From MYSTERY WITHOUT MAGIC by Russell Pregeant
"I would judge a religion this way," the psychology professor said. "If it expands your horizons, opens you up to new possibilities, it is good; if it narrows your field of vision it is destructive." I thought of his words as I read an anecdote of Lynn Andrews in a book that recounts her experiences as an apprentice to Agnes Whistling Elk, a medicine woman of the Cree in Canada:
Agnes turned. Her face was red-brown against the green, windy day. "Lynn, what do you believe in?"
I was surprised at the abrupt question.
"What do I believe in?"
"Yes, tell me." She smiled at me with a special glint in her eyes.
"Well, I believe in being honest."
Agnes laughed softly. She placed a small rock on the earth in front of me.
"Go on, what else?"
"I believe in being good at what I do."
Giggling, Agnes placed another rock alongside the other one.
I went on to describe to her all of my important political and ethical values. By the time I had finished, there was quite a large mound of rocks.
"What does that mean?" I asked indicating the pile.
"Those rocks represent each of your beliefs...You must see that you sit on those rocks as if you were a mother hatching them. You must see that you are not free because you will never leave your nest of self-ignorance...There is your nest. You can spend the rest of your life hatching that if you want to. Those eggs will be the boundaries of your experience."
She toed the edge of the rockpile with her moccasins. "There is one egg that you would do well to hatch-- one that is in harmony with the Great Spirit. It is the sacred rock at the center of the hoop. Hatch the sacred rock and you will hatch the queen bird that rips her talons through all barriers to perception..."
She picked up one of the rocks. "This is that part of you that believes in being honest. Yet only one who has shattered the egg of truth and falsehood can be honest. You mother that egg as though it contains a precious child--you brood over counterfeit eggs. Can you throw these children away one by one?"
"No" I said "My beliefs represent who I am. They represent a kind of truth to me. How could I throw them away?"
"You better. You must realize that you are not free. Walk the sacred path and hatch the limitless egg."
Both the story of the call of Abraham and the Parable of the Talents speak about "God"...It is important now to see that the actual function of "God" in these stories is not at all to provide comfort or securit in the escapist sense but rather to encourage venturesome an courageous action. It is in fact closely parallel to the function of the Tao in philosophical Taoism. To follow "God" in this mode is not to hold tightly to unquestioned beliefs; it is more like "walking the sacred path" and "hatching the limitless egg." Far from pandering to human insecurities with the offer of a haven from the terrors of existence and far from counseling conformity, the traditions we have examined actually proclaim that there can be no ultimate guarantee about the action we take and that the search for an absolute security ends in paralysis that negates life itself...it should be evident that there are at least some forms of religious insight that are neither other-worldly escapism nor the neurotic imagination's attempt at false security. In at least some instances, religious insight directs our attention to the task of living creatively and meaningfully within the world.
One may of course ask by what right we may assume that venturesome existence is better than conformity and why the particular vision of the authentic style of life presented in these stories and sayings is better than some alternative vision...
As to why a venturesome and courageous mode of exisence should be chosen, there ultimately is no REASON that can be given. The matter remains a question of insight and intuition. There is no compelling logic and certainly no set of ovservable facts by which to authenticate the truth of such a vision. There is only the inherent appeal, or lack of it, to the human imagination.
Why embark on a journey that offers no guarantees? Why break with our present understanding of things, whether it is a conventional religious perspective, a general belief in the worth of human life, or a committed refusal to believe in anything? It makes sense to do so only to the extent that the calls to such a lifestyle touch a sensitive nerve somewhere in our awareness, somehow excite our imagination, in some way offer a sense of promise that makes the risks worthwile. Why break with a pattern of existence in which we are at least relatively comfortable? There is no reason-- unless we are, perhaps in a dim and indefinable way, uncomfortable with our comfort, limited by our beliefs, encapsulaed by our doctrine, and weary of rock-eggs. "This I was taught, this I believe." There is no refutation for this position--- only some irritating question. Do you REALLY believe what you were taught? Does it really tie together the many strands of your life and provide a genuine sense of passion for the life you live? Do your beliefs in fact open up a future to you, expand your horizons, or do they narrow your experience and bind you to the past?
"I find no reason to believe in anything." There is no way out of this paralysis apart from some kind of risk. We would all like to be able to say "Ah, yes. That is a convincing argument; the evidence is indeed overwhelming; now I can make a decision." But the person who takes this attitude has, paradoxically, the same problem as the one who says "this I was taught, this I believe". For in each case we have the conception of religious faith as some kind of absolute certainty-- as definite, hard and fase knowledge that cannot be shaken. One must, in the final analysis, choose between the stultifying comfort of neutrality-- this too, is a rock egg and one that CANNOT hatch-- and the risk of commitment that promises 'adventure'.
There is thus no 'reason' to approach life as venture-- apart from the dawning insight that all life is risk of some sort anyway and that neither the merely conventionally religious nor the uncommitted person really succeeds in avoiding life's perils; each merely forfeits the excitement of life before the buzzer even sounds. But neither is there in the call of life as venture the barrier entailed in appeals to belief in supernatural realities or events. Nor is there anything arbitrary in the appeal to venture, as such, for it is an appeal to life as we all already know it. The question is whether life, secular life, does not contain within it some beckoning toward meaning, some inkling of a sacred path, or mystery, some implicit demand that we take it with ultimate seriousness and seek its depth dimension-- even if this means abandoning the more immediately comfortable patterns of thought and action that shape our vision of the world.
To the extant, of course, that we recognize a beckoning toward meaning and find the call to break away appealing, we are also searching for something better in life. We are searching for a greater truth than we have as yet been able to find, and it is meaningful to speak of such a search as a quest for a deeper kind of security. But there is all the difference in the world between an ultimate security that is not only found but also maintained through venture and an immediate kind of security that is possessed only through the denial of risk. The truly venturesome pattern of existence is thus fully paradoxical. It accepts only that kind of security that demands no visible guarantees and holds within it the insecurity that comes with the knowledge that we cannot prove the ground upon which we stand. Yet within these limitations it issues a promise loud and clear: "seek, and you shall find" (Matthew 7:7).
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