Religious Scholar

We are All Mozart

Reflections on going through stacks of old artwork in the pantry

Simone turned from him gently, and sat beside the open window. It was dusk, and she looked out over the rooftops toward the setting sun.

“Don’t we always identify with Mozart? I am the messy one who can’t find her sketches. They are smashed between sandwich bags and sacks of barley on the kitchen shelf. They’ve been there 35 years!  Where are my songs? My stories? Why can’t I be organized and neat, with clean sheets of paper with unfolded corners stacked like Pringle’s chips in a cardboard box?

“That is not my mind. All I can do is laugh. And cry. My wig keeps slipping off, even when my back is turned. I found my best portrait: the paper split an inch from the middle, and all the edges brown. What am I always thinking of, or did for all those years? Everything once fine smells like old newspapers forgotten in the cellar, a bit dusty, a bit damp. That is the stale smell of my soul.

“So, did you know I can write backwards and sometimes draw what’s over my shoulder while looking in the mirror? That once I wrote all night and drew all day, magic flying out of me like a sparkler’s fire? Find me someone, quick, before the sun is gone, someone with the Dewey decimal system etched into his heart, a fierce art-saving Kali: a feather-duster in one hand, a Vupoint scanning wand in the other. Have him save these fragments of my soul before they wither into scraps of random words and lines, a corner of a dancing image, a leaf, the last iambic memory of a lost quatrain.

“We are all Mozart, leaving life with nothing to our name but that trail of vague flickering fairy lights—a poem, a song, a star. Save them, they are all I am. If one of them must, then let it be me, who turns to dust."

"Meditation is embedded in all the practices of yoga. When you are practicing the postures or some other aspect of yoga, you are focused. When you are more relaxed, you get a glimpse of yourself."

--Vijayendra Pratap, Ph.D., Founder and Director of the SKY Foundation. Comment made in class March 7, 2013.

We need to be grounded in the nourishing traditions of the past in order to propel ourselves forcefully into the future. The past is a launching pad for what is to come, not a tar pit to drag us down and smother us.

Tweet @ReligiousSchola November 2012: True saints speak of poverty of spirit and emptiness. Only when empty of greed & selfishness do we reap abundance of spirit.

Praying for stuff is gaining ground! It all started with Sarah Ban Breathnach’s Simple Abundance a few years back. “Abundance.” What a slippery code word for “more stuff.” Soon Joel Osteen was on the bandwagon. “Abundance” was the word to watch in a series of Osteen’s televised sermons that I followed in 2010.  God’s affable pitchman even authored a book titled, Living in Favor, Abundance, and Joy. The idea is, you pray for God’s Favor, He rewards you with Abundance (aka more stuff), and you have Joy (happy happy, joy joy).

Lately, Deepak Chopra’s has latched on to the lure of Abundance.  In early November, he announced a daily guided meditation journey to an “Authentic Abundance Consciousness.” (my quotation marks and caps for emphasis). “…discover and leverage the secrets to attract abundance of all kinds in to our lives through the power of meditation,” Deepak’s Web page exclaims. Don’t you just love that word, “leverage,” too, with its suggestions of high finance and its whiffs of risky business deals?

Even followers of a Hindu master have bought into Abundance. This week I received an e-Newsletter from the promoters of one of my favorite 20^th century gurus, titled, “Creating Prosperity Consciousness.”  “Prosperity Consciousness”! Whatever happened to the austerity and spirit of detachment found in the gospel of Hinduism, the Bhagavad Gita? Two full chapters of this holy work are devoted to detachment from things of the world. Nothing there about “creating prosperity.”

I know that these and other traffickers in spiritual understanding have a ready answer to criticism. “Oh, we’re not talking about money!” they retort. “We are speaking of abundance of spirit, being more than you are, giving more because you get more!” Of course, according to Abundance Theory 101, when you grow in spirit, you also grow in…you guessed it…material wealth.  Nifty, huh?

Well, sorry, I am not convinced. The lure of abundance is designed to bait a new market:  the “What’s in it for Me” crowd who seek tangible results for their investment of prayer, meditation, and “free-will offerings.” After all, religion that results in self-knowledge or communion with the Divine isn’t for everyone.  Can you pay down your Mastercard with inner peace? Will deep meditation help your child get into Harvard? Is fasting in the desert really as cool as Botox and Viagra?

The truth of the matter is, religion and spirituality are all about what’s under the superficial appearance of abundance. Strip away abundance, say Jesus and Krishna, and you find the real treasure underneath. Nowhere is this more clearly articulated than in Buddhism with its focus on Emptiness. Be still and know that I am God, wrote the Psalmist. (But it is true, as Shakespeare wrote, that the Devil can cite Scripture to his own purpose.)

The truly successful spiritual voyagers of history, without exception, found peace, humanity, and understanding by minimizing distractions and focusing on what is most important. For us today, that includes self, family, friends, neighbors, nation, nature, world. The message of the world’s religions is to cultivate stillness, help others, listen for solutions, to be thankful and, as Buddha’s last words express it, “work out our salvation.”   Leave the quest for abundance to Donald Trump and the Kardashian sisters. Folks, we have work to do! 

Atheism is usually referred to as a religion. But is it really? A religion may be defined as a system for recognizing and worshipping a divinity or living in spiritual harmony with others and pursuing spiritual ends. By these descriptions, atheism is the lack of religion, not a religion on its own terms.

A key characteristic of religion is its use of rites and rituals, often in communion with others as well as in the personal quest. To my knowledge, atheists do not have a "church" or liturgy, or even a vague "I am in touch with something cosmic" point of view. One could say that atheists have religion in the form of Ethical Societies, but these also often attract open-minded religious or spiritual people. (See my blog on this site about religion vs. spirituality).

To my mind, atheists have valid philosophical and lifestyle viewpoints. But until they are holding regular weekly meetings, wearing funny hats, and reading responsively from old copies of Shelley and Thomas Paine, I am loathe to call them religious.