Dreaming the Future Closer

So, I’ve been seeing, talking, and reading about divination a lot lately.  I’ve been thinking about what I thought divination was when I first started playing around with things like tarot cards and runes and comparing that to how I think of divination now.  A lot has changed for me.

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[Brief Preface: I do feel lately like my soul is moving up and down the axis of things, jumping from things humble and profane to things lofty and almost too abstract for sense to come of them.  My posting seems to reflect that well, though perhaps a touch schizophrenic from the outside.  I'm not sure what to make of it, just observing.]

Emerson’s essay “On Friendship” serves as an intellectual touchstone for me.  In saying that, I don’t mean to suggest that I accept its contents as given and unadulterated truth.  Rather, I mean the term ‘touchstone’ quite literally.  I return to it, read it, contemplate it, and find myself diverging from portions of it.  Yet I never feel like I’m moving beyond it.  Quite like a good conversation, it inspires and inspiration doesn’t settle well with straightforward right or wrong, settled or unsettled.

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(and now for something completely different)

I wouldn’t be surprised if someone already caught this, but it’s novel to me right now.  I was watching the season finale of Dexter on CBS and it dawned on me all of a sudden why, for all of the gore and sociopathy, Dexter seemed so familiar.  The plot, the character, are modeled on superhero comics.  In fact, not just any superhero, but an iconic and powerful one–Spiderman.  There are significant variations, of course, but the structural parallels are strong.

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This post has been brewing in my head for a while.  I keep meaning to sit down and let it out, but until now that hasn’t happened.  For all the time brewing, I’ve not had tons of time or energy to rework the underlying ideas, so take it for the rough piece of work it is.  It ends up a good deal more vague than I would prefer.

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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.

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The conversation over on the previous entry (including  Oli pointing me toward this), combined with revisiting some of the stuff I wrote and read as young’un, has posed this very basic question for me: how do I understand what spirit is and how it operates? 

I have a sketch of an answer, one that would need a good deal more detail, but serves workably for sharing.

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So, this is something that has been brewing in the back of my mind.  It’s hardly a novel insight, but perhaps there may be some novelty in how I bring the insight to fruition.  The premise is simple enough: there is no one reason for someone to engage with a religion.  Quite the opposite, there are a great many different reasons, though one or more may play a greater role than others.

This suggests that we might be able to sketch, in outline, a sort of typology of the different sorts of religious devotee, based around their central concerns.  As a typology, this should come with all the appropriate qualifications, namely that they are not about labeling a person into perpetuity, but about addressing the given space they occupy presently.  So, while I will talk about kinds of people, what I am really talking about are kinds of motivations, which a given person may change.

This is a quick post, so it’s not meant to be anywhere near exhaustive, just suggestive.  Right now, there are three major types of engagement that leap to mind.

Problem solver: These sorts come to a religion seeking from it solutions to their problems.  I think this group catches most flack for having an insincere faith, though sometimes unjustly.  Just as the problems a person may face can vary, so will the exact reasons for a problem solver’s approach to religion. 

Perhaps they seek a material benefits.  They may have a sick mother they hope to make better through prayer, a crime they hope to elude punishment by promises of reform to a higher power, or just be pleading for a break that would change their life.  These folks are often the most maligned, though, in truth, there are few religions that do not hold out some hope of just these miracles.  There are also few within a religion who do not hold out hope to, at least, see evidence of just these sorts of explicit benefits. 

Perhaps they seek out moral justification.  More than a few people embrace religion for the clear road map it provides them in terms of moral behavior.  They turn to spiritual authorities for moral certitude.  We tend to demean these people less within our own religion, though we often mock them when we encounter them in another religion, ascribing to them (and sometimes their religion in general) a sort of zealotry.

Perhaps they seek out intellectual satisfaction.  Religions often have elaborately complex metaphysical and ontological systems, which appeal to those whose restless minds need to find some fundamental order in the world.  There is a tendency to lump these folks with the moral folks, but they may appear separately.

Traditionalist: They come to a religion either because it provides them with a feeling of community.  While it may revolve around the same axes as problem solving (material, moral, intellectual), it may just as well be about a more basic commonality of shared stories and history.  The oft-discussed ‘ethnically Jewish’ individual well exemplifies that latter type. 

They may not have an investment in the religion as a problem solving mechanism in any way, they may find the community it supports comfortable in a very deep sense.  The sorts of jokes and stories and behaviors are comforting almost in and of themselves, for the way they embody a being with others.

Grappler with god(s): These folks have had an experience that suggests to them a spiritual dimension of experience that is not satisfied by ‘mundane’ or ‘profane’ life.  The experience need not be mystical in the most high-falutin’ sense of the term, with being ravished by G-D or what have you.  It could just as well be a nagging sense that the world as lived isn’t quite all there is.

These folks come to the religion in order to find a way to access that ‘more.’  They often seek some way to sustain a fleeting experience of divine intimacy.  They may feel that their experience indicates that they must do something, that they owe a debt to the divine that they hope religion will help them fulfill.

Now, while I think the latter motivation is the most uniquely religious, I have some concern that an over-emphasis of it makes it too easy to think of those without it as falsely religious.  It seems a bit like the old discussion of learning styles–those who end up teaching tend to have a very particular learnign style that is statistically abnormal.  If they don’t realize this, they don’t actually do a good job of teaching, because they channel their realizations to others in ways that make it difficult for them to absorb.

Those with the latter motivation have a nasty tendency to think of themselves as properly religious whereas others are not, merely going through the motions.  This strong distinction is inimical to a religious community, through which the latter type may, in fact, fulfill their sense of calling.  They are, ironically, inimical to the community.

Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor may have had a point in this regard, but only to the extent that the sincerely ‘holy’ mistake their experience of religion as the only proper way of experiencing religion.  When they are doing their part to nurture the community, to ground themselves out within it, they may become the soul of their worlds. 

This is brief, a half-formed thought that I want to start meditating on.  I intend it more tentatively than I make it sound.  I just want to hear it out loud.

One of the defining characteristics of a lived religion is the internal debates that structure it.  Even when they fall short of leading to outright schism, they provide a sort of rubric for those practicing the religion to determine what is important.  In other words, if you are willing to fight over this, it’s a sign that there may be something key to the ideas motivating the scuffle.

One of the dangers of recon work is that you overlook those oh-so-important tensions in favor of something else.  It may be statistical majority (more people practiced like this, so it’s the way to go), status of certain people (well, kings practiced like this, so it’s the way to go), or what have you.  (Easily, it can be a combination of things.)  But, regardless, the tension disappears, replaced by ‘reclaimed’ dogma. 

You get, in short, the body of the religion without its heart.  Which makes me think that it makes sense to talk of religion as defined by three inter-related things: body, heart, and spirit.

Body includes all the concrete practices, rituals, ceremonies, that compose the religion.  The spirit includes the connection of the religion to spiritual forces, the divine.  The heart is defined by the ethical struggles that define the religion.  Missing any one of those elements, you do not have religion proper.

Lately, I have found myself thinking about Simone Weil quite a bit.  She’s one of those people whose work seems to have fallen between the cracks, in part I suspect because of her earnest refusal to separate her political and religious thought into separate boxes.

Her political work, though, forms one of the most legitimate ‘third ways’ to the capitalism vs. communism debates I have found.  Her spiritual work…well, it’s just some of the most rigorous, insightful, unrelenting stuff out there.  I recommend it unhesitatingly, but not without qualifications.  Much of this has to do with how thoroughly Christian her spiritual thought becomes.

I am unwilling to throw out her work because she is Christian, though.  The spiritual insights described by many Christians are real, are meaningful, and not just internal to their faith.  The dismissive attitudes of some of those Christians toward our faith does not diminish the truth of their writings.  Nor, of course, does it necessarily affirm them.

What follows after the cut is my effort to highlight some of the things Weil has to offer us non-Christians and to make sense of those qualifications.  All the citations in this piece come from the translation of Gravity and Grace published by Routledge.  I’m aware that the work is posthumous collections of her notes.  The unguarded nature of those makes it much more useful for this discussion.  I think this may be my longest post to date and definitely one of my more ‘academic,’ so be forewarned ;-). 

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Religious folk don’t often sit down for a talk about signs and portents.  In most every faith, they play an important, sometimes even primary, role.  While efforts to reclaim religion for ‘rational’ people tend to downplay or eliminate their place, they remain one of the defining elements of a spiritual mode of thought.

Here’s me thinking a little bit about that.

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