Sunday, March 10, 2024

Escape from Freedom

While a freshman in college, I read Erich Fromm’s famous 1941 book Escape from Freedom. Fromm was a German Jew who fled Nazi Germany. He explored the reasons why people would willingly submit to authoritarian rule. He theorized that humans either embrace freedom or seek to escape from it. 

Embracing freedom is healthy and courageous. Yet many people seek to escape from freedom by means of psychological escape mechanisms. Fromm identified three main mechanisms: automaton conformity, authoritarianism and destructiveness.  

Automaton conformity is conforming to a group’s preferred type of personality, losing one's self in the process. It transfers the burden of choice from self to society. 

Authoritarianism is giving control of oneself to a political movement or leader. By surrendering one's freedom to someone else, the freedom of choice is almost entirely removed.   

Destructiveness is the attempt to eliminate others in order to escape freedom. If that means genocide, overthrowing a government, overturning an election or burning down the country, so be it. Fromm said that "the destruction of the world is the last, almost desperate attempt to save myself from being crushed by it." 

Later in college I read Sinclair Lewis’ 1936 novel It Can’t Happen Here. It describes how a Hitleresque politician rose to power in the United States to become the first American dictator. These days I find myself recalling the insights I received from reading these two books. Now it seems like it could happen here after all. 

I watch American politics today, and I see life imitating art. History is repeating itself, or at least it is echoing. As Mark Twain is anecdotally reported to have said, “History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes.”  If that is true, then the 2020’s are rhyming with the 1930’s.  

On February 20, 1939, a Nazi rally took place at Madison Square Garden, attended by more than 20,000 patriotic Americans. It took place two days before George Washington's birthday and was promoted as a “Pro-American rally.” A huge portrait of Washington hung behind the dais with equally large American flags draped on either side.  

The National Anthem was sung. The American flag was saluted with the Nazi salute. The rally was opened by James Wheeler-Hill, national secretary of the German American Bund, with the words: "If George Washington were alive today, he would be friends with Adolf Hitler." Fritz Julius Kuhn, a German Nazi activist, who served as the elected leader of the Bund, was the keynote speaker.   

After the rally the Bund came under investigation, and its financial records were seized. It was discovered that $14,000 (about $273,000 in today’s currency) from the contributions raised during the rally was spent by Kuhn on his mistress and various personal expenses. Kuhn was convicted of embezzlement and sent to prison in December 1939. 

Does any of this sound familiar? It does not take an historian to see parallels to today. I hear echoes of fascism every day in election year rhetoric. I hear rhymes of the 1930’s in the news every morning. Why is this happening? Fromm understood. People are seeking to escape freedom.  

American society is changing rapidly, and that is threatening to people. Change threatens traditional religion, the traditional family, and traditional values. So people take refuge in an imagined, unchanging, and idealistic past, seeking to bring back “the way things used to be.” People see this goal as an exercise of their freedom, but it is actually escape from freedom.  

True freedom is freedom for all. Not just for me and people like me, but for those who are very different from me. Religious freedom is not just for my religion but all religions. Not just for those of my sexual orientation, but all orientations.

It means allowing others to express themselves morally in ways that do not conform to my moral values. It is to refuse to use government power to control others’ behavior, as long as it does not impinge on others’ freedom. True freedom is freedom for all or it is not freedom at all.  

The same is true for spiritual freedom. It is tempting to surrender our freedom to religious authority. To believe only what our religious tradition tells us is safe to believe. To not color outside the lines. To consider our scriptures, our creeds, our leaders, our founders, our church, and our understanding of God to be infallible. There is security in believing we have the one true religion. But there is no freedom in such faith. It is only the illusion of freedom. 

Freedom is a paradox. We love it, and we hate it. We imagine ourselves to be free when we are not. The more we examine our choices, the more we see how limited our freedom really is. Our thoughts, opinions and actions are largely (if not completely) determined by unconscious forces beyond our control. When we realize how unfree we really are, then there is an opportunity to be truly free. 

True freedom requires a spiritual resurrection. We die to self and live to God. We view the world through the eyes of God. We see ourselves as God sees us. We see that only God is truly free, and therefore we are free only in God … or as Christians say, “in Christ.” As Jesus said, “When the Son sets you free, you are free indeed.”  

When we are spiritually free, then political freedom does not scare us, neither our own freedom nor others’ freedom. We can be free and allow others to be free. To be free is to live authentically as one’s True Self, rather than living in bondage to the psychologically and socially conditioned personality that we mistake for our self. Then we can stop this mindless rush toward political Armageddon and take our rightful place as citizens of the Kingdom of God.  

Monday, February 26, 2024

Rewriting the Psalms

This Lent I am beginning a spiritual practice of rereading and rewriting the Psalms. This will take much longer than the forty days of Lent. There are 150 psalms, and I am meditating on one psalm per day. It will take considerably longer than 150 days because some days I only do a portion of a psalm. There are some really long psalms in the Bible!  

The idea for this project came from a book that my wife is reading, entitled Psalms for Praying: An Invitation to Wholeness by Nan Merrill. I have not read the book myself. That is intentional. I do not want to be influenced by her versions of the psalms. Anyway, the idea of rewriting psalms is not unique to her. Decades ago I used to lead retreatants in praying the psalms and writing their own psalms. 

My Lenten project is the same sort of thing. I am rewriting the psalms from a nondual mystical perspective. This is an untypical approach. Generally speaking the psalms are neither mystical or nondual. The psalms reflect the Hebrew spirituality of the time in which they were written and compiledThey are earthy and emotional. They are honest and disturbing. They can be violent at times. This is because they are products of the very human faith of the psalmists. 

The psalms are also among many people’s favorite books of the Bible. They are among my favorites books. I took a course on the Psalms while in seminary, taught by respected Old Testament scholar Marvin Tate, who was later my faculty advisor for my doctoral studies. He was the author of two volumes in the Word Biblical Commentary: Psalms 51-100 and Job. He also helped with Hebrew translation for the New International Version of the Bible.  

He taught me how to interpret the Hebrew text of the psalms. Although I have forgotten most of the Hebrew I knew back when I was a seminary student, I have not forgotten the basic lessons he taught me. I am putting those to good use as I rewrite the psalms from a nondual perspective.  

Some might question my perspective in rewriting the psalms, thinking I am distorting the text. Yet every translation of the Bible is a rewriting of the text. Everyone who reads the psalms reinterprets them from their own perspective. We all rewrite the psalms in our minds as we read them, even if we are not aware of doing so. I am consciously reinterpreting them from a mystical perspective.  

The Christian church read these Jewish psalms in the light of the life and teachings of Jesus, thereby reinterpreting them and shedding new light on the ancient texts. I interpret them in the light of the nondual teachings of Christ. Jesus invited us to be one with God as he is one with God. That is what he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane.  That is how I pray the psalms.  

This is an approach that not only transcends the differences between the Jewish and Christian faiths, it transcends and includes all faiths. We live in a religiously pluralistic world. No religion is isolated from other faiths any longer. The internet has made that impossible. While traditional churches are dying, there is a blossoming of creative spirituality beyond the bounds of branded and monetized religion.  

In reaction to this spiritual ecumenism, some people are retreating into fundamentalism to escape perceived threats to their religion and their way of life. But many others are opening to the Perennial Wisdom at the heart of all spiritual traditions. It is from this latter perspective that I write. It is from this perspective that I rewrite the psalms.   

Tuesday, February 20, 2024

A Ribbon of Light

Every day I turn on my laptop and am greeted with the desktop wallpaper. It depicts an evening scene on a beach. It is an example of what is called long exposure photography. The shutter was left open for several seconds while someone moved a light source to form a pattern. This photo looks like a red and white ribbon of light hanging in the air. 

I used to take pictures like this back when I was a photographer for my high school newspaper and yearbook. Usually the subject was just a friend writing a word with a flashlight. Often in such photos there is a blur of the person visible in the background, almost like a ghost. But if you do it correctly, the person is completely invisible. The pattern of light appears to be suspended in thin air.  

I have been pondering this image recently. One might even say I have been meditating upon it. Several biblical verses have come to mind. One is Jesus’ teaching that that we are the light of the world. The other is his brother James’ words, “You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes.” The Teacher of Ecclesiastes made a similar observation, “Life is fleeting, like a passing mist.”  

The photo communicates to me the fleeting nature of human existence. The spiritual teaching is known as impermanence. Our lives are brief appearances in the fabric of spacetime. A shooting star. One could even say we are nothing at all. All we leave behind is a brief streak of light that is gone before a person blinks. 

I recall a scene in the old movie The Time Machine, based on H. G. Wells’ famous novel. The main character is operating his time machine in his workshop, watching the history of the world whiz by. At first he sees people come and go quickly. As he speeds it up, people become a blur and then invisible. He can see only buildings arise and fall. Then he watches as civilizations rise and fallGeological eras pass.  

Speeding through time gives us an eternal viewpoint on our lives and the human race as a whole. It puts things in perspective. It is easy to get bent out of shape by what happens during our lives. Elections seem so important at the moment. We paint political choices in apocalyptic terms. If the other side wins it will be the end of our nation as we know it! Possibly the end of our world! 

Such eschatological language fails to remember that this has always been the case. Jesus spoke in apocalyptic terms about the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple. The Book of Revelation, also known as the Apocalypse of John, saw the end of the world coming with the fall of the Roman Empire. Yet Rome fell, and the world continues. 

The universe will survive with either Biden or Trump in the White House for four more years. The world will survive with or without the United States. The earth will survive fine without the human race. It prospered without our species for millions of years, and it will undoubtedly do better without us. Humans are nothing more than a blip in the history of the planet. 

Our individual lives are even more ephemeral. Just a brief ribbon of light shining in the darkness. Our faces and names are forgotten quickly. It will be as if we never were. We are a momentary eddy in the river of time, a dust devil that takes form for a moment and dissipates. We are dust and to dust we shall return. That is what the preacher said on Ash Wednesday.  

We are nothing. Yet we are. We know intuitively that we are more than these passing forms. Jesus knew this. He said, “Before Abraham was, I am.” We are that which does not arise and fall in time. When we see we are nothing, we also see we are everything. The balance of these two is the fullness of truth.  

Nisargadatta, the sage of Mumbai, said, “Wisdom says I am nothing. Love says I am everything. Between the two my life flows.” Jesus said, “You are the light of the world.... Let your light so shine that others might see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.” We are a ribbon of light shining for a moment in the twilight. Yet by that light people may glimpse the Kingdom of Heaven.