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.

I’m going to list off, in no particular order, the underlying problems and assumptions that have been spurring me on lately. 

Syncretism and eclecticism are both essential ingredients of a living religion.  Notice, please, the use of both those terms.  Following its usage among the Greek and Roman philosophers I want to distinguish the composition of a personal system (eclectic) from the intermingling of elements between religions (syncretism).

That division is key.  Eclecticism focuses our attention on individual religious people and the decisions they make in following their spiritual path.  Syncretism focuses our attention on the religion as a nexus of social forces and the kinds of consensus that define religious convention.

Eclectics (those engaged in the reasoned combination of different religious elements) clearly play some role in the process of syncretism.  You need individual agents to accept that other concepts and practices are valuable in order for their incorporation in a religion’s body of practices to become an issue.  However, syncretism is not identical to eclecticism.  Eclecticism is ‘checked’ in the religion by forces that sustain the tradition.

Those ‘forces’ are not just other practitioners, by the way.  They include things like how the tradition is sustained.  For example, the core texts (oral or textual) of a religion may not be subject to much change even while the clergy accepts a great deal of eclecticism on the part of its members.  Since that eclecticism does not make it into the core texts, it is more easily lost.

Religion, personal and social, relate people to forces that are bigger than our historical experience.  There are a few facets to this problem.  First, quite literally, spirit is bigger than history.  This is a bit of a no-brainer, but it bears repeating.  The history of a thing is not identical to that thing.  Histories are emendations, shorthand, to help us move about in time.

Second, though, it’s important to remember that the connections between the religions of the world, like the connections that join the people of the world, predate all of our histories.  If, as we think today, humanity shares a common origin in Africa, then so does our religious experience.  The nature of those connections are lost to us, though, so we must make do with a ’sense’ of those connections.

Saying that, I want to steer clear of some more Jungian ways of framing that relationship.  I don’t really think that there are archetypes from which all images of spirit are derived.  Quite the opposite, I really do believe that there is some truth to the ‘hard polytheist’s’ claim that each pantheon represents a ‘real’ and distinct set of spirits. 

However, knowing what we do of how worship of a spirit spreads almost by diffusion to nearby peoples, I have a hard time accepting the firm boundaries of pantheons.  Surely, even as travel brought people to encounter new spirits, so too did it bring old spirits to new places.  Since we will never have a clear image of that process, we ought to have some humility in regards to the very human conceptions of a pantheon.

Too much eclecticism is a bad thing; so is too little.  While eclecticism is a necessary feature of religious life, an over-emphasis of it seems to result in an overly rational idea of religion.  While that might seem counter-intuitive to some (how can something be too rational?), it relates to the previous concern about the limits of history.  Reason is a human faculty and remains bound up in our limited being in the world. 

Moreover, we have a tendency to accept something rational, something that seems logical, as necessarily true.  There are probably many reasons for this, but the one that seems most prominent to me is this: reason allows us to do more by creating shorthands of how things work, principles if you will.  Those principles allow us to generalize to other situations, s[peeding up how we learn.  However, in doing so, we don’t engage with the concrete world so much, more with our ideas of it.  Those ideas come to seem more real to us than the actual situation.

In religious experience, where the objects of our worship are already so subtle, too much reason can have a lethal effect on our worship.  It can lead us to a kind of narcissism, where we are only worshipping our own ideas.  I don’t know if there is an easy way to avoid this danger, except to keep it firmly fixed in our minds, keep our doubts ready-to-hand, and fix our eyes closely on our religious experience.

I know some would suggest traditionalism as an answer to this dangerous eclecticism, but that traditionalism risks substituting a social rationality for a personal one, bringing no one any closer to the divine.  Here, you see the need for an eclectic attitude capable of checking that social rationality. 

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.

I, like many I suspect, approached divination with a mixture of two approaches.  I thought about divination as, on the one hand, a psychological exercise to help me think through an issue and, on the other hand, as having (in a “maybe, not sure” way) some potential to illuminate the future.  When I did readings, I kept the book of meanings close to hand and did my best to “add” together all the meanings of a spread.  More often than not, I ended up with a little insight (enough that I found the process worthy of repetition) amidst a headache of meanings I couldn’t ‘hold together.’

It’s quite a bit different for me now.  I like to have the book ready to hand, for a quick refresher or a clarification, but I much prefer to ‘listen’ to the divination itself.  At my very best, when I’m in the zone, the meaning of an element of the reading is less important than the opening it makes possible. 

More precisely, I reach for the meaning and bring it to mind as something akin to a mantra.  Like a mantra, it seems ‘tuned’ to a spiritual state and if I can hold it in my mind, it helps me shift myself toward that spiritual state.  In that place, the reading usually acquires a new clarity, almost as if I’m ‘listening’ to a radio broadcast (though I don’t hear voices or anything so dramatic; there’s just this ’sense’ of how things are related).

I’m thinking about this partially in response to those folks who see divination as a ‘lower’ spiritual activity, the sort of thing you get involved with if you aren’t properly focused on the sacred and devotional dimensions of faith.  Quite the opposite of that, when practiced spiritually, divination seems like one of the more spiritual practices available to us, a vehicle through which spirit is brought closer to everyday life, through which we can better adjust our daily life to spirit.

Divination ends up being a two-sided process.  First, it’s tuning into the spiritual dimension of things.  Second, it’s using the results of that to help tune the material world so that it becomes a better channel for spirit.  The act of divining is a microcosm of that–listening to spirit and then expressing that ’spiritual voice’ in material terms like speech and writing.

[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.

So, today, I find myself drawn to this:

Almost all people descend to meet. All association must be a compromise, and, what is worst, the very flower and aroma of the flower of each of the beautiful natures disappears as they approach each other. What a perpetual disappointment is actual society, even of the virtuous and gifted! After interviews have been compassed with long foresight, we must be tormented presently by baffled blows, by sudden, unseasonable apathies, by epilepsies of wit and of animal spirits, in the heyday of friendship and thought. Our faculties do not play us true, and both parties are relieved by solitude.

I don’t want to dwell upon the message of the passage, I’ll let you do that for yourself, but I want to reference it so that what it inspires makes more sense.

Emerson does an amazing job of expressing the dangers of friendships.  Because we are drawn to those who excite our faculties and return to us a sense of who we are, it makes it very easy for us to model ourselves after our friends.  In so doing, we create an image of ourselves that differs, subtly or not, from who we actually are, from the totality of relationships, spiritual and otherwise, that compose our being and our destiny.

Yet, how many of us have either the temperament or the resources to dwell in splendid isolation?  That dream of friendship seems to rest on deeply bourgeois presuppositions (for once, I do not mean the term ‘bourgeois’ in a negative sense).  It assumes we have or ought to have the sort of life where our home is identical to our self. 

And what of all those people who cannot create this realm of splendid isolation?  Are they doomed to living in the mingled world of mere things, in the realm of mixed affections?  The presumption that solitude is the proper correlate to friendly company seems a bit snobby and a little out of touch.

I suspect that solitude is but one possible answer to the company of friends.  I’m thinking quite a bit about the sort of friendships we develop in religious circles and about what seems a ‘proper’ complement to the shared moments of ritual and divination.

What happens when we, through the preparation of ritual, approach our friends as spirit to our spirit?  I think about ritual work and am struck by how, at its best, when we encounter each other in ritual space, we encounter each other as spiritual beings.  That immediately creates a sort of distance between us, like standing on mountaintops and being magnified, visible, but still so clearly distinct.

We can, in that frame, have something to say to each other, but with a keen sense that we speak as one monarch to another. We may offer counsel, but with the keenest sense that we have no right to demand obedience.  We may heed counsel, but with the firmest sense that it comes from one who has no authority in our domain, nor fully understands its operations.

There’s a concept from Rastafarianism that illuminates this quite well, the concept of the I-and-I.  There are times when two believers will sit and share counsel, but in the understanding that they are approaching each other as spiritual equals, each full of insight and yet separate, being unified only beneath a greater spiritual order that includes them both. 

The ritual trappings, as I understand them at least, are minimal–an acknowledgment of the mutual intention of both parties to approach each other in this light.  Also, the conversations need not be about deep, abstract theological things, but are often of the most pressing daily problems, concerns with proper behavior, right conduct. 

What’s more, in leaving that place, the two people do not withdraw into solitude, but go out into the world, to set their affairs in order according to the illuminations of their conversation.  In other words, they return to the world, to the hurly-burly of it all, refreshed and ready to act.

They return to the world, not in solitude, but wrapped up in their sense of self, wrapped up in their sense of having a proper place and a proper course.  Solitude proper seems less important than the need to act on the counsels made possible by friendship.  For Emerson, writer and intellectual, solitude was an important dimension of that.  He needed time to work the inspiration from friends into the artistic and intellectual works they helped him visualize.

For another, it might be just as well for them to dive into some other action that is very social–perhaps a business deal, settling some family affairs, or building a house.  We need solitude less than we need the time to manifest the wisdom we acquire from those shared moments.  Some of that action may be private, some of it may be communal, but the important thing is to act, to manifest wisdom through the creation of something concrete. 

Truly, the concrete creation is a good deal less ‘refined’ than shared spiritual discourse, requires much work to give form, and gives us much occasion to confront the intractability of the world to our desires.  Yet, in that struggle, spirit isn’t lost or missing, it’s given form, grounding, a channel through which it can be shared with others beyond our close coterie.

(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.

Let’s tally the list real quick like:

Dexter is raised by foster parents.  For Spiderman, it was his uncle and aunt, but the important thing here is that he was an orphan.

Dexter has a secret identity.  Moreover, he has all the problems that come with a secret identity.  He has to have cover stories for his nightly forays to brign justice to the world.  If people were to find out, it would have disastrous consequences for them and him.  And, of course, he has people who suspect he is something more, even if they don’t realize what he really is. 

Dexter has a code of honor.  Better yet, that code, like Spiderman’s, is rooted in his adopted father figure’s morality.  He acts to maintain that code to the best of his ability, even when it makes things harder on him.  Through flashbacks, we see very clearly that he dealt with many of the classic superhero dilemmas–does he use his powers for good or for evil (i.e. selfish) ends?

Dexter is a science geek.  What’s his job?  He’s a labworker, a specialist in blood, admittedly, but it’s a rational, science-y kind of affair, just like Peter Parker’s chemical giftedness.

Dexter has an origin story.  This one is important because it’s actually quite hard to determine what, if anything, ever happened to a serial killer to make them a serial killer.  Not so with Dexter.  Just like a superhero, we can establish a dramatic moment at which he became what he was.

Dexter’s life is episodic, villain of the week, with a recurring arch nemesis.  This is important, too.  Each episode features his conflict with a single and colorful villain.  While none have superpowers per se, just like Dexter they have the power of killing easily, and misuse it for their own pleasure.  Against that backdrop, there is an escalating tension with a supervillain, an arch-nemesis, who has special insight into our hero.  Like many good superhero stories, that villain is part of the hero’s ‘normal’ life, embodying not just the threat to his heroic person, but to his life and loved ones.

Here I have emphasized the proximity of Dexter the character to Spiderman, but, you know, the reverse holds in an eerie way, too.  What is with the superhero trope of being above the law, of working outside it even as they supposedly carry it out more effectively? 

One of the things Dexter and superheros embody is the urge to reach justice more quickly, more truly, without the intervening system of justice.  They emerge, in part, in response to a system of justice that is growing ever more distant, less immediate, more complicated. 

Reading this way also illuminates a certain moral blindspot in the show.  While much effort is put into humanizing many of the victims of the serial killers Dexter kills, the hookers his nemesis kills are not so well portrayed.  Those women are in so many ways ‘beneath’ the law. 

The show doesn’t touch upon those women as people except in the briefest of moments (i.e. when his sister, no longer undercover, goes back to the hookers she worked with, when Angel discovers the hooker with the prosthetic hand painted just like one of the nemesis’s victim’s hand) and doesn’t really treat their deaths as a moral problem.  Quite the opposite, it spends more time dwelling upon the spectacle of their murder, their body as meat, not the life it ended.

However, as soon as his sister’s death is immanent, the whole situation changes.  It’s telling that, before she can be threatened and rescued, she has to undergo a transformation.  She can’t be the potentially promiscuous woman that the series began with.  No, she has to be monogamous, virtuous, in love. 

That the route of her purification is also the killer arch-nemesis is a clever twist, but it doesn’t change the underlying message: only as sister and good, as marriage-material, is she the woman worth saving.

Which suggests that, for all its adult content, the show hasn’t really moved beyond a basically comic book notion of morality and justice.  It still presumes that we need a virtuous damsel for us to care.  I keep thinking of Plato’s Republic, about his concern over the difficulty of representing virtue in theater.  Thinking about Dexter makes me much more sympathetic to his concerns. 

Theater often works best when it plays to our sympathies, our prejudices.  We ’swallow’ the story more easily, throw our hopes upon it.  Though, perhaps unlike Plato, I’m not sure that is such a bad thing so long as we differentiat keenly theater of justice from true justice.  Per Aristotle, catharsis, release, is perfectly acceptable as a goal of theater.

Of course, keeping theater and life separate is awfully difficult, especially when, like Dexter, they mimic life so well in places.  The better the illusion, the less like illusion it seems.

It starts to seem like an endless dialogue between the Platonic and Aristotlean positions on theater, no?  Perhaps it is by sustaining the dialogue, the tension, that we manage to sustain the difference between the realm of theater and life, to the benefit of both.

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?

Much of this relies on our approach.  We need to choose our ground, the mode of thought from which we intend to look out on the spiritual world.  We don’t need to commit ourselves to it forever and ever, but we should be on the lookout for that mode of thought that speaks so truly to us that we want to commit ourselves to it in that way.  The important thing, though, is that we begin on some sort of stable ground.

concretely: We want to begin with a pantheon, a family of gods whose relationship are conceptually worked out in myths.  This ought to be a fairly extended sense of the term ‘pantheon,’ too.  If, say, your ground is Norse myth, then remember that this system is itself plural and diverse, spread across a wide geographic area and containing geographic variations (among many other kinds of variations).

From there, it’s a matter of letting our intuition work alongside our (ideally, historically educated) intellect.  Our intellect provides the tools to amplify our search beyond our immediate proximity, brings us examples to compare to our ground.  Our intuition lets us know when we have stumbled across a comparison that speaks to our ground.

This step is fraught with difficulty.  It’s very easy to let the impatience replace intuition.  The telltale marker of this, for me, is that I begin to force correspondances, stretch them out, and begin to identify rather than complicate what is being compared.

concretely: let us imagine that Thor is the occasion for the comparison and you are studying a range of thunder gods in other pantheons.  You come across the Chaaks in Mayan myth, their trademark lightning axes evoking a powerful sense of resonance. 

Driven by impatience, what you are likely to do is to establish simple relationships that posit the identity of the three figures and, in turn, posit a relationship of those figures to other figures in their pantheon that are identical.  Guided by intuition, you want to let those seeming identities ‘resonate’ and let them illuminate differences as well as identities.

concetely: the Chaaks have a close relationship to the Bakabs, giant figures who hold up the world, who will drop the sky to end this age.  Thor has a powerful relationship with giants, also bound up with bringing an end to this age.  However, the Chaaks do not fight with Bakabs (and sometimes even are treated as Bakabs). 

We can find folktales of ‘lightning boys’ who go to the mountains to gain supernatural powers.  These boys, after using their powers for their community, must return to the mountains because they are now to dangerous for the community.  A very different image than that of Thor, who ventures out to giants only to return to his society.

The important element of this comparison is that it (1) lets knowledge of one sort of pantheon illuminate our examination of another and (2) lets the study of that other pantheon illuminate our ‘ground’ pantheon.  It remains ‘conversational’ or, more technically, ‘dialogic.’  At no point is one term replaced for another, but they are allowed to inform each other.

concretely: Thor’s relationship with giants cues us to look for parallel relationships with similar forces, even as a closer examination of those relationship differentiates them from Thor’s.  We look for giants, for ties to massive ‘natural’ forces because we know those exist for Thor, but we don’t then expect the relationship to be identical.

We start to get a sense for the different ways in which the relationship between these different kinds of forces are related conceptually, which in turn suggests how they might be related differently ritually.  We get a sense for different ritual strategies, different ways to relate to and work with those powers.  Those differences, in turn, begin to illuminate why one pantheon speaks to us more than another, why one mode of religious thinking is primary, while others are ancillary, if at all important.

This is why the grounding part is so key.  A pantheon ought to give us a map for how we can interact ritually with the world of spirit and if we do not choose a ‘primary’ mode, we are likely to fall into an endless comparative inaction or, perhaps more problematic, mere fiddling with different modes, settling into no one mode, gaining little stability because our fiddling choices can easily counter and frustrate each other.

Conversion remains an open possibility, but that is a matter of switching grounds, not of abandoning ground altogether.

Of course, grounded, it’s also possible to incorporate those different strategies into the primary ritual system, as ways of filling out a fuller picture of how to relate ritually to these forces.  This can be especially important in ritual systems that we have only fragments of. 

This is not so different from two swordsman sharing techniques.  Their primary style remains dominant in their fighting, but they can tease ‘tricks’ out of their interaction with each other.  Or, less soldierly, we can imagine two farmers who grow different sorts of crops, they might discover that one crop leaves the soil more fertile for the other’s crop, leading them to develop a secondary planting practice that enhances the success of their primary planting practice.

Of course, those metaphors reveal something else quite important to me.  They illustrate how thinking in this light gives us the tools to talk to each other about our ritual practice without trying to lay claim to another’s ritual practice.  It allows us to open ‘trading zones’ between diverse ways of thinking about spiritual life.  We can inform and educate each other without expecting to come to some final agreement, some final point of convergence.

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)

For context, it’s important to mention that in this section the Herskovitses are distinguishing between two types of tales among the people of Dahomey.  First, there are tales that are just stories, which narrators are free to develop and vary according to their own skill.  Second, there are ‘histories’ which encompass not just a history of a people, but myths sacred to the vodun cults.  Histories must be told a certain way.

It’s worth pointing out that the ‘just stories’ tales may use mythic figures but it’s understood by listeners that these tales are not ‘true’ tales of the vodun, but creative uses of ideas the people of Dahomey have about the vodun.  Yes, a worthwhile reminder that oral cultures are as savvy about narrative as literate ones.

Now, the differences between the two cults’ recounting of the myth are not dramatic and end up being ones of tone.  In both tales, Sogbo becomes lord of sky, water, and fire, while Sagbata becomes lord of the earth and crops.  In both tales, the two vodun come to agreement that allows rain to fall and crops to grow.  However, each cult emphasizes the importance and action of their respective vodun.

The elder’s statement presumes the limited nature of human faculties, establishing right away that we do not grasp the whole of things.  What’s more, it suggests that, as individuals, we have different ways of being in the world, different natures.  What is good for a devotee of Sagbata is not as good for a devotee of Sagbo.

As a counterpoint, the Herskovitses also talk about a young man who, as a result of working with them, hears many lineage histories from lineages other than his own and becomes baffled.  To his surprise, the lineage histories share many common elements and events.  He cannot easily resolve the apparent similarity, especially since they involve events to which only one lineage ought to be able to lay claim.

They differ in a way similar to the way religious myths vary, except that in this case the agents change while the actions remain the same.  For example, the cunning princess may bring good fortune to her family but she may be from lineage X in lineage X’s histories and from lineage Y in Y’s histories.

Now, qua myth, both lineages’ histories serve the same function within the lineage line.  They foster a sense of pride and likely help define acceptable and exceptional behavior for its members.  In the past, they likely also fostered a sense of admiration for the monarchy by way of establishing how their cooperation with the monarchy fostered good fortune. 

They are thus true ‘in the same way’ as myth, as modeling relationships, this time between people rather than between spiritual forces.  However, unlike the religious myths, they do not foster difference but similarity.  As history becomes mythologized, it veers toward a one-way for all model.  Following the ideas implicit in the elder’s understanding of variation, this means more people living in ways that, at the very least, are not quite as good for them as other ways of living.

This all dovetails nicely with my last post and provides a more concrete way of talking about the fundamental issues I have in mind.  I want to be able to validate both the elder’s sense of myth’s multiple expressions and the young man’s questioning of applying mythic standards of truth to claims about the history of people and societies.

This requires a differentiation between a historical account of how things have been and are and a mythical account that models and supports present relationships.  History is primarily descriptive, it aims to tell us what happened in as much detail as possible and to provide us insight into how one happening impacts another happening.  Myth is primarily normative, it aims to tell us what ought to happen and to provide us with some insight into how we might make what ought to happen, happen.

That last paragraph is really important.  Myth and history blur because they are both caught up with sharpening our insight.  Moreover, myth turns to history for an understanding of how things happen in order to better grasp how things can be made to happen. 

But, myth is forward directed, suggesting a means for how to change, even if it is just to change enough to keep the situation mostly the same.  It doesn’t need to get the history ‘right’ in order to function.  History is subsumed to myth’s normative role.

This can become toxic when the myths we are taking up are not ’appropriate’ to us (as when the history gets treated as myth), if they reflect norms alien to us, norms that hinder us.  In this history becomes an important tool a reminder of the plurality of ways that we can be in the world.  It can be a refuge and it can also be the means by which we can encounter the myths that do speak to us, that do provide us with models to change our surroundings for the better. 

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.

The basic idea behind this is simple: History is not the enemy of faith.  It has only become so in light of the discipline’s alliance with the ideal of Enlightenment, that notion that creates this divide between the modern world in which ‘progress’ occurs, and the archaic world that languishes in ignorance and superstition. 

That alone doesn’t quite tell the story, though, because that division between progress and ignorance is not entirely abandoned by many spiritual people.  More often than not, they transform the division into one between the ‘empty’ change of the present and the unchanging face of the ‘real’ spiritual world.  In turn, the values that real world tends to get projected backward in time, to an immemorial past that we are trying to recover or recreate.   

Enlightenment history picks up on this and tends to criticize religion by criticizing the image of the past it memorializes.  The equation of myth with falsity emerges from this approach—the idea being that when you show that the myth is not ‘true’ history, you disprove that religion, too, since its validity is premised upon the (historical) validity of its myths. 

This can be quite effective persuasion.  Plenty of people leave their religion because they see their myths’ historical truth as the justification for their religion.  I want to suggest that both ways of framing the problem are wrong-headed.

The spiritual person, in their encounter with the sacred, comes away with a sense that their is a, for the lack of a better word, timeless order to which the everyday world is of secondary, derived, importance.  The cultural resources (the concrete religions) that allow them to make sense of that experience tend to get associated with that timeless quality. 

Religions, however, are not unchanging.  They, like all things, are subject to the vicissitudes of time.  Elements change.  Sometimes those changes make it easier for some people to interact with the spiritual world, sometimes they make it more difficult, sometimes they have little impact either way. 

A lot of times, I suspect the habit of connection replaces an actual connection.  In the same way that we must refresh our appreciation for our friends, see how they have changed over time, we must refresh our connections to the divine and appreciate how we may need to interact differently.

Rather than fight with the enlightenment history, we can re-embrace it to our own ends.  We can look at it not as an elaborate reductio ad absurdum of our faith, but a record of the kinds of struggles that sustaining a connection to the divine entails.  If I had to draw a comparison, it’s akin to reading the history of diplomacy in order to understand all the factors that go into a negotiation, all the complexities that can arise. 

In the diversity of myth and religion, in their conflict, we aren’t seeing the churning of animal irrationality, but the passionate engagement of limited intellects and limited imaginations in representing a much more complicated spiritual reality. 

Rather than look to disprove or prove this variation or another, we ought to consider that those variations were likely created in response to different situations, or different perspectives on the same situation.  There is a diagnostic element to this, reading myth as we might read over competing diagnoses and treatment plans.  Here, we see an invitation to Zeus as the proper balancing act, and there we see the need for that to be qualified by another force, that of Hera. 

They are reasoned applications of tradition to a changing world, applications that can introduce novelty without simply overturning the tradition.  Myths aren’t just just-so stories, but symbolic, schematic models for how the different facets fo divinity interact with each other.  They provide us with insight into how different ways of comporting ourselves toward the divine can change the way in which the divine manifests.

In this, we need to keep in mind the relationship of myth and ritual.  They are in dialogue with each other.  One does not determine the other, but both exert influence upon the other.  Variations in ritual suggest new ways of telling myths and variations in myths suggest alternative ritual practices. 

And both focused upon the realization of a deeper relationship with the divine that they cannot fully encompass. 

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.

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.

 First, I don’t think of spirit, whether in the form of our higher self or in the form of the divinities we offer praise, exists as a thinking thing quite like ourselves.  I don’t think, for example, that these words that I am writing emerge from the great high me, channeled directly to you, no matter how in touch with my higher self I really am.

This writing (any writing, any expression of thought be it verbal or pictorial) is just too historical, too caught up in the particular trajectory of this life, this world, this time, to itself reside in the great spiritual beyond.  I remember reading around medieval Islamic philosophy at one point and seeing this articulated pretty well: the soul that I am, that extends beyond death, is not ‘me’ but a divine schematic of me. 

In art, in writing, in action, that schematic (it’s a poor word, but it will do for now) is better or worse realized.  But it’s realized through the material accoutrements of our being, and its realization is historically particular.  If pushed, I would suggest that the schematic self and our more mundane self meet along the thin line of our will, our agency. 

I suspect that’s a muddy process and one that gives ethics it’s reflective character.  We don’t have transparent access to our best self and must, tot he best of our ability, seek out ways to clarify our access.  That entails sharpening our tools—our words, our thoughts, our actions.  In a spiritual community, much of our ‘obligation’ to each other lies on this shared effort to improve our tools.

This is spiritual labor, which we don’t often appreciate.  While, yes, spirit permeates the world, the world can be made a better or worse vessel for that spirit.  One of the real miracles of evolution is our brain and nervous system, this remarkable channel for expressing spirit.  As spirit alone, I cannot write, I cannot speak.  But as embodied me, with this great world of words and people to draw upon, my capacity for expression soars.

Henri Bergson uses this metaphor to describe why he remains suspicious of efforts to reduce consciousness to the brain.  He compares it to a coat hanging on a nail.  If the nail is removed, the coat falls to the ground, but does not cease to be a coat.  In a similar way, remove the body, and spirit does not cease to be spirit, but it does lose a good deal of structure.  It falls into a heap.

Which gets us back to this question of how we treat each other and how we treat sacred things.  The destruction of holy things is a real loss, akin to destroying the part of your computer that turns binary data into this screen.  The substrate remains, but in a less intelligible and workable form.  It cuts off one of the avenues through which that spiritual part of existence is able to move into and upon the world. 

There may be reasons for doing this sort of damage, but the trick is not to take it lightly, to appreciate the deeper implications of destruction, of iconoclasm, and violence.  Since such violence and destruction (as degradation if naught else) is inevitable, it’s also an occasion to consider how we face those moments of loss, great and small.  Confronted with the loss, we have more tools at our disposal than just mute horror. 

Beneath that, too, there are occasions where loss, where destruction, is itself a sacred act, a clearing of one thing so that another may continue to be or come to be.  It’s worth remembering that beneath the destruction there remains that indestructible side of things, though it be not like what is lost. 

Loss is real loss, not an illusion to be papered over with apologetics and theodicy.  That is, in the end, what gives ethics its force.  That no loss is absolute, gives to ethics its hope.