Dreaming the Future Closer

As in, getting it right in the here and now.

This entry will probably be short and sweet, but I’ve been chewing on this one awhile and it feels like it is precisely the principle I’ve been looking for:

Lived spirit, lived religion, cannot be satisfied with an understanding of its past as the past.  It must have a sense of its present and its future, as a trajectory, as a vector for growth.  Getting it ‘right’ must never be reduced to reproducing it right after some model from the past.

This insight comes to me courtesy of Walter Benjamin’s meditation on history.  Contemplating them closely helped me realize what was missing in much of my historical study of the past: I lost the sense of the religion as lived in favor of a series of frozen images of one moment of its past life.

In the present, all religions are related to each other, not by virtue of some deep, common archetypal source, but by virtue of their shared presence with each other.  We don’t need correspondences (science before the fact) but ‘reports from the field’ (facts without the presumption of science), where we can discover the real encounters between spirits and peoples.

That sort of spiritual history is a lot harder to do in public, a lot more exposed.  It demands finding an active, ethical core (not just an ethical code, a list of morals) from which we can derive a path, a direction, to carry the religions forward.  That is firstly a personal project, a constant reflection on what has brought me to this point, but like all personal questions it has a social aura.  To speak of my destiny (destination, destiny) is also speak of who shares that. 

It’s also, in the end, to acknowledge that there are many with whom I share a present but with whom I must diverge.  We may share a present, a past, even a future, though we do not share a destination.  We may, too, share a destiny without sharing a present or past, just as two arrows may meet in the same target.

I’m thinking of this as a ‘throat-clearing’ post.   There’s a lot that I have been thinking about, but it seems to be all running together in my head.  What I want to do is think through the issues that define the blockage and untangle them a bit.  If you, dear readers, come away with a clearer picture of my goals, all the better.  It will probably take more than one post.  First. before I forget, the cut.

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This is just one more note, a sketch, toward a more substantive thinking out of this matter.  Nothing here is intended to be taken as a final statement of the matter but as an experiment arranging one possible solution to a complicated question. 

The question: how can we engage in comparative religious work without taking ourselves constantly outside the spiritual world that is our ‘home’?  In other words, how do we engage in comparative work that doesn’t end up being one long list of correspondences or, worse, substitutions?

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Just something I ran across last night:  

The Dahomean believes, and will say with conviction, that each narrative “history” is fixed and unique, both in form and content.  We tried the experiment of reading to a cult head two different versions of the myth giving the quarrel of the two brothers, Sogbo, the Thunder, and Sagbata, the Earth….The unhesitating reply was that the gods do not reveal the same things to everyone, and that each narrator was telling “true history” according to the way the vodun have given it to him.—Melville J. & Frances S. Herskovits, Dahomean Narrative (18)

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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 there is this beautiful passage in Plato’s Phaedrus in which he describes the orbits of the gods about the Good, each accompanied in train by the souls they have chosen for their retinue.  It’s a beautiful passage and, sadly, I don’t have a copy of the work ready to hand to quote. 

But I was always struck by how that seemed to parallel the notion in many African diaspora faiths that the orisha or loa chose heads.  The metaphor seemed nearly identical, right up to the notion that the orsha/loa were in turn oriented toward Olodumare or Bon Dieu, the greater Good.

So, let me share this little bit I came across in Simone Weil’s Intimation of Christianity among the Ancient Greeks:

The image of the man as a plant whose root penetrates heaven is linked in the Timaeus to a theory of chastity….This plant is sprinkled by celestial water, a divine semen, which enters the head.  In that man who continually exercises the spiritual and the intellectual part of himself…in him the whole contents of the head, including the divine semen, is propelled by circular movements like those which govern the rotation of the heavens, the stars and sun.  This divine semen is what Plato calls the divine being lodged with us, in us, and whom we must serve. (98-99)

How well this parallels the whole notion of initiation and worship in many of the African diaspora faiths!  It’s interesting to think of that in evolutionary terms, as indication perhaps that the two share a common ancestor.  If naught else, it’s interesting to consider in terms of parallel development.

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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In Straw Dogs, Gray quotes Schopenhauer from On the Basis of Morality:

“I should liken Kant to a man at a ball, who all evening has been carrying on a love affair with a masked beauty in the vain hope of making a conquest, when at last she throws off her mask and reveals herself to be his wife” (37)

It’s a good quote, I would say a ‘true’ fable.  But both Schopenhauer and Gray seem unable to crack open its hard outer shell to enjoy the meaty nut contained within.  They think Kant laughable, worthy of derision, for being so foolish as to spend so much time chasing after what was already his.

But imagine that this story is not in the mouth, the pen of bitter Schopenhauer, sitting, lonely, in his study with his dog Atman at his feet.  Strip away the cynical laugh he is having at the ‘old fool.’  Instead, imagine Kant telling this story, his wife at his side, in a warm drawing room, with an old friend fresh from the dusty road to Konigsberg. 

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