Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Humanities, Writing

Getting Ready for the Dark Time

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Lughnasa                                         Waning Harvest Moon

The museum (MIA) has us check out when we’re going to be gone over our tour days, so I’ve checked out from mid-October through early December.  I’ve not had many tours in August and none in September, just one in October.

That, plus the relatively light schedule for the Sierra Club–the legislature doesn’t convene until February, so no weekly meetings–has given me plenty of time for the late garden work with time left over rearranging the downstairs and reconfiguring my study.

Yesterday I finished swapping out books from the bookcase nearest to my desk.  The desk and the bookcase form the sides of a U, with the bottom of the U created by the computer workstation.  On this bookcase I had collected various art and art history texts as the docent years had gone on, but they were works I did not reference frequently.

What I need near the desk are books I pull off for work.  It’s a working bookcase, not a storage unit.  Now I have near me all my Latin dictionaries, commentaries, grammars and readers; various style manuals like The Chicago, a thesaurus and english grammars plus books on writing.   The works I use most after the latin texts are the oxford dictionary of art, the oxford dictionary of philosophy and the oxford english dictionary.

On the bottom most shelf I have notebooks from docent training and several comprehensive art history texts.

I do have a shelf devoted to a long term project which I’ve shorthanded Ge-ology.  This project has its own page on this website, but I’ve let it dangle, as I have the ecological history of Lake Superior.  Here’s the summary:  This work will gather various strands from ecology, environmental movements, pagan and neo-pagan faiths, literature, art and philosophy.  It will weave those strands into a faith indigenous to the Midwest (and most other places) and universal to Ge.

Having at least some key texts near to hand may spur down time work on Ge-ology.  Oh, hell, why not go for it?  It will produce work.

There are still a few book stacks on the floor and this and that to find new places for, but I’ll finish that today.  Ready for winter.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Literature, Politics, Writing

Exegesis and Hermeneutics

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Lughnasa                                              Waning Harvest Moon

“It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” – Aristotle

While the empirical method, the theory of falsifiability and scientific rigor make it an article of faith that scientists will entertain thoughts with which they may not agree, it is even more important that in the world outside the realm of science:  politics, art, sports, religion, literature, psychological therapies and commerce for example, that we insist on considering the opinions and beliefs of others without subordinating ourselves to them.

Why more important?  Because these are the realms in which we live our lives.  The realms of home, work, play, faith, leisure and citizenship.  The crucial realms.  Science is but a helpmate, a maidservant to these much more central human activities.  Science gives us tools to use, like this computer on which I work and the communication network on which you read this, but the tool does not write the words, think the thoughts, feel the feelings.

Science gives us a clearer and clearer picture of our world, the fundamental physical and biological components of it, but science fails when it steps into such everyday, yet critical arenas like defining life, the meaning of life, the decision between a good use of nuclear power and a dangerous one, identifying the beautiful or the just, embracing love.

It is in these fuzzier areas, the areas marked by complexity and uncertainty, that the humanities come into focus.  The humanities allow us, demand really, to search the experience of humans who have lived before us or who live now.  We search their experiences and their thoughts and dreams through books, movies, paintings, sculpture, music, political structures, even through the medium of a blog such as this one.

We then face the always daunting task of exegesis, that is, making sense of the thought or experience in its original context, and after this challenge, we face the even more critical task of hermeneutics, applying the wisdom of the past or of others in other places, to our own situations.

Only when we can entertain the thoughts of others, often alien others, alien due to era or geography or culture, can we examine our own lives and situations in a broader context.  In that broader context we can see new or different ways to handle the problems we face today.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

This Light of Mine

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Lughnasa                                                  Full Harvest Moon

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” – Howard Thurman

Howard Thurman was a theologian who studied with the Quaker mystic, Rufus Jones.  His work, which I had forgotten until I read this quote yesterday, reaches deep into the human heart.

The Quaker concept of the light that leads from within influenced many theologians, including Thurman who, in turn, influenced Martin Luther King.

In Scientific American Mind a recent article referred to the human “self-schema.”  Created due to our ability to see into our past and project ourselves into the future, this organization of thoughts, experiences and natural gifts produces the Self, that ever elusive entity at the heart of our life.  Self-schema strikes me as a scientific description of the Self I refer to here from time to time, that Self that pulls us into the future, that can challenge us to live a deeper, richer, fuller life.

This Self is the light that leads us, a light whose brilliance and warmth comes not from a supernatural realm, but from a super natural one.  When Thurman challenges us to find what makes us come alive, he asks us to dig deep into our Self, to use our imagination and our deep heart to find vitality within it.

When we can locate a path, our own ancientrail, that knits together the genetic gifts, the particular experiences and the most exciting prospects we can imagine for our future, then we can come alive to the personhood for which we each yearn.  We can become alive in every fiber of our being. Such persons live.  They burn with an incandescence available only to those who feed all of themselves into the furnace of their Self.

You know such people.  Martin Luther King was a such a person. Perhaps you are.  I know for sure you can become one.

This is a spirituality that holds nothing back, that demands it all, all you have and all you will have.  This is a humanist spirituality, a call to kindle the light of your true Self, the one light only you can bring into this world.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality

Got a Habit?

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Lughnasa                                      Waxing Harvest Moon

“We are what we repeatedly do; excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” – Aristotle

Good old Aristotle.  A subtle mind, tutor to Alexander the Great and foe of Platonic idealism.   His work is dense to the point of impenetrability, at least to me, which did not augur well for a future in philosophy.

This quote sounds like 7 Habits of Highly Successful People material, but Aristotle wrote way ahead of the 20th century obsession with self-help.  It would be interesting to know what he would make of Covey’s material.

Philosophical training sharpens the mind, enhances the ability to understand and appreciate the arguments of others, aids in the construction and self-critique of ideas and puts a solid platform under a life, a platform strong enough to withstand the ebb and flow of others opinions and one’s own inevitable missteps.

Let’s take Aristotle at his out of context quote for a moment.

Hmmm.   What happens over and over in my life?

Reading.  Writing.  Politics.  Working with art.  Gardening.  Bee keeping.   Dog tending.  Travel.  Driving.  Watching TV. (does excellence fit in here?)  Spending time with family.  Grocery shopping.

This one will repay a bit more pondering.  What happens over and over in your life?  What are your areas of excellence?

 

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Memories

Fall-ing

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Lughnasa                                                  Waxing Harvest Moon

As August slides away and the sky shifts its colors toward deeper hues, an inner barometer detects higher emotional pressures.  The atmosphere weighs more, cuing those momentary pauses, breaks in attention.  It may signal a storm ahead, but more likely the prediction carries gray skies and mist, perhaps early morning fog.

Melancholy comes calling this time of year, an acquaintance, maybe a friend, of long standing.  Mom died in October, 1964, 47 years ago, a year longer than she lived.

Her death came at different moments in life for all of us.  Mark, 5 at her death, has few memories of her; she lingers in his past as a faint spirit, an enigma.  Mary, 12, has more, a young girl heading into adolescence, becoming a woman, missed the guidance a mature woman could give as she made that critical transition.  At 17 my life had already begun to pull away from the family, in my senior year of high school, the last, college plans in the making, I had her longest of all, only a brief time less than Dad.

When that dark angel comes, and he comes for us all, finality is the hardest lesson to absorb.  No more mom.  No more.  Memories, yes, but memories fade and change as life goes on and here all three of us are, 47 years later.  47 years.  A lifetime.

Why a friend?  How could melancholy be a friend?  Well, in this way.  As life patters on, this event following the other, we can become accustomed to its rhythms, lost in its small decisions and its casual absorption of our energy.  So lost, in fact, that we forget the Self that carries us forward, the Self into which we live and which lives itself into us.

Melancholy can turn us away from the day to day and cause us again to walk down the stairs leading to what Ira Progoff calls the Inner Cathedral.  We often forget this quiet place within, our own sanctuary, and melancholy can call us to visit it again.

So, yes, melancholy can be a friend of the Self, a guide back into the depths and resources of your Self.

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Literature

Text, Reader, Learning

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Lughnasa                                                                              Waning Honey Extraction Moon

Been feelin’ tired, a bit lowdown.  Got a good nap this afternoon and better.

Latin today was a bit more encouraging than I had anticipated.  My translation was not so far off, I hadn’t pursued sentence and clause construction quite as diligently as would have been good, but I had the right idea, for the most part.  I now see another level to this translation process and that is the one where I set off on my own, with no expectation that a tutor will read it.  Instead, I will rely on my own knowledge and skill.  That day is off a ways, but no where near so far as it was a year ago March when I began this journey.

Greg and I had a conversation today about the classics, about language and books and translation and interpretation.  Exegesis and hermeneutics.  This is turf  I know well from my days in Sem.  I persist in believing that there is a history and an author to which texts refer and are bound.  Surprisingly, this belief is not widely shared among academics in literary fields.  They’ve ridden off on the horse of post-modernism, headed, with speed, down what Francis Bacon would have called the wrong path, a path not unlike the Scholastics, where all knowledge happens within a field of words and all conclusions come from deductive reasoning.

Bacon said traveling down the wrong path will not lead your toward your destination and traveling faster down that path only leads you further and further away.

Faith and Spirituality

A Little Late Night Darkness

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Lughnasa                                                                     Waning Honey Extraction Moon

Well.  5.8 earthquake on the EAST coast.  Hurricane Irene bearing down on a direct line with the eastern seaboard.  Astronomers have seen a black hole swallowing a star.

Coincidence?

Rapture Index 183
 Net Change    -1

A fire and brimstone preacher of the old guard would doubtless see these events as apocalyptic messages sent in God’s Old Testament form.  Doubt it.

Nature continues violent, ruthless and heartless, a force beyond our imagining, a force our understanding cannot diminish and a power our technology cannot dominate.

We came out of the darkness and will return to the darkness.  These are the messages in these events.  Read them and weep.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel

State Fair, Auld Origins

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Lughnasa                                                                            Waning Honey Extraction Moon

The state fair has begun:  corn dogs, cheese curds, church run restaurants, politicians of all stripes, trade unionists, farmers and a few cows, horses, pigs, chickens, llamas and rabbits.  Oh, yeah.  That butter sculpture, too.  You know, Princess Kay of the Milky Way.  Or, Queen of the Tao of Dairy.

State and county fairs, occurring in late summer, are the direct remnants of the Celtic festival of Lughnasa, a first fruits market and holiday week which brought farmers, crafts people, villagers and nobility together.  These festivals had a religious beginning, honoring of some god or goddess whose attributes seemed especially apt, in the case of Lughnasa, the Celtic god, Lugh, a god of many skills, whose foster-mother Tailtiu died after clearing Ireland for agriculture.

At Lughnasa handfast marriages were made, hands stuck through a hole in a stone wall and held fast blessed a couples trial for a year and a day.  Games and feats of skill played a prominent part during the Lughnasa festivals, too.  Winter lodging for those without homes was also contracted for during these festivals.

(Lugh had a spear which sought battle, a sling with which he was expert and a raven by his side.  His name means, in Gaelic, long arm.)

The gathering of such diverse groups as 4-H’ers, beekeepers, dairy folk, farm implement dealers, artists, union workers, political aspirants and hawkers of all kinds makes our contemporary Lughnasa as vibrant and colorful as the originals.

I don’t know how many year and a day marriages get sealed at the State Fair, but I imagine many relationships begin or deepen during its run.

However you style it, the State Fair celebrates the many skills and talents in our state and brings folks together.  Lugh, the god of many talents, must feel at home here, too.

 

 

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Writing

Spiritual Resources for the Humanist

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Lughnasa                                                                Waning Honey Extraction Moon

More butting my head against a language that any 4 year old in ancient Rome could speak and a reasonably intelligent 5 year old could read.  I guess there is a plateau affect here and I’m standing on one right now.  I can see the path I’ve taken to get here, off to my back, but the road ahead lies blocked, beginning at a point somewhere above me, as if I stand before a cliff.

Not complaining, just observing.  I’m here by choice and I know that.

Groveland asked me for a sermon topic, something I’m going to preach on October 9th, exactly a week before our cruise.  A month and a half is a long lead time, so I went back through this blog, hunting for a topic that interested me and one that might interest Grovelanders, too.

Here’s what I sent them:

Spiritual Resources for the Humanist

What resources do we have, those of us no longer in the Christian faith?  Or those of us never in it?  What resources do we have to replenish the spirit and feed the Self?

The Western cultural tradition, a great river of classical literature and fine arts has enough nourishment for several lifetimes.  We’ll explore works like the Bible, Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Dante’s Inferno and how to use them for our personal growth.

I lifted the phrase the great river of the classics from one of my favorite authors, Camille Paglia.  Other eras have used the writings of the Greeks, the Jews, the Romans and the Italians in particular as stimulus for reflection, contemplation, meditation.  I’ll toss in a few later writers like Kafka, Camus, Goethe, Hesse, Tolstoy, Isaac Bashevis Singer, probably Rainer Rilke and Wallace Stevens, too.

Might toss in a few works of art, perhaps Goya, the color field painters, Song dynasty potters and painters, perhaps a Tibetan Buddhist thangka.

I suppose I’ll have to start by considering the nature of resources for spirituality, something I’ve come of late to define as enrichment, expansion, deepening of the Self.  But count on a Latin phrase or two, just because I can.

 

Aging, Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Health

Degree of Difficulty

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Lughnasa                                                                                    Waning Honey Extraction Moon

I have grasped the swallow’s tail, offered a shoulder strike, wielded a single whip, pushed and pulled, brushed the leg, deflected, parried and thrust.  All moves in Tai Chi.  I have made real progress over the last 20 weeks, nearing the real end of the first third of the form.  Once I finish the first third, I can practice it three times in a row and will have a feel for the time it takes to do the entire form.

At some point I will have the entire form under my belt, perhaps in the next year, though I will have a month and a half hiatus while rounding South America.  Then, I can continue the form as a means of meditation, relaxation and conditioning.

With the single exception of some modern dance I did while in college, this has been the most difficult, by far, physical work I’ve ever done.  Not difficult as in strenuous, but difficult in the care and precision needed, the execution of movements which do not come naturally to me.  The degree of difficulty has surprised me, but only because I was so ignorant of Tai Chi.

Mastering a difficult physical project has been satisfying for me, satisfying in direct proportion to its difficulty.  I tried piano for quite a while about ten years ago, but I just didn’t have the skill or the real interest.  This I can and am doing.  New for me.