Musings

Dr. Aether's Guide to Cult Leadership

(This piece, by my "altar ego", Dr. J. T. Aether, is a work in progress. If you have other chapters to propose, please send them to me to pass along to him.  The idea: to offer, in comic form, some cautionary considerations about the abuses to which all religious and spiritual organizations are subject.  Enjoy!)

Dr. AEther's Guide to Cult Leadership
For preachers, politicians, gurus, consultants, executives, psychics, therapists, and other purveyors of snake oil - and for all who may fall under their spells
By Dr. J. T. AEther, DQ, MDiv, DC, LLD

Chapters:

1)  Spiritual Jargon
   * Strategic use of Capital Letters
   *  Inventing new words for old spiritual ideas

   *  How your unique lingo can help your followers feel like cool "insiders"

   *  Recycling old self-help concepts with new terms
   *  Forming your "steps" - (maximum: ten)

2)  Becoming a  Cult Personality
   *  How to limit access to yourself - to enhance your authority and increase your net worth
       *  How often can you make appearances, while keeping them rare and valuable?
   *  How to act as if you are intensely intimate with people about whom you really could care less
   *  Use of unpronounceable names or titles that have a vague air of antiquity or significance to them
   *  It's what's on top that counts: strategic use of unique head coverings
   *  Tips for cult leader persona development - how to seem sensitive, but remain aloof - the art of talking about yourself in the 3rd person

   *  Channeling for beginners: how to talk as if a divine being is talking through you

        *  A list of divine beings who haven't been "channeled" yet

3)  Ghost Writers in the Sky:  A Guide to Creating Your Cult's Holy Scripture

   *  Ponderous prose:  how to write long, boring text that seems holy and requires continual study
   *  Keeping it obscure, to create endless opportunities for interpretation (thus expanding your base of followers)
   *  Use of peculiar sentence structure (a la Yoda)
   *  How to make unintelligible utterances seem profound
   *  Liberal use of the definite article

   *  How to make very simple spiritual principles seem difficult to experience, so that followers will stick around for years to figure out how to have them

   *  Creating complex categories of divine entities, spiritual states, levels for your followers to achieve (at great cost), varied afterlife outcomes

   *  Mythological Writing 101

   *  How to make mysterious, cool-looking charts to illustrate followers' spiritual advancement process, intelligible only to those who have reached the highest level

 4)  Buying a Used Cult:  Pitfalls and Promises
   *  You as a successor to a line of prophets: how to fit in, but distinguish yourself
   *  You as the reformer of a corrupted religion: from savior of a cult to cult savior
   *  You as the creator of a new cult, partly based on an old or forgotten one

   *  How to find the right lawyers to protect your organization and frighten your detractors

5)  Rituals and Rites
   *  Smells and bells: universal principles of ritual
   *  Creating intimidating initiation rites: why people want to join groups that are hard to join
   *  Becoming a two-chord wonder: chanting your way to culthood
   *  How to use obscure symbology and incomprehensible incantation to induce spiritual states

   *  Elements of an effective sacred holiday: turn your birthday into a day off for everybody!
   *  Using your rituals as tools for marketing your cult

 

Perfect Love Casts Out Guns

The recent mass murder of children in a Connecticut school has resulted in at least some redemption, in the form of the current effort by the President to introduce sensible gun laws.  Banning assault weapons and imposing universal gun registration would be modest measures to reduce the appalling level of gun violence in our country. 

But laws alone won't solve the problem.  If all of them were banned outright, our nation would continue to have more guns than citizens for years to come.  Alongside legal change there must be spiritual transformation.  Fear leads to gun ownership.  "Perfect love casts out fear." (1 John 4: 18)

When we know our neighbors, we feel safer.  When we love our neighbors, and they love us, we feel more secure.  At their best, churches and temples and mosques are means for people to know and love their neighbors more perfectly. 

There is no logic in gun ownership as a means of self-protection for the overwhelming majority of citizens.  But facts are not persuasive in the debate about gun control.  It's about emotions.  Guns make a lot of people feel safer, even though owning them in fact makes them less safe.  So to get rid of the guns, we have to help people feel safer by other means. 

That's where religion can help.  If you feel cherished by God, you'll feel safer.  If you feel cherished by other people, you'll feel more secure.  Belonging to a faith community helps on both counts.  And a faith community that reaches out in its neighborhood, helping people know and trust their neighbors more, can be even more useful in creating a spiritual and emotional culture in which people will be willing to give up their guns.

For religious communities to lobby for passage of the proposed gun laws is a good start, but only the beginning.  Faith communities need to do their part in changing the culture of this country.  We need to be known to the wider public as communities of people who feel so secure in divine Love that we don't need or want guns in our households.  What would happen if our houses of worship took a "special collection", and asked our members and our neighbors to turn in their guns and ammunition?  What if the guns we collected were then melted down and shaped into crosses, or other redemptive religious symbols, placed in our sanctuaries?  My wife is ready to bake one of her sumptuous cheesecakes to give to somebody who will turn their gun in to the police.  What if the church people of America started baking their best desserts for the same purpose?  Some police departments offer money or vouchers in exchange for weapons turned in by the public.  Maybe our faith communities could do something similar, but distinctively different - something that touches and transforms hearts.

Do you have any ideas?  Is your faith community taking action?  I'd like to know - and to pass your experiences and proposals on to others.  I pray that this issue will inspire some holy creativity, so that we can help Perfect Love cast out guns in America.

JIM BURKLO
Website: JIMBURKLO.COM     Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See my GUIDE to my books, "musings", and other writings
Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

The Geology of Love

 

It was carved with hand tools on a rough slab of native red rock:  “Marcelito L. Baca - murio a la edad de 17 dias (died at the age of 17 days) – 1919”.   It was planted upright over a grave in the pale dust of the “cementerio”  - the cemetery – of the remote, tiny village of Contreras in central New Mexico.

 

Last Sunday, my wife, Roberta, myself, and our friends from Albuquerque, Byron and Jill, went on a rock-hounding expedition along the upper riverbed of the Rio Grande.  Jill found a big grey rock stippled with black triangles: fossilized fish scales.  Byron found some smooth, flat granites that might have served the Pueblo Indians as metates for grinding corn.  Roberta found a thin, smooth piece of red sandstone with a perfect yellow circle on it.  I found dozens of small, shiny agates and cherts, and glittering pieces of iridescent quartz.  I found a weird, shiny, lumpy stone that looked like fossilized dinosaur poop. More likely, it was a concretion of iron precipitated out of red sandstone.  All these rocks had been deposited far from their sources.  They eroded out of cliffs high in the mountains, tumbled down arroyos into the course of the Rio Grande, and rolled southward with flash floods.  The formation of these enchanting stones took eons, and their deformation took further millennia.

 

On our way back to Albuquerque, we stopped in the dusty town of Contreras and visited its burial ground.  There, I began to understand why Jill is fascinated by old New Mexican graveyards.  They evoke the history, and even the natural history, of that richly-storied state.   Marcelito L. Baca lived 17 days.  I stood before his resting place, grieving the lifetime that he might have had.  But I mused that, in geologic time, my span of life is only trivially greater than his.  His gravestone was formed from a dune of red sand that shifted in the wind 250 million years ago.   Will either of us leave marks more lasting than those of the fish whose cuneiform scales marked that rock in the river’s rubble?

 

The earth is a graveyard of displaced stones and bones, ground to sand and turned into something else by the slowly churning earth.  The periodic table lists the results of the decomposition and re-composition of the simple matter that ejected from the primordial “big bang”.  In their dying explosions, the earliest stars alchemically made gold – and iron and all the other heavier elements - out of the dross of hydrogen and helium.  Did something precious precipitate out of the short life of Marcelito L. Baca?  Did love, in grief, move the hands that carved the irregular shapes of the letters on his rustic gravestone?  Does love leach through the tragedies of human history and, over time, concentrate itself in powerfully positive manifestations?  Is his gravestone a fossil of consciousness in evolution toward deeper compassion? 

 

Carved above the words on the gravestone is the image of the cross.  It focuses the eyes, and the soul, on the cycle of life, death, and rebirth.  Its intersection aims at a transcending meaning for the life and death of Marcelito, and for all of us.  It invites us to imagine the person he could have become, had he lived longer – and what we can become together.  The churning cosmos has concentrated tiny bits of itself into human beings, glittering gems of mind-matter.  We’ve barely discovered ourselves.  What shall we do with our precious days in this universe, vast in space in time?  Can we cherish this life we’ve been given, and make the most of it through curiosity, creativity, and compassion – to honor the memory of Marcelito, and all forms of life and being that have come before us?

 

 

 

JIM BURKLO
Website: JIMBURKLO.COM     Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See my GUIDE to my books, "musings", and other writings
Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

The Resolutions of Jesus

Traditionally this is a time to learn from our mistakes and commit ourselves to do differently in the new year.  

 

I wonder what resolutions Jesus would have made? 

 

For some, it may seem shocking to suggest that Jesus had room for self-improvement.  But it’s hard to miss his sins if you read the New Testament gospels.  The idea that Jesus was perfect came after the gospels were written, as the early church developed its doctrines.  By the fourth century, the church had painted itself into a corner.  The church declared Jesus to be fully human (though somehow sinless) and fully divine.  But the church couldn’t white-out the gospel stories that revealed his very human failings, because it had declared the New Testament to be a sacred text.  Theologians have filled libraries arguing the contrary, but it's still obvious that Jesus needed to shape up his act in a number of ways.

 

If I were Jesus, here would be my list for 2013:

 

1)  Be much nicer to my family.

 

Let’s face it, Jesus’ “family values” left much to be desired.  When he was twelve, he ran away from his parents in Jerusalem so he could hang out with the teachers in the Temple (Luke 2: 42-52).  Apparently “honor your father and your mother” wasn’t the lesson being taught there that day.  When Mary and Joseph finally caught up with him, and confronted him with his behavior, he gave a smart-ass answer:  "How is it that you sought me? Did you not know that I must be in my Father's house?" Disrespect heaped on outrageousness!  If I was Jesus’ father, I’d have given him some serious “consequences”.  

 

Then there was the time in his early adulthood when he went to a wedding in Cana with his mother (John 2: 1-10).  Upon seeing that the host had run out of wine, she asked him to do something about it.  His answer?  "O woman, what have you to do with me? My hour has not yet come."  Is that any way to talk to your mom?  There’s no excuse for it.  He ended up doing what she asked, but with a bad attitude.

 

Then there was the day he was preaching, and his mother and brothers sent someone inside to ask him to come out and speak with them (Matthew 12: 47-50).  He brushed them off with an insult:  "Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?" And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, "Here are my mother and my brothers! For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother."   High-falutin’ talk from a guy who treated his family like strangers.  Who wants to be brotherly with somebody who treats his own brothers so badly?

 

What can we learn from his negative example?  Charity begins at home.   Changing the world begins with showing love and respect to your own family. 

 

2)  When I’m in a bad mood, don’t take it out on others – not even if the other is a fig tree.

 

Jesus was hungry one day, and passed by a fig tree (Matthew 21: 18-22).  But the tree had nothing but leaves because it wasn’t fig season.  Apparently his hunger affected his attitude in a powerful way.  "May no fruit ever come from you again!" he yelled, and the tree withered on the spot.

 

I’ve seen people wither on the spot, too, when they’ve been yelled at like that.  Their faces shrivel like leaves before a fire.  We forget how our attitudes affect others.  We forget to breathe, to take a hike, to take a break when we are upset, rather than taking it out on other people. 

 

The tree was minding its business, doing what it was supposed to be doing, and Jesus killed it because it didn’t meet his immediate need.  He acted like he was the center of the universe, and that everything and everybody ought to give him what he wanted when he wanted it.  Two-year-old behavior from a thirty-something guy!  He could do better – and so can we.  Let us all resolve to honor the seasons of others, even fig trees.  Let us make 2013 the year of putting others at the center, instead of ourselves.  Let us resolve to be conscious of our bad feelings and deal with them, instead of projecting them onto others.

 

3)  Keep doing compassionate things, but be more humble about how I do it.

 

A Canaanite woman asked Jesus to free her daughter of possession by a demon (Matthew 15: 22-28).  He ignored her because she was a foreigner.  She kept asking for help, and he insulted her by saying “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs”.  Groveling, she said:  "Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters' table."  Finally he relented and healed her daughter.  He did a good thing, but the way he did it was pretty disgusting. 

 

Jesus started out believing that anybody who was not a Jew was a dog.  But the gospel stories suggest that repeated encounters with faithful gentile people like the Canaanite woman cured him of the antipathy toward foreigners that he had inherited from the culture surrounding him.  He didn’t want to serve gentiles.  But grudgingly he acquiesced, and was humbled.  The Bible reveals that Jesus was a racist in recovery. 

 

We can resolve to follow Jesus’ journey of self-improvement, working ever-greater miracles of kindness while deepening in humility.  What makes us most Godlike is to recognize how far from God we are and always will be.

 

Christianity could use some humbling, too.  For Christians to suggest that our religion is somehow superior to others is to make the same mistake Jesus made when he treated the Canaanite woman so rudely.  When we look at the mistakes of Jesus, we’re also looking at the big mistake that Christianity made when it tried to turn Jesus into a superman instead of letting him be who he was:  one of us regular folks who need to make New Year’s resolutions!

 

 

JIM BURKLO
Website: JIMBURKLO.COM     Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See my GUIDE to my books, "musings", and other writings
Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California