Local Issues and Goals for 2021

 

This was submitted to the Ramona Sentinel, and a portion was published on January 6, 2021

 

What are the biggest issues Ramona faces in 2021 and why?

 

I think the biggest issues faced by our community have to do with the situational application of the main themes of the Serenity Prayer.  Having courage to do the things which are in our power, while having serenity about the things over which we have no control in this pandemic which confronts us as individuals, as churches, as businesses, as families, governing bodies, and as educational institutions.  The biggest issue which faces us is the uncertainty about how the changing situations of the pandemic are going to impinge upon our existence.  It is one thing to ask for serenity to accept the things that we cannot control, but the pandemic requires that we just keep accepting things that we cannot control for a very uncertain period of time whose duration is still very much a mystery.  In more ordinary grief situations, there are caregivers and support teams who are not a part of the impact of the loss.  The pandemic is so embracing and widespread to everyone, there is no one who is outside of the crisis to be modeling what “normal life” is like now outside of the crisis.

 

The biggest issue for us in 2021 is what I would call the maintenance of serenity as we face things over which we have no control.

 

Accepting things that we cannot control?  That is what the serenity project would be.  And when everyone is partaking of the same crisis with no outside caretakers who are exempt from all of the elements of the crisis, what can we do?  We have already seen much community discord instigated by the pandemic crisis.  We have seen the typical reactions to loss, including denial, anger, bargaining, depression and more.  In the continuing losses of this pandemic crisis, it is easy to be swayed by the emotions and the feelings of continual loss.

 

What is the outside mentor for us during a crisis in which all of us are trapped?  Science.  Science is the best method of actuarial wisdom which involves eschewing feelings to apply the methods of statistical approximation.  With dispassion, one asks what are the probabilities based upon what we heretofore know?  In medicine, in business, in education, in politics, in emergency planning we allow ourselves to be guided by the very best actuarial wisdom.  It does not mean that we always get every response to probable outcomes correct, but it is the collaborative processing of best research and practical application of the same.

 

While it may sound very theoretical to say, look to science, we get the most practical advice on behaviors from the scientific communities.  And if we don’t think that we can trust what a political leader or pastor advises, then the most practical spokespersons are the doctors and nurses who are not dealing with a theoretical virus; they experience the immediate outcome of the pandemic and they are the most credible authorities.

 

What goals do you hope to accomplish in Ramona in 2021?

 

Since I am a priest who believes I can be a poet and scientist at the same time without contradiction, my goals would to be articulate faith as a way to promote the best practices for our community’s response to the changing conditions forced upon us by the pandemic, at its full tide effect and as it ebbs in its power.  Faith at its root means what one is persuaded about to the degree of unifying the total person in action toward hopeful outcomes.  A community goal would be to gain greater unity together in our persuasion about safe behaviors in our community.  A goal would be for us to understand the conditions of forced fasting from so many habits that we’ve taken for granted.  We have lost and had to give up so many things.  A religious fast has an intentionality about it.  A goal would be to teach us how we can come to meaning regarding what we are losing.  The main meaning might be the attaining of an empathy for people in our world who have lived prolonged deprived lives as their ordinary staple of existence.  A goal would be for us to develop appreciation for a different kind of presence, the virtual presence of Zoom meetings, phone calls, and other ways of reaching out.  We can appreciate that virtual presence is derived from the real face to face presence.  Another goal is to “take notes” on what we are learning in the times of our deprivation; what will we retain to bring with us to assist our regathering in better ways?  How much burning of fossil fuels has been saved by Zoom meetings?  Virtual meetings can actually expand participation because of ease of instant connection.  Another goal would be to visualize what the future fondness of gathered community will be like since the absence has intensified the heart’s fondness.  Another goal would be to do some American self-examination, as we compare how other countries have dealt with the pandemic: Would we rather sacrifice 1-2 persons per thousand for the sake of our open gathering habits?  What does that tell us about ourselves?  In 2021, a community goal should be to look at who is dying the most in the pandemic, and why are certain groups of people dying more than others?  Will it indicate that we unevenly divide the rewards and punishment for people in our country, because some have been forced to live more closely in harm’s way for economic reasons?  A further reality goal in 2021 will be to convince people that we are in a marathon and not a hundred-yard dash, so we have to be prepared to run accordingly.  The goal is endurance, and most of all, the practice of how best to endure together.

Bible As Virtual Reality

 Because science has become so prominent in modern life, it has attained a very pragmatic and functional truth status for everything that we do today.  We live and move and have our modern being in the results of the scientific method which was industrialized and commercialized into all of the products which govern our lives.  It has so vastly governed our lives that the latest generation seem to prefer a completely virtual life to actually being present.  And even when people go to big box churches and stadiums, they watch the contest or the preacher on a big screen.

Perhaps Covid-19 will help us appreciate actual presence again when virtuality is forced upon us as the main way to relate with each other because with actual presence we could infect each other.

Lest we despise the virtual too much let us admit that the Bible is virtual.  Written text was a technology of memory which stood in the place of "not being there."  A biblical text did not permit and actual give and take with the actual writer, so it is a virtual communication.  The author of the text becomes very weak; he or she cannot defend or specify or determine a certain meaning of the words written.  The author is weak because the words come to depend upon those who are interpreting.  When it comes to biblical words, traditions of how to interpret the words have arisen and differences in interpretation account for the different communities within Christianity and in Judaism.

Why attribute personality to God?

Why attribute personality to God?

One could say that if in human language God is "that which none greater can be conceived," then greatness would also be defined by the users of language.  One could posit that God's greatness would be so unsurpassable, that in comparison with human "personality," God's personality would be such a super-personality that God could be an "impersonal" Being, meaning not personal like the limitation of human personality.

The reason God attains a personality for human beings is that we have language.  Human beings have language and language is the essence of inter-connection and inter-relationship and this essence of inter-relationship comes to be defined as having personality.  Einstein said the greatest question was to whether the universe was a "friendly" place.  If what we call enjoyment is evidence of friendly regard, then the friendliness of the universe expresses something of the meaning of a Personality for human beings.

Any thing that comes to language is colored with personality since having language expresses the most personal aspect of anthropomorphizing projection.  Perhaps the chief principle of the belief in the incarnation is that emptying of the divine into a divinely human person.  This, in fact, expresses the human situation of being merely human, but with the freedom to anthropomorphize about what is not human, e.g.,  animal beings, plant beings, unseen beings and the Great Being of God.  In actual practice, animals, plants, angels and the divine become the human versions of them, even while we in this mutually reflexive process of inter-relations, we confess it to be the participation with a Higher Personal Being.

Because we have language, we assume a Greater linguistic personal Being who is Word and the origin of being able to know ourselves as those who use language. We have happened onto believing some greater Language User made us personally in such a way because Communication conducted between beings is the chief attribute of being human.  Word is Spirit and Spirit is Word.  Word implies personality because Word implies the Connectedness which defines the meaning of personality.

Reflections on the Transition to Postmodern Possibilities of Faith

  Post-modernism has many different definitions but one of the consistent definitions of post-modernism is the perpetual criticism of Modernism.  Modernism dates from the Enlightenment when theology began to be de-throned as the the queen of the sciences and chief arbitrator of truth and Reason was enthroned as the final method for establishing truth, meaning and value.
  As a result theology was delegated to a very narrow field of morals and ethics or a practice of nostalgia for a different era when we did not know so much.
  The crowning jewel of modernism is what we call modern science.  The methods of modern science with its requirement of empirical verification and/or falsification of statements of meaning called scientific laws or theories have been very successful in creating all of the technological products to make our lives better and easier.
  But has the modern era only been better and easier?  Post-modernism has arisen as intellectual and social movements to challenge the supremacy of the outcomes of the so-called progress of modern science.  Post-modernism is not the denial of modernism; it is critique of modern progress being seen as only positive, salutary and recommendable.  Post-modernism represents a disillusionment with some of the results of progress.  Modernism has been so progressive that one of our chief achievements now includes the ability to destroy, quickly or progressively, human life as we know it at our own hands.  One of the chief achievement of modernism is the military industrial complex which has given us the bombs to destroy the planet.  A slower death of the planet has become obvious because of our poor stewardship of the environment.
  In American culture, the beat cultures and the hippie cultures of the fifties and the sixties were early protest movements of post-modernism against modernism.  The sixties highlighted wrong-headed achievement of science resulting in controversial wars; technology had brought us to the place of being able to go to war because we "could" and not because we needed to defend ourselves for some life threatening enemy and many began to note that we could be very inconsistent for the reasons of our military intervention in other parts of the world.  "Our interest in the region" became a rather convenient and pliable interpretive principle for foreign policy.
  We did have a seeming idealistic bubble in the 1950's when because of television we believed or aspired to believe that everyone was or could be a "Ward and June Cleaver" middle class family living in the nice home with the white picket fence.  Such a world had an undercurrent which we did not care to highlight because it was too much a part of the "goes without saying" tacit background of the racial and socio-economic situation in our country.  The bubble of our "naive" sense of being good or better than people of other countries had not yet been popped and we naively assumed that we were a Christian country and that we really knew what being a Christian country meant.
  Ironically, there were a variety of Christian responses to the impressive truths of science. Various brands of fundamentalism expressed in various Christian confessional groups subtly embraced the truths of science by virtue of accepting the products of a thoroughly scientific industrial culture and life style and they regarded  it necessary to begin to explicate all things biblical as scientifically truthful. So the virgin birth of church tradition also had to be understood as a modern biological understanding of child conception and birth.  Embracing the the truth of radioactive dating the creation story had to be the understood as the creation of old rocks because Adam was created as an adult male and not a baby .  Truly adult rocks were created and managed to fool the radioactive dating methods and appear to be very ancient while having been created but some 6000 years ago.  This is the ultimate irony; fundamentalism was a product of modernism impressed by its truth and therefore fundamentalists had to conform biblical story to modern scientific truth criteria as a way to defend the ancient faith.  After all, an omniscience God would have known about Cadillacs before they existed.
  This truly anachronistic phenomena of fundamentalism was a modern phenomena but very poorly constructing unbelievable apologies for having faith in the modern era.   One can truly feel sorry for those who suffered from nostalgia and so they attempted to wed details of ancient cultures with an incompatible modern scientific methodology.
  Even while fundamentalism tried to present myth as actual history, the modern study of history resulted in a historical presentation of biblical peoples whose stories needed to be de-mythologized for modern people who held to causality based upon the uniformity of natural causes in a closed system.
  What was lost because of "historicism" and "fundamentalism" was the kind of seeing which comes from having one's constituted state of seeing "altered."  So in revolt many people in this post-modern revolt against the effects of modernism sought for the ways of seeing and experiencing through "altered" states.  People went East and gurus came West to teach "altered" ways of seeing the world so that negative effects of progress could be resisted, interdicted or given new direction.  Both historicism and fundamentalism had locked off a kind of seeing which was present in the lives of those who wrote the Scriptures.  Some people found refuge in even more visionary literature of Eastern Religions.   Some found a way to alter their states of being, living and seeing through the discipline of meditation and other  yogic practices.  Others found a way to alter their seeing through hallucinogenic drugs.  Some found that to challenge their sound and rhythm environments with new hybrids of music deriving from Blues and Rhythm of African-American culture gave them a music of reaction, protest and resistance.  But the new sound environment also became a significant new way to alter the state of seeing life; social, cultural, political and religious lives.   This also included a reaction against fundamentalism's puritanical controlled holier-than-thou restrictions upon the libido.  The altered states of the sixties and seventies included an orgiastic revolt against the previous order for the libido whose main "punishment" of pregnancy was beginning to be dealt with because of modern medical science.
  Hopefully we have arrived at a place of a more sanguine appraisal of the kinds of religious modernism, fundamentalism and de-mythologizing historicism.  Perhaps the greatest opportunity we have in our Post-modern age is the honesty we can have about acknowledging language as the undeniable human absolute.  We may refer to pre-lingual, a-lingual or extra-lingual, or post-lingual but we are always using language to do so.
  With an appreciation of the supremacy and the fluidity and omni-reflexivity of language in human experience we can begin to understand that language performances arise in response to a variety of human experience and as language is produced it differentiates itself into discursive practices which are appropriate to providing meaning in different "language-games" or human scenarios of life.  With an appreciation of language we can understand that the restrictions put on language products of the scientific method are not the same which pertain to the aesthetic appreciation of Shakespeare or a poetic work or Holy Scripture.  There are works of writing which were produced from dream-like states of interior seeing and when such seeing is brought to text, it cannot be read or interpreted for the same meaning that we get from reading a reported event of current news.  It cannot be read or interpreted in the same way in which a scientific experiment is being observed and recorded.  We are variegated enough in our discursive practices so we need to be committed to surpassing ourselves into the fullness of manifold meanings.  This means inner seeing can contradict scientific seeing even while co-existing in each person as a language practitioner.  By nature we cannot avoid language craft and to accept the full vision of this marvelous language craft we need to avoid creating battles which we artificially create as being "out there...outside of language" because there is no such place.  We need to let language honestly bear the contradictions and ambiguities involved in being fully true and honest to continual surpassing human meanings.  We in communities of faith can embrace our variety of "altered state" seeing as handed on to us by our wisdom traditions and we do not blindly copy the details of applied wisdom in past cultures; we embrace the wisdom of "altered seeing" today which helps us with faith apply wisdom in the details of our lives today and do so with hopeful approximations of justice and love.

Holy, Wholly Negligible as a Metaphor

    In human experience we may grapple with trying to conceive of greatness in terms of quantity and we use the word “infinity” to refer to an impossible quantity.

    We perhaps use infinity as metaphorical attribute of God.  We may use infinity to refer to space, time and matter as a way of measuring the limits of human experience.

   The notion of infinity would present us with what is impossible to know.  If an infinite number of things are in relationship with each other, how would it be possible to know fully cause and effect relationships?  How could we gauge the effect of the flapping of butterfly wings on weather patterns?  We might say that the effect would be trivial, negligible or insignificant or unable to be registered in our methods of perception.  But what is the totally negligible effect of all of the events for which we have no access in measuring the sum total of all untraceable events?

    It could be that the intuitions about God have to do with human beings feeling very small in the face of what we cannot experience; we sense the effect of an infinite number of negligible and so we might indeed confess God as the Holy Negligible, or the effect of the infinite number events that we call insignificant because we cannot register in knowable ways their direct or collateral effect upon us.

     In the face of what we cannot know, in the face of the great negligible, humanity has had to tell stories to give purpose and meaning and science has been one of the stories of coming to meaning and purpose.

    Historically, we can note that when we did not travel very far in the world, we had people telling stories about travels in purgatory or the afterlife, in a place in the sky called heaven.  Such places were regarded to be knowable places in human experience.  So, persons  in medieval Europe knew how to get through purgatory, but they did know not know the existence of Tokyo or how to get there.  As knowledge has grown and the earth become to be discovered as a globe and gotten smaller through travel, there has been less concern about purgatory and the afterlife.

    As we have conquered more of the negligible, the nature of speculation about the unknown has been more along the lines of science fiction.

  Modern science has not ended the negligible; it has seemingly changed how we define and approach the negligible.  Modern science has not removed the negligible; it has but cleared up some of the immediate fog of the negligible.  But we are still small because the more area of the negligible that has been discovered, the more we have come to appreciate vastness and plenitude; the more we have come to appreciate the microscopic and the nanoscopic.

We are less certain about details of heaven and purgatory today, even while we can appreciate the meaning of interior and creative parallel world and its relevance to our external world.        
 As people of science we are elated with discoveries that become technological products, there remains tentativeness about any discovery or products because the once seeming negligible has been exposed to be not insignificant.  In the discovery process we view the negligible afresh but now standing on the pedestal of the latest discovery. 

  We as people of faith can embrace  tentativeness of our lives because of the sum total of the negligible that we encounter at any time.  This could help us be humble about presuming to use the poetry of our revelations as causative absolute agents of the world as it is.  Rather our Biblical metaphorical poetry should teach us respect for God as Holy, Wholly Negligible.