Freedom . . . for Which?
I subscribe to the notion that separating out religion from other meaning-making systems is valid only for the sake of convenience. I agree with anthropologist Jonathan Z. Smith who says,
Religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study. It is created for the scholar’s analytic purposes by his imaginative acts of comparison and generalization. Religion has no existence apart from the academy. (Imagining Religion)
Allowing for humor and rhetorical overstatement, Professor Smith’s point is that we human beings exist in a matrix of symbolic systems that we separate out only for the sake of contemplating (and one hopes clarifying) them. In our minds and in our lives, the meanings are all mushed up, a puree or whip of meaning and purpose. Sometimes we question the powers that be in our lives; often we don’t.
Since Emanuel Kant, it has been clear to many people that human beings are meaning-making creatures and that the meanings we create exist in systems of narrative and symbol. In these systems, it’s us or them: we control them, or they control us. Whenever we aren’t paying attention, it is the latter.
Religions are one way human beings create meaning. A religion is a subset of narrative and symbol within a system. A system separated only for convenience and clarity.
Given this mushy matrix, removing what is conventionally called “religious” (or “spiritual”) from a personal or collective meaning-making system does not leave a hole or gap, but is rather an opening that other symbolic systems will fill.
If the god concept does not guarantee or underwrite meaning and purpose for a human being, something else will . . . perhaps even the insistence that life has meaning and purpose without the god concept! (Hence the “angry atheist” syndrome.)
Think for a moment how many people you know who actually take meaning and purpose from the god concept. My suspicion is that the concept actually functions as shorthand for something else in most human lives.
Theologian Gordon D. Kaufman gives his view, writing:
The central question for theology is not . . . primarily a speculative question, a problem of knowledge at all. Most fundamentally it is a practical question: How are we to live? To what should we devote ourselves? To what cause give ourselves? Put in religious terms: How can we truly serve God? What is proper worship? (Face of Mystery: Constructive Theology)
Put succinctly: “What’s your cause?”
Your cause might be survival. Approval. Family. World peace.
Often the god concept becomes the straw man who underwrites preexisting wishes and prejudices. The symbolic systems we live in are difficult to see and even more difficult to separate into understandable strands. Most difficult of all is putting all the strands back into a conceivable whole. Yet, finally, there is no religion, no politics, no self. Only the forest of symbols we wander in.
As Jean-Paul Sartre once said, “Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.”
Arguing Over the Light
All religions, all this singing, one song. Rumi
1.
A poet I met once,
Leslie Scalapino, said
“stay in continual
conceptual rebellion.”
She thought we must
“re-form” our minds,
“make it new, every day,”
as Pound put it, or fall
for the snake oil routines
of all the drummers and
askers around us.
“No” to con-vention,
she thought, checking
out of the general meeting
where the selling
is done is “yes” to life.
2.
Seeing things as they are,
Nagarjuna said, is the way
to wisdom. Finding first causes,
hooks on which to hang a hat,
is a fool’s game and leads
to distinctions–this is
not that. And on and on.
Until there’s only suffering.
We like listening
to the snake oil salesmen
throwing out distinctions
and offering attachments.
It’s entertaining.
It’s death.
3.
When an old man was asked
what held the earth up, he
said, “It sits on a turtle.”
And under the turtle?
“Another turtle.” And
under that one? “It’s turtles
all the way down,” the man
laughed. And it is. Turtles.
It’s turtles all the way down;
turtles all the way up;
turtles in every direction,
and turtles because there
is no direction. It’s turtles,
and we, too, are turtles.
Or one turtle.
Or snake oil.
Or light.
They Walk Into the Place Where (a reflection on immigration)
They walk into the place
carrying a bandana,
carrying a balaclava,
carrying a bordada
made by abuela.
They walk into the place
that burns the soles of huaraches,
the soles of tennis shoes
into twisted rubber.
They walk into the place
carrying an extra tee shirt.
An extra dress for a hija.
They walk into the land
carrying cheese crackers
and Red Bull and cheap cell phones.
They walk into the place
where money is god.
They walk into the place
where violence is all.
They walk into the
North American desert,
the border boondoggle,
the land of prisons for profit.
The walk into the land of
“you don’t understand.”
They walk into the land
where violence is the export.
They walk into the land where
loss the rule of the land.
http://www.tucsonsamaritans.org
Here, In This Flow
The turtles go
out of their water
this time of year,
slow on roadways,
slow to mating
somewhere,
or slow to dates
with car tires.
No, there’s no
enlightenment–
there’s no one
there. (That’s
Buddhism 101
each day teaches.)
No, there’s no
virtue–
there’s no one
there. Only
being.
Lost in this
movement I rub
the cat’s head,
a black cat, a warm,
cloudy morning.
There’ no cat.
There’s no I. There’s
only purring,
this congeries
of movement
to movement–
to car tires,
to this ache
of loss
and fulfillment
in each instant.
There is
this flow
only to be
and savored.
Our Place in the Alhambra
1.
Go ahead, climb up
the Alhambra brick–
taxis can’t come here,
and the effort it takes
is only as much as
you have in mind.
2.
How often we’ve fallen for
another algorithm for bliss,
the snake oil shill of camphor
shadows. Enough. The book
is there now, a shining blossom,
big as a magnolia bloom.
Blank. To be written. Yes, we
think–at last I’m back to myself.
Climb there too. The beautiful
street vendors are selling
therefores. The dark wine
of place. Buy some. But
carefully pluck the book, its soft
leather bent just enough to say,
yes, climb the brick passages.
3.
It may be when you wake
you’ll believe you’ve had
a stroke, but the sunlight
in its morning patterns will
teach that’s OK as well–
the world goes on without
you, us, and that’s always
been OK as well. A lesson in
belonging. Everyone’s place in
the story of the Alhambra.
Incarceration Nation
Incarceration nation,
where did you put
your young men?
You put them in a plea bargain;
you put them in a felony record;
you put them out of your mind.
Incarceration nation,
your heart is in a prison cell;
your future is in a prison cell;
your conscience is in a prison cell.
Incarceration nation,
where did you put your future?
Where did you put your hope?
Where did you put your justice?
Where did you put your freedom?
Incarceration nation,
where did you put
your young men?
You put them into poverty;
you put them into despair;
you put them into chains.
Incarceration nation,
you took your children;
you took your hope;
you put them in a prison cell;
you put them in a felony record;
you put them out of your mind.
Incarceration nation,
you put yourself
into a prison cell
into fear; into hate;
into racism;
into money’s death spasm;
Incarceration nation,
where did you put
your young men?
They are the universe
aware of itself;
they are consciousness
trapped in money’s death spasm.
Incarceration nation,
why have you
imprisoned yourself?
Benediction for the Wind (on the occasion of a killer tornado)
What better way to
get people praying
than to remind us
of random chance?
What better way than
the cold logic of air
rising, falling, killing
here, not there;
this one, not that.
Where I come from
we name them
by a year: 2011,
1957, 1925, and
remember deaths,
695, 255, 12.
What better way for
the screaming winds
to set us praying
than the cold logic
of random chance?
What better way
to hold sanity and
loved ones close than
to set to praying?
Where I come from
we know the scream
of the green clouds
well; we know to hug
the floor close; where
I come from the wind
teaches us to pray.
A Bad Day for Theocracy (14 May 2013, marriage equality Minnesota)
A bad day for creeds;
a bad day for stares;
a bad day for blind
obedience to blundering
oracles, as Henry put
it long ago. A bad day
for obedience. A bad
day for “act like us.”
Why not, Ralph asked,
long ago, why not
behold god and nature
face to face with our
own eyes, weaving
our own tales? Long
ago Henry and Ralph
said stop listening
to long ago. So, do
we have a poetry of
insight, a philosophy
without tradition now,
a religion of revelation,
to us, not the masters
inscribing themselves on
ages, not the moldy books?
not the stares of the old,
powerful “it’s always been”?
A bad day for moldy books;
a bad day for fistfuls of musts.
A good day to speak
of Henry and Ralph
erasing themselves
into revelation, to
you, on and on, a good
day to write ourselves.
A Former Member Asks the Minister for a Favor
She says her family
shuns her. She says
it has something to do
with God. She says
the cancer has gone
way too far. She says
when her brother died
the family pastor said
he went straight to hell
and “Let that be a lesson.”
She says, “Will you do
my funeral?” A light rain
falls on the lake,
circles in circles.
On “Faith”
Faith is a noun. It’s a person, place, or thing.
An online etymology site tells me it came into English in the mid-13th Century.
The word means, the site tells me, “duty of fulfilling one’s trust.”
The word comes to English from Old French: feid, foi, which meant “faith, belief, trust, confidence, pledge.”
The word came to Old French from Latin: fides, which meant “trust, faith, confidence, reliance, credence, belief.”
The word ultimately derives from from the oldest known ancestor of English, Proto-Indo European: *bheidh- which also gave us the Greek word for faith, the one that appears in Christian scripture, pistis.
The dictionary notes that the word in its theological sense dates from the late 14th Century. Meaning this: What religions today mean by faith, as in “you gotta have faith,” did not exist as a concept when the Christian scriptures were written.
I’m just sayin’ . . .
See for yourself: http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=faith
Softballing with Spinoza
If a triangle could speak, it would say . . . that God is eminently triangular, while a circle would say that the divine nature is eminently circular. Thus each would ascribe to God its own attributes, would assume itself to be like God, and look on everything else as ill-shaped. ~ Baruch Spinoza
I remember going home for the first break of my first semester in college. We, my mother, father, and I, were driving along the Mississippi River in Missouri, along the New Madrid Fault Line, traveling from our family farm in the southern part of Illinois to visit some relatives near Memphis, Tennessee for Thanksgiving. I, eighteen years old, was driving.
As I drove, I was paraphrasing the above observation of Spinoza, which I had just been studying in an intro to philosophy class at the community college I was attending. The community college was only twelve miles from our family farm, but a world away for me. My philosophy class was taught by the first openly gay man (“open” is a flexible term when applied to the attitudes of the 1970s), and my mind was racing with new ideas.
Spinoza’s argument seemed so elegant to me; so irrefutably true: We are not created in God’s image, but rather we create our gods in ours. If triangles could think, they would consider themselves created in the very image of god. If ants could think–and who says they can’t?–they would create an ant god (and who says they don’t?).
Neither my mother nor my father had any idea what I was talking about. How would a triangle think? Why would an ant think about god? Those things didn’t make “good horse sense.”
Both of my parents grew up in rural southern Illinois. They attended one-room schools–not the bucolic one-room school houses of US nostalgia, but places where the overworked teachers had, at best, a full year of college education and had to contend with whatever learning disabilities and behavioral disorders appeared among the in-bred hill country population. The teachers were generally paid in chickens, eggs, and firewood.
Consequently, both of my parents were nearly illiterate. Abstract thought did not come easily to them. As a matter of fact, the only negative statement I ever heard from either of them concerning orthodox Protestant Christianity was spoken decades later by my father, when the subject of the Resurrection came up. Out of the hearing of my mother, he said, “It just don’t seem possible, does it?”
I answered gently, “No. It doesn’t seem possible.” That’s as close to mystery as my father ever got.
On that day driving along the New Madrid Fault, I realized that Spinoza could not speak to my parents. And I discovered something else: I had the power to destroy the faith of poor, oppressed people such as my parents who had nothing else to fall back on. I stopped the argument when I was eighteen, and I have never argued religion again.
The chance to think abstractly, to pursue truth wherever it leads, is a powerful gift. A privilege. As with all power and privilege, it must be used responsibly and humbly.
