RELIGION, HISTORY, AND WRITING
No cure seems possible for theistic forms of belief except just to ignore it, or at least hold it at arm’s length. It’s core of sex fertility terms — Jesus son of God, descendant of Abraham — links it to family. Thus part of separating from theism (neither for it or against it, just not obsessed with it) is being apart from family. Thus I’ve done both.
I can’t help having been born or all the sequences of people who had to be born before I could be born, but I made an active conscious decision not to cause anyone else to be born. I’ve kept that vow. My brothers had no children from marriage either, but one had step-children (grown) and one — oops — fortunately had a daughter out of wedlock, by accident from his point of view. A blessing from mine, because she is pretty terrific. She can come closer.
Keeping family and church both at arm’s length these days means they have become literary, subjects of my writing. Now that I’m on a mini book tour of Robert Clark, I see really “high” literary treatment of his family and religion, both quite complex. Startlingly, since he’s ten years younger and quite out of my class, there’s a lot of overlap through the Unitarians and the sub-set of them called “Transcendentalists.” That is, the “Concord group”.
The books of Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, et al. were in my home when I was growing up; that is, I didn’t go to the library and look for them, they were already in the stuffed bookcases, so I read them as much as I was able at whatever age. Hawthorne came first, alongside Grimm and Hans Anderson. Dark stuff that seemed accurate during WWII in the Oregon rain. It’s the strongest force that took me out of Unitarianism in its present therapeutic feminist form. (I’m not the first to ask “where is the evil?”) Surely cheery optimism didn’t come from Margaret Fuller, the figure I knew least. Maybe Louisa May Alcott and the Bronson Alcott high-falutin’ attitude. of unreal optimism, sowing all the grains together, taking the concept of the generic to be more important than the actuality.so not realizing they had different harvest times, heights, weights, sizes, etc.
Robert Clark’s search ended — so far as I know — in the Catholic church as an anchored and savory place. He’s a theist as he writes in “His Grandfather’s House.” But you can’t say he neglects women because so much of that book is about Margaret Fuller. He depends on women. His grandfather’s house had a picture window with an admirable view which he loved to contemplate — Clark seems to view women that way. Inaccessible.
My paternal grandfather was brought to South Dakota as a grown and educated man. At first he was a school superintendent and married a school teacher, but also they homesteaded on plots next to each other and got a start in raising potatoes. Things got complicated and they emigrated to northern Manitoba where they continued to raise potatoes until they got into farm machinery just as horses were replaced by tractors and weed-harrowers were replaced by chemical herbicides.
This venture into the industrial revolution took them out of the major prairie cooperatives into a bit of prosperity. My grandmother’s iodine deficiency took them to Portland. Their strategy was to send my father, the oldest, to college at Oregon State College where his thesis was about the economics of potatoes. He never developed enough success to pull the rest of the family up the class ladder.
Somehow, along with his cameras, classical records, and house-crowding books, along came the Concord group books that harmonized with the curiously related Edith Hamilton worship by my Edwardian spinster high school teachers. Marsha Shull loved Hamilton, and Katherine Tyler loved Walt Whitman. These were the markers of the educated and progressive people. Today’s black student body would never imagine!
After a life-changing concussion — changing the family’s fate — my father never gave a sign of reading these books — no discussion, no quotes — except by long summer vacations during which we visited Concord. The Alcott home, Walden Pond, but not Emerson’s home. Maybe because of Louisa May or Hawthorne, this pilgrimage was regarded as esp. relevant to sub-teen me. Walden Pond had a concrete verge and was thronged with teens.
My father, loudly proclaiming he was an atheist, quietly attended First Unitarian Church in Portland to hear Dr. Steiner, a deeply scholarly Jewish pastor. In 1961, the year I graduated from NU, the Unitarians and Universalists began an uneasy merger in Portland and my father evidently paid attention to that, which the Portland media must have elevated. The Unitarians were vital to the development of Portland. Reed College; Thomas Lamb Eliot.
The top of our upright piano was awash with toppling masses of magazines, slick weeklies trying to follow the recovery from war that forced so many into existentialism. But that’s not what kind of atheist he was. His allegiance was to the near-socialism-but-not-Marxism he learned as an undergrad at the U of Manitoba. My mother stayed with her own father’s status-ridden Presbyterianism and her mother’s covert Baptism. I stuck with the old maid Edwardian acting teacher, Alvina Krause, nominally Methodist though her “scriptures” were Ibsen and Chekov.
Then I came to Browning, Montana, during the years that Robert Clark was exploring Berkeley and hippie Buddhist terrain up the coast. (So was my friend Tim.) The influence was not unlike the Asian religious alternatives that the Yankee traders brought to New England where it so inspired the Transcendentalists, but it was a way of evading theism and the patriarch’s grip.
I’m the first generation after agricultural life where Universalism was developed and the first to get as far into academic life as an MA in religious studies, but elements have lingered. For instance, my distancing of theism by saying that my Jesus is the earth itself, the planet, and my natural access to awe, a regard for the supernatural defined as the cosmos.
This is not so different from the Transcendentalists and their close adoption of good old English natural history which developed from the Catholic idea that the way to understand God was to study creation. People develop art through their own personalities and skills. Why would the Big Guy be different? Except it was disconcerting when Rembrandt became Picasso.
The other Transcendentalist element was the defense of private life that began when people could read the Bible for themselves, recognizing their inner life and asserting that they could thus “read” God or at least his stories. This is the seed of the oppositional defiance syndrome that invited people into forbidden territory like drugs or the underworld.
According to Clark’s research, at least two of the “Concord Group” (Hawthorne and Melville) were dark and pessimistic, though they got on well together. None of them except Emerson seemed to become prosperous but he was generous with his wealth, sponsoring and sheltering others. Still, he was not inclined towards communes as others were. The AIDS of the time was TB and if they themselves didn’t succumb, around them many others including loved ones did, so the shadow of grief is cast over all. But there were ecstatic moments in nature and somehow their grandiose and orotund writing comforted them.
Robert Clark’s multi-syllabic and thoughtful writing explains his novels for me, the way I used to read biographies of theologians so I could understand the works by their plain creator’s lives. But it also explained and connected a lot of my own life, particularly the Unitarian Universalist years, a way of being religious that seems to have come to the end of its cycle. I’m not done with the subject.
