Robert Spitzer makes the point, "The heart’s reasons are essential, but without the mind’s reasons, they might seem to be ungrounded idealism that can undermine conviction and openness to God and grace." I've always sensed the anti-intellectual tendencies you get with some spiritual paths can be limiting and defeating. We should want to follow Truth in all things, with every aspect of our being! And that's what I am aiming to do with the blog.
But I suppose where all us heady types veer off, is when the imagination has been repressed. We lose our child-like innocence for possibility in the stories we know.
Take the greatest story every told. I, like many intellectuals, can acknowledge that Jesus did exist. But I was not so open to the idea of seeing him as fully divine, maybe just fully human. And assuming he was some "enlightened" sage, he was no different than the Buddha, Lao Tzu, Sri Ramana Maharshi, etc.
In this latest video installment, Bishop Robert Barron reviews Rodrigo Garcia's film, Last Days in the Desert. While film is not well received for many reasons, Bishop Barron makes a great point that part of the problem is the director made Jesus so boring because it portrays him simply as another spiritual seeker among many.
And I get that this probably plays better to a secular audience who is sophisticated, intelligent, and imaginatively deficient.
But if Jesus was just another spiritual seeker, could he have had the transformative impact in culture that did ensue? And as Barron says, "what you sense on every page of the New Testament is that something happened to the first Christians, something so strange and unexpected and compelling that they wanted to tell the whole world about it."
According to the Church, Jesus is not quasi-divine and quasi-human, but rather completely human and completely divine: meaning he was completely integrated in his human will and God's will. But here's the real interesting thing that Barron brings out that rocks me to my core:
"There is a distinction between the Bible and practically all other spiritualities, religions, and philosophies of the world. Whereas those last three can articulate very well the dynamics of our search for God, the former is not primarily interested in that story. It tells, rather, of God’s search for us. Mind you, that first story is a darned good one, and it’s told over and again in spiritual literature from the Epic of Gilgamesh to Star Wars. It has beguiled the minds of some of the great figures in human history: Homer, Virgil, Cicero, Plato, Spinoza, Kant, Newton, and James Joyce. In a very real sense, the comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell was right: in all of the cultures of the world, one great song is sung and one great monomyth is repeated. But the Bible is not one more iteration of the monomyth. It is the deeply disorienting account of how the creator of the universe hunts us down, finally coming after us personally in Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is not one more man looking for God; he is God in the flesh, searching for his people: It is not you who have chosen me; it is I who have chosen you."Imagine that! It could very well be possible that the greatest story ever told allows us to stop striving for spiritual attainment/wisdom/enlightenment, and surrender to His search for us. Behold the imagination that gets the best of us!