Whole Earth God is a community forum for inter-religious dialogue founded by Clark Strand. Its philosophy is simple and inclusive: Nothing left out. No one left behind.
Whole Earth God welcomes bloggers from any spiritual tradition or none at all, but it encourages all participants to remain inquisitive about the spiritual beliefs and practices of others. Together we can accomplish the work of wholeness; separately, we never will.
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Clark Strand is the author of the groundbreaking book HOW TO BELIEVE IN GOD: Whether You Believe in Religion or Not (Doubleday, 2009). A former Zen Buddhist monk, he is the founder and spiritual director of Koans of the Bible—a weekly Buddhist Bible Study meeting dedicated to the idea of using the teachings of one religion to interpret the spiritual texts of another. Q. You were on the verge of becoming a Zen master when you left the monkhood in 1990. What inspired you to walk away from Buddhism like that? A. There are too many reasons to name them all. First off, I wanted my freedom. Second, I wanted a family. And it was hard to have either one if you were running a monastery. But it was also a lot bigger than that. I wanted a new way of being religious. I just couldn’t figure out what that was. Q. So, did you figure it out eventually? A. I did. Though not by myself. Religious paradigms don’t shift often, but when they do, they tend to shift big—all at once. As individuals, we experience that shift as the feeling of being pulled along by forces much larger than we are, and that can be very disorienting. We’re like tiny specks of iron being drawn by the magnet of a completely new way of thought. Q. But a lot of specks, right?
A. Exactly. Gradually we notice that a lot of other people are being pulled along, too. At that point, we recognize each other for who we are. We get drawn together—and new types of religious community are born. Q. But the subtitle of your book is “Whether You Believe in Religion or Not.” That makes religion sound optional. A. It is optional. Today you can practice yoga without having to become a Hindu, and you don’t have to be a Taoist in order to benefit from qi-gong. You can believe in God without belonging to a church. For that matter, you can do to all three at the same time, downloading whatever you need onto your individual spiritual playlist. It’s an age of “iReligion” where the old rules no longer apply. Q. OK. But how do you get community out of that? How do people get drawn together if everyone’s taking such an individualized, iReligionist approach? A. Well, though a weekly study group like Buddhist Bible Study. But it took a long time to figure that out. After I left the monkhood, I felt I had no choice but to throw myself into a number of different spiritual traditions in order to learn as much as I could about each one. I studied one set of teachings after another--everything from Hasidic prayer to Sufi mysticism, with a half-dozen Buddhist and Hindu traditions thrown into the mix--and mastered at least one spiritual practice related to each. Q. That's a pretty serious "spiritual playlist." How long did that take? A. About twelve years altogether. During that time I was very restless, and very driven--there was always this sense that I was on the verge of finding what I was looking for, but . . . Q. But never finding it, right? Like a mirage? A. Exactly. It's hard to find what you're looking for when what you're looking for is an illusion. Q. God is an illusion? A. No. God isn't an illusion, but our religious ideas about God are. It's a little like the story of the blind men and the elephant. A king brings all the blind men of his kingdom together and asks them to describe an elephant, but each blind man can describe it only in terms of the part of the elephant that he has touched--the trunk, the tail, the ear, the foot. I was examining all these different parts of God--the Jewish part, the Sufi part, the Zen part, and so on--trying to decide which one was right. Q. And . . . A. And they were all wrong, because each was trying to do the work of God-finding on their own, and God is the one thing we can never find alone. Q. "We are saved together, or not at all." That's the way you explain in in HOW TO BELIEVE IN GOD. A. That's right. The true image of God emerges from the conversation between all the different faiths and the spiritual practices associated with them. Properly speaking, Religion is the work of a species, not the work of a tribe. That's why I always stop to talk with people who hand out religious flyers on the street. And the reason why, whenever the Jehovah's Witness come to the door, I ask them lots of questions. Q. That sounds risky. A. Quite the opposite. It's risky not having those conversations. Religions don't serve us well as a species when they are allowed to grow in isolation from one another. The more "pure" a religion--the more perfect, the more refined and internally consistent it becomes--the further it is from God. It is extremely important that we learn to talk with one another about religious and spiritual matters. Q. But surely these people don't know what to make of you. Somebody handing out flyers about hell and the end of the world can't possibly agree with what you say in your book--that all are saved. A. [Laughing] Well, that's true enough. You don't find too many people like me handing out flyers on the street. Then again, maybe you should. When I talk with these people, I'm not out to debate with them or to change their mind. And I certainly never argue. I just explain what I believe--that all beings are saved, without exception, even the people they might think of as evil or bad. I speak of God in terms that are overtly ecological. In nature, I explain, nothing is wasted. In nature, there is nothing that doesn't belong. Q. How do they respond to that "Whole Earth God" approach? A. Often, they're on a kind of script. They have a message to relate or a story to tell. So it's important to be patient and let them have their say. Nature is vast and beautiful, but it's also a complete ecological system--so it has its quakes, its eruptions, and its storms. And those, too, have their beauty and their place. Sometimes you just have to stay put and wait out the rain. Q. That does require patience. A. Perhaps. But eventually it stops and you can have your say. And it's essential to have your say, because God emerges only out of that species-wide conversation. If we're not talking to one another, it's impossible to talk about God. Q. That's the idea behind your Koans of the Bible group, right--this thing you call Buddhist Bible Study? A. That's right. The new way of being religious I was looking for--that "new type of spiritual community" that everyone is being drawn to--is essentially a discussion group model. What we do on Thursday nights in Woodstock is just a small-scale version of that great species-wide discussion about God. We don't sing hymns or engage in any other overtly religious behavior. We sit quietly in a circle for about 20 minutes at the beginning of each meeting, then read a passage from the Bible and discuss it--as a species, not as a tribe. Q. Are you doing some kind of meditation during those 20 minutes? A. Who knows? We're quiet together. But there's no single spiritual practice that everyone does. Over the years we've discussed a number of different practices and techniques, and I've been happy to teach some of these whenever anyone asked. But everyone is different. What binds us is the intimacy of our ongoing conversation about life, God, and the Bible. It's not necessary for us to all have the same practice. Q. But you contemplate God and the Bible together--week after week, year after year. That's a pretty strong shared practice. A. True. At the same time, our group has always included at least one or two atheists, in addition to people who have some pretty serious beefs with the Bible. And yet they keep coming back year after year. Q. So it's not just God and the Bible that defines the group. A. No. People come to address their spiritual needs and concerns--and to explore those needs and concerns. The group's work is to support them in doing that. If the group told its members what their needs and concerns ought to be (rather than asking what they were and offering support in trying to address them), then it would be the same old religious model we've had for centuries. This is something completely new. It's a completely new model. Q. Like being spiritual but not religious? A. That's one way of looking at it. Or you could say that it's what religion should have been in the first place. Maybe it just takes a few thousand years to begin to get it right.
