Catholic Yoga: Confession and the Lost Art of Spiritual Gastroenterology

Like most postmodern Catholics of a certain age, I hate going to Confession – really and truly dislike it. It’s worse than going to the dentist or the gastroenterologist. Like the gastroenterologist or dentist, confession is inherently embarrassing. It probes for decay and disease and often finds it. It’s uncomfortable. It can be painful.

Priests today, like modern dentists, do everything they can to make you feel at ease. They offer analgesics. They try to be as non-threatening and encouraging as possible. Some even offer the equivalent of nitrous oxide. I was told recently that when the actor Mickey Rourke goes to confession, he and his priest drink wine and smoke cigars. That is the way it should be. But as much as he might sugar coat it, a good confessor is still poking around deep down in your soul, scraping here, probing there, noting the presence of unusual growths that should probably be cut out. Many times, it’s just routine. A quick in and out. Like a quarterly teeth cleaning. No big deal. But every once and a while, it becomes a disgusting, uncomfortable process, involving blood and pus.

For people today, it’s particularly uncomfortable because we have been led to believe, since we were young, that we’re all “okay.” I’m okay, you’re okay. It’s all good! As I’ve said before, the only Immaculate Conception we children of the Sixties believe in is our own. There are no more sins, only neuroses. The only sexual sin is failure to orgasm. But it hasn’t always been so. As late as my own childhood, confession was once quite popular. The lines for confession often extended out of churches into the street. Perhaps people in an earlier time accepted their own sinfulness as a matter of course and embraced the relief that comes with confession. It’s been said that confession is a kind of Catholic yoga, free psychotherapy for the masses – and people in previous eras took advantage of it. In earlier times, people accepted both the reality of sin (violent, real, soul-withering sin) and the fact that they are inherently flawed, given to taking short cuts, repeat offenders in every sense of the word.

For about a century now, we’ve been telling ourselves that such a worldview is too pessimistic, even vaguely neurotic, and so have cultivated an image of ourselves as merely earnest strivers out to better the world. Perhaps some of this was necessary… because there is a heterodox strain of Calvinistic dualism in U.S. Catholicism. It may have come from Jansenism or from our Puritan neighbors but it’s there. Yet, like many correctives, this attempt to remove shame from our lives has gone too far. We now are literally shameless. Activities and attitudes that once required penance are now entertainment, celebrated on reality TV shows. Why go to confession when the activities you need to confess can, if broadcast to millions, make you rich? Don’t we all want to cheat our best friends out of fortunes and, like Mark Zuckerberg, found Internet empires? Don’t we all want to “hook up” with really “hot” guys and/or gals? Isn’t fame – bragging about our own wonderfulness — the path to wealth and happiness?

Catholics have a duty to go to confession at least once a year. It’s called the Easter Duty. Most ignore it. My friends in Opus Dei , which has as one of its “missions” the revival of confession among Catholics, like to say most Catholics haven’t been to confession since high school. I know that’s probably true. The only reason I go to confession as often as I do, which isn’t all that often, is because I occasionally attend an Opus Dei “evening of recollection” at a local high school. I’m not a member of Opus Dei but have a few friends who are… and I admire a lot about them. Unfortunately, some Opus Dei priests can be creepy, traditionalists in a bad sense. Our local parish priests are a lot better confessors because they function in the real world of single moms and scheming corporate lawyers. (The last time I went to Confession, right before Easter, I had the priest snorting in mild derision at my pathetic sins.)

Now, my evangelical in-laws, in occasional outbursts of anti-Catholicism after a few glasses of wine, will complain that they “don’t need some Catholic priest” to forgive their sins, that they can go “directly to God.” Of course, that’s true enough. That’s true even in Catholic theology… although I won’t bore you with the details and talk about mortal versus venial sins and acts of perfect contrition and all that. I also won’t bore you with the historical and scriptural evidence for sacramental confession. But saying you don’t need a Catholic priest to forgive your sins is a lot like saying you don’t need your dentist to clean your teeth or your gastroenterologist to clean your bowels: good luck with that! We go to confession for the same reason we go to the dentist: precisely because we don’t clean our teeth regularly or floss sufficiently and precisely because we don’t examine our conscience regularly and ask God for forgiveness. No, you don’t “have to” go see your gastroenterologist. You can take your chances. You can skip that checkup at age 50. After all, who wants to get a colonoscopy? But every once in a while, one of those intestinal polyps can get a little dicey and, if left unattended, can gradually grow into a nasty tumor that will kill you. So, no, you don’t “have” to go to Confession. But it’s a good idea.

One last thing. Like many healthy practices, like hot yoga, you can get used to Confession. It takes a while, but you can even get to like it eventually once you’re in the habit. Here’s why. There is something inherently powerful about someone listening to the deepest, darkest secrets of your soul – or at least to the deepest, darkest secrets you can bring yourself to talk about – and then saying that, by the power and authority invested in him by God Almighty, your sins are forgiven, truly and really forgiven. It can be truly transformative. That’s because many people, deep down, harbor a profound sense of shame despite all the best propaganda of our culture that there is no such thing as sin. When that sense of shame is brought into the open, like a bowel obstruction, and cut out, there is a real sense of relief and even of well being. You feel a lot better. If sin ages you, as it does, the forgiveness of sin is God’s anti-aging medicine, his way of keeping you young.

Benedict XVI’s Visit to Great Britain Will Bring Out the Lunatics

The Vatican announced today that Pope Benedict XVI will visit Great Britain on September 16-19. “Accepting the invitation of Her Majesty Elizabeth II, Queen of the United Kingdom, and of the bishops’ conferences of England and Wales, and of Scotland, His Holiness Benedict XVI will make an apostolic trip to the United Kingdom from 16 to 19 September,” the Pope’s spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, said.

The theme chosen for the papal visit to England is “Heart Speaks Unto Heart,” Cardinal Newman’s motto.

According to Inside the Vatican magazine, following the pope’s arrival at Edinburgh airport on September 16, he will be driven to Holyrood Palace where he will be welcomed by Her Majesty the Queen. “He will then travel through the center of Edinburgh in the Popemobile, and the Scottish bishops are encouraging ‘as many people as possible’ to attend and line the Pope’s route and to attend the public Mass in Glasgow’s Bellahouston Park.”

Given the official welcome by the Queen, it is doubtful that the British government will permit the threatened legal action against the pope planned by the UK’s infamous village atheists, the Oxford biologist and town crank Richard Dawkins and U.S.-based journalist Christopher Hitchens.

The two men have allegedly been scheming for months — with the help of two British lawyers, Geoffrey Robertson and Mark Stephens — to have the Crown Prosecution Service arrest the pope for “crimes against humanity.”

Dawkins and Hitchens think that the can make a case against the pope for his alleged “cover-up” of sexual abuse in the Catholic church. They point to the arrest of Augusto Pinochet, the late Chilean dictator, when he visited Britain in 1998 as a example of taking action against foreign leaders.

Last year, Palestinian activists talked a British judge into issuing an arrest warrant for the Israeli politician Tzipi Livni during a visit to Britain.

“There is every possibility of legal action against the Pope occurring,” said lawyer Stephens. “Geoffrey and I have both come to the view that the Vatican is not actually a state in international law. It is not recognised by the UN, it does not have borders that are policed and its relations are not of a full diplomatic nature.”

It is doubtful that Hitchens, at least, will be on hand for the legal fireworks as he was recently diagnosed with cancer.

Bible, Patriarchy & Wicca

To say that the Bible is patriarchal is like saying that Tai Chi is Chinese: It is such a bewildering statement of the obvious that only an academic or reporter would think it a profound revelation.

Yet in the 1970s and ‘80s, literally millions of feminists opened the Bible (some for the first time, some for the millionth time) and were shocked — shocked! -- at what they found.

Not only was the Divinity addressed as “He” – as He had been, both in the original scriptural languages and in vernacular translations, for 2,000 years — but the entire book was riddled with masculine prerogatives and male-oriented language.

The people of Israel are routinely referred to as bnei Israel, literally the “sons of Israel.”

God creates the male human being (the adam) first.

Under the Mosaic Law, men can divorce women at will… but women cannot divorce men.

All of the Twelve Apostles are men. Jesus is a man. St. Paul, the first Christian theologian, is a man.

And on and on it goes: male chauvinism everywhere you turn.

In an era when radical feminists were trying on such linguistic novelties as referring to “seminars” as “ovulars,” the frank “patriarchy” of the Bible drove many feminists to distraction.

That is the only way to understand the phenomenon of Mary Daly, the ex-Catholic nun turned lesbian isolationist who banned all men from her classes at the Jesuit-run Boston College and, in such classics of feminist rage as Gyn/Ecology, Pure Lust and Outercourse, proclaimed that “a woman’s asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person’s demanding equality in the Ku Klux Klan.”

Of course, many feminists were content to remain within the broad confines of Christianity and Judaism and sought moderate corrections to what they saw as the sexism inherent in western religion — such as the creation of politically-correct “inclusive language” Bibles and so on.

Others, however, were driven to reject western religion altogether as irredeemably sexist — and sought, like Daly, to “discover” (actually create) a new religion known as “feminist spirituality.”

“The feminist movement in Western culture is engaged in the slow execution of Christ and Yahveh,” explained Naomi Goldenberg in her entertaining book, Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions “The psychology of the Jewish and Christian religions depends on the masculine image that these religions have of their God.  Feminists change the major psychological impact of Judaism and Christianity when they recognize women as religious leaders and as images of divinity.”

Drawing upon the writings of neo-pagan writers such as “Starhawk” (née Miriam Simos), author of the fascinating chronicle The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Great Goddess, these new feminist theologians asserted that prehistoric peoples all worshipped variations on the Great Mother Goddess – sometimes in conjunction with the “horned god” who died and was resurrected each year.

For tens of thousands of years, they said, primitive societies were matriarchal, ecologically in balance, egalitarian, peaceful, civilized, in touch with their own sexuality and bodies. (Priestesses presided “skyclad” or naked, “embodying the fertility of the Goddess,” explained Starhawk – a far cry from the staid, less tantalizing services found in your average Methodist congregation or Reform synagogue.)

But into this matriarchal utopia disaster struck: Indo-European invaders swept across the European continent, their veins surging with testosterone, bringing with them weapons of killing, patriarchy and (male) hunter gods.

When Christianity arrived on the scene, full of the myriad repressions and patriarchal traditions of Judaism, the Old Religion of the Great Goddess was forced to go underground – in the form of the various goddess-worship Gnostic sects that the early church persecuted and which figured so prominently in The Da Vinci Code.

But the “Old Religion” lived on, secretly practiced by old women (crones) and “witches,” until the “Burning Times” arrived in the Middle Ages – when, according to Starhawk and Mary Daly, some 9 million witches were burned at the stake.

An entire generation of “gender feminists” — now in their 60s and ‘70s — accepted this new mythology hook, line and sinker.

It is still routinely cited by prominent feminist theologians, writers and theoreticians within the Christian churches and, increasingly, within liberal branches of Judaism as well.

There is only one problem with it: It has about as much basis in history as the volcano-dwelling Thetans of Scientology.

Virtually everything taught about the Great Goddess in “feminist spirituality” and Women’s Studies classes – from Berkeley to Boston — is a hoax.

In fact, wicca in general and feminist spirituality in particular were largely the creations of one man…

Catholic Lesbian Blogger Eve Tushnet

The New York Times had an interesting article on the lesbian Catholic blogger Eve Tushnet.  She’s not interesting because she’s lesbian and Catholic (lots of those) but because she is lesbian, Catholic and opposes same-sex marriage.

Raised in a liberal household (her father a non-observant Jew, her mom a Unitarian), Tushnet went to Yale a conventional student liberal and left a committed Catholic intellectual with a decidedly conservative bent.  She went to a meeting of the Yale underground club, The Party of the Right — to, as she puts it, “laugh at the zoo animals” — and was astonished to find the conservative kids to be intellectual, quite tolerant of her open lesbianism and very funny.  Tushnet herself defies the stereotypes of faithful Catholics by embracing the ideology of joy:

She may befuddle others, but for her, life is joyful. She takes obvious pleasure in being an eccentric in a tradition with no shortage of odd heroes, visionaries and saints. “You can be really quite strange, and the Catholic church will canonize you eventually,” she says. She loves eating the flesh and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, which she believes is a carnivorous meal, not a metaphor. She loves gay synth-pop bands.

“I really think the most important thing is, I really like being gay and I really like being Catholic,” she says. “If nobody ever calls me self-hating again, it will be too soon.

“Nothing is quite as great as getting up in the morning, listening to the Pet Shop Boys and going to church.”

In some ways, Tushnet resembles that other great gay Catholic convert, Oscar Wilde… whom she obviously emulates to some degree. If you want to see why she’s courageous for being a faithful Catholic while still acknowledging her lesbian nature, read the raging hate directed her way in the comments section of a typical gay website. (Gays are all for “tolerance” and against “hate crimes,” so long as the tolerance is reserved only for their own point of view: As these comments show, some are perfectly capable of justifying the most violent “hate speech” imaginable for anyone who dares to disagree. Here’s a typical example of what Tushnet faces from the oh-so-tolerant gay community. The writer is quoting Tushnet’s comments in the New York Times piece:

“A two-tiered marriage culture, where heterosexual couples are asked to do the hard things (sex only within marriage, marriage for life in most circumstances) and homosexual couples work out their own marriage norms” – What the SHIT is she even saying here? Her argument is that we want to get married so we can bastardize marriage BEECUZ DE GAYZ R ALL WHORES? Okay, bitch. Get your hand out of your pants and shove it down your throat.

“reshape marriage into an optional, individualized institution, ignoring the creative and destructive potentials of ‘straight’ sex” – Now she wants to ban gay sex. Yeah, good luck with that, cunt. It’s not like it’s been around since before your precious Christ.

“or encourage all couples to restrict sex to marriage and marry for life, and hope that gay couples accept norms designed to meet heterosexual needs” – This is gibberish. Nonsense. No amount of quality education in the world will help this creature because it is completely divorced from any understanding of anything on this earth.

Ugh, FUCK YOU. GAH.

Classy, eh?

Catholic Church in Tibet

I’ve been fascinated by Tibet my entire life — ever since I read, as an 11-year-old, Alexandra David-Neel’s classic Magic and Mystery in Tibet (a book I still own and reread). As a child, I scooped up every book on Tibet I could find in my local public library: Lowell Thomas, Jr.’s Out of This World to Forbidden Tibet… Heinrich Harrer’s classic Seven Years in Tibet... Thubten Norbu’s Tibet is My Country... and Lama Anagarika Govinda’s The Way of the White Clouds.

Of course, I am hardly unique in this fascination. The whole Lost Horizon’s fantasy obviously appeals to millions of westerners… that of a peaceful kingdom of meditating monks living in an isolated plateau in the faraway mountains. But I’ve maintained my interest in Tibet for more than 40 years… eventually discovering the works of Chogyam Trungpa and other westernized lamas. The peaceful Tibetans struck me as very similar to people in my own Catholic background. Both the Catholic Church and Tibetan Buddhism share many similar external traits — a central authority figure who serves for life (the pope, Dalai Lama)… large monasteries and converts… different religious “orders” (in the case of the Tibetans, the four principal “sects” such as the Kagyu, Sakya, etc.)… elaborate liturgical ceremonies involving vestments, incense and the like… a highly developed iconography… different mystical traditions that date back millennia… a wide variety of saints… and on and on. What’s more, both the Catholic Church and the Tibetans have been persecuted by murderous secular regimes hell-bent on destroying their culture and traditions. My heart has always gone out to the Tibetans… and still does. (My kids mock my taste in music as “weird Tibetan music” because I listen to the eerie, otherworldly music of such Tibetan artists as the beautiful Yungchen Lhamo.)

I’ve also long been fascinated by the story of Fr. Ippolito Desideri, S.J., a Jesuit missionary who established a mission in Lhasa in 1712-1727… mastered the Tibetan language… engaged in regular debates with Tibetan philosophical masters (geshe)… and did his best to describe and explain the strange mystical traditions of Tibetan Buddhism to the European Christian world. One of my Jesuit philosophy professors, in the 1970s, was coincidentally an expert in Tibetan in general and Fr. Desideri in particular: He went from classical Greek to Sanskrit (also an Indo-European language) to Tibetan.

All of this is a prelude to a story I saw today about a Catholic Church in Tibet — which I have never known existed. Wonders never cease. The article is from the Communist-controlled Xinhua news agency, which, like all things controlled by the Communist oppressors of Tibet, cannot be completely trusted. The Communists have murdered millions of Tibetans in cold blood since invading their country in the mid-1950s and have continued to practice a form of “ethnic cleansing” (such as importing Han Chinese to run all of the central organizations in Tibet) ever since.  They have a vested interest in portraying the Chinese-dominated “Tibetan Autonomous Region” as a model of religious tolerance and forbearance… when, in fact, the Chinese have done everything in their power to stamp out Tibetan Buddhism.  The Chinese allow one tiny Catholic chapel to exist in Tibet, subject to rigid oversight… just not Tibetan Buddhist monasteries.

LHASA, May 31 (Xinhua) — Every daybreak on the southeast edge of the Tibetan Plateau, Lucy walks into the only Catholic Church in Tibet, dips her fingers into the holy water and makes the sign of the cross before praying.

Rain, hail or shine, the 62-year-old has attended masses and sermons since she was baptized as a child. The priest who baptized her gave her the Western name.

But Lucy is at home among Tibetans, who swing prayer wheels and prostrate themselves in front of Buddhas.

Unlike Catholics elsewhere, Lucy reads the Bible in Tibetan and presents hada, long pieces of silk used as greeting gifts among Tibetans, to the Virgin Mary.

The church she visits every day is perched on a hill in the valley west of the Jinsha River. It is in the village of Yanjing, also known as “Yerkalo”, and is adorned with gesang flowers in its court, where white hada frame the religious artworks.

Built by French missionary Felix Biet in 1865, the whitewashed structure has two crosses on its outer walls while its interior is adorned with Gothic arches and frescos on the ceiling.

Father Felix was born in 1838 and ordained a priest in January 1864. He arrived in Tibet two months later. He was also ordained a bishop and died in 1901.

After the church was built, clashes between its followers and those of a nearby lamasery were common. The clashes reached a peak in the 1940s when armed lamas took over the church. The church was not returned to Catholic hand until 1951 after many local Catholics had asked the local authorities, the Qamdo People’s Liberation Committee, to return it to them.

That handover marked the end of clashes between the local Catholics and Tibetan Buddhists, according to the China Tibet News website.

The church became an elementary and middle school during the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976). In the late 1980s, the church was renovated at a cost of 102,000 yuan (about 14,934 U.S. dollars), 95,000 yuan of which came from the government.

Tibetan priest Father Laurent says the Upper Yanjing Village has a population of less than 1,000, and that the church, with more than 500 parishioners, has enriched the local culture and coexists with Tibetan monasteries.

“Many villagers bring their babies to be baptized, and the baptism is performed over eight consecutive days. The babies will receive religious names like Paul and Anne. The names will be with them for their whole lives, and when they die, they will be buried,” he says.

But wedding ceremonies do not take place in the church, Father Laurent says, the priest will instead go to the couple’s home and pray for them.

Maria takes charge of cleaning and daily necessities. But her husband Zhaxi Wangdui is a fervent Tibetan Buddhist.

Maria says they are both pious and respect each other’s beliefs – “We still share the same culture and lifestyle after all.”

When the Tibetan New Year falls, normally in March, Maria joins her husband and the village folk to celebrate.

“After all these years of coexistence, couples who belong to different religions in the village can stick to their own faiths when they marry and their children can choose their own religion once they grow up.”

At Christmas, Father Laurent says Catholics from neighboring provinces come while Buddhists from nearby lamaseries are invited over.

“Religious conflicts between the Catholics and Buddhists are a thing of the past,” says Father Laurent.

Jesus in Ancient China

It’s an amazing story, one only now being told. More than 1,300 years ago, a Persian Christian monk named Aleben traveled 3,000 miles along the ancient caravan route known as the Silk Road all the way to China, carrying precious copies of the New Testament writings (probably in Syriac). Aleben and his fellow Christian monks stopped in the Chinese city of Chang-au (Xian), where, under the protection of the Tang Dynasty Emperor Taizong, he founded a CHristian monastery and began the arduous task of translating the Christian texts into Chinese. It was the year A.D. 635. When the Italian explorer Marco Polo arrived in China nearly 600 years later, he was astonished to discover that a tiny Christian community had existed there for centuries.

We know about this amazing Christian evangelist and his genial Chinese hosts because in 1623 graver diggers working outside of Xian dug up a stele weighing two tons and carved with 2,000 Chinese characters. Now known as the Monument Stele and residing in a museum in Xian, It was created in A.D. 781 and tells the tale Aleben and what the Chinese writers called “the Luminous Religion” because it taught of light. Here is what the Stele proclaimed:

The Emperor Taizong was a champion of culture. He created prosperity and encouraged illustrious sages to bestow their wisdom on the people. There was a saint of great virtue named Aleben, who came from the Qin Empire carrying the true scriptures. He had read the azure clouds and divined that he should journey to the East. Along the way, Aleben avoided danger and calamity by observing the rhythm of the wind.

In the ninth year of the Zhenguan reign [A.D. 635], Aleben reaching Chang-an [Zian]. The Emperor sent his minister, Duke Xuanling, together with a contingent of the palace guard, to the western outskirts to accompany Aleben to the palace.

The translation work on his scriptures took place in the Imperial Library and the Emperor studied them in his Private Chambers. After the Emperor became familiar with the True Teachings, he issued a decree and ordered that it be propagated…

… the Emperor issued a proclamation, saying:

“We have studied these scriptures and found them otherworldly, profound and full of mystery.

We found their words lucid and direct.

We have contemplated the birth and growth of the tradition from which these teachings sprang.

These teachings will save all creatures and benefit mankind, and it is on ly proper that they be practiced throughout the world.”

Following the Emperor’s orders, the Greater Qin Monastery was built in the I-ning section of the Capital. Twenty-one ordained monks of the Luminous Religion were allowed to live there…

The Emperor Gaozong [A.D. 650-683] reverently continued the tradition of his ancestor and enhanced the Luminous Religion by building temples in every province. He bestowed honors upon Aleben, declarin ghim the Great Dharma Lord of the Empire. The Luminous Religion spread throughout all ten provinces, the Empire prospered and peace prevailed. Temples were built in 100 cities and countless families received the blessings of the Luminous Religion.

Christianity flourished in China for at least two hundred years. But then, around A.D. 850, Chinese leaders began a purge of foreign religions, including Buddhism. Buddhist temples were destroyed and, according to one source, more than 3,000 monks of the “Luminious Religion” were ordered to return to lay life.

For more than 1,300 years, scholars and missionaries have searched for the lost scriptures that Aleben translated into Chinese — and for his monastery. A breakthrough finally occurred in the late 1880s when a lonely Taoist monk named Wang Yuanlu discovered 50,000 lost Chinese manuscripts hidden away in more than 500 caves in Dunhuang. Amazingly enough, it wasn’t until about a decade ago, in 1998, that the full story was told. The Dunhuang manuscripts are sort of the Dead Sea Scrolls of ancient China, a cache of long-buried treasures that reveal a tremendous amount about life in ancient China — including the strange story of how the “Luminous Religion” took root there and blended with Taoist and Confucian elements to create a uniquely Chinese form of Christianity. The discovery of these ancient Chinese texts by western scholars — and their dissemination to museums in France and Britain — along with the many decades it took to get them translated and published — very much resembles the story of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Of the 50,000 manuscripts discovered at Dunhuang, only eight comprise what are now known as the Jesus Sutras. Nevertheless, they clearly show Christian influence. They paraphrase passages from the New Testament and thus provide direct evidence that the ancient Chinese writers of these texts clearly knew the Gospel accounts:

“Do not pile up treasures on the ground where they will rot or be stolen. Treasures must be stored in Heaven where they will not decay or rot.”

“Always tell the truth. Do not give pearls to swine; they will trample and destroy them. You will only be blamed by them for your actions and incur their anger. Why don’t you realize this yourself.”

“Knock on the door and it will be opened for you. Whatever you seek, you will obtain from the One Spirit. Know on the door and it will be opened for you.”

“Look at the birds in the air. They don’t plant or harvest, they have no barns or cellars. In the wilderness the One Spirit provided for the people and will also provide for you. You are more important than the birds and should not worry.”

The Jesus Sutra texts clearly are attempting to translate Christian ideas and ideals into an idiom that the Chinese people — steeped in Buddhist, Taoist and Confucian concepts — can understand. Thus, the Jesus Sutras speak of the “Higher Dharma” that leads to Peace and Joy. “It is the Sutras of the Luminous Religion that enable us to cross the sea of birth and death to the other shore, a land fragrant with the treasured aroma of Peace and Joy,” the Sutras proclaim. “The Sutras are like a great fire burning upon a high mountain. The light from that fire shines upon all.”

Here is how the Jesus Sutras relate the story of Jesus:

The Lord of Heaven sent the Cool Wind to a girl named Mo Yen. It entered her womb and at the moment she conceived. The Lord of Heaven did this to show that conception could take place without a husband. He knew there was no man near her and that people who saw it would say, “How great is the power of the Lord of Heaven.”…

… Mo Yen became pregnant and gave birth to a son named Jesus, whose father is the Cool Wind.

… When Jesus Messiah was born, the world saw clear signs in heaven and earth. A new star that could be seen everywhere appeared in heaven above. The star was as big as a cart wheel and shown brightly. At about that time, the One was born in the country of Ephrath in the city of Jerusalem. He was born the Messiah and after five years he began to preach the dharma.

… From the time the Messiah was 12 until he was 32 years old, he sought out people with bad karma and directed them to turn around and create good karma by following a wholesome path. After the Messiah had gathered 12 disciples, he concerned himself with the suffering of others. Those who had died were made to live. The blind were made to see. The deformed were healed and the sick were cured.

… For the sake of all living beings and to show us that a human life is as frail as a candle flame, the Messiah gave his body to these people of unwholesome karma. For the sake of the living in this world, he gave up his life.

… After the Messiah had accepted death, his enemies seized the Messiah and took him to a secluded spot, washed his hair and climbed to “the place of skulls,” which was called golgotha. They bound him to a pole and placed two highway robbers to the right and left of him. They bound the Messiah to the pole at the time of the fifth watch of the sixth day of fasting. They bound him at dawn and when the sun set in the west the sky became black in all four directions, the earth quaked and the hills trembled. tombs all over the world opened and the dead came to life. What person can see such a thing and not have faith in the teaching of the scriptures? To give one’s life like the Messiah is a mark of great faith.

Fascinating stuff, no? To see this early form of Christianity — delivered by means of a Nestorian monk in the 6th century — through the eyes of the poetic, Taoist-influenced Chinese translators and scribes is to go back in time. It is yet another reminder of the universality of the Gospel message, how it transcends all culture and language and philosophical concepts. Christian yogis, above all, who seek wisdom from the East as well as from our own traditions, should appreciate this.

As the Apostle Peter tells the righteous Roman centurian Cornelius, following his vision: “I see clearly now that God is not one to show partiality, but in every nation the man who fears Him and does what is right is welcome to Him (Acts 10: 34-5).” We Christians who seek wisdom from the East.

If you’re interested in this topic, you can discover more in The Lost Sutras of Jesus: Unlocking the Ancient Wisdom of the Xian Monks, edited by Ray Riegert and Thomas Moore (Berkeley: Seastone, 2003). A much more scholarly work, and without the frequently anti-Christian tone of Riegert and Moore, is Martin Palmer’s The Jesus Sutras: Rediscovering the Lost Scrolls of Taoist Christianity (Wellspring/Ballantine, 2001).

Sex and John Paul II’s Theology of the Body

According to rabbinic tradition, the first commandment God gives Adam and Eve in the Garden is to have sex: Pru vehravu, “be fruitful and multiply.”

It’s little wonder, then, that Christian theology has pondered for centuries the place that human sexuality and bodily existence have in God’s plan for the universe.

On the one hand, anyone familiar with the Jewish testament knows that sexual attraction (and sexual sin) permeate virtually every book. What’s more, two centuries of crusading secularism has exaggerated Christian pruddery in the early centuries of Christianity and in the Middle Ages.

On the other hand, it’s also true that the monastic movement that led to so many cultural and educational achievements in the West did tend to emphasize the negative aspects of human sexuality and bodily existence — if only because vowed celibate monks and nuns inevitably saw sexual feelings as temptations to be avoided at all costs.

Into this tangled history stepped the late pope John Paul II.

Raised by his widowed father in Poland during the nightmare of World War II, Karol Wotylwa was a working man, athlete and actor before he became a Catholic priest and a philosopher.

His experience with young married couples during his early years as a pastor — combined with his in-depth study of early 20th century phenomenologists — allowed the young priest to see the sexual embrace and life in the body in an entirely new way: as quite literally a way to God.

When he was elected pope, John Paul delivered a remarkable series of 129 lectures during his Wednesday audiences on what has become known as the Theology of the Body (TOTB) — a very traditional, very radical teaching on human embodiment and sexual attraction that papal biographer George Weigel has described as “a kind of theological time bomb” that will have dramatic consequences …perhaps in the twenty-first century” (Witness to Hope, 343).

John Paul’s argument, in essence, is that both secular libertines and Christian pruddery have missed the point. Human beings are radically, essentially physical. Human beings are not “ghosts in a machine,” as Descartes described it.

In a dramatic way, the entire Christian understanding of the incarnation means that Christians are and must be “pro-sex” and must celebrate the body generally. I would even say that Christians take the body at least as seriously as the devotees of most religions, including even Hinduism. The doctrine of the bodily resurrection reflects the Christian belief that we are our bodies — that if we are to survive death then it must be a physical survival. A disembodied spirit would not be a human being.

In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna teaches Arjuna the exact opposite of the Christian view of our essentially bodily natures:

As a man discards his threadbare robes and puts on new, so the Spirit throws off its worn-out bodies and puts on new ones… The Spirit in man is imperishable.

While Christianity agrees with the Gita (and with yoga!) that there is an imperishable, immortal essence of the human being, which, for lack of a better word, the west has traditionally called the “soul,” it does not agree that the physical body is merely incidental to that essence — something that can be “thrown off” for a new one.

Rather, in the Christian view, we are embodied spirits or spiritual bodies – and thus it is our bodies themselves that are (or will be) immortal. Thus, the Christian hope is even more absurdly optimistic than people give us credit for: We actually believe that we will live forever… in glorified “resurrection” bodies, not as disembodied spirits. I’ve never been the least scandalized by Taoists who claim that yoga can lead to physical immortality of a sort or at least extreme longevity: it seems perfectly plausible to me given the Christian revelation.

That is why St. Paul tells the (male) Corinthians that they should take good care of their bodies and not defile themselves with prostitutes — and why Christian practitioners of yoga celebrate the body and do what they can to maintain good health. That is also why Pope John Paul II, in his teachings on the Theology of the Body, emphasized how incarnate human beings come to God in and through their bodies — and that sex, far from being inherently sinful, is actually a way to God.

In John Paul’s teaching, sex (for non-celibate “householders”) is a sacrament (a “sign”) of divine presence because it is the preeminent example of that spiritual intimacy that is the birthright of all human beings.

Thriving Long-Term Marriages

The break-up of Al and Tipper Gore’s 40-year marriage is sparking a soul-searching among many long-time married couples. The Wall Street Journal today had an interesting article about the shifting marriage patterns among couples who have been married 30, 40 years or more. It turns out the Gores are typical of the baby boom generation:

Whatever the Gores’ issues—he’s 62, she’s 61—they are part of a new normal that began with their generation, according to Census statistics. Of the 8.1 million women who were married between 1970 and 1974, just over half made it to their 30th wedding anniversary, compared with about 60% for women married between 1960 and 1964.

That is likely the biggest generational jump in divorce rates ever seen, says Pamela Smock, a research professor at the Population Studies Center at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research. From more women in the work force to the gradual acceptance of unmarried couples living together, the Gores’ generation “saw a sea change in how people thought about what they were supposed to do with their lives, including their family lives,” she says.

My wife and I celebrated our 20th wedding anniversary last year. I don’t think we were too smug about it, though. More like combat veterans sitting around after a battle, happy to be alive but a bit dazed and exhausted. With five wild kids and our own business, we’re just glad to be in one piece. Plus, we’ve seen our share of divorces in our circle of friends. The Gores’ breakup, like the divorces of of friends, both unnerve us and make us more determined.

The Wall Street Journal article argues that greater longevity dooms marriage. “People are living longer, and they’re less willing to spend their last decades with someone who leaves them unfulfilled,” the author writes. “The anthropologist Margaret Mead believed marriage was designed for a time when people died in their 40s and 50s, after raising children together. The concept of decades-long, empty-nest marriages was never considered.”

Perhaps. But the article also had hope for those of us committed to seeing marriage through til death do us part. The second half of marriage, now that the kids are semi-launched, can be a time of re-focusing on the relationship that set the family yacht sailing the seven seas in the first place. It’s a time when the husband and wife tell the kids, “See ya! We’re off to Tahiti!” Well, if not Tahiti, at least down the street.

My wife and I now run every morning on the beach near our home. It’s partly for our health, of course — we’re committed Younger Next Year folks — but it’s also a time when we can reconnect. We often sit on the beach before we start running, quietly listening to the waves, sipping coffee, reading the Wall Street Journal and just talking. It’s like daily marriage therapy. The kids have to fend for themselves for breakfast. At this point in our lives, we come first. Ha!

Like most combat veterans, my wife and I have seen too much to be flip about the next battle. We’re not overconfident… but not pessimistic, either. A stray bullet could take you out. But we’re determined and hopeful. Another day, another run together.

Time Magazine Slams Pope Again (What a Surprise!)

Former Time Magazine staffer and now contributor Jeff Israely (aided by news editor Howard Chua-Eoan) takes a predictable cheap shot at Pope Benedict XVI in a cover story this week (June 7, 2010). The cover headline is actually: “Why Being Pope Means Never Having to Say You’re Sorry.” (Golly, I wonder where they’re going with this one?)  The article is riddled with the usual embarrassing errors of fact we’ve come to expect from the dying lamestream media and is distinguished by an almost comical lack of actual reporting. (To be fair, Jeff now lives in Paris, where he is anxiously attempting to launch, along with a gaggle of other former lamestream media types, a news service that is supposed to challenge the Associated Press’s hegemony over the daily newspaper market.) Presumably, Time is so pathetically short of funds it couldn’t pop for the $200 it would take to fly Jeff down to Rome for some on-site reporting.) Instead, the article amounts to little more than an excuse for a salacious cover story as part of Time’s increasingly desperate efforts not to go the way of its erstwhile rival, Newsweek, into the proverbial dustbin of failed magazines.

To expect any MSM type to care enough about a subject to actually, you know, like read a book about it, is probably expecting too much… but this is a spectacularly egregious example of how a media person these days could actually live in Rome and not learn anything about the Vatican. Here are a few samples of what passes for analysis in the world of Time Magazine:

Vatican officials are concerned that a mea culpa would diminish the magisterium, which has been integral to the papacy’s ability to project power in the world throughout its history, from the humiliation of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV at Canossa in the 11th century to the humbling of Soviet power in Poland in the 20th. It plays a key role in the doctrine of papal infallibility, which declares that the Pope is never in error when he issues teachings ex cathedra — that is, elucidating dogma from the throne of St. Peter. It is tied up in the traditional prerogatives of that Apostle, to whom was given the power “to bind and loose” in heaven and on earth — in rough terms, the church’s ability to open the gates of heaven to you or damn you to hell because it will always be holier than thou.

Classy, no? But wait! There’s more…

That mind-set has been deeply ingrained by history. The church is hard-wired with extraterritorial prerogatives that go back more than a millennium. The Catholic Church believes it is Christ’s representative on earth, with all the sinlessness and omnipotent authority of its Saviour.

The whole article goes on and on like this for 8 solid pages… column after column of undergraduate (forgive the pun) pontificating without nary a named source or piece of actual news in the entire diatribe. (Even that bastion of conservative theological opinion, the New York Times, manages to bother with reporting actual facts: See its far more balanced coverage here.) You might expect that a magazine that claims to practice journalism might include, in a major cover story on the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, a detailed analysis of what, precisely, the pope’s sins of omission and/or commission might actually be? A detailed description, say, of what then-Cardinal Ratzinger did or did not do when he was (briefly) archbishop of Munich. But as John Belushi would have said, nnnnnnoooooo…. that merits literally a single paragraph.

After all, why let reporting get in the way of an old-fashioned smear campaign against that last enemy of liberal progressivism, the Catholic Church?

Clearly, Time’s former subscribers have had enough of these fact-less exercises in essay writing.  As one reader wrote:

How many more inane articles on the Catholic church will I have to endure from the nitwits that call themselves journalists at Time? Seriously, all these articles seem to prove is the mainstream media’s bias against the church and lack of understanding in regards to its teaching. give it a rest. yes…there is no excuse for the crimes committed against the innocent. sadly no institution is immune from these abuses as inexcusable as they are. but they need not be the context in which we discuss and evaluate all issues impacting the church. this tragedy is compounded when the media neglects to report the churches contributions and the truth it offers people in these uncertain times. What a loss it is when someone is searching for understanding and their hearts are closed off to the beauty of the Church’s teachings due to a skewed representation of what the Church truly is and can offer believers.

I am looking forward to the inevitable demise of Time and the other newsweeklies. They are writing themselves into irrelevance.

Another reader, Ryan Ellis, commented:

This is uninformed tripe. how many times does the church have to apologize (including this pope) for crimes which were committed generations ago? i wasn’t even alive when these crimes were taking place, and I’m old enough to have a family myself.

where’s the mention that there were six credible abuse cases in the US last year–six! do you know how many priests, religious, and laity interact with children every day? that number is far, far smaller than public schools, or virtually any other institution. while six is six too many, it’s frankly a rounding error given the scope.

i look forward to seeing time magazine’s in-depth review of the much bigger, current problem of sex abuse in public schools and prot denominations.

not holding my breath.

Indeed.

The Eternal City

I took my whole family to Rome this year for Easter… and, as usual, it was an invigorating, life-affirming, faith-building experience for everyone. Rome has a way of doing that to people. I’ve been to many of the great cities of the world – from New York, London and Paris to Berlin, Athens, Cairo and Jerusalem – and none has the mystical quality to it as Rome does.

My wife agrees. Paris is beautiful… Berlin is majestic… but Rome is truly magical. Perhaps it’s the warm, spring weather, the bright blue sky that lights up the white travertine of the Colosseum. More probably, it’s the way that all of western civilization… all of our political, historical, philosophical, religious understanding… is somehow condensed, like a diamond, in the 2,000-year-old buildings that still dot the Roman landscape. You can almost hear voices from the past as you walk through the old Roman neighborhoods of Trastevere and through the city center. Even jaded, bored teenagers gawk in astonishment as they walk through the portals of Rome’s great temples, from St. Peter’s Basilica to the Pantheon. When you combine that with the intoxicating energy that flows through the Eternal City like a live wire – the youthful exuberance of a hundred different nationalities – it’s easy to see how Rome can totally change your outlook on life. I feel more alive in Rome, a lot freer. God still speaks to people in Rome. Sometimes they even hear him.

The thing is, in Rome Christianity is not a religion. It’s not even a way of life. It’s history. Family history. The good, the bad and the ugly. And all of it happened, as far as Romans are concerned, only yesterday.

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