Spirit rambling

[fabrisse]

When I was a kid there was a Bill Bixby show on TV that I loved -- no, not The Incredible Hulk -- The Magician. The first season had a bigger budget than second season and I remember the plates on his white Corvette (which he flew on his private plane to gigs), they read SPIRIT.

I have, over the course of the past decade found myself walking away from the Christianity of my childhood. That last part should probably read "all the myriad Christianities" of my childhood. My grandfather was a Baptist minister. We attended the Church of Scotland when we lived in London, and that's the tradition that still feels right to me, but we were Presbyterians here. Then I was sent to Catholic school followed by Episcopal school while learning about Judaism from close friends. When we moved to Belgium, I read the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita on the trip. One of the things that saved me through my last depression while I was in Dorchester was my weekly visits with my Jehovah's Witness ladies. They were good women who asked honest questsions of me and made me think for myself.

I've attended Greek and American Orthodox services. I've connected with Wicca, at least the Green Witch path, and I'm fascinated by Buddhism. Amida Buddhas call to me in museums, sometimes from rooms away. (Seriously, this happened. I went to the MFA with two friends about a decade ago. We saw the Roman and Greek things we came for and then I said I wanted to go look at something else. Instead of heading for the Impressionists the way I wanted to, I kept going the wrong way. I finally followed what I thought I heard calling me. About two rooms away, one of my companions felt it too. We ended up in front of a gorgeous Buddha. It was not the Buddha that was the focal point of the room or even one of the ones that was part of the Director's tour, but it was the only Buddha in the Pure-land tradition.)

But, frankly, I've, in someone else's phrase, "accepted the scientific method into my heart."

Watching the events of the recent election with my new atheist filter in place was fascinating. I had no idea how casually Americans accepted the equation Religious = Good because I was somehow inside the equation. I'm worried that if we aren't more secular in our government, we may lose the Constitution and our founding principles.

I miss ritual less than I thought I might. I miss the music, both singing the hymns and hearing the anthems and organ. I miss having something to Thank, weirdly enough, more than I miss having something to ask for stuff.

I am aware of the holy and the sacred as much as I ever was. I have walked into small chapels that made me understand how Moses must have felt in front of the burning bush, and there's one cathedral in France that felt entirely evil to me.

Always, nature, maybe not wild nature but only slightly tamed nature, has brought me closer to the idea of the sacred. I miss being able to take the occasional walk on Wollaston or Nantasket beach. The mountains have always called to me. I loved that portion of my trip across country by the Northern route.

The desert is my mother's place. She was born in El Centro and grew up near the Mexican border in a world before air conditioning and sunscreen. I've never been able to connect to the colors of the desert. In some way, Southern California just looks wrong to me, there's so much brown and ochre and grey (Eucalyptus trees are grey. That's just wrong.) The colors of an East coast spring are yellow and pink and white and rich purple. The colors of a South-West spring are blue and grey and green and cream.

I'm trying to figure out my sense of the sacred. Some of it is in the Terry Pratchett phrase, "If any place is holy, it's here. If any time is sacred, it's now."

My sense is tied to the trees and sky and rivers. Always, I'm at my happiest in cities with rivers. It's the only failing of Brussels, in my opinion; they buried their river. Mind you, they kept their forest, and that's wonderful.

Currently, I'm reading Svaha by Charles de Lint. It's one of his most sci-fi, as opposed to fantasy, stories, and it's definitely set in a dystopia where most of humanity is cut off from any nature.

siderea mentioned something when we met up last month about stewardship of the Earth. I know I was reading Gaia theory back in the early 1980s. And somehow, reading Svaha and Zodiac so close together is making me ponder.

Sorry for rambling.



I applied for a couple of jobs at the Department of Energy last week. I think I'm qualified for them. It would be within walking distance, and the pay is good. Fingers crossed.

Comments

[rhiannonhero.livejournal.com]

I miss having something to Thank, weirdly enough, more than I miss having something to ask for stuff.

I would miss this more than anything else if I found myself an atheist. You describe yourself as an atheist, and yet you talk about the sacred and having a sense of it. Maybe I'm confused on atheism, because I don't know that much about it, but how does that fuse for you? Or are you still working through it.

I think that being thankful and expressing it whatever (the night air, the snow, the sky, the wind -- thank you, thank you, thank you for existing, Wind!) is key to living happily in this world, no matter your religious beliefs. :) As a non-Christian myself, this is my experience, anyway.

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

I don't believe in a God or Goddess. And that was a difficult sentence for me to type.

It's something I'm still working through. I'm not sure, for instance, whether or not there's a prime mover (e.g. an instigating force for the big bang) or what it might mean if there were.

Lack of belief, when I've come from such strong belief, has changed my intellectual perceptions, but it hasn't changed my feelings.

For me, a sense of holiness or a sense of the sacred is a huge part of what I feel. There's also it's opposite -- a visceral sense of certain things that rob humanity of itself as evil.

I don't know if there's a soul that continues after death. I think self-awareness may create something that continues.

[tijmetje.livejournal.com]

I loved reading this. While my religious upbringing wasn't particularly diverse, interesting, or even vaguely spiritual, I'm still at times wondering how to get some spirituality going now that I've realised I'm an atheist. I did the Alpha course once, and all the talk of God made me very happy, being generally content, feeling loved, that sort of thing, even though I was fast realising their view of God wasn't anywhere near mine and well on my way to realise the whole God concept wasn't for me. Which kind of made continued discussion annoying as they thought I just didn't get it and kept trying to explain it to me, and I've yet to find a new, more open-minded group of people for spiritual things.

I think I get what you mean with missing something to thank. Sometimes I'm simply happy about this amazing little thing, some fortunate coincidence, something of beauty, and I just want to share it with someone. Except that it's not quite that. Not just being able to share it. Something else, too. I don't know what, exactly...
I still thank things, but it feels a little odd. I expect I'll get used to it.

Crossing fingers!

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

What's the Alpha course?

One of the big things about my part of DC is how Jesus driven things are. I love how content the people are who have this faith, but on another level, I don't understand how unquestioning they can be.

[tijmetje.livejournal.com]

The Alpha course is a basic intro to Christianity. Basically you watch a video lecture where some English bloke standing next to a huge bouquet talks, after which you break into groups and discuss the matter further.
There were some interesting things, and I very much enjoyed the talk about the Holy Spirit, well, apart from the emphasis on experiencing it through Christianity, and it did get me thinking, but ultimately

A lot of my older religion-tagged posts are about me taking that course, though I never got around to writing up my thoughts on the Holy Spirit weekend.

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I went and caught up with them.

[thorbol.livejournal.com]

I enjoyed this post! It coame less than a week after I finished two Marcus Borg books, The God We Never Knew and Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. (My memory being what it too often is, the full titles may be longer, but what I have here should be enough to find the books.)

I found a lot of interest in these books, especially the first. One key point, as I recall it, is that what matters is a *relationship* with God, not *faith* in the sense of believing certain things about God or God's supposed directives for our behavior. A relationship to God is a common enough thing to claim, but often enough the propaganda is that you have to believe certain things before you qualify for that connection, so I've rarely thought about the difference between *relationship* and *belief in* in this context.

Now, I don't think Borg dealt with the question whether you can have a relationship with a God you don't claim to know. His own conversion from a "closet atheist" (one who nonetheless was a Jesus scholar) to a very different sort of Christian than he grew up as apparently resulted mostly if not wholly from something he regards as a mystical experience. A priest I had for a teacher back in college told me that, too, and said that others told him it reminded them of experiences they'd had on drugs. I've never had a thing like that. It sounds a lot like "faith is a gift," and I'm none too fond of believing that a supposedly all-wise and all-loving Primal Source would be stingy or whimsical in satisfying Its seekers. Because I have no way of knowing whether the experience in question is or is not just brain chemistry having fun, and for some other reasons, I remain agnostic. My Catholicism-spawned hopes for some sort of eternal paradise remain, and I have no wish to squash them, but they are only hopes, hopes that often seem stupid or just out of place.

[fabrisse.livejournal.com]

The Borg books sound interesting. I'll look into them.

The arbitrariness of mystical experience is a problem. I do get that for many who meditate -- whether through the Christian tradition or another tradition -- this is a goal.

I've always liked the title of the book "Be Still and Know" which I think is a way of approaching the mystic.

But, as you can tell, there's conflict in my own views.

[riverfox.livejournal.com]

*squeeees* Crossing fingers for the Gov't job. :):):)