Perhaps time for a new kind of spirituality

A mad man walks through the market, in the full light of day, in the morning, a lit lantern in hand, crying out aloud, unceasingly "I seek God, I seek God". One passer-by thinks he is "lost". Another thinks that he is straying, "like a child". A third thinks he has hidden himself away from the world too long and has grown afraid of seeing real people. The mad man jumps into their midst and transfixes them with his glances. He calls out "Where is God gone?". Nobody answers. He continues:" I mean to tell you! We have killed him--you and I.We are all his murderers" He asks" What did we do when we loosened this earth from its sun?...Whither does it now move? Whither do we move? Away from all suns? Do we not dash on unceasingly? Backwards, sideways, forwards,in all directions? Is there still an above and below? Do we not stray, as through infinite nothingness? Does not empty space breathe upon us? Has it not become colder? Does not night come on continually darker and darker? Do we not hear the noise of the grave-diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell the divine putrefaction?...God is dead! God remains dead! And we have killed him!" he raves on. He asks:" How shall we console ourselves, the most murderous of all murderers? The holiest and the mightiest that the world has hitherto possessed, has bled to death under our knife,--who will wipe the blood from us? With what water could we cleanse ourselves? What lustrums, what sacred games shall we have to devise? Is not the magnitude of this task too great for us? Shall we not ourselves have to become Gods, merely to seem worthy of the it?.." The madman falls silent and looks again at his hearers; they also are silent and look at him in surprise. At last, he throws his lantern on the ground. It breaks into pieces and is extinguished. "I come too early, " he then says, "I am not yet at the right time....Lightning and thunder need time, the light of the stars needs time, deeds need time, even after they are done, to be seen and heard..." The same day, he makes his way into different churches and there repeats his message" requiem aeternam deo" and when led out, he always replies "What are these churches now, if they are not the tombs and monuments of God?"  This is what Nietzsche wrote in "The Gay Science" in late 19th century.

If Nietzsche's madman was too "early" then, he is no longer now. The day of reckoning has come. We see, we hear, we feel that "God is dead" all around us, everywhere we go. Where has God gone? We need look no further than all that's around us: at the quickening and maddening pace of urbanization, industrialization, standardization, technologicalization of our life and at the ubiquity of our information media, our I-pads, I-phones, desktops, our I-banking, I-government services, I-purchases etc. It is said that our old Christian God is almighty, all-knowing and all good. Our information technology seems to have taken the place formerly occupied by that Christian God. Our internet technology and its products and processes have become omnipotent, omnipresent and if someone were to type a question on the keyboard of our super-computer about whether it considers itself moral, the computer screen will most likely display the answer that it thinks itself all good too.

It is reported that Jesus said a long time ago, "man does not live by bread alone." If he is right, the great Roman Empire had long thought of a solution: "bread and circus!." The Roman Empire fell. It was replaced by the Holy Roman Empire, with the Holy Roman Emperor sitting upon his throne at the head of the secular government and the Pope at the head of the realm of man's spirit in Vatican. It lasted a few hundred years more. Then came the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the industrial revolution, the Age of Enlightenment, the age of Western imperialistic expansion and then the world wars, the Communist Revolutions, first in Russia, then in China, then national liberations, decolonization etc and now the emergence of Third World countries. Is the greater part of humanity thereby rendered happier? Do they find their life more satisfactory? Do they find more joy, less stress? Are they more anxious, restless, fearful about their uncertain future or the reverse? Is materialism our only option? Does man still have need of a certain spirituality?

In the West, the number of people who find consolation and peace in the traditional religions are rapidly declining. Its magnificent churches have now become more "tourist attractions" than places of worship. The once universal, Catholic and apostolic church has now splintered into thousands of denominational churches. The Church has plenty of competition. Man' s needs for some kind of spirituality, for meaning and for hope are now satisfied by the thousand and millions of fortune tellers, astrologers, tarot card readers, wija board operators, masters of chi mei calculations, four-pillar fortune telling,  feng shui, worship of all sort of idols, including secular rock stars, movie stars, TV celebrity, sports heroes  etc if not in person, then in newspapers, magazines, periodicals, on TV or even on the internet. What does that tell us?  We don't just have eyes, ears, mouths, noses, stomaches and sex organs.  We got brains too. We got what used to be called "hearts" which are supposed to be the seat of our emotions and our "soul".  Their needs have to be attended to too. Are they? These are problems on which many thoughtful people have spent a whole life time reflecting and writing. Some of them are making certain tentative suggestions. One of them is Thomas Moore, who wrote inter alia, the following

1. Care of the soul: a Guide for Cultivating Depth and Sacredness in Everyday Life (1994)
2. Soul Mates: Honoring the Mystery of Love and Relationship (1994)
3. The Re-Enchantment of Everyday Life (1997)
4. The Dark Eros: The Imagination of Sadism (1998)
5. The soul of Sex: Cultivating Life as an act of Love (1999)
6. Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality (2001)
7. Dark Nights of the Soul (2005)
8. A Life a Work: The Joy of Discovery what you were born to do (2009)

To me, Moore always writes with sympathy and a great deal of insight. In the chapter entitled "Theology of the World" in "The Re-Enchantment of Everyday life", he urges us to listen to the "voice of the earth and being in a family relationship to the world". because to him the modern sciences, both physical and social, do not actually foster any "real dialogue between nature and human life". In the sciences, we are the subject and the world is an object. To him, only "theology grants subjectivity and power to nature" and for this reason, he thinks that "only theology can speak adequately"  but that nowadays, our conventional theology is "colluding" with the disenchanted logic of our culture at large. The kind of theology he has in mind is much broader in scope and bolder in vision, "a fundamental, life-informing mode of understanding that takes the infinite, the mysterious, and the spiritual into full account as it seeks to formulate our imagination of human events.", one which is nonsectarian, nondenominational, something not defensive, narcissistic, obsessive or jealous and which yet considers the many issues of ordinary life that involve mystery. "We need the specialist who has no need to defend his or her own beliefs but who can speak intelligently and reflectively on how to live ritually, how to deal with death, and how to find deeply rooted attitudes towards marriage, illness, work and community." This is not at all easy. Although we are now in the 21st century, he regrets that there are still "few signs that theology as a field is adjusting to this new world." He thinks that it's not sufficient to shape a theology out of the major religious traditions of the world because to him, even the "smallest religion" has something of value to contribute. Neither does he think it sufficient or appropriate to look for "some intellectual amalgamation of all religious views" i.e. the idea that all religions say the same thing or point in the same direction. We need something which is able to deal with such things as deaths, accidents, meaning, nature, intuitions, rites of passages, sacredness, holy places, ethics, values and educations. He says that the kind of theology he is looking for is "not a blend of all traditions but rather a style of thought that takes spiritual matters into account as we try to deal with daily challenges". He believes that unless we have such a theology, we would continue to think of our problems as merely psychological or sociological when in fact, it requires "a special way of thinking and responding that reaches into the mysteries that underlie human life."

What would the kind of theology Moore thinks of involve? It requires a deep sense of our connections with the mysteries of every day life, what he calls " a profound appreciation for dialogue with the holy, for the limits of human knowledge in the face of mystery, and for emptying our language and idea about the divine so that we can live with an attitude of utter openness to fate, nature and destiny." because to him, secularistic disciplines and methods force us to live in a closed system but only theology may hope to open up our possibilities towards the infinite. He thinks that we should stress love over law, intimacy over understanding, rather like the traditional shaman, the mystics, like Julian of Norwich, going through an initiatory illness in a way that is remarkably shamanic. For him, we have had enough of intellectualization and moralization which has "kept us culturally disenchanted and divided into competitive groups". We need to break these old patterns of response in our spiritual practice: we need a new kind of imagination. As he says, it is less a question of borrowing the idea and practices of one religion from another than of "rediscovering" spiritual perspectives and opportunities within one tradition through association with another. He cites the example of Thomas Merton. I think he might usefully include Thich Nhat Hahn too.

Moore complains that for far too long, "we have imagined that the "theos" of theology to be the limited image of divinity that we jealously protect and hold as the only valid and true version."  To him, "theos" or "God" is a word that fails every time it is defined, described or translated. It is an "evocative" word which "calls forth the spirit that is often described as "infinite", "unnameable", "beyond" any statement about it, and yet is "the source of all life". For some, "it is an invitation to silence, the emptying of all understanding, beyond language and story, and yet fully present as the active spring from which time and events flow." In short, we should focus on its connotative and suggestive rather than its denotative possibilities. To me, what he is advocating seems remarkably similar to what the Zen Buddhist are talking about. Moore, however, relies on the what the European theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in the Nazi prison: " God is beyond in the midst of our life. The church stands at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village.", the word "church" to be understood here not in any institutional sense but as the "spirit which gather us together to acknowledge the ultimate mysteries that frame a human life." To him, "theos" is not something set apart from life, but is "the very heart and substance of the most ordinary dimension of everyday life." and as he says, "it is the ultimate source of enchantment, so that to seek the spell of the dreamlike immersion in the boundless sea of life is to live religiously, worshiping the God who is beyond any definition or idea of God, the God who appears, as God appeared to Bonhoeffer, in the face of utterly inscrutable insanity and inhumanity.". He talks a bit like a Christian existentialist philosopher: "taken to the brink of rationality, we look into the absurd abyss and behold pure divinity, beyond any institutional description, far beyond any moral prescription, and infinitely beyond any convenient, defensive, anxious, provincial, narcissistic or belligerently argued notion". To him this kind of theology is "the ultimate basis for an enchanted life": "it restores magic as a principle of mature living rather than an aberration in the course of human experimentation, and it gives utter seriousness to the re-enchantment of everyday life". We need to restore a little of the "magic" of a spirituality conformable to the conditions of modern life and build anew a certain "ritual", a ritual which restores to everyday activities a kind of "sacredness", a kind of "holiness", a sense of its hidden or long suppressed or repressed "connections" with other living things, with the air, the sea, the sky, the mountains, the trees, etc, and feel once again that pounding of our heart beat, that sense of intimacy which has been denied to us for so long by our prolonged exposure to our artificial, dessicated and dessicating urban, intellectual and cultural environment which has drained us from that vital source and fountain of all life: the feeling of connection to everything else in our world..  

However, as it is, many people encounter enormous resistance to their tentative efforts to discover or invent this new kind of unattached spirituality emanating not only from the traditional religions, but also perhaps, from their own prejudices built up over the years and manifesting itself by the way they limit themselves by their own particular needs and narrowness of vision. There is no doubt that the practitioner of this new type of spirituality also needs community, something which they will have to build for themselves and they must also be careful not to fall into the trap of the kind of narcissism and narrow-mindedness of the tradition from which they are now trying to escape. To Moore, enchantment needs its own specialist and mystery its own lobbyist. To him "a theology of daily life, practised by us all would open our eyes to a dimension solidly sealed off by the modern secularistic imagination and it would restore soul, because soul is fed by the eternal and spiritual as much as it finds nourishment in the temporal and the physical". Is that not what we, in the UUHK are trying to do? I am so happy to find corroboration of the worth of what we are trying to do from this master of the art of the human soul.