Snow day(s)!

Guess I'll be in SoCal a bit longer... where there's been some snow too!

Literate leaves

Went to the Botanical Building in Balboa Park with a visiting friend today, enjoying the warmth before we both head back to NYC.
(I go Tuesday.)
Is it because she's a librarian and we were talking texts that we stumbled on this tall fern with such bookish leaves (whose name, alas, we forgot to cite)?

Christina Taylor Green, 9 years old. Another casualty of America's estimated 250,000,000 guns. She'd gone with a family friend to meet her local Congresswoman, who'd just read the First Amendment in the House's ritual reading of the Constitution and now lies near death. Did Arizona's and the country's poisonous political discourse lead the man who killed Christina and at least five others to his horrifying deed? Perhaps. But it is the gun that made the massacre possible. Sorrow, o America.

Doubling up

When waves ripple over waves

Off with their heads!

I know it's not fashionable to praise the French Revolution anymore, at least not the way it used to be. But after finally seeing Charles Ferguson's documentary about the causes of the 2008 financial crisis, "Inside Job," I'm ready to get out the guillotines.

The film brings together many things I've more or less known about with some new stuff, but seeing them all at once is devastating. The greed, corruption, impunity and impenitence of an entire class!!! And both major parties in the financiers' pockets for thirty years now!!! (Obama named his new Chief of Staff today - straight from J. P. Morgan Chase.) Why are the Tea Partyers the only ones demonstrating in the streets?

What amazes me all over again: so many played their part in this - and so few of them have seen the error of their ways. I'm not just thinking of the "fat cats"; in a way it's too easy to focus on them, as it was too easy to focus on W during the years of Republican pillage. I'm thinking of the whole food chain from small-town lenders through ingenious alchemists of financial products to those who made billions betting on other's losses.

Ferguson reminds us that accountability is nowhere - nobody's been brought to justice, or even to trial. Beyond political failure, what about individual conscience? Has even one of the thousand Wall Streeters who've been receiving record bonuses sent it back? Has even one of the thousands of predatory lenders who set vulnerable people up for ruinous debt and foreclosure repented or tried to make amends? Have any even tried to explain what they thought they were doing, and why they thought - think - it justifiable? Some, indeed most, must have felt that what they were doing was acceptable, even commendable - not just making a killing but generating wealth and value. The great documentary "The Corporation" provides an account of why people lose their moral bearings when working for corporations. Ferguson doesn't go so deep - but maybe that's as deep as it goes with some of these folks.

That's ultimately what's most depressing. At a political and cultural level, it's paralyzing to see that an entire leadership class of exploiters remains unassailable. But at a moral level, a whole culture seems to have collapsed. Remember that rather eloquent speech I wished Obama would give, back in September '08? Its refrain was "we're better than this." The election of 2008 seemed to confirm that we could be. But twenty-eight months later, it's harder to believe. Where's the outrage? Do we expect no better? Or is that we can imagine no better, can't imagine even ourselves better?

Out of the blue

My Spanish relatives, who just flew home today, were amused at how excited we get at sunsets - and, especially, that my father and I leap to take pictures of them. Why do we? Hard to say. Perhaps if they'd seen tonight's, which offered pleasures to southwest, west, northwest- and above! - they'd understand. It was completed (as grace completes nature!) by the sudden appearance of the new moon. Earthshine
(which we've seen before on this blog) made it a perfect ring.

Horizontal, and vertical too?

I've just read rather a fascinating book. It's not just the subject matter - the lived tensions between varieties of Islam and Christianity (and some indigenous traditions) in Nigeria, Sudan, Somalia, Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines - though this eye- opening stuff is enough to make the book worth reading. It's also the way in which Eliza Griswold, a fearless poet turned investigative journalist, navigates this complex and often tragic terrain. (She interviewed some of the scariest people you'll ever read of over 7 years of research along the 10th parallel.) I take particular pleasure, as you'd expect, at her casual overturning of commonplaces, one especially: the main conflicts aren't between traditions but within them, especially as the newer forms of recent revivals challenge older forms.

The tenth parallel, as Griswold explores it, is overdetermined. The torrid zone of Aristotle (sort of), it is also where desert north Africa and its Islam were stopped by tsetse flies and marshes, where the developed but resource-poor Christian north of the Philippines meets the south. Trade winds shape climate, and climate past has generated reserves of petroleum. We tend not to think much about these parts of the world and their conflicts, let alone all at once.

Well, we don't. But I suspect one of Griswold's motivations for writing this book came from others who are very aware of it: American Evangelicals. I'm embarrassed I didn't know that a Brazilian evangelist named Luis Bush in 1990 described what he called the "10/40 window" - the area where the most unevangelized people in the world live (especially Muslims) - and that missionary-loving Evangelicals have been organizing missions, exchanges, education and prayer-interventions ever since. (The map above is from here.) Griswold has an intimate awareness of Evangelical projects and their opposition to liberal Protestantism: she's the daughter of Frank Griswold, who was Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church when Gene Robinson was elected bishop of New Hampshire. She gives an account of a brief flash of recognition with another "PK" (preacher's kid), Franklin Graham, son of Billy Graham, in her splendid 13th chapter, "Choose."

Christian missionaries, who've been in the tenth parallel area for over a century, are one of the factors in Griswold's story - just like assorted international jihads. But Griswold suggests that their versions of Christianity and Islam gain traction because of non-religious factors. [Fundamentalist] theologies — driven by narratives of good pitted against evil — graft easily to competition over land and resources. (35) Griswold is at her brilliant best in showing how historical, cultural, economic and climatic factors coalesce and compete with religious identities - and how individuals, families and communities are affected. None of these conflicts turns out to be as simple as it might at first appear. Don't suppose any intervention will have the intended consequences!

There's also a part of Griswold's project which fascinates me as a religious studies person - and in a more personal way too. On the personal level first, Griswold encounters and acknowledges forms of life in which religion plays a very different role than it does up here in the wealthy secular pluralistic West. Of Rebekka Zakaria, an Evangelical woman, imprisoned for setting up a school on Sundays for poor children in Indonesia, Griswold writes: Unlike Western Christians, she believed, who could afford to think about God only on Sundays, believers along the tenth parallel did not have the luxury of doubt, or of interpreting scriptures as anything but the infallible word of God. (188) While I wonder if Zakaria would have put it quite this way, I totally get what Griswold's describing.

This shades into my reaction as a religious studies person. To what extent can I, who live in the comfort of the pluralistic, doubt-luxurious West, even understand what the history of religion - and its present! - is really about? Can I even imagine what religion as a necessity, not a luxury, is? Or religion as "hierophany" - a term from Mircea Eliade which Griswold introduces to explain the power she felt as a child in her father's church, with its "book of spells," the Bible (117)? In Eliade's terms, hierophanies are sources of power, and quench our "thirst for being." They provide "orientation": a time and place to be, and ways to move in it.

My other religious studies response involves Griswold's expert integration of sociological, historical, etc. factors and explanations. Is hers then a secular account of religion? It doesn't mean to be, as her intriguing epilogue, which dares speak of "true religion," makes clear. With inspiring candor, Griswold reveals and reflects on her own way of understanding and explaining what she's encountered - and acknowledges something beyond it. This something eludes the sociological as well as the systematically theological. She tells of Reverend Abdu, a nomadic herder from Nigeria who converted to Christianity and has been preaching to his Fulani kin (recently converted to Islam from traditional African practices), all without special training, support - or results. Here are the book’s last four paragraphs:

Here I was on the tenth parallel with a man who had once been a Muslim and now was a Christian, who had spent his life preaching to his former kinsmen driven south by the need for water. Set against these simple facts, explanation failed. So much history and theology had been grafted onto the people of the tenth parallel over the centuries: the dramatic images of clashing civilizations and competing fundamentalisms; the demographics and big-picture analyses of the roles played by oil, weather, war, colonial interest, and clan conviction. All of these sought to explain Reverend Abdu and his like, and yet here he was before me, sheltering the gas flame and defying explanation — a man who believed what he believed for reasons that were mysterious even to him. He was not a foot soldier in a fundamentalist army or a statistic in some relief agency’s annual report; he was not in revolt against his government, nor was he waging a one-man protest against Western hegemony. He was a walking, talking hierophany, and he embodied the space where the horizontal, secular axis of the everyday intersected with the vertical, sacred world of God.

I had met many believers like him — those whose religious convictions were emphatic and elusive — and every time I thought I had them classified, they slipped out of my easy distinctions. That such people could accommodate conflicting worldly labels (evangelist, nomad, Muslim, and Christian in Reverend Abdu’s case) was a talent of postcolonial life, evidence of adaptation by people who have had many different categories foisted on them by outsiders. But it ws also born out of nearly fifteen hundred years of religious coexistence, of Christians and Muslims living together, and it had moved far beyond the binary divisions between Saved and Damned, Good and Evil, Us and Them.

Religious strife where Christians and Muslims meet is real, and grim, but the long history of everyday encounter, of believers of different kinds shouldering all things together, even as they follow different faiths, is no less real. It follows that their lives bear witness to the coexistence of the two religions — and of the complicated bids for power inside them — more than to the conflicts between them.

Reverend Abdu bore his several identities, and all their contradictions, in a single skin. It wasn’t relativism; his convictions went deeper than that. His was the experience of true religion, which is dynamic because it is alive. Such labels seemed ultimately unimportant to him because he did not belong to himself, or to this world, at all; he belonged to God. The identities that mattered to him told him not simply where he came from, but where, with God’s help, he was going. (281-82)

I'm not able to say what "true religion" is, at least not yet. But I suspect it's somewhere in the vicinity of this unchosen sense of belonging, a necessity beyond constraint and convention and closer to freedom and power, even in the most inauspicious everyday.

Eliza Griswold, The Tenth Parallel: Dispatches from the Fault Line
Between Christianity and Islam (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2010)

[On rereading this and seeing my caveats at Griswold's quotations, I guess I'm more ambivalent about the book than I wanted to be. It seems clear to me that Rebekka Zakaria could not have said what Griswold attributes to her - nobody is a literalist only because of necessity, and the imagination of doubt is already doubt. I wonder, too, if Reverend Abdu still thinks of himself as Muslim in any way. Griswold's grafting onto them descriptions which makes sense to us, indeed gratify us. I'm not saying that I could do better - where did the business about "freedom and power" come from, in my little swatch of nice religion at the end? But I'm suspicious... even as I understand and clearly share the thirst for a non-fundamentalist religious being which would lead a Griswold to find in an Reverend Abdu a hierophany. - Jan 5th]

Happy new year!

The animals of the San Diego coast join me in wishing you the warmth of the sun and of loved ones, interesting encounters with beings unlike yourself, and the courage to do your thing, whatever the herd thinks!

Fluke

Whale watching, something of a New Year's tradition for us, is as unphotogenic an activity as it is exciting. The grey whales - if you're lucky enough to encounter them at all - rise to the surface to release a little cloud of vapor for three or four puffs, and then dive under for a few minutes, even more occasionally show some tail ("fluke!"). The excitement is all in scuttling from one side of the boat to another ("thar she blows, ten o'clock!") to see the knuckled back of one briefly appear... This time, despite brooding weather which sent us back to port early, we saw a few whales, a pod of dolphins (with some sea lions leaping along) and, most unusual for these parts, a mola mola (giant sunfish). The camera limps behind; I was lucky to catch the dolphin back, mola mola and whale puff, above. Most is left to the imagination - which, however, ranges widely along the long route of the whales' migration.

It's a wrap.

Adieu 2010

What a year, a lemon among lemons.

Spiny!

Learning to swim

A wise Mahayana take on the famous image of Buddhist teachings and practices as a raft (I hadn't realized before how Hinayana/Theravada the image is, or what a nirvana is samsara deconstruction of it might look like):

When we study Buddhism, we learn about the view and the meditation as supports for encouraging us to let go of ego and just be with things as they are. ...
These supports are often likened to a raft. You need the raft to cross the river, to get to the other side; when you get over there, you leave the raft behind. That’s an interesting image, but in experience it’s more like the raft gives out on you in the middle of the river and you never really get to solid ground. This is what is meant by becoming a child of illusion.

Pema Chödrön, Start Where Your Are:
A Guide to Compassionate Living (Boston: Shambhala, 2003 [1994]), 33-34

Brief mission

Taking advantage of the nice weather, we went up today to see Mission San Luis Rey de Francia, "King of the Missions," near Oceanside. Set up in 1798, this is the 18th of the 21 California missions which stretch from San Diego up to Sonoma. (Actually, as this map from an Arqueología Mexicana I got in Tijuana shows, the 21 Franciscan missions of "Alta California" were latecomers to a series which began in 1683 and included 61 missions in all, most Jesuit and Dominican.) While a relative latecomer, this mission has seen its share of history - though little of it as a mission. Center of a self-supporting agricultural community of as many as 3000 Native Americans (named after the mission Luiseños) supervised (...) by European Friars, it was secularized a dozen years after Mexican independence in 1833 and sold (the land which was to have been restored to the Luiseños was taken by European settlers), occupied by American soldiers from 1846 to 1852, and restored to the Catholic Church by presidential order (Mr. Lincoln!) in 1865. It remained a picturesque ruin until reconsecration in 1893 by a Father O'Keefe, who worked with a community of Franciscans uprooted and relocated from Zacatecas (in Mexico) to rebuild it. After a stint as a college it now accompanies a parish, houses a retreat center, and looks mutely out over what was once a verdant valley but is now a highway garlanded with strip malls and business parks; the Marines' Camp Pendleton starts just to its north. Whew. (This rain-kissed succulent was in the garden.)

(Meanwhile, back in Brooklyn,

they've had a little snow: picture above by my ex-student D. Below a gorgeous pic from the Times of snowy windswept Brooklyn, seen from Manhattan's East Side. Once it was known as the "City of Churches."

Uprooted

Looking like the remains of marine monsters, bull kelp uprooted and rolled into skeins by rough surf. It's rarely one sees even one entire stalk of this variety, more common in the Pacific Northwest than down here in SoCal, dozens of feet long from its root to the 2-4 foot gas bladder.

Family resemblances

Enjoying the holidays with my parents, and my mother's sister from Madrid and her husband - two of my favorite relations. It's their first trips out here in 28 years and ever, respectively.

Merry Christmas

This year's nativity scene.

The kids are all right

I hope this video goes viral! (If Blogger won't show you the whole frame, just click the video title "The Christmas Story (HD version)" below, and it'll take you to the Youtube page where you can watch it full-screen.)

It's the work of the Anglican congregation of St. Paul's in Auckland, NZ. For a holiday story closer to home, check out this charming tale about some married folk in Chelsea. It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas!

Land art

The rains have turned our familiar Torre Pines beach into an art studio.