Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Great Wheel

Imagine Your Soul Traveling on a Lambent Beam

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69  bar rises 29.85  0mph NE dew-point 68  Summer night with a full moon, steamy beautiful

Full Thunder Moon

Five of us sit down every 4 to 5 weeks or so and play sheepshead.  This is a game, as I’ve said before, peculiar to eastern Wisconsin and there among the German community where it is also known as schotskopf.  Sheepshead is the thin glue that gives us an excuse to sit together, laugh and be amused at the spectacle of ourselves.

As I grow older, it is these close gatherings of friends that provide the social cohesion I need.  My needs may be less than most, but they are not non-existent.  These men, all save me variously Catholic, from not anymore to still engaged in the work, have wry, knowing attitudes toward life, attentive to the ridiculous and the tender.  I am more when I return than when I left.

And something to be said for the moon.  A perfect circle, silvered white and suspended in the sky with stars and planets gathered round.  On the nights of the full moon the dark opens its arms to secret pacts, whispered love and the breath of Diana, huntress and defender of the forest.

Take a moment and step outside, stand under the Full Thunder Moon and let it shine on you.  Imagine your soul traveling on a lambent beam to the moon and back, gazing down toward the spinning blue globe as you come home.  This dance of the planets and their satellites around the greater gravity of Sol creates and destroys.  Shiva Nataraja.

Amen.

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Garden

Corn in the Mist

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81  bar steady  29.84  0mph NE  dew-point 66   Summer, hot and muggy

Full Thunder Moon

“Just because something doesn’t do what you planned it to do doesn’t mean it’s useless.” – Thomas Alva Edison

I like Edison here.  He illustrates a fundamental flaw in the planning paradigm.  When we plan, we have a criteria for success.  Most planners see that as the summum bonum of the plan.  I know I did when I worked as an organizational consultant in churches and other organizations.  Time-limited, quantifiable and concrete.  That way you know one when you see one.

The problem here?  Just what Edison says.  The serendipitous.  Think of Roentgen who saw his hand on a photographic sensitive paper while working with radioactive material.  Not the point.  But.  Roentgen saw X-rays.  The North St. Paul 3-M’er who worked on glues and found one that didn’t work so well.  He used it for a while to stick notes in his hmynbooks.  Then.  Oh, Post-It notes.

The problem is deeper yet.  Plans and goals put us into a pass/fail world where our progress or lack of it runs up and down a scale, with our self-image and our sense of self-worth often traveling along for the ride.  In fact, life offers so much to us, whether we write that bestseller or become an academic superstar or get straight A’s or climb the mountain or ski the double black diamond or not, that too often the important parts of life get overlooked in the scramble to meet the plan.

A child’s smile.  A flower opened, beautiful, transient.  A partner’s caress.  A dog’s eager greeting.  The smell of fresh cut hay.  A tomato fresh from the garden.  A shooting star.  A full moon.  None of these come according to plan.  They come only with attentiveness, when we live in the now and notice not the graph headed up the chart, but the beating of our own heart and the breath of our own soul.

Plans.  As Scrooge might say, Bah, Humbug.  Buy that Christmas goose and pass out alms for the poor.  All better than getting the account books done on a holiday.

Here’s a shot I took this morning.  When I take my camera outside on these muggy days, the lens fogs up.  I often clean it, but this time I decided to shoot anyway.  This is corn in the mist.

cornmist500.jpg

Faith and Spirituality, Garden

A Time of Burnt Sacrifice

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85  bar steep fall 29.89  0mph WNW dew-point 68  Summer, warm and sunny

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

We long ago passed the midpoint of summer, June 21, and have begun the fattening, browning, bursting journey to the harvest season.  It begins in earnest as July ends, but some early givers have offered themselves already:  lettuce, beans, beets, carrots, onions and garlic.  We all, at least all of us up north of 45 degrees latitude, await squash, cucumbers, corn, watermelon and the full seasonal abundance of beans and peas and tomatoes.

Even the angle of the sun reached its apogee at the Summer Solstice and has begun steadily declining since then, shortening the day and lengthening the night.  The deepening shadows of afternoon tell the tale, too, as does the now far gone blooming of the daffodils, tulips and scylla.

This partly benighted soul finds a comfort in the change, preferring the winter to the summer solstice, the sweet melancholy of fall to the bursting forth of spring.  When the wind direction swings to the north, and the winds begin to howl, then the weather begins to stir the deep reaches.  The inner cathedral gains in holiness as the need for candles increases.  Walking those corridors, those ancient trails of the interior journey, demand a commensurate gloom, or, at least, welcome it.

Until then, Persephone above ground keeps us focused on food and external pleasures.  We soak in the sun,  till the earth, travel the highways and airways.  This is, too, a time of burnt sacrifice, smoked hecatombs appearing on decks and patios across the land.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Writing

Hey, Buddy! Wanna Live Forever?

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69  bar rises 29.92 0mph NNW dew-point 57   Summer night, pleasant and clear

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

The gibbous Thunder Moon hangs low in the south, below the tops of the great poplars in our woods.  From our perspective it illuminates downtown Minneapolis.

Some switch got hit and the mosquito population jumped out of the woods.  Now they are out even in the daytime.

A program on the Science Channel discussed the nature of aging and held out the possibility of stopping or even reversing the aging process.  Kate and I discussed whether we would want to live a long time, say a thousand years.

I would.  The number of books to read and write, plays to see, movies to watch, places to go, there are enough for several lifetimes for me.  Gardens and dogs and family would all retain their interest to me.  What we would do with all the people, I don’t know.  Might place a premium on space flight and terraforming Mars.

Tomorrow I have teeth cleaning.  An event I look forward to every six months.  Not.  Still, consider an eight hundred year old set of teeth.  Yikes, if you didn’t take care of them.  Bad news.

The UU history piece has picked up speed.  I’ve gathered enough information now to have a sense of the sweep of Unitarian and Universalist movements west, then on into Minnesota Territory.  Next I have to do some specific research at the Minnesota History Center on the large churches.  Right now I don’t know whether I can answer the question that interested me in the first place, i.e. Why did liberal religion find such fertile ground in the Twin Cities?  I have not given up on that; the information to answer it seems elusive.

Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Holidays, Writing

Tending to Plants and Animals, So They Will Tend to Us.

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79  bar rises 29.79  0mph WNW dew-point 64   Sunny and warm

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

Finished The Thief of Baghdad last night.  This movie, a 1940’s special effects pioneer, has its roots, loosely, in the Arabian Nights.  Just occurred to me that the same title might be used for a documentary on the Bush years in Iraq.  It is an engaging story,  though the actor playing Ahmed, a co-star with Sabu, who plays the thief,  Abu, didn’t seem heroic enough to me.  My favorite character was the Sultan of Basra (this movie has many contemporary reference points), who has a Wizard of Oz like persona.  He loves mechanical toys.

I bought the Criterion Collection discs.  This is all in my hit and miss attempt to educate myself as a cineaphile.  I have a small library of books on cinema.  It has books on theory, history, technique and genre, but I’ve done little with them as a group.  The most I do now is watch the occasional old movie, like the Thief of Baghdad.  My 60th birthday present was 50 films chosen by the Janus Corporation as the most influential art films distributed by them in the last century.  I’ve watched 4 or 5.   I have to figure out a routine for watching more movies and I find that difficult because it interferes with my TV jones.  Problems, problems, problems.

Don’t know about you, but some residual collective memory got triggered by the photograph of folks lined up outside the IndyMac bank to withdraw their savings.  A bank run signals danger to this child of depression era parents, a danger sign I didn’t know existed until I saw this picture.  The older man sitting on a metal folding at the front of the line, thick soled black shoes, gray trousers and a white shirt, worried look.  Ooff.

Kate’s in food preservation mode.  She bought a pressurized canner to complement her older, hot water canner.  She’s been busy making jams and preserves, canning green beans and in general wiping her hands on a calico apron while waving a wooden spoon in the air.

As the crops begin to mature, we are both more focused on how to preserve what we have grown and the lessons we have learned from this year’s crop.   Fewer onions next year, for one.  Do not know why I got so carried away on planting onions.  More beets and carrots.  About the same on beans and peas.  Garlic again, descaping this time.  Add some crops, though what, I do not know.  Harvest is the fun part.

On August 1st we celebrate Lughnasa.  This is a first fruits festival that provides a festival around the time of the first maturation of crops.  There are three harvest festivals:  Lughnasa, Mabon (Fall Equinox) and Samhain, the Celtic New Year on October 31st.  A full quarter of the year has the harvest as a dominant theme and idea.  An old acknowledgment of the value and necessity of tending to plants and animals, so that they will, in turn, tend to us.

Art and Culture, Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Literature, World History

What Does It Mean to Be Human?

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85  bar falls 29.79  3mph NE dew-point 55  Summer, hot and unpleasant

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

The Woodrow Wilson Quarterly has an interesting article titled, The Burden of the Humanities.   I want to add a cadenza, a riff of my own to this Big Band music of the intellectual sort.

The first part of this article that caught my attention was the question of definition.  What are the humanities?  An obvious follow-on question, and the thrust of the article, is: Why the humanities?

I come to this topic from some hours now of researching the growth of Unitarianism and Universalism in Minnesota.  The connection is not obvious, but it is real.  In Minnesota Unitarianism, at First Unitarian Society, the general topic of religious or secular humanism got its launching pad into public debate and debate within the Unitarian-Universalist Association. This came from the powerful preaching of the Reverend John Dietrich who regularly filled the Garrick Theatre with over a thousand attendees.  A former Reformed Church clergy he experienced a gradual evolution of his views away from Reformed Calvinist doctrine.  In a heresy trial in that denomination in 1911 he was found guilty and defrocked.

Dietrich lifted the term humanism from an essay by Frederick Gould, published in the pamphlets of the British Ethical Society.  In that essay Gould proposed a new definition of humanism, one not rooted in the Renaissance understanding.  He proposed humanism as the “belief and trust in the efforts humans make.”

This new definition of humanism tried to put itself on the same intellectual path as science.  Here is a snippet from one of Dietrich’s sermons, one defining his own religion:

“So I take for my authority in religion the actual facts that have been discovered by science.  Beyond these facts which have actually been observed and verified, we really know nothing; and I make no assumptions which are not warranted by these facts.”      My Religion, John Dietrich, FUS 1929, p. 5  Published in the Humanist Pulpit, Vol. 3

The Humanist Manifesto of 1933, influenced by Dietrich in content, reinforces this apparent marriage of humanist thought and the then triumphal march of science and reason.

I’ve gone on a bit here about this because it is important to separate this now common understanding of humanism from the question, What are the humanities?  The answer to this question, I believe, turns the definition and the defining of humanism away from science and toward those realms of knowledge found in the classics of East and West, the artistic output of both East and West, and the philosophical and religious systems of both East and West.  That is, the question of what it means to be human can be answered only in a very narrow way within the science of say, physical anthropology or gross anatomy or human evolution.  Here the human is a physical entity shaped by the process of natural selection.  This is not wrong, it is right and necessary; but, it is not sufficient.

What it means to be human is found in the lived experience of humans.  That is, we are what we have been and what we have been shapes without defining what we can become.   How do we know what we have been?  We read the Grand Historian on the Qin and Han dynasties.  We listen to karnatic music.  The plays of William Shakespeare come to life before our  eyes.  Tolstoy helps us understand humans in War and Peace.  The cave paintings in Lascaux and the Cycladic figurines of the Cyclades both reveal aspects of a human response to lived reality.  The Winter Count of the Lakota and the great urban areas of London, Istanbul, or Rio De Janiero do the same.

The knowledge base of the humanities is broad and deep; it requires years to become fluent in even a small part of its study, yet it is precisely among the paintings and plays, the music and the poetry that we can rethink the human project and find old resources for new questions.

Thus, if I were to redefine humanism, I would say:  “an appreciation for what it has meant and what it now means to be human, an appreciation gained best from the cultural products of humankind over the millennia of our existence.”

Cinema and Television, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Family

Where We Are Is Where We Will Become Who We Are

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63  bar rises 29.78  0mph W  dew-point 54  Summer night, cool

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

Travelers and Magicians is a Bhutanese movie, the first one I’ve seen.  It’s theme spoke to the question, “What is your dream for this stage of your life?”  A Bhutanese official, newly appointed to work in a small mountain village, has an opportunity to go to America.  He considers himself modern, hip and wants very much to go.  On the road he meets many travelers, one a monk who tells him a tale of a young man who studied to be a magician.  There is a Canterburyesque flavor to the movie, a pilgrimage story of a sort.

It reminded me most of Emerson, who spoke of the futility of going to Italy to see beautiful things, when beauty is a notion within each of us.  The young official also meets a beautiful girl on the road, one he learns plans to return to her village to help her aging father.  By the end of the movie it is clear that he will return to the village.

A strong and persistent strain of my thinking in the last few years has focused on just this notion.  Where we are is where we will become who we are.  This is  true, for me, I believe.  Here in Andover, removed from the urban thrum, the constant action of political and religious life diminished by distance, is where I will become an old man, an elder.

My dream for this stage of my life is not yet as focused as the other three dreams I mentioned:  revolution, children and writing.  Even so, its outlines seem clear.   As I have until now, I will continue to support and nourish the dreams I have for political change, a healthy nuclear and extended family and writing.  The nesting or embedded nature of these dreams will remain, not get left behind.

Here are the emerging elements of my dream for this stage.  Kate and I will, together, create a paradigm for optimal living on suburban and exurban lots of 1+ acres.  We will focus our home and energy on supporting creative activity.  Somewhere in the mix, I believe, is Kate’s commitment to medical services for the poor.

Or not.  I don’t know.  This next phase hasn’t gelled in my thinking.  It may be that I don’t need a dream for this stage, that I’m already living it.

Faith and Spirituality, World History

After the Wind, After the Earthquake, After the Fire

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77  bar steady 29.75  5mph E  dew-point 49  Summer, breezy and pleasant

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

“The only tyrant I accept in this world is the ‘still small voice’ within me.” – Mohandas K. Gandhi

“And behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the
rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake,
but the LORD was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the
fire; and after the fire a still small voice.” 1 KINGS 19:11-12

After this wonderful passage, Elijah descends to the valley floor from his mountain cave and passes on the mantle of prophecy to his successor, Elisha.  God loves Elijah, but could not countenance his suspicion of the chosen people, so He calls Elijah up into heaven in a whirlwind, forcing him to give up his role on earth.

Elijah is an incredibly important figure in Judaism.  At the Seder a  cup is set for him at the table, in anticipation of his coming to announce the messiah.  During the bris the patron (me in Gabe’s case) sits in the Elijah seat while the mohel performs the circumcision.  When asked about the Elijah seat, Jay Federer, rabbi and jeweler and mohel, told me this story.  “It is in the Talmud that Elijah, for doubting the chosen people’s willingness to keep the covenant, is required by G-d to witness all the instances in which the people maintain the covenant.”  The seder and the bris are two important moments. “This can be seen,” Jay said, “As a blessing or a curse.”

Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Great Work, Woolly Mammoths

Undercurrents and Subtext

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74  bar steady 29.75 3mph W dew-point 49  Summer, sunny and pleasant

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

A party.  Kate and I are not party people.  We both prefer a night at home or the theater or classical music, but we’re headed out tonight because of Paul Strickland’s kids.   Kate Strickland, oldest, heads out in two weeks for Japan.  She’s going to Kyoto prefecture to teach English as part of the JET program, a government sponsored ESL that places applicants in the Japanese school system.

The backyard party at their 4900 block Colfax Avenue home in Minneapolis had many people we did not know, but Stefan Helgeson and Lonnie were there.  Stefan, Paul and I represented the Woolly Mammoths.

Such parties have, like family reunions, undercurrents and subtext.  The lines of relationship, for example, the casual observer would assume ran strongest among Paul, Stefan, and me.  Only partly true.  Lonnie and Sarah (Strickland) were friends of mine for a couple of years before their husbands pulled me into the orbit of the Woolly Mammoths.

There was Kate Strickland’s closing of this chapter in her New York life.  Why?  Unsaid.  There was Lonnie’s recovery, less than a month along, from cancer surgery.  A rare great outcome.  No chemo or radiation needed because they caught the uterine cancer at its earliest stage.  Paul’s work, entangled with his across the alley neighbor, is in uncertain times.  Stefan has had a come to Jesus moment with Lonnie’s cancer surgery, “I find it difficult now to not do the things I want to do.”

Overhanging the whole is the generational tide sweeping those of us over 60 toward years of a new time while our kids go to Japan, have their own children, become 2d Lts in the Air Force, head off to college, or graduate from college.

This event was in no way unusual in these subtexts and undercurrents and I’m confident there were more, perhaps darker ones, about which I know nothing.   Any time we human beings gather we bring with us the scent of our current life and the trail on which we have walked to get there.  As social creatures our scents intermingle creating a perfumed community while our paths (ancientrails) intersect and deflect, generating paths of a slightly different direction than the one we were on before.  This is life as we live it, as we must live it.

Running through my mind today has been a bumper sticker I saw years ago during the controversy over the Boundary Waters.  I was in Ely and noticed a local pickup truck.   Plastered on the gate the bumper sticker read:  Sierra Club, kiss my axe.  That was redolent of a real debate, an actual conflict between parties with drastically different visions.  Politics and its cousin the law are the arenas in which, in a democracy, we slug out conflicts without, hopefully, violence.  I like conflict and the clash of ideas, the taking up of the sword in defense of an ideal, a vision.  Being back on the battlefield brings sparks to my eyes.  Fun.

Faith and Spirituality, Politics, Writing

One Thunder Storm of a Word

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88  bar steep fall 29.48  3mph SE dew-point 73   Summer, hot and sticky

Waxing Gibbous Thunder Moon

Passion.  A violent word.  One thunder storm of a word.  An Angel Falls and Victoria Falls of a word.  A 500 mile race, first-lap pile up in the first curve word.  

from the Latin, patior: to bear, support, undergo, suffer, endure

Latin words bad, anglo-saxon words good.  To bear.  To burn.  To bind.

Buddha cautions us against passion.  Desire.  It binds us to our weird.  Throws straps around our hands and feet, lashes us to the pillar of the material world.  To move toward nirvana, extinction, we must move away from passion.  Eliminate desire.  Exist in the moment.  The self, the passionate self confined to a moment, gone in an instance.

The world for now exists in me in two:  the passionate one who would bear burdens, burn with the fire of action, bound to this world for I love this world.

The calm one who watches.  Observes.  Lets things pass by.  Become old or yesterday.  Who lives right now.  Here typing, interactive with the screen and the keyboard.

These two have me locked in an inner dance, twisting up then down.  Around a helix shaped stairway down into the my soul and up into the Self.  Opening a gothic iron gate into heaven.  Wielding a hammer to crack apart the bonds of oppression and injustice.  A whirling, sitting dervish in my own body.