A DIASPORA CONGREGATION

This is an oxymoron -- two concepts that don’t fit together.  A diaspora refers to a scattered group of people with some common tie.  A congregation refers to an assembled group of people who are often physically together, though they may not share a history.  My life has been guided by two “realities” that express this oxymoron: the Blackfeet, who are almost equal halves people on the reservation together and people scattered separately around the planet; and then my ministry, which began as circuit-riding, moving from one small group to another with what I hoped was a unifying message.

Today we are presented with this oxymoron in every computer internet connection: both people gathered together by being in the same head-space at one time and people scattered around the planet, not just in terms of place but also in terms of social circumstances: wealth, education, politics and so on.

Brains are organized as rhizomes.

Deleuzeguattari (which is a compound name for two men who shared ideas) called this oxymoron pattern a rhizome.  Strawberries, sweetgrass, hops, and iris grow as thick vegetable clumps underground that send out connections to the next clump through a long stem called a stolon.  A journal formally called “Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge” exists and I once sent them an article, but they were afraid to print it.  They were academic and academia neither approves nor recognizes -- except in a distant experience-proof way like studying bugs in a lab -- the people I was writing about as examples of social rhizomes.  I was writing about at-risk boys, a dispersed congregation.  So I write TO them.  Whether they read it or not and any hint of who they really are is invisible to me, so I'm actually writing to whom I imagine.  They're real to me.

When I reflect about subjects that society labels “religious,” I don’t look back at my academic classes (“seminary” is another plant-based term meaning a place where seeds grow) because they only thought about plants that are valuable and useful and beautiful.  Not weeds that have learned to survive on "waste lands."  What’s culture got to do with feral boys living like raccoons in the interstices of cities or the collapsed structures of broken industries, the rhizomatic warehouses connected by railroad track?  But they have been my marker for something for which I have no real name: the concepts and forces that either maintain or destroy life.  Survival concepts, both individual and culture-wide.  This is my idea of what the public culture calls religion.

This sweat lodge killed two.

Years ago, responding to a ministerial study group that was trying to understand the Seventies' challenges to traditional religious organizations -- a dilemma that is far from resolved -- I went to the most basic sources I could think of, but not the then popular New Age sorts of shamans which the rez had taught me were often empty.  I mean, shamans to me are white men who pretend they know how to run a sweat lodge but kill the participants because the modern materials of impermeable plastic tarps don't work and the book-recorded “ways” of doing it as well as assorted misfit clients seeking magic wouldn't work even with proper tarps.

Instead I went to the testimony of European “saints” who often lived alone and encouraged no one to follow them.  Only recently has neuro-research given me a framework that I find explanatory.  When a human seed begin to grow in the seminary of the womb, its brain begins to form concepts even as the structures create themselves to hold ideas. Felt concepts emerge in binary tensions:  dark/light, warm/cold, embraced/falling, fed/hungry, and a few others.  When the baby emerges from the mother, everything new it learns has to be fitted into these categories, so if you asked Saint Theresa what she knew from her orgasmic ecstatic experience of God, she would say that God was freezing her and scalding her, that his love was dark and empty at the same time that she was swept through by light, that she hungered and thirsted but was filled with satisfaction. 

That is, the experience of extreme holiness is an oxymoron -- it will not fit into definitions.  This is a very Manicheistic way of looking at things, but maybe that's where Manicheanism gets some of its power.  Maybe contradiction is the path to enlightenment -- thinking impossible thoughts in beautiful -- or terrifying -- koans.

What are the survival oxymorons of feral boys?  Hope/despair, intimacy/betrayal, creation/destruction . . .  How do I know this?  I listen.  I watch.  I do not avoid virtual places where these boys group to express themselves.  Not just drug shooting galleries, but also garage bands and graffiti tag-teams.  They learn skills, art vocabulary and media, and they grow up, carrying the energy into the rest of the culture.  Except the parts that are afraid of them and deny them. 

Manicheism. by Bolbitius-Vitelinius

The journal called “Rhizome” was afraid to print the article about these boys.  They were honest enough to say exactly that.  Because they had to have statistics, approval of the sources of their concepts IN WRITING, budgets that were partly grants and therefore had strings attached, and most of all, they were fragile themselves, dependent on approval for their careers.  Most of them were female and had come from poverty and struggle.  Curiously, the thing that the academic world was demanding was exactly what they secretly craved the most -- privileged contact and knowledge about at-risk boys (sons) -- even though they knew very well that the boys' names, habitats, and markers would allow the boys' destroyers to find them.  The boys' secrecy, their ability to confuse fact with myth, their underground stolons, their meshing with other undergrounds -- political, illegal, trafficking -- was what made them valuable to others -- those who were criminal, not academic and therefore oblivious to propriety or law.

An oxymoronic institutional understanding of religion.

Shooting creates targets.

You can make money from all underground and forbidden stuff.  You can’t make money from being respectable and just like everyone else, unless you want a low-pay obedience-based job.  That’s not survival.  At least not for me.

Survival-based groups are religious, spiritual, deeply ecological, complex and not inclined to follow leaders.  They pair-bond, they need intimacy, and they learn skills because they really use them, not because someone told them to.  Nor do they raise pots of money.  Their culture is emergent and desire-based.  Me, too.

Why do ministers/pastors -- in some places called “Dominee” (eeks!), pursue people who have no time, no money, no interest in the message?  Reread above.

Here’s a vid about people wrestling with theism -- not Christianity.  http://aeon.co/video/philosophy/suburban-god-a-pastors-quest-for-the-sacred-in-the-secular/?utm_source=Aeon+newsletter&utm_campaign=474317c99a-Weekly_newsletter_April_10_20154_10_2015&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-474317c99a-68600437  These people are Dutch, famously independent, skeptical, and open to secular ideas.  BUT middle-class.  Aeon is a website explicitly interested in outlining a new religious understanding that reconciles and inspires.  They, too, have nothing to say to a boy abused, deserted, starving, sick, suspicious.  They’re not stupid or callous -- their metaphors don’t fit.

In the early days of encounter with whites, when the whites had the idea that education would make Native Americans become “like them,” the schools (which were often run by churches) employed “seizers” who would go out across the landscape and literally “seize” and take away children.  They were trafficking.  There are still seizers and they are still often connected to churches and schools.  They think "seizing" is not the same as trafficking, but it is. 

But I am not, nor do I want to "seize" anyone.  I think the street boys should not be too grouped in one place.  I think they should continue to find ways to be on the Internet while all the time remaining dark and setting their own terms.  They will find it hard to believe I say this.  It is a survival skill for them NOT to believe.  I could not say these things if I were writing for church, university, media, or publisher.  So this is another way that the internet and blogging supports a dispersed congregation.