The paradox of spirituality
A conversation I had with a friend some days back still nags at me and haunts me with its implications.
We were talking about the various and sundry forms of (mostly white) western cultural (mis)appropriation of various and sundry native cultures, particularly native American, including the increasingly bizarre manifestations of "Mayan" 2012 mythology, and I came to a realization that I circle around to from time to time and which has the same impact on me every time I come back to it: the misappropriations and hijackings of those traditional concepts, and the mystical power they're often charged with, sometimes appropriately and sometimes not, in "new age" culture, all come back to what I see as a common feature of European ancestry in general: the real spiritual traditions we hunger the most for mostly don't exist.
My ancestors, before one of them moved to the east coast of what would eventually become the USA, lived in County Cheshire, England, for the most part. Those roots, for me at least, go back to at least the 11th century and probably much farther than that -- we were there before the Norman Conquest. The only spiritual experiences my ancestors were allowed to have, if they wanted to avoid potentially gruesome and severe punishments, were those of the Christian church, which had more or less successfully eradicated all traces of anything even remotely resembling the native folk culture and traditions as "witchcraft", so thoroughly that even the oral history of them was silenced. This is true of the native traditions of most people whose ancestry lay within the areas of Britain and western Europe that were under Christian control -- the assimilation by Christianity was so complete in the Middle Ages that literally only the history of (and largely written by) the Church survives from that time period.
There is a line from the movie Luther that stuck in my mind so deeply I may never forget it -- "the works of Luther shall be erased from the memory of man!" It stuck in my mind because I realized, hearing that, that it could very well have happened -- a church so completely in control of all flow of information that it could eliminate not only a man but any record whatsoever of his ideas, simply for disagreeing with the Church authority, could easily have succeeded not long before Luther's day, and almost certainly did, time and time and time again. We don't even know what we don't know, because so little of the culture of pre-Christian Europe survived that we literally only have the vaguest notions of what our own folk traditions may have been before they were stolen from us.
And stolen they were. We were robbed of that legacy before we were even born, by the cruelest and most vicious means imaginable. We live today as survivors of a literally unimaginable generations-long purge that crushed the heart of our ancestors' cultures so completely that we will probably never discover more than occasional tantalizing hints of what we were. And we were fed a travesty of the teachings of ancient Middle Eastern sages who were no more ours than they belonged to the councils who made a Bible of those teachings, a Bible that was composed and edited from the outset to be an instrument of state power and coerced obedience.
And there, I think, lie the roots of that hunger people like me feel for something deeper. The traditions my ancestors and I grew up with are increasingly unsatisfactory food for our souls -- we're offered bread and given stones, to cite that same Bible -- and the True Believers in those traditions betray the origins of those traditions by pushing hate and demands for unthinking obedience ever more forcefully, and poisoning what little good was left in those gospels. For me, there is no turning back -- I knew decades ago that I have never been, am not now, and never will be a Christian, however much I may appreciate Jesus' insights and teachings or the strength of the gospel stories as mythology. It was never real to me, and I would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. To me, the cross will always be a symbol of what was taken for me, and what was done in the name of everything I was told to believe in, the rationalization for the extermination of native cultures in my ancestral home and the continued extermination and assimilation of more native cultures in the land where I live. I look at the cross and see only that betrayal of everything I could have been in that insane murderous quest for perfect orthodoxy.
And so I hunger for something that speaks to my soul, and the things that speak to my soul and inspire me are, at best, borrowed from people who will never accept me among them, no matter how well I may take their teachings to heart. I will always be haole, goy, bilagáana, gaijin, to the cultures who kept what my ancestors lost, most likely forever. Many people like me simply pretend to be part of other cultures that resonate in them, some believing that they somehow belong, others exploiting that hunger for personal gain, still others simply following the herd, but ultimately, so many simply hungering for something to take the place of what they will never truly find. As for me, the best I can do is become a religion of one, live my own tradition to the best of my ability, and hope I find some comfort in it, because that is all I really have to myself. That religion sometimes converges on other traditions that interest me mostly from the convergence, but I am ultimately alone in my own spirituality. And I wish I had company ..
We were talking about the various and sundry forms of (mostly white) western cultural (mis)appropriation of various and sundry native cultures, particularly native American, including the increasingly bizarre manifestations of "Mayan" 2012 mythology, and I came to a realization that I circle around to from time to time and which has the same impact on me every time I come back to it: the misappropriations and hijackings of those traditional concepts, and the mystical power they're often charged with, sometimes appropriately and sometimes not, in "new age" culture, all come back to what I see as a common feature of European ancestry in general: the real spiritual traditions we hunger the most for mostly don't exist.
My ancestors, before one of them moved to the east coast of what would eventually become the USA, lived in County Cheshire, England, for the most part. Those roots, for me at least, go back to at least the 11th century and probably much farther than that -- we were there before the Norman Conquest. The only spiritual experiences my ancestors were allowed to have, if they wanted to avoid potentially gruesome and severe punishments, were those of the Christian church, which had more or less successfully eradicated all traces of anything even remotely resembling the native folk culture and traditions as "witchcraft", so thoroughly that even the oral history of them was silenced. This is true of the native traditions of most people whose ancestry lay within the areas of Britain and western Europe that were under Christian control -- the assimilation by Christianity was so complete in the Middle Ages that literally only the history of (and largely written by) the Church survives from that time period.
There is a line from the movie Luther that stuck in my mind so deeply I may never forget it -- "the works of Luther shall be erased from the memory of man!" It stuck in my mind because I realized, hearing that, that it could very well have happened -- a church so completely in control of all flow of information that it could eliminate not only a man but any record whatsoever of his ideas, simply for disagreeing with the Church authority, could easily have succeeded not long before Luther's day, and almost certainly did, time and time and time again. We don't even know what we don't know, because so little of the culture of pre-Christian Europe survived that we literally only have the vaguest notions of what our own folk traditions may have been before they were stolen from us.
And stolen they were. We were robbed of that legacy before we were even born, by the cruelest and most vicious means imaginable. We live today as survivors of a literally unimaginable generations-long purge that crushed the heart of our ancestors' cultures so completely that we will probably never discover more than occasional tantalizing hints of what we were. And we were fed a travesty of the teachings of ancient Middle Eastern sages who were no more ours than they belonged to the councils who made a Bible of those teachings, a Bible that was composed and edited from the outset to be an instrument of state power and coerced obedience.
And there, I think, lie the roots of that hunger people like me feel for something deeper. The traditions my ancestors and I grew up with are increasingly unsatisfactory food for our souls -- we're offered bread and given stones, to cite that same Bible -- and the True Believers in those traditions betray the origins of those traditions by pushing hate and demands for unthinking obedience ever more forcefully, and poisoning what little good was left in those gospels. For me, there is no turning back -- I knew decades ago that I have never been, am not now, and never will be a Christian, however much I may appreciate Jesus' insights and teachings or the strength of the gospel stories as mythology. It was never real to me, and I would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. To me, the cross will always be a symbol of what was taken for me, and what was done in the name of everything I was told to believe in, the rationalization for the extermination of native cultures in my ancestral home and the continued extermination and assimilation of more native cultures in the land where I live. I look at the cross and see only that betrayal of everything I could have been in that insane murderous quest for perfect orthodoxy.
And so I hunger for something that speaks to my soul, and the things that speak to my soul and inspire me are, at best, borrowed from people who will never accept me among them, no matter how well I may take their teachings to heart. I will always be haole, goy, bilagáana, gaijin, to the cultures who kept what my ancestors lost, most likely forever. Many people like me simply pretend to be part of other cultures that resonate in them, some believing that they somehow belong, others exploiting that hunger for personal gain, still others simply following the herd, but ultimately, so many simply hungering for something to take the place of what they will never truly find. As for me, the best I can do is become a religion of one, live my own tradition to the best of my ability, and hope I find some comfort in it, because that is all I really have to myself. That religion sometimes converges on other traditions that interest me mostly from the convergence, but I am ultimately alone in my own spirituality. And I wish I had company ..