High Road

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“You take the high road and I’ll take the low road,” starts the chorus of that overused, unofficial national anthem of Scotland. The low road, while offering less spectacular views, is quicker and more practical. At least that’s how it seems to this erstwhile expatriate who spent three bonnie years in that land. Still, we all know the appeal of taking the high ground. In studies of morality, high moral standards are better than low. High income is sought after over low. We are encouraged ever to reach higher, shooting our probes out to the very stars. Who wants to admit to being low? There’s more than a hint of this condescension in the terminology I’ve lately been noticing when it comes to the Bible. Instead of saying that an author of a book is Conservative, it is now common code to claim that s/he has “a high view of scripture.” I guess the rest of us have a low view.

Despite the increasing secularity of culture, there are still many, many books being written about the Bible. In fact, the standard industry rag, Publisher’s Weekly, routinely carries story after story about religion publishing, much of it biblical. But readers want to feel safe when approaching the Bible. New ideas can be dangerous and challenging. So we want to know the perspective of the writer before we crack open the cover. Those who believe, within a reasonable degree, that the historical tales of the Bible are factual have a high view. When the four stories of Jesus contradict one another they can be harmonized. That’s the high view. Saying that the world was created in one day, as Genesis 2 asserts, is tending toward a low view, literal though it may be. After all, didn’t we just read in the previous chapter that it was six days? One can become six with a high enough view. Just stand on your tippy-toes.

A high view

A high view

Now the cynical side of me wants to believe that this coding of the high view of Scripture is willful misrepresentation. The stratospheric viewers may not actually say that the industry standard has a low view—not exactly—but miracles are easier to see from the mountain top. If you want to know who to trust, you rely on those with a high view. In this world the sun can stand still and giants can grow to be nine feet tall. It is a high view indeed. While no one knows the original meaning of the lyrics to “Loch Lomond,” many associate it with the Jacobite rebellions of the eighteenth century. The lyricist may be referring to the heads of the executed exhibited on pikes along the high road from London to Edinburgh while their dispossessed relatives walked on the low road. Neither group devalues its native land where some hope to return and others died trying. So feel free to take the beheaded high road while I take the low, because we’ll all end up at Loch Lomond in the end.

Order of Melchizedek

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WhyPriests?A considered reflection from a long-time believer is a force never to be taken lightly. Garry Wills is a lifelong Catholic and an intellectual. His book, Why Priests? A Failed Tradition, was recommended to me by a friend and it is indeed a book that raises most profound questions. To someone born Protestant, such as the current writer, many of the arguments Wills marshals are strangely familiar. Many were lobbed in Fundamentalist harangues where clergy that believe in a literal six-day creation proved surprisingly adroit at finding the chinks in Catholic armor. The New Testament says nothing about the Christian movement having its own priests. And even the explicit command that seems to have come from Jesus—call no man father—is immediately reversed once priests become a fixture in a priestless faith. Wills explores the origins of these practices not to tear apart the religion of which he remains a loyal part, but to suggest that religious tolerance is the only proper solution. It is amazing how much of Catholic thought goes back to the disputed book of Hebrews with its mysterious Melchizedek.

While I have never been a Catholic, I have always been haunted by the idea that my religion was some kind of innovation. After all, the stakes were beyond stratospheric. If you pick the wrong one, at least according to what I was taught, Hell awaits at the end of the day. Then I discovered that my own Fundamentalism also had a history. We were called Protestants because we protested Catholicism. As I moved into the Methodist tradition, at least there seemed to be a continuity—John Wesley was an Anglican and Anglicans were really kind of English Catholics. Or so it seemed. Naturally, I became an Episcopalian since going Roman seemed like it came with exceptional amounts of accretions that were clearly not biblical. Such accretions are much of what Wills explores. Traditions that become doctrine. And exclusive. Those on the outside can hope for Purgatory at best, and the very Hell I was trying to avoid remained a distinct possibility. Who was right?

Religions suffer with time. The faith that Jesus seems to have proclaimed had already altered by the time Paul put pen to parchment. Ask any Gnostic. Already, within just three decades, the question became “now what did he say again?” And what exactly did he mean? The core of that message seemed to be love above all else, but that doesn’t make for sexy doctrine. Exclusivity achieves what love could never accomplish. Wills explores how sacraments evolved, and how Scripture became a sword dividing believer from believer. His most sensible solution? Its time to get beyond priests. He doesn’t actually suggest doing away with them, but asks Catholics why they don’t consider closely the implications of their roots. Melchizedek takes on a stature greater than anyone seems to have imagined for an imaginary figure. And a lifelong believer here asks the most basic of questions: what is Christianity truly about?

Call it Civilization

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HinduismWhile brushing up on Hinduism by reading the book of that title by Cybelle Shattuck, it once again occurred to me how the concept of religion distorts itself. Prior to the Roman Period, the concept of religion really had no name. In fact, religions were sets of folk beliefs held in common by people of a single culture. These beliefs had many functions: keeping social order, establishing common practice, undergirding a kind of optimism in the face of inevitable death. Since long-distance communication was rare and unreliable, communities separated by more than a few miles soon developed details that fit their own situation and would hardly apply universally. Until they were written down, anyway. In Hinduism—which is in no sense a unified religion—even the “sacred writings” were not held to be authoritative for all people across all places and times. That concept would emerge with Christianity, a religion that would define the term and try to make it stable.

Hinduism is the oldest continually practiced “religion” in the world, as far as we can tell. The religions of the Mesopotamians and Egyptians eventually died out (although they have been revived by some in recent times) but the folk belief—or better, folk practice, of ancient India has continued relatively uninterrupted while new religions from Israel and Arabia changed the rules of the game. Monotheisms quickly demand heresies. A single God would not tell people different truths. Something upon which Shiite and Sunni, Catholic and Protestant, Pharisee and Sadducee all agree. One Lord, one faith, one baptism. By fire.

Meanwhile, even with Muslim and Christian missionaries afoot, Hinduism continued its accustomed continuity. To be a Hindu doesn’t mean worshipping the same god with the same ritual as everybody else. It is a way of living intended to keep dharma and avoid bad karma. And even as trendy westerners stretch themselves into impossible yoga postures, they are participating, at some level, in ancient practices that we call the religion of Hinduism. Shattuck’s brief introduction is a nice little primer that explains this time-honored folk tradition in a way even a believer in religion can understand. There are, it turns out, more things in this philosophy than our universe has ever dreamt of. Or perhaps the one dreaming is really Vishnu after all.

It’s My Body

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Those who believe mythology is dead have to look no further than the Supreme Court. Amid pictures of women protesting religious freedom to be told what to do with their bodies, the Court decided that employers may withhold rights to birth control under the rubric of religious belief. The ones who raise the issue, however, biologically never carried a baby to term. One gender making decisions for the other. We all know that the official stance of Roman Catholicism, closely followed by radical Evangelicalism, is that God intended sex only for procreation. Those women who find themselves on the receiving end of unwanted conception are helpless in the eyes of the law, depending on who their employer is. Blind justice indeed. Obamacare is intended to help level the playing field. Too few people have any real control over what medical treatment they can afford. I know more than one fixed-income person who suffers chronic pains due to lack of adequate treatment. I also know people who have used the system for plastic surgery before a trip to the beach. It seems that your employer now has the right to decide—but only if you’re a woman, and only if it involves what might be euphemistically called your “private parts”—what care you deserve.

Legislating morality, we religion majors debated even when I was back in college, cannot be effectively executed. If you presume there is a God, then enforced obedience is no obedience at all. Even conservative undergraduates could see that. Now our “Supreme” Court, with its male majority, has followed the lead of closely held corporations (doublespeak for certain patriarchal, Evangelically based companies) and declared that half the humans in America don’t deserve the same health care as the other half. The reason? Closely held companies don’t want women to have access to birth control. Our courts strike a blow against freedom and justice for private religious interests.

Within days of one Christian denomination declaring that gay marriage will be—should be— sanctioned, our own judiciary sides with the right of upper management in private corporations to discriminate based on gender. At least the owners of Hobby Lobby and Conestoga can sleep better at night knowing that they’ve prevented women from having their basic rights upheld. And metaphorically crawling into bed with closely held corporations are a male majority of supreme court justices who believe one man’s religion (yes, man’s) has the right to overturn the freedom of his employees. With the blessings of a male God. A situation like this prevailed, it seems to me, until 1863, also with the backing of scripture. Only in those days the argument was, I believe, that God is clearly Caucasian.

Looks balanced...

Looks balanced…

Tongues of Fire

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“Do you want to see?” she asked me, fraught with all the emotions of a teen far from home. I’ve often questioned the wisdom of church groups sending large numbers of high school students to retreats or conferences where shear ratios of chaperones to teens guarantees intrigue. She was an attractive girl, and despite my commitments to asexuality early in life, I found her plea compelling. We weren’t supposed to meet after hours without the adults around. I was insanely curious, however. “A few of us will be gathering behind the gym,” she said. I demurred, afraid to break the rules. “Do you want to see now?” she insistently asked. We were in a room largely empty, as the adults were headed toward the food, the way adults always seem to do. I agreed. Nervously she closed her eyes in prayer. When she opened them, they were glassy and far away. A stream of nonsense words effortlessly bubbled from her mouth. This went on for what seemed like minutes, although I knew it was only seconds stolen from a scheduled curriculum. She closed her eyes, and coming back to herself, looked exhausted. “What did you say?” I asked, breathless. “I don’t know,” she admitted.

This was my first experience of glossolalia, or speaking in tongues. I was at the United Methodist Youth Annual Conference, and I’d just met the girl who’d revealed so much. Methodists, as a rule, aren’t much into glossolalia, but the Pentecostal movement has Methodist roots, and teens are the great experimenters of the human race. I can’t recall how I met her, or even her name. I felt an incredible attraction to a girl who could let herself be so possessed, however; so vulnerable to an Almighty deity. I decided not to go to the after dark gathering. Instead I sought out a minister I trusted. He explained that such signs, if truly divine, are only done in the presence of an interpreter. She was misguided. Yet I couldn’t get those glassy eyes out of my mind. Where had she been in those fleeting seconds when her mouth spoke a language she didn’t know?

While reading David Kling’s The Bible in History’s chapter on Pentecostalism, this all came back to me with incredible force. A few years later I attended a Pentecostal service with one of my college roommates who belonged to that tradition. Being in a room full of true believers speaking in tongues at the same time unnerved me. I never went back. Psychologists and neurologists have explanations for how glossolalia occurs. The standard evangelical explanation is quite different. For one young lady whose name I can’t recall, it was a sign she wanted desperately to share. A personal assurance that John Wesley himself encouraged his followers to seek. Not that Wesley ever suggested speaking in tongues. That only began in 1901, after a hiatus of nearly two millennia. To a teenage spiritual seeker in the presence of a young lady, away from home, it was a mystical experience indeed. The assurance, however, would have to wait.

Image credit: Phiddipus

Image credit: Phiddipus

Born Identity

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Richard Dawkins, most famously in The God Delusion, made the claim that children are born without religion. Faith is something we’re taught in the growing up process, and we generally learn it from our parents or guardians. A recent piece in The Guardian (the newspaper, not ersatz parent) by Andrew Brown, stakes a bold, and surely correct, counterclaim: children are not born atheists. This isn’t just wishful thinking. As Brown points out, study after study has shown that people, especially children, are prone to belief. Where Dawkins does have a claim to verisimilitude, however, is that religious branding is not a product of nature. We have to learn what flavor of religion tastes good. As Brown points out in his opinion piece, we also have to learn to be the nationality that everything from our passports to our job applications requires of us. I can’t decide to be Scottish or Canadian. I’ve tried both, and here I am, an American mutt, just as I was assigned at birth.

What should I believe?

What should I believe?

Like nationality, religion is frequently a matter of where you are born. Take a look at a world map of religions and see. India is the most statistically likely country to be born Hindu. It can happen elsewhere, but it would be unlikely where no Indians live. Life sometimes offers the opportunity to change belief, generally through education or through proselytization, but it is fairly uncommon. Most people don’t think too deeply about their religion. You accept what your parents tell you about what’s poisonous and what’s not, and how to drive a car. Would they steer you wrong on religion? Not willfully, surely.

The tabula rasa myth has been one of the most difficult to eradicate. We’re born with all kinds of things going on inside already. Specific religious belief is not one of them, but the tendency to believe is. We believe because it is human nature to do so. We can learn not to believe, and we can even become wealthy by sharing that outlook vociferously. You can also get a good deal of money by being religious and selling alternatives to science. The Institute for Creation Research is well funded, from what I hear. The one place where there is no money, and where you’re not likely to be noticed, is in the middle. Some of us are born as middle children. We had no choice in the situation, and no matter what we decide to believe, we’re no less Episcopalian than we are atheist, or vice versa.

Trans-Human

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“Rapture of the Nerds,” an article in this week’s Time magazine by Jessica Roy, has me scratching my head. Or it would if I had a head. That is, if I were an uploaded consciousness in a machine. A transhuman. The idea that consciousness is transferable to hardware has been gaining momentum over the last several years during which humans have evolved into illogical machines. Roy’s article about Terasem, which is being called a new religion, explores what the leaders of the movement teach about human consciousness. You write down your thoughts in most intimate detail, download, and viola, send them out to the cosmos. Your soul has been saved. If only we knew what a soul was. Transhumanism has been promising an attenuated kind of immortality for its adherents, but as I sit down to write out my thoughts, I’m aware that there’s always a lot more going on in my brain than the simple ideas I can scrawl down before they evaporate. There’s quick wisps of thoughts about my loved ones, my schedule (what do I have to do today?), what I ate for supper last night, how I feel—all of this while I’m putatively thinking about writing a blog post. Schizophrenia of the soul?

Faith

So much of thought is having a biological body. From early days I have been aware that this body will die. I was taught that the soul would live on, but this thing I call consciousness seems pretty closely tied with this thing I call life. And once the biological input ends, that part will be over. I think. In other words, my thoughts are tied to my biological existence. How can I even begin to write a minute fraction of them down accurately? I used to toy with an idea called meta-thinking. It was something I came up with as a plot element in a science fiction story. The idea was that those who can think two thoughts at once would eventually take over from those of us with lesser mentalities. Those who have two minds in one brain are, it seems, a step closer to the divine.

I use technology on a daily basis, but I am a disingenuous advocate. Some of the most transcendent moments I’ve experienced have been outdoors with technology left behind, under a sunny sky with an ocean breeze blowing in my face and those I love walking beside me. I think I’ve already broadcast that out into the universe by simply being a part of it. I don’t need circuits and motherboards to make me more of what I am. Technology is the follower. It is consciousness that will always remain in the lead. And we still really don’t even have an idea of what consciousness actually is. It’s certainly not this computer that’s sitting on my lap. And I do have to wonder, once my consciousness becomes a robot, what it will do with this strange, primate urge I have, when I’m puzzled, to scratch my head.

Mores the Merrier

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The Presbyterian Church (USA) and I go back a long way now. Not that I’ve ever been a member, but one of their institutions gladly accepted four years of my tuition money and tolerated my presence on campus during that same time. I arrived at college a fundamentalist, but, as a religion major who thought through what was presented in class, I soon discovered that literalism was as wrong as sin. This past week the Presbyterian Church (USA) voted to allow gay marriages. Talking to someone I still know in my native, conservative western Pennsylvania, I learned that disgruntled heterosexuals I’ve known since I was a child are now denomination shopping because of the change. Ironically, this includes divorced individuals and others who can’t seem to get the hang of this heterosexual relationship thing. Marriage may not work for straights, but we sure don’t want the gays to have a chance at it.

Gay marriage, of course, is only the tip of the iceberg upon which modern Christianity is bearing down. And not just Christianity. Any ancient religion that finds itself surviving in a world that has completely changed since its founding has trouble remaining relevant. This issues of peasants in Palestine under imperial Roman rule are very different from a high-tech, service-industry, desk-job society. One could argue that people never change, but I suspect that society gives the lie to that. Some issues are perennial—we still haven’t figured out how to make sure the poor have enough. We will walk out of church, however, when we see affluent people of the same gender walking down the aisle together. With priorities arranged this way, is it any wonder that the mainline churches have difficulties retaining members? For some, the church has become a place to feel comfortable with their prejudices rather than to try to figure out what a first-century religion means in a twenty-first-century world.

I applaud the Presbyterian Church (USA) for its decision. It will certainly cost the denomination numbers. It is, however, a move to try to introduce justice back onto the agenda. One does wonder whether it was predestined. Far be it from me to speak for a first-century carpenter, but I suspect that a church founder who stressed repeatedly that love, not judgment, was the way to become one of his followers might be a bit sad at the political turn this has all taken. We know, from all that biology tells us, that sex has far more importance to humans than reproduction. It has a pair-bonding social function without which many couples would split up. This seems true regardless of the gender combination involved. Why not acknowledge this fact as truth and get on with the important business of negotiating the twenty-first century? Of course, we will have to find some other way to justify our prejudices.

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Medjugorje Matrix

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Miracle Detective“Expect a miracle,” Oral Roberts used to sign off, “and a miracle is yours today.” Physicists tend to be a bit more hard-nosed about the issue. In a mechanistic universe miracles are disallowed. How can you predict the outcome of any experiment or scenario when the whim of the divine could change the results? Nevertheless, most churches at least hold out the possibility of the rare miracle either set in centuries far past, or even occurring today. Randall Sullivan’s The Miracle Detective is, therefore, an almost unbelievable book. A reporter for Rolling Stone, Sullivan began investigating Marian apparitions. Although in the popular mindset, even among skeptics, such things are seen as promotions by the church to shore up the faithful, as Sullivan points out, the Catholic church is extremely cagey regarding miracles. It might be easier to convince a physicist than it is the Vatican, that a miracle is occurring.

Spending part of the tragic war in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sullivan interviewed most of the six children who claimed to have visions of Mary at Medjugorje. While he remained skeptical of what he found, it is at times a decided head-rush to read his book. We tend to dismiss non-academic reporting of events by hoi polloi as unsophisticated, or superstitious. The events at Medjugorje, however, have been thoroughly tested by physicians and communist-appointed scientists and have left them scratching their heads. In some cases, getting them to convert to Catholicism. Rome, however, did not give its seal of approval to what was happening there. Sullivan, not religious himself, but open-minded, found the investigation compelling, if not life-changing. In this lengthy account, the reader is drawn into a rational world where something mysterious is clearly happening. A world that both the church and the academy deny might exist. And yet, something incredible stands on record nevertheless.

Lourdes, Fatima, and numerous lesser-known locations boast erstwhile visions of Mary that include miracles in their wake. Although the events in Medjugorje were unfolding the year I started college, majoring in religion, I had never heard of them until I read The Miracle Detective. As Sullivan notes, at times it seems better not to know about such events because they disturb a comfortable worldview where intrusions from the outside just don’t happen. Life, however, includes many incidents which we simply take off the table because they don’t fit into our scientific paradigm. The implications are just too discomfiting. Climbing off the bus after having read several chapters of the book was like stepping back into a world somehow so effaced that I felt there must be something on the other side. Many of those experiencing these miracles were barely Catholic, or were not religious at all. And yet something happened to them, causing them to wonder. And that wonder is catching for those who read the strangely compelling account of an open-minded, if accidental, miracle detective.

Inspired. Absolute. Final.

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IMG_1394Recently I spent some time in my native Pennsylvania. Doing so sometimes makes me believe in a bizarre kind of predestination. I never had any truck with theological fore-ordainment; I’d rather just give up and get it all over with now. Nevertheless, the Bible was very present in the Pennsylvania of my youth and logic dictates that if something is, a priori, more important than everything else, only a fool wouldn’t pay attention. When we’d be driving along a country road and a prominent outcropping of rock was spray painted with “Jesus Saves,” I’d feel a quiet reassurance that my choices had been sound. I started reading the Bible as a child, toughing it through Leviticus and Chronicles, with true Protestant fervor. The Bible, I believed, could never let you down.

On my recent drive down memory lane, I passed a road sign advertising the sacred scriptures. It read “The Holy Bible. Inspired. Absolute. Final.” There was a number to call, ending with the words “for truth” in place of digits. Operator. Information. Get me Jesus on the line. (With apologies to Sister Wynona Carr.) The odd thing is that I always assumed this was normal. Ticking off the miles on Interstate 80, I used to see how many “Jesus Saves” graffiti I could find on overpass pylons. Even in Manhattan I still find the same phrase scrawled in the cement of a grimy sidewalk, and I always look for it when I walk that way. It was all so matter-of-fact that there seemed to be no reason to question any of it. The same held true for most of the faculty at Grove City College. No questions asked. Just read the highway signs.

Ambiguity toward the Gospel truth seemed wrongheaded and foolhardy. It is, however, difficult to take the Bible seriously without at last beginning to ask questions. Even the Bible has a backstory. Be careful how far back you turn the pages. There was a prequel to Genesis, for those who dare to look, just as their is a sequel to Revelation. Inspired—no doubt. Absolute—perhaps. Final—I doubt it. The last word comes only when all has been said and done, and given the signs I see along the road, it looks like this journey is only just getting started.

Missing Apocalypses

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Sharknados aside, we seem to be in a lull of apocalypses at the moment. In the run-up to the change of the millennium and 2012, we perhaps had our fill of dire predictions of the end of all things. Funny how the fears seem to run so high when the Grand Old Party is telling us what to believe. When we settle down and try to wrestle with real-world issues with real-world ideals, the need for watching it all burn seems to settle down in the back seat and let the adults drive for a while.

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I recently came across The End Times Bible (now out of print). Published in 1999, this Bible had a not-so-subtle message that the end of all things was nigh. As it had been before, and, knowing human nature, will be many more times again. I imagine myself, in a Left Behind fantasy, watching a neophyte trying to make it in the post-apocalyptic world with a Bible. References to the end times are rare in Holy Writ, and dreadfully obscure. Reading Tim LaHaye or Hal Lindsey you might think the Bible has step-by-step directions for negotiating the wrath that is to come. As if the Bible were a recipe book and you wanted chocolate-chip cookies. Ironically the world is full—over-full in point of fact—of people with advanced degrees in Bible who’ve spent years and years of their lives learning to uncover the minutest hints that the Bible gives. Most of these folks are unemployed and wouldn’t mind sharing a bit of that simplistic apocalyptic pie baked up by the premillennialists. And yet, the world goes on.

Even as I was researching The End Times Bible, however, I began seeing references to the next apocalypse. Some are hopefully suggesting 2019, since, apparently, God likes round numbers. The reprieve we’ve been feeling, I have no doubts, is only temporary. In the course of human events we will have alarmists elected to high offices and once again panic will begin to build. The Maya let us down, and Howard Camping up and died. No worries—there are other arcane civilizations and the world knows no shortage of prophets in button-down shirts. Still, I’ve kind of enjoyed this little vacation without having to hush the irrational fears that God’s non-biological clock is inexorably ticking.

The biblical world is a simple one, in its own way. Created in six days just a few thousand years ago, it topples off its pillars and ends in a fiery demise in some millennial scenario, if only it can keep its own story straight. And like any good story, children will come back to it time and again.

Map and Territory

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MapsHeavenMapsHellAt first glance the Puritan divines of early New England should seem to be as far from horror films, on the cultural divide, as phenomena can be. After all, academics long ago declared “genre fiction,” and particularly Gothic and horror fiction, to be lowbrow at best, and generally of no cultural worth. The amazing success of scary movies only underscores this point. Edward J. Ingebretsen (S.J.), however, begs to differ. His wonderfully insightful book, Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King, is a surprising study of how religion and terror share much that is essentially human. On this blog I have, from time to time, claimed that religion and horror are close cousins. In fact, they may be siblings. Since studies of Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards are often produced by Reformed, or at least Protestant, theologians, it may be that a Catholic thinker will catch aspects often overlooked. The Puritans, with their Calvinistic underpinning, had a worldview that holds much in common with standard horror fare. Ingebretsen suggests that to map Heaven, you must also map Hell.

The map conceit works well as the reader navigates through unconventional ways of thinking. The fears of the Puritans included the fear of God, and those who read or watch horror have noticed that nothing scares like the divine. It may not be on the surface, however. Even those not accustomed to deep digging can, upon a few moments’ reflection, see that the Gothic writers of the American canon have drawn repeated from this well. Many literary experts (well, some) celebrate H. P. Lovecraft’s atheistic rationalism, but enjoy his tales of the old gods nevertheless. His modern heir, Stephen King, is quite open about the potential fear of religion. He even blurbed the back cover of the book.

As society grows continually more secular, the religious impulse will not disappear. Sublimation, the process of changing states, may hide what is happening from the casual eye. A close look shows, however, that the same fears Mather and Edwards unleashed on witch-addled, spider-fearing New Englanders, have come back to us in pulp and celluloid. Religion has its earliest roots in a kind of holy fear, it seems. The innovative human mind, however, with its drive to rationalize, devised mythologies that make fears seem plausible. Those mythologies are relatively easy to believe. Everybody likes a good story. Stories, with all their twists and turns, can leave you lost in the woods. It’s good to have a map. I would suggest Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell. You may still be scared, but you may feel more sophisticated for it.

Uisge Beatha

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Water is essential for life. Life as we know it, in any case. It is no surprise, then, that many religions incorporate water into their rituals. Last week I posted about the biblical stories of Jonah and Noah, both of which involve acts that were later interpreted by Christians as baptism. Muslims use ritual ablutions as part of their worship tradition. Water is life, after all.

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While wandering the halls at work, I notice the various artwork on the walls. One large, framed image has frequently caught my attention: several men are shown carrying a statue of Genesha, the Hindu elephant-headed god, through the water. Coming at this from a Christian background, I wondered what was going on since it looks like baptism. Hinduism, I know, is not a unified religion, but rather a conglomeration of many folk traditions from ancient India—one of the two seats of ancient religiosity. The stories of ancient India are colorful and diverse, and a bit of research suggests that this particular photo is likely the festival Ganesha Chaturthi, commemorating the story of how Ganesha came to have an elephant’s head. Crafted from inert matter by his mother Parvati, Ganesha was posted to watch the door while his mother bathed. Parvati’s consort Shiva returned and not knowing who the boy was, the lad’s refusal to allow anyone to enter led to a war. Eventually the Ganesha was beheaded and to appease his consort, Shiva supplied him with the head of a dead elephant and the boy resurrected. The immersion of Ganesha statues, or Visarjan, takes place as part of the Ganesha Chaturthi, during August or September.

I admit I’m not an expert on Hinduism, so some of the details may be a little off here. What strikes me, however, is the similarity between this story and that of Jesus. Like Ganesha, Jesus was associated with a modest mother, slain, and resurrected. He, too, is associated with ritual baptism. Growing up, we were taught of the many unique aspects of Christianity. We had, we were led to believe, the only resurrecting deity in the world. Our God alone could bring back from the dead, and the way in was through immersion in water. While learning about Ugaritic religion I read of Baal’s death and resurrection. Although stories of baptism haven’t survived, he also battled the sea and came out victorious. Some ideas, it seems, are particularly fit for religious reflection. The details may be unique, but the archetypes are very similar. Religions may be many things, but in the end, unique is a word that must be applied with the greatest of care. In the meanwhile, the next time I read of walking on the water, I will recall that even Asherah was know as “she who treads upon the sea.”

Two Roads Divergent

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DivergentOne of the most hopeful signs for culture is the quality of young adult fiction on the market. Since I’m now in the book industry, Publisher’s Weekly is required reading. I always take a look over the fiction lists as well as the non, and over the past several months a couple of “teen fiction” books have been near the top for regular bestseller lists as well as for demographic-specific ones. (That is, adults seem to be reading them too.) One of those books is Divergent by Veronica Roth. While movie tie-ins certainly don’t hurt, as many of us opine, it is difficult to do justice to a complex story on screen. Divergent is one of those books that stays with you after you’ve closed the cover, and that suggests to me that something deeply meaningful is going on. What about dystopias is so compelling?

I’m not indulging in any spoilers to say that Divergent is a dystopia. Set at an indeterminate time in the future, civilization still exists—at least in Chicago—as society has fallen into five factions: Dauntless, Erudite, Candor, Amity, and Abnegation. Each group has its own beliefs as to why civilization collapsed, based on philosophical dispositions. Abnegation, the self-deniers, are the leaders of government. And clearly, the idea of Abnegation is a form of quasi-monastic Christianity. In fact, among the factions, Abnegation is the only one that seems to mention God. The other groups, stressing bravery, intellect, honesty, and peacefulness, don’t really have much need for the divine. To deny oneself, however, requires a powerful motivation. Even the protagonist’s name, Beatrice, is taken from its favored status among early Christians. I know little of Veronica Roth, but I have to wonder whether Dante is in the background here.

In the acknowledgements to the novel, Roth first gives thanks to God. As a high school convert to Bible-based Christianity, I suppose that’s only natural for a writer who is, at the moment, only twenty-five. Writers for young adults often have their religion close to the skin. Stephanie Meyer’s Mormonism translates into moral vampires. Orson Scott Card provides Ender Wiggin with values from the same faith tradition. People are, despite the logical implications, inherently religious. That doesn’t prevent Divergent from being a page-turner. Full of action and personal development, the first book of Roth’s trilogy bristles with self-sacrifice and belief in something better to come. Even if it’s a world we have to make ourselves. And like most human enterprises, it comes out as a well-meaning dystopia that underscores the value of reading for us all.

Singing the Truth

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Attending a local high school choral concert recently, I arrived late. That’s fairly common since the bus from New York is often quite tardy—arriving forty minutes after the scheduled time is pretty standard. In any case, I joined the concert already in progress. One of the first pieces I heard was “Operator,” a number based on an old Manhattan Transfer song. Since my wife grew up liking the group, I recognized the song and yet it felt strange to have Jesus mentioned repeatedly in a public school setting. Music, by its very nature, however, often contains religious sentiments. The Doobie Brothers had, in the early 1970s—the height of a hedonistic age—done very well with a cover of “Jesus is Just Alright.” Jesus, after all, had been declared a superstar a couple of years before. I used to tell my students that the musical impulse is linked with the appearance of religion in very early human culture. Still, disestablishment reigns.

I know that a large Jewish population makes up a significant demographic at the school, and I often think about how the cultural supersessionism of Christianity must feel. Much of what became Christianity has deep roots in Judaism, and even Jesus was Jewish. Can a song be just a song? After a while Randall Thompson’s “The Last Words of David” was performed. No offense there, since the Hebrew Bible is recognized by both Jews and Christians. But what of those of other faiths? Don’t get me wrong—our high school has an excellent music program. I was just wondering how the music might be perceived in a multicultural world. We have Muslim and Hindu students, as well as secular. Is this just counted as mythology to them? The selection of music teachers would be far more restricted if all music associated with religious words or themes were jettisoned.

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These were the kinds of thoughts milling about my head when the last song from a religious tradition came up: “Wangol.” This is a Vodou song. I was pleased and amazed that the “last word” went to an underrepresented religious group. True enough, Vodou grew out of Christianity’s interaction with traditional African religions, but it demonstrates just how eclectic both American religious culture and high school music concerts can be. Choosing the music for a secular choral concert in a multicultural setting must be a trying experience every single time. When we lived in Wisconsin, most concerts were unabashedly Christian in orientation. This is hardly surprising, I suppose, since choral music itself is often composed to express religious sentiments. New Jersey is a different world. I left the auditorium musing that Vodou is just alright with me, and just as plausible as calling Jesus on the telephone.