between sacred and profane

So my friend and I have a deal worked out, if she goes to church with me, assuaging my curiosity to see what a service at her Unitarian Universalist church is like, I will willingly go to a strip club with her. Which may be just as enlightening of an experience, the way things have been going in my life. Amidst all the intense partying that's been going on lately I've spent hardly any time trying to understand the intense spiritual urges that have resurfaced in my life over the past year, much less learn how to put them into practice. I got a copy of Gustav Gutierrez's A Theology of Liberation today and what impressed me through reading the introduction was his insistance that it is not enough just to theorize (or theologize) about the need for the Christian faith to embrace and assist the poor in radicalizing themselves, but to actually get down into the streets and do it. Of course I'm in a very different place in my own spirituality right now. Though I was raised Catholic I never bought their conception of an external and anthropomorhised God, but at the same time I don't reject that there is something useful in the myth of being more than just one individual self at odds with the rest of the world. Call it a communion with life, perhaps, or a celebration of the diversity that coexists in our world. The Unitarian Universalist faith, from what I understand in having read little about it, practices a faith in which there is no set creed or religious dogma, asking that its particpants adhere to a set of seven principles promoting human dignity, justice, truth, interdependence, etc, which I already stand behind in my own life, and peculiarly remind me of the layers of consciousness. Talking to Katie about her experience with the UU she mentioned that their rituals were often pagan influenced and there was no mention of God in their teachings (if not a downright disbelief in "Him"), favoring instead an emphasis on the human community.

Of course, my own beliefs as they now stand are perhaps a bit more radical leaning and self-transcedent, being shaped as they are by intense personal experiences of interconectedness to all life and a great deal of anarchist and quantum physics thought. Not that these beliefs are at all formalized, and if anything change too much with each day to really be pinned down into a cohesive theology. Not that I don't try. Ironcally I don't often get much chance to "talk religion" amidst all the insane parties and art shows, and it doesn't come up much in conversation, even frightfully little among my housemates who could perhaps be classified as zen existentialists, and much more inclined to wax spiritual than other of my dear friends. Especially the anarchists, who in their ideals of "no gods no masters" often find it fit to reject the benefits of spirituality and faith alltogether and deride those among us who are spiritual for being weak or closed minded and hypocritical. I know a few punks who are openly christian, but don't talk about it for fear of repreisal, and even the Pittsburgh Punk legend's Gunspiking's singer wrote a song called "Methodology of a Book Burning" to address all the shit she's gotten from her peers for being an anarchist catholic. Which isn't to say that this keeps anyone from practicing their beliefs however they choose, and even I still manage to sneak in a few "prayers" before my band goes on stage.

Oddly enough, a good number of my most intense spiritual experiences have happened at raging parties, or when walking down the street and paying attention to the social climate and crumbling buildings of the city. I don't have my Rumi book in front of me, but a good number of his poems extoll the illuminaing virtues of getting really drunk. I guess that would be one of the tenants of my practice, that even the most profane or mundane of situations can contain the same element of meaning found in meditation or ritual worship or the intentional use of certain mind altering chemicals. In fact, there have been many times when I was a kid at church when I found the whole situation to be absolutely banal, if not most times, and more recently many occasions that ought to be considered potentially spiritual where the mind rebels and just can't believe the absurd zealousy of the whole thing. I would rather have a sunny day in Bloomfield or a late night porch talk about the most inconsequential of things. The spiritual dimension is not in the events but in the way we approach them, more a mindset or an openess towards the importance of an event in not just our own lives or "God's life" or society, but in a synthesis of them that still leaves room for us to have no clue towards understanding the essential mystery of being here in this weird world.

for a little shining

The sky is filled with light and noise, a barrage of fireworks and rescue helicopters and the nonstop glow of the city. It's hard to imagine that once upon a time you could look up and see the full glory of the heavens spinning off into infinity. Now, a few stars twinkle resolutely, as if to remind us that there are still some mysteries that haven't been solved, some dark corners left in the universe where we haven't yet explored and left dirty footprints and candy bar wrappers and brochures reading manifest destiny. Why do humans have this insatiable need to shed light on everything, to turn over every stone, as if it was really possible to gain some solid understanding of our lives and the world we live them in. Tomorrow they're crashing a large hunk of metal into the comet Tempel in order to see if the material in its core really is the stuff from which the whole Universe arose. So even the stars aren't that sacred anymore. These days not much is. It's all about control and concrete facts. Will we really be any closer to enjoying life if we wake up tomorrow and they say they've found the answers to everything?

Swinging in the hammock in our dark yard, feeling the cool summer wind stir the trees and watching a few lightning bugs pretend to be shooting stars. They haven't forgotten what the sky once looked like. Somewhere bats and trains call out to each other and in my head 1905 sings "I don't want to look at the stars with you until you can look at strangers with me." Let's look up anyway, even if we can't always bear to look at each other. Perhaps the stars can reflect just a bit of the light that we hide from each other. I am enamored by the stars, and their fading, and beautiful phrases that express that things can actually change. "Everyone is a star, and every star wants to shine." Even if sometimes we get dirty and lost and want to hide a little. It's funny, trying to figure out who the fuck we are and what we want and how to deal with being our selves in this weird and often times hositle world, this too is trying to shed light on the dark corners of our hearts, trying to turn ourselves inside out and see what we are made of. Patterns of behaviour, little fears and insecurities and annoyances. Needs to control and let go. And desires, unqunechable desires. There was a stamp Selena made for her art show yesterday which read "without desire I cease to exist." Desidero ergo sum. Is that really all that sets us apart from each other, those specific wants and needs, individual hopes and dreams that pinpoint us in the constellations of our social lives? Or is this too a myth, and do we each shine with some common light that happens to be displaced just a little in space and time so that we each appear to desire different things when really we all just want to be happy and free then die knowing that we lived our lives satisfactorally?

Or does it even matter? We are here, the night is young, the stars are fading and I know you want to shine despite all the dirt history has shoveled in your path. I don't think there are any right answers, at least not any that we glorified lemurs could understand. And certainly no easy ones. So let's just rewrite all the rules for human interaction as we come to them, one trembling heartbeat and timid smile at a time. Maybe next time we look up together we'll see two new stars flickering small and bright above the city.