More things about deer hunting

More thoughts:

Someone told me at a church meeting about how Native Americans believed the deer offered themselves as food for the people because otherwise the people would have perished during the last great ice age.

Offered themselves. The people survived, not because of their great prowess as hunters, nor because of their good luck, or any other factor but that the deer loved them.

I believe it. I enter the woods clad in thermal long johns, gortex, insulated boots, etc, and armed with sophisticated weapons. Those ice-age hunters hunted with sharp sticks and stones, and went naked until they killed something. If the deer did not “offer themselves” as food, our ancestors would have starved to death the first winter.

St. Hubert, the patron saint of hunters, was the greatest deer hunter of his time, but he renounced it all to become a fulltime man of prayer when a huge buck appeared to him in the woods and instructed him to do so.

That is what I need. The buck that offered himself to me as food must appear to me and explain what happened. Until that time, I cannot even renounce hunting a la St. Hubert, because it would be disrespectful, petulant, and leave open the possibility that deer do not offer themselves, that they do not love us, even a little. I cannot accept that conclusion, not only because it empties the world of magic and meaning, but because it would mean the old people all starved to death during the last ice age, and we do not actually exist.

So I am waiting for that buck to tell me I do indeed exist, and why I was not permitted to accept his offering of himself as food.

If this were to occur, it would not be the first time that deer have brought messages to me, although it helps to be asleep.

ONE MORE THOUGHT... the last deer I killed was 17 years ago. I have been at St. Stephen's, Troy, for 16 years. Every November I am (more or less jokingly) informed that a significant number of my parishioners are "praying for the deer." Is there a connection here? 16 years of prayers may have bestowed invulnerabilty upon any bucks in my vicinity. But this would not resolve the matter... what would God want me to learn by granting such prayers?

The Thing About Deer Hunting: November 21, 2007

Here’s the thing about deer hunting.

After seventeen buckless deer seasons, I was in the right place, at the right time. A buck appeared in gathering dusk, 30 feet away and framed unmistakably against a dusting of new snow. I raised my rifle, took aim through the telescopic sight, and fired. The deer bounded away unhurt.

There has to be a lesson, a meaning to this. Had I not put in a seventeen year novitiate, cultivating the thin strand of hopefulness that endures through hours of staring into empty woods? Had I not humbled myself, purified myself, emptied myself of haste and envy? Had I not trained myself to focus on the experience of being in the woods, at peace with myself and in communion with the deer? I can think of no reason why I should have missed that deer. If I had failed to get my gun up before being noticed, or if the buck had come from some unanticipated direction; if I had been dozing, or crinkling a gum wrapper, or any one of a thousand deer-hunting sins I have committed at crucial moments in the past, then I could reproach myself in all the familiar ways.

But this time I did everything right, at least as “right” as I am capable of doing them. So there has to be a meaning here, or else there is no “rightness” to be had.

Meaning 1) There is no meaning. Shit happens. Comment: And that’s not a meaning?

Meaning 2) Jonathan cannot shoot a gun any better than he can shoot a basketball. If it’s such a big deal, take some lessons! Comment: the only lessons that would help would be real-life scenarios with real deer looming out of the dimness, which, at seventeen-year intervals, would not provide much opportunity to practice.

Meaning 3) God is teaching you humility. Comment: I already learned that. In 1988. Ask Bill Moulton. He even wrote an unsolicited letter to the then-Bishop of Vermont to this effect. Can you top that? So don’t be telling me about humility.

Meaning 4) What’s the big deal about deer hunting? It’s not as if something really tragic happened. Comment: When a man who has not had a decent shot at a buck in seventeen years misses a buck standing 30 feet away, it doesn’t seem tragic, it seems stupid. At least tragedy is cathartic. Things like this are… boring? It feels bad enough to ponder, but not so bad as to break him to pieces. So it’s NOT such a big deal, and that relative insignificance is precisely why it has to have a meaning. Get it?

Meaning 5) maybe it was a ghost deer. Maybe the bullet went through him, just to show how the wild things are going to survive the death-dealing blows of technology and urbanization. Maybe, David says, it wasn’t a deer but a person-in-transition, a Webelow maybe, messing with my head on its way to the spirit-world. Comment: what person? It couldn’t be just any Webelow. It would have to be someone who has an agenda for me. I can’t think of who that might be… The former Bishop of Vermont? I doubt it. He never even answered Bill’s letter.

Meaning 6) came to me as I was sitting in the same place the next morning, the first day of the next phase in this long novitiate. “Live gracefully in a world that often seems graceless.” Comment: “That’s what everything means,” says David. Maybe so.

Unwrapping The Rapture: November 8,2007

With Advent impending, the church’s attention turns to somber thoughts of the End-Time, of Death and Judgment, and of the “Second Coming.” With Commercial Christmas upon us, no one else is thinking about such grim matters, but who cares? The church observes Advent anyway.

Well, maybe not “no one else,” as the vast popularity of the Left Behind novels attest. These books, written by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, claim the Book of Revelation as their authority for their version of an Apocalypse in which, according to New Testament Scholar Barbara Rossing, “the heroes are an elite band of born-again Christians called the ‘tribulation force’ who drive gas-guzzling Hummers and carry Uzis.’

I have not read these books, but I did read an enlightening article in the Fall, 2007 Anglican Theological Review by the afore-mentioned Barbara Rossing, a Professor at the Lutheran School of Theology in Chicago. “The so-called Rapture that forms the basis for the Left Behind novels is not traditional bible teaching,” she writes, “but was rather a nineteenth-century invention of the British pastor John Nelson Darby, founder of the Plymouth Brethren.” (p.555)

Yet The Book of Revelation can speak just as powerfully for Christians today as it did to the early church, claims Professor Rossing, “as a diagnosis of the illness of the imperial world, and as an urgent wake-up call about the future.” “What may be ending”, she continues, “is our unsustainable view of life [and]…our task must be to help people envision a way of life beyond empire, articulating God’s joyful and compelling vision for the future.” (p.553)

Rossing agrees that Revelation unveils the “end of the world,” but not in the sense of a destruction of the physical world (kosmos or ge in Greek), but the world as oikoumene, or “world order.” This Greek term is the one used in the New Testament in passages such as Luke 2:1, “…a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be enrolled.” It is that “imperial” world order that will be destroyed, not because God is a blood-thirsty avenger, but “through the logic of natural consequences,” (p.559). The heedless exploitation of people and environments has tragic consequences. “It is axiomatic (axios estin).” (Revelation 16:5) But “God wills not to destroy our world but to heal it.” (p.561)

According to Rossing, the Roman Empire represented a “toxic political economy” that “was built on deforestation, mining, slavery, [and] unjust globalized trade…” as colorfully described in Revelation 18:11-19. In contrast, Revelation “leads up to the wondrous vision of New Jerusalem…a vision… not of people being ‘raptured’ away to heaven, but rather, if anything, of God being ‘raptured’ down to earth (Rev. 21) to dwell with us… .” (p.560) “How can we reclaim our vision for planet earth?” asks Rossing. For her, it is “a vision of Jerusalem and all cities as places of justice and beauty, with a river of life flowing through the middle, welcoming all.” (p.561)

All Saints Sermon? Mother Teresa's dark night

thinking abt a sermon for All saints... thinking abt the way popular culture "canonizes" people like Princess Diana & Mother Teresa.Like some of the other commentators, I have been put off by the latter's conventional piety and submissiveness... but more drawn to her since the revelation re her doubt and interior bleakness.
How can God be anything but "absent"? I mean, Jesus was present with the disciples in Galilee, but only for a few years. His real accomplishments only began when he absented himself from the world and left the over-dependent disciples to finally grow up. I'm sure his absence was difficult for them, since they were used to being able to come whining to him over every little thing. But the odd thing about Christianity is the way that "absence" became a new sort of "presence", still vulnerable, still incarnate, and still strangely authoritative.
Maybe Teresa was too close to God. Maybe the God she experienced was so wounded, so crucified, that it precluded any joy, any experience of resurrection. Maybe she was really pissed off about all the suffering she saw in the world, but was too constrained by conventional piety to ventilate. I wonder of her spiritual directors ever urged her to dwell upon psalms such as 44 & others that criticize God in some graphic ways. She might have found some spiritual solidarity with Sudanese Christian women described by Marc Nikkel in WHY HAVEN'T YOU LEFT YET?, women who , in effect, stage protest rallies against (and, paradoxically, alongside) God. The "protest rallies" are prayer services, but they freely express people's anger about watching their children starve in refugee camps. Mother Teresa might have benefited from knowing some women like that.
Maybe she was so close to God she couldn't see God, like trying to see your own eyeball. Maybe she was too busy "being Christ" to see Christ. Anyway, it's too bad she didn't have more fun.
If religion is never fun, it gets depressing. Did she ever see , or enjoy, the irony in her own situation? Maybe that is something we can do for her. Maybe from her present vantage-point she will appreciate it and pray for us, or at least not get too pissed off.

2 Psalmic Compositions August 26,2007

Psalm for Jonathan Daniels d. August 20, 1964

Jon Daniels went down to Alabama * a volunteer, helping black

citizens register to vote.

He left his seminary studies back in Cambridge, * the green hills of New Hampshire,

his boyhood home.

He left the incense-haunted place of revelation, * and took magnificat to be his creed.

Guileless, he lived among the people; * their children trusted him.

Unknowing, he joined the group that went to Hayneville; * nonviolent, they spent the

night in jail.

Released in the morning, they went to get a drink, * Coca-Cola, at the nearby little store.

In the street, Tom Coleman shot him, * and Father Morrisroe his friend.

Tom Coleman, (was he a deputy?), * believing that he did God’s will.

Jon Daniels placed his body * between the shotgun and a teen age girl;

He died instead of her, * white for black, male for female, him for her.

His novice priesthood sacrificed, * his cup spilled, but covenant unbroken.

The reputed deputy went unpunished: * his jurors, twelve white men,

While, from the dust, another justice worked a silent plan * to heal the land.

PSALM OF SACRED IRREVERENCE

O how strange is your wisdom, O God, * how subtle your judgments, how masterful your

process of indirection!

Surely, Coyote is your emissary, * and Raven your plenipotentiary.

When Israel was enslaved in Egypt, Pharaoh commanded the midwives to kill the

little Jewish boys, * as soon as they were born.

Pharaoh commanded Shiphrah and Puah; * he commanded, and they had no choice but to

obey.

But they hastened very slowly, * whenever they were called for.

They explained themselves to Pharaoh, * they offered this excuse:

“The Hebrew women are too fast for us; * by the time we reach the birthing-place, they

have already delivered, and their new-born boys are hid from you.”

Thus were Pharaoh’s plans subverted, * and Israel preserved.

Pharaoh raged and cursed, * but the midwives rolled their eyes and said, “tee-hee.”

How ridiculous are the mighty, O God, * when they set themselves against you!

In vain do they wage war against infants, * and command the merciful to commit acts of

cruelty!

For awhile, they seem invincible, * but history soon forgets them, and robbers

desecrate their tombs.

But let Shiphrah and Puah be remembered, * and their names be praised in Israel.

Wherever childbirth is respected, * and midwives held in high esteem.

Wherever slaves move slowly, * to follow ruthless orders given by the strong.

God’s praise is sung among the lowly, * among those who act with kindness, even

when it places them at risk.

While the cities of the ruthless fall into ruin, * and sand blows over them.

Coyote howls among the fallen pyramids, * and Raven cackles at their tombs.

Exodus 1:15-21

August 21, 2007 3rd month of the last sabbatical

Dear Dad:

You taught me, not just “how to fish”, but how to experience our fishing on a deeper level. Since your death on this day (August 21) in 1981, I have missed the opportunity to recount my fishing adventures to you, knowing that you would excuse and understand my flights of fishing fancy, my piscatorial phizosophizing, and also that you would not hesitate to point out the more unfortunate examples of excessive prosifying, such as that last phrase. Oh, and the spelling mistakes, of course. But we have this thing called spellcheck…

Dad, you know that I don’t just “miss you”, I grieve for you, I love you more with each passing year, and I pray that you know this, somehow, by means beyond our knowing.

Here is my story about…

LAVISH ABUNDANCE ON THE AUSABLE RIVER.

Our lives are spent staving off scarcity, or the possibility of it. We don’t want to run out of money, so we earn more; we don’t want to run out of food, so we store it up. The most glaring example of scarcity would be nothing-ness. So we could, and do, regard all the examples of something-ness around us as random exceptions to a general rule of scarcity. A trout, for instance, or the various stages of insect life upon which they feed… mere flecks of anti-scarcity clinging to the surface of a tilted universe, sliding toward oblivion. If nothing-ness is the norm, then we are all engaged in a desperate struggle to beat one another to the next scrap of edible scarcity.

If that were so, then perhaps our fly fishing would be a symbolic expression of this primeval anxiety. But it is not. While daylight prevails we try to tempt the trout with imitations of the occasional stray bug, but rarely do they respond. And why should they? In their collective trout-consciousness they seem to know: their lives are not “exceptions to a general rule of scarcity”; they are a function of lavish abundance.

Sometimes we get to see this for ourselves.

Last Tuesday evening, fishing with River Dog (guardian of the purity of Michigan rivers), on the Ausable. A few trout had been rising to occasional and largely invisible prey, except for the encouraging sight of an occasional white miller mayfly. This inch-long puff-ball of white insect is known to hatch in mid to late-August along this part of the River, and we had come hoping to witness and, by stealth and artifice, to join it. But who can predict the ways of insects?

Around 8 p.m. the breeze died and the overcast that had prevailed all day cleared somewhat, revealing patches of blue sky and a setting sun. River Dog and I had separated, so, except for two kingfishers, I had this stretch of river all to myself. I caught a trout, and after releasing it, realized that the feathers on my white miller imitation had unraveled, making it useless and unworthy as a trout lure. Standing hip-deep on the edge of the swift current, I set about tying on a new one, and as I did so began to be aware of the sound of trout rising frequently around me, some within a few feet of where I stood. The combination of dim light and barely-visible fishing line can make the tying of a secure knot difficult, and this occasion was typical in that respect. During those few frustrating minutes, I became aware of what was causing the fish to rise. In the darkening air around me a transformation was taking place: along the whole length of river a swarm of white millers was emerging from the water and forming a mist-like layer over the surface, ascending to the tops of the high trees, and then surging upstream in great waves of coordinated movement. New insects continued to rise up, squeezing between the spent white carcasses of their dead relatives floating on the surface. As this transpired, trout were consuming them with successive slurps, sips, and splashes. I hooked one on my first cast with the new fly, and as I was landing and releasing it the last trace of daylight disappeared from the western sky. In the darkness the insect horde continued its pilgrimage, emerging, ascending, surging upstream, dying, falling, and returning downstream again.

Very soon, however, the sound of feeding fish ceased altogether. Apparently the trout were satiated, like overstuffed Romans at an orgy. Bugs continued to flutter at my ears, bat up against my fly line, collide with my glasses, and occasionally get sucked in with my breath. Satiated myself, I soon stopped fishing, and, lighting my way with a pen-light, waded to shore in a shimmering cloud of light reflected from countless white wings. From under the cedars along the shore, the River appeared to be shrouded in a pale fog that swirled sporadically upstream, stirred by an unfelt breeze.

No wonder trout are slow to strike at other times! Why search for food if such a bounteous plentitude is about to offer itself? Why eat when you are still “stuffed to the gills” from last night’s feasting? Their lives are a function of abundance.

What we had been doing was more than a fishing expedition, it was an immersion in the symbiotic relationship between fish and insects and river, and in their collective relationship to us. In this setting we were the intruders, the witnesses, the priests who, alone among the actors in this drama, could behold all the elements of the plot, and all the relationships between the players. We could even masquerade as legitimate members of the cast, disguising ourselves as bugs so as to gain backstage admittance, where we could don our neoprene vestments, and wave our sacred wands over the river, beseeching acceptance.

Our lives proceed from such lavish abundance, and end the same way. Love is not scarce, nor is grace in short supply. The problem for us is not how to beat each other to the fishing hole… it is to find a way to inhabit the abundance with humility and grace, like a native, like a mayfly, like a trout.

Like you, Dad.

August 14, 2007. 3rd Month of the Last Sabbatical

OLD ST. PAUL’S, EDINBURGH: OUTLAW’S HIDE-OUT OR CAVE DWELLING?

The “Royal Mile” in Edinburgh, Scotland, is an historic urban thoroughfare that has adapted successfully to the demands of postmodern tourism and commerce. Its shops specialize in Scottish paraphernalia, cuisine, and whiskey, and street performers do a brisk business among summer crowds that bulge out into the traffic. The “High Street”, as its’ known, runs up the side of a mountain, a dormant volcano, with Holyrood Palace (where I believe the Queen stays when in Edinburgh) at the lower end and Edinburgh Castle on the commanding heights, and numerous alleys and narrow by-ways intersect with it all along its length.

Located on one such obscure side street is Old Saint Paul’s Episcopal Church, its existence noted only by a small sign on the High Street. There is no church building in sight, however, and those who wish to find it must proceed with considerable faith down a sloped alley cluttered with the usual signs of urban excess and dereliction to where a weathered door marked by another small sign identifies Old St. Paul’s as having been a “center of Jacobite politics in the Eighteenth Century, and later of Anglo-Catholic religious activity…”, or words to that effect. Like Harry Potter seeking admission to a Wizards-Only rendezvous, one must summon their courage and push on this door with some authority in order for their quest for Old St. Paul’s to be fulfilled.

There may be another, more conventional point of entry for this church, but entering it as I did reinforces the impression of a clandestine meeting place, a catacomb, or cave dwelling, for the door opens onto a space of astonishing depth and height, built as it is into the side of a cliff. Little daylight penetrates, since other buildings surround and conceal it, and so the large stained glass windows admit only a pale greenish version of daylight, barely enough to make out the faintly glowing shrines and altars scattered about the space below.

On the walls of certain European caves are crude paintings of animals that are regarded as the oldest evidence of religion among human beings. It is supposed that prehistoric hunters created these icon-like paintings to express gratitude, wonder, and hope with regard to the animals that sustained their lives. Like all hunters, they spent a lot more time story-telling, than they did hunting, and the cave-paintings were probably the result of winter nights made shorter by tales and memories of wooly mammoths slain and eaten, and of the miraculous renewal of their numbers that occurred every Spring. This sense of kinship with other species and gratitude to whatever it is that produced them is the primal source of religion, and (I am convinced) remains with us still, though few of us hunt, and those who do engage in a highly modified, ritualized version of this ancient struggle for survival.

As I have said, Old Saint Paul’s struck me as cave-like, and had its stained glass contained imagery of hairy bison and wooly mammoth instead of saints and angels I would not have been surprised. Those who worship in this place are delving deep into the primal elements of faith and human community, and when they emerge from their prayers into Sunday-morning sunshine they are reenacting a Navajo creation-myth wherein human beings emerge into this world from a crack in its surface. That was in Arizona, of course, and this is Scotland, so you might have to forget about the sunshine. But cosmic rebirth can occur anywhere, right?

The Jacobites were partisans of the Scottish house of Stuart, adherents of those royal politicians known to the British establishment as “Pretenders.” The Scottish Episcopal Church has this tendency in its pedigree, since its bishops were “Non-Jurors” who believed they could not in conscience rescind oaths of allegiance made to James II, the Stuart King deposed in the “Glorious Revolution” of 1689. Of his successors, the most famous was “Bonnie Prince Charlie,” whose efforts to regain the crown were definitively overthrown at the Battle of Culloden in 1742, the last pitched battle to be fought on British soil.

So it appears that Old Saint Paul’s was, in times past, a center of conspiracy and dissent, a gathering place for outlaws and rebels. No wonder this church is so hard to find! In former times it would not have been wise to be seen entering Old Saint Paul’s publicly. Better to make one’s way furtively down the alley, unseen by officials of the Hanoverian kings.

In some ways Anglo-Catholicism may be to postmodern culture something of what the Jacobite-ism was to Eighteenth Century British politics. To those who know enough about Anglo-Catholicism to criticize it, its adherents often seem like “pretenders” who crave the pageantry of catholicism but have no appetite for its disciplines. Like the “Non-Juring” stance taking by Scottish Bishops of the past, places like Old St. Paul’s can seem out of step with the times, attractive only to mavericks, waifs, and strays. Like Prince Charlie’s doomed cause, there is something quixotic about the effort to melt capitalism’s stony heart by waving incense at it.

I am told there is still a Stuart Pretender to the throne, and nothing could be more irrelevant (or ridiculous) with regard to the current state of British politics. But outlaws have their place in history, an example being found at Old St. Paul’s, where one of the more modern stained glass windows shows three Scottish bishops in the act of consecrating Samuel Seabury, the first Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the USA. It is a relatively well-known historical fact that Seabury sought episcopal ordination from the Scots because English Bishops were unwilling to elevate to the episcopate a representative of England’s rebellious former colonies. Perhaps, along with the apostolic succession, those renegade Scottish bishops conveyed to America’s first bishop some their subversive spirit, and a measure of “up yours” defiance that is not uncharacteristic of Scotland to this day.

Anglo-Catholicism had its beginnings in the “Oxford Movement” of the mid-Nineteenth Century, but in the contemporary scene of ecclesiastical life and politics it continues to wield influence, not so much as a movement as an attitude. Perhaps a parallel observation could be made regarding the Jacobite cause of former times, which could be understood as having evolved into an attitude of cultural resistance to English dominance. In the past, this has taken the form of distinctive Scottish music, customs, and speech, but more recently has shown a more overtly political face, as evidenced by ubiquitous Edinburgh graffiti that reads “END LONDON RULE,” and the like. Anglo-Catholicism persists like the reverent stories told by hunters as they huddled around campfires in icon-studded cave dwellings. It haunts the halls where synods and conventions meet, manifesting itself wherever partisans of any stripe are inspired to take the long view, identify with the underdog, or learn to tolerate ambiguity. In all its diffusion, and even absurdity, Anglican catholicity continues to become incarnate in places like Old Saint Paul’s: obscure, odd, as deeply rooted in human consciousness as it is in the side of its volcanic cliff.