Visiting

A criterion of sharing experiences, that can solve a lot of problems and difficulties, but also creates some, is that of visiting.

I can visit a religion that is not mine, even if I am an atheist; I can even share their prayers, their rituals, while making clear that I am not doing that as a believer, but because I highly appreciate and respect those people, I am even sure that their religious experience has a lot to teach me.

Let’s consider an obvious objection: isn’t it quite strange, even hypocritical, to invoke, for example, Jesus Christ, or Allah, after having clearly said that I don’t believe at all in their divine existence and I have absolutely no intention to convert myself to those religions? Isn’t even an offence to that religion and to the dignity of those believers?

The answer to these questions has to consider how and how much those people would like to be visited with this attitude of mine. If they feel offended, I cannot force them to be visited by me. But there are other people who are open to this mentality. Religions are not composed exclusively of radical believers; there is a wide range of different attitudes and mentalities inside each religion and a lot of believers are passionate about exchanging experiences, exploring different mentalities, even experimenting contaminations and mixtures of rituals and ideas.

Obviously, these things cannot be done with shallowness and lack of commitment; on the contrary, they are serious experiences where we want to make exploration and research in a mental context where we acknowledge that what we are exploring is always greater than our thoughts and comprehension.

This kind of visiting can be practiced in the opposite direction as well, that is, for example, believers visiting the experience, philosophy, life, friendship, of atheists.

This criterion, this mental category of visiting, can be further generalized, until we realize that everything is a visit to somebody or something that is, to a certain degree, a stranger. This happens, for example, even when believers experience their own religion or when I try to explore my own thoughts. This implies respect and humility. This way, an atheist who visits a religious ritual, can work as a reminder, for believers, that every believer, to a certain degree, is always somehow a stranger in their own religion. We can think, for example, of how frequently and severely God criticizes his followers in the Bible.

Another aspect of the topic of visiting is when we adopt songs, taken from various religions or cultures, in contexts that are very different from the original one. Obviously, in this discussion, we are not taking at all into any consideration contexts of lack of respect. What we consider here is a complain that those belonging to a religion or a cultural tradition make against those using their songs in different contexts. This can happen, for example, when we would like to sing Spirituals just because we like them. Descendants of ancient Black slaves could complain, saying that we have no idea of their suffering, of the weight and depth of the words of those songs, their cultural, spiritual and religious significance, because we don’t have a lived inner experience of that cultural context. About this problem, being here in a context of spirituality, any answer needs to be discussed in a context of subjectivity. My desire to sing is subjective, my understanding of Spirituals is subjective, Black slaves’ understanding of their own Spirituals is subjective as well. Here “subjective” does not mean “meaningless” or “open to any wild interpretation”. We are trying to move here in a context of the best of humanity that we are able to adopt in our mentality. Once we have clarified this context, I think that we can openly say that everyone has the right to use any song, provided, as I said, that this happens in a context of total seriousness and respect.

A good background to understand this position is the mentality of humbleness, self-criticism, that is already implied in what I said about believers being anyway, at any time, strangers, at least to some degree, in their own religion. When I sing a song that belongs to tradition that is stranger to me, I am not pretending at all to have any adequate understanding of everything. This concept of adequate understanding makes everything killing, destroying, pretentious, hypocritical. Adequate understanding of something does not exist, it never existed. Even those who where directly involved in the Black slavery cannot claim an adequate understanding of it. We are all humble searchers in this world, trying to grow, to communicate, to enrich each other, to learn and self-criticize endlessly. This way we can say that, in a context of humble acknowledgement of our human fundamental inability to have any adequate understanding of anything, everything not only can, but even has to be shared, adopted and used. On the contrary, in a pretentious context of claiming that one, who directly suffered, has the proper and adequate understanding of something, we can say that even those people should be aware of their humble state of being human and should understand that their claim is just wrong.

On the contrary, the same way I am endlessly interested in a better understanding of things from those who more directly have experienced them, they as well should be interested in the interpretation that can come from those who are strangers to those traditions. In other words, all intepretations, even those coming from ignorant people, have something to teach. What makes us unable to teach is considering ourselves owners, adequate experts or even contemptuous, which is the worst position. The author of a work of art has always to learn from those who interpret his production and viceversa: we are all learners. Gadamer has taught us that a work, once produced, gets a degree of independence from the author. Those who are affected by an illness cannot say that a doctor cannot understand them because he has never had that illness. Vice-versa, a doctor cannot claim to have understanding of illness just because he has studied everything. The concept of adequate understanding, forgetting our situation of permanent learners who need self-criticism, is what has always turned revolutionists into the new tyrants, as Orwell’s “Animal Farm” teaches us.