Quest Magazine

Printed in the  Winter 2024 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Long, Jeffery D "Service as a Spiritual Path: Swami Vivekananda’s Teaching of Karma Yoga" Quest 112:1, pg 23-29 

By Jeffery D. Long

0The Indian sage Swami Vivekananda (1863‒1902) was one of the most influential figures in bringing the spiritual teachings of India to the modern West. In a lecture delivered in Boston on March 28, 1896, titled “The Spirit and Influence of Vedanta,” he says:

There has not been one religious inspiration, one manifestation of the divine in man, however great, but it has been the expression of [the] infinite oneness in human nature; and all that we call ethics and morality and doing good to others is also but the manifestation of this oneness. There are moments when every man feels that he is one with the universe, and he rushes forth to express it, whether he knows it or not. This expression of oneness is what we call love and sympathy, and it is the basis of all our ethics and morality. This is summed up in the Vedanta philosophy by the celebrated aphorism, Tat Tvam Asi, “Thou art That.”

The swami continues:

To every man, this is taught: Thou art one with this Universal Being, and, as such, every soul that exists is your soul; and every body that exists is your body; and in hurting anyone, you hurt yourself, in loving anyone, you love yourself. As soon as a current of hatred is thrown outside, whomsoever else it hurts, it also hurts yourself; and if love comes out from you, it is bound to come back to you. For I am the universe; this universe is my body. I am the Infinite, only I am not conscious of it now; but I am struggling to get this consciousness of the Infinite, and perfection will be reached when full consciousness of this Infinite comes. (Vivekananda, 1:399)

In 1897, Swami Vivekananda established the Ramakrishna Mission and coined its motto—atmano moksha artham jagaddhitaya cha: “For the liberation of the self and for the welfare of the world”—under the inspiration of his guru, Sri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa (1836‒86). Ramakrishna made two statements which Vivekananda would take as an imperative to the kind of social service to which he would later dedicate herculean efforts. These statements are Jatra jiv, tatra Shiv—“where there is a living being, there is Shiva”—and Jive doya noy, Shiv gyane jiv sheba: “not compassion to living beings, rather service to the living being that one knows to be Shiva.”

For Swami Vivekananda, and for the Ramakrishna tradition, the ideal of service cannot be separated from, and is indeed deeply rooted in, the understanding of oneness that is at the heart of Vedanta. Why should I serve others? Is such service not a distraction from the spiritual path? These questions fail to grasp the oneness, the nonduality, that underlies self and other. To posit duality between one’s own state of God-realization and the good of the world around us is to introduce a bifurcation that is ultimately a false one.

According to Swami Vivekananda, the practice of service to others as one would wish to be served oneself is a path to the full consciousness of the Infinite. The other that one is serving is, in fact, oneself. The servant and the one being served are not different, and both are divine. In practical terms, it certainly appears that there is a “self” helping an “other.” But in reality, the helper and helped are one, and the act of giving and receiving dissolves the duality which appears to separate them, joining them in a bond of love.

Love is essentially the experience of the deeper oneness of being. Love is what it feels like to be one with all existence. By helping the other, we in fact are helping ourselves, manifesting the love that is our true, fundamental nature. To again quote Swami Vivekananda: “Our duty to others means helping others, doing good to the world. Why should we do good to the world? Apparently to help the world, but really to help ourselves” (Vivekananda, 1:75).

Swami Vivekananda refers to the path of spiritual service as karma yoga. In this context, he is not referring to the law of karma, which is the principle of action and reaction. He speaks of karma in this latter sense as follows: “As soon as a current of hatred is thrown outside, whomsoever else it hurts, it also hurts yourself; and if love comes out from you, it is bound to come back to you.”

By contrast, karma yoga harks back to the meaning of the word’s original Sanskrit roots: action. This is the yoga, or spiritual discipline, in which action is performed with detachment from its fruits and offered lovingly as a form of service. This becomes a way to purify the mind of egotism and thus aid us on our way to the highest realization.

The philosophy of oneness underlying Swami Vivekananda’s ideal of social service not only helps to ground such service in a wider metaphysical worldview, it also serves as a theodicy: an account of why there is suffering in the world at all. Vivekananda unpacks these implications of karma yoga when he explains why we should help others in light of the insight that the world is itself a manifestation of the Self.

In the course of developing this theodicy, Vivekananda makes a number of claims that, if taken out of context, would sound like rejections of social service. But one must bear in mind the larger worldview behind these assertions. From the perspective of the Infinite, time, space, causation, and the seemingly fundamental distinction between subject and object are unreal. There is therefore, at the ultimate stage, no suffering, no servant, and no person in need of service. This is the paramartha satya, the ultimate truth. But if this is confused with an assertion of the vyavahara satya, or conventional truth of the realm of duality, it would sound cold, strange, and out of touch with the reality of the miseries of this world. If we bear in mind the extremely important distinction between these two aspects of truth, we can now turn to sayings that are seemingly at odds with Vivekananda’s deep commitment to the ideal of serving suffering beings.

“If we consider well,” Swami Vivekananda says, “we find that the world does not require our help at all. This world was not made that you or I should come up and help it. Is it not a blasphemy to say that the world needs our help? We cannot deny that there is much misery in it; to go out and help others is therefore the best thing we can do, although in the long run we shall find that helping others is only helping ourselves.” (Vivekananda, 1:75)

Most dramatically and counterintuitively of all, Swami Vivekananda tells us that the world “is perfect . . . We may be perfectly sure that it will go on beautifully well without us, and we need not bother our heads wishing to help it” (Vivekananda, 1:76).

Here Vivekananda is not denying that suffering is very real in the world that we are currently experiencing. As we have seen, he also says of the world that “we cannot deny that there is much misery in it; to go out and help others is therefore the best thing we can do.” But how can this be squared with the ultimate truth that the world is “perfect”?

The seeming imperfection of the world, as Vivekananda explains, can be likened to the exercise equipment in a gym: it is there so we can do the work that we need to do in order to realize our goal: “The world is a grand moral gymnasium wherein we have all to take exercise so as to become stronger and stronger spiritually” (Vivekananda, 1:80). Thinking that we will finally make the world a better place by solving all its problems is therefore futile, for it would defeat the whole purpose of these problems. In the words of Swami Atmarupananda, another teacher in the Ramakrishna tradition, “life is problem-solving.”

It is not the case, then, that we should not solve the problems before us. This is our dharma, our duty, as human beings, and a central theme of the Bhagavad Gita, in which the hero Arjuna is encouraged to do his duty, however difficult it may be, in the awareness that this is an essential part of his path to realization.

On the other hand, we should not solve problems on the assumption that all problems will one day be solved, or in the expectation that there will ever come a time when there will be such a thing as a problem-free existence upon the earth. Should that time come, the earth would cease to be a fitting place for living beings to work out their spiritual paths, for it would be missing an essential element of its purpose. If life is problem-solving, then a world without problems would be dead. Earth will be problem-free only when there are no more sentient beings upon it. From a spiritual perspective, the point is not so much solving the problems themselves (important though this is in the near term) as the transformative effects that our attempts to resolve them have upon us.

The world, therefore, is full of urgent problems, and it is imperative that we work to resolve them. But the world is also perfect, because problem-solving is precisely what we need to do to realize our ultimate oneness and manifest the love which is the infinite ground of our being. In a gym, we do not run the treadmill to get somewhere; we do not lift weights because the weights need to be moved from one place to another. These obstacles exist so that we can transform ourselves, and we choose to avail ourselves of them because we yearn for this transformation. In a gym, we are trying to cultivate physical health and fitness. In this world (in which we have chosen to be born), we are trying to realize the infinite potential that is the divine Self within us all.

To use another image, Swami Vivekananda says, “This world is like a dog’s curly tail” (Vivekananda, 1:79). We can try to straighten it out, but it is just going to flip back to its former position. We can and should solve specific problems by doing good in the world: specific conflicts can be resolved, specific wars prevented, diseases cured, and obstacles overcome. But life in samsara will always have problems; if it did not, it would be pointless. According to Swami Vivekananda, this way of thinking can help us to avoid fanaticism. In solving problems, it is important not to lose sight of the big picture:

It is a mistake to think that fanaticism can make for the progress of mankind. On the contrary, it is a retarding element creating hatred and anger, and causing people to fight each other, and making them unsympathetic. We think that whatever we do or possess is the best in the world, and what we do not do or possess is of no value. So, always remember the instance of the curly tail of the dog whenever you have a tendency to become a fanatic. (Vivekananda, 1:79) 

Precisely how do problem-solving and service to others help us realize the infinite ground of our being? Karma yoga operates by subordinating the ego to something far greater than itself. It thereby brings the ego to such an attenuated state that it eventually vanishes altogether. Or rather, the ego becomes transparent, allowing the light of our potential divinity to shine through and thus be realized, actualized, and made manifest both in the world and in our consciousness. At this point we realize that we are not in fact the doers of action, but merely instruments of the Divine. According to the Bhagavad Gita, “one who is confused by egotism thinks, ‘I am the doer.’” (3:27; my translation). The ego makes us think we are the ones solving the world’s problems, and in extreme cases, that the world needs us to “save” it. This kind of thinking has caused much destruction in human history.

The aim of karma yoga is this purification of the mind from the stain of egotism:

The main effect of work done for others is to purify ourselves. By means of constant effort to do good to others we are trying to forget ourselves; this forgetfulness of the self [meaning the ego] is the one great lesson we have to learn in life . . . When a man has reached that state, he has attained to the perfection of Karma Yoga. This is the highest result of good works. (Vivekananda, 1:84, 86)

This is what is meant by “helping others is only helping ourselves.”

To further dramatize the point, Swami Vivekananda goes so far as to say that “unselfishness is God” (Vivekananda, 1:87). Unselfishness, for the karma yogi, is the highest ideal, just as the personal deity serves as the highest ideal for theistic devotees who surrender their egos to the Divine in the experience of loving devotion.

The ultimate purpose of karma yoga is to eradicate the ego. This fact has profound implications about the attitude with which one should engage in service. It prevents what both Swami Vivekananda and Sri Ramakrishna took to be the problematic attitude inherent in more conventional approaches to charity, which can all too often involve a self-congratulatory attitude or an attitude of superiority over those who are “less fortunate.” To again quote Swami Vivekananda: “It is a privilege to help others. Do not stand on a pedestal and take five cents in your hand and say, ‘Here, my poor man,’ but be grateful that the poor man is there so that by making a gift to him you are able to help yourself. It is not the receiver that is blessed, but it is the giver. Be grateful to the man you help, think of him as God” (Vivekananda, 1:76).

If the recipient of aid is not to be looked down upon in pity, but rather to be looked up to as divine, then aid is not charity but service, or seva, as it is known in the Hindu tradition. This is of course the point of Ramakrishna’s dictum: “not compassion [or pity: doya] to living beings, rather service to the living being that one knows to be Shiva.”

One could extend this idea even further and say that karma yoga in this sense is a form of bhakti yoga, the spiritual discipline of devotion: to cite another famous line of Swami Vivekananda, “work is worship” (Vivekananda, 5:245). Vivekananda famously exhorts his followers, in language almost reminiscent of the biblical prophets, to worship the living God in the form of suffering humanity—daridra narayana—even to the point of appearing to belittle more conventional forms of worship (Vivekananda, 7:245).

Vivekananda places the ethical implications of oneness at the front and center of his vision of Vedanta, going so far as to extol karma yoga, in the form of seva, as a path to liberation as valid as the other yogas of wisdom, devotion, and meditation. His ethical monism is the cornerstone of the Ramakrishna tradition’s ethos of selfless service. It is also deeply rooted in a traditional Vedantic understanding of oneness as expressed in the Bhagavad Gita: “I am not lost to the one who sees me everywhere and who sees all in me, nor is that one lost to me” (Bhagavad Gita 6:30; my translation).

Citing the Bhagavad Gita brings to mind the image of Lord Krishna, who is often represented as playing his flute. A modern bhakti poet, Radhey Shiam, writes eloquently of this flute as an image for the transformation of the ego that both karma yoga and bhakti yoga aim to cultivate. Shiam prays to Lord Krishna to make him like the flute, which must be hollow in order to allow air to pass through it. He prays that he may be empty of ego, empty of the sense of “I” and of being the doer of action, so that the Lord may use him to make beautiful music in the world. Through the practice of karma yoga, through selfless service that is offered with this understanding of oneness—that God is everywhere and in everyone—we become like Lord Krishna’s flute: instruments of divine action in the world. This is reminiscent of the first line of the Prayer of St. Francis from the Christian tradition: “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.”

This is the essence of the philosophy of oneness propounded in the teachings of Swami Vivekananda and embodied in the service work of the Ramakrishna Mission. Service is not to be contrasted with the quest for realization and rejected as a distraction. Service in the spirit of oneness is realization. It makes the reality of oneness manifest in the life of the world through loving service aimed at serving suffering beings: service offered not in a patronizing spirit, but with love. 

Sources

Bhagavad Gita. Edited and translated by Winthrop Sargeant. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2009. Translations in this article are taken from the Sanskrit text of this edition.

Swami Vivekananda. Complete Works¸volumes 1, 5, and 7. Mayavati, India: Advaita Ashrama, 1979.

Jeffery D. Long is professor of religion, philosophy, and Asian studies at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pennsylvania, where he has been teaching since receiving his doctoral degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School in the year 2000. He is the author of a variety of books and articles, including Hinduism in America: A Convergence of Worlds and Jainism: An Introduction. He has spoken in many national and international venues, including three talks given at the United Nations.

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Printed in the  Winter 2024 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Macrae, Janet "Florence Nightingale and Dora Kunz Perspectives on Nursing and Therapeutic Touch" Quest 112:1, pg 34-38

By Janet Macrae

Florence Nightingale’s textbook Notes on Nursing, published by the great pioneer of modern nursing in 1860, contains her basic recommendations for the care of the ill. This work is still essential for nursing because the fundamental needs of the ill, such as proper ventilation, cleanliness, adequate rest and nutrition, and confidence in the caregivers, remain unchanged. Moreover, her emphasis on cooperating with the restorative powers of nature is consistent with holistic methods in modern nursing practice.

Therapeutic Touch is a modern holistic method of facilitating healing which has been researched, practiced, and taught in nursing since its inception in the 1970s. And yet it is rarely associated with Nightingale’s work. The main reason, perhaps, is that Nightingale focused on the physical body and Therapeutic Touch is based on the concept of the human being as a complex system of energies.

Although an energy perspective might seem to be inconsistent with Nightingale’s focus on physical care, her view of health and illness was essentially dynamic. Throughout Notes on Nursing, she emphasized that (a) it is the “vital power” within the patient, derived from nature, that activates the healing; (b) this power is enhanced or reduced by environmental conditions; and (c) the nurse must knowledgeably regulate these conditions so that healing can proceed without obstruction.

There are many parallels between Florence Nightingale’s principles of nursing and those of Therapeutic Touch as explained by Dora van Gelder Kunz, its codeveloper. Two of their basic assumptions are the concept of a Higher Power and the concept of universal law.

 One of the most important statements in Notes on Nursing, which reveals the way Nightingale integrated spirituality and healing, is found in a footnote: “God lays down certain physical laws. Upon His carrying out such laws depends our responsibility” (Nightingale, 25). She viewed God not only as the ultimate source of creative power but also as a divine mind or intelligence who regulates the universe through law as opposed to caprice. All processes in creation have an underlying intelligent design. Nursing’s challenge and responsibility, therefore, is to discover the principles of the healing process and to work with them effectively. Nature alone, the expression of God, cures, she wrote, “and what nursing has to do . . . is to put the patient in the best condition for nature to act upon him” (Nightingale, 133).

 Dora Kunz had a unique perspective because she was clairvoyant since childhood. She was able to see various dimensions of subtle energies interpenetrating and extending beyond the physical body: vital (prana or chi), emotional, mental, intuitional (creative), and unitive (healing or inspirational). For a detailed discussion of these fields, see the series of articles by Kunz and Peper listed in the references. After observing many well-known spiritual healers, such as Kathryn Kuhlman and Ambrose Worrall, Kunz, together with nursing professor Dolores Krieger, developed a method of facilitating healing that could be practiced and researched in secular settings, such as nursing schools, hospitals, and clinics.

From Kunz’s perspective, the healing power comes from the unitive or inspirational field, which is characterized by order and compassion. The energy from this higher level, when knowledgeably channeled to the patient, quickens and strengthens the individual’s own healing resources. In Kunz’s view, there is an inner drive towards wholeness or “coordinated functioning,” which is derived from the orderly processes of nature. This drive exists not only within the physical body but within the entire multidimensional energy system. This dynamic underlying order is responsible for healing or restoring wholeness; the role of the nurse or therapist is that of a facilitator when help becomes necessary (Kunz and Krieger, 48‒62).

Therapeutic Touch Processes

The practice of Therapeutic Touch involves several processes: centering oneself, assessing the patient’s energy system, clearing congestion, and sending healing energy with the ideas of order, balance, and wholeness. These are most easily described as sequential phases, but in actual practice they tend to occur simultaneously. Each of these processes has parallels with Nightingale’s recommendations for nursing practice.

Centering

Centering, as Kunz explained, is focusing oneself in the present moment. It is making the intent to align with a higher level of consciousness that is a center of peace and quiet. She described this as the “inner self,” the core of one’s being, “the enduring constant, the continuing background of all one’s consciousness” (Kunz and Krieger, 17).

The practitioner must maintain this centered state throughout the treatment process because it is through the alignment with the inner self that the higher energies are accessed. Therapists are able to avoid fatigue because, by serving as a conduit, they are continually replenished. Additionally, the inner calmness of the centered state helps to reduce any anxiety or physical tension on the part of both therapist and patient that might interfere with the energy transfer.

 Although Nightingale did not use the term “centering,” she wrote about the need to “possess oneself,” to maintain a calm, purposeful manner when caring for the ill, because “all hurry or bustle is peculiarly painful to the sick” (Nighingale, 48). In her spiritual work Suggestions for Thought, she wrote that focusing on our work with a spiritual intent brings an attunement with the inner divine nature, the finest part of oneself inspired by God. From this attunement comes compassion, inner calmness, steadiness of purpose, and confidence. It also brings the flowing vitality to keep nursing alive in our hearts so that it never becomes, in her words, “a very hardening routine and bustle” (Dossey et al., 214).

Assessing

The Therapeutic Touch therapist, in a centered state, quietly attunes to the patient’s energy field, searching for areas of congestion, depletion, and/or dysrhythmia.

The assessing process enables the therapist not only to transfer energy but also to knowledgeably help the patient’s efforts toward rebalancing and assimilation. Even if some of the cues are not picked up, Kunz observed, the innate healing ability of the patient can distribute the energy where it is needed; thus the treatment is still helpful (Kunz and Krieger, 201). The centered state of the therapist aids the assessing process, for it allows her to “step back” in consciousness. From this shift in perspective, she can pick up energy cues, make observances, and see connections that might ordinarily be missed.

 Nightingale was much less forgiving with respect to missed cues. For her, assessing or accurately observing the patient’s condition can be a matter of life and death. The following strong statement from Notes on Nursing relates to one of Nightingale’s fundamental teachings: although nursing is motivated by compassion, it must be guided by a knowledge base that is built through “ready and correct observation” (and statistical analyses when appropriate). “For it may safely be said, not that the habit of ready and correct observation will by itself make us useful nurses, but that without it we shall be useless with all our devotion” (Nightingale, 112).

Clearing Congestion

The Therapeutic Touch therapist clears the patient’s energy field of congestion, which is usually felt as sensations of heat, thickness, and/or pressure. This process helps to reestablish a freely flowing, balanced energy field. Because energy congestion can be experienced as discomfort or pain, often the patient will start to feel better at this point. Also, once the congestion is removed, the patient is more open to a transfer of energy through the therapist.

 Clearing energy congestion has its parallel in Nightingale’s practices of ventilation and cleanliness.

 “The very first canon of nursing . . . the first essential to a patient . . . is this: TO KEEP THE AIR HE BREATHES AS PURE AS THE EXTERNAL AIR WITHOUT CHILLING HIM” (Nightingale, 12).

For Nightingale, the elimination of toxins or “noxious matter” through the lungs, skin, and bowels is intrinsic to the healing process. From her perspective, assisting nature means establishing a clean, flowing interaction between the patient and the environment. Anything introduced into the patient’s system, such as air, water, and food, should be as pure as possible. All soiled materials, from wet bedclothes and sheets to dusty carpets and furniture, should be removed. This will prevent, or at least help to reduce, the buildup of stagnant conditions, which impede the healing process.

  Just as the Therapeutic Touch recipient feels relief when the energy congestion is removed, Nightingale writes how patients are relieved when “noxious matter” is removed from the skin:

The amount of relief and comfort experienced by sick [sic] after the skin has been carefully washed and dried, is one of the commonest observations at a sick bed. But it must not be forgotten that the comfort and relief so obtained are not all. They are, in fact, nothing more than a sign that the vital powers have been relieved by removing something that was oppressing them. (Nightingale, 93)

Transferring Energy

Therapeutic Touch therapists make the intent to open themselves to the universal healing field and allow its energy to flow through them into the patient. This focused, conscious intent establishes and maintains alignment with the higher dimension. As Kunz emphasized, the energy is sent with the idea of wholeness, which can be understood as coordinated functioning, dynamic order, or harmonic balance of body, mind, and creative spirit. The added energy strengthens the individual’s own power to heal, or reestablish his or her inner balance (Kunz and Krieger, 99).

The conservation of vital energy necessary for healing was important enough to Nightingale to be part of her definition of nursing:

I use the word nursing for want of a better. . . . It ought to signify the proper use of fresh air, light, warmth, cleanliness, quiet and the proper selection and administration of diet—all at the least expense of vital power to the patient. (Nightingale, 8)

Nightingale’s concern, expressed throughout Notes on Nursing, is that the patient’s vital powers not be undermined and diminished through want of attention to the fundamentals of care. For example, the patient’s taste should dictate what food he takes and at what time; otherwise the food will be left untouched or undigested. Unnecessary noise, or noise that creates an expectation in the mind, is hurtful and tiring to the patient. Being roused out of a first sleep is extremely detrimental. And if the patient becomes chilled through a lack of attention to hot water bottles and bricks, flannels, or warm drinks, the results can be fatal. Although modern hospitals do not use hot water bottles or bricks, Nightingale’s observations and recommendations are as accurate and important today as they were in 1860.

A Spiritual Practice

The regular practice of Therapeutic Touch, during which one’s energies are focused and harmonized, holds healing potential for the therapist as well as for the patient. From Kunz’s perspective, the inner self gradually comes closer to the personal self: its peace and confidence became more accessible, flashes of insight come through more frequently, and negative patterns tend to dissipate. Her clairvoyant observations of changes in her students’ energy fields should be encouraging not only for Therapeutic Touch therapists but for all those who regularly center themselves in their healing work.

I have now known people who have been practicing Therapeutic Touch for several years. I have noticed increasingly how they have changed individually from year to year. Their continued involvement in the Therapeutic Touch process radiates from them, changing their character and breaking some of their old habit patterns, often without their being aware of it. It is very encouraging to know that Therapeutic Touch has done that and I emphasize it because you may not be seeing it from my point of view. (Kunz and Krieger, 33)

Strengthening the communion or alignment between the individual and the inner divine nature was, for Nightingale, the ultimate purpose of human life. From the perspective of her active spirituality, this inner alignment is both cultivated and expressed through one’s chosen work. In Suggestions for Thought, she wrote:

“Work your true work, and you will find His presence within yourself—i.e. the presence of those attributes, those qualities, that spirit, which is all we know of God” (Calabria and Macrae, 143).

 By “true work,” Nightingale meant work for which one is personally suited, which is freely chosen, holding one’s interest and love, and which is performed for a higher purpose. In her view it is the motivation that transforms one’s personal work into God’s work. This has its parallel with the Therapeutic Touch therapist’s focused intent to attune to the inner self and the higher healing energies. Nightingale understood what Kunz saw clairvoyantly: that our motivation or intent not only changes the quality of our therapeutic interactions, but can change the whole of our lives for the better.

Sources

Emphasis in quoted material is from the original.

Calabria, Michael, and Janet Macrae, eds. Suggestions for Thought by Florence Nightingale: Selections and Commentaries. Philadelphia: University of  Pennsylvania Press, 1994.

Dossey, Barbara. Florence Nightingale: Mystic, Visionary, Healer. Springhouse, Pa.: Springhouse, 2000.

Dossey, Barbara, Louise Selander, Deva-Marie Beck, and Alex Attewell. Florence Nightingale Today: Healing, Leadership, Global Action. Silver Spring, Md.: American Nurses Association, 2005.

Kunz, Dora. The Personal Aura. Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1991.

Kunz, Dora, and Erik Peper. “Fields and Their Clinical Implications.” In Kunz, ed., Spiritual Healing. Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 1995.

Kunz, Dora, and Dolores Krieger. The Spiritual Dimension of Therapeutic Touch. Rochester, Vt.: Bear and Co., 2004.

Nightingale, Florence. Notes on Nursing. New York: Dover, 1969 [1860].

Van Gelder, Kirsten, and Frank Chesley. A Most Unusual Life: Dora van Gelder Kunz. Wheaton: Theosophical Publishing House, 2005.

Janet Macrae is a coeditor of Suggestions for Thought by Florence Nightingale (University of Pennsylvania Press) and the author of Therapeutic Touch: A Practical Guide (Knopf).

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Printed in the  Winter 2024 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Kathy, Gann "A Tapestry of Compassion: Changing the World for Good" Quest 112:1, pg 19-22

By Kathy Gann

The letter was clear and unambiguous, even blunt in places. It said that Theosophy must not consist merely of theory and useless talk, but that Theosophy had to be made practical if it was to be of real value to the world. Furthermore, it emphasized that the goal of putting Theosophy into action was to alleviate suffering: “It is esoteric philosophy alone, the spiritual and psychic blending of man with Nature, that, by revealing fundamental truths, can bring that much desired mediate state between the two extremes of human Egotism and divine Altruism, and finally lead to the alleviation of human suffering.”

 The letter (which can be found as letter 82 in Letters from the Masters of the Wisdom, Second Series, edited by C. Jinarajadasa), explained that the great mission of true Theosophy involved ethics and duties whose value we could test and discern for ourselves because it “would satisfy most and best the altruistic and right feeling in us.” The letter admitted that modeling these ethics was laborious, requiring strenuous and persevering effort, but it promised real spiritual progress in return for the efforts. Here, it said, was a way of simultaneously diminishing both self-centeredness and suffering in the world, if only we would put forth real effort and stick with it.

 To the extent that the letter was clear and direct, it was equally mysterious. Nobody knew exactly who wrote it or, perhaps fortunately, to whom it was written, as it reprimanded a pompous gentleman claiming that because he was a Theosophist, he somehow had a right to judge others. H.P. Blavatsky gave her word, documented in a paper at Adyar, that the letter was written by a Master of the Wisdom. A modified version was published as an article titled, “Some Words on Daily Life” in an early edition of Lucifer, the magazine of the Theosophical Society.

Fast forward to 1908, and life was good in many ways. The new year was celebrated with New York City’s first dropping of the lighted ball in Times Square. Dutch artist Piet Mondrian found Theosophy, the Chicago Cubs won the World Series, and the Summer Olympic Games were held in London. Terms such as “world war,” “global pandemic,” or “Great Depression” had no place in anyone’s vocabulary.

At the same time, 1908, like all years that came before and after, saw tremendous suffering in human beings, animals, and the environment. People in cities like London and Delhi died prematurely because air pollution was much higher than today’s levels. Animal experimentation, including vivisection, was widespread and largely unregulated. The labor laws and social safety nets we take for granted today were unheard of. The result was a widespread and heartbreaking level of suffering.

In Madras (now Chennai), India, sixty-year-old Annie Besant, newly elected international president of the Theosophical Society, studied the mysterious but adamant letter-turned-article, which stated, “Theosophy must be made practical; and it has, therefore, to be disencumbered of useless digressions, in the sense of desultory orations and fine talk.”

Captivated by the idea that Theosophy put into practical action could reduce human misery in the world, in February 1908 Besant founded the Theosophical Order of Service (TOS), whose mission was to unite all who love in the service of all that suffer. The goal was for TS members to put Theosophy into action so that suffering of all types in their communities could be alleviated.

Since that time, the TOS has continued to serve as a haven and structure within which volunteers release, bit by bit, the inexhaustible light that lies deep within their hearts and integrate it with their mental, emotional, and physical natures to ease the world’s suffering. Today, as in Besant’s day, TOS projects reflect the widely varied interests of its members. More importantly, today’s TOS still plays a dual role in the life of its workers: (1) selfless service to those who suffer, and (2) the inner transformation of the server who loves.

Today the TOS continues to function as the service arm of the TS, and the two organizations are inextricably linked. The president of the international TS serves ex officio as the president of the international TOS, appointing a secretary (currently Nancy Secrest) to oversee the operations of the TOS in national Sections.

As the TS fulfills its mission to make Theosophical teachings available to the world, the TOS gives its members and workers the opportunity to put those teachings into practice in order to reduce suffering of all kinds. It’s a simple yet profound formula: Theosophy in action changes the world for good! The very reason for being of the TOS lies within the First Object of the TS, with its emphasis on universal brotherhood.

How has the TOS in the United States put Theosophy into action over the years? Any attempt at a detailed history would be beyond the scope of this article, but even a bare-bones summary will show the enthusiasm and life force poured by Theosophists into the alleviation of suffering.

Early workers, such as Max Wardall, inspired a great deal of activity in several departments: social service, animal welfare, world peace, arts and crafts, healing, and going back to nature. “Mr. Max,” as he was known, was a passionate speaker, writer, and worker who not only championed TOS projects but also lauded the efforts of Theosophists who worked through and within other organizations. Unfortunately, Max succumbed to illness and exhaustion and passed away in 1933. His death, combined with the Great Depression, led to a brief decline in TOS activities during the early 1930s.

In 1934, Robert Logan headed the TOS-USA, assisted by two energetic members, Edith Lee Ruggles and Blanche Kilbourne. Together they kept TS members posted about service opportunities and asked them to engage as activists for the causes of the day, including abolishment of capital punishment, antilynching legislation, protesting the import of monkeys from India to the U.S. for vivisection, and protesting Sonora Webster Carver’s diving horse act, in which horses were trained to jump off diving ramps from heights up to sixty feet! Each issue of the American Theosophist magazine contained more and more appeals. Kilbourne wrote to members, “The test of sincerity of one’s beliefs is action in support of them. Let’s be doers . . . not readers only.”

During World War II, Esther Renshaw and Edith Ruggles coordinated projects for wartime relief for TS members in Europe, including shipping food and supplies to members in war-torn areas.

Joy Mills joined the TSA staff in 1942 (later to become the Society’s president) and recalled, “At Olcott I remember packing boxes of donated items: warm clothing, basic foods, personal essentials, to be sent to members in Europe . . . it involved the entire Olcott staff (we were such a close-knit community in those days, everyone lived in the main building), so in the evenings we would gather in the basement to fill boxes and ready them for shipping.”

Inspiring pamphlets and pen-pal letters were sent by members to servicemen and women serving abroad in the war. Many families were grieving because of the many deaths during that time, so members in the healing department sent copies of C.W. Leadbeater’s leaflet “To Those Who Mourn” to provide comfort.

 To help traumatized soldiers returning from the war reintegrate into civilian life, the TOS established the arts and crafts department, which included a national weaving guild known as the Olcott Weavers. TOS workers saw this creative work as a therapeutic necessity for soldiers suffering from shell shock or battle fatigue (now known as posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD) long before the condition was well recognized.

Diana Winslow and Marion Swift kept the momentum of the TOS going with their Bundles for Korea movement during the Korean War in the early 1950s. Starting in the mid-1960s, Jean Gullo headed the TOS-USA and worked to rekindle interest in the organization by making members aware of its activities and work. As a national speaker for the TS, Jean traveled extensively and wove her enthusiasm for service into her work for the TS.

For the next few decades, the TOS, through several dedicated volunteers, published newsletters keeping members abreast of opportunities for service in parenting, animal welfare, healing, environment and energy conservation, peace, and social service, to name a few. In the 1970s, Jean’s husband, Joe Gullo (who recently died at the age of 102), became an invaluable TOS worker as well. In 1982, Joe suggested that the various newsletters be combined into one magazine: For the Love of Life. The TOS raised funds to help refugees in Bangladesh, orphanages in Saigon, and Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala, India.

 One project that began in 1979 deserves special mention. TS member Karole Kettering began a TOS project in her home, collecting food for needy families in the area near the Olcott campus in Wheaton. Originally called the Senior Citizen Project, Karole’s work flourished to the point that her project eventually became a separate nonprofit organization, the Humanitarian Service Project (HSP), now overseen by her husband, Floyd Kettering (now national treasurer of the TSA). So dedicated and successful was Karole’s work that she received special recognition awards from the state of Illinois prior to her passing in 2013. HSP continues its mission through three main programs: the Children’s Project, the Senior Citizen Project, and the Christmas Offering. TOS workers who live near the Olcott campus still volunteer regularly at HSP.

From the 1980s to 2006, TOS member Joseph Tisch focused on hard-hitting issues, with a special interest in the plight of the poor and the needs of those who were incarcerated. Joseph regularly visited and counseled prisoners near his home in Melbourne, Florida. When prisoners were released, Joseph provided them with clothing and basic toiletries and helped them find housing and a job. Under the direction of Deni Gross, the peace department became one of the TOS’s most active endeavors until her retirement in 2006.

From the 1980s into the 2000s, Karen Schulz-McCormick headed the family department. For a number of years, she gathered and personally delivered warm winter clothing for children and seniors, as well as school supplies for children each fall, to the Rosebud Indian Reservation in South Dakota. Candi Phillips continued the work of the animal welfare department.

From 2007 to 2013, the TOS adopted the Chushul Orphanage in Tibet, providing over $30,000 to provide necessary supplies and build new bathrooms and showers for the children. TOS support came to a reluctant end when Chushul was closed by the Chinese government.

When the COVID pandemic confined us to our homes, the TOS still found ways to help. To bring relief to overburdened hospital personnel, TOS volunteers in Chicago and other cities worked with restaurant owners to provide nourishing vegetarian meals and snacks to hospital personnel. Medical caregivers loved the thoughtful support, and the restaurant owners appreciated the business. Another win-win solution was woven into the TOS tapestry of compassion.

Through an ever-changing group of directors, officers, and volunteers, TOS-USA provides much needed support for diverse causes including the environment, animal welfare, homelessness, hunger, education, and healing. The TOS sponsors two healing networks—one for people and one for animals. The networks consist of dozens of groups and individuals who regularly perform a healing ceremony designed by Geoffrey Hodson, invoking the cooperation of devas to send healing energy to people and animals suffering illness, injury, and other challenges. (You may submit recipients’ names for healing via the TOS-USA website: TheoService.org.)  Recently, TOS-USA launched the Meditative Action Network, a group of volunteers who meditate on infusing difficult world situations with light so they may be resolved in accordance with Highest Will.

TOS-USA cooperates with other TOS sections around the world to ensure that help is at hand where it is most needed. American Theosophists have taken great joy in helping to support the Golden Link College, a project of the TS/TOS in the Philippines, which provides Theosophical education to students from preschool to college. Most students are from low-income families and rely on scholarships to pay their tuition. Donors love knowing that their support (up to $18,380 this fiscal year) is doubled by a generous matching grant from the Kern Foundation. A donation of $120, for example, is matched and becomes $240, enough for one elementary school student’s annual tuition at Golden Link.

With the Russian invasion of Ukraine, TOS-USA sent substantial support for refugee relief and other urgent projects in war-torn areas. The most basic human needs such as food, water, shelter, clothing, and hygiene products were provided to people in areas cut off from supplies, often at great personal risk to those making the deliveries. With donations flowing from TOS groups around the world, the TOS in Ukraine has wisely partnered with like-minded organizations to form a tapestry of compassion that’s making a huge difference in a time of unthinkable suffering.

Local groups around the U.S. have undertaken a rich variety of projects through the years. In Houston, members regularly worked at a food bank to ensure that those living in food-insecure households had plenty to eat. They also assembled and delivered care kits to the homeless. Members of the Cleveland-Besant Lodge participate in and support numerous organizations in their area dedicated to animal welfare and children and families. They regularly perform a TOS healing ceremony, and one member not only provides free Reiki healing weekly but also conducts Reiki training (called attunements) at no charge.

Members of North Carolina’s Research Triangle Study Center assembled lunches in lovingly decorated bags for people experiencing homelessness, which were distributed by an outreach center run by Raleigh Catholic Charities. The Salt Lake City study center raised awareness about plastic pollution in the ocean through large events in cooperation with the First Unitarian Church and a local university. Their events educated local residents on simple adjustments to their daily routines that would help lessen the amount of plastic that ends up in our oceans.

Each December, Denver members focus on projects for animals and children. In 2019, members donated blankets and comforters, which were shipped to the Ironwood Pig Sanctuary in Marana, Arizona.

During the pandemic, TOS members kept their service projects alive through the magic of drop-shipping. In 2020, Christmas gifts for traumatized children with mental health issues were drop-shipped to a member who delivered them to the Denver Children’s Home. Members purchased warm winter clothing and wish-list items for the Lakota Waldorf School on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. For the past two years, members have purchased Christmas gifts for children at Warren Village, an organization providing housing and services for single-parent families who have experienced homelessness or housing instability.

Members of Philadelphia’s Abraxas Lodge worked with a local organization called the Joy of Sox to provide new socks to the homeless, proving that Philadelphia truly is the City of Brotherly Love.

In 2016, Milwaukee Lodge raised and delivered $550, along with carloads of goods, to Daystar, Inc., a local long-term transitional housing facility for women who are victims of abuse and poverty. The TOS Dharma Group in Wheaton provided copies of the Quest book and audiobook War and the Soul by Edward Tick to local veterans’ organizations to provide combat veterans with a means of healing. Members of the Portland Lodge purchased backpacks and stuffed them with food for a local school’s backpack program. Backpacks were delivered to children who would otherwise have gone hungry during weekends and school holidays.

With the COVID pandemic receding into the rearview mirror, local groups are once again emerging and looking for ways to alleviate suffering in their communities. In May 2023, the Wheaton-Olcott TOS group helped their local post office “Stamp Out Hunger” by sorting and packaging food items donated by postal customers. The food was distributed to community members in need by the Humanitarian Service Project.

A thread here, a project there—bit by bit, year by year, TOS volunteers continue to build a tapestry of compassion that started with Besant’s brilliant idea and has grown through the actions of countless TOS volunteers, known and unknown. Why do they do it? Perhaps it’s because their inner natures have become such that they have no other path to go, no other way to be, than to put Theosophy into action to change this world for good.

Kathy Gann has studied Theosophy since 1994. She has served numerous terms as secretary of the Denver Study Center and served for twelve years on the TSA board of directors, including a term as vice president. She currently serves as president of the TOS-USA (theoservice.org).

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Printed in the  Winter 2024 issue of Quest magazine. 
Citation: Richard, Smoley "Active and Contemplative Lives: An Interview with Carl McColman" Quest 112:1, pg 12-18

By Richard Smoley

Many TS members will remember Carl McColman from his talk at the Summer National Convention in July 2023.

McColman is a spiritual director, retreat leader, and internationally known speaker and teacher on mystical spirituality and contemplative living. He is particularly well known for his work with the contemporary contemplative practice known as Centering Prayer. His latest book is The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism (Broadleaf).

In this conversation, McColman discusses how mysticism, contemplation, and the ways that mystical Christianity can restore the radical wisdom teachings of Jesus as an authentic, perennial tradition of inner liberation and transformation. He also explores the future of organized religion and the present state of spirituality in America.

A full version of this interview can be found on YouTube.

 

Richard Smoley: In The New Big Book of Christian Mysticism, you define mysticism as “living with the mystery of the love of God.” Could you go into that?

Carl McColman: If we’re going to talk about mysticism, it seems to me that mystery is a good place to enter.

In our culture, I think there is a kind of idolatry of dogma or certainty. The path of the mystery invites us out of that addiction to dogma into a place where we can listen to the deep well of unknowing in our own hearts; in that place, everything becomes possible. Spirituality becomes less about a framework of doctrines or teachings to which we need to conform and more a field of radiant possibility, where we discover the beauty and majesty of our own soul.

This brings us to the word God, which is a fraught word.  God is a concept by which we measure our possibility, our love, our compassion, our capacity to wonder, our capacity to be beings of the miraculous. God is a mystery about which we have all sorts of narratives: the old man in the sky, the Gandalfesque figure, the Force from Star Wars. If you move into nontheistic traditions like Buddhism, the word God is essentially meaningless. I think approaching God mystically allows us to hold all of those different narratives with a sense of wonder and possibility rather than a need to nail down the one truth.

We can also speaking of living—of life. Mysticism, at its heart, is life-affirming; it’s biophilic. The mystical path says yes to life in its most expansive and inclusive and radically egalitarian way.

Smoley: What you say about the idolatry of certainty is true, but it seems to be the consequence of a much larger lack of certainty. People are clinging to certainty, not like a rock on the shore, but like the last piece of flotsam of a broken ship. That’s why it seems so desperate.

McColman: I think the opposite of certainty is not uncertainty, but possibility. The beauty of a mystical approach is that it invites wonder and dialogue. That’s what mysticism invites us into. Even in the New Testament, Jesus teaches that with the Divine, all things are possible. Those are mystical teachings, and we need to keep them in mind when we approach the problems that dogma or doctrine present to us.

Smoley: Let’s explore a major theme in the Christian tradition, which you discuss in your book: the contrast between the active life and the contemplative life, symbolized most famously in the story in the Gospel of John about Martha and Mary.

McColman: For anyone who may not be familiar with that story, the idea is that Mary is sitting with Jesus and the disciples, engaging in spiritual conversation with them. Martha is the hostess, working in the kitchen. She’s getting the food ready, and she gets angry that Mary is not helping her.

Anything in Scripture has to be read on a metaphorical level. So it’s not just a couple of sisters that are having a little tiff because one of them wants to hang out with the boys and the other one wants to make sure that dinner is served. Beneath that surface, Mary represents the contemplative life, a life of deep engagement with the Divine. Martha represents the life of radical service, which came to be known as the active life: working to make the world a better place, setting up hospitals, setting up orphanages, campaigning against slavery, bringing the values of the spiritual life into the material world.

Church history is not my primary focus, so I speak with the knowledge of a layperson, but for some reason it seems that at about the time that the Roman Empire fell, Christianity turned its mystical heart into the cloister, into the monastery. From around the year 500 to about the time of the Protestant Reformation, nearly all of the mystics are either monks or nuns, living a cloistered life.

In the Gospel story, Jesus says that Mary has chosen the better part. The monks and nuns took that idea and ran with it—the idea that the contemplative life is higher than the active life: we shouldn’t be worrying about injustice or worldly conflict; we simply need to turn our entire attention towards the spirit, towards the interior life, and everything else will take care of itself. I can see that argument, and as somebody who is psychologically an introvert, it has a lot of appeal to me.

But especially around the time of the Reformation, you see something else emerging. I’m thinking of Teresa of Avila, the wonderful Spanish mystic, who teaches that when you get to the seventh mansion of the “interior castle”—in other words, the end of the mystical life—what is emphasized is the sisterhood between Mary and Martha. Mary and Martha even merge and become one. Being immersed in the contemplative act and what the East calls the bodhisattva vow—to be of radical service to others—become as unified as breathing in and breathing out. There’s an essential unity of finding the Divine in service and finding service in union with the Divine.

Many of us go toward mysticism because we’re seeking that interior presence of the Divine, but then we find that it pushes us out—into relationship, into community.

 Smoley: What you say about the active versus the contemplative life seems to be very accurate and compelling. But I’m going to disagree with you on one major point, and that’s the major difficulty I have with your book. It’s not true that in those centuries, all the mystics were monks and nuns. There were many mystics who were not monastics: the Cathars, the Beguines, the Brethren of the Common Life. Most of these had one thing in common: the Catholic church disapproved of them, or approved in only the most equivocal way. Even Meister Eckhart died before the Inquisition could get its hands on him. Yet all of the mystics you have in your book are those approved by Catholic and Orthodox Christianity. Did these alternative Christianities have nothing to say to us?

McColman: I don’t dispute anything you’re saying. We could chalk it up to marketing. If I want to introduce people within the institutional church to the mysteries, and I start talking about the Gnostics, they’re going to just toss me out; they’ll just say, “Sorry, not interested.”

The primary audience for this book is people who are within the church. They are not familiar with the mystical life and may even be scared of the mystical life. Sitting here talking with you, I’m assuming that the primary audience of this conversation is going to be people in the Theosophical world, which has an entirely different understanding of history and an entirely different understanding of mysticism. This book is probably going to be kindergarten for many of them. But that doesn’t make the book useless: we need kindergarten literature.

This book is for people who are afraid of mysticism from soup to nuts, because their church has told them to be afraid of mysticism. If I can’t get them to be pay attention to the Cathars, can I at least introduce them to Howard Thurman, Julian of Norwich, and Teresa? The reality is that there are a lot of people that are even scared of Julian of Norwich.

Smoley: That’s very fair and understandable. But a large number of Christians and ex-Christians are not afraid of Julian of Norwich. They are afraid of the church—on the basis of their experience.

McColman: I would say it’s the institution. The mystics and contemplatives have always been on the margin; I’m on the margin of the institution. You could argue that the Theosophical Society functions on the margins; that’s where the mystics tend to be. The monasteries have been on the margins.

Here is a metaphor, and I think about it a lot: institutional Christianity is like a building that’s on fire. Even Pope Francis, the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, or the most conservative evangelical would probably agree with that.

The church needs to be asking, is our primary job to save the building, or is it to save the people in the building? You can look at how the Catholic church has dealt with the abuse crisis: the institution is far more interested in saving the building than saving the people in the building.

I think this book has the potential to help the people that are in the building, but I don’t say, get out of the building. If they start reading the mystics, they’ll find their own way out.

I’ll be honest with you: when I first wrote this book, I was more in the institution than I am now. At that time, I had an idealistic idea that we could save both the people and the building.

At any rate, I do draw a distinction between institution and church, because I believe that mystical Christianity is a community, a communal mysticism. We need one another. Human beings need to be in a relationship. A church, when it’s functioning, is simply a relationship of mystics. It’s a relationship of people who are drawing from a shared spiritual system, from a particular wisdom lineage.

Institutionalization leads to the hunting of heretics, to the kind of violence and aggression that we see in the church to this day. All you have to do is go on social media to see how many people are spewing incredible aggression in the name of Jesus. It’s a betrayal of the wisdom teachings of the Master, yet for whatever reason, the institution seems to facilitate that. So burn down the institution, but let’s try to preserve some sacred community.

Smoley: You’re saying that the institution may be a building that is condemned, but there’s a community that needs to be perpetuated. Could you tell us about your vision of what this community might be like?

McColman: I wish there were people who were forty years younger than you and me in this conversation, because I think their vision would be a lot different, and probably a lot more creative and with a lot more potential. If you go into your average neighborhood Christian church—I don’t care if it’s Catholic, Protestant, evangelical—chances are, most of the people you’re going to see in there are sixty and over. Young people from the millennials on down have largely given up on church.

So what do young people need in terms of building community? Now I don’t want to go too far down this particular rabbit hole, but I do think there are political forces at work in our culture that militate against the formation of healthy spiritual community. That has to be addressed. But I think a bigger part of the problem is how the churches have betrayed their own mission, which is to be conveyors of wisdom, to pass wisdom down through the generations.

First of all, I think we need a community that listens. Those of us who are the older ones need to be doing most of the listening. We need to be radically curious about what our children and our grandchildren need. We need to be radically curious about people who are different from ourselves. So straight people, be curious about queer people; queer people, be curious about straight people.

You do get into systems of privilege and oppression, so there are some political dynamics here. But we need to be a community of wonder, a community of listening, a community of profound silence—and a community that is radically committed to compassion as well as ruthless in going after violence.

Institutions tend to have incredible pockets of violence or aggression. It’s not necessarily overt, but a matter of stripping people of their voice, shaming people, creating hierarchies of who’s in and who’s out. Whenever we see situations like that, we need to take a step back and ask, what is it we’re really promoting here? Are we promoting radical, egalitarian liberation? Or are we just creating another club? I think the future of any spiritual community will have to address questions like that.

We have become complacent with aggression in our culture and our systems of privilege, which will rot out spiritual communities from the inside.

Many of the people that you mention in the esoteric tradition were violently suppressed. You mentioned Meister Eckhart: at least they let him die. Marguerite Porete was burned at the stake. John of the Cross was held a prisoner by his own monastic brothers, and they beat him every week. We have to unpack the incredible violence that is at play in the spiritual life.

Then we get into gender-related violence or sexually related violence towards queer people, or people who are transgender or nonbinary. A lot of unpacking has to be done if we are going to be faithful to the wisdom that is encapsulated in Jesus’s message. Love the divine, love yourself, love one another, and even love the people you experience as enemies. There’s the mystical life in a nutshell, and we all fall incredibly short of it.

Smoley: What specific forces in our society do you see as the most debilitating toward spiritual community?

McColman: I’m only going to speak about the United States. In the last forty years, we have created an economic structure that hoards wealth—toward one tenth of 1 percent of the superwealthy, which has decimated the middle class. It’s a regressive movement, to a culture of a very small percentage of people who control 90-plus percent of the wealth, with the vast majority of people struggling to get by.

The philosopher Josef Pieper wrote a book called Leisure: The Basis of Culture. He doesn’t just mean culture in the sense of entertainment. He means a culture that has the capacity to pray, the capacity to contemplate, the capacity to cultivate one’s interior life.

Right now, most people can’t afford that. Why? Because we have created an economic system that concentrates and hoards wealth. We need to be taking a hard look at why. Why have we collectively created this system—or allowed this system to be created—that pits people against one another through divisions of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, or religion? We have all these narratives whereby the other person is the scapegoat, and we get caught in them. Meanwhile, the people who are making life difficult for all of us are just getting richer and richer.

Smoley: That all strikes me as very true. On the other hand, there also appears to be a natural tendency toward divisiveness in human nature that these forces exploit. Where do you see that coming from?

McColman: The orthodox Christian answer would be original sin, but I’m not comfortable with that theology, so I’ll just put that to the side. Here I stand only on the authority of my own contemplative practice. But I would argue that the heart of what it means to be alive is God playing hide-and-seek with God’s self.

When we hide from who we truly are, we typically make choices that are not skillful—choices that seem to take us away from the essential teaching of love, compassion, and kindness, so we become aggressive towards ourselves and aggressive towards one another. We play games of one-upmanship; we become hypervigilant about status. You don’t have to be very old before you’re playing these games; they happen in the home, with sibling rivalry, and in elementary school. They seem to replicate in bigger and bigger forms as society gets larger: office politics, Wall Street, regular politics.

By the time we reach adulthood, this game of hide-and-seek has pulled in on itself so many times that we often don’t even know we’re doing it. An associate of mine wrote a book called Good White Racist? It’s a compelling title, because I think many people who are the beneficiaries of racial privilege in our culture are not conscious of it. They would actually protest: “Of course I’m not racist. Of course I want an egalitarian society. I want people of color to have the same freedoms and opportunities that Caucasians have.” The game of hide-and-seek is so well played that people aren’t even aware of it.

 I’m sure you’re familiar with René Girard, the French philosopher who argued that the heart of Jesus’s message is that scapegoating is simply not OK: Jesus came to announce the end of scapegoating. But 2,000 years later, we haven’t gotten the memo.

That’s how the game of hide-and-seek manifests: we become aggressive toward one another, because on a deep soul level, we’re aggressive towards ourselves.

Then, of course, there is the more advanced teaching: the recognition that I am my neighbor; my neighbor is me; we are not two.

Smoley: This leads toward a problematic theme, which is love. In the English language, the word love encompasses an enormous range of meanings, from plain old lust to the highest mystical love of Dante. I think many people have a resistance to love simply because they’re confused about what kind of love they’re supposed to feel. Are they supposed to feel romantic love for their neighbor? Some people love their neighbors—or their neighbors’ spouses—a little too much. I think it’d be much easier if people just talked about elementary human decency.

McColman: Yes, kindness, civility, decency, basic candor and honesty, willingness to admit when we made a mistake.

I would say that eros ought to be a higher dimension of love. I think we live in a culture that has debased and commercialized eros. But the Song of Songs and many of the great mystics’ teachings are profoundly erotic. There’s a profound sense of the sacredness of desire.  It’s not about cessation of desire, but about the baptism or transformation of desire.

Then there is compassion, self-giving love, the love of the bodhisattva: I will deny my own enlightenment in order to be of radical service to you as you work out your own enlightenment.

Like it or not, we’re saddled with this one word—love—that is supposed to carry that full spectrum. But even the best language is limited, so we have to be continually stopping and asking, what do we really mean, and how do we embody it? What does this look like on the ground?

We’ve got to create a culture of civility, a culture of decency. We’ve got to have that conversation with our children, and I don’t know that it’s happening right now. I don’t have children or grandchildren, so maybe I’m just missing it. But it seems to me that our culture has become incredibly cynical, and there’s a pervasive idea that nice guys finish last. Where’s this leading? If that’s what we’re teaching our children, what are we creating? What kind of a future are we inviting them into? I don’t know that anyone’s really asking that question.

Smoley: I think there is another element in the current spiritual situation. People go to church for a sense of mystical uplift: we want to be inspired. But often church is just boring. I had a witty but cynical friend in college who used to say that in heaven, you don’t have to go to church, but in hell, you do.

McColman: I think Christianity made a deal with the Apollonian psyche and repressed the Dionysian, which soon became the Devil.

It’s created a bifurcation in our culture, where church is all about being polite and repressed and supernice. Then what do we do on Saturday night? We go to bacchanalian rave parties, where date rapes happen and where people use too much drugs and alcohol, and then they die in car accidents. We have this split: a moralism, which has become desiccated, and the Dionysian, which has become immoral.

I’m not trying to be a prude here. I’m all for having a good time, for being embodied and sexual. Why don’t we have an integration of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, where church could be a little bit sexier, and secular culture could be a little nicer?

Smoley: The Kabbalah says that God planted the yetzer ha-ra, the evil impulse, in the human heart, along with the yetzer ha-tov, the good impulse. No one, I think, could deny that’s the case: good and evil have been planted in us, and it’s never entirely sure which one will prevail at any given moment. Does that make sense to you?

 McColman: It makes perfect sense. It reminds me of the folktale that may come out of the Native American tradition: the idea that we all have two wolves, the wolf of hope and the wolf of fear, the wolf of compassion and the wolf of hatred. You only have enough food to feed one of the wolves, so which one will you feed? Most of us tend to give this wolf a little bit, and that wolf a little bit. I think that’s a healthier model to argue than the idea that Christianity often presents: that God is pure goodness, pure light, and the Devil is pure darkness, and there’s a marketing campaign going on between the two. Are we going to go this way or that way?

If we accept that within each one of us is both the light and the shadow, how, then, do I manage the shadow and get what it’s good at? How do I get the energy, the anger, which can be in the service of justice, and the zest, the lust for life, that makes life worth living? And then balance that with the deep compassion and deep care and concern that can help those who are in need and can create joy and love?

If we just try to repress the shadow, we’re really not much better than those desiccated Christians that we were talking about a few minutes ago. But if we just give into the shadow, we join the pervasive cynicism of our culture. We have to bring in a kind of sacred balance that has boundaries but also recognizes that even the shadow has something to offer. This is the beauty of mysticism at its best, where mystics are not afraid of the dark.

Smoley: Could you talk about Centering Prayer—what it is, what value it has, and how a person might integrate it in their life?

McColman: Centering Prayer has its roots all the way back to the Desert Mothers and Fathers of the third and fourth century. But the the key text is The Cloud of Unknowing, which was written in the 1370s. It is the practice of intentionally cultivating interior silence.

You’ll hear people say it’s about emptying the mind, but I don’t think that’s a skillful way of describing it. Because the reality is that our minds are just like our heart. You slow down your heartbeat, but you don’t eliminate it. Eliminating your heartbeat would be to die.

It’s the same thing with the energetics of consciousness. We can slow down our thinking. We can let go of frenzied thinking and enter into places of profound serenity and profound peace. But the mind is never emptied: there’s always something there, even if it’s just supernal light or that rich darkness.

Centering Prayer is a gesture of consent. It’s a gesture of recognition that for many of us, our mind-heart matrix is unruly. It’s been described as the monkey, or wild horses, or a cocktail party in our hearts and minds that is making lots of noise. It tends to drown out the divine voice, which often comes as a whisper—the still, small voice that we find in 1 Kings.

Centering Prayer is a gesture of nonattachment to the flow of thinking and images and daydreams, letting them come and letting them go, and learning to pay attention to the silence that is between and beneath all of our thoughts, all of our images, our feelings.

You don’t have to empty your mind. The emptiness is already there. Your mind and your heart are chalices of deep silence and of divine light. Can I learn to notice that which is already there, and in noticing it, consent to it—consent to the Spirit?

To go back to the beginning of our conversation, it’s a mystery: all the names ultimately fail, but it is that in us which leads us to the compassion, which leads us into wisdom, which leads us into the Union, which leads us into nonduality. We could even argue that we’re already there, but we’re playing that game of hide-and-seek.

Centering Prayer practice is this mindfulness, the practice of radical consent. Spiritual teacher Cynthia Bourgeault describes it as objectless awareness, and I think that’s a beautiful view: you are cultivating awareness without any particular object.

Now the instructions in Centering Prayer are similar to those for other meditation practices: you use a sacred word. It’s a little different from mantra meditation, because in mantra meditation, you continue to use the sacred word, but in Centering Prayer, there is a willingness to even let the sacred word go and simply rest in the objectless silence. Then another thought or another distracting image comes along, and you get caught up in it. We use the sacred word as a tool to let go of those distractions.

Oftentimes the sacred word will function like a mantra—we keep returning to it—but there’s always the open possibility that it all drops away—the distracting thoughts, the daydreams, even the sacred word—and we are simply resting in that which cannot be named or described, but which is always there.

Finding that conscious awareness is deeply nourishing on a soul level; it feels good. But from my own experience, I would argue that it also allows deep interior transformation to take place. To use Christian language, the Holy Spirit gets to work healing us heart and soul. That’s not to say that the Spirit can’t heal us heart and soul even if we don’t do this practice, but the gesture of consent is like a facilitation.

When people learn about this, they often say, “Oh, that’s just Christian Transcendental Meditation; it’s just Christians borrowing from the East.”

It certainly has affinities to Eastern methods, but the teachings are all out of the Christian tradition, from The Cloud of Unknowing all the way back to the Desert Mothers and Fathers. That’s not to say, it’s Christian, so that makes it better, but for the many people who want a Christian practice, this is a Christian practice that has deep resonance with universal spiritual practices.

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