Category Archives: Humanities

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., The Move, Third Phase

Between

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Beltane                                                                            Summer Moon

Janus. The two faced god, one face looking to the past, the other toward the future. Hence, January. “…the god of beginnings and transitions,[1] and thereby of gates, doors, passages, endings and time.” Wiki  The door to Janus’ temple stood open during war and closed to indicate peace.

Got to thinking about Janus this morning in light of  Bill Schmidt’s comment about liminal spaces. Janus is presented as the god of liminality, of the time between war and peace, beginning and ending, inside and outside. But. As I thought about the image of Janus, he looks back into the past where lie regrets and failures and loss. At the same time he looks into the future where there is anxiety and hope and maybe despair. The one thing he is not is the god of liminal spaces. No, he’s the god of regret and worry. That thing that he cannot do is see the present, be in the now, for he is eternally fixated on the flow of time past or the onrush of time future.

More. As Bill suggested, to live is to be in liminality, between life and death, yesterday and tomorrow, this project and the next one. We can define, interestingly, liminality as the now since the now we inhabit has a position after a moment and before the next one.

The Celts reserved a special place for the liminal, seeing it as a magical time. So Celtic magic often happened at dawn or as evening fell. But in the understanding I’m presenting we can work our magic in the liminal space we inhabit. Right now. This is not an idle metaphor, but an expression of the magical reality of the now, of inhabiting liminal space always.

Whatever it is, we can bear it for this moment. At least for this moment. We may not have been able to bear it a moment ago and we don’t know whether we will be able to bear it in moment, but, right now, in this fleeting doorway where we stand poised between then and the future, right now, we can marshal our resources and get through the moment. With practice our capacity to live in this space between becomes usual, ordinary and we know in our body that regret is gone, in the past, and that anxiety is of the future, not yet.

As Stewart Brand puts it so nicely, we live in the long now.

 

Faith and Spirituality, Great Work, Humanities, Science

Nothing Alien To This Neighborhood

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Beltane                                                                      Summer Moon

We have had rain. And then some. And will get still more. The Great Anoka Sand Plain soaks it up and funnels it on down to the aquifers below our land, recharging them, then putting more flow into the streams like Rum River and the lakes like Round Lake.

The Summer Moon watches it all, as it has watched all since it split away from its partner the earth. Like the split aparts of Plato’s lovers the earth and the moon have continued together locked in a long term relationship, a dance in the coldness of space. The moon is our seer, an audience for all that we do, we creatures and rocks and clouds and waters of this spinning planet.

The whole solar system is a dynamic ballet. The sun’s selfless and profligate dispersal of energy feeds those of us closest while it’s gravitational pull keeps even those outer planets in our company.

And we humans, we think of ourselves as different from all this, unique, special but look at us from a solar perspective. We’re the deer and the whale, the paramecium and the volcano, the mammoth and the brontosaur. We are nothing more-and nothing less-than parts of this planet we ride. Yes, parts come alive, come animate, even come conscious, but we are creatures of this earth nonetheless and in the most literal sense and we are given energy in the same way all our solar system is given energy. By hydrogen fusion in the nuclear furnaces of the sun.

Terence, Roy Wolf reminded us at sheepshead last Thursday, said, “Nothing human is alien to me.” I’ll paraphrase: “Nothing human is alien to our sun’s neighborhood.”

Humanities, Latin, Letters, Writing

Home

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Spring                                                                                New (Emergent) Moon

Since listening to the TED talk I posted below, I’ve been trying to decide what my home is. Certainly writing is a contender. Two or three times a day I sit down the computer and pound out a post for this website. I’ve written novels and short stories over the last twenty years plus all those sermons over the last forty. When I need to clarify fuzzy thinking, I head to the keyboard, trusting the One Who Types as less addled than the One Who Only Thinks.

The other contender is scholarship. I’m hesitant about this one, since it seems the realm of the academic and I left the academy long ago. Still, I translate Latin, take the MOOC courses and follow up, stay in touch with the literature in several fields: hermeneutics, biblical scholarship, ecologial thought, climate change, certain sub-disciplines of philosophy like aesthetics, pragmatism and metaphysics, neuro-science and classical literature. And, perhaps more telling, I approach life with the mind of a scholar, critical and analytic, wanting to be confident of my data, my sources, always pushing toward synergy, toward new ways of thinking.

These are not, of course, exclusive.  The writing requires research and research requires writing. Perhaps my home is the liminal zone between writing and scholarship.

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.)

 

 

 

 

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

What Do You Choose?

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Spring                                                                   Bee Hiving Moon

Despair.  It’s easy to find among those who follow climate science and climate change.  Or, immigration.  Or, poverty.  Or, war. Or, availability of medical services in the U.S. even with Obamacare. Or, agriculture as usual.  And no wonder.

Climate science shows that we have 3.6 degrees of warming baked-in with the current carbon dioxide load in the atmosphere and that if things don’t change drastically by 2050 that number could increase between 2 and 6 times, or just to be brutal, between 7.2 degrees and 21.6 degrees!  And, current measurement shows co2 emissions increasing, not decreasing.

That’s due in part to fighting poverty in the world’s two largest countries, India and China. Their growing economies have coal burning or wood burning energy use at their heart, plus as their middle-classes grow they all want cars.

The American way of agriculture, so productive and revered throughout the world, depends on two unsustainable practices:  the constant injection of chemicals and herbicides into and onto depleted soil and irrigation using aquifers with very slow recharge rates.

You understand these issues, I’m sure you do, and you probably find them as far from solution as I do.  So why don’t we just go on that final road trip?  In an electric car of course.

We won’t go on that final road trip because the last thing to escape Pandora’s box was hope.  And, yes, hope is an anodyne or can be, I know that.  But the long read of history suggests it is the doomsayers whose predictions prove overblown.  On our way in to see Mountaintop yesterday we drove past the local 7th Day Adventist church.  In their denominational history is an American story of the end predicted, and re-predicted, then re-predicted again.  Here’s a line from the Wikipedia piece on Millerism:  “October 22, 1844, the day Jesus was expected to return, ended like any other day [28] to the disappointment of the Millerites. Both Millerite leaders and followers were left generally bewildered and disillusioned.”

Malthusian estimates of the final carrying capacity of the earth have been overturned time and time again.  Even the mad doctrine of mutually assured destruction lived up to its policy promise rather than its often contemplated nuclear holocaust.  The War to End All Wars.  Well, we know how that turned out.

We’re very good at despair because we project potential disastrous scenarios into the future as if the most extreme occurrences are the most likely.  In fact, the opposite is true. The most extreme occurrences are just that, most extreme.  They are the black swans of human culture.  Yes, black swans happen, as the book of the same name shows, but they are rarely the black swans we have predicted.

Who, for example, would have predicted that one man, Thomas Midgley, would produce two chemicals that threatened millions of people, unintentionally?  Midgley is the man responsible for lead in gasoline as a successful anti-knock agent.  He also invented Freon, non-toxic itself, but in combination with chemicals in the upper atmosphere it creates an ozone eater.  It produced the well-known ozone hole.  BTW:  “He contracted polio when he was 51. As he lost the use of his legs, he invented a harness to get himself out of bed. On Nov. 2, 1944, he tangled in the gadget. It strangled him.”  Engines of Our Ingenuity, #684.

Our current Thomas Midgley is laboring away somewhere right now, solving some problem with a lethal solution.  Only he or she doesn’t know it.

But back to despair.  It is the emotional equivalent of Midgley’s harness.  It begins as an assessment of possibilities, moves to an acceptance of a certain gloomy situation, and ends as a tangle in which some of us, like Midgley, end up strangled.

(Pandora, Rossetti)

Here is the nub of hope, anodyne or not.  What is most disastrous has not happened. Today we can choose to live differently, live toward the possible solution rather than wrap ourselves in seemingly inevitable defeat.  No amount of despair will move us toward a better tomorrow.  Just a bit of hope can.  This is not pollyanna thinking, it recognizes life has crushing defeats and sorrows.  The question is one of choice.  Do you choose to live toward the bleakness or toward the sunrise.  As for me, I’m turning toward the east.

Cinema and Television, Great Work, Humanities, US History

Wish I’d Known the Son-of-a-Bitch Wanted to be a Millionaire.

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Spring                                                                      Bee Hiving Moon

Kate and I saw Nebraska the other night.  This movie was pitch perfect for heartland small town dialogue.  The images it created of Billings, Montana, Hawthorne, Nebraska,  and Lincoln, Nebraska felt taken from my recent adventure driving between my surprise incursion point into Kansas and Highway 80 in mid-Nebraska.  Small rural towns in the midwest have suffered, a lot, over the last 50 years.  They’re run down and often sparsely settled though that trend has begun to ameliorate somewhat.

There were as well images of striking beauty, especially a wide-angle shot of a slightly rolling field with bales of rolled hay sprinkled throughout.  If not for the black and white, it could have been painted by Breughel.  The big sky and vast horizons of the drive from Billings to Lincoln are also beautiful, the stark aesthetic of the plains.

Not only because it was black and white, but because of its tight focus on family and strangeness (remember Mom lifting her skirt to the gravestone?), too, this film reminded me of Ingmar Bergman.  These were everyman characters dealing with everyday issues:  a desultory  job, American hucksterism and its unwitting victims, a long distanced father and son closing the gap, a slow revelation of Woody and David’s largeheartedness.

It will, unfortunately, only serve to convince bi-coastal sophisticates that the rural midwest is unredeemable, shabby and coarse, low-browed.  It cannot and does not try to show the agricultural culture that lies behind the small towns and cities and lives it portrays.  It also cannot show the slow but persistent erosion of rural life as farming has gone corporate and the kids leave home for Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver, even Lincoln and Omaha.

This is not a criticism of the movie, but a wistful longing for an artful representation of growing food, tending livestock, some way of showing the heartland as just that, the heart of a great nation and a food producer for the world.

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.

Art and Culture, Dreams, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities

Excited

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Spring                                               Hare Moon

The turning of the great wheel to the season of birth and rebirth and the celebration of this golden moment seem now poised to reinforce some new work, at least a major insight.

Today begins the life integration workshop, the last of the three, and the one which ties together the inner and the outer with an eye toward the future.  This morning I had a big dream.  Its content was driven by work I’ve been doing over the last four days.

(Jacob Wrestling the Angel, Marc Chagall)

That means I’ll have a meaty piece of inner life to take into the integrative work of the next two days.  It has something to do with my spiritual life and seems to suggest working in and through the time period when I decided to return the ministry in the late 1990’s.

It’s exciting to me to have such relevant and significant material to work with in the concluding hours of this intensive journal workshop.

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

Follow the Light

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Spring                                                Hare Moon

We’re at the mid-point of the workshops, currently in the depth context focus.  This was the one that stimulated my desire to attend a journal workshop again.  My spiritual life, meditation in particular, but also working with images and dreams had gotten shoved aside as I cranked up the creative side of my life.

This was not a conscious act, just a gradual slipping away, until I had become unaware of its absence.  Odd to think of it that way, but it’s what happened.  Progoff has a method called process meditation and that’s the focus of the depth context workshop, learning how to engage dreams, imagery and other key sources of meaning in your life.

A mantra developed in my first journal workshop in 1981, I have used ever since.  That’s 33 years.  Process meditation works and more than met my needs when I engaged it regularly, but, like any discipline, it requires attention and I’ve let mine slip.

The workshop is both reinforcing and its own complete journey.  I’m working with an incredible experience I had while in college.  Some of you know about it.

I had just finished a class in metaphysics.  When I opened the door of the humanities building and began to step out into the quad, a visceral feeling gripped me and I became all interior.  My interior in turn became all light rushing out in all directions and receiving light in from all directions.  For a brief moment I had a physical experience of my relatedness to everything in the universe.

Then it was over and the sunny fall morning in Muncie, Indiana came back into focus, I stepped out onto the quad and walked away.

I can recall this event very well.  We’ll see where the workshop process takes it.  I’m interest in its connection to reimagining my faith.  This is the sense in which the workshop is its own complete journey.

But it has also reminded of the role and the way meditation and work with dreams and images can reenter my life.

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant.

Caesura

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Imbolc                                                                     Hare Moon

 

25 years ago I left the workaday world for home based efforts, but the weekend still has a different, more relaxed feeling.  As if things just aren’t quite as urgent.  This is thanks to the union movements press for the 40 week combined with early Protestant and Catholic Christianity that tried to reserve Sunday for church.

In a more secular time Sunday has become, for many, a true day of rest with Saturday providing time for the domestic tasks not accomplished during the week.

The notion of a day of rest, a time to pause and consider the week behind and the one ahead, can seem like a luxury, perhaps even irresponsible.  The cell phone, e-mail, broadband, and television are available around the clock.  In hypercompetitive work settings there is the awful sense that someone might be catching up or that you’ve not done enough. Why not fill up this blank day with that extra effort, the push that might get you ahead.

In music there are rests, the caesura that lets a particular line or run of notes breathe, giving them definition.  In winter whole species of animals hibernate and thousands of individuals are doing so right now on this property where I write.  Holidays, spread throughout the year, are caesura, as are our vacations, our anniversaries and birthdays. In art, especially sculpture, we learn that negative space defines a work.  Without negative space that David would still be a block of granite.

Taoism, perhaps the clearest on this idea, points out that the usefulness of a cup is not its body, but the negative space it contains.  Windows. Doors. Rooms. Baskets. Silence.

The effort in our lives is like the cup, the window, the door, it is the body which contains the life, it is not the life itself.  Life itself is realized in the negative spaces among our focused efforts.  That’s where the laugh comes, or the gentle touch, or the smile, the encouraging word, the hug, the tear.

In my view it behooves us to grant ourselves as much negative space as we can and a day a week does not seem like too much.  It is probably too little.