Category Archives: School/Seminary

#2699

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Darkness when I close my eyes. Pinpoints of light flare and fade against the backs of my eyelids like constellations. I imagine myself walking along a familiar stretch of beach on the Pacific coast, my feet kicking up spray as I walk in the foamy shallows. Waves uncover little shells buried in the soft sand, treasures to be collected or simply admired and left for other seekers.

After a time I move back from the water and settle cross-legged in the sand, dune grass behind me and rows of crashing, churning waves before me, and above me a vast evening sky purpling to night and dusted with stars. I do not know who will join me here; I tried to come with no preconceptions for what form my ‘inner advisor’ might take in this guided meditation. Still, I am greatly surprised when I am suddenly joined on my left and right by… myself. On my right sits my ten-year-old self, a wild little thing in rumpled clothes and long, tangled hair. On my left sits my seventeen-year-old self, looking a little more refined in scribble-covered jeans and a smart bob. Behind me I think I can almost sense others, perhaps ancestors or even my father, but it’s hard to tell truth from projection and wishful thinking. These two kids, however, are solidly here. That I know.

I entered this exercise intending to seek guidance about my future in emergency management, as a chaplain, as a leader and mentor and subject matter expert. So I voice the fear lurking coiled in my gut. “What if it all falls apart?” My ten-year-old self shrugs as she draws shapes in the sand and answers simply, “Then put it back together again.”

“What if I can’t put it back together again, though?” I ask. “What if it’s not okay?” My ten-year-old self shrugs again. “Then find something new.” Clearly my adult anxieties don’t seem as world-shattering to her as they do to me. On my other side, my seventeen-year-old self says, “If it’s not okay, then it’s not the end.”

“But what if I fail them?” I ask. My seventeen-year-old self smiles. “You can’t fail the ones you love,” she says, and I think I hear my father say, “You’ve got this, kiddo.” The words are simple yet comforting; the kind of stuff you know deep down but forget so easily in the stress and uncertainty of the day-to-day. Maybe I actually can do this. What a concept!

The meditation is drawing to a close so I take a breath, recenter myself, and ask, “How do I lead? How do I protect those I love and serve?” Neither of my selves answer; instead, superimposed on the scene in my mind I see an outstretched hand unfolding, palm up, as if in offering. I take this to indicate I should emulate the Servant style of leadership and allow myself to be guided by the needs and desires of those around me in order to best empower both them and myself. 

“Who are you?” I ask the girls, but they just smile and reply with a wink, “You know who.” And I do, though it feels so weird to commune with myself in this way. I’m too used to seeking the advice of gods and spirits. But our past selves are a kind of ancestor too, I realize.

It’s time to go. I thank my selves and stand, wiping sand from my pants, then head in the direction from which I first came. I glance back just once, fixing the sight of two carefree kids playing with their father in the sand in my mind. It hurts to walk away from that, to separate myself from such joy, but there’s a sweetness to the pain that I cherish. I may have to keep moving forward but at least the past lives on here, untouched by time’s corrosion. At least these children, who do not yet know what it’s like to lose their dearest father, can stay here with him eternally.

Later, in a different class, a teacher mentions that your inner child is connected to your astrological moon sign and I smile to myself. My moon sign is Gemini. The twins. Of course.

#2675

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A color digital art piece of two lionesses and a baby lion in bright colors. One lioness, bright orange, is laying down and the baby lion, bright blue, is laying across her outstretched front legs. The other lioness, bright pink, is standing over them with her head bowed over the baby. Both lionesses have bright sun disks floating over their heads like Egyptian goddesses. The baby lion has a tiny little sun disk on its forehead.

For one of my seminary classes I had to create an image representing what I think of when I hear the word “spirituality.” I chose to do a digital art piece, and the above is the result.

When I think of spirituality, the feeling that comes over me is one of safety and belonging. It reminds me of pictures I’ve seen of big cat cubs with their mothers, like lion cubs or cougar cubs. You have these silly little balls of fluff who are totally defenseless, so at the mercy of the wide, scary world around them, and then you have their big, powerful mothers who can take down creatures three times their weight yet handle their fragile little cubs with so much care and affection. You can see that the cubs feel completely safe with their families, that they have the utmost faith that nothing bad will happen to them with Mama nearby. For lion cubs especially, they grow up surrounded by fierce mothers, aunts, and sisters, a whole pride’s worth of protection and love.

My gods, especially Bast, make me feel the same way, like I’m surrounded by a divine love and strength that will never let harm come to me. They will let me learn lessons, of course – every cub needs to, after all, if they’re to grow and survive in the world – but when the real danger shows up, their fangs and claws will intervene. That’s what my spiritual journey began with, and that has continued to be the experience that underlies everything else.

#2674

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On Inclusion, Exclusion, and the Stories We Tell

(The third of my seminary reflection papers)

As a lifelong writer and seeker of stories in all their varied forms, the ChI Cultural Foundations course spoke to me on so many levels. For this paper I therefore want to focus on storytelling: on the stories we tell, who they include, who they exclude, and how they shape our perception of the world around us.

What I vibed with in the readings:

Something I found fascinating in many of the readings for this class was how often I saw clear parallels with the queer community. This was very apparent, for example, in the third chapter of Injustice and the Care of Souls titled, “Engaging Diversity and Difference: From Practices of Exclusion to Practices of Practical Solidarity.” In this chapter Brita L. Gill-Austern discusses four forms of the violence of exclusion: expulsion, assimilation, subjugation of the other, and exclusion by the indifference of abandonment. While it is easy to see how this exclusion can be perpetrated by the dominant majority (whether that’s racial, religious, sexual, gender, etc), these same forms of exclusion are also frequently perpetuated within minority groups. In an essay titled “Plural America Needs Myths” in response to Eboo Patel’s book Out of Many Faiths: Religious Diversity and the American Promise, Laurie L. Patton muses, “Why include others when we are worried about our own rights being trampled and, in many cases, keeping our community safe? […] Relatedly, there is a fear of admitting the pluralism within one’s own community, for it would undermine the idea that, in an American democracy, a community is coherent enough to claim an identity, and that identity and members of that community should be respected.” 

Online queer spaces are a prime example of this painful friction, as they can be either incredibly welcoming or incredibly hostile depending largely on whether those in the space consider your identity valid and acceptable. Less common queer identities, such as asexuality/aromanticism and bisexual lesbians, have long been stigmatized in online circles. This has escalated to the point where some online queer people proudly identify as ‘radical exclusionists’ and bully the most vulnerable in their own community, going so far as sending death threats and urging people (often teenagers) to kill themselves. These radical exclusionists believe they’re doing this to protect their community from interlopers who make it ‘look bad’ to the cishet majority and steal valuable resources from those who actually need them. Sound familiar? To balance this extreme gatekeeping in the queer community, others call themselves ‘radical inclusionists’ and take a far more open minded approach to which identities are included under the queer umbrella. People like this believe in ‘good-faith’ identification, meaning we accept a person’s identity at face value under the assumption that they identify the way they do because they know themselves best. Excluding them based on that identity, or trying to change that identity because we think we know better, is both cruel and pointless. 

This goes for all identities commonly policed both outside and within their communities, not just queer identities. Racial and religious identities are similarly policed, and almost always to their detriment. Thus when Sarah Gibb Millspaugh writes, “We are called to seek justice, to work for radical inclusiveness,” I feel that in my bones. In my heart. In my soul. I’ve seen countless instances of the misery radical exclusion causes, and have been on the receiving end of these attacks; never have I seen the violence of exclusion contribute to the safety or happiness of the community it purports to protect. What harms one harms us all.

The antidote to this fear-driven exclusion, as many of the readings for this class highlighted, is dialogue with the other. As Eboo Patel writes in Out of Many Faiths, “Dialogue, as simple as it sounds and as hard as it is to structure well, goes a long way toward stripping away the blinders of our identity-based stereotypes in order to see others for what they are and see ourselves as we are viewed by others.” It is so easy to fear what we don’t understand and to hate what we fear, but when we connect with the other we lose the little pilot flame that fuels both the fear and the hatred. Heck, even just knowing that we all fall prey to that instinctual fear is something that can bring us together, or at least help us find common ground.

What I struggled with in the readings:

The stories we tell, whether we mean them to be or not, are always biased to some degree. After all, we want to protect our communities, our identities, and sometimes we do that on a completely unconscious level through storytelling and the blending of fact and fiction. When a story is biased toward us, it can be hard to sense that bias because it feels instead like neutrality; yet when the story is biased against us, that bias bites quick and deep. We have to be critical of the media we consume and question assertions that sound a little too good to be true, especially when they aren’t supported by hard evidence, because we never know what biases we’re pushing and how they might harm someone else.

Let’s take, for example, something mentioned in New Monasticism: An Interspiritual Manifesto for Contemplative Living by Rory McEntee and Adam Bucko. I already wrote a fairly lengthy blog post about my issues with their claims that an ‘Axial Age’ generated some global revolution of human consciousness, so I won’t get too detailed here (lucky you!), but I think this quote is a good example: “What was this revolution in consciousness? It was the emergence of an individualized consciousness, one which allowed human beings for the first time to think apart from the “tribe.” […] …and it is here that the basis of science develops as people for the first time could stand apart from nature and look upon it as an object. Monastic spirituality wasn’t possible before [800-200 BCE] because primal people’s consciousness could not sustain it. […] It is also here that one is able for the first time to criticize social structures and injustices, as seen among the Jewish prophets who emerge in this period. […] Pre-Axial consciousness was not individualistic; it was tribal, seamlessly connected to the cosmos, nature, and the collective. It had no perspective of itself as separate from nature or from the tribe.”

Depending on your perspective, this quote might seem innocuous or might set off alarm bells. It certainly has some major red flags for me. After all, the authors seem to be claiming that before 800 BCE, humans were too ‘primal’ to have the cognitive function necessary to 1) see themselves as individuals, 2) see themselves as separate from nature or the tribe, 3) create lasting works of art, and 4) understand the concepts of science, social justice, or monasticism. This despite all the unbelievable works of human societal ingenuity that remain with us from before 800 BCE: the pyramids of Egypt, the Sphinx, Gobekli Tepe, Stonehenge (to name just a few), and all the ancient cultures which developed complex mythologies of justice and balance around which their laws revolved. The quote, quite simply, is ahistorical and unintentionally racist. However, if you come from a monotheistic background, especially a Caucasian and/or Western one, it probably sounds completely harmless – which is why we have to challenge our own biases and assumptions.

Similarly, our biases can drive us to see a benefit to assimilation or to a pluralism that still uses the majority as the umbrella under which all other identities reside. In the United States, for example, this results in interfaith spaces that still have a decidedly Christian/monotheistic vibe. I therefore very much appreciated Eboo Patel’s quoting of Stephen Prothero when he writes that Prothero, “calls the idea that religions are mostly alike and all paths up the same mountain ‘pretend pluralism,’ a notion that might make us feel good on the surface but at its core is ‘dangerous, disrespectful, and untrue’.” 

I agree also with Patel’s argument for a civil religion or overarching civil mythology which helps bind us as a nation together, though I agree with some of the other essayists in the same book who point out flaws in his argument. John Inazu eloquently spoke to Patel’s over-optimism in his essay “Hope Without a Common Good” where, for example, he stated, “The attempt to neutralize the power of the Christian symbol of the cross in the service of national unity should concern Christians and non-Christians alike.” The idea that symbols like the cross are theologically neutral comes from existing in a predominantly Christian society; it shows once more our bias and what stories we take for granted as part of everyone’s lives.

What this may mean for my future work:

In Chapter 3 of Injustice and the Care of Souls, Gill-Austern poignantly states, “Partnering begins with the humility to know that we do not know what is best for the other.” I think this is a core part of ministry: recognizing not only your own biases and preconceptions, but that you can never know what is best for someone else. You can only help guide someone on their path, providing support and insight as needed, and hope they find what they are seeking. There is a greater lesson in this as well, of course; in all aspects of our lives, a little humility can go a long way toward fostering more harmonious relationships with others. This is especially important in any situation where we hold a degree of power over another and thus even our best of intentions can come off as controlling, domineering, or paternalizing. For example, I have to be aware of this constantly in my work in emergency management since I represent the state of Washington. When I am interacting with our local jurisdictions and especially with our local tribal nations, I am careful to conduct myself in such a way that it never seems like I am telling them what to do or what is best for them. Even well-meaning advice can sound like a command when it comes from a government employee, after all.

Something else I take away from the readings as being an important component of ministry is a quote from Inazu: “We can find common ground even when we don’t agree on a common good.” Common ground is found in that space where we have set aside our personal goals and have come together simply to understand each other better. This sounds simple, but of course it can be the hardest thing we ever attempt. If we struggle to find common ground with people within our own communities, who have so much in common with us, how much harder is it to find common ground with those who are not just the other, but often even the persecutor? This is something I struggle with constantly, especially when it comes to people or groups who have shown little desire or effort to understand me and mine. Extending understanding to someone can leave you feeling vulnerable or like you have betrayed those they harmed; to make this effort and then have it come to naught because the other person refuses to attempt a similar understanding is an outcome I think we all fear deep down. So how do we overcome this gap?

“You overcome story with story,” Eboo Patel writes, quoting Martin E. Marty. “You break the spell of myth with another myth.” This, I firmly believe, is how we come together, and is the role my ministry is meant to play. Humans are natural storytellers, even if most of us never really think about the role stories play in our lives or the many forms stories can take. My work, for example, involves telling stories – cautionary stories of past disasters and natural hazards, scary stories about the consequences of inaction, and empowering stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things in times of danger. Telling stories is also a vital aspect of paganism, and many pagans like myself use storytelling to share experiences of our gods, guides, and ancestors. Likewise, the queer community uses storytelling to keep alive the memory of those who came before, to dream together a better future, and to build a network of support. And as disparate as these communities all are, their stories still contain many of the same narratives and connect in more ways than you might initially think. 

Storytelling brings us together. Shared mythology unites us. It need not be religious – look at how stories like the sinking of the Titanic or the ‘boy king’ Tutankhamun fascinate us on a grand scale decades, centuries, and millennia later. Can they not be part of our shared mythology too? I think they can. I think they all can. So why not bring people together and simply ask, “What is the story that drives you?” – and find the common ground between us all?

#2666

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In Which I Rant About Racism in Religion

I have been fuming for some days now over a book I have to read for seminary called New Monasticism: An Interspiritual Manifesto for Contemplative Living (2015) by Rory McEntee and Adam Bucko. Although I agree with much in the book, it suffers to a great degree from the monotheistic arrogance I am coming to find is common in interfaith spaces. I need to outline the most egregious of its claims here not only because I otherwise won’t be able to stop fuming, but because these claims have to be pushed back against or they will simply continue to be taken at face value. And if you know me at all, you know I’m not one to keep my mouth shut. So let’s dive in!

The part of New Monasticism that pushed me over the edge, as it were, was when it introduced the concept of the “Axial Age,” something I was not familiar with before this. Wikipedia tells us that the term “refers to broad changes in religious and philosophical thought that occurred in a variety of locations from about the 8th to the 3rd century BCE.” Basically, people who buy into this concept (most of whom are not historians, I should mention) believe the revolutions in human society associated with the creation of such things like Christianity, Jainism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Confucianism, and Platonism are all part of a global spiritual awakening triggered by a literal change in human consciousness. 

Belief in this “First Axial Age” leads – well, more like requires – these same people to make extremely biased assumptions about the humans who existed before 800 BCE. The authors of New Monasticism especially are so enamored of the religions birthed during this time that they almost fall over themselves to express their disdain of those who came before. Two sections of quotes suffice, I hope, to summarize what feels, uh… kinda really racist?

“I would suggest that the millennial religions remain our best options because what directly descends from Heaven can best ensure a felicitous return. Manmade experiments have been going on for some time, but they rarely produce a Saint Francis of Assisi, Rumi, or Sri Ramana Maharishi, as well as great works of art such as Chartres Cathedral, the Dome of the Rock, or the Taj Mahal.”

“What was this revolution in consciousness? It was the emergence of an individualized consciousness, one which allowed human beings for the first time to think apart from the “tribe.” […] …and it is here that the basis of science develops as people for the first time could stand apart from nature and look upon it as an object. Monastic spirituality wasn’t possible before [800-200 BCE] because primal people’s consciousness could not sustain it. […] It is also here that one is able for the first time to criticize social structures and injustices, as seen among the Jewish prophets who emerge in this period. […] Pre-Axial consciousness was not individualistic; it was tribal, seamlessly connected to the cosmos, nature, and the collective. It had no perspective of itself as separate from nature or from the tribe.”

So let’s get this straight. Before 800 BCE, humans were too “primal” and did not have the cognitive function necessary to…

  • See themselves as individuals
  • See themselves as separate from nature or the tribe1
  • Create lasting works of art
  • Understand the concepts of science, social justice, or monasticism

I read this in bed one night and literally couldn’t sleep for the next two hours because I just kept thinking of all the ways it was so demonstrably wrong. I tossed and turned, ranting, How dare you! My gods were worshiped in temples 3,000 years old by the time your infant god was born to a frightened virgin! Temples that still stand today and capture hearts by the millions while your Notre-Dame has already burned once! I ground my teeth thinking of all the unbelievable works of human ingenuity that remain with us from before 800 BCE: the pyramids of Egypt, the Sphinx, Hatshepsut’s mortuary temple, Stonehenge (to name just a few, of course)! Did they think human civilization burst fully formed from the minds of monotheists in 800 BCE? What about the Sumerians, who invented writing 3,000 years before that and gave us not only the Epic of Gilgamesh but Enheduanna, the first named author in history? What about Egypt and the cultures of Mesopotamia, who gave us increasingly complex math and science over the course of their long-lived civilizations? 

Or, setting all that aside, how could the authors overlook that these civilizations numbered among their pantheons gods of justice who wielded immense power and influence? The ancient Egyptian religion revolved greatly around ma’at, which comprised the concepts of justice, truth, balance, harmony, law, and morality. The Egyptians so valued ma’at as a concept that they believed when a person died, their heart was weighed against a feather from the goddess Ma’at – if the heart was found to be so weighed down by ill deeds and crimes against one’s fellow humans and the gods that it was heavier than the feather, it was tossed to the demon Ammit to be devoured. And like the Jewish and Christian faiths that would follow, Ma’at provided the ancient Egyptians with a list of rules called the 42 Negative Confessions to best ensure the lightness of their hearts upon death. 

Humans who are not cognitively evolved enough to recognize themselves as individuals (something some apes, dolphins, elephants, and magpies can do, by the way) would not worry about what happened to their souls after death. They would not build grand mortuary temples to ensure they were remembered, or write hymns pleading to the gods for mercy or intercessions. They would not worry about whether their names would still be spoken a thousand years from now, nor would they destroy the works of others to ensure their enemies’ names were forgotten – and yet we would not know of Tutankhamun any other way.

This blatant racism and religious bias makes me so angry for the people who came before, people who built religions of beauty and complexity yet are apparently condemned for the mere crime of being lost to history. The big polytheistic religions, all long dead now (and their modern revivals never acknowledged in these interfaith writings), are judged more harshly for whatever remainder of their ancient faith we have pieced together than any ‘living’ tradition is for its current actions. These civilizations accomplished unbelievable works of global significance yet today are dismissed as tribal, primal, and backwards. In fact, in this Axial Age theory the great bulk of human history is being discarded as if it had no impact on our world or value in and of itself to fit the narrative that culture did not truly begin until monotheism took over in 800 BCE. It’s an ahistorical and deeply flawed narrative, and it smacks of a monotheistic brand of white saviorism coming to free the world from the dumb, brute polytheists. Which is gross! That’s gross!

This wasn’t supposed to be an essay, I swear. I’m just getting so sick of this. There is great value in the “dead” religions, many of which are not so much dead as simply ignored by the mainstream faiths. I guess the moral of the story is don’t believe everything you read in a book, especially religious ones, and trust your instincts when they start setting off those alarm bells. Anyone who claims to have it all figured out, who professes to know exactly how we should move forward as a global culture and what we should discard from the past… well, they’re selling something. Maybe it’s just a worldview, but they’re still selling something. And we don’t need that snake oil.

  1. *please, white people, we gotta stop using that word, we obviously can’t be trusted with it ↩︎

#2664

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On Theologically and Geologically Accurate Mountains

(The second of my seminary reflection papers)

“In order to fully recognize our place in creation,” Sherri Mitchell writes in Sacred Instructions: Indigenous Wisdom for Living Spirit-Based Change, “we must realize that our stories are not the only stories that are being told.” I feel this quote serves as a good introduction to the topics covered in Global Spiritual Traditions 1 (GST1), as the class not only covers religions and worldviews less understood by the West but ones which have been systematically silenced and suppressed. Much of the lessons we can learn from these faiths come from a rich and ancient practice of deep listening which Western society has long lost. Given how much history and how many concepts GST1 covered, including all of the lessons I took to heart from this class would require a much lengthier paper than anyone wants to read, so I will try to hit the highlights with some brevity.

What I vibed with in the readings:

I knew going into this class that I would enjoy many of the readings – in fact, several of the required books were ones I already owned. Restoring the Kinship Worldview by Wahinkpe Topa and Darcia Narvaez has been in my digital library for a while, though I had not yet had a chance to read it, so this was a delightful opportunity to bump it up my to-be-read list. I found the chart of common worldview manifestations extremely helpful as a quick overview of the Western versus Indigenous mindsets, and especially appreciated the highlighting of the dichotomy between ceremony as rote formality and ceremony as life-sustaining. I also appreciate that the authors emphasize, “All people are indigenous to Earth and have the right and responsibility to practice and teach the Indigenous worldview precepts.” When we try to respect closed traditions and historically marginalized populations, sometimes in doing so we struggle with recognizing the line between cultural appreciation and appropriation, and between learning from shared wisdom and stealing ideas that are not our own. I imagine many non-indigenous folks worry they have no right incorporating aspects of the Indigenous worldview into their lives, so this statement is a valuable confirmation and invitation to all to learn from the text.

I also knew I would enjoy the readings on Buddhism, as I have felt drawn to Buddhism for several years after reading about the Buddhist response to the 2011 Great East Japan earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. Buddhism’s emphasis on the cessation of suffering led some Buddhist sects to denounce nuclear power in the wake of the 2011 disaster as being anathema to the preservation of life, a stance which was obviously quite unpopular with the Japanese government. This was also how I learned about bodhisattvas, as the bodhisattva Jizō is beloved in Japan as a protector of children and many of his statues mark areas where children died during the 2011 disaster. Thus Mahayana Buddhism’s focus on bodhisattvas and service to others speaks most strongly to me, as I can think of many souls – not just humans! – I have known in my life that seemed like bodhisattvas. They often challenged the status quo and inspired those around them to be better simply by exhibiting honorable qualities like humility, patience, empathy, humor, inclusivity, and reverence for all life. They demonstrated a dedication to coexistence and nonviolence that I strive to attain on a daily basis. As Buddhist Pamela Ayo Yetunde says in Casting Indra’s Net: Fostering Spiritual Kinship and Community, “If our compassion bypasses what we find most difficult, we will not develop the strength to weather our most profound challenges.” 

What I did not expect was to enjoy and align so much with Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu! I was least familiar with the Tao Te Ching coming into this class and found myself nodding along in enthusiastic agreement during the readings and lectures. When Dr. John Mabry writes in the introduction to his translation of the Tao Te Ching, “The Taoist follows the example of the animals and the Earth herself, and perceives of the divine in the same way,” I feel this in my bones. Animals do not question their experiences; they do not second-guess their senses or accuse their minds of playing tricks on them. Only humans ascribe so many rules and rights and wrongs to everything around them to the point where we hardly know what to make of the divine when it is right in front of us. We struggle with the concept of Yin and Yang because we hate thinking about ‘bad’ things – even though ‘bad’ is merely another concept we have pinned on some parts of our world and not others. No wonder we cannot keep our environment in ecological balance when we have forgotten what balance even means! It makes sense, then, that many pillars of the Indigenous worldview are also reflected in the Tao Te Ching, such as cautions against exalting people of extraordinary talent (thus fomenting competition) and public displays of wealth (thus fostering envy and discontent), and of course the idea that true strength comes from gentleness of spirit, not violence and aggression.

I would be remiss if I did not also mention how much I appreciated Hinduism’s concept of ishta, or one’s chosen aspect of the divine which holds a special place in the heart. Many modern pagans call this a ‘patron god’ or something similar, and this is often the deity to whom they first became devoted or with whom they primarily work. My ishta or patron god is Bast, the Kemetic (ancient Egyptian) goddess of war, love, protection, the home, and of course felines. Bast has been part of my life as long as I can remember, since I have always had a fascination with both cats and ancient Egypt, but I never really realized I could worship her legitimately. Then one morning when I was 25, Bast came to me in a way I could not ignore or disprove and opened my eyes to the spiritual journey before me. I am forever grateful to her for helping me embark on what has become quite the spiritual adventure! She will always be my soul-mother and the main deity I follow, no matter who or what else I incorporate into my practice.

What I struggled with in the readings:

I feel like I should preface this section by saying I actually enjoyed Huston Smith’s Buddhism and Hinduism chapters in The World’s Religions. I think these chapters were two of his strongest and provided good foundations for the rest of the readings on those topics. However, I do want to quibble a bit once more on one place where his monotheistic bias shows through (for the sake of brevity I cut a few others). In The World’s Religions Smith writes, “It is possible to climb life’s mountain from any side, but when the top is reached the trails converge.” While I greatly appreciate the pithy poeticism of this line, I politely must beg to differ. For one, that just isn’t how mountains work and I dislike inaccurate metaphors, even pithy ones. Mountains have no single summit, no point at which myriad trails can converge to one singular place, but instead a range of peaks and ridges (or perhaps wide plateaus for the more rounded summits) to which many trails may lead yet never cross paths. Think of the many sacred mountains which make up the Himalaya, for example, or the Cascades of the Pacific Northwest. A better metaphor instead might be to think of divinity not as the point at which the trails of life’s mountain merge, but as the stone of the very mountain itself and all its sisters in the range. I have a hard time believing, after all, that we are all climbing the same mountain – even in a metaphor. Plus, since no two mountains are alike in composition or ecosystem, it better suits the fact that no one’s experience of the divine is the same as another’s, and many people experience it as a multiplicity of identities or entities, not a homogenous whole.

Setting Smith aside, I do have to admit that I struggled a bit with some of the chapters in Restoring the Kinship Worldview despite fervently agreeing with much else in the book. So many of the readings for this class cautioned against rigid binaries yet it feels like the binary of Indigenous versus Western worldview is just that – rigid. For example, I felt uncomfortable when Topa and Narvaez essentially blamed the Sumerians for the creation of the Western worldview when they were neither white nor European, and existed over 8,000 years ago. I know the Western worldview is not necessarily a new thing, though of course modern society has exacerbated it beyond any other time in history, but it seems unfair to wrap any society that built permanent settlements or developed agriculture into what has become a deeply white supremacist and capitalist worldview. There were plenty of non-white cultures that built great cities and enacted war or conquest on each other – do they deserve to be stripped of their indigeneity for it? Do the Sumerians, who in some ways had one of the most gender-progressive societies in human history, deserve to be tossed aside completely as part of the Western worldview with all the negatives that brings to mind? I understand the intent of the binary, I do; I just worry that its rigidity means we lose valuable nuance on both sides, and that Western as a term is beginning to lose its precision as its umbrella continues to expand. At the very least, it is a good reminder that we can become entrenched and unbalanced in even the most well-meaning of views and should regularly check-in with ourselves to see if we have become overly dogmatic.

Lastly, something I knew I would struggle with in the readings, because I already struggle with it when I read about some of these worldviews, is the concept of nonviolence. I understand and embrace the concept in theory, and I truly believe it is necessary for our global society to embrace nonviolence on a grand scale if we are ever to solve the issues plaguing us. Yet when it comes to individual situations, to specific circumstances, I find it so much harder to adhere to a nonviolent approach to resolution. This is especially difficult, of course, when something or someone I love is threatened or impacted, but with my fiery temper I tend to struggle no matter what. Releasing that anger is important, yet it often feels like in doing so, or in advocating for a peaceful resolution versus punishment, the original act of violence is condoned. That punishment equals justice is perhaps the hardest part of the Western worldview for me personally to release, though I think I have made a small bit of progress over the last year or two. Chapter 18 in Restoring the Kinship Worldview was immensely helpful for me in reframing how we can go about conflict resolution with its emphasis on how “offenders help the community by drawing attention to imbalances.” Focusing on the greater imbalance helps me recognize that no offending action is done within a vacuum and any resolution also has to take the entire network into account.

What this may mean for my future work:

While the worldviews and traditions covered in this class span greatly in both space and time, they all in some way address the concept of change and how humans can become unbalanced and unhappy when we fight change instead of accepting its inevitability. This is especially so for the major systemic changes we face as a global society such as climate destabilization, increasing wealth inequality, and armed conflict. “The time has passed for us to opt out of change,” Mitchell so sagely writes in Sacred Instructions. “Change is upon us.” As someone in the field of emergency management, I want to help people through this process of acceptance so they can become more resilient to the changes we know are either inevitable or very likely. There are also a lot of overlaps between emergency management and Buddhism specifically, which I wrote about here, and I think there are great opportunities for incorporating a Buddhist worldview into emergency management. I definitely intend to incorporate aspects of various Indigenous worldviews, Buddhism, and Taoism into my future work to bring a more spiritual dimension into the work I do each day and into whatever I find myself doing post-seminary. (Not to mention that the readings on Indigenous worldviews are quite valuable for my work with our tribal nations in general!)

“Filling your cup until it overflows is not as good as stopping it in time,” states the Tao Te Ching. “Oversharpen your sword and it will not protect you very long.” I also want to use the lessons learned from these sources to help people, especially those in emergency management, develop a better relationship with self-care and wellness. Ours is a ‘tough it out’ field where burnout runs rampant and I think these worldviews have a lot to offer in terms of moving us toward a healthier professional, mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual environment. This need not be ‘religious’ in the overt sense; after all, Mitchell reminds us that, “We are tied to every ascended master that has ever lived.” I experienced this myself when the renowned writer Rachel Carson came to me in a dream, a treasured visit which served as a powerful reminder that our ancestors include not just those of our blood and our teachers not just those enshrined in holy books and mythology. They can be those who walked similar paths to ours, who fought the good fight and can help us do the same without exhausting ourselves completely. I hope I can assist others in making similar connections and discovering the aspects of these worldviews that will best guide them toward a more balanced life of service to self and others.

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On Change and Impermanence: Buddhism and Emergency Management

There is no certainty in life except that all things change. What you have today could be washed away tomorrow, taking with it everything and everyone you thought you were. In a heartbeat your world can turn upside down and you can do nothing to stop it; nothing beyond accepting the impermanent nature of existence to free yourself of the anxiety and fear fighting such change produces. You cannot control change – but you can control how you respond to it.

The above sentences could apply equally well as an introduction to the basic principles of Buddhism or as an introduction to the basic principles of emergency management. Buddhism teaches us that we suffer because we cling to things that we mistakenly believe to be immutable and real when in reality they are as impermanent and untouchable as the wind. It is when we release this death grip we hold on our sense of self, and thus on everything attached to that identity, that we can free ourselves of the fear, anxiety, and other negative emotions that come from trying to control the uncontrollable. Similarly, the field of emergency management teaches that we can never know when disaster will strike and completely alter not just the trajectory of our own lives, but the trajectory of our community, our nation, and even our entire world. However, there is no such thing as a ‘natural disaster’ – a natural hazard such as an earthquake or tsunami becomes a disaster only when it impacts human civilization. We cannot and should not prevent natural hazards but we can prevent natural disasters (or at least mitigate their impacts) by changing the way we understand and honor our connection to all of creation. We must also be willing to learn from disasters when they do happen and change our habits; returning to the old ways of life which caused the disasters is like turning away from the Eightfold Path to continue the cycle of suffering.

As life paths, both Buddhism and emergency management require practitioners who can embrace life’s impermanence and roll with changes as they come. As Buddhism upholds values like honesty, compassion, patience, humility, and selflessness, so do people in emergency management need these same values to best serve their communities during both ‘blue sky days’ and when disasters occur. The layman looks to experienced Buddhist leaders for guidance during times of spiritual or personal unrest in the same way the public looks to emergency management for guidance during times of external uncertainty or disaster. Those who come into either path carrying hubris, rigidity, or falseness of word or action are sure to either get out again quickly or face an extremely steep road with many hard lessons waiting.

Despite having much to offer in times of need, Buddhism and emergency management are also not always the most popular with people looking for easy or comforting answers. Buddhism requires a degree of mental, physical, and spiritual dedication many find daunting, and has been accused (albeit unfairly) of being nihilistic. Its emphasis on personal accountability, growth, and internal work can also be a turnoff for those expecting a simpler path to salvation that requires less constant maintenance of the soul. Like Buddhism, emergency management emphasizes the chaotic nature of existence and urges an awareness of the ways in which change can suddenly shatter our sheltered worlds. “It’s not a matter of if,” people in this field are fond of saying, “but of when.” To mitigate this, emergency management promises nothing without hard work – constant awareness, preparedness, and a readiness to act for the safety of oneself and others when disaster strikes are necessary to see things through to the other side. Emergency managers are often considered to be pessimists who think constantly about the worst case scenario and are too logical, but in reality they have simply applied the same logic as Buddhism to assess the likeliest sources of suffering and plan for their eventuality. One might say the two paths apply slightly different medicines to slightly different diseases, yet they are both operating in the same hospital on the same base population. Maybe they even share a department.

As our world grows ever more complicated, so do the issues Buddhism and emergency management seek to address and in turn ever more unpopular are the solutions they provide. Buddhism urges asceticism in a time of mass materialism, when many of the objects which so hold us in their thrall (smartphones, cars, laptops, internet access, etc) are also necessary to fully engage in society and access even its most basic of resources. Emergency management urges degrowth or at least mindful infrastructure management, especially along coastlines and the wildfire-urban interface, in a time when expansion of human settlements threatens even the most remote places on Earth. Our desire for more – more international vacations, more beachside condos, more bitcoin, more golf courses, more fame/money/stuff/power – is antithetical to both our own freedom from suffering and that of the planet. The increasing disasters we face each year as climate change alters our global ecosystem are evidence of the immense gulf which has opened up between humanity and the rest of creation. 

We can still fix the damage we have done, or at least slow down our fatal trajectory, but only if we are willing to accept that we are part of this world and that we cannot cheat death through wealth and willful ignorance. We can begin the hard work of recompense only if we are willing to give up our old way of life, to give up who we thought we were and embrace who we must become. We are not all Buddhists. We are not all emergency managers. We can all, however, learn from both paths to live more harmoniously with the planet that we and countless other animate beings call home.

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Reflecting on Soups, Muds, and Other Squishy Things

[ Since I’m now officially in seminary, I’ve decided to post some of my writings for school here. ]

Global Spiritual Traditions 2 is my first ChI course as an official student. As such, this is also my first reflection paper. Because of this, I feel a short preface is in order to set the tone and establish my thought process for this paper. I am, as will become abundantly clear, a writer through and through; the gods marked me as such from the beginning and it colors every aspect of my being. This means I approach any piece of writing, be it personal or professional, with an extremely high expectation of myself for the final product and a certain verbosity that can bury the lede in favor of lyrical run-on sentences. (See? I’m doing it even now. …I also really like parentheticals.) This also means I have trouble simply reflecting in a piece of writing such as this, as there will always be part of me that demands to know what the ‘right’ answer or ‘point’ of the paper is in order to best please the person reading. (That this paper will not be graded doesn’t seem to make a difference to my type-A brain.) To circumvent this, I’m going to try to treat this reflection paper more like a diary entry and less like a thesis. We’ll see how well I manage. Let’s dive in!

What I vibed with in the readings:

Mysticism! Oh how I wish I had known about mysticism as a kid. The only religion I had much exposure to as a child was the blander kind of Christianity that seems to care more about rules and appearance than inspiring beautiful spiritual experiences. “Freeze-dried liturgy” as Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi so aptly calls it in his book Jewish with Feeling. My heart was open to the mysteries and majesties of the universe back then but I found little to inspire such feelings in beige-colored churches lacking beautiful stained glass windows or towering organs. Even as an adult I knew very little about the mystic traditions in Christianity and Judaism, and only a bit about Sufism thanks to a college course on Islam. This course introduced me to Rumi, whose words spoke directly to the longing in my soul. I have come back to his poetry many times in the years since, finding great comfort and validity in the emotions expressed there. But beyond Sufism, it seemed like there was little for me in those religions as a person who found the divine in cats and moths and morning mist, not archaic texts and hard pews and the worst interior decorating ever.

Ultimately, it makes perfect sense that I vibe best with the mystics of any faith. A Christian friend once asked me, back before I even had an established spiritual path, how I as a ‘blind’ person (blind to what he considered the divine truth, ie God) could walk my path with such certainty while he struggled with his path daily. I think part of the answer came down to the fact that he focused so much on the “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” of his religion, on all the things his faith expected of him, while I simply moved toward whatever made my heart sing. There were no scriptures or priests or elders to get in my way; no bars to reach or expectations to fail to meet. I followed my heart like a lodestone, trusting the universe to lead me wherever I needed to go, and this was just impossible for my friend to understand. “How do you know killing people is wrong if you don’t follow God and the ten commandments?” he once asked me in genuine confusion, and I didn’t really know how to answer him except to say that I just knew. I just felt what was right and what was wrong, like I was being guided, but I knew it wasn’t his God doing the guiding.

If I had read back then the following by Ibn ‘Arabi (quoted in The World’s Religions by Huston Smith), it would have clicked immediately: “My heart has opened unto every form. It is a pasture for gazelles, a cloister for Christian monks, a temple for idols, the Ka’ba of the pilgrim, the tablets of the Torah and the book of the Koran. I practice the religion of Love; in whatsoever directions its caravans advance, the religion of Love shall be my religion and my faith.” This speaks to my soul so deeply. Perhaps I might have been able to use these words to explain to my friend how I walked my path so faithfully.

In addition, for all that I have always been the ‘good kid’ and am not naturally a rule-breaker, I balk quickly at being told what to do by authority figures who have not earned my respect. Thus any religion that tries to tell me how to experience the divine, and especially how not to experience the divine, is going to trigger my stubborn side. Why should it matter how I dress or what I eat? Who are you to say who can and cannot be part of the inner circle? Why are you so focused on these two lines of text and not the other thousand? Etcetera etcetera. For this reason I appreciated Deborah Broome’s analysis in Who’s at the Table? Inclusiveness in the Gospel of Luke when she said, “Luke’s Jesus has a new interpretation of the law of purity – that purity means inclusiveness in table-fellowship.” While Jesus wasn’t exactly preaching the kind of mysticism I subscribe to, I think any expansion of inclusivity and a focus more on fellowship than right praxis moves us toward a more direct relationship with the divine as both individuals and a greater spiritual community. After all, if I am so focused on my personal connection with the divine that I lose my sense of responsibility to my fellow creatures, will that lead to a healthy spirituality? Of course not. No matter what we see as the overarching divine (God or gods or something else entirely), mysticism has to include a dedication to the divinity in everything around us as well. “…all ground is holy ground,” Vincent Pizzuto writes in Contemplating Christ. “All water is holy water. All bread is Eucharist. All life – not merely human life – is sacred.” And I think that’s beautiful.

What I struggled with in the readings:

Coming into this class as a queer person from a distinctly agnostic household, I thought the biggest thing I would struggle with in this class was the not so stellar history of these religions and equality (Christianity and queer people, Islam and women, Israel and Palestine, etc). I even prepared myself for this, reminding myself ahead of readings that I likely would disagree with at least some of what I found there, would roll my eyes at the overwhelmingly male, cishet worldview from which the writings sprang. I was ready to try my best to be open minded and remember “not all Christians.” Yet while I probably did roll my eyes once or twice, these concerns never really came to fruition. Instead, what I actually found myself struggling with was the superiority many of the authors expressed when talking about monotheism versus polytheism. 

Huston Smith, author of The World’s Religions, was perhaps the worst at this, especially since some of his claims were just plain false. “Small wonder that no nature polytheism ever spawned a principled revolution” he writes, along with claiming “polytheisms feared change” as if some of the greatest and longest lasting empires in the world were not polytheistic. Sumbul Ali-Karamali in The Muslim Next Door: The Qur’an, the Media, and that Veil Thing likewise paints a picture of the pre-Islamic Middle East as a barbaric, godless place full of idol worship and polytheism (gasp!) saved only by the coming of the Prophet Muhammad. She also claims early Islam granted women more rights than any other religion or culture at that time which, again, is a bit of a stretch. I don’t mean to undersell the incredible changes Islam enacted; I just want to make sure we look at the whole of human history, and that means not taking religious texts at face value. Even Rabbi Zalman, despite his impressive knowledge of world religions, seems to think only in Judaism do you find mankind going toe-to-toe with the gods when the Egyptians regularly hassled, guilted, harangued, and otherwise called out their gods in much a similar manner.

I understand this penchant to see monotheism as inherently superior to polytheism, I really do. The polytheist empires of the past are far gone and seen most often now in Disney cartoons and bad Halloween costumes; they hardly feel real anymore, and their religions even less so. It’s even harder to respect their breadth and beauty when they play the Big Baddies in so many stories from monotheistic religions’ histories. For many people in western society, both atheistic and theistic, the idea that polytheism naturally and inevitably evolved into monotheism is unquestioned. This belief is so ingrained that I honestly don’t think any of the writers from these readings consciously meant to include such bias in their work – it just seeped in of its own accord.

Even interfaith spaces often seem to suffer from this subconscious bias. While it’s nice to hear faith communities talk about how it doesn’t matter what you call the Creator or source of the divine, that all faiths are one, the language used still comes down most often to the singular. God, not Gods; Creator, not Creators; Divinity, not Divinities; Spirit, not Spirits. This is similar to soft polytheism, or the belief that all gods are simply different manifestations of the same single divine entity, and it can be really alienating to someone who worships multiple, unique gods. If all gods are the same, and names do not matter, then why do these spaces never pray to my gods? Why are mine always subsumed into the collective and not the other way around? My gods are not slivers of a greater whole, nor are they archetypes wearing regional costumes. They are as fully realized as Allah, as Jesus, and have much to offer the global community. That their voices are quieter today than two thousand years ago is not because their power waned in the face of the Christian God, but merely the result of human politics and the inevitable rise and fall of civilizations. They are still here, as are their followers.

I think Rabbi Zalman put it best when he said, “…we need to survive also the danger of dissolving into mere secularism or into a vaguely spiritual New Age soup in which the distinctive contributions of the various religions would be wiped out.” While he was speaking from the perspective of Judaism, the old gods are already victims of that so aptly named New Age soup. I fear further efforts to emulsify them into a generic divinity will dissolve their own unique qualities completely. Fortunately, us pagans tend to be a loud lot, and I personally don’t plan to let this happen without some serious pushback!

What this could mean for my future work:

So I have talked up the mystics and griped a bit (okay, maybe more than a bit) about monotheistic bias. What does this mean for my future work as a chaplain, or whatever official role I ultimately find in the greater spiritual community? I turn back, as I imagine I shall again and again, to more of Rabbi Zalman’s words: “Our ancient faiths have become over-verbalized and under-experienced. We talk too much and feel too little.” 

We talk too much and feel too little! How well-put! No matter where my path leads me, I know I want to help people get to the place where they think less and feel more. I want to help them understand that the divine is all around us, always waiting for us to reach out, and that we require no one’s permission or presence to access it. “The point,” Rabbi Zalman writes, “in our non-theological, experience-based approach, is not what God ‘wants’ or doesn’t want; God, however we understand the concept, can take care of Godself. The point is what we want and need.” I love this. The divine is limitless and incomprehensible; there is no reason to think it relies on humanity to provide it anything. So what do you want? What do you need? Those things are what matter on your path. It’s easy to get lost, though, to confuse what you need with what you’re told to need, to bury your desires in a deep dark place, to muddy things up terribly. If I can help someone uncover the buried lodestone in their own heart, or sift the waters until they’re pure and clear again, then that is what I want to do. 

In Jewish with Feeling, Rabbi Zalman recounts a story in which Reb Menachem Mendel Schneerson said, “The Earth contains all kinds of treasures, but you have to know where to dig. If you do not, you will come up with nothing but rocks or mud. But if you ask the geologist of the soul where to dig, you might find silver… A rebbe can only show you where to dig. You must do the digging yourself.” As someone with a geoscience background, I absolutely fell in love with this metaphor. I’m not sure I see myself as ever being a spiritual teacher, really, or at least not in such an official capacity (hello imposter syndrome), but I can be your spiritual geologist for sure! Bring me your soul mud. Bring me your soul rocks. I will teach you how to identify the different minerals inside, what they represent, how they formed, and what they say about the person who birthed them. And like a true geologist, I will be excited about it all, because while not all that glitters is gold, all that glitters is interesting.