I get what you're saying about reverence and awe, and how that's different from celebration. One of the most affectingly human experiences I've had was when I was 14 and my friends' mother died in a car accident. We went to their home, as did many other friends from our church (adults and teens), and when we arrived, their house was overflowing with people, surrounding the kids who wailed openly in the street. It was the most honest display of grief I've ever been part of. Other than giving birth, I've never had a more fully embodied experience.
Such things are really what it is to be human, and so deeply missing in the religion of modernity. The most the average urbanite can expect now is a high count of "care" reacts on social media, but this is nothing compared to having humans actually care...
People are afraid of this, right? Is this the source of the cultural elite obsession with language, naming things with more and more granularity? Easier to argue about life by proxy than to actually experience what these things mean in lived community.
I think they become afraid of it because they stop experiencing it, and that fear makes them avoid the possibilities of experiencing it even more. It spirals out like that, and leads people to embrace "social anxiety" as a badge of honor rather than a human thing we all eventually learn to overcome because we need people.
And yeah, in such a state, it's a lot easier to categorize people rather than confront the human-ness which those categories can never fully describe or overcome.
Is it fear, or inability to find the way to it? Churches used to provide this to many of us. I turned atheist (from a Catholic upbringing) at age 15 or so (I am now 65), because I had a scientific understanding of the world that seemed more than sufficient. I would have walked away forever, but then I got lucky a decade later and married a practicing Catholic woman, and for her sake went to Sunday Mass, and raised our child in the Catholic Church. Though I do not Believe in any meaningful sense, our local Catholic Church has been a source of great strength and stability and community. In particular, we know where to go when personal tragedy strikes, which it always does.
I guess this might eventually covered by the class, but... When you address the river with a “Hail”, does the river... respond?
I guess what I’m trying to get at, in your view, what is the purpose of engaging with aspects of nature as a living person? Is it simply that it is beneficial for us as humans to behave _as if_ the river is a person? Or is the river in fact a person? But even is she is, how can we have any hope of communicating with her? How can she understand our greeting? And how can she greet us back in a way that we can be sure we aren’t just projecting our own wishes onto a river who is otherwise uncaring and unconcerned?
I think it's a bit the other way around. I wrote somewhere in an essay which I'll try to find, but "what we think is our call is actually our reply."
Basically, when I say "hail" I am replying to something the river (or what have you) said, something it communicated to me in a language I feel but cannot fully understand.
You are gifted, and a gift.
I get what you're saying about reverence and awe, and how that's different from celebration. One of the most affectingly human experiences I've had was when I was 14 and my friends' mother died in a car accident. We went to their home, as did many other friends from our church (adults and teens), and when we arrived, their house was overflowing with people, surrounding the kids who wailed openly in the street. It was the most honest display of grief I've ever been part of. Other than giving birth, I've never had a more fully embodied experience.
Such things are really what it is to be human, and so deeply missing in the religion of modernity. The most the average urbanite can expect now is a high count of "care" reacts on social media, but this is nothing compared to having humans actually care...
People are afraid of this, right? Is this the source of the cultural elite obsession with language, naming things with more and more granularity? Easier to argue about life by proxy than to actually experience what these things mean in lived community.
I think they become afraid of it because they stop experiencing it, and that fear makes them avoid the possibilities of experiencing it even more. It spirals out like that, and leads people to embrace "social anxiety" as a badge of honor rather than a human thing we all eventually learn to overcome because we need people.
And yeah, in such a state, it's a lot easier to categorize people rather than confront the human-ness which those categories can never fully describe or overcome.
Is it fear, or inability to find the way to it? Churches used to provide this to many of us. I turned atheist (from a Catholic upbringing) at age 15 or so (I am now 65), because I had a scientific understanding of the world that seemed more than sufficient. I would have walked away forever, but then I got lucky a decade later and married a practicing Catholic woman, and for her sake went to Sunday Mass, and raised our child in the Catholic Church. Though I do not Believe in any meaningful sense, our local Catholic Church has been a source of great strength and stability and community. In particular, we know where to go when personal tragedy strikes, which it always does.
I guess this might eventually covered by the class, but... When you address the river with a “Hail”, does the river... respond?
I guess what I’m trying to get at, in your view, what is the purpose of engaging with aspects of nature as a living person? Is it simply that it is beneficial for us as humans to behave _as if_ the river is a person? Or is the river in fact a person? But even is she is, how can we have any hope of communicating with her? How can she understand our greeting? And how can she greet us back in a way that we can be sure we aren’t just projecting our own wishes onto a river who is otherwise uncaring and unconcerned?
I think it's a bit the other way around. I wrote somewhere in an essay which I'll try to find, but "what we think is our call is actually our reply."
Basically, when I say "hail" I am replying to something the river (or what have you) said, something it communicated to me in a language I feel but cannot fully understand.
Would love to learn more about this.