Sunday, March 17, 2024

Gifts of vocation

We're a few months from the fiftieth anniversary of the first ordinations of women priests in the Episcopal Church. They were "irregular" because the ordination of women was not approved by General Convention until 1976. (But would that have happened without this act of civil disobedience?) The Jesus who called them was decidedly irregular, too.

This weekend I finally got to see a documentary about the "Philadelphia Eleven" that's been years in the making, and got to see it in the best possible setting - at a church led by a friend, a female priest, and followed by a panel discussion with five priests, one ordained each decade since 1974. That was yesterday. Then we had a discussion of the movie at my church, a church with a woman rector and associate rector, today. Just how momentous the change ushered in by the Philadelpha Eleven is is hard to describe. One might start with some statistics from the film's end: almost 7000 women have nowbeen ordained, and 30% of bishops and 40% of priests in the Episcopal Church today are women. But that gives you no sense of what it was and is like to be one of those women at different stages of this unfolding, or to have been ministered to by them. 

The two discussions helped fill that out for me. This change has not been easy, although it has become easier. Each of the voices I heard, each soulful in her own profound way, made clear what a gift the inclusion of these remarkable people in the priesthood represents - and how bereft the church before that was (and, in many churches, still is). Fifty years is a change within the span of a single lifetime but in the history of the church, it's a moment. Yet, my friend suggested, the true opening of the priesthood to all is really as epochal as the Reformation. We are only just beginning to understand where the Holy Spirit is taking us through it. These discussions have made clear that this sea change is already bringing about transformed understandings of vocation, gender, family, church - and God. How wonderful to be living in such a time!

I can give a sense of the sea change of these fifty years with two phrases used by priests who spoke in these discussions, one ordained in the 1980s and one a quarter century later. The former grew up Episcopal but of course knew as a girl she couldn't be a priest. Yet at some point - a few years after the Philadelphia Eleven - she realized that "the things I wanted to do are things that priests do." The latter, deciding after an earlier career to go to seminary and become a hospital chaplain, was asked by someone "why aren't you a priest?"

Breeding lilacs out of the dead land

April used to be the cruellest month, but (one of our alums writes) now plants bud an average of 18 days earlier than in the 1950s.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Precursor

Meet my predecessor Mrs. J. H. Philpot. I wish I knew more about her, such as her Christian name, but haven't been able to find out. I've found a J. H. Philpot, apparently a strict Baptist dissenter, but don't know if and how they're connected.

In any case, Mrs. Philpot published The Sacred Tree: Or, The Tree in Religion and Myth in London in 1897. It is pretty much the book on the subject for most of the next century, at least in English, which say as much about the topic as about her treatment of it. (Nathaniel Altman's Sacred Trees will appear in 1994.) It is in fact an impressive work of synthesis, bringing together research from archaeology, folklore, classic literature and "contemporary anthropology" in multiple European languages. Important emergent theories of the evolution of religion are mentioned too: Tylor, Spencer and Frazer.

Philpot says she’s writing her book because 

no other form of pagan ritual has been so widely distributed, has left behind such persistent traces, or appeals so closely to modern sympathies as the worship of the tree (vii)

Just what "modern sympathies" she has in mind is not, alas, made clear, nor whether the enduring appeal of the “worship of tree” is a source of hope or fear. 

The Sacred Tree sets the stage with Chaldean images of pairs of worshipping figures—often real or mythical animals—facing a central stylized tree, an image to be found even in the cathedral of St. Mark’s in Venice. There are traces everywhere of these ancient practices. Philpot then touches quickly on Canaan and ancient Israel, contemporary Africa, ancient Egypt and Persia, India and Southeast Asia ancient and contemporary, Japan and the western hemisphere from Mexico to the Great Lakes to Patagonia. She returns to Europe, moving from the Germanic forests to Poland, Russia, Finland and France before alighting in May tree celebrations in England. Everywhere she finds illustrations of 

the primitive idea that there was a spiritual essence embodied in vegetation, that trees, like men had spirits, passing in and out amongst them, which possessed a mysterious and potent influence over human affairs, and which it was therefore wise and necessary to propitiate (3).  

In the following we encounter the coffin of Osiris found in a tree, Indian tree veneration remarked already in Alexander’s time, oaks of the Druids and at Dodona, the trees of the several Buddhas, customs of hanging gifts and trophies on trees going back to the Golden Fleece, use of wreaths and branches in religious as well as domestic ceremonies, practices of placing sick childen in the clefts of trees, trees which bleed and others which produce intoxicating potions, a cavalcade of wild men, elves, djinn, fauns, nymphs, dryads, fairies, pixies and moss-women, spring festivities and, inevitably, Christmas trees. 

This teeming multiplicity manifests in various forms, which Philpot deftly organizes under several headings. She devotes a chapter each to "tree gods" friendly to humans – really gods who make their abode in trees - and indifferent or hostile "wood-demons and tree-spirits,” parrying on the question if one developed from the other. What is clear is that these tree-connected spirits 

preceded the gods and outlasted them (53)

just as ancient tree shrines outlasted the temples built next to them. Next she adduces examples of practices which connect trees with human life - its origin, its key transitions, its end, etc. - and cases where trees serve as oracles. She mentions as a possible source of tree veneration the use of intoxicants from tree substances used by seers. 

She turns next to what she calls the “universe tree,” a variant of what will become known as the axis Mundi, the pillar separating - and connecting - sky and earth. Primitive folks will have wondered why celestial objects aren't subject to gravity like everything else, she quips, but acknowledges that not all peoples imagine a tree pillar. Sacred mountains serve for many, but flatlanders prefer trees. The universe tree shades into the tree of life, and that leads to ideas of paradise, whether as a home of gods or the beginning or end of human life. 

[O]riginally the mystical tree was the essential feature of paradise, and the garden was merely its precinct or setting—one of the many conceptions which grew up around the central idea of the cosmic tree. Each nation, according to its stage of culture or its prevailing habit of thought, emphasized one feature of it. The monster tree which, according to primitive cosmogony, was believed to support the universe by material branches, became in the minds of more cultivated races the central tree of a dimly-realised paradise, and eventually the symbol of an abstract idea. The intellectual Buddhist saw in it the emblem of knowledge; the Persian thought of it as the tree of immortality; the Hebrew, filled with the idea of man’s frailty and with the longing to explain it, made it the tree of temptation. 

But in all these various conceptions we find a central idea, derived no doubt from an antecedent and universal tree-worship, an idea which places a tree at the root of all philosophy, refers all phenomena to the existence of a central tree, serviceable to man here and hereafter, and concentrating upon itself the reverent devotion which had outgrown its earthly counterpart. (142) 

From these lofty heights the book's final sections turn to practices in her own British Isles. She describes the boisterous celebrations at the arrival of spring, and folk practices to commemorate it, notably involving May trees. These have a dark edge, she notes – it seems the May King was once sacrificed – but Philpot is not James Frazer, and she move on. May day practices largely lost their religious meaning since the Puritans banned them, she notes. Yet as pagan May revels subsided Christmas has given trees a new meaning, this time on the side of spirituality rather than paganism. 

Modern as it is in its present form, the Christmas-tree epitomizes many most ancient ideas; is the point to which many streams converge whose source is hidden in a far-distant antiquity. It is the meeting-point of the old pagan belief in the virtues vested in the tree and of the quaint fancies of the Middle Ages, which loved to see spiritual truths embodied in material forms. Christ, the Tree of Life, blossoming on Christmas-eve in Mary’s bosom; the fatal tree of paradise whence sprang the cross, the instrument of man’s salvation …; the miracle of nature, so stirred by the wonder of the event as to break forth into blossom in the midst of winter—all these ideas, so characteristic of mediaeval thought, became grafted together with observances derived from solstitial worship, upon the stock of the sacred tree, laden with offerings and decked with fillets. Indeed, the Christmas-tree may be said to recapitulate the whole story of tree-worship,—the May tree, the harvest-tree, the Greek eriesione, the tree as the symbol and embodiment of deity, and last but not least, the universe tree, bearing the lights of heaven for its fruit and covering the world with its branches. (172-73) 

Grafting all of the varieties she has gathered onto the rootstock of the “sacred tree,” this yuletide denouement comes as something of a surprise. (These are the last words of the book.) Frazer’s Golden Bough found Christianity to be no more than a particularly long-lived example of the human sacrifice at the heart of the worship of trees. Philpot has domesticated and converted the whole history. And if her theology isn’t one to allow intimations of immortality in “paganism,” a properly civilized paganism can yet perhaps play a part in true religion. It's all very… Victorian.

But where are the trees? As Philpot assembles examples from (she avers) across time and place, we encounter practices and myths engaging cedar, palm, sycamore, cotton-tree, acacia, myrrh-tree, pine, cypress, myrtle, plane, bamboo, ficus religiosa, sakaki, cypress, oak, birch, mountain-ash, pear-tree, alder ... But their differences matter not. Her tree worshippers' relationship were never with the trees themselves, but with the gods or spirits which made their home there. That particular trees or tree species might have had something to do with all this is inconceivable to her, because actual relationships with actual trees have already been effaced by her "civilization."

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Covid knocking at the door

On this fourth anniversary of the day when covid was declared a national emergency in 2020, noticed this in a show of works by by Bobbi Beck at our local library. Not sure at what point she stitched it, but it's important to remember that covid had the key to many a door.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Graft the gap

I didn't post about it last September when the "Sycamore Gap" tree - a tree growing in a sheltered dip along Hadrian's Wall in Northumberland - was cut down by vandals, or about the outpouring of grief and call for a reset in Britain's relationship to the natural world it provoked. (It was in fact a non-native tree* planted not that long ago in a landscape that had long been deforested.) But I can't resist posting now as efforts to give it a second life proceed.

Material from the Sycamore Gap tree was cultivated using a variety of techniques, according to the National Trust. Experts at the center used “budding,” in which a single bud from the original tree is attached to a rootstock of the same species, and two forms of grafting, which involves a cutting from the tree and a rootstock being joined. These techniques are designed to create genetically identical replicas of the original tree, the organization said. 

Meanwhile, the center’s team is also working on growing seeds harvested from the tree — several dozen of which are now sprouting, the trust said.

There's hope also that the tree stump itself will regrow, although it will take two to three years to see if that happens. It's interesting to consider the various kinds of afterlife the tree might experience, though "afterlife" may be the wrong word. Back when I was in college philosopher Derek Parfit wrote a book called Reasons and Persons that, through thought experiments like my brain being placed in someone else's body, challenged the idea of "personal identity" used in metaphysics and moral philosophy. Identity is always gappy!

*Note that this article uses an AI image!

Sunday, March 10, 2024

Snowy mountains












Short but sweet quest for snow in the Adirondacks! Au revoir!

Thursday, March 07, 2024

Courtyard kin

Not to be maudlin but the courtyard trees today reminded me of this

Tuesday, March 05, 2024

More miracle

At this week's Crossan and Friends, the special guest was recovered evangelical Brian McLaren, who started us off with a poem (he called it a sort of haiku) that he'd just written. Not Szymborska but lovely.

I do not walk on water

Except in winter,

When ice makes the miracle more natural.

To me, these days, natural miracles are better,

Signifying lessons to live rather than shortcuts to take,

A more subtle yet more real magic.

For me, nature is already as supernatural

As it needs to be.

The simplest, humblest things —

Green moss on grey rock,

Spotted turtle basking in a shaft of sunlight —

They are true signs and wonders,

Holy, significant, wonderful.

I used to crave miracles to prove something

(most especially, myself, my faith, my tribe’s exceptionalism).

Now, instead of the miracle,

I try to keep my eyes open for the meaningful.

That these sounds in air or these marks on paper

Could bear my heart to yours,

Or bring what you see to my eyes … what

Could be more miracle?

Shake on it

Since last week the buds of the courtyard maples have burst open! 
Well, not all the maples. I counted eleven without buds.
Next week some or all of these will be taken out, so I felt I should greet them while I could. After placing my hand on each of the trunks, I found myself shaking one. The dead trees have hula'd when shaken for a while, rattling and snapping, and did again today. I went around letting each shimmy and shake once more against the sky.

That didn't age well


So that's that? Has the Anthropocene party ended? It's not so simple... 

to qualify for its own entry on the geologic time scale, the Anthropocene would have to be defined in a very particular way, one that would meet the needs of geologists and not necessarily those of the anthropologists, artists and others who are already using the term.

That's right and proper; I've felt for a while that there was a translation problem between geological and humanist categories. We've never had to bring them in converation with each other before - part of the challenge of the Anthropocene, some might say! - which doesn't mean it's not worth doing. Stratigraphers' debates if there was an anthropogenic Holocene-ending "era" or "epoch" or "age" or "event" definable in their term, what to call it and and where to locate its "golden spike," have made for interesting watching. They've also clarified that the work of humanists, policy makers and others (even religionists!) is distinct from this, and appropriately so. When the Anthropocene Working Group made its final recommendation for a "golden spike" last year I found myself ready for this phase to finish so we could move onward to a multi-pronged multidisciplinary engagement with the challenges of living in these times. 

if approved, this does mark the end of a chapter in the story of the Anthropocene. Maybe we leave behind the pretense that the meaning of the Anthropocene for us and our kin is determined by the specificity of the golden spike, a methodological contrivance, if a valuable one.

Today's article makes clear that many of the geologists share that sense that the stratigraphical question doesn't and should be taken to settle the broader historical and moral questions, whose urgency none of them denies.

Sunday, March 03, 2024

Behold the tree II

Once you start noticing them, trees are everywhere. Like in the so-called Reidersche Tafel, a c. 400 Italian ivory carving (housed now in the Bayerisches Nationalmuseum) which represents one of the first extant representations of the resurrection and ascension of Christ.

I've seen it before, but just reencountered it in John Dominic Crossan and Sarah Sexton Crossan's Resurrecting Easter: How the West Lost and the East Kept the Original Easter Vision, part of my Lenten reading. The Crossans' story is that it took Christian iconography a long time to find ways of representing the resurrection, which, after all, isn't directly described in any of the canonical gospels. (The Gospel of Peter obliges.) The Reidersche Tafel is shown as they work their way from symbolic depictions through a series of images in which Jesus awakens, steps out of and finally hovers above the tomb. But that happens centuries later than this carving, which leads to a detour on how the discovery of the tomb and the erection of a church above it (perhaps shown here) ushered in a period where representing the tomb took the place of the event. But this isn't just the tomb yet.

This is again a symbolic depiction of the actual moment of resurrection. Here the solution is the olive tree growing luxuriantly out of the very top of the tomb with birds feeding on its fruit ... This is the resurrection as the Tree of Life for the world; and this olive tree visually links the Resurrection, on the left, to the Ascension on the Mount of Olives, on the right (Acts 1:12). ([HarperOne, 2018], 49)

It is an exquisite tree, a marvel of art and technique. But is it really also a representation of the resurrection? That would be grand! The other accounts of the iconography of the tree I've found (on a rather cursory search) present it as representing the church, the two birds its Jewish and Gentile members. And the Tree of Life isn't usually depicted as an olive. But this carved wonder is definitely doing more than just filling out the space as beardless Jesus gets a hand on his way into the sky, and clearly growing out of the tomb. Fascinating!

Saturday, March 02, 2024

Preview of coming attractions

Colors of a rainy late winter at Untermyer

Behold the tree

This lovely Gandhara sculpture, acquired by the Buddha Tooth Relic Museum in Singapore at a 2015 auction, shows what unfolds from the time of Siddhartha Gautama's enlightenment under the Bodhi tree (at right) to delivering his first sermon (at left). In the middle we see the now Buddha gazing in unblinking gratitude at the Bodhi tree - how he apparently spent the second week after his blissful breakthrough. 

Friday, March 01, 2024

Foreshadowing

Shadow play from reflected morning light in the Lang courtyard