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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[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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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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The notion of magick in the Crowley-esque sense of the term tends to haunt modern polytheism.  Magick seems to run counter to the devotional elements we tend to see as properly religious.  Praising the divine seems to be one thing, plying the divine for favors quite another.  In general, both are seen as acceptable, but their relationship is a little obscure.

Crowley’s phrasing exacerbates the problem by making magick primarily a question of Will, of training the Will to exert itself over the world.  There are all sorts of qualifications here, since that isn’t the Will in the sense of ego, but Will in the sense of higher self.  And training the Will isn’t simply a matter of getting what you want but of moving in harmony with the higher Will so that you want what is proper to it. 

Still, this seems a bit different than the attitude that directs itself toward a divine presence outside of and beyond itself.  The importance of banishing, for example, points toward a defensive posture toward the world of spirit.  In more devotional frames, we tend to think that too much asking is a bit gauche. 

To paraphrase a friend, we have the sense that the gods have better things to do than just help us with some money.  What encounter we do have with the divine through devotional work tends to be received as an injunction rather than as a pact we must examine before accepting.

This pans out at the level of ritual, too, with there being two sorts of ritual, the sort meant to manipulate and the sort meant to praise.  The problem isn’t unique to paganism and we can see variations of it Christian, Islamic, Judaic, Hindu, Buddhist, and other traditions.  The question of self-worth gets posed pointedly in these discussions.  How important am I in relation to the divine?

I don’t work well in that magickal mindset and I suspect I’m not alone in that.  It jars with my basic reason for pursuing spirituality.  Yet I feel like not praying for things is equally problematic, especially since so much of my practice has to do with the sacredness of the world, not just localized in divinities ‘out there’ but in the world ‘right here.’

The approach I take is that praying for something is more than asking for some thing in your life.  It’s asking for the divine to enter into your life through that thing you pray for and giving your promise that you will nurture that spark of the divine as it enters that place.  The prayer does not end with the request or the granting of the request, but continues as we put that blessing to use.

We ought, whenever possible, to use that blessing to deepen our connection with the divinity granting it.  In so doing, we bring that part of the world into closer harmony with that sacred divinity.

I don’t think that’s solely an intellectual distinction, either.  In making requests in this way, it shifts the way in which we relate to the divine and very possibly changes how the divine responds to us.  It makes the self a point in the circulation of blessings rather than the endpoint of them.

My joy, my happiness, becomes an opportunity for shared joy.  I may manage and care for them for myself, because my self is the point of entry for them, but my self is not the measure of them.

Unlike Protagoras, I do not think man is the measure of all things.  I define my religiosity in great part by the notion that there are standards by which man is judged that man does not create.  The effort to reduce religion to man, to the symbols we create, to the movements of our psyche alone, undoes the movement of devotion so central to it.

This isn’t to do away with reflecting about who we pray to and for what.  But it becomes less a manner of caution (don’t make a bad deal, get cheated) than of care (what blessings can you make the most of).

[Just to get the rough outline of this out of my head] 

In her essay on human rights, Weil makes this astounding statement about what defines a person.  She says in clear terms that she cannot imagine an account of ethics that would make a person’s body merely incidental to their person.  She speaks clearly about how gauging out someone’s eyes does not merely change their body, but assaults their very person.

Yet, how much ethical thought is charged with making our body incidental to our self?  Carried further, how much religious thought is charged with making the physical manifestations of an object incidental?  How often does someone reply that this holy object was *just* an object when they are confronted with its destruction?

When we look at ritual, at the work that goes into investing holy objects, I can’t help but think we wander far astray if we see those rituals, those objects, as merely symbolic.  While I do not want to underestimate the importance of meditation, of inward work, nor do I want to underestimate the inherent value in sacred objects, value that resides outside of our ideas of them. 

Through sacred things, the world of spirit and the world of things enter into communion.  The destruction of them, while it may never ‘kill’ the world of spirit, does real damage to the divine, to its mingling with the world.  We do not simply honor what is ever present, but through our actions secure a place for it in the world, secure a channel through which it may flow.

This is not a one-sided argument for never destroying sacred things ever.  In fact, the whole question of being sacred gets bound up with the question of sacrifice, with its potential destruction.  But what it does point toward is a mindfulness to the sacred that sees its real presence in particular things and takes actions in regard to that sacred thing with that real presence in mind.

The tibetan sand mandala may be one of the most well-known exemplars to draw upon.  The mandala is sacred, made sacred through the ritual process of its creation.  At the same time, its creation is bound up with the sacrifice of it at the conclusion of the process, but that destruction is itself part and parcel of its sacred character. 

In a similar way, we might consider a soldier who, mindful of the incredibly precious body that they are, still offers up that body to damage and destruction for the sake of another, hopefully more profound, sort of sacredness. 

It’s not always about preserving the sacred at all costs, but acknowledging its presence wherever we find it, and attending to it.  So that, to the best of our very limited abilities, we come to secure a greater place for the sacred throughout life, destroying according to deeper rhythms than purely selfish hungers.