Wednesday, January 02, 2008
Amy
Walking to my writing post this morning I found myself humming the Penn football fight song:
... fair Harvard has her Crimson, and Yale her colors, too, but for dear Pennsylvania we wave the red and blue...
Sometimes I eavesdrop on my mind (if that's what it is) like a voyeur hoping to discover something of what is cooking beneath my relentless and too-tricky conscious.
See if you can follow this. Or care to:
I am buried lately in the fight between so-called atheists and so-called believers. I call them so-called because neither party to the argument represents either the atheist in me nor the believer.
I am a believer because I recognized a long time ago that there is a dimension to me - sometimes healthy, sometimes neurotic - that is going to find an object of devotion. I could have been a Nazi or one of Jim Jones followers who drank the cool-aid. Or- if I wasn't so tactile, restless, and erotic - a monastic.
I am an atheist because the God of conventional church religion strikes me as silly and preposterous. That there might be a mighty and personal Being who listens to our woes and praise and rearranges the universe in response seems so obviously the projection of human ego that can't bring itself to see us as just another phenomenon alongside all the others that have showed and eventually gone extinct.
Having been a parish priest for 30 years, never quite letting go of the illusion that people who come to church are searching for an encounter with the Wholly Other, the unsettling energy that convicts the ego of overreaching and disciplines the intellect to find pleasure in the odds-against fact of being here in a largely empty universe.
I guess I have been pretty proud of my courage and intellectual honesty about all this. In fact I am loving this chapter, the western slope chapter, in which I get to look at a life with a perspective I could never have mustered at a younger age.
But I have forgotten - or ignored - that non-rational believer in me. From earliest memory it has attached itself to the feminine side of life. And specifically to specific women.
I am going to save the long complex unfolding of this for future writing (and for the book I am at work on), but the short version is that I can make of a woman what I saw Vietnamese in Hanoi making of the many shrines scattered around the city. They buy and light incense sticks, put them into the pagoda, put the palms of their hands together and bow, again and again.
I never asked, but I imagined they would tell you they do that because, well, because they do that. No specific reference, no creed or set of rules. Clearly there is an element of reverence and respect for ancestors and for their history, but, again, no elaborate holy writings or beliefs. Just obedience and surrender to a dimension of themselves that defies reason.
Maybe you've forgotten, I began this piece by telling you I found myself singing the Penn fight song this morning.
Penn named a new president last year. Amy Gutman. When I saw her picture - she is young, blond, with a nice smile, nice figure - I was spellbound. Why? You figure it out. I haven't.
I graduated from Penn 45 years ago and have never been back. Send them a few bucks occasionally. Read the alumni magazine about all the fascinating things going on in the university, and check my class for luminaries and obituaries.
But since Amy became president I scour the magazine for pictures and news of her.
Now I understand better what made me so uncomfortable all those years as a parish priest, being a stand-in for the projections of people hungry for that other dimension.
Amy is my priest because she is the leader of my church, the academy. And she often wears red.
Penn just announced a capital funds drive with a goal of something over $2 billion. We'll see if this non-rational religious hunger can be translated into those big bucks.
I hope it works better for Amy and Penn than it ever did for the church and me.
Singing Penn's songs won't build a new science center, but, like those hymns they play in stores during Christmas, it likely does pay tribute to the power of the symbols we have entrusted to those who have been ordained to guard the holy grail.
... fair Harvard has her Crimson, and Yale her colors, too, but for dear Pennsylvania we wave the red and blue...
Sometimes I eavesdrop on my mind (if that's what it is) like a voyeur hoping to discover something of what is cooking beneath my relentless and too-tricky conscious.
See if you can follow this. Or care to:
I am buried lately in the fight between so-called atheists and so-called believers. I call them so-called because neither party to the argument represents either the atheist in me nor the believer.
I am a believer because I recognized a long time ago that there is a dimension to me - sometimes healthy, sometimes neurotic - that is going to find an object of devotion. I could have been a Nazi or one of Jim Jones followers who drank the cool-aid. Or- if I wasn't so tactile, restless, and erotic - a monastic.
I am an atheist because the God of conventional church religion strikes me as silly and preposterous. That there might be a mighty and personal Being who listens to our woes and praise and rearranges the universe in response seems so obviously the projection of human ego that can't bring itself to see us as just another phenomenon alongside all the others that have showed and eventually gone extinct.
Having been a parish priest for 30 years, never quite letting go of the illusion that people who come to church are searching for an encounter with the Wholly Other, the unsettling energy that convicts the ego of overreaching and disciplines the intellect to find pleasure in the odds-against fact of being here in a largely empty universe.
I guess I have been pretty proud of my courage and intellectual honesty about all this. In fact I am loving this chapter, the western slope chapter, in which I get to look at a life with a perspective I could never have mustered at a younger age.
But I have forgotten - or ignored - that non-rational believer in me. From earliest memory it has attached itself to the feminine side of life. And specifically to specific women.
I am going to save the long complex unfolding of this for future writing (and for the book I am at work on), but the short version is that I can make of a woman what I saw Vietnamese in Hanoi making of the many shrines scattered around the city. They buy and light incense sticks, put them into the pagoda, put the palms of their hands together and bow, again and again.
I never asked, but I imagined they would tell you they do that because, well, because they do that. No specific reference, no creed or set of rules. Clearly there is an element of reverence and respect for ancestors and for their history, but, again, no elaborate holy writings or beliefs. Just obedience and surrender to a dimension of themselves that defies reason.
Maybe you've forgotten, I began this piece by telling you I found myself singing the Penn fight song this morning.
Penn named a new president last year. Amy Gutman. When I saw her picture - she is young, blond, with a nice smile, nice figure - I was spellbound. Why? You figure it out. I haven't.
I graduated from Penn 45 years ago and have never been back. Send them a few bucks occasionally. Read the alumni magazine about all the fascinating things going on in the university, and check my class for luminaries and obituaries.
But since Amy became president I scour the magazine for pictures and news of her.
Now I understand better what made me so uncomfortable all those years as a parish priest, being a stand-in for the projections of people hungry for that other dimension.
Amy is my priest because she is the leader of my church, the academy. And she often wears red.
Penn just announced a capital funds drive with a goal of something over $2 billion. We'll see if this non-rational religious hunger can be translated into those big bucks.
I hope it works better for Amy and Penn than it ever did for the church and me.
Singing Penn's songs won't build a new science center, but, like those hymns they play in stores during Christmas, it likely does pay tribute to the power of the symbols we have entrusted to those who have been ordained to guard the holy grail.
