Rooms and compartments occupy my this morning.
In particular, I was thinking about the manner in which we compartmentalize our lives and separate religion into its own sphere separate from our workaday world as well as our domestic world.
The sphere of religion is "supernatural".... whatever that means.
I mean, I really find the notion appalling. Superstition is supernatural to my way of thinking: it is a means of understanding which is beyond normal causality and reason: it is "supernatural".
But, the notion of God as something "missing" from this world and kept severely apart in some existence beyond the natural is bizarre, but it may also be the founding paradigm of the sickness of Western society: the creation of the abyss between reason and faith.
Ever since we created the abyss, we have tried to amend it, sometimes in the most outlandish ways - such as the nonsense of an Intelligent Designer, a notion which is more suited to HGTV to be used in remodeling kitchens rather than in any philosophy, science, or religion.
Or, in another bizarre way which is very common in the present, we politicize religion: many of us receive our "marching orders" once a week from the pulpit of righteousness, reset our brains, and go anew into the fray until we receive another re-charge on the following Sunday.
In the interim, we follow the ethics of Work and Society, where "business is business", and the Meek shall most surely never, ever inherit the Earth... that is, if we got anything to say about it!
The warp of our lives consists of many strings under tension upon which we lay the weft our individual lives. Although we may speak of the different strings of the warp, they are the basis of one indivisible life: when we look at our lives, we do not see the warp and weft separate, nor do we see the warp itself separate into its individual fabrics. It is a network of networks, complex and intertwined, full of warmth and color and resilience.
Separate the pieces of the Textile of Life, and it unravels.
I feel I am viewing a Great Unraveling now.
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2 comments:
A beautiful way to envision it, even if it is heartbreaking to believe it is happening.
I believe that separation is the great sin, the only sin. This separating and compartmentalizing, of God, of human tribes against one another, of parts of the self which turn us into un-whole beings, this is sin.
One of the main reasons I have turned my back on institutional Christianity is for the ways it creates God as Other. He, as great CEO of my life. I believe this separation causes great suffering.
I must agree. The institution of the Pastor mutated early on into Big Brother, and it seems a natural response of human acquisitive desires.
However, that which separates religion from all the other phenomena of life is its "stepping above" the fray of social life and saying that there is more to life than the dismal economics of gain and loss, hunger and satiety, weakness and power.
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