Dreaming the Future Closer

I’ve been dipping in and out of this book, The God Who May Be.  It’s a good book, though perhaps over-steeped in deconstruction for my personal tastes.  Still, I won’t be too critical of a book that tries to conceive of how religions can develop a sense of the future that is full of possibility rather than apocalypse.

Still, this post isn’t about that book, but reading it triggered that part of my mind where all my Biblical images live.  When another issue came up, I found myself thinking through it by way of the Burning Bush image.

Like much imagistic thinking, it has its limits and I probably go a little too far in pursuing it.  But it’s meaningful still in its excess.

The issue is an old one, one I have talked about before, namely, the balance that exists between personal and communal expressions of religiosity.  In the pagan community, it’s expressed keenly by the reaction participants have to the reconstruction crowd, but it’s part of a broader tension that crosses religious communities.  The responses people have to fundamentalists in their religion is telling in a similar manner.

It’s a bit trendy to criticize fundamentalists and conservatives of any religion, regardless of how their religious fundamentalism does or does not connect to a political conservatism (they are not often so tightly linked as we would believe).  This creates a polar trend where the individual’s religious experience becomes more primary than tradition, often supplanting it entirely.  Again, not as common as we might imagine, but not uncommon enough to make us comfortable.

This is where my image comes in.  Imagine that a faith tradition is, basically, a burning bush.  Its roots sink into the ground, drawing nourishment from a past we can never fully understand. Its trunk rises up and nourishes branches which in turn nourish and are nourished by their leaves.  The tradition (roots and branches) and the individual (leaves) exist in a symbiotic fashion.

The tradition isn’t just a bunch of book learning.  It includes ritual practices that have been effective at one point or another.  It sustains these practices through its connection to knowledge.  As the leaves come and go, the tradition remains to nourish the next generation.

And, from time to time, that interaction of knowledge and practice catches fire in the individuals, yet that fire does not consume the bush.  It only illuminates it all the better, giving powerful reason for the tradition’s place.

Now, however, the fire does seem alien to the bush.  It’s not an organic and ever-present part of it.  Some individuals, seeing or experiencing the fire, want more of it and seek to get more of it by turning against the bush, the tradition.  They try to set fire to it quite literally, mistaking the fire of destruction for the fire of devotion

On the flip side, there are those who identify the fire with the bush as trunk and basically cut it down, petrifying the traditions and practices, evacuating them of their capacity to circulate nourishment through the busg.

And, too, both approaches ravage the bush, making it into a mockery of itself.  Tradition, like the bush, ought to grow and sometimes (less often than we might want) change.  Tradition, like the bush, ought to send out seeds from which other bushes, related but different, might grow.

The image as a whole speaks to me most cogently as a warning: don’t fetishize the fire, the ecstatic moments of faith. 

Neither make them something to be sought at all costs nor something to be avoided and feared.  Let wisdom, practice, and the reverie of mystery coexist and feed each other without excessive, overthought, interference.

Don’t be afraid to leave a tradition, nor make someone afraid to do so.  Like seeds to the ground, though be mindful that not all seeds come to fruition.