(Reflection on Assigned Reading Material)
In the book Original Visions, this phrase jumped out at me:
"In one interpretation of the ancient oral mentality... the wind moving through the corn could be spirits singing..." (p. 8)
My friend Nicole considers herself a "shamanic Christian." When I asked her exactly what that meant, she said that she believes in the basic tenants of Christianity but also believes that God uses nature in a much more direct, ordered way than mainstream Christianity acknowledges. She believes that various animals, weather phenomena, and circumstances can be structured into a relatively consistent symbolic language of God. She loosely terms this point of view "shamanic" because it reminds her of Native American vision-seekers and their interpretations of the natural world around them.
Nicole's explanation and then this passage in Original Visions have challenged me to consider my own tendencies to dismiss the same circumstances Nicole considers so important. My whole life, animal behavior, weather phenomena, dreams, and all kinds of life occurrences have been explained to me in perfectly logical terms, usually through the medium of science. Once fit into these neat little packets of information, I was taught to deal with and then discard them as no longer relevant.
Thinking about it now, I'm not so sure anymore. I think that humans in general and our society in particular tends to mistake "knowing" with "understanding." By this I mean that we love to figure out HOW things work without necessarily caring WHY. We have very neat, structured methods for analyzing nature, our mental processes, our emotions... but analyzing their processes doesn't necessarily mean we understand their ends. If we find an old machine that some unknown person made, it's entirely possible we would be able to reconstruct it and get it working without having a clue what it was meant to do. So, who cares if we know WHAT makes these things happen if we don't know WHY?
I'm not sure.
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2 comments:
Joanna Andrusko
It's interesting that other monotheist traditions also have mystic options for the less fundamental. In Islam it is sufism and in Judaism kabbalah. It's fascinating to think that each tradition has members who seek to find a more imminent God. They seek to find a God they can worship in everything on this earth, one that whispers to them in the wind the same way he does for many primal religions. So then are these mystics monotheists? Are religions that find many interpretations of the almighty such as Hinduism necessarily polytheists? And what of primal religions? All the things they pay homage to on this earth reflect their reverence to a one being typically. So how have these religions become so separated? If Bruce Olsen was able to explain Jesus and faith and grace using Montilone Bari terms that already existed in their world how different can the two practices be? Why do we as modern religions frown so often upon religions that consider God to play such a heavy role in the world? Do we not also believe that God controls everything? How come so of us are able to so easily find correlations between these traditions and yet some of us will fight wars over the assumed differences? What calls one to be a fundamentalist? And even if one was a fundamentalist could they not understand how different interpretations could be made out of such powerful works such as the Vedas, the Bible, the Qur'an?
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