First, what could Oprah be "preaching" that has captured the hearts of so many (predominately women)? In a nutshell, Oprah's journey of faith has led her away from organized "religion" and towards a broader notion of "spirituality", with many New Age tendencies. As one listens to the teachings of her spiritual confidants, the seemingly Eastern tenets become clearer. Essentially, this worldview affirms the inherent goodness of human beings. However, one somehow becomes distanced from this purer version of the self as he/she exists in the everyday world. Thus, human beings need liberation. This is achieved through practicing spiritual disciplines of meditation and reflection in order to realize our true connection with the Universe. As one guest on her show put it, we all have an inner light - like one inside a lantern. However, that glass tends to accumulate dirt, preventing the light from emanating in full. Our goal is to repeatedly wipe away the dirt in order that it may continue to shine. Faith is specifically addressed as a journey rather than adherence to any particular doctrine.This view of the world is inviting for a number of reasons. First, it rejects the traditional understandings of religion that have failed many. To these people, Oprah's faith presents a lifestyle of pragmatism. Rather than having to serve any notion of God, people are free to focus entirely on their own desires. Furthermore, this spirituality lacks any serious historically-sensitive baggage. While Christians are continuously haunted by the Crusades, and Muslims jihadist fundamentalism, adherents to this faith have nothing to be ashamed of. They are free to focus entirely on their own spiritual journey. In addition, this faith lacks so little definition that there are no serious disagreements within its community. Instead, there is the communal emphasis upon love and tolerance. However, perhaps the most fundamental attraction to such a lifestyle is its promise of purpose and personal fullfillment. According to Oprah and her friends, we all have a reason for being. Not only do we have purpose, though, but the possibility of true spiritual self-actualization. It is finally in our hands. A fan of Oprah articulates it quite well,
"Oprah shows us that people are longing for meaning and significance in their lives. They want to know they have a reason to be, a purpose for existing. And they seek practical help in living out that purpose. In some ways, Oprah addresses our existential dilemmas."
Apparently, Oprah has helped millions wrestle with the most profound questions of the human experience. Are our own any different? When turning out your own bedroom light, have you ever not paused to consider why we are here? Has the death of a friend of a parent ever led you to wonder if there really is any meaning behind our lives? Or is it all a matter of chance? Oprah's marked authenticity and vulnerability have given her audience permission to ask questions they have always wanted to.
Perhaps the most clarifying insight into Oprah's way of thinking has been a statement she made years ago on her hit television show. In discussing her own journey to spirituality, Oprah noted her conviction that God is a feeling rather than a belief, or in religious jargon, "doctrine". While this may sound poetic, I am absolutely certain she doesn't believe it, as much as I am convinced that you don't either.
Here is why: for if God really is a feeling rather than any sort of belief, then God is less of a truth and more of a mood. This becomes a very slippery slope. As soon as truth becomes subjective, you and I lose any right to claim something is right or wrong. You may "feel" or experience rape as a bad thing, but your neighbor may "feel" it is just fine. You may feel like your marriage is fulfilling. Your spouse may not - and sleep with another person. What does truth become, then? Not a question of right and wrong, but of power - whoever has the most power determines truth. "Might is right". This is an extraordinarily dangerous concept, and has a terrible history, not least to mention the Holocaust or slavery. Ultimately, the means justifies the end. This is the serious danger behind Oprah's spiritual movement. Without any serious definition or precision, such faith becomes impotent. Ultimately, this relativism has no ability to judge the ways in which you might have been wronged (or perhaps how you have wronged others), nor does it it have any true promise of hope. It ultimately leaves us with lives bereft of hope and meaning.
Unfortunately for its followers, this lifestyle places individuals at the center of their universe. The onus is upon them to both purify themselves and desperately try to find the good in even the worst of experiences. I recently listened to one show on spirituality hosted by Oprah and her panel of spiritual authorities. As caller after caller described their own experiences of tragedy, the panel essentially asked each one to smile and put on a happy face, or in other words, "To try to listen to what the Universe is teaching you" in the midst of it. What is the Universe teaching you when lose your job? What might the Universe want to say when your health insurance refuses to cover your child's cancer treatments? What might the Universe offer to a parent whose infant died upon birth? Sadly, this form of spirituality demands its adherents to pull themselves up by the spiritual boot-straps when things get tough. One caller even confessed her repeated failures to maintain this spiritual marathon, and asked what she could do to keep running.
Fortunately, the race is over, as there is a God distinctly different from such an unmerciful, exhausting, and pantheistic existentialism. Rather than just one discipline away, this God chose to enter actual time and space that he might reveal the nature of the world. But rather than asking his followers to continually "dust off their lantern", he permitted his own child to suffer a tortuous death that we might be free from the judgment of our inability to shine. Not only a feeling, but truth Himself, this God offers the hope of a place where the true injustices of this world will be made right, and we will join him there . If you are exhausted from running the hampster wheel of this spirituality, or anything remotely related to it - if you are interested in a God that made His own arduous pilgrimage to you, you may experience it THIS day!
*Please note, while this entry is quite critical of the theological positions taken by Oprah Winfrey, I acknowledge and applaud both her humanitarian work and affirmation and valuing of women. These are two significant issues we must take more seriously in the body of Christ.
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9 comments:
Amen! A couple of things:
"Oprah's marked authenticity and vulnerability have given her audience permission to ask questions they have always wanted to."
So true. She does this well and we should take notes! People HAVE to be listened to or they go off the deep end.
And...
"...the possibility of true spiritual self-actualization. It is finally in our hands."
Yikes. The popularity of this kind of deal is freaky, because it appeals to our narcissism and our delusion of control in order to deal with all the terrible issues that have arisen from our narcissism and delusion of control. It's like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.
Spiritual self-actualization isn't very useful if it's not discovering anything TRUE about ourselves. And I'm afraid true discoveries would be too tragic for the Oprah model of positivity. What do you do when you find out the source of your "inner-lantern" is a gnarly fire-breathing alien dinosaur monster?
You ask yourself what the Universe is trying to teach you.
Excuse me, but did you allude that the relativism of Oprah's
Spirituality could lead to something like the Holocaust? No doubt had tolerance and unity been the spirits at the time, rather than fundamentalism, Nazism would have never prevailed.
Do you believe there is any place for meditation or spiritual practice within Christ?
Good point Trevor. I guess it would depend on where you drew the line in your relativism. If it were PURE relativism or pure tolerance, of course it offer justification for genocide. But as you point out, fundamentalism can give rise to genocide as well.
But it's interesting that you put "tolerance" and "unity" together. It seems to me fundamentalism unifies far more than tolerance. Unity was not in short supply among the Nazis.
If you're speaking of some kind of universal unity, then isn't that a form of fundamentalism rather than tolerance. You would assume peace and certain human rights to be fundamentally good, and you would not tolerate belief systems and actions that stood in opposition.
So...two questions: 1) Where do you draw the line for what ought to be tolerated? 2) Why would unity ever be a good thing unless it is based some fundamental truth that transcends all of us?
With "tolerance and unity" I was paraphrasing "the communal emphasis upon love and tolerance", used to describe O's spirituality in the post.
I agree with you about the unity inherent in fundamentalism, although I was talking about a universal unity. And I disagree that universal unity is a form of fundamentalism BECAUSE of the truths that are the same for every person. For example, I believe that the lack of peace and human rights in our society is based on a rejection of the truth that is fundamental. The fact that Truth exists despite ourselves means that it is the same for everyone, and not contingent upon what we individually claim to believe (It exists regardless). So that is a type of unity.
In mysticism, the Sufis of Islam and the Christian mystics come to the same conclusions about the nature of God and His relationship to man: That He is eternally merciful, all powerful - the source of everything seen and unseen, that the self is inherently flawed in it's separation from God, and that God desires union with His children and achieves that union through His love made manifest.
Every religion also has it's extremists. Hitler's National Socialists were extremists of state religion, which is business and politics.
But it is left to God to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Trevor,
First of all, I really appreciate you questions. Thanks for asking - seriously. In discussing this notion of relativism, I was trying to illustrate the dangers of a value / faith system derived from personal preference, or feeling. This is drastically different than one oriented around any concept of universal belief.
I definitely understand the sentiment behind your statements concerning tolerance and the Holocaust. Were people to have been more tolerant of others, perhaps an entire ethnicity might not have been scapegoated and suffered such awful persecution.
At the same time, I think we might be dealing with different definitions of the word "tolerance". For tolerance is usually described as the acceptance of minority groups who have been unfairly represented or persecuted.
For example, in our own country, this could include both African-Americans and women, who sadly were treated as either inhuman or second-class citizens for centuries.
At the same time, tolerance is a double edged sword, for the very definition implies FULL acceptance of not just SOME cultures/persons/values, but ALL of them. Thus, Martin Luther King, Jr. would technically have been considered intolerant towards whites and others preferring to retain their social dominance. Furthermore, the 19th Amendment would be considered intolerant of persons wishing to withhold a woman's right to vote.
In the case of the Holocaust, tolerance would not have had the capacity to condemn Nazism, as it technically would have to accept this belief hand in hand with ethnic equality.
You are free to correct me, but what I think you were actually getting at is that a universal affirmation of human equality could have prevented Nazism from prevailing. However, this same belief would technically be considered intolerant of those who want to destroy life.
Thus, while tolerance can sound most noble, it is actually quite dangerous. This is all I was trying to get at in my comment. I actually am deeply sorry for associating Oprah's name with such horrible events. I did not intend to smear her - I simply wanted to note the logical end of this way of thinking.
Yes - intolerance can be extremely dangerous, depending on its basis. Terrible, terrible things have happened in the name of absolute belief. Yet, Jesus was the one teacher of absolutes who actually demanded his followers love their enemies. Sounds pretty tolerant, to me. Yet, this same love was intolerant of those who persecuted the poor and faked religiosity for their own gain.
As far meditation and spiritual practice, it simply depends on how you define these things. What I would see as means communicating with God described in scripture might be called "meditation" by others - including both praying and listening to God. As for "spiritual practice", this again depends on what you mean. There are several "practices" I read about in the Bible, including fasting or praying. But I don't do any of them because I believe it will make God love me any more - I do them because his unconditional love evokes a response in me - one which sometimes might be expressed in these "practices", and at other times not. If these practices help you express your own gratitude towards God, then good.
I hope you feel like I've addressed your questions. Please let me know if not. Thanks again
It looks like we all agree that absolute tolerance or relativism cannot really exist because it would deem 'wrong' anyone who disagreed. And we agree that unity is not intrinsically good, but its goodness depends on the thing about which the unity exists. And we agree we can learn something from Oprah and how she cares for people. And that's certainly surprising that the Christian and Muslim mystics seem to be in such agreement on theological points. We should be wary of how much we love drawing lines, and I am far from well-versed in Islam, but it is nevertheless significant that those groups no doubt had fundamental disagreements on what I would call the nature of God. Christians say God is Triune, the Koran explicitly denies this (see Surah 4.171). They probably disagreed quite a bit on the value and inspiration of the Koran vs. the New Testament. And insisting that Jesus was only an apostle (3.59, 61.6) the Koran denies that Jesus really died, but that the people were only duped into thinking that he did (4.157-158).
It's just a different God and a different story, if God did not send his divine son down to die on a cross and then be resurrected to save the world. But just because there is not unity on who God is and who Jesus is, hopefully that doesn't mean there cannot be unity in humbly loving one another. I pray we can agree to pray for Muslims as we pray for ourselves, recognizing (REALLY RECOGNIZING) that we need God's mercy NO LESS than they do.
Yes, how exactly "God achieves that union [with us] through his love made manifest" is extremely important. And this is perhaps a key place in which the writers of the NT, Koran, and Oprah Magazine differ substantially.
Thank you for the fine discussion, guys.
I would like to be clear about the distinction between exoteric Islam and esoteric, or gnostic, Sufism. This is only a recent topic of study for me but not all Sufis take the Koran at it's word, just like not all Christians take every part of the Bible at it's word.
For the mystic, there is no difference, the Christian is a Sufi and the Sufi lives under the grace of Christ (despite the many differences of opinions about the life of the historical Jesus).
Clearly there are differences in what it looks like on the outside, but how do you reconcile that God is all-merciful at the center of both of those traditions? And what of the Buddhist belief that you have to die in order to live? These similarities are ever looming, seemingly outside the discussion.
I tend to think we need less alienation and more understanding that we are all children of God and can all become co-heirs with Christ - is not Christ's saving work powerful enough to transcend culture and language, even description and the finer points of theological understanding? Lord knows you can be deaf, dumb, and blind and know Christ!
But like I already said, it is God who separates the wheat from the chaff, and to echo Thomas, Christians just like Oprah and pals just like radical Jihadists just like esoteric pacifist mystics just like Leo Tolstoy and Martin Luther King Jr. and Aleister Crowley and Albert Einstein need the mercy and love of the one God who actually exists.
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