Tikkun (https://www.tikkun.org/category/emancipatory-spirituality/page/31/)
What is your passion? Find it — or let it find you — and, from that ecstasy, act to make the world better, more just, more joyous. It is only from such ecstasy, from such an energy-producing position outside of (ex) the fixed place (stasis) of things, that tikkun comes about.
While barriers to understanding and implementing human rights are the biggest challenge facing the community from within, particularly in the international context, from without, Islamophobia is a huge problem. The Danish cartoon controversy is a prominent case in which there was a marked failure of communication.
For someone who interprets the course of events from a Christian realist perspective, the prospects for healing and repairing the world appear less than promising. That defines the position I happen to occupy. Although my admiration for those who insist otherwise knows no bounds, I find myself unable to enlist under their banner: over the course of many centuries, evil has proven to be too persistent; humankind’s penchant for folly too great; the allure of mammon too insidious; and power in all its variegated forms too corrupting.
Long before science, every tribe shared a “cosmology,” that is, a big picture. If we construct a shared cosmology today, based on our best scientific understanding combined with a deep appreciation that in human brains the sense of reality is created by metaphor, it could transform our minds and thus our world.
It is an ancient realization, always relearned in resistant, recalcitrant ways, that we cannot receive what is new without relinquishing something of what is old. The anniversary of Tikkun is a time to notice that Tikkun, from the outset, has advocated receiving what is new for Israel and the Palestinians.
Utopian as it may sound, I believe that the hope for significant reform in the United States as a whole must also create a strong civil society in which the competing demands of faith and reason have somehow been reconciled.
The death of my father last April caused me to reflect anew on where we agreed and where we disagreed. When I was a college student, we would debate capitalism and socialism. Over the years I came to realize that people would be much better off under the capitalist system he envisioned than under any of the capitalist or socialist realities today.
It isn’t enough to assert that dry goes with dry and wet goes with wet. What happens when life is more complex than our sorrow and our fear might suggest? What about when something that once worked becomes broken in the course of its use?
A progressive movement that is explicitly concerned with fostering an awe-based consciousness will be far more likely to be perceived as understanding one of the most basic needs of contemporary humanity than will a social change movement that appears blind to that concern.
Here I tell you what little I know. I have studied Jesus and preached Jesus and misunderstood Jesus and re-understood Jesus. I have demythologized Jesus and applied “critical theory” to his words.
From the best of the world’s spiritual and social traditions and from contemporary creativity, we need to develop our tool kits and to organize curricula and training programs to support our ongoing learning and evolution, doing so even in the very midst of action.
First, they acknowledged that Christianity alone does not have the resources to resolve these problems and recognized that other religions, having deeply reflected on the question of greed over the centuries, have significant wisdom to offer. I want to push a bit further and suggest that religious communities cannot afford to do our work for peace in isolation from each other anymore.
The loftiest ideals, the most far-reaching agenda, the best rhetoric — all are for naught if pursued in a spirit of ego enhancement, judgment, and ideological zeal. Exhibit A: Communism. Exhibit B: the Catholic Church throughout its history, as well as current forms of fundamentalist Christianity and Islam.
The need to evolve human consciousness enough to inspire a fundamental shift in global priorities at this historic juncture is urgent. Thus, it is no longer adequate for spiritual progressives to simply write and talk about elevating consciousness or promoting healing and transformation; we must engage in such healing ourselves.
I’ve had the privilege of working with a kaleidoscope of issues from local to global: disarmament, economic justice, labor justice, decolonization, indigenous sovereignty, homelessness, urban ministry, community organizing, gang diversion, immigrant rights, hospice, food justice, water rights, environmental protection, fair housing, literacy, solidarity, inclusion — not to mention all the relational work that glues together (or doesn’t) such work.