THE SCRIVER SAGA

Meadville/Lombard Theological School

On my shelves are a set of two 3-ring binders labeled “The Scriver Seminary Saga.”  They are the collected one-page typed weekly reports to my home church (First Unitarian of Portland, OR) during my four year seminary education, including the summer of Clinicial Pastoral Education in Rockford, IL, and the year as an intern minister in Hartford, Connecticut.  (78-82)  Once I began to serve churches, their newsletters replaced the practice.

Firmly, I believe that anything closely examined over a period of time is worth preserving evidence from to look at again when one’s mind and being has evolved or cooled or caught on fire or whatever other change might happen.  I was very much impressed by a course with an historical bent that discussed a church record in Europe that was kept for centuries but had some mysterious gaps.  The point of the discussion was how powerful the gaps were once a person inquired into their cause:  like, for instance, the Black Death.

But there are no gaps in the Scriver Seminary Saga because in those days (and now) I considered one of my virtues to be consistency and tenacity, partly natural temperament and partly reinforced by marriage to Bob Scriver who also valued those characteristics since he was a musician and the way to Carnegie Hall is practise, practise, practise.  (He didn’t make it past the Montana Historical Society warehouse.)  But I haven’t gone back to see what I said or, as Kenner would put it, what it meant.  I have been discouraged by the collapsing of both seminary and denomination.  But maybe it’s time now.  There's been a gap.

A small part of the reason I left the ministry in 1988 turns out to be related to a big part of the UUA’s problems.  The Unitarian Universalist Association that so attracted me changed into something else and it was — in my eyes — ugly.  I didn’t realize until recently that others shared my opinion, at least in part.  This morning I stumbled upon “Regaining Balance” by Michael Werner, a monograph published by the American Humanist Association which is a kind of sibling to the UUA that is sometimes pulled in and sometimes pushed out.  It’s a history of the roller coaster ride both movements have been on for the last decades as the cultures surged around them. 

I can’t order the booklet at the moment because someone fraudulently used my VISA to order car parts (!) which was evidently detected immediately -- maybe because I only order books and cat food.  A “fraud specialist” called me to explain and to tell me to cut up my invalidated VISA.  A new one is on the way.  I gather that there are plenty of these cases, thus justifying a specialist, and I also gather that most of the fraudsters are amateurs, easily caught.  (Is this a clue to religion?)  

So to get the booklet, I went to the AHA to request a review copy.  All copies are Kindle via the Internet, so if they refuse, the delay will only be the time it takes to mail me a new VISA, not mailing the booklet, but the mail is entirely unpredictable these days.  I don’t know whether AHA will send a review copies since I'm only a blog.

"Starhawk" he's not.

So I read the part of the publication that’s on Google Books and was startled that it was so clear and that I am so much in agreement.  BUT it’s old-fashioned.  (Consider the source.) Or at least "old-school" which sounds a little better.  These days, everybody who is more than ten years behind on the avalanche of technical scientific discoveries is old-fashioned. Even "The Edge" is old-fashioned.  So are Aeon, TED, maybe not Nautil.us.  They are ALL culture bound.  To the dominant culture.  Even Ozy.  Al Jezeera went under.  Indigenous equals invisible.

Anyway, why is it is that the American Humanist Association never takes on the current assault on the humanities?

The shifts (indeed, explosions!) in paradigms they (logically) demand, the radical revision of our cherished 19th century humanist and religious ideas, our tanglefooted integration of contradictions, and the necessary economic/governmental implications, require some working premises to anchor or center ourselves for the sake of sanity.

Many, as always, are finding that anchor to be a life in community, maybe simply growing where they are.  Ecology, IMHO, is the root of harmony.  Happily, the Internet means possible virtual community online.  My additional strategy is a rather ascetic private life (AKA poverty) in order to wring out enough time to think and to find sources beyond sensational media skewings and commodifications.  

Werner’s book is part of a series.  I would like to add to it the implications of the new science that I read about and that are so deeply suggestive.  The findings continue to unroll, so it’s not worth a bound book, but there's enough evidence to write something.

Here’s a partial list of what I mean:

1.  New understanding of how the human body works, what “thought” means in bodily terms, the evolution of the brain, the actions of neurons, the 200 specialized sense cells that are in our brain besides the familiar organs, how memory works (it’s complex), gut thinking, limbic thinking, and the capacity to share thought and feeling simply by looking at each other.  Why consciousness is not the key to survival.

2.  Instead of the bricolage interpretations of pluralistic “equal” religious tolerance, an environmentally informed deep understanding of metaphor drawn from living experience, and the dangers of institutional rigidity and “ownership” if it becomes dogma.

3.  The idea that a print-based culture, “People of the Book”, is better than all others;  how that suppresses the more basic speaking-only small-group cultures; and what iPhones means to them.  What many identify as a fall from grace because of agriculture with its walls and hoarding, it’s priests and lawyers and kings, might really be about the hegemony of writing: record keeping, laws, hierarchies.

4.  The slow realization that there is no such thing as “rationality” and logic, as opposed to deep feeling of the Sacred, because both emerge from the formation of basic theories of life when we are infants, structures of conviction that are nearly impossible to escape.  Both rationality and emotional responsiveness are part of it, always in conversation with each other.

5.  Humans, including the 200 estimated hominin species preceding us, cannot be defined as the end point of evolution or even the apex.  The march of life up the beach to the triumph of progressive humans is a broken metaphor.  Rather there is a surge, a sheet, a symphony of unfolding life that emerges from itself in surprising ways.  Salvation is not going to heaven, it's participating in the furor and ferment that we both receive and pass on.

6.  We need far better ways to balance resources with their uses.  Food, rare metals, energy, water, soil fertility, each other.

7.  People, some on the other side of the planet and some just down the street, are suffering terribly and being actively destroyed.  We cannot address this by making ourselves oblivious.  Instead we need to approach, to question, to sift through the shit, get dirty.

8.  Religious denominations are controlled by demographics and economics, much of it unconscious and propelling evil forces. They can stifle all progress and replace genuine responses and observations with whatever makes them feel good:  inclusion, therapy, economic safety, elitism.  They are not about beliefs.  They should not be controlled by political factions in the larger world.  The killer of both AHA and UUA is arrogance, privilege, entitlement.

My tenacity is still paying off.  Consistency is a lot tougher.  People who have not been keeping up with this new research don’t even understand what I’m talking about.  My seminary has literally been gutted, the library and faculty moved downtown.  But the building, now housing the Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society, IS addressing this new body of inquiry by supporting a series of scholars and lectures.  That’s nice and a good use of the building.

But “nice” is a very suspicious category.  If you think your church is “nice,” you are stuck in the past.  What IS a church anyway, but an institution?

Neubauer Collegium of Society and Culture

ON CONTAINERS: A Response to Daniel Lord Small

The building that was created for Meadville/Lombard UU seminary was sold and not just repurposed but also totally renovated to house the Neubauer Collegium, which supports scholars and other thinkers in their work.  One of the recent thinking guests was  Daniel Lord Smail whose current work is "On Containers."

  

http://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/events/uc/on_containers/

This abstract but “felt” concept is developing at the intersection of “deep time,” which is the effort to understand very very early humans combined with what we are now learning about how the brain forms concepts, metaphors, cultures out of human lives.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6-zVNiItxs   Here is a video of the talk Prof. Smail gave last month in the Meadville/Neubauer building.

The following is a blog post, but also a first response to this powerful but elusive field of study.  Professor Smail’s main formal study is in Mediterranean cultures and history.  But I’m adapting his ideas to what I know about Blackfeet.

___________

The first container was the human hand.

This hand made it possible to create containers from whatever materials were in the environment.

Containers represent wealth because they make it possible to isolate, order, carry and store useful materials such a foodstuffs or fuel.

Containers make “wet cooking” possible by holding the food where it can be boiled even if the container is flammable, so long as it hold water.  Closely watching containers beginning to cook gives us concepts: “will this idea hold water?”  This is called “lattices” of thought -- a structuring that allows progress of ideas.

Cooking causes people to gather to eat, maybe in a shelter, and the bringing and sharing of food reinforces communities and families so that they become containers of relationship and a meaningful unit which can be linked in interaction with others.

Hunter-gatherer uses of containers must be light, convenient for carrying, like sacks made of hides, maybe small enough to attach to belts.   Even a shelter, like a tipi or other kind of tent, will be a “soft container.”  Hard-sided boxes don’t appear until people stay in one place, maybe because of agriculture or possibly because of fishing.  In the Pacific Northwest the people make houses out of easily split cedar boards, so there were boxes there, and the people lived on local fish.  They created canoes that were containers. 

In the Mandan villages, the people make houses out of reinforced earth mounds.  On the prairie along the Rockies, the Blackfeet cut lodgepole pine to make a skeleton on which to arrange a cover of skin.  In marshy land the people may bundle reeds into units of building.

The Blackfeet moved constantly and seasonally according to the sources of food.  When the Camas roots were ready to gather, they camped there to process them: burying them in a hole, building a fire on top and keeping it hot long enough to bake the roots.  People still do that by putting potatoes under a campfire to bake.  Though so far no animals have been observed making containers, some recognize natural containers and will, for instance, put a nut into a stone hole that will allow the shell to be cracked open without rolling when pounded.

baking camas roots

Much more elaborately, Blackfeet used “found” containers, opportunistic formations.  When using the technique called a “piskun” or buffalo jump, the people created a pop-up factory. Part of repeating the use of a certain place was not just the cliff that the animals could be driven over, but a cliff that had on the high side enough of a grassy valley (natural container) for a group of buffalo to linger there, grazing.  On the low side there needed to be another meadow where pits could be dug to throw in bones to cook the fat out of the marrow.  The meat was sliced thin, dried in sun and over smoky fires, sewn into sacks of skin, and stashed in caves high enough in the cliffs to keep the sacks dry.  

All of these strategies depend upon close observation and experience.  This makes human beings containers of knowledge for the others.  In that sense, animals who live in groups store knowledge of place and action.  Often it is a female, like a cow elk, maybe because they are not so likely to be killed young, so she remembers the migrations of the seasons, where the water sources are, and the good places to calve.

A responding use of hands is with tools.  A Plains Indian woman carried a digging stick because so much of the food was roots and rhizomes.  It is an humble object and usually overlooked by young male anthropologists.  This was the valuable object considered sacred because of its meaning at the Sun Ceremonies.  Tools -- in our relentless gender-role binaries -- are for men who must keep hands free for the instruments of hunting and war -- bows and arrows, or atl-atls and their use of containers corresponded:  quivers or small belt sacks -- but because everything was made of local materials, it was simpler to go where the supplies were than to remove them to carry along.  When metal knives, awls, needles arrived through trade, they were small and valuable, so the people of both genders made custom containers and sheaths for them.  For materials like hides, the container was likely to be a parfleche -- a rawhide folded envelope that lent itself to decoration, one of the few square objects in a camp.

parfleche

In places with reeds or straight withy branches, like willows, baskets and woven shapes became containers.  In places with the hard obsidian glassy stones, the people learned flint-knapping, chipping the material into sharp points for knives and arrows and then those could be carried in a sack.  Other special materials that needed containers were paints: red iron ochre, yellow from certain fungi, special charcoals,  or aromatic smudges from dried sweet grass, balsam fir (sweet pine), sage.  No doubt there were medicinal leaves and roots.  The little fossil stones, iniskim,  that look like tiny buffalo were carried along and the advice was to make a little cushion of bison fur to protect them in their bundle.

So, if containers are women’s objects (womb) and tools are men’s objects (like penises) then the two must be brought together in order to create a culture of daily interface with the work of hunting, cooking, and gathering.  Then there are children who can mature.

In the course of this talk called “containers,” Smail presented lists of belongings made for purposes of taxation or inheritance.  On the short lists of poor households, some things were designated as “sad,” which in that area (Tuscany) means something like “tristesse” which means used, worn, shabby, or what in translations from Blackfeet are called “scabby.”  One whole tribal group was called “Scabby Robes” because their tanning was spotty for some reason.  They were a group who did a lot of trading, which meant they were vulnerable to disease from contact.

horsehair bridle

A category of objects that are “restrainers” rather than containers but can do the same work of linking, sorting, keeping at hand, carrying along, is that of the rope.  I once watched a man separate out vegetable fiber by taking tall green weeds between his two hands and vigorously rolling them until the soft green stuff was pulverized and fell away, leaving the tough supporting fibers that could then be twisted together.  Once horses were around, their tail hairs were excellent for fine braiding into beautifully patterned bridles.  Vegetable and sheep fibers are the basis for clothing and linens.  In the Pacific Northwest there was a kind of woolly dog that was kept for its coat, which could be a kind of knitting wool.  That area still produces characteristic sweaters.  

All of these land-based objects, so intimately felt by hands and so constantly in use -- storage is a kind of use -- are a relationship with place that is lost by the kind of urbanization that is made of concrete and plastic.  “Don’t touch,” is a childhood barrier to understanding the world.  

Around “basic” people -- maybe called “paleolithic” -- there is a lot of time in the day to sit doing daily occupations, making and preparing materials, and talking all the while: telling stories, explaining where to find materials, remembering events and who did what, gossiping and criticizing.  In the “anthropocene” the urge is to hurry, to focus on one partial work (one cooks, one sews, one manages money, one makes furniture) and to trust that others are doing their part of the work well.  Relationships are often not intimate, long-term, or in any context but their one duty.

I came to this body of thought (contained) through reflection on designed spiritual experience as in religious ceremonies.  I’ll continue in another post.  It was the subject of my doomed Master’s Thesis at M/L which stalled out in part because this kind of thinking was not done except by Eliade.  But also in part because this new dawn of neurological research had not made a “way in.”  The building itself has become the container that links and preserves my work.