PILGRIMS IN A STRANGE WORLD

...Religious life as a specialized mode of being is important for the secular world, I shall argue, precisely because it attempts either to renew the significance of humdrum ordinary life from sex to eating to work, or to imagine and embody a new creation when the social order becomes deadly...

...We have not felt what we mean to God, so how can we really mean him to others...

...One thinks of Malcolm X returning from his pilgrimage to Mecca...

...Nor can we afford to lament the passing of the "old church...

...In the remainder of this essay I propose to explore the worldly significance of that other-worldliness of religious life that I have called its "power base...

...The question is, what would such a mystical eroticism look like in our actual setting, and is it really practicable without sharpening immeasurably our critical appraisal of those structural alliances between business, government, the media and education which determine that it shall remain a pipe dream...

...The first phase of the ritual is the community formed from sharing a common adversity...

...Once you've seen that, even a piece of it, life is never quite the same...

...As far as I can see, that's what monasteries were about...

...One wants the real thing...

...Liminal periods summon us forth to a radical redefinition of our self-understanding, and as any shaman knows, this phase of the process is dangerous...

...What is equally clear, however, is that this Other-based identity and the communitas that flows from it will be a dead letter without those transformative experiences which have usually been designated as mystical...

...And, significantly, for our topic at hand, literature is playing an important role in the current scene...

...The world needs that...

...Isn't this what he's saying to us...

...yet he came, ready or not...

...But no second-hand, hearsay vision will suffice...

...We are too full of ourselves and all the rackety sensory overload of modern life—and have no space, no hearing for God and what he would speak and do through us...

...It is just this latter phenomenon that is creating a whole new field in psychological research, that of Transpersonal Psychology, which is little else than a raid on the mystical tradition's secret therapy...

...He had to die...

...If our Jonah Syndrome, our resistance to greatness, to love, were not so fierce...

...He came back transformed, but we didn't know what to do with him, couldn't fit him into the categories we were used to...

...Plato's distrust of the poet, combined with an Hebraic fear of idolatrous images and an interpretation of the New Testament as "otherworldly," combined to create a situation inimical to the arts...

...This was not the repressed life...

...I suspect the debate between these adversaries could use a mediating third alternative as yet missing, but there is no question in my mind but that if we intend to find the "Yes" contained in our "No," this is the right conversation to get involved in...

...In other words, it briefs us for a descent into our personal hell (what the monks called the "purgative" way), prepares us for a here and now ascent to heaven and the renewal of our cosmic connection (what ascetics spoke of as "illumination" and the "unitive" way), and finally, in traditional societies at least, reintegrates the individual into society at a new psychic and social level...

...The Heavenly Father brings forth his only-begotten Son in himself and in me...

...Augustine was wise enough to understand that the reason his people were not great lovers was not due to bad will, but to a deformation in what we would today call the subconscious—only today we need to understand, as Augustine did not, more exactly how the uncivil socio-economic order of things distorts our psyches beyond the reach of normal consciousness—at a depth which little short of a mystical experience can heal...

...But Eckhart continues...

...There are also links between ascetical detachment and the modern scientific posture of disinterested knowledge...

...For in saying the liminal phase entails a "symbolic death-rebirth," we must not kid ourselves that this is like "playing dead" in a stage play...

...Fortunately, as is the inscrutable way with the Lord of history, events came to our aid—experiences of the ghetto, Vietnam, Watergate, Chile...

...I am in God, and if the Holy Ghost does not take its being from me it does not take it from the Father either...

...And before that event," the elimination of cloister walls may spell a lethal leveling into the mass of philistine modern life, or just as bad, the individualistic career politics of academe and industry...

...On the other hand, a lost shepherd is not much help until he reorients himself...

...Others can surely touch it, evoke its movement—but I think, finally, what really awakens this truth lies beyond this world, beyond the mind of man to imagine...

...This is equally true for the virtue of chastity (the capacity to honor, committedly, the face of God in another), less clear today in the matter of celibacy, with which the vow of chastity is often confused...

...There is strong evidence, I believe, for similar appreciative openness to the possibilities within present-day theology...

...I will try, then, in what follows to throw light on my subject by casting it in the frame of a rite of passage, of which pilgrimages are one type...

...Sad too...

...Perfectly socialized and adjusted to ordinary secular life, to the status quo, religious life has lost all entitlement to its own meaning as a deliberate enactment of Christ's "sign of contradiction...

...Yet an examination of the texts of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross will tell you right away that they knew a kind of eroticism which most of us can only fantasize...

...The temptation to stop or turn back spells death...

...In part for this reason, the Gospel is unlived, or spoken halfheartedly...

...What would it avail me if I had a brother who was a rich man, and for my part I were a poor man...

...In those contexts, celibacy might well be realized as liberation for a more complete and humane eroticism...

...John Climacus, put to himself: "What is this mystery in me...

...This is the quest for one's "naked being," the jouiney to discover who one really is outside all structure...

...At the same time, this secularization of religious life has brought us closer to the people and the problem of modern society...

...No, from within there's this amazing truth in us waiting to be born...

...What is so far largely missing in the latter, however, and which one might expect communitarian religious to realize, is the implicit social critique that needs to accompany any psychological approach to contemporary problems—that, and the necessity of developing a counter-culture, an alternative institutional arrangement that grows out of a shared vision...

...The Hebrews knew something of that—and know it still...

...Why in Himself and in me...

...As a religious, it is not enough for me to mouth them, let alone simply glorify another who could say them and mean it to such extent that all these simple words were like the primordial fiat spoken at the creation...

...What is the meaning of this blending of body and soul...

...In fact, throughout the history of theology and until recently, literature and the other arts were viewed by Christianity with suspicion...

...Before the living God, as Job found out, no man can claim innocence...

...How am I constituted a friend and a foe to myself...

...And if the '60s and early '70s are any clue, ours too is one of those times, a liminal period between relatively stable social relations and cultural values...

...It is not thus...

...on the other hand, we do need to reunderstand the abiding social function of the otherworldliness that has always constituted the power-base of religious life to quite literally move men and women to dare great things—albeit some doubtful great things like St...

...I am not recommending any false harmonistic efforts, much less a whitewash...

...For something else, a shared contemplative experience is indispensable...

...to General Motors, and "community" degenerates into the camaraderie of a men's or a bridge club...

...rather, what we have learned to appreciate is new forms of the novel, forms more suited to our contemporary sensibility than the linear, individualistic search-for-identity of the "classic" 19th century novel...

...rather, appreciate is forms more rary sensibili viduaiistic s "classic" 19tl strong evidei appreciative ities within j And, signi hand, literati tant role in was not alv throughout 1 and until rei other arts we with suspicio poet, combin of idolatrous tation of the '. worldly," cor tion inimical has always b( for didactic murals on Gi temporary S amply illustra SALLIE MCFAOI School of Van ville and the Parables: A St ology (Fortresi 16 June 1978: 404 One hears cries from many corners these days that theology is dead, that the great theologians have passed and no new ones have taken their places, that theological reflection is at best "occasional" and at worst, chaotic...

...I suppose the problem goes the other way, that it is I, with my narrow conception of myself, or that tightly held ego of mine that fits so well into the slots of conventional life—it is I myself who does the shutting out...

...This underscores, I think, the contemporary relevance o\ the contemplative life as a radical effort to recover both spirit and imagination for new alternatives to the traps of businessas-usual...

...The church has always been happy to use the arts for didactic purposes, as the stone murals on Gothic cathedrals and contemporary Sunday School literature amply illustrate...

...In other words, it intends to create real individuals who stand on something other than social approval...

...At the moment, lacking any clear perception of what our resistance in the sexual sphere is really about today, in this context, it is little wonder that the supposed signvalue of celibacy registers on very few if any (of the young especially), and that new entrants assume it halfheartedly, consciously willing to be this way for reasons of the head...

...I am one with Him, and He cannot shut me out...

...And without this kind of experience, it is understandable our internal governance compares (favorably...

...Nor is George Eliot's "belief in belief" sufficient...

...The introduction of romantic love within marriage, however, a thing unheard of before the troubadors first popularized the notion (at that, outside marriage intially), changes things—or does it...

...The question for religious at this point is whether the program implicit in their renunciation of genital sex has now been achieved...

...I am thinking here, of course, of Herbert Marcuse's and Norman O. Brown's argument—and against them, those in the tradition of Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, for whom sexual repression and sublimation is the price we pay for keeping Hobbes's wolf in...

...What I have seen and experienced," he said, "has forced me to rearrange much of my thought patterns . . . and to toss aside some of my previous conclusions . . . We were truly all the same, brothers...

...Never," says James Hillman, "was the minister more truly one with his flock than when the lostness of the sheep is equaled by that of the shepherd...

...Precisely...

...What would it avail me if I had a brother who was a wise man, and I were a fool...

...We are democrats...

...Sooner or later, we must put to ourselves the question one of the original desert rats, St...

...It isn't the promised land, but it keeps you moving...

...An answer to this question will depend on what one makes of the current sexual liberation in its saner and serious forms...

...They rather set up conditions to reduce those psychic defenses that seal off "common sense" from the experience of the supernatural...

...On the other hand, when seen in historical context, for some the vows of obedience and poverty represented a way of transcending and criticizing a conventional loyalty to status quo power arrangements and the reification of people in servitude to an unjust economic system— holding out for and trying to exemplify a quality of relationship and communal equity undreamt of by either oppressed victims or their masters...

...Foolish people," says Eckhart, "deem that they should look upon God as though he stood there and they here...

...This is crucial...

...I mean that no one, after Freud, will be naive about the dangers of a crippling transferencerelation veiled in the vow of obedience...

...Yes, and you do have to be crazy, a fool, by conventional standards...

...And yet the resistance is understandable...

...I hope this will illuminate the contemplative activity which lies at the center of the thing since its inception with those crazy individuals who first ventured into the vast silences of Sinai to "see" God face to face as Moses had...

...Cultural and social barriers between us only really come down when, together, we quite literally step "out of this world" where they rule the day...

...That's why ego is not enthroned in the literature of liminality, nor is the personality...

...today, we have a further slant on the pretense that any of us have clean hands: by the very fact that none of us, by living in society, can escape the institutional sins of our fathers...

...Seeing really, behind the facades, the true faces of others, anguished and perhaps weeping now in an entirely different way that these beautiful, fragile beings so easily forget themselves...

...They are ways of deconditioning ourselves T from those habits of a lifetime that keep us small and contracted, ways of re-disposing the self for the advent of God's grace...

...The fear we feel is part of the ritual process, a necessary part, including the grief over loss of old ways and the terror of the unknown and undefined world we must enter...

...Or how awake others when we ourselves sleep...

...but if it means a lowering of that aspiration or a contraction of spirit to the pathology of everydayness, the gamble won't have been worth the price...

...I am not shut out in any way...

...Yes, it will profit little if we celebrate Christ the King while we are still serfs...

...On the one hand, decloistering, for all the identity-crisis it has provoked among religious and perhaps because of this very unmooring from traditional anchors, has probably been the principal stimulus behind the movement to recover our contemplative roots and our intellectualcritical role in church and society, both of which lie at the heart of what religious life should have to contribute to the wider community...

...What in fact is being renounced by the three vows is the absolutist tyranny of normal social differentiations over the determination of human identity and worth ("without my job, I am nobody...

...A rite of passage represents a structured way of redefining and integrating the potential individual and social disorientation and anomie that invariably accompanies a transit from one mode of being in the world to another higher mode of being...

...The editor has asked me to review new frontiers in one sector of this pilgrim church, that of religious life, the life of the so-called "counsels" of perfection which, again after Vatican II, we recognize as no longer applying exclusively to a specialized caste but to every Christian...

...Hillman takes this positively insofar as the soul-turmoil of "lostness" can beget a search for that inner, vertical pivot without which all words are cliches, all doing insubstantial, that is, insofar as disorientation compels development along the contemplative axis of selfhood...

...Theoretically, then, the council blurred the boundaries between layperson and religious, and sociologically, if we take the disappearance of distinctive clerical garb as symbol, we can assume that psychologically the hierarchical two-class division among Christians is vanishing as well...

...If the secularizing trend creates in us an exigency for this "seeing," then we may be on our way to redeeming the calculated risk of Vatican II...

...I believe this clarifies the true purport of terms such as withdrawal, detachment, and disinterest in the mystical lexicon of vowed religious...

...Creative forces are that way, like Shiva-the-Destroyer in Hindu myth...

...But let me now retrace my steps and try to recast the meaning of the vowed life in a way that I hope will clarify the thoughts I have just now so loosely strung together...

...Listen to that liminal being, Meister Eckhart...

...that leave the demons in us intact...

...Obviously it's an anti-heroics, and no one will undertake it who buys into the ruling paradigms of "scientific" reality...

...Or how can we heal if we have not ourselves been healed...

...But people do return from this experience, and greatly enhanced in stature, often enough really cherishing and loving the earth and all living creatures for their own sakes for what seems like the first time...

...If I get it right, the idea is that what was first spoken by God might eventually be spoken by humans, that in some germinal, cross-purposed way, we are the face of God in the world, and may yet speak with his voice...

...Again, in historical context, chastity and celibacy can be seen as dissents from the dominant styles of Roman and feudal culture which treated women as chattels, and procreation as a way of building a personal dynasty...

...No one, I think, will argue today for a return to the exaggerated contempt for "the world" which we have known in the past...

...It follows, he said, that if the church insists on it own vision, she must in part work against the dominant culture, recruiting to an anti-heroics...

...For all that, a clear "No" in service to a "Yes" to a future alternative is all the more demanded...

...They have recovered a new way of imagining the world, and hence a different project...

...There is enormous energy breaking ground, which if it does not find outlet in creative channels, can easily turn destructive...

...You can never forget—and remembering it is like remembering yourself, your real self...

...If religious orders have a distinctive function within the larger church and society, it is finally this: to know first hand the passage between this world and that "other" beyond the imagining of ordinary consciousness, and to give away the secret freely...

...And is that freedom as illusory as our freedom to buy at the supermarket—after we have sold our souls and bodies, to the system...

...Even the 20th century sallie mcfaoue is Dean of the Divinity School of Vanderbilt University in Nashville and the author of Speaking in Parables: A Study in Metaphor and Theology (Fortress...

...To be sure, the activists cared for soul problems which no social system can remedy, but we also did a lot of dirty work for the system, caring for those maimed and broken by it—without, till lately, seeking out the social source and causes...

...After inducting his despairing people into an actual experience of his great vision, Black Elk of the Dakota Sioux tells us simply that they were "madeover," that they were "able to see the greenness of the world, the wideness of the sacred day, and the colors of the earth...

...any way you cut it, it's borrowed luster—and the grandeur does not belong to us...

...Let her go...

...It maps out an "anti-structure" in contrast to normally structured social involvements wherein the process of death-rebirth or self-transcendence can occur under optimal conditions...

...And seeing too that there's a new work to be done, one that would never have occurred to them before...

...Extraordinary Lives Though I am not competent to do so, it is clear the history and social function of religious orders needs to be recast and reunderstood in fresh ways...

...Whether an initiatory rite that qualifies a child to join the adult world or the more lengthy and arduous pilgrimage characteristic of and in tension with complex feudal systems, such anti-structural passages embody three phases, one of separation from normal structured social existence, a transitional or "UminaT' phase in which the actor undergoes a symbolic rebirth, and finally a return to and reincorporation into society with new responsibilities there...

...Is it a spurious liberation, itself a symptom of the malaise of a post-industrial, computer society...

...Does it enthrone the genitals as the last hold-out of freedom when the rest of the body has been totally de-eroticized, made ^thing-like in the service of commercial rationality and productivity...

...John of the Cross reminds us, that real faith begins in earnest...

...I am not shut out in any way...

...Do many go willingly to death, lay down their lives freely...

...A master says, God has become man: through this all mankind is raised and exalted...

...There is no room for pentecostal highs...

...In the same act the Holy Ghost receives its being, and it arises through me as it does through God...

...It is precisely at this point, however, when we've consented to let go of our old selves and face the unknown and descending dark, St...

...Similar Cassandra-like prophecies on the death of the novel have not proven true...

...But this is exactly the trip that, according to my argument, religious are called upon to map out and lead others to...

...So much of the story has been told in terms of the lives of extraordinary individuals, and surely there is a largely unexamined link between what makes saints tick and the historical rise of individualism in the West and the value we place upon it...

...Many refuse because they've never actually met anyone who's "gone over" and come back to tell the story of the enhanced existence he or she found there...

...From what we can tell by the Gospel narratives, Jesus's audiences were no less unprepared...

...Let us rejoice that Christ our brother has ascended . . . This master has spoken well, but in truth, I do not set great store by it...

...In parallel, think of those primal, healing words in the Gospel—"I will not forget you," "No,'' "Yes," "take heart," "follow me," "stand up and walk," and God's unspeakable name itself, "I AM...

...And that is why, properly understood, ascetical disciplines work at baffling the rational mind's filter system, work at softening body-armor, work at emptying and opening the breathing...

...One hears these days t the great th< no new one: that theolog "occasional" Similar Cass the death of true...

...It cheapens the greatness of the courage here if anticipation of a happy ending glosses over the reality of a symbolic shift of this dimension...

...Symbolically, we did away with that conception with the depositions of Charles I and Louis XVI...

...Because among other reasons the orders are to such a great extent locked into serving those institutions, political and economic, which are perceived as choosing death rather than life—the very institutional set-up which induces the dis-eases and pathologies which increasing numbers of psychologists find they are impotent to cure...

...And when does a society most need this mystical inward turn...

...You remember that time out of time when you caught your own true face, your own true voice, revealing some of the glory of God...

...We want strong, primitive stuff here, and the kind of thirst for it that drove Graham Greene to Africa in order to take himself out of the anemia of British culture...

...Religious life attempts at one and the same time to link the roles of the workaday world to their paradigm in the divine creativity (thus giving the ordinary cosmic significance), and establish an identity for the human person not constructed on social status and role, or that whole network of games we learn to play to win self-esteem from the powers of this world...

...Then why haven't the young been knocking down our doors...

...There was nothing more undermining of the reason d'etre of religious life than the heady post-Vatican II enthusiasm for the wonders of the secular city—for why renounce all that if it's so good...

...Let's be clear on that score —but let's also be clear that this plunge into liminal space and time is not to be recommended for those of weak ego...

...Politics, after all, is the science of the possible—and at least occasionally monks, nuns and mendicants could respond to cynical realists that they had actually pulled off a real alternative, and thus held a mortgage on the future direction of political and economic organization...

...we want a part in the action...

...For my purposes here, it is Turner's proposition that religious orders represent examples of an attempt to institute a state of "permanent liminality" within and yet somehow outside of the norms and routines of society that throws fresh light on the creative, and not merely legitimating, function that contemplatives have had in the past and may yet have...

...For this is the stage of the ritual in which our arsenal of consciousness-raising devices come into play—fasting, rhythmic dancing and chanting, trance induction, dream interpretation, social isolation, hyperactivity, sleep deprivation, physical yoga and various forms of meditation...

...This madness requires extraordinary stability and courage—and I have spoken to any number of sensible folk who had the opportunity and refused...

...No, of course there are degrees of intensity, but the ego-death involved here should feel exactly like biological death, a crunching severance, a total abandonment into the encompassing darkness...

...The turn-about represents both gain and loss...

...In liminality, however, it is precisely this ethos of communitas which tends to characterize the relationship between those jointly experiencing the ritual transition...

...Tell me, tell me, my yokefellow, my nature, for I shall not ask anyone else in order to learn about you...

...Further, as Turner is at pains to point out, the total unmediated relationship at stake here does not submerge one into another but safeguards each's uniqueness...

...Bernard's "preaching" the crusades...

...Except, as is all too clear, the very Utopias which monasteries established were built on surpluses provided by that disordered order they implicitly criticized, just as it might be said that without the particular system in which they worked the activist orders would have had far fewer needy, poor and oppressed to minister to...

...Not that these techniques cause what a person experiences...

...Unfortunately, through formalistic misuse, many of us have forgotten or never knew how to use these methods well, or what they really meant...

...But surely now we need less hagiography, and more socio-political and psychological analysis of how these figures and their movements dissented from and in strange ways blessed their times, and were often co-opted by the powers that be...

...History tells us mystical movements occur at junctures when the public order's conventions, projects and rituals become petrified, a frustration rather than a help in the promotion of truly human interests and creative energy—in the late Roman empire, in the waning middle ages, during the 17th century...

...Such was not always the case...

...The terminology and analysis here is drawn from anthropologist Victor Turner, who in turn has drawn upon and expanded the earlier work of Arnold van Geenep...

...For Turner sees at all levels of history and society a tension, a kind of polar magnetic field, between those utilitarian objectives of a society which hold people apart, define difference in terms of occupational status and role, constrain action, and what he calls communitas, the anti-structural desire for an equalitarian, immediate and existential relationship among people which nullifies all the normal classifications upon which the social order depends...

...The story sounds vaguely familiar...

...It does not mean withdrawal from humanity but from the normal structure that divides people from each other...

...It was Ernest Becker who first made it clear to me: the principle that when a social system begins to lose credit as a medium for the heroics all of us crave, the church supporting that system will also be discredited...

...16 June 1978: 400 us at bay...

...While putting all socially structured rules in question and suggesting new possibilities for how we "get together," it is not to be confused with Durkheim's "mechanical solidarity...