Clarion: Journal of Spirituality and Justice

Layering the Rich Man and Lazarus - by Brad Jersak

Throughout the ‘hell debates’ of recent years, the parable of the rich man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19-31) has repeatedly begged our attention, especially in Q&A times following the documentary, Hellbound? The dialogue has urged me towards a sharper focus on the layered functions of the parable than I offered in my contemplative read in Her Gates Will Never Be Shut.[1] Herein, I will introduce an outline that I hope invites fuller treatment.

False functions

First, we ought to dismiss the false functions of the parable as assigned by traditional (but sloppy) literalism. Readers often imagine that Jesus’ intent is to describe the nature of divine judgment and the state of the damned—or ‘hell’ (lit. hades), defined as an inescapable place of fiery judgment. The symbolic nature of parables is frequently negated and the passage treated as a revelation of the afterlife.

Briefly, interpreting the story of Dives (Lat. ‘rich man’ in the Vulgate) and Lazarus as descriptive of ‘hell’ ignores the difference between hades and paradise vis-à-vis heaven and hell, both biblically and theologically, even by literalist standards. The text says the rich man is in hades, borrowed from Greek language and mythology to correspond with the Hebrew Sheol—the place of the dead or the grave prior to the final Day of Judgment. This is confirmed by the rich man’s desire to send a warning to his brothers before it is too late. Thus, whatever the rich man is suffering, it is a precursor to the Day of the Lord and distinct from the infernalist’s typical everlasting ‘lake of fire.’

Moreover, aspects of the story make a crass literalism awkward: how does the rich man communicate with Abraham across the chasm? Does everyone there have a direct line to the patriarch? Does someone being incinerated in a furnace care about thirst? Are these literal flames? And since hades precedes the resurrection of the body, do we have literal tongues with which to feel thirst? Is this also the literal Abraham? Do the millions in his care take turns snuggling with him? Or is his bosom big enough to contain us all at once? How big he must be! And so on into implausibility.

Taking the parable seriously means we mustn’t take it so literally. Rather than text-mining for the architecture of the underworld, we ought to be digging for the intended message of Jesus. He is using the afterlife to illuminate some truth about this life. If we read carefully, we begin to see hints of the rich strata of meaning that beckon us deeper beneath the surface. I will propose three such layers here.

To read the rest of the article, click here

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[1] Brad Jersak, Her Gates Will Never Be Shut: Hope, Hell and the New Jerusalem (Wipf & Stock, 2009), Excursus 1: The Rich Man and Lazarus.

'Kingdom Repentance' - Brad Jersak

Sermon - "Kingdom Repentance" - Brad Jersak - April 07, 2013

Click here to hear the sermon

 

Grunewald's 'Crucifixion'

 

"The time has come," Jesus said.

"The kingdom of God has come near.

Repent and believe the Good News."

Mark 1:15

 

Sequence of Repenting: "He knows repentance is not what we do in order to earn forgiveness; it is what we do because we have been forgiven. It serves as an expression of gratitude rather than an effort to earn forgiveness. Thus the sequence of forgiveness and then repentance, rather then repentance and then forgiveness, is crucial for understanding the Gospel of grace."

- Brennan Manning, Abba's Child.

And Can It Be - Charles Wesley

verse 4 

Long my imprisoned spirit lay,           

fast bound in sin and nature's night;           

thine eye diffused a quickening ray;            

I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;       

my chains fell off, my heart was free,           

I rose, went forth, and followed thee.           

My chains fell off, my heart was free,           

I rose, went forth, and followed thee.   

Dostoevsky' Idiot and Holbein's Christ (2) - Brad Jersak

The theologia crucis of George Grant, John Oman and Dostoevsky by Brad Jersak

George Grant on Oman’s theologia crucis

George P. Grant’s PhD dissertation focused on John Oman. And Grant’s theology of the Cross actually bears many of the marks of Oman’s theologia crucis. Both men held the Cross as central to all Christian theology, that faith (not reason) is essential to one’s knowledge of God’s love and forgiveness, and that God’s providence must ultimately remain a mystery. Both believed redemption was accomplished—consummated¹—in Gethsemane and Golgotha. They believed that Christ is risen, but that Easter Sunday did not reverse a Good Friday defeat. The Resurrection was not a fulfillment, but a consequence of the Cross.² Sheila illustrates Oman’s lingering impact on Grant by comparing an analogy common to each.

Oman: “The theologia gloriae sees on the cross ‘the King in rags, who will soon tear off his disguise and show himself in triumph.”

Grant (1976 lectures at McMasters): “There is a ghastly way of speaking about the Resurrection in the modern world which I call the fairy-tale way. A prince is dressed in rags, and everybody scorns him. Suddenly the clothes are pulled off and he appears in his prince’s costume, and everybody treats him well.”³

But Grant also critiques Oman’s theology as insufficient—too simple, triumphant, and voluntaristic for moderns whose faith is shattered by despair. Oman’s vision is beautiful as far as it goes: Grant acknowledges Oman’s Cross as a prophetic revelation of the Father’s love, the Son’s forgiveness, and the call to “find joy in the world by the knowledge that all can be redeemed.”⁴ It also reveals God’s call to an ethic of forgiveness: “Oman’s faith is that Our Lord on the Cross reveals the Father as Love, Who demands from men that they take up their crosses in forgiveness. The Father’s Love and man’s freedom to partake of it are the essence of Christianity.”⁵ But something is missing. By resisting Oman, Grant tells us his own story—how this simplicity is marred by the reality of doubt and despair that comes with extreme affliction. 

To read the rest of this article:  Download Grant Oman Dostoevsky

Good Friday - 1951 - by George Grant

Good Friday [1] 

O dearest word, the very Word indeed,

Breathes on our striving, for the cross is done;

All fate forgotten and from judgement freed,

Call Him then less - Who shows us this - Your Son?

Look it is here, at death, not three days later,

The love that binds the granite into being.

Here the sea's blueness finds its true creator,

His glance on Golgotha our sun for seeing.

Nor say the choice is ours, what choice is left?

Forgiveness shows God's Will most fully done.

There on the cross the myth of hell is cleft,

And the black garden blazes with the sun.

Hold close the crown of thorns, the scourge, the rod,

For in His sweat, full front, the face of God.

---

[1] S. Grant, “Grant and the Theology of the Cross” (1996), 248 (citing United Church Observer 13.6 (15/05/1951): 16).

New Books on George Grant and Red Toryism

These new publications on George Grant and Red Toryism are now available in paperback and kindle. They include essays in political theology, political science and philosophy, exploring Grant's engagement with Nietzsche, Heidegger, Weil and much more.

RED TORY, RED VIRGIN: ESSAYS ON SIMONE WEIL AND GEORGE GRANT by BRAD JERSAK

Simone Weil and George P. Grant were among the 20th century's top political theologians. Weil, a philosopher-activist-mystic from France, was the Christian mystic who refused to join the Church but nevertheless, influenced the Vatican II popes with her radical openness. George Grant, one of Canada's top three thinkers, once said that next to the four Gospels, Weil was his highest authority. This book is a series of essays in political theology, exploring some of their key themes and how their work inter-relates. This book explores in depth, for the first time, how their 'theology of consent' informs their political philosophy and a public ethic of the Cross.

Table of Contents Preface / 1 Part 1 – SIMONE WEIL: RED VIRGIN 1. Simone Weil: George Grant’s Diotima / 5 2. Stages of Weil’s Mystical Ascent / 19 3. Competing Conceptions of God in Biblical Religion / 49 Part 2 – GEORGE GRANT: RED TORY 4. Grant and the Matrix: Complex of Ideologies / 71 5. Grant and the Matrix: Dialogue Partners / 75 6. Finding His Voice: Conversion to Lament / 83 Part 3 – DIVINE CONSENT 7. Wrath and Love as Divine Consent / 109 Abbreviations / 123 Bibliography of Sources Consulted / 127

GEORGE P. GRANT: MINERVA'S SNOWY OWL by Brad Jersak

George P. Grant (1918-88) was one of Canada's premier political philosophers and stands as the benchmark for the Red Tory Tradition. He can also be credited with introducing the thought of Nietzsche, Heidegger and Simone Weil to Canada, critically analyzing their work seriously for the first time. Grant's Red Toryism has been revived and modified in the UK, but for a look at the essential thought of its chief architect, this book is a must read. Included in this work are essays in political theology, along with previously unpublished letters and classnotes that are critical to an understanding of Grant's 'primacy of the Good' vis-a-vis the 'primacy of freedom-as-mastery.' Especially important is the analysis of his theological relationship to Simone Weil and an appropriation of his work to rise above the culture wars of left and right.

Table of Contents Preface / 1 Part 1 – CONVERSION 1. George Grant’s Conversion Accounts / 5 2. Simone Weil’s Encounter with Christ in Marseilles / 13 3. Grant’s McMaster Sermon / 17 Part 2 – THE RISE OF MODERNITY 4. Sprouts of Modernity in Medieval Theology / 23 5. Blooms of Modernity in the Reformation and Calvinist Puritanism / 37 6. The Autonomous Subject: Knowing as Willing in Descartes, Bacon and Kant / 49 Part 3 – MYSTICAL EPISTEMOLOGY 7. Etymology of Nous / 65 8. Heidegger’s Eckart / 81 9. Weil’s Mystical Ascent / 85 Part 4 – GRANTEAN THEOLOGY 10. God the All-Powerful, All-Powerless / 111 11. Consent as Coercion / 123 Part 5 – GRANTEAN JUSTICE 12. Grant’s Rhetorical Method / 131 13. Christ at the Checkpoint / 141 Part 6 – PRIMARY SOURCES 14. Previously Unpublished Letters and Journal Entries / 151 15. Reading Simone Weil: Unpublished Excerpt / 199 16. Dalhousie Classnotes on Plato / 201 17. Robin Mathews: The Wave of the Future / 211 18. Grant’s References to Martin Luther’s Thesis 21 / 213 APPENDICES 19. Grant’s Readings in Weil: French and English / 219 20. Beyond Dualism: Correspondence with Radical Orthodoxy / 221 Abbreviations / 227 Bibliography of Sources Consulted / 231

 

Simone Weil's 'Awaiting God' - Now available in paperback

At long last, the hard copy of my Brad Jersak's new translation of Simone Weil's 'Awaiting God' is now available for purchase at the following link: https://www.createspace.com/4183960
On that page there is also a description. Why get the book?

1. Sylvie Weil (Simone's niece) has included a 13-page introductory essay entitled 'Simone Weil and the Rabbis: Compassion and Tsedekah.' 

2. It's the best primer available for those who want to start reading Weil, in that it combines her famous 'Waiting for God' with her 'Letter to a Priest' in a single, freshly translated volume.

Endorsement

There are those who hold Simone Weil as high, almost, as the Holy Eucharist.
There are others who place Weil, almost, in Hades.
Then, there are those who sift wheat from chaff in the life and writings of
Simone Weil -- such is the judicious approach of Brad
Jersak's Simone Weil: Awaiting God. The Introduction by Sylvie Weil
(Simone's niece) adds a tender touch, also.

Ron Dart
Department of Political Studies/Philosophy/Religious Studies
University of the Fraser Valley
Abbotsford BC

Response to Ron Dart's 'Keepers of the Flame' - by Brad Jersak

It may seem redundant to follow up Robert Williams' fine review of Keepers of the Flame (below), but having recently completed three years of Grantean studies under Dart's supervision, I would like to voice my own response while the experience is still fresh. 

In this book, we get the sort of 'best-of' material that has put Ron Dart at the forefront of Red Toryism in Canada. With Williams, I see Ron standing among the ranks of the 'Keepers of the Flame' discussed in this book. The capacity to scan the landscape from 30,000 feet enables him to see very broad patterns and connections, as well as significant discontinuities and contrasts. I would argue that this eagle-eye perspective makes Dart one of Red Toryism's premier analytical historians today, taking up the torch from giants like William Christian.

Becoming a Prophetic Community - Brad Jersak

The following represents some guidelines developed by Fresh Wind Christian Fellowship as a protocol for practicing prophetic ministry in the local church in the 1 Cor. 14 'charismatic' sense. For a Word doc of the following in pamphlet form, which can be freely edited for use by others, click here: Download Becoming a prophetic community pamphlet 

Prophetic protocol For Freshwind Christian fellowship

I. We believe in the prophethood of all believers.

We take Jesus seriously when He said, “My sheep hear my voice” (John 10).

We believe that God meant it when He said, “Call on me and I will answer you” (Jer. 33:3)

We believe Jesus’ promise that because He had much more to tell us, He would send His Spirit to guide us into all truth, even as to what is coming (John 16).

We take seriously the truth that God’s Spirit has indeed been poured out on all people so that men and women, adults and children, the privileged and the lowly all have access to hear from heaven (Acts 2).

Thus, we have confidence that members of Fresh Wind can expect to hear from God and that what we hear should be taken seriously.

Just as not all are evangelists, but all can share their faith, so too, not all are prophets but all can prophesy.

The Gospel in Chairs - Brad Jersak with Lucy Smith

The Gospel in Chairs- Brad Jersak from Mark Lowe on Vimeo.

"I do not permit a woman" -- Brad Jersak with Lucy Peppiatt

Brad:

Without any qualms, I am proud to say that Eden Jersak is among the wisest pastors I've ever observed or followed, primarily because of her stubborn insistence on moving forward only according to what she sees and hears the Father doing as she attends to God's voice in the context of a trustworthy and prayerful leadership team. 

Further, I have come into a teacher's dream job at Westminster Theological Centre (UK) where I serve under the direction of the Dean, Dr. Lucy Peppiatt, who is profoundly gifted as a theologian, teacher and leader who knows how to both bring and stir vision in her staff and faculty.  

In other words, I'm enjoying the good fruit of some exceptional 'women in ministry.' And I like to say so. And when I say so publicly as an itinerant minister, invariably someone -- usually a young person, usually but not always a male -- will approach me after a seminar and say something like,

I really enjoyed your teaching today ... but ... you mentioned women in ministry. What do you do with the passage where Paul says 'I do not permit a woman to teach or have authority over a man'?

Consider the context: I'm at the front of a church at the end of a talk, surrounded by a small crowd that wants to get in a parting question. The church (often led by dear friends) has been kind enough to invite me, even though many have a policy and practice of leading with all-male pastors and/or all-male eldership. Everyone is listening and I have at most two minutes to answer. Others are overhearing what is typically an unsatisfactory answer. Whatever I say will be seen as divisive or liberal or sloppy. But admittedly, I have pushed that button. I couldn't help it. To me, ecclesial sexism is a justice issue, a moral absurdity, and a sin against the Gospel.

So I needed help. I went to Dr. Peppiatt with my dilemma and asked her to coach me through a brief but decisive answer. What follows is the answer she provided. I have memorized it, internalized it and will begin to employ it. I found it so weighty that I felt the urge to offer it to readers for further thought and use. 

Lucy:

Listen. I want you to listen to me very carefully because this is very important.

We come from an evangelical tradition that believes that Paul, along with Jesus, taught and demonstrated that women should serve alongside men in absolutely every area of church life and ministry ... which includes teaching, preaching, leading, all the gifts of the Spirit, serving the poor and absolutely anything else that you can think of.

We don't believe that a woman has to have any authority over her apart from Jesus Christ.

One of our controlling texts is Gal. 3:28, which affirms total equality of men and women as central to the Gospel. That means that when we come to passages in Scripture that appear to contradict that, they need to be read differently.

Here's my card. If you want to contact me to talk about how we read those Scriptures, I would be more than happy to talk to you. If you want to argue with me, I won't have those arguments. I've read them all and I've heard them all and I don't find them convincing.

I take this issue with the utmost of seriousness. I believe that other traditions that have subjected women to men have caused untold damage to men, to women, to the church and to the church's witness in the world.

That's all I have to say about that for now.

Brad:

That's probably all I have to say about that for now too. Except to say ...

I would ask dear friends from patriarchal faith traditions to show the same mercy and restraint which I have shown over this issue when co-labouring with you.

And for those wanting to relook at some of the difficult texts, I recommend Gordon Fee's Gospel and Spirit as a primer.  

 

Red Tory, Red Virgin by Brad Jersak

Red Tory, Red Virgin: Essays on Simone Weil and George Grant is now available online:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/103609789/Red-Tory-Red-Virgin

Click on image below to zoom in.

Simone Weil's 'Awaiting God' - A new trans. by Brad Jersak

Awaiting God is a fresh translation of two of Simone Weil's works, Attente de Dieu (Waiting for God) and Lettre a un Religieux (Letter to a Priest). This edition features an Introduction by Weil's niece, Sylvie, entitle 'Simone Weil and the Rabbis: Compassion and Tsedekah' and a translator's preface by Weil scholar, Brad Jersak.

The book is available on Kindle and can be accessed by Kindle reader apps for smart phones and tablets.

http://www.amazon.com/Awaiting-God-ebook/dp/B00ASP2EO2/

Endorsement:

There are those who hold Simone Weil as high, almost, as the Holy Eucharist.
There are others who place Weil, almost, in Hades.
Then, there are those who sift wheat from chaff in the life and writings of Simone Weil -- such is the judicious approach of Brad Jersak's Simone Weil: Awaiting God. The Introduction by Sylvie Weil (Simone's niece) adds a tender touch, also.

Ron Dart
Department of Political Studies/Philosophy/Religious Studies
University of the Fraser Valley
Abbotsford BC

Dateline: Bethlehem Then and Now by Brad Jersak

"Oh little town of Bethlehem"—will we ever see the Holy Land experience the promise of "Peace on earth, good will to men" Jesus came to bring peace to this hotbed of violence and strife. What can his followers do to live out the incarnation of God's peace and love? 

Link to DATELINE BETHLEHEM: THEN AND NOW by BRAD JERSAK

Pussy Riot and the Temple Incident - by Brad Jersak

Pussy Riot and the Temple Incident by Brad Jersak

I’ve been asking afresh why the political and religious authorities of Jesus’ day thought it necessary to conspire in his death. What did he do or say that constituted a capital crime in their minds? It was certainly not because he preached love. The answer lies in two of Jesus’ most dramatic acts of performance art.

First came Jesus’ celebrated victory ride into Jerusalem on a donkey—an overt claim to kingship, referencing Zechariah 9. The second was his ‘occupy’-style protest in the so-called ‘cleansing of the temple.’ In fact, when Jesus overturned the tables, he was reenacting Jeremiah’s threat of the forthcoming destruction of the temple (by smashing pottery there, Jer. 19). Christ supplements his prophetic act of upheaval with the ‘little apocalypse’ (Mk.13), forecasting the demolition in which not one stone of the temple will be left on another. He delivers his ‘woes’ to the corrupt temple establishment and proceeds to occupy the grounds throughout Passion Week.

The combination of Jesus’ symbolic claim to kingship and his perceived threat to the temple were among the charges laid before the Sanhedrin and Pilate. The political and spiritual power brokers of Judea were responsible for keeping the peace during the Passover holiday, a volatile event considering the festival’s backstory of national deliverance. They saw Jesus’ capacity to attract and stir up crowds of enthusiasts as a real threat to public order, so they acted. Decisively. An arrest, a trial, a conviction and the sentence carried out in scarcely a day.

When I picture the temple incident, it’s a wonder that Jesus didn’t trigger a riot. He got rough. This was no spontaneous tantrum; he was deliberate, strategic. And yet … were his disciples and entourage so mesmerized that they just watched? Or did they join in the antics, upending tables and stalls as well? Why did the temple guards simply stand by? Why no immediate arrests? It must have been surreal.

The limits of the language of wrath - Brad Jersak

For the past week I’ve been marinating in Kevin Miller’s Huffington Post article, “Why We Need the Language of Hell.” That bit of commentary, penned by the director of the, Hellbound? Documentary, may be the most poignant summary of humanity’s perennial need for wrath lingo since Rene Girard’s Things Hidden… (1978).

It’s certainly timely, given the recent epidemic of domestic massacres (a jaw-dropping oxymoron!) and ongoing malignant violence in which we’re entangled overseas. Miller’s commentary makes a striking point in tracing the pervasive use of ‘hell-speak’ to diagnose the bloodshed and prescribe a just response. Some primitive intuition—from the depths of our death anxiety—evokes liberal analysts and shiny churchgoers alike to move quickly from revulsion at suffering to the ancient imagery of fiery wrath. 

A pastor-friend of mine from the Midwest reported this week that one of his pristine elderly congregants was lamenting news of the latest ambush on American troops in Afghanistan. This precious Christian lady says, “Our boys are over there getting killed by the people they are trying to help. Maybe we need another Hiroshima.”

Wrath and Love as Divine Consent by Brad Jersak

“God does no violence to secondary causes in the accomplishment of his ends.”[1]

In this article, I will attempt to creatively apply a theology of the Cross or ‘divine consent’ towards a metaphorical reading of wrath back into those Scriptures that so repulse those who know God as love.

If God operates in the world by consent, we might see 'wrath,' not as the retribution of a wilful God, but as a metaphor for the consequences of God’s consent to our self-will and non-consent. That is, we can appropriate a theology God's consent to ‘demetaphorise’ biblical assertions about 'the wrath of God.'         

The texts where God intervenes with smoldering vengeance were an offense to thinkers like Simone Weil because such texts portray a God of personal wrath through violent force—the willful uber-Gott (my term) they rejected. Throughout her works, Weil warns us not to literalize metaphors or personalize anthropomorphisms. Rather, we can apply a theology of the Cross and cosmology of consent as the hermeneutical lens for demetaphorising the Bible’s judgment narratives, and so retrieving them.[2]

The Mirror of Hell - Miller, Dart, Puhalo, and Jersak

Acceptance is the Answer -- A Clarion Meditation

1. Start with meditating on this statement: "It is what it is."

This statement originates with Luther's Heidelberg Disputation, 1518, where he says,

“19. That per­son does not deserve to be called a the­olo­gian who looks upon the invis­i­ble things of God as though they were clearly per­cep­ti­ble in those things which have actu­ally hap­pened [Rom. 1:20].

“20. He deserves to be called a the­olo­gian, how­ever, who com­pre­hends the vis­i­ble and man­i­fest things of God seen through suf­fer­ing and the cross.

“21. A the­olo­gian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A the­olo­gian of the cross calls the thing what it actu­ally is … [or in some translations, 'says that a thing is what it is.']

2. Pray the serenity prayer. Here is the full original version:

The Full Original Copy of the Serenity Prayer
by Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971)

God give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed,
Courage to change the things which should be changed,
and the Wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.

Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.

Amen.

3. Read a this chapter from the AA Big Book:

Acceptance was the Answer:

Online here: http://www.aa.org/bigbookonline/en_theystoppedintime16.pdf

4. Further reading: Byron Katie, 'Loving What Is.'

Jesus is Lord and death is not -- Brad Jersak

A friend recently asked to respond to the following statement:

Through the resurrection, Jesus conquered and disempowered death, but he also reclaimed death as a natural blessing to the rhythm of life and shows us that it is possible to befriend it. When we live inside the resurrection even death is reclaimed as friend.

As I pondered this proposal throughout the Passion Week and especially on Easter Sunday, this flood of thoughts came up for considertion and meditation:

I have the same reservations about calling death a friend. But I think it's worth taking a scalpel to this statement for a bit to see where we might explore the way Christ's work changed not only our relationship to death, but changed the nature of death itself. So I want to ask first, how is this not true, and then, how is this true, and finally, how we might approach dying and death afresh in the aftermath of the Resurrection.

So first, and easiest, how or why is this statement not true? The most obvious point is that Paul calls death an enemy, and in fact, the last enemy to be destroyed, which is to say, it will remain an enemy until the final day. 

Dateline Bethlehem: Christ at the Checkpoint Pt 3 -- by Brad Jersak

"The risk is that the Holy Land is becoming a 'spiritual Disneyland.'"—Fouad Twal, Catholic Patriarch of Jerusalem

Like millions of others throughout the centuries—Jewish, Muslim and Christian—I saw my trip to the Holy Land as a spiritual pilgrimage. Many who go hope that by visiting key sites and religious shrines of biblical events they will have a profound encounter with the God of their faith. Christians of all traditions line up for hours to kiss the spots where Jesus was born, died and buried. They pay to be baptized in the Jordan. They sing, pray, and walk in procession carrying crosses along the Via Dolorosa. Some experience a touch of the divine as they kneel in devotion in sacred space, tears rolling down their cheeks. Others wait in vain for their magical moment, deeply disappointed by the hollow plastic carrot they've chased halfway across the globe to this 'spiritual Disneyland.'