One of these days I’ll complete my Cathedral pilgrimage post. I promise! The next week and a half is going to be crazy, as I prep responses to papers for the upcoming Sunstone West Symposium, gear up for a work project deadline, and try to catch up on my papers and readings for my grad program. Warning: posts may be sporadic, really short, or more academic than usual during this time.
I’m reading an essay by historian Tamar Frankiel in Retelling U. S. Religious History. She opens it with a description of Tibetan monks creating a sand mandala in a cultural center in South-Central Los Angeles. This is a process that can take anywhere from weeks to months. The sand painting contained a symbolic representation of the Buddhist universe, with the focus on the palaces of various Buddhas.
In a neighboring room, Watts teens worked quietly for hours on another sand mandala, using tools and techniques provided by the Tibetan monks. Theirs was heavy with symbols that evoked African imagery and incorporated prominent African-Americans, like Rosa Parks and Malcolm X. Frankiel writes that “Except for exchanges with visitors, there was no talking. The African American youngsters worked in silence with the same visage as the monks, focusing intently on the on the work at hand.”
When, after a couple of weeks of persistent work their paintings would be completed, both groups would ritually sweep up their sand paintings, bless it, and release it all into the ocean. Frankiel tells of the significance of this contact across religious and cultural boundaries:
Thus, in one of the more violent sectors of the African American community of Los Angeles, an extraordinary event of cultural contact was occurring, focused around learning and adapting a ritual. Both communities explicitly intended to cross geographical and cultural boundaries. The Watts community offered the space; the Tibetans offered the practice, negotiating a ritual setting in which the two groups could, temporarily and partically, share their traditions and enlage their horizons.
I’m fascinated by this description and analysis for a variety of reasons, and I also include it as an unsatisafactory and oblique response to part of Nate Oman’s comment #7 on the previous post. My research emphasis within my academic study of religion is on religious practice (especially religious ritual). I think that most of us (in the U.S.? in the academy? in Mormonism and mainline Protestantism?), with the Englightenment and Protestant influence woven throughout our environment, approach religion with too much emphasis on the mind and heart and not enough on the body.
Frankiel opens up a little window into the power of ritual and non-verbal contact. I’m impressed. It leaves me wondering what we lose in our ecumenical efforts when we spend too much time discussing religion and not enough doing and experiencing it.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Nate Oman // Apr 14, 2006 at 5:21 am
John: This may be too deep and too narrative for me. I have a dumb lawyer’s brain that wants premise, inference, and conclusion. I realize that the world doesn’t actually work that way, but I still rage against the injustice of this fact.
If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting that religious boundary crossing and syncrenism offers the possibilty of meaningful engagement with the Other, a deeper spirituality, social justice, and an understanding of the beauty of the people around us. At one level, I agree with this. On the other hand, were I — in my enthusiasm for the progressive and transformative powers of syncretic sand mandala — to make an elaborate madala on the floor of a temple in Llasa in which Mao was shown using Bhuddist symbolism as the prophet of nirvana, I think that my action would be obscene. Furthermore a genuine love for Tibetan Bhuddism and an entirely sincere and good-hearted belief in the liberating possibilities of religious syncrenism would not rescue my actions from obscenity. The import of what we do is exceeded by what we intend.
That said, there are times when we ought to risk blasphemy. Here I am thinking of something like Joseph Smith’s radical reinterpretations of the Bible, which strike many Protestants and Jews as a blasphemous and heretical twisting of scripture from its true meaning. However, if we are going to venture upon blasphemy — to committ and obscenity — I think that we are going to need to do so the basis of something more substantive than the thin gruel of tolerance and progressive political possiblities.
2 John // Apr 14, 2006 at 10:48 am
Nate, I cheated. I presented this as a narrative window, because, in the end, I couldn’t wrap it up. I struggled to write a tidy little conclusion, and I couldn’t. All I had were vague suggestions.
I hoped that I could throw it out into the ether, and that people like you and Caroline and PilgrimGirl and others could come up with your own interpretations, or just hang back with me and admire and ponder and puzzle.
Plus I was really tired and wanted to get to sleep.
I’m going for ambiguity and messiness in my religious life now. I’ve focused too much on neatness in the past, and I end up tidying God and religion and even compassion right out of my life. I’m willing to deal with the messy right now. It resonates with my life experience.
I do sympathize with your assessment. The mandala experience took place in a context of heightened sensitivity–it was part of a specific effort to create a positive contact between communities (mediated by the Center’s Jewish director). But there are definitely practical limits to these sorts of encounters. Boundary maintenance is a function of religion, so blurring and redrawing those is always a risky proposition. One religion’s blasphemy is often another’s sacrality.
3 Nate Oman // Apr 14, 2006 at 10:55 am
“I‚Äôm going for ambiguity and messiness in my religious life now. I‚Äôve focused too much on neatness in the past, and I end up tidying God and religion and even compassion right out of my life. I‚Äôm willing to deal with the messy right now. It resonates with my life experience.”
Fair enough. There are risks whatever we do. Life doesn’t seem to be structured to be safe.
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