Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

Homo sapiens the Energy Sink

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Winter Solstice                                                                    Full Moon of the Winter Solstice

Still listening to the series of lectures, Big History.  There was a really striking concept in the most recent lecture, one in which Professor David Christian, considered the perennial question:  What makes humans unique?  There have been many answers from imago dei to tool-maker to bi-pedalism to our brain to bulk ratio.  Each of these has run into challenges over time.  Professor Christian offers an idea that was new to me.

His idea is that humans, unique among organisms on earth, perhaps even unique among organisms in our galaxy, have the capacity to adapt quickly and often to their environment.  He offers as evidence the escalating energy controlled by humans ever since the Paleolithic.  This was the time when the humans went of out of Africa and began the vast migrations that put our species in literally all parts of the known world.  Each time an organism enters a new environment it has to adapt to that environment in such a way that it can meet its energy needs.  The familiar finches from Darwin’s Galapagos journey developed beaks suited for the kind of nut or other form of food found in the particular new niche they inhabited.

As Christian points out, organisms usually develop one such trick and apply over and over until their run as a species ends in an extinction event of some kind.  We are unique in that we adapt within one generation to a new or changed environment.  We then pass on those tricks through symbolic language so each generation can build on the learnings of the past.  Christian calls this collective learning.  It is, he says, the truly unique facet of homo sapiens.

How it manifests itself is in our increasing control over energy sources.  We now consume up to 40% of all energy utilized by all organisms on earth.  This means that some species no longer have enough energy and die out.  We are an extinction event ourselves on the order of magnitude of other notables like the Chixilub meteor.

Here’s what really caught me with this idea.  Our unique ability to adapt early and often manifests itself in increasing energy and resource consumption, consumption that has grown remarkably since the migrations of the Paleolithic.  To me this means that those of us in the environmental community have placed ourselves over against the defining outcome of what it means to be human.  I’m not sure what this means quite yet, but I don’t think its good.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Humanities, Myth and Story

Winter Solstice

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Winter Solstice Eve                                            Full Moon of the Winter Solstice

My friend Allison sent me a link to this article, There Goes The Sun.  It contains an excellent digest of solstice activity around the world and also explains some of the astronomical oddities attached to it.  Good reading.

Here’s another tack, a way of setting yourself in the context of the solar system, and, in that way, in the context of the cosmos, headed in one direction–out, external–and another that places you in the context of mother earth, the animal kingdom, mammals, hominids and your self, headed in another direction–inward.

As an astronomical event this solstice marks a transition, for those of us on earth in temperate latitudes, from a day with mostly darkness toward the inverse, experienced on the summer solstice when we make the transition from days with mostly light and again head toward darkness.  From the solar system perspective all that really happens is the earth returns to a spot on its orbit where its angle of declination spreads light out over a wider area, making its affect weaker.  The sun burns on, hydrogen turning to helium, vast amounts of energy released in this fusion reaction, radiating out from the sun toward the planets it holds in thrall.

The sun itself is one of 100-400 billion stars in our Milky Way Galaxy.  “Its name is a translation of the Latin Via Lactea, in turn translated from the Greek Γαλαξίας (Galaxias), referring to the pale band of light formed by stars in the galactic plane as seen from Earth.” Wikipedia.   How many galaxies altogether?  Estimates run as high as 500 billion.  I offer this to give you a sense of the particular significance of one moment in the orbit of one planet around just one of our galaxy’s suns.

Coming in toward you though, we can follow a different ancientrail.  This one responds to the specificity of the solstice and its impact on our northern home–winter.  Squirrels bury nuts.  Bears hibernate.  Dogs grow a coat of inner fur.  Human homes turn on furnaces and humans clothe themselves in ways designed to keep in heat.  Plants like daffodils, tulips, garlic, parsnips and lilies lie at rest in the soil during the cold period brought on by the solstice and the time just before and after it.  We have adapted to the return of the sun to this particular spot in the sky; and, without those adaptations this change in solar intensity would kill us.  In other words this event, so very insignificant when considered against the back drop of 500 billion galaxies, matters critically to those of us here, on Sol’s third planet, Earth.

There is a chance, tomorrow night, the Winter Solstice night, to abide with the darkness and the quiet, Stille Nacht; a chance to light a candle and meditate, take an hour, maybe more, to consider what has taken place in your life since light dominated the day, a time that ended on and around the fall equinox and how it may have changed as the dark began to grow more and more dominant.  This is not, and this is important, a once in a life event; no, this is a once a year time, a point where we can consider our lives, where we can go beyond our animal response to temperature and light, move inward toward the depth of our selves, that inner well where the uniqueness of you dwells.  You can spend time listening to the Self who contains not only who you are today, but who you could become tomorrow.

Or, you could pile up the wood, light the fire, dance naked under the stars and the full winter solstice moon, daring the sun to keep hiding, challenging it to start its journey, or, better to continue its journey, or, even better, challenge the earth to continue its journey so that the suns radiation will strike us with increasing intensity.  The Swedes have such celebrations, will be having them tomorrow night.  Seems a bit much for Minnesota, but there’s always a first time.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Politics

A Northstar Solstice Party

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Samhain                                                              Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

After a meal and some awards, members of the Northstar Chapter of the Sierra Club gathered around a bonfire under a clear sky lit by the almost full Winter Solstice Moon.  A poem was read; there were some reflections on Christmas in Santa Fe and the wonder of fire, then the annual solstice event began to break up with couples walking the quarter mile down a moonlit path to the parking lot.

The potluck meal, served before hand, represented the various subcultures within the club.  Vegetarians, vegans and carnivores all had dishes.  My favorites were the creamed corn, the summer sausage and a vegan vegetable and bean soup I made earlier in the day.

Dodge Nature Center is in West St. Paul, one of those spots south and east in the metro area, below St. Paul.  We live north and a bit west of downtown Minneapolis so we drove across most of the metro area to get there.

It was nice to have Kate along and I hope we can begin to do things like this more and more once she retires.

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

The Longest Night of The Year

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Samhain                                                            Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

In my sacred world the holiday season has begun to climb toward its crescendo, or, rather, descend.  Would that be a descendo?  As I gradually shifted my view of sacred time from the Christian liturgical calendar to the ancient Celtic calendar, at first I celebrated Samhain, Summer’s End, as my foremost holiday.  It is the Celtic New Year, representing the end of the old year, too, Janus like, like our January 1st.   The growing season ceases and the long fallow season begins as Beltane ends, the season of growth and harvest.  I liked this simple, incisive division of the year, growth and rest.  Samhain also sees the thinning of the veil between the living and the dead, between this world and the other world, between our reality and the reality of faery.  Life takes on a numinous quality around the end of October and the beginning of November.

In the years when I celebrated Samhain as my chief holiday I began novels then, ended projects begun in the earlier part of the year and thought a lot about ancestors and the delicate, egg shell nature of life.

Samhain still represents a key moment in my sacred year; but over time, as I worked with the Great Wheel, an expanded Celtic calendar that added Imbolc and Lughnasa to the solar holidays, equinoxes and solstices, my soul begin to lean more and more toward the Winter Solstice.  At some point, I don’t even know when, I began to look forward to the Winter Solstice as I once had to Christmas and after it, Samhain.  This was a quiet change, driven by inner movements mostly below consciousness.

Now the longest night has that numinous quality, angel wings brushing by, contemplation and meditation pulsing in the dark, taking me in and down, down to what Ira Progroff calls the inner cathedral, though for me it is more the inner holy well, that deep connection drawing on the waters flowing through the collective unconscious.  I’ve been to a few solstice celebrations, but none of them grabbed me, made me want to return.

I’ve become what the Wiccans call a solitary, practicing my faith at home, according to my own rhythms and my own calendar.  At times I’ve shared my journey through preaching at UU congregations or writing seasonal e-mails and sending them out, but now I write something on this blog and post it on the Great Wheel page.  Otherwise, on the Winter Solstice, my high holy day, it’s a candle and some reading, long hours of quiet.  This Tuesday.  The longest night of the year.

Faith and Spirituality, Holidays, Humanities, Memories, Myth and Story

Light and Dark

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Samhain                                            Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

The holidays.  Important for personal reflection, even have the ability to transform a life as we lay our lives alongside the possibilities suggested by Thanksgiving, Chanukah, Christmas, the Winter Solstice, New Years.  Birthdays, anniversaries, too, can reach into the deep part of your self, we can call it soul, and help you see yourself in the other.  Maybe, they let you see in there, too.  Holidays are a time out of time, a break in the straight ahead, up and at’em busyness of career, family, school.

There is, though, a dark side to the holidays.  All moments of possibility contain paths that lead not to transformation but to destruction, temptation, agony and pain.  The dark paths often emerge when the vulnerability and self-intimacy of the holiday intersects old ways of being, often ways learned in family settings, banished most of the year; but, as family and holiday conjoin, the vulnerability allows the past to rise quickly, to overwhelm.

This is as the Tao teaches us.  Even the dark side of the holidays offers a chance to become new, a chance to take the past and place it in a new frame, a way of understanding that puts the past in its own place and leaves the future open, perhaps even better for the relocation.

Darkness is not, in itself, bad.  Nor is light, in itself, good.  Too much light prevents our ability to see.  “Light is the enemy of art,” as the curator of the Thaw wing of the Fenimore museum said.  Darkness nurtures and heals, is a time for sleep, for seeds to germinate.  The holidays bring a special charge to the light and the darkness in our lives.  Our task is to open ourselves to what each has to offer us; to take it in and accept the possibilities.

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Humanities, Hydroponics

Stumbling

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Samhain                                             Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

Hmmm.  The ablative absolute and the passive periphrastic did not get put straight into my brain.  I stumbled through my lesson today, learning by mistake, a common method for me.  Still, I added a few more verses of Ovid to my translated column, down to 52.  Greg is a patient guy, a good teacher.  I’m lucky to have found him.  He played the music at the Minnetonka UU when I preached out there two Labor Days ago.  We got to talking and he mentioned his Latin and Greek tutoring.  I’d never had a tutor, one on one teaching and I love it.

A nap.  Then a lot of organization stuff, some for the Docent Discussion group I facilitate, some for the Sierra Club’s legislative committee, some for next year’s garden.

On that last point I ordered leeks, kale, chard, cucumbers, tomatoes, cilantro, rosemary, spinach, lettuce and a Seed Saver’s Exchange calendar.  They’re on the docket now because cranking up the hydroponics is a before the end of the year chore and I need to have seeds to start.

Most I’ll wait a bit on, but chard, lettuce, cilantro and rosemary I’ll start right away and grow them out in the hydroponic tubs for winter eating.  Then, around the end of February I’ll get other seeds started, some earlier, some later, getting ready for the start of the growing season.  Right now I’m happy it’s all under snow and out of reach, but come March, April I’ll be eager, looking forward to a new growing season.

Commentary on the news, Faith and Spirituality, Health, Minnesota, Politics

Legislature 2011-2012

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Samhain                                           Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

Conference this morning with legislative panelists who will have decision making authority in environmental matters.  I got a clear sense of the lay of the land.  There’s going to be a lot of efficiency, getting things done, streamlining, living in the real world and not dwelling on nit-picky words.  There’s also to be a lot of looking for common ground, shared vision, commitment to decisions already made, what Minnesotan’s want, keen thoughts about supplanting and supplementing. (Legacy Amendment Money)

The session began with a frame, the budget over the next few years.  Sobering doesn’t quite capture it.  More like catastrophic, devastating, difficult, no easy answers.  Environmental issues will seem, to some, as second thoughts at best, or, at worst, as possible pots of money to shore up the general fund.

How the legislature works this year and next depends on a group of newly dominant legislators who have not been running things for many years.  A steep learning curve will come into play at the same time a major economic crisis slides into place.  Not a recipe for a clean, clear-headed approach to the state’s needs, economic or environmental.

It will behoove all of us to avoid game-playing, name-calling and stereotyping.  I know that’s a cliche, but in the heat of what will be a contentious and possibly, bitter, biennium, it’s pretty damn important.

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

Midwest Radicals

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Samhain                                          Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

Worked on learning the ablative absolute and the passive periphrastic.  This last one is also the name of a colon problem.  Not really.  But this is strange about it, periphrastic is a latin derivative from the Greek.  The actual latin equivalent is circumlocutio, to talk around something.  Do you see the irony here?

This goes to the work of translation and the ways in which literal renderings don’t always, in fact, often don’t, serve idiomatic English.

Also spent time today with Leslie Mills, the UTS intern for whom I have been supervisory clergy over the last semester.  She’s a young woman, growing into her sense of herself and her understanding of a very odd beast, the UU ministry.  UU gatherings mimic protestant forms, e.g. congregations, church buildings, clergy, Sunday worship, but have none of the underlying biblical or church historical rationale, at least in their Midwestern humanist incarnations.

It is a peculiar fact of Unitarian-Universalism that the true radicals in the movement are and have been in the Midwest for some time, since the early 1800’s as the east coast heresies of unitarianism and universalism followed the frontier.  In the time of Jenkin Lloyd Jones and his creation, the first World Parliament and Congress of Religions, the liberal faith tradition in the Midwest gained breadth.

In the post WWI years Minnesota and Iowa, respectively, Des Moines and Minneapolis in particular, became the center point for a non-theistic approach to the human condition, an approach focused on the human and the human experience, as it played out in this vale of tears not in the triumphant heaven of certain Christian beliefs. In this atheological turn the Midwest Unitarians gained depth.

(happy Minnesotans dancing around a local outdoorsman)

Now, in the first decade of the third millennium, the third thousand year period after the dramatic events played out in Palestine, the Midwest has come the front again, this time building on the humanist legacy, but moving the human from the center as the humanists moved God from the center.  In its place now the diverse world of pagan thought has put the natural world and our home planet within that world.  It has been, you might say, a Copernican revolution in metaphysics, moving first away from the heavens to the consciousness and lives of humans, then moving those same humans to a place in that world, rather than pride of place.

This dramatic, unusual chain of thought and faith experience makes the gathering places of those humanists now something other than churches, something different from the great cloud of witnesses, or the gathering of saints.  Just what they are is not clear, nor will it be for a while, I imagine, maybe decades, maybe centuries.  They may be unnecessary now, vestigial organs of the Christian traditions.  Or, maybe not.  Time.  Only in time will we know.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Literature, Myth and Story

Hermes

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Samhain                                   Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

In my session with my Latin tutor today, Greg told me I’d made good progress.  For the first 4 verses or so, he had no corrections at all.  I’m learning something.

What I’m learning now, peeling back this onion one more layer is this:  figuring out the exact or closest to exact english that conforms to the Latin often fails to  make much sense.  There is a leap, a vault between the world of Ovid and his language and the third millennium English speaking world in which I live.  I’ve always suspected/known this and part of my purpose in setting out on this journey is to learn about that leap. More.  To investigate that process in a specific text that matters to me and to my understanding of the world.  Metamorphosis is such a text.

So, I learn the Latin, grammar and vocabulary.  Then, I apply what I’ve learned to the Latin text.  After I’ve done that, I can begin the task of translation.  It is, I suppose, exegesis and hermeneutics, my old friends from seminary classes on the Hebrew and Christian scriptures.  Each lesson I take another step on this journey.

Faith and Spirituality

Where Does the Path Go?

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Samhain                                                                  Waxing Moon of the Winter Solstice

“I see my path, but I don’t know where it leads. Not knowing where I’m going is what inspires me to travel it.” – Rosalia de Castro

Don’t know who Ms. Castro is, but we see life through the same lens.