Category Archives: Faith and Spirituality

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

The Environment Political

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Imbolc                                                Waning Wild Moon

Bounced out of bed this morning at 9:30 am.  Yesterday’s early morning and late night at the capitol had taken its toll.  I’m awake now though.  My Latin for Chapter 7 is done, this is 3rd declension nouns.  I’ve already received one of two books of readings that Greg, our tutor, feels will move us forward faster in regard to translation.

Lobbying in this political environment is tough for the natural environment.  Jobs and deficits rule the world of the legislature; the natural world, or at least the world outside of the built world, intrudes like a beloved relative dropping by for an unexpected visit.

This session we can set the table for issues of future years, defend against certain potential harms and hope to pass some needed but relatively non-controversial legislation like complete streets (involved all potential users of transportation equally, not privileging motorized vehicles), extension of the open-bottle laws to off highway vehicles, promote economic development tools that promote green jobs and encourage retention of the state’s moratorium against building nuclear energy plants.

At some point the winds will become more favorable and we’ll be able to tack instead of run before the wind, as we’re doing now.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Politics

Our Democracy At Work

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Imbolc                                   Waning Wild Moon

It’s late and I don’t want to get into too much detail, but I just came back from the capitol.  The event was a hearing on the proposed sulfide mining operation in northern Minnesota called Northmet or Polymet.  Like most hearings it went on too long and heard too much from too many people, but the depth and resonance of the environmental communities testimony made me proud to be there as part of it.

This issue is not going to go away because sulfide mining represents a real and ongoing threat to fragile wetlands, forests and watersheds, threatening to add mercury and other heavy metals, poisoning the very processes nature created to purify water and adding pollutants upstream from the Lake Superior watershed.

This one needs people on horses carrying red banners, trumpets blaring, and a town crier saying Beware, Beware, Beware.

Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story

Pyrrho of Elis

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Imbolc                                          Waning Wild Moon

OK.  So I’m listening to the history of Western Philosophy on the way into the museum today.  The lecturer starts going on about Pyrrho of Elis.  I thought.  Cool.  Not only is the name of his hometown near my own, he was the originator of radical skepticism, which boils down to my own philosophical position.

Not only those two interesting things, but I also found this interesting note:

Elis was the only city that built a temple to Hades in one of its precincts. The Eleans were the only one to worship him. The construction was built after Heracles’ war against Neleus in Pylos. Only once a year, the doors to the temple of Hades would open, but no one would enter the temple except the priests.

So, here’s a nod to a philosophical ancestor, pictured here.  And to his hometown of Elis and to the temple of Hades built there.

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

Worlds Opening Up

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Imbolc                                     Waning Wild Moon

On the way into St. Paul tonight I listened to lectures on Epicureanism, Stoicism and Skepticism.  These were especially relevant and resonant for me since Latin is the native language of many who took them up, though their roots were in Greece.  They got me excited about reading Cicero and Polybius, maybe Marcus Aurelius in the original.  It was a fun intersection current learnings.

Of course, in St. Paul, I play sheepshead with a group who have had varying relations with a Latinate institution, the Roman Catholic Church.  Mostly Jesuits, or ex-Jesuits rather, they have lived inside an institution directly influenced by the Latin language and Roman political culture.

The  card gods smiled on me tonight, sending me several wonderful hands.  This does not always happen so it’s fun to play them when they come.

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

Simple, eh?

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Imbolc                                                    Waning Wild Moon

Tomorrow Allan, the Grout Doctor, operates on the steam bath.  It’s been in place for 12 years or so and has some missing grout, some iron deposits, some loose tile.  He’ll give it an acid bath.  Sounds like the act of a vandal, but no, we’re going to pay him to do this.  After the acid bath some other folks will come and take out the current door.  Then, Allan will return to remove tiles and fix grout.  The door people will come and replace the door. Allan will come back and seal the entire steam bath.  Then he’ll come back  one more time and seal it a second time.  Hopefully, by this time, the tomatoes will be ripe and we’ll be able to send some home with him.

Simplicity may exist; it might.  Somewhere.  The world, however, has layers of complexity all the way down and all the way inside and all the way outside.  Think of it.  Our own cells, the cells that constitute our bodies, our very selves, are a minority population, only a 20th of the total cellular life in and on our body, the other 19/20 composed of microbes living in symbiotic relation with us or just living on or in us.  Complexity outside the human body begins with the other 6.8 billion people out there, but includes all the other animals, plants, fungi, rocks, water, air, chemicals everything and then of course we leave the earth and there is the solar system and our local galaxy and our local region and then the rest, all the rest.  In the end though there may be nothing quite as complex as the human mind, consciousness, which consists of a blooming, buzzing confusion (to borrow from William James) of synaptic pulses, stored memories and sensory input.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters

Pragmatically Speaking

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Imbolc                                     Full Wild Moon

“Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.” – William James

William James helped found and expand the American philosophical tradition of Pragmatism.  This is not a publicly well known school of philosophy, partly because it does not lend itself well to sound bites like dialectical reasoning, theory of forms, Occam’s razor, cogito ergo sum.

His quote teases us toward an important element of pragmatic thought, namely that truth is something we live into or toward rather than an absolute.  In fact, as this quote suggests, we can even change our own truth by changing our minds, our ways of thinking and the directions of our thoughts and in so doing, change our lives.

Pragmatism is a very American philosophical system, relying on the rough and tumble of human interaction with the world to get at what other systems find through deductive logic.  It’s messy and inexact, but it binds itself tightly to the human experience.

Here’s a nice paragraph from the Stanford Dictionary of Philosophy that will give you the flavor of James’ thought.  Pay special attention to the last sentence.

“James’s chapter on “Pragmatism and Humanism” sets out his voluntaristic epistemology. “We carve out everything,” James states, “just as we carve out constellations, to serve our human purposes” (P, 100). Nevertheless, he recognizes “resisting factors in every experience of truth-making” (P, 117), including not only our present sensations or experiences but the whole body of our prior beliefs. James holds neither that we create our truths out of nothing, nor that truth is entirely independent of humanity. He embraces “the humanistic principle: you can’t weed out the human contribution” (P, 122). He also embraces a metaphysics of process in the claim that “for pragmatism [reality] is still in the making,” whereas for “rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from all eternity” (P 123). Pragmatism’s final chapter on “Pragmatism and Religion” follows James’s line in Varieties in attacking “transcendental absolutism” for its unverifiable account of God, and in defending a “pluralistic and moralistic religion” (144)based on human experience. “On pragmatistic principles,” James writes, “if the hypothesis of God works satisfactorily in the widest sense of the word, it is true” (143).”

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Writing

Gonna Take That Wild Last Ride

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Imbolc                                         Waxing Wild Moon

Back at the novel today, 1,800 words.  There’s an uphill struggle to get back in the groove when I let a week or so slip by with no work on it.  Like navigating the turns in the fast luge track at Whistler, I get stuck at the start, but once the momentum picks up, I can dive into a chicane with confidence.  Back at it now headed down the track.

Self confidence is so fragile, at least for me, and I expect for many of us.  If I could graph mine’s rise and fall even in the course of a day, it would mimic a wild stock ride, selling up at one moment, then a run and a price in sudden decline.  And then the reverse.  Again.  Even now.

Example.  I came downstairs feeling pretty good about getting back to the novel.  Granted I skipped exercise tonight to keep on writing, but overall that felt good.  Then I went on Amazon’s website to check out an author Mark Odegard recommended, Dan Simmons.  Sure enough, he’s doing stuff enough like what I’m trying to do to make me nervous.  He’s already sold a lot.  I haven’t.

Now there’s a steadier core that chugs alone just underneath all this oscillation–the ego worried about its reception in the world–and that core is the one that, walking the garbage and recycling out tonight under a gorgeous waxing wild moon, reflected that no matter how gifted and accomplished, we all die, then sink away into oblivion.  Yes, a few don’t–Homer, Socrates, Qin Shi Huangdi, Confucius, Emily Dickinson, Boadicea, Teresea of Avila, Pancho Villa, Montezuma, Geronimo, Einstein, Chopin, Bach, Da Vinci for example–but the bulk of us, the 99.999999% of all who have ever lived, live in the best way we can, then slowly fade, first in body, then in memory, then we’re gone.

This one knows that the best life is the one we live on our own terms, not on borrowed hopes and dreams and not judged by externalities.  At 63 the core has become stronger and stronger, often balancing the ego’s surges and falls before they happen, but it is not yet dominant, at least not all of the time.  The devil of expectations still sticks a pitchfork into my ego every once and a while.  Predictably, my ego squeals.

If you have a chance tomorrow night, go outside and look at the moon around 9:00 pm if the night is clear.  The moon sat up there in the sky tonight, Orion off to its southeast, other stars around it like diamonds around a fat, lustrous pearl.  A work of art that needs no hand, but satisfies the eye.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, GeekWorld, Great Wheel

A Bit On Science

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Imbolc                                      Waxing Wild Moon

As the Great Wheel turns, as the earth flies in its unimaginably long ellipse around the sun, we go on pretending in a terra-centric universe.  The sun rises?  The constellations rotate through the sky?  The moon rises and sets?

It’s no wonder the Catholic church was so reluctant to buy it.  I mean, who was this guy Galileo and this other guy Copernicus compared to the Church Fathers?

Woolly Buddy Tom Crane surprised me at our recent retreat on a matter related to this.  I’d read a New Yorker article about the execution of a man in Texas convicted of arson in the death of his children.  The point of the article was to demonstrate that an innocent man had died as a result of our use of capital punishment.  It did this by using a renowned arson investigator who critiqued the arson investigators who sealed the man’s fate.  (I just did a quick look and I can’t find the article right now.  If I find it, I’ll post a link here.)

Anyhow, I mentioned it to Tom, a forensic engineer, and he said, “Oh, yeah.  Evidence-based science.  That’s we talk about all the time.”  He went on to say that it was a great tragedy.

What struck me though was this notion of evidence-based science.  My first reaction was, is there any other kind?  Then, I realized:  intelligent design, climate change deniers, any time ideology substitutes conviction for evidence, we risk non-evidence based science.

It was Francis Bacon in his Novum Organum who made the wonderful analogy about method.  If, he said, your method chose the wrong path for you on which to run, running faster would only take you further from your goal.  He proposed that method was all and that the empirical method was the right one for science.  This idea did not catch on overnight and there are still realms it has not penetrated, most notably of late of course, the GW Bush Whitehouse.

Asia, Faith and Spirituality, Weather +Climate

Don’t like the weather? Tough.

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Imbolc                               New Moon (Wild)

We have more snow.  Not a lot, maybe a couple of inches.  It makes the whiteness fresh.

Some folks have begun to complain that this winter has gone on too long and that this snow insults us.  The weather is.  It neither goes on too long, nor stops too soon.  Our food may run out before the winter ends, but that’s our dilemma, not the weather’s.  Our patience may wear out with weather too cold or too snowy or too icy, but the weather comes and it goes, our attitude toward it is what needs to change, not the weather.  The weather may wreck our garden, ruin our crops, or give us bounty.  Again, the weather causes rain, heat, drought, cool days and hot nights, what use we can make of them or what harm they may create for our horticulture or agriculture reflects our needs, not those of the planet’s air and water circulation systems.

Better for us to adapt ourselves to the changes, to find in our lives the place for adjustment.  As Taoism teaches, we need to align ourselves with the movements of heaven.  This is even true of our political work.  We need to act politically in a way that utilizes the forces and realities of the moment rather than railing against their injustice or patting ourselves on the back for their justice.  This too is aligning ourselves with the movements of heaven.

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Politics

Vitriol Set Aside

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Imbolc                                               New Moon (Wild)

I wrote a vitriolic piece on sulfide mining that the better angels of my nature said to set side for a bit and let it cool off.  Let me just say this:  if there is an issue in our time comparable to the Boundary Waters struggle of the mid-70’s, this is it.  While climate change is, admittedly, the uber issue of our time, in terms of local environmental politics, the question of sulfide mining and its nasty  side affects looms over all else.  I’m opposed to it, at least until they can demonstrate a safe  technique.

Birthday phone call from cyber mage Bill Schmidt.  Bill and I share a philosophical and theological education and a similar journey, one you might call, Leaving the Hermeneutical Circle.  That is, we have both stepped outside the tradition of interpreting Jewish and Christian scripture and tradition as pointing to a reality beyond themselves.  Neither one of us has a missionary sensibility like say, Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, in fact, we both appreciate the need for folks to make their own way in these matters.  Still, it’s nice to have a friend who understands the  ancientrail.