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We
need a religious revival on a personal level. I say personal level because if
you have read this far you have already found the present corporate models
largely unhelpful.
And I say “revival” for two reasons.
Revival implies that the old is not invalid, but needs renewal.
I sense this to be the case. I
am not persuaded that the old faith is totally without validity.
But it surely needs renewal. I
also use the language of “revival” because of what it implies.
Outside of the United States where "revival" often meant ‘a tent
coming into town and lots of preaching and singing,’ revival traditionally has meant a new
personal experience built on the old foundations.
It meant a very new experience… the Luthers and Wesleys were thrown out
of the church of their day. But
they were also founded in the tradition they came from.
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A
new experience will shape a new paradigm or faith world view.
This is what we need.
Adopting someone else’s paradigm
may
simply be to adopt a new slavery to a paradigm without meaning.
So going from Christianity to Buddhism or Islam, or to Christianity from
Islam is not the answer for someone who has found God is not there in the old
way. It is not reviving, it is just
adopting another ready made religious paradigm from a pre-scientific world
view.
There
may be another problem with this adoption. For example, our
whole subconscious in the west is based around Christianity in large measure.
If we are seeking a new reality of God, what does it mean to abandon much
of the part of our being which is perhaps closest to Reality; i.e. our unconscious
self. We will be at odds enough with our society and culture without going
further than we have to.
Likewise
for the Buddhist adopting western Christianity. What models and
deeply unconscious reality may be abandoned or suppressed to conform to
the morés of the western church in the name of faithfulness to
God?
If we
think the experience of God will involve the whole of ourselves
intersecting with the Divine in some way, then surely divorcing ourselves
from our instinctive history is a limiting move. |
I
think it is critical to have some sense of this. My loss of the
presence of God in the religious models or forms I have grown up with is
not about God ceasing to exist. It is about a world view which no
longer works. There is no reality in the language of that world
view. As children we are gripped by the story of Father Christmas. As we
grow up the story just does not "work" any more. It does
not link into the reality we live in. The traditional Christian story is
the same. It doesn't work to mediate the reality of the Divine to
us.
As far as I can see, my grip on reality is constructed by a kind of spiral
growth through experience which allows me to interpret and
conceptualise. The conceptualisations allow me to perceive more of
the phenomenon I have experienced. So, in a sense I need to nurture
my experience enough for a new set of concepts and interpretations to
develop. These form the new paradigm or reality in which I
live. This can be a partly conscious effort and yet is partly
outside my control. The very nature of a worldview or paradigm is
that it in some sense rules us! It defines our reality and opens our
eyes to some realities and blinds us to and or shields us from others.
This dealing with a reality shift, or paradigm change is what makes me
think it is unwise to cast ourselves too far adrift from the old
traditions. They are still something of an anchor point to reality
(albeit failing) until a new paradigm has enough strength and clarity to
sustain us. To lose all our symbolic reference points would be to
turn a profound personal crisis into a disaster and perhaps breakdown or
even the more permanent breakdown we could call insanity.
In the
Australian bush travellers are warned, 'Don't leave the car if you
have a breakdown or get lost.' Those who do often die of thirst. Those who
stay are more often found alive by searchers. Perhaps this is an
illustration of the danger of wandering too far from our tradition before
we have developed a knowledge of the new landscape. |
