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COMMENTARY
October 4, 2006
Comparative religion
Anger makes one blind. This is something I learned a great many years ago while working with blind people. Not angry ones, I hasten to add: they were calm and civil blind people. From them, and then from the autobiography of an underground hero of the Second World War -- the blind Frenchman, Jacques Lusseyran (And There Was Light, translated 1963) -- I grasped how bad things get, when one is blind, and becomes angry.Later I helped an experiment with some teacher-picked, especially bright and interesting Ontario high school students. We blindfolded them for a few days, by Lake Couchiching. We read them poetry, and other things they were used to hearing with their eyes wandering. We also played slow-motion tag in the woods, and out onto the canoe wharves. After a few days without the use of their eyes, several could actually run through the park, could “hear” where the trees were. With bare feet they could “feel” the shape of a wharf, and know when they were coming to the edge. One girl could sense even the outline of the horizon, and knew the sun was setting behind a house. But that is if one is in an accepting state of mind. You can’t do such things until you’ve given up trying to see. And even after you’ve given up, distress can hurt you. The person who gets in a lather, immediately falls in the water, or hits a tree. We are all blind, in this analogy. I wish this were still taught in school: that we know almost nothing, about anything. We get by in life mostly by playing along, quite ignorantly. It is given to few to “see” as clearly as, for instance, Jacques Lusseyran. The most fascinating thing about actual blindness, is that it confers certain advantages in seeing what is invisible to the eyes. There is, to put this plainly, a spiritual world “behind” this visible one, just as there is a visible world behind the tactile. The blind do not have the visible world to distract them. The spiritual world is not disputable. To deny it would be like a man born blind, denying colour because he has never personally experienced it, and refuses to take it on someone else’s faith. Nor could one prove to that blind man that colour exists. Even if you showed him a rainbow. And yet, there are people born blind who can tell the difference between red and blue, when they touch these colours in the sunlight. My reader will guess I am trying to make some arcane point. My topic du jour is comparative religion -- another long interest of mine. Even as a smug young Atheist, I was curious about “belief systems”, and read more than I could ever understand about the various world religions. Buddhism was a particular favourite, as it is for many atheists, agnostics, and miscellaneous hippies, looking for a belief system that might exclude a paternal God; yet offers a way to see through what we like to simplify as “the illusions of this world”. Like Catholic or Orthodox Christianity, but unlike Islam or Judaism for the most part, it also offers attractive monastic traditions -- robes for people to wear in their imaginations. “We all know” that Buddhism teaches this world is illusory, and that selfhood must be annihilated in pursuit of nirvana. But no, the Lord Buddha, himself emerging out of the rich and often surprisingly solid metaphysical traditions of ancient India, taught no such nonsense. The wealth of Buddhist art, and narrative, dwelling on the lives of Lord Buddha and his disciples, should have been the first clue -- that even Zen Buddhism takes this material world a lot more seriously than an idiot is apt to take it. A religion that doesn’t, and which cannot cope with the “real world”, soon disappears. Today, a great deal of nonsense is spoken about Islam -- as ever, especially by its apologists. There is a similar blindness towards a cultural tradition that includes much more than crazed jihadis. It is particularly the religious, the spiritual dimension of Islam that is incomprehensible, not only to observers who have not lived in Muslim lands, but to many “postmodern” Muslims themselves, who’ve become as blind to “Allah, the merciful, the compassionate,” as Western postmoderns have become to the Christian understanding of He who is Love. I am not saying there aren’t many hard, violent passages in the Koran, and Hadiths; nor am I saying these are no better or worse than similar passages in the New Testament, or Dharmapada. For to say this is to ignore fact. But before we stare, at what may seem alien and frightening, and before we let anger make us blind, we must realize that the sincere Muslim, in his humility, is doing what we are, when we are seeking God. He is in prayer. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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