Brendan Redler Collective Entries

10/25/09

Research Outside of My Field

I am a science guy. I am a biology major. I don’t spend much time thinking about how people relate to sacred space, or how a space can interact with people. I can conceptualize everything that we talk about in class and apply that to different scenarios…but I will likely never take much pleasure in formal research and discussion on topics like spirituality, philosophy, etc.
So when I set out to do research for my thesis paper I was looking at a big blue screen with a test tone. I spent about four hours trying to find any information worth reading about let alone writing my own paper about. What I found was a lot of junk written about things I didn’t care about written by people I had never heard of from institutions that sounded like made-up non-profit organizations. Naturally I panicked; I find that is the best way to overcome a problem. Then I did some more investigation into the matter and as it turns out, that is how a lot of academic writing in this field seems.
Then, magically, I found one good source. It was a study conducted by some psychologists about wilderness retreats. They used a generally scientific method, although predictably a bit watered down. The authors of the study set up a wilderness retreat somewhere in Minnesota with a fairly wide demographic of people for a couple weeks. One of the researchers went along first hand to observe and take notes. All of the participants used journals the entire trip and had entrance and exit interviews. Afterwards the authors of the study assigned different characteristics to the descriptions that the participants used in their journals and tallied and analyzed the data. The study was written just like a journal entry I might find in the American Journal of Botany or Journal of Organic Chemistry. As it turns out, not all liberal arts scholars are wishy-washy and I should give them more credit. After finding that article the rest came quickly and I even enjoyed reading some of the other sources I found.
The final verdict: I appreciate the work that philosophers and psychologists do, but I still won’t do any more than I have to.



11/27/09

Not to be a Whiny Broken Record But…

Until this class I have never respected the liberal arts very much. But until recently I didn’t know why. I felt this way because of my encounters with people who identified themselves as philosophy or religious studies majors. I was not impressed with most of what these people had to tell me on the matters of religion, philosophy, and reasoning so I dismissed the entire field. What I failed to realize is that most people are not great at what they do. This sounds harsh, but on average most people are…average. I even find this in the sciences when people are way off-base about a scientific concept but present their understanding of it as fact. What I have found in the liberal arts is that these kinds of disconnects between individual understanding and accepted meanings become hopelessly amplified by personal opinion. The freedom of the liberal arts is that after one reads a source text, one is free to interpret it however one feels appropriate and to apply that interpretation to one’s own arguments. The danger in this is that without reading the source text for yourself, another person’s opinion is all that you have to go on. So in reality I was not opposed to the liberal arts, I was opposed to the opinions and interpretations of my peers.

11/27/09
On I and Thou

I read a small piece of Martin Buber’s I and Thou. I have to get a copy of this book. Anyway, on to the reflection.

I did not realize such relativism pervaded Buber’s I and Thou, although given the title I should have guessed it. Buber speaks of encountering another human being as Thou, but not just as Thou. He makes a careful word choice that might be missed if not read closely. Buber writes, “I face a human being as my Thou.” It is interesting to note that he used a possessive to relate himself to another person. I think Buber made this distinction because another human being is only Thou in relation to one’s own consciousness just as one is Thou in the eyes of any other human being. This relativism does not carry over to the point in which a Thou exists as explicitly and exclusively relative to another entity, excepting the conscious experience of another Thou. That is to say, in order for an entity to be Thou, no object is required with which to compare it. Thou exists regardless of proximity to others. Buber explains that when a human being is his (Buber’s) Thou that “he is Thou…with no neighbor…and fills the heavens. This does not mean that nothing exists except himself. But all else lives in his light.” The relativism of Thou is made even clearer when Buber concedes that we must still live in a world in which most people live now, the world in which people can be described and enumerated. Buber explains that “each time [Buber describes a person’s characteristics] he ceases to be Thou.” Buber further claims that he does not experience a man as Thou (because one experiences an object and encounters a subject) but instead “stand[s] in relation to him, in the sanctity of the primary word.” Keeping these thoughts in mind allows me to relate more wholly to other people and reminds me to be a kinder person.

11/28/09

This Church is a Church Because McDonald’s Isn’t

Aside from physical and geographic attributes, what makes one space different from another? Lane would argue that it is each person’s unique insight through which all people view the world that changes our perception of a place. In the chapter, “Mythic Landscapes: The Ordinary as Mask of the Holy,” Lane talks about how in order to recognize a place as sacred we must see in a sort of binary vision. We need to simultaneously see the ordinary which everyone sees and the sacred which only individuals can see and only some of the time. “The turn of focus that brings the holy into view seldom occurs” says Lane. This idea leads to the concept that any place can be sacred if viewed with the right turn of your own lens. I would never look at a McDonald’s “restaurant” and conclude that there is any sort of sacredness inherent there. Somebody does though. I once saw a news spot on a man who is on a mission to visit every McDonald’s in the world. He really does view every McDonald’s as a sort of sacred place that he intends to visit before he dies. Disregarding a few obvious flaws in his plan: some McDonald’s restaurants will close before he can get to them, many were open before he lived, his minimum wage income, etc, this is no different than completing the Camino. Don’t take offense to this (I have to admit, even I almost do). McDonald’s clearly does not compete with Catholicism and an ancient path of pilgrimage for the rest of the world, but to this man McDonald’s restaurants are sacred places and his pilgrimage is to visit them all.

12/1/09

I am who I am

When I read chapter seven, “Precarity and Permanence: Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker Sense of Place” in Lane’s book I was struck by the apparent similarity of the various saints, Catholic Worker writers, and even Jesus to my own experiences in hiking. I had never really thought about it, but Jesus didn’t have a home after he left his parents’ and must have been largely unknown among the general population, causing a stir in only select circles. Jesus’ lack of a geographical home even served to illustrate that possessions and consequently a place to store them was unnecessary. As lane puts it, “being without place would become a badge by which true identification with Christ could be discerned.” It’s not all that easy, though. Lane refers to the “desire of the unsettled to be settled and the discomforting need of the settled to be unsettled.” I have experienced this on a time scale of a few days, never mind the scale of the lifetime of thirty or so years that Jesus lived. Whenever I am at home and bound by academic, work, social, or family obligations I cannot help but long to be hiking in the mountains indefinitely. The sense of being trapped and that your daily actions are without meaning is disheartening. Every so often I am lucky enough to escape to the mountains for a time and live as I please and as the landscape dictates. I went on a hike this past August on the Long Trail in Vermont. I had planned to complete the 275 mile trail in three weeks with my long-time friend, Chris. About three weeks before the trip, he bailed because he landed an internship that paid well. I understood completely but decided to make the journey alone anyway. The day finally arrived and I headed up to Vermont on the train. I hiked for five days before I felt so alone and placeless that I came home; it was a vacation, after all, so why waste my time feeling miserable? I started feeling like I had failed myself as soon as my butt hit the seat on the train home. I slept in my own bed that night and dreamt of being back on the trail. If I had been prepared with a different mindset when I had set out, then perhaps I would have delighted in my sense of placelessness but instead I felt alone; “I should have been here with Chris,” I thought. Maybe it’s just part of human nature to feel the simultaneous draw of being footloose and of being placed, maybe not. Knowing one way or the other wouldn’t make a difference anyway. I’m going hiking.

12/1/09

Vocabulary 223

As I have said before, I am not a philosophy student or writer by nature. Because of this, I had a lot of difficulty in the beginning of this semester with some basic concepts. One of the most difficult barriers to overcome was simply the language used in this discipline. I started this class familiar with terms like: dimeric, polyadenylated, ortho nitrophenol galactoside, and Z-2,2-dimethyl-6-isobutyl-3-octene; not chthonic, kenosis, liminal, entelechy and numinous. I have always taken the time and made the effort to think critically about science and it came naturally to me. Until recently, I had dismissed most non-scientific disciplines as less valid than science and failed to realize the logic underlying these subjects and my understanding of these subjects was greatly hindered by my lack of vocabulary in these areas. Even as the class progressed, I found myself interested but generally overwhelmed by the terms and language used. The richness inherent in the definition of each word had thus far eluded me. When the class was asked to define a word – I think it was manifest – we were at a loss. It had seemed like such a simple word until then. I had certainly used it countless times and seen it used countless more. But when we had to define the word and assign specific meaning to it we were without words. It was that class session that made me realize how little I know about the English language outside of scientific writing, in which the kinds of words with rich and historical meanings are scarcely used so as to avoid multiple interpretations of a single phrase. Now when I read something, instead of glazing over a word that I am not familiar with and dismissing it as fluff I look the word up and find out what the author is really trying to tell me. It sounds like such a simple practice, one that I should have been doing all along. It is. I should have. I am finally thinking critically about everything I read and I have Wilderness as a Sacred Landscape to thank for it.

12/1/09
“I’m beginning to think it’s ALL relative: evidence to further suggest that reality only exists as individual experience

Lane’s references to the relative nature of experience pervade his book Landscapes of the Sacred. He appears to have a generally Christian outlook on the world with some wholly rational and unreligious aspects thrown in. On his current biography page at Saint Louis University he even says that for six years he “served in the pastorate, from…New York State…to Philadelphia.” It is fascinating to me that Lane would have so many allusions to the idea of a completely relativistic experience

Our attachment to any place arises from what we experienced there and, subsequently, from what we retain of it in our memories. The power of a memory may be even more important than the continuing physical reality of the site itself.

Lane further comments that what we remember of a place “shares the ultimate impenetrability of all spiritual experience.” Lane makes a compelling argument that spiritual experience is just a result of our own projection of our memory on the world. What do you think? (seriously, if you get time over the break I would like to know Brendan.redler@gmail.com).

12/1/09
Tying it all together

In Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, Turner offers an explanation for the need to leave a place that Lane talks about. Most societies have a taboo against becoming a vagrant. It is in the definition of both society and vagrancy, societies are based on communities of people which are usually (but not always) stationary civilizations whereas vagrancy is characterized by wandering about with no lawful means of self support. Then, “the only journey possible” to get away from your society “is…a pilgrimage.” Turner writes about “‘occasions of sin’ which make up so much of the human experience of social structure” and how pilgrimage fulfills the need to get away from that. The Appalachian Trail is fraught with stories of this exact phenomenon. I have personally spoken to several hikers as well as read stories that cite unrest and a distaste for societal life as a reason for hiking the trail. In class, we even listened to a story about a man who lost his wife and his job simultaneously so he left his society and headed for the AT. There may even be other practices in the United States that could be interpreted as pilgrimage to which people are driven for the same reasons: cross-country trucking, military service, any move to a less familiar place to escape…

12/3/09
Pilgrimage as Defiance of Catholic Sacraments

Turner lists a few reasons why the Catholic Church might not be in favor of pilgrimages, despite their outwardly religious character: “the apparent capriciousness with which people make up their minds to visit a shrine, the rich symbolism and communitas quality of pilgrimages systems, and the peripheral character of pilgrimage vis-à-vis the ritual or liturgical system as a whole.” The word pilgrimage brings to mind a gamut of images, most of them religious; old women marching down the street with a rosary in hand toward a catholic shrine in South America, Muslims making their way to Mecca, Buddhist children on their way to a monastery to start their life as a monk. Yet the Catholic Church tends to disfavor the practice of pilgrimage in conjunction with Christianity. Turner cites that the sacraments of “baptism, confirmation, ordination to the priesthood,” are all rites of passage which are irreversible and bind one to the church. In contrast, “Eucharist and penance” are the sacraments most closely associated with pilgrimage. These sacraments are “indefinitely repeatable” and have no aspect of social control imposed by the people administering them. Sometimes pilgrimages gain a more ritualized and structured character, as in the Camino de Santiago, which is aided by the church and subsequently accepted. In the early stages though, pilgrimages take on “populist, anarchical, even anticlerical” qualities. This sounds like music festivals in the US to me. Woodstock was first…and best…then came a whole series of music festivals which became progressively more antithetical to the ideals of Woodstock. Today, small music festivals that have not been discovered or taken over by large companies are cherished because of their free atmosphere and closer adherence to the ideal music festival. It’s a bit of a shallow analogy but it works. I feel a greater draw to pilgrimages which adhere more closely to “populist, anarchical, [and] anticlerical” ideals, so sign me up…before the church catches wind.

12/4/09
Victor Turner is Mind-Numbing. Mind-Numbing, I say!

I have an incredibly difficult time reading Turner’s work. When I track the words on the page with my eyes and try to take it all in, I find myself trying to figure out why I would want to know this information. Of course I understand that this is an academic work that highlights much of Christian history as it applies to pilgrimage; and if I was writing a paper about that I might be interested. However, I am not. I am also not a Christian and do not find Christian history interesting. There is little to no outside perspective in this work that I can discern and I find it to be rather like a theistic monologue whereas Lane’s work was flavored by Christian ideas but focused more on universally applicable concepts. Also, the vast majority of this book is not applicable to the class, which is probably why we were assigned so little of it to read. Unfortunately, the part of the book we were assigned specifically was pretty helpful so it cannot be omitted from future sessions of the class. Oh well.

12/4/09
Mary’s Rock, A Reflection of a Past Winter

I arrived at the entrance to Shenandoah National Park on a cold January morning. I had never slept outside and had only been hiking twice before; once by myself, and once with a friend of mine who I convinced to go with me. It was damn cold, in the mid 20’s in the shade of the mountain and around freezing in the sun but the wind blew so hard on the sunny side of the mountain that you could hardly stand against it. I rolled down my window and waited for the ranger to open her window, but it was cold enough that she had been staying in another building nearby and quickly made her way over. We said our hellos and got down to business. I needed a backcountry camping permit for two nights, three days and I an approximation of where I would be going for safety’s sake. “It’s going to be cold tonight.” she said, “around 10, I think the report said.” “I’m pretty well prepared for it,” I said with a feigned smile. She said it looked like it and gave me a wink and told me to have a good time and be safe. I parked my car and started my hike. I had never hiked with my full gear weight before. I thought I had, but I was wrong. The hike from the parking lot to the summit of Mary’s Rock, my first stop, is a 1.5 mile climb with no downhill and no flats with about 1000’ of vertical gain. At the halfway point or so I stopped and looked up. What I saw was disconcerting. What I saw was a mycological malady. The landscape literally stretched away from me, the mountains distorting and becoming steadily smaller and wider until I shifted my gaze when it would start all over again; the mountains returning to their original shapes only to distort again. I caught my breath and continued up the mountain.
After my day’s hike of about 17 miles I stopped and found a spot to camp off the trail as the sky dripped its last color behind the horizon. I climbed into my hammock and waited for real night to come. Going to bed is a hollow experience when you have nobody to say goodnight to. Suddenly I was awakened to the pitch darkness of my the bug net in my hammock. Where am I? The woods. Why am I awake? I figured it was because I was not familiar and would just have trouble sleeping in the woods for a little while. Then I heard a twig break. Then another. Time stopped and my heart raced. It’s a bear and I am going to die. That is the only reasonable explanation for a panicked mind. Eventually I calmed myself down a little and resolved that if I was going to die, at least I would fight a bear first. I was no bear taco to-go. I slipped out the bottom of my hammock and into my boots and looked out the flaps of my tarp. Staring back at me were about 15 pairs of glowing green eyes five feet above the ground. I was surrounded…by deer who were a little confused. I laughed it off and the deer got scared away. I couldn’t sleep after that so I walked back to the trail and ahead to an overlook where I could view the sky. There were no clouds and the starlight was bright enough to see faintly in the moonless night. I couldn’t help but cry a few tears. I felt small and insignificant and I felt the power of life around me. The tears froze on my jacket.










12/4/09

The Tide

Night is falling in the mountains (Night does not fall)
The sun subsides below the mountains
Heeding their will

While the sun sinks low
Its beams rocket skyward
Above and from behind the mountains
Illuminating the heavens with their pointing fingers
A stern reminder that they will return again

Night does not fall

The Night rises like a tide from the earth
The oldest power to be
It rises like a tide from the earth

Before there was light
Night filled the universe
A crushing ocean

In time the dawn came
The dawn seems to crush the Night (the Night cannot be crushed)
The dawn seems to drain the ocean
The ocean cannot be drained

The Night crept
Into the ground

The dawn brought life
And life flourished

The Night returned and
Creatures born of the dawn
Now are flooded by the
Night
It rises as a tide from the earth

They are not drowned
They are not humbled
They are home.

The Night rises like a tide from the earth
With it rises life
Born of the dawn
But home in the tide of Night

Howls and
Claws and
Eyes and
Silent Whispers

I do not belong here
In the tide

My only grace is that
The tide will fall
For a time
And I will be spared the rising tide
Again for one more day
For one more day
For one more day

Then

The Night will rise like a tide from the earth
This tide will not fall.

12/3/09
C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed

While doing research for this class, I happened upon C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed. It is a collection of his notes and journals edited down into one document following the death of his wife referred to in the book only as L. Lewis takes great care to list his thoughts and details about his grief from when he is struck in the beginning and left as a God-hating bitter shell of a man through to his eventual acceptance and return to normal life. A Grief Observed is a phenomenological account of dealing with a death. The only way to truly explain what one feels when a loved one dies is to experience the death and encounter one’s own grief. In recording the events of his grief Lewis offers insight on grief and death and life. Reading this book forces one to feel the pain that he feels. My imagination does not allow my mind to stand idle for a second; scary movies give me nightmares, uplifting books empower me, books dissolve and yield to a world of my own creation. In reading A Grief Observed, my mind dissolved the pages and I was flooded with the despondency of a grieving man. It was a powerful experience and I must admit it was an incredible high to feel that terrible from reading a book.

12/4/09
The Problem of Pain

I read part of C.S. Lewis’ The Problem of Pain in which he deals with the question: If God is a loving God and God is omnipotent, then why is there pain and suffering? Lewis uses a painfully and appropriately rational approach to the question. I had never considered it in this way, but Lewis reasons that if God were to create a world in which he could simultaneously perform two tasks the opposite of each other (“God can give a creature free will and at the same time withhold free will from it”). He dismisses claims that God could perform tasks like these saying, “meaningless combinations of words do not suddenly acquire meaning simply because we prefix to them the two other words ‘God can.’” I tend to agree. Lewis posits that in order for God to create “a society of free souls” he would have to set boundaries and laws for the world in which they would live. Lewis imagines a world in which only one being existed and which “might conform at every moment to his wishes” and imagines further if another being were to be introduced to it. “If you were introduced into a world which thus varied at my every whim, you would be quite unable to act in it and would thus lose the exercise of your free will.” I like this. It seems a little childish, but if there is a God I should hope that he would be this logical if not so cheeky.

12/4/09

Dr. Redick,
This class has opened me to the liberal arte. I am actually excited to complete my six LLE credits next year hopefully in philosophy. You have taken my science critical thinking abilities and turned them upside down so that I might better understand philosophy and literature. I have greatly enjoyed this class and hope that you have a good break. See you at the final.

Respectfully and with gratitude,
Brendan Redler