Román Leão

Tag: faith

  • Philosophical Musings: On The Liberty of Conscience

    To know one’s self, or to know God, whatever that means to the individual, means to be actively involved in seeking that knowledge. One cannot plant a flag and say, “Here is what I know to be true, this and no further,” without it quickly becoming a false claim. One’s relationship with the self or an idea of a higher power should be a dynamic thing, changing as one’s own mind changes, becoming richer for the experience of striving to understand. As soon as hard and fast boundaries are placed, either by society, or dogma, one’s appreciation of the infinite becomes finite, by definition. What should be a supple, resilient practice becomes ossified and brittle.

    Almost as soon as Christianity became organized, there was the majority-accepted take on it, and those that chose to interpret teachings as they saw fit. Before being collected and codified by committee, many gospels existed that were followed by diverse groups such as the Essenes and, later, the Gnostics, or “those that have knowledge,” which didn’t exactly endear them to the mainstream Christians of the time. Many of these “lost” gospels were hidden away, only to be discovered again in the mid-20th century.

    As early as the second century, the emerging church denounced what they considered fringe beliefs as heretical, and by the time the Roman Empire got involved, under Constantine, these groups were persecuted, either disbanding or going underground. By the 13th century, the French Cathars drew the ire of Pope Innocent III who launched a crusade to wipe them out. The Cathars were an anti-materialist reform movement, which anyone can tell you just rankles the pervading power structure, no matter what time period it is. Whether or not they were gnostics, or if that was merely a smear to better throw them into jail and confiscate their properties is debated.

    Pope Gregory IX took things further by instituting the Papal Inquisition (cue Monty Python), as a way of getting things under control. Historian, and National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar, Thomas F. Madden writes in The Real Inquisition, for the National Review, “For people who lived during those times, religion was not something one did just at church. It was science, philosophy, politics, identity, and hope for salvation. It was not a personal preference but an abiding and universal truth. Heresy, then, struck at the heart of that truth. […] Heresy was a crime against the state.”

    Tired of the various purges and wars of religion throughout the ensuing millennium, a desire for secularization galvanized Europe in the 17th century. A division of the spiritual and the political referred to as the Great Separation finally drove a wedge between theology and the running of the State (large S). Radical ideas such as the rights of the individual, and religious “toleration,” set the scene for the recently independent American colonies to codify these concepts in a new constitutional government, free from control of church and kings alike.

    When the nascent Virginia Declaration of Rights, which became the template for the Bill of Rights in the United States Constitution, was first read during the Virginia Convention in May of 1776, statesman George Mason wrote that government must practice, “toleration in the exercise of religion.” James Madison argued that “toleration” did not go far enough, and changed the phrasing to, “free exercise of religion,” a right we enjoy up to this day.

    Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1782, “The legitimate power of government extents to acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” In a 1789 letter to the United Baptist Churches of Virginia, George Washington himself wrote, “If I could now conceive that the general Government might ever be so administered as to render the liberty of conscience insecure, I beg you will be persuaded that no one would be more zealous than myself to establish effectual barriers against the horrors of spiritual tyranny, and every species of persecution.”

    Our nation has provided, albeit, not altogether consistently, a rare opportunity for the individual to follow their own conscience when it comes to belief, or lack thereof. This was a hard-won victory for the seeker and agnostic alike and these rights should be valued and protected regardless of political ideology, lest we slide back into the morass of State-sponsored persecutions. Personally, I feel the best way to honor those who fought and died for us to have these rights is to use them actively and constructively in the face of spiritual tyranny.

  • Shit From an Old Notebook: Thoughts on the Deepwater Horizon Disaster (The World Would Be a Better Place If We…)

    Short answer: Shut the fuck up.

    Slightly longer answer: I think William Wordsworth was on to something when he lambasted “modern” materialism in his 1802 sonnet, The World Is Too Much With Us. He begins:

    The world is too much with us; late and soon,
    Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
    Little we see in nature that is ours;
    We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

    Sound familiar? This was written over 200 years ago! What could he have possibly experienced in the English countryside two full years before the invention of the steam train to nail modern society so presciently? If he could only see us now. It bares the argument it just might be human nature, and not the air-conditioned nightmare itself, that is to blame for our current state of disassociation. What have we sold our connection to the earth and to each other for? Thirty pieces of silver? Sixteen dollars worth of colored beads? A handful of magic beans?

    The Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
    The winds that will be howling at all hours,
    And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
    For this, for everything, we are out of tune;

    This quatrain really freaked me out considering the horror show that is currently playing out in the Gulf of Mexico. To me, the image of the sea as a closed flower chillingly augurs the huge deoxygenated dead zones in the Gulf that we now have to look forward to. We have been dangerously out of tune with nature for a long time, and I fear we are about to get our asses smacked like misbehaving children if we don’t begin to pay attention.

    It moves us not.—Great God! I’d rather be
    A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
    So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,

    “It moves us not.” That is a pretty accurate read of our reaction to just about anything. Even huge life-changing events recede too quickly into the background noise of modern life. Have you thought about whether or not New Orleans has been rebuilt lately? How about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; how are those shaping up? Are we still seeding the earth with depleted uranium?

    We, as individuals, as a society, and as a species, need to relearn how to listen to each other as well. Our political process has become nothing more than a Punch and Judy puppet show, with lobbyists, pundits, and the media railing in from the sidelines.

    What ever happened to the idea of informed, rational debate that was supposed to be the driving force behind our democracy? Watch C-SPAN sometime if you can stomach it. Every public representative, when they can be bothered to show up at all, vomits up party rhetoric and invokes the will of corporate interests.

    Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
    Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea;
    Or hear old Triton blow his wreathéd horn.

    By the time he hits the sestet, Wordsworth has sensed the futility of redressing our Christian God for assistance; He/She/Them has bigger fish to fry. He yearns for the more interactive gods of yesteryear, those that might poke their heads in once and awhile and call down thunder. How screwed would we be if, let’s say, Poseidon came on the scene, saying, “OK, thumb monkeys, I have had enough.”

    Now if I were a benevolent all-knowing deity, I would have been a little miffed when the President of the United States asked the country to pray for a solution to the Gulf disaster. God, nature, or whatever, has already given us the tools that we need to survive on Earth, and we repeatedly choose not to use them.

    We were given rationality; we know instinctively that we can’t keep punching holes in the center of the earth, yet we wring our hands when the government suggests the too little/too late idea of a temporary moratorium on drilling in the Gulf of Mexico. How myopic do you we have to be to realize that if your house is on fire, you don’t go turn on the stove?

    The second, and more important tool that our creator slipped us is free will. We know that we are seriously out of balance with this world; if we wanted to change, there is not a power on Earth that could stop us. We don’t change because we don’t want to; we don’t want to because we don’t listen; we don’t listen because we don’t ever shut the fuck up.

    Editors note: This was when I was teaching English and knew/cared what a sestet was. It’s the last stanza of a sonnet.

  • Philosophical Musings: On Genesis, Pt. 2

    Even as a child, I rejected the idea of original sin, instinctively knowing better than to take the rap for something I hadn’t done. I knew, even then, that I would probably do enough stupid things in life to legitimately feel guilty for, there was no reason to front load that weight. I would later come to believe that the way of the spiritual warrior would be to accept one’s failings and move past them; learning, and changing, not bemoaning.

    The creator we meet in the Old Testament is, by admission, a jealous and vengeful god, a god that needs a nap, Sunday apparently not having been enough. Upon rereading Genesis recently, I recognized the whole Tree of Knowledge scene as what is most definitely was: a total set-up. As a former high school teacher, if there was something I did not want my students to mess with, or something that I thought might distract from the day’s lesson, I simply would not have it sitting in the middle of the classroom, unless it happened to be the lesson.

    What was it that angered Yahweh so much to see what He/She/Them surely knew was going to happen play out? Was it the fact that, as we were created in the image of the godhead, the creator recognized one of His/Her/Their own tendencies reflected back? Regardless, it all seems a little petty for an entity that just created the universe. Could it have actually been the bittersweet anger of a parent that knows their child must defy them at some point to grow beyond the nest? It seems like only yesterday the kids were a pile of dust.

    Can we really proscribe human frailty and psychologically-driven peccadillos to an all-being? I think we have to. That would certainly be part of being “all.” Of course there would be countless unrecognizable motivations that color a creator’s actions. God moves in a mysterious way, indeed.

    Another thing that stood out was that Adam was a straight-up snitch. When Yahweh comes walking down the garden path, Ad-Rock doesn’t hesitate for a second to throw his partner—and not unimportantly, the only other person to talk to in all of creation—under the bus. Could this be read as humankind’s sublimation of the corporeal in deference of the spiritual? Maybe. It could be that Adam had no real father figure to tell him not to be a tout. But I digress.

    In Genesis, our man Adam actually comes off as a little dim. It is Eve who has a healthy curiosity and nascent agency, and, to be fair, FAFO (Fuck Around and Find Out) hadn’t been invented yet… whoomp, there it is!

    As far as getting kicked out of the garden, our whole concept of a garden is based on the environments that we have known, only not degraded. I would argue that the garden is all around us, and the sooner we start acting like it and treat it with due respect, the better off we—and the creatures we are supposed to be taking care of—will be.

  • Philosophical Musings: On Genesis, Pt. 1

    As I have been blessed with what could only be called a spotty memory (perhaps a learned coping mechanism, but I don’t really remember, so I guess it works). As I result, I can’t recall any of what my years of Sunday school and catechism actually taught. Over the years, this has led be to explore my own philosophical studies, which gradually wound their way back around to the books of the Bible.

    What struck me upon revisiting Genesis about 10 years ago, was how little of it has seeped into the general zeitgeist. I am pretty sure I would have been fascinated with the mention of a race of giants, the product of forbidden union between humans and angels. Hold on, could there have been allusions to Bigfoot in the Bible? I’ll make sure and circle back on that.

    When I wrote my second novel, Burn Your Starry Crown, I envisioned the creator as a distant CEO, the head of a Byzantine organization that hasn’t been seen around in years, but everyone fears could be back at any time. Whenever angels, members of the Upstairs Agency, referred to their chief, they used the term He/She/Them, a term I meant to indicate universal totality as well as poke a little fun at the pronoun culture wars that were raging at the time.

    The first thing that struck me upon rereading Genesis, was as God was first creating humankind in Genesis 1:26, it was written as, “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” From the perspective of the second decade of the second millennium this seems to denote an inherent plurality in the creator, which to me makes perfect sense. He/She/Them surely embodied the original encompassing spirit, the OG, that Walt Whitman much later envisioned when he wrote in Leaves of Grass, “And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.”

    However, as anyone can tell you, it is no fun at all to hang out with people exactly like yourself. (Do not get me started on the white supremacists.) There is nothing like a living mirror to point out the things in your own personality that drive you crazy. As the creator must, by definition, embody every conceivable notion or state, can fallibility be off the list? Of course not. It is rude to think so.

    Fortunately, He/She/They quickly sees the remedy to what could have ended up as humankind’s eternal insufferability, at least from a godhead’s perspective; split up the prototype, it would certainly be more entertaining. And so we are, for better or worse.

  • Philosophical Musings: On Faith

    In accordance with the wishes of my father—whose own father was a Mason and a virulent anti-Catholic—I was raised in the Roman church. I went to mass every Sunday with my grandmother and sister while my mom, a convert, sang in the folk choir; this was the ’70s after all.

    In addition to the weekly service, I attended catechism once a week as soon as I was of age. The only thing I remember about it was the day we were given a sheet of paper and asked to draw what we thought God looked like. Most of my classmates proceeded in drafting the usual old white guy with the flowing beard, but I, not being savvy enough to see where this was going, drew a psychedelic mandala, incorporating ersatz Native American iconography mostly gleaned from National Geographic and Eagles album covers. Needless to say, this was not what the nuns were looking for, and so the first rift in my relationship with Organized Religion was formed.

    I did continue on, going through the rituals of First Communion and Confirmation before hanging it up. This would have been right before the first major child molestation scandals hit in the mid-’80, continuing on through the new century, and effectively putting a pin in my faith where the Church was concerned.

    This is not to say that my belief in a higher power ever wavered. Experimenting with psychedelics throughout the ’80s only strengthened my conviction that there is a force for good that runs through it all (and just maybe Jerry Garcia’s guitar solos had something to do with it).

    This is a good place to mention my grandfather on my mother’s side, a polymath if there ever was one. Born in Hinton, West Virginia, he had an insatiable appetite for learning, devouring everything from Shakespeare to Crowley, from astral projection to, in his later years, calculus (which, in retrospect, doesn’t really seem the kind of thing one can learn on your own). When I was old enough, I borrowed books on Castaneda and mushroom cults from his extensive library, the glorious result of a bibliomania that appears to be hereditary, and probably fatal.

    It was the late ’80s when I found myself taking a Comparative Religion class in college. Our assignment was to attend three separate services in religious organizations other than the one we may have been exposed to. No pun intended. It was then that I learned that my grandfather had studied Hebrew so that he might read the Kabbala in its original language, as one does as an expatriated Appalachian academic.

    He had actually worked with a local rabbi on the project and called him up to ask if he and I might visit his synagogue together. We arrived at the evening service and were lent a pair of yarmulkes to show proper respect; I would say, “to blend in,” but that was not going to happen. Unbeknownst to us goyim stumbling through reading from the back of the siddur, or prayer book, we had arrived on the 50th anniversary of Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, when the Nazis rampaged throughout Germany, destroying as much of the Jewish communities as they could.

    One by one, survivors of the pogrom, and its horrific aftermath, stood to bear witness to what they experienced and endured. I felt as if each speaker was talking to me, making sure that I understood where that sort of ideology could lead if left unchecked.

    Finally, the rabbi stood and announced that there was a special opportunity that night. As the synagogue was new, they had written back to Eastern Europe for a torah. He explained that, as the Germans advanced toward the Soviet Union, leveling communities and places of worship as they went, they collected the typical silver ornamentation and velvet wrappings that the ancient scrolls usually wore, and tossed the naked torahs into a warehouse to be used in a “museum to a dead race” to be built later.

    The rabbi announced that this would be a rare chance to actually touch an 800-year-old scroll, as the mantle, or covering, did not reach to the bottom of the parchment. My grandfather and I watched as the object was carried down the aisle and the faithful touched it with total reverence. When they got to our pew, I deferred at first, feeling that—as an outside visitor—it was a step too far. I soon realized that the men who carried the scroll were not going anywhere and they redoubled the offer, saying that it was fine.

    As soon as I touched the edge of the parchment, I felt what I can only describe as a spiritual shock. The men just nodded like, “yea, this happens all the time,” and moved on to the next pew. In later years I learned about yogic awakening and the movement of Kundalini energy up through the chakras to the Crown chakra representing a connection to the divine. My grandfather’s Kabbala study had taught him about the Hitlahavut, or “catching on fire,” an intense burst of ecstatic spiritual passion. I’m not sure that’s what I experienced, but it was something.

    Itzhak Bentov, a Czech-born Israeli-American scientist, inventor, and mystic, wrote about how consciousness itself is an all-encompassing energy field and is responsible for creating our physical reality. A certain place or an object can amass psychic power and significance through protracted attention (I can only imagine the charge that an eight-century-old Pentateuch belonging to a community that had been through so much grief might hold).

    In quantum mechanics, as much as I understand it, this is called the Observer Effect. At the subatomic level, particles exist in superposition, or waves of probability. As soon as they are observed, the wave collapses, causing the particle to exist in a single state.

    Is faith a mechanism to create reality? Or are we the outcome of an outside observer? This bears further thought, but it’s late and I must sleep. Perchance to dream a better world.

  • Philosophical Musings: When the Saints Come Marching In

    Taking a break from the news and the eternal doomscroll really does a mind and body good. If it wasn’t for the mysterious bug that had cut down myself and my co-workers like summer wheat, I would have had a better chance to feel rejuvenated by our road trip. At least being stuck in low gear helped ensure that I wasn’t running from pillar to post with the missus like a rainforest version of The Amazing Race. I love her to death, but the woman doesn’t not know how to sit still.

    One thing I did have time for, and have been meaning to do for a long time, was to sign up for a course with ULC, the “non-denominational religious organization,” that ordained me back in the ’90s. All of the recent talk about Christian Nationalism, and the Dominionism preached by our Secretary of Defense’s pastor Doug Wilson, has found my thoughts toward faith and the teachings of Jesus become better defined in my mind. Maybe that’s these clowns’ purpose all along, but I am positive that they don’t think it is.

    Rushing down the Embarcadero to catch my boat home one evening a couple of months ago, I was confronted by a young, overeager evangelical who fell in quickstep with me, asking if I was a Christian. I was stopped in my tracks by the question, which is not conducive to making the ferry. I had to admit, that, “No, I do not consider myself a “Christian.” He proceeded to tell me that Christ died for my sins, and the usual litany of, well… litany.

    I had to stop him, and said, “Hold on, don’t get me wrong, I dig the rabbi. I try to follow his advice on the daily. It is these people that call themselves Christians and do not listen to a single thing the dude said that piss me off.”

    My candor stopped the young man, as suddenly as his question had stooped me. I continued on my desperate attempt to catch the ferry, but upon settling in my seat, I was kind of surprised by my own declaration. I was raised Catholic, your grandma’s weird, old country version of Christianity, which, don’t get me wrong, is one of the things I think it has going for it. I always loved the statues and the pageantry, which I strangely feel protective toward all of a sudden.

    Later that week, my sister and I were at a planning meeting at the Portuguese Hall, an old school immigrant society function if there ever was. If it wasn’t for half of the group Zooming in from parts unknown, it could have been a scene from 50 or 100 years ago. After bimonthly business was finished, the conversation drifted to whatever crazy thing the administration had said or done that day. As a joke, I asked, “What are we going to do when they make carrying the flag of Portugal in our procession illegal?” Ha ha.

    Wilson has called for one better. In his vision of a Christian nation, he would outlaw “public displays of idolatry,” meaning the very Catholic statues and parades that fascinated me as a youngster. This is the same pastor that was invited to preach at Hegseth’s Pentagon.

    One of the reasons the founders of this nation inserted an Establishment Clause in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was to avoid the type of religious infighting that tore Europe apart for generations. We now have a fundamentalist preacher, close to the levers of power, champing at the bit to start some shit.

    At the same time, TFG* has been beefing with the first American pope for doing what popes are supposed to do, i.e., advocating for the downtrodden, the immigrant, the peace makers. I admit that it had been years since I really paid much attention to what the various popes were up to, now all of a sudden, I’m seriously rooting for Chicago’s own Leo XIV.

    We unlikely theologians have got to stick together.

    *This Fucking Guy