Recognition

Rereading Robin Wall Kimmerer's wondrous Braiding Sweetgrass for class on Tuesday. I'd forgotten or missed that she knows who's reading her.

It takes real effort to remember that it's not just in a wigwam that the earth gives us everything we need. The exchange of recognition, gratitude, and reciprocity for these gifts is just as important in a Brooklyn flat as under a birch bark roof. (240)

I was there

It's that Friday Christians call Good. I went to the Church of the Holy Apostles for the suitably spare service, which was good for all sorts of reasons.

It's my home church, but since I celebrate the Easter Vigil there I tend to take in the other parts of the Triduum elsewhere. (True to form, last night we were at our neighborhood Catholic Co-Cathedral of St. Joseph.) But if there's something right in welcoming the Easter light with your regular people, in your regular place, it's no less appropriate to commemorate the Passion here, to face the Reproaches exquisitely sung by a choir of familiar faces, to adore the bare wooden cross leaning on the altar you face at a distance all year, to sing "Were you there...," your voice breaking in the final hush-voiced verse, to hear the bell that calls you to worship all year peal those thirty-three times.

Interactive

After a few months away, paid a visit to that savviest of museums, the Rubin, today. Interlaced with multimedia it's as thrilling as this ingenious portable mani shrine (tashi gomang) of Padmasam- bhava's Palace on the Copper-Colored Mountain (18th/19th century) must have been back in the day...

Swaddling

A new leaf unspools

Fonts of wisdom

This week saw the completion of Lang's first floor redesign, which includes this splashy spread of the areas of study we offer. It's rather busy when you look closely - each one appears three or four times superimposed (most jarringly in Politics). Sandwiched between Philosophy and Sociology, Religious Studies appears to be the only field that has the keys too the kingdom - or at least the keyhole...!

Hermeneutic community

My friend M guest lectured in "Performing the Problem of Suffering: The Book of Job and the Arts" today, to excellent effect. His charge was to talk about the use of Job in the Liturgy of the Dead, but he managed to do a lot more. He introduced the students to the role of scripture in liturgy as communal performance, first in the Mass (hence the lovely liturgical calendar above), in the Liturgy of the Hours, and finally in the Office of the Dead. This was in service of a generalizable understanding of the Church as a "hermeneutic community," and some broader points about reading. Nobody, he exclaimed, ever reads alone (whatever they may think!). And the communities of interpretation which make our reading possible are ones in which we bear a responsibility to listen to each other - even, indeed especially, those who we find "irritating." And these are communities which include the dead. Some things he offered us to think about:

1. No book of scripture is ever read in isolation. It is always read in conjunction/dialogue with other parts of the scripture. 
2. The scripture is not only presented to the ear – it is often put into the mouth (i.e. embodied) by the congregation. 
3. The reading is not individual, but communal. 
4. The reading is not chosen by the individual, but mandated for the community. 
5. A religious community is often though of as a group of people who agree about things. It might better be described as a group of people who agree about what is worth disagreeing about. 
6. The readings are set according to the Liturgical Calendar, but there are moments in the community in which the calendar is interrupted and/or supplemented by extraordinary events – like the death of a member of the community. 

In between naughty and self-deprecating asides he made it all dovetail beautifully with the Book of Job - itself a depiction of a hermeneutic community in crisis, he reminded us (they disagree but nobody leaves) - and the stuff of an Office in which the dead and the living grieve, rage and pray for each other. A marvel, and everyone was paying attention!

I've long known that M is a master teacher (he taught for a long time at Lang) but this was my first time seeing him in action, and with a group of students he didn't know to boot. I learned a lot, too!

Not too cheesy

What to serve to balance the richness of cheese fondue? We found the answer in a column with the wonderfully British name "Yotam Ottolenghi's recipes for tinned pulses." These caramelized onions joined quinoa (red and white), pepitas, avocado, lemon juice, parsley, basil and (tinned!) chickpeas.

Spring snow frolics

Back on the grid

Home sweet home

Morning beachcombing

 

At the Del Mar beach, shells which tell stories...

Most of them were in fragments... until this one

Definitely Springing

Early Spring

My father and I counted twenty-three kinds of plants already in bloom

as we strolled along the Guy Fleming Trail in Torrey Pines State

 

Nature Reserve this afternoon - not including the ferns!

Jet Blue

Looking for all the world like the landscape in the background of a Netherlandish Madonna, an early morning aerial view of the winding Hudson River and the shining city where it meets the sea.

Aspiration

This is the Church of the Holy Apostles. Like many an older New York church, its spire used to be the tallest thing in the neighborhood... no longer! The new Hudson Yards district is rising just to its northwest.

Times a'changing! What I really want to tell you that is that Holy Apostles has a bright future because its Vestry (of which I'm a member) has unanimously chosen a brilliant new rector... but that's all I can say.

UPDATE: It's official! Holy Apostles has called the Rev. Anna Pearson to be our new rector.

Landscape stroll

Went on a bit of an art binge this morning. It started in the Met's China galleries with students from "Religion & Ecology." Hard to imagine a better way of communicating the "liquid ecology" we'd read about than a scroll painting like "Remote Buddhist temples among autumn mountains" above (14th-15th C., unidentified artist). Since I had time I stayed on at the Met, encountering further landscapes in an exhibit of mountain paintings from Korea, and a lovely exhibition about Thomas Cole, one of the US's most famous landscape painters. This show,

which feels a little like the scene in the tiny work above (from the Ashmolean), lets us see paintings (Turner! Constable!) which Cole saw when traveling in Europe, and then experience anew his imaginings of the Hudson river landscape, and the famous "Course of Empire" (from the New-York Historical Society). Enough never being enough, I popped into the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, where I found a 15th century Iskander (Alexander) lecturing the seven great philosophers of Greece, with two onlookers tittering behind the hill. Delights!

Reddy for Spring

Museuming

In "Religion and Ecology," we're making our way through James Miller's China's Green Religion.

To help the students understand the profoundly different cosmology of Daoism, where "liquid vitality" streams and flows, pervades and condenses, sometimes into solids (like human bones or mountains), sometimes into liquids (like organs or spittle or waterfalls), sometimes into liquids that then congeal (like ink), and always in specific locales, I'm taking the class to the Met to spend time with Chinese ink landscape paintings.

But at MoMA today (a friend is visiting from Japan, so I had an excuse to go again) I found a lovely evocation of the "porous" selves Miller recommends we accept we are: Louise Bourgeois's "Articulated Lair" (1986), a circular enclosure of folding screens (with two small doorways for passing through), with mysterious pendants swaying almost imperceptibly as air is pushed by the bodies of passing viewers. Wow!

The view down over the Lang courtyard, south from the president's office's small conference room. Even from five stories up you can see that the trees are budding!

Something's happening

Nice to be living in the same city as these ...

Varieties XVIII-Epilogue: Almost a bodhisattva

I had completely forgotten how the Varieties ends. Not just with the lowest common denominator which goes lower still to a mere "MORE," which might be no more than approaching the world as if it's friendly to you, but that the Epilogue, in which he reiterates the "piecemeal supernaturalism" of his pragmatic way in religion, expresses an affinity not only with polytheism but with Buddhism as he understood it.

But what really moved me was a line I'd forgotten, from the Epilogue:

the current of thought in academic circles runs against me, and I feel like a man who must set his back against an open door quickly if he does not wish to see it closed and locked (523)

This is a dramatic image for the pragmatist resistance against an all-smothering universalism, whether naturalist or supernaturalist, and it speaks to James' somewhat difficult position within the science of religion he is proposing. The Varieties refers repeatedly to a "subliminal door," that space at the edge of conscious experience through which anything supernatural which might come to us can only come (243). James has repeatedly let on that his own door is shut, maybe even bolted. (I've always taken this line in his discussion of the Sick Soul to express a personal hope: Even late in life some thaw, some release may take place, some bolt be shot back in the barrenest breast, and the man's hard heart may soften and break into religious feeling. (205))

Holding a door open with your back, strange and striking image! He's not going through the door except incidentally, and not facing into the religious but away from it. Or perhaps one should say, in the direction it faces as it enters human lives: he sees how it helps, even if he is not himself helped. But he helps it help. Which might be enough:

Some men are even disinterested enough to be willing to be in the unsaved remnant as far as their persons go, if only they can be persuaded that their cause will prevail (526)

Not quite the bodhisattva (his Buddhism is the Victorian idea of karma, the self-made sufferer), this is more like a martyr. That's a religious variety he didn't highlight in his discussion, even among the saints, but it fits within the heroism he thinks all men called to.

Once for all and definitively

It's been a while since I read James' Varieties closely enough to recall that Job has a part here, too. After all isn't he the ultimate pragmatist?

That's in the chapter on philosophy (448), which James thinks had better give up trying to cook up its own religion out of ratiocination and instead accept its role as a Science of Religions, vetting hypotheses arising from experience, where religion truly lives. The Job of 40:4 and 42:5 has certainly left philosophical theology behind! But Job features twice before, too. Once, he's a paragon of religious seriousness (76):

The one speaking at 11:8 - it is as high a heaven &c - is really Zophar, not Job, but no matter. The first citation in the book (42) is to the infamous 13:15, Job as poster child for a masochistic Christianity:

Emotionally superior to mere Stoic resignation is the same trust which survives the rout of philosophical religion by the problem of evil.

Gave it a rest

I tried for a final time to excite the "Religion & Ecology" class about Pope Francis' Laudato Si' today, having them try to reconstruct what it identifies as problems, causes, solutions, and what religion adds. We did pretty well on the first three, but blanks were drawn on the fourth, though they granted that if stories like Cain and Abel worked for you, you should use them. More power to Francis for that - Laudato Si' is addressed to all people, not just Catholics, after all. But has religion nothing to contribute (and is its contribution only instrumental in addressing problems fully articulable in secular terms)? Before springing on them the challenging ideas that we are only bound to Brother Sun, Sister Moon and the rest* through a common Father, and (relatedly) that without a Creator everything is an ultimately valueless accident, we went through this lovely crystallization of the encyclical's way of understanding problems, causes and religious solutions:

§237. On Sunday, our participation in the Eucharist has special importance. Sunday, like the Jewish Sabbath, is meant to be a day which heals our relationships with God, with ourselves, with others and with the world. Sunday is the day of the Resurrection, the “first day” of the new creation, whose first fruits are the Lord’s risen humanity, the pledge of the final transfiguration of all created reality. It also proclaims “man’s eternal rest in God”.[168] In this way, Christian spirituality incorporates the value of relaxation and festivity. We tend to demean contemplative rest as something unproductive and unnecessary, but this is to do away with the very thing which is most important about work: its meaning. We are called to include in our work a dimension of receptivity and gratuity, which is quite different from mere inactivity. Rather, it is another way of working, which forms part of our very essence. It protects human action from becoming empty activism; it also prevents that unfettered greed and sense of isolation which make us seek personal gain to the detriment of all else. The law of weekly rest forbade work on the seventh day, “so that your ox and your donkey may have rest, and the son of your maidservant, and the stranger, may be refreshed” (Ex 23:12). Rest opens our eyes to the larger picture and gives us renewed sensitivity to the rights of others. And so the day of rest, centred on the Eucharist, sheds it light on the whole week, and motivates us to greater concern for nature and the poor.

The idea of the Sabbath, broader and older than that of the Eucharist, is so rich! As in most every section of Laudato Si' there's so much to like here, Catholic, Catholic-inspired and just, well, wise. Does it need the patriarchal foundation of the transcendent Father Creator?

*Not all the rest. Pope Francis doesn't include the whole Canticle of Francis of Assisi from which he takes the name for his encyclical. In §87, we encounter Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Brother Wind, Sister Water and Brother Fire, but not Sister Mother Earth or Sister Death!

Scherben bringen Glück

Sometimes when God closes a door she opens a window.
(I broke a glass but my partner found the perfect way to console me.)

Precolumbian treasure

Something extraordinary came into my possession today. It's a page from an old German book, depicting a scene beloved of Christian anti-semites (see Matthew 27:25 for the text of the twisting speech scroll, explained in German overleaf: das die juden die rachsal des pluts cristi über sich genummen haben). I felt I should take it out of circulation. Also, it cost just $5 (!!).

I guessed it was pretty old but was unprepared for what I found when I did a little internet sleuthing (with the help of google image); it's from Das Buch der Schatzbehälter, oder, Schrein der waren Reichtumer des Heils und ewyger Seligkeit genant (page 291), a book published in Leipzig in 1491 (!!!).  That's pre-Reformation, indeed pre-Columbian!

How this page (it's the seventy-fourth plate) came to be separated out I don't know, but it's well known that old illustrated books are often bought at auctions (or stolen from libraries) and dismembered for parts, the individual images sometimes fetching a higher price than the book did. Perhaps its companion images are individually framed, hanging on people's walls somewhere. But this might also be a case where someone ripped this particular page out of a book, perhaps for the reason I didn't return it to the pile of prints where I found it.

It's another mystery how it came to wind up at Housing Works thriftshop on 17th Street in Manhattan, five hundred twenty-seven years after publication. (Housing Works, an AIDS charity, is full of objects with stories we'll never know.) And the next question: what do I do with it? I'm inclined to give it to a library somewhere.

Brooklyn sunset

 Walk down Prospect Place at the right hour and you'll see this!

Varieties XVI-XVII: Ripples and pebbles

Having now read "Mysticism," we are reconciled to James. After the uncertainty about his argument and the abrasive characters he presented to us in healthy-mindedness and sick souls (can they be taken seriously? are some people doomed?), converts (is such change real?) and saints (why such extravagance?), he had us just where he wanted us. Who could not envy the person who had this experience (399);

And how reassuring James' tripartite conclusion that, while anyone who has as powerful an experience as this is entitled to build a life around it, it constitutes no kind of claim in the rest of us - just that, confronted with such experiences, we might safely conclude that there is more to life than we can articulate! We can listen to their accounts as to music. Indeed, the mystical speaks to us best through music, which gives us ontological messages which non-musical criticism is unable to contradict... There is a verge of the mind which these things haunt; and whispers therefrom mingle with the operations of our understanding, even as the waters of the infinite ocean send their waves to break among the pebbles that lie upon our shores. (421)

All was forgiven, as James knew it would be. At the end of "Mysticism," after he's arrived at these versatile conclusions, he confesses to over-generalizing and cherry-picking: he knows we'll excuse, even bless these inevitable editings. Nobody at this stage wants to hear more of most of the kinds of people whose testimonials he's "extracted"! And, more fundamentally, we're grateful for what he's given us. What he's slogged through for us, excerpting what we can use, are experiences which may determine attitudes though they cannot deliver formulas, and open a region though they fail to give a map. At any rate, they forbid a premature closing of our accounts with reality. (388) Latitudinarian! We noticed the usual terminological fuzziness, some new omissions - where is the erotic in his account of the mystical? - and tut-tutted at the "diabolical mysticism" he acknowledges but relegates to an aside, but he's our friend now. Nobody's perfect, he has his limits, there was more material than he could have included in any event... most fundamentally, he means well, we like where he's going.

Or where we think he's going! "Mysticism" offers a rest, but the journey continues. Will all still feel so warm and fuzzy when he turns to philosophy, science and the pragmatist metaphysics of "piecemeal supernaturalism" in the book's concluding chapters? Stay tuned!

Without a paddle

Not sure you'll be able to make them out from these photos, but fish - 

well, images of fish - swim along the narrow trail of the little park 

where Minetta Lane (and below it Minetta Creek) hits Sixth Avenue.