My writings - and those of others.
Whither spirituality?
A friend recently passed on an article from the Toronto Star published on December 26, 2018 entitled “A New Type of Church for the Community”. This kind of article turns up infrequently – usually in a slow news period – in which the reporter presumably tries to find a new thread of hope in what is generally seen as a declining religious presence. In this case, it’s a storefront church, with white plastic chairs, a row of computers against a wall lined with Bible verses – an example of a concept called a church plant. Interestingly the concept is supported and funded by existing denominations as the answer to their failing numbers and impact.
The writer goes on predictably to report the decline in numbers in religious affiliation and the storefront pastor’s seeing this as an opportunity to meet local needs for faith in a neighborhood setting. Like more conventional denominations, the storefront already has programs, services at times other than Sunday, and responses to other immediate social needs. We also learn that this plant is supported by an organization called Church Planting Canada which is using modern marketing methodology with Facebook video ads and expensively designed websites free from denominational affiliation. All this is totally predicable based on what the late writer Phyllis Tickle told the book publishing industry and the traditional denominations twenty years ago. Her book, The Great Emergence outlined the cultural changes affecting religious life in Europe and the United States that were happening decades earlier.
Among these changes is the reality that science and technology are the primary cultural forces - but there are others. The doubts of Albert Schweitzer that the Jesus of Nazareth was the the Christ of history led to new scholarship. Pentecostalism is a new and growing religion – and incidentally forms the base of Church Planting Canada. Alcoholics Anonymous is a strong healing ministry that calls on a nameless higher power and anticipated the rebirth of the small group movement – and more often than not meets in Church basements. Self-help dominates as a literary form. While immigration is front-and-centre of the news today – with the misguided narrative that immigrants are all terrorists - except that we ourselves are mostly descendants of immigrants who destroyed the habitats and spirituality of our native people. We now live in multicultural environments where the teachings of other religions have seeped into our consciousness. And I find it fascinating that most of these profound changes have occurred in my own lifetime since the end of the second world war.
While the planters are hopeful, it is instructive that their projects cost $50, 000 to $100,000 in grants in their initial year and considerable additional ones in the years following – ending up with exactly the same challenges that conventional churches face. Leaders often burn out quickly like those of any start-up in the arts or technology and the next set of leaders institutionalize the project.
Tickle in her essay also talks about the three strands of any religion – the approach to spirituality and recognition of the divine - the institutional framework and how it deals with leadership, formation, property, statutes, governance - and the approach to morality. In a recent article in the New York Times, the writer Donna Freitas notes an interesting feature of formation that I should pay more attention to – the fact that writers are discouraged by their editors for writing on the subject of religion for their young adult readers. Sex is fine – and so are LGBTQ topics - but faith is off limits unless you lampoon it. And I find in my own experience of working with young people from toddlers to teens - from learning to be nice, to learning the intricacies of liturgy, denominational history and pretty literal reading of scripture - that the one thing we hardly ever talk about is spirituality.
Donna Frietas talks about her own reading as a young Catholic and my own mirrors it to some extent. God talk at this stage and later in the early years of University were informed by books we read – more often metaphorical readings of authors like Lewis and Tolkien which also helped us deal with the stories of religion and how to ground their truth. I have to wonder whether Bible verses on a wall above computers is going to do the job. But what Ms Frietas does point out is that spirituality is immensely important to young people. How many meaningful articles about religious traditions of spirituality do we see in the press about that? Understanding that, of course takes much more preparatory work and research than interviewing a storefront pastor.
Someone I met at the 2018 Parliament of World Religions does get it. In response to the young people interested in spirituality and wanting to know more, he has created a very impressive website, What he said when we met was, “I’m not an expert on spirituality, but I know who some of the experts are – and I am trying to direct young people to them – and I try to help them avoid the too many quick fix answers that are out there.”
If mainstream denominations took this quest for spirituality more seriously, they might focus on their spiritual traditions rather than their historic denominational ones. That culture leaves them fighting old battles wearing new clothes. The old stories have frequently lost their context, leaving the young adrift on a planet with its own cosmology that is not being addressed for them. The young know that and they want better answers than the ones we are giving them.
Resolutions for the Planet
I’m often concerned about how little I am doing to combat the climate crisis and I’m reminded by a column today in Fast Company of a few practicail things. One that it doesn’t mention but one that should always be central is that we are not the only species on the planet . As writer and theologian Sally McFague observes, animals and plants were here long before us - and would survive much better without us.
But here are a few I can try.
Watch the number of bottles containing cleaning fluids - keep the sizes that fit on the counter and buy future ones in bulk sizes to refill them. I’ve already been using a concentrated detergent and one large bottle from Method will last a year. It doesn’t hurt that the laundry machines specify using less.
Washable bags for storage - I haven’t found any yet, but I do reuse the ones I have.
Recycled paper in every room in the house - I could do batter on that one.
More meatless meals - because of the crops that are needed to produce meat. It probably means looking at the vegetarian cookbook or the sections of the cookbook that I tend to avoid.
Buy things locally that don’t require more shipping whenever possible.
Never leave the house without a reusable bag to carry stuff home in - I’ve also stopped driving to the grocery store and buying more food than I need. The walking is doing me good and I’ve buying less and saving - since carrying it becomes an issue.
Wear the clothes I already have - fortunately most of them are from materials that have lasted well
These are easy and doable. Now to get on thinking about how to be an advocate.
A New Sense of Place
How do we situate ourselves? Where are you from, we ask? Where are we going? Where is our world going, we ask even more in the midst of political turmoil, war and environmental destruction? How do traditional powers and patterns of continuity collide with cultural changes of all kinds?
Thomas Berry (1914-2009)
Photo by Lou Niznik 10–6–1999
Academic institutions used to provide forums for such questions and some still do. It’s interesting to review the life of religious and cultural historian Thomas Berry, who taught at Fordham University and later founded the Riverdale Centre which used to present lecture series twice in the academic year and workshops in the summer. Now his ideas and practice is now conveyed several years after his death though film, books websites with rich resources well as online courses and social media. The ideas haven’t lost the relevance that first came to light in the seventies of the previous century.
Starting from his own religion and culture, Berry studied others searched to find their wisdom and points of comparison. This big picture thinking inevitably led him to focus on the earth itself as our common home and develop new questions with a new framing based on all the disciplines that were involved. These were not just religion also but geology anthropology, archaeology, biology, paleontology, and astronomy, We live in the world where all these play a role. Their combined role in industrial development and technology became a subject of concern for Berry as well as the lack of response to them of religion. Two world wars and subsequent ones were part of his life experience too. Most of us, in contrast, have specialized knowledge and lack a broader understanding of these multiple fields. One place to start to remedy our shortcoming is this resource for kids to learn some basics of “ologies”
Did the teachings of the world’s religions have anything to say to these scientific fields of knowledge? Did religions themselves need to get to know one another better as well as well as examining new developments and discoveries from their own perspectives?
The environment I where grew up in the thirties and forties was a comforting but basically limited world of a street, a neighborhood, a city, a province and a country. It reminds me of a scene in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town a play where the dramatist ponders life and mortality in a scene where a young girl meditates on this fact even more widely.
REBECCA:
I never told you about that letter Jane Crofut got from her minister when she was sick. He wrote Jane a letter and on the envelope the address was like this: It said: Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover's Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America.
GEORGE:
What's funny about that?
REBECCA:
But listen, it's not finished: the United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God--that's what it said on the envelope.
GEORGE:
What do you know!
REBECCA:
And the postman brought it just the same.
GEORGE:
What do you know!
Now my family and I travel and communicate in a world more like the second part of the letter whether we go the entire distance or not. But I still start from the ideas of my original spiritual background, cosmology, music, literature, painting, sculpture and dance. I now encounter those of others - including my own family’s digital natives’ world on an equally superficial and introductory level at the start. How am I going to go beyond that? More on that soon.
An important anniversary
50 years ago an iconic picture from space gave us a real sense of the planet when the image Earth Rising was taken by one of the Astronats. The wonderful writer Bill McKibben has reflected on this recently in the Huffington Post and also outlined how the world has changed.
The image brought a sense of hope then., he says. It was the inspiration for the first Earth Day. The Silent Spring had been published. The Grand Canyon had been saved. Here’s what McKibben quotes Margaret Mead saying about that era:
“Earth Day is the first holy day which transcends all national borders, yet preserves all geographical integrities, spans mountains and oceans and time belts, and yet brings people all over the world into one resonating accord, is devoted to the preservation of the harmony in nature and yet draws upon the triumphs of technology, the measurement of time, and instantaneous communication through space,”
There was a brief period when the idea of limits to growth had traction - but McKibben notes that it didn’t last and quotes Margaret Thatcher’s contrasting “There is no such thing as society. There are only individual men and women and their families.” Decades later this is an all too common prevailing view where we live off the earth instead of on it. In watching a show on Netflix recently, I was disheartened to hear a cosmologist join the voices of the Silicon Valley mega-millionaires who looked forward to space travel so that we can “colonize” some other planet. That’s madness. Read the full article from the link above. The scientists warn us - but it may have to be the poets that move us:
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
‘Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.Maya Angelou
There is no one but us.
A remarkable performance
I’ve heard some wonderful musicians in my time but a recent performance was remarkable. In the complex where I used to live we started a small concert series for the neighborhood and it has lasted several years with a variety of performers. This one was special because we were introduced to something totally new to us.
When a five year old starts to play the accordion look out. Michael Bridge has not only mastered the traditional one but introduced us to the digital one. The following performance is done entirely on this single instrument. It appears on his most recent recording.