InnerSelf.com

Hi Folks,

 Well, this month Swami Beyondananda felt the need to channel Steve Bhaerman, so here is Steve's uncommontary on the Israeli-Palestinian-Jerusalem crisis ... plus a pertinent song parody.

Some 40 years ago, Dr. Milton Rokeach, a resident psychiatrist at Ypsilanti State Hospital in Michigan, performed an intriguing experiment. Three mental patients at the hospital all had delusions of being Jesus Christ. Dr. Rokeach wondered what would happen if the three Christs were put together in a therapy group. Would they relate to each other? And how would they accommodate each other's delusions? The result of the experiment was a book, The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, which I read in a college psychology class.

I hadn't thought about that book for years, until I was reminded of it by two seemingly unrelated news items. The first involved the Middle East peace process, which recently has been neither peaceful nor much of a process. A huge seemingly unresolvable dispute involves Jerusalem, which houses the sacred sites of three major religions. Someone had the enlightening suggestion that Jerusalem be ruled by God. Of course, the next question was, whose God?

The other news item was about the Catholic church declaring that for all intents and purposes, IT alone is the one sure way to heaven -- and perhaps more important, the only certain way to avoid hell. A friend of mine who owns a marketing business (and incidentally grew up Catholic) says, "I can only dream of having such an unbeatable marketing premise. Buy my product, go to heaven. Buy the other guy's, go to hell." Not to single out the Catholics, though. Fundamentalists of every stripe play out a dyslexic version of that childhood taunt, "My dog's better than your dog." Except that "my God's better than your God" has caused millions of deaths and oceans of tears.

And that's when it occurred to me that the three major religious systems are like the Three Christs of Ypsilanti. Each lives in a delusional system that it alone is the One True Path. And now, God has placed them all in a therapy group to see if they can accommodate one another.

It may sound a little extreme -- blasphemous even -- to refer to sacred systems of belief as "delusional." The dictionary defines "delusion" as a "belief held in spite of invalidating evidence." Now while there is not necessarily evidence that invalidates any particular religious belief -- evolutionism vs. creationism notwithstanding -- there is evidence that invalidates holding one religious system as more effective than another.

I'm referring to studies cited by Dr. Larry Dossey in his book on the healing power of prayer where some hospital patients are prayed for -- in a variety of religious expressions -- and a control group of patients in similar circumstances are not (although if someone actually slipped up and prayed for them, who would know?). Interestingly, the studies show that patients who were prayed for did better than those who weren't. They recovered more quickly, experienced less discomfort, and had fewer complications. This experiment was repeated using animals -- and the results were the same! It seems that all that was needed was a prayerful intention, and the prayer worked. No one religious system proved any better than another.

This would seem to indicate that the belief that one's own religious system is the ONLY valid one is indeed delusional because it flies in the face of current scientific evidence. Now I suppose if the Pope or the Ayatollah or an Orthodox rabbi or the Dalai Lama or the Maharishi wanted to organize a Religions of the World Series, we could turn prayer into a truly competitive event of Olympic proportions. And each year, some religion would get the bragging rights for winning the Pray-Offs. But as of now, the smart money would go with using a variety of modes of prayer instead of just one. Or, as Swami Beyondananda puts it, "Don't put all your begs in one askit."

Which brings us to the Jerusalem issue, where both Muslims and Jews claim the same piece of turf as "their" sacred site. Well, just what is a sacred site, anyway? Martin Gray, a world traveler who has probably visited more sacred sites than anyone living today, has an interesting theory. These sacred sites, he says, may just be the Earth's "shiatsu" points -- energy fields that pre-exist any particular religion. For example, places where people claim to have seen apparitions of Mother Mary, Gray claims, are actually sites where some form of feminine deity was worshipped long before the Christian era. So maybe those sacred sites in Jerusalem aren't sacred because the Muslims or Jews or Christians say so -- but because they are sacred, period. Religions at their best are ways of interpreting this divine energy. At their worst -- well, look at the Middle East.

So what would it mean to have God rule Jerusalem? On a practical level, we could begin with the basic code that just about every religion has in common -- some variation of the Golden Rule. The ruling principle would be "do unto others as you would have them do unto you." No killing. No stealing. No false witness. That kind of stuff. There could be a panel of three clerics from each of the major religions with a stake in Jerusalem -- and also a stake in establishing a city truly ruled by God. How about a city where there are no guns, and where all residents have food and shelter? Just as in the East, shoes are taken off when entering sacred space, so upon entering Jerusalem, all weapons are left at the gates of the city (and it wouldn't hurt to have metal detectors just in case). It would certainly be an interesting experiment worth trying.

Speaking of experiments, you might be wondering whatever became of the Three Chirsts. Well, my memory is a bit hazy having not looked at the book in 30 years. But I do remember that after meeting together for months, the three mental patients actually began relating to one another. The one who was most flexible (i.e., mentally healthy) was most willing to accommodate the other two, and the one who was most rigid remained more isolated. It was interesting that Dr. Rokeach equated mental health with the ability to accommodate seemingly different world views than one's own. Only in this case, the issue was not so much the world view as who was "center" of this world.

It may be that our survival as a species depends on those who claim to represent God's wishes emerging from their insular systems where they comfortably sit in the center of their worlds into the reality which we all share. What do you suppose Jesus himself would prefer -- people living his principles of "love thy neighbor as thyself" or warring with other children of God just because they drive their karmas "on the wrong side of the road?" Maybe it's time we all recognize the sacred in all forms of spiritual expression, and reinforce them instead of looking for differences to fight over. It may hold the key to planetary sanity.

And here's a song for you!

Let's Call the Old Thing Off

Music By George Gershwin
New Lyrics by Steve Bhaerman
(with help from Scott Kalechstein)

You say salaam and I say shalom
You throw a bomb, I blow up your home
Salaam, shalom
I blow up your home
Ah, let's call the old thing off

You say baraka and I say barucha
Our blessings are sim'lar we must be mishpucha
Barucha, baraka this warfare is ca-ca
Let's call the old thing off

Oh, if we call the old thing off .. nobody needs to be right
And oh, if we call the old thing off, we gotta do better than ... fight
(we gotta do better than .. fight)

I'll take the kasha, you'll take the kibbe
We both dig falafel but never pork ribbie
To kasha, to kibbe we'll skip the pork ribbie
(at least there's one thing we agree on ..)
Ah, haven't we had enough?
Let's call the old thing off

Th-th-th-that's all folks!

New lyrics copyright 2002 by Steve Bhaerman. To hear a rendition of this tune, please go to http://www.wakeuplaughing.com

 

Share this article