c. 2000 Religion News Service
(Rabbi Rudin is national interreligious affairs director of the American Jewish Committee.)
(UNDATED) Spirituality”is one of today’s hottest buzzwords.
I constantly hear the word at sophisticated cocktail parties where self-proclaimed atheists eagerly ask me to fully explain the Kabbala, a highly complex form of Jewish mysticism, while they sip a glass of red wine.
And I frequently hear”spirituality”from total strangers during airplane flights who willingly confess the emptiness of their lives once they learn I am a rabbi. And I even hear”spirituality”on college campuses, which have historically been centers of political radicalism and strident agnosticism. Many of today’s students are deeply into maharishi masters, miraculous mantras, and magical magnets.
It’s also common whenever I speak at Jewish study luncheons within America’s executive suites. Even when my announced subject may be the current Middle East peace process or Christian-Jewish relations, there are always questions relating to the quest for meaning in life, the purpose of prayer, and finding God in the contemporary high-powered business world.
In what may be an ominous sign of the future, I encounter numerous bizarre examples of melded forms of spirituality that mix Judaism or Christianity with Eastern mysticism. This kind of make-up-your-own, do-it-yourself crossover religion is sometimes topped off with exciting promises of past-life experiences, channeling that will reconnect with one’s true self, or strengthening spiritual auras.
Because this widespread crazy-quilt pattern of searching for spirituality is so bewildering and baffling, I decided to empirically test whether my experiences about spirituality were merely episodic or whether they represented something much larger. And what better place to find out than by using America’s newest version of the old party-line telephone: Internet chat rooms dealing with religion.
I recently spent several long evenings sitting at my computer as a silent eavesdropper in several such religious chat rooms. A persistent theme was the quest for any method that could help achieve heightened spirituality. Many chat room conversations focused on angels, tarot cards, out-of-body experiences, communication with the dead, astrology and something called reflexology.
Most chatters saw no real conflict between their public lives as active members of traditional churches and synagogues, and the private intense religious lives they lead on the Internet or within small friendship circles that meet in homes. One especially lively discussion was whether a chat room participant, a Presbyterian, should continue to attend Sunday church services when such”ordinary”worship no longer met her enlarged spiritual needs; needs that were, however, being met through a potent mixture of pagan witchcraft and Christian mysticism. Meister Eckhardt, meet the wicca-witches.
While I had expected to find such religious schizophrenia in chat rooms, I was surprised so many Internet devotees proudly described how they were blending Christianity or Judaism with their inner world of gurus, mediums who speak to”the other side,”multi-dimensional healing with Pleidian spirits, and neuro-lingistic programming. While chatters often used”eclectic”to describe their choices, I constantly thought of”cafeteria-style”as an apt description.
Just as some Wall Stock observers completely underestimated the power and permanence of the Internet and its supporting technology, so, too, there are many traditional religious leaders who scoff at the current quest for personal spirituality.
However, I urge rabbis, priests and ministers not to make a similar mistake about the poignant power of the current search for spirituality. Just a few hours on the Internet convinced me the spiritual pain of many Americans is real, and must be effectively addressed by organized religion.
A booming economy, the collapse of communism, the end of the former Washington-Moscow rivalry, the lack of any transcendent national purpose and a rapidly growing disinterest in the U.S. political system have created an explosive growth of highly idiosyncratic forms of religious expression.
If rabbis, ministers and priests ignore these facts, they will pay a high price in human suffering, and they will miss out on a significant moment in our nation’s spiritual life.
DEA END RUDIN
