Lughnasa Waxing Back to School Moon
A very busy three days with something in the evening each night plus events during the day, too. Glad to get a chance to get back to the bees and the garden.
Some autumn blooming bulbs came in the mail today, so I’ll get a chance to plant them over the weekend. I need to get outdoors. Fall bulb planting is one of my favorite garden chores. Crisp weather and Folk Alley radio, sometimes the Andover Marching Band can be heard in the background.
I’m still trying to come to grips with the unsettling experience I had at the seminary tonight. I have no patience for the God talk, less for the elaborate hermeneutical dance that goes on in such settings. I put myself in the room as a favor to Groveland and to Leslie, but I no longer feel like I belong there, a strange feeling after 15 years in the ministry. These used to be my people; it is my seminary; but, I feel more like an outsider now than I did when I began back in 1970 and I was very outside the norm then.
I hope I’ve not done Leslie a disservice by agreeing to do this. I still respect the faith journey, the attempt to wrest some purpose out of life, to read the palimpsest of history and of nature, scraping away the latest scribbles to look even deeper, to find a way into the world of divinity, a trace of the sacred on the wind. These represent the sweetest and the best of human endeavor, those moments when the human vessel becomes a vehicle for discernment.
The institutional expressions of religion, the rationalization of charisma as Max Weber said, do little or nothing, indeed often obfuscate the journey with the insistent demands of institutional maintenance: credentialing of clergy, fund raising, dogma protecting, seeking new members, building buildings, routinized worship. Where is the ecstatic? The mystic? The awe-some? Where is the deep calling unto deep? Where is the fearless acceptance of the human condition? Dangerous, lovely, cloying, sensual, heady, brutal, wild and untamed, even in the most civilized. The Methodists and the Presbyterians and the United Church of Christ and the Baptists and even, for no God’s sake, the UU’s have fashioned clay towers with bright windows but no doors and no way outside.
The journey happens at night as sleep comes, when a dream grabs you by the throat and won’t let go. The journey proceeds as you walk to work, hold hands with a lover, dance in the rain, smile at the gorilla and the lion fish. It goes forward along the ancientrails of art, literature, dance, music, theater. Meditation? Sure. Quiet moments with fellow travelers? Yes. Finance committee meetings? Don’t think so. Evangelism? Nope. The journey deepens when we become vulnerable to ourselves, to the world around us and I’m sorry, but I don’t see the support for that in the pews of any church I’ve ever attended. Perhaps the monastery holds an echo of it. The solitary parishioner at prayer. The Jews at the wailing wall. Muslims at the Kabah. Maybe.
But the weak tea I experienced tonight? Unlikely. And I feel bad about that, sad.