The Monthly Salon: October
Come and have your say
It’s that time of the month when I open the floor to my readers to talk about anything you would like to address. Maybe there’s something on your mind that you think the rest of us should know about. Maybe there’s something I’m missing in my writing, or something I’m wrong about, and you’d like to tell me. Or maybe you have strong opinions about Ernest Hemingway’s beret.
This is Ernest with his friends in Paris in the 1920s. Sometimes they are referred to as the ‘lost generation’: exiled and out-of-sorts after World War One, in a world changing faster than any of them could keep up with. Hemingway made quite a career out of that changing world of course - but then, in the end, he couldn’t keep up with himself either. All literary careers end in failure. Some just take longer than others.
Does it feel like the post-WWI era today or the era just before it? Probably historical comparisons are always silly. Here we are. Come and say something about the times, if you’d like to.
While I’m here, you might be interested in this recent podcast conversation I took part in last week with Carlo Lancelloti, biographer of the Italian philosopher Augusto Del Noce, who I wrote about a while back here. We talked about how Del Noce might have understood these times, and about the wider project of modernity: the revolution that has replaced religion, and how it is playing out. I enjoyed it.
I think was already touched on a bit in Paul’s essay on transhumanism, but I am thinking a lot about the Machine in regards to fertility, pregnancy, and child birth. The amount of social pressure women over 30 put on each other to freeze their eggs or to start with IVF before even trying to conceive naturally in the US, is starting to feel over the top to me, and a bit alarming. While I do know fertility declines with age, and some women in their 30s face more problems with it (and I don’t judge women struggling with infertility for seeking fertility assistance *at all* it’s totally understandable in that circumstance) it feels like so many women automatically assume having a child is not something they can’t do --- either without having a lot of money first or without technology before they even try without it. With surrogates becoming very popular with celebrities and the transhumanists talking about artificial wombs in the future, are we moving to a world where pregnancy is becoming desacralized? Or having children is becoming a luxury good?
One thing I have noticed as I plan to start a family myself, is I see images of the Virgin Mary and the Buddhist deity Tara everywhere, and it feels like the spirit of the holy mother is transcending into my every day life and guiding me, it’s beautiful. And it makes me sad that the archetype of the holy mother seems to be losing respect in modern times (not to say that it is the *only* feminine archetype, but just a very important one).
I’ll try my luck here articulating a dilemma. I know many of you are Christians, and other than a slight connection with Dark Mountain, that’s why I came over to Paul’s blog—his story of conversion (that’s too light a word…how about revelation) inspired me.
I won’t lay out all the details, but I was deeply Catholic (with a touch of Baptist, typical American stew) as a child. Then I had a crisis of faith my first year in college, followed by a full monty mystical experience that blew apart my convictions and faith into some kind of pleasant agnosticism that privileged practice over belief. I then took the familiar tour of Eastern religions, all of which greatly inspired me, but about ten years ago walked away from it all. I’d gotten very sick with an autoimmune disease that honed me in on more somatic matters, but I’d also grown very weary of spiritual talk—especially talkers.
Anyhow, last year my frame blew up. I was living in my camper out West here in the wildfire smoke, and I could no longer make sense of the world (I wrote a brief essay about that for Dark Mountain here: https://dark-mountain.net/remembering-water/ ). Suddenly I felt an opening again, the first in two decades, not just towards codified religion, but for my ancestry and the frames of my ancestors. I realized: I don’t want to be the point at which their long transmission stops. I don’t want to make up the world anymore.
My mom told me to ask God for guidance, and I felt silly on my knees, but I did so. Soon enough I had a copy of the New Testament, and strange things happened, such as my saying before opening it “God give me a sign” and turning exactly to the phrase that Jesus utters, “Why does this generation ask for a sign? I tell you, your generation will receive no sign.”
Then I got swept up by the Spirit. Lots of all-nighters, lots of outpourings of love, lots of more strange things...
But I hit a block, and that’s why I’m here writing about it. My issues with Christianity have always been manifold, and they came back from their long snore to plague me. I won’t articulate them here, except to say that I struggle intensely with the theology (especially the Trinity), with the insistence on belief in particular miracles (I do conceptually believe miracles are possible), with the Christians who draw firm lines and castigate those on the other side, with the arrogance that occasionally shows up in salvation conviction, and so on.
So I stepped off the path for a few months, the Spirit left me, and I found myself entirely confused again. Now I feel the Spirit knocking on my door once more, but I’ve got a lot more patience than I did last year, and am willing to open that door more slowly rather than dive through. I made a leather cross that hangs in view from my bed, so it stands there every morning staring me down, and while I have no clue what it means, it’s staying put.
I feel called, I suppose. And trapped—partly by logic, that ‘ratio’ Paul mentioned last time, or maybe it’s better called skepticism (cynicism?). But called to where? Well, I want my Christian faith back, and I want to transmit it forward, and I want to be animated by God more precisely. And yet, I have this deep feeling that with the beliefs of Christianity that I currently hold, I wouldn’t be welcomed by many of the faith, including here. I’d feel that “unless I accept so-and-so premises,” I’m not Christian. Again, those firm lines (yes, lines aren’t always bad, but usually are, and in my view as a nondualist, always are when cordoning off God). I do take some solace in: “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven.”
For those of you who are followers of Christ who deeply believe the basic tenants of the religious claims—only Son of God, physical resurrection, physical return—how did that conviction arrive for you? Would you tell me I’m not Christian if I said I wanted to do what Jesus asks us to do, but have little interest in accepting the more extraordinary claims (with no interest in denying them either)? Do you still hold a little room for being wrong about the faith’s core claims, or is it a done deal, and does that feel liberating? What might you say to someone like me who feels called to walk the Way, but sees manmade roadblocks all over the path?
I know there’s a ton out there that discusses such issues, and I read a lot, but I’m interested in hearing from y’all who are here right now in this mysterious little corner of the electromagnetic field.