Tag: Religion

FROM CELIA THAXTER TO CHARLES IVES, WITH ANTIQUITY IN BETWEEN

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Celia Thaxter:  An Island Garden. A delightful book. The Childe Hassam illustrations are classic, and my favorite parts of the text are her descriptions of the sea and island life. Of course, the gardening advice is no slouch, either, especially with her passionate details of battling slugs.
  • Jennifer Toth: The Mole People. A daring demonstration of enterprise reporting by a Los Angeles Times correspondent in New York, detailing the rise of homeless people in the 1980s who retreated to the depths of the city, including those of the subways and railroads. Her investigations ultimately placed her life in danger. A remarkable alternative to my freewheeling, playful Subway Hitchhikers perspective.
  • Antonia Fraser: Cromwell: Our Chief of Men. After all of my Quaker histories and Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down, this biography provides a third leg for triangulating the upheaval that shaped the Society of Friends. I now see the Protectorate as a subset of the Interregnum, one in conflict with both Parliamentary rights and the political power of the Army (including its Leveller and Digger voices). Fraser’s description of the origins of the New Model Army as “godly men” hints that its span may have had several incarnations; also, John Lilburne’s role within this period, as a vocal dissident, leaves me concluding that Cromwell’s failure to extend the vote for the House of Commons to all free Englishmen (or at least all of the Army, who had fought for its freedom) was the central fatal flaw of the revolution, especially as Cromwell floundered in his attempts to rule with a greatly muzzled Parliament. From Fraser’s perspective, the Quakers were generally just one of the many sects flourishing at the time, and the Nayler trial by Parliament, while troubling in its legal foundation and execution, was not the pivotal event seen by Douglas Gwyn and others. In the end, Fraser is long-winded. What I would now like to see is a definitive treatment of Lilburne, another of the New Model, and yet another on the General Baptists of the era.
  •  James Joyce:  Ulysses. Such a troubling, disjointed work! On one hand, it points straight to Kerouac and William Burroughs in its free-flowing association. Despite many imaginative and wonderful lines and, especially, puns, it’s hard to follow the characters through this single-day pursuit, or to have any sympathy for any of them.
  • Jack Miles: Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God. This ex-Jesuit’s examination builds on his earlier biography of God, and his conclusion that, for various reasons, the God of Israel can no longer deliver his end of the covenant. Miles approaches Jesus exclusively as God Incarnate, rather than any of the alternatives I’ve perceived, and sees the Crucifixion as essentially a self-suicide by God – an offering of appeasement for his failure. Indeed, Miles sees Jesus as repeatedly evading questions about the free Jewish state promised in Isaiah, especially, and calls Jesus an “ironic Messiah.”
  • The Confessions of St. Augustine. His conceit of addressing these to God, as in prayer, even though the deity already knows all the details and more, provides an intimacy for the general reader to whom the work is actually aimed. Of course, Augustine’s ultimate denunciation of the turns that led him to his life in the Church – in fact, his appreciation of those steps – taints the work for me. Too much self-piety, in the end, with all of his destructive role in leading Christianity into the “dark night of the apostasy.” On the other hand, much of this is also a day book for reflection: not the way I handled the volume this time, but perhaps at a later date.
  • Charles Ives:  Essays Before a Sonata, The Majority, and Other Writings. The essays regarding the Concord Sonata and its Transcendentalist inspirations are provocative and insightful. His political writings, however, can be embarrassing, except for the sense of the Emersonian influences Ives is attempting to apply – his naïve faith in a Majority (the People) over an elite Minority (the Non-People) is all the more telling in that Ives (and, for that matter, classical music itself) will never appeal to the Majority in America!

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FROM RELIGIOUS COACHING AND ANTS AS SOCIETY TO DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries. But first I should note that this section was compiled during recovery from major surgery, when I’d been warned I could read like crazy but just wouldn’t remember much, thanks to the morphine. Thus, this was an exercise to help me recall what I’d completed – 43 volumes in all.

  • Rick Warren: The Purpose Driven Life. This is really set up as a sports COACH set of game plan instructions. Sports jargon is full of motivating, directing maxims, focusing concepts, directions. It’s also legalistic: these are the rules, this is what you do: behavior-oriented.
  • Paul Ormerod: Butterfuly Economics. A  challenge to orthodox economics. Curiously, ants, not butterflies, are the basis of the reconsideration of public policy options.
  • J. Brent Bill: Mind the Light. Pleasurable approach to faith by a Friends pastor, with good exercises for experiencing the Light.
  • Vanity Fair, February 2009. (I’ve subscribed to this magazine for years, so I could have included every issue.) On fundamentalism, Christopher Hitchens, “Assassins of the Mind”:  “For our time and generation, the great conflict between the ironic mind and the literal mind, the experimental and the dogmatic, the tolerant and the fanatical, is the argument that was kindled by The Satanic Verses.” Also,  a great, lengthy oral history of the George W. Bush presidency and a piece on how his administration killed Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
  • Indiana Alumni Magazine, January/February 2009. Includes a touching piece on a Vietnam veteran who had been one of the top newspaper editors but died in isolation in Florida.
  • Pennsylvania Mennonite Heritage, January 2009. (Another magazine, quarterly, where I could have noted every edition.) Includes an excellent overview of early Anabaptist history, resulting in four branches: the Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites, and Munster uprising.
  • Alexis de Tocqueville: Democracy in America. Volume 1: I had expected more description of his travels and insights in America. Instead, his focus in on how to avoid the tyranny of the majority as a consequence of democracy. An aristocrat himself, his interest is as much on ways democracy might be better constrained in its applications in France as it is on the American experience. His look at local and state politics is unduly weighted on the New England model, ignoring, for instance, the mid-Atlantic states in his contradistinction with the Southern states. His understanding of religion, especially his apologetics for Roman Catholic faith fitting well into democratic systems, fails to appreciate the Puritan connection of personal salvation and covenant or the Quaker sense of walking in the Light as foundations of democratic decision-making. On the other hand, he also perceives the states at this time as essentially sovereign, the resulting weakness of the national government (including a prediction of weak executives, which was in fact the case up to Lincoln), and foresees the possibility of the slave issue leading to the dissolution of the Union.
  • Volume 2: Here, the discussion turns to more of general findings from his travels in America and abroad. Still, his findings are vague impressions than specifics. Many of his conclusions must be seen in the time-frame of 1830, before American arts and letters really began to take shape. He does have an interesting theory about the tensions between an army in a democratic society and a democratic people itself.

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FROM SHERHERAZADE TO THE PARTHENON AND COYOTE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Fatema Mernissi: Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems. Puzzled by the smirks of Western men whenever she mentioned harem, this Moroccan Islamic feminist launches into an attempt to understand the differences between Islamic male-female dynamics and those of the West. She draws heavily on the stories of Scheherazade and painting, noting what is emphasized East or West. Along the way, she presents interesting insights into Muslim life, including the “secret” side of the feminine, often rural, traditions where forbidden teachings continue. I find this a provocative book, good for launching further discourse. Where I think she misses the mark is in her failure to comprehend the harem as pure fantasy, one that may be more about power and wealth – and pure leisure – than about sex. In the West, multiple sexual partners (other than prostitutes) was essentially limited to the upper (ruling) class – a mistress, at that, rather than a panoply; sex itself, according to Roman Catholic teaching, was not for pleasure, unlike that of the harem fantasy (Mernissi does write of the pleasures of the public bath, noting how often bathing was proscribed through European history); furthermore, for many Western men, having sufficient freedom of time and wealth to indulge in a harem would be foreign to their thinking – work before pleasure. Not until Hugh Hefner do we see anything remotely resembling the harem fantasy, and he and his empire have always been somewhat outside propriety. I sense that major difficulties arise in the fallacy of trying to compare a powerful male with a harem to an average male anywhere; this is paralleled by trying to celebrate the heroic wife among many, rather than the average wife trapped within the system. More telling, as she reflects, would be the insights of artists’ wives, knowing their husbands were painting nudes.
  • Barbara Jane Reyes: Poeta en San Francisco (poems). A blazing collection of mostly prose-poems by a Filipina-American, often seemingly free-association, often multilingual, often Catholic-anti-Catholic (blasphemous within faith?), often addressing the aftermath of war, racism, sexism from ghetto streets, often full of blame for the other. All the same, full of juice. Passionate. Inflammatory, priming me with a desire to write, as well.
  • Ellen Cooney: Gum Ball Hill. This novel attempts to recreate the tensions in a Maine community just outside York during leading up to and through the Revolutionary War. It has had me looking up some of the York and Dover experiences during the King Phillip’s War period, and considering this place as frontier through a difficult century.
  • Damon D. Hickey: The Cross of Plainness: A Century of Conservative Quakerism in North Carolina (issue of The Southern Friend, 2005). Excellent presentation of Wilburite Quakerism focused on a single Meeting, now laid down. Solid quotations and material for future writing.
  • Robert Bowie Johnson Jr.: The Parthenon Code. Examining the friezes of the Parthenon, the author argues that they present the other side of the Genesis story – one focusing on the Serpent and the line of Cain/Kain, having the Creator pushed out of the scene entirely, and showing Noah/Nereus being overcome by the human will of Poseidon and his kin. The work of an impassioned amateur, lacking in footnoted documentation, is nonetheless provocative and intriguing. I wish he had acknowledged that the Genesis stories themselves are drawn from widespread Middle Eastern mythology, which means that the Greeks might also be showing themselves overcoming Babylonian might, rather than a small and insignificant Hebrew philosophy per se. On the other hand, if the Greek account celebrates the victorious and conquering human, the Jewish account also seems to side with the underdog! Our God favors the powerless!
  • Grandfather Duncan Sings-Alone: Sprinting Backwards to God. Part Coyote tales, mostly memoir, an easy-to-read and often humorous account of a Cherokee half-breed’s spiritual journey from preacher kid to Disciples of Christ pastor to Native healer and pipe-carrier. Candid insights into the failure of his four marriages. (His father was Scottish background.) Includes some embarrassingly purple verse by his current wife. Helpful glossary.
  • Howard Norman: The Northern Lights. In this, his inaugural novel, Norman follows a young boy through his trials in the Canadian North and finally with his mother running The Northern Lights movie house in Toronto. Some interesting insights along the way, but not altogether satisfying from my perspective. The structure, for instance, seems flimsy and the conclusions don’t really fit … too much deus et machina for me.
  • John Canaday: Invisible World. Poems drawn from the year he spent in Jordan, tutoring the children of King Hussein and Queen Noor. I wouldn’t have known, however, from the poems themselves his reason for living in an Islamic nation, only that these reflect his attempt to understand the place and culture.
  • Melissa Jayne Fawcett: Medicine Trail: The Life and Lessons of Gladys Tantaquidgeon. A small, beautiful volume that includes telling blocks of quotations from the Mohegan matriarch responsible for bringing many of her people’s old ways into the twenty-first century. As the author notes, less is known about the New England Indians than about those anywhere else – and this is a valuable piece in that gaping puzzle.

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FROM SHAMANS AND NICE GUYS TO THE LEFT HAND OF GOD

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

With the annual Christmas shutdown, I thought my reading drive had also collapsed; seemed during the first two months of 2007 I wasn’t getting any traction, either. Only when I sat down to update the list did I realize I’d got up through quite a number here, and there may have been more. So to continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Jeremy Narby and Franics Huxley, eds: Shamans Through Time: 500 Years on the Path to Knowledge. Anthology of selected excerpts of field observations of “magic men and women … with the power to summon spirits.” Ranges from hostile writings by missionaries to anthropologists who submit to healing sessions, and from Siberia to South America and Africa variations. Includes mention of the dark side of the practice, too.
  • Paul Coughlin: No More Christian Nice Guy. Argument for a masculinity that has boldness in the face of fear – one that confronts prevalent assumptions in society at large, protects the weak, and upholds Christian values in the home and the workplace.
  • Stephen L. Carter: Integrity. This legal scholar of ethics presses the case that integrity is more than simple honesty. Rather, it is a matter of actions based on deep reflection, which also demands listening to perspectives other than one’s own. The crux of integrity, he says, is the willing of good rather than the willing of evil.
  • Geri Doran: Resin (poems). “We rowed all night in the river of God, / singing kyrie, kyrie.”
  • Sascha Feinstein: Misterioso (poems). Pieces rooted in and flowing through jazz.
  • Toni Tost: Invisible Bride (prose poems). “My friends are wheels turning away from themselves.”
  • David R. Montgomery: King of Fish: The Thousand-Year Run of Salmon. A geologist examines the pressures on salmon, both in historic preservation efforts in Scotland, England, and continental Europe as well as those in New England, and in the Pacific Northwest today. Includes consideration of the dynamics of rivers and they ways various varieties of salmon have adapted to the specifics.
  • Michael Lerner: The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country From the Religious Right. A social activist rabbi argues that in removing religious values from public discourse, the left has left a vacuum for the political right to exploit. Rather than being value-free, the result has been value-less positions by the left – and the left is perceived as spineless and without beliefs. Lerner has some good insights on the American workplace and the tension people feel, blaming themselves for unhappiness in their employment while applying value systems that are diametrically opposed to their religious faith. Much of this volume is quite painful to read, addressing public issues in full candor and complicity.

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OF THE GRAVE AND BEES TO PERFUME AND HOLLYWOOD

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Graham Montague: The Stillness of the Grave and the Quickening of the Spirit. Pamphlet by a contemporary British Friend, suggested by Patrick Burns. I love the use of Walt Whitman’s description of attending his first Quaker meeting and sensing the worshipers were as still as the grave — followed by insights of dying to the world around us momentarily and resurrection.
  • Matthue Roth: Never Mind the Goldbergs. Flippant fiction as late-night fun for this reader. One of my favorite teen-angst novels, it has some marvelous insights into religious identity as well as some scathing portraits of Hollywood values and practice.
  • Holley Bishop: Robbing the Bees: A Biography of Honey, the Sweet Liquid Gold That Seduced the World. Although the author spends much of her time following a commercial beekeeper in Florida, she does present a range of fascinating detail on the care of honeybees through history, the evolution of commercial hives, and the place of honey and beeswax over the centuries. A book to stand alongside, Cod, Salt, Cotton, and other basic commodities. Includes recipes.
  • Mandy Aftel: Essence and Alchemy: A Book of Perfume. A beautifully designed and produced book (North Point Press) exploring the history, artistry, psychology, and ingredients of perfume. But do I want all of those recipes?

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FROM BIRDING BY EAR TO GROWING OLDER, WITH OR WITHOUT CHOPSTICKS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Peterson Field Guides: Birding by Ear (booklet and audio tapes). Tweet! (OK, I still can’t identify most birds by their singing. Maybe I just don’t know the words?)
  • Stephan Yafa: Big Cotton. Exploration of the impact of another major commodity on world economies and politics. In line with Salt, Cod, Honey, even the fur and tusks that Farley Mowett has pursued.
  • E. Digby Baltzell: Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia. A disturbing comparison of the legacy of two Colonial cities founded on faith. Baltzell’s reliance on High Society and family dynasties gives the work its own twist, so that families that moved away from either city vanish from sight, no matter their continuing contributions to society. Still, many of his conclusions are also disturbing, especially from a Friends’ perspective.
  • Henry David Thoreau: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. A surprising amount of bad poetry here, as well as very little observation of what’s right before him. I find myself dismissing Thoreau as a suburban naturalist, more an antecedent to Kerouac than, say, Snyder.
  • Tom Montag: Kissing Poetry’s Sister. Includes looks at creative nonfiction as a genre. He’s another middle-aged poet who has continued to write in relative obscurity while being employed in non-teaching positions.
  • Elizabeth Lyon: The Sell Your Novel Toolkit. Had this one sitting on my shelf all along, thinking it was another self-marketing guide for once the work was published. Instead, it turns out to have in-depth sections on query letters, synopsis/outline presentations, landing an agent, and the like. As a result, I have reworked all of my materials for the three novels I’m pitching – even renaming two of them. Now, let’s see if it does the trick.
  • Victoria Abbott Riccard: Untangling Chopsticks. A young woman from New England moves to Kyoto to master the cooking and presentation of food that accompanies tea-ceremony. Along the way, she becomes adept in a culture where she would always be an outsider, even after a lifetime. Includes recipes.
  • Tom Plummer: Second Wind, Variations on a Theme of Growing Older. Pleasant essays more appropriate to newspaper or magazine columns, by an understated Mormon.

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THE NAYLER PRAYER FLAGS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

I’ve mentioned my love of Tibetan prayer flags, from long before they became so popular and easily purchased. One Christmas, though, I was given a kit for making my own, which left me wondering what to design. Early Quakers would have scoffed at the practice, mostly as vanity and superstition, but I do like the reminder to be more prayerful and attentive. So I turned to one of the early major voices of the movement, James Nayler, and began extracting a few words for each square.

Here’s what emerged:

To
ALL
HONEST
HEARTS

Stand still
in the Light
of Jesus.

Come to
SEE
the Life.

If the EYE
be single
NO
darkness.

One power
WORKS
in the
LIGHT.

Believe
and
WAIT.

HAVE
the
LIGHT
of
LIFE.

To
MAKE
MANIFEST

THIS
COVENANT
OF
LIGHT.

TRUTH
PEACE
RIGHTEOUSNESS

THE
FRUIT
YOU
BRING
FORTH

ONE
is the
POWER

Receive
the
LIGHT.

SHINE.

FOLLOW
the
LIGHT.

CONSIDERING THE COMPETITION

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

After I moved from the ashram, I spent a year-and-a-half in a small city that very much resembles one I call Prairie Depot in several of my novels. And then I returned to my university as a research associate.

While our institute was set in a town very much like Daffodil, there was one difference I omitted. By this time, the town had a large urban ashram and, for several reasons, I chose not to attend classes or other activity there but instead began sitting with the Quakers in their mostly silent worship in a country meetinghouse.

Still, as the joke went, the ashram owned a third of the town. It had a vegetarian restaurant or two, maybe a bakery by this point, a house painting company, art gallery, significant real estate, and maybe much more.

The university, of course, owned the rest.

Or so the joke went, back in the mid-’70s.

My own experience is much more along the lines of what I describe in my novel, Ashram. We barely owned anything.

HOLIDAY GREETINGS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

We’re in that time of the year when we receive cards and letters. Personal ones, I mean, rather than direct-mail advertising.

Each year, I find myself reflecting on differences among generations regarding this custom. My dad’s circles, for instance, would send out and receive about two hundred cards apiece – keeping touch long after their high school and Air Force years, and trailing off only with illness and death. My generation, in contrast, falls away quickly. Each year, more lost connections, often with a pang of disconnection. There are, of course, a few who cling on, often with nothing personal included. There are also some older friends of my parents or a handful of relatives, in some sense of duty. (Only one of my first cousins has kept in touch). There are even a few correspondents who have reconnected, after years of silence. My wife and kids, being of a practical mindset, figure the folks we see regularly know what’s up with us (and so there’s no sense in mailing greetings), while those we don’t see, well, they’re history (so what’s the point?).

I think a lot of my dad’s era was a continuation of an earlier awareness, before cheap long-distance phone calls and then email. Those connections were special. My kids, on the other hand, don’t send letters of any kind, but they do have a wide range of online correspondents and texting. (Should we ask what will happen to the timeless art of the love letter?) What all this says about American society is another matter.

Quakers in some measure maintain an ancient practice of epistles, typically sent from one Meeting to another or even from a Meeting or “weighty Quake” to individuals. Some of our most powerful expressions survive there, and not from George Fox exclusively. Still, in an email world, how do we extend our faith? What efforts will survive? What will be read over the years? How do we reach out with something personal and special? Suddenly, I notice how many people are buying candles, especially at this time of year! Candles, in an electronics age. Remarkable! A spark of Light in the dark!

ADVENT AND MORE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

This is the time of year when many people work themselves up into a frenzy of festivity, inevitably followed by a letdown. For whatever reasons, it has me reflecting on the contrasts between many of the expectations and realities in our surrounding culture. For instance, Christmas is supposed to be a holy occasion, but the fact is that one can eliminate all mention of religion and still engage fully in its revelry and spending. Family gatherings, too, are emphasized, although at the office, what we’ve noticed, listening to the police radio scanner, is how family structure is drifting: “live-in boyfriend or girlfriend,” becomes “fiance or fiancee” after their second child together. Maybe that’s a reflection of a widespread fear of commitment in America today – as if having a child isn’t a commitment. Those calls, too, typically arise in domestic abuse or breakdown, in turn arising in other fears. Think, too, of the troops overseas, and their families at home. We might ask, then, what is the real Christmas message.

Here I believe we can look to small children for a clue – those who are old enough to sense that something special is about to happen, but not old enough to equate it with receiving particular products. (Hmm, might the latter suggest something about the expectation of prayer many people seem to hold? Well, that’s another topic.) What I’m thinking about is that tingling anticipation that’s full of wonder and discovery and emotional overflow. Everything is new or newly repeated, from last year or maybe two. Full of hope and questioning, as well. Their exuberance and obsession are contagious. And, yes, they crave the stability of a loving family.

That is the energy early Friends had when they were known as Children of the Light. May we, too, be filled with a revived sense of that vitality and urgency –the ecstasy of apocalyptic faith that shakes the world for miles around, and brings change. And brings us together.