The Real Guru

The guru you are looking for is inside of you.

This is the central teaching of Sri Kumaré. He is the subject of a recent documentary that I watched a few weeks ago. He is also a complete fraud, sort of.

Kumaré's real name is Vikram Gandhi, a filmmaker who grew up in New Jersey in a devout Hindu family, but who had long struggled with faith. Skeptical of the sincerity of the gurus stoking America's infatuation with Indian spirituality, especially yoga, Gandhi set off with a camera to find out "if these spiritual leaders were for real or just full of it." He found only the latter, which inspired a new direction for his project. Gandhi himself would become a guru, the ultimate proof that "spiritual leaders are just illusions."

And so Kumaré is born, along with a collection of non-sensical sayings, symbols, yoga poses, and meditations. Devoted disciples soon follow. On the surface, it seems like an exercise in humiliation and mockery. As the experiment progresses, however, it becomes clear that Gandhi-Kumaré has actual truth to teach.

The guru you are looking for is inside of you.

"Do not listen to the preachers and prophets because they tell you that you should. Do not follow a teacher because you are afraid to be on your own. If you believe the message to be true in your heart, then listen to the messenger. If not, reject him, whomever or whatever he may be. Trust yourself. Trust your heart. She will not fail you. Believe in your own goodness, in your own loveliness. For that is what you are. Love and goodness brought to life. Turn your eyes inward, and you will see it is true."

God dwells within each of us. Some may be more aware of this reality than others, but that is not a sign of superior knowledge, just the randomness of grace. And while we can and should learn from such people, there is only one true teacher. Whatever the title, whether ordained or self-appointed, everyone else is a mere messenger.

God dwells within each of us. We already possess all the wisdom we will ever need. The messenger is simply there to remind us of that wisdom and to urge us to use it. Lust or pride may drive some to seek more power. Laziness or insecurity may prompt us to give it to them. But none of that changes the basic truth.

God dwells within each of us. Or "the guru you are looking for is inside of you."

And here is where we get to laugh at the divine joke. God chose the skeptic, the fraud, the phony guru to be their truest messenger, to remind us that we are all kumaré.

Welcoming the Incarnation

Last Saturday, I stumbled upon a new documentary, "Wish Me Away", about country singer Chely Wright, and her process of accepting her sexuality and publicly coming out as a lesbian. What I watched, however, was the story of a woman denying grace for so many years, until she finally recognized that the Incarnation dwelt within her all along. Is that not the task set before each of us in this season of Advent?

"You are my child. More than that, you are myself. We are one, linked forever. What you feel, I feel. What I know, you know. We are love incarnate. We are life."

The Church has long taught that God became human, so that we could become God. But I say that Jesus came to open our eyes to a divinity that already coursed through our very souls. That awakening is what we should be preparing for this Advent, for it is the gift our family needs most this Christmas. The many ways we abuse our siblings, as I have written about the last few weeks, certainly testify to that.

Perhaps the depth of this need is why I was so powerfully moved by Wright's film. Her story begins with a childhood prayer that becomes a daily mantra asking God to take away her gayness. Such pleading led her where it leads too many of our brothers and sisters, to put a gun in her mouth. But then she makes one last prayer, for peace, and finally hears what God has been whispering to her all along: that she's already exactly who they created her to be. And she knows she has an obligation to speak this truth, to share it with all her siblings who still have their fingers on a trigger.

Wright's truth is this: homosexuality is not a "deep wound" needing to be cured; it is a beautiful part of God's design that demands to be embraced. Her witness is evidence of what I tried to convey last June in "The Gift of Homosexuality" post, that our LGBT siblings have much to teach us about love. The most important lesson of which flows from the Incarnation: love trumps biology and everything else.

There is also in Wright's story a general reminder for all. Her childhood prayer did not spring up out of nowhere; it had a source. Corporate religion loves wounds; they keep its version of a hospital in business. Unfortunately, that means it often inflicts the very damage it claims to heal. Is there one among us who hasn't suffered from friendly fire? But that is why God became one of us, so that we might be able to see the difference between our rules and their truth, and to know what really harms our family. That is the grace, the peace, that we wait for so longingly during this time of Advent.

"We are the song of life, of love, of a mother and father who made us by sheer force of will. So much of life is a paradox, but it is there that we find God the most. It is there, in the confusion and that mess that we must dwell. It is there that we experience true beauty, true joy. It is there that we can see something wonderful, something that sends a chill down our spine, and puts a smile on our face and a laugh in our heart, where we know with certainty who and what we are and why we are here in this time and place. It is in that moment that we are at peace."

A New Direction, An Eternal Faith

Last Friday, my intention was to write about Donald Spoto's biography of Francis of Assisi "Reluctant Saint" in honor of the saint's feast the day before. Obviously, that didn't happen. Once again, the right words refused to come, for I have lost my way.

This blog was never supposed to be a "blog." It is a tool to promote a revelation, no more, no less. But then I decided to expand the content and somehow it morphed into being like all of the other religion blogs out there that endlessly talk over one another. It cannot be that, because that can never convey a revelation that is inherently simple.

"Why do you babble so much about me? So much time and energy, for what purpose? What more is there to understand about us than love? You think too much and feel too little. You talk too much and love too little."

Fittingly, my need to make a course correction with this blog takes place on the eve of the opening of the Year of Faith, which is "an opportunity for Catholics to experience a conversion - to turn back to Jesus and enter into a deeper relationship with him." This idea of conversion is also a key theme in Spoto's book:

The life of Francis of Assisi and the journey of his progress toward God had meant accepting a series of corrections and simplifications, a refining of his understanding about what God had wanted of him. We might even say that Francis had constantly to revise what he believed would honor God. Hence Francis's conversion was the work of a lifetime, with all its autumns and winters; it was not the achievement of an afternoon in springtime.

Life and faith is a journey, and not always an easy one. But why? If faith is just about believing the right things, being able to say the creed without your fingers crossed or fervently proclaiming that Jesus is your lord and savior, then how does that demand a journey? Well, here's one piece of the puzzle:

Take the earliest gospel, which is probably Mark. Right after Jesus’ baptism, Jesus goes out to proclaim his message: “The kingdom of God has come near; repent, and believe in the Good News.”

I am consistently asking my students, “What’s the good news?” It’s not that Jesus died and came back, because this is only the first chapter. He hasn’t yet mentioned the passion. Nobody knows he’s going to die. The good news has to be something else.

So the good news has to be what you get from the parables. The good news has to be the Sermon on the Mount. The good news has to be the healings, which show care for people in the community.

The good news is that everyone is part of the family. It doesn’t matter what your income level is. That’s even true of sinners and tax collectors, people who have removed themselves from the common welfare by working for the occupation government, disrupting the sense of community by stealing, or destroying marriage by committing adultery. Jesus says, “You know what? You’ve got a role in this community, too.”

That’s not belief; that’s action. It is reconciliation, and it’s family values in their best form possible.

Amy-Jill Levine, "A Jewish take on Jesus", U.S. Catholic

And here's a second:

Catholic stories are incarnational, they speak of God incarnate in the human condition at Christmas time and God going down to the valley of death with us and returning alive with us on Easter. They speak of a community of the followers of Jesus bonding with one another to pass on the heritage which is formed by the stories. The doctrines are latent in the stories. Both are necessary, but the stories come first. Alas, for much of which passes for Catholic religious education, the stories are discarded in favor of the doctrines. All the Trinitarian and Christological controversies in the early Church, as important as they may be, do not have the appeal or the value of the image of Madonna and Child.

... It is worth noting that it took four centuries to make the doctrine reasonably precise while the story was there at the beginning. Both require one another, but it is the story that appeals to the total human. It is the beauty of the story which holds Catholics to their heritage.

Andrew Greeley, "Why I’m Still A Catholic"

It's about relationship, from the beginning of our story as humans to the foundation of the Church, it's always been about relationships.

"You are my child. More than that, you are myself. We are one, linked forever. What you feel, I feel. What I know, you know. We are love incarnate. We are life."

"You are my sibling. We are family. This is the essential truth of life. It is the only moral truth that really matters."

Faith is a relationship, not only with God but with all of our siblings alive and dead, and relationships are always journeys. Faith is not defined by the stretches when we stay on the path, but by how we deal with the potholes along the way, and how we respond to getting lost. Faith is not found in a moment or a year, but only through a lifetime.

And what of my faith? Where is my journey headed now? Spoto's book gave me a quote from Francis that I use on all of my websites: "Who are You, my dearest God? And what am I but Your useless servant."

This is a sublime prayer, not the expression of a philosophical inquiry about the nature of God and the self. It faces with absolute gravity the idea that God is utterly unknowable - as is the deepest truth of one's own life. But it is also, by the very fact of being addressed to God, a statement of unreserved conviction about the supreme reality of God, Who brings sense out of Francis's own emptiness and absurdity, his uselessness.

It is the prayer of a man who has felt God's touch and just wants to be obedient to that call. It is my prayer, and the only destination worth traveling to.

Human Divinization

The Word became flesh to make us "partakers of the divine nature" "For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God." "For the Son of God became man so that we might become God." "The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods."

Catechism of the Catholic Church, No. 460

Are these just pretty words, or do we actually mean them? Last Sunday, the Church celebrated the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ. If the Real Presence is truly real, then becoming God would seem to be an expected outcome from consuming the Eucharist. Are you willing to embark on the path to divinity?

"You are my child. More than that, you are myself. We are one, linked forever. What you feel, I feel. What I know, you know. We are love incarnate. We are life."

These are not just nice sentiments, but a reality of the here and now. We are meant to be one with God, for we are true children of our Creator. It is not daring for us to say "Our Father"; it is our birthright and obligation. This is the true gift of the Eucharist.

The Purpose of Education

For the past ten years, I have taught a faith development course in a Catholic high school. Due to the implementation of a new standardized religion curriculum mandated by the U.S. bishops, that course comes to an end with my last class this Friday. The looming demise of my course has prompted a good deal of reflection on the purpose of education in our society. What seems evident is that our goal is to create people who will be what our corporate systems want and need them to be, rather than helping them to discover who our Parent created them to be.

What prompted this post was a recent article in Time magazine about partnerships between public schools and corporations to ensure that students receive the skills necessary in today's job market. The author quotes one of the corporate executives, a former school administrator, responsible for this effort. "These kids have already gone past a $15-an-hour lifetime. They are reinventing what high school - and their future - is all about." Once again, it's all about the money.

Why does our future depend on what we can do for the economy? Why do we identify ourselves by our jobs? Why do we surrender our lives to our corporate masters rather than our Creator? Does the economy love us the way they do?

"We were created for so much more. There is more love in every atom, every molecule than in all the romances ever conceived. We are the song of life, of love, of a mother and father who made us by sheer force of will."

In the case I began with, the bishops are not making curriculum changes because the current religion courses fail to teach God's love. Their concern is about the exodus of people from the Church and a decline in orthodoxy among those who remain. Their analysis of this problem is that it stems from a failure to properly convey the corporate message. Hence the curriculum changes as part of the solution. What the bishops fail to consider is that perhaps the people get the message better than they do.

"Do not listen to the preachers and prophets because they tell you that you should ... If you believe the message to be true in your heart, then listen to the messenger. If not, reject him, whomever or whatever he may be. Trust yourself."

Both of these examples are about control. They are variations on the "Tiger Mom" phenomenon: adults attempting to create children in their image. In so doing, we fail to follow the wisdom of the one Parent who actually accomplished this feat, then gave their children the freedom to become whoever they felt called to be.

But not all of us are this way. Another news story that made the rounds recently was of a child who made an entire arcade out of cardboard boxes. Sandy Banks of the Los Angeles Times wrote a column about the boy's father:

"Here's the whole thing about parents," [George Monroy] said. "They want to create their kid into what they want it to do. And they force upon them sports, books… 'This book is good for you, read it. Play T-ball. Play soccer.' But he'll be so miserable on the soccer field if he doesn't want to play, you're wasting his time and your time too. You have to let the kid decide what he wants to do."

If God trusts us to figure it out, why can't we trust our children ... and ourselves.

Faith & Reason

In last week's post, I mentioned taking time recently to watch several documentaries. Two more among these were the PBS Frontline series "From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians" and Bill Maher's "Religulous".

Despite their obvious differences, both of these works touched on the larger question of the rationality of faith. Human beings have always struggled with spiritual beliefs, as the gospel episode of "Doubting Thomas" makes clear. Our analytical minds want to know and understand the mysteries of the universe. The problem is that the mysteries of ultimate truth do not lie in the realm of rationality. Logic can take you to the edge of the chasm of belief, but cannot build a bridge across it. The leap of faith is an act of mystical courage. You either make that leap or you don't.

Unfortunately, mysticism is something we have a hard time dealing with. It is chaotic, paradoxical, and just plain messy. While we strive for knowledge, it call upon us to recognize. When we want to understand, it tells us to experience. We want clarity; mysticism looks like pure and deliberate confusion. The truth we hide from is that God, life, and love are exactly like that: gloriously and beautifully confusing.

Acknowledging this reality does not mean abandoning the pursuit of knowledge. Faith is not about settling for something of lesser intelligence. It is about acknowledging that truth is not the same as scientific or historical fact. Faith is an act of humility.

"We know you must approach us with logic, but do not get carried away by your ego ... I am not saying that you should turn off your brain. Your mind is our mind. Just see and accept your limits. Delight in them, they will teach you great things."

Faith also demands trust, something that pushes all the skeptical buttons of modern American society. We do not trust institutional authority, so why should we listen to organized religion? We cannot help but see the death, destruction, and evil that has come from corporate religion. Surely that must indicate that anything religion says is illegitimate? If that is our standard, however, what ideology or belief system would ever pass muster? Our failure to live out faith properly speaks to human imperfection, not the falseness of the faith itself.

Faith cannot be proven true or false, as much as we might want it to be. Intuition is the key. As I said last week, intuition is the voice of God within us. It speaks of what is right or wrong about a particular belief system, of what is true and trustworthy. It tells us where to find God. No amount of evidence can ever replace our intuition.

"Trust yourself. Trust your heart. She will not fail you. Believe in your own goodness, in your own loveliness. For that is what you are. Love and goodness brought to life. Turn your eyes inward, and you will see it is true."

Perhaps it is inevitable that our society views faith and reason as opposing sides in the Great American Culture Wars. There are plenty of individuals and groups happy to exploit this faux conflict for power and profit. We have allowed ourselves to be tricked into believing that easy formulas illuminate truth, when in fact they are nothing more than security blankets. It is time to wake up.

"We were created to give witness to the paradox ... to celebrate [it], to cherish it. Yet you run from your destiny. You hide in the worlds you create for yourselves. You demand truth along your lines, your logic. Truth does not exist for you. You exist for it. Stop your arrogance and embrace the paradox of love."

Intelligent Design

The week after Easter was Spring Break for the school where I teach. I spent a good chunk of the time watching several documentaries that have been sitting in various queues for months. Among these were two on the topic of intelligent design:

"Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed" (Ben Stein)

"Flock of Dodos" (Randy Olson)

They came to mind during my homeroom class on Friday because of a story on the Channel One News broadcast regarding the new Tennessee law on teaching about the origins of life. This legislation was also the subject of a Los Angeles Times editorial earlier this month. In that same day's paper, there was an opinion article arguing that the universe has no purpose. The latter topic is the true conflict in all of this.

The problem with this conflict is that all of the participants are trying to prove the unprovable. We are letting our human rationality get in the way of our intuition. We see intuition as weaker than intelligence, when in reality it is the opposite. Intuition, conscience, whatever you want to call it is the voice of God in our heart and soul. It speaks to us of what is true. We ignore it at our peril.

"I know you wonder why. Why are you here? Why are you alive? You know the answer. You’ve seen it so many times, in the eyes of a lover or a child, watching the sun disappear and the moon rise. You’ve felt it on the wind. Say it with me now. Let the word form on your lips. Love. It’s that simple, isn’t it. Love."

"So why did you come to be? The simplest answer is why not? But I suppose that won’t do. We needed to share ourselves. I’m not sure that answer is much better, but I will try to explain. You call it love. To us, it is simply our way of being."

This conflict is foolish. Our purpose is self-evident. The proponents of intelligent design choose to overthink it. The scientific secular-atheists choose to ignore it. Both do so because they fear the consequences of truly acknowledging it. If life is about universal love, what does that do to the exclusivist claims of religious, economic, political, and scientific institutional authority? Will we allow their fear of losing power and resources override what we know to be true?

"Love is why we are here. Love is the glue that binds this universe together, that gives us life. It is the magic and mystery behind our existence ... Not a lofty goal or purpose. It’s actually pretty simple, just to love, just to be who we are, for no other reason than that it’s who we are. No great cosmic justice, no heaven or hell. When we die our essence returns to the great river of life that drives this universe, no matter who we were or what we did. So why bother with this life, if it doesn’t matter? Why bother with love? Because it is who we are. To deny love is to deny ourselves."