Andy Skurka hiked 7,700 miles across the country, finishing last Sunday.
I’ve been following his trip logs since February, when he was at the halfway point of his trip. I find it a tremendously exciting story — that someone could hike close to eight thousand miles across North America in just under a year, crossing the midwest in the middle of winter. It’s just an amazing thing to do — reads like a real pilgrimage — somehow very life-affirming.
All the books are packed — finally — fifty-five 12x12x12″ boxes. Maybe too many books.
At this point, nearly everything is packed except the things that are fragile and difficult to pack: framed pictures, dishes, tchotchkes. But we don’t have much of any of those things, so it should go quickly.
Right now, the plan is to get everything packed except what’s going in the car with me, so I can have a week to go into Chicago, and work on a couple of writing projects. The sooner I get everything packed, the sooner I get to start that free time — so back to packing!
Went off to Whole Foods in Wheaton tonight to do a little shopping. We got in the habit of going late in the day, because traffic is light and there aren’t any lines in the store.
Next door to Whole Foods is Borders, and needless to say it has become a ritual to go to Borders for a few minutes. It was nine o’clock, and Borders was packed. And wait-a-minute, there’s all these kids…. Then I finally notice the signs: Harry Potter book release party. Of course! –today’s the day.
It was a pretty cool scene. Lots of people in costume. Kids standing around talking about the books. Palpable excitement. What I liked best was all the high-school-aged kids who were there. They have grown up on Harry Potter, and I guess he’s still cool enough, even into high school, to wait in line for the sixth book. And yeah, there were quite a few adults there, too. Too many to be all parents, or people who just happened into the store. It was the adults who looked a little embarrassed about being there.
Why be embarrassed? The Harry Potter books are pretty good. What other book commands enough attention that people will stay up until midnight, book after book, to buy it the day it is released? Maybe I’d be waiting in line right now, except I still haven’t finished the fifth book (I’m a cheapskate, I wait for the paperback editions.)
Here’s to Harry Potter.
Though I don’t have time to experiment with online audio for the foreseeable future, while I was packing up some things for our move to Massachusetts I ran across the project that initially made me aware of what you could do with religion and audio.
A year ago, I was serving temporarily as minister of religious education at the Unitarian Universalist Church of Berkeley, California. The facilites supervisor there was a fellow named Mark Johnson, a talented musician and visual artist, who had a degree in film studies (now you know why he was working as a faciltities supervisor — no money in the arts).
Mark was a Pentecostal, I a Unitarian Universalist, and our religions overlapped in three crucial areas — the importance of Spirit, integrating religion and the arts, and trying to get kids interested in our religious heritage. So one Sunday he recorded a chidlren’s story I did in the worship service, cleaned up the sound, and added a beat and sound effects to it. We put in a minimal amount of time — it took me a few hours to prepare the story but I would have had to do that anyway, and it took Mark about an hour and a half to produce the recording — but in spite of that the results were pretty good. Check out a compressed mp3 version of “12 days of magic” here. It’s the wrong season, but hey….
We talked idly about producing other stories from the Christian tradition, trying to produce something children and youth might actually listen to. But Mark had a new baby in his life, and I moved here to Geneva, Illinois, so we never got around to it.
But wouldn’t that be cool? I mean, podcasts of sermons are fine and good, but they’re kinda boring. The UUA’s “Drive Time” recordings are well-produced and fine for church geeks like me and boring for most people. But wouldn’t it be fun to do something with a little more… pizzazz?
Just throwing the idea out there, hoping someone picks up on it.
This week, I’ve been reading Proverbs of Ashes by Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker. Brock and Parker take on the subject of violence, and suggest that the Christian tradition provides a fertile breeding ground for acts of violence; they argue for example that if God was willing to kill off God’s son Jesus, what does that say to a child who’s being abused by her/his parents? –it says, do what Jesus did, accept the suffering, and all will be well.
But do not imagine that this is a Christian-bashing book. Both Parker and Brock have stayed within the Christian tradition. Rather, they are trying to retell the Christian story so that it becomes less destructive. In that respect, they remind me a little of the great Universalist Hosea Ballou. 200 years ago this year, Ballou wrote A Treatise on Atonement, in which he pointed out that a God of love would not kill his son in order to atone for something. It strikes me that what Brock and Parker are really doing is updating Universalism, finding anew that God is love.
And if you have no interest in discussions of God or Christianity, the book is still worth reading. The personal stories in the book are absolutely riveting — this is one book of theology that truly is a page-turner. And even if you’re not Christian, the stories give you a sense of how violence has become endemic in our culture. Highly recommended.
Twenty-odd years ago, I got into the habit of staying up late in the summer. I was living outside Philadephia, it was brutally hot every day for weeks. My job allowed me to pretty much set my own hours, so I stayed up late, sometimes all night, to take advantage of the cooler night air. I’ve been in love with summer nights ever since then.
This afternoon, it got brutally hot. I’m on vacation, so I had the luxury of not having to work, and instead I sat around in a stupor. Now it’s night, a magical summer night, and I can stay up late to enjoy it.
I can see some lights on in the upstairs apartment of the house over on Ford St.; at least one other night owl lives nearby. The moon has set already. The orange hazard lights on the construction crew’s sawhorses blink on and off all along Ford Street in an odd rhythm.
And I can hear the various hums and whines from all the neighbors’s air conditioners. The third shift of the Burgess Norton factory over on Anderson Boulevard has one of the doors open again, so I can hear faint factory sounds: machinery clacking away, the “beep-beep-beep-beep” as a forklift backs up. Across town, a late-night freight rumbles along the Union Pacific line.
The first light of day will come at about 3:30. That’s the time I came awake two nights ago, to hear a few birds idly start to sing. They thought better of it, stopped, and began again in earnest at 4:30 when dawn was more sure.
The drought keeps getting worse. NOAA’s National Weather Service Forecast Office has upgraded it to the category of “severe drought (D2).” They define severe drought in the following terms:
Crop or pasture losses likely; fire risk very high; water shortages common; water restrictions imposed.
Yesterday the air was dry, the easterly breeze we’ve had since mid-week continued, and the temperatures stayed in the eighties — a perfect summer day. I decided to walk to Batavia using the paved bike path along the river.
Walking down Hamilton St. to the river, I saw the leaves on some trees were beginning to wither with the dryness. Some shrubs and smaller plants were in even worse shape. One patch of Coneflowers appeared dead.
But once down by the river, everything was still amazingly green. Even the grass was green along the river, although everywhere else it has dried to a crisp brown. Duckweed is out now, and when I squatted down to look at some, I noticed all kinds of insect activity along the surface of the mud and of the river. I realized that I have seen almost no insects anywhere for weeks, not even mosquitoes. But there are insects close to the water, which must be why the swallows are flying so low recently.
The river remains low, and you can see it flowing over rocks that are usually well underwater. The surface of the water looked bright and cheerful beside me. I walked through a stand of trees, and could feel the coolness coming up off the river, and into the shade of the trees.
About halfway to Batavia, I passed an area of grass that had not been mowed. The higher stalks, which bore the seed heads, were dry and brown, but up to about eighteen inches the grass and the lower plants growing among it were green — not exactly lush, but green.
I passed two bicyclists who had stopped to pick mulberries, which are growing prolifically alongside the river, and still bearing heavily. “Good year for mulberries,” I said.
One of the cyclists,”Oh they are so good,” with an accent that sounded eastern European. He picked another handful. “Very sweet.”
On the walk back, I picked some. The plentiful juice stained my fingers (and presumably my mouth) a bright deep purple-red. They tasted extraordinarily good, although that may be because I was getting thirsty by that point. Or because the mulberries from trees growing up away from the river are small and wizened, and taste eldery.
As I walked up State Street, climbing up out of the river valley, I noticed the trees started looking bedraggled starting at about 30 feet above the surface of the river. Our house sits beyond the height of land that marks the edge of the valley, and we are about sixty feet above the river. The house was built in the 1850’s, and still has the old water pump out front, sticking up out of the concrete cap someone put over the well. I wonder how deep that well goes, and what kinds of droughts it has seen in the past.
A perfect summer day. It got down to about sixty degrees last night, cool enough that I had to pull a blanket over me before morning. But the weather forecast says a heat wave is going to set in tomorrow. I believe the forecast. My joints are starting to ache, which means a change in weather is coming within twenty four hours. On perfect summer days like this, my mind seems to work more clearly, so I better write down the long string of thoughts I had this morning before the heat melts it away….
The big argument
You’ve probably heard the argument, too — people who say they prefer spirituality to religion, that they can be spiritual without belonging to a church or a temple or a Zen monastery. Here are some thoughts on this argument….
Spirituality fits the North American mood. Most North Americans have only been on this continent for a few short generations. For the majority of North Americans, we or our not-too-distant ancestors came here to find a better life. Our North American mythology says, we can leave Europe or Asia or South America, and come here, and make a better life. That mythology has even permeated the lives of those North Americans whose ancestors were brought here forcibly, or who lived here as indigenous people before the great flood of immigrants. We believe that North American myth, at least to some extent. We are do-it-yourselfers, we believe it is possible to pull yourselves up by your bootstraps.
Spirituality means you can do it yourself. Henry David Thoreau, who resigned membership in the Unitarian church of his birth as soon as he became an adult, seems to be the perfect example of do-it-yourself spirituality that worked. He didn’t need his church. Instead of going to church, he’d go out and take a long walk. These days, not as many people walk, but they might do a weekend yoga retreat when the mood takes them, or read one of those books from the “Inspirational” section of the bookstore, or go to church when they feel like it. They chart their own course without reference to anyone else.
Religion is different. You do religion in a group, with other people. The fashionable way to say it is that you do religion “in community.” That means that in a religion, you are held accountable. You can’t just do anything you want. If you join a Zen monastery, you cannot say to the Zen master, I don’t feel like doing sitting meditation today, I’m going to take a long walk instead. Liberal religious congregations in North America have far lower standards than Zen monastaerys, but we do expect people to participate in the life of the congregation and give money.
Religion is more difficult than spirituality. Others in your religious community can question you about your religious life. They even have the freedom to make judgments about your religious path. And you have to question yourself as well. In do-it-yourself spirituality, if the yoga retreat doesn’t work out, you can always sign up for Zen meditation classes, leaving the yoga behind you. You can believe that no mistakes are possible. In religion, if your religious path doesn’t work out, you have to confront yourself and ask why.
It’s like music
You can make an analogy between religion and spirituality, and playing a musical instrument. Spirituality is like practicing your instrument. You can get really good at playing your musical instrument in the privacy of your own bedroom. But you’re just playing for yourself. It’s kind of solipsistic, with you in your own little musical universe where no one else exists. When you’re playing alone, you can easily ignore some of the wrong notes, and the changes in tempo, and the times when you stop in the middle of a piece and start over again. You can hear the way it’s supposed to sound in your head.
Religion is like practicing your instrument, and then going out and playing a concert or a gig, or at least playing along with some friends in someone’s living room once a month. When you play with other people, you get out of your own head. You know right away when you play a wrong note, and you know if you’ve played well or badly by the reactions of the other musicians, or the reactions of the audience if you’re playing a concert or a gig.
Any musicians will tell you that practicing is essential, taking lessons is good, but if you really want to make progress you have to play with other people, or play for an audience. Religion is something like that. Take those long walks. Go on a yoga retreat. And maintain regular contact with a religious community, who will let you know when you’re going astray (which can be uncomfortable at best), and who will take you much farther along your religious/spiritual path than anything else.
The theory behind it
I’m taking my basic concepts for this little essay from a group of thinkers known as the American pragmatists. The pragmatists don’t have any particular interest in trying to figure out the “ultimate truth.” Maybe there isn’t any ultimate truth, or if there is we sure haven’t found it yet. But if we want to make our ideas clearer, if we want to get a little closer to assuming-it-exists ultimate truth, we can work out a pretty good approach.
You get together with a group of people who are all interested in a similar problem. Call this group the “community of inquirers,” because they’re a community who are inquiring together into the same or related questions. Different people in this community of inquirers put out provisional ideas, hypotheses, and then everyone kind of hashes things out together. Bit by bit, together you will make your ideas clearer. If there is some “ultimate truth,” this is probably the way to get there.
If you have any training in science, you will see that this approach is pretty similar to scientific method. You can’t do science alone. Once you come up with some results, you have to ask others in your community of inquirers to check your insights and findings, and see if they can replicate your results. (Interestingly, many scientists are actually willing to make some kind of claim that there is some “ultimate truth” out there.) However, I’m expanding this method beyond just science. I’ve already made the analogy to musical performance, which uses the same basic method, altered somewhat for the peculiarities of playing music. Musical performance probably provides a better analogy for doing religion.
When it comes to people who are the great innovators, there’s an interesting corollary to all this. Just as a great composer has to learn how to play at least one musical instrument, or just as a scientist doing pure research has to know basic lab skills and lots of mathematics, the innovators in religion and spirituality have to have some basic grounding in doing religion. (Just doing spirituality would not be enough, because it’s too solipsistic.) Yes, Henry Thoreau stopped going to church when he was an adult. But he grew up in a church, his family with whom he lived all his life were deeply involved in that church, and Thoreau had constant and regular contact with other Transcendentalists with whom he constantly checked his new insights. James Luther Adams, the great 20th C. Unitarian Universalist theologian, is a better example. He was active in church and denomination, and his work and presence (by all reports) did much to make Unitarian Universalism a better community.
In fact, what Adams wrote about “voluntary associations,” which are somewhat analogous to what I’m calling a community of inquirers, takes the whole idea a step farther. Adams’s idea was that a community of inquirers, a voluntary association, can in turn go out and transform the world for the better. That provides an interesting twist on the whole idea of some “ultimate truth….”
Questions? Comments? After all, what I’ve just said is entirely provisional, subject to correction and revision!
Fill cardboard box. Tape up cardboard box. Label cardboard box. Stack in corner. Fill next cardboard box….
I hate packing up all our belongings. I haven’t done any packing for three days, but this afternoon I got up my courage again and started in.
The actual packing, the boxes and the tape, isn’t so bad. Handling things we own, one by one, is more complicated. I pick up this photograph and hear that conversation we were having. I pack up those odd-shaped rocks and hear the ocean. I find the box still mostly packed from our last move, and hear our late-night conversations with our housemates.
Packing books is easier. When I pick up a handful to put in a box, all I hear are snippets of what each book has to say.
Maybe I’ll go pack some books.