Fear Drives Out Love

Today, I was not surprised to learn that “the exact meaning of the term” religion “is subject to debate among some scholars.” Of course it is. After all, if you control the language, you control minds and hearts, and once you do that, you control just about everything. Even terms like scholar and experts are used to control the language and what follows.

Be that as it may, I am going with a meaning from Andrew Holocek in Reverse Meditation, who writes:

Even the word religion hints at the foundational return: re- (“back”), and ligare (“link”) —to “link back” to wholeness—which also echoes our narrative of reversal. In other words, to remember is to reverse, to turn (versus) back (re). By turning back and going directly into that which we would normally flee (all our unwanted experiences), we will return to this foundational wholeness that is so quickly forgotten when things start to hurt.

So, religion can (and should) mean a relinking to God, in which we find a foundational wholeness. I love that, and it’s what I’ve been (mostly unconsciously) working towards my entire life, but in the past, I was told (and believed) that there was only one way to do it.

In my studies of early religions and Eastern traditions, I am finding that in the beginning, a relinking to God (from whom we have been separated by all the ego-driven crap imposed upon us by others since infancy) is what religious seekers were/are/should be going for. But what has religion become?

Ursula K. LeGuin, famous for her science fiction works, explains in the introduction to her translation of the Tao Te Ching that she first came upon an 1898 edition in her father’s study when she was a child, and that the book became a companion throughout life. Here is how she approached her translation:

The Tao Te Ching is partly in prose, partly in verse; but as we define poetry now, not by rhyme and meter but as a patterned intensity of language, the whole thing is poetry. I wanted to catch that poetry, its terse, strange beauty. Most translations have caught meanings in their net, but prosily, letting the beauty slip through. And in poetry, beauty is no ornament; it is the meaning. . . . Scholarly translations of the Tao Te Ching as a manual for rulers use a vocabulary that emphasizes the uniqueness of the Taoist “sage,” his masculinity, his authority. . . . I wanted a Book of the Way accessible to a present-day, unwise, unpowerful, and perhaps un-male reader, not seeking esoteric secrets, but listening for a voice that speaks to the soul.

LeGuin includes notes on many of the entries in the Tao, and I find this one, on entry 4, “Sourceless,” important:

Everything Lao Tzu says is elusive. The temptation is to grasp at something tangible in the endlessly deceptive simplicity of the words. Even some of his finest scholarly translators focus on positive ethical or political values in the text, as if those were what’s important in it. And of course the religion called Taoism is full of gods, saints, miracles, prayers, rules, methods for securing riches, power, longevity, and so forth—all the stuff that Lao Tzu says leads us away from the Way.

I wish that religion could be relinked to the notion that we need to relink to God in the way that God intends for each of us, not in the way prescribed by some “scholar,” “expert,” “priest,” or “theologian.”

Entry 13 in the Tao speaks eloquently to me about this very idea.

SHAMELESS

To be in favor or disgrace
is to live in fear.
To take the body seriously
is to admit one can suffer.

What does that mean,
to be in favor or disgrace
is to live in fear?
Favor debases:
we fear to lose it,
fear to win it.
So to be in favor or disgrace
is to live in fear.

What does that mean,
to take the body seriously
is to admit one can suffer?
I suffer because I’m a body;
if I weren’t a body,
how could I suffer?

So people who set their bodily good
before public good
could be entrusted with the commonwealth,
and people who treated the body politic
as gently as their own body
would be worthy to govern the commonwealth.

Am I wrong in saying that a focus on being in favor or disgrace sits smack in the middle of organized religions? After all, you’re either in or you’re out. Here’s something else: the Bible says that “Perfect love drives out fear,” but doesn’t fear drive out love? Is God perfect, unconditional Love or is God a Judge who instills fear? Both cannot be true, and calling it a paradox is just another way of controlling language. It’s not a paradox; it’s a contradiction, and contradictions marketed as compatible should make you take a step back and look more closely, because they might be compatible with something, but it’s not the truth.