Fall Silent

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Some books impact an individual profoundly. Others are powerful enough to influence an entire society. Rachel Carson was the author of both. Tributes to the fifty year landmark of the publication of Silent Spring have appeared this month, and although the players have changed, the plot remains the same. Bryan Walsh’s tribute in Time a few weeks back captures the essence of the situation: an environmental danger is discovered, “industry” will at first deny it, then attack the science, and then try to frighten the population with the inevitable escalation of costs. Sometimes common sense wins, but only after a long tantrum by those whose main desire is personal enrichment.

Silent Spring is credited with starting the ecological movement. Until the early 1960s the world seemed vast enough to absorb our filthy, toxic run-off. We were only on the cusp of understanding that the world is much smaller than we had ever imagined. Disney had not yet published the theme song that would get through to the American imagination. We had yet to stand on the moon and look back at just how tiny our troubles were in an infinite universe. Using pseudo-religious backing, industries often claim the planet was made for us. In truth, we evolved to adapt to this planet. The sad story after sad story of those who’d figured out how to line their pockets at the expense of the health, and often the lives, of others constitutes an ignoble hall of shame. Rachel Carson, who truly deserves the title of prophet, was considered the enemy of progress. Better living through chemicals—who hasn’t heard the phrase?

The science behind DDT, which nearly drove the bald eagle to extinction, is not the culprit. The radium that rotted the teeth, mouths, and jaws of young women employed to paint it on watch hands, had always been radioactive. The coal still burning under Centralia suffers from properties properly discovered by science. In case after case we find greed running away with the science. Science unlocks the secrets of our universe, but it also gives ideas to those who are always looking to make a buck. It may be that Rachel Carson knew she was slinging stones at giants when Silent Spring was published. This one biblical metaphor might come in useful for those who are able to see the larger picture. We’ve only got one planet and if we want it to survive we’ve got to make it last. Giants should come to fear the disadvantaged who know how to use slings, whether with rocks or words.

Secret Life of Apples

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Considering that the story of Eden fits the pattern of many an ancient myth, modern writers still occasionally argue about what the fruit on the tree of life might have been. The favorite with medieval theologians seems to have been the apple because of the similarity of its name in Latin and the presumed badness of the act. Apples, however, are nutritious and make up a large part of autumn’s outdoor appeal. While at a local orchard over the weekend, apple picking, my daughter pointed out a tree with what might be termed biblical properties. A tree full of ripe apples yet to all appearances the tree was dead or dying. Perhaps that is nature’s way with apples, but it also seemed like such a resurrection symbol that I just couldn’t let it go. Would the apples carry on the line of the dead parent tree? Was there life after death?

I’m not sure why I’ve associated apples with new life. Shortly after my father died, I planted an apple seed in a plant potter in our Wisconsin home. To my surprise, the seed germinated and began to grow. We did not own our house, but we lived on a wooded campus and two large shade trees had been blown over in the past few months, so when the young tree was large enough, I planted it outside. The lawns on campus were rather aggressively mown with students who sometimes had anger issues, so I put up a little fence around the young tree to keep it safe from accidental mulching. By the time I was asked to leave Nashotah House, the tree was taller than me (not such a feat, but the fact that it survived so well was pleasing). No apples had yet appeared, but the tree is a symbol of new life. No one on campus knew its meaning, and I doubt very much that anyone thought much about it one way or the other after I left.

I often wonder if that little tree is still alive, and, if so, whether or not anyone enjoys its apples. Every year when the trees begin their long journey into a winter’s sleep, the apple trees send forth the own message of resurrection. Some will associate the fruit with sin while others will find pleasant autumnal memories. And a very few, I should suppose, will always think of trees as a symbol of someone they wish they might have known a little better. Far from being a sign of sin, the apple can be a sign of forgiveness and self-giving. Whether it is a myth or not, the northern hemisphere has begun its inexorable turn away from the sun. I look at a tree that is dead and full of life at the same time, and to me it seems to be a very different kind of fall than some suggest the Bible intends.

Buyer Beware

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Pain, it is said, has a wonderful way of focusing the mind. So when I woke up in what can best be described as a body position used for extras in the movie, Twister, I took a few aspirin and got on with my life. I had purchased non-refundable tickets for a campus visit, and capitalism is nothing if not unsympathetic. The lower back pain was fine when sitting, or standing. Try anything in between, however, and you’ll learn the real meaning of reading the riot act. Once off the train—slowly, slowly—I was fine again, until I had to sit down. The next morning, facing a day of meetings (why is everyone’s office on the fourth floor? Why do Brownstones still lack elevators?), I decided I’d better pop into CVS for some meds. It was with considerable irony and not a few groans that I noted all the products for back pain were on the bottom shelves. The condoms, in the same aisle, were right at eye-level. Sitting on the floor, pondering the relative merits of chemicals of which I’d never heard, I thought about what we take for granted.

Parents and guardians are our first teachers. Among those early lessons are often the religious ones. Recently speaking with both seminary professors and pastors, I have heard the common refrain that church membership is declining and the number of younger people listing themselves as religiously unaffiliated is growing. I noticed this in my teaching outside the seminary setting; quite apart from students of other religious traditions, many undergrads took my class knowing nothing at all of the cultural matrix of Christianity in which they’d been raised. It is also true in a consumer mentality that one shops for religious experiences just like one shops for backache medicine. You go with the one that works for you. Few bother to ask if they agree with the theology, after all, Methodist = Baptist = Presbyterian = Lutheran in many people’s minds. Doan’s or Bayer? Take your pick.

Now that Dark Shadows has been released for home viewing, another component may be added to the equation. We pass on what we value to those we love. While the writing for Dark Shadows leaves quite a lot to be desired, there are a few memorable lines. Angelique, you may recall, cursed Barnabas Collins for unrequited love, turning him into a vampire. When he laments to Elizabeth Stoddard that Angelique hates him, she replies, “No, if she had hated you she would have merely killed you. A curse takes devotion.” Passing on our beliefs, perhaps, somehow ties into all this. As believing creatures, perhaps we each need to find our own solutions. My only fear is that when I find the right remedy, it may very well be on the bottom shelf.

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Where is it?

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When I step outside to pick up the morning newspaper, I always look at the sky. I think this is a very early evolutionary trick. It may be because there was a time when primates were smaller and birds of prey larger, or it may be because some big cats like to drop on prey from trees. It may be simply that we don’t like to get wet, especially unexpectedly. For whatever reason, the sky is a source of endless fascination. Helen T. Gray, in a piece written for the Kansas City Star yesterday, ponders the place of Heaven in the space age. 80 percent of Americans report believing in Heaven, she points out, and she describes how Heaven has shifted from an improbably physical place to a transdimensional or neurologically embedded place. We, as a people, believe that there must be a better place than this. No matter where we locate it, Heaven is always a decided improvement on this place where too many people suffer too much and all of us suffer some of the time.

I once considered astronomy for a career. My high school, built in the fretful days of the Cold War, had an actual planetarium as the space race was burning over the red line. I took a high school class in astronomy and when I got to college I followed it up with an undergraduate course in the same. While I enjoyed learning about all the strangeness of space, it soon became clear that astronomy was simply another word for mathematics; the class involved intensive equations stressing a regularity that Metamucil would be proud to claim. And, of course, since we live on a sphere every direction is up. The belief in a better place is nothing if not resilient. It survived the knowledge that “up there” is either nowhere or everywhere, depending on your point of view. Most theologians after Galileo’s day finally admitted that. When I go for the paper, I still look to the sky, however.

In Hebrew the word translated “heaven” is the same word that is translated as “sky.” The Hebrew Bible knows no separate place called Heaven, but the latest parts do indicate a life restored after death. I wonder if Rick Nowels and Ellen Shipley might not have gotten it right when they wrote the song that would help solidify Belinda Carlisle’s solo career. Maybe Heaven is a place where love prevails. Not just the erotic love of pop music, but the love that sees not a Muslim, an African, a Hindu, or an Oriental, but human beings. That stranger experiences those same feelings, hopes, aspirations that all of us do. He or she should not be left shivering, hungry on the street corner begging for quarters to buy his or her next meal. If it’s clear outside I linger as I gaze at early morning stars and planets, feeling deep yearnings I can’t hope to express. No, Heaven may not be a Mormon planet where you get to become God after you die (ahem). Heaven is not a mansion in the clouds (I’m sure some satellite would’ve picked it up by now). Heaven is not where I get to go and you don’t. Heaven is here and now, but we all have to work for it.

Seeing the Dark

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The Dark may be a movie that tries to do too much, but it does illustrate an idea that has been lurking around my head for a few years. That which we fear and that which we worship are never far apart. Since The Dark was pretty much panned, in brief it goes like this—a separated couple gets back together in Wales to draw their troubled teen daughter back. While there she drowns and the ghost of a girl from the past shows her mother how to get her daughter back. The film is notable as being the first I’ve seen that could make sheep scary. Skulking in the back story is a minister, “the shepherd,” the father of the ghostly girl, who started a new religion over the ocean cliffs of Wales half a century ago. When his daughter died, he convinced his flock to leap off the cliff to reach a place that is a combination of Heaven and a Welsh mythical afterlife called Annwyn. The shepherd, however, is really using their sacrificial deaths to bring his daughter back from the dead. The story is complex and the darkness of the narrative is at times overwhelming, nevertheless, it is a showcase of how religious conviction can be more frightening than consoling at times.

Some years back I researched the Welsh mythology of the Mabinogion. Having been a student of ancient religions, however, I knew there was only so far I could go without the lexical support of learning Celtic languages. (This is a fact of mythological study often overlooked by popular treatments; if you really want to get what is going on there is no substitute for reading texts in their original language. I was too busy learning Ugaritic and the time, and struggling with Akkadian, to pick up Gaelic as well.) Nevertheless, the mythology struck me as particularly compelling. Some of the roots of the Arthurian legend lie deep within this lore, and although often uncredited, it still influences our society today. Mythology is simply religion dressed to go out for the evening. The concepts form the basis of much that we still believe and that which still has the power to terrify.

Although the critics didn’t care for the film, the dense interweaving of misplaced religious devotion, Welsh mythology, and basic human longing make The Dark in many ways a classic horror movie. It may be hard to find the characters sympathetic, but they are in some ways archetypal. With a sinister minister driven by personal loss turning to pagan folklore to bring his daughter back, we have a secondary character who curses the fate of an all-too-human condition. The concept of sacrifice becomes a tool for selfish gain rather than a means of helping others. Possibly those who panned the movie did so without an appreciation of the mythology that pulses just beneath the surface here. And while sometimes horror films are simply puerile escapism, at other times they should give us pause to think, and maybe even learn.

Hallowed Eve

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My last night in Boston found me in Copley Square. This has always been one of my iconic Boston locations; something in the juxtaposition of squat, solid, dual-toned Trinity Church with its wide, open plaza, the blue glass razor of the Hancock Tower, and the classical facade of the Boston Public Library where Sophia broods over the world, arrests my wondering gaze. Across Boylston Street stands the gothic Old South Church like a guardian for straying souls. As I walked through the square a local band of street musicians jammed and the first neons of an October evening were awaking. As I strolled past Old South I had to back up a step or two to see if I’d read the sign right.

Scared for Good, a Halloween organ concert featuring spooky music, will soon be on offer. Business-types have long noted that Halloween is a great potential selling holiday. With kids who want to dress up and parents stressed for time, the selling of costumes has grown into an increasingly substantial accessory item holiday. People want their houses to look scary, knocking down real cobwebs to make way for the artificial ones, hanging out orange and purple lights, and ordering pre-carved, artificial pumpkins. All the fear is, of course, a charade, and we laugh at ourselves for taking it too seriously. Some churches object vociferously to the very holiday itself, claiming it is devil worship and evil.

While Halloween does have some serious pagan influences, it is, in its present form, a good Catholic holiday. The night before All Saints, aka All Hallows, begins a period of reflection on mortality. I’ve celebrated “Protestant” Halloween from my youngest days and have never been in any way tempted toward devil worship. It is fun to be scared when you know it’s not real and it won’t last long. That’s why I applaud Old South Church’s Scared for Good concert. Reading the list of pieces included, it sounds like it should be a grand time. Too bad I won’t be in Boston for the occasion. As I walk back to my hotel in the chill of the evening,the only fear i feel is that moments like this evening come at insufferably long intervals for those who feel about the city as must the denizens of Copley Square.

The Future of Theological Education

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It is almost like stepping into a time warp. To be honest, it is difficult for me to admit that I graduated from Boston University School of Theology a quarter of a century ago. Standing here outside 90-92 Bay State Road, where I once lived, is like looking into a shattered mirror. Behind those doors much of what made me who I am took place. Perhaps I left some of myself there. I don’t even know if the property is still the single student “dorm” for the school of theology or not. Kenmore Square has transmogrified from an area that felt like Times Square in the ’80’s to an upscale dogtown. When I stepped into 745 Commonwealth Avenue, it was like being hit in the face with a combination of nerve gas and roses. The hallways look wider now then they did back then. The hallways where so many of my assumptions curled up and died. They still have chapel and community lunches. The Boston Book Annex is closed.

Boston University has sure poured a lot of money into the Back Bay redevelopment. Whence that sense of personal offense when I see a multimillion dollar new building there and recall the financial aid interviews where I was told, like in a Bruce Springsteen song, “we’d like to help you out, but we just can’t”? Has social justice come to live in these halls? In those days anyone who didn’t have an oppressed status was a minority. And I learned as much about hate as I did about love within these implacable walls. Is it ghosts that I feel rushing through me as i walk down Bay State Road, and stare out over Storrow Drive? I’m not sure of the future of theological education. Until schools of theology can lay down their swords and become truly ecumenical, can any change truly occur?

Theology is an exercise in the unknown. When I donned my red robe and graduated here, the world seemed to be full of possibilities. A lot of erosion can take place in twenty-five years, you know. I thought I was contributing to the future of theological education when I studied the Bible so minutely that no single letter existed that didn’t have a prehistory deep in the realm of pre-Israelite society. I assumed that truth was the end goal of theological inquiry. Problem is, for many, the end goal was written two millennia ago and we of the lost generations ever since have as our task simply to reinforce the crumbling foundations and assure our benefactors that we did have it right, we have had it right, all along. As I write this a very able colleague at another seminary is undergoing what can only be considered heresy trials for teaching the truth. Is theological truth so fragile? Maybe this is why it has taken a quarter century to return. Maybe this is the future of theological education. Those of us who still believe in theological education seem to be a dying breed, along with the ghosts of Bay State Road.

Year of Poe

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Apart from sharing a “middle” name, I would never dare compare myself to Edgar Allan Poe. Yes, I dabble in the literary arts, but every acolyte recognizes a true priest when he sees one. So as my train pulled into Boston, a city that has deep emotional resonances for me, I decided to stop and see where Edgar Allan Poe was born. The actual site is now a parking structure, an unexpected parallel between our emerging universes. All of my childhood homes, with one exception, are now parking lots. Standing at the foot of the memorial plaque near Emerson College, I reflected on my Poe year. I visited his college room at the University of Virginia in February, his one-time apartment in Philadelphia in March, his burial site in Baltimore in August, and now his birthplace. Not in any chronological order, but a voyage of discovery nevertheless.

This is the essence of pilgrimage. It is not rational and not really practical, but it is something people do. With religious intensity. I am in Boston as part of my secular job, but the city has sacred associations for me. I met my wife here, and that single event has changed my entire life. Boston will always be the place where something extraordinary happened to me. Poe did not like Boston, but for me it is the eternal city. Even the places with negative associations stake claims upon us. Over the weekend a friend posted a picture online taken before combat forced his evacuation from Vietnam many years ago. I kept coming back to that picture throughout the day. Lingering. Staring. Even though I’d never been there, it was like place had the ability to haunt those who’d even dared to look.

Poe and my friend are both writers who’ve drawn me into their worlds. What better way is there to learn that the universe is indeed infinite? Looking out my window at a Kenmore Square I recognize only by the giant Citgo sign that shed its garish light on many an evocative student night, I realize even eternal cities change. The last time I was in South Station I was saying goodbye to the woman I hoped, but did not know, would become my wife. Almost as if on cue, ” Lola” by the Kinks spills out of a local store as the Citgo sign flickers to life over the scene of my coming of age. In Boston I will always be twenty-three, wars will be long over, and Poe will remain alive forever.

Oil City Millionaires

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Oil City Junior High School. Ninth grade. As a kid who grew up politically naive, Mr. Baker’s words felt like the Gospel. “People will never elect a president against their own economic interests,” he once said. Then came the Reagan years with “trickle down” bs, and, let’s be honest, the working class has been hurting ever since. Reading the political headlines, I’m frankly distressed that politicians no longer have any clear idea what working class life is like. Online I see working-class friends following, zombie-like, the richest man to ever run for President, daily proving Mr. Baker wrong. I’m not naive enough to think that most career politicians of either party know what it’s like to struggle for a living, but I have seen time and time again the Democratic Party trying to stretch out safety nets for those who receive no trickle down hand-outs. I do know what it is to struggle, and I do know that getting an education does not equate to getting a job. I also know that no Republican since Eisenhower has tried to be fair to the working class.

I grew up just outside Oil City, Pennsylvania. It was a town founded by potential millionaires because petroleum had been discovered in the region. Many get-rich-quick schemers settled these pleasant hills and valleys, but the oil pools were as shallow as a politician’s sympathy, and some of the towns in the region became ghost towns. The Oil City I knew was working class families, trying to get by; many grasping religion when politics never ceased to disappoint. We were children of Damocles. Somehow the message has morphed from when I was a child paying attention in school. The issue is now, “I’m not well off, but I sure as heck don’t want the government helping those worse off than me!” Trickle down indeed. To me it seems obvious why the wealthy skew “pro-life”—their schemes cannot succeed without a constant stream of desperate workers. Keep those kids coming!

Because as a child I read all the time, I knew there was a life outside Oil City. Paying my own way through college with crippling debts, I managed to get out and earn an advanced degree overseas, just to be fired by a Republican who thought my advocacy for fair treatment had no place in a seminary. Yes, I’ve felt the barbed lash of unemployment. I spent years wondering what might become of my small family as trickle-downs began defying gravity and wormed their way back up to the wealthy. I’ve never owned a house; none has ever trickled down to my income level. Those Oil City millionaires never gave me any handouts. But Oil City did give me an education. I learned to see through those who say they are protecting me and my future. The only thing they are protecting is securely tucked into their back pockets. I’ve seen their ads castigating Jimmy Carter, a president who is actually out there building houses for the poor. I’ve heard them blaming Obama for not filling in a trench that took Bush the Less eight years to dig. I say let’s just let trickle-down fill that hole. I’m sure the Oil City millionaires will be glad to kick in a greenback or two; after all no one ever votes against their own economic self-interest.

Trickle down.

Beyond Science

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The nature of reality is not easily parsed. As a society we are still under the spell of rationalism, that wonderful left-brain system that seems to explain everything. Until we break down in tears and don’t know why. Like the proverbial chicken-and-egg, reductionists say it all comes down to electro-chemical reactions in the brain, to which non-reductionists reply “believe that if you want to.” Knowledge and belief, belief and knowledge. The truth is nobody knows. So when I see Heaven on the cover of Newsweek, I can’t resist wondering what’s inside. Dr. Eben Alexander, a Harvard-educated neurosurgeon, has just written a book called Proof of Heaven. In the Newsweek article he explains how during a week-long coma he had the most vivid experience of his life. While his brain was shut down. It might be more accurate to say he had the most vivid experience of his afterlife.

The classic debate for Near Death Experiences—so common they have their own acronym, NDEs—revolves around timing. Reductionists say the thought could have happened very, very quickly, just as the brain was shutting down. We all know how dreams can feel like they last far longer than we’re asleep, and how vivid they are. Those who accept the reality of an afterlife argue that many of the classic symptoms such as seeing your own body from above, or being able to describe in detail what was happening in another room at the time, count as evidence. It is the problem of the occasional phenomenon again. This is something no lab can measure, but it happens just often enough to make you wonder. The shaman might say, along with Inception, that the dream is the reality. That might explain why so much of “real life” is unpleasant.

As comfortable as the belief that reality is solid, material, quantifiable, may be, it does not count for the totality of human experience. Alexander’s heaven may not be the same as mine. Reality may not be one. Maybe Occam was wrong. Reading about shamans over the past couple of weeks, it became clear that some believe humans have more than one soul. (I can hear the reductionists rumbling—one soul is already too many!) Some cultures recognize as many as seven souls in a single individual. These, they suggest, account for the uncanny experiences of human life. Why do some people see ghosts and why are dreams so vivid and how does faith healing work? Reductionism calls them all illusions, tricks of the brain. Until his coma Dr. Alexander would have agreed. Now the newsstands suggest a different paradigm may be emerging. Dare we believe that the truth is out there?

Shaman on Us

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My reading habits are unorthodox. I don’t follow a fixed plan, but hope for something that will keep me engaged for the fifteen or so hours I spend commuting each week. I began October with a book about werewolves and followed it up with a book on the Hmong. Apropos of neither and both, I turned next to Shamanism: An Introduction, by Margaret Stutley. While not the best organized book, it does provide a smorgasbord of shamanistic traditions, principally from Siberia, where Shamanism was first recognized. Before I’d finished, I’d read about both epilepsy and werewolves.

Shamanism is not a “religion” per se. There is little agreement among scholars about what a religion is at all. Shamanism is very much a local set of beliefs and practices that have only very basic elements in common (shamans being one of them). It is a good example, however, of how moral heathens can be. Shamans often accompany egalitarian societies who do not require governments and religious leaders telling them to be nice to each other. No, this is not the noble savage myth, but it is a clear indication that major religions are not required for morality. It evolves on its own. Often shamanism is not constrained by overly left-brain influence, and sees connections science can only deny. The plight of Lia Lee was explained here in a way physicians could access—epilepsy and other diseases are problems of the soul as much as the body—if only they read books about religion. Healing involves calling the soul back. Treatment of the body misses the point. And sometimes the dead become werewolves.

We live in a world where real suffering is caused by lack of understanding about religion. Assuming a cultural hegemony of Christianity, or Islam, and sometimes even other religions, we discount those who believe differently than we do. The New Atheists frequently overlook just how seriously people take the world of the emotions and belief. That realm is a large part of what makes us human and it plays by no logical rules. Nor does it care to. In a country, such as the United States, where money is believed to be the very warp and woof of the good life, shamans sometimes secretly cut the thread. Still, don’t ask universities to expand the study of something as insignificant as religion because all intelligent people know that nobody really believes that stuff any more.

Good-bye Lia

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While The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, by Anne Fadiman, is not about religion, it is all about religion. The tragic story of Lia Lee is one where Hmong lives, completely immersed in what we would term “religion,” came into conflict with American perceptions of what religion should be. One of the events in Lia’s life involved the government removing her from her parents for their failure to follow doctor’s orders. Fadiman notes that this has been an issue is court cases with Christian Scientists and Jehovah’s Witnesses and other groups that refuse certain kinds of medical treatment for religious reasons. Adults may refuse—it is their constitutional right—but children cannot be subjected to an adult’s religion if it endangers their lives. Here is the rub; American religion only stretches so far. Sure, many of the faithful pray for loved ones, but they also trust the doctor’s knowledge. Not too put too fine a point on it, God doesn’t seem to do the healing unless the physician is involved. For many from traditional religions, like the Lee family, that is hardly trust at all.

Much of the problem in Lia’s case came down to taking the soul seriously. It is clear that the Hmong believe, really believe in the soul. It is the essence of a person. Reductionism declares that when all the matter is burned off, no soul remains to be found. Lia’s parents, however, could tell whether her soul was present or not just by looking in her eyes. Although she never recovered from her major seizure, the physicians had tried to prepare her parents for Lia’s immanent death. Removing her from the feeding tubes and sterile conditions of the hospital, the Lees took her home where she survived for years, although in a persistent vegetive state. Even as the book ends with Lia at seven, they are hoping for her soul to return. Lia died just two months ago, at the age of thirty. She was diagnosed as terminal at the age of four.

Diversity adds color (from Wikipedia Commons)

The story of Lia Lee is sad and one with no real villains (after the Secret War in Laos, and its aftermath). One of the most interesting aspects revolves around how the Hmong observe American religion. Well-meaning missionaries tried to convert them, but psychological studies have demonstrated that those who are the worst off are those who converted to western religions. At one point a Hmong girl, at a sacrificial ceremony to placate the spirits, tells Fadiman that she’s a Mormon. In another instance a Christian family tried to give their Hmong neighbors advice before a long drive, telling them they should pray to the Lord, not their ancestors. The Hmong honestly replied that the Lord had given him too many problems in America. It seems to me that the real issue here is just how seriously religion is taken. To the Hmong, it is their life. In capitalist America, it is very difficult to make religion your life. Even clergy have to have bank accounts, bills, and oil changes—all very secular aspects of life. If religion were taken as seriously here as among the Hmong, we would be facing a very different race this November.

Babel’s Gate

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Up north past Edinburgh, beyond the Cairngorms, on the shores of the chill North Sea lies the village of Cromarty, Scotland. A death occurred in Cromarty, according to CNN earlier this week. And why would CNN be concerned with a single death in a small village in a remote corner of Scotland? Because with Bobby Hogg’s death, his language also died. Hogg was the last speaker of Cromarty. Having lived in Scotland for over three years, I heard many an impenetrable accent, but even as I strained to understand, I loved it. The loss of Cromarty is part of an on-going, world-wide extinction of languages. Sure, the big ones survive, thrive even. The small ones pass away, often forgotten. Those who unabashedly champion “progress” take no time to mourn the passing of the idiosyncratic, the individualistic, the non-conformist languages. Dominoes are easier to stand, after all, if they are all a uniform size and shape.

I taught Hebrew to my students for many years. Those who wish to be clergy should be able to read God in his original tongue, it stands to reason. As complaints began to simmer, as they always did, at the difficulty of learning a semitic language, I liked to remind students that a language is far more than a collection of vocabulary and a smattering of grammar and syntax. Languages are worldviews. We don’t know who invented language, but we do know that it evolves more rapidly than biology, once human populations are separated. As in the case of Cromarty, languages often reflect lifestyles—they preserve the words and phrases necessary for distinct ways of life. Automation, however, prefers one-size-fits-all. Those who can’t understand are less efficient players in the colonialization of the world by capitalism. Languages allow for diversity and specialization. Cromarty was the language of fishermen.

Yes, multiple languages reduce efficiency. You don’t have to read too far into your Bible to discover that. Yet even efficiency comes with a price. Year by year, the cacophony of human expression becomes more uniform. Yesterday there were a thousand languages, today only nine-hundred-ninety-nine. Yarns were spun in Cromarty, just as surely as they were in Hebrew. Young ears will never hear that ancient language, and with it a way of looking at the world also died. Yawn if you will, but if all the minor languages disappear the one remaining worldview will be all the poorer for it. Yiddish to Aari, languages reflect who we are—and Mr. Hogg’s passing is a loss to all humanity.

Do you hear what I hear?

Disease Divine

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Diseases, for most people of the modern West, are difficult to diagnose as divine. At my wife’s urging, I’ve been reading Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. I have a feeling I’ll be commenting on various aspects as I read through it, but something caught me almost immediately. Although the book is not about religion, the culture of the Hmong (about which I knew nothing just hours ago) is truly imbued with religion. Our medical science is, well, science (unless perhaps you’re from Athens, Georgia). Western culture since the Enlightenment has come to understand many of the body’s systems intimately, discerning just which chemicals to proscribe to treat this or that electro-chemical reaction in the body. And we consider it normal. Epilepsy, the condition of Lia Lee, is a disease that, as Fadiman points out, has had a long divine pedigree even in the west. The Judaic tradition at various stages considered it demonic possession, the Romans understood it as a kind of deity-induced madness.

Interestingly, Fadiman uses the case of Tony Coelho, an epileptic and congressmen, to make a point about the Hmong community. Coelho, she notes, had been intending to enter the priesthood but the Church has a canon forbidding ordination to an epileptic. This gave me a considerable pause. Clergy in many cultures must be “perfect” physical specimens. According to the Hebrew Bible, men who had certain deformities “down there” were disqualified, although, one notes, that they would have served fully clothed. Epilepsy, having been putative cured by Jesus many times, might seem a strange disqualifier from priesthood. I wondered why it was singled out from among the many maladies that might have seemed more pressing. Even in our enlightened age, epilepsy still bears the scars of the divine.

Narrating the experience of the Hmong in a Thai refugee camp, Fadiman notes that the subtext was often conversion. As she points out, for the Hmong medicine is religion. Although the missionaries had converted some, their very enthusiasm ensured that the Hmong would not generally go to them for treatment. Here is a stark difference between a people whose religion permeates every aspect of their lives and westerners for whom religion is compartmentalized in a different place than medical science. For the Hmong, wellness is part of a larger picture from which religious belief simply can’t be separated. For some epilepsy is a disease to be cured, if possible. For others it is a sign of a budding shaman. I look forward to reading more, as it is clear that by shifting perspectives, even the enlightened might have something to learn from those they deem uneducated.

Holy Wolves

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Nothing creates the mood for a werewolf movie like reading a book about real werewolves. The Howling was released the year I was finishing high school. At that time my humble circumstances allowed for very few visits to the movie theater, and certainly never to see horror films. I grew up watching B-films in black-and-white on television, but paying extra to see what was slightly unseemly in a theater stretched the limits for a good Christian just a bit. College was on my mind, and it was while in college that my horror film interest blossomed. All of which is to say, I’ve never seen The Howling before. I remember the movie posters, but the film had to wait until werewolves clawed their way back into my mind. Most of the classic movie monsters have their basis in religion, but The Howling doesn’t really delve into the origin of werewolves as much as it wonders what to do about when their numbers start to become a problem. Those who know about such things note that the special effects were cutting edge for the time, but CGI has spoiled us all.

Although the film doesn’t inquire into werewolf origins, it still gives a nod to the religious. The film’s werewolf population lives in a colony that has a “ritual center,” and since the cover for the colony is a retreat center for a psychologist’s patients, we find seekers amid the crowd. One of the inmates, Donna, explains that before joining the colony she had tried all the new religious movements, without success. And the one character who knows how to dispatch werewolves runs an occult bookstore in Los Angeles that is visited, in a shock-comic moment, but a pair of nuns. The message, so typical of the early 1980’s, is that all religions are just about the same. People are seekers, and any religion will do in a pinch.

In a way, this downplaying of the religious element in werewolves is not unexpected. As society was becoming more obviously secularized in the sixties and seventies, religion was becoming just one of many options available on the path toward self-fulfillment. In The Howling, becoming a werewolf was another. Ironically one of the old-timer werewolves laments the loss of “the old ways.” The werewolf colony lives on cattle that are farmed as politically correct sheep for the wolves, and it just doesn’t satisfy. The same might be said for religions. Accommodations, so necessary to survival in an evolving society, inevitably change the old ways of religion. Religions themselves transform over time. The Howling may not be scary, or believable, but it does serve as a kind of paradigm for worldviews that are undergoing transformation. Shifting shape, after all, is a sure symbol that one is still alive.