close

Interfaith Lecture Recaps

Amy Edelstein details evolutionary calling of connection for new capacities to emerge

071222_Amy Edelstein_SS_01

When humans deeply meditate, they may find themselves connecting with the smallest of atoms to the enormous expansiveness of the universe within one singular breath. Amy Edelstein believes the power of interconnectedness has the potential to open new pathways of receiving a message of higher power. 

Edelstein, founder and executive director of Inner Strength Education, closed Week Four’s Interfaith Lecture Series theme, “The Future of Being,” on Friday, July 22, in the Hall of Philosophy with her lecture, “Wholeness, Fragmentation and the Mystery of the Emergent Possible.”

Inner Strength Education is a nonprofit organization that supports youth development through an innovative, social-emotional learning system. The award-winning organization has empowered over 17,000 inner city Philadelphia high school students since 2014.  

Edelstein has more than 40 years experience with contemplative practices, and is the author of six books.

To handle the conundrum of the contemporary world and embrace the message of her lecture, Edelstein encouraged listeners to be open to new ideas. 

“Keep your minds open, keep your hearts open and know that my relationship to philosophical exploration is grounded in a deep sense that we really need to do something for our world,” Edelstein said. “We want to make change from a ground of wholeness, not from the same ground of fragmentation that we’re so frustrated by much of the time.”

During her childhood, her father, an experimentalist, impacted her view of interconnectedness.

“The thing that really got me was that he described how all of us and everything is made up of the exact same building blocks. We’re not different,” Edelstein said. “… In addition to that, we’re more space than substance and … that space, although it appears to be empty, seems to create an attractive gathering field.”

At 6 years old, Edelstein wondered how so much separation was created out of sameness. She made it her life’s purpose to evolve humans’ unconsciousness in hopes of making a better world. 

Edelstein felt a calling to work with public school students, as she is the product of a Pittsburgh public school education. She started her journey of meditation in the ’70s, during her high school years.

“I really started searching for wholeness, and I started really trying to penetrate what it is in our own experience that can help us access that sense of this numinousness,” Edelstein said.

The divine being of God, as Edelstein described, is limitless, complete and perfect. These traits harmonize with one another to pull humans into a higher order, “even though we’re in the midst of perfection itself.”

Due to the divide of humanity, these harmonies between people and the divine become fragmented.

“When you work, like I do, in inner city schools, you come at the intersection of almost every social issue there is. You come at problems of … economic disparity and how climate change affects neighborhoods. … You experience the impact of gun violence, which we have lost students in our school (to),” Edelstein said. “… Fragmentation and the violence of separation is very real. It affects our consciousness. It affects our optimism. It affects our sense of possibility.”

When Edelstein finds herself intimately dealing with these issues through her work, she tries to dig deeper into the realm of wholeness, understanding and connection. Despite humans’ ability to only see two dimensions in a three-dimensional world, Edelstein calls for meditation, contemplation and reflection to help humans loosen their perception of these fabrics. 

As a co-founder of a meditation community that existed for 27 years, Edelstein said her community “really tried to create a container where you could let go into this profound exploration.”

This current era of human existence, in Edelstein’s opinion, is focused on division in more ways than one.

“That’s what we do in our culture: we divide up. … We’re deconstructing, we’re looking for faults,” Edelstein said. “We’re trained in college to look for flaws. We should be trained to look for wholeness, because that’s the largest container from which we can discern the different parts.” 

Leading the audience into a moment of self-reflection and meditation, Edelstein asked everyone to close their eyes and think of a time they experienced wholeness or a sense of balanced continuum. 

“Allow yourself to remember,” Edelstein said. “See if you can notice whether that remembering is in the past, or if it feels like it’s in the present.” 

Once audience members were told to open their eyes, Edelstein asked if they felt a difference in the smell of the air or if the sun’s light felt a bit softer. 

“This realization of wholeness brings us back to ourselves,” Edelstein said. “It’s a sense that I never knew this before, and I’ve always known it. This is so familiar. I can’t imagine not knowing it, but an hour ago, it seemed so far from me.”

In her 20s, Edelstein lived in India for four years, spending 12 months of that time walking through the Himalayas, with no contact to the outside world. She went there to see if she was called to live a homeless life.

“It was extraordinary; it changed my life. … I do feel it’s important for great mystics to continue to do their solitary practice,” Edelstein said. “… But for most of us, we have to engage in the world. We have to be in the world, but not of it. We have to find a way to embody that wholeness we were just experiencing.”

Ways of knowing higher orders have evolved throughout time, and Edelstein said humans now are on a journey to discover a way that has never existed. Pointing to Aboriginal dreamtime, which describes Aboriginal beliefs and dates back 65,000 years, Edelstein discussed the lost ability of being able to view a period of time on a continuum of past, present and future.

“We have to evolve new capacities from our order of complexity and fragmentation,” Edelstein said. “We have to find that wholeness from where we are now in a different order, and whatever is going to reveal itself is going to be something that hasn’t happened before.”

To garner this ability to see and know a new higher order, Edelstein calls for humans to embrace the uncomfortable reality they are in. From issues of mass refugee displacement, climate change, systematic injustice and species extinction, she encouraged the audience to broaden their perspectives and be open to viewing these catastrophes from a larger context. 

“When I talk about expanding context, we’re talking about taking a step back and enlarging the aperture,” Edelstein said. “… We have to do this in a very openhanded, openhearted way, where we’re open to reality, but we’re open to the numinous.”

Edelstein believes once humans can start sensing their interconnectedness to each other, the Earth, the multidimensional reality and the higher order, answers will be found; possibilities and pathways will become apparent within one’s openness. She believes evolution is calling for this moment.

“What we are doing, how we are seeing the world, how we interpret it, what we believe is possible … really matters. … Our very way of perceiving and knowing … (and) influencing that ground of being itself (can cause) new potentials and capacities (to) emerge,” Edelstein said. “If we come out of this with the urgency of our times, and the real sense of the weight on our shoulders, the gravitas of the movement, then … intuiting from that collective sense may be what helps reveal that portal for punctuated evolution to take place … so we can find a solution to the problems that seem too far gone.”

Drawing from Indigenous practices of love, forgiveness, Diane Schenandoah offers hope in looking to future of being

072122_DianeSchenandoah_GP_01

Word-of-mouth history is the glue that binds one generation to the next in Indigenous cultures. These oral stories hold important records and lessons that were once only held in the minds of elders. They’re shared through the art of storytelling, but they will be lost if people are not willing to listen.

Diane Schenandoah, an artist and Faithkeeper in the Oneida Nation of the Wolf Clan of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, spoke on Indigenous history during her lecture, “Our Journey of Being,” on Thursday, July 21, in the Hall of Philosophy as part of Week Four’s Interfaith Lecture Series theme “The Future of Being.”

Working over 30 years as a sculptor of clay and stone, Schenandoah is also a professional singer and writer. Her works, which are all rooted in her Indigenous culture, have won numerous awards and have been featured in galleries across America. She also serves as Syracuse University’s first-ever Honwadiyenawa’sek, which means “the one who helps them.” 

In this role, Schenandoah shares her intuitive energy with the college community through holistic wellness programs, which include teachings of energy work, art therapy, tuning forks and self-empowerment.

Georgia Pressley / staff photographer Diane Schenandoah, an artist, Faithkeeper and the first-ever Honwadiyenawa’sek at Syracuse University, delivers her lecture on “Our Journey of Being” Thursday in the Hall of Philosophy.

“In my role as a Faithkeeper, it is my duty to share our teachings, and it is said that one day, our people will hear the messages of peace,” Schenandoah said. “… I want to share with you our history and our beginnings.”

Because Indigenous histories are passed down orally, there are several versions of these stories. Schenandoah, however, told the version that resonates with her the most.

In the Oneida Nation, it is believed that humans were born from the stars and evolved from starbeings. She told the story of the first woman on Turtle Island, a term some Indigenous people use to describe North America in reference to an Indigenous creation story. 

“(The woman) came here, a sky woman, and gave birth to a female, and that was the beginning of our time here on this Earth,” Schenandoah said. “And as the Earth grew, our creator gave us certain instructions to live by.”

These instructions were simple: Love and care for one another and Mother Earth. 

“As time went on, of course, the human ego began to get in the way — control issues, different types of issues, as human beings will — and we began to forget our original instructions,” Schenandoah said.

Prior to the formation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca nations had been plagued by violence against each other. Schenandoah described this dark time as “a great tug-of-war (of) killing and destruction.”

During this tumultuous era, there was an evil Onondaga chief by the name of Tadodaho. 

“They say that (Tadodaho) tied snakes in his hair to scare people, to frighten them,” Schenandoah said. “And he killed … seven of (Hiawatha’s) daughters.”

Hiawatha was said to have spoken of peace at the end of war, spurring Tadodaho into so much anger that he killed his family. 

“They said that Hiawatha was so grieved, so heartsick, he couldn’t function,” Schenandoah said. “… One day, he decided he just couldn’t take it anymore and … they say that he threw himself into this lake. And as he threw himself into this lake, they say that the geese came and lifted the water so he would be unable to drown himself.”

As Hiawatha was lifted, a purple quahog shell was revealed, which would later be used to create peace, or wampum, belts. The purple beads on the belts represent the bruising on the nations caused during the time of destruction, according to Schenandoah. 

Hiawatha began stringing the beads together, to comfort himself and bring a sense of peace. With the beads he collected, he organized a healing ceremony in which he connected to nature and his inner emotions. Along with the beads, five symbols were collected to represent each nation, from an eagle feather ridding the dust of death, to deerskin wiping the tears from one’s eyes. The belts provided a path to move forward, toward forgiveness and peace.

When Hiawatha shared his message with a peacemaker, they traveled from nation to nation, telling everyone their message.

Georgia Pressley / staff photographer Schenandoah’s talk emphasized the roles humans have in being caretakers of their communities and nature.

“Each nation accepted these messages of peace,” Schenandoah said. “… So as a collective, they all decided to go back to Onondaga, to Tadodaho, and they approached him singing songs of love, telling him they forgave him for the evil acts. They wanted to wipe the tears from his eyes, take his grieving.”

When Tadodaho accepted their message of peace and love, it is said the heavenly body of the moon covered the sun, causing an eclipse. The clan mothers then began combing the snakes out of Tadodaho’s hair.

“This was the beginning of the formation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy,” Schenandoah said. “This is part of our great law, that we accept these principles under the messages of peace through forgiveness.”

Schenandoah shared that Europeans, in forming the U.S. government, used many of the tactics Indigenous peoples used to form the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. But Schenandoah said the Europeans forgot one key element: the role of women.

Women hold a sacred role in Indigenous life and leadership, as they are seen as the creators and sustainers of life; women today still hold leadership roles in nations and clans. 

Europeans originally came to North America to escape taxation and religious oppression. Yet there is now taxation, and Schenandoah said Indigenous people were never recognized as human because they were not Christian; they did not have rights to their own land in the Doctrine of Discovery, which stated that Christians had the right to claim any land not inhabited by other Christians. 

“The Oneida sided with the Americans in the Revolutionary War. We were guaranteed our homelands because of that act. We were guaranteed 5.5 million acres down through central New York. Guess where I grew up? The 32 acres that were left to our Oneida people,” Schenandoah said. “You can see the imbalances, the attempted erasures, the attempted genocide of the history of the Haudenosaunee people. We are still here because our teachers, our prophecies tell us that someday, all people will hear messages of peace.”

Rather than being filled with bitterness or negative energy over the injustices done to them, Indigenous people embody Hiawatha’s story of forgiveness, resilience and love.

“We are here to enjoy all of the beauty that our creator has given to us,” Schenandoah said. “Nobody reminds the birds to start singing in the morning, right? … We are reminded of these things of nature. Nature is not our resource. Nature is our relative.”

Practicing gratitude for one’s surroundings is a source of love, according to Schenandoah. She asked the audience when they had last thanked their hands for writing and holding, their feet for walking, or Mother Earth for the bountiful gifts that sustain life. She describes these teachings as simple, but very important.

“When we look around the world and see the fires, the wars going on, the senseless wars going on driven by ego, driven by greed, we have to stop and think,” Schenandoah said. “What kind of energy are we spreading out there? What kind of energy are we doing? What types of energies are we drawing towards ourselves?”

Citing an experiment performed by Masaru Emoto, Schenandoah described the power of words and energy. Emoto’s experiment was based on the impact of thoughts, words and energy on the molecular structure of water. He spoke positive praises to some glasses of water, while at others he directed horrible insults. 

When looking under a microscope, he found a stark difference between the positively and negatively treated water. The positively treated water showed beautiful, symmetrical patterns, while the negatively treated water showed fragmented and chaotic crystals.

“We share energy; we share this planet. I’m sure many of you have heard similar thoughts before, but we need to remember that we are part of all of this,” Schenandoah said. “… We need to forgive ourselves.”

With the belief that everyone has a purpose and a given path, Schenandoah said it is up to each individual to find out where their value lies. She advises people to draw from nature when they are struggling to find their path. 

“We can take those heavy feelings, when we are distraught, concerned, worried. We can go to these trees. And those trees will help us move the energy,” Schenandoah said. “Same with water, same with creeks and rivers.”

With the ongoing issues of global warming, many people feel hopeless for the future. But Schenandoah has faith in people and Mother Earth to restore each other.

“If you look at the Earth’s warming, global warming, these (natural) elements are there,” Schenandoah said. “And it is up to us to pay attention as human beings because … Mother Earth is going to shake and shout, maybe shake us beings off of her and start over again. But it is up to us as human beings now, as a collective.”

Schenandoah feels spreading awareness of the importance of gratitude, love for the Earth, and the past can help people understand how to change the future.

“When you hear of the Doctrine of Discovery, (when) you hear Indigenous people talk about land rights, don’t cringe and say, ‘Don’t tell me that,’ because you are standing on this land either by treaty, or it was stolen. And that is just a fact,” Schenandoah said. “I tell you these things not to cause angst, but for you to recognize and understand the simple ways of life that there are, and that we need to be with each other as human beings.”

Indigenous boarding schools operated in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries caused wide ranges of horrific abuse and even death. It is estimated over 500 of these institutions were spread across the United States and Canada. This is another issue that depends on awareness and listening for healing to take place.

“We cannot forgive without love. So even the boarding schools where over 10,000 (sets of child remains) have been found already — it is a horrible story, but a true story,” Schenandoah said, “… this is where you come through with awareness, come through with acknowledgment, come through with forgiving, because there needs to be healing, there needs to be healing upon our Earth. … We can do that when we have love and forgiveness.”

Spirituality, the New Age: Rabbi Shaul Magid speaks on importance of religious criticism

072022_ShaulMagid_JH_03

America may be entering a new phase of change in religious and spiritual values.

Rabbi Shaul Magid spoke on this forthcoming transition by explaining the relationship between culture, religion and spirituality, in relation to the New Age, Wednesday, July 21, in the Hall of Philosophy. 

With his lecture, titled “Can Religion Survive Spirituality? A View from Jewish Mysticism After the New Age,” Magid continued the discussion of Week Four’s Interfaith Lecture Series theme, “The Future of Being.” He detailed the past to better express what may come to fruition in the future.

Magid, the Distinguished Fellow of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College and senior research fellow of Kagod Research Center at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America, is considered an expert in Kabbalah, Hasidism and contemporary Jewish religiosity. 

Beginning his lecture by outlining the differences between culture, religion and spirituality, Magid said these terms are often used interchangeably without understanding what each truly means. Yet, Magid said, culture, religion and spirituality are inherently linked. 

“Religion is often the backbone of these cultures, and political theorists have argued that culture is itself often derivative of religion, often in secularized forms,” Magid said. “What separates religion from culture is that religion, at least the Western religions, … founded its principles on or around a divine being.”

Culture often contributes to the quality of life, but Magid said it doesn’t necessarily provide people with a purpose. 

“In some broad sense, religion is culture infused with a sense of spirituality,” Magid said. “… Spirituality is a product of religion, but spirituality is also sometimes opposed to religion, or at least challenges religious premises in its immanent critique of religious claims.”

Religious traditions often claim that one can only reach God through particular practices, while spirituality counters with the belief that God can be accessed through a variety of means. 

“Culture can be informed by religion and even contain spiritual elements, but it doesn’t have to,” Magid said. “… Culture is based on the past, but it’s not bound to it; it changes organically.”

Tradition plays such a prominent role in religion due to its connection to the past, and Magid said that culture does not necessarily carry the same burden. 

“Sometimes culture seems to conserve the past for progress, which includes negatively, but its rootedness in the past is often more ambiguous,” Magid said. “This is why, for example, certain cultural movements of conservation or conservatism often deploy religious categories to anchor their views in a more authoritative past.”

Recognizing religion’s inability to adapt and change, Magid noted the dangerous effects of religious stagnation. He also noted the issues that come with criticism. 

“The danger of religious inability to engage in self-critique, in some cases, resulted in fundamentalism,” Magid said. “… And when the critique of religion is too strong, it can result in the demonization of the role of religion, often viewing religion as the problem that plagues our society.”

While the separation of church and state is a tenet of American democracy, religion has always, to some degree, been intertwined with politics. 

“America was the great experiment, drawing from the European Enlightenment of trying to separate religion from the political — initially, to save religion from the political,” Magid said. “… ‘Can democracy survive theocracy?’ is a question the Founding Fathers answered with a definitive ‘no,’ which is why religion had to be controlled.”

The opposite can also be argued — some believe America could not survive without religion or culture, and this paradox puts everyone in a difficult position, according to Magid. He suggested that even though this plight creates tension, it is also the motivator for society to continue to evolve productively.

Magid quoted President Dwight D. Eisenhower:

“Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.”

Although it is not exceedingly clear what Eisenhower meant, Magid said he interpreted it as a calling to citizens to believe in a higher purpose. 

“The ’50s also, as some of you will remember, saw a rise in scientism, in atheism, in the belief that the power of humanity (will) move beyond the need for God,” Magid said. “That may have been what Eisenhower was responding to.”

Reflecting on the New Age movement of the 1970s, which is also called the Age of Aquarius, Magid said this cultural and spiritual shift still impacts society.

“(The New Age movement) yielded a look upward, and perhaps, more accurately, a look inward,” he said. “The Age of Aquarius — seismic, cosmic change, a new axial era, a paradigm shift, a spiritual critique of capitalism, the beginning of environmentalism — … filled the vacuum created by the demise of political radicalism.” 

The result of this movement was a new interest in religion; Magid described it as “a new refraction of religion through a spiritual critique” of the patriarchy and formalism. 

“While in some way the New Age made religion more popular, it also forced religion to conform to a new paradigm of spiritual awakening,” Magid said. 

The New Age also introduced the idea of a global perspective and universal accessibility to religion. 

“Religious traditions could participate in the New Age project, but one of the criteria was to envision access to divine power as equal to all, regardless of collective affiliation,” Magid said. “Fidelity to religious norms could survive if they were envisioned as serving the larger cause of human flourishing and global solidarity.”

Even though the New Age was not a political movement, it spread ideas of environmentalism and human rights with a criticism of materialism and consumerism. Mysticism was an impactful vehicle of both critique and openness. 

“Mysticism can function in one of two opposite ways. The mystical frame can universalize from an experience, making the mystic aware of the broader frame of any religious tradition,” Magid said. “… Alternatively, mysticism can serve to centralize religious claims, thereby deepening particularism. … In this iteration, mysticism hardens difference and works against the New Age goals of creating more avenues of shared spiritual life and different peoples.”

From the New Age, new spiritual movements were set in motion, while older religious traditions became more distinguished, enabling more fundamentalist beliefs. 

“So to finally address the title of my talk, can religion survive spirituality in 21st-century America? Of course, I don’t really have an answer,” Magid said. “… But I think it’s safe to say that we are living in the afterglow of the New Age and no longer in its midst.”

While utopian ideas of the Aquarian Age did not reach fruition, Magid said the movement’s so-called failure was still influential, resulting in changed perspectives. But the world in 2022 is much different than it was in the ’50s or even the ’70s.

“We have been smothered by technology through the internet and artificial intelligence, which have maximized communication, but hindered human interaction. But we also see ourselves in a more globalized perspective,” Magid said. “In short, we are moving in many directions at once; massive wealth skyrockets, while abject poverty continues; weapons of mass destruction proliferating, and people are being killed in the street with knives and guns as if we’re living in the wild west of the 19th century, or some kind of dystopian science fiction film.”

Magid said religion has the potential to play a constructive role in solving these problems due to its thousands-of-years-long existence and ability to survive attacks. But he also recognized religion’s inherent ability to separate humans from one another, viewing “humanity hierarchically rather than horizontally.”

Yet, religion is powerfully interwoven into culture, so much so that Magid believes it will not disappear. 

“Science is crucial in many ways. But science doesn’t produce culture. … Science tells us how to live, but it doesn’t really tell us why,” Magid said. “I suggest we’re presently living on the back edge of a sweeping critique of religion in the New Age movement.”

While the New Age left behind a cultural critique of consumerism and religious fundamentalism, Magid suggests that the return to religious particularity must be fought with cooperation, peacemaking and inner criticism. 

“Perhaps religion is best served when its internal critique remains operational, when spirituality embedded in religion pushes against religion’s own darker impulses to divide and claim ownership of the divine,” Magid said. “The question then isn’t ‘Can religion survive spirituality?’ but (rather) ‘Can spirituality save religion from itself?’ ”

While America continues to face a divide as a result of the same issues that it has faced for centuries — race, religion, culture, gender — Magid hypothesized that people are perhaps becoming primed for another spiritual intervention.

“The stakes may be higher now than they were in the 1970s. The Earth is more precarious than it was 50 years ago, guns are more readily available, religious maximalism has rooted itself more deeply in cultural consciousness,” Magid said. “… Spirituality, a sense of transcendent meaning that may be born from — but it’s not limited to — religion, is not the answer. At most, it’s only part of the answer.”

Policy, legal scholar Kathryn A. Sikkink shares collaborative history of international human rights

071522_KathrynSikkink_DT_01

The creation and codification of internationally protected human rights is often criticized for excluding certain voices from the conversation. But Kathryn A. Sikkink has dedicated her life’s work to discovering how much collaboration actually ensued. 

Sikkink delivered her lecture, titled “Exploring the Diverse Origins of International Human Rights,” on Friday, July 15, in the Hall of Philosophy, closing Week Three’s Interfaith Lecture Series theme, “The Spirituality of Human Rights.”

As a professor of human rights policy at the Harvard Kennedy School and an affiliated faculty member at Harvard Law School, Sikkink works to guide the understanding of international human rights and their diverse origins. She has published several books, including International Norms, Moral Psychology and Neuroscience; The Hidden Face of Rights: Toward a Politics of Responsibilities; Evidence for Hope: Making Human Rights Work in the 21st Century; and The Persistent Power of Human Rights: From Commitment to Compliance

Sikkink does not normally discuss the spirituality of human rights at lectures. However, she said spirituality is intimately connected to the years-long research she has conducted on the history of human rights.

“I’ve worked on the history, legitimacy and effectiveness of human rights movements, human rights institutions and human rights law,” Sikkink said. “And so, it is a logical step for me to think more deeply about the spirituality of human rights.”

People have many different ideas of what the term “spirituality” truly means and represents.

“One definition of spirituality is this sensitivity or attachment to religious values,” she said. “But more commonly, I think it refers to a sense of connection to something bigger than ourselves, and what issues that really make our life meaningful.”

Human rights can possess a similar meaning to spirituality, and their true role can be debated and differentiated by each individual. 

While human rights have a long history of both national and international protection, Sikkink focused her lecture on the formation of international, universal human rights. 

“(The formation of internationally protected human rights) does not necessarily come only from the great powers or from France or the United States,” she said. “It comes from more diverse audiences and participants. And it’s a moment where different religious traditions have a very important role to play.”

Most faiths believe all human beings are endowed with basic human rights for the entirety of their Earthly existence. Yet in some areas, human rights may be recognized, but the ability to possess and live with those rights have been stripped away.

“One of the most devastating things about human rights is that we simultaneously recognize and embed them in international law, and yet, there’s this huge gap between people having rights and people actually being able to enjoy those rights,” Sikkink said. 

There can often be a misconception, according to Sikkink, that human rights were born from the Global North to be imposed on the people of the Global South without their input or assent. 

“(After) over almost 15 years of studying the history of human rights, (I’d like to) say that is a flawed notion. It’s a flawed notion,” she said. “And it’s a notion that I take very, very personally.” 

Sikkink studied abroad in South America as a college student. She began working as an intern, and later became a staff member, for the Washington Office on Latin America.

“Many human rights demands came from people, actual victims of human rights violations, in Latin America,” she said. “And so for me to hear people (say), ‘Human rights come from the Global North, and the people of Latin America never would have thought of human rights if Jimmy Carter hadn’t told them in 1976,’ is just, to me, so deeply contrary to my lived experience that I felt the need to go and excavate the history of human rights and find out whether this was true or not.”

To understand who was involved with the formation and groundwork of international human rights, Sikkink invited audience members into a journey of the past, starting with the Dumbarton Oaks conference. 

The 1944 conference included only four representatives for China, the Soviet Union, the United States and the United Kingdom. These countries drafted proposals for what would become the United Nations Charter. 

“The Chinese representative wanted to (include the protection of human rights) in that draft, about racial and ethnic discrimination, because he knew that Chinese people around the world had suffered discrimination,” Sikkink said. “… And even that request by China to put one article about racial discrimination in the draft was not accepted by the other great powers.” 

Due to the United Kingdom’s imperial power and Jim Crow laws in the United States, this request was denied, and the term “human rights” was only used once in this draft.

In 1945, 50 countries gathered in San Francisco to finish the Dumbarton Oaks draft and implement it as the U.N. Charter.

“Of the 50 countries that were there, 18 of them were from what we’d call today the Global North,” Sikkink said. “Thirty-one, or 62%, were countries from what today we’d call the Global South. This included 20 countries from Latin America.”

The Latin American countries wanted to add an appendix to the charter that included the definition of human rights.

“Now, needless to say, they failed,” Sikkink said. “… But they did succeed in really enhancing attention to human rights in the U.N. Charter.”

Non-government organizations are standardly allowed in U.N. meetings in 2022. But the first time they were given a seat at the table, 42 NGOs were invited to share their missions and core messages on anything from civility to religious freedom to human rights.

With the partnership of NGOs and Latin American countries, the term human rights was added to the charter seven times.

“One of the most important (sections) is the only commission that has (explicitly) called for (countries) to set up a Human Rights Commission,” Sikkink said. “And all the future work of the U.N. on human rights is based on that language.”

But the U.N. Charter was still missing key definitions of what human rights actually protect, despite the term appearing in the charter. 

“The Universal Declaration of Human Rights was not the first intergovernmental Declaration of Rights,” Sikkink said. “The first (general international human rights instrument) was something called the American Declaration of Rights and Duties of Man.” 

This declaration was created by Latin American countries, and it included both rights and duties. Some of the duties include educating oneself and one’s family, a belief from Latin American tradition. 

“The negotiation of these initial declarations of human rights (included) people from many different traditions, including religious traditions, to bring forward their beliefs and try to gather acceptance for those beliefs,” she said. 

Because nearly all major religions have understandings of human dignity, these core values were implemented during the development of the American Declaration of Rights and Duties of Man.

Eight months after this declaration, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights finished the drafting stage, was presented to the U.N. General Assembly, and passed. But Sikkink said the drafting process tells an interesting story.

“All of us have heard about Eleanor Roosevelt, the chair of the drafting committee. She played a very important role. Some of us have heard of René Cassin, the great French philosopher jurist, who the French want to call the ‘Father of Human Rights,’ ” she said. “But how many of you have heard of the three or four other most important people drafting that document?”

Some of these notable people include Peng Chun Chang, the representative of nationalist China, Charles Habib Malik, the representative of the Maronite Christian community in Lebanon, and Hernán Santa Cruz, a Chilean who represented socialist Latin American tradition. 

“(Cruz) was the person who made sure that economic, social and cultural rights, economic and social rights particularly, got into the Universal Declaration,” Sikkink said. 

The last influential person Sikkink mentioned was Hansa Mehta, the delegate from India and a feminist. Mehta persistently lobbied to change one of the universal declarations that said, “All men are born free in dignity and rights” to say “All human beings are born free in dignity and rights.”

“Every single word, every single article in the Universal Declaration was debated over and over again by all the delegates present,” Sikkink said. “… When we’re choosing our values, for me, choosing ideas that are the result of deliberation among many people around the world, it’s really crucial.” 

Many treaties have been ratified since the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the most recent being the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities; yet the United States still has not ratified this treaty. 

“Even when Bob Dole went onto the floor of the Senate in his wheelchair to call on his Republican colleagues to support this, they did not get the votes,” Sikkink said. “We have to have two-thirds of the U.S. Senate in a presidential system — that’s the hardest ratification rules in the world.”

Even when treaties are ratified, Sikkink said it is debated if these declarations are being translated into practice. But understanding the roots and meanings of these international human rights protections “provides one of the most important and morally defensible  starting places for talking about progressive change in the world.”

These protections do not eliminate conflict in the world, but Sikkink said they represent deliberate nonviolence and noncoercive tactics. They represent triumph after struggle and injustice. They are the guidelines for global governance and change, promoting interconnectedness to all global citizens.

“Human rights helps me and many others in the world feel a sense of connection to something bigger than ourselves, and it gives meaning to life,” she said.

Cornell WilliamBrooks calls for necessary reparations for dignity assault

071422_CornellWilliamBrooks_GP_01

Human dignity has been repeatedly assaulted. 

Cornell William Brooks visited Chautauqua to discuss the issues of dignity assault with his lecture, titled “The Moral Inflation of Human Dignity: Race, Repair and Rights.” His lecture on Thursday, July 14, was a continuation of Week Three’s Interfaith Lecture Series theme of “The Spirituality of Human Rights.”

Brooks is the former president and CEO of the NAACP, a professor at Harvard Kennedy School, civil rights attorney, ordained minister, orator and writer. 

He also led a 1,000 mile-long justice walk from Selma, Alabama, to Washington in 2015, which lasted over 40 days, to demonstrate the urgency of voting rights and police reform. 

This moment in time is particularly tumultuous and challenging, according to Brooks.

“It is a moment that reminds me of a moment back in 1940, when a member of the executive board of the NAACP and a First Lady of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt, stood before the Democratic Convention and she declared, ‘This is no ordinary time,’ ” Brooks said. 

The moral ugliness that surrounds the current state of the world impacts human dignity in a number of ways, Brooks said, but documents like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and Scripture, remind all people that they have been bestowed with a measure of dignity. 

“We are a mere reflection of that which gave rise to this beautiful Earth … because we are made in God’s image,” he said. “We have value, we have worth, we have dignity. We can be esteemed and revered. … So no matter what happens, no matter the moral ugliness of the moment, we (can) see the sacred beauty within ourselves in this world.”

When human rights and dignity are violated, reparations are a way that people can rebuild their lives. Brooks told the Biblical story of one of the earliest examples of reparations: Zacchaeus and the sycamore tree. Zacchaeus was a tax collector who climbed up a sycamore tree. 

Once atop the tree, Zacchaeus found a broadened perspective and clarity, and vowed to give half of his belongings to the poor and pay four times the amount of what he had cheated from anyone through his tax collections.

“This is an important metaphor in terms of those who are called to do social justice,” Brooks said. “Are there times when we need to ascend the sycamore tree, to glimpse the humanity of others?”

But even if one does not believe in Scripture, he said there cannot be a schism between those of differing faiths when tackling human dignity issues. 

“In these social justice movements, you can’t really divide yourselves according to denomination or faith tradition, or whether or not you have a tradition at all, because the work is so hard,” Brooks said. “The work is so difficult,  the lives are so precious. We can’t afford those kinds of divisions.”

Still, Brooks respects the power that faith holds when people gather together for a common purpose. 

Beginning to talk about the resilience of dignity, Brooks cited the Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ dissent in the marriage equality opinion. 

“He made the argument that because dignity is immutable, it’s unchangeable, it can not be destroyed. It cannot be taken away. Therefore, to deny people of the same gender, the same sex, the right to marry is not a denial of dignity,” Brooks said. “Now, this was a matter of circular reasoning and tautology that just troubled my spirit as a lawyer and a minister. It is true that dignity is indestructible. We have it. We own it. But just because it’s indestructible does not mean it’s unaffected. Dignity can be diminished. Dignity can be denigrated.”

Dignity can be assaulted and damaged, Brooks believes. He defined dignity assault as the questioning of someone’s personhood, values and humanity. 

“A dignity assault is not necessarily a physical assault, although the line between a physical assault and a dignity assault can be exceedingly thin, exceedingly gray, exceedingly easy to cross,” he said.

Brooks shared a few examples of dignity assault, all of which were harmful incidents of prejudice that caused trauma, arrests and even death. 

But Brooks argued that when dignity is assaulted, it can make one’s life more precious. He used the example of systematic racism and his own concern for his children’s safety.

“When (my sons) leave the house, my wife and I are not sure if they’re going to come back the same way they left,” Brooks said. “When my wife and I see our sons go out the door, we may value them a little more, perhaps differently from those who simply take for granted that when your children leave the house, they will most certainly come back.”

Brooks said that while the perceived value of dignity can fluctuate depending on how much pressure is placed on one’s humanity, its preciousness can also fluctuate. 

“In other words, if you know your life can be taken at any moment, you value it more,” Brooks said. “If you know your dignity can be diminished, desecrated, degraded at any moment, for any reason, at any time by anybody with a sensible authority, you value it more. There’s a certain moral implication to your dignity.”

Because, according to Biblical tradition, all humans are brothers and sisters, because all humans are interconnected, dignity attacks can impact even those who are not directly involved, Brooks said. One of Brooks’ students organized protests in her hometown of Highland Park, Illinois, the site of the recent July 4 shooting, after the earlier mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas. 

“Three weeks after those tragedies, people were gunned down in the very place where she organized her protests. The dignity that was assaulted in Buffalo, the dignity that was assaulted in Uvalde, was assaulted in Highland Park,” Brooks said. “Race, ethnicity, geography and moral connection bond us all. You can’t move away. You can’t escape. You can’t change your skin color. … You can’t disappear from the moral universe. We are all bound together. … It is a collective assault on our dignity.”

With this, dignity assaults are never just physical; there is a greater subtlety, Brooks said. Referencing Critical Race Theory and book bans, Brooks argued that history and dignity are being banned and hidden.

“If we can’t talk about the ways in which we as a republic have demonstrated resilience, if we can’t talk about the ways in which we protested and demonstrated and shed blood for this country, our dignity is being denied as a country,” Brooks said. “It’s not merely about the Black and Brown ‘they,’ it’s about the multiracial, multiethnic, multigenerational ‘us.’ ”

Scientists have found that racial trauma is registered at the epigenetic level, meaning that this trauma is embedded in the genes. This shows how much dignity assault can not only affect people now, but also the next generation.

“If those in the fields of medicine tell us that racial trauma impacts your organs, from your brain to your heart, dramatically and dangerously increasing our destructive responses to stress, it simply means that literally, our lives are being endangered as a consequence of rabid and systemic racism,” Brooks said.

Drawing from Zacchaeus, Brooks discussed giving reparations to Black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved. Even though slavery ostensibly ended in 1863, its impacts live on.

Brooks listed three main reasons why people are opposed to reparations: Slavery was too long ago, it is too hard to provide reparations, and it is too expensive.

Slavery was not as long ago as it may seem, he said. With the Emancipation Proclamation symbolically ending slavery in 1863 and legally ending with the 13th Amendment in 1865, Black codes, Jim-Crow era laws that restricted the freedom of Black people, continued its legacy. 

“As a consequence of the Black codes, we have the convict leasing system,” Brooks said. “Under slavery, there were enslaved.”

The convict leasing system, or what he called slavery under a different name, did not end until the beginning of World War II. Slave patrols were the beginning of police departments in the South. Jim Crow segregation is embedded with the prejudice learned from slavery. Brooks said slavery’s dignity assault is still interwoven into American society. 

“We understand that back in the 1930s, our government sent out federal employees who crisscrossed the South and spoke to thousands of formerly enslaved people and captured their stories in terms of slave narratives,” Brooks said. “How long ago was slavery?”

As a child, Brooks slept under a quilt that was made from patches of his great-grandfather’s pants. 

“My great-grandmother Rosa Estelle took the britches from her father-in-law, my great-great-grandfather, the Reverend Poppy, and she made a quilt from his clothing. My great-great-grandfather was enslaved until he was 8 years old,” Brooks said. “He slept under that quilt as a man. I slept under that quilt as a boy. How long ago was slavery? That quilt hangs in my office today.”

When people say reparations are too hard and too expensive to provide, Brooks points to how veterans, radiation victims and those who have lost their physical belongings to natural disasters are given compensation. 

“Compensation is regular and routine for everybody but Black people,” Brooks said. “We’ve demonstrated a certain sophistication in identifying victims, ferreting out claims, designing programs to literally build and bring communities together. And so I simply say to you in this sacred space, is this not the moment for us to engage in a real racial reckoning?”

There are still inequities in school districts and housing. And when the GI Bill first came along, Brooks said Black people were denied housing and educational benefits.

“There were literally whole neighborhoods, whole communities, whole towns that were never built, because Black vets did not get their due,” Brooks said. “And many of them alive today still have not received their due. That means not merely houses that were not built, but what about vocations that were not lived? Careers that were not pursued? Doctors who were not trained, architects not trained, engineers not trained, teachers not trained, because these veterans were not able to get their slice of the American pie?”

Brooks left the audience with the lesser-known story of Harriet Tubman’s true resilience and work to free the enslaved. 

“The history books tell us that she went back time and time and time again to deliver 70 people to freedom,” he said. “The story that is less told is the fact that she is the first woman to lead American soldiers into battle as a scout in the low country of South Carolina … and they delivered 700 people to freedom.” 

Tubman’s story can still provide people with a lesson of resilience. 

“Had Harriet Tubman compared the 700 people she delivered to freedom to the 4 million people who were enslaved, she might have given up,” Brooks said. “But what I want to share with you today is that our hope is not empirically demonstrated and morally chosen that we choose to do the right thing. … We choose to make our country better. We choose to scale the sycamore tree. We choose to recognize dignity.”

Spirituality, human rights must unite, Rev. Adam Russell Taylor argues in opening talk

071122_RevAdamRussellTaylor_GP_01

The past 16 consecutive years have seen a steady decline of global human rights. While the world is progressing, inalienable rights are regressing. 

The Rev. Adam Russell Taylor, president of Sojourners and author of A More Perfect Union: A New Vision for Building the Beloved Community, opened Week Three’s Interfaith Lecture Series, Monday, July 11, with the idea of enhancing human rights through spirituality. 

This week’s theme is “The Spirituality of Human Rights,” and Taylor’s lecture was titled “Dignity for All: Faith, Spirituality and Human Rights,” which is based on a chapter in his book, titled “Dignity for All.”

Sojourners is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year, and the organization aims to inspire hope and aid social justice causes through Christianity. 

“For 50 years, we have been helping to inspire and equip Christians of all stripes, in addition to other people with faith and conscience, to put their faith into action boldly and courageously to advance justice and peace,” Taylor said.

Sojourners’ award-winning magazine has a readership of over 67,000, with their digital platform reaching 6 million. The organization challenges white Christian nationalism which threatens democracy, according to Sojourner’s 2021 Annual Impact Video.

Fighting apartheid, poverty and genocide have been a large part of the organization’s history of protecting and emphasizing human rights. Taylor focused his talk on global human rights commitments, particularly on what the U.S. government’s role should be.

“I think it’s critical for me to emphasize that, as a nation, we do not have credibility or legitimacy in our defense and promotion of human rights if we are not defending them at home,” Taylor said. 

Taylor practices Christianity through his progressive national Baptist tradition, but he celebrates religious diversity and freedom. 

“Our founders rejected the dangers of established religion and embraced religious freedom and pluralism as a core part of who we are,” Taylor said. “Christian nationalism is an enemy to the realization of human rights, not a friend.”

With his advocacy work, Taylor is familiar with strategic plans created to protect the rights of people across the globe. He particularly discussed Sustainable Development Goals, which are “the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all,” according to the United Nations’ website. 

GEORGIA PRESSLEY / staff photographer Taylor’s lecture was titled “Dignity for All: Faith, Spirituality and Human Rights.”

SDGs were created to continue the success of the Millennium Development Goals, which were established in 2000 and achieved three years early.

“At the time, I was leading advocacy efforts at one of the largest Christian humanitarian organizations in the world, World Vision, and had the privilege of trying to influence that very messy and complicated discussion and debate about what should succeed the Millennium Development Goals,” Taylor said.

With a more in-depth focus on rule of law and the prevention of violence, Taylor said he felt that the SDGs would be successful.

“I also believe strongly that unless there was a greater commitment to addressing human rights as being indivisible and inviolable, we would fall short of these bold goals,” Taylor said.

Although the agenda included a greater emphasis on the rule of law, combating corruption and protecting human rights, Taylor said SDGs have become “a hidden secret within the United States context.”

Taylor asked the audience how many people they know could summarize the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights or list the current SDGs. 

“Now, I am not emphasizing this point to be elitist or cruel,” Taylor said. “I’m emphasizing this point because unless there is a greater common understanding of these commitments, including our human rights commitments, they will be like a graveyard of broken promises.”

Taylor called for a greater focus on human dignity to connect people to one another and prevent these promises from being broken. 

“Human dignity is the moral thread that binds and weaves together all of our commitments to social, economic, political and cultural rights,” Taylor said. “With a greater understanding and commitment to human dignity, we could animate the cause of human rights and the fight for human rights all around the world.”

Taylor knows the power of human dignity; he told the story of his parents’ interracial marriage in 1968 — the year after it was legalized across America in the Supreme Court case of Loving v. Virginia, and the year of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy.

“It was a tragic turning point, I would argue, in the politics of this nation, creating a realignment from many Southern Democrats to the Republican Party,” Taylor said.

Taylor pointed to the rise of the religious right movement, which coincides with the desegregation of schools, which cements the racist undertones of the movement that still impact America now. 

“I fear that human rights has become silly putty,” Taylor said. “The understanding of human rights has often been hijacked and distorted to support and demean things that are often the opposite (and) are antithetical.”

At their core, Taylor said, human rights are based on the protection of the dignity of all humans. It has been instilled in Taylor by his parents that everyone is made in the divine image of God, which has been his moral foundation of human rights and dignity. 

“They taught me that my diversity, in a larger sense our diversity, … our religious diversity, our racial and ethnic diversity, our diversity of sexual orientation and gender identity, is indeed a strength and an asset, not a liability or a weakness,” Taylor said. “I would argue that underneath the tug of war between totalitarianism and various forms of fascism, which are often unrooted by attempts to dehumanize the other, is the struggle between whether we see our diversity as a strength or whether we see it as a weakness.”

There needs to be a shared understanding of human rights, or at least some shared principles, Taylor said. He reiterated that all human rights are universal and equal to each other, whether they are social, economic, political or civil. 

“There’s no such thing as a small right or a big right. There shouldn’t be a hierarchy of rights,” Taylor said. “They all matter as a part of our commitment to human rights.”

While religion has been responsible for uplifting human rights, it has also been known to minimize or hinder rights’ accessibility to all humans. 

“This divide (of human rights) has been exacerbated and often fueled by divides within the church, where the more conservative side of the church has often emphasized personal liberty and religious liberty as their sole focus,” Taylor said, “while many in the more mainline and liberal traditions have placed an emphasis on social justice and on our economic rights.”

These groups tend to fight for two separate sides of the same coin. But their ideals, when united, Taylor said, have the power to enhance a boundless amount of human rights. 

But people must not take for granted the rights they have now, as their rights can be taken away at a moment’s notice. Taylor quoted Salil Shetty, the Secretary-General of Amnesty International.

“The battle for human rights is never decisively won in any place or any time,” Taylor said. “The frontier shifts completely, so there can never be room for complacency.”

Taylor pointed to what he called 16 consecutive years of decline in global freedom to prove Shetty’s words to be true. 

“We can point to the 700 million people who live in the quicksands of dehumanizing poverty, the 800 million people who live with the daily pain of hunger, … the 25 million people who are estimated to be victims of human trafficking,” Taylor said. “All of these statistics paint a grim picture of the state of human rights in the world today.”

But Taylor has hope for the future. He believes if the power of faith and spirituality are harnessed on a global scale, the commitment to human rights can be reignited. 

Taylor acknowledged, however, that religion can both aid and hinder the development of human rights. 

“(Religion) can be an enabler, and it can be an obstacle. It breaks my heart that faith can be so easily misused and abused to promote human rights violations,” Taylor said. “And we as people of faith, myself included, must acknowledge and repent for the way in which religion is so often misused and abused.”

But looking closer at U.S. history, it is evident that religion had a vital role in the Civil Rights Movement, Taylor said. Beyond the United States, he mentioned the role religion played during the Solidarity Movement in Poland or the Anti-Apartheid Movement. 

“Well, it can be true, it is true, that (religion) can be a repressive force. Religion can also be one of the most powerful vehicles to inspire sacrifice and courage, to promote human rights and to resist evil in the world,” Taylor said.

Quoting Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, Taylor explained the importance of moving out of the position of a bystander and into the role of an advocate for human rights. 

“Morally speaking, there is no limit to the concern one must feel for the suffering of human beings, that indifference to evil is worse than evil itself. And that in a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible,” Taylor quoted. 

Both religion and human rights have the inherent vulnerability of corruption infiltrating their well-intentioned nature. Often, what is written on paper falls short of what is actually done for both. Taylor said ensuring common understanding of human rights could have the potential to promote real change and action. 

“​​I believe that one of the reasons there’s such a significant gap between this common understanding that is so desperately needed is there is often a tenuous relationship between the kind of secular system of human rights, particularly in the U.N. system, and the role of religion,” Taylor said. 

But Taylor said there is indeed an overlap: 84% of the world’s population identifies as religious. According to a Fetzer Institute study, for which Taylor served on the advisory board, those people are more likely to vote and speak out on social and political issues. They are also more likely to take civic and community action. 

Taylor calls for people to defend all human rights with the power of faith — even the most vulnerable rights of the most vulnerable people — through a commitment to a selfless outpouring of love.

“My beloved friends, now is the time to tap into the power of faith and spirituality, to recharge and to superpower a global movement for human rights,” Taylor said. “I would argue that the fate and future of human dignity hangs in the balance.”

John Philip Newell highlights intersection of science, divinity

070822_Newell_Interfaith_01

Among the presence of divine and sacred nature, becoming in tune with other living beings on Earth may be the closest humans can feel to God.

John Philip Newell, a Celtic teacher and author, closed Week Two’s Interfaith Lecture Theme, “Reconnecting with Our Natural World,” with his lecture Friday, July 8, in the Hall of Philosophy, “The Grace of Nature.”

Newell has led several international pilgrimages to Iona off the western coast of Scotland, and he has authored over 15 books, with his most recent publication, Sacred Earth, Sacred Soul: Celtic Wisdom for Reawakening to What Our Souls Know and Healing the World, earning several awards. He has spoken at Chautauqua before through the Interfaith Lecture Series and the morning worship services, but this is his first time back on the grounds since 2016.

PHOTO COURTESY OF CHQ ASSEMBLY John Philip Newell delivers his lecture, “The Grace of Nature,” Friday in the Hall of Philosophy.

“​​It is so good to be back in Chautauqua and in this space that opens so beautifully and naturally onto what the Celts call a cathedral of Earth, sea and sky,” Newell said. 

Within nature, one can reflect or listen to the divine hum of the Earth. Listening is a highly-regarded practice for Celts. 

“Perhaps the most cherished image that comes down to us in the Celtic tradition, from which I draw so heavily in my life … is the image or the memory of John the Beloved leaning against Jesus at the Last Supper,” he said. “It was said of him in the Celtic world, that he, therefore, heard the heartbeat of the divine, and he became a symbol of the practice of listening — listening deep within ourselves, listening deep within one another, listening within the body of Earth — for the beat of the sacred presence.”

Newell called for attendees to take the same posture of attentiveness and listening to become intrinsically connected to all sacred, living things. Yet, every being is idiosyncratic.  

“Everything that has being is essentially an utterance or expression of the divine,” Newell said. “This, I believe, holds the energy for deep and true transformation, or a reconnecting of us to our essence — each one of us, a unique and unrepeatable expression of the one.”

Paraphrasing the beginning of John’s Gospel, Newell depicted the interconnectedness of everything that has ever been and everything that will ever be.

“In the beginning was the sound. And the sound was with God, and the sound was God. And everything has been sounded into being,” he said.

Although recent times have been tumultuous, and the 2020s have been described as the “decisive decade,” Newell refers to the present as both exciting and profoundly challenging.

“Part of the excitement is a type of convergence between so much new science and ancient spiritual wisdom,” he said. “One of the things new science is enabling us to comprehend is that the sound of the beginning is still vibrating deep within everything that has being. And that sound has been identified by scientists as a B Flat, way down.”

Trained in Edinburgh, Scotland, by Irish priest Noel Dermot O’Donoghue, Newell said O’Donoghue had his own favorite paraphrase of the opening of John’s Gospel.

“His version was: ‘In the beginning was the gift, and the gift was with God. And the gift was God,’ ” Newell said. “Everything is essentially (a) gift, and not simply a gift given from God, but rather the gift of God — the gift of the sacred presence, deep within all that has being.”

Newell pointed to what Hildegard of Bingen said in the 12th century about awareness of the divine’s gifts through the observation of both beauty and suffering on Earth.

“She says, ‘We need to learn to fly with two wings of awareness. One is the wing of awareness of life’s beauty — life’s unspeakable glory,’ ” Newell said. “ ‘The other,’ she said, ‘is the wing of awareness of life’s brokenness and suffering. To fly with only one wing of awareness,’ she said, ‘is like an eagle trying to fly with only one wing. We will not attain a true height of perspective if we focus only on the beauty and glory and grace of life.’ ”

The Doctrine of Creation, Creatio Ex Nihilo, which literally translates to “creation out of nothing,” describes the creation of the universe by a distant, transcendent being out of nothingness. 

“(Irenaeus of Lyon) says that the cosmos, Earth, all things were created out of the very substance of God. This stuff, the stuff of the human body, is sacred stuff,” Newell said. “How we handle one another in relationships … are sacred matters. How we handle the matter of the body of Earth, with reverence, and justly and equitably, are sacred matters.”

But the sacredness of religion has been misused to commit unholy, poisonous exploitation of humans and nature, Newell said. He provided the example of the Roman, British and American empires. 

“When matter is neutralized, we begin to think that we can do whatever we wish to matter,” he said.

As nations exploit Earth’s resources, “in the fallacy of looking after its own well-being,” to harm the well-being of other nations, they are acting in the way “empire has expected of religion,” Newell said.

But there is hope. People, Newell said, are yearning for a reconnection between their spirituality and the Earth, which he has witnessed firsthand through leading pilgrimages to Iona, “the sacred island in Scotland that has been such a true voice over the centuries to the sacredness of Earth and sacredness of the human soul.”

People must become open to speaking and listening to all living things, or else the divide will continue to grow.

“Will we speak from this place of interrelationship with all things? Or will we continue to speak from enclosed places of separation from nature, or from one another, as nations, as great spiritual traditions?” Newell asked.

Newell said every great discipline of thought and study is summoning an awakening to the wisdom of the Earth flowing all around us. He explained the Greek word for a god, “theos,” derives from the Greek word for “flow.” 

“So that flow of the divine is not simply to be found in some people, or at certain points, or in certain religious traditions, or in certain moments,” Newell said. “It is the very essence of all life, that we are being invited back into relationship with.”

The invitation of reconnection to nature is waiting, and Newell said this reconnection is essential to be truly connected to the divine. He professed that religion is not static, but rather ever-changing to allow great reformation.

“Thomas Berry, the eco-theologian, said … ‘We are in such a mess. Politically, ecologically, religiously, we are in such a mess.’ He says that we need to dream the way forward. We need to allow ourselves to imagine ways of being, ways of seeing, ways of interrelating that we have known nothing of yet,” Newell said.

The French mystic scientist, Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, saw the universe as a “burning bush,” from the story of Moses.

“As my rabbi brother from New Mexico says, the important thing about that story is not that the bush was burning, but that Moses noticed, because every bush is on fire,” Newell said. “Everything that has being is lit from within.”

It is a critical time of transformation, Newell said, and somehow, the light of Jesus is not guiding humans. Some people have the impression that the light of Jesus is essentially foreign. But humans still want to follow it and grow closer to all energy.

“This dimension deep within us and in all things that invites union, that invites attraction, it is something of this that we know in the Universal Law of Gravitation. Every atom in the universe, at some level, longs to be in relationship with every other atom. Otherwise, the whole thing would spin off into unrelatedness,” Newell said. “Scientists don’t claim to understand this law of attraction, they describe it.”

Once humans can harness the outpouring of love and connection through the great energy of attraction, they can truly connect to the divine; Teilhard wrote that Christianity will experience a rebirth. 

“(He) wrote, Christianity is at the end of one of his natural cycles of existence. It needs to be born again,” Newell said. “We are invited to be part of this new birthing in this transitional moment.”

Whatever happens as humans move forward and time passes, there is no turning back. 

“We can’t go back to the small God — the small God that we have created in our image to look after just our nation, our religion or our species,” Newell said.

Drawing on Merton, Sophfronia Scott shares gift of finding divine in nature

070722_SophroniaScott_DT_06

The divine speaks through the rhythms and cycles of the natural world, but the message may be lost upon the forest floor. Not all humans are receptive to the messages being portrayed through the whirling winds, the humming birds or bending vines.

Sophfronia Scott, a professor, novelist, essayist and leading contemplative thinker, shared her lecture, “In the Water and the Air: Embracing the Divine Through Nature,” with the Chautauquan audience Thursday, July 7, in the Hall of Philosophy. 

Her most recent book, The Seeker and the Monk: Everyday Conversations with Thomas Merton, aligned with Week Two’s theme of “The Wild: Reconnecting with the Natural World.”

Scott first started her career as an award-winning magazine journalist for Time. Some of the books she has written or contributed to include Common Prayer, Love’s Long Line, This Child of Faith: Raising a Spiritual Child in a Secular World, Unforgivable Love and All I Need to Get By.

Beginning with a reflection of her roots in Lorain, Ohio, Scott shared a description of the front lawn of her childhood home. It may have been small, but in her earliest memories, Scott said it felt like a grand meadow.

“I have six siblings, but somehow I managed to spend a good deal of time alone, often outdoors, seeking solitude and sanctuary from a small and noisy house,” Scott said. 

She would often gaze upon the green of the yard and the blue of the sky, but one day, Scott saw rays of sunlight seeping from the sky. 

“I viewed (the rays) with wonder. No, not only that, I felt it as a living presence. Like one of those rays could lay upon me like a hand on my shoulder. And I don’t know why, but I had this sense that it would follow me everywhere,” Scott said. “Then the cloud shifted. And I couldn’t find it again. But I kept looking for it. I told my mother about it. And I remember this specificity with which I did so, as though I made a new friend.”

This ray of sun, in Scott’s words, was “the seed from which my faith sprouted.” It helped her understand that the divine was all around her.

The title of Scott’s lecture included the word “divine.” She explained that she used it not only because it is beautiful, but also to keep the door open for those who feel like the word “God” may be an obstacle. 

Scott said she often returns to a state of remembering her senses of the divine as a child. Often, she remembers naturally and without pressure, but sometimes, she needs to remember to move forward in the digital era. 

Quoting from Thursday’s morning lecturer Terry Tempest Williams’ book Erosion: Essays of Undoing, Scott read, “Our connection to the world is virtual, not real. … We have moved ourselves from the outdoors to the indoors. Nature is no longer a force, but a source of images for our screensavers. We sit, we stare, we text on our iPhones and type on our keyboards and await an immediate response. Patience is an endangered species. Intimacy is a threatened landscape.”

Scott shared the words of Fr. Richard Rohr, a previous interfaith lecturer at Chautauqua, who said that the separation of nature and human consciousness must be healed through a radical overcoming. 

God is continuously reaching out to humans with tenderness and love through nature, Scott said. But she questioned if humans are listening and paying attention to the messages God sends.

“We live in rhythms and cycles, which is how nature moves,” she said. “That’s how God moves.”

Alice Walker’s novel, The Color Purple, conveys the notion that God wants people to listen to him and notice the fruits of his labor on Earth. Scott quoted an excerpt from Walker’s novel.

“I think it makes God mad if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it,” Scott read. “People think pleasing God is all God care about, but any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”

Scott “met” Merton, the subject of her most recent book, in December 2011 as she read a passage from his book Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander

“Hearing those words, to put it simply, set my world on fire,” Scott said. 

She quoted from the section “The Night Spirit and the Dawn Air.” The story depicted birds of dawn, rather than singing a song, asking a question in chirps. They asked if it was time for them to be, and when they knew it was, they fully awoke in flight and harmony.

“I heard those words. And suddenly, I wanted to be outside at the crack of dawn, eager to hear the sense of the voice of the creator spirit, giving the waking birds that vital message. … I wanted God to tell me it was time to be,” Scott said. “I too wanted to hear and understand the message that Merton goes on to say. He says, ‘Here is an unspeakable secret. Paradise is all around us. And we do not understand.’ I felt something opened up in my whole being. It felt immense and small at the same time. Because it felt like one word: Yes.”

In December 2019 after Scott’s mother died, she traveled to visit the Abbey of Gethsemani, Merton’s Kentucky monastery, in the rain.

“December has become a tough month to navigate,” she said. “The days marked by decline in loss — the anniversary of the Sandy Hook shooting, my father’s final decline, which had begun in December of 1990. The same for two dear friends: Katie in 2017 and Rob in 2019. Now my mother was newly gone.”

The month of December was also tumultuous, yet pivotal, for Merton’s life. 

“He had entered the Abbey on Dec. 10, 1941,” Scott said. “In December 1959, he received a discouraging note from Rome, denying his request to move to a Mexican monastery. He died on Dec. 10, 1968.”

Scott’s journey to the Abbey was deeply personal, as Merton’s words illustrated a true reviving of life when describing the nature that surrounded him. But he was not always allowed to be one with nature. In fact, the first eight years of his life at the monastery were spent behind the Abbey’s walls.

“When Merton first arrived, monks were not allowed outside the walls except for work assignments,” Scott said. “His days were spent in cycles of prayer, study and writing. Even today on the monastery’s website, a note to the visitors reads, ‘We ask that you bear in mind that the monastic life is lived as a separation from the world.’ ”

But on June 27, 1949, Merton was unexpectedly granted permission to go into the woods alone to seek solitude and silence. 

“On that day, his writing and his spiritual reality changed forever,” Scott said. “It is a known fact that going outside and being in nature is good for us. But what Merton experienced that day went beyond taking a hike and beyond simply stopping to smell the roses. Merton’s heart didn’t soar, profoundly touched, because he took a walk. He felt something out there.”

Embarking on the same path through the woods as Merton, Scott began to feel a similar transcendence, awareness and oneness with creation. She expected to follow the path and return to the monastery in less than an hour, but felt compelled to stay. 

“Because I reached my destination, and because it was also cold outside, there was every reason for me to turn back and return to the Abbey as I planned,” Scott said. “But I didn’t move. I was entranced by something I heard, and that sensation was holding me there.”

The Earth began to speak to Scott, and she was listening. She surrendered to the divine silence. She waited for the silent message of permission to be fully alive, just as the birds had during the dawn. 

“I have no doubt it was the same silence that Merton enthralled with what he … had called ‘the marvelous quiet.’ I heard it. And it was indeed so stunning that I could only marvel,” Scott said. “It was amazing. How can I be standing in this big open space, sky all around me, and have it be filled with a lovely silence?”

Often, humans look to the weather as a direction of preparation rather than naturally tuning into it. 

“(Weather) is Earth’s personality speaking to us,” Scott said. “Each aspect of weather nudges me out of my complacency and says, ‘Look. You are here. Pay attention. The Earth is turning.’ ”

Information about the weather, Scott said, is more accessible than ever before, but the knowledge is often taken for granted. Merton believed humans should have a deep relationship with atmospheric conditions; Scott shared a quote on his beliefs:

“Perhaps we have a deep and legitimate need to know in our entire being what the day is like, to see it and feel it. … I have a real need to know these things because I myself am part of the weather and part of the climate and part of the place,” Scott shared from Merton. “And the day in which I don’t share truly in all this, is no day at all.”

Beyond being within the foliage of nature and understanding the work of the atmosphere, Merton also worked diligently to understand species of animals and plants that shared the same planet as he did. He would observe their behaviors and find natural resilience and strength through their very being. In one instance, he wrote of gardenias blooming after their typical blossoming season was over. 

“We learn about unusual circumstances. Merton saw the (gardenia) in the dark and the flower had bloomed in less than ideal conditions,” Scott said. “Therefore, we can take from it a lesson of beauty and resilience.”

Scott recites the names of flowers so she does not forget them. She understands the behavior of cardinals. She works to understand the nature around her to better understand the divine and herself, as she believes they are all interconnected. 

Both Merton and Scott believe it is important to understand the small portion of the Earth that one is surrounded by. 

“Wherever we live, to be on this planet at all is an extraordinary gift,” she said. “The best way to show our gratitude is to learn as much as we can about where we live. … It is all a part of us.”

Georgette Bennett shares power of individuals when global conscience fails

070122_GeorgetteBennett_GP_01

Many individuals feel helpless when trying to take meaningful action and make change amid issues much larger than themselves. But Georgette Bennett, who founded the Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding in 1992, recognizes how much power one individual holds.

Bennett visited Chautauqua to close Week One’s Interfaith Lecture Series, July 1. Following the theme of “America’s Global Conscience,” Bennett titled her lecture, “When America’s Global Conscience Fails: How the Syrian Crisis Upended the World Order and How Individual Conscience Can Help to Put it Right.”

Bennett has experience in a variety of fields, including sociology, journalism and philanthropy. She is a published author, and her main focus is on conflict resolution and intergroup relations. 

In 2013, Bennett founded the Multifaith Alliance for Syrian Refugees, which has worked to raise awareness of the Syrian war and mobilize more than $250 million of humanitarian aid to benefit more than 2.7 million Syrian war victims.

“Most of my family perished in the Holocaust,” Bennett said. “It may seem counterintuitive for me to take on the cause of Syrian war victims because most likely, they want to see every Jew dead and Israel driven into the sea. It’s not their fault. That’s just the way that they’re indoctrinated from childhood on.”

Her journey of supporting Syrian refugees proved that “even sworn enemies can see the humanity in the other.”

Bennett’s journey began in Budapest in 1946. As a result of World War II, many cities in Hungary were demolished, including Bennett’s home. 

“During the siege of Budapest, 38,000 civilians died of starvation and bombings. My own mother lost a pregnancy lugging a sack of rotten potatoes home because there was nothing else to eat,” Bennett said.

She recalled the helplessness of 937 Jewish refugees who embarked on a journey of asylum on the S.S. St. Louis in 1939. They were denied landing in Cuba, Canada and Miami. 

“They had no choice,” Bennett said. “The ship had to turn around and go back to Europe, where 300 of its passengers perished in the Holocaust. And the silence of the world was deafening.”

The horrific memories of the Holocaust resurfaced as Bennett saw the Syrian crisis unfold and countries closed their borders to refugees. 

“When I was given gruesome photographs documenting the torture of Syrian civilians, how could their emaciated and eviscerated bodies not put me in line with my parents, my grandparents, uncles and aunts who were imprisoned or literally went up in smoke in Auschwitz and Mauthausen and then other camps?” Bennett said.

Bennett felt the need to step up and help those suffering in Syria, as their suffering echoed her own family’s suffering in the Holocaust. 

“If I was to be true to the post-Holocaust admonition ‘never again,’ then ‘never again’ had to include my fellow human beings in Syria,” Bennett said.

Georgette Bennett, Founder and President of Tanenbaum Center for Interreligious Understanding, speaks on June 1, 2022 in the Hall of Philosophy. Bennett’s talk, a part of the Interfaith Lecture Series, was titled “When America’s Global Conscience Fails: How the Syrian Crisis Upended the World Order and How Individual Conscience Can Help to Put it Right”. GEORGIA PRESSLEY/ STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

But Bennett was just one person trying to create change within the huge Syrian humanitarian crisis. She needed to find an entry point and a gap that was not being addressed by large international organizations or governments.

She recognized that if she were to look at the crisis on a big-picture scale, she would be “paralyzed into inaction,” so she decided to focus on mobilizing a response from the American Jewish community. Once that was accomplished, she worked to organize a large interfaith response in the United States. That was when the Multifaith Alliance for Syrian Refugees was born. The alliance now has over 100 partner organizations.

Bennett began to share several grim statistics that show how many Syrian citizens have been impacted: 11 years into the conflict, 80% of Syrians entered poverty, life expectancy dropped from 80 to 56, over 500,000 people have been killed, 11 million are urgently in need of aid, and half of Syria’s population is displaced. Women and children make up 80% of Syrian refugees. 

The list goes on, and the longer it goes, the more evident it becomes that Syria desperately needs help. 

After founding the Multifaith Alliance for Syrian Refugees in 2013, Bennett visited Zaatari refugee camp, which is located less than 10 miles from the Syrian border with Jordan. The camp houses 80,000 refugees, making it Jordan’s fourth largest city.

“I expected to see a place of abject misery, and there was much of that — large families living in small tents or caravans with sparse furnishings. … But what I did witness was a startling affirmation of life and the building of the spontaneous, self-organizing community — a testament both to the resilience of Syrians and the hospitality of Jordanians,” Bennett said.

In the face of uncertainty and horror, Syrians host an array of shops and small businesses that sell everything from hardware, baked goods, bridal gowns, shoes and much more. The line of successful merchant tents has been coined “Champs-Élysée” after drawing similarities of its bustle to one of Paris’ most famous streets. 

As Syrian refugees work hard to create a new life for themselves in the face of war and displacement, they will likely spend over a decade searching for permanent asylum, as the average time of displacement is 10 to 26 years. 

Bennett points to two American presidents in recent years whose global conscience failed: Barack Obama and Donald Trump. 

In December 2012, the Assad regime, the ruling governmental body in Syria, was accused of using chemical weapons against its own citizens. 

Three months later, nearly 25 people were killed in chemical weapon attacks in the Khan al-Assal neighborhood of Aleppo and the Damascus suburb of al-Atebeh, Syria’s two largest cities. The Assad regime denied culpability. 

After 10 months of chemical warfare in Syria and political discourse on a solution, the Obama administration approved a plan that allowed Russia to enter Syria and remove the chemical weapons. 

“In that one act, Obama handed Syria to Russia, shifted the balance of power in the world and empowered Russia to do everything that followed: the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the invasion of Ukraine this year and the unrelenting air war for 11 years … that has destroyed the civilian infrastructure in Syria,” Bennett said.

Trump’s failures of American global conscience include his Muslim travel ban and tightening of American borders. 

“In the end, Trump unilaterally whittled away the U.S. presence, gave up U.S. leverage to Turkey without getting anything in return, and left valuable allies high and dry,” Bennett said. 

The impacts of the Obama and Trump administrations’ handling of Syria had immediate and lingering impacts that will continue for years. 

“When Trump left office, he left behind a largely dismantled infrastructure for processing refugees,” Bennett said. “So even in a more benign Biden administration, there are 29,000 fully vetted Syrian refugees in the pipeline who have been waiting for years to be resettled, and that makes the mobilization of individual conscience even more important in helping to make things right.”

Bennett recognized this need and was able to mobilize a group of like-minded thinkers to support Syrian refugees. But for the benefits to be reaped and come to fruition, it had to start with taking action. Israelis, Syrians and Jews put aside their differences – religious and political — to effectively support the 2.7 million Syrian refugees. Bennett feels this gives hope to all conflicts in need of resolution. 

“When I first became aware of the magnitude of the Syrian crisis, I felt I had to act. It was visceral,” Bennett said. “But you know what? You can act, too. When you confront an overwhelming crisis, like Syria or Ukraine, in which you want to do some good, keep my formula in mind: find an entry point, identify a gap and find something doable with which to fill that gap.”

From near tragedy, a mission: Satpal Singh speaks on interconnectedness

063022_SatpalSingh_SS_05

Traumatic experiences often lead to a chain reaction of consequences. In the face of adversity, some retreat into their shell. Others make it their life’s work to prevent such traumas from impacting others. 

Satpal Singh, a professor at SUNY Buffalo in the Department of Pharmacology and Toxicology, experienced a horrific religion-motivated attack 37 years ago. His life path was forever altered.

Singh spoke on the Chautauqua grounds this week for the first time, but in 2020, he appeared on the CHQ Assembly to discuss Sikhism and how to honor humans’ shared divine light. On Thursday, June 30, in the Hall of Philosophy, Singh delivered his lecture, “Global Consciousness in an Interconnected World,” as part of the Interfaith Lecture Series theme of “America’s Global Conscience.”

Singh is a founding trustee of the Sikh Council for Interfaith Relations and the former chairperson of the World Sikh Council America Region, among other renowned accomplishments related to interfaith and human rights. 

Singh received a doctorate in molecular biology from the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Mumbai, India. His research on neurodegenerative diseases is his current focus in the field.

Singh’s presence at Chautauqua is rooted in near-tragedy.

“The reason I’m here comes from a night, a specific night, about 37 years ago — a dark, lonely night — the reason that I was driven toward what I’m going to discuss today, which is: What should be (our) values, what should be our conscience, and how should we live in a world that throws significant challenges at you?” Singh said.

While traveling on a train after Indira Gandhi’s assassination, which was committed by her two Sikh bodyguards, Singh found himself to be the target of a hate crime. A mob entered the train car searching for Sikh people. 

“This is a group of 25 or so young men in extreme anger, and they knew that it was the end of my journey,” Singh said. 

The men stared into Singh’s eyes, and as he stared back, he said his last prayer.

“I prayed for my family. I prayed for everybody else I knew … and in those 10 seconds in silence, when I was praying, I prayed for the attackers,” Singh said. “I prayed for their peace of mind, (for) their soul.”

Singh was beaten mercilessly, and his unconscious body was thrown under the train tracks to be left for dead. When he finally awoke, he walked to an army headquarters on the railway station. 

“They told me that they were very sorry, but they cannot give me shelter,” Singh said. 

Continuing his journey in search of shelter and assistance, Singh was able to contact the police. They also refused him shelter. 

“They said, ‘Sir, this is your fate. This is your destiny. How can we interfere in your destiny?’ ” Singh said.

After the attack, he moved to America to ensure he could pursue his work safely. 

He said many people wonder how he, moments away from losing his life, could possibly pray for the attackers. 

“The way I had grown up, with the principles I had grown up (with), I could never and still don’t see the difference between you and me,” Singh said. “I grew up with principles (that say) all of us are children of the same God.”

This principle is relevant when discussing America’s global conscience. 

“I don’t think we can make any progress if we don’t see everyone else as (ourselves),” Singh said. “If we see somebody else as Other … we have lost our own connection to our own faith.”

While he believes no human should be looked down upon, Singh also believes everyone has always been deeply interconnected; all humans are children of God in his eyes.

“If we fight with each other, in my mind, it’s the same thing as a mother having two sons and each of those sons look at the other one, saying, ‘My mother is better than your mother,’ ” Singh said. 

Singh transitioned to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which he said is not unique. 

“We have seen Darfur, we have seen Rwanda, we have seen Syria, we have seen Chechnya. … What have we not seen? When will it end? We have no idea,” Singh said.

God may have created the Earth and humans, but Singh said God did not create territories, countries or borders. 

“Why did we have to create our own tectonic plates? We know that geological tectonic plates are there, and when they rub against each other, we get earthquakes, we get tsunamis,” Singh said. “We have created our own societal tectonic plates, which rub against each other and create brutalities, oppression and atrocities that are beyond our mind — that are so mind-numbing, that we cannot even put those details in responsible media.”

Despite the separation of domains and borders, Singh said he believes everyone is interconnected — both human to human and the individual conscience to the collective community; global cooperation through shared consciousness is needed to live sustainably.

Singh spoke on three main areas related to global conscience: equality, human rights and democratic principles.

Although America has more equal rights than most countries, he said Americans do not always practice equality. There may be progress toward a better tomorrow, but Singh said the progress is far too slow. 

Singh’s office in Buffalo is within walking distance of the Buffalo Tops Friendly Market that was the site of a race-driven massacre on May 14. Singh asked how we could forget and still assume we are equal.

The Buffalo Tops shooting is not an isolated incident, he said. With mass shootings happening multiple times a week in America, often driven by hatred, how can we be equal?

An emotional Singh quoted Robert Frost: “The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep.”

In spite of everything, Singh views all humans as one. He believes everyone should be treated equally, with kindness, compassion and respect. 

“Even when other countries or other states or other communities around us mistreat us, that should not make us lose our values. It is not something that we should give up,” Singh said. 

Speaking on human rights, Singh spoke specifically on the mistreatment and abuse of women. America may have more rights protected for women than some other countries, but Singh shared that in America, four women a day die from domestic violence. 

“There are very robust neurological imaging studies that (show that) 80 to 85% of women who suffer domestic abuse have traumatic brain injury,” Singh said. “And if you look at those statistics, there are around 20 million women in America who have suffered traumatic brain injury.”

Although America is looked at as a role model for democracy, Singh said our country needs to sustain that and not become complacent. 

Spiritual leaders serve an important role in the preservation and implementation of equality, human rights and democracy. Even though some say religion leads to division, Singh disagrees.

“People who want to exploit religion (try to divide humans). Religious leaders who believe in their own faith can play a very significant role in bringing up good values and character,” he said. 

To end his speech, Singh gave the audience a call to action. 

“We generally ask what any one individual of us can do, and my general answer is we have to do something, each one of us have to do something,” Singh said. “Whatever tugs at your heart, pick up that. Then pick up what is your strength. You may be good at giving a lecture, you may be good at writing articles, you may be good at organizing a non-governmental organization. … (When) you (go home), think about ‘What is my mission, and what can I do to add to the global conscience of this country?’ ”

Preacher, author Diana Butler Bass closes interfaith season with stories of resilience

082521_DianaButlerBass_KT_01

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Diana Butler Bass closes the 2021 Interfaith Lecture Series with her talk, “Get Up and Go On — Together,” Wednesday in the Amphitheater. KRISTEN TRIPLETT / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

Sifan Hassan began her first heat in the 1,500-meter race at the Tokyo Olympics with a tumble. The Ethiopian-born Dutch runner was expected to win the gold medal for the entire event, and within a moment of her first race was on the ground.

She got up, and she ran for her life. Breezing past racer after racer, she overtook the lead, and won the race. That night, she earned gold in the 5,000 meter final. She eventually won gold in the 10,000 meter, too, and bronze in the 1,500. 

“For a woman who fell in her first race,” said Diana Butler Bass, who told this story to open the final Interfaith Lecture Series of the 2021 season.

Bass, an author, speaker and preacher, presented her lecture, titled “Get Up and Go On — Together,” at 1 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 25 in the Amphitheater, bringing more heat to an end-of-summer heat wave. It was also the final Interfaith Lecture for Week Nine, themed “Resilience.”

Bass’ most recent book is Freeing Jesus: Rediscovering Jesus as Friend, Teacher, Savior, Lord, Way, and Presence, and she’s won awards for several of her other 10 books, including Grateful: The Transformative Power of Giving Thanks and Grounded: Finding God in the World.

She often thinks of stories like Hassan’s when she thinks of the word resilience — unbelievable stories of achievement, stories against the odds. But, she admitted, there are other versions of resilience, too.

“Resilience isn’t just grit and athletic superiority and making the best of a terrible situation, of bouncing back to win the gold medal,” she said. 

One different image comes from “The Trough,” a poem by Judy Brown. In it, a person is caught in ocean waves. They know if they fight against the current, they will strain themselves and certainly drown. But, if they conserve energy and let the flow take them, it will take them to another place on land.

“That is resilience, as well,” she said. “It’s a different kind than pulling yourself up and running on and displaying grit. In this poem, you’re employing knowledge, you understand the situation you are in and you know that if you fight you’re not going to make it. So, getting out of this situation means going with the flow until everything changes.”

In another image, Bass revisited one of her favorite stories, from Luke Chapter 4 in the New Testament. Jesus is at the beginning of his ministry and is invited to read a scroll to a synagogue on the sabbath. 

“He gets up, and he reads the wonderful words about how the captives are being set free, that liberation is coming to the oppressed, and then as he finishes it he sits down and says, ‘Today, the scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing,’ ” Bass said.

Jesus’ neighbors didn’t appreciate this, she said. A violent mob threatened to throw him off a cliff at the edge of town. Anyone who doesn’t know the story might wonder how Jesus will survive this situation, she said. 

“The text simply says, ‘Jesus passed through the midst of them and went on his way,’ ” she said. “He left!” 

Some people might argue that he is Jesus and worked a miracle to part the crowd, like Moses parting the Red Sea, she said. But Bass believes he simply walked away.

“It shows this idea of leaving when you’re rejected or when there is a threat,” she said.

A few chapters later, in Luke Chapter 9, Jesus commissioned his disciples to go out and spread the same news he shared in the synagogue. If people were not receptive, Jesus told them to “shake the dust off of your feet as you leave town,” Bass said. 

Knowing you can’t win, are in an unchangeable situation, are not welcome and that you could be hurt, and opting to leave is a form of resilience, she said. 

Bass’ March 2021 book, Freeing Jesus, is a memoir of her own experience with Jesus and of spiritual resilience, she said. Chapter 5 of the book is one she never wanted to write. Bass was in her early 30s and said she had taken the wrong path in life. 

“As a young woman, I was afraid of chaos and disorder, and I so wanted to be accepted, and I so wanted to please all the male authorities around me that I embraced an incredibly rigid, conservative form of neo-Calvinism,” she said.

She described herself as judgmental, certain she was always right and righteous, and easily condemned others. 

“I found myself becoming the sort of person you wouldn’t want to be around,” she said.

Eventually, she realized what she was doing, but she had no idea how to stop walking down that path. 

“I didn’t know what to do,” she said. “Except, it became increasingly clear that I needed to turn around and go the other way.”

Turning around is an incredibly difficult experience, she said, full of admitting her wrongs over and over again. At 32 years old, she was newly divorced and unemployed — released from her first academic job at an evangelical college. It was Thanksgiving, and Bass was alone, as she was also distant from her parents. She sat down on the concrete floor of her garage-turned-apartment, and she cried.

“I had no company,” she said. “No feast. No table to share. No one who would care if I died.”

Then, she heard a voice, from John 14:31. 

Diana Butler Bass closes the 2021 Interfaith Lecture Series with her talk, “Get Up and Go On — Together,” Wednesday in the Amphitheater. KRISTEN TRIPLETT / STAFF PHOTOGRAPHER

“I will not leave you orphaned,” she read. “I am coming to you. Do not let your heart be troubled, and do not be afraid. Rise up. Let us be on our way.”

Bass’ resilience speaks to reaching an end, admitting mistakes, and starting over from scratch, she said. She presented these examples because she thinks people have too narrow a definition for the word “resilience.”

“I hope they’ve invited you into thinking about your own stories of resilience, because there isn’t really a single definition of resilience,” she said. “There is not only one way of resilience.”

Bass is more concerned with answering the question: Which path of resilience is called for at any given time? Two spiritual practices can help answer it, she said. 

The first practice is discernment, or the capacity to understand the moment one is in, she said. 

Quakers, she said, have group practices where they try to answer where they are right now.

“Discernment gives us that ability to be able to read the moments of our lives, and if we read the moments of our lives then perhaps we can figure out which path of resilience is best,” she said. “You might need others to help you there.”

The second practice is wisdom, something that people may not see as a practice but something that people acquire through age and experience, she said. 

“Wisdom emerges from bringing other moments to bear on the current moment,” she said. “Wisdom entails knowing the answer to this question: Where have I been?”

Wisdom can also answer which moments of life contributed to understanding one’s self and one’s community, she said.

Referencing Colum McCann’s Interfaith Lecture on Tuesday, Bass said these questions are about knowing one’s story. 

“Our lives are resilience,” she said. “Our capacity to know which path of recovery to take is dependent upon the stories we have already written.”

She then shared a few stories.

First was a personal story of an 18-year-old she met at the Wild Goose Festival in Hot Springs, North Carolina, one of Bass’ favorite places to visit in the summer — along with Chautauqua. 

The woman ran into Bass outside of the green room. She was shaking, holding a copy of Bass’ book A People’s History of Christianity, and she asked Bass to sign it. 

Bass happily agreed, and asked her where was from.

“She was from a town of 300 people in the very buckle of the Bible belt,” Bass said.

The woman saved every cent she made from her after-school job so she could take a bus halfway across the country to this festival. It was the first time she ever left her town, a place where everyone believes the exact same way — questions are forbidden, Bass said.

“She said, ‘I had to see if you were real,’ ” Bass said. “I assured her I was very real. I asked her what she was going to do, and she said, ‘Well, I guess I’ll just go back home. But it won’t be the same.’ ”

Bass remembers this story every time she thinks of complaining about her church. She remembers that woman who sacrificed her savings to ask about her own faith. 

“That is heroism of the everyday,” she said. “That is resilience that doesn’t make it on the evening news.”

Everyone has a personal story of resilience, ranging from illness to surviving genuine threats, she said. Each one creates a life of resilience and the capacity for one to practice wisdom, she said, and when one faces a tough task again, they can call on that wisdom.

Bass then turned to history, specifically the Spanish influenza pandemic a century ago. Her husband’s grandparents were young with two children when they all were infected. Both of their children died, Bass said. 

When the flu receded in the early 1920s, they grieved over the loss of half their family. They agreed, however, to try again, not knowing if the same disease might return and steal from them once more. 

Among the new family was her husband’s mother. If her parents never tried again, Bass’ husband would have never been born, she said, nor Bass’ own daughter. 

“That’s what history does for us — it gives a sense of wisdom and resilience where we can look back and say, ‘Yes, that was horrible, and look at what happened as a result of it,’ ” she said. 

Both well-known history and personal history show humans’ resilience, she said.

Faith stories, too, demonstrate resilience, she said. She referenced Hagar going into the desert with her son, trusting God would help them find something; Israel wandering in the wilderness; and several stories of people in exile fearing everything was at an end, for examples.

“Muslim, Jewish and Christian traditions are stories about resilience, except we usually don’t call them that. We usually call them faith,” she said. “We can talk about resilience in medical terms and in terms of spiritual practice, in terms of storytelling and all kinds of terms that make sense in our secular world. But ultimately, it leads us back to the simplest and most profound thing: resilience.”

Resilience makes Bass think of two words: hope and love. She said her husband’s grandparents are a story of hope.

“Hope separates itself from resilience just a little bit by saying, ‘You’re not going to get back what you had, but there’s still a possibility of joy, of life, of true change, of overcoming what brought you to this place in the very beginning.’ ” 

Resilience also teaches people to love themselves in the same way God loves people, she said. 

“Resilience involves loving others,” she said. “To be able to reach out and pull others up when they can’t get up for themselves, to be there to listen and hopefully have someone who will listen when we need those ears, when we need that community to say, ‘Keep going. Keep going. Keep going.’ ”

It also can allow people to spread enough compassion so nobody has to suffer the same thing again, she said. 

“That’s the best I can help you with this week,” she said. “As Chautauqua comes to an end for this year — this terribly, truly awful year — the end of it is faith, hope and love abide. And the greatest of these is love.”

Author McCann discusses storytelling as ‘ultimate act of resilience’

082421_Colum_McCann_DM_04

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon and co-founder of Narrative 4, delivers his lecture “Resilience: The Life You Find in Your Stories …” Tuesday in the Amphitheater. DAVE MUNCH / PHOTO EDITOR

Albert Einstein wrote Sigmund Freud a letter in the summer of 1932 regarding humans’ lust for hatred. 

“Do you think it would be possible to guide the psychological development of man so it can become resistant to the psychosis of hate and destruction, thereby delivering civilization from the menace of war?” he wrote. 

Colum McCann, reading the letter to his Amphitheater crowd, responded with, “Gulp.”

At this moment in time, both Einstein and Freud felt they had a moral responsibility to speak out about the impending doom of the world, said McCann, a National Book Award-winning fiction author. 

Freud responded with an admission that people didn’t really like the things he told them, and he didn’t think it was possible for humanity to rid itself of aggressive tendencies, McCann said. 

Freud did have an idea, though.

“The desire to end war is not impossible,” Freud wrote. “Anything that creates emotional ties between human beings will inevitably counteract war. What should be sought should be a community of feeling and a methodology of the instincts.”

So began McCann’s Interfaith Lecture 1 p.m. Aug. 24 in the Amp. The lecture, titled “Resilience: The Life You Find in Your Stories,” the second of three Interfaith Lectures themed “Resilience.” 

McCann is a cofounder of Narrative 4, which he described as a global nonprofit that uses storytelling to create empathy and compassion among young people around the world. He believes stories and storytelling is one thing that, as Freud said, can create a community of feeling.

Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon and co-founder of Narrative 4, delivers his lecture “Resilience: The Life You Find in Your Stories …” Tuesday in the Amphitheater. DAVE MUNCH / PHOTO EDITOR

In one example, Narrative 4 gathered high school students from two seemingly complete different worlds. 

One high school represented the south Bronx. McCann said it was one of the poorest congressional districts in the country. They met with students in eastern Kentucky, near Hazard in Floyd County. 

“In the Bronx, you have a school that’s mostly Black and/or immigrant,” he said. “It’s mostly blue. It’s almost exclusively urban. In Kentucky, you have mostly white and/or Cherokee, mostly considered to be red and definitely mostly rural. These young people seem to us sometimes, and certainly to themselves at first, to be very distant from one another. In fact, they were often scared to be seen together and to meet one another.”

All the students met in rural Appalachia — the hollers, as kids from the Bronx would learn to say. Once they began sharing stories with each other, they realized they weren’t so entirely different.

“The fear faded, their imaginations expanded, and they began to see the world in an altogether different way,” McCann said.

One pair of students was a young woman who wore a hijab from the Bronx and a young man who owned a pickup truck, carrying in the back a rifle and a Confederate flag flying in the wind. The two looked at each other, unsure of how to ever understand one another, McCann said. 

Then, they begin to talk. The woman, under her hijab, had AirPods and was listening to the same music the man liked. She then learned that he carries a rifle because his family is poor, so he occasionally hunted rabbits — she didn’t realize that white people could be poor. 

“Suddenly, all these things start coming together,” McCann said. 

The groups talked about the opioid crisis, the suicide epidemic and discovered love, relationships, family, hatred, violence, sacrifice and more, he said. They did not, McCann emphasized, talk about facts, figures or political parties. 

“The exchange highlighted what stories can possibly do,” he said. “The world gets nuanced with stories. It gets complicated. It gets muddied — beautifully muddied. Sometimes even incomprehensible. And sometimes, that incomprehensibility becomes part of the joy.”

Narrative 4 pushed the students to turn their newfound empathy into action. McCann said the organization believes stories aren’t enough if no action is taken afterward. 

Looking back at the time of Einstein and Freud, when both men lived in exile from Nazi-controlled Germany, McCann said it’s sometimes easy to think the world hasn’t changed at all.

He pointed to wars and humanitarian crises around the world, from Afghanistan to North Korea, from Sudan to Catalonia, from Syria to Pakistan. 

“With this reality of constant war, constant dislocation and this moral homelessness that we seem to have allowed ourselves to be sunken into, we have to ask: Can story have any effect at all?” he said. 

In a world that is in flux, full of rapid evolutions, people like to think they are listening to each other, McCann said. He questioned if people really were, though. 

“So much of the time it seems — not in (Chautauqua) — but maybe if you go home, so much of the time it seems we’re coming indoors,” he said. “We’re closing curtains, locking down the GPS systems in our imagination.”

Stories increasingly sound like whining, or have borders, he said. People feel they need to win an argument and be correct, he said, especially in the last couple years because of politics.

“Our empathetic possibility is being walled off,” he said. “We’ve become so atomized and so small that our lack of affection for others is sometimes astounding.”

Cynical people, he said, believe the world is a dark and dreary place, but others can show understanding to that perspective, but present something new. 

McCann humbly argued that Einstein might have missed the notion that storytelling would be the change he proposed nearly 90 years ago. 

To explain, McCann brought in a little bit of science with the principle of emergence. This principle essentially means that a multitude of any living beings are stronger together than one single living being. For example, he said one bird is beautiful, six work great together, but 600,000 birds flocking over South America have extraordinary intelligence.

When discussing the principle of emergence and emergent storytelling, he means building stories from the ground up. 

“So, not only the story of you, but the other person, too,” he said. “I’m not talking about ‘other’ in a vague ‘otherizing’ sense which can get you in trouble at universities, rightly, these days. The other can be your husband, wife, person across town, person across continents, indeed. Keep that in mind when talking about telling your story, but telling the story of someone else.”

He also said that groups of people can possess either great intelligence or stupidity and violence. 

Stories upon stories can exhibit the principle of emergence, he said. 

“In this fractious day and age, the sharing of our stories might be the only thing within our resilience that can manage to save us,” he said.

When people do begin this process, they must listen and engage with those they don’t even know or like, he said. 

“It begins in our own backyards and then spreads outwards,” he said. “Even the wounded bird that doesn’t get to the front of the queue gets carried along.”

Colum McCann, author of Apeirogon and co-founder of Narrative 4, delivers his lecture “Resilience: The Life You Find in Your Stories …” Tuesday in the Amphitheater. DAVE MUNCH / PHOTO EDITOR

Students from the Bronx and Kentucky shared this experience by retelling each other’s stories, he said. A student from the Bronx would become a student from Kentucky, and vice versa.

“We didn’t demand from these young people that their stories would win any argument,” he said. “We didn’t demand that they would be didactic. We didn’t demand they would say the South did this or the north did this or slavery caused that. They didn’t want to talk about that. They wanted to talk about personal things. From that, the change rose from the ground up.”

When a principal from the Bronx died of COVID-19 last summer, the Kentucky students feared it was the one they met. It wasn’t, but they still wrote a letter to the impacted school. 

McCann reported that the Kentucky teacher said this program transformed the school, and the Bronx principal said there were higher levels of attendance and graduation and lower level of conflict in her school.

Resilience is found in our lives and rediscovered in other people’s stories, he said. It’s rediscovered a third time in recounting others’ stories and quadruply in listening to the stories of others. 

“Stories are the ultimate act of resilience,” he said. “Resilience means to be able to withstand and/or to recover quickly. Resilience means to say I have existed, and I still exist.”

People do not need to be reduced to simplicity as political parties and the media do, he said. Instead, he said people need messy engagement. 

“We need to go to the furthest point we thought we could go, and then take five steps eastward, then take another 10 steps westward, redward, blueward,” he said. 

Doing so can save democracy, the United States, and the world, he said. 

He then turned to his recent book, Apeirogon, and the book’s main characters, based on real people: Rami Elhanan, an Israeli, Jew and graphic artist, and Bassam Aramin, a Palestinian, Muslim, former prisoner and activist.

Both men lost a daughter due to the Israel/Palestine conflict, and both found connection through that loss. McCann was touched by their story. The book’s title means a shape with a countably infinite number of sides.

“You can be a part of the shape; exist in the finite and also exist in the infinite,” he said. “We all matter.”

Apeirogon is divided into 1,001 fragments, a nod to One Thousand and One Nights, a collection of Middle Eastern folk tales, he said. He closed his lecture reading from the 1,001st in his book. 

In it, he describes the two men going to meet each other and people from all over the world going to listen on a chilly, foggy day in late October. 

“(They were going) to listen to the stories of Bassam and Rami and to find, within their stories, another story, a song of songs, discovering themselves,” he read. “You and me in the stone tiled chapel where we sit for hours, eager, hopeless, buoyed, confused, cynical, complicit, silent, our memories imploding, our synapses skipping in the gathering dark, remembering while listening to all of those stories that are yet to be told.”

Tree of Life Rabbi Hazzan Myers opens week with story of congregation’s resiliency following trauma of mass shooting

082321_Hazzan_Jeffrey_Meyers_DM_01

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Rabbi Hazzan Jeffrey Myers, rabbi and cantor at the Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh, delivers his lecture “A Ticket to Ride: The Roller Coaster of Resilience” on Monday in the Amphitheater. DAVE MUNCH / PHOTO EDITOR

Fr. O’Connor was a beloved priest with the exception of his poor oratorical skills, said Rabbi Hazzan Jeffrey Myers. 

At the end of one summer, he went to a two-week retreat in order to better his skills. At the very first sermon, a well-known priest said he had spent the best years of his life in the arms of another woman, drawing stunned faces and gasps from the crowd.

He then said it was his mother, drawing a laugh, and O’Connor knew he needed to remember that joke. 

When he returned to his church, he opened with the same joke, except he had forgotten the punch line. As seconds ticked, the crowd’s collective jaw stayed on the floor as O’Connor blurted out, “But I can’t remember who she was!” 

Myers said O’Connor never preached again, and that he was not resilient. 

This was how Myers opened Week Nine’s Interfaith Lecture Series, themed “Resilience.” His lecture, titled “A Ticket to Ride: The Roller Coaster of Resilience,” at 1 p.m. Aug. 23 in the Amphitheater, was the first of three Interfaith Lectures in this final week of the season.

From that story, Myers turned to acknowledge that over the summer, he’s noticed two books related to trauma and resiliency have hit the New York Times Book Review’s top 10. 

“Apparently, it’s a big subject now,” he said. “But what is trauma? And what is resiliency? If there is anyone in the United States who has experienced both, I’m certainly one of the people.”

Before explaining further, Myers emphasized that he was not a mental health professional, and that his observations are from what he’s learned from professionals and those who have experienced both trauma and resiliency. He acknowledged that everyone experiences trauma at some point in life. Some traumas are minor, like breaking a bone. If one breaks a bone again later in life, they are more equipped to deal with it because they’ve gathered experience and tools to deal with it. He also compared it to a COVID-19 inoculation — it prepares the body for fighting the virus, he said.

Resiliency then comes from one’s ability to cope with trauma, he said. 

Myers himself experienced trauma and resiliency in a high-profile, severe way. On Oct. 27, 2018, when a shooter killed 11 people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, Myers was leading the Shabbat services. 

“It will soon be three years since the massacre, and I continue to shake my head in disbelief at the continuous events that revolve around me, with me and through me,” he said. 

He’s managed to get through survivor’s guilt, counseling the families, and the onslaught of world media through the support of his family, friends, congregation and mental health professionals, he said. 

“I see no stigma about that,” he said. “As I recognized early on, this was too traumatic for me to manage alone. If you have a heart problem, you see a cardiologist. If you have a skin problem, you see a dermatologist. If you suffer trauma, you see a mental health professional.”

As everyone suffers trauma, so too is everyone resilient, he said. He pulled out a large rubber band to demonstrate.

“My stretching this rubber band is exactly what trauma is — to stretch beyond the norm,” he said. “We revert back to what we were before the stretch, which is resilience. Place this rubber band in the freezer for several hours, and then try to stretch it. It will not stretch far, if at all. In fact, it might break.”

Typically, the rubber band can stretch and return, which is resilience, he said. When it’s frozen, or one doesn’t have the right skills or tools to handle the trauma, defrosting is necessary, which may be seeking out professional help.

Prior experiences can help cope with trauma, but sometimes not, he said. Sometimes, the rubber band snaps. 

“I’m grateful that up until now my rubber band has not snapped,” he said. “It has certainly been stretched farther than I thought possible. And, sometimes, it takes a while for it to resume its original shape.”

Some days are great until a sensory input sends it tumbling, he said. For him, it can be another mass shooting, but of the 411 mass shootings in the United States this year, as of July 31, not every single one retraumatized him, he said. 

Rabbi Hazzan Jeffrey Myers, rabbi and cantor at the Tree of Life Congregation in Pittsburgh, delivers his lecture “A Ticket to Ride: The Roller Coaster of Resilience” on Monday in the Amphitheater. DAVE MUNCH / PHOTO EDITOR

“Sometimes, one can,” he said. “I do not watch the news of a mass shooting as the activity brings me back to Oct. 27, 2018, and it can be draining to relive that day over and over.”

When he learns of a mass shooting, it can take his rubber band several hours to return to its normal shape, he said, but he credits this quick restorative period to his mental health professionals and tools he’s acquired — though he cautioned that what works for him may not work for others.

“Part of my resilience is the determination that I will not permit the shooter at Tree of Life to claim another victim,” he said. 

Instead, since that day, he’s been on a new mission to remove hate speech from society, he said.

A couple weeks after the Tree of Life shooting, Myers was set to give a speech in front of a huge crowd, which included celebrities. He had no idea what to say even as he walked up on the stage, so he prayed for what to say. 

In his speech, he noted how everyone was taught of four-letter words that were obscenities, and he said “hate” should be added to the list. 

“When people use this word, ultimately their language is emotional and leads to violent actions, such as a massacre in my synagogue,” he said. “If you just don’t like something, then say, ‘I don’t like it!’ ”

He understands that this act will not solve the country’s or world’s problems, but hopes it is a start. 

“Part of resilience is post-traumatic growth,” he said. “The growth of new shoots from the tree that was severely damaged on Oct. 27; the ability to discover hidden skills and abilities that created a newer version of the previous me.”

Myers said people have much more in common than divisions, as leaders of all faiths and organizations helped him post-Oct. 27, although he had only moved to Pittsburgh a few months prior. 

Trauma can appear at unwelcome and unexpected times, he said, and resilience has taught him how to let trauma know it is unwelcome. No matter how many times it’s kicked away, it will crawl back again, he said. 

The shooting and resilience, in some ways, helped Myers prepare for this pandemic, he said. As the Tree of Life synagogue was no longer a prayerful place, he said, citing the prophet Ezekiel, congregants moved to another nearby synagogue. 

“We were a displaced congregation, and despite how warmly we were welcome, everyone desperately wanted to go to their home synagogue, which we could not do,” he said. 

Then, when the risk of COVID-19 forced everyone online, everyone was displaced again. He reaffirmed to his congregation that they had existed since 1864, and the Jewish community was over 4,000 years old.

Part of resilience is post-traumatic growth. The growth of new shoots from the tree that was severely damaged on Oct. 27; the ability to discover hidden skills and abilities that created a newer version of the previous me.

—Rabbi Hazzan Jeffrey Myers
Rabbi And Cantor,
Tree Of Life Synagogue, Pittsburgh

“Judaism is not about a location,” he said. “It is about what is in your heart that binds us together.”

In his livestreams, he could see his congregants, but he noticed an erupting line of hearts shooting up from the bottom of the screen. They lined up perfectly with the candles behind him, he said. 

“I had to take a breath and pause and utter a ‘Thank you, God,’ for God’s divine guidance,” he said. “It was at that moment I knew that, together, we would get through our second displacement, for I saw my congregation’s resiliency right there on the computer screen.”

Either one will find resiliency or it will find someone, he said. Psalms helped show him resiliency in the days following Oct. 27 when, for the first time in his life, Myers lost his prayer voice. 

He was at another school where his wife teaches, and as they stood to recite prayers, Myers couldn’t find words to say out loud. He cried to God for help, and God’s answer was Psalms, he said. 

Myers read through all 150 later that day, and Psalm 121 stood out to him, which shows a recognition that God is the one who can provide help, and one who trusts in God can trust he will be protected. 

He’s recited this poem in Hebrew every morning since then. 

“It gives me hope and confidence for the day,” he said. 

Soon, Myers included Psalms into the conclusion of Friday evening services, initially using Psalm 27, which he recites at the beginning of Rosh Hashanah and in the middle of Sukkot. He read its final two verses to the Amp.

“Yet I have faith that I should truly see God’s goodness in the land of the living. Hope in God; be strong, take courage and hope in God,” he read.

He recognized these psalms, written by King David 3,000 years ago, hold eternal power against trauma. 

“For me, King David’s resilience has become my resilience,” he said. “His words encourage me that even during difficult times, I can endure. I can move past it, and I do. And the thing about resilience is once you’ve experienced it, you are poised for further moments of resilience.”

Myers does have days where he cannot fight against trauma, he said. 

On April 27, 2019, one person was killed in a synagogue shooting in a San Diego suburb. 

“I did not have the words to describe my response at that moment, as I do not have the words to describe my response right now,” he said. “But to say it was bad was a severe understatement. My wife quickly turned off the TV, and suffice to say, I was an inconsolable wreck for the remainder of the evening.”

He thanked God there was only one person killed, as he knew there could have been more, he said. The shooter in San Diego was inspired by the Pittsburgh shooter, and Myers had no way of comprehending that. 

“Fortunately, with time and care, I worked my way through it and moved forward,” he said. “I share this with you because there will be times in our lives when we are just not very resilient, and to reassure you that it is OK. … The most important lesson is to identify the trauma and to get the proper help for it.”

He’s not had another experience like that yet, but he knows it is possible. Myers surprises himself with his own resiliency, but said everyone has the same ability.

“It is in our DNA; evolving over time to face the challenges of being a human in a world that sometimes lacks humanity,” he said. “The fact that you are seated here today asserts your resilience, for a pandemic can most certainly challenge your resilience.”

Myers wasn’t sure why God wanted him in Pittsburgh after spending his life on the east coast, but now, he said, he understands. 

“I truly believe that God wanted me in Pittsburgh to help my community pick up the pieces afterwards,” he said. “God did not call the shooter to Tree of Life. The shooter made that decision on his own. I chose to stay. Sometimes, my wife will ask me why I answered the call. I answered the call because when God calls, you don’t send God to voicemail.”

When Tree of Life reopens, it will be a model of resilience to the world, he said. 

“Our resilience will help other communities to find their own resilience, because that is what it means to be a member of the human race,” he said. 

Resilience opens a new version of ourselves, he said. He read a quote from Bram Stoker’s Dracula that referenced humans’ resiliency and that trauma can be removed by any way, including death.

Myers said death was more exaggerated than he preferred, but agreed that removing trauma through resilience is part of humans’ DNA, and that people come away with hope and enjoyment. As a person experiences this over and over, they grow in confidence, he said.

“Success breeds success,” he said. “Resilience breeds more resilience.”

He closed with a critique on the celebration of life. When someone is born, there are celebrations, but that is not as common with death. Although he believes people should continue to celebrate births, people should celebrate deaths to a higher extent. He compared it to a ship at sea, where humans face storms and stiff waters, in addition to calm waters and sunny skies. When a ship returns from sea, it should be celebrated more than when it departed because it survived the journey. 

“As grand as our birth is, our pending end should be even grander — because we made the sacred journey, and that should be celebrated,” he said. “And we did so because we are resilient.”

To close series, Fuller Theological’s Murphy attempts to answer ‘Are we our souls?’

081821_Nancey_Murphy_DM_01

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Nancey Murphy, senior professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary, speaks Wednesday in the Amphitheater to close the Week Eight Interfaith Lecture Series theme of “The Human Soul: Our Ineffable Mystery.” DAVE MUNCH/PHOTO EDITOR

Words from different times and places can mean something entirely different, and the word “soul” varies more than most, said Nancey Murphy at the top of her Interfaith Lecture on Wednesday in the Amphitheater. 

Closing Week Eight’s theme, “The Human Soul: Our Ineffable Mystery,” Murphy also opened with an edit to her title in order not to sound too self-assured, she said. She instead called her lecture “Are We Our Souls?: Multi-Aspect Monism in Christian Thought.”

Murphy, a senior professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, California, wanted to focus on the ideas of the soul and Spirit — this word is capitalized when Christians make a distinction of the third person of the holy trinity. 

In the first section of her lecture, Murphy wanted to focus on radically different conceptual schemes, she said. 

She began with philosopher Paul Feyerabend’s examination of Greek art in the Homeric period, which she said was called Archaic. 

“If you’ve seen Archaic Greek or Egyptian or other ancient pottery artworks and so forth, you’re liable to see a profile with the nose sticking out to one side … but the eyes have been moved around to the side of the face,” she said. 

With Homeric literature, Feyerabend summarized Greeks as having lived in a world of paratactic aggregates, which Murphy said is when the elements of such an aggregate are all given equal importance. 

“There is no hierarchy,” she said. “No part is presented as benign, subordinate to or determined by others.” 

A list of Homeric dialogue defined the word psuche, or soul, she said. 

“It’s used to speak of what is risked in battle or what is lost in death,” she said. “This hardly fits with the description of the session of being of another dimension beyond the physical plane.”

She then turned to classic Greek scholarship, which she described as far removed from the Archaic period as possible. 

“For Plato, there is another dimension or realm above this physical one, the realm of Forms,” she said, emphasizing the capitalization of Form to indicate it shouldn’t be taken in a contemporary sense. “Forms were of a much higher degree of reality than earthly things.”

Murphy described earthly things as imperfect copies of transcendent Forms, and the soul is held captive within the body. 

When analyzing between the classical and Archaic worldview, she said it was important to remember to combine such ideas in the same framework, and her accounts of these two world views was too short. 

Nancey Murphy, senior professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary, speaks Wednesday in the Amphitheater to close the Week Eight Interfaith Lecture Series theme of “The Human Soul: Our Ineffable Mystery.” DAVE MUNCH/PHOTO EDITOR

She then turned to the question: Are we souls? 

“My main aim is to present an alternative to Christian theology to body-soul dualism,” she said. 

Although she said new findings and neuroscience provided motivation for studying monism versus dualism, she wanted to give evidence that the Christian Bible does not teach dualism.

“Those who think Christians are only questioning dualism now because of neuroscience are unaware of the fact that the dualism physicalism issue is already more than a century old in Christian Biblical studies and church history,” she said.

The 1997 book Death of Death (Resurrection and immortality in Jewish Thought), by Neil Gillman, argues the only part of human nature which fits the Jewish understanding of life and relationship to God is a physicalist account, Murphy said. 

This account is aligned with an emphasis on bodily resurrection in the afterlife, not immortality of the soul, Murphy said.

“He points out that the ancient concept of the soul was not a concept of an immaterial thing,” she said. 

Nephesh, the Hebrew word for soul, is not restricted to the physical space one’s body fills, she said. 

“When God is effectively speaking through a prophet, God is literally present through that prophet,” she said. 

She said human souls can be similarly present in others when they are having an effect.

“I am who I am because of my relationships to others,” she said.

Until recently, Murphy believed humans were complex bodies that developed capacities over time, such as language, abstract concepts, reasoning techniques, emotion and so on. 

But, the Apostle Paul notes that it is only one aspect of our being, she said.

Nearly all translations of Genesis 2:7, which Ori Soltes highlighted in Monday’s Interfaith Lecture, say that God formed man from the dust of the earth and breathed into his nostrils, and several interpretations are that God breathed in his immortal form, she said. 

Nancey Murphy, senior professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary, speaks Wednesday in the Amphitheater to close the Week Eight Interfaith Lecture Series theme of “The Human Soul: Our Ineffable Mystery.” DAVE MUNCH/PHOTO EDITOR

The word soma, or body, she identified as one aspect of us and that it might be better understood as an embodiment. Humans see it as a physical embodiment because our environment is physical, she said.

“What embodiment in the next eon after the resurrection is the truly ineffable issue we’re dealing with in this series,” she said. 

Early Christians had two options of what happens at death, she said. The Hebrew book of Daniel made body resurrection a possibility and several centuries of Greek influences made an immortal soul leaving the body another, she said. 

Murphy contended that embodiment might be whatever form fits the new character of the new eon. 

“One of my favorite images of the next life is that of a wedding banquet,” she said. “We can imagine the reunion of extended families and friends conversing over a meal, but we can’t get into the biology of how the food is processed after it’s eaten.”

The accounts of the resurrected Jesus are full of inconsistencies. Paul spoke of an appearance of light and a voice, while the Gospel said Jesus was identifiable and appeared like a normal body, she said. 

“I believe that a description of the resurrected person is not literally possible,” she said. “Our language is all built on and meant for describing this physical eon.”

Although what happens in another eon is indescribable, she said we can know resurrection is about moral character.

“We are not saved out of this world, but as a part of it,” she said. “That is, it leads us to expect the entire cosmos will be transformed or recreated in the same way we expect humans to be.”

Using Bruce Greyson’s Interfaith Lecture on Tuesday, Murphy wanted to see if descriptions of near-death experiences provided a glimpse of a resurrection. 

One aspect was faster thinking, which she said might be a sample of the human brain working faster in a new dimension, while it works slowly in this one. 

Nancey Murphy, senior professor of Christian philosophy at Fuller Theological Seminary, speaks Wednesday in the Amphitheater to close the Week Eight Interfaith Lecture Series theme of “The Human Soul: Our Ineffable Mystery.” DAVE MUNCH/PHOTO EDITOR

Another was a life review where one can see all the good they did in the world, she said. Perhaps one could see a good thing they did for someone led that person to do good for five more people, something they couldn’t know before death, she said. 

There’s the common element of time not existing, and Murphy said earthly time can’t be coordinated with eternal or godly time. 

Emotional changes regarding peace and concern for others sounds like words from the prophet Isaiah, she said. 

Murphy wondered if scenes of people meeting in beautiful meadows during near-death experiences mean the whole cosmos was not transformed. Greyson did note in his lecture, though, that a problem with researching near-death experiences is people often speak in metaphors because what they saw and experienced is indescribable and are often flattened memories. 

She also raised the question of a waiting period between the time each person dies and the end of the world, noting it was a highly contentious issue during the Protestant Reformation.

Martin Luther originated the idea of a soul sleep, where people would be unconscious between death and the resurrection, eliminating the idea of a cruel purgatory, she said. Calvinists and the Catholic Church discussed a conscious wakefulness between death and the general resurrection, she said. 

Another tradition that Murphy aligns with is the radical reformation, or anabaptist. She said they had an aspective account of how Biblical anthropological terms would be used, sufficient arguments against the New Testament teaching body-soul dualism, and beliefs in a concept of soul sleep. 

“It felt as though I had started on a journey, made my long way around, then finally came home,” she said.

What happens when we die? Near-death-experience expert Greyson shares 50 years of research

081721_Bruce_Greyson_DM_03

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Bruce Greyson, author of After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond, speaks Tuesday in the Amphitheater. DAVE MUNCH/PHOTO EDITOR

There can’t be anything beyond the physical world. That’s what Bruce Greyson believed growing up in a scientific, materialistic household and into young adulthood. 

As he began psychiatric training, patients told him stories about when they nearly died, which he tried to treat with respect, but assumed could not be real. 

Then more people told him similar stories. And more. By 1975, his colleague, Raymond Moody, wrote Life After Life, a book that coined the term “near-death experience.” Greyson felt inclined as a scientist to study and research these experiences. 

Fifty years later, Greyson has published his findings in his book After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond, also the title of his Interfaith Lecture on Tuesday in the Amphitheater, part of Week Eight’s theme “The Human Soul: An Ineffable Mystery.” 

“I’ve come to appreciate over the decades how important these experiences are to the experiencers themselves, and to scientists, and to all of us,” said Greyson, who is a professor emeritus of psychiatry and neurobehavioral sciences at the University of Virginia School of Medicine.

Several problems exist in studying near-death experiences, he said. First is a biased sample, in that Greyson and other researchers relied on experiencers coming forward on their own. 

“We heard blissful accounts of surviving death and joining deceased loved ones in the afterworld,” he said. “So we assumed these blissful experiences were all there was until years later. We started interviewing everybody in the hospital with a close brush with death, and we started hearing other stories that weren’t the same. Some weren’t very blissful. Others were downright unpleasant.”

Another issue was that people didn’t have the words to describe what happened, he said. Greyson and other researchers then insisted they try metaphors. Some people described long, dark enclosed structures they traveled through to get to the other side, he said. In the West, people might call that a tunnel, while those in the East described a well or a cave.

A third problem is many people are reluctant to discuss their near-death experience, he said. Either people will be afraid of ridicule, being labeled mentally ill, or simply misunderstood. Sometimes they feel it is too sacred or personal to speak of aloud. The next problem was distinguishing these experiences between reality and fantasy.

“We have accounts now from all over the world from different cultures, as well as the Judeo-Christian culture and Hindu, Buddhist and Muslim countries; we have accounts going back from ancient Greece, Rome and Egypt which are essentially the same experience,” he said.

Regardless of religion, culture or time period, people report the same thing, Greyson said. 

“I’ve gotten lots of accounts from atheists who said, ‘I don’t believe in God, but there he was,’ ” he said.

Memories of near-death experiences, unlike other memories, remain stable throughout time. Greyson has asked some people to tell the experience again, 30 or 40 years after their first report, and the stories do not change, he said. 

“Most near-death experiencers say this experience they had was realer than real,” he said, “that what happened in this other realm or dimension was more real than talking to me right now.”

One scale that measured near-death experiences with memories of dreams, fantasies or things people thought were going to happen but didn’t, demonstrated that these experiences are often more real than memories of real events, he said. Greyson then highlighted some of the common features of near-death experiences. 

One is a consistent change in thought processes, he said. People report thinking faster and clearer than ever, no sense of time, a sudden sense of complete understanding, and a review of their entire lives, he said. Sometimes they even see life literally from other people’s perspectives. 

Greyson described a 30-year-old man named Tom whose chest was crushed when the truck he was working underneath fell on him. While recalling his entire life, he remembered being a teenager when a drunk man ran out in front of his truck.

Bruce Greyson, author of After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond, speaks Tuesday in the Amphitheater. DAVE MUNCH/PHOTO EDITOR

Tom was infuriated with the man and rolled down his window to let him know. The drunk man came over and slapped Tom across the face, and Tom got out and beat the man. In his near-death experience, Tom recalled this from the point-of-view of the drunken man. 

“He felt his nose getting bloodied, he felt his teeth going through his lower lip, he felt the humiliation of being beaten up by a teenager,” Greyson said.

Near-death experiences also involve a consistent change in feeling and emotions, he said, including an overwhelming sense of peace, well-being, joy, cosmic unity and being one with everything. They report a feeling of unconditional love from a being of light, which Greyson said they often call a divine being. Additionally, there are paranormal features. People see colors and hear sounds they never experienced on earth, including hearing things going on far away and visions of the future.

One day, Al, a man in his mid-50s, had horrible chest pain, Greyson said. After rushing to the emergency room and being evaluated, Al was prepared by doctors for an emergency quadruple bypass surgery. During the operation, he remembered leaving his body and looking down at the room, seeing his open chest and the doctor flapping his arms like a bird. 

Greyson thought this was ridiculous and didn’t believe the claim, but Al insisted. Greyson called the surgeon. The surgeon admitted that while watching and supervising assistants, he keeps his hands up to his chest and points to things using his elbows so he won’t touch anything unsterilized.

People also often report seeing another realm or dimension, meeting a mystical being and deceased loved ones. Greyson said as a psychiatrist, he is more impressed with how people’s lives change after near-death experiences. 

“I make my living trying to help people change their lives,” he said. “It’s not easy. It takes a lot of hard work over a long period of time. Then, here’s this experience, which often takes seconds or a fraction of a second, which instantaneously seems to transform attitudes, beliefs or values.” 

People often report a decreased fear of death or no fear of death whatsoever after near-death experiences, Greyson said, frightening him that these people would become suicidal. He found out, though — by interviewing everyone in his hospital with a suicide attempt — those who reached a near-death experience were now less suicidal than those who didn’t. 

“They said they came back from their near-death experience with a sense that there’s a meaning and purpose to everything,” he said. 

This same revelation does not occur for those who get close to death but do not have a near-death experience, he said. Those people, instead, are much more afraid of losing their life. 

“If a patient has a heart attack and the doctor says, ‘I want you to stop smoking, give up fatty foods,’ the patient says, ‘OK, I don’t want to die,’ ” Greyson said. “If the doctor tells a near-death experiencer that if they don’t give that up they’re going to die, they say, ‘Yeah, so?’ ”

Near-death experiencers also report a decreased need for material possessions, power, prestige, fame and competition, he said, noting they still enjoy them, but are not addicted like many people. Greyson shared one study that showed highly significant changes in attitudes toward spirituality, attitudes toward death, quests for meaning and attitudes toward life. The same study showed, to a lesser extent, changes in concern for others, self-acceptance and concern for worldly goals. The only things that didn’t change were a sense of religiousness and concern for global and societal issues, he said.

An enhanced sense of spirituality is another common effect of near-death experiences. People may still enjoy going to church, he said, but they often report that the God in their near-death experience was much bigger and different than the God taught in church. 

With spirituality, people feel much more compassionate to others, seeing everyone as connected, he said, relating it back to the golden rule. 

Bruce Greyson, author of After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond, speaks Tuesday in the Amphitheater. DAVE MUNCH/PHOTO EDITOR

Tom, who beat up the drunk man, realized he was no different from him — they were connected. 

“He made (Tom) realize the golden rule is not just a guideline,” Greyson said. “It’s a law of nature.”

Scientists do try to measure spiritual growth, but Greyson qualified none as being that great. Yet one chart showed people who have a near-death experience show high spiritual growth compared to those who almost died but didn’t report a near-death experience. Neither group had a difference in spiritual decline. Better religious well-being, or one’s relationship to the divine, was shown as highly correlated to near-death experiences, while existential well-being, or relationships with people and things, was not significantly changed. With daily spiritual experiences, such as feeling touched by a sunset or beautiful music, people before near-death experiences or getting close to death were not much different. Afterward, those with near-death experiences reported much higher spiritual connections with these daily events, Greyson said.

A similar difference exists between the two groups with a change in spiritual and religious beliefs, he said.

An objective scale of compassionate love, another part of spirituality, showed a strong correlation with near-death experiences. Those who had experiences had changes in caring for others, accepting others and a willingness to sacrifice, he said. 

“The more depth there is to the experience, the more spiritual change you feel,” he said.

Near-death experiences also bring about changes in behavior, such as changing relationships or careers.. Take Joe, a policeman who had a near-death experience (not work-related). After he was resuscitated, he realized he couldn’t work a job where he might have to shoot someone. He left the police force, went back to school and became a high school teacher.

Sometimes, people are sad or angry when they return to life.

“They say, ‘This is a miserable place to live, I was great over there, I don’t want to be back here,’” Greyson said. “Some people have problems with other people’s reactions to them. They may feel they’re ridiculed or laughed at by other people, or alternatively they may feel like they’re put on a pedestal by other people.”

Greyson said people argue that near-death experiences are either physical or spiritual. He finds these philosophical questions pointless to his role as a scientist. 

In a study that involved brain scans of nuns praying to God, parts of the brain that lit up were interpreted differently. Neuroscientists believed it was the part of the brain that produced an image of God, while the nuns thought it was the part of the brain where God talked to them. 

“My viewpoint is you can’t have one without the other,” Greyson said. 

He then addressed how the mind and brain interact. He said it’s clear the brain produces thoughts — when intoxicated, it’s harder to think clearly.

“That doesn’t happen in near-death experiences — people whose thinking is clearer than ever and can form memories when brains are not capable of doing that,” he said. 

The brain acts as a filter for the mind, he said. One common analogy is trying to listen to every single one of the thousands of radio stations at once. It would be impossible to understand what’s going on, he said, but a radio tuner can single everything down to one radio station. The brain works the same, he said. 

Similarly, eyes do not see all of the electromagnetic spectrum, but only the wavelengths that humans need to see to survive, he said. The brain evolved to focus on thoughts needed to survive, he said.

“That raises the question: What is the mind?” he said. “As a scientist, I can tell you I have no idea.”

Humans have always sensed they have a soul, spirit or life force, he said, referencing Ori Soltes’ Monday lecture. 

“It’s something we have to believe in,” Greyson said. “Near-death experiencers would say it’s not a matter of belief — it’s experience.”

Greyson then discussed if humans survive bodily death. Al could leave his body when his brain wasn’t functioning, and many say they encountered deceased loved ones. Some debunkers say it’s wishful thinking. Greyson has a counterargument. 

Jack, a 25-year-old, was admitted to the hospital with severe pneumonia and repeated respiratory arrest, Greyson said. He was at the hospital for a week and was friendly with his primary nurse. She was leaving for a long weekend, and while she was gone, Jack had another arrest where he needed to be resuscitated. 

He had a near-death experience where he ran into the nurse on vacation. She told him to go back to his body, and to tell her parents she was sorry she wrecked the red MGB. Jack woke up and tried to tell another nurse this story, who walked out of the room immediately.

“Turned out, this young nurse had taken the weekend off to celebrate her 21st birthday,” Greyson said. “Her parents surprised her with the gift of a red MGB. She got excited, jumped in the car, took it for a drive, lost control and crashed into a telephone pole and died instantly.”

It was impossible for Jack to know she died, or how. But he met her in his near-death experience, which occurred after her death. Something was still alive and could communicate with Jack, Greyson said. In other stories, people encounter loved ones who died decades ago. 

Bruce Greyson, author of After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond, speaks Tuesday in the Amphitheater. DAVE MUNCH/PHOTO EDITOR

Greyson came back to the problem of metaphors. People cannot describe the warm being of light that radiates unconditional love, but Judeo-Christians may call it God, noting it’s not the God they learned. People from other religions would not use the term “God,” he said.

“Some people who reject the word ‘God’ still believe in some all-powering force or all-powering spirit that guides us all together,” he said.

Also true of the metaphor problem, he said, is the brain cannot process what happened. One person said their memory was flattened or simplified. 

“I believe this flattening happens because the human brain cannot understand a world so much more complex and possibly so alien,” he said. “When I read about people having seen streets of gold, it’s amusing, because that would be a flattened example of a complex visual reference.”

Greyson listed six things he wanted people to take away from his lecture. First is that near-death experiences are common — about 5% of people worldwide have had one. Second is that they are normal and not a sign of mental illness. Third is that profound aftereffects must be acknowledged and addressed. Fourth is that the mind can function independently of the brain, meaning fifth, the mind may function beyond death. 

Sixth, humans are all interconnected.

“Near-death experiencers, as Tom said, see this golden rule not as a rule we’re supposed to follow, but as a law of nature,” Greyson said. “Living in concert with it makes life much more meaningful and much more fulfilling.” 

Georgetown’s Soltes gives history of soul to open week

081621_Ori_Soltes_DM_05

MAX ZAMBRANO – STAFF WRITER

Ori Z. Soltes, teaching professor at the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University, delivers his lecture “What Are We? Three Early Visions and Versions of the Soul” Monday in the Amphitheater. DAVE MUNCH / PHOTO EDITOR

Georgetown University theology, art history, philosophy and political history professor Ori Z. Soltes took the Amphitheater stage on Aug. 16 to discuss the soul, one of his many areas of expertise. 

Soltes, who has authored over 280 books, articles, exhibition catalogues and essay and served as Chautauqua theologian in 2007, opened Week Eight’s Interfaith Lecture Series, “The Human Soul: An Ineffable Mystery,” with his lecture titled “What Are We? Three Early Visions and Versions of the Soul,” though he added a fourth vision. 

He reassured his audience, early and throughout, that the beginning of knowledge usually brings an awareness that one doesn’t know, which can be painful for some and invigorating for others. 

Egypt

Ancient Egyptians’ concept of the soul is complex, with seven different parts that have overlapping traits, Soltes said.

The most common of these is the ba, or personality, which is depicted in Egyptian art as a bird hovering over the body that then moves on after death, he said.

“It decides, you decide — it’s in part dependent on how you live your life whether you will remain forever and ever thereafter in this other spiritual reality,” he said. “Or, you may decide, it may decide, circumstances may decide you come back in a newly incarnate form.”

Ironically, pharaohs did not have the same options as ordinary Egyptians because the pharaoh was understood as a god incarnate, he said. When the pharaoh died, the ba went to the successor and so on. Ordinary Egyptians, rather, may not come back again and move on to the other realm, he said.

The ba comes from a heaven called nut, he said. 

“On the other side of many coffins, you have a depiction of nut as this kind of bluish, skyish being with four limbs in the four directions — east, west, north and south — and completely (covered) with myriad, myriad stars,” he said. 

These stars weren’t just little dots, but individual and distinct to represent souls, he said. 

“Likely, it is the individual souls who are the ancestral spirits of the one who is mummified within that coffin who is looking at eternity,” he said.

The ba is in union with the ka, which Soltes called the desire aspect of the soul and moral sensibility.

“It’s all animated by another aspect of the soul called khu, who I would render as divine spark,” he said. 

The ba can be thought of as the heart, while the khu as the mind, he said. There is also the khaibit, a shadow aspect of the soul that stays between the gate of life and death, which the ba must pass by in order to reach nut or go back and reincarnate, he said. 

When bodies were mummified in ancient Egypt, the lungs, stomach, intestines and liver were preserved in jars, but the heart was left inside the body, he said. 

“The heart is understood to be so intimately connected to the body that it can’t be extracted,” he said. “If you extract it from that mummified body, somehow something would be amiss in what happens to the ba, which is an aspect of the soul which has a body connection.”

Genesis

Genesis 2:7 – “And God blessed the seventh day and made it holy, because on it he rested from all the work of creating that He had done. The Lord God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.”

Soltes opened his second section with reference to this passage. Prior to it, in Genesis 1:27, the creature, Adam, was said to be created in God’s image, he said. In Genesis 2:1, we know God created the universe in six days and rested on the seventh — a number deeply important to the Egyptians, Soltes said. 

A difference exists — God is a singular being in Christianity, while Egypt’s story is much more complicated, he said.

The breath of life described in Genesis 2:7 is known as neshama in Hebrew, translating to soul or spirit. The ground, or earth, in Hebrew is called adamah, hence Adam. The Latin word for soul, anima, can be used to describe Adam as animated, or alive, he said. 

Later in the Bible, though, comes the word nephesh, another translation of soul that Soltes said is similar to the Egyptian ba. The Bible also laters mentions ruah, or wind, which Soltes said could imply the breath. 

The meaning of all this does not come from the Bible, but rather through interpretations of it, he said. 

“In the understanding that evolved into Judaism, Christianity and Islam, this breathing, this neshama, breathed into this cloud of earth is understood to be a soul, which is understood to be a bit of God in all of us,” he said. “That’s what these traditions understand the soul to be.”

If God is immortal and imperishable, then so too are humans who have God within them, Soltes said about these faiths.

Another important aspect of the soul to these traditions is free will, he said. In the story of Adam and Eve eating the forbidden apple, Soltes described it as God telling Adam, before Eve was created, not to eat the apple. Adam then incorrectly interpreted this to Eve, telling her not to touch the apple.

“How could they disobey God’s command unless they had free will?” asked Soltes. 

Free will was never considered in ancient Egypt, he said. 

Greeks

When Odysseus, in The Odyssey, is at the edge of reality, he is able to open a passage between the living and the dead, Soltes said. 

There, he is reunited with his deceased mother, and he tries to embrace her multiple times, unable to each time. 

Greeks’ understanding of the soul is that something remains that looks like someone is alive, but there is no substance, he said. 

Odysseus also meets Achilles, who he assumes must be having a great afterlife given all his praise during life. 

Ori Z. Soltes, teaching professor at the Center for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University, delivers his lecture “What Are We? Three Early Visions and Versions of the Soul” Monday in the Amphitheater. DAVE MUNCH / PHOTO EDITOR

“Achilles ruefully said, ‘I would rather be the poorest man on earth, a slave to someone (who) doesn’t own a stitch of property, than be king of all the underworld,’ ” Soltes said. “The Greek sense at that point of what it is that remains is something remaining in great discomfort. To have my bodily forms but not my bodily functions is a source of unhappiness.”

This perspective shifted with Socrates. Socrates was sentenced to death for impiety of the gods and corruption of the youth — essentially, he continuously asked questions that those in power were unable to answer, frustrating them, Soltes said.

Socrates was excited to die, though, because he believed the soul was immortal, Soltes said. Furthermore, he believed the soul was the better part of humans. 

This is completely opposite to The Odyssey, in which the ghost of Achilles wished he had lived a much longer life.

“Socrates can’t wait to be deprived of the body, which he finds an impediment to what his soul has been doing his whole life — to which we infer by soul he means something like mind — because he’s been inquiring through his whole life what is truth, what is virtue, what is justice, what is love, what is friendship, what is good,” Soltes said.

In death, Socrates believed he would no longer be impeded by physical barriers like food, drink, sleep, sex or going to the bathroom, Soltes said.

When Plato was alive several hundred years later, he used Socrates as a mechanism for getting at issues old and new, Soltes said. 

Three components of the soul are brought up here, from pure reason, or logos, to the opposite part of the soul, which is desire. In the middle is a component that deals with emotion and honor, he said.

“That middle state also mediates against doing crazy things that I have an appetite to do, or being robotic or being governed entirely by reason,” he said. “I think both Socrates and Plato very clearly understand that we are hardly a species governed by reason alone.”

Similar to these three components overlapping are the seven aspects that Egyptians believed in, though they are not the same, he said.

Greeks also believed that nobody was more powerful than fate. In The Iliad, Zeus, the most powerful Greek god, wants to save his son on the battlefield but knows that he cannot predict the outcome of his involvement, Soltes said. 

“Even Zeus has to desist from what he would like to do because of fate,” he said. “The soul, with its tripartite understanding, is understood to be devised of elements of what is predetermined and what I am free willed to make happen for myself.”

Hinduism and Buddhism

In Eastern beliefs, there is a large understanding of the Brahma, or the first god in the Hindu triumvirate, Soltes said. Some groups are more familiar with other gods in Hinduism than others, from Vishnu to Shiva to Krishna, he said. 

“If I am a Krishnite, I understand Krishna to be a constant avatar of being of Brahma, but I don’t disacknowledge all of the other manifestations,” he said. “It’s just they haven’t fully arrived as Krishna has.”

The text that describes that more succinctly is the Bhagavad Gita, or divine song, which he called a revealed text. In the Sanskrit language, this is Shruti, or that which is heard. 

Yet it’s found in Mahabharata, an epic poem that is not heard, but Smriti, or that which is remembered, he said. 

The content, he said, is a prince who has decided to go into battle to regain his throne, but then stops because he realized he was fighting against family, friends and neighbors, Soltes said. 

Krisha gives wisdom to the prince, essentially saying if he killed his cousin he would not kill the soul, but instead the body, Soltes said. 

“The truth is, the body is an illusion,” he said. “The body is what in Sanskrit is called maya. The reality of what is us is what’s called atman.”

The soul doesn’t die, but gets reincarnated in an ongoing cycle. If one does good things in one life, they will be reincarnated into a better life, and vice versa if one is bad, which is called karma

When one ends up in a condition of nirvana, or spiritual perfection, they are released, which is called moksha.

“It’s like a droplet of water that is subsumed back in the sea of being,” he said. “Once that happens, you no longer can see that droplet of water. When I achieve that condition of nirvana, I who achieves it ceases to be an I.”

Buddhism is partly built on Hinduism, he said, but the personified God, names and concepts are not involved. Consequently, Soltes said Buddhism, in a sense, is not a religion. 

“It’s not trying to tie me back to a God that is personified. … Buddha is not a God, it means enlightened,” he said. “But by having achieved enlightenment in the primary text of Buddhism, we understand he, in fact, transcends God.”

Buddha does not deny gods, but they are not where humans came from or are trying to return to; rather, it’s the sea of being, Soltes said.

What are we?

“We are what we as a species have come to believe ourselves to be, or perhaps what something other than ourselves has embedded in our consciousness,” Soltes said.

Humans have decided what we are over the course of our existence, based on egos, the brain, soul, heart, spirit, mind, God and gods. 

“We cannot know, but it’s also part of our human essence to keep on trying to know,” Soltes said. “I don’t know if that’s part of our soul or something else, but it’s certainly an ongoing process — sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.” 

1 2 3 4 5 12
Page 3 of 12