258 candles-days16-14

 Rabbinic wisdom holds that we were created so God could talk to himself. Another take is that God wanted us to learn compassion so a plethora of us were made. Someone else also said God wanted people to love and care for others so dogs were created. If all that is so this woman squares the circle. "Taking care of dogs is my religion."

258 candles-day 17

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: Krishna devotees looking to help religious retirees.

258 candles-day 3

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: Rescuing Kalu. (Warning: Kalu's initial appearance is disturbing. He appears better by the end, but for much of the video he can be frightening. Part of the reason for my choosing it is that, as much as I'd like to think I would do the same as these people, I'm not convinced I could overcome my revulsion.)

I've been everywhere, man

I've been putting together a new packet application for residencies for clinical pastoral experiences and rewriting some of the essays I'd done a year ago. This is actually a revision of both that one and one I'd written originally for my admission into seminary six years ago. I'm pleased with it.

I’m like the trucker in Johnny Cash’s “I’ve Been Everywhere,” only on a theological rather than a geographic level.  My parents were Seventh-Day Adventist—after my mother died my dad returned to his native Methodism—and I was raised that way.  They attended one of the German denominations, which is a pretty strict sect, although they weren’t as observant as they might have been—we ignored the ban on meat, for instance, and I don’t remember ever praying over a meal except when someone from the church was there.  My sister was baptized among them but I never was.

            When I was allowed to make my own choices regarding churches I opted not to attend one.  I’d read about Thomas Jefferson being an agnostic, and since that seemed to mean he didn’t attend church, that’s what I was.  Adventist churches can be a dismal affair, or at least they were in rural New York in the 1960s.  Agnosticism was attractive:  like most young adults, I was uncertain of a lot of things, and it seemed only right to question a divine presence along with everything else.

            My first wife was Lutheran.  We attended church a few times a year with her family.  When Barbara and I split I underwent a profound questioning of the meaning of my life, what I was intended for, how I was intended to live, and where I stood in relation to everyone else.  After a brief flirtation with nihilism and atheism, denying there was a purpose to any of it, I fell into radicality.  I’d been studying Jesuit education for a class, and the intense devotion to god suddenly made sense to me and seemed right.  The ritual and drama of the mass was comforting, as was the prescription that god had to accept me in return for confessing my sins.  Like Frost said of home, heaven was where, when you went there, they had to take you in. 

            Catholicism didn’t stick beyond two intense years.  Too many questions, too many strictures, too much solidity and order.  I’d had enough of order, I wanted chaos.  But in New York, where I was, even if you weren’t Jewish you were a Jew, and I became attracted to the controlled chaos of Jewish women. I was really attracted to the symbolism and mystery of Judaism.  I lived eventually with two Jews at different times, one Reformed and the other Orthodox and a sabra, and kept a kosher house with each.  That was an interesting experience, looking to the domestic to for the order daily worldly experience denied. 

            Eventually the desire for uncertainty moved me out of an apartment and into the streets.  I spent several months in New York City, alternating between people’s couches, some people’s beds, and the safe and relatively warm crawlspace beneath a fenced-in trailer on the Grand Central Overpass.  I visited the Hare Krishna kitchens downtown often and the Sri Chinmoy kitchens in Brooklyn, and listened to both while they filled my ears with chanting and my belly with rice.  I eventually wound up at the Krishna commune near the Newburgh airport for a month, sorting out what remained of my life and trying, unsuccessfully, to get sober.  My parents bought me a station wagon and I disappeared for three years into the US, visiting communes and churches, reservations and tiny communities.  I loved those years:  they were full of exploration, especially spiritual exploration.  I attended Rainbow Gatherings and Powwows, Festivals of Light, ashrams and intentional communities.  My consciousness expanded, as did my intake of drugs, which I saw as gatekeepers to the Absolute. Or something like that. 

            I read up on Buddhism all the time.  I tried peyote with a small Native Church congregation.  I dropped acid as often as possible, consulted Mescalito, took vision quests and Long Walks.  When I was camped for a month atop Wildcat Mountain in the Catskills I had a vision that involved Brother Blue, a storyteller I’d studied with.  I kept a milk crate in the back of the car full of books by Alan Watts, Stephen Diamond, Ram Dass, Carlos Castenada, Sun Bear, D.T. Suzuki, Krishnamurti, Robert Thurman, Robert Pirsig.  My copy of Gary Snyder’s The Old Ways is so well-thumbed I have to hold it together with a rubber band. 

            I never made my intended goal of Arcosanti in Cordes Lakes, Arizona.  Eventually, however, I found my way to sesshin at Dhammapada in Montreal where the abbot, a tiny wizened Japanese man, explained my deficiencies to me in terms even I could understand.  When I left there I was humbled, but no closer to finding some cogent spiritual sense.  I hung out with Santerians I knew back home, kept my head shaved, went to work in a health food store in Woodstock where I met up with cross-country skiing devotees of Ramtha and the community-sharing confrontational lovers of a man named Gavin who called himself Bayard Hora, and converted my upstairs two-room apartment into an electricity-less shrine to discipline.  I ran the four miles each day into work and back in the snow and cold, and eventually found my way back on the road, where I discovered I really belonged. 

            When my mother insisted I either join the Army or attend graduate school, I knew she was onto something. In Mankato, Minnesota I met my second, or as she puts it, my last wife.  Jayne was Methodist at that time, soon to return to Lutheranism and finally to settle among the UCC, and after we married and moved back to New York, she started carting me along to different churches, insisting that I ought to be grateful for the life I’d been given, even if it wasn’t everything I wanted.  I made contact with two delightful Dutch Reformed ministers who made me realize it was possible to be both clergy and relevant, and read Daniel Berrigan. 

            In 1996, returned to the Midwest, and getting a handle on both my drinking and my hitherto undiagnosed depression—I am a poster boy for the wonders of Prozac—I found the White Bear UU Church online.  I’d attended a few UU services back east in my wandering years and hadn’t been terribly impressed.  But something about the photos on the White Bear website suggested I should give this a try.  My first sermon by Christa Wolf, the interim minister, used the terms “Jungian” and “eschatological,” and hearing those I knew I was home.

            Years later I joined a different congregation in Menomonie, Wisconsin, smaller, in greater need of help, and trained as a Commissioned Lay Leader.  I became more and more involved in the ministerial aspect of the CLL position and had an affinity for it. Like Cash’s trucker intimates, Unitarian Universalism may not be where I stay.  I might continue to move on and find my journey takes me elsewhere.  The congregation I served housed Christian UUs, UU atheists, and UU devotees to Kryon, a channeled being. I came to love the difficulty of making current events relevant and comprehendible to their different sensibilities and found a calling among them. I’ve since left that congregation to serve another in the Twin Cities where the makeup is composed of secular and Christian humanists.

 

spiritual homelessness 4

The final segment of my essay "Spiritual Homelessness," and again a part of which some of you may have read before.  

Part III:  What is my hope?

A final story, this one about me rather than people I’ve known.  The worship experience that most resonated for me was one where I wasn’t present at first. Decades ago, while I was homeless, I was invited to take meals with a Hare Krishna group that met around Newburgh, New York, and because I was hungry I took them up on it. A part of the understanding, not uncommon among religious charities providing food for people, was that I would take part in one of their services.

A Krishna service is a misnomer. It’s more like a short, extemporaneous lecture punctuated by ecstatic dancing and chanting, similar to Sufi celebration. Individuals were invited to the house where its members communed, sat in a large room listening to one essentially tell the story of his conversion to Krishna or his recognition of Krishna’s influence on his life, then be invited to eat of the prana or gift that Krishna had for us, have short conversation for digestion, and then dance and sing to celebrate our acceptance of Krishna’s prana.

All I wanted was to eat. Having spent the previous days subsisting primarily on peanut butter and crackers, I had been lured by the promise of mounds of hot rice and raisins, dates, oranges, and of course the eyes of the shave-headed girl who’d invited me. I certainly wasn’t interested in a lecture, although the nascent anthropologist in me was open to experiencing it. Still, when the time came for the lecture/personal tribute, I managed to excuse myself to the bathroom and remained there for about 15 minutes, which seemed like the right amount of time.

It was an old house, one of those hundred year and older grand family mansions of the Hudson Valley burghers that had been subdivided and made into apartment housing over the decades and eventually remade back into spaces for family-type living. It had a large bathroom on the first floor, which was where we visitors were relegated to, with plants and guest towels and white walls (the Krishnas make a fetish of the color white) but it was also drafty and unheated. It was set up with books and pamphlets and I knew I could pass time there painlessly.

I sat on the floor and started paging through a book. Several rooms over, the personal testament of some gawky middle class suburban kid began and occasionally sounds came in under the door that I identified as his voice getting louder and then softer and then people muttering appreciatively.

The illustrations in the book were captivating. Nearly 30 years on and I wish I’d noted the title of the book or even snuck it out with me. They were old Hindu woodcuts and paintings of pilgrims and ascetics, monkeys and housewives, merchants and jaguars. I was lost among those illustrations, lingering on page after page, trying to drink in every element of every picture as if it was the dinner I was waiting for.

Eventually the murmuring outside the room grew quieter with a few scattered single loud words. I grew more transfixed by the pictures and then by the silence I experienced in the room. And it dawned on me, this was the prana I was receiving. The food was nice, the food was what I needed, but equally necessary was this silence and meditation I was allowed in the hundred year old bathroom of a Hare Krishna commune. I had been invited to share time and food with them and all they’d asked for in return was a little of my time to listen to them. I had that time to give; it wasn’t as if my life was going anywhere fast anyway.

I jumped up and put the book back on the stack next to the toilet and hurried back out to rejoin the group as the Krishna convert finished his narrative. There were appreciative mutters from people gathered in the room. The eyes of the shave-headed girl were on me as I returned to my place on the floor next to her: she had seen people hide in the bathroom before, people for whom the only prana was food and someplace warm, and my epiphany was that I wasn’t there only for that. I was also there to be given space to develop into something or someone I needed to become and the immediate path was to take me through these people.

I tried to explain that to her during the conversation after we ate. It wasn’t nearly as well-articulated as it may seem now. She smiled and nodded as if she understood but I had no doubt she’d heard something like that before too. But it was real, I assured both her and me; I wouldn’t join them but I’d like to remain near them, learning what I could. (And, I admitted, seeing her and eating on a regular basis.)

When we stood to chant I chanted and then danced with abandon. That summer I returned to the commune for days at a time, staying in my car and studying with the ascetics there. The girl, whose name I’ve forgotten, eventually left to seed another commune in New Jersey. I was asked to join the group moving there but I said no. I hadn’t found a home but I had found one of the landmarks I recognized on the way there.

In loss there is also discovery.  This last story illustrates what it was that I found when I was in need:  a place to be and people to be with.  At this time my Rule of Life was simple:  to exercise, shave, and brush my teeth every day.  That has not changed.  It is still my Rule.

But what do I want to do, if it is not being in a traditional church setting with traditional church people?  I’ve often been most comfortable with people on the edge of civilization, people whose transgressions have put them there or who have put themselves there, liars, cheaters, thieves, the lame and the halt.  My service, if I can design it, would be this:  I would spend my days walking around and talking with street people, listening to their problems and their joys, laughing over coffee, crying over injustice, holding hands.  One of the things that appeals to me about Unitarian Universalism is that it’s not evangelical, so I would not be bringing the Good News of it to people, but would use it to listen to people tell me their good and their bad news.

My problem, of course, lies in the fact that I don’t know anyone who will pay me to do this.  From the Krishnas I have learned such service is often gratis.  My problem is that I have also learned I like being married and having a home to return to each day.  Toward this end I’ve made the decision recently to seek licensure as a chaplain as well as ordination because that is essentially the sort of work I want to do, only on a larger scale than a facility or even an area.  In my dreams I would even do this nation-wide.

It is my calling to be with other people.  While I’ve never seen myself as a chaplain, and I’m still not certain that’s how I see myself, I find I am very comfortable being together with people who need someone there.  I’ve worked for a long time to create what Murray Bowen and Rabbi Edwin Friedman called a “non anxious presence”—Buddhism would call it nonattachment, the Krishnas would call it Krishna-consciousness—in which anxiety over a result is accepted and released. It’s a concept I’d only begun to comprehend when I ate Krishna’s prana, but I know now it’s my gift to present that to others.  I continue, of course, to work on using it on myself.  In my imagination I characterize it as being like a duck, placidly floating above the water, below it peddling like crazy.   It is in this wobbling tension where I find my hope.

dead finch

last night a few miles from home I killed a finch.  it was slow in taking off from the center of the road and I didn't see it until the last moment; and then it hit the grill of my car and sailed up the hood and across the edge of my window like a crumpled piece of paper.  I know it was dead because the 1st chance I had I turned around and returned.  3 other finches were investigating its body and I said, "sorry" out loud as they took off, meaning to take in both them and the dead finch and the universe itself.  I picked it up.  its neck was broken and sagged like a sock but its body was still warm.  this had been alive and vital just minutes before.  now it was meat in the weeds.

I reflected, on the rest of my drive, on how I live my life in such a way that, when I do things like this, I try to make certain the consequences are final.  that if I hit an animal it's either dead or I help it (if I can--there have been few of those).  I do the same if I'm driving along and find an animal someone else has struck.  I think of myself as keeping some sort of balance to life by doing this, not in a mystical sense, but in the sense of karma.  I have a responsibility to do what I can about bad situations, especially if I'm responsible for them.

I came home and mentioned the above to my wife and then followed it with, "and I'm thinking, my life is really busy if I'm only doing this for situations I'm involved in accidentally.  I've got to wonder about the karma of people who do this sort of thing purposefully, who hurt other animals and people on purpose."  she said, "they don't care."  I said, "whether they care or not, they've got the burden of somehow paying a price for having done it."

she stopped what she was doing and gave me 1 of Those Looks.  she said, "that's a really xian statement."  I said, "well, it's not just xian, there's a lot of faiths that believe you have to balance the bad you do in life with good.  the buddhists, the jews, muslims, hindus--they've all got this balancing act you're supposed to do."  she repeated, "that's still a really xian statement."

she's right.  it's 1 of the best elements of religions, that there is a sense that what you do to others you have to  accept on yourself, like colin powell's definition of the pottery barn rule.  it's this sense of responsibility that keeps us honest as human beings, or that should keep us honest.  I don't know that there's an afterlife, and while all evidence I've seen convinces me there isn't, I think it's a part of right living to clean up after our own messes whether there's a goalkeeper or not.

eight cows: sangha

this is a mashup I made for my class on buddhism.  it's grainier than the original which is apparently a consequence of a 20-minute video being converted to a size suitable for uploading.  we're expected to do a dharma talk on a topic of our choice and I determined mine would be on sangha, mostly because I'd already done a sermon on that about 6 years ago and still had the research.  but when the crunch came, I opted to do a video rather than a sermon and the message of the dharma talk also changed.  I'm rather proud of the outcome, although as I let the class know last night if I'd had my druthers I'd have cut some of the more sensational images out of the iranian sufi video clip since the sufis represented include the more extreme member who expect their faith makes their flesh impenetrable to pain.  thus the hammering of daggers into heads.

still, I like it and I'd have to call it a hit among my classmates who seemed somewhat agog at the presentation.  that may have been amazement at my accomplishment or it may have been astonishment at my gall, I never can tell.  

feed the birds

I've been having a disagreement with a friend of a friend on the role of government and at 1 point he said, "The government wasn't designed to be a charity Bob. If I want my money to help people with disabilities or feed the hungry or provide funds to people who need it, I'll donate my money to those people. And what people don't realize is that when you subsidize things, the prices go up. I.e. health insurance, expanding the money supply. How about drug testing people before they can receive a welfare check?"

well, the drug-testing question I answered quickly. but the rest of what he said left me thinking about what charity is all about. as I quickly explained to him, he might be willing to give his money to those worthy groups (although almost anyone who makes this argument seems to hold that "if" in abeyance so that he doesn't actually have to do it, making it more capriciousness than responsibility), but most people aren't, and it's an obligation of government to provide for the people who aren't covered by other people's charity. charities are designed to provide only for a small group of people--those who apply to it--and they tend to be people who need it but only in the short run. what about those people who need it for the rest of their lives? and what about those people who aren't very pretty charity cases: addicts, the mentally ill, criminals? these are members of our society as much as they're members of our families, and just like in families, many of them are shunted off for someone else to deal with or to sink or swim on their own. it's a rare family that doesn't have at least 1 member of each of those categories.

in the midst of all this I fed the birds. which provided my answer. I've written before about the responsibility I feel to help trapped birds and I reflected that when I do that, or put out seed and corn for them, I'm not only doing it for the songbirds or the chickadees which are cute and provide aural and visual pleasure. I put it out too for the jays and the grebes and the crows and the countless noisy, ugly birds that crowd around and gulp it down and fly off somewhere else. I can't discriminate, only letting some eat and others not. I put the food out and they come by and eat and when it's gone I put out more.

a better example may be the rabbits and mice I put cracked corn and peanuts and sunflower seeds for. they are actually a hassle in the spring and summer in my gardens and I might argue myself happy if they pulled up stakes and cleared off. but then they're someone else's issue, and besides, I like the sight of rabbits early in the morning eating on the deck. I'd feel as if some aspect of my life were missing if they weren't here, something inarticulate and inexpressive. I can't explain what they add to my life but I can say I would feel a void in their absence. I can't let them starve when it's in my power to help them. I don't feel a responsibility to answer to an outside power but if I did I would have a hard time justifying allowing that to happen.

government is in the same position. its responsibility is to all the birds and the critters, metaphorically speaking, not just the "deserving" 1s that others might care for. its role is to collect monies to distribute to people who will otherwise die. if the cost of other things goes up in relation to that (a tenuous connection that requires a lot of givens, but I'll pass on arguing the point), then that's the price we--by which I mean all of us, even those to whom the monies go; most people tend to forget they don't suddenly pay less than anyone else, it's just that we help to subsidize their share--must be willing to pay. history shows private charities can't help everyone, and sometimes they only help 1 or 2 people, usually those setting up the charity. if there is a single good trope to religions it is this: that most of them make an obligation on the part of those who have benefitted from society to help those in worse straits. distribution is a necessary government action.

a palestinian gandhi

"some people think that satyagraha is weakness; they believe that the angrier you are, the stronger you will be. this is their great mistake.

"causing someone to suffer the same price you have paid will never ease your pain. it doesn't help much to be right. you damage your right by just being right. one usually wants to be right only because he or she can't be honest. give me a solution...where my right is in harmony with my humanity and their right is in harmony with their humanity. nonviolent protest is where you invest your pain, a place where this pain becomes active in accordance with your humanity. you cannot practice nonviolence without listening to the other side's narrative. but first you have to give up being a victim. when you do that, no one will be able to victimize you again. I don't want the world to feel pity for me; I want the world to take responsibility, as I do."

--ali abu awwad quoted in "salt march to the dead sea: gandhi's palestinian reincarnation" by david shulman in the june, 2011, issue of harper's magazine

this is a mashup I've done for my course in older testament. the assignment was, attending to my audience, come up with a presentation on some aspect of the hebrew bible. I chose to present wisdom literature and sophia to a UU congregation. below the video is a quick explication of the images used.

THIS SHE KNOWS
“A short celebration of the Sophia in us all”
Shot 1: A manipulated image from Anvari
A responsive reading from Thandaka
Shot 2: A woman sits crying in the ruins of an apartment building in the aftermath of a Russian bombing attack in Gori, Georgia
Shot 3: A child appreciates the rain
Shot 4: “Walking Woman” sculpture (1960s) by Michael Snow
Shot 5: A junkie in an alley in Amsterdam
Shot 6: Shortly after France passed its law banning full facial coverings, including niqabs, a female lawyer, taking offense at another shopper’s appearance in full burqua, tried to rip the woman’s veil off
Shot 7: “Bliss Dance” sculpture made and disassembled at Burning Man 2010
Shot 8: Graffito by Banksy on the Israeli-Palestinian separation wall
Shot 9: Artsy pic from Google
“Get It While You Can” by Janis Joplin, particularly reflective of Ecclesiastes 9:7-10 and Proverbs 4:7
Shot 10: A blow up of one of the Dead Sea Scrolls
Shot 11: Body painting by Chelsea Rose from her website
Shot 12: The Questioner of the Sphinx by Elihu Vedder (1863)
Shot 13: The Goddess of Wisdom (Saraswati) by Om Prakash Saini (2008)
Shot 14: A 3 dimensional model of a carbon molecule
Shot 15: A seedling growing from a mortuary bench
Shot 16: “Moon Flower Opening” (not time-lapse) from Timeforross on Youtube
Shot 17: Buddhist monks eating in Bangkok
Shot 18: Chitra Lele, a Hindu priest
Shot 19: Aminda Wadud, a German imam
Shot 20: Jain monks in India
Film clip 1: Alanis Morissette as God in Kevin Smith’s Dogma smelling flowers and doing a handstand
Film clip 2: Linda Fiorentino as Bethany and Alanis Morissette as God; Bethany’s final facial expression shows her uncertainty about God’s response
Bibliography:
Aldredge-Clanton, Jann. 1995. In Search of the Christ-Sophia: An Inclusive Christology for Liberating Christians. Twenty-Third Publications; Mystic, CN.
Brueggemann, Walter. 2003. An Introduction to the Old Testament: The Canon and Christian Imagination. Westminster John Knox Press; Louisville, KY.
Ceresko, Anthony. 2005. Introduction to the Old Testament: A Liberation Perspective. Orbis Books; Maryknoll, NY.
New Oxford Annotated Bible. 2007. NRSV. Oxford University Press; Oxford.
Newsom, Carol and Sharon Ringe, Ed. 1998. Women’s Bible Commentary. Westminster John Knox Press; Louisville, KY.
Thandaka. 1993. “The Legacy of Caring.” In Singing the Living Tradition. Beacon Press; Boston.

Van Voorst, Robert. 1994. Anthology of World Scriptures. Wadsworth Publishing; Belmont, CA.

prana

The worship experience that most resonated for me was one in which I wasn’t present, at first. Decades ago, while I was homeless, I was invited to take meals with a Hare Krishna group that met around Newburgh, New York, and because I was hungry I took them up on it. A part of the understanding, not uncommon among religious charities that provide food for people, was that I would take part in one of their services.

A Krishna service is a misnomer. It’s more like a short, extemporaneous lecture punctuated by ecstatic dancing and chanting, very similar to Sufi celebration. The way this particular group operated was that individuals were invited to the house its members communed in, sat in a large room listening to one essentially tell the story of his conversion to Krishna or his recognition of Krishna’s influence on his life, then be invited to eat of the prana or gift that Krishna had for us, have short conversation for digestion, and then dance and sing to celebrate our acceptance of Krishna’s prana.

All I wanted was to eat. Having spent the previous days subsisting primarily on peanut butter and crackers, I had been lured by the promise of mounds of hot rice and raisins, dates, oranges, and of course the eyes of the shave-headed girl who’d invited me. I certainly wasn’t interested in a lecture, although the nascent anthropologist in me was open to experiencing it. Still, when the time came for the lecture/personal tribute, I managed to excuse myself to the bathroom and remained there for about 15 minutes, which seemed like the right amount of time.

It was an old house, one of those hundred year and older grand family mansions of the Hudson Valley burghers that had been subdivided and made into apartment housing over the decades and eventually remade back into spaces for family-type living. It had a large bathroom on the first floor, which was where we visitors were relegated to, with plants and guest towels and white walls (the Krishnas fetishize the color white) but it was also drafty and unheated. It was set up with books and pamphlets and I knew I could pass time there painlessly.

I sat on the floor and started paging through a book. Several rooms over, the personal testament of some gawky middle class suburban kid began and occasionally sounds came in under the door that I identified as his voice getting louder and then softer and then people muttering appreciatively.

The illustrations in the book were captivating. Nearly 30 years on and I wish I’d noted the title of the book or even snuck it out with me. They were old Hindu woodcuts and paintings of pilgrims and ascetics, monkeys and housewives, merchants and jaguars. I was lost among those illustrations, lingering on page after page, trying to drink in every element of every picture as if it was the dinner I was waiting for.

Eventually the murmuring outside the room grew quieter with a few scattered single loud words. I grew more transfixed by the pictures and then by the silence I experienced in the room. And it dawned on me, this was the prana I was receiving. The food was nice, the food was what I needed, but equally necessary was this silence and meditation I was allowed in the hundred year old bathroom of a Hare Krishna commune. I had been invited to share time and food with them and all they’d asked for in return was a little of my time to listen to them. I had that time to give; it wasn’t as if my life was going anywhere fast anyway.

I jumped up and put the book back on the stack next to the toilet and hurried back out to rejoin the group as the Krishna convert finished his narrative. There were appreciative mutters from people gathered in the room. The eyes of the shave-headed girl were on me as I returned to my place on the floor next to her: she had seen people hide in the bathroom before, I knew, people for whom the only prana was food and someplace warm, and my epiphany was that I wasn’t there only for that. I was also there to be given space to develop into something or someone I needed to become and the immediate path was to take me through these people.

I tried to explain that to her during the conversation after we ate. It wasn’t nearly as well-articulated as it may seem now. She smiled and nodded as if she understood but I had no doubt she’d heard something like that before too. But it was real, I assured both her and me; I wouldn’t join them but I’d like to remain near them, learning what I could. (And, I admitted, seeing her and eating on a regular basis.)

When we stood to chant I chanted and then danced with abandon. That summer I returned to the commune for days at a time, staying in my car and studying with the ascetics there. The girl, whose name I’ve forgotten, eventually left to seed another commune in New Jersey. I was asked to join the group moving there but said no. I hadn’t found a home but I had found one of the landmarks I recognized on the way there.

what if (part 2): superman

if we take as a given the origin story of superman--last survivor of another world dropped surreptitiously and raised the same in our world who makes his appearance as an adult--I think the reaction of most religious institutions to his existence would be denial of it or alternatively deification of him. xianity, especially, would react to superman as a rival to jesus, perhaps even seeing him as the antichrist, although it's just as possible he would be seen as the second coming. but the primary reaction I think would be that he is an affront to god since he would be, at least the way he's presented in original stories, a near-perfect being. for the same reason, I suspect institutional islam would denounce him (tho I also think sufiism would be drawn to him).

judaism might see him differently and might even recognize superman as the messiah. I'm not certain what the reactions of other religions like hinduism or buddhism might be (although this is an interesting take) but I think that the raelians and scientologists as well as other alien-based faiths would welcome him, not as an adherent but as the focus of worship or at least as an emissary.

likewise, I don't think he would be likely to identify exclusively with a single nation or social group like the white americans he's mostly surrounded by in comics. particularly if he were seen as some emissary or agent of god I suspect people would expect him to effect god's will by counteracting disasters that are also seen as "god's will" such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and tsunamis or other impersonal forces like disease and war. as a result he would have neither the time or need for a secret identity.

spirit jambalaya

this is a great idea. it only makes sense in a world growing ever closer physically and psychologically yet sometimes splitting at the seams that we train our future religious leaders to see each other's truths in perspective rather than pretending each is privy to a sole truth. after all, we train keynesians and friedmanites and marxists, freudians and jungians and adlerians, new critics and pragmatists and post-structuralists under the same roofs. well, all right, we don't. but we really should.

I am a little eichmann

"When human beings are in [codependent] relationships with a huge corporation, the corporation can cause immense harm, far more than could be caused by individual human beings. Individuals have been 'caught in something larger than themselves.' This fosters a collective mindset...'People are relieved of their individuality, along with their sense of judgement and choice.' Knowingly or unknowingly, those who serve a corporation without questioning its effects in the world adopt the corporation's collective ideology and values. Willingly or unwillingly, they work to serve its purpose and extend its power. They are complicit in what the corporation does."

--from Shaking the Gates of Hell: Faith-Led Resistance to Corporate Globalization by Sharon Delgado


on the whole I'm impressed by delgado's book but I'm uncomfortable with a tendency I sense throughout it, probably because I'm prone to it myself: confusing the employees of a place and their values with the values of their organization. in several places she covers her ass by noting that people involved with corporations are "not exceptionally immoral: they are, on the contrary, quite ordinarily moral." but she leaves the morally offended employee with only one presumed way out: sever the relationship.

twenty years ago, that was my answer to such a conflict. if you don't like what your job entails or the impact your company has on the world, starve the beast by leaving it. someone will take your place but the evil will be his and not yours. but even then I knew the situation was more complicated than that: my mother taught school and my father retired a bank vice president and people I knew worked for mcdonald's and ibm and even I knew I would eventually end up making money the only way I knew how, by being a faceless prole at the business end of some implement.


the term "little eichmanns" came into public use in 2001 when former professor ward churchill infamously wrote "If there was a better, more effective, or in fact any other way of visiting some penalty befitting their participation upon the little Eichmanns inhabiting the sterile sanctuary of the twin towers [than flying planes into them], I'd really be interested in hearing about it" (although the epithet "eichamann" had been used previously in the same way by public intellectuals lewis mumford and john zerzan).

it's to my credit I recognize the little eichmann in myself but it doesn't excuse me or my eichmann. many of us should consider ourselves damned by churchill's articulation that we are a part of "a technocratic corps at the very heart of America's global financial empire...and [do] so both willingly and knowingly. Recourse to 'ignorance' – a derivative, after all, of the word 'ignore' – counts as less than an excuse among this relatively well-educated elite. To the extent that any of them were unaware of the costs and consequences to others of what they were involved in – and in many cases excelling at – it was because of their absolute refusal to see." it's true, the beast I feed is a comparatively benign one--the college where I teach has no defense programs, say--but I am teaching corporate behavior and goals at the same time as I'm teaching writing. and my calling as a minister is no different: it might seem easier as I'm not a xian not to have the example of jesus before me all the time, but it's actually worse since I've also the words of buddha and allah and zoroaster and krishna to contend with. all of them point in the same direction. if you help to do evil, you are evil.

-what hope then is there for a little eichmann like me? delgado is silent on this issue. we are in the position of the walmart customer who hates everything about walmart, and whose only store in town is walmart. do we give up eating? we could--we could grow and kill everything on our own. do we also make our own clothes and utensils and sunscreen? what time is left to do good work? also, that seems counter to making the beloved community--we would leave it to be less contaminated by the evil choices others make.

if there is a mark of mature faith it is this. it recognizes the little eichmann in us and refuses to allow him to give a pat answer.

you must change your life

I've spent all week in essay-land and below is the final paragraph from one of them, for an online class I took on the spiritual life of the congregation. the essay reflects one of the thoughts I've been having the past few weeks, encouraged by the reading for this class and another class on liberation theologies. if contemporary xianity is the church of the empire--and this is not just about xianity, by effect all contemporary religions, judaism, islam, buddhism, hinduism, and unitarian universalism, are the churches of empire--then perhaps it's not a bad thing that congregations and churches are dying out. perhaps the reason we aren't drawing young people to us is because we are not offering what they need from a spiritual angle. perhaps what needs to happen in the 21st century is the previous millenia of theologies need to fall away so new, 21st century theologies can be built by those young people themselves. let the dead bury the dead, indeed; let the living build for the living.

"We’re concerned, and rightly so, about the drain on congregations. Churches are dying out and there are any number of statistics that prove this to my satisfaction. But perhaps we’re looking at this wrong. My friend Pete, a Lutheran minister who nears retirement and the return to Tanzania where he was born, has a theory that every ten years a church ought to burn down so each generation has the opportunity to rebuild it from the ground up. No more favorite windows, no more nostalgia about the hymnals, no more untouchable crosses sitting like a gargoyle on an otherwise renovated wall. We fear the end of church, the dying of the light. Perhaps it is not such a bad thing. As Diane Butler Bass notes, “Jesus insists that every person he meets do something and change. The whole message of the Christian scripture is based on the idea of…the change of heart that happens when we meet God face to face.” We may be wrong to assume one needs a face to meet with god. All religion has at its core this message: You must change your life. Perhaps we shouldn’t assume that advice is meant only for people. Perhaps like a fir seed, snuggled so tightly in its pine cone husk that it takes a forest fire to bring it out, churches must die out for greater church messages to emerge."