The Lonely Goth's Guide to Independent Catholicism

I’m procrastinating some teaching preparation at present that I’m getting increasingly irritated and impatient about - I’m supposed to lead students through a chapter on Tibetan Buddhist debate in Georges Dreyfus’s Sound of Two Hands Clapping. I hate it.  If you didn’t already know from a disclosure in the first paragraph that the author is a practitioner and the genre of the piece is apologetic, you would pick up on this fact almost immediately from the content - just as it is obvious that Victor Hori is deeply invested in the Rinzai Buddhist tradition and his piece on monastic training is apologetic for that institution, it is obvious that Georges Dreyfus is a Geluk geshe writing an apologetic for the scholasticism and polemicism of his tradition.  I hate both of those things (scholasticism and polemicism), as well as being deeply ethically-conflicted about the practice of debate.  This is an essay celebrating (virtually) all the irritating characteristics of Indo-Tibetan intellectual culture which finally drove me away from the study of Buddhist philosophical texts to the study of bhakti.

I don’t buy the basic thesis - that Tibetan debate is not merely a formal regimented exercise to train scholars to defend the niceties of arcane scholasticism according to the approved methods of discourse, but rather am open-ended debate in which it is possible to defend insights novel to the tradition and advance human knowledge, whose agonistic features do not crush and humiliate losers and inculcate feelings of pride and aggression in winners but tend towards the ethical and intellectual improvement of both.

I would like to suspend my skepticism about this thesis, because I prefer to think well rather than poorly about Tibetan Buddhists - but then I imagine the same kind of apology being made for Thomistic scholasticism as practiced by conservative Roman Catholics, and I don’t buy it - at all.  I know too well how scholastic arguments proceed, and I find the procedure and results of such argumentation horrifying - insular in approach (that is, convincing only to people who already agree with the conclusions), guaranteed to use any stratagem to replicate already approved positions or to discard otherwise-approved lines of argumentation when they are used to yield the “wrong” conclusions, and usually grossly misrepresentative of intellectual opponents (either out of a strawman mentality or because the debater has spent so long in the intellectual ghetto that he has acquired no real understanding of the opinions of others from outside his particular camp).  If I wanted to stay within the tradition of reference, all I need to do is think about Candrakirti or Vasubandhu’s horrible, tendentious, fallacious arguments against their opponents - every representation of the other is a strawman, never the actual position of the opponent, and much of the argumentation relies on generalization extended beyond the force of previous examples, equivocation, or naked appeals to scriptural authority.  The only way not to completely dismiss this kind of thing is to imagine that it is a successful instance of one rhetorical genre (indoctrination or perhaps apology to convince wavering members of one’s own fold) rather than a grossly unsuccessful instance of publically-accessible rational debate.

As to debate making winners and losers better people - I don’t buy that, either.  I lettered in debate - I went 8-0 at my first tournament to take home the trophy, was moderately successful at state finals despite a raging fever, hallucinations, and a temperature of 102, and was considered the best Lincoln-Douglas debater ever at my public high school.  Nobody I beat at debate felt good about being beaten, and I felt horrible about beating them.  I was ethically conflicted and miserable the entire time I was involved in debate because I could tell that it was a highly-aggressive competitive activity which generated feelings of combativeness and pride in me (and then, when the opponent was humiliated, guilt and misery).  If it’s different in Tibet, I would be greatly surprised.  I’m just too cynical to buy Dreyfus’s argument.

The particular form my procrastination is taking at the moment, obviously, is blogging about ethics - ethics of argumentation, but also the ethics of conjure.  I’ve been doing a lot of herbal and ritual magic lately, most of which is off-the-scales successful, some of which is outside my usual ethical comfort zone.

If you grow up around Wiccans and Neo-Pagans and “white people’s magic” (as I did), you’re thoroughly indoctrinated in the idea that anything aimed at changing someone else’s will is unethical - perhaps the paradigm case here is the individual love spell (I want THIS man or THIS woman, and I’ll do whatever it takes!) as opposed to a spell to make yourself so immensely attractive to everyone in general that someone will come along of their own free will fully intent upon seizing your handsome, sexy body to make mad passionate love.  Long before I ever practiced any sort of magic except divination, I was exposed to this idea and internalized it.

Also long before I practiced any sort of magic except divination, a Buddhist friend of mine (who is something of a contrarian and dialectician, in addition to being a rather ethical fellow in general) engaged some Wiccans and Neo-Pagans in a theoretical debate about the matter.  He didn’t think this restriction was particularly logical or compelling unless human beings were willing to abandon a lot of standard forms of persuasion - why single out magical persuasion as especially bad?  To influence the will of other people, we dress in particular ways, wear cologne or perfume, modify our bodies through exercise or surgery, produce slick television ads, master the art of rhetoric, beg, bribe, cajole, call in favors, and a whole range of behaviors geared towards getting exactly what we want from people who are otherwise reluctant.  We don’t consider all these things unethical, so it is not necessarily the case that someone should consider a magical operation aimed at influencing the will of another person unethical - criteria must be developed to tease out the difference between ethical and unethical forms of magical persuasion.  In hoodoo terms, “love me or die” spells (where horrible, injurious things are made to happen to someone who doesn’t love you) would almost certainly be grossly unethical; something gentler (such as a honey jar spell, aimed at subtly “sweetening” a friendship relation) probably would not.  It would probably also matter what you were trying to get someone to do and why, what kind of relationship you otherwise have with the person, whether you are trying to get something for which you have a just claim or something you have no right to ask, and whether or not it is the kind of thing that can be resisted or whether the magical operation turns its object into an effective automaton - but even then, one would have to think that certain forms of slick rhetorical salesmanship would have to be banned also, along with any form of persuasion with an above X% projected success rate.

I’ve been forced to do a lot of conjure, not all of it geared towards persuasion (romantic or otherwise).  Almost all of it has worked.  What is perhaps a little unsettling is the pattern of success.  Every conjure doctor worth his or her salt is thought to be good in some areas of the art, mediocre at others, and probably poor in others still, leading to a certain amount of professional specialization.  If I were to hang my credentials on a door somewhere, it appears I would probably be a specialist in magical persuasion - everything I have done in that area has been a runaway success, to the extent that I’m actually beginning to worry about the possibility of an “automaton” effect which renders people incapable of making decisions for themselves in the face of my overwhelming persuasiveness.

This is worrisome to me for many of the same reasons that debate was worrisome to me.  Hermes (or in this case, Papa Legba?) clearly loves the dickens out of this particular rhetorical huckster, and I am not sure about how I feel about having this kind of power.

(But it’s kind of fun, too…)

I believe the Divine is absolute, transcendent, unconditioned - beyond existence and all categories of thought, form, and speech. I believe the Divine is relative, immanent, conditioned, intelligible, expressible - manifest as personal gods and goddesses who lack none of the fullness of the Divine.

I believe individual persons are non-dual with the ultimate Deity while at the same time ineffably distinct, allowing personal relationships with external divinities which are at the same time identity relationships with the Absolute.

I believe the transcendence and immanence of Deity neither compromise nor annul one another but rather subsist in the Divine Word or Wisdom which was before all things, manifests all things, sustains all things, redeems all things, loves all things, and in which all things hold together.

I believe the relative cosmos is perfect, unblemished, divine - the “moving image of eternity” whose play of alienation and return enriches the the Absolute.

I believe there is a great chain of being and fellowship of life extending from the highest celestials to the lowest demons including both the living and the dead, and that all creatures are part of this communion and are beautiful and good. I believe everything is worthy of veneration - gods, spirits, ancestors, plants, animals, the elements, and earth itself. There are no natural or substantial evils, only adventitious imbalances and relative privation of the good. There is no permanent destruction or loss of individual beings, only transmigration and change leading through prevenient divine grace to an ultimate state of beatitude for all creatures.

I believe the human person is the image of the Divine and microcosm of the Absolute, having a body whose members correspond to the architecture of the celestial body, whose ritual actions influence the whole. I believe ritual is a sacrament - a kind of “natural magic” that works through the macrocosmic correspondences of plants, animals, and minerals.

I believe Jesus Christ is a magician and healer par excellence, establishing his Church to pour Spirit on all flesh so the old would dream dreams and the young would see visions and all creatures might be healed of the spiritual and physical imbalances which manifest themselves as disease. I believe Our Lady reveals herself as Queen of the Forest, spirit and guide and giver of medicinal plants.

I believe Nature bestowed every seed-bearing plant and fruit-bearing tree and every manner of herb and plant for the sustenance and healing of creatures, establishing a “law of signatures” by which healers would know the effect of each substance from its external appearance. I believe the gift of visionary and healing plants was irrevocable and cannot be taken away by human authority.

I believe there is no such thing as binding legal code or sovereign human authority - loving the Divine and one’s neighbor constitute the whole of one’s duty, as Jesus Christ set the universe free from law, authority, hatred, violence, sin, and death. Passionate, all-consuming love for one’s personal deity is the ultimate purpose of human existence, and this is normally manifested as compassion, benevolence, non-violence, and non-interference towards all living things.

I believe there are many paths to the truth and no one should be compelled to accept an expression of faith which is not their own but left to follow the inspiration of their own heart, which is the Divine leading them in their own way.

From the Santo Daime religion:

I was baptized when I was 15 by a friend’s mother who happened to be a minister, and this was the only way I was likely to get baptized, as no one in my family has ever particularly cared for the culture of the church.  Church is too respectable, upper middle class, self-righteous, stuck up - “hoity-toity,” as Grandma used to characterize it.  It was always an agony for the family to find somewhere we could tolerate attending for Christmas and Easter.  (It invariably turned out to be a Unitarian Universalist or mainline Protestant service; our few experiences with evangelical Protestant churches were disastrous).

I didn’t have to join any particular church as a condition of baptism - the minister told me to shop around and pick the best fit.  I started college as an undergraduate philosophy/religion major the next year and commenced church shopping (Quakers or Episcopalians being  the only real contenders for my allegiance) while also becoming a very active participant on a Bible/theology discussion board on a BBS I still occasionally frequent.  Nearly my entire experience with organized Christianity since my baptism has been profoundly negative, with someone or another constantly trying to shove me out the door for some kind of ideological non-conformity.  Generally speaking, the only people who respect me as a Christian are non-Christians, and the only people I think of as being particularly Christian themselves are (paradoxically enough) non-Christians.

I made a lot of friends on that BBS who are still very good friends of mine - Jewish Buddhists and Neo-Pagans and Wiccans and such, along with a couple of leftwing Protestants and Catholics.  18 years later, despite almost never contributing to public discussion anymore (perhaps it’s been 5 years since I’ve had anything of significance to say), it appears that I am still public enemy number one to the forum’s self-described fundamentalist.  (There used to be an entire faction of fundamentalists who hated me nearly as much, but the others have moved on).

The resident fundamentalist was once a charismatic Catholic, but he left Roman Catholicism when he realized that one of my theology instructors (also on the BBS) and I were both Roman Catholic or very attracted to Roman Catholicism, and that means that Roman Catholicism must be a false and demonic religion.  The fact that such horrible people could be attracted to Catholicism was proof that it could not be the teaching of Jesus Christ, so he decided to leave.  He proudly publicized this fact to the entire forum.  That’s right - someone left Roman Catholicism just for the spite of me.

18 years later, it’s the same thing.  The resident fundamentalist is currently berating a formerly tormented, now openly gay evangelical who liberalized over the years for supposedly doing so in order win the approval of people like me - people he says would cause him to reflect seriously on what mistakes he must have made in his faith if ever he should find himself in agreement with people like that on anything whatsoever.  Never mind that I haven’t posted anything of any substance in at least half a decade and could hardly be considered  serious influence on anyone even if I had - somehow, I am still considered the corrupter par excellence, even a sort of antichrist.  Much of his rant wasn’t directed towards the person he was ostensibly berating, but towards me.

“There are several people in here whose disdain I wear as a badge of honor. Maybe I’m a just a little strange, but I don’t even remotely think about putting the likes of Faunus, [Wulfila], or Peccavimus on par with Peter, Paul, and John. If you’re looking to them to validate, support, or guide your faith; then I’d say you’re in some pretty serious trouble. I don’t view someone as a Christian simply because he or she gives intellectual assent to the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth, loves children, and doesn’t kick dogs.”

“You can delete as many portions of the Bible as you desire; you can syncretically merge Christian beliefs with Buddhism, Baha’i, Kabbalah, Hinduism, Shinto, Voodoo, Native American Spirituality, the religion of Heaven’s Gate, or anything else you care to create yourself…just don’t expect me to view you as a brother-in-Christ.”

So there we have it - I’m not a brother in Christ, and he still would rather change religions (from charismatic Catholic to fundamentalist Protestant) than acknowledge me as Christian.  Same as it ever was.

Should I care?  Probably not.  I’m not in constant contact with fundamentalist Christians so I’m not hearing this kind of thing all the time like I did before - though I did hear it all the time in seminary, I still hear it (albeit in a more impersonal form, directed towards groups rather than individuals) whenever I read First Things or post-liberal Christian theological discourse, and I still cannot get most Christians I know to regard me as any kind of Christian at all.  And there is an obvious desire on the part of the RC hierarchy to purge people like me from the church.  Somehow I am stuck being the posterboy for everything a  militant and angry group of Christians thinks is wrong with the world, and every so often that means I have to be their scapegoat or rhetorical punching bag - even if I can’t remember the last time I said “boo” to a goose.

I hardly care anymore about your stupid religious and denominational labels - you can have them for yourself.

Just leave me with Jesus Christ, OK?

“I am a soldier of Christ; I cannot fight.” - St Martin

In one of the liturgical year’s splendid ironies, November 11 (Veteran’s Day in the US; Armistice Day elsewhere) is also the Feast of St. Martin of Tours, patron saint of pacifists and conscientious objectors - providing a most graceful way to opt out of the mandatory culture of militarism and patriotic fervor that seems to surround the occasion.

On patriotism and nationalism.

I’m rather charitable when it comes to assigning marks, but if one of my undergrads in Intro to Buddhism or Living Religions of the East represented Buddhism in the way that it is represented in this article, they should fail - whether or not I actually failed then.  The picture of Buddhism given here is too divergent from the actual beliefs/practices of the religion to qualify as anything other than a polemical strawman.

I wonder if this means Paul Griffiths (Buddhologist, comparative theologian, Warren Professor of Catholic Theology at Duke, and frequent contributor to First Things) is no longer welcome there.  I certainly take it as meaning that I am not the least bit welcome in post-liberal Christian circles, but I guess I knew that already.

I will have to take them to task.

From First Things:

Modernity offers uneasy secularists two seductive hedges: aestheticism and Buddhism. New York’s Rubin Museum yokes them together in a pictorial fantasia on the New Age-y theme of universal spirituality. No divisive truth claims mar the view from the $100 million monument to Multi-Plan founder Donald Rubin’s own purchasing power and those acquisitive cravings that Buddhist doctrine decries. But all contradictions and irreconcilable differences disperse in the solvent of art appreciation, that distinctly Western ideology at the heart of museum culture.

Those who stake their lives on the Cross can only choose against the discordant spirit of Tibetan Buddhist ritual art. Undeniably, thangkas are interesting and, yes, decorative. But that does not make them beautiful. The distinction cuts to the heart of commitments larger than formalist sympathies and superficial analogies.

Industry watchers have been saying the new revision of DSM-IV would medicalize normality for some time now.   Here’s a specific instance.

From Off the Grid News:

Is Free Thinking A Mental Illness?
Oct 8th, 2010 | By Andrew

Although the authors of the manual claim no ulterior motives but simply better diagnostic practices, the labeling of freethinking and nonconformity as mental illnesses has a lot of potential for abuse.  It can easily become a weapon in the arsenal of a repressive state.

When the business man rebukes the idealism of his office-boy, it is commonly in some such speech as this: “Ah, yes, when one is young, one has these ideals in the abstract and these castles in the air; but in middle age they all break up like clouds, and one comes down to a belief in practical politics, to using the machinery one has and getting on with the world as it is.” Thus, at least, venerable and philanthropic old men now in their honoured graves used to talk to me when I was a boy. But since then I have grown up and have discovered that these philanthropic old men were telling lies. What has really happened is exactly the opposite of what they said would happen. They said that I should lose my ideals and begin to believe in the methods of practical politicians. Now, I have not lost my ideals in the least; my faith in fundamentals is exactly what it always was. What I have lost is my old childlike faith in practical politics. I am still as much concerned as ever about the Battle of Armageddon; but I am not so much concerned about the General Election. As a babe I leapt up on my mother’s knee at the mere mention of it. No; the vision is always solid and reliable. The vision is always a fact. It is the reality that is often a fraud. As much as I ever did, more than I ever did, I believe in Liberalism. But there was a rosy time of innocence when I believed in Liberals.

Apparently this is intended to be an all-purpose charm - love (the heart shape), career/money (St. Martin Caballero), and even stopping slander (Tapa Boca).  I’ve been meaning to make something like this myself, but I just haven’t had the time.

Sometime over a given weekend, I typically end up going through my herb drawer and concocting some folk magical preparation not because I have any urgent need to do do, but just because I find it restorative and relaxing.  I suspect it’s to get in touch with my poor neglected body, which due to clumsiness, chronic knee injury, and consequent arthritis I am usually trying to forget.  It seems like a positive thing, even (especially?) when the task is a fairly mindless one, like mashing a bunch of herbs to pulp in a mortar and pestle.  Last night, I ground down some anise, star anise, and althaea to test out whether or not there is any merit to the claim that they can be burned as incense to induce visionary dreams - and those dreams, too, turned out to be about the body.

I ran into Grandma in my dreams, and was understandably quite confused about how I could know she is dead and yet keep running into her all the time - surely this is not allowed?  She asked me what I would know about “allowed” anyway - do I think that God would not “allow” such things for people who need it?  Do I think that God is  not compassionate?  “But, this is bodily!” I protested (the implicit criticism being that there is no bodily presence for the dead until the resurrection).  “And what do you know about ‘bodily’ either, you absent-minded professor?  It just so happens that this a ’spiritual body’  as in 1 Corinthians 15, and you’re confusing it for a normal physical body.  So there, too!”

Assuming that there’s anything to it all, apparently someone out there things I need to know that the soul is immortal, resurrection is real, Grandma is OK and loves me and isn’t completely out-of-contact, and there are better things to do than read books 24 hours a day - much hoodoo about the body, in other words!

UPDATE:

Many unexpected gifts of grace from a loving God.  1.  The Anglican service I dragged myself to this morning felt a little like home, 2. one of the readings was about Daniel and his prophetic dreams (derails modern Christian tendency to distrust all spiritual experiences as psychologically and/or demonically-induced), 3.  the priest transferred All Saints to this Sunday because it fell mid-week and preached on how all the faithful departed are saints and remain in communication with the faithful on earth and how we all need that communication (situates dream as timely/plausible divine communication), 4. I went to church despite deep misgivings when I thought that perhaps they might play some Bach, and part of the sermon was about how Bach is commemorated in the new edition of what used to be called “Lesser Feasts and Fasts” and how Mendelssohn’s arrangement of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion brought our (Jewish) priest to Christ.  It certainly sounds as if I were meant to dream as I did, and to drag myself into the local Anglo-Catholic church…

Life is unsettled at every level, but since summer I do not believe I have crossed the line that separates sadness/anger from a depressive episode.  I’ve had a few nihilistic fits, certainly, but they’ve been experienced differently - there is much less pain and hopelessness in them, and they have more to do with a very positive view of death and resurrection than a negative view of life.

Why?  I don’t know.

Possibilities:

1.  I’m fighting back with the assumption I can win or at least cause serious mayhem when people or institutions push me to do something I think is morally wrong, rather than blackmailing myself out of resistance.  I seem to be fairly content when I’m willing to allow myself to say “No, there are things I cannot and will not do and still be myself, and I don’t care what you do to me if I resist, I’m going to fight back in every way available to me.”  The conflict (though inevitably damaging, as conflict triggers some very dysfunctional thoughts and feelings) is much less damaging than the same conflict would be with me surrendering or internalizing the guilt.  Maybe that one difference is enough to keep on the “sad” or “angry” rather than the “depressed” side of things.

2.  I seem to believe much more deeply in the reality, accessibility, and immediacy of God’s supernatural power on behalf of individual human beings, and so never seem to be getting into situations where I think anything (love, happiness, financial stability, whatever) is actually impossible or even very far out of sight.  Surely prayer and the practice of Catholic folk magic help here, making hope and optimism seem plausible rather than quixotic.

It might not sound like a lot, but there’s a world of difference here.

There is probably also 3:  aside for some conflicted professional dealings, interpersonal relationships are mostly in a good and wholesome place.  Thank you kind people who are treating me so exceptionally well!  I wish you every happiness in return!

When it comes to my affective orientation, I suspect I’m pretty much as far in the closet as it’s possible for a human being to be.  My mother and grandmother have always known just because it’s obvious and there was never any need to tell them.  There are some internet friends who know, as does an anamchara to whom I write postal letters.  And within the last couple of years, maybe there’s a stray confidante here and there.  But beyond that, while someone may figure it out on their own and I will not care overly much, I’m not about to tell them.  (Vastly more often than not, this includes even people for whom I have romantic feelings - there is no way for them to reciprocate and they will only feel discomfort and/or pain over my interest, so there’s no point in even telling them and raising the issue - I’d rather stick my hand in a blender, frankly).

This is taken to extreme lengths - unlike most of my gay friends, who make a kind of surrealistic liturgy out of trying to hide everything in their living spaces that could possibly incriminate them if their parents visit (it’s surrealistic because there’s always too much to hide, and one will inevitably miss something as unsubtle as a bottle of KY or a historical replica of a Greek winged phallus), I don’t even want the stuff where I can see it.  I’m absent-minded and not particularly conscious of objects in my environment - so if someone shows up, I know I won’t remember what’s around and where so that I can do something to hide it.  So pictures of beautiful, well-beloved human beings are either kept in storage so I can get them out whenever I like and then replace them immediately thereafter, or else ciphered like the orishas in Santeria using my saints’ images (Santa Barbara = Chango, Caridad del Cobre = Oshun, etc.) so I can keep them in somewhat plainer view.

I got back from “Howl” last night buoyed by how deep a spiritual experience it had been and feeling on top of the world and celebrating the transformative and healing powers of love, only to realize when I went looking for it that my favorite image of my beloved had gone missing since the last time I wanted to use it to praise God for making people who are good and beautiful and true.  There had been some displacement to the usual order of things in the last couple of weeks - I was recently the victim of identity theft and lost a significant amount of money, so there have been unfamiliar people in and out of the apartment (police, bank reps, etc.). So I’ve shoved a lot of things (mostly saints’ images) into odd nooks and crannies in the apartment where I would never think to look for them, because as it stands the apartment is iconographical overkill and could give a distinctly bad impression to someone who doesn’t understand that I’m a religious studies graduate student and have a professional interest in religion - if it’s all personal interest, I probably look like some kind of a fanatic.  The problem with mainstreaming my living space is that I am so unperceptive of my physical environment that if I move something or allow things to get even slightly out of order, I may literally never find them again - and that seems to be the problem at present with my favorite pictorial representation of the heart of my heart.

There’s an unsubtle lesson in here about closets, isn’t there (ie, that they’re a really bad idea, because you can hide your feelings so thoroughly that you yourself can never find them again)?

A brief musical trip back to the 1990s, because swing has the power (what power? The power of voodoo! Who do? Do what?)!

Sometime this weekend I need to go to the Bijou (the student theatre), where they’re showing this film about Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl”. I hear it’s about censorship…

So to wrap this up into a single coherent thread: save us from the man with the hex (the university bureaucrat) through the power of voodoo, spirituality, sex, poetry, anarchism, and swing!

Save us, save us!
Save us, save us!
Save us from the man with the hex!

PS:

All praise to the man with the power

…who therefore ran through the icy streets obsessed with a sudden flash of the alchemy of the use of the ellipse the catalog the meter & the vibrating plane,

with the absolute heart of the poem butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years.

(If you don’t understand why these lines from “Howl” complete the thought, you don’t understand the Beats, swing, or both. Or Christianity, perhaps).

I’m so sleepy right now that this is probably going to be a very inadequate reflection, but ridiculously late at night is the only time I have available right now to think through such things, so here goes:

I’ve been dealing with serious religious disconnect (impatience with mainstream Western expressions of Christianity and the failure of all religious labels I might use for myself) using the Indian approach. What is the Indian approach? Imagine an Indian Catholic in Tamil Nadu filling out his census form as follows: “Religion: Indian. Caste: Christian”. Now imagine that pretty much everyone fills out the census form in that manner (seriously) - that the genius of Indian Catholicism is generous non-exclusivism in an inculturated Catholic idiom. Imagine that particular vision winning me back to the practice of Roman Catholicism after chronic massive disillusionment, then imagine me trying to pick up and come back to the United States and finding - well, absolutely nothing, because there’s nothing else remotely like it. So I might find myself writing: “Religion: Non-exclusivist. Caste: Christian.” Religion: pretty much everything I can believe or imagine or hope or love or dream, with particular ritual obligations accruing to my social body by virtue of physical membership in a particular religious caste (Christian). In India, that manner of constructing one’s religious identity maximizes communitas. In the US, it severs you from communitas. Catholicism in India is truly Catholic, bringing in material originally extraneous to the Christian tradition in radical acts of inculturation; Catholicism in the US is fundamentally sectarian, a reactionary political party with a construction of Christianity so narrow that even Protestant denominations (or liberal Catholics) get treated as if they belonged to entirely distinct and incommensurable faiths. I can visit botanicas and practice “syncretic” folk Catholic devotions to offset some of the limitations, but these are not communities per se (at least, not outside the barrio system) but more like cabildos or clienteles.

I’m not angry or depressed or burned out about any of this (rather the contrary:  the discovery of Indian Catholicism was good for my soul, allowing me for perhaps the first time some degree of religious communitas with some people in at least one part of the world).  But I do feel as if somehow all the religious communities available to me on the ground have failed me and vice versa, and there is no particularly positive way to connect.  And having been exposed to something better, I miss it.  Here and now, it seems obviously better for my esteem of Christianity to stay very far away from it, and to publicize Christian identity only in that extremely limited set of circumstances in which it will not be misunderstood (e.g. as a preference exclusive of other religious involvement).  And as the exclusivist misunderstanding is endemic, the circumstances in which it seems socially meaningful and constructive to disclose any kind of religious identity are precisely zero.

I’m not sure I need to call myself a Christian where I will be misunderstood (Acts 11:26 “the disciples were first called Christians in Antioch” - that is, one can be everything denoted by the term “Christian” without actually using the word).  But I would like some community too, either wholecloth or piecemeal, and would like to find more opportunities to make a connection.  Botanicas, yes.  Paul J. Griffiths anamchara and penpal, yes.  Experimentation and ad hoc religious activities with friends who practice various alternative religions, yes - I feel loved and welcome.  But organized Christian worship is not working at all - I do not feel loved or welcome in any religious community in Iowa City.  In the best of the local environments (the Anglo-Catholic Episcopal parish), there is a definite if subtle tendency to treat me like a freak, and unfortunately I am usually perceptive enough to pick up on things like that and not really equipped to deal with it except through quiet withdrawal.  Challenge if you doubt me:  imagine trying to feel comfortable in an average parish of the Episcopal Church if you are obviously, conspicuously, and unapologetically not middle class and come to church in the uniform of your own particular tribe (black leather, no hair, mohawk, piercings, whatever).  It ain’t happening, whatever the good intentions.

So:  I’m in a quandry.  Not a bad quandry, not an agonizing quandry, not even a particularly unpleasant quandry.  Just a quandry, and maybe not one that needs to be solved.  And that (the lack of urgency that it be solved) is perhaps the strangest thing of all.

The election has given a lot:  resurgent Christian anarcho-pacifist conviction, connection at least to a tradition of theological opinion/social activism to which I have a well-nigh absolute commitment.  I can’t find anyone who shares this commitment, at least not here, but it is a tradition that gives itself to me (and vice versa).  I’ve even discovered a grudging (though not entirely unqualified) admiration for Stanley Hauerwas, who gave a fine podcast at the Christian anarchist site Jesus Radicals.  This is a lot, and more than I have a right to expect.

But this is neither communitas nor friendship, which require a meeting of the minds either on the ground or through some witchery such as phone, the internet, or a personal letter.

What is physical sacrament without social communion?

(I might go on, but I’m becoming too exhausted to function - and at any rate, you get the general idea).

If you don’t have time to read the book, listen to the interview:

http://www.opal-online.org/IRB20101027/

Shamelessly stolen from a psychology blog:

A new study by graduate researchers and staff at UC Berkeley suggests that depression and other forms of mental distress are a serious problem for students in graduate school and professional programs (i.e. medical, law, and business schools). The Berkeley study, which included over 3100 graduate and professional students at UC Berkeley, is the first of its kind at the university. The survey results are discussed in a report released in December by the Berkeley Mental Health Task Force, a graduate student group advancing mental health as a campus priority. Nearly half of all survey respondents (45%) reported an emotional or stress-related problem that significantly impacted their academic performance or well-being. 67% reported that they have felt hopeless at times, 95% have felt overwhelmed, and 54% have felt so depressed that it was difficult to function. 10% reported that they had seriously considered suicide, and ~1 in 200 respondents reported that they had attempted suicide at least once in the last 12 months. The full report is available at http://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~gmhealth/.

I had never heard of this particular game, but apparently there’s a session of the live-action role-playing game Humans vs. Zombies being played on campus.  It sounds fun; were it around when I was an undergraduate, I definitely would have played.  (I sometimes played LARPs - and wearing dark clothes and harboring a none-too-casual interest in supernatural creatures is part of the whole “Lonely Goth” persona, right?)

As I said, I’d never heard of the game - but I’ve been confused for a “zombie” (a bandana-wearing player who seeks to tag “human” players) twice in two days.  Why?  Well, for starters, I wear bandanas - sometimes for whimsy, sometimes for style, but sometimes just to keep my poor bald head from freezing in the cold northern wind.  It’s fascinating to observe the social stereotype complexes surrounding my supposed participation in the game.

I happened to be sporting a Halloween-themed bandana at the Wendy Doniger talk - a very stylish skull-and-roses bandana deployed to keep my head warm.  I already narrated how the talk went.  What I did not narrate was the reaction to the Doniger/Wulfila exchange among graduate students at the reception.  I overheard classicists who thought they were just out of my earshot gossiping about how incongruous it was that some stupid undergraduate zombie could have put on the performance that I did.  It’s a game for mindless social dropouts, so how could that exchange possibly have happened?  How could a mindless social dropout challenge Wendy Doniger?  To shame them, I cheerily wandered into their conversation querying “What’s this about zombies?” (ignoring the reference to the incongruity of my intelligence).  The shamefaced classicists explained the game to me, appearing convinced (despite my vigorous disavowal) that I was an avid player choosing for some reason to feign ignorance.

Today I came into lecture a little bit late, adjusting my bandana as I entered.  I parked myself next to an oddball student I rather like (it being the only seat available in the lecture hall).  “You’d better watch out,” she murmured from behind a bandana of her own.  “Someone will think you’re a zombie, and the TA union will get upset if zombies start teaching classes!”  “Are you a zombie?” I asked.  “Oh, of course!”  Again, there were suppressed giggles around us, with a number of students poking fun at the kind of person who plays Humans vs. Zombies.

It would almost tempt me to start wearing hats (or else a t-shirt which reads “I am not a zombie”!) except that I rather like sticking up for oddball students and screwing around with people’s perceptions of who in their environment could possibly be “intelligent”.

Maybe I’ll start playing the game, and “eat” some of those nasty, prejudicial, prim and proper little co-eds!

(And I wonder if that’s the appeal:  the undergrad zombie is shy and socially marginal, so perhaps it gives her a chance to fight back against her oppression on her own terms - particularly in a state which has just sent us all a message that minorities are to be feared).

The talk on the ground from other Iowa lifers and academic long-timers is that the judicial retention vote is entirely uncharacteristic of Iowa (where even the most die-hard conservative voters are fiscally frugal but tend towards a compassionate, live-and-let-live attitude towards social and lifestyle issues) and that the bipartisan Supreme Court decision was much more characteristic of Iowan values than the retetion vote - surely the problem must be the amount of money thrown at the issue by outside agitators.  In other words, the Grim Iowan should forgive Iowans for having been misled by a slick, glossy professional advertising campaign, and restore the state to his affection and love.

The Grim Iowan was initially inclined to take this very position, but attributed it to his own unrealistic, rose-colored image of his own state. But since he is hearing it independently from dozens of people, might it perhaps be true?  Or has something fundamental changed, and we’ve all been caught up in the ivory tower so long that we didn’t notice?  (It doesn’t seem that way:  other than the judicial retention vote and the election of a long-term former governor, Nov. 2 was an all-incumbent affair, and even some pro-environmental legislation was passed on ballot initiative.  In other words, nothing else of any significance appears to have changed.  But perhaps appearances are misleading…)

Make the Grim Iowan’s day - prove his ugly cynicism about Iowa wrong!  (Please!)

O patria, I love thee no longer. You are not who I thought you were.

Iowans dismiss three justices

Supporters of the justices considered the attacks an affront to the integrity of Iowa’s courts and how justices are selected.