The Story of a Life

 This post is not exactly about religion, but is about meaning. My wife of 50 years died on October 24, 2021. I nearly wrote the current euphemism 'passed away' but I am determined to write honestly. That she went on to an afterlife I believe, but in terms of this life she is dead. 

But is she?  Let me explain. I needed a small piece of notepaper and I grabbed a little square of sticky notes that were my wife's. The top had a message written at a Christmas in the past sometime. It said in her printing (her handwriting was always very clear too):  M:  GossBumps and Jack We2. I assume it was a scribbled note about toys to buy our two grandchildren. I folded it up to throw away, but stopped to write this. 

The note is a part of my wife, an indication of her annual happy (sometimes) task of buying Christmas presents. Her mind, her emotions, her spirit are present in that ink on that coloured paper. We are physical creatures and interact with the physical and leave bits and pieces of ourselves not only in the minds and hearts of others, but in the flotsam and jetsam of material objects. 

I've bought a red plastic file box that I have labelled the memory box. I cannot keep every little bit of material that my wife left behind. But I can keep items that meant something to her and perhaps now, a tiny bit of a scribbled Christmas gift list. Maybe it says more about her than any larger object. 

Religion as community

 For some unknown reason, this morning I began thinking about my mother and her faith. My mother was one of those individuals who was deeply religious all her life. Raised in the Episcopal Church in Rochester, NY but attended the Church of England in Canada (the name used by the Anglican Church of Canada until 1956) while at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario in the 1930s. She married my Dad, a United Church follower (baptized Methodist), in 1941 and was married in an Anglican church in Ottawa. After the war they settled in Montreal, but switched there to the United Church because their Anglican parish was Anglo-Catholic and both were not interested in that form of Christianity at all. In 1954, they moved to suburban Toronto and attended Thornhill United. In 1959, they moved to Windsor, Ontario and for a few months attended the local United Church. They then switched to St. Matthew's Anglican. 

This is the bare bones story. But what was swirling through my head this morning was the communal and social side of this story. This communal side is, I think, as important or perhaps more important than belief for many if not most. 'Church' is as much a story of being part of a community as it is of theology, at least for the ordinary members. 

I want to illustrate this with two anecdotes, one short and one longer. 

The short anecdote looks at my father, the boy baptized Methodist in 1918 and become United Church in 1925. He married my Mum in an Anglican church because the custom was that marriages occur in the bride's denomination. In his heart I suspect he preferred the United Church - I hasten to add  as it was in the past, not today. A generically Protestant church with all the usual moral strictures of strict Protestantism - all now pretty much abandoned. Why then, did he agree to attend an Anglican Church a form of Christianity that he stayed with until his death?  His story:  the Anglican minister was going door to door looking for converts to his new parish. The church did not yet have a church building, but had started very pragmatically with the hall. This building could be converted to worship Anglican style within a half hour. This is the first time I realized the importance of community: build the hall before the church. My Dad claimed that he hit it off with this minister at the door, and then took classes to become Anglican and the family switched. The two did have a love of English sports cars in common. But..... a few weeks before this happened, the minister at the local United Church my parents were attending,  passed around the 'pledge' in a service. The 'Pledge' was a pledge to avoid the consumption of 'spiritous liquors'. There was no way on earth my Dad was going to give up his Labatt's IPA he drank while watching the CFL on TV every Saturday every Fall.  I have always maintained that was the real reason for his conversion. My mother, of course, was Anglican anyway.

Turning to my mother, she became one of the church ladies at St. Matthew's.  I attended Sunday school there, then church after confirmation. But she was one of the ladies who set up the hall for pot luck dinners, weddings, baptisms, funerals, Sunday school concerts, etc. etc. Most Girl Guide, Brownies, Cubs, Scouts in those days met in church halls and my mother duly became a Brownie, then Guide leader. She also taught in Sunday School, preferring the very young. I remember that hall better than I do the church they eventually built. They had a collection of China cups, saucers, plates and silverware (though probably that was not actually 'silver') which they hauled out to place on the tables they set up, with good quality table cloths for parish dinners, or for any of the celebrations mentioned just now. Everybody knew everybody and there were probably about 400 adults who regularly attended services and these celebrations in the hall. My mother was part of this for more than 40 years until she was no longer able to live on her own. My elder sister and I had to bring her to the Niagara region to live in a nursing home at that point. When she died, we arranged the funeral at her old parish in Windsor as many there still remembered her well and my father, brother and one sister were already buried in Windsor.

I gave the eulogy at her funeral. I have to digress here for a minute to tell my favourite story of her that got a good laugh at the funeral, but also sheds light on one church lady. Christians do laugh at funerals, especially for those who have had a good, long life. In the late 1950s, my parents lived in the suburbs just north of Toronto. Highland Park Blvd. the first east-west street north of Steeles off Yonge, to be precise. She could walk a block to catch a bus on Steeles that would take her south to the nearest subway station at Eglinton to go into Toronto to shop. But for normal shopping she relied on my father to take her to get groceries. It was decided she should get her driver's license. My parents hired a teacher who came to the house. I was there watching that day. The fellow parked his car. My mother got in the driver's seat of the family car and he got in the passenger. This car was a 1956 Packaard with a huge V8 engine - a giant 1950s powerhouse of heavy steel and an engine that roared if coaxed. These houses had ditches running along the side of the road then - each driveway had its own little earthen bridge over the ditch, but there was the ditch. The car started, purring loudly, then my mother tromped too hard on the gas and it flew back into the ditch. She had missed the little driveway bridge entirely. It sat there for a few moments, pointing to the sky, with occupants inside gesticulating and saying something no one could hear....later i learned that the teacher wanted her to get out and he would try to get the car out of the ditch. My mother was a very stubborn church lady. Instead, she floored it.The engine roared, the rear wheels spun in the ditch - fortunately dry then - and it rocketed out of the ditch and went flying at our house. For some reason, no doubt her guardian angel, she slammed on the brakes and it stopped a few inches short of the house. The driving teacher emerged, white and shaking and said to my mother, also out by then. "I think that's enough for today". He got in his car and left, never to return. This is the essence of my church lady mother. Never underestimate church ladies is a good motto. 

I told this story at her funeral as I said. We went out the to cemetery for the burial. We came back to the church hall and the church ladies had set out the tables with good China and nibbles and coffee and of course tea for the mourners. I had the bitter sweet thought then and now that my mother had done the same for others probably thousands of times. 

This is what church is about. This is what any religion is about for ordinary followers. Yes there are varied degrees of assent to the theology, but this is religion for all those who belong to these small communities. 

More David Petts

I've finished a close reading of the short book by the archaeologist David Petts: Pagan and Christian, Religious Change in Early Medieval Europe. I had to grind my mental gears to accustom myself to the archaeological mode of writing, but I do like his conclusions. He notes that conversion to Christianity in the 6th and 7th centuries was not a clear cut process, adhering to 'book' Christianity. Mostly he focuses on Anglo-Saxon England in the early period of the spread of Christianity, but covers digs and evidence from many parts of western Europe in these early years of missionary activity.

I read this book because of debate over Christian missions in North America, primarily in the region now called Canada, in a course I teach.  The residential schools are also a popular focus of student attention. It occurred to me that I don't know how many of the children forced into these schools were already Christian. Another area of debate that arises regularly in this course is that slippery term syncretism. Just how Christian were those baptized by members of the Anglican Church Missionary Society, not to mention other Christian missionaries. This arose from a paper I gave a long time ago at what used to be called the Learned Societies Conference, now the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. It is also a central focus of David Petts's look at early medieval Europe and conversion. 

I was working at the time for an ethnohistorian from the anthropological side, Mary Black Rogers. She was completing a study of the Weagamow area begun by her late husband Edward S. Rogers, who had been Curator of Ethnology at the Royal Ontario Museum and one of the earliest ethnohistorians.  Mary allowed me to dig deeply into the evidence and studies amassed between 1958 and 1974. I focussed on a Cree (or perhaps Orkney-Cree) Anglican priest at Big Trout Lake who left a large body of records on his ministry in the Severn river area, including Weagamow. My paper found that this apparently fully converted  native person, allowed a fair degree of elasticity in practice that a later Euro-Canadian priest assigned there found dubious. 

Without going deeply into the evidence here, baptisms were eagerly followed by native peoples still living a mostly traditional lifestyle, but Christian burials were rare. More interestingly were marriages, which mostly followed Christian theology and Church of England rites. I say mostly, because I found a few instances of this Cree priest marrying men who had more than one wife 'in the custom of the country' (a phrase found frequently in the records of the Hudson's Bay Company posts). There were also a very small number of apparent marriages in the church that were according to Christian theology,  bigamous. This is difficult to ascertain clearly because of the multitude of names that Oji-Cree peoples ordinarily used. Ed and Mary had spent a large amount of their time sorting out names so I am moderately convinced that marriage customs continued to follow indigenous cultural norms while employing Church of England rites. 

Now, the Petts book. His study of early medieval Europe and the case studies he uses from Anglo-Saxon England note that burials only gradually became matters for the Christian church. Even Christian sources don't focus on burial as a religious act often in the early mediaeval period. Gradually archaeology has found Christian goods in burials, but this is not a Christian practice in 'church' terms. Christian burials theologically speaking do not include burial with other objects. Yet burial with objects is common in this period where these burials are definitely Christian. This suggests a mingling of cultural norms carried forward from pagan practices into early Christianity. In other words, what we call syncretism. 

For my teaching purposes and for my own curiosity, the seemingly partial conversion of Oji-Cree peoples in the Severn River region has a strong mate in early Christian Anglo-Saxon England as well as in much of western Europe. David Petts spends a part of his book discussing the differences found in historical writing concerning Christian missionary work in Europe and the evidence of grave goods. His plea is to use both kinds of evidence and not to judge this issue based only on church norms. Rather, the growth of Christianity involved the maintenance of pre-Christian practices within a new Christian context and not the complete abandonment of former societal practices along with conversion. 

Language and Religion

I am in the process of reading a short book (long article?) by an archaeologist, David Petts, Pagan and Christian:  Religious Change in Early Medieval Europe.

He raises the idea that liturgical language needs to be viewed differently than has been the usual way it is interpreted. For example, the use of Latin by the Church in western Europe up to the Reformation, despite most people, including priests, not understanding the language. I recall reading somewhere a few years back that the last place where Latin was a commonly used language was in a part of northern Italy in the 9th century. I would assume this was not the classical Latin I was taught in High School or university (most of which I have forgotten). Probably it was a vulgar Latin where much of the complex grammar of Cicero was flattened out and made more easily used in conversation. The last evidence of even this form of Latin dates from the 9th century.

David Petts's thesis is that holy or sacred languages such as Latin in the medieval church did not have the purpose of communication in the sense we use language today. This Latin was not used to communicate facts or ideas. Rather this Latin communicated the sense that listeners were now in the presence of the divine rather than the ordinary or secular world.  In one of the courses I teach, I have students read a description of the emotional impact of the Mass on late medieval hearers. Students almost universally are surprised that people attending could not understand the language, yet still seemed eager and even passionate about attending. The thesis that David Petts advances explains this passion for hearing an incomprehensible language. The language is not incomprehensible, but communicates on a deeper and emotional and spiritual level.

Beauty

Years ago Richard Dawkins, while debating the Archbishop of Canterbury, was asked what he would miss if religion had not existed. His reply was Buddhist and Hindu temples because of their beauty.

I meditated long on this and believe that religious architecture in general comprises the most beautiful architecture humanity has ever produced: no matter the religion.

Secularization Revisited

I came to my often neglected blogger blog because yesterday I watched a short, 15 minute TEDx talk on secularism and why religion will not recover. I began thinking about the place of religion in society back when there seemed no threat to religion as a functioning, normal aspect of society (1964). The fellow who gave the talk is an English Sociologist who taught for a time at the University of Essex, although he lives in the United States now. He presented as cool, soft spoken reason personified. His talk was carefully organized, with points on a screen, built logically and using evidence, (well, if statistics can be considered evidence when presented alone).  A brief bit of research into his background reveals a scholar who has focussed his career on the sociological study of religion through the lens of statistical analysis.

I posted a few comments to the effect that what has replaced religion as a societal basis was chaos not order. I mentioned particularly the culture of entitlement which I hypothesize as being the new foundation of modern society - if that can be considered a foundation upon which to place our common house. I mentioned also the collapse of reasoned discourse as a norm and its replacement with a 'the loudest win the debate' ethos. Most of the other comments were of the celebratory, 'religion is dying at last' sort, with a few Christians citing scripture. There seemed to be no reasoned critique of his talk.

For those who accept the arguments of the New Atheists, the debate is over, or to borrow from Climate Science, 'the science is settled'. My thoughts posted on that TEDx talk and here in my own blog are at no such complete and dogmatic state. I am at the stage of  early hypothesis. What surprised me about the talk was the underlying implication that the victory of secularism in the western world is a case of 'the science is settled' amongst sociologists. Yet I know from my preliminary reading that there is no such consensus. At present I am reading slowly and carefully through a book entitled, Rethinking Secularism, a collection of essays on this topic edited by Craig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer and Jonathan Antwerpen. The introductory essay, written by the three editors, shows no such unity of analysis on the state of the 'science'. The essays that follow are by historians, philosophers, political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists and one expert in International Relations. They come from a variety of backgrounds. Most teach in U.S. universities although not always American born and trained. One writes from India, one from the Netherlands and there is one Canadian (whatever we are these days!). I read the book quickly a while back and recall the chapter on India as the most interesting for its very different view of the role of religion in society and its critique of the very term 'religion'. This was one lacuna I noticed immediately in the TEDx talk:  there was a very loose use of the term 'religion' as though those listening would know immediately what that is. He implied that 'religion' is the institutional church with its buildings, and rituals and preaching. I found that very curious indeed. I insist from my students that they define the terms they are using and not expect that every reader will know what is meant by a term as though there were no debate on its use.

The speaker, David Voas, has excellent credentials and a highly successful career in the statistical analysis of religion. I was surprised that he seemed unaware of equally erudite critiques of the secularization thesis.

Here is the talk:  Why there is no way back....by David Voas

Dreams

I am nearly finished grading a student assignment in one of the history of religion courses I teach. I came across the idea of dreams as inspirations, in this case a bishop named Aubert had a dream in the year 708 that Michael the Archangel told him he should build a church. The small church that resulted was the foundation of Mont St-Michel Abbey.

I wonder at dreams as inspiration.

The literature on dreaming is vast, encompassing scientific research, philosophical thought and religious beliefs.

Dreams as in the tale I opened this post with are the typical asleep dreaming ... usually I forget mine, but many people have vivid well-remembered dreams on a regular basis. I don't. This could be because my dreams happen while I am awake. This was an elementary school sin..."Stop day dreaming!"  I day dream as much as I live in whatever this place called the 'real' world is; my mind is always going off in directions alternate to the physical space. I might be standing in line at a supermarket or walking my dog Toby and my mind is floating off to the side or up and back or living in an alternate universe while my body continues on its linear trajectory.

Perhaps mystics are those who live more in this dreamscape than in the physical landscape.