2009
Zulu Tattoo
I can’t remember when I first wanted to get a tattoo, but it was sometime in high school. I wanted a yin yang on my ankle. In college, I finally got it, but at the last moment, I changed its placement to my lower back. It was amazing. It was transcendent. It was painful. It was crooked.
I love my tattoo, which is at my hara, a placement that means something to me in terms of focusing energy as well as balance. I love its imperfection, though it took me a bit to get there. I don’t like that it’s so hidden from me. I didn’t get it so that others would see it, I got it so that I would know it was there—a commitment to balance, an acknowledgement of imbalance. But ever since I got it, I have wanted another.
I once read somewhere that, if you think you want a tattoo, wait five years. If you still want it, then you really want it. Indeed, I’ve already decided on a third tattoo, but it has a few more years of thought left to go into it. It has been five years since my first tattoo and I’m ready for my second.
I’ve been wanting a spider tattoo for some time and only recently started thinking concretely about it (I had to give it 5 years, after all). I know where I want it (on my foot) and that I want it to be a realistic (rather than stylized or cartoony) spider. But what kind of spider? I did a lot of research & kept coming back to the black widow, a beautiful spider. But I knew I didn’t want the hourglass—I want the emphasis on the fact that she’s a beautiful spider, not that she’s a beautiful killer. I just recently realized that I could get a top view of a black, shiny, beautiful spider.
But who? When I got my first tattoo, I went into Venice (Beach) and stopped at the first place I found. Not a real sophisticated approach. I knew enough to make sure they were clean & ask the right questions, but I didn’t have a relationship with the place. My step-mother-in-law has recently gotten a few tattoos, each time developing a relationship with her artist and working together with him or her to develop a design. And they are beautiful. This has been what has been stopping me from heading back into Venice. I don’t just want a permanent mark. I want an experience.
At the Edwardian Ball recently, I saw & met (sort of) one of the sponsors: Zulu, of Zulu Tattoo. When I interacted with him, I didn’t realize he was someone, but he was kind and gracious and warm and friendly. So I looked up his parlor. I found following poem on his site (I’m doing it an injustice printing it statically, you should go to the website for the full effect):
Since the dawn of time…
Man has marked his body…
To associate with his tribe…
and his Gods
this ancient art is preserved by the Primal Spirit that dwells in us All
that Spirit which yearns to artistically express it’s Pride and Ancestry
Welcome to the Tribe
I want my next tattoo to be a deeper experience. Zulu Tattoo seems to be the right place to do it. Then I read Zulu’s message to his visitors: “My concern is to provide you with a custom design fitted for you alone. I encourage clients to get involved in the creation of their sacred markings as we work together to bring that which is within you to the surface. I look forward to having the pleasure and the honor of being chosen to give you your sacred mark.” That’s it. I want a sacred mark. And I want to get it at Zulu Tattoo.
2008
Mary in Catholicism: Close to my heart (Spark)
Two recent news stories impressed upon me the fact that I will always be some kind of Catholic. Even if it’s ex-Catholic. My first step in rejecting religion was exploring my own. This started as what I later knew to be feminist critique of Catholicism. The more I learned, the more it seemed clear to me that women had a larger role in this religion than I was ever allowed to know growing up in it.
I still keep tabs on the Womenpriest movement and hope that someday the Church of my birth becomes something I can be proud of. I still think of Mary Magdalene as an integral part of what the Church should be (and is, even if it’s denied). And recently, these stories made me smile and be hopeful.
Feminists (even if they don’t use that word) are trying to get stories from the Bible that include positive depictions of women read more often during Mass. Proof of their desire for a female representation of the Divine, they gather in their churches while mass is not in session to share in their subversive readings.
Every day, there are more and more books that discuss the historical underpinnings of Christianity from a feminist perspective. Here is an interview with a recent author of one such.
2008
By xJane
11 Comments
“Are you really an atheist?”
said the friend sitting next to me at Christmas Eve dinner, with a vague look of disgust on her face, like I’d just admitted to enjoying self-flagellation. I was in the company of a number of people who had escaped Western religion (all some form of Christianity) and landed firmly in Eastern religion (all some form of Buddhism). With three beautiful dogs wandering about, Deva, Metta, and Gaia, this was a decidedly religious environment. And yet, there was no prayer before dinner, no implicit religion anywhere. There were buddha heads, mala, and yes, even crosses hung on the walls and displayed on shelves. But this was a place I felt at ease enough to say something atheistic enough to “out” me.
Later, another attendee told a story about a different dinner to which an atheist was inadvertently invited. One who waxed lyrical about the evils of religion and the stupidity of the people engaged in it. He was quieted with a “Yes, fundamentalism of all kinds is horrible,” and a glass of alcohol. This may or may not have been aimed at me, but was accompanied by shock that anyone could presume to know for sure what is or is not.
It is true, however, that my particular brand of atheism is less anti-Divine and more anti-Religion. As far as I am concerned, religion is objectively fucked up. But I believe that there is in all beings something special. Something worthy of awe, respect, love, acknowledgment, and equality. As a feminist, I can believe nothing else. I strive toward treating everyone with a namaste attitude. I feel filled with a sense of wonder when I walk in the forest, talk with good friends, or meditate. There is something out there, which name I give “the Divine”, that I cannot deny. Nor do I wish to.
And so I call myself an atheist to distinguish myself from any religionist who might make you uncomfortable by trying to convert you (or even just by talking too much about it). And while I have a great deal of respect for the hard-core, dyed-in-the-wool, fundamentalist atheists, I also don’t consider myself one of them. DH calls himself a “humanist”, though I’m not certain how he defines this, in order to avoid the atheism label (although he is the only person I’ve ever met who grew up completely outside of any religious influence).
I’m a dualist, a pantheist, a pagan, a feminist (in the religious sense, though not a Dianic), a meditator, a yogini, a post-Christian, an ex-Catholic, a Jino (Jew in name only); a pray-er to Bastet, Au-Set, Gaia, & Luna; a talker-with-animal-spirits and to trees; a student of Fire, a daughter of Earth, a foe of Water, a student of Wind; and an atheist. I meditate, I cook, I swim, I do yoga, I ski. I pray to the deities that strike me at the time, be they Mary or Skadi, Ra or Thor. I pray to the animals whose flesh I consume. I cast spells to help and to harm. And I reject the effect of prayer (whether as meditation, as supplication, or as spell) on anyone or anything other than the one who prays. I’ve seen and touched things that cannot be explained and which I cannot deny. But having no desire to foist them upon you, or to congregate with others in an effort to gain favor with a being who we cannot hope to affect, I reject the labels of religion. I refuse to allow anyone’s religion into my government and hope for a secular society, where all practice whatever they believe in their homes; whether that means meditation or family dinners.
“Yes,” I should have said, “I really am an atheist. But that makes me just like you.”
2008
By xJane
33 Comments
Spark: Does Religion Empower Women?
WaPo’s On Faith asks its panelists Does religion empower women? This is one of the few On Faiths that I’ll probably read each response to. I’m looking forward to the Christian/Catholic answer, which I’ve found generally centers around “having kids is empowering!!1!” There is some wonderful evidence for non-child-based empowerment which I’ve yet to hear a priest mention when trying to keep women in their flock.
2008
By xJane
No Comments
a Jihad for Love
This is the trailer for a new movie, a Jihad for Love. I thought it was apropos given Prop 8′s drawing ever nearer. It is a story about the struggle of gay Muslims. I have added it to my Netflix queue, but if it comes out in the greater LA area, I’ll prolly get a group together if people are interested.
[wp_youtube]78jUBRio3So&e[/wp_youtube]
2008
By John
12 Comments
I don’t want to F the Ineffable.
I did some bad things during my stint as a Mormon missionary in Japan. I’d like to repent of one of them right now.
Some of my Japanese friends confided deep, personal spiritual experiences with me. In several cases I coopted their experiences for my own ends, and using my words, contorted them so that they fit perfectly into the LDS worldview.
Looking back, it seems almost a violent act.
I shouldn’t be too hard on myself. After all, I was only trying to understand their experiences using my dominant perspective at the time. It’s only after getting beat up when my experiences didn’t fit my LDS leaders’ and teachers’ paradigms do I fully understand my own complicity.
There is power in naming something. And when someone came to me as an expert in spiritual matters after experiencing deep sense of connectedness to the universe/humanity/etc. and asked for some help in understanding this strange and frightening moment, I called that event the Spirit, and then said that that Spirit was God the Father’s communication to them that they needed to read the translation of some old golden plates, believe in Joseph Smith and Ezra Taft Benson as having the Red Phone to The Big White House in the Sky, and put on white clothes and get dunked while I say some mumbo jumbo over them so that they can join an organization and get married in Masonic-inspired cermonies, and now I’m thinking, WTF!?
Was I really that unthinkingly manipulative? Did I bludgeon their sweet experiences with my well-trained, well-intentioned I believes and I testifies and I knows?
Which is why I struggle sometimes with atheist discourse. I don’t want atheists (or believers) to write off my cravings and reverence for the oceanic, the mystical, the “spiritual.” I don’t always want to know what chemical reactions or evolutionary mechanisms or social indoctrination triggered my desire to appeal to something outside of myself. I don’t want to label it projection or insecurity or ritual impulse. Sometimes this is too dismissive. I just want to be. I want the wordless to remain so. I don’t want to F the ineffable.
Which is why I think I’m comfortable in the Quaker mode. There are some words to describe experience, but they are gentle, intended to convey that the experience in minimal terms: the light, that of God, seeking within, etc., but there are no real attempts made to explain or to force those experiences into Christian or Buddhist or Skeptical language. Also, when personal experience is conveyed to others, such as when someone in meeting for worship breaks the silence with words, they talk of their own personal experience.
It’s ironic that I have to convey my frustration with the limits of words through words. I guess you can only say so much via blogging.
So I’ll slip into…silence.
…
…
…
2007
Atheist Mysticism
There is a place within atheism for mystical experience. By this I mean those sublime moments in which we feel a deep awe and a sense of connection to humanity and the universe. I’ve had a number of such instances throughout my life, and I treasure the lasting sense of inspiration, peace and sense of interconnectedness that they provide.
Romain Rolland, Nobel Laureate and a friend of Sigmund Freud’s called this sense of connection and awe an “oceanic feeling.” Freud summarizes Rolland’s concept of the oceanic and its relation to religion in the first few pages of Civilization and its Discontents:
…the true source of religious sentiments…consists of a particular feeling… which he would like to call a sensation of “eternity,” a feeling as of somthing limitless, unbounded-as it were, “oceanic.” This feeling, he adds, is purely subjective fact, not an article of faith; it brings with it no assurance of personal immortality, but it is the source of the religious energy which is seized upon by the various Churches and religious systems, directed by them into particular channels, and doubtless also exhausted by them.
I like this quote because it both affirms the subjective nature of such experiences and points out how institutions can co-opt individual euphoria and manipulate their interpretation for their own ends. I was even an agent for such interpretation when I served as a missionary for the LDS Church sixteen years ago. We were taught to take almost any positive emotion potential converts felt when they came to religious meetings or prayed or read the scriptures and to attribute it to God. Negative feelings were dismissed or explained away (often pointing to Satan as their source).
There is always a space between the experience and its interpretation, and in this space we insert the explanation our context provides (if we can find one). The summer I left home for college, I had my first deeply euphoric experience. Although it is still difficult to describe how I felt, at the time I relied entirely on the metaphor of my newly adopted religion. I felt as though the “heavens had opened up” and “choirs of angels” were singing all around. At the time, I translated this as God’s attempt to communicate with me the truthfulness of Mormonism, since I was continually being reminded by my Mormon friends, Church leaders and holy writings that God would witness this to me.
I still pursue and occasionally am pleasantly surprised by such experiences (just so you know, they are never induced by ingesting foreign substances, unless you count listening to Bad Religion), but I no longer use religious imagery to describe them. When they do wash over me, I try to keep the interpretive layers as thin as possible–it is enough to immerse myself in their peaceful waters, and to float in a warm ocean of connectedness.
2007
By xJane
3 Comments
Duality: Chaos & Order
When I was in high school, if I wanted to do anything on a Sunday (missing church), I’d have to go to Saturday evening mass. Since the English Community only had one service a week, and since it was 50k away, I’d walk down to the local Catholic Church and sit in the way back (eventually it did occur to me that I didn’t have to go there, just be gone for the right general amount of time, but I still usually hung out around there). I found it much easier to tune out mass in German, so I often spent the hour or so thinking Deep Thoughts. One of the major Deep Thoughts was of chaos & order.
By this time in my spiritual life, I was quite well versed in Classical myths (Roman & Greek) and fairly well versed in other European (Norse & Irish) and some Shamanic traditions (Egyptian & American). I knew I wasn’t Catholic, but I didn’t really know what I was. Chaos, in the Greek myths, is how the universe began. Upon it, order was imposed & it became the Cosmos.
I always felt (and still feel), that Chaos still has quite a hold on the world in general. When sitting in the last possible pew, I would look at the orderly church: rows upon rows of pews set just the right amount apart. And then humanity would trickle in through the doors and seat themselves willy-nilly. Chaos imposing itself back upon Order.
I see this often when I look around. There is order. And there is Chaos. And they exist in less of a matter/anti-matter state, where one destroys the other, but in an almost agreeable discord. Like a violin with one string out of tune.
I love this. I love seeing order being swept away, covered, or dismembered by Chaos. Sometimes I think my life as too much order; although I never wish for Chaos, when it comes, it brings a necessary balance. Maybe it’s because I’m so anal retentive that the slightest disordered item stands out as though it’s neon, but I cannot abide a situation in which Chaos came only briefly.
I’m a dualist in many senses of that word, but it’s chaos and order that really bring it home to me.
2007
The Expected One
by Kathleen McGowan
When walking through the airport last year sometime, I ran out of airplane activities (I’m somewhat limited these days) and found myself in an airport bookstore. Two books caught my eye: Labyrinth, by Kate Mosse and the Expected One, by Kathleen McGowan. Both appeared to be (in the little time I had to peruse) fictionalized accounts of historical/sacred traditions that I’d been studying, even pre-Da Vinci Code. And, for light plane reading, they seemed prime candidates. A little Da Vinci‘d out at the time, I bought & read Labyrinth. Read more >>
2007
By Miko
9 Comments
Religious ethics for the 21st Century
The three major monotheistic religions all have holy books that date to a minimum of 1400 years ago. This makes the relevance of these supposed Divine rules somewhat suspect.
A Jewish cartoon that I enjoy reading has an interesting take on Jewish bioethics, including links under the cartoon to discussions of same. Among some of the articles that I find problematic is the discussion of genetic material from non-kosher animals being kosher (in the sense that the products from these genetic unions could be considered kosher). Sounds like obeying the letter of the divine law, rather than the intent.
The means of making divine laws relevant to today seem to fall into two categories: God spoke in terms people at the time would understand, so we need to update certain things based on what we know they knew; and God’s law is eternal, so whatever He said then still applies, we just need to figure out how.
Incidentally, I ran across this a while ago: an answer to the question how do Muslims in space pray? Hypothetical at the time it was written, it may soon need to be put to practical application.
What are other science fictional (hopefully someday science factional) problems various religions might face? A Jain encounters non-carbon-based life (how do you know if it’s alive in order to avoid killing it)? The Ender’s Game series tackled how to preach Jesus to non-Earthlings (he died for all, just happened to be human). Shinto managed to roll with the obvious humanity of the emperor. Clearly, religious faith is strong enough to withstand space travel (or measly moon colonies). But, speculation is fun!
2006
Dualist.
Those few of you who have seen me online know that I have many “available” messages including “Heretic”, “Portable Pagan” (my other computer had me as simply “Pagan”), “Sacralicious”, “2nd person of the Divine Trinity”, and the above, among others less incendiary. I had this particular one up and a friend of mine, who is particularly fond of verbal tennis as a way of starting conversations, asked me in disbelief if I really was (his SN is Pantheist, so the lines appeared to be clearly drawn). We had a brief conversation about the matter before he had to go. But his questions rarely end there, in my mind, and I was left with a debate against myself: what do I believe?
I recently saw the Dark Crystal again, a movie I remember watching daily when I was a kid, a movie which I can now barely make my way through. And looking back on it, my parents would perhaps have done better to let me watch something else (the other movie I begged to watch again and again was Return of the Jedi, not much better as we shall see below).
Both of these have a fundamentally dualist world-view. And I don’t recall ever really thinking of them as anything but metaphors. The Skeksis were not evil, they simply were; and the Mystics were not perfect. There had to be a Darth Vader for every Luke Skywalker. A fine rat, as Heinlein says, deserves a fine cat. And Jen (to continue mixing my literary & cinematic metaphors) had the best of both worlds. He was neither Skeksis nor Mystic. He walked the razor edge between them. And as such, was the most complete (with or without Kira); the most perfect.
Years later I learned Aristotelian Ethics. These were not the first Ethics I was formally taught (right and wrong at my parent’s knees don’t count here), but they were the first Ethics that made sense to me on a fundamental level. The gist of them is: no act carries any moral weight without taking into account the actor, the manner, the situation, and every other conceivable variable. “Eating” is a morally neutral act; starvation (having already a moral tint to it, it should be rightly called eating-too-little) is immoral; gluttony (similarly, eating-too-much) is also immoral. Therefore, the person contemplating the act of eating should take into account how much to eat, when the person last ate, when the person will eat again, &c. to be sure to act morally. (This concept gets stickier when you get into more emotional morally neutral acts like “killing” and “sexual congress” but we’ll leave it in the elementary stages for our purposes.) Once again, this duality “clicked” in my head. The moral person is the one who walks the razor between one moral extreme and another. Aristotle was teaching that we should all be Jen.
And so I believe that I have a body and I have a soul. And the particular combination of body and soul that I know as “me” is unique and somewhere between angel (for want of a better word) and animal. When I learned the physical concept of energy never being created or destroyed, it suddenly made sense on a metaphysical level. The molecules in my body have been all over this world (universe?) before becoming incorporated (lit. “en-bodied”) into my person. Most recently, the water and minerals in that orange I just ate are no longer orange; they are now brain and fingers and hair follicles. Why not the same for my soul? It made absolutely no sense to me that everyone should have a unique soul that gets used only for them (what a waste! I guess I’ve always been a Green…). And the image of what I will call the all-soul came to my mind. It’s like an ocean made up of soul; and for each person who needs a soul, a cup is taken from the ocean; for each person who dies, the cup is emptied back in. No cup is ever the same but it certainly contains water that was used in a cup previously.
Aside: Which is when I discovered that I believed in reincarnation. But again, not that I’ve been Cleopatra in a prior life, but Cleopatra’s soul may very well be a part of the soul that is currently in my custody.
I believe that I am a unique combination of body and soul; such that never was nor ever will be again. I further believe that there are certain activities that neither body nor soul can fully appreciate on their own. Each is fundamentally dependent on the other for experiences in this world. And so, when I die, and my soul goes back into that “ocean in the sky”, it will know more than when it came down in the first place. And, my body will be worm food. And the consciousness that I recognize as “me” will never be again.
What this means for my day-to-day operations is that I don’t believe in an afterlife. I don’t believe that I’ll be judged by anyone other than my conscience (and, you know, friends’ and family’s guilt). I don’t believe that my soul will stop the cycle if I reach enlightenment (but it may help the all-soul in the long run), but that my soul will certainly learn a lot if I do. I don’t believe that there is anything I can do in this life that will keep my body from decaying. But I do believe that we’re all in this together. I do believe that you are my brother, you are my sister, in the fundamental way that beings who share so much, both physically and metaphysically, are related. But I also believe that this earth we live on should be protected. This is as much heaven as the all-soul is; this is where we’re going when we die. And we’re not ever going away. We may be incinerated when our sun goes nova in a few billion years; but we won’t ever really disappear. And so I believe that I owe just as much to this world: the people in it now, the people who will be in it some day, and the people who used to be in it; as anyone can believe that they owe to a deity.
2006
Dark Night of the Soul, Part Two (Midnight).
I’ve had two major life-changing spiritual experiences. The first, at seventeen, helped propel me into the LDS Church. The second, some seventeen years later, eased me back out. The former was dominated by a sense of beauty, connection and purpose; because I was investigating the LDS Church at the time, I understood the sublime experience through a heavy Mormon interpretive layer. The latter was a deep realization of the purposelessness and profound indifference of the universe. I accepted this intellectually, but had never let it sink in before then. Here is an excerpt from my description of the experience:
…reality can be scary and bleak. Hide as we might, the seeming random callousness of the universe intrudes in some way, shattering our expectations for ourselves, our loved ones, our world. The only thing to do the end is to embrace it wholly. I am reminded of Jesus praying in the garden, preparing to face a horrible death and the worse torture of the sins and pains of the worlda horrible, unfair burden for one man alone to bear. He wants to reject the bitter cup, but in the end says, not my will but thine be done.
One of my favorite Christian theologian is Paul Tillich–he is famous for reconciling Christian theology with existentialism. He is my personal 20th century San Juan de la Cruz, and has given me a different sort of narrative lens through which to view my dark encounter with the apathetic universe:
He reacts with the courage of despair, the courage to take his despair upon himself and to resist the radical threat of non-being by the courage to be as oneself. Every analyst of present day Existentialist philosophy, art, and literature can show their ambiguous structure: the meaningless which drives to despair, a passionate denunciation of this situation, and the successful or unsuccessful attempt to take the anxiety of meaninglessness into the courage to be as oneself.
It’s taken me a couple of years, and may take me many more, but I am slowly owning up to this reality at a deep, emotional level. Mine is certainly the courage of despair. I have my moments where I turn to faith out of fear–this tendency is neatly summed up in Bad Religion’s Materialist: “The process of belief is an elixir when you’re weak. I must confess at times I indulge it on the sneak.”
Religion still has some relevance to me. I choose to read religion like poetry–and much of it is really, really bad poetry. But there are a few stanzas, a couplet or two here and there that are sublime, that allegorize all of humanity’s deepest fears and wildest hopes. I feel that there is beauty and even utility in the poetry that is religion. It’s why I, as an atheist, continue to hold to the metaphorical value of spiritual experience and the connecting power of religious imagery. It is why I seek out skeptics who can feel sacred awe at the majesty of the cosmos, like Carl Sagan and Richard Dawkins, as well as theologians who realize the terrible apathy of the universe and face it with courage, like Paul Tillich and Simone Weil. My dark night continues, but I choose to open my eyes wide to the black void. For the moment, my candle burns strong, and I take comfort in the dancing flicker of a few other flames.
This post is dedicated to Carl Sagan, in honor of the ten year anniversary of his death. Thanks, Watt, for the reminder.