The lovely Sage has tagged me for a meme, so here goes:  5 things you may not know about me:

1. Any project that requires a trip to a hardware store makes me very happy.  I daydream about owning a home someday and building an add-on studio where I have places for writing, drawing, painting, collaging and recording music (!).  I would love a woodshop.  Perusing and learning about other people’s tools energizes me.
2. My first and most sustained career plan was to become a concert pianist.  I think I gave the plan up when high school started.
3. My closest brush with death (to my knowledge) was a cross-country ski trip I took with my sister and dad on my 13th birthday.  The trail we thought we were following never looped back to the parking lot, and by the time we realized this, it was getting dark, and in our t-shirts and sopping gloves and pants, we were freezing.  Literally.  We retraced our entire treck, the whole while begging my dad to let us lay down and sleep.  Luckily he didn’t (thanks Dad!).
4. At age 15 I spent a summer in Kenya, building a small dormatory for a little school on the edge of Lake Nakuru.  I went with an organization called Teen Missions, which I do not recommend.  Kenya, however, I do.
5. I am drawn to weather pages like moths to light.  Especially the ones in real live newspapers.  Like with colors showing all the different regions of temperature.  I like anything that gives me a big-scheme picture, come to think of it.  Maps.  Theories that cover huges swaths of history or geography.  Anything that makes the lived terrain feel less random or confusing.  Which is funny, given Sage’s #5. :)

Okay, I’d love to know what unknown things Gail and Heather and Fran and Gypsy Girl might divulge.  And anyone else, too!  If you’re not those four and you feel like it, leave a comment here that says something about you that many don’t know.

A few posts back I said I wanted to spend this advent blogging about things that fill me up with wonder. Those of you who have read here for a while may remember my review of David James Duncan’s book, God Laughs and Plays. I quoted him on wonder:

Wonder is my second favorite condition to be in, after love–and I sometimes wonder whether there’s even a difference: maybe love is just wonder aimed at a beloved. Wonder is like grace, in that it’s not a condition we grasp: wonder grasps us. We do have the freedom to elude wonder’s grasp. We have the freedom to do all sorts of stupid things. By deploying cynicism, rationalism, fear, arrogance, judgmentalism, we can evade wonder nonstop, all our lives. I’m not too fond of that gnarly word, sin, but the deliberate evasion of wonder does bring it to mind. It may not be biblically sinful to evade wonder. But it is artistically and spiritually sinful. (pg 8)

What I didn’t quote was what Duncan said about wonder’s underside:

“Wonder is anything taken for granted–the old neighborhood, old job, old buddy, old spouse–suddenly filling with mystery. Wonder is anything closed, suddenly opening: anything at all opening–which includes Pandora’s box, and brings me to the dark side of wonder. Grateful as I am for this condition, wonder, like everything on earth, has a dark side. Heartbreak, grief, and suffering rip openings in us through which the dark kind of wonder pours. I have so far found it impossible to be spontaneously grateful for these openings. (pg 9)

I’m filled with dark wonder today. I’m going to write about it, both as part of my spiritual practice this advent season, and as a means of wishing and praying and hoping the brighter side of wonder toward the situation here in question.

My husband, N, has been getting email updates for the last year from an organization in Honduras called Association for a More Just Society (AJS). This is a faith-based nonprofit dedicated to promoting justice for the poorest and most vulnerable people in Honduras. They focus primarily on labor rights, land rights, crime victims’ rights, and creating access to legal and psychological services. From what we can gather from their website and email updates, this is no flimsy deal. These people literally put their lives on the line for those they serve. Their boots are covered in mud from all the trenches they spend their days tromping: organizing, investigating and reporting injustices, and offering legal and psychological services.

Last night N told me about their work, and I was filled with the bright kind of wonder. Their inspiration is Jesus, and they’ve taken into their bones his revolutionary way. Theirs is not an aspirin-Jesus, or a prop-up-the-status quo Jesus, but one who seems to have awakened them to the notion that they can do something about the sources of our world’s darkest things. They can do something. The words ring in my ears and move toward my heart. They can do something. It’s true for me, like them. It’s true for you. We can do something.

I feel like life is an amazing narcotic for most of us, or like layer upon layer of blubber. We live most of the time with a thick and sometimes sanity-keeping layer of blubber between us and deep awareness of the suffering in our world (we all suffer, this is true. But surely there are degrees, as in “I can’t leave my front door without getting shot” suffering, compared with “my child will not eat her vegetables” varieties.). We live with blubber between us and the awareness that these lives we’ve been given, these thoughts and feelings and the money and tools we’ve gathered along the way? They can address and alleviate the things that should instill dark wonder: AIDS, poverty, corrupt leaders and governments (!), global warming. I feel heavy even listing these things, heavy trying to think of more. The blubber is trying hard to close the opening I’m making in it here–the air hole that’s my connection with the kind of Life I want to live.

I want to be awake. I WANT TO BE AWAKE!! I scream it through all the insulation: I want to LIVE! I want to be awake to the things my hands and voice and written words can do for all the parts of me that are ill–the parts that are poor and fired for no good reason. The parts whose parents have died from AIDS. The parts that are being abused, and have only slum dwellings as options in which to live. I want to be awake. I’m one who likes to see the many layers of any issue, and so am well aware that one person can’t and should not do every good thing possible. I’m not advocating a kind crazed giving that takes nothing of self or family into account. I’m just saying I want to be awake. And in my wakefulness, I want to do what my little heart tells me is mine for the doing.

Last night N told me about a progression of updates he got from AJS this week. The first was a request for prayer. One of AJS’s lawyers, a man who represented clients abused by two of Honduras’s major corporations–one of the corporations a security service, no less–had recieved a death threat for the work he’s doing. Yesterday N got a note saying the lawyer had actually been killed. Just outside the courthouse, masked gunmen took him down. He leaves behind a wife and young son.

A hole is ripped through all my insulation. Dark wonder still pours through. This man was awake. Maybe he still is, in some other form. But not in the way his wife and son need most. Not in the way his clients need, and his colleagues, who, awake though they are, surely must be quaking in their boots right now. And grieving. Yes, grieving. Fear and grief are some of the best blubber producers, I think (though sometimes they’re the opposite…), and may be reason, in the case of AJS, for enormous setbacks.

I don’t know what to say about all this. I don’t know what to say about the powers in our world that pulse against everything I understand Life to be. I don’t understand them. Are numbness to their reality and self-centered living the best responses we have to their presence?

I’m planning on donating money to AJS, and invite you to do the same. But even more than that, I extend an invitation, as one who needs the invitation too, to not wait until tomorrow or next week or ten years from now to find a way through all the blubber. Maybe read Duncan one more time, thinking both sides of wonder as you do, rather than only just the bright:

Wonder is my second favorite condition to be in, after love–and I sometimes wonder whether there’s even a difference: maybe love is just wonder aimed at a beloved. Wonder is like grace, in that it’s not a condition we grasp: wonder grasps us. We do have the freedom to elude wonder’s grasp. We have the freedom to do all sorts of stupid things. By deploying cynicism, rationalism, fear, arrogance, judgmentalism, we can evade wonder nonstop, all our lives. I’m not too fond of that gnarly word, sin, but the deliberate evasion of wonder does bring it to mind. It may not be biblically sinful to evade wonder. But it is artistically and spiritually sinful. (pg 8)

UPDATE:  Here is a note that N recieved from AJS today:

The enemies of justice continue to oppose the poor and those who would help them in Honduras . This morning Carlos Hernández, president of the board of AJS (and also director of Genesis) received a text message in English on his cell phone sent from the internet that read, in part: ” You are the next.” We do not know whether this is just a sick joke or whether it was sent by someone who is truly a threat. But circumstances do not allow us to take this lightly. Carlos at this very moment is denouncing the threat before the national Human Rights Commission and other organizations.

More than ever we at AJS need your prayers right now. We also need your help:

1. Send an email to Honduran officials urging them to address Dionisio’s murder and to guarantee the safety of the rest of AJS’s staff and board.

2. Donate to one or both of two funds we have set up in memory of Dionisio–one to fund the education of his 7-year-old son Mauricio and one to help AJS continue Dionisio’s work of promoting labor rights.

To do either or both, please visit www.ajshonduras.org/dionisio

Thank you, and may God bless you,

Abram Huyser Honig
AJS Communications Coordinator

(This is continuing the conversation started here and here.)

When I was a child I don’t think I ever heard about clairvoyance or other kinds of outside-of-what’s-normal-for-most-of-us psychic phenomenon. Probably the first time I heard of such things was from television, where the pseudo-documentary shows always had deep, male voices narrating, like the one that does the trailers for movies: very dramatic, intended to spook you out, or get you thinking this is the most amazing, unbelievable thing you’re ever gonna hear. I always loved seeing those shows, and loved believing with only about a tenth of myself that the stuff they were showing was real. Most of what I saw seemed staged, or at the very least over-inflated, and the reports explainable by other means than actual psychic phenomenon. I wished I could talk with someone real, who really had such experiences and wasn’t always voiced over with that dramatic morning-voice guy. Would they be able to just talk…normally with me?

Spring of 2004 I started working on the novel that I’m working on now. I knew I wanted to tell a story about human motivation, and some of the common things I think all of us carry around inside. The seed for my story was a boy who has a gift for seeing in picture form, as well as actual scenes, what’s really going on inside of people. Like in his mind’s eye. He is the catalyst for most of the story’s conflict, because what he sees so often contradicts what people actually say their motivations are.

Anyway, I was in the beginning stages of dreaming up this character and forming a story around him, and decided to have him write me letters, telling me about himself. I didn’t use the word “clairvoyant” when thinking or writing about him because I had no category for his gift. It was just a gift that I gave him, and one for which I had to work out the “rules” (like how exactly does it work? when does he see these visions? can he see inside of everyone?).

So there I was, spending lots of time getting into the mind of this kid.

One day as I was working, I began to get an uneasy feeling. It wasn’t indigestion, and it wasn’t that I was realizing I had done something wrong, or forgotten to do something I was supposed to do. It was a different flavor of uneasiness than any of these things.

I kept working, trying to ignore it, trying to swat it away, and even got up from my desk and cleaned the whole house, trying to ward the thing off. But it persisted. I couldn’t get away from the sense that it had to do with someone else, someone that wasn’t me, and that whoever it was was feeling the very feelings I was, only way, way worse. The thought seemed strange, and wasn’t one I tried to produce or puzzle out–it was just a kind of clearness that was with me, like when you’re having a dream and just know something to be true.

Finally by early evening I felt so bad that I simply had to stop and listen. If this was about someone I knew, then I figured I might as well try and figure out who; if they were feeling these feelings worse than I was, surely they were suffering.

So I sat down on the floor and tried to listen.

Instantly a dream that I had had the night before and forgotten about came to my mind. In it I had watched a friend of mine at his place of work leave with two others to deal with a fire that had started in another part of the building. My friend had told those of us in the first location to stay put, that he and these other two would deal with this and be back soon. And everyone but me did just that.

I did not want to stay put, though, and so followed after them to see what was actually going on. Would they be able to put out the fire?

Then I woke up.

So as I sat and listened, this dream popped into my mind, and another knowing feeling came, where I knew it was this friend who was suffering so badly. I also knew his suffering didn’t concern me, and wasn’t something I was in a position to do much about. So I sent out all the strength and help I could wish and pray for, and tried to continue about my day.

That night I still felt awful. I went to bed, but had only fitful, frustrated sleep. I kept getting this image in my mind of a letter, though I couldn’t ever see what it said. All through the night I saw that thing, over and over, often in dreams, sometimes in half-sleep. It was charged, somehow, and deeply connected, though I did not know how, to whatever my friend was wrestling through.

I still felt bad the next morning, but within a couple of hours of rising, something dramatically changed. I had been feeling like something was making it difficult to breathe, a pressure on my chest and a kind of metaphorical smoke, but almost instantly that feeling was replaced by the freshest, most peaceful breeze. I can’t say literally, since I was in my house with all the windows closed, but more…internally. I actually got an image in my mind of a beautiful blue sky with bright white clouds and clean air. And again, that knowing feeling, this time that my friend was fine. I knew that whatever thing he had been struggling with was through.

The experience puzzled and perplexed me. It had come unbidden, and left within the day. And it brought to mind similar experiences I had had at other times, too, but without accompanying dreams. Occasionally I would get an image in my mind of a certain location–a parking lot, a street, a home–and the distinct feeling that something bad was about to happen there. I’d usually pray, feeling helpless to know what was actually about to happen or how to prevent it. The images were fleeting, but super charged–a whole different quality from the kind of images any of us gets in a day as memories are sparked, or daydreams wander through. I never thought to call this clairvoyance.
Given I was just in the thick of developing a character with a similar sort of gift, I started feeling strange inside. Wobbly. Shaky. Like life was getting too weird all of a sudden, and I didn’t know what to do with it. Like I was taking on this gift that my character had…which I had thought I had only made up.

I wrote to my friend.

“You may think I’m crazy,” I said, in effect, “but…did anything difficult happen to you on such and such a day? Here’s what I was feeling then, and the things I dreamt about before and after.”

He wrote back with only confirmations. He couldn’t betray any confidences, but said that the day I had felt so bad, he had become nearly debiliated by the afternoon from a conflict that was in the works. He and two others were involved in it, and he wrote, “I felt as if the air was being squeezed from me, the forces of Death looming large.”

The next morning, though, he got a letter from one of the people involved that cleared the whole thing up. The person had had a change of heart, and a truly awful situation got completely turned around. By means of this letter.

That week I had two other dreams/feelings of the same quality, but without any clarity as to who they were about, such that by the time I visited my therapist the next week (on a normal weekly visit), I was all worked up.

“What do I do with these things?” I asked frantically. I was feeling like I was back in time, playing some of the guessing games with God that had so characterized my young adult days of Christian evangelicalism. My beliefs at that time had made every day feel like a test of my faithfulness and attentiveness, where I was supposed to do and say specific things in specific instances, but never given clear instructions as to what these things were. It was up to me to figure them out, and I never felt like I knew if I got them right. It was crazy-making, I tell you. No way to Live.

“I don’t think you have to do anything,” my therapist said. “If these things come to you, just acknowledge them, and move on.” She knew me and wisdom well enough for this to resonate right away as what I needed to hear.

As time went on, my experiences like this lessened. I was fascinated by them, though, and could not help wondering about them. Why did they come when they did? Does everyone have these experiences? My dabblings in physics and Eastern thought made me search for some kind of theory on this stuff, some way to make sense of it. The explanations I would have made earlier in my life–having to do with God, and God’s urgings and conveyings of information–didn’t seem to describe what I was experiencing, or jive with my emerging concept of God. Jean Bolen’s The Tao of Psychology and Belleruth Naparstek’s Your Sixth Sense, were helpful reads at this time–the latter a very practical, down-to-earth discussion of the ways some people have actually nurtured this kind of gift. Naparstek thinks everyone is capable of having it, though some are much more naturally wired for it. I considered trying to nurture it more in myself, but never felt right about doing so. The possibility felt charged with danger for me.

That winter I stumbled into a comment left on someone’s blog that referenced this kind of thing–a kind of clairvoyant “knowing”. I emailed the commenter, asking him more about his comment. We proceeded to have a fascinating conversation, in which he described his own clairvoyant gift, as well as the gifts of some of his family members. His father and his daughter communicate regularly, he said, telepathically. His daughter can move physical objects with her mind. For years he was involved in the darker side of these things (I’m not sure what he meant by this exactly), but as an adult became a Christian and chose to use them only when he feels led by God to do so, and within his Christian framework for understanding things. He was a warm and generous fellow, from what I could tell, and it felt wonderful, on one level, to finally talk with someone so normally about these things.

But then my own “knowings” started to return. And unlike that first experience, they weren’t accompanied by clarity as to who they were about. They’d come most often as I was trying to go to sleep at night, like when my conscious mind relaxed. And again they began raising my anxiety about what to do about them, and also that crazy sort of feeling you get when it feels as though things you take for granted–gravity, for instance, or physical distance between people–are presenting themselves more as illusion than fact. I wonder how many people we consider insane in our country are actually in touch with everything this way–in touch in a way that makes it impossible for them to function normally. We need our illusions, I think.

One night as I lay there trying to sleep, I felt as though my brain tapped into a firehose of knowings. I wasn’t trying to know anything, but there I was, getting some of the most awful images. All of them were intensely charged. I felt like they were from people in the near vicinity–maybe the apartment complex next door. I got up and shook my head and shut my mind’s door. And decided this had to stop.

Reflection and another conversation with my therapist convinced me I didn’t want to pursue this at all at this point (i.e. try to develop this gift more, or continue conversing with the guy online). I was pregnant at the time, and, for the life that was growing in me, needed to be as grounded and centered as possible. I didn’t want to pry into anyone’s business, and didn’t want to play guessing games about uninvited information. And, tangentially, of course, didn’t want to feel or become insane. So I ended my conversation with that fellow online and kept my inner door shut. And have ever since.

Occasionally I’ll get a dream that feels more charged than usual, but generally I’ve been “knowing”-free for a couple of years now. And it’s felt great.

My take-home from all of this, including the research that I’ve done, has been a deep conviction that the psychic stuff people report isn’t all hogwash (including telekinesis, ESP, precognition, etc.). Though some of it surely is, it isn’t all made up. I’m convinced we are all interconnected in some mysterious way, and that time and space are both shorthands for something that’s bigger than both, that contains them both. I’m convinced that love makes time and space between people disappear sometimes–even into the past and the future–and opens up channels of communication that otherwise exist, but don’t get tapped into. And I’m convinced that at least in this season of my life, I don’t need to try to know, firsthand, how true all of these things are.

How does all of this jive with any of your thoughts or experiences? I’d really love to hear.

I haven’t written about synchronicity yet, but this first paragraph is a good example of it. Today I got this email telling me registration is open now for winter Continuing Studies courses at Stanford. Among the courses highlighted was one on quantum physics, and more specifically quantum entanglement. All the physics I know is based on books that were only somewhat new back in 2001 and 2002, which means the research in them was even older than that. So I’m feeling totally out of the know, now, since apparently, to the uttter shock of all, I’m sure, while I haven’t been looking, new discoveries have continued getting made. Consequently, I’ve just been swimming around online in things like quantum entanglement and teleportation and Bell’s Theorum. I guess none of these are new to the last decade, but I somehow managed never to have heard of them before now, and certainly not the most recent experimentations with them. Because of them, my ideas for a next post have all been turned on their heads.

Here’s what I was going to write about this time: I was going to talk about clairvoyance, and my own experiences with it, and try to theorize how tiny particles could travel distances, instantaneously, between people. I kept getting stalled up on the whys involved in this theorized process, though, like why, for instance, would those of us who seem to recieve these theorized particles recieve them only from certain people, and not everyone, since theoretically everyone is emitting particles all the time. What would determine the “stations” that our “radios” are tuned into, so to speak? (I will say that I have on a couple of occasions felt my dial break, and signals from everyone flood into my brain, and that these have been among the most alarming and disturbing experiences of my life.)

But! Then I read about quantum teleportation, and my mind is now spinning a whole different way. I have to begin what I want to say now by telling you what I’ve just been learning of quantum teleportation. (here is where any physicists reading this blog might need to roll their eyes or make very squeemish, contorted faces and wish I would just stick to fiction writing. And here is where I guess I’d have to say that…well…maybe I am. I think fiction is more deeply true than anything else sometimes.).

So. To explain what I’ve gleaned on quantum teleportation so far, I have to start with quantum entanglement. Apparently, very tiny systems–quantum particles, we might call them–can sometimes get entangled. What entangled means is that something happens to them, some special kind of thing, such that when they get separated, the two systems aren’t distinct entities anymore. They’ve taken on one another’s characteristics so much that now they act almost entirely as one. They’re spatially separate, but not in reality, if that makes sense. I’ve known a few couples like this. And some people with their dogs.

The guy who coined the term “entanglement” says it this way:

When two systems, of which we know the states by their respective representatives, enter into temporary physical interaction due to known forces between them, and when after a time of mutual influence the systems separate again, then they can no longer be described in the same way as before, viz. by endowing each of them with a representative of its own. I would not call that one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics, the one that enforces its entire departure from classical lines of thought. By the interaction the two representatives [the quantum states] have become entangled. (Shrodinger, 1935)

Quantum teleportation, then, refers to the nearly simultaneous “communication” that happens between entangled systems. When something happens to one of them, it’s mirrored precisely in the other. Like the other is a copy of the first. And it doesn’t matter how far apart these systems are! Miles, inches: same dif. It’s as if space between them does not exist.

I know I’m still an embryo when it comes to understanding these things, but for the sake of having fun, and maybe actually stumbling into something true, I’m going to let my imagination fly.

What if clairvoyance is nothing more than entangled particles doing their thing? We’ve all heard stories of people knowing things about their loved ones–deaths, injuries, etc.–before they’d have any known reason to know such things. What if there simply are parts of these pairs (each pair being the person “knowing” and the person actually dying or being injured) that are quantumly entangled, so that nothing actually has to cross time or space for the two to experience whatever is being experienced? In effect, at least partially, or on a certain kind of level, the two people aren’t two people. They’re one.

These kinds of experiences seem like they’re reported most often by people who love each other. Maybe love is a quantum entangler. I wonder if love will ever become a variable in physicists’ experiments.

But here is where my mind goes next: What if everyone is quantumly entangled with everything? What if we’re all made from the same stuff, all rooted in some common seed, such that when Buddhists and sages from many traditions, and now the priests of science, no less, speak of oneness, they don’t mean only metaphorically, and they don’t mean only by cause-and-effect ripples that spread infinitely out from every act? What if they mean literally?

Einstein called the very notion of entanglement “spooky action at a distance” and didn’t want to believe it. And the individualism of the Enlightenment and of much in Christendom today wouldn’t want to believe it either. But what if it’s true? What if we are all one, and it’s only the distances we keep believing exist that actually keep us from reading each other’s minds? What if clairvoyance really is what its French roots imply: clear seeing, and this clarity of sight is awakeness to our own limbs, our own bodies, our own minds and extensions that just so happen not to be anywhere nearby?

This is disturbing stuff, at least to me, and I aim to talk more, next time, about how I’ve dealt with my own clairvoyant experiences, and the choice I made a couple years ago to turn my “radio” off.

In the meantime, I would love any book suggestions–related to physics or otherwise, religious or otherwise–that deal with this idea of oneness. I’d like to explore this some more.

Living in a culture where face-to-face community sometimes feels as accessible and ready-made as homemade bread, my feelers are up high for where to find it. Having spent the majority of my life in the church, I entered the out-of-church world wondering (wandering), genuinely, how people out here find it. Who brings you casseroles when you have a baby, for example? Who fills in as surrogate family when your own lives miles away? And how do you have meaningful conversation, about politics or spirituality or ethics or the mysteries of quantum physics, for that matter, if the most informal conversation you have in a week happens in line at the grocery store?

The main thing I’ve learned in recent years is there are as many answers to such questions as there are people.

For the last two months I have been going with Elijah to a neighborhood park each morning. We spend about an hour there, eating sand, testing the doneness of bark chips, drying the slides with our butts. What has happened, though, in spite of or because of these things, is community has formed around a little crew of us who gather there each day. There’s the Swedish nanny whose family is mostly scattered across Europe, and who misses them dearly. There’s the Chinese caregiver who is teaching me, laughingly, her language, while I teach her mine. There’s the granddad who is full-time watcher of grandbaby, Ben, and who loves ham radios and biking and Nova. Yvette, who loves to travel, and whose Liam has the best manners of any 20-month-old I know. John, whose Sarah eats only humus and guacamole and who serenades us constantly (Sarah–not John). We talk together, almost daily, in the relaxed, come-and-go way that can only happen in a place that’s built for play.

We like each other. We look forward to being there. In a world of so much anonymity, it feels great to be greeted warmly by name, to have a place, to be missed when illness keeps us away.

Here’s four of the little guys who are forming friendships of their own, at our feet. Elijah is on the far right, next to Sarah, Liam, and Ben. I think he might be receiving some kind of revelation about Sarah’s elbow.

This is one of the ways that I’ve found connection and conversation in a life season and occupation that aren’t particularly people full. But how about you? How have you done it? Any stories of unlikely groups or connections?

I’m still making my way slowly through Sam Harris’s End of Faith. I just finished a pair of chapters that details the brutish histories of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. The second of the pair is on Islam, and by the end of it I found myself more afraid of Muslims than I care to admit–more afraid of their God, their customs, their worldview. And seeing “them” as something unified, too–something all, or at least mostly, alike.

I think Harris is scared, too. His whole book is about how religion, and Islam to the greatest degree, will either have to die, or be the death of us all, given the kinds of mass destruction that modern warfare-combined-with-religion is capable of. But here’s the most robust irony: he is actually giving himself more, and increasingly legitimate, reason to be afraid. By means of his book, he is creating more division, more distrust, more fear of the “other”, and therefore more layers of violence, than would otherwise exist had the book not been written.

This evening I attended a lecture given by Reza Aslan, a scholar of world religions, and expert on Islam. He’s written a book called “No god but God: The Origins, Evolution, and Future of Islam,” and lectured tonight on what he’s calling the Islamic Reformation. According to him, Islam is in an extreme state of flux right now, with authority shifting increasingly away from its clerics/scholars and into the hands of everyone (think Martin Luther, sola fide, sola scriptura). Groups are popping up across the globe of people reading Koranic texts differently, newly, outside of mosques, in the equivalent of home churches. And like in any decentralized institution, groups are forming along the whole spectrum of liberal to conservative, feminist to misogynist, violent to peaceful.

Aslan’s excitement to be alive in this season of change is palpable, and too his eagerness to present a more accurate picture of today’s Islam than any unified story can tell.

I know little of Islam (and plan to read Aslan’s book). But I know lots about Christianity, and can’t imagine, now that Aslan has popped the fear-bubble Harris created for me, that Islam is any more immune to the forces of peace and of violence than Christianity has been. While I plan on finishing Harris’s book (and to explore here some of the good points I think he makes), I’m eager to get a broader picture of Islam in my brain, in my bones, so that I can more fully participate in this project I’m giving my life to, this work of undoing fear.

Thank you everyone for such a great discussion!  I hope those whose perspectives differ from the ones offered so far feel free to join in.

Here is some of what I’ve heard us saying:

• Devoutness comes in many forms–both religious and not, evangelical and not.  And we’re all devoted to something…many things.
• This begins a list of ways that people are alike:
  • Early formation probably has a lot to do with our epistemology–the stories we internalize about how to know what’s true.  Some epistemologies have more wiggle room than others, and therefore lend themselves more naturally to a variety of ways of finding truth.
  • Regardless of our epistemology, respect and tolerance are challenges for all of us, inside and outside of religion.
  • Seeking security/self-protection is a natural instinct, and making sense of the world/self/God is part of how we protect ourselves.  Establishing a shared reality around this sense furthers our protection; camaraderie makes us feel (and actually be more) secure, and feel more like the sense that we’ve made is right.
  • When the sense we’ve made gets challenged, we instinctually move to protect ourselves more, by protecting what’s being challenged.  This is normal.  There’s nothing wrong with this.
  • Unlike many other types of animals, we can more easily (I say more easily because I think this doesn’t come easily for everyone) self-reflect and recognize we’re feeling challenged, feeling self-protective, and make decisions about how we want to respond to such feelings.  We can consider the ramifications of our responses for our relationships.
• Religious devotion (and possibly any devotion at all) that includes vulnerability and insecurity may be and open up the possibility for non-violence in ways that other types of devotion cannot.
• Religious devotion (and any kind of devotion at all) that requires assent to a set of assertions–assent, specifically, that claims security and invulnerability–may be and open up the possibility for violence in ways the alternatives do not.

In light of all of this, I’ve been thinking more about that list that began the last post.  I’m wondering whether all of it needs to be changed.  I have this image in my mind of what it means to differ from another person about some fundamental thing–whether God exists, for example, or what God is actually like, or what in our heart of hearts, we’re like.  It’s the image of a chasm, opened wide between you two.  I suppose the wideness of the chasm depends on how different your views actually are from each another’s.  But still, I think the chasm’s there.

And I think it’s possible to live one’s entire life feeling, and therefore believing, that that chasm defines, entirely, relationship with that other person (or group.  I think we often see people as members of groups, rather than as individuals–Jews/non-Jews, Christians/non-Christians, theists/athiests, gays/straights, men/women).  Sometimes that chasm is so deep, and so wide, that it’s nearly impossible to ever, even with the best of luck, see anything beyond it.

But this is the other thing I’m becoming convinced of:  these chasms aren’t all there is.  In any dyad, and a dyad can be two people, or two groups, or one person and a group, whatever–in any dyad I think there are multiple chasms, as well as multiple stretches where the ground between the two parts comes completely together.  And I think that even in the case of chasms, there are often also bridges, where abysses can actually be crossed, albeit sometimes only skillfully, and sometimes at great peril…or great cost.

But the terrain is varied, is what I’m saying.  Between all of us.  Try living with someone–even someone you’re madly in love with–for any length of time, and any dream of only solid, crackless ground will dissipate into all the little and big things that drive you nuts about them (God bless their soul), or, and this may be more pertinent to this conversation, all the ways you realize you don’t see things as similarly as you thought.  You’ll realize that for the sake of love, and of peace, and of sane cohabitation, both of you must work to find ways around those chasms.  Or through them.  Both of you must believe that they aren’t the only thing there is.

I think this is true of relationships across any religious or devotional divide.

So.  In the case of that list from last time, maybe people from different sides of religious divides can actually talk honestly about religion–even openly about thinking the other person is wrong–and remain genuinely respectful of one another if, and this is an enormous if, I think–they can also include in their active awareness the knowledge that the terrain between them is varied, and includes long stretches of connection.  Long stretches of ground that’s in common, and passed easily between.  Sometimes it’s probably even necessary–not optional, but necessary–for the two to explore together where those places of connection are.  Not doing so can mean the chasm (or chasms) defining the whole relationship, and consequently coloring completely both party’s feelings about one another.  Feelings for people across chasms, at least as far as I can see, aren’t generally pretty.

This "if" is a big one, though, and one that’s hard to find in many circles.

So the question then begs asking:  is it really worth finding places of connection and common ground when a) the chasms between two people or two groups are immense, and/or b) one half of the dyad in question isn’t interested in searching for them?

I think in many cases it’s not.

I think there are cases where all this kind of searching does is leave one or both parties constantly scraped and bruised, constantly hopeless and frustrated, constantly yearning for some kind of home, some kind of place to relax and be at ease.  I think there are times in certain lives when peace is what’s needed most–needed to heal, needed to discover oneself actually normal, rather than whatever alternate labels keep getting lobbed across those voids.

Maybe there are times for unpeace, too, though.  Times for unrest.  Times when getting bruised constantly is a kind of gift a person gives to those who come after.  Examples paint history, where people of color and homosexuals and women and youth and elderly–where people of all kinds have participated in the very groups that would exclude them and call them evil or less than or stupid.  Those who have stayed active in such groups, doggedly proclaiming, even if by their silent presence alone, that chasms aren’t all there is:  I could weep in gratitude.  Thank you.  What a silly, tinny phrase to give to such world-changing work.

I’m thinking that that work isn’t everyone’s though, and that each of us must decide which relationships, or potential relationships, we need to walk away from, and which ones we must navigate the chasms of.  Because chasms, it seems to me, mark them all.

What do you think, though?  Am I wrong in some of this?  And in which cases are the BIGGIES, the canyons that can make the Grand one look small, worth working around for the sake of relationship?

I’m really interested in this whole discussion (from the last post).  It sounds like we all agree that meaningful relationship across the religious divide is possible, but only if:

a) we don’t talk about religion, or
b) we’re open to the other person being right (about their religious beliefs) or both of us being wrong or
c) we think we’re right, but we nevertheless don’t see other people as projects, in need of conversion.

Here’s the problem I see:  none of these seem like options for the deeply devout.  Am I wrong in this?  When I was an evangelical Christian, I took my faith very seriously.  My feelings, on one level, so confirmed for me the rightness of my spiritual path, and the teachings of my holy book seemed to so clearly say mine was the only True way, that the thought of another religion being more true than mine was nearly inconceivable.  Furthermore, my understanding of hell, and my conviction that many would end up there if they didn’t turn to Jesus:  these made it nearly impossible for me NOT to see anyone not so turned as a mission field.  I didn’t use in-your-face conversion tactics, but I was very aware of trying to be a good witness for the Truth, of watching for chances to speak of Jesus, of feeling a warm gladness if conversation turned to religious things.  My heart was good; I genuinely wanted non-Christians to know the Truth, and to spend eternity with God.  But the effect of this good-heartedness was to make people into projects.  My relationships were colored by this conversion agenda, and when things stayed "light" (i.e. I just had fun with non-Christians and didn’t think or talk about anything goddish) I felt by the end of the time a little disappointed, and a little bit guilty.

Is is possible to not be like this, and also be deeply devout?  I’d love to hear what it would look like if it is.

Taking steps away from religion, I think it’s entirely possible to have conversion agendas about things other than God.  We all have them–desires for friends to try the beer we like, or join the neighborhood watch, or be convinced of global warming, or that we need to do something about Darfur, Congo, AIDS, cancer research, etc.  The difference, though–and this is part of Harris’s point I think–is that all of these other agendas can be discussed in terms of observable evidence, while the finer points of religious belief cannot.  At the end of the day, a "leap of faith" must be made when it comes to trusting that God has revealed God’s ultimate plan for the world in the Bible, or Allah dictated the Quran, or a man named Noah existed, and all of us–black, brown, white, yellow, red–are his descendants.

So the agendas on the plates of the religiously devout have a different sort of charge to them I think, and a really challenging combination of having everything at stake (i.e. eternal location), and no luxury of observable evidence, beyond our subjective feelings of our religion being true, of God being one way versus another, etc., to use for the convincing.  How can we as humans NOT get a little dogmatic, even if just in our hearts, when we’re up against this sort of challenge, and needing to psyche ourselves up for the work we feel God’s given us to do?

I’m still back to wondering whether it’s possible for the religously devout to come to relationship with people of other faiths, or no faith, and have the kind of intimacy with them, or just merely the respect, that seems built on seeing each other as equals.  I’m thinking that it’s not.

I’m reading Sam Harris’s The End of Faith these days–a book I’d like to review here in coming weeks, once I’m through.  It’s very quotable.  He’s more caustic than I’d want to be were I to broach his subject, but I think he has some very important things to say.  He thinks there’s no way to avoid escalating violence in our world except for religion to die.  He thinks religion divides people irreconcilably, and makes rational discourse impossible, since faith, as he sees it defined by the majority in every religious tradition, is belief that things about God and our world are true without needing evidence to prove it.  Without evidence available to discuss the truth or untruth of a claim, and indeed, in a climate where criticizing or critiquing one another’s faith is taboo, how can we navigate life together?  How can we not stay divided if each of us believes deeply something fundamentally different about God (as one example) which isn’t open to rational, evidentiary discourse?

I’m not sure if you got all that, but what I’m wondering a lot these days is whether he’s right.  One of the greatest tragedies I know, and by know I mean experientially, is the way religious beliefs divide people who otherwise have so much in common.  There are so many things that all of us, across the board of religions and cultures, share in being human–fears that we have, hopes, longings, worries about jobs or kids or finances, losses, illnesses, joys, experiences of redemption.  We have a wealth of things in common.  And yet it seems to me that religion becomes a kind of gatekeeper for any of this to get realized.  If I’m not one of your flock, the gateway of meaningful relationship gets swung shut.  And vice versa.  The gate becomes what determines whether or not we can be comfortable together, whether or not we can explore the geographies inside of us to discover common ground.  Indeed, it can become a source of bitterness and condescension and rivalry and distrust.  It causes violence.

Do you think this is true?  Is intimacy and respect, of the kind for which I imagine all of us ultimately long, possible between people when one or both are religiously devoted, but not to the same religion?  Maybe the taboos against critiquing faith are really about trying to keep that gatekeeper sleepy, trying to find ways to slip past an otherwise wall to find ourselves together, at ease, in love.

Before his current season of studenthood, N (my husband) was a community organizer. Part of his job was to meet with people one on one in the neighborhoods where he worked to determine what people’s self interests were. Organizing around what people already want is way, way easier (I didn’t say easy; I said easier) than running yourself into the ground trying to rally support for things people couldn’t care less about.

During those years of organizing, N and I had many conversations about self interest, and the ways it seemed to knock heads with the altruism pushed in the religious environments in which we moved. In those environments, self interest was often equated with selfishness, and was therefore something to try to tame and eventually, ideally, get rid of altogether. The goal was to have God’s interests at the helm (or, I suppose, have these genuinely become your own). How to define God’s interests was and is and ever shall be a whole nother truckload of worms.

The more we talked, though, and the more we lived and observed ourselves and those around us, the more we came to see self interest as not only the air we humans breathe, but actually something, when gotten conscious about, that’s healthy. Something we actually trust more than altruism to keep “good deeds” truly good. If I can be honest that I’m giving money to a beggar because I want to feel less guilty for the wealth I enjoy, and not because I actually care about this person in front of me, I have more options for figuring out whether I’m comfortable with not caring, and if I don’t care, why that might be, and if I do, whether tossing a few coins is really how I want to express that. Self interested good deeds with an altruistic veneer on top are a wonderful recipe for dehumanizing people, I think, for using them harmingly, and not actually helping in ways that are needed.

So I guess my first point is that I think all of us are self interested, and all (most? all sounds so extreme) of our good deeds are at their roots attempts at meeting our own iterests (for feeling important, establishing ourselves as nice or generous, not being lonely, staying out of trouble, not pissing someone off), and not only do I think that isn’t bad, but I think it’s good, and that getting conscious of what we’re actually wanting is the best way to avoid hurting people, and even the best way to actually help people. If I know what my self interests are and try to understand what yours are, we can negotiate a mutual sort of playing field where we both benefit. Mutuality seems like the safest place to be–no matter who in a pair has the most age or money or positional power–the best space for humanizing and protecting and truly serving everyone involved, not the least of which (and I mean that) is you or me.

Trying to empty ourselves of self interest seems to me to be the best way to nourish blind spots, and the best way to push our truest needs and motivations underground where they have no choice but to express themselves subconsciously, which is to say in ways we aren’t choosing, which is to say in ways we can’t evaluate with our conscious minds and values. I’m guessing some of the darkest things in our world, some of the ugliest abuses, could have been avoided were people free to acknowledge their self interests (sexual, emotional, vocational, intellectual) and find conscious and healthy ways of meeting them in mutual sorts of exchange.

The second point I want to make is that I think it’s okay when we can’t meet others’ self interests. I’m thinking here about people we really care about, specifically. Because those are the ones we can get caught in cycles with, cycles of being so driven by our need to make them like us, or be happy with us, or prop up their egos so they don’t pout or get mad, that we lose sight of our other needs, which include honoring and listening to our own selves. It is a painful lesson to learn that people in our lives cannot be everything we want them to be (can’t meet all the needs we thought they could or should); it is a freeing lesson, though not always painless, to learn that when we can’t be what others want us to be, that doesn’t mean we’ve done anything wrong. (Can you tell this is a pep talk aimed at me?)

But what do you all think of self interest? Does true altruism exist? What are ways that religion/spirituality can free us toward humanizing involvement with the needs around us, and not something that only masquerades as such?