Vote of confidence

Is it frivolous denial to post pictures of trees budding when the nation is under siege by barbarians not the least of the victims of whose destructiveness will be our other than human kin around the world? Maybe not. These buds capture the feeling of a steadily growing resistance, promise of eventual course correction. The death-dealing damage is vast, and will continue. But defiant life will out.

Gospel of James

We've nearly finished our semester-long read-through of James' Varieties (all but the Postscript). I had everyone write out something they found significant from his "Conclusion" on one of the two whiteboards which frame our class, and then move around the room and underline, comment or otherwise respond to some of what their classmates had written. 

Instead of taking the quotes in the sequence in which they appear in the text we went clockwise around the room, hearing from those who'd chosen and from those who'd responded to each passage. This somewhat jumbly approach proved perfect for teasing out the most important themes in the book as a whole and our enduring questions about them. 

In particular it helped me make clear that James thinks the evidence he's assembled and parsed entitles him to make some bold claims - not just about religious experiences and their variety but about their significance. For it is in these experiences, which in their irreducible personalness are "fuller" than the abstracted and general teachings of the sciences, philosophy and theology, that we appreciate that reality itself is more than the sciences, philosophy and theology can conceive. 

Epitomized by prayer, the mutual intercourse of an individual with what they take to be divine, religion in this way is not just relational but transactional. We and God have business with each other. Human beings don't just access new energy, peace and inspiration in the experiences he calls religious, but it might be there that we make our signal contribution to the universe.

The quote I put up for us to engage (which I made sure came at the end of our movement around the room) was: the recesses of feeling, the darker, blinder strata of character, are the only places in the world in which we catch real fact in the making (501). 

By this time we'd revisited James' sense that religious experience comes through a "subliminal door" and had seen the ways he bends and stretches words like "real" and "fact." We remembered our impatience with the squishiness of his language and frustration at his almost solipsistic emphasis on the individual when human lives are social and many of our most important experiences are too. 

We'd seen Oliver Wendell Holmes' observation that on religion James had always made a point to turn the lights down low so as to give miracle a chance but this time we found ourselves willing to join him. How exciting to conclude with the pregnant paradox of fact in the making, how electrifying the hope that one might achieve effective occupation of a place in life, with its dynamic currents passing through your being.

I found myself quite the evangelist for James, delivering the good news that there is enough openness in a reality that at its deepest is about relationship that received accounts of the world and our place in it are always incomplete. Just as the saints lead us redefine our human possibilities, so our experience and attention forge new connections within reality as a whole, "new facts." As James concludes the book, Who knows whether the faithfulness of individuals here below to their own poor over-beliefs may not actually help God in turn to be more effectively faithful to his own greater tasks?

Next week we'll see James move beyond the "God" language he settled into for the comfort of the audience of the Varieties lectures and suggest that the personal transactional reality disclosed to us in the variety of religious experiences is more polytheistic, the "piecemeal supernaturalism" which Mary-Jane Rubenstein celebrates as a "pluralistic pantheism." How many of us will be willing to go there with him?

Lift-off!

What were just tufts ten days ago lifted off in the last two!

Lang pushes forty

While we angst about the future of our university in the face of hostile government headwinds, planning continues, including not just for next year but eight-year "culture of assessment" plans mandated for every unit. Yet the fall will also be the fortieth anniversary of the founding of Eugene Lang College, so one kind of forward planning gives me an excuse to look back. New School's histories have been an object of interest for a long time, of course! But somehow I've never had occasion to look at the history of my own division (though I did the prehistory). 

Now I'm working with a student researcher to put together what seems to be the first timeline of this now not quite so young member of the New School family. (It was still a teenager when I arrived in 2002!)

We began today in the University Archives with two boxes of files from the President's Office, covering the years 1983-85, the immediate lead-up to the transition from the Seminar College (or The College, or The College at The New School for Social Research, judging from various letterheads) to Eugene Lang College in 1985. Two studies on possible expansions of the school had been commissioned by a new university president and they were different enough that the long-time leader of traditional age undergraduate experiments at The New School, Dean Elizabeth Coleman, resigned. That was December, 1983. The money to realize some of the proposed changes wasn't secured until the "Eugene Lang Gift" in early 1985. 

These images are from a 1983-84 recruitment flyer, as all these changes were in the air. The somewhat ramshackle looking courtyard (what happened to the Alvin Johnson Oak?) looks ready for a change.

Forest rain and forest fires

One of the final sessions of "Religion and Ecology: Buddhist Perspectives" almost became a religion ot trees class today. I'd chosen three final readings from the old anthology Dharma Rain: Sources of Buddhist Environmentalism - the passage from the Lotus Sutra which gave the anthology its name, an essay on "the religion of consumerism" from Sulak Sivaraksa's 1991 Seeds of Peace: A Buddhist Vision for Renewing Society and Gary Snyder's semi-serious "Smokey the Bear Sutra" of 1969. 

The "Medicinal Herbs" fascicle of the Lotus Sutra argues that the limitless Dharma, like a soaking rain which lets each and every kind of plant thrive, naturally expresses itself in a variety of teachings suitable to the variety of suffering beings. I was hoping that would allow us to sense a wide and still unfolding tradition in Sivaraksa's critique of consumerism in Thailand as well as Snyder's revelation of Smokey the Bear as a kind of Dharma protector for Americans. 

Discussion of the Lotus section went well enough. A student from Pakistan helped us appreciate the text as written in a monsoon climate, to which I added that the "inferior, middling and superior" medicinal herbs and small and large trees to which the Lotus likens beings of different levels of enlightenment should be understood as constituting a forest, each part of which was distinct and necessary - herb, understory, canopy. Even the tallest trees can't provide the healing of ground-hugging medicinal herbs, though they provide shade for them. So far so good. The "Dharma rain" wasn't just offering each individual something that worked for them, but sustained a whole interconnected world.

But if religion and trees was helping here, students weren't having it come Smokey. Zen poet Snyder revalues the familiar U. S. Forest Service mascot, whom the Buddha "once in the Jurassic about 150 million years ago" announced would be his "true form" in our time:

 

... Bearing in his right paw the Shovel that digs to the truth beneath appearances, cuts the roots of useless attachments, and flings damp sand on the fires of greed and war;

His left paw in the mudra of Comradely Display—indicating that all creatures have the full right to live to their limits and that deer, rabbits, chipmunks, snakes, dandelions and lizards all grow in the realm of the Dharma; 

Wearing the blue work overalls symbolic of slaves and laborers, the countless men oppressed by a civilization that claims to save but often destroys; ...

Trampling underfoot wasteful freeways and needless suburbs, smashing the worms of capitalism and totalitarianism...

Fun, huh? The students tasked with leading the discussion on this weren't having it. "We all hate Smokey the Bear!" they cried. Why? He's so commercialized! He represents the settler colonial effacement of indigenous peoples! He's the emblem of the fire suppression strategies which generate mega fires! He anthropo-morphizes the non-human world! The real Smokey bear cub was rescued from a fire only to spend the rest of his life in a cage! He makes tourists endanger themselves thinking real bears are warm and cuddly! 

Did you read beyond the title, I asked? Snyder isn't actually much more interested in forests than the Lotus Sutra is. It's a metaphor, a skilful means... They assured me they hated Snyder too, whom we've critiqued for claiming he had become a "Native American." When I observed that Synder was one of the models for Kerouac's Dharma Bums one volunteered "I hate the Beatniks!"

This conflagration of Smokeyphobia caught me by surprise. Synder's "Sutra" is celebrated among American Buddhists, appearing in the HDS "Buddhism through its Scriptures" MOOC as well as the Norton Anthology of World Religions, not to mention Dharma Rain. But clearly what was a skilful means for older generations wasn't working for these students. 

I tried to let this be the takeaway of our discussion. Smokey's clearly not the medicine we need now. But the forest is full of plants. "What might a more skillful metaphor be?" Our class time had sadly run out. But I think we were all struck by the ferocity of the reaction to the "Smokey the Bear Sutra." That must be telling us something. Perhaps it's the effrontery of the generations which destroyed the environment telling children "Only YOU can prevent forest fires." On Earth Day no less!

Revocations

What we feared would happen has happened: some of our university's international students have had their visas revoked. As was sadly predictable from this administration slovenly as well as cruel, they weren't even notified! In the face of the administration's capriciousness, universities now need to check the status of all student visas daily, and it was through such a check that these unannounced and unexplained revocations were discovered. The only upside to our having to be the ones to let the affected students know is that we could immediately make them aware of support and resources, though there is limited recourse in the face of these exercises of arbitrary power.

Similar discoveries are being made at universities across the country. Perhaps it will provide an occasion for leadership to unite in public defense of education and of our students in the face of these attacks. The need for a strong response to these attacks on student visa status provided a pretext for our president to pronounce publicly things he's been saying more discreetly behind closed doors for a long time.

Non possiamo stare fermi: RIP, Papa Francesco

Pope Francis died this morning. It was a death foretold but still a shock. A bright light, a bright warm light, has gone out. It shone until the end. Here are some words from his Easter sermon, delivered just yesterday:

Mary Magdalene, seeing that the stone of the tomb had been rolled away, ran to tell Peter and John. After receiving the shocking news, the two disciples also went out and — as the Gospel says — “the two were running together” (Jn 20:4). The main figures of the Easter narratives all ran! On the one hand, “running” could express the concern that the Lord’s body had been taken away; but, on the other hand, the haste of Mary Magdalene, Peter and John expresses the desire, the yearning of the heart, the inner attitude of those who set out to search for Jesus. He, in fact, has risen from the dead and therefore is no longer in the tomb. We must look for him elsewhere. 

This is the message of Easter: we must look for him elsewhere. Christ is risen, he is alive! He is no longer a prisoner of death, he is no longer wrapped in the shroud, and therefore we cannot confine him to a fairy tale, we cannot make him a hero of the ancient world, or think of him as a statue in a museum! On the contrary, we must look for him and this is why we cannot remain stationary. We must take action, set out to look for him: look for him in life, look for him in the faces of our brothers and sisters, look for him in everyday business, look for him everywhere except in the tomb.

In St. Peter's someone read it for Francis, who was already too weak to do so himself. I tried reading aloud the Italian original myself. Having first read the English translation, I savored every word. Grazie, Papa.

Easter hope

And somehow, happy Easter! Made it again through the Triduum - Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and last night's Easter Vigil - to the victory lap which is Easter Sunday. Like many Christians I used to go only to the Easter service, then became an aficionado of the more involved three, skipping the Easter service as unnecessary. Perhaps it is. But what a joy it is, on a bright spring morning surrounded by lilies and liturgical white, the church full as it never otherwise is, with faces familiar and unfamiliar, exchanging smiles of relief and complicity with the clergy and acolytes who've been through it all together. We in the choir, exhausted by too much music over too many days, are lifted up by the presence of a brass quartet. It's a party! But can there be anything more serious than Easter? Our rector quoted Jim Wallis, Hope means believing in spite of the evidence and then watching the evidence change. But this was just a detail in one of the best sermons I've ever heard, words of truth in these terrible times, and resolve. Start 19 minutes in here.

By your leave

 

 

Just some trees springing at the NYBG, mostly native, all wondrous!

Good Friday

That day again.

Hill of beans

William James on the illusion of order - or disorder - in the world.

When one views the world with no definite theological bias one way or the

other, one sees that order and disorder, as we now recognize them, are purely

human inventions. We are interested in certain types of arrangement, useful,

æsthetic, or moral,—so interested that whenever we find them realized, the fact

emphatically rivets our attention. The result is that we work over the contents

of the world selectively. It is overflowing with disorderly arrangements from

our point of view, but order is the only thing we care for and look at, and by

choosing, one can always find some sort of orderly arrangement in the midst of

any chaos. If I should throw down a thousand beans at random upon a table, I

could doubtless, by eliminating a sufficient number of them, leave the rest in

almost any geometrical pattern you might propose to me, and you might then

say that that pattern was the thing prefigured beforehand, and that the other

beans were mere irrelevance and packing material. Our dealings with Nature

are just like this. She is a vast plenum in which our attention draws capricious

lines in innumerable directions. We count and name whatever lies upon the

special lines we trace, whilst the other things and the untraced lines are neither

named nor counted. There are in reality infinitely more things 'unadapted' to

each other in this world than there are things 'adapted'; infinitely more things

with irregular relations than with regular relations between them. But we look

for the regular kind of thing exclusively, and ingeniously discover and preserve

it in our memory. It accumulates with other regular kinds, until the collection of

them fills our encyclopædias. Yet all the while between and around them lies an

infinite anonymous chaos of objects that no one ever thought of together, of

relations that never yet attracted our attention. (Varieties, 438n)

Is our cherry-picking too unambitious? Noticing the unremarked "relations" among the "infinite chaos of objects" might be part of making them into adaptations. I love the bean game. Maybe Bruno Munari can help us take it farther! Courtyard maples in red/green/yellow approve!

Unholy week

This is another week of mounting alarm and anxiety. Government breakdown, economic instability and international chaos have been building. This is the week the war on universities went nuclear. This is the week the administration's wanton disregard for due process and habeas corpus became clear, along with their plans for domestic and foreign concentration camps. This is the week its defiance of court orders - including flagrantly lying about them - may precipitate the constitutional crisis we’ve been dreading. And Easter Sunday is the day the president's stooges in the Departments of Defense and Homeland Security may recommend the invocation of the Insurrection Act. Woe!

How good it was to march with colleagues - students and faculty - from across the city in the Rally for the Right to Learn today. Hands off our students! Hands off higher ed! Hands off the life of a free people!