34  68%  26%  0mph  bar 29.66  steep fall  windchill33  Winter

                 New Moon

“Let your capital be simplicity and contentment.” – Henry David Thoreau

Yes, it’s a stretch after a week of wires and bytes and high definition, but Thoreau’s got it right.  If we can’t be happy with what we have and content with our life, then we doom ourselves to slavery, handcuffed to the next big thing as sure as if we rode in the middle passage.

Then what?  After my change of mind about the exclusivist claim of Christianity, I floundered for several years. 

There had been a prior change in my spiritual life, of a seemingly subtle nature, but it began to play increasing importance.  At some point on my Christian pilgrimage I began to resist transcendence and the many, many metaphors for it that take us up and away from our Selves, our inner journey.  Heaven, God as a being resident there, the Bible or the Pope or church doctrine as a source of truth.  Remember Bacon on method?  Ascension.  Rapture.  Rooting my ethical decisions in the literature of a long dead people. 

Emerson made a lot of sense to me here:  “Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”  Introduction to Nature

Since I found Emerson in my first church experience after Presbyterianism, I oriented toward liberal religion.  Liberal religion is more a method than a faith, that is, it proposes to apply the Enlightenment to religion:  reason, tolerance and freedom.  At first the literally heady mix of those three allowed me to swing wide the doors of my spirit and just play, considering this possibility and that.  At some point, though, I can’t pinpoint just when, this tradition began to raise in me the same quandry Emerson had seen after only three years in the Unitarian ministry:  it was corpse cold.

Reason, tolerance and freedom are good tools to open up a space for free thought in politics, religion and science.  In the end, however, they are tools, not content.  They can take apart political ideology and scientific speculation, but in themselve they neither decide for or against, say, democracy or socialism or communalism.  Though they also are great aids to understanding the world through scientific investigation, they offer us no clues as to why there is a world investigate, a cosmos to explore.  In religion, again, they are tools handy for dismantling false claims like the inerrancy of scripture, or, even, the universality of a particular religion’s dogmas, but as constructive tools they do not build a faith of the heart.  No, that can only happen when, as John Wesley said, the heart is strangely moved.

More on that which moved my heart later.