Category Archives: Commentary on Religion

Commentary on Religion, Garden, Great Wheel, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Weather +Climate

Growing Up

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Beltane                                                                   New (Early Growth) Moon

Cold, wet and occasionally sunny the short Minnesota growing season has finally begun.  Our cold weather planting is done, sometime in the next week we’ll put in our tomatoes and peppers.  Then, we wait for the sun to warm the soil, the rain to nourish the roots, carrying nutrients from the soil into the plants, elevatoring it up to the leaves where that true, abundant and necessary miracle photosynthesis will transubstantiate solar energy into the real body and blood.  Each leaf a priest, each plant a diocese.  A garden the whole catholic universe.

It is in here, somewhere, that reimagining faith will finally come home, right down here at that literally elemental level where the chemicals and elements of earth, soldered by sunlight make the essentials for life.  No photosynthesis, no life, at least on the surface of the planet where we live.  I understand there are different processes in the deep sea vents, strange creatures with arsenic in their veins, but up here, in the green world, we depend on–what a weak word–we live or die by this vegetative marvel.

It’s not as if there might not be gods, there may be.  There may be.  But I can think of no god that does more to sustain my life than the least of the leaves.  Here’s the nexus where sin and redemption must occur.  Sin makes our planet less hospitable for these; redemption conserves the planet’s soil, assures the availability of sun light.

(Gods Pantheon.  Ratteau)

Think of the crucifixion each year as soils leach out their nutrients, become so friable that they can blow away in the wind.  Think of the top soil, made fertile over hundreds of years, wasted in a season or two.  Think of the aquifers, draining themselves for our sake with no hope of replenishment in a hundred hundred human lifetimes.

How will we roll away the stone on this deep crime?  Who will stand at the tomb, that fine rising’ up mornin’, when the world cares for its soils and its forests and its lakes and its streams as if life of very life could not do without them?  Someday.  I hope.  Someday.

Commentary on Religion, Myth and Story
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“Concerning the Gods, there are those who deny the very existence of the godhead; others say that it exists, but neither bestirs nor concerns itself nor has forethought for anything. A third party attribute to it existence and forethought, but only for great and heavenly matters, not for anything that is on earth. A fourth party admit things on earth as well as in heaven, but only in general, and not with respect to each individual. A fifth, of whom were Ulysses and Socrates, are those who cry:— _I move not without Thy knowledge!_”
Epictetus

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Translating Metamorphoses

An Old Idea Whose Time Has Come

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Spring                                                                           Bloodroot Moon

In May some docent friends from the class of 2005, a rowdy class and proud of it, will go to
Chicago for a time with the arts scene there.  Like my visit to the National Gallery a couple of weeks ago this too will be an exercise in part in discovering how to keep the arts active and alive in my life.

One of us has decided to offer a mini-tour on an object at the Chicago Art Institute.  I decided I would do one, too.  My plan is to focus on methods of analysis, including the praxis idea I wrote about yesterday.

Ever since I got seriously interested in Ovid, my seminary education in biblical criticism has niggled at the back of my mind.  Why?  Well, biblical criticism, the higher criticism in particular, uses scholarly methodology for exegesis.  Exegesis tries first to get at the plain meaning of the text in its context.  It precedes the task of hermeneutics, that is, interpretation of the text for a contemporary audience.  What’s niggled at me is that neither exegesis nor hermeneutics is peculiar to the study of scripture.

In fact, exegetical method can be applied to other texts, whether in a foreign language or not, just as hermeneutics can be applied to the resulting exegesis.  As this thought persisted I kept wanting to create a method for using exegetical tools designed for literature in the service of art history.

Well, that day has arrived.  “Exegesis includes a wide range of critical disciplines: textual criticism is the investigation into the history and origins of the text, but exegesis may include the study of the historical and cultural backgrounds for the author, the text, and the original audience. Other analysis includes classification of the type of literary genres present in the text, and an analysis of grammatical and syntactical features in the text itself.” wikipedia article

Not sure yet whether I’ll venture into the realm of hermeneutics.  That may, in art, best be left to the viewer.

This also raises another profound idea I learned from the philosopher of religion, Paul Ricoeur, second naivete.  Ricoeur developed this idea to explain how a student of the higher criticism might use its critical methods on scripture, then return to the text later with a second naivete, one that includes the scholarly work, or incorporates it, while at the same time allowing the text to speak again as scripture.

My sense is that the idea applies to analysis of art as well.  That is, we can engage formal analysis, praxis analysis, style and methodological analysis, school, content analysis, then step back from all that and return to the piece with a second naivete which allows that work to enrich our immediate engagement with the work.  Anyhow, this is on my mind right now.

Commentary on Religion

Easter

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Spring                                                                    Bloodroot Moon

It is, astonishing as it is to me, Easter.  In days past this was an important, the important, moment in the year.  The annual celebration of the resurrection of the God who died.  Now it’s another day in a 365 day a year celebration of the earth that lives.

Were Christianity a dead religion, we might look at this day with mythic interest, a holy day reminding each of us that the divine within us, the sacred trust given to us all with the breath of life, might seem to die, but will always rise up victorious.  In ancient days that was what the peoples of Western Europe believed.  But, of course, Christianity is still much alive and spread out now far beyond its Middle Eastern and European concentrations.

Life triumphing over death is a powerful message, perhaps the most powerful message humanity delivers.  Osiris.  The early Chinese emperors.  Even Orpheus and Eurydice, Demeter and Persephone.  It’s a story that needs to be out there, available as a hope, a promise.  Whether the matter goes beyond mythic power into the ontological?  Doesn’t seem likely, but then…

As pesach and Easter come in these months when the season of renewal approaches, so do Chinese new year and the former European Lady Day new years, their vitality meshes well with the orbit of the earth and the power of the vegetative world to bring us hope after the fallow seasons.  This is enough for many of us, but if you require the extra hope that it means something more, well, I hope you had a happy, glorious Easter.

Asia, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Woolly Mammoths

Goin’ In, Fishin’ Around

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Imbolc                                                                      Bloodroot Moon

“Things never were “the way they used to be.”
Things never will be “the way it’s going to be someday.”
Things are always just the way they are for the time being.
And the time being is always is motion.”

— Alexander Xenopouloudakis

Warren, Frank, Bill, Mark, Scott and I gathered at Frank’s for the traditional St. Patrick’s dinner.  It was a light turnout for this always festive meal featuring tonight shamrock shaped ravioli.  This was a mixing of cultures, a bit of culinary diversity.  Otherwise it was the corned beef, cabbage, short bread and potatoes.  What I’ve always imagined as the peak meal in a year for poor Irish folk.  It sure tastes good to this one-half Celtic guy, with half of that coming from the auld sod.

We had an interesting evening discussing what I described as the mechanist versus the vitalist debate.  This is an oldy but goody from the 19th century, a debate very far from over and anyone who follows the neurobiological thinking about the brain will find it much alive in the third millennium.  Here’s a review of Ray Kurzweil’s (the Singularity guy) new book: How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed.  It focuses on this topic through careful thinking about the distinction between the brain and consciousness.

We also had a brief encounter over a topic dug into deep to my psyche, that of our solipsism.  We construct our own reality using sense data, organized and turned into information by the brain, then utilized as part of consciousness to define the world as we experience it.  This solipsism makes the existential argument that existence is prior to essence; that is, that our life is not being human; it is about being ourselves, a particular instance of human.

In a book I’m reading right now:   Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism, and the Inner Life of Artists by Kay Larson (reviewed at this link) the author describes the Zen idea of no permanent identity, no permanent reality, that is, we are what we are in this moment, then what we are in the next moment and so on.  It fits very well with this conversation, the uneasy, slippery grasp we have on who we are as individuals and what we’re experiencing at any one time.  In a sense Zen increases the degree of relativity created by our solipsistic situation to an infinite number of slices, not even necessarily threaded together by an identity.

If embraced, this is deeply disturbing.  It shakes the foundations, as Paul Tillich said.  In fact the earthquake is so severe that intellectual structures built over thousands of years come crashing to the ground and disappear.  We do not like this stripping away of the animal cunning that gives us the illusion of permanence.  What then is left?

Not very damned much.  If embraced, this is profoundly liberating.  Those structures fall to the ground and disappear.  Religion and tradition and politics and culture no longer have power to frame us, shape us, define us.  We are free.  Free in a radical, personal, cosmic sense.  Neither chained to the earth or to the past or to each other, not even to self.

The world moves through and in us, just as we float through and in it.  When I can bring this awareness to consciousness, when I experience it, at first I feel disoriented, tethered no longer.  At moments it seems I (the I of this aware moment) might split apart, shred into molecular portions and drift away.

 

 

 

 

 

Commentary on Religion, Latin, Myth and Story, Our Land and Home, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

A Solid Day

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Imbolc                                                                                 Bloodroot Moon

Missing in the a.m.  About 1/6th done.  As I read, it’s hard not to jump in, start line editing, but getting the story and the transitions and the big picture clear is necessary.  I have to reenter the story when I begin this 3rd rewrite, reenter the story in order to change it.  Only by having it again in mind will I be able to do that.  I can already see the value of this approach.

I have a list of characters, things and places that I’m writing down as I read.  The first time a character appears or a place gets mentioned or a thing like a particular sword gets used.  A long list and I’m only a little ways in.

Translating today went well, two sentences, about 6 verses.

The mechanical inspector came to examine our new furnace.  A cursory look.  “Fine.”  And he was on his way out.  To show though the things you do not know.  He stopped at Kate’s long arm quilter.  “My wife just died.  She was a quilter, left me with a lot of quilting things.”  Then, he buttoned up and left.

Still reading the competition.  Percy Jackson and the Olympians.

And, hey!  How about that Pope.  Argentina, eh?  But, from a good Italian family.  And a Jesuit?  Interesting though.  Look at a graphic  that shows Catholic strength by world region and you will see that it has bulged for some time in the Southern Hemisphere.  As the West has gotten more secular, Africa and Latin America have grown more Christian.  And more conservative.  It will be a while before we can see what this means.

Commentary on Religion

Too Pooped to Pope!

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Imbolc                                                           Valentine Moon

Cybermage Bill Schmidt held the hot hand tonight in Sheepshead.  He just kept winning.  And came out ahead, well ahead for the evening.  The card gods blessed him in his coming and in his going.  My cards were middling.  In the black, but barely.

Since this is three ex-Jesuits, a very engaged Catholic layman, and me, a former clergy, talk turned to the Pope.  One guy thought the headline for Benedict’s resignation should have been:  Too Pooped to Pope!  Great line.

The Vatican has always fascinated me.  Partly the mystery and secrecy, the Vatican library for example.  Partly its nation-state status inside the city limits of Rome.  Partly its peculiar prominence among the world’s religions.  Partly the long history and partly its long reach.  Partly the great outfits.  Surely the great art.

Kate and I sent the thank-you notes for our wedding, penned over the Atlantic on a Pan-Am airliner, from the Vatican Post Office.  We also first had what we call Popeteria salad (mozzarella and tomatoes with basil and olive oil) in the cafeteria of the Vatican Museum.  When we were there in March of 1990, the Last Judgment was still in the process of being cleaned, but the rest was, well, pristine.  Ha, ha.

Michelangelo. Raphael. Bernini. Great and illustrious names in Italian art decorated–decorated–St. Peter’s, the chapels, apartments and even the hallways.  The Vatican is a great monument to the power of the Western artistic vision as well as the power of the papacy and the curia.

Sede vacante.  The chair is empty.  Now the inside ball, politicking without politicking.  Running without running.  Men in cardinal soutanes and small cardinal berettas file in and begin a centuries old tradition, an oligarchy of the church chooses their monarch.

Set aside the metaphysics, this is just plain interesting from a human and organizational and historical perspective.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Travel

Ghosts

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Imbolc                                                                          Valentine Moon

Today, a bit tired due to early rising, moving books put a weight on my shoulders.  It was the past and its tangled feelings.  Found my first passport and saw a young man with a full head of dark brown hair and a beard that matched.  Surprised me, so long have I seen his gray descendant in the mirror.

(arrestedmotion.com 2012 10 upcoming aron wiesenfeld new paintings arcadia-gallery)

That was my passport for Colombia, the trip to check out a bank for the poorest of the poor.  Carolyn Levy was in my life at that point, between my divorce from Raeone and meeting Kate a year plus later.  A hard time, raising a 6 year old boy, working night and day between church meetings and organizing.  A hard time, too, since the future had grown unclear.  Something big had happened or was about to happen, but its outlines in my life were not yet clear.

Then I moved out the books related to shifting my ordination to the Unitarian-Universalist movement.   Again, a time when the future had become unclear.  Writing had not shown the promise it offered when Kate and I agreed I should leave the Presbytery.  Frustrated there, I regressed, headed back to the trade that I knew.  More lack of clarity.

Poor decisions.  I chose Unity UU over First Unitarian for my internship.  An error.   The humanist congregation would have fit me much better.  Then, at the end of an interesting year, I accepted a job as minister of development.  Chief fund raiser.   OMG.  One of the really boneheaded decisions in my life.  Not the only one, for sure, and not the worst one, but dumbest?  Probably.  Kate saw it coming. I ignored her.  Sigh.

(Vincenzo Foppa The Young Cicero Reading 1464)

Those books were the heaviest to move because I’ve traveled out of the UU circle, too.  A solo practitioner am I, as the Wiccans say.  In that vein though I retained many of my books on spirituality, works on natural theology and those commentaries I mentioned on the Torah and the book of Revelation.

Heavy, especially with lack of sleep thrown in.  Ghosts.  They’re real and they live in the closets, basements and attics of our mind.

Commentary on Religion

German Shepherd Heels

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Imbolc                                                                     Valentine Moon

Benedict has bowed out.  Exit stage right, 2/28/2013.  A man who began his papacy less radically than I imagined gained conservative momentum as he stayed in office, facing down Vatican II, modernism (a bit late on that one, I think) and maintaining a wall of episcopal purple between the Church and its accusers.  Failure depends on perspective and intent, so calling him a failure seems premature to me.

He may have realized that the world for which he hungered no longer exists, will not exist.  In that case he would not be a failure, but simply a warrior facing too strong a foe.  A hero of his convictions, if not his results.  It is, of course, to this outsider, a faux-war that he generaled.  Contraception, gays, criminal priests, the vernacular liturgy, the onswelling tide of secular sentiments, all these Benedict saw as problems, problems requiring a marshaling of the troops and tight theological armor.  Yet these are problems only from within a narrowed, puckered understanding of the richness of life.  Except for those criminal priests.

They are a problem, but Benedict saw them as a problem of public relations rather than for what they were, commentary on the Church’s inane devotion to celibacy and its more than archaic understanding of human sexuality.  Not to mention the criminal acts themselves that in their mundane nature challenge the sacred order.  Literally.

As a former church administrator (Presbyterian), I have a good feel for the difficulties the Vatican faces.  Most of their wounds have come self-inflicted, but the pressures from liberal constituents and conservative constituents make consensus only a dream, not even a far away hope.  Benedict chose to lay the power of his office, the levers over which he had direct control to cover up, dismiss and hide from world of our day.  I doubt that his successor will have much better to offer.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Latin, Myth and Story, Poetry, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

A Life Long Passion

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Winter                                                            Cold Moon

“A mythology is the comment of one particular age or civilization on the mysteries of human existence and the human mind…”                                                                                                                                            H.R. Ellis Davidson, Gods and Myths of Northern Europe

A life-long fascination with mythology and its companion fields, ancient religions and folklore, can be explained by this quote.  We have multiple ways of understanding the world, of asking and answering big questions.  In our day science is regnant, queen of the epistemological universe, but it is not enough.  Not now and not ever.

(Charles Le Brun, Fall of the Rebel Angels, 1685)

Science cannot answer a why question.  It can only answer how.  Neither can science answer an ethical question.  It can only speak to the effects of a course of action over another in the physical world.  This is not a criticism of science, rather an acknowledgment of its limits.

Mythologies (usually ancient religions), ancient religions, legends and folklore are our attempts to answer the why questions.  They also express our best thinking on the ethical questions, especially folklore, fairy tales in particular.

Where did we come from and why?  “1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth, 2 the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters. 3 Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.”  NRSV

(edward_burne-jones-the_last_sleep_of_arthur)

Want to live a good life?  Live like Baldr or Jesus or Lao Tze or Arthur.

How can we tell a just society from an unjust one?  Look at the 8th Century Jewish prophets.  Look at Confucius. (not a religion, yes, but functions like one)  Look at the Icelandic Sagas.  Different answers in each one.

I fell in love with these complex, contradictory wonderful narratives when I was 9 years old, maybe a bit younger.  Aunt Barbara gave me a copy of Bullfinches’ Mythology.  I loved Superman and Batman and Marvel Comics.  I was an attentive student in Sunday School and later in seminary.  Over time I’ve come to recognize this fascination as a ruling passion in my life, one that guides life choices with power in my inner world.

It will not, I imagine, fade.  It means writing fantasy is a work of great joy and a hell of a lot of fun.