Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Humanities, Myth and Story

I (heart) Religion

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Imbolc                               Waning Bridget Moon

Some people like NASCAR, others quilting, some the middle ages, some middle age.  Tastes and attractions vary for often indiscernible reasons.  Me, I like religions.  Most of them anyhow.  Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, Zoroastrianism, Shinto, Taoism, Celtic Faery Faith, ancient Greek, Roman and Egyptian, Voodoo, Native American, Mayan, Aztec, Hawai’ian, Tibetan Buddhism, Jain.  Buddhism, except for its practices like meditation, mindfulness, some how doesn’t attract me.  Don’t know why.

A part of me, a strong, even dominant part never left the young boy stage where why came out at every instance of anything.  Why do birds sing?  Why do dogs die?  Why is the sky blue?  Why is Dad grumpy?  Why did you make noise last night, Mom?

Philosophy suited me, fit me like a bespoke suit straight from Saville Row.  What is beauty?  Why do we love?  What is justice?  What is the nature of reality?  What is reality anyhow?

Religion is often a folk way of asking–and answering–these same questions.

Let me give you an example from breakfast.  I just experienced transubstantiation.  The folks who run the monastery think that happens at the eucharist as the wine and wafer transform themselves into the actual body and blood of Jesus.  I”m not sure about that.  But, I do know that this morning I ate an apple, a slice of bread with peanut butter and drank some tea.  They became me.

No.  I’m not saying I’m Jesus, far from it.  I am saying that the apple, the peanut butter, the bread and the tea did transform, through the miracle of my digestive tract and its millions, billions, of host organisms, into me.  Think about it.  After the big bang and the gradual cooling of the universe, gas clouds gathered, due to gravity and created stars from the initial elements, thinks like hydrogen, iron.  The stars themselves, in their fusion furnaces, then combined and transformed those basic elements into the familiar elements making up the periodic table.

Later still, as the gas clouds and chunks of matter surrounding each star coalesced those elements deposited themselves inside and on the newly born planets, comets and asteroids.  Those same elements, the very same elements, then, through more eons, at least here on earth, combined and recombined to form simple organisms like single celled animals and  plants. Long after that those simple organisms combined to form multi-celled life forms, among them humans.

This morning I–consider that I–the end point of a certain historic chain of events traceable to the creation of the universe ate.  In eating I took in the products of other organisms, the apple which grew in the air on a tree, wheat which grew in fields across these very plains and peanuts which grew beneath the soil.  I also drank water, the same water present on earth for eons, perhaps the same water drunk by dinosaurs.

And it is, even now, as I write, becoming me.  The apple, the wheat, the peanut are also, like me, the end point of a traceable (if we had the instruments and skill) chain from the moment before time until now.  So we recombine, sift and shift elements.  A miracle.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Health, Humanities, Retirement

This is life.

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Imbolc                                            Waning Bridgit Moon

Sunday night Kate and I went to St. Anthony Main, overlooking the Mississippi and St. Anthony Falls, for a Roots Music festival put on by KBEM, a local jazz station.  While we ate at the Aster Cafe and listened to a small group, Kate looked up at me and said, “Ah, the life of the retiree.”

I understood what she meant.  Free at last.  But….

I had another reaction too, “Yes, I know what you mean.  But, really.  This is life.  Not retired life, but life itself.”

In that moment I realized the category mistake everyone makes when speaking of retirement.  It is seen as special, different, unique, something to be fussed over and transitioned into when really it’s just life, life continuing.  Not different, not special, not unique, not to be fussed over.

Or, to say the same thing another way.  It is different, special, unique, to be fussed over because it is your life, your life, your one and only special and true life.  We have to want our life and lead our life before we work, while we work and after we work.  We do vacate the workplace, but we do not retire from our lives.

In fact, the fuss is too often that we’ve left our lives up to others.  Our boss, our clients, our patients, our corporation or agency.  The past times and activities that seem so necessary, but are really only the ideas of others.

So, the problem and the promise lies not within the change in our work, but with the change in ourselves.  If we have known what our life is, if  we have chosen activities and friends for their intrinsic value not their external rewards, well, then, on with your life.  If not, the issue is not the transition, but the need for self-examination, for honesty with the you that you bring to life as  you grow older.  No one else can do this work for you.  It’s up to you.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Writing

Breakfast in Silence

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Imbolc                                  Waning Bridgit Moon

The monks and individual retreatants like me all eat together in a long, tiled room.  There are six long wooden tables, a blond wood reflecting the era when the Abbey was built.  These tables sit at a slight diagonal to the western wall, mostly below ground level, only narrow windows above letting in light.

Trays, the blue plastic kind familiar to me from Alexandria Elementary School over 55 years ago, come up first with the silvered racks for tableware above them.  A steam table is next, roughly the size of the one Kam Wong’s Chinese restaurant has for its afternoon crowd in Andover.  Butted up against the steam table is another long wooden table on which sat this morning plastic bags of bread baked here in the monastery.

I picked up some creamed wheat–makes me think of the bear opening the creamed wheat crates in the Art Institutes American collection–brown bread, spread the bread with a little peanut butter, a tangerine and took my tray to the retreatants table.  After putting some milk in my cereal and getting some tea, all along the southern wall, I returned to the the table, eating my second meal here in silence.

Monks came in and out, some dressed in black robes, others in jeans and work shirts.

While eating, I looked up from time to time.  Above my chair was a painted crucifix with the words, God Rules from a Tree.  On the eastern wall, above the steam table, there is a long panel that contains the four symbols of the gospels:  Ox, Eagle, Lion and Angel.  In between each symbol is a graphic and words like:  Happy is he who is hungry.

We ate, the monks and I, in quiet, the only sounds an occasional chair scuffing the floor or silver ware against plastic.  The mood invited mindfulness so I imagined the field in which the wheat for bread and the cereal had grown.  The fall day on which it was harvested.  A barn full of Holsteins, water vapor steaming off them in the warm barn while they were milked.  The sunny vineyard in California where these grapes had grown fat and full of the water dried from them now.  Maybe a sugar beet field along the Red River or a sugar cane field in Hawai’i for the sugar.  I didn’t get as far as the tangerine and the tea and the peanut butter as my mind drifted, no longer mindful.

Now I’m warming up for the morning’s work, writing this piece.

From the Benedictine Monastery, Blue Cloud Abbey, near Marvin, South Dakota.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Literature

Tech Savvy Milbank

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Imbolc                                          Waning Bridgit Moon        Blue Cloud Abbey

Since I plan to spend most of my time writing, I brought one of my split keyboards which make typing much easier for me.  Only thing.  It had an old fashioned pin style plug-in.  I have a USB exclusive laptop along.  Sigh.

Got on the web and discovered a Radio Shack in Milbank, only 13 miles back toward Minnesota.  They were redesigning the store tonight, so, though they would have been closed otherwise, tonight they were there.  After supper, I drove to Milbank, had a nice chat with the clerks and the owner, who offered me a beer, bought a new keyboard–they couldn’t find the adapters due to remodeling–and schlepped back to the Abbey.

When I pulled up in the Abbey parking lot, I opened the truck door and the bells started clanging.  7:30, time for Vigils.  Scared the B…well you know, out of me.

So here I am, typing on my new keyboard, ready to get up tomorrow and start writing more pages of Missing.  The Abbey is a peaceful place, set high atop a prominent hill in an otherwise flat topography.  As a result, you can see for miles.  At night Milbank twinkles off to the east and farm houses dotted across the prairie are outposts of electricity, television, the modern world.

What would Per think?

The meal was in silence tonight and Brother Bennet read while the rest of us ate.  Another Minnesotan is here, a woman, and me.  The monks were all in black robes and cowl tonight.  I don’t know what signifies, but I’ll ask  tomorrow.

The drive out here is a long one, over 4 hours, and I’m tired.  Early bedtime tonight.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Myth and Story, Woolly Mammoths

Obits Optimists

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Imbolc                                                                       Waning Bridgit Moon

The most optimistic page in the newspaper?  The obituaries.  Every day and especially on Sundays I see evidence of the hopefulness and optimism of Minnesota citizens.  I imagine it’s the same everywhere.  With no evidence for an afterlife at all, let alone a particular one, person after person greets their mother and father, relaxes in the arms of their Lord and Savior Jesus, are welcomed by God the Father or pass over to their next adventure.  The range of metaphysical perspectives may be narrow, usually encompassing some version of the Christian afterlife or the less well understood world of late 19th century spiritualism, the passing over folks, but the confidence and clarity braces me every time I read it.

I’ve not done a comprehensive study of obituaries, let alone a cross cultural one (though it would be fascinating), but it seems likely each place has its own, culturally specific brand of confidence about the unseen world.  In ancient Rome a favorite epitaph mentioned here before:  I was not.  I was.  I am not.  I don’t care. represents a very different take on the after death experience, one more in tune with my own existentialist one, though I’m not as nihilistic.  I do care, at least now, about my death, though, with my Roman fellow travelers, I’m pretty sure that after death I won’t care either.

This kind of optimism has ancient roots.  Certain Neanderthal remains have been found with ochre painted on the body, indicating some thoughts about life after the grave.  Just what that thought was, of course, we have no idea, but burying a body and decorating it moves well beyond the animal world’s relative disregard for their dead; relative because elephants do have mourning rituals*.

The new atheists like to lampoon all this as magical thinking or evidence that the human race has not yet grown up, but there are ways of looking at it.  To my mind it is a poetic, metaphoric way of declaring that the person’s memory will live on among there descendants and friends.  It also a means of consolation in the face of a forever event, perhaps the first one the family has experienced.  Since there is no evidence, it is possible that one of the many perspectives has got it right.

Long ago I made a pact, a version of Pascal’s wager, with the afterlife.  I will live my life in as straightforward and useful a way as I can, being true to my own understanding of the world.  With Camus I stand with those who would make the trip toward the great river of death easier for all.  If, as I suspect, death is a personal extinction event, then the wager ends.  If there is a supernatural being who cares about living entities and their future, then the minor or even major screw ups in my life will be forgiven since their/its perspective will embrace all things, giving a context to any individual life that even the most forgiving friend cannot.  Either way, I’m ok. Continue reading Obits Optimists →

Aging, Cinema and Television, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Politics

Still Examining

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Imbolc                                                        Waxing Bridgit Moon

Greg Membres, my Latin tutor, recommended a film, The Examined Life.  You may have seen it already since it was made in 2008, but it’s a powerful introduction to some fundamental philosophical questions like ethics, the meaning of life, political theory.

One truth struck me more powerfully than any other while watching this movie.  I imagined, when I was in high school and then in college, that there was an upward and onward nature to learning, a steady progression in which high school and college pushed me, and a progression that would give me enough momentum to take my life up the mountain, all the way to the top, that somehow learning and life would be a regular unfolding of answers and conclusions.  After, maybe, my sophomore year I began to realize this was a mistaken view, not only mistaken but might have had reality actually inverted.

That is, I was never more certain of the truth than when I was in college and then, later, in seminary.  Life since then has offered a sometime gradual, sometimes sudden degradation of both the things I know for sure and the things I know at all.  An abstract thinker by nature and inclination, I found it logical, desirable to hunt for truth in the abstract systems of philosophy, theology, theoretical approaches to various disciplines.  At one point, in fact, I wanted to study the theoretical foundations of anthropology in graduate school.  Turns out not many graduate schools had much interest.  In either the discipline or me studying it.

As life experience and longer thought has lead me to reconsider many of my core positions, I have abandoned Christianity, the liberal politics of my father, the traditional roles of men and women, boys and girls, the positive assumptions about capitalism with which I was acculturated, the metaphysics of Rene Descartes which still informs our unexamined ontology, a soul, an afterlife, respect for the government, though not for democracy itself.  These are not trivial decisions, nor were any of them made lightly nor suddenly.

On some of the big questions like the meaning of life, I have chosen to abandon my search.  Life is what we are, it is what we do and needs no abstract cover story for its purpose.  This may be too minimalistic for many and I get that, but for me, I find my purpose in life itself, the living of it that includes marriage, family, friends and  actions that press for greater justice, a sustainable future, a climate that will not kill us.

Though I’m not a complete cultural relativist, I’m pretty damn close.  Murder, oppression, suppression, starvation, unchecked disease, poverty, racial and sexual discrimination of any kind are wrong, in my view, universally.  In almost all other matters, I’m more than open to different cultural perspectives and practices, I expect them, celebrate them and would find the world shallower and morally impoverished without them.

Still working on this, noodling it.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Politics

Life Review

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Imbolc                                                       Waxing Bridgit Moon

“Justice is what love looks like in public.” – Cornel West   

So, valentine’s day is a justice holiday, too.  I like it.  I met Cornel West in 1974, when we were both much younger.  We attended a week-long conference on liberation theology at Maryknoll College in Detroit.

Since the retreat, I’ve begun looking back, seeing my life as a whole rather than in its most immediate reality.  There’s a task here, called integrity (see below), defined by Erik Erikson, a task in which we review our life and decide if it has threads, through lines, think about its cogency as a work of art.

Maturity(65 to death) Ego Integrity vs. Despair Reflection on Life Older adults need to look back on life and feel a sense of fulfillment. Success at this stage leads to feelings of wisdom, while failure results in regret, bitterness, and despair.

This is a delicate task, I think, since most of us, myself included, don’t see our lives slowing down or as less productive or even, in important ways, discontinuous with the life preceding.  That aspect, the final, end note aspect of Erikson seems premature, but the task itself is one that can begin now, that is, in our mid-60s.

There is a need, it seems, for a 7.5 or an 8.0 followed by integrity as a 8.5.  Jung, who broke with Freud early, earlier in his career than Erikson did, sees the second half of life as an inward journey, a preparation for dying, but, also, a recipe for living.  It is this aspect that seems left out of Erikson’s model, that contemplative, meditative facet of life as we pull away from the world of engagement toward a world of the inner journey.  So, I see this ego integrity task as a subset of a more important turn, the turn from achievement and goals, to the interior, to the inner cathedral, the cultivation of the deep Self.

Life review certainly fits as a section of the inward journey, but it fails to acknowledge the still active, still an agent, role of our lives up to our death.  We need to retain agency, to take responsibility for the journey now, just as we have in the past.  Still, there is no question that getting older means taking stock, reviewing our past, but it cannot dampen the vitality and purposive nature of life even in our 80s and 90s and 100s.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Family

Will You Still Need Me? Will You Still Feed Me?

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Imbolc                                                 Waxing Bridgit Moon

Iconic birthdays.    Sweet sixteen.  18-old enough to die.  21–when I was young, this was THE iconic birthday.  Ok to drink.  Woops.  A few years later I was an alcoholic.  Then for my generation there was 30.  We didn’t trust anybody over 30.  Uh-oh.  That came and went.  Then, 40.  40 was a big one because it was the time you might buy a red sports car, hunt for that trophy wife and make strange vocational decisions.  Close.  I met Kate, my wife who has been a wonder and a major Valentine ever since we got serious.  I made a strange vocational decision.  Got out of the ministry and in to writing.  Yes, there was, too, that little red sports car.  Bought it in 1994.  OK, I was 47, but hey.  Still driving it.  There was another major birthday for me, 46.  My mother died at age 46.  To pass your own mother’s age is a strange sensation, I imagine, at any age, but at 46, it seemed more than strange.  Sad. Painful. Happy to be alive.

After those, 50 was not a big deal.  60 was 60.  I mean it’s a big deal in a way, but still, the only thing I felt was that I had passed into the new late middle age.

But.  64.  Now that’s a biggy.  Wouldn’t have been I suppose if not for that Beatle’s song.  It managed to set a date for a change in attitude, a time when our life and love might change, might change so much that we would ask if we were still necessary to the people we love.  That’s too grim a statement for the light-hearted tenor of the song, but I think it did capture a fear resident in many a then 20+ years old heart at the time it came out:  what can life be like when we’re old?

Those of us in the baby boom generation had created an entire culture around youth, rebellion, drugs and rock and roll.  Sgt. Pepper came out in June of 1967.  The summer of love.  Wearing flowers and heading for San Francisco.  How could acid-dropping, hard rock lovin’, anti-war, free love folks like us ever grow old.  When I’m 64 was like a time that would never come.

Of course, no generation, at least none so far, gets to re-write the rules of aging.  We passed through our 20s, then our 30s, then 0ur 40s and 50s and have now begun to crest upon the shore of social security and medicare.  We have started to hit our mid-60’s.  As iconic ages go, of course, the big one for years was 65.  The finish line.  Throw away the work clothes, grab the gold watch and go golfing, then fishing, then drop dead.  Not now.

We hit 64 and we’ve just begun to pick up speed.  It’s not an age; it’s a speed limit.

Suddenly we’re here, many of us, and we realize that the song was written by youngsters.  It expressed their and our fear of moving on beyond the wonder of the sixties.  What would it be like?  What could it be like?

I’m happy to report that it’s just fine.  Just as I told Kate, yes I still need you and yes I’ll still feed you; she tells me the same.  We have come a long ways from the days of the summer of love and the march on Washington.   Those were great days, so are these.  I’m happy to be 64.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story, Poetry, Woolly Mammoths

Old Stories, Old Poems, Old Men

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Imbolc                                             Waxing Bridgit Moon

Jacob and Esau and Rebekah and Isaac came to life tonight as we felt our way into this peculiar, even troubling story of deception, betrayal, theophany and a redemptive moment followed by a warm hearted, unexpected ending.  These stories still resonate, still have the power to grab the attention, hold the heart and propose new perspectives.  These are stories by and for men, archetypal moments held close to the heart for thousands of years.

After the reading of these stories and a conversation that followed many paths, a few left for bed:  Mark, Scott and Tom while Paul, Stefan, Charlie H., Jimmy, Warren and I sat up reading poems or, in Paul and Jimmy’s case, reciting poems from memory.  Poetry comes alive when one poem sparks another and books come out, dogeared and ragged from much use.  Rilke, Frost, Oliver, Pauly, Sarton, Rumi all visited us, speaking across the centuries or the decades, speaking directly into the heart.

A magic, spontaneous moment, the stuff of which retreat memories are made.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Travel, Woolly Mammoths

When the Bell Tolls, It Tolls For Me

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Imbolc                                      Waxing Bridgit Moon

Here I am, a heretic beneath the bell tower of Blue Cloud Abbey, sitting at this mobile scriptorium, pecking away at the keys.  The bell tower rises outside the window, a jet passing by, contrail at an acute angle toward the north, a metal angel streaking like Icarus toward the sun; a sun, obscured early by the western wing of the retreat center, that this morning draped a bloody red-orange mantel over the far horizon, visible for miles from this point, 900 feet above the floor of the otherwise flat prairie.

When the bell rings, which it does every quarter hour once, every half hour twice and the  number of the hour on the hour, I fly on the time machine of sound back to the middle ages when the sound of the bell determined the compass of a parish, all within the sound part of the same community, an aural community, knitting itself together every half hour.  These days, these latter days, these 21st century days the bell could not be heard over the rumbling engines of trucks bearing cookware, basketballs and note-book paper, cars scurrying here and there with people, like small loud beetles set loose on the hardened surface of mother earth.

How do we know what community we belong too, now, now the bell’s sound has become muffled?  Could it be that this very medium (there goes the bell, ringing 3:00 pm), these bits and bytes that travel from this prairie monastery, constitute our new bell tower?  A quiet sound heard world-wide, making us one people, one community, one pale blue marble in a vast ocean of airless space?

We ate lunch today with the monks in their lunchroom, a wide, long room with the animals symbolizing the gospels painted on a mural, done in a style reminiscent of Northwest Coast Native American design styles:  an ox, an eagle, a lion, a winged human.  Some of the monks wear the black robe, others blue jeans and sweaters.  Some of the monks have become stooped by age, while others, younger, would not be distinguishable from any one at the counter of a Marvin, South Dakota coffee-shop.  I had spinach, a vegetable medley, two peaches and a bit of tuna salad.  Fare fit for a simple life and just fine with me.

I find myself wanting to come here by myself, perhaps for two weeks or so, to concentrate on my Latin, on finishing the novel I’ve already well begun.  Perhaps I will, one of these days, if Kate’s ok with it.