Category Archives: Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

The Leaf In Place of The Cross

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Spring                                                                      Bee Hiving Moon

Final post on this series.  If you need a symbol of eternal life, let me refer you to the tree leaf and not the cross.  In this 74 degree day I just finished scraping the mulch from bulbs I planted last fall.  The mulch is tree leaves gathered in the same season.

The leaf works hard from early spring until fall capturing sunlight, drawing up water from the tree’s roots and combining them with CO2 in a true transubstantiation, photosynthesis. When the seasonal change indicates to the tree that conditions will no longer be good for photosynthesis, the leaf detaches from the tree’s vascular system and in so doing, its chlorophyll returns to the tree. This is the moment when the leaf changes color, revealing its other pigments.

As it withers from loss of water, the leaf changes color again and eventually detaches from the tree itself. That’s when I pick it up as a mulch. When I apply the leaf to the newly planted beds, the leaves perform two functions.  First, they insulate the bed, retaining the cold into the early days of spring so the earth won’t heave and throw the newly planted bulbs out. Second, they begin to decay and transfer their remaining stores of nutrients and fiber into the soil itself.

In this way the engine of transubstantiation, the leaf, even after it produces oxygen for us to breathe and glucose for the plant to use in its growth, gives up all of itself to the plant community in general, enriching the soil for the next generation.

So the leaf, a most ordinary miracle doer, does in fact what Christian’s claim Jesus can do, that is, give life through their death. You might say that in focusing on the cross Christian’s chose the wrong part of the tree.

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

All It Requires Is Some Love

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Spring                                                             Bee Hiving Moon

Having said all that. (see post below) Reclaiming, celebrating the power of spring’s wonder is an important part of the Great Wheel’s message.  What the motif of the dying and rising god suggests (there is legitimate debate around this idea, but it’s not critical to my point here.) is the obvious. Death is a central fact of the human experience, yet it is a fact shrouded in mystery and pain. What exactly is death?  Not physiologically, but psychologically, spiritually. What does it mean? If anything. What happens after death to the person who dies?

We just don’t know the answers.  This black box characteristic of death makes it so upsetting. Without further knowledge we have to assume that extinction is the basic result. Having had a man die and come to back life with the message that, hey, you, too, can die and still have everlasting life is compelling.  The story alone has carried itself into millions, probably billions of heart, easing the mystery for them.

As I said earlier, I can’t see that it matters much.  Look at it another way, either Jesus did or did not rise from the dead. If he didn’t, well, we’re back where we started. If he did, and it’s the true sign of a loving God, then that same God will not build a doctrinal fence around the afterlife.  It’ll more likely be a heavenly version of y’all come.  We did say he/she was a loving god, didn’t we?

So, I’ll pass on all the paperwork and skip straight to the flowers emerging in my garden. Or, perhaps more germane to the story of rising from the dead, I’ll also tend to what I believe is a living bee colony.  Yes, I went out today and bees were buzzing all around the hive I thought was dead.  Surprised the hell out of me.

Could be honey robbers, but I don’t think so.  I’ll have to suit up tomorrow morning and see. Afternoons are not a great time to check bees.  They’re coming home and pretty protective.

Yes, I claim in my own soul the emergent joy of each daffodil, each tulip, each crocus, each lily, each iris, each fern, each hosta, each pachysandra, each apple, cherry, plum and pear tree, the magnolia, the gooseberries, the elderberries, the currants, the quince, the strawberries and the garlic, all those members of our family here at Artemis Gardens and Hives. I will rise with each of them, spreading out, greeting the sun, creating new energy from the sun, the soil and the water, bursting with a new season’s vitality.

The virtue for me in this celebration is that it requires no dusty tomes of medieval logic, no interminable meetings to decide the color of the altar banners, no envelopes chucked in a metal plate, no weighty hands pressing down in ordination.  All it requires is some love.  Shoulda been enough for the church, too.

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

Apostasy

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Spring                                                                         Bee Hiving Moon

There are certain holidays when a former minister’s thoughts turn to apostasy. Easter is chief among them.  This is the true high holiday of the Christian liturgical year and it is such because it is the resurrection that marks Christianity off from other faiths.  And, yes, I know about the dying and rising gods and how Jesus fits that paradigm. I agree it matters.  Nonetheless, when you put Christianity on the stage with Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Taoism, Shintoism, the various faiths counted as the Hindu religion, Sikhism, Jainism and whatever I might have forgotten, Christianity distinguishes itself by claiming a man/god who died, then rose from the dead.

It is that unique characteristic that Christians all over the world celebrate on Easter.  The resurrection is not only distinctive, it is central theologically to the Christian claim. Christianity moves on from Judaism at the empty tomb.  But not before.  Until the risen Jesus, Christianity’s story was not remarkable.  There were other would-be messiahs.  Others had followers and claimed miracles.  The teachings of Jesus largely conform to Jewish thought. Even the crucifixion was not remarkable. Other Jews died on the cross, too. This was a common form of capital punishment for the occupying Roman empire.

(George Frederick Watts – Orphée et Eurydice)

No, it is the dying and rising that makes Jesus unique and transformed him into Jesus the Messiah, Jesus Christ.  So, to set this claim aside, at least in its ontological sense, is the worst of apostasies.  And yet that is what I have done. Am I sure it never happened? No. That’s as impossible as being certain that it did. The shift for me came when I realized whether it had happened or not no longer mattered to me.

What do I mean by that? As one trained in Christian history, biblical scholarship, ethics and theology, I began to find Christianity, in all its forms, even its most liberal, simply too narrow. In my years in the Presbyterian Church I had many good friends, participated in many activities that moved justice forward, but I also struggled with church members and congregations over gay lifestyles and rights, the Vietnam War, income inequality and the privileges of white america.

In itself, of course, that back and forth is not unusual.  There were, at the time of my ministry, some 75,000 Presbyterians in the Presbytery of the Twin Cities for which I worked.  The Presbytery went as far north as Pine City, as far west as Buffalo, south to the Minnesota border and east a county or so into Wisconsin.  That there would be widespreads on matters of public policy is not at all surprising.  There were urban/rural differences, liberal/conservative differences, evangelical and liberal theological differences.  All quite normal sociologically.

What became clear over time, at least to me, was that the conversation and disputes happened in a sealed dome, a sort of osmotic barrier that surrounded those 75,000 people when they gathered as the church.  The barrier filtered out those who could not believe in the resurrection, yes, but it also filtered out, and this is more crucial to me, those who would not conform to the various ideological accretions adhering to denominational institutional life.

(Frederic Leighton-The Return of Perspephone (1891))

Here’s an example.  Presbyterians, as Calvinists, were long known for their adherence to predestination, even double predestination. Predestination is a theological form of materialist determinism (a current favorite among some practitioners of hard science) that posits God has determined every thing that happens.  Double predestination so-called took this belief to its logical, yet absurd conclusion. God had determined in advance who would be saved and who would not. This particular barnacle had been unstuck from the goodship Presbyterianism by liberal theologians quite a while back though certain branches of the denomination continue to hold the view.

My former boss, Bob Lucas, a great and good man, often warned against “majoring in the minors.” Within the ambit of the church this means don’t fuss with matters not essential, don’t get into conflict over things that are incidental to salvation, the primary purpose of the church. I think another version of this idea goes: In essentials unity, in all else, tolerance.

My position became that Christianity itself, as a movement, was majoring in the minors. It focused on conforming belief, ethics, morality and culture to the idiosyncrasies of a long gone time.  That is the effect of seeing biblical material as inspired and the church’s early days as somehow foundational, like the American Constitution.  Christianity has expended so much time, wealth, intellectual power and even violence to achieve this conformity, yet a casual step outside that dome, outside the osmotic barrier shows us that the great majority of people need food, medicine, work, public health.  Those are the majors.

(The Osiris-bed, where he renews the harvest cycle in Egypt.)

The minors are matters like the crucifixion and the resurrection.  Why? Not least because their truth or falsity get trapped within human institutions that use them not for the intrinsic wonder and awe they represent, but as chits in the distribution of power.  They simply are not the world altering events they claim to be.

(inanna sumerian goddess annunaki   clawed feet is an ancient way to depict the fact she visited the Underworld.)

 

 

 

 

GeekWorld, Latin, Literature, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Translating Metamorphoses, World History

Emergence, Complexity and Augustan Rome

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Spring                                                                 Bee Hiving Moon

Two projects are pushing themselves forward, aspects of work already underway.  After reading a recent batch of articles arguing against a crass materialism and insisting on looking at the world not only through reductionist goggles, I have decided now is a good time to reimmerse myself in the world of emergence.  Emergence is a concept that identifies emergent properties, things not predictable by the sum of a thing or processes immediately preceding a particular phenomena.

(Garni_Gorge Symphony of the Stones carved by Goght River at Garni Gorge in Armenia is an example of an emergent natural structure.)  wiki, emergence

The example that is most familiar to me is culture.  Culture is that society based phenomenon that weaves language, place, kinship, food choice, divisions of work, art, music and play into a whole that shapes the individual, makes them part of something, a culture, larger than themselves.  Culture does not follow from an examination of an individual or even a small group of individuals, it only begins to emerge in a larger group over a period of time.

Another and easier to grasp emergent phenomenon is the transition of a caterpillar to a butterfly.  Am I a butterfly or am I a caterpillar dreaming I’m a butterfly?

This also relates to the complexity movement in science.  Science proceeds by breaking things down to their most basic components, then discerning law-like behaviors.  Physics is the paradigmatic science in this respect.  But there are many phenomena, like emergence, that appear not as things are reduced to their simplest parts, but as things combine to create more and more complex materials and organisms.  Science has historically ignored those areas because they are difficult to quantify and/or difficult to study using usual scientific methods.

I’ve flirted with learning these two areas:  emergence and complexity theory, but have never devoted the necessary time to it.  It’s time.  This fits in my reimagining my faith project.

The second is broadening the scope of my learning about Ovid, his time, the Augustan period, other tellings of the same myths Ovid works with, and Augustan poetry more generally.  This is in service of the commentary/translation I plan to begin in earnest after this growing season ends and of a big novel still forming itself.

 

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase, Translating Metamorphoses, Weather +Climate

Solar Lighting

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Spring                                                           Bee Hiving Moon

sun calendarThe days are getting longer.  The large calendar I have with the yellow egg-yolk like mass in the center and the months around it in a circle grows closer to the calendar’s inner circle day-by-day. The yellow mass represents hours of sunlight, thicker and closer to the calendar as we grow close to the summer solstice, then gently beginning to pull away until a large gap exists by December 21st, the winter solstice.  It’s a clever way to visualize a prime seasonal driver, hours of sunlight per day.

My order for nitrogen is on the way and I’m hoping the soil will at least be workable enough to plant the cool season crops before we leave for Denver.  Kate and I look forward to the gardening time, though we’re also glad for the break during the winter.

I moved further into Book I of the Metamorphoses today.  Deucalion, the son of Epithemus, the sole male survivor of the deluge, says, “Earth is the great mother (and)…the bones in the earth’s body are stones.”  He and Pyrrha, daughter of Prometheus, and the sole remaining female after the flood, will repopulate the earth by throwing stones behind themselves as they walk and the stones will become humans.

[Deucalion and Pyrrha Repeople the World by Throwing Stones Behind Them, c.1636 (oil on canvas)  by Rubens, Peter Paul (1577-1640)]

Her bones are still turning into people today.

 

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

A Firefly Lit Lane

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Spring                                                         Bee Hiving Moon

Down the well this morning, tapping into the underground stream.  Still searching for an image.  Something to coalesce the third lifetime, the third phase of this body/mind’s adventure here on earth.

One came to me.  Suddenly.  But it feels apt.  I’ll have to let it set for awhile.  Work with it itself in the imagery extension section of the workbook, but it feels pretty good.

The image is of a lane headed back into a woods where the lane continues but with tree branches creating a leafy roof over it.  The time is late twilight, the season late summer.  The air is cool but humid.  And the lane, where it enters the woods, is lit by thousands of fireflies, blinking on and off, shifting locations, providing a weak but real luminescence so I can follow the path into the woods.  Because the fireflies are spread out along the path’s length, they also give the lane a feel of depth, as if it proceeds quite a long way into the woods.

This is not a mind birthed image, but a memory.  I saw this lane and these fireflies several years ago during a trip to New Harmony, Indiana.  I’ve written here about New Harmony before, but just as a reminder, it was founded by the Rappites who created a very successful religious community there in the mid-19th century.  Much of New Harmony’s built environment has its roots it that era.

When they moved to Old Economy Village in Pennsylvania, the Welsh industrialist Robert Owen bought the whole town for his utopian community, a quasi-socialist endeavor.  He brought with him from Britain a number of scientists and engineers committed to his scheme on a ship dubbed the Boatload of Knowledge.  The community didn’t last long, but the U.S. Geological Survey among other things grew out of the efforts of the people who came to New Harmony.

Since that time, New Harmony has continued to have a religious and intellectual bent.  In fact, as I looked down the lane into the firefly lit woods, on my left was an open air Episcopal Church designed by famed architect, Philip Johnson and on my right was a small garden marked by tiny drumlins planted with firs and dotted with boulders carved with quotes by Paul Tillich, the Protestant theologian, whose tomb lies there, too, in Paul Tillich Park.

In fact, this aerial photograph shows the spot where I stood between the open air church on the left and Paul Tillich Park on the right, looking north down the lane into what at night was a tree lined bower over an ancientrail leading into an infinite distance.  This feels like a perfect third phase image.

Faith and Spirituality, Health, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Increase the Flow of the Water

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Spring                                                            Bee Hiving Moon

A major reason for doing the Intensive Journal Workshop was to restart my meditative practice and I’ve done that, now meditating in the morning and before bed. In its emphasis on integrating inner and outer work the journal itself  is a spiritual method fit for a humanist to practice though it is agnostic in its essence.

In the workshops I’ve attended many attendees have been Catholic and I can see why. This is a way that puts a premium on regular introspection and openness to the movement of the underground stream.  And, it insists on bringing that work into daily life.  This would feel familiar to someone who knows the monastic spiritualities.

It also has a distinctively Quaker feel with its emphasis on being led by the inner life (what Quaker’s call the inner light) and working in silence.  Though I never became a Quaker I’ve always felt close to their way.

Perhaps the point of closest connection between my own philosophical position and Progoff’s comes through Lao Tse.  A parable Progoff often uses sounds Taoist to me. When we come to an obstacle, imagine a large boulder, in the stream of our life, we have several options.  We can try to go around it.  We can climb out of the stream and attempt a You can’t control the Universe. You are the water, not the rockportage.  We can probe for a way under the obstacle.  Or, we can remain stuck behind it.

Progoff offers an unusual strategy. Increase the flow of water in the stream.  Then, we can simply ride over the rock, carried by the extra water.  How do we do this in our life? By identifying the things that are working and emphasizing them.  As we increase our activity in the things that are working, we increase the positive flow in our life and any obstacles diminish, in fact, we may be able to float right over them.

Progoff offers this approach as an alternative to the problem oriented strategy of most therapy.  I like this idea, which is essentially the goal of Jungian analysis, too.  In my troubled late twenties and early thirties, I sought therapy, including doing outpatient alcohol treatment through Hazelden.  I went through a number of therapists, all well-intentioned, kind and compassionate, but each focused on my problems.  As I focused on the problems in therapy, then tried to work out the solutions in my life, it seemed my whole life was problematic.

It wasn’t until I found John Desteian and his Jungian approach that I began to appreciate my virtues.  Though I continued to grapple with anxiety and depression, I dealt with them as a whole person experiencing debilitating symptoms, rather than as a “depressed person” or an “anxious person.”  This insight, which came over years, allowed me to increase the flow of water in my stream so I could metaphorically rise above them.  That is, I continue to experience melancholy and anxiety, but as episodes in a full life, rather than as definitive of my life.

The Progoff work underscores and reinforces this understanding.

 

Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Translating Metamorphoses, Travel, Writing

What Is My Life Reaching For?

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Spring                                                              Bee Hiving Moon

On the last afternoon of the Intensive Journal Workshop we had an exercise focused on what our life is reaching for.  In the first morning we had defined the current period of our life: in my case the time after Kate’s retirement.  By the last afternoon we had worked ourselves into the next period of our lives.  Since we were newly in this next period, this exercise asked us to feel, below the conscious level, where our lives wanted to go.

Here is my sense of what my life is reaching for in this next period:

1. a bountiful, sustainable nutrient dense harvest of fruit and vegetables.

2. a way to use the Great Wheel website to advance the Great Work through literature, science and political activism.

3. a third phase (third lifetime) writing portfolio with short story writing credits as a floor for selling novels.

4. a schedule for translating and commenting on at least several books of the Metamorphoses

5. still more of a stable, wonderful marriage, regular visits and communication with kids and grandkids and friends.

6. more mutual travel opportunities with Kate.

As I work in the inner movement of my life, I can feel a quieting, a confidence that who I am and what I do is enough-no matter the outcomes.  This feeling has grown stronger since Kate retired and continues to strengthen with time.

In my third lifetime I will be calm, steady, productive.

 

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Retirement, Third Phase

Three Lifetimes: What to Do?

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Spring                                                               Bee Hiving Moon

The process of reintegration begins now.  These intensive journal workshops mark an end to one period of life and the beginning of another.  That’s by design.  The period I was in when I got to Tucson began when Kate retired, when I left Tucson I had begun a new period, her retirement in the past, and what’s in the present and future is life in the third phase for both of us, together.

BTW:  A big aha on the idea of the third phase which came while listening to a cd by Ira Progoff (Intensive Journal creator) speaking about the process of the journal’s development.  He noted that in society’s not all that long ago, the average lifespan was thirty to forty years.  At some point in that life a death/rebirth ritual would occur and the initiate would emerge an adult member of the society with a particular role to fill.

In contemporary civilization two realities make that clear process difficult, not impossible, but difficult.  The first is the secular nature of society.  We have stripped away the culturally specific religious practices by uprooting ourselves from the context in which those practices had unquestioned authenticity.  So the ritual elements of traditional culture simply has no weight in the modern psyche.

The second reality is the one that directly bears on the third phase.  Progoff notes that with modern life spans an individual might live two or three of the lifetimes available to a member of a traditional society.  Each full lifetime requires a death/rebirth ritual to adjust/reconfigure the image the self carries as its primary identity.  We’ve created two fundamental images for the first two phases:  student and worker/parent.  We have no fundamental image for the third phase, or, in Progoff’s analysis, our third lifetime.

One of the key tasks in the intensive journal workshop itself is to come up with an image for the next phase of your life.  I’m not sure I have it yet, though the Greenman has come to me.

The Celtic triskele (see above) can serve as symbol for this tri-fold life that each of us now is heir to.  The bottom two spirals are the beginning pair:  student and worker/parent. The third life, the third phase, sits atop the first two, growing out of them, but beyond them.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Travel

Land of Enchantment

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Spring                                                      Hare Moon

Santa Fe.  The adobe here catches the eyes, then the scent of pinyon smoke and the art galleries.  Also, the number of thin gray-haired citizens moving around with purpose, as if channeling Georgia O’Keefe.  It’s easy to imagine a chunk of this Latin influenced culture breaking off and taking root in other places.  An emphasis on beauty, use of native products and Latin American diffusion carried by sophisticated Latinos, artists, writers and outdoor enthusiasts.  Maybe as Chaco Canyon was to the pueblo cultures of the 850-1150 period.

By this time in the trip the Garmin, once unwelcome, has made me her bitch.  I hang on her every word, follow her exactly.  I think the voice model they hired might have been a dominatrix at some point.  It does take away the anxiety of navigating, especially in cities and off the main highway systems.  I like that.

When I drove from Holbrook to Gallup at 4 am yesterday, a sickle moon hung in the sky with Venus about 4 degrees away in line with the bottom point of the sickle.  It is an image that I will work with in the journal.  The pueblo people emulate the clouds, building up communities, then dissipating and moving on.  This moon hung in a clear sky and it was not difficult at all to stand with the pueblo people and the dine of the last thousand plus years and see with them the blessing.  The clouds created by the heat of the day would extend this beauty into the blue reaches of a sunlit sky.

Our kiva sees the same moon and planet, sees clouds in the day and the procession of stars at night.  Yes, our seasons are different, but plants grow in both our kivas and so do animals.  We are different, yet we are the same.