A new beginning

The Pharisee took up his position and spoke this prayer to himself, ‘O God, I thank you that I am not like the rest of humanity — greedy, dishonest, adulterous — or even like this tax collector. I fast twice a week, and I pay tithes on my whole income.' (Luke, 18: 11-12)

A few weeks ago I published a post entitled “Abjure” in which I used somewhat hard language to distance myself from much of what I’ve done in the past. After more pondering, and also taking into account the effect of that post on my best friend (and maybe on others), I want to apologies for the language I used there. That post was written in a 'pharisean mode', which undermined any utility or goodness it might have had. I have now removed that post and I’ll try here to explain again, hopefully better, the grain of truth I wanted to share, while also setting up a new project for myself. 

If we take the Bible seriously for a moment, its first page already tells us the most important thing: everything is essentially good, all that exists is there because it is good and in order to manifest some goodness. The origin of this goodness, the Bible teaches, is God and the world is his artwork (his “glory”, which literally means the splendor and light of God's manifestation). 

The next thing that the Bible teaches us is that, since a very early time, human beings have chosen finite goods instead of the fundamental one. They gave precedence to their own desires and sacrificed God’s love for them. This is dramatically called “the original sin”, but more colloquially translated as “egoism”. The rest of the story (of human history indeed) is the very long and tortuous quest for turning back from egoism and rediscover God’s love. 

If one starts from these premises (even if only for the sake of discussion), then it follows that (1) the marks of God’s goodness and love are findable everywhere by everyone, since everything that exists is nothing but a sign that refers back to God; and (2) in the quest for conversion (i.e. the tuning back from oneself towards God), human beings explored different paths through different times and places. Some of them were more complete than others in bringing people back to God. 

This completeness is hard to judge in general and a priori because everybody is different; while one person might need more, the other might need less. But in general (and this is the axiom of Christian Faith) it was Jesus, as the Son of God himself, who disclosed the most complete path to conversion. 

This does not mean that the Gospel (our primary witness concerning the deeds and words of Jesus) should be considered as an encyclopaedia that deals with everything. Jesus taught what was necessary and sufficient for people to come back, but he was not committed to teach everything he knew. I’m pointing this out just to say that some obvious differences between Jesus’ teachings and those of other traditions can also be due to a different focus: if he didn’t think that a certain aspect was necessary for salvation, he would not teach it. 

These short remarks provide a basis for saying that there is a ground of truth in most traditions, culture, teachings and even individual insights that developed prior or independently from the Christian revelation. If everything is created good by the same God it would be weird if this goodness remained completely concealed and unnoticed by most people who did not have access at first to the Biblical revelation (for the official Catholic view on this point, see the Catechism articles 842-848). 

Before my conversion, I have myself endorsed, cultivated and experienced in my own life (and flesh) several teachings that have relatively little to do with Christianity. What I would like to outline now is what I was missing there, which I have now found in Christianity (and in the Catholic faith specifically). 

My “spiritual journey” (for lack of better term) began exactly seven years ago (March 2018) with Buddhism. Through Buddhism I’ve learned the importance of leading a moral life, cultivating attitudes of non-craving, non-aversion, and non-ignorance. I learned how to cultivate my mind and bring it to stillness, I’ve also learned that true happiness originates from within. Moreover, I was convinced that we need to face the inherent uncertainty of life instead of fighting or flying from it, and we should approach our vulnerability with friendliness and compassion. Buddhism also convinced me that egoism is an essential problem to face upfront, and the major obstacle to overcome in order to gain freedom and true contentment.

The limit I encountered in the Buddhist teaching has to do with the fact that, ultimately, it is the individual who needs to free themselves. The community is there, but only for external support. The Buddha freed himself with his own right effort, and his disciples are ultimately invited to do the same. This freedom, moreover, is understood in terms of relinquishment of all personality and hence leads to a state of complete detachment and lack of any preference (“indifference” remains a possible translation for upekkhā). 

However, in the effort of freeing oneself, it is the ego that has to do everything, and that’s why a subtle sense of conceit remains till the very end of the process of awakening. The result can thus be only complete egolessness and depersonalisation (remember this post). For this reason, furthermore, the state of awakening is incompatible with actual love, in which someone feels themselves bound to another. Friendliness is not love, and the Buddha (the ideal, the one who is fully awakened) can be compassionate for everybody but he does not love anybody. This does not mean that Buddhist practitioners do not know love, but it perhaps suggests that they did not yet reach the kind of awakening that the teaching is pointing out and sees fully realized in the Buddha himself. Love requires a sense of self and other to be felt and cultivated. Impersonal love is a square circle. I’ve tasted enough of the Buddhist path to witness that it surely can lead precisely where it aims—in this sense, it surely works. However, at some point I realised that something in me didn’t want to go there. I didn’t want awakening, I wanted love.

The second trajectory I explored had to do with yoga. The older and classical traditions of yoga shares with Buddhism the same ascetic ideal (that's why Buddhism can be considered a form of yoga). Perhaps it is even stronger in asserting that the ultimate state to reach must consist in a form of cessation of all mental activities. Quite soon, I started drifting toward more tantric forms of yoga, characterised by devotion, non-dualism, and love towards God as the supreme goal (remember this post). Reading the Bhagavata Purana and then the works by Sri Aurobindo led me to explore this sense of surrendering towards divine love. 

However, to some extent, also in these traditions devotion remains something experienced as an individual effort. The Bhagavad Gītā presents it as a tool, more accessible than the older forms of yoga, for the individual to reach union with God. Sri Aurobindo, while emphasising much more forcefully the sense of “grace” and “surrender” necessary for liberation, still conceived (and seemingly lived) his yoga as something he was doing to help nature to come to its new evolutionary phase (this perhaps dissipates in his poem Savitri, which however seems also the most deeply inspired by the idea of Christ incarnation, death and resurrection). This aftertaste of “me doing a practice” is less strong, sure, but still present even in tantric forms of yoga. 

(Incidentally: christianity is not a practice (a set of methods or actions one learns and performs), but a faith (a free decision of answering "yes" to Jesus' love), which eventually informs all aspects of life, including actions. In the same way one cannot "practice" love but only feeling and experiencing it, so faith does not ask to follow a method, but to follow a person, or rather sees the person (Jesus) as the path itself.)

Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, I was still missing the sense of a real community.  Of course there are communities of practitioners. But to me these felt like clubs of like-minded people who support each other in their common endeavour. This is nice, but it does not entail that my awakening will directly impact others (other than by means of example and testimony), in the same way in which the awakening of others will not per se make me awakened. The model of awakening remains ultimately based on each individual having to walk their path on their own. Everybody eventually awakens in their own tempo, independently of each other (Sri Aurobindo, and the Mother, did see explicitly the limits of this approach, but again the Christian influence on them is undeniable).

From a Christian point of view, I can now say that I was missing the idea of a “church”, which before being describe as a socio-political organisation is actually the embodiment of a whole “people”, or a “herd” walking together towards a shared destination of freedom (The Kingdom of God). An individual, one-to-one relation to God is not enough. God’s love is not only relational but also collective, it reaches not only each individual calling them by name, but also the whole folk. The command of loving God always go together with the command of loving your fellow humans.

This need for a collective salvation is something I observed as a potential innovation that Spinoza brings in the domain of Yoga (see my last book). It is by meditating on Spinoza’s philosophy that I have refined the experience of the love of God, which I already met through Indian devotion. Spinoza’s philosophy can be an excellent counterbalance for (a) an excessively transcendentalist view of God as an entity totally far away from the world; and (b) as an antidote to exceedingly anthropomorphic images of God (forgetting that Jesus was also human, but the Father remains unknowable as such). 

Paradoxically, Spinoza also shares with the traditions I have just mentioned the same limitations. Like the Buddhist and the Yoga traditions, also for him the project of “salvation” is something that must be realised by each individual. He argues more explicitly that this requires social support, but the experience of salvation per se remains an individual experience. And like the yoga traditions, Spinoza does not envisage  any role for a “church”. If anything, he deconstructs the idea of an “elected folk” and with that the possibility for a collective salvation. 

More importantly, Spinoza firmly believes that reason can reach certainty in knowing the truth. I think that this is seductive, but I’ve to confess (in agreement with most contemporary philosophers and even with scientists) that reason can at best reach plausibility (I came to this conclusion through my engagement with Severino’s philosophy, but this is another story, explained here). If this is so, the whole idea of substituting faith with the geometrical method collapses. Moreover, Spinoza goes so far in his project of rejecting anthropomorphism that he jeopardises the intellectual love that he still describes as ultimate goal. Love requires personality: if God is a thing and not a person, he cannot really love, or that love is not really love. 

Besides all these limitations, there is one more. The day of my conversion I realised that God’s infinite love can be revealed only by God himself as he embraces all the possible negativities and shows that his love is way stronger and broader than them. This is what Jesus does on the Cross: he embraces everything wrong and shows that nothing is so wrong that God cannot love it. In a sense, he shows that evil cannot subvert the fundamental goodness of all that was created. For Spinoza this is absurd because evil is only an inadequate idea and hence God cannot even know evil, much less experience it. But without experiencing evil, the manifestation (the glory) of God as love itself cannot really be fulfilled, because a love that loves only what is nice and ignores the rest is, at best, limited and ultimately not really divine.

Jesus does not teaches this as an idea but demonstrates it by dying and being resurrected—literally (not only metaphorically, like Spinoza believed), because death actually is being cut away from God’s love, and Jesus, being the incarnation of that love, cannot be separated from it. More: Jesus offers us concrete means to share in the same love: his sacraments. More: Jesus announces that this life is the short time in which we are asked whether we want to join or not in that life of love that awaits for us—the Kingdom. 

The Cross and the Kingdom are eschatological truths of faith that I never came across in other traditions. They are a complement and a supplement of salvation not only in the sense of clarifying something that was missing elsewhere. They give to the whole story (our lives, the whole of human history) a radically different meaning. 

Faith doesn’t mean knowing with certainty. Faith is surrendering and trusting. Faith is not unreasonable but also not fully understandable by reason alone. Since my conversion, I didn’t significantly increased the quantity of information I knew. What happened was instead a radically different, profound and embodied affective understanding of my life, and why I am here. This happened with a clarity I never experienced before, not the least because I experienced it as something coming towards me and asking me to enter into a loving relation with Another who had already fully accepted me, despite all the defects and mistakes I may carry with me.

I’m grateful for what I’ve learned through my pilgrimage around the world of spirituality. I see now how each time I embraced only those bits of the truth that I could receive at that moment, and by doing so I gradually grew and walked out of my spiritual ignorance. 

What worked for me might not work for everybody. Faith, especially Christian faith, is also an act of freedom. Jesus’s call is a call for love and love can never be forced. Not only in the sense of being obliged from the outside but also in the sense that there cannot be an indubitable “argument” that would transform faith into a certainty. This is nonsense, because by taking away the freedom of assenting or refusing, such an argument would undermine the love itself that is the object of faith. Hence, it is but to be expected that not everybody will say “yes” (remember, Jesus was crucified after all, not a great sign in terms of convincing everybody).

I still don’t believe that there is but one universal revelation and everything is ultimately the same. Actually, I do not think that this kind of intellectual or spiritual soupification (If you know how to make Italian minestrone you will understand the term) can do any good to anybody. I think this view is pernicious for all parties involved, because if anything, it downplays differences and by so doing it undermines the possibility of genuine dialogue—since dialogue too, like love, requires genuine duality and otherness. 

What I find interesting right now is thus to articulate a twofold reflection: on the one hand, look at what positive elements from other traditions might be helpful to support and shed new light on certain aspects of the Christian faith that for historical or cultural reasons might have been downplayed or interpreted in problematic ways (eg God’s immanence in the world); on the other hand, trying to clarify (from both a Christian and a non-Christian perspective) what is the “extra” that the Gospel announces and why it is relevant also for those involved with other traditions—and even without assuming they should convert to Christianity (eg the need for a collective salvation anticipated by the collective effort of a whole “church”). This, I hope, might be the basis for a fruitful inter-religious and transcultural conversation, from which everyone might benefit.