• Tag Archives faith

  • Imaginal Cells and the Afterlife

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    37  bar steady 29.86 k0mph WNW windchill 37  melting.  it’s melting!

         Waxing Gibbous Moon of Winds

    At times the days go by with little more than random patterns, but in these days after my return from Hawai’i there has been purpose in each one.  Today I worked with Transcendentalism and finished a brief summary using annotated links and edited my presentation, Transcendent Thinking, for this Sunday at Groveland. 

    This Sunday happens to be Easter.  Imagine my surprise as I edited this piece and noticed that it ended with an image entirely appropiate to the Easter concept.  I say surprise because I wrote Transcendent back in mid-January before my trip to Hawai’i and only recently learned this was to be Easter Sunday.  This is as early as Easter can be or within a day or two, so I hadn’t tumbled to it.  Here are the closing paragraphs:

    Death, though, is not the only truth, or perhaps better, it’s not the whole truth.  All faith traditions wrestle with the question of an after-life, not surprising since most anthropologists and historians of religion peg the development of spirituality-the inner world of faith and wonder-and religion-the outer, institutionalized world of beliefs and rituals-to questions about death. What was it?  What happened?  What did it mean?

    The mythopoetic stories of dying and rising gods like Osiris in Egypt, Jesus in the Middle East, Mithras and Attis represent a grappling with the question of life and after-life in terms of vegetative symbolism.  

    During the winter, more than once my thoughts turn to the daffodil bulbs, the tulips, the iris, the hemerocallis, the true lilies, the bug-bane, hosta, maidenhair fern and lady fern, peonies and bleeding hearts as they rest, buried beneath soil and snow.  Some, the garlic in particular this year, lie also beneath six inches of straw.  All this life adapted to winters during which the air temperature drops to -18, even -38 (three or four years ago). 

    There are so many miracles.  The sun shines, our heart beats and these hardy plants pull themselves in for a season.  Instead of wasting the cold months by feverishly working to stay warm or hunting for shelter outside themselves, they cast aside their above ground parts: stem, leaves, flowers and seed pods, leaving them withered in the face of harsh conditions. 

    The plants retreat inside their own, individual root cellars.  In them they have laid by sufficient nourishment to catch the wave of warm air when the soil around them rises in temperature enough to wake them from their slumber.

    When I think of this my heart goes out to the bulbs, corms, tubers and rhizomes.  As I often feel for my own sons and grandchildren, I feel a fondness for them that radiates joy in the durability of my offspring.  This is not some spring nostalgia at work; no, this is simple appreciation for the millions of years of evolutionary work that has preceded this winter and adapted these wonderful, colorful livelinessess to grace our land.

    It is not a stretch to consider death in the same way.  We wither and cast aside our above ground parts, the body, then go to some unknown equivalent of the soil to rest for a period, to wait until conditions are right for our return.

    If the advocates of string theory have it right, there are multiverses, multiple branching realities based on alternative outcomes to our daily lives.  It is possible that one of those multiverses is the metaphysical realm, literally a realm beyond our physics, beyond the reach of our senses, where the seed of our life goes, where it may blossom and grow and live in a form quite different from the one we now know.

    Here’s another way to think about it.  Go out into your garden this fall and find a wriggly caterpillar happily consuming your favorite flower or vegetable.  Watch that caterpillar over the next few weeks as it spins a cocoon.  What goes on inside?

    Here’s an explanation:

    The Imaginal Cell Story

    The caterpillar’s new cells are called ‘imaginal cells.’
    They are so totally different from the caterpillar cells
    that his immune system thinks they are enemies… and gobbles them up.

    But these new imaginal cells continue to appear. More and more of them!
    Pretty soon, the caterpillar’s immune system
    cannot destroy them fast enough.
    More and more of the imaginal cells survive.
    And then an amazing thing happens!

    The little tiny lonely imaginal cells start to clump together
    into friendly little groups.
    They all resonate together at the same frequency,
    passing information from one to another.
    Then, after awhile, another amazing thing happens!

    The clumps of imaginal cells start to cluster together!
    A long string of clumping and clustering imaginal cells,
    all resonating at the same frequency,
    all passing information from one to another there inside the chrysalis.

    Then at some point,
    the entire long string of imaginal cells
    suddenly realizes all together
    that it is something different from the caterpillar.
    Something new! Something wonderful!
    …and in that realization
    is the shout of the birth of the butterfly!

    Since the butterfly now “knows” that it is a butterfly,
    the little tiny imaginal cells
    no longer have to do all those things individual cells must do.
    Now they are part of a multi-celled organism-
    A FAMILY who can share the work.

    Each new butterfly cell can take on a different job-
    There is something for everyone to do.
    And everyone is important.
    And each cell begins to do just that very thing it is most drawn to do.
    And every other cell encourages it to do just that.

    A great way to organize a butterfly!”

    *Adapted Version of Nori Huddle’s story from her book, Butterfly

    These considerations lead me to an agnostic position when it comes to the afterlife.  The ancients may have known something we find difficult to approach with our highly rational, often scientistic take on such matters.  They knew the miracle of the grain that falls on the soil and springs to life, birthing a plant quite unlike its size and appearance.  And what a miracle!

    The ancients did not have string theory to propose multiverses, but we do.  It does not have to answer questions about the after-life, but it could.

    The ancients did not know about imaginal cells, but we do.  What if death is a process to ignite our imaginal cells, creating a flame version of  ourselves burning bright in another time and place?


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Great Work 📎and tagged

  • A Sacrament From Mother Earth

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    35  91%  23%  2mph ESE bar29.06 steady windchill34  Winter

                  Last Quarter of the Winter Moon

    Something I’ve thought about for a while.

                                                       A Sacrament

    water from our well, bread from local grain and cheese from Minnesota, candles

    Light candle(s).

    Say to all:  See this light, not as symbol, but as energy brought to us by fire from the sky and fire from deep beneath the earth.  By the light of this fire we see this water, this bread, this cheese.

    On the table or altar have the pitcher, a cup, a plate with bread not broken and cheese not broken

    Water in an earthenware pitcher. Pour into a single cup.

    To each person as they take the cup:  take this and drink it, not as symbol, but as substance, the necessary liquid of all life as blood is the necessary liquid in our body.

    Break the bread and hand pieces to each person

    Say to all:  Eat this bread, not as symbol, but as substance, the marriage of earth and sun which gives birth to grain.

    Break the cheese and hand pieces to each person

    Eat this cheese as a gift from one mammal to another, food which sustains us.

     Say to all:  This water, this bread, this cheese transforms itself even now into your body, one link in the sacred chain stretching back to the one-celled organism, our common ancestor, and forward to our descendants, who may be as different from us as we are from that one cell.  This is a miracle.

    Go now in peace. 


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Garden Great Wheel Great Work Our Land and Home 📎and tagged

  • Transcendentalism and the NFL Playoffs

    Posted on by Charles 2 Comments

    -5  61%  17%  0mph W  bar30.64  Windchill-5  Winter

         Waxing Gibbous Winter Moon

    Got out the discussion materials for the religious influence on art session with the docent book club, March 17th.  That’s one item finished.

    While I watched first the Patriots beat the Chargers and, then, the New York Giants beat the Packers, I read snatches of material I printed out about transcendentalism.  Gotta admit, I’ve had a backward idea of it for a long time, unless I learned it once and forgot it.  Always possible, how would I know?  Here’s the backward part. I thought the transcendent was about leaping the surly bonds of earth and heading for the Platonic/Gnostic heavens.  Nope.  It was about opposing the empiricism and rationalism of John Locke, et al.  Transcendental refers to the Kantian notion that there are important a priori structures in the mind that allow it to function at all.  This rules out the empiricist idea that our understanding (reason) works only on data brought to the mind through the senses.  First, there is the mind and its structures like time and space that order and create intelligibility with sensory data.  Besides, Kant believed that we can never touch  reality, the ding an siche, the thing in itself, since all we ever really know are the data our senses bring to us; in other words we (our mind) never reaches the source of the sensory data which are secondary to the thing in itself.

    There is, of course, much more to the debate and the idea, but getting this straight will help as I write a presentation on Transcendentalism for Groveland UU.  By happenstance I also read today an article about Shinto in the work of Japanese anime artist Miyazaki published in the journal, Religion and Popular Culture.  The close correlation between Transcendentalist treatment of nature and Shintoism was so obvious it took my breath away. Likewise, if we add Taoism into the mix we have a sort of triad of nature focused faiths that I think speak profoundly to our current reality.

    The Giants/Packers game had my attention the whole way. (I read during the commercials.)  The two teams played more or less evenly for four quarters, though the Giants looked better.  With the score tied at the end of regulation the Packers won the toss and elected to receive.  Favre threw an interception, then Eli Manning took the Giants down to the field for a shot at a 47 yard field goal.  Tynes, the Giants field goal kicker, had missed two shorter kicks in the fourth quarter.  He hit it.  And the crowd went wild.


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  • A Gospel for These Heavens and This Earth

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    -10  59% 23%  0mph  WSW bar30.36  steep rise windchill-12  Winter

                  Waxing Gibbous Winter Moon

    How low will it go?  Pretty low.  These are the days for staying inside, watching movies, drinking hot chocolate, reading and studying.  I’ll do all these tomorrow.

    Driving into the MIA this week, on Monday and then again today, I saw sundogs.  A sundog creates a rainbow like lens, in this case pointing toward the west.  As I understand the presence of a sundog indicates ice crystals in the air which act as a prism.   Just checked, that’s right.  Also, it says they always form at 22 degrees on either side of the sun. 

    Both days an earth centered faith was on my mind, as it often is these days, in fact, these last few years.  It is not, perhaps, most accurate to say earth centered, since the  sundog itself is a good reminder that any faith which grounds itself in the material reality of this world also relies, for life itself, on the heat and energy received from the sun.  So, I don’t know, perhaps a solar system centered faith.  The earth’s orbit around the sun orchestrates the seasons and the moon pulses the oceans through bays and onto beaches with tidal flows.  Even a rudimentary understanding of the creation of the solar system acknowledges the intimate nature of our relationship to other planets that share Sol.  So, there’s a puzzle here in terms of where to focus, but I don’t think the parameters are much wider than the solar system, although there is the whole star formation, interstellar dust cloud thing which makes us part of the ongoing galactic reality. Even so, those relationship are distant both in distance and in terms of direct affect, if any on our daily lives, where Sol makes our life possible and its planets are our neighbors.

    Anyhow, more thoughts on the notion of Ge-ology.  What I might write, rather than a Ge-ology, is a gospel for these heavens and this earth, a faith focused on the intricate and delicate and complex interdependence between and among life and the inanimate yet critical context in which it exists; a celebration of the wonderful and the awesome we experience each day.  Our heart beats.  The winds blow.  A lover or a child smiles.  The sun warms our face.  We recall times that seem long ago; we think and imagine.  The stars shine.  Snow falls.  These are miracles which do not require walking on water, a Pure Land or a night ride to Jerusalem.  No exodus or burning bush. 

    Gospel means good news.  I see this faith as good news for all humankind and for all living creatures on our planet.  It means we can turn our face toward each other and our hands toward the earth in love, not lust. 

    As I see it, this is the ur-faith, the one prior to all the others.  It came naturally to indigenous communities through faith traditions like Taoism, Shintoism, Native American faiths, the faith of those who painted Lascaux and who erected Stonehenge.  Are all these the same, no, of course not; are they all similar in their insistence on loving attention to the reality within which we dwell and move and have our being? Yes.  This is the ur-faith because it was one we all know in our deep heart; it is not exclusive, if you want to follow the path of this ancient faith and the way of Jesus or Buddha or Shiva or Mohammad, there is no conflict. 


    📂This entry was posted in Faith and Spirituality Great Wheel Great Work Weather +Climate 📎and tagged

  • What Moves Your Heart?

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    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.


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  • Christians Sued for Use of Allah

    Posted on by Charles Comment
    22  82%  25%  0mph ENE bar 29.95  windchill 22  Yuletide
                      Waning Gibbous Cold Moon 
    My brother Mark sent me this one.  He’s on his way to Malaysia this week to renew his Thai visa.
    From a BBC Online article: 
    Malaysian row over word for ‘God’ 

    (Religious freedom is guaranteed under Malaysian law)
    “A church and Christian newspaper in Malaysia are suing the government after it decreed that the word “Allah” can only be used by Muslims.In the Malay language “Allah” is used to mean any god, and Christians say they have used the term for centuries.

    Opponents of the ban say it is unconstitutional and unreasonable.

    It is the latest in a series of religious rows in largely Muslim Malaysia, where minority groups claim their rights are being eroded.

    A spokesman for the Herald, the newspaper of the Catholic Church in Malaysia, said a legal suit was filed after they received repeated official warnings that the newspaper could have its licence revoked if it continued to use the word.

    “We are of the view that we have the right to use the word ‘Allah’,” said editor Rev Lawrence Andrew.”
    Here’s my reply to Mark:

    Thanks for sending it over. Irony comes to mind. After all, the so-called Abrahamic religions all claim to worship the same God, so why wouldn’t the names be interchangeable? Stupid also comes to mind.

    And Mark’s back to me just moments ago: 

    “Indeed. A Muslim lawyer was complaining in the Malyasian Star, a local paper, that the Muslims were being way too sensitive. Indeed, I read further that the Catholic paper is suing whomever gave that ruling. The lawyer pointed out that Al means the and lah means God in Arabic. It seems futile and yes, dumb. The God of the Jews, Muslims and Christians is the same. It seems especially dumb to have the dispute around Christmas, but there you go.”


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  • The Dark Night Comes

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    40  60%  40%  5mph  windrose SSW  bar steep rise  dewpoint 27 Waxing Crescent of the Snow Moon  Ordinary Time

    A great wind blows through Andover today.  Literally.  40 mph gusts.  The grass in my window bends to the ground, leaves swirl up from the ground and my shed door, left open yesterday, bangs against the frame.  A change in the weather, air coming from the arctic.

    This is the brown season, a season in which the only garden color is green.   The bleakness corresponds to a certain wildness in my soul and I revel in it.  Lower the lights, crank up the wind, bring on the snow.  Then, then we can get down to it, the travel toward the deep places, the caverns and secret gardens hidden by too much light. 

    This is holiseason, a time when external beauty and easy movement vanish, clearing away a swath of maya, leaving us bare before ourselves.  The Winter Solstice is the well, the sublime and darkest moment.  St John of the Cross gave us the phrase “dark night of the soul.”  He saw the dark night as a place of challenge, of despair and hopelessness, the extinction, or near extinction of faith, salvaged only by re-emergence into the light of faith.  This is one ancient trail.  There is another that sees the dark night as the very place, the site of connection with the sacred depth.  Here in the darkness from which we came and toward which we move our entire life we embrace fecundity, the richness inherent in blackness.


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