Can a Spiritual Life Combine with a Life of Action?

by Dr. Robert D. Crane

I.  Posing the Question

  One of the most persistent dilemmas raised in every religion is whether the “spiritual pursuit” impedes a life of action, or whether the greatest challenge in life is to maintain a balance between the two.

  Is it off-topic to discuss law or even justice at the same time that one discusses one’s relation with God?  Or is it off-topic to discuss rational ethics in discussion of either meditation or contemplation?  Probably not, because concern for others is motivated by our higher nature, whereas human motivation out of greed and envy comes from our lower nature.  Otherwise, who would care about justice except for oneself. 

  This is why everyone and even every animal knows what injustice is, but few persons can go beyond this to pursue constructive paths to universal principles and practices of justice.  Anybody can want to kill the pigs in the White House because one does not want to pay taxes for a welfare society at the expense of one’s own hardworking self.  Killing the pigs does not accomplish anything constructive.  Have suicide bombers ever accomplished anything?  Or Che Guevara or Mao Tse Dung?  Or Syed Qutb? On the other hand, how about Jesus Christ, or Gandhi, or Martin Luther King? 

  We should distinguish between meditation and contemplation.  For example, Sahaja Yoga Meditation can amount to little more than a focus on oneself through awakening the kundalini energy and the vibrations of one’s chakras in order to achieve a state of mental stillness.  This can easily convert to the strategy of “turning the other cheek” and ignoring injustice to others and even to oneself.  At worst in the modern world it can lead to the more simple fix of heroin.

II.  The Christian/Islamic Answer

  Simple meditation on an object or on the lack of any object is different from profound contemplation on the Ultimate as the ultimate “other than oneself” from which one’s self comes, which English-speaking Christians call God and which Muslims, using the ancient Semitic word, call Allah.  The best book on this subject perhaps is Father Reginald Garrigou Lagrange’s book, Christian Perfection and Contemplation According to St. Thomas Aquinas and St. John of the Cross.  Both of these savants borrowed heavily from well-developed Islamic teaching, St. Thomas as the greatest intellectual or “rationalistic” teacher among the Fathers of the Church and St. John of the Cross as the most spiritual teacher among the Saints.  They both taught that there cannot be any contradiction between the spiritual or transcendent and the rational or imminent, between divine revelation and natural scicnce but, more importantly, they concluded that neither by itself would bring any lasting fruits for human happiness.

  Last month in perhaps the most important papal message he has ever given, Pope Benedict XVI introduced a Synod of Christian leaders from twelve different branches of Christianity, warning against the false ‘gods’ of our age, the hidden ‘divinities’ of our time, and he named several of these ‘false gods’ from whom we must free ourselves if we are to turn to the one, true God: 1) the world’s anonymous financial interests, 2) the promoters of terrorist violence, 3) drug-traffickers, and 4) ‘the way of life propagated by public opinion’.

  He argued that all four of these groups are in the service of ‘false gods’—divinities which must be ‘unmasked’ if God’s kingdom of justice and peace, the kingdom of the true divinity, is ever to reign on this earth.  The major threat to civilization, as brought to the surface only in the past year by the public media, is the wealth gap and concentration of capital ownership, which, in an era of capital intensivity, relegates 90% of humanity to the status at best of wage-slaves.

  In his remarkable words of reflection at the Synod after the reading of the Office for the Third Hour, Pope Benedict declared:  “Think of the great powers of the present day, of the anonymous financial interests which turn men into slaves, which are no longer human things, but are an anonymous power which men serve, by which men are tormented and even slaughtered.  They [i.e., anonymous financial interests] are a destructive power, a power that menaces the world. ... “
  “And then the power of the terrorist ideologies.  Apparently in God’s name, violence is done, but it is not God: they are false divinities, divinities that must be unmasked, that are not God. ... And then drug-trafficking, this power that, like a devouring beast, extends his hands towards every part of the earth and destroys: it is a divinity, but a false divinity, which must fall. ... Or also the way of life propagated by public opinion: today it is so, marriage is no longer important, chastity is no longer a virtue, and so forth. These ideologies that dominate, so much so that they impose themselves with force, are divinities”.

  In the daily readings of the book of meditations, Benedictus: Day by Day with Pope Benedict XVI, for February 25, Benedict warns against non-answers.  He warns against the dangers of reducing Christianity to moralism: “The temptation to turn Christianity into a kind of moralism and to concentrate everything on man’s moral action has always been great. ... For we are all living in an atmosphere of deism.  It seems that there is no room for God himself to act in human history and in my life.  What is left?  Our action.  So we are the ones who must transform the world. ... If that is how one thinks, then Christianity is dead”.

  He continues, “Love has the capacity to transform the world.  It spurs our love and, in this communion of the two wills, one can go on. ... Christian faith is properly the faith of ordinary people.  It comes about in a state of obedience that places us at God’s disposition wherever He calls.  It is the same obedience that does not trust to one’s own power or one’s own greatness but is founded on the greatness of the God of Jesus Christ”.

  Pope Benedict XVI further explains his optimism in the reading for January 30 as follows:  “God is not simply infinite distance; he is also infinite nearness. ... He expresses himself in the man Jesus, although not exhaustively, since Jesus, though one with him, nevertheless addresses him as ‘Father’.  God remains the One who is infinitely more than all visible things. ... Man is so made that God can enter into union with him.  The human person, who seems at first sight to be a kind of unfortunate monster produced by evolution, at the same time represents the highest possibility the created order can attain”.

  The Islamic answer to combining the spiritual life with a life of action may be found best in the shelf of books published almost one a year for the past thirty years by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, and in such treasures as Muhammad Abdul Haq Ansari’s book published by The Islamic Foundation in 1986, Sufism and Shari’ah:  A Study of Shaykh Ahmad Sirhindi’s Effort to Reform Sufism.

III.  The Buddhist/Islamic Answer

  Buddhists have discussed this interaction very simply.  They teach a progression from Hinayana, which is separation from the material world, to Mahayana, which is elevation to the transcendent, known as nirvana, and then to the ultimate gift, Tantrayana, which is the overwhelming desire to bring peace through justice to everyone in the world. 

  The best single source on the Buddhist/Islamic answer is the new book by Reza Shah Kazemi, Common Ground between Islam and Buddhism: Spiritual and Ethical Afffinities, with a lengthy foreword by H. H. the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and a lengthy after word by Hamza Yusuf Hanson under the sponsorship of H. R. H. Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad of Jordan.

IV.  The Jewish/Islamic Answer

      Perhaps the greatest spiritual leader of the 20th century and the most acute in his teaching on the interdependency of spirit and action was Rebbe Abraham Izaac Kook, who was the Grand Rabbi of Palestine from 1919 to 1935.  He bespoke the centrality of justice for all human beings as the purpose of all religion, and especially of Judaism.  He taught that every religion contains the seed of its own perversion, because humans are free to divert their worship from God to themselves.  The greatest evil is always the perversion of the good, and the surest salvation from evil is always the return to prophetic origins.

  Rebbe Abraham Isaac Kook’s entire life spoke his message that only in the Holy Land of Israel can the genius of Hebraic prophecy be revived and the Jewish people bring the creative power of God’s love in the form of justice and unity to every person and to all mankind.  “For the disposition of the Israelite nation,” he asserted, “is the aspiration that the highest measure of justice, the justice of God, shall prevail in the world.”  Universally recognized as the leading spokesman of spiritual Zionism, Rebbe Kook went to Jaffa from Poland in 1904 to perfect the people and land of Israel by bringing out the “holy sparks” in every person, group, and ideology in order to make way for the advent of the Messiah.

  This was the exact opposite of “secular Zionism,” which resulted from the assimilationist movement of 19th century Europe, compounded by the devastating blow of the holocaust to traditionalist Jewish faith.  Thus alienated from their own culture, and vulnerable to modern nationalist demagoguery, a growing portion of the Jewish nation came to elevate control over physical land to an ultimate value and goal, and therefore to transform the land of Israel into a golden calf.

  As a Lurianic Cabbalist, committed to the social renewal that both confirms and transcends halakha, Rebbe Kook emphasized, first of all, that religious experience is certain knowledge of God, from which all other knowledge can be at best merely a reflection, and that this common experience of “total being” or “unity” of all religious people is the only adequate medium for God’s message through the Jewish people, who are the “microcosm of humanity.”

  “If individuals cannot summon the world to God,” proclaimed Rebbe Kook, “then a people must issue the call.  The people must call out of its inner being, as an individual of great spiritual stature issues the call from his inner being.  This is found only among the Jewish people, whose commitment to the Oneness of God is a commitment to the vision of universality in all its far-reaching implications and whose vocation is to help make the world more receptive to the divine light by bearing witness to the Torah in the world.”  This, he taught, is the whole purpose of Israel, which stands for shir el, the “song of God.”  It is schlomo, which means peace or wholeness, Solomon’s Song of Songs.

  But he warned, again “prophetically,” that, “when an idea needs to acquire a physical base, it tends to descend from its height.  In such an instance it is thrust toward the earthly, and brazen ones come and desecrate its holiness.  Together with this, however, its followers increase, and the physical vitality becomes strikingly visible.  Each person then suffers: The stubbornness of seeking spiritual satisfaction in the outer aspect of things enfeebles one’s powers, fragments the human spirit, and leads the stormy quest in a direction where it will find emptiness and disappointment.  In disillusionment, the quest will continue in another direction.  When degeneration leads one to embrace an outlook on life that negates one’s higher vision, then one becomes prey to the dark side within.  The spiritual dimension becomes enslaved and darkened in the darkness of life.”

  Rebbe Kook warned that “the irruption of spiritual light from its divine source on uncultivated ground yields the perverse aspect of idolatry.  It is for this reason that we note to our astonishment the decline of religious Judaism in a period of national renaissance.”  “Love of the nation,” he taught, “or more broadly, for humanity, is adorned at its source with the purest ideals, which reflect humanity and nationhood in their noblest light, but if a person should wish to embrace the nation in its decadent condition, its coarser aspects, without inner illumination from its ancient, higher light, he will soon take into himself filth and lowliness and elements of evil that will turn to bitterness in a short span of history of but a few generations.  This is the narrow state to which the community of Israel will descend prior to an awakening to the true revival.”

  “By transgressing the limits,” Rebbe Kook prophesied, the leaders of Israel may bring on a holocaust.  But this will merely precede a revival.  “As smoke fades away, so will fade away all the destructive winds that have filled the land, the language, the history, and the literature.” Always following his warning was the reminder of God’s covenant.  “In all of this is hiding the presence of the living God.  It is a fundamental error for us to retreat from our distinctive excellence, to cease recognizing ourselves as chosen for a divine vocation.  We are a great people and we have blundered greatly, and, therefore, we suffered great tribulation; but great also is our consolation.  Our people will be rebuilt and established through the divine dimension of its life.  Then they will call out with a mighty voice to themselves and to their people: ‘Let us go and return to the Lord!’ And this return will be a true return”.

  We cannot know whether the catastrophe that Rebbe Kook foresaw was merely a warning, or whether the true return is already taking place, but he was confident of the end result.  The Rebbe always sharply defended the validity of both Christianity and Islam as religions in the plan of God, and proclaimed that, “the brotherly love of Esau and Jacob [Christians and Jews], and Isaac and Ishmael [Jews and Muslims], will assert itself above all the confusion [and turn] the darkness to light.”