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.

CAN YOU SAY THAT IN ARAMAIC?

In December of 2011 the Bishop Edward Braxton forced the resignation of the 72-year-old Rev. William Rowe of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Mount Carmel, Ill, because Rowe deviated from the exact words dictated in the Roman Missal in order to better echo the Gospel message of the day. Instead of saying, “Lord our God that we may honor you with all our mind and love everyone in truth of heart,” he said, “We thank you, God, for giving us Jesus who helped us to be healed in mind and heart and proclaim his love to others.”

Of three experts on liturgy from within the Catholic bureaucracy, Monsignor Kevin Irwin, professor of liturgical studies at the Catholic University of America, came closest to the point of view of my manuscript, “The Molten Chalice.” He said there were some prayers said by a priest at Mass in which he is “beholden to the structure not the words.” And I’m also asserting that the structure emerges from the human brain interacting with the immanence of meaning in their world. Not from Rome.

Why would the church be upset enough to fire a priest for paraphrasing when there are in existence authorized multiple translations of the missal anyway, some of them in different languages altogether? First of all, this is a challenge to the top-down authority of the Catholic church, which is -- after all -- modeled on the Roman Empire. One could argue that the purpose of the Pope is to prevent the “mission drift” which affects every human organization. If the Pope does not need to take contraceptive measures, neither should you. However, the grasp on the supposedly faithful over the years has been loosened so people don’t do what the Pope tells them to, even inside the bureaucracy. Rowe had been creative with the Missal for 18 years before he was found out and thrown out of an establishment that badly needs priests.

The Pope daren’t excommunicate all the people who use contraceptives -- which would be the natural remedy for such disobedience to the rules of that church -- because he would have few parishioners left, so he tries to get secular authorities to enforce his ideas by criminalizing them. In the meantime, one priest of retirement age can be a good example of what happens to disobedient people, though saying he was “crucified” would be an exaggeration. He is retirement age.

When the Protestants left the Catholic establishment, they took the structure of the liturgy with them and sometimes even the words. Most people are not very aware that they are using this pattern because it is so natural. What could be more inevitable in any human event than a beginning and an ending? Even fewer are aware that it grew out of Jewish patterns: a group studying scripture followed by a potluck which evolved into a formal evocation of Passover and then Communion. So if the Pope doesn’t insist on the “right” words, how will people know they aren’t at a Lutheran mass?

On the other hand, invariant words imply a dimension of magic, having to perform an alchemical formula exactly, in order to kindle the magic. The Roman Catholic church, esp. since medieval days when people thought that the Communion bread actually turned into Christ on their tongues, has always had a strong strain of this. Why else would someone steal the mummified heart of Saint Laurence O’Toole, patron saint of Dublin from Christ Church Cathedral and leave the gold and silver chalices behind? It’s Harry Potter stuff, knowing the right words to put the monsters back in their places. “Eye of newt, toe of bat, heart of Saint!” That oughta do it.

In fact, the Roman Catholics have always asserted that the priest must mediate contact with God, no matter how rotten he is, because he is the ordained conduit of the truth’s connection to the original Apostles. THEY have the franchise, the key to the Kingdom. Evangelicals pick up this point of view. It’s a rather shamanic view, labeling a special sort or class of people to have privileged access. Among Unitarians there are always individual ministers who claim the privilege of doing what they like because they are of a different class (more educated maybe) but Unitarian parishioners are vigorous levelers and administer their version of education more quickly than Bishop Braxton. The scientists among the UU like the owls but not the wands.

At heart, I suspect, what this incident enacts is the same clash between the Baby Boomers who dearly admired the Aquarian Revolution and Pope John Paul, the ones who unscrewed the pews, put them in circles and sang guitar-accompanied hymns, as opposed to those who have gotten where they are through simple longevity and loyalty. Also, KA, if you know what I mean. I don’t want to be TOO disrespectful. Just enough to provoke thought. But they are human despite irrational claims to other possibilities.

It IS a tightrope walk. But I would suggest that the balance depends on taut structure rather than trying to control exact wording of formulas. I would locate the power of the liturgy in the relationship between the priest and his people and I mean the priest as a person, though that can lead to a certain amount of variation. But that which is not open to change will die.

Once at seminary I had a friend who was a Franciscan monk. A big lively fellow, more Friar Tuck than his supervisors might have liked, was open to discussions so I asked him how on earth he managed a vow of obedience. (I was hoping for helpful tips, since I struggle with it.) He said, “We’re into creative obedience.” Not much of a tip. But useful. In some places Jesus advises obedience to the spirit of the law rather than the jot and tittle stuff.

The Pope seems to like jots and tittles, probably also beer and skittles. (That’s a joke. He’s German.) In fact, “jots and tittles” are little marks in Hebrew alphabets and even English (a tittle is the dot on an i). The reference is in Matthew 5:18. According to Wikipedia: “In the Greek original translated as English "jot and tittle" is found as iota and keraia. Iota is the smallest letter of the Greek alphabet, and was used as a small diacritic below other vowels (the hypogegrammeni in ancient Greek texts. Alternatively, it may represent yodh, the smallest letter of the Hebrew and Aramaic alphabets. "Keraia" is a hook or serif, possibly referring to other Greek diacritics,” Of course, Jesus probably spoke in Aramaic, so unless we can speak that language and have access to a written version in Aramaic, we are obliged to change the words no matter what the Pope says.

COMMUNITY LITURGY

“ . . .that which can be expressed only in ritual is not trivial. It is, I think, crucial and because of it I take ritual to be THE basic social act. I will argue, in fact, that social contract, morality, the concept of the sacred, the notion of the divine, and even a paradigm of creation are intrinsic to ritual’s structure.”

--Roy Rappaport

For a person or organization to persist (survive) it must manage on two levels: survive short term environmental fluctuations by adapting (drought) and survive long term by transforming themselves (glaciation). Crucial variables (food, water, shelter) must stay within a range of variability that is survivable. But as variables continue over years to the point of evolutionary change, at what point is this a new organism? (My great-grandfather’s ax has had the head replaced three times and a new handle attached five times. Is it the same ax?)

If the Blackfeet tribe come from the Great Slave Lake, as some anthropologists claim, and then moved to the East Slope of the Rockies on the high prairie where they learned to be buffalo hunters by using piskuns, or buffalo jumps, were they still Blackfeet? When they acquired horses and did their hunting that way, with guns, were they still Blackfeet? When they accepted reservation life and are by now intermixed with other people and make their living like any modern American, are they still Blackfeet?

Immutability: which is the crucial part that cannot change without ending the organism as itself? Rappaport suggests that liturgy can repair a people’s sense of themselves. This has proven to be true for some of the enrolled tribespeople who still perform a “Bundle Opening” every spring, inventing and bridging over as necessary to adapt, but still sitting in a circle of relations.

Because human patterns of behavior are not much specified by genetics, people can change quickly by adjusting memes instead of genes. The terms usually used when stepping away from blood quantum and tribal enrollment are “Indian-identified” or “white-identified,” that is, the self-identity sense of the person as expressed in participation in liturgy like “Bundle Opening.” There is much more resourcefulness in this kind of identity but also more chance of chaos. The controller is VALUES or what Rappaport might call SANCTITY, which he defines as values that are never questioned, beyond questioning. At the high level of values, vagueness is adaptive because it is more inclusive. Most Bundle Openers see themselves as also good Catholics because they consider the values to be the same: compassion (often called “pity” in early translations), dependence on the Great Spirit, personal honor, and family.

Rappaport suggests that such primary process thought is largely metaphorical, which is good because that helps resist heresy (erosion) and hair-splitting. Ultimate sacred postulates are almost beneath (or above) conscious reflection. They are in the mind (“heart”) as the most basic givens. “Even metaphor’s grasp is exceeded. . . . All distinction and all likeness may dissolve into a sense of non-distinction or unity. Ultimate meaning is sometimes called by such names as ‘pure being’ and ‘Being-Itself.’ . . . “ the objectification of self and the world, and the concomitant language, may be overcome for the nonce by the sense of identity with self and the world . . . that constitutes highest level meaning. This is mystical.”

One distinction between religion and “magic” is that religion is shared by a community while magic can be manipulated by an individual, maybe for dubious motives. This becomes important among the Blackfeet because so many outsiders come seeking what amounts to magic for their individual benefit rather than sharing an endorsement of the community values, much less participation in daily lives. Native American Indians have acquired a cultural attribution of high prestige and purity, but that makes those among them who have “fallen” even more stigmatized, guilty of a religious apostasy in addition to the affliction of alcoholism or whatever.

The Blackfeet Thunder Pipe Ceremony (which I don’t know as it is organized today except second-hand, since I have stepped back from these circles, but did know in the Sixties) is an in-gathering of the Beloved Community and also an in-gathering of the spirits of many creatures of the northern prairie. It is not mysterious, or was not when it grew up within the lives of the People centuries ago.

How many years ago? No one really knows, but the Thunder pipes that I’ve seen have brass tacks, brass falconry bells, satin ribbons, and occasionally exotic birds that were once mounted by a taxidermist (they have glass eyes) and that are not local (a parrot, a rooster). The stem or calumet, three feet long, has been drilled by technology similar to that for rifle bores -- in fact, the stem is about the length of a “long gun.” All this suggests post-contact. In fact, the pipe may be the kernel of a liturgy meant to adapt and integrate the new material culture, acknowledging and claiming its power. It may be a source of the mystique of the “peace pipe.”

The stone bowl, where the tobacco burns, is not normally put on the stem because this kind of pipe is not smoked except in times of extremely intense need. The most striking element of the pipestem is a pendant fan, an entire set of colorfully quilled eagle tail feathers, usually from a young golden eagle, not a bald eagle. Bald eagles are fish-eaters found around water. Golden eagles live on the prairie and along the mountains where thermals lift them soaring across the sky. Many ermine hides (winter weasel pelts, which are white with a black-tipped tail) hang with other objects, maybe a Metis assumption sash. There are beads and sometimes the red wool cloth manufactured for trade in Stroud, England.

There’s sometimes a secondary pipe, similarly decorated and called “the woman’s pipe,” which is really a length of gun barrel that had been taken off a “long gun” the way a shotgun is illegally shortened today. And there’s a smoking pipe, maybe not kept in the Bundle. In those days a pipe for smoking tobacco was something like today’s coffee pot, always hot to pour for guests. It was a kind of structuring device: the guest comes, the pipe goes around while there is talk, at some point people have had enough and the guest leaves. It also makes spaces for people to consider what they are saying while they puff or re-light or refill the pipe.

The People gathered according to the seasons, coming from far and wide across the prairie to meet when there was enough grass for the horses and fresh meat for the People. Some think they used the stars as a calendar and others guess they went by the same kind of natural indicators that a farmer might use to decide when to cut hay. The Thunder Pipe Bundle is associated with the spring storms that sweep across the vast grasslands, booming and flashing as they move, and sometimes striking lodges, people and animals. Prayers are made that storms will not do damage, but will water the grass and make the sarvisberries flower, for this is the beginning of the berries that will end up in berry soup.

Berry soup is the ceremonial food, not to symbolize someone’s death, but to work by affinity to encourage a good crop. When handed one’s bowl of soup, one picks out a big fat berry to hand forward to an altar where they are dedicated as examples of what is asked for. If Christian Communion is interpreted as a sharing, a plea for salvation, then maybe berry soup is the same. If Christian Communion is about the Crucifixion of Jesus, then berry soup is not the same thing.

Berry soup is not normally a store-bought food though in desperation blueberries could be improvised. Usually dried sarvisberries are used, the last of the previous year’s crop, so they are more like seed grain than bread. Many different people might donate berries. In the old days they might have been cached somewhere, the way a marmot hoards grass underground among rocks. If you want to be funky, in the old days the seeds of the berries the People ate were returned to the land in the same way that the seeds eaten by birds and animals go back to soil, so sarvisberries grew thick near the accustomed campgrounds. Such elements of the People’s lives traveled through natural feedback loops much in the way that our bodies stay stabilized by metabolic feedback loops in the blood.

Besides the People and the berries being gathered together, there is another in-gathering within the Bundle, the skins of lesser creatures of the land. Anthropologists and aficionados are always dazzled by big bright objects like the spectacular calumet, but often the stronger meaning is in the humble, scruffy sub-bundles. These might include the skins of an owl, a duck, a loon, a spotted fawn, or a muskrat. Each is wrapped in cloth the way a baby would be wrapped, with the head sticking out. They are harbingers of spring, such as owls being especially vocal because of looking for mates, the ducks coming back and pairing off, the fawns being dropped by the deer. Blackfeet didn’t eat these creatures except in some kind of emergency, but they watched them carefully to see what they could learn. The land was their text, the animals the writing on it.

At the Bundle Opening Ceremony, the men choose one of these little sub-bundles to hold as they dance, imitating the animal’s movements as closely as they can. Each animal has its own song. If a person REALLY wanted to be a Bundle Ceremony participant, the right way to go about it would not be reading the complete notes of Clarke Wissler or John Ewers, but walking on the land daily in pursuit of natural history.

INCARNATIONAL LITURGY

All anthropocentric and certainly all anthropomorphic religions have strong concerns with human flesh, "embodiment." The sensory pleasures, pains and symbolisms of the body are at the heart of liturgies as well. This is a quick overview.

Ordeals are used among the Blackfeet and other warrior cultures as training for survival and hardship, to call out courage and demonstrate it to others. The most commonly known ceremony is the Sun Dance Lodge in which men are tethered to cords that are fastened at the high center of the lodge and the dance, pulling against them until they tear loose. There is evidently a contemporary covert version of this in which a circle of people set hooks in their backs and pull against each other. The idea is to mortify the flesh with pain, to kill the sin and weakness of the body, or possibly just to evoke the extremity of the experience for the sake of the strong hormones generated in the body or for psychological reasons.

Whipping is a more familiar mortification, sometimes a self-discipline. In museums there are displays of ritual whips used in antiquity by penitents. the practice is often depicted in movies like “The Seventh Seal.” In times of great fear and horror, as during the European plagues, groups would join together to do this. Fasting or thirsting are also methods of penance and self-testing, whether it is Christian lent or Blackfeet dream beds in the mountains where a young person waits for a vision.

During times of paralysis, boredom and trapped living, self-affliction can increase. Today people, particularly teenagers and particularly those feeling shame and/or guilt, sometimes use cutting with a razor to relieve their emotions. Tattooing can be a slightly displaced self-affliction that leaves a mark often dedicated to strong emotion: love, allegiance, self-definition. I once spoke to a small group on a Sunday morning and talked about cutting. I suggested off-hand that branding might be next. The teens in the group broke in to say that branding had already arrived among their peers. Some had moved on to amputation. One of my students on the Blackfeet reservation who had just received word that his mother had died, left the building and somehow managed to catch his finger in the heavy doors, cutting off the end. This is a traditional mourning gesture in his tribe, but he claimed to have no such intention or even knowledge of the practice.

All of these practices can be found in anthropological literature, along with distortions of the body: insertions, stretching, scarring, and genital surgeries. Those of us who read the National Geographic know about the ear lobes hanging in loops, the lips like platters, and the elongated necks. Feminists have made us aware of female circumcisions and activist males in the US have recently been objecting to the routine practice of removing foreskins. The meanings are very complex and emotional: ownership, belonging, sacrifice, submission and so on -- often mixed with theories of hygiene.

Even our ideas of what life beyond death might be like are connected to the concept of unbearable pain and unimaginable pleasure -- though we tend to describe both in terms of our earthly lives: pain as burning and pleasure as sex or food. At least this is the Abramic context. The Plains Indian context is more like dissociation, possibly like the dissociation of the body/mind under extreme duress. They speak of a shadowland, the Sand Hills, where one lives a faint gray version of life much the same as already known.

There is probably a biological substrate to all these practices and concepts. Animals trapped in leg-hold mechanisms are known to chew off their foot to escape. Animals trapped for long periods of time in too-small cages will begin to pull out their hair and gnaw sores into their flesh. Humans are not exempt from these self-harms.

In our times there has developed an attitude known as “extremophilia” -- the love of being out at the edge of risk: bungee jumping, erotic strangulation, high-speed car racing, Russian roulette, ice-climbing, risky sex, injected drugs. Partly the payoff is admiration from persons more guarded and partly, of course, the feeling of the bodily chemicals and the psychological triumph when things work out well.

“ALIVE!”

This example is about a nearly unsurvivable event and how religious understanding became a life-saving near-liturgical way of going outside normal behavior.

“On October 12, 1972, a Fairchild F-227 of the Uruguayan Air Force, chartered by an amateur rugby team, set off from Montevideo in Uruguay for Santiago in Chile.” (from the book entitled “Alive!” about the incident) So begins a story that is both terrible and inspiring. The airplane crashed very near the top of the Andes. Sixteen young men survived for 72 days and two of them eventually walked for ten days down out of the mountains. Their means of survival was cannibalism.

Not only did the youths survive well enough to recover good physical condition after their rescue, but also they managed to maintain sanity and morale while living jammed into the remains of an airplane fuselage with no amenities or even enough clothes to keep warm, since the tail section with all the luggage fell far from the rest of the plane. The source of their real strength was religious, in fact, what I’ve called “incarnational liturgy,” spontaneously arising from their Catholic culture. (Carne means meat.)

The first suggestion of cannibalism was when one of the boys, seeing how short the food supply was, threatened half-jokingly to fortify it with chunks out of the dead pilots, since they had made the mistake that caused the crash. This kind of ironic fierceness was characteristic of the boys. They were fighters, partly because of the South American macho tradition and partly because of their athletic training. Many were descendants of people displaced by WWII who had endured much hardship. Also, their minds were shaped by their schooling with Irish Christian Brothers until they were a remarkable and resilient mixture of matter-of-fact practicality and poetic confidence in other-worldliness. The boys were the cherished sons of large, conservative, closely-knit families. Rebellion and scorn were not directed at their parents, but at those who fell short of family standards. Many of the families were ranchers, so the boys were used to coping with emergencies and knew meat for what it was. Two boys were first year medical students who immediately turned their attention to the wounds imposed by the crash.

In a while several of the boys realized that if they were to survive they would have to eat the bodies of those who had died in the crash. It was a ghastly prospect. The corpses lay around the plane in the snow, preserved by the intense cold in the state in which they had died. While the thought of cutting the flesh from those who had been their friends and relatives was deeply repugnant to them all, a lucid appreciation of their predicament led them to consider it.

“... Finally Canessa brought it out into the open. He argued forcefully that they were not going to be rescued: that they would have to escape themselves, but that nothing be done without food, and that the only food was human flesh. He used his knowledge of medicine to describe in his penetrating, high-pitched voice, how their bodies were using up their reserves. “Every time you move,” he said, “You use up part of your own body. Soon we shall be so weak that we won’t have the strength even to cut the meat that is lying there before our eyes.”

Canessa did not argue just from expediency. He insisted they had a moral duty to stay alive by any means at their disposal. . . .

“It is meat,” he said. “That’s all it is. The souls have left their bodies and are in heaven with God. All that is left here are the carcasses, which are no more human beings than the dead flesh of the cattle we eat at home.”

One of the deeply Christian elements that emerged was a sense of oblation: willingness to give their bodies to the others.

“I know,” Zerbino went on, “that if my dead body could help you to stay alive, then I’d certainly want you to use it. In fact, if I do die and you don’t eat me, then I’ll come back from wherever I am and give you a good kick in the ass.”

The first eating of meat was ritualistic. Canessa, the medical student, cut twenty slivers of meat from the buttocks of one corpse and laid them on the roof of the plane to dry. He invited the other boys to begin and when no one would, he prayed and then forced down the first piece as an example.

The boys wrote letters to their families and novias constantly and there was a testimonial feel to what they wrote. Even in such extremity the boys could say the equivalent of Prayers of Intercession for others. They felt part of a strong community. Some of the boys and an older married couple could not force themselves to take the flesh, in spite of progressing weakness and neediness.

Pedro Algorta was one of the two boys who had been dressed more scruffily at the airport than the others: as if to show that he despised their bourgeois values. . . . Algorta watched Canessa and Fito Strauch cutting the meat but said nothing until it came to the moment when he was offered a slice of flesh. He took it and swallowed it and then said, “It’s like Holy Communion. When Christ died he gave his body to us so that then we could have spiritual life. My friend has given us his body so that we can have physical life.”

Exalted landscapes stretched away from the improvised camp, which soon became a foul and stinking charnel house since the boys had no strength to do more than a minimum of maintenance. At night the boys clasped each other tightly for warmth and reassurance, but in the day time they sprawled carelessly in the sun, half-blinded by the dazzling sweeps of snow. Every night Carlitoes Paez led Rosary.

After their rescue the young men’s decision to eat human flesh and their justification of it through the image of Communion was accepted, despite their fears. A Catholic curate arrived at the hospital where they were first taken, confirmed their wisdom in saving their lives, judged the cannibalism necessary and not sinful, and gave Holy Communion to those who wished it. Later the Roman Catholic church simply cautioned them that it was not a true “Communion” since the flesh was not in any sense the flesh of Christ. Thus the church maintained its dogmatic ownership of the concept.

Ironically, Algorta, the man who had the original insight connecting flesh and communion bread, was the one who refused the priest’s ministrations. Perhaps his intellectual irreverence, which allowed him the freedom to use religious metaphors unconventionally, also denied him the emotional directness of accepting comfort. Or perhaps he was arrogant or depressed or simply needed a different kind of religious ministration than formal Roman Catholic liturgy. Or perhaps he believed that the Christian communion was a people’s rite, not one to be dispensed by officials.

There was one question the priest could not answer for any of the boys. “Why was it that he had lived while others had died? What purpose had God in making this selection? What sense could be made of it? “None,”replied Father Andres. “There are times when the will of God cannot be understood by our human intelligence. There are things which in all humility we must accept as a mystery.”

This is a very extreme example and deliberately so, partly because it is an excellent antidote to the notion that worship must be “pretty” or “aesthetic” and partly because it is an example of such strong emotional chiaroscuro that things normally taken for granted become more obvious. One rescuer could not accept any religious explanation. The skulls the boys had used as bowls were for him not at all bony chalices to hold melted snow water.

CONSCIOUSNESS (A Chapter from "The Molten Chalice")

WHAT IS CONSCIOUSNESS?

Consciousness is as hard to define as “religion” because it is used so carelessly and yet emotionally in so many ways. It is a concept arrived at through introspection, which is part of the problem. But also it is sometimes defined by its lack -- it’s “un” unconsciousness, its wakening. Then there is the Freudian complication which draws a mysterious distinction between things done on purpose, intentionally, and those that are controlled somehow by stored impulses and patterns we don’t even know are there.

Focus, attention, awareness, mood, attitude, frame of mind, receptiveness, inspired, “hot,” are only some of the synonyms and aspects of consciousness. Sometimes consciousness is only “feelings” or instincts and sometimes it is sharp and objective, factual, even mathematical. We are still fascinated by “FLOW, the mental state of operation in which a person in an activity is fully immersed in a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity proposed by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly.”

Part of the reason we are so interested in flow is that the study of it showed how to achieve it: merely do something you want to do that is at a level of difficulty right at the edge of your capacity to do it, whether chess or mountain climbing or surgery. The result is “absorption” in which one’s brain is so engaged and focused that there is no consciousness of time and even no awareness of pain. Knowing how to achieve flow is a combination of knowing one’s self in all it’s particularity and uniqueness (your style of strategy), and knowing the enterprise at hand in both a technical and participatory subjective way (the strategies of chess). We are sometimes yearning to be able to move from the consciousness of waking into sleep or in some cases, as when driving, to keep from doing that; the consciousness of uncaring to the eroticism that opens sex; the consciousness of fear into the context of bravery; from apathy to engagement. We prize media and events that can take our ordinary consciousness into passion, catharsis, extraordinary sharing. All of this is relevant to religious consciousness.

Surely part of controlling consciousness in oneself and others is the establishment or awareness of a boundary, that threshold/limen, maybe something like the division between Freud’s conscious and subconscious, though that’s a blurry division. I always think of it as a kind of water level, moving around with thoughts like fish leaping into one’s mind for a flash, then diving again. Sometimes there are things passing just under the surface, like a whale going under a boat, only a dark shape to those onboard.

Daily consciousness is a matter of habits, relationships, tasks, and time to reflect. What this manuscript (“The Molten Chalice”) hopes to do is to raise the awareness of ALL sensory inputs, even realizing that unconscious ones are recorded and guessing what they might be, both in the body (muscle tension, breathing, intestines) and out (temperature, smell, movement, other presences) and to suggest their use in the art form called “liturgy” to shift consciousness into a liminal state. Within that liminal state, once achieved, major changes in identity and belief are possible. Conversion, if you like. Visions, if you’ll allow more than sight. Realization, for a less threatening word. “Growth” maybe. More than words, more than any body of literature, more than devotion to a leader or icon, the sum of the body’s life and identity.

This is not a matter of words, but we must acknowledge that “word magic” like “number magic” is powerful and not to be ignored, whether it is Kyrie Eliesen, Open Sesame, Shazam, or Bibbity-Bobbity-Boo. A key to consciousness shifting may be a familiar phrase valorized by use at significant moments. Consider how the ventriloquist uses a magic word to bring a hypnotized person out of a trance.

POINT OF FOCUS

It is characteristic of brains (and eyes which are an extension of brains) that they actually only “see” a part of what they are looking at. Though the cell “pixels” in the retina are picking up information, the brain decides at either the level of whatever sub-part organizes ocular information or at the level of the “dashboard” neuronal workspace what is important. Then the point of focus is aimed at it. This is parallel to what happens with the whole brain: only what is assimilated and interpreted CAN be conscious and even only part of that might be stored in the unconscious or preconscious -- what I’d like to call the “underconscious” since it is not “un” at all. Maybe subconscious. (Actors use what they call the “subtext” which is the forces and information that are not in the script, but “under” the dialogue and action.

The brain can be trained to not see things, it can have damage at the point of transmission or assimilation that prevents awareness of phenomena. Since brains grow and constantly re-allocate cell resources, experience with the phenomena makes it more perceptible. So kids who are used to quick flash-edits in vids and popcorn movies can see MUCH more than adults, but adults who have learned to read faces and situations are far more patient with slow foreign films because they are processing a lot more information than a kid could perceive.

Things that are unimportant to us are simply not noticed. Some things are blocked for psychological reasons, like a new death, which will take time to sort through and assimilate. There is a now-famous experiment in which a man in a gorilla suit walks through an exciting ball game but no one sees the gorilla.

A religious event is no different. People can assimilate what they know, but they may grow if they are exposed to the unfamiliar in ways they can recognize. The expert liturgist knows how to manage both and to weave them together. High value is usually given to media that can take us from a tragic consciousness to a moment of comedy without compromising either one. Laughter in church can be revelatory.

DISSOCIATION

Dissociation is a whole category of states of mind that are outside reality. They could be frank psychosis as in the case of a brain that is not working or they could be a hypnotic state or they could be drug-induced or an out-of-body experience after surgery. Children and sometimes adults who are severely abused will enter this state. These states are coherent and real to the person experiencing them but not to others, who may not know how to react.

Religion has sometimes claimed dissociations like trances, speaking in tongues, having visions and hearing voices. It is always possible that a deeply moving liminal state might cause dissociation.

GROUP CONSCIOUSNESS

Talk to the sports people to find out about actual people grouped physically and sharing. Major coliseum and gymnasium events are among the biggest and most powerful groups, all focused on the game -- either by playing it or participating through mental and emotional sharing. Many of what used to be groups (theatre, classes) have been individualized by electronic devices. Much to explore here.

In general, people in groups pick up cues and energy from the people around them which could either carry them into the moment or possibly exclude them. Turner felt that a characteristic of the liminal state was an essential equality of every person present and the use of reversals.

THE GOAL

Thinking of “flow,” how does the liturgist take the congregation to a level of difficulty right at the edge of their capacity and awaken their consciousness to a new level? How do you learn how to cross the limen, kindle the liminal state, and then leave it? Much of it will have to be sensitivity to the worshipping group and even more will have to do with the ability to handle one’s own consciousness with clarity and stability.

THINGS THAT PERSIST

Working on the manuscript I’m calling “The Molten Chalice,” I found my notes for Robert Schreiter’s class: CTU T-300 “Structures of Religious Experience: The Primitive Traditions.” The file included two papers. I got A’s on both of them! I will take advantage of my ability to “publish” here, so I can brag. But also, I find that in the last thirty years since I took this class (Nov. ’80), I’ve changed my mind very little. I don’t know whether that means I’d struck on the Great Truths or whether it means I’m too stubborn to update. These excerpts will go into the manuscript.

STATEMENT ON THE RELATION OF RELIGION AND CULTURE

Human experience consists of three levels: the concrete sensory world, the cultural world that is constructed by and shared with other people -- at least those of the same culture -- and the private pre- or sub-verbal world of the individual which is most real in sleep or reverie.

There is a special dimension to all these levels of experience: that of the Holy or the Other. When it is recognized in the concrete world, we describe the sensations involved as Sacred, giving access to a special depth. When the Holy is part of culture, we call it religion and often identify it with an institution, a structured group of people who agree on a description of what is Sacred. Weaving in and out of all these aspects is the private world of images, yearning, and identities that make a person uniquely human.

If all three levels of human experience are congruent, or at least complementary, the human being is freed -- though within the givens of the system -- to explore, to dare, to persist, to love, and to create. If the three levels are contradictory, or if there are double-binds within the levels, or if any level is confused (if any of the three levels is totally destroyed, the being will not survive), then the human being is exposed to a unique kind of anguish: a loss of meaning. Every resource will be thrown into an attempt to seek or create a new meaning, even if it is a limited -- even painful -- one. . . .

Secular art, however, deals with the symbolic intimate world of the individual, activating the images and dreams that lie hidden in all of us, and developing them into cultural conventions and structures. Art can come close to religious mysticism and a secular culture must reduce art to the “private” realm or else convert it to the uses of the state, as in Soviet tractor art. Secularity, then, is on the cultural level and may be circumvented either by going to the individual emotional level or by going to the sensory level: moments of great insight or poignance or beauty may become religious. . . .

The religious leader is a person who is sensitive to and skilled in gaining access to the holy on all three levels of human experience. S/he is a poet of experience. A religious leader is separated from the ordinary religious believer in three ways (these are based on the shaman model):

1. The intensity of the experience of the Other, the Most Holy. (There is no need to pretend this is a person.)

2. The special self-discipline and commitment necessary to handle this “charge.”

3. The special body of historical and technical knowledge about the art of gaining access to the Holy dimension of life on all three levels.

Ideally, the religious leader is able to reconcile conflicting systems, either by showing which is “right” or by synthesizing a new system (like Bahai or Konkokyo, which reconciles Christian elements with Shinto concepts). S/he is able to identify legitimate exceptions to a conventional system when it is “moral” to defy the laws of the prevailing culture. S/he is able to defend the system when it offers no explanation -- as when a child suffers for no reason -- and to seek ways of reforming the system when it has broken down or become outdated. The religious leader is not only able to mediate between cultural religious institutions, but also between the “religious” and the “secular.” S/he knows better than others how to activate the Holy dimension of any level of human life, though the Other cannot always be called at will. . . .

In a pluralistic, metaphorically overwrought world, the community of like-minded people becomes very important for the health of the individual. Continuity and rhythm in daily life, agreement and familiarity with the artistic elements of worship, caring and understanding between persons are the desiderata of a religious community in any culture. . .

In today’s religious community, particularly in a pluralistic and partly secular context, the professional leader cannot hope to be all things to all people, and to make such an attempt would be destructive all round. Rather, the minister calls out the ministry of the people to each other. This means it is necessary for all to take the time and make the effort to discover what Norman Holland (a literary critic with a bias to psychoanalytic method) calls the “poems in persons.” www.clas.ufl.edu/users/nholland/ Each of us carries a paradigmatic metaphor at a nearly unconscious level which is the very heart of our identity. More than personal history, the physiological nature or the social situation of a person, this private poem is what can be reached, supported, or transformed by religious experience. [I am now identifying this with “liminal space” as well as the “workspace platform” in the brain.] It is the source of genius. It is the axis mundi of the individual.

If this human center can be seen as a “seminary,” a seed-bed for growing future nourishment and beauty, then around it stretches the fields, pastures and vineyards of the community, the “commons” where culture is shared and negotiated. And farthest away from this known land is the cosmic wilderness, the Mysterium Tremendum. Much of human life consists of a metaphorical quest out from the safe heart of the known, across the world shared with others, to that tangled “Unknown” and back again. The Other is most accessible at the secret point of most uncontrollable innerness, and the unknown periphery of numinous Outerness. . . .

When I was doing my CPE, the two questions dying people asked me in various forms were: “What has my life meant?” and “Who will remember me?” At the very least a religious leader must be able to see that meaning and promise to remember it.

THE BRAIN'S WORKSPACE & SOURCES

“The Molten Chalice” is not about theology. It’s not even really about religion in the institutional sense. Nor is it about being “spiritual,” whatever that means. It’s about being human, which means using the most human part of the brain -- the frontal lobe -- and whatever it is that brain research people are calling “workspace” and “sensorimotor” which some say are complementary approachs to experience. The idea is that the brain is the collection point for all the sensory material (including those from movement) where it is sorted into categories according to what the brain already knows, and then dictates what should be done. This workspace is “where” you can update your categories, eliminate some, make new ones. Religion has a lot to do with all those categories a brain sets up in childhood. And it has even more to do with managing them later in life. But it’s not the same thing as our daily shifts of attitude as we go along hour-by-hour, mostly because of a difference in degree and depth.

It is a matter of consciousness and shifts of consciousness when addressing different situations. The shifts are real things: neurons firing, hormones and enzymes secreting, muscles tensing or relaxing, electrochemical waves varying. Consciousness and memory are “filed” in the brain by being marked with sensory inputs. But much of this -- MOST of this -- goes on underneath awareness. If you lose a sense (hearing, taste, sight), you can still get along. If your “workspace” shuts down, you are asleep, in a coma, not “there.” The difference on an fMRI is not the end of brain action, a blank, but the end of its integration, the “making sense” part.

The point of this liturgical technique is to think about how to move consciousness by using senses to a point where the “work space” is deeper and more intense. This is what von Gennep and Victor Turner were talking about with their “liminality” metaphor, limen being the threshold of a doorway. If this liturgy theory is working, the person crosses into a vulnerable and intimate state of “play” or “virtual reality” or creativeness. Then it brings them back over that threshold, possibly changed.

Religious institutions with traditional worship practices have developed these protocols for specific times and places, so that they are connected to the imagery of a certain material culture. So long as that culture remains the same, the worship is meaningful. If there begins to be a mismatch, the intensity drains out. Going up broad stairs into a building with carved doors and a steeple stops meaning: “you are coming into a special space.” Kings and shepherds lose their significance.

Robert Schreiter http://www.ctu.edu/academics/robert-schreiter-cpps -- and Eliade and Campbell if one listens closely -- tries to get us to understand that though deep human categories developed very early in life never really dissolve, the equivalents between cultures are not obvious and cannot be imposed on each other. They are drawn from different ecologies. There is not a “Jesus” in every culture, much less bread and wine, but there is always a force towards salvation.

The long struggle to move the hunter/gatherer people with their burnt flesh offerings over to the bread and wine of the agriculturists is the theme of the Old Testament. It is not the theme of the Plains Indians. I would argue that one can’t even properly say that the self-torture ordeals of the Sun Lodge can be compared to the Crucifixion ordeal -- in the first place, it doesn’t mean the same thing. (This college kid who comes prowling around the Sioux to get them to let him tear his flesh with thongs, is he suffering to save the souls of his people?) Secondly, the REALLY important part of the ceremony is the old woman who fasts in a lodge. It is her digging stick -- which feeds the people when there are no buffalo -- that is the real sacred object. And it is feeding the body -- plain raw survival -- that counts. I would make an argument for an old woman with a pointed stick as a “Jesus” salvation figure.

What the contemporary (post-modern?) liturgist must investigate is what material culture the people feel and what those sensory objects stand for. A sensory “object” might not even be a material object: maybe it’s moving very fast, maybe it’s music, maybe it’s a smell. And under that, what are the categories that the brain “workspace” uses, what are the issues of life in this specific time and place?

Much of our liturgy doesn’t dare go near sex, though that’s obsessive in the culture. Some do take on the realization that our little planet is so small and we may be very temporary. What about the problem of patriotism? I don’t think I’d take on emotional depression as such, because I think depression is the result of a lack of engagement with reality, perhaps because of a malfunction in brain function. Not that reality isn’t pretty depressing, but there is a lack of energy to confront it, reflect on it, do something about it, a failure of identity that religion can address liminally.

Crossing-the-limen three-part shifts happen all the time: love-making, reading, cooking. Reflecting on them, becoming more sensitive to them, can be rewarding and enlightening. Stop and smell the roses or coffee or foot powder -- whatever. Let your body catch up with itself. Liturgies are about bodies, not just words on paper, because brains are in bodies, managing what they take in and making decisions about all of it.

Paradigm shift can be the work of the brain’s “workspace” and so can be paradigm confirmation. Faith needs to be maintained. Sensory information and other evidence need to be reconsidered. Are you in touch with reality? Can you handle the truth? What do all these other people know that you can’t figure out? What do you know for sure?

Every time I restate this little chain of logic, I become more convinced I’m onto something significant and add a little more to it. For instance, it seems pretty clear to me now that the “workspace” in the brain is the place where “dissociation” happens. “Dissociation” events (some call them schizy, but that’s too stigmatizing) are like day-dreaming, being “in the zone,” runner’s high, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s “flow”, immersive reading that seems real, acting, or extreme states like the out-of-body experiences of an abused child, danger as in combat, or drug-induced mind alterations. Shift of consciousness can be intense, but not really recognized as out of the ordinary until on reflection afterwards, back in the daily mind.

Much of religious thinking is academic, book-centered, and forced to work with all the thinking that has gone before, especially when one is working with institutions. This “Molten Chalice” concept is an attempt to go back to the elementary evolutionary and celebratory steps of percussion, dance, chanting, and then maybe recapitulate civilization as expressed in the material culture that emerged from a particular ecology, whether it’s about salmon, or wheat or bears or digging up something edible on the prairie.

ABRAXAS: A Worthy Worship Experiment

http://www.uua.org/worship/theory/abraxanessay/ At this url is an essay written by a group of ministers and lay people who belonged to the Unitarian Universalist Association. Now it is part of the UUA website called “Worship Web,” which is particularly needed in this denomination because many of the small congregations are lay-lead and don’t have a trunk full of things to read or any real certainly about how to go about organizing worship. They may have come from places where it just wasn’t done by laypeople. Sometimes even as a professional and experienced minister, it really helps to be able to find something specific.

One of the main leaders of Abraxas was the Rev. Vern Barnet, now working at http://www.cres.org/pubs/abraxas.htm (Community Resource for Exploring Spirituality) though the formal organization may have tuckered out. It appears that even the indefatigable Vern is now “emeritus” and writing. Here's Vern: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTCBKUp42kM

I admired this organization and liked Vern, but in 1978 I didn’t quite know how to approach this group. Abraxas, named for an early god-idea, thought of itself as a monastic order in a joking way. They were very earnest and yet jocular, which I know doesn’t mean they weren’t serious, but it seemed like a cover for what I finally decided was -- on the part of some members -- simply arrogance, a wish to know more and be better and keep secrets. They declared themselves “spiritual” but seemed to define that as “interfaith” among the major religious institutions, including those that were Humanist. Vern still writes his religion column for the Kansas City Star. Here’s the most recent column:

http://www.kansascity.com/2011/11/29/3290633/gandhi-and-king-parallel-lives.html

Abraxans loved paraphernalia, vestments, smells and bells, secret names. They were very traditional, but would mix traditions within their prescribed ceremonies by using a reading from Hinduism, or a little ritual from an obscure corner of Christianity. It’s a style that came from the Sixties/Seventies comparative religion studies. Things can get a little confused with such an approach. I remember a time at the UUA general assembly, when some Buddhist priests had been invited to perform their liturgy. The audience, wishing to do the right thing, imitated the priests by standing and sitting or whatever, (paper fans were involved so the people used their programs) as they would have in a Catholic mass. This disconcerted the priests, who came from a tradition where the important people do the stuff while the congregants merely observe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhNtBWFbW0 This ten minute YouTube vid is a little service to view privately. The UU Chalice is there, with a double-circle for the Unitarian-Universalist overlap, the music is gospel and a well-known contemporary song. The sentiments are inclusive, so that the martyrs include Harvey Milk and many others, plus ringing spaces to indicate that there are more and more of them than we know. (I expect there was a gong bowl rather than a bell.) Many religions are mentioned. It’s hard to see how anyone could be offended. But to me, that’s sort of what’s wrong. It’s so generalized that it is -- forgive me RevWik (Erik Walker Wikstrom) -- bland. It’s over-familiar, very Sixties and Seventies.

But then, that’s probably who’s there in that congregation, what they know, what they have used as an operating principle for the last decades, and what helps them keep their bearings. If a person came along and started challenging the idea that love conquers all (which is not very hard to do) they’d be considered a trouble-maker and if there were too much trouble, love would pitch trouble out the door -- and that’s what they SHOULD do. As it says in Robert’s Rules of Order, a person who is not in sympathy with the purpose of the meeting may be excluded.

The Roman Catholic Eucharistic Mass is from the same liturgical patterns as Abraxas except for sticking to prescribed historical words that have been used for thousands of years. In the Sixties and Seventies they too “loosened up” by including guitar players with the organist, unscrewing the pews so they could be put in a circle, and using an English translation of the Latin mass. The result was uproar and residual resentment -- now reversal. Just a few days ago another new English mass was introduced and there was less emotion, but it was NOT comfortable for people who were used to the memorized words rolling out in a litany.

http://www.danielharper.org/resource13.htm#plan Here’s an interesting blog about what is called “Circle Worship” which kind of riffs off of Starhawk. The actual order of service is familiar, not far from what people kiddingly call a “hymn sandwich.” Daniel Harper is a Minister of Religious Education, which has a special concern for children and that shows up in this service. Again that same “nice” sort of “arty” context with a lot of earnest idealism. Familiar, pleasant. Quite like a concert attended with friends.

Such a context can be an oasis for some people but it does not exactly change lives. There’s not likely to be a spiritual breakthrough into other worlds or an epiphany of new understanding. Halfway between the Masonic Lodge and Bahai, but always in a familiar pattern laid down long ago, content wobbles between therapeutic counseling and post-WWII social action. The stream bed is wide in some ways, but the people attracted by tolerance and plurality are not likely to be cutting edge. On the other hand an amazing life-changing experience every Sunday would only wear everyone out. This is the problem of the whole United States “experiment,” as some call it: that it is meant to include everyone but doesn’t always (it DOES sometimes) or dare to power change even when the status quo is cooking the frog.

Abraxas was an admirable experiment in re-invigorating the medieval models by reaching out for world-wide words and practices, something like the New England Transcendentalists realizing what Buddhism and Hinduism had to offer and pulling it into their Christian thinking. But they are never going to kill roosters in church because Santeria might do that. They are never going to use Sun Lodge ordeals in which chest muscles are torn. And they are never going to throw up their hands and speak in tongues and fall on the floor. Worship styles are almost always class-based and so are denominations. Even the more radical experiments like those at UU Leadership School stay within UU culture, elastic as it can sometimes be.

I’m just the kind of bear who wants to go over the hill to see what I can see. Which is why I left the meeting.