Searching for God #153

 In the last post the word munificence suggested the blessing that can and will accrue to those who move in the direction of ‘seeing, perceiving, conceptualizing and adopting the perspective that all persons of the world are to be regarded, and interacted with, from a discipline of respect, dignity and human rights. That proposition might seem like a paradox, or even a giant stretch of what has been perceived and practiced reality. How, possibly, could such a perspective, when shared universally, bring about a ‘blessing and gift’ to the vast majority of us whose lives are redolent with privilege? 

 We, universally, have seemed to consider the poor, including urban racial minorities refugees, migrants, asylum-seekers and IDPs as a “blight” and/or a “problem without a solution,” or perhaps even undeserving of anything more than those tent cities that proliferate in many of the world’s worst locations or ghettos in our cities. 

 It is not a stretch to suggest that for centuries we have been frenetically, obsessively, ‘squirrelishly’ engaged in whatever presented itself as our ‘job’ or our ‘responsibility’ or the ‘mess’ we simply had to clean up. As children we learned quickly that ‘doing’ eclipsed reading or thinking or especially ‘dreaming.’ As adolescents, most of us were responding (unconsciously likely) to the surge in hormones, dating, part-tine jobs and gearing up for the next stage, university or college, the workforce, the military, or even a ‘gap year.’ Activity, doing, demonstrating our ‘skills’ and perhaps even our ‘talent’ if we were fortunate enough to have ‘discover’ that unique feature of our life comprised the menu of our days, weeks, months and even years. 

Calendars became filled with family activities, and in executing those ‘appointments’ we built a resume, part of it as a student, part of it as an employee, part of it as an athletic and for some, a possible stint as a volunteer. We were (and continue to be) part of a family, a neighbourhood, a school, a team, a workplace, a service group and perhaps even a church. We built relationships and learned some of the nuances of that adventure. We also read books, saw films, met people and watched documentaries from other lands. Some of us were privileged to travel  to ‘foreign lands.’ We may have participated in fund raising for some ‘cause’ like a food bank or an international agency like the Red Cross. 

In public schools, we sat beside those whose private, family lives were clearly operating in various forms of scarcity. Those from the middle and affluent segments often looked down on their attire, or their lunch options, (if they even had any). Of course, occasionally someone would share a lunch, and occasionally too, if necessary, perhaps a night on a couch, if the student were known to have been evicted from his home. Individuals, as usual, reached out, most often almost surreptitiously, so as not to be singled out as some kind of ‘hero’ (ironically, in adolescent speak), and also, in sensitivity, not to embarrass the recipient. Increasingly, we were encouraged to engage in some form of public service, as integral to the development of our school record in order to impress admissions committees in colleges and universities. Also increasingly, those same academic institutions offered opportunities to ‘study abroad’ for a semester, thereby enhancing the global perspective of once-again privileged students. 

In offices and workplaces, however, there still was heard the somber drum-beat of ‘we have to look after our own, and let the rest of the world look after itself.’ Isolationism, NIMBY (not in my backyard) over potential constructions or openings of various forms of industrial, commercial and especially socially conscious sites like warming centres for the homeless, or easily and readily morphs into some degree of nationalism. The current forms of that political concept have taken on a decidedly malicious and frightened and frightening turn. 

Protecting, or even better, closing the borders to any and all foreigners whose numbers have eclipsed those only a decade or so ago, has become a rallying cry for right-wing political parties. And submerged, or injected into that cry for nationalism, there is also too often a religious component of white Christian nationalism/supremacy. The migration of a substantial Muslim population from various locations into what have been caucasian, Christian, racially uniform (read pure!) enclaves. Most of these migrants, refugees, asylum-seekers and IDP’s are coming from North Africa, South America and some from central Africa. Reducing this interface to a religious/faith conflict only exacerbates both its complexity and its depth. Religious attitudes, beliefs, convictions, and the righteousness of each of those aspects, in all people whose religious life has significance for them and their children, are all more deeply held and defended than almost any other identifying feature of their lives. Public rhetoric, and the laws and norms that both underline and reinforce a veneer of religious freedom, the right to practice one’s religion free of any state persecution or prosecution, abound, almost as a pseudo-universal consensus. At the same time, however, religions, all religions, are engaged in various deliberate, highly designed efforts to ‘grow’ their faith. 

Some specific faiths will denounce all forms of prosletyzing, in an effort to filter those who might be merely testing a new faith, preferring those whose study and experience demonstrates a deep and profound interest in joining (think Judaism). Studies illustrate that both Christians and Muslims are more active in recruiting new converts and this basic fact, while not a silver bullet requiring disarming, nevertheless offers a glimpse into some of the most virulent tensions in some of the most crowded and desperate camps of migrants, refugees, asylum-seekers and IDP’s. Some consider both Christianity and Islam as ‘all-or-nothing faiths, in that each believes its faith is the only correct one. 

Perhaps one of the concepts that pertains to both Christianity and Islam is the evolution, from various roots, into different kinds of fundamentalism. Following a brief litany of specific moments in the late twentieth century in which religion reared its head dramatically, for example in ‘young Egyptians..donning Islamic dress casting aside the freedoms of modernity and engaging in a takeover of university campuses in order to reclaim them for religion, and also in Israel (where) an aggressively religious form of Zionism (which originally had been a defiantly secular movement) had risen to political prominence” (Karen Armstrong, The Case for God, p. 292), Ms Armstrong then opens up more expansively: 

This militant religiosity, which would emerger in every region where a secular, Western-style government had separated religion from politics, is determined to drag God and/or religion from the sidelines to which they have been relegated in modern culture and back to center field....This new form of piety is popularly known as fundamentalism....All are initially defensive movements rooted in a profound fear of annihilation, which causes them to develop a paranoid vision of the ‘enemy.’...Protestant fundamentalism was chiefly exercised by theological questions that had been challenged by the new scientific discoveries.....In Judaism, the state of Israel has inspired every one of the Jewish fundamentalists, because this has been the form in which secularism has chiefly impacted on Jewish religious life, Some are passionately for the state of Israel and regard its army political institutions, and every inch of the  Holy Land as sacred; other are either vehemently opposed to the notion of a secular state or adopt a deliberately neutral stance toward it. In the Muslim world, the political state of the ummah, the ‘community,’ has become an Achilles’ heel. The Qur’an insists that the prime duty of a Muslim is to build a just and decent society, so when Muslims see the ummah exploited or ever terrorized by foreign powers and governed by corrupt rulers,  they can feel as religiously offended as a Protestant who has seen the Bible spat upon.....Because fundamentalists feel under threat, they are defensive and unwilling to entertain any rival point of view, yet another expression of the intolerance that has always been part of modernity....Fundamentalists are swift to condemn people whom they regard as the enemies of God: most Christian fundamentalists see Jews and Muslims as destined for hellfire, and some regard Buddhism, Hinduism and Daoism as inspired by the devil. Jewish and Muslim fundamentalists take a similar stance, each seeing their own tradition as the only true faith....Christian fundamentalists quote extensively from the book of Revelation and are inspired by its violent End-time vision but rarely refer to the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus tells his followers to love their enemies, to turn the other cheek, and not to judge others. Jewish fundamentalists rely heavily on the Deuteronomist sections of the Bible and seem to pass over the rabbis’ injunction that exegesis should lead to charity. Muslim fundamentalists ignore the pluralism of the Qur’an, and extremists quote its more aggressive verses to justify violence, pointedly disregarding its far more numerous calls for peace, tolerance, and forgiveness. Fundamentalists are convinced that they are fighting for God, but in fact this type of religiosity represents a retreat from God....But it is essential for critics of religion to see fundamentalism in historical context. Far from being typical of faith, it is an aberration. The fundamentalist fear of annihilation is not a paranoid delusion. We have seen some of the most formative creators of the modern ethos have indeed called for the abolition of religion-and they continue to do so. (pps. 292-3-4-5) 

We are all at risk of being swamped, even drowned, by the tsunami of bellicose rhetoric, based on minimal, as well as literal, reductionisms that demonstrate, not only the profound fears and anxieties of fundamentalists. In a perilous sense, we are at risk of falling into the ‘trap’ into which Armstrong says those fundamentalists have fallen, their own inescapable fears, at an existential level, and the intemperate compensatory reflexive response of expressing, endorsing, and even engaging in words, perceptions, actions and seductions that betray our best sense of ourselves. 

And that best sense of ourselves is not based on steroidal reactivity, throbbing headlines, armed threats and ridiculous enjoinders of ‘annihilation’ for example, of Iran....or any other perceived opponent. 

And that includes our inclusion of ‘different’ or ‘foreign’ or ‘poor’ or ‘starving,’ or ‘stateless’ men, women and children. 

The very depth of their resilience, their persistent, diligent and ‘survival-based’ strength, irrespective of the specific reasons for their impoverishment, displacement and dismissal, all of that is inescapable, irrefutable, undeniable proof of the ‘eternal flame’ they continue to shine for the rest of the world.  

Whether or not we are able, willing or imaginative enough to see that, while there may well be faith/religious motivation and compliance that helps to keep them enduring, their demonstration that the words of William Faulkner, in his Nobel acceptance speech, December 10, 1950 continue to resonate in many quarters: 

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat. He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the only universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed---love and honour and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice......I believe that man will not merely endure; he will prevail; He is immortal not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honour and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail. 

These words and the spirit they enflame, seem to echo a line from Tolstoy, in The Kingdom of God is Within You: 

Whatever the opinions and degree of education of a man of today, whatever his shade of liberalism, whatever his school of philosophy, or of science, or of economics, however ignorant or superstitious he may be, every man of the present day knows that all men have an equal right to life and the good things in life, and that one set of people are no better nor worse than another, and that all are equal. Everyone knows this, beyond doubt; everyone feels it in his whole being. (p.116) 

It is at the level of a common, profound, inescapable and ephemeral spirit that each of us is ‘one’ with all others. The differences that we pontificate, in and through religious dogma, and political ideology, and legal theory and practice, and economic determinism are merely emblematic of the many masks we have chosen under which we purport to ‘identify, fight, compete and deceptively to ‘win’. 

All the while we are fully engaged in arming ourselves, we are also profoundly and inescapably conscious of our common humanity, which, if and when fully recognized and embraced, can and will free us from our play-acting.