SELLING "RELIGION" THAT ISN'T DOGMA

“The Molten Chalice,” the manuscript about liturgy that I’ve been working on, is about ready for Beta testing (if anyone wants to read a PDF, just ask and I’ll email it) and I’m beginning to send out queries.  So far I don’t have a written list of publishers and/or editors, but there were about six obvious places to query.   The first two have turned me down.  Until I get out there to maybe a hundred queries, I’ll hold off on self-publishing.

1.   Wendy Strothman was at the U of Chicago Divinity School at the same as myself.  She was the brilliant (and beautiful) person who “saved” Beacon Press from dying after it got the tourniquet from the money flow of the Unitarian Universalist Association, which had included it in their “portfolio.” Strothman went on to other publishers and then started her own agency, which is focused on “major ideas.”  

2.  Orbis is the publisher that published “Building Local Theology” by Robert Schreiter, which is one of the building blocks of the book.  The editor is Daniel Ellsberg’s son, Robert Ellsberg.  But this press is specifically Catholic and is focused on peace.   Schreiter’s book was subsidized by organizations.

There are two Unitarian Universalist publishers if you still include Beacon.  The second one is “Skinner House” which is specifically for UU materials.  I have a big section on UU Religious Humanist liturgy -- partly PNWD Leadership School, partly Von Ogden Vogt and Kenneth Patton who were historical forces, and partly Abraxas, the movement at the time I was in seminary -- which played a part in inspiring this manuscript, originally my doctoral thesis.

A host of “spiritual” houses are out there because it is such a hot topic, but they tend to be quite Christian and sort of -- well, like weight-loss clinics.  Overblown, not particularly educated, generally kind of downscale, unless they are Buddhist.  But this is not a particularly Buddhist theory and they are as politically and structurally knit together into as closed a community as the various Christian denominations.

Another angle is the Atheist movement, which is as much a sort of loose dogmatic group as any Christian group, though it is based on resistance and contention.  They spend all their time railing against the pre-existing instead of scouting out a new path.  Also, they enjoy the political and personal sparring among themselves.  it’s too bad that Christopher Hitchens is dead -- at least he was witty.

Which brings up another problem with writing about religion: not only are dogmatists contentious in that agonistic Western way, but they are legalistic and dogmatic.  it’s all theology to them and they want theology to be set in stone, a set of commandments enforced by an authority (friendly to them).  

Because of that, they’ve become conflated with the American political parties so that to be Republican has come to mean being conservative, fundamentalistic, evangelical, prosperity-based mega-church Christian, while to be a Democrat has come to mean liberal, progressive, mainline, small-church, and marginally agnostic.  Both are devoted to rule-making, one in the interest of personal success which they feel sure can happen if they are unregulated (being unregulated also relates to rules) and the other in the interest of the protection of the vulnerable, the disadvantaged, the unemployed, the old, the very young, and the atypical.  Both want to control the rules, one based on “last-man-standing-means-best,” and the other based on “minorities must be protected for the good of the whole.”   Both are bent on survival, but the right wing thinks they know what survival entails (they can read God’s mind) and the other thinks the key to survival may be hidden in a wheelchair or a prison or a gay bar.  In the middle, of course, are the unchurched and uncommitted.

It’s an opportunity, but also a problem.  This schism makes it hard to “sell” the liturgical idea of how to reach spiritual experience because it does not respond to this war between extremes.  And since the un-religious  either don’t get out of bed on the weekend or leap forth to go climb mountains, they have no use for liturgy.  

Religion has been captured by institutions, whose primary guideline is their own survival as an institution, so Beacon and Skinner will look at a manuscript and ask, “Will this make the UUA grow?”  and also “Will this make our publishing house grow?”  It would be even better if competitors were scooped.

Institutions, which is what denominations are, though there’s always a minority opinion that claims the UUA is a voluntary association (that’s the A) of independent congregations, generally operate like corporations (though they claim to be cooperatives).  This means that there is a superstructure of administrators as well as a “sales force.”  The UUA is no different.  The ministers are plainly the network of sales persons who persuade the congregations to grow on grounds that this is the best of all possible denominations.  A cadre of CEO’s in Boston and stationed at each of the Districts, mostly ministers, are supposed to be developing materials and guiding and encouraging growth.   They tend to be self-serving rather than risky visionaries.  Friends stick together.

The seminaries might be considered Research and Development arms, but little innovation comes out of them and now -- for lack of support -- the students are dispersing among Christian seminaries.  Many of the leaders on all fronts are older, trying to secure their retirement (money) if not their prestige (speaking engagements), and committed to what they’ve been doing for the last decades.  All these folks are increasingly Christian in style if not content and methods.  That’s where the juice is so far.

The counterforce is the last of the nineteen-fifties Fellowship Movement, which is where I developed my own theories but consequently I never developed a network of denominational relationships among ministers and administrators.  My work was done directly with small groups of mostly Western (prairie) people who were explicitly free thinkers and sometimes mystical humanists, meaning that they had strong spiritual experiences, but not related to any deity or dogma.  There are secular groups that have some of the same earmarks.  Quakers come closest in denominational terms, though Quakers themselves are divided between more and less Christian.  I have not explored whether the UU Fellowships have developed a sub-group.  I know that the big ones have a loose affiliation mostly focused on business practices:  growth and money management.  I was part of a wave of growth workshops in the nineteen-eighties.  Anyway, I'm not particularly interested in limiting my audience to UU's.

It’s an interesting reflection that though one would think ministers would be the most likely persons to be interested in liturgy, they turn out to be the least.  Ministers are sermon-centered.  Also, usually male.  This means a bias towards dogma and structure.  As I turn towards “sales” and “promotion,”  I must think like them in order to communicate with them.  Sigh.

RELIGION VS. THE HOLY

All along in my liturgy manuscript I’ve been evading the question of what one should address if one gets the congregations to the state of “liminal.” Suppose they are now ready to realize what assumptions they have never challenged and to move on to some new understanding. Which assumptions? Which new understandings? It takes far more than one book, one lifetime, one culture, to answer such questions, partly because they change all the time and people don’t agree. Ray Rappaport’s theories of adapting to a changing ecology are useful but hard to make concrete. But to trace and analyze the macro and micro theories of humans is what humanities is all about -- a sea in which we all swim even as the tide turns.

Many everyday ways of thinking, defended by religion as “moral” collide with each other, creating consequences destructive in their power. Religious institutions claim they are rules imposed by God and will defend them with force. “Ricky Raw” who writes the blog called “therawness.com” noted that part of our culture (think Rush Limbaugh) believes or pretends to believe or certainly encourages a portrayal of women who act harmlessly seductive and dependent but have the maws of sharks between their legs. The “feminazi.” Honey traps. The justification for harsh social control. A good illustration (lots of clip art) is “Manhood 101,” a book/website/train-of-thought that explores this thinking . There’s a YouTube vid.

“Ricky Raw” and I visited back and forth a little bit and he said:

“There is an entitlement mindset that creates these horrible women who think they're Cinderella and want to be rescued and pampered, yet they act more like the wicked stepsisters. My problem is I think just blaming feminism over-generalizes because I think the problem isn't so much feminism but the combination of growing up with feminist message on one side combined with daddy's little girl traditional messages on the other side, so they end up taking what's convenient from both sides and becoming manipulative spoiled monsters. This in turn creates guys who instead of trying to transcend a broken system just try to learn to navigate it instead, which is where I think the toxic pickup artist mindset is coming from. But the type of women Manhood 101 describes among the 18-35 year old set are quite prevalent in America.”

I think he’s right. It’s a toxic collision between two trains of thought, one that belonged to a certain class of people in the past (those with the means to indulge their girl-children) and one developed from more recent liberation movements . They ought to be mutually exclusive: either one is a little girl dependent on a big strong man, or one is competent, fully capable of running their own lives. This strange combination does indeed create a scary type. They’re not just a hazard to men, but to anyone who opposes them. I call the ones around here Prairie Princesses. In high school they are glamorous to the point of flaunting, but just underneath they are tough as nails, lethal in their narcissism. They give nothing and take mercilessly, because they sincerely believe this is the way life is supposed to be.

There’s a parallel dysfunctional collision in the convictions of men, also very American. 1) A man is responsible for the success of his family, whatever it costs him -- or them. 2) A man must protect the appearance of respectability, imposing whatever secrecy is necessary. I see it as a product of immigration, frontier, and hard times that justified brute force, ownership, and the use of any means necessary. This generates the craving for control, even beatings or rape, supposedly hidden from society, which purports to object to it but is willing to pretend it isn’t happening IF the man in question is powerful. That power can come from religious institutions.

It is hopeless to simply argue rationally against such internalized convictions as the two sets of conflicting ideas, each gender-assigned, above. The ideas are not thought but “felt” and they feel self-evident, which is why they claim religious as justification. The point of a liturgy would be to free their feelings, to give them an “amazing grace” moment in which they realize the damage they do to others, just as the old sea captain whose repentence caused him to write the hymn.

Serendipitously, this book review came along in the New York Times. “THE RIGHTEOUS MIND: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion” by Jonathan Haidt is reviewed By William Saletan.

Haidt has read ethnographies, traveled the world and surveyed tens of thousands of people online. He and his colleagues have compiled a catalog of six fundamental ideas that commonly undergird moral systems: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity.

These are humanities categories as well as religious.

The worldviews Haidt discusses may differ from yours. They don’t start with the individual. They start with the group or the cosmic order.

I would challenge that “cosmic.” Maybe he means universal human principles.

They exalt families, armies and communities. They assume that people should be treated differently according to social role or status — elders should be honored, subordinates should be protected. They suppress forms of self-expression that might weaken the social fabric. They assume interdependence, not autonomy. They prize order, not equality. . .

You don’t have to believe in God to see this higher capacity as part of our nature. You just have to believe in evolution. Evolution itself has evolved: as humans became increasingly social, the struggle for survival, mating and progeny depended less on physical abilities and more on social abilities. In this way, a faculty produced by evolution — sociality — became the new engine of evolution. Why can’t reason do the same thing? Why can’t it emerge from its evolutionary origins as a spin doctor to become the new medium in which humans compete, cooperate and advance the fitness of their communities?

All human social arrangements are contingent, negotiable. Evolving morality certainly seems like work to be done socially in a liminal space and internally on a global neuronal platform, because it is so relevant to our behavior. But we don’t see what our own senses would reveal if we paid attention. Brains are meant to filter the dissonant. It’s tough to bypass that. Institutions don’t necessarily want to anyway.

Morality is a big part of what we call “religion,” but there is another category even bigger that we name “holy.” It is unmediated by any humanities thinking, even the kind we call “religious”, “church”, “sanctified”. The holy is what engulfs us all and exceeds all thought. It is the immense unknowable in which all species on the planet are but a fleck in time. Now that’s raw. It’ll put you on your knees -- if not flat on your face -- and make you pay attention.

A TROUT IN THE CHALICE

Below is a part of a manuscript I’m calling “The Molten Chalice” which is a bit of an paradox because a chalice is supposed to be an unchanging container, like a crucible, and the contents rather than the container are supposed to be molten. The title is an attempt to capture what happens in the human brain (a bony chalice) when one is feeling holy participation in the universe, which some call meaning. It is not meaning in the sense of a dictionary definition, but rather an experience, a shifted consciousness, that can be perceived and even measured by outsiders with fMRI, fine electrodes, and blood analysis. The idea of a “god” may or may not ever be provable, but the state of the participant in worship is. The key mechanism may be in the neuronal platform that coordinates brain function, allowing sensory information from subsidiary neural networks to shift consciousness. I suggest that liturgy is the art of that shift.

A TROUT IN THE CHALICE

Abraxas was an admirable experiment in re-invigorating the medieval models by reaching out for world-wide words and practices, something like the New England Transcendentalists realizing what Buddhism and Hinduism had to offer and pulling it into their Christian thinking. But Abraxans are never going to kill roosters in church even though Santeria might do that. They are never going to use Plains Indian Sun Lodge ordeals in which their chest muscles are torn. And they are not likely to throw up their hands and speak in tongues and fall on the floor. Worship styles are almost always class-based and so are denominations. The UU Abraxans are upscale.

My approach is so new as to be shocking, but it does not contradict anything above. Two anthropologists (Von Gennep and Victor Turner) are my sources for a three-step process of going over a “limen” (threshold) into a state called “liminal” and then returning back into the secular world. I am matching that with the research on “neuronal brain platform” function (see Gazzinaga) to insist that “liminal time or place” is a true brain state in which previous assumed thought categories can be questioned and either changed or confirmed. This “liminal” state can be seen in electrical recordings, hormonal changes in the blood, and fMRI tests. It can also be felt by the person and is either identical or close to what Eliade called “the sacred.”

The first essay in the Abraxan Worship Reader is an excerpt from “Art and Religion” by Von Ogden Vogt. It’s not long or elaborate, but this essay is the source for what I call “the Dilation of the Spirit,” a change of dimension in the scale of thought to respond to what Tillich called “Ultimate.” Perhaps this is what some people feel when they take LSD, opening their previously settled minds to new possibility. “Go cosmic.” No more wishing for personal prosperity. No more fellowship mornings devoted to what has been called “City Sewer System Syndrome,” the crowding out of religion by politics.

In terms of liturgy, the idea is first to bring up to consciousness what is sinful, painful, dreadful, terrifying and most humiliating in a world full of such forces. (One only has to recall the latest news.) This is “The Confession of Sins.” Then comes the “Assurance of Pardon.” The question in our era has been without an all- powerful God, what can salvation and forgiveness possibly be? I see human intimacy, connection with the beloved place in creation, and participation in the entangled universe, no matter how minute that participation might be. Since you are included, you share its dimensions. On that scale, what is human trouble? (This is related to the literary concept of the “sublime,” but that is a different discussion.)

Vogt was a humanist and honored human cultures in their grandest dimensions, but the industrial revolution was still as far as his mind could reach. He had no notion of quantum mechanics or the birth of stars. He knew nothing about the Higgs boson and neither did anyone else. The powerful marriage of physics and poetry had not quite happened yet.

The Eucharist has been powerful in societies where bread and wine are the most basic of meals, taken for granted. When missionaries went to totally different parts of the planet, especially those whose people were still hunter/gatherers who depended on meat and roots, the bread and wine just didn’t work. In fact, the Jewish culture’s pattern of communal meals like the Last Supper where talk mixed with food, and also prayer (at one historical point one was supposed to say a prayer of gratitude for each bite bigger than a tablespoon) doesn’t work in a context like Blackfeet where meat was always simmering over a fire to be dipped into as was convenient, except for major feasts. One whole band was called “Eats Alone” because their chief preferred to take his food apart from the camp. But at ceremonial communal meals, prayer combined with food, notably sarvisberry soup or buffalo tongue.

I’m proposing that entering or leaving this state of liminality and merger with the universe is deeply entwined with sensory cues and that they touch something real in the person that can’t be accessed in other ways, not even words. They are emergent from the ecology that has created the local culture. Which images of which senses evoke the liminal -- a mix of sound, smell, space, and so on -- will test the skill of the liturgist, both in their choosing and in their arranging: both their “beats” and their “arc.” It should be obvious that the liturgist must truly know the worshippers to achieve the kind of intense experience that people find poetic, quasi-sexual, life-changing. This is not to discredit the daily small rituals that order our lives or even the great patriotic spectacles that can unite us en masse. They are not quite the same.

But I’m pleased to have found something useful and fitting in the dim recesses of UU archives. Sound theory from an old-fashioned humanist liturgist in a polka dot bowtie. I grieve that the tower of Vogt’s cathedral has been taken down due to deterioration. When paradigms shift, by definition priorities change. But the underlying process and structure persist.

A NEW "THEOLOGICAL" DIAGRAM

In the eighties when I began doing the research and reflection necessary for this manuscript, I was in a seminary that was not exactly doctrinally Christian but at least a part of Christian culture. I had to come to terms with the quadrants produced by working with a Cross. The explanation I liked best was Paul Tillich’s because he spoke of the horizontal crossbar being extended experience on this earth surface (history and geography) versus the vertical timber as being aspiration to the transcendent and possibly rootedness in the deep interior of the person. I used to have a little riff about how the transcendent strikes through the ordinary again and again, not just once, so that the symbol ought to look like a whole lot of verticals and one horizontal.

But soon I went to the idea of a dot in a circle -- the dot being that which is most centered in the person and the circle as the most distant conceivable awareness that person has. I added the idea of the vertical at the middle of the dot: the person’s “axis mundi” or “umbilical attachment.” Then a life story seemed to be a matter of traveling on that schema from what is most central to what is most distant. But what starts out as the edge of the unknown can become the limits of what is allowed.

I had the assumption that a person is an instrument of mind/heart, the source of observation, the collection and integration point of experience. Thus the crucial importance of both sensory access (data) and brain function (theory), one informing the other in both directions. I thought about the many ways of extending one’s senses (microscopes, telescopes, various recording devices and intensifying strategies) to things that no human being alone could sense plus the strategies that make circumstantial evidence or testimony from others fairly reliable.

At that point neither I nor anyone else knew anything about “mirror cells” which allow one person to access the experience of another person, a phenomenon usually called “empathy.” When one sees a hand laid gently alongside the face of another, one feels it on one’s own face. I had done acting exercises in which one persuades someone else to copy one’s posture, expression, and -- ultimately -- emotion. So now I wonder how to make my little dot in a circle add some symbolism for empathy. Maybe a lot of circles with dots in the middle, with arrows going back and forth. Wireless. Bluetooth technology.

All along I’ve been quarreling with two common and stubborn Christian ideas. One is the concept of God. I do not believe there is a big humanoid in the sky and I do not think it is helpful to anthropomorphize the concepts of creation or love. The other is the pesky problem of the congregation, particularly when it becomes institutionalized, bureaucratized, and begins missionizing to capture others. So often this is a source of evil. Both of these problems are helped by considering empathetic sharing with others instead of the constant fortification of one’s own self-understanding. It is a way to escape both narcissism and anthropocentrism.

In fact, I think empathy was built into my liturgical structure (unawares) at the point of what I call “Dilation of the Spirit,” which is very much a matter of being conscious of others. (We say “raising one’s consciousness.”) To experience the Confession and the responding Assurance of Pardon “properly”, one doesn’t confess one’s own personal sins but acknowledges the tragedies of all people -- maybe all entities. To exist is to be limited, even broken. We all die. The Assurance of Pardon is really an Assurance that the greater whole continues, which can be a source of joy through belonging and participation. It can be powerful to sit with others and face these two extremes, sharing the experience.

V.S. Ramachandran is a brain researcher who is able to explain -- or begin to explain -- how the human brain, that three pound blob of jelly, works. Research shows that the brain is in a sense rhizomatic -- it is a network where cells (rhizomes) are connected by tendrils. At first it was thought that each cell contained the information for one function or thought or memory or sensation. Now we see that there are regions with specialized functions (face recognition, sense of time, attribution of importance) each with connections to other parts. In a living person the whole brain is engaged in a dynamic and constant dance of processing.

Something about this allows “recursive embedding” which I take to be the ability to think about ourselves thinking, so that I can not only invent a theological diagram, but go back later to see that it is too limited and to devise an addition. Then to reflect on the implications of this addition. Not only are we aware of other’s consciousness, but we are able to stand apart from ourselves, observing. We are our own guardian angels.

Over the years I’ve been criticized for being narcissistic (self-contained, uninterested in other people, more concerned with my own goals than theirs). This is reflected in my diagram of just ONE circle and ONE dot, so that it was about my own inner world and not about sharing with others. It might be suggested that my circle boundary is too hard to penetrate, that I’m isolating myself, don’t want to share. Or it might be that I’m keeping my boundaries high because otherwise I am too EASILY penetrated by other people and find myself dominated by their needs and ideas. I suspect that boundaries are situational: we string barbed wire to keep some people and ideas out, but quickly open doors for others and even find that some people can fly over our walls. (Sometimes we bond or even fuse with others, which is a different kind of problem.)

Boundary disorders can be either organic (the bit of brain that works with mirror neurons isn’t functioning) or psychological (you just don’t want to know -- maybe are afraid). If the resulting disorder is a problem, both possibilities need to be explored. Ramachandran does much work with people who have phantom limbs: an imagined limb that persists after the flesh has been cut off. He set up a screen to hide the amputated arm and a mirror so the amputee could see “both arms” -- one of them being the reflection. Then the amputee made movements with his good arm, “saw” the missing arm do the same things in the mirror, and his brain erased the phantom. (You can see videos of Ramachandran explaining on Edge.org, TED, or Charlie Rose.) It is possible that autism is due to missing or malfunctioning mirror neurons, which would cut the person off from empathetic connection with other people. They are not ignoring, but emotionally blind.

Sharing minds, emotions, visions, in a group is at the heart of congregational liturgies. At its most transcendent, it seems a participation in the cosmos. Not control, not protection of oneself, but joining in the ongoing dance. But for many people the key to the boundary is lost and they are isolated, lonely, unconsoled. An ordinary church experience does not reach them.

What are the keys that will open up boundaries? What screens and mirrors? Singing and dancing? Words? Sex? Danger? Drugs? What if a person outside the boundary has an accurate understanding of what is inside some person's boundary and presents it through the arts, whether talk, painting, pantomime? Will the barricaded person feel the empathy and open the door? This may be the real effectiveness of psychotherapy. But it might also be a salvific use of liturgy, to embody a phantom life.

LITURGICAL SMELLS

Of all the conventional five senses (as distinguished from the less-considered senses like orientation in space or internal distention, or non-ocular light sensitivity) smell is the most primal, since it is the earliest sense, present even in a one-celled animal, for it is the detection of molecules in dispersal, either in fluid or gas. Those without this perception cannot find substances nor avoid substances, nor distinguish whether they are good or bad.

In mammals the sense of smell is directly connected to the brain, even more so than the eyes, and linked neurally directly to the hippocampus which is the locus of memory sorting for preservation. Smells and information or incidents linked with smells are more memorable -- remembered longer and more vividly. Memories connected to “unpleasant” odors (subjective as that may be) are remembered better than those associated with “pleasant” odors. This makes sense in two ways: toxins and rot should be remembered so as to avoid them, and the funky smells of intimate bodies associated with intense stimulation (not just pheromones) should not be forgotten for positive reasons. But unless you’re a bee, the smells of flowers don’t matter that much -- they are decorations.

Octavian Coifan, on his blog called 1000fragrances.blogspot.com, is often eloquent about the primal connection between perfumes and religion. Consider this review of Aesop Mystra, which comes in a small brown bottle as though it were medicine.

“. . . Taking inspiration from religion or past is a hard work but Aesop succeeds at it in all ways. It's not the opulent sexy Byzantine perfume that would make you feel attractive .... but a mysterious mixture like a formula from the past that would transport you in other world. The main ingredients are incense, labdanum and mastic, and a lot of other naturals that would make it dark and uneasy to explore. There is an unusual quality I found inside - it’s profoundly animalic and dirty like a sinful woman. It has the combination of jasmin-amber-musk of the old world. . . a whisper of death in a decadent universe. “

Unafraid of being offensive because he’s in pursuit of deep truths, he traces the associations of perfume to the preservation of the dead, the attempt to prevent corruption, the need to disinfect, and the original substances used by the Egyptians for mummification. “Natron” (which is merely sodium bicarbonate to dry the tissues), minerals, bark derivatives, alcohol, acids, salts, resins, oils were all used and became associated with the hope for an afterlife. Frankincense and myrrh. All aromatics.

Another source of memorable smells is fire and burning. Smudges. Incense. For those people who maintained household fires, the collection and uses of different kinds of wood became a vocabulary in themselves: what burns hot, what makes smoke, what holds embers -- each with a distinctive smell. Through the long period when religious offerings were creatures, burnt flesh in the temple sent messages to Heaven. Add burnt feathers, bone and hair. Ritual cremations of humans at death. As soon as people understood how to make a fire hot enough to smelt metal, those pungent smells also became associated with acts so powerful and mysterious as to amount to magic.

Tanning is a messy process, fairly odorous. First, some means of removing the water in the new skin with salt or other dessicant is necessary; then working out the sub-cutaneous fat, perhaps by diluting it with the fat of brains, well rubbed in; and then removing the glue with a mild acid, maybe vinegar or urine. Native Americans used smoke to preserve. In Europe elegant leather gloves, still retaining a whiff of tanning methods, were all the rage in some historical periods, and traditionally scented by keeping them in a sandalwood box. Shawls being shipped from India were packed with patchouli, an aromatic plant that repels insects. Tobacco and sweetgrass did that, too. Maybe camphor or menthol. Where there is wealth, there are preservatives.

The smells of the pest house and various corruptions were fought with vapors of sulphur and solutions of iodine, all the disinfectants like ammonia or pine-sol and lye. Garlic and mustard were used as poultices. Even so came creeping the reeks of excrement, vomit and rot. Skilled doctors used their noses as much as their eyes to understand what was happening. Not many of us know the smell of blood as well as they did. (I’ve never understood why it smells coppery when it is in fact mostly iron.)

Then the smells of food preservation: pepper, chili, vinegar, char, cinnamon, dill, various dried substances both animal and vegetable, sometimes mineral. The smells of distillation and fermentation, baking and roasting, fresh torn greens and newly shucked peas or corn. These are life-sustaining odors, associated with contentment and energy. The Christian tradition has chosen bread and wine to celebrate, when they could have chosen dried fish or even burnt flesh, but those were about earlier times before households had the time and stability to grind flour or ferment grapes.

The smells of the city and of the industrial age are with us now, but not so associated with religion though they certainly saturate our understanding of reality. Hot asphalt, new tires, WD40, gasoline fumes, hot metal, a passing cigar smoked in the rain on a cold day. Perhaps churches have smells of their own: lemon oil rubbed into the pews, beeswax candles.

Years ago when I was in the ministry I attended the UUA General Assembly back east. It was pretty miserable, too hot and humid. When I got back, I stepped into the dry wind of the little Helena airport and found that all the sweet clover had just bloomed, billowing in a yellow cloud everywhere. When the burnt jet fuel blew off, which didn’t take long in a stiff Montana breeze, I was saturated by the honeyed smell of those weeds. It was so healing that I sat down on the curb instead of going to my pickup and on home. I sat there a long time. Sure, I know that the “sweet” smell of sweetgrass and sweetclover and even sweetpine (balsam fir) is coumadin, which is the blood thinner many people take as medicine. It’s the effective ingredient in rat poison (renamed Warfarin). But my blood needed thinning.

Something similar happened again on another occasion except that I was flying in and out of Portland and got back on a warm spring evening when the frogs had just burst into song in the slough next to the airport parking lot. I stayed there a while, too, watching the full moon rise over the Columbia River. These two threshold experiences are so deeply embedded in my sense memory bank that when I grow very old and can’t smell anymore, I’ll still be able to summon at least one Holy smell and one Sacred sound.

FIVE-PART LITURGICAL OUTLINE

A big turquoise envelope was floating around the kitchen. I thought it was full of newspaper clips about cow fertility for my niece, but it turns out that it’s five-step liturgies for worship that I wrote for the Blackfeet Methodist congregations in 1988-89. I wonder whether I could or should find the concordance for the year, the scriptures assigned to each Sunday. The weather had its own ideas about the calendar and since my theology is “immanental,” the seasons had as much to do with what I wrote as the Bible verses.

Here’s a sample from January 8.

___________

CALL TO WORSHIP (Responsive)

We come again in this New Year to renew our faithful attendance at this house of worship.

The calendar has turned now and we look down the length of the months for a whole year to the next Christmas.

It is cold and we draw together as families and as friends in order to keep our hearts warm.

And we warm ourselves before this great flame of glory that we give the name of God Almighty.

INVOCATION

May those who are frightened come to be with us here where we may comfort them. May those who are joyful come to be with us here that we may rejoice with them. May those who love life come to be with us here, for this is a place where we love life and all its beauty.

PRAYER OF CONFESSION

A great wind came last week to rip at our roofs, tear at our windows, knock us off our feet when we tried to walk. Now it is stone cold and we must watch our fires to make sure they don’t go out, watch our children to make sure they dress warmly. We feel fragile in such a world. On the news we hear of terrorists and nerve gas and we hear the wails of the bereaved mothers. We are very small, oh Lord, and we must trust others to guide our country through the perils. Keep us from the loss of hope when the chance of peace is great, but the powers of hatred are still potent. Let us never lose hope or confidence that good will overcome evil. We falter.

ASSURANCE OF PARDON

Our God has made us various and resourceful, able to draw on each other’s strengths. We are not alone in the world, for we have families, fellow country people, wise people, strong people, people who will be with us even as we are with our God. For if we are unable to reach out for God, behold, the wind of His Spirit reaches us and lifts us up.

BENEDICTION

The change in our lives sometimes feels like loss, but other times it is a gift and we are glad to be different. Some of the trees who live alongside us survive by dropping their leaves and growing new ones, and others survive by conserving and renewing the old needles. In the coming week may we both conserve and renew, sending our roots deep into the soil of our world. For through us blows not just the cold winter winds, but also the wind of the spirit which lifts us up everlastingly.

________

These liturgies were written for the Sundays from September 25 to May 28. I’m thinking about just posting them on a separate blog even though I wouldn’t be able to get the dates to match. They’d make a pretty nice meditation manual for people around here because the whole thing is based on the material culture of the people who live on the Blackfeet Reservation.

One would have to add the prairie fire for this Sunday. The photos are remarkable. (See www.gftribune.com) Black velvet spread over the land in stripes, stopping just short of the houses. The sentiments are meant to be Christian -- the Methodist symbol is the fire with the cross against it, so fire is an easy “gimme.” If you want to see Divine Intervention or the Devil’s handiwork in the fire, be my guest.

One of the little knots for a minister to work out personally is how much to accommodate the beliefs of the congregation and the doctrine of the denomination. If it’s insincere and rote, people can feel it. But I don’t think the minister going off into private ecstasy is very helpful either -- that’s performing and leaves no way for the people to participate. Where’s the communication?

But there’s nothing wrong with following a liturgical year. We’re roughly a little past epiphany, which Christians more or less consider to be when the three Magi or Wise Men or whoever they were, finally got there. (A recent piece I read contended that the three Magi were considered jokers, goof-offs, for thinking that any baby could be God. But then they arrived and saw that the God had become the baby. A little tender pearly damp specimen of incarnated flesh.)

By now this stuff is old, so you have to work a little to knock some surprise into it. Each time period has its own style. The Christian Year is a series of poems for every day of the year by John Keble in 1827. Victorian scholar Michael Wheeler calls The Christian Year simply "the most popular volume of verse in the nineteenth century". It was considered "Tractarian Aesthetics” in the Romantic Tradition.” My seasons of Sundays would be “pastoral” in aesthetics but still in the Romantic tradition (see note at the bottom, cadged from Wikipedia), which is laden with nature imagery. But informal. Rather more like the guided imagery of a modern meditation group than hymn language. Keble is writing a love letter.

Here’s Keble:

SUN of my soul, Thou Saviour dear,

It is not night if Thou be near;

Oh may no earth-born cloud arise

To hide Thee from Thy servant’s eyes!

When the soft dews of kindly sleep

My weary eyelids gently steep,

Be my last thought how sweet to rest

Forever on my Saviour’s breast!

Abide with me from morn till eve,

For without Thee I cannot live;

Abide with me when night is nigh,

For without Thee I dare not die.

The nature imagery here is melded with personal romantic and physical (!) love. It is sensual and bedroom-obsessed in the way that girls in our culture somehow confuse physical passion with being nursed by their mothers. It’s chick-flick religion, pulling God off into a little one-on-one in seclusion, wearing a maid’s uniform, no less. Think about it.

FOOTNOTE:

“Romanticism (or the Romantic era/Period) was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe and strengthened in reaction to the Industrial Revolution In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature. The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities.”

LOST IN TRANSLATION

Getting back to those young men who seek out and participate in Sun Dance piercing ceremonies, why are they doing it? What do they get out of it? Originally it was a way to model and experience the consciousness changes connected to ordeals. Plains Indian men had lives based on hunting and fighting to preserve their band. They needed courage and determination and had no thought of painlessness as desirable. (The pre-anesthesia era.) Life was challenges and a “swag” (swagger) attitude was crucial. In return for their demonstrations the people gave them respect.

But traditional Blackfeet did not inflict pain on their children as a means of control or punishment. The harshest punishment in the early literature is “throwing water up their noses.” (Waterboarding! But that is far more extreme.) There was none of the thrashing by irate fathers or caning by frustrated teachers that is a steady theme in Euro fiction and bio.

The Sun Lodge ordeal was embedded in the culture in the same way as the Vision Quest trial. This is not to say that free-form or formally imposed affliction was a value nor was all pain a matter of blood and force. The virtuous old woman with her digging stick ceremonially fasted for three days, which was life-threatening and unpleasant, but this was a time and place where people might go hungry for any number of reasons and could survive it. Why is it that old white ladies of virtue don’t arrive at Plains Indian gatherings to declare they are going to fast as a sacrifice for others? Is it because they may have been on diets their whole lives in order to improve themselves, their own status?

The two rituals, piercing and Vision Questing, have similarities and differences. Piercing at a Sun Lodge ceremony was witnessed and highly prescribed -- a rawhide thong to pinned to one’s chest muscles with a skewer. One had to tear oneself free, ripping the chest muscles. Others danced and sang in the special “lodge” like a round tent with a leafy canopy and high leafy sides that contained a center pole, as is often present in religious symbology. Vision Quests were solitary, high in the mountains, and often detectable today because of leaving one of the rare “architectures” of worship that whites are used to: a low outline of stone the right size for someone to lie down in: a “dream bed.” The person, usually a boy ready to become a young man, went there to fast and thirst until his consciousness had changed enough to invite a vision.

The similarity between the two ordeals was that even for the solitary youth, someone was watching and ready to intervene. In the case of those skewered and pulling at tethers or dragging bison skulls, the helper might add his own weight to make the ordeal shorter. Or the man in charge of placing the skewers might, in his judgment, decide the skewers should be fairly shallow because the person who had volunteered was overestimating his stamina. This in spite of everyone agreeing that the deeper into the muscles the skewers were implanted, the more honorable the ordeal. Pride, showing off, was the big danger of ordeals. (Also of combat, though there it was encouraged.)

Since showing off is a part of adolescence and knowing one’s limits is a part of growing up, there was some danger of a young man simply dying in pursuit of his vision. So a relative or older mentor would make it a point to check on him, maybe from a distance so that he didn’t even know it. There is a cautionary tale about a man who wanted his son to fast longer and better than anyone else’s son. When he finally got around to checking, the son was gone and all that was left was a little mournful bird. It wasn’t even the son’s own pride that killed him.

When members of one culture, who have organized their brains according to the assumptions of the people they have known and loved, encounter another culture with entirely different cubbie holes and secret compartments, they can’t see what’s before them. This is now notorious knowledge.

One of the most secret of Blackfeet societies was the Horn Society doin’s. It was so secret that accounts of it were written in Latin, the assumption being that REAL authorities mature and entitled enough to know about it would be able to read Latin -- like priests. And the others didn’t need to know. The reason it was secret was that it was a ritual based on congruence: the vital buffalo had to make babies, so the ceremony re-enacted how to do it, from the heat to the birth. The Blackfeet women sequestered themselves to be yearning cows. At some point they imitated the delivery of calves. The Blackfeet men did their best to look like old bulls. At some point the chief among them demonstrated the sex act. (It was noted that if the most important man were too old, once he had taken the most appealing of the women off onto the prairie to show the bison what to do, he should just pretend.)

Prissy anthropologists were shocked! Well, actually they weren’t. But in the 19th century they thought that on the one hand people would think they were naughty to know such things, much less write about it, and on the other hand it undercuts the mystique of anthropology not to know racy things about native cultures with no taboos. (Well, not the same ones as the Victorians.) It was a woman, Alice Kehoe, who let the English version out -- as bold a social action as celebrating the Mass in English.

The Blackfeet had some small personal rituals, little things with the efficacy of rosaries, like the fossil stones known as “iniskum,” or buffalo stones. With a bit of imagination and maybe some helpful filing, these little bits shaped by the insides of compartments in baculites (a sort of squid) did look quite like a buffalo. The idea was that the people were starving and again it was a woman who came to the rescue. This time it was not an old woman who knew how and where to dig roots. It was a young woman, the youngest and least valuable of multiple wives, who was left behind on a women’s expedition for firewood. She hears a little voice, some say a whistle or song, and finds an “iniskum.” It has the power to call buffalo and it does. The people are saved by an humble person, unexpectedly. It’s a New Testament sort of story. And in this case, two cultures are in agreement. “The least of these” is important and should be valued, a basic human truth.

PRAIRIE LITURGY

A competent ethnographer who comes to a new community to study “religion” will look at the most global and thoroughly integrated information possible, but a naive pop religionist will tend to look at rituals in isolation and accumulate “theological” statements apart from everything else, pressed into categories from another continent. This is an radically important difference and will lead to quite different results. Most ceremonies and liturgies arise from within the lives of the people. If their lives are changed -- most likely by the introduction of the industrial revolution and concepts of modernity or Christianity -- the whole meaning of everything will change.

Even the sensory world will change: think of the difference between traveling on horseback and traveling by pickup. The smells, motion, distance traveled, exposure to nature, necessary skills are all radically changed; in fact, as much as it was to go from walking alongside dogs to riding alongside dogs. Dogs remain. Perhaps there are few liturgies about dogs because they are “givens” to all reservation life, participants rather than objects of veneration.

The “givens” of the ecology are the substrate of all religion and culture, so for the Blackfeet the four directions, the cycle, the achievement of harmony (fittingness) are the key to survival and therefore feature in ritual. The sterilizing effect of sun, the unpredictable deadliness of lightning, the persistence of wind, the paralyzing cold, are constants. Circling the lodge, monitoring virtue in the sense of tenacity as much as bravery, the importance of being in the right place at the right time are all vital. "Indian time" in its own context is not about being late: it is about waiting for the proper moment when the forces are aligned, then acting.

Amateurs and some professionals only spend part of the year in locus, which usually means they miss the winter. They might not realize the brevity and harshness of the summer arc when hail storms can be barrages of fist-sized ice chunks rather than the little white pellets many think of. They have not competed with bears in the sarvisberry patches. They have not as children lain quietly by a ground squirrel burrow to snare one of them. Such small but indelible sense memories are threads in the fabric of life. I’ll resist my natural impulse to go on with ideas about that metaphor, particularly since there was no woven fabric until Europeans began to supply it.

In fact, the early culture was about tanned hide, fur, bone, feathers, wood, and stone as incarnated in plants and animals. The beads, ribbons, metal thimbles, brass tacks and falconry bells, the knives and spark-striking firestarters were all from European culture. Blackfeet “bundles” developed out of the need to pack things along on horseback in a life based on movement through the cycle of food availability: camas roots now, chokecherries later, newborn large animals now (the skins are lightweight for clothing and, if kept whole, make a container) and fat bison cows later. In spring move towards the prairie while there is water in rivulets, in winter move towards the stream shores where there is wood to burn.

So now it’s possible to understand the major June gathering when all the small groups of nomads came together while there was grass for their horses and it was a little too early for harvesting most things. The importance of sarvisberry soup, which is made from dried berries, as a ceremonial food becomes clear. It’s not about the body of someone -- it’s about having enough food to have gotten through the winter and to eat the last of the stored berries in faith that there will soon be a new crop. It’s a show of appreciation, which is why one fishes out the biggest, fattest berry and hands it up to the little altar.

Christian liturgies have come to be an individual act even if practiced in company. One [sic] tries to save one’s own soul, though it’s good to pray for others. Blackfeet are far closer to the reality that the unit of survival and evolution is the band. Individual loss and suffering are certainly mourned, but the individual acts on behalf of the whole group. Therefore, the modern young men who seek meaning in the Sun Dance ordeal of piercing are guided by individual motives, but in the original ritual this was only part of a complex that rested on the virtue of one old woman. She was not virtuous for her own glory, but because her acts affected everyone. The same was true for the Bundle Keepers; Bundles were meant to be maintained well because they affected the fortunes of the whole band.

It is very hard to keep any religious ritual from drifting off into personal demonstrations of wealth, like the Pacific Northwest tribes who practiced the ritual of potlatch. In that rich ecology one person could accumulate a LOT of wealth, which he redistributed in a feast so generous that the communal bowl was the size of a canoe. The Blackfeet will give blankets and tobacco, but the Kwaikiutl moguls gave everything they had. They could accumulate wealth in intricately embossed sheets of copper which were broken and thrown into the sea. In return for all this, they were entitled to put a sort of disc on their hat. Some men had several discs.

The complaint that people tend to reduce meaningful rituals into attempts to superstitiously and magically control events recurs again and again. When I did my hospital chaplaincy, the Catholic chaplains hated to supply rosaries because people didn’t use them to discipline devotional prayer (keeping track of the number of repetitions of the formula) but rather considered them magical. I wangled a rosary for a young mother with a baby who needed surgery that would require resources the mother didn’t have -- not even emotionally -- and, sure enough, she wound the rosary into the baby’s crib and disappeared, as though the “magic” of some beads would be compensation.

In the same way the liturgies of indigenous peoples are used to supply prestige and “magic” without any real care for the context of the land itself, which is only a backdrop for them rather than the substrate of existence that it has always been.