The National Cathedral in Washington, DC, which is run by the Episcopal Church, is reaping criticism for allowing its nave to be used to teach yoga and tai chi classes.
Robert Knight, senior fellow for the American Civil Rights Union and a columnist for The Washington Times, says the classes were part of the Cathedral’s “Seeing Deeper” event which is described as being a “five-day exploration of expansiveness, immediacy and insight.”
Translation – engaging in non-Christian activities meant to draw people into the slowly dying Episcopal church that someone thought they could save by becoming more “progressive”.
“Last week, the cathedral, which has already celebrated same-sex ‘weddings,’ jumped the shark,” Knight writes about the “Seeing Deeper” event.
Knight quotes the Very Rev. Gary Hall, dean of the cash-strapped cathedral, who went on the record with The Washington Post complaining that protestantism made religion “too mental . . . not enough experience. You see a cathedral, but you don’t see anything being done with it. I’m trying to get this place back to its roots.”
What does he suggest? “I want to skateboard down it — or have a paper airplane contest . . . ” (I’m not kidding).
While speaking, Hall was standing in his cathedral watching about 100 people practice tai chi in the enormous nave.
“That’s right. The nave — the heart of the church leading to the altar,” Knight responds. “They took out the seats to stage activities including yoga sessions during five days of ‘Seeing Deeper.’ I wonder if they have given thought to renaming the nave as the ‘navel,’ as in contemplating one’s own?”
According to the cathedral’s website, guests to the program were provided with “written prayers, yoga mats, zafu meditation cushions, poetry, and mandalas to draw and color” to use as “reflection tools.”
“For those unfamiliar with Eastern religions, you use a zafu during a zazen (sitting) meditation session,” Knight explains. “Mandalas are geometric patterns representing the cosmos, and are used in Hinduism, which has thousands of gods, or in Buddhism, which is godless.”
Knight claims he’s been searching through the New Testament for support of Mr. Hall’s assertion that the cathedral’s transformation into a multipurpose center with mandalas would fit into Jesus’ ministry, “but so far, no luck.”
” . . . (C)an you envision Jesus of Nazareth converting a cathedral into a handy gym for alternative religions and public-policy debates on topics including gay equality and gun control?”
I don’t think so.
But Rev. Hall seems to think this will work to revive a church whose average Sunday attendance dropped 24 percent in the last 10 years. This is the same church that rushed to bless same-sex unions, women priests, and liberal contraception and abortion policies thinking it would attract a young crowd. It didn’t. In fact, it lost members – in droves – and yet continues down the same self-destructive path.
Rev. Hall seems bent on keeping the decline going. “If I get people together and say, ‘Let’s talk about God,’ we’ll get an argument. But if I say, ‘Let’s all pray together and experience the divine together in our own way,’ people can enter that in a much more creative and less-judgmental way,” he said in defense of the “Seeing Deeper” event.
Knight gives us the translation: “Don’t let Jesus and the Bible get in the way. In John 14:6, Jesus says, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life; no man cometh unto the Father but by me.” That doesn’t leave much room for the kind of spiritual smorgasbord we’re seeing now in Western nations . . .”
