Working on God by Winifred Gallagher

Author:Winifred Gallagher [Gallagher, Winifred]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76636-6
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2010-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

Subtler than conversion, another effect of America’s increasing pluralism is far more widespread. Like the imam’s and Jiro’s, my religious life has been changed by a new tradition, but in a way that’s much more difficult to describe. As I reacknowledge my Christian roots, I’m also moving deeper into Zen meditation. Tolerant researchers refer to this combining of beliefs or practices from more than one tradition as religious layering or blending, and point out its benefits of richness, personalization, and freedom from dogmatism. Critics charge that “designer religion” loses in depth what it gains in breadth and particularly fails to challenge the individual with established religion’s outward focus on the commonweal.

The histories of Buddhism and monotheism demonstrate that choosing elements from one tradition and combining them with those from another, along with fresh ideas, to make a “new” religion is hardly unprecedented. What’s different about spiritual synthesis at the millennium is that it has become much more rapid, individualized, and complex, in that there are many more toolboxes to be drawn from. Just as the new global information culture supplies us with world news, scholarship, and music, it brings us the world’s religions. Confronted by multiple systems that have stood the test of time, we find it hard to maintain the conviction that any one faith has a monopoly on truth—an idea that’s also challenged by other disciplines, from history to feminism to science. In this milieu, most religious Americans will respond with increased tolerance, but remain in their own tradition. Some, like Jiro and Imam ‘Abdur-Rashid, will adopt a new one. Many will attempt to combine elements from more than one faith. Despite nay-sayers’ attempts to lump them together, these spiritual eclectics fall into two groups: people who try to fashion their own one-man-band religion and those who primarily identify with one tradition but add to it. To me, the first group risks shallowness on the one hand and exhaustion and isolation on the other. While the second group also faces challenges, I feel they have much to gain.

Christian Zen practitioners, say, or Jewish yogis attempt to satisfy a hunger for personal spiritual practice in a country where religion has long stressed its social, humanitarian dimensions. The medical professionals who repackage meditation as stress-reduction or relaxation therapy know that using yoga or zazen to “come to rest and just be before heading off to the next thing can be a vital source of renewal,” says Diana Eck. “It’s extremely important because we get so preoccupied. Millions of people take pills or suffer from chronic sleep disorders. They’re aware that they’re incredibly anxious, or that the minute they sit still, they get depressed. Today doctors in white coats teach what used to be the province of swamis in orange robes.” Although the vipassana meditation that this Methodist practices is called Buddhist, “it’s really a form of breath-centered meditation that goes beyond labels,” she says. “I don’t do it for hours, but I need to meditate for ten to twenty minutes daily.

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