The cheapest room in the house

I began last week’s posting with Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani. Let’s just pick up that concern again briefly. If you haven’t heard of the Avaaz website it’s worth a visit. Having organised a petition against Sakineh’s stoning, they are following it up with more pressure on the Iranians to try and stop this medieval punishment altogether.

Is there an onward flow of human progress: a growth in right brain consciousness? This blog, The Now Show, arose out of my discovery that there is much more to life than left brain, ‘logical’ thinking. I am just one among many thousands (millions?) who are making a similar discovery, but it isn’t clear yet whether enough of us humans will develop this discipline soon enough to stem the tide of madness which sometimes threatens to engulf us.

People get frightened when the rules, as they understand them, are being challenged (the elder son for example in last week’s post about Jesus’ parable). Fear drives people to tighten the rules: to be less compassionate: less aware of our solidarity with all other humans on the planet: less able to exercise wisdom. It’s all perfectly logical of course; that’s the power of left brain thinking and it is essential for our humanity to survive and flourish. It’s just very dangerous when it isn’t tempered by right brain disciplined insight and wisdom.

The Vatican has just amended the Roman Catholic Church’s code of canon law. Law codes are left brain documents by definition: very logical. So now, apparently, it is a crime for any Roman Catholic priest to be involved in the ordination of a woman. What is it with religion and women?!! I know, I know – it’s just sex and us men have always had a problem with it. So maybe this is another example of men getting frightened and tightening up the rules.

The first example in Christian history came within fifteen years of the birth of the church. Jewish law said that all males must be circumcised and at first all converts were Jewish, so there was no problem. Paul, however, was making Gentile converts without demanding that they comply with Jewish law. Fortunately he won the argument with Peter and the rest of the new community in Jerusalem. Not that Paul was without prejudice: women, he thought, should not speak in church and should keep their heads covered ‘for fear of the angels’!

In Christianity, and I suspect in most religions, there has always been tension between law and grace: between left brain and right brain disciplines. I hope that we are living through a period of profound readjustment of the balance between the two. Christina Feldman, in her book, ‘Compassion’ quotes a Sufi saying,

“Fear is the cheapest room in the house and I’d like to see you in better accommodation.”

Well, amen to that.

Lost in translation?

For the next edition of A History of the World in 100 Objects, they are going to translate something from English into French, from French into Greek and finally from Greek back into English using a standard internet translator thingy. The idea is to show how garbled things can get in such a process.

I ended my last blog with the word ‘compassion’. I’m reading a book with that title by Christina Feldman who is a Buddhist. It occurs to me that perhaps ‘compassion’ is more a Buddhist than a Christian word so I turn to my New Testament Greek lexicon. My computer skills don’t run to printing the Greek word which is translated ‘compassion’ so here’s a rough transliteration of it: splagxnizomai. It occurs five or six times in Matthews Gospel, four times in Mark and three in Luke (for example the Good Samaritan in the famous parable has compassion on the mugged traveller). There’s a dramatic use of the associated word ‘splagxnon’ in the Acts of the Apostles (chapter one) where some unfortunate has a serious fall so that ‘he burst open in the middle and all his bowels gushed out’! So compassion in New Testament Greek is a matter of the guts: it’s visceral. When Oliver Cromwell said, “I beseech you in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken”, he was trying to have an argument in a compassionate way.

Now, the writer of John’s Gospel is not interested in the guts – never once uses the word. He’s your man for ‘agape’: one of the New Testament Greek words for ‘love’. Two of the others are, ‘eros’(from which comes our word ‘erotic’) and ‘philia’ (sort of ‘family love’). So you might be forgiven for thinking that love in the Christian tradition is somehow more of a mental attitude than a response of the whole person – body as well as mind and spirit; and you’d be in good company. Down the ages us Christians have been suspicious of our bodies; treacherous things leading us into lust; not at all helpful when it comes to loving our neighbours (never mind ourselves). But suppose we got it wrong from the beginning? Jesus spoke Aramaic not Greek. What was his word for love? Did we lose something in translating it into Greek? If there’s an expert in Aramaic out there who can help me I’d be very grateful.

Does it matter? It matters to me because, as my body begins to remind me that I am entering old age, I am coming to appreciate more deeply that it’s the only one I’ve got. With my discovery of contemplative prayer has come a much more respectful attitude to my body, including its aches and pains. I realise that there is no other way to the 'eternal' than through this transient physical form. It’s the only way to the attitude Wordsworth was exploring in the poem I quoted last week:

While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.”

Is that best described by the word ‘love’ or by ‘compassion’? Given our mangling of the word love, I prefer compassion.