It’s cold, it’s late (for me), and now I owe the gang a few words on their thoughtful engagement with my response to Steve’s “devotion” blog.
To oversimplify to an extreme, I suppose my point was that devotion (as best I understand it) is always utterly particular, and has as part of its structure a dimension of accountability that didn’t seem obvious in what Steve said. A devotion without either an object-of-devotion or a community-that-shares-in-one’s-devotion just sounds fishy to me.
This does connect, honest it does, with Dave and Kurt’s conversation about Buddhism. I have no interest in dissuading people from Buddhist belief and practice; although I don’t believe it to be true in a final sense (or else I would be a Buddhist), I don’ imagine that I’m in a position to give a laundry list of reasons Christianity is superior to Buddhism. Mercy’s sake, I’m not even sure I think Christianity is superior. I just find it to be right. But the important element of this discussion for the purposes of illuminating Steve’s and my differences has to do with the extent to which non-practitioners of a Way are in a position to size up the strengths and weaknesses of that Way. I share some of Kurt and Dave’reservations about the cultural presence of Buddhism in the industrial West, and I share some of their admiration for specific teachings —but I’ made cautious by (for instance) the exercise of evaluating the extent to which Buddhism is “really” a religion or a philosophy. How much does that question matter to people whose lives are defined by the Buddha’s insight into the true nature of reality? Though both Kurt and Dave are courteous and careful, the risk of condescension certainly seems high; indeed, it sounds from what Kurt and Dave say that the author to whom both they advert (John Horgan, writing in Slate in an article I haven’t read) may have crossed the line into condescending dismissal. But here, my ignorance quotient is red-lining, so I’ll back away quietly and change direction back. . . .
Even more, my discomfort with Steve’s gentle, non-specific devotion involves dimensions on which Tom touches. I already touched on how that would be; Tom addresses the kinds of community life he associates with Catholic and Protestant Christianity. I won’t split the hairs about “catholic” and “protestant”; Tom’s undeniably onto something here, and that’s what I have to follow through.
Tom suggests that the very catholicity of Catholicism — its identity as a church for everyone (whether everyone likes it or not) — effects a significantly different kind of ethos from Protestant congregations which are informed (and deformed) by their historically antithetical origins. Tom pushes me to be more specific about how my usage of “community” plays out, when the term seems to function so differently in these two different versions of Christianity (and we could show more different varieties of “community” by looking at Orthodox and non-denominational, independent congregations).
The point I was aiming at involves the [different] ways that community life itself makes possible the individual’s devotion. So when Tom asks to what the devotion is oriented, I answer quite vigorously, “To God, as God has been revealed in and to the lives of a body of people big enough to damp out individual idiosyncrasies.” That may issue in some traditions as a direct inner experience of the inner flame — but I’d insist that that’s not because somehow Tradition A has discovered the One Spiritual High Road, whereas Tradition B is stuck in muddy ruts of misguided ritualism. Rather, in each case the community’s mediation makes possible a mode of devotion that bespeaks and, pardon the barbarism, be-hears the God toward whom the community shares its devotion.
And then, back round to Steve Himmer (who may by now wish he’d just never brought the topic up in the first place), my unease with the sort of devotion described in “Afternoon Vespers” derives from my uncertainty about what community is mediating, tempering, cultivating the sort of devotion Steve describes (and what its relation might be to an ordered religious community, something of an antithesis of unspecific devotion).
Steve Yost comes into the picture byciting Gary Snyder, whose take on Beat Religiosity strikes several interesting and relevant notes. Snyder, not surprisingly, commends the sort of path that he took, and notes drawbacks to other paths, but charitably observes that even a partial, haphazard beat “may get pretty far out, and that's probably better than moping around classrooms or writing books on Buddhism and Happiness for the masses, as the squares (who will shortly have succeeded in putting us all down) do.”
Now, my eyelids tremble, and I begin to grow in confidence that I’ve written more than the usual arrant nonsense, so I’ll call it a night.
Except to say, you gotta love David Weinberger.
Posted by AKMA at February 24, 2003 10:44 PM | TrackBackThat is hard, the idea that devotion is: "To God, as God has been revealed in and to the lives of a body of people big enough to damp out individual idiosyncrasies."
How do I reconcile my idiosyncratic experience of God with the way the community (eg. a parish) understands God? Slowly I have learned to describe my own experiences more in the language of the church, but it isn't always a comfortable fit. A lot of what I most value in my experience of God is indeed idiosyncratic.
I understand intellectually the need for a community to discern what of individual experience to accept. I went to a church service Sept. 11, 2001 where an individual got up and said that God is punishing us for the evils of modern life. I don't doubt that that individual believed that he heard God directly just as sincerely as I do, but don't think his community (it wasn't my church) would be wise to follow him.
But I guess individualism is deep in me even though I question it politically. At least at this stage in my journey my deepest loyalty is to the truth of my individual experience, not to what the community tells me.
Posted by: Pem at February 26, 2003 07:36 AMThe use of the term "accountability" suggests a form of religious experience in which, however deeply individual the ardor or commitment of any one in particular, there is acknowledged a larger, deeper body of collective devotion to which the individual owes some measure of allegiance, fidelity and obedience.
The question is whether this "debt" necessarily translates to the erasure (or bankruptcy) of individuality. The initial statement that "devotion (as best I understand it) is always utterly particular" seems to allow infinite respect for the individual moment of devotion, at the same time as what follows points to an equally unbounded respect for something that transcends the individual, and to which the individual is accountable.
But for groups (any group) to command that fidelity, ought not the group in turn be required to show its ability to be subordinated to something more than itself? And if that thing is not to be found in some larger established group or tradition, then it seems to me that every time some subsect builds a church, it is walling itself in. Every cent going to brick and mortar for a religious community might be used to work for the larger whole of which it should always remember it is but a part.
When a group forgets this and takes itself for a whole, does it not undermine its own authority vis a vis the individual?
That leaves two vexing issues for me: First, exactly what is delimited in the metaphor of "damp out" - is this an extinguishing, a mellowing, a sponging that removes or just leaves less damp?, or a mollifying, a pacifying, a modulating, a form of bondage by bonding, a bringing to its senses, a softening, or something else?
Next, how might groups counterbalance the centripetal force that brings them into being with a reaching out toward something larger, even if this would in turm damp out the idiosyncrasies that make it a group?
Posted by: Tom Matrullo at February 26, 2003 10:07 AMTreading lightly here amongst bright folk.
I have some similar questions and problems stemming from an understanding of catholicity. "Walling in" something that is as ephemeral as faith into structures made of brick and mortar, scripture and doctrine, seems problematic on some level. I think that the afore mentioned can certainly be tools, they cannot be, as a whole, the end of faith experience. At some point, individual revelation needds a voice, a place to be heard and affirmed as a solitary experience and not necessarily as contingent upon the wider whole.
Though Christianity may be "right" if not "superior," posessing in it a final truth, is it possible that that truth is unknowable? And if it is such, how do we rely on anything other than what washes well with our individual experiences?
What makes religion difficult, aside from it being about God (an easily understood and explained phenom), is that it wants to institutionalize the most personal and deep experiences of life. It is not merely a governing system with mores and ethics wrapped up in myth. It is the experience of the Other. How can we possibly enshroud that in any institution?
I ask this question, as I ask all of late, as someone in the ordination track. I plan on working for the institution, and I do not desire to work for something relativist and empty, but one fruitful and deeply committed to the undefinable. Can I have both and hold to a credible faith, on posessed of livable tennents and some sense of the absolute?
Posted by: Tripp at February 26, 2003 05:35 PMWe can see an example of this in our code we've written so far. In each function's block, we declare variables that hold our data. When each function ends, the variables within are disposed of, and the space they were using is given back to the computer to use. The variables live in the blocks of conditionals and loops we write, but they don't cascade into functions we call, because those aren't sub-blocks, but different sections of code entirely. Every variable we've written has a well-defined lifetime of one function.
Posted by: Roland at January 12, 2004 11:59 PMWhen the machine compiles your code, however, it does a little bit of translation. At run time, the computer sees nothing but 1s and 0s, which is all the computer ever sees: a continuous string of binary numbers that it can interpret in various ways.
Posted by: Jocatta at January 12, 2004 11:59 PMNote the new asterisks whenever we reference favoriteNumber, except for that new line right before the return.
Posted by: Gregory at January 12, 2004 11:59 PMThe Stack is just what it sounds like: a tower of things that starts at the bottom and builds upward as it goes. In our case, the things in the stack are called "Stack Frames" or just "frames". We start with one stack frame at the very bottom, and we build up from there.
Posted by: Melchior at January 13, 2004 10:03 AMThis is another function provided for dealing with the heap. After you've created some space in the Heap, it's yours until you let go of it. When your program is done using it, you have to explicitly tell the computer that you don't need it anymore or the computer will save it for your future use (or until your program quits, when it knows you won't be needing the memory anymore). The call to simply tells the computer that you had this space, but you're done and the memory can be freed for use by something else later on.
Posted by: Emmett at January 13, 2004 10:04 AMEarlier I mentioned that variables can live in two different places. We're going to examine these two places one at a time, and we're going to start on the more familiar ground, which is called the Stack. Understanding the stack helps us understand the way programs run, and also helps us understand scope a little better.
Posted by: Humphrey at January 13, 2004 10:04 AM