Serpentine

I met my first years on Monday night for pizza (to make up for one of our Sandy-scrubbed classes). They were to talk about their final research projects. The topics were one more sensationalist than the next - straight from the tabloids! I guess the sorts of "lived religion" we've been reading about are sorta dull.
So I decided we'd read Dennis Covington's account of Pentecostal snake-handlers (which is discussed in our last reading, Robert Orsi's essay "Snakes Alive!"). I hadn't read it before. Just did. It's a trip!

Buddhism as a metaphysics for lived religion

In my first year course we've started reading Jeff Wilson's Mourning the Unborn Dead: A Buddhist Ritual comes to America. As I should have known to expect, nobody knew anything about Buddhism, so I had to trot out my canned history, carefully eschewing derogatory terms like 'Hinayana'. Hard to resist the four noble truths in this context!

It was too early to question if 水子供養 mizuko kuyo - the subject of Wilson's book - really is a "Buddhist ritual" so I slipped in a cameo for William LaFleur's book Liquid Life and the wisdom and humanity of a tradition which understands that there are no bright lines in life, its beginnings or its endings, and - LaFleur eloquently if somewhat wishfully rhapsodized - acknowledges this fluidity with opaque ritual. (By contrast  LaFleur accuses Americans of thinking they can master the contingency and complexity of life with "definitionism" and silence).

Since we were heading toward 地蔵菩薩 the bodhisattva Jizô I capped it with a brief ode to upâya (方便 hôben), the "skillful means" of enlightened beings who take whatever forms necessary to reach suffering deluded beings in their delusion. There is no length to which a bodhisattva will not go, even using untruths strategically in helping suffering beings break through to the truth. This was a subject which intoxicated me when I learned about it in graduate school, and seemed to me at the heart of the sacred mysteries of teaching (you might remember it from here). Hardly germane to lived religion, or?

In the context of this class on "lived religion" other things came to mind, or fell in place. Wilson describes the way "water baby ceremonies" have been taken up in American convert Zen, especially in monasteries led by women. He describes in detail a ceremony at Oregon's Greater Vow Monastery (images of whose Jizô Garden I show here), whose inclusion of a statue of the Virgin Mary is my favorite icon of lived religion. The ceremony's structure and participants' roles, even its "Zen" aesthetics of nature, are American. But Buddhist ideas made it possible.

 

The last class reading (while I was away), Neil Gaiman's fantasy novel American Gods, let us think about "lived religion" from the perspective of hungry gods struggling against obsolescence. With Wilson's help, perhaps we can consider lived religion as guided by bodhisattvas!

Fahrvergnügen

We got to Weber's "Religious Rejections of the World and their Directions" in my first year seminar today, our one token classic text. I expected the jargon and style to be a source of difficulty, but we got over it. How? By making fun of (but writing down and learning) long German words. From Wirtschaftsethik der Weltreligionen to Zwischenbetrachtung, to Eigengesetzlichkeit, and its roots in the Sanskrit svadharma elegantly to the revived polytheism of values. Smooth like a Volkswagen!

Lived religious geography

My first year students hit the jackpot today. I'd talked them through the walk we made (part of) on Tuesday, explaining why I'd chosen each site, and then asked them to think of a few sites in their hometowns they might show someone interested in the "lived religion" of the place. Each then shared her/his tour with a neighbor, and the neighbor reported on something that struck them from this tour. Great things emerged!

My tour:
• Roman Catholic church of St. Francis Xavier to suggest the individuality of congregations, how much bigger and varied a big church may be than its official line, and the paradigmatic lived religion of queer Christians;
• Limelight Marketplace (in erstwhile Episcopal Church of the Holy Communion) to evoke secularization, prise apart religious life from religious buildings, and suggest that nightclubs, if not malls, might offer some "religious" solace;
• Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art to explore the continuum between religion, spirituality and art, and to think if cultural centers like museums might serve religious needs too;
• the Salvation Army to introduce the privatization of religion thesis and the ways religious organizations have reacted to it;
• Village Presbyterian Church for more building secularization but also to tell the story of the cohabitation of different religious communities in the same building (and its limits);
• Tiles for America, an example of the spontaneous memorialization which is a prime locus for lived religion, not explicitly religious but symbolic; and finally
• the 2nd cemetery of the Spanish Portuguese Congregation Shearith Israel, to recall the palimpsest of grids in New York, and to raise the question: where are the dead New Yorkers?

What they came up with:
• a church in the Bronx which broadcasts its services live on a big TV screen out front, where they are followed by some people who aren’t comfortable with the community inside;
• a Catholic school, also in the Bronx, elaborately transforming the school auditorium into a church for holy days: altar, new lighting, etc.;
• Prosperity Dumplings on Eldridge Street in Chinatown
• Whole Foods, in London;
• a group which met on Sunday afternoons in Annapolis to solemnly ring fourteen singing bowls;
• the bedroom of one student, which has to Buddha statues as well as the signs of the bat mitzvah she organized for herself;
• stops on the Great Ocean Road where you can leave other people behind and be alone with the raw power of nature;
• a local video store in New Jersey, now closed, which was a family not only for those who worked there but for many others;
• hookah bars in Palestine, and here;
• abandoned churches in Chicago now inhabited by homeless squatters, as well as a Catholic neighborhood with shops selling all sorts of paraphernalia, and a tree a whorl in whose bark reminds some of the Virgin Mary.

Window shopping

First day of "Lived Religion in a Secular Age"! After syllabus preliminaries, I took the class on a walk around our neighborhood to try to unsettle their sense of religion. First stop, the church of Francis Xavier, vast and newly renovated Roman-style pile - and home to the city's most visible gay-friendly Catholic congregation, whose brilliant Pride Parade archbishop-bypass is a splendid example of lived religion. Next stop, the Limelight Markeplace, three-story mini-mall of fashion and accessories in a landmarked ex-Episcopal church - before it became a shopping center, it was site of the city's most famous nightclubs, Avalon and Limelight. Time was running short so I could only point to the Salvation Army headquarters' deliberately non-religious civic architecture, the portico of what was home to the Village Presbyterian Church and a Reformed Jewish congregation, and we ended at the Second Cemetery of the Spanish-Portuguese Synagogue across the street from school ... without having time even to glimpse the Tiles for America, last survivors of the city's explosion of 9/11 memorialization. Oh well, it was a start.

Lived ... secular ...

First meeting with the students in my first year advising seminar, "Lived religion in a secular age." An interesting bunch, if gender-imbalanced even for Lang: nine young women, two young men. Not necessarily a problem, perhaps an opportunity. But there's more. As we went around the room introducing ourselves, I asked the students which pole of the course title - lived religion or secular age - interested them more. I hoped and prayed that it wouldn't be 9 to 2 for lived religion, and map onto gender lines. But it did.

(I hope nobody else noticed.)

Happily, the peer adviser who'll be running the first year workshop running parallel to my class was there too. A true model of Lang insight and sophistication she claimed the question on her own terms. She was interested in half of each pole, living and secular. Thank you! Now we can proceed.