Something that has always bothered me is the lack of importance we place on introductory places - notably ushers and sunday school teachers.
I'm not going to get into ushers today.
Sunday School teachers are a lot of well meaning and lovely (mostly women) people. And we let nearly anyone be a Sunday School teacher. And this amounts to mostly babysitters with craft projects. We spend very little time, and honestly, many of these teachers won't invest much more time than they have to, and often do not fully grasp the mutuality of experience they are undertaking by sitting with children in these developmental spaces.
A diversity trainer once told me that we were doing the most difficult sort of brain surgery - poking about in people's unconscious and trying to initiate a paradigm shift. I think that this is the same thing that we are about on Sunday mornings - a time when, in their heart of hearts, I think most people are thinking of in terms of child care - aka, a bit of quiet so I can hear the sermon.
I am ok with Godly Play. I am not totally against it, but I do whole heartedly approve of the level of teacher qualification that it started out with. Anymore, we are inclined to just set people free with the lesson and the toys. What I do not approve of, is the bringing of Godly Play into the liturgy. Not because I don't think we could all use a little less of the pastor rattling on, but because we have a terrible tendency to conflate the literal-concrete-interpretive stage of childhood development, with being Child like towards God. How very tedious for a being who was looking for companionship - for a being that limited itself in order to make space for something else to have independent existence. As nearly any stay at home parent will tell you - the desire for a little adult conversation will lead to desperation - there were days I'd talk to anyone in order to interact with someone who was post puberty - I made a lot of homeless friends, they were the only people not working and had time for me.
I realize I fall far to the edge of reflected faith - it's led me right out the other door of most religious experiences. I get lonely for want of people to talk to about what I am reading or thinking or doing. And I get tired of the metaphor, and the same old interpretation of the metaphor. For a multitude of reasons, the cycle is experiencing a break - or I am just in a place the I have few role models and friends for. I suppose I should spend some more time with the ones that I do have.
What interests me in the book I am currently reading is that we are aligning faith formation with stages of development, and I hope that at some point he talks about what happens or what to do, when a perfectly adapted adult is trapped with a toddlers view of faith. Maybe you do spend time with Godly Play, but it seems that most people are content with this, and they go to church, or do something else, equally supportive of their childish understandings. Maybe people have always been this way, and it is just wishful thinking on my part that the world be otherwise.
Monday, August 25, 2014
Saturday, August 23, 2014
Musings
All I really have right now are musings. Something is unfolding but I don't really have much by way of articulation yet.
Incarnation is becoming more important, and a co-creating God. How funny that we are at the place where adding God to creation is what makes sense when for so long we struggled to add us to creation. I am reading a book on a theory of Extended Cognition, which is adding a fascinating dimension to epistimology right now. It actually makes it easier for me to slide out of the limiting mythology of God as sole creator - makes all knowing a much more interactive and fluid affair. Makes the world important in it's own creation from a human understanding perspective.
Some days, I wish I could recapture the feeling I had during that year in Portland. On the one hand - religion was kicking my ass, but on the other, what I was doing and experiencing during direction and in relation to my own relationship with God was unfolding is awe inspiring ways. I felt awash with possibility - and that possibility and that awe and comfortable uncertainty were certainly something that the committee could not grasp.
Shannon, last night said that I had a vision for what my life would look like once I got through the hazing, what the church could look like once I got through the hazing, and the hazing won, and that is the struggle I have been dealing with trying to come back into my own. Perhaps it is clever to call yourself a prophet, but God alone will help you if you actually are one (since as far as I can tell, prophets are totally unwelcome in their home town. haha)
In other terms, Ross again, I was busy breaking open the mythology (closed system) and that is uncomfortable for people who have secured their faith by limiting their God to a system of knowable - often pithy - attitudes and expectations. I suppose it was unkind of me to not affirm thier belief that buts in seats was a sign of the working of the spirit, when what I was seeing was a collective reversal of faith - a move backwards in development to a meaner and more limited understanding of God and the working of co-creation.
People over and over again tell me I should just start my own church - but Sam made a good point - your friends are never your supporters, and right now, I am not ready to make a lot of new colleagues. I'm not ready to start a religious or other movement out here in the fog. I can't even get excited about finishing the landscaping - another place where my imagined self is totally out of wack with my real self.
On the other hand, the jury isn't capturing my imagination in the way that I expected or desired. Which has been a good learning curve but a poor execution. I am waiting to hear back results from a "hmmm, let's take more pictures" mamogram, which has brought all sorts of things to mind, but none of them a fear of death. There was a hope this would easily let me removed them, something I am working on anyway, and there was the silly response that I must be near the end of my growing up - since I always joked that once I figured all this out, I'd get hit by a bus - my eyerolling response to God hurts everyone so that they can be better Christians. How do people live with the implications of the shit that rolls out of their mouth? I will never understand.
I don't have answers, but I don't have a lot of questions either - at least not any soul wrenching ones. This might be a good place eventually, but I still have a lot of work to separate the things I do because they need doing or I make a commitment, and things that I do because they are vital to my understanding of the world. I think, perhaps, I have done this work, I am just not ready for the consequences of that knowledge yet.
Incarnation is becoming more important, and a co-creating God. How funny that we are at the place where adding God to creation is what makes sense when for so long we struggled to add us to creation. I am reading a book on a theory of Extended Cognition, which is adding a fascinating dimension to epistimology right now. It actually makes it easier for me to slide out of the limiting mythology of God as sole creator - makes all knowing a much more interactive and fluid affair. Makes the world important in it's own creation from a human understanding perspective.
Some days, I wish I could recapture the feeling I had during that year in Portland. On the one hand - religion was kicking my ass, but on the other, what I was doing and experiencing during direction and in relation to my own relationship with God was unfolding is awe inspiring ways. I felt awash with possibility - and that possibility and that awe and comfortable uncertainty were certainly something that the committee could not grasp.
Shannon, last night said that I had a vision for what my life would look like once I got through the hazing, what the church could look like once I got through the hazing, and the hazing won, and that is the struggle I have been dealing with trying to come back into my own. Perhaps it is clever to call yourself a prophet, but God alone will help you if you actually are one (since as far as I can tell, prophets are totally unwelcome in their home town. haha)
In other terms, Ross again, I was busy breaking open the mythology (closed system) and that is uncomfortable for people who have secured their faith by limiting their God to a system of knowable - often pithy - attitudes and expectations. I suppose it was unkind of me to not affirm thier belief that buts in seats was a sign of the working of the spirit, when what I was seeing was a collective reversal of faith - a move backwards in development to a meaner and more limited understanding of God and the working of co-creation.
People over and over again tell me I should just start my own church - but Sam made a good point - your friends are never your supporters, and right now, I am not ready to make a lot of new colleagues. I'm not ready to start a religious or other movement out here in the fog. I can't even get excited about finishing the landscaping - another place where my imagined self is totally out of wack with my real self.
On the other hand, the jury isn't capturing my imagination in the way that I expected or desired. Which has been a good learning curve but a poor execution. I am waiting to hear back results from a "hmmm, let's take more pictures" mamogram, which has brought all sorts of things to mind, but none of them a fear of death. There was a hope this would easily let me removed them, something I am working on anyway, and there was the silly response that I must be near the end of my growing up - since I always joked that once I figured all this out, I'd get hit by a bus - my eyerolling response to God hurts everyone so that they can be better Christians. How do people live with the implications of the shit that rolls out of their mouth? I will never understand.
I don't have answers, but I don't have a lot of questions either - at least not any soul wrenching ones. This might be a good place eventually, but I still have a lot of work to separate the things I do because they need doing or I make a commitment, and things that I do because they are vital to my understanding of the world. I think, perhaps, I have done this work, I am just not ready for the consequences of that knowledge yet.
Tuesday, August 19, 2014
Poetry and Philosophy
So, I've been reading poetry for the last year. It was an effortful, conscious decision. I went through the pedantic period, where I wrote horrible poetry, some of which I even subjected an open mike community to. And I still have all of it - printouts in dot matrix.
But I had made the decision to start accessing the noumenon - for those who don't have the philosophy (noumenon is Kantian for thing you can't know through the senses. Numenon is Otto for communion with the Other or the Holy) - and didn't have any better ideas for how to go about it than to try poetry. And I get caught in the numenous all the time with this. In fact, the physiology book I am reading right now, doesn't mesh with an idea of a noumenon at all. I expect that there actually is no noumenous reality. Inherited constructions and blank slate, for the win.
In any case, way back in the dark of time, I stopped taking Literature and Art courses and started taking Math and Philosophy courses. I loved formal logic, but I never was able to place it higher than common sense - the reason my philosophy department would not recommend me for a masters program in philosophy. (I love to tell the story of the famous logician who came to give us a talk on the truth value of referents to mythical(false) creatures - like unicorns. I was not popular for saying that the truth of the referent was independent from the truth of the pronoun, also a referent, of the actual, not real thing. This, apparently, is wrong, and I am burning in fire of Plato's cave, undoubtedly for being morally corrupt.) So, I suppose all was not lost in my intuitive side, although it was not anything I was particulary paying attention to.
I'm reading a book called The Fountain and the Furnace, by Maggie Ross. And I must say that whenever I complain that no one ever gave me the book that would explain things, I am in error. KN said, in my very first discernment committee meeting, that I reminded him of Maggie Ross, and I should read her. Then he promptly dropped out to go on sabbatical, and thus, all this fucking growth opportunity was born.
I have been drawn to tears and people who openly cry in the literature for some time now. This is unsurprising, I cry all the time, and it makes lots of people uncomfortable, but I was awfully old before I came across someone who sanctified those tears, made them holy and powerful. And now, I have found that this author who was handed to me on, basically, the first day, has written a whole treatise on tears. And I am barely into this book, when she says, intuitive people need to read philosophy and rational people need to read poetry (rational is a technical term, see above comments to referents). I do love it when I can see all those puzzle pieces coming together.
In completely other news,
I looked up Humanist Chaplains the other day, on the advice of a friend suggesting I be a secular chaplain. This is what google came up with. And while I know what humanist means, I thought it was rather sad or silly. Humanist is the ethical postion that people can be good without a god. My response to which is, first, you need to really reevaluate the concept of god you are walking around with, and second, good and bad don't make sense if you take the moral agency out of the equation, and where do we infer moral agency if not through some god - some organizing principle of all the morality humans are inventing left and right. Bears and bees and squirrels are neither good or bad, they are not in need of a moral system at all. Iterative self reflection and self creation (that physiology book I am reading), the thinking about thinking and thinking up better ways to think, that is the bread and butter of humanity, the nonsense that leads you to questions of power and whether your actions are moral. Bears do not consider the ethical implications of eating salmon, they just eat it if they can catch it.
Further, humanists believe there is only this life, and not a heaven in the sky. Interestingly, neither does early Christianity, given that they were all Jews, who had a one life philosophy as well. Jesus doesn't refer to judgmental beard in the sky or cloud floaty afterlife, either. The thing Jesus did was flip up the patriarchy by refering to judgmental God as daddy, not just as a father, but as the father of our youth, when we were not yet betrayed by our fathers humanity, when that all powerful was a comfort. And we are encouraged to live in that comfort, to make sure that our god is big enough to offer that comfort, and the beard just doesn' cut it on that score - for anyone except the infantile adult who is in a lot of denial (my opinion). Still, you must be able to hear the truth within the metaphor to be able to use it. The heaven Jesus speaks of is on earth, it is the perspective that this life can be morally good with a change of perspective, not that it will be perfect and peaceful in the simplistic sense (no war, no poor, no hungry, no orphans) but that it will be perfect in that we will see as God sees, that we will be saddened and horrified by what people do, but that their freedom matters. Their ability to choose, to be moral creatures, matters, and is God in that sense.
So, I am not sure I qualify as a humanist, since it feels like a rebuttal position, and I try not to define myself in negative terms (it does nothing for the self esteem) but I do still qualify as a secularist, if you use the term in the fashion of Gertz - practically the only book in seminary I found fascinating enough to buy from the exerpt we read in class. (Not the only good book, there are some that I still haven't read but that are life changing/game changing, so they tell me. I'm getting to them, slowly.) I'll talk about secularism later. For now, I need to go change the world, one scheduled meeting at a time.
But I had made the decision to start accessing the noumenon - for those who don't have the philosophy (noumenon is Kantian for thing you can't know through the senses. Numenon is Otto for communion with the Other or the Holy) - and didn't have any better ideas for how to go about it than to try poetry. And I get caught in the numenous all the time with this. In fact, the physiology book I am reading right now, doesn't mesh with an idea of a noumenon at all. I expect that there actually is no noumenous reality. Inherited constructions and blank slate, for the win.
In any case, way back in the dark of time, I stopped taking Literature and Art courses and started taking Math and Philosophy courses. I loved formal logic, but I never was able to place it higher than common sense - the reason my philosophy department would not recommend me for a masters program in philosophy. (I love to tell the story of the famous logician who came to give us a talk on the truth value of referents to mythical(false) creatures - like unicorns. I was not popular for saying that the truth of the referent was independent from the truth of the pronoun, also a referent, of the actual, not real thing. This, apparently, is wrong, and I am burning in fire of Plato's cave, undoubtedly for being morally corrupt.) So, I suppose all was not lost in my intuitive side, although it was not anything I was particulary paying attention to.
I'm reading a book called The Fountain and the Furnace, by Maggie Ross. And I must say that whenever I complain that no one ever gave me the book that would explain things, I am in error. KN said, in my very first discernment committee meeting, that I reminded him of Maggie Ross, and I should read her. Then he promptly dropped out to go on sabbatical, and thus, all this fucking growth opportunity was born.
I have been drawn to tears and people who openly cry in the literature for some time now. This is unsurprising, I cry all the time, and it makes lots of people uncomfortable, but I was awfully old before I came across someone who sanctified those tears, made them holy and powerful. And now, I have found that this author who was handed to me on, basically, the first day, has written a whole treatise on tears. And I am barely into this book, when she says, intuitive people need to read philosophy and rational people need to read poetry (rational is a technical term, see above comments to referents). I do love it when I can see all those puzzle pieces coming together.
In completely other news,
I looked up Humanist Chaplains the other day, on the advice of a friend suggesting I be a secular chaplain. This is what google came up with. And while I know what humanist means, I thought it was rather sad or silly. Humanist is the ethical postion that people can be good without a god. My response to which is, first, you need to really reevaluate the concept of god you are walking around with, and second, good and bad don't make sense if you take the moral agency out of the equation, and where do we infer moral agency if not through some god - some organizing principle of all the morality humans are inventing left and right. Bears and bees and squirrels are neither good or bad, they are not in need of a moral system at all. Iterative self reflection and self creation (that physiology book I am reading), the thinking about thinking and thinking up better ways to think, that is the bread and butter of humanity, the nonsense that leads you to questions of power and whether your actions are moral. Bears do not consider the ethical implications of eating salmon, they just eat it if they can catch it.
Further, humanists believe there is only this life, and not a heaven in the sky. Interestingly, neither does early Christianity, given that they were all Jews, who had a one life philosophy as well. Jesus doesn't refer to judgmental beard in the sky or cloud floaty afterlife, either. The thing Jesus did was flip up the patriarchy by refering to judgmental God as daddy, not just as a father, but as the father of our youth, when we were not yet betrayed by our fathers humanity, when that all powerful was a comfort. And we are encouraged to live in that comfort, to make sure that our god is big enough to offer that comfort, and the beard just doesn' cut it on that score - for anyone except the infantile adult who is in a lot of denial (my opinion). Still, you must be able to hear the truth within the metaphor to be able to use it. The heaven Jesus speaks of is on earth, it is the perspective that this life can be morally good with a change of perspective, not that it will be perfect and peaceful in the simplistic sense (no war, no poor, no hungry, no orphans) but that it will be perfect in that we will see as God sees, that we will be saddened and horrified by what people do, but that their freedom matters. Their ability to choose, to be moral creatures, matters, and is God in that sense.
So, I am not sure I qualify as a humanist, since it feels like a rebuttal position, and I try not to define myself in negative terms (it does nothing for the self esteem) but I do still qualify as a secularist, if you use the term in the fashion of Gertz - practically the only book in seminary I found fascinating enough to buy from the exerpt we read in class. (Not the only good book, there are some that I still haven't read but that are life changing/game changing, so they tell me. I'm getting to them, slowly.) I'll talk about secularism later. For now, I need to go change the world, one scheduled meeting at a time.
Monday, August 18, 2014
Reconcilliation and Justification
(a complete wander through my mind this morning.)
There is some deep meat inside these words as technical language, but there is also a secular meaning totally fucking them up.
I wonder how much a clear explaination of what contortions the church did in order to respond to modernity would make religion more understandable as a long term faith tradition. Seriously, you look at the church, wander into any parish, right now, and you have to wonder if people were really total idiots and so some few men became hideous abusers, or if things have really gotten off the beaten path. There really is a beaten path, although it's pretty weedy right now.
The biggest problem I had with seminary was that we were working hard to learn to support the institution, and at the time, I didn't actually know that there was a difference, or, I thought going deeper into the institution was how to go deeper into faith, except that is totally wrong. It was probably always wrong, but it's particularly troublesome in times of profound change.
But, to think about reconcilliation and justification in a secular sense -
Reconciling seems to be incorporating the trauma into your world view - not that it was right, not that it makes sense or was deserved, but that it happened, and it happened to you, even if it was not deserved, even if it was wrong, reconcilliation isn't a moral stance or meaning making out of trauma, it is acknowledgment that trauma happened and that you can be whole with it - not in spite of it, or because of it - just with it.
Justification feels very different. It feels like the incorporation of the damaging event must be explained as deserving. It is the God wanted this to happen, and to happen to you, and suffering will make you a better person. It is a moral stance on the trauma, the meaning making that incoporates the trauma itself as identity forming in a moral - right or wrong - sense. The incorporation must be good or bad and it must not alter the status quo. That is really important, that we not admit to any break with the world agreement, that we deny the event the definition of trauma itself.
I don't think justify means that in a strictly religious sense, but it isn't all that fantastic in any case. Justify is an extremely legalistic term and used by Paul (the ultimate used car salesman) to connect a lot of beliefs about the coming end of the world - jews realy did think the world was about to end, with the judgment (again, a highly specialized legal term aka ruling) of God and the event of Jesus' crucifixion. What is really interesting in this is that if you take that, in combination with the secularization of the word faith, what a dirty mess you make.
Faith, in modernity and more importantly, in English, has been bent into something as close to it's opposite as can be.
"Faith, clasically understood, is not a separate dimension of life, a compartmentalized specialty. Faith is an orientation of the total person, giving purpose and goal to one's hopes and striving, thoughts and actions." Fowler
"There was a time when "I believe" as a ceremonial declaration of faith meant, and was heard, as meaning: "Given the reality of God, as a fact of the universe, I hereby proclaim that I align my life accordingly, pledging love and loyalty." A statement about a person's believing has now come to mean, rather something of this sort: "Given the uncertainty of God, as a fact of modern life, so and so reports that the idea of God is part of the furniture of his mind." Smith (in Fowler, I haven't purchased this book yet.)
And you can substitute God with ultimate concern - you need not limit God to a beard in the sky. My God is in fact quite removed from the metaphor used to discuss it. And in coming to the realization that the bible can be a big ass metaphor meant that I could finally understand the difference between true and fact - something that has also been conflated in the modern mind. But even if you substitute ultimate concern with beard in the sky into the modern definition - you still get something that hardly compels you to get out of bed in the morning, and no wonder there is so much depression and anxiety - it's a wholesale slaughter of meaning, there is no way to align yourself with furniture. I like my dining room table, but it hardly constitutes something I would live and die for, yet, consumerism really does frame dining room tables in this way.
So, I'm thinking about this phrase, justification by faith, and superficially, it has always felt that believing statements about Jesus as Christ as true means that I am going to heaven and whatever I do based on those beliefs about Jesus as Christ make what I do right.
But that isn't quite what is going on with Paul - and context really matters. Paul is saying that, given the immanent ending of the world, given your faith or alignment of your life's meaning with the teachings of Jesus, the crucifixion of Jesus acts as surety in the final judgment of God on the world. And, given that jews didn't have a heaven (sweet pad in the sky), the heaven Paul is talking about is totally earth oriented. It means you would experience, right now, in the face of the immanent judgement of God at the end of the world, a peace in yourself - an alignment of your ultimate concern with your actual existence. And that doesn't me nothing bad happens, just that you are super resilient in the face of it. And the fact that the jews and early christians believed the whole thing only had to last for a few more years, made it all the easier.
The problem, of course, is that it's a lot easier to commit to something for a short amount of time. It's the long haul that kicks you in the ass. And there is a whole lot of Christianity that concerns itself with the fact that the world didn't end and now what the fuck do we do, that Protestants (and the Anglicans fall in with the Protestants in this - at least the ones I know of) rejected or ignore or paternalize all of this work and go "back to the bible" which brings us to the dispensational millenialists, the church's response to modernism, which in hindsight strikes me as particularily short sighted. Of course, the world is still with us, and so many of us are back at square one, without benefit of the tradition that explained what to do when the world wasn't coming to a crashing end, and with the added handicap of all the language and beliefs contaminated with end of the world thinking.
No wonder church is such a bore - even when the sermon is nothing but exegesis, it never really spends time working through ultimate concerns but busies itself with rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. What a shocking idea that we could wholesale reject the end of the world mentality and figure out what to do given that nihilism isn't actually working for us. I have to assume that Christianity had some meaning to last so long that wasn't just a response to the immanent end of the world, but here, my history is weak. I also see why science fiction is so appealing to me and is so full of religious overtones, it may be where the faith ended up hiding out once it was rejected by the church.
There is some deep meat inside these words as technical language, but there is also a secular meaning totally fucking them up.
I wonder how much a clear explaination of what contortions the church did in order to respond to modernity would make religion more understandable as a long term faith tradition. Seriously, you look at the church, wander into any parish, right now, and you have to wonder if people were really total idiots and so some few men became hideous abusers, or if things have really gotten off the beaten path. There really is a beaten path, although it's pretty weedy right now.
The biggest problem I had with seminary was that we were working hard to learn to support the institution, and at the time, I didn't actually know that there was a difference, or, I thought going deeper into the institution was how to go deeper into faith, except that is totally wrong. It was probably always wrong, but it's particularly troublesome in times of profound change.
But, to think about reconcilliation and justification in a secular sense -
Reconciling seems to be incorporating the trauma into your world view - not that it was right, not that it makes sense or was deserved, but that it happened, and it happened to you, even if it was not deserved, even if it was wrong, reconcilliation isn't a moral stance or meaning making out of trauma, it is acknowledgment that trauma happened and that you can be whole with it - not in spite of it, or because of it - just with it.
Justification feels very different. It feels like the incorporation of the damaging event must be explained as deserving. It is the God wanted this to happen, and to happen to you, and suffering will make you a better person. It is a moral stance on the trauma, the meaning making that incoporates the trauma itself as identity forming in a moral - right or wrong - sense. The incorporation must be good or bad and it must not alter the status quo. That is really important, that we not admit to any break with the world agreement, that we deny the event the definition of trauma itself.
I don't think justify means that in a strictly religious sense, but it isn't all that fantastic in any case. Justify is an extremely legalistic term and used by Paul (the ultimate used car salesman) to connect a lot of beliefs about the coming end of the world - jews realy did think the world was about to end, with the judgment (again, a highly specialized legal term aka ruling) of God and the event of Jesus' crucifixion. What is really interesting in this is that if you take that, in combination with the secularization of the word faith, what a dirty mess you make.
Faith, in modernity and more importantly, in English, has been bent into something as close to it's opposite as can be.
"Faith, clasically understood, is not a separate dimension of life, a compartmentalized specialty. Faith is an orientation of the total person, giving purpose and goal to one's hopes and striving, thoughts and actions." Fowler
"There was a time when "I believe" as a ceremonial declaration of faith meant, and was heard, as meaning: "Given the reality of God, as a fact of the universe, I hereby proclaim that I align my life accordingly, pledging love and loyalty." A statement about a person's believing has now come to mean, rather something of this sort: "Given the uncertainty of God, as a fact of modern life, so and so reports that the idea of God is part of the furniture of his mind." Smith (in Fowler, I haven't purchased this book yet.)
And you can substitute God with ultimate concern - you need not limit God to a beard in the sky. My God is in fact quite removed from the metaphor used to discuss it. And in coming to the realization that the bible can be a big ass metaphor meant that I could finally understand the difference between true and fact - something that has also been conflated in the modern mind. But even if you substitute ultimate concern with beard in the sky into the modern definition - you still get something that hardly compels you to get out of bed in the morning, and no wonder there is so much depression and anxiety - it's a wholesale slaughter of meaning, there is no way to align yourself with furniture. I like my dining room table, but it hardly constitutes something I would live and die for, yet, consumerism really does frame dining room tables in this way.
So, I'm thinking about this phrase, justification by faith, and superficially, it has always felt that believing statements about Jesus as Christ as true means that I am going to heaven and whatever I do based on those beliefs about Jesus as Christ make what I do right.
But that isn't quite what is going on with Paul - and context really matters. Paul is saying that, given the immanent ending of the world, given your faith or alignment of your life's meaning with the teachings of Jesus, the crucifixion of Jesus acts as surety in the final judgment of God on the world. And, given that jews didn't have a heaven (sweet pad in the sky), the heaven Paul is talking about is totally earth oriented. It means you would experience, right now, in the face of the immanent judgement of God at the end of the world, a peace in yourself - an alignment of your ultimate concern with your actual existence. And that doesn't me nothing bad happens, just that you are super resilient in the face of it. And the fact that the jews and early christians believed the whole thing only had to last for a few more years, made it all the easier.
The problem, of course, is that it's a lot easier to commit to something for a short amount of time. It's the long haul that kicks you in the ass. And there is a whole lot of Christianity that concerns itself with the fact that the world didn't end and now what the fuck do we do, that Protestants (and the Anglicans fall in with the Protestants in this - at least the ones I know of) rejected or ignore or paternalize all of this work and go "back to the bible" which brings us to the dispensational millenialists, the church's response to modernism, which in hindsight strikes me as particularily short sighted. Of course, the world is still with us, and so many of us are back at square one, without benefit of the tradition that explained what to do when the world wasn't coming to a crashing end, and with the added handicap of all the language and beliefs contaminated with end of the world thinking.
No wonder church is such a bore - even when the sermon is nothing but exegesis, it never really spends time working through ultimate concerns but busies itself with rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. What a shocking idea that we could wholesale reject the end of the world mentality and figure out what to do given that nihilism isn't actually working for us. I have to assume that Christianity had some meaning to last so long that wasn't just a response to the immanent end of the world, but here, my history is weak. I also see why science fiction is so appealing to me and is so full of religious overtones, it may be where the faith ended up hiding out once it was rejected by the church.
Sunday, August 17, 2014
Tears, first of many, many posts
"The way of tears, while not seeking pain for its own sake, is a willingness to be continually confronted not only painful truth about one's self, but also seeks to know this truth on a universal level of human suffering. This compassion mirros the kenotic God's willing interrelatedness and self-limiting power that comes from choosing to be related to creation." Ross, p45 in my book.
My mother tells me I was a happy outgoing child and I know that my adolescence contained little outgoing and questionable happy. My mother says that I did not cry all the time as a child - and indeed I don't remember excessive bouts of crying as a child. But I do remember these at various times in my adolescence. I've spent a lot of time and money connecting these various bouts to a theory of anxiety and depression and an image of myself as someone who is anxious and depressed (the very fact that I don't see myself as depressed is often my own reasoning for my depression).
In particular, I recall my first mission trip, those ridiculous things that the leaders of which are really quite unprepared to help people navigate in anything but the most superficial way. We went to Baja, and into a shanty town, and I cried and cried and was on the bus the entire time. And even then, I did not feel what people were telling me I was feeling. I wasn't shocked by the state of housing (I have lived in a house with no actual floor and a tin lid for a roof) not considering my upbrining to be suburban middle class confort, I was not shocked to find people living with out running water and electricity and all those other creature comforts that are so much more work than we realize.
I wonder, had I been with some adult supervision besides some comfortable middle class suburban folk intent on bringing some feel good - gratitude - attitutde to their children, if someone would have recognized those tears for what they were. I am pretty sure that even now, I would not necessarily be able to see the working of God in some awkward 13 year old. Even more, even today, I am not sure how I would help some awkward 13 year old incorporate such an event into their own world view.
I wonder, now and again, if being raised by the Catholics instead of the Baptists in my family, might not have brought me through my faith journey with considerable more ease. If nothing else, my experiences in a more catholic faith have certainly been broader than I got as a baptist.
My mother tells me I was a happy outgoing child and I know that my adolescence contained little outgoing and questionable happy. My mother says that I did not cry all the time as a child - and indeed I don't remember excessive bouts of crying as a child. But I do remember these at various times in my adolescence. I've spent a lot of time and money connecting these various bouts to a theory of anxiety and depression and an image of myself as someone who is anxious and depressed (the very fact that I don't see myself as depressed is often my own reasoning for my depression).
In particular, I recall my first mission trip, those ridiculous things that the leaders of which are really quite unprepared to help people navigate in anything but the most superficial way. We went to Baja, and into a shanty town, and I cried and cried and was on the bus the entire time. And even then, I did not feel what people were telling me I was feeling. I wasn't shocked by the state of housing (I have lived in a house with no actual floor and a tin lid for a roof) not considering my upbrining to be suburban middle class confort, I was not shocked to find people living with out running water and electricity and all those other creature comforts that are so much more work than we realize.
I wonder, had I been with some adult supervision besides some comfortable middle class suburban folk intent on bringing some feel good - gratitude - attitutde to their children, if someone would have recognized those tears for what they were. I am pretty sure that even now, I would not necessarily be able to see the working of God in some awkward 13 year old. Even more, even today, I am not sure how I would help some awkward 13 year old incorporate such an event into their own world view.
I wonder, now and again, if being raised by the Catholics instead of the Baptists in my family, might not have brought me through my faith journey with considerable more ease. If nothing else, my experiences in a more catholic faith have certainly been broader than I got as a baptist.
Saturday, August 16, 2014
Henotheistic
I just love it when I find someone has already figured out something I am struggling with. If nothing else, it always reinforces the idea that heaven would be a library with all the books, understandable in all the languages, and never being hungry, tired or uncomfortable while reading.
Having reached another change point in my personal growth, I am pleased to find this term.
Henotheistic - "I shall use the term henotheistic to characterize a pattern of faith and identity in which one invests deeply in a transcending center of value and power, finding in it a focal unity of personality and outlook, but this center is inappropriate, false, not something of ultimate concern." Fowler (p20 in my particular book)
It even uses my favorite word - inappropriate.
But I think much of my life has been in this place, continually "upgrading" my ultimate concerns. It is certainly true that you don't start with anything really worthy of the word ultimate.
In particular, "In this more noble form of henotheistic faith, identiy is found in losing the self in the service of a transcendingly important, if finite, cause."(21) Which goes a long long way in describing why I keep having the feeling of being knocked off my feet when I do things.
And I realize, in a way that I couldn't before, that all the places and activities and causes I have placed my whole heart into have been human things - since I am no environmentalist to place it in Gaia or some other thing that disappoints. Mine have always been people oriented, since I am so people oriented. And the church didn't cut it, and civil service doesn't cut it, and disaster relief doesn't cut it, so I am completely unsure what the next step is in finding God as my ultimate concern except, maybe, it has something to do with that star - which I am going to laugh and laugh when I find out it was a stationary satellite.
I feel a whole new spiritual autobiography coming on, in a year or two. Someday I might even write the whole thing out, but thankfully, I've got decades left to come to something worth writing about.
Having reached another change point in my personal growth, I am pleased to find this term.
Henotheistic - "I shall use the term henotheistic to characterize a pattern of faith and identity in which one invests deeply in a transcending center of value and power, finding in it a focal unity of personality and outlook, but this center is inappropriate, false, not something of ultimate concern." Fowler (p20 in my particular book)
It even uses my favorite word - inappropriate.
But I think much of my life has been in this place, continually "upgrading" my ultimate concerns. It is certainly true that you don't start with anything really worthy of the word ultimate.
In particular, "In this more noble form of henotheistic faith, identiy is found in losing the self in the service of a transcendingly important, if finite, cause."(21) Which goes a long long way in describing why I keep having the feeling of being knocked off my feet when I do things.
And I realize, in a way that I couldn't before, that all the places and activities and causes I have placed my whole heart into have been human things - since I am no environmentalist to place it in Gaia or some other thing that disappoints. Mine have always been people oriented, since I am so people oriented. And the church didn't cut it, and civil service doesn't cut it, and disaster relief doesn't cut it, so I am completely unsure what the next step is in finding God as my ultimate concern except, maybe, it has something to do with that star - which I am going to laugh and laugh when I find out it was a stationary satellite.
I feel a whole new spiritual autobiography coming on, in a year or two. Someday I might even write the whole thing out, but thankfully, I've got decades left to come to something worth writing about.
Friday, August 15, 2014
O'Shaughnessy Dam
Last night we walked out on O'Shaughnessy Dan to look at the starts. So many city dwellers-so many fears of bears and snakes.
But I look at this dam, this rather pictorially large but actually small piece of the whole story and I am amazed by the remnants of the belief in Progress. I really don't think we believe in Progress anymore-we just use the word. Not that there are not some but collectively, as a whole, we have sold the idea of somthing larger than ourselves for the good of civilization for the very think Marx was so afraid of - except he called in religion, and imagined it was a church or a God when is was really just distraction.
I wonder, now, if the Egyptions actually worshipped cats, or if they had solved enough in the name of Progress that, like the internet today, there really isn't much to do except post pictures of our cats.
I've had another PTSD episode. The kind that make me totally freak out for 4 days (sometimes months) trying to integrate the trauma - the SUPRISE- into my worldview again. Shannon tried some tough love on my, again, because he hasn't quite figured out that stubborn isn't what is going on here and that he isn't telling me something that I don't know-just something that my body has a massive allergic reaction to. So he said something that he has said before, but hasn't quite figured out that it's only result is to make him feel bad. He said I don't get what I want because I keep doing the same thing - not breaking in order to get what I want. That, specifically, I am not a priest because I won't play by someone elses rules and I won't support their vision.
It occurs to me that the trauma is often if not always, that I thought I was. But what I was seeing was God's vision and not human vision. I am always so broken whenevery I think (ok, I invent) a leader in my mind that is the leader I want to support, the leader that is also seeking after God's plan. And when that leader is following a perfectly humanly secular rational goal, I encounter another rift in my soul.
Here, I really want to say that my problem with (often women) leaders is some deep seated bullshit about my mother, it really isn't. It may appear in relation to my Mother archetypes of God, but working through the feminine in God is something I have known I needed to work on for a long time now anyway. I think this is so hard because I have not been in a place to really explore incarnation before, and it will be around incarnation for me to look at Mothering, given that I am a feminine incarnation.
I may finally be in a place to start considering separating the human and the divine. Another step in the process that sucks from this side and sucks more because I know how much more amazing it will be on the other side. And I have done the work to separate God from religion; I think it is time and possible finally to start separating God from humanity. Perhaps this is why incarnation is finally a thing I can contemplate when for so long I was coming to grips with Death-Resurrection.
Last night, laying on the dam, looking at the starts, sattelites and planes, I found myself drawn to just one star, a bright, white steady star directly overhead. And I could look at that start and everything else would fade away and I could feel the fire of life inside me as part of the fire of that star - that burning brightness was where God existed. It had no desires or emotions, it had no needs except the knowledge that it was the shimmering that resonated in me of I AM - and how I AM is enought reason for being, enough reason for keeping body and mind whole in the face of life's bullshit - natural and manmade.
I see so clearly how humans can be - with all this smallness and the flaws and fixes - in relationship with one another and with the systems of humans that doesn't have to change people in order to make the world perfect, and my perfect, I don't mean that all the ills of civilization or humanity are solved in a perfect Skittles rainbow, but how mitigated the difficult bits are when that spark is what motivates us rather than the fears and foibles and discomfort of the vision of perfection.
Beauty is messy and it has warts and all, as they say, but never despite the warts nor because of the warts. Warts just are, why be so obsesses with warts? Focus on beauty without justification and it is so messy and awe inspiring. I can see systems and I love formal logic, but the answers aren't found in it making everything conform to the logic - everything will fall within a standard deviation or two anyway. Help people with falling in the deviations and don't worry about it. Just know people and it will all work out.
One of the things that Shannon and I have been hashing out over the last few days has been my will. I have this vision as part of my will, and one of my superpowers is to build rather than destroy in the pursuit of that will. I can make people see, believe, desire, that vision, and feel their place within it, and that place is always inside the circle. Other people come along and try to exert their will over me, and it is perfectly reasonable, rational, sucessful ways of exerting will and vision, but when it is never as big as mine (will or vision) I am oblivious to it right until I figure out what is happening and I always respond in the same way, which is a problem. Because, not everyone is pursuing the vision of God, and lots of people are probably easily separating their vision and will of God from everything else, and I either can't do that, or more likely, can't imagine why you ever would.
I wonder how people wander around life not always considering how they are making meaning and connecting to their ultimate concern. I wonder if people even know they have one. I wonder why I have always done this instinctively.
But I look at this dam, this rather pictorially large but actually small piece of the whole story and I am amazed by the remnants of the belief in Progress. I really don't think we believe in Progress anymore-we just use the word. Not that there are not some but collectively, as a whole, we have sold the idea of somthing larger than ourselves for the good of civilization for the very think Marx was so afraid of - except he called in religion, and imagined it was a church or a God when is was really just distraction.
I wonder, now, if the Egyptions actually worshipped cats, or if they had solved enough in the name of Progress that, like the internet today, there really isn't much to do except post pictures of our cats.
I've had another PTSD episode. The kind that make me totally freak out for 4 days (sometimes months) trying to integrate the trauma - the SUPRISE- into my worldview again. Shannon tried some tough love on my, again, because he hasn't quite figured out that stubborn isn't what is going on here and that he isn't telling me something that I don't know-just something that my body has a massive allergic reaction to. So he said something that he has said before, but hasn't quite figured out that it's only result is to make him feel bad. He said I don't get what I want because I keep doing the same thing - not breaking in order to get what I want. That, specifically, I am not a priest because I won't play by someone elses rules and I won't support their vision.
It occurs to me that the trauma is often if not always, that I thought I was. But what I was seeing was God's vision and not human vision. I am always so broken whenevery I think (ok, I invent) a leader in my mind that is the leader I want to support, the leader that is also seeking after God's plan. And when that leader is following a perfectly humanly secular rational goal, I encounter another rift in my soul.
Here, I really want to say that my problem with (often women) leaders is some deep seated bullshit about my mother, it really isn't. It may appear in relation to my Mother archetypes of God, but working through the feminine in God is something I have known I needed to work on for a long time now anyway. I think this is so hard because I have not been in a place to really explore incarnation before, and it will be around incarnation for me to look at Mothering, given that I am a feminine incarnation.
I may finally be in a place to start considering separating the human and the divine. Another step in the process that sucks from this side and sucks more because I know how much more amazing it will be on the other side. And I have done the work to separate God from religion; I think it is time and possible finally to start separating God from humanity. Perhaps this is why incarnation is finally a thing I can contemplate when for so long I was coming to grips with Death-Resurrection.
Last night, laying on the dam, looking at the starts, sattelites and planes, I found myself drawn to just one star, a bright, white steady star directly overhead. And I could look at that start and everything else would fade away and I could feel the fire of life inside me as part of the fire of that star - that burning brightness was where God existed. It had no desires or emotions, it had no needs except the knowledge that it was the shimmering that resonated in me of I AM - and how I AM is enought reason for being, enough reason for keeping body and mind whole in the face of life's bullshit - natural and manmade.
I see so clearly how humans can be - with all this smallness and the flaws and fixes - in relationship with one another and with the systems of humans that doesn't have to change people in order to make the world perfect, and my perfect, I don't mean that all the ills of civilization or humanity are solved in a perfect Skittles rainbow, but how mitigated the difficult bits are when that spark is what motivates us rather than the fears and foibles and discomfort of the vision of perfection.
Beauty is messy and it has warts and all, as they say, but never despite the warts nor because of the warts. Warts just are, why be so obsesses with warts? Focus on beauty without justification and it is so messy and awe inspiring. I can see systems and I love formal logic, but the answers aren't found in it making everything conform to the logic - everything will fall within a standard deviation or two anyway. Help people with falling in the deviations and don't worry about it. Just know people and it will all work out.
One of the things that Shannon and I have been hashing out over the last few days has been my will. I have this vision as part of my will, and one of my superpowers is to build rather than destroy in the pursuit of that will. I can make people see, believe, desire, that vision, and feel their place within it, and that place is always inside the circle. Other people come along and try to exert their will over me, and it is perfectly reasonable, rational, sucessful ways of exerting will and vision, but when it is never as big as mine (will or vision) I am oblivious to it right until I figure out what is happening and I always respond in the same way, which is a problem. Because, not everyone is pursuing the vision of God, and lots of people are probably easily separating their vision and will of God from everything else, and I either can't do that, or more likely, can't imagine why you ever would.
I wonder how people wander around life not always considering how they are making meaning and connecting to their ultimate concern. I wonder if people even know they have one. I wonder why I have always done this instinctively.
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