Misguided intensity

I was reading a post written in February by the Episcopal Bishop of Colorado. He was describing what it is like to to parish visitations throughout the state. And how he was confronted with similar anger and rigidity from the opposite ends of the religious spectrum. . . . He then wrote the following:

"As I drove home, I could hear the words of a friend of mine—a Mennonite from Iowa—echoing in my mind. Some years earlier he had shared a lay person’s perspective with a group of clergy. 'I just want you to know,'he said with great honesty and compassion, 'that from where I sit in the pews, I just can’t tell the difference.' He paused for a moment, and when he continued he spoke very quietly. 'I can’t tell the difference,' he said gently, 'between an angry, self-righteous liberal and an angry, self-righteous conservative.'"

Here's a link to the full post: http://coloradobishopsblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/ashes-and-attitude.html

This comment struck me particularly intensely -- because I tend to fall on the liberal end of the spectrum, and it is far too easy to become self-righteous.

Joseph Campbell

I was recently re-remembering my readings of Joseph Campbell. I think most people would remember him for the consulting/mentoring work he is supposed to have done for George Lucas during the creation of Star Wars. (People hotly dispute how useful or influential this really was.)

Campbell was, for me, an important key for unwrapping the importance of mythology to the human mind and spirituality. I started by watching parts of "The Power of Myth," a PBS show where Bill Moyers interviewed Campbell. Then I went on to read "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" and the four-part "Masks of God." Campbell studies mythology and its infinite variations over the course of human history. From this study, the stories of Christianity took on a new significance for me, as really wonderful examples of mythology -- which is NOT to insult or denigrate them.

I use the term "myth" very carefully. Being raised as a conservative evangelical Christian, I was taught to believe that "myth" meant "untrue fable." The Greek and Roman Gods were myths, but the stories in the Bible were "true."

And yet Campbell taught me that the power of the Bible comes from how it digs into the same core of human desires and psychological structures as did the mythology of the Greek Gods. As I see it, behind almost all religions are deeper psychological truths that use the stories and forms of religious mythology to communicate deeper truths about ourselves. Myths are actually specially-charged stories that have a deep connection with what it means to be human . . . They are true to our psychological needs as humans, even if they are not objective in the manner of a story in the New York Times.

In my own history, if not that of the rest of the world, Cambell's work is also tied up with that of Carl Jung and the Jungian archetypes . . . . Quoting Wikipedia (that quick source of dubious quotations), these are "innate universal psychic dispositions that form the substrate from which the basic themes of human life emerge. Being universal and innate, their influence can be detected in the form of myths, symbols, rituals and instincts of human beings." This is as good a description as any.

What is liberating for me was to realize that Christianity is not unique in being the sole "true" religion in a sea of "false" religion. Instead, it is one reflection of how humans deal with their innate psychological "hardwiring." . . . We may still argue over whether that hardwiring was created by design or by chance (and I'm not sure there is any way to resolve that argument, hence my attraction to some form of intellectual agnosticism), but we can all begin to see patterns throughout human history. Assuming God's existence, perhaps God was working a lot more broadly in human history than conservative Christians have been willing to admit. "And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice. . . " (quoting from John 10:16)

Savage Loss -- From This American Life

When I was in high school, I bought an record album called "The Wind Came Singing"; it's sort of a contemporary Christian/folk album (originally released in 1983), full of early-'80s sounds. I don't know if my affection for it comes from the inherent quality of the music, or from how it influenced a particularly impressionable moment of my time growing up. At any rate, one of the songs on that album is called "Welcome Home." Some of the words included: "You're at peace with yourself . . . and I'm so glad . . . Welcome Home . . . To a Love that has waited since before time began, to a Love that remains when everything else is gone."

I thought of this song as I was listening to "This American Life" Episode 379: "Return to the Scene of the Crime." Act Three of this episode was a meditation by Dan Savage on life, the death of his mother, and his very fraught relationship with the Roman Catholic Church: they labelled this act "Our Man of Perpetual Sorrow." In some ways it broke my heart, because it was such an honest grappling with the tension and love and loss of many modern thinking people's experience of organized religion.

We often leave the church of our youth in a burst of adolescent righteous anger at the failings, hypocrisies, inconsistencies and intermittent sheer inhumanity of organized religion. The vision of God and the Transcendent we are given as children falls away, or part of it becomes absurd, and we find ourselves questioning whether ANY of it can possibly be true. If we are gay (as is Dan Savage), the rigid blindness of what we are taught about traditional morality seems especially inhuman.

As a child, I often had the half-unconscious and inarticulate sense that my religious beliefs were all interrelated in a way that meant if one part is untrue, then the whole edifice must crumble. If (for example) the world were not created in 7 literal days, then one could not trust Genesis or the Bible for anything. Belief was something both all-encompassing and incredibly fragile.

At the same time -- and by contrast -- my childhood eyes saw -- or imagined they saw -- a world illuminated through the bright, clinical light of science. Progress was everywhere -- we used to die of diseases that are now just annoyances. Things like cholera and tuberculosis no longer touch anyone's lives (or anyone I knew, to be more accurate). We now understand how hygiene works (unlike the doctors at the time of the Civil War, who didn't even know to wash their hands between patients). My grandparents were born when buggies transported people to the train station: I was born when mankind had walked on the Moon. In ways both great and small, science had improved lives.

At some point in life, it became tempting to compare the messy, occasionally logically-inconsistent pre-industrial hodgepodges of half-understood mythology that fills traditional "religion," with the world of clean lab coats, bright lights, and solidly-empirically-provable advances enjoyed by the world through "science." Then popular culture tells us that there is a head-to-head struggle between "science" and "religion." And best-selling books by Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens tell us that "religion" is always and everywhere a leach sucking the life from true human progress.

In that context, it can seem a relief to say goodbye to the frustratingly intangible, and sometimes dehumanizing, struggles that come from engaging with traditional "religion." . . . Dan Savage related how his disengagement from formal Roman Catholicism came during high school -- he was a freshman at a parochial school that prepared young men for the priesthood, but chose to graduate from a public high school without a hint of religion.

His engagement with Roman Catholicism lay dormant for the next 30-some years. When it returned, it returned powerfully. . . . As Dan Savage's mother lay dying, something brought a certain comfort, a certain dignity to the transition from life to death. It was the priest giving the dying mother her last rites, and the familiar sounds of the prayers repeated from childhood memories. . . . ( In my own life, I saw my own grandmother lean over and kiss the cooling forehead of my grandfather on his deathbed: "Goodbye dear, I'll see you in the Morning," she said.) Ritual and religion brought peace and order to the last moments of life.

When Dan Savage returned to his regular life, he was changed. He found himself drawn into cool, empty (and traditional) Catholic churches. Something was drawing him into a place he hadn't been for many years . . . And yet voices he identified as "reason" and "progress" told him that what he was feeling was neither rational nor healthy. . . . Why, why, backslide (it seems to be saying) into the writhing pit of pre-rational mythology from which modern science had rescued us?

That's where Dan Savage's story for this American Life ended -- with him suspended between a need for something he felt through the Sacraments, yet a mind told that this need with unhealthy and not in tune with modern progress. (Or that's how I heard his final statements.)

[To be fair, he also talked about the wildly-unhelpful things done in the Catholic Church in the name of sexuality, and how that sort of thing keeps him unengaged as well. That is a different topic I am not addressing in this writing. . . . And I don't want to minimize the damage religion has perpetrated. One observation from the book "Faith, Reason, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate" by Terry Eagleton in regard to this point -- "the cruelties and stupidities that the Irish church has perpetuated do not prevent me from recalling how, without it, generations of my own ancestors would have gone unschooled, unnursed,  unconsoled, and unburied."]

What makes me mourn, and what made me think of that old song, was the sense of loss that seemed (in my perception) to shadow Dan Savage -- a loss of the ability to see the religion in which he had grown up as a potentially important source of valid consolation for rational adults. . . . Somewhere I sometimes feel we've gotten the idea that valid consolation can come only from the sources that my childhood mind saw as the brightly-lit world of empirical science. Anything else is (one sometimes feels) wishful thinking.

Yet I do not think we need to be caught between a weak, unsatisfying (yet intellectually valid) consolation via "science" versus a strong, yet invalid, consolation via "religion." In my life, I have felt that I need to refocus both religion and science, so that I can come out with something true to both, not in conflict, and able to provide the sort of consolation that makes human life rich and enjoyable. This involves several interrelated observations (still tentative, but leading towards a synthesis that satisfies me).

(1) Initially, and most importantly, neither empirical observation (what we commonly call "science") nor self-revelations from the Transcendent (what we commonly call "religion") holds a monopoly on how we grapple with truth -- instead both elements provide richer materials to help me connect with something Transcendent.

(2) Spirituality in its purest form is a realization that we as humans are interconnected with our world, other living things, a greater purpose, and something Transcendent -- religion is the language we use to put this inarticulate observation into concrete terms that can affect our ordinary life.

[For example, Spirituality says: "We are all connected as humans." Religion translate this observation into something more tangible: "Is not this the fast that I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?" (Isaiah 58:6-7 NRSV).]

(3) The religion with which I was raised provides my "mother tongue" as I explore spirituality -- provides form and structure against which my struggle for connectedness and truth play out. This doesn't mean I can't learn and can't appreciate other languages, but it does give me a place from which to explore.  As easy as it might be to alienate myself from my mother tongue (with its imperfections), I am growing to believe my task as I "grow up" is to make this "mother tongue" my own, and to adapt it to reflect the experiences I've had and the lives with which I've interacted.

(4) But even as the world is full of languages which all describe a reality that transcends them, so I must realize that my religious "mother tongue" is itself a description of something bigger and more real and more complex than anything one single religion could embrace.  And by studying other "tongues," I can learn more about Transcendent Reality that religion is struggling to describe.

This being the case, I would like to say to Dan Savage -- don't let the Church alienate you from your own Mother Tongue -- Roman Catholicism is as much your own possession as it is the possession of the Pope and the bishops.   

Own your spirituality: Own that language that you were taught in your childhood religion.

Take that language away from its jailers.  Combine it with life experience, with "science," and with everything that you are, until it can help you back to the Transcendent.   Don't foreclose an avenue through which you can enrich and deepen your own experience because some narrow-minded clergy have acted and continue to act without humanity, or because some (but clearly not all) of the forms of religion from childhood no longer make sense.   Because . . .   

I believe with all my heart that there is a Love that has waited since before time began, a Love that will remain when everything else is gone . . .  And that Love comes to us in our post-religious, scientific world as fully as it ever did before -- Sicut erat in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in saecula saeculorum.

I wish there were a way to make love uncomplicated.  This evening I had dinner with someone -- the only person I've ever imagined myself marrying.  It fills my heart when I am with this person.   And yet . . .   I don't think things are mirrored.  

I don't know if they every will develop the way I want.  I tend to think love sometimes means respecting the autonomy of one's beloved.  Of letting that beloved have the freedom to love or not love . . .   And yet.  . . .   

I think of the ending of Shakespeare's Sonnet 130:

"And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare

As any she belied with false compare. "

Ah love . . .  

The Soul in Depression

I just listened to a very interesting PRI show. The episode is called "The Soul in Depresssion" . . . It's all about how depression and spirituality interact. I was struck by a poem one of the individuals interviewed had written. You can listen to the episode here: http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2009/depression/


Here is the poem. It's by Anita Barrows:

Questo muro
Quando mi vide star pur fermo e duro
turbato un poco disse: "Or vedi figlio:
tra Beatrice e te è questo muro."
(When he [Virgil] saw me standing there unmoving,
he was a bit disturbed and said, "Now look, son,
between Beatrice and you there is this wall.")
-Dante, Purgatorio XXVII

You will come at a turning of the trail
to a wall of flame

After the hard climb & the exhausted dreaming

you will come to a place where he
with whom you have walked this far
will stop, will stand

beside you on the treacherous steep path
& stare as you shiver at the moving wall, the flame

that blocks your vision of what
comes after. And that one
who you thought would accompany you always,

who held your face
tenderly a little while in his hands—
who pressed the palms of his hands into drenched grass
& washed from your cheeks the soot, the tear-tracks—

he is telling you now
that all that stands between you
& everything you have known since the beginning

is this: this wall. Between yourself
& the beloved, between yourself & your joy,
the riverbank swaying with wildflowers, the shaft

of sunlight on the rock, the song.
Will you pass through it now, will you let it consume

whatever solidness this is
you call your life, & send
you out, a tremor of heat,

a radiance, a changed
flickering thing?

In the Midst of Life, We are in Death

I spent the last week in February this year on a week-long meditation  -- "Memento mori."   

This isn't exactly difficult for me, since I've had a certain morbid fascination with the whole issue of time and decay since I was rather young.   In high school, some of my favorite music included the Mozart Requiem, the Brahms Requiem, the Rutter Requiem . . .  Well, you get the picture.

This year, Ash Wednesday fell in the middle of last week also.  I was walking to work, when a businessman hustled in front of my with the black ash cross inscribed on his forehead.  . . .   Now I grew up in a church that lived far too much in its head -- as if belonging meant more of a matter of subscribing to correct beliefs than taking particular actions (or rather, actions flowed from correct belief, but no belief flowed from actions) -- The common phrase for "how long have you belonged to this church?" used to be "How long have you been in the Truth?" . . .   In later life, I have discovered how belief and physicality can reinforce each other, as on Ash Wednesday, when one kneels before a priest and feels the slightly gritty, ash-y cross being inscribed on one's forehead as the priest murmurs: "Remember you are dust, and to dust you shall return."   Pure physicality is reinforcing something spiritual -- a moment from eternity is entering a quiet church and forcing us to confront our own frailty.  We kneel before it in silence (or perhaps listening to Psalm 51 being said or chanted) - that moment echoes down the centuries, from when the priests said: "Memento quia pulvis es, et in pulverum reverteris."

I missed that action this year, and yet life found a way to remind me that dust I am, and to dust I shall return.  My uncle died on Shrove Tuesday (or "Fat Tuesday," for those more accustomed to New Orleans), the day before Ash Wednesday.  . . .  My father's older brother, I always thought of him as my "Chamber of Commerce" uncle -- owned an auto parts store, played golf, was a Shriner, and a civic leader in his particular Midwestern town.   I drove 5 hours to get to his funeral, arriving just in time for the family to solemnly walk into the church.  A shaky Soprano sang "Beyond the Sunset," and the minister gave a summary of my Uncle's life.   He had declined from a vibrant civic leader, and died a frail old man, beloved, but facing the possibility of assisted living.  "Memento quia pulvis es, et in pulverum reverteris."

And this brought me to music by Henry Purcell.  In 1695, Queen Mary II of England died.  Purcell wrote some of the most profound anthem/meditations on death that I've heard.  Here are the words:

"MAN that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full of misery. He cometh up, and is cut down, like a flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow, and never continueth in one stay. In the midst of life we are in death: of whom may we seek for succour, but of thee, 0 Lord, who for our sins art justly displeased? Yet, 0 Lord God most holy, 0 Lord most mighty, 0 holy and most merciful Saviour, deliver us not into the bitter pains of eternal death. Thou knowest, Lord, the secrets of our hearts; shut not thy merciful ears to our prayer; but spare us, Lord most holy, 0 God most mighty, 0 holy and merciful Saviour, thou most worthy judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee." (from the 1662 Book of Common Prayer's "Burial of the Dead.")

Through actions like Ash Wednesday, and through the beauty of the Book of Common Prayer set to music, I find the sort of comfort needed when I am confronting deaths, like that of my uncle.  I sometimes think it is easier to deal with the idea of eternity through art than through logic.   And it was only when that art took my outside my own head that I began to find a way to deal with the unrelenting change and the rush towards my own mortality that is coming more and more clearly into focus as I approach middle age.

The Weird Elixir of the Unconscious Mind

Shakespeare's Sonnet 130 begins: "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun." He goes on to point out that in ordinary terms, the woman he loves does not compare to traditional hyperbolic descriptions of one's beloved. Nonetheless, he ends with the following lovely couplet: "And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare / As any she belied with false compare."

Skip forward a few hundred years, to (according to Wikipedia) 1937 and the songwriting team Rodgers and Hart, speaking of "My Funny Valentine:" "Your looks are laughable, un-photographable / Yet, you're my favorite work of art."

Or yet again, there is a phrase that has stuck with me from Isaiah (if it isn't inappropriate to use it in this context): "he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him." And yet . . .

In my own life, I have met one individual that I wanted to marry. And it wasn't traditional physical beauty that caught me: it was that individual's combination of intelligence, character, and some indefinable quality of life that hooked me (and keeps me hooked to this day). Not that conventional physical attraction was absent, but rather that it was made to grow and strengthen by the other, intangible characteristics of my desired spouse.

Physical desire, in this context, was transformed. It was like Mahler taking up a simple folk song -- weaving that simple musical element into a larger and more complex tapestry of sound. Gradually the senses became almost overwhelmed, until one was close to drowning in the sea of music. Yet in that music, the original folk theme is recognizable, transfigured through the composer's genius.

In the same way, I found myself surprised at how the intangible beauty of an entire personality could transform another person from ordinary acquaintance into the central figure around which many of my desires, hopes and dreams seemed to coalesce. And this happened without conscious effort on my part.

The tragedy (?) for me, so far, is that timing and the interpersonal situation have remained in a state where most of what I feel remains internal to me. (And a dry, cynical part of my mind questions whether much of this tranformative internal experience would actually survive being shared fully with another person -- or whether it is so beautiful because it is internal to me alone.)

I am feeling compelled to write (and share -- however obliquely -- the experience), because recently I met another potential transformative person. The experience shared enough characteristics with "the first" experience -- and was so far beyond my other interactions with potential spouses -- that I realized something in my unconscious might be stirring again. If that is the case, I want to be able to document and better examine what happens, in hopes of better understanding both myself and the emotional phenomenon I am (might be?) experiencing.

Suzanne Vega . . . Language

I was listening to an older Suzanne Vega song today -- "Language." I find the words quite profound:

If language were liquid
It would be rushing in
Instead here we are
In a silence more eloquent
Than any word could ever be

These words are too solid
They don’t move fast enough
To catch the blur in the brain
That flies by and is gone
Gone
Gone
Gone

I’d like to meet you
In a timeless, placeless place
Somewhere out of context
And beyond all consequences

Let’s go back to the building
(Words are too solid)
On Little West Twelfth
It is not far away
(They don’t move fast enough)
And the river is there
And the sun and the spaces
Are all laying low
(To catch the blur in the brain)
And we’ll sit in the silence
(That flies by and is)
That comes rushing in and is
Gone (Gone)

I won’t use words again
They don’t mean what I meant
They don’t say what I said
They’re just the crust of the meaning
With realms underneath
Never touched
Never stirred
Never even moved through

If language were liquid
It would be rushing in
Instead here we are
In a silence more eloquent
Than any word could ever be

And is gone
Gone
Gone
And is gone

Lyrics by: Suzanne Vega
Album: Solitude Standing

Sunday Meditation . . .

"As [Jesus] went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, 'Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?' Jesus answered: 'Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him.'" Gospel According to St. John 9:1-3 (NRSV).

My brother is subject to a degenerative genetic disorder, which is passed through mothers, but almost always affects only sons. Other family members have researched this disorder, and tell me it is called Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease. My brother has never walked, and the disorder is degenerative -- meaning that he gradually can do fewer things and has less control over his muscles. Beginning from my maternal grandmother, there have been five men born into the genetic line. I am one of two who are not affected by Pelizaeus-Merzbacher disease.

This genetic fact makes the passage from St. John very relevant to me. I have been told many times that in the time and place where Jesus Christ spoke, the common perception was that physical infirmity was a mark of spiritual judgment. One of the things that changed through the life and teaching of Jesus Christ was that a new paradigm of physical infirmity began to take root in the Judeo-Christian culture -- one where physical imperfection was no longer a mark of spiritual judgment.

In the late 19th century, Western medicine began to refine its understanding of the role that physical changes in the brain play in our psychological makeup. Throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century we understand increasingly more about how our brain functions as a physical entity. Although I know it is very complex, a good deal of our personality and our perceptions of the world relies on the proper functioning of that physical organ inside our heads.

With this greater understanding of the physical nature of our thoughts and perceptions, I think that the passage from St. John should be applied to more than just physical infirmity. In fact, I think it should be definitely applied to the psychological problems humans suffer.

Depression, for example, is not a result of weak faith, or spiritual malaise. It is a chemical imbalance in the brain. (Or that's my guess -- I am no psychologist or psychiatrist.)

When a person is despairing, it does not help that person if they also believe that they are also spiritually abandoned - or cursed of God. . . . I have heard tell of certain very religious individuals whose depression or worse came from their sense that they had committed the "unpardonable sin" - or were otherwise cut off from God. (Of course, this might be more of a "chicken and egg" question -- since I am not sure if the sense of being cut off from God followed or precipitated the despair and depression.)

It is time (and past time) that mental disorders are treated more scientifically by the religiously conservative. Someone with schizophrenia needs to be treated with medication, not deemed to be possessed by demons. Or . . . to avoid excluding either approach, they need to be treated both spiritually and medically.

But it is long past time to end the sort of damage done when pastors or well-meaning lay persons attempt to treat mental disorders as exclusively spiritual problems. The more enlightened portions of Christendom recognize it, but really the conservatives need to think hard about how they apply Jesus Christ's teachings to matters of mental illness.

Where does Belief End and Civics Begin?

February 2009. There are two ongoing cases involving potential financial mismanagement at religious institutions that are leading to acrimonious civil disputes. In both these cases, there has been alleged wrongdoing regarding the finances of a religious body. But there are many in that particular religious body that do not think the dispute is over financial mismanagement -- they think that the secular government is interfering in church matters, using the financial issues as a pretext for religious persecution.

(I) -- Diocese versus Parish in Colorado Springs:

Colorado Springs, Colorado is sometimes called the Evangelical Protestant Vatican. For many years, the largest Episcopal parish in Colorado Springs was Grace and St. Stephen's Episcopal Church. Among other things, the parish owned a beautiful neo-gothic church building, a parish house, and a generous endowment fund. For an Episcopal church, it was fairly conservative, but was long loyal to the national Episcopal Church. Father Donald Armstrong was the parish's long-time Rector (i.e. pastor or priest). Through the mid-2000s, Father Armstrong continued to proclaim loyalty to the Episcopal church.

Then in 2006-2007, the Episcopal Diocese of Colorado began to suspect that Father Armstrong had funneled money earmarked for "single, unmarried seminarians" from a Grace Church trust fund to pay for his two children's college tuition. Suddenly, and at about the same time, Father Armstrong began to have very public doubts about the continuing doctrinal purity of the Episcopal church. The dispute came to a head in the spring of 2007, when Father Armstrong and the vestry of the parish voted to "secede" from the Episcopal Church. The Bishop of Colorado responded by stripping Father Armstrong of his position. Furthermore, the Diocese of Colorado notified Colorado Springs police that it suspected financial wrongdoing by Armstrong - resulting in a Nov. 25, 2007, warrant authorizing a search of the church.

Since then, those of the parish congregation who agreed with Father Armstrong's doctrinal position claim the complaint was pure animas against doctrinal differences. They currently remain in possession of the parish's buildings and trust funds. Those of the parish congregation who disagree have sided with the diocese, and are now worshipping at First Christian Church as a "home in exile." . . . Even as I am writing in February, 2009, a civil trial is being conducted, trying to determine who has the rights to the parish's buildings and trust funds.

State of Utah versus the FDLS and its Trust Funds:

Also in February, 2009 I finally listed to the podcast of Episode 373: The New Boss from "This American Life. "Act 2" of the episode is described as follows: "A Trust Without Trust."

An accountant, Bruce Wisan, is hired by the state of Utah to clean up a very complicated mess in a complicated place: Short Creek, home to hundreds of members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints—or FLDS, which practices polygamy. The community had been run by the notorious Warren Jeffs, now in prison for rape. Jeffs had been in charge of the FLDS church, and also of the giant trust which church members paid into all their lives. But when Jeffs became a fugitive, he began to mismanage the $112 million trust, and so the Utah attorney general stepped in, giving Wisan control. Wisan had plans: He was going to modernize the town utilities, improve the roads, and most important, give people titles to their homes, which under Jeffs were owned and controlled by the church trust. But Wisan quickly ran into an enormous problem: The majority of people in Short Creek would have nothing to do with him or his ideas. Claire Hoffman reports. Claire also wrote about Wisan for Portfolio Magazine in June 2008, in an article called "Satan's Accountant."

Questions:

In both these cases, the two sides have entirely different views of the financial aspects of the dispute. One side sees the dispute as a entirely spiritual, where the financial issues are a cover for religious persecution; the other side sees a cloak of religious piety being thrown over simple financial misconduct. . . . Which side is right? Or does the truth lie somewhere between the two sides?

The side accused of misbehaving in both cases is waging a fierce battle to maintain its control of financial assets. (Parenthetically, we must recognize that the magnitude of alleged misbehavior is much great in the FLDS case than in the Episcopal case.) Neither side in either dispute seems to inclined to "turn the other cheek" as suggested by the Founder of their religion. . . . Is there a neutral way to determine which side is more likely to be correct, without resorting to unprovable doctrinal arguments?

What is the role of the State in relation to these sorts of religious disputes?

And one final comment -- I have friends who would point to the fury of these disputes as reflecting the bad influence of religious belief.

I am inclined, however, to think that it shows that religious ideology can be used to cloak power-plays quite effectively. . . . One of my favorite quotes from C.S. Lewis is in the form of a toast by the devil Screwtape: "All said and done, my friends, it will be an ill day for us if what most humans mean by 'Religion' ever vanishes from the Earth. It can still send us the truly delicious sins. Nowhere do we tempt so successfully as on the very steps of the altar."

I take this to mean spirituality is a potent force in the world -- whether for good (Archbishop Desmond Tutu) or for ill (The Spanish Inquisition) -- or to paraphrase the old nursery rhyme, when it is good, it is very good, but when it is bad, it is horrid.

So the final question would be . . . How do we preserve the good aspects of religious belief and get rid of the horrible parts?

90 years of sex education films

I listen to various podcasts while I am commuting to work. The BBC produces a weekday poscast called "The NewsPod." They select various stories that have appeared throughout the BBC radio network. On February 9, 2009, one of the stories was the above-titled "90 Years of Sex Education Films." It is a fascinating story . . . I want to concentrate on one minor aspect of the story that caught my attention. It doesn't do justice to the entire production, but it illustrates something that fascinates me.

The first sex education films in Britain were evidently made in about 1918 or so.

In discussing them, the exhibition curator commented that she was expecting that the films would go from indirect and fumbling discussions of sex in the early years though more progressive and enlightened films in more recent times.

But this isn't what she found. Instead she found that discussions of sex ebbed and flowed in both how explicit they were and the sort of messages that they were giving. For example, in the 1940s, there was a lot of discussion of STDs which was probably intended to protect the armed forces as they traveled (and were tempted?) around the world.

In another example, the curator contrasted two stories of unwanted pregnancy from 1930s and the early 1970s -- where the basic plot was the same (i.e. late-teen girl finds herself pregnant). In the 1930s version, the girl eventually was forgiven by her fiancee and was able to go live with a sympathetic aunt: in the 1970s version, she lost all her friends and family and ended up alone. Oddly enough, the 1930s version was much more humane.

This story illustrates (for me) what I see as one of the key features of the "Modern" Western world - the idea of "Progress" - and why that idea is something of a mass hallucination more than a empirical fact.

Since the 18th century (at least), the general view has been that because of our technological innovations and increasing education, we are qualitatively different than our ancestors (who were poor, simple people) - generally society sees itself as more enlightened than the ancestors. [By the way, the Apocalyptic view of history also buys into this theory, if in an inverted way - i.e. we are the most evil generation in history, calling upon ourselves God's wrath.]

It is true that our ancestors didn't have many of the material and scientific advancements that we take for granted. (I am writing on a computer that will post things to a server in some location I don't even know, using phone lines and goodness knows what other technology.) Yet . . . This does not mean that we actually interact any more efficiently or meaningfully with our surroundings than did our ancestors.

We now have the ability to compare 90 years worth of sex education films -- and we can see that in fact, there was no steady march of "Progress" from ignorance to enlightenment. Instead, each generation made films that addressed their time and place. Some things became more permissive, others become less so -- in the 1960s, the films were relaxed, but by the 1980s (and the height of the AIDS epidemic), the films featured tombstones.

Is it possible that the author of Ecclesiastes might have been right? "What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; there is nothing new under the sun. . . . It has already been, in the ages before us. The people of long ago are not remembered, nor will there be any remembrance of people yet to come by those who come after them." (From Ecclesiastes 1:9-11)

Here is the BBC story:
** 90 years of sex education films **
Katie McGahan, curator at the BFI, and psychologist Dr Petra Boynton discuss sex education films.
< http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/today/hi/today/newsid_7878000/7878373.stm >

Intellectual Rigor in the Non-Empirical

I ran across a blog post I found very interesting at the following link: http://www.ordinary-gentlemen.com/2009/02/falsifying-the-unfalsifiable/

Here's a taste of what the writer was arguing: "There is, to be blunt, no scientific way to prove or disprove the existence of God. Both theists and atheists would serve their causes much better if they kept this in mind. " C.S. Lewis said much the same thing in a quote I can't find right now.

Yet . . . One of the ideas that I am wanting to develop more fully comes from the observation that many (although not all) humans in the course of the centuries have had experiences of the Numinous, or the Divine, or the Transcendent.

If the principal error of the Medieval centuries was to put too much in the category of "God's unchanging and revealed truth," I sometimes think the error of the 20th Century was to discount categorically any accounts of the Transcendent.

In a time where the scientific method reigns unchallenged, those things that are not able to be accounted for via the scientific method have no place in orthodox intellectual life. Without intellectual rigor, popular culture began to be give every description of something vaguely supernatural the same level of credibility -- from the theology of Thomas Aquinas, to UFO sitings, to hauntings of English manor houses, to Apocalyptic literature, to the Hindu gods.

This mindset disturbs me, because I think that reality may be bigger than we can describe exclusively using the scientific method. However, what sort of intellectual rigor is appropriate when approaching issues of faith (and revelation)?

Richard III

Last night, I went to see a performance of "Richard III." Everyone knows the line: "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse" uttered by Richard III. But how many have heard some quiet lines about tragedy uttered by women in the play?

This production included a tragic scene which is evidently sometimes cut to shorten the play. Three woman devastated by the Wars of the Roses reflect on their losses: Queen Margaret of Anjou (widow of the murdered Henry VI); Cecily Neville, Duchess of York; and Queen Elizabeth, widow of Edward IV (formerly Elizabeth Woodville) and mother of the murdered Princes in the Tower.

The Duchess of York says: "So many miseries have crazed my voice / That my woe-wearied tongue is still and mute." Many eloquent lines later, of course, the Duchess again asks: "Why should calamity be full of words?"

The play itself (which Wikipedia tells me is one of Shakespeare's earliest, being written and published sometime around 1580) is examining the bloody and pointless end to the Wars of the Roses, during which various branches of the Plantagenet Dynasty slaughtered themselves into extinction. These women were some of the survivors of the carnage -- each one having lost husbands, sons, and brothers to the bloodshed.

In the mist of all this, Shakespeare has them observe a sort of numb grief. It doesn't stop the flow of eloquence, but it provides a harsh sort of reality check.

I found myself considering the Duchess' question as I went to bed last night and as I spent my day today:

"Why should calamity be full of words?"

Spring and Fall

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918.

31. Spring and Fall


to a young child


MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, líke the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Masks of God

I don't think I'll blog at this pace in the future, but at first I have a lot to say.

I was recently re-remembering my readings of Joseph Campbell. I think most people would remember him for the consulting/mentoring work he is supposed to have done for George Lucas during the creation of Star Wars. (People hotly dispute how useful or influential this really was.)

Campbell was, for me, an important key for unwrapping the importance of mythology to the human mind and spirituality. I started by watching parts of "The Power of Myth," a PBS show where Bill Moyers interviewed Campbell. Then I went on to read "The Hero with a Thousand Faces" and the four-part "Masks of God." Campbell studies mythology and its infinite variations over the course of human history. From this study, the stories of Christianity took on a new significance for me, as really wonderful examples of mythology -- which is NOT to insult or denigrate them.

I use the term "myth" very carefully. Being raised as a conservative evangelical Christian, I was taught to believe that "myth" meant "untrue fable." The Greek and Roman Gods were myths, but the stories in the Bible were "true."

And yet Campbell taught me that the power of the Bible comes from how it digs into the same core of human desires and psychological structures as did the mythology of the Greek Gods. As I see it, behind almost all religions are deeper psychological truths that use the stories and forms of religious mythology to communicate deeper truths about ourselves. Myths are actually specially-charged stories that have a deep connection with what it means to be human . . . They are true to our psychological needs as humans, even if they are not objective in the manner of a story in the New York Times.

In my own history, if not that of the rest of the world, Cambell's work is also tied up with that of Carl Jung and the Jungian archetypes . . . . Quoting Wikipedia (that quick source of dubious quotations), these are "innate universal psychic dispositions that form the substrate from which the basic themes of human life emerge. Being universal and innate, their influence can be detected in the form of myths, symbols, rituals and instincts of human beings." This is as good a description as any.

What is liberating for me was to realize that Christianity is not unique in being the sole "true" religion in a sea of "false" religion. Instead, it is one reflection of how humans deal with their innate psychological "hardwiring." . . . We may still argue over whether that hardwiring was created by design or by chance (and I'm not sure there is any way to resolve that argument, hence my attraction to some form of intellectual agnosticism), but we can all begin to see patterns throughout human history. Assuming God's existence, perhaps God was working a lot more broadly in human history than conservative Christians have been willing to admit. "And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice. . . " (quoting from John 10:16)

Intellectual Agnosticism & Imaginative Religion

I recently told a friend that I am probably intellectually an agnostic who nonetheless chooses to be Christian. I choose Christianity because of my birth and upbringing, and because of the imaginative impact of an image (a concept?) distilled in the words to a Latin motet set by Anton Bruckner (among others) -- "Christus Factus Est:"

Christus factus est pro nobis obediens usque ad mortem,

mortem autem crucis.

Propter quod et Deus exaltavit illum et dedit illi nomen,

quod est super omne nomen.

The motet quotes from Philippians 2:5-11: "Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, being born in human likeness. And being found in human form, he humbled himself and became obedient to the point of death—even death on a cross. Therefore God also highly exalted him and gave him the name that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father."

As a child, I was taught that Christ's death on the cross could mean one of two things: (a) Christ was paying the just demands of "the Law" on our behalf, or (b) Christ's death showed the rest of the universe (including countless "unfallen" worlds) just how bad sin was. I do not find either of these two options particularly inspiring.

Option (a) makes me think of an Celestial Accountant finding a clever tax dodge that just might work. Option (b) makes me see a Universal Puppetmaster, who drags humanity into the middle of a Cosmic Object Lesson without giving it any choice in the matter.

Over time, I found another option that is (at least for me) emotionally satisfying. And here is a tentative stab at describing the option:

Inherent in giving creatures free will is the potential that those creatures will use their free will in ways that harm both them and others. What if God, recognizing that potential, decided that if the creatures he allowed to exist misused their power of choice, he would make sure that he took into himself the full measure of that misused will? Rather than standing aloof from the effects of free will, he would be in the middle of it?

To put in in playground terms, if free will created the potential that someone would try to bloody someone else's nose, then God made sure he was one of those who got punched.

Philippians says that God emptied himself, took on the form of a slave, and suffered the torture of death on a cross. . . . In the passage, God seems to me to be taking a direct hit with full impact from humanity's bent toward cruelty - and also taking responsibility for designing a system where cruelty is possible. . . . And THAT captures my imagination.

Why Create a Bog?

Why create a blog?

There are a thousand million blogs, it seems, and there probably isn't the need for one more. Still . . . Sometimes one needs to record thoughts, impressions, and so forth.

Why the title?

When I was in law school, I came across this old Latin maxim. It means (basically) -- "Not everything that is permitted is honest." This phrase caught in my imagination.

To me, it means that merely because something will not get us in trouble does not mean it's a good idea . . . And that when one thinks one is following the strict letter of some edict, one still can completely violate its purpose or its spirit. . . . The phrase echoes (to me) something from the Gospel of Matthew: "for ye pay tithe of mint and anise and cummin, and have omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith: these ye ought to have done, and not leave the other undone." Matt. 23:23

When I am trying to blog, I want to try to go deeper into the subjects I consider (at least part of the time). I want to consider what is essential and what is superficial. . . . . And sometimes I guess I also want to be completely frivolous. . . . . But always I would like to keep myself "honest," rather than merely "permitted."