I’ve been following Dreher’s re-enchantment for a while now (amongst his other writings), and I can honestly say I am sitting in the edge of my seat waiting for YOUR next post. Don’t get me wrong, I love Dreher and his mind — and he pointed me to you — but your posts speak to something I can’t wait to hear more about. A world that has gone crazy, a world that doesn’t understand where the road it is running down is going to lead it. I think you do. You may not, but, DAMN! you *get* a lot of it, and I want to know what you think. It moves my soul. I’m here, waiting for the rest of it!
It's irreverent but extremely thought-provoking, and comes from a very different perspective as the Abbot. It probably comes to a very different conclusion as to the solution, but I found it very compelling!
Your decision to start writing with no apology for words that need to be said and action that needs to be taken in defense of our natural world is what brought me here. Being a person around so many others that desecrate this region I live in has made me highly defensive of it, for the animal life here and I have lost patience with them all, not a helpful reaction often, but there it is. As you say while speaking to Jonathan above, in the recent youtube, I also feel we are on the edge of something very big about to happen with nature; this is an anxiety that energetically wise maybe is sensed by others in other places also. Paul, your viewpoints here in the Abbey are the most refreshing guidepost I have found and am grateful for your happening to have taken this route. Will be working through your early writing of Beast in N. Kotar's group shortly and look forward to moving through the trilogy. Thank you for what you do and how you do it!
Speaking of the Garden. Some beautiful thoughts on a fruitful human relationship with earth. Taken from Climate, A New Story by Charles Eisenstein.
"Tending the Wild
The regenerative practices I’ve described are rooted in a mindset and way of relating that goes back tens of thousands of years outside civilization, and even as a recessive gene within civilization, the seed of the future.
This section is named after a book by Kat Anderson that describes the relationship between the pre-colonial indigenous people of California and the land. Anderson demolishes the myth that hunter-gatherer people were mere occupants of pristine “nature,” demonstrating their deliberate, sustained influence on the composition of biotopes and species in their territory. Entire landscapes that appeared to the untrained eye of white settlers as wild were anything but. Anderson explains:
Through coppicing, pruning, harrowing, sowing, weeding, burning, digging, thinning, and selective harvesting, they encouraged desired characteristics of individual plants, increased populations of useful plants, and altered the structures and compositions of plant communities. Regular burning of many types of vegetation across the state created better habitat for game, eliminated brush, minimized potential for catastrophic fires, and encouraged diversity of food crops. These harvest and management practices, on the whole, allowed for sustainable harvest of plants over centuries and possibly thousands of years.[21]
When white settlers marveled at the stupendous bounty of fish, game, and wild plant foods that the Indians, it seemed, lazily lived off in an indolent existence, when John Muir wrote his glorious praise of California’s Central Valley with its endless meadows of wildflowers, they were actually looking at a sophisticated garden, lovingly tended for generations. According to the elders Anderson interviewed, “wilderness” was not a positive concept in Native culture; it meant land that was not well tended, land in which human beings were not exercising their duty to protect, enhance, and develop life. (I live in California and have heard this same approach from two native elders)
Modern conservationists might be excused for wanting to minimize human impact, since the kind of human impact we’ve seen in the industrial era makes the caring observer recoil in horror. We might be excused for promoting an ethic of “leave no trace.” We might be excused for envisioning a future where humanity retreats to bubble cities, space colonies, or a virtual reality, leaving nature behind to recover its former wholeness, relating to it as a spectacle or a venue for recreation, visiting it perhaps as zero-impact ghosts, observers but not participants.
Tending the Wild suggests a different vision, freeing us from the perceptions with which industrial society has imbued us. Instead of zero impact, it suggests positive impact. Instead of leave no trace, it suggests “leave a beautiful trace” or “leave a healing trace.” It suggests that we ask, “What is our proper role and function in service to the health, harmony, and evolution of this whole of which we are a part?”
We have potent gifts of hand and mind that take the form of technology and culture. These gifts are not meant for us alone. They are meant to serve the wholeness and evolution of Life.
Just because someone is indigenous does not mean he or she, or her culture, knows how to live in mutually beneficial harmony with the earth. It is something each culture must learn. Furthermore, each level of developmental scale requires a new learning.
Extinctions of megafauna and other animals and plants regularly followed human settlement of new lands. Australia, the Americas, New Zealand, Madagascar, and Polynesia all experienced them, suggesting a kind of inevitability to anthropogenic ecocide, which has only accelerated along with our capacity to perpetrate it. Yet, in the end, people in all of these places eventually came into equilibrium with their lands. In most places, as the subsequent biological wealth of the Americas exemplifies, it was an abundant and biodiverse equilibrium. This suggests another possibility beyond Man the Destroyer—that we can learn from our mistakes, that we can mature in our gifts and turn them toward a different purpose."
1491 by Charles C. Mann talks about it being realized that the Amazon rain forest instead of being sparsely populated primeval forest was much more populated 500 years ago under a productive agro-forestry style model of management.
Love this. If you want to read more about cultures who tend nature as a garden and come into balance with it, I highly recommend Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweet Grass (Native American POV; RWK is a trained scientist and also embraces the native spiritual perspective - it's amazing to hear both views presented) and Diana Beresford-Kroeger's "To Speak for the Trees" (Anglo-Irish, with an amazing life story about becoming an orphan and then the bearer of Celtic wisdom tradition about trees/plants for her community)
Her work really spoke to me Jeff - I'm of similar ancestry. Something resonated. I hope it's moving for you as well :) Let me know how you like it, if you read it!
Got “To Speak for the Trees” Her upbringing and subsequent personal journey was intriguing. I had already absorbed her nature/forest/tree message from other places. I also have my own “magic” connection with trees and the natural world starting in my rural childhood. My interest in reading faded out when I got to the The Celtic Alphabet of Trees part. But overall a worthwhile read.
Jeff, I'm glad you got something out of it even if it's an imperfect book. I had a semi-rural childhood as well, and also have a relationship with trees that began then. Like you, I found her upbringing + personal journey fascinating - and was riveted hearing how the community came together to share wisdom with her, how she became almost a living book of the local traditions. It made me think about how we construct/share/transmit culture and ways of knowing - and what old ways of doing this we might want to go back to. Anyway. Glad if it was of any use. Take good care.
Fascinating stuff for which many thanks. Given your experience of the last few months, Paul, it will be interesting to see how your readership changes. I read many of your early essays and found them implicitly pointing toward something that is perhaps being fulfilled for you at the moment. Hopefully you can bring some of the less militantly secular environmentalists along with you on this ride!
I thoroughly enjoyed your trilogy - especially The Wake which, for me, was the best literary portrayal of a sort of Steiner/Barfield 'original participation' I have come across lately. An excellent conversation with Jonathan Pageau.....I'm getting my money's worth already, though obviously I'm not thinking in those terms!
It will be interesting, yes. I have already have a few of my more 'secular' readers drop away. I hope I can speak to some degree across the barricades; although who knows, in pratice this may simply mean alienating the left and the right at the same time! But these silos are the problem.
I think you're percepctive in what you saw in my early essays. I can see it too now, though it was much less clear then.
I am not planning to drop away because you have so much that is really helpful to say and dialogue with. However reading you and listening to the interview sounds very much like listening to someone in the uncritical excitement of a recent conversion. No problem with that, I have been there many times in my 60 years! What worries me is, for a moment ignoring the contents of christianity, any framework of understanding of the world that sets up a higher being and then gives humans a unique relationship to it, is setting up a distorting and destructive mode of experiencing and relating the more-than-human world. It is abstract and ungrounded. For me, we need to start right at the embodied foundations of our existence - what are the psychological and neurological impulses that cause us to desire these vertical meaning structures - whether its christianity, human reason, capital, ideologies, paradigms. And how do we then use these abstract narratives to dominate and destroy everything around us even when we were just desiring to create a better world? Starting with religion, politics, ethics, is to start too far up the meaning structure. And yes the narrative around Jesus is a powerful and helpful resource but possibly not because of the meaning structure he sits in! I still feel Feuerbach's diagnosis of how we create a God is helpful - we create a being, project onto them the most idealised attributes that we can aspire to as humans, then we kneel before them because we fall short of that perfect image! And he said that before we understood the mode of operation of the prefrontal cortex or the workings of the left brain hemisphere. He also said "Theology, I can bring myself to study no more. I long to take nature to my heart, that nature before whose depth the faint-hearted theologian shrinks back; and with nature man, man in his entire quality." After decades of wanting to find in Christianity an answer, I feel that position is more likely to yield the slow, at the margins response we seek for.
You're half right Alistair - I have been excited, but not uncritically. This has been a long time coming, and I have explored other paths for some time - including more obviously rationalist ones like Zen.
Your response here presupposes that we 'project' or 'create' God/divinity because we 'desire vertical meaning structures.' That's philosophy - and highly questionable philosophy too. Could be true, could be false, but I am not Christian because I want a 'vertical meaning structure'. I'm Christian for other reasons, none of which can be rationalised away. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you are. We can't say, at least not using these criteria.
I don't know whether humans have a 'unique relationship' to God. I think we are called to behave in certain ways towards all other life - call it Creation, or not - and that we fail to do that. We are, very clearly, not the same as other creatures in key ways, better and worse. One of those ways is our lack of integration into the web of life; a product presumably of our ability to reason and create stories.
I think that some Christians seem to believe the Earth is their domain, and that this is wrong. I agree about the embodied foundations, but there's no reason those 'meaning structures' have to be destructive. We are all embedded in 'nature' because we are nature. Who knows where nature precisely comes from? But I have believed in an intelligence behind it all for much longer than I have been a Christian. And even the church teaches that ultimately we can never know God.
Brain science is no answer to the reality of ongoing religious experience. Neither is philosophy, or reason. I think that if Christianity, or any faith, is to survive, it will need to become much more embodied and entwined with the rest of life. I think that will happen. We will see. But in the end, there is only truth and falsehood. We'll find out as we walk which is which, I suppose!
Thanks for your measured reply. Will respond but it takes time and there is life to be lived. I am going to challenge you a lot but from a place of admiration and gratitude. I have read your confessions essay every year ever since I came by it, your Language of the Master essay is utterly spot on and your online writing course was a game changer for me! I am a big fan but this shift mystifies me!
Challenge away! It has mystified me too, but I know it is real, and so I am going to follow it wherever it leads me. But I am not going to pretend that I know where that is. Take care.
Hi, Alistair, for me the living God has a taste of eternity that nature lacks. When I look at nature by itself (Romans 8:21)I see that in the end death is king, and I am just another piece of soon to be road kill on nature’s highway. I call Jesus of Nazareth “The Grand Anomaly” as death didn’t have the final say with him. So I am betting everything on his resurrection as being the over ruling fact of reality along with my present experience of the down payment of the Spirit in my heart. 2 Corinthians 1:21. Hitching a ride with Jesus I guess. Hoping you can come to that place of simplicity. For what it’s worth prior to the God/Jesus reality I was a mish mash of scientism, and new age and eastern religion.
Thanks for your comment Jeff. I understand your sentiment as I would once have articulated something close to it myself. I did write a potted version of my own journey when I was writing my initial response to Paul but put it aside as I suspected it was of no interest or little relevance to the debate. But I will drop it in here as a response to your comment! ...... Just listened to the conversation (with Jonathan Pageau). And to be honest am a little dazed and not actually sure what it's worthwhile to write. I guess my overriding reaction (I write as a 62 year old) is that you sound just like me on my conversion to christianity 40 years ago. I sense your enthusiasm, just as I felt, that Christianity wasn’t what I thought it was and that it made more sense than anything else I had come across. I felt part of something that was the answer to problems of the world. It wasn’t Orthodoxy but evangelical christianity at that time and like thousands of others in UK and elsewhere I was part of a big movement that started new grassroots churches that wanted to break free of the issues of the established church and follow the teachings of Jesus more authentically. We thought we were the answer to the world )-: I read Martin Luther King and got involved in social change - starting soup-runs, drop in centres, running training courses for many years for the long-term unemployed and those with mental health issues. Over time, evangelicalism stopped making sense for me and I moved to a high Anglian church where ritual, theatre, art, mystery were dominant and to me crucial. I studied theology and though never involved with the Orthodox Church (went once but it was just too alien and inhospitable for me!) but I became very drawn to apophatic theology. Partly through reading David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous (and partly because I wanted a rational foundation to escape metaphysics (the idea that there is a level above sensed experience) I did a Masters in Phenomenology studying Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. Alongside I helped curate a performance art group called “the garden” which explored the boundaries of a fairly deconstructed christianity and our relationship with the land. One of your other Abbey readers mentioned Pyrotheology which is an initiative of a Belfast guy called Pete Rollins, who whilst he was still in Ireland created a group called Ikon, who we were in close links with. Finally the whole spiritual narrative dropped away for me completely and I have spent the last few years exploring the relationship between our animal bodies and the land and aspiring to feel into a different language (so far largely of practices rather than words) to navigate this territory. ..... So, Jeff, I have been where you speak from but it was a long time ago!
Thank you for your lengthy response. I am 67, I suppose I have a Christian animism layer to my world experience, stemming from a childhood intimacy with the midwestern landscape of the USA and continued intimacy with the landscapes and soil of California. The trees are alive!, especially the old ones. Along with that has been a none apophatic theology - the Jesus of Nazareth alive as seen in Acts, the last Adam as a life giving spirit, a reference to a verse in 1 Corinthians.
“the uncritical excitement of a recent conversion” I had the same reaction. It seems to me Paul is having the joy of a dolphin exploring a strange, wonderful new sea. Eastern Orthodoxy has its attractions but in the end doesn’t work for me. But I’ve realized we humans have to encase the experience of the Living God in some sort of structure as part of being in this world. Those structures reflect our human limits, weaknesses, strengths and historical and cultural developments. It’s unavoidable. I include my own Protestantism in this.
In the spirit of this community I do want to stress that I am not wanting to judge Paul or anyone one else on what is arising for them. My reaction is purely as someone who has taken a path that included Christianity for some years but found it, for me, ended up being very problematic in providing any framework for wrestling with the issues that Paul has so elegantly laid out (especially in some of his other essays) that I am personally struggling with the idea of revisit that journey. Even though I am not so arrogant (I hope) to believe that there is not something new to be learnt. I arrived at the place, perhaps first and most poetically articulated by Neitzche, but then redescribed by others that any form of meta-physics cuts us off from experiencing the authentic presence of the "What is" because it locates true meaning in some abstract, mentally constructed "upstairs". I also don't want to prejudge what Paul may bring to us of his journey in the coming weeks. It's not wise to form an opinion about something that at this moment remains unspoken!!!
My take on Paul and this place is we have freedom to graciously share our viewpoints, even with firmness and our personal conviction of the truth of what we are saying. which you have done wonderfully well.
Hi Paul- thank you for your always excellent, heartful writing and scholarship, as well as your intellectual bravery and candor overall.
Watching this video interview, I came away with the feeling that I might sincerely re-investigate Christianity from a much different perspective RE: ritual, denying the self, radical humility, the essential human need for myth... all of these things seem sensible and true, and as you suggest may be more relevant/ important than ever today to try and actionably summon.
However I just wanted to register a few other comments here; IMO, Pageau, based on the philosophy expounded in several of his other videos… has some pretty retrograde/ frankly openly sexist views; his explication of/ defense of the so-called natural authority flowing from the top down, + from men to women, is IMO extremely flimsily conceptualized...if not almost idiotic. also, for him to frame the worldwide George Floyd protest movement primarily as a, “religious impulse“, although perhaps true in a very “macro” sense....to me seemed bizarrely paternalistic (as well as extremely tone deaf.)
And let me be totally clear, here; IMO
explicitly seeking to integrate the modern feminist struggle, along with other (massive) demographics of human society in one’s Christian philosophy/ vision...is NOT some knee-jerk expression of “woke-ness”!! Nor is my critique of him here an effort to try to “cancel” him, or broadly reject any/ all of his other ideas; just to point out that (some of) his perspectives in this context, IMO work at fundamental cross-purposes with a truer vision of love, compassion, true understanding etc.
uncritical/ unexamined, modern human, male and white supremacy, while (also) being obvious foundational characteristics of a godless/ hyper-individualist/ capitalist culture…unfortunately also (still) go deeply hand-in-hand with traditional Christianity, and IMO one must be extremely vigilant/ careful about not uncritically allowing these toxic dogmas to remain tacitly animated, even when they superficially appear to cut against the grain of mainstream (Christian, atheist, capitalist) culture.
IMO, Pageau’s often overly simplistic and paternalistic Christian worldview explicitly eschews recent historical reality and political analysis, in favor of more reassuring macro-philosophical (and mythological) narratives- + based on the comments section of the video itself (*not his responsibility obviously! but still worth noting)..it seems that many of his viewers apparently still don’t have a visceral sense of how catastrophic the environmental catastrophe actually is.. and (in some cases) also casually vilify BLM/ liberalism as whole/ the entire climate change movement. + regardless of (some of) the misplaced fervor embodied by champions of these movements online...IMO broadly dismissing these phenomena merely as expressions of “failed liberalism“ seems extremely misguided...if not flat out dangerous.
...I just think it’s extremely important for advocates of (even radical) Christian values to not unwittingly gloss over the real life, on-the-ground economic and political mechanics of present day white supremacy (*which while having non-racially specific antecedents/ precedents, + ones far older and more deeply entrenched than their current manifestations) .. IMO it still warrants at least being mentioned (if not actively litigated) in any serious discussion about a contemporary radical transformation of human society.
anyway, thank you again for your excellent work + I look forward to all of your upcoming writings ❤️
What I have seen of Jonathan P is very interesting to me. I think that his picture of the sacred shape of reality is key. I also think that hierarchy is real, and always exists, in every culture (the current 'culture war' after all, is mainly about inverting the pre-existing one.) Doubtless he and I would have different views in a number of areas - we had some in our conversation - but of course nobody is required to sign up to the entire worldview of someone they talk to online. If I had to entirely agree with everyone I spoke to I would never speak to anyone! I'm more interested in discovering people whose insight into the mess we're in goes deeper than the usual ding-dong surface battle.
Reading your comment, it looks to me like a specifically American perspective. For example, this statement:
"uncritical/ unexamined, modern human, male and white supremacy, while (also) being obvious foundational characteristics of a godless/ hyper-individualist/ capitalist culture…unfortunately also (still) go deeply hand-in-hand with traditional Christianity"
This may or may not be true in America, but it is not true elsewhere. There are more 'traditional Christians' in Africa these days than in the whole of Europe and America combined, and they are unlikely to be 'white supremacists.' In my view, in any case, this phrase is not to be thrown around lightly. I don't accept its application to my society at all, and I think that this escalation of language is part of the problem right now.
As I say, your view I think is quite culturally specific - not one that would be very applicable to Christianity here in Ireland, or in my Romanian church. I do agree with you however about the too-common Christian dismissal of environmentalism, and nature as a whole; and the tendency of some Christians (perhaps again especially in America) to politicise their faith. I've no interest in that, from either side.
hi Paul- thanks so much for this thoughtful response
In immediate retrospect I realized that my framing it as a general critique of “traditional” christianity was totally culturally specific = as you suggested, broadly not applicable to other large swaths of the world...what I meant was (IMO) the way mainstream, modern/ contemporary Christianity functions (and notions of innate hierarchies notwithstanding) by and large still isn’t very “evolved”, whatsoever, in terms of basic notions of equality and dignity for women… so I guess it hits a nerve with me when such smart/ influential people (like IMO, Pageau) not only explicitly fail to recognize that, but in fact openly promote sexist tropes, etc .
+ In terms of the cultural specificity of my invocation of, “white supremacy” ..I definitely agree- and you are correct, I am an American/ a New Yorker- for the last several years, particularly during the entire Trump presidency, the atmosphere for me has been one of general frustration and disillusionment about the clearly, unbelievably retrograde/ super destructive policies of that Republican administration, on every conceivable level (*for the record I am no fan of the Democrats either...let alone the entire direction that techno-industrial civilization is headed in general, etc) ...and made all the more bizarre/intractable when underpinned by clearly bogus, utterly cynical claims of “Christian values” - it’s in this more local, and perhaps less larger-world picture/ philosophical context, that all the deeply embedded racism here; in the courts, in the schools, by the police, in the jails, in housing, the medical and insurance establishments, voter suppression, as well as the flagrant, open hostility by so many extremely powerful politicians here… Ends up coloring my worldview in such a way that perhaps ought not, as I believe you are suggesting, just be frictionlessly transposed into a larger picture analysis- so I sincerely appreciate your analysis and contextualization here !
+ again, thank you for your thoughtful and humane answer… As I said I hugely appreciate your work and look forward to all of your upcoming writings!
Religion can get very easily politicised, especially in places where the culture itself is very divided, as in the US right now. I also think the history of religion in America is unique. It fascinates me how political Christianity is over there: it must be surely be a legacy of the puritan founding. Certainly when I see someone with a cross in one hand and a Trump flag in the other my mind boggles. Politics looks like idol worship to me, on all sides of the aisle.
I think that the balance between tradition and innovation is very hard. Many people, myself included, are attracted to orthodoxy precisely because there has been so little innovation - it's as close to the early church, or at least to the early Byzantine church, as you can probably get now outside Ethiopia. In contrast, protestantism seems like a failed experiment - so much compromise with modernity that its shape as an alternative to it has almost died entirely. Our world wants to change everything immediately, in according with ever-shifting cultural values. In contrast, I am increasingly keen on going very slowly indeed. That doesn't mean no change - it just means careful change that will not endanger the whole.
This is a very important point. Many of us are seeking a more liveable balance of what could be rendered as centripetal and centrifugal forces. Modernity has been a largely centrifugal enterprise. Postmodernity exponentially more so. If modernity is centripetal at all, it is largely so at the tippy-top, i.e., the concentration of the power and wealth disproportionately in those who rule the machine. The attempt to cure the centrifugal disease with a double helping of that same disease can only make things worse. It is well long past time to apply deeply centripetal remedies. Myth, tradition, cultural roots, a sense of place, a balance between human and ecological flourishing, etc. In short, higher stability found in radical humility. I guess we are all trying to figure out what that means exactly.
Especially after reading a response here by another person...it occurred to me that I may be perceiving stuff here from a very different frequency of consciousness; one that’s not only (in certain ways) uniquely American, and also (however deeply reluctantly) still locked into conventional notions of “reform“, either through political process, or through community- based action- most of the social + Earth justice rhetoric for me correlates with very specific types of activism and academic discourse, and now more than ever, online discourse reflected in and by the media.
My point being, that either explicitly or implicitly, I think my entire conception of genuine “progress” fundamentally still exists within existing the social, economic and political structures… Especially living here in New York City, where the normal rhythm/ tenor of life here generally lends itself towards brutal workism/ capitalist hustle, maybe even default support for The Machine...as alienating as it is, and as much as I despise it in certain profound ways (and all this, without even beginning to get into the notion of God, as you are now currently communicating your emergent experience/ relationship with.)
..what I’m trying to say is that I feel like you responded to my comments...almost from another dimension! And I genuinely appreciate this in as much as it naturally compels me to reflect upon an entire set of philosophical presumptions and the ideological background of my life. Thanks again, cheers /T
Hi Timothy, just wanted to throw you a hand of support here as I am a fellow American, deeply embedded in radical Left culture, who had a recent intense spiritual experience that has set me on a completely different religious course towards Christianity. I trust it and am following it and I am also totally freaked by what I assumed about most Christianity in America... most of which is totally accurate. I have all of the same concerns that you voiced here.
I think what Christ was calling us to do was to take on a mindset, 'attention of the heart' and behavior that is so radical we are still 2000 years later struggling to comprehend it. I personally am finding any time I find myself wanting to land on easy answers, to stop and step back. Even/especially when those answers seem 'right' to me. It's really difficult.
I keep coming back to the actual definition of the Greek word for which we use 'repentance'... it doesn't mean "admit you are bad", which was my previous understanding. It means something like 'to alter the course of your mind' or 'a transformative change of mind' or 'enter into the greater mind'. All of which are really difficult when our ego wants to scream that we already know the truth.
This puts into words very well what I have felt too, after being similarly unexpectedly called. Wanting to settle on answers, positions and places in which I can make Christ comfortable to me, and always being disabused.
Yes, I learned too that repentance means something like 'to change course.' And that sin, also from the Greek, means 'to miss the mark.' What is the mark? Theosis - union with God. When we miss that mark, which we do every few minutes, we change course and aim again. For a lifetime ...
I think that puts it very well, Timothy. I think I was in the place you are in a decade or so ago. That's not to patronise you, or suggest that you will 'progress' to where I am! Simply to say that the inner dimension - and the wider picture - is what I write about now. I have gone through a couple of decades of letting a lot of things slough away, from when I was a young activist to where I am now. I have a lot more sloughing still to do. But I'm trying to write here from the bird's-eye perspective of a very particular bird. I want to understand the very big picture.
“Protestantism seems like a failed experiment” I am a Protestant, but good point. From my American perspective the goal in the conservative American Protestant church, though not explicitly stated, is to be a well adjusted, well functioning member of the middle or upper middle class with a veneer of prayer and church activity and charitable works. The liberal wing adds in being a gentle woke social justice warrior environmentalist aspect veering into nature worship as the Trinitarian God isn’t especially real and present.
Maybe that is a harsh judgement, but I am quoting an Anglican priest of my acquaintance, so it seems legit! An Orthodox priest - admittedly biased - also said recently to me that while orthodoxy has remained constant in its core teachings for a millennia, few protestant churches have remained constant for more than three decades. In some ways I have an Anglican soul, so this fact pains me, but I think your analysis is correct for the UK too.
I read recently the notion that the devil spent a thousand years trying to get the church out of the world, and failed. So he changed tack and spent the next thousand trying to get the world into the church, and was much more successful ...
I remain a hardened Protestant nonetheless:) I could summon well argued critiques of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox spirituality, theology, and practice but find it pointless to do so. Jesus was called a “friend of sinners” and since we all fall into that joyous category of “sinner” (joyous, because it makes Christ my friend!) I am called to be friends with everyone.
Timothy and Paul, I am not so sure that the idea of "white supremacy" is American specific. I would like to hear what the non-white people in this group think about that. Or if there aren't any non-white people in this group, we might consider the implications of that as well. As to the mixing of religion and politics, those of you in the group who are Christians surely cannot believe that Jesus didn't mix religion and politics. It seems to me that his attitude toward political authorities was what got him killed in the end. But I am neither a Christian nor a Bible scholar, so I defer to those who are.
Hi Sylvia - I agree here, for sure… I was initially responding to Paul‘s response to my original comment...+ I certainly didn’t mean to imply that the US has some kind of primary claim on white supremacy ! It perhaps goes without saying that it’s one of the) ideological foundations for many pre U.S. egregious colonialist/ imperialist interventions... I just meant to suggest that it is for me personally, “top of mind“, living in the US/ NYC, etc.
It might be worth laying down a marker here. The term 'white supremacy' has a clear historical meaning, and to apply it to contemporary European nations is both offensively inaccurate and dangerously provocative. I reject it, just as I reject the division of the planet into 'whites' (Europeans) and 'people of colour' (everyone else) - something which clearly is of American origin, and perhaps is more understandable there. But I live daily in a mixed race family, and I reject the radical left's current attempts to re-racialise my society in this dangerous way. At this point, the only difference I can see between the far left and the far right is which 'race' they want to be on top. I won't concede to this way of seeing.
As for Jesus: today is Palm Sunday, the commemoration of his entry into Jerusalem. Many of his supporters, hoping for a war leader, revolutionary or politican to deliver them from the Romans, perhaps expected him to enter by war chariot or stallion. He chose a donkey. When asked by Pilate where his army was, if he was a king, Jesus replied 'my kingdom is not of this world.' It wasn't his attitude to political authorities which got him killed, but his attitude to the hypocrisy and power-seeking of the religious leaders. His attitude to politics was 'render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's': meaning, leave politics to the politicians and get on with finding the path back to God.
hi again Paul - this might seem a bit random, but one of your follow-up comments above:
"The term 'white supremacy' has a clear historical meaning, and to apply it to contemporary European nations is both offensively inaccurate and dangerously provocative."
..has been eating away at me a bit since the time of this original conversation. + although (I think) I understand the point you were making about your reluctance/ refusal to casually throw around the term "white supremacy", + how it currently is used/ occasionally weaponized on the left...also broadly claiming that its not "applicable to contemporary European nations", IMO seems bizarrely out of touch...considering all the MASSIVE, above ground, often extremely well organized and effective, contemporary youth-driven white nationalist movements in France, Spain, Germany, and Greece...among several other European countries. These nationalist movements unequivocally, openly DO espouse (*albeit derivative/ culturally bastardized, "re-branded") doctrines of white supremacy.
+ As and much as I totally agree with the macro sentiment/ hope for an eventually "de-racialised" world, suggesting that there's some currently kind of political or ideological "equilibrium of ignorance/ impact" between the right and the left about race (*for example, crystallized in the alt-right "All Lives Matter" slogan here in the US), is
IMO not only wildly overly simplistic, but on balance serves to dangerously minimize/ relativize/ obfuscate all the massive institutional cruelty, bigotry, economic disenfranchisement and police and state violence that the (*arbitrarily, yet nonetheless understood as, for the foreseeable future) 'people of colour' will continue to endure...whether or not you (rightfully!) personally reject it/ "concede to this way of seeing" in your own family, or whether or not it's (as large of) a phenomenon in Ireland, etc.
anyway...this particular "bone to pick" notwithstanding, thank you again for all of your always excellent and enlightening recent work!
To be clear Timothy: my point was not that there are no 'white supremacists' in Europe, nor that Europe does not have a history of this attitude. Obviously that would be nonsense, given the history of the last century.
My point was that European countries are not 'white supremacies.' This is the marker I wanted to lay down, and I think it is vital to understand the culture war aspect of what is going on.
Why has this phrase - 'white supremacy' - suddenly roared to the surface of political debate in the last couple of years? This is the question to ask and the answer is that, as with so many other words and phrases - 'including 'racism', incidentally - the word has been capaciously redefined on the left in order to advance a particular agenda.
Take my country, Britain. It is enormously racially diverse now - radically so compared to how it was just one human lifetime ago. Mass migration continues, at historically unprecedented rates, and the culture and demography is changing rapidly as a result. It is very difficult for many people to manage.
All of this is baked into the system, which promotes 'diversity' at every level, and penalises anyone who takes issue with it. The decks are enormously stacked in favour of this process, and against those who object to it, on every level of the culture.
Then look at social attitude surveys and opinion polls. You see that despite these large changes - or perhaps because of them - the country is one of the most tolerant in Europe, and thus the world. Attitudes to mixed marriages, immigration, Islam and other such issues are very tolerant even in comparison to neighbouring European countries. There is no far right political grouping of any significance in the country.
What is the left's current narrative about my country? That it is a 'white supremacy.'
As I said above, this term has clear historical meaning - it refers to countries like Apartheid South Africa, or indeed to parts of the pre-civil rights US, where the culture and systems that uphold it are sytematically and deliberately racialised, and designed to promote 'whites' over others. This is precisely the opposite of what countries like Britain are: which is presumably why they are still magnets for large scale migration from the global south.
The point I wanted to make here was that calling countries like mine 'white supremacies' is insulting and dishonest. It is yet another attempt by a dominant political/cultural movement to demonise and degrade Western culture and heritage. As far as I can see, in the current lexicon of the left, 'white supremacy' translates as 'white majority.' The very same people who are racialising every aspect of society are at the same time attacking and demonising native Europeans and their cultures. This can only end very badly.
As ita happens, I do think there is an equivalent between the extremes of left and right on race right now. In fact, I think they advance precisely the same narrative: that the world is divided into racial groups, usually the 'whites' and the 'others', and that society is about a struggle for supremacy or equality between them. I have seen Ibram X Kendi and Richard Spencer publicy agreeing on this issue. The only difference between them is who ought to come out on top.
This is the context in which the nationalist movements in Europe you speak of are arising. They are a very mixed bag; some openly fascist, others ethnic nationalist movements, some far more civic in nature. Again, be careful with the notion 'white supremacy,' please. The word 'white' in Europe in this context is pretty meaningless. An ethnic nationalist movement in Finland, for instance, is not interested in 'white people', it's interested in Finnish culture. Nationhood, ethnicity and race are distinctive concepts, though often messily intertwined. I find again that in the US this is not so well understood, given that the country is a recent creation of settlers and immigrants from many places, and that it has a long and difficult history of racial antagonism. But applying US attitudes and terminology to Europe causes difficulties.
This has been a long reply, but I wanted to be clear. Actual 'white supremacy', like any worldview based on racial superiority, is a great evil. To hijack a term like that to use in an ongoing crusade against the traditional makeup of Western nations is something I want to call out wherever I see it.
From my understanding of the Gospels Jesus was seen by the religious authorities of his day as a problematic, competing nexus of spiritual authority that had to be removed to maintain the status quo. To achieve that removal the religious leaders manipulated the Roman authorities and also the populace mob.
“ritual, denying the self, radical humility, the essential human need for myth” for me seem to be the results of faith in Jesus not the core attraction of Christianity. In fact it can said those items can be found quite well in other religions. For me it has been an encounter with the risen Jesus of Nazareth and resulting gift of the Spirit that has been the main attraction. In Orthodox Christianity (I am not an Orthodox Christian) this encounter with Jesus is found in the Orthodox emphasis on the use of this prayer “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” and also in their focus on Holy Communion as a meeting place with Jesus the Pantocrator.
There are levels to this. Whilst an appreciation for virtues can be found in many cultures, there is something particular about the Christian emphasis on humility. All other cultures have tended to think of the divine as unreachable and therefore to an extent uncondescending. In many cases they have viewed the divine as requiring certain sacrifices for the purposes of appeasement. Only in Christianity is it believed that the divine took on human flesh in order to reconcile us to Himself. And not only took on human flesh but allowed Himself to be humiliated and killed in a worldly sense. Christ said he came not to be served, but to serve, and even washed his disciples feet. In that sense, a God who is that radically humble is unique to Christianity.
Yes, which deepens the sadness of much of Christian history when believers succumbed to "the yeast of the Pharisee and the Sadducee" Jesus warned against and were cruel and oppressive in the name of Christ instead of being "the servants of all". Scientifically yeast is omnipresent in the air and the environment and wet flour exposed to it can pick up sufficient yeast cells that with care can be nursed into a leavening for bread. I have done this. This judgmental, condemning Pharisee attitude is endemic to humanity, even a default response when we embrace a sincere belief of any kind. Even Buddhism and Taoism historically have had their times of religious oppression and persecution and heresy hunts.
Thank you for this. I was a little shocked at the paternalism and retro attitude, to be honest. As a woman, I really don't want to go back to the bad old days of antiquity when men ran the show. It is disturbing to me that those traditional hierarchies don't ever seem to get addressed - not in the Americas, not in Europe, not in Africa, not in Asia. They don't even get addressed in some of the most radical environmental movements out there. But those hierarchies are real, and they have real repercussions. So if we want to truly transform human society, we'd better bite the bullet and address the patriarchy first. IMHO.
Hmm? Feminism has been addressing those hierarchies for sixty years and has pretty much won the argument throughout Western culture, to the point where the very notion of masculinity is being called into question and the previously male-dominated culture is now seeing women outperform men at almost every level, and measurably so. I don't see how you can make a statement like that.
We are all allergic in modernity to these old symbols; to icons, to myths, to representations of divine order. I'll be writing about this soon. Pageau is interesting because he gets right to the symbolism of the matter: that modernity is in its essence a rebellion against God. In place of worship and humility, it offers self-worship instead. Something in us rebels almost primally against antying which reminds us of the real cost of this.
I don't agree. I certainly don't think superficial, top-down gains in some parts of the world over a few decades will make much of a dent in the fiercely defended traditions of the past 2000+ years. I am 67 years old and men are still explaining things to me. Also - and this tickles my irreverent funny bone - I feel like someone in an ancient helmet has sprung out of the bushes, swinging a magic sword at me. Truly no offense intended, and now I do promise to bow out for awhile.
Are they superficial? I suppose time will tell, but they look pretty impactful to me - and as Nikola says below, both the negative and positive consequences of the ongoing dismantling of many things are becoming clear.
But in any case, nothing I've written or said here addresses this issue either way. I'm really trying to think about the negative consequences of promoting me-first individualism, as the modern world does at its core, and the fact that this is, to my mind, a spiritual problem, which has led to both cultural and ecological dissolution. I think that some form of return to an understanding of the divine order of things is going to be necessary, I think.
That isn't the same as defending particular worldly social orders. My wife, for example, is Sikh. Sikhism from its very beginning was a faith which mandated equality between women and men, at the same time as centring love of God and other people, and the importance and family and community and love of nature. Done properly, it all fits together. To my mind, modernity sells women the same lie it sells men: you can have it all! We end up losing what matters most.
I'm too dim to understand the sword joke, but I wouldn't take offence even if I did.
Paul - As a 47 year old working, married, American mother, I'd argue that this idea that "Feminism has won the argument" is true at the level of dialogue, but not true at the level of lived reality. I'm drawing on my experiences living and working in both San Francisco / Silicon Valley (much has been written about how sexist this work culture is) and also living in the American South (ditto) as well as working remotely with professionals in major American cities (NYC, Chicago, LA, Houston, all the usual suspects). Yes, the LANGUAGE has changed. And certainly what is/is not allowed culturally has changed a lot with the "me too" movement. Yes, we've seen men toppled from power, and yes we now have the phrase "toxic masculinity" to sling around. Heck I've designed some of the "check the box" Diversity and Inclusion courses that global companies roll out to ensure compliance / that they can't be sued. However, ask any wife-mother if the division of labor is fair in her marriage, and the vast majority will say "No." Ask any woman involved in a church or school community "Whose free labor keeps this organization going?" and they will all laugh and say, "THE WOMEN'S LABOR." I've had the usual sordid allotment of sexual harassment and assault experiences at school and work of most women my age. Even when I work in traditionally more "female" fields (Ed Tech, Instructional Design), men typically hold more of the C-Suite positions of power - often because they are supported by non-working wives at home. The male bias in terms of company policy is often glaringly obvious. Don't get me started on unpaid maternity leave in the US. So yes, feminism won the ARGUMENT. But those are just WORDS. The infrastructure of patriarchal hierarchy, while not nearly as bad as it was in my mother's day, is still very much in place. But what does all of this have to do with you? With your discussion of the intersection of faith/spirituality and your post-environmentalist love of the Earth? Not too much, overtly. I'd just say to keep your eyes open. Maintain situational awareness. Here's the thing: Feminism has been corrupted by capitalism every bit as much as environmentalism has. To say "Feminism has won" is about the same as saying "Environmentalism has won" --- which is to say it has been co-opted by the machine. Much lip service has been paid, and much is still being destroyed. Just be mindful, that's all I'm asking.
PS - One thing to watch: Gendered language in the Christian faith. One of the things I love about Catholicism (vs. Protestantism) is the unabashed love of Mary. Which is to say the unabashed love of the old Goddess. God transcends gender, obviously. To center Christ/God as only male as so much of traditional Christianity does is a loss of the felt sense of the sacred of both men and women. It's something to notice and keep noticing. There's a long history of Christians arguing about whether women even possess souls at all. You'll understand if some of us still feel a sting at the memory.
Gah - I shouldn't have said "non-working wives at home" - I do not intend to cast any aspersions on my fellow wife-mothers who don't receive pay for their labor. I find the "women who don't work outside the home" phrase awkward and unclear and I don't have a better one. I'm just pointing out that many male executives have wives who support them at home 100%, which enables them to perform a certain way at work (as if they have no responsibility at home and can be avail for work 24/7), and so this informs their POV about how all of their employees should work.
These are interesting thoughts; thanks for them. I do try to keep my eyes open. I also try to negotiate the minefield carefully ... which is not always easy.
Yes, I did say that the argument had been won - I think that's true, but as you say, at the level of reality that doesn't necessarily translate into action. Virtue-signalling is easy. On the other hand, as I also said, in Britain at least, girls and women are outperforming men on almost every metric in most of the culture (exam results, earnings in most areas, health and welfare metrics), and that culture itself is increasingly pro-women (good) but conversely anti-men (not good, though maybe inevitable.)
I have a son and a daughter, so I try to think about the world they will both grow up in. I am more confident that it will promote the interests and nature of my girl than my boy. None of which is to say that you are wrong. I am glad that you have offered me this perspective.
Here are a couple of things I think about. Firstly, that 'feminism' has always been very much an elite movement. Less than 10% of British or American women sign up to it and it is overwhelmingly (upper) middle class. Perhaps that is because, as you say, it has been entirely captured by capitalism (what hasn't?)
But also, as Nikola says here, my experience of the 'feminist' narrative right now is that it overwhelming promotes a radical individualism which is inimical to family, community and human flourishing, but great news for corporations who can promote 'liberation' to women in the same way they have historically promoted it to men - leave your home and family and come out to work for us! Dump your kids in (paid!) childcare, let your home become a dormitory, see yourself overwhelmingly as an ambitious individual rather than a member of a family or a wider whole. We have all been sold this story since the industrial revolution, and it is hard to escape from.
Wendell Berry's essay 'Feminism, the body and the machine' offers an alternative to this. I don't know if you've read it or what you think. As a father and a homeschooler, I'm living in a family which has tried, a la Berry, to make the home an economy and a mini-culture, as something of a piece of grit in the capitalist oyster. For that reason I'm very glad to see what you say here about not receiving pay for 'labour.' I find the language around this positively demonic: the notion that either mothers or fathers should need to be paid for the 'labour' of creating a family is the direct invasion of the ethic of commerce into a space which should be founded on love and duty (for both sexes.)
How can a culture respect men and women as due equal rights and dignity while respecting the fundamental difference in their natures (and there is one), reducing neither to corporate labour units, and promoting motherhood, fatherhood, family and community, as opposed to atomised wage slavery? (And maybe getting men to do more washing up ...) I don't think this culture can. It sells us all the lie of 'freedom' through commerce and ambition. Women and men end up competing for CEO posts instead of building a real culture. We're supposed to cheer at the prospect of a female US president in a trouser suit bombing Iran.
I am rambling. There is a lot to think through. Thanks for your contribution. If I'm feeling foolhardy I might write about this here one day.
I think you've articulated some things here that many of us sense but perhaps hadn't heard expressed before. In my eyes too, feminism is inextricably linked to modernity and the ideology of endless progress. Whenever I think about what feminists want to see, it seems to me like their ideal is one of individualist independence from every single traditional structure, including their own family. Yet still, as you point out, there is an irony in that the vision involves them being tied to corporations who will pay them a high wage. In exchange for this high wage and prestige they will either forgo or delay having a family and potentially outsource the familial responsibilities to paid nannies. Somehow this is uncritically viewed as independence.
I think the key though, controversial as it may be to some, is that our culture has completely conflated dignity with nature. We seem to have told ourselves that there are no differences between sexes and that both are interchangeable. I've always sensed that feminism doesn't actually dignify women or validate their feminine attributes and nature. It almost seeks to eliminate the beauty in the inherent differences between the sexes (and ironically the ideal seems to be more male-oriented i.e. everyone working in offices in equal measure). The direction of travel is becoming clearer with time. Now we tell ourselves both that sex is a social construct and that there are more than two sexes. The next step of course will be to challenge our notion of what makes us human. This can be seen by the attempts to create embryos that mix human and animal DNA. Or it can be seen in the ambition to reduce the person to a piece of consciousness that can be uploaded into a cloud. It all goes back to the fact that we don't want to be constrained by any limits.
Paul and Nikola - Respectfully to both of you: These ideas of Feminism being co-opted by Capitalism are not new to me. I agree with it. Also many things can be true simultaneously. I'd like to speak to that. For example: Even though Conservationism/Environmentalism is absolutely and elitest endeavor and it's in bed with Capitalism now - it's still a good idea, at minimum, to respect and take care of the Earth and recognize the Earth/everything else is of equivalent importance to ourselves / e.g. "We're all One/We aren't Separate/It is Us" - can we stop being human-centered, etc. etc. For Feminism it's the same thing. Perhaps the word "Feminism" itself is too loaded these days. Please when I say "Feminism" hear "Equal treatment of women." All I am arguing for, is that both genders (and I'm going to include trans and non-binary and two-spirit folk in this, being "two spirit" is not a new concept in our time) - ANYWAY I am simply saying, CAN WE TREAT EVERYONE AS HOLY AND WORTHY PLEASE. That's it. Christianity has historically done a piss-poor job of treating women as holy and worthy. This is not unique to Christianity. However I know it's history better. Women have been seen as flesh but not spirit, as the "pit" men would fall into, as Eve the temptress, as Jezebel (this slur was heard often growing up; it was a common term for a girl who wore makeup too young), as Lilith, as the mouthpiece of Satan, as witches, and so on. Yes, there is also the cult of Mary and more Catholic churches are dedicated to Mary than anyone else - but then the Protestants got rid of her. Christianity has a HIGHLY problematic relationship with women, and with the body (which is seen as feminine vs. the masculine spirit). And I'd say this spirit/matter dichotomy, which is also a male/female dichotomy --- and seeing the spirit/masculine as superior to the body/feminine, is at the heart of the story about why our Western Christian Culture thought it perfectly fine to take dominion over the body of the (Female) Earth. To take possession of it. To rape it for its resources. To do whatever it wants with it. This metaphor goes deep. It's at the HEART of this whole problem. So please - when I say feminism - I'm not talking about the culture war stuff so much. I mean I AM. But that's not really the point for our purposes. I'm saying, "Can you notice that in our cultural metaphors, the Earth is feminine? And that in the West the feminine is there to be managed and subdued and owned and used like a resource? To be tilled and fertilized like land?" This thread runs through all our cultures stories and thoughts, and until we undo it, we're going to have a real problem with respecting the Earth as equal. Anyway. I'll go read your Wendell Berry article now ;) Perhaps I've shot my mouth off without good reason.
Thanks Wesley for your points and Paul your response. Wesley, I wasn't sure how to articulate what I was feeling in response to feminism being brought up here, and you nailed a lot of it. Especially operating in 'male' spaces (I was a cab driver, worked in the fishing industry, and built my own [tiny] house) I feel like I've encountered the patriarchy trying to keep me in my place constantly. But I certainly have been afforded more freedom and choice than any women before me. I appreciate this topic being addressed and Paul, I do hope you are 'foolhardy' enough to write about it here one day. It is an important topic. I see so much despair and self loathing in men around me. It is especially difficult to have intimate relationships with men who secretly hate themselves. But putting the old hierarchies back in place isn't the answer to that.
I'm curious, Paul, how you will address the fact that when one opens the door even a smidgen to critique things like feminism, the Left, wokeism, whatever we're calling it, this rhetoric of 'feminism/trans people/antiracism is ruining culture and the answer is to go back to the old ways" always seems to think it has found a comfortable home. I'm seeing this playing out even in the comments on these posts. And I think there is often the response (from the left) that because these "fascist" (which these days is another meaningless buzz word) ideologies seem to come if we critique, we shouldn't critique. Which is certainly not the answer.
Late to the party, but just dipping my toe in to say I hope you do write about this issue one of these days. I'm an American woman, retired academic. I'm old enough to have seen first, second, and third-wave feminism. I am grateful for, and have benefited from, the push for equal rights legally and socially. But... if we are going to have a conversation about what has gone wrong and where we go from here, I think it is important to be able to ask the question about what traditional forms of Christianity had to say about gender and hierarchy and why. What wisdom do the myths of hierarchy have for us? Why are so many men and women in the West adrift? I think you are brave to address the question of gender and individualism (not to mention transgender and transhumanism). It's so difficult to have an honest conversation about any of this, but I admire you for taking this (and many other things) on. Glad to be here.
"So if we want to truly transform human society, we'd better bite the bullet and address the patriarchy first"
You frame things as if the transformation hasn't even started. As Paul points out, the process of dismantling traditional hierarchies started decades ago (at least). To not acknowledge that is to sweep the negative repercussions we have already seen under the carpet (not that everything has been negative). In any case feminism and the whole battle against the patriarchy is just part of the larger direction of travel, it can't be viewed in isolation. It's the same human rebellion against limits with the misplaced optimism that we know better and are more enlightened so can build a new world from the ground up. Some humility about the unintended consequences would be in order. For example, do we not find it ironic that after all the changes to date to "improve" society as a whole, and women in particular, there are a smaller percentage of life-long marriages (or even committed relationships) which stand the test of time than ever before. And it isn't because everyone else has found an alternative which makes them happier- there is also more loneliness, depression, suicide than ever before. Our sense of fulfillment and our relationships are not better for it. And yet we still feel like we should dictate to societies in Africa or Asia what their direction of travel should be. Not because our evidence is impressive, but because we have a religious belief that the evidence already out is a bump in the road towards a glorious future.
I like to say Paul, l am around your age, gestationally. My point is, your still young enough to know we're getting older. But we are not old yet, in my opinion. How refreshing to hear and feel how we should stop being rebellious toward God. I came across Jonathan Pageau via internet, watching Paul Vanderclay, a reformed minister from Sacramento, CA.
Hello Paul. Thank you for trying to hold the two opposite poles of love-of-the-wild and Christianity - you're obviously risking electrocution by trying to hold the paradox. Thanks for forging ahead anyway. I'm similarly weird and I find it very, very difficult to language the intersection of these things myself. In my heart, they don't seem paradoxical at all - especially in the mystic traditions. But to most people they seem like political opposites and it can get dicey to talk about them. My friends are a liberal crowd and whenever I get too spiritual people look at me like I grew another head (that would be any Christian talk; there's no problem with Buddhist or yoga/chakra/energy talk). Thanks for being willing to work it out in public. It's a messy but very needed.
A bit of personal background - in case you're wondering what sort of person is engaged by your attempt at this: I'm about your age. I was born in 73. I grew up the child of agnostic scientists in the American South (Bible country, north Louisiana specifically). My parents took me camping instead of to church. But my devout grandparents hauled me to First Presbyterian for soul insurance purposes. Meanwhile, my parents taught me to treat trees and animals and rocks and rivers with as much respect as people - all the while calling this "scientific observation." They were accidental animists. I did not find these experiences contradictory as a child - I found them deeply harmonious. When I was 20, I wrote a bombastic college literary (not religious studies) thesis on "The Female Body as Text in Medieval Women's Visionary Literature of the 13th Century" - while an agnostic/atheist kid. At that age, I believed "my religion was science." My advisor was a former Catholic nun. At the time I had no idea why I was writing it. Now, the memory is hilarious. Of course I was working that out! I'm still working it out! At 23 I ran away to San Francisco to study literature and work in a used bookstore and stayed there 15 years. But I rapidly fell into the tech industry in order to make rent. This felt like a death. At age 25 God showed up while I was working on an interactive gizmo for third graders (weird and embarrassing) and kept showing up. I didn't know who to talk to about it or HOW. I tried Buddhism at the SF Zen Center. I went on retreat to Tassajara and Esalen and did a lot of yoga. I read lots of weird books. Somewhere in there I got married and my mother insisted it be a church wedding so I insisted on getting baptized so as not to be a hypocrite and my entire family (including me) was confused. I went back to SF and we had our first child. In 2011 as the excesses of the tech industry grew to ever dizzying heights, I convinced my husband that it was time to FLEE THE CITY NOW. We made it back to small town Louisiana and tried to build a life. I started going to my grandparents' church. This felt good and it was an incredible relief to start living my life in rhythm with liturgical time - the ritual of it was important! - but I was also aware that there were old-fashioned Christians who were skeptical of me and my wide-ranging (and highly mystical/mythical) POV and that it might be offensive to them if I opened my yap. So I was unsure how deeply I could integrate myself into the church. I was also aware that this church, like all the mainline Protestant churches in America, was very obviously DYING. They still knew how to summon sacred time and yet....something was still missing at the center. Things were too heady. Embodiment was missing. Many people were going through the motions without knowing why. Most young people were gone. And meanwhile my hometown was stuck somewhere btwn 1955-1980 in all the worst ways as well as the good ways. I discovered the old saw: You can't go home again. I had attempted time travel and it half-way worked - but it also broke something. It was revelatory, cathartic, depressing. Then my husband's film company closed and we came to Dallas for his work (mine is remote, I can take it with me). Now I'm back in the proverbial belly of the beast. Back in urban sprawl. We send our kids to Montessori in an attempt to airlift them out of some of the craziness. I became a certified yoga teacher as a manic attempt to do something about something. IT IS SO CONFUSING to know how to be with all of this. Thank you for reading all this, if you were able. I only have one very good friend with whom it's safe to share all these contradictory things. Otherwise, I can only share conservative religious bits with some. And liberal bits with others. I can't tell you what a relief it is to find a place where all might be talked about at once. Thank you.
The splitting of what you talk about with whom, depending on their 'politics', does get exhausting and strange doesn't it? But I feel you on the 'whenever I talk about anything spiritual people look at me like I grew another head', unless it's talking within the context in which spirituality is 'acceptable' (which these days seems to be witchcraft or Buddhism). I was/am(?) a very active practicing witch who recently turned towards Christianity and everyone is SUPER CONFUSED and sort of horrified, as I would have been if it hadn't happened to me.
Yes! The splitting! My stars, the exhaustion of constantly discerning what is/is not allowed in conversation and navigating the cultural taboos. So far my journey has included many, many things ranging from Zen Buddhism to Ancestral Lineage Healing/Worship (this is pretty Pagan/Animist) to Christianity. What I tell my children is that, "All human cultures need food and that all those foods taste different but they are nourishing. Similarly, all human cultures need a relationship to the divine - how they do it looks different, but all the ways are nourishing." This seems like it shouldn't be a controversial message but it very often is. (And yes, one could argue about how nourishing vs. not various cultural traditions are!) Anyway, interesting times. Postmodern explosion. Lost of roots and traditions and ways all blown up or scrambled. I get Paul's movement toward orthodoxy. I've done something similar with yoga - after years of practicing Vinyasa styles, I now do Ashtanga. Which seems nuts and semi-cult-like, but it's simply a stripping away - a moving toward what is most essential. A peeling back of layers. I digress. You were talking about splitting and also the horror of moving toward something you'd rejected on an ideological level. Yes, there is so much splitting. And a realization that all our dogmas get in the way. All of it needs dismantling. I do still find guidance from the Buddhist approach of observing direct experience. What is happening right now? This helps. But it also is profoundly scary and requires a great deal of self trust. How do we know what is real? Where are our guides? Are there any guides left? Do the old ways still work? What traditions are dead? Which are living? It's a puzzle.
It's very good to 'meet' both of you. What you are saying really reonsates with me - the 'splitting', politically and spiritually. So much of this seems to spring from the human desire for tribalism. Are you with us or against us? And the cultural collapse now deepends that a hundredfold - now you are 'friend' or 'enemy'. I have spent my writing life being looked at with suspicion by both left and right, and I'm sure that will continue.
I was recently reading - I can't remember where - about an Orthodox monk on Mount Athos who was a great nature lover. 'Whoever does not love trees', he would say, 'does not love Christ.' When farmers came to him for Confession he would tell them plant trees rather than say prayers foe redemption. I love this vision. It is so very clear to me now that we need traditions - we need structures that can pass the truth down to us, and guard them from the world. But we need to remember our roots too, on Earth. Why should Christianity be disembodied? It should not be - and one reason I came to Orthodoxy was that it is so rooted in the immanent. God is 'everywhere present', in every tree and lake. There's work to be done here to speak across the aisles. Many thanks to both of you.
Thanks for the response, Paul. One of the reasons I enjoy reading your work so much is that you're willing to risk being out of favor with various camps (all the camps?) in order to ferret out what is authentically true -- and you're also willing to change your mind given new information and experience. This takes courage and it's also murder on the constructed Ego / Persona. From a spiritual POV this practice is good medicine and requires humility, but socially it's a rough slog and invites attack. I think it's more fundamental even than tribalism (though related). We build these little egos, these little selves, these constructed personas - whatever you call them - like little cars to carry our true Selves (God help me, our Souls?) about. The ego thinks, "I like this, not that. I like these people, not those. I believe this, not that." It builds up a collection of all these little bits --- if you've ever seen a Decorator Crab pasting bits of stuff on its shell, it's like that, how we construct our identities. And then we HANG ON to them, these identities built of flotsam. We experience loss of any of these bits as DEATH. (I mean, what am I telling you this for? You did the Zen thing. You know what I'm talking about. The Ego resists its own death. The Ego is insane that way.) Anyway - I think the reason people throws rocks at you is because your very ideological flexibility threatens their Egos with Death / messes with their sense of a stable reality. If a person hasn't accepted that the Ego/Persona is a mask, and subject to change, they are going to freak out on you when you start moving bits about on the board. "YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO MOVE THAT BIT" is what they are saying, "DON'T MOVE THAT PIECE YOU'LL MAKE THIS NICE REALITY I'VE CONSTRUCTED FALL DOWN." I'm sure you must know this. I guess I just want to be one voice from the crowd saying, "Hey, I see this is happening to you." and "Thanks for doing it anyway, I appreciate you taking that blow on the noggin." Personally, I'm not as courageous as putting my ideas into print. The attacks are why. I have chosen silence as a way to preserve my sanity / think my stuff out in peace. But I'm extremely grateful for this forum you've created to try to hold the paradox.
And to add regarding the Christian bits - I love the story about the monk who prescribes tree planting for redemption/penance. I do a fair bit of tree planting and gardening myself (tending my own little corner) and it often feels like...well yeah, like hands-on worship and a giving of labor to the Earth. It feels right. Resonates. A re-Earthing of the spirit and all that for me --- and an honoring and giving back to the Earth which gives so much to me. It's good. Which brings me to the idea of an embodied Christianity. I absolutely agree with you that it can and should be embodied! I mean, goodness, isn't Christ the very metaphor of embodied Spirit? The God made flesh? Christianity is all about embodiment. When I said it was disembodied, I just meant the way in which it was practiced in the mainline southern American Protestant church I grew up in (Presbyterian - I'm of good lowland Scots stock - or should I say, I'm probably descended from a bunch of ornery cusses and Border Reivers, but I digress). I do think most Protestant spiritual practice is HIGHLY disembodied. Cerebral. Spiritualized. About a God up in heaven or OUT THERE. Personally, though, I'm more on team St. Francis (and many other mystics besides), who believe God is right here - in this tree, in this Earth, in this rock, river, root, stream, fish, air, bacterium, cell. In my body. In your body. God is absolutely immanent in every bit of creation. There is no place where God IS NOT. God is the very breath of life. God exists between atoms. Between sub-atomic particles. (Before long I'm going to go off the deep end and sound like I'm talking about the Force from Star Wars, and then we'll all be embarrassed. Sorry!) I just think Christianity is not always good at honoring this - though I know it HAS been good, at some times and in some places. I came back to Christianity from Buddhism and other spiritual forays because I was searching for a more culturally authentic expression of faith, something that belonged to me culturally and my own ancestors --- and where there was a living practice with elders I could tap into. Something that didn't feel like cultural appropriation of the East. However the Protestantism that I encountered in my very conservative Bible belt hometown in the American south was not matching my experience of the very embodied experience of Christ and God that I know is OUT THERE somewhere. I'm just not sure where to find it. So I'm curious about your experience with the Orthodox church. A few other thoughts: That thesis I wrote as an unbelieving kid, on "The Female Body as Text in Medieval Women's Visionary Literature" - that's all about your countrywomen Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. The anchoress and the hysterical weeper. If I'd expanded my scope I could have written about the stigmata too - anyway, the point is that back in those days, women weren't allowed to speak about their spiritual experiences, so they manifested them through their bodies - these were received as signs literally written on the flesh by God because women's voices were considered often to be corrupt or Satan's preaching. So denied their voices, their bodies spoke. Then faced with this visual evidence, the priests were forced to listen to them. To hear their spiritual testimony and write it down. I'm not sure why I'm telling you this except I think it's a story you need to know. It has to do with emodiment. On words being written in physicality vs. air. This strikes me as relevant to things you are trying to sort out, and your own sometimes frustration with language. Take care. TTFN.
I have been either lucky or unlucky to be born and operate in so many disparate communities that it's always felt unnatural to cling to just one 'side', while also desperately wanting to belong somewhere, anywhere. My father is from rural Alabama, Baptist, 200 years in the same county people who are super affectionate and never stop talking, and my mother is descended from Westward-expanding settlers who ended up as stick-up-the-butt kind but cold Pacific Northwest Lutherans. I lived in 'keep it weird' Portland for 15 years as an adult but spent my summers in the conservative leaning, land based fishing industry of Alaska. I've thought about moving to Alabama, I've thought about moving to Alaska, I've thought about going back to Portland where at least I sort of fit in. It's all a lot of flailing and if anything these discussions make me feel better about it. It makes more sense. Recently I've been noticing I am just tired of being motivated by my own "I WANT" but what else to be motivated by? I am just leaving that question with God.
I love the quote by the monk about the trees! Thank you for sharing.
Hi Paul, I thought I would just write a bit about a couple of things to do with nature and Christianity, since that's in a few of the threads below. I grew up always sensing the sacred in nature, and had long 'prayer' times speaking to God while lying in the garden, feeling at one with everything, and sensing a security, a 'presence' around me and in the grass, the tiny flowers and insects, and the clouds drifting above. Unlike you, I also had a fairly strict brethren upbringing, and somehow left behind this sense of the presence of God in nature as a teenager, as I was initiated into a more rationalist version of the faith. Such experiences did not at that time seem to me to be reflected in church and so I became fragmented. I think one of the threats to children from technology is that they are deprived of this early experience to simply 'hear' God for themselves, and may be condemned to be locked in a transhuman prison of the mind. We should probably pray against this. This rationalist version of being a Christian did not last me even into university and I became an 'impersonal God is everywhere/I can't be a Christian' sort of person and assumed Christianity was not for me. Then a decade later, following a very desperate and short prayer, I had an experience of God's presence which remains the outstanding detail of my life. His presence in the room was first of all highly intimate. It was also immense and I was unable to physically rise from the floor and had to crawl to lie down because of the weight of the air above. I was aware that the entire room was full of 'Person'. My mind was unhinged for several weeks by encountering a being so enormously greater in reality than me, who yet was intent upon something scarily personal. I was quite literally changed forever by this. I have read also since then that during the revivals on the Isle of Lewis, there was a locational aspect in which people were unable to escape from the presence of God, since the ground itself was sensed to be so sacred and full of God's presence that people would simply fall down with a sense of their true place. (It seems key to me, this sense of our true place as humans, when considering the possible ecological outcomes of a people fully living in this way). There are still a few people alive today in Lewis who remember this time. I believe there have also been areas in Africa which have experienced ecological renewal following mass conversions, I will try to find out about this. I have since had other times of sensing this sacredness in terms of walking on ground which suddenly seemed holy. The ground I think is always holy, it's just that at various times we are privileged to understand this in an experiential way. I would love to see an interaction between those from protestant traditions who have experienced this holiness of God's presence in creation and the orthodox churches who have that tradition of God being present in creation. For myself, as being used to the protestant tradition, I am in the process of reaching out and wanting to learn more from Romanian orthodox christians who have recently moved to the area. I hope that as things become dim, we will see more Christians becoming more open to the experiences and traditions of one other, and a way will open towards this embracing of the presence of God in all places.
I just want to say to those who always demand proof, that if the existence of God could be proved beyond the shadow of a doubt, then it would make despots of us all. What would such a society look like? Would we even be human, since we would have no choices to make? In the words of Dallas Willard (whose book the Divine Conspiracy is quite helpful), God wants to see what WE want. Then we have the option of becoming co-creators, fully participating with the divine, or simply continuing to build our own empires. I believe this choice is laid before us each minute of each hour of each day. Other people are of course free to differ and they will!
I’ve been following Dreher’s re-enchantment for a while now (amongst his other writings), and I can honestly say I am sitting in the edge of my seat waiting for YOUR next post. Don’t get me wrong, I love Dreher and his mind — and he pointed me to you — but your posts speak to something I can’t wait to hear more about. A world that has gone crazy, a world that doesn’t understand where the road it is running down is going to lead it. I think you do. You may not, but, DAMN! you *get* a lot of it, and I want to know what you think. It moves my soul. I’m here, waiting for the rest of it!
This is an essay by Scott Alexander at his old Slate Star Codex blog that nudged me a few years ago to start thinking along these lines: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
It's irreverent but extremely thought-provoking, and comes from a very different perspective as the Abbot. It probably comes to a very different conclusion as to the solution, but I found it very compelling!
Your decision to start writing with no apology for words that need to be said and action that needs to be taken in defense of our natural world is what brought me here. Being a person around so many others that desecrate this region I live in has made me highly defensive of it, for the animal life here and I have lost patience with them all, not a helpful reaction often, but there it is. As you say while speaking to Jonathan above, in the recent youtube, I also feel we are on the edge of something very big about to happen with nature; this is an anxiety that energetically wise maybe is sensed by others in other places also. Paul, your viewpoints here in the Abbey are the most refreshing guidepost I have found and am grateful for your happening to have taken this route. Will be working through your early writing of Beast in N. Kotar's group shortly and look forward to moving through the trilogy. Thank you for what you do and how you do it!
Speaking of the Garden. Some beautiful thoughts on a fruitful human relationship with earth. Taken from Climate, A New Story by Charles Eisenstein.
"Tending the Wild
The regenerative practices I’ve described are rooted in a mindset and way of relating that goes back tens of thousands of years outside civilization, and even as a recessive gene within civilization, the seed of the future.
This section is named after a book by Kat Anderson that describes the relationship between the pre-colonial indigenous people of California and the land. Anderson demolishes the myth that hunter-gatherer people were mere occupants of pristine “nature,” demonstrating their deliberate, sustained influence on the composition of biotopes and species in their territory. Entire landscapes that appeared to the untrained eye of white settlers as wild were anything but. Anderson explains:
Through coppicing, pruning, harrowing, sowing, weeding, burning, digging, thinning, and selective harvesting, they encouraged desired characteristics of individual plants, increased populations of useful plants, and altered the structures and compositions of plant communities. Regular burning of many types of vegetation across the state created better habitat for game, eliminated brush, minimized potential for catastrophic fires, and encouraged diversity of food crops. These harvest and management practices, on the whole, allowed for sustainable harvest of plants over centuries and possibly thousands of years.[21]
When white settlers marveled at the stupendous bounty of fish, game, and wild plant foods that the Indians, it seemed, lazily lived off in an indolent existence, when John Muir wrote his glorious praise of California’s Central Valley with its endless meadows of wildflowers, they were actually looking at a sophisticated garden, lovingly tended for generations. According to the elders Anderson interviewed, “wilderness” was not a positive concept in Native culture; it meant land that was not well tended, land in which human beings were not exercising their duty to protect, enhance, and develop life. (I live in California and have heard this same approach from two native elders)
Modern conservationists might be excused for wanting to minimize human impact, since the kind of human impact we’ve seen in the industrial era makes the caring observer recoil in horror. We might be excused for promoting an ethic of “leave no trace.” We might be excused for envisioning a future where humanity retreats to bubble cities, space colonies, or a virtual reality, leaving nature behind to recover its former wholeness, relating to it as a spectacle or a venue for recreation, visiting it perhaps as zero-impact ghosts, observers but not participants.
Tending the Wild suggests a different vision, freeing us from the perceptions with which industrial society has imbued us. Instead of zero impact, it suggests positive impact. Instead of leave no trace, it suggests “leave a beautiful trace” or “leave a healing trace.” It suggests that we ask, “What is our proper role and function in service to the health, harmony, and evolution of this whole of which we are a part?”
We have potent gifts of hand and mind that take the form of technology and culture. These gifts are not meant for us alone. They are meant to serve the wholeness and evolution of Life.
Just because someone is indigenous does not mean he or she, or her culture, knows how to live in mutually beneficial harmony with the earth. It is something each culture must learn. Furthermore, each level of developmental scale requires a new learning.
Extinctions of megafauna and other animals and plants regularly followed human settlement of new lands. Australia, the Americas, New Zealand, Madagascar, and Polynesia all experienced them, suggesting a kind of inevitability to anthropogenic ecocide, which has only accelerated along with our capacity to perpetrate it. Yet, in the end, people in all of these places eventually came into equilibrium with their lands. In most places, as the subsequent biological wealth of the Americas exemplifies, it was an abundant and biodiverse equilibrium. This suggests another possibility beyond Man the Destroyer—that we can learn from our mistakes, that we can mature in our gifts and turn them toward a different purpose."
1491 by Charles C. Mann talks about it being realized that the Amazon rain forest instead of being sparsely populated primeval forest was much more populated 500 years ago under a productive agro-forestry style model of management.
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Sounds like a description of Eden to me!
Love this. If you want to read more about cultures who tend nature as a garden and come into balance with it, I highly recommend Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweet Grass (Native American POV; RWK is a trained scientist and also embraces the native spiritual perspective - it's amazing to hear both views presented) and Diana Beresford-Kroeger's "To Speak for the Trees" (Anglo-Irish, with an amazing life story about becoming an orphan and then the bearer of Celtic wisdom tradition about trees/plants for her community)
Thank you, I have read Braiding Sweet Grass, will check out "To Speak for the Trees" I am anglo saxon/celtic with a dash of viking.
Her work really spoke to me Jeff - I'm of similar ancestry. Something resonated. I hope it's moving for you as well :) Let me know how you like it, if you read it!
Got “To Speak for the Trees” Her upbringing and subsequent personal journey was intriguing. I had already absorbed her nature/forest/tree message from other places. I also have my own “magic” connection with trees and the natural world starting in my rural childhood. My interest in reading faded out when I got to the The Celtic Alphabet of Trees part. But overall a worthwhile read.
Jeff, I'm glad you got something out of it even if it's an imperfect book. I had a semi-rural childhood as well, and also have a relationship with trees that began then. Like you, I found her upbringing + personal journey fascinating - and was riveted hearing how the community came together to share wisdom with her, how she became almost a living book of the local traditions. It made me think about how we construct/share/transmit culture and ways of knowing - and what old ways of doing this we might want to go back to. Anyway. Glad if it was of any use. Take good care.
Looking forward with interest Paul. I'm sure you'll give us something worthwhile to think about.
Fascinating stuff for which many thanks. Given your experience of the last few months, Paul, it will be interesting to see how your readership changes. I read many of your early essays and found them implicitly pointing toward something that is perhaps being fulfilled for you at the moment. Hopefully you can bring some of the less militantly secular environmentalists along with you on this ride!
I thoroughly enjoyed your trilogy - especially The Wake which, for me, was the best literary portrayal of a sort of Steiner/Barfield 'original participation' I have come across lately. An excellent conversation with Jonathan Pageau.....I'm getting my money's worth already, though obviously I'm not thinking in those terms!
It will be interesting, yes. I have already have a few of my more 'secular' readers drop away. I hope I can speak to some degree across the barricades; although who knows, in pratice this may simply mean alienating the left and the right at the same time! But these silos are the problem.
I think you're percepctive in what you saw in my early essays. I can see it too now, though it was much less clear then.
Very glad you enjoyed the novels!
I am not planning to drop away because you have so much that is really helpful to say and dialogue with. However reading you and listening to the interview sounds very much like listening to someone in the uncritical excitement of a recent conversion. No problem with that, I have been there many times in my 60 years! What worries me is, for a moment ignoring the contents of christianity, any framework of understanding of the world that sets up a higher being and then gives humans a unique relationship to it, is setting up a distorting and destructive mode of experiencing and relating the more-than-human world. It is abstract and ungrounded. For me, we need to start right at the embodied foundations of our existence - what are the psychological and neurological impulses that cause us to desire these vertical meaning structures - whether its christianity, human reason, capital, ideologies, paradigms. And how do we then use these abstract narratives to dominate and destroy everything around us even when we were just desiring to create a better world? Starting with religion, politics, ethics, is to start too far up the meaning structure. And yes the narrative around Jesus is a powerful and helpful resource but possibly not because of the meaning structure he sits in! I still feel Feuerbach's diagnosis of how we create a God is helpful - we create a being, project onto them the most idealised attributes that we can aspire to as humans, then we kneel before them because we fall short of that perfect image! And he said that before we understood the mode of operation of the prefrontal cortex or the workings of the left brain hemisphere. He also said "Theology, I can bring myself to study no more. I long to take nature to my heart, that nature before whose depth the faint-hearted theologian shrinks back; and with nature man, man in his entire quality." After decades of wanting to find in Christianity an answer, I feel that position is more likely to yield the slow, at the margins response we seek for.
But as I say - I am in for the journey!!!
To clarify - to understand humans we need to understand them in relation to nature not in relation to some projected Theos.
You're half right Alistair - I have been excited, but not uncritically. This has been a long time coming, and I have explored other paths for some time - including more obviously rationalist ones like Zen.
Your response here presupposes that we 'project' or 'create' God/divinity because we 'desire vertical meaning structures.' That's philosophy - and highly questionable philosophy too. Could be true, could be false, but I am not Christian because I want a 'vertical meaning structure'. I'm Christian for other reasons, none of which can be rationalised away. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you are. We can't say, at least not using these criteria.
I don't know whether humans have a 'unique relationship' to God. I think we are called to behave in certain ways towards all other life - call it Creation, or not - and that we fail to do that. We are, very clearly, not the same as other creatures in key ways, better and worse. One of those ways is our lack of integration into the web of life; a product presumably of our ability to reason and create stories.
I think that some Christians seem to believe the Earth is their domain, and that this is wrong. I agree about the embodied foundations, but there's no reason those 'meaning structures' have to be destructive. We are all embedded in 'nature' because we are nature. Who knows where nature precisely comes from? But I have believed in an intelligence behind it all for much longer than I have been a Christian. And even the church teaches that ultimately we can never know God.
Brain science is no answer to the reality of ongoing religious experience. Neither is philosophy, or reason. I think that if Christianity, or any faith, is to survive, it will need to become much more embodied and entwined with the rest of life. I think that will happen. We will see. But in the end, there is only truth and falsehood. We'll find out as we walk which is which, I suppose!
Thanks for the thoughts. Look forward to more.
Thanks for your measured reply. Will respond but it takes time and there is life to be lived. I am going to challenge you a lot but from a place of admiration and gratitude. I have read your confessions essay every year ever since I came by it, your Language of the Master essay is utterly spot on and your online writing course was a game changer for me! I am a big fan but this shift mystifies me!
Challenge away! It has mystified me too, but I know it is real, and so I am going to follow it wherever it leads me. But I am not going to pretend that I know where that is. Take care.
Hi, Alistair, for me the living God has a taste of eternity that nature lacks. When I look at nature by itself (Romans 8:21)I see that in the end death is king, and I am just another piece of soon to be road kill on nature’s highway. I call Jesus of Nazareth “The Grand Anomaly” as death didn’t have the final say with him. So I am betting everything on his resurrection as being the over ruling fact of reality along with my present experience of the down payment of the Spirit in my heart. 2 Corinthians 1:21. Hitching a ride with Jesus I guess. Hoping you can come to that place of simplicity. For what it’s worth prior to the God/Jesus reality I was a mish mash of scientism, and new age and eastern religion.
Thanks for your comment Jeff. I understand your sentiment as I would once have articulated something close to it myself. I did write a potted version of my own journey when I was writing my initial response to Paul but put it aside as I suspected it was of no interest or little relevance to the debate. But I will drop it in here as a response to your comment! ...... Just listened to the conversation (with Jonathan Pageau). And to be honest am a little dazed and not actually sure what it's worthwhile to write. I guess my overriding reaction (I write as a 62 year old) is that you sound just like me on my conversion to christianity 40 years ago. I sense your enthusiasm, just as I felt, that Christianity wasn’t what I thought it was and that it made more sense than anything else I had come across. I felt part of something that was the answer to problems of the world. It wasn’t Orthodoxy but evangelical christianity at that time and like thousands of others in UK and elsewhere I was part of a big movement that started new grassroots churches that wanted to break free of the issues of the established church and follow the teachings of Jesus more authentically. We thought we were the answer to the world )-: I read Martin Luther King and got involved in social change - starting soup-runs, drop in centres, running training courses for many years for the long-term unemployed and those with mental health issues. Over time, evangelicalism stopped making sense for me and I moved to a high Anglian church where ritual, theatre, art, mystery were dominant and to me crucial. I studied theology and though never involved with the Orthodox Church (went once but it was just too alien and inhospitable for me!) but I became very drawn to apophatic theology. Partly through reading David Abram’s Spell of the Sensuous (and partly because I wanted a rational foundation to escape metaphysics (the idea that there is a level above sensed experience) I did a Masters in Phenomenology studying Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. Alongside I helped curate a performance art group called “the garden” which explored the boundaries of a fairly deconstructed christianity and our relationship with the land. One of your other Abbey readers mentioned Pyrotheology which is an initiative of a Belfast guy called Pete Rollins, who whilst he was still in Ireland created a group called Ikon, who we were in close links with. Finally the whole spiritual narrative dropped away for me completely and I have spent the last few years exploring the relationship between our animal bodies and the land and aspiring to feel into a different language (so far largely of practices rather than words) to navigate this territory. ..... So, Jeff, I have been where you speak from but it was a long time ago!
Thank you for your lengthy response. I am 67, I suppose I have a Christian animism layer to my world experience, stemming from a childhood intimacy with the midwestern landscape of the USA and continued intimacy with the landscapes and soil of California. The trees are alive!, especially the old ones. Along with that has been a none apophatic theology - the Jesus of Nazareth alive as seen in Acts, the last Adam as a life giving spirit, a reference to a verse in 1 Corinthians.
“the uncritical excitement of a recent conversion” I had the same reaction. It seems to me Paul is having the joy of a dolphin exploring a strange, wonderful new sea. Eastern Orthodoxy has its attractions but in the end doesn’t work for me. But I’ve realized we humans have to encase the experience of the Living God in some sort of structure as part of being in this world. Those structures reflect our human limits, weaknesses, strengths and historical and cultural developments. It’s unavoidable. I include my own Protestantism in this.
In the spirit of this community I do want to stress that I am not wanting to judge Paul or anyone one else on what is arising for them. My reaction is purely as someone who has taken a path that included Christianity for some years but found it, for me, ended up being very problematic in providing any framework for wrestling with the issues that Paul has so elegantly laid out (especially in some of his other essays) that I am personally struggling with the idea of revisit that journey. Even though I am not so arrogant (I hope) to believe that there is not something new to be learnt. I arrived at the place, perhaps first and most poetically articulated by Neitzche, but then redescribed by others that any form of meta-physics cuts us off from experiencing the authentic presence of the "What is" because it locates true meaning in some abstract, mentally constructed "upstairs". I also don't want to prejudge what Paul may bring to us of his journey in the coming weeks. It's not wise to form an opinion about something that at this moment remains unspoken!!!
My take on Paul and this place is we have freedom to graciously share our viewpoints, even with firmness and our personal conviction of the truth of what we are saying. which you have done wonderfully well.
Hi Paul- thank you for your always excellent, heartful writing and scholarship, as well as your intellectual bravery and candor overall.
Watching this video interview, I came away with the feeling that I might sincerely re-investigate Christianity from a much different perspective RE: ritual, denying the self, radical humility, the essential human need for myth... all of these things seem sensible and true, and as you suggest may be more relevant/ important than ever today to try and actionably summon.
However I just wanted to register a few other comments here; IMO, Pageau, based on the philosophy expounded in several of his other videos… has some pretty retrograde/ frankly openly sexist views; his explication of/ defense of the so-called natural authority flowing from the top down, + from men to women, is IMO extremely flimsily conceptualized...if not almost idiotic. also, for him to frame the worldwide George Floyd protest movement primarily as a, “religious impulse“, although perhaps true in a very “macro” sense....to me seemed bizarrely paternalistic (as well as extremely tone deaf.)
And let me be totally clear, here; IMO
explicitly seeking to integrate the modern feminist struggle, along with other (massive) demographics of human society in one’s Christian philosophy/ vision...is NOT some knee-jerk expression of “woke-ness”!! Nor is my critique of him here an effort to try to “cancel” him, or broadly reject any/ all of his other ideas; just to point out that (some of) his perspectives in this context, IMO work at fundamental cross-purposes with a truer vision of love, compassion, true understanding etc.
uncritical/ unexamined, modern human, male and white supremacy, while (also) being obvious foundational characteristics of a godless/ hyper-individualist/ capitalist culture…unfortunately also (still) go deeply hand-in-hand with traditional Christianity, and IMO one must be extremely vigilant/ careful about not uncritically allowing these toxic dogmas to remain tacitly animated, even when they superficially appear to cut against the grain of mainstream (Christian, atheist, capitalist) culture.
IMO, Pageau’s often overly simplistic and paternalistic Christian worldview explicitly eschews recent historical reality and political analysis, in favor of more reassuring macro-philosophical (and mythological) narratives- + based on the comments section of the video itself (*not his responsibility obviously! but still worth noting)..it seems that many of his viewers apparently still don’t have a visceral sense of how catastrophic the environmental catastrophe actually is.. and (in some cases) also casually vilify BLM/ liberalism as whole/ the entire climate change movement. + regardless of (some of) the misplaced fervor embodied by champions of these movements online...IMO broadly dismissing these phenomena merely as expressions of “failed liberalism“ seems extremely misguided...if not flat out dangerous.
...I just think it’s extremely important for advocates of (even radical) Christian values to not unwittingly gloss over the real life, on-the-ground economic and political mechanics of present day white supremacy (*which while having non-racially specific antecedents/ precedents, + ones far older and more deeply entrenched than their current manifestations) .. IMO it still warrants at least being mentioned (if not actively litigated) in any serious discussion about a contemporary radical transformation of human society.
anyway, thank you again for your excellent work + I look forward to all of your upcoming writings ❤️
Thanks for your comments. Timothy.
What I have seen of Jonathan P is very interesting to me. I think that his picture of the sacred shape of reality is key. I also think that hierarchy is real, and always exists, in every culture (the current 'culture war' after all, is mainly about inverting the pre-existing one.) Doubtless he and I would have different views in a number of areas - we had some in our conversation - but of course nobody is required to sign up to the entire worldview of someone they talk to online. If I had to entirely agree with everyone I spoke to I would never speak to anyone! I'm more interested in discovering people whose insight into the mess we're in goes deeper than the usual ding-dong surface battle.
Reading your comment, it looks to me like a specifically American perspective. For example, this statement:
"uncritical/ unexamined, modern human, male and white supremacy, while (also) being obvious foundational characteristics of a godless/ hyper-individualist/ capitalist culture…unfortunately also (still) go deeply hand-in-hand with traditional Christianity"
This may or may not be true in America, but it is not true elsewhere. There are more 'traditional Christians' in Africa these days than in the whole of Europe and America combined, and they are unlikely to be 'white supremacists.' In my view, in any case, this phrase is not to be thrown around lightly. I don't accept its application to my society at all, and I think that this escalation of language is part of the problem right now.
As I say, your view I think is quite culturally specific - not one that would be very applicable to Christianity here in Ireland, or in my Romanian church. I do agree with you however about the too-common Christian dismissal of environmentalism, and nature as a whole; and the tendency of some Christians (perhaps again especially in America) to politicise their faith. I've no interest in that, from either side.
Thanks for commenting.
hi Paul- thanks so much for this thoughtful response
In immediate retrospect I realized that my framing it as a general critique of “traditional” christianity was totally culturally specific = as you suggested, broadly not applicable to other large swaths of the world...what I meant was (IMO) the way mainstream, modern/ contemporary Christianity functions (and notions of innate hierarchies notwithstanding) by and large still isn’t very “evolved”, whatsoever, in terms of basic notions of equality and dignity for women… so I guess it hits a nerve with me when such smart/ influential people (like IMO, Pageau) not only explicitly fail to recognize that, but in fact openly promote sexist tropes, etc .
+ In terms of the cultural specificity of my invocation of, “white supremacy” ..I definitely agree- and you are correct, I am an American/ a New Yorker- for the last several years, particularly during the entire Trump presidency, the atmosphere for me has been one of general frustration and disillusionment about the clearly, unbelievably retrograde/ super destructive policies of that Republican administration, on every conceivable level (*for the record I am no fan of the Democrats either...let alone the entire direction that techno-industrial civilization is headed in general, etc) ...and made all the more bizarre/intractable when underpinned by clearly bogus, utterly cynical claims of “Christian values” - it’s in this more local, and perhaps less larger-world picture/ philosophical context, that all the deeply embedded racism here; in the courts, in the schools, by the police, in the jails, in housing, the medical and insurance establishments, voter suppression, as well as the flagrant, open hostility by so many extremely powerful politicians here… Ends up coloring my worldview in such a way that perhaps ought not, as I believe you are suggesting, just be frictionlessly transposed into a larger picture analysis- so I sincerely appreciate your analysis and contextualization here !
+ again, thank you for your thoughtful and humane answer… As I said I hugely appreciate your work and look forward to all of your upcoming writings!
Thanks for your reply also Timothy.
Religion can get very easily politicised, especially in places where the culture itself is very divided, as in the US right now. I also think the history of religion in America is unique. It fascinates me how political Christianity is over there: it must be surely be a legacy of the puritan founding. Certainly when I see someone with a cross in one hand and a Trump flag in the other my mind boggles. Politics looks like idol worship to me, on all sides of the aisle.
I think that the balance between tradition and innovation is very hard. Many people, myself included, are attracted to orthodoxy precisely because there has been so little innovation - it's as close to the early church, or at least to the early Byzantine church, as you can probably get now outside Ethiopia. In contrast, protestantism seems like a failed experiment - so much compromise with modernity that its shape as an alternative to it has almost died entirely. Our world wants to change everything immediately, in according with ever-shifting cultural values. In contrast, I am increasingly keen on going very slowly indeed. That doesn't mean no change - it just means careful change that will not endanger the whole.
All the best
Paul
This is a very important point. Many of us are seeking a more liveable balance of what could be rendered as centripetal and centrifugal forces. Modernity has been a largely centrifugal enterprise. Postmodernity exponentially more so. If modernity is centripetal at all, it is largely so at the tippy-top, i.e., the concentration of the power and wealth disproportionately in those who rule the machine. The attempt to cure the centrifugal disease with a double helping of that same disease can only make things worse. It is well long past time to apply deeply centripetal remedies. Myth, tradition, cultural roots, a sense of place, a balance between human and ecological flourishing, etc. In short, higher stability found in radical humility. I guess we are all trying to figure out what that means exactly.
A brilliant summary of what I am hoping to do here. Thank you. That is exactly the remedy.
Hi again Paul - just briefly
Especially after reading a response here by another person...it occurred to me that I may be perceiving stuff here from a very different frequency of consciousness; one that’s not only (in certain ways) uniquely American, and also (however deeply reluctantly) still locked into conventional notions of “reform“, either through political process, or through community- based action- most of the social + Earth justice rhetoric for me correlates with very specific types of activism and academic discourse, and now more than ever, online discourse reflected in and by the media.
My point being, that either explicitly or implicitly, I think my entire conception of genuine “progress” fundamentally still exists within existing the social, economic and political structures… Especially living here in New York City, where the normal rhythm/ tenor of life here generally lends itself towards brutal workism/ capitalist hustle, maybe even default support for The Machine...as alienating as it is, and as much as I despise it in certain profound ways (and all this, without even beginning to get into the notion of God, as you are now currently communicating your emergent experience/ relationship with.)
..what I’m trying to say is that I feel like you responded to my comments...almost from another dimension! And I genuinely appreciate this in as much as it naturally compels me to reflect upon an entire set of philosophical presumptions and the ideological background of my life. Thanks again, cheers /T
Hi Timothy, just wanted to throw you a hand of support here as I am a fellow American, deeply embedded in radical Left culture, who had a recent intense spiritual experience that has set me on a completely different religious course towards Christianity. I trust it and am following it and I am also totally freaked by what I assumed about most Christianity in America... most of which is totally accurate. I have all of the same concerns that you voiced here.
I think what Christ was calling us to do was to take on a mindset, 'attention of the heart' and behavior that is so radical we are still 2000 years later struggling to comprehend it. I personally am finding any time I find myself wanting to land on easy answers, to stop and step back. Even/especially when those answers seem 'right' to me. It's really difficult.
I keep coming back to the actual definition of the Greek word for which we use 'repentance'... it doesn't mean "admit you are bad", which was my previous understanding. It means something like 'to alter the course of your mind' or 'a transformative change of mind' or 'enter into the greater mind'. All of which are really difficult when our ego wants to scream that we already know the truth.
This puts into words very well what I have felt too, after being similarly unexpectedly called. Wanting to settle on answers, positions and places in which I can make Christ comfortable to me, and always being disabused.
Yes, I learned too that repentance means something like 'to change course.' And that sin, also from the Greek, means 'to miss the mark.' What is the mark? Theosis - union with God. When we miss that mark, which we do every few minutes, we change course and aim again. For a lifetime ...
I think that puts it very well, Timothy. I think I was in the place you are in a decade or so ago. That's not to patronise you, or suggest that you will 'progress' to where I am! Simply to say that the inner dimension - and the wider picture - is what I write about now. I have gone through a couple of decades of letting a lot of things slough away, from when I was a young activist to where I am now. I have a lot more sloughing still to do. But I'm trying to write here from the bird's-eye perspective of a very particular bird. I want to understand the very big picture.
“Protestantism seems like a failed experiment” I am a Protestant, but good point. From my American perspective the goal in the conservative American Protestant church, though not explicitly stated, is to be a well adjusted, well functioning member of the middle or upper middle class with a veneer of prayer and church activity and charitable works. The liberal wing adds in being a gentle woke social justice warrior environmentalist aspect veering into nature worship as the Trinitarian God isn’t especially real and present.
Maybe that is a harsh judgement, but I am quoting an Anglican priest of my acquaintance, so it seems legit! An Orthodox priest - admittedly biased - also said recently to me that while orthodoxy has remained constant in its core teachings for a millennia, few protestant churches have remained constant for more than three decades. In some ways I have an Anglican soul, so this fact pains me, but I think your analysis is correct for the UK too.
I read recently the notion that the devil spent a thousand years trying to get the church out of the world, and failed. So he changed tack and spent the next thousand trying to get the world into the church, and was much more successful ...
I remain a hardened Protestant nonetheless:) I could summon well argued critiques of Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox spirituality, theology, and practice but find it pointless to do so. Jesus was called a “friend of sinners” and since we all fall into that joyous category of “sinner” (joyous, because it makes Christ my friend!) I am called to be friends with everyone.
Timothy and Paul, I am not so sure that the idea of "white supremacy" is American specific. I would like to hear what the non-white people in this group think about that. Or if there aren't any non-white people in this group, we might consider the implications of that as well. As to the mixing of religion and politics, those of you in the group who are Christians surely cannot believe that Jesus didn't mix religion and politics. It seems to me that his attitude toward political authorities was what got him killed in the end. But I am neither a Christian nor a Bible scholar, so I defer to those who are.
Hi Sylvia - I agree here, for sure… I was initially responding to Paul‘s response to my original comment...+ I certainly didn’t mean to imply that the US has some kind of primary claim on white supremacy ! It perhaps goes without saying that it’s one of the) ideological foundations for many pre U.S. egregious colonialist/ imperialist interventions... I just meant to suggest that it is for me personally, “top of mind“, living in the US/ NYC, etc.
It might be worth laying down a marker here. The term 'white supremacy' has a clear historical meaning, and to apply it to contemporary European nations is both offensively inaccurate and dangerously provocative. I reject it, just as I reject the division of the planet into 'whites' (Europeans) and 'people of colour' (everyone else) - something which clearly is of American origin, and perhaps is more understandable there. But I live daily in a mixed race family, and I reject the radical left's current attempts to re-racialise my society in this dangerous way. At this point, the only difference I can see between the far left and the far right is which 'race' they want to be on top. I won't concede to this way of seeing.
As for Jesus: today is Palm Sunday, the commemoration of his entry into Jerusalem. Many of his supporters, hoping for a war leader, revolutionary or politican to deliver them from the Romans, perhaps expected him to enter by war chariot or stallion. He chose a donkey. When asked by Pilate where his army was, if he was a king, Jesus replied 'my kingdom is not of this world.' It wasn't his attitude to political authorities which got him killed, but his attitude to the hypocrisy and power-seeking of the religious leaders. His attitude to politics was 'render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's': meaning, leave politics to the politicians and get on with finding the path back to God.
hi again Paul - this might seem a bit random, but one of your follow-up comments above:
"The term 'white supremacy' has a clear historical meaning, and to apply it to contemporary European nations is both offensively inaccurate and dangerously provocative."
..has been eating away at me a bit since the time of this original conversation. + although (I think) I understand the point you were making about your reluctance/ refusal to casually throw around the term "white supremacy", + how it currently is used/ occasionally weaponized on the left...also broadly claiming that its not "applicable to contemporary European nations", IMO seems bizarrely out of touch...considering all the MASSIVE, above ground, often extremely well organized and effective, contemporary youth-driven white nationalist movements in France, Spain, Germany, and Greece...among several other European countries. These nationalist movements unequivocally, openly DO espouse (*albeit derivative/ culturally bastardized, "re-branded") doctrines of white supremacy.
+ As and much as I totally agree with the macro sentiment/ hope for an eventually "de-racialised" world, suggesting that there's some currently kind of political or ideological "equilibrium of ignorance/ impact" between the right and the left about race (*for example, crystallized in the alt-right "All Lives Matter" slogan here in the US), is
IMO not only wildly overly simplistic, but on balance serves to dangerously minimize/ relativize/ obfuscate all the massive institutional cruelty, bigotry, economic disenfranchisement and police and state violence that the (*arbitrarily, yet nonetheless understood as, for the foreseeable future) 'people of colour' will continue to endure...whether or not you (rightfully!) personally reject it/ "concede to this way of seeing" in your own family, or whether or not it's (as large of) a phenomenon in Ireland, etc.
anyway...this particular "bone to pick" notwithstanding, thank you again for all of your always excellent and enlightening recent work!
To be clear Timothy: my point was not that there are no 'white supremacists' in Europe, nor that Europe does not have a history of this attitude. Obviously that would be nonsense, given the history of the last century.
My point was that European countries are not 'white supremacies.' This is the marker I wanted to lay down, and I think it is vital to understand the culture war aspect of what is going on.
Why has this phrase - 'white supremacy' - suddenly roared to the surface of political debate in the last couple of years? This is the question to ask and the answer is that, as with so many other words and phrases - 'including 'racism', incidentally - the word has been capaciously redefined on the left in order to advance a particular agenda.
Take my country, Britain. It is enormously racially diverse now - radically so compared to how it was just one human lifetime ago. Mass migration continues, at historically unprecedented rates, and the culture and demography is changing rapidly as a result. It is very difficult for many people to manage.
All of this is baked into the system, which promotes 'diversity' at every level, and penalises anyone who takes issue with it. The decks are enormously stacked in favour of this process, and against those who object to it, on every level of the culture.
Then look at social attitude surveys and opinion polls. You see that despite these large changes - or perhaps because of them - the country is one of the most tolerant in Europe, and thus the world. Attitudes to mixed marriages, immigration, Islam and other such issues are very tolerant even in comparison to neighbouring European countries. There is no far right political grouping of any significance in the country.
What is the left's current narrative about my country? That it is a 'white supremacy.'
As I said above, this term has clear historical meaning - it refers to countries like Apartheid South Africa, or indeed to parts of the pre-civil rights US, where the culture and systems that uphold it are sytematically and deliberately racialised, and designed to promote 'whites' over others. This is precisely the opposite of what countries like Britain are: which is presumably why they are still magnets for large scale migration from the global south.
The point I wanted to make here was that calling countries like mine 'white supremacies' is insulting and dishonest. It is yet another attempt by a dominant political/cultural movement to demonise and degrade Western culture and heritage. As far as I can see, in the current lexicon of the left, 'white supremacy' translates as 'white majority.' The very same people who are racialising every aspect of society are at the same time attacking and demonising native Europeans and their cultures. This can only end very badly.
As ita happens, I do think there is an equivalent between the extremes of left and right on race right now. In fact, I think they advance precisely the same narrative: that the world is divided into racial groups, usually the 'whites' and the 'others', and that society is about a struggle for supremacy or equality between them. I have seen Ibram X Kendi and Richard Spencer publicy agreeing on this issue. The only difference between them is who ought to come out on top.
This is the context in which the nationalist movements in Europe you speak of are arising. They are a very mixed bag; some openly fascist, others ethnic nationalist movements, some far more civic in nature. Again, be careful with the notion 'white supremacy,' please. The word 'white' in Europe in this context is pretty meaningless. An ethnic nationalist movement in Finland, for instance, is not interested in 'white people', it's interested in Finnish culture. Nationhood, ethnicity and race are distinctive concepts, though often messily intertwined. I find again that in the US this is not so well understood, given that the country is a recent creation of settlers and immigrants from many places, and that it has a long and difficult history of racial antagonism. But applying US attitudes and terminology to Europe causes difficulties.
This has been a long reply, but I wanted to be clear. Actual 'white supremacy', like any worldview based on racial superiority, is a great evil. To hijack a term like that to use in an ongoing crusade against the traditional makeup of Western nations is something I want to call out wherever I see it.
From my understanding of the Gospels Jesus was seen by the religious authorities of his day as a problematic, competing nexus of spiritual authority that had to be removed to maintain the status quo. To achieve that removal the religious leaders manipulated the Roman authorities and also the populace mob.
“ritual, denying the self, radical humility, the essential human need for myth” for me seem to be the results of faith in Jesus not the core attraction of Christianity. In fact it can said those items can be found quite well in other religions. For me it has been an encounter with the risen Jesus of Nazareth and resulting gift of the Spirit that has been the main attraction. In Orthodox Christianity (I am not an Orthodox Christian) this encounter with Jesus is found in the Orthodox emphasis on the use of this prayer “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” and also in their focus on Holy Communion as a meeting place with Jesus the Pantocrator.
I agree; that's been my experience and understanding too.
There are levels to this. Whilst an appreciation for virtues can be found in many cultures, there is something particular about the Christian emphasis on humility. All other cultures have tended to think of the divine as unreachable and therefore to an extent uncondescending. In many cases they have viewed the divine as requiring certain sacrifices for the purposes of appeasement. Only in Christianity is it believed that the divine took on human flesh in order to reconcile us to Himself. And not only took on human flesh but allowed Himself to be humiliated and killed in a worldly sense. Christ said he came not to be served, but to serve, and even washed his disciples feet. In that sense, a God who is that radically humble is unique to Christianity.
Yes, which deepens the sadness of much of Christian history when believers succumbed to "the yeast of the Pharisee and the Sadducee" Jesus warned against and were cruel and oppressive in the name of Christ instead of being "the servants of all". Scientifically yeast is omnipresent in the air and the environment and wet flour exposed to it can pick up sufficient yeast cells that with care can be nursed into a leavening for bread. I have done this. This judgmental, condemning Pharisee attitude is endemic to humanity, even a default response when we embrace a sincere belief of any kind. Even Buddhism and Taoism historically have had their times of religious oppression and persecution and heresy hunts.
Thank you for this. I was a little shocked at the paternalism and retro attitude, to be honest. As a woman, I really don't want to go back to the bad old days of antiquity when men ran the show. It is disturbing to me that those traditional hierarchies don't ever seem to get addressed - not in the Americas, not in Europe, not in Africa, not in Asia. They don't even get addressed in some of the most radical environmental movements out there. But those hierarchies are real, and they have real repercussions. So if we want to truly transform human society, we'd better bite the bullet and address the patriarchy first. IMHO.
Hmm? Feminism has been addressing those hierarchies for sixty years and has pretty much won the argument throughout Western culture, to the point where the very notion of masculinity is being called into question and the previously male-dominated culture is now seeing women outperform men at almost every level, and measurably so. I don't see how you can make a statement like that.
We are all allergic in modernity to these old symbols; to icons, to myths, to representations of divine order. I'll be writing about this soon. Pageau is interesting because he gets right to the symbolism of the matter: that modernity is in its essence a rebellion against God. In place of worship and humility, it offers self-worship instead. Something in us rebels almost primally against antying which reminds us of the real cost of this.
I don't agree. I certainly don't think superficial, top-down gains in some parts of the world over a few decades will make much of a dent in the fiercely defended traditions of the past 2000+ years. I am 67 years old and men are still explaining things to me. Also - and this tickles my irreverent funny bone - I feel like someone in an ancient helmet has sprung out of the bushes, swinging a magic sword at me. Truly no offense intended, and now I do promise to bow out for awhile.
Are they superficial? I suppose time will tell, but they look pretty impactful to me - and as Nikola says below, both the negative and positive consequences of the ongoing dismantling of many things are becoming clear.
But in any case, nothing I've written or said here addresses this issue either way. I'm really trying to think about the negative consequences of promoting me-first individualism, as the modern world does at its core, and the fact that this is, to my mind, a spiritual problem, which has led to both cultural and ecological dissolution. I think that some form of return to an understanding of the divine order of things is going to be necessary, I think.
That isn't the same as defending particular worldly social orders. My wife, for example, is Sikh. Sikhism from its very beginning was a faith which mandated equality between women and men, at the same time as centring love of God and other people, and the importance and family and community and love of nature. Done properly, it all fits together. To my mind, modernity sells women the same lie it sells men: you can have it all! We end up losing what matters most.
I'm too dim to understand the sword joke, but I wouldn't take offence even if I did.
Oh! Pages 333-334 of your marvelous book The Wake! I forgot to mention the green cape. :D Now I really am bowing out for a bit.
Hit and run!
Old Bucc really didn't like Christians. Ask the Biscop.
Paul - As a 47 year old working, married, American mother, I'd argue that this idea that "Feminism has won the argument" is true at the level of dialogue, but not true at the level of lived reality. I'm drawing on my experiences living and working in both San Francisco / Silicon Valley (much has been written about how sexist this work culture is) and also living in the American South (ditto) as well as working remotely with professionals in major American cities (NYC, Chicago, LA, Houston, all the usual suspects). Yes, the LANGUAGE has changed. And certainly what is/is not allowed culturally has changed a lot with the "me too" movement. Yes, we've seen men toppled from power, and yes we now have the phrase "toxic masculinity" to sling around. Heck I've designed some of the "check the box" Diversity and Inclusion courses that global companies roll out to ensure compliance / that they can't be sued. However, ask any wife-mother if the division of labor is fair in her marriage, and the vast majority will say "No." Ask any woman involved in a church or school community "Whose free labor keeps this organization going?" and they will all laugh and say, "THE WOMEN'S LABOR." I've had the usual sordid allotment of sexual harassment and assault experiences at school and work of most women my age. Even when I work in traditionally more "female" fields (Ed Tech, Instructional Design), men typically hold more of the C-Suite positions of power - often because they are supported by non-working wives at home. The male bias in terms of company policy is often glaringly obvious. Don't get me started on unpaid maternity leave in the US. So yes, feminism won the ARGUMENT. But those are just WORDS. The infrastructure of patriarchal hierarchy, while not nearly as bad as it was in my mother's day, is still very much in place. But what does all of this have to do with you? With your discussion of the intersection of faith/spirituality and your post-environmentalist love of the Earth? Not too much, overtly. I'd just say to keep your eyes open. Maintain situational awareness. Here's the thing: Feminism has been corrupted by capitalism every bit as much as environmentalism has. To say "Feminism has won" is about the same as saying "Environmentalism has won" --- which is to say it has been co-opted by the machine. Much lip service has been paid, and much is still being destroyed. Just be mindful, that's all I'm asking.
PS - One thing to watch: Gendered language in the Christian faith. One of the things I love about Catholicism (vs. Protestantism) is the unabashed love of Mary. Which is to say the unabashed love of the old Goddess. God transcends gender, obviously. To center Christ/God as only male as so much of traditional Christianity does is a loss of the felt sense of the sacred of both men and women. It's something to notice and keep noticing. There's a long history of Christians arguing about whether women even possess souls at all. You'll understand if some of us still feel a sting at the memory.
Gah - I shouldn't have said "non-working wives at home" - I do not intend to cast any aspersions on my fellow wife-mothers who don't receive pay for their labor. I find the "women who don't work outside the home" phrase awkward and unclear and I don't have a better one. I'm just pointing out that many male executives have wives who support them at home 100%, which enables them to perform a certain way at work (as if they have no responsibility at home and can be avail for work 24/7), and so this informs their POV about how all of their employees should work.
These are interesting thoughts; thanks for them. I do try to keep my eyes open. I also try to negotiate the minefield carefully ... which is not always easy.
Yes, I did say that the argument had been won - I think that's true, but as you say, at the level of reality that doesn't necessarily translate into action. Virtue-signalling is easy. On the other hand, as I also said, in Britain at least, girls and women are outperforming men on almost every metric in most of the culture (exam results, earnings in most areas, health and welfare metrics), and that culture itself is increasingly pro-women (good) but conversely anti-men (not good, though maybe inevitable.)
I have a son and a daughter, so I try to think about the world they will both grow up in. I am more confident that it will promote the interests and nature of my girl than my boy. None of which is to say that you are wrong. I am glad that you have offered me this perspective.
Here are a couple of things I think about. Firstly, that 'feminism' has always been very much an elite movement. Less than 10% of British or American women sign up to it and it is overwhelmingly (upper) middle class. Perhaps that is because, as you say, it has been entirely captured by capitalism (what hasn't?)
But also, as Nikola says here, my experience of the 'feminist' narrative right now is that it overwhelming promotes a radical individualism which is inimical to family, community and human flourishing, but great news for corporations who can promote 'liberation' to women in the same way they have historically promoted it to men - leave your home and family and come out to work for us! Dump your kids in (paid!) childcare, let your home become a dormitory, see yourself overwhelmingly as an ambitious individual rather than a member of a family or a wider whole. We have all been sold this story since the industrial revolution, and it is hard to escape from.
Wendell Berry's essay 'Feminism, the body and the machine' offers an alternative to this. I don't know if you've read it or what you think. As a father and a homeschooler, I'm living in a family which has tried, a la Berry, to make the home an economy and a mini-culture, as something of a piece of grit in the capitalist oyster. For that reason I'm very glad to see what you say here about not receiving pay for 'labour.' I find the language around this positively demonic: the notion that either mothers or fathers should need to be paid for the 'labour' of creating a family is the direct invasion of the ethic of commerce into a space which should be founded on love and duty (for both sexes.)
How can a culture respect men and women as due equal rights and dignity while respecting the fundamental difference in their natures (and there is one), reducing neither to corporate labour units, and promoting motherhood, fatherhood, family and community, as opposed to atomised wage slavery? (And maybe getting men to do more washing up ...) I don't think this culture can. It sells us all the lie of 'freedom' through commerce and ambition. Women and men end up competing for CEO posts instead of building a real culture. We're supposed to cheer at the prospect of a female US president in a trouser suit bombing Iran.
I am rambling. There is a lot to think through. Thanks for your contribution. If I'm feeling foolhardy I might write about this here one day.
I think you've articulated some things here that many of us sense but perhaps hadn't heard expressed before. In my eyes too, feminism is inextricably linked to modernity and the ideology of endless progress. Whenever I think about what feminists want to see, it seems to me like their ideal is one of individualist independence from every single traditional structure, including their own family. Yet still, as you point out, there is an irony in that the vision involves them being tied to corporations who will pay them a high wage. In exchange for this high wage and prestige they will either forgo or delay having a family and potentially outsource the familial responsibilities to paid nannies. Somehow this is uncritically viewed as independence.
I think the key though, controversial as it may be to some, is that our culture has completely conflated dignity with nature. We seem to have told ourselves that there are no differences between sexes and that both are interchangeable. I've always sensed that feminism doesn't actually dignify women or validate their feminine attributes and nature. It almost seeks to eliminate the beauty in the inherent differences between the sexes (and ironically the ideal seems to be more male-oriented i.e. everyone working in offices in equal measure). The direction of travel is becoming clearer with time. Now we tell ourselves both that sex is a social construct and that there are more than two sexes. The next step of course will be to challenge our notion of what makes us human. This can be seen by the attempts to create embryos that mix human and animal DNA. Or it can be seen in the ambition to reduce the person to a piece of consciousness that can be uploaded into a cloud. It all goes back to the fact that we don't want to be constrained by any limits.
Paul and Nikola - Respectfully to both of you: These ideas of Feminism being co-opted by Capitalism are not new to me. I agree with it. Also many things can be true simultaneously. I'd like to speak to that. For example: Even though Conservationism/Environmentalism is absolutely and elitest endeavor and it's in bed with Capitalism now - it's still a good idea, at minimum, to respect and take care of the Earth and recognize the Earth/everything else is of equivalent importance to ourselves / e.g. "We're all One/We aren't Separate/It is Us" - can we stop being human-centered, etc. etc. For Feminism it's the same thing. Perhaps the word "Feminism" itself is too loaded these days. Please when I say "Feminism" hear "Equal treatment of women." All I am arguing for, is that both genders (and I'm going to include trans and non-binary and two-spirit folk in this, being "two spirit" is not a new concept in our time) - ANYWAY I am simply saying, CAN WE TREAT EVERYONE AS HOLY AND WORTHY PLEASE. That's it. Christianity has historically done a piss-poor job of treating women as holy and worthy. This is not unique to Christianity. However I know it's history better. Women have been seen as flesh but not spirit, as the "pit" men would fall into, as Eve the temptress, as Jezebel (this slur was heard often growing up; it was a common term for a girl who wore makeup too young), as Lilith, as the mouthpiece of Satan, as witches, and so on. Yes, there is also the cult of Mary and more Catholic churches are dedicated to Mary than anyone else - but then the Protestants got rid of her. Christianity has a HIGHLY problematic relationship with women, and with the body (which is seen as feminine vs. the masculine spirit). And I'd say this spirit/matter dichotomy, which is also a male/female dichotomy --- and seeing the spirit/masculine as superior to the body/feminine, is at the heart of the story about why our Western Christian Culture thought it perfectly fine to take dominion over the body of the (Female) Earth. To take possession of it. To rape it for its resources. To do whatever it wants with it. This metaphor goes deep. It's at the HEART of this whole problem. So please - when I say feminism - I'm not talking about the culture war stuff so much. I mean I AM. But that's not really the point for our purposes. I'm saying, "Can you notice that in our cultural metaphors, the Earth is feminine? And that in the West the feminine is there to be managed and subdued and owned and used like a resource? To be tilled and fertilized like land?" This thread runs through all our cultures stories and thoughts, and until we undo it, we're going to have a real problem with respecting the Earth as equal. Anyway. I'll go read your Wendell Berry article now ;) Perhaps I've shot my mouth off without good reason.
Thanks Wesley for your points and Paul your response. Wesley, I wasn't sure how to articulate what I was feeling in response to feminism being brought up here, and you nailed a lot of it. Especially operating in 'male' spaces (I was a cab driver, worked in the fishing industry, and built my own [tiny] house) I feel like I've encountered the patriarchy trying to keep me in my place constantly. But I certainly have been afforded more freedom and choice than any women before me. I appreciate this topic being addressed and Paul, I do hope you are 'foolhardy' enough to write about it here one day. It is an important topic. I see so much despair and self loathing in men around me. It is especially difficult to have intimate relationships with men who secretly hate themselves. But putting the old hierarchies back in place isn't the answer to that.
I'm curious, Paul, how you will address the fact that when one opens the door even a smidgen to critique things like feminism, the Left, wokeism, whatever we're calling it, this rhetoric of 'feminism/trans people/antiracism is ruining culture and the answer is to go back to the old ways" always seems to think it has found a comfortable home. I'm seeing this playing out even in the comments on these posts. And I think there is often the response (from the left) that because these "fascist" (which these days is another meaningless buzz word) ideologies seem to come if we critique, we shouldn't critique. Which is certainly not the answer.
Late to the party, but just dipping my toe in to say I hope you do write about this issue one of these days. I'm an American woman, retired academic. I'm old enough to have seen first, second, and third-wave feminism. I am grateful for, and have benefited from, the push for equal rights legally and socially. But... if we are going to have a conversation about what has gone wrong and where we go from here, I think it is important to be able to ask the question about what traditional forms of Christianity had to say about gender and hierarchy and why. What wisdom do the myths of hierarchy have for us? Why are so many men and women in the West adrift? I think you are brave to address the question of gender and individualism (not to mention transgender and transhumanism). It's so difficult to have an honest conversation about any of this, but I admire you for taking this (and many other things) on. Glad to be here.
"So if we want to truly transform human society, we'd better bite the bullet and address the patriarchy first"
You frame things as if the transformation hasn't even started. As Paul points out, the process of dismantling traditional hierarchies started decades ago (at least). To not acknowledge that is to sweep the negative repercussions we have already seen under the carpet (not that everything has been negative). In any case feminism and the whole battle against the patriarchy is just part of the larger direction of travel, it can't be viewed in isolation. It's the same human rebellion against limits with the misplaced optimism that we know better and are more enlightened so can build a new world from the ground up. Some humility about the unintended consequences would be in order. For example, do we not find it ironic that after all the changes to date to "improve" society as a whole, and women in particular, there are a smaller percentage of life-long marriages (or even committed relationships) which stand the test of time than ever before. And it isn't because everyone else has found an alternative which makes them happier- there is also more loneliness, depression, suicide than ever before. Our sense of fulfillment and our relationships are not better for it. And yet we still feel like we should dictate to societies in Africa or Asia what their direction of travel should be. Not because our evidence is impressive, but because we have a religious belief that the evidence already out is a bump in the road towards a glorious future.
“The modern world will not be punished. It is the punishment.” -Nicolás Gómez Dávila
I like to say Paul, l am around your age, gestationally. My point is, your still young enough to know we're getting older. But we are not old yet, in my opinion. How refreshing to hear and feel how we should stop being rebellious toward God. I came across Jonathan Pageau via internet, watching Paul Vanderclay, a reformed minister from Sacramento, CA.
Hello Paul. Thank you for trying to hold the two opposite poles of love-of-the-wild and Christianity - you're obviously risking electrocution by trying to hold the paradox. Thanks for forging ahead anyway. I'm similarly weird and I find it very, very difficult to language the intersection of these things myself. In my heart, they don't seem paradoxical at all - especially in the mystic traditions. But to most people they seem like political opposites and it can get dicey to talk about them. My friends are a liberal crowd and whenever I get too spiritual people look at me like I grew another head (that would be any Christian talk; there's no problem with Buddhist or yoga/chakra/energy talk). Thanks for being willing to work it out in public. It's a messy but very needed.
A bit of personal background - in case you're wondering what sort of person is engaged by your attempt at this: I'm about your age. I was born in 73. I grew up the child of agnostic scientists in the American South (Bible country, north Louisiana specifically). My parents took me camping instead of to church. But my devout grandparents hauled me to First Presbyterian for soul insurance purposes. Meanwhile, my parents taught me to treat trees and animals and rocks and rivers with as much respect as people - all the while calling this "scientific observation." They were accidental animists. I did not find these experiences contradictory as a child - I found them deeply harmonious. When I was 20, I wrote a bombastic college literary (not religious studies) thesis on "The Female Body as Text in Medieval Women's Visionary Literature of the 13th Century" - while an agnostic/atheist kid. At that age, I believed "my religion was science." My advisor was a former Catholic nun. At the time I had no idea why I was writing it. Now, the memory is hilarious. Of course I was working that out! I'm still working it out! At 23 I ran away to San Francisco to study literature and work in a used bookstore and stayed there 15 years. But I rapidly fell into the tech industry in order to make rent. This felt like a death. At age 25 God showed up while I was working on an interactive gizmo for third graders (weird and embarrassing) and kept showing up. I didn't know who to talk to about it or HOW. I tried Buddhism at the SF Zen Center. I went on retreat to Tassajara and Esalen and did a lot of yoga. I read lots of weird books. Somewhere in there I got married and my mother insisted it be a church wedding so I insisted on getting baptized so as not to be a hypocrite and my entire family (including me) was confused. I went back to SF and we had our first child. In 2011 as the excesses of the tech industry grew to ever dizzying heights, I convinced my husband that it was time to FLEE THE CITY NOW. We made it back to small town Louisiana and tried to build a life. I started going to my grandparents' church. This felt good and it was an incredible relief to start living my life in rhythm with liturgical time - the ritual of it was important! - but I was also aware that there were old-fashioned Christians who were skeptical of me and my wide-ranging (and highly mystical/mythical) POV and that it might be offensive to them if I opened my yap. So I was unsure how deeply I could integrate myself into the church. I was also aware that this church, like all the mainline Protestant churches in America, was very obviously DYING. They still knew how to summon sacred time and yet....something was still missing at the center. Things were too heady. Embodiment was missing. Many people were going through the motions without knowing why. Most young people were gone. And meanwhile my hometown was stuck somewhere btwn 1955-1980 in all the worst ways as well as the good ways. I discovered the old saw: You can't go home again. I had attempted time travel and it half-way worked - but it also broke something. It was revelatory, cathartic, depressing. Then my husband's film company closed and we came to Dallas for his work (mine is remote, I can take it with me). Now I'm back in the proverbial belly of the beast. Back in urban sprawl. We send our kids to Montessori in an attempt to airlift them out of some of the craziness. I became a certified yoga teacher as a manic attempt to do something about something. IT IS SO CONFUSING to know how to be with all of this. Thank you for reading all this, if you were able. I only have one very good friend with whom it's safe to share all these contradictory things. Otherwise, I can only share conservative religious bits with some. And liberal bits with others. I can't tell you what a relief it is to find a place where all might be talked about at once. Thank you.
The splitting of what you talk about with whom, depending on their 'politics', does get exhausting and strange doesn't it? But I feel you on the 'whenever I talk about anything spiritual people look at me like I grew another head', unless it's talking within the context in which spirituality is 'acceptable' (which these days seems to be witchcraft or Buddhism). I was/am(?) a very active practicing witch who recently turned towards Christianity and everyone is SUPER CONFUSED and sort of horrified, as I would have been if it hadn't happened to me.
Yes! The splitting! My stars, the exhaustion of constantly discerning what is/is not allowed in conversation and navigating the cultural taboos. So far my journey has included many, many things ranging from Zen Buddhism to Ancestral Lineage Healing/Worship (this is pretty Pagan/Animist) to Christianity. What I tell my children is that, "All human cultures need food and that all those foods taste different but they are nourishing. Similarly, all human cultures need a relationship to the divine - how they do it looks different, but all the ways are nourishing." This seems like it shouldn't be a controversial message but it very often is. (And yes, one could argue about how nourishing vs. not various cultural traditions are!) Anyway, interesting times. Postmodern explosion. Lost of roots and traditions and ways all blown up or scrambled. I get Paul's movement toward orthodoxy. I've done something similar with yoga - after years of practicing Vinyasa styles, I now do Ashtanga. Which seems nuts and semi-cult-like, but it's simply a stripping away - a moving toward what is most essential. A peeling back of layers. I digress. You were talking about splitting and also the horror of moving toward something you'd rejected on an ideological level. Yes, there is so much splitting. And a realization that all our dogmas get in the way. All of it needs dismantling. I do still find guidance from the Buddhist approach of observing direct experience. What is happening right now? This helps. But it also is profoundly scary and requires a great deal of self trust. How do we know what is real? Where are our guides? Are there any guides left? Do the old ways still work? What traditions are dead? Which are living? It's a puzzle.
It's very good to 'meet' both of you. What you are saying really reonsates with me - the 'splitting', politically and spiritually. So much of this seems to spring from the human desire for tribalism. Are you with us or against us? And the cultural collapse now deepends that a hundredfold - now you are 'friend' or 'enemy'. I have spent my writing life being looked at with suspicion by both left and right, and I'm sure that will continue.
I was recently reading - I can't remember where - about an Orthodox monk on Mount Athos who was a great nature lover. 'Whoever does not love trees', he would say, 'does not love Christ.' When farmers came to him for Confession he would tell them plant trees rather than say prayers foe redemption. I love this vision. It is so very clear to me now that we need traditions - we need structures that can pass the truth down to us, and guard them from the world. But we need to remember our roots too, on Earth. Why should Christianity be disembodied? It should not be - and one reason I came to Orthodoxy was that it is so rooted in the immanent. God is 'everywhere present', in every tree and lake. There's work to be done here to speak across the aisles. Many thanks to both of you.
Thanks for the response, Paul. One of the reasons I enjoy reading your work so much is that you're willing to risk being out of favor with various camps (all the camps?) in order to ferret out what is authentically true -- and you're also willing to change your mind given new information and experience. This takes courage and it's also murder on the constructed Ego / Persona. From a spiritual POV this practice is good medicine and requires humility, but socially it's a rough slog and invites attack. I think it's more fundamental even than tribalism (though related). We build these little egos, these little selves, these constructed personas - whatever you call them - like little cars to carry our true Selves (God help me, our Souls?) about. The ego thinks, "I like this, not that. I like these people, not those. I believe this, not that." It builds up a collection of all these little bits --- if you've ever seen a Decorator Crab pasting bits of stuff on its shell, it's like that, how we construct our identities. And then we HANG ON to them, these identities built of flotsam. We experience loss of any of these bits as DEATH. (I mean, what am I telling you this for? You did the Zen thing. You know what I'm talking about. The Ego resists its own death. The Ego is insane that way.) Anyway - I think the reason people throws rocks at you is because your very ideological flexibility threatens their Egos with Death / messes with their sense of a stable reality. If a person hasn't accepted that the Ego/Persona is a mask, and subject to change, they are going to freak out on you when you start moving bits about on the board. "YOU ARE NOT SUPPOSED TO MOVE THAT BIT" is what they are saying, "DON'T MOVE THAT PIECE YOU'LL MAKE THIS NICE REALITY I'VE CONSTRUCTED FALL DOWN." I'm sure you must know this. I guess I just want to be one voice from the crowd saying, "Hey, I see this is happening to you." and "Thanks for doing it anyway, I appreciate you taking that blow on the noggin." Personally, I'm not as courageous as putting my ideas into print. The attacks are why. I have chosen silence as a way to preserve my sanity / think my stuff out in peace. But I'm extremely grateful for this forum you've created to try to hold the paradox.
I think this is very perceptive. Thank you.
And to add regarding the Christian bits - I love the story about the monk who prescribes tree planting for redemption/penance. I do a fair bit of tree planting and gardening myself (tending my own little corner) and it often feels like...well yeah, like hands-on worship and a giving of labor to the Earth. It feels right. Resonates. A re-Earthing of the spirit and all that for me --- and an honoring and giving back to the Earth which gives so much to me. It's good. Which brings me to the idea of an embodied Christianity. I absolutely agree with you that it can and should be embodied! I mean, goodness, isn't Christ the very metaphor of embodied Spirit? The God made flesh? Christianity is all about embodiment. When I said it was disembodied, I just meant the way in which it was practiced in the mainline southern American Protestant church I grew up in (Presbyterian - I'm of good lowland Scots stock - or should I say, I'm probably descended from a bunch of ornery cusses and Border Reivers, but I digress). I do think most Protestant spiritual practice is HIGHLY disembodied. Cerebral. Spiritualized. About a God up in heaven or OUT THERE. Personally, though, I'm more on team St. Francis (and many other mystics besides), who believe God is right here - in this tree, in this Earth, in this rock, river, root, stream, fish, air, bacterium, cell. In my body. In your body. God is absolutely immanent in every bit of creation. There is no place where God IS NOT. God is the very breath of life. God exists between atoms. Between sub-atomic particles. (Before long I'm going to go off the deep end and sound like I'm talking about the Force from Star Wars, and then we'll all be embarrassed. Sorry!) I just think Christianity is not always good at honoring this - though I know it HAS been good, at some times and in some places. I came back to Christianity from Buddhism and other spiritual forays because I was searching for a more culturally authentic expression of faith, something that belonged to me culturally and my own ancestors --- and where there was a living practice with elders I could tap into. Something that didn't feel like cultural appropriation of the East. However the Protestantism that I encountered in my very conservative Bible belt hometown in the American south was not matching my experience of the very embodied experience of Christ and God that I know is OUT THERE somewhere. I'm just not sure where to find it. So I'm curious about your experience with the Orthodox church. A few other thoughts: That thesis I wrote as an unbelieving kid, on "The Female Body as Text in Medieval Women's Visionary Literature" - that's all about your countrywomen Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. The anchoress and the hysterical weeper. If I'd expanded my scope I could have written about the stigmata too - anyway, the point is that back in those days, women weren't allowed to speak about their spiritual experiences, so they manifested them through their bodies - these were received as signs literally written on the flesh by God because women's voices were considered often to be corrupt or Satan's preaching. So denied their voices, their bodies spoke. Then faced with this visual evidence, the priests were forced to listen to them. To hear their spiritual testimony and write it down. I'm not sure why I'm telling you this except I think it's a story you need to know. It has to do with emodiment. On words being written in physicality vs. air. This strikes me as relevant to things you are trying to sort out, and your own sometimes frustration with language. Take care. TTFN.
I have been either lucky or unlucky to be born and operate in so many disparate communities that it's always felt unnatural to cling to just one 'side', while also desperately wanting to belong somewhere, anywhere. My father is from rural Alabama, Baptist, 200 years in the same county people who are super affectionate and never stop talking, and my mother is descended from Westward-expanding settlers who ended up as stick-up-the-butt kind but cold Pacific Northwest Lutherans. I lived in 'keep it weird' Portland for 15 years as an adult but spent my summers in the conservative leaning, land based fishing industry of Alaska. I've thought about moving to Alabama, I've thought about moving to Alaska, I've thought about going back to Portland where at least I sort of fit in. It's all a lot of flailing and if anything these discussions make me feel better about it. It makes more sense. Recently I've been noticing I am just tired of being motivated by my own "I WANT" but what else to be motivated by? I am just leaving that question with God.
I love the quote by the monk about the trees! Thank you for sharing.
Hi Paul, I thought I would just write a bit about a couple of things to do with nature and Christianity, since that's in a few of the threads below. I grew up always sensing the sacred in nature, and had long 'prayer' times speaking to God while lying in the garden, feeling at one with everything, and sensing a security, a 'presence' around me and in the grass, the tiny flowers and insects, and the clouds drifting above. Unlike you, I also had a fairly strict brethren upbringing, and somehow left behind this sense of the presence of God in nature as a teenager, as I was initiated into a more rationalist version of the faith. Such experiences did not at that time seem to me to be reflected in church and so I became fragmented. I think one of the threats to children from technology is that they are deprived of this early experience to simply 'hear' God for themselves, and may be condemned to be locked in a transhuman prison of the mind. We should probably pray against this. This rationalist version of being a Christian did not last me even into university and I became an 'impersonal God is everywhere/I can't be a Christian' sort of person and assumed Christianity was not for me. Then a decade later, following a very desperate and short prayer, I had an experience of God's presence which remains the outstanding detail of my life. His presence in the room was first of all highly intimate. It was also immense and I was unable to physically rise from the floor and had to crawl to lie down because of the weight of the air above. I was aware that the entire room was full of 'Person'. My mind was unhinged for several weeks by encountering a being so enormously greater in reality than me, who yet was intent upon something scarily personal. I was quite literally changed forever by this. I have read also since then that during the revivals on the Isle of Lewis, there was a locational aspect in which people were unable to escape from the presence of God, since the ground itself was sensed to be so sacred and full of God's presence that people would simply fall down with a sense of their true place. (It seems key to me, this sense of our true place as humans, when considering the possible ecological outcomes of a people fully living in this way). There are still a few people alive today in Lewis who remember this time. I believe there have also been areas in Africa which have experienced ecological renewal following mass conversions, I will try to find out about this. I have since had other times of sensing this sacredness in terms of walking on ground which suddenly seemed holy. The ground I think is always holy, it's just that at various times we are privileged to understand this in an experiential way. I would love to see an interaction between those from protestant traditions who have experienced this holiness of God's presence in creation and the orthodox churches who have that tradition of God being present in creation. For myself, as being used to the protestant tradition, I am in the process of reaching out and wanting to learn more from Romanian orthodox christians who have recently moved to the area. I hope that as things become dim, we will see more Christians becoming more open to the experiences and traditions of one other, and a way will open towards this embracing of the presence of God in all places.
I just want to say to those who always demand proof, that if the existence of God could be proved beyond the shadow of a doubt, then it would make despots of us all. What would such a society look like? Would we even be human, since we would have no choices to make? In the words of Dallas Willard (whose book the Divine Conspiracy is quite helpful), God wants to see what WE want. Then we have the option of becoming co-creators, fully participating with the divine, or simply continuing to build our own empires. I believe this choice is laid before us each minute of each hour of each day. Other people are of course free to differ and they will!