Wednesday, March 29, 2006

The Great Transformation

An article in the W. Post this morning about Karen Armstrong and her new book: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/28/AR2006032802162.html.

She's a scholar, a religious historian, and ex-nun. I read her first memoir, about her childhood and being in the convent, and found it pretty depressing. I can see why many, if not most, of my
Catholic friends call themselves recovering Catholics.

Seventeen books later, she has decided that she agrees with the "great mystics" that "God" is "within the self." We are on the same page there, because that is how I experience it. She also says that she discovered from her most recent studies that in the four different philosophical (religious) traditions she studied for this most recent book that "what mattered was not what you believed, but how you behaved." It would please me if the followers of those religious traditions could get back to their roots in that regard, if that is true. That notion also coincides with my personal spiritual belief, from which comes the title of this blog and my philosophy of life, i.e., "Life is a prayer."

I also liked and agree with two other things she is quoted as saying by the author of the article. The first is "Being spiritual means allowing your heart to break...Because that's when you can learn compassion." The second is "It's a mistake to define God...'To define'...means to set limits." (I do wish she would start using the word "God/dess" since the word "God" has such a strong male connotation (no matter what people say)).

Perhaps her most important finding was that "All of the Axial Agers practiced what the Chinese called jian ai or concern for everybody. Not just for your own group, but for everybody. And if we don't do that, I don't see how we can save our planet." Me, neither.

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