Christianity/Spirituality

Clear Eyes

Posted on by stephen t berg / 1 Comment

…concluding the last two posts:

Several years ago a local radio talk show (The Bill and Bill Show) had a callers opine about whether the northern lights made sounds. There were a few callers who called in swearing that they had heard them and stuck to their story. The late Bill Mattheson on the other hand, produced the science and fun ribbing the troglodytes.

But we know now that "hearing" the northern lights happens. It has to do with the brain supplying the sound. This is not an audio hallucination, but a kind of leakage where a small part of the current of electrical impulses carrying the images going from the nerve endings of the eye leaks over, or is rerouted into the area of the brain where sound is processed.

This corresponds to why it is that deaf musicians can "hear" music, and can enjoy concerts and other musical events. We used to think that the brain was hard wired; one part was for this activity and another part for that. But only a few years ago Dr. Dean Shibata, an assistant professor of radiology at the University of Washington, found that the brain trains itself and rewires itself to utilize an available area.

Deaf people sense vibration in the part of the brain that other people use for hearing. The perception of the musical vibrations by the deaf is every bit as real as the equivalent sounds, since they are ultimately processed in the same part of the brain.

While I am still unable to hear the aurora boreales I am again opening myself to the possibility. When I am anointed by them, like I was just the other night, I am lingering and leaning into them. One day perhaps I’ll again hear the swoosh and crackle.

In the mean time–although I am still remanded by information and too seduced by the control I pretend it gives me–I try to read and ponder, meditate and pray in ways that will keep moving me nearer to the felt presence of God.

We all have the ability for simplicity, for an eye that is sound, for a second innocence. We carry within us a mystic-saint. We know this not only because the mystics and saints tell us this is so, but because we have all been stirred in a now forgotten place by the first play of God-light, by the first naïveté.

Test your "magic eye" skill
tranquility2

The mystic is simply one who has become unencumbered, dispossessed of all forms of real estate, and so, as Christ says, her "eye is clear". She has moved through the information and the science, has acknowledged and is thankful for their gifts, and because of this, and in spite of this, is able to again hear the voice of light to where her whole body is filled by light.

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Religion/Spirituality

Second Naivete

Posted on by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

Further to yesterday’s post:

So, if your eye is sound, your whole body will be full of light. (Matthew 6)

Paul Ricoeur, (1913-2005) was a philosopher and a theologian. In the midst of hard self-questioning to understand why one of his children, a son who was gay, committed suicide despite his family’s love and faith, he came to the conviction that real theology ought to lead beyond a critical preoccupation with the Biblical text.

Real theology, says Ricoeur, should lead to a fresh encounter with the divine reality, a reality to which scripture bears witness. This rediscovery or retrieval or unlearning he called the "second naïveté". Second naïveté leaves you open to the work and word of God.

Ricoeur saw how "information" about God can push us ever further from God, even if that information is logically coherent and ostensibly correct. He saw how this inevitably undermines relationship with God and therefore with others. When theology and knowledge become our treasures, God recedes.

There is a reason that the verse in Matthew about the sound or simple eye comes exactly between two warnings about treasure and the priorities of the heart.

Standing on that gravel road in Saskatchewan, not having knowledge that the aurora borealis is soundless, I was open to the "truth" that the lights not only dance but sing. Like a sequined chorus line choreographed to the shifts and changes of flow and colour. A harmony of wind through willows, the crackling of crumpling cellophane, the hissing of an old radio.Chorusline

Is there hope for us who have been immured by information? Is there hope for a second naïveté? A first step is becoming open to conversion.

With the right kind of receptors and the right apparatus for conversion we can now hear the northern lights.

A few years ago scientists and more recently hobbyists began to make audio recordings of the northern lights. With a special low frequency radio receiver, the natural radio signals are converted directly into corresponding sound frequencies. When I listened to a recording, the sound I heard was similar to my memory of it years ago in rural Saskatchewan.OldRadio

Equally important for the dawning of a second naïveté is unlearning, rerouting, and retraining our modernist sensibilities to postmodernist avenues of uncertain-certainty, tension, trust and relationship.

And this is related to another explanation about why I really did hear the northern lights… Continued…

Technorati Tags: , , , , , ,

Beauty/Religion/Spirituality

The Sound of Light

Posted on by stephen t berg / 0 Comment

Ken and I were standing in the middle of a tree-lined street in St. Albert looking up at a gibbous moon. (like to use gibbous-a word Mary gave me-when I can) We were talking about northern-lights. Ken said that one time the lights were so bright, so full of movement, that they almost put the scare in him. It was like he had to duck. (He assured me this was not an early herb-enhanced experience.)

This is a great time of year for northern lights. Just the other night, Deb and I were driving home late from the country. The lights were so full of colour and tango that we had to stop and watch from the side of the road.

I remembered a time as a kid with some friends in the small hours just before dawn on a country road in Saskatchewan. Rivers of purple ribbon were veering and carving out pieces of sky. There were confluences of plasma, bright green rapids and the rush of white light. And I heard the lights.

northernlights

When I was older and learned that the northern lights don’t make sounds, that in fact the physics of the aurora phenomenon doesn’t support any possibility of sound, I stopped hearing them. Electromagnetic waves, or natural radio waves, which are vibrations of electric and magnetic energy, the kind northern lights produce, are not audible. The extremely low frequencies of these natural radio waves have similar frequencies as sound waves, but they are two different wave species.

And of course the aurora borealis occurs a hundred or more miles off the ground, where, if there is any air, it’s probably too thin to adequately support the transmission of sound.

All this was valuable information that added something to my stock of natural world knowledge. But it took something away as well. It took away an immediacy of experience from future viewings. It reinforced the schooled notion that in order to truly understand something you need the proper distance; you need a platform outside of the event, subject or experience from where you can objectively observe.

I think this is the way we modern Western Christians view God and the cosmos. Instead of an experienced faithfulness of God leading us to trust, we begin with information as authoritative and try to move to trust and faith. This has been the approach of modernity and it has been a blight on Christian faith. When our allegiance to objectivity and literalism are transcribed on to our existential experiences of God, our light slowly dies. When our inner-self’s understanding of the Spirit and the Word is seduced by a systematic view of God, we miss the nuanced and relational.

continued… Find out why I actually did hear the lights.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

Spirituality

Interview with a Minor Diety

Posted on by stephen t berg / 3 Comments

I harbour a minor deity. I regard him without trying. I have overcome his malevolence many times but on a weak day he makes his home with me. He survives prayer. I’m not sure about fasting–but I think he would feed on it. No, in my experience only humour and humility exorcise him.

If I could trust him to give me true answers I should care to interview him:

  • I would ask him why self-exaggeration is alluring.
  • I would ask him why a flush of indignation rises within him when a dish is added late to a stack of dirty dishes it is his turn to do.
  • I would ask why he feels threatened when a friend or acquaintance succeeds at a task he feels suited to.
  • I would want to know why he suffers at the thought of being overlooked.
  • I would want to know why he takes such care to present himself and is never satisfied at the result.
  • I would want to know why he has agonized even a gathering of friends, and has felt the need to brush up on some popular idea that is currently circulating before he goes.
  • I want to know why he so quickly feels sorry for himself when reflecting on his youth.
  • I would ask him about all his fantasies of fame, and the sometime fantasies of a different sort of life.
  • I would ask him why he clings to all this death. How, when given an everyday epiphany it is accompanied by the thought that he will die.
  • I would ask why he has felt that every happy thought deserves to be punished. Why he has thought the world to be evil and that it conspires, even as God watches on, to thwart any shivers of hope.
  • I would ask why he is enticed to view his world with a mix of superstition and fatalism.

Well, at the expense of all minor malevolent deities, here’s to far more humour and humility in our world. Grow Mercy and start with yourself.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , ,