ON RELIGION, COMFORT FOODS AND LEAFY GREENS
                                                           by Hieromonk Crustacean
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“I have learned so much from God
that I can no longer call myself a Christian,
a Hindu,
a Muslim,
a Buddhist,
a Jew.

The Truth has shared so much of itself with me
that I can no longer call myself a man,
a woman,
an angel, or even pure soul.

Love has befriended Hafiz so completely,
it has turned to ash and freed me
of every concept and image my mind has ever known.”

--Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky



“Just as the butterfly destroys its home
when God has perfected its delicate wings,

so will true worship take flight
when you are finally ready to burst through
the cocoon of your own beliefs.”

--Hermit Crab




I have a friend in the newspaper business.  Several years ago when we were undergrads together –before I dropped out in
favor of wandering aimlessly—I too was studying to write for the fishwraps.  The plan was to major in journalism and take
a minor in philosophy.  In many ways I have always felt that these forms of writing represent the polar opposites of verbal
expression –one by its nature limited to a blunt assessment of What Is as it appears on the surface, the other an unlimited
exploration of What Could Be if we lift the veil and look beneath the surface.  

(Leaving behind both academic disciplines, I somehow jumped off the spectrum altogether and became a metaphysical
writer –someone who is, to himself, a journalist of the soul, and to everyone else a crazy philosopher.)

Anyway, my friend recently explained why he feels most people won’t go for the ash-turning and cocoon-bursting
mentioned in these poems: “not because it’s hard and not because it’s cumbersome, but because the one thing I have
learned as a journalist, and am reminded of every day, is people want order….And if you look to the start of the Torah, ‘In
the beginning G-d created the heaven and the earth.  Now the earth was unformed and void, and darkness was upon the
face of the deep; and the spirit of G-d hovered over the face of the waters.  And G-d said: ‘Let there be light,’ and G-d saw
the light, that it was good; and G-d divided the light from the darkness.’ Order.”



Theology aims to make us feel comfortable in our skin.  It quiets our existential fears, our grave anxieties about being
mortal; it gives us a digestible concept of Who We Are and Why We’re Here, and of our personal relationship to something
much larger and more durable than ourselves (be it a tribe, a body of believers, a common humanity, the natural world, or
the master-Creator of our whole being).  Without some kind of theological foundation for our view of the world, life seems
to hold little value to the human being, and our awareness of the eminent death of the body foretells of a terrible, dark,
everlasting emptiness that we fear to the core and avoid at all costs.  Theology wakes us up from this nightmare and
attempts to clean up most of the messes we make while sleepwalking through life, leaving the believer with a saner,
healthier, more comfortable sense of self.

But our spiritual journey does not stop there.  Just as a diet of nothing but comfort foods will not sustain our physical health
adequately enough to let us enjoy them indefinitely, theologies that highlight our individuality –and therefore also our
separateness from each other, the world and God—will not sustain our spiritual health.  The simple reason for this is that
our beliefs are just that: ours.  They become part of our identity, an aspect of the ego we use to compare and contrast
ourselves with others (“I am a Christian.  That guy over there is a Jew.  We’re different.”), which inevitably leads us back
to our baser human judgments (“That guy thinks he’s so great cuz he’s rich, but I’ll be going to heaven while he burns in
hell.”).  Theologies are also language-based, so they bind us to the conceptual level of perception and comprehension, one
step removed from direct, immediate knowledge of our Reality.  These tandem factors limit our theological capacity to
induce us into that state of being that we both crave and dread: the spiritual.  In other words: theology can elevate the ego
from a deprived state, clean it up and polish it, and give it the elevated status we seek in our worldliness –but it cannot
deliver us to the Other World.  It can still the mind and calm the heart to prepare us for liberation from our isolated state,
but it cannot take the next step.

For that, we need to go beyond theology –metatheology.

If theology wakes us up from our nightmare of the mortality of the self, then metatheology wakes us up from our dream of
the immortality of the ego.  Both are illusions that cloud our perception of the Spirit.  They are distinct maladies calling for
distinct remedies, but are rooted together as twin products of one human experience we all share without exception: the
formation of the dualistic mind during our earliest years.  Religion aims to remedy both by addressing and reassessing this
one experience, and it is the mystic path within each faith that forms the bridge from the theology to metatheology.

This leads to a very important point that should not be overlooked or understated here: every religion and spiritual path is a
distinct amalgam of both theology and metatheology, a diet of both comfort food and raw greens.  

Without a theological framework, the path of metatheology leads to a Reality that looks too much like the “dark, everlasting
emptiness” for us to be inclined to embrace it with our whole selves; furthermore it cannot be communicated from one
individual to another, nor transmitted from one generation to the next.  Without the presence of the metatheological calling,
however, a theological path would be little more than an entertaining story, a tasty bowl of popcorn to munch on while we
watch the movie of our separate lives, fearing all the while the end of the film (“Do I really have the right version of this
story?”).  

A religion, then, is a phenomenon that is at once unique and universal.  Theologically they are as distinct to each other as
one language is to another; metatheologically they are as universal as the nameless Reality that acquires different names as it
is examined through the lens of different languages.  We tend to think and speak in the language in which we were educated
and in which we are most literate, most comfortable with our ability to communicate.  This choice of language inevitably
shapes our perception of Reality, but it does not shape the Reality itself.  A rose is a rose is a rose, regardless of whether we
see it as a rose, una  rosa, or eine Rose.  

The same is true of the ultimate Reality to which our distinct religions point us and lead us.  The theological aspects of each
religion vary anywhere from slightly to drastically. It is not hard to translate the English concept of “a rose” to the German
“eine Rose,” or the French “une rose” since they use the exact same spelling, and the Spanish and Italian “una rosa” are
both very similar, but it gets a lot more difficult to find the bridge of understanding between English and Greek, or Russian,
or Chinese –these languages utilize alphabets that I cannot even type with this simple keyboard!  

But a speaker of any of these languages can spot a rosebush, appreciate its vivid colors, drink in its intoxicating aroma, and
lose him/herself in a nameless Beauty that transcends all human language.  Religion tells us that there is such a Rose at the
base of our existence.  Theology explains in symbolic terms how we lost touch with this Rose and how we can get back to
it; once we arrive at it, metatheology gives us the techniques to put aside our notion of the Rose as separate from us, and
lets us become this Rose.   Once we do that, we are no longer inclined to argue about which was the correct path to the
Rose.

This is the blissful secret behind the concept that tells us “Truth Is One, Paths
Are Many.”  The many paths do not lead to different Truths, but one universal
Truth that in English is called “God,” in German is “Gott,” and in Spanish “Dios.”
Again, the theological conclusions of the many paths vary as much as these
distinct names, and to stay within the comfort zone of our own theology is to
cleave to a truth that is profound and life-changing, but relative, always threatened
by the existence of other “truths” that infringe upon our sense that ours is the
absolute Truth.  Every “holy war” that has ever been fought, from a sidewalk
skirmish in Crown Heights to the Crusades, is a direct consequence of this
confusion.

The way out of this quandry is not to abandon the path we are on: it is to embrace
metatheology, and metatheology exists within every one of the paths.  When
theology stands alone, the truth it tells us is only part of a mind-boggling
complexity of mutually exclusive choices; when theology collaborates with meta-
theology to form a unique mystic path to Truth, it says to he/she who would
follow it, “The Life that you truly are is eternal; to know this while you live is the
ultimate Joy and absolute Bliss, but the price of knowing this will be your life.  
To know yourself as the Self, you must be ready to die to your self.”  If we
comb the Gospels of Jesus and the Bhagavad-Gita side by side looking for meta-
theological Truth, one cannot miss the fact that Christ and Krishna are telling us
the exact same thing in different theological languages: I am the Life.  Follow Me,
embody Me, and you will know that you too are the Life.

The number of religious devotees who are willing to trade their lives for this Life at any given time is extremely small –such
is the unfortunate downside of comfort food-- but it is they who blaze the trails and keep the spiritual life vital for the rest of
us.  For this they are usually thanked by the local religious authorities through banishment, excommunication, torture or
some variation of murder, but such corporeal repudiation is inconsequential to the mystic; the body is a home he/she left
long before.

copyright 2005 by Hermit Crab
a Fish Out Of Water production


“I Have Learned So Much” by Hafiz, translated by Daniel Ladinsky, from The Gift, copyright 1999, Penguin Putnam Inc,
New York



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