Tag: Christianity

Francis of Assisi: From Radical Monk to Garden Ornament

On By Chas S. Clifton2 Comments

The real-estate supplement of the Taos News this week carried an article titled “Five Must-Haves for a Beautiful Backyard.” Oddly enough, four of the five items* were available at the store owned by a person interviewed for the story.

“Saint Francis of Assisi, the patron saint of animals, is one of our most popular statues,” said Char Austin, who works at Camino Real Imports. “People like the air of serenity that he brings in, more so when the statue is surrounded by trees, and birds can nest around. El San Francisco definitely contributes to create a peaceful environment.”

The real St. Francis of Assisi was anything but serene. He was more like “Occupy Rome”  AD 1204 — an upper middle class young man angry at the establishment, demanding radical change in the Roman Catholic Church. But history has turned him into a bird bath — and perhaps that metamorphosis was inevitable.

St. Francis as a bird bath with the wolf of Gubbio.
St. Francis as a bird bath, with the wolf of Gubbio.

Growing up as a Forest Service brat, with an agnostic father and a devoutly Christian mother, I noticed that Christianity seemed to end at the edge of town. Relations with the other-than-human world were not discussed in church. The Episcopal Church’s Book of Common Prayer contained a prayer for rain, as I recall, and that was about all.

For the rest, I was offered the secular gospel of conservation: scientific forestry, soil and water conservation, state-regulated hunting. At least that was better than what had gone before: cut-and-run timber cutting, market-hunting that wiped out species, the Dust Bowl . . .

Pope Innocent III has a dream of St. Francis of Assisi supporting the tilting church (attributed to Giotto).  Francis was more concerned with church reform than with nature itself. (Wikipedia.)

His Franciscan order grew to where it too was a bureaucratic organization, and some of the monks who clung too hard to Francis’ peace-and-poverty ideals (the “Spirituals”) ended up condemned as heretics. (The conflict between hard-core Franciscans and the Vatican appears briefly at the beginning of The Name of the Rose. Most viewers probably don’t get it.)

Yes, he wrote the “Canticle of the Sun,” in which all creation, including animals, the Sun and Moon, etc., is invited to praise God and is depicted as manifesting the divine. And he supposedly preached to birds — but he preferred to preach to people, even to the Muslim sultan of Egypt, who was enough of a sporting gent to let him live. In the story of the “wolf of Gubbio,” he saves the wolf from persecution by the local pastoralists, but at the price of giving up its wolf-ness. There is nothing in the canticle about the ecological role of predators.

Fast forward to 1967, when the journal Science published an essay by the historian Lynn White, Jr., “The Historic Roots of our Ecologic Crisis” (PDF), still widely read and anthologized today. In it, White blamed the crisis on the dualistic creator/created thinking fostered by the monotheistic religions, among which he included Communism, given the environmental crises created by Communist Party policies in the Soviet Union, China, and Eastern Europe:

Our daily habits of action, for example, are dominated by an implicit faith in perpetual progress which was unknown either to Greco-Roman antiquity or to the Orient. It is rooted in, and is indefensible apart from, Judeo-Christian theology. The fact that Communists share it merely helps to show what can be demonstrated on many other grounds: that Marxism, like Islam, is a Judeo-Christian heresy.

Christianity (and its parallel faiths) did not just end at the edge of town, it ended at a strip mine. Here is an interesting slide-show summary of the essay.

Casting about for an alternative to the “domination” model within the Christian tradition, White settled (rather half-heartedly, I always thought) on Francis, even though Francis’ view of non-human nature was thoroughly Catholic. To quote the Wikipedia entry,  Francis taught “that the world was created good and beautiful by God but suffers a need for redemption because of the primordial sin of man.” Contrary to the slide show linked above, this is not particularly “closer to Eastern philosophy.”

With the environmental movement growing, religious officialdom had to respond. Some Protestant Christians started talking “eco-justice,” while in 1979, Pope John Paul II named Francis “patron of ecology,” urging Catholics to be like Francis and take care of nature. Francis, said the pope, “offers Christians an example of genuine and deep respect for the integrity of creation” — as long as we understand that it is human-centric and required to praise God the creator, who is outside of creation, for letting it exist.

Of the hundreds of officially canonized saints, Francis was the only candidate for patron of ecology, even though the Vatican had squeezed all the radical ideas out of the Franciscan order within a century of his death.

Maybe as a medievalist Lynn White, Jr., was unaware of how nature, parallel to scripture, has served as  source of spiritual value in America.

We could see Bird Bath Francis as an attempt to bridge these traditions, to consecrate a safe, protected, and  cultivated nature — if not the self-organizing wolf-ridden wilderness. Followers of what Bron Taylor calls “dark green religion,” which may not be at all theistic, might not be so easily persuaded by the monk of Assisi, were they to meet him on the path.

*Wood carvings of saints, giant metal flowers, concrete animals, small water fountain, and ceramic Sun and Moon faces

OK, It’s Their Holiday, But Really, the ATM Too?

On By Chas S. Clifton4 Comments

Went to town with M. today—it’s our secular Sunday routine of coffeehouse brunch, newspapers (v. trad, that’s us), and then the laundromat and the grocery store.

The coffeehouse is owned by (extremely low-key) Christian ex-missionaries. I had checked the Facebook page to see if they were closing today for Easter — nothing posted there one way or another, so off we went.

When we arrived, however, there was a sign on the door to the effect that they were closing at noon, and the lone barista was totally overwhelmed by a long line of people all ordering cinnamon-ginger-latte-Italian soda-extra large-and-sugary drinks that take five minutes to make. (Really, why don’t they just go down the street and get a milkshake and a cup of coffee, then pour them together?)

All too soon the noon siren at the fire department blew.

With the clothes at the laundromat, we then went to the supermarket. One item on the short shopping list was potting soil, because M. is starting seeds in the greenhouse. But it was closed.

“Let’s try the hardware store,” I said. Nope, closed. Oh, and I needed cash for the week, so I walked to the bank, entered the ATM lobby and — “Temporarily Out of Service.” Now that’s really not fair. I feel marginalized and oppressed.

Around the Blogosphere, 24 March 2013

On By Chas S. Clifton

• Unitarians squirming over polyamory:

But as the issue of same-sex marriage heads to the Supreme Court, many committed Unitarians think the denomination should have a position, which is that polyamory activists should just sit down and be quiet. For one thing, poly activists are seen as undermining the fight for same-sex marriage. The UUA has officially supported same-sex marriage, the spokeswoman says, “since 1979, with tons of resolutions from the general assembly.”

• How do you honor your Christian ancestors?

When They first began contacting me, it was a cacophony of voices, questions like “Why did you stop going to church?  Do you not like Fr. ___ anymore?” and “You can still pray with us, yes? (or ja?, dependent on the Ancestor)?” and many others.  Their Catholic identity was so strong and intrinsic to Their Being that They carried it over with some part of Them into Death.  If Their Catholicism is as deep, powerful, and purposeful a presence in Their life as Paganism is in mine, that it lasts well after They have crossed over, who am I to argue with Their spirits?

• While we are reclaiming formerly pejorative terms, why not reclaim “apostate?”

The word apostate is one such boundary. It is a word that requires confidence and defiance. People demand things when they hear it. It opens conversations and breaks down walls. It can also cause a great deal of pain and suffering in places that do not allow freedom of belief or thought

Articles on Otherkin, Therianthropes

On By Chas S. Clifton5 Comments

• Joseph P. Laycock, ” ‘We Are Spirits of Another Sort’:  Ontological Rebellion and Religious Dimensions of the Otherkin Community,” Nova Religio 15, no. 3 (2012): 65–90.   DOI: 10.1525/nr.2012.15.3.65

• Venetia Laura Delano Robertson, “The Beast Within: Anthrozoomorphic Identity and Alternative Spirituality in the Online Therianthropy Movement,” Nova Religio 16, no. 3 (2013): 7–30. DOI: 10.1525/nr.2013.16.3.7

“Therianthropic,” coined from the Greek words for “wild beast” and “man,” first showed up in 1886, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, when a contributor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica wrote of  “Religions, in which animistic ideas still play a prominent part, but which have grown up to a therianthropic polytheism”—such as ancient Egyptian religion with the jackal-headed Set, etc., I suppose. Other therio- combinations go back to the seventeenth century, such as theriomancy.

Both Robertson and Laycock rely heavily on blogger Lupa’s book A Field Guide to Otherkin.

Laycock’s Otherkin scholarship seems to be a spin off from his work with the Atlanta Vampire Alliance, which produced Vampires Today: The Truth about Modern Vampirism.

Although he has to take time to explain the Otherkin “community” to his readers (I use the scare quotes because I have some reservations about the world community in such cases), Laycock is really engaged in religion scholars’ ongoing debate over what “religion” is or whether the word “religion” is useful at all in a scholarly setting. (There are those who claim it is not, that it merely masks political and social competitions.)

He places the Otherkin in the historical spectrum of Western esotericism and spiritualism: the idea of “walk-ins” goes back to the 19th century, for example, while the influential English esotericist Dion Fortune wrote of “possesion by ‘elementals’ or thought-forms . . . . Despite Fortune’s rather pejorative view of such people, Psychic Self-Defense has since been cited as an early reference to the Otherkin phenomenon” (71).

To Laycock, Otherkin are perhaps best described as an ” ‘audience cult,’ a movement that supports novel beliefs and practices but without a discernible organization. Individuals frequently participate in audience cults simply through reading books and watching television programs. . . . As an audience cult facilitated primarily by the Internet, Otherkin are free to practice whatever religion they like, but their identity tends to color that practice” (73).

There is more, but I am just summarizing a few points.

Robertson spends more time explaining the concept of Therianthropes’ self-descriptions of “awakening” to their dual natures, goes into “Internet religion — Therianthropy popped up on alt.horror.werewolves in 1992 — and concurs with Laycock  that Therianthropes “reify their anthrozoomorphic identity through the appropriation of spiritual concepts into personal mythologies” (10).

She spends time on the idea of shape-shifting through history and the return of totemism through neo-shamanic teaching as well as contemporary Paganism. But she also notes that there are Christian Therianthropes who see themrmselves as “having a gift bestowed upon them by God to redress the balance between nature and civilization” (23).

Her conclusion is that the Therianthropy movement “exemplifies the innovation of spiritual individuals in the postmodern age . . . popular occulture and re-enchantment in motion” (24).  In other words, the key sociology-of-religion concept of re-enchantment is more malleable and multi-faceted than previously discussed.

Is Paganism Doomed?

On By Chas S. Clifton3 Comments

No, this is not the judgment of one of the usual (Pagan) suspects.

It is a tangent spun off a column by Rod Dreher, who comments frequently on ecclesiastical matters. He was raised a southern Protestant, converted to Roman Catholicism, left that church over the sex-abuse scandals, and is now an Orthodox Christian — although he is aware that the Orthodox churches are not scandal-free either.

Although Dreher and I are a little different theologically, I think that he would pass the next-door-neighbor test, especially as he loves to cook and appreciates the cuisine of his native Louisiana. Maybe he would invite me over now and then.

Like many members of the chattering classes, Dreher has been looping back again and again to the resignation of Pope Benedict XVI. What does it mean for the future? and all that sort of thing. (Me, I wonder if the prophecy-falsely-attributed-to-St.-Malachy is right, and the next guy will indeed be the last pope. Then we can ask some questions.)

So in the course of musing on the future of Christianity and religion in general, he quotes some Brazilian who says that interest in Brazil’s established Afro-Brazilian traditions is diminishing.

[Quoting the Brazilian:] As I said in other topics, christianity in America and Europe is not the only faith that is hemorraging people: as follower of the so called ‘african paganism’ (macumba), here in Brazil, it’s baffling to see the temples devoid of young people: of the dozens of young man and woman I know only three (including me) are active. In my mother’s generation, almost everyone in Brazil was macumbeiro (follower of the macumba), today temples are closing, the priests are spiritually weak, and one rarely see the offerings to the spirits in the crossroads, beaches and graveyards.

And he decides that paganism [sic] is preferable to atheism, even if it is not the Real Thing.

Personally, I find paganism far more attractive than atheism, because pagans, however mistaken their understanding (from a Christian point of view) nevertheless share with Christians a recognition that there is Something There beyond ourselves, and the material world. I can have (have had) a fruitful, engaging discussion with my friend and commenter Franklin Evans, a pagan, in a way that I just can’t with friends who have no spiritual or religious beliefs, or a sense of the numinous.

My guess, and it’s only that, is that some pagans will fall away from the practice of their faith for the same reason many Christians are: because it doesn’t make sense in our scientistic, materialistic, consumerist world. At the same time, I think that paganism stands to gain overall from the unchristening of the West. If you look at the Asatru site, this neopagan religion speaks to longings that are deep within all of us, and cannot be suppressed forever.

Read the rest, it’s interesting.

“Yana Dropped Off First”: Vanishing Pagans of Egypt and Syria

On By Chas S. Clifton2 Comments

To begin with, there were just a handful of them. And some are going silent, as Cara Schulz writes for the Pagan Newswire Collective:

The situation in Syria appears to be more grave, according to the last messages I received from the five Pagans I chat with regularly.  They spoke of the fighting and how places looked like Beirut,  buildings just shells of themselves, rubble blocking the streets.  They detailed neighbors going missing.  Islamic fundamentalist patrols that monitor behavior and took violent action against people who violated rules and customs. They debated fleeing, worried about being outed as a Pagan, and started destroying or burying altars.  Three began attending local mosques to show their devotion to Islam.

I would bet that in a generation, even the Egyptian Christians will be gone, off to North America or somewhere else. I have even met a few in my area — and we see very few Middle Easterners. In this case, it was the family coming to visit their daughter who had married an American and then moved with him to this area — and then I heard that they were still in the United States. Trying for political asylum?

Revising the Story of Christmas

On By Chas S. Clifton2 Comments

It is an article of faith (an appropriate word here) for contemporary Pagans that Christianity stole holidays left and right from our spiritual ancestors, particularly Christmas.

Here Mollie Ziegler at Get Religion, a blog about the critical examination of religion-writing in the (mostly) American media, gets into some of the nuances in the process of critiquing a typically breezy seasonal piece from the Washington Post.

Yeah, well, it’s certainly true that when the calendar was standardized, there was a push for Dec. 25 as the date to mark Jesus’ birth. But was this because it was a co-opting of Saturnalia? It’s certainly a theory. But Dec. 25 was one of the many dates being used by Christians to mark Christ’s birth and maybe not for the reasons you hear.

Some historians argue — read her piece for details — that Jesus’ birth was placed on December 25th centuries before “Christmas” was celebrated. In the early church, Easter was much more important.

Now before somebody says “Yeah, and ‘Eostre’ was a Germanic goddess,” we are not talking about Germans but about the eastern Mediterranean region (and Rome) when we say “the early church.” The Germanic tribes were mostly unaware of Christianity until some converted in the fourth century, right? And complete conversion took another six hundred years.

It is the news media, not the Pagans, that keeps the “Christmas started out as a ‘pagan’ holiday” meme alive. Maybe that is more of a secularist position — taking organized religion down a notch — that provides a convenient bit of cover for the modern Pagans?

And let’s not forget another group that contributed to the Christmas-is-pagan meme — the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Just today at the laundromat I saw a one of their Awake booklets, which made that very same argument, one that they have been making for many decades.