kaberett | {faith is both a prison and an open hand}

SOME TERMINOLOGY

exegesis: critical explanation or interpretation of a (particularly, religious) text (from "to lead out")
extelligence: knowledge-outside-one's-head; the cultural capital available to us in the form of media; things we don't have to know or learn anew every damn time because they're available externally
lares & penates: Roman (guardian) deities of house & family, of home & hearth, worshipped at household shrines
psychosocial: relating to psychological development in and interaction with a social environment
theology: the study of the nature of religious ideas

The part where I wryly tell anecdotes so you can gauge your interest in reading several thousand words on the topic
I've been talking intermittently over the last little while about shit like theology as repository of psychosocial extelligence (e.g.). Thursday lunchtime I realised with some dismay that I needed a purification ritual and I needed one fast and all of this is stuff I'm cobbling together as I go along, but I ended up with: sorting out my hair; showering even though it was hard; scrubbing my face and hands with some of the nice salt we keep in; moisturising with the E45 that I stuck a couple of bay leaves in lo these many years ago; eating half a teaspoon of honey from a friend's parents' hives; and then I spent the journey over to the tattoo shop meditating, and now I have symbology etched on me, and it is good -- but I have also realised that I've been doing most of my talking about this stuff via chatting with people one-on-one and I might perhaps benefit from going into a bit more detail, a little more formally.

The disclaimer
This is all me. Descriptors apply to me only; phrasings are chosen to indicate my state of mind with respect to my own status rather than as a general statement on How Religion or What I Think Of Religion More Generally. In the absence of direct and unambiguous statements that something is inherently unsalvageably flawed (e.g. literalist unitary interpretations of Biblical texts) I'm not actually disagreeing with you: you do you, we're cool. In particular, I don't actually care whether There Exists (for some value of "exists") A Deity Or Deities (for some value of "deity" or "deities"); it's not relevant to me and it's not something I'm particularly interested in.

Background
I'm going to start out by summarising my background and context so it's all in one place. It goes a bit like this:

I was brought up Roman Catholic, and then at around the same time I realised (i) that I couldn't reconcile the teachings of the Vatican with my ethics and (ii) that I was queer. Over the course of several years I wretchedly came to the conclusion that I couldn't in good conscience be a member of the Catholic Church but I couldn't do anything else, and it was heartrending and awful and I ended up leaving the Church well before I lost my faith.
I am Jewish. In that my father's Jewish, it is completely obvious to all concerned that I bear his genetic material, but nobody up that line of the family's been observant since at least my great-grandma. Separate from the question of ethnicity, I also spent a chunk of time in my late teens paying some attention to various bits of online Jewish community (much less vile than the Christians I found, by and large!) and to bits and pieces of the Cambridge community. The combination of the two introduced me to the concept of observant atheist Jews: people who recognise the value of the community and ritual and teachings without actually feeling any particular need to engage with the metaphysical/spiritual stuff. I summarise crudely, but this is not an uncommon thing and as (for want of better terminology) lateral cultural heritage has had a fair bit of influence on me one way or another.
In Yuletide 2013 I wrote dystopian spacepunk future Greek mythology fic, and as concept and symbology Hecate grabbed me and isn't showing any signs of leaving yet.
Late 2014 I accidentally developed a coherent theology around the sourdough culture I'd managed to get going and grumpily started referring to the sodding thing in terms of lares & penates.

To summarise the summary: I was a perfectly content atheist ex-Catholic (of the "existence of god/s is irrelevant to me" variety -- I had long since decided that any god unhappy with me applying my code of ethics as best I could wasn't one that deserved worship, and reading a pile of books by Karen Armstrong in my late teens finally got rid of some of the guilt over that). I now appear to be an atheist ex-Catholic with increasingly irritatedly hippy pagan bullshit leanings.

Getting here from there
November 2010: Grossmutti died. November 2011: Harry and Keris died. All of a sudden I had a very definite use for All Souls', not least because it was one of the things Mama did; one of the things I was capable of thinking in the immediate aftermath of my mum telling me she had died - along with a whole bunch of how to sort out the logistics of dropping out of a concert of the orchestra I chaired on five days' notice - was that I'd been craving her Seelkuchen and I was never going to get to eat them again, and then my mother and Problematic Fave Aunt and I got down to the mouldering ancestral pile as the advance guard and there was a bag of them in the front fridge over from All Souls' and I cried a lot. And then I realised that going to Mass on All Souls' was a thing I wanted to do, as ritual and tradition, as comfort and memorial, as a thing I could take out of the context of a God who had forsaken me and turn into a private tribute and offering of my own, on my own terms.

It was about here, at least in narrative terms, that I realised that the way I feel after a good counselling session has an awful lot in common with the way I feel after Mass, at least with a sermon that works for me rather than annoys me. Which is how I ended up at the realisation that confession + Mass serves much the same function as counselling: reflection on the self, on what one has done or failed to do, on one's actions and aims and ideals, and how to better achieve them. (It is probably worth noting that as a mid-teens Alex for all Heinlein's many faults and there are many I imprinted quite hard on the concept in Stranger in a Strange Land of I am god, you are god, we are god, collectively and separately, not least because of its echoes of made in God's image.)

Now add to that: that I started working with mindfulness-based cognitive therapy in my fourth year of undergrad take 2, and consequently to think about the value of focuses for meditation; the context of my awareness of observant atheist Judaism; and reading a pile of Karen Armstrong and history-of-theology more generally. Outcome: moving away from the internet-evangelicals and college-Christian-Union insistence that the Bible is the literal Word of God with One True Interpretation, and towards (and this in part through discussion with my mum as well, in fact, but also memories of

jedusaur's community college class on the Bible as literature) interpreting it (and all religious documents) as inherently living texts, which (like classical - in the loose rather than strict sense - music) have been written in one context and read in another, with any exegesis being of necessity a collaboration across temporal and spatial distances. Perfection may be changeless, but nothing changeless is alive; and in this as in all else I'm not terribly keen on performing actions unless I know why.

Food laws are obvious: by and large it comes down to "eat this and die, so just don't". Menstrual taboos turn out to optimise for sex resulting in conception. You pass this shit on via oral tradition or write it down or whatever and you make it holy because what holy means here, really, is important: kids, we learned this the hard way, so remember it so you don't have to.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that pretty much the same thing is true of the psychosocial side of things: that, yes, humans being fundamentally social creatures benefit from community and ritual and ways to indicate and reciprocate belonging, but that in addition to this religious texts can be how we as a species have enshrined what we've learned about how brains work, how people work, in a desperate attempt to build up sufficient extelligence on the topic that we don't, every one of us in every generation, have to learn it all the hard way again.

Here is where I've talked about some of this before, under access lock, in dribs and drabs: relevant are the phrases count your blessings and everything happens for a reason and others of that ilk. Because it turns out that I do count my blessings, and it does help; and, yes, everything happens for a reason. They're phrases worn to rags and tatters, that have been twisted out of true into condescension and resignation, but nonetheless they contain truth; nonetheless, there were reasons I went to Mass; nonetheless, there is something profound and important in the concept of being loved unconditionally, yes, even with your flaws.

Thus arises the deal with myself where I've got to go to at least one of Mass or therapy at least once a fortnight: I need the dedicated time and the dedicated space, or at least I do a lot better when I have it, and if I've got to go to one I'm more likely to actually schedule and make it to therapy because it will annoy me less.

That's the fortnightly ritual. I've made myself others, cobbled together out of collective extelligence about how to handle life events, taught myself other triggers to fire off moments of reflection. Annually, as discussed, there's All Souls' and my three weeks of formal mourning that follow it; there's the tries-to-be-daily pause before my altar on the way out, wherein I say I will try to make good choices, and similarly feeding the sourdough starter (I give unto it libations; it gives unto us the bread of life); and the occasional, the lighting candles or small fires, from Catholicism and from paganism and from human trust in fire. I've found and created and learned symbols and symbologies and focuses: Hecate grabbed me so hard in her aspects as triplicate, as of crossroads and of choices, with their connotations of balance and movement.

Increasingly I think in terms of Terry Pratchett's Small Gods: symbols acquire power through their relevance, through how they (metaphorically) speak to people, through being necessary (hear the echo: art is good if it has sprung from necessity). Thus the symbols that have hung around for long enough for us to still be aware of them -- they have power, there are shared and common reasons for their staying, and learning why will leave me the wiser. Trusting myself enough to follow where instinct leads in this arena will take me to places that need tending: the feeling of being called to Mass on All Souls', the sense that Hecate was a symbol I needed enough to have set up an altar to her, to choice and chance and memory.

I will build myself armour of symbology. The ink I acquired yesterday symbolises change and choice and constancy; it is a reminder and promise to myself; and with it, with this choice, I claim this body as my own, in distinction to its being simply where I happen to live. (Part of the symbology of change is that it is sufficiently simple and sufficiently abstract that I can attach new meanings to it as desired.) And that's why I felt the need to ritually purify myself before receiving it: it is a dedication of & to myself, and deserves to be given due weight, to be taken as seriously at the beginning as I mean to go on.

tl;dr
Symbols have power and we're drawn to them (like moth to flame) for reasons. WHO KNEW.

This concludes the service. Go in peace.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

liv

This is amazing, thank you so much for setting it all down. And you actually have ink, is there going to be a post about that? Congrats, anyway!

I'm a teeny tiny bit uncomfortable with Food laws are obvious: by and large it comes down to "eat this and die, so just don't". Menstrual taboos turn out to optimise for sex resulting in conception. Cos, well, as the excellent

oursin would say, it's All More Complicated Than That. And here you put it in fairly general terms, but I think I've seen you commenting along similar lines specifically about Jewish food and menstruation laws, maybe I'm misremembering, but I have been feeling vaguely awkward about that sort of statement for a while.

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only by balancing move

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