Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Cinema and Television, Faith and Spirituality, Memories

Cheesy Sci-Fi Movies

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21  bar steady  1mph W dewpoint 15   Spring (yeah, right!)

              Full Moon of Winds

Spent this afternoon and evening watching NCAA basketball and movies.  Watched a medium bad Sci-Fi movie about a blackhole created in a lab in St. Louis.  It’s bad in part because of the acting.  Cheesy sci-fi movies only seem to have enough budget for one take.  It’s also bad because I read the hard sci-fi book from which the concept came and this movie bore no relationship to the very good book at all.  Which is a shame since that book had real science behind it and would have made a good movie.  This one had a beast that came out of the black hole and ate energy.  Hmmm.  So much wrong with that premise, you’d think I’d stop watching, but, no.  I have a low threshold for quality when I want entertainment.

Been kicking around the idea, for a few years, of writing some original theology/atheology, a ge-ology, or something.  The woman who complimented my learning this morning, Lois Hamilton, got me thinking about all this again.  I’ve spent since 1965 getting seriously educated.  In a lot of fields.  I’ve had interesting real world experience in politics, the church, development and working with developmentally delayed adults.  I’ve traveled some, read a lot and learned a good deal about gardening and art.  Maybe I don’t need to anything, but I feel like a bad steward of the work I’ve done and the knowledge I’ve gained if I can’t set it down in some form for others.

Not sure what I want to do, or if I want/need to do anything.  Just pondering, for now.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality

The Movement Attacks the Establishment

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27  bar rises 30.38  3mph WNW dewpoint 24  Spring

               Full Moon of Winds 

“If a man doesn’t delight in himself and the force in him and feel that he and it are wonders, how is all life to become important to him?” – Sherwood Anderson  (women, too.)

A good quote for an Easter humanist.  This morning I go into Groveland UU (Unitarian-Universalist) where the conversation will focus either on transcendentalism or on my presentation, Thinking Like a Transcendentalist.  I say either because I’m going to give them a choice, listen to my prepared presentation or have a free form conversation about transcendentalism.

Transcendentalism’s connection to UU history tore at the fabric of the Unitarian break with Christianity when it emerged.  Unitarian and Universalist problems with Christianity came from the Enlightenment push of reason against the Trinity on the one hand and Calvinist notions of original sin on the other.  This conflict resulted first in the fracture of New England Congregational churches into two camps, one orthodox Christian, the other newly Unitarian.  Around the same time Universalist churches popped up here and there with a message of universal salvation to counter the notion of total depravity offered by staunch Reformed church dogma.

The transcendentalists were of the opinion that neither the U’s nor the U’s had gone far enough in their challenge to the prevailing religious and commercial establishment.   Terming this solid front of New England rectitude, the Establishment, was an Emersonian pun, in itself an affront to the (false) notion of permanence they claimed.  Against the establishment, Emerson and his merry band of pranksters, whom he called the Transcendentalist Movement, threw charge after charge.  

Theodore Parker, abolitionist and minister of the 23rd Street Unitarian meeting, championed the new higher criticism of the bible just beginning to cross the Atlantic from its birthplace in Germany.  This criticism placed holy scripture under the light of reasoned analysis checking translation against ancient texts, investigating interpolations of meaning from biased authors, making clear the various contradictions and conundrums the texts created rather than “harmonizing” them as was the practice of the time.

Got back from this around 1:30 PM.  They chose the conversation about Transcendentalism.  I gave an extemporaneous capsule of the intellectual history behind transcendentalism, its history and affect on the Unitarian church and its longer lasting affect on American philosophy (pragmatism) and American literature during which we discussed the impact of Emerson, Thoreau, Thedore Parker, Margaret Fuller and Orestes Brownson.

Whitman and Emily Dickinson were our first poets, though far from the last, to observe Emerson’s idea that a poems content should determine its meter and that matter observed in daily life was appropriate for that content.  You can even see the transcendentalist affect in some one as far away from metaphysics as Hemingway, whose stark, realistic prose works hard to recreate the lived experience. 

A primary aim of the Transcendentalists was to create and stimulate an American as opposed to a European literature and scholarship.  They succeeded with stunning results.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work

Imaginal Cells and the Afterlife

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37  bar steady 29.86 k0mph WNW windchill 37  melting.  it’s melting!

     Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

At times the days go by with little more than random patterns, but in these days after my return from Hawai’i there has been purpose in each one.  Today I worked with Transcendentalism and finished a brief summary using annotated links and edited my presentation, Transcendent Thinking, for this Sunday at Groveland. 

This Sunday happens to be Easter.  Imagine my surprise as I edited this piece and noticed that it ended with an image entirely appropiate to the Easter concept.  I say surprise because I wrote Transcendent back in mid-January before my trip to Hawai’i and only recently learned this was to be Easter Sunday.  This is as early as Easter can be or within a day or two, so I hadn’t tumbled to it.  Here are the closing paragraphs:

Death, though, is not the only truth, or perhaps better, it’s not the whole truth.  All faith traditions wrestle with the question of an after-life, not surprising since most anthropologists and historians of religion peg the development of spirituality-the inner world of faith and wonder-and religion-the outer, institutionalized world of beliefs and rituals-to questions about death. What was it?  What happened?  What did it mean?

The mythopoetic stories of dying and rising gods like Osiris in Egypt, Jesus in the Middle East, Mithras and Attis represent a grappling with the question of life and after-life in terms of vegetative symbolism.  

During the winter, more than once my thoughts turn to the daffodil bulbs, the tulips, the iris, the hemerocallis, the true lilies, the bug-bane, hosta, maidenhair fern and lady fern, peonies and bleeding hearts as they rest, buried beneath soil and snow.  Some, the garlic in particular this year, lie also beneath six inches of straw.  All this life adapted to winters during which the air temperature drops to -18, even -38 (three or four years ago). 

There are so many miracles.  The sun shines, our heart beats and these hardy plants pull themselves in for a season.  Instead of wasting the cold months by feverishly working to stay warm or hunting for shelter outside themselves, they cast aside their above ground parts: stem, leaves, flowers and seed pods, leaving them withered in the face of harsh conditions. 

The plants retreat inside their own, individual root cellars.  In them they have laid by sufficient nourishment to catch the wave of warm air when the soil around them rises in temperature enough to wake them from their slumber.

When I think of this my heart goes out to the bulbs, corms, tubers and rhizomes.  As I often feel for my own sons and grandchildren, I feel a fondness for them that radiates joy in the durability of my offspring.  This is not some spring nostalgia at work; no, this is simple appreciation for the millions of years of evolutionary work that has preceded this winter and adapted these wonderful, colorful livelinessess to grace our land.

It is not a stretch to consider death in the same way.  We wither and cast aside our above ground parts, the body, then go to some unknown equivalent of the soil to rest for a period, to wait until conditions are right for our return.

If the advocates of string theory have it right, there are multiverses, multiple branching realities based on alternative outcomes to our daily lives.  It is possible that one of those multiverses is the metaphysical realm, literally a realm beyond our physics, beyond the reach of our senses, where the seed of our life goes, where it may blossom and grow and live in a form quite different from the one we now know.

Here’s another way to think about it.  Go out into your garden this fall and find a wriggly caterpillar happily consuming your favorite flower or vegetable.  Watch that caterpillar over the next few weeks as it spins a cocoon.  What goes on inside?

Here’s an explanation:

The Imaginal Cell Story

The caterpillar’s new cells are called ‘imaginal cells.’
They are so totally different from the caterpillar cells
that his immune system thinks they are enemies… and gobbles them up.

But these new imaginal cells continue to appear. More and more of them!
Pretty soon, the caterpillar’s immune system
cannot destroy them fast enough.
More and more of the imaginal cells survive.
And then an amazing thing happens!

The little tiny lonely imaginal cells start to clump together
into friendly little groups.
They all resonate together at the same frequency,
passing information from one to another.
Then, after awhile, another amazing thing happens!

The clumps of imaginal cells start to cluster together!
A long string of clumping and clustering imaginal cells,
all resonating at the same frequency,
all passing information from one to another there inside the chrysalis.

Then at some point,
the entire long string of imaginal cells
suddenly realizes all together
that it is something different from the caterpillar.
Something new! Something wonderful!
…and in that realization
is the shout of the birth of the butterfly!

Since the butterfly now “knows” that it is a butterfly,
the little tiny imaginal cells
no longer have to do all those things individual cells must do.
Now they are part of a multi-celled organism-
A FAMILY who can share the work.

Each new butterfly cell can take on a different job-
There is something for everyone to do.
And everyone is important.
And each cell begins to do just that very thing it is most drawn to do.
And every other cell encourages it to do just that.

A great way to organize a butterfly!”

*Adapted Version of Nori Huddle’s story from her book, Butterfly

These considerations lead me to an agnostic position when it comes to the afterlife.  The ancients may have known something we find difficult to approach with our highly rational, often scientistic take on such matters.  They knew the miracle of the grain that falls on the soil and springs to life, birthing a plant quite unlike its size and appearance.  And what a miracle!

The ancients did not have string theory to propose multiverses, but we do.  It does not have to answer questions about the after-life, but it could.

The ancients did not know about imaginal cells, but we do.  What if death is a process to ignite our imaginal cells, creating a flame version of  ourselves burning bright in another time and place?

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Weather +Climate

Snow, Snow, and Then, Some More

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33 bar steady 0mph ESE windchill33 29.85   a buncha snow

         Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

We got socked after I came home from Frank’s at around 10.  Maybe 4 or 5 inches of wet spring snow.  All the leaves, rocks and beginning to peak through patches of grass are white again.  Tourney snow we called it Indiana.

Gotta get out and see if the snowblower can take it.  Often, at the beginning of the winter and especially in its last gasps the snow is so heavy and wet that it plugs the chute of the snowblower.  Then, I just wait for the grand snow remover in the sky to work his solar wonder.

Allison sent me this note after the docent book group discussion.  I think she caught the sense of the meeting. 

Charlie,

I enjoyed the discussion meeting today.  I want to thank you for your efforts.  I think we were chasing something elusive.  And also feeling each other out-on some pretty big subjects.

Personally, I think Dale phrased his initial question rather awkwardly.  

However, Sharon intrigued me with her question which was “Why doesn’t contemporary religion seem to make better use of art?

So between the two of them we are left with something corresponding to “what came first the chicken or the egg?”  Did art lose its need for religion or did religion lose its need for art?

I would have liked to have the team fill out your worksheet and plan a tour.

Speaking of your tour ideas, it would be great to get some serious discussions going on a tour.  You need the right people to show up for that to work.  

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Woolly Mammoths

Up At 5AM and Hard At It

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33  bar steep fall 30.11  6mph N  windchill 33

    Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

Boy is my sense of time screwed up.  Got up at 4:30AM for the bathroom.  Went back to bed.  No sleep.  Waited.  Still no sleep.  So at 5AM I got up, went downstairs, opened by John Weber collection catalogue and tried to figure out what to do next.  This was difficult because I had put my notes for the tour in the carrier I take when I go into the museum.  That location didn’t occur to me until ten sleepy minutes had gone by shuffling this paper and that trying to locate the item I needed to finish the tour.  Those notes.

But I did find them.  As a quiet spring snow began to fall outside in the dark, I entered again the world of the Heian poets, the Shining Prince Genji and the floating world of courtesans, no theatre and elegant costume.  Japan and China are strange and distant cultures for most Westerners so entree into their world does not come without some struggle, some setting aside of preconceived notions. 

Over the last three years in particular I have worked hard to get a handle on the historical context in both Japan and China.  I’ve worked harder on China, but Japan has had some time from me, too.  As so often happens in the life of the mind, eventually the heart begins to follow and somewhere along the line I went from interested to captivated. 

It was easy then to begin comparing poems used in the poetry competitions, mythical contests in which cultured Japanese matched poets from different eras, then matched two of their poems that seem to have resonance.  The competition was not between the two poets in question of course, but among the Japanese who created the matches.  It would be like, say, putting Robert Frost’s “Snowy Evening” against one of Emily Dickinson’s darker pieces, Wallace Stevens and Coleridge. 

So it went for two hours until the dogs began to whine and I let them out of their crates, fed them and began my own breakfast.

After breakfast I caught another hour and a half or so of sleep, then drove into the Common Roots Cafe where the docent book club gathered to discuss the (apparent) lack of religion/spirituality in contemporary art.  I guided this discussion, but I’m afraid I didn’t conceive a way to do it fruitfully.  We had a lot of conversation, though, and I think we may have gotten greater clarity from it than was immediately obvious. 

It was Tom Blyfeld’s 80th birthday.  He celebrates his 56th wedding anniversary on Friday.  He mentioned the doctor who delivered two of his children, a man 90 something who has great-great grandchildren. Amazing.  He will celebrate his 65th wedding anniversary.  These are numbers unattainable by most of us in the divorce generation.

Tonight is the celebration of St. Patrick’s day at Frank Broderick’s.  He bought the meat last Friday.  His table always groans with meat and potatoes and cabbage.  I look forward to it each year.

Faith and Spirituality, Memories

Are You Still Waiting for Your Special Purpose?

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26 bar steep rise  30.39 2mph ENE windchill 26

         Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

“Exaggerated sensitiveness is an expression of the feeling of inferiority.” – Alfred Adler

Adler was one of the big three:  Jung, Freud, and Adler, though his name does not ring a bell in the larger public mind anymore.  If Freud was about sex and death, Jung about archetypes and the collective unconscious, Adler was about power.  He was a birth order guy and believed that how power dynamics worked out in relationships and within our own psyche determined our mental health. 

Just checked up on my knowledge about  Adler and discovered a fascinating twist to his point of view.  He believed that each of develops a more or less submerged final goal, a goal that creates significance for us.  This goal compensates for feeling of inferiority.  Don’t know about you, but the feeling I was here for something special, nurtured by mom and dad and reinforced by teachers and friends has cost me big time in life’s journey.  Like alcoholism this striving wastes time and pushes us away from the Tao.  

At this point I am a recovering alcoholic and I feel good about my now 32 years of sobriety, though not overconfident. It’s still a day at a time in reality.  I have stripped away most of the vestiges of fame seeking, break through idea hopes and now seem to have little left in the way of the old drivers that Adler names.  Not none, it’s difficult to let go of the vague, perhaps magical idea that someday, somewhere things will change, but I try to put it context if it arises and then to let it go.

Note from Mary that she’s working away on the revision of her dissertation.  Her advisor is on her case, she says.  Oh, boy, am I glad I’m not doing that.

Kate and I went through our calendar through July.  Next month will be busy for me.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality

Art and Religion

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30  bar steady 30.06 1mph WNW windchill 30

     First Quarter Moon of Winds

When I woke up, Kate was long gone.  It was 9:30.  I missed my nap yesterday and I picked the sleep time this AM.

The rest of the morning, what there was left anyhow, I used looking over my notes for the religion and contemporary art discussion I will lead on Monday.  This topic follows two ancient trails I have followed for many, many years.  I would not characterize myself as an expert in either one, though I know enough to guide conversation.

The result of this work has convinced me that there are several interesting tours at an encyclopedic museum like the MIA that do not follow either the cutesy or the artworld insider glimpse that most of our tours use.  With tours like love and scandal or chocolate whatever we give a cutesy turn to looking at art. It gets some people into the galleries I suppose and and the works themselves have many different facets, so these tours are not vacuous at all, but they don’t focus the mind.

The other category of tour:  On Dragons Wings, a Taste of Asia, Art of the Americas, Art of the Ancient World give tour goers an insiders tour, a short glimpse of the world of art history, connossieurship and curating offered through a slice of an encyclopedic museum.  Nothing wrong with this either, though I often wonder about the value of this brief an introduction to six to eight objects.  It may spark interest that tour goers will pursue on their own.  I hope so.

The kind of tour topic this religion and art material suggests could offer a third type of tour, one that takes a point of view and pursues an argument through use of various objects.  The relationship between religion and art has a long history with many chapters and in some senses the most interesting chapters come last in the world of contemporary art.   The MIA has a much better collection for pursuing this topic than, say, the Walker because we have art as old as the Lady of LaMouth and art as recent as Hirsch’s, Death of St. John.  Other interesting tours along these lines would involve the relationship between literature and art.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Travel

The Days Look Potent

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26  bar rises 29.93  5mph  NNW windchill23

       Waning Crescent of the Snow Moon

The angle of the sun has changed; the days look potent, ready to burst open and let plant life smash through winter.  Even the snow today has a futile, last gasp appearance.  It is not the snow fury of midwinter when the drifts pile up and driving snow blinds motorists, making the home a cozy refuge.  Yes, temperatures will plunge the next couple of days, but we know this is just the Hawthorne Giant reluctant to let go his grip on the land.  The Oak King has already seized the season, opening the eyelid of nature wider and wider until one day soon the snow will melt and the ground begin to thaw.  Then, all hail breaks loose.

This drama, the back and forth of seasonal change, is not felt in the tropics.  I remember the struggle my brother Mark had explaining snow to his classes of Thai students learning English.  How to grasp cold and frozen water falling from the sky when all you know is wet seasons and dry?  As a child of this land between the Rockies and the Appalachians, the vast Midwest, and as an adopted son of the northern reaches of it, the seasons long ago seeped into my bones.  The sun’s countenance changes and I know it; I know it in the animal part of my brain that tells me when it’s time to migrate toward the growing season or to put up stores for a coming winter.  The subtle variations between late season snow and the early spitting of snows in November have deep meaning for me.  We are, all of us, practitioners of meteoromancy, attempting to tell our futures through cloud cover, length of day and temperature.

I would have it no other way.  Visiting the tropics is  wonderful, a chance to see another life way, another adaptation to the planet’s many faces, but to live there, to wipe out lifelong learning about spring and its puddles or summer and its heat, does not appeal to me.  This has been and will be my home.  As I said the other day, I am kama’aina of the heartland, a child of the Upper Midwest on the North American continent and this is where I belong.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics, Travel

The True Radicals of Today Are Conservatives

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7:45AM.  Bright sun.  Blue water.  Breeze off the ocean.  Mourning doves coo.

The mourning doves have had it goin’ on the last week.  Males walk up to a female, bow, stomp their feet, then spread their tail feathers.  Oh, yeah.  I saw that move before.

Last post from Da Fish Shack.  My bags are packed and I’m ready to go.  Just 12 hours until my jet plane.  Da Fish Shack check-out is 10AM and my flight doesn’t leave until 8:15 PM so I have time to do some more sightseeing, shop, visit the museum in Lihue, have lunch and dinner.

One point of comparison I forgot between Da Fish Shack and the Hyatt was showers.  At the Hyatt the shower was an ordinary shower in a tub, found in most hotels.  Here at Da Fish Shack showers are al fresco although with appropriate screening.  Kate suggested I use flip-flops when I used the shower.  Although I would not want to take showers outside at home, here in Hawai’i’s wonderful climate, it provides a note of adventure to a routine task.  You can hear the surf and feel the wind all over.

On driving back last Sunday night to Da Fish Shack after supper in Wailua, I turned on NPR.  Guess who was on?  Garrison Keillor and Prairie Home Companion.  Right here on route 56 headed north toward Princeville and Hanalei.  This morning I read the NYT while I ate breakfast.  Lead story in travel?  Skiing on the Gunflint Trail.  

Something I’ve started rolling around.  It appears to me that the true radicals of today are conservatives.  No, not the George Buckley, Russell Kirkland variety or the neo-con versions that got us into this damned war, but conservatives who focus their conservative tendencies on species and eco-systems, on cultures and life ways.  These eco-conservatives are in fact conservative over against enlightenment liberals,  free-market economists and raging bull capitalists of multi-national corporate organizations.

In tandem with this thought, which still percolates, is another.   Rather than the nexus of evil, the world’s faith traditions are vast resources that represent the human heart and mind at its most integrated, its most daring and its most compassionate.  Yes, the religious institutions that accrete around these faith traditions often become like the coral reef, rigid and sharp, but the faith traditions themselves preserve the world’s oldest stories and humankind’s most radical dreams. 

When anti-religion dogmatists like Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris and Christopher Hitchens rail against these institutions, all they are doing is raising the enlightenment flag of REASON.  Well, here’s the big news guys, REASON is not all there is.  In fact, reason works its magic by dividing and parsing, by reducing the world to manageable portions, to forumlas and laws.  Not a bad thing as far it goes, but turn the process on its head and move out toward the whole, toward life and the solar system, the galaxy, the cosmos. 

These things are.  And, they were before science and reasons and they will be after science and reason has passed away.  They do not need to consult either Newton or Einstein to go the speed of light or engage gravity.  It is this whole, the buzzing, blooming whole that is most precious and it will not be dissected because there are too many variables, too many data points moving in too many disparate directions.

And so forth.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Travel

The Tao and the Islands

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7:41AM  Cool breeze.  Overcast. Calm ocean, no surf. 

Last full day in Hawai’i.  Time has passed more slowly for me than usual.  Often, I go on vacation and the next thing I know I’m back on the plane headed home.  This trip a variety of circumstances have slowed things down, among them Kate’s illness and my decision to get the full resort experience at the Hyatt.

When I arrived last Saturday at Da Fish Shack, I was already on Island time.  Having a place this close to the ocean did, as I’d hoped, attune me to its rhythms.  Surf comes in, goes out, comes in, goes out night and day. 

Nighttime breezes off the ocean cool the land to perfect sleeping weather and mountain breezes move the air during the heat of the day.  The slow warming of the day gives way to pleasant, dark nights with no traffic and no metro glow to dull the view of the stars.

Last night I realized the true character of this little place.  It’s a Hawai’ian hermitage, a small cell on the ocean where the soul can come for a rest and rejuvenation. 

The immediacy of ocean, mountain and lush plant life call out for malama ‘aina.  It’s not surprising that the first Hawai’ians heard the call.  Our home in Andover gives me the same sense of connection to the land, a place where Kate and I have, over years of gardening, become na kama’aina. 

The Tao almost becomes visible here on Kauai.  That is, the ebb and flow of the cosmos, its inevitable course, has so much evidence on this ancient island, already long eroded and heading toward a new life as an atoll, then its permanent one as a seamount. 

 Here in Hawai’i land emerges from the ocean with hot rock and vitality.  Rain and the ocean combine with the wind to create soil.  On the soil plants take hold, sending out roots which further fracture the lava, creating more soil.  The island moves off the hotspot and this erosive process takes over as the primary shaper of the land. (excluding bulldozers and cement) As furthest along in this process of the main high islands, Kauai has the feel of a hermit, ravaged by time and wrinkled, yet bearer of the earth’s wisdom. 

A few weeks here is only enough to catch a glimpse of the message Kauai has for us as we hurtle forward in our terraforming experiment.  The message may be, whatever happens, the earth herself will survive.