The response we give in those moments is always wholehearted. In the heart, at the core of the human person, intellect, will, and emotions still form an integral whole. Yet, once the response of the heart expresses itself in thinking, willing, or feeling, the original wholeness of the response is refracted, or broken. That is why we are never fully satisfied with the expression of those deepest insights, in word or image. Nor is our willing commitment to justice and peace, our yes to belonging, as wholehearted on the practical level as it is in moments of mystical communion. And our feelings often fail to celebrate the beauty that we glimpsed unveiled for a moment, the beauty that continues to shine through the veil of daily reality.
Thus, doctrine, ethics, and ritual bear the mark of our shortcomings, even in these earliest buds of religion. Yet, they fulfill a most important function: they keep us connected, no matter how imperfectly, with the truth, goodness, and beauty that once overwhelmed us. That is the glory of every religion.
As long as all goes well with a religion, then doctrine, ethics, and ritual work like an irrigation system, bringing ever fresh water from the source of mysticism into daily life. Religions differ from each other, as irrigation systems do. There are objective differences: some systems are simply more efficient. But subjective preferences are also important. You tend to like the system you are used to; your familiarity with it makes it more effective for you, no matter what other models may be on the market. Time has an influence on the system: The pipes tend to get rusty and start to leak, or they get clogged up. The flow from the source slows down to a trickle.
Fortunately, I have not yet come across a religion where the system didn’t work at all. Unfortunately, however, deterioration begins on the day the system is installed. At first, doctrine is simply the interpretation of mystical reality; it flows from it and leads back to it. But then the intellect begins to interpret that interpretation. Commentaries on commentaries are piled on top of the original doctrine. With every new interpretation of the previous one, we move farther away from the experiential source. Live doctrine fossilizes into dogmatism.
A similar process inevitably takes place with ethics. At first, moral precepts simply spell out how to translate mystical communion into practical living. The precepts remind us to act as one acts among people who belong together, and so they keep pointing back to our deepest, mystical sense of belonging. The fact that a community will often draw too narrow a circle around itself is a different matter. That’s simply an inadequate translation of the original intuition. The circle of mystical communion is all-inclusive.
Because we want to express unchanging commitment to the goodness we glimpsed in mystical moments, we engrave the moral precepts on stone tablets. But in doing so, we make the expression of that commitment unchangeable. When circumstances change and call for a different expression of the same commitment, the dos and don’ts remain stone-engraved and unchangeable. Morality has turned into moralism.
What happens with ritual? At first, as we have seen, it is a true celebration. We celebrate by remembering gratefully. Everything else is optional. The particular event that we celebrate merely triggers that grateful remembrance, a remembrance of those moments in which we were most deeply aware of limitless belonging. As a reminder and renewal of our ultimate connectedness, every celebration has religious overtones, echoes of mystical communion. It is also the reason why, when we celebrate, we want all those who belong to us in a special way to be present. Repetition also is a part of celebration. Every time we celebrate a birthday, for example, that day is enriched by memory upon memory of all previous ones.
But repetition has its dangers, especially for the celebration of religious rituals. Because they are so important, we want to give them the perfect form. And before we know it, we are more concerned with form than with content. When form becomes formalized and content is forgotten, ritual turns into ritualism.
Sad as it is, religion left to itself turns irreligious. Once, in Hawaii, after I had been walking on still-hot volcanic rock, an image for this process occurred to me: the image not of water but of fire. The beginnings of the great religions were like the eruptions of a volcano. There was fire, there was heat, there was light: the light of mystical insight, freshly spelled out in a new teaching; the best of hearts aglow with commitment to a sharing community; and celebration, as fiery as new wine.
The light of doctrine, the glow of ethical commitment, and the fire of ritual celebration were expressions that gushed forth red-hot from the depths of mystical consciousness. But, as that stream of lava flowed down the sides of the mountain, it began to cool off. The farther it got from its origins, the less it looked like fire; it turned into rock. Dogmatism, moralism, ritualism: all are layers of ash deposits and volcanic rock that separate us from the fiery magma deep down below.
But there are fissures and clefts in the igneous rock of the old lava flows; there are hot springs, fumaroles, and geysers; there are even occasional earthquakes and minor eruptions. These represent the great men and women who reformed and renewed religious tradition from within. In one way or another, this is our task, too. Every religion has a mystical core. The challenge is to find access to it and to live in its power. In this sense, every generation of believers is challenged anew to make its religion truly religious.
This is the point where mysticism clashes with the institution. We need religious institutions. If they weren’t there, we would create them. Life creates structures. Think of the ingenious constructions life invents to protect its seeds, of all those husks and hulls and pods, the shucks and burrs and capsules found in an autumn hedgerow. Come spring, the new life within cracks these containers (even walnut shells!) and bursts forth. Crust, rind, and chaff split open and are discarded. Our social structures, however, have a tendency to perpetuate themselves. Religious institutions are less likely than seed pods to yield to the new life stirring within. And although life (over and over again) creates structures, structures do not create life.
Those who are closest to the life that created the structures will have the greatest respect for them; they will also be the first ones, however, to demand that structures that no longer support but encumber life must be changed. Those closest to the mystical core of religion will often be uncomfortable agitators within the system. How genuine they are will show itself by their compassionate understanding for those whom they must oppose; after all, mystics come from a realm where “we” and “they” are one.
In some cases, officials of institutional religion are themselves mystics, as was true of Pope John XXIII. These are the men and women who sense when the time has come for the structures to yield to life. They can distinguish between faithfulness to life and faithfulness to the structures that life has created in the past, and they get their priorities right. Rumi did so when he wrote:
Not until faithfulness
turns into betrayal
and betrayal into trust
can any human being
become part of the truth.6
Note that betrayal—or what is seen as such—is not the last step. There is a further step, in which betrayal turns into faith. This going out and returning is the journey of the hero; it is the task of us all. Faith (that is, courageous trust) lets go of institutional structures and so finds them on a higher level—again and again. This process is as painful as life, and equally surprising.
One of the great surprises is that the fire of mysticism can melt even the rigor mortis of dogmatism, legalism, and ritualism. By the glance or the touch of those whose hearts are burning, doctrine, ethics, and ritual come aglow with the truth, goodness, and beauty of the original fire. The dead letter comes alive, breathing freedom. “God’s writing engraved on the tablets” is what the uninitiated reads in Exodus 32:16. But only the consonants are written in the Hebrew text: (chrth). Mystics who happen to be Rabbis look at this word and say: Don’t read charath (engraved); read cheruth (freedom)! God’s writing is not “engraved”; it is freedom!
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It takes courage and vision to see beyond our present understanding. Children do this all the time, with greater ease than do adults. Saying more than she realized, for example, a schoolgirl once wrote, “Many dead animals of the past changed into fossils while others preferred to be oil.” That’s what mystics prefer. Alive or dead, they keep religion afire.
6. From an unpublished translation, with the kind permission of Coleman Barks and John Moyne whose volume of Rumi translations is entitled This Longing (Putney, VT: Threshold, 1988).
Meditation: “One Is the Human Spirit”
Publisher’s note: In October, 1975, on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, leaders from the Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, and Jewish faiths assembled to consider the moral and spiritual dimension needed for progress. The final ceremony was held in the U.N.’s Dag Hammarskjöld Auditorium. The speakers for Buddhism, Islam, and Judaism held similar beliefs in the oneness of humankind. The ceremony ended with a meditation under the guidance of Brother David Steindl-Rast.
Sisters and Brothers in the Spirit:
Since we are truly one in heart, we ought to be able to find a common expression of the Spirit who moves us at this moment. But the diversity of our languages tends to divide us. Yet, where the language of words fails, the silent language of gestures helps to express our unity. Using this language, then, let us rise and stand.
Let our rising be the expression that we are rising to this occasion in deep mindfulness of what it signifies.
Let our standing be a mindful gesture: mindful of the ground on which we are standing, the one little plot of land on this earth not belonging to one nation, but to all nations united. It is a very small piece of land, indeed, but it is a symbol of human concord, a symbol of the truth that this poor, mistreated earth belongs to all of us together.
As we stand, then, like plants standing on a good plot of ground, let us sink our roots deep into our hidden unity. Allow yourself to feel what it means to stand and to extend your inner roots.
Rooted in the soil of the heart, let us expose ourselves to the wind of the Spirit, the one Spirit who moves all who let themselves be moved. Let us breathe deeply the breath of the one Spirit.
Let our standing bear witness that we take a stand on common ground.
Let our standing be an expression of reverence for all those who before us have taken a stand for human unity.
Let us stand with reverence on the ground of our common human endeavor, joining all those who stood on this ground, from the first shaper of tools to the engineers of the most complex machines and institutions.
Let us stand with reverence on the common ground of the human quest for meaning, side by side with all who ever stood on this ground in their searching thought, in their celebration of beauty, in their dedicated service.
Let us stand in reverence before all those who on our common ground stood up to be counted, stood up—and were cut down.
Let us remember that to stand up as we have now stood up implies a readiness to lay down one’s life for that for which one stands.
Let us stand in awe before those thousands upon thousands—known and unknown—who have laid down their lives for the common cause of our human family.
Let us bow our heads. Let us bow our heads to them.
Let us stand and bow our heads, because we stand under judgment.
We stand under judgment, for “One is the human Spirit.” If we are one with the heroes and prophets, we are also one with those who persecuted and killed them. One with the henchmen as we are one with the victims. We all share the glory of human greatness and the shame of human failure.
Allow me to invite you now to focus your mind on the most inhuman act of destruction you can find in your memory. And now take this, together with all human violence, all human greed, injustice, stupidity, hypocrisy, all human misery, and lift it all up, with all the strength of your heart, into the stream of compassion and healing that pulsates through the heart of the world—that center in which all our hearts are one. This is not an easy gesture. It may almost seem too difficult for some of us. But until we can reach and tap with our deepest roots this common source of concord and compassion, we have not yet claimed within our own hearts that oneness that is our common human birthright.
Standing firm, then, in this oneness, let us close our eyes.
Let us close our eyes to bring home to ourselves our blindness as we face the future.
Let us close our eyes to focus our minds on the inner light, our one common light, in whose brightness we shall be able to walk together even in the dark.
Let us close our eyes as a gesture of trust in the guidance of the one Spirit who will move us if we open our hearts.
“One is the human Spirit,” but the human Spirit is more than human, because the human heart is unfathomable. Into this depth let us silently sink our roots. There lies our only source of peace.
In a moment, when I will invite you to open again your eyes, I will invite you also to turn in this Spirit to the person next to you with a greeting of peace. Let our celebration culminate and conclude in this gesture, by which we will send one another forth as messengers of peace. Let us do this now.
Peace be with you all!
Sources
Quotes from these books by Br. David appear at the start of the chapters in the present work.
Gratefulness, the Heart of Prayer: An Approach to Life in Fullness. Mahwah, NJ: Paulist, 1984.
Jesus and Lao Tzu: The Parallel Sayings, edited by Martin Aronson, introduction by Br. David Steindl-Rast. Berkeley, CA: Ulysses, 2002.
A Listening Heart: The Spirituality of Sacred Sensuousness. New York: Crossroad, 1999.
Music of Silence: A Sacred Journey through the Hours of the Day, by David Steindl-Rast and Sharon Lebell. Berkeley, CA: Ulysses, 2001.
About the Author
David Steindl-Rast is an Austrian-born Benedictine monk and one of the most influential and beloved spiritual teachers of our time. He has been a monk of Mount Saviour monastery in New York since 1953, dividing his time between monastic life, writing, and worldwide lecturing. He has contributed to a wide range of books and periodicals as well as authored ten books of his own. He is the cofounder of Gratefulness.org, and he was one of the first Roman Catholics to participate in Buddhist-Christian dialogue. He has brought spiritual depth into the lives of countless people through his lectures, workshops, and bestselling books.
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