In, but not of. Yesterday at mussar, a spiritual/ethical system within the Jewish tradition, I had a complex moment. We were discussing truth and mercy, the relationship between them. To compare mercy and truth I defined mercy as suspension of judgment. Truth though is a sword and a judgment. If that’s correct, then not all truth is merciful. Rabbi Jamie started to dispute that, but had to leave for his daughter’s wisdom teeth extraction.
In the conversation that followed afterward my use of the sword metaphor was identified as a Christian trope, “I come to not bring peace, but a sword.” I’ve been working very hard over the last year to bracket my mode of theological thinking while absorbing a Jewish style of thinking. This requires effort because though I abandoned Christianity over 30 years ago, my seminary education and professional life as a clergyman reinforced my already strong Judaeo/Christian enculturation. Christianity does still define much of how I think and feel about matters religious and secular.
While that’s obvious, I still felt a flush of embarrassment at being identified with a New Testament informed concept. That flush, as mussar teaches, is an important signal about where growth is necessary.
On the way back up to Shadow Mountain I described my situation to Kate as similar to traveling. “I love to go where the culture is very different from mine, where I’m a stranger. It helps me know my self.” Kate’s journey is one of a Jew deepening her own understanding, her own identity as part of a religious world. My journey is closer to travel, “It feels like I’m traveling on the inside.” In this case no geographic change is necessary for me to be a stranger.
This inner travel exhilarates me, but it also confuses and, in a mild sense, scares me. I’m trying to gain wisdom and personal growth from Beth Evergreen while maintaining my own identity as a pagan. But, not only that. My life as a pagan is not divorced from my enculturation as a Christian. I’m a cultural Christian in many ways. That means I encounter many shocks to my inner world, shocks that wake me up, like a Zen koan, but that also and in the same instance disorient me.
Yaowarat
It’s like being on Yaowarat Road in Bangkok on a weekend night. On Friday and Saturday night the sidewalks of Bangkok’s Chinatown, of which Yaowarat is the main street, fill up with small restaurants, often two tables, some chairs and a street vendor style kitchen with a wok, propane tank, utensils and a stack of plates and soup bowls. What food are they serving? I don’t know. I speak neither Thai nor Mandarin. Many people are there who do understand the food offerings, how to eat them, but I’m not one of them. I’m in, but not of the street life. Observing, yes, eager to learn, yes, but even after sampling some food and gaining some insight, I will go back to my hotel, a stranger traveling through.
I’m grateful to the folks at Beth Evergreen and Kate for putting up with my being present as a stranger and an inner traveler. A long journey, barely begun.
No snow. 10% humidity. A spate of small wildfires. Result: stage 1 fire restrictions put in place by Jeffco. In February. Winter has gone on holiday and the outlook for summer is fiery if we don’t get more moisture in March and April. Like death, oddly, I find the whole wildfire possibility invigorating. It motivates me to work on our lodgepole pine and aspen and it brings those of us who live in the mountains closer together. A common foe.
Lodgepole pine. From our bedroom window I look out and up to a jagged line of tree tops. On clear nights stars often align with the tops of the pines, giving them a decorated for Christmas look. Sometimes stars also align with branches further down, emphasizing the effect.
Which reminds me. Monday or Tuesday night of this week I looked up at the pines, as I often do before falling asleep. They were lit up with what looked like lightning bugs. What? The phenomena went on for quite a while, small specks of light flashing off and on. Obviously in February and up here on Shadow Mountain, no lightning bugs. A complete mystery.
While waiting on the Rav4 to finish its spa day at Stevinson Toyota I spent some time considering whether I had become a Coloradan yet. First thing. I left my prostate and significant portions of my left knee in Colorado. No flowers in my hair, but I do feel I’ve contributed in a meaningful, whole body sort of way. Then, living in the mountains. Everyday. Learning the rhythms of mountain seasons, the wildlife, the vast number of hikes and sights and sites to see. And we’re adjusted to life at 8,800 feet. A very Colorado and mountain thing.
Of course, there are Jon and Ruth and Gabe, family links to schools, synagogues, sports, life as a child in the Centennial State. Our dogs, too, as Dr. Palmini said, are mountain dogs now. Due to the spate of mountain lion attacks on dogs in the last month or so, I have a concern for their safety that is very Coloradan. In fact I bought a powerful LED flashlight and have my walking stick ready to do battle with a mountain lion if necessary.
Kings Peak near us 4 pm 12 29
Congregation Beth Evergreen, in addition to a religious community, also facilitates ties with people who live up here like the lawyer, Rich Levine, we saw last week. Many others, too. Kate has integrated quickly thanks to the two sewing groups she belongs to: Bailey Patchworkers and the Needlepointers. Her integration helps mine.
The town of Evergreen has many great restaurants, as does Morrison. We go to jazz and theater in Denver.
That’s the coming to Colorado part of the story. The other is my relationship to Minnesota. Of course there are the Wooly friends, especially Tom, Mark and Bill and the docent friends, many of whom I connect with through Facebook, but also through visits, e-mails, the occasional phone call. Those connections are still strong, even though attenuated by distance.
Minnesota will always occupy a large, 40-year space in my heart. That’s a long time, enough to become home. So many memories, good ones and bad ones. But, it is just that now, a 40-year space in my heart. I do not want to return. Life is here, now, and that, more than anything else, tells me that, yes, I have become and am a Coloradan.
Just finished reading Strangers in their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild. It’s subtitle is: Anger and Mourning on the American Right. I found the book by reading this article, Why We Need Empathy in the Age of Trump. Here’s an excerpt from near the end that points to part of the way forward, according to Hochschild’s research.*
After finishing the book, I’m not so sure there is a way forward for this particular work though I hope I’m wrong.
Here’s why. In my own analysis, shared by many on the left, we failed to address the economic situation of the working class over the last 40 years or so. As a result of that, it was easy for the right to cherry pick them by focusing on so-called “values politics.” Values here meant hot issues like abortion, gay marriage, affirmative action, climate change. By appealing to the baser elements, the fears and anger of the white working class, they were peeled off from their natural political home, the Democratic Party, and inserted, very clumsily, within the big tent of the Republican circus.
lewishine-nationalarchive
What this simplistic analysis (I’m calling myself out here.) misses is the genuine love of God, church and country that the white working class already had. When the Republicans convinced this constituency that they were the party of Christian (right-wing Christian) values and the only party consistently behind a flag-waving form of patriotism, many (most?) of this demographic switched allegiances, some as early as Nixon’s Moral Majority, some later first as Reagan Democrats, then transforming into Tea Party Republicans.
What I missed, and really shouldn’t have since I grew up in this exact milieux, was the sincerity, the authenticity of the religious and patriotic values of working class whites. These values are more important to them than economic self interest and Hochschild’s book makes this very clear. What happened in the late 20th century was a gradual shift away from economic self-interest voting to voting patterns based on cultural values as well.
The Christian right metaphysics mixed with flag/gun/anti-government passions, honestly held and sincerely believed, makes allying with secular globalists like myself and everyone else in the progressive movement seem most unlikely. I don’t like seeing it this way. It makes me sad and a bit fearful for the immediate future. Perhaps dialogue can help, but when what Hochschild calls the deep stories are so profoundly different, it means the assumptions with which we start the conversation may defeat the effort at its inception.
It still seems to me, however, that policies aimed at working class, high school education or less, Americans must be advanced. As we resist Trump and his gang of mediocres, we also have to stand for something. That something can be economic justice for those left behind by our educational system, by our economy, by big corporations and by automation. It’s important whether or not it convinces the working class white folks of Tea Party/Trump inclinations to shift allegiances. And I fear it won’t.
Still thinking about this, about what might come next. No real good ideas yet. You got any?
* “In fact, they are very friendly toward Bernie Sanders, these people on the far right. Bernie is standing back and asking some big questions. Now, they’ll say, “He’s a socialist. We’re Americans, we can’t be socialists.” But they sense him as a populist. There are possible connections we can make across class—and perhaps re-connect with people we have lost.
We are not looking at that loss. And we feel morally armed to not look at the reasons for that loss, because we are anti-racist, anti-sexist, and so on. Our moralism—our moral convictions—are getting in the way of really understanding people that are making the Democratic Party a shadow of its former self. I think we need to dig deep. That’s the hard thing. It doesn’t mean giving in to it. It’s just the opposite. It means looking at people who feel alien to you, and understanding how they think.
We have to reach out. We need school-to-school crossovers. We need church-to-church crossovers, union crossovers—people on different sides of the political divide learning to listen, and turning their own moral alarm system off, for a little while. They don’t need to turn into somebody else. It’s just listening, and getting smart about what you’ve learned.”
Charlie – The conversation turned towards reality, the nature of human experience, and the essential nature of life as Mystery. I finished this short Stephen King novel this weekend (The Colorado Kid) and really loved the unanswered questions left for the reader at the end of the story. The following is part of King’s afterword which comments on the nature of life and mystery:
“I don’t want to belabor the point, but before I leave you, I ask you to consider the fact that we live in a web of mystery, and have simply gotten so used to the fact that we have crossed out the word and replaced it with one we like better, that one being reality. Where do we come from? Where were we before we were here? Don’t know. Where are we going? Don’t know. A lot of churches have what they assure us are the answers, but most of us have a sneaking suspicion all that might be a con-job laid down to fill the collection plates. In the meantime, we’re in a kind of compulsory dodgeball game as we free-fall from Wherever to Ain’t Got A Clue. Sometimes bombs go off and sometimes the planes land okay and sometimes the blood tests come back clean and sometimes the biopsies come back positive. Most times the bad telephone call doesn’t come in the middle of the night but sometimes it does, and either way we know we’re going to drive pedal-to-the-metal into the mystery eventually.
“It’s crazy to be able to live with that and stay sane, but it’s also beautiful. I write to find out what I think, and what I found out writing The Colorado Kid was that maybe—I just say maybe—it’s the beauty of the mystery that allows us to live sane as we pilot our fragile bodies through this demolition-derby world. We always want to reach for the lights in the sky, and we always want to know where the Colorado Kid (the world is full of Colorado Kids) came from. Wanting might be better than knowing. I don’t say that for sure; I only suggest it. But if you tell me I fell down on the job and didn’t tell all of this story there was to tell, I say you’re all wrong.
Don’t know why it took me so long, but I know how to make America great again. It will not require red baseball hats or xenophobic bluster. No, it only requires listening to the ideas of a Passionate priest, Thomas Berry. Berry wrote a small book, The Great Work. It influenced a turn in my political activity from economic justice to environmental concerns.
This 258 page book is a quick read and it introduces The Great Work. Civilizations, according to Berry, have a quintessential role that only they can perform. The one he identifies for our civilization is this: Creating a sustainable existence for humans on this earth. That is our Great Work. It is the way to make America Great again.
The phrase, the Great Work, comes from medieval alchemy. The primary, original material of the universe, the prima materia, in the alchemist’s lab can create the philosopher’s stone. The philosopher’s stone could turn base metals into gold or silver and extend the alchemist’s life.
We can take the prima materia of the U.S., its citizens and its land, put them in the alembic created by our need for survival and our need for economic justice, and turn up the heat until we have our philosopher’s stone. When we have it, we can use it to heal the earth and create good-paying jobs for all.
Then, then America will be great. Not only again, but still and not only still but into the future as well. May it be so.
Imbolc, or in-the-belly, celebrates the time in Ireland when the ewes would freshen. Their pregnancies meant milk would be available after the long fallow season that had begun at Samain, Summer’s End.
Pregnant ewe
Imbolc lies halfway between the Winter Solstice and the Spring Equinox, what the Celt’s called a cross-quarter holiday since it falls between two quarters defined by the solar year. That milk is also a promise, like the gradual lengthening of days after the longest night of the year in late December, that spring and the growing season will come.
It’s easy for us in our refrigerated, grocery stored world to gloss over these signals of the natural world. It seems like we don’t require them anymore. After all we can buy milk, cow’s milk, at any time of the day or night, 365 days a year. And the growing season particular to our latitude and longitude also seems irrelevant since it’s always the growing season somewhere on earth. The occasional gaps that even modern transportation can’t resolve can often be filled by greenhouse or hydroponically grown produce. We’re good, right?
I’m afraid not. Celebrating Imbolc or any of the Great Wheel holidays will not resolve our alienation from the sources of our sustenance, the sun and mother earth, but this ancient tradition exists to call us back home. The Great Wheel is a reminder that the cycle of life continues, even when the fields and animals are barren. The power of the sun, working in harmony with the soil, with plants, with animals that eat the plants does not disappear. It can be trusted.
It is though, that alienation, evident in so many ways, that drives climate change, that creates produce modified for harvest and storage, not human well-being, that underwrites the paving over of cropland and wetlands. We imagine that somehow the droughts in California will stop there. We hope they’ll be confined to somewhere else, somewhere where we’re not. Global agriculture means we’ll be affected wherever the damage occurs.
Right here in Colorado we have a key example of the interdependence for which the Great Wheel stands. Our snowpack, high in the Rockies where the Colorado River rises for its journey south toward its ancient destination in the Gulf of California, determines the amount of water available to nine states. Including California. Winter snowfall, melted by the increasing warmth of spring and summer, nourishes millions of people, cities like Las Vegas, Phoenix and Los Angeles.
In the age of Trump and rising nationalist, right wing populism, the need for the Great Wheel has never been more profound. It softens our in the moment, human conflicts by lifting up the long term, the cycles of life in which all humans, all life participate. The Great Wheel reminds us that there is no other when it comes to living on this planet. We’re all here and bound to one another, connected. My hope is that someday, perhaps someday soon, we’ll all realize that and adjust our politics accordingly.
OK. I admit it. I occasionally take the quizzes that pop up on facebook. I mention this because one set of quizzes seems, well, accurate. The same quiz website offered two recently: What kind of ancient religion would you follow? What kind of philosopher are you?
Druid Harvesting Mistletoe
Though I thought I’d saved the piece about ancient religion, I didn’t. Still. The ancient religion that matched my answers? Celtic Druidism. How ’bout that? In the year leading up to my leaving the Presbyterian ministry I was in spiritual direction with John Ackerman at Westminster Presbyterian Church. When I told him I no longer believed in Jesus/God/Holy Spirit, but was more focused now on how I fit into the natural world, he said, “Well, you might be a druid.” He meant it. Not a flippant observation. Prescient.
Since then, the Great Wheel has become my liturgical calendar. I’m much more like what I would once have critiqued as a flat-earth humanist. That is, the metaphysical realms of the world religions seem like poetry to me rather than statements about ontology. I am not a new atheist, a scorner of faith and its many, many permutations. And, yes, I recognize the role religion plays in human conflicts, but I know that most of the time religions gather people of similar demographic characteristics. When conflict emerges, it often has roots in economic and political realities that align closely with religious preferences.
I did save the note about which philosopher I’m most like.* This also seemed apposite. It surprised me, in both instances, how the 29 questions they ask managed to get somewhere close to how I see myself.
*Your mind works like the philosopher: Thomas Paine
An anarchist who championed reason and free thought, Thomas Paine was never afraid to speak his mind no matter how unpopular or revolutionary his theories were. Like Paine, you see life as full of possibilities and love to shake up the status quo by thinking outside the box. You are spontaneous and communicate confidently and fluidly. Could you write a post to inspire world-transforming events like Paine’s pamphlet ‘Common Sense’ influenced the start of the American Revolution? Who knows? (But we think it might be worth a try.)
Kate and I supplied bagels, schmear and fruit for the bagel table at Beth Evergreen yesterday. The bagel table is a casual shabbat service that includes the prayer book and the torah reading. Yesterday the parsha was va-er, Exodus 6:2-9:26, for the most part the story of the plagues sent by God on Egypt.
Rabbi Jamie said that in one instance the verb usually translated as go, as in Go to Pharaoh, is actually come. The meaning shifts a good deal with this understanding. Come to Pharaoh implies, according to Jamie, that God will be acting through Pharaoh. This falls under the difficult to understand category for me.
Kate and I talked about this idea as we drove up Brook Forest Drive. After some conversation, we decided that if you pull back, look from a historical view, then the actions of Pharaoh do work as part of God’s efforts on behalf of the Jewish slaves. His hardened heart provides the impetus, eventually, for the Exodus.
We then turned to our contemporary Pharaoh, the Trump. Could God (whatever you want to insert into this metaphysical placeholder) speak to us through the Trump? Jamie’s point was that we have to see the potential for God to speak us especially through those things or persons that we fear or despise. I suppose. Let’s try here.
Pulling back, taking the historical view, what possible liberating impulse could come from Trump’s presidency? (I take liberating impulse to equal God.) It’s true that Trump’s election highlighted the plight of the white working class, those with no more than a high school education. And, it may be, policies to address their concerns will lift all of the working class, high school educated folks. That would be an astonishing and welcome outcome, at least to me.
Too, we might consider the orders to build the wall, block Muslim refugees from certain countries, repeal the ACA, gut environmental regulations as a hardening of the heart, a so-obvious step away from justice and fairness, a big step away from a sustainable future for humanity on this planet, that the reaction to them will part the climate denying sea and create the political will for single payer health care, a return to Ellis Island immigrant welcoming that so many of us yearn for. Maybe. I suppose it could happen that way. May it be so.
As you can tell though, I’m skeptical. But, if it can be, I’ll be the first in line to admit my skepticism unwarranted.
In the Nix (see post below) the author Nathan Hill takes a side excursion into the difficult, thorny problem of the self. The idea he presents helped me, gave me a middle ground beyond the no-self notions of the Buddha and several contemporary psychologists and philosophers and the Western view of one true self.
The dialectic between no-self and one true self has always found me much closer to the one true self pole. It’s the one that I accept intuitively. In fact, it was the unquestioned truth until mid-college, so unquestioned that any other idea seemed literally absurd.
“Oh, that’s her true self.” We might say this when we see someone angry, apparently peeling back the onion, layers of false selves, to reveal the enduring self located, well, somewhere; or, when some other extreme behavior allows us, or so we think, to peer into the interior of another. This is the radical western reductionist view of the self, perhaps linked to the notion of soul, the essence of a person.
The Buddhist notion, which I don’t pretend to understand well, posits no I, no we, only a consciousness that responds to whatever shows up in the present moment, our self a narrative, a story we tell ourselves, but having no “real” existence.
In Hill’s notion there is a third, perhaps a middle way, between these two poles. A character says, oh, her true self has been hidden by false selves. No, Hill’s other character says, not by a false self but by another of her true selves. Ah. Not split personality or multiple personality, not that idea, rather the idea that we each have more than one “true” self.
This makes so much sense to me. The self that writes this blog is the writing me, the self that wants somehow to turn my inside out so others can see in. I have a husband self who acts in relation to Kate and to the history of relationships I’ve had. There is a grandparent self brought into existence by Ruth and Gabe. A Woolly self. A friend self, perhaps as many friend selves as I have friends. There is an art lover self, a physical self focused on the body, a reading self, too, who willingly opens all these selves to influence by another. Each of these true selves, and many others, have their own history, their own agenda. You might call these selves the specific wanderer on each of my several ancientrails.
Given the quote above from Whitman, I’ll call this the Whitman theory of self. It is, for now, the one to which I adhere.
Just finished reading 
The Christian right metaphysics mixed with flag/gun/anti-government passions, honestly held and sincerely believed, makes allying with secular globalists like myself and everyone else in the progressive movement seem most unlikely. I don’t like seeing it this way. It makes me sad and a bit fearful for the immediate future. Perhaps dialogue can help, but when what Hochschild calls the deep stories are so profoundly different, it means the assumptions with which we start the conversation may defeat the effort at its inception.
Don’t know why it took me so long, but I know how to make America great again. It will not require red baseball hats or xenophobic bluster. No, it only requires listening to the ideas of a Passionate priest, Thomas Berry. Berry wrote a small book, 
The phrase, the Great Work, comes from medieval alchemy. The primary, original material of the universe, the prima materia, in the alchemist’s lab can create the philosopher’s stone. The philosopher’s stone could turn base metals into gold or silver and extend the alchemist’s life.
