A Journey of Hope

Everywhere we turn today, we see the signs of a growing moral crisis. Violence and destruction from a cold, cruel world tears at our bodies, minds, and souls. In fear and denial, we turn inward only to find our own hearts growing cold. We turn outward only to find our education, morality, and religion, are part of the problem rather than the solution. Few can deny we’re going in the wrong direction, but there’s little guidance on how we can change course - when what’s at stake is nothing less than the life or death of the human heart. We are losing the capacity to love.

A Journey of Hope: In Search of a Religion of the Heart offers a light in this dark tunnel of modern life. Through engaging parables drawn from everyday life, provocative discussions of the challenges that confront anyone seeking a guiding truth to live by, and bold explorations into the lure and limits of today’s secular and religious teachings, the author beckons serious readers of all creeds – including agnostics and atheists of good faith  – to walk with him in search of a hope that can truly sustain us.

  Case by case, example by example, Garret Wyner peels away the barriers that block our way. He exposes secular and religious leaders who embroil us in moral dilemmas, while challenging us to look behind and beyond our own prejudices about God, religion, and what we call the truth about the “real world.” He raises deep and sometimes disturbing questions about how we live, how we love, and how we worship, but in a gentle, respectful tone. Often, he uses his own foibles and missteps to illustrate the inherent difficulties of walking a path of the heart.

Ultimately, his message is uplifting and engaging: we can become more than we are, better than we are, and even transform human nature as we now know it. How? As Wyner says in his introduction, “not by appeal to a new religious, political, or social movement, but by calling us to that reformation of the heart or conscience that has always inspired what is good in every such movement. Not by another watered-down, baseline moral or religious pluralism that leaves us exactly where we are, but by calling sincere atheists and believers alike to lift our eyes up to the brightest light and highest good we are capable of.”

In the process of this journey, we may even find that the foundation level claims of atheists and believers, Jews and Christians, are not contradictory as we commonly believe, but complementary in the way they grasp different sides of a complex problem. In this novel and paradoxical way, Wyner points to our prospects for true spiritual community and extends a warm and loving invitation to find, create, and nourish it. His hope is that “creative altruism,” or unselfish love, can become as natural as breathing air.

FOREWORD  by Dallas Willard
INTRODUCTION: Is Hope for Humanity Naïve?

PART ONE: Turning Inward, The Fragmented Self

The Lie: In the Name of Love
The Curtain: An Assault on Conscience
Postscript: Some Reflections on Faith and Trust
The Cardinal: The Cost of Violating one’s Own Conscience
Killer Instinct: One Law of Love and Two Ways of Response

PART TWO: Turning Outward, A Fragmented World

The Awakening
White Arm Band: Can We Become More than We Are?
Discovered in Hollywood: An Education in Denial and Despair
Postscript: Liberals, Conservatives and the Mis-education of Children
The Chair: The Temptation of Radical Despair
The Chameleon: The Price of Success in a World in Darkness
Postscript: Turning Outward or Inward – “Just More World”

PART THREE: Turning Upward, Toward Reintegration

A Voice in The Shower: In Search of a God and Religion of the Heart
The Buddhist and the Nothing: What are We Really Looking For?
The Ozark Philosopher: The Voice of Truth and its Counterfeits
Prescript: Modern Philosophy & the Education of Character
The Voice in the Desert: The Freedom to Love

PART FOUR: The Last Barrier to Hope

The Rabbis
The Christian Jew for Jesus
What is Necessary to Live a Good Life?
   Pre-Script: Toward Unveiling the Last Barrier to Hope
The Christian Hat Club

CONCLUSION: Toward a Renaissance of Hope

Foreword by Dallas Willard

There is a road for every human life, and a journey that must be taken.  No choice.  For most of us we wake up one day already on the road, as children, at a point where bombs are exploding all around us, and where violence and destruction are tearing at our vulnerable souls and bodies.  We cannot, really, comprehend what is happening.  More often than not the “bombs” are wounded adults who have despaired of goodness—usually, but not always, of goodness in themselves—and are imploding with the fury of a dying star.  The spiritual injury they inflict upon those around them, especially the small ones, makes the physical harm look insignificant.  Blessed is the child who does not know this.

But there we are, little people with a road and a journey, surviving on an inborn and unintelligible hope for good that keeps us moving.  We become aware of a larger world as we go.  We see there is some goodness there.  But can we believe what we see, come in touch with it, identify ourselves with it—and still live?

Risking goodness approaches us as a temptation.  We have learned by the time we begin to think that so much that appears as goodness is not.  The abundance and power of lies all around us is a backhanded compliment to the overwhelming importance of goodness.  Appearances must be maintained: One of the very first lessons.  The consistent testimony of human practice is that lies are more trustworthy than goodness, and finding our way out of the network of lies—even as it interlaces with our own secret thoughts and feelings—seems a hopeless task.  Where can one stand to do that?  How rare to find anyone who is simply guileless!  It seems to disqualify one for human relationships, such as they are.  Yet there seem to be such people.

As we begin to take on substance, we start to think that the road and the journey is not what it’s all about.  It is about who I am becoming.  That becomes our most dreaded thought, if we aren’t very careful and do not allow ourselves to be sufficiently distracted.  And then the guileless ones, who appear here and there (in a picture, a story, a haunting phrase), begin to send us messages—furtively, intermittently at first, almost as if they were not doing it.  Are they or aren’t they?  Why are they there?  Maybe these aren’t messages.  Are they waiting to see what we are going to do?  Like young people flirting without flirting?

Yes, we hope.  What else can we do? There is something there!  The guileless ones have found it.  It is an entire world intersecting right through the world of the desolate road and the bombs past and future.  Somehow one can walk that desolate road and simultaneously live in another world where goodness is real and guilelessness is its natural expression.  Those people were winking at us.  They were inviting us.  We can find our way into the world of Shalom, even though singed and wounded by the bombs, and even though bombs are still going off around us and we see them falling ahead of us.  There is, as the author says, “A therapy of hope.”

How can we reliably find our way into the world of Shalom?  Beware the hucksters who would sell you one and profit from it.  Our best bet is to find the guileless ones wherever we can and begin to step in their steps until we learn the world in which they walk.  We have to learn by our own experience that that world is real and can be trusted.  It is the Kingdom of God. They, the guileless ones, are not that world within the world, but it is where they are, and we can learn it by drawing close to them.  Find the brightest of them you know and begin to practice what they practice.  Beware of too fine judgments about them.  Don’t disregard those a little weaker in The Way, and accept the fact that none who are fully human, as they all are, are wholly strong and good.  We do not worship them.

Garret Wyner has been over a good stretch of the road. You can learn a lot from him. He has himself been profoundly affected by guileless ones, and has seen through, battered his way through, many of the counterfeits of goodness that throng the road and block the way into the world of truth and peace, or into what he calls “the religion of the heart.”  He has learned his way in the midst of our “best” institutions of religion and knowledge.  He knows the worst about our best, and especially how they leave untouched the deepest parts of the human heart, from which all those bombs are launched.  He is a profound scholar of the history, literature and life of human spirituality, on its dark as well as its bright sides.  He will shake any confidence you have in “saving” institutions, but that will certainly do you good.
So put him to the test.  Walk his journey with him, ups and downs.  He is not home yet.  Who is?  But if you would like some rare help with your journey toward who you will forever be, shoulder up to him, keep your eyes open, go slow, and walk!  It doesn’t matter much where you are now, but it matters a lot what you do now.

‘Tis not to late to seek another world!