Hand Shaking and the impact of Science

In Christian worship, traditionally a point in the liturgy came where clergy and people would embrace with a ritual kiss, called the holy kiss, signifying the love of God and unity. I'm not speaking here of a passionate kiss, but a kind of perfunctory pecking.  In later eras, this was often restricted to the clergy alone, but has been reintroduced to the congregation as well in the past number of decades. In mediaeval England, the 'peace' or 'pax' (Latin for peace) was an actual object of wood or wax passed about the congregation to signify love and unity, and which each person would 'peck'.  The reintroduction in the later 20th century of this ritual came in the form of a handshake usually. In this part of the liturgy, people in the pews, standing at this point, would smile and shake hands with those nearby saying 'Peace be with you'. Although found mostly in Christian denominations where ritual is primary, it is also found sometimes among so-called 'anabaptists' or Mennonites.

This is a very circumscribed history and description of this practice just to set the scene for my point.

What actually interests me here is the element of human, physical contact. Ritual forms of Christianity do stress that worship should involve body, mind and soul working in a unity. Thus, the 'pax' or 'peace' or 'holy kiss' necessarily involves actual touching between Christians to join the physical with the spiritual and emotional - a wholeness.

In the 21st century, however, this touching, this physicality in the 'peace' is receding. People still say 'peace be with you' but they cross their arms and bow slightly and smile. The crossed arms indicate they do not intend to touch the other person. This absence of touch springs from our fear of germs and of illness and sickness spread person to person. Science tells us not to shake hands unless we have sanitized our bodies first.

It seems to me that far more is lost by this lack of human touch than is protected against. It seems to me that isolating ourselves in this way from others is a far greater disease than a cold or flu or any merely physical affliction.

Finally, it seems to me that this is a sign of a belief that only the physical matters and that physical suffering of any sort is far more to be feared than any spiritual outcome. I proffer my hand, and find that where someone responds in kind, we give each other a kind of .."aren't I daring and a rule breaker' smile.

Meandering

My body was following the straight lines of city sidewalks this evening with my dog Roscoe, but my mind was meandering here and there as is its wont.

I was thinking about hospitals. My wife is incarcerated in one of these rather mad institutions, but the keepers have decided to attempt a move to another system where she can get specialized care.

This is beside the point however. The hospital she is in is a part of an atheist healthcare system, while the other is Catholic Christian. This division occurred to me on a particularly straight section of sidewalk and a particularly meandering sweep of my mind. I asked myself why I classified the Juravinski hospital and the Hamilton Health Sciences system of hospitals as atheist. I answered myself this way: If one truly believes in God or a god or any transcendent entity or force (say the Dao, for example), then life must be structured around this fundamental, overarching reality. It would be like rocket scientists ignoring gravity to do otherwise. I can imagine such a scientist. I can't see gravity!  Therefore I will build this rocket and just pick it up and toss it up in the sky... and off it will go! Hmmmm. Well, Hamilton Health Sciences does its very best to apply the dictates and discoveries of modern medical science without reference to God. The system allows for God for patients - preachers and priests do stalk its corridors, but this belief is not imprinted in the DNA of the system.

St. Joseph's Healthcare System is somewhat different. It is a Catholic hospital system founded by an order of nuns in the 19th century. Looking at patients as a whole, in a holistic sense, used to be central to their mission. I am not sure this is the case anymore. The nuns no longer dominate or run the place. I hope that some vestige of this essential view of healing remains, lying in littered places in corners, picked up on the shoes of busy linear thinking medical scientists as they pass busily and importantly by. I suppose that is the difference between a hospital system that does not, in its heart, believe God exists and one founded on that belief. One regards healing as an exercise in repair, a mechanical act. The other regards healing as, well, as healing the whole person, not 'repair' of a mechanistic bodily system, but of a restoration of physical and emotional and mental balance. In short, healing.

Anyway, that is where my mind wandered as I walked in straight lines tonight.

What is Religion?

Presently I am listening to a podcast from the CBC Radio program Tapestry. Jonathan Sacks, the former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom is being interviewed. Quite apart from the fact he is a highly intelligent and thoroughly decent man and of course a very religious man was his definition of religion. The interviewer said she had a friend who no longer practiced the religion she was raised in, but felt a need to find one she could believe. Jonathan Sacks's reply was that in Judaism religion is not a set of beliefs. The word 'faith' in Hebrew, he said, is better translated as 'being faithful', rather than by the word 'faith'. He goes on to say further, that 'religion' for Jews is not a body of knowledge that could, for example, compete with science.  Religion, he said, is not a set of beliefs, rather it is a set of relationships.

Women and Religion

I watched this TVO - The Agenda video today on Women in Religion - represented was a Sikh, a Christian, a Muslim and another woman whose religion I could not identify. The interviewer was Steve Paikin's new back up interviewer. She did fairly well though she stuck to her script mostly.

The discussion was good and covered the main points and in a fair and even handed fashion, which was a relief as so often gender studies are just man-bashing.

This got me to thinking. While I was doing my PhD research, I came across some interesting tidbits of information that I had hoped one day to expand into something more. I noticed how in the late 19th century, women had begun to speak and vote in Anglican congregational meetings in Hamilton, Ontario (called Vestry meetings by Anglicans) and I have wondered ever since, if this was happening in other Christian denominations at the same time, and have wondered further if the practice of women voting in what was then the single most important social meeting place in society, had some kind of impact on women being granted the vote federally at the end of the First World War.

The second tidbit was more narrowly focussed, but also suggestive of social change more broadly speaking. In one particular Anglican parish, the men who handled the finances had pretty much bungled this chore - for example Anglican parishes could not be fully consecrated until free of debt. This particular church could not shake its mortgage, until the men got the bright idea of mortgaging the church hall and using that cash to pay off the church - robbing Peter to pay Paul is the old expression. Next, this parish, because of its financial problems brought on by foolish spending, could not afford to buy a house for their minister and family, and rented instead. The women decided this was not good, and set about to raise funds to buy a house. They used the usual techniques employed both then and now by Christian women, bazaars and bake sales. Of course they could not raise the entire cost of a house, but did raise the down payment. They then went to a widow who used money from her late husband's estate to give mortgage loans. Middle class women did not work outside the home then - to do so would have been humiliating personally, so lending money at interest was a way to keep eating regularly and a roof over your own head. So, here we had a group of church women borrowing money from a woman to buy a  house for their minister and family.

They took out the mortgage loan, then continued their fund raising. I don't recall how long it took but if memory serves, three years later they had paid back the loan and the house deed was in their possession.  Now this little tale is interesting enough on its own merits, but what happened next is where the story made me sit up and take notice and think ... one day... an article....

Once the house was paid for entirely, the men of the parish - the official leadership, assumed the women would then turn over the deed to the parish, which is to say, to the men.

A little word of explanation is needed here for those unfamiliar with the structure of the institutional body of Anglicanism. Each parish is headed by the minister/priest who is called the Rector. The Rector is assisted by two lay officials called Wardens. One is the People's Warden who is elected by the 'Vestry' (the members of the church) and the other is the Rector's Warden, who is chosen by the Rector. Legally they form the officials of the parish and are legally accountable for taxes, services, repairs, and ownership of the buildings (church, hall, rector's house). To complicate matters further, final ownership belongs to this church's territorial division called a diocese, headed by a bishop.

Well, to return to the story, the women who had worked so hard and prudently to buy the house, refused point blank to turn the deed over the the male leadership. I discerned from other evidence that they (quite rightly) did not trust the men to keep the house debt free, but feared the male leadership would mortgage the house to raise money for other things in the parish.

The fight went on and on and finally the bishop had to step in to act as a mediator. In the archives of the diocese, I found the written out agreement. Apparently the bishop called the women involved, the rector and the two wardens to a meeting at the diocesan headquarters to find a solution. The agreement was written out on a piece of paper - typed, but with parts crossed out in pen ink, and changes written in, between the typed lines. At the bottom were the signatures of all those present, including the bishop.

The essence of the agreement was that the deed and therefore ownership of the house would be given to the diocese and the bishop, to be used exclusively as a residence for the Rector of this particular parish.

And a final note:  I wish I could have been the proverbial fly on the wall - not at the meeting, but - the woman who lead this protest and the fund raising was the Rector's Warden's wife - I have wondered just how frosty the interior of that home was during this incident......

Utopia

Thomas More's book Utopia has given to the English language and imagination the idea of an ideal. In it, this Humanist scholar invents a place, necessarily on an island, where exists a perfect society. The details are irrelevant. What is relevant is the word utopia itself. It is based on a Greek word meaning 'not or no place' - More's little joke being that there can be no perfect place here in this broken world. More was, of course, more than a Humanist, he was a devout Catholic Christian. Only paradise was perfect as one was in the near presence of God who is perfection and perfect love. Thus no place (utopia) could exist on this earth. To all Christians, since Adam and Eve were expelled from the Garden of Eden this world is and will be, imperfect.

This is a roundabout introduction to a podcast I have just finished listening to called Brother XII (for those who are Roman numeral challenged, that is Brother 12). The documentary details the attempt to find utopia on the coast of Vancouver Island in the 1920s by Edward Wilson, who called himself Brother XII. He was a retired sea captain who became a theosophist, a mystical belief system that mashed together various bits and pieces of eastern and Egyptian mysticism with personal mystical experiences. Wilson himself branched off into his own alternate universe, described in the podcast.

My interest was captured by the Canadian connection and by a general interest in the various forms mysticism has taken, often in Protestant countries. I probably don't have enough years remaining to add another research interest, but I have indeed been interested in mysticism for many years and now my interest makes me ask what need is fulfilled by the mystical impulse.

I have no answers here, only questions....

Music, apples, oranges

At this very moment I am listening to Rachmaninoff's All Night Vigil on CBC radio's Choral Concert. I have heard this piece many times by different choirs. This recording is currently nominated for a Grammy award!  When 'Grammy Awards' is mentioned I immediately think Rock or Country - but in fact all types of music recordings have their categories. Choral is found under Classical.  This is the piece that Catherine Duncan played at the end of today's show:

Rachmaninoff: All-Night Vigil

Charles Bruffy, conductor (Paul Davidson, Frank Fleschner, Toby Vaughn Kidd, Bryan Pinkall, Julia Scozzafava, Bryan Taylor & Joseph Warner; Kansas City Chorale & Phoenix Chorale)

Label: Chandos

Russian Orthodox church music is mystical and soothing and deep, dark on an emotional plane. This is very different from Greek Orthodox music that has a distinctive 'middle eastern' sound. To my ear it has more in common with Arabic chant and Jewish Mizrahi music. Not in its theology of course, but the cultural similarities are obvious to me. 

Western (often called Latin) music divides along the familiar Catholic/Protestant divide. Catholic was formal and serious with a dash of mystery in its pre-Vatican II incarnation - and in its life going back to the early Middle Ages. Prior to that Catholic music was congregational, but that is lost to us, other than the fact.  Protestant music was and is congregational. It teaches and preaches as you sing. I attend a Baptist church a few times a year when visiting friends who are members.  Their music is happy and open and easy to follow even for the non-musical. I was raised in the United Church of Canada and the Anglican Church of Canada where music contains the same preaching and teaching, but is formal and semi-Catholic in its musicality.  Catholic music itself has largely abandoned the mystical aspect and moved towards the Protestant in late years - though once in a while you will find an adventurous choir leading a congregation in a Latin hymn in the old style.  Western Christian music is in general varied and accessible in its content and musicality to ordinary singers. There are exceptions in keeping with it variety - tune into a YouTube video of Anglican Evensong where the choir sings and the people listen as the music is too complex for the untrained voice. 

My point (if there is one) in this rambling discourse is that religious music and religion itself is culturally modified. I am not speaking here necessarily of theology, of underlying doctrines, but of the presentation of a faith.  Years ago a brilliant student of mine wrote an essay on Jewish music, dividing it into Sephardic (Jews of the Iberian peninsula and their diaspora), Ashkenasic (Jews of Germany and France and mostly commonly of North America), and Mizrahi (the Jews of the Middle East - those who never left that area of the world). She detailed the same religion, the same faith but with very different cultures reflecting their social and cultural experiences over the centuries. This is true of all divisions of Christianity and is true of all religions. Place and time and experience over changing cultural and social norms adds salt and pepper to the base mixture of any religion.

George Grant on my Mind

Today I got into a bit of an educational moment about George Grant.  The discussion began on Facebook when I posted this article from the National Post by Conrad Black:

Conrad Black on the Canadian election

Bear with me!  Religion will enter soon.....

I wrote in my explanatory comments for posting this on Facebook:

"Conrad Black writes in a strange, Victorian style. In this analysis he is all succinct business. I find nothing to disagree with here, finding clearly spelled out reasons why a George Grant Tory such as myself cannot vote Conservative this time."

Then I wrote in the thread spun off from this:


"... he was anything but cloistered in the 50s, 60s and 70s - despite his essential (and true) 'Toryism' - unlike every Conservative government after Diefenbaker's, he was a public intellectual. He wrote for non philosophers and non academics in a clear and engaging style. No doubt if he were alive today he would be active on social media. Though he was in some ways the very image of an absent minded professor. I wrote two medical histories for a doctor who had retired from family practice in the small town Dundas Ontario where Grant lived while at McMaster. He told me that one time he was called out to make a house call at the Grant home for a sick child. Grant himself was rushing out the door, late for a class. The professor was wearing his usual tweed jacket etc but my doc friend noticed that pyjama trousers poked out of the bottom of his regular trousers! He had just pulled them on over his pyjamas..."


Then I decided to surf around to see what the internet had on Grant and I came across an old, uncredited interview of Grant - by someone I don't know, in colour, but noted as occurring in 1973. In it a largely incoherent and beardless Grant answered questions about his public philosophy. Then I turned to an episode of the Agenda with Steve Paikin done as far as I can tell just a few years ago as President Obama was referenced once, but ISIS not at all.   Here it is as this discussion interested me in that the discussants missed the point.  That is, some of them, sometimes came close to the central element of Grant's idea, but then missed still. They were brought together to discuss his seminal book, Lament for a Nation. I suppose that could excuse their missing the mark, ... but no, it can't.  They seemed unable to get away from purely political discussion and from short term thinking.

Still Lamenting for a Nation

(now I see the date - 2011)

George Grant's essential point was that we have become a civilization that sees everything as 'object'. He ascribes this to 'science', that we look at nature, at animals, at our own bodies, at ideas, at societies, at everything in short,  as 'object' - something to be manipulated, altered, improved, added to, taken away from, .... manipulated. He calls this technique - the attitude that comes from a civilization based on technology and science. His lament for Canada, written in 1963 has this view at its core. It was indeed focussed on the Canadian election of that year, and the defeat of a Conservative government by a Liberal party - but this was just an illustration from the political life of the time for his underlying thesis.  He used the United States  in those days as the exemplar of civilization based on technique - as the paragon of this. These were, however,  temporal and temporary examples of a permanent principle. He believed there must be some eternal ideas lying at the heart of existence, or all was a nonsense. In this view Grant also saw a past that was holistic and not manipulative in that sense.  In this, he saw Christianity as being in opposition to this technique, this technological attitude.

One criticism raised in the video linked above was the case of China.  Here the discussants opined was a case of a civilization that took this capitalist civilization of technique and bent it to its own purposes.  What they missed was contained in the 18 minute clip where Grant said he saw more similarities between Marxist approaches and capitalist then differences. Both implicitly accepted technique. One, the Marxist he compared to George Orwell's dystopian fantasy, 1984. The other, the American paragon exemplar of capitalism he compared to Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, an equally but differently dystopian fantasy. Both required the same mentality however.

In another of Grant's essays he talks about religion in schools in Ontario in the 1960s - back when 'public' elementary schools were still following Egerton Ryerson's model of generic Protestant Christianity.  He saw the religion taught in these schools as dead because their true religion was technique.  Only the Catholic schools were genuinely Christian because they still believed Christianity to be true. The Catholic church he saw still had one foot in the premodern, pre-technique world.

As an historian I would say that George Grant's error was not in predicting the eventual victory of technique driven civilization, but in not going far enough back to find its roots. He mentioned John Locke, but a civilization based on technique is older. He needed to go back to Gutenberg. Print technology changed the way we think, the way we perceive reality and led to our current state of worshipping at the altar of technique. Grant was also wrong in seeing some possibility of light in political systems. Light, in my view, comes from the undercurrent of attention paid to holistic views.  First Nations' peoples are beginning to recover their own connection to this, people who choose to live in small scale communities, Prince Charles and his experimental communities, the organic movement, the work of Jane Goodall, the fact that the Catholic church is 2000 years old and has never been entirely able to forget this, the caring and sharing communities of evangelical Christians, the ethnic communities of large cities - all speak to the survival of an older, saner holistic conception and reception of reality. This exists as a hidden current running silently, but alive below the notice of a world worshipping the manipulation of objects.

Quite some time ago, I took a photograph with my phone of a small flower growing in a crack in pavement.  Therein lies hope.