Monday, May 28, 2007

Lord Buckley vs. St. John of the Cross

Well, some good idea-candy today. I've been reading about the sins of mysticism tonight, and I see this:
Purgation is the cleansing stage which begins with self-examination and penitence and leads to a holy life. Sixteenth-century monk, St. John of the Cross, is best known for his description of this stage which he called the “dark night of the soul.” During the dark night the soul of an individual feels abandoned by God, spiritually dry and at the point of despair. John saw this as a way in which God purified the soul by suffering, for only when the soul has been purified is it in a position to experience a rapturous union with God. This purgation involved detachment from the things of the world including material and physical desires; and mortification, the building of new paths to replace the old ones now rejected.


But I wonder. Watch this clip of my favorite preacher, Lord Buckley, and see if you don't catch him describing the love of God overtaking someone right in the middle of a sinful act.

A spot of pronoia

So I was thinking about the alleged extinction of the honeybee today -- a topic that's been frightening me for weeks now -- and somehow or other, my mind wandered onto the topic of Al Gore -- you know, the man who lost the last presidential election.

Do you remember (those of you who didn't vote for George Bush) how crushed you felt when the wrong party won? Do you remember how permanently lost it all seemed? I am far from a political expert, so I will simply gloss over the slow-motion train wreck of the past four years, and remind you of this:

Al Gore went on to accomplish something else he has been trying to do for the past 30 years: revolutionize the political will on the subject of global warming. I wouldn't be surprised if he has already accomplished much more out of the White House that he ever could in it. This is just the latest example of the principle: sometimes the Universe knows better than you do.

Saturday, May 19, 2007

Working the practical side: a place to research

Here's a little post to help you work the practical side.

I'm in the midst of starting a (not-conjure) business, thanks to Women's Initiative for Self-Employment, as described before. A classmate of mine, Dream Doula, turned me on to a website that is a mine of information:

"City-Data.com"

There you can find out all kinds of surprising things about any town you might want to work in: where are the richest neighborhoods? How many gay households are in your town? How much money does city government spend on services? How clean is the air? What is the racial makeup? Is the economy growing or shrinking, and why?

You can advertise your business, too.

Sunday, May 13, 2007

My Own Particular Strait and Narrow Path, Part 6 of 2

My apologies for the long delay between the last post and this one.

I've had my plate full – and happily so – with a little thing called the Women's Initiative for Self-Employment. Long story short, I'm building myself another day job. Anyhow, nothing more now about my own attempts at Coincidence Management ™; here's another entry in the "Narrow Path" series.


A French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, once wrote: "Oh, will you not give me, who has suffered so much, the life of adventure found in children's books?"

How many of us get into magic or other spiritual quests for this reason? And is there, or is there not, an element of guilt in it? Is there nothing more in it than escapism? (Why the hell did T. H. Lawrence do it?)

Are our poets at fault? Was Plato right to warn against poetry? (But he advocated geometry, the measurement of the world, instead. I think I've got hold of the wrong dichotomy here.)

I have discussed before the Declaration of War against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality, and Eoghan Ballard's cogent exposition of the imperialism that underlies white middle-class America's embrace of ... well, spiritual gaudiness generally.

But is there a way to do all this innocently – without running roughshod over other people's spiritual treasures?

How did the Cao Dai Church do it in Vietnam? (If you click on the link provided, the first picture above the cut is of an edifice that reminds me, just a little bit, of the Missionary-Independent Spiritualist Church I visited yesterday. You can't google it yet, but it exists due to the hard work and conviction of my main mentor, Catherine Yronwode.)

Anyhow, check out the Wikipedia link to the PBS story about Cao Dai, which is as deliberately syncretistic as Unitarian Universalism now is. After the communist takeover of North Vietnam, séances were forbidden to the hierarchy; now, this was a central practice of the Church. However, a Vietnamese-American author describes the current situation this way: "We don't see the necessity to have a séance anymore because we have direct from the Supreme Being to people by returning inside to our heart to see the Supreme Being in there, to see God in there."

I see a comparison to the Roman destruction of the second Temple at Jerusalem in 70 CE; just as that resulted in the development of rabbinic Judaism and the relocation of spiritual activity to the synagogues of the world, the shutdown of centralized spiritual communication via the Cao Dai hierarchy spreads, rather than dissipates, spiritual power. I mean to say that spiritual power is democratized rather than dissipated!

Hasn't the same thing happened in the African-American Diaspora? Isn't hoodoo, conjure, the Pentecostal movement, the Holiness movement – in which the manifestation of the holy spirit bears noticeable similarities to the highly prized spirit possession of African religions – and the black church – isn't it all the American Cao Dai?

Another question suggests itself: why have not those people subject to religious imperialism contented themselves with be mild and tepid religious observances of the West? Why have they developed nothing similar? (And no fair comparing Buddhist monasteries to the bland tedium of a second-rate Protestant sermon; there is no comparison with an intense bout of, say, Vipassana meditation.) Let us not underestimate the value of amazement and splendor in spiritual life.

But this still leaves unanswered the question of spiritual imperialism. I'm not callous enough to say that there is no such thing; but the white folks' story is much more complicated than some conjures or medicine people are prepared to believe. I think the next thing to investigate is something I've only heard of, but have not yet been convinced of: "bourgeois emptiness;" the so-called "hunger for meaning." Maybe I'm not as high on Maslow's ladder I thought I was. Or maybe it's just my conviction that I already have so many of the things money can't buy.