Imbolc Black Mountain Moon
“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? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply, to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Introduction to his essay, Nature
Two new categories appear today on Ancientrails: Beyond the Boundaries and Original Relation. They come from this paragraph, the first of Emerson’s introduction to his essay, Nature. When I first read this paragraph, I was just beginning to grasp the radical nature of Emerson’s thought and the liberal religious movement which claimed him. Since that first reading, it has become a steady source of inspiration and more. It has become a sharp knife for my own thinking, my own willingness to walk out to the boundary of what I have learned, what I believe, what I know, to walk out to the boundary then step over it and walk in the meadows beyond.
Now I want to try and give systematic attention to that work, to collect the thoughts I’ve had, the experiences I’ve had out beyond the boundaries. In a way you could call this an attempt to create a personal testament, a summing up, but by the nature of the work those categories are too limiting. Instead this is more in the way of an adventure, following ancientrails out to their terminus, then investigating the terrain beyond them.
What happens after religion, for example? I do not share the current negative assessment of religion, in any of its forms, not even Emerson’s. Religion is the great poetry of our species, the language in which the common person can give voice to wonder, to awe. It is, too, and at the same time, a way to congeal values and create a code of behavior, a way to define who we are and what we do.
Most religions I have studied, or at least become familiar with, have great learnings that all of us can use though we may not be so enamored of the codes of behavior that come along with them. No, I’m not trying to reduce all religions to some universal value like love your neighbor, or love, such work denies the particularity, the native genius in each of them.
I have found in my own searching certain key ideas, even revelations perhaps (if we are careful about what we mean) in various religious traditions that I have incorporated into my own thought. Let me give you an instance: incarnation and how it manifests in the Christian tradition, especially the birth narratives for Jesus. This is a god, in the Christian tradition—the God, becoming human. It’s a mind rattling idea, an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent being funneling Itself down into the frailty and limitations of a human body. What are we to make of that? What if we walked up to the notion of a god coming in from the outside, looked around the edges of that idea, and stepped over the fence line? You might get a result like the one below.
Here’s three paragraphs from a Christmas time post:
Three wise men, shepherds, angels and gospel writers of all kinds should take note each time a new human is born. Each of us is the universe looking on and through itself. That is god-like, making the universe a true polytheist.
Each of us has the full potential of a new Self, a Self that may be the next Madam Curie, Ghandi, or Doris Lessing. Or, that Self might be the next loving mother or father, the next hero or heroine, the kind big sister or the thoughtful big brother.
Whatever he or she becomes, each birth could be greeted with: Hallelujah, this day, a new divinity is born.
Beyond the Boundaries and Original Relation are part of a trinity of ideas with Reimagining Faith. In posts to these categories I hope over the next year or so to lay down enough material for a book, not a new religion, not at all, not even a new philosophy, hardly, but an idiosyncratic vision, seen from within the life and mind of one man, as he walks up to various boundaries and crosses over them.
