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Holy Envy: Sikh Langar

Langar of the Sikh Dharamsal of San Antonio

I read Barbara Brown Taylor’s Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others back in 2021. It continues to shape how I understand my own engagement with people of different religious persuasions. I don’t participate in interfaith dialogue and community building with the goal of erasing differences or pretending that we’re all the same. I think we can celebrate many of our differences and also that we can remain in disagreement without being hostile or disagreeable. When we celebrate differences, this is what Brown Taylor means by “holy envy”. It when you see something offered by another religious tradition and you think something like, “That’s beautiful. I wish my tradition had that.”

Whenever I bring my students to our nearby gurdwara, our Sikh hosts welcome my students into a langar. Harvard University’s Pluralism Project summarizes the point of the langar this way:

Langar is the communal meal shared by Sikhs and all visitors to the gurdwara. Since the founding of the Sikh community, langar has come to be an important part of Sikh religious life. After the service, no Sikh will leave without partaking of langar. For Sikhs, eating together in this way is expressive of the equality and oneness of all humankind. At the same time, it strengthens the Sikh sense of community. Visitors and guests are readily and warmly included in the great hospitality of the Sikh tradition. In visiting a gurdwara one will always be offered the sweet prashad which is distributed in the sanctuary as the “grace” of the guru. And in visiting at the time of a service, one will be offered the entire langar meal.

“Langar: The Communal Meal”

They’ve told me that serving food to me and my students is a blessing for them. There’s no doubt that it’s a blessing on us as well. The food is delicious and the hospitality unmatched.

In Amritsar, Punjab, there’s a building known as “Harmandir Sahib” or more broadly as “the Golden Temple”. It’s a point of pilgrimage for many Sikhs but more relevant to this post, the langar there serves 100,000 people per day (not a typo). This video by vlogger Khalid Al Ameri provides a good overview of what happens there: “Inside the Gold Temple”. Gurdwaras around the world welcome people to the langar, whether you’re Sikh or not. Sikhs have told me that wherever I go in the world, if I’m hungry, lost, in danger, or there’s been some sort of disaster, all I need to do is look for the gurdwara.

The communal meal is beautiful. My own tradition has Eucharist (or Mass, or Communion, or the Lord’s Supper) which has its own food-as-sacrament beauty but entering a langar is unique. Once a student of mine asked if the Sikh communal meal was like what early Christians celebrated, and as far as I can tell this seems to be the case, except when it was abused like it appears to have been by the Corinthian Christians. Since we Christians have ritualized and sacramentalized our meal to the point where it hardly can be called a meal, I envy what Sikhism has. I’m sure it’s not perfect. I’m sure there are Sikhs who can tell stories about how this or that went wrong in this or that langar. But the tradition has centralized something beautiful in its pragmatism, community building, and hospitality that many communities of my coreligionists lack.

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Carl Schleicher’s Eine Streitfrage aus dem Talmud and Reading the Gospels

I don’t know how other private high school teachers approach teaching the Bible to their students but since I work at a college preparatory school sponsored by the Episcopal Church, I introduce them to the best of scholarship available to us. For example, this means that my students encounter the Synoptic Problem. They come to see the similarities and differences between the accounts of the different canonical Gospels (and they do read some non-canonical Gospels as well). For some of my students, there’s an indifference to what they’re learning. For others, there’s a sense of adventure while being simultaneously overwhelmed because they’ve never studied the Bible before taking my class. (Often this is the case for students who aren’t raised by Christians.) For others, there’s an excitement, possibly because they’re being given a space to read the Bible critically without judgment, some for the first time. (Now, “critically” doesn’t mean disparaging the text but instead reading it thoughtfully: not taking the claims of the text at face value but instead putting in the intellectual work required to determine how I understand and how I receive what I’m reading.) For others, my class can lead to a bit of an existential crisis.

Now, I see my role as primarily that of an academic guide to the text. I don’t favor any particular confessional approach. I don’t try to pursued my students of the truthfulness of the text’s claims. I don’t try to convert or proselytize my students. When I’m asked what my religion is (because sometimes my approach makes them wonder), I’m honest that I’m a Christian because I don’t want to feign objectivity even if methodologically I try to be as objective as possible. Since I’m a Christian who has been studying the Bible academically for a couple of decades, and since I’ve found a way to find peace between my own religious commitments and the demands of scholarship, I’ll talk to students who want to think through how what they’re learning might impact their faith. And here I want to share one of two examples I use for students who wonder how I remain Christian while reading the Bible critically. I’ll discuss one here and one in a future post.

Eine Streitfrage aus dem Talmud via Wikimedia Commons

First, I share Carl Schleicher’s Eine Streitfrage aus dem Talmud (above). This 19th century oil painting provides me with a perfect visual for how I read the Bible, academically and religiously, often simultaneously. In this painting, five rabbis are reading the Talmud. They’re debating its meaning with some intensity. The fifth rabbi listens in from behind the group. This depicts one of the beauties of the Jewish tradition: internal debate about the meaning of sacred texts isn’t a bug but a feature. Christianity hasn’t done as well in this regard. Our obsession with orthodoxy versus heresy has killed much of our theological creativity.

Personally, when I read the Gospels, specifically, this image comes to my mind. As I told a student recently who’s troubled by the reality that non-canonical Gospels exist and that the depiction of Jesus differs between Gospels, I see myself in this picture. As I reflected on this further with a friend who I was talking to yesterday, I see myself as the man in the back listening to the debate. And I imagine the four rabbis as representing how I see the four evangelists. Who is Jesus? These four accounts present different pictures. I’m invited to listen, to ponder, and to decide for myself.

Now, as I told my student last week: this puts more responsibility on us. We can settle for a shallow “Bible-in-a-year” approach to reading the text that checks a box but never stops to truly wrestle with what we’re reading because we may care more that we’re reading than that we’re understanding and interpreting what we’re reading. But if we care to interpret and understand, this takes work. We must listen intently. We must hear the different presentations and then we must decide what we’re going to do with them. I understand why someone would want to outsource this responsibility to their clergy. I understand why someone might prefer to encounter the Gospels primarily through the filter of sermons and liturgy. That’s a legitimate approach. But if you take the challenge of reading—really reading—then you inherit the responsibility as well.

Again, this can be seen as a negative thing. Who wants the responsibility of sorting out who Jesus was and is for themselves? That may feel high stakes. But for others, like me, and I hope for many of my Christian students, this is an invitation to truly encounter what the Gospels are within their canonical setting: four sages exploring the meaning of Jesus of Nazareth.

(What about the non canonical Gospels? How does this fit my analogy? Well, I read those too. I find them fascinating. But on historical grounds even more so than theological grounds, I find their lateness less interesting and inviting. Note: I think even the Gospel of Thomas is a later second century text that derives from the canonical Gospels, as has been argued by scholars like Mark Goodacre and Simon Gathercole. It’s fascinating. Other noncanonical Gospels provide me with comfort knowing that Christians have been wrestling with who Jesus was and is to them from the earliest generations, and that sometimes their understanding of Jesus clashed with what they found in what became the canonized Gospels, but I find them less compelling. Maybe this means the concept of canonization has a greater pull on me than it should.)

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A Short Note on David Bentley Hart’s Tradition and Apocalypse

David Bentley Hart, Tradition and Apocalypse: An Essay on the Future of Christian Belief

(Amazon; Bookshop)

I’d say that at this point in my life, my favorite contemporary theologian must be David Bentley Hart. He won me over a couple of years ago with his exploration of Christian Universalism/Universal Reconciliation, That All Shall Be Saved. Recently, I read his short history of Christianity, The Story of Christianity. This week, I finished Tradition and Apocalypse.

Hart’s two interlocutors are Catholic theologians: John Henry Newman (see his Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine) and Maurice Blondel (see his Histoire et Dogme). Both, in their own way, argue that the Catholic tradition is the natural unfolding of history. Hart questions this in light of the findings of critical historiography and a basic philosophy of history that questions, for example, that there’s anything more natural about the development of say imperial Christianity post-Constantine than there was say the varieties of gnosticism (so-called). As historians know, causality is as the historian see, interprets, and narrates it. It’s not at all clear from the historian’s perspective that Catholic Christianity had to win the day (where it did).

But Hart doesn’t want to give in to a nihilistic historicism where there’s no direction of history or force moving things in any direction: he is an Orthodox Christian theologian, after all! Admittedly, the deconstruction of Catholic claims that history has been leading, inevitably, to their tradition is the easier task; the constructive argument that Christian tradition is indeed going somewhere, though somewhere we only see “through a glass, darkly” (ala St. Paul), is more difficult. That’s where apocalypse enters the title.

Each version of the Christian tradition points back and tries to understand the apocalyptic act of God in Christ, and the seeds of that events meaning reside in the varieties of Christian tradition, but for Hart the fullness of what the Christian tradition has been pointing toward can’t be revealed until we reach the final apocalyptic horizon, when once again God in Christ completes his intended project.

If I were to summarize this book, I’d say it’s subtext has to do with the relationship between faith and epistemology. Tradition is a vehicle of faith but to equate faith in a living God with faith in a tradition is a categorical error; and to equate faith—fidelity!—to knowledge (as we traditionally understand “knowledge”) is to undermine faith.

As someone who teaches comparative religion, and who identifies as a Christian but who has had his Christianity shaped by reading the writings of and about other religious traditions, I especially appreciated Hart’s suggestion that this apocalyptic horizon of which he speaks must be not only the end of all Christian traditions but the end of all traditions, and that at the end there may have been realities recognized by other traditions (he talks mostly about Vedantic philosophy) that proved to have had insights into reality that the various Christianities missed.

This book is for those who (1) have hope in some redemptive eschatological end; who (2) are comfortable living in their tradition with an open rather than closed hand; and who (3) want to place an emphasis on living by faithfulness to what you sense has been revealed/experienced rather than by rigid, confessional dogmatism and defensive apologetics. If that’s not you, this probably won’t be as enjoyable a read as it was for me but I believe there are many Christians who will be encouraged by Hart’s essay.

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Sermon for the Eleventh Sunday after Pentecost (August 13th, 2023)

Delivered at the Episcopal Church of the Holy Spirit:

  1. Introductory Exposition of Genesis 37:1-4, 12-28

Let me confess, our Old Testament reading from the Book of Genesis struck me as peculiar when I first read it. I’ll tell you why momentarily but first, let’s review the broader narrative of which this excerpt is but a part. The main character is the Patriarch Joseph, the son of Jacob, grandson of Isaac, and great-grandson of Abraham. This is the one that Orthodox Christians call “Righteous Joseph the Fair,” because, in spite of all that was done to him, he sought justice and redemption in the end. For those who don’t know the whole story, it begins with the horror of a brother being sold into slavery by his ten older brothers. This action was fueled by jealousy, as Joseph was the favorite child of his father, Jacob. The brothers had considered killing Joseph but one among them, Judah, convinces the others to sell him to some Midian slave traders instead. Then the brothers take Joseph’s fancy coat, a gift from his father, cover it in the blood of an animal, and tell their father that Joseph had been tragically mauled to death in the wilderness.

This narrative becomes roller coaster-esque. Joseph is sold to an affluent Egyptian man named Potiphar. He becomes the lead slave in Potiphar’s household but then, according to the Book of Genesis, Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce him and when she fails because of Joseph’s moral strength, she frames him for sexual assault. Joseph is sent to an Egyptian prison but due to a divine gift he received—the ability to interpret dreams—he is freed, eventually, when he happens to be imprisoned with Pharoah’s exiled cup-bearer who remembers him one day when the restored cup-bearer hears that Pharoah has had a troubling dream. This cup-bearer recommends Joseph to Pharaoh; Joseph successfully interprets Pharaoh’s dream, warning him that after seven years of agricultural plenty, there will be seven years of famine. Joseph is appointed to oversee Egypt’s preparation for the years of famine—a famine that leads Joseph’s brothers to Egypt begging for food. Joseph tests his brothers, who don’t recognize him, to see if they’ve changed, and when he is confident that they have, he reveals his identity, welcomes his family—including his elderly father—to Egypt, and as fairy tales end, “they live happily ever after”. 

But our liturgy stops at Genesis 37:28, which read, “When some Midianite traders passed by, they drew Joseph up, lifting him out of the pit, and sold him to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver. And they took Joseph to Egypt.” This is why I found our stopping point peculiar: it ends with one of the ugliest parts of the story as Joseph is being trafficked to Egypt.

  1. The Middle of the Story

It’s clear that the compilers of our liturgy recognized that this was less than edifying. How would preachers preach this passage to congregations on a Sunday? It’s a downer. So, you’ll notice that the accompanying psalm previews the aforementioned happy ending when it says:

Then he [God] called for a famine in the land 

       and destroyed the supply of bread.

17 He sent a man before them, 

       Joseph, who was sold as a slave.

18 They bruised his feet in fetters; 

       his neck they put in an iron collar.

19 Until his prediction came to pass, 

       the word of the Lord tested him.

20 The king sent and released him; 

       the ruler of the peoples set him free.

21 He set him as a master over his household,

       as a ruler over all his possessions,

22 To instruct his princes according to his will

       and to teach his elders wisdom.

Whew! Don’t worry, our liturgy tells us, it’ll all work out in the end! The inclusion of the psalm provides a theological interpretation of the narrative that is meant to console us: the famine was the work of a sovereign God who had plans to protect his chosen people, using Joseph’s suffering redemptively for the good of his family. This echoes the words of Joseph in Genesis 50:20, which reads, “Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today.” But maybe we should ignore the psalm for a moment, and maybe I shouldn’t have fast-forwarded to the end of Joseph’s story.

Let me suggest that sometimes stopping in the middle of a biblical narrative, as our reading from Genesis did, invites us to hear the story afresh. Let me suggest that it’s dangerous for us to become too comfortable with the Bible, especially when we’ve become accustomed to hearing the same stories for years. Let me suggest that the saying “familiarity breeds contempt” is wise and true. Let me suggest that sometimes we need to stop in the middle of a story because that’s how real life is often experienced. Sometimes we find ourselves in the middle of our own story, when life is its ugliest, and we have no way of knowing whether or not things will be alright in the end. And yet, whether we sense God or not, the power of being in the middle of the story is that our God is as present there as he is at the end of the story. We may want to skip to the ending but the ending doesn’t make any sense without the middle.

I see this every spring when I walk my students through the Passion Narratives in the Gospels, where Jesus is arrested, brutally beaten, and abused in numerous ways, only to be crucified by the Roman state—which, by the way, was one of the most shameful and dehumanizing ways to die. As I point out how the disciples respond, like the two disciples walking to Emmaus who say of Jesus in Luke 24:21, “But we had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel,” and I try to help my students understand that for all intents and purposes, according to the criteria of the day, Jesus was a failed and false messiah because messiahs don’t get crucified, many of my more biblically literature students want to jump quickly to “Yes, but, he comes back from the dead.” And while this is correct, it misses the point. The Evangelists Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John all dedicate much of their narrative about Jesus to explaining and detailing Jesus’ suffering and death. They could’ve written, “Yes, Jesus died by crucifixion, and it was sad and all, but enough with that—let’s move to the real good news!” But they didn’t because Jesus’ resurrection is given meaning because of his crucifixion.

This is why our liturgical calendar makes us stop at Good Friday, asking us to feel what that day represents in and of itself. Then we’re to sit through the silence of Holy Saturday. Only then does Easter Sunday feel triumphant.

Unfortunately, we Christians often act like my students: we want to jump to the triumphalistic parts. We want to hear how Job receives back double from God after his time of tribulation. We want to hear how Joseph rises to power after being dragged into prison. We want to hear that Jesus calms the storms that appear to threaten the lives of the disciples. But for the Bible to pack its intended punch, I contend, we must wade through chapter after chapter of Job’s friends telling him that he must deserve what he’s experiencing; and we must sit with Joseph in prison, feeling that sense of abandonment; and we must be with Christ as he hangs from his cross, rejected by Heaven and Earth alike. This is where Scripture meets most of our actual lives.

  1. The Ending is Not Yet

So, while I was initially perplexed by how the excerpt from Genesis 37 ended, now I’m grateful that it ended there because it provides me the opportunity to remind us that in this narrative, two decades pass between Joseph’s enslavement and his reunion with his family. Two decades! Don’t get me wrong, I want to believe with the great theologian Julian of Norwich that Christ told her, “It behooved that there should be sin; but all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.” And I do hope that the quote derived from the Brazilian writer Fernando Sabino is true when he wrote, “…everything works out in the end. If it didn’t, it’s because it hasn’t come to the end yet.” And I’m what you might call an “eschatological optimist,” which is to say I’m not always optimistic about the present but I believe (on my best days) and hope (every day) that our Creator has a plan for how to end our collective story so that every injustice is rectified and every suffering rewarded. But the ending is not yet, and that’s ok. It’s ok to be in the middle of your story, not knowing what will happen next, not sure if you’ve been abandoned by God and humans, like Christ on the cross crying out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” It’s ok to be in the part of the story where we left Joseph: when you can’t pretend to know that it’ll all work out and it’s ok to feel those emotions without feigning confidence. It’s my conviction that, like Joseph, we are as loved in our times of abandonment and doubt as we are in our times of triumph. We may feel distant from God. We may feel lost. And if that’s you, that’s ok. You’re allowed to be in that part of your story. You’re allowed to be unsure. You’re allowed to have doubts, just as I’m sure Joseph would’ve felt as he was being dragged to Egypt. I want to encourage you with the claim that if you’re in the middle of your story, God hasn’t forgotten you but I won’t guilt you if you feel like life has left you exiled far away from home. The end of our stories don’t make any sense without the middle, so if you feel like your life has stopped in the middle of your story, I hope that today’s excerpt from the Book of Genesis can serve as a reminder that sometimes that’s just where we are, and it’s ok, and you’re loved. Amen

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Sikh philosophy, Christian history, generational differences, and the meaning of birth

Sometimes I finish a book and either because the book is a bit older, or I can’t find the words for an adequate review, or because I feel a bit too busy to write something blog post worthy, I’ll opt to leave a shorter blurb and rating on Goodreads. Recently, I’ve finished the following books that won’t get a review here but will get something there:

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Sermon for Evensong, Trinity Sunday (June 4th, 2023)

Delivered at St. Thomas Episcopal Church and School:

I. Introduction

According to the fourth-century theologian, Gregory of Nyssa, the doctrine of the Trinity was the trending topic of his day. He claimed that everywhere you went, people were sharing their theological opinions: whether you were asking for change at the market, inquiring about the quality of the bread being sold, or visiting a bathhouse, you would run into someone who wanted to share their personal theology with you (Oratio de deitate Filii et Spiriti Sancti). In other words, “doctrine” or Christian “teaching” was akin to what we see regarding politics and sports in our society today. It’s what animated people! Can you imagine the equivalent of an ESPN, CNN, or Fox News that is dedicated to Christian theology? Or people arguing about the Trinity, en masse, on Twitter as they argue about politics and sports. I can’t. (And maybe that’s a good thing!)

Today, for better or worse, only some Christians want to discuss the Trinity. I can’t say that I blame the rest. Throughout the history of Christianity, one of the quickest paths to being labeled heretical by your fellow Christians has been to try to explain the Trinity in a way that they find unsatisfactory. It seems that every analogy and metaphor—from three-leaf clovers to water in the form of a liquid, a solid (ice), and a gas (steam)—can lead to accusations that you’ve misunderstood one of the central teachings of Christianity. For this reason, many have found comfort in side-stepping discussions about the nature of the Trinity by using the one phrase that can provide an escape from complex theological debates: “It’s a mystery!” And this isn’t wrong. In some sense, it’s wise. Christian theology is often at its healthiest when Christians admit that the Christian God is “ineffable” (a fancy way of saying that our God is beyond our ability to describe with human language). But I’m not in a position to avoid talking about the nature of the Trinity tonight. After all, it’s Trinity Sunday! 

So, I want to emphasize the value of the doctrine of the Trinity with regard to how it shapes us as individuals seeking personal, individual spiritual nourishment within a diverse, pluralistic community, like St. Thomas. Our goal can’t be to revisit the philosophical, theological, and metaphysical arguments that led to the present shape of the doctrine—after all, it took many of the most prominent minds of Christendom several centuries to iron out the specifics. Instead, we’re going to skip directly to the practical implications of Trinitarianism. 

II. The Trinity as Unity-in-Diversity

We must begin with the earliest Trinitarian language which is found in the texts of the Christian New Testament. While attempting to maintain fidelity to the Jewish theology they inherited, the earliest Christians spoke of the Creator God in a unique way. There was a recognition that the Creator God had been experienced afresh with the appearance of Jesus. For example, as we sampled in our excerpt from the Gospel of John (16:12-15), the Gospels report that Jesus’ followers were invited into a dynamic relationship between the Father, Son, and Spirit. As a whole, John’s Gospel claims that Jesus Christ prayed to and spoke about God the Father, that God the Father spoke to and about the Son, and that the Holy Spirit was actively sent from the Father to the Son, but also that the Son promised that he would send the Spirit who would draw Jesus’ followers into the divine life. As their Lord and Christ, Jesus spoke of the divine nature in such a way that the earliest Christians understood as revelatory what he had said regarding the nature of God, but also it seems to have aligned with their own experience of God in Christ and through the Spirit.

III. Experiencing God through the Son and the Spirit

Our other reading from the Apostle Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (5:1-5) sketches the Christian experience of the Trinity as the One who saves us. Paul wrote:

“Therefore, being justified (or made right) by [Christ’s] faithfulness, we have peace toward God through our Lord Jesus Christ whom also we have access into this grace in which we stand and we boast in the hope of the glory of God. But not this only, but also we boast in afflictions, having known that afflictions produce steadfastness; and steadfastness, character; and character, hope; and hope does not humiliate because of the love of God that has been poured in our hearts through the Holy Spirit—the one gifted to you!”

Paul’s audience had collectively experienced reconciliation and peace with their Creator, God the Father, and they were growing together as a community through their collective struggles, into a fuller understanding of God’s love. This peace and reconciliation had been experienced through the crucified and resurrected Son, Jesus Christ. The shared, internal confirmation of this reality was actualized by the Spirit. Notice how Paul presents the experience of God: with regard to the peace we find with God, the touchpoint—if I can use that word—is the Son. The Son is the one by whom we find peace, but we don’t experience peace with the Son alone. You can’t separate your experience of Jesus from your experience of God the Father. Jesus provides us with the human face that helps us see the invisible God. Similarly, the love we experience is the love of God the Father, but the touchpoint is the Spirit. When we consider the whole testimony of Scripture, we know God the Father is Love and loves us by sending the Son (1 John 4:16; John 3:16) and that the Son has loved us, even commanding that we love each other as he has loved us (John 15:12). But here Paul says that this love is something we can experience, we can know, we can feel because of the Spirit’s work in us. The Spirit is the divine touchpoint for experiencing the love of the Father and Son.

IV. Embracing Diversity and Plurality within the Trinity

As you know, I’m a Social and Religious Studies Instructor at TMI Episcopal. In this capacity, I teach courses on comparative religion. One component of these courses is that I lead field trips to various sacred sites in San Antonio. While visiting other religious communities and listening to the various presenters as they teach my students about their beliefs and practices, I often experience what the theologian and Episcopal priest Barbara Brown Taylor calls a “holy envy,” where you see something in another religion that you respect, or maybe even wish was part of your own religion. These encounters make me rethink my own Christianity anew. For example, when I take students to the local Hindu temple in Helotes, they see a variety of murtis or images of the various Hindu gods. This may seem to be an aspect of Hindu belief and practice of which Christians should be critical. But when you talk to Hindus about the various murti, many will explain that each murti is analogous to how multiple TV channels can show the same event. Let’s take the State of the Union address, for example. Everyone who watches it wants to hear what the sitting President has to say, but everyone approaches it through the means that are most natural to them. This means some will watch on ABC, others on CNN, others on Fox News, etc. Same event; different platforms. Similarly, for many Hindus, the divine is one—similar to what Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe—but how you access the divine is multifaceted and people are invited to approach the divine from where they are through the murti that most resonates with them. Each murti or god is a different channel emphasizing a different aspect of the one and same divine reality.

Christians sit at an interesting place within the schema of the world’s religions. Like our Jewish and Muslim neighbors, we place a strong emphasis on the oneness of God but unlike our Jewish and Muslim neighbors, we want to emphasize internal diversity and plurality-in-oneness. In some sense, this connects us with our Hindu neighbors, though, unlike our Hindu neighbors, we place greater emphasis on the unity of God. But what’s important for my current point is that we can learn to think of the Trinity with the help of our Hindu neighbors. We speak of God as Father, Son, and Spirit. Whatever worship we give one, we give the Trinity, ultimately. But the plurality-in-oneness gives our minds more ways to perceive our God and to be open to our God based on our present needs, past experiences, and the state of our mind and heart.  

For the individual who needs a majestic deity who provides assurance that in the chaos of this life, there is a sovereign One above it all, holding it all together, guiding everything towards its ultimate purpose, the Father is our divine touchpoint. For the one who asks the question (that the musician Joan Osborne asks, “What if God was one of us?” What if God participated in this “workshop, of filthy creation”— to take a visual from Mary Shelley—the Son is our divine touchpoint, sharing in our human frailty, but also showing us the way as humans to be the imago Dei (image of God) that we were created to be. For the one who needs a sense of presence, of experience, an assurance that we’re not alone in this world, the Spirit is our touchpoint, bringing us into the divine life. But in all these ways that we can experience God, we experience the Trinity holistically, through each touchpoint. We experience the one Creator God who is Trinity but we experience the Trinity as we need it at that moment wherever we are in our life through the Person that acts as our touchpoint. 

This is depicted beautifully in the cover art by Kelly Lattimore found on your handout. If you look closely, you’ll see that there’s an opening at the table. The Trinity sits for a shared meal but the internal divine nature isn’t closed off to us; there’s an opening for us to join. You’ll see that we’re invited to experience the Triune love of God. It may be that you find that invitation is made possible through reflection primarily on the Father, or on the Son, or on the Spirit, but however you approach you get the whole Trinity. And when one Person of the Trinity interacts with us, we get the whole Trinity. As the fourth-century Bishop and theologian, St. Augustine of Hippo, wrote (Letter 11.2), “For the union of Persons in the Trinity is in the Catholic faith set forth and believed, and by a few holy and blessed ones understood, to be so inseparable, that whatever is done by the Trinity must be regarded as being done by the Father, and by the Son, and by the Holy Spirit together; and that nothing is done by the Father which is, not also done by the Son and by the Holy Spirit; and nothing done by the Holy Spirit which is not also done by the Father and by the Son; and nothing done by the Son which is not also done by the Father and by the Holy Spirit.”

Now, if the language of Father, Son, and Spirit creates a hurdle, our Triune God goes beyond language. (Remember, God is ultimately ineffable!) As the 14th-century English theologian and mystic, Julian of Norwich reminds us, and as Kelli Lattimore has depicted it, we are free to think of God through feminine language as well, if the masculine language is prohibitive or feminine language more inviting (since language is but an arrow pointing to God, not God in God’s self). In her book, Revelations of Divine Love (LIX), Julian points out to the reader that “we receive our being,” our very existence, from God through Christ just as we receive our existence through our mothers. Therefore, God, and Christ, are Mothers to us. The Triune God self-reveals as who and what you need. Julian says that God says to us, as an invitation, “I am the power and the Goodness of the Father, I am the Wisdom of the Mother, I am the Light and the Grace which is blessed love, I am the Trinity, I am the Unity, I am the supreme Goodness of all kind of things, I am the One who makes you love, I am the One who makes you desire, I am the never-ending fulfillment of all true desires.” And this is what I want you to remember on this Trinity Sunday: Christianity has long taught that we share one God, Creator of us all, and this unifies the Church and potentially humanity but this one God is internally pluralistic, relational, Trinitarian. And the Trinity’s plurality meets our human plurality so that in all our difference—even in our differences of language and imagination—we can find God as unified individuals. We don’t have to become homogenous to experience God as Christians; our God can meet all of us at different points simultaneously, as we see here in this setting tonight. And you—especially you—are invited to approach this God just as you are.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

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A Short Note on Jay L. Garfield’s Losing Ourselves

Jay L. Garfield, Losing Ourselves: Learning to Live Without a Self (Princeton, 2021).

(Amazon; Bookshop)

Jay L. Garfield does for the Buddhist concept of anattā /anātman, what Robert Wright did for Buddhist meditation and mindfulness practices: he provides scientific and philosophical justification for their value to an audience that might be hesitant to embrace the metaphysics of Buddhism. For those unfamiliar with anattā /anātman, its a Buddhist doctrine that teaches there’s no essential “I” underneath my physicality, emotions, perceptions, mental formations, or even consciousness. Instead, “I” am the culmination of these realities; their intersection, if you will. Buddhists call them “Skandhas” or “Aggregates” or “Heaps” that together make “me”. Buddhists reject the idea, encapsulated in the Indian concept of the “Atman” which has parallels to the “soul” of the Abrahamic religions. Hinduism’s “Atman” is the “real me” underneath it all. You could change my body, thoughts, feelings, etc., but those aren’t the “real me”. The “real me” is the Atman that holds it all together. Buddhist say “no,” there’s no “Atman” (hence, “anatman” or “no-Atman”) underneath it all. What makes “me” who “I” am are all these realities. For those familiar with Greek philosophy, which posits an underlying “essence” that shouldn’t change (e.g. humanness) and “accidents” that do change (e.g. gender, eye-color, weight, height) from human to human, in a way Buddhism teaches we are our collective “accidents” and that’s what we must embrace when we speak of “I”.

Garfield is a philosopher, so he runs through a wide-array of philosophical arguments for why this Buddhist concept is closer to the best philosophy than say Descartes’ dualism or other approaches to the mind-body problem that seem to depict a little “me” controlling my body from inside my brain. Similarly, modern neuroscience appears to be leaning in a direction that leads some to reject the concept of a static, essential “me” underneath it all. Instead, most neuroscientists appear to argue for an understanding of consciousness and explain our mind-body relationship in such a way that the Buddha would approve.

For Garfield, this doesn’t mean there’s no “me” but instead of a “self” he prefers the word “person,” with a person being what Buddhist understand when they see the Skandhas intersecting together. And Garfield argues that there are ethical implications to seeing ourselves (for lack of a better word) as “persons,” interconnected and dependent upon the environment in which we live and the relationships that shape us, over against a “self” that somehow transcends our material and relational realities. This work is very thought-provoking, easy to read, clear in its arguments, and challenging in its conclusions. I highly recommend!

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Gen Z, social media, and mental health

Recently it dawned on me that in a few short years I’ll be teaching so-called “Generation Alpha” (we’ve got to get better named for the post-Millennials!) but for now, my concern remains “Gen Z”. If you parent and/or work with Gen Z-ers (c. 1994/96-2010/12), I have a couple of podcast episodes worth listening to:

The argument that there’s not just correlation between smartphone and social media use and mental health but causation, and negative causation at that, seems to be strengthening.

On a slightly related note, I deleted my Twitter account today, probably for the last time. I did it back in 2016 and I don’t know why I rebooted it. It’s truly a terrible platform. If, like me, you keep your account private, then there’s almost nothing “social” about it.

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A Short Note on Robin Dunbar’s How Religion Evolved

Robin Dunbar, How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures (Oxford University Press, 2022).

(Amazon; Bookshop)

Robin Dunbar is an Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford. In his book How Religion Evolved: And Why It Endures, he explores the interface between the social phenomenon we call “religion” and the evolution of the human species. To be clear, this is not a rehash of the older theories where so-called “less developed religions” like shamanism matured into so-called “more developed religions” like Christianity and Islam. Instead, it asks basic questions about what religion—and all that we associate with religion from shared belief and rituals to community creation and identity formation—did for us to help us become what we are. \

The first several chapters don’t highlight the evolutionary history of religion. That begins in Chapter 7, “Religion in Prehistory”. Instead, Dunbar discusses subjects ranging from the possible health benefits of “belief” (Chapter 3, “Why Believing Might Be Good For You”) to what rituals do for us humans that participate in them together (Chapter 6, “Ritual and Synchrony”).

There are a couple of aspects of the book worth flagging for scholars of religion. First, while Dunbar doesn’t use the old simple-to-complex approach that places value judgments on religion, he does discuss the function of “Moralizing High Gods” as a “very late development” (p. 199) and how this late development had a major impact on human societies and our sense of morality. Second, he does use the word “cult,” which I know is upsetting to many scholars, though for what it’s worth, this is less a value judgment and more a way of describing smaller or newer religious movements, a “seedling” religion if you will, instead of a negative religion or “fake” one.

If you’ve wondered why humans are religious and how it has benefitted our adaptation over time, I recommend this book. It addresses a very complex subject in an inviting way. It’s informative and thought-provoking, assuming a naturalist/materialist stance on the question of what religions are and how we got them.

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A Short Note on Christopher Bartley’s An Introduction to Indian Philosophy

Christopher Bartley, An Introduction to Indian Philosophy: Hindu and Buddhist Ideas from Original Sources (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015).

(Amazon; Bookshop)

The other day, while reading Christopher Bartley’s An Introduction to Indian Philosophy, I sent a text to a friend marveling at the fact that Indian philosophers like Ramakantha and Dharmakirti were debating ideas related to the self centuries ago that sound a lot like what we might hear from David Chalmers and Daniel Dennett today. But it takes some work to find these thinkers and their writings. For this reason, I’m grateful to Bartley for the volume he has created. This book introduced me to a wide variety of Hindu and Buddhist intellectual traditions with which I was unfamiliar. It made most apparent something I teach my students over and over again: “religions are internally diverse”.

Hinduism and Buddhism are oversimplified labels that we use for pragmatic reasons. Beneath these labels there are many Hinduisms and many Buddhisms. Bartley guides the reading through the dense arguments. The reading takes some work, or at least it did for me. (I purchased the book in May, 2022, and it’s only about 300 pp. of content!) But it’s worth it.

In my estimation, the major philosophical topics that this book addresses are the self, consciousness, cosmology, and epistemology. The reader will learn that Indian philosophers have been addressing questions centuries before Descartes, Hume, et al. Yes, the Indian milieu is different but I contend that Hindu and Buddhist philosophers are easily as thought provoking and challenging as their European counterparts

A year ago, I finished reading Bryan Van Norden’s Taking Back Philosophy, which passionately argued that we must include world philosophies into our philosophizing or start honestly labeling what we call “philosophy” more precisely as “Anglo-European philosophy”. I’ve taken his argument seriously, and in doing so, I feel like my brain has been stretched in a good way. Indian thinkers have been deeply engaging our world for millennia and we do ourselves a disservice if we ignore their contributions or mistakenly dismiss them as “religious”. I highly recommend Bartley’s book for anyone interested in world philosophies, the philosophical categories I mentioned above, or Indian traditions in general.