I just love your depiction of the Just Folks. Just because you hit the nail on the head. I despise this tendency to just repeat what they’ve just said!!
It’s just filler.
My mother was religious and spiritual. We always said Grace before meals and she would talk about church to my recollection. My daddy on the other hand was spiritual. Though he never discussed religion I could tell how sensitive and spiritual he was. He was quite the philosopher , too. He didn’t go to church except on Easter or Christmas. What I call a Chreester. In respect of him, I don’t use it in a derogatory way. The rest I see as only meeting an obligation. They never attend other high holy days. So I imagine their attendance to be a habit at best. One of the things I liked about daddy going to church was that he dressed in a suit and tie and looked thoroughly elegant especially when he wore his grey suit with lavender shirt and striped tie. What a classy guy! My mother was classy as well.
Since I’m a believer and the sort of Episcopalian that thinks that people of different religions, including Hindu, Buddhist and even Wiccan, and especially Native American are going to the same place after they die. I don’t think it necessarily Heaven but some place where I can carve. And my pets will all be there; but, of course they go there. If on the chance they don’t I don’t want to go either. I think that Jesus’ idea of God’s kingdom on earth is a crazy wonderful concept and it’s up to us to bring it about. With all the hate and wars in the world I don’t know if it’s possible but I do want to try and help it along in my neck of the woods.
I thoroughly enjoyed your piece and am grateful you can still teach me if from afar.
It's interesting to me that I went to church all those years and came away with no supernatural beliefs at all. As to the Heaven Thang, I hope it happens for the people I love who want it, but for me, I strongly feel that one life as this Daniel guy is quite enough. (I don't mean that I expect or want to be reincarnated as anybody or anything else [even if that actually made any sense], only that I have no wish for a Heavenly continuation of my own Being. Perfectly happy to return the physical body to the planetary recycling process and allow the soul/spirit/consciousness to evaporate [as I think it's Prospero who says] "into air, into thin air." =:o)
Some of this sounds so familiar, while being almost the opposite of my experience. It's funny to read about how you're an "unbeliever" when you believe so much stronger (though less literally) than most of the "believers" in my life :)
As usual, I think we agree at least 99%. I do think it's a misnomer to call religion a "study of how then we should live". It strikes me more as a heuristic for how then we should live.
It seems like the places it's "studied" all the research questions are asked in the wrong way. (But this is certainly some percentage projection of my experience.) If we "studied" a bird in the hand being worth more than two in the bush by researching ornithology and botany, we would perfectly miss the point, while spending endless effort doing so.
Likewise, we thought if we put an "-logy" at the end, our "Theo" would be more legitimate than fiction. Of course, this is a great disrespect to fiction, whose Truths are meta-truths and whose power is more potent than all the -logy's in the universe. The Jesus [legend] was right: the religious always lead the least Divine lives. (Matthew 21:31)
I wrote you a substantial response -- and then, Hey presto! it slipped away into the aether, evidently never to return.
Let's see whether I can recover some of it ...
As to my believing more strongly (if also less literally) than most 'believers' in your life: well, that our conscious lives are founded in Story is the guiding idea behind this whole stack of essays. We should never have expected that human values and meanings would be best addressed and worked with in purely rational/logical and concretely physical ways. Mythologies are central to our understanding because our understanding is centered on our psyche, which is able to imagine anything we can conceive (or do I mean able to conceive of anything we can imagine?).
As to whether or not religion is a study: we may well be using the word 'study' differentially.
Here's a way to begin:
I consider the creation of a work of art a type of study: a following of the <vision/feeling/apprehension> down into the imaginal in order to discover what belongs in the work and what does not, and how what *does* belong is to be deployed. I think that this by-no-means-primarily-intellectual-or-rational process of discovering what is 'true' of the nascent artwork is parallel to the discovering of what is 'true' about a mythology or about the theology that is discovered in the sounding and exploration of the mythology. Similarly (I think) we could say that Lewis & Clark and Company were 'studying' the territories they were 'exploring': "What is here? What is true of it? How does it work?" So I suppose perhaps you might prefer me to call religion an 'exploration' or a 'discovery' of how then we can and/or should live.
In any case, what I definitely did *not* mean was that the answers have already been found and established, and we are just memorizing them for the test. By referencing a study of "How then we should live", I was not at all intending to be understood as positing that these things are already known by anybody -- certainly not by any human being -- such that all we had to do was check out the correct version of the instruction book. They are human meanings and values, which is to say that they are always subject to further evolution and even radical change.
Thanks for *your* notes on this one: one way and another, just now, I'm spending a lot of time with you and your own work. A Major Jamin Week or two.
I just love your depiction of the Just Folks. Just because you hit the nail on the head. I despise this tendency to just repeat what they’ve just said!!
It’s just filler.
My mother was religious and spiritual. We always said Grace before meals and she would talk about church to my recollection. My daddy on the other hand was spiritual. Though he never discussed religion I could tell how sensitive and spiritual he was. He was quite the philosopher , too. He didn’t go to church except on Easter or Christmas. What I call a Chreester. In respect of him, I don’t use it in a derogatory way. The rest I see as only meeting an obligation. They never attend other high holy days. So I imagine their attendance to be a habit at best. One of the things I liked about daddy going to church was that he dressed in a suit and tie and looked thoroughly elegant especially when he wore his grey suit with lavender shirt and striped tie. What a classy guy! My mother was classy as well.
Since I’m a believer and the sort of Episcopalian that thinks that people of different religions, including Hindu, Buddhist and even Wiccan, and especially Native American are going to the same place after they die. I don’t think it necessarily Heaven but some place where I can carve. And my pets will all be there; but, of course they go there. If on the chance they don’t I don’t want to go either. I think that Jesus’ idea of God’s kingdom on earth is a crazy wonderful concept and it’s up to us to bring it about. With all the hate and wars in the world I don’t know if it’s possible but I do want to try and help it along in my neck of the woods.
I thoroughly enjoyed your piece and am grateful you can still teach me if from afar.
Thanks, Darlin'!
It's interesting to me that I went to church all those years and came away with no supernatural beliefs at all. As to the Heaven Thang, I hope it happens for the people I love who want it, but for me, I strongly feel that one life as this Daniel guy is quite enough. (I don't mean that I expect or want to be reincarnated as anybody or anything else [even if that actually made any sense], only that I have no wish for a Heavenly continuation of my own Being. Perfectly happy to return the physical body to the planetary recycling process and allow the soul/spirit/consciousness to evaporate [as I think it's Prospero who says] "into air, into thin air." =:o)
Some of this sounds so familiar, while being almost the opposite of my experience. It's funny to read about how you're an "unbeliever" when you believe so much stronger (though less literally) than most of the "believers" in my life :)
As usual, I think we agree at least 99%. I do think it's a misnomer to call religion a "study of how then we should live". It strikes me more as a heuristic for how then we should live.
It seems like the places it's "studied" all the research questions are asked in the wrong way. (But this is certainly some percentage projection of my experience.) If we "studied" a bird in the hand being worth more than two in the bush by researching ornithology and botany, we would perfectly miss the point, while spending endless effort doing so.
Likewise, we thought if we put an "-logy" at the end, our "Theo" would be more legitimate than fiction. Of course, this is a great disrespect to fiction, whose Truths are meta-truths and whose power is more potent than all the -logy's in the universe. The Jesus [legend] was right: the religious always lead the least Divine lives. (Matthew 21:31)
Okay, that was highly annoying:
I wrote you a substantial response -- and then, Hey presto! it slipped away into the aether, evidently never to return.
Let's see whether I can recover some of it ...
As to my believing more strongly (if also less literally) than most 'believers' in your life: well, that our conscious lives are founded in Story is the guiding idea behind this whole stack of essays. We should never have expected that human values and meanings would be best addressed and worked with in purely rational/logical and concretely physical ways. Mythologies are central to our understanding because our understanding is centered on our psyche, which is able to imagine anything we can conceive (or do I mean able to conceive of anything we can imagine?).
As to whether or not religion is a study: we may well be using the word 'study' differentially.
Here's a way to begin:
I consider the creation of a work of art a type of study: a following of the <vision/feeling/apprehension> down into the imaginal in order to discover what belongs in the work and what does not, and how what *does* belong is to be deployed. I think that this by-no-means-primarily-intellectual-or-rational process of discovering what is 'true' of the nascent artwork is parallel to the discovering of what is 'true' about a mythology or about the theology that is discovered in the sounding and exploration of the mythology. Similarly (I think) we could say that Lewis & Clark and Company were 'studying' the territories they were 'exploring': "What is here? What is true of it? How does it work?" So I suppose perhaps you might prefer me to call religion an 'exploration' or a 'discovery' of how then we can and/or should live.
In any case, what I definitely did *not* mean was that the answers have already been found and established, and we are just memorizing them for the test. By referencing a study of "How then we should live", I was not at all intending to be understood as positing that these things are already known by anybody -- certainly not by any human being -- such that all we had to do was check out the correct version of the instruction book. They are human meanings and values, which is to say that they are always subject to further evolution and even radical change.
Thanks for *your* notes on this one: one way and another, just now, I'm spending a lot of time with you and your own work. A Major Jamin Week or two.
- d xo
=:o)