Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Aging, Art and Culture, Bees, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Literature, Politics

Moving From the Theoretical to the Concrete

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Lughnasa                                            Waxing Back to School Moon

Kate has had a nasty cold since Monday and I can feel it trying to claw its way up my esophagus, making my throat scratchy.  My hope is that the recent two time bout I had with some bug in July, then August has revved up my immune system.  With rest I can pound this sucker down before it takes hold.

Starting back on Latin today.  I took part of July, all of August and the last couple of weeks off with the bees and the vegetables and the orchard.  Thought I’d get work done on Ovid, review, but in fact I got very little done.  An old student habit of mine, if it’s not pressing, it’s not getting done.  I’m looking forward to the weekly sessions, building toward enough confidence to tackle Ovid and others on my own.  It’s a project, like the bees, that keeps the gears turning, not giving them a chance to rest.  Best that way.

A few years back it was the MIA docent training.  Then the move into permaculture and vegetables and fruit.  That one’s still underway as I learn the complicated dance of seasons, cultivars, pests, harvest and storage.  The MIA training, for that matter, only gives you enough legs to get into the books and files yourself, training you to look and think about art, but each tour demands specific self-education on the objects and the purpose of that tour.

(Minoan Gold Bee pendant from Crete, circa 2000 BC)

Part of my impatience with the seminary experience is that I’ve moved so deeply into more concrete endeavors.  Art has the object as an anchor, then its history and context.  Latin has words, grammar and literature as well as Roman history.  Vegetables and fruit have real plants, particular plants with needs and products.  The bees have the bees themselves, the colonies, woodenware, hive management, pest control, honey extraction.  This is, probably, the world I was meant to inhabit, but philosophy and the church lead onto another ancientrail, that of the abstract and faraway rather than the particular and the near.  It’s not that I don’t have an affection, even a passion for the theoretical, I do, but I find my life more calm, less stressful when I work with art, with potatoes and garlic, with conjugations and declensions.

I now have almost three decades of life devoted to the theoretical, the abstract and the political so I bring those skills and that learning to my present engagement with the mundane, but I no longer want to live in those worlds.  They are gardens others can tend better than I can.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality

How Do We Open Ourselves to Mystery?

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Lughnasa                                      Waxing Back to School Moon

A very busy three days with something in the evening each night plus events during the day, too.  Glad to get a chance to get back to the bees and the garden.

Some autumn blooming bulbs came in the mail today, so I’ll get a chance to plant them over the weekend.  I need to get outdoors.  Fall bulb planting is one of my favorite garden chores.  Crisp weather and Folk Alley radio, sometimes the Andover Marching Band can be heard in the background.

I’m still trying to come to grips with the unsettling experience I had at the seminary tonight.  I have no patience for the God talk, less for the elaborate hermeneutical dance that goes on in such settings.  I put myself in the room as a favor to Groveland and to Leslie, but I no longer feel like I belong there, a strange feeling after 15 years in the ministry.  These used to be my people; it is my seminary; but, I feel more like an outsider now than I did when I began back in 1970 and I was very outside the norm then.

I hope I’ve not done Leslie a disservice by agreeing to do this.  I still respect the faith journey, the attempt to wrest some purpose out of life, to read the palimpsest of history and of nature, scraping away the latest scribbles to look even deeper, to find a way into the world of divinity, a trace of the sacred on the wind.  These represent the sweetest and the best of human endeavor, those moments when the human vessel becomes a vehicle for discernment.

The institutional expressions of religion, the rationalization of charisma as Max Weber said, do little or nothing, indeed often obfuscate the journey with the insistent demands of institutional maintenance:  credentialing of clergy, fund raising, dogma protecting, seeking new members, building buildings, routinized worship.  Where is the ecstatic?  The mystic?  The awe-some?  Where is the deep calling unto deep?  Where is the fearless acceptance of the human condition?  Dangerous, lovely, cloying, sensual, heady, brutal, wild and untamed, even in the most civilized.  The Methodists and the Presbyterians and the United Church of Christ and the Baptists and even, for no God’s sake, the UU’s have fashioned clay towers with bright windows but no doors and no way outside.

The journey happens at night as sleep comes, when a dream grabs you by the throat and won’t let go.  The journey proceeds as you walk to work, hold hands with a lover, dance in the rain, smile at the gorilla and the lion fish.  It goes forward along the ancientrails of art, literature, dance, music, theater.  Meditation?  Sure.  Quiet moments with fellow travelers?  Yes.  Finance committee meetings?  Don’t think so. Evangelism?  Nope.  The journey deepens when we become vulnerable to ourselves, to the world around us and I’m sorry, but I don’t see the support for that in the pews of any church I’ve ever attended.  Perhaps the monastery holds an echo of it.  The solitary parishioner at prayer.  The Jews at the wailing wall.  Muslims at the Kabah.  Maybe.

But the weak tea I experienced tonight? Unlikely.  And I feel bad about that, sad.

Asia, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

Death

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Lughnasa                                         Waxing Back to School Moon

The thing about death is, it is forever, unlike life.  Once entered there is no return.  It is that one way disappearance that creates the chaos of grief, the sense, the realization that something has been done that cannot be undone.  There is no longer any action to take, no remedy to try, no act of contrition that will change things.  There is here, the living, and there, the dead.

Death comes to humans, dogs, mice, birds, lizards, fish, death comes.  We living things are alike in facing the cessation of our agency, the end of all the striving.

Life has death as its forever dance partner, the danse macabre.  It is a dance like those marathons from the 30’s where the dancers slump along near the end, barely holding each other up as the sun rises and the music slows.  The dance hall begins to take on its daytime character, the cracks in the ceiling come out, the floor has not been mopped, the romance of the contest and the hall slip away and we are left with the one partner who will never let us go.

Death is not life, whatever else it may be.

Tibetan Buddhist thought has a wonderful, I would even say exemplary, way of approaching death.  The photograph here, a partial of a Yamantaka statue, illustrates it iconographically. “Yamāntaka is a Sanskrit name that can be broken down into two primary elements: Yama, the name of the god of death; and antaka, or “terminator”. Thus, Yamāntaka’s name literally means “the terminator of death”.”  This statue shows Yama in cosmic embrace with his consort, thus wisdom and compassion become one.

Meditating on Yamantaka, so I was told by a Tibetan Buddhist, involves imagining your own death in as real a fashion as possible.  The intent of the meditation is to eliminate the fear of death, either in the body or in what Buddhists call the subtle body.  When we achieve an acceptance of our own death, we become free.  This is, if I understand the Buddhist thought correctly, also a path to enlightenment.

Of course, a Buddhist would see this in the context of Buddhist doctrine, with which I am not familiar, but I have embraced this image and this understanding as an important part of my own spiritual journey.

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Politics, Writing

A Waning Taste For Politics

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Lughnasa                                      Waning Artemis Moon

Bob Feemster owned the Alexandria Times-Tribune which my father served as editor for many years.  In 1951 Bob bought us a black and white TV because the believed newspaperman should be aware of this new media.  My earliest memory of television and politics comes from watching that little TV in the 1952 race between Stevenson and Eisenhower.  A Democratic household, we were pulling for the Unitarian Stevenson against the former General of the Armies, Eisenhower.

This  was long before news organization using exit polling and computer modeling to declare victors.  The actual number of votes was what mattered and they showed up at different points in time.  The far west results didn’t begin to come in until midnight or so.  Dad let me stay up and watch the election returns with him.  Of course, it was partly staying up late at night that intrigued me, but I had also caught my father’s passion for the process.  What would happen?

You know the result.  Far from turning me away from politics, that long ago late night served as a foundation for a life of modest political activism.  You know, student politics in high school, student politics in college, radicalization during the Vietnam war era and engagement since then in various levels and kind of activism from Indiana Presidential politics and Minneapolis City politics to Minnesota state politics, neighborhood politics in Minneapolis as well as community based economic development and a raft of other state and local efforts.

In some ways politics has been the defining theme of my life.  I’ve been at it, more or less, since that night in 1952.  Rarely I have gone for more than a year without some concrete form of political engagement.  When I encounter problems in our broader community, my first thought is of a political response, how to organize it, where to start.

But.  I’m losing my taste for it.  Why?

These days I work on political issues related to environmental concerns.  I have a responsible position in a large Minnesota organization with a track record for achieving change at both the state and national levels.  My role is directly political in that I serve as a sort of manager for the organizations legislative work.  My passion for a peaceful, verdant, and just world (as some foundation says) is not less than it has been.  So, what’s the problem?

It may be broadly an analytical problem.  That is, my political work has a good deal of calculation attached to it. Analysis of political realities and the nature of changes we want often conflict.  The political path is the one on which something can be made to happen.  This puts the work largely in my head, when my motivation comes largely from my heart.  Over the years, now the many years, of political work, I have learned dispassionate detachment perhaps too well.

The work no longer serves as a vehicle for my passion.  Where has that passion gone?  Into art and writing.  When I have downtime, art comes to mind.  The world of art has drawn me, given me space for my passion and an arena in which to share that passion.  Writing has done the same.  I even have a passion for the Latin work I’m about to start up again.  But, no longer for politics.

This is a difficult place for me to be.  It feels as if I’m denying a part of myself or about to become irresponsible.  However, here’s what I’ve concluded.

When I pressed my way into the Sierra Club’s work a few years ago, I did it through the political committee, which seemed the natural fit for me.  Long experience in non-profit organizations and in political contexts have given me skills that helped me move up in the organization’s leadership.  Yet it feels increasingly like a burden.  I wonder now whether this work with the Sierra Club isn’t a regression like my return to the UU ministry.

Regressions, my analyst told me, occur because there is something you need to retrieve or repair.  In this case it might have been my agency.  Agency is the capacity to have an impact and I wondered, when I reengaged with the Sierra Club, if I still had it.  Yes.  The answer is yes.  A more important question now, however, is this:  Do I need to assert my agency at this point in my life?  No.  I don’t.

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Retirement

Shame, Guilt, Fear

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Lughnasa                                                  Waning Artemis Moon

While it’s fresh.  A meeting this morning with our financial manager where we went over, again, the various moving parts of our investments.  It resulted in a down feeling, almost defensive.  What was this?  He said we’d be fine financially and I believed him.  We overhauled our whole approach to money now over ten years ago and have a great track record since then.  When I mentioned my feelings to Kate, she said she trusted in our ability to adapt.  Again, I believed her.  We have and will adapt to changed circumstances.

It took a while to delayer my feelings.  First, I noticed anxiety (my unfortunately favorite response to the unknown), as if a vast pit were about to open ahead of us.  A pit of this and then a possible that and more stuff we didn’t know, or have impact on.  A little deeper I recognized a fear about being dependent on a bag of gold held in some financial dragon’s lair and only won back by dint of great effort.  Silly.  Obtuse.  Still, the case.

Pushing a little further, a different layer.  Retirement.  When Kate retires, my long tenuous connection to the world of work would fray, then vanish.  It’s as if she’s retiring for both of us.  Or, rather, that I feel the imminence of retirement perhaps in a manner similar to the couvade, a strange situation in some cultures where a husband takes on the characteristics of his wife’s pregnancy, often placing a heavy rock on the belly near the birth moment and heaving it off.  So, there’s the unknown, the strange sense of money coming in from a pot somewhere far away, a feeling of retiring that is sympathetic or empathetic rather than actual.  But, that wasn’t the end.

What finally came to me was a mixture of shame, guilt and fear, all related to no longer having a viable connection to the world of work.  This is my middle class roots talking.  As long as Kate practices, I have a tangible though fragile link to work and the income it produces.  After she retires, all semblance of that relationship vanishes.  In the central Indiana world where I grew up not to work was shameful, weak, irresponsible.  Kate responded with, “Well, I’m upper middle class and I don’t care! (about the abandoning work)”

All of our life comes along for the ride and we never knew when one part or another will express itself, rise up and claim attention.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, permaculture

A Real Boy

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Lughnasa                                               Waning Artemis Moon

Had an odd experience as I rode the lawn tractor back to the garage after putting all the no longer needed honey supers in the shed, putting the spun out frames back on the hives and heading back along the vegetable garden toward the truck gate.  I felt like a real boy.

A la velveteen rabbit, that is.  Something about having followed the bee-keeping from last year’s single colony, a package that Mark Nordeen helped me hive into hive boxes he loaned me, through the divide and hiving a package on my own this spring, over the course of the summer and the nectar flow, through to this moment, with the honey in jars, stored now at home, in the bee’s care no longer, triggered a gestalt, a deep link between my Self and this cycle of nature in which I had participated.  Somehow that made me feel real.

Now, I don’t go around in skeptical philosophical clothing all day wondering whether or not I exist.  At least not any more.  Joke.  I mean I have a developed sense of who I am and what I am, but this particular feeling, a oneness, an at-one-ment with this place and the work of another species, I’ve never experienced.  It may relate to my relatives who farmed, a now, finally, getting it, what it meant to milk the cows or bring in the corn harvest, even to gather a clutch of eggs in the morning.

Whatever it is, it felt good.  Right.

Aging, Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality

Lapsed Unitarian

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Lughnasa                     Waxing Artemis Moon

Oh, boy.  Just got myself into another situation.  Promising things I’m not sure I know how to accomplish.  I hope this goes with do one thing you fear every day, month, year–whatever time frame you can stand.  Cannot reveal details right now, but this could be a lot of fun for a lot of people or a complete bust.  Feels like the old days when I used to do this kind of stuff all the time.  Dream up something, contact a few folks, make it happen.

Still fatigued.  Kate says it’s my body still healing itself.  I hope so, because it feels like I’m still sick.

A friend the other day referred to herself as a lapsed Unitarian.  Lapsed Unitarian.  That made me wonder.  What are the spiritual and metaphysical consequences of falling away from the only faith named for two doctrines, Unitarianism and Universalism, in which none of its members believe?

I have come to see UU as a way station of sorts, a caravan serai for the pilgrim lost in the desert or high on a mountain and in need of refreshment, companionship.  Maybe a spiritual decompression chamber where individuals are brought safely back to their spiritual sea level.  It’s clear to me that my decompression is complete, has been complete for several years now.

Now, this is probably idiosyncratic, but I’m pretty sure it’s not unusual.  When we step away from a long time, culturally supported faith tradition like Christianity or Judaism, the lag time for decompression can be lengthy.  Not only do we have to unlearn one faith identity, we have to find or create another.  The UU movement is perfect for that time, for the initial time of confusion and disorientation and for the development, the constructing of a new faith.  Once that work is done however it most often results in a person anchored no longer in institutional faith, but in a place more like the world, the world of the human and the animals and the rock and the lake, a place where the spiritual moment is every moment and where the faith commitment may have an introspective, interpersonal, natural, and/or political expression, but not an institutional one.

So.  Perhaps lapsed Unitarian is the destiny of most of us no longer inside the Christian hermeneutical circle.  It still helps to have a place to rest along the way.

Art and Culture, Asia, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Humanities

Kids, Chinese Heritage and Sheepshead + Buddhism

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Lughnasa                          Waxing Artemis Moon

Whew.  Into the MIA for tours with kiddies from the Peace Games at the park across from the Museum.  I had two groups, one a group of girls mostly who were sensitive, responsive and imaginative.  A pleasure.  The second group was all tween boys who wandered, posed, paused and were harder to engage, though the sword did get their attention.

When finished, I knew I had to return at 5:45 and I had the option of staying, but I chose to drive back home and take a nap.  After an illness, I like to get as much rest as possible.

So, turn around at 5:00 pm and go back to the museum for a tour of the Matteo Ricci map with the Chinese Heritage Foundation.  They were a lively, bright group who could read the map!  That gave more insight into it.  Lots of good questions, conversation.

I left the museum at 6:45 and headed over to St. Paul to sheepshead.  The card gods smiled on me tonight.  After a slow start, I got some better cards.

Then, back home.  A long day.  On the drive I’ve been listening to more of the Religions of the Axial Age lectures.  The ones right now focus on Buddhism.  I’ve never found Buddhism appealing though certain elements seem helpful.  Since I’m a not a big believer in reincarnation or kharma, the Buddha seems to be solving a problem I don’t have.  After listening to the notion of no-self, I began to have a distinct puzzlement.  I don’t get how the notion of no-self and continuing rebirth co-exist.  I must be misunderstanding something.

Faith and Spirituality, Health, Humanities, Politics

I Sing The Body Electric

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Lughnasa                                        Waxing Artemis Moon

The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself
balks account,
That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect.    “I Sing the Body Electric,” Walt Whitman

Coming to the end of another round of this summer bug, or rather virus, an intracellular interloper replicating at my expense.  Even though I’ve felt decentered, defocused and dis-eased, my body has gone on working, repelling these bad actors and throwing up barriers to their return.

Do you ever think about the daily miracle that is your body?  All the parts of it that have to work in homeostasis, levels of creatinine, thyroid hormones, testosterone, potassium and the gut with its legion of foreign bacteria working to aid our digestion and the lungs stealing oxygen from the atmosphere which has just enough that we can live and the ear which not only helps us hear but keeps us upright and steady; the nervous system wheeling electricity throughout the body turning this on, that off, moving this muscle, contracting the other, moving my fingers for example in the dance learned long ago in Alexandria-Monroe High School typing class; all that blood moving, moving, moving pulsing, delivering oxygen, energy to muscles and organs, pulsing through the heart, that fleshy pump working night and day, year in and year out, an organ we take notice of most often when it begins to fail or flail; not to forget the only organ connected directly to the brain, the eye with the optical nerve taking information back to the occipital lobe where it converts to actual images of what the eye has impressed upon it.  Amazing.

Let me say thank you to whatever long and distant chain has led from the foamy oceans of mother earth’s origins up through the one-celled, the multicelluar, the strange moving ones who finally made land and who went on to be dinosaurs and woolly mammoths and lions and tigers and bears oh my and me, too.  Each of us sit as the particular and current end-point of one line of protoplasm that could,  if we were god-like enough, be traced to its unique origin in, say, a small amoeba-like creature floating at the time in a place that would someday be called Australia.  Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles.

Having said that what do you think of Mark Dayton?  I confess, I voted for him, in spite of my doubts, because he seemed the best bet to beat Emmer, a strange duck to have representing anybody except say, Michelle Bachmann and Sarah Palin if they constituted the whole of an odd sub-set of Minnesota voters.  We so need a Democratic governor and legislature over the next four years.  Without them budgets will get balanced on the backs of the poor, just witness the cock-up in GAMC that Warren Wolfe has covered so ably in the Star-Tribune.  Without them budgets will get balanced by trading short term gain for long term environmental degradation.  So, if you’re of the Democratic persuasion, give money, knock on doors, help them.  If you’re a Republican, take a really good long look at Emmer.  He’s a weird one and not right for this state.

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story

What is Analysis for?

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Lughnasa                                   New (Artemis) Moon

This month is the Artemis moon because Artemis is the goddess of honeybees and the name goddess for our hives.  Why this month?  Because the end of August is the usual time for honey extraction among beekeepers in our area.  Our brand new extraction equipment is in en route to us from Dadant Bee Supplies in 5 boxes of approximately 34 pounds each.  Some assembly required.

The honey labels, designed by fellow Woolly and graphic artist Mark (LockMan) Odegard, are spectacular.  Literally.  You’ll have to see them.  I’ll post an image when I have a photograph.  Odie offered to do this design work because he always wanted to keep bees himself.  His work displays  long study and careful craftmanship.

A short bit on a longer topic.  Analysis.  A New York Times Magazine piece, My Life In Therapy, raised a question I’ve pondered many times.  That is, does therapy accomplish anything? The author, Daphne Merkin, seems to say no, or mostly no; but, her criteria, character change, is, I think, precisely the wrong measure and gives rise to the dilemma that haunts her piece.

Ms. Merkin started in therapy early, at age 10, and has experienced several therapists, most of them Freudian if I read between the lines.  I didn’t get started so early, age 24 or so, but I saw therapists and counselors from several schools:  existentialist, bumbling pastoral counseling, Adlerian until I hit the big hole in my therapeutic road, treatment for alcoholism.  My month long stint in a Hazelden outpatient program spelled the end of my bouncing from this to that trying to sort out the unusual strategies I had for getting in my own way, many of them, near as I could figure out, related to grief over my mother’s sudden death at 46.

Getting sober made a lot of things come clear that had been foggy.  Without the medication and confusion of drinking, a lot of my life snapped into focus.  Not fast enough however to have prevented a second marriage while I was still drinking.  That marriage, like the first one, ended up in the divorce courts.

Raeone and I parted ways in 1988, but not before I sought therapy once again.  This time I landed, and I don’t recall how, in the offices of John Desteian, a Jungian analyst.  John himself and the Jungian paradigm in particular fit me.  Exploration of dreams, the linkage between imagination and self-knowledge and Jung’s special attention to the creative combined to move me forward on that most ancientrail of all, self-knowledge.  John encouraged me and forced me deeper in my self-exploration, helping me see the very real boxes I constructed, boxes that prevented me from getting to the core of my self and my true pilgrimage.

It took a long time, maybe 18  years off and on, perhaps mostly off, but at certain points weekly for a couple of years at a whack.  Over the course of time I did not go through a character change.  I went through a dramatic change in self-acceptance.  Those melancholic mood swings?  Yes, probably somewhat related to my mother’s death.  Now though they presage a return to creative activity, an ingathering of energy and self collecting itself for a push forward.  The ministry?  An aspect of my three-part self certainly– scholar, monk and poet–but not well related, since the monk is a meditative, solitary archetype for the religious life and the ministry has an extroverted, communal structure.  A better fit?  Writing, solitary work.

The writing has not been a royal road to success, measured in the externals of publishing and money-making and those are real measures.  It did, however, let me focus on creativity, on the domestic front:  cooking, husband, father, gardener and now bee-keeper and on the inner work of the religious or faith pilgrimage.  It’s not that I’ve not written, I have. Six novels.  Many short stories and essays.  This blog and many handwritten journals.  The shift did allow what I call my Self to lead me rather than the demands of the culture or my own ratocinations based on expectations from childhood.

No, I do not believe the goal of therapy or analysis is character change, a goal that may not be achievable at all.  Rather, I see the goal of analysis as the clarification of self, stripping away the accretions of fear, role, pleasing others, traps which cause us to shut some or even all of our self away as unworthy or unnecessary or unwanted,  and in that clarification coming to design a life congruent with the Self, one that nurtures and explores its unique possibilities.  This may mean dramatic role changes; it did for me, moving from the ministry to the study.  This may mean accepting parts of your self that seem unacceptable, for me melancholy and introversion and my need to write, all of which felt unwanted at one time or the other.  This may mean moving from a place of external success to a place of internal satisfaction.  It has for me.

Analysis with John Desteian, using the insights of Carl Jung, helped me achieve a goal I didn’t even know I had, becoming more like who I already was.