The other day, my son asked me to read Ecclesiastes. He told me he found Ecclesiastes to be very confusing to read but he thought I might like it. He cinched it by telling me he would like my ‘take’ on it. When a child asks a parent’s opinion or advice, it’s almost a sure bet the parent is gladly going to give it.
For me, I found reading Ecclesiastes time-consuming and a bit annoying. The writer, who I will call Teacher, offers tale after tale of how he has accomplished everything under the sun and has been left completely unsatisfied. He does everything the various prophets have suggested and he still feels he has not achieved God’s attention. ‘I did good works and found it didn’t get God’s attention.’ ‘I gave away everything and it didn’t get God’s attention.’ ‘I became rich beyond imagination and found it didn’t get God’s attention.’ Teacher whines his way through the first four chapters but by Chapter 5, he seems to have concluded that God doesn’t sweat the details and neither should he. In other words, there is a bigger picture here.
I think I would like to invite Teacher for dinner some night so we could toss this idea around over a glass of good wine. From my perspective as a Taoist, Teacher gets one thing absolutely right. All his efforts are vain attempts to get attention from a God who just doesn’t work that way. “All is vanity,” Teacher cries. For me, the word ‘vanity’[1], repeated over and over in Ecclesiastes, is a word in which motivation is implicit. In our culture, vanity compels people to act in a certain way in order to achieve a reward, in Teacher’s case God’s attention. Going through all the appropriate motions, and all their opposite motions, Teacher never once feels like he has become rewarded for his efforts by getting closer to his God.
This attention-getting motivation, present in so much of the
Bible, has been one of my major difficulties with Christianity since I was very
small. Christians pray for forgiveness, for intercession on their troubles, to
stop war, to end hunger or poverty, or for Lazarus to be raised from the dead. At
a very tender age, I prayed that God would grant my father the strength to overcome
alcoholism. But God does
not stop wars; God is not going to keep innocent people from dying from hunger,
disease, or war nor is God going to help parents overcome their addictions
unless that parent is good and ready to do the work.
The Christian God simply does
not intervene to keep every human on Earth safe, happy and healthy. And this kind of thinking, the idea that God will solve all the world's problems if we just pray hard enough or do enough good works, shackles Christians in their hopes for a better world. For a Taoist, it is already clear that any attempt at
attention-getting is futile (the word used by the NJS). If you want to change
the world or at least YOUR world, you have to start with yourself.
As I see it, in addition to relying on the "Big Guy" to solve problems if you just pray hard enough, the largest impediment not only to my belief in
the Christian God but to Christianity itself is that Christian humans, more so
than the other Abrahamic faiths, fashioned their understanding of God after themselves. This is
completely understandable and fashioning concepts of
the gods after the known has quite a long tradition in religion.
The Aztec decided their gods lived in volcanoes because they experienced volcanoes as so very much mightier than they and absolutely unconquerable. Volcanology was an infant science just about the time the Aztec culture waned into history and the Aztecs , without the words to think of this enormous natural force in any other way, had to fashion their god thought by examining the mightiest and inexplicable forces around them directing their fear and admiration on those.
The Aztec decided their gods lived in volcanoes because they experienced volcanoes as so very much mightier than they and absolutely unconquerable. Volcanology was an infant science just about the time the Aztec culture waned into history and the Aztecs , without the words to think of this enormous natural force in any other way, had to fashion their god thought by examining the mightiest and inexplicable forces around them directing their fear and admiration on those.
The Hebrew people were nomads in an unfriendly desert and
many of them came from different god traditions, syncretizing these beliefs
into a mostly avenging god who was eventually, after enough years of penance in
the desert, going to save them (mostly from themselves) and deliver them to a
Promised Land. Once the Christians got hold of the idea of one true God who
fashioned humans and especially the Messiah after God’s own image, it became necessary to imbue the
Christian God with human emotions and motivations so they could better
understand their own motivations for worshipping or fearing something bigger
than them. We humans are quite an arrogant bunch.
Humans’ understanding of God pretty much implies a reactive and interactive relationship – give
and take. In my point of view, forming the idea of god as humanlike, much the way
a potter would form a figurine out of clay, also has seriously limited the
Christian God to a very small dominion, a Dominion which is comprehensible by ‘His’ people and imminently controllable
by God.
So a loop is established. If one prays with the right
intentions and worships and does the things required in the Bible, God will
love him or her and give her or him good things – a good life, hope, riches, perhaps
a hereafter in a place with angels and harps and rainbows. Sometimes this works if only to give someone a feeing that they have done SOMETHING. I freely admit that
I pray this way, too, sometimes forgetting the bigger picture especially in the
agony of loss. That is the tradition of my childhood and it is a habit really hard
to break.
However, even though I know of no HP that directs the traffic here on Earth, I try to pray all the time, which in Taoist terms means
I try to remember to regularly send a steady stream of love and acceptance,
checking with my ‘conscience’, that inner voice, to see if my actions are
bringing me closer to or further away from Tao. I try to remain in constant
contact, broadcasting to whichever HP is listening, propagating the idea of a
Humanity so emotionally mature it no longer needs ‘rules’ because it has found
‘love’. I freely admit that this is most, most difficult when I hear someone
else spout very unloving things against my black, Mormon, Muslim, gay, Jew,
Southern, Northern, Canadian or any other culture or stereotype of human beings
that someone needs to put down in order to secure their fleeting feelings of
superiority.
As a Taoist, my HP (Higher Power) has no shape, no form, no possibility
of description. Tao Te Ching (The
Book of the Way), the Taoist book of verses that guides thinking about the Way,
starts out with the verse:
The tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao;
The
name that can be named is not the eternal Name.
If you can
wrap your head around that one, it’s just possible you might be a Taoist. I
feel frustrated even trying to explain the Tao to people but I guess one of the
ways I make it knowable in my heart is to think of it as a constant stream of
love I can tap into at any time, at any moment. And this is the intersection
that sends me to my very mainstream Progressive Christian church every Sunday
morning I can get there. If I think of the Christian God (or the Muslim Allah
or the Jewish Yahweh) as a stream of love and light, I always get something
from worshipping with my fellow church members because in that sanctuary, love
is all around. I literally feel the Tao moving on Sunday morning in that place.
Even if it is indescribable, I am human nonetheless, searching for ways to understand my Cosmos and yearning to put my faith into words in order to explore and share it. I truly believe there is Tao in every ‘good book’, whether it is the Bhagavad Vita, the Bible, the Torah, the Koran or whatever other text there is that maps how to treat each other gently and kindly and guides our way of thinking about the One. That has been my experience because I have dear friends who are Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, Christian, Secular Humanist, Mormon, 'Spiritual' and no religion at all. When I am with these people or even passing messages back and forth to them on Facebook, I feel the Tao moving.
The Tao is real but not real, knowable only by not knowing. But for me the Tao is the great force in my existence calling me to the river of peace it offers. It is a river I long to be immersed in forever.
[1][1]
The version I read came from the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV). The
Message uses the word “smoke”, the New Jerusalem Bible “futility” the New
International Version uses “meaningless” and the Catholic Bible goes along with
the NSRV. I like to think of The Message’s ‘smoke’ to mean something like ‘smoke
and mirrors’.
