The ideas I've been exploring for the past decades are hard to convey to anyone else because I came to them in small shifts over many years, sometimes not realizing how strange they may seem to more conventional people, even at seminaries where they should have been at home. Maybe it would help if I offered a list of books that were milestones. Each has one of five insights that add up to a new way to understand how to understand the world. I keep a longer list, but these five are a good start. They are small books and not difficult.
1. Mircea Eliade defends and describes the idea that sacredness can be felt in ordinary settings as well as the big visions. It is a matter of feeling, not theology.
2. D. W. Winnicott explains how a person develops with the help of older caretakers, building on childhood. This is not about discipline but about attachment, which is love.
3. Robert Schreiter shows how under all our theories and requirements, humans share far deeper commonalities that can resolve the differences of religious systems. It's far different than catechisms or icons.
4. Stephen Porges finds the evolved structure of the vagus nerve that makes mammals into caretakers of each other, because mammals that don't do that will die. Reptiles don't nurse their babies.
5. Antonio Damasio maps out the long story of how we came to be ourselves, tracing mutations through evolution from microbes to the feeling creatures that we are in the midst of all these other beings.
“THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE: The Nature of Religion” by Mircea Eliade (1957) This book responds to Otto’s IDEA OF THE HOLY which I never really read. Eliade’s office was in the Meadville/Lombard building when I was there and I often encountered him but never talked to him. His book is foundational for me.
“PLAYING AND REALITY” by D.W. Winnicott (1971) The first “teddy bear” book I read that led me to Bowlby and Kohut. This is one of the gentle and comprehensive English object relations people whose books I found late at night in the Hyde Park Powell’s bookstore.
“CONSTRUCTING LOCAL THEOLOGIES” by Robert J Schreiter. (1985) How to think about Christianity when explaining it to people who are not Christian or even Western. Schreiter belongs to a religious order, The Society of Religious Blood, and was a professor whose course I took while at the U of Chicago Div School Cluster. This book is meant for missionaries but is not focused on conversions. Rather it draws on the deep meanings where the similarities are shared because we are all human.
“THE POCKET GUIDE TO POLYVAGAL THEORY: The Transformative Power of Feeling Safe.” by Stephen W. Porges (2017) Anchoring “feelings” in physiology, this anatomical expansion of the freeze/flee/fight/fawn responses to danger also notes our Frame of Expression (my term) and how we use it to create empathy which is the foundation of humans working together.
“THE STRANGE ORDER OF THINGS: Life, Feeling, and the Making of Cultures” by Antonio Damasio (2018) A summary of what an educated person should know that dispels the conventional 19th century and even medieval ways of thinking that confine us and blind us. It throws open the future.
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