I graduated from Vanderbilt University's Divinity School, Summer 2007, with a Master's degree in Theological Studies. Although my spiritual understanding draws on a number of different religious traditions, I have enjoyed engaging the Christian doctrines and perspectives, and developing my personal theology within this framework. Below are some of my writings from the program.
Kenneth Robinson
Christian Constructive Theology
December 11, 2006
The Divine Breath
The purpose of this paper is to present my understanding of the tasks and methods of Christian theology and to present my efforts toward constructing a coherent Christian theology that addresses the doctrines of God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit, as well as doctrines of creation, redemption, humanity, eschatology, and the church. To do so, I will rely on the image of the breath to unite my understanding of these doctrines. I see breath as a powerful metaphor for the workings of the Divine because of its life-giving nature and because breath gives evidence of the presence of life. Air is necessary to all living beings and thus it connects us all. In our interdependence with the plant world, humans and other animals offer our out-breath to the trees and grasses while in return receiving their offering with our in-breath. Breath has flow, rhythm and pulsation that is suggestive of Meeks’ notion of the jazz trio and the Cappadocian view of the Holy Trinity as a divine dance (perichoresis). Awareness of breath returns us to our sense of ourselves as embodied creatures. This is central to our spiritual well-being in light of the reality that we have become farther removed from our connection to our bodies with each successive technological revolution. Breath, like spiritedness, is both invisible and essential to humans, and we recognize it through its movement. Full, relaxed and mindful breath opens us, sensitizes us and connects us empathically to the world, and charges our bodies for action. Finally, matters related to breath are especially relevant in this age when our very existence is threatened by the pollution of our air and the warming of our planet due to greenhouse gases.
The Nature and Tasks of Christian Theology
As I see it, the purpose of theology is to map out a means by which humans may find the freedom necessary to do what love desires. To be free, we must understand, as much as is humanly possible, the nature of love, and how love works to free us for its pleasure. We are enslaved because we are, through various means and by varying degrees, frozen by fear, and thus limited in our capacity to love. The fear that arises by nature of our experience as vulnerable human beings subject to pain and suffering, in need of deep and ongoing connection, and destined for a physical death becomes crystallized not only as physical and emotional frozenness but also as institutional heartlessness when we fail to recognize the presence and the effects of unclaimed fear. Communally we become a people willing to divide ourselves through an “us vs. them” mentality that is expressed and maintained through our institutions. This “institutional sin” makes it very difficult to recognize the ways in which we have abandoned our free and ecstatic hearts, and at the same time, makes it exceedingly difficult to effect a communal return to heartfulness. Christian theology’s purpose is to examine and criticize the beliefs and practices of the Church in terms of the Church’s faithfulness to the Christian mission—liberating ourselves and all of creation for participation in God’s loving community. As Racine asserts, “All Christians who participate in the proclamation and practice of their faith must at some point examine the ways in which their sets of beliefs and their actions are accountable to Scripture and to the community of faith” (Position paper, 8/31/06),
Christian theology is founded in the church, in the narrative of God in the history of Israel, in the narrative of Jesus, and in God’s promise of a new creation. It is a conversation between the scriptures, the Christian tradition, the beliefs and practices of the Church, and theologians (published or otherwise) both within and outside the faith. The conversation begins with my affirmation that neither I nor anyone else has a monopoly on the truth. Our perceptions and our understandings emerge from and remain linked to our context and social location. As a white, North American, working class male raised in rural Tennessee in the Protestant Christian tradition, I am a member of an oppressor group. Currently, as the bloodletting continues in Iraq due to the imperialism of the United States government (and the blindness born of institutional sin in much of its citizenry), I am acutely aware of that membership and the shame that accompanies it. I am a beneficiary of the exploits of the American empire. And although I have not known the hopelessness of long-term poverty, as a child in a family of very modest means I have felt the effects of being unable to impact political decision-making or to exercise economic influence. In this theological reflection, I focus on the liberation of the oppressor group. I feel that it is necessary for the members of the oppressor group to break free of their imbeddedness in institutional sin and awaken to the needs of the poor for “the reign of God’s righteousness” to come fully into being.
Because theology can be understood as “God-talk,” it is necessary to consider how we know what we claim to know about God. Knowledge of God is described as available either through natural knowledge or revelation. Natural knowledge of God is gained through the study of nature and the application of human reason. The traditional proofs of God (ontological, cosmological, teleological, and moral arguments) attempt to develop rational arguments for the existence of God but cannot bring us knowledge of God. Revelation, on the other hand, is “communion with God” (Meeks, 9/14/06). Rather than trying to determine what God is, revelation is concerned with who God is. Our knowledge of God’s identity requires engagement both with the “story” of God as revealed in the scriptures, and with our own contemplative life. The insights that have emerged from my own ecstatic experiences (and from my study of the scriptures through the lens of Buddhism and psychology) shape most of what I hold to be true about the Divine. “To date, the discoveries I have made while in ecstatic states have been overpowering affirmations of my worth and acceptability, my connection to other creatures and the natural world, the blessedness of my body, and power I could not have attributed to love from reason alone” (Robinson, 9/13/06).
Doctrine of God
Who is God? When we speak of God, to which God are we referring? If one thinks, as I do, that God is love, then how are we to understand love’s action? Meeks has asserted throughout this course that our entire theology rests on how we answer the question of God’s identity. All that we expect to happen is founded on our perception of who God is and what we perceive to be God’s actions in human history. Christian tradition has long expressed the nature of God in terms of the Holy Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Theologians have grappled with this model for centuries in their efforts to determine the relationships between these three persons who make up the Triune God. While some of these models of the Trinity have imagined a hierarchal relationship in which Jesus and the Holy Spirit are subordinate to the Father God, the perichoresis of the subjects of the Trinity put forth by the Cappadocians of the fourth century emphasizes flow, improvisation, equality, and interpentration. This approach addresses some of the problems created by a vision of a God who rules through force, control, and domination, but it does not provide the necessary corrective to ensure that the feminine is in an equal and intimate relationship with the masculine. Yet because of the Trinity’s foundation in the scriptures and the tradition of the church, I do not think that we can easily dismiss it as we attempt to conceptualize the Christian God. While there is “no imagery that can fully reflect who God is, the doctrines’ exclusion of the feminine (the attribution of feminine status to the Holy Spirit notwithstanding) is a serious weakness and supports a patriarchal tradition that is harmful both to women and to men” (Robinson, 9/28/06). Meeks has attempted to address this failing by referring to the tradition’s “Father” as the “Father/Mother.” This is helpful, yet it is possible, and I think necessary, to go further. The notion of God as Father/Mother, and thus as creator and protector, must be expanded to emphasize these masculine and feminine aspects in their relationship as lovers. Hindu gods are represented in their male and female dimensions as physically entwined and making love. This age calls for a Christian God who likewise can be seen through the lens of the sexual. It is evident (especially in the U.S.) that through our history, the church has often been the author of, or a contributor to, a profound condemnation and repression of our sexuality. This has done much to damage our capacity both to accept our bodies and receive the Divine through our bodies. It has deprived us of the freedom to open fully to our sexuality and discover the deep insights that embodied love offers. It has made us wary of embodied pleasures and the ecstasy that may accompany mindful, open, surrendered sexuality. The pathway afforded by sexual intimacy that would allow us to receive the Holy Spirit has often been closed to us. Restoring the sexual aspect to the Trinity would be a step toward a remedy.
A course correction that empowers the feminine is absolutely crucial to the well-being of the church and the world. This emphasis on sexual love contributes to that empowerment. Also it strengthens the overall vision put forth by Meeks of the Trinity as interdependent persons relating in mutual love. For these reasons I prefer to re-envision the Trinity as Lover—Beloved—Loving. This model’s emphasis on mutuality and relationality makes sense in terms of how we are to relate to one another as well as to ourselves. If we are to become whole we must, as individuals and as a community, find ways to embrace all aspects of our humanity so that we may no longer be tempted to hide from our humanness. For when we do, these aspects become shadows that we deny and project onto others. The result is more divisiveness and alienation.
Meeks speaks of the doctrine of mutual co-inherence in which “the persons of the Trinity never work alone. The work of one person is done through the presence of the others. Each person (Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier) acts in concert with the others” (9/26/06). So it is with Lover—Beloved—Loving. There is no Lover without Loving and the Beloved; no Beloved without Lover and Loving; no Loving absent Lover and Beloved. All are contained in one, yet there remains a sense of identity for each. There is no effort by one to act forcefully against the others. Breath is natural and effortless unless there is illness or trauma. It is an expression of aliveness and its nature is flow. There is, at once, the one who breathes, the breath itself, and breathing. Just as to be alive is to breathe, God (Love) has no choice but to love. God does not decide. John B. Cobb Jr. argues, “One of the craziest of inherited ideas about God is that, for any reality to be considered God it must have all the power” (Placher, 63,). Love can do only that which is love’s nature—adore, give, forgive, receive, flow, nourish, illuminate, attract, charm, bless, create and unite. Love has incredible power through attraction, but is not capable of force. God can only bring down or shatter or break in order to bring about wholeness. If an act serves only to do bring about death, it cannot be God’s action. God is the source of breath—the one who gives life and who breathes life into creation. There are many ancient religious traditions (especially in the East) that call for contemplation of breath in order to discover our source, our nature, and our freedom. When we become intimate with our breath and remove the constraints on our breath, we may feel fear but fear can no longer hold us or bind us. Instead, we are bound to love’s desire. And we know best what love desires when we are living an ecstatic life—bound by the bliss of existence.
The Person and Work of Jesus
We know almost nothing about the historical Jesus, and the accounts of Jesus in the Gospels are, according to Meeks, “thoroughly theological” (Lecture, 10/5/06). But we cannot construct a Christian theology unless we hold the person and works of Jesus central to our understanding. As Christians, what we know of the actions of God through history, we know through God’s relationship with Israel and through the person and teachings of Jesus. Placher identifies Jesus through the Gospel record as Jewish man who lived a life of poverty, identified with the poor and oppressed, whose central teaching was the “kingdom of God” (Placher, 186-7). And although Jesus is located as a Jew and a man at the time of the Roman Empire, he transcended his culture in many ways as he radicalized Jewish teachings and embodied many aspects of humanness that we might think of as feminine. It is, at least in part, by studying the life and teachings of Jesus as portrayed in the scriptures that we find a Christian blueprint for ecstasy and freedom.
Although I feel apologetic for my Arian leanings regarding the person of Christ, I see Jesus as no more God than we ourselves are capable of being. I am too much a product of post-Enlightenment individualism to subscribe to a notion of Anselmian satisfaction or any of the Christian tradition’s substitution theories in understanding the redeeming power of Christ. For me, Jesus the extraordinary human, reached the pinnacle of human achievement through both great effort and grace, freeing himself from the bindings of institutional sin. He has not been the only human to achieve this magnificent feat, but he accomplished what few have. Jesus and these blessed few have revealed the power and glory of freedom and have introduced a contagion to which we may, if we are lucky, fall victim. The myth of Jesus describes a spirit that is aliveness that humans achieve at great price. Jesus is a bodhisattva—one who has gained his freedom in love, and because of love’s nature, is compelled to work and live in a way that brings to others the rewards of the spirit. Freedom (i.e. salvation), by my estimation, is not gained only through following the particular human Jesus of whom the Gospels speak, but through contact with the spirit of Jesus as Christ the liberated. Jesus arrived as a human with seeds of divinity, as do we. But as the narrative of Jesus’ life and works reveals, he paid the enormous price that comes with total immersion in Love. Jesus was willing to sacrifice reputation, security, and life in order to confront the evils of institutional sin. According to Van Dyk, Jesus was able to satisfy God by his obedient life and his willingness to drink the cup of death as an inevitable consequence of that obedience” (Placher 216). I do not think, as my friend Nicole Lemon argues, that Jesus’ death was necessarily a suicide, but I think Jesus, living true to his ecstatic existence, could not help but speak against the forces of coercion and enslavement, and the consequence was execution. It is this willingness to live according to Love’s desires that comes through life in the Spirit.
I will add that there is one sense in which I do subscribe to the notion of a substitutionary “death” of Jesus. Jesus on the Cross receives a full measure of the projected suffering of the world without resorting to revenge. He faces the violence of the world with innocence and vulnerability as a “Lamb of God.” He is unwilling to pass on the pain that is inflicted on him. Instead, through his forgiveness, the “evil” dies with him. In a less dramatic way, anytime a victim of violence or oppression refuses to respond with vengeance, that person “dies” for the sins of others. Allowing the projected pain to be transformed within our own hearts is in essence a dying of our conventional sense of self and a freeing of others from that strand of vengeance.
The dying I am describing here is, it seems to me, something that Jesus practiced continually. He lived in close contact with death throughout his life: as a child endangered by Herod’s command, as one who prayed alone in the wilderness, as one watched and threatened by state and religious authorities over the course of his ministry, and as the one who raised Lazarus from the dead. His ecstatic life brought him into intimate relationship with death. In this way, I suspect that Jesus experienced his Resurrection before he experienced his Crucifixion. Moltmann argues “There is eternal life before death {italics mine}. We do not experience it in terms of its length, as a life without end. We experience it in terms of its depth” (137).
According to Jensen, “Jesus to be sure, has died and therefore even as risen can now be invoked or addressed only as an inhabitant of that future beyond death into which he is risen. Therefore, he is available to our addresses from within this present age only in the special way called sacramental. What we can see or touch or hear is never something that sounds or looks like Jesus; it is always some other human reading Scripture or preaching or otherwise speaking the gospel claim, or is a loaf and cup or a basin of water, or hands making the sign of a cross, or an icon of Mary with her son, or any of the church’s multitude of signs of Christ’s presence. But it the gospel claim of his resurrection is true, when we encounter these things we do indeed meet the living human person Jesus.” (Placher, 202)
Jensen goes on to say that notions of Jesus’ “divine nature” or “human nature” are labels for communities to which Jesus belongs (Placher, 202). These are, I think, communities to which we all belong and which we can realize and embody with the aid of a bodhisattva such as Jesus.
The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit
“The person of the Holy Spirit is the most neglected of the persons of the Trinity. Without the Holy Spirit, the Trinity lacks breath. And breath connects us to life, to our bodies, to our sexuality, and to the other persons of the Trinity. Open full breath awakens our senses and makes God visible in the ordinary. The flow of breath allows us to bear fear without violence or denial or withdrawal, and frees us from the tyranny of fear” (Robinson, 10/19/06).
It is with the Holy Spirit of course that my guiding image of the breath is most relevant. According to Meeks, one name for the Holy Spirit is the “Lord of Life,” and he describes it as the “power for life” (Lecture, 10/24/06). The Spirit is associated with wind, and movement, and vital energy. Meeks identifies the Spirit as making it possible for all of us to “meet at the mystical” (Lecture, 10/24/06). And in the mystic, we find not only other human beings, but also the other forms of life with whom we share this planet. In the mystic, our connection to earth, sky, stars, wind, animals, plant-life and sea go far beyond and intellectual understanding of interrelatedness. Here we are able to know ourselves as part of the matrix of life and can develop deep extra-human friendships.
My experience in offering breath practices in my healing work supports these descriptions. I find that it is often enough simply to encourage a person to slow down, breathe fully, and witness their body in order for them to begin to experience a shift in consciousness that takes them beyond ordinary modes of thought. Oftentimes even this mild intervention will make the person aware of fear and tension, or it will evoke strong feelings of grief or sadness or longing. More intense practices, under the guidance of an experienced healer, can bring forth powerful emotions such as hate, rage, terror, joy or awe. The person’s experience may range from a deep sense of belonging to the pain of profound abandonment. If they are allowed to feel and express these emotions in a safe environment, what often follows is a deep sense of release and connectedness accompanied by states of ecstasy and bliss—the presence of the Holy Spirit. This is of course not the only way one may encounter the Spirit, but it is one of the ways to invite its presence. Holy Spirit cannot be forced or manipulated, but it can be welcomed through such means as meditative practices, prayer, mindful movement, dance, and encounter with the natural world. I think Holy Spirit receives little attention in most churches because, within Christianity, we have grown fearful and distrustful of our bodies. We have come to see the body as associated with sin, while the mind is considered safer, purer and more trustworthy in seeking the Divine. In actuality, cloistering ourselves in the mind alone, we are separated from the wildness and spontaneity and courage that enlivens us to serve God’s purposes for all of creation. Dichotomizing mind and body only serves to alienate us from ourselves. God remains hidden from us while God dwells unnoticed in obvious places—our physical beings and our natural environment. Without an experience of the Holy Spirit, we lack any sense of inner authority by which we may witness and serve God. We are left with only our intellects to guide us in our attempts to understand the scriptures, or we rely solely on the authority of others and their interpretations and teachings about the Divine. It is our connection to Holy Spirit that is by its nature free, untamed, and untamable, that we feel our deep longing to free ourselves fully from institutions that would enslave us. And this longing sends us forward not only to claim freedom for ourselves but also to liberate others. It is the ecstasy of the Holy Spirit that makes it possible for us to face death and the hell realms created by crystallized fear. It is in the mystical realms, where Spirit leads us, that we experience a sense of union even as we acknowledge and accept our differences.
The Doctrine of Creation
Meeks asserts that the doctrine of creation has three dimensions—the original, the continuing, and the new creation—and argues that creation and redemption should not be separated (Lectures, 10/24 and 10/26). To imagine the original and the new creation, I draw upon the continuing creation to which I am witness. “God creates by speaking,” argues Meeks. “God creates by luring and inviting” (Lecture, 10/26). I think of God breathing life into things. I remember the fetishes (small carved animals) from Native American tradition that serve as spiritual allies or sources of power. One rubs them against one’s heart and then blows on them to bring them into being. The poet David Whyte gives suggestions for writing that include remaining still in nature and watching something—the river, a leaf, the sky—until one absolutely must write. I imagine God working in these ways—loving things into being. I believe there have been times in my healing work, when I have loved someone into her experience of her existence. I know there are beloveds who have done that for me.
“Empathy is God’s power for life” (Meeks, 10/26). If we breathe and open ourselves to the natural world and feel our empathic connection to creation, we cannot continue to enslave the plants and animals only for our purposes. God’s power is to be with the other and that involves risk. When we are genuinely with the other, we are affected; we are at risk of being changed—of becoming other than we thought ourselves to be. If the one we love is in hell, we cannot keep our distance. We cannot stand outside hell and save them; We must enter hell without knowing with certainty what the outcome will be.
Creativity involves the unknown. Love creates through a cycle of life and growth—first connecting, then joining, then staying with, and finally reaching fulfillment and ending. When we rely exclusively on our will and attempt to force creation into meeting our expectations, we create something false and weak. I suspect evil comes when we try to do something on our own without empathic connection to the people and the world around us. When Meeks says, “evil always eventually destroys itself” (Lecture, 10/26), I take that to mean that nothing can be sustained that attempts to separate itself from the rest of existence. This is where we find ourselves now in relation to our planet. We have become parasitic, and unless we redeem ourselves by awakening to the reality that humanity and the natural world are interdependent, our doom is sealed.
Humans seem to label as evil things perceived as threatening our existence—including natural disaster. Human evil lies in the extremes of frozen fear, numbness, and disconnection. We cannot receive what we need when we are numbed to our needs, and often that numbness comes about when we are insulated by material wealth and privilege. Humans become what Buddhists call “hungry ghosts”—beings who take and take but cannot be filled. Again, it is the breath that can rescue us if we will allow it. Mindful breath discloses our fears and offers aliveness in its place. As we discover the power in creating as God creates, we cannot but hope for a New Creation where love melts the will of the frightened.
The Doctrine of Redemption
In order to participate in the New Creation promised in the Gospels, we must recognize how we are enslaved and how we can be freed. For the poor, who are enslaved by the lack of essentials such as food, health care, access to opportunity and political power, salvation (from a Christian standpoint) comes through the Gospel message of God’s bond with the poor. The scriptures repeatedly give witness to a God who is sympathetic to the oppressed and desires their liberation. Redemption comes through empowerment founded in God’s love. And it comes through release from self-blame as the oppressed recognize that their condition is not simply because of their own failings, but is fostered by institutions that reject God’s plan for humanity.
The oppressors must be redeemed from their numbness, blindness, and shame. Those who have what they need for their economic and social well-being must become aware of the institutional protections that shield them from their collusion in the exploitation and abuse of the poor. Institutional sin and its effects are revealed in racism and ethnocentrism, sexism, poverty, homophobia, environmental degradation, and a persistent belief that security can be achieved through material accumulation, economic and political oppression, and war. According to Jones “sin is passed on to me through my commerce with the world in which I live. In this sense, sin is something I inherit; it is given to me by virtue of my relationship to an expansive environment of relations shot through with unfaithful modes of being…In its collective pride, humanity constructs institutions—forms of government , economic systems, and structures of domestic life—that seek to take the place of God in our lives, to control and dominate not only whole groups of people but the environment as well” (Placher, 151-2).
Atonement from these sins begins with awakening to the reality that even if we strive to live a moral life through our personal choices, it is insufficient to bring about “the reign of God’s righteousness. We must also work to transform the institutions that maintain a culture of separation, disconnection, and death. The Crucifixion not only exposes the forces that legitimate and sustain a culture of necrophilia but also reveals the reach of God’s forgiveness.
At the personal level, we must become conscious of how the sins concealed within our institutions (e.g. objectification, competition, slavery) have also entered our very being. The unholy demands and legitimations of corrupt institutions are expressed in our bodies and our identities. Deeply held fears are present in the organization of our muscles, nerves, and bone. The free breath that would resensitize us to ourselves and our world is bound up by this tension. In part, our personalities are comprised of our justifications and denials of cruel realities that would otherwise shatter our hearts. It is this breaking of our hearts that is necessary for Holy Spirit to enter us, transform us, and guide us in creative action to bring all of creation into full participation in God’s righteousness.
Doctrine of Humanity
Who are we as humans? We are creatures who love, and long to be loved, and who are destined to experience a physical death. We live in an environment that includes others, both human and nonhuman, whom we perceive as different from ourselves. Our bodies and our psyches are subject to hurt and trauma and damage and we deny, fear, and often resent or reject our needs and our inherent vulnerability. For this reason, we many times rely on force of will in an attempt to gain control and avoid our needs and our relatedness. In our creation myth, we were expelled from the garden because of our efforts to gain autonomy and remove ourselves from relationship with God. Love does not wish this for us. Migliore argues, “We are created for life in community with others, to exist in relationships of mutual fidelity and mutual freedom in fellowship” (145). We are called to relate to the rest of creation in the same way that God relates (and as the Trinity expresses itself)—in communion.
The scriptures and the Christian tradition view humans as sinners. Meeks describes sin as “the refusal to accept grace” (Lecture, 11/7/06). We deaden ourselves when we identify ourselves as a self-contained “I” that does not need the grace of God. We become trapped in a cycle in which we attempt to take matters into our own hands, fail to gain the security that we sought, and then feel ashamed and unworthy to ask for or receive help. We perpetuate the cycle through addictions that fail to address our core need for connection—drugs, over-consumption and hoarding, and military escalation. We objectify and violate others because we ourselves become objects. Our unconscious fears are projected onto and imbedded within the social, economic, and political structures that we create, and in turn, these structures play a part in forming the physical and psychic make-up of each succeeding generation. As Cone explains, “ideas can be a distortion of reality not only because of the subjective or psychological wishes of the thinker, but because the social a priori, form which this thinking emerges, is blind to certain aspects of the truth” (84).
But the scriptures also view humans as redeemed. God’s nature is to forgive and grace is pre-eminent. Our primary task is one of opening to receive grace. This work is physical, emotional, and spiritual. We must return to an awareness of our bodies through breath so that we may recognize the ways in which we are constructing barriers to God’s grace. We must come to accept our humanness as fundamentally good and to experience ourselves as beloveds. In my healing work, I have found that much of what is needed for one to experience a sense of wholeness is a reclaiming of our dignity as humans. It is not by denying or concealing our vulnerability and need that we are saved, but by realizing the triumph of embracing our dependency on God and on community, and fully entering into the beauty of our co-creating.
Eschatology
“Resurrection is not a consoling opium, soothing us with the promise of a better world in the hereafter. It is the energy for a rebirth of this life. The hope doesn’t point to another world. It is focused on the redemption of this one. In the Spirit, resurrection is not merely expected. It is already experienced. Resurrection happens every day” (Moltmann, 81)
The promise of the New Creation in Christian theology is bound up both with notions of the original creation and ongoing creation. Understanding the nature of God through the framework of the Trinity reveals that God’s desire for humanity throughout history is that all creation be joined in loving community. Resurrection for humanity is freeing humanity to realize itself in community. We experience the fullness of the gift of our humanness and the liberating reality of our communal essence through the Holy Spirit. Christians expect a resurrection of the body—retention of our identities through some form of “spirit body.” When we experience the ecstasy of the Holy Spirit, we receive a glimmer of that reality. In ecstasy, we retain a sense of who we are, but without the grasping or clutching of our selfhood. Our experience of ourselves is less solid, less fixed, more expansive—an interweaving of ourselves with others and with creation itself. Some Peruvian shamans describe it as “perceiving the filaments.”
The paradox is that it is our sinfulness that provides the doorway by which the Holy Spirit enters. In order to experience the kingdom of heaven, we need only bring the light of awareness to the aspects of ourselves that we have heretofore banished from consciousness. These are places where we have abandoned the ongoing creative process-places where we have tried to immobilize the moment in order to preserve it. Our obsession with control and security deprives us of the safety of communal love. When we allow the grace of the Holy Spirit to reach our sinfulness and our deadening isolation, we are resurrected in bliss. The heaven that is a reflection of the Triune God appears to us as we remain in the flow of breath and change and continual becoming.
What is most traumatizing about the tragedies we experience is not so much the pain or loss, but the betrayal we feel when we are abandoned in our suffering. Injury suffered in isolation sets in motion the cycle of revenge. Loving community is medicine for these traumas. According to Meeks, “as we love others, we participate in God’s eternity now” (Lecture, 11/27). Yet the tension remains between our experiences of God’s kingdom in the present and our longing for redemption for all of creation. It is beautifully expressed by our Buddhist brothers and sisters in the Bodhisattva Vow: “Sentient beings are numberless. I vow to save them all.” No logical argument can be made for believing the Christian God’s promise that we will all be reconciled. The chances of the world we know in conventional reality being freed from rule by violence and force are a million to one. So what? It is the promise of love. Whether or not it is achieved does not rest in our hands, though our greatest joy is to work tirelessly toward its realization.
The Doctrine of the Church
“The essential task of the Church (i.e. the community of believers) is to provide the means for the power of the raw energy of empathy to be contained and channeled. To practice, in an ongoing way, the mercies of “giving, forgiving, hospitality, and sending” (Meeks, 8/29/06) requires the support of a community that can hold us and heal us as we face our own inner doubts, our own sense of unworthiness, and all the ways by which we resist the power of God to guide us. The community is most effective when it supports its members in opening their hearts and allowing the Holy Spirit to enter” (Robinson, 10/5/06).
The mystical and mission elements of the Church are mutually dependent and support each other in bringing about “the reign of God’s righteousness. I see Christian liberation theology as a powerful and insightful understanding of the Christian mission. The special relationship of Jesus and the God of Israel to the poor, and the importance of the liberation of the poor from the enslavements of hunger, despair, and lack of access to political power, education and opportunity cannot be overemphasized. The human community has the means and the resources to see to it that the world’s disadvantaged are fed, empowered, and provided with medical care and other necessities that can free them from hopelessness and profound insecurity. We who possess access to the greatest share of the world’s resources, and with the material means for freeing the poor, have failed to transform ourselves or our societies to the point that our collective will is focused on liberation for all. Because of this, we privileged collectively remain spiritually poor. All must grow in spirit, while the poor must be strengthened economically and politically. There is food for the table (to use Meeks’ image for Christian theology) but there must be spiritual transformation for all to be invited and for all to eat. Bread is essential to our humanity. Deprived of bread, we lose heart, and as hunger deepens, many may lose signs of their humanity. But food will not reach our brothers and sisters unless our institutions (our systems of relating) are inspired by love. We must be transformed through love to create systems that deliver bread and the means to produce it. We will not find the will to see that all are fed until we experience love and become obedient to it. Recently I was at a progressive political meeting in which we were each asked to share what influences in our lives had led us to become politically engaged on behalf of the disadvantaged. One young African-American woman spoke up: “I am here because I have been loved.”
Antwerp 2004
Kenneth Robinson
Field Education
November 26, 2006
The Healer as Artist
Because I hold the artist in such high esteem, I am uneasy in claiming the artist as the guiding image in my healing work. Yet, this is how I think of my participation in the transformational process and it is also my greatest aspiration. In announcements for the weekend retreats which I lead, I offer this description of my intention:
In our work, we are continually creating new forms
that help bring us to a state of yogic steadiness, alertness, and lightness.
Our work is an art form. It is not art that can be viewed in public,
but it is an art form nonetheless—an improvisation and a collaboration
between teacher and participant that reveals and expresses the beauty
of pursuing a life lived with passion, compassion and presence.
I approach each retreat, private consultation, and training event as performance art. By calling my actions a performance, I do not mean to suggest that I am focused on myself to the exclusion of the needs of those who come to me for healing. What I am saying is quite the opposite—in these settings I am attempting to be fully present, mindful, and engaged in an effort to bring grace and beauty to the healing moment. In fact, I often find that it is grace and beauty that bring about healing. I can think of nothing more respectful of the wounds and longings of my clients than the notion that from their wounds art and beauty will emerge. It is here, in contact with the client’s woundedness (and my own), where the stakes are highest, not only in terms of the experience of deep pain, but also in the potential for psychological and spiritual transformation, that the dignity of the aethestic is needed most.
Many times, I construct my workshops around a poem or the writings of a spiritual teacher. I present these themes at the opening of the retreat, and then ask participants to share the needs that brought them to the workshop. As the retreat progresses, I incorporate the stated needs of the participants with my own vision for the group and develop rituals on the spot to further these ends. In this way, the group is shaped through a collaboration between group members, my assistants, and myself. The rituals become a channel both for honoring and fulfilling the clients’ intentions. For example, on one occasion, we constructed an “altar of broken things,” in which group members brought a broken object that represented some aspect of themselves that they experienced as “broken.” In the process of naming and honoring and being witnessed by others, in many cases a mending occurred. And part of that mending was the simple beauty of the altar itself.
I have gained at least as much insight into psychological and spiritual dynamics by reading poetry and novels, engaging with visual art, reflecting on theatrical productions and film, and listening to music as I have from studying psychology texts and theological discourse. The playwright and director David Mamet’s reflections on acting (and their application to daily life) have been especially inspiring to me.
“You are going to bring your unpreparedness, your insecurities, your insufficiency, to the stage whatever you do. When you step onstage, they come with you. Go onstage and act in spite of them. Nothing you do can conceal them. Nor should they be concealed. There is nothing ignoble about honest sweat, you don’t have to drench it in cheap scent. And when you go onstage determined to act, that is, to get what you came for, and not to be denied, you can come offstage at peace.” (Mamet, True and False, 119)
Likewise my own attempts to create through musical, poetic, and dramatic art forms have done much to deepen my understanding of the healing process. Through these efforts, I experience the anxiety and awkwardness of beginning, the excitement and distress of living with the unknown, the frustration and doubt in waiting, the grief that comes with the dying of who I thought I was, and the joys of finding something new and alive within me. Through the creative process, I grow in my appreciation for what it is to be human, and I believe I bring that appreciation to my healing work.
“Human limits can’t be transcended. They can only be fully inhabited; the art of living is to fill a circumscribed space completely” (Maisel, Affirmations for Artists, 56).
In my work, I communicate to participants that all feelings are acceptable, and that all feelings can be brought into the creative process. Likewise, all dualities are allowed. Many times we have feelings or needs that are at odds with one another, and by using methods derived from Gestalt psychology, I encourage clients to physically enact these conflicting emotions using what is called “polarity work.” In what amounts to “healing theatre,” clients are free to fully embody one need, and then the other. One of the ways to invite transformation (and the power of the Holy Spirit) is through the practice of “being total.” We are often halting and uncommitted in our expression of ourselves and fail to draw on and experience our full power. Like a theatre director, I engage the actors in an effort to call out the full intensity and expression of the emotion or need or resistance or refusal and thereby bring the participant into contact with forces in themselves that they had previously repressed, avoided, or never known. For example, I might ask a client to first express their deep love for a friend, and then, moving to a different place in the room, express the intensity of their anger toward that same friend. Dramatic enactments such as this allow the person to reclaim hidden parts of themselves and make choices based on awareness rather than unconsciously repressed emotion.
One of the key elements in allowing the creative process to unfold is the creation of a safe environment so that people can discover more of who they are, and who they can be. By “holding a space” that attends both to the participants physical safety and to their emotional well-being (i.e. accepting their emotional experience without judgment), clients are able to face their fears and make choices based in love rather than fear. In my work, I am not trying to release, exorcise, or eliminate fear. I accept that our fears are natural, ongoing, unavoidable, and to be expected in a world ruled primarily by force, coercion, shame, violence, competition, and revenge. But I know the heart is greater than all of these, and that as we work to find what we love most, and allow ourselves to love fully, our choices will transcend the ego and the merely rational.
I express my artistic nature in my work through my willingness to explore, experiment, take chances, make mistakes, recover from mistakes, stay light, and work with whatever form the energy takes in the present moment. Sometimes I scare myself half to death. But ultimately I find this way of working to be most rewarding. I give people permission to be artists because that is what I long for. Looking through the lens of the artist opens my life and allows me to live more from my own authority and less through the rules and expectations of others. It allows me to take risks, to be crushed by disappointment, to rise up and try again, to seek beauty, and to make an art of my frailties and fallibilities. It gives me freedom to challenge and transgress, to have a voice, to love with abandon, and to suffer without thinking I am worthless. It sometimes even allows me to feel worthless and find expression there. And though my deepest wish is to be viewed as an artist by others, even if that does not happen, my life has still been enriched by this guiding image.
Slovakia, 2003
Kenneth Robinson
19 September 2005
What is Religious Imagination?
Religious Imagination—it sounds natural, and radical, and illegal. It sounds like sin. Bednarowski defines it in this way—“the desire, the commitment, the capacity to construct religious worldviews that are intellectually and emotionally motivating (15).”
To exercise our religious imagination is to take our place in the fullness of living. To fail to is to be less than fully human. It is our longing to enter into the very source of aliveness and, in the intensity of that desire, we care not whether we get there via the Bible or the suffering or the lucky break.
Theological imagination has as its tension the twin necessities of calling on scripture and tradition for the powers they hold to illuminate this desperate moment, while remaining willing to reject any and all teachings that lack the power to draw us to the Divine. We know it through the gifts of our ancestors, the mad ones, those who stood near enough to feel God’s breath. And we know it through revolution, as when the poet David Whyte says, “In this high place, it is as simple as this: Leave everything you know behind.”
Bednarowski speaks of the necessity to cultivate ambivalence. If we wish to think with the necessary rigor and see with the necessary clarity to engage our religious imagination, we must be able to remain conscious to the experience of our strong conflicting emotions. Unless we can create a place inside ourselves (and inside our communities) that can hold those feelings, we will run—either into the arms of mindless conformity or the shelter of some personal and arbitrary canon. The Buddha said we cannot comprehend the Four Noble Truths from ordinary consciousness. We must enter into the realm of the ecstatic imagination to fully know what is knowable.
Bowing is a gesture or form of practice common to many religions. We can look to any number of traditions to find a way to bow, but finally, if we are to build theological muscle, we must experience bowing—a wild and active, courageous and lonely thing. We must bow until we actually bow. Our hearts and our bodies will let us know when we are bowing. Then we will feel the humility and power and despair that signal our own authority.