Dreaming the Future Closer

Fate conspires toward this project and now it seems more open and inviting than ever

I’m not sure how long it will take me (probably quite a while), but I want to start working on a larger scale intellectual project.  It’s been a long time coming and I am just about at the place where I can do justice to it.

The basic goal: to lay the groundwork for what I affectionately call open theology.  At its most basic, it is an effort to talk about spiritual experience in its fullness and diversity without reducing that diversity to some posited (false) simplicity.

The motivations for this project come from a few different sources.

First, reading theologically-minded modern philosophers like Gabriel Marcel and Walter Benjamin.  Their insights into the spiritual are clear, powerful, with much to tell us about the appropriate attitude to take toward modernity.

Yet, the work is flawed by a blatant Christian and monotheistic bias.  I can almost pinpoint, for example, when the spark of truth departs Marcel’s reflections when he feels compelled to assert that he speaks, ‘of course,’ of civilized modern Christian faith.

Second, I have spent some time reading contemporary ‘(neo)pagan’ discourse about divinity.  I have found much that smacks of monotheism (”all just expressions of the one god(dess)”) and much that smacks of outright psychologism (”all just ways of expressing human experience”).  The reduction that entails seems untrue to the actual experiences of many faithful and conceals more than it reveals.

In that same arena, though, I have come across a kernel of ‘hard’ polytheists who endorse an account that opposes all such reduction.  They defend the notion that Hera and Frigg, for example, are not simply expressions of the same figure (be it the ‘goddess,’ ‘hearth goddess,’ or ‘archetypes of wifeliness’) but distinct beings.

This attitude strikes me as sound, but I have some concern for the way some hard polytheism seems attached to ‘hard’ traditionalism that makes often overstates the coherence of a pantheon. 

That tendency privileges one of two problematic (not wrong, but fraught) positions of power:  (1) an outsider perspective that makes the spirits a peculiar property of a culture they objectify or (2) an insider perspective invested in centralizing and organizing the worship of spirits, often staking claims of the authority of certain worshippers over others.

Third, I have spent a fair share of time reading up on modern anthropological and historical accounts of religions.  I have found many useful models, many people starting to struggle with the interpenetration of cultures that so much 19th-century driven work elided.

However, despite the cultural insights, I remain dissatisfied with the way in which they cannot address the spiritual concerns I have. 

It is not the fault of the anthropologists, whose discourse conventions and personal attitudes prevent them from going further.  It is a problem, though, for those of us whose spiritual practice does include that personal dimension.

The anthropological and historical texts are having a profound influence on spiritual communities.  There is a growing ‘anthropological’ attitude that undermines faith from within the spiritual community.

Fourth, and perhaps most importantly, I have grown more committed to my own spiritual path in the Lucumi religion. 

This has placed me in personal contact not just with fellow practitioners, but with the orisha.  The experience of their personalities, their individualities, has been a moving and powerful one, that has put solid ground beneath my feet.

It has also put me in contact with the most pointed version of the question raised by the divergence found in the (neo)pagan community.  In the diaspora, there are several faiths closely bound together and it is far more difficult to separate out where we find separate spirits or just the same spirit under different names.

I realize that the problem there is not so unique.  While there has been much effort to divvy up spirits and divinities according to ethnic lines, in truth their existence was always more blended and cosmopolitan, and have only become more so in the contemporary context.

Which leads me to think that there must be a better way to talk about all this than having to (1) start reducing one kind of spiritual being to another, (2) retreat into narrow ideas of religious culture, or (3) rely on foreign modes of discourse like anthropology to provide answers.

I have grown fond of talking about religions in terms of their kinship—so we can say that Haitian Vodou and Cuban Lucumi are sister or close cousin religions.  It also allows me to talk about spirits moving between the two, just like people move between families through marriage and adoption.

While there are surely limits to that approach, it is one that starts us out on the right path.  I want to follow that path even further, see what can come of it.