Two Implications About Spirituality From Terry Jones' Qur'an Burning Frenzy

A Moment in the TV Studio Malcolm Muggeridge, the English journalist, author, media personality, and satirist, wrote about the time he escorted Mother Teresa into a New York television studio so that she could be interviewed on a network morning show, “a program,” he wrote, “which helps Americans from coast to coast to munch their breakfast cereal and gulp down their breakfast coffee.”  Her interviewer for this TV show was, as Muggeridge described him, a man “with a drooping green mustache, a purple nose and scarlet hair.”

Here’s the way Muggeridge told the story.  “It was the first time Mother Teresa had been in an American television studio, and so she was quite unprepared for the constant interruptions for commercials.  As it happened, surely as a result of divine intervention, all the commercials that particular morning were to do with different varieties of packaged food, recommended as being nonfattening and non-nourishing.  Mother Teresa looked at them with a kind of wonder, her own constant preoccupation being, of course, to find the wherewithal to nourish the starving and put some flesh on [the] human skeletons [in Calcutta where she served].  It took some little time for the irony of the situation to strike her.  When it did, she remarked in a perfect audible voice:  ‘I see that Christ is needed in television studios.’  A total silence descended on all present, and I fully expected the light to go out and the floor manager to drop dead.  Reality had momentarily intruded into one of the media’s mills of fantasy – an unprecedented occurrence.”  (quoted in Gordon MacDonald, Forging A Real World Faith, p. 42)

Both Malcolm Muggeridge and Mother Teresa certainly knew that this world they were in that day, this environment of the TV studio run and operated by real people with real lives facing real issues was a real world.  But it wasn’t the whole world.  It was a world that tended to be isolated from the starving and suffering people she served every day in India – the commercials and advertisements that day revealed that truth.  In contrast, her spirituality and faith were informed every day by the realities of a bigger world where the poor, suffering, and dying existed on dirty streets and faced daily injustices and inequalities.  A world beyond the sanitized TV studio – the world of the ghettos, where the color of your skin or the level of your economics or the place of your birth determined your opportunities or lack of opportunities in life.  Mother Teresa’s spirituality compelled her to point out the reality of their limited world that day in the studio.

Muggeridge had lived most of his life as an agnostic.  But his relationship with Mother Teresa, his up close and personal witness to her passion to live out a real-world spirituality and faith that made such a radical difference in the lives of so many suffering people through the years, ended up leading him to convert to Catholicism and Christianity.

One of our great temptations is to assume that the world we live and work in is the whole world.  When that happens, our spirituality and faith become narrow and small.  Our faith and spirituality become in fact unreal – divorced from the rest of the planet.  And the irony is that that is antithetical to the true nature of spirituality and faith.

True spirituality, having a faith that is genuine and that works, has to be connected with the whole world – it has to work in the rest of the world beyond the fences & studios of our own little lives.

So we’ve started a Saturday morning series at Second Wind this month called “APPLYING YOUR SPIRITUALITY TO THIS WEEK’S GLOCAL* HOT SPOT."  Our goal is to inform our spirituality by means of seeing the rest of the world beyond our individual lives.  So each week, we’re focusing on a current issue taking place in the world (*GLOCAL = think global + act local).  What is the crisis/need/situation – what are the issues involved – who are the people involved – how is the situation being currently handled – how are we impacted?  And how does this situation inform and shape our spirituality, and how does our spirituality inform our response?

Last Saturday we looked carefully at the stunning circus surrounding Pastor Terry Jones (of the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida) and his threat to burn over 200 Qur'ans (Islam's holy scriptures) on the anniversary of 9/11.  I call it a "stunning circus" because Pastor Jones' hateful rhetoric and threats managed to provoke not just a local response but a global one, including personal statements to him by the leaders of our government including the President, the Pope, and governments across the world.  His YouTube sermons and Facebook pages went viral on the internet.  The media became obsessed and every other news story was obscured by their coverage of this one man and his tiny congregation.  In one month, he had become a global media celebrity.

The Spirituality of Interconnectedness

Let me suggest two implications for real-world spirituality from this major news event.  First, interconnectedness.  Genuine and transformational spirituality must embrace today's global reality:  nothing ever happens in isolation.  We no longer live and act in isolation – one action can cause a global stir.  We are first and foremost citizens of the world.  Which then embraces the truth that we have a responsibility to each other on a planetary scale.

Spirituality and faith are not just about me and God (or whatever label you put on your Life Source) and the rest of the world can go to hell.  Personal spirituality must include global interconnectedness and interdependence.  I must allow the "other side" of the world to help shape and inform my spiritual life.  And I must recognize that the way I live out my faith impacts the "other side" of the world, too.  Though John Donne wrote "no man is an island" several centuries ago, that paradigm is especially true today.

My sense of global citizenship profoundly shapes my spiritual life because I allow my mind and heart to open up to broader, wider, deeper possibilities and realities beyond my local world.  Mother Teresa comes into my personal studio - a place where my focus is on what cereal I'm going to have for breakfast in the morning - and interjects global reality - children and adults are dying from hunger on her streets of Calcutta.  And suddenly I'm forced to open up my spirituality by asking, What do my spirituality and faith do in response to that acute awareness and need?

The Spirituality of Honoring Others

Second, freedom and expediency.  We live in a country that honors and values religious freedom.  It's protected by our Constitution shaped by our founding fathers and mothers.  It protects the right for the Terry Jones in our midst to proclaim their message of personal and religious conviction.  Even though the city of Gainesville was refusing to give Terry Jones' congregation a fire permit to burn the Qur'ans on their property, his lawyers were reminding him that his right to burn those books was a guaranteed and protected right.  So go ahead if you are so convicted, they said.

Genuine spirituality acknowledges freedom.  Embraces it.  Celebrates it.  And it also willingly includes a caveat.  "All things are permissible," says the Christian New Testament, "but not all things are expedient.  You are allowed to do anything, but not everything is beneficial.  So don't think only of your good.  Think of others and what is best for them."  (1 Corinthians 10:23-24)

Manifesting the Divine Nature

Transformational spirituality embraces complete freedom with self-imposed limitations in order to show tangible honor and respect for the Other.  Terry Jones' worldview compels him to conquer the Other by putting his own convictions and even rights ahead of honor and respect.  Though he concludes that he is putting his honor for God ahead of all others and therefore is not compromising his faith, ironically his approach reveals a lack of understanding about the very God he feels he's honoring, "who though he [Jesus] was God, he did not demand and cling to his rights as God.  He made himself nothing; he took the humble position of a slave and appeared in human form ...."  (Philippians 2:5-7)

That's profound!  The very nature of the divine life, the very nature of divine freedom, is expressed in the context of self-imposed limitations out of honor and respect for the Other.  Terry Jones missed that nonnegotiable center of Godly living.  Exercising the freedom of his convictions was more important to him than whether they were truly beneficial to the Other as perceived by the Other.  This tends to produce a very self-centered spirituality with minimal benefit and often destructiveness to the world.

The central and core principle at the heart of every enduring spiritual tradition is what has been called The Golden Rule:  do to others only what you would want them to do to you.  Transformational spirituality uses freedom to show honor and respect to the Other, just as you would want that same honor and respect shown to you.  What a profound contrast the two spiritualities of Mother Teresa and Rev. Terry Jones are!  This isn't about having to agree with everyone.  It is about honoring and showing care toward others even in the midst of our disagreements.  Which of the two spiritualities would you like someone in your world possessing?

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Developing A Faith That Works, 5: Faith, Vision, and How You See the Universe

[Thanks for SHARING this blog with people who might be interested!  Hit the button on the right to subscribe or to share the post] We've been talking in this series about the nature of faith and spirituality - how faith is something more than simply believing doctrinal statements about Reality, God, and life - it's about the heart, an experience that goes deeper than the mind and thoughts and impacts the deepest part of our selves and works itself out in acts of compassion and love and unselfish service.  We've seen that the original words for faith describe more than reason and propositional beliefs (read the last several blog posts to see the whole picture here).  Fiducia is about a relaxed, worry-free trust and confidence in God.  Fidelitas emphasizes a deep loyalty, allegiance, and faithfulness in heart, soul, mind, and body to God - a desire and choice to stay on the journey no matter what.  And Visio is vision, a way of seeing – a way of seeing “what is,” of seeing the whole - a choice to see Reality, God, the Sacred as life-giving and nourishing (as opposed to hostile and threatening or indifferent).  So let's unpack Visio a bit more and notice how vision (how you see the whole) impacts personal faith and spirituality.

Faith As Vision (Seeing What Is)

There's an ancient story about Jesus and a blind man that illustrates the nature of faith as Visio and how that impacts life:

^35-37Jesus came to the outskirts of Jericho. A blind man was sitting beside the road asking for handouts. When he heard the rustle of the crowd, he asked what was going on. They told him, "Jesus the Nazarene is going by."  ³⁸He yelled, "Jesus! Son of David! Mercy, have mercy on me!"

³⁹Those ahead of Jesus told the man to shut up, but he only yelled all the louder, "Son of David! Mercy, have mercy on me!"

⁴⁰Jesus stopped and ordered him to be brought over. When he had come near, Jesus asked, "What do you want from me?"  ⁴¹He said, "Master, I want to see again."  ^42-43Jesus said, "Go ahead—see again! Your faith has saved and healed you!" The healing was instant: He looked up, seeing—and then followed Jesus, glorifying God. Everyone in the street joined in, shouting praise to God. (Luke 18)

Notice the contrasting visions of Reality, God, and life between the crowd and the blind man.  Placed in the context of theologian H. Richard Niebuhr's description of the 3 ways of seeing "the Whole" - Reality and Life (as I described in my last blog post) - it's interesting to see how those differing "visions" play out in this story.

THE CROWD	THE BLIND MAN
Who Jesus is:  the Nazarene – a local religious dignitary at best; so he's being seen as too busy to help a blind man; plus this view says that blindness is a punishment from God so why would a religious leader help?  The blind man is under divine judgment.	Who Jesus is:  Son of David – a designation for Messiah, chosen of God; Jesus is God's representative.
How Jesus will respond:  don’t bother him – he’s too busy, too important	How Jesus will respond:  if I can just be noticed or make myself heard, Jesus will listen and do something for me; God is on the side of sinners
The Universe:  conditional; you get only what you deserve, and you deserve only what you put it; different “layers” or stratas in life based upon worthiness, value	The Universe:  capable of giving mercy; responsive to need
Life Response:  structured and ordered – must follow by the rules of those structures – must act appropriately (keep yourself in your designated place)	Life Response:  courageous; break the rules at times when the need is greater than the system; some confidence of being heard; live life with passion and desire; express it

There are some significant implications of these contrasting visions for our faith journey:

• Notice how Jesus connects the issue of faith with “seeing” in the blind man’s experience.  In contrast to the crowd who “sees” Jesus in a very limited way (a local man, albeit a religious dignitary), this blind man, even before he’s healed of his physical blindness, in fact already “sees” – Jesus affirms to him, “You’re actually 'seeing' more than these other people who have their eyesight.”  The man’s faith in Jesus as the Chosen of God (the anointed Messiah who comes to deliver captives and bring wholeness to the broken of Israel) reveals his "enlightenment" and ability to "see."  This man’s “vision” of Jesus is as one from God who will bring him healing or at the very least is interested in his well-being and state in life.  If nothing else, Jesus will at least give him some alms for his next meal.  His view of God’s Kingdom is one of well-being, being nourished and sustained – the God of this Kingdom is gracious.  And this kind of faith empowers the man with courage, with boldness, with persistence and tenacity in the face of obstacles and social rejection.  The point illustrated here is, how you “see” the whole impacts your experience!
• Jesus says to him, “Your faith has saved you and healed you!”  Those are the words for wholeness and salvation and completeness – before he has received his physical eyesight.  Seeing – vision – this kind of faith – is a matter of the heart, the perspective – a choice you make about how you want to look at life, the world, the universe, God.  You may not be able to prove it all, but you choose to live with a paradigm of grace, confidence, compassion, and self-forgetfulness – a belief in God as a gracious, supportive, compassionate, faithful Force in your life that empowers you to not live in fear, anxiety, uncertainty, and insecurity.  One whom you’re willing to follow even when you might not feel all the reality of it.  It’s still truth to you and you shape your life around it.  As Neibuhr said, How we see the whole radically affects how we respond to life!

So here are some personal questions for your reflection:

1. Where are you in the three differing views of Reality Niebuhr describes (see my last blog post) with your VISION for Life and Faith?  Which “reality” tends to be what you SEE?  Why?
2. What do you tend to do to cultivate that VISION?
3. In this series, we’ve talked about FAITH as confident trust, faithfulness/loyalty, and vision of a gracious God. Which of those words for faith do you relate to the most (tends to be your "normal" faith experience)?  Which one would you like to possess the most?

Conclusion

Remember Mother Teresa and how her diary reveals the deep doubts and frequent sense of abandonment by God she experienced in her life?  And yet, in the midst of all this darkness, she continued living her life, following the Way of Jesus of self-forgetfulness and abandonment to God, by giving herself tireless and compassionately to the forsaken ones in Calcutta.  In reality, she was empowered to live this powerful life because she made a choice to “see” all of Life, including her faith in God and her view of others, in the context of goodness and graciousness.  She made a commitment to that Vision.

In an undated diary entry written to Jesus, she wrote, “If this brings You glory — if souls are brought to you [because of my struggling with personal darkness and pain from not feeling your Presence] — with joy I accept all to the end of my life.”

TIME magazine, in August 2007, did a cover story titled, “Mother Teresa’s Crisis of Faith,” after her diary was published.  They told the story about her encounter in 1968 with the British writer-turned-filmmaker Malcolm Muggeridge who visited Teresa. Muggeridge had been an outspoken agnostic, but by the time he arrived with a film crew in Calcutta he was in full spiritual-search mode. Beyond impressing him with her work and her holiness, she wrote a letter to him in 1970 that addressed his doubts full-bore.  It was almost like she was talking to herself and describing her own journey of faith.

She wrote:  "Your longing for God is so deep and yet He keeps Himself away from you," she wrote. "He must be forcing Himself to do so — because he loves you so much — the personal love Christ has for you is infinite — The Small difficulty you have re His Church is finite — Overcome the finite with the infinite."

Muggeridge apparently did. He became an outspoken Christian apologist and converted to Catholicism in 1982. His 1969 film, Something Beautiful for God, supported by a 1971 book of the same title, made Teresa an international sensation.  And Mother Teresa apparently heeded her own advice - she walked through the darkness by overcoming the finite with the infinite.  She chose to maintain her faith in the God of her Beloved Jesus even when she couldn't feel the love.  She chose to give the Love anyway, in acts of profound self-forgetfulness and compassion, to those who needed it.

Faith as vision chooses to see the Whole of life in a very profound way – that Life is nourishing and life-giving, that God is gracious, even in the midst of not experiencing it that way all the time.  Because in the end, that vision is the most empowering for a life of compassion, giving, and unselfish serving and blessing to the world.  Faith isn’t just a matter of the head – believing certain propositional statements about God – faith is a matter of the heart – a deliberate choosing to allow your heart to trust, to have confidence, to be faithful and loyal to the best in Life – and yes, to believe (which before modern times literally meant to belove) – to believe that God is gracious – to belove God and to belove what God beloves.  That’s the kind of faith that produces an empowering and sustaining spiritual life!

So how’s your vision today?  How about joining me in the following personal prayer.

MY PRAYER:  “If Jesus were here in front of me today and asked me what I wanted, like the blind man, I would say, ‘Master, I want to see again!’  I confess there are times when I look at life through the lens of fear, anxiety, self-preoccupation and lack of confidence.  But today I choose to see the Universe as life-giving and nourishing.  I choose to see beauty and feel wonder and awe and gratitude for life.  I choose, God, to see you as gracious and compassionate.  I choose to be willing to live beyond myself, to spend and be spent for the sake of others.  I choose to live in freedom, joy, peace, and love.  O God, I want to see!  Amen.”