Awaken to a spirituality that values diversity

Under "Holistic Spirituality" today on the Whole Spectrum Healing Blog, Catherine Campbell writes, "One of the positive things happening in today’s world is a groundswell in grassroots spirituality. A spirituality that is neither competitive nor claiming to be the 'right way': a spirituality that is characterised by an inner experiencing of the sacred and a willingness to do personal transformative work: a spirituality that embraces and values a diversity of paths, whilst honoring the universal." As she considers the role of religion in this opening spirituality, Campbell quotes Thomas Moore’s Dark Nights of the Soul and includes Moore’s suggestion:

"Maybe your dark night is a gestation, a coming into being of a level of existence you have never dreamed of. Maybe your dark night is one big ironical challenge, just the opposite of what it appears to be — not a dying, but a birthing."

Campbell observes, "First thoughts revolve around two commonly misused phrases, 'awakening the spirit' and 'how to be spiritual'. One simply cannot awaken what is a priori; neither can one be anything other than what one already is – Spirit in human form. What we can do is awaken TO Spirit, then act in ways that allow us to BE, as one of my professors was fond of saying, 'alive and awake to being alive and awake,' as good a definition as any of what 'being spiritual' means. Journalist and man of faith Bill Moyers wrote, 'Any journalist worth his or her salt knows the real story today is to define what it means to be spiritual. This is the biggest story — not only of the decade but of the century.' Today, more than ever, the human world requires such an inquiry, burdened as it is with anxieties, fears, violence, and an overall soul-sadness. And the natural world, inseparable from the human, is deeply, loudly pleading with us to move ever more intentionally into this soul work of waking to the Spirit that lives in and behind every thing.”

Corporations sponsor chaplains in the workplace

For The Wall Street Journal, Sue Shellenbarger writes about corporate chaplains,"Praying With the Office Chaplain":

"A growing number of companies are offering the services of chaplains in the workplace. Managers say many employees who wouldn't think of calling a therapist or an employee-assistance program will willingly turn to a chaplain ...

Following the military-chaplain model, these roving spiritual advisers typically visit offices or factories weekly, greeting employees, hanging out in the break room, handing out business cards and meeting one-on-one with workers. But they're also on-call 24/7, so chaplains rush to hospitals, restaurants or homes on request, providing comfort and support free of charge to employees.

They perform weddings or funerals for people who have no one else to do so. And they pray with employees over problems from medical or marital crises to job loss, addiction and financial woes, holding the information in confidence."

She reports, "In another side of spirituality at work, about 15% of employers have set aside space for prayer or religious practices in the workplace, and 9% allow religious groups to meet on-site, says a 2008 survey of 543 employers by the Society for Human Resource Management. Texas Instruments Inc. offers 'serenity rooms' where employees can go to pray and meditate."

Thomas Moore writes about spirituality in the workplace in his book A Life at Work (Broadway Books, 2008).

Groundhog Day replete with religious meaning

"Lessons of the Groundhog", a sermon by Rev. Mark Hayes (Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Centre County at State College, Pennsylvania) explores religious associations with the date February 2, commonly celebrated in North America as Groundhog Day. Hayes describes a number of references and writes, "So February 2 has had religious significance for a long time, throughout both Christian and pre-Christian Pagan history. And believe it or not, there are connections between Groundhog Day and both Imbolc and Candlemas. By Pagan legend, Brigid's snake would emerge on Imbolc, either from her womb or from a mound of earth where it hibernated, and its behavior would indicate the length of the remaining Winter. Doesn’t that sound familiar?"

Hayes quotes Thomas Moore's Original Self and Care of the Soul. Barque initially linked to this sermon in September 2008. It is more relevant today: "The final lesson I’d like to draw from the groundhog this morning comes from taking a metaphorical view of its emergence from the darkness of the underground burrow back into the light of day. Its retreat into its underground shelter from a temporarily inhospitable world could be likened to our occasional retreat from the busyness of our lives into a burrow of solitude, where we might find emotional and spiritual renewal and regeneration."

Recently, Hayes delivered a sermon, "Dark Nights of the Soul", drawing from Moore's book with the same title.

Spiritually open pedagogy contributes to learning

Powell's Books offers a used copy of The Spiritual Side of Writing: Releasing the Learner's Whole Potential, edited by Regina Paxton Foehr and Susan A. Schiller. According to the description, "Foehr and Schiller assert that spiritually open pedagogy is a choice that can reintroduce balance and, at the same time, foster lifelong learning. To them and their contributors, critical thinking and spirituality are not mutually exclusive but mutually intertwined. They view intellectual argument and the interpersonal exchange of ideas as some of the highest forms of spiritual empowerment, capable of filling students with wonder, exhilaration, and an awe for learning. Those interchanges give students a new vision of their own power to understand and create meaning."

The book includes a chapter of interviews, "Writing the Spirit: Interviews with John Bradshaw, Larry Dossey, M.D., and Thomas Moore." Powells includes the full Table of Contents in its description.

The Spiritual Side of Writing
Subtitle: Releasing the Learner's Whole Potential
ISBN-10: 0867094133
ISBN-13: 978-0867094138
Editor: Foehr, Regina Paxton
Editor: Schiller, Susan A.
Publisher: Boynton/Cook Publishers
Location: Portsmouth, NH :
Publication Date: March 1997
Binding: Paperback
Language: English
Illustrations: Yes
Pages: 214

Sheila Packa feels poetry as spiritual practice

In her blog post, "Poetry as Spiritual Practice: Work in Progress", Sheila Packa writes, "Poems are spirit/objects. They are made of sound and breath and truly good poems seem to have life — they bring us an experience, a body experience, and spirit or light." She follows this discussion of poetry as subject/object, with its characteristics of flow/resistence, ambiguity/certainty, and in her final section about vision/revision, she quotes Thomas Moore's Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality (2000):

"The soul has its own set of rules, which are not the same as those of life ... the events of the soul are cyclic and repetitive. Familiar themes come round and round. The past is more important than the future. The living and the dead have equal roles. Emotions and the sense of meaning are paramount. Pleasures are deep, and pain can reach the very foundations of our existence."

Packa follows this quote with Ranier Maria Rilke:

"I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not complete this last one
but I give myself to it."

She concludes, "The four spiritual dynamics, spirit/object, resistance/flow, ambiguity/certainty, and vision/revision, can bring healing. Using these dynamics with your material — that which is given to you — helps you engage in an interaction or exchange. The last dynamic, vision/revision, provides an opportunity to reframe experience, to identify a cultural, historical and even mythic pattern."

Packa ends this post with a bibliography, a thoughtful guide for readers' further explorations.

Apophatic spirituality expressed as via negativa

For Sunday 29 November 2009, Rev. Ken Sawyer of the First Parish in Wayland, Massachusetts, writes a sermon, "Going Apophatic: The Spirituality of Emptying" in which he discusses Urban T. Holmes III’s book, An Analytic History of Christian Spirituality (1980). In the sermon, Sawyer mentions,

"So I was all set to return to apophatic spirituality, and then I went to a convocation of UU ministers a few weeks ago, up in Ottawa. These happen every seven years. The theme of the week was stories, and the keynote speaker, the author Thomas Moore, stressed emptiness stories as part of his focus on the via negativa, the path of negation, which is another traditional Christian term for apophatic spirituality.

Moore is all for it. He thinks the twentieth century was all about acquisition, adding things, and it did not get us where we should go, which is deeper into our own spirituality – and the way to do that is by emptying, especially for people much given to talk (maybe like the 400 UU ministers he was addressing).

Moore offered a quote from the Gospel of Thomas: "The kingdom of God is like a woman who bought a bag of seeds that dropped out of the sack by the time she got home."

Sawyer concludes his sermon with two Zen stories, including, "The nun Chiyono studied for years but was unable to find enlightenment. One moonlight night she was carrying an old pail, filled with water. She was watching the full moon reflected in this water, when the bamboo strip that held the pailstaves broke. The pail fell all apart; the water rushed out; the moon’s reflection disappeared. And Chiyono found enlightenment.
She wrote this verse:
This way and that way
I tried to keep the pail together
Hoping the weak bamboo
Would never break.
Suddenly the bottom fell out:
No more water:
No more moon in the water:
Emptiness in my hand!
[Enlightenment.]"

El zorro9 explores Moore's enchantment of sex

In today's post "The Soul of Sex", blogger el zorro9 summarizes Thomas Moore’s presentation of the topic in The Re-enchantment of Everyday Life (1996).

El writes, "Moore opens with a surprising statement. He said that he could never imagine Jesus or Buddha or Moses or any other great religious figure as asexual or as speaking against sex nor that spiritual dedication, even the taking of a vow of celibacy, as necessarily a statement against sex or as precluding a sexual life. But he was there referring to sex as being "beyond the literal or the biological". To him, the idea that renunciation of intercourse implies a judgment against sex and the presentation of a statue of Jesus without his genitals may be a rather "unnatural" presentation of the importance of the human body as God created it."

After describing New York State's Oneida Community according to Moore, el continues, "Moore suggests that we should seriously consider exploring the possibilities of giving back to sex its magic, its mystery, its values in a socially controlled way so that whilst on the one hand, we may protect the security and sacredness of the vows of marriage and on the other hand relax a little the strict prohibition of extra-marital sex in an organized manner, with proper ritual and suitable forms. To Moore, religious orgies normally take place in the context of a ritual, which to him is a "heightened form of imagination". In a ritual, nothing is to be taken literally. In such a ritual, the human and the divine are engaged in an intercourse, and the fertility sought is not just purely personal. It concerns the welfare of the family and the wider community. To him, sex is not to be understood only as "two individuals expressing their love; the community and the cosmos are involved as well". He thus recommends a "re-enchantment" of sex at a social level so that sex may be released from its current materialistic, biological and behaviorist values and be restored to its "spiritual" level as a form of celebration of the productive and creative union of the body with the spirit.”

Following suggested changes within religious orders, el writes, "I am quite sure if those in authority in the Vatican were to make an effort to free themselves from the shackles of past dogma and encrusted thinking and really think about Life as it is lived and not as it is conceived by their predecessors hundreds of years ago, then only can we begin to have any possibility of hope that our church will once again be a living vibrant faith community which Jesus intended it to be!"

Editor's Note: Typographical and spelling errors are corrected in quoted blog passages.

Reviewer looks at Writing in the Sand for retailers

Anna Jedrziewski reviews Thomas Moore's Writing in the Sand: Jesus & the Soul of the Gospels for New Age Retailer and posts her comments on inannaworks.com. According to Jedrziewski, Moore writes, "The gospels present a vision so radical that people have been intimidated by it. For centuries it has been kept hidden beneath thick layers of moral, theological, and devotional camouflage. This book is an unveiling, a revelation, and a resurrection."

Jedrziewski recommends to retailers that they display Writing in the Sand "with John Dominic Crossan’s Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (Crossan was one of Moore’s teachers) and with Stephan Hoeller’s Jung and the Lost Gospels."

Spirituality and work honour Venusian soul

Julie Register summarizes Thomas Moore’s session for spa professionals, "The Spirituality of Venus" in her report about the 2008 ISPA Conference, held in Las Vegas, Nevada last November. She includes,

"Thomas Moore uses the word archetypal about the notion of the Venusian/Aphroditic as part of life, our sensuality, and our care for things like our hair. In the tradition of Aphrodite and Venus, hair is a wonderful thing. Taking care of our hair is a good and virtuous thing to do. It's a way to be religious or spiritual in the realm of Venus. Taking care of our hair and our body is something we are called to do and we need to do. Materials we use like shampoos, lotions, and anything else we use to care for our body are holy objects in the realm of Venus. They are used in service for this type of spirituality.

Americans do act out some of these things, but we do it with guilt. Or we don't see how our concern for our body and the time we spend in front of a mirror or in the bath is part of our spiritual practice. It goes against the Puritan spirituality (which didn't get that at all). We need to understand that the care of our bodies, the pleasure of our bodies and the taking time for our bodies is part of our spiritual practice. Many depictions of Venus show her at the bath and for her, the bath is a holy thing to do. You take a bath for your body and for your soul as well.

We find the Venus/Aphrodite nature within us in the bath, in front of a mirror, applying ointments and lotions and oils to our body and taking care of our physical life, including sexuality. Our souls need this attention to sensuality and sexuality. If we could be more sensual in life, many of our emotional issues would be helped. If you don't take care of the realm of Venus, you become aggressive and depressed."

Moore’s ISPA talk is available on two CDs for $12 from Mobiletape. Scroll down the linked page to order:
08ISPA-SS01 Working for Body and Soul with Thomas Moore.

For another description of Moore's presentation in Las Vegas, read an earlier Barque post.

Radio interview about dark nights in book

Daphne Michaels promotes her book, Light of Our Times: Conversations with Today’s Leaders in Health and Spirituality, that includes an interview with Thomas Moore about dark nights of the soul.

Michaels writes, "The book is a collection of interviews transcribed from my KLAY radio program The Vibrational Health Show which aired between 2003 and 2005. During this time, I spoke with a number of well-known artists, healers and progressive thinkers, discussing various aspects of the Vibrational Paradigm. Among my honored guests were Ram Dass, Thomas Moore, Julia Cameron, Dr. Masaru Emoto, Victor Sanchez and more."

This softcover book is available for $16.95 U.S. from a Vibrational Health Institute page that also lists the people interviewed in it.

Sermon explores meaning of Groundhog Day

Rev. Mark Hayes introduces his sermon of 3 February 2008 with a passage from Thomas Moore’s Original Self: Living with Paradox and Originality, before exploring religious associations with Groundhog Day. Hayes says,

"In the same book from which I took this morning’s reading, Thomas Moore writes at one point, "The essence of religion is to see the sublime and the awesome in the lowliest of things." In yet another place in the same book, he states that "Beneath the favorite tale of the moment a deeper story always lies waiting to be discovered."

And so this morning we take up the challenge of finding a deeper story beneath one favorite tale of the moment: Groundhog Day. How much lowlier can we go than this little critter that digs around in the dirt and spends a fair part of the year in a burrow underground? We take up the religious challenge of identifying some sublime or awesome aspect of this simple celebration of this humble, lowly creature. But before we explore the origins and history of the celebration of Groundhog Day and seek for its deeper religious implications, I must point out that February 2 already has some explicit religious connections."

Keep this 5-page .pdf file in mind for Tuesday 2 February 2009.

Bloggers mention Moore's writings about sex

Two recent blog posts refer to Thomas Moore’s writings about spirituality and eroticism. Douglas Todd, a columnist with the Vancouver Sun writes "Sex brings Christians closer to God" in which he talks about research exploring erotic spirituality, conducted by Chuck MacKnee. The post also cites research by Rich Heffern:

"...inspired by writers such as Thomas Moore, a former monk who wrote The Soul of Sex, Heffern has come to believe Catholics need to get beyond their guilt and enjoy sexuality for its sacredness; to experience married sex as a form of religious expression.

Heffern's favorite gospel story is of the woman who bathes Jesus' feet with her tears, "wiping them dry with her long sensuous hair. It always knocks me out, reminding me of the intimate Christian connection between sacredness and vulnerable flesh."

Bodies are "thoroughly sacramental," Heffern wrote. He goes so far as to make the connection that people who are uncomfortable with their own bodies, alienated from them, may be destructive to the body of the planet, leading to ecological devastation."

Todd asks MacKnee about the sexuality of Jesus.

"I think Jesus was celibate, but that doesn't mean he wasn't sexual," MacKnee said.

Jesus appeared highly sensual, he said. "People loved him and were in awe of him. I think there was a lot of sexual energy there."

According to Todd, "As in Celtic Christian tradition, MacKnee believes being sensual and sexual creates a "thin zone" between humans and God, reducing the usually thick barrier between this world and the sacred realm."

On another blog, Bill Johnson talks about eros and spirituality, where he says,

"In societal terms there is a tendency to blur distinctions among the various psychic levels of sexual experience. Society is focused almost exclusively on the moral distinctions, which sets all of us up for inner conflict and chronic guilt over our sexual desires, or complete rejection of the moral code we have been fed.

What if instead we endeavored to focus on the rich dynamic of our sexuality from an "inner wisdom" standpoint? This inner wisdom is generally personified by Sophia, the Greek goddess of wisdom, and in the Gnostic Christian tradition, by Mary Magdalene."

Later in his post, he observes,

"Eros, the idea of which comes to us through Greek mythology, is an archetypal, non-physical aspect of our being, a part of our soul, which can only be represented indirectly, and therefore requires a subtle inner awareness and attention. Unfortunately the word "erotic" is greatly misused, applied to a broad variety of sexual stimuli and experiences that are in fact very superficial. It has been co-opted by the culture as a feature of entertainment, which only fans our sexual longings further.

A great book that addresses this aspect of sexuality is Thomas Moore’s The Soul of Sex. In it, Moore goes into great detail as to how and why this level of sexuality is neglected, and compassionately proposes suggestions as to a remedy. His gentle and imaginative approach opened up what was once a locked door for me.

From Moore I learned it is at the level of subtle erotic stirrings that our sexuality starts to find connection to our spirituality..."

Cardiologist explores spirituality of the heart

When asked which five people, living or dead, he'd like to invite to dinner, cardiologist Kirk Laman chose Thomas Moore, Prophet Muhammad, Mohandas Gandhi, Mother Theresa, and his father who died three years ago.

Laman says,"My passion and life's purpose is to help people discover and heal their heart's troubles. I'd like to share the concept of living a mystical life now. This means shifting our focus from the outside to the inside to tap into our heart's deepest wisdom. Our hearts do know. They know what we need to be well on every level. If we can connect with this knowledge then we can begin the healing process."

In the Ann Arbor News today, "Emotions could be key to heart" describes Laman’s work to heal hearts through spiritual means as well as medical methods.

"Having grown up in the Methodist church with a typical Christian upbringing, he'd long been interested in things of the spirit. When he learned about the mystical Rumi tradition of Islam, which includes the healing of the heart, he converted.

Laman, an assistant professor of medicine at Michigan State University, does "heart-opening" exercises 45 minutes every morning, and throughout the day...

Asked which emotions are hardest on the heart, Laman said studies show depression is the most severe, followed by anxiety and stress..."

The article quotes Laman,"Getting people to change is difficult. We live in a world that's focused on the outer. In order to really change, you have to take your focus from the outer and move it to a more inner portion of your heart."

Lamen’s blog offers ways to do this.