PRAIRIE HUMANIST SOLSTICE

It’s the Winter Solstice, one of those natural events that is the substrate for a multitude of human religious ceremonies and paradigms, one that escapes all dogmas, all priesthoods, all institutions, all nationalisms, to tilt through our lives once a year whether or not we pay attention.  On the prairie we never escape awareness of where the sun is or the effect on the Great Winds that rule our lives as much as if we were seafarers in the great winged ships of the past.  The jet stream is often overhead and sometimes in our yards.

One of my cousins is a California Prosperity Christian (claiming that he had to overcome his natural narcissism and hubris to achieve that state).  His adversary, he thinks, is secular humanism, so he was a bit disconcerted to be told that our paternal grandparents were quietly dedicated prairie humanists.  This was revealed when a grad student studying the movement in Canada found their names on an organizational roster and inquired through this blog what we descendants knew about them and their ideas.  As it turned out, not much.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/glenn-w-smith/prairie-humanism-and-the_b_452696.html

This blog post is a good place to start.  Progressivism and neighborliness in response to very hard times, self-reliance combined with co-operative organizations, are certainly what I recognize.  But also, the fuzzy future envisioning, the weak ability to form a future, the craving to know more, are also part of that strand of my Strachan family which started with immigration from Scotland in order to farm where the Brulé Sioux had just been cleared away.  In the end they didn’t do much better than the tribe.  South Dakota is a tough place to live.

Glenn W. Smith has taught at Starr King, the UU California seminary I passed up in favor of Meadville, the Chicago UU version.  His “skew” is political and if you google him, you’ll find that he’s been fighting the good fight for a long time.  My own “skew” is cosmic.  I did a sideways step to identification with the U of Chicago Div School, but they are merely global.  I was taking writing classes from Richard Stern, sitting alongside the wife of David Schramm, the wildman astrophysics prof who was always seeking the missing “Dark Matter,” not as a metaphor but as what he hoped was a reality.  He died in a plane crash, the sole occupant and pilot.  I lost track of his wife.  The planet is full of dark matter.

I find that somehow, though I respect and will claim prairie humanism, my faith center is not there.  Many have suggested fanciful ideas about how to name this forming “faith” that many don’t even recognize as existing.  “Scientific mysticism” will do.  Non-anthropocentric, often represented in science fiction (especially if one includes the work of people like Ursula LeGuin and the visions of pop film), welcoming to indigenous “spirituality” (whatever that is, so long as it’s land-based), the space program, and the persisting Aquarian thought represented by the Edge, some TEDtalks, the Bioneers, and other think tanks.  

Paul Tillich used to say that symbols can’t be imposed on people as advertising icons are, but must be “found.”  That is, they are emergent from our lives.  This is certainly true of Scientific Mysticism which tries not to be anthropomorphic by including all life as neighbors.  On the other hand, the science part of the syndrome is emphatically NOT about magic and superstition, but rather about the interwovenness of all existence whether it is T-cells trying to resist HIV virus or the nursery of the stars where new fusion-based entities create energy.  We come to understand our bodies as aggregates of cooperating cells organized into -- well -- “organs” and our brains as an orchestra that plays the symphonies that are our consciousness.

Salvation is not found in virtue, but in participation.  Eternal life is not found in the persistence of one skin-enclosed entity but rather in the long-time influence and sharing through eternity.  Once defined, our impact may be small but it is forever.  No “faith” is necessary, just communication, action, connection.  One of the strong influences on the Strachan generations has been a baby named Archibald who lived only seventeen days.  He was the first child of my paternal grandmother, immediately preceding my father.  

The loss of that baby, which my grandmother believed came about because she was so desperate for the company of others that she went to town in the jolting wagon, even knowing she was close to term in her pregnancy, has meant a legacy of sadness.  The birth came on the isolated homestead.  Archibald was kept alive for a little more than a fortnight in the warming oven of the woodstove.  My generation didn’t know of the baby’s existence until I read through the boxes of journals my grandmother kept.  Neither did we know that her sister had died in childbirth and we still don’t know what happened to that baby.  Live babies and conceived but naturally aborted babies are lost every day, often undetected, often due to bad code.

Now we understand that all is code.  The first response, like that of the US government, is to hoard code, to try to get hold of all information in the effort to save everything, like a mechanic making sure to save all the pieces. But this is not the way.  It leads us to the problem of the centipede who was asked how he knew to walk with so many legs to manage.  He ended in the ditch with his legs in the air, a symbol that emerges again and again.  The way forward, as Smith recommends, is a function of desire and focus.  The goal may not be reached, but the minutia will be pulled into some kind of purpose.

Oh, yearning!  Oh, vulnerability!  I listen, I watch.  My kitchen has a big east-facing picture window where I often stand and look up the long alley that reaches to a close horizon, a bulge in the terrain.  From behind it rises the full moon, coloring the snow blue but draining the color from the feral calico cats I can’t resist feeding just under the window, their tails forming a mandala around the dishes of cat food.  It’s a good depiction of the mental and emotional life of a single old woman in a balky small town, using a fancy education in a way it was never intended.  (One is supposed to become a success in one’s field, usually through affiliation with an institution, but when it comes to them I’m strictly a feral cat.)

Words don’t serve as well as music.  Consult Paul Winter.  The Winter Consort at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. http://solsticeconcert.com  

Of course, this is the summer solstice in the Southern Hemisphere.  We are all connected.  Survival drives evolution; evolution responds to the rhythms of the world.

(This is a repeat post.)

SEX & SECRETS AT THE SOLSTICE

Sex and secrets are well-known “coin of the realm” when people are too impoverished to have any of the more conventional wealth. Clearly sex and secrets are interrelated because of conventional morality. If no one cared who had sex of what kind with whom, then one president, a number of other politicians and one notable golfer would not have had troubles as they did. But people DO care and not just because Mrs. Grundy says NONONONO.

What makes sex valuable? Love, babies, comfort through the night. And then what makes secret sex valuable? Extortion, blackmail, emotional unfulfilled need, the craving for danger.

Originally sex was valuable because of inheritance law: the progeny got the land, the money, the stuff. So it was important to know whether a child were actually the physical result of sex between this man and someone else. Therefore, it was very important to make sure the woman had no possible way of getting inseminated by someone else. She was kept locked up, surrounded only by women and eunuchs. I wonder whether it ever occurred to anyone to use AI. Maybe not until turkey basters were invented. When was the first turkey baster invented? If someone knew the secret of turkey baster use for AI, what difference would it have made? Would it be different from Mary the mother of Jesus being inseminated through her ear by a dove?

Early AI might be the key to a rousing historical speculative novel plot. In fact, there have always been rumors that Elizabeth II and Margaret were conceived with a little help, but it was medical and the source was the proper father, who was evidently not a particularly good propeller of sperm though he was an excellent father. But there’s a good shocking plot -- if the Royal gendarmes couldn’t get you. Who would be a good sperm donor, if that were the pretended fictional secret? Might be a good parlor game, more fun than claiming the royal families were descended from Jesus. (No one has ever really addressed the fertility of Jesus, though there is a bit of interest in his erection when crucified.)

So there are legal consequences to productive sex. What about sex that was only for pleasure? Or domination? That never produced children. Like maybe between same sex partners or children too young or women too old. Was that one of the sources of Winston Churchill’s and Benjamin Franklin’s valuing of the older women?

At one time vasectomies were secret so that a male lover could play some games with his lack of fertility and women always play games with “the Pill.” One can imagine scenarios that made the advantage go either way, playing expectations off against reality. The pill, of course, occasionally fails, so it has its own games to play. The law, on the other hand, is on the side of someone who claims to be fertile but can’t “come through” as it were. Grounds for annulment or divorce.

A whole new level of secrets might be connected to an abortion or naturally miscarried pregnancy and the disposition of the evidence. If an infant were born dead or killed after birth, or if the whole pregnancy was somehow managed so that no one knew, those all lead to secrets. Adoption has in the past been secret, but modern practical good sense has managed to arrange for open adoption where everyone knows what’s going on and the only games are the usual human attempts to obligate and intimidate. But most sperm donors remain cloaked as well as egg or zygote donors. (I'm guessing.) Surrogate mothers -- in the sense of allowing someone else’s baby to grow in their uterus until delivery -- adds another dimension. Such highly medicalized and technical procedures put enormous secrets in the hands and folders of doctors and hospital records clerks. What about the brief but poignant story of the blastosphere in the petri dish that is NOT chosen to be carried by anyone, but simply discarded or made into stem cells.

Sometimes babies born out of wedlock are quietly acknowledged but not allowed legal rights and other times their existence is denied. The possibility of proving parenthood with DNA has changed the landscape drastically. For one thing, fathers who were merely inseminators find themselves with the power flow going the other direction: instead of claiming that the woman was at fault and his fatherhood can’t be proven, they have now acquired the major liability of the obligation to support the life they started. Instead of bragging about how many babies they’ve made, they might find it more practical to just leave the country. Of course, there is a certain type of male who believes that the woman he has inseminated “owes HIM” because he “gave” her a baby. Some women believe this and end up supporting both baby and husband. They should think it over.

It’s a little strange that sex should be the focus of so much social morality. Maybe. But the use of sex as a distraction from other issues (money, war, politics, even scientific advances) is so time-honored and still so effective because it’s a scarlet thread through almost everything human and certainly everything mammal. Wait! Humans are animals! Wait! What about all those birds, bees, and fish who depend upon sex? Oh, yeah. Most animals don’t “do” sexual morality. They just do what comes naturally. Unless humans divert them. (Big argument about dog “rape racks” and anthropomorphism on one of the H lists.)

But let’s get back to the point. Conventional arrangements about sexual matters -- which are “covert,” which are monetary, which are inter-familial or intra-familial, which can or can’t be examined scientifically -- are arbitrary, but they surely don’t feel that way. Their symbolic weight alone makes them powerful like nothing else except possibly money.

Take the issue of survival in a world where little kids are created and then abandoned because there is no acceptable social structure to protect them. In Dickens’ time, when the shift from country farm to city factory changed everything, the streets were full of unwanted boys, many of whom simply died and others of whom clung to life through extraordinary and disgusting means. Something similar happened to women.

Or, given the season, take a look at Matthew 2:16-18. Because of the prediction that Jesus was being born in Bethlehem, Herod had all children (my New English Bible doesn’t say “male children”) under the age of two killed. (Nothing said about babies still in utero. Maybe Herod was anti-abortion.) Secretly Joseph and Mary had skipped town. (They had not had sex.) There is historical evidence about Herod. No proof that he actually did this. He evidently died in office, so his strategy worked. It was what some might call an endarkenment strategy, more appropriate for the longest night than for a single star.