Queries & Clarifications

I am a former fundamentalist-christian whose upbringing was within the structure of a denominational institution with a heavy, near-exclusive focus on scriptural studies, as well as hermeneutical exegesis (understanding the linguistic, archaeological, and historic contexts of a document); I'd read the bible cover to cover an annual basis a fair number of times between the ages of eight and seventeen. 

My first sermon was at age eleven, I was a frequent speaker behind the pulpit by mid-adolescence, and I went on to do my best to serve people - while instead being sworn to serve the church - in the mission field by one's earliest definitions of adulthood. This was a teeth-grinding degree of irony to be the career start for someone whose family was only granted religious freedom in the living memory of many (AIRFA), and whose birth was greeted by family members who survived the american Indian residential-school system.

I count myself as fortunate, insomuch as having muslim, queer, jewish, wiccan, buddhist, bahai'i, sikh, and confucian friends in my core friend group in community college ripped away many of the falsehoods intrinsic to the worldview I'd been indoctrinated with, within the confines of which I'd been doing my best to be benevolent and caring. My Dad's folks have a history of involvement with the catholic worker portion of the franciscan-laity, with a leaning toward the liberation theology of mid-century south american firebrands; my Mom's folks anesthetized the pain of invasion and occupation with a variety of largely protestant practices, including some unhealthy degrees of radical hedonism; some preserved our stories and reverence etiquette as best they could, a thankless task for many until relatively recently.

I was taught to understand the faith I was exhorted to have through scriptural analysis; I endeavored to do the same regarding the cultures of my friends. The laser of study I was trained to be knew no other settings, and I fell hungrily into the Analects, the Tao-Te-Ching, the Mishnah and Hadith alike, the stories of Mullah nas-Rudin and the sufi poets, Sutras and manuscripts, prophecy, ode, and elegy. Works of Baruch Spinoza, Hildegard von Bingen, Marcus Aurelius,  Epicurus, Niels Bohr, Niccolo Machievelli - the Prince was an appendix on his pro-republic treatise, y'all - Aldous Huxley, Richard Feynman, and Terry Pratchett leapt onto my ravenous plate, as I tried to chase down... something. 

The Holy? The Sacred? The Divine? Eldritch Beauty? ...Wisdom? 

Who's to say.

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There's a quote - misattributed to Sagan, but I don't otherwise know where it comes from - that says "I refuse to debate the existence of God until they define 'Exist,' and 'God,' as I either do or don't espouse such a perspective, depending." (Sagan instead once said "To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.") 

There's a different quote by an elder that goes "The greatest disservice we have done to the Creator is to insist that it be human-shaped."

These resonate with something deep in my gut and spinal cord; the space between them conveys something about trying to conceive of something-  or someone - ostensibly infinite, something Brahmic, Tao-like... the big-E Everything choosing to froth itself into the little-e everything in the huckleberry story of uncle Delsin Suppah (Shoshoni-Bannock). 

If I am at the end of all this then to be agnostic - albeit with inclinations toward the dance and game of bio-deific and cosmo-deific notions - I wish to be an ecstatic one, a reverent one, one woven into ancestral through-lines of benevolence and resilience. 

Euro-american academic consensus has only served to increasingly confirm knowledges affirmed to me by Indigenous elders since I was very small; stories of crow linguistics, mycorrhizal cognition, botanical emotions, crystalline memories, passages of non-Euclidean time, the topography of hyperspheres, and the personhood of things other-than-human, seen and unseen, embodied and un-embodied. 

At this point, it seems less a waste of my seemingly limited lifespan to plug into alignment with these perspectives, global and ancient, that are pretty consistently expressed with the humility and avoidance of absolutes that would return honor to the margin-of-error-calculation sections of the average peer-reviewed paper.

My cosmology, ethics, and ritualistic mnemonics of ceremony, gesture, and custom... accordingly don't lean heavily on either the assumption of the absence or existence of immaterial "spirit;" my grasp of physics is broad enough to entertain concepts such as epigenetic data storage, temporal echoes, imaginary spacetime, unhuman cognition, and biomagnetic resonance - none with the boldness of experts in those fields of study, but enough to bumble along - that my reverences don't require a Supernatural to keep a civil tongue in my head toward the Unseen. The Hypernatural does just fine lol.

I come from communities whose oldest perspectives are broadly similar to that of those of far-flung friends. My grandmaternal word "Shélech'" is similar in aspect to Teotl, Brahman, Kami, κόσμος, in so much as it is proposed that the deeper nature of reality is a technicolor multidimensional psychedelic yin-yang soup of undulations, currents, reverberations, swirls, and eddies... and that in that soup, you and I are twirling flickers of current; and also, there are maelstroms, torrents, monsoons, tsunamis.

The mystic, when these manifolds of cataclysmic beauty and fearsome power are bumped into, hangs about in tongue-tied euphoric suspension, or in babbling attempts to convey a fraction of what - for a glimpse - they felt that they partially comprehended.... but it's the impulse of the artisan to create intermediaries more-easily grasped for interaction with these vast things.

The poet hangs a metaphor on the maelstrom, to chat with it.

The philosopher hangs vocabulary on the typhoon, naming it, and thus... claiming it understood.

The scientist does the same to the hurricanes in the cosmological soup, but with mathematical formulae, three dimensional models, and some crisp-looking graphs.

The cleric and the ritual specialist hang masks and symbols on them, and muster up the boldness somehow to ask them to help out with the laundry.

From this can be drawn implications as to how to treat each other, move through the world, and seek harmonics, flow, and resonance in keeping with what we hope for, and to seek relief from what we fear.

So is what I'm offering, then, to serve as a spiritual advisor, despite the above waffling regarding the existence of spirit?

Maybe. Kinda.

Let's go with kinda.

No, I'm not; my closest folks are the Lhaq7temish ("Lummi"), from the North Salish Sea. The communities in the area, in many of which I'm immensely grateful to have found friendship and even mentorship, are Wasco/Wishram, Yakama, Clackaimas, Molalla, Chinook, Kalapuya, Tualatin, and travelers from the coast at Siletz, as well as plateau folks like the Umatilla, Cayuse, and Paiute, Klamath and Modoc from further south, and Nez Perce and Shoshoni-Bannock from along the Big River... and I've likely left some out. 

As some elders have expressed to me, my grandmother's people have old diplomatic rights of travel, trade, and sometimes residence in the area, if we are at least in some part working toward the well-being of the land and her people. I hope to do so, and try and show up to do so as invited; it's at that invitation that I serve on the Steering Committee for the Native Gathering Department at Portland Parks & Rec.

I joke - with seriousness - that like many here, I'm a guest; I'm simply an invited one. I hope to be a good guest, and I'm trying my best.