Secular Soul, Religious Refining / Advent Day 15

I awaken from a dream about being at Holden Village, the abandoned copper mine deep in the North Cascades which the Lutherans turned into an adult retreat center. Where some of us lived together a couple years in the mid-nineties. In the dream I was at Holden during a pastors’ convention. I don’t think that I knew anyone there. For some reason I was asked to present slides as an after-dinner program one of the evenings. I sat by myself at dinner, which I realized as the meal progressed, wasn’t very savvy, because I needed to be connecting with people so that they’d want to stay and watch, plus, I couldn’t find out who was introducing me, and so on.

The crowd thinned considerably after the meal, and so the AV guy decided to show the slides up on (and get everyone to sit up on) the stage. We eventually found a way that the setting sun wasn’t so bright that the slides could be seen. More people returned and brought chairs up. I surprised myself by starting the slides with my own introduction, telling my Holden story, how I’d always wanted to be the village pastor there, from my first visit. My sense of things went from scared and alienated to joyful and connected, in the simple sharing of my story. Everything suddenly was right, good, and fun.

It’s a recurring, basic theme for me that is hardwired, I think, from childhood. I remember it from standing around at junior high school dances, from meeting people at church youth group retreats. You feel and behave like a social outcast, and then you are forced somehow to reach out, which connects with other people’s equally felt but more effectively hidden alienation. The end result, at least for me, is exhilaration. It’s a kind of social bipolar disorder. Prep the sermon, feel like it’s a bomb, preach it, people like it, you feel exhausted and happy. Dial the phone number, sweating, and then begin talking, forgetting yourself in a great conversation...

But the image I woke up with was of a fire in my chest cavity. A transforming, a creative fire, which takes experience and events and burns away the dross, concentrating the gold. The idea comes partly from reading Camille Paglia, a progressive lesbian atheist who says that religion is required for good art. She was talking about how Europe has entered a kind of decadence. All Italy cares about, she says, is soccer. No 21st century Fellini, no painters, writers. Just paranoia about Muslims taking over. And she attributes it to a failure of the secular world view which rules in Europe, not that she has any interest in what the Vatican or the Southern Baptist Convention are serving up.

She’s talking more about passion (motivation), trust (faithfulness), stories (cultural narratives), images (icons) and hopes for a transformed future that are believed in and create a stimulating context (safe, exhilarating) for creative expression to take flight. She’d probably see the chaos of America – immigration, gun control, feminism, fundamentalism – as being a rich and spicy soup.

I do remember how she said secularists tend to veer off into talking about the human prospect primarily in economic variables. "People deserve health care. Women deserve equal pay for equal work. Racism deprives kids of a future..."

Strikingly, Paglia doesn’t believe (!!) in global climate change (talk about the failure of secularism – her inability to see the profound mystery of warming which is right before her eyes) or else she’d probably add scientific apocalypticism to her list of the debilitating features of the earnest secular mind. In the Stephen Dunn poem I used a couple weeks ago preaching to the UU’s, the voice in the poem tagged this malady as "cynicism / that other sadness."

When I woke, I had the image of what it means to have faith, it’s this fire inside you. You reliably connect with "God" or "hope" or "what-I-do-is-really-important-to-our-world," a sense which you harbor deep inside your being. The rest of the day, whatever you receive, whatever befalls you, whatever you give, however you behave, comes out of this furnace of love, trust, gratitude, and hope.

This is what I think of as "spirituality," that ability of people to feel right in their lives, and energized to contribute something meaningful in their place and time in life.