T He T Ies T Hat B Ind
THE TIES THAT BIND
Relationship
In the Judeo-Christian worldview, all pleasure is ultimately seen from the perspective of what is of eternal value and definition. I often think of that day the astronauts became the first ones to go around the dark side of the moon. To them was given a beautiful glimpse of the “earthrise” over the horizon of the moon, draped in a beauteous mixture of blue and white and garlanded by the light of the sun against the black void of space. It was something human eyes had never witnessed before. Isn’t it fascinating that no poem or lyric came to the commander’s aid in lending him words to express that moment of awe? Instead, the words that came to his mind were the first words of the book of Genesis: “In the beginning, God…”
There are moments like that in our experience when nothing can take away from the miracle of human life. No amount of time can explain it. No pondering within can satisfy all that the moment declares. There is something extraordinary here. It is not just the miracle of life; it is the miracle of life imbued with particular worth. The identity of the child is as significant as the fact that it is. We all know that. The New Spirituality distributes life into the generality of “consciousness” and loses the particularity of personal relationship. So it is not merely time we are talking about here, or some pool of consciousness into which we all merge and from which we emerge. In the Judeo-Christian worldview, we believe that every “person” is actually created in God’s image, in that God himself is a person, and that each person has relational priorities that are implicitly built in, not by nature but by God’s design.
Consider again the tragedy of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Even in that stoic culture, where community rises above everything else, each one who wept was grieving the loss of their own loved ones: They were not grieving just for the total loss of life but also for their personal loss. This is real. It is not imaginary. We stand before the individual graves of the ones we love more often than we stand before a graveyard in general.
But there is more. Personhood transcends mere DNA. There is essential worth to each person.
Recently in a game show, a computer (named Watson after the founder of IBM) handily defeated two human contestants in a knowledge contest. This had happened before when the computer Deep Blue beat the world champion in chess, Garry Kasparov. Computers are faster and better at calculations and at chess. But what one article said is interesting: In this instance, where language was involved, Watson’s victory over its two human competitors advanced IBM’s master plan of making humanity obsolete. I would add that the ultimate revenge would be for Watson to deny that humans exist or that they created “him.” You see, to create a computer to do what Watson did required brilliance. As David Ferrucci, the principal investigator of Watson’s DeepQA technology at IBM Research, said,
When we deal with language, things are very different. Language is ambiguous, it’s contextual, it’s implicit. Words are grounded really only in human cognition—and there’s seemingly an infinite number of ways the same meaning can be expressed in language. It’s an incredibly difficult problem for computers.1
It was precisely the coding of that “human-ness” into Watson that required the effort of twenty-five of IBM’s top research scientists, and they accomplished it with a mishmash of algorithms and raw computing technology. “Watson is powered by 10 racks of IBM Power 750 servers with 2,880 processor cores and 15 terabytes of RAM; it’s capable of operating at a galloping 80 teraflops. With that sort of computing power, Watson is able to… scour its roughly 200 million pages of stored content—about 1 million books worth—and find an answer with confidence in as little as 3 seconds.”2
The question is, “What is Watson doing or thinking now?” The entire question is reduced to one issue: What does consciousness mean? It is not surprising that “consciousness” and “conscience” come from the same root word. When you put together terms like “consciousness,” “conscience,” “individual,” “right,” “wrong,” “good,” and “evil,” you are on the path to spiritual thinking. Matter alone or resorting to quantum doesn’t create spiritual thought. Chopra can write of an ageless body and a timeless mind all he wants, but when you lose your child, something has been lost that can never be replaced—even if you have another child—and can never be explained by his philosophy. Never.
What this means is that our essence is both shared and particular—a truth that is Judeo-Christian in its assumption. This leads me to see the critical and defining notion of essence and its connection to relationship. That must be defined first before pleasure can be derived legitimately or otherwise in concert with the essence of the thing enjoyed. So it is not merely the essence of the object that is being enjoyed that matters. It is the essence of the subject who is experiencing pleasure that legitimizes or delegitimizes the experience.
There is a clear and unequivocal assertion in the Judeo-Christian faith that God created us for his purpose: to fulfill life’s sacred nature within the particularity of an individual life, in relationship with him and his indwelling presence. This particularity does not offset the fact of being part of the larger community of fellow human beings. It does not deify us, nor does it demean us. To be a human being is to be one who is fashioned in the image of God, who is the point of reference in all relationships. This is the difference between Islam and Christianity. In Islam, a person will kill to supposedly protect the honor of Allah. In the Christian faith, Jesus sacrificed his own life to honor the love of God as it is revealed for all humanity. In pantheism, the “I” dies the death of a thousand qualifications; hence that vacuous term “duty” in the Gita or even “dharma.” For the Christian, the I is a person valued by God. This is a world of difference from all other religions.
In search of this relationship we pursue spiritual realities. And often we end up creating God in our own image when we have failed to see, or perhaps don’t like, what it is that God intended to convey to us in his love. No, this is not the “relativity” of physics, special or general, or of quantum theory, or even of metaphysics. It is the relationship of a person within himself or herself. It is who we are, not fragmented, in the accretion of everything that makes us an individual. It is why we even refer to ourselves as “individuals”… indivisible… the underlying meaning being that we cannot be divided into parts.
Even in pantheism, one cannot be content with the Gnostic category of “knowledge.” Nor in Zen can we merely mutter “Rupa is nothing.” That is where the monists and Vedantists and Zen thinkers wish to leave us. Thus Hinduism has the Gita, the most beloved of Hindu texts (not the Vedas), in which questions of war, devotion, worship, and sacrifice are raised. These are relational issues. How can I go to war and kill my brothers? was the question Arjuna placed before Krishna. Only he didn’t know who Krishna was, so reality and the nature of the source of the answers were veiled from him in the early stages of the text. What is good and what is evil? What is the right thing to do? That’s what Arjuna wants to know. It came down to duty in a play called Life.
Buddhism raises the issues of poverty, pain, sickness, death, responsibility, and the causes of misery. All these were not just ideas, they were evidenced in persons or in how they impacted persons. Of all religions, Islam is the least focused on relationships, even though it gives the appearance of being a community. And the result is law, authority, and power over the community. These become the rationale for Islam. Thus, it is not surprising that the very word Islam means “to submit.” And it’s no wonder that it is sometimes called a “pantheism of force,” where individuality is sacrificed at the altar of authority. Some Muslims I have spoken to admit this is what Islam is, but insist that it was not intended to be this way. How do you even debate such an issue when you are silenced if you disagree? This authoritarianism and submission become the means to the end of community. Any community there is exists only in the narrow confines of faith, which often provides the adherents with justification to sacrifice their own for “their faith.” The faith, in effect, negates the person.
I have two very special friends whose lives have been a blessing to countless children who have been deformed from birth. They have established an orphanage to give them a home and find medical help to correct what can be corrected. Then they look for families who will adopt them. One little boy had always been passed over for adoption because he has a particular brain malfunction that is very rare. He often doesn’t connect thoughts. At about nine years of age, as I remember the story, he was becoming despondent as, one-by-one, he saw his housemates being selected by families and leaving. He began to ask those who were taking care of him why no one was adopting him. Why didn’t anybody choose him?
Through an incredible series of events, a couple from Texas, who had already adopted one child from the same orphanage, called to ask if this boy was still there. Through the goodness of the parents’ hearts, and the generosity of the couple who established the orphanage in agreeing to cover all the costs of his adoption, the day has been set for this little boy to be taken to his new home. The special part of the thrill for him is that he will be reunited with one of the little boys who was his housemate at one time.
His actual name is quite hard to pronounce, but it is quite a normal name in his native setting. His adoptive parents have sent him the name they want to give him—Anson Josiah, the initials of which are A.J. He now walks around that home, waiting for his new parents to come for him, telling everybody as he points to his chest, “You can call me A.J. My name is A.J.” Is it not interesting that even with the debilitation of disconnected thoughts, he is able to pick up the redeeming thrill of relationship and particular worth evidenced in his new name?
One of the great epic poems of the Middle East is Shahnama (or Shanameh), written by the Persian poet and author Abu ol-Qasem Mansur Firdawsi (ca. 935–1020). In it he recounts the legendary history of the ancient kings and heroes of Persia. It is known to English readers principally through Matthew Arnold’s version, written in the mid-nineteenth century: Sohrab and Rustum. I remember reading it as a young lad in Delhi. Rustum is a mighty warrior, second to none. War is his way of life and as the story unfolds, even though he has a family to take care of, Rustum is constantly far from home, taking on challenges. One day, he comes across a younger though equally well known warrior named Sohrab. Sohrab is reluctant to take him on because he knows that Rustum is actually his father. Years before when he was a small child, Sohrab had been sent away by his mother to spare him the lifestyle of his father, and Rustum has been misled into believing that the child who was sent away was a daughter, born while he was gone.
Sohrab and Rustum eventually meet in one-on-one combat. Twice, Sohrab could have fatally wounded Rustum, but he spares him. Finally, Rustum has Sohrab on his back, and victoriously plunges his sword into Sohrab’s side. As the life is ebbing out of him, Sohrab tells Rustum who he is and, when challenged, proves it by producing a locket his mother had given him. The rest of the story is the grief and remorse that fill Rustum when he realizes he has killed his own son, who had spared him when he had the advantage.
I find utterly fascinating the stories of deep relationship that are woven into the histories of various cultures, stories that reveal the folly of succumbing to the lure of power and prestige. What a tragedy to destroy our own children by denying the One who gave us life. Isn’t that where we are today, in our geopolitical and religious wars?
The good and decent among us mourn broken homes. We mourn broken lives. We mourn shattered dreams. We celebrate reunions. We delight in long relationships that have withstood the test of time. This is a clue, a huge clue of how life is intended to be lived. We are designed, shaped, and conditioned to be in relationships of honor, and in our hearts we wish to see those relationships triumph over all other allurements. It has been nearly four decades since I lost my mother. I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t think of her. Is all this not an indication, given to us by the One who made us, that we are designed to live within relationship and to find our greatest sense of worth and fulfillment within relationship?
Relationships are multidirectional and multidimensional. For this, physics, chemistry, even psychology, for that matter, are all inadequate starting points. Relationship must begin with essence, not with the essence of others but rather with the essence of oneself. That is why pleasure and pain become critical. It is not psychologically necessary to teach somebody that their parents matter. We know that by intuition. My life has been replete with examples of meeting people who wish they could find that one friend or one relationship. It is not accidental that in the long bibliography at the end of her book on spirituality, which draws sparsely from Christian literature, Elizabeth Lesser still finds place to mention C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed, a powerful book on the depth of his grief when he lost his wife, Joy.
How and why is this so? In Christianity, the essence of each and every person and the individual reality of each life is sacred. It is sacred because intrinsic value has been given to us by our Creator. Atheism is the extreme form of placing ultimate worth in an accidental universe. For the atheist, the only real relationship is between each person and the universe. That is it. There is no outside voice or revelation. To attempt to mask the loneliness of this reality, we offer parallel universes, aliens or some other entities somewhere that will surely someday find us if we don’t find them first. There was a play written some years ago called Waiting for Godot. The title was a play on words for the lonely inhabitants of the world in the play, waiting for a God who never shows up. The play to honor the sciences should be titled Waiting for Logo, which would mean waiting for a word from anybody out there.
In pantheism, which is the basis of much of the New Spirituality, the “I” is lost in the desired union with the ultimate impersonal Absolute; there is no more “I and you.” In rebirth, all actual relationship with what has preceded is lost, and we are encouraged to believe there is an essential relationship only with the deeds of the past. No one in this cyclical framework ever answers what an individual was paying for in the first birth. After all, one cannot have an infinite number of lives to their credit: If there were an infinite number of births, one would never have reached this particular birth. So, going backward, what was the debt owed in the first life? As one of my Hindu friends once said after he came to know Jesus, “Even the banks are kinder to me. At least the bank tells me how much I owe and how much time I have to repay what I owe. In karma, I don’t know what I owe or how long it will take me to repay it.” For Deepak Chopra to bring relief to Maharishi Mahesh Yogi by telling him that his (Chopra’s) blood would not carry his karma to the Maharishi borders on the pathetic… the pupil having to reassure the teacher that karma was not carried in the blood. Where is it carried, one might ask, in an ageless body and a timeless mind?
A relationship with God that is both individual and to be reflected to the rest of humanity in a shared birthright is God’s gift to us.