Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Faith and Spirituality, Woolly Mammoths

Blue Cloud Abbey

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Imbolc      Waxing Wild Moon

The next 3 days + I will be on retreat at Blue Cloud Abbey in Marvin, South Dakota.   The annual gathering of the Woolly Herd finds in eastern South Dakota at a Benedectine Abbey.  As usual, what the retreat will be like hides behind the curtain of our relationships.

My part will consist in a reprise of the 25 random things about me exercise for everyone and discussion of an article on solitude in the cyber age (the Deresiewicz piece I mentioned here) and an Economist article, The Frat Boy Goes Home, about the departure of GW.

On a personal note I plan to focus on my non-existent meditative and contemplative life.   Both meditation and contemplation have been, at various times, part of my spiritual practice, but have fallen away in the last few years, fallen away it seems in favor of a more tactile devotional form:  gardening.  I also have to consider, however, the Deresiewicz possibility, which is that my life has flattened out as I have gone more cyber, that I have pulled my root system up to a different layer of the soil.

What I do know for sure is that I want some more contemplation and meditation in my life.  This retreat is an opportunity to get going again.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story

Imbolc: The Great Wheel Turns

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Imbolc  Waxing Wild Moon

Imbolc.  The celebration of lamb’s in the belly, imbolc and the festival honoring Brighid*. (see information below from the Encyclopedia Mythica.This is my favorite web source for quick, accurate information about Gods and Goddesses.)

When I came back to my Celtic roots during my transition out of the Presbyterian Ministry (the state church of a Celtic country), Brighid became central to the spirituality I began to develop.  As a fire goddess, her Imbolc celebration symbolizes the quickening of the earth as the reign of the Caillieach, the crone, recedes under the sun’s (fire) unrelenting return.

As a fire goddess, the blacksmiths worshiped her, as did the housewife with her hearth-fire and the poet, the filid and the bard, roles critical to ancient Celtic society.   Brighid inspired the poets.  Thus, she supported craftspersons, domestic life and the spark of genius that kept kings and the ruling class in check and still gives Ireland fame in letters to this day.  She became associated with fertility, hence the ewe and the lamb in the belly.

In one interpretation of the Great Wheel, the earth goes through three phases:  the first, or the virgin/maiden takes prominence with the beginning of the agricultural year, Imbolc.  The second, the Mother, takes the God as her husband at Beltane (May 1) and reigns over the growing season.  As the harvest comes in the Cailleach, the old woman or crone, takes charge.  The year proceeds in this way through virignity, motherhood and old age; a procession repeated over and over, as this archetypal linking of the year and the maturation of humanity repeats over and over in human society.

On this February 1st, as the business cycle continues its skid, the Great Wheel can teach us that the cyclical nature of human events will right this plunge and prosperity, too, will return.  You might see the business cycle as going through its crone phase, except the crone was a wise woman and as near I can tell this phase of the business cycle represents foolish men.

Time has many puzzling aspects, not the least is its appearance of linearity while we experience, too, and more profoundly, its cycles.  I see the cyclical nature of time as more true to my experience and more hopeful.  The Great Wheel, the natural cycle, does not require a cataclysm at the end to right injustice and imbalance, as do faith traditions invested in chronological time.  Each year each season brings its own opportunities for renewal, for celebration and each season is only that, a season.  In regular succession the next season will come.

I used to close my e-mails with this quote I discovered carved into the Arbor Day Lodge wooden border in its reception atrium:

There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrain of nature–the assurance that dawn comes after night, spring after winter.    Rachel Carson

This is the great and wonderful gift the Great Wheel can bring to your life, if you let it. Continue reading Imbolc: The Great Wheel Turns →

Faith and Spirituality, Politics

Agnotology, A Sad and Important Word. Thanks, Robert Proctor

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Winter  (for us Celts, the last day of Winter.  Imbolc starts tomorrow, actually this evening.)   Waxing Wild Moon

Clive Thompson taught me a new word:  agnotology.  Clive writes a regular column in Wired, one of my favorite magazines.  He reports in his column (2/09 issue) on the work of Stanford historian of science , Robert Proctor.  Proctor believes that when it comes to contentious issues our knowledge decreases.  He offers climate change, evolution and Obama’s religion as examples of contention decreasing our knowledge.  Thus, the neologism agnotology means “the study of culturally constructed ignorance.”

Proctor says his research shows that when society doesn’t know something, it’s often because special interest groups have intentionally created the confusion.

“People always assume that if someone doesn’t know something, it’s because they haven’t paid attention or haven’t yet figured it out.  But ignorance also comes from people literally suppressing the truth–or drowning it out–or trying to make it so confusing that people stop caring about what’s true and what’s not.”

Clive believes we need to focus on the disinformation revolution.  “The ur-example of of what Proctor calls an agnotological campaign is the funding of bogus studies by cigarette companies trying to link cancer to baldness, viruses–anything but their product.”

I’ve known about the holocaust deniers, the global warming deniers and the active suppression of test results by drug companies but I never had a word for it before and now I do.  These agnotologists give evil a fleshly form.  Think of Cheney and his willingness to bend intelligence to fit his preconceived agenda for war in Iran.  Think of the dozens of websites I come across in my Sierra Club research that point to cold weather and cite it as proof global warming has no clothes.  Think of the anti-Semites of today trying to cloud the horror of Nazi death chambers with manufactured doubt.  Agnotological campaigns all.

As Thompson says later on in his column, “If we are argue about what the facts mean, we’re having a debate.  If what we argue about what the facts are, it’s agnotological Armageddon, where reality dies screaming.”

Faith and Spirituality, Letters, Writing

A Bit More on the Humanities. OK, Maybe a Lot More

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 Winter    Waxing Wild Moon

I reproduce part of a David Brooks column here because it relates to the humanities thread I began a few posts ago.  He seems to counterpoise the liberal education as defined by Harvard against the institutional life devoted to what I would call a vocation.  This seems wrong-headed to me on a number of fronts, not least that the liberal arts education received its birth within the church and there is not much more institutional a creature than the church.

Vocation and its fit within an institution has been part of my life.  Ministry qualifies as one of the oldest professions, vocations, that exists.  Ordination confers upon you a responsibility to a particular institution, a responsibility defined by my Presbyterian vows to uphold the peace, unity and purity of the church.  The role of clergy specifically demands nurture of the institution and the tradition which it serves.  While in the Presbyterian church, I followed that vow with energy.

Brooks does not speak of the demand within any vocation and the institution they support:  law, medicine, education, even journalism for the prophetic voice.  This voice recognizes that traditions, in order to survive, must live and in living they must be constantly weighed in the crucible of every day practice.  Sometimes they fall short; the rote learning of the nineteenth century has given way to  learner centered education.  The church’s ministry, previously open only to men now has women in equal to greater numbers.  Continue reading A Bit More on the Humanities. OK, Maybe a Lot More →

Faith and Spirituality

The Now

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Winter  Waning Wolf Moon

“Forever is composed of nows.” – Emily Dickinson

Now is all we ever have.  The Buddha lived this truth into a faith.  We forget it often, living instead in a land filled with regrets and shame, or in a world flooded with anxieties.  Too little do we consider the lilies.  The rose beside us goes unnoticed in our rush to get to the next spot on our calendar, any spot but the one in which we find ourselves at the moment, the now.

This notion seems magical the more you dwell on it.  A focus on the moment, a determined grasp of the gestalt of now has the effect of letting regrets fall away, for they are in the past and calming anxieties, for they are in the future and the now is neither past nor future. It is now.

We can deal with this moment, this particular segment of our existence, the only part of our existence in which we are, ever.  It is those past moments which somehow found us lacking or those future moments in which our fears inhere that drag us away from serenity.  It does not need to be so.

Meditation can train us to focus on our breathing, our physical presence.  It can help us deal with the monkey mind that scrambles this way and that, shaking a stick of worry or throwing a rock of shame.  Even meditation, though, only trains us.  It trains us for life in the moment.

If you can, stop a moment.  Right now. Notice your feet, your hands.  Breathe in and breathe out.  Take a few deep breaths, use the diaphragm.  Notice the thoughts that come to you.  Notice them and let them go, let them pass on through.  They, too, have a journey.

This is all you know and all you need to know.  Right now.  Pregnant moment.  Your eternity.

Faith and Spirituality

Well, Now. Where the Rich Are Below Average?

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January 13, 2009, 1:10 pm
New Model for the Rich: Minnesotans

When it comes to spending and flaunting their millions, the American wealthy have had no shortage of role models in recent years, from Trump and Stephen Schwarzman to Larry Ellison and Ira Rennert.

But now that thrift is in and bling is out, who can they look to for guidance?

Minnesotans.

Setting aside some obvious differences (for most of the rich, Sub-Zero is a luxury appliance, not a six-month climate), it turns out Minnesotans can teach the rest of the nation’s wealthy a thing or two about thrift, guilt and luxury shame.

An article in the Star Tribune by Kristin Tillotson says that luxury goods are the new porn, “things that must be hidden behind plain brown wrappers lest one be viewed as marching down the road to Prada perdition.”

And apparently when it comes to concealing their impure purchases, no one tops Minnesotans. “Conspicuous consumerism has never been in fashion for Minnesota’s anti-ostentation old money,” the article says. “Their idea of being flashy is breaking out Grandma’s diamond necklace once a year, and then only for a Wayzata fundraiser.” (For non-Minnesotans, Wayzata is a country club). Continue reading Well, Now. Where the Rich Are Below Average? →

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Myth and Story, Writing

American Identity: What Is It?

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2  steep rise 30.30 WNW9  wchill -5  Winter

Full Wolf Moon

Got my copy of the Mahabarata today, four doorstopper sized books.  You read a long book the same way you read a short one, one page at a time.

The seed database has most of the seeds entered with planting dates, inside and/or outside.  It will make the process of following the garden this year much easier.  It will also make evaluating the varieties and their production much simpler.  The garden has a straightforward demeanor this time of year.  It resides in the realm of fantasy, hard to even imagine with several inches of snowcover and windchills really cold.   The windchill just changed to -9.

Tomorrow I’m going to cover a meeting of the MN Senate Energy, Utilities, Technology and Communications Committee. The Sierra Club’s Government Relations person, Michelle Rosier, has a meeting in New Orleans until late in the week.  (Windchill now -10. )  This meeting has an interesting focus: Discussion of anticipated federal stimulus package.  In a state with 5B+ deficit, the conservation should reveal some lines of attack.

Emerson’s American Scholar contains his usual wise bits and some extraneous thoughts, but I’m half-way through it and he has not gotten to the American scholar yet.  I’m starting here on American identity piece:   American Identity in the Time of Obama.   Emerson’s time set about with clear intention to create an American character, an American identity.  If they could, we can, too.  But first I want to know what they did.

BYB:  I’m interested in the ex-pat perspective on American identity.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Literature

A Source of Mutual Creativity and Emotional Support

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15  steep rise 30.31  NNW2  windchill 14  Winter

Waxing Gibbous Wolf Moon

Kate has responded well to the injections.  She is pain free and giddy about it right now.  She bought me supper at Canyon Grille tonight.  A nice place and good to be out with her.   We reaffirmed our love for each other and the joy we have in our relationship, a source of mutual creativity and emotional support.   This pain has been constant since early November so it is difficult to overstate the relief she feels.

That was the high point of the day.

Finished The Given Day by Dennis Lehane yesterday and began White Tiger, a book recommended by Woollies Charlie Haislet and Paul Strickland.  A good read for those of you in Southeast Asia.  An Indian entrepreneur communicates his life story to the premier of China via e-mail.

Much to do tomorrow, then preaching on Sunday.  We’ll see how Homecomer goes over.