| 2Mar$, reading around "in the community" I re-read part of a discussion we had awhile back and have something to add. My children and wife alternately laugh and curse that sometimes I take an eternity to finish a thought---pauses in conversations that drive them crazy. You wrote, Chritianity is in essence, a very monastic teaching, of giving up the things of the world and becoming unnattached of desire and ego , and being "married" to the spirit etc etc. Regarding giving up things, etc., I have been doing some reading on righteousness. (That statement alone opens an entire vista of rabbit trails to pursue. Let's just say that anyone describing me would not think to include righteousness or any related term in their list of attributes I have.) There is an interpretation of righteousness, doing right, etc., that gives Christianity,and also Judaism (perhaps in Christian and other religions' view) a decidedly legalistic feel. Those interpretations operate within Christianity and Judaism themselves, as well as outside them looking in. In other words, then as now, there was a running debate about what was meant in the teachings about God, and how best to reflect it in one's life. The 1st century Christian writers would say the "Pharisees and Sadducees" were legalists of some kind when compared to Jesus. They sought a righteousness of the law, or they hoped to justfiy themselves by an observation of the law. But there were also serious donny-brooks in the Christian community about legalists and antinomians. Your comment seems to be coming somewhat from that general direction, using "monastic", giving up desires, etc. The best summary source I have found for understanding Jewish, then the resulting Christian idea of righteousness (and "right living", if you will) is the Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible. Greek and western concepts resulted in right and wrong as absolute, abstract, free-standing lists of ethical behavior. There were good things to do and bad things, and it came down to the individual. A person was righteous or not, and bottom line it came down to the individual. A person could be righteous on a deserted island, and might actually find it easier to do there. So you had ascetics and monks who moved off by themselves to escape the world and its temptations and distractions. By the 6th or 7th century celibacy became a required vow for priests (actually compounding problems rather than addressing them). The Essenes and Qumran community were earlier Jewish expressions of the same kind of thinking. Well, it's a bit different slant on it in their case, but for our purposes now... But in the Jewish Bible one can never be righteous apart from the context of relationship. Righteousness had no meaning, and could not be defined, except in relationships. It would be pointless to move away, or "give things up" in an attempt to be righteous. Righteousness was not an abstract norm of ethical behavior, but was defined by the obligations represented by the relationship in question. The preservation of relational and communal peace, harmony, wholeness, shalom, were what mattered. Cf the story of the non-Jewish Tamar who married the son of a Jewish patriarch for how righteousness can mean different things depending on the relationship. An ascetic life of denial and repression of desires is pointless in the attempt to achieve individual personal righteousness, and therefore perhaps by extension, spirituality. In this approach, having sexual desires is not a problem at all, but is accepted as natural. Turning that sexual desire toward a person in a way that disregarded the relational connection to the individual and the community, and therefore resulted in the loss of communal harmony, was the problem. For the Jew, the basis of life was the community and its relationships, not individual experience or expression per se. Righteousness was primarily positive action, and the avoidance of destructive actions. Spirituality relates to that foundational concept, and would involve some lengthier discussion. But that is a contrast to Eastern religions as well, as I understand them, which look at ego and individualsim as perhaps the problem, but also rather theoretically and abstractly, and not relationally. |
