Religious Liturgy and the Wholly Other

In the Zhuangzi, how can Zhuangzi possibly know that the fish are happy? To know what it is like to be a bat, a person must be a bat. This is not to say that we disagree with bats. Sonar represents the “sheer otherness” of a bat. In Christianity, how does eternal joy and bliss differ from happiness? Happiness is not a theological concept. There are different kinds of experience, and it follows that they have different kinds of truth-claims. To treat every such claim as the same kind of thing is premised on conflating domains of human experience that are qualitatively different. I contend that the domain of religion is both distinct and unique. Our ordinary ways of describing the world and even ourselves are not well-suited to our endeavors in the domain of religion.

Pseudo-Dionysius, a Christian theologian, made the point that God goes beyond—is sourced, as it were—inherently beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion. According to Montaigne, humans cannot provide truly convincing arguments on any topic, especially theology. “Human reason goes astray everywhere, but especially” in theology. Augustine stressed that revelation must make it way to us as though sunshine making its way through a smoked, stain-glass church window. Hume argues in The Natural History of Religion that the human mind has a great deal of difficulty grasping the notion of divine simplicity for long, and so the mind inevitably starts hanging artifacts on pure divinity that, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, are human, all too human. God is angry. God is pleased. God is benevolent. God is just. God even has a human form. God has a mother.

I submit that what any of us think we know about what God does and even what divinity is goes beyond what creatures can possibly know. That faith is premised on belief rather than knowledge is all too often forgotten as claims about God are treated as if they were facts of reason. Religion within the limits of reason turns out to be human, all too human. So too, efforts to reduce religion to psychology, and emotional needs in particular, miss the qualitatively different nature of religion as transcendent in reference to a wholly other. All too often, the legitimate instinctual yearning to transcend beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility becomes conflated with knowledge of divine attributes.

In terms of liturgical worship, all too often services can be consumed by speeches by religious functionaries who know so much about God at the expense of time spent by a congregation in transcendence as experiential yearning of the wholly other. This is not to say that it is metaphysical or ontological; not even presence in a religious sense need be conflated with those fields of philosophy. Rather, the yearning itself, as in for example being prefaced by a ritualized ingestion of the divine, goes beyond knowledge and description. Worship, in other words, is inherently experiential, rather than analytical and descriptive. Focusing on a sermon, or even on a ritualized way of getting to an experience of wholly-other-directed transcendent yearning, misses the point of why people gather to worship. All too often, religious services are programmed to a stultifying death by humans who are too interested to leave their imprint. Stepping out of the way to let the divine be present in people’s distinctly religious experience does not come naturally to programmers.

This is not to say that ritual and preaching cannot play a useful role as prep for religious experience; rather, the problem lies in confounding the means with the ensuing experience that can be facilitated by them. Ritual and preaching in the context of sacred space and time, set apart from ordinary life even by stained-glass windows, have great value as means, which should know when to step out of the way and even point to what comes next as more important. In the ritual of the Christian Eucharist, for example, priests could encourage congregants to stay in the pews after receiving Communion because the point of the ritual is arguably merely to prepare for the interior yearning experience of the divine once ingested. This inward experience, back in the pews, rather than the consecration, is the high point of the Eucharistic liturgy. To treat the high point as a short time to reflect while the “dishes” on the “table” are washed demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding on the role of ritual in terms of worship experience that goes beyond the limits of symbol and ritual.

On Kindness to Detractors: Compassion Beyond Universal Benevolence

In late April, 2025, Richard Slavin, whose Hindu name and title are Radhanath Swami, spoke on the essence of bhukti at the conclusion of the Bhukti Yoga Conference at Harvard University. Ultimately, the concept bhukti, which translates as devotionalism directed to a deity, such as Krishna in the Bhagavad-Gita, refers to the nature of the human soul. The immediate context is selfless love, which is directed to a deity, and this context immediately involves extending universal benevolence to other people (and other species), and even to nature (i.e., the environment). After Radhanath’s talk, he walked directly to me. I thanked him for his talk and went on to suggest refinement to compassion being extended universally, as in universal benevolence even to other species. To my great surprise, he touched my head with his, which I learned afterward was his way of blessing people, while he whispered, “I think I want to follow you” or “You make me want to follow you.” A Hindu from Bangladesh later translated the swami’s statement for me. “He was telling you that he considers you to be his equal,” the taxi driver said. I replied that being regarded as that swami’s equal felt a lot better than had he regarded me as his superior, for in my view, we are all spiritually-compromised finite, time-limited beings learning from each other.

Throughout his talk, Radhanath emphasized the innate nature of the soul to love God, whether that be Krishna, Jesus, or Allah. Such love directed to a divine person, rather than an impersonal ultimate (e.g., brahman), should not be for something. Just as God’s love for us is unconditional, so too should a person’s love be so towards God. This is the first of the Ten Commandments, and, the swami, whose parents were Jewish immigrants from Europe to Illinois, charitably said, “Jesus adds a second, like unto it,” that of neighbor-love. Simply put, love your neighbor as you love yourself. Like the giant red-wood trees that survive earthquakes and fires in California by interlocking their roots, we too can reach out and embrace each other, rather than fight over insignificant transient earthly gain. The swami stressed that we simply don’t devote enough love to God and thus act in service to God by being compassionate to one another.

Rather than taking issue with any of that, I suggested to the swami that his teachings could go further, and in a way that would transform the world. “Rather than just universal benevolence spread out like butter on a piece of toast,” I said, “kindness and compassion directed specifically to people that a person doesn’t like or who don’t like the person should be emphasized; if it were to take hold, the world would be transformed. Peace might even break out.” I pointed out that it would be easy for me to be kind to him, but much more difficult, and spiritually richer, for me to feel compassion and act in kindness to the Christian student at Yale’s divinity school who had recently called me a heretic while I was visiting my alma mater to audit a seminar on Jonathan Edwards—an academic seminar and thus not the same as a litany of personal beliefs.

For that seminar on Jonathan Edwards, which was brilliantly taught by the director of Yale’s Jonathan Edwards Center (which is distinct from Jonathan Edwards College at Yale), I had read Samuel Hopkins’ book on Christian holiness. Hopkins was a protégé of Jonathan Edwards in the eighteenth century in New England. Whereas Edwards preached love thy neighbor (i.e., universal benevolence) with an addendum that it is good to return evil with good, Hopkins contends in his book on holiness that the essence of the Kingdom of God is a person’s compassion or kindness to other people whom the person doesn’t like or don’t like the person. Because detractors are emphasized, the flatness of universal benevolence is subordinated. I briefly preached this to Radhanath, who, rather than viewing me as a heretic, told me in his way that he regarded me as his equal in religious terms precisely because I was urging him to go beyond universal benevolence in a way that would be more difficult and more likely to transform the world. For “love thy neighbor” can be glossed over, whereas helping out someone you don’t like or who doesn’t like you is relatively specific and concrete; after all, a person doesn’t need much urging to talk on and on about one’s detractors and other dislikeable folks so we know them and thus do not have to spend much effort determining to whom kindness should be directed.

Being able to dispense religious insight does not require having achieved any sort of sainthood, and indeed grace fuels the urge to preach. Nevertheless, a compliment is a compliment, but much more important than compliments is the difficult, and thus spiritually rich, way in which compassionate service not just overall blandly to everyone, or to the proverbially needy, or so easily to people whom a person likes or like the person, but especially to people whom the person dislikes or dislike the person. Universal benevolence pales in comparison, both in terms of spiritual worth and the possible impact both interpersonally and in terms of peace on earth. I told the swami that it was easy for me to give this helpful message to him because he had been so nice to everyone at Harvard. “So I am giving something to you,” I told him as we waved in parting.  Lest I be a complete hypocrite, I made it a point the next time I saw the young theology student at Yale who had called me a heretic to respond in a kind, generous way should that student speak to me. Rather than ignoring him when he did in fact subsequently approach me on that campus, I responded in kindness and was authentic in sharing knowledge with him. I even admired the value he put on his studies as a graduate student and sought to feed his thirst for knowledge. We did the same during the final day of the seminar, at Jonathan Edwards College at Yale. Crucially, my kindness and generosity did not depend on him apologizing for having decided that I am a religious heretic, and I would not have applied Hopkins’ notion of the Kingdom of God, which of course comes from Jesus in the New Testament, were the student to have continued to insult me. Too often people demand forgiveness and open themselves up to verbal or even physical abuse in turning the other cheek. Returning good for insult inflicted is unconditional and yet it should not put someone at risk of being attacked psychologically or physically. Lest contrition be held to be requisite to kindness and helpfulness to a detractor, Jesus’s famous statement, “They know not what they do” ought not be forgotten.

Both Paul and Augustine wrote that the Christian notion of the divine is love. Such love, as agape, is unlike other kinds of loves that do not instantiate holiness. I contend that a sense of holiness is more salient in returning good for evil done than in universal benevolence because the former turns the ways of the word more upside down more than the latter does. Being compassionate to everyone one meets is laudatory, but a different, one might even say holy, dynamic is in responding to the humanity of a detractor. For one thing, self-love and its interests are out of the picture in love that is inconvenient. I told the Swami that if enough people got a taste for that sort of holy compassion, the world could really change.

Imagine hungry Palestinians voluntarily serving Israeli settlers in compassion for the latter’s humanity as unconditional as God loves us, and homeless Ukrainians volunteering to repair buildings in Russia that have been damaged by Ukrainian drones. Imagine Republican members of Congress volunteering at homeless shelters once a week. Imagine Democratic members of Congress volunteering to bring water to people in line on a hot day to a “town hall” or Republican rally. It does not mean that the residents of Gaza need to become Zionists politically, that Ukrainians would have to support giving up territory to Russia, and that Republicans and Democrats in the U.S. must give up their respective political ideologies; rather, compassion is geared to relieving suffering on a human level, responding to our common humanity, which goes beyond religious, economic, and political differences. In a plane crash, for example, people who can walk do not check for party ID cards in deciding who among the injured to help. Getting into the habit of actually helping people who have been assholes is the point, for the spiritual dynamic that is unleased between the two people turns the world’s ways on their head, and thus is utterly transformative spiritually. To say that the world could benefit were enough people to work to transform themselves by making such instantiations of human kindness a habit would be an understatement.

Love as God Loves Us: Embodying Inconvenient Compassion

I contend that compassion is an automatic byproduct of having shut out the outside world for a time to experience transcendence in its religious sense (i.e., reaching beyond the limits of human conception, perception, and emotion). Such experience as prayer, for example, or meditation can result in a heightened sensitivity in perceiving the world, including things and other people who are in proximity. Such sensitivity where other people are being perceived can illicit compassion to them. It is the bracketing experience itself, away from our daily life, rather than what is being prayed about or meditated on that triggers the generalized sensitivity and thus the enhanced readiness or inclination to feel compassion where it applies. I submit furthermore that with some beliefs regarding how God in the Abrahamic religions views us creatures in Creation, we mere mortals can assume to some degree the perspective that, given how God is depicted in scriptures, God would or does have in watching us in our own little worlds.

Roughly speaking, God may look down at us from heaven similar to how a parent perceives one’s child, but here as a small creature doing the best that a small yet selfish created being can.  Augustine warns that applying the relation between a human father and son should not be thought to apply to the relation between the Father and the Son in the Christian Trinity. Specifically, Augustine wrote that human weakness “can only think of what it has been accustomed to do or hear.”[1] Augustine urges that “no carnal thought creep up” in thinking of Jesus’ phrase, “As the Father has taught me,” like how a human father teaches his son.[2] Thinking of the relationship in the Trinity as being akin to a human relationship would be to “fashion idols.”[3] Human weakness might prompt us to reduce God’s perception of us to seeing our weaknesses, but God’s perspective on Creation, including the created beings within it, would more likely be to see us as functioning as well as we can in our little corners of this created realm. Not even a parent looks at one’s very young child, or toddler, as being weak in trying to walk for the first time, or even the second or third time. Rather, from this analogy, I submit that God sees even human adults as small, circumscibed  beings fiddling with ourselves without situating ourselves in the wider context of Creation, and beyond. Such a divine perspective is subtle and wholistic and yet penetrating and specific. The good news is that we can assume that perspective to an extent sufficient to change our negative attitudes and emotions regarding another person, whether we deem that person to be ugly, pathetic, strange, or crazy, to genuine compassion as though a friendly demeanor were a natural end in itself.

One morning while on a local transit system’s bus, I watched with a visceral feeling of distaste as a particularly ugly woman aged about 60 years boarded, sat down, and proceeded to keep her miuth open while touching her tongue with one and then another of her fingers longer than to lick off something edible. The sight of the person was itself revolting to me and yet I couldn’t help myself in staring in disgust (though not showing my reaction). Writing in retrospect, I feel ashamed of myself. It was not that she gave the impression of being a bad person, and not yet of being mentally ill. At the time, I thought about how God manifested as the Father in Christianity might look on human beings specifically as finite, imperfect creatures (meaning in Creation), doing the best that we can. Looking at a living person from outside the created realm would change how we observe other people. This shift in perspective is difficult to describe.

In allowing myself to assume such a stance, though without presuming myself to be divine and thus superior to the woman, my attitude toward her instantly changed to one in which I saw her not as weak or pathetic. Instead, I saw her creatureliness as she tended to herself as best she could.

We all can be pitied in spite of our nasty selfish pettyiness because from God’s perspective, we look like little children rather than self-sufficient adults. Our existence is radically of fundamentally contingent rather than solid and complete. By intentionally assuming that perspective to some degree, and thus without presuming ourselves  to be like God in that respect, my anger and disgust suddenly dissipated. I did not yet feel compassion for her, but I did notice that my attitude toward the woman was then much different that that of a well-dressed Caucasian man who was eyeing the poor Black man who had just dropped his bag and was standing in the aisle close in front of the other man, who was seated. I could understand and even identify with the distaste that comes when someone enters my personal space too closely, but I was more taken with how much my attitude toward the ugly woman had changed from that of the seated man looking up at the Black man who was hiding his face in a hood.

The woman and I disembarked at the same bus stop; she used the front door while I used the back door. So I couldn’t miss seeing her walking in front of me in a way that intimated that she was suffering from a mental illness.  I would have felt ashamed for myself had I not used my free will to try to adopt God’s perspective on us. I walked faster, and thus I walked by her.  She looked at me, and, when I was in front of her, I looked back and saw that she was wearing a sweat shirt that had cartoon characters from the “Peanuts” comic and television shows that feature Charlie Brown and his dog, Snoopy.  “I like your shirt,” I said in a friendly tone that was genuine.  It was not that I thought I might get some heavenly reward; rather, the compassion seemed to arise quite naturally from me having assumed a perspective that has been attributed to God.

Thinking about how God looks down at us and then trying to adopt such a posture as much as we can as finite, hardly omniscient entities, and then staying in that posture for some time while watching another person (or persons) is not only done by grace. Our free-will in deciding to do this is necessary too, as it is for then deciding to approach rather than avoid the other person even if one is noxious, mentally ill, or just plain creepy. It is astonishing how quickly and dramatically anger, disgust, and the will to avoid such a person can change to kindness and compassion. If we are indeed made in God’s image, perhaps the esoteric meaning in it is that we are the only species that can self-consciously that can adopt a perspective and attitude as if we were looking in on creatures who are in Creation. That we can do so even while knowing that we too are creatures within Creation is itself astonishing, and this point is perhaps why we can assume such a posture only to some extent, yet even that is sufficient for the Kingdom of God to manifest within us, if only episode by episode, and then perhaps enough that habit kicks in and the Kingdom can gain some traction.

 

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1. Augustine, Tractates on John: Books 28-54, 40.4, trans. John W. Rettig, Fathers of the Church: A New Translation 88 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1993), 126.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.