• Category Archives Commentary on Religion

  • AncientTrails Visits All Continents

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Samhain                                         Waning Wolf Moon

    “Just as the wave cannot exist for itself, but is ever a part of the heaving surface of the ocean, so must I never live my life for itself, but always in the experience which is going on around me. It is an uncomfortable doctrine which the true ethics whisper into my ear. You are happy, they say; therefore you are called upon to give much.” – Albert Schweitzer

    Schweitzer was a theologian with unusual views and a favorite of my Mom and Dad.   His “reverence for life” played an important part in their thinking about politics and the world.  Though I’ve never considered it before, I imagine his perspective had a role in shaping mine, too.  Reverence for life was a pre-abortion hoo-ha concept and not meant to be part of that debate.

    Just reviewed Google Analytics for AncienTrails.  Thanks to the wonder of the internet (and google) this website has received visits from all 7 continents and 46 of the 50 states in the last month.  Only Nevada, North Dakota, Delaware and Connecticut recorded no hits from November 7th to December 5th.  I find this very strange, perhaps unexplainable, but somehow pleasing, too.  Anyhow, if you’re one of those readers from other parts of the world, please add a comment or two from time to time.  It would be fun to get a conversation going.

    Kate and I just took the first two segments of the 55 Alive online driver safety course.  It reminds you that reaction time slows down as you age.   Drinking and driving?  No.  That prescription and non-prescription drugs affect our driving.  Mostly stuff you know, but good reminders so far.  Sobering statistics about driving after age 75, too.  Crashes and fatalities go up considerably with people in those age ranges having the same accident rate of drivers from 16-24 with more deaths.  Gotta factor that into retirement planning.

    The Vikes vs. Cardinals game got moved to the higher ratings slot of Sunday night football.  That means the day time is more free than usual at this point on Sunday.

    I visited Big Brain Comics yesterday and picked up two graphic novels, both, believe it or not, on advice from reviews in the New York Times.  Strike Force is an anti-war novel set in Iraq and LogiComix, very improbably, is a biography of Bertrand Russell and his work on the Principia Mathematica.  Last night Strike Force kept me up past midnight.


    Aging Commentary on Religion Friends Humanities Letters Sport 📎and tagged

  • Doubt

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                               Waxing Blood Moon

    Got this comment on my post:  Blood Moon Risin

    Gently put, nicely said. Doubt isn’t it’s own reward but I think it’s an honest place to be. As you quote Rilke at the outset – the first stanza of his famous, profound and beautiful “Fall Day” – I’ll offer another Rilke for you.

    There’s a story in the collection ‘Stories of God’ that he wrote while working on the ‘Book of Hours’, which most folks consider his better (of the two) work).

    Regardless, the story is called, in English, ‘A Tale of Death and a Strange Postscript to it’. In it, a happy couple that have squirelled themselves away from the world, are greeted by death. In their fear they hide from Him, and little by little lose their joy of life.

    I love this story because I too am afraid to die. It’s helped me acknowledge and move past that fear.

    Keep writing – you do it well –

    Regards,

    Jack

    Jack Beacham
    Stories-of-God.com
    Jack.Beacham@Stories-of-God.com
    98.21.188.5

    As Jack intended, I’ve rethought that post, considered it.  Here’s how I see it now.  Doubt is an odd word and I’d never noticed it before this comment.  Doubt sets the conceptual table and has a trick for dessert.  Doubt, defined by the person identifying it in another, says really,  “Oh, I see.  Right now you can’t see the things I see, but if and when things clear up for you, you will see them.”  That is, the  idea of doubt from the position of its identifier defines the doubter using the identifiers terms.  In other words, if I express my sense that there is nothing knowable beyond this life, I’m a doubter.  In fact, all I’m identifying is my sense that this world is all we get.

    I get the sense that Jack is a kind and compassionate man. I appreciate his taking the time to respond.

    As for me, I understand his doubt about my take on the afterlife.


    Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality

  • Bio-Char and the After-Life

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                             Waxing Blood Moon

    The Woolly’s met at the old Cenacle in a new retreat center.  We’ve met there three or four times this year.

    The focus was views on the afterlife.  The conversation revealed a surprisingly conservative undertone with several Woollys hedging their metaphysical bets.  Immanuel Swedenborg got a mention as did reincarnation as a proven reality.

    Some, like me, took a more existential stance.  “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.”  I believe that was Carl Sagan.  The questions death raises have confounded humanity since at least the time of the Neanderthals.  There is something about a void after death, an extinctionist perspective I saw it called recently, that unsettles many people.

    It is, as much as anything else, I imagine, such a stark contrast with the vitality and hereness of life.  That this magical adventure, this ancient trail might end in nothingness seems like a cheat.  But by whose perspective?

    To me the wonder is this life, this one chance we have to experience whatever we can, to do what we can.  To be who we are.

    On another note Mark Odegard had two words for today’s graduates:  bio-char.  New to you?  Me, too.  It’s worth a look though and here’s a website that will help you get up to speed.


    Aging Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Woolly Mammoths 📎and tagged

  • The Afterlife

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                Waxing Blood Moon

    The energizer box, a low impedance model, has a connection to the rope.  There is not enough high capacity underground wire left to do the grounds so I’ll stop by Fleet Farm on my way to Wayzata tonight.  The Woolly meeting convenes on the grounds of the old Cenacle retreat center, now an addiction treatment center.

    Tomorrow morning we’ll power up and see if the damn thing works.  My best guess right now is that it will.  Then we wait for word from Rigel that it has begun to serve its intended function.

    Warren has posed a question about the afterlife for tonight’s Woolly meeting.  What do we believe about it?

    A few years ago I used this  analogy for the question of the afterlife.  It still expresses what I feel.

    Think of the universe as a great tapestry woven from the life and death of stars, the solar winds, the orbits of planets and the emergence of life, especially on the planet we know intimately.  Our life, lived as best we can, blinks on at some point in this tapestry and adds color, texture, intensity and vitality to the design.  This tapestry never loses anything and it extends as far as the Great Wall of Reality extends.  Without your life the tapestry would be a poorer, less beautiful creation.

    This is my Credo:
    From the very stuff of this cosmos we were made.

    Each life is a unique, energetic organization of this stuff.

    Human life is neither less nor more unique than any other, with one exception (maybe):  consciousness.

    Each of us has a Self into which we try to live.  The Self pulls us and prods us to be who we are.

    You are a special and important contribution to the story of the Universe, so you must live as who you are.  If you live as you believe others would have you be, then the world loses your unique and precious story.

    Economic justice is a means of assuring each persons chance to be who they are.  Therefore, political action in support of economic equity is important to the universal story.

    We need the world of plants and animals, oceans and sky far, far more than they need us.  So, work to protect them, and you will protect your loved ones.

    The human family and friends we love and support in this life will, in all likelihood, be our primary legacy.

    An open heart and an open mind keeps the Self fresh, defeats stagnation, and assures a vital life at any age.

    Learning from our gardens, our children, our friends, our spouses or partners, and from the collected wisdom of others connects us to the past and links us to the future.

    Art, children, dogs, jazz, and travel have the capacity to jolt us into new perspectives.


    Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Great Wheel Great Work 📎and tagged

  • Thoughts of Your Own

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Lughnasa                                Waning Green Corn Moon

    “To find yourself, think for yourself. ” – Socrates

    Gnothi seauton, written over the door into the temple of Apollo, the home of the Delphic Oracle on Mt. Parnassus, means, Know thyself.  How, you might ask?  Listen to Socrates: to find yourself, think for yourself.  This seems so straightforward, but humanity society pushes more toward thought focused on blending in, getting by.  The need to belong and to have respect is so strong it bends our thoughts, often before we know they have been changed.   We change our values so they conform to the group not because we are weak, but because we are social animals.

    Our life in community cuts against the grain of thinking for ourselves.  This is why so many people have trouble with finding themselves.  We seek out meditation, religious dogma, political ideology, even scientific certainty in place of careful examination of evidence for themselves.   It is, at first, so pleasing to quiet the anxiety by replacing your own thought process with ready mades that we do not realize we have begun to censure ourselves.

    Yet this much is true:  if you have not weighed and considered a matter using your own reason, your own intuitions, your own feelings then you have moved further away from finding yourself.  To do otherwise  is a harsh discipline, often not pleasant, but it has one saving grace: you know who you are.

    As you go through the day today, ask yourself if that thought is your own.  Ask yourself if the value you hold comes from your decision making or the pre-cut cloth of public or group opinion.  Ask yourself if you want to be who you are or who others would shape you to be.


    Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Humanities

  • This Is The Question I Face Now. One I Have Not Answered.

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring            Waning Seed Moon

    Agency.  There’s been a lot written in psychology and history about agency.  We have agency when we can affect the flow of events in our own lives or in the world around us. (No, I’m not going to get into the subtle no-free-will arguments floating around.)  A lot of the historical work has concerned how those without agency–say women, slaves, workers–get it or why they don’t have it.  In the case of the individual agency refers to our capacity to direct our own life.

    A sense of agency underwrites our sense of self, or our sense of group identity.  Note that our agency or our group’s agency can be positive or negative.  A more negative sense of agency, that is, sensing that others or factors outside your control influence your life or your group, leads to a feeling of diminished capacity or is a feeling of diminished capacity.  A positive sense of agency promotes a feeling of active and successful engagement with the world, the ability to act in ways congruent with your self-interest or your group’s self-interest.

    Here’s where I’m going with this.  In my regression back into the ministry after 8 or so years out I made the move because my writing career had not produced the hoped for results.  I had lost a sense of agency in the work area of my life and moved backwards on my psychological journey to retrieve it.  Going backwards to pick up something left behind is a key element of regression.  Its flaw lies in a return to a previous reality no longer relevant.  The ministy was what I had done, a minister what I had been.  The experience of return to the ministry produced missteps and a low level of energy for the actual work.

    Now, about ten  years later,  once again I have reached back into my past, this time even further, to retrieve a sense of agency, the ur-agency, for me, the political.  This is the work with the Sierra Club. (hmmm.  just realized I did the same thing two years back when I studied Paul Tillich.  That was a return to life as a student, a potent form of agency for me.)

    What the work with the Sierra Club, the study of Tillich and the ministry have in common is an attempt to regain a positive sense of self through a form of agency already well-established and presumably easily recaptured.  None of these activities in themselves is a bad thing, but that is the lure, the  seductive call of regression.

    Back there, if only I could go back in time, and become the captain of the football team again.  Prom queen.  College radio jockey.  The actor I became after college.  My successful years as a bond trader or nurse or carpenter.  Back there I was strong, able.  I had a way with the world, a position of respect and self-confidence. Continue reading → Post ID 4689


    Aging Art and Culture Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality Great Work Politics Writing 📎and tagged

  • A Thought on Extinction

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring     Waning Moon of Winds

    Quick notes for some future thought.  Often I carry a notion around for days before I set it down and I’ve had one banging around for a week or so.  On Monday last at Frank Broderick’s I offered a view of legacy that featured, as I posted here, Shelley’s poem Ozymandias.  The more I’ve thought of that poem and the sinking in to the sands of time of 99.99999% of us, often not even name remaining for long, I’ve felt strangely liberated by it.

    Let me extend  the notion.  Not only will even the best and the brightest of us fade from view, as have all but a very few, but given time even the starship on which we travel will die away, too.  Long before that humanity will have ended its time here on earth, perhaps we will go out to the stars, perhaps not, but at some point the planet we know, that humanity has known as its only home, will disappear from the universe, swallowed by an expanding red giant.

    This cheery line of thought led me backwards then to our self-awareness.  We know we will die.  This is said to be the ur-fear, but I think is not.  The ur-fear is not death per se, but the question of extinction.  Somehow extinction makes us uneasy, as if we should be an exception to what we expect for dogs, cows, trees and frogs.  This winking out of aware life carries a potential and, I think, actual message of nihilism.  That is, life has no overriding moral purpose when seen in light of death.

    Does this mean no ethical system has roots, punch.  No, of course not.  Camus felt that death made us all brothers and sisters, committed to each other and to as smooth and happy a course of life for the other as for ourselves.  Ethical systems validated only by post death rewards or punishments do fall by the side.  But they are no great loss.


    Commentary on Religion Faith and Spirituality 📎and tagged