Columbus interests me not at all. He’s a PR stunt and a political tactician with low standards. I’m interested in indigenous people, particularly the over-explored prairie peoples but they are multiple in dimensions and centuries in times. I try to stick to the Blackfeet, mostly in the Sixties when I was in Browning, because those were my vivid years.
“Discovery” is the quick marker for people in communication trying to understand what is “out there” in terms of books, websites, audible stories, and so on. Most people are looking for things to read but also many people are looking for categories their interest fits into so they know who to watch.
More than that is the drive to get people into categories for purposes of sales and entrainment. The assumption is that everyone wants “friends” and to “belong” and that people fit into categories (which the rebels call “boxes”) that will operate like pot lifters. (The gimmicks that let you lift lid to see what’s cookin’.)
Some are so restrictive that once you show an interest in a specific author, they will expect you read every book by that author and will assume that the author will please their publisher by regularly producing the same product with minor variations. This drove both Louisa May Alcott and Lucy Maude Montgomery quite mad. Zane Grey got tired of writing the same thing and delegated the chore to his wife. James Willard Schultz never got tired of it.
My most exasperating puzzles are those around religion or what people think is religion — esp. the people who design silos according to the Dewey Decimal System which limits them to what Dewey knew, or the Library of Congress system considers respectable. I want to discover new meanings never assigned numbers on a shelf. How do I find them?
Because of:
1) the unreasonable taboo on ever discussing, much less challenging, religion even if it’s as nutty as snake-handling;
2) the conviction that religion is always defined by institutions, preferably with buildings and a privileged class;
3) confusing “believing” with things that are not real or perceivable.
Most people are deadly deficient in this category. They cover it up by arguing about imperceivable things like the nature of God — three people or one is a nonsense question since no god is a person, by definition. The flaw of logic is starting with categories or distinctions that don’t exist.
So Academia.edu offers me a manuscript about whether “Pagans” will accept “science.” I assume “pagan” means non-Christian which means that there are a zillion ways to BE pagan, including the use of science as a religion. But what is non-Christian except not observing the principles of Jesus who may or may not have existed — which is a point that can be argued on and on. By this standard most people in this profit-dominated culture are admirable losers, as Trump would assure you.
I come from two streams of families who considered themselves “Christian” but never went to church, didn’t read the Bible, signed no documents of membership, pledged money to no entity. (My mother was an exception and so were her parents, but her sisters and their husbands were conventionally secular.) So why did I get so interested, not in Christianity but in congregations?
Churches, both as parishes (meaning everyone living in a certain area) and as gathered communities who are socio-economically clustered, come from an advance in human “civilization” called sedentary. That is, when people could stay in one place and still find enough to eat. This is why so many New Testament people are fishermen — coasts are the first places where the food was always there. It was the invention of herding and grain agriculture that made towns possible and therefore congregations. It is the stability of place that sustains development of thick enough cultures to reflect on the nature of human meaning. Enough wealth means people can specialize in thinking about such issues.
Therefore, maybe our instability of demographics is what keeps breaking up “religions” as real ways of life based on meaning. I’m not sure what that has to do with the instability and triviality of current leadership, their vulnerability to greed and status-hunger. I know from first-hand experience that congregations don’t want to be challenged very much — life is enough of a problem already. Give them solutions and be a cheer-leader or they’ll leave.
I lost interest in that puzzle, in spite of it attracting me in the first place. I see that congregations that succeed are based on internal structures of relationship and interests, whether social service or sacred environment. I see that their survival depends on their emplacement and the nature of the larger context, whether it supports the group or hampers it.
Now, as a solitary in a time when science is exploding the knowledge of the cosmos, I’m looking for consensus of meaning in the midst of process and I’m trying to evade all taboos, even the ones about violence and sex, about madness and hatred. Like Blackfeet, I see life and meaning as additive, saying yes to all helpful systems. What is help? Whatever leads the way forward, even knowing that the end point is always that it’s over, it’s done, it’s now something else that wasn’t expected and couldn’t have been imagined. Can a “pagan” imagine science? Of course.
Can an ordinary person in a modern time, let’s say a suburban mom, be a Christian? In the purest sense, probably not. There are so many other principles for meaning in our times. To Trump or McConnell, Jesus was a loser. They don’t admire crucified people. They align with the Roman emperors, even knowing what happened to them.
I’m not defending Christianity. I’m not defending religion. I’m defending the human search for meaning which includes all the precursor forms that we are built on by evolution in spite of waysides and blind ends created by the conditions of the planet — the many extinctions that threaten us as well. Even in terms of culture, the Republican Party is now extinct and the Dems are evolving as quickly as they can. We’ll see what identities remain after this pandemic, after climate change, after famine.
No comments:
Post a Comment