Hello and Intro

[Ian]

Hi all,

I live in Sydney, Australia with my wife and 16 month old daughter. I first came across Thomas Moore's ideas a few years ago when a counsellor I was seeing for depression and anxiety recommended Care of the Soul - I had strong reservations about it at first because I couldn't fit it into the science and philosophy I thought had all the answers; I thought the reasons I struggled with life were because there was something wrong with me, not with what I 'knew'.

How things have changed :-) I've been rereading The Soul's Religion recently, and now feel I've started along a more soulful path. Now I see that I'd never understood religion and spirituality before - the relationship to mystery and something bigger, the breaking down of reason and ego, the swelling up of meaning and identity from the depths - I find something that makes me think and see things anew on most pages, which I never found in years of philosophy and science.

[Barque]

Hi Ian,
Thanks for your self introduction and for sharing your interest in Thomas Moore's writings. Wecome to the Barque forum. Integrating our current understanding of science with an openness to mystery, seems to me, a feature of living soulfully. The Soul's Religion is becoming one of my favourite books by Moore. D.

[Ian]

Thanks for your comments. I must admit I know little of American politics,
but one thing I would say is that although it seems openly religious, the religion
in it does not seem spiritual, in the sense Thomas Moore describes.

Anyway, here's my take on this and related matters
(Please forgive the broad brush and generalisations - I'm speculating!):

The war between science and religion intensified last year with the publication of so
many books by atheists claiming to bring science to bear onto the ideas of religion.
It is interesting that at the same time the clash between religions and cultures is becoming
more heated - the increasing popularity of fundamentalist Islam around the world is at odds
with Western culture. The world seems to be becoming more polarised on several different
fronts at the same time - I wonder if this is a coincidence?

It seems to me that what these conflicts have in common are a lack of spirituality on the opposing sides. The Soul's Religion is all about spirituality - I won't even try to summarise its conclusions, but it argues that the point of spirituality is to break the bounds of reason and ego, not in order to get away from the world and suffering and mortality and mystery, but to embrace them more deeply, and in this embrace, which could be called faith, relate to something greater than ourselves and find meaning. According to Moore, today's dominant forms of science and religion lack this kind of spirituality: they claim absolute truth and to have defeated mystery. In general, or at least as argued in the recent atheist books, science despises faith, and the mainstream religions have turned faith into the absence of doubt.

I speculate that in fundamentalist Islam the sacred is an escape from the profane - religion has invaded every aspect of life to its cost (that's why its fanatics will kill themselves for what they believe in). In Western religion, the sacred has given way to the profane, in that its churches are irrelevant to most of the culture, except in their preoccupation with moralising about trivial matters like sexuality. Thus both cultures lack true spirituality: fundamentalist Islam fears the West's abandonment of the sacred, which looks immoral, while the West sees fundamentalist Islam as immoral because it no longer cares about people. Yet if we were all to become more spiritual, perhaps we could talk to each other again.

Of course, it's very hard to say what being 'more spiritual' entails, so its very hard to reach conclusions about politics or interfaith dialogue or science vs religion. Thus it's not clear what use this conclusion is, except perhaps that we all need to think more about our
spirituality and go beyond mainstream science and religion and our cultures, such as through The Soul's Religion. Let me know what you think!

[Ian]

The Soul's Religion would be very helpful to you, because the spirituality it describes seems to me to be of wide application and appeal. I have been an avowed atheist all my life, at times even militantly so (in the sense of scorning religious belief), so it was an initial barrier to my understanding of Moore's books that he is a theist. The Soul's Religion bridges this gap because it helps me see that my atheism can be spiritual, without having to agree with him about a divine will or God or angels, and now my scorn is gone because I can see the good things in religion. The fact that his spirituality also appeals to me, despite my very different starting point, suggests its relevance to many.

I don't think there is anything in this book that specifically addresses how child rearing is shaped by this spirituality, but what it describes is I think so profound (an attitude to life, to self, to suffering, to others) that simply by living it in the family we give children what they need. We all walk such long roads (or should) in finding our feet existentially and spiritually, that I think all we should try to give our children is more than a void but less than the answers, which, after all, we don't know ourselves :-).

[Ian]

That is a fascinating turn of events! I know nothing of Orthodox Christianity, so read a few things on the Net, thinking at first to try to find out what the differences are between it and the Christianity I know. This approach didn't get me very far :-) I know too little about the latter. But to my surprise an unfamiliar feeling came over me. In reading about the Mysteries, hesychasm, fasting, etc, I felt a strong yearning for ritual like this in my life, and suddenly I also saw the depth in ideas that were more familiar, yet had previously had no substance for me, like sacraments and Jewish fast days. It sounds like you've understood all this for a long time, but to me this is a revelation, given I've never 'got' monotheistic ritual before.

Yet I'm also cut off from Christian ritual by my beliefs; I don't believe in any deities. Thomas Moore writes, "We are all believers. The real question has to do with the object of our belief. Is it sufficiently great, infinite, worthy of our absolute endearment?" (p30, TSR) I experience this question as a profound challenge that I can't meet. I can only point vaguely and abstractly at life and the universe, but I remain envious of the concrete acts of relationship to the infinite and the mysterious that are so embedded in the traditions of religions like Orthodox Christianity.

Oh well, so much more road to travel. Perhaps Wicca or Zen :-)

[Ian]

Your point about a dome stayed with me while we were away on holidays. The three of us stayed in caravan parks near coastal estuaries and had the time to watch the ocean surf, sea birds, and sunsets on lakes. The night sky does lead to a sense of insignificance (not a bad thing) and a sunset to feeling special. I had a lot of time for reflection once my wife and daughter had gone to bed; a new space opens up for experiencing the world more deeply when traveling.

I am reminded of the passage in Care of the Soul (p208ff) that describes Jung's tower, which he built as a retreat; surely this was Jung's vision of such a dome. We could, as Moore suggests, create such spaces in our own lives: at home, at work, in our minds.

Yet such approaches (even or especially when traveling!) seem stuck in the personal - they lack the sense of community that established religions offer and that monks enjoy. This is perhaps what our sense of the vagueness of gestures at the universe comes down to; whatever rituals we might engage in are vague because they are not shared.

Maybe this is not a problem for Moore, given that he remains a Catholic, but I'm not sure where that leaves those of us with much weaker or nonexistent religious roots.

[Thomas Moore]

I came across a report in the newspaper the other day about many people becoming unaffiliated from religion. I have been calling myself a deep Catholic, or a Zen Catholic. Now, maybe I should say "unaffiliated Catholic." Not pretty, but close to the reality. I don't have a particular religious community. I see religion as being without borders anyway. So my friends are important to my sense of community. The people I feel close to over the centuries through their books-they are my community. And the world as a whole is my community. That's more than I can handle. I think we need to deliteralize the meaning of community in 21st century religion. Some of us, anyway.

Thomas

[Barbara Babkirk]

I'm in trouble. Amazon.com's 1-click ordering makes it way too easy to satisfy my consistent curiosity about the latest thinking on work and meaning. But, after all, your new book "A Life At Work" was the reason I went to Amazon last week after reading your candid article in this month's Spirituality and Health magazine. As a clinical counselor who has been practicing as a career counselor in Maine for 20 years, I appreciate the way you write about "calling" -- how it can be apparent at one time in a life and obscure in another life phase. With many clients seeking "their passion" or "life purpose", I have come to see the tapestry of their life story as the grail. At the moment when we both recognize the true essence in their story, I experience the deep satisfaction of my own calling as witness and guide. Thank you, Thomas for providing inspiration that fuels my work.

Barbara

[Julianne]

For years I felt a sense of guilt about not being able to commit to a particular group of spiritual devotees. But since I only started becoming aware of spiritual groups after I had already studied various teachings and incorporated them into my life, it seemed impossible to join one group.
I love what you say about connecting to people through their books. And being able to communicate in a forum such as this brings the idea of community to another level.
In an article I was reading recently about the Renaissance Neoplatonists, it spoke about having spiritual ancestors and imaginatively communicating with writers of the past.

[Waking]

maybe I posted my introduction in the wrong section?
I moved it to my own entry...

[Ian]

I must say these ideas of deliteralising community and religion without borders throw me a bit, because that doesn't feel like what I want at all. I seem to belong to that 'some of us'! Please indulge me as I try to sort out how to think about these matters.

The two ideas of deliteralising community and religion without borders seem to together imply that religious community should not primarily be about belonging or identity. I must admit that I had been thinking of my spirituality in this way, as a route to connecting to the world, as a way of filling in a hole I experience as a lack in my life and self. I want to belong somewhere, and belong in that place deeply, and what feels deepest in me is my search for a vision and the ideas that guide me in that search; this search seems to be a spiritual one, so it has been in spirituality that I've looked for community.

But perhaps this is foolish, because asking too much; looking at these words now, wondering about what I want, this approach seems neurotic, in that it looks to gain from others what I need to find for myself. I don't have this sense of belonging in the wider deliteralised community: I feel like an 'adopted child' (to use Laura's apt phrase) in even this broadest context, but I'm realising that the spirituality I have been visualising as the answer to this absence is being overloaded.

What this absence reminds me of is the existentialists' sense of having being 'thrown' into life without roots or inherent nature, which we have to create for ourselves. Thus another way of thinking about this overloading is to see this spiritual vision as ungrounded; as Thomas says, spirituality needs soul. In other words, belonging and community and identity are spiritual goals that need to be grounded in soul. I think I should get out Care of the Soul again to rediscover what this means :-)

[Ian]

Laura, I'm sure you're right that connecting to the stories and events that make us who we are is part of soul-making. Australians have been reluctant to look squarely at our past because our ancestors profited from the dispossession and murder of our land's indigenous peoples and the destruction of their cultures; it is shocking to me that it has taken so long on a national level to begin even the symbolic reconciliation now undertaken, but I know that personally I've made little contribution to this process. Perhaps this is something I can grow towards as my own internal reconciliations progress.

The mistake I made when I first read Care of the Soul was to feel burdened by the wide range of soul-making activities I was learning about; there was soul everywhere that I didn't feel connected to, so I had so much to do! Now I've realised I was missing what I guess is obvious - it is the attitude of care and its expression that matters, much more so than the object of our care.

I've come to the conclusion that my desire for belonging and community was really a desire for people who would tell me that it is OK to be who I am - my struggles with mental illness have turned me inwards rather than out towards the world, and I have felt ashamed in the past when I compared my achievements in the world with those of my peers. But, of course, how I see myself is my responsibility; no one else can do it for me. I actually think this realisation is a big step for me, because I have learnt (largely from Thomas Moore, but also from Yalom's Existential Psychotherapy and Zen) how to love my suffering, humility towards the mysteries within and beyond, etc, so was very ready to hear this. In fact, I now feel that the me on this path to belonging needs less and can give and care more - just what communities are for.