Sunday, January 12, 2020

HOW I GOT HERE

"Preaching" has a bad reputation, associated with self=righteous people being wildly contentious about something unproven.  One person gets up high and yells at the groundlings.  For a decade I "preached" but my experience was much different because of my listeners.

Women who go "into"ministry, esp.when I did in 1982, are not likely to find a calling from a major urban church with an elevated pulpit.  In my case this was not a prospect because I wanted so badly to get back to Montana that with the help of two other regional administrative ministers, Emil Gustafson and Russell  Lockwood, who both came from the Prairie, and because the denomination was beginning to push hard to expand, we devised a circuit-riding plan among four Montana fellowships.  With barely enough pay to keep from starving and the help of a resourceful man who donated enough money for a van, I "preached" every Sunday morning and evening at one of the four.

This was speaking to a classroom-sized group of people, mostly college-educated people in a borrowed location, who considered themselves free thinkers.  Some were very funny and  some were very angry.  I preached the same "sermon," which was really an essay, in each of the four places and often the reaction in one place was quite different from the next.  There was no pulpit.  I did not wear an academic gown.  While I drove the hundred miles from one place to the next, I reviewed to myself what I thought people wanted and needed to hear.

In those three years and even more in following years, people were trying to come to terms with science dissolving the theology of the Big Three (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) based on life two millennia ago in the Middle East, and with an empire theory of economics based on exploiting an ever expanding invasion of resource-rich lands.  We knew we were "liberal" and even "progressive" but we didn't know what that meant.  At least four years of seminary were not wasted because, unlike the local Christians, the groups were not afraid to hear what I figured out nor were they afraid to talk back.  Some flatly contradicted me, others tried to redirect me into "mothering" them by organizing coffee hour and soothing the distressed.

And all time I drove across the prairie and mountains, mostly on the east side of the Rockies, the land was "preaching" to me.  It told me I was small, endangered, and brief, everything the denomination stood against.  At the end of the subsidy, I tried twice more, once in a sophisticated and artistic town across the lake from Seattle and once in Saskatoon, a place severe but lyrical.  I just didn't fit, not even with the denominational machinery.

I just wanted to go home and tried to return to the Blackfeet rez, Montana side, but they wouldn't have me.   The white school administrators were clearly Trump precursors. So I ended up back in Portland, dependent on my mother  and working for the city.  When my mother died in 1999, her bequest set me free to come back to Valier for decades of writing in solitude, pondering it all.  The invention of Internet blogging provided all the publication I needed. I live on the poverty line via Social Security and a small pension, keeping my ordination by the UUA, but not serving a church.  The circuit-riding days are nearly forgotten.

But the science breakthroughs and the social distresses have increased.  There is more knowledge, bigger implications, and more need and suffering than ever.  Just as I began to be in danger from isolation, in spite of accumulating a library about Blackfeet and ecology and writing a book about Bob Scriver and the Sixties in Browning, a town that has dissolved, I was asked to contemplate a demographic I had given no thought,

Economics combined  with a merchandizing relentless use of sex as a success-indicator has created families always on the verge of dispersal.  Oldest boys, still very young, are often discarded in a Victorian oppression by gender, this time not during the rise of the industrial world but during its collapse.  Those boys who survived did sexwork in order to eat and inhabited the abandoned grounds of obsolete industries, mostly in American cities.  They had no religion because drugs were their God.

At the same time in Europe, where education was more effective, some of these excluded boys occupied an historic cultural niche informed by creativity and sophistication.  They began to ask the ancient questions about the meaning of life and justice.  I never met any of them, but was asked to give them some thought.  That's what's preoccupied me for the most recent decade:  what is a man?  I do mean a male.

It would have seemed more obvious to relate to the population of rez Blackfeet but they neither need me nor want me.  Most have no awareness of me or even Bob Scriver who lived there almost the whole 20th century.  Half the tribe live off the rez, often in cities with very little connection to their ancestors and not much financial advantage.  But there are still a lot of people, esp. in the academic world, who try to profit by connecting themselves to the Romance of the Disappearing Native.  I find that embarrassing.  But I recognize that a lot of non-indigenous people are part of the culture and should not be demonized.  I'm accepting Vine Deloria Jr.'s observation that the spirituality of the indigenous tribes is about place, in this case the East Slope of the Rockies.


The Industrial Revolution is barely receding in the face of the technology revolution.  The mega-machines, the resource-monsters, the water-hoarders, the soil-eaters, are upon us like medieval dragons.  Aged 80, I won't see what's coming for much longer.  But I also recognize that people like Wendell Berry, Stan Rowe, J. I .Rodale, all the people of the ecologies and poetries, have been clear-headed all along.  In the face of a mafia madman, they persist and they will prevail in small groups on scattered lands, gradually networking.

No comments: