Category Archives: Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

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

Harder Choices

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Lughnasa                                                                    New (College) Moon

Listening to outlaw country as I pack boxes full of books on Romanticism, American religious empiricism and Hindu thought. It’s harder in here, in the study where I’ve concentrated the books that have captured part of a long term idea. Wondering, for example, where the threads of the Classics, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Modernism come together. Are there clues there about tomorrow, about critiquing today? About laying bare the bones of this time?

How does religion play against this whole backdrop? Does it have a future, a non-dogmatic, non-institutional future or is it an anachronism with unusual vitality?

Or, on another tangent, how does the environmental movement and its thinkers weave into the Reimagining Faith work I’ve been doing for awhile. Does Jung matter in this or any of these threads? Maybe you can see how having books at my fingertips, books not obtainable outside university libraries, is important to me.

Again, you could rightly ask why I bother. Don’t know. This is just stuff that interests me and has interested me for a long time.

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Weather +Climate

Wild, Wild Grapes

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Lughnasa                                                                 Lughnasa Moon

500P1030676A cool breeze predicted autumn as I picked wild grapes this morning . These wild grapes have overgrown our amur maples and will get cut back when the lawn restoration work is done later in the fall. That will hardly diminish their presence though because wild grapes grow all over our woods, some branching out from vines thicker than my upper arm. The woods also provides morels in the spring.

Over the years I’ve highlighted the opossum, the great horned owl, wild turkeys, pileated woodpecker, woodchuck, salamander, newt, toads, frogs, dragon flies, deer, rabbits, chipmunks, squirrels, bumblebees, raccoons and snapping turtles that live on this property, too. A significant aspect of living in the exurbs is the diversity of wild flaura andIMAG0506 fauna, often on the chunk of land on which you live. This is a melding of the human built and the wild.

The Denver Post recounts encounters with bears, mountain lions and rattle snakes. In Minnesota residents encounter bears and wolves, perhaps the occasional lynx. Most of these encounters occur because human habitation encroaches further and further into formerly wild lands.

These predators are certainly part of the wild eco-system, but the bulk of wild life are prey species, amphibians, reptiles and birds. It’s these we humans encounter most often and which we often discount, as if their small size or lack of tools for killing make them less significant. Yet the woodchuck, or land-beaver, that occupied a tree here for a day, is a wild animal just as much as the wolf or bear. So, too, the opossum and all those others that flee when humans arrive, who try to keep their visibility to a minimum.

We are co-habitants, not owners really, of this land. Though we will sell it to other humans, we are not selling the wild life. Their lives will adapt to the new humans just as they adapted to us, either by leaving or hiding or just going on about their day.

The wild flaura includes not only morels and grapes, but ironwood, jack-in-the-pulpit, oaks white, red and burr, elm, ash, black locust, cedar, nine-bark and rhus radicans, or poison ivy. Barring a clear cut of the woods, which I consider unlikely, they, too, will remain.

Commentary on the news, Family, Feelings, Health, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

A Cloud Blocking The Sun

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Lughnasa                                                            Lughnasa Moon

A word about depression. I’ve experienced melancholy and perhaps one bout of true depression, back in 1975 after my first divorce, but I know the real deal when I see it. As I think I’ve written here before, three of my aunts were manic-depressive. One aunt spent the bulk of her life in a mental hospital, another was in and out and the other starved herself to death. It’s a subtle beast, depression, not at all like the usual presentation of the slump shouldered, gloom faced lump in a chair.

No, the depressed person can push right up against life, engaging in work and social life, perhaps with less energy, but that’s often not noticeable. A mix of obligation, habit and denial can even make a depressed person seem normal, even to those closest to them. Robin Williams worked hard, it said in the paper today, in spite of his depression. This suggests that yesterday might have been different, worse than the other episodes of addiction and depression he suffered, but that may not be true.

This might be the time when the impulsive met the depressive, the time when, just for a terrible moment, the idea of death outweighed the struggle for life. It could be that had someone accidentally interrupted this moment he could still be working today. This is not at all blaming someone else, rather I’m pointing to the deadly consequence of entertaining, even for a moment, the notion of self-extinction.

Yes, existentialists, and I count myself among them, see suicide as a possible affirmative choice in a meaningless world. If life has become unbearable, for whatever reason, the decision to end it needs to be taken seriously, not discounted or abjured. And perhaps especially because I feel this way I’m sensitive to the effects of a momentary mood, a flight of dark fantasy, that may have irrevocable results. These moods are not the same as an existential choice, being overtaken by a feeling of worthlessness or dead-endedness is not a choice; rather, these are situations of capture when the self becomes hostage and even victim to psychic weather.

Moods, as the weather systems of the psyche, have great power and in our interior world we often mistake weather for climate. That is, we take the mood as indicative of a general state of existence, when it is really a thunder shower or a cloud blocking the sun.

We humans, and our lives, are so fragile, so vulnerable.

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

Family Themes and Existential Aloneness

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Lughnasa                                                                Lughnasa Moon

Two widely divergent thoughts today. The first about family. Families have themes, melodies that play themselves out in different keys and different arrangements, using the instruments available.

Take mine for instance. Both mom and dad had a desire to travel, to see the world. Mom realized hers, making it to Italy and northern Africa as a WAC during WWII. Dad had a dream, a boat, some time in the Gulf of Mexico, then a book about it. Yet he never left the U.S. with the exception of Canada until very late in life when he flew to Singapore to visit my sister. He did, however, take short trips to odd places in Indiana, making do with what was available.

So, travel is a theme. I’m the less traveled of my siblings, only visiting foreign countries, never staying anywhere longer than a week. Mary has traveled a lot, spending years in Southeast Asia working, visiting Tibet, India, Indonesia, Europe, the Emirates. Mark has lived the travel theme most adventurously. He’s been across Russia on the Trans-Siberian railway, picked olives in a kibbutz in Israel, taught in Thailand, Cambodia and Saudi Arabia. We’re a gradation of the wanderer archetype, the one who visits but doesn’t stay.

Then, there’s the fascination with writing and language. Dad was a journalism major and well thought of at Oklahoma State University, a school with a respected journalism department. He wrote professionally, as a reporter and an editor, most of his life.

Mary and Mark advanced this theme by teaching English as a second language (ESL). I’ve advanced this theme through novels, short stories, sermons, essays, this blog. In this instance we’re a spectrum of the Hermes archetype, the one who takes messages and delivers them.

Mom was a teacher. Many of my cousins are teachers, on both sides of the family. Mark has taught ESL as an instructor while Mary has advanced from that role to that of University professor, teaching teachers of ESL for the nation of Singapore. I’ve never taught formally, but many of my roles have involved teaching of one kind or another. Here, we’re a spectrum of the elder archetype, when the elder is one who passes on the tradition.

There are other themes, some more subtle, but these three: wanderer, Hermes and elder seem most predominant. We did not engage these archetypes; these archetypes engaged us, shaped us, set us on our paths.

The second thought is about being alone in our interior. Reading an article in the New York Times today about Hinduism, a comment made me stop, think. The interior life is one path to liberation, the interviewee said, but at bottom the life of devotion and meditation is decidedly anti-individual. What? Yes, he said, at bottom we find in ourselves a deep oneness with all creation, with the brahma. So, at our most interior we are also at our most connected.

So this bounced around for a while. Then, a thought occurred to me. How does he know?  We can say for certain that we know each person’s interior life is unique and private. We can say this much based on our own experience and the mediation of other’s interior experience through interaction. Since those interactions are not identical, hardly identical, we can infer with confidence that the interior life of those we know is different from ours and different from others. It is also self-reported as different by those we know.

It’s an attractive idea, the idea of a substrata of oneness to be found at the end of our meditation, an idea known in the west through Carl Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious. But I don’t see how it can possibly be proven and without proof the notion of a layer of oneness underneath it all seems far fetched to me; as does, too, a layer of oneness that transcends our individual state.

 

Art and Culture, Asia, Cinema and Television, Colorado, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Humanities, Latin, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The Move, Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Writing

A Purging We Will Go

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Lughnasa                                                     Lughnasa Moon

Over the weekend and as deep into this week as I need to go, I’m packing up my former study. I’ve purged one file cabinet and consolidated its content into boxes for moving. A horizontal cabinet awaits attention. A large plastic tub full of art supplies went into the move with care pile. One small bookcase has been emptied and moved. The shop work bench I’ve used for storage is empty, too. That old printer, the one I bought in 1994, is in the truck and ready to go to a recycler.  An HP laserjet, it still functions.  That leaves three larger bookcases and some miscellaneous things on various surfaces, plus the art on the walls.

(what I hope to create in Colorado, my own version of this.)

When this room has been tidied up, the next and last big push begins. My study. This room has walls of books. Many will go in boxes with red tape, but most will not. The other areas have gone well, but this one will present some difficulty. So many projects. Some of the past, some of the future, some of today. Which ones do I imagine I’ll continue in Colorado? Which ones have enough spark to be valuable in the final third of my life? These are hard decisions for me and packing this room will be both valuable and difficult.

This is a chance to prune my work over the last third of my life, clear out the branches that have grown across each other. Take out that large branch that flourished then died. Increase the circulation amongst the remaining branches so they have air, can breathe. Pruning gives renewed vigor to plants and I hope to achieve the same thing when I pack up these materials, those closest to my heart, leaving behind what I no longer need.

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

Nocturne

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Lughnasa                                                          Lughnasa Moon

There is the decreasing light, the gradual slide into darkness now over a month underway, heading toward a culmination in December. There are nocturnes. There are evening prayers and compline. There is sleep, rest from the day. There is darkness now, a world which would be, without electricity, lit only by fire and the light from celestial furnaces burning bright.

(Evelyn de Morgan (1855-1919) – The Sleeping Earth and Wakening Moon)

This time comes each day, in its repetitive way soothing, not unlike the liturgy of the hours. Call this the liturgy of light and dark. In composing these nocturnes the night becomes a moment for reflection, meditation, consideration. These sorts of routines can simple our lives, give us dependable pillars that can see us through the storms on which we ride.

My wish for you tonight is the peace of sleep, the refreshment and joy of awakening to a new day tomorrow. Earth speed.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Live the Questions

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Lughnasa                                                                   Lughnasa Moon

I must have had this insight at another point, or been taught it or read it somewhere, but I don’t recall any inkling of it from any source. That is, the study of religion is important not for the answers religions give, but for the questions they ask.

Buddhism, in its emphasis on enlightenment and liberation from the ensarement of the senses is asking questions I’m not asking. It sees, in other words, human dilemmas, yes, but not the ones that are important for me. This is not surprising since Buddhism arose as a response to the harsh laws of karma that bound early followers of the various Hindu faiths-Shaivite, Visnhuite, followers of Kali and Ganesh-to the priesthood and temple. Karma, in spite of its cultural adoption into English, means little to me. I do not feel bound to the karmic wheel, so I have no need of release from it.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam, on the other hand, and the various pagan faiths of the Western tradition have shaped questions in response to the urgent questions felt by those of us influenced by Greek and Roman thought. What does it mean to be alone, as an individual entity? What does death mean, since it is not followed by reincarnation? What is justice in a culture ruled by tyrants or oligarchs? What is the nature of human community in light of all of these?

This is not to say, of course, that Eastern traditions don’t ask questions relevant to us. They do. Guilt can be understood as a form of karma. Why are we guilty and what can we do about it? Is forgiveness possible? Does it cleanse the soul or unburden our conscience? Are those the same things?

Taoism, for me, asks the profoundest questions of all the religious traditions with which I’m familiar. Is it better to take action against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them, or does it make more sense to learn how to live with the energy of tides, adjusting our actions to their ebbing and flowing? Is life better served by intention or attention? Do we need to know the nature of reality or just how to accommodate ourselves to it?

And underneath the questions of both Western and Eastern traditions are the fundamental questions: does life have meaning? are there actions that are required of us? who or what can we trust? with our lives?

All of these questions are important not because some guru, imam or monk said so, but because they are the questions that occur to the conscious animal, the reflective species. And they arise because we know certain things: we are alive. we will not be. we are bunkered within bodies, walled off by flesh and inner life from all others, yet desirous of living with them.

The answers to these questions are so various and so different that a thinking person cannot credit anyone as the truth. So, it is not the answers that are finally important, but the questions themselves. Are the answers important? Sure. They can point us toward a glimmer on the horizon. They can flash in our personal heavens as bright aurora, illuminating for a time our night sky. But in the end, unless capitulation is your thing (and it is for very, very many) you will be left wondering about the answers. But never the questions.

And it is the questions that bind us together. It is the questions that define the ancientrail of pilgrimage through this chance occurrence we share, life.

Again, I’ll quote Jim Morrison of the Doors. Into this world we’re thrown…riders on the storm.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Great Work, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Lughnasa 2014

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Lughnasa                                                                      Lughnasa Moon

In times before the pagan revival this holiday had the name Lammas, even among witches. Lammas, a modern English transliteration of an Anglo-Saxon word for loaf-mass, was celebrated on August 1st. The Roman Catholic imperial strategy of subjugating, then eliminating rival religions moved forward in part by absorbing and renaming other faith’s holidays.

It is not so easy, though, to stamp out folk religions. The old ways were held tight in rural areas and those doing so were called heathens (on the heath) or pagans, from the Late Latin paganus, or country-dweller.

Here’s an example. On Lammas parishioners would grind the first of the wheat harvest, then bake loaves of bread and take them to the church for blessing. According to this wikipedia site, many would then take the bread home, break it into four pieces and put them at the four corners of the grain storage building for protection against spoilage and rodents. So Lammas remained a first-fruits harvest festival, even under the Roman Catholics, but they replaced celebration of the grain itself with incorporation of the grain into the Catholic eucharistic symbology.

(a welsh corn dolly)

As the wheel turns, so does the nature of belief and faith. In this more pagan friendly world most neo-pagans, though not all, have returned to the original Celtic, Lughnasa. While I don’t align myself with any of the contemporary pagan splinters like Wicca, neo-paganism or Asatru, I do align myself with the impetus for the Great Wheel, the changing seasons themselves, and with the value of holidays to celebrate those changes. The Celtic holidays come from within my genetic heritage, so they make sense for me.

Sitting on the counter upstairs is a large laundry basket, the plastic kind that can be IMAG0382carried on the hip, filled with collard greens and chard. In the shed, drying, are yellow onions and garlic of different varieties. Downstairs, in the pantry, Kate has already stored bright orange jars of carrots, blood red jars of beets and jars the solid green of green beans. We have, too, eaten onions, chard, carrots, beets, green beans and collard greens already, so this is a good time to thank the land and the weather and the plants for the food they’ve already produced.

(onions and garlic, 2014)

In Celtic lands Lughnasa would have seen a corn maiden brought in from the fields in the first grain cart holding harvested wheat. (corn, in the British use, being wheat) And corn dollies would represent this symbol of the land’s fertility throughout the long, fallow months.

These holidays were not a single day (as we tend to celebrate them now, if we celebrate them at all), but were market weeks, when produce and crafts would come into a town and villagers and farmers would shop. Games were played, dances held, and marriages, of a 3-month or a year-and-a-day length could be entered. Both were considered trial marriages, the 3-month trial up at Samhain or Summer’s End.

Since these markets enjoyed the first fruits of many harvests, they were occasions tied to the rural life. In the United States Celtic peoples continued the Lughnasa heritage with county fairs and state fairs. Though the Minnesota State Fair is a much more expansive event than the typical Lughnasa festival, the Anoka County fair held recently or the 4-H fair held annually in my hometown of Alexandria, Indiana were probably similar.

In my world Lughnasa is much as it always was in terms of intention, a moment to stop and consider the strong bond between our land and our stomachs, our land and our survival. If nothing else these holidays make us pause and reflect on what’s happening in a world, the plant and animal world, that we might otherwise ignore. It’s for this reason chiefly that I think broad awareness of the Great Wheel and celebrations of its holidays could be a balm for an overheated world.

 

 

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

What Is This Faith?

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Summer                                                            Lughnasa Moon

So, continuing the subject from below, we might ask, what is faith? I will bring in my favorite definitionary, the O.E.D., but before we get to that I want to offer a couple of other observations. In the simplest, and therefore perhaps best, sense, faith is what gets you up in the morning. When you first wake, it comes to you that another day has started (another micro-life). What is it, on reflection, that makes getting out of bed worth it? Or, better, that makes getting out of bed seem possible at all?

Here’s my answer and I’m going to take a risk here and suggest that my answer is, roughly, universal. The body/mind that rises as you has confidence (Latin for with faith) that oxygen will be available. That food of some kind, either plant or animal, will also be available, if not today, then soon enough to sustain life. That your feet will land on the floor or the earth or the stone and not float up into the sky. That when your eyes open the visible world will flood into them once again so you can guide yourself.

Let’s extend this confidence. That the earth will spin and so the sun rise and set, the moon come and go. That our earth will speed its way around our star, tilted, with seasons appropriate to our place on it following as a consequence. That as those seasons come and go, the vast waters of our world will rise into the heavens and fall back to earth, splashing and rejuvenating all they touch. That as those seasons come and go, certain crops will grow and be harvested. Certain animals will be fed and will give their lives in a sacrifice for others so ancient as to be one of earth’s most holy acts.

This is the kind of faith that I believe we all, all native Terrans, share. It may sound trivial and inconsequential compared to the Book of Job or Genesis, the Rig Veda or the Diamond Sutra, but consider its great virtue: we know it to be true. We have to consult no wise men or women. We need no book or ritual. No institution decides whether gravity and the sunrise and the taste of tomatoes, the sweetness of cherries are correct. These are, quite literally, our birthright.

Now is the time for the O.E.D.

Faith, in its form understood from the Greek and Latin is:

1. Belief, trust

2. That which produces belief, evidence, token, pledge, engagement.

3. Trust in its objective aspect, troth; observance of trust, fidelity.

You may say, well. This is trivial. Obvious. And besides, faith, as Paul said, is faith in things unseen. Life is neither trivial nor obvious. Neither is its continuation. The wonder of this planet, so tiny compared to the vastness of the universe, swinging its way around Sol, only one star among a hundred octillion stars, nested inside one galaxy of ten trillion galaxies, is not trivial at all. Neither is it, speaking from the universe’s perspective, obvious.

And what, to agree with Paul, is more unseen than the future? Yet I have faith that these same matters which encourage me to rise each morning will sustain me, into and through the future. Even if that future is only this day, or this hour, or this minute.

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Great Work, Myth and Story, Our Land and Home, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

The Song of the Earth, Herself

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Summer                                                            New (Lughnasa) Moon

croppedZOE_0022At first, as I dug my way into a new faith, it was about a symphony: the early crocus, snowdrops, grape hyacinths followed by tulips, then iris and hosta and bleeding hearts, giving way in July to a the bold notes of the asiatic lilies until the daylilies and clematis, both bushy and climbing, the liguria and the snakeroot began to dominate followed by the soft crescendo of asters and chrysanthemums. This literal rising and falling, in palates of color always framed by many shades of green, played out in my mind, a curious analog to the mental images inspired by listening to Mozart or Haydn or Pachibel.

Then, with Kate’s guidance vegetables came to have more and more importance. They too come in their own season, following their own melodic lines, as do the fruits and the nuts. Even, I would later learn, so did honey and the concerto of the honey bee.

Amending the soil with compost and peat moss and decayed leaves and hay, finding the 06 27 10_beekeeperastronautheirloom seeds for the vegetables we grow and the beautiful varieties of perennials like the iris and the lily, made the whole a process laced with memory and filled with change.

It is no surprise that the Great Wheel, the ancient calendar of a people whose blood runs in my veins, came into this earthy process as a celebration, as a sacred abstraction of a very real lived experience. This was not systematic theology. This was neither dogma nor holy book. No, this was and is the song of the earth herself, composed in her own medium, the plants whom her body supplies with nutrients and her body which receives their dead bodies to replenish herself.

So this is a material spirituality, a spirituality that lives in the praxis between human awareness and the earth’s ordinary wonders, a paradoxical sacredness created by the essential, the necessary bond between the human body and the plant body and the earth’s body. It may be, probably is, that paradox exists here only when seen against the various gnosticisms of the world’s many religions. In fact, a faith rethought and reimagined without religion entering into the mix needs no spirituality other than that mysterious, miraculous link that binds the entire web of life into one interdependent whole.