The Dangers of Spiritual Disciplines (Gospel of Thomas)

In this episode we look at the fourteenth saying in the Gospel of Thomas.

Jesus said to them, "If you fast, you will give rise to sin for yourselves; and if you pray, you will be condemned; and if you give alms, you will do harm to your spirits. When you go into any land and walk about in the districts, if they receive you, eat what they will set before you, and heal the sick among them. For what goes into your mouth will not defile you, but that which issues from your mouth - it is that which will defile you."

This saying deals with the issue of religion, and in particular religious practices or disciplines. Jesus previously dealt with this subject in part in the sixth saying. Here in the fourteenth saying, Jesus goes deeper into the topic of spiritual practices. He mentions the same four practices of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving and diet. But in this saying he emphasizes the dangers inherent in religious practices. 

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Transcript

In this episode we look at the fourteenth saying in the Gospel of Thomas.

Jesus said to them, "If you fast, you will give rise to sin for yourselves; and if you pray, you will be condemned; and if you give alms, you will do harm to your spirits. When you go into any land and walk about in the districts, if they receive you, eat what they will set before you, and heal the sick among them. For what goes into your mouth will not defile you, but that which issues from your mouth - it is that which will defile you."

This saying deals with the issue of religion, and in particular religious practices or disciplines. Jesus previously dealt with this in part in the sixth saying, where his disciples came to him and asked, “Do you want us to fast? How shall we pray? Shall we give alms? What diet shall we observe?" And Jesus replied, "Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate, for all things are plain in the sight of heaven.”

Jesus’ approach in that saying was to treat spiritual disciplines as neutral. They are neither good nor bad, helpful or unhelpful in themselves. If you want to do them, fine. Just make sure you do them without hypocrisy, which was a very important characteristic in Jesus’ teaching. He said to do whatever spiritual practices you want with transparency and joy, not as a burden. As Jesus put it, “Do not do what you hate.”

Here in the fourteenth saying, Jesus goes deeper into the topic of spiritual practices. He mentions the same four practices of fasting, prayer, and almsgiving and diet. But in this saying he emphasizes the dangers inherent in religious practices. 

First Jesus says, "If you fast, you will give rise to sin for yourselves.” Jesus says “IF you fast.” He is not endorsing or prohibiting this spiritual practice. But he warns us that if we do fast, then it will give rise to sin for yourselves. Another translation says, “If you fast you will bring sin upon yourselves” or “If you fast you will bring sin to yourselves.” That last one is the best translation. In other words, it will attract sin.

It reminds me of Jesus fasting for forty days in the wilderness after his baptism. That attracted the devil and temptation. It is like having food in your camp in the woods; you can be sure it will attract bears! It is like wearing a scent that will attract mosquitoes or black flies, which are terrible here in New Hampshire in the spring. Jesus is making an important point that is often overlooked in spiritual circles. 

We tend to think that spiritual practices are either neutral or good. We think they can do no harm, and may even prepare the way for the grace of spiritual awakening. We tend not to think that they can have the opposite effect. They can thwart or block spiritual awakening. Jesus said that the Pharisee practice of fasting just reinforced the ego. When they fasted they thought of themselves as very spiritual. As the proverb says, “Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”

Spiritual disciplines can do the opposite of what we want them to do. They can lead us into temptation and off the path, which is the literal meaning of one of the most common words for sin in the New Testament. The most common word means to miss the mark. Spiritual disciplines can cause us to miss the mark. They can lead us down the wrong path.

Fasting and religious diets cause us to focus on what we eat ... and what we are not eating. It is like being told, “Don’t think of pink elephants.” The command makes us try to not think of pink elephants, which is just a form of thinking of pink elephants. It is a way of the ego trying to be in control. All it does is strengthen the ego and upset the body. So we are worse off than before.

So, Jesus instructs his disciples how to relate to food. He says, “When you go into any land and walk about in the districts, if they receive you, eat what they will set before you, and heal the sick among them. For what goes into your mouth will not defile you, but that which issues from your mouth - it is that which will defile you.”

Jesus was not a big fan of religious diets. He says in effect, eat whatever is placed before you. That was also the instruction of the Buddha to his followers. We get hung up on what goes into us when we need to be paying attention to what is going on inside of us, how we are reacting to the spiritual practices. 

This is not only true of diet and fasting but also prayer. Jesus says, “if you pray, you will be condemned.” That is a very strong comment! That is exactly the opposite of what we want to happen in prayer. But that is exactly what prayer does when followed to the end.  

The purpose of prayer is to grow closer to God. Becoming one with God means the end of the self. The self is condemned to death. That is the Dark Night of the Soul. When the ego comes face to face with God, then it knows it is condemned to die. No one can see God and live, the Bible says. The ego cannot be in the presence of Ultimate Reality and survive. It will die.

I know this firsthand. I have shared before my experience at a weeklong silent retreat at the Shalem Institute in Washington, D.C. years ago. I will share it again here briefly. I was enrolled in a program for spiritual directors, and my ego thought it had become quite effective at it. And that was the problem. 

At that silent retreat we were practicing various types of contemplative prayer and meditation. During one of the mediation sessions I died. Not physically but spiritually. It was not a fleeting experience that came and went when the meditation session was over. It didn’t let up for months.

 I was very disoriented. How do you function without a self? I had to leave the retreat early and return home, because it was so traumatic. My personal self experienced death, and it was terrifying to that self, which I had identified with completely. It was a powerful experience of No-Self. The ego dissolved, and it scared me to death. It was Kierkegaard's fear and trembling. It was Nothingness, the Void. 

This was not a panic attack or a psychotic break. It was the dissolution of the ego. It was seeing clearly that the ego was not real and never had been real. The ego is just a fabrication of the human brain reacting to the environment. What I thought I was died, which means for all practical purposes I experienced death. 

At the same time, I knew this was what I have been pursuing through spiritual disciplines. I thought it would be bliss, but it felt more like being condemned to death. The fantasy of my Christian religion that I would exist forever as an individual soul in a celestial paradise was seen as false. It was a lie that my religion had taught me, and which I believed. 

Do you see how dangerous such a perceptual shift is to traditional Christianity and traditional religion of all sorts? It was so scary that I suppressed this truth for another twenty years. I retreated back into evangelical Christianity where I felt safe and where I could hide in the fantasy of a future as an immortal ego in a theistic heaven. 

Twenty years later in 2012 I was ready to face Reality then. This time I was facing what I thought was imminent physical death, and this same death of the ego happened again. This time it was not fearful. This time it a spiritual awakening, which was liberation and peace.

Religious practices are dangerous. That is what Jesus is warning us about here in the Gospel of Thomas. Spiritual disciplines are double-edged swords. They can be used to buttress the ego so that we become lost in a blind egoic web of spiritual pride – which is fundamentalism of all sorts – like what I got lost in for twenty years. 

They are also dangerous in the sense that they might seem to work. And we might not be ready for them to work.  I was not ready. I can see how when used in the wrong hands – like in cults and authoritarian religion - they could lead to mental illness and mental breakdown and possibly physical harm. They can do more harm than good.

Next Jesus tackles charitable giving. He says, “and if you give alms, you will do harm to your spirits.” Again this is not what we expect. Money can be the root of all kinds of evil, as the Bible says, even when we are giving money. We all know the danger of hoarding money like the rich young ruler in the gospel story, or the man in Jesus’ parable who built bigger barns, or the rich man in Jesus’ parable about Lazarus and the rich man. Money is also dangerous when we give it. For one thing, we may give it in order to reinforce our ego, so that we see ourselves as spiritual and generous.

Money is especially dangerous to spiritual communities and spiritual leaders. Churches can be extensions of our egos. They can take on the characteristics of a group ego. We might think we are denying ourselves by giving generously to a church or spiritual community or organization. But we may be just exchanging an individual ego for a group ego. We are transferring our ego to this community and feeding a corporate ego. The institutional church becomes an alter ego. 

The same goes with nations and political parties and identity politics and social movements. They are just huge corporate egos. We can sacrifice our small egos for this big ego, and think we are being heroic. We can even die for these movements, but it is still ego. We just exchange one ego for another, a small individual ego for big ego. We identify ourselves with that group and leader. It is still ego.

On top of that, the community ego and its leader can very self-centered. The community can be possessive and greedy, hoarding money and spending money on itself - all in the name of God. It can build the equivalent of bigger and bigger barns like in the parable. Only in this case it is bigger and bigger churches with bigger and bigger budgets and memberships and bank accounts and endowments. We fool ourselves into thinking we are giving to God when we are actually giving to another form of ourselves. 

The corporate egoic accumulation of money is one of the most serious dangers in American Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity and the megachurch movement. It has historically been a serious problem in Roman Catholicism and Mainline Protestantism. This is a problem in almost every church. 

Religion is dangerous. Religious practices are dangerous. Even charitable giving and prayer and religious diets and fasting are dangerous. There is no spiritual practice that is without danger to harming our spirits, as Jesus phrased it. So, if you do spiritual disciplines, please be careful!