By Jeff Smith
Whatever you may believe about the evils or good of globalization, this story about the G-8 expanding to the G-20 is, to me, just another example Read the rest of this entry »

Off The Map brings leading thinkers and practitioners to expand your spiritual horizons. Read the rest of this entry »

All of which is to say that the symptoms and causes of the Reformation differ from the symptoms and causes of our recent disconnect more in wrappings than in content, the motto of the former – the priesthood of all believers – being remarkably lkke the motto of ours – I’m spiritual but not religious – which, truth being told, is a bit like saying, “I’m human but not flesh and bones.” – Phyllis Tickle

In her conclusion of Greed, Tickle offers us the dramatic picture that our seminal moment – 9/11 – is very similar to Luther’s hammering on that door in Germany in October in 1517.  It forces us to a kind of turning point or completion.  Tickle writes this:

My suspicion, though, is that the work of transitioning, which is patent in the popular opinions of that thirty-year-old experssion of “I’m spiritual but not religious,” reached a kind of turning point or completion during the months after the bombing of the World Trade Towers.  Insensitive and impolitic as it may seem to say so, the fact still is that 9/11, which was itself both the work and the result of greed, inestimably accelerated the process of popular change into a new way of being; and history, unless I am very, very wrong, will assign 9/11 a specificity of dating much like that struck into our cultural calendar by the blows of Luther’s hammer on the doors of Wittenberg.

As a conclusion, Tickle offers the Seven Deadly Sins painting by Mario Donizetti, who she believes will be our Da Vinci.   At its center is the avarice (or greed) panel.  A panel by the way, that strikes Tickle as “cross[ing] over out of life begun to shrink into herself…to look is to ache.”

Tickle finishes with this flourish:

I spoke in the beginning of the long lens of history as a corrective to too-quick judgment as well as a relief to daunting angst, and for me that is so; for when I look through the last 2,000 years, I see at each turn of the road, each change of perception, each repositioning of attention, that it has been greed and her children who have whipped or frightened or cajoled or tricked us to this place – this place of Donizetti’s where, the smoke of the soul’s battle and the bold colors of deliberated progress having cleared, there is, exposed before us, the numinous spirit, elegant and trembling in its death.

Through the mouth of the prophet Isaiah, the Lord God says: “I am the Lord, and there is none else.  I form light and creat darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things.”

Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; but when Donizetti paints for us, I understand that, though still beyond the reach of all naming, such mystery probably is the next imagination for most of us who have joined one another here in these pages; and I pray God this will be the one that makes us whole.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at Tickle’s book Prayer is a Place.