I accidentally stumbled across one of my favorite people and Catholic Priests, Richard Rohr, on an older This I Believe on NPR. I love how he says that his scientist friends are willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and come up with things like the “principles of uncertainty” while religious people of so called faith want certainty. “How strange that the very word “faith” has come to mean its exact opposite.” So true!!! Most of the religious people I know are religious because they want certainty (not mystery) while many scientists are perfectly comfortable with mystery. (I just finished reading The Grand Inquisitor and am in the middle of Father Zosima’s memoirs in Brothers Karamzov. I feel like I’m bumping into these themes everywhere!)

Anyway - here is Rohr’s whole talk. (You can listen to it here.)

I believe in mystery and multiplicity. To religious believers this may sound almost pagan. But I don’t think so. My very belief and experience of a loving and endlessly creative God has led me to trust in both.

I’ve had the good fortune of teaching and preaching across much of the globe, while also struggling to make sense of my experience in my own tiny world. This life journey has led me to love mystery and not feel the need to change it or make it un-mysterious. This has put me at odds with many other believers I know who seem to need explanations for everything.

Religious belief has made me comfortable with ambiguity. “Hints and guesses,” as T.S. Eliot would say. I often spend the season of Lent in a hermitage, where I live alone for the whole 40 days. The more I am alone with the Alone, the more I surrender to ambivalence, to happy contradictions and seeming inconsistencies in myself and almost everything else, including God. Paradoxes don’t scare me anymore.

When I was young, I couldn’t tolerate such ambiguity. My education had trained me to have a lust for answers and explanations. Now, at age 63, it’s all quite different. I no longer believe this is a quid pro quo universe — I’ve counseled too many prisoners, worked with too many failed marriages, faced my own dilemmas too many times and been loved gratuitously after too many failures.

Whenever I think there’s a perfect pattern, further reading and study reveal an exception. Whenever I want to say “only” or “always,” someone or something proves me wrong. My scientist friends have come up with things like “principles of uncertainty” and dark holes. They’re willing to live inside imagined hypotheses and theories. But many religious folks insist on answers that are always true. We love closure, resolution and clarity, while thinking that we are people of “faith”! How strange that the very word “faith” has come to mean its exact opposite.

People who have really met the Holy are always humble. It’s the people who don’t know who usually pretend that they do. People who’ve had any genuine spiritual experience always know they don’t know. They are utterly humbled before mystery. They are in awe before the abyss of it all, in wonder at eternity and depth, and a Love, which is incomprehensible to the mind. It is a litmus test for authentic God experience, and is — quite sadly — absent from much of our religious conversation today. My belief and comfort is in the depths of Mystery, which should be the very task of religion.

I posted on Heaven and Hell several days ago and noticed today that Beliefnet is running a series on Hell. One of the articles is by a Unitarian Universalist (Rev. Forrest Church) entitled There is No Hell.

He begins: “The difference between Universalists and Unitarians (the old joke has it) is that Universalists believe that God is too good to damn them, whereas Unitarians believe that they’re too good to be damned. I am a Universalist.”

Interesting little article.

Since it seems many of us are on the topic of “what do we do” and “how do we go about doing it”, I wanted to direct your attention to a wonderful article written by Doug Muder on his blog Free and Responsible Search back in August. In it, he compares Walter Bruegemann’s explanation of a prophet to Cindy Sheehan.

I believe that the proper idiom for the prophet in cutting through the royal numbness and denial is the language of grief, the rhetoric that engages the community in mourning for a funeral they do not want to admit. … I have been increasingly impressed with the capacity of the prophet to use the language of lament and the symbolic creation of a death scene as a way of bringing to reality what the king must see and will not. –

Walter Brueggemann, The Prophetic Imagination (1978)
[Walter Brueggemann is Professor Emeritus at Columbia Theological Seminary]

Doug Muder concludes:

…Cindy Sheehan doesn’t bring an answer, she brings a question: Why did my son die?

She has not come to us as a saint, an angel, or some other holy and transcendent being. The prophets in their own era were nobodies. They were without honor. They were poor, dirty, uneducated. Undoubtedly their families were ashamed of them.

The prophets used cheap theatrics. It’s easy to imagine the frustration of King Zedekiah when Jeremiah started wandering through Jerusalem with a yoke around his neck: That’s not a plan! That’s not a program! It’s just a stunt!

Camping out in Crawford is a stunt too. That’s what prophets do. They are not planners, technocrats, diplomats, or philosophers. They channel the grief of a numbed society. And they open the door to dreams of renewal.

To read entire post click here.

Just read an interesting article in the New York Times science section thanks to a post in this zen life: A Shocker: Partisan Thought is Unconscious.

The article states: “Researchers have long known that political decisions are strongly influenced by unconscious emotional reactions, a fact routinely exploited by campaign consultants and advertisers. But the new research suggests that for partisans, political thinking is often predominantly emotional.”

Using an MRI, researchers measured activity in the brain after providing condemning information on either President Bush or Senator John Kerry to research participants that were strongly biased toward one or the other. What they discovered was that the “cold reasoning” areas of the cortex were quiet as participants responded to attacks on their respective proponents. In fact, there are actually “flares of activity in the brain’s pleasure centers as information was being rejected.”

This shows why it is so difficult for those who hold very strong opinions have such a difficult time seeing beyond their own biases. As Kimberly writes in this zen life, they’ve rendered themselves physically incapable of seeing the other side rationally.

The only way to override these baises, according to Dr. Drew Westen (the lead author of the study), is to engage in ruthless self-reflection.

Newsweek joined Beliefnet.com to create a poll on religion and spirituality in America. The initial results are interesting and are the basis for the cover story, Spirituality in America, in the Aug. 29-Sept.5 Newsweek. Apparently, we are a much more religiously tolerant society than we appear to be.

According to the poll results, the mega churches are not bringing more people to church as their members would have you believe. A Time magazine poll in 1966 (for the “Is God Dead” issue) reported that 44% of Americans said they attended church weekly. Church attendance hasn’t changed even though God has regained His popularity. According to a recent poll, 45% of Americans say they attend church weekly, only 1% more than in 1966, when we were wondering if God might be dead. Researchers who have done actual headcounts in churches claim 20% is a more accurate estimate. The fastest growing church, according to surveys, is “none”. People are leaving traditional churches in order to pursue the transcendent. In order to counter the loss, many Christian churches are reaching out to meet this desire for the transcendent by offering meditation, yoga, and spiritual practices from various religious traditions, as well as focusing upon transcendent practices within Christianity.

A few more interesting results:
1 out of 3 Americans meditate.
8 in 10 Americans—including 68 percent of evangelicals—believe that more than one faith can be a path to salvation.
1 out of 5 respondents said they had switched religions as an adult so are intimately connected with ecumenism
75% of Americans feel spirituality is not about politics
Many Americans are actively involved in two or more religions. It is common, for instance, for people to practice Buddhism while continuing to be active in a Christian church (see article on the African-American Baptist Buddhist).

According to Martin Marty, this new individualized spirituality is taking the place of a communal spirituality. And while it is likely to create a clash, it will not resemble anything like the clash of two communal spiritualities. Battle is not central to individualized spirituality like it is in communal spiritualities.