Tikkun Daily Blog Archive (https://www.tikkun.org/tikkundaily/author/rogergottlieb/page/2/)
If inescapable Christmas music, endless JUST FOR TODAY GET IT NOW! sales, and long lists of gifts for everyone from your brother-in-law to your daughter’s day-care provider are getting you down, let’s see what some challenging spiritual virtues have to offer instead.
America’s annual consumerism orgasm is just passed. And if a little bit of post-sex let-down is to be expected, it may also be that some of us view the whole thing with negative feelings ranging from mild distaste to horror. People camping out on the sidewalk for days to buy a 54 inch flat screen, Wal-Mart customers coming to blows over a pair of shoes, families devoting hours to military style strategizing for the best way to hit the mall, a holiday defined by “thanks” and “giving” followed straightway by a veritable festival of desire, grasping, and I-me-mine. Endless environment damaging heavy metals, transportation, packaging and fossil fuels.
Yes, and it’s called prayer. And its power does not depend on faith in God or sacred texts, but on the passionate commitment of the person who prays. As Kierkegaard cautions: “Prayer does not change God, but it changes him who prays.” Prayers may be voiced in anguish or wrapped in silence, mumbled dutifully or constructed with care, put to melody or tears. They can be wordless, as Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel said that when he marched for justice with Martin Luther King “my feet were praying.”
“You don’t hit bottom,” says an old 12-step adage, “until you stop digging.” In other words: no bad experience, painful consequence, or downright awful time in and of itself will lead people to change. When we are thoughtless, reckless, destructively selfish, or blind to the effects of our actions on ourselves and others – and when all this leads in a Very Bad Direction, we can still hold on to the negative habits and damaging behavior. We can always close our eyes, turn our backs, and deny, deny, deny.
What I’m looking for is a spiritual response that can coexist with very different political views; providing, of course, that the different political views don’t depend on outright group hatred, violent aggression, or brute selfishness. Given that condition, I believe it is possible for people of spiritual good will to disagree about (for example) tax policy, responses to conflicts in the Middle East, energy policy, and even abortion rights. (And I say this as someone with highly defined politics, views so far to the left I fall off the planet occasionally.) Such spirituality is compatible with organized religion, with no religion, with reverence for God, goddesses, spirits, nature, or simply life.
As you may have noticed, superstar academic Cornel West has been in some public hot water for a recent web interview in which he made some, well, not very nice comments about president Obama. West, who writes on culture, politics, religion, and race, and who tends to shuttle between Princeton and Harvard, accused the nation’s first African-American president of being the puppet of Wall Street interests, uncomfortable in his own black identity, and more likely to be hanging out with “white and Jewish men,” then the brothers and the sisters. West was bitter about not getting an invitation to the inauguration, and that Obama was no longer returning his phone calls. And this despite his own hard work in getting Obama elected. Comments on West were predictable.
One regret, dear world, that I am determined not to have when I am lying on my deathbed is that I did not kiss you enough. –Hafiz
I am currently writing a book tentatively titled, Spirituality: What it is and Why it Matters. The book’s central idea is that the common theme of the enormous variety of traditional and contemporary spirituality is a set of virtues–habits of mind, emotion, and action–which provide long-lasting personal contentment and lead us to compassionate and generous action towards others. Here is a tiny excerpt from the working draft of Spirituality, on one of the most important of those virtues:
Gratitude plays a powerful role in spiritual life–as much in the contexts of traditional religion as in the more eclectic, less traditionally oriented spirituality of the present. Contemporary Catholic spiritual teacher David Stiendl-Rast tells us that “Gratitude is the heart of prayer.”
As we cut the budgets and let the social programs wither, as global warming and invasive species threaten the integrity of ecosystems and human health, as endless and endlessly faster technological change leads everything that is solid to “melt into air,” it is reasonable to ask: what should we try to preserve? What is worth holding onto? Here’s one answer: The Peace Abbey and the Life Experience School of Sherborn, Massachusetts. The Abbey is an interfaith spiritual center dedicated to the peace and justice teachings of all the world’s faiths. The centerpiece of its grounds is a life sized statue of Gandhi, flanked by a series of plaques with quotations about peace and justice from Quakers, Catholics, Buddhists, Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Taoists, Indigenous peoples, and secular champions of social goodness.
Forget Ben and Jerry’s ice cream or Godiva chocolate, there’s no sinful pleasure like that delightful sense that “we” are so much “better” (more developed, more moral, more spiritually advanced) than “them.” At least two recent items in the news gave me that seductive pleasure, big time. First, there is the report that a new biography of Gandhi has been interpreted by some people as suggesting that the Mahatma had a homosexual relationship with a long-time German follower. Even though the author denied that he was claiming this, the Indian state of Maharashtra banned the book, and many have called on the Indian government to make the banning national. Could anything be more ironic?
Do the horrific images from Japan – not to mention reports that safety records at the nuclear plant have been faked for years – make you a little frightened when you drive past your absolutely, completely, technologically guaranteed neighborhood nuclear reactor? Perhaps you are certain such a thing could never happen in the U.S. – where corporations and government inspection teams are known for their professionalism and moral responsibility. Then again, you might remember the BP oil spill, just last year, where a good deal of the problem was that BP had cut corners on some safety costs and the government inspection teams were both figuratively and literally in bed with BP staff. Alongside nuclear leaks and oil spills there’s the looming deficit, terrorism, and the rise in chronic childhood diseases (twenty-two out of 70 million U.S. children have chronic illnesses tied to some degree to environmental pollution). If the current state of the world doesn’t scare you, it’s probably just that you haven’t been paying attention.