Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Sunrise

May 13, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Emergence Moon

Been on the slow boat these last few days, walking with that peculiar slightly stoved-in upper body typical of lower back pain sufferers world-wide. I’m not a fan of those days when my mind’s not sharp, whether the cause is melancholy or percocet or persistent pain.

Thankfully that fuzziness has lifted and clarity has begun to blow through the temporary cob-webs. As that happens, I’m reminded of a possible utility for melancholy and, perhaps, pain’s distraction, too. That is, melancholy often occurs when life has shoveled in more data, more choice points, just more. The trigger may seem to be an experience, emotional distress, or a recurrent worry, but in fact the trigger may be more like a thresh-hold device. In this understanding your mind has more to process than it can handle. It could be that a major creative project has been bubbling along below consciousness and as it surfaces overwhelms the mind.

So melancholy and perhaps physical pain can put the brakes on more data, more ideas, more experiences as the mind catches up, sorts, makes decisions. This doesn’t change the unpleasant affect of melancholy or the sleeplessness and anxiety it can produce on its own, but it can help us understand why such a phenomenon has persisted in the human animal.

Sometimes, when I’m most on my mental game (not often in this case), I can sense the onset of melancholy and sometimes (even fewer instances), then I can dredge up what has occupied me below the surface. When this has happened, I find melancholy a rich time, even as it puts out the drag chute and stops consciousness from rushing forward, ahead of itself.

On Maui Mt. Haleakala rises high above the lower reaches of the island, an extinct volcano with a huge caldera. Tourists often visit Mt. Haleakala around 4 a.m. so they can see the sun rise over the eastern Pacific. The chill of the height and the early morning creates a cold fog that rolls in through a large gap in the caldera, the ocean breeze cooled into a cloud formation that obscures the volcanic cone and the caldera. Then, as the sun rises and heat begins to dissipate the fog, the down coats and sleeping bags draped over shoulders come off and Mt. Haleakala suddenly becomes visible.

So, this time, the sun has risen, the fog has begun to clear. Thanks be.

Faith and Spirituality, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

Walk

May 12, 2014 Charles 1 Comment

Beltane Emergence Moon

In preparation for What is your walk? A few items, resources for thinking.

Chaucer’s great work is a tale told by pilgrims, as is Pilgrim’s Progress. In Dante, Virgil and Dante walk first through the inferno, then the purgatorio, then paradiso. The Way of a Pilgrim is a classic of Russian Orthodox spirituality which focuses on a wandering starets who developed the Jesus prayer.

O.E.D. walk

as v.

1. Walk. o.e. to roll, to toss. (obs.) m.e. to journey, move about on foot.

2. to go from place to place, to journey, to wander, to go (one’s way)

6. chiefly in religious use, after bible examples: to conduct oneself, to behave (ill or well, wisely or unwisely). sometimes with reference to path or way.

as n.

1. an act or spell of walking or going on foot from place to place

b. travel, wandering (obs)

6. relig. lang. manner of behavior, conduct of life

eytmology

walk (v.) “travel on foot,” c.1200, a merger of two verbs, 1. Old English wealcan “to toss, roll, move round” (past tense weolc, past participle wealcen), and 2. wealcian “to roll up, curl,” from Proto-Germanic *welk- (cognates: Old Norse valka “to drag about,” Danish valke “to full” (cloth), Middle Dutch walken “to knead, press, full” (cloth), Old High German walchan “to knead,” German walken “to full”), perhaps ultimately from PIE root *wel- (3) “to turn, roll” (see volvox).

The shift in sense is perhaps from a colloquial use of the Old English word or via the sense of “to full cloth” (by treading on it), though this sense does not appear until after the change in meaning. In 13c. it is used of snakes and the passage of time, and in 15c. of wheeled carts. “Rarely is there so specific a word as NE walk, clearly distinguished from both go and run” [Buck]. Meaning “to go away” is recorded from mid-15c. Transitive meaning “to exercise a dog (or horse)” is from late 15c.; meaning “to escort (someone) in a walk” is from 1620s. Meaning “move (a heavy object) by turning and shoving it in a manner suggesting walking” is by 1890. To walk it off, of an injury, etc., is from 1741. Related: Walked; walking.walk (n.) c.1200, “a tossing, rolling;” mid-13c., “an act of walking, a going on foot;” late 14c., “a stroll,” also “a path, a walkway;” from walk (v.). The meaning “broad path in a garden” is from 1530s. Meaning “particular manner of walking” is from 1650s. Meaning “manner of action, way of living” is from 1580s; hence walk of life (1733). Meaning “range or sphere of activity” is from 1759. Sports sense of “base on balls” is recorded from 1905; to win in a walk (1854) is from horse racing (see walk-over). As a type of sponsored group trek as a fund-raising event, by 1971 (walk-a-thon is from 1963)

Faith and Spirituality

Native Terran

May 10, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Emergence Moon

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. – Hamlet (1.5.167-8), Hamlet to Horatio

A cartoon, I think it was in today’s paper, had two E.T. figures with their spaceship in the background. Two humans were in conversation with them. “But,” the E.T. said, “you’re from space, too.” Oh, yeah. The chicken is an eggs way of making more eggs. We often don’t realize that the way we understand things is not the only way to understand something. A truism perhaps, but a profound one. Another example is the Mexica view that death is the normative (real) state and life is a dream.

Which makes me wonder what I’m missing. A friend sometimes asks himself, “What if: you were a bodhisattva who is knowingly choosing to experience these feelings as part of the process of aiding the healing and enlightenment of all sentient beings?” This in response to the pall I’ve spoken of over the last day or so. This is a perspective shift, taking another, unusual angle from which to view a situation.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality

Crowded

May 9, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Emergence Moon

After meeting Becky yesterday at the MIA, I left. I had planned to stay a bit, wander in the galleries, visit old friends. But an unremembered aversion pushed me out the door. The place was packed. Lots of school kids and lots of Friends of the MIA for the Friends’ lecture.

Back in the now long ago and halcyon days when continuing education was rich in content and held on Mondays, the museum closed to visitors, going in for continuing education had the flavor of a monastic retreat. There would be an hour plus of wonderful thinking about art, followed by private contemplation in quiet galleries.

An understandable desire to get numbers through the doors has made visiting museums during high traffic times a much different experience. This is edutainment. Minds young and old soaking up the kind of information and experience that enriches their lives. That’s a big positive. But for those of us who visit the museum for a one on one moment with Song dynasty ceramics or Baroque masterpieces like Poussin’s Germanicus, not so much.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Friends, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

How We Walk

May 7, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Beltane Emergence Moon

It has always been so, I imagine. That those closest to us teach us life’s important lessons. Over the last couple of years my longtime and good friends in the Woolly Mammoths have taught me many things. This sort of teaching is much closer to apprenticeship than classroom lecture. That is, the lessons are taught by example rather than declamation. When we learn by example, we integrate the lesson into our journey; we learn as it affects us, rather than focusing on getting it right.

Two lessons stand out though there have been many from each Woolly. The first, accepting the death of a spouse has come from Woolly Bill Schmidt whose wife, Regina, died in September of 2012. The grace in his acceptance of her death, his willingness to give voice to his grief and his sense of loss while remaining upright and present to all around him teaches one elegant way to walk the ancientrail occasioned by our mortality. It is not in mimicking him that we will learn his lesson but, in heeding the deeper lesson, that is, to be present to grief in a way that is authentically our own.

The second is the homecoming of Frank Broderick. Frank has been in tremendous pain from spinal degeneration for the last couple of years. To deal with it a back operation, his second, was the only solution. But, Frank has a bad heart. Frank had to choose between a life of constant pain (He’s 81.) or an operation with some risk of death. As Frank does, he weighed his options seriously, getting a second opinion at the Mayo Clinic. Satisfied with the level of risk, he decided to go ahead.

He came home yesterday after a grueling 10 days of rehab and faced with several weeks of rehab still ahead. Again, the Frank lesson is not in how to deal with pain or a bad back, though he did both of those well, but how to bring personal courage and intelligent decision making to the often complex health matters we will all deal with as we age.

Both of these men have granted me access to their lives and to the way they live them. When the student was ready, his teachers appeared.

Faith and Spirituality, Woolly Mammoths

What Is Your Walk?

April 25, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

What is your walk? How would you answer? It’s the theme for the 2014 Woolly retreat, our 25th or so yearly gathering.

Ancientrails is a record of my walk, meandering here, walking quickly there, taking a rest at this point or that. It shows the divergent paths, sometimes down the writing trail, sometimes down the scholar trail, sometimes too melancholy to do anything but shuffle along.

It’s a good question, an important one as our lives have taken the third major throughway of our lives, call it the path triskelion, third of the three broad ways down which we stroll from birth to death. Maybe an inflection of it would be, What is your walk now?

Not Hope, Grief and Agency

April 22, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

Wanted to say a bit about Paul Kingsnorth, the environmental activist who has given up on activism. If you want to read the NYT article about him, follow the link.

You might be tempted to dismiss his analysis, or you might not want to hear what he’s saying and deny it. But from what I learned in the climate change course recently completed he’s right in an important sense.

The goal identified at Copenhagen is to limit warming to 2 degrees centigrade or between 3.6 and 4 degrees Fahrenheit.* This amount of warming is baked in already. That is, we’ve already loaded enough CO2 into the atmosphere to ensure it. So, the Copenhagen goal will be exceeded. The question at issue now is by how much. See below for a definition of RCP.**

The year to pay attention to is 2050. That’s the year that the pathways begin to diverge, representing the amount of emissions in that year. RCP2.6 assumes a successful reduction in emissions worldwide of 80% by 2050 and 100% by 2100. This can be done. There are several different pathways that get us there. The problem is the politics of carbon emission control.

Most of the lecturers in the climate change course thought this was not going to happen. That puts us into the range of RCP4.5 to RCP8.5. 4.5C=8F and 8.5C=15.3F. I don’t agree with Kingsnorth’s word ecocide because the plant and animal world will adjust to all of these temperature ranges. Yes, many species will not be able to adapt, but many will.

Still, and I think this is where Kingsnorth is right, the world as we know it is beyond saving. We will have to adapt and adjust to a dramatically changed reality, a new climate reality that may cause the death of billions of people from starvation, dehydration or heat exhaustion.

I also believe he’s right in saying that we need to accept dramatic change as inevitable and that we need to grieve the loss of our familiar world. Only in grieving will we touch the new reality.

Here’s where I think he’s wrong. There is still time and there are workable strategies that can limit the magnitude of the changes we face. With no action, the up ramp of CO2 that continues to pump into the atmosphere will ensure the RCP8.5 scenario. Somehow we must combine working through our grief over a lost world that may seem like paradise in another 100 years with our determination to moderate the degree of change as much as possible.

If we stick to the 2C goal of Copenhagen, the world will see failure and failure cuts the nerve of political agency. We need to accept that goal as simply wrong and work now to do what’s possible. The future demands that we do everything we can, only much later will we know how well we did.

*”Fahrenheit (symbol°F) is a temperature scale based on one proposed in 1724 by the physicist Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686–1736)”… wiki. Just occurred to me that I didn’t know the origin of the word.

** Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) are four greenhouse gasconcentration (not emissions) trajectories adopted by the IPCC for its fifth Assessment Report (AR5).^[1]

The pathways are used for climate modeling and research. They describe four possible climate futures, all of which are considered possible depending on how much greenhouse gases are emitted in the years to come. The four RCPs, RCP2.6, RCP4.5, RCP6, and RCP8.5, are named after a possible range of radiative forcing values in the year 2100 relative to pre-industrial values (+2.6, +4.5, +6.0, and +8.5 W/m², respectively).^[2]

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

The Leaf In Place of The Cross

April 20, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

Final post on this series. If you need a symbol of eternal life, let me refer you to the tree leaf and not the cross. In this 74 degree day I just finished scraping the mulch from bulbs I planted last fall. The mulch is tree leaves gathered in the same season.

The leaf works hard from early spring until fall capturing sunlight, drawing up water from the tree’s roots and combining them with CO2 in a true transubstantiation, photosynthesis. When the seasonal change indicates to the tree that conditions will no longer be good for photosynthesis, the leaf detaches from the tree’s vascular system and in so doing, its chlorophyll returns to the tree. This is the moment when the leaf changes color, revealing its other pigments.

As it withers from loss of water, the leaf changes color again and eventually detaches from the tree itself. That’s when I pick it up as a mulch. When I apply the leaf to the newly planted beds, the leaves perform two functions. First, they insulate the bed, retaining the cold into the early days of spring so the earth won’t heave and throw the newly planted bulbs out. Second, they begin to decay and transfer their remaining stores of nutrients and fiber into the soil itself.

In this way the engine of transubstantiation, the leaf, even after it produces oxygen for us to breathe and glucose for the plant to use in its growth, gives up all of itself to the plant community in general, enriching the soil for the next generation.

So the leaf, a most ordinary miracle doer, does in fact what Christian’s claim Jesus can do, that is, give life through their death. You might say that in focusing on the cross Christian’s chose the wrong part of the tree.

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

All It Requires Is Some Love

April 20, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

Having said all that. (see post below) Reclaiming, celebrating the power of spring’s wonder is an important part of the Great Wheel’s message. What the motif of the dying and rising god suggests (there is legitimate debate around this idea, but it’s not critical to my point here.) is the obvious. Death is a central fact of the human experience, yet it is a fact shrouded in mystery and pain. What exactly is death? Not physiologically, but psychologically, spiritually. What does it mean? If anything. What happens after death to the person who dies?

We just don’t know the answers. This black box characteristic of death makes it so upsetting. Without further knowledge we have to assume that extinction is the basic result. Having had a man die and come to back life with the message that, hey, you, too, can die and still have everlasting life is compelling. The story alone has carried itself into millions, probably billions of heart, easing the mystery for them.

As I said earlier, I can’t see that it matters much. Look at it another way, either Jesus did or did not rise from the dead. If he didn’t, well, we’re back where we started. If he did, and it’s the true sign of a loving God, then that same God will not build a doctrinal fence around the afterlife. It’ll more likely be a heavenly version of y’all come. We did say he/she was a loving god, didn’t we?

So, I’ll pass on all the paperwork and skip straight to the flowers emerging in my garden. Or, perhaps more germane to the story of rising from the dead, I’ll also tend to what I believe is a living bee colony. Yes, I went out today and bees were buzzing all around the hive I thought was dead. Surprised the hell out of me.

Could be honey robbers, but I don’t think so. I’ll have to suit up tomorrow morning and see. Afternoons are not a great time to check bees. They’re coming home and pretty protective.

Yes, I claim in my own soul the emergent joy of each daffodil, each tulip, each crocus, each lily, each iris, each fern, each hosta, each pachysandra, each apple, cherry, plum and pear tree, the magnolia, the gooseberries, the elderberries, the currants, the quince, the strawberries and the garlic, all those members of our family here at Artemis Gardens and Hives. I will rise with each of them, spreading out, greeting the sun, creating new energy from the sun, the soil and the water, bursting with a new season’s vitality.

The virtue for me in this celebration is that it requires no dusty tomes of medieval logic, no interminable meetings to decide the color of the altar banners, no envelopes chucked in a metal plate, no weighty hands pressing down in ordination. All it requires is some love. Shoulda been enough for the church, too.

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

Apostasy

April 20, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

There are certain holidays when a former minister’s thoughts turn to apostasy. Easter is chief among them. This is the true high holiday of the Christian liturgical year and it is such because it is the resurrection that marks Christianity off from other faiths. And, yes, I know about the dying and rising gods and how Jesus fits that paradigm. I agree it matters. Nonetheless, when you put Christianity on the stage with Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shintoism, the various faiths counted as the Hindu religion, Sikhism, Jainism and whatever I might have forgotten, Christianity distinguishes itself by claiming a man/god who died, then rose from the dead.

It is that unique characteristic that Christians all over the world celebrate on Easter. The resurrection is not only distinctive, it is central theologically to the Christian claim. Christianity moves on from Judaism at the empty tomb. But not before. Until the risen Jesus, Christianity’s story was not remarkable. There were other would-be messiahs. Others had followers and claimed miracles. The teachings of Jesus largely conform to Jewish thought. Even the crucifixion was not remarkable. Other Jews died on the cross, too. This was a common form of capital punishment for the occupying Roman empire.

(George Frederick Watts – Orphée et Eurydice)

No, it is the dying and rising that makes Jesus unique and transformed him into Jesus the Messiah, Jesus Christ. So, to set this claim aside, at least in its ontological sense, is the worst of apostasies. And yet that is what I have done. Am I sure it never happened? No. That’s as impossible as being certain that it did. The shift for me came when I realized whether it had happened or not no longer mattered to me.

What do I mean by that? As one trained in Christian history, biblical scholarship, ethics and theology, I began to find Christianity, in all its forms, even its most liberal, simply too narrow. In my years in the Presbyterian Church I had many good friends, participated in many activities that moved justice forward, but I also struggled with church members and congregations over gay lifestyles and rights, the Vietnam War, income inequality and the privileges of white america.

In itself, of course, that back and forth is not unusual. There were, at the time of my ministry, some 75,000 Presbyterians in the Presbytery of the Twin Cities for which I worked. The Presbytery went as far north as Pine City, as far west as Buffalo, south to the Minnesota border and east a county or so into Wisconsin. That there would be widespreads on matters of public policy is not at all surprising. There were urban/rural differences, liberal/conservative differences, evangelical and liberal theological differences. All quite normal sociologically.

What became clear over time, at least to me, was that the conversation and disputes happened in a sealed dome, a sort of osmotic barrier that surrounded those 75,000 people when they gathered as the church. The barrier filtered out those who could not believe in the resurrection, yes, but it also filtered out, and this is more crucial to me, those who would not conform to the various ideological accretions adhering to denominational institutional life.

(Frederic Leighton-The Return of Perspephone (1891))

Here’s an example. Presbyterians, as Calvinists, were long known for their adherence to predestination, even double predestination. Predestination is a theological form of materialist determinism (a current favorite among some practitioners of hard science) that posits God has determined every thing that happens. Double predestination so-called took this belief to its logical, yet absurd conclusion. God had determined in advance who would be saved and who would not. This particular barnacle had been unstuck from the goodship Presbyterianism by liberal theologians quite a while back though certain branches of the denomination continue to hold the view.

My former boss, Bob Lucas, a great and good man, often warned against “majoring in the minors.” Within the ambit of the church this means don’t fuss with matters not essential, don’t get into conflict over things that are incidental to salvation, the primary purpose of the church. I think another version of this idea goes: In essentials unity, in all else, tolerance.

My position became that Christianity itself, as a movement, was majoring in the minors. It focused on conforming belief, ethics, morality and culture to the idiosyncrasies of a long gone time. That is the effect of seeing biblical material as inspired and the church’s early days as somehow foundational, like the American Constitution. Christianity has expended so much time, wealth, intellectual power and even violence to achieve this conformity, yet a casual step outside that dome, outside the osmotic barrier shows us that the great majority of people need food, medicine, work, public health. Those are the majors.

(The Osiris-bed, where he renews the harvest cycle in Egypt.)

The minors are matters like the crucifixion and the resurrection. Why? Not least because their truth or falsity get trapped within human institutions that use them not for the intrinsic wonder and awe they represent, but as chits in the distribution of power. They simply are not the world altering events they claim to be.

(inanna sumerian goddess annunaki clawed feet is an ancient way to depict the fact she visited the Underworld.)