Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

And Then Is Heard No More

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Imbolc                               Black Mountain Moon

Let’s paint the same message as below, but with a different brush and color. Gray fading to black dominated the last post. Let’s use blue fading to dark, dark blue here.

Life is the time between the first rays of dawn and the last, bruised hours of twilight. At its brightening life comes with expansiveness, light revealing first this and then that, all new. These are the hours of Heidegger’s being thrown into the world. We see first a soon-to-be familiar face, then faces. Realize at some point a home, then the home in a particular place. That place is in a larger frame which sometimes takes a while to come into focus. At some point we know that the 1950’s, this time of childhood is neither, say, the the 1930’s of our parent’s time nor is it the middle ages with knights and castles and it is not, either, the future. Not 2000. Not 1984.

Over the next few years we learn that our unique self will have its hour upon the stage over a certain span of time, not any we wish, but this one and this one alone. Who we are to become, what we are to do must fit into these years, years that have their own shape, their own special challenges, their own significant opportunities. We choose this path, that person, those places. They fit or they don’t. If they don’t, we choose again.

As the years accumulate and our hour ticks down, the choices become fewer, narrower. Our own history now shapes our future. This is a time of reaping, of being the person you have chosen to be, the unique mixture of your Self and the times into which you have been thrown. When the reaping is finished, our hour is up.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Becoming (again) Native To This Place

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Imbolc                            Black Mountain Moon

Becoming native to this place is a phrase I’ve borrowed from Wes Jackson of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. Wes and his researchers are trying to develop perennial food crops so plowing will become unnecessary. No till agriculture.

As I’ve thought further about reimagining faith and proceeding from the heart or from the Self’s vast interior rather than reason or sacred deposit (holy books, dogma, pronouncements of religious leaders), it has occurred to me that the reimagining process might be described as becoming native to this place.

Here’s what I mean. Until very recently, maybe the last 150 years or so, most of earth’s inhabitants lived much closer to the means of food production, but by 1900 both England and the U.S. had become predominantly urban nations. Since that the time the pace of urbanization has rapidly increased and half of the entire population of the planet lives in cities.

Urbanization added to the mechanization of farming has removed more and more people from the land, distancing far more than the half who now live in cities further and further from the earth as a productive and vital center of life. It’s no accident that the same processes have seen automobiles and roads, trucks and trains, airplanes and ships become both, as the Old Testament said, a blessing and a curse.

Compounding the psychological distancing and the actual physical distancing from the earth is the pernicious effect of the carbon fuel cycle that has been central to global climate change. In this reimagining of faith we can see the carbon loading of the atmosphere and the warming effect it is already having (along with a whole cascade of other negative effects like ocean acidification) as the externalizing, the reification of our estrangement from our home. We are so far removed from the day to day life of other living things that we can harm them-and ourselves-without even noticing.

Thus, to reimagine faith, that is to reimagine how we might discover our true position in the world (again, defined as broadly as you want), must include becoming (again) native to this place, this planet that is our only home. We must experience atonement for our estrangement from the planet. We must become at-one with her again.

Within the urbanized, mechanized, carbon releasing zeitgeist we need not an intellectual assent to the needs of mother earth gathered from books and prophets like Bill McKibben, Wendell Berry or Wes Jackson, for this kind of assent is no different from the scholastic defense of Christianity mounted by St. Anselm or Thomas Aquinas.

No, we must atone, become at-one with her in our own way, in a way that proceeds from within, that follows our heart and not our head alone. We must (again) become native to her rhythms and her cycles, to the way she breathes, the way she distributes water, the way her soil replenishes its own nutrients, the way winter differs from fall and spring from summer. Only in this way will we able to take the necessary actions, not the necessary actions that will save mother earth, she will survive our worst insults, but the necessary actions that will allow human kind to flourish here, to flourish here at least until other, natural forces wipe her clean of all life.

Only in this way can we have the possibility, the hope that our species might perform the miracle of leaving this planet for good, for other places, other planets or moons. But note, even there, wherever there might be, we will, again, have to become native to that place.

Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, World History

Living in the Long Now

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Imbolc                                                 Black Mountain Moon

Between now and the time when Pipe Creek fills the lake that will cover all of human artifice here on earth there is a long interim. It may well be that humanity will fan out from this planet, seeking a home somewhere in space, perhaps on Mars or a moon of one of its sister planets, perhaps even out beyond the Oort belt, the furthest reach of Sol’s solar wind. I cannot see that far and, though I hope it turns out to be our destiny, I do not rely on such exploration in considering how far I can see.

We know from astrophysics that in about 7.5 billion years the sun will expand in its red giant phase, its bulk then extending past our orbit. That is a sure and certain end to the planet. Before that, though, several other extinction events loom. This brief Wikipedia article outlines several of them.

These future disasters (from a human perspective) limit the time of human habitation on earth, not by theological fiat, but by the laws of physics. In that they represent the working out of fundamental laws of this universe they are neither apocalyptic nor commentary on human failing. There are future disasters, perhaps of an extinction event level, that might have the human fingerprint, yes, but even these only advance the end of human life on earth, a certainty in any case.

Considering this certainty without placing an exact time frame upon it, we can then work backwards to consider faith, positioning ourselves in the world, however broadly you may define that term. We live in the long now between the emergence of life on earth and its end. Humanity is an extension of that true miracle, that enduring mystery, life’s creation ex nihilo from chemicals inert, as far as we know now, since the very birth of the universe.

Over our evolution, lengthy from the perspective of our species, but a wink in the time since earth’s creation we have developed into an animal capable of reflecting on its fate. That’s what I’m engaged in here. Does our fate really matter? Yes and no.

No because our duration as a species on earth has limits, ones we can define and foresee, even if we can not predict those limits exactly. Yes because our need to know ourselves as part of the universe, as part of life on this planet seems to be a human universal, most likely triggered by meditation on our own, individual limit: death.

If we accept (and you may not), that this world is wonder enough, miracle enough and, further, that any next world, no matter what its shape and character might or might not be, is hidden behind the pale of death and the inescapable veil created by our senses, then we must consider how we fit into that long now currently underway, the one between the creation of the earth and then life upon it and our emergence, and that certain end to this planet and its life which physics demonstrates.

That consideration will be the content of the next post in this series.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

fides quaerens intellectum

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Imbolc                         Black Mountain Moon

Reimagining faith surfaces, then falls back, behind other projects. Latin, books, art. This surprises me somewhat. I spent 20 years, 5 in seminary and 15 in the full-time ministry, focused on matters of faith. After I retired at 44, there was always some engagement, at times strong, then smaller and smaller though in the liberal religious tradition, not Christianity. All that investment of time suggests a deep commitment to the mystery of faith, one that you would think would keep me engaged.

And it has, if I read the trajectory of my life correctly, (A difficult task to do from inside the life, I grant you.)  but in unusual or atypical ways.

Faith seeking understanding (fides quaerens intellectum) was the motto of St. Anselm of Canterbury the 12th century Catholic who attempted to move beyond scripture and the holy fathers in “proving” Christianity. Anselm, like many in the scholastic tradition, took as certainty that the search proceeded from faith to understanding. That is, faith came first, then human reason sought to understand it.

Reason seeking understanding prior to faith defines the period of the Enlightenment and its deconstruction of the Christian scaffolding built up in the 1600 years that had followed the death of Jesus. As Anselm and others inside the church feared, a search for understanding that does not proceed first from faith can-and did-lead to knowing without need of religion.

There is a third route, one which proceeds from intuition or from inner light. It does not proceed from faith, nor does it rely on reason first, rather the heart leads from inside the human experience.

This is, perhaps, Emerson’s “revelation to us” in his well-known introduction to his essay nature. It means starting with the deeply felt, the unreasoned, perhaps the irrational, pushing aside books and dogmas, theorems and the laws.

Here’s one such thread in my own life. In Madison County, Indiana we had two main economic sectors: farming and manufacturing. We had the remnants of the great pioneer push west, now growing beans (soybeans) and corn, raising cattle and pigs, and producing milk. We also had the American equivalent of England’s “satanic mills”, huge automotive factories that employed thousands working three shifts a day.

So from young childhood the dialectic between agriculture and technology grew within me, not as an intellectual argument, certainly not as a matter involved with religious faith, but as a felt and experienced reality.

Pipe Creek ran through Alexandria. It was the creek (pronounced “crick”) that took a dogleg turn through town. In the rains that came in late summer it often flooded, putting the high school’s football field underwater. Some locals could be counted on to take their fishing boats out and putter along the 50-yard line.

It was, in that sense, wild, literally untamed. Yet its name called up not wilderness, but the factories and their waste. That it may have been named for an Algonquian speaking chief of the Delaware nation, Hopocan, who was also known as Captain Pipe, is a late learning and does not negate the long association I have between factories and the running water near my home.

Pipe Creek runs through my life, carrying in its compromised waters the tension between natural and artifice, a fruitful tension that has spilled out now in my third phase as a deep lake. In that deep lake artifice lies submerged, Atlantis like, civilization that triumphed for a time, then disappeared beneath.

Faith positions us in the world, however widely this term might be applied. Many faiths, including Christianity, posit a world beyond this one, one to which we more properly belong and to which we can retire after the last mystery has visited us. My reimagining of faith is in this regard simple. It positions us as in and of this world, the one in which we participate daily.

Pipe Creek in this reimagined faith fills the lake. Its waters rise over all human endeavor, taking them in as it takes in trees and rocks and sand and skeletons. This is neither an apocalyptic view nor a judgmental one, rather it is descriptive.

 

 

 

Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Minnesota, Mountains, Sport, The West, Third Phase, US History

Who?

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Imbolc                                                                      Settling Moon II

As the dominant ethos of Minnesota lies in its wild lands to the north, the Boundary Waters Wilderness and Voyageurs National Park emblematic of it, so the dominant ethos of Colorado lies in its wrinkled skin, mountains thrusting up from north to south and from the Front Range to the west. Where Minnesota’s map is essentially flat, marked with depressions filled with either water or wetlands or peat bogs, Colorado’s map is tortured, angular chunks of rock shoved up this way and that, lonely roads tailing off into gulches and canyons and valleys.

These two states share a common theme, wild nature at their core. You may live in these states and never trek in the mountains or visit the lake country; it is possible, but if that is you, then you shun the basic wealth of the land which you call home. In these two states, as in several other western states like Idaho, Washington, Montana, Oregon the political borders that mark them out matter much less than the physical features that define them.

In these places the heart can listen to the world as it once was and could be again. This is a priceless and necessary gift. It may be found in its purest form in the areas designated as wilderness, but these lands participate in wild nature in their totality. Those of us lucky enough to live within them have a privilege known only by occasional journeys to city dwellers. With that privilege comes, as with all privilege, responsibility.

These places which speak so eloquently, so forcefully when seen are silent out of view. On the streets of Manhattan, inside the beltway of Washington, in the glitter of Las Vegas and the sprawl of Los Angeles these places shimmer only in photographs, movie and television representation, books and their power is not in them.

Who will speak for the mountains? Who will speak for the North Woods and its waters? Who will speak for the trees?

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Sport

The Dawn Wall of Human Insight

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Winter                                                      Settling Moon

 

The Dawn Wall climb completed by Kevin Jorgeson and Tommy Caldwell yesterday collided with some reading I’ve been doing in a book by Arthur Danto titled, What Is Art?

In a later chapter of the book Danto referenced this work by Piero della Francesca, painted in 1460, “The Resurrection.” I knew the painting so the image immediately floated into consciousness and attached itself to Caldwell and Jorgeson emerging at the top of the Dawn Wall, a climb realized by using only their hands and feet. Ropes attached to them were there only to prevent a fatal fall, otherwise this was a human powered, human body only effort.

In Francesca’s painting the human body has failed the guards placed at the tomb. They were there to prevent grave robbers from stealing Jesus’ body and declaring him resurrected. But they fell asleep. Even with the guards asleep it takes a supernatural force to circumvent the tomb.

This all occurs, as we can tell from the pale light creeping up over the hills on the painting’s horizon, at dawn. Countless are the number of sunrise services held to celebrate just this moment.

Coldwell and Jorgeson started at the base of El Capitan on its face that has greeted that same rising sun for aeons, at least 100 million years. Imagine their climb as the literal embodiment of the human spirit rising, on its own terms, to the top, to the summit, of this wall that celebrates the rising sun, the first time this wall has been climbed using hands and feet in 100 million years.

Now imagine El Capitan as the sheer rock face of our human attempt to understand this absurd world into which we were thrown at birth and let the summit represent adequate insight into that question, adequate to guide a life.  Supernatural metaphysics posited that we humans must hoist ourselves to the top using pitons and ropes supplied by the supernatural being of our choice. In this analogy Caldwell and Jorgeson represent the humanist, the pagan free-climbing the Dawn Wall of human insight, using only the tools granted to them at birth.

It was this notion that flashed across my mind when reading Danto and considering their feat. Their emergence at the summit of the Dawn Wall overlaid Francesca’s beautiful painting, putting these two climbers in the place of the risen Jesus while blinkered humanity lay asleep below or clung to the cliff tangled up in the ropes of Islam, Hinduism, Christianity.

 

Colorado, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Desire, Emotion, Asceticism A Critical Look

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Winter                                                                     Settling Moon

Opened the last kitchen box this morning. Kate’s busily creating spaces to put the treasures I dig out. At one point this morning she said, “We’ve got so much stuff!” with an exasperated sigh. She’s right, I suppose, though we’ve gathered this stuff over 25 years together. A third purge, which Sarah Strickland predicted, will occur. Goodwill Denver, here we come.

The Stoics want us to be free from emotional entanglement. The Buddhists want us to be free from desire. Western spiritual thought wants us to be free from things. Think George Carlin’s famous rant about stuff. None of these blanket proscriptions satisfy me. In fact, they seem to pointedly ignore the human condition.

Our emotions guide us, warn us, help us make decisions. Desire defines our pursuits through this life. Following our bliss, finding our passion mark desire as an important element in living a full and authentic life. And then there’s our stuff.

Like emotion and desire, stuff can overwhelm us, cripple us, even, in some cases, defeat us. But, like emotion and desire, the physical things with which we surround ourselves support us and give us the tools we need to live our lives. Raising our emotional life to consciousness, raising our desires to consciousness and raising our stuff to consciousness so we can make choices about them seems the critical piece to me.

In other words the life controlled by repressed emotion, or ridden by desire, or the live lived for accumulation of things is an inauthentic life. An unconscious life. A life lived in thrall, no matter to what, is a life shorn of its potential and shrunken in its worth. In this way I take the extreme positions of Stoicism, Buddhism and anti-materialism as signposts warning us, danger ahead. Useful, but not if taken as absolutes.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Holidays, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Feliz Navidad

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Winter                  Christmas                                   Settling Moon

Eating out a lot since all our pots and pans except for the bare minimum still have cardboard around them. Los Tres Garcias was open, so we ate there. Feliz Navidad.

Coming home last night a sickle moon, horns pointed toward the open sky rested above the summit of Black Mountain.

Christmas is still an important holiday for me, even though we don’t celebrate it in any of the traditional ways. Its essential message, the birth of a god in human form, can be taken another way. Christmas is not a singular event, producing a particular person, a messiah, but a regular event, common in its universality, yet miraculous as Christmas suggests.

Three wise men, shepherds, angels and gospel writers of all kinds should take note each time a new human is born. Each of us is the universe looking on and through itself. That is god-like, making the universe a true polytheist.

Each of us has the full potential of a new Self, a Self that may be the next Madam Curie, Ghandi, or Doris Lessing. Or, that Self might be the next loving mother or father, the next hero or heroine, the kind big sister or the thoughtful big brother.

Whatever he or she becomes, each birth could be greeted with: Hallelujah, this day, a new divinity is born.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The Move, The West

Signs and Portents

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Winter                                                   Settling Moon

Signs and portents. While studying the Hebrew scriptures, I learned that a true prophet was one whose prophecies came true. A false prophet? Well…

Reading the signs that come into our lives. Difficult, but inevitable. Three instances. When I first came here on Samain, October 31st, for the closing, I found three large mule deer bucks in the backyard. They looked me, curious. I returned the curiosity. I moved closer and they stayed in place. On later reflection they seemed to be spirits of Shadow Mountain investigating a new resident.

Second. When Tom and I drove out here on December 20th, we encountered heavy fog in Nebraska. Then, the sky was clear and the stars out. The suddenness of the change took both Tom and me by surprise. A physical moment crossing from the humid east into the arid west, a welcome home to our new region.

Third. Shortly after crossing this barrier, a very bright and what appeared close shooting star, perhaps multiple shooting stars gathered together, flashed across the northwestern sky. Again, it took Tom and me by surprise. A confirmation of the second sign and welcome to the clan of those who have traveled this way before.

The wonderful thing about omens is this, they are multivalent, open to multiple interpretations. As our life here becomes more settled, their import might change.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Winter Solstice 2014

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Winter                                                       New (Settling In) Moon

A sacred calendar follows a scheme that interprets the flow of the year from within a certain perspective. It is now Hanukkah, for example, a holiday of memory, the annual recollection of rebellion and a small victory offered by a god. Later this week, on December 25th, Christmas, in all its multi-layeredness, descends on children and retailers alike. This holiseason, the period from October 31st to Epiphany has the brave festivals of light as well as Samain, Thanksgiving and the Winter Solstice.

Today, on my sacred calendar, and more significantly, tonight comes the most loved holiday of the year, the Winter Solstice. While, yes, it’s true to observe that axial tilt is the reason for the season, the empirical and scientific reductionism implied manages to the human meaning entirely.

The tilt of the earth’s axis and its orbit around the sun combine to make this the longest night of the year. See this webpage for a helpful animation of day/night length. At 4:03 pm Mountain Time today “… the sun on our sky’s dome reaches its farthest southward point for the year.) earthsky

The sacred moment comes not when earth’s axial tilt darkens our home place longer than at any other point on the orbit, no, the sacred moment comes when we consider the possible meanings, metaphorical, physical, psychological, ritual that longest darkness offers, or perhaps better, stimulates.

The sacred moment comes when the illumination and enlightenment focused Western mind encounters the dark, the quiet. Not all of human significance comes from reason and analytical work, perhaps not the most important in particular.

What does reason have to offer as we contemplate death, for example? Or the deepest human suffering or injustice? How does enlightenment speak to the fecund reality of life beneath the soil, of life beneath conscious thought? It cannot speak there for its realm lies with Demeter and like Demeter cannot reach the Hadean depths of either the earth or the human mind.

Tonight we celebrate the shadow, not the noon day sun. Tonight we embrace, for a moment, the darkness to this life death brings. Tonight we join, just for a while the roots and rhyzomes, the microbes and tiny, burrowing animals as they move and live and have their being out of sight of the sky, creating a richness on which we feed. On which if you consider the food chain we must feed.

Tonight we celebrate the dark and hidden parts of our own psyche, the wounded soldiers and civilians of our inner realm, those who carry in their struggle some of our most profound possibilities. In my inner realm for example a creature, part-boy and part impatient man (a man very much like my father at his most difficult moments), sometimes seizes the day. Quite literally. This short-tempered man-boy rises when the man I am most has not had enough sleep or is physically tired or sick. He’s annoying and rude, someone my daytime persona would  rather not admit as part of his whole being.

He is, yes, annoying and rude, but in him lies a distinct power. He  can and will confront wrong-doing, injustice, abusive behavior. He lifts the metaphorical sword arm of the more timid and conforming daytime persona. He gives daytime the courage and the will to make a stand. This is his power, though most often its expression is inappropriate, unwanted.

So the long Solstice night gives us a chance to bring our shadow in close, to greet it with the welcome and love it deserves. You might be surprised at the power you could find there. Tonight we celebrate the dark.