For better or for worse, outsiders note religious people for being close-minded. How did this become the case?
Religion has a goal in mind: to have a Divine Being or Pantheon become embraced in all details of someone’s life. Sometimes another goal is to ensure national fervor, especially in older religions—because these antique religions come from an era in which each nation had its own gods.
Look at that goal again: “embraced in all details of someone’s life”. ALL details…meaning that this all-inclusive goal has many obstacles. G-d is supposed to be in everything, and when things are appreciated for their own sake and not for G-d’s, this could be an obstruction.
St. Augustine advises that if one should love something, take the love away from the object and instead give it to its maker. This is a difficult task, and while I can say that I feel that way about love quite often (despite the fact that I am Jewish), there an alternate route taken in lieu of Augustine’s…not a helpful one.
Augustine advises that the love for something should be transmuted to its maker. Some found this difficult, and then found a dangerous solution: abstain from everything not related to religion.
Enjoyment is an uneasy process in religion, because it could lead to things being appreciated for their own sake—diminishing G-d in part, or even in whole. “Thou shalt not have any other gods before me”, a dictum in the Ten Commandments, has often been interpreted in the sense that nothing should have priority in one’s life over G-d. So everything but G-d can disappear from a religious life—and this is increasingly happening in many religious circles.
But is this what religion wants or needs? Not in the least! The goal I mentioned above is to have G-d suffuse in everything, not have G-d confiscate or condemn everything. Having nothing but G-d and religion, emphasized by insular lives, is capable of being harmful, and this image still hurts the image of religious people today.
Some asceticism is healthy, though. It builds discipline and can be a profoundly human and spiritual experience. But balance is essential to not only the being of humans, but G-d’s being! G-d created light, and then immediately made the distinction from darkness, and this first act in Genesis ensured an ideal that different aspects—even the distinctly profane—can become wholesome in the Divine as well as in the Divine experience.
The Founder of Judaism’s Hasidic movement, the Ba’al Shem Tov (Master of the Good Name), believed that beauty of any sort is glimpsing the Divine. Running away from the beauty in the world would be like running away from G-d Himself. The truly religious people learn to embrace the world and love all things.
Seeing a part of the world will give you a human experience, for humans are limited in thought and in scope. But attempting to see the whole and experience the whole—this can make a human transcend his humanity, as we were wont to do.
3 Comments
Daniel O'Sullivan
I like this, especially the idea of loving God through His creation– what other way could there be for gloriously-fleshed thingies like us– but I think you may be underrating asceticism. Voluntarily giving up a particular worldly pleasure or privilege doesn’t have to mean denying its goodness. It’s possible, I imagine, to choose an ascetic lifestyle in a spirit of disdain for God’s creation, which would be a kind of blasphemy and probably unhealthy– but it’s also possible to offer such a life to God in humility, as a giving back of worldly goods to the One Who gave them, a sacrifice of reciprocal (though infinitely lesser) love. After all, the very idea of a sacrifice is that something *good* is given away. As a Catholic, of course, I’m thinking of some monastic lifestyles that might fall under your disapproval of “insular lives” and “abstain[ing] from everything not related to religion,” though the boundaries are perhaps less clear than that. My admiration for those who, for instance, make the great sacrifice of lifelong celibacy and the even fearfuller sacrifices of various disciplines doesn’t conflict with my reverence for spousal love (a great sacrifice of its own) or my appreciation for pleasures and freedoms from which a Cistercian monk has to abstain. A life devoted to fasting and prayer can be just as much an adventure as one of travel and excitement. In my opinion. But I’d be interested to hear your reaction– and maybe you wouldn’t have disapproved of the kinds of asceticism I’m talking about anyway…
Jared Gimbel
I might very well address this in Episode 2. Clearly, in Christianity and in Buddhism, what you speak of is too fundamental to be ignored.
Certainly, there will be a “purist caste” in any religion no matter what the case, and making room for that is essential. As long as a religion can cater to all personality types (and believe me, all of the ones we know of DO), then it will work.
Thanks for an idea!
Yo Jared
I amW going to give up SubWay for a week, the menu is not kosher anyway