HOLY † SCHMIDT

The Guest House

2010-10-27T08:50:00.000-07:00

This being human is a guest house.
Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
He may be clearing you out
for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.

~ Rumi ~

(The Essential Rumi, translations by Coleman Barks)

Life Passages

2010-06-14T11:13:00.003-07:00

What can I say? It's been a crazy, busy 2010.

Not much to show for it - a few creative and personal development retreats, a fab family getaway to San Francisco by train, a whole lot of committee and other volunteer work and of course, the usual kid run-around and achievements.

My son spent a few months meeting with his congregational counterparts - all 8th graders - for their Coming of Age prep classes. The annual Coming of Age service at our church was held early-May. In prep for this service, in which all of the 8th graders plan the "sermon", the music and the readings, each 8th grader must write and deliver their own credo or personal belief statement which may or may not be traditionally spiritual. Holy Son was pretty secretive about his credo right up until the day before the service, as he wanted to surprise me. (Plus he didn't want his English Minor mother correcting his dangling modifiers). The sum total I was able to gleen from his speech was when he blurted out some words during his final edit the night before and asked me to be his live and interactive thesaurus.

Suffice to say, I was blown away by his credo. Up until that point, we hadn't spent a ton of time waxing poetic about his religiosity, despite the fact that I was a religious studies major for much of his childhood. The extent of his "churching" has consisted of only 5 years as a Unitarian Universalist - exploring what that looks like to believe what feels right within. This is, of course, a far cry from the evangelical leanings of his grandparents, who are newfound and rather devout Pentacostals.

So I was a bit nervous that he might stand up and profess that he believes we all come from aliens. Not that there's anything wrong with that - in all likelihood, we do - how else to explain the long-running success of Mork and Mindy, after all? But as it turns out, he chose to speak of a few of the UU principles, which are statements of belief, if I may purport to speak for the whole, that UU's choose to affirm and live out. He spoke of love, compassion, originality and music - a gutsy proposition for a 13-year old boy - and linked how meaningful each of these are in life relative to the 2nd, 3rd and 7th Principles. And then he ended with one of my favorite quotes - which really did tie it all together rather nicely. He quoted Rumi with:

Today, like every other day, we wake up empty

and frightened. Don't open the door to the study

and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.

There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Indeed there are. And he practiced one form that day wherein he and a couple of the girls from Coming of Age decided to form a trio and play Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah. Holy Son is featured as the cellist - check out the video clip link - it's a fine rendition, especially considering that the three of them practiced together only twice and never for a complete run-through.

Truth be told, I'm kinda jealous about this whole rite of passage thing. Not that there's anything stopping me from writing my own credo but having the opportunity to explore my life journey and faith and beliefs in covenant with other midlifers - it sounds divine. Clearly, I may need to create such a group. Each of the teens works with an adult mentor and many of the mentors express how rich and meaningful the journey was for them, as well - some admit they felt they were experiencing a Coming of Age far more profound than those of the teens.

And in a sense, they were. Bill Plotkin and others in the rite of passage world address and guide people through these various stages from childhood to adolescence to adulthood and finally, into elderhood. The grandest litmus test for most of us is to consider what our own major life passages have looked like and the degree to which they were healthy transitions for us. And yet, it is never too late to reclaim those memories and create ritual around honoring that pivotal life passage, even if does seem to be decades "too late."

I recently came back from a UU retreat, in which we explored this very topic and work. We worked wtih Bill Plotkin's 8-stage soulcentric wheel, which is showcased in his book, Nature and the Human Soul and we considered what healthy and not-so-healthy transitions look like in our society.

Case in point: ask any kid what signs and indicators are there for them to know they've come of age and they'll glibly share it was the moment they were allowed to get a cell phone. Or for Jewish kids, it is often the bragging right of how lavish a party their parents were able to throw for them. Similarly, a teen will likely speak to a frosh moment or a driver's licence or a drinking fest. The midlifer rites in our society aren't any better. Often, you can spot the midlife transition by the crisis rather than the healthy rituals. Affairs and sports cars most often accompany these critical points on the midlife timeline. And naturally, elderhood fairs no better. Elderhood in Western society, rather than being considered an honorable status, is marked by retirement from work and the freedom to engage in frivolous activities (bowling, golfing, RV park antics). Elders are cast aside to the peripheral instead of being called upon to be our greatest wisdom teachers.

Such is the fracture and fragment of our modern egocentric world, in which commercial rules supreme and the soul be damned. Which is why we might begin to see why the road to wholeness is paved with so much mental illness.

OK, off my soapbox. We all know the drill.

So Holy Son will be culiminating his spring Coming of Age experience with a trip in the wilderness this summer with Rite of Passage Journeys. This clip encapsulates much of what the journey means to the participants, both pre and post.

It will be mandatory fun for Holy Son but he's looking forward to it. The expedition will be three weeks in length and will follow a proper anthropological model of seperation, liminality and return. It encompasses various indigenous practices including a solo wilderness quest and fast, a sweat lodge experience, drumming, mask-making, performative ritual drama and yes, the hero's journey ordeal of overcoming the physical challenges that nature likes to throw our way (steep hikes and inclement weather). During this time, we will have no contact with him - it's that liminality and severance thing which is arguably the most critical aspect of healthy individuation.

Should we all be so lucky as to get and/or willingly give ourselves a three-week break from life, the universe and everything.

True confession time - I'm taking one week in August - it will be a 5 day respite to the same neck of the woods Holy Son begins his journey a month earlier. I'm looking forward to some solitude, some writing, hiking and time spent connecting with nature. And just being. Nothing to do and no place be be except in the here and the now. Or rather, in the there and then.

Just 54 more sleeps....but who's counting?

What is necessary, after all, is only this: solitude, vast inner solitude. To walk inside of yourself and meet no one for hours -- that is what you must be able to attain.

Rainer Maria Rilke

What To Remember When Waking

2010-06-07T10:16:00.000-07:00

In that first

hardly noticed

moment

to which you wake,

coming back

to this life

from the other

more secret,

moveable

and frighteningly

honest

world

where everything

began,

there is a small

opening

into the new day

which closes

the moment

you begin

your plans.

What you can plan

is too small

for you to live.

What you can live

wholeheartedly

will make plans

enough

for the vitality

hidden in your sleep.

To be human

is to become visible

while carrying

what is hidden

as a gift to others.

To remember

the other world

in this world

is to live in your

true inheritance.

You are not

a troubled guest

on this earth,

you are not

an accident

amidst other accidents

you were invited

from another and greater

night

than the one

from which

you have just emerged.

Now, looking through

the slanting light

of the morning

window toward

the mountain

presence

of everything

that can be,

what urgency

calls you to your

one love? What shape

waits in the seed

of you to grow

and spread

its branches

against a future sky?

Is it waiting

in the fertile sea?

In the trees

beyond the house?

In the life

you can imagine

for yourself?

In the open

and lovely

white page

on the waiting desk?

~ David Whyte ~

In Praise of the Earth

2010-04-22T09:03:00.000-07:00

by John O'Donohue

(excerpted from To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings)

Let us bless

The imagination of the Earth.

That knew early the patience

To harness the mind of time,

Waited for the seas to warm,

Ready to welcome the emergence

Of things dreaming of voyaging

Among the stillness of land.

And how light knew to nurse

The growth until the face of the Earth

Brightened beneath a vision of color.

When the ages of ice came

And sealed the Earth inside

An endless coma of cold,

The heart of the Earth held hope,

Storing fragments of memory,

Ready for the return of the sun.

Let us thank the Earth

That offers ground for home

And holds our feet firm

To walk in space open

To infinite galaxies.

Let us salute the silence

And certainty of mountains:

Their sublime stillness,

Their dream-filled hearts.

The wonder of a garden

Trusting the first warmth of spring

Until its black infinity of cells

Becomes charged with dream;

Then the silent, slow nurture

Of the seed's self, coaxing it

To trust the act of death.

The humility of the Earth

That transfigures all

That has falled

Of outlived growth.

The kindness of the Earth,

Opening to receive

Our worn forms

Into the final stillness.

Let us ask forgiveness of the Earth

For all our sins against her:

For our violence and poisonings

Of her beauty.

Let us remember within us

The ancient clay,

Holding the memory of seasons,

The passion of the wind,

The fluency of water,

The warmth of fire,

The quiver-touch of the sun

And shadowed sureness of the moon.

That we may awaken,

To live to the full

The dream of the Earth

Who chose us to emerge

And incarnate its hidden night

In mind, spirit, and light.

Charter for Compassion

2009-10-17T16:07:00.000-07:00

CHARTER FOR COMPASSION TRAILER from TED Prize on Vimeo.

On November 12th, I pledge to join the conversation and engage my RE class of 4th graders as we deviate from our World Religions unit on Judaism to discuss the Golden Rule and how compassion lives universally. Where better than in the heart of the Old Testament (Leviticus 19:18) to begin this dialogue on compassion and indeed, The Great Commandment?

If you are not familiar with the Charter for Compassion, or for that matter are not up on the great work of history of religions scholar Karen Armstrong, then run to your nearest bookstore or library and pick up any number of her great, accessible reads, beginning with Through the Narrow Gate to more recently, The Case for God. She has received a fair amount of press as a recent TED 2008 prizewinner for her work in calling for a Judao-Christian-Muslim interfaith call to arms of sorts - with the Golden Rule as the central tenet that would find a first and foremost place in the religious practice of adherents of these and other world faith traditions.

You can view her TED talk here, and see a sample of the Unitarian Universalist religious education curriculum available for RE leaders here.

How will YOU join the conversation?

An Obamanation!

2008-11-05T08:18:00.003-08:00

Ohmigosh.

I lend my happiness into the pool of millions of others in this nation and around the world who sat back and clapped and cheered and cried and stood in witness to this historic event.

Holy Daughter and Holy Son were so happy, they ran out onto the cul de sac, shouting Go Obama! Yah, Obama! We live in a mostly Democrat neighborhood on a mostly Democrat street but the great irony is that we weren't able to vote.

So on behalf of this green cards-in-waiting family, thank you thank you to all who voted, any many for the first time.

As a UU, it means a lot to know that we'll have a President in the White House who gets issues of inequality and social justice. Who sees beyond the blue and red and supposedly-divisive colors on the U.S. ma. More to the point, who sees beyond the U.S. map, period.

I am ecstatic, as any Canadian in the U.S. would be, to know that change is immiment in January. I've been staring at my neighbor's Impeach Bush window sign for more than a year and I can't help but wonder, as I saw it again this morning, what the reaction in the White House was. Blink and miss the news - I had to go searching for it. Apparently, President Bush passed election day quietly. As he has much of this term as President, as well. He gave a public statement this morning that was magnamious in spirit. It will be an interesting time ahead to see how he rides off into the Texas sunset as the most unpopular President recent history has ever known.

But I so can't wait to see Barack, Michelle, their daughters and their new puppy cross the threshold into The White House. It really will be the dawn of a new era in U.S. politics. I don't envy him the work and challenges ahead of him. I worry for his safety but I wish him godspeed and every success. He's campaigned hard yet made it all seem effortless. For this alone, he should be applauded.

Happier days are here on the horizon, if only because the psyche in the nation has lightened.

God bless America.

11.04.08

2008-11-04T08:19:00.008-08:00

It has been exactly 7 years, 1 month and 24 days since I last felt so compelled to park myself in front of CNN News and not move.

Today, on E-Day, D-Day, V-Day or B-Day - a label which changes invariably depending on one's slant - I shall revisit that feeling. It's a similar one, minus the shock. I feel emotional yet guilty for feeling as though I own such a personal stake in all this. I feel helpless if more than a little fearful but most especially, I feel far and away removed from this election process, just as I felt miles apart and worlds away on 9/11 from Ground Zero.

And yet, then as now, I am amazed at the epic show of patriotism that continues to sweep this nation, despite disastrous evidence to the contrary from the powers or lack thereof that be. Everything this country purports to stand for, including its symbol, its tattered and torn flag ~ which has been veritably dragged through international mud these past two administrations ~ has been tried and tested. But still Americans rally God Bless America without missing a beat, and I confess: I stand on the edge of the crowd with a baffled if bemused and respectful look on my face. God really does bless America with a patriotic pride unmatched elsewhere. It's incredible really. History books will surely pay testament to this sentiment, how ever misguided it might seem to us foreigners at the best and worst of times.

Equally incredible is that this epic campaign ~ which is assuredly the longest, most expensive, painful and drawn-out affair I have ever bore witness to (said the outsider on the inside with her nose pressed against the window looking out whilst viewing her reflection from within) ~ is that it entailed little mud-slinging of GWB, and nowhere in this process was there ever a battle cry for impeachment or electoral college reform. That, to me, is seems like a rather grand hoodwink. So much money pissed down the promotional drain, and for what? Pomp and circumstance.

It's been that kinda year of feeling betwixt and between. We weren't able to vote in the Canadian federal election this year, on account of being ex-pats. Nor are we able to vote in the U.S. federal election, on account of being aliens. A legal tax-paying kind, mind you, but an alien and an immigrant and a foreigner nonetheless.

So we stand on that patch of soil between two countries, singing This Land is Your Land, This Land is My Land with equal conviction in both languages and accents - Canadian and American - yet unable to really stand up, be counted and assert our say.

Early indicators point to an Obama Victory. I'd like to hang my hat on that hook, really I would, but I was quite sure Gore had won in 2000. And, of course, he did ~ in more ways than one. Pathetic Presidency or Prized Pulitzer - there's really no contest, is there?

I can't believe Republicans dare to still rally around their dysfunctional political party and have the audacity to believe this country needs yet a third term fear-based ideology, domestic neglect, corporate nepotism, lobbyist greed, and war-mongering. It astounds me. If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll keep getting what you've always got. I remember thinking that exact thing when Bush got elected in. People politely watched Fahrenheit 9/11 in the penultimate days to the 2004 election, and yet still, they voted him back in. It would seem America got what it deserved, or so thoughteth this cynical and disillusioned Canadian, back in the day circa November 2004.

But then a curious if ironic thing happened a few short months later in the spring of 2005. We decided to up and move to the UnUnited States of America. And I began to have a different take altogether and a sudden vested interest in American politics. Funny that, eh?

Well, not really. My disillusionment and mistrust of Americanthink has not dissipated. I see the map below and I'm astounded to see how red it is. And not just in red states. I encountered two serious Sarah Palin costume-clad gals on Friday who saw their costume not as mockery but as starstruck tribute. They like her, they really do!

And so, I can't help but feel apprehensive today. I want to believe but maybe all this decade of doom, gloom and fear is beginning to rub off on me, too.

I mentioned to Holy Hub last night that perhaps Obama's grandmother passing away on the eve of the election was a good thing. Maybe she's heading to heaven to sway the Big Kahuna. To which Holy Hub responded, "Yeah, well what if God is a Republican?"

It was a horrible seed of a thought to plant in my brain just before nodding off. I slept with one eye open all night because when push comes to shove comes to hightailing out of Dodge, I'd hate to be part of the exodus alluded to below so soon after pulling up temporal roots here.

*******************

From the MANITOBA HERALD, Canada:

The flood of American liberals sneaking across the border into Canada
has intensified in the past week, sparking calls for increased
patrols to stop the illegal immigration.

The possibility of a McCain/Palin election is prompting the exodus
among left-leaning citizens who fear they'll soon be required to
hunt, pray, and agree with Bill O'Reilly.

Canadian border farmers say it's not uncommon to see dozens of
sociology professors, animal rights activists and Unitarians
crossing their fields at night.

'I went out to milk the cows the other day, and there was a
Hollywood producer huddled in the barn,' said Manitoba farmer Red
Greenfield, whose acreage borders North Dakota.

The producer was cold, exhausted, an d hungry. 'He asked me if I
could spare a latte and some free-range chicken. When I said I
didn't have any, he left. Didn't even get a chance to show him my
screenplay, eh?'

In an effort to stop the illegal aliens, Mr. Greenfield erected higher
fences, but the lib erals scaled them. So he tried installing
speakers that blare Rush Limbaugh across the fields. 'Not real
effective,' he said. 'The liberals still got through, and Rush
annoyed the cows so much they wouldn't give milk.'

Officials are particularly concerned about smugglers who meet
liberals near the Canadian border, pack them into Volvo station
wagons, drive them across the border and leave them to fend for
themselves. 'A lot of these people are not prepared for rugged
conditions,: an Ontario border patrolman said. 'I found one carload
without a drop of drinking water. They did have a nice little Napa
Valley cabernet, though.'

When liberals are caught, they're sent back across the border,
often wailing loudly that they fear retribution from conservatives.
Rumors have been circulating about the McCain administration
establishing re-education camps in which liberals will be forced to
shoot wolves from airplanes, deny e volution, and act out drills
preparing them for the Rapture.

In recent days, liberals have turned to sometimes ingenious ways of
crossing the border. Some have taken to posing as senior citizens
on bus trips to buy cheap Canadian prescription drugs. After
catching a half-dozen young vegans disguised in powdered wigs,
Canadian immigration authorities began stopping busses and quizzing
the supposed senior-citizen passengers on Perry Como and Rosemary
Clooney hits to prove they were aliv e in the '50's. 'If they can't
identify the accordion player on 'The Lawrence Welk Show,' we get
suspicious about their age,' an official said.

Canadian citizens have complained that the illegal immigrants are
creating an organic broccoli shortage and renting all the good
Susan Sarandon movies. 'I feel sorry for American liberals, but the
Canadian economy just can't support them,' an Ottawa resident said.
'How many art-history English majors does one country need?'

Political Truth or Dare

2008-09-24T15:17:00.006-07:00

Forgive me Father for I have sinned. It has been many moons since my last blog post.

Summer had a way of seducing me into that comfortably numb place of apathy about all things religion and politics. Life is short, so is summer – why sweat the big stuff? Or is it small stuff? I can’t rightly discern anymore.

Truth
I no longer know what I know for sure, so snafu are the times. All I know is that by the time the Democratic Convention rolled around, I was more than ready to escape out of Dodge to Orcas Island, which is hours from mainland and miles apart in liberal aesthetics. Islanders have life figured out. I gotta get me some of that living one fine day.

Unfortunately, returning home entailed being bombarded with the Republican National Convention in the mass media on a 24/7 basis. These conventions are fascinating on so many levels, not the least of which is that they are packed to the rafters with regular Joes and Josephines who I would presume, lead a relatively normal life somewhere else other than as sign holders and groupies at a political conference.

In Canada, our national political parties are lucky if they can elicit the interest of several hundred people, let alone tens of thousands, make that millions in the Neilson ratings, during their election year convention weekends. Such is one of our many attitudinal and altitudinal differences. Heck, our politicians call national elections less than two months out. How’s that for quick, painless and frugal campaigning? Sure, there’s the regular mud-slinging, although a politician’s religiosity is still considered relatively sacred ground and mostly irrelevant to the task at hand. But the line between public and private life is still blurred. In the course of the past week, no less than three NDP (progressive social democratic views on the left side of the spectrum) party candidates have resigned over allegations of pot smoking and public nudity.

Thank God for politicians – who else would we lampoon nationally?

But thank God for short elections, as well. Enduring three years of active campaigning, not to mention innuendos, mudslinging and bi-partisan slander at the expense of real world news – to say nothing of productive government reform or lack thereof in the interim years – it begins to weigh on the psyche like a dead, lead weight.

Little wonder some of us begin to feel desperate for escape.

Or begin thinking mathematically. 43 days until the election. $1 billion in total campaign spending. Two+ years of active campaigning, if one adds to the equation Obama’s coming out party on Oprah and Audacity of Hope book launch in the fall of 2006.

A billion dollars. That’s a large chunk of change. That equates to the gross domestic product of India. That’s sick, and I don’t mean sick as in chill, cool, and far out. I mean sick as in demented and deranged and dysfunctional and decrepit.

Especially since these millions upon millions of dollars end up getting sucked into the media slot machine vortex so that Internet bells might ring and news junkies then salivate over the spat out and regurgitated remains that constitute soundbite belches and cliché-ridden sentence fragments on some obscure journalist’s blog.

Dare
Which is why it was laugh out loud funny to listen to Fox News’ outcry over the article of CBC "opinion column" pundit, Heather Mallick, with her rather colourful take on Sarah Palin a couple of weeks back. Fox apparently took offense at Mallick’s harsh critique of Palin as a white trash “type” with a porn actress look, “a permanently alarmed expression,” and “a voice that could peel the plastic seal off your new microwave.”

What blondie on Fox News was most incensed by, however, was not so much redneck and hick typecasting which proved “incendiary”~ it was that the CBC, as Canada’s publicly-funded broadcasting corporation, would not censor such free wheelin’ and egads! ~ misogynist speech about their new Alaskan husky bitch. How dare Canada have its own version of the first amendment?

It’s nothing if not humorous and more than a little sadly ironic, actually. Because at this point in my Fox News diatribe, I beg to question: isn’t this media indignation a little like the pot calling the kettle black?

As much as Fox News purports to be fair and balanced (and I’m a size 4 - when are clothing manufacturers going to get their labeling right?!), we all know it’s the embedded journalist cog in the Republican wheel of theocratic media feeds. The public gets it, but in this post-RSS age of MEdia syndication, we’re willing to tune out the offensive in favor of a more palatable and digestive news source. One that lets us sleep in salacious pleasure with our integrity each night. Not that Fox News doesn’t permit the same for so many. In true supply/demand fashion, a super-sized, zombaic graveyard of conservative Americans live, eat, breath, love it and stand in line for another heaping plate of it. Ratings and advertising demand proves this and indeed, so too, do the Republican advance polling numbers.

But the indignation did not stop there. Is that how Canadians really feel?, blondie went on to question, in what I’ll take to be a rhetorical tone, if only for the sake of my precarious footing on this rapidly-sinking American soil. The last time I can remember Canada being blanketed on such a wholesale basis was last December’s snowstorm. Suffice to say, it was equally as cold.

I get that she’s demanding an apology – apology is practically written into the polite and unassuming fabric of Canada. (C stands for cold; A is our apology for that; N is for northern backwater; A is another apology for that, too – we are very sorry; D is for drunkards; and A is our third apology – we are very, very sorry we have better beer than you do, America).

And heck, I feel downright compelled as an Americanadian to bow down in shame. It’s the typical Canadian response. Geewhilickers, Fox News, on behalf of all Canadians (because I’m magnamious like that – I’m sorry but it’s true - such that I would dare want to speak for all my fellow Canucks)… we’re so very sorry to have offended your Dominionist sensibilities. I mean what does that Heather Mallick know anyways? She said it herself ~ she out-hicks Palin on the small town front.

But unlike most Canadian news stories that enjoy less than two seconds of fame on American networks, the blasphemous stench from this one endures. Greta Van Susteren went on record to denounce Mallick as a pig, a comment that arguably posits Greta in the same pile of trough slop, journalistically speaking. Still others have been equally vocal. “Those morons up north just can’t keep their ignorant mouths shut when it’s really none of their socialist business…the People’s Republic of Canada is no friend of the USA,” rants one fellow, whom I would have to guess, has close familial ties to Levi Johnston. He makes a valid point though. Who are we Canucks to diss Americans? The unwritten rule within dysfunctional families hints that only family members can pick apart the system or lack thereof. Outsiders should mind their own business.

Indeed. North is north and south is south, and never the twain shall meet, especially when it comes to maters of patriotism, healthcare universalism, and hockey supremacy. As much as we straddle a common border, share a continent, speak the same language, and have similar consumerist tendencies, we are two wholly other worlds apart. We are like cheek-kissing cousins who oft get confused about whether to kiss left or right, how to turn the other cheek, or even when to bare the bottom ones.

Left, right, left, right, left. All is not fair in love, war and politics.

It would be easy to label Canada’s own bi-partisan angst a Democrat versus Republican one, but in fact, the integral differences between Canada’s two main political factions – the Conservative party and the Liberal Party. To suggest that the Conservatives are to Republicans as the Liberals are to Democrats is to make a gross error in generalization. The spectrum spread between the two is ever so slight as to render them both virtually centrist, give or take a degree or two in spectrum-speak. The Green Party and NDPs are the more socialist parties yet they only ever manage to garner a small portion of the left wing vote….too small to count, really. And I won’t even speak of the Bloc Quebecois Party except to mumble Sacriste Tabernacle under my breath and something else about merde that doesn’t necessitate repeating.

And so, to borrow a clichéic paragraph from standard journalism pages a moment, our systems are very much apples to oranges. Yet similarities persist. We have our out with the old, in with the new voting patterns, too. And often, what we find is that it’s six of one, half a dozen of the other – there often is no greener grass on either side of the so-called great political divide, to push the clichés to shove, if I may. Canadians are typecast for being just as bi-partisan when, in actual fact, most Canadians are equally chimerical in their wolf/sheep political views as Americans. It would be nice to think that most of us stand for only conservative values or only liberal issues, but the fact remains, most of us, aren’t that easy to pigeonhole.

Case in point, do the Republicans actually think Palin speaks to the feminist vote? I was pro-Hillary from a feminist perspective but not when it came to certain political issues. Palin, however, is the antithesis of female empowerment in this nation.

Holy Son confessed to his grandparents while visiting Alberta this summer, that if McCain won the election, we were moving back to Canada. The jury was still out on that one this past summer actually, but with Palin as the Republican ticket sidekick now, a green card re-assessment would definitely be in order.

We can do little more, as betwixt and between citizens, than cross our fingers and trust that this time, Americans are sick and bloody tired of having their good name tarnished and sullied internationally. With war-fatigue at an all time high, the mortgage industry in ruin, national debt at a chart-topping level, and financial markets in near collapse, there has never been a more opportune time to take a chance on change and dare I suggest, begin to rebuild the empire at a grass-roots community level.

I know it’s audacious, but one can still hope.

The Great Divide

2008-07-28T11:11:00.009-07:00

Despite the miles between the Puget Sound and Knoxville, Tennessee, yesterday's church shooting hits close to home.

For they, the murdered two, the wounded seven and the remaining traumatized congregants at Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville, TN, are my brave brethren in matters of faith, tolerance and values.

And yet, so too, is Jim Adkisson the shooter, my kin. I pray for him, as well, in this, his darkest hour. If I am to be perfectly honest in these quiet moments of the aftermath, I must then confess my own sins: the hate and fear that eats at him against liberals like us UUs also oft lives in me in no small degree when I am faced with tunnel vision, conservative religiosity; and manifests itself in bewilderment and anger when I see headlines like this.

As much as love is the doctrine of our church, the quest for truth our sacrament, and service our prayer, I don't always feel peace and harmony when we dwell together. I look around and marvel at our diversity - I love to see the gays and lesbians with their arms draped around one another - how many church homes afford a safe environ within which they might do so? And I love to see evidence of mult-faith leanings in the room - such as hijabs and kippahs and bright red forehead tikka bindis - as well as the plurality of ethnicities present in the sanctuary.

But I also notice those forever absent ~ the ultra-conservative fundamentalists of every ilk within our communities who are considerably less tolerant and not nearly as socially just. I won't just pick on Christians here - for there are countless millions in this nation and on this planet who wouldn't be caught dead in a UU Church, except perhaps on a suicide mission, as Mr. Adkisson set out to undertake yesterday. That's alarming to me.

And yet who am I to cast stones? I could no more in good conscience sit and worship at Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas or amongst the FLDS and any others who yearn for Zion than my father-in-law, an endtime Christian, might pretend to feel harmonious and at peace hanging out in fellowship at my UU church on any given Sunday. It would be a huge form of torture for him and when I set my worldview aside in order to appreciate his, I get that. This is the great and grievous divide of religion, and I feel it acutely, if only because I often think at times such as this, that church as a construct propagates divisive politics and tribalism ~ and I say this knowing full well that our non-doctrinal, non-dogmatic church is not like the others.

But nevertheless, we appear to "stand for" liberalism and tolerance, and even shades of "affluence," if Mr. Adkisson's resentment of liberals taking jobs away from him is any indication. And this scares me ~ which is evil in and of itself because fear breeds hate and hate breeds division and division breeds othering.

I have absolutely no soteriological yearnings except insofar as I hope to have one last taste of buttered popcorn whilst sitting down for that last private flashback screening of This Was Your Life, Holy. And OK, I'll admit, I wouldn't so much mind if there was a free-fall bungee drop at the end of brightly-lit tunnel, where I could then practice a somersault or five dozen before leaping to either nirvanic extinction, or that next subway stop in the journey. But apart from those minor indulgences, I pray only that we earthlings might find a way to apply salvific cravings and heaven and hell motifs to the ones of our own making right here on earth.

I'm nothing if not an idealist. I really do think the Real Thing is building the world a home, and furnishing it with love, and growing apple trees and honey trees and snow-white turtle doves. And let's not forget the part about teaching the world to sing in perfect harmony.

The trick to 'New Eden' hunting is not in searching out greener grass but rather, in finding the common ground - the space between the dichotomies and polarities that divide us all. It's not in Birmingham, Alabama - where gun fire still rhymes acutely with children's choir. It ain't in Topeka, where nothing, even a funeral, is sacred anymore. It's nowhere near Eldorado, Texas and speaking of Zion, it sure ain't in Jerusalem, (if pilfering Obama's Wailing Wall note for profit is any indication). And sadly, it isn't in Knoxville, Tennessee either.

But one fine day it might (nay it shall) be in all those places at once, wherein we dwell together in peace and unity. Peace starts from within as the little light, the beacon, we shine for others in namaskar omniscience, so that they might find their way to safe harbour from that lost, lonely and dark place. It is the light we illumine in honour of treating all people kindly, because they are our brothers and sisters, of taking good care of the earth, in all it's heaven and hell projections - and in trying to live lives filled with goodness and love, because that is how we will become the best men and women we can be.

Yesterday, today and forever more, Greg McKendry and Linda Kraeger were and continue to be those candles, those beacons. May their Love and Light never die.

My Artist's Prayer

2008-06-22T12:14:00.003-07:00

I'm still working through Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. I actually went back and retraced my steps somewhat, given that a new member joined and was eager to start from the beginning. I was happy to accommodate, if only because I had lost my artistic way somewhere at Chaptuer 6 - abundance. Hmmm...interesting.

So now my local group has dwindled to just a couple of us ~ I attribute the attrition to the fact that it's free, that self-commitment is tough psychological work and that the structure lends itself to working from beginning to end. There are a few newbie members who lurk in the background, happy to associate themselves with the group but leary to come out and give it a try.

This week's chapter is the 7th in the 12 step series - Recovering a Sense of Connection. I have been pondering lately the connection between being left handed and tapping into right brain sensibilities, as it relates to connecting to spirit and higher creativity. And lo and behold, what should I stumble across but a recent comment on my neurotheology post a few months back, in which a keen viral marketer (perhaps the good doctor herself), exhuberantly spouted the wisdom and message of Jill Bolte Taylor's My Stroke of Insight memoir. You can hear her speak here on Ted.com.

Anyways, a couple of chapters back, we were encouraged to write our own Artist's Prayer. I wrote mine a month and half back - just before I fell off the artist's cart.

Here is mine in all its Wordle glory, glory, hallelujah.

Soldier Boy

2008-05-20T07:07:00.005-07:00

We had the infamous torturing of Iraqis at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and now it seems a certain American soldier has stooped to a new all-time low by using the Quran as target practice.

Let's face it, this war has done more to tarnish the name of Americans worldwide than anything else in quite some time. And the simple crux of the matter is this: it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. America is as America does in the world. Did Michelle Obama really say and mean that contentious pride comment in relation to how she feels about her homeland? Of course she did. Ask the average American and they'll guiltily admit the same - they're ashamed even as they cry for their beloved country. And more to the point, they're ashamed that they're less than proud to sport an American flag with the same kind of abandon that they used to on the Fourth of July, because patriotism is carefully seam-stitched into every star and stripe on the flag of this brave and free land.

And while one soldier's actions hardly define the mosaic of thought and ideology in this nation, they do speak volumes about what kind of dangerous frontier games are really being played out there in the killing fields. It is random and calculated acts of stupidity like this that ensure wars get fought again in the next generation, in the interests of redeeming the injustices done to one's forefathers.

In the year following our move to the U.S., I used to blog indignantly and incessantly about politics and religion and what I called the metonymical madness of it all, wherein the part - in this case, the soldier - really does stand for the whole on foreign lands.

Little wonder then that William F. Shulz, a former UU Minister, head of the UUA and past Executive Director of Amnesty International, argues as much in his various books and lectures, most notably when he speaks of defending human rights as a matter of mandatory public relations and crisis management for America.

It is a bitter pill to swallow - this business of admitting that the euphoric balloon has popped which has the hungry, homeless baby now crying in her broken-wheeled stroller. History will not be so kind to America circa new millennium - this much we know to be true.

In the absence of a spoonful of sugar, bitter pills are best administered crushed and crumbled. And perhaps that's as apropos a metaphor as any for the medicinal measures necessary to contend with the fall and some semblance of resurrection of the empire in the decades to come. There is something quite humbling and hopeful about admitting disease and agreeing to rehabilitation treatment and therapy.

That is not to say I hold much hope that U.S. foreign policies will change from a mindset of war and to one of peace and love. I am nothing if not a Pollyanna, it's true; but I do not believe that even Barack Obama can lead us there in the immediate future. Having said that, I do believe hope is indeed audacious and that it is a much higher ground than the cesspool of resignation and the oxymoronic place of uneasy patience the Republicans would have us stand upon.

But I have come to see that just as that lone soldier is representative of his nation, I the Canadian immigrant (deemed a former patriot by my own government and an alien by this New southern Eden, if only because it suits the Bush agenda of tribalism and "othering") have my own civic responsibility as a soon-to-be green card holder to embody the peacekeeping ethos of my people and my own convictions. In matters of God, duty and country, the dictum must still remain, "'This above all, to thine own self be true."

I have done my fair share of soapbox raging against the republic, it's true. I archived no less than 200 pages yesterday - most of them rants of contempt and civil disobedience.

I wore my fury like a badge of honour and took considerable pride in maintaining my stalwart pose - you know the one: arms crossed and wide, Larry Craigian stance in which one foot was in and one foot was outside the cubicle, so to speak.

All that much better to straddle the border, I would think, and not have to be wholly committed to either side. I would watch lips move countless times these past years in performative utterance of the pledge of allegiance and marvel at the truth, lies and videotape of American nationalism, all the while pondering what the average American thinks when they declare this pledge. Do they really mean it? And if so, I'd wonder to myself in those brief moments of time and space where sacred and secular meet in mimetic discord: does a tiny piece of them die a mini-death every time said allegiance to their one God-given nation results in actions antithetical to true liberty and justice?

And yet a funny (funny as in queer, strange, surreal funny) thing has happened these past three years. I have gone from feeling like Jane Goodall - all human and wholly-other as I studied and documented the behaviours and habits of the apes; to feeling a kind of hybridity born of ex-pat assimilation and outsider perspectives. My rant can no longer be the apologetic I Am Canadian rant of Molson Canadian beer fame.

My latest rant is more cross-cultural and North American treaty in flavour - it is the rant of Americanadians who see their respective nations with a kind of displaced and double vision, such that one view informs and strengthens their place as a global citizen and compatriot, rather than tribal member and patriot. It means I am apt to get teary-eyed when singing Oh Canada or The Star Spangled Banner, and that I am equally guilty of suspicion when I hear the war-mongering rhetoric of either nation - be it on CBC or C-Span.

But to be honest, my rant has been fairly non-existent lately. I gave up on following the political race - it's just too long and tedious a marathon and watching the rabbits run countless expensive laps is quite frankly, exhausting, dizzying and disheartening. Especially given that, in Canada, we're accustomed to holding a one-day, not a two-year, federal election.

So I stepped down from the soapbox quite some time ago and retreated to the space of apathy between the dichotomies. I don't wholeheartedly endorse that space either - it's a bit like standing at the centre of the teeter totter. Yet it has done much for quieting my rage and bringing about a certain inner peace of mind. If the only change and world peace I can properly effect now is my own, then I will claim that as success.

Until I see headlines like today's Quran controversy that elicit my knee-jerk rage, once again. Perhaps if we just stopped calling this human thing a race, then the good leaders of the world might see fit to stop competing as though there was actually a finish line with a gold medal to show off.

What's been done in the name of Jesus?
What's been done in the name of Buddha?
What's been done in the name of Islam?
What's been done in the name of man?
What's been done in the name of liberation?
And in the name of civilization?
And in the name of race?
And in the name of peace?

Everybody
Loves to see
Justice done
On somebody else

Can you tell me how much bleeding
It takes to fill a word with meaning?
And how much, how much death
It takes to give a slogan breath?
And how much, how much, how much flame
Gives light to a name
For the hollow darkness
In which nations dress?

Everybody
Loves to see
Justice done
On somebody else

Everybody's seen the things they've seen
We all have to live with what we've been
When they say charity begins at home
They're not just talking about a toilet and a telephone
Got to search the silence of the soul's wild places
For a voice that can cross the spaces
These definitions that we love create --
These names for heaven, hero, tribe and state

Everybody
Loves to see
Justice done
On somebody else

"Justice" - Bruce Cockburn

Born a Tribe, DiaTribe

2008-04-20T14:21:00.017-07:00

"We light this chalice to remind ourselves..to take good care of the earth, because it is our home."

UU Chalice Lighting Response

As I look out upon the blanket of snow that is covering these parts of Seattle and the Puget Sound region, it's hard not to think about earth and climate and ecotheology, especially in the penultimate couple of days leading up to Earth Day 2008.

I love how the words above find themselves sandwiched in the space between loving kindness for our fellow brethren on this planet, and living lives of goodness and love. Earth is the sacred ground upon which this covenant finds communitas, just as the wind becomes a Holy Spirit that whispers the Truth and Beauty of these words.

I think there was a huge part of me that resisted the notion of Church for years because no religious institutional construct could ever come close to my ideal of what Church should look like.

The closest I've come to discovering such a sacred place was in the environs of a couple of outdoor chapels in the Kananaskis foothills of the Canadian Rockies. And while I still consider nature to be the greatest of all the houses of worship on this planet ~ from the beaches, the mountains, the meadows, the forest, the rivers, the canyons, the deserts, and the tundra, to the Great Lake and ocean waters; I have since reconciled my notions of holiness relative to place.

I now see nature in more panentheistic terms - that is to say that I recognize that the no-longer sentient and seemingly profane wood in the pews can be a glorious creation of the divine tree from which it came, and that the tranquil, wooded view from our sanctuary is a blessed sight to behold.

Today in church, we sang This Land is Your Land. Long time no sing that classic folk song. We sang a more globally-correct version that mapped a vision "from Patagonia to the Azores Islands," rather than the Americanized one that saw only "from California to New York Island," or even the Canuck version I found myself automatically singing today as befit my own tribal upbringing, which had me imagining the limits of the land "from Bonavista to Vancouver Island."

And it got me wondering: Why are people so scared of having a global vision? What is it about one-world sensibilities that scares so many? And for that matter, why must we be so tribal and totemic and contentious and greedy and wasteful and toxic and so fearful of humane response? We kill our earth softly every day and in doing so, we annihilate pieces of our collective soul like so many piercing pinholes in the fabric of existence.

I don't pray much but when I do, it's inevitably for a quantum shift in Worldview. Not to dissipate plurality but rather to really and truly integrate it in both thought and deed ~ this whole, great big, messy co-existent, web of life. Think about all those sexy in words for a minute...Innovate, Integrate, Involve, Intrigue, Ineffable, Indigo, Infinite, Integral.

We're all in this together. It is your land, my land, and ultimately, no one's land because no single one of us can hold claim and title except through our good deeds. To take good care of the earth, because it is our home.

I am the Earth
And the Earth is me.
Each blade of grass,
Each honey tree,
Each bit of mud,
And stick and stone
Is blood and muscle,
Skin and bone.
And just as I
Need every bit
Of me to make
My body fit,
So Earth needs
Grass and stone and tree
And things that grow here
Naturally.
That's why we
Celebrate this day.
That's why across
The world we say:
As long as life,
As dear, as free,
I am the Earth
And the Earth is me.

Jane Yolen

Desperate Theology

2008-04-15T11:46:00.005-07:00

One of my seven deadly TV sins is Desperate Housewives. As I always say, takes one to know one.

A new episode aired this past Sunday and the theme was religion. It was only a matter of time before God came to Wisteria Lane (shoddy ratings owing to viewer attrition, stale satire, a few months long writer's strike, and show hiatus notwithstanding).

God entered stage north when the tornado struck - in all its mysteria, hysteria and Wisteria wonder. That was where we left off a few months ago.

God was asked to stick around awhile or so it might seem. Sunday's episode opens with Lynette deciding - post-cancer and tornado scares - that she wants to start going to church. So she approachs Bree, the lesser of all irreligious evils called friends, and Bree offers to take Lynette, her reluctant couch-slothing, football-loving hubby, and their four amiable children to her Presbyterian Church. All all was well and swell until Lynette dared raise her hand during the sermon to ask the Pastor some pointed questions concerning that oh-so awkward topic of good, God and evil in the Garden of Eden.

Bree was mortified and later suggested that Lynette might be better off with the Unitarians because she heard that with them, "anything goes."

Someone at the Unitarian Universalist Association must have been loving the timing of that desperate if disparaging dialogue, coinciding as it did with the latest UUA ad campaign, which includes full-page ad spreads in Time magazine and the like. Perhaps that line was even bought and paid for in pop culture fashion. If it was, kudos to the UUA for doing some saavy church planting in TVland. Who rightly knows.

Who knows indeed. In fact, who knows might well be the two words I would have chosen, rather than "anything goes," to describe us them thar Unitarians. At the very least, it would have been "seek freely."

On the topic of UUism though, I've found myself not quite evangelizing or spreading the good news of UUs these past couple of weeks, so much as setting the record straight. One young Mom I know wants to find a new church home for her pre-teen daughter ~ one far removed from the church of her childhood. She may indeed find what she's looking for in our humble abode. She's planning to attend an upcoming Coming of Age ceremony to hear how our daring young 13-year olds articulate their own personal theologies. In two words? Damn inspiring.

A few other members that I've not so coincidentally met through my other community spheres lately have validated how important the fourth principle of UUism is to them ("a free and responsible search for truth and meaning") with respect to the religious direction they want for their children.

Another friend of mine I spoke with this week admits that God is Who and what's keeping her from going to Church. The latest UU print ad in Time magazine this month (with the tag line, "Is God keeping you from going to church?") succinctly speaks to her truth.

And as for buddy, my newfound investment advisor who attends a "non-denominational" Christian church here in town...I dunno, I get the impression he was a tad worried about my weird hybrid breed and brand of religion, on account of the dangers of relativism and humanism and the Immanent rather than Transcendent mask we UUs tend to place on God's face. I smile, raise my hands and assure him I'm in no more danger than him on my bike ride through life, even if I do appear to be pedaling a little crazily and yelling, "look ma, no dogma!" at the top of my lungs.

I like that I attend a church where I can freely raise my hand, ask a question of Peter the Pontificator at the Pulpit during service, and know that he'll have no more THE definitive answer than I do. If anything, he knows exactly how to frame the Definitive, Divinitive questions. And to this I give a reverential bow and murmur Amen, brother.

Because what I've noticed is that when God isn't busy hanging out at the busy corner of Sacred and Profane streets, panhandling for us to notice His presence, (or on Wisteria Lane for that matter), he's meditating and chillin' in the Gaps. As a fellow UU friend insists, this is the precious if precarious place upon which we all do well to stand. He calls it "the space within the dichotomies." Now if that's not cosmic, kismet and inane, I don't know what is.

And what do ya know? I've found a couple more two-word phrases to add to my UU description peace pipe and smoke ~ "don't know" and "what is."

In deed and blessed be. :)

1 Artist Way NW

2008-04-02T14:58:00.005-07:00

I've started a local 12-chapter "recovery" tribe centered around following the principles and exercises outlined in Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way ~ which, at their core, are really spiritual truths, of sorts. The book is 15 years old but the work is timeless, and is primarily focused around treating creativity as a sacred expression.

Keats, Gandhi et al nailed it when they declared Beauty to be Truth and Truth, Beauty. I believe all art great and small to be an expression of the Divine so this book speaks to me.

At its most basic level, the homework entails:

a) Morning Pages (writing 3 pages of stream-of-consciousness journalling first thing each morning;
b) The Artist's Date - making an artist's date with Self once a week to let my inner Artiste out to play
c) Weekly Walks - walking each week, ideally 3 times, to connect and commune with nature.

So we the people begin meeting tonight. I'm mucho excited about finally 're-claiming' my inner-artiste. I've never really allowed myself permission to delve down this road - be it writing, painting, collaging, whatevering. I allowed the spark to be snuffed out by others in grade school and then made up all sorts of excuses why I shouldn't take Art in junior high and high school.

But what I've noticed is that no matter how much I deny it, my inner Creator wants to ooze out anyways. Like when I help the kids with their creative projects for school. Or Halloween costumes. Or whatever.

So tonight marks the beginning of this reclamation process. To be continued...

Googling God

2008-03-12T19:39:00.007-07:00

The funny thing about maintaining an eclectic blog/guide to the galaxy and all things cosmic, kismet and inane, (in which I wax and wane profusely on matters ranging from God to food to books to cartoons to cults to politics to life, the universe and everything in between), is that I'm never quite sure who's going to stumble on in.

The Google search strings lately have been wild and wacky, by cracky.

In no particular order, they include:

21st century thought on what is sacred and what is profane and where do the two cross (at the corner of Church and State?)
plymouth rocks (you betcha)
almsgiving procures for us admission (alrighty almighty then)
words that follow holy (ummmm, schmidt?)
mystics and experience of eschatology (I didn't know anyone Googled eschatology - cool)
blood holier than water (so are donuts)
golden blood alien (OK, that's creepy)
Eucharistic holy spells (is that an oxymoron?)
third degree (a Master Mason wannabe, I'm guessing)
Gumby limbo image (I get tons of hits for Gumby - plymouth rocks but Gumby rules)
Eckhart Tolle the antichrist (poor Eckhart - he's getting a ton of hits on my site)
if I should die before I wake words (if you should die before you wake, you probably don't have to worry about setting the alarm anymore)
blood is thicker than water analogy (but water freezes and so might hell by the time you find any answers to that search here at holyschmidtland)
religion and blood to save a life (there but by the grace of God go thee)
are most holy wars about religion (is this a rhetorical question or would you like me to answer this?)
red secret cult blood to blood (I'm going to Google this one myself - I'm curious now)
pilgrimess moves (yup, 22 times in my life to be exact)
lego workshop Alberta (lego my Vegreville egg-o)
bloody guts (that's what I get for typing graphic words on my blog)
ancient rivers polluted (and modern ones too)
controversy of religious symbols in chocolate (a good slogan might be, bite me)
death and glory and schmitt (not necessarily in that order, I'm sure)
etymology of word jihad (in a word - struggle)
questioning the truth of midnight in the garden of good and evil (this site should actually be titled, 'questioning the truth')
oprah tolle hubbard connection (I had to Google this one myself - go ahead, I dare you)
the strangling game (OK, that is beyond creepy)
holy cards, holy.com (all holy roads lead here, I guess)
meaning of burquah (male oppression)
menstrual mysteries eckhart oprah (say wah?)
jesus tongue (no comment)
origin of no guts no glory (beats me)
new earth theology theodicy (clearly a scholarly search but if you're looking for the theodicy of Eckhart, start with chapter 4 - Pain Body)
indian goddess blood sacrifice (I'm never blogging about blood again)
blood drain acts (I rest my case)

And so I guess there's not much else to add, except to ask: What Scooby would do? Because I've always wanted to have that search string in my list of big life questions.

Giving Jesus the Third Degree

2008-02-27T11:41:00.008-08:00

The following text, written by Deepak Chopra in December 2005 as a blog posting on the Huffington Post, seems a good synopsis and was likely the creative seed for his latest book, entitled The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore, which hit bookstands this week. Little wonder his Antichrist Google ratings have gone up in recent weeks.

Taking the Bible literally makes no sense to moderate and liberal Christians, and one of the most urgent tenets of literalism, that Jesus will soon return to Earth to render judgment and save the righteous, seems like a fantasy. Secular society has no need for Jesus to return. It leaves each citizen to privately choose a religion, or to not choose one, and all other matters fall outside the realm of faith.

So it came as a shock to secular society when millions of people couldn't take their minds off the return of Jesus, so much so that Judgment Day colors everything else they think about--family, relationships, morals, business, politics. Speaking for myself, I came to terms with this issue in the following way: We are indeed waiting for the return of Jesus, and in this "we" I include those non-Christians who want to live in a tolerant, compassionate relationship with everyone. But if Jesus returns, there are three choices of who he will be.
The first Jesus was historical, a rabbi living in first-century Palestine whose life profoundly changed religious belief in the West. The second Jesus is the core of a religion, which has its particular dogmas, rituals, priests, churches, and scriptures. These two Jesuses are undeniably real, but the second one--the Jesus of organized religion--has been subject to human whim and change. Right now, if you are not a fundamentalist, he seems to have been hijacked in the service of intolerance, bigotry, and war. A religion that began in the name of love has reached almost its exact opposite--not for the first time, of course.
The third Jesus is not rigidly sectarian. He falls into the world tradition of spirituality. This Jesus speaks for peace and love; his morality includes all peoples; his Father is a universal deity. I was well acquainted with the third Jesus as a child in India. I could love and revere him. It never occurred to me that he would ever become an enemy. This Jesus doesn't speak of non-Christians as pagans. He raises human nature to its highest ideal, along with the saints and sages who have guided humanity for centuries.

I don't think that well-intentioned fundamentalists mean to pervert the third Jesus; I suspect they've never heard of him. He has one great disadvantage, however. You can't own him. You can't say "he's all mine and nobody else's." The third Jesus won't work if you need to justify a war, if you need evil enemies, or you want to brand "them" as godless.

Sadly, many fundamentalists need Jesus for all these purposes. So the third Jesus might not return to them, but if Christianity is to survive among moderate and liberal believers, who used to be the mainstream of the religion, won't it take the return of the third Jesus? The first one is long deceased, the second has fallen prey to politics and narrow-mindedness. What alternative is there? Loss of faith and a slide into deeper and deeper meaninglessness. that would be a terrible fate for all of us, not just the Christians.

Hmmm.....what would Jesus think of all this fuss and debate?

Blood, Guts & Glory

2008-02-11T11:58:00.000-08:00

I donated blood a week and half ago for the first time ever.

To be honest, I was a tad nervous about doing so, giving my pusillanimity towards needle poking and such. Nothing like a couple of amnios and epidurals to breed an irrational aversion to needles. But phobic apologetics aside, I lived to die another day, although my arm still sports a rash and is sore even today.

Holy Daughter wasn't so sure about this. I'm not certain what she thought said donation meant to my health in the scheme of things - I suspect she assumed my donation was a life & death, quid pro quo economic equation - my pint to help save another life must somehow mean I was risking mine.

She made a point of telling everyone within earshot that day that her Mom had given blood, and she went to great lengths to ensure I was drinking my fair share of water. She also harboured a morbid fascination with wanting all the gory details - did it hurt? did I watch the blood drain out? how much did they take? what colour was the blood? When I told her it was more burgundy- rown than fire engine red, she was completely grossed out.

Bloody. Well. Rite.

In religious terms, blood is like that. Sacred, sacrificial, economic, taboo, impure and infinitely profane. It is the holiest yet potentially, most polluted river of life.

Tertullian said it best in this regard when he declared that "the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church." In fact, if you look closely at the foundation of every religion, you'll find blood (or the absence of, as in the mythos of virginal birth) to be the very ink stain of the prophets.

Shi'ites flagellate themselves each Feast of Ashoura in bloody commemoration of their holy martyr and great Prophet's grandson, Hussein. Arguably, Jesus the Christ wins poster boy fame for blood sacrifice in religion, in that he is offered up (posthumously) in synocdoche for the sins of humanity. The blood ritual continues today, as Christians partake in communion by drinking the Eucharistic red wine and thus, not figuratively but literally, consuming the transubstantiated blood of Christ.

Sacrificially, bulls, goats and lambs figure prominently in the formation, and indeed, syncretism between ancient Egyptian and Vedic rites and the mystery cults of the Greco-Roman Empire, such as Mithraism, as well as the later pagan, Ancient Israelite, Jewish, Christian, Islamic, and Hindu religions.

The sacrality and profanity of these rites explain, in part, the prohibitions of Acts 15:29, which suggest staying away from food sacrificed to idols, as well as abstaining "from blood." In fact this passage becomes the justification by faith and revelation that JCs will use and cite when they allow their offspring to die rather than undergo a life-saving blood transfusion.

Consider also, Judaism. Jewish dietary laws prohibit the consumption of blood because the life and soul of an animal is believed to be contained in its blood, and also because blood is believed to be the body's polluted rivers, of sorts, which becomes the dumping place for any bacteria, viruses or impurities upon the animal's final moments.

Leviticus 17:14 states ~ "For as for the life of all flesh, its blood is identified with its life. Therefore I said to the sons of Israel, 'You are not to eat the blood of any flesh, for the life of all flesh is its blood; whoever eats it shall be cut off.' The link between myth and ritual here is murky, most especially because this core belief in blood as the life sustainer and more importantly, soul keeper, dates back to those prolific philosophers - Pythagoras and Plato - and their views on the transmigration of souls.

This life sustaining, soul-keeping notion is prevalent in myriad religious worldviews to the extent that blood is both revered and reviled. The Indian goddess, Kali, is renowned for her insatiable appetite for blood, and inspires an almost fanatical blood and fertility cult that continues today, albeit minus the live sacrifices. She is the divine bitch, mother, child, lover and redemptrix.

Blood's fertile and sacral properties are richly entwined in history and etymology, such that links can be found between the ancient Sanskit word for ritual, rtú and the advent of winter as the approaching or 'cooling-off' season of menses. Owing to its fertility links, blood from the womb was thought to have great animating prana or creative, life-force energy, and indeed, it does, for arguably, blood also indirectly spawned the birth of ethnomathematics. Female blood is a prime example of the mysterium tremendum et fascinans phenomena which Otto, Eliade et al allude to, wherein the idea of the holy is a force that is both fearsome and fascinating.

Indeed, in some tribal societies, such as the Kalash Valley peoples of what is now Pakistan, menstruating women are deemed untouchable and are still sequestered away in menstrual huts in moon-phasal fearing fashion. Said impurity and male fear of womanly power lies at the root of most patriarchal, Vedic and axial-age religions - blessings be to Zoroastrianism, the ancient Aryan rulers and countless tribal kings the world over who were responsible for shifting the cult of blood from the macro to the micro.

The fertility cult of blood alive and well in matriarchal/goddess religiosity (theme song: I am Woman, Hear me Roar), with its mythic and universally animistic imaginings, no longer suffices. In its place comes a decidedly more controlled, contested and personal religiosity of blood, wherein blood is no longer sacred so much as profane in theopolitical terms. Blood becomes a theopolitical bath and body works commodity for he-men (theme song: I'm the King of the Castle) in search of divine kingship and immortality.

Such is the lot of woman - the whole mysteriously, bleeding lot of us - misogyny continues to be alive and well, even, or might I suggest, especially today. Of course, modern science paints a different, revisionist canvas , and indeed, so do many resourceful femme artistes, who use menstrual blood as their chosen painting medium, but time will tell how well such things as menstrual stem cells and the bleeding arts are received.

Socio-cultural and gender issues aside, blood continues to be highly symbolic and in many ways, metonymically understood in many cultures.

In Aryan times, the bindi or red tikka mark on the forehead was a ritualized seal of marriage, signifying the newfound chattel status of bride unto husband. A red powder is the modern substitute, as is its more auspicious purposes of luck (warding off evil) and wisdom (tantric/sixth chakra link).

Holy Blood, Holy Grail

Blood is inherently perceived to have this power, which is why it is oft associated with many tribal coming-of-age ceremonies. The memetics of blood ceremonies find their way from occult practices and necromancy to modern Western schoolyards, with pinky swearing and cross my heart performative utterances. I defy most adults of a certain age to deny having performed a secret blood brother or sister ceremony with a best friend circa 60s and 70s or neighboring decades pre/post to that.

The magic and mystique of blood as the great alchemical potion and holy grail elixir, is a cup that runneth over into literature and language, thanks to Dracula lit and lore. Leeches (blood suckers) have come to symbolize a lowly-life form, with vampires at the helm of the food chain; just as crimson/red and passion/heat and murder/redemption have their place as symbolic stand-ins for poetry, prose and post-modern lyricism, where loves often lies bleeding on Sunday bloody Sunday.

Blood is to artery as branch is to tree. It connotes family ties and loyalty because it's "thicker than water," it is the remains of the day in times of sport, war, battle and gruesome death; it suggests toil and sacrifice along with its other bodily fluid friends - sweat and tears, it hints at fear when mixed with chill, it is linked to money, thirst and lust; and it has entailed much medical lettin g in past centuries, as doctors sought to temper human dis-eases and ailments. Interestingly, in Ayurvedic terms, bloodletting is called rakta moksha (rakta means blood and moksha means spiritual liberation in Sanskrit).

And, in that it is the last of the four humours, blood comes to be associated with the season of spring, sensing perceiver temperament (artisan), the liver as organ, warm and moist as qualities and courage, hope and amour as ancient characteristics.

As a religious archetype, however, blood is incestuously entwined in history. One hears talk of blood in relation to one religion or another, particularly in recent history, wherein the battle for God is as contentious as ever in history. I have fundamentalist friends and relatives who like to grant Islam with the dubious honour Islam of being the religion of blood (and I do not mean blood in prophetic lineage terms), yet obviously, all religions may lay claim to said fame.

From time immemorial, Mircae Eliade insists religious (wo)man has been participating in the "primordial divine act" of blood sacrifice in imitatio dei, by reenacting the cosmogonic and mythic birth of humanity ~ one that more often than not cross-culturally, entailed creation by sacrifice or dismemberment within a culture.

Arguably, blood continues to be a mainstay typology, mythically and ritualistically speaking; and if this ongoing clash of religious civilizations we bear witness to is any indication, I would venture to guess it will remain so for some time to kingdom come, thy will be done.

On earth as it is in heaven, or so our hierophanic imaginings would have it.

"My great religion is a belief in the blood, the flesh, as being wiser than the intellect. We can go wrong in our minds. But what our blood feels and believes and says, is always true. The intellect is only a bit and a bridle."
D.H. Lawrence

Eve, Prey, Loaf: In Defense of Religious Hedonism

2008-02-08T11:14:00.000-08:00

I was reading The Revealer this morning, as per my daily bread, and I caught paused to read this snippet, which contains this bit of cynicism and that snide commentary on the blindness of faith.

I snickered at the last link, because she expresses doubt that anyone who reads Christopher Hitchens would never read Eat, Pray, Love. Ummm, forgive me, Calahan for I have sinned - I consumed and loved both and lived to tell of it.

To be fair, I feel bad for any author such as Gilbert, who registers their blip in the Opracentric solar system, because it invariably means they start orbiting around her and becoming subject to the perils of shooting stars, falling meteors, wayward satellites and all other manner of space junk and garbage matter that gets hurled around the galaxy.

I know it's a stretch to feel sorry for someone whose seemingly unassuming memoir gets catapulted to international bestseller lists because it bears the magic O mark, but there is so much bad and ugly that comes with all that good. Namely, the anti-Oprah crowd and the kiss of intellectual death that her recommendations seem to bring.

What can I say? I loved Eat, Pray, Love. I remember closing the book and saying, Amen, sistah. I blogged as much here. Sure, she comes across as narcissistic (but what memoirist doesn't), she doesn't take herself too seriously, she writes a smarter breed of chick lit than the coffee and bonbons variety, she admits the ashram was cult-like, and moreover, she brings us a book that is apropos of 21st century mid-life female crisis and the dawning of this post-new age of Aquarius ~ where spiritual travel and messy life journeys are definitely where it's at.

I was reading another spiritual memoir (Swinging on the Garden Gate) at the same time, which was way better written, and in many ways, more deserving of accolades and praise. Eat, Pray, Love was the lighter read, to be sure, and a fun and voyeuristic glimpse into another person's religiosity - imperfections, blemishes and all. Was it the best book I ever read? No. But of course, the O stamp sets up huge expectations.

There are those who will go out of their way to avoid reading a book on the Oprah Book Club list and that's fair. But as with all matters of excess, anything labelled Oprah must be taken with a few grains of salt (adding a lemon wedge and a shot of tequila doesn't hurt either). Obviously. We need only think James Frey here to realize that.

Yet heaps of titles included in the OBC bookshelves are indeed worthy of their placement there. Night by Eli Wiesel is stunning, A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry is absolutely one of the best books I've ever read, and others like Anna Karenina....well, what can I say except to espouse that classic literature of that sort looks almost tainted and tacky sporting the O stamp on its cover. Of course, nepotism is alive and well with the likes of Toni Morrison, Sidney Poitier, and Bill Cosby in the group, however, such is the reality of book clubs. They are not always very democratic and holistic in their selections.

But back to the crux of the matter.

Does Oprah lean new-agey? Well duhhh. You could clearly see the spiritual evolution of Oprah, circa brand new millennium, back when she first had Gary Zukav appear on her show. His brand of metaphysics was clearly eye-opening for her, and it was apparent this was the first time she had given serious thought to the metaphysics behind the much-bantered mind, body, spirit buzz she was so fond of espousing. Since then, we've seen a parade of spiritual gurus and self-help experts grace and dance upon her couch, to the extent that her programming underwent a conscious shift to all things spiritually woo-woo and feel good.

I thought it might have culminated last year when she hurled The Secret into the cataclysmic nethers of outerspace - a rightful place in many ways, if only because Rhonda Byrne's writing was lame at best, and her ideas but a sad, and in many ways, erroneous carbon copy of others. Suffice to say, the secret wasn't a secret, except to the 'unenlightened,' I suppose.

Which is where Oprah enters, lowered on the wings of her OWN angel network unto her church stage, front and centre beneath her pulpit, to preach to the unconverted. I'm kind of surprised the apocalyptic types haven't latched onto her as the new anti-Christina, but alas, a quick Google search reveals they have. A long time ago. A host of blogs and sites are dedicated to warning the masses of her Satanic ways. I won't link them here for fear I might elicit the wrath of O.com, inc. onto the sanctity of my holy place in schmidtland.

Her latest book club pick, A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose by Eckhart Tolle, a fellow Canuck, may well be the spark that ignites the Christian soldiers methinks. Oprah will be teaching an online class with Eckhart in order to enlighten her followers of this new world order.

Having said all that, I'll read Eckhart's new book, if only because I think he disseminates complex Buddhist thought in an engaging and accessible way. And because curiosity killed the cat and I once owned cats.

But if, as Maureen Callahan-channelling-Hitchens asserts, this reeks of "Western fetishization of Eastern thought and culture," then so be it.

'Kool-Aid' kumbaya may seem kooky and krazy to my acquainted brethren, the Über-secular humanists of the world (with whom I sometimes flirt, God have mercy on my soul), but gene counting isn't exactly a multi-sensory festivity we're apt to confess we wish we had done more of upon our deathbed.

I say bring on the big plate of linguine, sprinkle it with a liberal dose of Sanskrit chanting, wash it down with a bottle of two of Chianti and chase it with a shot of carpe diem and a late night snifter of amore. It'll probably cause a cosmic burp or two but what the heck? When we sit down in the penultimate moments of our life to watch that epic cinematic adventure movie called This is Your Life, we might as well make sure there's some PG-13 and R-rated, popcorn worthy moments.

And don't forget the extra butter and salt, and wait a minute: did someone say salt? You might as well bring on the tequila, too, then. And since this is the final shot, make sure it's the good stuff when you slap life's ass and declare in your best Chaucerian accent that, "upon the rump, God save you, I am done!"

Because let's face it: pasta, puja and punta dancing, not unlike their distant cousin, beer, are indeed theological proof that "God loves us and wants us to be happy," or thus spoke Benjamin Franklin.

Amen, brother Ben. Pass the communion wine. I'll drink to that.

In Memoriam

2008-01-25T18:34:00.000-08:00

Death is such a dirty, rotten thief and scoundrel - sculking around to steal those who live liveliest, and who have so very much to lose. Like Claudia, who leaves a devoted husband and two children to mourn her.

I just caught word an hour ago that Claudia passed away yesterday. I feel immensely sad.

I had just been asking my friend about her on Tuesday. My friend called her immediately after we hung up but apparently there was no answer. Said friend feels terrible that she got caught up in her own busy life this past month. And I feel that ache of regret at not having performed a random act of kindness for virtual strangers, as they juggled Ricardo's travel, her sons' soccer, plus Claudia's hospice and homecare scheduling challenges.

You see, Claudia and I were barely acquainted - she was the friend of a friend, as was her son and Holy Son - who also share a mutual close friend. I would see her at church only occasionally because she tended to go to the earlier service. The last time I saw her, she was sitting in front of me in church during the later service, flanked on either side by her two young boys. She seemed well enough, but cancer is an evil shapeshifter like that.

Despite or more to the point, because I barely knew her, I found myself quietly lurking on Ricardo's blog - sharing vicariously in the pain and suffering of her illness and his narrative, which he so eloquently and honestly revealed to the world. And though she never knew, she touched my life. Her courage and strength as a wife and mother, in the face of terminal cancer, both terrified and inspired me.

I cannot even begin to imagine how she was able to project such grace, resolve and what looked suspiciously like a whole lot of, but was likely the mask of eventual acceptance born of serenity prayer embodiment. Ultimately, she did wage a pugnacious and feisty battle against the cancer. She beat the odds and borrowed a handful more days and weeks cards than Death and Fate originally dealt her.

And so in honour of Claudia's tenacity and timeless Spirit, I will place a small inukshuk in the memorial garden at church this Sunday. And while it may sound cheesy and perhaps sacrilegious, I'm going to finally get around to going to see The Bucket List this weekend and updating and notarizing our bloody will, which hasn't been touched since before the birth of my daughter. Death has a way of doing that - sounding that universal gong to get your schmidt together and live large, because life, she is is short-statured.

Claudia's service isn't until next Saturday - Holy Son and I will attend. It will be our first UU memorial service and a huge departure from the last service we attended three years back - which was Russian Orthodox and more than a little glossolalic and unorthodox sounding to this Orthodox tradition neophyte.

I anticipate next weekend's service being a beautiful tribute to her life and spirit. As below, so above.

CULTivations

2008-01-18T13:15:00.000-08:00

Did you watch the leaked Tom Cruise Scientology video this week and marvel at his vanity, his vacuous verbosity, his vilification of all us SPs ~ or perhaps, variants of all three? And more to the point, did it confirm what you've always suspected of Scientology - ie. that it's weirder than you thought?

What struck me the most about this, was not how bizarre and cult-like Scientology seems with its own little coded language, but rather, how very religious it seems. Religious as in zealot.

Having said this, a couple of definitions are in order.

When I talk about bizarre, I'm actually referring to the bazaar of acronyms and rituals associated with Scientology, from birth to death to the clearing processes that happen in between. Decidedly not normative.

And when I reference 'cult,' what I mean by that is not simply "other people's religion" - although that is perhaps the most apt definer, given the derogatory denotations of brainwashing and 'wrong beliefs' that this conjure's up, and the simple fact that, at heart, all religions really are cults.

Nor do I mean "a religious group which denies the essential doctrines of Christianity" although that might well be a popular belief. This latter definition, available online, cracks me up although having said that, when we refer to cults, we are almost always talking about new religious movements that are not just somewhat subversive and conspiracy theorist in their leanings, but rather, seem to almost invariably have a charismatic leader or prophet at the helm to aspouse the Truth, whatever that is.

What I mean by cult is more so the extreme dogmatics that have little to no basis in pragmatics or what I would say is a practical way of being in this reality that we call life. I say this despite knowing that Scientologists do consider themselves to have found a perfectly workable worldview.

But it seems to me, if you have to go through expensive Freudian pseudo-pychotherapy to 'clear' all your formative painful thoughts, beliefs and memories, chances are you're having to live a pretty twisted game of life from hereonin or heroin ~ or whatever kind of altered reality one has to ascribe to in order to get by.

So if one has to construct an elaborate and imaginary religious labyinth in order to "do" life, I begin to question the stability of the philosophical ground upon which are built said myths and rituals. Granted, whether or not it's sound philosophy is in the eye of the spiritual beholder - if it works for them - amen and peace be upon them (except if "them" happens to be a member of my family - then egads!) - but the crux of the matter is that this, like all religions and all cults, is really about crux.

That is to say, it's just another coping mechanism to deal with suffering. At their core, all religions are really theodical tethers that attempt to answer the age old question: how can this religion help me to better deal with and reconcile pain, suffering and evil in this world?

So little surprise that Hollywood, if I may pick on Tinseltown types metanymically, has latched onto Scientology as a self-help haven. Not surprisingly, many actors and actresses first stumble through the Scientology Celebrity Center doors in need of drug and alcohol rehab. Scientology hears their prayers with Narconon.

I've only read a cursory amount of L. Ron Hubbard's bio. It's enough to gather that he was a bit of an Aleister Crowley-type figure and that he was the antithesis of what he boasted. "Do as I say, not as I do." He was violently opposed to psychiatry and drugs, yet popped pills like crazy, or more to the point, because he likely was crazy.

And his worldview seems decidedly gnostic such that cosmologically, evil not good prevailed. His ideas aren't complete hogwash to all, however, because he clearly has enough 'clear,' albeit considerably-poorer, thetans to show for his efforts. It's the prophets & profits thing all over again. His three decade old media quote may well go down in history: "If a man really wants to make a million dollars, the best way would be start his own religion." Indeed.

My intent is not to dis Scientology or any religion specifically, so much as to call into question the sins and limitations of all religious constructs. There is a necessary evil inherent in all religions - why else who people purport to call themselves spiritual rather than religious? (I argue they are one and the same, but tomayto/tomahto in the garden of Eden).

Huston Smith says this best, I think. "If you do not institutionalize your spirituality, it gets no traction in history. So if Jesus had not been followed by Saint Paul, who established a church, the Sermon on the Mount would have evaporated within a generation. So I think if we are serious about the spiritual life, we have to undertake the burdens of institutionalization -- and they are heavy."

I'm reading a rather excellent book right now from which the above quote is lifted: Rational Mysticism: Dispatches from the Border Between Science and Spirituality. I like it because the author takes a stance that is firmly grounded in both reason and mysticism (famously deconstructed as "begins in mist, has an I in the middle, and ends in schism"). And while his views are far from the final frontier, he does reflect and refract his scientific lens in order to look closely at the innermost face of religion, experience.

So while all of us Supressed Persons can sneak a peek at Tom Cruise's indoctrination video and snicker and snort, we do well to look turn the camera lens around and press record.

My religion, if I may be so bold as to claim temporary ownership - Unitarian Universalism - has it's own fair share of ideosyncracies, starting first and foremost with the name, which is a mouthful in and of itself.

I would be willing to guess that less than half of us UU types (eat your heart out, Tom: we have acronyms, too) could articulate who we are and what we stand for, in any less a logorrheaic fashion than Tom just did in this now-infamous video clip. We have our own cultic crosses and chalices to bear, too. Such is the path of religion.

And yet, I dunno. I get scared when any religious adherent purports to have all the answers, especially when history has yet to reveal all the questions.

Just as I get scared when I see that rantings like his becomes so much fodder for the anti-Christ crowd. This story will also, no doubt, feed many a crumb to the Dawkins, Harris' and Hitchens of this world, who believe religion to be an idle hobby for delusionists and dodos. Because to many people, all things antithetical to one's own worldview are prooftexts for absence of God, or similarily, that the devil is alive, well and spawning.

It must be so, for the Pope announced plans recently to beef up his God squad of Exorcistors to help fight the spread of Satanism. I wonder if part of their training involves sitting around, eating buttered popcorn and watching old Exorcist tapes?

And it must be so, or Huckabee might not have intentionally stuck his tongue entirely in the wrong cheek last month when he rhetorically questioned whether Mormons believe Jesus and the Devil are brothers in arms ~a veiled but obviously antichristological comment intended to provoke fear and contempt amongst his evangelical right followers.

And it must really be so, because look at the desperate efforts the Church of Scientology is going through to clean up their image online and get this Tom Cruise clip off YouTube.

Ultimately though, religion is as religion does (so help us, God), which is why atheism is seeing a neo-renaissance of sorts.

Sigh. You know what that means.

Yup, it's apocalypse now time again, which explains maybe why all the aliens have been hovering over Texas lately. Looking for humanoids, mad heifers and Bush supporters ~ although not necessarily in that order ~ to beam up.

Yeehaw and nanu nanu ~ may the force be with them.

Presidential Lament

2008-01-04T06:40:00.000-08:00

Normally I wouldn't be given to blogging about politics on my religion-only blog, but since the two are so incestuously entwined in this nation and in this Presidential race, my rant is apropos.

Actually it's not a rant but a public prayer akin to the kind of desperate bargaining I used to make with the Big One when I was a kid: Please God, don't let Huckabee win. I promise I'll be a nicer person and I'll even pray more, even when I don't want things.

The last thing this country needs is yet another Presidential hopeful from Arkansas with a name like Huckabee....it would do nothing for its public persona internationally, which is negligible at best.

And the last thing this country needs is someone to further build the Theocracy. Besides, anyone who studied religion yet professes to not be entirely sure if Mormonism is a religion or a cult. It's frightening to say the least.

And I'm not just saying all this because I'm an Obama fan. And because I think Obama gave a brilliant speech last night, even if he was a little heavy on the rhetoric.

I can't vote anyways. And I just found out that because I wasn't born here, I can't run for President. Which is a good thing anyways. My religiosity would be called into question and even I would be hard pressed to define it.

Material Matters

2007-12-12T09:40:00.000-08:00

I haven't checked the box office stats for The Golden Compass, nor have I followed the media trail on it overly much, except to catch the odd murmuring, news headline or online link.

But it doesn't take a rocket science degree to figure out that any whiff of religious controversy and/or hint of boycotting by the Christian right is all a film needs to pack bums in theatre seats and all a theatre owner needs to sell XL popcorns. Think Passion of the Christ and The Da Vinci Code.

Now, I also haven't read this hot little book by Philip Pullman. Dark fantasy and traditional Christian allegory (Narnia) fiction are not my style - (my claim to fame is that I have not nor ever intend to read the Harry Potter or Narnia series and don't even get me started on the plethora of Left Behind drivel that we seem to be bombarded with), but I'll admit: I am a sucker for religious symbolism and metaphor in literature so having said that, against the mass e-mail spam urgings we've all received of late, I will plan to read this...perhaps even with my children -egads.

'Cuz don't tell me I can't do something because it creates a double negative. And we all know what that means.What I do understand, from what little I've read, is that this classic good/evil hero myth involves magic dust, daemons, a Magisterium, a small plot twist involving the death of God and a whole lot of underlying hints that the author is an atheist.

Ah, the crux of the matter, pardon the pun. Matter is what matters in this controversy, after all.

From what I can tell, Pullman is not your "garden variety materialist" as one commenter on the film blog link below noted. By that I mean, he's not merely stuck on religion as delusion, Amen or Ahem....the End. He's actually got a very well-developed atheology, that is naturally grounded in materialism. We're not talking a flimsy cloth of material here either.

He accounts for consciousness within matter and admits he ascribes to a rather elaborate panpyschist philosophy. This would seem to make sense because it strikes me that this dust particle theme in his tale bears significant resemblance to Jung's collective unconscious and that threads of Northead's process thought could potentially be found within. And it doesn't stop there. I'm also wondering if some of the materialistic dualism alive and well in this tale might also align with Samkhyan epistemology. It strikes me that shades of intelligent design provide glimmers of light to this tale of darkness but I'll have to read and decide that for myself, I guess.

Yes, even the theists can find more than enough fodder to fuel their fires lurking in the dark corners of this film and/or book. God in the dust, as it were.

I like that Pullman grants large nods to William Blake in both interview links in the paragraph. Blake is not easy reading. I would venture to say, from what little I've read, that it's obvious he gets the concept of myth ~ its role in society, religion and more to the point, storytelling and self.So yes, Virginia, I do plan to read the trilogy and I also plan to read Killing The Imposter God: Philip Pullman's Religious Imagination in His Dark Materials.

I suspect these are destined to be classics in the dawn of this neo-enlightenment era, where science and religion are converging and twisting in new and interesting ways.

The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
William Butler Yeats

Holy Sheepschmidt

2007-12-05T11:35:00.001-08:00

No need to turn the sound up for this clip from The View yesterday - it speaks volumes even at low decibels.

They were talking about Epicurus, the Greek philosopher (341 - 270 BCE) who advocated living a tempered life rather than an overly-indulgent one, as might befit post-modern epicure sensibilities.

And so one thing led to another and next thing you know, they're chatting about religious chickens and eggs, relative to the Hellenistic era, which is BCE or BC, if you happen to be from Prince George and/or measure time Christologically.

Sherri Shepherd's responses ~ "Jesus came first" and "I don't think anything predated Christians" ~ are not only pop-culture classics and fabulous fodder for bloggers, they're also revealing statements about her not-so-unique brand of religiosity.

Now I don't mean to poke fun at her....that's Whoopi's job. Nor can I accuse her of being born yesterday, especially when I know she was born again. There's a marginal difference. I get the narrow albeit brightly lit tunnel she's standing in. I can even picture it grafitti'd with slogans like "Ignorranse is blisse!" and "Tribulation Tunnel: Next Stop - Heaven" and "Jesus Loves Me, this I Know, for the Bible Tells me So."

In her mind, Jesus transcends time and history as we know it, Genesis is literal and the earth, she is young. And in her rather flat worldView, chronological religious history is irrelevant. I mean gosh golly, the world wasn't even created until a handful of millennia ago.

Greco-Roman religion and mystery cults? It's all Greek to her. Judaism? A nishtikeit religion that pales in comparison and more to the point, doesn't even warrant mention. And forget the Shahadah (the Islamic creed) and the Mohammed the messenger stuff. The Lord Jesus is Sherri's Shepherd and there is no other religion but Christianity. Amen.

I hope, make that pray, for Sherri's sake, salvation, soul and all other manner of s words, that when she arrives at the pearly gates with the rest of the flock of sheep, she won't be made to answer a skill-testing question to get in. Like, on a scale of one to ten, what's your favourite colour?

Otherwise she'll be catching that express roller coaster, Hellinahandbasket, at Mach 5 in a downward spiral, and lending an entirely new meaning to the term hot to trot.

Walk Like An Egyptian

2007-11-29T11:15:00.000-08:00

I took this goddess quiz and it turns out I'm Isis.

She's as good a mother goddess as any mere mortal mama could aspire to be - less destructive and fearsome than Kali, and a good deal more anorexic than those Germanic matronesses or Maltese mamas that Gimbutas helped resurrect to the forefront of our collective divine consciousness.

But I have to confess - being queen of the underworld sounds dreary and tedious. Having to perform, recite and cast all those Book of the Dead mummification rituals, incantations and spells.....it all sounds exhausting and cold as Isis. The only bright spot would be doing the goddess strut in the underbelly of the pyramids. Well, OK, it also wouldn't be too shabby to have my own cult and be the goddess of 10,000 names. I'm thinking it would be much more easier to be a Mayan Moon Goddess who hangs out in hot cenotes and drinks tequila tempered with a shot of agave juice and adorned with a slice of pineapple and a maraschino cherry. What the heck...if you're gonna chill out down under, you might as well do it up in slothful style.

Plymouth Rock (Paper, Scissors)

2007-11-20T11:00:00.001-08:00

Thanksgiving Redux
I've been around the block and back again twice over, if I might liken the passing of a year to a civic measurement. So I think it's time I talked turkey.

American Thanksgiving turkey, that is.

Yes, 'tis the season, arguably the highest and holiest of days in this red, white and blue land, if the plethora of hushed and humble Happy Thanksgiving greetings we receive each year is any indication. The closest I have ever come to seeing such buoyant excitement and reverence in the air was during the flurry and festivities leading up to (Big) Eid in Islamabad ten or so blocks back.

Most Americans we encounter are surprised at how irreverent we are about American Thanksgiving. Truth be told, calling it American Thanksgiving is a dead giveaway. No one calls it that except us non-Americans, obviously.

When we admit that we're not doing much because we've been there, done that a month a half back, and are still suffering the ill effects of the mashed potatoes, turkey and pumpkin pie, most are shocked. Their first reaction is invariably an awakening - oh, Canada has Thanksgiving, too? You can see the wheels churning - how can that be? - the Mayflower landed in Plymouth, MA. Did it then head to Nova Scotia? Their second is surprise, and you celebrate at a different time than us? And the third is confusion, and you don't want to do it all over again by celebrating it pilgrim-style this time?

To be honest, I did get into the spirit of things last year. We celebrated Canadian Thanksgiving in October and then had a big feast again for American Thanksgiving. And we even got up at 4am to check out Black Friday sales like the good connoisseurmers we are.

But I'm not in the mood this year for huge extravaganza. It's not that I'm feeling completely bah humbug - we'll be attending our church potluck this Thursday and bringing sex in the pan for good sacred/profane measure - but I find all the school pilgrim and turkey teachings become a bit much.

Holy Daughter comes home each day filled with tales that tell a truth, but tells it slant. She is brimming with stories of happy harvesting hoe-downs between the pilgrims and the Native Americans. Big fat sigh. Presumably, the myth still lives large in grade school curriculum. No lie left behind.

When I said, yes, well, that's nice dear but that is only one version of events: there are others, she was confused. I explained that the pilgrim's plight was heroic and sacrificial and that their rite of passage across the great ocean towards new beginnings deserved pomp and circumstance, but if the dead pilgrims could talk, they'd probably tell us that their new Garden of Eden was more paradise lost than found and that a more apt moniker for their American dreamland might just as easily have been Garden of Greed'n.

Indian Paintbrush
To be fair, the history books don't paint it all with a rose-coloured brush. We know that starvation, cold winters and illness plagued the intrepid Brits and Europeans who dared carve a life for themselves in this brave new world. A small sacrifice, however, when compared to the Native Americans who suffered much slaughter, disease and plundering of land and women as a result of white man's arrival.

I didn't bother to share with her that small irony of fall being the season of tragedy, according to Northrup Frye, a famous Canadian literary critic. Not everyone would concur that two of the more contentious colonial and imperial holidays - Columbus Day and Thanksgiving - are anything less than auspicious. But I think 1% of the US population would, which at most recent tally, is the total percentage of Native Americans. Who speaks for them today, tomorrow? The silent untold three million, who quite rightly begrudge the parcels of reservation land set aside for their so-called privilege? Or the silenced few, who are well within their rights and dignities to criticize new-age religiosity that seeks to plunder and all but bastardize the one thing ~ their earth-centered spirituality ~ they can still call their own?

Holy Daughter seemed genuinely surprised by this alternate tale, in which possession turned out not to be 9/10ths of the law, and which does not exactly promise a happily ever after for Native Americans. No surprise that she's confused, considering the only context she has for understanding their relations is the Disneyfied romantic tale of Pocahontas and Captain John Smith, or additionally, of the happy, helpful Squanto.

But I like her logic. Upon hearing my hints of battle and war and death and territorial conquering, she said, "But I don't get it, Mom. Why didn't they just play rock, paper, scissors?"

Out of the mouths of babes.

They did play rock, paper, scissors, of course. It's just that the rocks got piled into fences, forts and catapults, the papers were non-negotiable notarized deeds, and the scissors became weapons.

Canada shares chapters in this tale, too, of course. We had our own British and French invasion, Squanto spent some time in Newfoundland, and our own First Nations peoples didn't exactly finish first either. But instead of calling it hegemony, which is a bit harsh, we like to call this shared history commonwealth, denoting, if you will, a win-win agreement. God save the Queen and all that jolly good stuff.

There are no winners in such games but the point is, we have no less a contested history. In many ways, I think it was smart that we moved our Thanksgiving up a month (from the second Monday of November to the same in October). All the better to distance this day from thoughts of war (Armistice/Remembrance) and adopt an air of reverence more in keeping with what Thanksgiving should be, which is a harvest celebration. Harvest time in Canada is most definitely October, not November, when the snow usually starts flying.

Sacred Wheel
And yet at the heart of Thanksgiving, as it is celebrated by this generation in this age, is something extremely sacred. It is not sacred myth but time. It is a time to feast and a time to reconnect with family and friends, because for everything, there is a season, turn, turn. And first and foremost, it is a time to be grateful and to heed Meister Eckhart's words: "if the prayer you said in your whole life was 'thank you,' that would suffice."

It's not always that pretty - Holly Hunter probably has Thanksgiving nailed better than anyone - but when you ask people what they love most about Thanksgiving, they aren't thinking pilgrim stuff - they're thinking pilgrimage. To happy holidays in their childhoods, or back home to Chicago where Mom & Dad are. They're thinking Grandma's pumpkin pie and juicy succulent turkey and cranberry & sage dressing. Or they're relishing down time at home to recharge batteries. They wear their avoidance of Black Friday mall avoidance like badges of honor, and they speak wistfully about this being their favorite holidays - perhaps because it anticipates Christmakwanzikah and all that December festivity. But most likely because for most, it means four precious days off.

Thus, within the Thanksgiving myth - the holistic one - we have visions of fun, feast, and frivolity, even if that's not really how those early Thanksgiving dinners really went down. We have this need to be inspired by the possibility that we are greater than we are, and to fantasize that our North American history was a cooperative rather than contested one. And given that this is a Christian nation, we have this little myth of the eternal return thing going on, wherein we unconsciously think we might be able to re-create and replant prettier perennials in the garden myth.

And so be it. All that much better to be humbled by our less perfect humanity, so that we can aspire to slightly higher ground than the rock at Plymouth. So that the myth can one day fulfill all that we project upon it. Or not. Who but knows what is to be or not to be - that age-old divine question.

Let's face it - when stripped bare of all those layers of myth, Thanksgiving is not much more complicated than Rabbi Heschel's words above, and yet because it is a constructed and human ritual, it is necessarily so.

And so it is in the spirit of grace and with an attitude rather than altitude of gratitude that I shall approach these next few days, in redux and re-connection to all that is sacred. Sadly, said re-connection and redux is something I need to be reminded of every day, such that there is much I continue to learn and re-learn, again and again, about sacrality, hallowed-ness, thanks and giving from the "red man" who has always known and embodied that thankfulness is irrefutably the most sacred way of being.

Happy Thanksgiving. Blessed Be, Shalom. Salaam. Amen.

"Every part of this country is sacred to my people.
Every hill-side, every valley, every plain and grove has been hallowed
by some fond memory or some sad experience of my tribe.
Even the rocks that seem to lie dumb as they swelter in the sun along the silent seashore in solemn grandeur thrill with memories of past events connected with the fate of my people,
and the very dust under your feet responds more lovingly to our footsteps than to yours,
because it is the ashes of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch,
for the soil is rich with the life of our kindred.
The sable braves, and fond mothers, and glad-hearted maidens, and the little children

who lived and rejoiced here, and whose very names are now forgotten,

still love these solitudes, and their deep fastnesses at eventide grow shadowy

with the presence of dusky spirits.

And when the last red man shall have perished from the earth
and his memory among white men shall have become a myth,
these shores shall swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe,
and when your children's children shall think themselves alone in the field, the shop,
upon the highway or in the silence of the woods they will not be alone.
In all the earth there is no place dedicated to solitude.
At night when the streets of your cities and villages shall be silent,
and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts
that once filled and still love this beautiful land.
The white man will never be alone.
Let him be just and deal kindly with my people,
for the dead are not altogether powerless."

Chief Seattle

Remembrance Day Tribute

2007-11-11T13:30:00.000-08:00

The young dead soldiers do not speak.

Nevertheless, they are heard in the still houses: who has not heard them?

They have a silence that speaks for them at night and when the clock counts.

They say: We were young. We have died. Remember us.

They say: We have done what we could but until it is finished it is not done.

They say: We have given our lives but until it is finished no one can know what our lives gave. They say: Our deaths are not ours: they are yours, they will mean what you make them.

They say: Whether our lives and our deaths were for peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say, it is you who must say this.

We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.

We were young, they say. We have died; remember us.

Archibald MacLeish, 1892-1982, American Poet

Pilgrim's Progress

2007-11-10T14:48:00.000-08:00

"Hello darkness my old friend.

I've come to talk with you again."

Simon & Garfunkel

The dog and pony show has now packed up and left town and with it, the many lurkers who tiptoed and traipsed through the tulips this past week have also vanished. The Holy halls, once again, echo with the sound of silence.

And no surprise there - the big dog took best of show. A few of us small mixed breed types looked OK ~ we clean up well if nothing else - but it was no contest. It woulda coulda shoulda been though. The Deacon's Bench was by far the best blog of the bunch but sadly, he failed to win the purple ribbon.

That doesn't matter though. The 'real' contest was happening over here in Holy land. And if you entered my contest, you are no doubt, waiting with "bated breath and whisp'ring humblenesse."

Yes, that's right, ladies and gentlemen, the contest votes have been tabulated and the results are official. In strict accordance with ANUS rules (Academy of Novelties and Utilitarian Souvenirs), the ballots were carefully placed into the Tupperware container with the least amount of orange spaghetti sauce stains ringing its belly, before being painstakingly crumpled into origami-like creations, in order that a Gelert entry ballot might be of the same inscrutable nature as that of a Jeri vote. It was then shaken and stirred, in bruised and Bonded fashion, and all was completely apropos; that is, until that one renegade slip attempted to jump ship to the hardwood floor and had to be plunked back into the ballot pool. I can't be sure, but I think it was Brenda having a guilt moment that she voted for me instead of the big Catholic blog frontrunner.
The award-winning ballot was then hand-selected with sticky hot chocolate fingers at 13:58 hours by Holy Daughter, Managing Director of Earnest Young Incorpserratedging. (How big did you think this holyschmidt.org group was anyways?)

But not before she dared question the very integrity of the prize.

"What are you doing this contest for anyways, Mom?"
"It's a contest for my blog, sweetie. For everyone who voted for me in the Best Religious Blog
category."
"Oh. Cool. What do they win?"
"The holy toast stamper, just like the one we have."
"Oh." Thinks a moment. "That thing. I thought you were doing like a real prize."

Out of the mouths of babes. But real schmeal. This is cyberspace, where surreality reins supreme.

Anyways, it was all auspicious and above board, or should I say, bored, because Holy Daughter had to stifle a yawn as she chose the lucky entry from the container. OK, so it's not exactly the Emmy's, but without further ado, drumroll please....

The winner of the Holy Toast stamper is.....

Pilgrim!

If you could please hold your applause until the end. Here to accept the award on his behalf is...Holy. His name isn't really Pilgrim. That's his surreal name, but old habits die hard. He's actually a man of many pseudonyms ~ Pilgrim, Captain Rotundo and Bloggeezer (BG for short) are but three of many. Take a moment though to stop by his blog and congratulate him on his holy winnings.

To be fair, there were a few names, Pilgrim's included, that claimed a handful of spots in the ballot bowl, as befit their daily voting status. I was actually teasing him the other day via e-mail about how many ballots he had stuffed in the box and even gave him a Holy handshake and wished him luck. I didn't really expect him to win though. I actually thought one of the one-vote wonders (it only takes one) would claim victory in this auspicious contest.

So there you have it. Thanks to all of you for voting, aiding and abetting my meteoric rise up the ranks to 5th place, with 212 votes and 6.1% of the vote.

And for all my capital R religious friends and family who have been expressly avoiding my blog this past week in light of the sacrilegious scandal of my finalist status, you may now come back and visit, and even venture to drop a line. The contest is really and truly over, the coast is clear and as of this writing, I have no plans to start my own religion anytime soon.

But look for more contest kitsch in the future. Another friend of mine, Sam, pointed out that Archie McPhee, my favorite Seattle shop, has a new patron saint chutzkah. I like it. I like it alot. So perhaps I'll run a Hollydays and Holy Days contest in December. For guttsiest God story or conversely, ungodliest guts tale.

Speaking of holidays and the spirit of love and light, happy belated Diwali.

If I Should Die Before I Wake...

2007-11-08T09:30:00.000-08:00

On Death

Kahlil Gibran

You would know the secret of death.
But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?
The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.
If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.

For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.
In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond;
And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.
Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.
Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour.
Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling, that he shall wear the mark of the king?
Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

Death Becomes You

2007-11-08T09:24:00.000-08:00

I blog about eschatology alot so the following meme on a local PNW UU Minister's blog caught my eye. What can I say? I'm drawn to the poetic rather than prophetic in my end-time imaginings.

What's your eschatology?
created with QuizFarm.com

You scored as Moltmannian Eschatology

Jürgen Moltmann is one of the key eschatological thinkers of the 20th Century. Eschatology is not only about heaven and hell, but God's plan to make all things new. This should spur us on to political and social action in the present.

Moltmannian Eschatology

100%

Preterist

55%

Amillenialist

50%

Dispensationalist

25%

Premillenialist

Left Behind

Postmillenialist

The Father, Fun & The Holy Toast

2007-11-07T14:50:00.000-08:00

Voting closes in 24 hours. Looks like I'm getting my assets kicked by the other shortlistees, who clearly have way more friends, Romans, countrymen and/or deities lending them their ears and votes.

But I have something they don't and that's Kitchen Kitsch. That's right - it's perhaps one of the most beautiful examples of the overlap between the sacred and profane.

It's not too late to add kitsch to your kitchen though. Place your Holy Vote and you, too, could be eating Special K in the morning. A vote for Holy is a rabbit toehold in the drawing for you to win that lovely mediatrix bread stamper, featured in all its glory a couple of posts below. And it only takes one vote to win and/or be a Holy Roller.

*****************

Actually, from the looks of the polls, there are a decent amount of born-again voters spreading their love amongst my various competitors, but none come close to the resurrected Christendom that is Father Z's Roman Empire. He's literally beating the Pope to the altar with 41% + market share of fans.

It makes me think that maybe I really do need to get off this small soapbox more and do some cyber-evangelizing and planting and tithing and passing of the Holy hock plate and all that fun stuff that goes along with amassing converts and disciples and white fluffy sheep.

Speaking of collection plate, I hate to keep picking on the good padre in Italy (who bears an uncanny resemblance to both Kevin Spacey and Bobby Darin), but his paypal pandering kinda sorta brought a smile to my face.

To be fair, I banter his name about when really, I'm actually poking metonymical fun at the machine behind the man - his blog institution, as it were. But I couldn't help but notice he has a rather clever, if prominent, procurement appeal on his blog. Check it out. He put his collection plate right on his blog. You can't miss it. Upper left hand corner.

Now don't get me wrong, I admire a priest with chutzpah....it's so, I dunno, JC (Judeo-Christian) of him. Said donation button actually makes great sense from a cyber church perspective. It's bound to be way more lucrative than the paltry revenues Adsense generates. But he doesn't stop there.

He's also got an Amazon book wish list link. Now I know I'm not supposed to be coveting thy neighbor's schtuff, but I'm digging this book link idea.

More on this in my next post though, when I blog about prophets. I mean profits. I mean prophets and profits.

Lego and Let God

2007-11-06T13:16:00.000-08:00

Holy Son fairly skipped his way into church this past Sunday. I almost took a picture and posted it here, because the site of it was such a cosmic anomoly.

Alas, I know I should heed the second mark of Buddhist existence at this point because I'm fairly certain that this, too, shall pass.

The secret behind his Sunday skip? Lego. Of course. He was lending his bin of bricks to the holy cause of constructing sacred space and architecture in a special RE workshop for our Grades 2-5 kids, which in the case of this past Sunday's creations, ranged from structures such as the Taj Mahal and the Acropolis, to Wiccan churches, to secret chambers - think early Christian church history here - to nature spots, and other more modern, churchy-looking buildings.

Now I have done a ton of things in a myriad of churches in my time - snored, coughed, laughed, cried, drank coffee, read a novel, gagged on the Eucharist, lipsynced, even prayed a time or two. But I have to now admit, building a Lego chalice out of primary color bricks and adorning it with three miniature red flames ranked right up there in my top five most divinely delicious moments of what not to do in church.

I would rate it slightly higher than reading the newspaper in the front pew and just below that one incident at the Sherwood Park Christian Reformed Church on the coldest winter day in Alberta's history, when I accidently tried to lick an icicle hanging from the boot rack outside the chapel doors and became stuck for 45 minutes until somone thought to pour some warm water over my frozen, exposed tongue.

There were roughly a dozen boys and even a couple of curious girls who attended the late service Lego workshop on Sunday, which I think was most impressive. Holy Son isn't the only boy who drags his feet at the thought of attending Sunday RE, and little wonder. Religious education tends to be geared to girlie interests, generally speaking. Classes are traditionally oriented so as to encourage captive audience storytelling, theological discussions, cooperative games and arts & crafts. It's all very sugar and spicey, which is to say that it is the structural antithesis of what boys want to do. They need kinesthetic time. They like to engineer things and they need to really get behind something. Which I suppose is why our RE Director embraced my little Lego idea when I pitched it to her last spring.

Parents are not alone in lamenting the lack of engaging curriculum components for boys. All of us First Grade RE teachers last year noted how much of the time, the boys were no-shows. Who can blame them? It's painful for boys to have to conform to an unworkable learning environ every Monday to Friday in school, and then have to endure much of the same again on Sunday morning.

Less jaded RE educators might beg to differ, but Sunday school is little more than glorified babysitting. Sandwiching in any schmigeon of religion between the two slices of wanting to be fed a snack and wanting to play at the playground bread is a super-human feat, even on the best of days.

So what the heck - imparting a little Lego and let God in their Sunday schoolin' - or whatever it is you wish to call the divine wisdom of Lego creation and imagination - might just be what's needed to start our own brand of Sunday revival.

It's one one of the many new things we're trying in our little corner of the UUniverse. This past spring, a few of us in the children and youth ministry sat and down and schemed ways to revamp the entire younger ages curriculum from top to bottom.

We fashioned it, to a small degree, after the ever-popular workshop rotation model that is alive and well in many mainstream Christian churches. We then identified the key teachings and themes our children, parents and teachers wanted to see included - be these of history and mystery, social justice, or prophetic teachers - and then set about determining where and when to plot the noted priorities into the RE calendar. Last but not least, we looked at how we could then overlay the core UU principles and sources, as well as important rituals and service projects, whilst still honoring the sacred wheel of life that lives liveliest in seasonal holidays and holy days, not to mention other annual festivities and events.

Thus, a new child was born with a completely revamped curriculum this year. So far, so good but the year, she is young. On a macro sacle, I get that Sundays such as this past one are mere drops in the Lego bucket of an entire childhood of church memories. But getting up and going every Sunday for this newbie family of churchgoers remains a struggle, so the more enticements there are for the kids, the merrier.

Will this past Sunday's workshop register as a transcendent moment on the childrens' REchter scale of religious experiences and learnings? Probably not. But if you ask me, it sure beats the holy heck out of having your tongue stuck to an icey boot rack while a bunch of Dutch Reformed gray-haired grannies hover around you, fretting and frowning.

God & Pony Show

2007-11-05T13:20:00.001-08:00

Did you hear the one about the Catholic priest, the evangelical apologist, the philosophical portmanteauist and the heretic?

God instructed each one of them to race to the finish line, and whoever got there first would be allowed to be crowned the winner, thus permitting him or her the opportunity to visit the Throne room and sit for a time to experience the glory and exaltation that comes with being the Chosen One.

So God lined each of them up - and to be fair in American religious terms, added a host of other Catholics, evangelicals and the like into the mix. He then dressed them up in religio-carnival garb. You know ~ the usual suspects. The lion, the white witch, the lamb, the philosopher king of raccoons, the goddess, the serpent, the virgin, the temptress, et al - and instructed each one of them to gather thee followers and thine flocks to stand in front of them, affix their sites on their chosen target, and squirt holy water pistols at said target in bell ring, all salivate fashion. Whichever of the carnival racers should rise to the top, would be declared the cream atop the pitcher of sour milk.

Each of the racers quickly assumed their position. On the stage, the lion preened, the goddess mooned and the poet schemed....not a word was spoken, the church bells all were broken.

I could go on here, but you know how the real lyrics go anyways. Suffice to say, the joke's not technically over.....you have to wait until November 8th, when the voting closes for Best Religious Blog in the 2007 Weblog Awards for the punch line.

I don't mean to make fun of the Weblog Awards....well OK, actually I do, but only insofar as I'm always amused at how art imitates life imitates art. While I'm flattered to be in the blogofray mix and in the cybergroover, I remain, nevertheless, endlessly amazed at the not so fine giant, scented, washable marker lines between reality and surreality.

At last count, my humble blog has amassed some 7% of the total votes in the Best Religious Blog category. Which is impressive and amusing, if only because:

(a) I don't have nearly as many readers as voters
(b) I don't even know as many people as there are
votes for my blog, and;
(c) I don't pigeonhole very nicely into a quantifiable round
hole, being a square peg and all.

Said squarepeggedness clearly accounts for some of the drive-by protest votes I'm sure have been aimed my way by the few or many, such as the science bloggers who lament the absence of a Best Atheism Blog category and thus, may mistake my brand of heretical musing for a lack of theism. Or those who have read my fine print and might well have erroneously assumed my UU cloak precludes any form of trinitarian belief on my behalf.

Ponderings schmonderings though. That I'm even a sub-layer of pond scum in this pool of blogs, is for some, the great scandal of my shortlisting.

I've had a chance to now visit all of my 'opponents' blogs and forgive me Father for I have sinned...I peeked into your cupboard drawers (I drank an extra strong Bloody Mary for breakfast as penance though), and snuck a read at some of the fear and trembling notes from your faithful sheep, who seemed to be b-ah-ah-ah-ah-lking at the company you've had to keep in this God and pony show.

What can I say? How much nobler and 'vastly superior' you appear in their eyes - standing as you do amongst all manners of pariahs and sinners such as the LBGTs and indeed, even the so-called intellectual featherweights. That is most admirable. No doubt, God will reward you for your fortitude in not 'blending in' with this motley crew, Fr. Z. :)

Actually, kidding aside, Fr. Z is being rewarded.

His pistol shooters have a pretty steady aim, if his impressive garnering of 42% of the vote is any indication. Mind you, from the looks of this Catholic Forum, of which he coincidentally appears to be forum adminstrator, it helps to have 11,000 potential sharpshooters gunning for you... even if a few of them are, uhmmmm, shall we say, a tad homophobic and unecumenical.

Good thing commenter Kent (do take a moment to scroll to the bottom of the comments in the CF link above for his worldview on LBGTs and other inferior souls - I supplied a few of his words in 'scare' quotes above) wasn't a member of Fr. Brennan's parish. I sometimes marvel at the etymological divide between small c catholic and Big C Catholicism. Only sometimes though because every Catholic I know, close friends and family included, is bi-atholic. That is to say, they swing both ways.

But I digress.

My point - and I do have one - is that this small sampling of shortlisted blogs, in whose company I happen to keep for a brief time, is clearly not representative of the best of religious blogging. It is but a moment in time reflection of bloggers who names were submitted...nothing more, nothing less.

So those who assume outrage at the categorical inclusions, because they have Christian ringtone links; or worse, at the sins of omissions, need recall the second deadly sin of religious comparison: the lack of an adequate cross-sampling. Where is the Muslim, the Buddhist, the Sikh, the Hindu, the New Ager, the Wiccan, quick name another religion, etc, etc., in the mix? Enter, One Cosmos, stage left, with his best Arnold Horshack impersonation.

If anything, we serve to highlight the dangers of reductionism and the fundamental problem of defining voice. The question remains: who can and should speak for faith and reason ~ the Catholic, the evangelical, the racoon philosopher, the candlestick maker? All of us? None of us? For those of you rushing to pick the "right" answer, here's a hint: it's not a skill-testing question, it's rhetorical.

But if you feel so compelled as to play in God's arcade room, then by all means, come wave a flag in my little corner of the race. There's no line-up. And if you aim your water pistol and all those drops of water in the endless sea straight enough, you'll even get the added cheap thrill of seeing my burquah skirt fly up to flash a glimpse of fishnet, as it kicks up a bit of dust in the wind.

Because Kansas was right: all we are is dust in the wind, which is as apt a blogging metaphor if ever there was one.

Speaking of wind dust and cries in the dark and the blog post penultimate to this, when I alluded to the notion of epitaphs ~ I shall leave you with one of my fave-ola poems. I believe the author is Bishop Pedro Casaldáliga, a renowned liberation theologian.

Note to younger Brother: if I should die before you do, I pray thee heed my last gumshoe. I ask that this poem be read at my wake. Further note: it is to be read just prior to the mandatory plenary performance of the Belle of Belfast jig, which my lovely daughter, the budding Irish dancer, shall perform.

(My apologies to His Excellency in advance for my creative pronoun bastardization).

I shall die erect, like the trees.

(They will kill my standing upright).

The sun as the sole witness, shall put its seal

On my doubly anointed body,

And the rivers and the sea

Will become the paths of all my wishes

While the primordial forest joyfully shakes its treetops over me.

I shall say about my words:

I did not lie when I cried out.

And God shall say to my friends:

“I attest that (s)he lived among you waiting for this day.”

In the twinkling of an eye in death

My life will become truth.

Finally, I shall have loved!

Standing Oblations

2007-11-03T16:52:00.000-07:00

Walking on Water

1999 Darwin Award Nominee

Confirmed True by Darwin (24 November 1999, California)

One particular group of Christians attempted to follow in Jesus' footsteps more literally than most. They worked to master the secret of walking on water. Diligently, day by day, the group tried to be closer to God by making a sincere effort to walk on water. These Christians continued their unorthodox practices until the leader of this small Los Angeles group unexpectedly died while practicing in his bathtub. His wife said James spent many hours trying to perfect the technique of walking on water, but had not yet mastered the ability. He apparently drowned after slipping on a bar of soap.

Note from Giles Read -- "These people obviously haven't realised that anyone can walk on water. I've done it myself. Just wait until the lake freezes..."

Source: http://darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1999-49.html

*********************

Mircea Eliade was onto something when he noted that since time immemorial, us mere mortals seem to be permastuck in an imitatio dei/divine drama. As above, so below. We will do almost anything to transcend our natural binds in pursuit of a supernatural power, or in Eliadian-speak, we eternally return or timeslip from profane reality back to the primordial sacred inception (cosmogony).

What compels us to slide down the axis mundi pole and down into the rabbit hole in order to hang out in supernatural wonderland? Do we inadvertently trip the invisible ground wire from time to time, or are such moments rites of passage ~ penulimate proto-journeys if you will, for that last great, one-way carriage ride to the Beyond?

In secular terms, ultimate thrill seekers well know this rush. They plunge, jump, soar, dive, race, and climb to the depths and/or heights of their existence, defying their mortality whilst summarily hoping to overcome it. That's why there continues to be hundreds of new Darwin Awards bestowed upon a new and tragically deceased population each year.

And yet, what of the religious? Check your own religiosity (or irreligiosity) at the door for a moment here. And while you're at it, set down that cumbersome little designer bag with the nice OPR [other peoples' religion] logo on it. Then try to imagine what supernatural truth informs the Vodou priestess in Toronto, or the snakehandler in Tennessee, or the modern-day dervish in Istanbul, or that sannyasin in the forests near Kathmandu.

And for that matter, what giant leap of faith ~ however erroneous the rest of us 'know' it to be ~ must that last trip have been for those Heaven's Gate adherents? Can you imagine? Neither can I. I'll never forget the surreality of staring up at the Hale Bop Comet during my stint on the other side of the globe, and wondering anew at the links between inner and outerspace.

Just as I fail to understand such cultic convictions, I cannot fathom how Abraham could sacrifice Isaac. Well actually, I kinda get how God could talk Abraham into his covenantal scheme. But had God been bargaining with Sarah, all us motherly types totally know what her reply would have been. Suffice to say there would be no need for exegetical translation with her "No way, Yahweh!" rebuttal.

Oh me of little faith and I mean that entirely in Wieselian terms, given his worldview that "no faith is as solid as a wounded faith."

Faith really is the final frontier, methinks. It is the quintessential sacrifice and leap from that somewhat solid ground of reason to the prodigious plane just beyond and around the corner.

Yes, faith, which hails from the Latin fides "to trust, believe," arguably entails no small amount of sacrifice in my books, beginning with the baby called Reason that invariably needs to be tossed out with the holy water in all such conundrum moments within the various scriptures and/or religions. Not to say that reason and faith don't live in holy matrimony - they do and must. But faith lives liveliest when tested. That is to say, when reason has long hit the road for firmer ground, or so sayeth that quote, "faith isn't faith until it's all you're holding onto."

It's the kind of big F faith that Abraham wrapped Isaac in. And by big F, I mean the sacrifical kind: one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.

But think beyond Abraham here to the life and times of other Axial Age and beyond, to the gods, prophets and messianic likes of Jesus, Sakyamuni, Confucius, Lao Tsu, Mani, Mohammed, Confucius and Agni. The sacrifice typology is alive and well with each of their prophetic deeds and words and mythos. And lest we forget, from ancient times through to contemporary, we have sacrificed countless lambs in synecdoche with God.

As civilization advanced, so too did its religious rites. Sacrifices saw a subtle shift from the violent, social-control domain of the public altar, to the ruminating psyche and self-sacrificing austerities of the individual practitioner.

One step removed from these forefront figures are the lesser characters who helped redefine sacrifice ~ if I may be so bold as to reduce the whole lot of the aforementioned religio heavyweights to a small case menial noun 'figure' for a moment. These secondary cast members in the Divine Comedy of holy historic dramas are the countless mystics, saints, and religious epic heroes who help make religious literature so inspiring and profound.

Christ and obvious scapegoats aside, there are but three in the dead poet's society of religious history that whisper sacrifice and truly walk on water in my books - Saint Francis of Assisi, Arjuna and Rumi. Beyond the ascetic archetype, we see that sacrifice is very much at the heart of each of their tales and teachings. Saint Francis - because he is the veritable posterboy for imitatio dei or in postmodern terms, WWJD?; Arjuna, because he was able to intellectualize challenging Indian epistimology in the face of battle against family; and Rumi, because he used words and dance to overcome his near constant cravings for intoxicating Turkish hashish and lascivious women. No small feats, any of them.

And so it is that I return, in cosmogonic fashion, to the Darwinian roots and heart of this blog ~ our oft pathetic attempts at hierophany.

While most of us are not half-human, half-God (except perhaps, Holy Hubby, when he stands before his sacred altar called the Weber barbeque, proclaims himself Prometheus, and works his alchemic magic with dead cows as offering to the Goddess and demi-gods and goddess who are his wife and children) ~ we can aspire to great moments of sacrifice through our lives and times. Through the sacrifice of time and energy in great or small works of social justice. Or through the sacrifice of worldly pursuits in favour of humility and devotion.

I can't lie - it would take a greater leap of faith than I currently possess to lay my children at the base of Mount Moriah - even on our collective worst familial days. And it would take an absolute Übermensch will for me to race my chariot headlong into battle against family or friend or foe, as Arjuna immortally did, regardless of the Divine game or eventual stakes.

Yet I would risk life, limb and dignity by tiptoeing barefoot across the Puget Sound for the promise of a Miracle, and the amazing and certain grace of Truth.

On that note, I must now go finish my game of Risk with Holy Hub and Holy Son. My hold on Alaska, Alberta and the Northwest Territories is as tenuous as my theological quest for God in the gaps between reason, chance and providence. The rules of both games befuddle me and the "capture the flag" metaphorical correlation between both is not entirely lost on me. Do I sacrifice where and what I have now for I might have and/or become? Conversely, both games might easily be reduced to a grand crapshoot - albeit one sacred, one profane.

I'm willing to go roll the dice for my shot at world supremacy whilst ensuring I remain queen of Alberta, my home and native land of bubbling crude. Oil, that is....Fort Mac tea.

Not only that but Alberta lakes freeze in the winter. All the better for me to do my own sacred walk on water moment, complete with a triple sowkow for good measure. It's all about the epitaph.

As above, so below.

Holy Troller

2007-11-01T23:59:00.000-07:00

I caught wind that I've been shortlisted to just one of 10 in the Best Religious Blog category compiled by the 2007 Weblog Awards team. I presume they are to Academy what we blog slog nominees are to red carpet Oscar hopefuls. Except we of the blogger variety tend to hang out in pajamas and fuzzy slippers.

There were more than 100 entries in the Religion section, not to mention some 4,000+ nominations in over 49 categories for this year's awards.

I have yet to check out the other nominees in my category - I'm still in the flattered mode headspace ~ feeling honored to be rubbing shoulders with a master list of real bloggers like Ariana Huffington, Post Secret, Andrew Sullivan, Perez Hilton, and Rosie O'Donnell. Well...OK, so maybe only the first few carry weight but regardless...I'll wear my nomination bling with pride and give a demure, Mona Lisa smile at what a gloriously Godacious cybermoment this is. So, in the shameless interest of pandering to all 14 of you dedicated readers - friends, family, Lithuanians, countrymen, lurkers and fans from afar - I invite you to click here to cast your Holy Vote.

All it takes is one vote (actually, technically it's one vote times 7 consecutive days multiplied by the number of computers you have). But for simplicity sake, we'll call it One vote, under God, indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for all.

Then leave me a comment or e-mail me at holy dot schmidt at hotmail dot com to let me know you've voted, and I'll add your name to my new Holy Roller blog roll section. Or, if you'd prefer, I can assign you a glossolalic pseudonym instead. And to sweeten the sacred pot of stew, I'll even enter your name in the drawing for my most coveted Holy Toast stamper, pictured below. Trust me when I tell you ~ you have not eaten toast until you've sampled the likes of this mediatrix marvel.

What can I say? Membership has its privileges.

Midnight in the Garden of Good & Evil

2007-10-29T09:40:00.000-07:00

The other night, I fell asleep watching The Antichrist on the History Channel.

I caught only a few minutes of it but I may tape it tonight at 1am. If only because it seems everywhere we turn, we are being subtly and not so subtly reminded of the events and mediums of the day which suggest the end is near. Al Gore et al have been awarded a Nobel Prize for bringing his Inconvenient Truth to the forefront of the world's consciousness. CNN is featuring a Planet in Peril series. Fundamentalist churches seem to be conveying more urgent signage.What's a gal to do except to camp out in the last minute indulgences line-up now and show them my Get Out of Hell Free card and hope for the best?

I'm not one for biblical prophecy although I did have a mini-flashlight moment/paradigm shift last night when I heard the narrator define biblical prophecy not in terms of foreseeing the future so much as explaining and reconciling the present. In the case of the apocalyptic visions we read of in the Book of Daniel, this context makes huge sense, given that these writings were inspired during a very tumultuous time in history circa the reign and ruin of Antiochus and the final decades preceding the Maccabee Revolt.

I do believe in the duality of good and evil ~ although I would prequalify that good is entirely a priori and evil is an a posteriori construct ~ but I don't believe it is as black and white as End Time apocalyptists would have it seem. I see the big picture in Hegelian dialectic fashion: thesis-antithesis-synthesis. None of us knows how this synthesis plays out but I'm not inclined to believe that the penultimate moments to salvation entail a Holy Land battlefield complete with horses and beasts and the like. My theodicy is more subjective and introspective. I think we need look no further than our own interior castle to find the mythos or should I say pathos of a lurking antichrist who blocks the doorway to the throneroom of one's God. This fearsome archetype is alive in every evil thought and deed we create, undertake and/or passively permit. He/she/it is personified is every fear and every doubt that clouds divine Love, subjective Truth and real Beauty.

That is not to say I have not known evil. My deck was stacked in advance with as many bad cards as good. I have experienced tremendous pain, loss, abandonment, hurt and betrayal, just as I have been blessed with love and goodness from many great teachers who have come to me in the form of friends, family and foe. And I know without doubt that I would not have the same outlook towards evil had I survived the Holocaust, or were I to be living in modern day Darfur, or any other godforesaken place on this planet - pick one, there are many.

Evil can also be expressed in terms of the absence of God. The most haunting and arguably, exegetically challenging words in the entire Bible are those uttered in the last cry of Jesus: "My God, My God, Why have Your Foresaken Me?" Psalm 22

Christian apologists make a compelling case for God's absence in this penultimate moment of Jesus' humanity, although arguably, this very so-called absence might call into question some Christological debate concerning His fully man, fully divine status (hypostatic union). And so we return to this notion of evil expressed as the absence of God. Does the absence of God in such moments preserve God's omni-goodness or alternatively, is God actually hanging from the gallows along with the suffering, as Eli Wiesel so infamously stated in his Holocaust memoir, Night?

Jürgen Moltmann, a German Protestant theologian, thinks so. Now granted, his theology is greatly informed by his personal experiences as a German POW during WWII. Yet he articulates a creative theodicy such that God and suffering cannot work in contradiction, but rather in concert. Because God is love, "God's being is in suffering and suffering in God's being itself" (Crucified God, p. 72).

If you have read Life of Pi, have studied Jewish Kabbalism or perchance read my March blog post about Tsimtsum, you may have some understanding of this fascinating little theological motif. Whether I read the scripture literally or metaphorically, I see a fit here between Tsimtsum and Jesus' godforesaken moment on the cross. Farfetched I know, but we are talking about a supposedly metaphysical phenomena, if the resurrection of Christ is to be believed, and we are talking about theology - which is home to some of the most creative thought ever.

God, in that moment, withdraws into Self, creating a vacuum or void such that the Rabbi from Nazareth, is left bereft and alone. This act of creation makes room for Christ. Make of that what you will according to whatever trinitiarian, unitarian or arian faith you ascribe to.

I mentioned Moltmann and funny enough, Moltmann boldly commits to paper what I only dared think audaciously. I'm reading a book called The Doctrine of God by a systematic theologian from Helsinki whose name is utterly unpronounceable, and what do ya know, Moltmann stole my very thought 22 years ago. Talk about a timeslip moment: Emerson was right. "In every work of genius we recognize our own rejected thoughts; they come back to us with a certain alienated majesty."

Here's what Moltmann has to say about tsimtusm relative to his cosmology and perhaps more importantly, his Christological vision: "the infinte God must have made room for this finitude beforehand 'in himself.'" As the author puts it, "God withdraws into himself in order to go out of himself. In order to indwell in us all. Luke 17: 20-21... - hence the "kingdom of God is within you."

Not surprisingly, Moltmann has been labelled a trinitarian panentheist which is as much of a mouthful as all this good, bad, ugly God-talk. Understanding the crucifixion of Christ then as an act of panentheistic theocide (God and mankind, conjoined on the cross in suffering) is not too many theological steps removed from this tsimtsum process of contraction/expansion/re-creation. Moltmann, in essence, suggests God has metaphorically thrown the baby out with the bathwater (think Abraham and Isaac big-picture ethics for a moment here) in salvific sacrifice for the sins of humankind, in co-dependent suffering and as a "praxis of hope." Once and for all time. Amen.

But, it's not quite so amen, because even still, evil triumphs, forcing us to reconcile God's omniscience, goodness and greatness in the heart of it all in this eschatological age.

There's simply no avoiding it. Everywhere we turn, someone new is prophecized to be the Antichrist. Napoleon, Hitler, Hussein, Bin Laden, and even Al Gore have been named as such in the eyes of some staunch fundamentalists. In fact, google "Barack Obama antichrist or "Al Gore antichrist" and you'll see numerous sites dedicated to warning us of their starring role in the upcoming Apocalypse. To be fair, GWB is in the running, too.

Evil is the energy that binds, knots and fashions our collective fears into a noose. And as long as there is evil and/or religions that juxtapose the dychotomies of good and evil (all bow to Zarathustra), Antichrist types will abound. Those loose threads called fears will always be with us, as well. 'Til kingdom come, they will prevail, methinks. We're hardwired for fight, flight and that spine-tingling and tremendum (terrifying) feeling called fear. But with every fear, comes choice. As Dorothy Thompson quipped, "Fear grows in darkness; if you think there's a bogeyman around, turn on the light."

And that's my lightbulb moment on this dimly lit day.

Namasté.

Brain Food for Thought

2007-10-11T10:45:00.001-07:00

Oftentimes, when borrowing popular demand books from the library, I feel a kind of misguided loyalty to read each and every word. Such is the case with The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul. Sometimes common sense prevails, however, such that abandonment remains the only avenue. If something bugs you, set it free. Or something like that.

There I was, about two dozen pages away from the finish line but I couldn't hang on any longer. There remained no hope that this book might offer any kind of chemical marriage between the outer limits of science and the inner limits of religion. And post humus to my reading, I still don't get his so-called case, except to intuit that his apologetics, in defense of of a more holistic study of religious experience and against what he calls "dogmatic materialist scientism," are extremely weak. His religious studies scholarship? Weaker still. But shucks, if you don't believe me, ask the science blogger types. Dogmatic materialist scientismy types, the whole lot of them, it's true ~but they're also a heck of a lot more rational than Beauregard's argument in this book.

Or if you'd rather read a more favorable book review for good measure, then you'd be heeding Sir Francis Bacon's advice: "Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider."

To be fair, two things stand out within the 3oo pages. Firstly, he insists there is no centralized 'God Spot,' as previously hypothesized by Newberg and D'Aquili (authors of Why God Won't Go Away). On the contrary, God on the brain is, instead a "complex and multidimensional" phenomena.

Upon studying the mystical experiences of Carmelite nuns, Beauregard insists that religious experience (he calls them RSMEs) is "neurally instatiated by different brain regions involved in a variety of fucntion, such as self-consciousness, emotion, body represetation, visual and motor imagery, and spiritual perception." So there's a bit of a laser, light show going on in the brain. Well, quelle suprise, Monsieur scienteeste.

The second notable standout occurs on the penultimate pages of the book, where Beauregard finally gets to his real point epiphany by confessing to having had a "cosmic consciousness" type of religious experience twenty years ago. It was his awe-ha moment. Materialists will have a heyday picking apart the biological roots of his illness narrative, as this experience purportedly happened while he was suffering from chronic fatigue syndrome. Cynicism aside, he still does little to further this all-important field of study, owing in large part to his shoddy scholarship.

To be honest, the last time I saw such piecemealed scholarship was on a draft version of one of my first year religion courses as an undergraduate, in which I was attempting to imbed five million expert quotations into my research paper as a way to give makeshift props to my non-existent thesis. Beauregard and O'Leary have apparently lifted a page from this freshman approach in hopes that neophyte readers will be summarily dazzled by strings of four or five quotes from the likes of long dead mysticism heavyweights like William James, Evelyn Underhill and W.T. Stace, and thus, might forget Beauregard had yet to make his point. Although he insists to the dismal finish that he has one.

As summation for his case, Beauregard calls for a more integrated framework of study between science and religion in order to apprehend an "intuitive, unitive, and experiential form of knowing." I sympathize with his viewpoint and had high hopes his book might be a more comprehensive study as such, which is why I have been eagerly awaiting this reading.

But in the spirit of true religious confessions, I have to admit that I have been highly disappointed with arguments on both sides of the table as of late. I started to read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins last year but finally gave up, not because our views were diabolically opposed (they were and are) and not for lack of highly amusing discourse (Dawkins dolls this out in droves) but because once again, lax scholarship (shame on Oxford for permitting this) and prooftexting leaves much to be desired.

So then I thought I would jump sides to see what Francis Collins had to say with The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. This one I managed to finish but again, I admit to a vague feeling of disappointment. Then, as now, I cannot help but feel as though all these scientists hold the veritable key to the universe, and yet they are too busy jossling each other at the gate about whose key is a brighter shade of gold to bother unlocking the dang thing.

I'm just not seeing compelling scientific evidence either for or against God from either camp. I firmly believe in intelligent design, just as I strongly believe in evolution, albeit from a teleological perspective; affording me, I suppose, a rather tenuous foothold upon process theology ground.

I have a sneaky suspicion that the answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind from Santa Barbara, and I don't mean from Oprah. Consciousness studies, that last horizon, that final frontier in this race for god, guts and glory, is likely where it's at.

Beauregard and his co-author, Denyse O'Leary say as much, of course. Too bad they preface it with 295 painful pages before doing so. If you must read his book, do yourself a favour and begin at the end and work back. It's not exactly an evolutionary approach, but I suspect Beauregard himself might commend you for this.

Grave Matters

2007-09-29T09:53:00.000-07:00

The deeper that sorrow carves into your being the more joy you can contain.

Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?
Kahlil Gibran

Our church toasted a key aspect of service last week. And by toasted, I do not mean that they raised a glass in honour of a long-cherished tradition. No. They no longer feature the sharing of Joys and Sorrows as part of the natural order of the sermon. And while I'm sure freeing up an extra 15 minutes of service time brings the good pastors great joy at the thought of yet more time to pontificate to the congregration ~ I personally feel sorrowful that such a personal and emotional component of our congregational life is no longer.

If you're still stuck on wondering what the sharing of Joys and Sorrows entails, permit me to digress. It is perhaps one of the more defining and unifying functions of UU pastoral ministry. It involves having congregates step up to the mic in order to ritualistically pass a flower from one vase to another, whilst verbally sharing with the church fellowship the best or worst part of their week as they do so. This may be a small and trivial joy, like getting a new job or finishing a major incomplete project, or it could be a huge life sorrow, such as the death of a family member.

Yet regardless of the size and scope of these joys and sorrows, there was something so emotionally touching about all of them. It allowed new members like me to put a name to a face and breathe meaningful life into each person, thereby reminding me anew what it means to be an iota in this interconnected web of creation. What I'm talking about is the remembrance that life is about connection, grace, gratitude and at least two of the three marks of Buddhist existence - dukkha (suffering) and anicca (impermanence).

I suspect churches the world over struggle over how best to make their ministry minutes count. Our service is typically 75 minutes, give or take a dozen, depending on the sermon de jeur. There is rhyme and reason and cadence and measure to it, such that each quote, each reading, each tale, each hymn, relates metonymically and musically to the sacred wheel of life.

But the service feels emptier now, devoid as it is of the happy and sad tears and faces that accompany joyous and sorrowful proclamations. And devoid of a certain kind of intimacy, connectivity and shared ministry amongst the community. The ministers insist that they will still share the highs and lowlights - but they will do so vicariously. Because, it would seem, they have the power vested in them to do so. Amen.

I'm not a seasoned UUer - I can still count my total churchgoing visits with only a few rounds of fingers and toes, so I'm not yet jaded to the fact that Mr. Klein was inclined to go on ad nauseam about his aches and pains at the podium during this time, to the utter bemusement of those who know and love him, to the extreme annoyance of those who do but wish they didn't, as well as to the abject boredom of the younger folk who squirm restlessly in their seats and pray only to God at these moments when they wish to escape this certain form of hell.

And I don't know Mrs. Weingartner with her whiny ways and her nasally voice, so to my newbie ears, she sounded less tentative and insecure than I guessed she otherwise might ~ as though for this one moment at the podium, she gets that her problems are significant and that she does indeed matter in some small and real way in the big scheme of things.

But I know something of what it means to be human, or so the decades tell me, and it seems to me that the passing of this part of service feels rather like a human departure. A liturgical death of a loved one whose time had come too quickly, and whose obvious absence has yet to be mourned fully, and whose burial ground cannot be fully discerned as being either a shallow grave or a deep rut.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And for everything there is a season, turn, turn. And so I move this blog flower in small sweet sorrow for the parting of a great church tradition.

Fast Times at Islam High

2007-09-12T12:09:00.001-07:00

"Prayer brings us half way to God, fasting brings us to the door of his palace, and alms-giving procures us admission."

The Holy Qur'an

According to the lunar calendar, today marks the start of the highest and holiest of all Islamic holidays - Ramadan.

Westerners tend not to give much thought or observance to Ramadan which is a shame, as there is much to be learned about the ritual, piety and "dark night of the soul" ascetic sacrifice necessary for a Muslim to honour this 4th pillar (siyam) of his or her faith. The list reads like a high school behaviors list. In a conch shell, it prohibits food, drink, sex, alcohol, tobacco, or reluctant yielding to any of the deadly sin temptations, save perhaps sloth, which inevitably ensues following abstinence from all things fun, feast and frolic.

Because while sloth is not necessarily encouraged, it is nevertheless condoned, if only because maintaining high energy levels when the body all quasi-shuts down each day between sunrise and sunset, is all but impossible.

Yet Ramadan is also about zuhd - detachment. It is essentially asceticism for the common folk who live very much in and of this world for the other eleven months of the year. It is a time when all tenets of the faith - devotional creed recitation, prayer, alms giving, and yes, even pilgrimage to Mecca (if only in metaphorical and salvific terms) become as but One hyperlinked religiosity, as devotees submit to the will of Al Muqeet, Allah the Nourisher, to provide them with sole and soul sustinance during this time of self-denial.

Such fixation on Allah is precisely the point of fasting, in fact. By working through the various levels of ritual purity, such as avoidance of outward practices and sins of the body - be these gluttonous or lustful in nature - a devout Muslim is then stripped down to the quintessential, innermost practice of the heart and spirit - that which Paul Tillich dubbed one's "ultimate concern."

This third level of ritual purity is what Al Ghazali, the famous Islamic philosopher, considers the most virtuous and ultimate submission of the fast - refraining from thinking of anything but Allah during this month. Indeed, the first tenet of the faith (shahadah), which states, "there is no god but Allah" rings literal here - and such fixation expressly discludes the lesser culinary, sexual and hedonistic gods us mere mortals tend to worship most of the time. Thus, not only is it a time of refraining, it is also a time of reframing one's religiosity towards and upon the One.

Little surprise then that fasting in a mainstay in most religions. Think Yom Kippur, Purim, Lent. It is a kind of desert spirituality 101. Indeed, mystics have apprehended the noetics of fasting since time immemorial.

I'm no psychobiologist ~ a psychobabblist might be a more apt moniker ~ yet even my most cursory glances at the scholarship of medieval historians, such as Carolyn Walker Bynum's works, suggests to me that social control issues aside, there is a clear correlate between starvation and lack of nutrients and oxygen in the blood and altered state of consciousness. That age-old, pass-out game we used to play for kicks in junior high back in the day (which was the prototype for the choking/strangling game of recent hype and hysteria) worked a similar kind of magic and agape as the Eucharist diet (wafer-only) did for certain anorexic medieval mystical women who shall remain nameless. Restrict oxygen flow and voila, God is good, God is great, let us thank him for this high, Amen.

Controlled fasting, however, can be entirely a good thing as far as one's religious outlook is concerned. One learns quickly to adopt an attitude of gratitude towards Allah, who both giveth and taketh away. For an excellent glimpse into one adherent's experience of both fasting and Ramadan, click here.

Alas though, the link between suffering and soul-making is an unwelcome reality for many. As Carl Jung once asserted, "One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” Somehow though, thirty long days and nights of fasting seems like a wilderness trip fraught with peril and pain. I think I far prefer the vicariousness of armchair religious fasting. Less suffering, and austerity of being, and all that.

And as if on cue, my stomach rumbles, beckoning for me to give it its dates and daily bread. So I shall throw crumbs at this lesser demi-god, while summarily admiring all Muslims who go without today and this month thereafter.

Peace be upon them ~ the full chand, she is near. For just as good and evil were Eden's primordial playmates, fast and feast are only one vowel removed. All who succeed can weigh in at month's end on matters of both divine devotion and yes Virginia, even fat loss.

Eid-ul-Fitr is the first official feast at which to eat and be merry again, guilt-free. Eid-ul-Adha, which follows some moons later, is my personal fave, however. Goat slaughtering abounds in ritualistic ode to the theme of this feast: sacrifice. Indeed, violence, the sacred and goats, or rather, scapegoats, go hand in hand, or so sayeth Girard. With only a couple of word changes, the mantra for this holiday changes from ashes to ashes, dust to dust to "goat meat to fire, fork to mouth." Same blood, guts and glory, different religion, is all.

Salam. Shalom. Amen.

Fasting
There's hidden sweetness in the stomach's emptiness.

We are lutes, no more, no less.

If the soundboxes stuffed full of anything, no music.

If the brain and belly are burning clean with fasting, every moment a new song comes out of the fire.

The fog clears, and new energy makes you run up the steps in front of you.

Be emptier and cry like reed instruments cry.

Emptier, write secrets with the reed pen.

When you're full of food and drink, Satan sits where your spirit should, an ugly metal statue in place of the Kaaba.

When you fast, good habits gather like friends who want to help.

Fasting is Solomon's ring.

Don't give into some illusion and lose your power,

but even if you have, if you've lost all will and control,

they come back when you fast, like soldiers appearing out of the ground,

pennants flying above them.

A table descends to your tents, Jesus' table.

Expect to see it, when you fast, this tablespread with other food,

better than the broth of cabbages.

Rumi

Faith: The Final Frontier

2007-06-19T09:38:00.000-07:00

I've said it before and I'll say it again: we are living in a fascinating time in religious history. Case in point, religion's dubious place setting at the head of the US election table.

I love the lively debates and our pluralistic landscape wherein mosques, temples, churches, medicine wheels, creation museums and the like all share geographic coordinates yet speak to differing, if sometimes overlapping cultures.

Religious diversity is something to be honored, for it speaks to the myriad ways we as humans attempt to construct and celebrate our religiosity. I cannot imagine a world in which we all believed in the same God and the same afterlife and the same devotional traditions. To me, this seems aberrational and somehow as though we would be missing the point...whatever that point is. I like to think there's a point - I'm too idealistic not to.

My brother (not my blogging brother, my udder brudder) once confessed to me that he holds the suspicious notion that we are all one great alien science experiment. This was the most depressing thing I had ever heard and I remember feeling very disturbed by his confession.

But then I happened upon Zecharia Sitchin's The 12th Planet years later, in which Sitchin postulates that ancient Sumerians were visited by aliens who even mined gold in Africa way way way back tens of thousands of years ago pre-ancient civilization periods. Anyways, the book is crazy weird and yet also crazy interesting - especially his theory of this one mysterious planet that orbits the earth every 3,600 years. But it made me realize, hmmmm....at least two people on this planet believe this alien experiment theory.

If we're going to be anyone's experiment, then I have to confess: I still hang my hat on the God coat rack.

Now admittedly, everything about my vision of God has changed over the years except the name. I still prefer the generic term - God - if only because of its anagram potential, but I'm open to almost any word remotely reverential and omni-powerful in exchange. Divine creator - that works. Universal Being - that's fine with me, too.

I no longer see God in a hippydoperfreak kinda way, wearing a long white flowing robe, sporting an unkept long white beard, looking altogether too much like Moses, a mad scientist, a bad sci-fi movie wizard, or a chimera of all three.

Nor do I see God in patriarchal light. God is beginning to look less and less human to me and more and more like an energy source to me, as time goes on. I'm not sure if that means I've digressed or progressed in my divine imagination. I just know that it no longer serves me to limit God to a masculine form or gender, nor to a mother-creator form such as Gaia or Kali, nor to a hybrid human-animal, such as Ganesh. God is all but ultimately none of those things and more.

So I love the pluralism and let me go back to the religious landscape: I love the diversity of religious practices. In Pakistan, we would hear the call to prayer as an amplified and somewhat exotic chanting song. Some cities have the ringing of church bells. I like that all can mesh in religious cacophony, but I don't like when religions compete and become territorial.

And I don't believe religion and science must compete, especially in the classroom. I strongly believe we need to teach evolution to children just as I also strongly believe we should teach world religions to our children, again from an evolutionary and historical perspective, rather than revelatory perspective. That, after all, is the role of the church. When we teach geography, we should also be teaching the geography of faith, the sacrality of space and the politics of place.

Kids need to get a sense of what all these disparate and often competing polemics are, especially if they are to make heads or tails of how and why creationism, global warming, globalization and terrorism have come to be such factioned and fractured religio issues. Or how and why the Ann Coulters and Michael Moores of this world have been able to prosper.

We do the children of this age no great service by teaching them rigid and dogmatic religiosity - and by that I mean an unbending, narrow-lens faith - at the expense of exposing them to other traditions and ways of living. Just as I have come to realize there are innumerable ways to cook a turkey - our stuffed and barbecued bird last Thanksgiving being, perhaps, the most recent indicator - I have come to appreciate and embrace the eternal truth and beauty that exist in the myriad ways of religious being for humankind.

Appreciating other religions is not simply a tolerance, however. I think religious tolerance brings with it a kind of pejorative attitude wherein one tolerates the presence of the Mormon temple on the hill that now blocks their mountain view....or endures the traffic jam the Hindu street festival downtown has caused. I speak, instead, of an attitude of gratitude about the multi-faith landscape and culture as cause for religious freedom celebration.

Thus, I have come to greatly value the individual quest for truth - a sacramental statement in my faith tradition - such that I fairly defy my children to leave the UU fold for a brief time or lifetime, upon hearing their own call, in order to embark on their own faith journey through other traditions and continue their quest until such time as they, too, find their spiritual home.

Because it seems to me that religion should not have to be inherited baggage. How many times have you heard the response to that great daring question, "What religion are you?" "Oh, well, my mother was Presbyterian." Uh huh. Or some variant thereof.

I'm beginning to believe, more and more, that one's predisposition to religiosity (or not), is as much genetically encoded as one's predispositions to disease, obesity or disorders. Conversion then, is not simply a 'turning around' or 'transformation' so much as a becoming or awakening or embodiment. Like illuminating a room that once was dark.

This, my friends, is what I don't know for sure about faith. Hence, my ruminations in the dark by the dim and flickering light of a cyber candle.

Spirit in the Sky

2007-05-16T08:10:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking alot about coming of age lately and the particular rites of passage I want to enact for my children to mark their entry into young adulthood in the years to come.

And I've been thinking of my own coming of age. More on that in a later blog though.

So little wonder then that my thoughts return to this in transference and reflection of Rev. Falwell's death last week.

I say this because I believe there to be a direct correlation between my path and Rev. Falwell's path. How so, Holy? you ask. Well, even though he was the quintessential televangelical Christian heavenbent on righting the moral wrongs of this nation, and I am not any of those things except perhaps, quintessential insofar as my maiden name begins as such and my motherly role in life dictates a few moments of the latter ~ I was, nonetheless, a product of his time.

I came of age as a mother in a Teletubbies era and as a religious studies scholar in the penultimate years of Jerry Falwell's rein in the years of our Lord circa 2001-06 AD specifically.

I never got to meet Jerry Falwell but if I had, I would have admitted to him my overt fondness for Tinky Winky. He was a newer, purpler worldlier version of Barney and for that I rejoiced. Tinky Winky was also my son's fave-ola Teletubby. Wherever my son went, so too, did his purple, purse-toting, hip swinging stuffy. And it was all good. Still is.

Of course now that all's well with Falwell in his new afterlife (trusting he hasn't ended up in Teletubby land), I would presume he also probably has a newfound omniscience about us earthling creatures. So he probably also now knows that same said son of mine likes to walk around batting his eyelashes and affecting limp wrist poses while exclaiming, "Stop. the. car!...I like think I broke a nay ull!" And thus, the late great Rev. Falwell has now concluded that it was all because of Tinky Winky and that said son is gay. And he would be right. According to the earliest roots of the word in etymology online, my son is, indeed gay - as in, "full of mirth and joy; brilliant and showy."

But alas, I know it's a week late, but I confess I owe a debt of honour to Faretheewell Falwell, because his Teletubby rant was but one of a series of religious awakening moments I had in those early motherhood years that caused me to think seriously, for perhaps the first time, about disparate worldviews....(correct reading: disparate from mine) and how one's view about God can so shape one's intolerant attitude towards others.

My first reaction when I first heard his Tinky Winky rant was incredulous laughter. I wondered about the poor souls who took his Christian esotericism seriously. I mean, seriously...I was alarmed and I remember feeling a little unsettled and thinking, paranoia self-destroyer. And then I remember feeling pity, which is kinda pitiful, I know. Pity that such an abject fixation on human sexuality would and could cloud one's interpretation of a kid's show and more to the point, what it means to be one of God's creatures. And lastly, I remember feeling intensely fascinated and morbidly curious by the nature of Falwell's God, such that he really believed only a select few are saved.

Thus began the earliest inklings of my religious studies quest at a pivotal time, actually, in the history of evangelicalism. Many historians have noted the links between turns of centuries and millenniums, and increased millennialism and apocalyptic fervor. Some, such as Richard Tarnas with his Cosmos and Psyche book go further, linking planetary positions and astronomical cycles to political and social strife.

Liberal fears and right/left contentions aside, it's actually a very exciting time in the religious history of North America. Here we are in a a post-televangelist stage - with dead Falwells and near-dead Tammy Faye Bakers, Jimmy Swaggarts, and Pat Robertsons soon to follow. I say post because Falwell's death marks a deliberate passing of sorts and dare I predict, turning point.

There is such a wealth of theological constructs in Evangelicalism that I get why most are reluctant to be painted with the generic brush. I have one relative who is Pentecostal and another who is an End Time dispentationalist. Both would call themselves evangelical yet their worldviews are monumentally different.

Falwell sat somewhere along the same E line, sharing an unwaivering conviction, as most but the most doubting Thomas' do, about the infallible word of God as revealed through Logos and Jesus as living Word.

Modern media affords a glimpse into how these worldviews play out. Movies like The Apostle are a gripping character study of what makes the Prophet archetype so charismatic and compelling. And Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory is a great documentary, based on the book by Randall Balmer.

Along the Balmer lines, other scholars who study the eclectic fabric of America that is Evangelicalism include Mark Noll, George Marsden and Grant Wacker. For those who dare, Salvation on Sand Mountain is an unputdownable glimpse into the minds and lives of snake handlers. And I haven't seen Jesus Camp yet but I'm guessing it is an apt if somewhat scary documentation of what is the quintessential coming-of-age rite for Christian youth and leaders.

Which brings me back to the whole coming of age notion relative to Evangelicalism. With as many next generation Evangelicals and divergent paths as history is starting to give us ~ ranging from the fundamental, anti-ecumenical types to the mainline mega Churches who use The Secret and The Da Vinci Code pop cultural stuff to reel them in ~ I can't help but question: with all this fragmentation and religious disconnect wherein so few Christians can agree on what being a Christian means, where is the train actually heading?

Is this the golden age...or to speak eschatologically, is this the penultimate days before thine kingdom come?

And what would Falwell say now about Tinky Winky? Would he he call himself a Dipsy who lived a Laa-Laa land religious life or does he fashion himself more like a Po-et now, able to now see the creative One forest through the million trees?

And by one forest, many trees I mean this:

Religious people can only learn from this kind of philosophy (ie. religion pulls us apart but spirituality brings us together in love) if they go to the basic experience of the founder of their religion. And then they'll realize that Christ wasn't a Christian and that Buddha wasn't a Buddhist and Muhammad wasn't Muslim. These people were having the experience of unity consciousnesses and universal consciousness and they spoke of it in words. So if you're a real Christian, you should be listening to what Christ said in the Sermon on the Mount and then you are expressing the universality of spiritual consciousness.

Because if you claim that your religion is exclusive and that your God is exclusive, then how can that God manage the whole universe? We are one speck of dust in probably the junkyard of infinity and there are billions of galaxies with billions of planets and billions of solar systems. We should not diminish the magnificence of God by giving him a sexist male identity, an ethnic background, squeezing him or her into the volume of a body and the span of a lifetime and a regional geography. That's really not paying a pure respect to the magnificence of the Almighty.

(Excerpt from Beliefnet Chopra interview here)

On that note, I recommend a great book about life and death by Deepak Chopra, who was in town last week but who I didn't go see because my son guilted me into staying to watch his baseball tournament game instead. The book is called The Book of Secrets and it's a hugely interesting look at life and death at both the micro cell level and the macro metaphysics level. I just finished another astonishing book of his ~ Life After Death: The Burden of Proof ~ in which he postulates that heaven and hell are current not after-life realities and that we may well be able to invent our own post-death experience. It's a transformative and many would say preposterous look at eschatology but what I like is that he approaching things with an Ayurvedic understanding and a panentheistical (Tat Tvam Asi) worldview, rather than looking at things dualistically as theism teaches.

So long story short, Falwell that ends well. Or Falwell ends in a well. Or end Falwell's well. Or well, that Falwell ends.

I'll let you choose your own ending.

Have a nice day. Namaste.

Rite of Passage

2007-05-07T11:02:00.000-07:00

Each year, our UU congregation sets aside a day of worship for the 8th grade youth, in order to honour their spiritual quest and subsequent Coming of Age. While similar in concept to the spring rites of other faith traditions - ie. Confirmation, First Communion, Bar/Bat Mitzvah, etc., the UU COA ritual differs in huge dogmatic degree, insofar as the kids are not taught or told what to think, believe, memorize or accept as Truth. For many youth, being encouraged to critically reflect and think for themselves in order to craft and articulate their own credo statement at ceremonial end of this rite of passage can be a disconcerting experience.

Truth be told, sitting in on the Coming of Age ceremony last spring at church is what prompted me to become a UU. Watching these incredible, young teens take over and run the entire worship service, from music to liturgy to sermon, was such an amazingly powerful, not to mention emotional experience, that I felt the first official stirring of having arrived at a spiritual home.

I was in awe that these kids could be so grounded in their own process - from who they were, to who they are now, to who they are in advent of becoming - seemed incredible to me. Last year as this, I listened to these youth express their own theologies with a clarity of purpose rarely found in in tender-aged souls, and more to the point, with a freedom of expression seldom permitted in a house of worship.

Some confessed they still weren't sure about this thing called God and that the only reason they were there is because there parents (usually a pushy mother) made them be part of it, but they at least felt safe in being able to feel such uncertainty without fear of judgment or penance. Others insisted they knew God to be the universal ground of all beings. A bold few admitted they felt this exercise doomed to ritual failure, given that they belong to a willy-nilly congregation that often struggles to explain itself succinctly to the outside world. Still others could stand amongst the most erudite of theologians and speak about theodical and eschatological matters without a moment's hesitation.

Armed only with the guidance of just seven principles and six sources as props, these kids are encouraged to look inside to that scary dark place with the dimly lit candle for spiritual direction and meaning.

I, yet another pushy mother, look forward to the day my own children will come of age and begin their own earnest quest for the holy truth. As one girl admitted yesterday, "I've learned through this process that I don't have all the answers, even though I let on to my parents like I do. Instead, I just have alot of questions. Like if there's really a God, why would he or she create a world like this one? So I guess I'll be maybe continuing on this quest for a really, long time - probably the rest of my life, in fact."

Join the club, I wanted to say. But then, by virtue of the fact she has now official crossed the threshold and come of age into the larger congregation of holy questers, it would seem she already has.

In Limbo

2007-04-23T12:32:00.000-07:00

That they sinned not; and if they merit had,

'Tis not enough, because they had not baptism
Which is the portal of the Faith thou holdest;
Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy: Inferno

Speaking of the next life, it would seem that every limbo boy and girl, all around the limbo world, gonna do the limbo rock now that they will no longer be in their own special handbasket hell, in the netherlands of heaven. In case you missed the Pope flexing his Papal infallibility muscle with his recent limbo declaration, click here.

In essence, the Pope has built a stairway to heaven for infants who die before baptism so that they may suffer no more in that liminal holding tank called limbo (a place incidentally, that bears not an iota of mention in the Bible).

As the Holy See's International Theological Commission admits, "it must be clearly acknowledged that the church does not have sure knowledge about the salvation of unbaptized infants who die." How does one aptly respond to such a statement except to smile and say, indeed?

Now, I'll admit, I relish a juicy soteriological conundrum such as this. And a conundrum this is, for what are we then to make of Augustine's dogma of original sin and indeed, other interrelated doctrinal issues such as the sacraments, Immaculate Conception and grace? Eradicating centuries-old supporting theology, while a liberating step for Roman Catholicism, is tricky business, because when you pick at the very pillars and foundations of theology such as that of Augustinian thought in Catholicism, then you run risk of crumbling an entire section which just so happens to be housed atop and near and dear to constructs such as limbo. This is not necessarily a bad thing, merely a bold one.

I'd be willing to bet the farm at the Divinity Poker Challenge (letting Jesus spin the wheel, of course) that the Pope has thought three to four chess moves ahead in removing this little complicated, sidestep move from the overall sacred dance (consider the not so coincidental fact that in the West Indies, limbo is thought to mean 'to bend backwards'), but the question remains, if limbo's a salvific improbability, what other theological babe(s) is he willing to throw out with the holy bathwater for the sake of strengthening missionary efforts and/or making a bigger splash in papal history? Purgatory, indulgences, mediatrix liturgy?

Surely if any of us had absolute and certain knowledge about salvation and our posthumous fate (and by certain knowledge I mean empirical), well gosh darn, gee willickers, might we not have saved ourselves many a Holy war and all that paving of endless paths to the Divine instead of just building one highway marked "Shortcut to Heaven?"

But since none of us has all the answers to give Virginia, (no, forgive me father, for I have sinned: not even the Pope) ~ except by taking a flying leap of faith and reason, an act which often involves closing our eyes wide shut, crossing our fingers and toes, and drinking a pitcher of bloody Marys for good measure ~ what else is there to do but to keep dancing in our own little hokey-pokey kinda way and hope we get picked in the ultimate Spot Dance?

Don't move that limbo bar

You'll be a limbo star
How low can you go?
Chubby Checker, "Limbo Rock"

Eschatologichemistry

2007-04-12T15:51:00.000-07:00

Even though Snopes outs this joke as an ongoing urban legend dating back to early-70s science rag publications, I still think it's funny as, ummm...hell.

Going to Hell

The following is supposedly an actual question given on a University of Washington chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so "profound" that the professor shared it with colleagues.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle's Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant thereof.

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, let's look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell.

Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell.

With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially. Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle's Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose. 2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, " it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you", and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over. The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct...leaving only Heaven thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting "Oh my God."

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY "A"

:)

* Now I get why Bachelor of Science degree holders (BSc) capitalize the BS but leave the c small.

Pasta, Puja and Promise: A Pilgrim's Tale

2007-04-05T13:48:00.000-07:00

Eat, Pray, Love:

One Woman’s Search for Everything
Across Italy, India and Indonesia

by Elizabeth Gilbert

Viking; 2006
331 pages

Every once in a long while, a book comes along that fills the soul’s myriad hungers for vicarious hedonism, heaven and healing. This would be that book.

Gilbert has managed to craft a memoir that is witty and wise, sexy and soulful, not to mention extremely engaging and entertaining. She recounts her journey post-divorce – an experience she likens to “having a really bad car accident every single day for about two years;” post break-up from her rebound lover, and post-depression; from that place of disconnect and discontent, to the sacred self or I, as alphabetical mapping would have it.

In fact, she ends up heading to not to one singular I but to three Is: Italy to learn the fine art of pleasure, India to find discover devotion, and Indonesia to explore the sacred balance between the two. As such, her journey takes her to Rome to learn Italian, to an Ashram in northern India to immerse herself in the intricacies of Siddha Yoga, and to a Balinese village to glean wisdom from a medicine man.

While her story does read with a measure of surreality, complete with a fairy tale happy ending, she unabashedly hangs her hat on the one truth that shines like a beacon throughout the pages. “I was the administrator of my own rescue,” she asserts, a truth the reader becomes witness to some three hundred pages along the road with her.

She fashions her book into the three country sections for a total of 108 chronicles or tales (plus one to spare), along the lines of a japa mala or string of prayer beads. This methodology is apropos for her journey because threaded into each quirky chronicle of this pilgrimess’ tale is a glimmer of grace and and a bead of divinity.

What is notable and curious to this particular tourism marketer, is that despite the fact Gilbert took a year off to explore these disparate nations, her travels are anything but touristy. She shockingly admits to visiting just one museum while in Italy (and only at her visiting sisters’ insistence) and never venturing beyond the Ashram to see the real India of mughals, monuments and maharajas charted by history and folklore. And she doesn’t even escape to a beach in Indonesia until six weeks after arriving, shock of all shames.

Instead, she ascribes to the when in Rome adage. She hangs out in restaurants or at soccer matches, where she feasts on “a delirious banquet of Italian language.” Her passage to India is no less authentic an experience. She spends almost all her time in meditation and even finds herself “pulled through the wormhole of the Absolute” into her own mystical experience, not on the penultimate page but rather, a mere 67 beads along the tale’s pearly string. And her time in Indonesia is just as off-beat and magical. She hangs with the locals, befriends the village medicine man, and learns exactly what it means to live life fully in the moment.

What else remains to be said of the book except simply this: read it. Find a good cozy corner in the sun, or tuck yourself 'neath a nice lamp on your chaise lounge with a fuzzy chenille blanket and ensconce yourself in her journey. But do so before the movie version (Brad Pitt production starring Julia Roberts) comes out. Trust me. And if you're going to order your book online at Amazon...ahem, look and click no further than my sidebar. I've got my own sacred travel plans too, ya know.

The Muddling Glory of God

2007-04-02T13:58:00.000-07:00

Anne Lamott was in town this past weekend so Jeri , her sis Cheri, and I met up at a downtown church to hear Anne talk about none other than her thoughts on faith during her latest book peddling, Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith. I hadn't met Jeri before but as is the case with reading the musings of other fellow bloggers, I felt as though I had.

In any event, I really enjoyed Lamott's talk. Much more so than the reading of her latest work, actually. There were easily 1,000 people who packed the church to hear her speak, and yet strangely, it seemed as intimate to me as a small salon gathering. Her soft-spoken nature surprised me. She comes across kind of spacey and unassuming - sort of a cross between the witty and wise Diane Keaton and an adorable, cutsie Melanie Griffith - I wondered at one point if all those drugs from her former addict lifestyle hadn't perchance gotten the best of her. And yet her thoughts on faith are lucid and anything but spacey.

What's refreshing is how irreverently reverent she is about her Christian faith. She's not praise the Lord! preachy but rather, unabashedly honest, questioning and grateful. "The opposite of faith," she claims, "is certainty." This may be the only thing she knows for sure about this quest called God.

Apart from the fact that she knows she hates process. "There must be an easier way," she laments, than the mistake-ridden path of living, learning and passing it on. "If I were God," she says, "I'd have a completely different system." It would be more like a kitchen drawer organizer and there would be a definite out-box corresponding to the God box system she utiliizes. God box?

Yup. She admits to having a physical box where she stashes notes and prayer requests to God. Think Wailing Wall on a local scale. She's unabashed in her praise of this system. It works, she insists, eventually, which is another thing she hates. It's part of the reason she thinks God is so clever. Her prayers are always answered....somehow, somewhere...they just seldom resemble the original request.

Lamott read a couple of excerpts from her new book, a loose collection of commentaries about grace and the notion of forgivishness, as she calls it. One of the tales she read is about the estrangement of a friendship since partially mended, while the other is the riveting account of an assisted suicide she facilitated years ago. In both cases, grace was a change agent for her.

She believes strongly in the power of grace, even if it does seem as though it isn't an immediate process. Grace, she notes, "often buys me a few minutes," whether this be in matters of Sunday school discipline, parenting a teenager, writing a book or radical self-care, as she calls it.

She took some time to address the process of writing, as detailed in her book Bird by Bird, and then stayed to sign books. I lined up to get my book signed, something I haven't done since waiting to get Eric Estrada's autograph at a car show. Thankfully, the line-up was only a ten minute wait. I decided to buy Bird by Bird, so titled to describe the process and reality of what she dubs "shitty" first drafts (my blogs in a nutshell).

Which is metaphoric, really, of this journey through life we are all in together and of the "muddling glory of God" and eventual grace that abounds, if only we would but pay attention.

Death by Chocolate

2007-04-02T09:51:00.000-07:00

Hot Cross Reactions
The latest religious uproar to make news is the chocolate art exhibit cancellation of an anatomically correct (yikes, I'm afraid to ask) replica of the crucified and very naked Jesus, bringing new meaning to the term death by chocolate.

This 200-lb edible artwork, entitled "My Sweet Lord," has caused such a public outcry, particularly amongst the Catholic community, that its Holy Week exhibit, slated for a Manhattan hotel gallery and set to launch today following Palm Sunday, has been cancelled.

The usual comparative religious finger pointing has happened, with some Christian groups protesting that you'd never see this sort of naughty bits chocolate art depiction of the Prophet Mohammed or of Martin Luther King Jr. on his day of honour. And they have a point. Why the artist didn’t see fit to layer a white chocolate loin cloth around Jesus' hips is as much a mystery as his audacious choice of artistic expression.

In the Name of God
No one religion can claim exclusion from controversial artistic portrayals though.

Eastern traditions, notably Hinduism, enjoyed a long history of depicting the swastika in their religion art, (dating back to Neolithic Eurasia and pre Indo-Aryan conflict era), that is, until the Nazi misappropriated the symbol for their own Aryan supremacy purposes. And while the portrayal of nude deities is commonplace and a throwback to its fertility cult roots, even Hindus draw the line at sacrilegious depictions of their deities.

Buddhists, too, have always struggled to remain true to the beliefs of Siddharta Guatama by tempering their idolatrous tendencies, as much as some Buddhist religious art might hint differently.

The Abrahamic traditions share some of the more contentious views of idolatry, however. Judaism has historically walked this controversial fine line between affording itself a creative and abstract religious expression and subjecting itself to base idolatry. Even in recent centuries, Jews have had to wrestle with issues of censorship and controversy, relative to Holocaust art and even more recently, post historical Jesus hype, with depictions of Jesus as an itinerant Rabbi.

And so sacred is Islam's holy trinity - Allah, the Qu'ran and the Prophet Mohammed - that any pictorial depiction or textual translation is considered blasphemous. Hence, the Muslim outcry following the Danish cartoon controversy.

So it's of little surprise that Christians are ready to wage an iconoclastic war against such this secular, Warholish chocolate sculpture of the suffering Jesus. Art is meant to portray the seamless link between Truth and Beauty. Sadly, it does not always do so.

Having said that, the subtle ironies of this controversy are difficult to ignore.

First of all, here we have a faith tradition that began as an underground religious heresy, and built itself literally from the catacombs up.

Its earliest teachings relied as heavily on art and symbolism as they did on the Word or Logos, most especially because a great deal of Christian converts were either illiterate or not versed in Latin. When one thinks of Christianity then, certain Greco-Roman motifs immediately come to mind. Cross, fish, shepherd, sheep, doves - these are all intertextual symbols that owe more to the power of art and architecture to convey the ethos and pathos of Christ than the Gospels themselves.

Secondly, lest we not forget how sacramental Christianity is. When Catholics, for example, receive the host or wafer during Eucharist and/or drink Communion wine, they are, in essence, eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ in commemoration of the Last Supper, or so transubstantiation would have it. It is, arguably, one of the greatest leaps of faith an adherent must take, not to mention one of the most magical, and I think beautiful, examples of the link between myth and ritual.

Food for Thought
So to see Jesus depicted in temporal, culinary form seems fitting, almost. Such a display speaks to the mystery of Jesus the Christ on so many levels. First, we have the whole substance of Christ issue, so prevalent in early-Christianity leading up to the Council of Nicea. All that talk about whether Christ was half human, half divine, fully human or fully divine. Truth be told, it continues today.

What better medium for the artist then, but chocolate to portray both the sinfulness of His humanity and the heavenliness of His Divinity? Chocolate, after all, comes by its rich reputation honestly, for it enjoys a rich religious history. The Mayans revered the Cacao Tree, calling it “food of the Gods.” And the Quakers were some of the first to capitalize on this reality, if the business enterprises of families like Baker, Cadbury, Fry and Rowntree are any indication.

Which leads me to the little matter of paganism in Christianity, and more specifically, Easter.

Christianity, as most everyone knows, owes much to its pagan predecessors. Some would argue Christ Himself is but a mythical lifting from Mithraism, given that both Mithra and Christ share equinox dates with winter solstice birthday and spring (Easter) rites, a virgin birth, a Mediator role, the Messiah label, twelve disciples, the magic touch of healing and miracles, a cave tale, an itinerant lifestyle, persecution, transfiguration and symbolism of the lamb.

But that’s fine. What’s a little syncretism between religions, after all?

Yet factor in the pagan history of Easter, and it is small wonder Easter has become an eclectic mix of religious rites. The word Easter derives from Eostre, the goddess of spring, whose name comes from the root “to illuminate” or “dawn.” As the story goes, Eostre came upon an injured bird in the snow, transformed it into a rabbit to help it survive the winter, but curiously, the rabbit still possessed the ability to lay eggs. In gratitude for this life-saving gesture, the rabbit decorated the eggs as a gift for Eostre.

And so there we have the origins of the Easter bunny. Chocolate confectioners the world over owe a debt of gratitude of their own to the spring rites of pagans who honoured fertility, and celebrated earth’s seasonal cycles as living symbols of birth, growth, bountiful maturity and death.

Of Buns and Bunnies
Given this mixed heritage of Easter weekend celebrations in the sacred-secular mosaic we call 21^st century modernity, I cannot help but sympathize with the confusion my daughter feels. She has a hard time making sense that Good Friday is wrapped up in the pathos and crucifixion of Jesus, whereas Easter Sunday is all about the feast and frolic of gorging on hot-cross buns and finding foil-wrapped chocolate in amongst other dark turds in the yard, while Easter Monday then celebrates resurrection and the renewing power of spirit.

It's a crazy, mixed bag, but life and holiday rituals are like that. I can honestly confess I think the artist has captured something rather powerful here, yet much like my daughter on her Easter egg hunt, the observant must be willing to look for the bits of sacred amongst the profane.

Carolyn Walker Bynum, a leading history of religions scholar and author of Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, notes that eating is “one of the most basic and literal ways of encountering God.”

Indeed, if we consider the Judeo-Christian history, such that Passover honours the Exodus of the Israelites from ancient Egypt and the “birth” of the Jewish nation with a feast of unleavened bread, and that Christian spring rituals involve fasting and feasting (Lent and Last Supper); it is somewhat appropriate this exhibit be edible, albeit in a theoretical sense (eating sweets molded by the sweaty hands of an artist is not my idea of a box of chocolates).

While I’m not suggesting that one should feel tempted to nibble the toes off a chocolate Jesus, I do believe there is much artistic and religious meaning to be garnered from viewing the exhibit and the compassionate message of Jesus through a new hermeneutical lens ~ one large and ecumenical enough to embrace both the heritage and the humanity of religiosity.

Because when it’s all said and done, we’re not all that different a religious animal from Neanderthal man. We still revere life, fear death, cower beneath extremes in the elements, dance around fires in both celebration and imitation of the gods, and praise the Divine when all goes well. We still need myth and ritual to make sense of the cycle between life and death.

And we still don’t like when others mess with our own personal Imago Dei, a reality the artist discovered for himself. All is not lost, though. He can still melt his sculpture down and fashion a bunch of last minute bunnies out of the deal.

Such is the everlasting message of Easter, after all. Death, renewal, hope.

Revolutionary Patience

#4
Go ahead and compare him with other great figures
socrates
rosa Luxemburg
gandhi
he’ll stand the test
it would be better of course
if you compared him
with yourself

# 7
I like as you have noticed
to bring things down to earth
miraculous loaves obedient waves
even the deathbeds of children
lying asleep
they occur
in the stories of ancient peoples

Go ahead cut him down to size take away
the loaves the sea the halt and the lame
you’ll get them back
when you begin
to see with his eyes
every day
cripples start out
for his kingdom
the blind
begin to see

All his miracles
become the most natural thing in the world
if we make them come about
Dorothee Soelle

Holy War of Words

2007-03-23T09:30:00.001-07:00

Move over jihad, there's a new ihad in town.

It's being whispered behind ladies’ hijabs, murmured at mosques, and debated heatedly by fundamentalist Muslims the world over.

It's called ijtihad and it is an audacious word, to be sure.

Struggle for Words
To say it's a new concept is misleading, however. It shares etymological roots with the word, jihad, which loosely defined, as we have all come to learn, also means struggle. Ijtihad is a striving, as well, yet not towards God so much as inwards. In both respects though, the struggle is both a process and a journey.

Where the struggle deviates is that while jihad can be understood to be a psychological process, ijtihad is much more a philosophical one. Roughly defined then, ijtihad is the painstaking, soul-searching form of critical inquiry necessary to form a theological or legal judgment and arrive at a new interpretation of the source text(s).

If this sounds suspiciously like the work of scholars and philosophers, it's because it is. Or rather, was.

Every religion has its scholars ~ Aquinas, Maimonides, Nagarjuna and Shankara are all names that come to mind for the various other major traditions ~ but what's interesting, and I think pivotal to both the intellectual rise and fall of Islam, is how influential Islam's medieval scholars were.

Ibn Rushd and Al-Ghazali are the two most celebrated in historical Islam. Both were savvy to the ways of reason and law, and yes, the fine art of ijtihad. I won’t bore you with their details, but read even a smattering of their works and you’ll be amazed at how brilliant and instrumental these great thinkers were both within and to the development of the medieval world.

What bearing should such arcane exegetics as ijtihad have for modern Muslims? According to one of Islam's most vocal reformers, Irshad Manji, a self-proclaimed 'Muslim Refusenik,' a significant amount.

Faith Without Fear
As best-selling author of the book, The Trouble With Islam Today and mistress of a rebel movement called Project Ijtihad, Manji is as disturbed as most Muslims today at the religious turn of events for Islam, particularly the changing worldview post 9/11.

In fact, more so, for she dares to write and speak publicly, honestly and most-dissidently about issues of faith near and dear to the Muslim heart; bold words, incidentally, that earn her as many accolades (ie. the Oprah Chutzpah Award) as death threats.

She spoke here in town the last couple of evenings at PBS-sponsored talks to launch her new documentary, Faith Without Fear, set to air mid-April, and to plug her new paperback, which I had the distinct pleasure of reading in hardcover format a couple of years back when it was first published in Canada.

How and why Islam went from being a religion of such theological, philosophical and scientific renown, such that it was the flavour of the week for a medieval time (even fostering some 135 schools of thought), to becoming such a strict, neo-conservative religion that allows virtually no room for deviation from the literal words of the Prophet Mohammed in the Qu'ran ~ these are the questions she raises. She pulls no punches. What the hell happened? she dares ask.

Well, let’s see. There were these little matters of holy wars with Christendom and the Jews, not to mention great political and imperial strife throughout the Middle East and Central Asia, as empires came, conquered, collapsed. Add to that diasporas, and dysfunction and bickering within the Islamic family itself, and you begin to get a sense that struggle is as much a defining element of Islam as the five pillars themselves.

But instead of struggling against the grain and the tides of this new millennium, Manji suggests it is high time Islam, and more to the point, Muslims who are the living faith, reform their thinking and begin the process of personally re-claiming their religion as their own. This process of accountability and responsibility, Manji insists, starts with ijtihad.

But wait a minute. Making a personal judgment to interpret the Shari’ah (Islamic law)? Blasphemous, devout Muslims would claim. The words of the Prophet were not meant to be written on subway walls or debated in tenement halls.

Nonetheless, they do echo in the sounds of silence and uneasy acquiescence. And shifty-eyed silence speaks volumes.

That said, there comes a time in each religion when reform becomes necessary, or so says history.

Luther believed in small c catholicism and in an ecumenical approach to religion, which is not to be confused with the economical approach of Rome circa the Reformation era.

Faith to him was not bound up solely in repenting sins, performing sacraments or purchasing indulgences, all in mediated Papal fashion, but rather, was salvific in so far as he believed that God grants grace to those who receive Christ as their savior and place their faith in Him.

Justification by faith. Salvation by grace. These were holy heretical notions when Luther first nailed his 95 theses to that Wittenberg church door back in 1517 and yet they would prove to be the impetus to one of the greatest turning points in Christian history.

Nearly 500 years later, Islam is at a similar stalemate and reformative crossroad. It too has strong reformers willing to stand up and be counted; warriors women like Irshad Manji and Ayaan Hersi Ali, who are trying desperately to drag their faith kicking and screaming into the new millennium, fears be damned.

Faith Without Faith
A religion stops breathing when a culture, or religio-political leaders, (ie. to borrow from Islam, certain Imams, rogue madressas, the Taliban, etc.), claim all rights to interpret, preach and bastardize the sacred to suit geo-politics and cultural constructs, at the expense of modernity, progression and a little thing called the free and responsible search for Truth.

A religion stops speaking when groups like al Quaeda purport to speak for it and the masses can do little more than let the Mosque do its talking for them.

A religion stops growing when independent inquiry is discouraged and resignation and doubt pervade. And by growth I mean relevancy, not population statistics, because the continued spread of Islam worldwide is self-evident and directly proportionate to this rising index. The question then remains: is Islam as authentic and relevant to its adherents now as it was 500 years ago?

Some, like Manji, say no. She says part of the problem is the current blame game and inshallah, shoulder-shirking attitude that has the populace crying, “culture is the problem but Islam? Islam is perfect!”

Islam is far from perfect claims Manji, and is as much of the problem as the cultures who have shape-shifted it. So much so that rather than being the so-called religion of peace it is purported to be (a notion Manji likens to a slogan rather than a reality), she believes it has manifested itself, instead, as a religion of justice.

Down with Dogma
It is hardly surprising then that Manji advocates faith versus dogma, education not indoctrination, and a fusion of faith and reason not readily found in modern Islam. Her thinking is not altogether revolutionary, and yet it is liberating insofar as she is uttering a call to religious arms that promotes a return to reverence and intellect, and an abandonment of fear.

And it not altogether shocking that she tends to be critical and unsympathetic when incidences like the Danish cartoon controversy, or the Pope’s harsh words about Islam, or any negative media depictions of Islam are made public.

Rise up and be accountable, she cries. Muslims need to stop playing victim to the self-censorship ties that bind and gag them powerless and instead, start claiming the religion as their own in modernity, using the empowering spirit of ijtihad to guide them.

To watch this formidable, articulate and brave woman with her multi-tonal, spiked locks, match and surpass wits with the Muslim brotherhood in the back of the room the other night, says as much about her tenacity as it does about the rising fear-based polemic in the Muslim community.

While Imams may well be circling the wagons in an attempt to keep infidels like her from getting through to the flock (as evidenced by the “Status of Women in Islam” brochure I was handed on my way out), the reality is there are cracks in the wall and she has found a medium as an award-winning journalist, to poke larger holes in them.

Manji’s book, banned in most Muslim countries, is readily (and freely) available for download on her website in Urdu, Persian and Arabic. And her Project Ijtihad movement is a grassroots endeavor that is quickly catching fire with young and old alike worldwide. Already she has had former jihadists and suicide bombers read her book and have a change of worldview, as a result of the question she raises. Wow - you go, girl.

I wish her Godspeed and luck ~ peace be upon her ~ because her task will not be an easy one.

Look for Manji’s special to air on PBS April 19^th and an interview excerpt to be broadcast on 60 Minutes sometime soon, as well.

God's Breath

2007-03-21T09:55:00.000-07:00

“The whole course of things goes to teach us faith.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Today I’ve been pondering the cosmological notion of tsimtsum.

No, I did not do this while eating dim sum. I suspect that would not be a digestively sound thing to do. After all, how can one ponder the fine art of God crafting the universe whilst staring at a cart of chicken feet rolling by?

Tsimtsum (pronounced zimzum) is a Kabbalist term which, according to its corresponding dot com, “portrays God as inhaling at the moment of creation, diminishing himself to make room for the universe.”

Don’t ask me why I got thinking about tsimtsum when I should instead be doing what normal stay-at-home mom types do. Get buffed at the health club. Watch the daytime talk shows and fold laundry. Scrapbook two decades of photos. Have morning coffee with the PTA moms and chatter about the upcoming school auction. Or go shopping for bed and bath décor. (translation: what I should be doing rather than blogging).

But I think what started this train of thought was that I got to pondering the overt absence of God during my childhood years and began wondering if there is a kind of micro tsimtsum- osmosis that transpires at birth for all of God’s creation.

As above, so below, and all that.

I’m sure Rabbi Luria would be rolling over in his grave right now if he knew the extent to which I have metaphorically messed with his most sophisticated creation concept. He intended to introduce (or so I gather) the notion that because Ein Sof (God) was an energy source that existed as all that was, Ein Sof needed to contract and allow a space/place of nothingness for creation ex nihilo, before next crafting humans with both form and purpose.

Thus, the primordial Adam (not to be confused with Adam of Adam/Eve fame) became the first man in this chaos to cosmos tale. Lurianic Kabbalists then view God as an evolving Source in process and evolution; both Creator and Creation, Infinite and Temporal, Exoteric and Esoteric, Transcendent yet Immanent.

So that’s the extreme skinny on tsimtsum. There’s much more to it than that, obviously. This is Kabbalah and a metaphysical worldview, after all, and nothing in Kabbalah is simple, (except perhaps Madonna’s time goes by so slowly for those who wait lyrics).

One of my fave and perhaps the best-known modern portrayal of tsimtsum can be found with the Good Ship Tsimtsum in Yann Martel's Man Booker Prize winning tale, Life of Pi. If you have not yet read Life of Pi, what can I say? You really ought to. As one of my best-loved profs was so fond of instructing us with assignments, “read this: it will be good for you to do so.”

I read the book for my Nature of Religion self-study class and while it reads, at first skim, like a simple grade five, epic sea adventure, the book is actually an Überintertextual, religious allegory of man’s plight against, nature, self and God. To borrow a line from the Lucky Charms commercial, it’s magically delicious (if a bit tedious in spots).

And of course, it is no mere coincidence that the name of the ship our good friend Pi the protagonist was aboard happened to be the Tsimtsum. One could say that at the point that the ship sunk, Pi was born-again. Now before you start speculating whether I have perhaps been inhaling a bit too much of something or other myself, and have forgotten to exhale, consider the possibility with me for just a moment. Tsimtsum for everyone. What if?

What if we understood God, (or whatever name you wish to address God as), God’s grace and/or God’s breath, through this same lens, whereby we are each left to our own devices (scare quote emphasis on 'vices' for some of us more primitive beings) from the point at which our soul first attaches to us, be that in-vetro or during delivery. Things that make you go hmmmm.

He contracts and then tiptoes away, allowing each spark of ensuing creation the breathing room to expand and soul-make, which in turn, in this kind of process theology, helps evolve God and expand the cosmos. Now granted, that doesn’t explain the divine sensibilities of the enlightened few, who are veritably born wired for God as saints, nuns, priests, mystics and prophets. In these cases, I think God accidentally takes a deep breath in, but inadvertently breathes out a tiny gasp in the final moment; imbuing them with more than a few sprinkles of his divine spit. Which goes to show why only a small handful of babies are born attractive.

But for many of us, like me, who had only the faintest shards of divine light illuminate the cracks of our secular childhoods; this grand, God-toking and getting high on His/Her own energy process makes sense. It contains way more logic than the mythical stork tale. And it might well explain why babies cry when they get their asses slapped at birth. It is a metaphoric reminder of the tsimtsum trauma ~ when God first said, “see ya, wouldn’t wanna be ya.”

And it is an interesting worldview; this apparent absent, yet veiled presence of God business. I liken it to desert spirituality: creation must find its way back to the water Source while avoiding the mirages along the way. The desert analogy does not work perfectly for our friend, Pi, of course, who had no shortage of water to contend with, albeit of the salty variety. But the plight is the same, nonetheless.

As Pi states, “I was alone and orphaned, in the middle of the Pacific, hanging on to an oar, an adult tiger in front of me, sharks beneath me, a storm raging around me. Had I considered my prospects in the light of reason, I surely would have given up.” Rumi’s sage words, “do not seek water, seek thirst” ring true here.

Were it not for Pi’s transcendent faith and conjuring of Richard Parker ~ that mysterium tremendum et fascinans tiger and trusty raft companion ~ how might the tale have ended?

By the same token, were it not for his reason and bouts of religious naturalism, how might he have otherwise survived?

And what of the co-dependency between Richard the tiger and Pi the boy?

As above, so below.

O Lord, how manifold are your works!
In wisdom you made them all;
the earth is full of your creatures.
There is the sea, vast and spacious,
teeming with creatures beyond number—
living things both large and small.
There the ships go to and fro,
and the leviathan,
which you formed to frolic there.
These all look to you
to give them their food at the proper time.
When you give it to them,
they gather it up;
when you open your hand,
they are satisfied with good things.
When you hide your face,
they are terrified;
when you take away their breath,
they die and return to the dust.
When you send your Spirit,
they are created,
and you renew the face of the earth.
Psalm 104: 24-30

Holy Terrifying!

2007-03-20T15:29:00.000-07:00

This is a pic of the new Grand Canyon Skywalk, unveiled today. Intrepid visitors can step out onto this glass bridge at about 4,000 ft. above the canyon floor and say a holy prayer that the engineering and construction materials are solid.

Me? I don't care what wonder of the world they call it, I much prefer the view from here, thank you very much.

God.com

2007-03-14T09:09:00.000-07:00

Since time immemorial, both the piously faithful and lapsed unfaithful have been searching for God.

From the lofty heights of pyramids and stargazing, to sacred scriptures, to shrines and worship sites, to the depths of the inner soul in meditation and the recesses of neurology, these searches have led us far and wide, but perhaps no more closer than primeval man to the Divine.

It is little surprise then that the latest pilgrimage phenomenon should be an online quest. Google "God" with either a small or big G, and 402 million links later, you may well find what you're looking for.

Or maybe not.

World religions and scholars alike are beginning to cybertap into the prayers of adherents and curious cats alike, and are awakening to the portal potential of the Internet as a wide-reaching, albeit messy place of holiness. Looking to read the Gospel of Philip? Just click here. How about having an online conversation with God? Alas, the Web hears your prayer. Need an e-confessional? Done. No time and money to get to Mecca? Try going on the hajj, YouTube-style.

While cyberseeking God may look like 21st century religiosity, the wired pious do not necessarily view it that way. David Lamp likens his online church worship at The Online Church of Cyberspace "to a moment on the road to Damascus." And rightly so. A modern-day pilgrim seeking spiritual experiences on the information highway is bound to find a type of communitas and connection not much different than that of Hindu devotees converging enroute to Varanasi.

Discovering kindred spirits in the so-called disconnect and liminality of cyberspace can be a great source of comfort, particularly for some who may be physically unable to worship by traditional means publicly - be their constraints illness or distance. Still others who gravitate to technology would have their religion no other way. Connecting with God by click of a mouse is ideal for those who are intensively private in their devotions or those who desire a more remote and solitaire form of religious contemplation. And then there are others who would rather commune with God while wearing their housecoat and pjs. One could argue that some religions more than deliver on the robe and pj-wearing end, but that's another blog for another time.

The ways and means matter little. What matters is that some people are discovering that online religion can be as multi-sensory, illuminating and fulfilling a religiosity (sacramental religiosity aside) as attending a temple, church or mosque. Indeed, if we apply Ninian Smart's dimensional theory to this notion of online religion, we might arguably find that God.com measures up in virtually all regards, pardon the pun.

So perhaps that is what is meant by God of the gaps: Looking for God in all the blog places.

On a personal note, I attend church near weekly now and while I enjoy my time in the sanctuary amongst hundreds of similar souls in either philosophical or meditative reflection, I still prefer to look for divinity beyond the gap in the door; that is to say, in nature, communing with space, time and the wonders of science.

To see a world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

An eternity in an hour.

William Blake

The blog confessional is now open. Today's topic: cyberspace or outerspace. Today's question: Where do you find proof of God?

Or are you still at the faded signpost, trying to map the way?

Confessions of a Holy Mind

2007-03-08T12:19:00.000-08:00

Holy Schmidt, I did it!

Forgive me Bill, for I have sinned. It has been a lifetime since my last confession and a daily transgression in my mind of infidelity.

And now it's finally happened. I lifted the skirt of my burquah, dusted the dirt off the hem and now here I am, in bed with a new blog server. I had the good sense to keep my veil on, though. And like all good blog whores, I had the good sense to adsense.

On that note, welcome to my new blog boudoir. It's much the same schmidt, only holier.

Because while I still offer my cosmic, kismet and inane thought and tales as sacred tithe to the universe, and while I shall still list holy books, words, and links and confessions, I intend to do only that. Keep it holy, that is.

On earth as it is in heaven and all that.

What would be adequate penance for my sins? Drinking 10 bloody marys? Or having to skip boisterously down the street singing Mary Mary quite contrary, how does your garden grow? Or maybe nothing because at the end of the day, it just doesn't matter.

I saw a bumper sticker yesterday that said just that: What if the hokey pokey is all that it's about?

What if, indeed.