• Tag Archives liberal religion

  • Teasing Out the Pagan Lovesong

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    76  bar rises 29.89  0mph NE dew-point 67  sunrise 6:02 sunset 8:35  Lughnasa

    Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon

    I saw the dentist today, oh boy.  He unscrewed a couple of fillings, refilled them, then closed what he insists on calling an “open contact.”  Does that sound like an oxymoron to you?  Does to me.  Dr. Mahler comes into my mouth unbidden, the occasion the retirement of the redoubtable Dr. Moghk, may he golf in peace.  Dr. Mahler is good, fast and communicative.  Sure of himself. Just what I want in a dentist.  No, seriously.  He’s a keeper.

    The closing words of my last post have rung like a bell in my head since I wrote them:   This whole enterprise needs a rethink, a radical redo.  We have gotten thin and liberal, instead of profound and prophetic.

    What to do? Part of the responsibility rests with me.  I have the task of articulating what I believe and have faith in right now.  This articulation must be clear and emotionally compelling.  And it is work I feel I can do, am ready to do.  Looks like I was off about ten years when I hoped for intellectual maturity in my early 50’s, it has come instead, in my early 60’s.  That’s all right.

    The later maturity came because my individuation and maturation occurred more slowly than it might have thanks to alcohol and neurosis.  I regret the years I gave to anger, disappointment, drinking and smoking.  I regret the hurt I caused then and the overhang it left me.  Even so, I also know that regret is an emotion with no purpose, no forward motion, so I acknowledge it and set it to the side.  Today, the only time I have ever had and will ever have, is the day in which I take up this challenge, perhaps I could have ten years ago, but I didn’t.

    Now it remains for me to tease out the pagan lovesong that courses through me when I  touch a lily or eat an onion grown in soil I have prepared.  There is an ancient language of love and awe for the natural world and for ourselves as part of and dependent on it.  This vocabulary of seasons, lunar changes, life’s stages, friendship and family has no nation, knows no creeds and depends on no books, yet it is as particular as the street on which you live and the air that you breathe.

    This dream, what Thomas Berry called the Dream of the Earth, is a dream in the sense of the aboriginal dreamtime, it is a way of dreaming worlds into being and it is our great and primary gift as a species.  Like all gifts it can cause great good or great harm.   Over the next few years I will slip from time to time into the dreamtime and let you know what I find there.


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  • This Whole Enterprise Needs A Rethink

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    71  bar rises 29.77  0mph N dew-point 64 sunrise 6:02  sunset 8:37  Lughnasa

    Waxing Crescent of the Corn Moon
    This website + $100, 000 will get you your very own jetpack.  Advertising says it can fly for  30 minutes.  Almost enough for the commute, but how will you refuel? 

    When I quit writing at 5:30 pm today, I had four single-spaced pages done and I had not gotten off the east coast in this story of the move west.  This may be a two-part presentation.  As I said below, for me, context is everything.  Nothing happens without relationships.  In this case understanding the planting of liberal religion in Minnesota requires an understanding of interreligious conflict in the midterm past:  the Reformation and the long term past: say, Abram and the voice of YHWH facing down the Gods of Chaldea.  The near term past, the history of colonial America, the young United States and the westward expansion have their own threads to weave in this story.  It may be that the mid and long term past will require one Sunday and the near term a second.  Not sure yet.

    As I wrote the above, I kept thinking about Buddhism in which the now is everything.  We are not, in Buddhist thought, the same self from moment to moment so how arrogant is it to lay out patterns over millennia?  Maybe a lot, but it is a contradiction I’m willing to risk.  If I can talk about it, this narrative has some meaning, even if, in the end, the now is all that matters.

    My hope is that by the end of this work I will be able to illustrate five things.  1.  The conflict of orthodoxy and heterdoxy goes back at least as far as Abraham in the Judaeo-Christian tradition.   2.  The expansion of liberal religion had as much, if not more, to do with religious freedom guaranteed by the first amendment and spawned directly by the Reformation than it has to do with liberal religious thought in Europe.  3.  The westward expansion of liberal religion created a nurturing climate for its increasing radicalization, partly due to accidents of history and partly to the nature of the frontier.  4. Liberal religion in the west has a long and distinguished record of support for heresy.  5.  In the end all the conflict outlined in this presentation has at its roots the question of religious authority.

    I have ended up in an odd place.  In the late 19th and early 20th century liberal religion in the west took risks, challenged both religious and cultural norms, but it feels to me like the latter part of the 20th and the early part of the 21st find us in trough.  Our faith does not quicken hearts, nor does it create much change.  It seems to me we fail on both important measures of a faith tradition, i.e. the ability to nurture the inner life and the power to affect change in the culture.  This is a finger of blame not extended from my hand or wagging in shame, but curved back at me and the leadership of this generation that I represent.

    This whole enterprise needs a rethink, a radical redo.  We have gotten thin and liberal, instead of profound and prophetic.


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