It's no surprise that the Eucharist is described as the central mystery of the Christian church service.
It didn't used to be something that happened at every service, and some churches still reserve it for special occasions, but in my church, it's something we do together every week.
My sister once told me a story, second or third hand, about a friend who was travelling in some part of the world that was in the opposite hemisphere (Antarcticans often travel to various places in the Pacific that Americans don't usually get to, on their way back home from deploying), and talking, I believe in the local language, to a local person, and they got onto the topic of religion, and the local person said, 'Oh, yes, I've heard of your God. He has three heads, and you eat him!"
That's the most exotic understanding of the ceremony, and the most mundane also comes from my sister, from a class she was taking while living in DC. They talked about the history of the Early Church, like, the first few hundred years, when Christians were underground, and small in number, and had to meet very privately in each other's homes. The structure of the current Liturgy still follows the meetings of those times - first is the teaching section, with readings from the Book, and remarks by the most senior person there, some group singing, some sending of well wishes to those connected to us, then the second part is a dinner party. The group forms into a body by sharing a meal together.
The whole thing got started at the Last Supper, after all.
So, there's quite a bit you can make of the Eucharist, on the spectrum from spooky to mundane, and in our church it tends to be a somewhat somber, serious, and extremely private thing. We have all greeted each other earlier in the service, during the Passing of the Peace (which the rector of my Mom's church calls "Recess", with some disdain I think), but after the hymn that takes place during the Offertory (during which time my offering is usually the singing of the hymn itself, since the collection plate doesn't come past up in the choir stalls, and I tend to bundle my giving and do it once annually), suddenly the Priest, the Celebrant, has moved from the lectern that is up at the front of the sanctuary all the way to the back behind the altar, and the acolytes and the Deacon are beside him, hands clasped. The words are from a different part of the Prayer Book, and more ritualized (echoing more strongly back to the childhoods of the Cradle Episcopalians in the room, not to mention all the former Catholics of which there are many, many), and the gestured also more ritualized and more grand.
If a Priest is there, and not just a Deacon, then the deal is that the host wafers and the wine are turned, right then, transubstantiated into the Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus Christ (capitalization for effect). His words and gestured make them into sacred substance.
The congregation then goes up, row by row, and kneels at the altar rail, and accepts the host and wine, and then walks back, and those who know to do it will kneel in prayer, and there's always music because our Organist is always first, closest to the rightmost part of the rail, and often the Choir will do our big bang-up Anthem during this time but he usually waits until everyone is sitting back down again, so there's that time for prayerful contemplation afterward, except when you're in the Choir and then it's a bit more brief because you need to get your music out and look over that one tricky interval just the one last time. After the Choir sings, the Priest and Deacon and acolytes sometimes have more work to do, cleaning the altar and putting things away, and I believe the Priest drinks the remainder of the consecrated wine, and then there's a prayer of Thanksgiving that we all say together on our knees, I rather love this prayer, because...well, here it is in its entirety:
Eternal God, heavenly Father,
you have graciously accepted us as living members
of your Son our Savior Jesus Christ,
and you have fed us with spiritual food
in the Sacrament of his Body and Blood.
Send us now into the world in peace,
and grant us strength and courage
to love and serve you
with gladness and singleness of heart;
through Christ our Lord. Amen.
(from The Online Book of Common Prayer, http://www.bcponline.org/)
Thanks for feeding us, and now send me out with a reminder to be better, and do better. I love that part of the service.
But back to the Eucharist ritual itself. If we trace things back to the early church, this is basically a dinner party, right? We are bonding by eating together. And in fact, the Body of Christ is a name for the collection of people who make up the whole Christian Church, worldwide.
However, it is also a spooky Holy Mystery, and bread and wine are being turned into human flesh and human blood, of a man who died more than 2000 years ago, yet here he is, right in our presence. And the first time this happened, it was very very sad, because it was his last dinner with his close and beloved followers, before he died, the next afternoon.
So that probably explains the somberness of the members of my church congretation, as they go up to receive Communion, and even more so as they walk back to their places, where they will kneel and contemplate and pray for a bit.
I'm so used to catching people's eye and smiling and saying their name in greeting - our church contains quite a few long hallways so this is often how you meet people. I want to smile and meet their eye, because, I realize, it makes me feel connected, it helps knit us together as an Us, a We.
But no one meets my gaze, when they're walking back from the Eucharistic rail. They don't flinch, or avert, or frown in chastisement, but they just walk calmly on, with gaze forward and expressions impassive.
It's a dinner party, right? That is the signature thing that binds us all together in this one community, and the man told us to do it for that very reason, too, right? But in the moment itself, everyone is very solitary, and doesn't connect through regular human mechanisms like smiling and connecting with eyes.
We are Together, but each one of us is also Alone, We do this Alone thing, Together.
Sunday, June 14, 2015
Monday, June 8, 2015
My Cosmology
I believe that the only things that exist are the entities that make up physical reality. I believe that reality consists of the things that are studied by the physical sciences.
So, although I obviously attend church, and call myself a member of a denomination (Episcopalian), and find myself going deeper into the liturgy and traditions and exploring what they mean and what they can bring to me, strictly speaking, I don't believe in God.
At all. Really don't. Really, really don't, at all.
Or souls, or Heaven, or a spiritual plane that is separate from physical reality.
I even have trouble with the existence of abstract realms. I've had some fierce arguments with both Mathematicians and Physicists, because they think they are explorers, mapping out things that actually exist, independently of them, and I know that they are just constructing formal systems, human inventions, games that have certain rules that humans invented and humans can change. Which is why paradoxes have never bothered me at all. Just because your formal system breaks down when you think about the barber who shaves everyone but himself, that doesn't mean someone both is and is not out there in reality, it just means your formal system is broken. And just because an equation tells you something is both a wave and a particle, that doesn't mean that something out there in reality actually is both a wave and a particle, you just need to go back to your drawing board and see where your theory went wrong.
I read recently somewhere that people who are bad at Math also have a more informal attitude about money. Yep. Money seems unreal and invented to me, just like numbers do.
So, the project for me is, how do I explain all the things I need to explain about the universe, with only physical building blocks to build them from, or else dismiss them and accept living without them?
That's what this blog is here to explore, as I work out more and more answers to the questions. But I wanted to make this formal statement about the ground rules, just to get it down in black and white.
So, although I obviously attend church, and call myself a member of a denomination (Episcopalian), and find myself going deeper into the liturgy and traditions and exploring what they mean and what they can bring to me, strictly speaking, I don't believe in God.
At all. Really don't. Really, really don't, at all.
Or souls, or Heaven, or a spiritual plane that is separate from physical reality.
I even have trouble with the existence of abstract realms. I've had some fierce arguments with both Mathematicians and Physicists, because they think they are explorers, mapping out things that actually exist, independently of them, and I know that they are just constructing formal systems, human inventions, games that have certain rules that humans invented and humans can change. Which is why paradoxes have never bothered me at all. Just because your formal system breaks down when you think about the barber who shaves everyone but himself, that doesn't mean someone both is and is not out there in reality, it just means your formal system is broken. And just because an equation tells you something is both a wave and a particle, that doesn't mean that something out there in reality actually is both a wave and a particle, you just need to go back to your drawing board and see where your theory went wrong.
I read recently somewhere that people who are bad at Math also have a more informal attitude about money. Yep. Money seems unreal and invented to me, just like numbers do.
So, the project for me is, how do I explain all the things I need to explain about the universe, with only physical building blocks to build them from, or else dismiss them and accept living without them?
That's what this blog is here to explore, as I work out more and more answers to the questions. But I wanted to make this formal statement about the ground rules, just to get it down in black and white.
Sunday, June 7, 2015
On Clutter and Decluttering
Last week I got into a Facebook argument with a Buddhist about our attachment to material things.
What started it, if you go back a few steps, is a trendy popular discussion about "Decluttering". I have certainly been involved in it as a pop phenomenon. I Facebook-friended a page called "Decluttering 101" as a New Year's resolution in January, and actually did a few of the daily 15 minute exercises, before the rest of my life rushed back in to my free time like the walls of the Red Sea. I have been in long conversations at work with co-workers who are trying to clear out their basements, scan all their old photos so they don't have to keep them around, get rid of their kid's stuff. In most of these conversations, I just stare blankly, because I am a notorious "Keeper", from a long like of Keepers, famous for never deleting any emails (I just move them to something called "Inbox - Old"), needing a new filing cabinet because I just move piles of paper into the empty drawers, buying a big house so that I have room for all of my belongings.
But I have experienced some joy from decluttering, as well. Informally, since I abandoned the strict calendar of the 101 site, still I have culled and given away some clothes, about 20 old purses, two boxes of books, lots of kitchen items, some expired cans of food (did you know that cans of food can expire?), some bottles of hair products that I tried once and will never use more of. It is a good feeling, decluttering. Getting things out of your house that you have no use for.
Still, I usually end up on the Keeper side of most conversations with other women, and don't share their values. I was in a group of older member of my Mom's church, and all of them were talking about trying to downsize their "stuff", which they pronounced with a spitting vitriol. Get rid of your "stuff"! Why do we have so much "stuff"? And you'd better get rid of it, one woman pronounced, because your kids sure as heck aren't going to want any of it. I looked at my own Mom ruefully, because I have informed her that she and Dad are to get rid of nothing, nothing, without consulting me, and I know in my heart that what I really want is to preserve their house, exactly as it is, forever, with everything in exactly the place that I remember it being, so that I can always go back there, to that place that has been the anchor of my wandering heart for so, so many years.
So, when I was this article called "Let's Celebrate the Art of Clutter" <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/style/lets-celebrate-the-art-of-clutter.html?_r=0> going around on Facebook, I was delighted to see someone beautifully and articulately express the Keeper's point of view. Who was this woman? Dominique Browning, published in the New York Times. No wonder it was so thoughtfully well written.
I posted it on my own Facebook page, because it seemed to speak for me. I did include my dual response to clutter in my comment on the post: "As someone who has derived joy recently both from sending a pile of clothes to Goodwill and also from installing a new bookcase, I can see both sides, so here's something from the under-represented anti-decluttering, pro-stuff point of view." And I extracted this quote:
"I would like to submit an entirely different agenda, one that is built on love, cherishing and timelessness. One that acknowledges that in living, we accumulate. We admire. We desire. We love. We collect. We display."
I'm not sure if it was my post or someone else's or the cumulative effect of many people sharing the article, but the Buddhist on his own Facebook page posted an angry diatribe. His take on the popularity of the article, if I am summarizing him accurately, was that it was just the bourgeoisie making a self-congratulatory defense of the status quo. That the persecution the New York Times writer had described was just the first tiny inklings of an alternative point of view raising its head, and that her article was a disingenuous squashing of consideration. Acquisition is not going anywhere in America, he said, so there's no reason to "defend" it. And he accused the author and all of us of completely missing the point. He had posted a post of his own, a week or so earlier, reporting that he was exploring simplicity, and clearing his home and life out of clutter, which I had completely forgotten, and certainly was not thinking of when I posted my own link.
I was rattled by being called "bourgie", and felt that I was being misunderstood in turn, because the people from whom I felt the strongest attack were themselves extremely bourgie women. In fact, one could argue that their love of de-cluttering and of being "Throwers" was bound up in Capitalist waste and planned obsolesense, that they bought things only to throw them away to make room for buying more things to throw away.
There is one way in which we're all saying the same thing. The Decluttering expert on Facebook and the woman who wrote the celebration of clutter both say we should have things around us that we love and treasure. Everyone is saying that it's bad to surround yourself with piles of useless garbage. The woman celebrating clutter is saying it's good to have things around you that you love, and an article I saw in a whole different Facebook post about the Japanese approach to decluttering said that you should only keep things around you that you love, so it's a junk-drawer-in-the-kitchen is half-empty or half-full type situation.
But what I appreciated about the article was that it presented acquisition as a type of autobiography, which really resonated with me. Since I think that human life has no intrinsic meaning, the only way we can give our lives meaning is by our acts, our choices of action, one action into the next moment by moment, with nothing predetermined and everything free for us to choose, and by choosing and acting on our choices we define ourselves - when we look back at the end of a life, it has meaning because it has been defined by all those series of choices moment by moment along the way. So, the stuff one accumulates by the time one gets into adulthood is a physical manifestation of living our human lives. Which gives the stuff meaning, in the same way that a narrative gives a life meaning.
Plus, the only way we can live on after we die is to leave some physical impression on others. The stories about us (narratives) that live on in others' memories can give us life beyond our death, but the stuff that we have accumulated, as long as the stories are still associated with it, can make our existence have a lasting impact on the world as well.
So I think this is why the responses were so emotional, on both sides. If someone, whether a bourgie lady co-worker or a Buddhist neighbor, attacks my attachment to my stuff, they are attacking the relationship that gives my life not just meaning but a chance at an afterlife.
It then occurred to me, later, after thinking about this exchange some more, that of course I seem to have a materialistic point of view, the point of view criticized as being crass and base. Materialistic, because I am a Materialist. I believe that nothing exists besides material reality. Everything that exists is made up of physical stuff, the stuff that sciences can study. Atoms, cells, rocks, plants, planets, solar systems, but nothing beyond, nothing on any kind of higher plane. Human lives have value as physically lived actions, in a community of other physical things, the greater human community. We don't have souls, we won't go to any kind of heaven after we leave our bodies, there is no other higher plane of perfection or spirit or spirituality.
Does he think there is, my interlocutor? I don't know; the higher plane figures in Greek philosophy, and Christianity of course, but I don't know which other of the world's religions. But if he does, this would explain something foundational about our dispute. I value my things and my attachment to them because they are physical traces of my physically lived life, which will persist beyond me to help tell my story and keep it alive in memory. He believes, if I'm interpreting correctly, which I'm probably not, but I believe that he believes that being attached to physical things keeps us rooted in this lower plane, when our focus and concentration should be on a higher plane of spiritual enlightenment and possible perfection. Does he? Well, Plato did, anyway.
But I am connected to my stuff and therefore open to the accusation of being Materialistic because I am a Materialist.
Postscript: The next time I saw the Buddhist in person was at the opening of an art exhibit by another mutual friend, which was entitled "Shtuff".
What started it, if you go back a few steps, is a trendy popular discussion about "Decluttering". I have certainly been involved in it as a pop phenomenon. I Facebook-friended a page called "Decluttering 101" as a New Year's resolution in January, and actually did a few of the daily 15 minute exercises, before the rest of my life rushed back in to my free time like the walls of the Red Sea. I have been in long conversations at work with co-workers who are trying to clear out their basements, scan all their old photos so they don't have to keep them around, get rid of their kid's stuff. In most of these conversations, I just stare blankly, because I am a notorious "Keeper", from a long like of Keepers, famous for never deleting any emails (I just move them to something called "Inbox - Old"), needing a new filing cabinet because I just move piles of paper into the empty drawers, buying a big house so that I have room for all of my belongings.
But I have experienced some joy from decluttering, as well. Informally, since I abandoned the strict calendar of the 101 site, still I have culled and given away some clothes, about 20 old purses, two boxes of books, lots of kitchen items, some expired cans of food (did you know that cans of food can expire?), some bottles of hair products that I tried once and will never use more of. It is a good feeling, decluttering. Getting things out of your house that you have no use for.
Still, I usually end up on the Keeper side of most conversations with other women, and don't share their values. I was in a group of older member of my Mom's church, and all of them were talking about trying to downsize their "stuff", which they pronounced with a spitting vitriol. Get rid of your "stuff"! Why do we have so much "stuff"? And you'd better get rid of it, one woman pronounced, because your kids sure as heck aren't going to want any of it. I looked at my own Mom ruefully, because I have informed her that she and Dad are to get rid of nothing, nothing, without consulting me, and I know in my heart that what I really want is to preserve their house, exactly as it is, forever, with everything in exactly the place that I remember it being, so that I can always go back there, to that place that has been the anchor of my wandering heart for so, so many years.
So, when I was this article called "Let's Celebrate the Art of Clutter" <http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/31/style/lets-celebrate-the-art-of-clutter.html?_r=0> going around on Facebook, I was delighted to see someone beautifully and articulately express the Keeper's point of view. Who was this woman? Dominique Browning, published in the New York Times. No wonder it was so thoughtfully well written.
I posted it on my own Facebook page, because it seemed to speak for me. I did include my dual response to clutter in my comment on the post: "As someone who has derived joy recently both from sending a pile of clothes to Goodwill and also from installing a new bookcase, I can see both sides, so here's something from the under-represented anti-decluttering, pro-stuff point of view." And I extracted this quote:
"I would like to submit an entirely different agenda, one that is built on love, cherishing and timelessness. One that acknowledges that in living, we accumulate. We admire. We desire. We love. We collect. We display."
I'm not sure if it was my post or someone else's or the cumulative effect of many people sharing the article, but the Buddhist on his own Facebook page posted an angry diatribe. His take on the popularity of the article, if I am summarizing him accurately, was that it was just the bourgeoisie making a self-congratulatory defense of the status quo. That the persecution the New York Times writer had described was just the first tiny inklings of an alternative point of view raising its head, and that her article was a disingenuous squashing of consideration. Acquisition is not going anywhere in America, he said, so there's no reason to "defend" it. And he accused the author and all of us of completely missing the point. He had posted a post of his own, a week or so earlier, reporting that he was exploring simplicity, and clearing his home and life out of clutter, which I had completely forgotten, and certainly was not thinking of when I posted my own link.
I was rattled by being called "bourgie", and felt that I was being misunderstood in turn, because the people from whom I felt the strongest attack were themselves extremely bourgie women. In fact, one could argue that their love of de-cluttering and of being "Throwers" was bound up in Capitalist waste and planned obsolesense, that they bought things only to throw them away to make room for buying more things to throw away.
There is one way in which we're all saying the same thing. The Decluttering expert on Facebook and the woman who wrote the celebration of clutter both say we should have things around us that we love and treasure. Everyone is saying that it's bad to surround yourself with piles of useless garbage. The woman celebrating clutter is saying it's good to have things around you that you love, and an article I saw in a whole different Facebook post about the Japanese approach to decluttering said that you should only keep things around you that you love, so it's a junk-drawer-in-the-kitchen is half-empty or half-full type situation.
But what I appreciated about the article was that it presented acquisition as a type of autobiography, which really resonated with me. Since I think that human life has no intrinsic meaning, the only way we can give our lives meaning is by our acts, our choices of action, one action into the next moment by moment, with nothing predetermined and everything free for us to choose, and by choosing and acting on our choices we define ourselves - when we look back at the end of a life, it has meaning because it has been defined by all those series of choices moment by moment along the way. So, the stuff one accumulates by the time one gets into adulthood is a physical manifestation of living our human lives. Which gives the stuff meaning, in the same way that a narrative gives a life meaning.
Plus, the only way we can live on after we die is to leave some physical impression on others. The stories about us (narratives) that live on in others' memories can give us life beyond our death, but the stuff that we have accumulated, as long as the stories are still associated with it, can make our existence have a lasting impact on the world as well.
So I think this is why the responses were so emotional, on both sides. If someone, whether a bourgie lady co-worker or a Buddhist neighbor, attacks my attachment to my stuff, they are attacking the relationship that gives my life not just meaning but a chance at an afterlife.
It then occurred to me, later, after thinking about this exchange some more, that of course I seem to have a materialistic point of view, the point of view criticized as being crass and base. Materialistic, because I am a Materialist. I believe that nothing exists besides material reality. Everything that exists is made up of physical stuff, the stuff that sciences can study. Atoms, cells, rocks, plants, planets, solar systems, but nothing beyond, nothing on any kind of higher plane. Human lives have value as physically lived actions, in a community of other physical things, the greater human community. We don't have souls, we won't go to any kind of heaven after we leave our bodies, there is no other higher plane of perfection or spirit or spirituality.
Does he think there is, my interlocutor? I don't know; the higher plane figures in Greek philosophy, and Christianity of course, but I don't know which other of the world's religions. But if he does, this would explain something foundational about our dispute. I value my things and my attachment to them because they are physical traces of my physically lived life, which will persist beyond me to help tell my story and keep it alive in memory. He believes, if I'm interpreting correctly, which I'm probably not, but I believe that he believes that being attached to physical things keeps us rooted in this lower plane, when our focus and concentration should be on a higher plane of spiritual enlightenment and possible perfection. Does he? Well, Plato did, anyway.
But I am connected to my stuff and therefore open to the accusation of being Materialistic because I am a Materialist.
Postscript: The next time I saw the Buddhist in person was at the opening of an art exhibit by another mutual friend, which was entitled "Shtuff".
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