Red Barn Rockland

FROM 04/01/07 TO 06/30/07

North Haven

Absent for a year I took the one o’clock ferry from Rockland 12 miles out into Penobscot Bay to North Haven. I am related to some of the year-around island people. There is still a field here named “Lindsey Field,” a house, the Mark Ames house, built by my fifth great grandparents and now owned by “summer people.” My wife’s family have traveled here summers for four generations, among the original rusticators. We surmise my great grandfather Kalloch peddled tinware to her great grandmother Wheeler, his wares still in the pantry on “the Vinalhaven side.” (See Eleanor’s wonderful book, North Haven Summers.) It is quiet here. The spruce thicket surrounding us is dark and still. It is 9:30 in the evening. My light may be the only one for miles. People sail during the day on the thoroughfare past the lobster boats. The social set have cocktail parties after the sun sinks below the yardarm. There is a golf course and a hiking trail up Ames’ knob. I’m out here to help Eleanor launch the North Haven dinghy she named, “Mˆwen mist.” Then I’ll be catching the ferry back to Rockland to mow the lawn.

06/30/07

Giving Birth

I have never given birth to a human infant but I have produced sermons and several books. If all goes well I will see the first copies of Archetype of the Spirit Tuesday, printed, pressed, cut and bound. I will count the fingers and toes. Is it good? Will anyone want to read it? Will it make a contribution to human understanding, the quality of lives, push back the envelope of ignorance – my own and the world’s? Can it make its way in a world of mega corporate publishing, promotion, marketing and find its readership? It will all be “on the knees of the gods,” with some help from me, and friends.

06/28/07

In the Collective

There was a time not so long ago when humans were wholly engaged in the collective consciousness. Very little was individual. The tribal everyday was collective, rituals were traditional without innovation, responses to famine or the encroachments of enemies were total and collective. The entire social reality would respond as one body. There was little separate reflective thought, no choosing to be a part of things, no responsibility. The “individual” was within the collective, indeed was collective. At our remove in the twenty-first century we still need to ask: to what extent is our social participation non-reflective? Being in society are we swept along without perceiving it? What percentage of our lives is lived in a collective way without a process of individual deliberation. Particularly in our present transition from a print to an electronic environment we need to ask how much of our participation we may not have chosen from an individual rather than a collective consciousness.

06/15/07

Nature Abhors a Vacuum

Turkey has begun incursions into the Kurd sections of northern Iraq. Both Turkey and Iran have their own “Kurd problems.” This morning Senator Lieberman advocated bombing inside Iran “a camp training men to kill American troops.” Translated it may mean a camp training Shia militia. Mr. Lieberman has a strategic imagination about as sophisticated as that of Caligula’s in the first century. Complaints are legion of Sunnis in Syria and Jordan sending supplies to Sunni “insurgents.” The U.S. may be doing this on the sly as a ‘divide and conquer’ ploy. In the new Balkanization of Iraq the time has come to build fences, diplomatic fences that is. Just about everyone now can say with assurance: “If only ___________ would stop doing what they are doing everything would begin to get better” (fill in the names of your chosen villains). We have managed to bring out the worst in just about everyone involved.

Two and a half millennia ago Lao Tzu said, “Where troops have encamped there will brambles grow; In the wake of a mighty army bad harvests follow without fail.” Post “shock and awe” can certainly be thus characterized. Is there a way out? Just think, if they all donned white robes and went on pilgrimage together peace could return to Iraq, and without our “assistance.”

06/10/07

Pronouncing Transcendentalists

Unitarians pride themselves in their descent from New England Transcendentalists and many acknowledge a theological continuity. Surprising is a rampant mispronouncing of their names. Bronson Alcott for example is not pronounced like the common nick name, “Al” (as in “Al – cot”). In Concord it is pronounced “All – cut.” Most common is mispronouncing of Thoreau. When the Huguenots fled from religious persecution in France the first thing they did was to change the pronunciation and/or spelling of their names. Thoreau should not be pronounced as in French 101. Emphasize the first syllable, “thorough.” If you visit the Thoreau Society this would be the prime way they separate the sheep from the goats. Most UUs do well by Peabody, correctly pronounced “p – bid – e,” not “pea – body.” We do well by names like Parker, Emerson, Ripley, Fuller, Hoar and Hedge. But Concord itself requires care, not “Con – chord” but rather “conquered.”

06/05/07

Patriotism

“Patriotism is stupid” Tolstoy said in 1896. Here we are in the twenty-first century, when long-since we have seen earth from the moon, and its stupidity can only be compounded. Love of country, its people, its landscapes, yes. “America the beautiful.” But “my country right or wrong,” such blind faith in the twenty-first century is not only stupid but dangerous. The spectacle of super-patriots who support the Iraq war because we “support the troops” is illogical and blind faith. All other rationales for the war have collapsed. Even worse are so-called liberals falling all over each other declaring “we are patriots too, we support our troops too, dissent is patriotic too,” only legitimates the original stupidity. Women should know better by now than to advocate a “father-land.” Do we not support an equality of the sexes in this land? Waves of passing passionate patriotism do not contribute to a mature and deliberate democracy. From its oldest constitutional democratic republic the world needs a leadership capable of patient diplomacy, able to hear the many perspectives present, and to steer a course best for the wellbeing of all earth’s citizens.

06/01/07

The Trance of Everyday

We are experiencing one of those Maine springs so delayed all flowering things burst out at once. One allergy pill a day is hardly enough. A groggy stare for awhile greets the morning. To accomplish anything I must stand up and forge ahead. Once again this seasonal accentuation reminds me of the trance state of everyday. We rise, follow routine preparations and breakfast, proceed on to the tasks of work, prepare and enjoy supper, then on to evening meetings or projects or entertainments, then to bed. A good deal of everyday could be accomplished with our eyes closed or our ears stopped. The idea of “Sabbath,” one day in seven, is to break the trance state, to awaken to deeper far-reaching realities. Alas, much of what passes for worship keeps the mind, the imagination, the deeper awakenings at bay. “Reassurance” is not helpful when a break – a breakthrough – is required of us. Snap out of it! To see! To hear! To live!

05/28/07

Immigration

If the world seen from space without borders is not enough evidence, the reality that fences and fortresses no longer work (if they ever did) will be. The great wall of China is a monument to this truth. The massive walls in Israel will be. Even Mr. Bush knows that fences are not the solution in the American southwest, and who, after all, will build them? Perhaps the present scare revolves around brown skinned immigrants. If that worries you compare your palms with the backs of your hands. Perhaps it is Spanish speaking that worries some. If so wait a generation and hear how many bilingual speakers there will be on both sides of the “fence.” What worries me is the exploitation of migrant and “temporary” workers. I hope we will not build-in condemning millions to picking cabbages and oranges for lifetimes in “dirt poor” subservience. In a “land of opportunity” I hope a fair percentage will rise to teaching the young, crafting pottery, healing the sick, designing temples and writing poetry.

05/20/07

Mother’s Day

The American Mother’s Day is far more popular than Father’s Day, tucked in as an afterthought. More than once I have seen football and basketball stars reduced to sentimental mush talking about their mothers. Even my father, not known for sentimentality, was certain that no one on earth, including my mother, could make an apple pie like his mother. So it has been for generations of grown men. Mothers not only gave birth to us but are our only connection to the biological continuity of our humanity extending back to Eve. The connection is unbroken for us through our mothers, for our wives through their mothers and forward in gestation and birth through their daughters. The one fact looming somewhere in the mother archetype is the continuity of mother and the discontinuity of male children. If they accomplish nothing else, our mothers created us and usually nurtured and formed our early characters as well. Men are discontinuous. We appeal to a god as guarantor of our creativity. “yea, the work of our hands establish thou it.” We should not be mystified that a corporate CEO would throw it all to aside to go home, give birth and raise their children. Today women have freedom to choose at last. Some will chose the sacred hearthside to which all are connected. In the dark shadows of mother earth always looms the presence of mother archetype, ancient and elemental in our natures.

As a boy I remember my grandmother and great aunt rocking on the piazza here and looking across the street. For many years their grandmother (my great great grandmother), Achsah, would go to the east door of her kitchen in the early morning and wave a white hankerchief. Her mother, Mary, would go to the southwest door of her kitchen in the old house on the hill and wave her white hankerchief back. I heard of this ritual so many times I remember it for my grandchildren. We have in Mother’s Day an ancient celebration of continuity.

05/13/07

“Higher” Education

A workshop announcement (APT, Baltimore) recently attached a PhD next to my name. I am not sure whether I should be flattered or alarmed! True education is supposed to help you understand how little you know and to relate what you do know to outlines of the surrounding ignorance. I do not know enough of little to be a PhD and have attempted to be a generalist. I wonder what others think my PhD “field” might be: history? religious studies? psychology? “Higher” education is a patchwork of departmental fiefdoms with artibrary borders. Even in the history of religion scholars have broken out realms of specialization labeled Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity, etc., three credit courses each. In my youth somehow I came to resist narrow specializations and boundary guarding. “Experts” have their place but I so not automatically defer to them. It is sobering how much damage a young PhD can wreak in a field like clinical psychology or political “science.” It takes patient time to be educated. Schools are resources for your journey, not factories for the turning out of credentialed “professional” workers. Education, as opposed to training, resists boxes. We can not be replaceable parts which are plugged in for the highest bidder. I follow R. Buckminster Fuller when he dropped “the” from universe. Universe is one. When viewed from space, earth has no boundaries. Likewise, the human mind has no academic departments. Whatever we think we know flows through one body.

05/11/07

An Unconscious

How can you convince a person there is an unconscious when they can’t “see” it or don’t want to “see” it? Consciousness is everything we are attending to at the moment. Everything outside the spotlight of this attention is in the unconscious. If I am talking and listening to you next to a heavily traveled street, I am attending to you. Traffic noise, “seeing” a truck coming right at us, whether or not it is raining and everything else is in the unconscious while I attend to our conversation. (If the truck is coming at us our conscious attention will shift quickly to jumping out of the way! The unconscious has been doing its work.) Some things can remain in the unconscious unattended or unreconstituted from memory for years and decades. Do they exist? Yes. Do they operate or can they be active, unconsciously? Yes. Jung observed three levels of the unconscious: (1) our personal unconscious, what for now we have forgotten, repressed or is happening in our bodies to which we are not attending, (2) a cultural unconscious or what socially exists which we have internalized that we can call on, and (3) the collective unconscious, those archetypes which can structure our responses to life as symbols or complexes. “In the beginning” even the ego rose from the omnidirectional unconscious as the beginning of the conscious part of ourselves, a mere bubble floating on the sea of the unconscious. The self, our conscious and unconscious together, is always in motion. Even in meditation there is motion, much more in dire emergencies. This motion or psychic energy depends upon the imbalances, the polarities of influence, the stimulation from the body and environs requiring reconfigurations, unconscious and conscious. There is much more, of course, but it seems to me this is a minimum picture for an organism of fifty or a hundred billion or so cells in which consciousness has emerged.

05/07/07

Night Walking

Watching the waxing moon last night reminded me how important it is when walking at night not to take a flash light. The skunk, porcupine, raccoon and woodchuck do not have flashlights. As a result they “see” much more. At night we walk slower, our eyes, ears, touch work more slowly, or to be accurate we have fewer and more subtle clues from which to surmise what we are encountering. Slowing down can be a spiritual exercise. To see we move our heads as cats do to find objects looming in the darkness. If we are walking in familiar territory near our homes, we know the whereabouts of stones, tree trunks, stream beds. Slowing down, our body remembers and we are ready for them. And we hear the world as bats and birds do. Slowing down we will likely avoid injury from bush branches, something flashlights don’t find either. Buddhist meditators work hard to slow down when mindfully walking during the day. At night it comes naturally, a delightful “attachment.”

05/01/07

Vacation Bible School

A response to “Orphans Religion” (see Blog, 02/17/07) raised for me an important issue among others. Don’t we have to begin our journey within a tradition before we find our way across religious borders? Isn’t it important to be grounded in something? That is certainly the route for most of us. Being raised in a world context from an early age has hardly ever been tried.

I remember childhood Vacation Bible School with the Baptists when we had a contest memorizing scripture. I learned by heart Psalms 1, 23 and 100, Ecclesiastes 3: 1-9, Micah 6:8, the Beatitudes, I Corinthians 13, Galatians 5:22, and the order of the books, Genesis to Revelation. The leaders that year were my mother and her friend, Virginia Dodge. The two fell into disfavor with the minister and that was their last VBS. Perhaps it was because their choices of “purple passages” were not sufficient doctrinally.

04/28/07

Too Old?

This morning’s bumper sticker, “If its too loud, you’re too old,” raises questions. Perhaps the driver has heard complaints about his/her music, I assume. But I am wondering what “too old” might be: age 40? age 60? age 80? And “too loud”: 5 decibels? 10 decibels? 20 decibels? The complaint I hear among “old people” is rather that sounds are too soft. Elders prefer not to be asking, “what?” all the time? Speak up! Of course if the music is “too loud” perhaps no one can hear. Conversation would be futile, at least anything requiring responses or dialogue. Indeed if the decibel level rises too high, too often, our bumper sticker driver may become “too old” too young and be among the “what”ers. Too bad.

04/22/07

Scarcity vs. Generosity

There is a premise in ‘conservative’ thought that planet Earth does not have the capacity to support all of us so it is the prerogative of the strong to grab as much as possible for themselves. This is a longstanding perspective even when world population was far smaller than now and global warming was unheard of. It is dovetailed with Social Darwinism, “survival of the fittest,” applied to human relationships. With the general scrambling for oil and the spectacle of Darfur, people left destitute in a conflict of grazers vs. farmers in a region of increasing desertification, events are tending to support the idea of nations “red in tooth and claw.” We now can see a scenario of climate change resulting in massive dislocations nearly everywhere, as if fulfilling the ‘conservative’ ideology of scarcity and competition. Rising sea levels, expanding deserts, unfair distribution of fresh drinking water, extreme weather and changing habitats for cereal crops are the major known symptoms.

The great challenge ahead for ‘liberal’ theologians and congregations will be to present visions of hope and a confidence that cooperation, generosity and humane hospitality are the way forward. A world of bullies hoarding the world’s resources at the point of a gun will lead us to extinction. It will be an unprecedented challenge for our moral clarity and our morale for living.

04/19/07

Sand Castles

Once again houses built on sand next to the ocean have slid into watery graves in a northeaster. For the most part they are the property of the wealthy guaranteed with

Federal insurance (yet another instance of national socialism for the privileged). Summer “cottages” were built on the dune systems which replenish our beaches. Years ago we were ignorant. Now there is no excuse for building roads, walls, houses on beech dunes. Particularly with rising sea levels in global warming it is morally/structurally foolish and destructive. Let’s return our ocean-front resources to the young fish (behind the dunes that protect salt marshes), the beach birds and the hoi polloi (those of us who love the beaches and can’t or won’t afford to exploit them).

04/17/07

Sensing/Intuiting

We are physical and social animals. Everything we experience comes through or from our bodies, including knowledge of who we are. Neuroscientists are finding how the brain “maps” the state of well being of our bodies second by second through our lifetimes. It is done in chemical and electric activity we call emotional states. These states are of two kinds, “as it is” and “as if it were.” We can reconstitute emotional states, images, (i.e. memory) in order to anticipate future possibilities. We are already beginning to speak of consciousness at an elementary level, a level humans share with many other organisms. Antonio Damasio speaks of autobiographical consciousness where the feelings based upon our emotional states, present and reconstituted, can in turn, be reconstituted and owned as a story through time. James Newman has called Jung the original cognitive psychologist, fifty years ahead of his time. When Jung discovered the perceiving functions, sensing and intuiting, and judging functions, thinking and feeling, he was already working with the cognitive functioning of autobiographical consciousness. Sensing (S) is the cognizing of emotional states, “as it is,” perceiving what is real. Intuiting (N) is the cognizing of emotional states in the “as if” mode, anticipating possibilities. It appears Jung’s typology and the MBTI identify processes only now documented, hand and glove, with state of the art neuroscience and cognitive psychology.

04/14/07

Easter/Passover Preaching

I have always enjoyed leading worship in this season. Passover is one of humanity’s greatest stories of the liberation experience, from the hardening of Pharaoh’s heart, pulling up stakes and leaving, to the dilemmas of what to do with your freedom when you reach the other shore! Then to experience that fateful week of Jesus in Jerusalem, its themes of social justice, the last supper, Gethsemane, the trial and crucifixion, with an empty tomb two days later, too intense really to compact into so short a time! Behind this drama is another: rabbits laying eggs and Eostre, goddess of the dawn, dancing at the eastern horizon for the “sun’s rise.” I will never forget an interfaith Easter “sun rise” service on Kennebunk Beach in Maine. I was about to begin the meditation when a V formation of geese flying north appeared with their calls to one another. We stood silently below them until their sounds grew faint. Spring is the season of the renewal of life and core reason for religion!

04/06/07

Spring Snow

A foot of snow fell last night, heavy water logged snow. I spent all morning shoveling front walk, driveway and path to the barn. I like neat and tidy shoveling. Perhaps it was my ISTJ father (also a One in the Eneagram scheme) or perhaps it is aesthetic. I remember many times as a boy when our shoveled out yard was the most thorough and symmetrical in the neighborhood. There is a certain satisfaction in doing work right, whatever right may be. It is all “vanity” as the author of Ecclesiastes reminds us, particularly in spring, the season of rebirth. Winter quickly melts into the ground, sweatens the sod and the world transforms from shades of bright white to yellow green. So it is with all projects of a lifetime. They melt into the common ground of our being.

04/05/07

Progressive Revelation

The idea that God from time to time breaks through into history with an update or clarifying revelation is unique to the Abrahamic religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam and Baha’i. It is said there will be another in a thousand years or so. Moses was a prophet who ‘saw’ God face-to-face. Jesus was elevated to an eternal portion of God. Muhammad was “seal of the prophets,” whose recitations, Qur’an, have remained a presence in the body (Ummah) of Islam ever since. Baha’u’llah was known as a manifestation of God. Each branch of this monotheistic tradition found a way to bring a wholly other divinity closer to where people live. In the remaining religious traditions of our humanity authority rises from the ground and not “down” from the clouds. It seems to me, whether from “above” or from “below,” religious authority is really earned in the lives of those who live the tradition and in the vision the founders give us of how our humanity can fulfill its deepest potentials and widest affirmations for a peaceful world.

04/03/07

Not Yet Quite Homogenized

It is a relief to be home! After the ‘dog days’ of March in FL we were greeted with snow flurries and cold winds off Penobscot Bay in ME. We will be here to welcome spring! The US of A is far more homogenized than most realize. 2000 miles showed us innumerable MacDonalds, Waffle Houses, Exxons and Comfort Inns. Greeting us here was a brand new Hampton Inn and Applebee’s in Thomaston. Rockland still has two viable local building supply firms we patronize to compete with newly arrived Home Depot. I like to see local names like Spear’s, Cayouette or Goodnow’s on signs, to know they are neighbors for the duration. But most of all it is good to be home in this landscape, to hear the fog horns at Samoset and Owls Head lights and the trains at the crossing bringing limestone from Dragon Cement to Atlantic Wharf.

04/01/07

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