Image: abnormalarts.com


Dear Drummers,

I’ve been trying to write an eloquent, deeply thoughtful letter to you about the power of grieving, and the need for formalized ceremonies to channel grief through us so we can rebalance ourselves, for to be human is to build up grief about decisions we have made that later we realize have caused harm. I was going to tie my thinking to Obama’s inauguration speech where he said we need to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off. Americans hear in those words “good ‘ole American pluck” but I hear "and we need a ceremony to go with that."

I was going to say something about how our usual religious rituals to channel grieving through us – confession, the Eucharist, and asking Father God to forgive us our sins –these do not really work for me. Neither do the most common ritual activities to dispel grief: television and shopping. I was going to write about how Americans have become accustomed to living in some kind of a bubble , in fact, they demand a bubble and respond well to politicians who promise more bubbles, yet Obama seems to be saying that it’s time for us to exit the bubble life and live in the world. That’s easier said than done and we shall see if it is possible.

Well I was going to try to tie all of that together concisely but it’s been a week of distractions and suddenly it's Thursday and the drum is tomorrow I made a terrible mistake this morning by making up this little song for my two boys at breakfast:

“There once was a boy who lost his pants
He sat on hill populated by ants
Ow- ow- oooooooh! Ow Ow ooooooh!”
(And then you have to shake wildly)

And now they are running around the house singing it and guffawing and there is no way I can craft a thoughtful letter to you in the few moments I have to do it. But as I think about it, that song is a pretty good description of grieving and the ceremony of dispelling grief. Well, the Spirit works through us in unexpected ways, I suppose.

Tomorrow I intend to tell you a very good midwinter story about grief over choices that have harmed us. Some of you may have heard it before and that’s good, because stories get more powerful the more times you hear them. Then we’ll enter into a ceremony intended to move grieving through us. But of course we will begin with warm, delicious, groovelicious rhythm-making!

See you soon!

Jaime

Happy New Year!

Joan Miro, Bathing Woman

Dear Drummers,

I look forward to gathering this Friday, January 2 for warm laughs and cool rhythms. For those of you new to this email list, we meet at from 7-9:30 PM at First Universalist Church in uptown, Minneapolis: 34th street and Dupont Avenue South. Click here for a map. The easiest parking is on the south end of the building. We drum for about 90 minutes, then we take a break for tea and cookies and we come back together in “hour two” for a meditative or ceremonial element. The suggested donation for the evening is $15 but please don’t stay away because money is an issue. If the drum is calling you, answer. Pay with joy, and with abandon and with love of Spirit.

It is lovely, oh lovely
We turn our eyes to the North:
The frozen earth, the defense against the dark,
the silence between the dreams.
Arise in me, and pour forth from me
Thou silence of the North.

By the time Friday rolls around, the whirlwind of the holidays will be over. Now we can turn our attention to the energies of winter: rest and silence and what I like to call instasy. This is a similar energy to ecstasy (a rapturous delight arising from moving outside of your accepted boundaries) except that its direction is inward.

I have never liked the phrase “New Year’s resolutions.” I like to replace it with: “New Year’s dissolutions and evolutions.” I think the reason so many New Year’s resolutions fail is twofold. First, we don’t do the “dissolution” part. Like painting a wall, if you do the quick, easy (lazy) work of slapping a new coat on without scraping the old paint off first, the paint does not stick for long; it bubbles and peels quickly and you find yourself back where you started (and even more depressed). Ceremonially speaking, we need to do the dissolution alongside the evolution.

Second, our resolutions tend to be mandated by society, not by the gods. Our resolutions are so often attempts to fit better into society’s norms, by getting thinner or prettier or more muscular or richer or less hairy or happier. I think the way around this is to ask not ourselves (our ego) what we want or should try to become, but ask the Spirit(s) what they want from us. They may not want us to exercise more—they may want us to forgive more. And by forgiving more we may find that we stop eating compulsively.

So Friday, we will find a way to create dissolution and evolution, and hopefully along the way experience a little (or a lot) of instasy.

See you soon!

Jaime

"Heaven Forbid" by Gosha Gibek.)

Dear Drummers,

I’d like tor remind you about my Winter Solstice event at Wisdom Ways Center for Spirituality. Click here for tickets. We had a rehearsal last night, and I am telling you, this show is going to be amazing.

At work today I asked a new employee if I could take his picture for a communications piece I was producing. He did what everyone one does when I ask to take their photo: cringed, and sheepishly said, okay. I started my usual speech trying to make him feel comfortable, and he let me speak for awhile but then quietly interrupted me and said it’s not that he’s embarrassed, it’s that is religion doesn’t really allow him to have his photo taken. He would have done it if I had insisted, which of course I did not. This experience made me wonder: what does my religion forbid me to do?

Well, first off, I don’t have a religion. I have a “spirituality” but I definitely not a religion, which is a heavy word. In fact the roots of the word religion are “to bind.” Spirituality comes from the word Spirit, which is the Latin word for breath: diaphanous, ephemeral, free.

All religions sprout from culture. I don’t think we invent God, as Freud asserted. There is something more mysterious about the universe than simply humans fantasizing about a Creator. But it is clear that in every corner of the world, our concept of God sprouts from our culture, which is rooted in our physical landscape. It is our time and place that offers us our vocabulary and imagery for God.

I am well aware that my God, my religion, sprout from the soil of 1960’s America, watered with fear of “the Man” and his institutions and fertilized with feminism and her freedoms. And this is why I have spirituality (breath) rather than a religion (the ties that bind).

But a question nags at me today: I know what my spiritual life calls me to do, what it calls me to try to be like. But does my spirituality call me away from anything? Does it ask me to deny anything of myself? Does it forbid me anything? I am finding that this is a very good question for me to ponder and so I offer it to you as well.

When religion forbids, is this the sign of some corrupt authority holding onto power? Is it a holdover from an older superstition that no one has dared to think through now in modern times? Or is it possible that a religion cannot be a truly deep one without stating injunctions against certain things? Once in seminary a professor said that any religion that does not seriously wrangle with sin is not a religion but a hobby. I walked away offended but I think he was right (and that’s probably why I was offended).

Can spirituality only call us to “the Good” or must it also warn us away from the evil? But not only warn, for that is a suggestion. I am talking about the power to forbid.

I’m thinking about this because on the Celtic wheel of the year we are heading into the direction North, which is associated with spiritual battle. And I’m thinking about the great Celtic warrior-hero Cúchulainn. In the Celtic world many heroes have a geasa, or taboo, laid upon them. Cúchulainn’s fate is sealed by his breaking of his geasa against eating dog meat. But in early Ireland there was a powerful general taboo against refusing hospitality, so when an old crone offers him a meal of dog meat, he has no choice to break his personal geis or break the cultural gies. He eats the meat, is made weak, and dies in battle soon after.

I am also thinking about a conversation I had once with a Rabbi who said that the laws of Judaism, which some people think of as too many and extreme, actually make him feel free. He knows exactly what he cannot do and therefore he does not spend energy contemplating these possibilities. For him, freedom comes from being firmly bound.

So, back to the question. What in my spiritual life binds me and thus frees me? What are my taboos? On Friday we will explore the topic of Spiritual battle. But not before we have a whole lotta thumpin’ stompin’ whompin’ fun.

Dear Drummers,

I love Radio Jesus.

I’ve been groovin’ to Radio 91.5 “The Refuge: Positive hit Music” (translation: Christian rock music). When I worked a t the seminary I remember people making snipy comments about Christian pop music because it was considered so light on real theology. I always suspected that some of the professorial consternation included a dose of envy—that Christian Rock has an enthusiastic, even orgiastic audience, something scholarly publications could only dream about. Christian Rock also taps into one of the basic tensions for ministers—they always want their flock to go deeper, to work harder at their faith, to pray with more vulnerability, read more difficult books, and meditate longer. They find that the vast majority of the faithful want simple, non-nuanced and fun experiences that bring them a sense of peace.

Christian Rock co-opts the coolest riffs and most compelling melodies from the secular pop music world, and jams in praise lyrics. Only a few of the lyrics are distinctly dogmatic like the hip hop-lite: “I can’t believe that you died 4 me, gave me eternal life and eyes that see….” Most of the songs are love songs and the lyrics are indistinguishable from anything you’d hear on any other pop music radio station except all sexual energy is excised, as is anger. So you have the heavy metal sound without the earthy bite, and you have hip hop-hop structure with the sweat carefully removed.

What you are left with is a popular art form that is all about one thing: pleading for companionship, in a non human form, without the frailties, vagaries and pettiness that we must endure in every other relationship in our lives. Radio Jesus never lies to us or demands anything of us except our love; never betrays us or comes up short, never confuses us with competing truths. To the biblical scholar steeped in the conflicting truths revealed in every passage of scripture, Radio Jesus is an insult.

But to 99% of the faithful, Radio Jesus is all they really want from religion. Radio Jesus reminds us that on this cloudy day, if you were to just rise high enough, you would burst through the clouds and realize the sun is always shining and it’s constantly a new day in which your mistakes are erased and your welcome never wears out. The theologian comes to faith through the intricate maze of the mind; a faith built carefully brick by brick, and this is a good path for some. Most people come to faith through the need for comfort in a terribly frightening, disempowering and disappointing world, they want a spiritual Jacuzzi.

Well, I suppose there is plenty wrong with Radio Jesus if you look deeply into it, but having steeped myself for so long in the scholarly love of ambiguity and ambivalence, I find the simplicity of Radio Jesus very attractive. I too sometimes want to be loved, and not always worked by God. Because I always live in the grey area between scholarship and mysticism, between the one God and the many, I tend to see Radio Jesus as a collection of awesome and helpful energies rather than as one guy. But that’s just me.

At this Friday’s drum I hope we can enter into a conversation about The Comforter. How do you find comfort in this world? And I hope we can ask the drum to take us above the clouds, or if you wish, beneath the earth, to that place where The Comforter comes to us and gives all the love we need.

See you soon,

Jaime

Dear Drummers,

I write this a few moments after President-elect Barak Obama’s magnificent acceptance speech in which he reminded me that change is possible and that hope is the beginning of change. Change is the body in action and all action is impossible without food. Hope is the food. Without the food of hope, the body weakens and actions are made impossible.

For as long as there have been humans, it has been tempting to fall into hopelessness and the languor of the body. For far too long our leaders have deliberately, systematically starved us of the food of hope, in order to make us weak so that they may be left free to enact their avaricious visions. Obama’s remarkable victory teaches me many things, but the one I thinking of right now is my embarrassment at how often I have turned away from hope and accepted, in my own way, the processed food of cynicism and the colorless side dishes of complaint and sarcasm.

Hope is often seen as a gift of the Holy Spirit, an emergence of Spirit, wending its way up through the thick, recalcitrant spiritual sinews of the human individual and the human community. And when hope comes, it opens love in us. Spirit has a far larger vision than the human does, forward and backward in time, and in all seven directions. When it wends its way up into our awareness, we are opened and we love more of the world, in more ways. Our contraction - our compaction into ourselves - is released, and we realize, as Rilke said, that wherever we are folded in on ourselves, there we are a lie.

The years of small-minded chatter of the biblical literalist zealots compressed the primal American sense of hope that has now been reawakened. Those jowled pulpit pounders are revealed for what they are: frightened, narcissistic, snapping creatures with a theology not only irrelevant but dangerous to our collective future.

Tonight I delight in the play of the wind through the night-lit branches outside my window. I hear the cleansing song of the Old Bone Mother carrying away the world-killing poisons of these past eight years, emptying me and opening me to hope, which opens me to love.
And I hear the Mother making a demand on me: now that she has opened me to Hope and to Love, how do I repay her with my changes, with my actions? As Obama has said, our work is only beginning.

This is the topic I intend to lead us into when we gather together this Friday to drum. I hope to see you there.