Connecting with Compassion

My last two posts were about a negative view and a positive view of choice and behavior. I find that I am extraordinarily drawn to the negative view. It seems to have quite a hold over me. I find myself feeling beaten down by the idea that there is some innate badness at my core that spoils any "good" I might do and makes my every action "bad." Therefore, it is best that I find an isolated niche in this world where I can do as little harm as possible. As fear-based, as life-destroying, as nuts as this view is, I find it quite gripping.

Now, let us apply Karen Armstrong's idea about the neocortex to this. I discussed Karen Armstrong's idea about the neocortex in my previous post.

First, I would like to consider the progression of creation. We have non-animate entities: the mineral kingdom, if you will. We have the elements: earth, air, fire, water. I think of rocks, particularly - very much there, enduring, being. All four elements are beautiful, all are powerful. This speaks of something important at the heart of God - beauty, power, endurance, being - and the capacity to support and provide a home for life.

Then, we have the non-sentient life forms: one-celled organisms, plants, insects. And we have life-forms where I am not sure how sentient the creatures are: reptiles, amphibians, fish, birds. Here, I would add to the heart of God abundance, diversity, proliferation, and more beauty - a sort of divine extravagance.

Hmmmm - God is creative, extravagant, beautiful, and joyful.

Next, we arrive at the mammals, particularly the higher intelligent mammals: horses, whales, dogs, cats, chimpanzees, and others. These animals, it seems, do not have the capacity of self-reflection, but do they perhaps have the beginnings of compassion? I know that rhesus monkeys who are deprived of food and made to see that they will receive food as a reward for giving a painful electric shock to another rhesus monkey, will refuse to give the shock (especially if they have previously experienced such a shock) even though this means enduring hunger. These monkeys will refuse to cause pain to another monkey, even though this means that they won't be fed. Here we can add to the heart of God love and loyalty.

And then we arrive at human beings with our neocortex - self-reflection, reason, compassion. Karen Armstrong says that the precarious situation of today's world comes from the use of our reasoning powers (our neocortex) in the service of our selfish survival instincts (our hypothalamus). This gives us weapons of mass destruction (created with the reasoning power of our neocortex) to use in keeping ourselves on top (a survival goal of our hypothalamus). Nonetheless, we also have the capacity to align ourselves consciously with the compassionate heart of God.

God - compassionate, creative, extravagant, beautiful, joyful.

SO - here is a solution to my impulse toward the innate badness view. The solution is to acknowledge the impulse, to recognize it, to stand aside from it, and to choose something else. To choose compassion for myself. To choose to act for good in the world, knowing that I make a difference, whether that difference is immediately apparent or not. Every compassionate thought, word, or act makes a difference.

Choices and Our Brains: A Positive View

In my last post, I wrote about a view which would say that some people are innately bad so that even their "good" choices become "bad" by virtue of their innate bad nature. In this post, I will present a much more positive view as expressed by Karen Armstrong in her latest book, Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life.

First, I would like to mention that Karen has studied the religions of the world, and has found at the core of each an understanding that the heart of God or the Transcendent or the Universe is compassion. Karen has so many wonderful and right-on things to say about compassion.

Let me begin with Karen's definition of compassion. I will quote her definition from page 9 below, with the addition of bullet points to make the elements of compassion stand out:

But "compassion" derives from the Latin patiri and the Greek pathein, meaning "to suffer, undergo, or experience." So "compassion" means

• "to endure [something] with another person,"
• to put ourselves in somebody else's shoes,
• to feel her pain as though it were our own,
• and to enter generously into his point of view.

Karen explains that compassion is natural to human beings. We feel good when we behave compassionately, and life flows more smoothly and positively when we treat each other with compassion.

Karen also explains the uneasy co-existence of two parts of our brain:

• The hypothalamus (a very ancient part of our brain located at its base and stemming from our reptilian ancestors)
• The neocortex (a more recently evolved area of the brain)

Karen says that the hypothalamus is concerned with feeding, fighting, fleeing, and reproducing - in other words, with survival. It is ruthlessly selfish. It strongly pulls us to consider ourselves and our own safety and well-being first. It also evolved to handle conditions of scarcity, so the hypothalamus will prompt us to continue hoarding even when we already have more than enough.

The neocortex, on the other hand, says Karen, allows us to reason, to think about the world and ourselves, to stand aside from and consider the instinctive reactions of our hypothalamus, to make choices about our behavior. The neocortex allows us to align ourselves consciously with the Heart of God, of the Transcendent, of the Universe - which is a Heart of Compassion.

What this means, says Karen Armstrong, is that we have a choice: to behave at the level of our hypothalamus, that is, instinctively and selfishly with concern for our own survival, or to behave at the level of our neocortex, that is, compassionately. Karen stresses that the pull of our survival-oriented hypothalamus is strong, so we would do well not to castigate ourselves for our feelings of fear and anger and our impulses to selfish behavior, but rather to accept them with compassion for ourselves, realizing from whence they stem. We do not, however, have to choose selfish behavior. We can calmly acknowledge selfish impulses, stand aside from them, and choose compassionate behavior.

In other words, IT IS NOT A QUESTION OF BEING INNATELY BAD. It is a question of choosing instinctive and selfish behavior associated with the hypothalamus, or choosing conscious and compassionate behavior associated with the neocortex. This is very hopeful!

God as Being Itself - Creating Heaven or Hell on Earth

As a result of reading Karen Armstrong's A Case For God, I am coming to envision God more and more, not so much as A Being, but as Being Itself. In my previous post, I examined some of the differences in envisioning God as A Being and envisioning God as Being, and I noted that envisioning God as Being has these three consequences.

• God cannot be contained, described, or defined, because Being lies beyond the capacity of logical language.
• Our ideas about God cannot be said to be right or wrong, because seemingly different ideas about God often point to a deeper truth.
• We experience God, not through correct belief (which cannot be determined anyway), but through the practice of compassion and through ritual.

In this post, I will examine an additional - and very important - consequence of envisioning God as Being:

As particular beings - created in the image and likeness of God, or Being - we participate in Being Itself. This means that we have a vast capacity to create. God, or Being, will not dictate or limit how we use this vast creative capacity. Therefore, we do truly have the capacity to create Heaven or Hell on Earth.

People sometimes use horrific human creations, such as the concentration camps of Hitler's Third Reich, as evidence that there is no God. In the face of such horror, God seems to make no sense. God is said to be all-powerful and all-loving. But if God is all-powerful, then the fact that God did not prevent Hitler's cruelty shows that God is not all-loving, for an all-loving God would most certainly have used God's infinite power to prevent such suffering. If God is all-loving, then the fact that God did not prevent Hitler's cruelty shows that God is not all-powerful, for an all-powerful God would most certainly have shown God's infinite love for Hitler's victims by preventing their excruciating pain. Conclusion: There is no God.

However, if we understand God as Being Itself, I think we can see this differently.

First, I think it is important to understand that Being is vastly creative and that, as particular beings, we share in this vast capacity to create. Second, I think it is important to understand that this vastness encompasses good and evil. We can create vastly for good as well as vastly for evil - as we choose.

Now - why would God, or Being, not limit our capacity to create for evil? Evil is so destructive and causes such terrible suffering. Why wouldn't God, or Being, simply prevent this?

I believe that God, or Being, does not limit our capacity to create for evil because any limitation of our creativity would diminish our creative capacity as a whole. You cannot limit the capacity to create for evil without diminishing the capacity to create period.

Observing the way the world works, I see that God, or Being, is not about limiting but about choosing and expanding. It is clear that we have choice - people can and do choose to act for good, and people can and do choose to act for evil. It is clear that acting expands our capacity to act - the more we exercise a particular capacity, the more we expand that capacity. We expand our creative capacity by using it, and we choose in which direction to use it, for good or for evil. We simply HAVE this capacity - and God, or Being, is not going to limit us.

We really can, if we choose to, create Hell on Earth. We have the vast creative capacity to do so. Hitler and his Gestapo did. Karen Armstrong points out the similarities between our common depiction of Hell and the concentration camps of the Third Reich. People packed like sardines into railroad cars without food, water, or sanitation for their long trip to the equally-packed concentration camp. Brutal and meaningless labor under the all-seeing eyes of the wrathful guards. Extreme deprivation. Cruel and dehumanizing medical experiments. Fiery ovens igniting gas chambers of death. Rageful yelling of overseers and terrified screaming of victims. Hopelessness and despair. Human beings created a heartless machinery that would destroy all misfits (Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, the physically disabled, the mentally impaired) and support only productive and efficient Aryans.

On the other hand, we really can, if we choose to, create Heaven on Earth. We have the vast creative capacity to do so.

Now - let us consider this question: Why is it that we want God to limit our capacity to create for evil?

I think I know at least part of the answer. First, we see ourselves as separate from each other to a greater extent than is probably true. We see Hitler and his cronies making decisions and acting in ways that caused horrible suffering to others. Second - as we see the individual, Hitler, aided by his individual henchmen, hurting innocent people - we believe that an all-powerful, all-loving, and all-parental God should never allow this.

First, let us consider the question of individuality. I think we have a paradox here, and perhaps a deeper truth that underlies the paradox. On the one hand, Hitler is an individual and is responsible for his choices. So is each of Hitler's henchmen. Each of these individuals did make choices that inflicted terrible suffering on millions of other individuals. On the other hand, Hitler would never have risen to power if the wider society had not permitted it and if the collective mindset had not in some way supported Hitler's ideas. Hitler and his henchmen acted as individuals AND as members of a society that allowed them to do what they did. Both points are true. Perhaps we can say that the fact that Hitler and his henchmen could create what they did points to something that deeply needs to be healed in our collective soul.

Second, let us consider the idea of the all-parental God. Perhaps God isn't the all-encompassing parent we often envision. What if God shares Being with us and expects us to participate actively in Being? What if we are the ones to prevent the cruelty of Hitler and his henchmen? What if we are responsible for the way our creative capacity gets exercised on Earth? What if it is up to us to say and enact a resounding NO to Hitler?

We would like to see God do this or that to limit our capacity for evil, yet we ourselves have the capacity for self-limitation through our choices. We can choose to avoid and to stop evil (creating suffering) and choose to enact good (creating beauty). Observing the way the world works, it seems clear to me that God, or Being, isn't going to do what we have the capacity to do ourselves through our own participation in Being.

God as Being Itself - Overview

I have recently read Karen Armstrong's A Case For God. Karen takes us through the whole sweep of human pre-history and history and the ways humans have envisioned and related to God over the millennia. One of Karen's main points is the difference between seeing God as A BEING and seeing God as BEING ITSELF. In this post, I will examine the difference between these two ways of seeing God.

GOD AS A BEING

As an elementary Catholic school child, I learned in my Catechism class (as did Karen Armstrong) that God is A BEING. God is, in fact, THE SUPREME BEING. In its trademark question-and-answer format, the Baltimore Catechism states:

QUESTION: Who is God?

ANSWER: God is the Supreme Being, infinitely perfect, who made all things and keeps them in existence.

This invites us to see God as A Being (just as we are each a being), but as A Being much greater, much wiser, much more powerful than we are. We are lesser, finite, imperfect beings. God is The Supreme Being, infinitely perfect. Each of us is a being created by God. God is The Supreme Being who has always existed and who has created all other beings.

Here are two consequences of viewing God as A Being.

• We can contain, describe, and define God: Envisioning God as A Being suggests that God is someTHING out there which (though incorporeal) can nonetheless be contained, described, and defined. God exists (as we do) and possesses characteristics (as we do). God's existence (unlike our physical existence on earth) is immortal and eternal. God's characteristics (unlike ours) are perfect and infinite: God is infinitely and perfectly knowing, infinitely and perfectly wise, infinitely and perfectly powerful, infinitely and perfectly loving, infinitely and perfectly just.
• Our ideas about God are either right or wrong: Envisioning God as A Being also suggests that any given idea about God is either right or wrong. Since God is A Being who exists and possesses characteristics, I can be right in my ideas about This Being, and if your ideas differ from my right ideas about This Being, then your ideas about This Being are wrong. I may feel that I need to convert you to my right ideas about God, or worse, that I need to destroy you because you are a source of heresy or even blasphemy.

Karen Armstrong points out that this view of God as A Being - who can be contained, described, and defined and about whom our ideas are either right or wrong - is a relatively recent one that coincides with the flowering of modern science during the Enlightenment. Karen explains that, as science came into its own and improved people's lives so extensively, the thought patterns upon which science is based were exalted more and more until they became the only legitimate type of thought. This type of thought is called logos. Logos is logical, thrives on analysis and differentiation, insists on rational proof, sees time as linear.

Karen Armstrong explains that logos is proper for science but not for religion, where different thought patterns are needed - the thought patterns of mythos. Mythos sees deeper truth within logical contradictions, teaches wisdom through story, thrives on art, feels comfortable with paradox, sees time as spiral.

Logos sees God as A Being who can be contained,described, and defined and about whom our ideas are either right or wrong. Mythos sees God as Being Itself.

GOD AS BEING ITSELF

For millennia before the scientific age and the exclusive focus on logos - stretching back into the reaches of pre-history and surviving here and there through the Enlightenment and into the twenty-first century - we find people who see God as Being Itself. In other words, God is seen not as A Being but as Being. What does this mean? As it turns out, language begins to fail us when we try to talk about God who is not A Being but Being.

To see God as Being Itself is to see God as completely beyond anything in our experience. Everything in our experience is a being. We know what a being is (which may be why we feel comfortable envisioning God as The Supreme Being), but what is Being? We don't know.

As I think about this, I am not sure if we don't know what Being is because Being is not within our experience - or if we don't know what Being is because Being is so intimate a part of our world that we can't see it, or in other words, because we are so enmeshed in Being that we can't step back from Being enough to get a view of it.

Examining the previous sentence makes me see that the two possibilities - Being as not part of our experience and Being as something we are too enmeshed in to see - may really be the same thing. That is, something can be so intimate a part of our experience that we don't experience it! We can't separate from it enough to experience it consciously.

But it is also true that there are things beyond our experience. As a simple example, color is beyond the experience of a person who has always been blind. No matter what words we use to describe blue to such a blind person, we will not be able to convey the experience of blue. Lacking physical vision, the blind person does not have the capacity to experience blue. Just so, it may be that we lack the capacity to experience Being Itself.

Whether because we are too enmeshed in Being to experience it or because Being is truly beyond our capacity to experience, we simply do not have language to describe Being. Everything we know in our world is a being. Nothing we know in our world is Being. Yet, from the dawn of time, humans have recognized that Something Beyond - let us call this God - is there. The sages have recognized that we in our finite, mortal, human state do not have the capacity to contain, describe, define God. But we do have the capacity to experience God.

Karen Armstrong points out the difficulty we have with language about God. For instance, can God be said to exist? We know that a being exists, but can Being be said to exist? We sense that Being is there, but we also sense that Being does not exist in the way that a being exists. A being may exist one day and cease to exist the next day. Being seems to be that which makes possible the existence of any particular being. So Being is there, but Being is not there in the same sense in which any particular being is there, even an incorporeal being. Being is not there even in the same sense, for instance, as an angel is there.

Here is what I would say about Being. Being is the Beyond-Description in which we all participate and which is there in a sense far beyond that in which any particular being is there. And I'm going to go out on a limb here - basing this on what humans consider their highest aspirations and making the assumption that our highest aspirations over the ages tell us something about the nature of Reality - and say that Being is somehow the source of compassion, beauty, joy - all that gives our lives the deepest fulfillment.

But what is Being? We don't know.

Here are three consequences of seeing God as Being.

• God is beyond our capacity to contain, describe, and define: I have spoken about this above.
• None of us is "right" about God and none of us is "wrong": Different ways of envisioning God can be right. Mythos holds that deeper truth underlies apparent paradox. Buddhism, Christianity, Druidry, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Voodoo, Wicca, and all other faith traditions hold truth about Being. The Pagan religions have much to teach us about integration of truth. As far as I know, Pagans have never tried to set themselves up as holding THE truth and have never tried to "make wrong" or destroy other religions. Instead, Pagans have taken it for granted that other peoples would envision God, or Being, in other ways - ways that might add to their own understanding.
• God is experienced in the practice of compassion and in ritual: Holding correct beliefs about God is not important and not even considered possible. Since Being cannot be contained, described, or defined, it is not possible to determine correct beliefs anyway. What is important, first, is correct practice - what we think, say, and do. Correct practice is rooted in compassion. Throughout the ages, people have recognized that the practice of compassion draws us into the Heart of Being. What is important, second, is the enactment of deep truth about Being in artistic expression - through myth, story, poetry, music, song, dance, drama, mime, visual art - and through ritual, which has been described as poetry in act. All of this allows the soul to experience Being at a level beyond the reach of logical language.

My next post will consider more of what it means to envision God as Being Itself.

Hospital Experience #18: Karen Armstrong - Compassion and Pain

This is the eighteenth in a series of posts on a recent experience at Ochsner Hospital - having a cardiac catheter ablation procedure to correct a heart arrhythmia. These posts describe and reflect on various aspects of the hospital experience. This eighteenth post will reflect on my hospital experience in relation to what Karen Armstrong says about compassion and pain in her memoir The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, in which she describes her adjustment to life in the world after seven years as a Catholic nun.

In her study of world religions, Karen Armstrong finds that compassion is at the heart of all. Compassionate behavior is expressed in the Golden Rule: Do not do to others what you would not want others to do to you. Karen prefers this ancient Jewish expression of the Golden Rule, asking us to refrain from what would cause others pain or discomfort.

How do we know what may cause pain or discomfort to another? Karen Armstrong says that we learn this by observing what causes pain or discomfort to us. Compassion means feeling with another, standing in another's shoes and feeling what it is like to be that person. Karen says that nothing teaches us better how another may feel than our own pain. When something happens that causes us pain, it is well to take careful note and to resolve never to cause such pain to another. This, Karen says, is how pain can be redeemed - by using it to build compassion. Otherwise, pain is wasted.

I found that, in the hospital, I wanted to be treated in a kind, caring, professional, and dignified manner. I experienced pain when Nurse Dreadful did not treat me in these ways. I experienced comfort when other nurses did. I am not a medical professional, so it is not likely that I will be called upon to treat hospital patients in kind, caring, professional, and dignified ways. However, I am a teacher - and my students would certainly appreciate being treated in kind, caring, professional, and dignified ways. They would appreciate seeing that I welcome them, that I am happy to see them, that I have the skills to teach them well, that I take their concerns and questions seriously, that I evaluate their work fairly, that I have time for them, that I am available to them, that I respect them and deeply value their contributions to the class.

I think that it is extremely helpful for professionals of all kinds to be in the position of those they serve - for medical professionals to be patients, for example, and for teachers to be students. This builds compassion. Medical professionals need to know what it feels like to be handled by strangers, and teachers need to know what it feels like to struggle with an unfamiliar subject. Language teachers need to know what it feels like to be confronted with a new language and culture, and writing teachers need to know what it feels like to be confronted with a writing assignment, a deadline, and a blank sheet of paper or computer screen.

These are important lessons from the hospital and from Karen Armstrong - use pain to build compassion, and put yourself in the shoes of those you serve.

Compassion at the Heart of Faith - Karen Armstrong

Karen Armstrong's study of world religions has shown her that compassion lies at the heart of each one. Thus, we can say that at the heart of Being is compassion. Karen says that compassion is feeling with another. It is putting ourselves in another's shoes, standing where another stands, seeing through another's eyes--and acting accordingly.

Karen connects compassion with ecstasy. Ecstasy occurs when we empty ourselves of the self, when we step outside of ourselves, when we leave behind our local individualized self--and step into something larger. By being compassionate, by feeling with another, we step out of our own self-focused experience and into the experience of another.

How do we enter into the mind and feelings of another? Karen Armstrong says that one way to do this is to use our own pain. In other words, when we are treated in a way that causes us pain or discomfort, we can take careful note and resolve never to do that to someone else.

I am not a naturally compassionate person, but I can think of at least one very small way that I practice compassion. (Recognizing this very small way helps me to grasp what compassion is and how it feels to practice it, and then hopefully to expand upon it.) Here is my very small baby step in compassion. First, I have noticed a particular type of situation that causes me discomfort. Sometimes when I am telling a story or sharing a thought with one or more other people, an interruption will arise. For instance, if we are at a cafe, the server may come to take our order or another person may arrive and join our group. After the interruption, the conversation may veer elsewhere, and I don't get a chance to finish what I was saying. When this happens, I feel disappointed.

Knowing how I feel when this happens to me, I try not to let this happen to others. When someone is telling a story or sharing a thought and an interruption occurs, I try not to let the conversation veer away before the person has the chance to finish. I do this by saying, for example, "Jane, I want to hear the rest of what you were saying about Edgar Allan Poe." This allows Jane to finish what she was saying without seeming to put herself forward, in case she feels uncomfortable being the one to reintroduce her story. (I've even started extending this compassion to myself. Since I've been doing this for others, I find that, after an interruption, I can more easily say on my own behalf, "I'd like to continue what I was saying about Alice Walker.")

I find that I experience a nice warm feeling when I can do this for others and when I can do this for myself. I also think that this is what it means, in a very small way, to love one's neighbor as one loves oneself. In this conversational type of situation, I show the same consideration both for my neighbor and for myself.

I would say, too, that to be compassionate in one's work, one needs to feel what it is like to be on the other side. A doctor or a nurse who has been hospitalized with illness or injury can more readily feel with his or her patients. Psycho-therapists are required to undergo psycho-therapy themselves in order to feel what the process is like for their clients. A teacher of English to speakers of other languages would do well to take a course in Vietnamese or Arabic or Hungarian to understand what it feels like to be confronted with learning a very different language and culture.

Self-emptying, compassion, and ecstasy also occur when we lose ourselves in contemplation of something greater--as a scientist does in her lab, an architect in his building, a lawyer in her client's case, a painter in his studio, a musician in her composition, a dancer in his movement, a reader in her story, a writer in his characters, a chef in her cuisine, a teacher in his subject. This loss of self in something greater can occur both as a creator and as an admirer: it can occur for the artist who sculpts a statue and for the art lover who admires it, for the chef who prepares a beautiful meal and for the gourmet who savors it, for the poet who composes a poem and for the reader who enters into it, for the gardener who creates a garden and for the flower lover who basks in it.

Karen Armstrong has found that she experiences self-emptying, compassion, and ecstasy through her study of and writing about world religions. She has learned to have compassion, to feel with, people of other faiths. On page 290 of The Spiral Staircase, Karen says, "It was not enough to understand other people's beliefs, rituals, and ethical practices intellectually. You had to feel them too and make an imaginative, though disciplined, identification." Karen explains how she did this when writing about the Prophet Muhammad. On page 278 of The Spiral Staircase, Karen says, "I had to make a daily, hourly effort to enter into the ghastly conditions of seventh-century Arabia, and that meant that I had to leave my twentieth-century assumptions and predilections behind. I had to penetrate another culture and develop a wholly different way of looking at the world. It required a constant concentration of mind and heart that was in fact a type of meditation. . . . I was learning the disciplines of ecstasy." In fact, on page 287 of The Spiral Staircase, Karen says, "I was finding in study the ecstasy [and, I would add, the compassion] that I had hoped to find in those long hours of prayer as a young nun."

On page 63 of The Case For God, Karen Armstrong speaks of Socratic dialogue as a means to self-emptying, compassion, and ecstasy. Karen says, "In a Socratic dialogue, therefore, the 'winner' did not try to force an unwilling opponent to accept his point of view. It was a joint effort. You expressed yourself clearly as a gift to your partner, whose beautifully expressed argument would, in turn, touch you at a profound level." On the same page, Karen says, "Like any good initiation, a successful dialogue should lead to ekstasis: by learning to inhabit each other's point of view, the conversationalists were taken beyond themselves." I love that: "learning to inhabit each other's point of view."

Compassion, then, is the heart of religious faith. A very legitimate question to ask about any religion is this: Does this religion lead to a compassionate life? That is the gold test.

Faith as Belief: A Modern Phenomenon - Karen Armstrong and Marcus Borg

Many Christians today understand Christian faith as giving intellectual assent to a set of beliefs. Such Christians would also say that one should live according to Jesus' teachings on attitudes and behavior. But they would insist that, without basic orthodox beliefs, one can't call oneself a Christian.

In my previous post, I showed how Karen Armstrong learned that other religions emphasize faith as practice rather than belief. In fact, the view of faith as belief is quite recent.

On page xi of her Introduction to The Case For God, Karen Armstrong explains that people from pre-historic times until the Enlightenment understood the difference between logos, or rational thought, and mythos, or mythical thought. Karen says that rational thought helps us to function in the external physical world: to fashion tools, to build structures, to solve problems. Rational thought deals in facts. On the other hand, Karen says that mythical thought helps us to understand our psyches: to move through grief, to face life with courage, to love deeply. Mythical thought deals in symbols.

Pre-Enlightenment people understood the difference between a factual account and a myth. A factual account tells about something that happened at a particular time, in a particular place, in a particular way. A factual account is true if the events recounted actually happened in the physical world as stated. A myth is not a factual account. Karen Armstrong says, "A myth was never intended as an accurate account of a historical event; it was something that had in some sense happened once but that also happens all the time" (page xi). A myth is true in the sense that it imparts deep truths about life.

This distinction of logos and mythos was lost during the Enlightenment, the period of time in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when science came into its own. Karen Armstrong explains that the huge success of science, based on rigorous rational thought, led to an over-emphasis on logos. Karen explains that science brought wonderful technological and economic improvements to people's lives and that people, therefore, began to rely exclusively on rational thought to the inclusion of mythical thought.

Karen Armstrong shows that people even began to apply rational thought inappropriately to myth. For many, it became impossible to believe in God as portrayed in the Bible because many of the Bible accounts are not factually true. Mythical truth was abandoned. Karen says, "In particular, the meaning of the word 'belief' changed, so that a credulous acceptance of creedal doctrines became the prerequisite of faith, so much so that today we often speak of religious people as 'believers,' as though accepting orthodox dogma 'on faith' were their most important activity" (page xv).

Marcus Borg, in The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith, puts it like this: "For many, Christian faith began to mean believing questionable things to be true--as assenting to the truth of claims that have become 'iffy' " (page 29).

This misguided effort to apply rational thought to myth has resulted in at least three responses.

• Fundamentalism. Karen Armstrong points out that, to hold onto their faith in a purely rational world, fundamentalists insist on giving rational intellectual assent to religious teachings and stories. Christian fundamentalists insist on believing the Bible to be factually true and and on interpreting the Bible in a literal way that was foreign to earlier Christians.
• Atheism. Karen Armstrong also points out that Atheists, especially today's New Atheists, respond to this literal interpretation of religion--which seems completely incredible to them--with a rejection of the whole idea of God.
• Drifting. Marcus Borg points out that many people are spiritually adrift. They can't give intellectual assent to the incredible accounts in the Bible, so they see no place for themselves within Christianity, and they have found nothing to replace it.

This indicates to me that we have actually regressed in our religious understanding. Many of us simply don't understand mythical thought. We apply rational thought to everything, even when it is not appropriate. We do this because logos is all we know. We have lost the whole marvelous and necessary faculty of mythos.

Faith as Belief vs. Faith as Practice - Karen Armstrong

This post will contrast the understanding of faith as belief, which is the understanding held by many present-day Christians, and the understanding of faith as practice, which is the understanding held by other religions. I will draw on Karen Armstrong's insights from her second memoir, The Spiral Staircase: My Climb Out of Darkness, which chronicles Karen's life in the world after seven years of convent life as a nun, and her most recent book, The Case For God. Karen examines the Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist view of faith as practice rather than belief.

In The Spiral Staircase, Karen Armstrong describes her surprise at learning that other religions do not subscribe to a set of beliefs. Karen first learned this during a lunch-time conversation with her Jewish friend Hyam Maccoby. Hyam explained to Karen that Jesus, a practicing Jew of his time, may have belonged to the school of Rabbi Hillel, a leading Pharisee, who summarized the whole of Jewish teaching in this way: " 'Do not do unto others as you would not have done unto you' " (page 235).

Karen couldn't quite understand how the whole of Jewish teaching would not include at least some specific beliefs. So she asked Hyam, " 'What about faith? What about believing in God? What were those pagans supposed to believe?' " (page 235).

Karen reports Hyam's reply: " 'Easy to see that you were brought up Christian.' Hyam didn't have a high opinion of Christianity, I noticed. 'Theology is just not important in Judaism, or in any other religion, really. There's no orthodoxy as you have it in the Catholic Church. No complicated creeds to which everybody must subscribe. No infallible pronouncements by a pope. Nobody can tell Jews what to believe. Within reason, you can believe what you like' " (page 235).

Karen describes how stunned she felt at this: " 'No official theology?' I repeated stupidly. 'None at all? How can you be religious without a set of ideas--about God, salvation, and so on--as a basis?' " (page 236).

And here is Hyam's answer: " 'We have orthopraxy instead of orthodoxy,' Hyam replied calmly, wiping his mouth and brushing a few crumbs off the table. ' "Right practice" rather than "right belief." That's all. You Christians make such a fuss about theology, but it's not important in the way you think. It's just poetry, really, ways of talking about the inexpressible. We Jews don't bother much about what we believe. We just do it instead' " (page 236).

Karen Armstrong found this same emphasis on faith as practice in Islam. In The Spiral Staircase, she says of Islam, "Muslims had to cultivate within themselves a caring, generous spirit that made them want to give graciously to all, just as God himself did. By concrete acts of compassion, performed so regularly that they became engrained, Muslims would find that both they and their society would be transformed" (page 280). Karen also says, "Repeated actions would lead to the cultivation of a new awareness. The point is that this was not a belief system, but a process. The religious life designed by Muhammad made people act in ways that were supposed to change them forever" (page 281).

In The Case for God, Karen Armstrong recounts a story told of the Buddha. The Buddha insisted that his monks practice a complete program of yoga that emphasized acts of compassion, and he refused to discuss questions of belief with them. One monk, however, simply couldn't pull his mind away from cosmic questions. Karen says, "One of his monks was a philosopher manque and, instead of getting on with his yoga, constantly pestered the Buddha about metaphysical questions: Was there a god? Had the world been created in time or had it always existed?" (page 23).

The Buddha refused to discuss this. As Karen reports, "What difference would it make to discover that a god had created the world? Pain, hatred, grief, and sorrow would still exist. These issues were fascinating, but the Buddha refused to discuss them because they were irrelevant: 'My disciples, they will not help you, they are not useful in the quest for holiness; they do not lead to peace and to the direct knowledge of Nirvana' " (page 23).

Karen explains further about Nirvana and the role of acts of compassion in attaining Nirvana: "Nirvana was the natural result of a life lived according to the Buddha's doctrine of anatta ('no self'), which was not simply a metaphysical principle but, like all his teachings, a program of action. Anatta required Buddhists to behave day by day, hour by hour, as though the self did not exist" (page 24). Further, Karen explains, "By far the best way of achieving anatta was compassion, the ability to feel with the other, which required that one dethrone the self from the center of one's world and put another there. Compassion would become the central practice of the religious quest" (page 24).

This post has shown how Karen Armstrong came to understand faith as practice rather than belief, as she studied Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism. My next post will examine how Christians became so fixated on faith as belief.

Karen Armstrong's Through The Narrow Gate--Religious Life continued

This post will continue my thoughts on why religious life didn't work for Karen Armstrong, as she describes in her book Through the Narrow Gate: A Memoir of Spiritual Discovery. I will begin by repeating the quote from my last post that sums up the difficulty with Karen's religious training. On page 252, a nun whom Karen calls Mother Melinda tells what she had heard from a priest who was a psychologist: " 'He was saying that the traditional way of training nuns has been to keep them in a prepubescent state by treating them like children--you know, do as you're told, no responsibility, no mention of sex, no men, no freedom.' "

The religious life, or the caricature of it presented as an ideal to Karen, asked nuns to do the impossible--to live in a way that was utterly incompatible with who we are as human beings. Some nuns were able to live the religious life because they could ignore the humanity-denying trivia and concentrate on the essentials. Others were only able to live a soul-less cartoon of the religious life by strongly suppressing their humanity. Unfortunately, these latter nuns were the ones who trained Karen. Karen, with the humanity-suppressing example before her, simply couldn't do it. Her effort led to a nervous breakdown. Here are some of the difficulties that Karen experienced.

OVER-EMPHASIS ON EMOTIONAL SELF-EMPTYING. The professed religious life involves emptying oneself so that one can be filled by God. One works to purge oneself of attachment to preferences and to emotional states. The goal, though, is not the self-emptying but the union with God.

Unfortunately, many of the practices specified by Karen's superiors led to a pre-occupation with self. For example, Karen and the other nuns were required to exam their consciences in minute detail twice a day and to record their failings in a notebook. For Karen, this was a constant reminder of her self-absorption. She kept seeing how full of self she was and how far from the ideal of self-emptying. She was constantly discouraged.

This emphasis on emptying, emptying, emptying simply kept the focus on how full I am of self, self, self. It practically guaranteed that one would never move beyond self-emptying into experiencing God's filling. In addition, it produced empty, shell-like nuns, all of whom were focused on self-emptying.

NO PARTICULAR FRIENDSHIPS. Everything about the religious life was set up to discourage particular friendships. Silence was the norm except at communal recreation. Nuns were not to engage in conversation in twos but only when a third was present. Each nun was to communicate solely with God.

This, of course, ignores the fact that humans are social beings. One hugely important way that we experience God's love is through the love of a friend. Not to allow friendship produced nuns starving for love. Karen recounts the story of the two rival convent cats, Ming and Sebastian. Certain nuns of Karen's convent favored Ming while others favored Sebastian. One day, when Sebastian tore Ming's ear in a fight, a nun whom Karen calls Mother Imelda became so distraught over her dear wounded Ming that she couldn't stop weeping, had to receive sedatives from a doctor, and was given bed rest for three days. The need for tangible love came out in this exaggerated way with cats.

Karen suffered greatly from the prohibition of friendship. She also saw that the constant self-policing to avoid particular friendships produced an aloofness or even coldness in many of the nuns. The convent was an emotionally cold place, lacking the warmth of friendship. Karen was isolated and lonely.

Adding to Karen's isolation was the fact that her superiors, to whom she was allowed--even required--to talk freely about her spiritual progress, simply would not listen to her. These superiors had fixed ideas and rejected anything that didn't fit. For example, when Karen confided that she absolutely never experienced consolation in prayer, her superior replied that she was exaggerating. Thus, the one person in whom Karen was allowed to confide--her superior--simply rejected Karen's difficulties as impossible. Karen really had no one to turn to.

MENTAL DISTORTIONS. Karen was forced to perform mental distortions in the area of obedience. Obedience requires that nuns do whatever their superior asks without question, no matter how much the nun may disagree with the command or even find it absurd. Karen, for example, was ordered to practice sewing daily on a machine that had no needle, to scrub the pavement with a tiny nailbrush, and to eat cheese even though it caused her to throw up. She struggled constantly to convince herself that such pointless or even harmful orders were God's will.

Karen also struggled mentally with Catholic doctrines. At one point, she produced an essay proving incontrovertibly that Jesus physically rose from the dead, all the while knowing that her essay lacked intellectual integrity.

Such mental distortions became all the more difficult as Karen's mind began to awaken through her study of English literature at Oxford. It became nearly impossible for Karen to use her keen mind in her Oxford studies and then to shut off her mind upon her return to the convent.

EPILEPSY. Karen began to suffer epileptic seizures while in the convent. To the nuns, she was engaging in a disgusting display of emotions by fainting, and she was sternly admonished to control herself. Of course, this was impossible, since the electric impulses in the brain of a person with epilepsy are not under conscious control. Karen herself, though, believed that her fainting was a shameful failure, and this led to deeper discouragement because she simply could not control it.

SEXUAL REPRESSION. Another area outside Karen's control was sexual arousal. Karen first noticed this when using the discipline. The discipline was a set of cords with which the nuns flagellated themselves to subdue their bodies and to offer penance for sins. The discipline was supposed to be physically painful. Karen, however, found the discipline to be sexually arousing. This was a great conflict for her. She was commanded under obedience to use the discipline daily and she was also supposed to shun sexual pleasure, yet the discipline created sexual pleasure for Karen!

KAREN'S DREAMS. Immediately after her breakdown, Karen experienced a very pointed dream, which she describes on page 245: "Sometimes trying to kill something growing. A plant that keeps putting out new shoots, huge monstrous growth, stabbing and thrashing at it, feeling its pain as the green sap falls in huge drops. But it never dies."

The convent is killing the ways in which Karen's soul is striving to grow. She keeps putting out new vibrant intellectual shoots with her literature studies, but the convent life keeps stabbing at these shoots, calling them monstrosities. The new life won't stop, though. It keeps growing, even in the pain of being stabbed again and again. It won't die.

Oh, my! Karen needs to GET THE HELL OUT before the convent life kills her. And she does.

Karen Armstrong's Through The Narrow Gate--Religious Life

In my previous post, I gave an overview of Karen Armstrong's Through the Narrow Gate: A Memoir of Spiritual Discovery, which tells of Karen Armstrong's life as a nun from 1962 to 1969, ages 17 to 24, in the Society of the Holy Child Jesus in England. In this post, I will begin to look at why religious life did not work out for Karen.

On page 252, Karen pinpoints the crux of the matter. Karen is recuperating from an emotional breakdown, and a fellow nun whom Karen calls Mother Melinda comes to visit her in the infirmary. Mother Melinda had taken a course the previous year with a priest who was a psychologist and who had talked quite a bit with disturbed nuns. Here is what Mother Melinda reports the priest as having said:

" 'He was saying that the traditional way of training nuns was to keep them in a prepubescent state by treating them like children--you know, do as you're told, no responsibility, no mention of sex, no men, no freedom.' "

This method of training seemed to produce at least three types of nuns.

NUNS WHO ACHIEVED TRUE HOLINESS. First, some women, even highly intelligent women like Mother Katherine and Mother Bianca, achieved holiness under this system, probably by seeing through to the core of religious life and holding fast those things that supported union with God while holding loosely those things that were superficial and unhelpful.

NUNS WHO EMBODIED A CARICATURE OF HOLINESS. Second, other women, like Mother Walter and Mother Praetorita, became caricatures of holiness, holding fast to the letter rather than the spirit of the order's rules. Mother Katherine describes this on page 247 as a failure in courage. Here is how Mother Katherine says that these nuns failed in courage: " 'By clinging to the rules as to the rail of a swimming pool. Not being willing ever to go out of their depth and trust that God will hold them up.' "

In other words, these nuns never actually lived the religious life. They remained perpetually in training, and they didn't even allow the training to do what it was intended to do. Instead, they clung to the rules themselves as though rule observance were the religious life, whereas rule observance was simply intended to empty and free one for union with God. These nuns emphasized the emptying, emptying, emptying--but never the living in union with God.

This reminds me of what Frank Schaeffer says about Marine Corps boot camp in Patience With God. Much of what is done in boot camp, such as drills, is preparation for living the life of a Marine. No recruit wants to remain perpetually in boot camp! A recruit accepts the training so that he or she, after three months, can live as a Marine. Clinging to rules indicates fear of risk taking. I know the rules, they are familiar to me, I'll just blindly obey--no thinking, no risk required. This type of nun projected detachment, separation, aloofness, but not aliveness, interest, compassion.

NUNS WHO BROKE UNDER THE STRAIN. Third, some women simply couldn't fit the mold that they believed they had to fit to be a nun. This was the mold held up for them by the rule-obsessed nuns who trained them. Karen was one of these women. She deeply wanted union with God but simply couldn't master her emotions, mind, and body in the ways enjoined by her superiors. Yet she also believed that her failure to achieve this mastery would keep her separated from God. The strain of Karen's constant striving and failing finally led to a nervous breakdown.

In my next post, I will look into some of the specific aspects of religious life that caused difficulty for Karen.

Karen Armstrong's Through The Narrow Gate--Overview

I have just re-read Through the Narrow Gate: A Memoir of Spiritual Discovery by Karen Armstrong. In this memoir, Karen Armstrong writes about her life as a nun. From 1962 to 1969, ages 17 to 24, Karen was a member of a Catholic religious order, the Society of the Holy Child Jesus, in England. This time period includes nine months as a postulant, two years as a novice, and the rest of the time as a professed sister.

The primary ministry of the Society of the Holy Child Jesus is teaching girls and women. Therefore, upon making her religious profession, Karen was sent by her order to study English literature at Oxford, in preparation for teaching. Karen deeply loves literature.

Karen writes of the joys as well as the difficulties of professed religious life, though admittedly, in her case, it was mostly difficulties. She speaks especially of the difficulty she experienced in mastering her emotions, her mind, and her body. Karen often experienced religious life as a struggle to empty herself of what she saw as self-centered emotions (pride in small spiritual victories, hurt at a superior's harshness, frustration at her lack of skill in sewing, boredom with hours of housework) so that she could be filled by God. For Karen, this struggle to master her emotions was consistently unsuccessful.

Karen also had difficulty subduing her mind to accept the religious ideal of blind obedience to superiors, even when their instructions were counter-productive, and the "truth" of Catholic doctrines, even when her mind told her that these doctrines weren't really true. With persistent effort, she forced her mind to stop thinking and just obey--but then came her literature studies at Oxford, which awoke her mind and her deep pleasure in keen thought. As her mind came more and more vibrantly to life through her study of literature, Karen began to question certain practices of the order that she saw were harmful for the nuns, such as the ban on personal friendships and the use of the discipline (a set of cords used by nuns to flagellate themselves as a means of subduing bodily passions and performing penance).

Finally, Karen had her first epileptic seizures in the convent. These were seen by her superiors as spells of fainting due to emotional weakness, and Karen was ordered to stop these emotional displays. Since epileptic seizures are absolutely beyond the control of the will, there was no way for Karen to obey this command. One simply cannot decide to stop the abnormal electrical activity in the brain that causes the seizure. Karen also began to experience sexual arousal while in the convent. This was another aspect of her body that she simply could not control.

In my next post, I will look more closely at why religious life in the Society of the Holy Child Jesus did not work out for Karen.