Dancing with the Stars

Last year we had what we thought was a fool proof plan for seeing the annual August meteor shower, the Perseids. Instead of sitting in our suburban backyard, brightened by our neighbor’s houselights and the orange glow of a street light so that only the boldest and brightest of stars can be seen, we drove three hours to the country house of friends.

After a delicious dinner and a couple of games of scrabble, we dressed warmly, took our plastic Adirondack chairs out to the clearing, and stared up at the sky waiting to see the promised shower of meteors. I expected to see a show, a naturally occurring fireworks display that would take my breath away with wonder as the sky filled with the light of shooting stars and their tails going this way and that.

That’s not what happened or what we saw. Granted, there were a few shooting stars that graced us with their beauty. I counted about 4 in the two hours that we sat there. But what we did see was a magnificent sky, filled with stars of different sizes and intensity of light. We saw the river of light called the Milky Way with its 100-400 billion stars and at least 17 billion earth-like planets! We saw the vast, limitless universe extending distances far beyond our comprehension. We saw the silhouette of the tree tops looking inky dark at the edges of our clearing. We became aware of how little we are in this universe, as individuals, as a species and as a planet. It was an awe-filled experience that sort of put us in our place.

The words of Psalm 8 come to mind from the days when people nightly looked up to the heaven and couldn’t help but respond to what was there with awe:

When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place,
what is mankind that you are mindful of them,
human beings that you care for them?

The psalmist and I may understand that question differently. Influenced by the Judaic tradition, the psalmist assumes humans have a special place in a hierarchy, chosen by a G-d on high, with the authority to rule over plants and animals. I ask the question presuming our frailty, tininess, and hubris in the greater scheme of things. For me, the answer is humans are just amazingly fortunate that we get to be a part of this tapestry at all!

Whichever way you see the answer, the experience is humbling and deepens or broadens the view of our place in the universe. It allows us to see a far bigger picture than we would otherwise. Of course, anyone who has taken the time to look at the sky like that will have a similar recognition. But the trouble is, we rarely do it! We are so busy running around with our everyday lives, so busy pursuing or worrying about the picayune things that we make into monumental ones, that we don’t keep it all in perspective. We forget just how tiny and inconsequential we are in the greater scheme of things.

Perhaps like meditation or prayer, going out and looking at the night sky should become a daily practice. Perhaps such a daily practice would be a meditation or prayer. It certainly would nudge us out of our self-centered concerns and remind us of who and where we really are. Maybe it would get us to prevent wars.

I might not have seen the Perseids, but it was a night to remember nonetheless!

Pick and Choose Views

The other day I sat by the Hudson River in the late afternoon. The reflection of the sun made the water appear as molten silver with blue mountains in the background. And yet, I know that’s not what I ‘really’ saw. My mind automatically translated the poetic vision to a deep river of tidal water with the reflection of the sun on it and a haze changing the colour in the background. But it got me thinking about how culture and creature bound our view of the world is. We assume so often that what we see – or our interpretation of what we see – is the way things really are. And we are often so wrong.

Recently a study done on plants showed that they detect and react to the sound vibrations of caterpillars chewing on leaves by creating an insect repellent. If you later play a recording of the caterpillar chewing, the plants will also react accordingly —but not to the recording of ‘pleasant’ sounds like the wind. And so, we again must recalibrate our views of other living beings in this world. Another creature we saw as nothing but a backdrop to our humanity turns out to be a sentient being after all.

This happens so often! We keep setting up criteria that distinguish us from other animals only to find others share the same aspects after all. It used to be that what separated us humans from other living creatures was our ability to use language. And then we found that other creatures, such as dolphins and crows, use language. We thought our ability to use tools separated us as distinct. And then we found that other creatures – including birds – use tools. We thought our ability to mourn and recognize death made us unique. And then we found that elephants, crows, and apes all have mourning rituals for their dead loved ones.
Humans are trained by their cultures to see and not see in certain ways because of our assumptions and our limited views. Here are two examples: The people who live in African rainforests have a spectacular ability to see snakes and animals that are camouflaged by the forest. But if you put them on the veldt, wide open ranges with far vistas, they cannot see a giraffe that is in the distance. Their eyes have been trained to see objects close up, but not far away. A youtube video, “The Invisible Gorilla” asks people to watch carefully a group of young people passing a basketball and count how many times the ball is passed to the people wearing white. People concentrate so carefully on the ball and the count, they completely miss the person in a gorilla suit walking through the crowd beating his chest!

This culturally trained vision has been confirmed by neuroscientists in laboratory experiments as well. In her fascinating book, Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain, science writer Sharon Begley describes the conversations a group of neuroscientists had with the Dalai Lama. One of the neuroscientists, Helen Neville, summarized her findings by saying: “Brain specialization is not a function of anatomy or dictated by the genes. It is a result of experience. Who we are and how we work comes from our perceptions and experiences. It is the outside world that determines the functional properties of the brain’s neurons.” (Begley, p. 108)

Sometimes we can or can’t see because of our innate vision limitations. In the window in our bedroom we have a hanging crystal from an old chandelier. Most of the time it just hangs there like a piece of glass – clear with nothing special emanating from it. But on summer mornings, as we lie in bed, we watch the sun through the crystal create multiple rainbows shimmering and dancing throughout the room. Those colours are always coming into the room. But we only see them through the help of the crystal and even then, some of the colours that are refracted through the crystal cannot be seen by the human eye.

In fact, it turns out that we humans (who knows what other creatures can/cannot see!), only see arpoximately 4% of the whole universe. Scientists acknowledge that “roughly 68% of the universe is dark energy. Dark matter makes up about 27%. The rest – everything on Earth, everything observed with all of our instruments, all normal matter – adds up to less than 5% of the Universe.” (science.nasa.gov/astrophysics) They don’t know what dark energy and dark matter are, they just know that they’re there.

Physicists are boggled by the idea of entangled particles, two atoms which had been connected at one point are then separated even miles apart. Yet, despite the distance, when one changes the direction it spins in, the other one does as well, immediately. There is nothing connecting them anymore that we can see, and yet, they are still connected, still ‘communicating.’ How does it happen? We don’t know yet.

How many other things do we think look like one thing, yet are really quite more complicated and deep than we have surmised? How many things do we not see or recognize because of our cultural biases? Ghosts, auras, vibrations emanating from all kinds of sentient beings we never ‘saw’ that way before may be just some of the manifestations of a world far more complicated, vital, and knowledgeable than our limitations – cultural and physical -- allow us to see.

As Dr. Frankenstein said in Mel Brook’s movie Young Frankenstein, “I do not know what I do not know!” Perhaps like Dr. Frankenstein we too need to recognize our limited knowledge. Perhaps, like the plant that picks up the vibrations from the caterpillar, we need to be willing to enlarge our attunement to include more vibrations. Perhaps that’s what meditation and prayer attempt to do. It wouldn’t hurt!

The Talmud

One of the quips about Judaism is that where there are 5 Jews there are 7 opinions. Nowhere is this clearer than in the phenomenal collection of opinions trying to understand how best to live ethically in this world called the Talmud. Page after page, volume after volume, are discussions and arguments over time and space between rabbis from other eras who use precedents and ‘what if’ scenarios to try to explicate what the Torah, the first five books of the Bible and the heart of Judaism, is asking us to do.

In a way, the relationship of the Torah and the Talmud is very similar to the U.S. Constitution and the American Legal system. For example, our Constitution tells us that people have freedom of speech. But what if someone cries “fire!” in a crowded theater or joke about bombs at an airport? Is that freedom of speech, our Supreme court Justices asked. No! Well, what if a group of Nazis parade in a Jewish area or an anti-abortion group demonstrates in front of an abortion clinic? Is that freedom of speech? Yes. And then there’s the question as to what constitutes a ‘person.’ What if there’s a major corporation donating a lot of money to politicians? Is that to be considered a person? Unfortunately, in today’s Court, the answer is yes. Although, as with the rabbis of the Talmud, the Justices do not all agree on the answers to issues.

Based on a phrase or a commandment from the Torah, each page of the Talmud tries to work out how to apply it to everyday life. For example, in the book Exodus, it says “Do not boil the kid (baby goat) in its mother’s milk.” “What does that mean?” asked the rabbis? Well… they worked out, don’t mix meat foods with dairy foods. “But what if you have a plate that meat gravy had permeated, or was not entirely washed off?” Well then, you must use separate plates and silverware for meat and dairy. “What if … a person eats a piece of cheese, how long before they can have a piece of meat – and does it count differently if they have the meat first?” they asked. Yes, you can eat meat half an hour to an hour after dairy, but you must wait six hours after meat to eat dairy because meat takes longer to digest. (Don’t ask what if it’s hard cheese or a piece of meat between your teeth! The rabbis did, and there are answers.) These are how the laws of kashrut or keeping kosher developed. And there are Talmudic books on how to keep the Sabbath, marriage, holidays, civil law such as who constitutes a witness and what forms of punishment there should be for different crimes.

But my favorite Talmudic discussions are the ones that are ethically thorny. For example, the book of Leviticus is full of a lot of dos and don’ts for the people of Israel once they get settled into their new land. It gets quite wordy and – for me – it’s easy to zone out in a ‘yadda, yadda, yadda’ state. So I would miss a line like Leviticus 25.36 that says: “…If your … so that your brother might live with thee.” But the rabbis didn’t miss anything. Believing that every word and phrase was there as part of G-d’s message, they felt a need to understand what that meant in order to live a good life. And so they asked, “What does it mean that my brother might live with me and who constitutes my brother anyway?” And the ‘what if’ they posed is as follows:

What if two people are out in a desert with only one flask of water that’s enough to keep one of them alive, but not both of them. Who gets the water and why? When you stop trying to find a way out of the situation, you begin to consider seriously additional questions: Would it be better for both of them to die or only one of them? What is the relationship of the two people and does that make a difference? What if one of them is the parent of the other? Does age matter and if so, how? Does position or contributions to society matter – for example, what if one person is a cancer researcher and the other is a drug addict? Does over-all health matter? Or does possession (who brought the water in) matter?
And the questions – and answers -- raised by the scenario no longer apply just to this old and improbable situation, but some very real, very modern examples of limited resources as well. How do we as a society decide who gets an organ transplant when there are a limited number of donors? Do we let the wealthiest or healthiest people on the top of the list? Should it be by potential for doing good for society? Should it be first-come first serve? And what about the international black market for organs? Is that fair?

Water itself is a growing modern, global problem. In a world where there is a dramatically decreasing supply of clean, fresh water, we are already arguing about who gets it and why. Should the farmers in California get the water coming from Colorado or should the suburban citizens of L.A.? Should water continue to be sold as a bottled commodity or should it be available to all people? Is it fair that in our country that is less than 20% of the world’s population should consume 80% of this and other limited resources?

Every religious tradition has a way of asking and answering the hard questions of how best to live life in an ethical and humane way. (Although we don’t always follow the answers we give!) Japanese Zen koan, Catholic catechism, Hindu literature such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Ramayana, the Buddhist Jakata tales, all are ways of posing and grappling with life lessons. They may look to different sources, they may come to vastly different conclusions based on their understanding of the source. But they all are looking and providing guidance – whether it’s followed or not.

FASTING

Right now it's Ramadan, and Muslims are fasting everyday from sunrise to sunset for a month. some Buddhists, Christians, and Hindus often set aside days for fasting. In a few months it will be Yom Kippur, the holiest and most solemn day of the Jewish year. Jews will fast from sundown Friday to nighttime Saturday.

So one of the questions one might ask is –“What’s with the fasting?” Why suspend eating for a whole day or a whole month of days? It’s not the same as dieting. Nor is fasting the same as an eating disorder. So what’s the purpose?

There are a number of reasons people – in almost every religious tradition I know of – practice fasting. Literally, at a gut level it, fasting stops us from our usual running around and makes us pay attention in ways we didn’t before. We become aware of our body in ways that we didn’t before. We become aware of our dependency on food and those who make or prepare it in ways that we didn’t before. We become aware of how often we usually do things willy-nilly – like snack or how often we think we’re invincible. It empties us of our hubris and fills us with awareness of our fragility.

So fasting makes us aware. Rabbi Allan Lew in his book on the Jewish High Holidays, This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation, says that every tradition:

“ speaks of a kind of layered mindfulness, a sensibility that works up and out of the body, to the heart and then to the mind and finally to the soul.” (p. 190)

The Quran says that “fasting is proscribed to you…that you may learn self-restraint.” (Sura 2.183) Self restraint – there’s something to learn! It’s interesting that no human reaches maturity without learning self-restraint. Every religion, every society, every school, every family, binds us in some ways, keeps us in check somehow because to live in society – maybe even to live on our own – we need to learn self-restraint. As the Rolling Stones song lamented, “You can’t always get what you want.” And religious fasting makes you recognize the reality of that human condition.

The fasts of both Ramadan and Yom Kippur remind us that we live in a larger sphere than just our own bodies or our own lives. We are connected to a larger community. Others in the tradition are also going through the pangs of hunger and that unites us. Others in the world – through no choice of their own – are also going through the pangs of hunger and that unites us with them as well.

My friend Eboo Patel, an Ismaili Muslim who does a great deal of interfaith work, wrote a book about growing up as an American muslim. This is what he wrote about Ramadan:

"For a moment, I stopped thinking about my own gnawing stomach and dry throat, and thought for a moment about the people in the world whose hunger will not be lifted at sundown. And what was I doing for them? On a normal day, I do not think such thoughts. On a normal day, missing my daily cup of coffee or piece of chocolate puts me in a bad mood. But Ramadan is not a normal time. This is a month, in my view, not primarily about restraint, but about remembrance."

And one of the things Eboo remembers is what the Quran demands of all Muslims:

“Spend of your wealth, out of love for G-d, for your kin, for orphans, for the needy, for the wayfarer, for those who ask.” (Suara 2.177)

In Judaism the words of the prophet Isaiah are there to question and challenge our reasons for fasting. Resoundingly he claims that the purpose for the fast is:

“To let the oppressed go free;
To break off every yoke.
It is to share your bread with the hungry,
And to take the wretched poor into your home;
When you see the naked, to cloth him,
And not to ignore your own kin.” (Is. 6-7)

As well as connecting us to a larger community, fasting empties us. We are no longer 'full,' or 'full of it,' but now we have room to receive. For the Western religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam, what we hope to receive is the word and the presence of God. By shutting down our satiated self absorbtion, we can listen to the Source, the Other. For the Eastern religions of Hinduism and Buddhism, the fasting allows us to stop focusing on our needs and desires, and allow true insight/knowledge/wisdom to enter us. There is a Buddhist story about a scholar interested in learning from the Zen Master. He begins by telling the Master all of his credentials, books, and knowledge. The Master says we will now have tea. As the Master pours the tea, the scholar keeps talking, until he notices the Master is still pouring after the cup is full. When he asks with shock why he Master is still pouring the tea when the cup is overflowing, the Master replied: You cannot fill a cup that is already full, nor can you teach a person who is already full."

So what’s with the fasting? We become aware of our humanity on a gut level. We practice self restraint. We remember that we are connected to a larger community than our own needs. We are reminded to help others. And we practice being empty so that we can spiritually receive. Not bad lessons to learn!

Let it Shine

When I was a young teen, I had a picture of Mary, mother of Jesus, taped inside a tiny closet in my room and I used to pray to her regularly. Perhaps that’s not such a strange concept for a Catholic – but I was from Jewish-Quaker parents and had no religious education at all! I think what appealed to me is that Mary represented not just a loving mother, but a kind and patient loving mother. The mother I wish I had had, the mother I try to be. But it also had to do with the light that both suffused her inwardly and emanated from her outwardly.

The image of the sacred heart, a heart glowing with the light of a passionate fire, breaking through the boundaries of pain and thorns, is a powerful one that appeals to me greatly. It tells me that no matter how much one might suffer – and, with the death of her child, Mary certainly suffered – divine light and love can be at our very core and radiate throughout and beyond our bodies to share with others. There’s a Buddhist meditation, the Metta Sutra that is very similar to this idea. Even with the recognition that life is suffering, it suggests that we should try to love each creature in the world – all people, plants, animals, and insects – all sentient beings, as if we were their mother and they were our child, our only child. To practice that in meditation is to extend that loving light throughout and beyond our bodies. The effect of feeling this light from within that radiates without has been described quite beautifully by three very different people from very different viewpoints.

Hildegard of Bringen was a most remarkable woman in 12th century Germany. She was the founder and abbotess – head honcho -- of a number of nunneries. She was also a composer of beautiful liturgical music, an expert on and author of botanical and medical knowledge, a theologian and a visionary, as well as a lecturer and healer. Her correspondence with the Pope and leaders of her times illustrate both her brilliance and their appreciation of her counsel. Hildegard refers to what she calls “the Living Light” as the source of all her visions, her creativity, her healing powers, her life. And this ‘Living Light’ – which she saw as coming from God -- gave her sustenance, courage, and strength. At one point she wrote: “The Living Light…while I am contemplating it, all my sadness and all pain are taken from my memory so that then I act like an unaffected girl and not an old woman.”
I saw this in action one day when I was in the Behavioural Health unit of the hospital in which I was doing chaplaincy work. An older Nigerian woman, tormented by the mental illness demons in her life, sat in our group both quite agitated and morose. But then she asked if she could sing a song she’d composed about God. As she sang, and as she became more spirited, our group watched her face transfix from worn-down pain to uplifted joy. Like Hildegard of Bringen 900 years before her, The Living Light took away her sadness and pain and she looked like a young “unaffected girl and not like an old woman.”

Another person who describes this inner, divine light is a professor I heard speak at the American Academy of Religion in 2013. As well as being a tenured professor of religious studies at a prestigious university in Texas, he is a practitioner of the Santo Daime religious tradition which originated in the Amazon of Brazil. In describing his personal religious experiences he said:

"I am deeply grateful for having the opportunity to be immersed in
divine light… I’m left with a subtle (or not so subtle) awareness of
a heart that is more open than it once was; of spiritual eyes that are
more attuned to the divine Beauty that shines through the leaves of
trees as they are blown by the wind; of an increasing sense of compassion
for the suffering that this world is undergoing; and of a deepening ability
to rest in the soft glow of divine presence in the midst of everyday life.”
(G. William Barnard, “Enthogens in a Religious Context: The Case of the Santo
Daime Religious Tradition,” AAR, Nov 2013.)

Author/educator/therapist Michael Gurian, in his book The Soul of the Child: Nurturing the Divine Identity of Our Children. reminds us that what makes us alive is the electromagnetism of our brains, our heart and our bodies and that electromagnetism is just another form of light.

“The science of neurochemistry shows us that the human being, like all
living things, is only alive in relation to the electrical energy – the
light – it organizes… the very neurochemistry of human life is electrical
– a spark, a flow of light… whether a galvanic skin response test is
administered to our bodies, or an EKG to our heart rate, or a PET scan
to our brain waves, or a series of monitors to a mother’s full uterus,
all will measure that light.”
(Michael Gurian, The Soul of the Child, p. 20-21.)

He goes on to suggest what every religion has also taught: that through the love and attachment we receive from others, particularly from our family, our love light grows and develops. Studies have shown that when a mother enters a room and coos lovingly to her child, the child’s brain lights up. And that light suffusing our brain and our body, Gurian identifies as our soul.


How similar that idea is to the artists and writers of every religion who show the holy, saintly people of their tradition with a halo or aura surrounding their body. Moses came down from the mountain and his face was gleaming. Jesus was transfigured in radiant light on the mountain. Rays of light emenate from the bodies on Buddhist bodhisttvas. Or the Hindu god Krishna who is seen as a "blaze of splendor...so radiant You are glowing like the blazing fire, brilliant as the sun...Your face beaming with the fire of sacrifice, flooding the whole universe with light." (The Bhagavad Gita, Chapter 11) That inner, spiritual, electromagnetic light of their love and their experience is so great, that it extends beyond their skin and radiates for all of us to see and feel.

It reminds me of the sentiment in the song identified with the civil rights struggle in this country, “This Little Light of Mine, I’m going to let it shine… Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.”

But I'm also aware of this divine light in the heart and the body as I do meditations to cure my cancer. Meditator after meditator extols me to let the light in, to shine it on the cancer cells, and to bring a sense of peace and wholeness through this divine light wash. It seems to be working -- at at least I feel great when I do it.

May the healing power of the Living light, that comes from beyond us yet permeates the very core of us, give us strength and guidance. May it help us to remember that even on those most dark and dismal moments of our lives, we can draw upon the light, and allow it to infuse us, allow it to radiate beyond us, and, with the kindness and patience of Mary, allow us to share the light and love with all sentient beings. Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine!

The Tree Outside My Window

Green-dappled and shimmering in the sun, the tree outside my window stretches out toward the sky, seeking and breathing sustenance from the sun and air, transforming them into the needed nutrients and chemicals for further growth. But underneath, there’s an entirely different world, like a photo negative or a mirror. The roots, like tentacle brain synapses stretch through the dark, rich, denseness of earth seeking and sucking water.

This tree, like all trees, is interactive with its environment in larger ways as well. Birds and squirrels make their way up or down, back and forth. Ants, grubs, and beetles tunnel around the roots. As Sheldon Silverstein in his book The Giving Tree, it provides us humans with food, shelter, shade, fuel, and oxygen. And more. Its root system keeps soil from eroding making land fertile. The Green World Campaign describes it on their website like this: “Trees restore degraded lands, relieve poverty, and foster biodiversity. They bring back life to struggling rural villages, and, by absorbing CO2, they help the global village, too.” (www.greenworld.org)

These magnificent beings, trees, live at once in two vastly different worlds, giving and sharing with both, and interacting with those around it. They are truly the connectors and transformers of the elements: earth, water, air and fire in the form of the sun’s light come together to promote and sustain life. Is it any wonder trees symbolize the axis mundi of our spiritual lives?

An axis mundi is an object that symbolically acts as the central pole connecting the heaven, or the transcendent beyond, and the earth, the immanent here and now, and around which the believing community gathers. They are like antennae which bring in signals from beyond and make them clear and available to everyday folk. Cultures from all times and places use different objects as an axis mundi. Sacred mountains, or objects that look like sacred mountain such as the pyramids, Mayan temples, church steeples, the Ka’aba act as axis mundi. So do trees. The trees in the center of the Garden of Eden, both the tree of knowledge and the tree of good and evil are axis mundi. A Christmas tree, a May pole, the Bodhi tree, the 8 branched menorah – all of those trees that we believe connect our earthly, ordinary lives with the spiritual beyond and by doing so transfix and transform us – are axis mundi.

Perhaps an axis mundi – whether we believe in a higher power or not – helps us to recognize, as does a tree, the duality of ourselves. We are both rooted, earthy beings with all kinds of animal instincts and needs as driven as the lowly grub. But we are also reaching out, stretching our tenderness out into the atmosphere, absorbing the ephemeral light of intangible nourishment from art, music, poetry, love, care, compassion.

The biblical creation myth says that human bodies were made of the same material as the earth. The Hebrew word ‘adam’ means both ‘mankind’ and the earthy, muddy humus of the ground. In fact, our bodies are made of the same chemicals, minerals and water found in the earth and the universe. So we are – both literally and figuratively – earthy, grounded, rooted, stick in the muds. But that’s not all.
The biblical myth goes on to say that the power of life, biblically called G-d, then breathed ‘nefish’ into us. In Hebrew the word means ‘spirit.’ So perhaps that includes all those intangibles that we think make us different from other creatures: our mind, our imagination, our artistry, our spirituality.

Strangely, like a tree, our bodies seem to inherently be formed to deal with those two elements in the same way. Our earthy part, the part that eats food, makes compost, excretes humus, and is below the nefish part that breathes in air, has great thoughts, and feels immaterial emotions. So, perhaps we too are axis mundi, connectors of the ordinary with the extraordinary, the earth with the heavens. And maybe that’s what the founders of different religions were trying to teach us as role models for our own behavior.

Moses holding the 10 Commandment on the mountain, Jesus on the cross (perhaps a symbolic axis mundi tree?), Buddha reaching enlightenment while sitting under a tree, shamans of indigenous traditions, they themselves are all axis mundi connecting the everyday world with the spiritual world beyond. All of them had extraordinary abilities to channel that which we call the divine and teach it to us earthlings. They, like trees and other axis mundi, became the central pole connecting the two worlds and around which, life revolved. Perhaps those people are role models for us.

Perhaps each one of us, with our feet planted firmly on the ground and our head in the sky, are also tree-like axis mundi. We just need to dig deep, stretch wide, tap into those internal juices, and share with the outside world – just like the tree outside my window does.

Learning from the Wisdom Traditions

I had a professor once who used to say there are two things you should read every day: the Bible and the NYTimes.  His thinking was, if you want to understand human beings, what makes us tick, what our strengths, weaknesses, values, yearnings, wishes, sense of reality is all about, there’s nothing more human than the bible and the NYTimes.  Personally, I expand that to include the wisdom literature of all different traditions – and the NYTimes.  And I consider myself so very fortunate that I get to spend my days doing just that – reading and discussing the wisdom literature of different human cultures – with young minds who (when they’re awake, engaged, and not fretting about grades)  make really interesting comments and ask really interesting questions.

I get to ponder the important questions of life and the answers from extremely different world views!  The shamanic experience taps into layers of reality vastly different than my here and now.  And yet, who knows, maybe they’re in touch with the multiuniverses that string theorists speak about.  Maybe the spirits of indigenous cultures are the same as entangled particles.

I get to read and reread the Hindu story of the Bhagavad Gita where poor Arjuna – like us -- faces an ethical dilemma.  The dilemmas he and we face are not between between good versus bad, they’re between two conflicting values like truth or loyalty, individual rights vs. community rights.   And yet, he (and we) are reminded that a person “cannot escape the force of action by abstaining from action.. .perform necessary action, it is more powerful than inaction.”

The Buddhist notions of  impermanence – that everything changes all the time so don’t cling to things as they are, and the ideas of compassion for and interconnectedness of all beings deeply shape me in every day ways.

Unfortunately, we rarely have enough time in world religions to examine Taoism and Confucianism.  Yet these philosophies which are the ying and yang of each other deserve time because they express ways to live with nature and in society.

Judaism, the religion of my people, helps me to remember the prophetic call for justice and mercy to all people – particularly the oppressed.  MLK used to quote the biblical prophet Amos: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.”  And the rabbi Hillel used to ask three questions: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?  But if I am only for myself, what am I?  And if not now, when?

Christianity gives us a story of radical transformation.  Just like those seeds you put into the ground changed into flowering plants, Jesus used stories and healings to show radical change our lives and our society so that we could be more loving and just.

The ethical demands of Islam, in both the Quran and the sayings of Muhammed (pbuh) to be kind, to be charitable, and to live up to a high standard, are ones that resonate with me.  Said M. “Show kindness to the creatures of the earth so that G-d may be kind to you.”  And also “Visit the sick, feed the hungry and free the captives.”

Yes, I know and understand (particularly when I read the NYTimes!) that religions cause a great deal of pain and suffering in this world.  We humans sure know how to screw up and twist some good ideas!  But I still think there’s a great deal of beauty and wisdom in all of these traditions just as I still believe there’s a great deal of beauty, wisdom and kindness in human beings despite our tendency toward the opposite as well.  In any case, studying religious wisdom is a really good way of understanding human beings and it acts as a guide post in life.  .

Next week we have Passover and Easter.  Both holidays are celebrations of hope, freedom, and new life – which is what I plan to enjoy.  And with this being poetry month, I’d like to end with a stanza from a favorite poem by the 13 century Sufi poet, Rumi:

“Let the beauty we love be what we do.  There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”