Category Archives: Commentary on Religion

Aging, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Politics, Sierra Club, US History, Weather +Climate

On the Margins

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Samhain                                                                  Winter Moon

We’re in the dark period of the year, the time when the Winter Solstice stands out even among long nights as longer and deeper. Tonight, all Solstice eve, it’s 4:30 pm and twilight fell a while ago.  Snow comes down, adding to an inch or so to what we got over last night, all accumulating on top of the snows of early December.

Let me demonstrate how odd my religious situation is.  When my doctor, Corrie Massie, asked me what plans I had for Christmas, without thinking, I said, “We’re Jewish.”  Now we’re Jewish in that I support Kate’s Judaism, but what I really meant was, “I don’t celebrate the Christian holiday.”  Didn’t want to start with the whole theological narrative in my doctor’s office so my unconscious answered.  Not a lie, just not the whole truth.

No elevator speech for following the rhythmic cycles of nature, for celebrating not transcendence but immanence.  No quick way to say I’m an outlier here, too, standing on the margins of religion.  So often I find myself in conversations where I just don’t want to go through the whole analysis to explain myself.

Yes, too much carbon dioxide is, will be a problem. The unseemly gathering of wealth threatens the fabric of our culture.  No, I’m not really a Democrat and am planets away from Republicans.  Tea Party?  Different universe.  No, I don’t use pesticides.  Yes, we grow a lot of our own food and keep bees.  Oh, and I have a son in the Air Force who now has aspirations to become a general officer, to make sure authentic folks have their say.  No, mining minerals on the border of the Boundary Waters Wilderness does not make sense.  Socialism and single-payer health from Mark Odegardcare?  Sign me up.  I’m glad China and the rest of Asia have begun to grow strong.  I love the U.S.A.  Cable television?  Cut the cord.  That sort of thing.

I guess I’m at an age where I’m living the life I chose and choose, yet no longer have that evangelical zeal for my decisions.  Maybe because I recognize more and more how many right answers there are.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Holidays, Myth and Story, Sierra Club, Weather +Climate

Repent Or Face Damnation

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Samhain                                                                      Winter Moon

Samhain ends tomorrow with the arrival of the Winter Solstice.  The long fallow season following Summer’s End fades into the coldest months of the year.  Here in Minnesota the coldest days of the year begin on December 1st, meteorological winter; the old calendar reflects a different climate situation in Ireland and Britain.  Still, that calendar and its larger cultural context is the one which continues to influence our holy day practices.  Christmas comes on the celebration of Sol Invictus, the all the conquering sun, a Roman holy time set by the coming of the Winter Solstice.

Paul Strickland heard a Christian talk radio show lamenting the re-emergence of Winter Solstice celebrations and complaining that everyone knows Christmas came long before such pagan holy days.  We all laughed.  Christmas is a late addition to the Winter Solstice celebration collection and not a very important holiday among Christians until the Victorian era.

When Samhain ends at the Winter Solstice, the old growing season shifts from the death and desiccation of fall into decay and enrichment, preparing the way as the light begins to increase.   When Persephone returns to the Underworld to rule with Hades, the active forces of the soil begin their work in earnest, breaking down the fallen, dead and rotting materials into rich nutrients that feed soil organisms and will feed plants when Persephone returns home to her mother Demeter in the spring.

James Hillman said we see the gods today in our pathologies and I suppose that’s true in his sense, but the gods of polytheism suffered their Nietzschean fate long ago and have come again in more than psychological ways.

As Paul Ricoeur suggests, Christian’s familiar with biblical scholarship might return to the texts with a second naivete and see them once again as holy; so, I would suggest that the gods and goddesses of polytheism have long since resurrected, once again ready to offer themselves to us. All we need is our second naivete to see them. They can help us follow the recurring cycles of nature and understand them as powerful and dynamic realities, ones to which we owe allegiance.

Our blasphemy toward the old gods has created environmental havoc. We wantonly pollute–in the religious as well as the chemical sense–Poseidon’s ocean, Persephone and Hades’ soil, Zeus’s sky and even Aurora’s dawn.  Perhaps only Apollo’s Sun has escaped our meddling.

We are heretics to the old religions and we have paid the price.  If we do not repent, it will lead, as the logic of religion suggests, to our damnation.

 

Commentary on Religion, Commentary on the news, Politics, US History

Sexism and Privacy

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Samhain                                                                        Winter Moon

Snowden did us all a good turn.  I don’t see others saying it, so I will.  It’s no accident that a US Judge for the first time applied the 4th amendment to the NSA’s actions.  Without Snowden’s leaks we would have no idea how far this opaque bureaucracy had gone in eroding our privacy rights.  We could not have a debate about the reasonable limits of super snooping with cyber tools. Though computer surveillance was not imaginable in the Revolutionary era, abuses perpetrated by the powerful were.

Franklin’s famous quip applies here:  “They who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”  the original quote according to this wiki site.

Also, how about those Catholics?  Did John Nienstedt really touch a confirmand’s butt? Who knows?  What is known is that the Nixon lesson is difficult to learn for those in positions of power.  The cover up is often worse than the crime.  That’s true in this case.

Why?  Well, covering up sexual abuse by priests is on the face not as bad as the act itself; but, when that cover up allows known offenders to circulate through different parishes and ministries with the laity ignorant, then the cover up facilitates the abuser, gives them opportunities to offend they would not have had in a transparent system.

This is an old boy’s club where a wink here and a nod there pass for scrutiny.  Much like the NSA.

One more place where secrecy and male domination protect abusers.  The military.  When rapists know their crimes will go up the chain of command, up the ladder in a buddy system, then the logic of deterrence due to exposure lessens.  A lot.

In all three of these large institutions run by men the rationalizations of the powerful take precedent over the needs of the powerless.  This is sexism in the service of sexual abuse and the erosion of personal privacy.  Considered from one perspective sexual abuse is, too, a dramatic case of the erosion of personal privacy.

Where is the Ed Snowden in the Archdiocese of Minneapolis/St. Paul?  They need to step forward, files and computer discs in hand.  We need them.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Memories, Music

Holiseason Begins to Put the Pedal Down

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Samhain                                                              Thanksgiving Moon

We’re in that pre-holiday time when the air begins to take on a certain quality.  It’s part hope for a Thanksgiving (this time) that we both recall and imagine, a desire for an ideal time with family, with busyness, with good food and good memories made.

There are those other times, the times before, when the magazines had turkeys in their ads and the Whitehouse spared a turkey.  This year it will be a Minnesota turkey.  The times when we all had to put on our Sunday clothes even though it was Thursday and drive to an Aunt’s or to Grandma’s or to a friends.  Football and stuffing, a browned turkey and mashed potatoes.  Too many people around a too small table.  That drowsy, sleepy feeling, a tryptophan haze.  The turkey drug.

Those times mesh with hope, give it a flavor, a scent, a sound, a cast.  Those are, for me at least, good memories.  They give the time, this time, a pleasant before hand buzz, a family inflected smile.

This is holiseason.  It has these moments one after the other.  Times when others and the world of commerce and the world of religion and the world of small children all begin to bang into each other, making the world merry.  Yes, it’s chaotic and capitalistic. No doubt of that.  But it’s also fun, filled with good songs and lights.  Gifts and cold weather.  At least here.  Not so much in Singapore and Muyhail.

To all of you headed over the hills and through the woods.  Have fun.  Eat too much.  Laugh a lot.  Drive safely.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Literature, Memories, MOOCS, Myth and Story, Writing

The Narrative Fallacy

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Samhain                                                             Thanksgiving Moon

Narrative fallacy.  I read about it first last night in a book on Amazon.com called “The Everything Store.”  Jeff Bezos refers to it as a construct he read in the book, “The Black Swan.”  It struck me as very post modern.

Here’s how I understand it.  The narrative fallacy occurs when we use our logical, cause and effect seeking mental habits to place often chaotic events in a series that we can understand.  This means leaving out details, rearranging troublesome sequences, condensing complex interactions.  We make a story out of the data available to us.

I haven’t read the Black Swan but I imagine this is how Black Swans (big problems that seem to come out of nowhere) slip under the perceptions of people trying to evaluate risks.

This squares with an especially nettlesome idea in current neuroscience (the author may have gotten it from that source) that suggests our self is a narrative fallacy.  That is, our self is a story we construct out of certain pieces of our life, knitting this into the fabric and leaving that out.  In this view the self is not solid and unchanging, it’s not even relatively solid but changing slowly over time.  No, the self is fluid from beginning to end, a long long novel with ourselves in a starring role, but the script keeps getting handed to us, marked up with changes.

This partly comes from the plasticity of memory and the proven unreliability of human memory.  We now know eye witnesses, once the gold standard of detective fiction and fact, are the least likely to portray events accurately.  Not because the eye witnesses lie, but because our capacity to remember events as they happened is poor.  Emotions skew them, bias skews them, our senses feed us less than reliable data.  We’re a walking hodge podge of experiences.

(sarah fishburn)

The narrative fallacy neatly explains the role of story.  As Bill Schmidt’s Tom Clancy quote says, “Fiction is not like reality.  Fiction has to make sense.”  A key role of fiction is to reassure us of the intelligibility of the world.  The world is not, in fact, intelligible.  There’s just too much going on.  We have to edit our experience to have any hope of using it to our advantage.

Why is it post modern?  Because post modernism (I’m not convinced this is a very good term.) insists on the unreliability of any narrative. [think about this idea in relation to the photograph below of a Traditional Catholic service in Kitchener, Ontario] As a direct corollary of this, though, there is the role of agency, the role of narrative creator.  That gives all of us a key role in constructing the future we want.  We can claim neither fundamentals from so-called foundational documents or ideas, nor can we rely on history as other than story; but, we can rely on the necessity of our role in creating a new story, one constructed in a way that seems to us true, just and fair.  Even beautiful.  Knowing that none of these categories are more than markers for working or not working.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Myth and Story, Our Land and Home

Crossing Over

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Samhain                                                               Samhain Moon

Javier delivered three wheelbarrows of two-year dry oak.  I’ve cut up the ironwood and cedar, split and stacked them.  This morning I cut five four foot lengths off the ironwood’s branches and upper trunk.  They will not be split and will go on the outside of the bonfire. The heat of the fire will ignite them through the bark and they’ll provide a long-lasting flame.

Kate’s gathered together makings for smores, mulled cider and snacks.  She’s also drilled pumpkins with arrows, clever and cute.  She’s also found fall color napkins and plates.  We’ll have bottled water and a warming house, complete with crystal chandelier that used to hang over the piano.

The center piece of the evening will be the fire.  And I’m planning a big one.  We’ve had a wet week so the fire danger is nil.

Doesn’t sound like too many folks can make it. Andover creates a good deal of resistance for city folk, the distance a good ways for an evening out.  We’ve gone low key with this one anyhow, figuring we’d learn what kind of work is necessary to pull one off.  We plan a winter solstice bonfire and one for Beltane, too.  We may skip the summer solstice due to the potential for fire problems.

(welsh holy well)

Tonight the ancestors can move more freely from the Otherworld, as can the folk of faery. At least so my Celtic ancestors believed.  It is interesting to consider that Mexican and Latino cultures also celebrate a similar idea as do some in the Christian church.  The anthropologist in me says that means there’s something here, something the folk beliefs have recognized, perhaps in some precognitive way.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Our Land and Home, Third Phase

Samhain, 2013

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Samhain                                                                    Samhain Moon

Tonight is Samhain, also known as All Hallow’s Eve, and Halloween.  An abbreviated thick description (see post below for thick description) for this Samhain, in this place, 3122 153rd Ave N.W., Andover, Minnesota could begin with any aspect gathered in to this day and its night, but we’ll begin with the firepit.

Kate and I hired Javier Celis to finish a firepit begun several years before by me, worked on by brother Mark two years, but needing some finishing work.  Javier and his crew made the granite paving stones, from a cobbled street in Minneapolis, into a neat circle, lined the firepit with ground stone and put crushed marble around the outside of it.  They also laid down landscape cloth and thick mulch over the entire area, a former compost pile.

Kate’s family had a firepit in their home in Nevada, Iowa and we both enjoyed them at other’s homes.  The firepit hearkens back to campfires of native americans and pioneers here in the U.S., warming, lighting and provided heat for cooking.

The fire itself pushes back further to a fundamental separation between hominids and their close primate relatives, the domestication of fire.  Who knows how it happened? Embers from a lightning struck tree conserved overnight by accident?  A fire on the veldt which left grasses aflame and led to their use as early kindling?  This basic transition, an elemental moment, as essential to our future as a container for water, lives on in our fascination with fireplaces and bonfires.

Bonfires, especially, may be linked, probably are linked, to the fear of night stalking predators, meat eaters for whom human meant food.  So we feel safe around a bonfire, huddled around it, just a bit of the thrill left over when that thrill came from the very real possibility of death by fang or claw.

In the Celtic tradition, which we celebrate tonight, the bonfire had sympathetic magic at its core.  In the spring, on Beltane, the fire transferred its vital energy to the soil where it could quicken the seed and ensure a successful planting.  The opposite end of the year, Summer’s End, or Samhain, finds the bonfire a way of ensuring our warmth and protection from the cold and hungry months ahead.

My Celtic roots run through Ireland, the Correls, and through north Wales, the Ellises, and, perhaps, through County Kent, the Keatons.  The Correls came as potato famine immigrants in the late 19th century and we have no information about the Keaton immigration though it might have been in the same era.  The Ellises we know came here first in 1707 when Richard Ellis was put ashore by a greedy sea captain, sold as an indentured servant to pay his fare.  His mother had paid his fare in Dublin, Ireland where her husband, a captain in William and Mary’s occupying army, had recently died.

Searching in my own and the more general Celtic past led me to the Great Wheel of the Year.  It has gradually become a center point for reimagining my faith, helping me find the rhythms of the year and of human life as key sacred moments.  Thus it is, at least in part, that we go to our firepit this year, to build a bonfire and say the names of our ancestors, standing there around the universal symbol of human protection, warming our hands and waiting as the Great Wheel turns from the bounty of the growing season to the Great Rest of the fallow time.

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

God is the zocalo of Western religious life.

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Fall                                                                     Samhain Moon

 

Last night I dreamed of a place where reality could be reconfigured only by imagining.  Though I don’t remember many specifics, I do remember that at the close of the dream I wondered if the same process could put us in different historical eras, not just different places in current time.

This led, after waking, to a continuation of the dream space to the matter of the modern and post-modern, much on my mind these days thanks to the two MOOCs I’m taking. Having read Wittgenstein on language games from his Philosophical Investigations and his attendant critique of the really real as inaccessible at best since words do not hook onto reality, only other words (a paraphrase), somehow the Zocalo came to mind.

Kate and I visited Mexico City in the 1993.  It impressed me then that at the very center of the Federal District, with the National Cathedral on one side and the National Palace on the other was a vast empty space, the zocalo.   The idea of a country with a vast open square at the very heart of its national culture appealed and appeals to me.

Mexicans fill the zocalo often.  On September 15th at 11 pm, the President comes out on a balcony of the National Palace and delivers a grito, a cry that remembers the “grito de Delores” or the cry of Mexican independence first heard in the small town of Delores.  At other times the military parades through the zocalo.  Recently it has been filled with striking teachers trying to turn back education reform.  Each spring equinox Mexico’s ethnic groups, la raza, fill the zocalo with a celebration through which they assert their critical importance to the nation as a whole.

With Wittgenstein in the background and in particular his emphasis that meaning is use, that is, we learn the meaning of our language from the contexts in which we use it, the zocalo and God suddenly merged.  God is the zocalo of Western religious life.

What do I mean?  God is the empty square at the heart of Western religious and political culture.  Over the course of two thousand years various groups from Judaism to Christianity to Muslims and many, many diverse splinters of all these groups have gathered in the square to give their grito.  At the time they fill the square they occupy the center of the culture’s awareness. (Note:  this is not at all, to the contrary in fact, a truth claim about what they say there.)

This same square also receives those who would fill it with alternative metaphysical or anti-metaphysical ideas.  Nietzsche, God is dead.  The square was empty and continues to be empty.  Nature is god.  The pantheists.  Even those who would entertain the world of many gods, contemporary polytheists like Wiccans and Astruans, have to enter the God/zocalo to make their proclamations over against this central Western idea.

This means that God is, for the group occupying the God/zocalo, what they say God is. That is, the way they use the concept of God in the square is what God is to them.  Use gives meaning.  Context gives meaning.

How is this helpful?  It helps me understand that faith, that word I’ve been trying to reimagine over the last couple of years, is not about a transcendental claim at all, but rather is a pledge to walk into the God/zocalo with a particular group and, while there, to abide by their understanding.  Faith is an initiatory passage into culture, not a passageway to the really real.  Said another way faith is agreement with claims about the really real made by a particular group when they inhabit the God/zocalo.

As long as you remain within that group, their language will be useful to you as a shared agreement about what spreads outward from the zocalo.  In Mexico City it is Mexico and Mexicanness.  In the Presbyterian occupation of the zocalo it is the presbyterian form of church government, John Calvin, local presbyteries and congregations, the Book of Order, ordination exams, elders, presbytery meetings, General Assemblies.

 

 

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion

The Sacred and The Profane

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Fall                                                                         Harvest Moon

Kate and I ate at Gather last night before seeing Episode 1, the Nature Theater of Oklahoma production in the Walker’s McGuire Theater.  We had a table beside the window that projects out over the side walk, giving a panoramic view of the Basilica, St. Marks Episcopal, Hennepin Avenue Methodist, Loring Park and part of the Sculpture Garden while Hennepin Avenue, filled with bustling cars and bicyclists and individuals walking, walking ran just below.

On the east side of Hennepin, the location of the three churches, the transcendent has precedence.  And the past.  The deep Western past. On the west side of Hennepin though modernity has sway.  The noumenal realm swept away in favor of the phenomenal, the religious by the secular, the surface and the particular gaining favor over the ideal.  It fascinates me that we have here in our built environment such a bald dividing line and that that line either begins or ends in a cemetery and disappears among the industrial detritus of the early part of the last century.

Hennepin Avenue runs roughly north and south in front of the Walker Art Center, coming up from Lakewood Cemetery, then taking a gentle right, curving until it runs east and west through downtown Minneapolis and across the Mississippi to peter out among the brick warehouses, off brand filling stations and small manufacturing businesses of east Minneapolis.

( CLAES OLDENBURG, COOSJE VAN BRUGGEN   Spoonbridge and Cherry, 1985-1988)

 

Right at the Walker though it creates an interesting division between then and now, past and prologue, the modern and the pre-modern.  On the west side, fittingly, sits the Walker Art Center, a premier museum of contemporary art with a wide-ranging performing arts program that brings globally significant musicians, dance, theater and film to the Twin Cities.  North of the Walker building complex is a sculpture garden filled with modern and contemporary sculpture including the iconic spoonbridge and cherry.

On the east side of Hennepin, beginning diagonally south from the Walker and in order moving toward the north are Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church, St. Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral and then the Basilica of the Archdiocese of Minneapolis and St. Paul. These churches are, respectively, dominant congregations in the case of Hennepin Avenue and St. Marks and the second congregation of Roman Catholicism in the state. (after the Cathedral of St. Paul)

These days I find myself a west of Hennepin sorta guy.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Weather +Climate

A Coarse, Tactile Spirituality

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Lughnasa                                                                    Harvest Moon

While out preparing beds for bulb planting later this fall, I thought over the post I’d made below.  Spirituality is not the best word for describing what I was talking about, I realized. At least it’s not in metaphysical terms.  I’m talking about a here and now, sensory delivered experience.

In a broader sense, and as I think it is often used, spirituality refers to a mode, event, ritual that makes present, even if momentarily, our connectedness.  In traditional religious circles that connectedness links up to what Kant would have called the noumenal realm, the realm beyond our senses.  Nietzsche put a stop sign to philosophical consideration of the noumenal, a problem for Western philosophy since the Platonic ideal forms, when he said God is dead.  That is, the noumenal realm is not and never was accessible.  If it ever was at all.

Using spirituality in this latter sense–the revelation of connectedness however it comes–then my use of it was just fine.

Just now I looked out my study window and to the north the sky was black and to the east a sickly green cast hoovered near the horizon.  When my eyes read that green, my stomach sank, just a bit, the fear engendered by growing up in tornado alley struggling to assert itself, demand my attention.  Survival at stake!   Red alert.  This was a moment of awe, a reminder of the power nature can bring to bear.  It was a spiritual moment in its sense of immediate connectedness between my deepest inner self and the world within range of my vision.

These are small epiphanies, yes, but they are available. This coarse, material spirituality, tactile in its immediacy reminds me, in definitive manner, of who I am and of what I am a part.  Do I need more?