Thank you Mark. I had a different experience yesterday, watching the service at Canterbury, here on "the UA-cams" - a beautiful address by Canon Emma Pennington that I found deeply moving. So much is dependent upon the teacher. I do think it is important to recognise how flawed we are, but still loving and still loved. I think you may be mistaken in saying that "it won't do" in today's society. I look at the "grab it now", instant gratification, respect me by default - I don't think that many people recognise or examine the darkness within - and if we don't recognise and acknowledge it, well Hell can happen. I think we ought to be reminded and examine it, and especially over Lent - while still recognising, as Emma says, that we are loved as we are. *[It was the Ash Wednesday choral eucharist for 14th Feb just btw]
I can imagine a sung service feels very different. One with Allegri's Miserere can hardly fail to move! But I suspect there's a kind of ill-considered hypocrisy in repenting of consumption, in the sense that consumption itself probably has Christian underpinnings, after all it arose in Christian countries. Why? Because in the early modern period Christian thinkers like Bacon argued that technology was given by God to make heaven a place on earth and restore Eden. The prosperity gospel and social gospel are closer than people like to think, both having that logic. Then, it gets secularised and notions like progress bed down...
Professor Mark Vernon would you try to get Ian McGill crest and Robert Sapolsky to talk on your channel and do an interview with those two… Bless you and our community … 🦋🕊♥️
Can't help but feel there's a lot of hyperbole in this. Some of the New Age, Non-Dual types are so, so harsh on mainline Christianity. There's no doubt it has its faults, yet this representation is a bit strong IMO, espeically when we venerate the Eastern traditions which are very similar in their flaws in reality (if you don;t have a Western reading of them that is).
Honestly, eastern and western forms of Christianity are quite different in their basic theology, the obvious one being the west's focus on salvation, the east's on theosis...
@@PlatosPodcasts I'm not challenging that in the slightest, what I'm raising is a common Western trend in nonduality circles to pathologize mainline Christianity, especially Catholicism. While there is SOME truth in such criticisms, they stroke with a very broad brush and ignore the very same issues with Eastern traditions. My wife is Orthodox for example and has many sad tales to tell of dogma in the Eastern church, and being from Leicester I grew up with many Hindus and a few Buddhists who offer exactly the same criticisms of their own traditions as you offer here of Christianity. It's a Western illusion that the Eastern trads are that different. It'd be nice to see a bit more nuance and appreciation for the Western trads as there's lots of wisdom in there, however I fear the nonduality crowd seems to enjoy overegging things and making mainline Western Christianity the bad guy to justify their own beliefs and practices (which too are full of wisdom and beauty, but far from perfect).
Well said. I still attend an Anglican service and, though the congregations I'm involved with are much less shame-filled than my evangelical upbringing, I still have to grit my teeth from time to time. In many ways, the bluster and performative anger of modern Christianity is an unavoidable consequence of decimated self-worth.
I feel a bit ambivalent about your take here. If you look at the regimen and culture of the traditional Rinzai monastery (as I understand it) there is not the same emphasis on moral 'sin', but I would say there may be an equivalent emphasis on the ego's inherent insufficiency and paradoxical nature, and that this uncomfortable sense of inherent self-wrongness, in both religions, may help to accomplish a similar end? So I'm not sure that 'East' and 'West' are poles apart. And the Buddhists, too, had their hells. The ego has many strategies for ignoring the fundamental ignorance. It looks for solutions to this or that 'problem' and thereby ignores the fundamental problem and supplies itself with a sense of (limited) existence and purpose. Attending to the fundamental problem involves stripping away defences and distractions. It's not comfortable. Religion wants to intensify this, not soothe it. But this is done in the controlled context of religious culture, where there is a valid path and, ideally, a living exemplar of having overcome ignorance. This prevents the ego from falling into mere despair or other pitfalls. I'm not a Christian, but I can imagine that these liturgies are missing key aspects of proper context needed to be effective. You're being filled with self-loathing but not inspired with confidence that there is a Way that has been consummately realised by a living teacher and therefore if they did it, so can you. Instead, you are told to take it on faith that God may intervene if you can only humble yourself enough. This might work sometimes, but I think few are so ripe.
Points taken, and remind me of another facet of the issue, which is that of personal transformation - a key part of monastic life, of course, but strangely not much attended to by western churches, at least as I’ve experienced it, for all that if you asked a clergy person they would likely say, of course that matters…
@@PlatosPodcasts Yeah. Rupert Sheldrake thinks that the social forms & rituals are still important even absent the core understanding, but when the core understanding is so chronically and conspicuously absent, all sorts of problems inevitably creep in, and I think the whole thing decays and, after a certain point, can no longer be said to be more beneficial than harmful. We can't abandon it, and we can't go on just the same--we need to reform and revitalise these empty forms. Kinda like... In the UK, Christmas means less and less to people, but they feel even sadder at the thought of letting it go altogether. The solution is to revitalise it, but how? This would require the true religious inspiration of one who has overcome ignorance; otherwise, it would be well-meaning but insipid. I can imagine a reworking of Christmas by Pixar, and it would hit some relatively wholesome or psychologically astute notes but lack any existential profundity.
I experienced too much of this, I believe, from the western minset- steeped in Protestants and catholicism even when not religious, but find Eastern Orthodoxy very different, but also find it hard to breakthrough from all the affects of a mindset grown up in and experienced majority of my life
Your sermon is in direct opposition to Dante’s teaching how can you reconcile this in your mind? With all due respect you clearly haven’t encountered Christ. When you do, all you want to do is cry at the feet of everyone you’ve ever sinned against but especially God. I really hope you reflect deeper on sin and consider what happens when we desecrate the temple of God. how can God inhabit a corrupted body. Without purification without turning away from our way and to Gods way. That divide will always be there. I’m saddened by your false Christianity and saddened by the people you’re leading down your personal interpretation of Christ.
Well, in hell, Dante finds everyone is frozen with guilt, glee, terror or evil, with absolutely no room for change. That's why it's hell. In purgatory, people suffer and lament but in the light of hope; the purging is of what obscures God rather than what is not acceptable to God, so as to find the divine within them, you could say, echoing the soteriology of John and Paul, when he says, I no longer live but Christ within me. The souls are becoming more capable of paradise, which they then enter and the real return to God begins. You might be quite surprised by the near absence in Dante of the kind of Christ encounter you seem to envision. God inhabits every body, even those in frozen hell, because if God didn't, those bodies would fall out of existence altogether. Such is Dante's vision.
I have just read Frederick Turner's book on beauty, and he feels that our shame as humans is intimately connected to our capacity to experience beauty, an experience he defines much like mystical epiphany, but available in each moment. Maybe the church as it exists is like bad therapy, a false and distorted version, like BF Skinner for instance, of human propensities that are evolutionarily vestigial, which each of us must face, but when faced, free us. As you and Rupert Sheldrake discussed, NDEs show us that we don't need to be saved from death. Maybe the Western liturgy is like the repetition compulsion, trying to reveal something long buried, but only succeeding in repeating the trauma.
That shaft of light off your left shoulder.....my goodness. Beautiful.
Such a synchronicity, or a divine approval perhaps?
Ha!
Lovely & just right to gently open the Kingdom here, now. ❤
New subscriber. My search began with the phrase, "The kingdom of god is within."
We need you Mark Vernon.
Thank you Mark.
I had a different experience yesterday, watching the service at Canterbury, here on "the UA-cams" - a beautiful address by Canon Emma Pennington that I found deeply moving. So much is dependent upon the teacher. I do think it is important to recognise how flawed we are, but still loving and still loved.
I think you may be mistaken in saying that "it won't do" in today's society. I look at the "grab it now", instant gratification, respect me by default - I don't think that many people recognise or examine the darkness within - and if we don't recognise and acknowledge it, well Hell can happen. I think we ought to be reminded and examine it, and especially over Lent - while still recognising, as Emma says, that we are loved as we are.
*[It was the Ash Wednesday choral eucharist for 14th Feb just btw]
I can imagine a sung service feels very different. One with Allegri's Miserere can hardly fail to move! But I suspect there's a kind of ill-considered hypocrisy in repenting of consumption, in the sense that consumption itself probably has Christian underpinnings, after all it arose in Christian countries. Why? Because in the early modern period Christian thinkers like Bacon argued that technology was given by God to make heaven a place on earth and restore Eden. The prosperity gospel and social gospel are closer than people like to think, both having that logic. Then, it gets secularised and notions like progress bed down...
To dust you will return always seemed to deny the resurrection. I'm a great believer in the positive power of feeling guilty but not in shame.
Elucidating words indeed! Thank you once again.
Professor Mark Vernon would you try to get Ian McGill crest and Robert Sapolsky to talk on your channel and do an interview with those two…
Bless you and our community …
🦋🕊♥️
Thank you. Could not agree more!!
You are spot on🙏🏻
Can't help but feel there's a lot of hyperbole in this. Some of the New Age, Non-Dual types are so, so harsh on mainline Christianity. There's no doubt it has its faults, yet this representation is a bit strong IMO, espeically when we venerate the Eastern traditions which are very similar in their flaws in reality (if you don;t have a Western reading of them that is).
Since UA-cam won't show my thumbs down, here is this comment.
Honestly, eastern and western forms of Christianity are quite different in their basic theology, the obvious one being the west's focus on salvation, the east's on theosis...
@@PlatosPodcasts I'm not challenging that in the slightest, what I'm raising is a common Western trend in nonduality circles to pathologize mainline Christianity, especially Catholicism. While there is SOME truth in such criticisms, they stroke with a very broad brush and ignore the very same issues with Eastern traditions. My wife is Orthodox for example and has many sad tales to tell of dogma in the Eastern church, and being from Leicester I grew up with many Hindus and a few Buddhists who offer exactly the same criticisms of their own traditions as you offer here of Christianity. It's a Western illusion that the Eastern trads are that different. It'd be nice to see a bit more nuance and appreciation for the Western trads as there's lots of wisdom in there, however I fear the nonduality crowd seems to enjoy overegging things and making mainline Western Christianity the bad guy to justify their own beliefs and practices (which too are full of wisdom and beauty, but far from perfect).
@@Richie3264 I'm sure you're right about institutional forms east and west, Christian and otherwise, yes. Here's to the wisdom.
Well said. I still attend an Anglican service and, though the congregations I'm involved with are much less shame-filled than my evangelical upbringing, I still have to grit my teeth from time to time. In many ways, the bluster and performative anger of modern Christianity is an unavoidable consequence of decimated self-worth.
Marvellous - thank you
I feel a bit ambivalent about your take here. If you look at the regimen and culture of the traditional Rinzai monastery (as I understand it) there is not the same emphasis on moral 'sin', but I would say there may be an equivalent emphasis on the ego's inherent insufficiency and paradoxical nature, and that this uncomfortable sense of inherent self-wrongness, in both religions, may help to accomplish a similar end? So I'm not sure that 'East' and 'West' are poles apart. And the Buddhists, too, had their hells.
The ego has many strategies for ignoring the fundamental ignorance. It looks for solutions to this or that 'problem' and thereby ignores the fundamental problem and supplies itself with a sense of (limited) existence and purpose. Attending to the fundamental problem involves stripping away defences and distractions. It's not comfortable. Religion wants to intensify this, not soothe it. But this is done in the controlled context of religious culture, where there is a valid path and, ideally, a living exemplar of having overcome ignorance. This prevents the ego from falling into mere despair or other pitfalls.
I'm not a Christian, but I can imagine that these liturgies are missing key aspects of proper context needed to be effective. You're being filled with self-loathing but not inspired with confidence that there is a Way that has been consummately realised by a living teacher and therefore if they did it, so can you. Instead, you are told to take it on faith that God may intervene if you can only humble yourself enough. This might work sometimes, but I think few are so ripe.
Points taken, and remind me of another facet of the issue, which is that of personal transformation - a key part of monastic life, of course, but strangely not much attended to by western churches, at least as I’ve experienced it, for all that if you asked a clergy person they would likely say, of course that matters…
What is this “EGO” of which you speak? 🤔
@@PlatosPodcasts Yeah. Rupert Sheldrake thinks that the social forms & rituals are still important even absent the core understanding, but when the core understanding is so chronically and conspicuously absent, all sorts of problems inevitably creep in, and I think the whole thing decays and, after a certain point, can no longer be said to be more beneficial than harmful. We can't abandon it, and we can't go on just the same--we need to reform and revitalise these empty forms.
Kinda like... In the UK, Christmas means less and less to people, but they feel even sadder at the thought of letting it go altogether. The solution is to revitalise it, but how? This would require the true religious inspiration of one who has overcome ignorance; otherwise, it would be well-meaning but insipid. I can imagine a reworking of Christmas by Pixar, and it would hit some relatively wholesome or psychologically astute notes but lack any existential profundity.
@@TheWorldTeacher Indeed. No-one before Freud talked of it. And even for him it wasn't a thing but a senes of I-ness.
I experienced too much of this, I believe, from the western minset- steeped in Protestants and catholicism even when not religious, but find Eastern Orthodoxy very different, but also find it hard to breakthrough from all the affects of a mindset grown up in and experienced majority of my life
❤💙🤍
Your sermon is in direct opposition to Dante’s teaching how can you reconcile this in your mind?
With all due respect you clearly haven’t encountered Christ. When you do, all you want to do is cry at the feet of everyone you’ve ever sinned against but especially God. I really hope you reflect deeper on sin and consider what happens when we desecrate the temple of God.
how can God inhabit a corrupted body. Without purification without turning away from our way and to Gods way. That divide will always be there.
I’m saddened by your false Christianity and saddened by the people you’re leading down your personal interpretation of Christ.
Well, in hell, Dante finds everyone is frozen with guilt, glee, terror or evil, with absolutely no room for change. That's why it's hell. In purgatory, people suffer and lament but in the light of hope; the purging is of what obscures God rather than what is not acceptable to God, so as to find the divine within them, you could say, echoing the soteriology of John and Paul, when he says, I no longer live but Christ within me. The souls are becoming more capable of paradise, which they then enter and the real return to God begins.
You might be quite surprised by the near absence in Dante of the kind of Christ encounter you seem to envision. God inhabits every body, even those in frozen hell, because if God didn't, those bodies would fall out of existence altogether. Such is Dante's vision.
I have just read Frederick Turner's book on beauty, and he feels that our shame as humans is intimately connected to our capacity to experience beauty, an experience he defines much like mystical epiphany, but available in each moment. Maybe the church as it exists is like bad therapy, a false and distorted version, like BF Skinner for instance, of human propensities that are evolutionarily vestigial, which each of us must face, but when faced, free us. As you and Rupert Sheldrake discussed, NDEs show us that we don't need to be saved from death. Maybe the Western liturgy is like the repetition compulsion, trying to reveal something long buried, but only succeeding in repeating the trauma.
I've been pondering the matter of being born again recently, feeling it means being consciously re-established in our true source and sustainer.
This is a helpful thought...
Extremely dark - once again. Stop spouting this crap