Fall Hunter Moon
We had two ribeye steaks last night. After Kate and Ruth lit the shabbos candles, I said my piece about the cattle we knew from the meadow. The primary point was to say thank you to the animal who gave his or her life. The words felt clumsy and anachronistic in my mouth, but right. It was a simple moment, not long, but placing us, as brother Mark pointed out, among others from Jain to Native Americans who stop to honor their food.
It particularly felt right juxtaposed against the familiar Midwestern grace, Bless this food to the use of our bodies. The food is all about us. We can safely ignore the real animals, the real vegetables because God made them for us to eat. This is another way in which traditional Christian values deflect believers from the world around them to the world beyond or at least to a source beyond.
This was a pagan ceremony, one that directs us toward the vital and necessary web of interdependence that sustains us all. This particular cow was not a sacrifice to an abstract principle. In fact there was nothing abstract about it at all. This meat came from an animal that lived this year, ate grass that grew this year, nourished by rain that fell this year, breathed oxygen this year. And her essence did not reach the gods through an altar fire, rather it entered into the truest and most significant transubstantiation, the same transubstantiation that occurred when the grass entered her four stomachs, a transubstantiation facilitated by water falling from the mountain skies of Colorado and the true and astounding miracle of photosynthesis. 
Ultimately our meal, not only the beef, but the green beans, the baked potatoes, the pasta and pineapple, the bacon bits and sour cream, was on the table, hecatombs for humans, by the power of nuclear fusion. The sun projects light and warmth into the solar system it holds in its gravitational thrall. On this earth the also miracle of evolution, began among the deep sea vents billowing out sulfur and heat from earth’s own interior, has found a way to embrace Sol, our sacred source of life and light.
(eatsunshine) We eat sunshine. Reimagining faith then must embrace astronomy, evolution, plant biology, animal science, human culture. This embrace occurs most intimately each time we sit down to eat, no matter the culture or religious beliefs represented. We live and move and have our being thanks to the elemental forces driving our local star and the astonishing fact that our planet has shaped its own elements into hands and leaves and hearts and minds able to receive those forces into our own bodies. Quite amazing.
Divorce matters seem finally to be breaking Jon’s way. Can’t say more than that right now, but I’m glad.
Elizabeth itself is a small rural community that could have been anywhere, usa. It has a small historic downtown; that is, older retail buildings repurposed into boutiques and a fiber art store and antique shops. Mainstreet is Co. Highway 86 and there is the obligatory Walmart anchored, downtown killer of a strip mall on the edge of town.
My head says ethnobotany. Our culture chooses our diet for us, decides which foods are tasty, which gross, which taboo. Our bodies are neither obligate carnivore nor obligate vegetarian. We are designed by evolution as omnivores, able, thankfully, to eat what the world places in front of us, be it plant or animal. This is a great advantage for us as a species and has allowed us to thrive in many diverse climates. There is nothing wrong, then, about eating meat, either from a biological or cultural perspective. Meat is simply one source of food.
To purchase their meat was to kill them as surely as if I took a rifle out and shot them. Back in 1974 I moved onto the Peaceable Kingdom, a farm Judy and I bought in Hubbard County, Minnesota, the county home to the headwaters of the Mississippi. We had goats and decided we wanted to barbecue some goat meat. Johnny Lampo, the man who rented our fields and farmed them, gave me his rifle and I killed one of our our goats. I’ve not been the same since. I can’t even euthanize our dogs.
So this evening when Kate cooks the ribeye steaks thawing right now in our sink, I plan to add a small ritual to the lighting of the shabbos candles and the sharing of challah. We will remember the animal that died so that we may eat, so that our bodies might be strong. We will thank this particular individual for the role he or she plays in our daily life. We will acknowledge the cycle of life, the interlocking web of life and our mutual parts in it.
I now celebrate several distinct new years. The Jewish new year, just over, comes not long before the Celtic new year which begins on Samain eve, or All Hallow’s Eve, Halloween. The next one is the Western calendrical new year on January 1st and that is followed by the lunar Asian new year, which comes sometime in February. That’s at least four opportunities to assess the old year and make plans for the new one.
This fall season will end on Samain, the third of the three harvest holidays: Lughnasa, Mabon and Samain. The Celts began their new year with the end of the growing season, a last fruit’s festival, one marking the beginning of the fallow time. I like the specifically seasonal emphasis of Samain, tying the new year not to dogma or tradition or an arbitrary date like January 1, but to the cycle of life on earth, a cycle influenced by the sun.
Beth Evergreen’s sanctuary has multiple clear glass windows that offer views of Bergen Mountain and Elk Meadows. The view next to the Torah Ark had a mountain side filled with lodgepole and Ponderosa pine. Almost to the peak of the mountain though there was a small stand of aspen, golden still, in a perfect heart shape. All through the service I had a symbol, an accident of nature, created by my view, my perspective that synched up remarkably well with the overall theme of Yom Kippur, atonement. Also, up and to my right, at the roof of the sanctuary, a square window framed the tip of a Ponderosa pine. It looked like a painting by a member of the Kano school of Japanese art.
When Kate and I drove home from the kol nidre service at Beth Evergreen last night, the Hunter Moon lit up a sky covering labyrinth of white fluffy clouds. Occasionally, a few clouds would become very bright, then a hole would open, briefly, and the three quarter moon would not only backlight the cloud cover, but provide a luminous presence, too. It was a magical sky, a sort that seems particular to the onrushing fall. Aspens still blaze bright gold in some places, in others the leaves have turned brown and blown away leaving stands of naked branches as harbingers of the winter months.
I feel odd at Beth Evergreen. My physiognomy is out of place. The language of many of the prayers and songs is foreign to me. I don’t feel, and don’t expect to feel, part of the tribe. Yet, Kate feels, is, part of the tribe. Also, much of the content resonates with my own faith reimagining project.
Speaking of seasons, this is not the silly season; it’s the Insane Clown Posse season. When a reactionary like Mike Pence gets kudos for a stable debate performance, the world has gone seriously out of whack. This is a guy who tried to abrogate the first amendment, destroy unions, and denigrates women. The only reason he looked less than totally unappealing is the comparison to his running mate, Donald the Hair Trump. OK, Kaine wasn’t much better, but, hey, these guys were picked as Vice-Presidential candidates for a reason. Whatever it was.
Yesterday was a reading day, getting up to speed on the middot (character trait) of watchfulness. The notion of Mussar is to take character traits like watchfulness, explicate them, then practice them. Literally. Mussar encourages taking a character trait like watchfulness, then working over the period of a month to manifest it in your life or raise your observance of it to a higher level. Watchfulness entails what a Jesuit might call examen. Paying attention to your behavior, becoming conscious of it rather than letting it flow by out of habit unnoticed, that’s the first part.
Yesterday included three separate trips into Evergreen. First, I took Kate in for the morning Rosh Hashanah service at Beth Evergreen. Then, I came back to answer questions, be available for the electrician and the painter. At noon I went back to pick up Kate and eat the after service lunch with her. All these trips included waits in two spots on Brook Forest Road for culvert repair. Stop. Slow. Stop. Slow.
There were kugels in aluminum pans, bagels with lox and cream cheese or chopped egg, fresh cut vegetables, fruit. Paper plates and plastic forks. Lots of eating and greeting. Some very short skirts. Some men carried small cloth pouches containing prayer shawls and yarmulkes. Kids ran around,
This conforms to Michaelmas as the springtime of the soul. Sadness is a way we consolidate past experiences and sort them out, learning from them and choosing which aspects of the past to embrace and which to let go. When our tears are over, we are cleansed and renewed, ready for the next phase of life. Autumn gives us an annual opportunity for self-renewal. This Great Wheel, natural cycle phenomena matches up exactly with Rosh Hashanah and its climax, Yom Kippur.