Tag: Religion

It’s not really taboo, is it?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Is a writer really expected to explore deep matters without including the hot subjects of religion and politics? Here I’ve been writing about the hippie movement, which had a strong anti-materialism streak, at least on the surface, as well as a strong anti-war stand, though I’m sensing it wasn’t quite as anti-violence as well. Early drug use was often described in religious terms pointing toward a union with the divine or transcendental wisdom.

For some of us, at least, spirituality and religion (shorn of religiosity) were a big part of the era. Not that that many others wound up there by now, from what I see.

As for politics? What a disaster.

~*~

In my journey, the time in the ashram was the ultimate of hippie. We were a tight-knit community (think of the ideal of tribe), vegetarian, back-to-the-earth (though not off the grid), sitting in meditation twice a day (the best way of getting high). The celibacy ran counter to the broader movement, but we did have a better balance of the sexes than elsewhere. We were focused, after all, on changing ourselves first before trying to change society.

So that’s the basis of my novel Yoga Bootcamp, humor and all.

I tried to walk a line between guru adulation, which I saw in books about various religious leaders of all stripes, and an expose about their shortcomings, mostly sexual and financial. While there were problems after I moved on, I had learned and grown much during my residency. To turn on that for larger readership would have been a betrayal.

~*~

I wasn’t so considerate with the churches in Hometown News. What I saw in the industrial city that modeled Rehoboth was rivalry, and I never got to know the ministers. I was worshiping with Quakers an hour to the south.

~*~

The subject became more nuanced in Nearly Canaan, where Jaya ventures forth to spread yoga-based spirituality along with her progressive social service. Having her become close friends with an evangelical pastor’s wife, which evolved in the final revision, is one of my favorite strands in my fiction, along with the middle novella in the Secret Side of Jaya, with its more primitive Baptists.

~*~

Let’s return to my first book, where a third leg of the original saga was Tibetan Buddhism. Memories of a documentary I’d seen in childhood about the flight of the Dalai Lama had taken root in my psyche, and my yoga ashram residency included teachings about karma and reincarnation. Even my fundamentalist mother had been impressed by some of that. Well, and maybe the fact that they were fighting the evil Communists.

Once the seemingly absurd premise of a lama being reincarnated in Iowa, I was off running. And then, a few years after publishing the book as Subway Hitchhikers, news stories presented claims about such an occurrence actually happening. For me, though, the prompt fit a personal sense of being born into the wrong place and time.

After the book was drafted, I returned to Indiana as a research associate and found myself taking the bus to work some days with the Dalai Lama’s brother as one of the passengers. I was too abashed to try to converse with him, but he was on the university’s faculty and, as another coincidence, a Tibetan Buddhist center took root in Bloomington, something I was already anticipating in the story line that finally jelled as What’s Left, springing from the ending of the subway story.

Drafted a quarter century after Hitchhikers was published, What’s Left picked up with the Greek-American family the lama married into, except that I felt I needed to tone down the reincarnation possibility. Besides, I was exploring dimensions of Greek-American culture and Orthodox faith, which I’ve presented here at the Barn.

This has me thinking about the original scope of my subway novel. What if I had envisioned it as a graphic novel sans the graphics but one where each encounter somehow builds toward his establishing a temple somewhere in the Catskills or Berkshires or other high point near the big city? Instead, I intuitively had him zoom back to Indiana, a reflection, I thought, of how far Manhattan’s tentacles reach.

Tibetan Buddhism was a way of abstracting my Hindu-based yoga training, and my Buddhist tastes leaned toward Zen.

After moving to Dover, though, I got to know a deeply committed woman who was on her way to becoming a Tibetan Buddhist nun slash teacher. Some of her insights have been woven into the revised story as it stands today in Subway Visions.

A few thoughts spinning around Scripture

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment
  1. Even if Biblical Scripture is essentially the “men’s minutes” of divine history, the women therein generally come off much better than the men – and whenever the women are named, there is growth in the church: Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, etc.
  2. Because the male gender language has been inclusive, representing the universal, there is no English way for men to refer to themselves in the particularity of being male – no way, in other words, that we can distinctly represent the specifics of being male only. So just who has been more impoverished by this defect?
  3. When I get away from my emotions, I’m also far from my God … (God is love).
  4. Argument: It’s possible to do religion without faith, but impossible to maintain a mutually loving connection without faith i.e. trust. Thus, positive relationship exists with the Divine.
  5. Hosanna and Alleluia as universal expressions of awe and ecstasy.
  6. Hashem = “the unnamable name” = neutral.
  7. Adoni = lord = male.
  8. Elohim = breast = female.
  9. The idea of “casting spells” is that you can order God/the gods/spirits to do your bidding rather than the other way around.
  10. Zionism originated to save a language. That is, a language needs a place where it lives.

Hodie, hodie!

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My choir has been singing a joyous Renaissance piece that translates, in Allen M. Simon’s rendering, as:

Today Christ is born:
Today the Savior appeared:
Today on Earth the Angels sing,
Archangels rejoice:
Today the righteous rejoice, saying:
Glory to God in the highest.
Alleluia.

I first heard it in the second classical concert I ever attended, around age 12, with the velvety Roger Wagner Chorale on tour. Never, ever, did I imagine I’d be part of presenting it myself.

Still blows me away, all around.

There’s much more to Salem than witch hysteria

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Through much of the colonial era, Salem was one of America’s ten biggest cities. In addition, it was closer than Boston to Dover, and like Dover it was settled by West Country English fishermen before the Puritan migration flooded into New England.

Salem’s first Quakers suffered some of the most intense persecution for their faith found anywhere, and they were instrumental in bringing that faith to Dover.

What I didn’t realize was that Salem was long the only Quaker Meeting in the Massachusetts Bay colony. The other early Meetings in today’s Massachusetts were actually in the Plymouth colony.

Details on Salem Meeting’s existence were scarce until I was pointed to Carla Gardina Pestana’s Quakers and Baptists in Colonial Massachusetts.

Her study breaks off before the Salem Meeting shifts to Lynn, where it was once the largest or second largest Friends congregation in New England. And then that, too, faded from sight early in the 20th century.

Pestana’s sensitive telling of Friends through the period includes her sense of Quakers as family oriented, communal, even what she calls tribal. I would still like to see the story of what happened to Salem Friends in the industrial era, but she provided consolation for my own conclusions in Quaking Dover.

As for Salem, its unique Peabody-Essex Museum ranks in many categories in the top ten art institutions in America. It’s definitely one of our favorite destinations. Its grounds even include a reproduction of Salem’s first Quaker meetinghouse, built about the same time as Dover’s.

An awakening awareness from a Native perspective

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

The realm of religion can certainly express our highest aspirations as well as manifest some of our darkest fears, as I feel I’ve examined in my new book Quaking Dover.

In my research of early New England, for instance, I see too clearly how often the differences between the Calvinist Protestants known as Puritans led to violent clashes with the French Roman Catholics to the north, as well as the other way around. (Not that I’d expect it to have differed if the Anglicans/Episcopalians had been in charge rather than the Puritans.)

Through their mindsets, the English, in their negotiations with the Indigenous tribes, crudely failed to acknowledge intricacies of decorum or ceremony that included food and dancing. Not so the French, whose missionaries to the Natives established bridges between the Native and Christian faiths. The priests even lived in tribal villages.

More critically, the English failed to impose the moral standards of their faith in their transactions with the Natives. Fair trade rather than widespread cheating would have been a start.

~*~

Where I’m now living, reciting the rosary is an important ritual among the local Passamaquoddy, especially at wakes and funerals. One late tribal leader was also a deacon and has left notes of his efforts to his blend Native religion and his Roman Catholic teachings. I’m hoping that some of this will find publication.

What’s the hold?

Are there comforting commonalities of rosary with chanting or even drumming? Or, from my end, might something connect to the long-lost art of Quakers who preached in “tones,” otherwise called sing-song?

Considering a young cousin’s ability to mimic one minister’s exhorting preaching style I encountered among Ohio’s remaining Wilburite Friends, I’m left wondering how much of the Quaker’s messages was formulaic and how much original, either way an emotional outburst not found in academic sermons and homilies delivered from a pulpit.

I suspect there’s a lot to be learned through what Quaker Douglas Steere called “mutual irradiation” when we do what’s sometimes called “listening in tongues” here.

It doesn’t always have to be about religion, either, though it may underpin much of the historical thinking.

One fascinating new voice from the Indigenous view is Lisa Brooks, author of The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast. Her websites – lbrooks.people(dot)amherst.edu/thecommonpot/ and ourbelovedkin(dot)com/awikhigan/index – continue her presentation.

I believe we can all be enriched by participating in such sharing.

 

I’m rather glad I waited to read the First Parish history

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

As a parent, you really try to keep your kids from a lot of painful encounters but they never listen to your advice, as far as you can tell, which seems to be futile no matter how hard you try, and then the next thing you hear is crying.

Maybe that’s a good thing, if from their experience they learn more than you knew.

There are several books that fall into that model. Had I read them before completing Quaker Dover, I might have overlooked some fresh insights. But now that my book’s out, I really appreciate what else I’m finding.

Donald R. Bryant’s History of the First Parish Church is one of them. The 160-page volume, first published in 1970 and enlarged in 2002, offers another side of my argument of the Quaker invasion in town, for one thing, while relating other parts of the early years with, well, perhaps more discretion. And, my, I do admire his resources and tenacity.

One of my favorite sections is the profile of John Williams that Bryant works into the narrative. Williams, a member of the parish, was, as he says “a visionary, a leader in bringing textile manufacturing to America,” and a cofounder of what became the big millworks in today’s downtown.

But he also became part of the faction of 26 male members who announced in 1828 they were leaving the church to join the Unitarian Society in establishing a new congregation. The split among the heirs of the Puritans into Unitarian or Trinitarian Congregational at the time paralleled a similar one among American Quakers into Orthodox and Hicksite. New England somehow remained Orthodox, as far as Friends went.

The plot within First Parish further thickens over the kind of minister it needed along with the construction of a new, and present, house of worship. What follows in the parish history is a turmoil that includes the changing economics of the town I haven’t yet found in the Quaker Meeting.

Bryant’s history then turns largely to the successive ministers rather than the congregation’s members and their influence in the community.

Still, I appreciate the comments by David Slater at the end of the book. He was First Parish pastor when I first came to Dover and quite engaging. He offered a checklist on how church life was changing that remains relevant, though nothing hit me more than this:

“Christianity is becoming more and more counter-cultural.”

That takes me back to the Quaker invasion into Dover, back in the mid-1600s.

As for the city’s other congregations? I’m anxious to hear more.

Reconsidering a nest for alternative social progressive witness

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One of the sides my Quaking Dover presentation for Cape Cod Friends awakened in me was a nagging awareness that some of the elements that encouraged social progressive action could also be used to sustain reactionary conservative activism from the other sides as well.

This could be seen especially in the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturn of the Roe decision, the result of a long-term resistance movement, where reactionary forces could claim  a victory.

Quite simply, both side have deep roots, perhaps unlike the middle.

My big question now is what makes one morally superior to the other.

The answers, I suspect, can be quite humbling. As well as a point of common engagement.

One of the many ways the dynamic of American society has changed in my own lifetime

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

As Dover First Parish pastor David Slater wrote in 1983: “Christianity is becoming more and more counter-cultural. In the 1950s public values were largely Christian values (even Protestant Christian values). Today we are more religiously pluralistic, but even more importantly, more secular. We can no longer assume that the values of the church will be shared by the larger society.”

How prophetic, considering where American society is today.

And how ironic, considering that his congregation embodied the common culture the Quakers in my book were countering.

As a reminder from the dominant side

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The ruling Puritans in New England had reasons for opposing the Quakers, something I need to remember in the midst of my Quaking Dover arguments, They don’t get much sympathy in their objections, at least from my audiences.

As Dover First Parish historian Donald R. Bryant put it, “The Quakers did not conform with the orderly practices of the Puritan churches. They would not join in fellowship, and met among themselves, propagating their own beliefs. Many of them did not do this quietly, but in a manner that was disturbing to regular church members. They were apt to interrupt a meeting or a preacher, or to even interfere with the proceedings of a court. They insulted church order and disturbed the peace. Their conduct was described as ‘indecent and provoking.’”

Some of these points still sting as I look at today’s political and social polarization.