Talking back to
PEACE AND JUSTICE IN THE SCRIPTURES
OF THE WORLD RELIGIONS
by Denise Lardner Carmody and John Tully Carmody
Talking back toPEACE AND JUSTICE IN THE SCRIPTURES
by Denise Lardner Carmody and John Tully Carmody |
|
I think it is a dangerous thing to say that destruction as well as creation are needed in this world. It could too facilely be used to justify every variety of outright evil.
Karma is defined in this book as "a moral law of cause and effect." I like this a lot. It means that justice is not dependent on the whim of a personal god, but is as intrinsic as...hydrogen. Of course the human wolverines could take the line that you've earned any and all misery that comes to you -- but maybe acts of compassion toward the miserable are part of their karma, too!
Moksha is the Hindu escape from the perpetual round of birth and death, sin and recompense, the ensnaring bonds of the past. This description bears a faint resemblance to the Christian idea of salvation. The way to moksha is to detach yourself from desire; the goal, to escape to the "full awareness of divine, ultimate reality," where "change and time are no more."
I'd go nuts. This description of moksha occurs on p. 18 of the book, and so early in my search I have rediscovered that I DON'T WANT TO GO TO HEAVEN AT ALL!
I can see that "The meek shall inherit the earth" is another doctrine I'm likely to carry over from Jehovah's Witnesses.
Dharma (which means both teaching and duty) is how you can achieve moksha. There are several ways to follow dharma: you can meditate; you can study, like a theologian; you can spend your life in "desireless" (selfless?) work, like a nun or a Peace Corps volunteer; or you can love God, like a Pentecostal. There is nothing abstract or calm or platonic about this love. It is "ardent, even erotic." Which explains why Harry and I have had so much fun since I began hanging out at Starr King.
It occurs to me that Starr King is probably very much a bhakti (devotional) church, despite its humanist culture, if the Sunday services are anything to go by.
You will find more blatant contradictions in the Bhagavad-Gita than we are accustomed to perceiving in the Bible (though they certainly exist there, too). The Hindu reaction to such a charge is: "So?"
The theme, or rather the "excuse" for the Bhagavad-Gita, is the Mahabharata, an epic battle of prehistoric times. So it begins by dealing with this bloody battle in prospect. War throws good and evil, freedom and oppression, and the search for God into sharp relief.
Arjuna faces the question: should he go to war? Krishna (the Krishna, but nobody knows that yet) explains that the soul is immortal and Krishna loves you, therefore you can stand anything. The soul needs purifying, precisely because it is immortal, and that's arduous work, in which Krishna will sustain the Hindu believer.
Arjuna is not comforted, apparently. Beyond mere physical fear for himself, he is appalled to the point of prostration by the horrors that will be visited on others. If this is a normal, healthy reaction, then every war is indeed an orgy of destruction, and no banalities about valor will change that. Why do people go to war? Krishna says, eventually, that he ought to do his duty as a warrior, but this goes against the Hindu grain. Hindus know as well as James that warfare springs from desire.
On reading about this puzzlement of Arjuna's, I got a glimmer of possible insight into why Hinduism teaches reincarnation.
If you truly understand how much misery and blood guilt war can bring, it boggles the mind to think of the karmic debt incurred by the participants. It might seem impossible that seventy years would be enough time to pay it off. Or that seventy years of recompense might be enough for the victims. Or, for instance, it might be beyond belief that Hitler and his cronies could have grown so murderous in the span of a single human lifetime.
Hinduism is as ambivalent about war as any modern pacifist who says to himself, "--but I would have fought Hitler." "The Gita, like the New Testament, suggests that true divinity is spiritual in the sense of too reasonable, good and creative to get dead-ended into approving people's mutual maiming."
And yet Krishna advises Arjuna to fight -- his relatives, no less -- on the grounds that that is his duty. Not slaughter per se, but defense of his country. For Arjuna, a soldier, to be a pacifist (like a priest) would panic everybody. (Say, I ought to read Karl Shapiro's "The Conscientious Objector" again.) "We are not yet at the stage [of human history] where the individual conscience has evolved sufficiently to stand up to social pressures." So Krishna pressures him to kill, coaxing him with earthly or heavenly rewards, threatening him with the wrath of the gods and the loss of his good name.
Well, in the ordinary case, this won't do.
But what if Arjuna had been an Allied soldier? Maybe there is such a thing as a holy war that can be fought with carnal weapons, the authors say, but the chances of being involved in one are not high.
The authors say Krishna's arguments have been disproved by two millennia of human history.
How does detachment, desirelessness, apply to a god like Krishna? Supposedly it merely means that he is not easy to disappoint, is slow to anger, as the God of the Bible is said to be. Now, in learning from all the world's religious traditions, we have to "leave the chaff and take the wheat," as Emerson put it. A long description of Krishna's splendor and divinity follows his short-sighted urging of Arjuna to war. Is that sufficient "wheat"?
Say, this reminds me of the vision of "Behemoth" in Sheri Tepper's book, Shadow's End.
To quote Krishna, "Demonic men do not understand either acting or turning away. In them there is no purity, or even good conduct or truth. They say the world is without reality, without foundation, without a lord, not made by one thing following another but only moved by desire."
I find this a very bewildering statement. For one thing, branding any category of people as "demonic men" seems to provide fertile ground for the religious intolerance Hinduism is famed for not having. Further, I know very few people like this. To say that the world is "without a lord" is not necessarily to say that it is without reality or foundation or moved only by selfish desire. Krishna doesn't recognize the possibility of ethical atheism or agnosticism, at least not here.
But the Carmodys make great capital out of this passage [16:7-8]. They say that "the demonic make the will to power, the desire to possess, the key to understanding politics. In Western terms, the demonic see the world much as Thomas Hobbes and Sigmund Freud did: libido, desire, is all." Well, this makes better sense, but I'm not sure how they wring it out of this verse. It sounds awfully Fundamentalist to me. They say that the demonic are connected neither to divine principles -- not to any moral principles higher than themselves -- nor connected to the realities of everyday human life, like hunger and thirst and getting old, which would humble them.
Sounds like Ollie North, who could not see anything one hair's-breadth higher than "patriotism", and who probably hasn't missed a meal in twenty years.
The Hindus apparently have as much trouble believing in the love of God as I do. But in both Hindu and Christian tradition, perception of the love of the eternal God for man is supposed to be the root of self-confidence and people's love for each other.
I've never been able to get that to work. A Catholic priest, I forget who, once wrote "The love of God will drive a man to drink." The thought of a personal god who wants into my life horrifies me -- has for at least the past year. What have I got that he wants? "You are loved by me surely," says Krishna. What on earth attracts him?
Contemplation, or meditation, is another route to moksha, and it sounds terrifying the way the Carmodys describe it. It sounds like when you make proper contact with God, you cease to exist. That's the same as death, as far as I can see.
But the authors draw a distinction between meditation (which you do with you brain) and contemplation (which you do with your heart). No wonder the Watchtower Society warns people away from it.
But when Westerners contemplate god they come back talking about being "taken outside themselves and shown the unity of all things," and it is evidently identical to the Indian mystic who thinks he is dissolving into the cosmos. The Carmodys instead compare it to a child utterly at ease in its mother's arms, asking, "What resource is better able to secure people in the mature sense of self-worth necessary for peace-making?"
Well, it is still appalling even when described this way. How can a human being survive the direct experience of the love of God? Such warmth is heat of volcanic intensity. I can't see why it wouldn't burn you to death.
Or maybe it would just transform you permanently. Maybe that's all that mystics mean when they talk about the annihilation of the soul. Tear down and rebuild. Maybe I could do that.
Gautama Buddha was apparently uninterested in developing arcane philosophy about religion: his mission was to save people, not from hell, but from hellishness. Buddhism does teach that there is "no self," but I don't know what this means. I think it means there is no soul which can be considered separately from the round of daily life -- and yet they believe in nirvana, which is practically the same as moksha. There is plenty of room for arcane speculating here, but Gautama was not interested in it, nor were the Zen Buddhists; getting to nirvana was more important (and easier to teach) than knowing what it was.
Buddha, when attaining enlightenment, vowed not to go on to nirvana but to stay in the world and aid others in the search. Now I wonder why this is, if the Carmodys are right about moksha and I have understood them correctly. I should think -- considering what contemplation is -- that achieving nirvana would provide the best possible emotional fuel for this work. Couldn't he come back once he went on? Is nirvana a kind of destruction after all?
One thing Buddha knew well: evil creeps up on you gradually. But righteousness, by contrast, is no less real or helpful just because it develops gradually.
The Carmodys do produce one phrase that illuminates the "no-self" doctrine somewhat: They describe the human substance as "the collection of 'heaps' of impressions that make up your selfless identity." Now, this sounds diametrically opposite to what little I know of Plato. Didn't he preach that human souls were among the things that existed as ideal forms in the spiritual realm? Maybe when Buddha says "no self" he only means "no soul independent of life experiences."
Many moderns have been educated out of a belief in an independent soul before they run across this doctrine, so they think that "no self" means "no mind" or "no personality."
Both evil and good can spread from one area of life to transform all others. Something about the doctrine of separatism is pulling too many Witnesses toward bigotry, possibly even against the will of many of them.
The Carmodys recommend the active seeking out of mystical experiences as the best aid to "weeding out" vices from your life; at least they say Buddhist traditions recommend it. Here's another terror for me. I've always heard Jesus' parable about the man who purged himself of one demon only to be overtaken by seven others applied in this context. If you "blank your mind," I've been told, Satan can come and fill it with lies, and probably will.
Confucius's emphasis on li (ritualistic propriety) seemed absolutely foreign to me until I recalled my own resolve not to participate in rituals I don't mean. At present this is the wall that stands between me and paganism. I'm in no hurry to breach it.
Despite their thoroughgoing de-paganizing, Jehovah's Witnesses still retain baptism, the Memorial emblems and the prohibition on blood transfusions as expressions of li.
In the past they have sometimes gone too far (some of them) in de-sacralizing the Memorial emblems, though -- in the process of debunking the transubstantiation doctrine -- which has sometimes made it hard for me to appreciate the significance of the rite.
(There is more to this book, but it all has to deal with Islam and the Judeo-Christian traditions, to which I am currently still unsympathetic, so I did not read these sections deeply enough to be able to write about them. I extend my apologies to any who are offended by this fact. It may wear off.)
Return to BooklistNo hurry: This was posted in December 1995; it is now March 1996, and I am beginning to view paganism more positively; the myths of the older religions strike me as richer and psychologically truer than the Christian ones. I celebrated my first Christmas in 23 years a couple of weeks after posting this piece. It was by and large a satisfying experience -- not just because I renewed family ties, but because of the pagan symbolism involved.
Memorial: the name Jehovah's Witnesses use for "The Lord's Supper", their version of the communion service, which is held annually on the anniversary of Jesus Christ's death as figured by the Jewish lunar calendar...or so I was always told. I have no idea whether anybody's interpretation of Bible chronology can be trusted at all, actually.