Tag: religion

epiphany

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In the last year, many of us have gotten weirder. I have become more religious.

I was raised in the church, and because I like books and ritual and community and art, it rooted deeply. When I went to boarding school, I was surrounded for the first time by people who were not raised in generally the Christian church. Some were non-religious and raised in families where religion was not present at all. Many were from other countries where the majority religions were other than Christianity.

I found myself surprised to have nothing to say to these people—all of my evangelizing concepts had been developed around what bringing Jesus Christ into your life, and they did not have much to say to why Christianity?

The church I was raised in had no respect for a pluralistic faith that saw the light in other religions, nor the value in faith that did not try to convert others. That became the tip of the wedge that drove religion out of my life. By the time I started discovering my sexuality and having to accept or reject the idea that my church offered me two paths: denial and heterosexual conformity or a lifetime of tortured marginalization, I decided that there was no room for me in the church.

I could never break from it completely. The art and music still moved me. The sensitivity to something other than this world, the place from which I could look at the world and see how contingent all of our circumstances are on social ideas and history, I also found in Plato’s realm of Forms, and E.T.A. Hoffman’s realm of art and music beyond language, and Jean Toomer’s vision of a future beyond race and sexuality.

Over time, my sense of myself began to settle into something that could not be blown around or bullied, and the church environment became less threatening. I miss the sense of cross-generational community, and the beauty of singing in a body of untrained voices. This is a tough world to maintain a sense of meaning if you are not making it.

Other artists trying to integrate faith into the life of an artist made their way to me. The incredible, literary quality and artistic integrity of Stephen Cone’s films floored me, particularly Princess Cyd. Discovering the drive of Dorothy Day to do good, and of the poet (I can no longer remember who) that would sit in the back of the church during Mass, never returning to the church but in some kind of relationship with it nevertheless.

It’s still hard for me to imagine attending church services regularly. I no longer have the expectation that things or people must be perfectly resolved and completely comprehensible in order for me to engage with them. Yet it’s hard for me to imagine attending church services regularly. Could I really be seen, be myself? Do I dare to dream that that aspect of myself, in all of its keen and sinister dimensions, can be experienced in loving community?

I suspect not, but I have less patience now for the sterile and monotonous loneliness of a life holding myself apart from others.

loops

Matthew EilarLeave a comment
Chow Chun Fai –– “Last Supper“, Renaissance Trilogy I (2005)

This story tickled me:


Hundreds of thousands of Chinese citizens have gone to work in Africa, where they have encountered foreign cultures that leave many of them feeling alienated. For some of these disaffected Chinese workers, a source of comfort has come from religion, most notably the Evangelical Christianity that pervades much of sub-Saharan Africa. Evangelicalism prioritises conversion of non-believers, and the Chinese, heavily discouraged from practicing religion at home, are attractive potential converts.


Many local African churches have reached out to Chinese workers, including incorporating Mandarin into services.  A number of Chinese, in turn, have welcomed the sense of community and belonging that these Christian churches offer. And a small but growing number of ethnically Chinese missionaries from Taiwan and other countries are specifically targeting Chinese nationals in Africa, preaching to them with a freedom they’d never be allowed in the People’s Republic.


Many of these Chinese workers are returning home, and they’re bringing their newfound religion with them.  Visitors to the coastal province of Fujian, for example, now hear South African accented English and see houses adorned with crosses.  African migrants are also moving to China in larger numbers, many of them practitioners of very evangelistic forms of Pentecostal Christianity who are willing to flout the rules placed on religious activity in China.

Christopher Rhodes “How Africa is converting China,” The Unherd

First things first, I cannot evaluate the accuracy of this story in pretty much any way, and The Unherd is a new media venture with maybe ideological leanings (?) that are giving me Quilette vibes. Nevertheless, I love hearing globalization stories that have nothing to do with the United States. One of the defining characteristics of US culture is its indifference to anything outside of it. Plus, both China (because of its ascendancy and trade powers) and Africa (because of its color and post-colonial politics) often operate as political opposite poles to the United States to the extent that Americans think about foreign policy at all.

It reminded me of this working definition of religion I’ve been toying with:

A religion is a system of attaching meaning to behavioral choices that creates a positive feedback loop whereby adherents gain a greater survival advantage as some combination of strict adherence to precepts, size of the community of adherents, or access to spiritual experience increases.

I have never had any formal education in religious studies, so maybe this is a 101 level insight, but it feels like it’s all my own and it speaks to some of the uneasiness I feel when some of the people around me go in on religious people. I think about the people in my own life for whom religion was a way to feel control and agency in their life, or for whom religion was the opening to being able to talk about and access an inner emotional life. Religious people can be shitty, but, like, maybe they would be even shittier without it?

I’m fascinated by dying churches. I play piano every now and then for a Norwegian Presbyterian Church here in a Portland Suburb, a dwindling congregation that once served an ethnic community that barely exists anymore. The churches and religions that are thriving right now are the ones who have figured out how to give a survival advantage to those who walk through their door. These Chinese, workers, for example, get to walk in the door and experience a feeling of community and common struggle in a context where that is hard to find.

It’s why I can’t imagine they will ever die. As long as living remains a challenge, there will be a need for some way to teach adaptation, and a secondary need to attach meaning to that adaptation. What used to be called New Age religion so thoroughly dominates American culture its practically indistinguishable from it. We might have way more atheists in this country than ever before, but there are also more folks practicing yoga, going on meditation retreats, consuming bone broth. Scientologists get it, you join, they get you auditions. Mormons understand it, if you’re a man they’ll set you up with a career and a family.

You want to start a new religion? Come up with your survival advantage. The rest of the patter will write itself.

Worlds Collide

Matthew Eilar1 Comment

I was fascinated by this profile, in The Smart Set of Henry Steel Olcott, the American leader of a Buddhist revival in Sri Lanka in the late 19th century. It would be hard to find a better example of an extraordinary person doing extraordinary things than Olcott’s life, spanning from antebellum United States:

Henry Steel Olcott began life in 1832 on a farm in Orange, New Jersey, the eldest of six children. His parents were devout Presbyterians who traced their lineage to the Puritans. Olcott would study agricultural science at what is now New York University, and then work in experimental agriculture, publishing several influential studies that gave him international renown. Olcott was a confident man and a modern man, unconventional and independent, excelling at whatever he did, an embodiment of the American ethic. He allied himself with the liberal causes of mid-19th century America: the abolition movement, the women’s movement, the temperance movement, the cremation movement. There is some evidence that a young Olcott dabbled in Spiritualism, a fad at the time. Everyone who knew Olcott thought of him as a man of principle, and also a kook, and maybe a visionary, too. When he tired of agriculture, Olcott decided he would be a journalist, writing for the New York Tribune and a few other papers. Around this time, Olcott married the pious daughter of an Episcopalian minister who bore Olcott two sons. But husband and wife were destined to grow apart, and eventually they divorced, leaving Olcott to explore his more experimental side.

At the onset of the American Civil War, Olcott joined the Union Army and served as the special commissioner of the War Department investigating fraud, corruption, and graft at the New York Mustering and Disbursement Office. By the time he was through, Olcott had achieved the rank of colonel. He became so well respected as a man who could get to the bottom of any injustice, the secretary of war appointed him to investigate the conspiracy behind the Lincoln assassination, which was accomplished in two weeks’ time. At the war’s end, Olcott decided he would leave government service and become a private lawyer specializing in insurance, revenue, and fraud.

and ending as a leader of men:

By the time Olcott died in 1907, it was clear he had played a crucial role as just such a leader. In Sri Lanka, Henry Steel Olcott would create scores of Buddhist schools, and many more would be built in his name. It was Henry Steel Olcott who initiated the design of the international Buddhist flag, and you see it everywhere in Sri Lanka, from temples to trishaws. His Buddhist Catechism has been translated into more than 20 languages and is still used in Buddhist education all over the world. And Olcott has been honored in kind. There are Henry Steel Olcott statues in Sri Lanka, and Henry Steel Olcott streets. There is a Henry Steel Olcott Memorial Cricket Tournament (perhaps the greatest honor Sri Lanka could bestow upon a man) held across the country each year.

In 1967, at a ceremony for the commemorative stamp issued in Sri Lanka to celebrate the 60th anniversary of Olcott’s death, then-Prime Minister Dudley Senanayake summed up Olcott thus: “At a time when Buddhism was on the wane in Ceylon, Colonel Henry Steel Olcott…awakened its people to fight to regain their Buddhist heritage. Colonel Olcott was one of the heroes in the struggle of Lankan independence…. Colonel Olcott’s visit to Ceylon was a landmark in the history of Buddhism.”

On a more personal level, I was intrigued by this tidbit: “At his funeral in India in 1907, his successor as resident of the Theosophical Society, Annie Besant, told the gathering of mourners that they were not to say goodbye to Colonel Henry Steel Olcott but merely to the cast-off garment that once held his spirit.” It turns out that this woman, Dr. Annie Besant, was one of the founders of Besant Hill School, a competing boarding school located in the town that I attended school in, Ojai, California. Ojai has a long history of strange religious establishment; the school that I attended is located next to a compound run by the followers of Jiddu Krishnamurti.

easter song

Matthew EilarLeave a comment

happy easter, for those of you who believe as such. a note about the origin of the holiday name from Jim Burroway of Box Turtle Bulletin, you may find it as interesting as I did.

Above, the christian songwriter Keith Green performs “Easter Song.” Below, “El Cordero Pascual” (The Passover Lamb) from Oswaldo Golijov’s cantata La Pasión Según San Marcos.