The Religious Imagination

The core of religion is that we make what we imagine real. We fear thunderstorms, and we call that fear into a shape that makes sense to our human imagination. Yahweh, the God of the Old Testament, who became the God of the New Testament (with some minor editing) started out as a storm god of a rag-tag band of desert dwellers that later became the nation of Israel. It makes wonderful, beautiful sense that a desert people who believed that the sky was a hard shell protecting the earth like a bubble from the flood waters of cosmic chaos, would see sky-thunder and sky-rain as the embodiment of both divine judgment and grace, and that over time with more imagining, that God would become the creator of everything, including human morals and religious taboos.

Jesus, a carpenter, preacher and healer who gathered minor notoriety in his lifetime, came to be understood as the savior of the world after only a few decades of imagining and editing of the stories abound him (and, later, the systematic repression of certain kinds of stories).

All gods and goddesses evolve—or our understanding of God evolves generation after generation. This is a truism that really gets some religious people’s undies in a bunch—but really, it only bothers those people who are desperate to put the post modern mind back in its bottle.

George Macleod, the founder of the spiritual community on Iona, a sweet little island off the northwest coat of Scotland liked to say “God is now. Not yesterday primarily, and not tomorrow primarily. Now. God is now.” There’s a fellow who had something worthwhile to say.[1]

Our religious tradition has long imagined the earth as a lovely place devoid of actual life. We have been working hard at making that imaginative stance become real. John the Scott (mid 800’s), one of the founders of the University of Paris, said that the whole world is a revelation of god, and that god speaks to us in two books—the little one is the Holy Scripture and the big one is creation. This view was actually quite common in early Christianity, and heartily suppressed. The authorities condemned John the Scott’s writings for a thousand years as "swarming with worms of heretical perversity."[2] Give them this: they knew how to use effective imagery.

The German theologians definitely corner the market on cool names. Ludwig Feuerbach is number one on my list of fun theologians to pronounce, followed by Friedrich Schleiermacher and Ulrich Zwingli.

Zwingli, by the way, becomes even more entertaining when you put together where he was born and where he first went to school. You can make a pretty decent jump-rope rhyme out of Zwingli’s life (remember to use the “v” sound on all the “w’s”:

Beyond revealing what seminarians do between classes, my point is this: the western religious tradition is full of people who have made it their life’s work to re-imagine God, to revive God from the neurasthenia[3] perpetrated on the people by priests, kings, and theologians; to pull God’s feet* out of the cement blocks into which we have put them.

Zwingli (early 1500s) re-imagined the bread and wine of the Eucharist ritual as primarily symbolic, rather than the actual or even spiritual essence of Jesus’ body and blood. He came to this as a response to what he saw as superstitious literalism of the church that proposed a magical transformation of the bread and wine into a supernatural medicine as it slid sacredly down the sinful human gullet.

Schleiermacher (late 1700’s) crafted his theology as a response to his own time in which all religion was attacked by science as superstitious hokum, supported by ridiculous dogmas that had no basis in fact. Schleiermacher countered that the point of the religious quest was to summon a feeling—a feeling of absolute dependence on the mysterious and unknowable source of creation—and that feeling was truer than any religious dogma or science could reach.

Feuerbach (mid 1800’s) rattled the theological world of his time by declaring that humans construct God in their own image. This was an about face to the book of Genesis, which said that humans were created in God’s image. To Feuerbach, the god of birds would have wings. He used these charmingly obtuse words: “God is the highest subjectivity of man abstracted from himself” (See? It’s language like this that makes theology so utterly entrancing!). He also said “God is the mirror of man.” He declared that the imagination is the original organ of religion and that imagination is an involuntary process.[4] (I love that idea, not only because I experience imagination as involuntary, but because, if you link imagination with Grace, as I do, then you come up with Augustine’s idea of “irresistible Grace.”) Feuerbach’s ideas would later be interpreted to mean that God is a mere human fantasy, a dilly dally daydream, a destructive delusion that must be shed in order for civilization to advance (see Sigmund Freud early 1900’s).

The neo-shamanic movement—new age nut cases like me, sitting in basements drumming and closing their eyes to dilly dally with the spirits of nature—are part of a long line of people with a prophetic spirit who see a great need to renew their culture’s religious imagination; an imagination that is damaging the intellects, the hearts, the spirits and the bodies of the people. That line of renewing dreamers includes Jesus and the prophets of the Hebrew scriptures/Old Testament, and Plato and Socrates before them, and the late medieval mystics (many of them women), and the Protestant reformers—all of whom were seen by the intelligent, high-status religiously orthodox people of their time as new age nut cases—and the scientists of the enlightenment, and the English translators of the poetry and text of unfamiliar religions, and on and on. Like these spiritual ancestors, the modern neo-shamanic movement is a theological response to our times—a prophetic response that attempts to renew our culture’s religious imagination—to realign it with our current understanding of science, art, reason and culture—in a word: creation. To understand creation is to understand God. As our knowledge of one grows, so does our knowledge of the other.

I’m fascinated with the Holy Eucharist—the “bread and wine” ceremony in Christianity. At the seminary, they always begin the ritual by saying “all are welcome to the table.” They look at me a little quizzically when I take communion. My official denomination is Unitarian Universalist, and I guess people assume that makes me uninterested in Christian ritual.

I always wonder why, when they swallow the bread and wine, Christians don’t weep, laugh, dance with joy, fall on their knees and tremble, or just faint with the power—or the idea—that they have just taken God into their body? When I take communion, I am almost overwhelmed with the power and beauty of it—the idea that the Holy Force that made Jesus what he was is now being invited into me to inspire me to become as Christ-like as I can be.[5] It’s almost too much for me to comprehend. I have to keep myself from leaping about and singing as the bread and wine go down. But there seems to be a rule that you munch it quietly, and shuffle quietly back to your seat. Maybe they look at me quizzically because they can sense that I am about to shout and fall down and babble in tongues. I don’t want to stick out, so I too shuffle back to my seat, somber, a holy mule kicking inside my belly to get out.

Or maybe they are just saying to themselves: well, he can dress in a suit, but he still doesn’t look like a vice president to me.

Or maybe they are all trying to keep that mule from kicking out their pancreas, just like me.

Each time period in each culture has its fundamental theological question that it’s trying to work out. In Jesus’ time, it was a question of how to be made clean of sin. In Martin Luther’s time, it was salvation—how can I be sure that I will go to heaven? [6] In the mid 20^th century, one of the main theological questions had to do with the nature of God—is God really a man? The feminist movement and the goddess movement arose simultaneously to answer that concern with a resounding “no.” But that question was the beginning of what is now, I believe, the fundamental theological question of our time: given what we now know about evolution, the structure of physics, DNA, and the interrelatedness of life forms, what is humanity’s place in the web of life on this planet?[7]

Up until very recently we have been able to go about our theological business, arguing over whether God was one or three, or hacking each other up over which magic text was right or which magic landscape belonged to whom. But we are at a point in theological history where we can no longer ignore the question of whether humans are specially created to dominate nature or created to fit into the web of life. The neo-shamanist practice of intentional—and intense—reverence toward nature and gratitude to it, is one response to this theological question. It is a response with long-term vision, and with a sense of hope, gratitude, compassion, humility and love—core values of Western religion.[8]

Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann says: “It is the vocation of the prophet to keep alive the ministry of the imagination, to keep on conjuring and proposing futures alternative to the single one the king wants to urge as the only thinkable one”[9]

Neo-shamanist practices summon a feeling (Schleiermacher) that goes beyond dogma and scientific analysis to help me experience and understand creation and my relational role in it. The spirits are real, and their actions are effective because they are symbolic (Zwingli)—meaning to me that the spirits are found in the human depths where our oceanic human psychology meets forces of nature that are not human, and those forces are translated through the deep imagery in our human psyche, and float up into the realm of language and then we translate those images into words. The spirits are the “highest subjectivity of [hu]man abstracted from [human]self” (Feuerbach). And like Feuerbach, it could be misunderstood that I am saying that spirits are mere human fantasies. I am not. The earth lives and breathes, and has a mysterious soul that we can barely comprehend; it speaks to us, because the creator is inside everything, there is spirit inside everything. God speaks to us in images and feelings from our deepest insides—that deep place whose boundaries are porous, and it is in that place where we speak across species and across matter to all other parts of creation. The imagination is the container and the language for these communications, and those figments take a shape and we call those shapes spirits (or Yaweh) and they are real.[10]

Like Feuerbach, I say all religion begins in the imagination and is fueled by the imagination. “Darkness is the mother of religion,” he said. In the depths of our human self, down at the border between our humanness and that which is not human—that primal area where images are born, and where all myths are born, because they are the clumsy translations of the utterances of God; the place where if we want to, and if we know how, we may descend to find ourselves crossing into the otherworld of the shaman, the place that theologian Paul Tillich called the “depth dimension” and where William Blake said we cleanse the doors of perception—in this place we speak with God. And our translations of these revelations become stories that become scripture, which becomes physicalized as rituals, which are passed on as our religion. And we build our lives and our cultures on them. And as dogma grows, the religions harden. And someone comes, regularly, to reapply that original imagination to them, because this grace is irresistible. And our images of God and creation are renewed—with much flailing and gnashing of teeth, and much killing. Maybe God does not really care about all of that—or perhaps God weeps over this tragedy, I don’t really know. I do know this: the religions that do not allow themselves to renew the imagination collapse, burying their followers and whole cultures in cracked stones and dust, and usually in spilled blood.

In 2,000 years will everyone have a drum and a basement in which to worship? Dream on. But who has ever been able to tell in the world of religion what would “become” and what would sink back into the dust? I do know this: all we can do is make real our love of that mystery that we call God, make it as honest and authentic as we can, as humble and as passionate and as true as we can, check it against reason and also against the heart, and live that. Live it all the way. (That sounds a lot simpler than it is, of course.) I do believe this: in 2,000 years humans will either be much more integrated into the overall web of life, or locked in hellish combat for the final scraps of food and energy, or hopping hunched over, poisoned, nuked and mutated ape-like, purplish creatures who once believed they ruled heaven and earth.

Renewing the religious imagination has always been part of religion, and it has always been resisted and ridiculed by cranky fundamentalists throughout time, those who believe it is their holy job to keep the laces tied tightly on God’s cement shoes.*

For me, our monthly drumming groups are a life saving, culture rescuing, prophetic act—prophetic in the Old Testament sense of shattering the small universe that has been perpetrated upon us by our kings and priests; shattering that small universe so that the larger universe of God may be revealed.

Theologians have talked for eons about the possibility that God is inside all things. In the 20^th century, ideas of the imminent “God of all processes” is now commonplace. While theologians and preachers talk about God (an act that, in too much abundance, creates cement for God’s shoes) drummers descend into the rich humus of the body, and sink into the oceanic depths of their humanness to go meet this imminent God to find out what all the jabbering is about.

Religion always has to be renewed and not only intellectually, but that renewal needs to be acted upon, it needs to come into the body, or it remains a figment. Winter releases itself physically to spring. It is the nature of nature, and the nature of God to be a renewing, resuscitating, resurrecting breath—even renewing our own images and models of God.[11] I’m fairly positive there are some trees that would prefer to keep their leaves crumpled up within themselves in April—they have gotten used to it, it seems right, it’s so frightening to change, and I don’t doubt that somewhere in Tree-land there are orthodox tree priests preaching about the sin of bursting forth, that it only leads to a debauched exchange of pollen, and that this devilish change of light and warmth must be resisted in order to keep one’s tree soul pure. But springtime comes laughing, rising up from the earth and down from the sky, compelling the trees to break open with new life. Ands those who listen to the cement shoe priests find themselves hanging on a dead tree. Around them, the air changes, and the morning light gleams on the creatures of the earth, and this unspeakably mysterious, erotic world is made new again. As it has been. As it will be.

In late 1500’s Italy, Giordano Bruno, a new age nut case who was one of the first scientists to accept and revel in what Copernicus said about the earth moving around the sun, instead of the sun circling around the earth, said this:

“This entire globe, this star, not being subject to death, and dissolution and annihilation being impossible anywhere in Nature, from time to time renews itself by changing and altering all its parts. There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the universe, and the observer is always at the center of things."[13]

Not only did Bruno describe the history of the religious imagination, he anticipated the ideas of uncertainly and relativity that, 400 years later, would become the foundation of modern physics.

Giordano Bruno appeared at the height of a 200-year long mystical frenzy, a time when religion and science were becoming the separate—and antagonistic—disciplines that we know them as today and a time of obsession with ancient Egypt. Picking up from his forefathers, Marsillio Ficino and Pico della Mirandola (the Italians rival the Germans in enjoyable theologian names) Bruno extolled a new (yet ancient) way of marrying heaven and earth: by using the imagination to summon celestial powers into yourself, filter them, and disperse them into the world to create magical effects. These techniques had been brought into modern time by Ficino’s translations of several newly discovered writings of an ancient Egyptian holy man named Hermes Trismegistus. (Three-in-one Hermes).

Hermes Trismegistus had lived before Moses, and all of the wise and holy men of the past had taken their essential ideas from him. It was clear that Moses, who had written much of the Old Testament, had read Hermes Trismegistus’s many writings, because the ideas were clearly similar (for example, the creator was described as the One “Father.”) This ancient Egyptian Holy Man too, had clearly influenced Plato because he had talked about a celestial place of purity from which all hard, created forms had descended. Venerable early church fathers like Lactantius (early 300’s) had praised Hermes Trismegistus for prophesying the coming of Christianity (The One Father had had an only begotten son who came to save the world from ignorance). Augustine, the most venerable of all early church fathers (early 400’s) had even condemned some of the writings of Christians that stated that the ancient Egyptian Hermes Trismegistus had been the world’s first truly wise man.

Now, in Renaissance Europe, as Marsillio Ficino giddily translated newly discovered writings of Hermes, it became clear that he was bringing to humanity the pure, clear, ancient font of all wisdom. He wrote an excited letter to his patron, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, telling him that he had discovered an “immense present” for his benefactor. It was not a physical gift, but a lesson straight from the dawn of time in how to work with images of the three favorable stellar influences—the sun (grace/life force) Jupiter (joviality) and Venus (love). By either holding these images in his mind, or actually painting them on the ceiling of his bedroom and meditating at length upon them, Lorenzo could call down the celestial divine effluvium to surround him, protect him, and allow him to “escape the threats of fortune, and, under divine favour…live happy and free from cares.”[14] These images can be real (painted on the ceiling) or imaginary—either way they work.

Can there be a cooler image than “divine effluvium”? Why don’t we talk like that anymore? Well, we do. In the neo-urban shamanist world, we call the divine effluvium “the spirits.”

Draw into yourself all sensations of everything created, fire and water, dry and moist, imagining that you are everywhere, on earth, in the sea, in the sky, that you are not yet born, in the maternal womb, adolescent, dead, beyond death. If you embrace in your thought all things at once, times, places, substances qualities, quantities, you may understand God.[15]

The tradition of the renaissance magus raised human will and human imagination to the highest position as the way to uncover the truth of the universe.[16]

Clearly the church didn’t appreciate this kind of imagination entering the religious landscape. The warnings were clear, and if you didn’t put a lid on it, like Ficino eventually did, you were burned at the stake.

Here is what I love about this story: It turns out everyone was wrong about Hermes Trismegistus. It is now clear that the writings translated by Marcilio Ficino were not from the dawn of time, before Plato, before Moses. They were not words wrapped in the golden glow of Eden. They were written during the second Century CE, during another revival of interest in ancient Egypt, and influenced by the Christian, Hebrew and Greek ideas prominent of that time. Rather than influencing all the great wise men of history, the writings of Hermes Trismegistus were a somewhat messy conglomeration of them all. And the writings were not in all likelihood, written by one person. The holy man Hermes Trismegistus probably never existed at all. He was a figment. A spirit.

The scholar Francis Yates calls it one of the biggest, most widespread mistakes in human history.

Sometimes it takes me a lot of traveling around in a very wide circle to arrive at my point, and now here I am: urban American neo-shamanist new age nut cases like me often think we are saving or resurrecting or calling on the wisdom of ancient indigenous peoples of the earth—wisdom from before western culture, wisdom from the dawn of time, wisdom wrapped in the golden glow of Eden.

Like all religious people of all time—including indigenous peoples, early orthodox Christian fathers, Egypt-loving folks in the Italian renaissance and 2006, 21^st century evangelical Christians, Mormons, Hindus, Buddhists, Eckankarists, Jehovah’s witnesses, Pentecostals, and new age nut cases like me—all of us combine influences of our own time, often projecting them backwards into a more pure time, in order to answer immediate theological questions. One major—and underrated—influence on urban neo- shamanist guys like me is the mystical traditions of medieval and renaissance Europe. Yes, shamanist’s spiritual ancestors are as likely to have dressed in fluffy white shirts and colorful codpieces as they did in fringed deerskin. Europe is full of new age nut cases.

Rene Descartes (early 1600’s), who is often vilified by new agers as the man who killed the imagination by claiming that only reason mattered, came to his conclusions as a response to the absurd, irrational imaginative mysticism lived out by Ficino, Bruno and others. Descartes’ fundamental theological question was how to establish a reliable, sensible cosmos, without all that capricious divine effluvium drifting around that filled people with such nerve wracking fears and delusions of personal magical power. He reacted to the religious imagination of his time by imagining a mechanical, magic-free cosmos. Ultimately for him, mathematics was the only reliable thing upon which we could base our quest for the true nature of everything. After quite a bit of mental struggling, he arrived at what has come to be called his dream argument: Whether I am awake or asleep, two plus three make five.” [17] In other words, there is one reality constant through all changing human moods. For Descartes, the vibrations of the senses, the swirling of the imagination, and the emotions that they birth—all are deceiving demons of the utmost power and cunning, whose intention it is to lead us astray from knowing the true structure of the universe.

The wildness and aliveness of Bruno’s cosmos, where grace floated everywhere for our picking was washed clean and made as neat as a 1950’s suburban living room. If God is anything, he’s tidy.

A few years later, Schleiermacher would react against the cosmos Descartes had wrought, and demand that feelings are a sign from God, not from demons.

I love two things about Renee Descartes. First, a part of his story that is rarely told: It was a series of powerful dreams following a day of intense meditation which awakened in Descartes his call to be a philosopher whose job it would be to solve once and for all time the riddle of reality. Dreams—the very embodiment of the world of unreliable forces—called him to his noble purpose: to diminish the influence of dreaming on human reality.

This illustrates western culture’s two most favorite traditional activities: biting the hand that feeds us and sawing the limb out from under ourselves.

Toward the end of his writing life, Descartes ran into a large philosophical problem as to the nature of the human soul. For him, the entire universe was made of matter. Everything, even the behavior of animals could be reduced to mechanical, material processes. We see this same application of reason today in articles describing “the God brain”—that our sense of God is located in a particular burst of hormones from a certain part of the brain.[18] This is recycled Cartesian cosmology.

But what of the human soul? For Descartes, this was a sticky conundrum. How could an obviously immaterial thing lodge itself in a material body? This was a “primitive notion” to him. He certainly could not claim there was no such thing as the soul, because there was a stake, a pile of pitch-covered wood, and a excitable priest with matches waiting for him if he did. His solution was to locate the seat of the soul in the small conarial gland—what we call the pineal gland—at the base of the brain, or nape of the neck.[19]

Descartes banished the immaterial soul to a tiny mysterious material island floating in the material body. In the real world, chemical processes ruled. On the faraway, minuscule conarial island, magic and dreams were safely locked away, unable to perpetrate their torments upon civilized men. Mystery is tamed by mathematics. May God prevent the soul from learning to swim its way off that island, and may we teach our children not to build boats.

If Carl Jung had been in the room with Rene Descartes, he would have said (in a German accent of course) Ya, Ya, ziss iz egzactly vat I mean by ze shadow—ze place vee put pzsychic energzies zatt bozzer uss and give us zoze coNIPpshuns.

In the book of Genesis when Cain kills his brother Abel, God banishes Cain to the wandering wilderness, away from civilization where morality and reason set the rules. Cain is banished to the land of Nod, east of Eden. Curiously, one archaic definition of the English word “nod” is the “nape of the neck”—the location of the conarial gland—Descartes’ island of soul afloat in the body. In a strange—and admittedly stretched connection—Descartes intuited that the land of Nod was the place of banishment, and so he deported the soul there. Descartes, the killer of dreaming, gets to stay in the world, and not be banished. Instead he goes back home to Adam and Eve and says: “It turned out Abel was a demon, so I had to kill him.” And they believe him and go on being fruitful and multiplying and having dominion over the earth.

In Genesis, why did Cain kill Abel? Because God was pleased with Abel’s offerings, and displeased with Cain’s offerings. Abel fit in well with the Creator’s idea of how one should relate to the Creator. Cain did not.[20] Rather than becoming pleasing to the creator, Cain killed his brother. Isn’t it curious that, 1,000 years or so later, the foundation of Western Christendom became original sin—that we are, in our very essence, not acceptable to God? Cain lives at the base of our culture’s twisted relationship with creation.

At about the same time Descartes was dreaming his way into becoming the killer of dreaming, William Shakespeare was writing The Tempest—a play wherein Prospero, a wise magician who was able to commune with and control invisible earth spirits—had been banished to an island by greedy friends who wanted to steal his material property. Descartes, too, wanted to steal the material world away from the magicians of his time.

The word “nod” is also our word for saying yes, for accepting, for assent. Yes is the guiding word of the mystic and the artist, for when the Holy Spirit comes calling, most of us—the civilized, the orthodox (orthodox means “straight thinking”)—say no to it. It is the primary occupation of artists and mystics to nod when the creator spirit comes calling them to into relationship, or into transformation.

Martín Prechtel, Mayan shaman and all around very cool modern guy (Mayan is not really accurate—he is half Swiss, so I guess he too, is a new age nut case), says that modern industrial culture banished the “ancestral, indigenous soul” which exists in each human being—that soul which connects us to the past and the present and the future, and connects us to creation. Banishing it left industrial culture free to devour the planet.[21]

One of my favorite jokes of all time: Descartes is sitting at a bar. He finishes his drink. The bartender asks: "How about another?" Descartes considers it for moment, then says: "I think not."

Drumming calls the soul back from Descartes’ island; it’s that plain and simple. Western Christian industrial culture—the land of Halliburton and Exxon, the land of the children of Cain—banished the indigenous soul and its defense of creation to the faraway Conarial Island in the sea of shadow. It banished the drum, which is the instrument used around the world to celebrate the indigenous soul and infuse it with the erotic power to remind us that we are connected to everything, that we did not come into this world, we came out of it; and it banished the imagination which is the meeting place between the creator and the human being. It separated us from this meeting place, it separated us from the land, it took over the world and we became the kind of human being Ann Coulter so proudly describes:

“I take the biblical idea. God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God says, ‘Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.’" [23]

Artists, who are the carriers of the cloth that wipe clean the doors of perception, the bearers of the Holy Spirit of imagination, which is the language of the divine, are enslaved by the Industrial Culture which encourages artists to pump out product just like the factories, and to dress up and dance for the scraps of money that Halliburton throws out, and act kooky so as to attract attention so as to sell more product. They are encouraged by industrial culture to trade spiritual depth for cleverness[24] because they know the history of Western prophets: to truly call the soul back into this culture is to risk being burned at the stake.

This is why drumming is a soul retrieving, culture defying, world saving spiritual practice. And this is why if you buy that really beautiful drum at that cool shop, for god’s sake don’t hang it on the wall as art. Bang it until you begin to change.

[1] J. Phillip Newell, who lived on Iona for several years with his family described McLeod in these words in a lecture for Wisdom Ways, May 12, 2006 in St. Paul, MN.

[2] See Online Encyclopedia, ERIGENA, JOHANNES SCOTUS. Newell mentioned the quote about the big and little book as coming from Scotus’ commentary on the Gospel of John.

[3] Neurasthenia: This is one of my all time favorite words. It is a psychological disorder characterized by chronic fatigue and weakness, loss of memory, and generalized aches and pains, formerly thought to result from exhaustion of the nervous system. No longer in scientific use.

[4] Ludwig Feuerbach, tr. by George Eliot, The Essence of Christianity (Harper Torchbooks 1957) Pages 31, 63, 214 and 213 respectively.

[5] Zwingli lives! Long lire Zwingli!

[6] For a readable, lucid exploration of the major theological arguments throughout Western history, see Paul Capetz, God: A Brief History, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 2003. In my first seminary class, he was my first professor. He took the podium, and the first thing he said was: “All religion is a response to current earthly problems.”

[7] I arrive at this question knowing that smarter people than me, like Sallie McFague, have been asking it exactly this way for many years. See McFague’s The Body of God.

[8] The Christian right’s theology is another response. See Notes about Ann Coulter below.

Also, this: In a sermon in 2006, United Church of Christ Rev. Karen Smith Sellers told this story:

Methodist Bishop William Oden tells of a visit with the great liberation theologian, Gustavo Gutiérrez.

“Tell me about Methodism in America,” Gutiérrez began.

“We are struggling to find our center,” Oden responded.

Gutiérrez looked at him. “You already have a center.”

“Share it with me,” the bishop implored.

Shaking his head, the priest of Peru’s poor and long-suffering replied, “It is the joyous response to the grace of God.” Then he added, “If Methodism can keep its center, it will be a faithful force for God. If not,” he shrugged, “God will raise up another community” (From Karen Smith Seller sermon “Hosanna!” (Installation as Conference Minister, Minnesota Conference United Church of Christ, Mayflower Community Congregational United, April 8, 2006). I often think that the shamanist movement and the deep ecology movement is that community being raised up as Liberal Christianity continues to ‘find it’s center.”

[9] Walter Brueggemann The Prophetic Imagination, one of the finest small books ever written.

[10] The demonic spirit that makes Ann Coulter’s hair and legs so sexy, and that blinds us to the love of death that she preaches, is real. It has real effects in this world, and must be taken seriously, not seen as a mere human fantasy. She is a demonic spirit right out of the fantasies of the early church fathers—female, sexually alluring, and full of lies—except that she is speaking their theology. So I guess that makes her an angel.

[11] Paul Tillich says this a lot more eloquently than I can, but also in several volumes.

[12] © 2006 by Jaime Meyer. All Rights reserved. I feel compelled to admit that the “soft animal body” line is a quote from Mary Oliver’s poem The Wild Geese. I also feel compelled out of sheer embarrassment to say that the overall approach of the poem is trying to model the radiant voices of Rumi and Hafiz—shining suns to my little quiescent candle.

[13] Giordano Bruno: The Forgotten Philosopher, by John J. Kessler, Ph.D., Ch.E.

http://www.infidels.org/library/historical/john_kessler/giordano_bruno.html

[14] Francis A. Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (University of Chicago Press 1964) 76

[15] Yates, page 32

[16] Richard Tarnas, The Passion of the Western Mind, (New York: Ballantine Books 1991) 215

[17] Material concerning Descartes is taken from Robert Audi, General Editor, The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press 1995) 193-196

[18] For more on this see: http://atheistempire.com/reference/brain/main.html

[19] Yates, 454

[20] Genesis, Chapter 4

[21] Martín Prechtel, Secrets of the Talking Jaguar ( New York: Tarcher Putnam 1998) 280

[22] See, this is the kind of joke that theology geeks like me just adore, and it’s why we hardly ever get dates. Descartes is famous for the phrase “I think, therefore I am”—the idea that humans’ very existence is predicated on the fact that they have been imbued with the power of Reason. Without thinking we would not exist. I’m telling you, this jokes is hilarious.

[23] (Hannity and Colmes, June 22, 2001.) Ann Coulter prides herself on being a truth teller, and really she is: she articulates the demonic truth of conservative Christianity without feeling the need for softening the language or equivocating. This is the Christianity that is bringing on the church’s death, and perhaps much of the planet’s death along with it, and I really don’t understand why liberal Christians refuse to say it out loud. For more entertaining tidbits about this angel of truth and sanity, see: http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0111.coulterwisdom.html

[24] Prechtel says: “Spiritual amnesia is the price of cleverness.”, Secrets of the Talking Jaguar, 22

[25] D.H Lawrence Healing in Robert Bly, James Hillman, and Michael Meade, editors,) The Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart (Harper Perennial, 1992) 113

The Religious Imagination

By Jaime Meyer

© 2006 All Rights Reserved

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All imagery and text (unless otherwise noted) is the sole property of Jaime Meyer and may not be reproduced without consent.
Copyright © 2006-2007 Jaime Meyer and DrummingTheSoulAwake.com

The Religious Imagination

By Jaime Meyer

© 2006 All Rights Reserved

Return to top

All imagery and text (unless otherwise noted) is the sole property of Jaime Meyer and may not be reproduced without consent. Copyright © 2006-2007 Jaime Meyer and DrummingTheSoulAwake.com

All imagery and text (unless otherwise noted) is the sole property of Jaime Meyer and may not be reproduced without consent.
Copyright © 2006-2007 Jaime Meyer and DrummingTheSoulAwake.com