Does it matter: An instantantiation of a culture?

Our Vorpel Blade - Lived experience

Domains of Normalcy

The passionate embrace of tentative knowledge

The granularity of experience

Letter to 'The Layman Online' regarding hypocrisy

Let’s think about this for a minute.

Certainly, Rev. Williamson is defending his home turf, and that is an honorable position, but it seems to me he has missed his own point when he claims that Rev. John Shuck of Elizabethton, Tenn., and other certainly challenging ministers brought up in the letters, are guilty of hypocrisy.

Indeed, the claim that the five unbelieving ministers are “living a lie,” and are hypocritical might be true, though we would need more information than is available in Rev. Williamson’s article. But even so, the branding of hypocrite here seems to miss the biggest mark. But perhaps I am wrong, as I’ve not been to seminary, but only listened to those who have.

My understanding is that the typical seminary curriculum is quite open about the state of Biblical scholarship which has developed over the last 100 years. This scholarship shows how the Christian texts, back through the old Hebrew books, are historical constructions, written, edited, rewritten, redacted, etc, by humans in response to their real, lived circumstances over many hundreds of years. The origin of the words is not at all clear, though the fact that the characters in the Bible most likely did not say them as written is quite well established. Even many of the characters and events themselves are fictional reconstructions at best. The fellows of the Jesus Seminar, among others, make the point quite strongly that this knowledge, which most ministers are given, is kept quietly away from their congregations, who are deemed unable to accept it. And so, they instead repeat the stories as if their flock were children. Not only is that hypocritical, it is condescending.

As for the legalistic claims, heresy and apostasy, I say, perhaps to the first, but certainly not to the second. My dictionary defines apostasy as the abandonment of one’s own religion, especially for reasons deemed low. It seems to me that Rev. Shuck is abandoning Rev. Williamson’s religion. That’s a different act altogether.

I have heard Rev. Shuck deliver a sermon on many occasions. I think many churchgoers, having been kept ignorant as children from the understanding that the ministers themselves were offered in their education, would find them outrageous. That is not Rev. Shuck's fault, nor his congregation’s, who respect him a great deal. It is the fault of the frankly hypocritical posturing of the swarms of ministers who do not allow those who listen to them to come to terms with the world as it is now known.

If the stories of the Bible show anything, it is that the religion described within it evolved over time. It needs to again, I think. Leaving the old behind at this point is not a low action. I think it is what good people need to do. The five ministers Rev. Williamson decries may not be as brave or as fortunate as Rev. Shuck, but we should at least allow that they are swimming in a sea of hypocrites. They and many others are doing what they feel able to do in nibbling away at the simple stories that block a more mature understanding of what Christianity is all about.

- Originally posted as a response, published April 28, 2010, to a letter by Rev. Williamson in The Layman Online, a publication of the Presbyterian Lay Committee.

Numinous

a fat little boy, not even a boy, not even;
but barely a walker, not even a talker, in his hand—a toy.
sit you down here, my boy, my fat little boy;
momma's got to bustle, about the house, independent
of you, too much to do, must leave you, here, a spell;
you can sit, and play, and watch.

my bottom is big, sucked to the floor, I watch
while her legs go by, her face so high, even
to heaven I would have said if some spell
would have given me my religiosity, my holy toy,
my grown-up sense, my independence
from her, from love, from 'boy.'

oh, she did not abandon her boy,
her darling, her son, but left him to watch
it all go teasingly away, riveting his independent
nature to her stead. his eyes not even
level to her skirt hem; but him, her toy,
her boy, her what, watching her leave—a spell.

now what? now what to do with my hands, this spell
of time and longing and fear that a boy
I'll always be away from thee, a toy
of numinous femininity; they go, i watch
they live, I long: my best things not even
close. would I give anything to be independent?

for time, time, time I sit wishing for that independent
reckoning of this knot, for a princess's kiss which this spell
would dispel, would send me, would make even
the score. but no, I could not wish not to be a boy
on occasion, at least, to see the skirt return, a toy
of the moment, my sacred, my duty, my watch.

so, that, then, is the verb of the day, the year, a life—to watch
this unnatural dependence on her independence
whoever, wherever, what: is this thing a toy?
no. what I should do is try my own spell
to snag a star from heaven itself, to pick up the boy
and hold his sweet heart and mine up even.

For life is a toy
And woman is a spell
And funny is the word "independent."

"A wonderful human being" - Marcus Borg

There he was, delicate with his words but allowing himself to "stammer" in the face of the ineffable mystery of his god. Marcus Borg's polemics, for me at least, separated error from truth. He brought a god to life. He witnessed.

I. You don't know about me without you have read some book.

So said Huck Finn. What about your god? If it's from 'The Good Book," Marcus Borg says, that's not enough.

At least you don't know about the god of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob, the god of Jesus. Even if you've read the Bible cover-to-cover and can recite verse from memory. If knowing this god is important to you, you have to know something about the Hebrew language, the Roman Empire, the subjugation of the Jews, resistance and the power of poetry. If you want to know the god of Jesus, Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and Paul, you have to think like them.

"Adult religious re-education." Marcus Borg's passion. He offered a different Christian god, a different Jesus, a different Bible. He tried to bring the Jews and early Christians who experienced the things recorded in the Christian texts into the room. For me, he went a long way towards that goal. I was moved. Scripture came to life.

Marcus Borg is quite candid about one thing: the stories of the Bible should be read as metaphor, as poetry, as "language stammering" to communicate the ineffable knowledge of the human spirit embedded in the physical world. To some, this might seem like a demotion: the literal truth of religious education is replaced by stories, interpretations, wishy-washy and mutable. Not for me. The words of the Bible do not resonate with my childhood; they were not part of my childhood education. The stories do not make sense to me as an adult. Marcus Borg wants to talk to the adults in the audience. For me, he elevated scripture by working to replace a brittle and childlike faith in something not understandable with a supple and mature comprehension of experiences that only a grown-up could understand.

II. The Intent and Passion of God

You have to be there to really get it: His god is not a superhuman, but an indescribable totality. His Jesus was not born miraculously of a virgin, but was the "decisive revelation of God," "the incarnation of God's intention and passion." His Bible is not literal history and unquestionable instruction, but a collection of stories and metaphors, some lost to our understanding, some clearly not applicable to our situation.

However, to Marcus Borg, "God's intention and passion" are readable in the Bible. Justice, Justice, Justice. Notably, distributive justice, that is, an equitable distribution of the benefits of society. And we are all called to participate in the transformation of society to increase justice. All this is surely a threatening heresy to some.

To others it will be unsatisfying. It was to me. I asked him if his conception of the Christian "God" allowed for the contingency of humans, that our species was not inevitable. He said brightly, "yes." I asked then, what would the intent and passion of this god be if humans had not appeared. He stammered a bit and said, again brightly, raising his hand in a characteristic way, "I have no idea!"

Well... but he answered my question, at least for me. For one, he doesn't know how to understand his god outside of human experience; for another, it doesn't matter to him.

III. The Evolution of God

Marcus Borg didn't go all the way; he didn't let the Christian god just become just another story, a part of history, like Zeus. Does he think that Vishnu has a passion for the world? I looked up Vishnu in Wikipedia and I see that Vishnu "is one of the five primary forms of God" in one tradition of Hinduism. "God?" Why the capital G? Why do so many people, including Marcus Borg, insist that there is such a thing, when scholarship shows that it is an historical construction—and not a Hindu one, to boot. And why the syncretism? Why does Marcus Borg, in particular, insist "God has a passion and intention" for the universe?

God is evolving, evolving under pressure and within a new "adaptive zone," to borrow a phrase from evolutionary theory; and Marcus Borg is offering up an adaptive radiation, a venture toward a new species, a new line of descent for God.

IV. Idiosyncratic Monotheism?

Language is idiosyncratic. That is, we each have our own language, based on our experience, and with implicit faith we expect that our words are understandable to another. It is surely this way with our gods as well, even the monotheistic ones.

Somewhere near the end of his talks, Marcus Borg spoke of his friend, Rev. William Sloane Coffin, calling him a "wonderful human being." You could tell he meant it. As I watched this man just then, speaking in front of me, raising his hands as if in a blessing he seemed the picture of a religious icon himself. I thought, "this man's Christianity is a literary frame; it's not judicable by the laws of physics; it is a vehicle constructed to ferry the ineffable qualities of his god."

And what are those qualities? Language stammers. If you at all can, go listen to Marcus Borg. Watch him, his charm, his humor, his delicate use of language, his command of history, his respect for people, his quiet passion. For me, a god should be experienced directly. Yes, I was moved. We are not given easy access to the name of "God," the "I Am Who I Am;" but the god I felt in the room is, for me, approachable through a bit of language. What I felt present in the room was, in short, the very thing that Marcus Borg named—a wonderful human being.

Not a bad step forward, in my book. Perhaps one you can find comfort in yourself.

Avatar

What a brutal movie.

Others will write much better about the construction of the movie, but I want to get down my experience. It was brutal. Not saying that is a bad thing, but I felt bad that my children were watching it, consuming it as entertainment. When I was young, I watched Nazis exectuting villagers on TV. That has haunted me till this day. What will this do to our kids? I can't figure it out. Maybe being haunted is the right thing?

I. Hearts and minds.
If you want to visualize Americas onslaught on Indochina, you might start here.

Besides the clear 'hearts and minds' references, besides the personification of military character and we've got a mission here people, just let us do what you brought us here to do and we'll be back in time for drinks, besides the helicopter gunships shooting incendiaries into a rural population, the massive technology thrown against skin and bone, besides the giant bulldozers ripping away the jungle, besides the pretense that they're the savages, beside the subordination of human values to a lust for resources.

Besides all this, I would focus on one image: a living, burning creature. The local woman, in the midst of what we thought was a complete rout, struck speechless, watching that magnificent horse running wildly away, on fire, burning on fire and running. My heart broke on that one. I could not turn away, but I almost left my seat.

The movie could have ended there. Orwell once said ''If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever." Orwell fought the Fascists in Spain. He could not have imagined Viet Nam. The movie could have ended with this horrifying debasement of nature, including human nature, leaving us with an image of what our past projects into the future.

II. Nature and machine

That leopard creature.

The director made us earlier feel the massive power of that beast. He let us be quietly thrilled to see it return, this time aligned with the locals. We, at this point, new what joining those two tails meant. We knew it happened: the humanish local, the overviewer of nature, gets to descend and experience nature directly through the beast, which responded to the mind of its rider. Amoral power linked with a moral mission to preserve something precious.

At the same time, elsewhere, the military man descended into his machine, synched with it, and got to experience the power and the graceful action of such a creation. Amoral power linked with a single-minded drive to dominate, to brush away obstructions.

Each humanish character got to feel the extension of power by synching with what they identified with, what they transcended by having a human mind. They descended into this reality. And they fought. My god, what a fight. I couldn't tell what would happen. An ending, or a false ending? But I wasn't thinking at the time. Earlier, the minions were pulverized gloriously by beasts. Captain America's fleet had been destroyed by nature, his bomb deflected by the hero. Now it was essence against essence. A point was to be made. Nature was ceremoniously murdered. The brutality of the killing of that creature, now an extension of the audiences' hopes for vindication--those knife thrusts. Calmly delivered by man through his machine.

III. Memory of Fire

Beyond all this, there was something else.

When it was clear that the heros would have a final chance to fight the villian, I knew what would happen, everbody did, I'm sure: Good would win. I thought to myself, 'they can't do this to them.' But who was the them?

Near the end of the movie Dances with Wolves, the White hero, John Dunbar, sits in a tent with his adopted Lakota people, discussing their killing of the soldiers taking Dunbar back for trial and execution for betrayal. Dunbar says in the native language, that it was good they killed the white soldiers, he is glad that they did it. But then he tells them that he must leave, for they will never give up looking for him; and he tells the chief that the White men will continue to come in numbers like the stars. Dunbar must leave to protect the village and to tell anyone he can of what is happening. The movie ends with Dunbar and his wife, a White woman raised from childhood by the Lakota, leaving. The text on the screen says the last remaining Lakota turned themselves in at a fort some years later. The results for their resistance: degradation, forced removal, apartheid, alcoholism, near genocide.

But listen: Back in the 80's I worked as a librarian in an activist library on US Policy towards Central America. There, I found the trilogy, Memory of Fire, by the Uruguayan journalist, Eduardo Galeano. It tried to be honest to the conquerors and the conquered in Europe's onslaught against the Americas. He tried to be honest to everyone, especially the resistance and the defeated. Much later, in an essay called The Nobodies, he made a point about conquest and resistence:

Fleas dream of buying themselves a dog, and nobodies dream of escaping poverty: that, one magical day, good luck will suddenly rain down on them - will rain down in buckets. But good luck doesn’t rain down, yesterday, today, tomorrow or ever.

Avatar gave us a tidy ending, albeit with costs. However, the victory was theatrics. It was honest to no one in real history. That the movie brought us here and gave us this--that was brutal.

Galeano goes on in The Nobodies:

The nobodies: nobody’s children, owners of nothing. The nobodies: the no-ones, the nobodied, running like rabbits, dying through life, screwed every which way. Who are not, but could be. Who don’t speak languages, but dialects. Who don’t have religions, but superstitions. Who don’t create art, but handicrafts. Who don’t have culture, but folklore. Who are not human beings, but human resources. Who do not have faces, but arms. Who do not have names, but numbers. Who do not appear in the history of the world, but in the crime reports of the local paper. The nobodies, who are not worth the bullet that kills them."

Avatar stops before the nobodies hit the screen. If this movie would have ended earlier or differently, it could have served as our "Ghost of Christmas yet to come." They're coming back, we know it, in numbers like the stars. What are we going to do?

IV. Coda

I don't like my ending. I don't want to sound so hopeless. I just think the movie should have ended differently. Watch Twelve Monkeys, the end, an endless loop of watching your own future be killed. But that spurs me on to be better; and so does Avatar, I think.

And what are we to do? What does resistance look like now? Are we becoming the nobodies? And think, indigenous spiritualities are infusing White America's hopes for a better world. The populist movements and economics of Latin America are some of the most promising developments for our future. It took hundreds of years and so many nobodies. Maybe we can help cut all that down some. We have to try.

- originally posted in my blog, Readings, February 18, 2010.

Fiction. What is it worth?

Grand poems and epics are written about one who follows his beloved to Hades. The personal challenges and pains that are met along the way there and back are illustrated with demons, entrapment, tortures, battles with outrageous creatures.

I take the worth of these stories mainly as allegories, perhaps unselfconsciously, for the real experiences some people feel when trying to hold on to someone who is disappearing, perhaps into depression, into addiction, perhaps just away.

So easy to read about facing a gorgon or being pierced or cast adrift in cold blackness. This is the trap of fiction: there are no gorgons, no vultures eating away at your liver, no black void; but the fears and pains we may face in our own heads on a single quiet night are not expressible without such devices.

Parable of the pebble

Listen:

In my view, the biosphere is unpredictable for the very same reason--nothing more nor less--that the particular configuration of atoms constituting this pebble I have in my hand is unpredictable. No one will fault a universal theory for not affirming and foreseeing the existence of this particular configuration of atoms; its enough for us that this actual object, unique and real, be compatible with the theory. This object, according to theory, is under no obligation to exist; but it has the right to.

That is enough for us as concerns the pebble, but not as concerns ourselves. We would like to think ourselves necessary, inevitable, ordained from all eternity. All religions, nearly all philosophies, and even a part of science testify to the unwearying, heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its own contingency. (p44)

Chance & Necessity

Jacques Monod

Sacred artifacts: mask, belt

A story in the NY Times or some such hit me bad (this was some years ago). It was all about the Maori people, how they viewed the world and all, and the author described the masks they hang on their homes and elsewhere as sacred. He explained that they were believed to carry the spirits of their ancestors. He sounded very respectful, yet I called him an ass. "You ass, as if you have any idea what that means."

It was quaint that they had these beliefs, but really, we know that spirits don't 'live' in things. I thought about me, how do I participate in this kind of thing? Do I? Am I so advanced?

My dad died when I was about twenty. His brain went dead after half a year of living in a

mangled and paralyzed body, the result of a car wreck, his own fault. My mom had the plug pulled after talking with us children. On a vacation home from college, I helped my mother sort out his clothes from the closet. What to do with it all? She kept asking me to try on pants to see... No. No, they don't. How about this belt? White, vinyl, two or three inches wide. Ma...! But, what complaint did I have? Style? It was in good shape. Shouldn't I just take it. Otherwise, I would just throw it down in the pile of things. My choice. Throw away my dad's belt.

I felt the force of the images of my dad, happy or drunk. I felt how complex he was, how... That belt brought a force into my mind, sent me on a trip, stayed my hand, changed my behavior. What? I thought, if I were to place this belt into a pile of others, similar, I couldn't pick it out, just from its physical qualities, yet right there, it had a profound power over me. My dad's spirit?

Sure, this is just the way memory works, mementoes and all. We can work to rationally kill such feelings as they pop up. Move on.

Perhaps, though, these are the better parts of us.