MAPS AND IMAGES

My mother believed in the Christian map of three-layer earth/heaven/hell or so she said.  She thought the way to get to heaven was love and service.  My father said he was an atheist but he loved mountains, engineering and patriotism.  We had two iconic images in our front room.  One was a wheat field in the Dakotas under a stormy sky for my father.  The other was a moody photo of sheep at the south end of the Willamette Valley for my mother.  My father never raised wheat (his father raised potatoes) and my mother never raised sheep (but her sisters did).  These were origin images.  In their bedroom my mother hung her own icon, the painting called "Peace and Plenty" by George Innes.  She got all her art from magazines and made good choices, bought frames and hung them well.

"Peace and Plenty"  George Inness

When art changed utterly during WWII, so did science, and because religion is really our best paradigm of the structure of the good life, the Valence Damasio suggests our stream of life is guided by, we fell into confusion.  The rural life was past for many people, but picturing the future as moving to another planet wasn't that appealing.  What was really happening was instrumentation and thinking so incredible that scientists weren't prepared to share it for decades.

Now we know that discoveries and proofs were taking us to a new vision of life.  Instead of clay puppets inspirited by the breath of God, we were temporary embodiments of a sheet of life, both nucleated with DNA and not, but sharing even despite our skin boundaries.  We could go into deep time through fossils, the magnetic orientation of stones, and penetration of the layers of the earth.  We study fragmented artifacts and the patterns of disappeared cities.  We posit cosmic structures in extents we can barely imagine.  

All this means that we must forget obsessing about our individual deaths and claim our embeddedness in eternity and infinity, our privilege based on realizing we belong, we are part of it, we are links between what was and what will be.  Give up the hierarchies of race and wealth.  They don't really matter.

There are several maps of how to get to this state of mind, which is essentially religious.  One is art, especially photos we were never able to take before, sometimes because no one knew such things existed.  Another is math, admittedly built on premises logically built out into systems.  Traditionally, prayer and meditation are a path.  

Some people might be surprised to hear me suggest that well-performed tasks like washing dishes or hanging clothes can create moments that allow the Holy to break into the mundane.  Buddhists have recommended it.  Those who mechanize everything won't have the opportunity.  If you need to know more, I recommend this classic book.

Here's a map for achieving contact with a new way of thinking.  It won't guarantee an epiphany, but it will be a chance to consider your maps and images.

1.  Find a place that is protected and quiet.  Maybe a church sanctuary or mosque or chapel, or maybe your parked car, or possibly under a tree.

2.  Something must mark the transition, the limen or threshold of going there.  It can be a grand staircase, a certain music, or a special hat.  Once on the inside it may be a prayer or invocation, a gesture, something to hold or look at.

3.  The structure you developed deep in the brain from birth and which exists biologically among the neural cells and connections, can now become flexible and safely open to new ideas.  If you are in a congregation or assembly of some other kind, separations and rancors will be suspended.  There may be a leader.  Or maybe just experiences like music or familiar words.

4.  When this feels complete, even if unchanged, go back over that limen ceremonially, honoring the transition.  Sometimes greeting others is that ceremony.

What makes the difference among the people doing this (whatever they call their "religion") is their ecology, which is the deep fund of material sensations that make up experience.  What is smelled, eaten, worn, inhabited, and so on and how they are all handled  (eat with your fingers, use slightly different embossed silver utensils for each course, manage chopsticks), becomes part of those perceiving them, using them, eating them, breathing them.  The microbes are there, unseen, making tiny differences.  Time is there, structuring everything.  For an Amazonian tribesman it is one way and for a Swiss mother it is another, but each way contains the images of life.

The problem with a religion like Christianity is that there is no one ecology anymore.  The core elements of family  --  even the Holy Mother gets pushed aside -- are weak now.  Not many of us raise sheep or make wine.  We eat what is native to other countries.  Our environments are being devastated.  We are being evicted.  If we are dependent on divine intercession, we're out of luck.  Replacements have not been imagined in any way we seem able to use, except for those of us who have incorporated (remember that "corpus" is body) this vision of infinite/eternal process, always changing, and always including us in time though we may not travel far along the stream as individuals, tiny but essential.  We need to matter.

Basing religious institutional maps and images is how it has always happened.  Arguing about logical natures of imagined entities in an impossible place has been quasi-effective for a long time but it now ineffective for most people or they would not have left the traditional churches.  They do persist where life is so hard or endangered that nothing less than a fantastical story will satisfy.  

But a ravaged bloody naked man broken on a cross is a hard image to exceed for humans. For the front of the Catholic Church of the Little Flower in Browning Gordon Monroe made a huge fiberglass copy of Bob Scriver's small bronze corpus, "Eli, Eli".  One Easter I saw that the figure had been clothed in a gold lamé tunic.  A devout woman was there and I asked why a figure meant to be impoverished was clothed in gold.  She said, "He is our Son.  We honor him."  This is deep in the Blackfeet culture -- suffering sons, whether warriors or car crash victims -- and that fits with Christian compassion.  So be it.