New Age heresy comes to Catholic school retreats

On Friday I attended my school's annual faculty retreat to kick-off the school year (even though I won't see my first students for another week and classes don't REALLY get going til after Labor Day). According to staff surveys at the end of last year, most of us wanted a retreat that teaches stress management techniques. So on Friday we got that, and much more.

First of all, I want to say that I don't have a problem with EVERYTHING "New Agey". I think the techniques using meridians and chakras to reduce stress are actually helpful and you might catch me "tapping it out" after a particularly stressful day in the future. Even the energy and auras and all that I don't find particularly problematic from an orthodoxy standpoint. But the theology usually attached to these techniques is certainly heretical.

I caught three distinct heresies in what we were learning on Friday: deconstructionism, pantheism, and the all-sufficiency of the self.

Interspersed with practicing various stress reduction techniques (such as reiki, cranio-sacral, and "energy medicine"), was singing New Age "hymns", viewing videos, and reading excerpts of books on these subjects. During these times, she (or the authors or songwriters) would equivocate on "God," "the universe," and "Being". Several times she insisted that we are discovering that "everything is one." One "hymn's" lyrics read: "we are the heart... of the Spirit." At the end of the retreat, she read from a book by a woman who, at the end of her life, after suffering from a painful terminal illness, rejected "belief" and embraced not any "ultimate truth" but "her truth," for this is what sustained her in the end. The speaker shut the book and then proceeded to heap praises on the author for her bravery, beauty, and other such virtues, as if at the end of her life, she had attained enlightenment. The video we watched spoke in vague terms of a "revolution in consciousness" whereby humans everywhere are beginning to realize they have what it takes to make the world a better place. All this while images of cultural diversity play on the screen.

The problem with all this isn't the sentiment it expresses, for there's nothing wrong with making the world a better place, awakening your latent potential, or human solidarity. Rather, it's what is being taught. Christ is all-sufficient, not us. I am not one with the Holy Spirit, or my fellow man, or the earth, because I am sinful and God created us as distinct individuals. Sure I may share human nature and being created in the image of God with my fellow man, but ultimately I am an individual soul, specially created by the Heavenly Father. And no matter how comfortable "a truth" or "our truth" makes us, even on our deathbed, it's irrelevant to it's really being TRUE. Truth is objective and not in any way dependent on us.

It's for these reasons that on my evaluation at the end of the retreat I labeled the content not only un-Catholic, but un-Christian. The philosophy of Deepak Chopra and Eckhart Tolle (whose books were out on a display table the speaker had set up) is heresy. It contradicts the Christian worldview which we must take as a whole, not in just the bits we like.

Oh, and on top of all of this, the speaker was a nun.

Dang. Almost Two Years Later...

I forgot I already have this blog. I almost started a new one.

So in Tremont on Tuesday, while Emilia and Helen galavanted around the Lincoln Park playground, I had a discussion with two friends: Jeff, and his wife Pandora. Jeff told me that he likes to read books that are against Christianity (he and Pandora are evangelical, I believe). He asked me if I knew about Richard Dawkins' "The God Delusion," then proceeded to give me two of the arguments from the book. The first had to do with similarities between the Bible and other ancient Near Eastern literature (in this case, the Egyptian Book of the Dead). The second was the classic atheist question/argument: "Well, who created God?!" I told them I was familiar with these objections.

Pandora asked me if this made me question my faith. I told her no, because there are good responses to them. First, alleged parallels between other Near Eastern literature and the Bible usually break down when one really looks at the passages or stories in question. For example, the resurrection of Osiris in Egyptian mythology bears little in common with resurrection in Jewish thinking (the former being tied to the Egyptians' cyclical view of reality; the latter reflecting a linear view of reality, culminating in the end of the world). Also, similarity in stories (for example, the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh and Noah's Ark) may simply reflect two accounts of a common, historical or cultural event. I submit that it would be shouldering an nearly unbearable burden of proof for one to assert that this is definitely plagiarism. Simply saying that one is earlier than the other is not enough.

In response to the old atheist "Who made God?"-line, I defer to William Lane Craig's two principal responses: 1. In order to recognize something is the best explanation, you don't need an explanation of the explanation. To require this would destroy science, for it would imply an infinite regress of explanations. If astronauts find a pile of ancient machinery on the dark side of the moon, they are justified in inferring this to be the work of intelligent extra-terrestrial life, even if they can't explain where these life forms came from, and other such questions. 2. The traditional concept of God in Christianity is one of a metaphysically necessary being. That is, a non-contingent being that exists by the necessity of its own nature. So therefore, the question "Who made a metaphysically necessary being?" is utter logical nonsense.