PLAYING THE "BELIEVING GAME" IN IRELAND

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From A Spiritual Field Guide -
Meditations for the Outdoors
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One summer - it was 1975, when I was a willfully drifting college student - I visited Ireland for the first time.  I arrived there after two weeks of hitchhiking in Scotland, a country that completely caught me off guard by its beauty and its history.  Ireland was in some ways disappointing; I had imagined it as being more beautiful than it turned out to be.  It took me a while to realize that, while Scotland's majestic scenery amounted to one symphonic crescendo after another, Ireland is better understood as a sweet but unforgettable folk melody.
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Hitchhiking through County Mayo I arrived
 in the little town of Newport.
  Croagh Patrick, a mountain that is a pilgrimage site,
 stands behind the town.

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I decided I needed to stay put for a few days,

so I pitched my tent in an oak-filled campground that overlooked Clew Bay with its 365 islands.
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My days at Clew Bay were both empty and strangely full;

actually, most of my time there consisted of sitting on the shore, walking around the town, visiting the graveyard, and killing time until the evening when it reached a seemly hour to go to a pub and get drunk.  But it was one of those unencumbered spans we rarely get as adults, or even as young people - a time when the deeper soul can at last have a chance to re-tune itself.  And waiting around at Clew Bay is not like waiting in a bus station or hanging around the airport for a delayed flight, not like waiting with your thumb out for a ride.  The area was charged with a harmony and a wholeness that I have never encountered elsewhere.  I'm sure a hundred places in Ireland make better postcards, but it was, nonetheless,
 a beauty-haunted landscape. 

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I've heard people say of the Greek islands that

if you spend a little time there, you realize that
 some sort of god is present. 
 The same thing was going on at Clew Bay.

In the town, a shopkeeper who sold me an apple said that the early Irish monks had a tradition of going island to island, spending a day in prayer on each one for a whole year's time.  The ghosts of those monks hung in the air and in the light.  That Sunday, I went to Mass.  It was tedious; by no stretch could I claim that I was given faith at that point.  But in this seaside village, some impediment to faith was removed; I was able, as Simone Weil says, to play the believing game.

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Because of that experience, I could not be as dismissive

of the faith and tradition into which I had been born.  I am convinced that a sacred geography was at work.  When I crawled out of my little orange pup tent to spend a day looking at the bay, I was stepping near to something supernatural.

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James Silas Rogers

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MODERN LIFE IS GEARED FOR A FLIGHT FROM GOD

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In order to spiritualize our lives and

make them pleasing to God, we must become quiet.

The peace of a soul that is detached from all things and

from itself is the sign that our sacrifice is

truly acceptable to God.

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Bodily agitation agitates the soul.

But we cannot tranquilize our spirit by forcing

a violent immobility upon the flesh and its five senses.

The body must be governed in such a way that it works peacefully, so that its action does not disturb the soul.
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Peace of soul does not, therefore, depend on physical

inactivity.  On the contrary, there are some people

who are perfectly capable of tasting true spiritual

peace in an active life but who would go crazy

if they had to keep themselves still in absolute

solitude and silence for any length of time.
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It is for each one to find out for himself the
kind of work and environment in which he can
best lead a spiritual life.  If it is possible to find such
conditions, and if he is able to take advantage of them,
he should do so.  But what a hopeless thing the
spiritual life would be if it could only be lived under
ideal conditions! 
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Such conditions have never been within the
reach of most men, and were never more inaccessible
than in our modern world.  Everything in modern
city life is calculated to keep man from entering
into himself and thinking about spiritual things.
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Even with the best of intentions a spiritual man finds
himself exhausted and deadened and debased by
the constant noise of machines and loudspeakers,
the dead air and the glaring lights of offices and
shops, the everlasting suggestions of advertising
 and propaganda.
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The whole mechanism of modern life
is geared for a flight from God and from the spirit
into the wilderness of neurosis.  Even our monasteries
are not free from the smell and clatter of our world.
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From NO MAN IS AN ISLAND
by Thomas Merton
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RELIGION IN TIBET

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From THE URANTIA BOOK

Part III, 94, 10
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In Tibet may be found the strangest association

of the Melchizedek teachings combined with Buddhism,

Hinduism, Taoism, and Christianity.

When the Buddhist missionaries entered Tibet, they

encountered a state of primitive savagery very similar

to that which the early Christian missionaries

found among the northern tribes of Europe.

These simple-minded Tibetans would not

wholly give up their ancient magic and charms.

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Examination of the religious ceremonials of

present-day Tibetan rituals reveals an

overgrown brotherhood of priests with shaven

heads who practice an elaborate ritual embracing

bells, chants, incense, processionals, rosaries,

images, charms, pictures, holy water, gorgeous

vestments, and elaborate choirs.

They have rigid dogmas and crystallized creeds,

mystic rites and special fasts.

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Their hierarchy embraces monks, nuns,

abbots, and the Grand Lama. They pray to angels,

saints, a Holy Mother, and the gods. They practice

confessions and believe in purgatory.

Their monasteries are extensive and their

cathedrals magnificent. They keep up an

endless repetition of sacred rituals and believe

that such ceremonials bestow salvation.

Prayers are fastened to a wheel, and with

its turning they believe the petitions

become efficacious.
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 Among no other people of

modern times can be found the observance of

so much from so many religions;

and it is inevitable that such a cumulative liturgy

would become inordinately cumbersome

and intolerably burdensome.

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The Tibetans have something of all the

leading world religions except the simple teachings

of the Jesusonian gospel: sonship with God,

brotherhood with man, and ever-ascending citizenship

in the eternal universe.
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(It should be noted that THE URANTIA BOOK passage

came out in the first half of the 20th century, and

cannot account for the current state of

religious evolution in Tibet.)

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HOW ABOUT THOSE MONKS!?!

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Monasticism was actually an immense and
multifarious series of experiments in alternative
community lifestyles. The monks prayed and
meditated (directed fantasy), sang, read, composed
music, copied and illuminated manuscripts,
studied every classical language and discipline,
developed new agricultural techniques, provided
solace and hospitality, worked, ate, and drank
together in thousands of different communal
patterns. Nor were they wholly "withdrawn" from
the everyday world. They interacted with it at a
hundred different levels. They served, taught,
nursed, prayed for, and contributed to the life
of the commonweal. The different monastic orders
displayed numberless fantasies of how human beings
could live together in love and mutuality.
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The monks understood their relation to the
rest of Christendom within a theological
worldview that seems implausible to us today,
at least on the surface. They were praying for
the people who had less time to pray because
they fought, ruled, or toiled in the fields.
The monks lived out a longing for spiritual
perfection that was hardly possible for all men.
Their communities, in other words, were
contributing in their own distinctive way to
the future everyone in Christendom expected
or at least hoped for, a blissful reward in
heaven after death.
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Though this theology eludes us today,
the monks were really more accurate than
we often think. They were in fact contributing
to the future of the whole civilization, though
not quite in the way they understood.
The seeds of the Renaissance and the Reformation
were cultivated in the monasteries. Luther and
Mendel were both monks. The Benedictines
practiced participatory democracy before it
became a political issue. The idea of a
disciplined work schedule and of work as
service to God began with the monks, and
without it the entire Industrial Revolution
could never have occurred. Max Weber was
right when he said that during the Reformation
"every man became a monk and the whole world
a monastery." Life styles, discipline, and
communal patterns that had been born,
nourished, and refined in small communities
now supplied the pattern for a whole civilization.
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From The Feast of FoolsHarvey Cox
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