Category Archives: Commentary on Religion

Art and Culture, Asia, Commentary on Religion, Family

OK. Here’s The Guy To Blame.

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Summer                            Waxing Grandchildren Moon

Ruth and Gabe have napped, like Grandpop and Granma.  This means they have considerably more energy.  Gabe covered a complete circuit of the patio to front door run, moving as fast as his stubby little legs and slightly forward leaning motor could take him.  I was in hot pursuit.  By hot I mean dew point that is absurd from a Minnesota perspective.  Gabe did not seem deterred.

Ruth and Grandma, in other news, had feathered boas and performed various short versions of 1920’s flapper era music.  The show moved upstairs only a moment ago.

Jon has the trailer attached to his car.  It will travel to Colorado and not return except under unusual circumstances.  He needs it for his remodeling and his fledgling custom ski business.  It’s absence frees up space in the third garage bay.  I know, I can’t believe we have three garage bays either.  If you come to our house from the west, it looks like we are pets of three internal combustion driven machines who have the big home.

Due to a spotlight event tomorrow and an America’s public tour immediately after, I’ve had to study while the grandkids are here.  This morning I read the material on the butterfly maiden kachina and this afternoon I read about Tlingit culture and house screens.  The Hopi faith tradition fascinated me as I learned more about it.  They have a tradition of peaceful living, living that consciously seeks a balance with the natural world and all living things.  The Tlingits have a similar perspective.

In listening to a set of lectures titled Religions of the Axial Age, I’ve learned that it may have been Zoroaster who pushed Western culture away from a natural, earth centered faith and toward a pantheon, adherence and propitiation of which had a direct correlation to eternal life.  Which was, at least according to this guy, also a Zoroastrian notion.  By developing the notion of a messiah, an end-times judge, and, along with it, the idea of an apocalypse, Zoroaster stuck us with the linear understanding of time.

(a tower of silence where zoroastrians exposed their dead to vultures and decay)

Give me the kachinas who come back from their home in the San Francisco Peaks for a six month period beginning around the winter solstice ready to help out.  Makes much more sense to me.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Memories, Myth and Story

An Entrance to Faery

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Summer                              Waning Strawberry Moon

My cards were good.  I won some hands.  But.  Boy, did I screw up when I took a chance on a hand where winning would have offered double points, but losing, as I did, with below a minimum, quadrupled the penalty.  Ouch!  Sigh.

The night was glorious.  A warm summer night, a clear sky, the kind of night when everyone is a child, just waiting for the other kids to come out, to play one last game, perhaps wave a sprinkler around or sit down and talk.

A night much like the one I experienced in New Harmony, Indiana when I walked down a lane past the only open air Episcopalian church in the country, designed by Phillip Johnson.  This astonishing church is on one side of a lane that runs back into a woods.  Just across the lane, behind a wonderful small restaurant, The Red Geranium, is a grove of conifers planted on small drumlins.  Inside a modest maze created by these trees lies, improbably, the grave of one of the 20th centuries finest theologians, Paul Tillich.

It was just after dusk, night had come softly, but definitely.  The lane only ran for no more than half-mile on past the church and Tillich’s grave.  As I wandered back, moving away from the main street and toward the woods that lay at the end of the lane, I began to notice the fireflies.

Right where the lane met the woods, fireflies congregated, blinking off and on, creating an arc of bioluminescence.  Then others began to blink, further back in the woods.  There were thousands of them and as the ones further in began to blink they created the effect of a tunnel of light, blinking on and off.

(this pic is similar, not the night I describe)

Walking toward this between two holy places, the possibility that this was an opening to faerie seemed very plausible, even likely.

I stood there for over a half an hour, neither entering the woods, nor leaving the lane, captured as I was by the sense of a veil between the worlds opened where I was.

Aging, Asia, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Friends, Humanities

Gyatsho Tshering: My Friend

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Summer                                     Waxing Strawberry Moon

Gyatsho Tshering* died a year ago  today.  He left his wife and daughter who live in a neat  home in a first ring suburb of Minneapolis, Columbia Heights.

Regret is not a big part of my vocabulary.  What’s past is  past and cannot be changed.  A healthy life, I tibetflagbelieve, leaves yearnings for past deeds, past achievements and lost loves behind us, where, I believe, they belong.

I do have regrets about Gyatsho.  Read the material below and  you will learn what an amazing man he was.  I sat in a class with him on South and Southeast Asian Art that he, no doubt, could have taught himself.  He was a shy man, a bit introverted, although that could have been partly his immersion, late in life, in U.S. culture.

He loved to share his knowledge, to speak from within his own experience and learning.  He was a sweet man, and, as I told Scott Simpson today, I don’t meet many sweet people, a result, no  doubt, of the company I keep.

We had plans, Gyatsho and I, but we both tarried in fulfilling them.  I was going to eat at his house, learn more about Tibetan Buddhism, just spend time with him.  He didn’t call.  I didn’t call.  Then, he died.  Tarrying has a cost.

As a result, I went to his house today with a lump in my throat, a combination of grief and yearning, grief for Gyatsho’s absence and yearning for the time we did not get to spend together.

Tibetan Buddhists, as in the Jewish tradition, commemorate a loved one on the anniversary of the death.  Monks come to chant, friends and family prepare food, people sit on folding chairs and eat from styrofoam plates using plastic spoons and forks.  Sound familiar?

Gyatsho’s gracious wife,  Namgyal Dolma, received guests and guided us in the ritual.  Scott, Yin and I went in, one at a time into the tiny corner bedroom transformed into a small temple with thangkas and prayer flags, an altar with offerings and the monks on low cushions and the smell of incense.  The chanting was remarkable, mesmerizing.  I wanted to be there, bowing first to the monks, hands folded in a namaste like position, then to the altar.

The chanting fell over me like a shroud, no, like a prayer shawl, a tefillin.  It moved me into a sacred space at once, the repetition soothing.  One of the monks, thick of shoulder with a magenta robe crossed over one shoulder, the other shoulder bare chanted in two tones, the throat singing that has gained some fame here.  The other three, with magenta robes and gold, chanted in a single tone.  They began at 10:00 am and will end around 5 pm, with, as Namgyal said, a break for lunch.

Namgyal said, “He was my husband,” she paused, “and my teacher, too.  He still lives here.”  Her hands swept over her body.  Me, too.  In a much less intense way of course, but his presence lives on for me, as well.

In a setting back home in Dharamsala or Tibet the monks would have been at one end of a long room, the food and the guests distributed further back.  Every one would pray.  In the more cramped conditions of a 1960’s working class suburban home, the whole became fragments:  the monks in the corner temple room, the guests outside under an amazing orange tent, food being cooked in the garage with propane burners and woks.

So, yes, I admit it.  I regret not pursuing with more vigor and intention my relationship with Gyatsho.  Not many, but this is one.

*Obituary: Gyatsho Tshering, Eminent Scholar of Tibetan Studies
Phayul[Monday, June 29, 2009 12:17]

by Bhuchung K. Tsering

His Holiness the Dalai Lama inspecting the Library’s construction plans with former director of LTWA Mr Gyatso Tsering (Left) (Photo: Tibet.net/file)

His Holiness the Dalai Lama inspecting the Library’s construction plans with former director of LTWA Mr Gyatso Tsering (Left) (Photo: Tibet.net/file)

Gyatsho Tshering, former director of the Library of Tibetan Works & Archives and a respected scholar, passed away on June 25, 2009 at a hospital in Minneapolis, MN, after a brief illness. He was 73.

Born in 1936 in Sikkim to Lobsang Lama and Nyima Dolma, he finished his college education from the University of Calcutta. Following his studies, Ku-ngo Gyatsho la worked in the Ministry of External Affairs and the Ministry of Home Affairs of the Government of India, and had served at the Indian Mission in Lhasa. He also served in the Government of Sikkim.

He joined the service of the Central Tibetan Administration in 1963 and worked in various departments until his retirement in the late 1990s. He served in the publications and translation department in 1965. In 1966 he was transferred to the Foreign Department and in 1967 to the Department of Religion and Culture. During his stint there he was a member of the entourage of H.H. the Dalai Lama during his first trip to Japan and Thailand. Subsequently he was promoted as a Secretary in the Department and later as Assistant Kalon. In 1972, he became the acting Director of the newly established the Library of Tibetan Works & Archives (LTWA) until the appointment of Prof. Thubten Jigme Norbu as the Director in June of that year. He was appointed by His Holiness the Dalai Lama as the new Director of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in 1974 and served in that capacity from March 1, 1974 until his retirement. Following his retirement he joined his wife, Namgyal Dolma, in the United States and they settled in Minneapolis, MN.

He was an unassuming individual who shunned publicity, but was totally dedicated to his work. He came to serve the Tibetan community during those years when there was a dearth of educated Tibetans with adequate knowledge of the English language or exposure to the world. His most significant contribution would be the development of LTWA as the pre-eminent center for Tibetan studies internationally. He nurtured several Tibetans in the field of Tibetan studies at the LTWA. Also, it may not be incorrect to say that almost all of the Tibetologists serving in various research institutes and universities throughout the world currently have had some educational stint at the LTWA during his tenure there.

His simplicity and his readiness to be of assistance endeared him to all those he came in contact with. Personally, he has been a source of encouragement to me from the time I started working in Dharamsala in the early 1980s. I benefitted greatly from his advices.

As a subject of Sikkim and a citizen of India, Ku-ngo Gyatsho la had quite many work opportunities, often with more attractive compensation than the one he was getting at the LTWA. However, his reverence and loyalty to His Holiness the Dalai Lama and his love of the Tibetan people made him reject all such job offers and to continue with his work in the Tibetan community.

He liked gardening and used to have a neat but small garden at his official residence at the LTWA.

He is survived by his wife Namgyal Dolma and daughter Yiga Lhamo.

A Home for the Tibetan Mind: The Legacy of Gyatsho Tshering

Phayul[Wednesday, July 01, 2009 18:59]

by Rebecca Novick

When the young Gyatsho Tshering approached the Tibetan government with the idea to build a library he was told that he was crazy. “They said, ‘This is impossible. You’re just dreaming.’” Tshering could see their point. “But I am a dreamer. I just go on trying and trying.”

Gyatsho Tshering (1936 - 25th June 2009)

Gyatsho Tshering (1936 – 25th June 2009)

It was 1967, during the early and challenging days of exile. The re-established Tibetan government, overwhelmed and under-funded, was struggling to provide for 100,000 traumatized and penniless refugees, flooding over the Himalayas fleeing the Chinese occupation. But Tshering had his sights set further than the immediate needs of food and shelter.

Tibetan Buddhist texts had been arriving in the sub-continent across Tibet’s borders since 1959—carried on the backs of these same refugees. Tshering was profoundly impressed by how many people, only able to bring with them what they could carry from their homes, chose to rescue dharma objects from their altars; pechas (Buddhist texts) statues and thangkas (sacred scroll paintings) rather than items of monetary value.

Tshering was deeply concerned that the millennium-old heritage of Tibetan wisdom was being destroyed by Communist forces in Tibet. Inspired by the stories of the great library of Alexandria in ancient Egypt built to house the knowledge of the world, he wanted to create a safe repository to preserve “the skill of the Tibetan mind.” He finally took his “impossible” dream to His Holiness the Dalai Lama who gave the project his blessing. “He was very pleased,” Tshering recalls. “He said, ‘Why not? Go ahead.’”

But there were a few considerations. Firstly, there was no money. “We didn’t have any funds,” said Tshering. “Not one cent. Not one penny.” During visits to the West, he would always try to bring up his vision with potential supporters. He was repeatedly, if politely, turned down, with the explanation that the library would be a religious rather than educational establishment. But Tshering refused to become disheartened and he eventually found an ally in the Catholic Church that understood the importance of religious archives. “They were very generous,” he said. After this, other funders gradually began to come on board.

The texts that managed to survive the punishing conditions of high altitude passes and a rugged month-long trek in the packs of Tibetans dodging Chinese bullets, formed the library’s very first collections which can still be seen today. Manuscripts were landing on Tshering’s desk battered and torn, with missing pages and passages smudged beyond recognition from snow and rain. It was clear that the challenges went far beyond those of cataloguing and archiving. This was first and foremost a restoration project.

A team of the most learned Tibetan scholars was assembled—monks who had spent decades studying in the great monastic institutions of Tibet. “It had been part of their study to commit many of the texts to memory,” said Tshering. They worked from dawn often into the late hours of the night, filling in the missing parts of the texts by hand with nothing but their own memory as a reference.

Gyatsho Tshering expressed his regret that with the computer-age Tibetan calligraphy is fast becoming a lost art. “Tibetan calligraphy has power. It has energy. That is something that I miss. But what can we do? The times have changed.”

The manuscript restoration team lived without electricity in shacks that before them had housed cows. “We were living hand to mouth, but we didn’t care. We spent whatever we had that day even though we didn’t know what we would eat tomorrow.” Lamp oil was considered more precious than food. “Every day was a day of excitement for us because every day we discovered a new and rare manuscript.”

Gyatsho Tshering’s most vivid memory of that time was the support that he and his team received from His Holiness the Dalai Lama. “He would personally take the time to come down and encourage each one of us.”

The construction of the library building began in 1969 and took four years to complete and became known as the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives. But just as it was mostly the contributions of ordinary Tibetans who filled its shelves, it was the contribution of the poorest and most disenfranchised Tibetans that stood out in its construction.

In those days, many Tibetans were literally carving out a living on road crews in the harsh North Indian mountain states, sleeping and eating in dust-filled tents, and earning a meager 3 rupees a day. Many of these workers put aside one rupee and donated it to the construction of the library. Others even took unpaid leave to come to Dharamsala to volunteer as laborers on the building project. Said Tshering “They built it as if it was for themselves. That was very moving.”

As the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives began to gain international recognition acquisitions started to arrive not just from Tibet but also from Mongolia, Germany, and America. Private individuals began donating their personal collections, including a number of gifts that had been given to them or their family members by the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. Tibetan scholars and academics from around the world began making regular visits to Dharamsala to the library that was becoming renowned for its rich and comprehensive collection of authentic Tibetan texts. Tshering recalled people like Jeffrey Hopkins, Robert Thurman, Stephen Batchelor, Alan Wallace and Alexander Berzin who went on to become seminal figures in the Tibetan Buddhist movement in the West. “I remember every one of them,” he said fondly.

Today, the Tibetan Library houses the entire collections of Tengyur and Kangyur —the complete Indian commentaries on the Buddha’s sutras and the Tibetan Buddhist canon respectively. Every evening you can find Tibetans, generally the older ones, ambling clockwise around the building, rolling prayer beads through their fingers. “Wherever you find the collection of Tengyur and Kangyur, you will find people doing circumambulation around them,” noted Tshering. “Whenever they feel sad, whenever there is someone sick in their home, or when they want to find consolation, they go to the library and pray.”

“The library was a pioneering institution in many ways. We started a thangka painting school, a woodcarving school, a philosophy school. We had the cream of the scholars. Each one of them was a specialist in some field of Tibetan learning.” The original idea was for the library to house only written works, but Tibetans were arriving with so many statues, and other religious artifacts that Tshering saw the need to also incorporate a museum. “To outsiders it’s a museum, but to Tibetans it’s something living.”

Tibetans going back and forth from Tibet in the 60s and 70s were often requested to look out for missing parts of key manuscripts that made up the monastic curriculum, and without which monks could not complete their studies. Although they risked arrest and imprisonment for bringing such items out of Tibet, to Tshering’s knowledge no one ever got caught. He believed that there are still many important texts and documents languishing in drawers and file cabinets in Tibet, some that could prove politically “sensitive” for the Chinese authorities who have no interest in seeing them made public.

Born in 1936 in Gangtok, Sikkim, a country where Tibetan Buddhism dominates, Gyatsho Tshering grew up with a love of Tibetan culture, particularly its literature. “The attitude of the Tibetan people towards Buddhist philosophy was very different to now,” he observed. The generation of which he was a part, was in his view motivated by a purity of purpose and a sense of altruism that’s becoming harder to find in the Tibetan community. “Nobody thought to extend their hand to outside help,” he said. “We all thought, if we don’t do it, who will do it for us?”

Tshering served as the director of the Tibetan Library from up until 1998, after which he moved to the United States because he said, “I needed some rest”. He also wanted to have more time for his personal spiritual practice—an ironic reversal of the West-East trail that has led legions of Westerners to seek spiritual opportunities in Asia.

“I feel very satisfied that I was able to do something that was very much of benefit not only to Tibetans but also to people around the world. I’m a very lucky person in that I led a useful life. I have no regrets. When I die, I will die in peace.”

Gyatsho Tshering passed away at the age of 73 on 25th June 2009.

—–
This article is based on an interview with Gyatsho Tshering that took place in the summer of 2007 in Dharamsala. Rebecca Novick is a regular contributor to The Huffington Post and the founding producer of The Tibet Connection radio program online at thetibetconnection.org
Commentary on Religion, Woolly Mammoths

The Largest Hindu Temple in the USA

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Beltane                                    Waxing Planting Moon

The largest Hindu temple in America is in Maple Grove.  Who knew?  I dare  you to find it there, though it’s a big place, set on 80 acres and rising high above the plowed fields to its south.  The location makes it intriguing as it sits next to farms and has a large marshland on its property.  This was my fourth visit to the temple, the first since Indian sculptors finished all the smaller temples, 21 in all, and since the carvings have come almost all the way down the temple facade pictured here.  Not a usual sight in Minnesota.

The Woolly’s met there tonight and heard a presentation on Hinduism by Dr. Sane, the founder of the Children’s Hospital and the energy behind the development of the Hindu Mandir of Minnesota.  We then had a fine Indian dinner served by a temple cook.  Great desert, as usual, but the best nan I’ve ever had.  Worth coming back for the food.

After the meal we adjourned to the main room of the temple which has smaller temples built inside housing the living statues of various Hindu deities. (Sri Durga) The main temple deity is Vishnu and he has the largest temple.  He faces the large ceremonial doors which, when opened, shine the light of the rising sun on his body.  Shiva, Lakshmi, Ganesha and Saraswati also have temples.  Each temple has the superstructure of a particular temple located somewhere in India.

All during our presence in the main temple area, Hindu priests with the Brahmanic thread, shirtless and shoeless, chanted prayers, offered pujas and lit incense.  The smells of the incense transported me to Singapore where my sister Mary and I celebrated Diwali by visiting a couple of temples, shopping in Little India and watching the fire walking in the early am hours of a November morning.

This mandir incarnates the global cosmopolitanism that cities across the world have begun to display.  We’re lucky to have it here.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities

Is there life after birth?

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Spring                                            Awakening Moon

Resurrection makes sense on a day like today; as it happens, Easter Sunday.  66 degrees, green popping out all over, pachysandra continuing its green invasion (planned) of the third tier of our perennial gardens, daffodils in bloom and many, many throwing up their green spears toward the sun.  Tulips and garlic and parsnips.  Buzzing bees.  Dogs running and jumping.  The air moved around with light, warm breezes.  Who says the dead don’t come to life?

In spite of the easter bonnets, the died eggs, chocolate bunnies and marshmallow ducks this is the key event in the Christian liturgical calendar.  With no resurrection the other claims are nothing more than interesting two-millennia old ethics and culture.  With resurrection all the other claims take on a sacred aura, through them you too can participate in the life after death.

This is such an odd thought, once you step outside the hermeneutical circle.  Not so much that a God could bring the dead back to life, I mean, God, right?  Not so much that people could believe it, many strange things are known with or without philosophy, after all.  No, for me, the strange thing, in retrospect, is that the club has so many convoluted rules.

A loving God who retrieves his own son from the ferry and returns him to life.  OK.  A loving God who promises the same thing to others.  OK.  A loving God who seems convinced that many won’t make it and end up either vanished or in gehenna, the burning waste dump outside the city walls?  Geez.  Of course, His game, His rules.  Yeah. But why go through the motions for only a few, a select few. That’s not only weird, it seems perverse.  We can’t understand God’s logic?  Boy, is that true.

Anyhow, enough about Him.  Me, I’m in for the resurrection that comes from mixing my essential elements back into the soil, providing a little food for the fungi and micro-organisms in the soil, the soul?  What if that’s what the after life really is, our souls collected in the mass grave that is this earth to become food for the worms?  Works for me.

It’s possible, of course, and I like to entertain the idea that death is a process like the cocoon, a time of incubation when our cells become, like the butterflies, imaginal.  They reshape themselves into a new think altogether, a Swallowtail from a caterpillar.  It happens here.  I’ve seen it.  Or, maybe we’re like water, in this shape in this state, but in a gas or a  solid, something related but different.  Or, and this  one seems the most plausible to me, the many worlds hypothesis turns out to be true and we pass from world to world, inhabiting this body, perhaps another, on and on and on until last syllable of reported time.

Resurrection is so important a possibility, is my point, that it shouldn’t have a morals clause or be dependent on what we believe.  If it is, it just is and we will be swept up into something new, something different and have another go.  I like that idea.

Cinema and Television, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

The Sparrow

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Spring                                             A Near Full Awakening Moon

Just saw La Vie En Rose, the story of Edith Piaf. Kate was familiar with the story, I was not.  Her life began in abandonment by both of her parents, one after the other, a childhood in a brothel, her grandmother’s, a life singing on the streets until her discovery at 20.  It went from there to a world career, on stage, in movies, while in her life disaster kept following on disaster.  The love of her life, a boxer, died on a plane flight she had begged to make, so he could be with her instead of his wife and children.  Her frailty, evident in childhood continued throughout her career with exhaustion, then drug dependency and an early death at 47.  Her music has a smoky, nightclub ambiance and strikes the heart fast, often from the first note.  I was glad to make her acquaintance.

My conversation earlier today with Ian Boswell on music as a convergence of rationality and soulfulness has stayed on my mind.  I ordered Beethoven’s piano sonata’s and Chopin’s music, a complete set played by Garrick Olson.  I’m making a commitment to start listening to classical music and jazz here at home until Kate and I can break free, after her retirement and return to the Ordway to hear the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra again.  I miss the music.  The notion of a post-modern world, one where reason and spirit blend, where the critiques of the Enlightenment like Romanticism and environmentalism might converge, may be a world filled with thoughtful, soulful music.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Letters, Literature

Preachers Who Are Not Believers

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Spring                                   Waxing Awakening Moon

Gave Liberal II this morning.  Lot of conversation, a little consternation.  Best piece was a conversation with Ian Boswell, the music director.  We discussed the limits of rationality and the integration of reason and soulfulness that great music represents.  He pointed to the late sonatas of Beethoven.  This has given me food for thought for Liberal III:  The Future.

The work I do for Groveland and the transition from Christian to Unitarian got a piece of context I hadn’t had from this very interesting paper:  Preachers Who Are Not Believers.  This is qualitative research done by a social worker with five subjects.  She has done extensive interviewing with each one and her co-researcher, Daniel Dennet, the theophobe philosopher from Tufts University carefully explain that the sample is too small to allow any general conclusions to be drawn.  Each of the clergy self-describe as non-believers though what they mean by that phrase has enormous plasticity.

If the topic interests you, I encourage you to look at the paper, the link above will take you there.  What intrigued me was their guess about why there is such a phenomenon in the first place; that is, how to people end up in the ministry then come to lose their faith.  I think they’re right.

Let me quote:  “The answer seems to lie in the seminary experience shared by all our pastors, liberals and literals alike. Even some conservative seminaries staff their courses on the Bible with professors who are trained in textual criticism, the historical methods of biblical scholarship, and what is taught in those courses is not what the young seminarians learned in Sunday school, even in the more liberal churches. In seminary they were introduced to many of the details that have been gleaned by centuries of painstaking research about how various ancient texts came to be written, copied, translated, and, after considerable jockeying and logrolling, eventually assembled into the Bible we read today. It is hard if not impossible to square these new facts with the idea that the Bible is in all its particulars a true account of actual events, let alone the inerrant word of God.”

They don’t mention the equally corrosive discipline of church history.  In church history the actual stories of doctrinal development give a historically relativistic inflection to them that does serious damage to their confident assertion.  My favorite example is the trinity, a concept which passed by one vote at the Council of Nicaea embedded in the Nicene Creed.   There are many other unsavory moments in church history.  Among them is Martin Luther’s response to a peasant’s rebellion –Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants. Another is the annihilation of the Cathars in France and, in general, the often violent response to those not in agreement with one particular doctrinal nuance or another.

If you put the historical reality of church history in tandem with textual or higher criticism of the Bible, it is impossible not at least consider whether the church and its foundations are things of this world, not another.   It is the frisson of doubt, strengthened by a hundred small instances that leads to faith changes, often of considerable magnitude.

“Biblical criticism is a form of Historical Criticism that seeks to analyze the Bible through asking certain questions of the text, such as: Who wrote it? When was it written? To whom was it written? Why was it written? What was the historical, geographical, and cultural setting of the text? How well preserved is the original text? How unified is the text? What sources were used by the author? How was the text transmitted over time? What is the text’s genre and from what sociologial setting is it derived? When and how did it come to become part of the Bible?”

The biggest problem though, and the Preachers research spells this out, too, is the gulf this creates between clergy and congregation.  The gulf between clergy and congregation only grows over time and it does so for some very straight forward reasons.  First, to teach others a new and especially an unpleasant truth you have to have a clear and profound grasp of it yourself.  Though the training in biblical scholarship in seminary is extensive, the actual field of information is vast.  Old Testament Ph. D.s are among the most difficult in scholarship.  At least five languages have to be mastered:  Ancient Biblical Hebrew, ancient Greek, Latin, Aramaic and Ugaritic or Akkadian.  Then are the techniques of higher criticism themselves:  literary, form-critical, historical, redactive, rhetorical, source, narrative and textual.  Not only do they have to be  learned and applied to a vast body of literature, much more than the Old Testament contains, one also has to learn the history of these disciplines themselves.

Textual criticism alone is a large field.  The Dead Sea Scrolls come into play, for example, in attempting to discern the oldest texts available for certain biblical passages, as do many other documents.  This is all in search of the oldest and therefore closest to the original text, one presumed to be more authentic for that reason.  It also involves comparing available texts against each other.

My point here is that this is a difficult body of scholarship to assimilate, let alone deploy creatively in the development of sermons once a week.  Without substantial command of the disciplines involved it, it is difficult at best to explain this material to laypeople.  This is a task fraught with tension for a clergy because each instance of information that runs contrary to biblical views received in childhood runs the risk of creating real problems in the life of the congregation.

This means that such fundamental clergy tasks as preaching and adult education often proceed from very, very different starting assumptions from that of the laity.  This makes honesty and authenticity in the ministry almost impossible.  The issue here is real and deeper than even this brief explication can suggest.  Just ask your minister.

Art and Culture, Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality

Why Is This Art?

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Spring                                       Waxing Awakening Moon

Two interesting tours with third graders this morning.  In the first tour two different kids asked why is this art questions?  One wanted to know why the George Morrison was art and the other wanted to know why a piece in the modern gallery, one with parallel lines on a white background qualified as art.  We had significant discussions on both pieces.  On the first we discussed Morrison’s fascination with horizon lines.  Could they see the horizon line?  Could they imagine a beach?  Yes?  Well, that can make it art.  On the second piece we had a long discussion about blank canvas and a canvas with parallel lines.  One boy offered that it looked like notebook paper.  I mentioned parallel lines.  Had they studied them?  Yes.  Do parallel lines ever meet?  No.  Might have something to do with this piece.

On both tours I took them to foot-in-the-door and suggested they might start thinking now about entering in 2020.  Plenty of time to prepare.  They found many things that interested them.  On the second tour when I told them Frank had only two tablespoons of ink on the  whole canvas, Annie, a small girl, said, “Yeah. Right.  If the tablespoon was this big.” spreading her hands wide.  I enjoyed their skepticism.

After that I settled into a familiar role as a future field instructor for a Unitarian student intern.  Church meetings have a tendency to be unfocused, like gangly children, going this way and that.  It was a feeling I had experienced often, but I have little patience for it now.  I’ll have a chance to have my own meetings with Leslie, the student, provided they ever get the details of their contract worked out.  Thank God I have no role in the details of that.

Off to home.  A nap.  Now some treadmill time.

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

Poison Fruit

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Spring                                        Waxing Awakening Moon

Spring has sprung, then it sprang back.  23 today.  Not prime gardening weather yet.

The conservative embrace of right wing populists has begun to bear poisoned fruit again.  They referred to Obama and African-American congressmen as niggers, Barney Frank as a faggot and phoned in death threat to several members of the House who switched their votes on health care reform.  The great irony of the moral majority, Christian right, tea-party tea bags is that by all normal political calculation they should vote Democrat.  They are, in the large part, blue collar folks, some living on minimum wage, many no doubt eligible for the health insurance provisions just passed by Congress, but conservative strategists have intentionally chosen to underwrite their social prejudices against people of color, homosexuals and folks with a college education in order to collect them into the party’s ranks.

This is not a deal with the devil; it is the devil making a deal.

I know these folks because I grew up with them in Indiana.  They first came to national notice in Indiana when 30% of the Hoosier electorate voted for George Wallace for President.  They were first and second generation folks from Appalachia, Mississippi, Arkansas, Alabama and Tennessee and worked in the automobile and other heavy manufacturing centers in the Illinois, Indiana, Michigan and Ohio area, the area long since identified as the rust belt.  Union workers in the 1950’s and 1960’s, these constituencies voted a straight Democratic party ticket in line with their economic self-interest.

After LBJ and the passage of the Civil Rights Act, George Wallace made an independent run for the Presidency aiming himself squarely at southern Democrats, the diaspora of southerners working in the north and those other bigots nationally willing to sign up.  This came to the attention of Kevin Phillips, then a strategist for Richard Nixon.  He conceived of the moral majority, corralling the Wallace voters and conservative Christians, sometimes the same group into a winning base for conservative Republican politics.  This was the time of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robinson.

Right wing populism has a long and unsavory history in the US.  The KKK, anti-semite, homophobes, anti-Darwinists and love it or leave it patriots are just a few examples.  The Southern Poverty Law Center has made a career for Morris Dees and his compatriots filing suit against various organizational expressions of these folks.  When economic insecurity marries the all-too human propensity for discrimination, a violent firestorm will result.  It is no different now than it was in the post-Reconstruction days, the days during the Great Depression or the years after passage of the Civil Rights act.

True conservatives should be ashamed.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden

Liberal II

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Spring                                    Waxing Awakening Moon

A writing day.  I put in several hours in a row on Liberal II:  The Present.  I was going to include the future, but in the end it took all I had to finish with the present.  The story, the present, is a difficult one to tell to liberal audiences like Groveland UU because the reality is that liberalism is victorious.  We live in a modern world that has liberal ideas as commonplace beliefs:  individual liberty, equality, the rule of law, government by the people, an openness to change, a market economy.  When I finish editing Liberal II, I’ll post it, but the hard to convey message is that more folks are not Unitarian because the worldview we embrace is widely shared.  Strange, huh?

I also worked a bit on Latin.  During this time Kate got outside and pruned the fruit trees in our young orchard.  She’s in charge of pruning and assembling woodenware, so I went out later in the day and complimented her on her work.  She did Latin in the morning.

I love these kind of days where a focused task gets completed.

After I finish the first draft of Liberal II, I also took on trying to get my networked computer in the study to share a printer with the other computers, like a nice computer should.  It took a while, but I got them all clicking together. Felt like a victory to me.