THE U OF CHICAGO WANTED TO KNOW

Sorting through my books in order to discard as many as possible, it becomes clear that my seminary education is almost thirty years old.  I’m gob-smacked.  During the fourth year I was working as a transcriber for the U of Chicago Law School, an entirely different sort of people than the Div School crowd in two different ways.  The professors (among them Scalia, Zimring and Sunstein — Obama wasn’t there yet) were brilliant (just ask them) and part of the elite national establishment.  The support staff were female, middle-class, more dutiful than competitive.  Some were black.  At least one loved Sting.

Computers were barely coming into use.  (This was 1982.)  The professors were just learning by closing their office doors and playing “asteroids”.  The computers were actually work stations with a mainframe in the basement somewhere.  Among the many things computers and the Internet just then began to transform (you might not realize this) was the ability to work with ancient texts, since fragments could be pieced together onscreen, vocabularies in various languages could be kept at hand, and the fear of destroying something priceless, owned by people who wanted to prevent access, was much less.  This meant a leap in knowledge about recorded antiquity.

I’m reading “The Silk Roads: A New History of the World” by Peter Frankopan, a documented account of how the Eurasian continent was transformed by trade and travel which brought together contrasting cultures, fed and shaped empires, and carried exotic luxuries everywhere as indexes of success and power.  This is a much earlier religious account than Karen Armstrong’s “Axial Age” when today’s major religious institutions were founded and began to struggle with nations.  “The Silk Roads” — at least as far as I’ve read — is about tribes who still locate the Sacred on the closest mountain and are just beginning to consolidate under major personalities, a pattern that is related to monotheism and intolerance.  The main hint of this that I got in seminary was the suggestion that the New Testament and the message of Jesus came about because he spent time in the East learning Buddhism.

Somewhere (maybe even on my shelves) are books that compare the cultural development of the Eurasian continent to that of the Americas.  There are always hints and mostly the discussion comes down to geology, the existence and placement of mountain ranges and major rivers, which are the result of plate tectonics and drive extreme weather.  There were no Silk Roads because of the Rockies.  There was no Mediterranean basin but instead the Mississippi Valley.  There were major civilizations, as early and elaborate as Egypt, but they were destroyed by drought — just as they were prevented in Australia by fire.  This is Jared Diamond’s kind of thinking and I find it revelatory, though some people get so angry that one person wrote an academic article entitled “Fuck Jared Diamond.”  Diamond does not address written culture, but rather the underlying ecology.

The people who resist plate tectonic theories of history want to believe in their elitism, the idea that Roman and Greek culture are the source of science, enlightenment, and progress and justify every privilege of being white, male, Euro-rooted and technologically dominant.  Unfortunately, many of the people who believe in this privilege and superiority are not good examples of it, being themselves less educated, less compassionate, less politically adept.  They brag of the wardrobe but stand in the marketplace naked, only accessing a tiny part of it on their handhelds.  They are totally unaware of what they don’t know and claim it doesn’t exist.

The upshot of addressing all this with my decades-old education is that the denominationally defined classes I took are obsolete, the U of Chicago Law School social classes have gone to the top but toppled over, and the U of Chicago Div School principles of inquiry are now central, though their confidence is shaken.  I just answered another one of those abominable questionnaires, half-market research and half-how-ya-doin’?  The bottom line for them is mostly “why aren’t you sending more money since you’re an alumn.  How are humanities to survive if all the money is going to science and commerce?”

Of course my answers didn’t come close to fitting the questions so I had to write a little essay.  Here it is:  how my Silk Roads always lead back to the grasslands and never to the cities, as was expected by the university.  Part of the answer is that now the biggest city of all is the Internet and it is world-wide.   (This is somewhat edited.)

U of C Law School

I came to seminary late in life through the Unitarian movement (First Unitarian of Portland).  I turned forty while I was at seminary so my classmates rang the bell at First Unitarian of Chicago forty times.  They were red-faced and puffing by the end.  We were technically Meadville/Lombard students, meant to satisfy a trust requirement at the Div School that a certain percentage be preparing for ministry.  My first ministry was in Montana, circuit-riding among four fellowships in Bozeman, Missoula, Great Falls and Helena for three years.  I lived in a Ford F150 van.  

Then I took an interim ministry across the lake from Seattle, and next went to Saskatoon for two years.  I made almost no money at any point.  Though Seattle loved my message they were prevented from hiring me because of interim protocol.  Saskatoon was not a good match and I left the ministry.

. . .

Now I barely have enough SSI and pension to survive, partly because of low-pay jobs, partly because my marriage in the Sixties meant not paying SS during that time, and then eight years total of being a student also meant no SS contribution.  The pension is from the City of Portland: $200 a month.

But because of the internet, the availability of low-cost second-hand books, and my U of Chicago Div School education which was about METHOD more than content, I’m as happy as Br’er Rabbit in the briar patch.

U of C Div School

. .

For the last decade or so, parallel to blogging, I was co-writing with Tim Barrus . . . His lifework has been special education and since the coming of AIDS, special pediatric care for boys who are HIV-positive, including those who have accompanying problems such as emotional trauma.  Some, like himself, struggle with avascular necrosis (bone death) and many have recurring lung infections.  Some were needle drug users and many did sexwork as pre-adolescents as a way of survival because of abandonment and abuse.

My input, unpaid, was exploring ways of understanding all this.  Christian ideas worried them.  They expected me to hate them though I’d never met them.  Some had been abused and infected by priests — this is an international group so some of the concerns overlap with the systemic problems in the Irish and British churches as well as American . . .

Unitarian Universalists are proud of their principles, but they are based on the Enlightenment.  Now we are in Post-Enlightenment times.  The “principles” are just too old-fashioned and peacefully academic for teens . . . in search of something solid.  Anyway, congregations and denominations are sociologically homogenous and UU’s are educated upper middle class.  Until recently, they assumed prosperity.

What do you say to a boy who was surviving behind a downtown dumpster by sucking cock at five bucks a pop?  What does God portrayed as a powerful old man mean to a boy who has been taken as a toy for political leaders onto yachts for parties that can end with tossing a boy overboard?  These are not things that preoccupy Div School professors.  Most people have no idea. . . .

Recently two dawning thought systems have influenced me.  One is our post-taxonomizing understanding of existence: how interwoven we are at the electrochemical molecular level and how much environment shapes life, which is close to the heart of evolution.  The other is the frankly evolving Deep Time (pre-literate, recorded in geology and biology) understanding of what it is to be human.  The neurological fMRI research is especially fascinating because the boys often have organic anomalies created by abuse and malnutrition.  But traditional psychotherapy is also effective if it is with someone who has “been there/done that” in contrast to the “nice lady” convention of social work.

These ideas merge into what I’m reading about as a kind of scientific mysticism — they say that congregations are actually forming in some places with the right population.  Deep space explorations provide images more powerful than any theism.  So I am pursuing a theory that is not about salvation as a perfected version of what “is,” but rather the idea of inclusion at every level.  Once you have happened, you are eternally in time as both an effect and a cause.  It’s the social level that’s tough.  No one wants bad boys, except tricks.

. . . I’m writing a theory of worship design that responds to my change in theological thinking. (It’s no longer theology since there’s no theos.)  It is actually an extension of the thesis I started at Meadville/Lombard.

The Div School was a terrific place, but I was a cat attending a picnic — mostly a watcher.  The work that I wanted and needed was sometimes just outside the curriculum:  Eliade, Lakoff and Johnson, Victor Turner, Gendlin, Csikszentmihalyi  — all that fabulous new thought was synthesizing right then about what I had learned earlier about Stanislavski’s method, Blackfeet concepts, and a kind of poetry of being (natural history).  I write all day every day and think constantly about all this, but there’s no money in it.  If I stop writing and try to promote or publish, I will short-circuit where I may be able to go with it in the future.  Born in 1939, I feel the pressure.

Blogging is what works.  From my keyboard to the eyes of the world.  I talk about the U of Chicago Div school all the time.  As far as I’m concerned, Meadville/Lombard is dead, merely a correspondence school for nice people.  I feel as though I took difficult jobs that repaid them for their very real monetary investment in my education.  I read Sightings and Criterion and the alumni mags, but there is no way for me to send money and my estate will be worthless.  But they tell me that anything that’s blogged to the internet is eternal.  Maybe.

LIBERAL CORRUPTION OF SPIRITUALITY

Montreal demonstrations against Quebec Liberals raising tuition.

So if spirituality is corrupted and prevented by rightwing Mancheism forcing everything into good/bad, thumbsup/thumbsdown, light/dark boxes, excuses for stigma and the relentless need for control, what are the equal opportunities for corruption from the left hand side of the culture: the liberals and do-gooders.  A moment of googling and I can make a list.  I’m not even counting mommieism.

1.  Spirituality becomes causes and causes mean institutions, marches and endless money raising.  Competitions, awards, speakers.  They have so much fun, they forget the issue.

2.  It’s always a great opportunity to be “holier than thou.”  Personal leadership often means personal arrogance.

3.  Spirituality sells, esp. if it’s from some anthropological “other” source like the Native Americans, the Tibetan Buddhists, ancient Chinese ideograms, etc.  Dream catchers, prayer wheels, little statues of Buddha or Ho-Ti.   Vids full of water, clouds and trees.

4.  Lots of things to do:  Classes, therapies, Tai Chi in the park, yoga at home, meditation.  Travel to exotic places.  (Tip: spirituality is never about things to do.)

5.  Discounting and ignoring the daily realities of life that need tending, all the while claiming to “rise above” all that dish-washing and bill-paying.  (No wonder there's nothing to do.)

6.  The always dependable short-cut through drugs.  (Alcohol works, but it’s a little downscale.  No liberal would be caught "huffing," would they?)

7.  Elitism.

All this is particularly obvious when it comes to the environment.  For many people “nature mysticism” almost defines spirituality and they will tell you solemnly that the mountains are their church.  But in the next breath they are wanting to pass laws about wilderness, march to preserve the plants and animals in the state they would like (lots of big predators, no game hunting, save every fish species), and make idols of sun phenomena like rising, setting, rainbows, sun dogs.  Pretty soon there’s a business conducting groups of worshipful people to watch wolf packs slip through the trees or whales make a big splash.

This is not spirituality.  Spirituality is when you aren’t apart from anything, observing it, but rather a shift of one’s internal consciousness so that you are participating, not even that -- in fact, you’re not even you anymore.  The boundary is gone.  You are being everything.

Nail down those boundaries.

Do I believe that?  Well -- I admit it’s more of a working premise than a developed way of life.  My boundaries are pretty tough and thick.  But I’ve had glimpses and they were vivid enough to make me work towards understanding.  I’m pretty sure that if there’s a rule, an institution, a course to take, a march, or any hint of bureaucracy -- that’s not spiritual.  I look at ads for books about “deep ecology,” “deep time,” despair work and so on, all promoted by attractive wise old women, and I think, “Wow, I’d better read that book,” but when I get them they are empty.  Full of the obvious.  The works of the entitled.  They talk about the rage and trauma, but it’s not really about them, even when they claim it causes them to have PTSD.  They are living nice lives, blameless, or they wouldn't be able to find a publisher.  I always think of that gaunt Somali woman with the dying baby, walking barefoot for miles on cracked hardpan in search of water.  Her cultural advantages are woven fabric, uncut, tied as a garment, and an old tin or plastic container for the water.  She might know a song.

Spiritually liberal folks like green things, they don’t like nuclear power, they ignore most science and math, they love Buddhism in its more theoretical aspects -- not detachment -- and they don’t climb mountains.  That’s for guys.  These spiritual women prefer the Elm Dance or the Spiral Dance and will give careful detailed instructions about how to do it properly.  They compose poems and songs.  They claim and dominate spirituality and it is all about humans.  Except other people's babies.  Other people should not have babies.  If they aren't raised properly with every advantage, who knows what they might do?

I go to a website about “simple living” and it announces a meeting at Starbucks to discuss what rewards and punishments might force corporations to make the world a better place -- meaning more like what they want it to be.  They worry about bees and arctic ice and they wear really elegant handmade jewelry.

Deep spirituality -- the deepest of any deep thing, the abyss -- is not about human beings.  There is an ancient approach called “kenosis” that is a dark vein through most major schools of thought, including all the sciences.  It means empty.  Nothing.  No meaning, no matter.  It’s not comforting nor is it meant to be.  It may require acceptance.

None of this means you’re off the hook for daily functioning.  You still need to do it all and do it as well as you can.  It doesn’t mean you should start a mail-order business about emptiness.  Spirituality means lots of don’t and doesn’t.  Not doing.

I don’t know what comes next.  In terms of brain development, I think what counts as evolution now is the brain/body/society complex interacting altogether as a whole, but I think it’s intriguing that new sensitivity and capacity seems to be arriving through single cells, the spindle cells.  Spindle neurons, also called “von Economo neurons” (VENs).  Will the next step after the bulging of the forehead to make room for the prefrontal cortex be the extension of antennae to escape the bony skull?  That’s sci-fi.  So far.

Ven spindle cell

In more practical terms, how do we get people to use the potentials they already have?  How do we grow into a culture that doesn’t encourage blows to the head?  (Ours DOES.  Also between men’s legs.  If I were a sneering feminist I might say "their second brain.")  I suspect a lot of people are being born without having that most recent mutation of VENs.  But it interests me that so much recent change is not the result of a whole new organ -- just more individual cell specialization in the society of collaborating cells that is a human body.  Fractal theory would suggest that society is the same: single human beings slowly accumulating change rather than institutions having a committee meeting and recording the ideal on newsprint taped to the wall.

As I sort all these stacks of paper, VERY slowly, I come across useful documents.  Just now, “Mapping a field: Why and How to Study Spirituality” by Courtney Bender and Omar McRoberts, Co-chairs of the Working Group on Spirituality, Political Engagement, and Public Life at the Social Service Research Council.  It’s an attempt at capturing the definition, the history, the political use of the concept of spirituality in various times and places, including a quick dip at magic, all that looking for ghosts in the spiritualist Eastern US.  They point out a sequence of trendy influences:  the Transcendentalists -- esp. Emerson -- trying to pull Hindu and Buddhist thought into their philosophy;  then the mystical wilderness (Muir) and the use of Native American thought (or what was thought to be NA thought); lately our love affair with love and the idea of orgasmic/drug-high access to transcendence; and now the engagement with theories of the cosmos and the ravishing telescopic views of the universe -- all supposedly spiritual sources and powerful enough to give rise to a new religious category:  the “nones,”  the people who declare they belong to no religion, attend no church, but consider themselves to be spiritual.

Maybe they just want to say that they are virtuous (love God and all that) but they do NOT want to be on a committee or attend potlucks or -- least of all -- pledge.  What relationship does this have to the Asian disconnect between being “spiritual” and undertaking social action, a relationship that is strong (almost obligatory) in the U.S.?  Mother Theresa just accepts suffering; Martin Luther King Jr. does not. 

Possibly my idiosyncratic insistence that the spiritual is an abyss, an indescribable depth not at all human, much less individual, is not that different from the Islamic refusal to picture God, to leave that metaphor totally undefined.  But Bender and McRoberts suggest that if only they had access to the social media evidence --  they might be able to capture a reliable description of the nones.  Maybe they should sit down for a talk with Ogi Ogdas and Sai Gaddam to come up with a “billion inspiring thoughts” about how to capture this information.  But no one goes to internet “spiritual sites” the way they go to sex sites -- do they?

Steve Jobs: "enlightened but cruel."