[Oe List ...] 6/18/20, Progressing Spirit, Gretta Vosper: Playing for Love in the Time of COVID; Spong revisited
Ellie Stock
elliestock at aol.com
Thu Jun 18 06:44:41 PDT 2020
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Playing for Love in the Time of COVID
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| Essay by Rev. Gretta Vosper
June 18, 2020
Looks like what drives me crazy
Don't have no effect on you--
But I'm gonna keep on at it
Till it drives you crazy, too.
Langston Hughes
The world has shifted on its axis since my last article appeared in Progressing Spirit. As I write, the number of COVID-19 deaths has passed 400,000, a number that shrinks from the reality experienced around the globe. As countries attempt to reopen their economies, anti-racism protests are sweeping the globe. Immune to neither challenge, we in Canada are little more than a quiet simmer when compared to the legitimate rage being expressed across America and around the world.
Who couldn’t call this one?
It would be lying if we said we didn’t see this coming. Maybe the clash of two tragic realities and the exponential impact they had on one another. Maybe that was a surprise. But what created those independent realities was something we’ve been watching approach in slo-mo for a long, long time. The only question was when one or the other was finally going to erupt. The only defence against a pre-existing knowledge of the approach of these matched threats is ignorance and how many of us could really claim that?
The virus
Let’s begin with the virus. There has been a lot of loud yelling and much finger pointing at China as the source of the virus, as though just being angry at the right people will make everything somehow better. In particular, those who often consider themselves above laying blame on “a people”, are quick to name “wet markets” like the ones in Wuhan province as the origin of the problem. That finger-pointing gets us nowhere as these very markets are often the best way for people to get local, fresh produce and meats and are among the lowest sources of microbial infections outside of Europe, the Americas, and the wealthier countries of the Pacific Rim.[1] The problem isn’t the wet markets; it’s the origins of the food that sometimes shows up in them.
We cannot claim ignorance about the link between humanity’s[2] incessant destruction of Earth’s natural world and the emergence of novel viruses for which the human body has no immunity. In the 1970s, the Ebola virus emerged in South Sudan and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is believed that the impact of deforestation on populations, both human and animal, has led the two toward one another at an escalating pace and with devastating results. As humans are forced to venture further and further into the wild for food, their interaction with and consumption of animals previously unencountered provides viral opportunities. As animals lose habitat, particularly bats which can carry many viruses without themselves being infected, they move into areas where humans are establishing new agricultural industries. The pairing of the two can be disastrous.[3]
Black Lives Matter
Now let’s look at the images coming to us through news outlets the world over: the rising up of defiance against white privilege, not only its abuses, but its very existence. Regarding the oppression of Blacks, Indigenous people, and People of Colour (BIPOC), well, we white folk can’t plead ignorance there, either. We have seen, over and over again, the imposition of brutal force upon the black bodies of Americans and other populations. We’ve watched videos depicting the seemingly approved police practice of shooting first, as if anyone could answer the questions later. In February of last year, aspiring rapper, Willie McCoy, was permanently silenced for no other reason than being found sleeping in his car in the parking lot of a Taco Bell; police shot him 55 times in 3.5 seconds. Read that again.
Commentators have suggested that anti-racism protests have swollen in size and vehemence because of the sense of release and purpose felt by people kept too long idle and in isolation due to the pandemic. That may, indeed, be true. But it isn’t the whole truth. It intimates that without COVID-19 setting the stage, there might have been another wave of indignation, a few marches, some judgments and condemnation expressed by Black leaders, and then the return to business as usual with an underlying sense of something isn’t quite right. After all, the return to normal seems to be what we do when it comes to killing Black men and boys. All of us, American or otherwise, who have watched graphic videos like the ones that captured the cold-blooded “I can’t breathe” murders of Eric Garner and George Floyd, walk our streets and go about our lives in varying states of post-traumatic stress disorder[4]. Our brains cannot process the depth of indifference, hatred, and horror even as we who are white begin the work of exploring our own complicity, the reality of our own investment in white supremacy.[5]
The suggestion that the protests are as significant as they are is because of the injection of COVID-restlessness discounts the real fuel behind the Black Lives Matter protests. It misses, or perhaps intentionally downgrades, the anger fueled by the arrogance of the voice magnified by its presidential role. It misses the value of insurgency that marked the making of that country and that has found its place and power again. It misses the tsunami of fury felt by those who have lived in fear or watched it rain down the faces of their black neighbours, friends, and family members. The painting of BLACK LIVES MATTER on 16th Street in Washington was a decided nod to the voices of dissent. The renaming of the square “Black Lives Matter Plaza” was a moment of triumph. The announcement of the dismantling of the Minneapolis Police Force is a recognition that it is time to wash the blood of Black people from the streets for all time, streets that, we hope, will never be the same again.
Those protesting at the Black Lives Matter gatherings have no interest in a return to normal. Those protesting around the world at the impudence of white privilege are drawing their line in the sand. What side of that line can we be on? What parts of democracy do our faith communities really support? These are the questions we need to ask and address in community and with our people. Let the questions come. Sit with them. Feel their impudence. Be uncomfortable. Find where you really stand and stand there.
Singing on Zoom
West Hill has been meeting, as have many congregations, by Zoom and not just for Board meetings. Our Sunday Gatherings have been on Zoom as well. Having already established a robust participatory Sunday morning service, Zoom provides us the ability to have the back-and-forth that we so often enjoy when we are together in one room. True, we are still ironing out the challenges, but the first one we realized was that we could not sing together. Live music without the benefit of experienced performers and technicians is gawdawful on Zoom. [6] But singing is a significant part of our gatherings. My partner, Scott Kearns, has written most of the music that inspires our Sunday mornings. It’s been written for communities who choose values over religious beliefs in a decidedly contemporary tone (Scott’s a former evangelical and brings his musical roots with him). When we sing the music of traditional hymnody, new words have been written to the same purpose: uplifting our values and reminding one another and ourselves how it is we want to live.
When we realized we couldn’t sing together, we refused to give up the use of music in our Gatherings; it is just too important. So we turned to the only source of music we thought could offer the same experience even if it didn’t involve singing along: YouTube. The greater part of my service preparation these days is watching YouTube videos and determining if they are inspirational enough for our gatherings. Or clean enough; though I forgot to prepare the congregation for the F-bomb on one of the first Sundays we used music videos, I’ve warned them since. There are no holds barred in this important work.
A Curated List
Here are some of those songs. The first many find a focus in the earth and our relationship with it. Then, on May 31st, we fall into the abyss of racial injustice; we’re still falling. The themes grow out of the events of the day but are also linked to lectionary passages (for the following year). All the songs were chosen because they speak to the very real realities of these issues that currently face us: environmental devastation and its connection to our current pandemic situation, and the pain of recognizing white privilege, its power and its shame. We must find the courage to work with one another to dismantle it. May these songs find a place in your broken heart and invite you to the healing work we must undertake together. Click here for Song List. Read online here
~ Rev. Gretta Vosper
About the Author
The Rev. Gretta Vosper is a United Church of Canada minister who is an atheist. Her best-selling books include With or Without God: Why The Way We Live is More Important Than What We Believe, and Amen: What Prayer Can Mean in a World Beyond Belief. She has also published three books of poetry and prayers. Visit her website here.
[1] For more information, check out this article and the references contained within it. ” China Is Reopening Its Wet Markets. That's Good”, by David Fickling, Bloomberg,[2] I use this word, “humanity”, and I feel the slight lift of relief. Initially, the sentence read “our incessant destruction of Earth’s natural world”. But that just feels so much more damning. So I edited it to a more remote perspective, to give you a little breathing space. If you’re reading this footnote, however, you’ve been exposed to the ruse and the bald truth. And now, like me, you might feel more responsibly to doing something about it.[3] For further reading, check out the following Forbes article and the references contained within it. “How Deforestation Drives the Emergence of Novel Coronaviruses”, by Jeff McMahon, Forbes, March 21, 2020. https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2020/03/21/how-deforestation-is-driving-the-emergence-of-novel-coronaviruses/#540284b51723, Accessed June 8, 2020.[4] My friend and visionary speaker, Carrah Quigley, articulated this for me. You can visit her and read about her own shooting story at https://www.carrahquigley.com. Carrah will be speaking at West Hill via Zoom on Sunday, July 12. You can join us here at 10:30 EDT: https://zoom.us/j/370030792[5] I know. You think that is harsh. If you do and you are white, please pick up a copy of Layla Saad’s Me and White Supremacy and work through your blind spots and the horrors of realizing how deeply invested you are in the racist realities of our world. Saad’s book is short and provides 28 days of reflections, each with questions meant to prompt critical (in every sense of that word) self-reflection and understanding. If you can’t bear the thought of reading that, start with White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism by Robin DiAngelo.[6] Always learning, we are about to explore live music again using the setting corrections we found on Music Repo's YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WoXM5wcpVNU. |
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Question & Answer
Q: By A Reader
As a scholar of Thomas Aquinas can you help me understand his teleological argument for his belief in the existence of God?
A: By Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox
Dear Reader,
First, too much can be made of the term “proofs for the existence of God” by Thomas Aquinas. As scholar Mary T. Clark advises, he “never claimed that the five ways for trying to prove God’s existence … were his ‘proofs.’” They are found in his summa theologica right after he talks of how God’s existence is not self-evident to us. He seems more to be addressing pagan philosophers in his remarks; and, in his eminently ecumenical way, offers guideposts on where to look into science for overlaps between believers and non believers around God talk. (110f)*
Your question alerts me to a point British biologist Rupert Sheldrake made to me a number of years ago. “The future of biology is Aristotle… because the future of biology is teleology.”
Here are Aquinas’s words on the subject of the teleological argument which, he says, “is taken from the ordered tendencies of nature. A direction of actions to an end is detected in all bodies following natural laws even when they are without awareness, for their action scarcely ever varies and nearly always succeeds; this indicates that they do tend toward a goal, not merely succeeding by accident. Anything, however, without awareness tends to a goal only under the guidance of someone who is aware and knows; the arrow, for instance, needs an archer. Everything in nature, consequently, is guided in its goal by someone with knowledge, and this one we call ‘God.’” (124)
Placing this within a postmodern scientific worldview, we might ask: Is evolution entirely random? Each species and individual within a species seems to have its goal (or purpose or aim): To Live. To survive. This goal or aspiration we might call the divine imperative since “God is life, per se life.” (Aquinas)
Aquinas’s argument takes on a fuller context within his and Aristotle’s teachings about the Four Causes which they name as Efficient; Material; Formal; Final (or goal or end). What is the Final Cause? It “signifies the aim, that for the sake of which something is… The question, why?’ expects a cause.” (120)
Aquinas says, “Every agent acts for an end. Otherwise, only by chance would definite results come from an agent’s action.” (128) And “the aim is called the cause of causes, since it causes the causality of all the causes.” (172) He offers the example of when we exercise to stay healthy, health is our final cause.
I think it is useful also to consider the Four Causes in light of the Four Paths of Creation Spirituality. My major work on Aquinas, Sheer Joy: Conversations with Thomas Aquinas on Creation Spirituality, is centered around the Four Paths; and, in the course of my interviewing him, it becomes overwhelmingly clear that Aquinas is steeped in all of them--the Via Positiva, Via Negativa, Via Creativa and Via Transformativa (as is his disciple, Eckhart).
Is it just coincidence that the Four Causes and Four Paths are developed so richly by both Aquinas and Eckhart? Is the final cause akin to the Via Transformativa, namely, Compassion and Justice, Celebration and Healing? Interestingly, both Aquinas and Eckhart call God Compassion and also Justice (“compassion means justice” Eckhart adds). It would follow that where justice and compassion are, God is.
Is that a teleological argument for God also?
~ Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox
Read and share online here
About the Author
Rev. Dr. Matthew Fox holds a doctorate in spirituality from the Institut Catholique de Paris and has authored 35 books on spirituality and contemporary culture that have been translated into 74 languages. Fox has devoted 45 years to developing and teaching the tradition of Creation Spirituality and in doing so has reinvented forms of education and worship (called The Cosmic Mass). His work is inclusive of today’s science and world spiritual traditions and has awakened millions to the much neglected earth-based mystical tradition of the West. He has helped to rediscover Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Aquinas. Among his books are Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Transforming Evil in Soul and Society; A Way To God: Thomas Merton's Creation Spirituality Journey; Meister Eckhart: A Mystic-Warrior For Our Times; Hildegard of Bingen: A Saint for Our Times; Confessions: The Making of a Postdenominational Priest; Stations of the Cosmic Christ; Order of the Sacred Earth; and Naming the Unnameable: 89 Wonderful and Useful Name for God...Including the Unnameable God. To encourage a passionate response to the news of climate change advancing so rapidly, Fox started Daily Meditations with Matthew Fox - See Welcome from Matthew Fox.
*Citations are from Mary T. Clark, ed., An Aquinas Reader: Selections from the Writings of Thomas Aquinas (NY: Doubleday Image, 1972). Pages within the text refer to that book and all citations are from Aquinas except the first.
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Bishop John Shelby Spong Revisited
The Study of Life, Part 4:
Tracing the Story of Charles Darwin in the Galapagos Islands
Essay by Bishop John Shelby Spong
August 29, 2020
Still pursuing the meaning of life as the necessary prerequisite for raising the question of what might lie beyond life, we left the Amazon Rainforest and made our way by air from Quito through Ecuador’s major port and biggest city, Guayaquil, to the sole airport in the Galapagos on the island named Baltra. This is the principal gateway into this mysterious area, which has been called everything from “the closest thing to hell on earth” to the “Garden of Eden.”
These islands are a series of land masses, created by volcanic eruptions in what is called the “hot spot” of the Galapagos. The oldest island in this chain is 6.5 million years old, while the youngest is no more than 300,000 years old. These islands drift to the east as if on a slow-moving conveyor belt at the rate of about three inches a year. Given their ages, that can constitute significant distances. The oldest island, for example, has drifted 378 miles from its place of birth, while the youngest has moved only 21 miles. So the further east-southeast the islands of this chain are, the older they are. The effects of their volcanic birth are everywhere, with black ash and rolls of spewing lava, now hardened but quite visible. Each island’s vegetation reflects its age. The earliest form of vegetation is normally the volcanic cactus. That is followed by more sustainable vegetation as hundreds of thousands of years pass. The animate life native here is limited to sea birds and various reptiles, the best known of which are the giant tortoises and the iguanas. Mammals, which are by nature late developing, are indigenous to this land only in the form of sea lions and bats. The Galapagos’ sea lions have been traced to the sea lions of California, while bats have amazingly long navigational abilities and can come from almost anywhere. The scarcity of fresh water makes other forms of mammalian life all but impossible.
These islands were first discovered by fishermen in the 16th century and were later used by pirates, lying in wait for galleons loaded with Inca gold and other prizes of the new world. The pirates introduced other forms of life here, such as goats, so that they would have a fresh supply of meat waiting for them on future voyages. Remarkably, these goats proved to be sufficiently hardy to survive on the slight moisture they found in plants and the occasional rainfall, while at the same time they demonstrated one of Darwin’s principles by adapting their bodies to the ability to drink brackish salt water that was available in great supply.
A stop here in 1835 by the HMS Beagle, captained by Robert Fitzroy and having on board serving as the “naturalist” a young man in his mid-twenties named Charles Robert Darwin, brought change not just to the Galapagos, but to the face of human history. The voyage of the Beagle lasted five years, from 1831 to1836, but the only time spent in the Galapagos was between September 5 and October 7 of the year 1835. Of that five-week time span Darwin actually spent only 19 days on land.
In that limited time, however, Darwin visited every island on which he could get ashore and immediately became aware of their relatively recent origins and even of the gaps of time between each island, small by geological standards but significant in terms of the development of life forms. Everywhere he went, he collected specimens for his study. The differences among the same species of the finch provided Darwin with what was to be an invaluable clue that would underlie his theory, namely that various forms of life were not immutable, but were in fact always changing. Indeed these changes could be so total, he found, that given the necessary time, new species could actually develop. Just as the various islands of the Galapagos chain floated eastward over time, so the life forms on each island were distinct as they adapted to the different environment and resources available on each island. Darwin thus broke two “established” conclusions present in the religious world view of his day. One was that the age of this planet Earth was far older than the 6000 or so years postulated by Irish Bishop James Ussher who, from his biblical sources dated the birth of this Earth in 4004 BCE. The second was the idea firmly stated in the creation story that God created each species “after its kind” and that there was therefore no changing or evolving after the creation.
Darwin himself did not yet embrace the real dimensions of time in the Earth’s history, which we now count at 4.7 billion years. If he had, his work would have been much easier. Nor did he embrace the possibility, now well established, that our separated continents were once a contiguous land mass. This would have explained, for example, both the similarities and the differences in vegetative and animal life in Africa and South America. Yet even without these two dimensions of knowledge that were to come much later, his thesis was remarkably accurate.
What, he wondered, brought about the observable changes in the various forms of life from island to island? It was in answer to that question that Darwin’s real contribution came. His answer to that question would also prove to be most controversial in religious circles, for it shattered the primary concept by which human beings conceived of God. For Darwin, biological change was accomplished by natural selection. There was no place in his thinking for a divine intelligence directing the process.
The clue for this truth for Darwin was seen in the wide variety in the shape of the beaks of the finches from island to island. Since the food supply was different on each island because of its age, the finches that survived in each location had to have beaks that were well adapted to the local food supply. Over multiple generations the finches with the fittest beaks for the environment in which they lived were naturally selected for survival.
That same principle is still observable today among the sea lions of the Galapagos. The dominant male of the sea lion colony patrols a limited stretch of the beach, preventing other male challengers to his kingdom, and thus he impregnates all of the female sea lions in that area. Regularly, the dominant sea lion fights off male challengers to maintain his position until finally a stronger one than he prevails and takes over. In this way, the strongest characteristics are continually bred into the offspring. Natural selection works to foster survival adaptations.
When Darwin left the Galapagos after this short visit, he discovered that his record-keeping was quite happenstance. Only later, by use of the notes kept by Captain Fitzroy, was Darwin able to organize each of his specimens by the island and the date on which it was obtained. Only then, when the differences on each island became visible to him, did the theory of evolution begin to take shape, since it alone made sense of the now apparent data. Natural selection emerged as the key to the theory.
Darwin himself was shocked by his own conclusions. It was such a revolutionary way to view life from anything supposed before. He sat on this knowledge, seeking to be certain, while constantly testing his thesis from 1836 to 1859. When he finally published his findings, he was quite aware of the challenge his ideas would bring. This had been made clear to him from two primary sources. First, there was the vigorous opposition to his conclusions on biblical grounds that came from Captain Robert Fitzroy. Second, his wife, a devoted member of the Anglican Church, made him aware of her fears. With the negativity destined to be so high, he wanted to be sure that he stood on solid ground before he put his conclusions into irrevocable print. Twenty-four years after the voyage of the Beagle and under pressure from another scientist named Alfred Russel Wallace, who was working in the same area and who might have become the one with whom evolution was identified if he had published first, Darwin finally released his book to the public in 1859 just 150 years ago and in the 50th year of his life. When this book hit the streets of London, it sold out on the first day of publication. The world would never be the same.
Within a few weeks Darwin’s theory was the subject of the historic debate between Thomas Huxley, representing Darwin, and the voice of the threatened religious establishment, Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford. This debate took place before the members of the British scientific world at the Museum of Natural History in Oxford. Though Wilberforce was, by popular acclaim, the winner of this debate, history has not treated the good bishop kindly. He is viewed today more as a buffoon than as a serious critic. When Wilberforce tried ridicule by asking Huxley whether it was on his mother’s or father’s side that he had descended from apes, he had stooped to the oldest trick that losers regularly employ in a debate: “If you can’t deal with the message, attack the messenger.” The chief result of this debate was that press coverage guaranteed that Darwin’s ideas quickly entered the public’s awareness and began that inevitable process of seeping into universal consciousness. Today the discovery of DNA and the subsequent recognition of the interrelatedness of all living things has fairly well clinched the argument in Darwin’s favor. There is universal acceptance of his theory in intellectual circles. Medical science is organized on the basis of evolution. The study of genetics assumes it. The fields of biochemistry and biophysics have it as their prerequisite. Evolution has in fact won the day. Religious opposition is now little more than a minor skirmish fought on the battlefield along the major retreat routes of religious thinking. Darwin had signaled the fact that religion would have to change dramatically, perhaps even die, before human beings would understand the very meaning of life. This last possibility finally became clear to me in the writing of my new book. I discovered that I had to walk beyond religion in order to discover the meaning of life here or the hope of life hereafter. Before I could find a doorway into an understanding of life after death, I had to find my way into what Dietrich Bonhoeffer called “Religionless Christianity.” I will seek to reveal the process this book took in next week’s column.
~ John Shelby Spong
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