The spiritual world is rife with powerful paradoxes, perhaps none more confounding than the fact that romantic love can be at once passionately physical and profoundly mystical, transcending time, space, and even bodily limitations. In its material manifestation, romantic love can encompass the best and worst of human drives, from fierce loyalty and self-sacrifice to physical and emotional abuse, lies, and betrayal. Yet the mystical realms to which love can open the human heart are boundless, extending beyond the physical body--as far as we now know the nonlocal mind can reach.

That all-in-one reality of human love gives the lie to the Manichaean split between body and soul that has formed the basis for countless strains of puritanical prejudice and bad religion over several thousand years. So it's all the more inspiring for a book that tells the love story of two people who emerged from the New York City art and music scene of the 1970s, and who were known for their celebrations of physical love, to be shot through with spiritual references. Even on the first page of the Foreword, the author mentions saying her prayers before going to bed, not as a child but as a grown woman of 43 who was a staple of the punk rock revolution. Patti Smith's memoir of her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe, Just Kids (Ecco/HarperCollins, 2010), is emotionally involving and even sweet while detailing a subculture not noted for its compassion or spirituality.

In a recent commentary on disgraced sports figure Tiger Woods, retired Fox News commentator Brit Hume had the following to say: "The extent to which he can recover as a person depends on his faith. He's said to be a Buddhist. I don't think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. So my message to Tiger would be, 'Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world."

Hume, who once described himself as a nominal Christian, says he "came to Christ" after his son committed suicide a decade ago. Unfortunately, Hume displays the rampant ignorance about world religions typical of the news media in general and religious fundamentalists in particular. I'm not sure what Hume thought he meant to say, but the central tenets of Buddhism revolve around compassion for all beings, including oneself. As Buddhist journalist Barbara Hoetsu O'Brien put it, "Mr. Hume is right, in a sense, that Buddhism doesn't offer redemption and forgiveness in the same way Christianity does. Buddhism has no concept of sin; therefore, redemption and forgiveness in the Christian sense is meaningless in Buddhism. Forgiveness is important, but it is approached differently in Buddhism."

However, as any good Buddhist would quickly and compassionately inform Hume, the Buddhist practice of metta, or loving kindness, is extended to all beings, including those who have wronged us. In the basic meditation or prayer of metta, which is embraced by the Vipassana or Mindfulness tradition as espoused by the great Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh and many others, we beegin by offering loving kindness to ourselves, and then extend this compassionate intention in ever widening circles to those near and dear to us, to casual friends and associates, those we don't know personally, and even our enelmies.

For more detailed instruction on metta, please consult the ever-reliable buddhanet.com, run by people who actually know something about Buddhism. In the meantime, you might send Brit Hume an email suggesting that he read up on the Dalai Lama's practice of compassion. Every morning before sunrise, the Dalai Lama rises to practice  four hours or so of meditation. For years, people have asked him exactly what he is meditating on. And he has given them a one-word answer that is a primary tenet of Buddhism: compassion.

I admit I've spent the past few months feeling annoyed, no, furious, with Pres. Obama and the Democrats in general for cutting deals with Big Pharma, selling out to corporate interests and not doing enough to help the people who elected them by living up to our highest ideals. I'm painfully aware of how much better the Health Care Reform bill could have been, of how much corporate money has diluted it. Part of the problem, which needs to be addressed immediately, is the obsolete, unconstitutional, segregation-era tactic of the Senate filibuster that requires a 60-40 majority. That has to be changed so that a simple majority can enact all legislation. Without cloture, Ben Nelson and Joe Lieberman would still be groveling in near-anonymity trying to get someone to pay attention to them.

But on a related front, today I received a notice in the mail from Bank of America regarding my credit card, noting a few changes coming in February. I braced for the worst, then started reading. 

I try not to get into partisan politics in this blog, although it's often inevitable. After all, the Democrats have not extricated themselves from the influence of money much more than have Republicans. Both major parties are beholden to so many monied interests that I'm astonished when any good legislation is passed. Until all money is removed from the electoral process, I don't believe this will change. And yet, when only 1 Republican out of 177 in the House voted in favor of a Health Care Reform bill, no matter how flawed, I have trouble und3rstanding how Republicans can so blatantly embrace Christianity in other contexts. Have any of them read the lengthy section of the Gospel of Matthew known as the Sermon on the Mount? Or the parable of the sheep and the goats (Matt 25:31-46) that embodies the heart of Christian compassion for the less fortunate? So I was intrigued to learn more about the lone Republican who apparently had not only read the Gospel, but taken it to heart, and voted in favor of health care. His name is Anh "Jospeh" Cao of Louisiana (photo by Brady Fontenot).

Does the Vatican want to re-establish its role as supporter of great spiritual art? Pope Benedict XVI recently convened an extraordinary gathering of creative people from many disciplines--and religious traditions--to discuss his beliefs about the place of the spiritual in art. But first, a little background is in order.

The link between art and spirituality may seem obvious, but it has fallen out of favor in recent years. Spiritual themes have been apparent in the mythic art of the Goddess era going back 40,000 years or more, and in the work of tribal artists for millennia, but also in medieval painting, sculpture, weaving, and manuscript illumination from Europe to Asia. The expression of profound spiritual insights connected to Nature was a major element in the first concentrated movement of art in the U.S., the Hudson River School that flourished from 1825 through the end of the 19^th century. Great painters including Thomas Cole, Frederic Church (that's his painting above, Twilight in the Wilderness), Asher B. Durand, George Inness and Ralph Albert Blakelock were informed by impassioned spiritual teachings ranging from Calvinism to Swedenborgianism.

 

In a year of firsts, and what we hope will continue to be an Era of Firsts, the President of the United States has sent a videotaped greeting to all those who celebrate Diwali, the "Festival of Lights," in the U.S. and around the world. The holiday, which runs over five or six days in different regions, is observed by Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs for a variety of reasons, and it is a national holiday throughout India. In the President's message, he creates yet another first by quoting from Hindu Scripture, specifically the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, 1.3.28:
From the unreal lead me to the real,
From darkness lead me to the light,
From death lead me to deathlessness. (trans J. Mascaro)
    In a year in which the primordial sound of OM was referred to in an acceptance speech at the Oscars, and Vice President Biden spoke the traditional Hindu Greeting "Namaste" on CNN, this adds another link in the chain of worldwide spiritual awareness emanating from America, the most spiritually diverse nation on Earth. We may have our failings as a country, as a political and economic force in the world, but it is hard to find another place more accepting of the world's religious traditions, from Atheism to Zen.

The word is out that Carl Jung's legendary Red Book, containing many years' worth of his most private explorations of his psyche, will be published in facsimile this month by W. W. Norton. The combination of hand-lettered pages and astonishing multicolored paintings in a baffling array of styles makes the book feel like a cross between William Blake's illustrated poems and an illuminated manuscript from the Middle Ages. In 1913, Jung underwent a crisis, or what he termed a "confrontation with the unconscious." Not one to shrink from a challenge, he induced visions and hallucinations and recorded what he discovered. The Red Book is the result of his psychological self-analysis and artistic visions. The book, which was the subject of an unprecedented New York Times Magazine cover story, is laden with copious footnotes and cross-references by Jung researcher and editor Sonu Shamdasani, including citations of the writings of some of Jung's clients and his many astonishing paintings. (Judging from the few illustrations that accompanied the Times article, his artistic styles range from Surrealism and Transcendentalism to graffiti art--one image looks surprisingly like a precursor of Keith Haring!)
   

I've never thought of Michael Moore as an especially religious person, let alone a Catholic, although he does often come off as a moralist. But his new film and a series of interviews about it give a clear impression that Moore sees the world in spiritual terms. His latest film, Capitalism: A Love Story, takes the American system of capitalism and its wealthiest proponents to task for their lack of concern about the rest of the country--the 99 percent that live outside the sheltered world of the most powerful 1 percent. In an interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN discussing his film, Moore explicitly attacks the belief held by many of those in power in the U.S. that the richest one percent should control everything. "It's not right, it's not fair, it's not American, and it's not part of our Judeo-Christian ethic, or whatever religion you belong to--Buddhism, Islam. All the great religions are opposed to the wealthy being in charge and letting the poor suffer because of that." When Blitzer asks, "Are you a socialist?" Moore replies, "I'm a Christian." But Blitzer pushes his socialism question: "Would someone emerge from this movie saying, 'Michael Moore is a socialst'?"
    "Oh, no," Moore answers. He says that people instead would feel that "Michael Moore is following through on the values that his parents and the nuns and the priests gave him as a child. He believes that he is his brother's keeper. He believes that we will be judged by how we treat the least among us in this society."

Can political activists also be spiritual teachers? That's a valid question at a time when large groups of people are pursuing both active involvement in the political sphere and the development of personal spiritual practices, often outside of the conventional wisdom traditions. My good friend Andrew Harvey has written a new book called The Hope that promotes the fusion of political activism and spiritual practice into what he calls "sacred activism." Although I haven't yet read the book, on several occasions I have heard Andrew discourse for hours on this subject, and I can tell you that it's essential wisdom he is purveying, and that The Hope is highly recommended reading. Indeed Andrew would say that the two--spiritual practice and social activism--need to be inextricably intertwined in our contemporary world.
    Andrew's book has just been published by Hay House, but the whole issue came to me synchronistically as I watched a film dramatization of the life of Abbie Hoffman, entitled Steal This Movie