Spring\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Bloodroot Moon<\/p>\n
I’ve discovered an analogy between translation and science.\u00a0 Coming to a premature conclusion about the meaning of a passage causes chopping and cramping to fit meanings, declensions and conjugations into the preconceived notion.\u00a0 The better way lies in suspending judgment, collecting all the possibilities, then, sorting them out in context, both with the larger work and among themselves, to find the probable meaning the original author had.\u00a0 In science, the old method, the deductive method, began with a premature conclusion about the nature of reality, say, the earth is the center of the solar system and then made observational data fit the conclusion.\u00a0 Francis Bacon summed it up well.\u00a0 If method were a foot race, then the wrong method would take you further and further from your goal, no matter how fast you ran; the right method (the experimental method) carries you toward your goal, again no matter how fast you run.<\/p>\n
Biblical translation often suffers from this very problem.\u00a0 Predetermined theological or dogmatic conclusions force particular choices in translation, choices that support or reject a sanctioned premise.<\/p>\n
It is, too, unfortunately, a trap fallen into by many folks I know.\u00a0 Using second or third removed “sources” for so-called teachings is not new, but it’s phony baloney and muddies even the best minds.\u00a0 Let me give you an example.\u00a0 Many of the Wiccan or neo-pagan folk refer with confidence and certainty to certain Celtic religious practices.\u00a0 Here’s the rub.\u00a0 All we know about the ancient Celts in other than an archaeological sense, comes from three exceedingly suspect sources:\u00a0 Roman writers like Julius Caesar and Tacitus, Roman Catholic monks who wrote down some material about the Celtic folk religion and a romanticized version of Celtic lore that surfaced in 18th century England.\u00a0 The Romans conquered and subdued the Celts militarily; the Catholics oppressed them spiritually; and\u00a0 the English treated the Celts as second and third class subjects.\u00a0 Yet it is the literature of these three sources that contain the deposit of information about early Celtic religious practices and beliefs.<\/p>\n
Now, even this data, through careful scholarship and skilled literary criticism, can yield solid or at least strongly suggestive information.\u00a0\u00a0 We learn some things about the Triple Goddess Brigit, for example, through material written about the Catholic saint who co-opted her place in Celtic lives, St. Bridgit.<\/p>\n
It’s an odd field, these contemporary attempts to recapture a relationship in the present with the attitudes toward the earth held in our deep past.\u00a0 I count myself as part of it, though with a twist, rather than retrieving the thought world and ceremonies of our ancestors, I’m following Emerson.\u00a0 We need an original relationship to the earth, one based on our experience, not theirs, a religion of our own “revelations” gleaned from the earth as she is now, not the record of theirs.<\/p>\n
As one way of getting at it, I take a cue from an Iroquois shaman I met long ago who prayed for the winged ones, the four legged, the ones who swim in the rivers, lakes and oceans, the flying ones and the ones who crawl.\u00a0 When I asked him why he didn’t he pray for the two-leggeds, the answered, “Because we’re so fragile we depend on the health of all the others.”<\/p>\n
We don’t need to become faux Iroquois to grasp and incorporate this sensibility.\u00a0 All we need do is realize the onrush of climate change and the danger it poses to our species.\u00a0 In that one move we can shift over to a deep respect for mother earth and all her parts, the living and the inanimate.<\/p>\n
That is the fear based way and I’m perfectly ok with it if that’s what it takes to move you because not all fear is baseless.<\/p>\n
Another way is to step up your own intimacy with the living world by growing vegetables, keeping bees, growing flowers, participating in the local foods movement, shopping at food co-0ps,\u00a0 This web of activities coupled with mindfulness about where you are and what you eat can increase your sensitivity to the thrumming, vital interdependence of which we are a real and intextrictable part.<\/p>\n
Many use camping, hiking, bird-watching, weather forecasting, fishing and hunting to put themselves into this I-thou relationship with the earth.<\/p>\n
There’s so much more here, but I want to plead for direct experience, not the cadging of other cultures, not the assumption that by associating ourselves with indigenous persons we become somehow more in tune with the earth.\u00a0 No, the one you need to be associating with is yourself and your daily, lived experience.\u00a0 Can we learn from others?\u00a0\u00a0 Of course.\u00a0 Can we become them in any authentic way?\u00a0 No.\u00a0 Absolutely not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Spring\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Waning Bloodroot Moon I’ve discovered an analogy between translation and science.\u00a0 Coming to a premature conclusion about the meaning of a passage causes chopping and cramping to fit meanings, declensions and conjugations into the preconceived notion.\u00a0 The better way lies in suspending judgment, collecting all the possibilities, then, sorting them out in context, both … Continue reading Our Own, Original Relation to the Earth<\/span>