Category Archives: Commentary on Religion

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Summer Solstice 2014

June 21, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Summer Solstice Summer Moon

At 5:51 am the sun reached its full height in the sky, full, that is, for the 45th latitude, 69 degrees above the horizon. That means more solar energy per square foot on the ground and rising temperatures to follow in July and August. It also means the rain soaked plants here in Minnesota will finally begin to get the attention they need to grow tall and produce big fruit. Yes, today is the summer solstice.

This day, like the winter solstice, is an ancient holiday, born of fear and hope, awe and wonder, the basic ingredients, according to Rudolf Otto, of the holy. At the summer solstice the hope was for warmth to heal bones chilled by winter’s cold and sunlight to ensure a good harvest, whether food was gathered or grown. The fear, the opposite of that at the winter solstice when many feared the sun might never return, leaving the world to freeze, with food gone, was that the sun would come too close, stay high too long and burn the earth, scorch it with an intensity neither plant nor animal could survive.

In this way these two markers of the solar system’s formative years, when the orbits of the planets stabilized around their mother and father, Sol, could be seen as an early form of output produced by a very basic, but nonetheless real, computer, movement in the heavens. As this difference engine brought new information into the night sky, humans and other animals, too, sighted it and changed their lives according to its data.

If the holidays of Beltane and Samhain mark the human focused seasons, the growing season and the harvest season followed by the long fallow time, then the solstices mark the astronomical seasons, the season of heat and the season of cold. Together these four constitute the liturgical calendar of an earthly religion, one which honors the earth and its treasures, and a solar religion, one which honors the nuclear fusion roaring in the furnace of our star, a basic source of energy which makes the earth’s treasures accessible to our bodies.

The calendar shown here hangs on my wall, the solstices made evident by the yellow yolk displaying the hours of sunlight on a given day. The point where the yolk lies closest to the inner circle is today, the summer solstice, and the one furthest away, its polar opposite, near the top, the winter solstice.

This is a day to celebrate the majesty and wonder of photosynthesis, that essential transubstantiation which converts the love of the sun into foods that our bodies can consume. When you look outside today and see green, the color not absorbed by plant leaves and so left over for our eyes as a signal of the miracle, bless them. Bless the leaves and their photosynthetic work, bless the sun which powers it and the plants themselves which mediate between that work and our life. Their work is the sine qua non of our existence. And worthy of our thanks and our praise.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

The Leaf In Place of The Cross

April 20, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

Final post on this series. If you need a symbol of eternal life, let me refer you to the tree leaf and not the cross. In this 74 degree day I just finished scraping the mulch from bulbs I planted last fall. The mulch is tree leaves gathered in the same season.

The leaf works hard from early spring until fall capturing sunlight, drawing up water from the tree’s roots and combining them with CO2 in a true transubstantiation, photosynthesis. When the seasonal change indicates to the tree that conditions will no longer be good for photosynthesis, the leaf detaches from the tree’s vascular system and in so doing, its chlorophyll returns to the tree. This is the moment when the leaf changes color, revealing its other pigments.

As it withers from loss of water, the leaf changes color again and eventually detaches from the tree itself. That’s when I pick it up as a mulch. When I apply the leaf to the newly planted beds, the leaves perform two functions. First, they insulate the bed, retaining the cold into the early days of spring so the earth won’t heave and throw the newly planted bulbs out. Second, they begin to decay and transfer their remaining stores of nutrients and fiber into the soil itself.

In this way the engine of transubstantiation, the leaf, even after it produces oxygen for us to breathe and glucose for the plant to use in its growth, gives up all of itself to the plant community in general, enriching the soil for the next generation.

So the leaf, a most ordinary miracle doer, does in fact what Christian’s claim Jesus can do, that is, give life through their death. You might say that in focusing on the cross Christian’s chose the wrong part of the tree.

Bees, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

All It Requires Is Some Love

April 20, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

Having said all that. (see post below) Reclaiming, celebrating the power of spring’s wonder is an important part of the Great Wheel’s message. What the motif of the dying and rising god suggests (there is legitimate debate around this idea, but it’s not critical to my point here.) is the obvious. Death is a central fact of the human experience, yet it is a fact shrouded in mystery and pain. What exactly is death? Not physiologically, but psychologically, spiritually. What does it mean? If anything. What happens after death to the person who dies?

We just don’t know the answers. This black box characteristic of death makes it so upsetting. Without further knowledge we have to assume that extinction is the basic result. Having had a man die and come to back life with the message that, hey, you, too, can die and still have everlasting life is compelling. The story alone has carried itself into millions, probably billions of heart, easing the mystery for them.

As I said earlier, I can’t see that it matters much. Look at it another way, either Jesus did or did not rise from the dead. If he didn’t, well, we’re back where we started. If he did, and it’s the true sign of a loving God, then that same God will not build a doctrinal fence around the afterlife. It’ll more likely be a heavenly version of y’all come. We did say he/she was a loving god, didn’t we?

So, I’ll pass on all the paperwork and skip straight to the flowers emerging in my garden. Or, perhaps more germane to the story of rising from the dead, I’ll also tend to what I believe is a living bee colony. Yes, I went out today and bees were buzzing all around the hive I thought was dead. Surprised the hell out of me.

Could be honey robbers, but I don’t think so. I’ll have to suit up tomorrow morning and see. Afternoons are not a great time to check bees. They’re coming home and pretty protective.

Yes, I claim in my own soul the emergent joy of each daffodil, each tulip, each crocus, each lily, each iris, each fern, each hosta, each pachysandra, each apple, cherry, plum and pear tree, the magnolia, the gooseberries, the elderberries, the currants, the quince, the strawberries and the garlic, all those members of our family here at Artemis Gardens and Hives. I will rise with each of them, spreading out, greeting the sun, creating new energy from the sun, the soil and the water, bursting with a new season’s vitality.

The virtue for me in this celebration is that it requires no dusty tomes of medieval logic, no interminable meetings to decide the color of the altar banners, no envelopes chucked in a metal plate, no weighty hands pressing down in ordination. All it requires is some love. Shoulda been enough for the church, too.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Holidays, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Apostasy

April 20, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

There are certain holidays when a former minister’s thoughts turn to apostasy. Easter is chief among them. This is the true high holiday of the Christian liturgical year and it is such because it is the resurrection that marks Christianity off from other faiths. And, yes, I know about the dying and rising gods and how Jesus fits that paradigm. I agree it matters. Nonetheless, when you put Christianity on the stage with Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shintoism, the various faiths counted as the Hindu religion, Sikhism, Jainism and whatever I might have forgotten, Christianity distinguishes itself by claiming a man/god who died, then rose from the dead.

It is that unique characteristic that Christians all over the world celebrate on Easter. The resurrection is not only distinctive, it is central theologically to the Christian claim. Christianity moves on from Judaism at the empty tomb. But not before. Until the risen Jesus, Christianity’s story was not remarkable. There were other would-be messiahs. Others had followers and claimed miracles. The teachings of Jesus largely conform to Jewish thought. Even the crucifixion was not remarkable. Other Jews died on the cross, too. This was a common form of capital punishment for the occupying Roman empire.

(George Frederick Watts – Orphée et Eurydice)

No, it is the dying and rising that makes Jesus unique and transformed him into Jesus the Messiah, Jesus Christ. So, to set this claim aside, at least in its ontological sense, is the worst of apostasies. And yet that is what I have done. Am I sure it never happened? No. That’s as impossible as being certain that it did. The shift for me came when I realized whether it had happened or not no longer mattered to me.

What do I mean by that? As one trained in Christian history, biblical scholarship, ethics and theology, I began to find Christianity, in all its forms, even its most liberal, simply too narrow. In my years in the Presbyterian Church I had many good friends, participated in many activities that moved justice forward, but I also struggled with church members and congregations over gay lifestyles and rights, the Vietnam War, income inequality and the privileges of white america.

In itself, of course, that back and forth is not unusual. There were, at the time of my ministry, some 75,000 Presbyterians in the Presbytery of the Twin Cities for which I worked. The Presbytery went as far north as Pine City, as far west as Buffalo, south to the Minnesota border and east a county or so into Wisconsin. That there would be widespreads on matters of public policy is not at all surprising. There were urban/rural differences, liberal/conservative differences, evangelical and liberal theological differences. All quite normal sociologically.

What became clear over time, at least to me, was that the conversation and disputes happened in a sealed dome, a sort of osmotic barrier that surrounded those 75,000 people when they gathered as the church. The barrier filtered out those who could not believe in the resurrection, yes, but it also filtered out, and this is more crucial to me, those who would not conform to the various ideological accretions adhering to denominational institutional life.

(Frederic Leighton-The Return of Perspephone (1891))

Here’s an example. Presbyterians, as Calvinists, were long known for their adherence to predestination, even double predestination. Predestination is a theological form of materialist determinism (a current favorite among some practitioners of hard science) that posits God has determined every thing that happens. Double predestination so-called took this belief to its logical, yet absurd conclusion. God had determined in advance who would be saved and who would not. This particular barnacle had been unstuck from the goodship Presbyterianism by liberal theologians quite a while back though certain branches of the denomination continue to hold the view.

My former boss, Bob Lucas, a great and good man, often warned against “majoring in the minors.” Within the ambit of the church this means don’t fuss with matters not essential, don’t get into conflict over things that are incidental to salvation, the primary purpose of the church. I think another version of this idea goes: In essentials unity, in all else, tolerance.

My position became that Christianity itself, as a movement, was majoring in the minors. It focused on conforming belief, ethics, morality and culture to the idiosyncrasies of a long gone time. That is the effect of seeing biblical material as inspired and the church’s early days as somehow foundational, like the American Constitution. Christianity has expended so much time, wealth, intellectual power and even violence to achieve this conformity, yet a casual step outside that dome, outside the osmotic barrier shows us that the great majority of people need food, medicine, work, public health. Those are the majors.

(The Osiris-bed, where he renews the harvest cycle in Egypt.)

The minors are matters like the crucifixion and the resurrection. Why? Not least because their truth or falsity get trapped within human institutions that use them not for the intrinsic wonder and awe they represent, but as chits in the distribution of power. They simply are not the world altering events they claim to be.

(inanna sumerian goddess annunaki clawed feet is an ancient way to depict the fact she visited the Underworld.)

Commentary on Religion, Family, Memories, Sport

A Secular Sabbath

April 6, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

Sundays have a certain slowness to them, as if time itself moves languidly, the urgency of the workweek drained out. Of course, that’s an inversion of the real phenomena which happens not on Sunday but in the mind when it finds itself in a Sunday way.

Back when I was a small town boy, Sunday meant shining my father’s shoes in the morning before church. While complaining about it. I mean, thirty-five cents for dipping my hands in black shoe polish? Then, off to Sunday School with one teacher or another followed by the Sunday service sitting in the family pew (not reserved, but held for us anyhow by long tradition) under the watchful eye of Jesus praying, his hands on a large boulder, in the Garden of Gethsemane. This was stage right from the pulpit on the west side of the sanctuary.

Afterward, at least for a long time, we would often get in the family sedan, Mary and I in the back, mom and dad up front, and drive over to Elwood (our most bitter athletic rivals, but that didn’t matter to mom and dad) and go to Mangas’ cafeteria. It had those tubular rails with an upraised one at the back to hold your formica tray as you passed by the offerings in small dishes. I remember most the swiss steak, which I loved, and mashed potatoes with butter pooling yellow in the middle.

We would eat, then go home where the rest of the day disappears from memory.

Later, as a city rat, church was a work related experience since my city time is almost exactly coterminous with seminary and my career as a minister. So, I would head off to work on Sunday morning, usually in this church or that since I worked for the Presbytery (a geographical jurisdiction) and when I finished, again Sunday afternoon sort of disappears from memory.

As an exurbanite, I fell into the Sunday afternoon NFL maw for several years, but as of late the Viking’s have cured me of that experience. That means now Sundays have neither church nor the cafeteria nor football and what is left is the residue of passivity Sunday represented in its small town and football eras. No wonder my inner world moves more slowly on Sundays.

It’s my secular sabbath. And I think that’s a good thing.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase, Travel, US History

A Firefly Lit Lane

April 6, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Bee Hiving Moon

Down the well this morning, tapping into the underground stream. Still searching for an image. Something to coalesce the third lifetime, the third phase of this body/mind’s adventure here on earth.

One came to me. Suddenly. But it feels apt. I’ll have to let it set for awhile. Work with it itself in the imagery extension section of the workbook, but it feels pretty good.

The image is of a lane headed back into a woods where the lane continues but with tree branches creating a leafy roof over it. The time is late twilight, the season late summer. The air is cool but humid. And the lane, where it enters the woods, is lit by thousands of fireflies, blinking on and off, shifting locations, providing a weak but real luminescence so I can follow the path into the woods. Because the fireflies are spread out along the path’s length, they also give the lane a feel of depth, as if it proceeds quite a long way into the woods.

This is not a mind birthed image, but a memory. I saw this lane and these fireflies several years ago during a trip to New Harmony, Indiana. I’ve written here about New Harmony before, but just as a reminder, it was founded by the Rappites who created a very successful religious community there in the mid-19th century. Much of New Harmony’s built environment has its roots it that era.

When they moved to Old Economy Village in Pennsylvania, the Welsh industrialist Robert Owen bought the whole town for his utopian community, a quasi-socialist endeavor. He brought with him from Britain a number of scientists and engineers committed to his scheme on a ship dubbed the Boatload of Knowledge. The community didn’t last long, but the U.S. Geological Survey among other things grew out of the efforts of the people who came to New Harmony.

Since that time, New Harmony has continued to have a religious and intellectual bent. In fact, as I looked down the lane into the firefly lit woods, on my left was an open air Episcopal Church designed by famed architect, Philip Johnson and on my right was a small garden marked by tiny drumlins planted with firs and dotted with boulders carved with quotes by Paul Tillich, the Protestant theologian, whose tomb lies there, too, in Paul Tillich Park.

In fact, this aerial photograph shows the spot where I stood between the open air church on the left and Paul Tillich Park on the right, looking north down the lane into what at night was a tree lined bower over an ancientrail leading into an infinite distance. This feels like a perfect third phase image.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Our Land and Home, permaculture

What Is Your Kiva?

March 27, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Spring Hare Moon

Santa Fe. Staying in a reasonably priced motel right in the heart of adobe filled Santa Fe. The cathedral featured in Death Comes for the Archbishop is only a block or two away. I came to Santa Fe after seeing Chaco Canyon.

Due to a weird late night mix up I checked into a motel-cheap-no phone, no wi-fi she said. I didn’t mind. She forgot to add no heat. This in Holbrook, AZ high up just past the Mogollon Rim. 49 when I pulled in. I was too tired to hassle it so I went to sleep.

Fortunately, years of living with Kate have taught me cold sleeping skills. It was fine until I woke up 4 am. I’d never shifting my bed time from home, nor my rising, so the 6 am Minnesota equivalent had me awake. I decided to get in the warm car and drive to Chaco Canyon. Which I did.

This is a haunting place, difficult to get to now as it must have been difficult to get to in the period between 850 a.d and 1150 a.d. when it flourished. It was, for that time period the ceremonial for the pueblo peoples. The architecture of Chaco County shows up in many other pueblo peoples sites, though much more modest in scale.

The Chaco folks built big. And they built stone on stone, with a mud mortar. The construction technique reminded me of dry stone fences in the East.

The part of each person’s inner life that reaches out to a particular patch of mother earth has created thousands of small kivas, I’ll call them. The pueblo people go into the below ground circular stone structures called kiva’s as if returning to the womb. Each time they come out, they’re reborn. So a kiva is a patch of earth where you feel reborn. For me it’s our gardens and woods and orchard, for the pueblo people its Chaco Canyon and the Four Sacred Mountains.

Each patch of earth needs a kiva that holds it dear and feels responsible for its care. And who, in turn, are reborn in the giving of that care by the earth. This is a faith with so many worship sites and the worship is different for each kiva. What kiva do you belong to?

Commentary on Religion, Politics

Disagreeing with the Dali Lama

March 1, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc New (Hare) Moon

For those of us who come down on the introverted side of the extrovert/introvert dialectic, an event like seeing the Dali Lama is a strain. When I got back this morning, it was like I had been at the MIA for a couple of tours. I was drained. Kate would remind me that I’m 67 and, yes, that’s true, but there’s an element of overstimulation, too much of a good thing. At the same time, an interesting morning and worth doing.

I have that slight tingle in my body that says, not yet fully recharged, even after a nap. That will pass. At some point I’ll be left with the image of the Dali Lama in his maroon visor, his remark about loving honey and being reincarnated as a bee, him refusing to bless the crowd, then greeting individuals with a blessing. Talking to Bill and Sister Irene. The long, long lines winding in toward the seating. The early Saturday morning drive.

At first, his blessing individuals after refusing to bless the crowd seemed contradictory, but as I’ve thought about it, maybe not. His answer to change is to point a stubby finger toward his heart, lying somewhere underneath those maroon robes. “First change yourself. Then show compassion to your family. Then your community. Then change will happen.” When he touches an individual, he expresses his personal compassion for them, his blessing. That he can do. To spread that same compassion to an abstraction, like a crowd seems inauthentic, to an individual, no.

I don’t agree with his emphasis on change your self first, nor do I agree with him on his conclusion that education is the answer to world peace. He crooked his index finger and said a tree that grows like this is difficult to change; but, he straightened it, one taught from the beginning…” This sounds right and makes sense in a facile, feel good way, but change is a social, communal affair that requires moving those in power to change their thinking.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with changing your own heart and educating the young in how to grow up compassionate. Hardly. Very, very worthwhile. But.

It will not and has not changed a regime like, for example, China’s ruling communist party. Nor would it have changed Hitler or Pol Pot or will it change the Tea Party crowd in the U.S. Congress. Changing these sorts requires organizing sufficient power to force them to change their ways. Not necessarily revolution, what I’m talking about is the essence of democratic politics, but this kind of change may require revolution.

And education without change in the structure of the economy and patterns of embedded classicism, racism and sexism will not and has not lifted groups out of poverty. Individuals, yes, from time to time, but whole communities? No.

Commentary on Religion, Friends, Woolly Mammoths

A Close Encounter (With Thousands) of the Dali Lama

March 1, 2014 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc New (Hare) Moon

Up very early (for me) for a drive in to the Minneapolis Convention Center. Had to be there by 8 am. To get in line. For a speech that began at 10. Somebody famous, eh? You betcha. His Holiness the Dali Lama.

Frank Broderick got several tickets for his birthday and distributed them according to Frank criteria. I was in the second tier, but benefited from someone else’s not taking him up on the offer.

Two lines, each with hundreds of people in them snaked back and forth, distended caricatures of a pleasant day at your local international airport. After waiting in line for forty-five minutes to an hour, we went through the metal detectors and entered the auditorium. With no one ever checking our tickets.

This was the opening of a Norwegian slanted Noble Peace Prize forum, apparently in its 26th year. Who knew? The forum celebrates laureates and the Dali Lama, being one, was chosen for the keynote opening address.

This auditorium, A, is huge with hundreds, if not thousands of seats and the orchestra level seats were full and much of the tiered seating was full, too. This guy is charismatic, has a sort of rock star appeal.

He’s funny. At least I think so. He had several lines in his opening remarks where he laughed. But the acoustics were difficult and he speaks softly so following the thread of his talk proved beyond this hearing impaired guy.

I did get one part. He talked about his love of honey. “I might,” he said, lifting one hand and creating a small gap with thumb and index finger, “come back as a bee, I like honey so much.” He made these remarks because he apparently had a physical while here and was told as a precautionary measure to cut back on sweet things. Including honey.

He was easier to understand when he sat and took questions, fielded by Cathy Wurzer of NPR. The answer I liked best was, when asked if he would give the gathering his blessing, he hesitated. “I’m Buddhist. The blessing comes from within.”

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

You Are the Fates. You Weave Your Own Destiny.

December 26, 2013 Charles Leave a comment

Winter Winter Moon

Yet another caesura, this between Christmas and New Years. Often a time of let down, regret, self-flagellation as we drive ourselves toward the New Year, whip in hand. Again the self/no-self conversation comes to mind. A good while back I used the image of a jockey riding our day-to-day actions, sometimes encouraging, sometimes holding back, sometimes using the quirt. It’s this image that gives me pause when thinking about the no-self idea. How can I have the clear sense of a guide, a jockey at work and maintain a notion of the no-self?

That is, if there is some part of me, no matter how small, that moves me to conform my actions to some roughly consistent standards or ideals or conceptions (whatever they are), at least that part has to be continuous.

We must be some combination of the two ideas. My jockey is not a super-ego, or at least not only a super-ego. My jockey loves his steed, has an intimate bond with it and wants only the best for it. This is a relationship of love, not control, so all of the jockey’s urgings aim to enrich the life of the mount. The bond between jockey and mount, between crudely put, mind and body, requires some ongoing entity whether that entity be a portion of the mind, a certain kind of body/muscle memory, an unconscious or subconscious cluster of hopes and dreams or whatever.

With the idea of a jockey or guide or a host or a friend of my journey there does come the evanescence of day to day experience, that flood of emotion, experience, thought and action we bathe in constantly. Constantly here means waking and sleeping for our–jockey, guide, host, friend of my journey–never completely walks away from the task.

OK. Let me shift metaphors here, maybe to a better one, our weaver (our own personal norns or fates) constantly has weft and warp threads in hand, shuttle rattling noisily back and forth across the loom weaving the tapestry that is our life. Our weaver does not pluck all the threads (experiences, moments, feelings, thoughts, actions) out of our life to make her art. No, she picks the threads that seem especially significant, or memorable, or important, somehow worthy of affecting the ongoing design.

The design for the tapestry shifts as it is woven, sometimes future threads wind back and alter scenes long wound up and considered done. But note, and here is the no-self aspect, so many threads get dropped, no longer part of the thickness. In this dropping of moments and in the selecting of so few moments to include in the tapestry (think of the total giga-peta-terabytes of information packed into anyone’s lifetime) we discard selves by the millions, the billions and the selves (the you interacting with a particular moment) that the weaver keeps are in a sense so random that the linkages seem not to exist at all. Therefore, no-self.

However, and here is where I end up honoring the idea of the Self, there is the end a tapestry, a tapestry that gives visual shape to the life we have lived. That tapestry of course is who you are at this moment. Which will, following out this metaphor, change as your daily experience changes, sometimes, perhaps often at some points, altering understanding and appreciation of the past and thereby changing the design. The look of the tapestry is never complete, never finished, always liable to change, even drastic change. But there is still a weaver, a hand with the shuttle, working quickly and surely to see that our tapestry is a rich one.

A New Year is not a new year, of course, but a moment in time, an arbitrary moment when we pause, pay attention to the weaver. What’s been added recently? How does the design look? Am I proud of it? Could it use some spiffing up? Perhaps a new image here and there? OK. Let’s see how we can create some new threads.

Let me take this idea one huge step further. Our tapestry gets woven into the ongoing tapestry of our species and will always be a part of this larger work. The hominid tapestry joins itself to the ape and the primate tapestries which in turn get knitted together with the mammalian. You can see how this goes. I’m not proposing a weaver in the sky, not at all, what I am proposing is an ongoing visual image which future conscious beings will be able to see. They will marvel at it.

And, they will be, just like we are, the universe collected in a particular moment and looking back over the whole and saying, “It is good.”