WHAT IS RELIGION?
My maternal grandparents went to church in Roseburg, Oregon, every Sunday. “Pop” was an aspiring important person who believed in hierarchy and propriety. He was a pillar of the Presbyterian church.
“Mom” was a sweet, obedient, emotionally dependent person raised in a prosperous home. Using the excuse of leaving early to start the coffee pot brewing for the socializing after the Presbyterian service, she slipped over to the Baptists to hear their words of love and comfort.
Pop had married above himself, against his bride’s family’s wishes. He had thought he would be improving himself, but it turned out that the construction business and orchards were not lucrative just then and money was the determiner of importance. He did not have a leader’s temperament. He was defiant, stubborn and cheap.
These might seem like choices according to the doctrines of these institutions, because we think of religions according to the denominational categories of institutions and the buildings they create to prove their importance. Looking closer, these two contexts reflected the nature of the two people. My own mother, Presbyterian like her father, never quite achieved reconciliation between the two modes and went farther in her defiant choice of marriage partner, my father the self-declared atheist. But she needed to attend church and did. In her father’s context.
So now I’ve solved this dilemma, partly because in college I took classes in the philosophy of religion and world religions. More than that, acting classes, being included in Blackfeet ceremonies, and the U of C Div School each had a part in working through the dilemmas of denominations, historical entities of considerable power since the system of naming became necessary when the Roman Catholic Church based on the Roman Empire that dominated Europe, was finally challenged.
But congregations and denominations and even whole separate religions, like Buddhism or Shinto, are only part of what “religion” is, a big vague “thing” that doesn’t really exist except as a complex of human reckonings and copings. At its simplest it is one’s felt meaning about life that guides one by habit, morality, material culture, ecological context, family heritage, and happenstance.
In the end I settled on the intense transient experiences of being that individuals sometimes report. A sermon about them that I took with me to guest pulpits always evoked little accounts from people afterwards. Some felt sheepish about it or afraid of being mocked. I assured them the moments were real and valuable, recorded through history everywhere, but I couldn’t account for them. Often they were not at peak moments at all.
One memory by a man who had been camping stood out to me: he was at a campsite with a picnic table and was bathing his baby in a dishpan on the table. He said every pine needle on top of that table was still a vivid detail in his memory.
I set out to understand those moments and accumulated theories. Then came the new revelations about how the physical mind/brain works in terms of neurons, the systems of function they form, how they gather sensory information and use it as a “filing system” for memory, how significant the senses are in relating to the larger world, and how new sensory information can trigger or flashback to moments of significant experience.
Supernatural explanations don’t appeal to me. But Newtonian science is clearly supportive of 19th century religious approaches. Quantum mechanics at last suggests another deeper layer of reality under our ordinary seemingly solid world of chairs and trees. If the scientifically supported idea that all sensory information comes to us through electrochemical information about energy, which is the deepest understanding of the world that we have, then we are part of that swirling, mostly empty, all pervasive existence.
Pretty scary. But humans are — in the mathematically defined sense — EMERGENT — — from the infinite numbers of interactions, temporarily knotted-together forces, that are born, live consciously, and finally die. Likewise, those occasional moments of extreme intensity are the result of something similar, even if they happen in the industrial complex setting of an elevator. You CAN have an epiphany in an elevator.
It can’t be proven by science but it is supported by science/math as we know it today, because that defined source of meaning operates like religion to create the felt conviction of doing the right thing. It does take education, which is learning the humanities as well as science. The other side of my quest has been experimenting with liturgy, as I’ve described, to call out echoes of the past so they can be explored, re-affirmed or changed, to “trigger’ liturgy.
In her last days my mother rejected her local Presbyterian congregation. They failed her. They didn’t keep track of how she was or send the “visiting minister” to cheer her up. The dominant “ladies” occupied themselves with needlepointing pew cushions and didn’t invite her to help, so she found an old man who made quilts for poor people and needed someone to hand-whip bindings onto them. It was the Baptist in her coming out.
When I wangled my way into seminary, she was offended by my idea that it was an intellectual search and told me her idea of a minister was someone who helped people. I was taking something like the aspiration of my grandfather to the high prestige of academia.
When I married, it was for my mother’s sake. Bob’s parents had been Presbyterian in Browning on the rez until that congregation failed. The minister had been the father of the notorious Doug Gold. The T.E. Scrivers were very pleased that Bob’s third wife would be properly married in a church. The first two had been quick trips to Cardston where the Mormons will marry anyone as part of their doctrine.
The music minister at Westminster was so propriety-conscious that he would not allow the bagpiper my mother asked to play to come into the sanctuary because it was a heathen instrument. The next properly-called minister played the bagpipes himself and responded to my father’s final days with attention, compassion and ceremony. But he had gone by the time my mother died.
The point is that religion, institutions, congregations are all human negotiations that pretend to be divine. Science does not pretend to be divine. It is deeply complexly human.
