spiritual genealogy

historical jesus

i haven't posted here for ages, but there is just so much being published now on the historical Jesus that I want to share.  I love anything that makes Jesus more real for me.

"Rabbi Jesus," "Rabbi Paul" and "Mary Magdalene" by Bruce Chilton make all this research eminently readable for the non-scholar, opening up a fascinating world for the christian and non-christian reader alike.

Highly recommend!

redirection

This weblog is no longer active.  If you'd like to read more about the spiritual genealogy of me and my friends, please check out my new weblog, not native fruit.

imagination & its (unacknowledged) place in religion

july 10, 2005

"my eyes look towards the hills, from whence my help comes"

when i studied theology, i learned that the early authors of the bible saw thunder and lightening on the mountain tops and believed that the life-giving rains were God's blessing to them.  Today, religious people quote this passage to express their sense of dependence on God in their lives.  But do they literally believe that God lives in the hills?  No.  It's a figure of speech.  It's a spur to the imagination.  It reminds us to 'look up.' In my more religious days I would definitely have interpreted that passage as meaning that when I needed spiritual help, for example, if I needed more courage or more faith or more love, I would have 'looked up' - to my higher nature, to the indwelling Holy Spirit, often pictured as a dove or as a breeze, both of which are celestial images associated with the sky.  I would have 'looked up' to 'God in heaven.'  When i was a child, and I prayed, i directed my energy to the third eye point, where a certain very positive energy seemed to reside.  Later, I would learn more about that in the kundalini tradition, with its mind-body maps.

my point is that religious language is the language of the imagination.  it deals in images: God is imaged as Father, as Mother, as Savior, as Pure Truth, as the Oneness of Everything (some of these images are at the bare edge of conceptualization.)  Paula, of Paula's House of Toast, wonders about applying the phrase 'the body of Christ' to a robin red-breast.  But in some theological traditions, all of nature is the incarnation of God, and someone like Jesus is the special exemplar of that truth.  (All of nature suffers, as did Christ - another parallel with the 'body of Christ' notion.)  In fact, when I was a little girl in a predominently Catholic neighborhood, the robin red-breast was considered to be a 'sign' or 'reminder' of Christ's passion,  because the robin made his appearance at the beginning of Lent, the church season leading up to the Passion of Christ (ie his suffering and death). 

I believe that religion is really all about imagination, personal improvement, and social structure.  I think the part about religion being about imagination causes confusion in many minds because...

...we think the imagination has to do with what is not real.  There are times when that distinction is useful, as for example, when we are trying to find out if someone only phantasized about robbing the vicarage, versus actually doing it.  But what gets lost in that distinction is something that cats like Augustine and Wallace Stevens seemed to know: that the imagination links us up to some deep stratum of truth.  Imagination links us with what is real. 

This is why, for people like me, saying that hoary bible stories are 'myths' does not make them less 'true.'  They are just not literally true.  Take, for example, the story of Noah's

Ark.

  There are people trying to scientifically prove that the Great Flood really happened.  Fine.  Maybe it did.  But it doesn't matter to me, because for me, whether there was a flood or not, a Noah or not, an ark or not, the story is still true: life is something precious that is floating in an ark (the earth) through an environment (outer space) that is fundamentally antithetical to it.  The Genesis Creation story really rocks on this level of interpretation.

You might think all of this goes without saying.  Perhaps you watched Joseph Campbell's 'The Power of Myth' years ago on PBS.  This is old stuff.  But I don't think so.  There are, apparently, lots of people who still believe that their religions are literally true.  This prevents them from seeing the truth in other people's religions.  This is very dangerous, because it brings us back to those hideous times and places when people actually killed each other over religion: actually, this is the present-day situation in many parts of the world. 

We all image God differently.  That's clear, even within religions.  We dream of ideals like peace, love, heaven, harmony, equanimity, etcetera, partly because we have experienced these things at different moments in our lives.  Our memories keep those moments alive in our imaginations, and we hope they'll guide us to find them again in our day-to-day lives, in the contexts of our families, our work-lives, our larger social realities.  So we go to our church, or temple, or mosque, and repeat 'magical incantations,' known as 'prayers,' such as 'may all beings be happy,' or 'forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,' and many other such prayers in the hope that these things will happen...again, ...or for the first time. 

These prayers are not different in intent whether they are uttered in English, Arabic, Sanskrit, Pali, Hebrew, Malayalam or Athabaskan.  Why can't we all pray together? 

                                                                        *

Here's a good example from 'The Zen Works of Stonehouse' (p.87):

See your nature become a buddha there is no other buddha
the ancients said it best
then you grab but nothing is there
don't be misled by words
despite the million kinds of fiction
all lead back to a single truth
this old monk is writing it down

chinese characters - a picture's worth a thousand words

I just got back from Muir Beach with my friend Elizabeth (see more here). We found all these incredible 'designer' mussel shells with markings like butterflies!  Do you see the teal spot in the upper portions of both shells?



Anyway, these shells have got me thinking about patterns, communication, and written language.  I'm hardly a 'scholar' in any of these areas, but I've always felt a certain fascination with the patterns in nature, and the fact that both the ancient europeans and the ancient chinese thought you could see words (messages) in the shape of a twig (runes) or the way a few sticks crossed each other and a leaf (characters).  Wallace Stevens, my favorite poet as you know if you've been paying attention, felt that nature communicates with us.  See a great comment on this by 'Sammy' on my Dao of Wallace Stevens blog. 

I got started on this fixation when I was around twelve, when an older friend gave me a book on the history of the alphabet, and I saw that the letter A was derived from the shape of the head of an ox.  Later I fell in love with art, and even with the tarot cards because I found the pictures were so mysterious and evocative. Now I'm a film junky for the same reason.

When I studied oriental medicine, prior to my licensing as an acupuncturist, I fell in love with the pictures in the chinese characters I was learning, mostly for the names of the herbs.  I've decided I'm going to add the characters that are currently fascinating me to my blog, placing them here and there as the mood takes me. 

So far I only have two to share: Huang, 'yellow', which consists, from top down of the radical for cao, 'grass or grain', the character for field (which looks like four boxes), and at the bottom the radical for 'eight', ba, which also means 'many.'  So the charcter for yellow is basically a picture of endless fields of grain, something that can be seen in Pennsylvania, and Illinois and Nebraska! 'Yellow,' I suppose like 'gold' has overtones of 'prosperity, abundance,' to it, perhaps because it is the color of the sun.  So many of our forebears were sun-worshippers.  I've tinted this one just a little bit green, to get that color of new grass, that yellow-green shade.

The other character I'm prepared to share right now is 'Ren,' which is translated as Love in Chinese Characters, by Dr. L. Wieger, S.J.  The Jesuits have a long and interesting relationship with China, strangely enough.  I can't help but wonder if he colors everything he writes with christian connotations.  Anyway, he writes that 'Ren', which consists of the radical for 'man' (on the left) and the radical for 'two' (the double dashes, like an equal-sign) is "the fundamental virtue of confuciansim, which the Shou Wen defines as to love each other.  The benevolance that must link each man to his neighbor; two, mutual, reciprocal." (p.28)

More mussel shells:

Clear colors:

Iridescence

blue mountains of pennsylvania

I began my 'dao of wallace stevens' blog around ten months ago, wondering just what is the basis of my personal draw towards Wallace Stevens?  I've discovered all sorts of parallels so far.  First, we're both from southeastern Pennsylvania.  My mother's people originated somewhere just north of Reading.  The towns where my relatives still lived when I was a child were Weissport, Tuscarora, Tamaqua, Pottsville and Port Carbon.  My mother and grandmother seemed to feel that Berks County was paradise on earth, and apparently WS would agree, according to Thomas Lombardi's book, Wallace Stevens and the Pennsylvania Keystone. 

Reading Lombardi's quotations of Stevens' letters, probable PA poems, diary entries, etcetera, just brings back the magic of my own growing up in Pennsylvania:  playing along the Wissahickon Creek, watching lightening bugs come out at night, listening to the crickets, and interacting with all the rest of the prolific bug-life of southwestern PA.  Following the meandering track of Germantown Avenue, and later, exploring the roads out through Montgomery and Bucks County, and on up along the Skuylkill River to 'up-state.'  I just LOVED it up there; there was so much feeling and atmosphere to those old towns and places.  They had a character all their own, and that character felt warm and serious and very much a part of its surrounding nature.  For example, the four seasons were very pronounced in se pennsylvania.  I took it all for granted as a child, and fell in love with it consciously in my twenties, but, like Elsie Moll, fell in love with another person and moved away.  But southeastern Pennsylvania still 'feels right' to me, whenever I return 'home.'  I can relate to Stevens' feelings on that score, and also to the almost inevitable sense of separation from all of that warmth of 'home' that we both feel as self-imposed exiles, so to say.

I remember the Pennsylvania 'blue' laws very well.  Every Sunday, absolutely everything was closed, by law.  There was an incredible quiet that settled over everyone and everything.  Even the children had to 'play quietly.'  Like the Stevens' family, we would read on those quiet Sundays.  But I'm sure that those Sundays with their 'Sunday blue laws,' set the tone for my love of silence and contemplation now.  I look back on those Sundays as some of my most formative moments.  There was a lot of just plain 'be-ing' during those long empty Sundays, just being present to yourself and present to whatever was around you: plants, the sky, certain features of the neighborhood: the various front porches and steps.  We had to wear our good clothes all day on Sundays, so right there, that cut down on playing.   And on certain Sundays, for instance Easter, there was just no playing allowed, or even reading.  I assumed we were supposed to be praying, or at least, being aware that it was Easter, the most sacred day of the year.  maybe I didn't 'assume', most likely my mother told me so!

Like Wallace Stevens, I grew up with a deeply held and practiced faith, shared by my family and community, but, due to cultural influences (not as enlightened as Harvard's in Stevens' day), I reasoned my way out of my faith, came back to it, and then reasoned myself into a position on faith that was basically not religious anymore.  Hence, I can sympathize with the possibility of his 'missing' some dimension of shared spiritual life after that.  Not that we are really sharing it, but rather there is the strong illusion that we share it.  He probably still had the feeling-experience, or felt, at times, its attempts to erupt from within, which can manifest as a nostalgic feeling, or as is often noted of Stevens, a 'loneliness.'  The trouble is where to relate the feeling.  Whether to relate it to oneself, or to 'the world,' or to 'God.'  In the orient these are all valid spiritual options, but in the Christian West there is only one option: God; in the post-20th-century-Enlightenment (surely there is some name for that period around the turn of the last century up into the 20's and 30's), there are only two: self and world.  I believe Wallace Stevens played around with all three in his poetry.  He was trying them all on, in different combinations.  But we'll get into all of that more further along in the blog. 

Pennsylvania is beautiful, and used to hold a particular charm that may be related to its earliest people, its native peoples, and those first German (plain people, Pennsylvania Dutch) and French (Huguenot) and English (Quaker) settlers who intermarried with them, and who set up their religious communities among the Blue Mountains.  I've known Pennsylvanians who loved southeastern Pennsylvania passionately (my husband's relatives, for instance), and that passion was always partially spiritual, partially earthly.  Perhaps this is why I resonate so completely with so much of Stevens' imagery.  I know it from the inside, from my own experience as a Pennsylvanian, and a lover of Pennsylvania. 

Stevens once wrote in a letter to Elsie, "Reading is too, too common and so set in its ways.  I cast my shoes at it and empty my wash-pot upon it.  But blessed be its name."  Perhaps after all Pennsylvania is not like any other place on earth, as we believed during the years of our youthful ignorance.  It always seemed like somewhere else must be better.  But just maybe, at least as far as the east coast is concerned, it is the best of all possible worlds, sharing something with both the luxuriant and lethargic south and the industrious and austere north.   As Lombardi writes, "the spring that arrives early reminds one of a Pennsylvania greening, with its gentle, opulent countryside, not of New England's, where spring is brief and advances late, where the countryside is more niggardly in its yield of crops and woodland vegetation.  The observation that Pennsylvania is 'a milder and softer New England' was in decades past articulated by William Dean Howells.  That 'milder' countryside materializes in 'The Comedian's' following lines:

The natives of the rain are rainy men.
Although they paint effulgent, azure lakes,
And April hillsides wooded white and pink
Their azure has a cloudy edge, their white
And pink, the water bright that dogwood bears.

The lakes, the hillsides, the dogwoods could be realities nearly anywhere in America's Northeast, but I suspect that the landscape drawn here depicts Pennsylvania."  (p.67)

Reading this book is just taking me back to the Pennsylvania I loved passionately as a girl and young woman.  And back to my relatives: my grandfather and his people were Quakers; my husband's forbears, Pennsylvania Dutch and Huguenot, with a dash of the old time people, the Lenape, as well.  We may have had a dash of the Susquehanna, as well.  I love to read the names of the old towns: Tuckerton, Schwenksville, Mount Penn, Mount Pleasant, Wyomissing.  It just conjures up an old and complete world.  It makes me feel so homesick! 

I think I understand Elsie in a way that most of the critics I've read so far, with the exception of Lombardi, don't.  And also the structure of the family.  For example, when I read Stevens' father's letters to him at Harvard, I don't hear them as harsh and domineering.  Yes, he was definitely telling his son what's what, but with a gentle good humor.  There is an ease and openness in communication among the old-time Pennsylvanians that I knew personally.  Of course, I can't speak for everyone.  But a lot of good humor, a sort of self-effacing quality that keeps everyone relaxed and open.  Nobody put on 'airs,' so everyone could be gentle and kind of folksy.  Not a lot of expectation, especially among the women.  I can imagine Wallace and Elsie, at least in their early years, talking quietly about many things, but not bothering to talk about literary criticism, or linguistic policies.  No, it would be enough to enjoy life together, meaning the simple pleasures of the domestic scene, for example gardening and good eating, and separately to engage their own interests. 

I've read that Stevens kept a conoisseur's appetite and that Elsie catered to his palate.  But no less humble a gentleman than my grandfather, who held a succession of jobs including milkman and mounted Fairmount Park Guard, favored Chinese foods, and delicacies such as sweetbreads and mountain oysters, and my grandmother, an even humbler soul, prepared these for him with a complete formal table setting every night.  They were of Wallace and Elsie's generation, my grandfather being born in 1881 and my grandmother in 1884. 

So, maybe I'm off the mark, but I think I may have some 'insider' inklings into Stevens' and his scene.  I look forward to further studies to discover whether this holds true or not.

school of christianity

I like to think of religions as schools, because the potential is there to learn a lot.  Also, like schools, some are better at passing along valuable information than others.

Today is Good Friday and also the Feast of the Annunciation, the day the Virgin Mary was visited by an angel and heard that she was to become the Mother of God. One of the things I learned at the school of Christianity that I was fortunate enough to attend, is that the Angel announces to each one of us that God is to be born within us. God is present within us like an egg. Once fertilized, our God-nature becomes gradually more and more apparent, at first appearing like a child and at last maturing into a fully grown human being. 

I attended several schools of Christianity during my earlier life.  The first one was Roman Catholicism in the 1950’s, and the emphasis there seemed to be on rules and social behaviors.  There were all sorts of competitions going on among groups and families in our community that revolved around church.  I didn’t get much out of that.  I’ve heard it said that religion exists to help society, but spirituality is about the individual.  As a child I was fortunate enough to experience the gift of spirituality, even in the context of this first school of christianity.  The annunciation (above) pictures what I personally got out of that first school: the sense that I could go within and meet God, the notion that prayer and contemplation were a valuable part of life.

My next school of Christianity centered on love, forgiveness and healing.  It was a school of reconciliation, for people who needed to forgive and be forgiven, for people who needed to heal.  It was right after the Vietnam War, the drug explosion, and the destabilization of society by the civil rights movement, so there was a lot of pain around.  Our group was especially focused on the Holy Spirit as guide and teacher and source of personal transformation.  Of course, there were members of our group who felt that people needed to comply with formulaic belief statements in order to be christians, but it didn’t take me long to see that those statements were not at all important, and what mattered was the intentions in the heart.  If a formula expressed how you really felt, fine, but I learned the difference.  Spiritual experience became the most important thing to me, because it seemed to me that everything we needed to learn, and to see, comes from within, if we can just listen attentively.  As for personal transformation, I saw our intent as bringing to us what we needed for changing ourselves, for becoming more who we really were, uniquely ourselves, designed by a loving God. 

The third school of Christianity I attended was centered on the suffering of Christ.  My earlier, first school focused on this a lot too, but in a different way.  The first school saw the suffering of Christ as God’s way of atonement.  But the third school saw Christ’s suffering as having something to say about our suffering, and the transformation that could come out of it.  This was the school of ‘a seed falls into the ground so that new life can spring up.’  This school helped people deal with the (perceived) failures of their lives.  Our American culture and society is very much centered on the concepts of success and prosperity.  But clearly not everyone is enjoying those, and even when we do, it isn’t necessarily going to last forever.  We are all going to have to face our eventual demise.  This particular school of Christianity is very compassionate, and wants to help us walk through ‘the valley of the shadow of death.’ 

It feels appropriate to review my schooling in Christianity on Easter Sunday. To express my appreciation.  I’ve moved on now to a university that seems like the perfect continuation of my education.  Within this university there is the vast and varied school of Hinduism, for one thing.  But my present school seems to have room for the whole world, so I won’t try to limit it with a name.  It’s Amma’s School, and Amma means Mother, so maybe her school is the mother of all kinds of learning.  It seems to be that for me.  I want to express my appreciation for all the wonderful schools of life and religion I've attended.

Wishing you Easter Blessings!  With Love, Karen

insomnia, haiku & r.h. blyth

The other night, after watching a disturbing film, I had trouble falling asleep, and took out my volume of r.h. blyth’s haiku, and read the section on peonies. 

When I was fifteen years old, a sophomore in high school, I had one of those magical experiences commonly associated with youth, but which really may have something more to do with adulthood.  I had only recently begun going ‘downtown’ with my friends, and on one such outing, I stepped into a shop, and felt as if I’d entered another world.  That world was India.  The very plain and undecorated shop was run by Indians (at that time, the mid-nineteen sixties, and before the Maharishi had come on the stage, a true novelty in the USA), and was full of bins of silvery bangles, bundles of incense, stacks of insect-spotted deity pictures, small woven items, incense burners and jingling bells of every conceivable size. 

My friends were unimpressed, but I returned there often, just to be in the atmosphere of the shop, which made me feel a way that nothing else did.  I felt so comfortable there, so relaxed, so myself.  There was a light and a softness I experienced in that shop that I hadn’t previously known I craved.  it was an epiphany of an undefined kind, something felt and smelt, but gave me the sense of having come home, having found some integral part of myself.

On that first visit, I bought a couple of bells, and perhaps some incense.

After a few visits, I discovered a small room off to the side of the shop, dedicated to what we used to call ‘the far east’; primarily Japan.  On the shelves in that room, I found the 4 volumes of Haiku by R.H. Blyth, nestled in their yellow, illustrated covers. Taking those volumes into my hands for the first time had all the feeling of a sacred moment.  As I opened the pages and saw the dainty Japanese script, and read the short verses, it was as if the pages exhaled a delicacy and beauty I had never known.  I’d never heard or seen the word ‘haiku’ before, and it was like finding some kind of mythical treasure.  There was a sense that perhaps after all, everything could turn out all right, if discoveries like this awaited me in the world. 

I saved for months to buy the four volumes.  I managed to hang onto two of them all these years, and gave one to a fellow haiku enthusiast a number of years ago.  I still have volume 3 Summer-Autumn.  Here are a few excerpts from the section on peonies, with commentary by R.H. Blyth:

*     *     *

The peonies do not allow

The rain-clouds a hundred leagues round

To approach them.

Buson

This is a fancy, but there is so much imagination put into it that it expresses a truth which the fancy disengages from the mere scientific fact.  That is to say, the rain-clouds and the peonies are not connected, ‘really,’ as we say.  The fancy supposes that the peonies have the power to prevent the rain-clouds from approaching.  The imagination, seizing on the colour and size of the peonies with the utmost violence, and regarding with defiant eye the encircling banks of thunder clouds piled up on the horizon, perceives that the peonies and the clouds are connected in some mysterious way; that they stand opposed as enemies.

*     *      *

The stamens and pistil

Of the peony gush out

Into the sunlight.

Taigi

From the pale red petal of the (herbaceous) peony the golden stamens and pistil burst out into the bright sunlight.  In this verse we are made to feel a power and glory of the peony which has no reference to that of man.

*     *     *

The garden is dark

In the night, and quiet

The peony.

Buson

In the original, ‘night’ is put in the objective case with wo, and this faintly suggests a causal relation of quietness between the peony and the night.

*     *     *

Dusk on the flower

Of the white peony,

That embraces the moon.

Gyodai

The whiteness of the flower seems to draw to itself all the pallor of the moon.

*      *      *

To the candle,

The peony

Is as still as death.

Kyoruku

The candle burns motionless; its soul of fire does not quiver.  The peony, too, not to be outdone, glows immovable, overpowering the candle with its fervent blooming.  They are as quiet as the grave, in their burning life.

mlk day, the past remembered

In their own quiet, unassuming way, my parents were integrationists, back in the '50's, and we lived in a part of town that was studied by sociologists as a model of integration.  It didn't seem very integrated to me, but maybe at the time, it was more integrated than most places.  Black people were certainly a part of my everyday life.  We shopped together, went to school together, took public transportation together.  But there was always a quiet, unspoken divide. 

Until I met Karen Dempsey, the daughter of NAACP chapter leaders in our area.  I enjoyed playing with the black children at a private summer school program for gifted students that we all attended on scholarships, as 'representatives of the community.'  I told her once in casual conversation that I believed in integration, and after that, we used to walk arm in arm up and down the main avenue in our town, and stand in front of a diner that refused to serve 'colored,' until we were chased away.  She told me her parents wanted us to do this 'in support of integration.'  We did it several times over the period of about a month that summer.  We were eleven years old, and both named Karen, which seemed very special to me at the time.  Karen Dempsey wore her hair in a french twist, which I admired very much. 

It was my first political action, and predated any awareness of the civil rights movement, which was, just about then, heating up in the south.  Martin Luther King, Jr., was becoming an active force to be reckoned with, a pacifist disciple of Gandhi, who believed that conscience and character could transform society.  He gave all he had to give, in a bid for a more human and humane society.  Today we honor his sacrifice.

And at this time of year, I often recall walking with a young black girl, both of us in ridiculous shoes we called 'pumps,' and wearing false-pearl necklaces, up and down Germantown Avenue in the sunshine, clasping each other firmly at the waist.

auld lang syne

retrospectives: stories I grew up with

I guess I’m at the age when I’m starting to look back over my life and think again, a little deeper, and certainly with a different perspective, on the things I’ve learned in my life.  With friends and family scattered far and wide, a weblog seems like a good place to do that.  (Another weblogger whose writing and insights are exquisite, can be found here.  His blog may be inactive for a while, but he'll be back soon.)  Since this is the season of AULD LANG SYNE, I thought it would be appropriate to start with a retrospective.

An old friend recently commented that my ‘Great Radiance’ blog is trendy because it features diversity of belief.  But I wrote back to her that diversity isn’t a trend in my life, nor an ideal, it’s just ‘reality!’  I grew up in a racially, religiously and ethnically diverse neighborhood, and my parents were staunch proponents of tolerance and respect when it came to these kinds of differences.  So I grew up with that perspective, and if anything, diversity has become more and more a reality of my life with the passing years. 

This is one of the stories I grew up with, it’s a part of my personal mythology: