This list is just to remind you (and me) that I’m using these blog posts in part to accumulate material -- not quite chapters -- for an eventual manuscript. This particular manuscript, which I call “The Bone Chalice” (previously “The Flaming Chalice”) was sent to Beacon Press, the publishing arm of the Unitarian Universalist Association, because of the UU material included and because it was originally my thesis (incomplete) at Meadville/Lombard. Beacon rejected it without reading it, saying that they would only accept material that came through an agent. I do not believe this. It is not in their website policy. Rather, I suspect there was political interference.
What I’ve been addressing is the puzzle of how to create experiences with a sacred dimension when the community addressed is not dogmatic or even particularly unified in philosophy or theology. This is part of the movement towards a “global religion” where every human being is welcome. I think using the word “religion” is a mistake since it is associated with institutions who proselytize for a particular point of view, even the UUA which presents itself as only representing principles, which turn out to be arrived at by taking surveys of the membership. “Liturgy” seems to be another one of the “religion-owned” concepts, so now I will move to “experiences of holiness” or some other benign locution.
Humanistic academia has badly failed this project. Their goal is to maintain their own points of view, not to stay open-minded. Aggressive atheism is sensational and embedded in reputations. Instead, openness to the sacred has come from the environmental and natural history disciplines. Sometimes from the scientific community.
The later posts on this list are preoccupied with neurological brain theory and research. This is where I find the basis for the feeling of holiness -- NOT in any institution, dogma, prescribed rite, or “other-worldly” magic. A human being is an animal with an added dimension to its consciousness, but it is added-to and does not contradict our bodily animal nature. We can only be aware of what is provided by our senses. But those senses are far more bodily holistic and far more interpreted by the brain than we have understood. The real action is three-fold: molecular (electrochemical), connectomic (neural networks), and waves (the rhythm of the brain). It is responsive: a flame, a dance, that can be seen with instruments. Identity is a constantly changing construct that is rooted in persistent patterns formed early in life. Felt holiness reaches them.
Some will say this is wrong. They should remember this is MY interpretation. I’ve had enough institutional and personal repression in my life. Fortunately, blogging means freedom of expression. If you don’t like what I say, move on.
My next step is to assign categories to these posts, then work the categories into chapters. This time the manuscript I will construct will be a handbook for the creation of the experience of holiness. I’ll keep calling it the Bone Chalice and probably self-publish through www.lulu.com/prairiemary where I already stockpile Blackfeet materials. (There are more of them to come as well.)
BONE CHALICE POSTS (And related posts about “religion”) (but I may have missed some)
2007
2007
3-29-07 Flesh: a Religious Paradigm
8-10-07 Fleeting but Ineradicable
2008
3-17-08 The Poetics of Liturgy
4-8-08 Wielding Power: The Essence of Ritual Practise
4-17-08 The Staff of Life
4-21-08 Religion as a Source of Behavior
5-6-08 Found Notes
5-9-08 The Management of Consciousness
5-12-08 The White Dress
5-13-08 Cassowaries
5-14-08 Take the Umeda for Instance
5-20-08 The Umeda: Deep Liturgy
5-22-08 Notes on the Way to Dawn
5-24-08 Crossing the Threshold of Worship
6-3-08 How to Throw a Umeda Soiree
8-30-08 Three Words: Unity, Conscience, Meaning
9-30-08 Getting a Grip on God
10-1-08 The Ground of Being
10-2-08 Mapping the Virtual
10-5-08 Blackfeet Ingathering
10-11-08 The Uses of Liturgy: Theraturgy
10-26-08 Cannibalism or Communion
10-27-08 Part two
10-28-08 Part three
11-2-08 A Wedding of Life and Death
11-3-08 Reflections on a Rite of Joining
2009
11-19-09 Camille Paglia: Oh, Hello!
12-17-09 Religious Notes from Outside the System
12-24-09 Jesus the Apocalypse
12-30-09 A Recurrent Renascent Religious Source
2010
10-8-10 History of Liturgy
2011
9-13-11 Liturgical Stories
9-18-11 Binding Sound to Liturgy
9-20-11 Writing Grammar & Liturgy
10-4-11 Liturgical “Beats” and “Arc” AKA Elements and . . .
10-5-11 More Intense than Lyric Poetry
10-16-11 Grasping the Concepts
10-17-11 Poetics of Liturgy: An Appendix
11-2-11 Resisting Closure
11-6-11 The Molten Chalice Outline
11-8-11 Step Away from the Institution
11-17-11 Time is the Chalice
11-20-11 Fire
12-1-11 The Brain’s Workspace & Sources
12-3-11 Examples for The Molten Chalice
12-8-11 Things That Persist
12-11-11 Dom Gregory Dix: Liturgist
12-26-11 The Holding Community
12-28-11 Cupped Hands
12-29-11 Two Hands Clapping
2012
1-3-12 Prairie Liturgy
1-14-12 Consciousness
1-22-12 Exploiting the Apocalypse
2-7-12 Incarnational Liturgy
2-8-12 Liminal Neuro-Space
2-19-12 Community Liturgy
3-7-12 Can You Say That in Aramaic?
3-15-12 A Trout in the Chalice
4-3-12 Writing the Plan
4-23-12 This Time with Feeling
5-2-12 The Melting Chalice
5-5-12 Taking Barry Lopez at his Word
5-31-12 Structure vs. Communitas
6-3-12 Selling “Religion That Isn’t Dogma
6-9-12 Felt Meaning
6-11-12 What Is Ritual/Liturgy/Ceremony?
6-12-12 A Liturgy for Combat Veterans
7-1-12 The Bone Chalice
8-3-12 Marvelous Mystery
8-19-12 “Reinventing the Sacred” by Kauffman
9-19-12 Round and Round We Go
9-26-12 This Might be Performance Arts Stuff
10-10-12 Making It Up As We Go Along
10-14-12 Liminal, Liminoid, Ultraliminal
10-16-12 Flow
10-18-12 Going with the Flow
10-22-12 Hermeneutical Phenomenology
10-25-12 Making Memories
11-3-12 What Was That? Where? When?
11-4-12 Swan Jookin’
11-13-12 My Theory of Everything
11-14-12 The Ravenous Brain
11-15-12 “What’s Wrong with You?”
11-16-12 “Mirror, Mirror, Are We Fair?”
11-18-12 The Flame in the Chalice
11-19-12 Follow the Dog
11-20-12 Smokeserpent
11-25-12 Just Rambling about Morality
11-26-12 Going to the Guts
11-27-12 Feeling One’s Insides
11-30-12 “Thingness”
12-2-12 The Human Particle
12-7-12 A Summary of a Convergence
12-9-12 Elemental Smells
12-26-12 We Witness for Each Other
12-28-12 When the Rational Suppresses the Emotional
12-30-12 Time for a Query?
2013
1-5-13 Do You Hear What I Hear?
1-6-13 Is a Brain Like a Sea Anemone?
1-9-13 The Seeds of Liturgy
1-13-13 The Sacred Moment
1-16-13 What Happens in Liminal Space
3-8-13 Bone Chalice 2nd Query
3-8-13 Feelings Matter
5-5-13 Pastoral Counseling (CPE)
5-19-13 The Way
6-2-13 The Sublime and the Apple
7-27-13 Holiness Is Not Religion
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