Open Serendipity

Driving home from work one evening, I caught a part of a Fresh Air interview with Karen Armstrong. I recognized her name and wondered if she is the author of Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, a wonderful book I read some years ago. But then I realized no, she is the author of A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, a book that I started a year ago but sits on my shelf unfinished. My daughter read it, along with a couple of others, crammed in to the end of last summer as requirements for 10th grade honors English. She said the beginning and the end of the book were great but the middle was a little long. I have plans to finish it someday…. and her newest book as well: The Case for God.

Meanwhile, Armstrong’s Fresh Air interview was very entertaining. I particularly enjoyed this story she told about Brahman priests who devised a ritual, which was a sort of competition, in the 10th century before Christ. From the transcript:

They went out into the forest, and there they made a retreat, put themselves into a different frame of mind.

They’d fast, and they practiced certain sort of breathing exercises, early forms of yoga, and then they came back, and the competition would begin. And the challenger would try to define the Brahman – that is, the ultimate reality in Hinduism, something that lies way beyond the gods, that is way beyond anything we can know and yet is within us all.

And he had to do this definition in a very sort of poetic and enigmatic way. And his opponents would listen to him very carefully, and then they would respond, moving on from what he had said and make their own definition of what Brahman – or we would say God – is.

And the winner was the priest who reduced everybody to silence. And in that silence, the Brahman was present. The Brahman was not present in the wordy definitions of the divine. It was present in the stunning realization of the absolute powerlessness of language and speech to describe this.

And that, I think, is an authentic model of religious discourse. A theology should be like poetry, which takes us to the end of what words and thoughts can do.

I love this story! At first it seems so odd to have a competition about such a subject, but consider that the “winner” cannot go on babbling indefinitely because his opponents have stopped talking, so he won already, and must fall into silence himself. (Safe bet: these were all men.) And then, the entire concept and usual feelings that accompany winning and losing would have been left far behind by the time silence fell upon each of them in turn.

I cannot honestly say I would like to participate in such a competition, because it would seem like a self-indulgent waste of time to me. I wonder, who was feeding them? but no, they were fasting, maybe that is how they could afford the time out? (Oops, I’m revealing my modern obsession with time as a finite resource akin to money.)

On the other hand, if one is going to spend time in worship with others, this seems like a very creative way to go about it. My Methodist church is very big on small groups, I wonder if anyone would be interested in this unusual practice and how it would work! Hard to imagine, although it would be a good way to practice resistance to the human compulsion to desperately want everyone to believe the same thing we do. Even if we believe that God is beyond human understanding, but not beyond love, we remain delighted when someone else seems to share our limited ideas about who or what God is, and equally uncomfortable (or worse) when someone has an idea that is at odds with ours.

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