Journalist Barbara Falconer Newhall reports from the the second half of life -- on books, writing . . . her husband, house, aging relatives and grown-up kids.
By Barbara Falconer Newhall
Forgiveness has gotten a lot of ink and air time in recent years.
But what about the other side of the forgiveness equation? What’s the role of the person in need of forgiveness?
Writer, filmmaker and TV host Phil Cousineau went looking for answers to those questions [Read more...]
John Shelby Spong's latest book arrives in bookstores this month.
By Barbara Falconer Newhall
Former Episcopal Bishop of Newark John Shelby Spong says it’s time to ditch the two principle beliefs of Western religion.
The first one, he says, is that God is other, “a supernatural being who can do for me that which I cannot do for myself,” a situation that requires getting and staying on God’s good side.
The second outmoded belief is that human beings are alienated from the sacred and that our alienation requires some kind of atonement — which is another way of saying that we are all guilty as hell.
On these two premises, says Spong, have Western believers placed their dearest hopes for eternal life.
And it’s bunk.
Modernity, science, knowledge and reason have demonstrated once and for all that these premises are flawed, Spong argues in his latest book, Eternal Life: A New Vision – Beyond Religion, Beyond Theism, Beyond Heaven and Hell.
To continue to believe in this sort of religion is to be naively, hopelessly and pathetically stuck in denial. To cease to believe, on the other hand, means accepting that the universe – and we ourselves – are meaningless accidents.
Spong profers a third way, however, one that involves being “fully human.” We are not really separated from God, he asserts. Rather “we are part of what God is and we are at one with all that God is.” We are finite, but we share in infinity. We are mortal, but we share in immortality.
Spong, who turned 78 this year, says that “when I die I will rest my case in the ‘being’ of which I am a part . . . I step beyond words at this point into the wonder of a wordless reality.”
I like Spong’s sense that human beings are “at one with all that God is.” And I can cheerfully recommend this book to readers who don’t accept the idea of a miraculously parting Red Sea, or a Jesus risen bodily from the dead.
But, for me, questions remain: Is God an other, a person with whom we can enter into a relationship? Or are we part of God, each of us an expression of the Infinite? Or something else entirely?
Unlike Spong, I don’t think I have the answers to these questions. I have no certainty regarding God’s otherness vs. God’s me-ness. I’m not at all sure that traditional, God-as-other religion is delusional. Hey, for all we know, there may be an actual God out there creating and loving the Universe even as we speak — even as we debate the fine points of God’s time-and-space-shattering nature.
As Huston Smith repeats often in his recent autobiography, Tales of Wonder, “We are born in mystery, we live in mystery, and we die in mystery.”
Or, as I am wont to say: God is Big.
Eternal Life: A New Vision, by John Shelby Spong, HarperOne, 2009, hardcover $24.99.
© 2009 Barbara Falconer Newhall
Huston Smith c 2009
By Barbara Falconer Newhall
Huston Smith doesn’t know it, but he’s been my mentor for the past decade and a half – ever since I took a job as religion reporter at a local newspaper.
The religion beat has a steep learning curve, I quickly discovered, and Smith’s authoritative book The World’s Religions became my bible. It has remained so all these years.
Studying it, I often find myself trying to read between the lines – who is this man who speaks so fluently of Islam and Judaism, Hinduism and Taoism? What did he personally think of the many disparate religions he studied? Is he still a Christian? Did he ever practice any of the religions he studied?
Now I’m reading Smith’s most recent book, an autobiography, Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, written with Jeffery Paine. And I’m getting some answers.
In a chapter entitled “My Three Other Religions” Smith reveals that he “never met a religion I did not like.” Indeed, he practiced Hinduism unconditionally for ten years, followed by ten years of Buddhism, and ten years of Islam — all this without ever forsaking the Christianity of his missionary parents.
He was not following a checklist, Smith writes. He simply found these wisdom traditions, each in its turn, fitting.
"Tales of Wonder," begins with Smith's boyhood in China as the son of Methodist missionary parents.
And, “the proper response to a major spiritual tradition, if you can truly see it, may be to practice it. With each new religion I entered into, I descended (or ascended?) into hidden layers within myself that, until then, I had not known were even there.”
Now, at 90, and living in an assisted living facility in Berkeley, not far from the house in the hills he shared until recently with Kendra, his wife of 65 years, Smith’s reports that he’s finally found a mantra that suits him. He repeats it under his breath in the bathroom and in the assisted living elevator.
It’s “God, you are so good to me.”
After a lifetime of studying and teaching, investigating and deliberating, how simple it has finally become, he writes. “I have forgotten more about the various religions than I knew in the first place. All that is left of my study of them is . . . me.”
But for me, as Huston Smith’s anonymous mentee, the most wrenching words in this book are in the epilogue. They brought me to tears:
“Soon it will be time to say good-bye,” Smith writes. “Good-bye to you, dear reader . . . Although we never met in person, you were like a friend, the thought of whom spurred me to my best efforts.”
Tales of Wonder: Adventures Chasing the Divine, an autobiography, by Huston Smith with Jeffery Paine, HarperOne, 2009, $25.99.
© 2009 Barbara Falconer Newhall
I go where it takes me . . . Mt. Tamalpais in July. Photo 2009 by B.F. Newhall
By Barbara Falconer Newhall
A reader named Dana asks, “What is GodsBigBlog?”
Good question.
GodsBigBlog is — God’s Big Blog.
I’m a religion writer in the tradition of Huston Smith and the universalists. I’ve interviewed and observed hundreds of people with dozens of different, often conflicting, ideas, spiritual paths and experiences of Holy, and I have come to the conclusion that the Sacred, whatever It is, must be very large. If God is to encompass all those earnest people and all their – to me convincing – experiences of Holy, God must be very big, indeed.
Also, it seems to me that Whatever Is Going On Out/In There is way beyond human understanding, which takes me back to — God Is Big.
Someone else is using the URL God Is Big, so I’ve had to come up with an alternative for my other website on religion and spirituality. I named it GodsBigBlog, which is URL-speak for God Is Big – or God’s Big.
There’s a pun there, and I like it. God’s Big Blog can also mean this is God’s Big Blog.
God’s blog, not mine. I just live there and go where it takes me.
So there you have it.
