Transformation as Waking and Walking Together

In my last post, I wrote about how religion, if it is to be transformational, must be countercultural. Perhaps the most countercultural religious message ever is this one: “Awaken!”

We sleepwalk through most of our lives, and our culture tends to support this sleepwalking. If you bring even the tiniest bit of real awareness to this very moment—in all its horror and beauty—you will be changed, and you will be lured toward changing the world.

But rather than bringing our attention to this moment, our conformist, consumerist culture constantly encourages us to do things that keep us spiritually asleep. Most of what we buy, watch, read, eat, drink or otherwise consume might as well be a sleeping potion (and a lot of it is just that).

Resistance to the dominant culture requires building an alternative with other people and supporting one another in our efforts to see (and act upon) things as they really are—rather than through the filters of fear and unreasoned conformity.

Real and meaningful spiritual growth will not be gained by naming the problem and then transcending it—which has sometimes been the orthodox religious response to suffering and evil in the world. Mere transcendence (whether it is achieved in this world or any other) does not transform anything.

Rather, we move forward on the path of transformation by naming the problem and incarnating the compassionate response in community with others.

But, if we are to walk together, rather than sleepwalk together, we must adopt some way of walking that (1) keeps us on the path, (2) keeps us going in the same direction on that path and (3) can bring us back to the path when we inevitably stray from it.

The early American Puritans were not nice people in many ways. In fact, they were often hard-hearted, mean, judgmental and exclusivist. However, they did something really beautiful when they started articulating

their concept of covenant.

For example, in the 1632 covenant of the Center Church of Hartford, we find these words: “walking together therein, with all brotherly love and mutual watchfulness to the building up of one another in faith and love...”

There are dozens of other examples of such covenants from this era, in which members of the church pledged to God and to one another to walk together in the ways of love—not some mushy, idealistic love,
but a kind of love that results in building something real, something that can only be built when we all pledge to walk together.

Religious transformation requires covenant (or something very much like it) in order to become an actual human undertaking rather than just a nice idea.

Religion and the Status Quo

In an earlier post, I stated: "Maintaining the status quo is not a religious undertaking. On the contrary, transformation is the only option for religious institutions if they wish to thrive."

In one way, this might seem like an obvious point. If one of the primary aims of religion is transformation, then things staying just as they are would represent a failure of religion.

On the other hand, religion has frequently been used to prop up the status quo. And not just once, but time and time again. In fact, it's hard to think of any religious tradition or movement that has not been co-opted at one time or another by the powers that be to maintain power and control. In these cases, religion becomes essentially domesticated and stripped of its power to transform.

But those of us who are at all influenced by the dominant culture (and in the case of contemporary America, it is a consumerist corporatocracy) tend to be blind to anything but how we can thrive or survive in the current circumstances.

Transformative religion calls us to look at our culture not just from our own individual perpective, but from a more divine perspective. As St. Teresa of Avila said: 

The Divine has no body on earth but yours,
no hands but yours, 
no feet but yours, 
Yours are the eyes through which the 
Divine compassion is to look out to the world.

In other words, we are called not just to see how our narrow interests are served by the status quo but to see through the eyes of divine compassion, to allow our hearts to break for those who are ill served by current circumstances, and to work to change those systems and situations which are oppressive rather than liberating.

Religious transformation is--and must be--counter-cultural. Always.Otherwise, religion becomes merely a prop or decoration.

Transformation and an Ethic of Risk

In her seminal work, A Feminist Ethic of Risk, Sharon Welch wrote, “We are well aware of the costs of systems of injustice but find it impossible to act against them, because no definitive solutions are in sight.”

Welch, a social ethicist (and my instructor and advisor at Meaville Lombard Theological School), argues for moving from an ethic of control to one of risk.

In many ways, we inherited an ethic of control and power from orthodox monotheistic characterizations of the divine as being absolutely omnipotent—all-powerful and all-controlling. In an effort to emulate this notion of the divine, we strive to master and control all that we encounter. Such is the history of Western civilization.

And we (at least those of us who have been members of the dominant groups in our culture) tend not to get involved in situations if we do not believe we have a chance of controlling the outcome.

But our true power lies not in working toward omnipotence but rather in recognizing and reaching toward that which is ominpotential—in other words in moving away from conceptions of the ultimate as all-powerful and instead moving toward the ultimate as all-possible. But to make this move, one must be willing to live with considerable uncertainty and risk.

In a famous midrash about the Israelites leaving Egypt, Moses and the Israelites come to the Red Sea, and, with Pharoah’s army rapidly approaching, God tells Moses to lift his staff and command the sea to part so that the Israelites might cross safely to the other side.

However, in this version of the story, Moses raises his staff and commands the waters to part, but nothing happens. He tries again; still nothing. The Israelites are terrified as they can now hear the hoofbeats of Pharoah’s charioteers getting ever nearer.

At last, a man named Nachshon steps forward and begins wading into the sea. He goes in up to his knees, and his friends and family call out for him to stop, but he goes further still. He walks into the sea until the water is up to his waist, his chest, his chin.

Finally, when the water has covered Nachshon’s mouth and nose, the Red Sea parts, and the Israelites cross safely on dry land just before the water crashes over the Egyptians, forever freeing the Israelites from the cruel grasp of the Pharoah.

Nachshon understood that we are co-creators of our own destinies and, as such, are called to take risks.

In order to free ourselves from the tyranny of control, we must risk wading into the uncertain sea of infinite possibility. When we do so, we are following the path of transformation.