by Taylor Marsh
“Meditation is valuable for all of humanity,” the Dalai Lama told Oprah Winfrey in a 2001 interview posted on her website, “because it involves looking inward. People don’t have to be religious to look inside themselves more carefully. It is constructive and worthwhile to analyze our emotions, including compassion and our sense of caring, so that we can become more calm and happy.”
Turning to meditation, there is a sense of rising peace that is empowering. The religious door you might have once walked through to find faith in the first place has now opened into God’s outdoors, and you experience the force that is the creator of life and abundance in a world outside a building, and outside an organization run mostly by men. This is the limitless world of nature, containing the possibility of tapping the mystical formula that is the contagion of life.
All of a sudden, with eyes closed, through the process of clearing the chatter from your head and stopping the tape filled with voices of people who push rules on you that no longer apply, you find your own code.
Or just maybe you don’t. Maybe you decide that the buck stops with you, and that’s enough. You can live with making your own choices and mistakes, taking the consequences. That guilt imposed from the outside isn’t for you. Meditation can still calm the ego and offer massive physical benefits you can actually feel, through a calmer center of self and less angst. You find a place for problems by prioritizing what matters.
The Golden Rule is pretty simple and doesn’t require religious scripture, church or whatever hocus-pocus makes atheists go berserk when you cite faith as a foundation of your life. Many utilize Jesus’ words in the Sermon on the Mount, which Wayne Dyer quotes in his book The Power of Intention: “Whatsoever ye would that men do unto you, do you even so unto them.” Treating people as you want to be treated is simply enough spirituality for some.
According to Gallup, the first year they conducted polling on religiosity, in 1948, 69% of Americans considered themselves Protestant. In 2012, Protestant affiliation was down to 41%.
One particular part I wish I could write in the sky for all to see is that in the same Pew-PBS survey already cited, 58% of the respondents say they “often feel a deep connection with nature and the earth.” It’s the most important aspect of alternative spirituality and connection and the greatest opening for modern society since organized religion closed its door on spirituality and equality, choosing fundamentalism over freedom.
An organized religious group’s politics can reveal murderous cruelty at its heart. A church that would get in the way of a pregnant woman whose life is in danger — as the Catholic Church has done several times in recent years, refusing a woman lifesaving surgery in Colorado and also Ireland — has lost its moral center, not to mention its sacredness. No religious organization has the right to let a woman die because of church doctrine. Holding religious institutions accountable for these policies is the job of modern society.
During the conclave that selected Pope Francis I, an interesting article popped up in the Washington Post. Ashley E. McGuire, a senior fellow with the Catholic Association, authored the piece, in which she argued that she didn’t know “of a single man being ‘sent’ to Rome” for the conclave. Then in an effort to rehabilitate the Vatican’s image with women, a herculean task, McGuire offered her best defense of the male hierarchy, saying its “workforce is approximately forty percent female [and] has a very progressive maternity leave policy, allowing women paid leave beginning two months before their due date and allowing them a year of paid leave after birth. When the women return.” McGuire writes, “They are allowed to create a ‘milk schedule’ so that they can structure their hours around their nursing needs.”
This policy obviously reflects the respect the church has for women as mothers, which is absolutely deserved, but also happens to be the primary role the Catholic Church sees for women. It in no way addresses the continued second-class status of women’s leadership in matters of spirituality that still exists inside the Catholic Church, and the refusal of the Vatican to respect and support the social justice work of American nuns.
It’s these types of decisions and outcomes that have people running from church buildings, preferring to find solace in nature through the peace and calm of God’s outdoors.
It’s amazing what kind of conversations you can have with your partner while hiking or walking in nature. Taking the time to breathe, to take in the quiet and hear the life around you, while convening with the source of life itself — nature and the earth — proves God is indeed outdoors. When children are involved, what better teaching is there than to appreciate and protect our planet and all of its creatures? This has a vast spiritual and practical meaning.
In the midst of all this change, megachurches are faring better than traditional churches, even staying aloft in troubled economic times. In 2011, the top ten U.S. megachurches reportedly brought in $8.5 billion. Joel Osteen is considered the “rock star of Christianity,” through his non-denominational ministry that draws forty thousand in attendance each week, with Jumbotrons to view the service, while reaching seven million on television. The annual budget for his Lakewood Church is more than seventy million dollars, according to reports.
Osteen is out of a new mold. When asked in an interview on Beliefnet.com whether his advice is like cognitive therapy, because he encourages a way of thinking to be happy and optimistic, Osteen replied, “I think a lot of it is.” The emphasis on positivity jumps out from Osteen’s message. The guilt and damnation that have been the central focus of organized religion, the “Repent, sinners” shout, is not only missing but has been replaced by inclusivity. The message is very much about the power of positive thinking, straight out of Norman Vincent Peale, a man my mother read religiously. We fought her cancer together for more than a decade, and it’s unlikely she’d have lived and I’d be where I am today if she hadn’t read Peale.
Positive thinking even has its own place on MayoClinic.com, which devotes a full page to it from the Mayo Clinic staff. What are the benefits? “Increased life span; lower rates of depression; lower levels of distress; greater resistance to the common cold; better psychological and physical well-being; reduced risk of death from cardiovascular disease; [and] better coping skills during hardships and times of stress.”
The staff of the famed and respected clinic write that it’s unclear why people benefit from positive thinking, but the fact is, people do.
It’s the same with meditation.
Osteen’s positive messaging is also seen on gay marriage. In an interview with Oprah Winfrey, Osteen responded to questions about gay marriage quite differently from most religious leaders, which made headlines on TheBlaze.com, Glenn Beck’s website. Osteen said, “I believe that homosexuality is shown as a sin in the scripture. Oprah, it’s a hard thing in a sense, because I’m for everybody. I’m not against anybody. I don’t think anybody’s second class.” Osteen is obviously putting scripture in the lead and not confronting gospel, because no preacher wants that fight, while continually making it clear he’s not here to judge or condemn anyone. His humility is revealed through his words, as is his humanity.
The notion that homosexuality is a sin makes no sense when you think about the creation of life itself. Homosexuality is simply how someone is born.
It’s the bright side of religiosity, and what’s most important for people, that Os-teen represents. The joy he exudes from his preaching is fundamental to his message. Osteen wants faith exploration to be a happy journey that happens right now, even in the midst of challenges or life’s perils. The size of his ministry proves its relevancy.
Osteen leaves a lot of the journey to the individual to find on her or his own. There is something profound in this message, because that’s the job of each of us that no community church or its meetings and clubs can do. Eventually, we’ve each got to answer the question of God and religion or spirituality for ourselves. At least Osteen seems to be making it a little more joyful. That he also stays well aw
ay from politics is not by accident but by design.
Most of us are curious or involved in our own personal quest to learn about the meaning and purpose of life. This question applies to our primary relationship, when we are privileged enough to create it with someone. We ask what we are going to do together. You may say start a family, which is a natural and primary motivator. However, then what?
We are living longer lives, busier lives, with more coming at us to involve us and take us away from what once was quiet family living. What else are you going to create with your partner, as well as your family and children, that binds you?
Seeing the Grand Canyon was a holy experience for me. The crowds can rob us all of a meditative moment, but nothing can deny the magnitude and majesty of what we’re seeing. A magnificent forest like Yosemite can do the same thing. The natural wonders list inside America alone is limitless, especially if you’ve enjoyed the gift of travel. That six in ten people who are religiously unaffiliated feel a deep connection with nature and the earth is telling us something profound. If only we would harness these feelings to save the planet we profess to love.
Without human judgment and morality dictated from on high by a religious hierarchy, our connection to God is only as powerful as the openness of our mind allows it to be, with the personal empowerment of individual faith exploration shifting what religion means to people and our society today.
The biggest reason this isn’t a wider topic of discussion, with modern women declaring their religious freedom and a spiritual break from organized religion that no longer serves us, is that the American media is still run by people who won’t challenge the traditional religious hierarchy, which continues to be honored in ways that never include women.
This whole trend toward lack of religious affiliation also bridges generations, again according to Pew Research: “In 2012, 21% of Gen Xers and 15% of Baby Boomers describe themselves as religiously unaffiliated, up slightly (but by statistically significant margins) from 18% and 12%, respectively, since 2007.”
If you’re thinking of marrying, with spirituality important to you or at least something you want to discuss, because having children is your intent, a conversation on the subject begins with the God factor. You can start the conversation after suggesting a walk outside, where there’s plenty of room for you both. A philosophical discussion will let you know a lot about a man. In a modern marriage, however, two people do not become one, so differences in how you both relate to spirituality shouldn’t be the end of the world, even if children are involved. Being exposed to different points of view will only make you richer.
Learning your own philosophy about religion and spirituality is a lifelong quest. It’s very personal and it doesn’t require us to be “God-fearing,” because fear has nothing to do with spirituality or God. When I think of the Old Testament, that phrase certainly has meaning to me. I visualize Michelangelo’s white man with a beard, an image that rendered me awestruck when I first saw it in the Sistine Chapel. But what I’ve come to know through meditation and the teachings of modern leaders of spirituality has made the scary, malevolent-sounding God a fictional character to me. The irony that Michelangelo got into trouble with the church for his Last Judgment fresco, which dares to suggest Jesus and others communicated directly with God, isn’t lost on me.
“We originated in a field of energy that has no boundaries,” Dr. Wayne Dyer writes in his book Inspiration. “Before entering the world of form, we were in-Spirit — a piece of God, if you will.”
In the sense that God lies within, as New Age gurus teach, this reinforces that the primary relationship of life is with yourself. This primary relationship matters most in life, because if you’re not centered on the path to your own bliss, it really doesn’t matter whom you love; at some point, you’re headed for an awakening, which could shake the foundation of your partnership.
This modern-day shift toward self-actualization and away from the church’s dominance over our lives has had a dramatic effect on relationships, most of it for the better, especially for women. Breaking free of the structural cave of organized religion has freed women to explore spirituality in a much more personal and unique way, with no guilt trips, no political agenda and no scandals to sift through that make a mockery of everything being heard. In addition, there’s zero bigotry and prejudice to overlook in the comfort of a meditative om-m-m. I do sometimes miss singing the hymns in a cathedral, and that’s why when we do go, I get such joy.
Meditating in a beautiful cathedral, well, there’s just nothing like it. When we first moved to the Washington, D.C. area, the first thing I did was get tickets for Easter service at the National Cathedral. It was packed, politicians running down the aisle to take their seat up front, where the price was higher as you got closer to the pulpit. It wasn’t the same as taking a tour in the church, when stealing a moment in a pew to just shut my eyes and connect was far more private. Wherever I travel, I always seek out the great churches, the architectural splendor still seductive to me.
Beyond our spiritual excavation, the traditionalism enforced through religious norms, which, no matter the religion, is shared across the world, remains an impediment to women’s advancement and leadership. It is also counterproductive to include it in relationship advice today, with stereotypical gender roles no longer serving women or our families.
“No matter how society changes or how many responsibilities men take on in the household, the bottom line is that everyone still expects the woman to turn a house into a home — a clean home,” Steve Harvey writes. But it’s Harvey’s follow-up that unmasks perfectly and succinctly the dilemma for women in the modern era: “Now if we’re both working and you don’t have time to keep it up, and I don’t want to keep it up…” Full. Stop. So, women can get too busy to clean the house, but men may just not want to clean it. Harvey suggests in this case that “the house simply cannot be dirty,” and that couples may need to “carve out some cash to get a housekeeper.” But what if there’s no cash to carve out of the monthly budget? After all, men don’t want to do it. Oh, if only women had that choice.
Steve Harvey, regardless of the many excellent points he makes for women to consider, represents traditional religious views on relationships. Even in his punchlines:“We’re still in a jam right now because of Eve.”
Harvey does know the story of Adam and Eve is fiction, right? I refer him to the mapping of the human genome.
Common relationship advice, including from The Rules’ authors Ellen Fein and Sherrie Schneider, adheres to a traditional path, representing people who know their fan base and cater to it, but are missing the modern era’s liberated reality. While they do speak for a certain contingent, they do not demand enough of men at a time when women are needed to take the world the next step forward and can’t do so without men stepping up.
Rigidly defined roles for men and women today are becoming obsolete, but not soon enough. Take a traditional Jewish prayer, which Betty Friedan utilizes in The Feminine Mystique. Men say: “I thank Thee, Lord, that Thou hast not created me a woman.” Women respond: “I thank Thee, Lord, that Thou has created me according to Thy will.” Perhaps we should really blame the Greeks, with Socrates and Plato supposedly believing thanks should be given openly “that I was born a human and not a beast; a man and not a woman; a Greek and not a Barbarian.”
When you stop and look beyond the United States, it becomes even more apparent what religion and culture continue to do to women, especially in countries that promote fundamentalist stereotypes. Honor killings, acid poured in the faces of girls and women trying to learn, and stoning for women who are victims of rape, all prove that fundamentalist misogyny is still rampant outside the U.S., led by countries that are guided by religious fanatics. When fourteen-year-old Malala Yousafzai of Pakistan was shot in the head and neck by the Taliban, almost dying because she dared to speak out against them and speak up for girls to be educated, the event became a battle cry for girls and women around
the world.
The message this now sixteen-year-old heroine is sending to American women, who met with President Obama in the White House, and Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace, should steel us all for the important work that is still left for us to do, because what we face pales in comparison.
Modern women are still trying to break out economically in a country that continues to support equal pay for equal work in theory, but not through laws. This unequal pay status was set up by traditional religion through the foundational societal belief that the man is the sole provider, which is still supported by traditional capitalism. However, it no longer serves our purposes. When a woman’s income matches or exceeds her husband’s there is an automatic shift in the dynamics of family. Equal pay enforcement must catch up.
If organized religion doesn’t recognize women’s leadership role in its own hierarchy, how will its leaders support the changes in the family, which include child-rearing duties and domestic chores? They won’t.
There is no way to get policies changed, from government to corporations, to support women in leadership, if our most vaunted institutions, which includes organized religion, don’t embrace the modern reality of twenty-first century living.
The independent individualism that permeates modern living now and applies to women and men offers the opportunity to live freer and fuller lives, but also more separate ones, too, which often breathe easier outside the church’s traditional strictures. Each of us is uniquely suited to finding her own codes. For more and more people, fighting against organized religion’s rules and dictates are a waste of time. The power of the church today is too entrenched, stubborn and male-dominated to allow the reforms that would bring it the new vibrancy and relevance that so many people would welcome. Change begins with opening all doors to women.