Is the medium ever the message in spirituality?

Image by jimforest via FlickrHave you ever visited a shrine or a temple or cathedral, maybe a synagogue or a mosque, and felt a vital energy and a connection to something ancient and mysterious?

Maybe you've had the experience around monasteries or monastic individuals, or when contemplating a statue or icon. Perhaps around something similar, such as an undisturbed and majestic natural space?

One way to look at it is that something in your own experience of being has resonated with something in these forms giving a sense of connection. But what then? Where does that feeling or experience take us and what do we make of it?

We know Jesus, and the Buddha, and the rest too well

Or to put it more accurately, in many ways we don't really know them at all.

I have alluded before to something that many theologians have known for a long time, something I didn't come up with on my own, that in many ways Jesus was a radical.  That isn't to say he was a raving ideologue, or some kind of Jewish anarchist.  From the depictions we have of him he favored quiet, peace and rest as well as good times with friends and family.  He also appears to have been very observant, going to the temple, singing the Psalms, and reading from the Torah.  Yet he saw past clinging blindly to the letter of the law and ignoring its spirit, in which he revealed its source and intent: love for God and for neighbor.  No interpretation of religious law that defied this mandate could be genuine and no secular law that ignored it could be just.

Then there were the early churches.  I've heard they initially shunned the iconography of the cross.  It isn't surprising.  The cross in that era was a sign of shame, terror and agony.  It was the visible symbol of what happened to those who defied Rome and its Emperor.  To look at a cross was to look at the power of the largest known empire in the world and its dominion over your life.  To have taken up the cross as their own symbol, the members of the church would have been doing what so much of the Gospels did, inverting familiar signs of power and meaning.  It was an act of defiance.  What you proclaim as death we proclaim as life.  What you intended to cause despair has become a source of hope.  But how can that symbol carry the same impact today?

Holding the mystery of the faith

1 Timothy 3:9: Holding the mystery of the faith in a pure conscience.

Our life is embosomed in mystery, the universe is wrapped in a garment of mystery. The unknown infinitely exceeds the known; the incomprehensible outweighs beyond all comparison the intelligible. To some persons this is an unpleasant fact. Yet, properly regarded, it would give them great comfort. Religion conducts us to the borders of mystery. Whatever direction we pursue in our religious inquiries, we are soon brought to a pause by limits which we cannot pass. With some persons this is a special occasion of surprise, disappointment, and complaint, while it should, on the contrary, strengthen their faith and enliven their gratitude...

-from "heart opened in faith", Boston Unitarian blog

Obviously if your experience (directly or vicariously) of the meaning of faith is a weight on the heart or blinders to the mind, this passage and the rest of the essay it comes from will seem nonsensical. If you have at least heard of or considered the notion that faith is actually a dynamic vital energy and orientation that opens us to the possibilities of existence and of our own potential, a trust or grounding of the heart that is ever-blooming and isn't rooted in any fixed conception or view of phenomena, then the essay can be very challenging and rewarding.

I have, for example, argued that classic supernaturalism demonstrates the power of metaphor to open our minds and worldviews to new possibilities of existence via the tension between the seemingly mismatched elements in the expression (but not nearly as well as Gary Eberle does in his book Dangerous Words). I have also argued that other mysteries should not be automatically relegated to the being superstition (a false causal correlation/explanation). I have stated in various web postings (for examples see here and there) that what we know about the universe is almost certainly a tiny fraction of what is possible and that there are some things which we will never be able to fully perceive, grasp, or explain as human beings.

Yet it may turn out that of all my hangups and issues that I have (finished or still am) working through in terms of my former prejudice against religion, spirituality, surrender and transformation, etc, that this was a major hidden blind spot. I am thinking I am one of those folks, despite my shift towards generosity in respecting and appreciating the unknown, that somehow in other aspects of my life meet such mystery with disappointment and complaint.