Letter to a Jesuit

Below is part of a letter I wrote recently. As an attempt to capture my spiritual path over the last 10 years or so, it seemed worth saving. I have removed anything that might identify the recipient.

I was born into a very devoutly religious family. My parents are both converts to Mormonism (Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, with headquarters in Salt Lake City), which they found in early adulthood and have adhered to faithfully since before I was born (the eldest of six living children). I grew up Mormon, far away from Utah, in a small and close-knit congregation of Saints (as they like to call themselves, perhaps a bit pretentiously from your point of view). I went through the entire cursus honorum that contemporary Mormonism offers young men—attending weekly meetings faithfully, receiving and carrying out the duties of the priesthood (first Aaronic then eventually Melchizedek), graduating from seminary, receiving my endowment in the temple, serving a two-year proselytizing mission in northern Spain (I spent many months working in Galicia), graduating from Brigham Young University (the LDS church's university in Provo, Utah), and eventually marrying in the Salt Lake temple (which you may have seen: it is rather pretty, especially when compared to more modern Mormon architecture). Experience has taught me to beware of judging the quality of one's faith in terms of external career. In my case, almost everything I did from the age of about twelve came from a motivation informed somehow by my Mormonism—a Mormonism that was very sincere and earnest, perhaps too much so as it happens.

As part of my Mormon formation, I was taught church history and doctrine (I hesitate to call it theology, but the term is not utterly inapt) formally and informally. My formal schooling took place in church, in seminary, in special retreats held for missionaries, at BYU (my alma mater), and in the temple (where Mormons take part in complex rituals that dramatize the creation, fall, and redemption of the world). Informally, I did a lot of reading on my own. I was drawn very early to scripture, and over the course of my youth became very familiar with the King James Bible, in addition to other books the LDS church regards as holy scripture (including the Book of Mormon, which I have read many times). I was naturally interested in the history of the books I read—the context out of which they arose and took their first meaning before being handed down to me. Before I went out as a missionary, I had already begun studying religious history and had even decided that I would need to study biblical languages (Latin, Hebrew, and Greek) in college. As a youth, I did not notice any great imbalance between my personal religion and the religion preached and practiced at church. The more contact I had with the institutional church, however, the more this changed. My two-year mission in Spain was revelatory in this regard: I saw the church doing things that made no sense to me, things that seemed to me to cheapen the gospel in the interest of gaining converts to it (superficial converts, with no great understanding of what it was they were committing themselves to). At BYU, I began studying church history in great detail, on my own and in company with others, and I slowly came to realize that the church history I had been taught throughout my youth was by and large a complete fairytale—a transparent hagiography of the early Mormon movement that transformed men like Joseph Smith and Brigham Young from nineteenth-century mobsters (with good and bad traits) into modern Saints (with no evil qualities worth noticing).

By the time I was married and about halfway through graduate school (far from BYU), I realized that I could not participate actively in LDS Mormonism any more. Under the influence of my ongoing studies into church history (early Christian history as well as Mormon history), I could not see the LDS church's version of Christian history as anything but an increasingly transparent fable (as literal history: as a symbolic narrative, it has some merit). To make things worse, the church demands that the individual conform his private thought and (at the very least) public utterance to its versions of events. It does this by controlling access to temples (etc.) through a process of ecclesiastical confession that involves meeting regularly with local church authorities (the bishop or one of his counselors, and then the stake president or one of his—perhaps a bit like talking to your local parish priest and then the bishop). These gentlemen inquire into your orthodoxy (“Do you believe in the divinity of God the Father, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Ghost? Do you believe Joseph Smith to be a Prophet, Seer, and Revelator?” and so on). If you cannot answer questions to their satisfaction, then your status as an active Mormon is revoked until you repent. I cannot answer questions as they would like, and I cannot repent (for when I look into the historical record, I do not see what they want me to see—viz. that I must subject my opinion on doctrinal matters to theirs, whatever it may be, without critical judgement).

When I was no longer able to practice Mormonism actively, I did not cease to have a spiritual vocation. I needed to feel myself part of something larger than myself, but I also needed the freedom to express myself openly and honestly, even when others might possibly construe my expression as a threat to faith (not the way I construe it, but I can certainly appreciate that I am not the only person with a point of view that matters: we all see things, and we all matter; I am certainly as open to taking criticism as I am to dishing it out). Fortunately, my wife was not a dogmatic Mormon: she was one of the few external things that remained constant in my hour of confusion; I am very grateful for her unflagging moral support. Initially, I felt something of a gulf between myself and institutional Christianity. (To be completely candid, I still sense that gulf today, but experience has prepared me to confront it with curious interest rather than defensive hostility.) As a result, my first spiritual home outside Mormonism was a small Buddhist sangha in the Kagyu tradition (Tibetan). I found (and contine to find) Buddhist rhetoric very liberating (it is nice to be told that the self is impermanent when your own has just been brutally shattered), and I continue to enjoy the Kagyu liturgy (which involves meditation and chanting prayers, with or without the aid of tools such as a rosary or icons). But there is something important missing in my Buddhist experience, something that I cannot help but call Christianity.

It is hard to put into words, but let me try. Buddhism satisfies my intellectual hunger entirely, offering an outlook on the world that appears appropriately wise and skeptical (important to me, given my past history of being gulled into what the Buddhists would call “wrong views”). While it is very beautiful, Buddhism does not satisfy my aesthetic hunger: I find the bodhisattva distant and aloof, rather like the gods of Epicurus. Mormonism such as I grew up with was not a religion of passive acceptance. Mobster that he was, Brigham Young was also determined to build heaven on earth, and while I shrink back from some of the evil consequences of his efforts (e.g. the Mountain Meadows Massacre or the suffering of people involved in polygamy against their will), I still admire the aim. I want to make the world a better place, actively—or at least to see the examples of others engaging with sin or crime or other natural hardships in authentic ways that I might possibly emulate. I love retiring from the world, but I need to build something in retirement (“the kingdom of God”)—and I have years of exposure to Christianity that predisposes me to find meaning of some kind in Christian scripture, discourse, and ritual.

While serving as a Mormon missionary in Spain, I attended a public mass in the Cathedral of St. James in Santiago and conceived a desire that I carry to this day of completing a pilgrimage there on foot. If I ever have money and time, I will certainly carry this desire out, whether or not I become Catholic. I feel a great internal need to do it, to see the places where I came bearing Mormonism and give thanks for the many unexpected gifts I received in return. One of those gifts was a chance encounter with the Jesuit Andres Torres Queiruga, who invited me into his apartment to discuss religion and left a very profound impression on me (as being utterly sincere and good, even if his belief in the resurrection is metaphorical rather than literal—as mine now is, too). Regardless of how I feel toward what are sometimes called “religious truth-claims” (i.e. whether God is personal in some particular way or the Bible a literal history composed in the manner of Thucydides), I feel drawn toward Christian tradition, especially older versions of it that have a sense of their history—a memory of the good and the evil done in God's name over time. I don't know what to do with this attraction, whether I should abandon it to continue on as a Buddhist atheist (see below) or pursue it (as I am trying to do in reaching out to you).

My reading of the historical Buddha is very like my reading of the historical Jesus. What draws me to both is not the idea that they are more real or powerful than ordinary human beings, but the aspiration that they have come to represent to so many of my fellow creatures, an aspiration to make life beautiful where it can be ugly. I share that aspiration, no matter what I may happen to think right now about the ultimate order or disorder of the cosmos. “The kingdom of God is within you” is a statement that I continue to find incredibly edifying (and frustrating, as I seek some means of relating my window on that interior kingdom effectively to others—in ways that edify them and me, recognizing and respecting the reality that we need each other, that we are all part of a vast ecosystem of overt and hidden relationships that have the power to become incredibly beautiful even if they are occasionally also ugly).

Many people whose circumstances appear externally very similar to mine—people whose history has brought them into significant conflict with some fundamentalist, literalistic religious tradition (such as modern Mormonism has increasingly sought to be)—become atheists. Some of them find all the socialization, all the service, all the spirituality they need outside established paths. I have examined their ways of life thoughtfully, and I find much to admire in many of them. But at the same time, I cannot believe that “the old ways” are defunct, dying, or useless. To me it seems that history shows humanity existing with certain constant strengths and weaknesses. Occasionally, these express themselves in ways that are incredibly destructive (and we get something like the Holy Inquisition in Catholicism or the Danites in Mormonism), but that does not deny that they can also be very good—and dropping a particular ideology does not insure us against their destructive recurrence (as the last century has proved to me: atheism or secularism carries the same capacity for evil that religion does, more in an age where science exists to supply leaders of any ideological stripe with WMDs). I see that religion is occasionally poisonous (like all medicines), but that does not mean that I can abandon it (any more than I can abandon eating, though its eventual consequence is death). I value tradition, I am trying to say—even when I disagree with it, even when it challenges me, even when my response to its challenge is more negative than positive. A good man needs good enemies, friends who know how to wear their friendship in disagreement and disappointment as well as concord. I did not find that in Mormonism. I wonder whether I might find it somewhere in the universe of Catholicism.

Is there some way a person like me might become Catholic, or at least engage Catholicism in a meaningful way (mutually useful in terms of building the kingdom of God)?  No matter what happens, I will always be grateful for the faith of men like Thomas Merton, whose books have been a real blessing to me over the past few years as I have sought to rebuild myself in the image of God.

Life, Liberty, and Happiness

Thomas Merton.  The Way of Chuang Tzu.  Abbey of Gethsemani, 1965.  ISBN: 0811218511.

As I was returning one of the last books I still have checked out from my soon-to-be alma mater's library, I could not help saving some more inspiration from Thomas Merton.  Without commentary (for now), behold:

"The Man of Tao" (pp. 91-92) 

The man in whom Tao
Acts without impediment
Harms no other being
By his actions
Yet he does not know himself
To be "kind," to be "gentle."

The man in whom Tao
Acts without impediment
Does not bother with his own interests
And does not despise
Others who do.
He does not struggle to make money
And does not make a virtue of poverty.
He goes his way
Without relying on others
And does not pride himself
On walking alone.
While he does not follow the crowd
He won't complain of those who do.
Rank and reward
Make no appeal to him;
Disgrace and shame
Do not deter him.
He is not always looking
For right and wrong
Always deciding "Yes" or "No."
The ancients said, therefore:

"The man of Tao
Remains unknown.
Perfect virtue
Produces nothing.
'No-Self'
Is 'True-Self.'
And the greatest man
Is Nobody."

"Wholeness" (pp. 105-106) 

"How does the true man of Tao
Walk through walls without obstruction,
Stand in fire without being burnt?"

Not because of cunning
Or daring;
Not because he has learned,
But because he has unlearned.

All that is limited by form, semblance, sound, color,
Is called object.
Among them all, man alone
Is more than an object.
Though, like objects, he has form and semblance,
He is not limited to form.  He is more.
He can attain to formlessness.

When he is beyond form and semblance,
Beyond "this" and "that,"
Where is the comparison
With another object?
Where is the conflict?
What can stand in his way?

He will rest in his eternal place
Which is no-place.
He will be hidden
In his own unfathomable secret.
His nature sinks to its root
In the One.
His vitality, his power
Hide in secret Tao.

When he is all one,
There is no flaw in him
By which a wedge can enter.
So a drunken man, falling
Out of a wagon,
Is bruised but not destroyed.
His bones are like the bones of other men,
But his fall is different.
His spirit is entire.  He is not aware
Of getting into a wagon
Or falling out of one.

Life and death are nothing to him.
He knows no alarm, he meets obstacles
Without thought, without care,
Takes them without knowing they are there.

If there is such security in wine,
How much more in Tao.
The wise man is hidden in Tao.
Nothing can touch him.

"When the Shoe Fits" (pp. 112-113)

Ch'ui the draftsman
Could draw more perfect circles freehand
Than with a compass.

His fingers brought forth
Spontaneous forms from nowhere.  His mind
Was meanwhile free and without concern
With what he was doing.

No application was needed.
His mind was perfectly simple
And knew no obstacle.

So, when the shoe fits
The foot is forgotten,
When the belt fits
The belly is forgotten,
When the heart is right
"For" and "against" are forgotten.

No drives, no compulsions,
No needs, no attractions:
Then your affairs
Are under control.
You are a free man.

Easy is right.  Begin right
And you are easy.
Continue easy and you are right.
The right way to go easy
Is to forget the right way
And forget that the going is easy.

This is really good stuff.  I wish I had spent more time listening as a young man, and less time preaching, but I recognize also that regret is pointless.  Let it all go and do what the situation demands.  There are no demands that cannot be met.  The Tao always takes care of itself: just don't invest heavily in any particular outcome to its evolutions.  Apathy is an amazing psychological (spiritual) tool, unlocking the floodgates of human potential, removing artificial barriers to the Tao that we all carry alive and well inside.

My Personal Canon

I have been thinking I should post a list of books that really speak to my soul.  Here, in no particular order, are books that I find uniquely inspiring as I pursue moral excellence.

Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth).  This book is the only part of the Old Testament that I still take really seriously as an inspiring commentary on the human condition.  (Some of the Proverbs and Psalms are good, too, but others are not.  I can also appreciate aspects of some of the prophets, especially Isaiah, but they also contain a lot of old-school mythology that doesn't really speak to me any more.)

Epistle of James.  This is the only book in the New Testament that I really like any more.  It is all about real ethical problems and workable solutions.  (The Gospels contain a lot of myth disguised as history, as does Acts, and Paul is a bit too polemical for my taste.  Revelation is an interesting kookfest, but its ethical relevance is pretty much nil, at least for me.)

Doctrine and Covenants 121.  This section of the D&C is a favorite of mine.  I still like the image of leadership that it presents (one that strives to inspire emulation rather than demand obedience).  If Joseph Smith had done a better job of living up to this, he might not have died so early.

Seeds of Contemplation.  This gem from Thomas Merton (published in 1961) has been a real source of inspiration for me.  Every chapter is quotable (and useful in real moral dilemmas that I have).  The Christianity practiced by the author is an ethical system that I definitely believe in.

What Makes You Not a Buddhist.  This introduction to Buddhism by Dzongsar Jamyang Khyentse (from Bhutan) has become another book that I look to repeatedly for insight into the human condition.  I have really enjoyed reading it over and over again, noting my reaction to the four truths: (1) all compounded things are impermanent; (2) all emotions are pain; (3) all things have no inherent existence; (4) nirvana is beyond concepts.  If I have an old-school credo (map of "ultimate reality"), this might be one of the most accessible statements of it that I have stumbled across.

War and Peace; Anna Karenina.  I have read both of these books multiple times over my life (especially the former, but the latter is also really, really good).  I am always impressed at the insight into humanity (rich and poor, working and lazy, intelligent and not, civilized and savage) that both contain.  Of the Russian writers, Tolstoy is the only one that has always spoken to me (though I really like Dostoyevsky's Brothers Karamazov, which should probably also be in this canon).  War and Peace is everything one could want in a book: comprehensive, entertaining (light-hearted at times, but deadly serious too), and very long (it is one of the few books over 1000 pages that I routinely wish were longer).  Anna Karenina shows us all aspects of sin, including the humanity (and human goodness) of the sinner.  Together, I think they provide more useful insight into your average human reality than any ancient mythology.

Dao De Jing.  This ancient Chinese text is a recent addition to my canon.  (I would not have understood it as a young[er] man, back when I approached everything in terms of Platonic forms, confounding the abstract with the concrete.)  I discovered it while working on the problem of organic wisdom (as opposed to absolute knowledge), and I have really fallen in love with it.  Life (and human ethics) is about process, not results, and everything we do is fluid.  Nothing is ever set in stone (unless it is meant to be broken).

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.  As a young college student, I was drawn to the Greeks and Greek philosophy, and I could never figure out why.  I also wanted to achieve a kind of personal excellence in other fields of endeavor that were important to me, but was not really interested in competition or what most moderns categorize as "success" (money, power, prestige, technical brilliance, etc.).  Robert Pirsig's book (published in 1974) is one of the clearest expressions of my own longing for "quality" (my own authentic, integral experience with reality) that I have ever found.  As I read it, something inside me said, "Yes! Yes! That's just what I have been feeling.  That's precisely why I hate my relationship with machines and am obsessed with studies that yield no obvious external rewards!"  The book is excellent.

Never Let Go.  This quirky collection of strength-training tips and life advice created by Dan John (and published in 2009) is included here because it speaks to my conviction that human ethics involve the whole individual, with physical health laying the groundwork for moral excellence (and all other emergent properties of the human condition that we sometimes refer to with words like "spirituality").  Dan believes this too (as far as I can tell), and his book is refreshingly honest, simple, and packed with great strength-training advice (including knowing references to most of the other authors I have read in my search for top-notch health tips).  Rather than pad my list with a bunch of stuff about strength and health, I include Dan as a concession to that part of my life (which continues to be important).  Also, I find his brutal honesty and humility as refreshing as they are funny.  (Seriously, how many strength books do you know that give you real insight into being healthy and strong and make you laugh at the same time?  Not many, I'm guessing.) 

Fooled By Randomness; The Black Swan; The Bed of Procrustes.  I have read Taleb's books several times (including the last, a collection of modern proverbs).  I find them continually entertaining and insightful (despite what some critics think).  They never fail to put me in touch with the reality of my own ignorance (which is what every good book should do, in my opinion).  I really like them.

These are all the obvious titles that come to mind today.  Of course I may expand the list, as time goes by.  My canon is completely open.

Responsible Religion

Thomas Merton.  New Seeds of Contemplation.  2nd edition (originally published in 1961).  New York: Abbey of Gethsemane, 2007. ISBN 081120099X.

(8) What is the purpose of religion?  In my experience, religion is a tool that individuals and communities use to tame human appetites.  Merton addresses this aspect of religion:

It should be accepted as a most elementary human and moral truth that no man can live a fully sane and decent life unless he is able to say 'no' on occasion to his natural bodily appetites.  No man who simply eats and drinks whenever he feels like eating and drinking, who smokes whenever he feels the urge to light a cigarette, who gratifies his curiosity and sensuality whenever they are stimulated, can consider himself a free person [an individual with integrity].  He has renounced his spiritual freedom and become the servant of bodily impulse.  Therefore his mind and his will are not fully his own.  They are under the power of his appetites.  And through the medium of his appetites, they are under the control of those who gratify his appetites.  Just because he can buy one brand of whiskey rather than another, this man deludes himself that he is making a choice; but the fact is that he is a devout servant of a tyrannical ritual.  He must reverently buy the bottle, take it home, unwrap it, pour it out for his friends, watch TV, 'feel good,' talk his silly uninhibited head off, get angry, shout, fight, and go to bed in disgust with himself and the world.  This becomes a kind of religious compulsion without which he cannot convince himself that he is really alive, really 'fulfilling his personality.'  He is not 'sinning' but simply makes an ass of himself, deluding himself that he is real when his compulsions have reduced him to a shadow of a genuine person.  In general, it can be said that no contemplative life is possible without ascetic self-discipline.  One must learn to survive without the habit-forming luxuries which get such a hold on men today (85-86).  

Religion aims to create an interface through which the community warns the individual about the dangers of going wherever his unguided fancy may take him (or her).  When it succeeds, it provides healthy (or at least innocuous) alternatives to the insane rituals we create spontaneously for ourselves.  When it fails, it magnifies the bad effects of ridiculous ritualism (which is endemic in all human life), fostering mass delusion. 

(9)  As Merton says elsewhere:

Where men live huddled together without true communication, there seems to be greater sharing, and a more genuine communion.  But this is not communion, only immersion in the general meaninglessness of countless slogans and cliches repeated over and over again so that in the end one listens without hearing and responds without thinking.  The constant din of empty words and machine noises, the endless booming of loudspeakers end by making true communication and true communion almost impossible.  Each individual in the mass is insulated by thick layers of insensibility.  He doesn't care, he doesn't hear, he doesn't think.  He does not act, he is pushed.  He does not talk, he produces conventional noises.  He does not think, he secretes cliches...Here the sin is not in the conviction that one is not like other men, but in the belief that being like them is sufficient to cover every other sin.  The complacency of the individual who admires his own excellence is bad enough, but it is more respectable than the complacency of the man who has no self-esteem because he has not even a superficial self which he can esteem.  He is not a person, not an individual, only an atom.  This atomized existence is sometimes praised as humility or self-sacrifice, sometimes it is called obedience, sometimes it is devotion to the dialectic of class war.  It produces a kind of peace which is not peace, but only an escape from an immediately urgent sense of conflict.  It is the peace not of love but of anesthesia.  It is the peace not of self-realization and self-dedication, but of flight into irresponsibility (55-56).

As with the individual, so with the crowd: nothing really good comes from just going through the motions.  Maybe the rain came because our ancestors danced this way and not that way--maybe our ancestors avoided moral problems by living this way and not that way--but how are we to sort the really useful kernel of the ritual from the (infinitely more abundant) cultural chaff?  How do we know that ethical behavior is guaranteed by chanting certain mantras (and not others), reading certain books (and not others), marrying certain people (and not others), obeying certain people (and not others), et cetera ad infinitum?  Until we think critically about how our religious behavior affects communal and individual moral integrity from an objective perspective (one that we can understand and apply as individuals, without outsourcing the thinking to someone else), our worship is no more rational or effective than that of a cargo cult.  Religion, to be useful, must be thoughtful, self-critical, and tailored to the foster the unstructured development of the responsible individual.

(10) All the foregoing militates strongly against the idea that there is something useful to be gained from theorizing about absolute truth from an imagined universal perspective.  If there is such truth, the process of human development effaces it so effectively that it might as well not exist, covering it up with crazy rituals that have little or no connection to it (and may impede responsible ethical conduct as much as they foster it).  Practical religion is always a question of balancing imponderables, making decisions without full understanding:

A man who is not stripped and poor and naked within his own soul will unconsciously tend to do the works he has to do for his own sake rather than for the glory of God.  He will be virtuous not because he loves God's will but because he wants to admire his own virtues [which he may or may not be in a position to judge]...Be content that you are not yet a saint, even though you realize that the only thing worth living for is sanctity.  Then you will be satisfied to let God lead you to sanctity by paths that you cannot understand.  You will travel in darkness and you will not longer be concerned with yourself and no longer compare yourself with other men.  Those who have gone by that way have finally found out that sanctity is in everything and that God is all around them.  Having given up all desire to compete with other men [in the mission field, at the university, before the congregation, on Wall Street] they suddenly wake up and find that the joy of God is everywhere, and they are able to exult in the virtues and goodness of others more than ever they could have done in their own.  They are so dazzled by the reflection of God in the souls of the men they live with that they no longer have any power to condemn anything they see in another.  Even in the greatest sinners they can see virtues and goodness that no one else can find.  As for themselves, if they still consider themselves, they no longer dare to compare themselves with others.  The idea has now become unthinkable.  But it is no longer a source of suffering and lamentation: they have finally reached the point where they can take their own insignificance for granted.  They are no longer interested in their external selves (58-60).

So the truly holy man (or woman) is not encumbered by some specious "mantle of leadership" that obliges him (or her) to tell lies or condemn others harshly for their ethical mistakes (whatever standard we use to determine these).  This to me is the essence of Christianity, the point that Christ is getting at when he tells the religious leaders of his own time (who were deeply committed to their own importance as the only legitimate representatives of God): "Verily I say unto you, That the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you" (Matt. 21:31).  I understand Christ to mean that the point of religion is not maintaining some outward form of piety (the kind that has to be justified by lies and threats because it cannot withstand rational inquiry), but fostering an inner integrity (something that all are equally capable of achieving, and that each must find for him or herself).  It is my belief that this integrity flourishes best in the complete absence of tyrannical moral authority.  So I am open to free and frank discussion with my fellow-travelers on the road to enlightenment (or salvation, or whatever), but when they tell me I must submit to their superior light and knowledge or be damned, I respectfully refuse to cede to them the character that I construct only for God (or whatever we happen to call the mystery of life that lies in and around us).  Responsible religion depends upon thoughtful dialogue, which can only exist when both parties to the conversation have equal authority to construct their own beliefs (including access to the information from which those beliefs are constructed).  The fact that leaders of the LDS church have been willing to ignore this fact (as I perceive it) for the past 200 years is very disturbing to me.  From my perspective, they are either (1) evil masterminds who take delight in bilking their gullible fellowman, or--what is more likely from the facts--(2) poor saps like the rest of us who happen to have inherited a broken (or malformed) cultural paradigm that they perpetuate for lack of anything better.  But enough ranting for the present: I do not want to make too great a show of my own unholy urge to condemn others.

Religious Integrity and the Church

Thomas Merton.  New Seeds of Contemplation.  2nd edition (originally published in 1961).  New York: Abbey of Gethsemane, 2007. ISBN 081120099X.

(4) The theme of individual freedom and integrity is one that Merton comes back to repeatedly.  Here is one passage that really struck me: 

We are free beings and sons of God.  This means to say that we should not passively exist, but actively participate in His creative freedom, in our own lives, and in the lives of others, by choosing the truth.  To put it better, we are even called to share with God the work of creating the truth of our identity.  We can evade this responsibility by playing with masks, and this pleases us because it can appear at times to be a free and creative way of living.  It is quite easy, it seems to please everyone.  But in the long run the cost and the sorrow come very high.  To work out our own identity with God, which the Bible calls 'working out our salvation,' is a labor that requires sacrifice and anguish, risk and many tears.  It demands close attention to reality at every moment, and great fidelity to God as He reveals Himself, in the mystery of each new situation.  We do not know clearly beforehand what the result of this work will be...The seeds that are planted in my liberty at every moment, by God's will, are the seeds of my own identity, my own reality, my own happiness, my own sanctity.  To refuse them is to refuse everything; it is the refusal of my own existence and being: of my identity, of my very self (32-33).

I have spent a fair amount of time "playing with masks" as a closet doubter in the LDS church.  I went through the motions of orthodox belief, even as my view of reality made it impossible for me to believe honestly.  I felt isolated and alienated at church, where I could not share my problems with anyone for fear of arousing anger, frustration, and increased alienation (not to mention the possibility that others might take my revelation as a catalyst to radically destabilize their own lives: I did not want to bring anyone's life crashing down by revealing that much of what is taught at church is patently "untrue").  But I needed to express my spirituality positively.  I needed a place where I could share my thoughts and feelings freely, knowing that others would respond affirmatively and constructively (instead of telling me to shut up and get back in line, reading scriptures and attending endless meetings where we are spoon fed pat answers).  I felt my spirit dying at church (from lack of positive nurture), and so I ended up fleeing to other places in search of spiritual refreshment.  It felt so good to take off the mask and be honest for a change (proving that I can still believe in the concept of a resurrection after all, even if I mean something different by it than the old bodily resuscitation).

(5) Another telling passage speaks about the pointless meeting (reminding me of my mission):

We have said that the solitude that is important to a contemplative is, above all, an interior and spiritual thing.  We have admitted that it is possible to live in deep and peaceful interior solitude even in the midst of the world and its confusion.  But this truth is sometimes abused in religion.  There are men dedicated to God whose lives are full of restlessness and who have no real desire to be alone.  They admit that exterior solitude is good, in theory, but they insist that it is far better to preserve interior solitude while living in the midst of others.  In practice, their lives are devoured by activities and strangled by attachments.  Interior solitude is impossible for them.  They fear it.  They do everything they can to escape it.  What is worse, they try to draw everyone into activities as senseless and devouring as their own.  They are great promoters of useless work.  They love to organize meetings and banquets and conferences and lectures.  They print circulars, write letters, talk for hours on the telephone in order that they may gather a hundred people together in a large room where they will all fill the air with smoke and make a great deal of noise and roar at one another and clap their hands and stagger home at last patting one another on the back with the assurance that they have all done great things to spread the Kingdom of God (83).

Reading these words, I am taken back to zone conference (where sugar replaced the smoke: the mission is a great place to pick up "clean" vices).  I am also reminded of other experiences (such as the first priesthood session of General Conference that I attended without my wife) where I found myself asking, "Why do we need to have this meeting?  What are we accomplishing?" and being dissatisfied with the answer.  The church is certainly not the only organization that persists through pointless meetings (as the faculty at my university will attest), and not all meetings can be avoided, as long as I am trying to be a part of society in any useful capacity.  Nevertheless, reading Merton confirmed me in my desire to avoid a useless meeting whenever possible, and made me even more skeptical of the alleged benefits of such meetings (increased "spirituality" at church; magic improvements in "efficient educational delivery" at college: too often it all boils down to a lot of hot air whose import is at best insubstantial, at worst an impediment to real learning and growth).

(6) The problem with meetings is not that they exist per se.  They have a disturbing tendency to substitute relatively ineffectual learning methods (in the form of passive listening and empty rhetorical posturing) for effective ones (practicing empathy with another person, undefended by artificial codes of conduct that narrowly prescribe action: it is easy to be "charitable" when this involves nothing more than sitting quietly or uttering platitudes at a podium; if we want to strengthen our charity, however, we should seek out situations that test it a little more).  So the church (whether LDS or Catholic) becomes something of a paradox:

Human traditions all tend toward stagnation and decay.  They try to perpetuate things that cannot be perpetuated [e.g. naive myths about the nature of reality].  They cling to objects and values which time destroys without mercy [e.g. human infallibility, institutionalized celibacy, polygamy, racist and sexist doctrines of supremacy].  They are bound up with a contingent and material order of things--customs, fashions, styles, and attitudes--which inevitably change and give way to something else.  The presence of a strong element of human conservatism in the Church should not obscure the fact that Christian tradition [which for me includes Mormonism], supernatural in its source, is something absolutely opposed to human traditionalism (142).

So the Church (as Merton calls it), in order to avoid becoming just another human organization, must foster life of a kind that does not occur elsewhere--a life that takes what is good from the tradition of the past and adapts it in revolutionary fashion to the challenges of the present.  It must be open to losing some things its members like, and embracing some things they hate. 

(7) Ideally, the Church provides social space in which the individual saint can build his own integrity and simultaneously improve that of his neighbor:

Very few men are sanctified in isolation.  Very few become perfect in absolute solitude.  Living with other people and learning to lose ourselves in the understanding of their weakness and deficiencies can help us to become true contemplatives...Even the courageous acceptance of interior trials in utter solitude cannot altogether compensate for the work of purification accomplished in us by patience and humility in loving other men and sympathizing with their most unreasonable needs and demands (191).

How can I achieve this ideal of iron sharpening iron when I cannot even speak my concerns about righteousness without being removed from the community as an apostate?  How can dialogue exist when one side of the conversation has no voice?  The moment I express doubt in anything spoken from the pulpit by an imposing man in a business suit, the community (including some close friends) assumes I have no integrity and tells me to repent or go away.  Contrary to what I have heard others say, I have no desire to impose my beliefs (or the lack thereof) on the imposing man in the suit or those who elect to hang on every word he utters.  I am perfectly willing to put up with the nonsense of others.  Why can they not put up with mine?  Does Christ make us all brothers and sisters of equal worth to the community, or does he just give some of us a convenient excuse to lord it over the rest of us?

Sacred Mystery

Thomas Merton.  New Seeds of Contemplation.  2nd edition (originally published in 1961).  New York: Abbey of Gethsemane, 2007. ISBN 081120099X.

This book was a real treat to read, providing the kind of "spiritual nourishment" that I used to find in scripture before my Mormon worldview collapsed.  Taken as a whole, the book seems random and resistant to facile analysis; the author himself characterizes it as "a volume of more or less disconnected thoughts" (xix).  Nonetheless, I found it a very rich exploration of the unknown (and unknowable) God I had met before in the work of Thomas Merton.  Rather than attempt to cover the whole thing in this brief review, I will quote a few passages that speak to me and summarize why I think they are important.

(1) The following is one of the best attempts I know of to express what I mean (and have always meant) when talking about "spiritual experiences":

Contemplation is the highest expression of man's intellectual and spiritual life.  It is that life itself, fully awake, fully active, fully aware that it is alive.  It is spiritual wonder.  It is spontaneous awe at the sacredness of life, of being.  It is gratitude for life, for awareness, and for being.  It is a vivid realization of the fact that life and being in us proceed from an invisible, transcendent and infinitely abundant Source.  It knows the Source, obscurely, inexplicably, but with a certitude that goes beyond reason and beyond simple faith...It is a more profound depth of faith, a knowledge too deep to be grasped in images, in words or even in clear concepts.  It can be suggested by words, by symbols, but in the very moment of trying to indicate what it knows the contemplative mind takes back what it has said, and denies what it has affirmed.  For in contemplation we know by "unknowing."  Or, better, we know beyond all knowing or "unknowing" (1-2).

This kind of "obscure knowledge" (which is really an awareness more than any kind of certainty) is still available to me, and I continue to cultivate it as I can.  Unfortunately, I am increasingly uncomfortable speaking about it openly in the LDS church, which seems afraid of it (and reacts to it officially with anger, condemnation, or lack of understanding).  The only rhetoric of belief welcome at fast and testimony meetings is a kind of absolute certainty which I have outgrown (inasmuch as it is founded on experiences I have not had as reported by people I can no longer find any compelling reason to trust).

(2) Elsewhere, Merton captures how the kind of obscure knowledge he embraces presupposes and demands skepticism and openness to reform:

Let no one hope to find in contemplation an escape from conflict, from anguish or from doubt.  On the contrary, the deep, inexpressible certitude of the contemplative experience awakens a tragic anguish and opens many questions in the depths of the heart like wounds that cannot stop bleeding.  For every gain in certitude there is a corresponding growth of superficial "doubt."  This doubt is by no means opposed to genuine faith, but it mercilessly examines and questions the spurious "faith" of everyday life, the human faith which is nothing but the passive acceptance of conventional opinion.  This false "faith" which is what we often live by and which we even come to confuse with our "religion" is subjected to inexorable questioning.  This torment is a kind of trial by fire in which we are compelled, by the very light of invisible truth which has reached us in the dark ray of contemplation, to examine, to doubt and finally to reject all the prejudices and conventions that we have hitherto accepted as if they were dogmas...What a holocaust takes place in this steady burning to ashes of old worn-out words, cliches, slogans, rationalizations!  The worst of it is that even apparently holy conceptions are consumed along with all the rest.  It is a terrible breaking and burning of idols, a purification of the sanctuary, so that no graven thing may occupy the place that God has commanded to left empty: the center, the existential altar which simply "is" (12-13). 

This captures exactly how I have felt over the last few years, as my "obscure knowledge" of God has eroded and destroyed my testimony of the restored gospel (as taught by the LDS church).  My desire has consistently been to eradicate my prejudice, to break my passion, and to exist at last as a freer man.  Under pretense of helping me fulfill this desire, the church has taken hold of my passion and prejudice and tried to make them permanent instruments with which to control me in life (and perhaps beyond): they want to establish themselves (and their image of God) on that altar where I am determined (with Merton) to put nothing.

(3) Why nothing?  Again, Merton has a thought-provoking answer:

In the end the contemplative suffers the anguish of realizing that he no longer knows what God is.  He may or may not mercifully realize that, after all, this is a great gain, because "God is not a what," not a "thing."  That is precisely one of the essential characteristics of the contemplative experience.  It sees that there is no "what" that can be called God.  There is "no such thing" as God because God is neither a "what" nor a "thing" but a pure "Who."  He is the "Thou" before whom our inmost "I" springs into awareness.  He is the I Am before whom with our own most personal and inalienable voice we echo "I am" (13).

So "god" is a term we use to mark reality as a whole: it is necessarily larger than any description anyone tries to make of it.  To define something that is by definition indefinite is to lose touch with the reality after which one is reaching.  Instead of leading to knowledge of God (who is infinite), such misguided efforts merely create an idol, a finite imitation that is now almost completely unconnected to the reality it affects to describe.  I think the LDS portrait of divinity, when conceived dogmatically, is such an idol.  It is wrong to say that the Mormon myth of the divine is demonstrably more "true" than the Catholic, or the Jewish, or the Islamic, or the Hindu, or the Buddhist, or the ancient Greek.  Instead of being "truer,"  it is just different, with a unique set of strengths and weaknesses.  Until this is acknowledged, it is impossible to really learn from other faith traditions: what can the man who knows everything (or at least, everything really important) learn?

Since I have more passages to put up and this post is already long, I will end here for the present, saving the rest for a future post or posts.

Unbinding the Lord

Thomas Merton.  Seven Storey Mountain.  New York: Harcourt Brace, 1948.  ISBN 0156010860.

Thomas Merton.  Mystics and Zen Masters.  New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1967.  ISBN 0374520011.

Buddhism was not the only place I looked for insight after my LDS worldview collapsed.  I had several good friends who were Catholic: like the Buddhists, they provided me with a figurative shoulder to cry on, hearing my story and validating it from a neutral perspective.  Talking with these friends confirmed my conviction that there is something good in Christianity, even if Christ is "just" a myth.  I became interested in the possibility of being Christian without believing in a historical Christ.  I was also very interested in learning about Christian attempts to meet other religions affirmatively rather than antagonistically.  Under these circumstances, it is no wonder that I eventually found myself reading Thomas Merton.

I started with Seven Storey Mountain, which tells the story of Merton's conversion from a lackadaisical atheism to a very fervent Catholicism that eventually saw him enrolled as one of the monks at the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemane in Kentucky.  I found his story compelling on several levels.  First of all, it reminded me of my own journey into faith, which as a teenager I deliberately constructed as an escape from the world (where all was chaos) into the kingdom of God (where divine order prevailed).  It was hard for me to fall from the kingdom back into the world (though the chaos was not as much or as bad as I remembered).  Above all, I did not want to bid an eternal farewell to the bliss that comes from being aligned with some kind of "higher" purpose.  Merton gave me hope that maybe I could find that again.  More importantly, he opened a window onto a different kind of religious experience than the one the LDS church teaches, a religious experience in which the nature and character of God remains an eternal, unfathomable mystery.  Whereas my LDS faith taught me to approach God as a concrete thing defined precisely by direct revelation to human authorities, Merton's faith did not.  His God was always outside precise definition: no formula of words or intellectual concepts could hold him.  As an LDS missionary and a scholar of church history, I had often heard this particular aspect of Catholicism derided as proof of weakness ("How is it possible to relate meaningfully to something or someone without definite characteristics like body, parts, passions?").  Now I experienced it as a bastion of strength.  The unknowable God existed for me (in the untold mystery of life) in a way that my knowable God no longer could (since I was pretty sure that neither Joseph Smith nor any Mormon prophet since ever really saw or handled him in an experience that I could relate to or have for myself).

Coming from a later point in Merton's career, Mystics and Zen Masters deepened my respect for the unknowable God.  Because Merton was willing to acknowledge a God without precise limits, he was open to perceptions and experiences of "the divine" (as formulated by Christians) that came from traditions radically different from his.  Instead of trying to convert Zen Buddhists to Christianity (let alone Catholicism), he asked himself, "What can Christians (and Catholics) learn from Zen Buddhists?"  In Mystics and Zen Masters, the response to this question takes the form of a beautiful tapestry of blueprints for experiencing God (or "enlightenment," if you are a Buddhist).  Merton productively engages Catholicism, eastern Orthodoxy, Protestantism, Zen Buddhism, and even existentialism in a dialogue where all parties have valuable information that they can share without forfeiting their status as equal partners.  The common thread that Merton finds uniting all these variations in human religious behavior emerges as a concern for connecting with reality (which one may call God, or enlightenment, or anything one pleases, as far as I am concerned).  He records two experiences of reality that strike me as being particularly beautiful. 

The first is his impression of the feelings motivating the Irish monk to leave his home on pilgrimage in the eighth and ninth centuries CE: "His vocation was to mystery and growth, to liberty and abandonment to God, in self-commitment to the apparent irrationality of the winds and seas, in witness to the wisdom of God the Father and Lord of the elements" (97-98).  The second comes from the world of Zen Buddhism: "A Chinese Zen master, Hui Neng, said: 'If you cherish the notion of purity and cling to it, you turn purity into falsehood...Purity has neither form nor shape, and when you claim an achievement by establishing a form to be known as purity...you are purity-bound [i.e., imprisoned by your limited and illusory concept of purity]'" (221).  Merton follows this story up by observing that "Zen is a full awareness of the dynamism and spontaneity of life" (222).  Both Irish pilgrim and Zen master experience reality as something dynamic and fluid, an erratic, evolving entity that is irreducible to definite form.  Rather than demand order, both ride the wave of chaos with faith that order will appear: spontaneous order, divine order, the order of God.  This is a kind of faith that I can live with because it matches the chaos (and serendipity) of real life as I experience it.  For better or for worse, my world can never again come together around a personal God who is completely knowable (but never chooses to reveal himself directly to me, preferring to speak through corporate handlers).

Merton's final message is a word of warning to organized religion.  Speaking primarily to Catholics, he points to the disasters of the Crusades, to the destruction of the Jesuits' early work in China, and discovers a moral lesson: the church cannot afford to join secular society in suppressing the need of individual human beings for authentic connections with reality.  If it is to exert a positive influence on social trends (rather than slap its label on whatever shenanigans happen to be going on), it must build individual integrity rather than institutional complacency.  Speaking to Buddhists, Merton takes a similar tack, enlisting Thich Nhat Hanh as an ally.  The following quote, while long, is one of the best passages in the book:

"Traditional Buddhism, formal, rigid, doctrinaire, is sterile, fit for a museum, irrelevant to the modern world, not because it is out of touch with current realities, but because it is out of touch with human experience itself [original emphasis]...To set up party, race, nation, or even official religion as absolutes is to erect barriers of illusion that stand between man and himself and prevent him from facing his own reality in its naked existential factuality.  In this case, says Nhat Hanh, the various world views, whether religious or political, may concur in the error of providing man with a refuge, and with stereotyped formal answers which substitute for genuine thought, insight, experience, and love.  One must break through these illusory forms and come directly to grips with suffering in ourselves and in others.  The aim of Buddhism is then the creation of an entirely new consciousness which is free to deal with life barehanded and without pretenses.  Piercing the illusions in ourselves which divide us from others, it must enable man to attain unity and solidarity with his brother through openness and compassion" (286-287).  

Here, in one paragraph Merton (with help from Nhat Hanh) brings together all the elements that went into my disaffection with Mormonism as practiced by the LDS.  The hardest part of coming out of my Mormon shell was recognizing that the LDS church subverted my moral integrity by convincing me to outsource it to them: instead of looking for God in the unknown as I experienced it, I was told to seek it in pronouncements from absolute authorities with power and knowledge that I could never really control for myself.  Like a tree with a wedge inside it, I grew up twisted and warped, with a hole in the center of my ill-developed faith that did not become apparent until "the brethren" could no longer supply me with absolute truth.  Now I find myself struggling to construct a worldview oriented towards the unknown instead of the known, toward God the mystery rather than God the celestial grandpa.  Sometimes it is a happy struggle.  Sometimes it is sad.  Always it is my own, and God (however I see him) is there with me, thanks in some measure to people like Thomas Merton: ordinary believers who experience God without trying to define or control him for others.