December 24, 1997
Pope John Paul II
Via del Pellegrino
00120 Citta del vaticano
Italy
Your Holiness:
Now
that we have once again entered into the bizarre ebullience of the Christmas
Season, let me cast the first stone. I have some comments on Christianity
to place out in the open. I was not born a Catholic but nonetheless understand
your position relative to the larger Church that includes the divisions
I have been associated with. Please consider my position and what it means
to you and all Christians. I am a parishioner at St. Paul's Anglican Episcopal
Church in São Paulo, Brazil. I was baptized and confirmed in a Community
church with subdued Dutch Reform undercurrents in Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J, U.S.A.
At that time I rather accepted the position of the church prima facie
and sang sweetly as the leading boy soprano in the choir for six years,
also writing a song I sang as a solo at the Easter service in 1962.
Jesus has risen on this day
From the tomb in which he
lay
He has risen up to say
Rejoice and be thankful every
day
On this glad moment we all
say
Hallelujah let's be gay
He has risen up to say
Rejoice and be thankful every
day
However, I am stern and inexorable
by nature and my life has since led me down many roads of harsh confrontation
as a result. After this odyssey, I am now finally getting back to stating
a more deeply considered position on Christianity. I am writing to you
as one of the key authorities in the Church in order, simply, to express
a divergent perspective on Christ's teachings and the role of the church.
Considering the fact that I am a leader of a mystic group and have the
academic credentials associated with long study, I require consideration
and response from you openly vested ecclesiastical authorities.
I attend
church and am thus fully aware of the strengths and weaknesses of being
associated with a dwindling foreign congregation attempting to confront
life in a confused social ambiance like Brazil. I guess we foreigners in
Brazil all feel a bit like we stand out like sore thumbs with our scruples
and emphasis on responsibility and honor. To some extent, the Church here
in Brazil gives us solace by joining in our view that it is not the scofflaw
majority that is right in the confusion that we face every day here, but
rather, that the majority, quem leva vantagem em tudo [who take
advantage in everything], is wrong. We are also consoled by being reminded
of our responsibilities from the pulpit and by the occasional protests
about the Brazilian situation that our clergy presents. In essence, we
thank them for expressing many of our views about what is proper and right
and also about the corruption and violence and the social morass that surrounds
us.
In
any case, I would like to introduce myself to you. I am David Gordon Howe,
an American with a Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of North Carolina
and am a fellow at Escola Paulista de Medicina here in São
Paulo. I am also a pamong or guru in a Javanese kebatinan
(mystic) group called Sumarah, that I researched and practiced in Java
and on which I wrote my dissertation, Sumarah: A Study of the Art of
Living (University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1980). My
position with Sumarah honestly involves a set of responsibilities that
I take more seriously than my Ph.D. in many ways.
In
Sumarah, we practice gradual opening to Reality which is both the problem
and the divine essence of existence itself. The opening process goes through
many well-understood stages until we reach what we call sumarah
or surrender, at which point we cease to describe the experiences involved
very much in that they are a part of divine being and constitute no confusion
to us in Java. However, I have been out of Java for sixteen years now and
in the last five years I have been through many experiences that enter
into the higher and undiscussed areas of our practice which have become
something of a burden in this social environment. At this point, I have
the responsibility of disseminating the experience and getting it viewed
properly.
When
we enter full surrender to Tuhan Yang Maha Ésa or the Totality
of Being in the jinem
level following entry into sumarah,
we begin to openly
Mamayu
hayuning bawana
Mamayu
hayuning jagad
Serve the harmony of the world
Serve the harmony of the universe
in that our experience is now
defined openly, rather than selectively, and the whole mess is our inescapable
personal affliction as well as the existential and philosophical angst
it necessarily is for everyone. After this entry into sumarah, our
experience gradually joins with the Divine Being and we essentially lose
any distinguished sense relative to our experience, i.e., the ego disappears
and we serve and work the being that arises out of our open reception of
existence. The maturation process in going from jinem through junun
to suhul depends on the accumulation of experience involving service
and suffering. In the process we develop open links within our being in
a kind of mutual presence involving "inner communication" in the Human
(sahir), Natural (kabir) and Spiritual (gaib) realms.
In Sumarah we do healing but the primary thrust of our practice is more
a confrontation of existence itself and "serving the harmony of the universe"
openly, though in suhul we enter into a relationship with existence
which looks more like: "I didn't make this mess, but I sure as all Hell
am going to clean it up," which is called the Divine Resolve (Tekading
Ingsun).
One
of the problems we are having in stating our presence is that our message
is obviously not "Good News" in the short term for a lot of "sinners" with
large karmic loads, which, as the church no doubt knows, is a common situation
in Brazil (How do you think this society got so happily corrupt in the
first place?) and, indeed, in the West in general. In fact, for reasons
I present more carefully elsewhere, there neither physically can nor ever
will be forgiveness for sins and we all just have to get used to the prospect
of being burned karmically clean by giving full satisfaction to one another
so that we can stand to be together and not anticipate betrayal in every
interaction as, for example, is the case here and elsewhere in the hedonistic
and escapist Postmodern World.
In Java the
primary function of our kings is to punish betrayal in any and all forms
in serving True Justice (Sejatining Keadilan). By way of expression
of this relationship, our kings traditionally refer to themselves not as
"I" but as Ingsun, one of our names for the Divine Totality they are responsible
for referencing to and from every moment. The principle of our leadership
contrasts sharply with the effective tyranny that is so obvious in a society
like Brazil:
Nya
gusti; nya kawula
Where there is
a lord, there is a servant
and service (not oppression or
manipulation or panem, circenses et Saturnália [bread, circuses
and carnival]) is the only true source of authority.
Due
essentially to the enduring agony of my experience in Brazil for the past
fifteen years, I have progressed through our levels of attainment or awareness
to the point of openly standing suhul, the divine being, which is
common enough in Sumarah's pinisepuh or elder leaders. Evidently,
I am in Brazil to serve but I have found the being here so corrupt and
convoluted that service has mostly involved an open attempt to expose and
punish its various levels of betrayal through personal definition and presence.
In Sumarah we term this the mirror function as we openly reveal the character
of others to them on various levels stretching from what is "unconscious"
in them but openly expressed in us to direct personal contact involving
subtle or not so subtle confrontation so that they can see themselves more
clearly in this feedback and correspondence.
-
When I say that you become like
a mirror I mean that then you do become aware of your total identity. A
mirror takes shape within which we can see our own reflection. . .The mirror
I mean is within the self, recognizing the self as a whole. . .If we cannot
recognize the whole composite of categories that comprise the self, then
we will not be able to surrender totally. . .Once the mirror within us
has begun to clear enough so that we can see ourself, then when it is turned
towards others they can see themselves reflected to whatever extent their
own mirror has not cleared. . .A pamong is only truly one when we see ourselves
more clearly in his purity of consciousness. . .It is the spirit
rather than the body of the pamong that provides the mirror. . .On this
path the mirror in each of us can become gradually clearer through the
mirror of the pamong. . .So a pamong is in the first instance a person
who can see himself clearly within the mirror in his own sanubari, he knows
his own behavior in both inner and outer worlds. Aside from that he is
given the task of supporting and aiding so that other people can gradually
awaken the functioning of their own inner mirror (Arimurthy, "Arimurthy
on Guidance in Sumarah" in Selected Sumarah Teachings, trans.
Paul Stange, Department of Asian Studies, Western Australia Institute of
Technology, 1977, pp. 21-23).
Believe it or not, one of the biggest
problems I
have had in
Brazil is not with the ugliness of those around me but with their beauty
(when they happen to have any). Apparently, seeing their glory and honor
in the mirror awakens defensive reactions coming out of long-standing traumas
and the tendency is to deny association with themselves; they can get quite
hostile about being appreciated properly for fear of what they assume to
be coming, i.e., enthrallment to a vision held and controlled by another.
However, we know this mirror, this vision, to be independent of us and
dependent only on Reality. Their beauty is theirs, not ours for seeing
it, and such confusion eventually sorts out in that we stand accountable
and in good faith (which I evidently argue that the Church often does not
in working the same function).
Like the
Church, we hope that people will see their own situation more clearly and
start making better and more responsible choices. But, in any case, we
are sure that they will eventually suffer the pain they cause to others
themselves this way (through the exposure process) and will thus be moved
to change their behavior for reasons tied purely to self interest if nothing
else. Obviously this is a long process and requires dedication in that
we are not offering people a beautiful view of "salvation" or "forgiveness,"
but rather, a clear understanding of how ugly, evil and horrible they truly
are and what they can do to improve their situation in personal terms by
confronting existence more honestly themselves and seeking less escape
from their responsibilities. Responsibility is the key to it all, really.
I have
been engaged in this duty (tugas) for fifteen years now, and thus,
in as much as my claims concerning my status are serious and based on years
of service, I would like to render a bit of a comment on Christianity in
a general sense. In fact, I would not describe myself as a Christian. I
find Christianity confused and often ill defined in pretending to the authority
of a questionable character like Jesus Christ, who taught many things that
we consider regrettable at the very least if not initially presented in
bad faith. As you will see, we in suhul are more in line with the Old Testament
God who does not give people the right to hand out "free lunches" and parlay
promises of forgiveness for their sins through oblivious belief or some
superficial association with "acting" good rather than being open, the
essence of responsible behavior of any kind. We wish them to be properly,
i.e., openly, defined in what they do such that the path they take eventually
involve awareness of purposes and consequences.
In
addition, the idea of there being a Son of God or, as came out in our church
Newsletter some time ago, Adopted Sons of God concerning other Church related
individuals who aspire to divine authority without assuming divine responsibility,
just strikes us as so strange that we are rendered momentarily speechless.
Divinity is a being and a purpose, not a "paternalistic" relationship that
seeks to impose short-sighted mercy on existence rather than asserting
the propriety of Justice, truly the eternal essence of God. Who could truly
love or trust anyone who does not work for Justice but rather tells us,
like a populist politician, that we have to abrogate our responsibilities
and let him sort out our problems for us without our being able to demand
accountability from him as to his purposes and the interests he serves.
The claim to being a Son of God does not bespeak Jesus Christ's acceptance
of divine responsibility in that he is pretending authority that places
him above answerability while acting in the stead of the Father he maligns
and defies with his teachings.
In his career
of peddling fancified notions of indolent salvation, Jesus promoted behavior
that God did not approve of according to the Jewish vision and attacked
the system of authority present among the Jews in an openly subversive
fashion, albeit without sufficient conviction or consistency as to have
been easily apparent at the time. He "played" his audience in rather a
callous manner, did he not? In fact, there are those in the suhul
being that consider this just another expression of the tyrannical bent,
the urge to pretend and promote yourself above others, that is so common
among humans and openly purport that the Jews were right in their depiction
of Christ as just a bigger demon than other demons:
-
And the teachers of the law who
came down from Jerusalem said, "He is possessed by Beelzebub! By the prince
of demons he is driving out demons." (Mark, iii, 22)
Preachers often speak of placing
yourself back at the time of Christ. These rabbis were there and it was
their job to evaluate the people around them and guide their understanding.
Heavens, maybe they were right and Christ's confused "peace and love" teachings
as the world's second flower child (after the similarly dubious and quintessentially
irresponsible Ikhnaton) were somehow an expression of his evil. Another
clear indication of this is that the Jews, who knew Christ best, did not
become Christians in notably large numbers.
Much
like Islam, to us Christianity is what we call a mixed consequence "wish
league," a kind of glorified chain letter of a social nature. Wish leagues
do some good by protecting the Natural innocence and beauty of the group
dominated in the presence of the defining being but are fundamentally flawed
because the leagues do not teach their participants to accept responsibility
for what they are, feel and do to those around them in proper terms or
to confront existence for what it is (which would evidently expose the
faulty foundation of the wish league). An obvious wish league is invariably
present in any tyranny where the population is forced to believe in the
lies of the head of the being and render their energies to his or her service.
Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler with all their propaganda and prevarication
are apt examples of demonic presences who have managed wish leagues. In
a wish league, anyone who speaks out against the established mendacity
is in danger of ostracism, torture, imprisonment or death.
In that light,
just look at the Holy Catholic Church in the Middle Ages and Renaissance
(or Islam and S. Rushdie at the moment) and explain to Galileo Galilei
and the other victims of the Inquisition how it is that Christianity is
not just a relatively sophisticated and institutionalized multigenerational
wish league where everybody has to agree with the dominant version of existence
while they move through their lives enacting the will of the often openly
corrupt and invariably callous tyrants at the top defining the direction
of the "ship of state" or "body politic." These despots may or may not
have an articulated understanding of what they are about in this larger
sense in that they serve their power itself within the dominating union
and float along in its unjust but highly defended and deeply felt presence
as expressed in societal oppression. Wish leagues obviously do not do very
well in periods of generalized acculturation like the present in that the
lies that define them (always a variation on the theme of group superiority)
become evident quite quickly.
However,
be that as it may, to us one of Christianity's most heinous teachings is
to deny your real feelings and seek out "the Peace of God that passes all
understanding" as if it were a drug. We see the need for calm appreciation
in making good decisions but we also profess faith in feeling everything
that comes to us in order to find out what is going on properly within
and around us. We are all responsible for everything we are and everything
we do. On the other hand, Christianity teaches us that if we just "believe"
we are no longer responsible ourselves in that we have surrendered our
lives to Jesus Christ.
Christ does
not teach us to confront our existence but rather to let someone else (him)
confront it for us and just go along for a ride on a veritable "trem
de alegria" ["happy train" associated in Brazil with political favoritism
for a select group of supporters] with the incredible promise of eternal
heaven coming to us for just obeying his will. Quite a deal. Doesn't anyone
in the Church ever contemplate how impossible and, actually, ridiculous
this promise is? What on earth could Christ and Company do with all those
karmic lepers and reprobates, hiding from their sins in the mercy of another?
A regrettable
consequence of Christianity in these terms is that it turns the devout
practitioner into a kind of emotional cripple who floats along with a beatific
smile and hides from his feelings rather than accepting them, suffering
them and maturing as a result. We recognize that feelings are a great part
of the way we relate to one another and Reality, our essential comment
on existence and its returning comment on us as we share experience with
it in what we call rasa in Java. Existence is often ugly and it
would seem appropriate that we should suffer ugly feelings about it when
they arise in order to see it clearly. But Christ tells us to love and
love alone and thus to deny what Reality is trying to tell us. My goodness
what a strange teaching: we are told we should not responsibly respond
to our own feelings and give the feedback we have to give to those around
us. "Turn the other cheek": Well maybe, but not without reason. Giving
people feedback about your reactions to them is one prime responsibility
we all have and is absolutely necessary for their maturation.
Our
feelings are our connection with reality and we are all responsible for
upholding, suffering and maturing by accepting them and learning from them. The
principle involved in solving problems is confronting them; denying your
feelings because you find them unseemly or whatever is obviously not a
form of confrontation but of escapism, the world's biggest problem at the
moment (with all the drugs and alcohol and violence and sexual and relational
irresponsibility) but much of the tendency to escapism can be laid at the
door of the church, in that it has always taught that we can escape from
our sins if we just say we are sorry and believe in somebody else's mercy,
in fact, even worse, this fount of forgiveness is someone who never even
assumed divine association except as a proxy so dubious that the people
around him, exposed to his presentation, insisted on his crucifixion, evidently
due to the pain and confusion he was causing them.
His general
teaching is so deeply at odds with Divine Will as we in suhul know
it that it is one of the reasons we honestly suspect Christ to have been
in bad faith in his Gospel when he purports positions like the following
thus advocating cutting people off from their deep and confused love and
need for one another:
-
"You have heard that it is
said, 'Do not commit adultery.' But I tell you that anyone who looks at
a woman lustfully has already committed adultery in his heart. If your
right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better
for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown
into hell. And if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw
it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your
whole body to go into hell." (Mathew v, 27-30)
You must admit that this kind of
teaching is more than strange: it is wantonly if not purposefully irresponsible.
How are people to clarify the confused feelings that unite and divide them
if they are not allowed to feel them and suffer them into something decent
that reflects love and purity. Another among the many horrors of irresponsibility
in Christ's teachings is:
-
"Do not judge, or you too
will be judged. For in the same way as you judge others, you will be judged,
and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
"Why do you look at the
speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank
in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, 'Let me take the speck
out of your eye,' when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You
hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will
see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye.
"Do not give dogs what
is sacred; do not throw your pearls to pigs. If you do, they may trample
them under their feet, and then turn and tear you to pieces." (Mathew vii,
1-6)
What on earth?! We are not to give
one another feedback?
What else can we properly do? It is our sacred responsibility to give one
another feedback that is as clean and clear as we can manage because it
is in the mirror of others that we learn about ourselves. We are not to
note the impurity of others because we are not pure ourselves? Impossible.
We all must work together in seeing and feeling and condemning one another
when appropriate so that we can free ourselves from the chains of our ignorance
and arrogance and evil by working together in exposing ourselves, one and
all, from the demonic all the way up to the divine being. In fact, the
Truth does not properly "free" anyone, but reveals the horror of existence
and real responsibilities. A daunting moment, to be sure.
We
in Java have been confronting this kind of fraud for ages. Some years ago,
one of our holy men and heroes, Seh Siti Jenar, became one of the Wali
Sanga, the nine disciples that spread Islam in Java. He eventually "Javanized"
Islam for us by asserting our vision of the divine in saying that:
-
Know, you two, that Siti Jenar does
not exist, now it is Allah who appears; report this. . .There is no Friday;
there is no mosque, only Allah indeed exists. There is nothing other which
now has existence (Ricklefs, M.C., Jogjakarta under Sultan Mangkubumi
1749-1792: A History of the Division of Java. London: Oxford University
Press, 1974, p. 7).
Evidently the Arabs were not amused
and put him to death but his posture was then and still remains our faith.
We found that the presence of "Allah" basically corresponded to a megalomaniac
who was interested in having people call his name and supplicate inordinately
and in having them go out and kill and conquer their neighbors to make
them exhibit the same curious behavior. Strange God. We could only accept
Islam when Allah became identified with the deity we worship, who we call
by various names including Tuhan Yang Maha Ésa, Sang Hyang
Tunggal and Ingsun, and is simply the Totality of Being. Gods
of love and power and control obviously exist but we do not consider them
even remotely interested in really solving anyone's problems: they are
just two-bit crypto-tyrants arrogantly demonstrating their power to cause
pain while claiming good intentions and their ability to get away with it for a
while. In addition we know that anyone can participate in Divine Being if they are
willing to suffer themselves clean and relate to and from the Totality
that is the essence of true divinity.
As
for Christ's miracles: we honestly don't care if they happened or not.
The world's charismatic leaders so often appear interested only in setting
up a group of glad-eyed sycophants seeking escape in their mercy and such
senseless, irrelevant stories are a part of this. We have seen plenty of
miracles in our time but few that were so obviously useless or theatrical:
what's the point of walking on water and if he could multiply fish and
bread, why only once? What a waste of energy. As for raising people from
the dead: contemplate the Divine position on melodramatically returning
life to someone God had put down. Regarding the curing of illness and blindness:
is God so incompetent that disease is outside His sphere or is it a part
of the Divine comment on existence? A legitimate miracle would have involved
getting people to confront their problems and feelings openly, rather than
hiding from them, because then they would eventually have become more divine
than Christ was pretending to be, in that they would be accepting their
responsibilities.
We
are taught not to "believe" in Java but rather to open to Reality and seek
experience, thus grounding, establishing and expressing our own position
on existence in experience itself. Our faith is founded in our experience
not on hearsay and in grounding our experience we obviously are obliged
to be accepting of any and all claims concerning reality until we have
them clarified and stated in their true context in Open Being. As we from
Sumarah openly declare: Confrontation will forever be the key to solving
any and all problems, as we accept them as our own, face them, suffer them
and let a solution form out of Reality.
Evidently,
my feeling for Christianity is not notably complimentary to the Church
but having been involved with Christians for much of my life, I feel it
my open responsibility to express my accrued reaction to your curious religion
and what is left of its attendant social order. I write to you both to
set the record straight and to place myself properly with the Church I
attend in a larger sense. I acknowledge my responsibilities in writing
to you. I hope you will accept yours in considering these comments and
replying in kind.
Thank
you for your attention.
Sincerely yours,
David
Gordon Howe, Ph.D.