Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Travel

Ghosts

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Imbolc                                                                          Valentine Moon

Today, a bit tired due to early rising, moving books put a weight on my shoulders.  It was the past and its tangled feelings.  Found my first passport and saw a young man with a full head of dark brown hair and a beard that matched.  Surprised me, so long have I seen his gray descendant in the mirror.

(arrestedmotion.com 2012 10 upcoming aron wiesenfeld new paintings arcadia-gallery)

That was my passport for Colombia, the trip to check out a bank for the poorest of the poor.  Carolyn Levy was in my life at that point, between my divorce from Raeone and meeting Kate a year plus later.  A hard time, raising a 6 year old boy, working night and day between church meetings and organizing.  A hard time, too, since the future had grown unclear.  Something big had happened or was about to happen, but its outlines in my life were not yet clear.

Then I moved out the books related to shifting my ordination to the Unitarian-Universalist movement.   Again, a time when the future had become unclear.  Writing had not shown the promise it offered when Kate and I agreed I should leave the Presbytery.  Frustrated there, I regressed, headed back to the trade that I knew.  More lack of clarity.

Poor decisions.  I chose Unity UU over First Unitarian for my internship.  An error.   The humanist congregation would have fit me much better.  Then, at the end of an interesting year, I accepted a job as minister of development.  Chief fund raiser.   OMG.  One of the really boneheaded decisions in my life.  Not the only one, for sure, and not the worst one, but dumbest?  Probably.  Kate saw it coming. I ignored her.  Sigh.

(Vincenzo Foppa The Young Cicero Reading 1464)

Those books were the heaviest to move because I’ve traveled out of the UU circle, too.  A solo practitioner am I, as the Wiccans say.  In that vein though I retained many of my books on spirituality, works on natural theology and those commentaries I mentioned on the Torah and the book of Revelation.

Heavy, especially with lack of sleep thrown in.  Ghosts.  They’re real and they live in the closets, basements and attics of our mind.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings

The Most Amazing Thing

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Winter                                                                   Cold Moon

What’s the most amazing thing you ever saw with your own eyes?  Question posed by the weekly calendar I mentioned a couple of days ago.

Interesting question.  30 years or so ago I was at the bedside of a dying woman.  Her son was there, too.  She was an irascible, even ornery person, though with a flint core of honesty.

She and her son were not particularly close and I knew her through regular visits to the senior citizen high rise in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood.  Part of my work with the West Bank Ministry.

She had lapsed into the labored breathing so often preceding death.

We, the son and I, stood beside her bed, taken completely by the final drama.  Finally, she raised up a bit, sighed and breathed no more.

That moment was so peaceful, intimate, and spiritual, a moment of profound and universal transition, it transformed both of us.  At least for a while.

We went down to the cafeteria, drank coffee.  Quietly.  Bonded.  I saw him a few more times, conducted a brief service for her.  Then we went our separate ways.

Why choose this moment?  I’m not sure, but its finality juxtaposed with its peacefulness combined to create an electric, vital moment.  Maybe it was the injection of hope that my own end could be so graceful.  Maybe it was the awe-ful and final intimacy of such a time.

I’m not sure it’s the most thing I’ve ever seen with my own eyes, but it’s up there, for sure.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Latin, Myth and Story, Poetry, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

A Life Long Passion

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Winter                                                            Cold Moon

“A mythology is the comment of one particular age or civilization on the mysteries of human existence and the human mind…”                                                                                                                                            H.R. Ellis Davidson, Gods and Myths of Northern Europe

A life-long fascination with mythology and its companion fields, ancient religions and folklore, can be explained by this quote.  We have multiple ways of understanding the world, of asking and answering big questions.  In our day science is regnant, queen of the epistemological universe, but it is not enough.  Not now and not ever.

(Charles Le Brun, Fall of the Rebel Angels, 1685)

Science cannot answer a why question.  It can only answer how.  Neither can science answer an ethical question.  It can only speak to the effects of a course of action over another in the physical world.  This is not a criticism of science, rather an acknowledgment of its limits.

Mythologies (usually ancient religions), ancient religions, legends and folklore are our attempts to answer the why questions.  They also express our best thinking on the ethical questions, especially folklore, fairy tales in particular.

Where did we come from and why?  “1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. 3 Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”  NRSV

(edward_burne-jones-the_last_sleep_of_arthur)

Want to live a good life?  Live like Baldr or Jesus or Lao Tze or Arthur.

How can we tell a just society from an unjust one?  Look at the 8th Century Jewish prophets.  Look at Confucius. (not a religion, yes, but functions like one)  Look at the Icelandic Sagas.  Different answers in each one.

I fell in love with these complex, contradictory wonderful narratives when I was 9 years old, maybe a bit younger.  Aunt Barbara gave me a copy of Bullfinches’ Mythology.  I loved Superman and Batman and Marvel Comics.  I was an attentive student in Sunday School and later in seminary.  Over time I’ve come to recognize this fascination as a ruling passion in my life, one that guides life choices with power in my inner world.

It will not, I imagine, fade.  It means writing fantasy is a work of great joy and a hell of a lot of fun.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Great Wheel, Poetry, Writing

First First

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Winter                                                                          Cold Moon

Kate premiered as both lyricist/poet and sung song writer.  She wrote the following to the words of the passover song, Dayenu.  We sang it today during the service at Groveland.

 

Refrain:            Di-di-urnal              di-di-urnal

di-di-urnal,  di-di-urnal,  di-urnal,  di-urnal:[[  di-urnal, time has come

 

 

Circles come and circles go round

Life eternal, everlasting

Everlasting, life eternal

Diurnal  (refrain)

Season come and seasons go round

Spring and summer, fall and winter

Winter, autumn, summer and spring.

Diurnal

Spring has come and life awakens

Time to get the garden ready

The ground is turned, seeds are planted

Diurnal

Summer comes and brings warm weather

Flowers bloom and insects hover

The crops grow big and bear their fruit.

Diurnal

Autumn comes and brings the ripening

Apples are crisp, berries are sweet

Harvest starts with food preserving.

Diurnal

Winter comes, the earth goes to sleep

Time for reflecting, memories sweet

The cycle ends, new one begins.

Diurnal

Circles come and circles go round

Life eternal, everlasting

Everlasting, life eternal

Diurnal

Dogs, Faith and Spirituality, Family, General, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Writing

A Productive Day

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Winter                                                                          Cold Moon

Kate spent the day at a sewing retreat.  All day.  From 9 am to 9 pm.  She came home exhausted, achy and smiling.  “I got a lot of work done.”  That’s Kate for I had a really good day.

Meanwhile I worked upstairs reading the Eddas and editing my presentation for Groveland tomorrow.  The dogs tend to get a bit rowdy if one of us isn’t upstairs with them.  With Kate gone, that needed to be me.

We did our dance together, the dogs and me’ I napped and worked out.  Watched a TV series on Netflix.  A laid back but productive day for me, too.

I have posted a link to Living in Season here.  It’s yet another segment in my continuing work on reimagining faith.  This one focuses on developing a pagan liturgical year.

Faith and Spirituality, Feelings

Hello In There, Hello

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Winter                                                                                Cold Moon

I guess it was inevitable.  After all the psychic work over the last few weeks, the last year, I’m beginning to head into a heavy place.  Low energy.  There is, too, the cabin fever syndrome.  Not out much.  Staying down here in the basement, reading, translating.  Working.  Then working out.  Sleep.  Get up.  Repeat.

Don’t know how long this will last, though I do know enough about these moods to know that they usually precede a creative period.  It may be that my work on the Edda’s, on thinking about the next revision of Missing, plotting for Loki’s Children; it may just be that all that has to go into the pot and cook awhile.  Meanwhile I’m on emotional simmer.

 

Faith and Spirituality

Roots support wings

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Winter                                                                                   Cold Moon

“My heart wants roots. My mind wants wings. I cannot bear their bickerings.”

— E. Y. Harburg

It has taken me a long time to resolve this dichotomy.  It drug me from Indiana to New York City in the summer of 1968, then pushed me back home in the fall.  I moved to Wisconsin, then Minnesota, all the while traveling as much as I could.  Wandering made me feel free, but it also made me feel homeless.

Now that I’m into my 42nd year in Minnesota and my 43rd up north, I feel I’ve gotten roots in the state.  It  took me three marriages to find Kate, but she’s given me roots in a relationship.  I moved 17 times in the Twin Cities and twice outside it before we moved to Andover where we’ve now lived 18 years, 19 this July.  Although I do not feel rooted in this town, I feel very much rooted to this place, this land, this home.  Even this county.

Here is the resolution that came to me, not long ago.  Without roots the mind cannot take wing.  Anchoredness, embededness, place stable give the mind freedom.  It does not have to occupy itself with the troubles of daily life since they can become part of a routine, a healthy routine, yes, but still a known quantity, a given.  So the roots reach down deep for stability and nourishment, deep enough to support the mind’s marathon to the end of the cosmos and back.

With solid roots the mind can at last break free, run out of its traces into the realms where only the mind can go.  Roots support wings.

This may be, probably is, obvious to you, but it took a while for me to understand.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humanities, Myth and Story, Writing

Living in Season

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Winter                                                               Cold Moon

Winter is upon us.  Beginning to give more thought time to my Living in Season presentation for Groveland on the 27th.  The short version is this:  learning to adapt your life to the season, rather than the seasons to your life.  I mean this on at least two levels: the literal and the metaphorical.

(A seasonal round.  This is a new idea to me, but I like it a lot.)

The literal can include such things as caring for plants outside during the growing season.  Maybe in a container, a window box.  Maybe in a flower bed or a vegetable garden.  Could be an orchard or a woods.  Maybe a community garden.  Something to synch up at least part of your daily life with the emergence of plants from winter’s fallow time.

It can also include intentionally leaving time in your winter schedule for retreats, inside projects like crafts or writing or visiting friends.

Perhaps in all the seasons hiking might be part of your plan, a liturgical response similar in all seasons but changed by them in profound ways.  If you can’t hike, get someone to help you be outside some amount of time each week.  Yes, even in the dreaded middle weeks of January.

Metaphorical:  first, know which season of your life you are in.  Are you college age, in the still vigorous growth years?  Or, are you in the mature years, the years of the late growing season, the early harvest days?  Or, like me, are you in the days of the late harvest, headed toward the long, eternal fallow time?

Here, too, we can find analogical help from living in season.  When sun and rain and warm temperatures push a plant up, up, up, perhaps that time right around flowering, then it must attend as well to its roots, not forgetting the stabilizing and nutrient gathering powers of those underneath surface parts.  So, for example, when college and the world of work begins to beckon, as graduation nears and your own unique bloom begins to present itself to the universe at large, this may be a time to recall hometown, old friends, family.  Favorite hobbies and pets and places.  It may seem that these people and places hold you back, hold you down, are heavy anchors weighted to yesterday.  But, no.  Instead these are the anchors in the deep subsoil of your life that hold you up, feed those parts of you that remember the child you once were, remind you of the long strengths that balance the new, shiny ones obtained through education.

Anyhow, stuff like that.  More by the 27th.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Friends, Politics, Woolly Mammoths

It Was A Very Bad Year

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Winter                                                                     Moon of the Winter Solstice

2012 has begun to fade into the past, most of its days now tailing off behind, most lost from memory, all passed into history.  It was, as all years are, a bad year.  The death of Regina Schmidt in September marked the first incursion of this finality into the immediate life of the Woolly Mammoths, that is, our spouses and ourselves.  While no death can be said to be bad, since death is a part and a necessary part of life, still it contains the pain of loss, the unsettling reminder that our life, too, will end and opens a hole in the social structure of family and friends.  We will miss her.

Warren and Sheryl lost, in relatively quick succession, three parents, having lost the fourth not long before these.  Sheryl’s father died first, then her mother, then Warren’s mother, then his father.  In the case of the Fairbank’s and Wolfe’s families this left both with sudden needs to reassess, reconfigure and learn how to live without their oldest generation.

Yin lost her mother, Moon, this year, too.  Moon emigrated from China with the young Yin, so they had not been apart for all those years.  The last several years Moon lived with Scott and Yin.

My cousin Leisa continues to mend from a stroke last year and Ikey, the oldest of the Keaton cousins, died this year.

Then, too, there were the guns.  The shootings.  More of the continuing madness, our embrace of the things which kill us in such senseless, brutal, unnecessary ways.  I happened to be in Colorado, staying only three miles from the Aurora theatre where movie attendees at a screening of the Dark Knight Rises were shot.  And, like you I imagine, the shootings in Newton left me weak in the knees.  Children.  Young children.

And the NRA solution?  A cruel satire, armed policemen in every school or, another alternative offered by gun rights advocates, arm teachers and principals and school psychologists.  Yes, we need more guns to prevent more gun deaths.  Can none of these guys see the serious flaw in this argument?

The country stumbled through the sort of end of the Great Recession, re-elected a middling President and saddled him with a congress unable to act.  These are not good things.