"INITIATION TO ADULTHOOD" by William O. Roberts Jr.

“Initiation to Adulthood: An Ancient Rite of Passage in Contemporary Form” by William O. Roberts, Jr. is a 1982 book that ought to be reprinted.  Written by a Christian minister to describe what his own church had been doing, this will naturally be of most interest to Christians, but to the open-minded, there is much useful material here for anyone.  The United Church of Christ and its ecumenical printing arm, Pilgrim Press, published this book and a second one by Roberts, “Crossing the Soul's River: A Rite of Passage for Men.”  I haven’t read it yet -- just ordered it.

These books come out of the same consciousness that produced the UUA Leadership Schools and I suppose, ultimately, they come out of the Sixties and Seventies experiments to understand humans in a newer liberated way.  There’s another root in “organizational development” for businesses, NGO’s, and institutions of all kinds -- including churches as individual congregations and denominations.  It’s the same impulse that resists lectures and endorses wilderness experiences.  Even more than that these books and others document individual struggle in turbulent times -- hence, the reason for republishing.  We ARE in those times.

Roberts had an excellent education in major schools (Wesleyan and Union) and at the time of writing this book was serving as the minister of First Church  of Christ in Middleton, Connecticut, which collaborated with him to develop a strong and innovative ministry for their adolescents, based on the concept of initiating them into adulthood.  In Part One he is careful to lay out “Higher Religions”  (meaning bigger, more complex, and better known) examples from Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish and Christian traditions.  Then he goes to Biblical examples and a careful history of Christian initiation and the theological issues.  Only the first chapter brings in the usual indispensable anthropological suspects: Norman O. Brown, Joseph Campbell, Eliade, Turner, Van Gennep.  

Part Two contains the actual account of the “risky business” of dealing with the young people of the parish in all their confusion and drama.  No move is made without justification and analysis.  These people are not throwing mud at the wall to see what sticks.  There is a “lesson plan” for everything.  Adolescence is one stage in a stream of development that begins in childhood (Sunday School) and continues through adulthood.  At every step Roberts shares leadership with adults and young people.  They do not shy away from sexuality -- in fact, they use the Unitarian Universalist model which was pretty “out there” at that time.  (By now the larger culture has caught up.)

Sometimes it sounds like Boy Scouts.  I mean, it stays pretty much within the church “bubble” without confronting some of the global anguish we see now: nothing about drugs or child trafficking or species extinction.  The book precedes AIDS and the African post-colonial descent into hell.  But on the other hand there are some remarkable efforts to get at major issues.  For instance, the lesson “packages” pick up some of the citizenship training that is now so neglected in the public schools.  The youngsters learn the vocabulary of politics and economics, a list of issues of the times --Disarmament, Hostages, Unemployment, Inflation, Moral Majority, Gun Control, Balanced Budget -- is only a few of the topics.  All of these issues are tied back to the New Testament injunctions to have a care for the poor and afflicted.  NOT the Old Testament prescriptions for wrath and destruction.

The four best simulation games were “Plea Bargaining,” (La Jolla, CA: Simile II.1971) an introduction to the legal system; “Baldicer,” (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1970) about world hunger, “Humanus” (LaJolla, CA: Simile II, 1976) about survival in a post-nuclear holocaust world; and “Starpower,” (La Jolla, CA: Simile II, 1970) about economics.  You might have noticed that in a comment “Herb” mentioned what impact “Starpower” had on him at the PNWD Leadership School he attended decades ago.  (Simille II appears to have disappeared, but googling “simulation games” brings up a wealth of materials.  Of course, computer games like Sim City have been around a long time by now.)

There are also strategies that Roberts calls “Mystery Rites” in which a group may “become” an historical group in the Judeo-Christian past; the Children of Israel, the people of the exile; the early church; the catacomb years and then the medieval and later times.  (It’s interesting to me that the honest history of religion is often more a description of alternatives than advocacy for the straight and narrow.)

Adolescents experience eight “mystery rites”:  Separation, Urban Adventure, Encounter with Silence, Masking Ritual, Sexuality Rite, the Ash Wednesday Service, the Wilderness Experience, and the Final Act of Initiation.  Parents are involved and “give up their children” so they may become adults.  Younger kids are involved as witnesses of the final ceremony which is made as intimidating and dramatically mysterious as possible.

All is not sweetness and light.  The usual kid probs with violence, the law, and unwanted pregnancy haunted them.  It would be good to have a lawyer on call and a bail fund.  Know where the hospital emergency room is.  Still, sometimes all this seems nearly too ideal to be real.

When undertaking such projects, one of the biggest dangers is to adults, especially those who didn’t have a lot of support or were too confined in their own adolescence.  Even traveling with these kids empathetically can activate old ghosts and yearnings.  Evidently it happened to Roberts himself.  As time went on, he left the ministry and his marriage, “wandering in the wilderness” for four years while his wife and children struggled on alone.  This is what finally resulted in the book about rites of passage for men.  He did return -- the paradigm is Job, but he claims Jung.

It appears to me that the advances of the Sixties and Seventies are coming back, that more people are making passages of major kinds -- not just maturation stages, but going from one country to another, one ecosystem to another (the climate seems to be proceeding somewhere without us anyway), one war to another.  Riding with Tim Barrus has made me painfully aware of who is out there in the darkness.  Some of them do not want to be brought close enough to the campfire for us to see who they are.  Some are standing on the other side of the River Styx, inviting us to join them.  Don’t tell the media -- they’ll spoil everything. 

I found Roberts today, googling and consulting people who might know, until Wesleyan, his alma mater, helped me out.  He says:  “I like the book on Initiation.  I like the book on Midlife even more.  I’m contemplating creating an Elder Passage and have offered classes, retreats, kick-off presentations at college reunions, but I have not (yet) actually created the rituals that are necessary for any Rite of Passage.  I will be in the village of Patzcuaro for the Mexican Days of the Dead celebration this year.  I’m quite certain that ancient ritual will provide grist for the slow moving mill of my mind.”   Bill Roberts can be contacted at bill@robertsconsultinginc.com

HOW OBJECTS BECOME ICONS

The thought break-through by Damasio and others came about by applying the principles of evolution to the concept of “consciousness.”  This has been prevented because humans think of “consciousness” as something separated from “thinking” which is what brains do.  To most people “consciousness” is a kind of mystical phenomenon, almost like soul.  “Thinking” is more mechanical, like what computers do.  But Damasio is applying the concept of “emergence,” the idea that as the brains of animals developed over time, each advance in complexity allowed a new capacity to process sensory information, always in the service of survival which is what governs evolution, but not always available to introspection, which has been the controlling access to thought about “consciousness.”  He claims that “consciousness,” even with this accumulation of powers, can never quite get to direct contact with reality -- no brain can, since brains work by constructing maps drawn from sensory information.  But we can get to an intense “feeling” of relationship that gives meaning to existence.  It is this “feeling” that I pursue as a function of liturgy. 

Every creature has “consciousness” in the sense of “sentience” because that’s more or less the criterion for being a creature.  But it can be, in the one-celled animal for instance, merely the abilities to go toward, to avoid, to ingest, to excrete, and to reproduce.  The four-letter functions, if you like to be blunt.  I used to tell people in my animal control education role (if I had an audience that could get it, like kids) that the basics of dogs were eat, shit, fuck, sleep, give birth, and die -- all of which people have major cultural hangups about.  (Admit it -- you reacted to these Anglo-Saxon words that have been markers of low class rudeness since the Normans invaded England.)  Of course, dogs are several evolutionary stages beyond one-celled animals, which means that their body functions are entwined and expressed with emotion.  Cats are usually the subjects of experiments on “emotion” because they are smaller, highly emotional, and not so protected by the culture as dogs are.  

What we know is that the lowest levels of creature function  (worms, sea creatures) do react but they have no emotion.  Their basic sentience is that of the sea anemone, which shrinks and balls up when things are unpleasant but blooms and reaches out when things are rewarding.  Damasio’s insight is that the sea anemones' reactions remain in us, no matter how many other processes are added.  They may be complexified or morphed somehow, but they are still there.  On top of them are arranged -- in our stacked brains going from early up to recent and then bulging out to even more recent developments like our round foreheads -- are all the self-regulations and sensory-mapping capacities that have survived the long trek through time.   The bottom structures are the most basic, so damage to the bottom (brain stem) presents far more of a function problem than the top. In the top brain, the older and therefore more vital bits are in the middle of the tissue and towards the bottom, while the structures that are towards the outer rind (cortex) and the sides can be destroyed without destroying the creature -- simply removing some functions, maybe so minor as to hardly make a difference.  The phenomenon of consciousness is not destroyed until damage is down towards the middle bottom, early in evolution.  That means coma, if not death. 

“Consciousness” as the word is used in ordinary conversation is not helpful because there are many SUB- UN- PRE- and UNDER consciousness functions.  They are not necessarily “knowable” by introspection, but can be detected by instruments, experiments, and even simple outside observation of behavior.  CONSCIOUSNESS IS NOT A MONOLITH but an interplay of sub-elements.  It is like an orchestra, not a soloist.  But to most of us it feels like a solo because only some of it is available for introspection.

One of the most basic functions of the brain is sensory perception of the world outside the body and also, at a rather higher level, “objects” that are in fact concepts, like love or mathematical zero.  These objects, both the concrete ones that the body directly contacts and the conceptual ones derived from thinking, each have an emotional “attachment” or aura to which the brain directly connects and uses to recover the memory or thought of the object.  When you think to yourself, “skateboard,” you cannot help but have an emotional response along with the sense memory.  They are entwined and expressed in what you do about skateboards.  You may not realize you have a feeling about them.  You may have a passionate attachment to them, so that the thought comes with strong feelings.  Maybe you are a rider and so your body gives you the sense of movement, even if you don’t move.

It is this dimension of sensory attachment that is lost when people think about religious objects in a factual, detached way.  If to some people a Koran or Bible is only a book and if books carry no emotional meaning, then how can it register on them that others are deeply enmeshed with the emotional significance of certain books?  The constant dry arguments about religion -- theological dogma about which statements are true facts -- encourages this suppression of emotional attachment.  When people say they are not “religious” but are “spiritual,” I think this is the dimension they are talking about.  Religion keeps turning into mathematics, while spirituality can be emotional and MUST be to carry identification and meaning of a higher kind.

How can objects, let’s say lighting a chalice on Sunday morning, be made meaningful?  By connecting them to emotion in the form of the sensory experience but also the simultaneous evocation of memory, image, testimony.  Starting with a sensorily perceptible solid object is an advantage -- we already have emotions about vessels and fires.  But to expand, reaching out, associate with the act of lighting a chalice in a safe place and in the company of a “holding community” associated with supportive explanatory experiences, is to open those individuals to what I’ve been calling “liminal space.”  In that space can be invoked “objects” that are concepts, like “freedom of thought.”  Those concepts are invested (that’s the right word) with feeling and therefore meaning beyond just the dictionary definition, because it is felt in the mind and body.

THE EVOLVED ALGORITHM THAT IS YOU

These are what I understand to be the state of the art premises of consciousness studies, though they change daily and there is no unanimity. I accept them myself -- provisionally, because that’s the way science works.

1. The brain is “on” 24/7 from the first moment a fetal brain appears. There is always something happening: electric waves, chemicals, sorting, recovering, and sensory input/behavior output.

2. The brain is not the only part that is involved in thinking: thinking is a whole-body activity because what the brain really does is manage the sensory inputs and the behavioral responses. Only a small part of these events are conscious.

3. One way of looking at the brain is the accumulation of “brains” piled at the top of the spinal column in order of evolution, each with its own domain and “factory-installed” way of working. This is true right on up to the cerebellum, which is the big wraparound that extends into the forebrain, nose and eyes.

4. Another way of looking at the brain is in terms of the small organs emplaced there, each specializing somehow: thalamus, hypothalamus, pituitary, hippocampus, amygdala, and so on. Now we realize that all these parts operate together to create a synergy that is managed by an area usually on the left side of the brain. This creates both consciousness and identity -- or rather those “personhood” aspects of a human that arise from it.

5. Beyond the “factory installed” functions of these little parts, sensory information reaches the body and brain from the moment of conception, because a human forms inside another human which is already a swarm of feedback loops, genes switching on and off, and whole body thinking. The fetal brain “learns” from all that, but also before birth it learns basic dualities, spectrums like light/dark, motion/stillness, sound/silence. This is the kernel of memory: every memory is wrapped in sensory information, but it is usually unconscious. The right sense information can make it conscious.

7. The habitual practice of nature is to create a plethora of something and then reduce whatever part of it is not needed. This is also true of the brain. The little parts don’t disappear, but the common neurons of the cerebellum that are not used simply disappear. This is called “apoptosis.” It amounts to being parted out. No trauma, no pain: just resorption. This process builds in the assumptions about existence that the baby makes in the first months. As the baby becomes more active in its environment, it adds the results of its actions in new assumptions. This continues life-long. You probably know all this.

What I needed for my thinking about liturgy is embedded in these paragraphs from a talk by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby at edge.com. I’ve emphasized the relevant phrases.

We thought that there should probably be internal regulatory variables in the same sense for social motivations. And so these would have evolved to track particular properties of the body, the social environment, and the physical environment—whose computation provided inputs needed for evolved decision rules. These internal regulatory variables have magnitudes, and they express value, or else they provide input to mechanisms that compute value.

TOOBY: The very interesting thing is that the role of consciousness suggests it's just necessary for carrying out at least some of the recalibrational computation required by new information. . We think feelings are signals broadcast through consciousness about changes in these regulatory variables,So that . . . our data show that the intensity of conscious feeling, such as anger, predicts the magnitude of the downstream changes in these non-conscious variables. People put a lot of time into, you know, seemingly functionless behavior—just feeling in response to personal news. When something important happens, they go off to be by themselves, and they take time to feel about it—so we think the function is revising their motivational weightings.

People like these thinkers do not use phrases like these in an idle or approximate way. In this case they are the key to a whole new way of thinking about identity, so I’ll try to invent my own definitions, staying as close to what Cosmides is saying as I can. But these are MY interpretations.

:

Internal regulatory variables: These are essentially rules for getting along in the world, deeply internal to the point of being part of one’s identity, They are a kind of “algorithm”, maybe with an if/then pattern. The capacity to develop these is evidently in the forebrain where it evolved during the hunter-gatherer period of evolution of humans, probably because it enables community and cooperation.

Evolved decision rules: These internal algorithms come from what happens to the individual and are recorded in actual brain cells, associated with the sensory inputs at that moment. If questions never come up, the decisions are never evolved, so entirely new situations are tough to address. We may fall back on rules that evolved somewhere else and don't really fit.

Recalibrational computation: When something previously unknown shows up, the algorithm has to be “recalibrated.” This is not something that happens easily. It’s not only that you have to give up an idea you’ve cherished, but also that you have to give up the idea that you really knew in the first place.

intensity of conscious feeling: Recalibration is accompanied by or possibly caused by or maybe made possible by intense conscious feeling. Like a religious feeling, a transforming experience. Maybe combat.

Revising their motivational weightings. So having brought to consciousness one’s previously unconscious assumptions because they seemed like simply the way the world IS but now there is contradictory evidence, one begins to change. Maybe in a good way and maybe in a bad way.

EXAMPLE:

Spartacus assumes that the world is terrible place where one must survive through violence and skill, suspicion and alliance codes. Gradually, though intense emotion and physical encounters that are meant to instill the brotherhood of gladiators, he subversively changes because of friendship and love until he is open to the gentle pacifism of Christianity. (Elaine Pagels says that there were evidently Buddhist missionaries carrying some of these ideas into the Middle East. Others claim Jesus went to India and developed his thinking there. How and through what experiences would make a fascinating novel.)

My core assumption about liturgy/ritual is that if it is intense and accurate enough, using the sensory context most meaningful to the person, it can be either a life-confirming experience or a safe place in which to revise one’s inner algorithm. This assumption should work in every culture. It is not about morality -- whether being a Christian is better than being a Gladiator is beside the point -- which is how a person gets from one to the other regardless of which direction he or she is traveling. It is not about institutions or dogma -- only human experience. You might need to grow some new brain cells. You might appreciate a community.

POETICS OF LITURGY: AN APPENDIX

APPENDIX 1

KINDS OF CONTEMPORARY CONSCIOUSNESS RESEARCH

Historically people have been eager to understand how they “are,” who they “are,” in terms of awareness.  Then came Freud with his ideas about the conscious versus the unconscious or subconscious.  Then came the computer with the challenge that the computer might have a “consciousness” like humans.  Where is the line?  And if we must draw a line between ourselves and machines, where is the other line between ourselves and animals?    Can a brain be separated from a body and still be conscious?  These issues have made consciousness research both dynamic and surprising.

ORGANIC (FROM OUTSIDE INVESTIGATION)

ORGANIC: STRUCTURAL/AREAS

It is confidently known that certain little bits of the brain have assigned tasks, though not exactly what they are or how they work or interact.  A good reference is:  http://www.brainwaves.com/brain_diagram.html

ORGANIC: fMRI

This technique rests on “hemodynamics,” the idea that brains use oxygen and increase blood flow to the parts of the brain that are operating.  This can be captured by MRI images and since they are “dynamic” the images are more like video than still photos.  http://www.fmri.org/fmri.htm  is a little technical but seems reliable.

ORGANIC: AUTISM

http://www.brainresearch2010.com/  is a report from a conference.  This field is pressed by the anguish of non-functional or differently-abled people.  So far no real answers have emerged, but many strategies for maximizing progress have developed.  Whether it is chemical, neurological, a matter of development, genetic mutation, environmental debits or something else entirely is still not known.

ORGANIC:  TRAUMATIC DAMAGE

Since closed skull injury is the “marker trauma” for the wars conducted with hidden explosive devices, which are the most recent US combats, we have many cases to explore.  http://www.allabouttbi.com/closed-head-injury/  There also major questions about sports injuries, car crashes, strokes.  People may seem quite “normal” but have major deficits in self-management or even maintaining consciousness.  I am classifying tumors with trauma.

ORGANIC:  CELL LEVEL

Some of the most esoteric study is about quantum “tunneling” or “processing tubules.”  This is suddenly intensely interesting because it turned out that the stain used for studying cells was dissolving its inner structures, which led to the belief that there was nothing there.  Also, now we have the equipment to work at the atomic level.  The senses of smell and vision are being studied in a startling way.

ORGANIC:  WHOLE BODY

It has become clear that the body “thinks” with every part, not just with nerves and brain.  There are co-existing networks like the enteric net embedded in the walls of the gut, the limbic system, molecular flows that carry information, and sensors in crucial places.  

ORGANIC:  BRAIN WAVES

Electrochemical action in the brain creates wave patterns that have acquired names and accompany known moods and functions, like sleep.  Disturbances can cause seizures, trances, out-of-body experience and so on.

FUNCTIONAL (FROM BEHAVIOR)

FUNCTIONAL:  INTERNAL REFLECTION

Reflecting on one’s own thoughts and perceptions IS a behavior.  What one can learn from it varies considerably, depending on the sensitivity and eloquence of the person.  This in turn can be misunderstood or ignored by the listener.

FUNCTIONAL:  PAIN

Pain can be perceived even if it is not reported and even if there is no outer sign.  Pain is a real phenomenon, which the brain can interpret different ways, denying, intensifying, transforming, claiming even in the absence of pain  (ghost pain in missing limbs).

FUNCTIONAL:  DISSOCIATION

The most “pop” example would be hypnosis, but this is also the term assigned to any “different” or alienated consciousness.  Multiple personalities are sometimes assigned here. 

FUNCTIONAL:  “MADNESS”

Any behavior that seems to other people to be irrational, unjustified, possibly too violent or non-reactive, can be assigned to “madness.”  Actual “dementia” (de- mental) is usually organic in origin.  A person can feel as though they’re going mad while other people deny that there’s any difference in them.

FUNCTIONAL:  MOLECULAR INTERVENTION:  DRUGS

Two kinds: mood-altering on purpose, sometimes for ceremonial purposes, usually with a long folk history.  Pharmaceutical meds may be prescribed for almost any reason with mental and emotional effects either as the deliberate purpose or as a side-effect.  Sometimes one is pressed to surrender comfort in order to stay alive.

FUNCTIONAL:  ART/FLOW/CREATIVITY/CONCENTRATION

The theories of flow are the clearest interface between individual consciousness and the uses of group consciousness.  This list from Mihali Csikszentmihali is both suggestive and practical.

1. goals are clear

2. feedback is immediate

3. a balance between opportunity and capacity

4. concentration deepens

5. the present is what matters

6. control is no problem

7. the sense of time is altered

8. the loss of ego

FUNCTIONAL:  BRAIN INTERPRETATION  (MEMORY, CLOSURE, IDENTITY)

Time perception is one example of a demonstrable brain function that can’t be seen, but that is reported subjectively.   Most of us have known time that dragged, time that flashed past -- those expansions and contractions.  It appears that there are many small “programs” like this.  One is closure: the tendency to invent an ending where one is expected.  Another might be identity: one’s sense of who one is changing in response to environment, esp. social environment. 

The material below from http://edge.org was very helpful in devising this “inventory in progress.”  I haven’t worked through it yet.  Each thinker is coming from a different discipline with different assumptions, but they are all useful in some way or other.

In July, Edge held its annual Master Class in Napa, California on the theme: "The Science of Human Nature".  In the six week period that began September 12th, we are publishing the complete video, audio, and texts:  

Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman on the marvels and the flaws of intuitive thinking; 

Harvard mathematical biologist Martin Nowak on the evolution of cooperation; 

Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker on the history of violence; 

UC-Santa Barbara evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides on the architecture of motivation; 

UC-Santa Barbara neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga on neuroscience and the law; 

and Princeton religious historian Elaine Pagels on The Book of Revelations.

GRASPING THE CONCEPTS

INTRODUCTION  to “The Poetics of Liturgy”

This theory of liturgy is hopefully useful for all cultures, all human beings.  It is not unique to any institution, dogma or tradition, but desires to uncover the actual phenomenon of feeling and managing the sacred, both “entering” and “leaving.”  It could be called “spiritual technology.”  This is theory meant as a tool for analysis, but also as a guide for creation.  It is indebted to comparative religion but, perhaps more than that, the mystery of sensory feeling as the substrate of behavior, which involves new studies in evolutionary brain function.  That is, culture as shaped by the strategies of the brain to receive and organize sensation in order to produce behavior.

This way of thinking is not the same as those that talk about the evolution of the physical brain from reptile to mammal to human.  Nor is it the same as what is revealed by fMRI studies of where certain thoughts activate the brain.  It is not available through internal reflection of one's own thoughts.  Rather these are things like face recognition, empathy, deep universal taboos, and certain other identifiable performances that can be tested but not attached to physiology.  Most of them are probably evolved fairly recently and are supported in the forebrain.  They include the skills of art and would encourage social success.

This is not theory for the individual but for community gathering.  It will define “theos” as merely ONE culture-bound concept of the spiritual: that is, this thought does not depend upon God or Christianity or any other form of “theos.”  But they include “theos” -- they are not A-theistic. They could be used in a conventional small town mainstream church. (I’ve done it.)  The original idea came out of a retreat workshop for Unitarian Universalists, solid citizens considered leaders.   

My own bias is towards the extreme, which is often vivid enough to make a point sharply.  I have a strong personal prejudice against the pretty, the facile, the accustomed, the bourgeois, which can diminish or even eliminate the feeling of sacredness.  Though there is plenty of justification for respite in a harsh and tragic world, anodynes are not enough.  Religion should be more than the opium of the people.  What’s more, religion should not be just another commodity in a mercantile world.  I take it to be an aspect of humanness that is not dependent on authority or wealth.

This approach privileges immanental ideas of sacredness -- that the holy naturally wells up from within the experienced world and is not the product of some other-worldly force.  But that does not exclude a sense of the transcendent (which I believe is NOT the opposite of the immanental, but rather “her sister”) and, indeed, may give access to that feeling of being in harmony with some force far greater than human minds can grasp.  Evasion of the dark side can mean diminishing the truly powerful energies for salvation, creation, and life-force that ought to be the artesian sources of immanentalist hope.  If one looks at the origins of the big “Book” based religions, so institutionalized, so focused on preserving their own interests, so buttressed with dogma, it will soon be clear that the roots of them are “watered with blood.”  To tie satin ribbons on them is bizarre and defeating.  Yet we need some way to withstand the crushing forces of life. 

Neither am I including the closely related field of study based on entheogens, substances that are mind-altering.  I do not question or discredit them, but they are far beyond my expertise.   I am agnostic about their use, but I am interested in what the brain does under their influence.  

What I call the “structure” of consciousness is called the “architecture” of consciousness by Lida Cosmides and John Tooby.

 (www.psych.ucsb.edu/research/cep/primer.html)  I believe we are referring to approximately the same thing, the physiological basis of “feelings” which underlie both the un- or sub-conscious functioning of the brain and conscious rational thought.   They are probably evolved ways that the brain works that were “invented” and “built in” during the long hunter/gatherer period of human history.   They make us human.  This is NOT the usual talk about reptile-mammal-human brains, but rather about unconscious mental strategies that were not possible before the cerebellum and forebrain developed.  

The mechanism of the whole body is reciprocating and enmeshed binaries -- that is, when one goes up, the other goes down and vice versa.  This is true of the way both the electrochemical nerve impulses work and the way the hormones in the lymph work.  (e.g. epinephrine/norepinephrine, or testosterone/estrogen.)  It’s an IO system like computers.  But there are algorithms and overriding mechanisms.  I am proposing that the sensation of “sacredness” in contrast to the ordinary (Eliade calls it “profane.”) is one of these evolved “domains” that begins to develop possibly as early as in utero and that it works on this seesaw principle.

Further, I’m proposing that the most fundamental perceptual dyad concepts are the most primal, the first formed in the brain:  light/dark, hot/cold, dropped/secure, distant/near.  These pairs can be found in the testimony of mystics, such as St. Bernadette, and are often described as paradoxically present at the same time.  Often they are attached to an Entity, identified as God, a parent and lover.  (We know that infants are born with “face-seeking” though it can be triggered with a Mr. Smiley drawn on a paper plate.)  These earliest domains or processes may be what reappear in dreams and death.  Perceiving them or even approaching them, sensing them, may be what gives us a feeling of the holy.

In the beginning I was reflecting on my own moments of intense “valorization” to use Eliade’s word.  When I preached about this, people would come up after the service to tell me about their own moments.  They wanted to know what they meant.  Now and then I would manage a liturgy that seemed to connect people to that feeling.  What was going on?  A classmate asked me, “How do you DO that?”  Thus the need to develop a “technology of the spiritual.”  This is a bare beginning.

Feelings are recorded in the brain by attaching them to the sensory impulses in that moment of the Felt.  This is why a sense impact (smell, musical phrase) can call up a whole emotional moment from the past.  It’s the coding, the filing for later access in the brain.  The newest theory is that this happens by something called “quantum tunneling.”  I won’t even attempt to explain but you could look it up.  Try looking for theories about the sense of smell that use the ideas of Luca Turin.  It's at the level of individual cells, their internal structure and ability to link.

Consciousness shifts all the time, adjusting to new perceptions coming in -- new decisions about behavior bring more information.  Much of these perceptions are processed below our awareness.  Stephen Pinker suggests that the importance of consciousness in evolution is that it supports language so that perceptions can be shared with other people.  I would assert that any patterned sensory construct (e.g. art form -- whether it’s spoken, sung, printed, painted or sculpted, danced, architecture, film or even some games) can convey a consciousness or persuade a person to enter a consciousness domain that taps underlying assumptions about the world: the architecture of the brain.  The “floor” and “foundation” might be acquired by the brains of all humans.  Others will depend on the individual circumstances of the person in their culture.  Liturgy, then, is a patterned sensory construct that reaches deep levels of brain processing, evoking felt meaning.  

If someone’s architecture of consciousness -- their developed construct of what goes on, how and why -- is challenged by change or realization of discrepancies, there will need to be a bringing to consciousness or possibly a re-experiencing of the area needing to be reinterpreted.  Liturgy, like play or psychotherapy or theatre or other designed experiences, can do this.  Memories, even sub-conscious ones as in PTSD, can get stuck in repetition, triggering the same behavior over and over.  This set of theories is not meant to stipulate harm versus healing.  Torture can be a liturgy.  Pain is a sensory experience.  

Human material cultures, which supply the sensory content of liturgy, evolve out of ecologies.  Communion in the Christian sense is not universal because not every culture provides bread and wine -- these substances are specific to their ecology.  An Inuit cannot be a religious vegetarian, nor can he worship trees: there aren’t any.  Nor is eating bread (“This is my flesh which you should eat in remembrance of me.”) the same thing as eating whale blubber.  Jesus was not a whale.  Nor is communion really understood without the long cultural background of flesh sacrifice and the necessity of giving it up that accompanied the relatively recent leaving of hunter/gatherer material culture in order to accept a grain and vineyard culture. But communal meals are nearly universal.

Both the strength and vulnerability of the Christian paradigm is in the centrality of the family: father, mother, child, which is potentially universal to all humans.  Those faces.  Also, it uses the very early domain of community (people eating together) and the evolved capacity to support and participate in a group of about a hundred people, a congregation.  These are not unique.  Other cultures have equivalents, but there is not always an exact match.  The Blackfeet Napi or Ninah are not the same as Jesus or God, though they have come to be conflated over the centuries in the interest of assimilation.  Sharing sarvisberry soup is not the same thing as communion.  We need to understand why this is true without accusations of heresy or paganism.  This analysis should help to accept what seems bizarre and unreasonable, separating what is valid from what is just adventurism. 

DRAW THE LINE

From the very beginning I was looking for examples of ceremonies and rituals that were unusual, even off-the-wall, extreme, although I did want to think about the traditional sorts of things, the Roman Catholic Mass, the Anglican  Vespers, and the Unitarian Universalist Leadership School gentle experiments.  But even when thinking about the grotesque and the illegal, a person ought to know where the line is drawn.  So this is where it is:  I won’t write about Jonestown, MOVE, or Waco.  Just enough to tell you why.

Jonestown was supposed to be a “religious,” utopian, self-contained society, which it wasn’t, of course.  The end came while I was in seminary and there were two points of contact with Unitarianism.  One was that a Methodist fellow student (who was at Meadville because of an interest in social justice) knew people who died there and grieved hard.  They were church family friends who had left the Methodist context and wandered over to the People’s Church.

The other was the Unitarian minister in San Francisco.  When James Jones was young and feeling around for possibilities, he had visited this minister to ask about becoming a Unitarian minister but could not be admitted to seminary because he had no bachelor’s degree.  Ministry in the UU tradition requires a master’s degree which is predicated on a bachelor’s degree.  (Actually, another student later did attend M/L without a bachelor’s degree.  He was an older man with a solid work record.)  Later this Unitarian minister had been approached by the sister of someone in the congregation of the “People’s Church” who tried to tell him terrible things were happening there.  He didn’t know what to do, even whether to believe her since the church had done many good things, so he did nothing.  His guilt was great enough that at the annual UUMA minister’s meeting, he rose and confessed, asking forgiveness.  The other ministers had no idea how to respond.  They knew they had often sort of finessed similar appeals.  Some felt he was weak to confess.  Others searched their own souls.  Basically, he was encouraged not to share.

MOVE was in Philadelphia.  The members went unwashed and naked, piled up feces and garbage, cursed and railed with bullhorns around the clock, had no detectable means of support and generally enraged everyone.  They were black and everyone took the surname of “Africa.”   But it was all principled, “living naturally.” The city decided they had to go.  In 1985 when they barricaded themselves in a gun fight, an actual bomb was dropped on the roof.  Somehow it caught fire and since they were row houses, sharing walls, a block of housing had burned out by the time it had ended.  Many died, some by gunfire.

WACO was similar except rural.    This is from Wikipedia.  “The Waco siege began on February 28, 1993, and ended violently 50 days later on April 19. The siege began when the United States Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) attempted to execute a search warrant at the Branch Davidian ranch at Mount Carmel, a property located 9 miles (14 km) east-northeast of Waco, Texas. On February 28, shortly after the attempt to serve the warrant, an intense gun battle erupted, lasting nearly 2 hours. In this armed exchange, four agents and six Branch Davidians were killed. Upon the ATF's failure to execute the search warrant, a siege was initiated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The siege ended 50 days later when a second assault on the compound was made and a fire destroyed the compound. 76 people (24 of them British nationals) died in the fire, including more than 20 children, two pregnant women, and the sect leader David Koresh.”   There’s quite a lot more about the mixture of sex, violence and sectarian religion.

When Jonestown happened, I was in Don Browning’s class about ethics for ministers, one of the most useful classes I’ve ever taken.  The explanation he proposed was that these people in Guyana had crossed the liminal threshold into a space where anything was possible and had failed to ever emerge.  In other words, they died because they were out of control, basically insane or at least mentally dislocated.  I don't agree.  In both Waco and Philadelphia, it was government that foreclosed the liminal space with fire.  They were militant Christians with hell at their heels, entirely respectable, inside the law, and deadly.  I’m not prepared to take that on at this point.

Every postal box holder in Valier received last week a little booklet from “A. Jan Marcussen.”  You can find him on Wikipedia.  He “joneses” for apocalypse.   He makes two mistakes of hubris:  first, that anyone can tell when the Judgment Day is nigh, and second that when it comes, he will survive.  He’s a Jehovah’s Witness, one of the Valier churches, and their missionaries come to the door.  I am not in sympathy.  This is a small town with many older people who should not be frightened into false salvation.  The people who come to the door seem nice and they are easily turned away when I tell them I’m ordained.  They have a high respect for authority.  Maybe too high.  Someday they may have to choose which authority.

Beyond that, none of these three examples are really rituals or liturgies.  Though the von Gennep and Victor Turner theories can be applied to the larger festivals of various cultures (Halloween is coming up.), they are still not the pattern of the “fire in the chalice” that I am discussing.  They are simply conflagrations with no containers.

And that’s the bottom line.  I do not want to think about uncontained fires.  I want to think about what sort of chalice can contain the burning hearts of human beings.  I don’t want to talk about supernatural authority figures in the sky who impose their timelines on us.  I want to explore the perfectly natural and absolutely real shifts of consciousness (brain waves and neurotransmitters) in our own human thinking.  As real as to sleep and perchance to dream.  Then to wake renewed, knitted up.

What I know from research, evidence and experience is that this little schema I’m exploring will work.  But there is another element that is necessary:  the liturgist must be open and sensitive to the personalities and material cultures of the persons attending.  They must be based on understanding which is the chalice for love.  This is the way to affect the deepest assumptions of people.  Not rules, force, punishment, and suppression.

MORE INTENSE THAN LYRIC POETRY

The major blind alley I took in my “feeling around” for a strategy to develop my Doctor of Ministry thesis was mostly due to political factors.  I was obliged to have three thesis advisors, one of whom was John Godbey, the Meadville/Lombard history professor with devotion to Transylvanian Unitarianism, a left-wing Reformation development that had no relationship to liturgical theory.  In fact, it was simply (and is now) Christianity that clings to monotheism.  Godbey himself was quite Christian, not quite Trinitarian. 

The second, more natural, advisor was Duke Gray, then the minister at First Unitarian Church kitty-corner from Meadville. The church Von Ogden Vogt built.  This link offers a fascinating look at how some people saw him:

http://www.djkeithjohnson.com/evangelicalucc-cape/documents/chronicler082010.pdf   It’s helpful, because I didn’t see him that way at all.  I found him authoritarian, attached to high prestige Anglican criteria, and inclined to “assemble” religious liturgy in an eclectic and aesthetic fashion that didn’t necessarily respond to the people it was for.  From the get-go he plainly disliked me.  His late move to a more explicitly Christian congregation seems a good idea.  At that time  Gray was a member of Abraxas, an organization of UU ministers and interested lay leaders who explored worship elements and practices.  I was interested in this at first, but finally put off by arrogance and what seemed to me bricolage of elements from a range of cultures, united only by arbitrary theme.  

Rather unexpectedly, it was Father Robert J. Schreiter at the Catholic Theological Seminary, who taught a class on liturgy meant to prepare priests to offer sacraments, who gave me a deeper understanding of what was going on -- or should.  It was an effective countercheck on the tendency, esp. in UU lay-led fellowships, that is mocked as “City Sewer Syndrome.”  That’s when the Sunday morning service drifts over into politics -- secular, sporadic, a smorgasbord -- partly out of exhaustion and partly out of not quite knowing what to do.  Father Schreiter was trying to get us to understand that when reconciling religious material cultures, one cannot assume simply that all foods are communions, so that bizarre ideas about rice and saké communions take hold.  Neither can one let the symbols of material culture, not even bread and wine, become sacralized to the point of losing what they evoke, which may be beyond human understanding except as felt concepts.  Father Schreiter would NOT be an advisor.  I was not Christian, let alone Catholic.

So I forced a relationship to a female professor of Rhetoric of Lyric Poetry, though I had little idea what that was.  I was just feeling my way towards poetics without much idea what THAT was either.  She was justifiably put off by me and my ignorance, though at first she tried to be honorable towards this seminary student, a fringey part of the sprawling complex that is University of Chicago.  In the end we both gave up.

Lyric poetry is a specific kind of poetry that is intensely emotional, often focused on a moment, sometimes in nature.  The “rhetoric” of this poetry is the choice of vocabulary, the tricks of arranging them in various traditional patterns of rhyme and rhythm, the allusions, the images, and so on.  It’s very much relevant to my ideas about liturgy, but in a secondary way, in the preparation of materials, not the actual beats and arc.  As words for hymns, as “prayers,” and in the summoning of mood, lyric poems act for the secular something like the familiar Bible passages used by Christians.  But they are muscle and skin, NOT skeletal structure.

There was another problem.  I had spent a decade on the Blackfeet Reservation and then a half-decade as an animal control officer in Portland, Oregon.  I saw life in very intense chiaroscuro terms, slammed up against death and despair.  But my context at seminary was middle class, mainstream, and bourgeois.  They “had compassion” towards people who lived in Third World conditions -- they just didn’t know them.  To them worship was a Sunday morning harmonious “nice” event, a place of safety and reassurance.  I wanted to think about cannibalism, ordeals, weird New Guinea ceremonies, and insanity.   To my guides, those were disorderly, to be resisted.  Even disgraceful.  When I said “sex,” they said,  “Our time is up now.”

The thinker I needed was Thomas Moore, whom I didn’t come to know until later at a conference in Bozeman, Montana, while circuit-riding there in the Eighties, though I don’t think he was yet quite at the point where our interests converged.  In his book  “Dark Eros” he made “an exploration of sado-masochism in everyday life and culture through a positive reading of the Marquis de Sade. . . .It’s purpose is to deepen our understanding and appreciation for the dark side of life.”  Moore is a James Hillman school Jungian with strains of Asian thought.  This puts him in harmony with my penchant for Eliade and Campbell.  Despite using his therapist’s license to go dangerous places, Moore is still “nice” in the public mind.  It takes someone like Geoff Mains to put a person right up against the extreme.  Your library probably won’t have his books.

Baptism, communion, reconciliation, confirmation, marriage, ordination, and Last Rites are the traditional Roman Catholic sacraments and are or should be on the level I’m talking about:  life-changing, requiring commitment, acceptance of moral terms.  They’ve lost a lot of their punch, partly maybe because they’ve been so effectively claimed by the counter-sacral, the Satanic as developed and expressed in so many music videos.  Secular legal enforcement of these steps has changed.   If the sacraments could be restored to meaning, we probably need additional sacraments of divorce, defrocking, and leaving combat that are equally intense.   

More than that, the sacraments have lost their connections to the inner molten core of life.  We are control freaks, we stay on schedule and on our diets, we don’t like change or risk.  We don’t like to be different.  All our drama is for watching, not participating.  Everything is calculated monetarily.

These are the categories I’m considering at present:  liturgies that focus on 

COMMUNITY: with persons gathered in a unity of purpose:  sharing, rejoining, emerging, changing context, world making, in-gathering, releasing.

GUIDED:  therapeutic, learning. shamanic, intimate confrontation

DEVOTION:  by a person alone:  reconciliation, reunification, empowerment, healing, grief, creation, transformation.

SOLITARY, in extremis:  theology of the void, uncaring, despair, anomie, entrapment, loss of boundaries, substance or trauma effects, madness, death.   Or the positive: ecstasy, fusion, transcendence.

It is these deep-brain concepts -- as much sub- or un-conscious as conscious, much less articulated in words -- that give rise to deep structures of religious experience that are managed by the shifting of consciousness through the use of sensory material culture.  The task of the liturgist then is to find the cultural concepts that can express the elements of these states, and then the derived sensory experiences (words, music, art, etc.) that will carry the structure into meaning for the persons involved.

LITURGICAL "BEATS" AND "ARC" AKA Elements and Sequence

The third year of “Slings & Arrows” is in part about staging a musical.  The avant garde director was making a dog’s breakfast of what was essentially a pretty musical about heroin addiction.  So the business director, who was a suppressed musical comedy nut, stepped in.  He made a chart of what the artistic director called “beats” (the scenes) and the “arc” (the line of plot development) which revealed what the play needed, which guided choices that made it a success.

When I look at the notes for my thesis and then look at the very popular books about the nature of God, I see that what I’m doing can not be considered part of that tsunami of argument about, with, and defining God.  I don’t CARE about God.  I’m working with human beings here.  I’m not even staying within the Christian context, but rather going to a more primal level in the brains of human beings.  (Check that.  I accept the new hypotheses that people think with their whole bodies.)  

Much of what I have in my archives from 1982 about this moldy old thesis of mine is irrelevant.  But it’s sort of interesting and though it doesn’t qualify for inclusion in my contemporary version, it might be worth putting on this blog.  So for what it’s worth, here’s what might be developed into a second book, maybe even called “A Trout in the Chalice.”  (See the post earlier this week about the Arthurian legends.)

In the Thirties (which we seem to be repeating, alas, having evidently not learned our lesson) along came Von Ogden Vogt, who developed an elaborate scheme of beats-and-arc as follows  (Vogt's words are underlined.):

THE CALL TO WORSHIP:  “Every service which has a call to worship begins with the state of the worshipper in mind rather than the presentation of divinity.  Exhortation or Statement of Intention are alternative beginnings.”

(“We gather this morning to acknowledge the beauty of the world and the shelter of our community.”  The bells ring.  A procession enters.”)

VISION:  “An awareness of All Things . . . it is the presentive element, the declaration of the divine life which the worshipper has come to find and it is itself the service of God going on in the sanctuary to which the worshipper has come to offer his praise.  In form, it is the preliminary announcement of the theme of the day, and the initial rhythmic movement of the liturgy, binding together minister and choristers as participants.”

(The first hymn is announced.  All rise.)

HUMILITY:  “The sense of diminution . . . this low point of contrast is a normal and often intense stage in the experience of worship.”

(This is the first part of what I call the Dilation of the Spirit and some Christians call the Confession of Sins.)

VITALITY:  “Out of the world of frustration and weakness into the tides of full and complete life.”

(I call this the second part of the Dilation of the Spirit and some Christians call the “Assurance of Pardon.”)

RECOLLECTION:  “The heightened imagination begins to operate on earthly scenes . . .a wider range, a fuller review, possibly covering a retrospect and forecast of many years and all their affairs.”

(In a Christian context this might be the reading of scripture.  Otherwise, anything that places the congregation in time and space: orchestra, video?)

ILLUMINATION:  “Problems are clarified and wishes reordered.  What seemed important sinks in the scale, the great values emerge and are freshly cherished.”

(For Christians the sermon.  Any equivalent.)

DEDICATION:  “When the mind sees what is right and best to do and the whole man [sic] is made more capacious to do it, the urgence to dedication is all but irresistible.”

For Christians the prayer after the sermon.

PEACE:  “Surely there should be at the end of such a supreme course of experience an integrity of being that is reconciliation and peace.”

(We used to form a circle and sing Shalom/Salaam.  Benediction.)

John Hayward points out that Vogt used this sequence to develop many actual worship services, carefully and poetically written.  He was ambivalent about his relationship to Christianity, wishing to keep the high Gothic forms, but trying to fill them with humanistic content, so that the church he “built” is a replica of a European cathedral but it is decorated with commerce and science.  Whether this is a synthesis or a collision is open to comment but it was convincing enough to energize his congregation and rally their resources.

At any rate, Vogt was working for a universal worship pattern with an integrity of its own that was drawn directly from human experience.  It’s the bit about human experience that’s relevant for this thesis.

Vogt says, “. . . the outer form of the exercise of worship should parallel the inner order of the experience of worship. . .If the principle be a correct one, the first task of an artist in worship is to analyze the experience.  It may be opposed to this suggestion that there is no typical religious experience of worship, that the many varieties of religious experience cannot be reduced to the general norm. . .  I only express my view that in the main there is a comprehending normal experience which covers all these major differences.  However varied the situation of the worshippers in mind, body or estate, however varied the approaches, whether mental or emotional or moral, the essential psychology of the experience is identical.”

The missing piece I needed was about the Von Gennep/Victor Turner three-step idea of “crossing the limen” into a “virtual space” where all taboos are ignored and deep change can take place -- then returning to secular life where that change can be expressed.  Once the idea of “felt concepts” that Suzanne Langer suggested was matched up with fMRI perceptible brain activity, then it could be proposed that an actual shift of consciousness was responsible for this entry into “virtual space,” which is a metaphorical way of describing a particular frame of mind that allows possibility to be considered.  Those who take LSD seem to describe something similar -- beyond the pretty colors and so on, some testify that they are transformed psychologically, that they let go of old conflicts and sticking points.

I’m proposing that entering and leaving this state is deeply entwined with sensory cues and that they touch something real in the person that can’t be accessed in other ways.  Which images of which senses -- a mix of sound, smell, space, and so on -- will demonstrate 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!  Here is a good link.  I grieve that the tower of First Unitarian has been taken down due to deterioration.   http://www.harvardsquarelibrary.org/unitarians/vogt.html