Kay Parris interviews Thomas Moore, one of America’s best-known and best-selling spiritual authors

A former monk and now a prolific and bestselling author, Thomas Moore appears to have taken away from his 13 years of monastic living three main traits: a devotion to religious study, a total commitment to “spiritual living” and a rejection of dogma.

During the weeks and emails that pass between us before we are finally able to set an interview date, he has travelled thousands of miles from his New Hampshire home, giving lectures on spirituality, psychology and religion – a pace of life that belies the depth of his commitment to the central importance of slowing down, contemplation and making space for the soul.

A few days before we finally speak in February, his 2009-published book, Writing in the Sand: Jesus, Spirituality and the Soul of the Gospels, wins a Books for a Better Life award in New York, and the ideas it contains become the main focus for our discussion.

“One of the big problems with the Gospels is that they’ve been written in stone,” he explains: “the words have been frozen in time. So I felt titling my book Writing in the Sand would suggest a constantly living, changing way of interpreting those words.”

What he believes the Gospels offer are precious stories, setting out the mind-blowing insights Jesus had into how humanity can achieve a higher form of life – a life free from violence, oppression and misery, and full of freedom, friendship, wisdom and joy.

As a life-long student of world religions, Moore doesn’t see the Gospels as more important than other holy texts – all are “writings from time immemorial that try to express the mysteries of the spiritual life”. But he does feel that, if the “moralism and judgementalism” of hundreds of years of translation and interpretation could only be cleaned away, the genius of the Gospels would be allowed to sparkle into life in a way that could be truly liberating, illuminating and “useful for the world”. To that end, he has now set himself the task of producing a fresh translation from the Greek.

You’ve expressed the view that formal religion hasn’t been able to tap fully into the wisdom and sophistication of the Gospels. Why do you feel that?

The Christian tradition, like other religious traditions, contains a great deal of wisdom. But generally speaking, the average person joining a church today is going to get a moralistic reading of the Gospels. They are going to be asked to see them as part of a religion, a whole belief system. I don’t think the Gospels have anything to do with that.

I think anyone who wants to have some insight into how to live more successfully, to live with a feeling of satisfaction and fulfilment – they can read these Gospels and they don’t have to join anything, they don’t have to believe in anything. It’s a matter of trusting life, trusting yourself and trusting the vision that is in the Gospels – if you do that, life will be much better.

How can you be influenced by something if you don’t subscribe to the truth of it?

Truth is a very difficult word. Today it is usually taken to mean something that can be proven as factual. But that doesn’t apply to the Gospels. I would take the Gospels as a kind of spiritual poetry, a very deep, important way of describing mysteries of life, that can’t be explained and can’t be put in any factual language at all. I think where people tend to see them historically and factually, they miss the point.

Do you think Jesus existed?

I think the historical evidence is very slim, but I see no reason to doubt his existence. I see no point in trying to prove it one way or the other historically. It is good to keep exploring the historical questions, but they are really in a way beside the point – the important thing is the message, the vision and the teaching. It’s the same thing with the Buddha, or [the ancient Chinese philosopher] Lao-Tzu.

The Tao Te Ching to me is one of the most remarkable and important sacred texts in the world. But I think people understand that Lao-Tzu probably never existed, or it was a name given to a compilation of writers who put the Tao Te Ching together. It’s important to explore that question, but not essential.

How would you want to describe Jesus the man?

He was extremely intelligent, gifted, a genius in many ways. He understood how we could be saved from our unconsciousness – out of which we kill each other and have wars and steal and abuse each other. He understood there is a way to avoid that kind of living and he had a secret to it. Just like the Buddha. The Buddha taught that if we could get rid of our craving, that would be the secret to providing release from all the suffering in the world.

Jesus spelled out what living would be like if we were able to rise to a higher level of existence. We would serve each other, rather than try to have power over each other and so on.

He had this ethical, spiritual insight. It was precious, and it was spelled out so thoroughly and expressed through stories in such a way that it stands out as one of the great achievements in human life.

You’ve also described Jesus as an Epicurean

Yes, I think he was very much like the Greek philosopher Epicurus, who taught that pleasure is of central importance in life. He taught a moderate approach, he gathered friends around him and he said that friendship is the key value. He taught his friends, men and women together. In that way he was much like Jesus, who cooked and ate and danced and told stories and had many friends around him all the time – people were drawn to him magnetically. You see him over and over again enjoying the company of people. You don’t see him ever being moralistic.

When all the religious leaders around him are being judgemental and ascetical, he is doing just the opposite and that is one of the reasons they don’t like him.

You talk a lot about the concept of metanoia, a radical change in one’s perspective, which is necessary if we are even to embark on the journey to this higher level of existence. Is metanoia something experienced by many people do you think, or something rare?

We’re all going through metanoia, which means a change of heart or a change of life vision – we’re going through it all the time in some ways, but it can happen at many levels. You might go through some remarkable experiences of change, maybe several in a lifetime. But some people don’t seem to have the advantage of doing that. Probably half the population doesn’t because so many people are just struggling with survival. I think that’s a reason we have to care for each other, to give each other the opportunity to go through these changes and reach a level of existence that ultimately, when it reaches a tipping point, could transform the way we are as a society. But we are not there yet at all.

Does religion point the way toward metanoia?

Often I don’t think it does, in fact sometimes it gets in the way, but I really think it could. I happen to have a great love of religion and religious institutions. I have hope for them. But I think they are retrenching in the face of challenges today. They are more interested in maintaining their own identities than in really teaching a message that could be of use to the world. I don’t just mean Christianity – all the religions. Buddhists often fall into the same traps that Christians, Jews and Muslims do, where they are more interested in themselves and their own traditions than they are in the world.

How about your own story? Have you experienced dramatic changes from one way of seeing life to another?

Yes, I’ve had several of those changes. One was when I was 12 or 13. I began to feel that I was called to a spiritual life in some way. I entered a monastery and joined a seminary to study for the priesthood. I stayed with that for 13 years until I was 26. Then I felt a similar change and a call taking place – by a call I mean just like, the world saying there is something here for you.

So I realised I had to leave that and explore life differently. It took around three or four years; I didn’t know where I was headed, but eventually it lead me into the study of religion and psychology and the work of psychotherapy, and that was a complete transformation for me. So at least there were those two and there have been other smaller ones in my life.

Do you miss anything from your days with the religious order?

Oh yes, I’m always trying to recover my life in the religious order. Right now in fact I’ve become friends with a monastery in Ireland; they accept me as a sort of monk and I spend time there periodically. I love it.

And in my own home I try to have little indications of the monastic style. In fact I am giving a workshop very soon that’s going to be based on monastic practices. So I still love it and have it there with me, but even when I’m in this Irish monastery I am happy I’m not a full-time member anymore. Being in the world is very important to me, and being an individual, not having authorities telling me what to do and what to think – that is worth everything – so I would never go back to it.

Do we need a spiritual element in life do you think, to fully appreciate the best human instincts – love, community, respect for the other person?

It depends what you mean by spiritual. For me it is not separate from an ordinary desire for a peaceful world and a good life. I don’t think being spiritual is unnatural or supernatural. It is part of life. Some people may be so caught up in money or power and unconscious living, being so plugged into the media and so on – that I think you would say their spirituality is not very strong. And by spirituality I mean something that could pull them out of that unconsciousness and that automatic absorption into the culture.

So if something pulls you out – maybe you have a bigger vision and you engage in certain practices, like careful reading, or some meditation or contemplation work with art – I would call that the spiritual.

So when you say we need a sense of the divine to help us grapple with the darkness in life, you mean we need to wake up to a bigger vision.

Yes, if you are going to live a good life and make ethical choices, you have to think beyond yourself. But you never transcend the natural, we are natural people. I just think you can transcend unconsciousness and a way of going about life where you don’t even think about anything beyond your own needs.

Is there nonetheless a power beyond ourselves that is both natural and supernatural?

You’re asking the most difficult question of all. Language fails us at this point. The way I see it for myself, if someone asks me do you believe in God, I would say yes, but I would probably not mean the same thing that most people would mean.

I believe the theology I find, in both east and west religions, that says God is unknowable, is mysterious. I believe we face mysteries in this life that we don’t understand. When you look into the sky, whether it’s the night sky or the day sky, you are looking into a great mystery that surrounds us. It is both a metaphor and also a direct experience of that sky. We wonder what’s out there, what is beyond us. And I don’t want to give any answers to what we don’t know. I don’t see any point in trying to make up answers to those questions.

I think what religion should be doing is helping us relate to those questions – giving us some language that doesn’t explain the mysteries, but rather allows us to relate to them.

How would you say people can get hold of the building blocks that allow them to live a spiritual life?

The things that have helped me are a combination of spiritual literature and psychology. The average person could read the Tao te Ching in about an hour – it’s very simple, it takes a lifetime to really get it, but still you can read it quickly.

Jungian psychology has helped me a great deal, although I am not a Jungian psychologist and I see great limitations in it as a system. But there are a great many insights there that helped me tremendously to have an appreciation for mystery.

For a lot of people nature teaches in that same way. People who are very active at going out into nature seem to have a sense of this thing I am describing.

Are you optimistic that society will enter a realm of more enlightened thinking?

Yes I am – I think there has been a shift in the past 50 years. Maybe we’re moving up and away from the closed world we have lived in so long – though things are not nearly where they should be, for example in terms of sexism, ageism and difficulties with homophobia.

We are moving in the right direction, but there are still an awful lot of people in this world who are at a very blind and unconscious stage, acting out of their passions and causing a great deal of trouble. We have bankers taking care of their own nest eggs and terrorists who are acting blindly out of a failure to see what the world is about. We have these tremendous problems, but the world has always been in a dangerous state. I think we have a chance – I think this new century we’re in could be the new cultural century as well.

This article appeared in the May 2010 issue of Reform.

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