Reverence and Otherwise

In the morning my thoughts float around in their zigzag way, and sometimes one lands on my hand. Today it was this:

All my deploring of things people do and the way things are has not helped matters.

This was triggered by morning coffee music with Pete Seeger, which was "Down by the Riverside." The thing about him, he meant it.

Ain't gonna study war no more,
Ain't gonna study war no more...

Now, the illustrious Pete, may his good work never end, meant it, he was against war and tirelessly sang and spoke about it.  And we still have war, don't we.  Oh yes, the bad bad karma of tribalism playing out in unfunny boy games in the Middle East.  God bless them, why don't they just give up their claims on a piece of earth and try to sneak into America like everyone else?

But one thing Pete did accomplish was give people, including me, a way to be in harmony together with our beliefs.  We all sang Guantanamero along with him, rocking a bit from side to side.  We all felt the sadness of the eternal cycle of unnecessary pain, flowers gone to young girls gone to soldiers gone to graveyards.  Gone to flowers.  The community we formed singing was a good thing, an excellent thing. I don't get to feel that much, other than in my women's meditation group, where the warm energy far from war goes round and round.

Last night Tom and I went out for ice cream, like our parents before us, though ice cream has changed since chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry.  Believe me, their toes would curl in alarm at the price of Jeni's Salty Caramel.

We got to talking a little about how as children we occasionally felt something in church I describe as shared reverence. I remember that especially on Easter morning and Christmas Eve.  Now I appreciate the sense of new clothes and spring hats - and white gloves on the ladies, back then - as a way of washing ourselves clean, resurrecting.

Tom went to a small-town Methodist church, and I went to a liberal Congregational church, but they had in common a shared acceptance of the Christian tradition.  In both churches there were those who got that it was not about the tribalism of Are you saved? but about love and unity. Certain stories were emphasized, like the parable of The Good Samaritan. It makes you sad to compare that with what is happening now on the Gaza strip.

I have had many good experiences in my Unitarian church, but have never felt that reverence in these 30-some years, despite our minister's many sermons on love.  I think this is because a percentage of the members there hate the very ideas of belief and mystery.  Atheists have long been vocal in the denomination. In my church, every summer we have a lay service by the Atheists and Skeptics, who affirm their belief only in what can be shown by science, which they revere more than I, who have been the victim of it.  In this service someone may talk about the mystery of life, but it is a head trip, not a spiritual practice, and does not go toward love and compassion. They would snort at the "notion" that Something loves us, and all is well.  They discard mysticism with the term "woo-woo."

I was recently told my group is woo-woo, O-kay, but I, too, have trouble with All shall be well when I watch the evening news.  Still, I enjoy experiencing the mystery and elegance of this great junkheap, even as I deplore the things men do.  For example, I am closely watching our tomato crop, pictured in its entirety here.

And, by way of the miraculous, I figured out how to download photos from my phone to my evil new computer, and then upload them.

Listening to the Atheists

A tabula rasa

Normally, I don't think about what people believe about the metaphysical - that which is beyond the reach of science.  The American Zen I practice has nothing to say about gods or a god, nor does my church, Unitarian Universalism.  But my church goes to lay-led services for much of the summer, though the ministers are usually around.  And up came one to be led by the Agnostic/Atheist/Skeptic group.

You're familiar with the idea of a knee-jerk reaction - actually a very picturesque cliche, if you've ever had your reflexes tested with a little rubber hammer.  When I saw this service on the schedule, I had one of those, a mind jerk.  It went, "I don't want to go to that."

I am committed to attending church every Sunday, both for my own sake and for the sake of the church itself.  Every body forms that larger congregation.  So I had to think about this.  It took me no time to relate it to my former husband.  I sigh even as I write that.  It is so hard to retrain yourself

Pete (who is beyond caring now) identified himself as An Atheist, bold and loud.  It was one of the first things anyone would learn about him, accompanied with a scorching indictment of the Catholic church in which he was raised, and that was before the sexual abuse scandals.  Interestingly, UU seems to attract quite a few ex-Catholics; it is a place that welcomes people who want and need a church, but don't want to be told what to think, and especially don't want to be called sinners.  That word sets teeth on edge, believe me.  It had scarred Pete, too, to the point where he wanted an anarchic world with no such thing as ethics.  I know, scary.

He firmly believed that atheism was the only intellectually respectable position, and talked me into that on our second or third date.  Why did I say I was an agnostic? he asked. How could you possibly think there might be a god of any kind?  There was no evidence for it.  And so on.  He was older than me and a professor, and quite at ease with this argument, which he also made in the English classroom every chance he got.  He and his friends agreed on this to a man, and somehow social conversations often came around to how stupid Christianity was, how venile the Pope, there was no sin, people should be able to do anything they wanted to, and so on.

Hey, I was raised to be a girl.  In the fifties.  I was silenced by this for quite a long time.  Interestingly, while I was still married to him, when I felt a need stirring in me for a church, the only place I dared go was the local Unitarian fellowship.  There you are.  Even he couldn't argue with its firm lack of creed, its openness to humanism and scientific thought.  And it turned out to be the right place for me.  I suppose it's ironic that that's how I met Tom. Alright, disclosure over. 

I saw right away that my residual resentment of Pete - it was so long ago, but those were hard years - was influencing my attitude toward the coming service.  So I simmered down and decided to go. By Sunday morning I wasn't even worried that I might get really upset and have to walk out.  And you know the rest.  It's like every story - once the conflict is resolved, the story is over.

It was a fine service.  I sat next to a dear friend, Terry.  People testified in the pulpit to their own spiritual histories, and what the church has meant to them.  It concluded with a marvelous video about the stars which illumined for me a certain Zen koan.

After the service I talked to a number of people and we got to planning a meeting to discuss the church's plan for the next disaster - how it can help members who don't have power, things like that.  That disaster is looming at our western edge even tonight:  another hot hot spell, scattered thunderstorms, which bring scattered lightening strikes, which bring down big old trees in neighborhoods like Clintonville, and blow out transformers.  And suddenly we're one community of sufferers, united in helping one another, all divisions of religion or creed quite forgotten.

It is hard for me to sit idle.  Below, notes I made on the cover of the order of service.

Do atheists exist?

The TED talks are as good a place to begin your study of humankind as any - all these highly motivated people!  Motivated to do what?  Anything from cure blindness in Africa to swim a specific body of water at age 60.  The first you can certainly understand as a purpose in life, though it's going to run you into grave problems of overpopulation and famine.  The second, well, maybe you can see the point, but I can't.  I just never got into Amazing Feats of the Body.  Yet I've seen a world enthralled by a similarly ridiculous contest of minds, chess between a snotty kid named Bobby Fischer and the world champion, Boris Spassky.  This was decades before the personal computer could beat us all at anything.  You wouldn't believe how interested we all were in this, because it had something symbolic to do with the Cold War.  That doesn't exist now, either.  You could say it never did, just an idea.  Poor Bobby - his Wikipedia entry includes a section called "Sudden Obscurity."  No kidding.

Inflicted as I am with shingles (painful) and depression (worse) - and who knows whether they're related or just different neurons colliding in the mix - I found myself watching a TED talk by someone on whether I exist.  I won't name him or post it, because I've found it a bad policy in life for a little tiny bug to make an implacable enemy of a powerful person.  But really . . . it was a tasteless porridge of Buddhism for Toddlers and modern science.  
But this guy got himself a PhD in philosophy and went on to make a career out of talking about this kind of thing and writing books about the rock-bottom-dumb questions of (Western) philosophy, which must surely be as dead as chess by (snail-) mail.  

In that, a nerd sent another nerd a move on a postcard.  A penny postcard.  Nerd2 thought about it and made his move and sent a postcard.  Try to imagine a world that slow.  That was a world in which long distance calls cost a lot of money, and were only made in the event of a death.  But you knew you existed and so did everything else, and it never changed.  Every Sunday night Dinah Shore came out in what seemed to be the same prom dress and sang "See the USA in your Chevrolet . . . " and blew a kiss.  She does not exist anymore, but are you telling me she didn't?  I saw her. 


You, however.  No, according to this TED talk, you don't exist.  I mean, what made you think you did?  The fact that every night of your life you confront the same stubborn stupid oily skin?  Your exact  cowlick?  The food trap between the  molars on your lower left?

No, you're just a bunch of relationships, the way water is just a couple of hydrogen atoms mingling with an oxygen.  So if you thought there was Evian and Yellowstone and the Baltic Sea, there was rain and ice cubes, think again. 


There are opposing theories about existence, such as the belief that we are all ideas in the mind of God.  I rather like that, but if I were an atheist, it would make me nervous.

So you're an atheist, yawn

This morning I got an e-mail, a new post from a blog I subscribe to.  In it the author claims there is absolutely no historical evidence for the story of the Buddha. He and some of the commenters get all worked up and use insulting language regarding those who believe this "puerile" legend is true.  Boring, yet aggravating.  Full of Monday energy, I wrote a short comment, as follows---

I just don’t get it, why some of you are so riled up about this. It’s a myth, an extended metaphor. It’s one step more symbolic than language itself.

A similar heated discussion exists in the perennial modern anti-Christian-theology movement called atheism. Why? So you don’t believe what someone else believes. Fine. We get it. Why so angry?

A rhetorical question, I guess.  I am sure people get fixated on this kind of thing for reasons deeply rooted in their own childhood and their neurosis, using that term as Chogyam Trungpa did to describe the general kind of messy human brain we have if we don't make a real point of engaging with reality (as the Buddha said, nudge).  As an English major trudging through degrees I met a great deal of elaborate thinking along the way, and many who subscribed to atheism, which seemed to be seen as The Thinking Man's Religion.  I observed that they were often anti-authoritarian, sometimes anarchists, disliked the idea of codes of ethics, loved transgression, and lived in these elaborate dreams of argument - and believed it mattered.

There is no good reason for me to engage in something like this.  I just think it's not nice to make a big point of trying to bring down other people's beliefs.  And, of course, name-calling is a low tactic, a rhetorical trick categorized as a logical fallacy.  There.

But at least they have a sense of humor (see image above).  And here, courtesy of an evil website, is an atheist joke:
Catholics are against abortions.
Catholics are against homosexuals.
But, I can't think of anyone who has fewer abortions than homosexuals! -- George Carlin

The Reality of Jesus

As far as I know, this Jesus is by Rembrandt. Not quite as Semitic as I think he may have been, but real. I note the smudges on the forehead, perhaps Rembrandt decided showing a crown of thorns was a bad idea, and painted over it.

This painting is a fact, a thing. An art historian could probably tell me whether my supposition is true; paintings are examined by x-ray techniques sometimes.

Was Jesus "a fact"? Did he actually exist? Recently I was conversed with by a radical atheist, who brought forth several "facts" that proved to him that Jesus was not "a historical figure."

Do I care? Not at all. And it does seem to me that people argue passionately about the damndest things.

If I "am" anything, I am a Unitarian Universalist, and subscribe to the principle of approaching all religions and world-views with respect, and asking what value they have. Perhaps there is no intrinsic value to ideas, so I ask what value a conceptual framework has for me.

The idea of Jesus was a window for me when I was five, and my mother dragged me (literally, furious that I had slipped in mud and fallen down) to a Sunday School. Baptist, maybe. On the wall in that room was Jesus the Shepherd, holding in his arm a little lamb. The idea: that there was someone who cared and protected us. As a child in an abusive family, oh how I wanted to think that somewhere, someone would hold me in their arms. The concept of God was too misty for me; the idea of a handsome, rather feminine young man in robes, I could relate to that. (In the late forties I never saw a man with long, wavy hair.)

I think it was that Sunday School that taught me the 23rd psalm, the one that begins "The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want." I was to use that some fifty years later to combat the terror I felt during radiation treatment for breast cancer.

No historical figure is real. The past is no longer real, except as the consequences of past actions unfold in our lives. What is strikingly real is the need of some people to argue vehemently and irrelevantly against some particular religion. The people I run into who call themselves atheists are in fact anti-Christian; the theism they are specifically against is the Christian concept of God, as they understand it. What is real is their contempt for everyone, it seems, who does not agree with them one hundred percent.

I know dreadful things have been done in the name of Christianity, and of other religions, like Democracy. And I know, further, that all dreadful things done under any banner are based on contempt for someone who does not think like us: The Other. What I liked about the Jesus I met when I was a child was his message of universal love.