The liminal redemption of Donald Trump

I believe strongly in redemption, the idea that anyone can redeem himself or herself with the good of society no matter what evils he or she may have done. Anyone. This includes racists and Donald Trump.The things we do, little things that we may not think about, big things we give a lot of thought to, affect other people and radiate in ways we don't understand fully. We call such things liminal, the confusing, often unconscious transition point between acting and not acting, a doorway between "Someone should do something about that" and "I am someone."

Can this liminal redemption happen? I don't know, but the butterfly effect is real. It's given us the ends of the Soviet Union, American institutional slavery, and South African Apartheid. It's given us smaller, more personal things like the cousin who checks in to make certain you're okay, the employer who gives you a second chance, the busy driver who helps you cross the street. These small acts of compassion demonstrate our humanity. They are what we must do to build us up against those who would tear us down.

258 candles-days 30-22

When I was much younger I stayed in an apartment where there were often people sleeping on the couch, on the floor, in chairs. We found one drunk guy curled around the toilet. We weren't always drunk or stoned there, but it helped. We called it "The Home for Wayward Transients."

I'm reminded of that place when I read this story about volunteers who collect and repair and display discarded deities. It's a belief in many Asian nations that a business or families prosperity is improved by the presence of shrines and icons to the local gods or to the family's faith. I've made a game for myself of stepping into Asian stores and finding the shrine. (Hint: It's often near the door.) This is no different than the Christian practice of votives; indeed, it's no different than most Christian practices. What's a cross or a crucifix but an icon? But individuals feel drawn to the ceramic and cheap plastic and plaster deities enough to care for them, not out of a religious duty, but because destroying them "goes against the conscience." This is heartening and a sign that there is such a thing as an interior sense of reverence. 

the twelve holy days

A sermon given to the

Dakota Unitarian Universalist Church

Burnsville, MN

December 22, 2013

Scholars are well aware now that Jesus, who probably existed either as an individual or as a group of men and women over the first centuries of the new millenium, certainly was not born on December 25 or anywhere in December, at least not according to the New Testament’s testimony.  It would be sometime in the spring according to the gospels, which makes a good deal more sense metaphorically, Jesus as the lamb of god and bringing in the spring of Christianity and all that.  Interestingly, the First Day of Christmas in the popular song we sang earlier is not Christmas.  In most chronicles of the twelve holy days, Christmas is considered the pre-day, day zero if you will.  It’s the day for celebrating the birth of Jesus among Christians, but it’s also associated with the births of Mithras, Attis, Aion, Horus, Dionysus and the Unconquered Sun.  Mithras you may be familiar with.  The Persian god of light, his name means “Friend” and he is often synonymous with the Sun who protects man after death.  Attis or Atys is not to be confused with Attic which means having to do with Athens, but was a young man laid claim to by the hermaphroditic fertility goddess Agdistis who was so maddened by her jealousy he castrated himself in frustration and before he could cut his throat was changed by her into a pine tree.  Agdistis herself, by the way, was also made wholly female by castration.  Aion is the Germanic term of personification for the age of the universe, an eternal being itself personified.  Horus is familiar as one of the Sky Gods as well as a Sun God and is often represented as having the head of a falcon.  Dionysus, also known as Bacchus, is the god of wine and good times.  His name in Roman, Iacchus, comes from the Latin for “shout” and is thought to have originated as an epithet for the rowdy, noisy god.

            The Unconquered Sun is an interesting character because it is both a stand-in for any of the above gods as well as a euphemism for the thing itself.  The unconquered sun is what we see in the sky along about this time.  It is equally connected with the Reindeer Man, a sort of Green Man of the North, a pagan mix of Sintaklass and Odin, who appears at this time of year with the gift of deer.

            Why twelve days?  The number twelve pops up a lot of places in both Abrahamic and pagan beliefs.  Twelve apostles, twelve months of the year, twelve zodiac signs, two twelve-hour segments to a day, the twelve of the Circular Council to the Dalai Lama, the twelve members of the Arthurian Round Table, the historical Twelve Peers of France, the twelve tribes of Israel, the twelve imams in Shi’a, the twelve principle gods of the Greeks, the twelve cranial nerves in the human cerebellum, the age 12 when a Jewish girl matures and receives bat mitzvah, the twelve sons of Odin, and even the twelve function keys on my PC keyboard—F1 through F12. 

            The true first day of Christmas is Boxing Day, so-called from the British custom of giving a servant a Christmas box the day after his masters have celebrated.  It’s also associated with St. Stephen, the proto-martyr associated with horses—it’s said his body was returned to his people on the back of a horse—and with wrens.  It’s said that to kill a wren on any day other than Boxing Day is to invite bad luck.

            The second day, December 27^th, is given over to Mother Night or MotherCarey or Mother Christmas.  She is the Anglicized version of the German Frau Holle or Holda or Hulda, a figure of fertility, abundance and justice.  She was often seen, originally, as a beautiful woman in white and with a golden girdle or a sash, dispensing gifts from a sleigh pulled by her dogs.  She probably physically resembled the evil character Mrs Colter played by Nicole Kidman in the film The Golden Compass, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Phillip Pullman based this character on her. 

            But far from the nasty Miss Colter, who Pullman chooses to personify the less savory aspects of Christianity, Frau Holle, whose name means “kindly one,” was a gentle goddess specializing in the care of children.  It was up to the early church to turn her to a witch who stole unbaptized children.  But at midnight on the Eve of Epiphany, it’s said that a man walking home heard voices, many voices, behind him and stepped aside in time to allow Frau Holle and her passel of children and her flowing white train to pass him, the children laughing and running beside her.  The last of the children, the smallest, kept falling behind from tripping over his nightshirt.  The man gave him his own belt to tuck the shirt into.  Frau Holle saw this and rewarded the man with a gift that his own children would forever be without want.  It is important that we recall Frau Holle or Mother Night or Mother Carey or Mother Chrismas as a mother.  She is both nurturing and kind and a shrewd judge of character and it’s for these aspects we honor her.

            Following is Day three:  the Day of Holy Innocents.  In the Middle Ages this day of Childremass was considered particularly unlucky; nothing begun on December 28^th would be completed, since children have remarkably poor attention spans and tend to wander around abstractedly.  The practice for this day is an ancient one that survived until the 18^th century: regularly beating children on this day.  The idea was that by mercilessly flogging and smacking children on the 28^th, one would both drive out the evil spirits that had lodged there the previous year and serve as a surrogate for any deserved beatings the following year.  The practice evolved into a call for ritual, painless token beatings between children and parents, husbands and wives, masters and servants.  On this day we honor children and correspondingly honor both our wishes for what they will become and our recognition of the reality of who they are.  We also recall our lives before their arrival, although it’s probably best not to think of that before we whip them.

            The fourth day is one we might be a little familiar with.  This is the Feast of the Fools, celebrated in the Hunchback of Notre Dame and a few other novels and a MASH episode.  This is the day when the normal order of things is reversed.  Servants become masters, pupils become teachers, women behave like men, and the fools rule.  Naturally, this is my favorite day.  Parties were held, masques given, general mayhem encouraged.  It was a ritualistic method for blowing off steam, the opportunity for people who lived by the strictest restrictions to behave in the riotous, cavalier way they had foresworn in order to keep their places in the community.  At one time, this day was more celebrated and better-remembered than Christmas.  So when someone tells you that we ought to put the Christ back in Christmas, you ought to remind him to put the Fool back in Fool’s Day.

Day five is the Feast of the Boar’s Head.  On this day, two ceremonies are honored:  the Scandinavian tradition that Frey, the god of sunshine, rides across the day atop Gulli-burstin, his golden boar, whose spikes are the rays of the sun.  The second is the older, now lost, tradition in England of the boar’s head, whose meat graced the Christmas table until probably the mid Twelfth century when it disappeared, being brought in as the final remnant of the sacred meal and distributed among the revelers.  It is meet we should remember the boars, now gone in both England and here, by leaving for them a small offering to their memory, an apple or orange, in the event one is still snuffling around.

New Year’s Eve, that most festive of drinking holidays, is day six, and in many places supersedes the celebration of Christmas itself.  In Gaelic Christmas is called An Nollaig Mhor “big yule” and New Year’s Day An Nollaig Bheag “little Yule.”  And why not?  The change of year has sturdier and more aged roots than the ostensible birth of the Christ.  Still, how anyone might have guessed this day would become the night when everything switches off for one year and switches on for the next is a feat of mathematical dexterity I couldn’t begin to fathom.  Nevertheless, December 31^st’s feast is known as Hogmanay and it was the day when the Druid priests cut the sacred mistletoe and distributed sprigs among the people.  Hogmanay itself is a corruption of the French term au gui menez “lead [us] to the mistletoe,” and in some parts of France children still celebrate the day with a race during which they cry, “Au guy l’an neuf, au guy Gaulois” “to the mistletoe, to the French mistletoe.”

This is the day when we take care of the things we have missed taking care of throughout the year.  The trash is taken out and fresh sheets placed on the beds.  Socks are darned and brass and silver shined.  Pictures are hung straight.  This is the day for Reclaiming Unfinished Business, clearing up all those things we neglected the rest of the year.  Everyone experiences a new beginning, a new clearing of the old.  After sunset, juniper branches and fresh water were brought into the house.  The branches were dried out overnight, and in the morning the head of house drank the first sips from the water and sprinkled everyone else with some.  Then the dried juniper was lit, the doors and windows latched, and the house was fumigated with the burning branch.  This ensured the gifts of the new year were appreciated appropriately.  The new year’s blessing was brought by the first person to cross the threshold to visit, called “first footing.”  All the lights were put out except for a single candle, and then that first visitor must step outside, protecting the candle from the elements.  At the stroke of twelve, he reenters, is given a mug of eggnog, and sets about relighting all the candles and lanterns of the house, blessing the house with new light.  Often that person also gives a handsel, a gift of coal or whiskey to make the blessings concrete.

Day seven of course everyone sleeps in.  This is the Kalends of the new year, the hopefulness of the new day.  The old year is now officially dead and while we may not immediately see any benefits yet to the new, there is always a reason to be thankful, even if it is our ability to have made it through another year.  In contrast to New Year’s Eve day, nothing is taken out of the house this day—trash, bones, excrement, they are all left inside until the next day, to ensure blessings of the first footing do not escape. 

One of the nostalgic traditions we think of as Christmas in origin is caroling, but this is actually done on the Seventh Day and is referred to as Wassailing.  Wassail is a heated, alcoholic apple cider and is meant to be shared with the trees of the orchard as well as with the visitors who sing.  Robins are the guardians of apple trees and it was them that the wassail was intended to provoke, cake pieces and bread pieces soaked in the wassail being stuck to branches to reward them for their past year of faithful service.  On this bleak day it is beneficent to intone, “The luck of the year, it is the bird-quiet hour, the midday contemplation of the sun.  On this bleak day, when no sun shines, what wraps the birds in silence, what power blankets their song?”  It’s the day of prophesying and divination—weather divination especially, as you can imagine from a people reliant on weather for their well-being, and one saying from Scotland runs, “Wind from the west, fish and bread; wind from the north, cold and flaying; wind from the east, snow on the hills; wind from the south, fruit on trees”—and the first day’s water drawn from the well is considered especially blessed and called the flower of the well. 

The Eighth Day is the day for sitting inside to contemplate and reflect on snow.  It’s imperative that we remain on snow’s good side, since to be in opposition to snow is to be in opposition to winter and that’s simply a waste of energy.  We pay our respects to snow on this day, for its cancelling out the darkness at midwinter and its transformation of even the bleakest spaces into places of wonder and enchantment. 

The Cherokee have a story about the Ninth day, which is devoted to evergreens.  The Druids of course revered the oak and during Kalends yew and juniper play a major role.  In the middle ages there was a well-known play about the Paradise Tree, a descendant of the original Tree of Knowledge, which Adam smuggled out of Eden and planted in the outer world, where it grew to huge proportions and provided the wood for the cross on which Christ was crucified. 

Back to the Cherokee.  When the Great Mystery created all the trees and plants she wanted to give something to all of them.  But she couldn’t decide among them who best deserved it, so she proposed a contest.  Whoever could keep watch for seven days and seven nights would receive the gift.  All the trees were atwitter to be given such an important duty and had no problems remaining awake the first night.  But on the second night they found it hard to stay awake, and the flowers were the first to fall asleep.  By the third night, the birch and grasses were drooped, and by the fourth night the elms were snoring.  On the fifth and sixth nights, the maples and even the oaks had drifted off, until, by the eighth morning only a few—the pine, the cedar, the spruce and fir and holly and laurel—were still awake and watchful.  “What great endurance you have!” cried out the Great Mystery, and so she gave them the gift:  they would remain green forever and keep guard throughout the winter while all the others sleep.  The evergreens, this story says, are always awake.  And always watching. 

            Day Ten is interesting because it is two different days for men and women.  For both it was the day when each had to return to the drudgery of work after the luxurious time off afforded by the festivities of midwinter.  In the case of women who in these preindustrialized times were often employed as weavers and spinners, it was known as St. Distaff‘s Day, while for the men who were also expected to return to work, it was known as Plough Monday.  Whether the day itself fell on a Monday or not wasn’t important, it was simply another Monday in their eyes.  This became the excuse for another day of celebration as mummers, the bemasked players who appeared throughout the year at festivals and feasts, now sped through town blessing the ploughs and spindles.  Today Plough Monday has been given its own day in England, January 8, separate from the twelve holy days, but it’s thought to originate in another ancient Roman celebration, Compitaline.  In this ritual a small shrine was built where four estates met to the four directions, with a miniature plough and wooden doll set on each alter, and then the first earth-breaking of the new year was done on each property. Until now we are living in Liminal Time, the threshold between extraordinary and ordinary events that for pagans began in late October or early November with Samhain. With St. Distaff’s Day we begin a return to normalcy, what Christianity calls Ordinary Time. 

            The Eleventh day of Christmas, January 5, is the Eve of Epiphany and the Festivalof the Three Kings.  This day is given over to the Magi whose journey is often a microcosm of the journey we ourselves make spiritually.  Consider, they were themselves seekers after something and doing what felt right to them to do, going where their inner compass told them to go, and for so many of us, here today in this church, we have traveled so far and so wide only on the basis of our own compasses, be they in our hearts or our heads.  As the Magi found what they sought in the form of a child, may you find what you seek here. 

            This is the day to consider too the gifts that so often become the major focus of these holy days, forgetting as we do that we are ourselves the recipients of a gift.  I quote now from JohnMatthews: 

At a time when the commercial Christmas has a tendency to swamp the sacredness of the season, we ask and are being asked, ‘What do you want this year?’  There are certainly things we would quite like, things that we hope will be brought for us, but these are not the same as our wants.  True wants are not small things satisfied by prettily wrapped parcels:  they are the immense needs of inner space that can be overwhelmed by all our little wants and yearnings.  To consider our real needs—the things we lack in our lives—is often too frightening, opening up an abyss of need that calls our very existence into question.

Our real wants eat holes in us:  never resting, never loving, never greeting, never finding, never seeking, never being satisfied deep down.  These ravenous wants define our treasures…they create a Christmas list that no store could supply:  time to stop and really enjoy, in a space of quietness and contentment all the things we were put on earth to do.

Space to give and receive love reciprocally.  The grace to seek and find our spiritual joy.  Freedom from the tyranny and burden of other’s expectations, of what others think.  Acceptance of ourselves as we truly are.

            This then is the gift afforded us on the twelfth day.  Epiphany.  It means manifestation, making an appearance, and refers theologically to the appearance of Christ to the Three Kings.  But it’s a lot more than that.  In literature James Joyce gave us another meaning in an early draft of what would become Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  He describes it as a sudden insight, an instant when reality shines through an ordinary object, when “its soul, its whatness, leaps to us from the vestment of its appearance.”  It’s the appearance of what we need.  Perhaps not what we want, because that’s always going to be something good, something we like, and our epiphany is more likely to be something we haven’t considered and don’t want and, god help us, we don’t like.  For me, epiphany is often the realization that the shift from dark to light carries with it a responsibility not to continue hunkering in but, like a bear or a vole, to start the stirring for the reawakening I undergo each spring.  For you it might be a recognition that you’ve had all your needs met and now it’s time to meet them for other people.  For others it may be exactly the opposite:  it’s time to consider yourself a while rather than others.  There’s no one size fits all when it comes to epiphany.  It can come in any number of ways:  in someone’s smile, in the smell of woodsmoke where we thought there were no houses, in the sudden, unexpected taste of a good wine, in the sound of voices where we expected to be alone, in the touch of flesh on flesh that reminds us we are with one another.  These tiny moments bring us out of ourselves and into the wider world. 

            Like anything artistic, epiphany can be ruined by over definition.  Let’s take a minute of silence to reflect on what we have been given. 

 

"a god who condones greed and injustice"

The Old Testament record of the dramatic struggle between the worshipers of Yahweh and Baal is illustrative of the clash between a democratic people with a democratic idea of God and an aristocratic people with an exploiting God...The Israelites were born to the rugged freedom of the hill country, inheritors of a rich social idealism, worshipers of a God, Yahweh, who stood for justice.  The Amorites were a commercial people, with traditions of a slave class, worshipers, therefore, of Baal, who became the shekel raised to the nth power, a God who condoned greed and injustice...[The] victory of Yahweh worship by the Israelites over Baal worship by the Amorites [is rightly called] the first great victory of the common people, for it meant the establishment of the religious sanctions to democracy, brotherhood and freedom.

So the struggle has gone on through the course of history, a democratic people projecting onto their idea of the deity those social and spiritual qualities which were most highly developed...Each nobler and more just conception of God, therefore, becomes evidence of a new level of political life, and is in turn a magna carta of liberties yet to be won.

In the light of this undoubted law, the  problem of theology in the twentieth century becomes twofold.  First, the problem of imagining attributes of deity which are at least as democratic as the attributes of the most highly socialized [people], and second, creating an idea of God which shall bring [humanity] up to a newer and finer level of social experience.

The old idea of a God who created a spiritual aristocracy, who maintained partiality, whose sympathies were not as wide as the whole of humanity, are patently inadequate to meet the new needs...[The] democratic instinct in the new [people have a passion] after freedom and brotherhood...lays bare [their] heart and mind to the great human current and exult in the tides of feeling which pour upon [them], enriching and enlarging [them].  There is no mistaking the widening of sympathies, the greater sense of inclusiveness, the new solidarity of humanity...A democratic people demand a democratic God, a robust deity who likes his universe, who hungers for fellowship, who is in and of and for the whole of life...

--from The Social Implications of Universalism by Clarence Skinner, quoted in Universalism in America:  A Documentary History of a Liberal Faith, edited by Ernest Cassara (my emphasis)

What Skinner was trying to get at a century ago was the question "What becomes of Christianity when it has become what it triumphed over, when it becomes the religion of empire?"  Obviously, he says, it must change.  And change consistently or at least often to remain "robust."

By this point what had become the various forms of Christianity had been simultaneously hidebound and mutating for nearly two millenia, great attention paid to the words in the Bible but not to the spirit of the best of it, as if its modern world continued to be made up of nomadic people and Romans.  Contemporary peoples required a God who was at least as open to change and empathy as they were.

Skinner's resultant God was almost Whitmanesque as a God who "believes in the flesh and the appetites," who does "not ask the wounded person how he feels," but becomes "the wounded person."  In two years, Skinner's country would join the bloodshed the rest of Europe was already engulfed in, as destructive of life and complacency as Whitman's Civil War had been.  In a presaging of our contemporary dilemma, Skinner was trying to articulate a God who mattered when six year old children are gunned down.

"we are unfolding"

"we have the same brain as our paleolithic ancestors. some scientists believe that the religious impulse is in the architecture of our brain, a by-product of evolution. (1) we believe in god because we are evolutionarily adapted to believe in what psychologists call an agent, something independent, purposeful, and outside ourselves that could affect us--possibly in a bad way. humans who assume that it is a lion causing that ripple in the grass, rather than the wind, tend to survive longer. (2) we believe in god because we are evolutionarily adapted to create narratives and explanations. the tracks in the sand mean that a deer recently passed this way. a pool nearby means the deer might be thirsty, and if it moves here and I move there, I could be eating its leg for dinner. life isn't just a matter of chance. life is about cause and effect. (3) we believe in god because we are evolutinarily adapted, as social animals, to understand that other people have minds. we cannot see what these invisible minds are thinking or planning, but we would be wise to anticipate whether they are friendly or angry. we believe there are invisible forces in the world, invisible minds in solid bodies.

"why not, then, a mind outside the body? why not an invisible agent involved in the story of our own life? although such an idea mostly describes theism, the message is the same for pantheists. we are predisposed to believe in a meaningful, interconnected world, as well as in something outside and larger than ourselves. we may choose to believe in these things because such beliefs help us deal with grief and despair, motivate us to cohere socially, and are generally more fun and interesting than not.

"other scientists say that religion is less a by-product of evolution than an actual adaptation, furthering longer life and more reproduction. for example, religious belief may have allowed our ancestors to marshal the placebo effect offered by shamanistic healing. although scientists are not sure how the human body responds to the idea of a cure and heals itself, we know that this happens on a regular basis. ritual healing may have been particularly important when there were fewer medical options. people who inclined toward a belief in shamans, spirits, and gods--who had more of the hardwiring that promotes religious experience--better survived injury and disease and thus had a reproductive advantage.

"from then to now, the hardwiring hasn't changed. we are, of course, running new software. we read. we write. we fly through the air strapped into plastic seats, drinking diet coke. I will never see the world the way a hunter-gatherer saw it. in terms of my relationship with the earth, I am sorry about that. I feel left out. I feel incompetent. but there you go. that's history...the universe is an irreversible emergent process. we are unfolding. we are moving forward along with everything else, changing and being changed. we carry with us our past and our genetic coding. we are who we were. but we can't go back either."

--from standing in the light: my life as a pantheist by sharman apt russell

the-opposite-of-loneliness

"it sounds good on paper. me and the earth. me and the animals. me and the sun and the moon and stars. but when I am in a bad mood, pantheism feels more like unrequited love, the dreary task of whipping up both sides of a relationship. the truth is I often feel lonely. I am talking to myself and no one answers. yada-yada-yada. blah-blah-blah. the same stuff I have heard all my life. I am so tired of this voice. I am so bored. it may sound strange, but I don't want to be alone in my body and mind. I want someone with me.

"this is an ontological loneliness that my husband can not redress, although I love him and he loves me. my children distracted me from this feeling for a long time, 22 years, and then they grew up and went away. (which was, of course, the right thing to do. still, you can't help but feel--ungrateful wretches.) now I am no longer distracted. I have more time to talk to myself. yada-yada-yada. blah-blah-blah. now this loneliness seems unending and almost unbearable.

"it is the loss of the personal god. in some ways, I think I would have done better in another religion [than quakerism]. without doubt, I would believe in god or gods or goddesses if I could. I would like someone to pray to. someone to note my fall and care about my scraped knee. I would like that shoulder, that chest, that arm. it is less a matter of won't than can't. did I believe in these things once? maybe, as a child. but even that belief felt more pretend than real.

"sometimes I feel envious of other faiths. then I remember the story of abraham and isaac. my first response is that I want a god to speak to me. my second is that it depends on what he has to say."

--from standing in the light: my life as a pantheist by sharman apt russell

if I understand what russell is saying here, then I have to take exception. I no more find the prospect of our being alone in existence any more lonely than the experience that only dogs and cats and plants and music made by humans are in this house with me now is lonely. this isn't simply some idyllic being-at-one with nature or the universe, it's a cold-eyed recognition of the connections between me, shale, the roadkill on I-94, the syrians being killed by their own government, the dust being plowed up by a meteorite on some nameless hunk of rock orbiting saturn, the woodtick on my dog beans, the carpenter ants at work in the barn, the guys widening the road a half mile away, and so on. in fact, if anything, when I was younger and believed in the easter bunny and santa and fairies and unicorns and ghosts and a whitebearded god in flowing robes I was lonelier. there would always be some part of existence to which I knew, even then, I would forever be denied--no one I knew had ever communed with any of them beyond his own wishful thinking. far from feeling lonely, the idea that there is nothing outside us and what we experience makes me feel more--what's the opposite of lonely? secure? surrounded? loved? maybe the term I'm looking for is "at peace."

a bird in the hand

the summer we moved here to the rim 10 years ago my father-in-law and I fenced in part of the side yard off the deck leading from a 3-season porch in order to let the dogs roam free. as a part of that, we put in a dogflap on the original screen door, and when that flap eroded after the 1st winter, we just left the hole open, and when the door itself started falling apart, I replaced it with a heavy wooden windowed door which, because it isn't the right height and won't sit right on the jamb, remains ajar about 6 inches, wide enough to let the dogs through and held to in the wind by a bungee cord.

naturally the gap doesn't let in only the dogs but an assortment of insects and flies and, about 1ce a day in the summer, birds. this is a common phenomenon here. when the dog flap was covered birds were always hopping in under the material and soon we'd see a whispy, fluttering shape darting from 1 side of the porch to the other, the dark movement brilliant against the white paint of the inside of the porch and the multiple windows that let in the afternoon sun.

generally my wife calls me to let the bird out. I am the official bird-letter-outer since I've got the patience for it. my 1st act is to open the door wide and herd the intruder toward it so he or she will make a dash for freedom. but birds are not apparently very good at seeing the difference between an open and closed door and continue to smash themselves against the brightness of the windows instead.

after a few minutes, worried that they'll hurt themselves by braining their noggins against the glass or snapping their own necks or exhausting themselves in vain until they suffer a heart attack, I'll catch the bird and release it. this isn't as difficult as it might sound. again, it's a patience game. I follow the bird from window to window to corner to floor, walking slowly and lightly, cooing reassurances all the while. the tone and words aren't really intended to affect the bird, who probably thinks it's all threats and bluster anyway, but reassure me that I can do it.

sometimes this takes 10 or 15 minutes. I have the time. when the bird is against the window or on the floor or in a corner I cup my hands around it gently, muttering all the while, and grip it as tightly and as loosely as possible. the feeling of bird-heart against my palms is indescribable. it is like holding a beating heart must feel. sometimes the bird pecks against my hand, sometimes drawing blood, and that's okay. don't go gently, I tell it in my head, if you think this is the end fight it. life should fight.

I step to the open door and fling my hands open and the bird flies like a shot into the trees and beyond. if birds have the equivalent of religion I like to think of myself as somewhere in it, not a savior but a boddhisattva. I've caught and held dozens, maybe a hundred or more birds like this, even hummingbirds which feel like holding a tiny buzzing cell phone. then I close the door and wash my hands.

air force pagans, druids and wiccans have a place to worship

this is a good thing. too often there seems to be a disconnect in folks' minds between the ability of people to worship as they want and the opportunity to participate in a physical way that makes a difference to them. in prisons, at least out here on the rim, there's a big move toward granting american indians access to sweat lodges for ceremonies, and here in wisconsin there was a big issue a couple years ago when one of the state's prison chaplains turned out to be a pagan. but as with the victory won a few years ago by the families of pagans as well as military pagan groups to have their religion denoted both on their dogtags and on their military graves, this is hard fought and worthwhile. too often, we only think of the abrahamics--judaism, christianity, islam--as the sole religions worth taking into account. but there are so many more faiths of which most of us aren't aware, and one of the unacknowledged benefits or curses of globalism is that our religions as well as our economies become less provincial. (there is nothing saying, of course, that the christians could not also benefit from this worship space, given some recent research.)