Experiencing the Sacred
Compare St. Teresa's experience of the spiritual marriage with both Muhammad's Night Journey and the Buddha's Enlightenment. The focus should clearly identify similarities and differences.
Teresa of Avila, Muhammad, and the Shakyamuni Buddha all had intense spiritual experiences. Their experience can all be classified as numinous and ecstatic, because they each surrendered their physical selves to experience union with a spiritual dimension. They were each subsumed by their spiritual experiences, imparting either fear or joy. Moreover, each of these individuals made a great impact on religious, philosophical, and spiritual teachings.
There are some distinct differences between these three figures, though. The obvious differences are cultural, geographic, and temporal. St. Teresa of Avila is the most modern of the three figures. She lived during the 16th century in Spain, and her upbringing was steeped in Catholicism. Muhammad lived during the 7th century CE, nearly a thousand years prior to St. Teresa. Rather than being steeped in the traditions of Catholicism, though, Muhammad was raised in Arabia: where he would have had contact with tribal polytheistic customs, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and Christianity too. Finally, Siddhartha Gautama grew up an upper caste, Brahmin Hindu. A prince, Gautama had privileged insight into the upper echelons...
Sacred Pipe Black Elk, or Hehaka Sapa, was a medicine man of the Oglala Sioux tribe. He lived during the final conflict with the native peoples, from 1863 to 1950 and was able to merge the gap between American Indian spirituality and many modern scholars of myth, including Joseph Campbell. Some European authors praised him as being one of the greatest spiritual thinkers of the Native North Americans, particularly because he
The need for romance and desire via the heart is portrayed as the key element of Christian life, rather than the fulfillment of the mere human body or the head, the physical or intellectual essence. The authors address an audience whom they assume may be undergoing a spiritual conflict. Without God, life is stagnant and unhappy, although this lack of purpose may seem like a lack of finding the
Sacred World of Slaves Based upon the reading of Sacred World of Slaves explain 3 ways in which slaves used artistic expression (music, dance, narratives) to cope with being enslaved and move them in a direction of Liberation. From slavery times, far more records about black spirituals have survived than for secular music, and the most common religious themes always involved freedom, an escape from bondage and Moses leading the children of
Communion with nature can come in the form of visual art and craft; in the form of storytelling; or in the form of dance. Each of these modes of creative expression invokes the unknown, powerful forces that underlie creation. Even though science can measure, explain, and manipulate nature it cannot answer the ultimate questions of why and how nature -- or human beings -- exist in the first place.
On the other hand, Christianity also stipulates a hell for those who do not believe its teachings. In the Christian tradition, a person's body is separated from his or her soul upon death. The soul is then judged, and can be sent to heaven, hell, or purgatory, though some Christian faiths do not believe in purgatory. In addition, Christians believe that they will be reunited with changed bodies in
This style is best represented by composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525 to 1594) and was written primarily for a cappella choirs without instrumentation and was always sung in Latin, the official language of the Roman Catholic Church (Robertson, "Music Through the Centuries," Internet). During the Reformation, sacred music became very closely linked to the congregational singing of psalms and hymns in Calvinist and Lutheran churches as a way of
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