WNY Institute for an Integral Theology

I am so irrelevant, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?”
We are finite, you infinite;
they have found the answers in division.
How do I witness this time around?

What does it mean this time around?
What is my mission?
The forces arraigned against me,
against us…it is us, isn’t it?
They are so powerful when confronted by one so inadequate…
I am driven to distraction!

Is it truly Love?
Are we here to keep one another company…
to be your companion in this creation, this love-in-action?

In being is finitude,
yet you are throughtout creation,
infinite beyond even contemplation;
how could we not be distracted?
How could we not lose focus?
Are You alone?

“…and one of them, a lawyer, asked him a question to test him. ‘Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?’ He said to him, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And the second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.’”
As I grow older I am tempted to kick back and relax, literally. Frequently, I find that I am just too tired to exercise. So finding some excuse, I ‘kick-back’ in my easy chair and watch the evening propaganda, worshiping at the altar of consumerism that is my televison. Smugly condemning their hypocracy, as they loudly proclaim, “Trans-fats will kill us all! And now a word from our sponsor: Don’t mess with the Fast Food King-you know you want it!”, I thank God I am not like these idolaters. But I am.
I am not tired; the earthen vessel that is my body may be, but I am not. Rather, I have identified my ’self’ so thoroughly with my body, I am convinced that ‘I’ am actually tired! I need to seek the source of this vessel’s fatigue. If the source is physical, the prescription is rest. If the source is poor nutrition, then this too needs attention.
As I grow older, I preform less physical labor, therefore, I need to exercise. The serendipitous creation I identify as my body is a vessel created for “loving God with heart, mind, and soul.” Additionally, it is meant for loving neighbor and self. I worship the idol sloth when I fail to take care of ‘my’ body. In other words, exercise is worship; you’re running on that treadmill for Jesus…and everyone else.
Idols are but jars of clay.

“To be or not to be…?”
the young prince muses,
descending to the chaos of the sea;

“Denial of the self,
taking on the Christ’s image.”
Who ever will our young prince be?

The patient dies,
the gurney, it is emptied,
no further use for truth or lies;

the carcass it is rotting,
the harbor too is naked;
“flee inland” the counsel of the wise.

Teutonic peoples crashing,
Tsunami waves now pounding,
alone the prince adrift does flee;

musing “To be or not?”
the old prince struggles,
looking through the narrow gate to see.

Yesterday (it is always yesterday!) my thirty-something son called; his step-father Larry “had passed”. Grasping this as a momentous occasion, my son muttered some platitudes. “I can’t say the twelve years I spent with him were the best-I fought him every step of the way…but to watch him die of his addictions, well, he deserved a better epithet than ‘complete organ failure’…”
He continued wrestling with the issue as the conversation progressed, giving description to the “passing”, “We were all there; Laural, Jesse, Mom and me; Larry was in a drug stupor-not much changed from the way I remember him for most of his life. But this was different-he kept coming in and out of it, joking with Mom, expressing a feint concern that her husband would be jealous of the attention she was giving to her ‘ex-’ at his sickbed. He looked upon his children wistfully, thankful that they had come, yet incredulous that he deserved all this attention, much less the love we all expressed for him.”
There was silence on the phone line; I asked my son, “What does it all mean to you?” He replied, “I don’t know; will Larry get another chance to rectify this life, or do we get just one take?” My son, battling his own demons, is experiencing his most potent brush with mortality yet. “I mean, a lot of people won’t care that he is gone, some will even be glad; does Larry get to ‘work this off’, so to speak, in the ‘next life’? Will Larry spend all eternity working off his karma?”

It is interesting to witness my son’s development and evolution of faith, specifically expressed here in his questions of eternity and karma; Pierre Teilhard De Chardin predicted this-the amalgamation of world culture. My son was raised a Roman Catholic, eternity ever present in the icons gazing from the walls of his mother’s household. His understanding of karma as cause and effect fits well with Catholic dogma. In response to his questions, I chose a decidely “un-dogmatic” line of thought, appealing to his belief system.
“What is your understanding of ‘eternity’? Is it a measurement of time? Is eternity a place, bounded by pearly gates or infernal pits depending on the circumstances of life and death?” “Isn’t that what I am asking?” came his matter-of-fact reply. “Does Larry have to pay for his sins? He hurt a lot of people, most especially himself. I mean, is there a next life in which he can atone for his transgressions?”
Stepping up to the pulpit, I began to preach, “The oldest ‘religions’ of the world-the indigenous belief systems of Africa-teach a ‘remembering’. That is, the individual is around as long as she or he is remembered. Eternity is outside of time; therefore, it is immeasurable. However, perhaps a person’s eternity is specific-fitted individually to the circumstances of their life and death.” Another moment of silence on the phone followed by a statement of understanding, again based on his conditioning: “Sounds like purgatory…”
“That very well may be-perhaps Larry’s condition in the ‘after-life’ is dictated by how we remember him.” I replied. Warming now to my topic, I offered further speculation, “This may account for the visions of Jesus and visitations of Mary; people remember them, so their ‘presence’ in eternity continues.” Not missing a beat my son smartly observed, “Elvis may have left the building, but he is alive and well in the state of Purgatory.” “And your step-father may very well be hangin’ with him…” I added.

God: “Serendipitous creativity” - Gordon D. Kaufman
“Ultimate concern” - Paul Tillich
Christ: Principle of Universal Regeneration.
Faith: A response to relationship providing an orientation to life
which corresponds directly with the quality of those
relationships.
Belief: “The holding of certain ideas.” - Wilfred Cantfield Smith
Intelligence- “The harmony of heart and mind.” J. Krishnamurti

This “glossary” shall be an ongoing affair-it is not necessarily the “definitive” final word; rather it serves to ground the line of thought here expressed. Please feel free to comment and contribute.

Rene Descartes famously states, “Cogito ergo sum-I think, therefore I am.” This “method of doubt” portrays that the very basis of knowledge is verifiable; doubt everything but this “conviction so firm that it is quite incapable of being destroyed”. Unfortunately, this line of thinking(not first espoused by Descartes, as we shall demonstrate) when applied lends to the practice of habitual thought. A duality is created in which you as the thinker are separated from the natural process of thought; “I know I exist, because I think I exist.” One exists whether she/he thinks so or not. The point is, we separate ourselves from what comes natural, thought, making our own selves the authority attaching undo importance to the practice of our now habituated thoughts. We dwell in the past, living for the future, with fictional values and nonsensical roles. A Biblical warning against duality follows.
In Genesis, “…out of the ground the Lord God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them; and whatever the man called every living creature, that was its name.” The mind was created to experience and respond to its environment, in other words, to think. But in this story of creation, Genesis chapters two and three, the Creator warns Adam about the danger of duality stating, “…but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die.” This is the “original sin”; the error of separating humanity from nature, simply by thinking it so; “Cogito ergo sum.”
Recently, (10/28/08) we had an email conversation regarding Jesus’ method of teaching. This was the proposition of the communication: Jesus always taught in the three perspectives; Christ, the 1st person, to the disciples/church, the 2nd person about the 3rd person, the kingdom. This is a reflection of Jesus’ own experience of God, of his “ultimate concern” (Tillich). Jesus took his “own, interior, subjective experience”, teaches it to the church, as a “shared, intersubjective experience” referring to his experience of God’s kingdom, “an exterior, objective experience.” (Ken Wiber, The One Two Three of God” copyright 2006) What might be Jesus’ response to “I think, therefore I am.”?
Descartes says that we exist because we experience; our thoughts are proof of this. Genesis says that our experiences, if based in the knowledge of good and evil, are dead; therefore, we already do not exist. A scribe then approached him and said, “Teacher, I will follow you where ever you go.” And Jesus said to him, “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the son of man has no where to lay his head.” Another of his disciples said to him, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” But Jesus said to him, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.”(Matthew 8:19-22) Those things that we have based our lives upon, those thoughts we have thought, do not exist; our existence is in God alone.
It seems what Descartes and Jesus both speak of is the temporal character of nature. Descartes starts from a “method of doubt”; Jesus’ experience of life is different. Jesus foundational basis is “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40) Paul Tillich said, “The fact is, we cannot love; only God can love through us. We are the vessels through which God’s love is poured into and out of.”
This is Jesus’ first person experience of God, loving God with all his heart, soul, and mind, therefore, experiencing the filling and unfilling of God’s love, God’s self. This is Jesus’ experience of God in the second person, “Father, I thank you for having heard me. I knew that you always hear me, but I have said this for the sake of the crowd standing here, so that they may believe that you sent me.” (John 11:41c-42) This is Jesus’ experience of God in the third person, “to be concerned ultimately, unconditionally, infinitely.” (Tillich, “New Being”) And that my friends, is the kingdom of God.

A more appropriate title for Bill Maher’s motion picture “Religulous” would be “Obvious”. Employing Director Larry Charles’ “Borat” ambush tactics, Maher sympathetically interviews “Joe Six-pack” regarding his literal understanding of the Christian Scriptures. Maher then “pontificates” as he and his crew make their “getaway” down another road in pursuit of more “jesting and merry-making” exposing the fundamentalist views of truckers and amusement park patrons/staff. To be fair, Maher and Charles subject Muslim and Jewish believers in this same fashion, pronouncing the absurdity of their religions also, to the point of hilarity. If the purpose of the Maher/Charles film was to denigrate a literal interpretation of scripture by religious fringe groups, tacitly demonstrating the dangers thereof with Tyler Durden-like insertions of nuclear explosions, perhaps their endeavor would be palatable, even amusing. However, the duo had a much more grandiose scheme in mind.
Reminiscing with his mother and sister regarding his angst upon discovering the mythical nature of Santa Claus, Maher, exhibiting the defensive mechanism “displacement” expresses his anger and disappointment with “belief” for perpetrating this fiction. Exposing his own literal understanding of “faith”, Maher rhetorically asks, “Who believes in a talking snake, I mean really?” Numerous people do and they are none the less for it in the “eyes” of God. (an allegorical device, Bill; God doesn’t literally have eyes.)
Not once does the team of Maher/Charles attempt to engage learned women or men of the mainstream faiths. (Unless they count the “cutesy” trespasses on Vatican and Mormon properties as attempts at engagement!) Harvard Theologian Karen King has done numerous interviews regarding religious beliefs. Marcus Borg and J. Dominic Crossan have both been featured sources for “Frontline” (and Bill would have gotten along famously with those two-they’re fun guys!) Had Maher or Charles familiarized themselves with James W. Fowler’s “Stages of Faith” or Ken Wilber’s “1-2-3 of God” they would have produced an intelligent, informed cinema.
Rather than a thoughtful film about the universal occurrence and evolution of faith within human-beings, Maher and Charles have instead offered an extended version of the “Jerry Springer Show” (a movie of which has already been done…). Aping “Jerry”, Maher sanctimoniously pronounces his own benediction declaring at film’s end (and I paraphrase…) “Unless humanity gets over the psychosis of religion/faith/belief we are doomed to fulfill the apocalypse!” I would suggest that if people wish to see Maher’s “anti-religion rant” they do it in the comfort of their own bed, where they won’t miss much when they inevitably fall asleep.

In his 1997 book “GOD IS A VERB”, dedicated to his parents Helene Markens and Sampson D. Cooper, Rabbi David A. Cooper decribes Tikkun as a potential coupling of “Bohu”, emptiness, with the primordial chaos (tohu). “This Universe of Tikkun is a container for the collection of all the missing gold. In kabbalistic language, the gold of our story is called nitzotzot: sparks.”
All of the manifested universe, that is, every bit of “matter” within creation contains these “sparks of life”; from the tiniest “nanos” (Greek for dwarf: 10 to the -9) to the mightiest glactic system, i.e. the Milky Way. In the Kabbalah, the mission of creation, in Christianity the mission of the Christ (the principle of universal regeneration) is to facilitate the “rectification” (Tikkun; Cooper page 29) of the separation of these “sparks of life-sparks of holiness” from their source.
Rabbi Cooper states, “The way these sparks are raised is through acts of of lovingkindness, of being in harmony with the universe, and through higher awareness.” (Cooper; ibid) We at WNYIIT maintain that Jesus taught this very same wisdom. In addition, we theorize that Jesus was in touch with the same source as that of the Kabbalah, most likely through his teacher, John, known as “the Baptizer”.

In my last posting I discussed Tikkun, the restoration of balance or harmony. This posting concerns the relationship between Tikkun, the restoration of balance or harmony and the Christ, the principle of universal regeneration.

In his book “Major Trends In Jewish Mysticism” Gershom Scholem says of Tikkun, “The world of Tikkun is (therefore) the world of Messianic action”. The Integrally inspired constructive-developmental theology I am currently constructing understands the relationship between the Christ and Tikkun to be the following: The Christ, the principle of universal regeneration brings about Tikkun, the restoration of balance or harmony in all dimensions of life as those dimensions develop or evolve. This is going on within and among us again and again, right now.

Gershom Scholem, on page 233 of “Major Trends In Jewish Mysticism” says the Jewish word Tikkun means “restoration of harmony” (a synonym for harmony is balance). Scholem goes on to connect the fall of Adam to the destruction of harmony or balance. When one falls they do so because of a loss of balance. Here I find an interesting connection with the work of Robert Kegan in his book “The Evolving Self”. In this important work Kegan speaks at length of persons losing their balance when they disembed from a particular “evolutionary truce” on their way to a qualitatively new balance between self and world. In a constructive-developmental framework “Tikkun” or restoration of balance or harmony is achieved with a qualitatively new stage or structure of development. I suggest that the myth of the fall is simply a dramatic re-presentation of an aspect of the process we all are–what Kegan calls “evolution as a meaning-making activity”. Regaining our balance after “the fall” is what we all do (as we develop) as we restore the harmony between ourselves and the world.