December 24, 1997
Pope John
Paul II
Via del
Pellegrino
00120
Citta del vaticano
Italy
Your Holiness:
Now that we have once again entered into the
bizarre ebullience of the Christmas Season, let me
cast the first stone. I have some comments on
Christianity to place out in the open. I was not
born a Catholic but nonetheless understand your
position relative to the larger Church that
includes the divisions I have been associated
with. Please consider my position and what it
means to you and all Christians. I am a
parishioner at St. Paul's Anglican Episcopal
Church in São Paulo, Brazil. I was baptized and
confirmed in a Community church with subdued Dutch
Reform undercurrents in Ho-Ho-Kus, N.J, U.S.A. At
that time I rather accepted the position of the
church prima facie and sang sweetly as the
leading boy soprano in the choir for six years,
also writing a song I sang as a solo at the Easter
service in 1962.
Jesus has risen on this day
From
the tomb in which he lay
He has
risen up to say
Rejoice and be thankful every day
On this glad moment we all say
Hallelujah let's be gay
He has
risen up to say
Rejoice and be thankful every day
However, I am stern and inexorable by nature and
my life has since led me down many roads of harsh
confrontation as a result. After this odyssey, I
am now finally getting back to stating a more
deeply considered position on Christianity. I am
writing to you as one of the key authorities in
the Church in order, simply, to express a
divergent perspective on Christ's teachings and
the role of the church. Considering the fact that
I am a leader of a mystic group and have the
academic credentials associated with long study, I
require consideration and response from you openly
vested ecclesiastical authorities.
I attend church and am thus fully aware of the
strengths and weaknesses of being associated with
a dwindling foreign congregation attempting to
confront life in a confused social ambiance like
Brazil. I guess we foreigners in Brazil all feel a
bit like we stand out like sore thumbs with our
scruples and emphasis on responsibility and honor.
To some extent, the Church here in Brazil gives us
solace by joining in our view that it is not the
scofflaw majority that is right in the confusion
that we face every day here, but rather, that the
majority, quem leva vantagem em tudo [who
take advantage in everything], is wrong. We are
also consoled by being reminded of our
responsibilities from the pulpit and by the
occasional protests about the Brazilian situation
that our clergy presents. In essence, we thank
them for expressing many of our views about what
is proper and right and also about the corruption
and violence and the social morass that surrounds
us.
In any case, I would like to introduce myself to
you. I am David Gordon Howe, an American with a
Ph.D. in Anthropology from the University of North
Carolina and am a fellow at Escola Paulista de
Medicina here in São Paulo. I am also a
pamong or guru in a Javanese kebatinan
(mystic) group called Sumarah, that I researched
and practiced in Java and on which I wrote my
dissertation, Sumarah: A Study of the Art of
Living (University Microfilms, Ann Arbor,
Michigan, 1980). My position with Sumarah
honestly involves a set of responsibilities that I
take more seriously than my Ph.D. in many ways.
In Sumarah, we practice gradual opening to Reality
which is both the problem and the divine essence
of existence itself. The opening process goes
through many well-understood stages until we reach
what we call sumarah or surrender, at which
point we cease to describe the experiences
involved very much in that they are a part of
divine being and constitute no confusion to us in
Java. However, I have been out of Java for sixteen
years now and in the last five years I have been
through many experiences that enter into the
higher and undiscussed areas of our practice which
have become something of a burden in this social
environment. At this point, I have the
responsibility of disseminating the experience and
getting it viewed properly.
When we enter full surrender to Tuhan Yang Maha
Ésa or the Totality of Being in the jinem
level following entry into sumarah, we
begin to openly
Mamayu hayuning bawana
Mamayu hayuning jagad
Serve the
harmony of the world
Serve the
harmony of the universe
in that our experience is now defined openly,
rather than selectively, and the whole mess is our
inescapable personal affliction as well as the
existential and philosophical angst it necessarily
is for everyone. After this entry into sumarah,
our experience gradually joins with the Divine
Being and we essentially lose any distinguished
sense relative to our experience, i.e., the ego
disappears and we serve and work the being that
arises out of our open reception of existence. The
maturation process in going from jinem
through junun to suhul depends on
the accumulation of experience involving service
and suffering. In the process we develop open
links within our being in a kind of mutual
presence involving "inner communication" in the
Human (sahir), Natural (kabir) and
Spiritual (gaib) realms. In Sumarah we do
healing but the primary thrust of our practice is
more a confrontation of existence itself and
"serving the harmony of the universe" openly,
though in suhul we enter into a
relationship with existence which looks more like:
"I didn't make this mess, but I sure as all Hell
am going to clean it up," which is called the
Divine Resolve (Tekading Ingsun).
One of the problems we are having in stating our
presence is that our message is obviously not
"Good News" in the short term for a lot of
"sinners" with large karmic loads, which, as the
church no doubt knows, is a common situation in
Brazil (How do you think this society got so
happily corrupt in the first place?) and, indeed,
in the West in general. In fact, for reasons I
present more carefully elsewhere, there neither
physically can nor ever will be forgiveness for
sins and we all just have to get used to the
prospect of being burned karmically clean by
giving full satisfaction to one another so that we
can stand to be together and not anticipate
betrayal in every interaction as, for example, is
the case here and elsewhere in the hedonistic and
escapist Postmodern World.
In Java the primary function of our kings is to
punish betrayal in any and all forms in serving
True Justice (Sejatining Keadilan). By way
of expression of this relationship, our kings
traditionally refer to themselves not as "I" but
as Ingsun, one of our names for the Divine
Totality they are responsible for referencing to
and from every moment. The principle of our
leadership contrasts sharply with the effective
tyranny that is so obvious in a society like
Brazil:
Nya gusti; nya kawula
Where there is a lord, there is a servant
and service
(not oppression or manipulation or panem,
circenses et Saturnália [bread, circuses and
carnival]) is the only true source of authority.
Due essentially to the enduring agony of my
experience in Brazil for the past fifteen years, I
have progressed through our levels of attainment
or awareness to the point of openly standing
suhul, the divine being, which is common
enough in Sumarah's pinisepuh or elder
leaders. Evidently, I am in Brazil to serve but I
have found the being here so corrupt and
convoluted that service has mostly involved an
open attempt to expose and punish its various
levels of betrayal through personal definition and
presence. In Sumarah we term this the mirror
function as we openly reveal the character of
others to them on various levels stretching from
what is "unconscious" in them but openly expressed
in us to direct personal contact involving subtle
or not so subtle confrontation so that they can
see themselves more clearly in this feedback and
correspondence.
Believe
it or not, one of the biggest problems I have had
in Brazil is not with the ugliness of those around
me but with their beauty (when they happen to have
any). Apparently, seeing their glory and honor in
the mirror awakens defensive reactions coming out
of long-standing traumas and the tendency is to
deny association with themselves; they can get
quite hostile about being appreciated properly for
fear of what they assume to be coming, i.e.,
enthrallment to a vision held and controlled by
another. However, we know this mirror, this
vision, to be independent of us and dependent only
on Reality. Their beauty is theirs, not ours for
seeing it, and such confusion eventually sorts out
in that we stand accountable and in good faith
(which I evidently argue that the Church often
does not in working the same function).
Like the Church, we hope that people will see
their own situation more clearly and start making
better and more responsible choices. But, in any
case, we are sure that they will eventually suffer
the pain they cause to others themselves this way
(through the exposure process) and will thus be
moved to change their behavior for reasons tied
purely to self interest if nothing else. Obviously
this is a long process and requires dedication in
that we are not offering people a beautiful view
of "salvation" or "forgiveness," but rather, a
clear understanding of how ugly, evil and horrible
they truly are and what they can do to improve
their situation in personal terms by confronting
existence more honestly themselves and seeking
less escape from their responsibilities.
Responsibility is the key to it all, really.
I have been engaged in this duty (tugas)
for fifteen years now, and thus, in as much as my
claims concerning my status are serious and based
on years of service, I would like to render a bit
of a comment on Christianity in a general sense.
In fact, I would not describe myself as a
Christian. I find Christianity confused and often
ill defined in pretending to the authority of a
questionable character like Jesus Christ, who
taught many things that we consider regrettable at
the very least if not initially presented in bad
faith. As you will see, we in suhul are more in
line with the Old Testament God who does not give
people the right to hand out "free lunches" and
parlay promises of forgiveness for their sins
through oblivious belief or some superficial
association with "acting" good rather than being
open, the essence of responsible behavior of any
kind. We wish them to be properly, i.e., openly,
defined in what they do such that the path they
take eventually involve awareness of purposes and
consequences.
In addition, the idea of there being a Son of God
or, as came out in our church Newsletter some time
ago, Adopted Sons of God concerning other Church
related individuals who aspire to divine authority
without assuming divine responsibility, just
strikes us as so strange that we are rendered
momentarily speechless. Divinity is a being and a
purpose, not a "paternalistic" relationship that
seeks to impose short-sighted mercy on existence
rather than asserting the propriety of Justice,
truly the eternal essence of God. Who could truly
love or trust anyone who does not work for Justice
but rather tells us, like a populist politician,
that we have to abrogate our responsibilities and
let him sort out our problems for us without our
being able to demand accountability from him as to
his purposes and the interests he serves. The
claim to being a Son of God does not bespeak Jesus
Christ's acceptance of divine responsibility in
that he is pretending authority that places him
above answerability while acting in the stead of
the Father he maligns and defies with his
teachings.
In his career of peddling fancified notions of
indolent salvation, Jesus promoted behavior that
God did not approve of according to the Jewish
vision and attacked the system of authority
present among the Jews in an openly subversive
fashion, albeit without sufficient conviction or
consistency as to have been easily apparent at the
time. He "played" his audience in rather a callous
manner, did he not? In fact, there are those in
the suhul being that consider this just
another expression of the tyrannical bent, the
urge to pretend and promote yourself above others,
that is so common among humans and openly purport
that the Jews were right in their depiction of
Christ as just a bigger demon than other demons:
Preachers
often speak of placing yourself back at the time
of Christ. These rabbis were there and it was
their job to evaluate the people around them and
guide their understanding. Heavens, maybe they
were right and Christ's confused "peace and love"
teachings as the world's second flower child
(after the similarly dubious and quintessentially
irresponsible Ikhnaton) were somehow an expression
of his evil. Another clear indication of this is
that the Jews, who knew Christ best, did not
become Christians in notably large numbers.
Much like Islam, to us Christianity is what we
call a mixed consequence "wish league," a kind of
glorified chain letter of a social nature. Wish
leagues do some good by protecting the Natural
innocence and beauty of the group dominated in the
presence of the defining being but are
fundamentally flawed because the leagues do not
teach their participants to accept responsibility
for what they are, feel and do to those around
them in proper terms or to confront existence for
what it is (which would evidently expose the
faulty foundation of the wish league). An obvious
wish league is invariably present in any tyranny
where the population is forced to believe in the
lies of the head of the being and render their
energies to his or her service. Saddam Hussein and
Adolf Hitler with all their propaganda and
prevarication are apt examples of demonic
presences who have managed wish leagues. In a wish
league, anyone who speaks out against the
established mendacity is in danger of ostracism,
torture, imprisonment or death.
In that light, just look at the Holy Catholic
Church in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (or
Islam and S. Rushdie at the moment) and explain to
Galileo Galilei and the other victims of the
Inquisition how it is that Christianity is not
just a relatively sophisticated and
institutionalized multigenerational wish league
where everybody has to agree with the dominant
version of existence while they move through their
lives enacting the will of the often openly
corrupt and invariably callous tyrants at the top
defining the direction of the "ship of state" or
"body politic." These despots may or may not have
an articulated understanding of what they are
about in this larger sense in that they serve
their power itself within the dominating union and
float along in its unjust but highly defended and
deeply felt presence as expressed in societal
oppression. Wish leagues obviously do not do very
well in periods of generalized acculturation like
the present in that the lies that define them
(always a variation on the theme of group
superiority) become evident quite quickly.
However, be that as it may, to us one of
Christianity's most heinous teachings is to deny
your real feelings and seek out "the Peace of God
that passes all understanding" as if it were a
drug. We see the need for calm appreciation in
making good decisions but we also profess faith in
feeling everything that comes to us in order to
find out what is going on properly within and
around us. We are all responsible for everything
we are and everything we do. On the other hand,
Christianity teaches us that if we just "believe"
we are no longer responsible ourselves in that we
have surrendered our lives to Jesus Christ.
Christ does not teach us to confront our existence
but rather to let someone else (him) confront it
for us and just go along for a ride on a veritable
"trem de alegria" ["happy train" associated
in Brazil with political favoritism for a select
group of supporters] with the incredible promise
of eternal heaven coming to us for just obeying
his will. Quite a deal. Doesn't anyone in the
Church ever contemplate how impossible and,
actually, ridiculous this promise is? What on
earth could Christ and Company do with all those
karmic lepers and reprobates, hiding from their
sins in the mercy of another?
A regrettable consequence of Christianity in these
terms is that it turns the devout practitioner
into a kind of emotional cripple who floats along
with a beatific smile and hides from his feelings
rather than accepting them, suffering them and
maturing as a result. We recognize that feelings
are a great part of the way we relate to one
another and Reality, our essential comment on
existence and its returning comment on us as we
share experience with it in what we call rasa
in Java. Existence is often ugly and it would seem
appropriate that we should suffer ugly feelings
about it when they arise in order to see it
clearly. But Christ tells us to love and love
alone and thus to deny what Reality is trying to
tell us. My goodness what a strange teaching: we
are told we should not responsibly respond to our
own feelings and give the feedback we have to give
to those around us. "Turn the other cheek": Well
maybe, but not without reason. Giving people
feedback about your reactions to them is one prime
responsibility we all have and is absolutely
necessary for their maturation.
Our feelings are our connection with reality and
we are all responsible for upholding, suffering
and maturing by accepting them and learning from
them. The principle involved in solving problems
is confronting them; denying your feelings because
you find them unseemly or whatever is obviously
not a form of confrontation but of escapism, the
world's biggest problem at the moment (with all
the drugs and alcohol and violence and sexual and
relational irresponsibility) but much of the
tendency to escapism can be laid at the door of
the church, in that it has always taught that we
can escape from our sins if we just say we are
sorry and believe in somebody else's mercy, in
fact, even worse, this fount of forgiveness is
someone who never even assumed divine association
except as a proxy so dubious that the people
around him, exposed to his presentation, insisted
on his crucifixion, evidently due to the pain and
confusion he was causing them.
His general teaching is so deeply at odds with
Divine Will as we in suhul
know it that it is one of the reasons we honestly
suspect Christ to have been in bad faith in his
Gospel when he purports positions like the
following thus advocating cutting people off from
their deep and confused love and need for one
another:
You must admit that this kind of teaching is more than strange: it is wantonly if not purposefully irresponsible. How are people to clarify the confused feelings that unite and divide them if they are not allowed to feel them and suffer them into something decent that reflects love and purity. Another among the many horrors of irresponsibility in Christ's teachings is:
What on
earth?! We are not to give one another feedback?
What else can we properly do? It is our sacred
responsibility to give one another feedback that
is as clean and clear as we can manage because it
is in the mirror of others that we learn about
ourselves. We are not to note the impurity of
others because we are not pure ourselves?
Impossible. We all must work together in seeing
and feeling and condemning one another when
appropriate so that we can free ourselves from the
chains of our ignorance and arrogance and evil by
working together in exposing ourselves, one and
all, from the demonic all the way up to the divine
being. In fact, the Truth does not properly "free"
anyone, but reveals the horror of existence and
real responsibilities. A daunting moment, to be
sure.
We in Java have been confronting this kind of
fraud for ages. Some years ago, one of our holy
men and heroes, Seh Siti Jenar, became one of the
Wali Sanga, the nine disciples that spread Islam
in Java. He eventually "Javanized" Islam for us by
asserting our vision of the divine in saying that:
Evidently the
Arabs were not amused and put him to death but his
posture was then and still remains our faith. We
found that the presence of "Allah" basically
corresponded to a megalomaniac who was interested
in having people call his name and supplicate
inordinately and in having them go out and kill
and conquer their neighbors to make them exhibit
the same curious behavior. Strange God. We could
only accept Islam when Allah became identified
with the deity we worship, who we call by various
names including Tuhan Yang Maha Ésa,
Sang Hyang Tunggal and Ingsun, and is
simply the Totality of Being. Gods of love and
power and control obviously exist but we do not
consider them even remotely interested in really
solving anyone's problems: they are just two-bit
crypto-tyrants arrogantly demonstrating their
power to cause pain while claiming good intentions
and get away with it for a time. In addition we
know that anyone can participate in Divine Being
if they are willing to suffer themselves clean and
relate to and from the Totality that is the
essence of true divinity.
As for Christ's miracles: we honestly don't care
if they happened or not. The world's charismatic
leaders so often appear interested only in setting
up a group of glad-eyed sycophants seeking escape
in their mercy and such senseless, irrelevant
stories are a part of this. We have seen plenty of
miracles in our time but few that were so
obviously useless or theatrical: what's the point
of walking on water and if he could multiply fish
and bread, why only once? What a waste of energy.
As for raising people from the dead: contemplate
the Divine position on melodramatically returning
life to someone God had put down. Regarding the
curing of illness and blindness: is God so
incompetent that disease is outside His sphere or
is it a part of the Divine comment on existence? A
legitimate miracle would have involved getting
people to confront their problems and feelings
openly, rather than hiding from them, because then
they would eventually have become more divine than
Christ was pretending to be, in that they would be
accepting their responsibilities.
We are taught not to "believe" in Java but rather
to open to Reality and seek experience, thus
grounding, establishing and expressing our own
position on existence in experience itself. Our
faith is founded in our experience not on hearsay
and in grounding our experience we obviously are
obliged to be accepting of any and all claims
concerning reality until we have them clarified
and stated in their true context in Open Being. As
we from Sumarah openly declare: Confrontation will
forever be the key to solving any and all
problems, as we accept them as our own, face them,
suffer them and let a solution form out of
Reality.
Evidently, my feeling for Christianity is not
notably complimentary to the Church but having
been involved with Christians for much of my life,
I feel it my open responsibility to express my
accrued reaction to your curious religion and what
is left of its attendant social order. I write to
you both to set the record straight and to place
myself properly with the Church I attend in a
larger sense. I acknowledge my responsibilities in
writing to you. I hope you will accept yours in
considering these comments and replying in kind.
Thank you for your attention.
Sincerely yours,
David Gordon Howe, Ph.D.