Ekankar: "Religion of the Light and Sound of God"

Sigh. It’s taken me forever to get this written. Yes, I’ve been busy with schoolwork, etc. etc. etc. But mainly why it’s taken so long is because Eckankar is just so hard to explain! I don’t quite understand all of it myself—it’s a very mystical religion—but I’ll do my best:

Eckankar was founded in 1965 by a man named Paul Twitchell. (Some“Eckists” will claim he only “rediscovered” the original religion from the beginning of time... but I’m not buying it.) After a period of spiritual searching, and ultimately finding nothing that struck his fancy, Twitchell decided to create a religion of his own. (Go figure.)

Like I said before, the basic beliefs of Eckankar are sparse and open to interpretation. Though the religion has a few main tenets, it focuses more on every individual’s personal relationship with God, or “Eck” as they call it/him/her. According to www.eckankar.org, the basic beliefs are as follows:

* Soul is eternal.
* Soul exists because God loves It.
* Soul is on a journey of Self- and God-Realization.
* Spiritual unfoldment can be accelerated through conscious contact with the ECK, Divine Spirit.
* This contact can be made via the Spiritual Exercises of ECK and the guidance of the Living ECK Master.
* You can actively explore the spiritual worlds through Soul Travel, dreams, and other spiritual techniques.
* Spiritual experience and liberation in this lifetime are available to all.

There are a number of specific exercises to further “God-realization.” Most of these are essentially forms of mediation focusing around a single chant which signifies a certain “spiritual plane.” The holiest spiritual exercise is the “Hu song”—“Hu” being the sound associated with the highest, purest spiritual plane.

Whew. Confused yet? Anyway...

Armed with this information, Carmen and I set off to... erm... “Hu” the morning away.

The group met downtown in a small office space with a poster on the door that read: “Eckankar: Religion of the light and sound of God.”

As expected, there were only about seven people attending. All were seated in a circle of cheap plastic chairs in the center of the small office space. They welcomed us, asked us how we heard about their group... all the typical questions. They briefly explained the proceedings and began the service.

People closed their eyes, took deep breaths, and began to sing the simple—and supposedly divine—syllable. The held the tone for as long as they could, then took another breath and began again. To my surprise, I actually found the sound quite lovely.

The “hu-ing” went on for about twenty minutes, followed by a few minutes of silent mediation. Afterwards they talked about their personal experiences during the service: One man mentioned some character flaws he felt he needed to fix in himself, and he described a scene he pictured in his head of Sri Harold Klemp (the current “spiritual leader”of Eckankar) leading him through a shining doorway into greater enlightenment.

My overall impression of it? Well, it was a little too... shall we say... “woo-woo” for me—with all the “soul travel” and “dream states” and such. But I guess some people get into that sort of thing. I must admit I underestimated the religion in some ways. The actual meditation was very pleasant, and in general, the religion itself wasn’t as “cult-ish” as I had expected.

But the religion on the whole lacked some essential quality... at least for me. There were no ancient rituals, no deep sense of awe, no artistic wonder. The religion would be so much more complete if it included some kind of ages-old tradition. The service would have been so much more profound if it had been performed by monks cloistered in a grand, majestic temple. I just couldn’t quite get into it with the creeper-eyes of Sri Harold Klemp staring at me from his portrait on the dull gray walls of an office building in downtown Lincoln.

~Monica

"It's Not a Rejection, It's a Realization" Pt. 3--- Two and Two Makes Five

Originally I hadn’t planned to add a third installment of this blogpost... But while I was writing the first two parts, I was reminded of a scene from a book I had read awhile ago. I think it illustrates the issues with “trying to believe” or “choosing to believe” quite well.


From Part 3, Chapter 2 of George Orwell’s 1984:

O'Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended.

'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?'

'Four.'

'And if the party says that it is not four but five -- then how many?'

'Four.'

The word ended in a gasp of pain. The needle of the dial had shot up to fifty-five. The sweat had sprung out all over Winston's body. The air tore into his lungs and issued again in deep groans which even by clenching his teeth he could not stop. O'Brien watched him, the four fingers still extended. He drew back the lever. This time the pain was only slightly eased.

'How many fingers, Winston?'

'Four.'

The needle went up to sixty.

'How many fingers, Winston?'

'Four! Four! What else can I say? Four!'

The needle must have risen again, but he did not look at it. The heavy, stern face and the four fingers filled his vision. The fingers stood up before his eyes like pillars, enormous, blurry, and seeming to vibrate, but unmistakably four.

'How many fingers, Winston?'

'Four! Stop it, stop it! How can you go on? Four! Four!'

'How many fingers, Winston?'

'Five! Five! Five!'

'No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?'

'Four! Five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain!'

Abruptly he was sitting up with O'Brien's arm round his shoulders. He had perhaps lost consciousness for a few seconds. The bonds that had held his body down were loosened. He felt very cold, he was shaking uncontrollably, his teeth were chattering, the tears were rolling down his cheeks. For a moment he clung to O'Brien like a baby, curiously comforted by the heavy arm round his shoulders. He had the feeling that O'Brien was his protector, that the pain was something that came from outside, from some other source, and that it was O'Brien who would save him from it.

'You are a slow learner, Winston,' said O'Brien gently.

'How can I help it?' he blubbered. 'How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.'

'Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.'

He laid Winston down on the bed. The grip of his limbs tightened again, but the pain had ebbed away and the trembling had stopped, leaving him merely weak and cold. O'Brien motioned with his head to the man in the white coat, who had stood immobile throughout the proceedings. The man in the white coat bent down and looked closely into Winston's eyes, felt his pulse, laid an ear against his chest, tapped here and there, then he nodded to O'Brien.

'Again,' said O'Brien.

The pain flowed into Winston's body. The needle must be at seventy, seventy-five. He had shut his eyes this time. He knew that the fingers were still there, and still four. All that mattered was somehow to stay alive until the spasm was over. He had ceased to notice whether he was crying out or not. The pain lessened again. He opened his eyes. O'Brien had drawn back the lever.

'How many fingers, Winston?'

'Four. I suppose there are four. I would see five if I could. I am trying to see five.'

'Which do you wish: to persuade me that you see five, or really to see them?'

'Really to see them.'

'Again,' said O'Brien.

Perhaps the needle was eighty -- ninety. Winston could not intermittently remember why the pain was happening. Behind his screwed-up eyelids a forest of fingers seemed to be moving in a sort of dance, weaving in and out, disappearing behind one another and reappearing again. He was trying to count them, he could not remember why. He knew only that it was impossible to count them, and that this was somehow due to the mysterious identity between five and four. The pain died down again. When he opened his eyes it was to find that he was still seeing the same thing. Innumerable fingers, like moving trees, were still streaming past in either direction, crossing and recrossing. He shut his eyes again.

'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?'

'I don't know. I don't know. You will kill me if you do that again. Four, five, six -- in all honesty I don't know.'

'Better,' said O'Brien.



-Monica

"It's Not a Rejection, It's a Realization" Pt. 2---Judgement and Perceptions

This is a tricky topic, so I’d like to start out with a little disclaimer: I am not one of those people who make scathing statements about how all Christians are nothing but judgmental hypocrites. I don’t believe that at all! I do think that Christianity is a world view that lends itself to judgmentalism fairly easily, however there are plenty of Christians who manage to overcome this. In this post I am referring to the ones who, unfortunately, do not.

In part 1 of this blog post I mentioned the tendency of the extreme fundamentalist sort of Christians to assume some pretty ridiculous things about those who do not share their faith. But few people ever really stop and think about how arrogant and offensive these notions actually are. The basic assumptions can be summed up as follows: “There is no way any intelligent person can come to a different conclusion I have come to. Therefore, any intelligent person who believes something other than me must be morally inferior.”

The obnoxious, cocky, Dawkins/Hitchens/Hawking brand of atheists do much the same thing towards Christians. Their version is: “There is no way any intelligent person can come to a different conclusion I have come to. Therefore, any intelligent person who believes something other than me must be emotionally inferior.”

Both of these statements are obviously ridiculous and judgmental, yet a surprising number of people subscribe to these sentiments. Many, however, do so obliquely: When presented with a blunt statement like the ones above, most people are able to see how absurd they sound. Yet they still cling to these assumptions in a subtle, intrinsic way.

No one has ever blurted out something like “I wonder what sort of moral defects are preventing you from believing in the Bible!” but they’ve come pretty close. I find it ironic how people who don’t yet know I am no longer a Christian just go on assuming that I am. They find no change in me. They find no moral lapses. Yet some (not all, thankfully!) who do know about my beliefs tend to view me through a poisoned lense. They actively search for evidence that I “need God in my life.” I often feel like these people are prowling around me, just waiting for me to slip up somehow so they can shout: “Ha! I knew it! See how depraved you have become without Christ?!” In addition, they are scouring through my records and picking out every time I annoyed or hurt them, and every ugly rumor they’ve heard about me so they can file it all away in the “Proof that she was never a True Christian™ anyway” folder.

But if they could really look at my life objectively, they would find that I haven’t changed. I’m no less moral, happy, or satisfied with my life than when I was as a Christian. Christianity does not have a monopoly on these qualities. (Neither does atheism, Buddhism, or any other philosophy or religion for that matter)

“Moral downfalls” are not what prevents me from being a Christian, just like “emotional weaknesses” are not what prevents Christians from becoming atheists. It is simply a matter of what and how we are able to believe. Unless you can come to grips with the fact that some people are “unbelievers” for intellectual reasons alone, then don’t try to tell me you don’t judge. Because, frankly, you do.

-Monica

Wicca- What it is and what it isn’t

Pop quiz: Who are Wiccans?

If you answered Satan-worshiping, spell-casting, demon possessed, drooling hags dancing naked around a bonfire while they raise the spirits of the dead by chanting ancient rhymes from the bouts of hell, you’d be wrong on every count.

Wiccans (or Pagans, as they are sometimes called) do not believe in the Christian figure of Satan, nor do they worship him. Very few of them believe in literal magic, spell-casting, or hexing. And they are certainly not demon-possessed spawn of the devil. The popular image of Wicca is largely due to portrayal in books and movies and age old prejudices that have stuck for centuries.

So what do Wiccans really believe and practice?

I sent an email to one of the leaders of a local Wiccan coven called the Order of the Red Grail. I told her about my interest in different religions, asking her what Wicca was all about. Here is her response:

In general, Wiccans believe in the sacredness of Nature in the form of the Divine Feminine and Masculine. We tend to believe in balance. Our concept of deity is both masculine and feminine. We honor the cycles of life and the turning of the wheel of the seasons. All beings are equally sacred. Humans are not ‘above’ animals in terms of importance in our ecosphere. They say that it’s really easy to get a gift for a pagan. A rock, stick, herb, bit of incense…little things of Nature are a delight. Details of individual beliefs vary according to the pantheon they relate to. For example, some connect with the God of the Forest or any of the Mother Goddesses. Some relate to Irish culture, others to Egyptian. Wicca is basically a Western European shamanistic religion with plenty of variety.

Wiccans are bound by only one law: the Wiccan Rede. It’s part of a longer poem but the words that people remember are “’an it harm none, do what thou wilt.” In essence, we can do anything we want as long as we do not cause harm to anyone or anything, even ourselves. This law sets a high standard, and when we dedicate ourselves to the God and Goddess we dedicate ourselves to being Stewards to the land and to each other. That’s a tall order and requires considerable thought.

There’s a lot of information in books and online that will answer your questions. The Grand Central Station of pagan websites is Witchvox.com. There are thousands of pages but the search engine is friendly. Resources like Witchvox are valuable because Wicca does not have a central book or central set of laws that everyone has to adopt.

Every Grail circle is different, but the underlying framework or focus is on transformation—personal growth. Like other Wiccans, we get together in sacred space quite often. Our liturgical year includes eight Sabbats, 12 or 13 full moons, 12 or 13 new moons. We also do rites of passage and special rituals for personal needs. In Transformational Wicca, our intent with ritual is to create an environment in which people can re-create themselves. We’re fairly orderly, try not to be chaotic, and tend to think things through. Pagans tend to share a code of circle etiquette which is based in respect and good behavior, and this is considered whenever we design a ritual.

During your exploration into different religions you will find many former Christians. In the Grail, only a couple of members were not raised some sort of Christian. My husband’s father was an evangelical minister. You could have quite a conversation with him and why he moved on. I’ve found that people come to Wicca in one of two ways. They are either moving/running *away* from the god-centered way of being, or they are moving *toward* spiritual duality, the balance of the Sacred Feminine and Masculine. The first generally involves a great hurt while the second is like a developmental step forward. Every person who has talked with me early in their journey has said that finding Wicca was like *coming home,* that they didn’t know there was a religion that matched what they believed.

My sister and I went to one of the Order of the Red Grail’s full moon circles, which I’ll cover in my next post. The website for the Order of the Red Grail is http://www.redgrail.com/


-Carmen

"It's Not a Rejection, It's a Realization" Pt. 1---The Nature of Belief

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned through losing Christianity, it is this: belief is not a choice.

Try it. Pick something you don’t believe in—it can be anything: Shiva, aliens, Santa Claus...

Now on the count of three, believe it.

1...2...3................

How did it work for you? I assume not so well. Just examine anything you believe in or don’t believe in and you will find out pretty quickly that belief is not a voluntary act. I never chose to believe that my friends and family love me—the overwhelming evidence simply convinced me. I never chose to believe stepping a piece of broken glass would cut my foot, I just realized it from experience. Trying to make myself believe broken glass would not hurt me is an impossible task because the facts all point in the opposite direction.

A belief arises from solid evidence, conviction, and sometimes a bit of emotion. Only in the absence of these three things does belief become a conscious decision.

For example: Some people look at the world around them and come to the automatic conclusion that there must be a god. Some people look at the world around them and conclude the very opposite. As I said in my first point about the existence of God---each side presents a pretty good case, and (for me) the evidence is inconclusive. It is in situations like this where belief becomes subject to an act of the will: I come to no conclusions concerning the existence of God, so in this case I have the ability to choose what to believe.

But though the "existence of God" question is pretty much up in the air for me, the evidence against the God of the Bible strikes me as pretty conclusive. Of course, there are a lot of people out there who could not bring themselves to disbelieve Christianity either. Humans are very diverse: Different facts hit different people in different angles. I don't think my methods of reasoning things out are any superior to those of the rest of the human race; they are simply my methods, the way my mind is wired.

Still, countless Christians have accused me of leaving the faith for one of three reasons:

1. I’m angry at God.

2. I have become too selfish and sinful to want God in my life.

3. I just don’t care.

No matter how ardently I try to assure people that none of these answers are true, they usually don’t get it. My intellectual conclusions are mistaken for selfish motives. It’s frustrating to no end.

(Christians: how would you feel if I accused you of rejecting Allah for one of those three reasons above? You would probably be pretty offended too. My guess is you’re not mad, you’re not selfish, and you’re not apathetic; you simply don’t believe Allah exists. Your conclusion is based on reason alone.)

Now I’m sure some non-Christians don’t believe for precisely the reasons I mentioned. I won’t deny that. But that’s not the way it was for me; I never wanted to leave Christianity—in fact, I waged a battle with my own mind for a while, trying to force myself to believe it. But those attempts failed pretty quickly—I knew I was lying to myself, just as you probably knew you were lying to yourself when I told you believe something on the count of three...

So why in the world did I leave Christianity if I didn’t want to? (Key words here: Did. Not. Want. To.)

The answer is simple: I had to.


-Monica

Tongues, Emotions, and Radical Pentecostalism

I had always been curious to hear what speaking in tongues sounded like. I had heard various views on it from my evangelical friends; that it was a gift only given to certain people, that it was only meant to be used in Bible times, or that it was just something “those crazy Pentecostals” did.

It was time to find out.

After our trip to the Eastern Orthodox church, Monica and I looked up all of the Pentacostal churches in town. There were plenty of Assembly of God churches and lighter charismatic denominations in town. I had been to an Assembly of God church before, and it seemed like it was just Baptist with a little more hand raising. But we wanted to find something a little more radical. (Maybe something slightly reminiscent of Benny Hinn.)
We found the perfect match: a wild, emotional, weepy, slightly cultish, 100% radically Pentacostal church just a few blocks from our house.

We walked apprehensively into the building, trying to be inconspicious but failing utterly. It is especially hard to go unnoticed when the worship leader loudly announces your presence to the entire congregation.

The Pentecostal service stood in complete contrast to the majesty and art of the Orthodox service. The worship was led by a man belting out lines from the pulpit, with a plunking out an accompaniment on an out of tune piano. It didn’t get long for the tongues to get started. Hand-raising, swaying, and streams of gibberish were all intertwined with the southern gospel style songs. In between songs, the worship leader would declare in a loud voice that the spirit was now filing the room, and would begin gasping, praying in broken fragmented sentences, or repeating IloveyouJesus, IloveyouJesus, IloveyouJesus, over and over again like an auctioneer. During these “spirit-filled” interludes, the people in the congregation would follow his lead. It seemed that “the spirit” could be turned on and off by command of the worship leader. When he wanted to make announcements he would go from gasping, emotion-filled tongue speaker to calm and collected orator in the snap of a finger. At one time, the worship leader called people up to be healed. A couple of people came up, and the rest of the congregation huddled around these people, placing their hands on them and shouting prayers all at once.

The preacher had no plan for his sermon whatsoever. He said he was preaching “as the spirit led”. I can’t remember much about the content of his sermon, except that he talked a lot about faith. He seemed to think that blind faith was the most important and obvious virtue you could possess. Once he said “faith is like your arms, you just have to have faith that they are there.” Monica and I still laugh over that one.

The whole service seemed like a combination of frothy emotionalism and bizarre rambling. It reminded me of a high powered version of Bible camp, were you were emotionally manipulated into a “spiritual high” that evaporated as quickly as emotions do.

I have some friends who are Pentecostal, and their churches just use the more charismatic singing and the speaking in tongues as a different form of worship. I have nothing against that. But this church took it to a creepy, extremist level. The entire service was centered around getting yourself worked up into a frothy-mouthed, screaming, wailing spiritual high. It was almost like “the spirit” was a drug that the worship leader and the pastor fed to the eager congregation.


-Carmen

The Start of Our Explorations: Orthodox Christianity

The air is charged with the scent of incense and the deep murmuring song of the priests. The embroidery flickers on their candle-gold robes as they perform their sacred rituals. The solemn icons observe the liturgy from all corners of the room, the wisdom in their faces intense and palpable.

The atmosphere is ancient, reverent, but never dismally so. The congregation stands, enraptured before the altar of their god, stirring the incense with their fingertips as they mark the sign of the cross over their chests and sink into an easy, lilting bow. Everyone who walks into the room is transfigured by the sacrosanct tranquility of the Orthodox liturgy.

This is what religion should be.

We began our exploration of churches with a visit to St. John of Kronstadt Orthodox Church. We weren’t disappointed. The service was beautiful. As I mentioned in my previous post: it didn’t matter that I didn’t agree with the theology of the church—the chants and rituals were more moving than the evangelical “praise and worship songs” had ever been to me, even as a Christian.

And as I soon discovered, my sister and I fit in perfectly with the members of the congregation—they were our “kindred spirits.” They didn’t meet us with judgment, they met us with love. Here we were valued for who we were, rather than for what we believed.

(I don’t mean to say that the evangelical church is full of judgmental people—that’s not completely true. But it is not entirely free of them either. More to come in a later blog post about this topic!)

So, what sets Orthodoxy apart from other denominations? Let me phrase it this way:

How many Orthodox priests does it take to change a light bulb?

Ha. Change? You must be kidding.

Not only the the liturgy of the early church is preserved by the Orthodox church, but the theology remains the same as well. And I like it that way.

There are many other differences between Evangelicalism and Orthodoxy (and Orthodoxy and Catholicism for that matter) But perhaps the most notable is simply how they treat religion. They are not obsessive-compulsive about dogma and doctrine—instead they value the mystical nature of their relationship with God. It is this that really sets them apart. They don’t try to wrap up their theology in a water-tight box. (Evangelicalism tries to do this, but all they end up with is a pretty misshapen box)

My sister and I now attend St John’s regularly. And even though we don’t believe in the teachings of the Bible, we feel at home in the Orthodox church. Why?

Because the Orthodox understand the art of religion. They understand the art of the unexplained.

(The website for St. John of Kronstadt Church is http://kronstadtchurch.org/ the website for their ancient Christianity coffee shop and bookstore is http://catacomblincoln.com/)


-Monica