Saturday, April 19, 2008

La bella luna

Having been rebuked by Mega for my critical comment about poetry (though truth be told it was more about missing the regular non-poetry fare on her blog than a dig at the month long poetry contest), I pulled out some poetry the other night. I'd been feeling quite negative all day--everything seemed the color of brown shit. And that feeling hadn't gone away, a kind of funk I knew would interfere with my sleep. Instead of seeking a sleep I wouldn't fine, I took out Billy Collins Picnic, Lightning.

It's not that I do not like poetry at all. I've actually had some wonderful experiences with poetry: Robert Browning's bickering priests, Shakespeare's sonnets, Tom Andrew's Random Symmetries. But these encounters with poetry have been forced--an undergrad English class, someone else's book club pick. Because it's not my strength--I'm always better when engaging the big stuff where details take a less central role--I don't gravitate towards it and I often feel I should "get it" better than I do. I mean I am an English Major.

So, I read Collin's "Moon"--and I found a glimmer of hope on both accounts, particularly in the last three stanzas:

"And if you wanted to follow the example,
tonight would be the night
to carry some tiny creature outside
and introduce him to the moon.

And if your house has no child,
you can always gather into your arms
the sleeping infant of yourself,
as I have done tonight,
and carry him outdoors,
all limp in his tattered blanket,
making sure to steady his lolling head
with the palm of your hand.

And while the wind ruffles the pear trees
in the corner of the orchard
and dark roses wave against a stone wall,
you can turn him on your shoulder
and walk in circle on the lawn
drunk with the light.
You can lift him up into the sky,
your eyes nearly as wide as his,
as the moon climbs high into the night."

Of course I wanted to be that "sleeping infant of yourself" carried out to see the moon, to take our own infant selves, these "limp" and wrapped in "tattered blanket" selves. I felt limp and tattered and wanted what the moon could bring: wonder. I winced a tear back and decided to read some more. Just maybe I could develop a connection to such stanzad, syllabic, stuff.

The next night, still trying to resurrect my now not-as-glum spirits, we finished Moonstruck. And for the second time in so many days the moon figured brightly in saving me a trip and 50 bucks. The old grandfather with all his dogs: "La bella luna! The moon brings the woman to the man. Capice?" And Ronny's speech outside his house after the opera:

"Everything seems like nothing to me now, 'cause I want you in my bed. I don't care if I burn in hell. I don't care if you burn in hell. The past and the future is a joke to me now. I see that they're nothing. I see they ain't here. The only thing that's here is you - and me...Loretta, I love you. Not like they told you love is, and I didn't know this either, but love don't make things nice - it ruins everything. It breaks your heart. It makes things a mess. We aren't here to make things perfect. The snowflakes are perfect. The stars are perfect. Not us. Not us! We are here to ruin ourselves and to break our hearts and love the wrong people and die. The storybooks are *bullshit*. Now I want you to come upstairs with me and get in my bed!"

A bit of peace with myself and poetry I gained. Maybe both work on each other.

Saturday, April 12, 2008

Towards Belief: Worthy of what humanity has become

Recently, I've been thinking a lot about how one negotiates community and personal identity. A couple of weeks ago my niece was baptized into the Mormon church. My sister asked if I wanted to stand in the circle (a big deal in the Mormon community) for her confirmation since I have the Melquisedec priesthood. I wasn't sure how to respond as I wanted to support her and my niece, but had to admit to her, as she already knows, that I don't believe in God let alone the notion of a priesthood. This didn't really bother her as she is not much of a literalist and has just recently gotten involved in Mormonism for the community stuff. Eventually she had me be a witness at the baptism which also requires the Melquisedec priesthood I believe. In part I think involving me was one way of helping my sister and my mother have someone from the family involved--my sister is divorced and her not-so-beloved ex did the baptizing.

Thinking about this decision connects, I think, to Spontaneous Expression's recent comment on my last post which you can find here if you scroll down. I was struck by the insight she gained when attending a church (not a Mormon church): "It made me reconsider the potential benefits of a formal organization, Mormon or otherwise." And then later in her comment she gives a typical SE zinger: "Let the believers believe in peace." Yes, I too want to let the believers believe in peace. I wish they could let me believe in peace, but I realize I can't let my actions to be contingent upon theirs.

And this is where I have to part ways with the likes of Richard Dawkin's and other new atheists who sometimes seem to want to get in a fight with religious folks. I have no desire to do this--well, only on bad days. In trying to find a new community, I bristle when "atheists" make judgments of religious people as simple-minded and fanatical. To me these kinds of blanket pronouncements only serve to reproduce the very same fanaticism these atheists proclaim to denounce, ultimately narrowing what it means to be human and spiritual. Of course I allow some leniency because this is such a minority voice and it can easily get completely squashed--still it ain't where I'm headed. And as long as there is a gap between our understanding of the world, there will be a place where art and religion seek out meaning. Even if I prefer art, I can see why religion fulfills this same desire, is experienced as art by some, and is preferred by many. To simply say religious people are wrong is simple-minded--clearly a creative and artistic imagination often-times flourishes in a religious environment.


I'm even uncomfortable with the term atheist. It seems to define me by what I am not--not a believer in God. This is similar to terms like "non-member" or "non-white," a type of term which helps create silly questions based on assumptions, "How can you not believe in anything?" As Greg Epstein, a humanist Chaplain (yes, chaplain, educated in a humanist rabbinical school), argues in his recent interview on Speaking of Faith, he is a believer, a believer in humanism, in life, in his family. I'm not ready to give up on belief as an important part of being human.

I turn to a quote from André Comte-Sponville's, a French philosopher, The Little book of Atheist Spirituality. It was part of the Speaking of Faith program I refer to above; again, as I've mentioned before in my blog, check out the program particulars created for each SoF program--they include extended quotations, titles to music, links, and images referred to in the program.

The quote below helps me to begin articulating the positive side of my beliefs, the what I believe in rather than the what I don't believe in. It's still wrapped up with God talk and religion, but it's a start:

***

Where morals are concerned, the loss of faith changes nothing or next to nothing. That you have lost your faith does not mean that you will suddenly decide to betray your friends or indulge in robbery, rape, assassination and torture. "If God does not exist," says Dostoyevsky's Ivan Karamazov, "everything is allowed." Not at all, for the simple reason that I will not allow myself everything! As Kant demonstrated, either morals are autonomous or they do not exist at all. If a person refrains from murdering his neighbor only out of fear of divine retribution, his behavior is dictated not by moral values but by caution, fear of the holy policeman, egoism. And if a person does good only with an eye to salvation, she is not doing good (since her behavior is dictated by self-interest, rather than by duty or by love) and will thus not be saved. This is Kant, the Enlightenment and humanity at their best. A good deed is not good because God commanded me to do it (in which case it would have been good for Abraham to slit his son's throat); on the contrary, it is because an action is good that it is possible to believe God commanded it. Rather than religion being the basis for morals, morals are now the basis for religion. This is the inception of modernity. To have a religion, the Critique of Practical Reason points out, is to "acknowledge all one's duties as sacred commandments." For those who no longer have faith, commandments vanish (or, rather, lose their sacred quality), and all that remains are duties—that is, the commandments we impose upon ourselves.

Alain puts it beautifully in his Letters to Sergio Solmi on the Philosophy of Kant: "Ethics means knowing that we are spirit and thus have certain obligations, for noblesse oblige. Ethics is neither more nor less than a sense of dignity."Should I rob, rape and murder? It would be unworthy of me—unworthy of what humanity has become, unworthy of the education I have been given, unworthy of what I am and wish to be. I therefore refrain from such behavior, and this is what is known as ethics. There is no need to believe in God—one need believe only in one's parents and mentors, one's friends (provided they are well chosen) and one's conscience.

***
It helps, as Epstein argues and we can experience in this last quote, to connect my own beliefs in humanity to many great thinkers of the past. There's a lineage of folks throughout time who felt similar to me--that's community too. And just maybe these connection will help me, when appropriate, allow others to believe in peace, to even participate amongst them with all of our differences and similarities.

From the mouth of a 7 year old

Referring to his friend, "Shane is always so restless."

"He is restless, you say?" (I'm thinking what a vocab!)

"Yeah, he always wants to wrestle me."

***

I made no attempt to explain the conflation of the two similarly sounding words.