Sunday, September 24, 2017

Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned from Drumming

A Story

A story is told about a group of people who live close to nature. Originally folks said it came from "Africa" but I think that was a convenient way for the author to say "someone not like me" so we don't need that part. 


This is the story, and the story goes... [T]here is a village where the birth date of a child is counted not from when they were born, nor from when they are conceived but from the day that the child was a thought in its mother’s mind. And when a woman decides that she will have a child, she goes off and sits under a tree, by herself, and she listens until she can hear the song of the child that wants to come. And after she’s heard the song of this child, she comes back to the man who will be the child’s father, and teaches it to him. When a child is born, the community gets together and they sing the child’s song. When the child begins it’s education, people get together and the child sings their own song. When they become an adult, the community gets together again to sing it. When it comes to your wedding, you hear your song. If that child, now grown, strays from the path of love, from their true self, the community gathers to sing their song and invite them back to themselves. Finally, when their soul is going from this world, family and friends come near and, like at their birth, sing their song to accompany them in the journey.


I am opening up in sweet surrender to the luminous love light of the one. (Sufi)

We start with the one. Some might call it the downbeat, some might call it the heartbeat. The symphony conductor shows us the one with the conductor’s wand. You might be talking about the time signature or you might be asked to just feel it. When do we join the song? How do we come together?
One of my drum teachers, Ubaka Hill, calls the rhythms we do, drumsongs, and a group of us making drumsongs together, is a drum-orchestra. We are all a part of the drumsong orchestra.
In a drumsong orchestra each drum has a responsibility. The mama drum. That’s the songba, will you say it with me? song-baa. The mama drum gets everyone to their appointments on time. It is the timekeeper. The baby drum is the kenkeni. Let’s say that together, ken-ken-ee. That drum makes us laugh, it is always doing the new and different, and the rest of the drums have to keep the kenkeni safe while it does its own thing. The grandpa drum is the junjun, let me hear you, joon-joon. It passes along wisdom, sharing longer stories. And then, the djembe. jim-bay. The first Djembe sings the main song. The bass djembe connects the song to the heartbeat. The lead djembe plays the signals to start and end the song. It is there to relate to the dancers, mimicking and cuing dance steps. The whole drum orchestra sings for the dancers so they have a rhythmic ground to dance upon.
No matter what unique song, each drum and each person brings to the symphony of life, we are all connecting through the one. We all must be faithful to the shared heartbeat. In your life, where is that which is larger than you? Where do you find the spirit of life? Where do you find that heartbeat that we all share?
Listen listen listen to my heart song (Pagan)

Each person has a unique song. You know it, you just have to remember it. In the drum song orchestra it works the same way. Your job in life is to remember your heart's song and to sing that song. Each person has their own drumsong. Each individual drumsong fits into the whole (by way of the One) to create the orchestra’s drumsong, the community’s drumsong. Each member of the orchestra has a job: Play your song.
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It began because the drum teacher did not allow spectators. Now, after 30 years learning, performing, and teaching West African drum-song the insights, ecstasy, and depth of the tradition have inexorably changed my soul for the better.
Invite Amy to a Saturday workshop where we learn drum-songs "Oya-De", "Fanga" and "Lamba." Complete the journey with a Sunday service where we will perform these three pieces and I will share stories and lessons from my journey, from expressing joy and sorrow, to building community.

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Sunday, September 17, 2017

"That's Primitive:" Sorting the Prerational/Transrational Fallacy

Is it "prerational", "rational", or "transrational"?

One of the most demoralizing moments in my preaching career was 15 years ago when a congregant responded to my Thanksgiving sermon (which quoted the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address) with the comment "That's primitive thinking." At the time, it floored me. I was ready to read the feminist, anti-colonialist riot act at him. (I did not.) Over time I realized I didn't have a complete response to his comment. The intensity of that moment helped me see the expression of an attitude that I have found shows up in all sorts of ways. Until I grappled with that feedback I couldn't recognize the "more rational than thou" attitude in others, and more disturbingly, in myself. Until I recognized the source of that prejudice I couldn't undo it.

The age of Modernism gave us the scientific method and near worship of the rational. The Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address begins "Greetings to the Natural World."  Susan Griffin, in the book "Woman and Nature" talks about the separation of the world into rational and irrational and the way that men, culture, and science are identified as rational (and rightful rulers) and women, spirituality, and nature as irrational (and dangerous). A cultural story of enlightened rationality saving the world from bestial nature permeates Western literature and religion.

We see this division in colonialism - as Western culture infantilized and feminized the conquered peoples while exploiting them. We see it in my sermon critic's dismissal of Native American religion as "primitive." We see it in the reactions of many hard atheists or old-style humanists to the use of religious language in our UU congregations.

This division of the world is a brokenness that needs to be healed.

We need language of reverence. We need a relationship to a sacred earth. We need mystery. We need the gifts of insight and intuition commonly associated with women. We need embodied, body-positive, diverse, and community-oriented ways of being.

And it is right to be curious about irresponsible superstition and unthinking credulity.

Ken Wilbur responds to these two categories with the observation that all things that don't fit into the modernist world view get lumped into the "irrational' category. He then separates that second category out into two: pre-rational and trans-rational.

He also grants that all the cautions that men of science have issued about the "irrational" state are appropriate to the pre-rational state, but not the trans-rational state. Using God to justify a system of "haves" and "have-nots", like the prosperity gospel does, is pre-rational. Unthinking belief in scripture or a literal belief in a God which results in wars, intolerance and hate are pre-rational. Superstition and unthinking credulity are the domain of the pre-rational.

When I read cultural anthropology books in the 80's the anthropologists mostly assumed that the native people they were studying were pre-rational. I picked up an anthropology book recently, however, and was pleased and surprised to read that the scientist recognized that the people he was studying had an excellent grasp of scientific concepts, cause and effect, and the nature of the natural world AT THE SAME TIME they spoke about these things in terms of story and myth. These "primitive" people were able to have nimble enough minds to understand reality on two levels at once: the mythical and the rational. Wouldn't it be grand if we modern Westerners had such skill?

The Thinking Mind... And?

On Sunday morning, many Unitarian Universalist children chant a welcoming song that expresses pride that they are part of a church that welcomes the thinking mind. It has been a point of pride for many that our religious communities don't ask folks to follow prescribed beliefs. Many identify as "religious humanists" or "religious naturalists." Indeed, many of the most brilliant scientific minds of our age are very religious and speak about their scientific observations with mystical, mythical, poetry.

"Trans-rational" living encompasses the rational, plus goes beyond it. This is spirituality that does not conflict with science. So, I say to my sermon critic of 15 years ago, "free yourself from the pre-rational/trans-rational fallacy! Open yourself to the gifts of trans-rational spiritual insight. I invite you to listen to the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address again. This time without fearing that your rational mind is under threat. Bring your thinking brain, and join it with your feeling heart and spirit."

Panentheism

As an earth-relating person I spend a lot of time in the Pagan community where I've experienced many who suffer from the opposite aspect of the pre/trans fallacy. To them I send an earnest request: please bring your rational brain. We do not need to toss it out in order to experience the gifts of the trans-rational. And when we take an "anti-rational' attitude we throw out all the gifts of the modern era. As we move into post-modernism, we need to build, not tear down.

Psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg wrote about the stages of moral development. In them we move from an undifferentiated "might makes right" to a differentiated "rules tell me what is right" to a relational "ethics tell me what is right". My experience with human beings is that we move through these stages over and over, in a spiral pattern, each time learning them more deeply.

Both/And

I believe that spiritual development is very similar, moving from the undifferentiated "I'm a believer" to the differentiated "scientific proof arbitrates reality" and on to the relational "both/and of rational mind in a dance with spiritual insight".
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I invite you to dance in the transrational with me!
My colleague Catharine Clarenbach also has written on the transrational.

Sunday, September 10, 2017

The Fool's Magic

"Laughter is the shortest distance between two people."
Victor Borge 
“Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach,
but it must do both if it would live forever.”
Mark Twain 
"Humour is the weapon of unarmed people: it helps people who are oppressed
 to smile at the situation that pains them.”
Simon Wiesenthal 
"If you can’t cry you might as well laugh."
My Spouse

Almost everyone, all over the world, grew up with trickster stories: Myths and folklore about a deity, spirit, human hero or human-like animal who plays pranks or disobeys normal rules and conventional behaviour. Tricksters have many names: Raven, Coyote, Anansi-the-Spider, Eshu-the-Orisha and the Fool.

I've been studying Tarot cards since I was 15 years old and was given a deck as a gift. At Lewis and Clark College, where I earned my Bachelor of Arts degree my senior thesis presentation was on the Tarot. One of my favorite cards is the Fool card. In the 1454 Visconti-Sforza deck that card is portrayed as a destitute vagabond. In the 1465 Mantegna deck the fool is labeled "the miserable". In these early decks the fool is often shown with feathers in the hair, which probably symbolizes a lightness of mind. The tarot fool is the one who is unconcerned with the misery of life, the embarrassment of inadequate clothing and the weight of possessions.

The fool has transformed into the joker in our current card decks and is often depicted as a court jester. In many decks there is a small dog nipping at the fool's heels, which traditionally represented the rule-enforcement driving the "otherness" of the fool away from polite society. The wild energy of the trickster creates little ‘air-pockets’ in which rules can be bent, maybe even broken, and in which we can let our sense of self breathe a little differently. In doing so, we energize the world.

The child is often the sacred clown. When I learned West African Drumming I learned the three bass drums. They are referred to as the Songba or Mama drum that keeps everyone on time, the Djun Djun or Grandfather drum that occasionally jumps in with something interesting or wise to say, and the Kenkeni or Baby drum who creates a rhythm that skips joyfully across the other rhythms, and is what actually makes the whole thing interesting! When I play those rhythms it tickles my brain and soul and stretches my ability to hear and feel.

Perhaps the quiet challenge now is to invest aspects of our lives with the fluid thinking of the trickster figure, the baby drum, the child, or the sacred clown.

Vicki Noble, in her book "Motherpeace," describes the fool card as "Trusting one's elf." It can be read as trusting "oneself" or as trusting "one's elf." The fool can hold multiple meanings at once!

In the Tarot deck, the number of the Fool card is zero. It is usually a picture of a young person, with a small pack on their back, eyes on the open space before them, about to step off a cliff.

In a Tarot reading, the Fool invites us to consider foolish, impetuous aspects, to boldly travel on the journey of life, our own fool’s journey. The fool embodies our confrontation with the big questions that we must face in our lives.


Tarot of the Cloisters - Fool Card
The fool asks questions: What am I supposed to be doing? What is the most important thing? Can I trust my heart's messages?

It is scary taking a new road, it is scary flipping our perceptions upside down, and it is scary to admit that we don’t really have it all together. In the Harry Potter movies Harry and his friends learned a spell to deal with something scary. The spell’s name is “Riddikulus”. For instance a boy who is afraid of spiders imagines the spider trying to balance on roller skates. It’s a “trick” that results in bravery.

The fool can make us brave, the fool can trick us into seeing new perspectives, the fool can open our minds... even open our minds to the answers we seek.


And that feeling of your mind opening? That is magic!

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Interested in a Tarot Card Reading? http://www.northstartarot.info/

Sunday, September 03, 2017

Rise and Shine

Rise and shine and give God the glory glory, Children of the World.*
I sang this in Sunday school when I attended the First Congregational Church of Corvallis Oregon as a grade-schooler.

Its a cute song. But I did wonder about a God who would send a flood to kill almost everyone off.

Now that I'm a Unitarian Universalist I know that the divine love that I hold holy would never do such a thing. But this week I was reminded of the song, and the feeling of forces beyond our control causing loss and pain. It was a sort of ironic counter-melody running through my head as I read the news about hurricane Harvey.

Global climate change is an unforgiving "God". One we have created or helped create. But it is not important to know who to blame. It is important to know how to respond. All of us are in this boat together.

Get those children, out of the muddy muddy
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0SauNUEw_OU
Yes, hurricanes and storms and floods are causing far more damage and loss of life than ever before. Scientists agree that the storms are getting somewhat worse, but the effects of the storms, due to population, construction, and more, are more serious.

They aren't just in Houston and New Orleans (the 12 year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina was August 29), but Japan, India, and Caribbean islands have been hit by extreme weather disasters as well. Not to mention the competition for resources that has resulted in death and suffering for millions in Yemen, Sudan, and similar countries. And then there's the heat and drought... from California to Turkey. Then, right here in my backyard in Oregon and Montana... fires...

In recent weeks we've encountered other kinds of storms. The white-supremacist culture that has grown interwoven with the history of America is another kind of storm. It too kills, damages, creates loss and pain. It, too, is predictable for those who are watching. It too, shows up in small, ignore-able forms and large, dangerous forms. From changing rainfall patterns, to killer hurricanes. From micro-aggressions to neo-Nazis.

God said to Noah build me an arky arky...
The image of the young man (looking at the photo he looks maybe 11 years old) in his kayak ferrying bedraggled dogs across the flood in Houston reminded me of Noah. Noah, saving the animals.

And who is Noah today, ushering each being in need onto the boat? Remember what Mr. Rogers has said about responding to crises? "Look for the helpers." Yes, look for the folks on the boats, helping others. Yes, look for the folks showing up to say "No" to tiki-torch-waving fascists.
https://itsnothouitsme.com/2017/08/29/how-to-
volunteer-at-convention-center-harvey-houston/
There is a picture going around of several hundred people standing in line in the rain on Tuesday, to get into the George R Brown Convention Center in Houston. What is this line is for? Water? Food? Housing? No! These people are waiting in line to VOLUNTEER!

Who is My Neighbor?
And I remembered the conversations I had with a tenant many years ago. Ranjeet was from India. He was asking hard questions of me. I was describing my fascination with a future space station. He described the sick and dying and malnourished and oppressed people who were his neighbors back home.

Since then I've become aware of the sick and dying and malnourished and oppressed people who are MY neighbors here at home. The people who are hardest hit when a natural disaster occurs. the people living in the buildings with the least compliance with building codes, closest to the factories and dumps full of toxins, the people without the resources to pay for insurance, or access to a car to drive to a safe hotel.

Water Communion
Traditionally, congregations in my movement celebrate a ceremony of coming back together in September. We call it the "Water Communion" ceremony and we mingle the waters from our summers, and our individual lives, into one container during the worship service.

What is important to me about this ceremony is that it is a reminder that we are all connected in community. It takes all of us to make the sacred water. It takes us coming together with intention to create the community that will sustain us through the year.

Each one of us contributes our part. Each one of us needs to shine our own light. Each one needs to show up in our own way. When we do that the way is made easier. When we do that we can clean up a mess like the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey, or global climate change, or racism. Showing up to shine may mean donating dollars. Showing up to shine may mean creating symbolic rituals that inspire others and create community feeling. Showing up to shine may be pulling out a lifeboat and paddling to rescue an exhausted puppy. When we are looking for the helpers, sometimes we are the ones getting helped, and always, we are the helpers. We are the ones we are waiting for. We can rise and shine. We can give all our glory.

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*I tend to look for a substitute for the word "lord" in songs when I can.