ACADEMIC STUDY OF RELIGION IS NOT WHAT I'M DOING

No, I don’t want to talk about it. I’m still thinking about it. But thinking is not exactly what I’m doing either. This is not introspective philosophy where one follows logic and definition to some conclusion. This is not religion sponsored by an institution which tries to control the thinking and lead it to a conclusion that supports the institution. This is not “spirituality” which is pretty much indefinable anyway but can lead to a particularly poisonous sort of self-delusion and a variety of oppressions.

Self-delusion is the whole problem and it is encouraged by the idea that introspection and/or emotional impulse are at the heart of faith — that one leaps to some position and calls it a commitment. I’m not a theologian because I don’t believe in theos of any kind. I’m not a Buddhist, though I try to be empty and non-yearning, but I still respond to suffering and anguish. Maybe a Taoist, but why do I have to be an “ist” at all?

Heraclitus

Who demands these labels? Though I’m attracted to the incomplete ideas of Heraclitus, partly because they ARE incomplete and partly because he seems to speak of constant change and interacting opposites, a sort of dignified version of Bibfeldt, who was a deliberate fantasy anyhow. It’s a bit of a problem that the Wikipedia entry writer is not identified, so it’s impossible to tell what his angle is. There’s always an angle.

“From the lonely life he led, and still more from the apparently riddled and allegedly paradoxical nature of his philosophy and his stress upon the needless unconsciousness of humankind, he was called “The Obscure” and the “Weeping Philosopher”.

“Heraclitus was famous for his insistence on ever-present change as being the fundamental essence of the universe, as stated in the famous saying, “No man ever steps in the same river twice” This position was complemented by his stark commitment to a unity of opposites in the world, stating that “the path up and down are one and the same”. Through these doctrines Heraclitus characterized all existing entities by pairs of contrary properties, whereby no entity may ever occupy a single state at a single time.”

When I used a “travel sermon” that I repeated whenever I was a pulpit guest, I based it on the phenomenon of “sweet spots” in time — the moments when one briefly feels the vastness of the universe but also one’s embedded belongingness in it. It was a Universalist point of view, quite unlike the “frozen-hearted” Unitarian logic and steely mechanisms. 

The two denominations never quite reconciled. Formally they joined in 1961, but were actually joined only by their heretical status in a world dominated by Calvinistic damnation. Each of the four professors at Meadville evaded the problem in his own way: Godbey went to history, Engel went to environment, Shadle went to social service, and Reeves went to physics. They were all dominated by the U of Chicago Div School objection to phenomenology, which seemed to challenge the Christian fantasy, and which stood (seemingly) as the Calvin to their UU variousness.

But I kept thinking about those “sweet spots.” It was also a sweet spot in terms of the work some people were doing on the same campus. Csikszentmihalyi was proposing “flow” as a key to happiness.  Gendlin was close by with "focussing."  Victor Turner was just developing his ideas of the three part “liminal” nature of African ceremonies and Bernie Brown was absorbed in using the concept, though others thought that “liminal” was just another term for “dissociated” but didn’t put it that way. When Jim Jones caused tragedy in Guyana, they said, Calvinistically, “You see how dangerous that liminal state is? Those people were led into psychosis and couldn’t get out.”

Carl Rogers was around, carefully using empathy, and Bettelheim was working with fairytales, though he was later accused of abusing kids. Toulmin was thinking hard but the Derrida folks didn’t like him. In terms of writing, Norman Maclean was in the early stages of Alzheimers, wondering what to do about it. Richard Stern and his love of narrativity helped me. I stole the title of his textbook — “Honey and Wax” — for my “sweet spot” sermon. The thinkers of that time who have come to be crucial to what I and many others are thinking about are Lakoff and Johnson in the frame of metaphor.

Eliade

Mircea Eliade had just the right mix of scholarship and mystery to become a point of pilgrimage for many young aspirants, so he was hidden in our seminary where we passed him in the hallway, too civilized to be a shaman but too elemental to be academic, trailing aromatic tobacco smoke. His basic book, “The Sacred and the Profane” remains one of my most valued sources.

Robert Schreiter, CPPS

The other was Robert Schreiter’s "Constructing Local Theologies” in which, as a priest in orders, he addressed the dilemmas of Christian specifics in a culture that had none of the relevant symbolism. For instance, the pre-contact Inuit ate only meat — that’s all there was — so what could bread and wine mean to them? What is a cross in a land of no trees? Schreiter urged the search for the most essential and deep symbolisms of all people. Technically, he was teaching Catholics how to be missionary celebrants of the Mass.

These are the reference points I acquired academically and still use in my thought. They are phenomenological — perceivable through the senses — even the feeling of the sacred that Eliade asserted. Perhaps sacrality is halfway between institutional theologies and the seductively flowering kudzus of “spirituality.” (Including the gothic ivies of academia, the spirituality of the intellectual.) Perhaps sacrality is a process, an interaction. There are sacralities of evil. Aesthetics of the body and forthright sexuality can be sacralities.

Instead of building a physics-type theory structure, I’m concentrating on defined, time-limited, symbol systems of ceremony that might never be analyzed except through outside observation and imposed definitions, so thoroughly real to the believers that they can't imagine anything different. This is the substance of the second book, “Come Through the Door.”  

I’m trying to find ways to consider the concepts as a celebrant or even a poet. Sacralities should move both ways, both controlled and uncontrolled. Sweet spots might respond to preparation, coming from the poet/celebrant or acting on the poet/celebrant.

“Susanne Langer’s unexplored thesis revolving around the connection of consciousness and aesthetics as well as her unusual use of language in her writing ultimately caused her to be scrutinized by her fellow scholars.” (Wikipedia) I found Langer but was waved off by advisors. She was  female AND phenomenological. Now I find that she is appreciated again, not least because she found and explored past thought in this domain of the “felt”. 

http://www.anthonyflood.com/gardnerlanger.htm 

I’m not bothering with the past very much. I don’t have time. Don’t have the philosophy background and don’t agree, as I’ve said, with introspective rationalisms.

The newest research about the brain is redeeming the great majority of the tissue and connections that result from animal evolution and still go on managing our bodies, certainly our emotions, and sometimes our minds. We have been so arrogantly insistent on logical, ethical, mathematical pre-frontal cortex operations that we have neglected the entire autonomic in-body system, deranging and limiting ourselves.

"The Sacrality of Love" by chicourano

Much social and particularly academic prestige and accomplishment depends upon this theoretical rational domination, gender-assigned to the male. I’m finding that when I explain the necessity of the sensuous and emotional, many upper-class men become angry and denying, particularly if I step over to the rough, stigmatized language of the oppressed. So I do it. Sacrality can be fun, but not if it throws you out of your endowed chairmanship. And this is where the third book, “Patterned Tumult”, is focussed: survival.

THE PATTERN OF MASS

Over millennia the Roman Catholic Mass has persisted but has elaborated its sequence.  A fine book that records both the persistence and the variations introduced by expansion across the continent of Europe is “The Shape of the Liturgy” by Dom Gregory Dix.   Though it is exhaustively researched, there was a theory driving Dix, which was that the entire liturgy of the Eucharist constitutes anamnesis — a commemoration and re-presentation of the one sacrifice of Christ.  This is a form of metaphor that invites reflection on the idea that the crucifixion of Jesus was a sacrifice that saved human beings.  He formulated what he called the "Four Action Shape of the Liturgy: Offertory, Consecration, Fraction, Communion. 

Putting the emphasis on the second half of the Mass ceremony emphasized that it was Christian (as opposed to the Jewish scholarly tradition of studying writing) and that it was an experience (technically a RE-experience) rather than theological rational thought.  He also justified it on grounds that it was the earlier practice of Mass and that because -- in his version -- the people brought the bread and wine rather than the church purchasing them, it was an intensification of the community’s beliefs rather than an imposition by an outside authority.  The book was published in 1945 as England emerged from the ordeal of war, a crucifixion in itself.

Dom Gregory Dix

So Dix, a personally charming man who made friends of his enemies, claimed in the end it was the homely act of breaking bread together that was at the heart of human experience as it relates to God, a unifying force for all Christians through history and across continents, thus easily shared in all the places he knew, a high value after a world war.

But he was serving the Church of England.  Robert Schreiter, a man in Catholic orders (and a professor of mine), was part of a missionary outreach to countries that had no bread, no wine.  Asia, where the staples are rice and the alcoholic drink is sake.  The Arctic, where people have almost no access to any kind of vegetation and must live on animal flesh.  New Guinea where the people subsist on the pith of sago palm trees made into mush and fortified with small fishes and swarming insects.  

His book “Constructing Local Theologies” explores the dilemma of a ritual based on a material culture never present where the mission is, therefore emptied or made into exotic magic.  What does one do where putting water on a head is a way of cursing a women into barrenness?  His solution was to look for the human universals in the new material culture that expressed the same things as the institutionalized rites.  It is the institutions that insist on imposing their own material culture.  The spiritual content is universally human, by definition, and therefore can be found at depth.  It's rather a Jungian idea.

Imposing surface similarities -- saying that Chinese noodles and green tea are the same as the flatbread and table wine of the Mediterranean that Jesus held up at the Last supper -- is ridiculous.  One must go deep into Chinese thought and daily life to find the equivalents.  I can’t do it.  

But in the Blackfeet culture, which was based on the buffalo, there are equivalents I can recognize.  One is the ordeal of the ancient and totally blameless woman who fasts and prays during the Sun Ceremony, a days-long Spring complex of rituals roughly parallel to Easter -- which has become associated with the crucifixion of Jesus, though it was originally a fertility rite in northern Europe.  (Therefore, eggs, and rabbits famous for fertility.)  At the series of Blackfeet events one high point is the consumption of "one hundred" buffalo tongues in a feast that precedes the notorious ordeal of dancing while attached by thongs to a central pole.  This torture has captured the imagination of some who seek to illustrate the imagined Sun Dance in various media or even re-enact it.  I don’t know what the originating event may be.  

Still, the sacramental eating of buffalo tongue is more like communion than the communal sarvisberry soup at a Thunder Pipe Bundle Opening.  If I were to use the tongue/bread/Jesus equivalence, I would tie it to the phenomenon of a buffalo who could speak.  If that buffalo were to say what Jesus said,  “This is my flesh, broken for you.  Take, eat, and remember me,” then that would be closer to the idea of bread as a commemoration of sacrifice, displacing the hunter/herder sacrifice of animals.  

It would also make central our dependence on other living beings and our necessary gratitude for nourishment through their death. The Inuit could recognize this.  But modern urban people, as is noted over and over, have no sense of such an intense idea.  Even their "bread" for communion is little discs bought at the church supply store. 

In the Sixties/Seventies a movement urging the return to origins of Christianity touched both Roman Catholics and Protestant Christians, partly as a yearning for more purity and intensity, and partly as a practical strategy for growth.  A previous parallel movement resulted in Pentecostal spirituality in which emotional intensity was seen as key, speaking in tongues of flame.  That’s when the Methodists added flames to their cross.  (Pentecostal Sunday, commemorating "speaking in tongues", an ecstatic outburst of unintelligible words thought to be either foreign languages or some other-worldly speech, was June 8 this year, 2014.)

Material culture changes in “Aquarian” terms meant rejection of Roman formalism, returning to the vernacular in music and prayer instead of the traditional Latin and chanting.  Results were mixed.  In Protestant circles people began to bake “peasant loafs” of whole wheat so the clergy could actually tear it apart and offer it to the people.  I witnessed a tense Easter when the young pastor was using a loaf so tough that he couldn’t get through the crust with his bare hands -- but one could hardly resort to a knife on what had just been announced to be the Body of Christ.  He finally broke it over his knee, which was not much better.

Similarly, a droll Unitarian minister at a minister’s conference presented a service celebrating men and offered a banana communion.   But he had underestimated the number of bananas that would be necessary and, in spite of having just blessed the bananas, had to cut them into sections to make them go around.  Since most of those present were male and  hip to symbols, there was an outcry at the mutilation and the entire focus of the ritual was subverted.  It would have been more meaningful to relate the shortage of bananas to the shortage of food for many people in the world --  therefore to appeal for martyrs to go without.  When a ritual has been around for a while, such blunders have already been eliminated.

The other problem is that the human mind is based on specific sensory cues and constructs powerful ties between sensory objects and that for which it stands.  (Consider the veneration of flags.)  To those raised on wafers and elegant chalices, the folk guitar music, the prayers in English (necessarily less elevated than the traditional Latin), and the pews “unscrewed” from the floor so they could be arranged in circles, were simply profane.  My local Catholic parish priest in Portland, Oregon, sold the expensive altar equipment and, in a neighborhood that had become ghetto, used the money to install a public phone for job searches, family contacts, and legal conferences.  He served communion on a common saucer with an ordinary glass.  People with gray hair left.  People with black faces arrived.

It’s not the substitution of different vessels and substances or the use of a different language that can go wrong.  Nor is it the use of a different sequence of events or dropping out something like the veneration of scripture.  It is the failure to reach deeply enough into the concepts in the brain/body to touch the most basic dilemmas of being human.  This is what creates holiness and meaning.   The task of the liturgist is to know the people well enough to understand their hearts and to have enough of the poet to manage the metaphors of material culture.  Luckily for the Christian liturgist, many of the theological issues are really about human family.  Of course, this also provides a lot of work for therapists.  And it only works with a "nuclear" family:  God, Mary, and Jesus plus disciples.  ("Uncle Joseph" also.)