Huge buildings, highly ornamented vestments, well-crafted religious artifacts, magnificent thrones, bejeweled scepters and crowns and rings are invariably costly and therefore sponsored by the exceptionally wealthy and powerful. It is impossible for me to see such things without being reminded of all the poor who have borne the heavy burden of providing goods and services for the powerful. Even when the wealthy are generous, the very possibility of their being generous is almost always bought at the expense of those who come to be in need of generous aid. I have a difficult time escaping the conviction that there is something indecent about some people amassing as much wealth as several thousand ordinary people could amass by putting all their fortunes together. Using that wealth to sponsor the building of magnificent cathedrals and temples and splendid vestments for priests and the monarchs they bless does not offset the indecency of acquiring such an imbalance of wealth in the first place.
A few days ago I sat in Notre Dame de Paris cathedral. Despite trying my best to get in touch with the inward light that my Quaker practice is based upon, I simply could not get past the distraction of the flashes of the cameras of thousands of tourists who ignored the many signs requesting them not to use a flash if they took photographs. There was hardly any sense of the sacred remaining in the cathedral. But perhaps one cannot expect much of the sacred to dwell in a cathedral in which kings and emperors were once crowned; the secular has always been a persistently invasive presence in that particular cathedral.
My own inability to get beyond external distractions to make contact with my internal guide distressed me and made me feel shallow and somehow inadequate. I found myself longing for the quiet and simple Quaker meetinghouse where my wife and I normally worship when we are in our home town. The Zen Buddhist side of my mentality brought forth images of masters tearing up sutras and burning wooden Buddha statues, not out of contempt but to show that in the end we have only our own inner resources to draw upon and cannot rely on anything else. My Zen background also delivered a sense of being ashamed for being so dualistic in seeing the sacred and the secular as antogonistic opposites.
Outside the cathedral, after my unsuccessful essay at meditating, I blended into the crowds of curiosity-seeking tourists from all over the world and the local pickpockets honoring a long tradition of striving to make a dishonest living. For a moment I felt like a character in a Victor Hugo novel. A brief fantasy of swinging from the belfry like Quasimodo passed through my consciousness. My wife became in my eyes the lovely Esmeralda with whom the unfortunate hunchback of Notre-Dame was enamored.
We went across the street together, Esmeralda and I, and there we ate baguettes with cheese.
A liberal by any other name
Like many other people today, I watched the funeral service for Senator Ted Kennedy. Like a good many other people, I was struck by the constant references to his faith, and to his drawing inspiration from the gospels and the Hebrew prophets. His long career as a public figure working for the poor, the mentally ill, the physically ill, immigrants seeking to improve their lives, the downtrodden was all inspired by Christian teachings. Similarly, his work for racial desegregation and for a full equality of opportunity for all people, no matter their race, their religion, their political convictions or their sexual orientation, bore the unmistakable stamp of his Christian values in general and his Roman Catholic values in particular.
Ted Kennedy called himself a liberal. What he called his liberal values were so intimately tied to his Christian values that it is difficult to imagine anyone being a Christian without also being a liberal. But one need not be a Christian to be a liberal, for liberal values are also at the heart of being Jewish, and Muslim, and Hindu, and Buddhist, and Sikh, and Jain. It is difficult to imagine anyone being truly serious about any of the world’s religions without being deeply committed to the traditional liberal values of protecting the poor against the wealthy, the weak against the powerful, the feeble-minded against the clever, the humble against the mighty, the peaceful against the warlike, the few against the many. It is impossible for me to imagine being a sincere practitioner of any religious tradition without being committed to what Catholics during the Second Vatican Council called the preferential option for the poor. That is, whenever there is a struggle between the rich protecting their vested interests and the poor struggling for a basic livelihood, and fundamental human rights, and dignity, and equality of opportunity, one should always side with the poor, the weak, the disenfranchised, the underprivileged. That is the message the prophets of Israel brought. It is what Jesus of Nazareth taught. It is the message of the Qur’ān and the prophet Muhammad. It is a central theme in the teachings of the Buddha. It is what Confucius and his followers repeatedly sought to implement. It is also what humanism is all about. These are the basic values not only of the religious but also of many agnostics and atheists.
A word that many people don’t like to use because they find it too nebulous in meaning is spiritual. Some people use the word to refer to espousing the core values of the world’s religions without necessarily buying in to the rituals and the dogmas of any those traditions. That is one way of using the word, but it is not entirely accurate, for that usage suggests there is a dichotomy between being religious and being spiritual. That is, however, a false dichotomy. While it’s true that people who prefer never to go inside a church or temple or synagogue or mosque can be spiritual, it’s also true that Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists can all be spiritual. Just as one need not be a Christian to be a liberal, one need not avoid organized religion to be spiritual. Just as liberalism embraces all the religions, and many ways of thinking that are not at all religious, so does spirituality.
It would not be going too far, I think, to suggest that spiritual and liberal overlap in meaning a great deal. They are not synonymous, but they are close enough in connotation that people who are allergic to one word can use the other without being too badly misunderstood.
I am among those who will miss Ted Kennedy’s tireless crusades for the poor and the powerless. And I am among those who know that the word crusade comes into English from the Spanish and from the Latin word for cross. A crusader carries the cross into his battles. Ted Kennedy did that brilliantly and unfailingly. One need not be a Christian to feel grateful to him for doing that. One need only be spiritual. And in being spiritual, one cannot help also being a liberal.
Out of a living silence 