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My Circle of Standing Stones
So each Sunday I make the pilgrim trek to my particular circle of stones (I pass two other Episcopal ones enroute, one because the pastor is a proudly self-proclaimed red-neck who preaches a funny, backwoods version of Americanism with some gospel stuff occasionally thrown in; and the other because the now-moved-on rector chased Nancy and me away with her incompetent temper tantrums) and wonder, “What am I getting from this community, circle of stones?” and “What is this community, this circle of standing stones needing or wanting of me?” I know I am trying to reach far beyond what this circle can open to me. I can still enjoy and engage in the intellectual musings of this community; they are fun, but in the end insufficient to fund my searching. And I’ve thus far found no one standing in this circle whom I trust to search alongside. So that is not its drawing for me, not a place to deepen and extend my search for the eternal.
And the liturgy? Well, it’s mine, it’s what I grew up with (despite the superficial changes of the 1979 Prayer Book revision), it’s what I was trained in and practiced professionally for so many years. I am accustomed to and feel most comfortable with it; it is my liturgical home. And it is a limen for me, in its own way, a doorway that opens in a very limited way, to whatever lies beyond, a tiniest, halting baby step toward an Eternal. But I have come to understand that liturgy is a communal thing, it is done to foster the community; it cannot, is not designed or intended to feed the individual’s soul. No one has told me that; I have gradually uncovered that for myself, and I do not know if that is true for anyone else around me, or whether anyone else has ever discovered it. So my soul-feeding must happen elsewhere, through some other limen or imaginal. Liturgy has become comforting, but not illuminating, and is instructive only to a minuscule degree. It is a comforting metaphor, but I am unclear for what.
And while I like the people who gather in this circle, and enjoy being with some of them, this is a very artificially chosen extended family for me. They are not intimate family or friends for me. But then I am a very alone person who has, or needs very few intimates or compatriots.
So what is this circle for me? I am no longer sure. It draws me back, and I willingly participate. It yields me some little time, some little place, some little focus to muse, to recall, to re-sort, to review and reframe. It causes me to pay enough attention to ask, “What is happening here? What is this about?” and “What is it pointing toward? For what is it the metaphor?” Probably without this time and place I would not take the time to wonder, much less to ask. It does that much. And perhaps it does much more. Perhaps it reminds me that there is something much more than what is happening here, something to which I, Jack Bowers, need to be paying attention. It invites me. But to what?
And what is this circle of standing stones needing of me? I’ve so little notion of what I have to give, and even less a clue as to what it is in need of. What do I bring that it wants, or needs?
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A Saturday—September 20, 2008
And now I place one foot outside my standing stone circle, and begin to wonder, perhaps to wander. Odds and ends begin to pile up, bits and pieces, and to join up, and to form a vague alternative to this particular circle, a not-yet-viable alternative, an only vague one.
I’ve been scouring, even teaching Jack Miles’s book, God: a biography. He tracks the YHWH of the Hebrew Scriptures, from Genesis through Chronicles, watching simply what He does and says, and asking “Who is He? What is He?” The portrait that emerges is not pretty, from a majestic and then bumbling creator-friend, into a demanding family protector, then on to a violent and sometimes cruel war-god and coercive law-giver, compact-enforcer, next a jealous and loyalty-demanding overlord who moves on to take up international roles, and then, when his covenant with his chosen people fails, a half-insane (manic-depressive?) God who, alternately pleading and then abusing, abandons his people, condemns them into exile, and after they return, becomes an increasingly absent God who, while not totally abandoning, fails to make any significant difference. I have not done a similar study of the God of the Gospels and early Christian writings, but at a first glance, the picture is only slightly more attractive.
I’ve been plowing my way through Karen Armstrong’s book, A History of God, in which she tracks the development of the several images of God in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, just barely touching Buddhism and Hinduism. It is fascinating to watch the evolution, from familial and tribal gods, through Scriptural presentations, and as those prove insufficient, through further evolving images. I get a portrait of a God who, when frozen into Scriptures, wanes insufficient, and is then further explored with philosophic (on the rational side) terms and in mystics’s (on the imaginal side) terms. Several things become clearer:
1) Armstrong points out (and others echo) that the mystics’s ways are for the few, that not many of us can achieve mystical vision, but that on the other hand, religions begin with the mystics’s visions full of energy and magnetic excitement, but that as the mystic’s vision is codified into a religion it becomes frozen, static and unmoving. The religion is the lay (i.e., non-mystic) person’s effort to respond to the mystical vision, but it is doomed to fail (i.e., to not be as inspiring and motivating as the mystical vison itself).
2) Each major religion has evolved its own mystical side, but that side is always on the fringe, too radicalizing to be at the center, and while it may subtly and gradually shift the focus or direction or center, it is at the same time threatening and at odds with the center.
3) Those mystical visions often wander off in directions quite different from the center’s vision, and are sometimes even antithetical. The God of most mystics is quite unlike the YHWH of Genesis-Isaiah. And
4) Armstrong, along with others, points out that Christianity in the West has been taken captive, and held hostage, by rationalism, spurns the non-rational, the irrational, the imaginal. We in the West have little patience for the mystical visionary, we give him only slight berth, and certainly ignore his wisdom, while most of the rest of the world, particularly Islam, values his contributions and leadership. We are, religiously, out of step.
And I’ve forced my way (with elbows and shoulders and knees) through William James’s lectures, Varieties of Religious Experiences a book I should have read thirty-five or more years ago. While those lectures are now a hundred years out of date, in some ways they are still seminal, in other places they’ve not yet been heard. On reading him I momentarily understand the fundamentalist mind set (not completely, not really, certainly not sympathetically). James divides us into two sorts, those of “healthy-minded” or “mind-cure” religious experiences (not so positive as those words might imply), and those of “sick-soul” experiences (sometimes as unhealthy as those words imply). Or in other words, those of us whose faith grows slowly vis-a-vis those whose faith, like Paul’s, is marked with a dramatic conversion experiences. And as I read James with twenty-first-century understandings and insights, I can only wonder to what extent our religious experiences are hard-wired genetically or hormonally etched into our neurological pathways. Is it possibly written in my bones that I will have or require a conversion experience, or that I will not and will instead slowly mature into my faith? Or that I will have no faith at all, no aptitude towards a god of any sort? (I am not referring to the recent discourses about the possibility of a religion gene within our DNA; until it is proven otherwise I think that a stupid notion.)
And I wonder about the imaginal. There is a part of me would have liked to be a mystic, to experience the God directly, without any mediation. I understand that at my age, and lacking as I do the essential discipline, and being probably completely without aptitude, that is not a possibility; but those reasons do not appease my yearning. Yet I can imagine. And I think I could learn to accept my imaginings as another reality.
As I reckon up this small pile of
