Musing abroad

Dan is currently musing abroad, on holiday in Europe. He will return soon with tales of the virtues (or lack thereof) of left-leaning agnostic countries, old churches, traditional and modern cuisines, and the pleasures and perils of 20 hours of sunlight per day.

The best of times, the worst of times

There’s a lot of news out there these days about progress (and the lack thereof) in religion, specifically Protestant denominations. Several large American mainline denominations have had conventions and conferences, both national and regional, of late. Note this USA Today article about various denominations, particularly the Episcopal Church USA and the Presbyterian Church (USA), and their ongoing debates over same-sex unions and ordination. At the time of this writing, the Episcopalians are still holding their General Convention in Columbus, Ohio – this is a triennial conference of the Episcopal Church throughout the USA. They are still debating resolutions about whether to express regret to the global Anglican community regarding the ordination of Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, as a bishop a couple of years ago. In a hopeful sign of progressiveness, however, they elected a woman (and a liberal one, theologically speaking), Katharine Jefferts Schori, to be their new “Presiding Bishop”, which is sort of like being the chief Archbishop over the whole country. Bishop Schori is a very interesting woman – she earned a Ph.D. in oceanography in 1983 and worked with the National Marine Fisheries Service before changing career paths and entering the ordained ministry, and is apparently a strong advocate for the Millennium Development Goals. Naturally, there are some Episcopalians who are unhappy about her election – although they say their unhappiness stems not from her gender, but from her progressive theology.

Meanwhile, a recent regional Conference of the United Methodist Church was a mixed bag of religious tricks. On the bad side, during a debate on an resolution about bringing the troops home from Iraq, one delegate addressed the Conference by reading a passage from the Quran about killing infidels and the like, and cited this passage as evidence that Muslims are inherently violent, and therefore we'll never be able to cease the war on terror until we subdue them all. Apparently this good Christian brother isn't familiar with Psalm 137, where the psalmist writes (verses 8-9) “Babylon the destroyer, happy is he who repays you for what you did to us! Happy is he who seizes your infants and dashes them against a rock.” Nor is he probably familiar with Hosea 13:16, “Samaria will become desolate because she has rebelled against her God; her babes will fall by the sword and will be dashed to the ground, and pregnant women will be ripped up.” Funny, sounds like Christians have their own violent past, doesn't it?

In other words, Christianity doesn’t have an exclusive angle on peacemaking and love, nor does Islam have an exclusive angle on a violent past. All of us religious types have histories we need to overcome, to evolve beyond. Unfortunately, some religious types are stuck in the past, or want to defend the past and are fearful of evolution (spiritual as well as biological). We who are not, I believe, are obligated to continue striving for enlightenment and understanding, both within ourselves and throughout our faith communities. Anything less will condemn us to the ash heap of history, because history is inherently progressive and forward-moving.

Should we hope or despair? Should we be optimists or pessimists? I reached one tentative conclusion this past week – I think I might try to be a spiritual optimist and a political cynic. That is, I do think that history inevitably moves forward, and human enlightenment has no choice but to grow and expand. The alternative, I suppose, is species extinction. I don’t think that this progress is neatly linear – reformations always spawn counter-reformations, and the forces of retrenchment get pretty fierce when they begin to perceive that the struggle might not turn out their way. As noted author (and former Episcopalian priest) Barbara Brown Taylor put it, "human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God." Here’s my question: If the God you worship is in such dire need of your protection, what kind of deity is he? I could say the same thing about the so-called “Defense of Marriage” amendments kicking around Congress and various state legislatures - if your marriage needs to be defended from two gay men or two lesbians who love each other and are monogamous with each other and want to get married to each other, perhaps you should be less concerned with them and more concerned with what’s going on in your own marriage.

Tongues of fire?

In Western Christianity, this Sunday is Pentecost Sunday. For those of you somewhat unfamiliar with the Christian calendar, this holiday celebrates the occurrence in the early Church wherein the Holy Spirit is reported to have descended on the gathered followers of Jesus like “tongues of fire”. According to certain gospel accounts, the post-resurrection Jesus promised his disciples that although he’d be leaving soon (ascending to heaven), they would receive this indwelling Holy Spirit, which in later Christian teachings became regarded as the third person of the Trinity (the others being “the Father” and “the Son”).

What happened on Pentecost, according to the record of the Book of Acts of the Apostles, was that the frightened disciples of Jesus, left alone after he went on up to heaven, were gathered together in a house when all of a sudden this wind blew through, and these tongues of fire descended on their heads, and they all started speaking in different languages – languages recognizable to the travelers of various nationalities gathered in Jerusalem at the time.

(An interestingly humorous and oft-overlooked side note: Some who heard this talk thought that perhaps the disciples were merely drunk. Peter, in their defense, said that they weren’t drunk, because it was only nine o’clock in the morning. Note that he didn’t say “Oh no, we’re good followers of Jesus, we’d never be drunk.” No, he merely argued that it was too early in the morning for them to be drunk yet. But I digress…)

Nowadays, Pentecostal and Charismatic Christians often practice this phenomenon of speaking in other languages or tongues, technically known as glossolalia. It is seen as a sign of the presence of the Holy Spirit in a particular believer – often concomitant with a special receiving or baptism of that same Spirit. It’s occasionally associated with ecstatic prayer, but also can be part of a quieter devotional practice.

That’s all fine, but here’s my rant on the current practice – and this can apply to a lot more than just glossolalia. The emphasis too often winds up being on the individual believer and the individual practice. Rather than looking at what one believer can or can’t do, or whether that believer or another is filled with a particularly holy or enlightened spirit, let’s focus instead on the oneness of the Spirit that’s supposedly doing all this indwelling. The point of the story about the early disciples of Jesus isn’t that they all had special language skills because of their special relationship with the divine spirit; rather, the point is that this spirit, working through them, was able to bring together an incredibly diverse crowd of folks from all nations by speaking to them in ways they all could understand.

If you’re thinking that I’m continuing with the theme of my last post – that whole underlying unity of the cosmos thing - you’re catching on. I also wanted to include a comment from my friend the Psych Pundit (you can find a link to his blog on the side of this page - although his schedule has precluded him from updating it as frequently as he’d like, it’s still quite a good read). PP noted in an email to me that my last post made him think of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Teilhard was a Jesuit priest, philosopher, and paleontologist who lived and worked in the first half of the 20th Century. He propagated such concepts as the noosphere, a sort of higher level of consciousness interconnecting all humans (or perhaps all sentient beings), and the Omega Point, a final unity toward which all creation is evolving together. PP’s comments, in essence, were that Teilhard stressed that our most profound interconnectedness will ultimately occur at this higher-order level of consciousness, as opposed to the lower-order level of quantum field constituent parts.

I think that the book I mentioned might agree with PP’s analysis and comparisons with Teilhard – perhaps it was only my clumsy rendering of those ideas that made it seem otherwise. When you think about it, Teilhard’s collective interconnected consciousness sounds a lot like various Buddhist concepts, all of which go back to this underlying unity of all things. Hey, if Jung can have a collective unconscious, why can’t we have a collective consciousness also?

Some folks have even posited the notion that the Internet is an early concrete step toward creating the noosphere. A really interesting aspect of this (well, interesting to me, at least) is that this evolution toward an Omega Point is at some level a conscious evolution, and that probably as we progress in this evolutionary process, it becomes more and more of a conscious process.

So are we yet at a point in human evolution when we can begin to evolve consciously? Can we start taking steps to evolve in ways that will be beneficial to all of humanity, to all sentient beings, to the entire planet, to all that is? One can only hope that we’re getting there. The alternatives don’t seem very appealing for our species.

Mystical connections

I’ve been reading this intriguing book lately – it’s about, how should I put this, the mystical elements inherent in quantum theory and the nature of the subatomic particle physics. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Anyway, most of you are probably familiar with Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc2, meaning that the inherent energy in something is equal to its mass times the speed of light squared. Now the speed of light is a huge number already – about at 186,000 miles per second, or 670 million miles per hour. So squared, that’s really big. What that means is that even the smallest atom has a huge amount of potential energy in it, if you can figure out how to convert the matter into pure energy. That’s the basic physics behind nuclear power, and nuclear bombs. The other thing that this means is that there are two kinds of stuff in the universe, matter, and energy, and that the one can be converted into the other and vice versa.

Well, what this book argues is that matter, the stuff we see and can touch and bump into, the stuff that actually comprises our bodies, is kind of illusory. Because you see, the distinction between what’s matter and what’s not isn’t like we usually think about it. We tend to think, I’m here, and I’m made of matter, and this desk, for example, is made of other stuff, and between me and the desk is more stuff that we call air, but I can move through the air because it’s not as dense, but I can’t move through the desk. But what are we made of? Mostly water – about 35 liters in the average human body. Our bodies can be broken down into the chemical elements also – we’re about 65% oxygen, 18% carbon, and another 10% hydrogen. But then what are oxygen and carbon and hydrogen molecules made of? They’re all made of atoms, which in turn are made of subatomic particles like electrons and protons and neutrons (for that matter, protons and neutrons are composite particles made of quarks). OK, you get the picture. I’m made of these subatomic particles, but so is this desk, and so is the air. Everything that is, is made up of the same subatomic particles. The only difference is how these particles are organized, put together, and which molecules they wind up forming.

Feeling dizzy yet? So here’s the really wacky part of the argument. At their most basic, all of these particles are really just energy. So then, this stuff that we call matter, the stuff that comprises me and you and this desk and the air, is really just energy organized in different ways. But it’s all tied together in this one big underlying field. It’s like I’m a cluster of energy, and you’re another cluster of this same energy, and so is this desk, and so is the air, and so is everything that we see and perceive as matter. This all sounds like something out of Star Wars, or perhaps something Buddhist, and I’m not sure I entirely buy into the whole argument. But, I do like the truth it’s getting at, namely that we’re all interconnected, whether we see it or not. Maybe we can’t always perceive it, but we are. We’re connected to people we know and like, and to folks we know and don’t much care for. Democrats are connected to Republicans. Christians are connected to Muslims. You, wherever you are, most likely in some relatively comfortable setting at the moment, are connected to the millions of people suffering and dying in Darfur.

Isn’t that what we really all long for, to be connected? E.M. Forster said it well in his novel Howard’s End; you might know it from the film version starring Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins. Forster, who happened to be gay, which in his Victorian and Edwardian England no doubt added to his feelings of disconnect, wrote about:

…the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man. With it love is born, and alights on the highest curve, glowing against the gray, sober against the fire…Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.

Soy un inmigrante

So I got to thinking, after all these boycotts and protests yesterday and all the discussions and diatribes about reforming immigration policy over the past few months, what does all this really show about our society?

Before I get very far into this at all, let me point out that there is no easy answer to the problem of undocumented immigrants or illegal aliens, depending on which side of the issue you choose. We can’t simply open our national borders and let everyone in who wants to come in, but we also can’t simply deport 12 million people. The correct legislative solution, obviously, lies somewhere in the middle, but to find it we’d have to have a vibrant middle in our political spectrum, and that’s pretty well lacking these days.

But I’m more interested in what this debate reveals about us. According to statistics from a Pew Research project, about 74% of the immigrants who are here illegally are of Mexican or other Latin American origin. That means that 26% of the immigrants, or over 3 million people, are non-Hispanic. Funny though, when the pundits bloviate about “illegal immigrants”, you never hear them talking about Romanians or Somalis or Cambodians. Nope, it’s always “those folks coming across the border”, and they don’t mean renegade Canadians, eh?

So is there a racial component to this issue? Naturally. Of course, it’s also true that if roughly 3 million of these immigrants are non-Hispanic, the other 9 million are Hispanic, and so the large majority of the people in question are in fact of Hispanic origin. So there’s some justification for focusing the debate on Hispanic immigrants – but nearly all prejudices have some tenuous connection to reality (or at least reality as it’s perceived by those harboring the prejudices).

But what we have here is another set of categorizations. We have constructed a “them”, in opposition to the “we” that is us, us being those folks who were made in America, and them being everyone else. And when we set up “us” and “them” categories, you know what the next step is: We good, they bad. Yes, it’s the old nasty collective shadow projection rearing its ugly unintegrated head once again. (Click on this link for a prior posting about the shadow concept as it relates to homosexuals and Brokeback Mountain.)

So as long as there’s a “them” over there that we can differentiate from the “us” here, we can project all kinds of badness onto “them”. It’s much more convenient to group folks into categories when we can find some obvious distinguishing characteristics to use in our taxonomy. Thus the emphasis on Hispanic immigrants – they all speak a certain, other language, one that is not ours. There are other inaccurate distinguishing characteristics that are often employed – cuisine, job types, etc. – but we’ll leave those aside for the moment.

But is the “us” really that different from the “them”? I know the argument – “My ancestors were immigrants, but they came here legally, and worked hard and played by the rules and made a better life for generations to come.” The flaws with that argument are obvious – immigration policy wasn’t the same back when your forebears made their way to our shores, and for that matter I’ll bet that one or two of the folks in your family tree probably did slip through Ellis Island without the proper documents. Oh, and if you trace your lineage back to the Mayflower? Well then, you were part of an invading force – or did the Indians stamp the Pilgrims’ passports and grant them extended work visas?

Here’s what really hacks me off about this issue – most, though not all, of the bloviators who are fiercely opposed to illegal immigration are also professing Christians. The last time I checked my Bible, there was a whole lot in there about welcoming the stranger, extending hospitality to the traveler among you, and allowing the refugee to settle in your land. Regardless of your position on immigration policy reform, it’s abundantly clear that if you call yourself a Christian, your moral duty is to welcome strangers in your midst and to offer hospitality to those you encounter.

Some legislators want to make it a crime to extend practical hospitality to immigrants who are in this country illegally. Does that mean my government wants to punish me for exercising my religion, since it’s my Christian duty to be hospitable? I don’t know what the correct legislative response to this issue is, but I can say what it’s not: It’s not one that locks up a priest for offering shelter and bread to a family, nor is it one that snatches a cup of cold water out of the hand of one who offers it to another.