The Interfaith Movement at the Moment of Apocalypse:

Toward an Interfaith Philosophy in the Modern World

THE CHALLENGE

One of the great challenges for anyone active in the interfaith movement is how to articulate what it is all about. Generally speaking, interfaith groups fall into one of two categories—both of which, we shall see, are somewhat dissatisfying to the spiritual seeker, philosopher, or mystic.

When the interfaith movement began, it was a wonderful, beautiful, radical idea. It still is. But we are in need of going deeper. There is a risk that in claiming to be all things interfaith ends up mired in superficiality. In this essay, I will make an argument for what I see as the crucial role of the interfaith movement at this moment in history.

WHAT DO WE MEAN BY “INTERFAITH”?

Part of the beauty of a movement like interfaith is its diversity. I’ve noticed that the term means something slightly different to everyone. As a way of talking about the subject, I have created some general categories. These are not meant to be definitive, but to provide a means of having a discussion about how one might speak about interfaith meaningfully.

The first category I would describe as secular. Groups in this category are interested in dialogue across faiths, but not in the depth of these faiths. Common ground is found, but only in secular areas.  The interfaith minister will often—quite rightly, in many cases—employ this approach in offering a service or compassion to someone whose beliefs they cannot abide—the fundamentalist, for example. Generally, this group is wary of interfaith groups or philosophies that claim to find any spiritual unity or ultimate truth across faiths. Interfaith seminaries have frequently fallen into this category with their emphasis on ministering uncritically to those from various faith traditions. But most frequently this category can be associated with various interfaith organization which attempt to foster religious tolerance.

The second category holds that there is indeed a spiritual connection between the faith traditions. But whereas the first group is often far too intellectual, the second tends to be anti-intellectual.  I call them New Age Fundamentalists, because, like fundamentalists of the great faiths, they reduce the answer to every question to a simple phrase, rejecting the beautiful, chaotic diversity of our religious world.  Moreover, the soul—ie, the isolated, Cartesian soul—not the world, is the focus. There is a certain self-indulgence in this approach, a fixation on healing the soul, a soul that is entirely apart from what is happening in the world.

The most of obvious critique of the secular interfaith movement ironically comes from the very group that birthed it: academia. Most academics rightly criticize the anti-intellectualism and cultural appropriation of the New Age Fundamentalist. In doing so, they ignore what their own scholarship tells us about the nature of religion: that our religions have never been static and isolated. There has always been an effort to integrate the philosophies of various traditions. One needs only to look at the syncretism of African religions and Christianity in the New World; or the blending of Greek and Jewish traditions at the birth of Christianity; or the integration of northern European traditions and Christianity as it spread across Europe; or the Taoist and Confucian influence on Zen; or the Hindu influence on Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, and Indian Islam. I could go on.

At the same time, reducing the world’s religion to oversimplified platitudes often reflects a poor understanding. To be an adherent of a faith means more than liking a couple of ideas, more than changing one’s clothes. It means inhabiting a new world. To have any clear understanding of how the world’s religions truly do reflect a shared, integral wisdom—not to mention avoiding a shallow and offensive appropriation—we must understand the underlying cosmology, the essential context in which they arise.

THE INTERFAITH MOVEMENT AND THE APOCALYPTIC MOMENT

Each group, while seemingly quite different, actually reflects the same worldview—that is, the fragmentation, literalism, and individualism of the Modernity. The first group is fragmented and literal in keeping with the Western intellectual tradition. Each religion is distinct and separate and we should keep it that way, the logic goes. The second, while appearing to reject Modernity—again, this is just like the fundamentalist—actually retains the core values of the Modern industrial world: the distinct, separate, isolated individual. The soul, in this approach, is entirely separate from the world. In each case, the Modern industrial world’s core assumptions are retained: that each religion, each individual, is separate and distinct from one another.

Why does it matter? While admitting that there are benefits to the Modern worldview as in every cultural paradigm, this one is coming to an end. This apocalypse, like others before it, must involve a reimagining of the relationship between the human and the world that is our home. The question for humanity at this moment is how this end is going to come about. Globalization and industrial capitalism have brought us wealth and inequality, unprecedented individual rights and unprecedented destruction of the natural world. Will its end come with horrific death and destruction that seems imminent with global warming? Perhaps this is unavoidable. Certainly history has taught us that loss and despair will change one’s way of relating to the world. But perhaps we can, in the midst of the despair that is surely a part of life, come to a richer, more enchanted, more meaningful worldview, one that allows us to participate in the rich tapestry of nature and humanity’s diversity.

The interfaith movement can participate in this paradigm shift in several ways.

• First, we can reject the fragmentation of modernity in embracing the paradoxical nature of existence.  To do this we must connect to the mystical elements of religion and to the nature-based traditions.  The answer to the question of “what is interfaith?” cannot be found in avoiding the difficult questions. Our religious traditions are at once deeply interconnected and wildly diverse.

• Second, we must understand the cosmologies and worldviews—that is, how a culture sees the relationship between the individual and the whole or the divine—of the spiritual traditions in order to find a deeper, more authentic connection among them. While I do advocate an integral spirituality that sees where the religions interconnect, we must be careful to take a rigorous approach that acknowledges their genuine differences.

• Third, we must embrace the insights of science, especially those that call into question the assumptions made in the Modern world.

• Fourth, we must express the new insights we have through creativity and imagination.  For it is the mythic, not the logical—the Greeks would have called this mythos as opposed to logos—that expresses the core values of a culture.[1]

THE NEW MYTH

When we study the world’s religions, we often spend a great deal of time on the various doctrines of the faiths. These are, of course, important. But we perhaps give them an undue amount of our focus. Modernity has taught us that facts are the most important thing. In fact, when it comes to religion, it is the story that is most important. Indeed, no religious tradition is without a myth. And it is the myth that invites us to participate in that reality, connecting our individual story to the greater one. The mythic is what brings the doctrine alive.

The myth is how the values of a tradition or culture are conveyed. I would argue that interfaith as a way of seeing the world can be a part of the basis for a new myth. That is, the values of the interfaith movement speak to a world that is not fragmented, a world in which we can hold the paradox of two seemingly contradictory facts. If Modernity is marked by fragmentation and either-or logic, the interfaith movement is marked by integration and both-and, paradoxical thinking.

Additionally, interfaith movements can and must uphold certain values that speak to the specific struggles of this moment. I would describe these values as “cosmo-centric”, that is, values that connect us more deeply to the rhythms of the earth, to the story of the universe, to our selves as expressions of the cosmos.[2]

Moreover, we are each participating in the telling of this new myth as we tell our own stories. No individual can create the new myth. It comes together as a tapestry, a story made up of stories woven together. It is unlikely that a new myth will come from the elites alone. The wisdom of the margins is required.[3]

This integration of a new story is how a new cosmology comes forth. In today’s world, I believe that this new cosmology must integrate the insights of modern science the wisdom of our mystical and philosophical traditions. Whereas the myth of Modernity was based on the notion of the universe as a machine, the new myth must be of a sacred, organic universe. Whereas the myth of Modernity was based on a fragmented world in which each of us is independent, the new myth must teach us that we are interconnected. In Cosmosophia: Cosmology, Mysticism, and the Birth of a New Myth, I describe the fundamental metaphor to build from is that of the universe as our womb, and its unfolding a process of continual birthing.[4] This is the work of the mythmaker, the poet, the artist.

This is what Thomas Berry calls our “Great Work”.[5] It is the task of mythmaking, of worldmaking, the most fundamental act of our humanity. The most ancient artwork, the cave paintings, reflected this: our ancestors, when they painted handprints on the walls of the cave, understood that we are always at the edge of our world, our womb, creating meaning.

These ancient paintings also commonly depict the relationship of predator and prey, the ecological reality that our ancestors deeply felt, that we have largely forgotten. Far from the rugged individualists that Modernity would have us to be, we are ecological beings, deeply interconnected to a community of living beings. The great predators from which we fled and the prey we chased on the African plain shaped our minds and our bodies, our communities and our stories.

The interfaith movement has always appreciated the desire for cultural diversity. But often it has lacked a real articulation of why diversity is so important. The importance of diversity—and of difference—is a lesson that ecology teaches us well. Whereas a loss of genetic diversity leaves gaps in the ecosystem that may not be filled, the loss of cultural diversity—for example, the loss of a spiritual tradition, a language, a culture—leaves us with a gap in the cultural ecosystem. Just as the loss of the wolf leaves the ecosystem imbalanced, so to does the loss of, say, feminist theology to provide a balance to patriarchy. This is only one example. We simply cannot say what kinds of worldviews might provide us with potential answers to the challenges our species faces. Just as a loss of genetic diversity leaves a species subject to disease, without a diversity of perspectives humnaity might not survive.[6]

CONCLUSION

Introduced at the right moment, a mere idea can become a movement.   I believe that this is just such a time for interfaith.  This moment—Modernity—is marked by many things that are coming to an end: fossil-fuel-based industry, individualism, capitalism, imperialism.  But above all else, this moment is about a loss of meaning, emptiness.  But this void is pregnant.  Apocalypse, after all, means “unveiling.”  We have the opportunity to make new worlds of meaning, and I believe that the Interfaith Movement is well placed to influence this process. Of the four suggestions above, it is the creative and imaginal which are most important. We must give birth, through our imaginative capacities, to a world in which spirituality, paradoxically, can represent the beautiful, chaotic diversity of human and be a source of our ultimate unity.

I spent my time there on the beach, camping next to a little beach bar. On my last night there, a small storm came in from the sea, filling my little tent with water. I had no choice but to find shelter in the bathroom next to the bar. There, in the dim light in the bathroom of a bar in the poorest nation on earth, I began to write. This is what I wrote.

The Dream

            And afterward,

            I will pour out my spirit

            on all people.

            Your sons and daughters will prophesy,

            your old men will dream dreams,

            your young men will see visions.

            Joel 2:28

…it happened the same, over and over again.

In the beginning, he always looks down at his feet, moving to the steady rhythm which he recognizes as his own, slow pace. But he is less looking down than he is avoiding looking up.  His eyes reveal so much: the blank, horrific gaze of a man who has crossed the threshold from seeing the world as God made it, as a child sees it, only in its beauty, to the hopeless, empty cognizance of a world irrevocably soiled.  So seldom do human beings rediscover that beauty once the ugliness has been revealed.  He looks down because he has chosen to see no more.

            He walks on.

            Over dirt and rock, he walks; over broken glass, cracking under his feet, plastic bags and candy wrappers, blowing in the wind.  Over sidewalks, barren, the man walks.  There are no dandelions reaching out between the cracks. 

            He walks past crowds, shouting at him, cursing at him.  Even the first time, when it all seemed so strange, those curses felt familiar.  He is certain that he knows no one in the crowd, but he knows the curses.  He is close to home.  He keeps on.

            He hates this part the most.  The walking.  The hoping.  Tortured with the possibility of a different outcome, he walks.  But he never truly believes it will end differently.  The man knows how it will end.

            But he cannot help but hope—hope that this time he will stop, or turn around, or even join the crowd and turn those curses to praise.

            Someday, perhaps, it will change, but not today.  Today he keeps on, his pace never changing, his eyes seldom lifting even to look where he is going, and then only briefly, only forward.  He does not want to see where he is going.

            He does not need to see where he is going.  He already knows. 

            And finally, he stops to pick up the small metal instrument.  He feels his hands close around its handle.  Only then does he see before him the huge, wooden cross and the faceless figure—neither male nor female, young nor old—tied securely, legs straight down on the vertical plank, arms stretched as far as they can go on the horizontal, palms open, pleading, or maybe waiting for an embrace.  He can never tell.  Truthfully, he no longer knows the difference.  It always surprises him that his victim never struggles.  He can feel the hoping in his victim.  Give up, he wants to say.  Hope hurts too much.

            Almost as much as for the dreams to stop, he wants just once to see who it is, to look into the eyes of the one he tortures, of his own torturer.  But to see those eyes is his greatest fear; and when that fear begins to enter his own consciousness he begins to smell the fear of his counterpart.

            It is then, as always, that he begins to drive nails into flesh.  And it is always the screams of his victim which awake him.  Or are those his own screams?

            Either way, he will sleep no more.

            The crucifixion has begun.

The Crucifixion will be available for purchase through Homebound Press on April 6.

Interfaith Mysticism

Sunday, Feb 12 & Sunday, Feb 26^th from 8:00 to 10:00 eastern.

Mysticism is among the most misunderstood and misused terms in religious studies. Often, it is conflated with the mere “mysterious” or the occult. In this class, we will explore the roots of mysticism as well as how it is expressed in the world’s great Wisdom Traditions. In doing so, we will attempt to understand the essence of these faiths. In this way, we will move toward an authentic interfaith, one that recognizes the paradox of the diversity of the world’s faiths as well as their essential unity. Finally, we will work toward mysticism as a way of moving toward a different way of relating to our world, one that seeks not to depart from the world or reject it but to create a more just, sustainable, and compassionate culture.

For an excerpt from Cosmosophia on Mysticism, go here.

Science, Cosmology, and Spirituality

Sunday, Feb 19 & Sunday, March 4, from 8:00 to 10:00 eastern

Throughout the Modern period, science and religion have been made to appear increasingly dichotomous.  Recently, however, scientific insights have revealed an understanding of the Universe that is far less rigid than the Newtonian. We will explore the ways in which the insights of evolution, Big Bang cosmology, and quantum physics intersect with various spiritual philosophies. In the second portion of the class we will explore some traditional cosmologies and how science can inform the emergence of a New Cosmology, one that might lead to a more just, sustainable, and compassionate civilization.

Ecology and Spirituality: Facing Ecological Crisis from an Interfaith Perspective

Sunday, March 11 and Sunday, March 25, from 8:00 to 10:00 eastern

In the face of rapidly increasing pollution, global warming, and the greatest mass extinction in 65 million years, it is clear that technological solutions alone will not solve the problem of the ecological crisis. A change in our relationship to the Earth is needed, something that requires a spiritual shift. What do the great wisdom traditions say about our interconnectedness and our relationship to the earth? What can we learn from these traditions that can restore a greater sense of connection to nature?

Mythopoesis: Spiritual Poetry and Literature: A Writing Workshop

Sunday, March March 18 & Sunday, April 1 from 8:00 to 10:00 Eastern

This workshop will be an opportunity to explore some of the great spiritual poetry and to share poetry with others.

• Each class (two two-hour sessions) cost $50 and fulfills one elective credit at TNS
• Please send your check or money order accompanied with the student’s name, email address, street address and phone number to: The New Seminary, 1350 Avenue of the Americas, 2nd Floor, New York. NY 10019 . Please indicate the title of the class for which you are registering on the check or in the paypal payment.
• Contact RM Peluso at rmnjpeluso@aol.com for registration and payment questions
• Contact Theodore Richards at theodorerichards@cosmosophia.org for information about the classes.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

While I love Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” my favorite quote of his is this: “Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.”  For King, salvation is not something individualistic, or entirely distinct from the world, but a process whereby we discover our selves as enmeshed in a community in which our fate cannot be separated from anyone else’s.  Salvation, for Dr. King, is communal.  And it is not by conforming to society that we find salvation, but by transforming it.

The most radical concept in the quote is the term “creatively maladjusted.”  For King, like any prophet, the highest calling is not conformity to society’s norms.  If we are maladjusted to a corrupt system, our task is not to become “well adjusted”, but to use our maladjustment as a creative, not a destructive, force.

Black Liberation Theology

When Howard Thurman, another, lesser known preacher out of that tradition, wrote Jesus and the Disinherited, he was responding, at least in part, to the “strange mutation” of Christianity that American religion had become. Thurman had gone to Morehouse with Martin Luther King, Sr., and knew MLK Jr. In fact, it is said that Dr King carried a copy of Jesus and the Disinherited with him on the road.

The Black Church was uniquely positioned to re-imagine American Christianity. Thurman and King knew this, as did Thurman’s grandmother who had made a young Howard Thurman tear pages out of her Bible that seemed to justify slavery.

The tradition of the Black Church, due in no small part to its position at the margins of American society, also connects to the mythic sensibility in a way that American Protestantism has generally failed.  Prophetic leaders such as Dr. King have seen how their people lived out Biblical myths.  His speeches are mythic participation at its best, in which he sees himself both participating in the past (“I have been to the mountaintop”) and giving voice to an as yet unrealized hope for the future (“I have a dream”).

The Radical Vision

Unfortunately, King’s vision has been watered down in the public discourse. While it is true that Dr King dreamt of a world in which it is possible for Black, White, and Brown children to go to school together, to play together, to love each other without thinking much of color difference–indeed, my three-year-old’s school demonstrates that this dream has been partly realized–it is also true that his vision was far more radical.

His was a three-fold critique of American power: he opposed American racism, American imperialism and military aggression, and the economic inequities of American capitalism. (Perhaps George W Bush meant to attack Imperialism, Capitalism, and Racism when he coined the termed “axis of evil”.) Surely, Dr. King would recognize that, while it is wonderful that some children today, like my daughter, are less hindered by racism, the inequities and seemingly endless wars he saw in his day are still common and, if anything, more extreme.

Finally, when we remember Dr King, the depth and nuance of his theology must not be forgotten as it so often is. His “Beloved Community” was not about churches and block clubs; this was a metaphysical position about the interconnected nature of reality. We are inseparably and inextricably linked. The fate of our sisters and brothers is our fate as well.

So let us not make the day set aside to remember Dr King’s message the day in which that message is most blatantly and cynically forgotten.

To read more from Dr King on “Creative Maladjustment” click here.

[For Sue]

the old garden where we sit

is overgrown

with weeds choking with each passing day

flowers  memories  stories

and—terrifyingly—your You

the old apple tree no longer bears fruit

still

it stands tall

roots proudly in the earth

does it

like you

still remember the old days?

what are your memories?

was it

like you

once the bearer of many fruits

mother of many sons?

what are your memories?

“do you know someone who could chop that tree down?” you ask

as if you know that

somehow

it endures

in seeds long-since planted

in other gardens

what are your memories?

i smile

but want to cry

when you ask if I’ll come in tomorrow

and I understand you do not remember

that you can no longer work

that we have not worked together

in years

and there are more questions repeated

questions

that seem to arise

like particles in the quantum foam

then gone

what are your memories?

my meditation

is to answer them again

and again

what are your memories?

my meditation

is to answer them again

and again

what are your memories?

we sit for a long time

in silence

then you ask

“what are your memories?”

then only more silence

heavy like the fruit of a dying tree

what are your memories?

you have given me many gifts

taught me many things

but perhaps the greatest gift

we can give one another is

simply to sit

and listen to the same old stories

the greatest teaching

that we listen to one another

even only—and perhaps especially—

when we only ask the same old questions

what are your memories?

i wonder

what are your memories?

“do you know someone who could chop that tree down?”

you ask again

and this time i answer

“no”

its fruit

for me

still sweet

One, the river of belonging, flows from our past

Reminding us of who we are

That we have been birthed in love

Reminding us that we need to look nowhere to find it

Another, the river of longing, flows from this moment

Into the possibility of the future

The ever-not-quite-ness of now.

Here, in the heart,

At the confluence of longing and belonging,

At the chaotic matrix of each moment,

Awe-some and Awe-ful,

Terrific and Terrible,

Love is born.

“At the Confluence of Longing and Belonging”

Originally published in Handprints on the Womb, Theodore Richards, 2009

Hiraeth: Longing for Belonging on the Banks of the River Teifi

In the memory of my grandfather, Rev Thomas Richards

&

My great-grandfather, Rev T. Teifion Richards

On the banks of the River Teifi, just before river meets sea, there is a small town called St. Dogmael’s. The ruins of a small abbey make something like a town square, but there is little more to speak of in the town.

I take a picture of the abbey and send a postcard home to my grandfather.

I follow the banks of the river a downstream. Little British houses become at once more sparse and spare until all that remains is rock and water and heath. This is a place for the birds and the fishes to comingle. The human has always been a visitor here, a wayfarer, or, at best, a participant.  It was here, among the mists and wetlands, at the very edge of the Old World, my ancestors learned to be preachers and poets.

I have come to Wales to remember.

To read the rest of the article, please go to the Hiraeth Press Blog.

In addition to information about me, this is the place to find information about:

• Books, articles, and poetry
• My work in education and community building
• Some of the main ideas from Cosmosophia
• Ways to connect through social media and links to like-minded sites and organizations
• News, events, and classes

Community is something cannot happen on a screen. Authentic community requires us to touch one another, to breath the same air.  The Community for Cosmocentric Spirituality is an effort to build community around the shared values of an interfaith spirituality that emphasizes the mystical and the Earth-, eco-, and cosmic-centered approaches to religion.

Here is an excerpt from the preface to Cosmosophia about a very different Christmas experience:

On Christmas morning, exactly 2,000 years after the birth of Christ according to our calendars, I found myself in a small village in the tribal areas of western Pakistan, waiting for the border to Iran to open so I could pass through.  I was terribly sick—some bad dates I’d eaten, perhaps—and lonely.  I had not expected to miss the Christmas season, but the loneliness I was feeling from months alone on the road was exacerbated by my knowledge that it was Christmas. 

Christmas is rather low-key in the tribal areas of Western Pakistan.

It was dark and bitterly cold, as the desert usually is at night.  The darkness, along with my sickness, contributed to my loneliness.  I wandered blindly through the town to find a place to rest, and settled on a pile of burlap sacks.  I lay down and looked up.  Immediately I was transformed by the immensity of the stars; unlike the terror of my youth, I felt intimate with them.  In a few moments, some local men, rifles slung over their shoulders, invited me to come into their home to drink tea around a fire.  The isolation I had felt as an American only made this interaction feel more powerful.  They saw me simply as a human being, smiling and laughing kindly when they realized that I was from America.  Moments of communion are all the more powerful and transformative when creative compassion is required in this way.

Christmas, if we could only stop shopping, teaches us that the moment of deepest darkness is the moment when we realize the light we each possess. It is, after, the celebration of the birth of god in the humblest of places.

Here is my Christmas poem, originally published in Handprints on the Womb:

“Christmas in New York”

In a dark, quiet corner

Amid the blackness of the season of light

Lonesome in a crowd of millions

Sipping hopeful wine, in a hopeless time.

I wonder how many more dreams will die

Before we dance the dance of resurrection.

I know now, how chaotic Jerusalem must have been

On that dark, holy night, many years ago.

In this dark season of light

Christmas, holy profundity

The time of the birth of God

The time of the crying, laughing baby

Born in the soul of millions

In every dark, quiet corner,

Of New York City, at Christmas.

New York, 2004

Happy Solstice! May you give birth to your own light in this time of darkness.

You can find info about my books at theodorerichards.com