Beyond Religion. Valson Thampu. Pippa Rann Books, U.K. distributed in India by Penguin Random House India. November 2021
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any of our communities today seem to be regressing to the kind of intolerance that is hostile to whatever does not fit their norms and values. There is often little space for people to hold differing opinions and beliefs, let alone express their individuality and faith freely. Individuals or groups representing such differences are met with aggression and ostracism because the axiom seems to be that only one way – usually the way of the powerful – can stand. People, then, cannot be themselves for fear that their beliefs, ideas and opinions will cause them to be “cancelled”.
It’s in this context, with this fear, that I read Beyond Religion, which explains that when any human community comes into contact with another, each highlights its distinctiveness from the other, whether out of conservatism, a desire to establish its superiority, or a wish to gain followers for itself. However, looking at people of other worldviews through such lenses that focus on dissimilarities makes it impossible for us to see anything but causes for dissension. Further, by tunnelling our vision to the narrow area of differences, we are at risk of developing a distorted and incomplete understanding of people, the world and God.
Drawing from philosophy, mythology, literature and world religions, the author gently leads the reader to appreciate what is universal and similar between us all. He writes particularly of religion, explaining that the majority of the original teaching – on which the world’s religions are thought to be based – are strikingly similar to each other. Most of the founders or teachers whose thoughts birthed or nurtured a new way to the Divine taught similar universal truths and demonstrated compassionate virtues that their followers then embodied. These thinkers often emphasised inner growth and peace in communities. They celebrated diversity and simultaneously allowed for unity and wholeness. The universal elements of each of their thoughts, that transcend the boundaries of religious traditions, Valson Thampu calls ‘spiritual’.
Beyond Religion is a call to move towards spirituality, to moult the old skin of narrow-mindedness and grow into the expansive freedom of God’s Spirit.
In inviting individuals to join this spiritual revolution, Thampu explains the pitfalls of religion, without completely antagonising it. He does this by building on a key idea that our understanding of God, the infinite Spirit, is limited by our mind’s capacity, which in turn is constrained by our context. “God in his infinitude, cannot be fully revealed in any single religious tradition, which is finite, as all traditions are.”(p.170) Hence, God reveals Himself to us little by little through them all. Over time, and across religions, the idea of God expands. However, Thampu makes it clear that “it is not the essence of God that changes, but the substance of our understanding of that essence.” (p.168) Each religion, then, could be thought of as highlighting a few facets of God.
This implies that to get a more complete understanding of the Divine, we must learn from – rather than tear down – traditions that are different from ours.
Another theme that is developed in Beyond Religion relates to the misconception that what is spiritual must be other-worldly. The author argues that spirituality is in fact, firmly grounded in, and improves, this world. He makes this case by showing that most traditions think of God as the Creator. We see God’s mind in Creation. “To see God is also to revere the mystery and wonder of His Creation; for Creation is a panorama of God’s self-expression. To see God is to see worth in everything and everyone.”(p.140) Spirituality appreciates this worth, and as a result, loves and cares for all of God’s creation. It is not possible for a spiritually robust person to sit still in the presence of, let alone be the cause of, violence, injustice and greed. Since creation is an expansion and expression of God, it would feel to them as if “each time injustice erupts, each time atrocities rage, God is wounded and violated.”(p.205) Rather, a spiritual person works towards restoring the awareness of the worth of all creation. “The more we grow in spirit, the clearer we see that humanity is a God-centred family. The earth is a shared inheritance.”(p.153)
The book, thus, makes a strong case for us to embrace spirituality. It explains that spirituality, unlike stagnating religion, embraces thought, discussion and creativity. It appreciates that creativity and self-expression are freedoms that God gave humanity. Hence, when pursuing spirituality, we can each be authentically ourselves. The book also shows that spirituality increases our awareness of ourselves and our surroundings, uses the catalyst of suffering to awaken our ingenuity and nudges us to grow and heal our communities. In this way, nothing – not even individual or collective suffering – remains senseless when looked at with spiritual eyes. Rather spirituality aids in restoring worth and celebrating life.
Thampu does, however, challenge the need for middlemen in our access to God. He does so by reaffirming the worth of every individual. “Every believer should deem himself or herself responsible and free to seek light divine through the scriptures… One must value oneself as a possible vehicle for the revelation of spiritual wisdom, and steward oneself in light thereof.”(p.118) Thampu establishes that each of us can and must seek to know God ourselves. This guarantees a crisis, not only for middlemen, but also for every individual and community that puts gurus and priests on a pedestal. Beyond Religion, then, while having the potential to empower and encourage the lay person, is a book that may offend the lovers of the status quo, those whose profession relies on selling access to God, as well as those who are prejudiced against reading different perspectives.
But perhaps you like to read different perspectives? Are willing to question whether access to God should be sold by middlemen? Are open to thinking about how to improve current state of affairs in the world? If so, this book will be a stimulating read. Beyond Religion is for leaders, seekers, peacemakers, and anyone who likes to think.
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Excerpt
Beyond Religion: Imaging a New Humanity,
Religions can be used for two opposite purposes. First, to anaesthetize the victims of the status quo to their deprivations and to perpetuate their misery. Second, to transform the established order of things towards making it more just and humane. Accordingly, religions will be either escapist deflections from realities, or transformative encounters with the status quo.
Mahatma Gandhi’s foremost resource for leading the people of India to freedom was spirituality. To him, liberation was a spiritual mission.[1] William Wilberforce’s[2] protracted struggle to eradicate corruption from England was, similarly, a spiritual project. Sree Narayana Guru in Kerala, [3] used the power of spirituality to bring about social transformation and the empowerment of the oppressed. Maharshi Dayanand[4] unveiled the light of truth to dispel the darkness of superstition and obscurantism from the Hindu society. The power of biblical spirituality sustained Nelson Mandela[5] and Bishop Desmond Tutu in their struggle against apartheid in South Africa.
These are but occasional flashes of the spiritual light in the long history of religions. Otherwise, their track-records in impacting the world spiritually, are not laudable. Engels observes that the church turned a blind eye to the misery and exploitation of the working-class all over Europe. Also, no proletarian movement was inspired or sustained by any school of religion or theology. “As a matter of fact,” he writes, “there appears to be an ever-widening chasm between the Church and the labourers . . . Individual priests may participate keenly in workers’ movements. But religious movements per se have nothing to do with justice to the working class and the poor of the earth.” [6]
The disservice that religions do to the victims of the status quo is the invention of fanciful metaphysical alibis to justify their present misery. If the poor suffer, it is because they deserve to suffer. They deserve to suffer because of demerits incurred in their previous births. In Hindu thought, not even the gods can interfere with the law of karma. This consigns the wretched of the earth to immitigable misery. Christianity takes a different route. It attributes human suffering to a primeval lapse through the doctrine of the Original Sin.[7] It is silent, though, on why people should suffer unequally, given that the stain of the Original Sin is an equal inheritance. Second, it foists on the oppressed the teasing hope that their present misery will be rewarded in the world to come. Either way, the end-result is the same. The status quo stays intact.
The irony of this is kept hidden five fathoms deep. Religions emerged as eruptions of the unprecedented. They were counter-intuitive responses to the human condition in their contexts. The vitality of religions stems from their power to transform the status quo. This power atrophies, when they domesticate themselves in the given, and become conformist. The religious elite plays a decisive role in this process.[8] Priests in every religion align themselves to the political and socio-economic elite. The passion for justice and human dignity ever-present in the spiritual core of religions, gets suppressed when they are overridden by priests who choose to endorse and subserve elite class interests.
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Footnotes [1] M. K. Gandhi: The Story of My Experiments with Truth (1927). Gandhi states emphatically in his autobiography that his spiritual experiments were far more significant than his political strategies in attaining freedom for India. The latter would not have been significant, but for the former. Gandhi is an unmatched exemplar of spiritually impacting the political domain and transforming the life of a sub-continent. [2] William Wilberforce: “Is Christianity so little esteemed among us, that we are to account as of now the hope, ‘full of immortality’, the light of heavenly truth, and all the consolations and supports by which religion cheers the hearts and elevates the principles, and dignifies the conduct of multitudes of our labouring classes in this free and enlightened country. Is it nothing to be taught that all human distinctions will soon be at an end…..and to know, on the express authority of Scripture, that lower classes, instead of being an inferior order in the creation, are even the preferable objects of the love of the Almighty?” An Appeal to the Humanity of the British Empire (1823) [3] Asokan Vengassery Krishnan, Sree Narayana Guru: A Comprehensive Biography (2018) [4] Maharshi Dayanand: Satyartha Prakash, or The Light of Truth (originally published in Hindi in 1875) [5] Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom (1994) [6] Friedrich Engels: The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 (1894) [7] In the Judeo-Christian tradition, each individual inherits the impulse to rebellion stemming from Adam and Eve, whose disobedience activated the principle of death, as in the doctrine of the Fall. Hinduism teaches that one bears the burden of debts incurred in one’s former births. This view, compacted of reincarnation and compensation (karma) undergrids and perpetuates the caste system. [8] The elites of the world, of all categories, belong together. Their interests are embedded in the status quo. The religious elite and the political elite share a solidarity. The elites constitute the dominant force, despite being a tiny minority, in every society. For this to endure, it is necessary that all power-centres, including religion, are re-configured to be tributaries of the status quo. As a result, religion becomes a pro-elite conformist force. Prophets and reformers strike their heads against this rock. Many perish. But, in the fullness of time, the rocks break and newer fountain-springs of spirituality emerge, which, in turn, suffers a similar fate. But the spiritual core they generate becomes part of the shared spiritual heritage of humanity.
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