Rudolf Otto and e.e.cummings?Holy Land Foundation sentencing, orto what level of tyranny can America progress?

“progress is a comfortable disease. . . .”

. . . .even progress into tyranny.

When I was in high school, the NCTE of Nebraska student writers competition rejected a poem of mine with the single note by a judge, “Plagiarized from e.e.cummings?” I had never heard of e.e.cummings. The judge did me a favor: my reading immediately progressed to e.e.cummings. My favorite e.e.cummings line is, “pity this busy monster manunkind not. Progress is a comfortable disease.”

This past week, without batting an eye, America has progressed from the comfort of terrorizing one group of Americans to tyrannizing another group of Americans. We have made a great leap forward in our progression into the fascist theocracy that even the greatest democracies are susceptible to becoming. And, as in other states that have progressed into fascist theocracies, hardly anyone noticed.

Last Tuesday, in the first instance, the self-righteousness of one religious group was institutionalized to tyrannize what should be (by both common sense and the Constitution) the religious freedom and personal morality of all other Americans. Because it happened in California, one might argue that the tyranny applies only to Californians, but the clichéd truth applies here: each of us is only as free as the most restrained of us.

Americans (the ones who are most sure they know "God’s will") seem to be willing with the stroke of a few judges’ pens to abdicate the very freedom of conscience that allows them to believe whatever cockamamie idea they hold about marriage—or any other religious issue. Tyranny seems, at least in some cases, to progress from tyranny: the religious community who did the most to insure that certain of our brother and sister Americans cannot marry, a triumph based on a myopic view of the history of marriage, are themselves members of a religion whose founder was lynched because he believed in polygamy, which most Americans thought was against God’s will. The Mormons have achieved parity for their loss of religious and personal freedom nearly two centuries ago.

The real tragedy is that those Californians (and other Americans) whose religious, personal, and moral freedom has been abrogated by an election campaign financed by Mormons largely from outside California have done nothing to join forces with and protect the religious, personal, and moral freedom of the other group whose lives were forever changed by another American tyranny this week. I have heard no outcry from the Human Rights Campaign, or Lambda Legal, or the California Courage Campaign against the tyrannical judgment of the United States District Court for North Texas in the case of the leaders of the Holy Land Foundation (or vice versa, I must be honest enough to add).

The leaders of the Holy Land Foundation were convicted last year of giving financial assistance to the “Specially Designated Terrorist” organization, Hamas, and sentenced Wednesday to prison for the rest of their lives. The Foundation was a legally constituted American religious organization that gave material support (mostly food and medical supplies) to the Palestinian people whose lives have been terrorized and tyrannized by the state of Israel since 1948 (and by Zionist settlers in their land for fifty years before that).

These men were convicted as part of a campaign to abrogate their religious and cultural rights controlled by forces not simply from outside their state, but from a foreign country. In an eerie similarity to the process whereby the Mormons influenced and controlled the voting against gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons, the State of Israel influenced and controlled the arrest, trial, and conviction of the leaders of the Holy Land Foundation.

Just as the Mormons and other fundamentalist Christians used the electoral process to abrogate my freedom to marry a man that I love, so the state of Israel used the American judicial system to abrogate the religious and political freedom of all Palestinians—my friends Shukri and Mufid and Mohamed who had escaped Israeli tyranny and had become Americans, as well as those who are clinging to their culture and religion in their homeland. And just as the Mormons progressed from their own persecution to inflict theocratic tyranny on one group of Americans, so has the state of Israel progressed from the persecution of the founders of the “Jewish State” during the Holocaust to inflict theocratic tyranny on another group of Americans.

These are hard words, and many people (thank God very few people will ever read them) would say I am anti-Mormon and/or anti-Semitic , or perhaps, just a crackpot, to write them. That would be because such people have no idea who I am.

But let us not worry “. . . progress is a comfortable disease.” Americans, above all else—even above their own freedom—value their comfort.
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Oh, no! Not Rudolf Otto, but Bakhtin! Or “the asymmetries in Christian consciousness”

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Don’t you just love these two sentences?

At the end of the nineteenth and throughout the twentieth centuries there was renewed emphasis on revelation of the living Word of God heard in worshipping communities, as contrasted with supposedly universal conceptions of deity identified with Hellenistic philosophies and inferences drawn from “religious” experience. Dialectical theologians (Brunner, Gogarten, Tillich, and, some would add, Barth) located hearing God’s Word in human responses normatively linked with canonical texts recording putative divine-human encounters during the history of salvation. (1)

I am a postmodern, not a scholarly or a coherent.

The main reason I’m not a scholar is that I don’t know how to use big words. “Dialectic” threw me this morning. I’m sure I could throw it around with the best of them when I was (by that time somewhat) in graduate school pursuing my second PhD. But these days my most common conversational partners are nineteen-year-old fraternity brothers and sorority sisters at the once and future home of the George W. Bush Library. They don’t know from “dialectic,” and I’ve forgotten.

I shouldn’t lie. The main reasons I am not a scholar are that I am not smart enough and I have no discipline (hypergraphic writing is much like my kitchen sink much of the time—beautiful and/or useful things are piled there, but sorting them out is just too much trouble).

My second-favorite graduate school professor in studying for my second-favorite unfinished PhD (sorry, Cynthia, Robert wins here) used the old saw, “I write to know what I think.” I have a different take on that. I write so I know THAT I'm thinking (no Descartes here, thank you). Otherwise, it all (I mean ALL OF IT, all of everything) washes together in a sea of unreality, and I am never sure if I dreamed what I said a moment ago or thought it or heard someone else think it. However, when I write it, I can see it. Or can I? I think I would be a great study for someone researching, Uh? what do they call it? Quantum physics? I forget. You know, parallel universes and all that stuff (that 2004 movie, What the #$*! Do We (K)now!?). You see why I say I’m not a “scholarly” or a “coherent.”

I realize that no one (should anyone stumble upon this page) can be particularly interested in reading through the fevered and completely disorganized stuff I put out in strings of words. But that makes me, I guess, the consummate postmodern. “Whether liked or not, postmodernism has affected all, especially the young. ‘Whatever’ has become a favorite word for the younger generation, and it expresses quite accurately the affect of postmodernism.” (2)

This, today, is one of my “whatever” compilations.

I’m still after the numinous (thank you Rudolf Otto). But I do have other fish to fry. I want to know (really, I do) how one gets on in this world, with or without the numinous as guide. I am a Lutheran, of sorts. So I hear and talk a lot about “grace.” But I’ve also read Dostoevsky and a bit of Bakhtin, and they don’t talk so much about grace as about getting “holy” (or some other concept I don’t quite understand). I don’t want to be “moral.” I have no concept what that might look like. I don't know if it looks anything like “holy.” In the article I quoted yesterday, Denis Müller addresses the issue of “morality.” He says the insistence by some that issues such as homosexuality are “moral” issues leaves those insisters in the position of asserting that one must “be moral” in order to understand “what is moral.” So I don’t even want to go there.

I’ve strayed a long way from “SO LONGS MY SOUL.” Or have I? What is that longing for me? It has (at least) two edges (a sword with three or for or five edges?). The first is, as I have already expressed, the desire to “know” God—or something like that.

The second longing is to know how to live in this world for the rest of my time here. I haven’t been very good at it up till now. The problem with that is the mixed message my culture and my received religion both send me on the subject.

Here’s a sample of both, rolled into one. Remember, I’m one of those postmoderns.

The Greek word porneia in Matthew 5:32 and 19:9 has been translated in many different ways in the various English Bibles. The RSV translates it as "unchastity." The NAB chooses "unlawful marriage"; the Jerusalem Bible as well as the Gideon uses "fornication," and the King James uses "adultery." What is the exception to divorce of which Matthew speaks? If only all contemporary Jews and Christians could be transported back a few thousand years and learn Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, maybe then people could have some idea of what the Word of God actually means.

Postmodernism makes believers uneasy, and when believers are also exegetes the uneasiness can be terrifying. Throw in religious leaders and the problem intensifies. The scholars often will say one thing, the religious leaders will say another, and the ordinary member of the faithful will live another. Whether liked or not, postmodernism has affected all, especially the young. "Whatever" has become a favorite word for the younger generation, and it expresses quite accurately the affect of postmodernism. (2)

Whether or not I am a postmodern, I do see clearly how all of this, all that I’ve strung together today makes sense. “What is an author?” Thanks, Mr. Foucault.

See, I AM a postmodern.

(1) Slater, Peter. “Bakhtin On Hearing God’s Voice.” Modern Theology 23:1 (January 2007).
(2) O'Grady, John F. "Postmodernism and the Interpretation of Biblical Texts for Behavior. " Biblical Theology Bulletin. 33.3 (Fall 2003): 95
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Not an ELCA Lutheran (horrors!). Not Rudolf Otto. Not me.

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The following passages are from the article, “The Original Risk: Overtheologizing Ethics and Undertheologizing Sin.” from Christian Bioethics 13 (2007): 7–23.

The article is by an infidel, Denis Müller, a Presbyterian (that's the horror, of course).
.
Denis Müller is a member of the Faculty of Protestant Theology, University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland. I understand that his comments are not germaine to an ELCA Lutheran discussion.

"In other words, we must not only be conscious that diversity will always persist, but we must also recognize that theological ethics makes that secular complexity more and more complex: Christian faith does not give us simple answers and solutions but makes ethical decision more difficult and more challenging. We should not be afraid of that. On the contrary, this challenge is exciting and liberating, because its helps us to renounce all will to power and all spiritual arrogance. It is exciting, because it obliges us to enter into real and difficult discussions with proponents of all kinds of secular and religious ethics. But it is also liberating, because it frees us of all the temptations that induce us to think, as Christians and as theologians, that our theological position protects us from any critical discussion conducted with rational arguments." (page 10)

"The position of the traditional Christian believer only works in and for a traditional world, which simply no longer exists." (emphasis in original)
.
Lets us be more clear. Of course this “traditional world” still exists in the head, in the heart and in the spiritual world of their [Englehart, Hauerwas, and company] fans. But for theology it is never enough to remain just a member of one’s fans’ club. I am a fan of soccer, and not only a fan of my own club. To be only a fan of one’s own club exposes one to the risk of becoming chauvinist, fanatic, nationalistic, fideistic and so on. I do not want to say that we do not have the right to support our own team. But what is here at stake is not to love one’s own single club, but to love soccer. In theological terms, that means that it is not my confession, or my theology, or my own school of thought that is the essential object of the discussion. What really matters is the meaning of faith for humanity as a whole and for the whole world. What really matters is the universal truth, not the particularity of Christianity, church, Christian faith, or theology. What is at stake is the universal validity of the truth we confess in Jesus Christ. Such validity cannot be established by a mere witness; it must be validated in the forum of public discussion, life and society. (page 11)

"There is no unified, coherent, definitive and unanimous vision of Christian bioethics today; as Christians, we have to live, honestly, openly, faithfully, hopefully, the tough reality of the conflict of interpretations.
.
I am for the right to abort, for a just solution offered to homosexual couples in society, against the legal permission of euthanasia, etc. That does not separate me from the common faith of my Presbyterian church and from the universal Church of Jesus Christ. I am in communion with Christians all over the world, even if we do not agree on abortion, homosexuality or euthanasia, because faith—real faith—is much more than just ethical correctness. And because ethics requires a free discussion, not any sheer deduction from the Bible, from dogmas or liturgy. Ethics is always risky, and must survive under the conditions of 'irresolvable tensions'.”
(page 14)

Rudolf Otto and Emmanuel Levinas Can any good thing come from the mountains of Wyoming?

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And what is it about being in the mountains—camping, staying for a time—that moves me as no other experience can (perhaps that’s redundant—perhaps every experience moves us as no other experience can)?

When I was a child, our family went often to the mountains. If one lives in Wyoming and Nebraska, one’s cultural-societal escape from the ordinary is the mountains, just as the beach and surfing and sunning is the cultural-societal escape from the ordinary in places close to oceans. I’m not quite sure why my parents loved the mountains so much. Perhaps because camping in such places gave my father opportunity to practice the skills he learned as an Eagle Scout in the ‘30s. Who knows?

I know the sense of wonder I have always felt in the mountains parallels (but is not the same as) the sense of wonder that overcame me when I was a college freshman and heard the Kansas City Symphony on tour play the Beethoven Seventh. I’ve never been able to figure out why that particular performance moved the ground of my being as no other musical performance ever had before and perhaps none has since. Come on. The Kansas City Symphony on tour in Southern California in 1968? There is no planning for the experience of wonder.

My plan is to spend several days alone in the Medicine Bow Mountains of Wyoming (the Snowy Range) this summer. Already, floating above the real world as I do so much of the time when I am in Dallas (I’m like the old lady on the airplane saying she did her part to keep the thing in the air; “I never put my full weight down in the seat”) I am experiencing the wonder and joy of walking among, smelling, seeing, feeling the pine (of whatever variety) forest and feeling the cool mountain air. (I will suffer no seizure activity there!)

Is it, I ask myself, feeling the joy, the safety, the love and warmth of being with family when I was a child—being together in a way we were not often together at home—that moves me beyond description (I’m not being hyperbolic or queenly dramatic; it is beyond description; description requires words, which immediately change the experience). Or is it the memory of the difference between the coolness and visual stimulation of the mountains and the flatness (except for Scotts Bluff) and, in my thinking, the barrenness of Western Nebraska?

I can revert to Rudolf Otto, my friend, and speak of the idea of the numinous.

Or can I impose another great mind into the mix:

The numinous or the sacred [le sacr´e] envelops and transports man beyond his powers and wishes. . . . The numinous annuls the links between persons by making beings participate, albeit ecstatically, in a drama not brought about willingly by them, an order in which they lose themselves. (1)

I first learned of Emmanuel Levinas participating in a graduate workshop in Rhetoric at the University of Texas at Dallas in about 1997. We didn’t pay much attention to his work except to acknowledge him as mentor of Jacques Derrida, whose work some of the class studied closely, but I didn’t have enough background even to understand.

In the mountains of Wyoming I participate “in a drama not brought about willingly by [me], an order in which [I] lose [myself].” More on this after I have time to digest my own thoughts on the matter. It’s not as simple or romantic or self-indulgent as it may sound. Notice, the passage from Levinas I quoted comes from a work on “losing oneself.” And I have coupled it in my reading with another Levinas work titled Entre Nous: Thinking-of-the-Other. Is the idea of the holy coupled inextricably with “Thinking of the other?”

(1) Levinas, Emmanuel. Beyond the Verse: Talmudic Readings and Lectures. 1982. Translated by GaryD. Mole. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1994.
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RUDOLF OTTO and Me minus the ELCA's Statement on Human Sexuality

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Why, you might ask, do I continue to take Rudolf Otto’s name in vain? It’s a quirk. I have many quirks, as anyone who knows me knows. I find my quirks amusing. Is that the height of narcissism, to find oneself amusing?

Yes. Of course.

I confess and own it. I’ve noted in a previous post the unusual (not unique) view of the world I have through temporal lobe epilepsy and other amusing defects. One symptom of TLE, for those who are not familiar, is hypergraphia. Read Dr. Alice W. Flaherty’s book. On page 218 she says,

The need for narrative, the need to place events in stories, shapes much of our writing and speech. Linking facts into cause-and-effect chains makes them easier for our brains to absorb, making them more memorable for readers and even for the writer. Creating narrative links gives a sense that there a causal chains that will allow us to predict and control events in the future, a sense that is not always true. (1)

Rudolf Otto, for the time being, is one of my narrative links, helping me make “cause-and-effect chains” where there probably are none. (Cause: the idea of the numinous. Effect: allowed me to remain a Christian all these years. Cause: Using Otto’s name over and over. Effect: will raise my blog to the top of the hit list when someone Googles “Otto.”)

Back to narcissism:

But with me it is a very small thing that I should be judged of you, or of man's judgment: yea, I judge not mine own self (I Corinthians 4:3, KJV).

OK. Out of context. But remember, I’m dealing with narrative “links” here, not logic. Narcissism may, in fact, for those who believe the Bible, not be such a bad thing.

For who maketh thee to differ from another? and what hast thou that thou didst not receive? now if thou didst receive it, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it? (I Corinthians 4:7, KJV).

Paul gives me permission to find myself amusing. I don’t “glory” in my quirks as if I had invented them. I find them amusing because I received them. Did I receive my epilepsy? I certainly didn’t cause it or choose it. Did I receive my bipolar condition? I didn’t cause it or choose it. Did I receive my alcoholism? I better stop while I am ahead. So I can glory in (at least find amusing) all these things if I remember that I received them. They are my gifts. They are what makes me different from you.

The ELCA continually ignores Paul and debates whether or not I “received” who I am. Did I invent my homosexuality? did I receive it? (If you think a vote or two in August is going to end the ELCA’s addiction to sex or settle our obsession with the received/chosen argument, you have more dangerous mental quirks than I have.)

Pardon me another narrative leap-and-link that probably makes no sense to anyone but me. I was struck the other day reading an article titled, “Science, Religious Naturalism, and Biblical Theology: Ground for the Emergence of Sustainable Living.” No, I’m not going green here. I internalized the following paragraph:

We see evolution. . . . as more than . . . . the mechanics of genetics. . . . it is also a record of individual struggle and courage, of stubborn refusal to give up in the face of odds that must have seemed overwhelming, a story of personal failure and personal triumph. Our lives are a gift of a cosmic creativity that, against all the odds. . . . found a way of giving existence to all that is, and did so through the personal courage and creative choices of individual organisms as they struggled to make sense of the daunting changes they confronted. (2)

I make no claim to courage. I’m weak and self-pitying most of the time. But there it is, the same idea I quoted from Paul (“what hast thou that thou didst not receive?”). Our lives “are a gift of a cosmic creativity that, against all the odds. . . . found a way of giving existence to all that is.” And that includes those quirks I find amusing, and the danger of narcissism attendant with them.

And so back to my friend Rudolf Otto. Here’s one of his observations about Jesus.

But he also possessed and manifested. . . . the warmest feeling and the purest love. Where all failed he knew how to understand, to pardon, to raise up, and to console. Pulbicans and sinners whom others cast out, he sought, discovered and awakened the flickering spark of their faith and love. (3)

Narcissists one and all and those who find your gifts amusing, enter.

(1) Flaherty, Alice W.. The Midnight Disease: the Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004.

(2) Fisher, George W. and Gretchen van Utt. “Science, Religious Naturalism, and Biblical Theology: Ground for the Emergence of Sustainable Living.” Zygon 42.4 (December 2007).

(3) Otto, Rudolf. Life and Ministry of Jesus According to the Historical and Critical Method. 1908.

RUDOLF OTTO and Me (and the ELCA)

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The semester (1968) I was thrown out of seminary for being gay (it was a bit more complicated than that, but that was the core of it), I was taking a class in Christian Existentialism. I was invited to withdraw before we advanced to the Existentialists, but we had read Schleiermacher and Rudolf Otto as background. (I have no idea how one gets to Existentialism from them; but most of what happens in institutions of higher learning I do not understand.)

My discovery of Rudolf Otto was one of the few important events of my mercifully short seminary career. My seminary stay certainly did nothing to increase my faith.

I’m grateful to have found Otto’s language for the “idea of the holy” to carry with me in mind, spirit, and body. I’m sure modern seminary students have much more au courant ideas about the holy than Otto's. The church wouldn’t set clergy loose without the most up-to-date, which is not to say Oprah-approved, ideas about the holy. But Otto’s understanding suffices for me.

My understanding of the holy, absent Otto's guidance, would be based on a sentimental sense of wonder at the mystery of life, perhaps best expressed by the love song my aunt sang at my parents’ wedding in 1937, “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life at Last I’ve Found You,” not by anything the church has taught me. "Sweet mystery" would pretty much sum up the holy for me.

But Otto's sense of mystery is based in reality, not "sweetness." The idea of the holy is inextricably bound up with piety. But the numinous is directly related to the new piety that Jesus taught:

Piety. . . . meant to possess God and His presence at all times in an experiential way, that is, to fill the entire life with the feeling of His nearness. And this feeling was. . . . a feeling of the deepest reverence and meekness in the presence of Him who sits enthroned above all the world and all creatures in unspeakable secrecy, the name of whom is Holiness. At the same time it contained a liberating, redeeming, and childlike trust which lifts its possessor above all servitude into eternal love. . . .

Piety and the idea of the numinous go hand in hand. Both are rooted in doing the will of God.

Jesus certainly demanded that they “do the will of God” . . . But what had hitherto been regarded as “the will of God”? The law, the thora. . . .precepts of a social character, of right, and of divine service, ceremonies and observances, especially precepts respecting “purity,” particularly ritual and Levitical purity . . . . Embedded among all of these were also commands of a purely religious and ethical character which referred not to external things but to the conscience . . . such a demand as, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” But these were not properly appreciated, because they mingled indiscriminately with ceremonial and ritual precepts. The duty of loving one’s brother was placed alongside of ritual observances as if they were of equal worth. And it was worse even than that; where ethical and ceremonial duties clashed, the former had to give way. Men watched with greater anxiety for the exact form of some sacrificial obligations than for love to their fellows, for ritual purity than for purity of heart. The first act of Jesus was to emancipate the ethical. He freed it from that dangerous conjunction and conformation with the ceremonial, the ritual, and the legal.

Jesus emancipated the ethical from the “dangerous conjunction and conformation with the ceremonial, the ritual, and the legal.”

The Churchwide Assembly of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America will vote in August on the ceremonial, ritual, and legal considerations of whether or not the church should bless same-sex marriages and/or ordain gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered clergy (or some-such questions; the exact questions before the house do not matter).

Whatever the question the ELCA will consider, it is purely ceremonial, ritual, and legal (the legal based, of course, on sound - always sound - theology). This comes in the form of voting whether or not to accept a “Sexuality Statement.”

When a church debates a “sexuality statement,” it is, of course, using a euphemism. “Sexuality statement” and “sexuality study” are (at least in part) ecclesiastical code words for, “Another attempt to decide whether or not gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered individuals are—by our ceremonial, ritual, and legal standards—persons.”

I fear that, because Rudolf Otto’s writings are passé, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America will never get around even to considering the possibility that the very act of voting on yet another “Sexuality Statement” means that, for the ELCA,

The duty of loving [our gay and lesbian] brothers [and sisters is] placed alongside of ritual observances as if they were of equal worth. And it [is] worse even than that; where ethical and ceremonial duties [clash], the former [have] to give way. [The ELCA is already watching] with greater anxiety for the exact form of some sacrificial obligations than for love to their fellows, for ritual purity than for purity of heart.

It would be possible for the ELCA to purify our ritual and lose the idea of the holy.

All quotations from:
Otto, Rudolf. Life and Ministry of Jesus, According to the Critical Method. (1908).
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Did Rudolf Otto Sleep Here?

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I am overwhelmed into awe by scientists’ descriptions of earthly phenomena—awed to the core of my being. One such is the geologist’s description of the Snowy Range in Wyoming:

The Medicine Bow Mountains have a core of Precambrian rocks. They contain the boundary, the Cheyenne Belt, between the Wyoming Province to the NW and the accreted Proterozoic continental crust to the SE (Karlstrom and Houston 1984). The Wyoming Province consists of Archean rocks that are locally intruded and (or) overlain by rocks of Proterozoic age, including the lithologies present in the West Glacier Lake drainage basin. (1)

Among the “certainties” (see yesterday) most present in Texas, (2) is the certainty that the Earth is "young," between 6,000 and 10,000 years old. Enough said. I’m not entering a debate that should have ended in Appalachia in Tennessee in 1927 along with Prohibition. What a time of certainty that was: the state said the Bible was literally true and federal law told Americans what [not] to drink. The backwoods folk of Tennessee demanded strict adherence to one legal certainty while freely and proudly flouting the Constitution regarding the other. Creationism and moonshine. What a combination!

If people want to be stupid and drunk, that’s not my concern. They need a seizure or two.

Back to the Precambrian: it comprises most of the history of our little planet.

Nearly 4 thousand million years passed after the Earth's inception before the first animals left their traces. . . . the Precambrian. . . makes up roughly seven-eighths of the Earth's history. . . .the most important events in biological history took place. . . Earth formed, life arose, the first tectonic plates arose and began to move, eukaryotic cells evolved, the atmosphere became enriched in oxygen—and. . . .multicellular organisms, including the first animals, evolved. (3)

Overwhelming! Life didn’t come along, apparently, until the planet was four thousand million years old. How old is that, anyway?

ROSENCRANTZ: It could go on for ever. Well, not for ever, I suppose… I wouldn't think about it, if I were you. You'd only get depressed. (Pause.) Eternity is a terrible thought. I mean, where's it going to end? (4)

I like to think about the Precambrian core of rocks overlain by rocks of Proterozoic age (part of the rising and movement of those tectonic plates) of the Medicine Bow Mountains of Wyoming. It is not a terrible thought (perhaps because it’s not eternity; even Psalm 46 seems to think that's possible: "Therefore we will not fear though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea."). Rudolf Otto helps me think about the phenomenon. He recalls Abraham’s saying to God in Genesis, 'Behold now, I have taken upon me to speak unto the Lord, which am but dust and ashes.' This, Otto says is

a self-confessed 'feeling of dependence', which is yet at the same time far more than, and something other than, merely a feeling of dependence. Desiring to give it a name of its own, I propose to call it 'creature-consciousness' or creature-feeling. It is the emotion of a creature, submerged and overwhelmed by its own nothingness in contrast to that which is supreme above all creatures. (5)

When I am in mountains (any mountains), I have a kind of “creature-consciousness” that I don’t have elsewhere. I was born in Douglas, Wyoming—about 100 miles from the Medicine Bow Mountains. For sixty years, those “rocks of Proterozoic age, including the lithologies present in the West Glacier Lake drainage basin” have had a primordial attraction for me. My creature-consciousness is never far away from them. I don’t feel dependence when I am conscious of the Medicine Bow; I do, however, feel a sense of awesome “nothingness” in contrast to the awesome force (call it God or whatever you want to) that put this all together. And the tiny millisecond of my life compared with four thousand million years. . . .

I’m going to spend a few days in the Medicine Bow this summer. I’m hoping to experience once again the awesome sense of nothingness. Or, perhaps it’s an overwhelming sense of belonging that not even epilepsy can negate:

Feeling Earth’s sacredness involves the kind of knowledge that philosophers call knowing by acquaintance—the way that we know and love a close friend or a familiar place. That kind of knowledge is grounded in compelling personal experience of a person or place, and, unfortunately, many of us in the developed world are so isolated from Earth and its creatures by the trappings of civilization that we have little real experience of Earth as it really is. (6)

NNNNN

(1) Rochette, E.A. " The Glacier Lakes Ecosystem Experiments Site: Geology." In: Musselman, R. C., technical coordinator. 1994. The Glacier Lakes Ecosystem Experiments Site. Gen. Tech. Rep. RM-249. Fort Collins, CO: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Forest and Range Experiment Station. p. 20-22. This article was written and prepared by U.S. Government employees on official time, and is therefore in the public domain. http://www.treesearch.fs.fed.us/pubs/7477

(2) "At its March 25-27, 2009, meeting, the Texas state board of education voted to adopt a flawed set of state science standards. . . .creationists on the board. . . .eventually prevailed with a requirement that students examine 'all sides of scientific evidence.' Additionally, the board voted to add or amend various standards in a way that encourages the presentation of creationist claims. . . ."
The National Center for Science Education April 1st, 2009.
http://ncseweb.org/news/2009/04/setback-science-education-texas-004710

(3) Waggoner, Ben. University of California Museum of Paleontology
http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/precambrian/precambrian.html

(4) Stoppard, Tom. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. (Act II)

(5) Otto, Rudolf. The Idea of the Holy. Chapter III. 2nd. ed. New York: Oxford University Press (1958).

(6) Fisher, George W. “Placing Ourselves.” Zygon 39.4 (December 2004).
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