The Geography of Thought

Oh East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet. . . — Rudyard Kipling, The Ballad of East and West 

We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world. — The Dhammapada

The world is orderly and simple; the world changes constantly and is immensely complex. These two ways of thinking have shaped human behavior and culture for millenia—and lately they have been tested in the laboratories of cultural psychology. 

Richard Nisbett’s book, The Geography of Thought, builds the case that Westerners and Easterners differ in their fundamental beliefs about the world. As one of his graduate students from China said to him, “You know, the difference between you and me is that I think the world is a circle, and you think it’s a line.” Nisbett, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, was skeptical but intrigued. He’d always thought of himself as a universalist, someone who believed humans perceive and reason in the same way. While their cultural practices may vary widely, he thought, their ways of perceiving the world are generally similar. 

He summarizes this tradition in four general principles. First, everyone has the same basic thinking processes when it comes to memory, categorization, inference, and causal analysis. Second, when people from different cultures have different beliefs it’s because they have been exposed to different aspects of the world, not because they actually think differently. Third, reasoning rests upon logic: a proposition can’t be both true and false. And fourth, our reasoning is separate from what we are reasoning about. You can think about a thing many different ways—and you can use your reasoning to come up with wildly different results. Such was the tradition that could be traced back through the Enlightenment to the Greeks. Surely everybody thought in the same way.

But that turns out not to be the case at all. In test after test, Western subjects focused on the objects in the foreground of a video while Eastern subjects took in the whole background. That’s consistent with another finding that Westerners regard objects as most important and Easterners emphasize relationships. Following Greek thought, Westerners think of themselves above all as free agents, individuals who act upon the environment around them, changing their circumstances to match their ambitions. Easterners, following Confucian thought, see themselves as part of a harmonious whole, experiencing the links between people and their environment as continuous. One does not so much wrest control away from Nature as align oneself with it. 

Independence, practically a virtue in Western societies, begins at an early age as we teach our children to “stand on their own two feet,” “think for themselves,” and “grow up.” Interdependence, the way of many in Eastern cultures, helps children to understand the reactions of others. One of Nisbett’s research partners, a 6 ft. 2 inch football-playing graduate student from Japan, was dismayed to discover, at his first American football game, that University of Michigan football fans thought nothing of blocking his view of the game by standing up in front of him. “We would never do anything to impair the enjoyment of others at a public function like that,” he said to Nisbett. It seems that compared to the Japanese wide-angle view Americans have tunnel vision.

Sensitivity to others’ emotions provides Easterners with a different set of assumptions about communication also. Whereas Westerners take responsibility for speaking directly and clearly, a “transmitter” orientation, Easterners adopt a “receiver” orientation in which it’s the hearer’s responsibility to make sure the message is understood. Nisbett notes that Americans sometimes find Asians hard to read because Asians make their points indirectly; Asians, on the other hand, may find Americans direct to the point of rudeness. 

The differences extend to how we think about causality and how we deal with historical events. Japanese teachers, says historian Masako Watanabe, begin a history lecture by setting the context. They then proceed chronologically through the events, linking each one to the proceeding event. Students are encouraged to put themselves in the mental and emotional states of the historical figures being studied and to draw analogies to their own lives. Students are regarded as thinking historically when they are able to see the events from the point of view of the other, even Japan’s enemies. Questions of “how” are asked about twice as much as in American classrooms.

By contrast, American teachers usually begin with the outcomes and ask why this result was produced. The pedagogical process often has the effect of destroying historical continuity and reversing the flow to effect-cause. This reflects the Greek heritage of the West in which we have the liberty to find our goals and define the means to attain them. 

“Easterners,” says Nisbett, “are almost surely closer to the truth than Westerners in their belief that the world is a highly complicated place and Westerners are undoubtedly often far too simple-minded in their explicit models of the world. . . . But Aristotle has testable propositions about the world while the Chinese did not. . . . The Chinese may have understood the principle of action at a distance, but they had no means of proving it.” 

No one is making value judgements about these varying perspectives. They are different ways of being in the world and viewing the world. But if this research is true or even close, we should pay attention to it for it could change how we communicate with  millions and millions of people. 

Occasionally in life we stumble across something that opens a window into our own interior castles. That is the experience I’ve had reading The Geography of Thought. Time and again, as I followed the tests scattered throughout the book, I was taken aback at my unconscious affinity for Eastern thought. More often than not, when I was absolutely honest with myself, I realized how often they are my default positions. That might explain why I found it so difficult to be the ‘answer man’ when working in faculty development at a research university. While some thought I should provide techniques that would work in every classroom—universals in effect—my tendency was to see each teacher and each classroom as distinct. Instead of developing objectives for all to reach my thought was to develop each teacher’s own style to fit their context. Context and background. . . instead of rules and foreground. At the time I lacked the analogies to talk about it, although pushing against that instinctual feeling made me feel off balance much of the time.

Thus we live and learn and discover coves and bays along our spiritual shoreline we did not know were there until we put in to port. 

Pencils to Death

We should not feel embarrassed by our difficulties, only by our failure to grow anything beautiful from them. — Alain de Botton, The Consolations of Philosophy

What should we do when everything we have tried seems to turn to ashes in our hands, when our best and most concentrated efforts have produced. . . . nothing. When we have failed?

We could take the route of Roseanne Rosannadanna, that lovable klutz from Ft. Lee, New Jersey, created by Gilda Radner all those years ago on Saturday Night Live. Roseanne once addressed an eighth grade graduating class on how little things can lead to a full crash-and-burn. You're sitting in a classroom ready to take a test but you have no pencil. You fail the test, get kicked out of school, become homeless and die on the street. All because you forgot your pencil. It's what my wife and I have come to call the Pencils to Death syndrome.

The ability to put failure in perspective is not coded into our genes. It’s a learned response and it takes a lot of failure to learn how to do it well. From an evolutionary standpoint, of course, all of us here today are the triumphant offspring of the winners—the ones who prevailed, adapted, overcame, and survived. The losers, wading in the shallow end of the gene pool, didn’t live long enough to reproduce and are gone and forgotten. But that glib scenario covers up the fact that the winners learned how to win by losing—not fatally, of course—but in enough small ways that effort had to be made and lessons learned. Don’t eat that! Don’t go there! Do we fight or run? Hello, hello? Guess I’d better run. . . .

But the lure of instant success is so powerful. All it takes is the trajectory of Justin Bieber shooting across the YouTube universe and into the welcoming arms of Usher to set the hearts of teenagers aflame with visions of personal stardom. Shortcuts to success abound in the popular mythology, their phrases ringing tinnily in the ear: The One-Minute Manager, Think and Grow Rich, The Secret. The culture encourages nay, demands, riches without work, knowledge without learning, success without sacrifice.

 As civilizations go ours is still an adolescent, beset with all the bumbling enthusiasm of a teenager, endearing in its energy, annoying in its arrogance, dangerous in its naivete. Our shiny hopes are easily bent; we grow surly when thwarted. In our impatience to grow up we bluster and brag, and then whine when we get the inevitable pushback. A country of immense natural resources, endless horizons, boundless opportunities—all those wonderfully elusive phrases that still pepper the speeches of politicians on the run—such a country will not be denied its place at the pinnacle. Will it?

In our unshakable faith in science and technology we believe that every problem has a solution, one that can be downloaded with the click of a finger, a swipe of a credit card, a flick of a switch. We can’t imagine a world in which some mountains cannot be moved or some barrier not be shattered. When in doubt, we say, put the pedal down and smash through it. Who has the time to untie the knot? Just cut the damn thing and we’ll be on our way. We seem to have little patience with difficulties, seeing them not as part of life but a personal slight, almost a slap in the face.

So I hear the wistful lyrics of Paul Simon in a song called American Tune to a melody by J. S. Bach:

I don't know a soul who's not been battered
Don't have a friend who feels at ease
Don't know a dream that's not been shattered
Or driven to it's knees.
But it's all right, all right, We've lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the road we're traveling on,
I wonder what went wrong, I can't help it
I wonder what went wrong.

What went wrong is that we never took to heart the truth that life is difficult. Philosophy, religions, literature, psychology, drama—they’ve all been nattering about that for eons. It’s one of the perennial issues that comes up in arguments about why people suffer, what evil is, and what God has to do with all of it. It is not the problem of evil, it is the mystery of evil. Gabriel Marcel, a French poet, playwright and philosopher, called it a mystery that has no solution but calls our very being into question. In answering it or trying to anyway, we discover our own unfathomable depths. We learn who we are in our response to evil and in our response to failure.

There’s something I’ve been living by for years that helps me. I think I may have picked up the terms from William Blake, that mad poet and visionary, but the illustration is my own. We begin in innocence, blessed beyond belief, and then we take a fall into experience. Down in the pit, cursing or sobbing, we look back up to the heights we occupied without realizing there were depths and we choose: death or life? In grace we begin to climb, foothold by foothold, until we arrive, after pain and effort, at innocent experience: the delight of discovery without the cynicism of defeat.  In this context we are no longer innocent for we have taken the inevitable fall into rough experience that comes to all humans. No one is exempt. What matters is how we react in the pit. Will we stay there, raging in our pride, or begin the climb, having sloughed off our naivete and arrogance?  We have learned and moved, on and up. And that’s good, very good, because we will have many falls in life and each one is a new occasion to learn. Failure may not be an option, but it can be an opportunity.

Mind over Murdoch

So, as men become more equal and individualism more of a menace, newspapers are more necessary. The belief that they just guarantee freedom would diminish their importance; they sustain civilization. — Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that after an extended tour of America in 1831. An aristocrat, de Tocqueville was fascinated with the young country, but not blinded to its impulsive nature nor swept away by its potential. But his shrewd analysis of the American character and its experiment in democracy still rings so true today that he is revered by many who span the political spectrum from left to right and in between. Pick up Democracy in America and open almost any page at random and you are sure to find something that perfectly encapsulates the current state of affairs.

Thus, his reverence for newspapers, back in the day, speaks volumes not only about how times change but also how newspapers themselves have changed. Can we imagine that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. empire would be the exalted sustainer of civilization? Could News of the World—or NotW as it's referred to in media today—have risen above its screaming headlines and its contemptible practices to carry the standard of "journalistic integrity"? How many more times could those in power have bowed the knee to Murdoch before they finally summoned the courage to revolt? Don't try to do the math: it's a number arrived at only after the cup of iniquity finally overflowed and the public got fed up.

So it comes as no surprise that politicians on both sides of the Atlantic, sniffing the wind and catching the unmistakable scent of blood on the tracks, shot to their feet as one from behind their protective barriers and denounced the Prince of Darkness. He is to appear before Parliament for questioning, along with his loyal lieutenant, the flame-haired Rebekah Brooks (who bears an uncanny resemblance to Ginger Baker, renowned drummer for Cream of late 60s fame), CEO of his UK newspapers and newly resigned. Les Hinton, the publisher for Dow Jones, the parent company of the Wall Street Journal, also resigned and is widely expected to take the fall for Murdoch, loyal to the end even after some 50 years of working for him.

Reporters at the Journal, watching the tide of effluvia rising around them, are finding their worst fears confirmed: that they are being tarred in the public's eyes with the brush of the New York Post and News of the World. And as the scandal spreads it tends to ignite fires in other places. The FBI may be launching an investigation into the possibility that 9/11 victims families may have had their phones hacked as well. There are a lot of conditional tones in that previous sentence because it's simply not possible in these circumstances to separate rumor from fact. And that is one of the legacies of Murdoch's brand of journalism.

There's a certain justice in the prospect that the hunter may finally be snared in his own traps. For decades Murdoch has bullied, threatened, derided, and seduced politicians, while undercutting the competition and monopolizing the media channels. For those who were drawn to journalism after the Watergate scandal, and those who admired the integrity and courage of the Washington Post, editor Ben Bradlee, and reporters Bernstein and Woodward, watching Murdoch in free-fall is an odd experience. One doesn't want to cheer because he has a reputation for coming back, zombie-like, from the grave. There is the temptation, as if it were even possible, to imagine a world without Fox News, without Roger Ailes, without Glenn Beck and the whole yelping, bug-eyed, pack of chatterati that pass for journalists these days. But there is also hope—an admittedly faint hope—that journalism as a profession can slough off these sleazy tactics, these millions expended on gossip and lies, and finally get back to the work of the Fourth Estate.

In the court of public opinion, a court that Murdoch's media are particularly adept at manipulating, lives and careers can be flash-fried in a matter of days. Like popcorn or onion rings these spectacles are hot to the touch, endlessly consumable, and finally turn one's stomach. We all suffer when the difficult work of searching for truth is jettisoned by news media in favor of chasing rumors into print. It may be too much to hope that this could be a cleansing moment for media moguls, a kind of moral epiphany for discourse in the public square, perhaps even a turning point for American democracy. Perhaps we should put the triumphantly swelling music on hold and aspire to something greater—a finely-tuned historical memory that puts this sorry episode in context and does not forget that it happened. Murdoch and others may be hoping that with our collective attention deficit we'll turn away and be off to something else in a week or so. Then they could breathe a sigh of relief and get back to business as usual. After all, we're consumers before we're citizens, right? Maybe, just maybe for once, we could reverse that condition in favor of meaning over manipulation, memory over Mammon.

When the World is Too Much With Us

And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men unto me. John 12:31-33 - KJV

Being a carbon-based bipedal organism with a comparatively short life span has its drawbacks. At birth we are helpless, red-faced, squawking bundles of potential—if we can live long enough to gain a foothold on this third rock from the sun. Most other mammal babies get up and walk within minutes of hitting the ground—we take years. We can't see as keenly as eagles, trot as fast as horses, climb as good as monkeys, or swim like dolphins. Almost everything we've done to overcome these physical deficiencies are through extensions—mechanical devices that give us reach, sharpen our hearing, project our voices, and peel back surfaces to see underneath and beyond. There has to be some payoff for all this vulnerability, and there is—we have imaginations. 

The imagination can lift us out of our everyday reality into another place, even another time. There is no doubt that a vibrant imagination is necessary for a child to try out scenarios, play with images and ideas, and stretch the mind in the process. Somewhere I've read that day-dreaming is part of mental exercise, as important as toughening the muscles and building endurance. 

Our imaginations seem to specialize. For example, architects can visualize their buildings in three dimensions while most of us can’t “see” the structure until it’s built, a disadvantage that is not trifling. Others can spin stories, bring clay to life under their fingers, or discover the beauty in the symmetry of equations. I marvel at those who can leap from intuition to concept to theory like a ninja running up a wall. At times I write like a man trying to thread a needle behind his back: it can be done but it takes a great deal of time and bloodletting is to be expected.  

Blessedly, one form of expression can be triggered by another. When I was a journalism student struggling for a lead to a story I’d often take a break, get myself down to the college library, and spend some time with Communication Arts, a magazine that features some of the best art and design in the country. Something about absorbing all that visual creativity and the possibility of wonder just over the page usually set me free to write my version of the truth. 

So too in my spiritual landscape I’ve found that seeing through another’s creative vision often gives me new eyes to see what was there all along. Through the years I’ve found artists who give me a place to stand and thus change my understanding. Chagall is one, Roualt is another, Picasso, Rothko, Cezanne, Paul Klee—and Dali. One painting of his in particular has been a kind of talisman for me, the function of which is to bring me to a humbling perception of humanity. 

Dali’s Christ of St. John of the Cross (1951) was based on a drawing by a 16th century monk named St. John of the Cross. Christ hangs suspended on the cross above the world, unbloodied, without nails or wounds. The observer looks down at the top of Christ’s bowed head and simultaneously at a landscape of fisherman and boats. The effect is disconcerting at first as we plunge down vertically past the Christ and immediately level off to a horizontal plane. Dali traced inspiration for the extreme angle back to a dream he had, the vision of which appeared to him in color as the cosmic Christ. The painting was purchased in the early 50s by the Glasgow Corporation for 8, 200 pounds sterling, considered quite extravagant at the time. In 1961 a visitor heaved a brick through the canvas, incensed apparently by the angle that looked down upon Christ instead of up. The painting was restored and hangs in the Kelingrove Art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow, the curators having stoutly resisted an offer of $127 million by the Spanish government. 

I don’t find the lack of blood or nails theologically upsetting. I know how Jesus suffered, and I don’t need Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ to drive the message home. In Dali’s painting Christ is still on the cross, his sinews twisting, his head bowed, the long shadow of one arm stretching ominously across the open space of the horizontal beam. 

It’s the angle I’m interested in. We see Christ from God’s point of view; His Son, His beloved Son, eternally hanging there above the world, floating in silent and profound dignity, magnificent in death. Down below, the fishermen, oblivious to the Light of the World above them, draw their boat up on the shore. One is standing at the stern in water up to his knees while his companion on the shore drags out the nets to dry. They seem indecisive or perhaps just tired. If they caught any fish we’re not seeing the evidence. They may be heading home, weary from work, wondering how long they can survive without a catch. 

When we see the Christ on the cross from the traditional angle looking upward it provokes our pity. The usual configuration is Mary, weeping on her knees or collapsing into the arms of John, the disciple who stayed to the end. Occasionally, we’ll see John the Baptist, a lamb, and several other well-dressed figures, usually the ones who commissioned the painting and paid the bill. We feel for Mary, her heart torn from her, and for John, whose duty to care for his Lord’s mother overrides his anxiety at being seen as one of the co-conspirators. 

But from the angle that Dali provides we can sense God’s compassion for the world. When the world is too much with us, when we find ourselves loathing humanity, when we feel, with shame, our complicity in the wickedness and suffering of this age, we can be lifted up, free and clear, to look down through Christ and see our tired world from a new perspective—one that through imagination wounds and heals.  

Am I Mything Something?

A mythology is a culture's device for interpreting its reality and acting on it. But what if the reality changes and the mythology does not? — Robert Reich, Tales of a New America

Someone once said—it may have been Joseph Campbell—that there are only six stories in human experience and we keep retelling them with infinite variations. To follow the trail of these stories back to their primal plot lines is like retracing our DNA back through the millenia to what geneticist Bryan Sykes has called the first mothers, the Seven Daughters of Eve.

We're constantly looking for patterns in the restless flow of time. We tell stories to make order out of chaos, to build meaning where there are simply isolated facts and events untethered to a cultural context. Robert Reich says every culture has its definitive parables and the ones America has lived by are four: they are The Mob at the Gates, The Triumphant Individual, The Benevolent Community, and The Rot at the Top. While they are situated in different histories and facts, they interpret and explain reality, they give us a place to stand as individuals and as a people, and they bring coherence to our experience.

Our political rhetoric, says Reich, is not so much pragmatic as prophetic. Our politicians, aided and abetted by the press—which is simultaneously fawning and recalcitrant—speak in tones both messianic and evangelical. We are the land of destiny, the hope of the world, the shining city set on a hill. In the parlance of Christianity, America is the kingdom that is and is yet to come. In its cruder forms all that destiny is reduced to a bumper sticker we used to see in the 60s: America—Love it or Leave it.

One story that has transfixed the press on both sides of the Atlantic is that of Dominique Strauss-Kahn (aka DSK), the former head of the International Monetary Fund, forced to resign because of his brutal sexual assault upon a hotel housekeeper in his penthouse suite at the Sofitel New York. Headlines screamed his guilt, the Manhattan District Attorney confidently locked up the case, and a flood of photos showed the accused, grim-faced and dispirited, headed for Rikers Island for a sleepover. It was a classic story of Rot at the Top in which a wealthy, powerful, and arrogant man runs amok and expects to get away with it. The trajectory was predictable, having been played out numerous times in recent years, with resulting profits and losses calculated not only in dollars but in morality lessons. The rich and powerful overstep the bounds, as is their nature, and get caught. They are brought low (remember Martha Stewart and Michael Milken?), suffer the shame and loss they so richly deserve, and later are returned to grace and wealth in a triumphant second act. Well, not every time, but often enough that we were not surprised when they did their time and reemerged on Larry King or Oprah. We loathed them and admired them, despising their crassness and greed while assuming they couldn't be all bad, seeing as how they had worked hard and prospered against the odds. That feral drive to succeed, corrupted though it was, could also be seen as Just the Way Things Are.

In a stunning reversal of fortune, prosecutors in the DSK case announced that the prime witness, the victim, the maid who had been forced into unspeakable sexual acts by this French predator, was a woman of no virtue, a liar and a cheat who had conned her way into the camp with a baseless story of gang rape in a far-off country and with suspicious connections to genuine low-lifes and criminals. Now the tide surges the other direction and we see the Mob at the Gates, desperate, dangerous foreigners of no breeding or class, who will do anything to get into this country and enjoy the benefits reserved for the hard-working American people. DSK, released from house arrest, gets his electronic ball-and-chain removed, gets his $1 million bail money back, and permits himself the barest hint of a smile as he steps outside for the first time in weeks. Will he be restored to his former glory? Ah, but someone else has taken his job, a woman all parties agree will restore the tarnished image of the IMF. And thus DSK is free to pursue his destiny and to quite possibly become the head of France, Inc. someday soon. The balance is restored, the mighty are back on top, and the lowly get what they deserve.

But the story is most assuredly not over, though media attention will no doubt turn its restless gaze elsewhere very soon. In a binary world of black and white, rich and poor, powerful and weak, DSK's circle will see class and power vindicated while others will smell a conspiracy of the first rank. How could it be otherwise when our cultural drug of choice seems to be the "us and them" dichotomy? That perspective turns issues of justice into entertainment. The struggle for truth gets lost in the call-'em-as-we-see-'em political posturing and the only ones who win are the lawyers and the media moguls. Such a story seems to define America at its basest level these days.

On this 4th of July at countless parades, barbecues, and political rallies, America and "what it stands for" will be invoked. Speakers will vilify the opposition and deify their own. There will be vague but inspiring references to the Founding Fathers and the dust bunnies of popular history will be yanked out from under the bed. Lines will be drawn, ultimatums delivered, much air will be heated, and the bands will play. The comforting illusion of a world in which we "win" and current enemies, domestic and foreign, "lose," will play out as the sun sets and the fireworks begin.

And yet, the wonderful thing about America, the characteristic that offers us the best hope in these sharply divisive times, is the willingness to try something new. The new for us would be the finding of stories which enlarge the boundaries of "us" and which quietly dissolve the brittle ramparts of our fearful individualism. The challenge, says Reich, "is to create settings in which obligation and trust can take root, supported by stories that focus our attention on discovering possibilities for joint gain and avoiding the likelihood of mutual loss." So perhaps we could rediscover an old story—E Pluribus Unum (out of many, one)—and add to it something new: "We're one, but we're not the same."

Imagine

There is no greater social evil than religion. It is the cancer in the body of humanity. Human credulity and superstition, and the need for comforting fables, will never be extirpated, so religion will always exist, at least among the uneducated. — A. C. Grayling, The Reason of Things

These words, from one of England's foremost philosophers and social critics, are not unusual in these days of the revival of public atheism from the likes of Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins. Grayling, author of over twenty books, is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, and writes a regular column for the Times. A frequent and prominent theme in his essays and newspaper articles is the imminent demise of organized religion. In an article from 2006 he countered a claim that religion was experiencing a resurgence by asserting that the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and American evangelicalism pointed to religion in its death throes.  In a transcript of a broadcast for the Australian Broadcast Corporation in 2010 (http://www.acgrayling.com/) he continued the theme by commenting that religious adherents are feeling anxious and on the defensive and are responding by turning up the volume. He pointed to a recent Pew Forum "Landscape Survey" of American religion (http://religions.pewforum.org/) which finds that mainstream Protestant adherents are aging and that the religiously unaffiliated young have doubled their percentage to 16 percent. One finding from the Pew Report is that Americans are restless, constantly on the move from one religion or religious body to the next. This mobility—and the number of choices available—makes for a fiercely competitive marketplace for American religions. Grayling's belief is that religion will lose its influence but not its life. There are always enough credulous morons around to keep the body just this side of clinically dead.

It's an interesting argument that Grayling and others make: the sheer volume of shouted messages in the public square means that the institution is on the way out. If that were true we could look for an early death for the Tea Party, Wall Street money manipulators, all celebrities and politicians who have affairs, the effects of globalization, those who oppose global warming, and Lady Gaga. Grayling and the Terrible Triumvirate have some legitimate complaints about religion, foremost among them the violence religions have perpetrated on the world for centuries. Behind their outrage and scorn one can hear longing for the believers to live up to their claims to have the truth that will set us free. John Lennon called us to "Imagine there's no heaven," and "no religion too." He envisioned a world free of religion as one in which people lived in peace, unencumbered by the fear of hell or the lure of heaven. I hear all this and I have to agree. . . . and I am almost persuaded. Almost.

There's a lot to be said for Religion (with a capital R). It brings out not only the worst in humans but the best. It has sustained people through the worst kinds of torture, often at the hands of those who claim to be fighting under the banner of Christ, and it has provided care and compassion to those who would have done away with it if they'd had the strength. It has given millions a deeper purpose in life, taught them to respect others, and has provided meaning in the face of chaos.

In conversations and class discussions these days people are sometimes careful to distinguish between "religion" and "spirituality," with the advantage always given to the latter. While there are way too many definitions of religion, "spirituality" is a term that seems as vaporous as the mists of dawn. We know it's there but it has a habit of disappearing when the light hits it. The distinction between the two seems to be in the form, if not the function. Religion is public, institutional, structured, powerful—and therefore corrupted—inhibiting, corrosive, and ultimately disillusioning. Spirituality, on the other hand, is private, personal, unstructured, informal, intuitive, and pure. The fact that American hard-core individualists sometimes fill up that cup with a heady brew of astrology, self-help remedies, a dash of yoga, a dollop of  self-congratulation, and topped off with a vow above all to be good to themselves, does not invalidate spirituality. Some of this is verbal ping-pong but a lot of the uncertainty might also point to a gradual evolution toward a kind of secular spirituality.

Consider William James' definition of religion, offered up in his celebrated Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion and published in 1902 as The Varieties of Religious Experience:

Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. 

The "divine," James makes clear, is broadly interpreted. "The divine shall mean for us only such a primal reality as the individual feels impelled to respond to solemnly and gravely, and neither by a curse nor a jest." James is not interested in debating the ontological existence of God at this point; he is much more interested in calling up the vast array of human experiences of the divine and the effect such experiences have on a person. He views religion, generously speaking, as something that ought to make a difference in a person's life, enough that the encounter with the divine will be something that cannot be mistaken for a momentary spike in giddiness or a desire to rule the universe. Among the many variations on the theme that James plays in the lectures, he keeps coming back to a single note of 'solemn joy,' the kind that rides out the storm, looks the Devil in the eye, and isn't swayed by success or failure.

James thought this primal experience of the divine, personal and holy though it was, was the seed from which sprang the secondary plants of institutional religion and their structures in society. The personal preceded the public and the public embodied the personal.

Perhaps spirituality is that desire to stand joyously before God, immersing oneself in the experience of grace, eyes wide open, heart aflame, honest for once and not ashamed to admit one's need. This is necessarily a solitary moment, but it can lead to community. Erasmus wryly noted that, "True piety, which flourishes only when the spirit spontaneously strives to grow in charity, withers when the spirit sluggishly reposes in external ceremonies chosen for it by others."

There's no reason to baptize Hitchens, Harris, Dawkins and Grayling as anonymous Christians. They deserve more respect than that. Such fierce striving for understanding, clarity, and honesty is rarely seen today and is often lamentably absent from those of us who call ourselves Christians. While a fanatic of any stripe can rarely admit to being wrong, a genuine seeker for truth can readily do so because what matters most is being honest with oneself. The Countess, in Christopher Fry's play, The Dark is Light Enough says:

Let us say
We are all confused, incomprehensible,
Dangerous, contemptible, corrupt
And in that condition pass the evening
Thankfully and well. In our plain defects
We already know the brotherhood of man.

So this is the thing I wish to imagine, no matter how horrific, contemptible, graceless or cowardly all forms of religion may at times appear, and no matter how resolutely any human may spurn the representations of the divine, what matters most is that any one of us, standing alone before the cosmos, waiting for the light to change on a feverishly hot August afternoon, might say simply and clearly, 'Yes!' to the Truth within.

I'm Already Praying

Whenever this dark begins to fall
Whenever I'm vulnerable and small
Whenever I feel like I could die
Whenever I'm holding back the tears that I cry
Whenever I say your name, whenever I call to mind
your face
I'm already praying — Sting, Whenever I Call Your Name

I have never found it easy to pray as an adult. And it's not that I don't believe I'm not heard. . . I'll rephrase that: I do believe that I'm heard when I pray; it's just that I don't want to be heard by others when I pray. I've sat through too many prayers that were announcements of this event or that coming up, of appeals for money to refurbish the lobby, tuck in reserves for the dry spells of giving, for the new carpet, for the upcoming evangelistic series, for campmeeting, for this radio ministry and that one, and inevitably, "for all those sitting here tonight who are resisting the sweet call of the Holy Spirit to come forward and surrender all to Jesus."

While I do not doubt the sincerity of those who utter such prayers, I nevertheless am not moved by them. If we need to rally round and give for our causes, just tell me and I'll do what I can. If you want me to come to the event on the 15th, print it in the bulletin.  And if you want me to surrender all, I did that years ago and I continue to re-enlist on a daily basis. But we are members of a community of faith, one that opens its arms to all those on the Way, no matter what stage of the journey they are on. So I do not begrudge the offer of salvation to anyone, but I will also politely duck the mighty thunderbolt of guilt hurled by the speaker of the hour. You might call it the jujitsu of faith.

In like manner, I resisted thinly-veiled orders to begin every class I taught with prayer. I understand the intention behind it, I think. It springs from a need to assure the constituents that their college is visibly—and audibly—"religious." There were occasions when I led a class in prayer: when a student was gravely ill, when it seemed we needed assurance or when a tragedy of some magnitude fell upon us all, such as 9/11. Those are the times when a community is walking blind with hands outstretched in the dark, reaching for something familiar. Those are times when the prayers come forth like songs we are hearing for the first time as we sing them. They are not "vain repetitions," they are not sanctified boilerplate nor are they cleverly crafted phrases to close the deal. I think they are God talking to Godself so that we might hear.

In the time-honored tradition of giving a song multiple meanings I have lifted Sting's words off his Sacred Love album, a psalter of songs written as the US and Britain were firing up their weapons of mass destruction, a time of a breathless tightness in the throat before the lightening strikes. They speak for me when all I can do is shake my head mutely, as does Paul, the former terrorist, who stands in all humility whispering that he does not know how to pray but he knows the Spirit hears his groanings and turns them into language that rings through heaven. I have also found comfort in this quote from Ladislaus Boros who says,

As to prayer, people today find it almost impossible to pray. When they shrink from praying, I would say that they are not trying to shrink from God but from themselves in their superficiality, from the hollowness of their own souls. We must make these people understand that waiting in the presence of God, simply being silent in his presence—that is prayer. It is even the deepest thing that one torn apart inside can do in the presence of God. Suffering under the inward incapacity to pray is already prayer.

 That would be me, no question. After the thunder and lightening, the earthquake, wind and fire, there is a voice so deep that it resonates in our bones, not in our ears. In a time when lovers quarrel up and down the bandwidth while standing in a checkout line, when the words fall short of the music, when the surreptitious chirp of a tweet can transfix the fooling class, one longs for a moment of silence. But if silence is no longer golden, a commodity in short supply, we can still find it alone within the crowd, for just a moment—that's all we need. Thus, from moment to moment we learn to pray without ceasing.