In the Sixties Bob Scriver and I became Bundle Keepers, Bob because he dreamt that he should and me because in those days I did everything he did. In those days Blackft ceremonies were still illegal so they were semi-secret and no whites had any idea what they were anyway. They had seemed to the People as though they were dangerous, risking criminal charges, and a sign of failing to progress, a primitive and ignorant thing to do. But if Scriver, the town magistrate, a Justice of the Peace, and a successful artist, were willing to do this, then it must be all right after all. Learning to speak Blackft followed something like the same re-energizing path through others who were respected.
Raised Presbyterian and educated in theatre, I saw the event as something more. This small group of old-timers, all of them born before 1900, went to a different place during the ceremony. When I studied Victor Turner later, I understood that they had entered liminal time/space. But also I saw that they were able to go there because they knew deeply what they were marking in the ritual. That is, if they danced and sang with the skin of an animal, often an imitation, they had sat in the grass to watch that creature for many hours, developing deep empathy for what it did and how it moved. Modern celebrants do not know the animals and have never sat in the grass to watch.
Missionaries have redefined categories to fit their ideas. Worse, the science of rez dwellers in the 21st century is still stuck in the 19th century, but many younger people are also stuck there with Cartesian ideas and Darwinian assumptions. They think blood holds their identity and that Beringia was a narrow little single-file bridge, and their tribe has always been right here. Truth is rooted, anchored, immovable.
I marked that but moved on to more recent theologies: process theology which tries to square Christianity with quantum physics or story theology or the American adaptations of Buddhism. Finally I stepped away from THEOlogy, because the concept of God dissolved and I got tired of apologetics. Now I follow the dynamic expansions of science, which often are full of awe and wonder, the kind of understanding we might call Holy or Sacred. I'm keeping Eliade's ideas of these as "felt". brought back in part by our realization that thought and understanding is body-wide and by new respect for the wisdom and reality of emotion.
I'm following several lines of specialty:
Given the continuousness and cross-creature existence of DNA and what it tells us, the world looks quite different than God making little figures in the mud. I now keep the idea of humans as a kind of knot or matrix that has developed from the essence of "humus" and related to all existence, not privileged except in the ability to think, reflect, and enjoy. Also, able to imagine and enact sin.
The fossil record shows the development of all creatures from one-celled animals to humans and then escaping skins through empathy so that we can share between people. Also, through imagination and metaphor so we can pretend to be the stag and the moon. These studies also show that every version of life still exists inside us, sometimes interfering. Development is cumulative rather than transformative.
Close examination with very delicate instruments has shown us what is inside cells, how molecules get in and out, why DNA has its own nuclear skin and why there are little circles of DNA floating in the cell outside the nuclear sac. DNA itself rests in a complex system responding to RNA (the template), the epigenome (which can change particular genes), the impact of omitted genes or added genes, and the basic fabric of the atoms and molecules interacting as pushed around by the environment (like differing isotopes or the unavailability of some substances).
What we call science only departed from theology and the precepts of the "Axial Age" some centuries ago. It was prodded along by geology and then our growing understanding of the cosmos. This is a source of wonder as we see ourselves from the moon or discover new forces passing through us without our awareness. The concepts of infinity and eternity are so vast they are almost unthinkable.
When theology leaves out the "theos", it becomes philosophy which is a discipline based on abstract rationality and precedent. A philosopher, one with a PhD, is meant to master all the precedents back mostly to Greek thought. This is done with books, lectures, arguments, and writing. But it is confining and sometimes so much new evidence is impossible to assimilate. Male college sophomores use it as a sign of worthiness, but it is often considered irrelevant by others. (One of the wealthiest business owners in town tells me, "I don't care about all that intellectual stuff.")
Psychology/psychiatry, one coming from practical phenomena and the other building on the medical model (which still clings to legal framework) are now being questioned by neuroresearch. We are coming ever closer to discovering how the circuits of thought are embodied in real cells that can hold sensory information and memory. The brain is not a computer, but a dashboard keeping track of flesh, what it needs and what it does. It classifies everything in terms of what was organized before birth and in the first few years of life, and those terms are very hard to change, particularly if the culture reinforces them.
This is where liturgy enters, taking a person into a safe time/space where memory and hope -- experienced and archived in the brain and muscles -- join to allow a new flexibility and oneness, a comfort in being with others, and deep experience that can be commemorated in art. This is a version of the "talking cure" where one expert person creates the space and guards the visions. Examples can be found in other times and places but the phenomenon does not come from outer space -- it is a capacity of human flesh to relate to the cosmos.
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