Between Heaven and Earth

Riffing on Hulu's "Under the Banner of Heaven," the Eighties, and the effort to find a clear, life-giving counter-dialogue with something called "the world."

It seems to me that spiritual life requires a certain amount of a counter-dialogue with something called “the world.” When humans gather in the commons, whatever wisdom emerges it’s certainly the case that you tend to get something else in the bargain: a muddle that the seeker of truth has no choice but to paddle against. Eastern traditions speak of the struggle to be free of attachment, or to escape the cycles of samsara, while the Abrahamic traditions have various injunctions by which the faithful live both engaged in the world and set apart. Indigenous traditions, which have almost universally been trampled by prevailing industrialized systems, have a particular critique of “the world,” too.

I am watching and really loving "Under the Banner of Heaven,” based on the non-fiction book by Jon Krakauer. (Like much good docudrama TV, it’s on Hulu). I appreciate that Andrew Garfield chooses projects as an extension of his own spiritual journey. (Playing Jim Bakker in “They Eyes of Tammy Faye,” and Desmond Doss in “Hacksaw Ridge,” were both motivated by his faith, and he was initiated into Ignatius Loyola's "spiritual exercises" while in the process of making Scorsese's film "Silence.”) Also, I am really enjoying the exploration of religious commitment, the ways that religious organizations have to navigate the continuum from agnosticism, to universalism, to orthodoxy, to dogma, to fundamentalism.

"Under the Banner of Heaven," is a story of a counter-dialogue with the world gone horribly wrong. Characters have drawn the lines with the outside world too sharply and too narrowly. Instead of seeking the divine in order to transform their fallibility, or even to palliate it, they use doctrine to escape themselves. Religion as a way to run away from truth, not toward it.

I was grew up sort of Catholic-lite in the eighties, around the time that “Under the Banner of Heaven” is set, and my childhood occurred along a mild, but definite border between the secular and the sacred. We went to church regularly into my early teens, but we rarely discussed spiritual topics at home. Otherwise, the world for me was alive with Star Wars, and Coca-Cola, and Transformers. America had definitively proved to itself that rebellion could be virtuous, AND that it was possible to be acceptably decent and a consumer at the same time, and it called, siren-like.

I remember my parents as though they were continually paused in thought, trying reluctantly to arrive at decisions, while I pointed at TV and the shelves and asked for one thing or another.

We ended up saying “yes” to more and more of what appeared to be the benignly commercialized world. Two roads diverged, and we took one more traveled by. Our culture has only begun to measure the difference it made.

I had friends and cousins who went to Catholic school, and their life made me uncomfortable. The thorny dynamics that accompany certain forms of organized religion are easy to sense even at a distance, and I think I sensed them even as a kid. I feared adult religious guidance the way one would fear any kind of tyranny. And certainly some of what I had resisted, and from which I was spared, ended up being the kinds of things that people I know today have had to carefully deconstruct for themselves in adulthood. I know people now who are either hyper-responsive or hyper-sensitive to coercion. I know people who find it challenging to locate their own perspective apart from doctrine. Some friends have taken thoughtful routes that have led to wrenching tensions with their families, with loved-ones categorically convinced they are going to hell simply for engaging in what seem to me to be healthy acts of critical thinking.

Also, though, growing up I knew children in religious families who were more confident than me — particularly if they grew up in parts of the country that were more ambiently religious. They seemed more grounded and, oddly, in some ways they seemed more prepared to engage the world as it is. Over time, it turned out that the benefits of religious upbringing could continue to pay off into adulthood.

I eventually understood, too, that my independent streak wasn’t entirely a positive reflection of my own character, either. Truth be told, religious narratives disturbed me not just because of the potential tyranny, but actually because I was nervous about the disciplined pursuit of goodness, and what it might revel to me about myself. Turning away from religion was definitely partly turning away from light, out of fear. And though I don’t think that everyone should engage in organized spiritual pursuits by any means, I suspect there are mixed motives to the avoidance of religious community for many people — perhaps more than is generally realized.

“Under the Banner of Heaven” explores Mormonism in both its fundamentalist and more world-reconciled forms, and it covers interesting ground in the direction of all of this, but much of it accords with cultural expectations. Our pluralistic-solves-to-secular culture reflexively associates religion with cults, and so, to no small extent, does the TV series. We’ll support one-pointed devotion to muscle hypertrophy, or passive-wealth-generating entrepreneurial careers long before we’d consider a similar devotion to spiritual simplicity, or ethical living, or self-mortification, or seeking out the intentions of a higher power — even though these latter pursuits were much more common in an America that was more uncontroversially ascendant, in the past.

It’s almost as though we tend even to think that the value of spiritual devotion is inversely proportionate to its intensity — as though dogmatism is not merely a risk, but the inevitable destination of intensifying one’s spiritual pursuit.

(At the same time, we find ourselves in crisis nested within crisis — quite notably with few prophets in sight. And we wonder why.)

It starts to look like a problem that is without a solution. Religions are cult-like, while the growing alternative category of spiritual-but-not-religious is either anemic in groups, or else a lonely journey. By contrast, the various secular mainstreams — I’m not really sure how to define these in our incredibly multi-channel world, but I do feel they’re still there — have a certain cloying, sanguine quality to them. They’re easy to find, and they have the benefit of the large number of people trying to find healthy solutions within — even if they have also steadily drifted off course, becoming gradually more blunted, brutish, and imperious themselves.

Probably it’s a good idea to be in tension with the world. But how do we do it?

The other day I was talking to a student about the importance of articulating a vision of the world apart from the mainstream. I said, “Clearly there are things to question when you look out there and you see . . .” And in the moment, I faltered for a concise way to put it.

“. . . Extinction-level events,” the student said.

Which, in seven syllables, seems to me to be one of the most essential ciphers that anyone can use to begin to articulate a counter-dialogue with the world.

If one wants to develop a clear path for spiritual inquiry, I think there are few better entry points than to look at what science is telling us about what’s happening to the planet. The overfishing of the oceans, the decline of airborne insect species. The nine planetary boundaries that the Stockholm Resilience Center believes to be essential to preserving the Holocene equilibrium that seems to be essential to successful agriculture — and the fact that we’ve crossed four of them while rapidly approaching the other five. The fact that the model of economic expansion forecasts that we will turn nature into products at ten times today’s rate by the end of the century — with market forces indicating, of themselves, no end in sight.

Personally, I think it’s a great idea to try to be right with Jesus. But how are we reconciled with the impending possibility of human-caused extinction-level events?

I try to look at where I actually sit in the systems that are generating the planetary crises. Virtually all Americans take more than their sustainably replenish-able share, every year. By one estimate, the average American takes five times more than their sustainably replenish-able share. I think about the conditions in garment and electronics factories, where people produced the clothes that I am wearing and the computer that I am using to write this. I think about in feedlots, slaughterhouses — how people benefit, and at what cost. I think about those imagines of orangutans’ earnest and hopeless rebellion in the last of what used to be a forest of trees. I try to realize that that’s actually happening, in part, for us.

Meanwhile, I watch commercialism continue to march unapologetically forward. I watch advertisements for money-saving apps that will make another person passively rich. I watch the fascination with speculative crypto assets and NFTs. I watch a large, house-party-like, Guy Debord-esque spectacle captivate so many of us. I watch the glazed, vaguely self-focused look in the eyes of numberless people who I pass in the two hours I spend walking the street every weekday, stepping out of their way because it seems it’s nearly impossible for others to imagine the courtesy of mutual deference. I watch youthful, aggrandizing, and essentially silly conversation dominate the internet, forming unmistakably real, though deeply flawed institutions — on Reddit. I watch our own government struggle to understand the magnitude of the crises we are in — or, at the very least, to struggle to narrate the situation and possible solutions in ways that feel clear and rousing.

Having all this in mind eventually drove me back to the Christian tradition in which I had been lightly raised, to see what the best minds there had been trying to tell us about these situations all along — what brings peace and harmony, and what works against it. It’s clear to me that within any tradition, there is a vein that clearly understands the risks of orthodoxy, and that works hard to help people navigate the nuances, so that they can be spiritual athletes without becoming narrow-minded zealots. What first appeared to me to be a set of rigid proclamations revealed itself, at a deeper level to in fact be a rich conversation. To no small extent, I just had to get past the outer reef.

Much of what I’ve found so far is not particularly new or surprising. It’s good to simplify. It’s good to meditate and pray. It’s good to read scripture for what it can suggest about what God is like, and the way that it encourages virtuous living. It’s good to shake out ones thoughts afterward so as not to perpetuate what Sam Harris calls “iron age thinking.” It’s good — and hard — to try to find community in one’s spiritual undertakings, to experience connection, support, accountability, and the sense-making that can only really happen when one is in a group.

Some of what I’ve found it surprising. It’s surprisingly powerful to imagine oneself to be a child of God, and to imagine that God is continually running after you. It’s surprisingly powerful to surrender and repent. It’s surprisingly powerful to make time for regular reading and practice, not only for the sake of self-development, but as an act of devotion and humility. It’s surprisingly powerful to imagine a basic polarity between “empire” and “shalom,” to choose the latter and renounce the former. It’s surprisingly powerful to say, “not my power but the power of Christ in me,” and “not my will but Thine.”

It’s surprisingly powerful to really consider what Paul going on about when he talked about a “new creation” — and to not rush to easy answers.

Especially when I observe friends and students, and I think about the challenges of raising children in today, I find something to admire in communities like the one in “Under the Banner of Heaven.” There is something to be said for creating intentional, positively formative culture — and that’s an essential part of what any church is. Setting healthy formative rules as a family is one thing. Setting healthy formative rules that are underscored by a feeling of community and belonging is much, much more effective — even as one regards the inherent risks.

At the same time, I find that even our best pioneers often fall short — whether they are attempting to work within an orthodoxy or not. We are in what Charles Eisenstein calls a “space between stories,” where the richest answers are not obvious, but emergent. And that requires effort, and experiment, and failure, and patience.

But at the very least, once you are at the point of picking intently through the various good takes that organized faith has to offer, you have gone a long way toward beginning to articulate your own strong counter-dialogue with the world.

It’s clear to me that some of the best spiritual work can be done in the midst of crisis. If crisis is not inherently a mechanism designed for producing sincerity, and then transformation, it certainly works as though it were. Spirituality is especially relevant when it genuinely helps people navigate actual problems. And we have some pretty big, pretty genuine problems that we have to face.

It is richly spiritual just to face them. And it’s obviously wise to seek good wisdom when we do.