ecotone & Thomas
Damp and chill weather when bluejeans are the only thing to keep legs warm. When cold wind whips through, Levis protect windstoppingly. Outdatedly snobbish, elitist obsession with something provincially called "good taste" are school rules forbidding bluejeans. Freedom is wearing what you DWP. And jeans do not have to be washed frequently, they can be worn like a skin until they smell like the animal that's wearing them.
An Op-Ed in the New York Times online this morning helps me realize something about myself, why my being was never at peace those years of living away from the sea or at least water of some sort, even creekside in Pennsylvania. The best: where I grew up on Massalina Bayou in the Cove, Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, Mayport a block from the Atlantic, but most especially where I live now and foreverafter, where this very moment I hear light surf because of either the tide or some silent craft passing offshore in the dark. Akiko Busch calls it ecotone, for me it's the edge of where I can live and where I cannot live. Here's the link to the NYT piece, and if the connection seems tenuous that's not my problem, that I get it is what touched me.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/27/opinion/life-on-the-edge.html?ref=opinion
An Op-Ed in the New York Times online this morning helps me realize something about myself, why my being was never at peace those years of living away from the sea or at least water of some sort, even creekside in Pennsylvania. The best: where I grew up on Massalina Bayou in the Cove, Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island, Mayport a block from the Atlantic, but most especially where I live now and foreverafter, where this very moment I hear light surf because of either the tide or some silent craft passing offshore in the dark. Akiko Busch calls it ecotone, for me it's the edge of where I can live and where I cannot live. Here's the link to the NYT piece, and if the connection seems tenuous that's not my problem, that I get it is what touched me.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/27/opinion/life-on-the-edge.html?ref=opinion
Nor is it my problem if the rest of this rambling Friday sunrise blog makes no sense to anyone else. I get it.
Still in the news this morning, the ongoing "Duck" fiasco reminds of freedoms, including freedom of speech and its underlying freedom of thought or freedom from thought -- not to mention relative freedoms of action. My father’s favorite shibboleths included “We don’t go to church because we have to, we go because we want to.” Usually in response to "Why do we have to go to church?" asked never by me but by my sister the rebel. As I've mentioned here before, in my growing up years it was clear that if you weren't going because you wanted to, you were going anyway because you had to. Yet there is even freedom in that. You can go pouting or smiling. And there is freedom when you get there: in all my growing up years I never heard a sermon, I was memorizing the Articles of Religion, the tune names for hymns, various liturgies, and other distractions.
Still in the news this morning, the ongoing "Duck" fiasco reminds of freedoms, including freedom of speech and its underlying freedom of thought or freedom from thought -- not to mention relative freedoms of action. My father’s favorite shibboleths included “We don’t go to church because we have to, we go because we want to.” Usually in response to "Why do we have to go to church?" asked never by me but by my sister the rebel. As I've mentioned here before, in my growing up years it was clear that if you weren't going because you wanted to, you were going anyway because you had to. Yet there is even freedom in that. You can go pouting or smiling. And there is freedom when you get there: in all my growing up years I never heard a sermon, I was memorizing the Articles of Religion, the tune names for hymns, various liturgies, and other distractions.
More news, what prompts me exactly and stirs memory very personally is Pope Francis reaching out to atheists and people of other religions, more papal words that seem to herald a church growing out of narrow medieval mindset of fear and judgment into maturity. The pope speaks of where I have been and where, as an Episcopalian, I am comfortable. In life, especially as a parish priest watching and welcoming people into my parishes, I found that undecided, questioning, doubting, uncertain people make good Episcopalians. Which is to say, Unitarians. Agnostics. Struggling atheists. The ecotone that Akiko loves doesn't have to be environmental, it can be mental too, or spiritual, religious, the wavering doubt of Thomas where faith meets unfaith.
Of freedoms of speech, thought and action, I remember giving up going to church, first mentally and then totally, in my long sophomoric adolescence when the realization came to me as a self-assessed intellectual and mental rebel (God help us, every sophomore is both intellectual and rebel and I italicize "intellectual" because in my case it's ludicrous), that surely my thoughts were thoughts that no one in human history had ever had before, when truly they were the thoughts of every sophomore who ever broke free. And certainly I could see better than the collective wisdom of the old men of the ages. That was my agnostic unto atheist period. Any college kid or teenager hasn’t truly lived who has swallowed whole the faith of our fathers living still without rebelling to claim the heady freedom of rejecting organized religion and moving beyond to the pseudo-sophistication, not to say arrogance, of agnosticism and even atheism, an organized religion in its own right, with their own mega-church style services. You pays your money and takes your choice because neither not-God nor God can be proved except with the absurd illogic that even St. Augustine played, and Thomas too; for me, only Schleiermacher makes sense with his notion about an implanted sense of the infinite. In the end, belief or unbelief is, partly cultural, a faith choice and perhaps social choice and even peer choice. But like every other sophomore, my venture into the wisdom of a fool was an essential part of breaking free on my way to maturity and independence, and I wouldn’t change a thing. This is one reason it's better to go away to college instead of staying home in the shelter: to ignite thinking on one's own and for oneself, and not only religiously but politically, socially.
Mine was part rationalization. My sophomore year at UFlorida, all my freshman-year friends from Bay High had dropped out, moved out of the dorms, or transferred to other colleges, and I was not about to go to church alone. All that sophomore year I went to church only one time, to the Christian Science Reading Room in Gainesville with my new roommate Gene Smith of Panama City. Dozing in a dorm room, any wise fool can concoct an excuse for not getting up Sunday mornings to go to church, and mine was "if God is so smart, then He can read: leave Him a note in church telling Him what prayerbook page to turn to and what hymns to hum." When the Sunday morning choice is either get up and get moving or sleep in, any dream will do.
The sophomore’s is the foolish wisdom of still a child but growing. The new thinker is proudly thinking but isn’t yet to the maturity of standing outside himself and with amusement or anguish watching himself think, which may come with aging. Growing up I enjoyed exercising my independent thought and developing my certainties. Grown up, I can smile or grimace at how certain I felt it necessary to be then; whereas in ancient age my greatest contentment is in being certain of nothing and not pressing myself to decide anything. I live in a perpetual Advent where my role is to watch and wait.
From his perch as the wise fool, the sophomore contemns the wisdom of older generations -- especially of know-nothing parents, for all sophomores’ parents know nothing. I have been there in spades. Most of us grow out of it into appreciation. If it’s us, or our child, we watch, enjoy, love, and suffer as we/they grow into whatever they/we will be. How will it turn out? Look in the mirror.
TW