Rabbi Rami Shapiro: Rabbi to the World

My husband and I have a saying, “The truth is the truth.” We usually say it after reading some spiritual text and marveling how easy it is to connect the dots from the key points in that book, be it Buddhist, Hindu, Christian or Jewish, to the countless others we have read because, “The truth is the truth.” That is a very simplistic way to describe what Rabbi Rami Shapiro refers to as “perennial wisdom,” and he has plenty of it to share with us.

I was first introduced to Rabbi Rami through his monthly question and answer column In Spirituality and Health Magazine called “Roadside Assistance for the Spiritual Traveler.” When we get the magazine at our home, the first thing we do is turn to his column and read it straight through. Rami has a way of answering questions from people of all faiths that transcends specific religious dogma, and touches both the universality of our experiences and the heart of each spiritual traveler’s concerns. And when you finish reading his column, or any one of his many books (and he’s written over 30), you know, for sure, that Rami is an uncommon Rabbi.

Here are just a few things about Rabbi Rami that make him unique:

·         While he was ordained as a Reform rabbi from Hebrew Union College, and has a PhD in religious studies he’s also a zen rabbi and Reb Zalman Schacter Shalomi welcomed him as a rebbe which in Chasidic Judaism is a title given to a teacher who touches not only your mind and your heart but can reach your essential being and guide you to find yourself there.

·         He was made a 32nd Degree Scottish Rite Mason and he’s also been initiated into the Ramakrishna Order of Vedanta Hinduism

·         And he’s been named a Holy Rascal by Seneca Elder and Franciscan Sister Jose Hobday; a Holy Rascal is someone whose experience of god transcends theology and religion, and is willing to live with the unanswerable questions that reality poses, rather than conforming to the answers religion offers.

An unusual resume for a rabbi, indeed.

When Father Richard Rohr was asked to write the forward to Rami’s 2013 book, Perennial Wisdom for the Spiritually Independent, this is what he said: “Who would have thought that a Franciscan priest in New Mexico, trained in classic Catholic theology, would even be invited to do such a thing? Or even want to do it? Yet, I read Rabbi Shapiro’s words and all I keep saying is “Yes,” “Of course,” “Makes total sense.” And “This fits my own experience and education!”

Or as my husband and I would say, “The truth is the truth.”

So, just what kind of Rabbi is Rami??

In answer to that question on his blog, Rami simply, but profoundly, answered this way:

 “For me, . . . being a rabbi isn’t about making Jews Jewish, but about using Judaism as a tool for making meaning and discovering wisdom. I am interested only in truth as best as I can discern it, and I fashion Judaism as a way of articulating that truth.

Because my loyalty is to truth rather than Judaism, I see myself as spiritually independent, and thus free to explore and draw from the entirety of human wisdom, and I want the Judaism I teach to be of value not only to Jews, but to other spiritually independent seekers as well. Just as Jews borrow from Buddhism, Hinduism, Sufism, and Christian mysticism, I want followers of these paths to borrow from Judaism as well.”

“So I guess I am the kind of rabbi that my rebbe once told me to be: a rabbi to the world.”

Indeed, Rabbi Rami has traveled the world bringing the perennial wisdom of the world’s religions to spiritual seekers of every faith and no faith for over forty years. He IS a rabbi to the world and we are fortunate to have had this Holy Rascal with us in our little corner of the world on April 25, 2015 to share his perennial wisdom with us for two hours, which wasn’t long enough and left us wanting more.

The theme of Rabbi Rami’s Sacred Threads presentation , “The Heart of Spirituality: Bridging the Wisdom of East and West,” which carries through the theme that on a mystical level, all the texts of every religion are saying the same thing. They all agree. They all have had the same experiences. As he says, “This is the perennial wisdom that transcends form and unites all in a common experience of the truth.”  And, when we tap into this perennial wisdom and experience of the truth, Rami reminds us that we are more loving, open-hearted and compassionate, less fearful and angry.  He presented this concept of perennial wisdom through four shared points of connection:

Point 1: Everything is a Facet of the One Thing:

There is nothing but God; we are all one. Everything you see, think, feel, imagine, is a part of and never apart from the same Source, whether we call it God, Allah, Krishna, etc.

Point 2: YOU are a manifestation of God, but you have two states of consciousness.

Everything is a manifestation of God and that means You are. To know God is to know yourself and to know yourself is to know God. When you know God directly, you realize that ultimately there is no You or anything/anyone else. Only God, which is simple to say, but living in this world, there is a big HOWEVER that doesn’t make it easy for us to accept it. Rami explains that we have 2 states of consciousness: one see ourselves as separate from God (ego) and one that sees ourselves as part of God (spirit). When we are separate we are anxious, fearful, angry, needy, narrow minded, feel threatened and live in a zero sum world. This is the mindset that scares people and sets us on a path to war. When we see ourselves as a part of God, we are compassionate, expansive, loving, just, spacious minded and believe there is enough for everyone. When we are in this state, our sense of self drops away and there is deep joy in what we’re doing. (Sounds like the place we want to be, doesn’t it?)

Point 3: When you are in the Zero Sum Self, separate from God, life is suffering.

We suffer because we want things to be other than they are.  We ask the narrow mind questions like “why would God do this to me? To others?” when the spacious mind question is, How shall I respond to this? What can I do?

Point 4: We are here to be open hearted and use our spacious minds

We are here to realize the oneness and divinity of everything and to move from conditional love, fear, “a constricted heart, closed mind and clenched fist,” to unconditional love, and an open heart, mind and hand.

These four points of perennial wisdom could easily be philosophical concepts that have us scratching our heads and furrowing our brows, but Rabbi Rami has a way of presenting them that makes them easy to understand and touches our collective hearts. And we laugh a lot too! He has a unique ability (and an endless font of knowledge) to finds ways to connect the four points right to our everyday experiences, to people of all faiths and to the spiritually independent, and when he explains the wisdom inherent in them, we DO understand that we are all connected, and that the “truth IS the truth.”

Rami ended his presentation with a discussion of the powerful time in which we are living, a time of great religious turmoil and potential spiritual advancement, referring to it as the “Second Axial Age,” a concept explored in Karen Armstrong’s book, The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Our Religious Traditions. Some two thousand years ago, during the First Axial Age, all the great religions came into being and the world shifted from magic to morals, ritual to compassion and from an “us thinking” to an “all of us” thinking. Today, Rami explains, we are amid a second Axial Age and are undergoing a period of transition similar to that of the 1^st  Axial Age. Now once again, we need to redefine the notion of the sacred so it can become relevant and enter our lives in new ways.  As he puts it, “At the heart of the 2^nd Axial Age is the realization that religions must transcend the zero-sum world view of saved and damned, believers and infidels, enlightened and unenlightened. Rather than a focus on religious dogma, in our non zero-sum world the focus of religious life is spiritual practice and expanding our sense of compassion to embrace all living beings.”
Rami called us to our spacious minds and engaged us in the perennial wisdom that sees our lives, every life as sacred. He says, “you know you have had a mystical experience because it transforms you; you are more loving, compassionate, less fearful and angry.” If that is the case, and I believe it is, then all of us had a mystical experience spending two hours with Rabbi Rami. He left us with spacious minds, open hearts and a strong desire for him to return to Sacred Threads soon so he can continue to share his perennial wisdom with us.

Pamela Econoply Woodnick

May 2015

References

Armstrong, Karen. The Great Transformation: The Beginning of Religious Traditions. Anchor Press. 2007.

Shapiro, Rami. Perennial Wisdom for the Spiritually Independent. Skylight Paths. 2013

On Atul Gawande’s "Being Mortal" : Life, Death, and Faith in the Power of Stories

            A “dry, leathery corpse” introduces Atul Gawande to medical school and readers to his book, Being Mortal.  Nothing else is revealed about the body; its former owner’s life and death are meaningless to the medical students who will dissect it. Gawande closes Being Mortal with a far different image: a memoir of his father’s illness, decline and death, that ends with spreading his ashes on the Ganges River, an “intensely moving experience” that connected them both to a “story going back thousands of years.” (p. 253)

            The pages between follow a trajectory as familiar as the story recounted in the old Christian hymn, “I once was lost, but now am found; was blind but now I see.” Being Mortal is, at its heart, a conversion story, a narrative of a transformation in Gawande’s understanding of the meaning of death, and ultimately, his own life and work. His profession of faith comes early in the book, “I have the writer’s and scientist’s faith. . .that by pulling back the veil and peering in close, a person can make sense of what is most confusing or strange or disturbing.” (p. 9) There’s a strong undercurrent of religious imagery in “pulling back the veil” and in the transformative power of clear vision. Such rich imagery is one of the pleasures that await readers of Being Mortal.  Reading the book flap biography, with its impressive list of credentials from Harvard, the MacArthur Foundation, and TED, a reader might expect a guidebook like his earlier work, The Checklist Manifesto, that changed operating-room procedures in countless US hospitals. Instead, Gawande offers his experience as testimonial and inspiration.

            To ‘fight the good fight’ is also an image common to conversion narratives, and it is an important one in Being Mortal.  Gwande describes mortality as a battle “to maintain the integrity of one’s life—to avoid being so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or want to be.” (p 147) Professionals who care for the sick and dying “ought to be aiding people in their struggle” with human limitations and the constraints of biology. But for Gawande, the battle of being mortal is not a struggle to defeat an enemy but to gain the victor’s privileges. Life in the face of death is a battle for autonomy, and the purpose of autonomy is authorship.  We may not control the circumstances of our aging, illness, and death, but we can struggle “to shape our response to them” (p. 210), “to keep shaping the story of our life in the world—to make choices and sustain connections to others according to [our] own priorities.” (p. 147)

            And here is the most potent image in Gawande’s conversion narrative, his renewed understanding of narrative itself. “For human beings,” he writes, “life is meaningful because it is a story.” (p. 238) Stories have arcs, and within stories, endings matter, to the point that endings can reshape everything that comes before.  Gawande faults current medical practice for its narrow focus on fixing problems that loses sight of the fundamental need to “remain writers of our own story. . .to shape our lives in ways consistent with our character and loyalties.” (p. 140)

among stories of scientists, philosophers, friends, patients, and practitioners. He knows the value of a punchy line, like “If end-of-life discussions were an experimental drug, the FDA would approve it.” (p. 178) He deftly displays self-deprecating humor:  “Between the three of us we had 120 years in medicine, but [my father’s illness] seemed a mystery.” (p. 223) His account of his father’s diagnosis and life with cancer, decline and death will likely be as central and illuminating for most readers as it was for Gawande.

            Gawande’s faith seeks understanding by looking closely and clearly at the human experience of mortality. He sees there a struggle for autonomy and authorship, and that stories, more than science or medicine, enable us to face our mortality.  Gawande concludes his testimony with a deeper understanding of himself as a human being and a physician, as one who accompanies others as they shape their lives in the face of what medicine cannot fix.

            And yet stories have their own autonomy, beyond the limits of any author’s intent. Once told, stories are the wildest things of all; when you turn them loose, who knows what havoc they might wreak? This description comes from another meditation on mortality, this time in the form of Patrick Ness’s young adult novel A Monster Calls. For all that storytellers like Ness and Gawande desire clear vision and courageous authorship, our stories can be untidy, elusive, and opaque. Veils remain between our understanding and experience of death. The final meaning of any life is unknowable until the time that we are no longer its authors. When our stories becomes as fixed as the stars, they will then be endlessly drawn into new constellations by the tales our survivors tell.

B.J. Brown

The Gift of Molly

Whispered in the air

Imagined in dreams

 

Yearned for with desire

Created through passion

 

Nourished with purity 

Delivered with long effort

 

Received into loving arms

Accepted unconditionally

 

Present in each moment

With wide-eyed wonder

 

Nurtured with patience

Living into possibility

 

Spreading joy abundantly

Bridging the past and future

 

Born anew, the old soul

Re-learns its wisdom

 

Open to give and receive

All that life has to offer

 

A gift to the world of

Pure Love.

 

Blessed be, little one!

 

                                                -Gretchen van Dyck Daggett

                                                  December 18, 2014

 

Solstice

 

 

on December twenty-third

the weatherman said

we've passed the winter solstice

today we gain

one minute of daylight

 

just one minute of daylight

I thought

what can I do with a minute of light?

 

hug my husband

share a kiss

say a prayer

pay a bill

 

standing at my kitchen window

watch snowflakes big as daisies fall

while robins forage

in the holly bushes

 

savor chocolate

steep a cup of tea

peel a clementine

breathe its sunny scent

 

or sit

eyes closed

hands open

breathe slowly, deeply

find my place

feeling life move through

a minute of light

and me

 

                                                                                    E.B.G.

 

Receiving

I recently received an email from my oldest sister (there are six of us) in which she proposed that we all stop exchanging Christmas gifts.  The message suggests that most of us have all we need and there is an implication that some of the gifts given have not been valued which magnifies the stress of finding presents at the holidays. I felt a reluctance to give up gift giving because Christmas gift exchange is one of our only remaining points of contact since our parents passed on. The whole episode started me thinking about what it means to give and to receive. I wondered what it meant that we were going down this road as a family even as I know so many families do.

I decided to reflect on it and as I did a poignant memory returned to me - a moment between my father and I from many years ago.  At the time, I was a single parent and earned my living as a private school teacher; for me, Christmas present shopping was always a case of creatively stretching a dollar.  This particular year, I was a tad short and had not yet figured out a gift for my dad.  Then I remembered that just that summer I had worked a summer job and indulged in a small extravagance for myself - the purchase of a watch. The watch had a faux ostrich watchband and a retro, military style, face.  I recalled how much my dad had admired it when I visited with him in August.  I still had the original watchcase and had barely worn the watch itself. I decided to tell Dad that I got him his own for Christmas as he had so liked it.

I don’t know why it isn’t until now that I realize that my dad ‘knew’ I had given him my own watch that Christmas.  What I do know is that he treasured it. He wore it till the band broke and then bought a new band which he showed to me; when the battery failed, he wrote to the company and secured a new battery letting me know it was still working; and, at each phase of his ownership he would share his appreciation of the watch by demonstrating that it was still working and reiterating that it was a great watch. 

Remembering all of this, I cry as I hold anew the beautiful gift my father gave to me in receiving that watch, ‘knowing all along’where it had come from both literally and figuratively. His authentic gratitude encompassed the meaning behind my meager gift, and imbued the watch with a reverence that respected what I lovingly tried to do more than the actual watch.

I think through the grace of this memory, my dad offers me a view of his soul’s complexion and he reminds me what it means to lovingly receive. Clearly, my siblings and I need to learn how to authentically share our gifts with each other.

And so, as I live into the ‘no Christmas gifts’ proposal, I shall endeavor to remember how little physical gifts really mean.  I shall value instead how much more vital it is to receive each other with compassion, open minds and open hearts – to offer the gift of accepting and loving each other.  And I shall hope that my own soul’s complexion will lovingly illuminate with the joy of receiving and appreciating in the deepest and most authentic ways the many gifts in my life.      Tory Londergan

A Reflection on A Morning with Joan Chittister and Janet McKenzie

“The stations give us a model of how to live life when our own struggles are unavoidable and life seems most oppressive, most unfair, most impossible to bear. They remind us again that there is new life at the end of every daily death.”

(pg. 13, Chittister, Joan. The Way of The Cross: The Path to New Life. Orbis Books. Maryknoll, NY. 2013)

In the fall of 2013, I participated in an on-line course called “The Blessings of Ageing,” the centerpiece of which were daily short video messages from Sister Joan Chittister. These videos led the way through the many facets of ageing and inspired participants to reflect on ageing in a more comprehensive way. The course was helpful, engaging, and appropriate for a time when so many of us Boomers are entering our “wisdom years” and looking for signposts. The content was meaningful but the real star of the course was Chittister, a Benedictine Sister, international lecturer and award-winning author of more than 50 books who is devoted to the issues of justice, peace and equality, especially for women in the Church and in Society. Few people live up to their hype, but Sr. Joan does that and more. She has a way of touching some deep part of you that was hiding and waiting for the right moment to be released and come into the light. By the end of the course I felt I knew her – as a friend, an advisor, and a fellow traveler, so when I heard that Sacred Threads was sponsoring a morning with her, I couldn’t wait to see her in person. I knew it would be a memorable experience but it was far more than that; it was literally transformative.

As a Catholic, I was raised with The Stations of the Cross and I admit, I wasn’t all that excited by the topic of this seminar, “The Way of the Cross: In and Out of Our Lives,” but I knew if anyone could change my thinking about it, it would be Sister Joan. And of course she did, and in the most glorious ways. My memories of the Stations were somber and depressing. Jesus’s message of love and forgiveness was met not with praise, but a crown of thorns, mockery, being forced to drag a cross, and being nailed to the cross and crucified in a horrific way, so to me, going through the stations was anything but an uplifting experience. But this is exactly the kind of topic Sr. Joan addresses and works her magic to help us see how the Stations are actually a perfect metaphor for each of our journeys through life; rather than being disheartening, she shows us how they give us hope and help us to make meaning out of all of life’s experiences and challenges.

Sr. Joan has a way of speaking to an audience of five hundred but making you feel as if you are the only one in the room and she is conversing directly with you. When she explains that the Way of the Cross is an invitation to human growth that teaches us what it is to be alive, you not only believe her, you know in your deepest heart she is right and she is speaking YOUR truth to you. She reminded me, and all of the attendees, that pain and human struggle are necessary elements to growth and building a life of meaning, and she explains that all in a simple yet powerful model as she takes us through each of the Stations. She explains “The Experience” of each Station and puts that experience in context, then “The Call” of each Station, which is the message Jesus sends us about that experience. Next is “The Model” that this Station presents for us to learn from, The Rising” which helps us to find the resurrection at each stage of the Way and leaves us with “the Question” which we must ask ourselves as a result of experiencing this Station.

For example, in Station 3, Jesus Falls The First Time, Sr. Joan explains that the “Experience” here relates to our own lives when “all pretense ends. Reality sets in.”(32) for we all fall many times whether it is the loss of a job, a mate, a poor investment, and we are forced to face the reality of our lives. In “The Call,” she explains that this Station tells us when we “fall” we can “finally begin to determine what is really important in life.”(32) While not an easy time, it is essential for us to ask ourselves the questions whose answers will guide us to our personal true meaning of success and what others/the world/society see as success may actually be failure for us. Next she explores “The Model” and reminds us that the third Station shows us “success often looks like failure” (34) and that floundering and faltering are an essential part of our process of becoming. Jesus fell down, but he didn’t stay down; rather he showed us that “the important things in life are worth struggling for to the end.” (35) “The Rising” or Resurrection of this Station advises us to find a moment, issue, reason, purpose important enough to give our lives over to achieve because there is work yet to be done. It is a time of recommitment, legacy, and ensuring what we are doing now will not be forgotten. She states, “To accept reality as it is . . .is the only thing that can enlarge our stature and will not diminish us as we go.” (35) Lastly, she leaves us with “The Question,” “Why am I doing what I am doing? Is the struggle of my life worth enough to struggle for it to the end?” (35)

I am a visual learner and have always been deeply influenced by the power that images add to any story or experience. The power of Sister Joan’s words would have been enough to transform my view of the Stations of the Cross but added to them, the artwork of Janet McKenzie for each Station reached deep into our hearts and made us understand that we could not ignore the eternal wisdom that is present in each of the Stations. McKenzie’s paintings are breathtaking and the combination of her images and Sr. Joan’s words forever changed my perspective on the Stations. Of her work, McKenzie says that “sacred imagery was always in my heart,” and after asking God to give her work better service, she found it in painting these profound, sacred images, which now reside in our hearts as well.

McKenzie asked us to “dig deep and bring hope to a fragile world” and with each Station, Sr. Joan gives us powerful life questions to ask ourselves and “by which to measure our own lives, the focus of our souls, and the commitment to our spiritualties.” The wisdom and guidance in each of the fifteen Stations (yes 15, Chittister adds The Resurrection as Station 15) is truly a master plan for living a life of meaning and service. It helps us to identify the “masks” we wear, and have the courage to remove them. It helps us open our arms, let go of everything we thought we wanted and see that the daily deaths of life are the gateways to new directions. As a result of being part of this experience, I will face each day’s challenges and “daily deaths” with a renewed sense of hope and meaning and I will continue to ask myself the questions of The Way so that “the struggle of my life is worth enough to struggle to the end.” Yes, indeed, this experience was more than memorable; it has transformed forever my thinking about The Stations of the Cross and about life, in ways I never expected and ways I have yet to know.

-Pamela Woodnick

Something To Think About While The Turkey’s In the Oven

  

            “Whenever you tell me about someone, you tell me what they cook!” My then-new roommate’s exasperated tone clearly suggested that this was not a good thing.  It was the 1970s, and women were supposed to be getting out of the kitchen! Our friendship didn’t last, but I still remember her words. Without meaning to, she pointed me toward what’s really going on in the kitchen.

            My personal company of saints gathers around me when I cook. I think of Jean when I pull the fat white cookbook off the shelf. I remember Steve when I grind oregano between my palms, and Joe when I push the pot of red sauce to the back of the stove until suppertime.  Apple muffins remind me of Madeleine, and breaking eggs of Margaret, who could scramble two or two dozen with equal aplomb.

            As surely as they guided me from Skidrow Stroganoff to Roast Turkey With All The Trimmings, my kitchen friends have taught me deeper lessons. Trying new things leads to some successes, some failures, and always a story to tell.  Taking care with the littlest things can make the biggest differences. There is always enough to share and room for one more. Food for the body also comforts and sustains the soul. Cleaning up after yourself is part of the process.

            Not a few Thanksgiving sermons will mention the religious significance of gathering around a common table and sharing a meal. But before sitting down, look around your kitchen.  Among the utensils, pots and memories, very good things are happening. Wisdom and grace are found there.

BJ Brown

November, 2014