Atonement/Religion

Open ears oppose sacrifice

Posted on by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

Sacrifice and offering you do not desire,
but you have given me an open ear.  (from Psalm 40)

So how did this Hebrew poet come to make this conclusion, steeped as he or she was in the cult of ritual sacrifice and burnt offering as something required by God?  (Okay, this isn’t a universal question…but it is my question, for a Sunday such as this.)

The Sits im Leben of the Psalmist, as a member of tribe-Israel, would have been all about seasonal rounds of sacrifice, usually animal, commemorating any number of events where God supposedly brought or restored peace and safety through an act of God-endorsed mitigated violence.

It’s like this: at a time where a contagion of violence (see: well, randomly open any historical book of the Old Testament) threatens to collapse the entire people-tribe…a culprit(s) is arbitrarily identified and put to death, upon which, “miraculously,” peace is restored. The “peace,” so intense because of the prior imminence of wide-scale violence, feels like a Divine rush of relief and is identified as such and subsequently coded as the “Law.” And through the Law, with its rites and taboo’s and purification systems, “revealed” through the circumstances of the violent event(s), and with its ritual sacrifices–safe representatives of the bloodier events–the people-group cohere and live off of the diminishing power of sacrificial ritual. So what this amounts to is a criminal act that results in curbing what could have been horrendous bloodshed. A bad/good thing. Yup, the world of scapegoating is just that wondrous.

Except that, back then, it was understood as all-good. But slowly, in the arch of time, cracks start to show. And pretty soon some self-reflective-culture-critiquing-prophetic-Cohenesque poet says that God doesn’t like sacrifice, didn’t ever want it, and throws the whole system into question. Because, if God is not the one requiring sacrifice…who then…? 

Well, pretty soon the Psalmist’s friends start to think that maybe the whole sorry enterprise is just plain bad. Not just bad-to-get-to-the-good, but entirely bad because anything that requires scapegoating violence is already, well, sin by definition.

aramaic_alphabetBut back to our poet: song writers, Psalm writers are sticky about stuff like truth in motives. Any artist knows that a work without the ring of truth has no shelf-life and so she always works toward the discovery of truth. I think our Song-40 poet had a moment of conversion: the “open ear” was that moment he or she understood the lie of the sacred, along with his/her own complicity. The moment the voice of the victim rose above the self-desire of the poet, ears were opened, and the whole state of the sacrificial mechanism was exposed. And from that kind of conversion, there’s no turning back…only risky publication.

Spirituality

Mashallah

Posted on by stephen t berg / 1 Comment

There’s someone swaying by your
side, lips that say Mashallah
Mashalla wonderful, god inside
attraction, a spring no one knew
of wells up on the valley floor,
lights inside a tent lovers move
toward. The refuse of Damascus
gets turned over in the sun; be
like that yourself. Say mercy,
mercy to the one who guides your
soul, who keeps time. Move, make
a mistake, look up. Checkmate.  -Rumi

I fear. I fear upsetting people, making people wait, frustrating people, disrupting people. I fear being thought inept, silly, irrelevant, stupid, tedious. I fear being found guilty. I fear shame. I fear having my life work defined by a mistake. I fear a loss of reputation; I fear not having one. I fear being disgraced. I fear losing all confidence. I fear being forgotten. I fear exiting in disgrace. And I fear staying in ignominy.

What all of this is, of course, is refuse. It’s the wet, uncomposted litter lying at the bottom of my soul. It’s the stuff that needs to be turned over in the sun. It needs to be moved, stirred up. And yes, in the process there is risk. Mistakes will be made…

…but what the hell, is there not mercy enough? If the refuse is left, nothing grows. No chance. No possible valley floor with surprising springs. No love, no light in the tent, no swaying, no lips whispering divinity in your ear.

Damn fine of Rumi to point all this out don’t you think?

muttartsm (34)

(Mashallah: may the Divine stir and grow and keep you.)

Beauty/Spirituality

Starbucks Log: After a train wreck

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I know little of morphic fields, and have long since given up morphia. And so I seek inspiration from what surrounds me. For instance, this morning’s absence of broken glass in the alley: a hopeful thing. And so I walked, waking, with each step. My ichabod-crane-body leaving a slight wake in the still air. I am, I thought, a passing guest. And sometimes I’m so fine with it.

I arrive at my table and before first thoughts at coffee I hear the ring of a twelve-string guitar. Like the one I bought with the money from a season of custom harvesting. The only money I had left after smashing into my boss’s pick-up with a loaded grain truck. I was driving blind in a wide open field, the sunset deep, way past my eyes, deep in my head, colouring the back of my skull. And then a stop so sudden… That sunset cost me everything except a twelve-string guitar. I didn’t think twice, it was alright and I sailed the hull of that Yamaki to the coast where I continued a lazy apprenticeship in noticing.

sandpiper

Noticing a precise moment, as delicate as the scent of jasmine on a sleepy breeze. Its contents is a large brown purse slung over a shoulder and a DATS bus that is apparently on time. It picks up a slight body wearing a red coat cinched with a four inch belt, shoulder straps and large black buttons. She sports painted black hair and damned-if-I-care rouge. Ready to engage this raggedy world once more.

Her day is one more page in an epic. I pray it will be worthy of a bookmark. Personally I’ve known too many blank pages (dog-eared days). Sometimes a train of days will go unnoticed.

But sometimes in the full blush of a moment, one must drive blindly into a sunset–or stall that train. Hope for train robbers on horseback to catch us, steal the gold, tie up the engineer, and send us hurtling down the track without any knowledge of what is around the bend…a Holstein cow perhaps…a guy taking a crap, or a holystone on the rail that sends the train down the embankment. Because who knows what the valley holds?

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Beauty

Subtlety of Beauty

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Beauty prefers and perfects subtlety. Like this first morning of June, never to hold me again. Or like the almost imperceptible red blush just now showing through the Castilleja. Or the quartz-flecked sandstone dusted by a predawn dew. Or the admiral butterfly I found, who, fearing no dictates of fashion, rested easily on tartan. Or a white, red trimmed, ’63 convertible Ford Galaxy. Or the thousand moons of Vesper, known only to the sunset.

Beauty, a veiled bride, is joy’s shelter, and joy, beauty’s gift.

admiral butterfly

There are gifts, of course, that these eyes will never see. An almost unbearable thought, but is it an excuse to shut my sad eyes? It should be incentive. Because waiting for God’s veil to be moved aside by a slow breeze is not only for sturdy hearts trained in beauty. It is also for gazing neophytes like me, who have seen only surfaces, felt lack, and have been guided only by anticipation.

The anticipation within beauty is a grace. Like the quiet poise of an African princess whose people wait enveloped in her serene tension.

Beauty always holds more than I know and it’s directness always escapes my fingers. Knowing possession would be lethal, it is still the impossibility I crave. But that is my own sickness.

Beauty is elusive, that is its mercy. I wait at its feet like a small dog anticipating nothing in particular. I wait to be thrown a detail.