And on with the religion…

I know, topic might be getting old. But I have some questions to put to you all.

Talking about spirituality and spiritual experiences, Sarah, one of my uni friends,  that she didn’t disbelieve  ’spiritual experience’, but the systems of belief to which those experiences are ascribed. For example, to have some kind of ‘encounter’ in prayer is one thing, but to then assume that that spiritual experience correlates specifically to one kind of belief system, which belongs to a certain group of people in a certain part of the world at a certain time within a certain political system, might be completely unnecessary. Is it possible that just because there’s ‘something’ out there, it isn’t necessary to ascribe that something to, for example, a white, patriarchal, monotheistic, culturally specific religion (Christianity). Especially when so much about that religion is oppressive or in direct opposition to some of your other beliefs. I have been thinking about this since Sarah put it to me.

Why ought I ascribe my spiritual experiences to a certain organized form of religion? I mean, spirituality and faith and religion are all completely different things. And you can have one without the other.

I get very put off by the claims that Christian ideology ‘founded the western world and our legal system’, as though that is something to be proud of. Capitalism is so oppressive, just that it’s an indirect kind of oppression with no ONE person to blame. So saying things like that put me off A) because of their underlying political ideologies, and B) because in seeming SO pro-western, statements like this emphasise Christianity’s NON-universality.

For example, how is Christianity relevant to native peoples on the other side of the world in BC times? Or even now? People with their own history, culture, dreaming, etc etc that have gone on for millions of years? How can we claim Jesus, one dude who lived in Israel over 2,000 years ago (but more importantly, millions of years INTO human existence) overrides that?

Judaism and then Christianity belongs to only one cultural history and that is largely a western history and culture, except where the West have imposed those views on other people groups. Eg. Christianity is not the ‘native’ history and culture of most Eastern countries. It is not even that native religion of the U.S, or Australia. It accounts for only a percentage of the population. And yet it’s supposed to be true for everyone? I find this really difficult to get past.

In fact, I’m not at all sure people can get around it and not stand accused of working within an exclusive framework that doesn’t account for cultural others.

Any thoughts?

Against Pollution

In the summer of 2008-2009 my family travelled around the South island of New Zealand. It was my first trip overseas, and despite NZ being considered our closest neighboring country in terms of distance and culture, I was enthralled by everything I discovered that was ‘different’ there. There were little things, like different shaped coins, no Mcflurry’s at McDonalds and no fines if you were caught without a bus ticket. There were medium sized things, like the fabulous wood and metal jungle gym playgrounds in every town, the kind that disappeared in favour of unexciting plastic ones a good ten years ago in Melbourne. But the most obviously different thing was the natural environment.

The South Island is Lord of the Rings country; majestic, ancient and unyielding. What I considered as mountains in Australia dwarfed in comparison with the steep, snow-topped alps that cropped up like giant guardians of the land that our car wound and dipped through. The terrain was so present, so demanding of attention that it seemed to become everything. It was as though vision had surpassed all my other senses, which stood to the side to augment the experience of drinking, and almost drowning in, the beauty of the landscape. Ridiculous as it may sound, sometime in the second week I found myself staring down at my dinner plate, and instead of seeing peas, pumpkin and mashed potato, I saw a birdseye view of snow capped mountains, earthy rocks and green forest. That was when I felt I understood the phrase imprinted on the mind. My external environment had found its way into my inner world. The mountains and rivers and cliff-faces seemed as much inside of me as outside.

On the way home from Tullamarine Airport in Melbourne, I was startled at how flat and ordinary my environment had suddenly become. Deprived of the commanding beauty of the South Island, my insides felt instantly parched. A strange melancholy crept over me that first night back. I felt as though something that I had grasped hold of was fading quickly from sight. The sense of openness that had bloomed inside of me while overseas disappeared like water down a drain. New Zealand became photos I printed at Kmart, a few funny and a few semi-disastrous anecdotes, archived safely in the back of my mind as a place I’d like to go again someday.

Tonight I was driving across the valley from Yarra Glen to Coldstream when I glanced to my right across the vineyards and caught my breath at the technicoloured display in the sky. The purples, pinks and oranges of dusk lit up the bluish-grey clouds, and the modest Yarra Valley mountains rose to meet them. I glanced several times from the view to the road and back, trying to assimilate the radiance of the sky with the dullness of the world below. It reminded me of the way I’d felt when first struck by the beauty of New Zealand, and I started musing over the idea of vision.

I’ve been watching True Blood lately and in episode 5 of season one (yes, I’m aware I’m behind), Lafayette offers Jason the chance to “see the world with new eyes” by taking a drop of Vampire Blood. He says “V will open up your mind to everything you’ve been missing around you… let it take you deep. Follow it. Soak it in. See the world with new eyes.”

Vampire Blood might not be on the market around the Yarra Valley, but lately I’ve been talking with people about the idea of looking at the world through different sets of ‘glasses’. In my cynical, ‘disbelief’ glasses, life is meaningless, and the pain I’ve been experiencing lately makes no sense, has no greater purpose. Yet I had a couple of days a few weeks ago when I put on my ‘belief” glasses, or my ‘greater purpose or meaning’ glasses.  I can only say that I really did see the world through a new lens. My life; memories, feelings, thoughts and experiences, which had been scattered like bits of a torn-up map, seemed to piece themselves at least precariously together. In those few days, everything that had been floating disjointedly in my mind converged into some kind of coherent whole. I couldn’t see that ‘whole’ in it’s entirety, but it was there, surely and inescapably, reflecting back at me like the mountains on the island. I felt a sense of oneness and of sureness. I saw a partial explanation rather than no explanation at all. Instead of feeling like a helpless bunch of atoms trapped in the time-space continuum, I felt the loose threads of my tapestry moving on towards some kind of completion.

The people I shared that experience with advised me to ‘follow it’. And while I attempted to, my ‘trip’ seemed to gradually taper off.  I’m not sure at what point I ditched my ‘belief’ glasses, perhaps it was in a moment when I doubted the accuracy of my vision, or when I caught sight of the other people wearing the same glasses and decided that they didn’t suit me after all. But everything I’d seen so vividly and fully became only a few days later a memory, a postcard from another place and time. So today I started thinking: how do we trust the accuracy of our vision? How does a trip over seas, or a few days with a different set of glasses lose its veracity so soon?

I don’t have any answers, but something that came back to me was these verses from two songs by The Mountain Goats:

“Love love is gonna lead you by the hand
Into a white and soundless place
Now we see this
As in a mirror dimly
Then we shall see each other
Face to face”

- The Mountain Goats, Love Love Love.

“When the last days come
We shall see visions
More vivid than sunsets
Brighter than stars
We will recognize each other
And see ourselves for the first time
The way we really are”

The Mountain Goats, Against Pollution.

Both the songs rip off parts of the Bible, and I have to say those are the parts that I like. Before my ‘belief’ glasses fell off, I was sure I could see at least “in a mirror dimly” rather than not at all. I could see some kind of greater meaning and purpose in my life. Then I started to wonder if I just wanted to see something, grasp at some larger meaning that probably wasn’t there at all.

Yet isn’t my experience of seeing with my ‘belief’ glasses the same as my experience in New Zealand? Just because NZ has been reduced to 3x5inch matte photographs now doesn’t mean the experience of actually being there doesn’t exist in a greater reality. So maybe it’s the same with belief, with seeing the existence of a bigger picture beyond our current experience. You may have to fly there, or put on your glasses to see it, but perhaps it is waiting for you, if you’re willing to follow it.

New Zealand

'in a mirror dimly'

On The Color Purple

Don’t read this book if you like “light” reading. The first page is shocking, and the first quarter hideously depressing.
Do read this book if you want to rage, cry, laugh and feel alive and enlightened. Read it if you’re interested in african-american history, read it if you’re interested in feminism, or how a feminist culture might be born within the heart of a cruel, misogynistic time and place. Read it if you are prepared to grieve for oppressed people, and empathise with traumas so awful that life and humanity seem irredeemable.

This book makes me think of African-American feminist Audrey Lorde’s famous statement: “There is no hierarchy of oppressions” which somebody quoted recently. The Color Purple exemplifies that there is no hierarchy of oppressions, but that there is certainly a hierarchy within the oppressed. Be prepared for your views on gender, sexuality, and race to be challenged. Be prepared to think over your own conceptions of history, of culture, and of human relationships. And, at the risk of sound cliched, be open and encouraged by Walker’s uplifting picture of the hope and love that can be fostered within the most trying and unlikely circumstances. But I really don’t need to say any of this, because reading this book will do the work for you.

My favourite part of The Color Purple was a conversation between Celie and Shug. Perhaps its the turning point of the novel, perhaps it’s just pertinent to me personally. Either way, when I reached page 168, my eyes jumped ahead down the page of their own accord, faster than I could comprehend the text. I turned a page back and started again. Then I put the book down and sat in bed. And I just smiled.

Excerpt (abridged):

“When I found out God was white, and a man, I lost interest… God ain’t a he or a she, but a It… I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found it.”

“People think pleasing God is all God care about. But any fool living in the world can see it always trying to please us back.”

“Well, us talk and talk bout God, but I’m still adrift. Trying to chase that old white man out of my head. I been so busy thinking bout him I never truly notice nothing God make. Not a blade of corn (how it do that?) not the color purple (where it come from?) Not the little wildflowers. Nothing.

You have to git man off your eyeball, before you can see anything a’tall… whenever you try to pray, and man plop himself on the other end of it, tell him to git lost, say Shug. Conjure up flowers, wind, water, a big rock. But this hard work, let me tell you. He been there so long he don’t want to budge. He threaten lightening, floods, and earthquakes. Us fight. I hardly pray at all. Every time I conjure up a rock, I throw it. Amen.”