Today is Martin Luther King Jr Day. Dr. King was murdered for the things he said & stood for. He was calling for a qualitatively different way of relating to ourselves, others, & life which a large proportion of Americans found & obviously still finds impossible to understand, disturbing & intolerable.
"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power.
We have guided missiles and misguided men.
Our hope for creative living lies in our ability to reestablish
the spiritual needs of our lives in personal character and social justice.
Without this spiritual and moral reawakening
we shall destroy ourselves
in the misuse of our own instruments." Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
“Our goal is to create a beloved community and
this will require a qualitative change in our souls
as well as a quantitative change in our lives.” Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
Why on earth would roughly 40% of Americans - most of whom claim to be Christians - find such words intolerable? Maybe Cynthia Bourgeault, an Episcopal priest, provides perspective:
“I became more and more intrigued and disturbed about why it was that Christianity, a religion that clearly has one of the most loving and inclusive gurus that’s ever walked the face of the planet, at its epicenter, should tend to develop itself in formats that were so rigid, exclusive & non-generous. And why didn’t people walk the talk? It became more and more of a heartbreak to me.
So it was actually through reading Jacob Needleman’s “Lost Christianity” in 1980, that the first pieces began to come together. He said at one point, ‘telling people to wake up and be conscious, is like telling stones to pick themselves up, sprout wings and fly to the sea.’
There’s a missing piece, and until you can get that missing piece online, you can’t do the teachings of Jesus. ‘If one aspires to live the beatitudes or any Gospel teaching it is necessary to establish the level of consciousness from which they emerge.’ is virtually a direct quote from Symeon the New Theologian in the 11th century, who was the first one to be on to the fact that the Jesus teachings emerged from a very high level of consciousness, and that until you could basically run that program, you are going to be constantly dumbing it down to a place where it’s basically an inversion of itself. So Needleman was onto the fact that something is broken in the way that we pay attention that keeps our consciousness scrambled, low, distracted, and not under our free command, and it's this that is constantly making hash out of the Gospel that Jesus was teaching."
Cynthia Bourgeault - Oct 23, 2017 interview: https://batgap.com/cynthia-bourgeault/
There are at least 2 levels of understanding anything: literal & metaphorical. Literal refers to an objective fact that can be observed & agreed on by any number of observers eg she was crying. A metaphor uses a comparison to make a point eg her tears were a river flowing down her cheeks. Our present industrialized consumer society is materialistic & literal, almost exclusively focused on the production & acquisition of material goods: digital devices, clothes, cars, houses, property, alcohol / drugs etc. "The one who dies with the most toys wins" is weirdly funny and the philosophy of a LOT of people. Discussing non-material matters - which requires metaphor - very often creates confusion, smouldering anger, up to & including violence & murder, among those who are simply not capable of understanding at this level.
"One of the great liabilities of history
is that all too many people fail to remain awake
through great periods of social change.
Every society has its protectors of the status quo and its fraternities of the indifferent who are notorious for sleeping through revolutions.
But today our very survival depends on our ability to stay awake,
to adjust to new ideas, to remain vigilant
and to face the challenge of change." Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
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