Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000

RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.

Countrymen,

ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT

I am an American Anglican of Scots, Scots-Irish, German Alsatian and French Huguenot descent.  I have been a Presbyterian and a Lutheran.  I grew up in a Community Church and bear ordination in the United Church of Christ.  I graduated at a Baptist university and what had been a Presbyterian seminary.  I am a Theologian in the line of John, Augustine, Francis, Bruno, Joachim of Fiore and Nicholas of Cusa.  My mentor is Paul Tillich.  My friends are Jerome, Benedict, Francis, Luther, Calvin, Teilhard de Chardin and Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  I am a Church Organist.  My mentor is J. S. Bach/Glenn Gould.  My friends are J. William Jones, Karl Richter, Herbert von Karajan, Maria Callas and Sviatoslav Richter.  I belong to Sathya Sai Baba, Mary and our children, in that order.  The animals in my life have been named Elmer, Mike, Halftime, Secretariat, Charles, Henrietta, Blighter, Bernard, Max and Philippe.

My father came from New York City, at 16 years of age was assistant organist at St. Agnes Chapel, at that time a 2000-member Upper West Side congregation of Trinity Parish, Wall Street.  My mother came from Elkhart, Indiana, where she took birth, as did I also, and married my father.  They met at Park College in Missouri and then graduated at seminary (he) and college (she) in New York City.  I grew up in Claremont, CA, 1946-1965.  I have one sibling, a sister two years younger than I.

Tillich’s last lecture — though it was not planned as such — is titled The Significance Of The History Of Religions For The Systematic Theologian.  Bonhoeffer’s most-noted — and enigmatic — phrase is religionless Christianity (in German: religionsloses Christentum).  Paulus and Dietrich developed those ideas peering at the future as something or someone latent in the present and resting in the past.  They assumed the divinity of corporeality and therefore the infinitely high status of life and history — forward and backward — with human life as its cognitive center and teleological thrust.  They knew that history — His [God’s] Story — is infinitely compassionate and infinitely obscure.  Fascination and Fear drive man’s life with God, whether he recognizes it or not.  They are bait God uses to entice man home to Him.

Note the look in her eyes at 1:14-15 and how she recovers in modesty at 1:18-25.
The same look of Shiva reappears later.
Watch the whole thing.

Italians have a saying: Dolce Far Niente (literally, the sweetness of doing nothing).  Unsurprisingly, it is not a motto for layabouts.  Its Vedic correlate is nishkama karma (literally, desire-less activity).  The phenomenon is difficult to grasp and really cannot be understood because its premise is non-dualism, a lack of distinction between subject and object, and non-dualism is unavailable to ratiocination, which rests on dualism.  One has to try to hold the mind still for a moment and realize the phenomenon — and it is a phenomenon, not merely a speculative abstraction of the mind — as one’s experience that moment, the experience of doing something without laboring at it, without wanting it either done or in process of getting done.  Activity that is sheer joy and sweetness in and of itself — and not for itself — with no other thought or concern, no striving … that is the experience named dolce far niente.  Restful, want-less, desire-less activity.

Everything God does is dolce far ninete.  This is why His yoke is easy and His burden is light.  Being Christ-like is just that, dolce far ninete, as a child.

Religion-less Christianity is being Christ-like but not religious.  No prayers, no worship, no acts of supererogation, no duties, no hierarchies, no laws, no rituals, no judicatories, no meetings, no projects, no good-deed-doing, no moralisms … unless such activities occur in dolce far niente.  And that would be naturally, not under a whip or even just the slightest hint of compulsion, external or internal.

What a person does naturally is sufficient prayer and worship.  What is done in the sweetness of utter freedom pleases God.  Even the Devil and his minions win His Grace when they act in utter freedom, in dolce far niente.  Religion-less Christianity is Christianity in freedom from impulse, one way or another.  Christianity free of religion is the phenomenon Bonhoeffer experienced and notably named.  Though he did not use that language, I think it is the phenomenon Teilhard observed — naming it Noosphere — in the geological and archaeological record.

Christianity free of religion — in dolce far niente — is the phenomenon Tillich, in his last lecture, names Religion of the Concrete Spirit.  A bit Germanic, but it does the job.

Listen to Callas or Gould or Richter (either one) and you will hear music just rolling out free of striving … music in dolce far niente.  Or watch Secretariat at Belmont.

Now, Christianity, like all activity, occurs naturally and constantly.  There are no layabouts because laying about is an activity, a choice-driven act, an actual doing of something.  So the dilemma facing man is not whether to act or not — he is already acting even in merely inquiring after the dilemma — but whether to act freely or compulsively and for his own good or for no one’s directly.  For his own good man acts in dolce far niente … but without trying to.  If he acts not in dolce far niente, man acts for no one’s good directly although he may act for someone’s good indirectly and at no credit to himself.

This raises the question of selfless service.  Selfless service is not service that accrues no benefit or credit to one’s self.  It is activity that one undertakes without thought of benefit or loss to one’s self or to one’s credibility.  Selfless service is a synonym for living action in dolce far niente.  Selfless service is sweet to the server and to the served.  It is action in utter freedom, the crown jewel of human life and history, the only act universally admired.  The Devil himself is forced to admire and remove from action undertaken without thought for self.  Dolce far niente is protection the Devil cannot penetrate (the point of the story of the resurrection of Jesus the Christ).

Recently my diocese — Olympia — completed her annual convention.  From it came the mission to see Jesus.  Thinking Oral Roberts, Jim and Tammy and the rest have made it into ECUSA — which in this diocese once had and perhaps still has a charismatic (aka prosperity theology, compare liberation theology) (and here) parish — I thought to find something nice to say about that mission.  And I thought, yes, how about not trying?  How about religionless Christianity?  How about dolce far niente?  And so came about this last sermon, which is a species of funny because in 71+ years the number of sermons I have delivered can be counted on two hands at most, probably one.

One has to be an inspiration or a pedant to make and deliver sermons.  I am neither.  So with respect to my sermon-making, you have not missed much.  In fact, you have not missed anything.  I have never seen Jesus.  I have seen the One Who sent Him.  Or better, He has seen me.  I feel neither short-changed, anxious, nor bereft.  I am ready to go home.

Update 1: Sarah A. Hoyt on Speaking Truth To Power

Update 2: David Warren seems to get it.

Update 3: Sabeel: Liberation Theology, Anglican Edition, spouts in Gaza and the West Bank.  Two thoughts: (1) “I seen me an Arab, I seen me a Gaza and I seen me a West Bank, but I ain’t never seen me a Palestinian or a Palestine.” and (2) “I ain’t never seen me no liberation theology that was Christian.”

Update 4: A statement regarding equating Christianity with Communism:

Several New Testament parables are used, since decades, to equate Christianity with Communism. Virtually the entire “mainline denomination” leadership, to include now Roman Catholics, concurs at least in principle with that equation. Thus the pews empty out, which, remarkably, convinces that leadership to embrace leftist manners and language more tightly: cut loose by God, let’s be saved by politics.

Christianity brightly distinguishes the realm of civil authority and law from the realm of religious authority, which transcends civil authority and law and has no law of its own. Each realm has its utility, powers and necessity (“Give unto Caesar….”) and neither has authority to control or dominate the other.

The relationship between religion and science is the same. They are about different matters entirely, without intersection, confirmation or conflict. Like civil authority and religious authority, however, they are parallel, indomitable vectors of human experience and history.

Grzegorz Kucharczyk writes sagely on Christianity vice Communism.  And here.

Update 5: What Really Happened At Synod 2015?

Update 6: Second Unit Of Yazidi Women Fighters Moves Into Raqqa To Crush ISIS

Update 7:
kevinstroup
Not believing in religion is not the same as not believing in God. You can be spiritual without being religious.

David R. Graham to kevinstroup
Well, Tillich is famous for saying that Christianity is the world’s great anti-religion religion.  I add Hinduism to that description, but that will be a bridge too far for many at this time.

Dragblacker to David R. Graham
I’m not sure I follow.  Does it mean that Christianity and Hinduism have elements in them that lead some people to eschew religion entirely?

David R. Graham to Dragblacker
Yes, that is what it means.  It also is in Hebrew Prophetism.  Religion is a means, not an end, much less the end.  Like all means, it is fraught with danger because it can lead either Godward or Godaway because there are right ways to be religious and wrong ways.  In fact, far more wrong ways than right ways.  Far, far more.  Religion is very dangerous in the absence of experienced and skilled guidance.  Religion (Latin re + ligare) means binding up that which has become unbound.  Once a body is repaired, its ligaments (ligare) grown or tied back together, it has no need for the doctor who or the procedures which repaired it.

Lawman45 to David R. Graham
Tillich is correct.  Christianity, shorn of the Elmer Gantrys of the world, is a great handbook to living in a large society.  Just remember that the substance is correct but all the rest is B.S.  And, as I learned at Notre Dame, the “Priests”, the “Rabbis”, and the “Ministers” are just ordinary folk who live life free off of the insecurities of others.

AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA