Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Memories, Third Phase

The Numinous

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Beltane                                                                         Early Growth Moon

One of the problems with the Self model I proposed yesterday is that it is sticky.  When the ego has its way, which it wants to do all the time, feelings and thoughts gum up the mental works, a problem that zen and other meditative disciplines can correct, or, at least, diminish.  Example.  Waking up at 4:50 am this morning, then running through the evening at Tom’s 35th anniversary gig.  Nothing in particular, just this thought then that thought, which might lead to an emotion which can careen off in another direction.

This not unusual for me, neither is it usual.  It happens.  Rather than eliminate the self to control the ego I choose to say, it happens.  And not worry the matter beyond that.  Then I can move on, albeit with less sleep than I might desire, but I can always–and always do–take a nap.

At 10:30 I see John Desteian, my analyst (Jungian), of long standing and we will discuss the numinous.  At least that’s the question for the day:  what is the essence of the numinous?  I’ve had some time to reflect on that since John and I last met.

Rudolf Otto invented the term numinous in his book, The Idea of the Holy.  In this book he wanted to get at the non-rational aspects of religion, the holy and the sacred being the usual terminology for it.  He felt these words had a lot of baggage and had gotten confused in the up take of rationalists who wrote theology, did historical criticism of biblical texts and generally tried to shoehorn the  whole of the religious experience into the reason paradigm forcefully advanced by Enlightenment thinkers and the newly regnant science.  Otto wrote in 1909.

The numinous is his word for the dimension of the holy and the sacred not touchable by reason, yet crucially important to their lived reality.  Jung, born in 1903, came to Otto’s work with a deep respect for the small r religious life and adopted the numinous as critical to his understanding of psychology.

Thus, the question, what is the essence of the numinous?  As I see it right now, the numinous is an affective response to an experience of the other, an example of which would be the ego experiencing the Self.  The ego, as the command and control center of the psyche, believes it has full authority for advancement of its priorities, but not so.  The ego works best and accomplishes the most when subservient to the overall needs of the Self.

That is, the ego wants to arrange matters to optimize the survival and flourishing of what it perceives to be me, the sense of I that has the most developmental history, and also the sense of I most invaded by cultural or personal expectations that may not advance the interest of the Self, but may try (too often successfully) to bend the Self toward the goal of career, ambition, money, fame, power.  This bending or truncating of the Self in service of needs defined by externals–the culture or persons influential in the individual’s history–leads to deep unhappiness, a sense (and the reality) of betraying one’s Self.

The power of the numinous comes in its ability to challenge the mundane priorities of the ego.  Note, the ego’s priorities are not bad or wrong.  To the contrary, they are in line with the need to survive and, within limits, to thrive.  Those limits are, interestingly, the places where the needs of the Self conflict with received expectations, either cultural or from your personal history.  In other words, the unexamined ego will take me down the path of whatever expectation hollers loudest.

When the numinous, the whole Self, (or God, or Brahma, or shunyata) intervenes, it enlists the ego’s powers of organization, protection and survival and marshals them in a more holistic direction, that is, fulfillment of dreams and hopes that connect the individual to the collective, not in the sense of overpowering it or coming to dominate it, but in a manner that synchronizes the gifts of the individual with the needs of the many.

This change of direction can be terrifying, can seem like abandonment of everything mom and dad taught, of those very things the culture says are most desirable, and such a direction threatens the individual with isolation and failure.  The most familiar direction seems safest and an experience of the numinous challenges it.

 

 

 

Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Travel

About Time

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Beltane                                                                              Early Growth Moon

I have stood on the shore of time itself, looking out on the broad sea that laps upon its sand, the vast space ocean, touching all, then circling back, once more to the beach where time rests, gay umbrellas stuck here and there, the men and women in bathing suits, swim suits, bikinis, nothing at all.  No children, just the adults of this one tribe, homo sapiens, from this one lonely outpost, away there in a long arm of the Milky Way Galaxy, nothing special as things universal and cosmic go, just conglobulated star dust.

They watch, as I do, the darkness and the many lights, those stars, those other suns, in other galaxies and those we can see only a tiny, tiny fraction of the whole though we strain these eyes of ours, a gift from the home planet and its billions of years of effort to create one who could see it back.

We watch, the ape that walks and talks, thinks, sees, laughs and cries.  The arms and the legs and the mind and the heart of this universe, allowed here on the beach so we can act out our purpose, seeing the rest, looking for all this, back at all this, born of star dust and doomed or fated or blessed to return.

I have stood on the shore of time itself.  And so have you.

Aging, Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Health, Music, Woolly Mammoths

It Won’t Be Long Now

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Beltane                                                                        Early Growth Moon

A poignant and salient answer to how to live the third phase came from an 18 year old Minnesotan, Zach Sobiech, who died yesterday of bone cancer.  Not much of a conversationalist or a letter writer, Zach’s Mom told him he needed to do something, something that would let people know he was here and leave them memories of him.  Diagnosed with osteosarcoma when he was 14, the cancer did not prevent him from writing and singing songs of his own.

He became an internet viral celebrity with the song, Clouds, downloaded over 3 million times.

Those of us in the third phase understand the challenge Zach faced.  Death was no longer an abstraction, but a certain visitor.  As he says in this song, it won’t be long now.  Oh, we may have 20 years or 30 years, compared to his 4, but the link is the moment when you come to know this life ends.  For good and for ever.

(Alphonse Osbert – Les chants de la nuit.)

How did he respond?  He dug into the riches of his Self, shrugged off the self-pity and depression, and turned those feelings into art.  This is the best and healthiest way to greet the coming of the Sickle Bearer.  Find out who you are.  Find out what best expresses your journey, the ancientrail that has been, is, your life.  Then open up that expression, put it outside yourself for the rest of us to learn from, to cherish, to embrace.  Because it won’t be long now.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home

A Grounded Faith

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Beltane                                                                         Early Growth Moon

I walked through the garden alone, while the dew was still on the beet seedlings and apple blossoms.  Oh, wait.  That was roses, wasn’t it, from the old gospel tune.

If you want a moment of intense spirituality, go out in the morning, after a big rain, heat just beginning to soak into the soil, smell the odor of sanctity, in this case fertility, coming up from the plants and their medium, see the beets and kale and carrots and cucumbers and sugar snap peas on the rise, look at the onions and garlic and leeks filling out, getting greener, taller and fatter.  Take a stroll past the cherry blossoms, the pear and plum blossoms, the apple blossoms that came out yesterday, past the bee colony hard at work, over to the blueberries and check out the new growth on the hard pruned wild grapes.   The sand cherries and quince and even the currants with their modest, tiny green flowerettes, all showing to the bees their best and sweetest offerings.  Each petal, each flower, each stalk, each leaf is a miracle, a wonder of the evolutionary path on which that particular organism travels, its genetic ancientrail.

(our quince)

That walk, by the way, is not the walk of an individual, self-reliant and independent, but of a dependent creature glorying in the symbiotic relationship between his cells and these plants.  This is a community enterprise, the humans here, Kate and I, in partnership with the vegetables, the flowers, the fruit, the bees.

(our honeycrisp tree in bloom)

Which reminds me of the other partners, or co-habitaters at least, all the wild animals that live in the soil here, the gophers and earth worms and grubs and snails and voles, those who use the trees the squirrels, the woodpeckers, pileated and red-tailed, crows, hawks, Great Horned owls, robins, chickadees, blue birds, those who live on the land, under buildings and in brush piles the rabbits, chipmunks, woodchucks, opossums, raccoons, mice, the interlopers the wild turkeys, the deer, the coyote.  And of course, the woods themselves the ironwood trees, the poplar, ash, cottonwood, red oak, burr oak, cedar, spruce, yes even the black locust and the buckthorn.  The grass, yes, the dogwood yes, the amur maples yes, the alicanthus yes.

(a baby opossum in a dead tree in our woods)

We all share this land, to which we have the deed, but so little else.  When Kate and I leave, as we will one way or the other, the rest will continue, unaffected, unmoved by our passing.  Land is not for owning, but for cohabitation.  We know this, if we bother to look.

Faith and Spirituality

Paradise (Just another day in)

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Beltane                                                             Early Growth Moon

For Bill.  He’ll know why.

“Since [landing after Apollo 12], I have not complained about the weather one single time. I’m glad there is weather. I’ve not complained about traffic. I’m glad there’s people around.  One of the things that I did when I got home, I went down to shopping centers, and I’d just go around there, get an ice cream cone or somethin’, and just watch the people go by, and think: “Boy, we’re lucky to be here. Why do people complain about the earth? We are living in the Garden of Eden.”

 

— — Apollo 12 moonwalker Alan BeanVia Brainrow: “Perspective”
Cinema and Television, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality

Po-Mo and Kids

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Beltane                                                                            Early Growth Moon

Po-mo shows up where you least expect it.  This time post-modernism reared its torqued and twisted head in the form of a children’s movie from Dreamworks, The Rise of the Guardians.  Now, this is old news since this is a 2012 release, but I don’t stay au courant in movies, especially movies for kids.

Still.  I did see it tonight.  It’s quite a head-bender if you look at from a theological point of view.  Two key for instances:  Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.  In the movie Santa and the Easter Bunny are part of a team of four known as the guardians.  The notion is that they guard childhood as a place of innocence, fun, imaginative thought and belief.  Here’s a theological kicker not unfamiliar in Christmas movies, Santa Claus stands in for Christmas, not the baby Jesus.  That is, it is the consumer driven toy and present extravaganza that gets billed as the reason for the season, not the incarnation.  You’ve seen it before.

But here the Easter Bunny represents Easter.  Which is about, he says, in Hugh Jackman’s Aussie Bunny accent, “Hope, new life.”  Gee, those sound like the themes of the passion without the gory stuff.

OK, at one level this is kid’s fare meant for multi-cultural audiences, many of whom are not Christian, so, maybe.

However, the real dramatic driver in the movie is the addition of a new guardian to the old group of four:  Santa Claus, Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy and Sandman.  The Man in the Moon, who picked all of the guardians, has now chosen Jack Frost as a new guardian.  A fifth.

Bear with me here.  The going gets a little theoretical, but I think the pay-off is interesting.

Jack comes into the story when the Boogeyman has gone on a campaign to stamp out belief in first the Tooth Fairy, then the Easter Bunny, aiming to get all four including the sandman who brings sleep and pleasant dreams to children.  Both the Boogeyman and Jack face the same problem, nobody believes in them so they are insubstantial, real but not seen as real because the belief meter doesn’t spike among the younger set at the sound of their names.

So the movie takes on the task of finding Jack a place in the believing hearts of children while simultaneously beating back their belief in fear’s ability to hurt them.  The battleground is children’s hearts.  First the tooth fairy loses her powers as child after child falls victim to the boogeyman’s nightmares, then the Easter Bunny.  Sandman gets disappeared by the boogeyman and eventually even Santa’s sleigh weaves and bobs and crashes to the ground, a no longer believed in Santa barely strong enough to stand.

Jack Frost, as you might expect, wins back the hearts of the children with his joyful, fun loving snowball fights and loop-the-loop kid’s sleds rides.  The children begin to believe again and the guardians grow strong, defeating the boogeyman as the children step forward to defend the guardians.  Jack Frost points at the boy leader’s chest and says, “The real guardians are in here.”

This, in other words, is a movie about the magical thinking of children and their charming, wonder-full beliefs, a movie that equates belief with that world and uses the characters dreamed up by American capitalist culture as the agents of restoring children’s beliefs in their existence.  Po-mo.  In a children’s movie.

Faith and Spirituality, Memories, Minnesota, Politics

Cities

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Beltane                                                                       Early Growth Moon

Writing the post below reminded me of a topic I pursued in some depth for many years, cities.  Cities fascinated me from the moment I visited Chicago, Washington and NYC as a teenager.  Small town central Indiana, even the Indianapolis of the late 50’s and early 60’s, had none of the energy, the danger, the possibility.

(Cedar-Riverside People’s Center, formerly Riverside Presbyterian Church.  I had an office there in the late 70’s and early 80’s.)

When I moved to New Brighton in 1970, on my very first day at Seminary, also my very first day in Minnesota, we visited the Guthrie, the Walker and the MIA.  Not too much later I discovered a program, I don’t recall its name, that allowed students to buy theater tickets and orchestra tickets for ridiculously low prices.  That put me in the seats at the Guthrie, its design in the old spot based on the Stratford, Ontario festival theater, a theater in the round(ish) with a thrust stage, a theater I had visited many times.

At some point not long after that I got a job as a weekend staff person for Community Involvement Programs (CIP), a facility for training recently released and high functioning developmentally disabled adults.  The concept involved apartment based training, teaching folks how to live independently.  The next stop after C.I.P. was your own apartment.

I lived in the facility, located in Mauna Loa apartment building, just to the east of what was then Abbott Hospital in the Stevens Square Neighborhood.  After that move I lived in either Minneapolis or St. Paul until 1994, our relocation year from Highland Park, St. Paul to Andover. (There was a brief and unhappy hiatus at the Peaceable Kingdom, my first wife and mine’s 80 acre farm in Hubbard County, and a bit of time in Centerville, the rest all in the cities.)

Over those years, starting with the organizing of the Stevens Square Community Organization and its subsequent redesign and redevelopment, which featured a very public fight with General Mills over their purchase and rehabbing Stevens Square apartments, my life became inextricable from the life of urban neighborhoods.  That engagement stuck until I left the Presbyterian ministry in 1991.  It even lasted a year beyond that when I took on teaching a small group of students in urban ministry internships.

Someday, I’m going to write about those years.  They were fun and a lot of good got done.  Plus I learned a lot of things about cities.

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Wheel, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Overview Effect

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Beltane                                                                                              Early Growth Moon

“There have been household gods and household saints and household fairies. I am not sure that there have yet been any factory gods or factory saints or factory fairies. I may be wrong, as I am no commercial expert, but I have not heard of them as yet.”
G.K. Chesterton

The video below, 20 minutes long, came to me via friend and cybermage Bill Schmidt through his daughter, Moira.  I include the two quotes along with it to emphasize a subtle point.  Chesterton was looking anthropomorphically at the locus of fairies, gods and saints, ok as far it goes, but he neglects the much longer tradition of nymphs, dryads, fairies of the woodlands and fields, holy wells, sacred mountains, places of pilgrimage and, most tellingly underlined in this wonderful video, the dynamic, vital oasis in the midst of the vacuum of space:  Earth.

(John Byam Liston Shaw  angel offering the fruits of eden)

We live already, as Bill likes to point out, in paradise.  We are, unfortunately, working hard, very hard, through the godless, saintless and fairyless world of commerce–Chesterton surely had this right–to expel ourselves from paradise.  There is no east of Eden in space.  If we lose this paradise, there is not another for us to inhabit.

“Heat-Trapping Gas Passes Milestone, Raising Fears  The level of the most important heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere, carbon dioxide, has passed a long-feared milestone, scientists reported Friday, reaching a concentration not seen on the earth for millions of years.”   NYT yesterday

I enclose the second, seemingly far out of context, quote which comes from our money manager because it highlights a fall in the prices of copper, platinum and paladium.  This fact, falling commodity prices, rather than science or political will, are the main things that will work in favor of stopping the Polymet mine near the Boundary Waters Wilderness Area and its follow-on mines that await only its successful completion of its environmental impact statements.

(expulsion, Masaccio)

“PolyMet expects to mine copper by late 2015   One day after announcing plans to raise $80 million in cash, officials of PolyMet Mining Corp. on Thursday said they are moving headlong toward permitting and, eventually, construction of Minnesota’s first copper-nickel mine.”  Duluth Tribune

We should not, must not, leave these decisions to the whims of the market.  We must develop the political and personal will to say no.  Hard?  Yes.  Necessary?  Listen to the astronauts and look at the thin layer of atmosphere that is all that protects us from the harsh reality of the space we inhabit.

“Commodities markets. It wasn’t all bad in April: natural gas futures rose 9.0%, cocoa futures gained 9.1%, and wheat futures rose 6.3%. Now for the bad news: gold fell 7.8% last month to an April 30 COMEX close of just $1,474.00. Silver cratered 14.6% in April; copper fell 6.4%, platinum 4.3% and palladium 9.2%”

 

 

OVERVIEW from Planetary Collective on Vimeo.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Health

Walking Upright in the World

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Spring                                                                         Planting Moon

Let me describe, before it gets away from me, submerged in the always been, how exciting and uplifting it was to realize I was walking across the floor at Carlson Toyota.  Just walking.  Putting one foot in front of the other.  No flinching, no torquing to keep things stable.  Just. Walking.

When we return to normalcy after a period of illness or trauma, there is a transition period, a time of grace if we take it, which can offer us a reminder about the wonder of the every day.  To walk across a floor with no pain, to walk as one is used to doing.  So powerful.

In fact, I took as my motto Walking Upright in the World reflecting back on the fact that I had to relearn to walk at the age of 2 and honoring that 2 year old guy for the gift of a normal, usually unregarded capacity to do that.

So much of what we do is really a wonder.  Take grasping and holding.  Typing on a keyboard.  Lifting objects from the ground to over our heads.  Breathing.  Yes, think about breathing.  Only to inhale is not enough to sustain life.

Sitting.  Standing.  Eating.  All wonders, wonders often, perhaps usually, revealed only when they disappear from our repertoire either temporally or permanently.

So take a moment today and celebrate the walk.  The jump.  The high five.  The low bow.

Congratulations!

Aging, Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase, Weather +Climate

Cancer in the morning, the numinous in the afternoon

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Spring                                                                                 Planting Moon

Got up with the sun this morning, needing to pick up Kona between 7:00 and 7:30 am in Blaine.  Having the sun out and being up early both put my mood into high in spite of the significant cash outlay for Kona’s needed care.

Imagine my surprise when I looked at the weather report.  6-8 inches of new snow.  Tonight!  Then, maybe 70 by the weekend.  OMG!

Had Kona over at the vets by 9:40 am where I got the good news that her heart murmur has disappeared and the bad news that her tumor was cancerous.  Kate was in the room from Denver, Colorado via Verizon wireless and my Droid phone.  We discussed the options with Roger and decided to go ahead, as I wrote below, to have it removed.

Back home.  Nap.  A long nap since my back, unconvinced by the meds and the rests I’d taken, continued to ouch.  A lot.  Couldn’t take the best meds because I had to drive out to Stillwater, then into St. Paul and home after that.

Stillwater was the bee pickup.  My two pound package of Italian hygienics are now buzzing on top of the dryer in the basement.  I sprayed them with sugar water, will do so again before bed, once more in the morning, then again just before I hive them around 6 pm tomorrow.  That way they have full tummies when hived and are less likely to go adventuring. Which would serve no good purpose right now anyhow.  I had planned to hive them tonight, but the snow.  Comes down hard and wet right now.

St. Paul was to see John Desteian, my longtime Jungian analyst, I started to see him in 1986 or ’87 and saw him for a long time after my divorce from Raeone.  I’ve seen him off and on over the years, last in 2006.

I want to see what I’m trying to tell myself through my dreams of loss and being lost.  As I imagined, we headed in the general direction of faith, though not retrieving a lost faith so much as redefining faith, Reimagining Faith, in light of the pagan, existentialist, flat-earth metaphysics of my current world view.

As always, John asked the good questions.  Pointed me, this time, toward an essay by Heidegger called “The Last God” and understanding the essence of the numinous.  I’ll have a month to ponder that since my next appointment is on May 23rd.  He’s been a useful, valued guide and Jung my chief spiritual adviser.  Sounds like that run will continue.

Back home to an oxycodone, spraying the bees with the sugar water, crating the dogs and relaxing.  Quite the day.  Cancer in the morning, the numinous in the afternoon.  A lesson there.

Oh.  Had a vicarious feeling of pride when I learned John now runs an international training institute for Jungian analysts based in Zurich, the Mecca and Jerusalem of Jungian thought.  Here’s the link.