Homecoming

Lead me from the unreal to the real;

Lead me from darkness to light;

Lead me from death to immortality

– Brihadaranyaka Upanishad

This first week of Extraordinary time which began with the Sunday of the Devoted Heart, and the placing of Hanuman's portrait above the altar should have been called Homecoming week. All this week I have been coming back to songs and ways of praying and checking unhealthy or unexplored or underexplored ways of thinking. We are playing, and praying and striving, striving with more sobriety than ever before, in the big and expansive lands of Hindu and Buddhist practice with all that these entail. 

It makes Judaism feel small and tribal. It more than points out the errors of Christianity. These religions that are not so much about one God as one way of looking at God, the unity of people as the declaration that there is only one people. We can foster both of those paths into something meaningful, spiritual and real and many have, but they are greatly damaged and as long as they depend on institutions to uphold them, will remain greatly damaging. I remember years ago, walking into the Tibetan shop I didn't get to visit this time around when I went back to Evanston. The shopkeeper asked me: You Buddhist?" I said, "Hindu." She said, "Same thing, same thing." Let us not even pause that she did not for a moment look at my skin color and think I must not be what she was. She insisted that as a Hindu I was the same thing as a Buddhist. Years later I told someone whose experience of those religions had been as a very white person on a college campus what the woman said and she was nearly offended. In the West we love differences and we cling to them. She could not understand a part of the world where this was not true, where faithflowed together, where, in fact, there was no word for Hindu or Buddhist, there was just the ways in which you did a thing.

In this time when we need more than ever to be saved from the actual sin of self destruction and self hatred, when we truly are in peril of going mad, it is strange that we still cling to religions run by institutions and stuck in the bad myth of chosenness. Buddhism is the first of what we call "world religions" because it is easy to join if not easy to do. Salvation, transformation, love, awakening were of the essense. There was no time for rituals, bloodlettings, testings, classes, approvals of priests or ministers of any type, assurances of belief in a particular story, being sure of ones allegiances. Though Judaism would never learn that lesson, its successors would at least, learn it in part, but now is the time to learn it fully.

The paganism which emerged as the interesting plaything of middle class white people in the 1960's and '70s had been going through a change, or rather changing back to itself as it is joined by serious writers, thinkers and anthropologists, as, abandoning its first myths its finds its place beside Voudou, Hoodoo, Druidism, shamanism and other magical or animistic practices and philosophies. Recently there is a coming to terms with what one thought was the pure creation of Gerald Gardner in the 1950's being the latest branch of a long esoteric tradition including a highly spiritualized Christianity and Judaism. Often this is called the Western Mystery Tradition, but now, whatever you call it, it is opening up and incorporating the East, What Saint Paul spoke of, no male no female, no Gentile no Jew, at least seemes to be happening though he would gouge his eyes out if he could see how it is happening. And the truth it, it has always been happening, though called gnosticism, witchcraft, heresy, though shut down as soon as it was seen by powerful men of religion. Now that the men of religion no longer have the power to do that, for the first time in seventeen centuries it can begin happening again. Could it be that now we have left the Christian Era, we could, possibly, become Christlike and enter our own spiritual renaissance, a true homecoming?.