Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home, permaculture

What Is Your Kiva?

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Spring                                          Hare Moon

Santa Fe.  Staying in a reasonably priced motel right in the heart of adobe filled Santa Fe.  The cathedral featured in Death Comes for the Archbishop is only a block or two away.  I came to Santa Fe after seeing Chaco Canyon.

Due to a weird late night mix up I checked into a motel-cheap-no phone, no wi-fi she said.  I didn’t mind.  She forgot to add no heat.  This in Holbrook, AZ high up just past the Mogollon Rim.  49 when I pulled in. I was too tired to hassle it so I went to sleep.

Fortunately, years of living with Kate have taught me cold sleeping skills.  It was fine until I woke up 4 am. I’d never shifting my bed time from home, nor my rising, so the 6 am Minnesota equivalent had me awake.  I decided to get in the warm car and drive to Chaco Canyon.  Which I did.

This is a haunting place, difficult to get to now as it must have been difficult to get to in the period between 850 a.d and 1150 a.d. when it flourished.  It was, for that time period the ceremonial for the pueblo peoples.  The architecture of Chaco County shows up in many other pueblo peoples sites, though much more modest in scale.

The Chaco folks built big.  And they built stone on stone, with a mud mortar.  The construction technique reminded me of dry stone fences in the East.

The part of each person’s inner life that reaches out to a particular patch of mother earth has created thousands of small kivas, I’ll call them.  The pueblo people go into the below ground circular stone structures called kiva’s as if returning to the womb. Each time they come out, they’re reborn.  So a kiva is a patch of earth where you feel reborn.  For me it’s our gardens and woods and orchard, for the pueblo people its Chaco Canyon and the Four Sacred Mountains.

Each patch of earth needs a kiva that holds it dear and feels responsible for its care.  And who, in turn, are reborn in the giving of that care by the earth.  This is a faith with so many worship sites and the worship is different for each kiva.  What kiva do you belong to?

Faith and Spirituality, Third Phase, Travel, Writing

Mr. Ellis Regrets

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Spring                                           Hare Moon

Just the last few things left in the room.  This “room” by the way has a kitchen and a small living room.  It’s a very comfortable way to live away from home.  I might try Residence Inns again sometime.  Not too expensive either, especially if you stack it up against a mid-priced hotel.

Been googling and looking at the EZY READ atlas Tom got me.  I don’t know why they say large print.  Doesn’t look large to me.  Chaco Canyon may, to my regret, be a road too far.  Gallup is 6 hours from here, not 4 as I figured for some reason.  That meant I could have gotten there by 9 pm MST with just 4 hours driving.  6 hours after a full workshop day is probably too much.

Haven’t decided what to do yet, but I can make Denver by Friday afternoon to surprise the birthday girl in two reasonably easy days if I skip Chaco Canyon.  I’ll still want to catch something, though I’m not sure what.  Not sure what route I’ll take either.  That will have an impact on what I can see, of course.

Anyhow as of this afternoon the trip turns north, back to the land of ice and snow.

Art and Culture, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

Excited

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Spring                                               Hare Moon

The turning of the great wheel to the season of birth and rebirth and the celebration of this golden moment seem now poised to reinforce some new work, at least a major insight.

Today begins the life integration workshop, the last of the three, and the one which ties together the inner and the outer with an eye toward the future.  This morning I had a big dream.  Its content was driven by work I’ve been doing over the last four days.

(Jacob Wrestling the Angel, Marc Chagall)

That means I’ll have a meaty piece of inner life to take into the integrative work of the next two days.  It has something to do with my spiritual life and seems to suggest working in and through the time period when I decided to return the ministry in the late 1990’s.

It’s exciting to me to have such relevant and significant material to work with in the concluding hours of this intensive journal workshop.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work

The True Apocalypse

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Spring                                                     Hare Moon

Tucson.  The Horse Latitudes.

The second of the three workshops, this one focusing on depth work, finished this afternoon.  Again, because of the nature of the workshops, they’re hard to summarize and its difficult to convey their spirit except to say its most like a contemplative secular retreat.  Which is, come to think of it, just what it is.

I can convey the spirit of this workshop by transcribing here the results of the next to last exercise. This one was to create a spontaneous statement, a testament, of what we believe to be true right now.  This was written following a long meditation, with no forethought.

Here are the things I know to be true:

Love forms the cross on which we all live.  The soil is the foundation of life. Our ancestors hold us up, have our backs. (FYI: those of you at Frank’s will know how this came to mind.)

The sun is a god who gives of himself wholly.  The light of the sun is holy and blesses what it touches.

The soil embraces the sun, marries the sun, goes into throes of ecstasy with the sun producing, producing, producing.

As the earth turns the soils embrace of the sun weakens and strengthens, weakens and strengthens and from these rhythms we get life eternal, abundant, gracious and undeserved.

We celebrate each other as moving, loving sons and daughters borne of the sun and the soils embrace-nothing more and nothing less.  We owe ourselves fealty to these two, our parents, our true god and our true goddess without whom we are nothing-brittle, cold, frozen, shattered.

We need no other religion, no other philosophy, no other politics than fealty to sun and soil.  They have given us what we need, they will give us what we need-unless we change their marriage to one which can no longer include the human family.  If we do, it will be the final anathema, the true apocalypse and the end of a long love affair.

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

Follow the Light

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Spring                                                Hare Moon

We’re at the mid-point of the workshops, currently in the depth context focus.  This was the one that stimulated my desire to attend a journal workshop again.  My spiritual life, meditation in particular, but also working with images and dreams had gotten shoved aside as I cranked up the creative side of my life.

This was not a conscious act, just a gradual slipping away, until I had become unaware of its absence.  Odd to think of it that way, but it’s what happened.  Progoff has a method called process meditation and that’s the focus of the depth context workshop, learning how to engage dreams, imagery and other key sources of meaning in your life.

A mantra developed in my first journal workshop in 1981, I have used ever since.  That’s 33 years.  Process meditation works and more than met my needs when I engaged it regularly, but, like any discipline, it requires attention and I’ve let mine slip.

The workshop is both reinforcing and its own complete journey.  I’m working with an incredible experience I had while in college.  Some of you know about it.

I had just finished a class in metaphysics.  When I opened the door of the humanities building and began to step out into the quad, a visceral feeling gripped me and I became all interior.  My interior in turn became all light rushing out in all directions and receiving light in from all directions.  For a brief moment I had a physical experience of my relatedness to everything in the universe.

Then it was over and the sunny fall morning in Muncie, Indiana came back into focus, I stepped out onto the quad and walked away.

I can recall this event very well.  We’ll see where the workshop process takes it.  I’m interest in its connection to reimagining my faith.  This is the sense in which the workshop is its own complete journey.

But it has also reminded of the role and the way meditation and work with dreams and images can reenter my life.

Art and Culture, Bees, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Garden, Latin, MOOCS, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

Now

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Spring                                             Hare Moon

The first of three workshops has finished.  This one, life context, positions you in the current period of your life.  It’s been, as always, a moving and insight producing time.  These workshops move below the surface and defy easy summary, but I have had one clear outcome from this one.  I’m in a golden moment.

I’m healthy, loved and loving.  Kate and I are in a great place and the kids are living their adult lives, not without challenges, but they’re facing those.  The dogs are love in a furry form.

The garden and the bees give Kate and me a joint work that is nourishing, enriching and sustainable. We’re doing it in a way that will make our land more healthy rather than less.

The creative projects I’ve got underway:  Ovid, Unmaking trilogy, reimagining faith, taking MOOCs, working with the Sierra Club, and my ongoing immersion in the world of art have juice.  Still.

I have the good fortune to have good friends in the Woollies and among the docent corps (former and current).  Deepening, intensifying, celebrating, enjoying.  That’s what’s called for right now.

Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Desert Twilight

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Spring                                                           Hare Moon

Aware now that the current moment of my life, the now in intensive journal language, began with Kate’s retirement.  It’s a hinge time, a door has opened toward the future, one closed toward the past.

Two good metaphors for this time came to me in my journal work yesterday.  The first may not be obvious but bear with me. Riding through the desert.

The desert is a stark place, often flat, but occasionally interrupted by bare loaves of rock, pinnacles, towers.  It also has a nighttime life style with critters coming out when the air cools down.  This is a place in Western culture where spirituality blossoms.  A desert spirituality.

Aging, especially as it carries us into the third phase, can strip away work, goals, shave off the barnacles of culture that slowed us down as we passed through life’s most pressured phase.  That means the third phase can begin as a ride through the desert, paying special attention to the soul when the forest is gone, the meadows are gone, the fields are gone.

This ride readies us for the twilight zone, that zone where the light from above diminishes, then winks out.  I’m not talking about death here, or at least not only about death; I’m talking about our ability, strengthened by our desert spirituality, to walk into the depths of our lives, no Park Ranger by our side.

When we go down through the natural entrance to our inner depths, we can return the same way, finding the twilight zone both ways.  These kinds of journeys may well be the signal moments of the third phase.

 

Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics, Third Phase

Burned

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Imbolc                                                             Hare Moon

Ross Douthat, a columnist for the New York Times, is a thoughtful conservative.  So is D.J. Tice, editorial writer for the Star-Tribune, though Tice often sets my kettle to boil.  Both had interesting pieces in their respective papers today, Douthat on individualism and the millennials, Tice on entitlement reform and the baby boom.

Tice writes as a baby boomer and asks us for another shot at society wide influence by seeking and seeing implemented reforms to both Social Security and Medicare.  I agree with him.  We need to solve this issue now, as the largest cohort to enter the python is only a fraction of the way in.  It is our responsibility to demand sensible changes and that our representatives in congress and the White House enact them.

What are they?  I don’t know the arguments right now well enough to recommend, but I know such arguments exist and I would stand with the fiscally responsible ones.  Tice and I agree this time.  I also appreciate his writing as a baby boomer and as one who calls for action.

Douthat read this Pew report on the millennials and concluded (though you have to read between his weasel words) that civilization as we know it is doomed.  This is a favorite conservative argument when societal trends point toward things they don’t like, in this instance, more individualism.

I don’t agree with Douthat.  Conservatives like to place individualism as an ethos over against communitarianism, the former eroding the latter until we’re all small, armed, loosely affiliated gangs.  The reality is much more complicated.  Individualism does not go over against communitarianism.

As an existentialist I believe we are each in this world alone, that our individuality is inescapable and incapable of being increased by any sort of belief or action.  Individualism is a definition of what it means to be human.  As an existentialist, I also know that we can recognize the remarkable affinity we share with others of our species.  And more, with a land ethic like Aldo Leopolds, we can recognize and act on the remarkable affinity we share with all of the natural world, animate and inanimate.  We are, after all, stardust.

Thus, the signal act of the aware universe (that is, you and me), is to bridge the abyss between the depths of one person and that of others, to acknowledge our solidarity as a creature aware of its own death.  We are all, as Camus said, in the river rushing toward our end, and we are in the river together.  It is this common bond we share that makes us compassionate toward the other and makes us want to ease their burdens in this one lifetime.

Now, here’s what’s really interesting in both of these columnist’s pieces today.  Both invoke a future disaster, one fiscal and the other communitarian, but both leave out the certain calamity that requires our action now, our action as a global community: mitigation and adaptation to climate change.  They both speak for the future, yet it is the heat and the storms and the floods and the rising oceans that reach from that future with the most destructive force.

Granted we have to multi-task, communities and nations can do that, though it’s very difficult for individuals.  But to bemoan the future without acknowledging the carbon in our atmosphere (so to speak) will only ensure a time in which individuals and poor old people will burn.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, MOOCS

Ending

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Imbolc                                                              Hare Moon

In that slightly down place that completing a course produces.  Yes, it feels great to have stuck with it, finished.  And, yes, it feels very good to have the new knowledge.  But there’s now a hole where the climate change course was.  This is not the same feeling I had when ModPo and the Modern/Post-Modern courses finished.  That was more like exhilaration.

This one mattered to me.  I’m not sure where or what I’ll do next. There are books to read, several recommended by the professors.  There’s the America Votes work and the possibility of using Great Wheel as some kind of vehicle to further mitigation and adaptation in Minnesota. But right now I feel deflated, a bit overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task that lies ahead for all of us.  This will pass.  But it’s there.

Since I finished earlier than I imagined, I’ll be able to work on my query letters tomorrow. I am also starting a new course focused on personal change that I don’t expect to be as demanding as this course was.  I let Whitman slide, did basically nothing and that’s the first one I’ve done that with, but I had overextended myself and something had to give.

 

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Third Phase

It’s About Time

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Imbolc                                                               Hare Moon

A long time ago, during college, while majoring in philosophy and anthropology, I read an article about the maturation points in different academic disciplines.  Mathematicians on the very young end of the scale and philosophers at the other, older end.  At that time my interest was theory of the social sciences.  That is, theoretical anthropology, psychology, sociology.  What were the major philosophical questions that each discipline raised by the assumptions and research methodologies it employed.

This turned out to be an unfortunate focus because I got turned down at three graduate schools for fellowships because no money was on the table for people wanting to focus on theory. At the time I was not interested in changing my orientation, so I passed on graduate school.  A decision I have regretted off and on ever since.

Ending up in seminary actually allowed me to continue my interest in theory since theology is just that, a philosophical and theoretical approach to the questions raised by religion.  I loved it.  Of course, there was that vocation on the other end, ministry, but at first I ignored that and enjoyed the work. (and the politics.)

That process funneled me (somewhat by inertia) into getting ordained, working for the church.  Even then, though, I still wondered about the systems of the church, how congregations worked, how they grew and declined, how the various denominations grew and declined.  My Doctor of Ministry thesis was on the decline of the Presbyterian Church from a post-modern perspective.

Anyhow, after I pulled back from that 20 year immersion in the Christian world, I revisited that earlier question about maturation.  When I looked at that material during college, I’d concluded that I would mature late, probably very late since I was interested in theory, a sort of meta-perspective on politics, social science and religion.

And so, now, in my 67th year, I can report that I feel the maturation process beginning to congeal.  It’s not yet finished, probably never will be, but I’m beginning to see how my odd path through the world has led me to today and how I might use that path for the good of others.  In large part, I’ll do that by continuing to write, continuing to learn Latin, continuing to educate myself, continuing to grow things with Kate and continuing some level of political activity.

(Jacob Wrestling the Angel, Maurice Denis)

I do think you will see more from me over the next few years in the form of ideas and actions.  It’s exciting to me to see that possibility ahead.