Spiritual Paths to an Ethical and Ecological Global Civilzation: Reading the Signs of the Times with Buddhist, Christians and Muslims

By Gerald Grudzen, PhD, Doctor John Raymaker and Doctor Joseph Holland

. This book by three notes scholars in the fields of philosophy, religion and social ethics explores how a global
spirituality needs to take expression to in a regenerative global civilization marked by a new ecology of the natural world and the human spirit. It provides an ecological and holistic vision which draws upon the wisdom of the ages as well as contemporary philosophy and science.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 1, 2014
• ISBN: 9781483519432

Book preview

The picture on the cover of the Ox and Oxherder is taken from

Tensho Shubun (1414-1463): Shokoku-ji, Kyoto, Japan.

commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AOxherding_pictures%2C_No._4.jpg.

Biblical quotations in this book are taken from the

Good News Bible, American Bible Society, 1976

Quotations from Jalal al-Din Rumi

are gratefully reproduced with permission from

translations by Coleman Bards and John Moyne in

The Essential Rumi, HarperOne, 2004.

Copyright © 2013 John Raymaker & Gerald Grudzen

for all material in this book except Chapter 13.

Copyright © 2013 Joe Holland

for Chapter 13.

All rights reserved.

ISBN-13: 978-1494275112

ISBN-10: 1494275112

eISBN: 9781483519432

Pacem in Terris Press

is the publishing service of the

Pacem in Terris Global Leadership Ecumenical Initiative

which is sponsored by

Pax Romana / Cmica-usa

1025 Connecticut Avenue NW, Suite 1000

Washington DC 20036

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

Stages in Personal & Evolutionary Understanding

PART I

READING THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES

Fears & Hopes within Globalization

1. MYSTICISM & SCIENCE BEFORE COSMIC MYSTERY

Dialogue on Spiritualities & Science

2. OUTLINING SIGNS OF OUR TIMES

Good, Ambivalent, & Bad

3. AN INCLUSIVE METHOD

Confronting the World’s Illusions

4. STAGES IN HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

With Emphasis on Universal Principles

PART II

EXPLORING GLOBAL SPIRITUALITY

Inclusive Mystical Paths for Globalization

5. BEYOND DUALISMS & IDEOLOGIES

Mystical, Evolutionary, Cosmological Interrelatedness

6. INTEGRATING MYSTIC INSIGHTS

The Spirit of Transformative Conversions

7. TEILHARD'S MYSTICAL-COSMIC STAGES

The Noosphere & Globalization

8. MYSTICAL VISIONS FROM SUFI WRITERS

Mysticism of Heart & Mind

9. COMPARING TEILHARD & GULEN

Dialogues between Religion & Science

PART III

LINKING GLOBAL SPIRITUALITY

WITH AN INCLUSIVE GLOBAL ETHICS

Holistically Bridging Our Religious Divides

10. TOWARD GLOBAL SOLIDARITY

Beyond Selfish Individualism & Exclusive Group Consciousness

11. BUDDHIST-CHRISTIAN-MUSLIM DIALOGUE

Linking Mystical Roots with Global Ethics

12. SEEKING SIGNS & MOVEMENTS OF HOPE

Ethical Initiatives to Bridge Our Divides

PART IV

TOWARD A GLOBAL ECOLOGICAL CIVILIZATION

Regenerating Ecological, Social, & Spiritual Life

13. THE CALL TO HOLISTIC GLOBAL REGENERATION

Creating a Healing Postmodern Global Civilization

CONCLUSION

Paths to Global Ethical Spirituality

Bibliography

Index

Endnotes

To Order the Paperback Edition of this Book

PREFACE

Two Recent, Important Signs of the Times

As a backdrop to this book, let us begin by reflecting on two recent and momentous signs of the times.

Global Religious Extremism. The first sign, a negative one, is the growth of religious extremism in various parts of the so-called developing world, as well as in many parts of the so-called developed world. While we have seen numerous examples of such extremism, the most graphic has been the attempted assassination by the Taliban on a young teenager, Malala Yousufzai of Pakistan – because of her modeling the education of girls and young women. On a more positive note, Malala has now become a global symbol for promoting female education in order to combat illiteracy and poverty.

Pope from the Global South. The second sign, this time a positive one, has been the election of a Catholic pope hailing from the still developing land of Argentina in the Global South. As priest and bishop, Francis had been a conspicuous figure reaching out to the poor and dispossessed in his land. When elected pope early in 2013, he immediately began showing strong signs that he would not tolerate business as usual in the Catholic Church. Now he lives and acts in simple telling ways, reminding us that the poor are his priority. He effectively employs symbolic actions like not living in the traditional papal apartment, washing women’s feet in a church ceremony, and freely discussing the state of the world with atheists.

The first sign, pioneered by Malala Yousufzai, showed that the education of youth – especially, in a deep understanding of world cultures and world religions – is a critical need in our now globalized world. We hope that this book will contribute to that need.

Regarding the second sign, who would have thought, even in the 1990's, that a decade later a Black American would become the President of the United States, or that in 2013 a Cardinal from South America would be elected Pope of the Catholic Church? Clearly, we are also in a new positive global experience, made feasible by contemporary globalization.

About the Authors

This book’s two primary authors, John Raymaker and Gerald Grudzen, have dedicated a good part of their lives working on behalf of grass-roots education, including of youth, in non-Western cultures. John Raymaker has worked in Japan and Mindanao in the Philippines, and Grudzen has worked in Bolivia and Bangladesh, with current outreach to Muslim-Christian dialogue in Kenya.

Gerald Grudzen's exposure to such lands and cultures led him to found in 2001 the Global Ministries University (GMU), which has now served some 400 students throughout the world. He also serves as GMU’s President and Raymaker serves as a faculty member.

In that regard, Global Ministries University has partnered with diverse educational organizations in Thailand, Turkey, Kenya, and the United States to foster interreligious educational models that serve the needs of both developing and developed nations. (For more information on the University's work, please consult http://www.globalministriesuniversity.org.)

All this rich global experience has led us to develop this book. While the book certainly explores historical realities and theories, it is also meant to provide a helpful handbook for supporting practical efforts at local-global interfaith dialogue and collaboration, as well as interreligious dialogue with science.

We found that this book's original manuscript resonated with the Pacem in Terris Global Initiative created by Pax Romana / CMICA-USA. For this reason, we asked the organization's President, Joe Holland, to publish our book though the Initiative's Pacem in Terris Press. (For more information on the Initiative and its Press, see http://www.paceminterris.net).

Later, as Joe Holland worked on the manuscript, his editing became an important contribution to the text. In addition, since the manuscript focused on global spirituality and global ethics but pointed toward a new inclusive and ecological global civilization, we welcomed a final chapter by him on that very theme and its relationship to the emerging philosophical-scientific cosmology of an evolutionary, ecological, and even mystical Cosmos.

Finally, this book, written in the early days of Pope Francis' pontificate, finds global hope in his promised Franciscan spirituality. As with the recently deceased Nelson Mandela, he hails from the southern hemisphere. Mandela, like the new pope, embodied in his life many of the central principles this book fosters for a global, ethical spirituality. Mandela well deserved the Nobel peace prize. He spoke from the heart and touched many people with his generous attitude of forgiveness and acceptance of all human beings.¹

INTRODUCTION

Stages in Personal & Evolutionary Understanding

This book is a sequel to our 2008 book, Steps toward Vatican III: Catholics Pathfinding a Global Spirituality with Islam and Buddhism . ¹ It, too, examined the dilemmas facing humanity and sought to build bridges among world religions. Reaching beyond our first volume, this book focuses on globalization itself and its attending challenges. Also, rather than addressing internal Church problems, this volume studies both the problems of the new globalization and the possibilities for a new global spirituality and global ethics to promote a healing global ecological civilization.

To support our human family's journey into the new globalization, this book addresses (among other experiences) the history of the Silk Road, one of the first human experiments in globalization. The Silk Road, as well as the discovery of America, helped to catapult us into the present globalization – with its innumerable problems, challenges, and promises. Our human family is now trying to deal with these pressing realities.

This book especially recounts how prominent prophetic and even mystical thinkers and leaders – for example, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Martin Luther King, Bernard Lonergan, and Fethullah Gulen – have tried to address these problems, and in ways reminiscent of someone called Rumi.

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhi, also known as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī and popularly in the English-speaking world simply as Rumi ... was a 13th-century Persian poet, jurist, theologian, and Sufi mystic."² A product and star of the previous Silk-Road globalization, Rumi remains an inspiration for many today.

In this book, we argue that the local-global spirituality and ethics needed today – exemplified by figures like Rumi, Teilhard, Lonergan, and Gulen – needs to be based on deepening insights into current global realities, which in turn need to be based on a profound psychological-moral vision.

So, in this book, we explore both history and theories as they impact on a global spirituality leading to a global Ethics, with both promoting a healing global civilization. We study integrative worldviews and the needed stages of global cooperation, so as to give useful hints for those engaged in the complicated ethical-spiritual ramifications of globalization. In addition, we probe the historical stages of cosmic and personal development, or possible reversals.

In our search though this book, we note that there are numerous and diverse theological spiritualities of Christian and Muslim origin, while Buddhists tend to explain their spiritual worldviews in philosophical rather than theological terms. So we address today's encounters of cultures and religions in a manner that respects all authentic spiritualities. (Some say that there is one underlying spirituality with many expressions.)

In this process, one problem is the need to understand the historical evolution of spiritual impulses. We believe that an evolutionary understanding of spiritualities, influenced by insights from the frontiers of contemporary science, can assist religious leaders engaged in interreligious dialogue to overcome any personal or collective fears in such dialogues. We all need to learn how to prevent cultural conditioning from clouding our common local-global vision beyond personal constraints.

In addition, we wish to insist that life is full of ambiguities and conflicting self-interests. We address such dilemmas with a self-transcendent logic of the heart – in so far as may be feasible in a brief book – with the aim of encouraging generous souls to move from any egotistic self-reference.³

While we believe that a global spirituality and a global ethics imply one another, we also need to ask: how do secularists and atheists fit in here? Even more broadly, how can people today of different persuasions cooperate in addressing globalization? In response, we state that, by drawing on sociological, theological, philosophical, poetic, and ethical insights, we will try to draw the big picture.⁴

In the movie, My Big Fat Greek Wedding, the Greek father of the bride is having trouble accepting his American son-in-law. In one scene, he says that his family's name in Greek means orange and his son-in-law's name in Greek means apple. Oranges and apples ... but in the end ... we are all fruit. This insight helps him accept the marriage. Our text tries to link the apples and oranges within an ethical local-global spirituality.

In doing so, we draw especially on the evolutionary science of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), who integrated pure scientific research with his religious vocation, even though the church officials silenced him during his lifetime. His book, The Phenomenon of Man, had to be published posthumously. In our view, his life and writings are exemplary; they are a main reference point for our book.⁵

We also explore the ecological, social, and spiritual traumas now facing our human family. In some ways, we are on a journey like that of Don Quixote at the beginning of the modern age. For Cervantes (author of Don Quixote), as in many recent sacred writings, there are difficult encounters between ancient traditions and contemporary experience, and serious traumas often occur.⁶ For that reason, one needs to have one's eyes opened – to heal such traumas. So we need healing dialogue on any basic issues that otherwise tend to divide humans and cultures.

But, while Don Quixote rebelled against the waning of the Middle Ages through an imaginary chivalry, we now approach our new global age by way of transcultural, ethical, interfaith dialogues based on a healing language of the heart.⁷ Reading the signs of the times with an open heart prods us to unify hearts for effective action by addressing in love and compassion all wise persons of good will.

This healing dialogue involves praxis of thought in action – something much richer than mere theory.⁸ We address such a praxis toward the end of the book in relation to the implications of peace and justice teachings.⁹

What we call our transpartisan¹⁰ viewpoint seeks to discover how Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam (and, potentially, other world religions), in mutual dialogue with the frontiers of scientific awareness about an evolutionary, ecological, and even mystical Cosmos, may all together seek local-global healing. We see such healing as eventually forming a new global civilization, which would learn from and draw on our human family's multiple, rich, and ancient existing civilizations.

Through such dialogue, we hope to reconcile various philosophical and theological approaches to both transcendence and immanence, at least as found in these three world religions, as well as in science, and even in atheism, by opening ourselves to subjective acts of meaning which can in fact become objective.

The title of our text refers to Paths, in order to indicate that each major world religion has its unique epistemological-metaphysical framework with its particular search for the transcendent Holy One (God, Allah, or emptiness) – including Buddhism's negative spiritual enlightenment, and also Hinduism's cosmic consciousness.

Of course, there are many world religions beyond the three we address here. But we have chosen Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam for this book because they have been part of our experience.

We also honor Earth-path of Creation Spirituality found in the indigenous spiritualities of the human family. This path is now especially manifesting itself in forms of ecological spirituality. In the twenty-first century, developments in Earth science, anthropology, cosmology, evolutionary biology, and psychology are all helping us better understand our interdependence with the evolutionary history of Earth and of the life stages of Earth's biological evolution, and within it of our human evolution.

Our text attempts to integrate all of these scientific insights and mystical insights from Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam, in a holistic and local-global spiritual-cosmological story.

Part I of this book will examine the signs of the times, to prepare us later for discovering a local-global spirituality of new hope and new life. Part II will then explore evolutionary views of a local-global spirituality, which draws on new scientific insights. Then, since a global spirituality implies a global ethics, Part III will address global ethics in the light of the mediating bridges proposed in Parts I and II. Finally, Part IV will offer some tentative and initial explorations of a healing global civilization.

PART I

READING THE SIGNS OF THE TIMES

Fears & Hopes within Globalization

1

MYSTICISM & SCIENCE

BEFORE COSMIC MYSTERY

Dialogues on Spiritualities & Science

Come then, my love; my darling, come with me.

The winter is over; the rains have stopped; in the countryside the flowers are in bloom.

SONG OF SONGS, 2:10-12 ¹

The S ong of Songs speaks of love, of renewed hope. In a similar vein, this book looks beyond the symptoms of winter in our all-too-confused globalizing world. We are the second generation able to annihilate humanity through nuclear war and the first generation to do so by killing Earth. The crisis is global in that humanity has reached a critical moment of either living in harmony and avoiding explosion or dying from within by environmental greed/ implosion.

Interreligious Transpartisan Method

In the face of human fears, religious/cultural differences are often at the root of a chaos that paradoxically allows for change that can save us. What we need is an inclusive and unifying transpartisan method that respects and honors each religious tradition.²

A question that Eastern and Western religions all seek to answer is the fundamental one of life: where do we come from, where do we go and how navigate this passage? They propose spiritualities and ethical forms of behavior. Up until now, many religions' leaders have interpreted their dogmas and practices in isolation from other religions and from global experience. However today, globalization is in need of a more basic and inclusive global spiritual consciousness, one which seeks dialogue among all world religions. The fact is that we must recognize that dogma and practices need to be linked to global human experience. Our efforts in this direction represent this book’s transpartisan method.

Emerging Global Spiritual Consciousness

We are now undergoing shifts in global spiritual consciousness on both individual and collective levels. One may ask: what there was before the Big Bang? Believers say 'God' or 'the Ultimate.' Scientists ask: how can God, who is spiritual, produce a material Cosmos out of a spiritual nothing? Thomists argue that we came out of nothing. For Buddhists, all is 'Empty.' The question remains: How can matter come out of nonmatter or be 'empty'? We seek to answer such a question with an "Uber worldview, a transpartisan religious spirituality grounded not only in beliefs but also in scientific insights. Individual and collective experiences of the heart also have their role. At the deepest level, ethics flows from being aware of an Uber spirituality" that recognizes our common humanity. The Golden Rule would have us treat all humans humanely. Earth and its resources need to be respected and be shared by all. In this spirit, we propose a transpartisan, metafaith spirituality,³ or an inclusive method. Our inclusive metafaith method seeks to mediate immediacy. It differs from New Age uses of metafaith in that it asks how spiritual leaders can coordinate one another's views with those of scientists in guiding needed changes in today's world. We seek both theological and scientific grounds.

In classical and early modern Christian theology, this foundational common human understanding of the ultimate Cosmic Mystery, grounded in the best scientific knowledge of the times about Nature, has been called Natural Theology, and its derivative ethics has been called Natural Law.

Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, & Science

Our transpartisan viewpoint seeks to discover how Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, and the frontiers of contemporary science may converge. Again, we hope to reconcile different approaches to transcendence and immanence in these three world religions, and in science, and even in atheism, by adverting to the subjective side of acts of meaning and how such acts can be objective.

We believe that a person's individual life experience implicitly integrates earlier stages of evolutionary history and can