Читать книгу A Carolina Psalter - Tony Scully - Страница 8

With A Carolina Psalter and my poems in conversation with the Psalms, I felt it was time to speak. The Psalms, some of them almost 2500 years old, have been with us in the Judeo-Christian tradition in every worship service, every prayer meeting, and every Mass for generation upon generation, their lyrical beauty manifest. As we become increasingly fixated on nuclear weapons and armaments, however, we cannot avoid inevitable questions. Why are we constantly at war? Even as we pray in good faith, do we pray to a war god? If God is our bulwark, as the Psalms maintain, why are so many of the best of us addicted to fighting? Why so much gun violence? Why so much addiction? Why so many suicides? Who is this God the Bible presents to us?

The pervasive kindness of believers in small towns and cities across the American South suggests they are deeply touched by Scripture. From prayers to the Heavenly Father and group discussions about Jesus come armies of compassionate, world-serving people who serve the homeless, the hungry, the grieving, and the incarcerated with warm hearts and the best of intentions. For many others, however, the Bible sets forth outmoded or impossible absolutes, from injunctions about the place of women and slaves, to the doctrine that Jesus is divine, to the imperative that we destroy our enemies.

Literal interpretation of the Bible may be the least of it. The argument is not about whether Eve ate a literal apple with a literal snake beside her, or whether Noah really built an ark. The question is about God. Who is this being? What is the nature of God? Many of the most progressive minds on the planet hardly believe in Spirit at all. Others address a Father God. Why is God a Father, a sometimes-threatening term for many, even if Jesus called him that? Others argue for God as Mind or Creative Source. Whole theologies, perhaps not intentionally, describe a spiritual universe predicated on good versus evil: the forces of light versus the forces of darkness. These interpretations run deep in our DNA and show up in our prayers and in our Scripture. In many cases, this duality seems to underpin and reinforce well-intentioned theological thinking—feeding into national and international conflicts and unrest, as in “God is on our side.”

We are increasingly a nation at war. Extended wars. We are four percent of the world’s population; we spend more money on defense than the next ten countries combined. Are we creating yet another empire? Where are we going? And who is this God of the Psalms that seems to be in the thick of it, savaging our enemies? Yes, we do pray, “the Lord is my shepherd,” surely a more benign presence, but he would seem insufficient for the argument. His alter ego, like unto Zeus, seems to dominate the proceedings.

As a young man, I became a Jesuit when I joined the Society of Jesus, an event that set me on an almost unending spiritual quest. The Jesuits, then as now, were committed to social justice and to scholarship, which is not to say every denomination, religious order, congregation, and sect does not embrace its own philosophies about what galvanized its founders; namely, the worship of God as they understood God. The Calvinists, as one example, following their understanding of God, are passionate about building a better and more equitable Earth. We are not so different.

The advancing conservatism in the Catholic Church in the seventies and eighties effectively closed down open-minded theological scholarship and discussion in American Catholic colleges and universities. During that period, when an almost ferocious evangelical movement seemed determined to influence local and national politics, the question, “Who is God?” sounded almost heretical. Believers knew for sure who God was. If the Bible didn’t tell them so, they knew absolutely that the Holy Spirit was the guiding presence in the Christian church and family. Even the most hidebound understood the commonality of the different Christian communities and were beginning to open themselves to the idea that non-Christians were worshipping the same God.

For some of us, self-professed spiritualists in an emerging culture of non-belief, especially in Manhattan, where I lived for many years, it seemed a truism that if the Bible was revealed truth, so were Mozart and Bach and Beethoven and Henri Matisse and Shakespeare, not to mention Einstein and Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison and about a million other creative people who somehow channeled new visions and new understanding of the universe, continually unlocking what had been called “the secrets” in physics, chemistry, and biology. Talk to any composer; he or she might tell you they serve as vehicles for energies that come through them, from where they are never sure. I remember a literary agent many years ago, no doubt in flight from some kind of orthodoxy, who ridiculed that idea outright: “Channeling—what a fanciful superstition”! But she wasn’t a composer, was she?

In the early seventies, still a Jesuit, after my three years at the Yale School of Drama, where I also served as a deacon for the Reverend William Sloane Coffin Jr., as well as being Writer in Residence at Joseph Papp’s Public Theatre one year, I worked for five years as Project Director of the Jesuit-sponsored Woodstock Center for Religion and Worship, no connection to the rock festival, at the Interchurch Center, 475 Riverside Drive, New York. Its mission was the exploration and renewal of liturgy in collaboration with such leading anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and theologians as Rollo May and Jungian Edward C. Whitmont. Dr. Whitmont, a former colleague of Carl Jung, spoke about the revelation of personal and collective truth in dreams and trance states. He had also experienced his patients in group therapy dreaming the same dreams. He spoke of patients reexperiencing trauma from past lives. In short, the language of belief was expanding before us. During that time, I also wrote a series of Prayers of the Faithful for Benziger Brothers, a liturgical press that offered contemporary language to the Prayers of the Faithful for the Youth Mass, as it was called. The prayers invoked everyone from John Lennon to Billie Holiday and Nelson Mandela. The idea was to stimulate like-minded language and thinking—to open up windows and doors to the world, especially the world of creativity, often in a surrounding landscape of suffering and violence. My thinking even then, aligned with Martin Luther’s idea that all believers were priests.

Once again, the question loomed: Who decides what voices come from God? Who draws the line between the secular and the profane? One might as well ask who has the authority to recognize love. Are we so blinded by the horrors of the twentieth century that we cannot see the light in the darkness?

By the time I left the Society of Jesus after 14 years in 1973, a prominent theologian made the public comment that what believers shared in common were not doctrinal certainties or any clear definition of God, but that in an age of increasing non-belief we were asking the eternal questions—and the questions said it all: “Who is God? Who are we in relation to God? What happens when we die”? The operative point: how could any belief system pin down God? You’d have to be arrogant or stupid to think so.

In the beginning of my new life outside the institutional Church, I chose not to be ordained a priest. The gulf between my personal beliefs and the official teaching had grown too wide. Since then, after a lifetime of questioning, I embrace all religions with love and reverence and take orders from none.

Today, my wife, Joy, and I live in South Carolina. As mayor of a small city here I spent many hours in many churches, especially at funerals and anniversary services praising the name of God. The South is a culture of hymns and blessings. As we press forward with our exuberant spirits in this extraordinary place, we also live with ghosts. If we listen carefully, we can hear the shouts and cries from the Indian wars, the American Revolution, the Civil War, and feel the sorrows of the enslaved.

My journey into the mysteries of spiritual awareness has been a long one and continues to open into the future. I wrote A Carolina Psalter for people who are looking to know God, as I am, a God who cannot be reduced to anthropological identity, a God, if you will, beyond gods, a God almost beyond understanding—beyond ritual and inherited prayer, a God of a trillion stars and planets, who we have been told by his prophets lives in our simple hearts as the God of love. Let us hope.

A Carolina Psalter—but one voice. Read the Psalms. Read the poems. Then, speak in your own voice. Share what comes to you. We will listen.