I went to a wonderful lecture last night with the Portland Enneagram Society about brain science and the Enneagram. The woman who gave the lecture was a One on the Enneagram so of course she did a good job with lots of detail. I need to make very clear that the following is NOT about the quality of the lecture. It was great.
But, when she started the lecture she got my ministerial juices going because she shared a quote about babies, about how they are born 'perfect' and then we screw them up!
Babies are born perfect and then we screw them up! What a perfect myth for this society in the 21st century on Earth in the US of A. It's got everything we value.
Lets start with the baby. It's young, so automatically that is good. It has no experience and so it is more perfect than someone who has it.
When it goes into relationship with its family and society it is automatically less perfect. Think about that one. Our relationships make us less perfect! Would we be more perfect alone then -- growing up all by oneself or with other perfect companions who would somehow leave us without mark. The whole vision seems somehow lonely and bionic -- a futuristic, spiritual utopia without suffering. Later in the lecture we learn, that no, actually, we need to attune with mother, or else we do not grow up recognizably human.
Well that is more like it.
I am as individualistic as the next person but I find myself growning tired of it. I do believe we have gone about as far as we can go down the road of being 'perfect'ly separate. We drive around alone in our cars, live in large houses with lots of unused space, buy things to prove and improve our individual lives. Carp about our families and the weird things they did to us. I do all that and more.
I am going to go visit my mother for lunch today. My mother doesn't ask much of me. I think I know some of the reasons; her mother could be pretty invasive. I wish she asked more of me, but lately I have been just calling her up to talk. I want to stop fighting the individuation wars of my youth. I am more perfect than a baby, lovely and intent as a baby can be. My mother is more perfect too.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
I know a Goddess when I see one
I liked the Tri-met MAX story with just enough villainy to make one pay attention and hiss, but no real tragedy. A man got ready to get off the light-rail train in Portland, and his three-year-old ran ahead. Something happened and the door closed between them. He pounded on the door. His toddler was already crying on the platform. A woman on the other side pounded on the door. Everyone was in an uproar. The train operator didn't hear, or didn't care, and the train pulled away. The frantic father waited for the next stop, got off, and took the next train back. It took him seven minutes. No parent can read that story without shuddering. A three year old! But when he got to the platform where he had left his son, a nice, young woman was waiting there with his little boy.
Here she is! The father was so distraught he didn't get her name. But then the newspaper tracked her down and printed her picture. What a perfect person to be on the platform for a little, lost boy! I mean, I take MAX sometimes; and the platforms are often full of people who look like they might kill you.
That is an exaggeration, the people are usually fine, but they don't look like this pretty, kind girl. It just nice to know they are still out there -- the good person who has to step up and comfort a toddler for ten minutes, missing their own appointment, or class.
There was more. The operator of the train said he didn't hear the father. But when they checked out the intercom system it seemed to be working fine. I am sure there will be more. But I don't need to hear the rest of it, because the best part was the little Madonna on the platform.
Here she is! The father was so distraught he didn't get her name. But then the newspaper tracked her down and printed her picture. What a perfect person to be on the platform for a little, lost boy! I mean, I take MAX sometimes; and the platforms are often full of people who look like they might kill you.
That is an exaggeration, the people are usually fine, but they don't look like this pretty, kind girl. It just nice to know they are still out there -- the good person who has to step up and comfort a toddler for ten minutes, missing their own appointment, or class.
There was more. The operator of the train said he didn't hear the father. But when they checked out the intercom system it seemed to be working fine. I am sure there will be more. But I don't need to hear the rest of it, because the best part was the little Madonna on the platform.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
All about Bultmann
I am taking a Gospel class and am amused by how often Jesus' identity is raised in the Gospels. "who do they say that I am?" is a typical question.
I have another identity mystery to solve however. Who is this Bultmann? As I do research on the Gospel John I keep running into his name. He seems to be a mythic figure to all the towering giants of exegesis. It’s hilarious in a way, I almost have to do research on the researcher. In John Ashton’s book, Understanding the Fourth Gospel, (boy is that misnamed) which left me cross-eyed and belligerent because of its insider, referential impenetrability (perhaps I should just say it’s a scholarly work), he treats Bultmann as a God.
And of course the name BULTMANN has the heavy sound of German authority; if God's name wasn't Yahweh it might just be Bultmann.
Ashton actually treats Bultmann as more of an idol than a God, because he is always trying to refute him. I put it down to an obsession by one exegete to an older, authority figure. Perhaps Bultmann was Ashton’s old professor, he has to be respectful while he undermines his pet theories.
But then I find in Raymond Brown (who himself is a towering something or other) this little bon mot "I do not think that the evangelist was either anti-sacramental (in a Bultmannian sense) or anti-ecclesiastic." Raymond Brown is more accessible than Ashton is, although not much. I cannot fathom the above quoted sentence though, and cannot imagine ever writing anything where I used the Biblical scholar Bultmann as an adjective.
Oh, then Malina and Rohrbach, who are very modern and try and be understandable, mention Bultmann as if everyone knows who he is and what he stands for.
They seem so happy and oblivious these Biblical scholars. It’s such a tempest in a teapot sort of environment where everyone knows everyone. These scholars of the Bible - not so long ago all male - obviously intelligent - very detail-oriented - learned - unemotional tinkerer’s of the Gospels. It’s as if the Gospels were car engines and they just have to have a go at them.
After writing a mild screed about Bultmann above, I felt a little guilty so I looked him up. He is all that I said, but also someone I think I might have agreed with. Wikipedia says "He carried form-criticism so far as to call the historical value of the gospels into serious question. Some scholars criticized Bultmann and other critics for excessive skepticism regarding the historical reliability of the gospel narratives." Interesting, he was really saying that the Gospels should be looked at in a different way -- actually sounds like he came to the post -modern conclusion that you cannot just take the Bible back and back until you finally have the truth of it, you need another paradigm. He was influence by Kierkegaard more than most people are now. His movement away from exegesis had a different flavor than it would have if he was writing today.
But Bultmann, it looks like you were all right, in a Bultmannian sense that is.
I have another identity mystery to solve however. Who is this Bultmann? As I do research on the Gospel John I keep running into his name. He seems to be a mythic figure to all the towering giants of exegesis. It’s hilarious in a way, I almost have to do research on the researcher. In John Ashton’s book, Understanding the Fourth Gospel, (boy is that misnamed) which left me cross-eyed and belligerent because of its insider, referential impenetrability (perhaps I should just say it’s a scholarly work), he treats Bultmann as a God.
And of course the name BULTMANN has the heavy sound of German authority; if God's name wasn't Yahweh it might just be Bultmann.
Ashton actually treats Bultmann as more of an idol than a God, because he is always trying to refute him. I put it down to an obsession by one exegete to an older, authority figure. Perhaps Bultmann was Ashton’s old professor, he has to be respectful while he undermines his pet theories.
But then I find in Raymond Brown (who himself is a towering something or other) this little bon mot "I do not think that the evangelist was either anti-sacramental (in a Bultmannian sense) or anti-ecclesiastic." Raymond Brown is more accessible than Ashton is, although not much. I cannot fathom the above quoted sentence though, and cannot imagine ever writing anything where I used the Biblical scholar Bultmann as an adjective.
Oh, then Malina and Rohrbach, who are very modern and try and be understandable, mention Bultmann as if everyone knows who he is and what he stands for.
They seem so happy and oblivious these Biblical scholars. It’s such a tempest in a teapot sort of environment where everyone knows everyone. These scholars of the Bible - not so long ago all male - obviously intelligent - very detail-oriented - learned - unemotional tinkerer’s of the Gospels. It’s as if the Gospels were car engines and they just have to have a go at them.
***
After writing a mild screed about Bultmann above, I felt a little guilty so I looked him up. He is all that I said, but also someone I think I might have agreed with. Wikipedia says "He carried form-criticism so far as to call the historical value of the gospels into serious question. Some scholars criticized Bultmann and other critics for excessive skepticism regarding the historical reliability of the gospel narratives." Interesting, he was really saying that the Gospels should be looked at in a different way -- actually sounds like he came to the post -modern conclusion that you cannot just take the Bible back and back until you finally have the truth of it, you need another paradigm. He was influence by Kierkegaard more than most people are now. His movement away from exegesis had a different flavor than it would have if he was writing today.
But Bultmann, it looks like you were all right, in a Bultmannian sense that is.
Thursday, October 1, 2009
The Crab
My friend and I were talking about making important decisions and I said "sometimes I can't look right at it, it has to come at me sideways like a crab."
She said "oh it makes you cranky."
"No it has to come in through my peripheral vision."
We went back and forth until we understood each other, but the crab was not her favorite metaphor.
But I like the idea of the crab.
If your unconscious is going to hoard something and not let you see it, its probably not a puppy or a kitten of an idea. Its going to be more like a crab.
Crabs are hard, unlovely, but undeniably real. And, it could be worse. I am not even talking snakes and spiders here. Surely those are in my unconscious too, but I am happy to leave them there.
But crabs walk sideways moving faster than you would think, you can imagine them getting away from your hoarding unconscious onto that beach that is the place of between, of productivity and possible danger. Crabs are used to moving from one medium to another, sometimes living in the water, and sometimes venturing onto land. They are only going to come out at special times when they think they can do it safely.
If it happens that you catch something out of the corner of your eye and turn your head fast, you might just see a crab scuttle away because he is as scared of you as you are of him. But maybe a little bit curious too. So he might pause before slipping away in that hole in the rock and look right at your with his beady eye.
You will know that you have seen something that is usually hidden. And you should pay attention.
She said "oh it makes you cranky."
"No it has to come in through my peripheral vision."
We went back and forth until we understood each other, but the crab was not her favorite metaphor.
But I like the idea of the crab.
If your unconscious is going to hoard something and not let you see it, its probably not a puppy or a kitten of an idea. Its going to be more like a crab.
Crabs are hard, unlovely, but undeniably real. And, it could be worse. I am not even talking snakes and spiders here. Surely those are in my unconscious too, but I am happy to leave them there.
But crabs walk sideways moving faster than you would think, you can imagine them getting away from your hoarding unconscious onto that beach that is the place of between, of productivity and possible danger. Crabs are used to moving from one medium to another, sometimes living in the water, and sometimes venturing onto land. They are only going to come out at special times when they think they can do it safely.
If it happens that you catch something out of the corner of your eye and turn your head fast, you might just see a crab scuttle away because he is as scared of you as you are of him. But maybe a little bit curious too. So he might pause before slipping away in that hole in the rock and look right at your with his beady eye.
You will know that you have seen something that is usually hidden. And you should pay attention.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Conversion
It has a ka-chunk feeling.
It's that feeling of satisfaction when a fact slips into place and suddenly you understood something that you didn't understand before. As a kid I remember having that feeling at school. Ka-chunk and suddenly I would understand what the x and y axis meant or get an image of water moving through the hydrologic cycle.
As I've gotten older I've noticed a similar feeling around a different kind of knowledge. I think of it as Knowing with a capital K. Its when my heart catches up with my head and I KNOW something. I usually already knew it with my head, perhaps for years. I had that feeling of Knowing when I drove by the low-income apartments on Sandy Blvd. one morning just as the school buses pulled in and watched as this huge horde of kids pile into the buses. I had always known that a lot of Parkrose students lived in apartments. But here they all were and so many of them! I could never look at the statistics the same way again. I had seen them and they now meant something to me.
I thought of that when I watched a clip of Wendell Potter being interviewed by Bill Moyer. Potter is an insurance executive who quit his job, and now works to expose how the insurance industry is trying to derail health-care reform. It's as good as my friend said it was, but I was fascinated by Potter's description of why he quit his job.
He had been visiting his family in Kentucky when he heard about a health fair at the county fair grounds. He was curious about it and drove over to check it out. What he saw appalled him. People in long lines, waiting for a free medical check up. Doctors doing procedures in horse stalls. He took pictures and showed them on air: hundreds of people waiting in line in the rain. He told Moyer, "I couldn't believe all the people." Moyers asks him "well didn't you know the statistics already." Potter answers "well I did, but this made it real, some of these people I probably grew up with." Potter didn't quit his job immediately but he finally did. The two realities of his high paying job and the people in the rain couldn't co-exist.
Potter had a conversion experience! We tend to think of conversion as only pertaining to religion. But Potter went through a rapid realignment of his heart, mind and soul that was as profound as the classic religious conversion. He looked out at people standing in the rain and felt that ka-chunk of real feeling. We can know something intellectually for a long time, but now and again we get the privilege of KNOWING it.
If you are interested in watching the video, Google Moyer Wendell Potter or try the link below:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07312009/watch.html
It's that feeling of satisfaction when a fact slips into place and suddenly you understood something that you didn't understand before. As a kid I remember having that feeling at school. Ka-chunk and suddenly I would understand what the x and y axis meant or get an image of water moving through the hydrologic cycle.
As I've gotten older I've noticed a similar feeling around a different kind of knowledge. I think of it as Knowing with a capital K. Its when my heart catches up with my head and I KNOW something. I usually already knew it with my head, perhaps for years. I had that feeling of Knowing when I drove by the low-income apartments on Sandy Blvd. one morning just as the school buses pulled in and watched as this huge horde of kids pile into the buses. I had always known that a lot of Parkrose students lived in apartments. But here they all were and so many of them! I could never look at the statistics the same way again. I had seen them and they now meant something to me.
I thought of that when I watched a clip of Wendell Potter being interviewed by Bill Moyer. Potter is an insurance executive who quit his job, and now works to expose how the insurance industry is trying to derail health-care reform. It's as good as my friend said it was, but I was fascinated by Potter's description of why he quit his job.
He had been visiting his family in Kentucky when he heard about a health fair at the county fair grounds. He was curious about it and drove over to check it out. What he saw appalled him. People in long lines, waiting for a free medical check up. Doctors doing procedures in horse stalls. He took pictures and showed them on air: hundreds of people waiting in line in the rain. He told Moyer, "I couldn't believe all the people." Moyers asks him "well didn't you know the statistics already." Potter answers "well I did, but this made it real, some of these people I probably grew up with." Potter didn't quit his job immediately but he finally did. The two realities of his high paying job and the people in the rain couldn't co-exist.
Potter had a conversion experience! We tend to think of conversion as only pertaining to religion. But Potter went through a rapid realignment of his heart, mind and soul that was as profound as the classic religious conversion. He looked out at people standing in the rain and felt that ka-chunk of real feeling. We can know something intellectually for a long time, but now and again we get the privilege of KNOWING it.
If you are interested in watching the video, Google Moyer Wendell Potter or try the link below:
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/07312009/watch.html
Thursday, July 23, 2009
Polar Bear Psalm
More school projects. I wrote some Psalms for my Psalm class and here is my polar bear psalm. Its a lament, which a very dramatic form that seems to me fits with the idea of a species dying out. Be prepared though, to be sad:
Psalm of the Polar Bear -- A Lament
I know you Lord as I know the ice -
It’s crusty thickness where I hide and wait is a testament to Your goodness
I know you Lord as I hunt through the icy depths
Your Arctic waters brings me the fat seal pup and rich narwhale meat
Oh God, who thickens the ice
Why do I hear the mumble and groan of cracking ice and the singing sound of melt water?
Oh God, who brings the cold,
every day I wake to a warm southern breeze - sweet smelling and false;
I lift up my nose and long for the hard white smell of the cold north wind.
But you, oh Lord, are the keeper of the ice,
You have cared for my people and our fierce, lonely hunt.
You, oh Lord, are the keeper of the ocean,
You have filled it with seal and salmon, whale and walrus.
You have given us immense strength, oh Lord, to swim tens of miles to the summer ice.
You have given us unerring smell, oh Lord, to find the aglus where the seals come to breath.
You have given us stillness, oh Lord, to wait by the aglus for the sweetest of seal prey.
You have given us sharp tooth and claw to grab and crunch the swift and wily walrus.
You have made us fat and strong, fierce and persistent and we adore you with our every stalking move.
Why then oh Lord do we swim out from land and never find the strong carriage of an icy ledge,
Where are you Lord as our limbs ache and tremble, and our power gives out in a limitless, edgeless ocean?
Why do we grow thin on poor meals of skinny birds and hard-caught caribou without finding the succulent seals we need to fatten and grow our children.
Where are you Lord as the sweet tender wind flows out of the Southern lands destroying your faithful hunters?
Psalm of the Polar Bear -- A Lament
I know you Lord as I know the ice -
It’s crusty thickness where I hide and wait is a testament to Your goodness
I know you Lord as I hunt through the icy depths
Your Arctic waters brings me the fat seal pup and rich narwhale meat
Oh God, who thickens the ice
Why do I hear the mumble and groan of cracking ice and the singing sound of melt water?
Oh God, who brings the cold,
every day I wake to a warm southern breeze - sweet smelling and false;
I lift up my nose and long for the hard white smell of the cold north wind.
But you, oh Lord, are the keeper of the ice,
You have cared for my people and our fierce, lonely hunt.
You, oh Lord, are the keeper of the ocean,
You have filled it with seal and salmon, whale and walrus.
You have given us immense strength, oh Lord, to swim tens of miles to the summer ice.
You have given us unerring smell, oh Lord, to find the aglus where the seals come to breath.
You have given us stillness, oh Lord, to wait by the aglus for the sweetest of seal prey.
You have given us sharp tooth and claw to grab and crunch the swift and wily walrus.
You have made us fat and strong, fierce and persistent and we adore you with our every stalking move.
Why then oh Lord do we swim out from land and never find the strong carriage of an icy ledge,
Where are you Lord as our limbs ache and tremble, and our power gives out in a limitless, edgeless ocean?
Why do we grow thin on poor meals of skinny birds and hard-caught caribou without finding the succulent seals we need to fatten and grow our children.
Where are you Lord as the sweet tender wind flows out of the Southern lands destroying your faithful hunters?
How should we live
The following is a post I made for my environmental religion class. It's a little rough around the edges, but I didn't want to lose it so here it is:
I have a Catholic background and from there became a Unitarian Universalist. I have no experience with the end times. I don't like to judge other's religious expression but I am not impressed by that branch of theology. There is something spooky about it to me. There is this emphasis on the powerlessness of the individual and the irrationality and powerfulness of the savior. Your role as an individual is to be in with the powerful one. Saving means believing, and the ethical side of religion is undeveloped. The end-times theology is something both Berrys (Wendell and Thomas) have regretted because it takes the focus off of the sacred material world and puts it onto heaven.
However, oddly, I've always been attracted to end of the world stories in literature. I have a taste for science fiction and one of my guilty pleasures are stories about comets hitting the earth, and I will watch some pretty bad disaster movies! (If anyone has times for a beautiful end of the world novel, Kevin Brockmeier, "The Brief History of the Dead" is NOT a guilty pleasure but a treasure of a novel.) When I was a child I used to fantasize about being in a world without people, just walking around the beautiful Earth playing with the animals. I have no idea what that means about me. I think it might just mean that I was a middle child in a big family! I told my older brother about this old fantasy of mine and he just laughed and laughed.
Its hard to take in how vulnerable we are, we protect against it. We have a filter that tells us the past dictates the future. But anyone who has had an important person in their life die unexpectedly knows that is just a filter, things change sometimes in the wink of an eye. So will it be a comet that gets us or our terrible stewardship of the Earth? They have very different theological meanings. The comet would be entirely natural, and would mean that all our struggles were pretty pointless unless some remnant survived and then came back again (science fiction language :) ). I have a big picture theology and even I can't get much meaning out of human flowering on Earth only to be taken out by a natural cosmological event.
Having Global warming go too far has another meaning entirely. Wendell Berry says being "fallen creaters in a fallen world can only instruct us painfully in division and disintegration" . I have always regarded my Apocalyptic interests as some private expression of my psyche. The fact of it is almost entertaining in a generally positive and forward thinking person like myself. This whole global warming crisis has pushed me toward darker thoughts than usual. Some think that religion is our human response to the idea of death, that we have these interesting complex identities, that feel so real and important packed into a biological package that dies. But one of the comforts has always been that the world continues on without us. Many people believe either in an after life or reincarnation. So far my response to these dark thoughts have been to realize that I can only do what humans do. I can change my behavior a little, I can preach about this, I can maintain my hope. I don't even want to be an activist about it -- although I end up doing so out of interest and enthusiasm, I really don't think that for me activism is a response to the Apocalyptic challenge but comes more from the gut, not my heart. I think Berry is on the right track, the response to something so large is to grow a garden, to be more human, to make more connections, to be more open to friends and family.
I have a Catholic background and from there became a Unitarian Universalist. I have no experience with the end times. I don't like to judge other's religious expression but I am not impressed by that branch of theology. There is something spooky about it to me. There is this emphasis on the powerlessness of the individual and the irrationality and powerfulness of the savior. Your role as an individual is to be in with the powerful one. Saving means believing, and the ethical side of religion is undeveloped. The end-times theology is something both Berrys (Wendell and Thomas) have regretted because it takes the focus off of the sacred material world and puts it onto heaven.
However, oddly, I've always been attracted to end of the world stories in literature. I have a taste for science fiction and one of my guilty pleasures are stories about comets hitting the earth, and I will watch some pretty bad disaster movies! (If anyone has times for a beautiful end of the world novel, Kevin Brockmeier, "The Brief History of the Dead" is NOT a guilty pleasure but a treasure of a novel.) When I was a child I used to fantasize about being in a world without people, just walking around the beautiful Earth playing with the animals. I have no idea what that means about me. I think it might just mean that I was a middle child in a big family! I told my older brother about this old fantasy of mine and he just laughed and laughed.
Its hard to take in how vulnerable we are, we protect against it. We have a filter that tells us the past dictates the future. But anyone who has had an important person in their life die unexpectedly knows that is just a filter, things change sometimes in the wink of an eye. So will it be a comet that gets us or our terrible stewardship of the Earth? They have very different theological meanings. The comet would be entirely natural, and would mean that all our struggles were pretty pointless unless some remnant survived and then came back again (science fiction language :) ). I have a big picture theology and even I can't get much meaning out of human flowering on Earth only to be taken out by a natural cosmological event.
Having Global warming go too far has another meaning entirely. Wendell Berry says being "fallen creaters in a fallen world can only instruct us painfully in division and disintegration" . I have always regarded my Apocalyptic interests as some private expression of my psyche. The fact of it is almost entertaining in a generally positive and forward thinking person like myself. This whole global warming crisis has pushed me toward darker thoughts than usual. Some think that religion is our human response to the idea of death, that we have these interesting complex identities, that feel so real and important packed into a biological package that dies. But one of the comforts has always been that the world continues on without us. Many people believe either in an after life or reincarnation. So far my response to these dark thoughts have been to realize that I can only do what humans do. I can change my behavior a little, I can preach about this, I can maintain my hope. I don't even want to be an activist about it -- although I end up doing so out of interest and enthusiasm, I really don't think that for me activism is a response to the Apocalyptic challenge but comes more from the gut, not my heart. I think Berry is on the right track, the response to something so large is to grow a garden, to be more human, to make more connections, to be more open to friends and family.
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