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Sunday, June 05, 2005Below, I wrote a post with somewhat snarkish implications for what I think of the work of Neil Douglas-Klotz. Having also looked at his The Hidden Gospel , I'd like to suggest something a touch more nuanced.A long time ago (In the early forties!), Robert Heinlein wrote a novelette, Lost Legacy (featured in the collection, Assignment In Eternity  ), that had a surprising view of where religion comes from. Said Heinlein, the earth was once inhabited by a superior man-like race that ruined its paradise through power struggles. Those on the side of peaceful co-existence left for another planet, but first left records of how to find peace and joy, so that future generations would have a shot at starting over. Unfortunately, those who discovered these universal truths later all brought a personal/cultural mindset that led to individual, warring religions rather than the re-establishment of peaceful unity.Heinlein's story foreshadows a lot of what's being pushed in the New Age these days. A lot of his fiction does, in fact, making one wonder if he wasn't in fact one of those authentic soothesayers who should have been shot on sight (see The Notebooks of Lazarus Long). Douglas-Klotz is in a curious place in the New Age, a place most people hadn't heard of until the Da Vinci code: he has a view of Christianity rooted in ancient texts that raises serious questions for how the Catholic church defined the faith. Brown's The Da Vinci Code  and the superior Angels & Demons , though, are the lite version: they look at stuff that's been floating around at the margins a long time (I was reading about the sacred feminine, the masculinizing of Greek mythology, etc before I left high school), simplify the mystical elements, toss up a conspiracy to hide the story and run from there. Douglas-Klotz, on the other hand, deals in the actual mystical stuff, and doing the heavy lifting of working with ancient texts in original languages and more.Where Douglas-Klotz and others go wrong, I think, is in their violation of Occam's razor: Were there as much hidden meaning in the text as such scholars see, there would have arisen wisdom traditions to make sure the true meanings of the words weren't lost, a Talmud for 1st c. Christianiyt. Douglas-Klotz offers enough serious commentary to make you think about Jesus' message in new ways, but then he decodes a single word and finds so much meaning that one is reminded of the queer theorists who prove such and such author was gay because he mispelt "biscuit" in a first draft and we all know what that really means. This makes it hard to know how to relate to his message short of becoming an Aramaic scholar yourself to see if such things are really possible. Which is a shame, because Douglas-Klotz is on an important mission: In a day and age where evangelical sects are turning up all over the place to assert that they're the only ones who have a real pipeline to God and too bad for the rest o' y'all who are gonna rot in hell, Douglas-Klotz is offering a loving, open understanding that asks us to recognize the spirit of God that dwelleth in us all, seeing a real relationship between our earthly life and whatever may come next that is focused not just on gittin' into heaven, but on increasing love, joy and understanding here and now. Considering that this is what Jesus did - most of His miracles bettered the lives of those He touched - one is a bit mystified that such notions would be controversial. And yet we stop singing "Yes Jesus loves me..." the second we're out of Sunday school, almost as though a conviction that God loves us in ways we could fathom is among those childish things Paul wants us to put aside in adulthood. The most fervent - or rabid - believers one sees on the news are those making sure we all know for whom there isn't any room in heaven, suggesting that if you're not on their mailing list you're likely headed for hell. The New Age is, in many ways, the logical response to the finest idiocies of the various churches - it carves out a place to escape from a world where Jesus loves us all so much that He's gonna send us to hell for our own good. Douglas-Klotz stakes new ground in the New Age: New Age values represented in a new interpretation of Christianity. Whether this means that Christianity is universal or that universal values inform a particular understanding of Christianity I'll leave to the reader to decide. One simply wishes that he'd offer a stripped-down version of what he seeks to share, something that would be a little harder for the "God of thunder" types to dismiss and easier for those recovering from fundamentalist upbringings to consider as a possible new understanding of fundamental truth. 
posted by gbarto at 12:14 PM |
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