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NOTE: Saturday is Prose & Poetry Day here on the blog, a time to take a moment once a week to relax the mind, open the heart, and access the soul through the gift of prose from one of the many books of The New Spirituality, and through the poetry of m. Claire, author of the forthcoming volume, Come As You Are.
This week’s prose…an excerpt from The New Revelations…
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(Note: In this excerpt, the dialogue approaches the delicate subject of the world’s religions. Nothing here is meant to offend, but only to sponsor and encourage further thought.)

The soul always feels joy, because the soul is joy. The soul always feels love, because the soul is love. The soul always feels connected with the wonder of life, because the soul is the wonder of life, expressed.
In order to feel this always, you have to be out of your mind. You have to get “out of your head” and into your heart.

I thought you were going to say, into your soul.

The heart is the bridge between the mind and the soul. First get out of your mind and into your heart space. From there it is a quick jump into your soul.
When you are in your heart space with another, that is when you can have a real soul talk. When you are in your heart space with yourself, that is when you can experience connecting with your soul at a very deep level. That is when you can experience communion with God.
If you stay in your mind, you will be affected by the constructions of the mind. If the mind is dampened or weakened, the body will function in ways that reflect that. If the mind is uplifted, strengthened, or renewed, the body will function in ways that reflect that.
If the mind is discouraged, diminished, restricted, frustrated, angry, wounded, or agitated, the body will demonstrate that. If the mind is excited, enlarged, unlimited, exuberant, joyful, healed, and peaceful, the body will behave in an entirely different way.

But isn’t that just the way “old time religion” makes people feel? Doesn’t it talk about “the renewing of your mind?” Doesn’t it make people feel excited, enlarged, unlimited, exuberant, joyful, healed, and victorious? Isn’t that precisely its appeal? Isn’t that explicitly its promise?

Indeed. Yet it is a promise your old religions have not been able to keep for humanity as a whole.

Why is that? If religion can make individuals ecstatic, why can’t it heal the world?

Because organized religion as you currently create it is largely an exclusive experience. It is exclusive to the individual or the group experiencing it. You have not found a way to include everyone in the same experience—that is, society as a whole—because you have not found a way for everyone to agree on how the experience should be experienced.
Indeed, you disagree on this question so dramatically that it has caused you to interrupt your own ecstasy to express your disapproval of another for not experiencing the same ecstacy.
You have argued with each other, battled with each other, and killed each other in your anger over this ecstacy.

Why? Why have we done this? And why can’t…

…religions heal this?

Organized religions by their nature exclude as many as they include. This would be non-problematic if religions were tolerant of those they exclude, yet far too often this is not the case.
Religions, which you count on to teach tolerance, have not learned how to practice it, and so, teach just the opposite.

I am so sad about that. And I wouldn’t have believed how serious the problem was—and is, to this very day—if I hadn’t come across evidence with my own eyes. The most recent, and to me a shocking, evidence of exactly what is being discussed here was contained in a newspaper article in the Arizona Republic, originally written and distributed by the Los Angeles Times, on December 1, 2001. I want to reprint that story here, in full, because I want all the world to know just how insidious—and how serious—this problem is. Most people to whom I’ve shown this story are aghast. Their mouths drop.
Here’s the article…
LUTHERAN PASTOR ASSAILED
Joining Interfaith Event Called Heresy
St. Louis – To the Rev. David Benke the ceremony at Yankee Stadium was a blessing, an opportunity to join other religious and civic leaders in offering comfort to a nation raw from the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He joined the celebrities and politicians on stage to sing patriotic songs and to pray.
It was, he thought, his duty as a pastor.
But some fellow clergymen took quite a different view. They saw his participation in an interfaith event as heresy.
Six pastors from the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod filed formal charges last week calling for Benke’s expulsion from the church.
Others have petitioned to oust church president Gerald Kieschnick for condoning Benke’s participation in the event and himself for praying with chaplains from other Lutheran denominations after a tour of the World Trade Center wreckage in October.
Benke “participated in idolatry by participating with non-Christians” at the Sept. 23 service, one of the dissidents, the Rev. David Oberdieck, told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Oberdieck would not comment further Friday, saying the dispute was a “family matter” that should not be aired in the “secular media.” But he stood by his interpretation of Benke as an idol worshiper.
He and other clergy also accused Benke of “syncretism,” which means promoting the view that all religions are equal. The 10-page petition against Benke called his participation in the New York ceremony “an egregious offense against the love of Christ” that gave “the impression that the Christian faith is just one among many by which people may pray to God.”
According to these critics, by standing alongside “heretics” such as Muslims, Jews, Hindus and Christians of other denominations, Benke implicitly endorsed their faiths, giving the impression that all offer an equal path to salvation.
Church leaders hold that they must not pray in public with anyone from another faith, even Lutherans of other denominations. They believe in worshiping only with those who interpret the Scriptures and understand God in precisely the same way they do.
“We can’t go to the communion rail with someone who thinks of communion in a completely different way,” explained the Rev. David Strand, a spokesman for the church, which is based in suburban St. Louis.
The nation’s largest Protestant denomination, the 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention, hews to a similar tradition. “I do not have an ecumenical bone in my body,” the Rev. Paige Patterson, a former president of the church, has often said. And indeed, many Southern Baptist clergy made a point of staying away from interfaith services after the Sept. 11 attacks.
Yet Benke and Kieschnick insist that the Yankee Stadium ceremony was not a formal worship service and thus was not off-limits to Missouri Synod members.
They viewed it as a secular event, organized by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and hosted by actor James Earl Jones, that included some prayer.
When it was Benke’s turn at the microphone, he recited a brief prayer that opened and closed with references to Christ. Although he stood in respectful silence while other religious leaders spoke, his supporters insist he was not worshipping with them. Nor was he assenting to their views.
“To suggest that when the imam was praying to Allah, Dr. Benke was praying right alongside…it’s an insult to even imply that was what he was doing,” Strand said.
As for Kieschnick’s impromptu prayer session with chaplains from other denominations, Stand said the same justification applied.
Now I read that story and I think to myself, I guess I must just be naïve. I mean, I thought I was a pretty savvy guy who knew what was going on in the world, but I’m seeing here that I have no idea of what’s happening around me.
That story shocked me. I was shocked and saddened and sick at heart when I first read it. I just had no idea…I thought that I had to look elsewhere in the world to find that level of hysterical, radical religious intolerance.

It is time you acknowledged a human truth at which no one wants to look.
One of the biggest problems in the world today is organized religion.
Organized religions are a problem.
They are not a solution, they are a problem.
Not all religions, but most. And certainly, most of the largest.
What you have in the case of most of your largest and most influential organized religions is the blind leading the blind.

Really. I mean, here is a nation in the midst of incredible grief, searching for spiritual support in a moment of need, seeking to experience its unity and oneness at a time of turmoil, only to have its own religions letting it down.
Here are a people wanting only to link arms and walk in-step, each person appealing to the God of his or her understanding, each person knowing that healing begins with the expression of tolerance for every other person’s understanding, only to find that organized religion forbids it.
Religions forbid tolerance. Can you imagine? Baptists refusing to pray with Jews or Catholics. Lutherans refusing to pray with other Lutherans. As if there was a wrong time, or a wrong place, or a wrong person with whom to pray.
Is it any wonder that human beings around the world are asking, “What’s wrong with this picture?” Is it any wonder that bumper stickers and billboards have begun to appear saying, GOD, SAVE ME FROM YOUR PEOPLE? Who in the world wants to believe in a God who is less charitable and less tolerant than they are?
How can we ask the world to heal itself when organized religion—the very institution which was meant to provide that healing—does nothing but inflict more and more damage, open wider and wider the wound, spread further and further its righteous indignation, its non-acceptance, its utter distain, its total intolerance?

Yet how can you blame religion if religions believe in a God who does exactly the same thing?
It is your understanding of God that is the main problem.
I will say again, so that you cannot miss it…the problem confronting humanity today is spiritual.
You do not understand who you are. You do not understand who God is. You do not understand how the world works. You do not understand that love is the basis of all of life, nor can you comprehend a love that is unconditional.
You imagine that God is a small, petty, jealous deity who says to people bowed in prayer, “Sorry, it’s my way or the highway. Your prayer I hear. Your prayer I don’t, because you didn’t do it right. You did not please me.” In this you turn me into a replica of the worst of humanity.
You claim that you are striving to be God-like in your lives…and if this is the God you are striving to be like, you have succeeded brilliantly.

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This week’s gift of poetry
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What I couldn’t say was…
Beloved, will you be here
in this world with me
long?
What I didn’t say was…
Beloved, where have you
been?
What I didn’t do
was rise,
draw the curtains,
and
take the cup from your hand.
With God watching,
I should have shown
how Humans
can
Love.
I should have
taken your upper lip and
caressed it with the warmth of my tongue,
run a fingertip, along your lower lip,
and had you taste me.
I should have found
your breath
and remembered it.
I should have placed myself
into the nape of you,
to know your scent.
I should have undone one by one
each of the buttons on your shirt,
and brushed my lips over every place
any clothing had just been.
And
with God watching
I should have taken you –
rigid, pulsing,
to hear you cry out
every last word that
I didn’t say
to
You
My Beloved.
(I Didn’t Say – m. claire – copyright 2007 – all rights reserved)
For more of the work of this new poetic voice you are invited to www.mclairepoet.com.