Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

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

What Is This Faith?

Leave a comment

Summer                                                            Lughnasa Moon

So, continuing the subject from below, we might ask, what is faith? I will bring in my favorite definitionary, the O.E.D., but before we get to that I want to offer a couple of other observations. In the simplest, and therefore perhaps best, sense, faith is what gets you up in the morning. When you first wake, it comes to you that another day has started (another micro-life). What is it, on reflection, that makes getting out of bed worth it? Or, better, that makes getting out of bed seem possible at all?

Here’s my answer and I’m going to take a risk here and suggest that my answer is, roughly, universal. The body/mind that rises as you has confidence (Latin for with faith) that oxygen will be available. That food of some kind, either plant or animal, will also be available, if not today, then soon enough to sustain life. That your feet will land on the floor or the earth or the stone and not float up into the sky. That when your eyes open the visible world will flood into them once again so you can guide yourself.

Let’s extend this confidence. That the earth will spin and so the sun rise and set, the moon come and go. That our earth will speed its way around our star, tilted, with seasons appropriate to our place on it following as a consequence. That as those seasons come and go, the vast waters of our world will rise into the heavens and fall back to earth, splashing and rejuvenating all they touch. That as those seasons come and go, certain crops will grow and be harvested. Certain animals will be fed and will give their lives in a sacrifice for others so ancient as to be one of earth’s most holy acts.

This is the kind of faith that I believe we all, all native Terrans, share. It may sound trivial and inconsequential compared to the Book of Job or Genesis, the Rig Veda or the Diamond Sutra, but consider its great virtue: we know it to be true. We have to consult no wise men or women. We need no book or ritual. No institution decides whether gravity and the sunrise and the taste of tomatoes, the sweetness of cherries are correct. These are, quite literally, our birthright.

Now is the time for the O.E.D.

Faith, in its form understood from the Greek and Latin is:

1. Belief, trust

2. That which produces belief, evidence, token, pledge, engagement.

3. Trust in its objective aspect, troth; observance of trust, fidelity.

You may say, well. This is trivial. Obvious. And besides, faith, as Paul said, is faith in things unseen. Life is neither trivial nor obvious. Neither is its continuation. The wonder of this planet, so tiny compared to the vastness of the universe, swinging its way around Sol, only one star among a hundred octillion stars, nested inside one galaxy of ten trillion galaxies, is not trivial at all. Neither is it, speaking from the universe’s perspective, obvious.

And what, to agree with Paul, is more unseen than the future? Yet I have faith that these same matters which encourage me to rise each morning will sustain me, into and through the future. Even if that future is only this day, or this hour, or this minute.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Myth and Story, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

The Song of the Earth, Herself

Leave a comment

Summer                                                            New (Lughnasa) Moon

croppedZOE_0022At first, as I dug my way into a new faith, it was about a symphony: the early crocus, snowdrops, grape hyacinths followed by tulips, then iris and hosta and bleeding hearts, giving way in July to a the bold notes of the asiatic lilies until the daylilies and clematis, both bushy and climbing, the liguria and the snakeroot began to dominate followed by the soft crescendo of asters and chrysanthemums. This literal rising and falling, in palates of color always framed by many shades of green, played out in my mind, a curious analog to the mental images inspired by listening to Mozart or Haydn or Pachibel.

Then, with Kate’s guidance vegetables came to have more and more importance. They too come in their own season, following their own melodic lines, as do the fruits and the nuts. Even, I would later learn, so did honey and the concerto of the honey bee.

Amending the soil with compost and peat moss and decayed leaves and hay, finding the 06 27 10_beekeeperastronautheirloom seeds for the vegetables we grow and the beautiful varieties of perennials like the iris and the lily, made the whole a process laced with memory and filled with change.

It is no surprise that the Great Wheel, the ancient calendar of a people whose blood runs in my veins, came into this earthy process as a celebration, as a sacred abstraction of a very real lived experience. This was not systematic theology. This was neither dogma nor holy book. No, this was and is the song of the earth herself, composed in her own medium, the plants whom her body supplies with nutrients and her body which receives their dead bodies to replenish herself.

So this is a material spirituality, a spirituality that lives in the praxis between human awareness and the earth’s ordinary wonders, a paradoxical sacredness created by the essential, the necessary bond between the human body and the plant body and the earth’s body. It may be, probably is, that paradox exists here only when seen against the various gnosticisms of the world’s many religions. In fact, a faith rethought and reimagined without religion entering into the mix needs no spirituality other than that mysterious, miraculous link that binds the entire web of life into one interdependent whole.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science

Into This World We’re Thrown

Leave a comment

Summer                                                             New (Lughnasa) Moon

Into this house we’re born
Into this world we’re thrown…
Riders on the storm             The Doors, “Riders on the Storm”

Reimagining faith. This has been a project of mine for over ten years. It started as an attempt to create a ge-ology as opposed to a theo-logy. (which, I just recalled, began long after a faith focus which saw me out in the woods and wild places of Anoka County for Celtic holidays.) My idea then was to put the earth in the place of God in a value system, a philosophical system for understanding life and its choices. In that vein I took a course on the systematic theologian Paul Tillich. If I could understand in close detail how a thinker like Tillich went about creating a theology, I might follow a similar path toward a ge-ology.

(Johann Wilhelm Cordes: Die Wilde Jagd” – Skizze zum Gemälde 1856/57)

The course was instructive, but not in the way I had imagined. Tillich’s work was too systematic, too neat and tied together with multiple logical bows. It was a product of the enlightenment, a philosophical system built on a clever and sensitive reading of the Christian theological tradition. It was not something I wanted to emulate, perhaps could not emulate. (Tillich was a really, really bright guy.)

After various fits and starts, I eventually set aside the ge-ology idea and turned toward reimagining faith. This idea came from feedback to a long ago post in Ancientrails where I referred to my spirituality as a tactile spirituality. Somebody appreciated this paradox, a material spirituality rather than an ethereal, post-Platonic soul based spirituality.

The starting point for both the idea of the ge-ology and reimagining faith is the Great Wheel. I’ve spoken elsewhere about how the Great Wheel has influenced my life and faith, but the short version is that following this ancient Celtic calendar through the seasons, and following through the season not as an intellectual abstraction but as a lived reality with flowers, vegetables, fruits and other plants subtly changed my understanding of faith.

I say subtly because it took me a long while to notice how deeply I had embraced it. Reimagining began as a second grand intellectual experiment like the ge-ology, but one focused on the Great Wheel. Not the Great Wheel as a pretty round calendar, nor as a neo-pagan liturgical calendar, though it is both of those things, but as experienced by the earth, through the changing seasons. It would not, in other words, proceed from the mind out, but from the ground up. Literally.

How was that going to happen? Didn’t know. Still not sure, but I did change the project a sun calendarthird time to reimagining my faith. Trying to be less grand, less global, more in a realm for which I have both responsibility and authority.

Then, recently, I came across an article in Foreign Policy magazine. It’s premise was a rethinking, a reimagining of the U.S. military. What if we designed a military for today’s reality, was the question it asked.

Aha. That’s the question at the root of my quest. What if we designed a faith for today’s reality? This is similar to Emerson’s notion of a religion of revelation to us, not to them, but it is not the same. I’m not necessarily interested in religion, especially religious institutions which serve to fossilize and deaden lived faith. A religious institution is anathema to a lived faith since lived realities change constantly and religious institutions live to fight change.

So, I’m not interested in revelation since revelation is a Christian idea. What I’m trying to do is rethink, reimagine what faith can look like in a world shorn of classical metaphysics, in a world moving toward a dystopian climactic future, in a world… Well, that’s just the point, I think. We’re rethinking now in a world context, not in a given ethnic enclave, not even within with the broad outlines of Western and Eastern, but on the rough and watery surface of our planet. All of us now, together. What can carry us forward, help us understand who we are and what we need to do, for each other and with each other? For the planet and for the future of all living things.

I’d love to think I could answer those questions. But the truth is I can only make my best effort at answering them for myself. That’s the project I’m engaging right now, reimagining, rethinking my faith for today’s reality and for the future toward which and for which we live.

 

Aging, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Nocturne

Leave a comment

Summer                                                            New (Lughnasa) Moon

It’s not a new idea, I know, but tonight I’m feeling the truth of each day as a microcosm of a life. We wake to begin our day from a state of unconsciousness, born anew into a world that has no mark on it. Our life goes on with or with out loved ones, with or with out work, with or with out health, just as a new born babies must.

It’s that element of being thrown into the world (I love this idea of Heidegger’s.) that gets repeated each day. The wonder and the vibrancy of life comes from just that unpredictability. What will this day bring? What will this life bring?

As the day goes on, our efforts are strong and effective or not, are loving and compassionate or not, are creative and exciting or not. And as night falls, our body grows weary and demands sleep.

Just as it will do one day for the last time. And on that day, it will have been a day just like any other. Except, as far as we know, we’ll not be thrown into this world again. Mayhap another. Or not.

It is now the end of this day, of this smaller life, this 26th of July in the year 2014 by Western reckoning. My body needs to rest. And so I shall. Good night.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work

Nocturne

Leave a comment

Summer                                                          Most Heat Moon

The increasing pace of the harvest is plant life telling us that the seasons that matter are cropped0017changing. What seems like the height of summer to us presages not more summer, but fall and the big harvests of September and October. That’s what the plants know and in their distinct and ancient language they’re reminding us the time to gather in foodstuffs is now. Right now.

Pressure cookers and canning kettles across the Midwest have begun to heat up, too. That’s another sign. 5 pints of carrots went into the jars today and beets go in tomorrow, green beans as well. In a less complex economy this work would decide whether some of us would live or die through the long winter. Even with our garden I’m grateful for grocery stores. We would have to devote so much more of our time and energy to growing food if it were not for them.

Still, it’s not bad to have a reminder that the complex market system that brings vegetablescroppedIMAG0327 and fruits and meats and processed foods of all kind into our grocery stores is just that, a human system. That means it can be disrupted by war, by natural disaster, by disease, by insects, by normal seasonal fluctuations in temperature and by climate change.

It feels good to have those chicken-leek pies in the freezer. Those red glass jars of pickled beets and the golden ones of carrots. The jarscroppedIMAG0347 of honey and pints of green beans, tomatoes and sauces. Frozen greens and peppers. Dried onions and garlic. Grape jam, currant and gooseberry pies. All the various herbs dried. And last year all the apples and cherries, plums and pears. Next year, probably, too, with the help of bees. (but we won’t be here, most likely, to make that happen.)

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, Third Phase

Nocturne

Leave a comment

Summer                                                            Most Heat Moon

As the night settles gently here, Kate is home and has taken Kepler with her to bed. He sleeps in his own bed near ours.

There’s a dynamic when she’s gone, a bit unsettling, but also affirming. Let me see if I can be clear about it. We are, together, more than two, but also two. When we are apart, the twoness remains in memory, but the day-to-day facticity of it shifts. There is no other body in the bed. Nor at breakfast. Nor as the day goes by. The simple joy of a dog’s antics, wonder at some passing insect or cloud, soothing of a momentary mood, a reminder of each other’s value just by being present one to the other is lost. Only for a while, but lost anyhow.

The affirmation comes in knowing these things by their absence. The unsettling rises with this third phase certainty, some day one of us will leave and not come back. What then? The facticity of the relationship will be gone and with it all those subtle, ordinary, sacred moments that make up a common life. Death brooks no return and the loss will be in that sense total.

That is not now, for us. And I’m glad. Happy that we had this day together. And hopeful that we will have tomorrow. We do, after all, have that move to prepare.

 

Asia, Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., World History

Aurora

Leave a comment

Summer                                                               Most Heat Moon

Well. The dogs have encouraged me to see another dawn. No, this is not some heroic clawback from the edge of terminal illness attained by the promise of canine companionship, rather it’s occasioned by canine demand for outside and food. So, here I am posting an Aurora just after a Nocturne. This might not be unusual for many, but for me, it’s downright odd.

The front page of the three papers I read consistently all feature the Malaysian Airlines disaster. The New York Times follows it with a long story about preparation by Israel for a ground assault on the Gaza Strip. Grim news from a part of the world that has been and continues to be a flashpoint for international conflicts.

Crimea, a major part of the Ukrainian/Russian violence, has featured in many wars and as part of the Great Game, the struggle between Great Britain and Russia for control in Central Asia. The Middle East, not far away, and its oil resources has become more prominent of late, particularly since the partition of Israel and Palestine. No one covers themselves with glory in any of these disputes and the politics are intractable, the product of ancient grudges coupled with the very modern demand for oil.

The ancient grudges often have their roots in this region’s other primary export, monotheistic religions. Though there were many polytheistic faiths in cultures there-from Babylonia to Assyria to Persepolis-it was with the Abrahamic covenant and the Egyptian diaspora of his descendants that monotheism began its ascendancy. In sequence came Christianity, then Islam both variants of that original turn toward one god.

The bitter soup concocted from petroleum and theological certainty, endemic to all three faiths, has bloodied nations and peoples over the whole globe. Where will it end? Oddly enough climate change might bring a peace of sorts in both central Asia and the Middle East. As the world backs away from its dependence on carbon based fuels, the relative importance of the oil rich regions and their conduits to markets (much of Central Asia, with pipelines headed toward China and toward the West) will decline.

Could be.

Faith and Spirituality

Nocturne

Leave a comment

Summer                                                                       Most Heat Moon

Quiet. Again. No big city noises. No fireworks. Just silence.

There is a time for talking and a time for not-talking. There is a time for being with and a time for being apart. There is a time for light and a time for dark.

I find solace in these evening hours, out here on the urban fringe. But on reflection the solace comes in its contrast to the also important activity of the day. If life were all quiet, all solace, then it would be indistinguishable from a cloistered cell and I chose long ago to live in the world, not apart from it.

So I am glad for the dark and I am glad for the light. I am glad for being apart and I’m glad for being with. I am glad for not-talking and I am glad for talking.

Commentary on Religion, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Humanities, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Theogony

Leave a comment

Summer                                                             Most Heat Moon

“Rage — Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,
murderous, doomed, that cost the Achaeans countless losses,
hurling down to the House of Death so many sturdy souls,
great fighters’ souls, but made their bodies carrion,
feasts for the dogs and birds,
and the will of Zeus was moving toward its end.”      Iliad opening lines, Fagles translation 1990

Let’s see. What I was trying to say in the post below was this: political life and our opinions, our proclivities do not have to be all one thing or another. We confuse ourselves and others if we pretend it is ever other.

We make a similar error with individuals (and with ourselves). We define people based on what we see of them, usually just a small slice, and that is true of even our closest friends. We imagine that the clues, the defining moments we know of, adhere in a package that makes some sort of sense.

No. People are not one thing or another. They are as Walt Whitman observed of himself, “multitudes.” To say it philosophically we are one, we are many. I’m not identifying a psychological pathology here, rather stating that even the most rule bound of us violate our own rules and sense of duty, probably daily. The least rule bound among us may stagger through life from one interest to another, one opinion or another, one activity to another. And all this is usual, normal.

Coherence is a naive tool for understanding. We have our reasons, yes, we do, but our reasons often contradict each other. We know this when we are honest with ourselves. And our emotions. Well, they come unbidden, sometimes riding us like storms, other times calming us in periods of upheaval. Notice, too, that we try to guide ourselves both by reason and by emotion, when in fact these two faculties are not two, but one, or if not exactly one, then inextricably woven together, woven so closely that we cannot without great effort separate one from the other.

It is no wonder, when we consider these complexities that there is the saying, African I believe, that when a person dies, so does a universe. What I take from all this is to be easy with myself, forgiving, since the universe that I am does contain multitudes and at times this version of the universe holds sway, at other times this one.

It may be, probably is, that such an observation reveals the origin of the gods. There are those within us, anger for example and its more intense cousin, rage, that can take control of us, organize our lives in ways surprising to ourselves and to others. (see the opening lines of the Iliad above.) Or, grief. Or, love. Or, fear. Or, vengeance. Or, delight. Or, abandon. Or, control. Or, poetry. Or, thought. To go against Hillman I would say not that we meet our gods in our pathologies, but in our inner selves.

(Banquet of the Gods, Frans Floris)

In Voudoun the practitioners talk of being ridden by the god, an enraptured state brought on by intoxication and dance and openness. I say we are ridden by gods and goddesses all the time. To our great joy and our great sorrow.

To paraphrase Whitman, “I contain within me many gods, I am a pantheon.”

 

Faith and Spirituality

Again, Emptied

Leave a comment

Summer                                                          Most Heat Moon

Ah. Can you feel the quiet? The silence spreading out in gentle ripples, absorbing sound, creating an island for us here. The saws and the drills, the dogs and the television, the chatter of Ruth and the pitch of the realtor all gone still. The only noise a subdued whir and rasp from within the computer tower and a strange feedback I get sometimes in my good ear.

This is the time to sink into the self, letting the day’s troubles go, for as Matthew says, “the trouble for each day is sufficient there unto.” Amen. In fact, hallelujah. I hyperbolize because on Monday night I was unable to know this and paid a sleepless price. To experience peace now is a blessing.