Reverend
King's Rabbi
Reverend
King's RabbiAt the entrance of a book store in my local mall is a display entitled: "Gifts Of The Heart And Soul." Most of the titles are from New Age religion. More conventional religious prescriptions such as the Bible and the Koran are stocked in the regular religion section, in the back.
Sales of New Age spirituality books have surged from over 5.6 million in l992 to over 10 million recently. Angels, messengers, and chats with God bring more direct inspiration than the word of sacred scripture. What exactly is spirituality? Journalist Doreen Carvajal describes New Age as a blend of more standard religions, while rejecting their wholes; a Buddhist stress on tolerance, Hindu belief in resurrection, and Christian emphasis on love. Mariane Williamson, highpriestess of New Age, preaches that "... there is no guilt in anyone...because only love is real. All the rest must be forgotten." Can conventional religion hold its own with this new spirituality? How are rules and traditions supposed to compete with blends and absence of guilt?
World religions scholar Huston Smith explains in an interview with Mother Jones Magazine that all religions are institutionalized spirituality. Institutions, by their very nature, cannot be as spontaneous as the original bang which created them. "Healing is wonderful," he says,"but the American medical Association! Learning is wonderful, but universities! The same is true for religion." As to New Age religion he observes: " I am not sure how much social conscience there is in New Age thinking...do New Age groups produce a Mother Teresa or a Dalai Lama?"
Should the spokespeople of standard religions simply dismiss this upstart? I think not. A woman in my congregation asked me to teach her kabbalah. I answered that kabbalah had always been a tertiary strand of Judaism without much truth value. I erred. She sought spiritual underpinnings. I should have directed her to the writings of one who although an adherent of formal religious Judaism, was the most prescient in our generation at unpeeling its inner core. Martin Luther King marched with him arm in arm at Selma. Twenty-five years after his death, his words serve as booster shots to the spiritual embedded within conventional religion. His name was Rabbi Abraham Heschel.
Abraham Heschel was my teacher at Seminary. To see him, one could mistake him for a religious leader encrusted by all the ecclesiastical formalism that Western religions present to their critics. He had a flowing beard and blessings flowed from his lips at required moments. But his legacy was to uncover in routinized ritual its spiritual spontaneity. On synagogues (or churches or mosques) - "In the pursuit of learning one goes to a library... For pure music to the concert hall...We are in need of experiencing moments in which the spiritual is as relevant and as concrete, for example, as the aesthetic. It is in the synagogue where we must try to acquire such inwardness, such sensitivity."
What Rabbi Heschel did with Judaism, Reverend King did with Christianity. He is most remembered on his birthday for his role in civil rights. But his contribution as a minister of Christianity was as important. King spoke of the Christian creeds of centuries with freshness and originality. Consoling the parents of martyred Birmingham Sunday School children who were killed by a bomb in l963, he said: "Death is not a period that ends the great sentence of life, but a comma that punctuates it to more lofty significance...God is able... to transform dark and desolate valleys into sunlit paths of inert peace."
New Age religion risks lack of substance and depth. Classical religion risks routinization and encrustization. But formal religion is irreplaceable, because only it has produced personalities like Rabbi Heschel and Reverend King who return to the original spiritual urge while simultaneously overcoming its potential hazards. For gifts to the heart and soul, the bookstore in my local mall should have featured their writings.