blogging as if it’s 2003 again
Imagine venerating something you don’t understand.
Imagine venerating anything you do understand.
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Nothing and nobody needs or deserves veneration. Every living being deserves the care and respect you’d extend to your own kin.
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What’s the difference between respect and veneration? Showing respect is part of a social dance; the consideration you show to another mirrors the consideration you hope they show to you. This is essential to the harmonious functioning of society. Veneration is tantamount to worship. It presumes a lowering of the head and a bending of the knee. Of course there are powers unimaginably greater than us that may inspire fear or awe. Groveling in the dirt does nothing to help our understanding, not to mention being a terrible basis for a relationship.
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We do need sacred places—and by sacred, I mean inviolate. Sovereign. Wild. Such places are essential checks on human pride, reminders that reality itself is beyond our everyday knowing, and that only through meditation, prayer, or absorption into the flow of creation (e.g. by sketching or composing poems), can we have any hope of reintegrating with the cosmos.
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Any contemporary theological system must take into account new findings about genes and cells and the microbiome. It might for example stress that we have inherited things via gene transfer from beings other than our ancestors; that symbiosis more than competition tends to be how disparate creatures interact; and that we each contain a wilderness vital to our health. I mean, for starters.
Hm. This post is interesting to me on all sorts of levels. The photograph, for one. The blue sky, the wires criss-crossing (a visual metaphor for religion, re + ligio, that which binds or connects us?), the brick building that looks to me like an abandoned factory…
And then of course there are the words. :) I share your discomfort with veneration. I feel like it’s not a very Jewish posture, though that may or may not be broadly true. Even “worship,” though we do use that word, and I can live with it. But even that doesn’t have the same valance as להתפלל / l’hitpallel, the reflexive verb “to pray,” literally “to judge / discern oneself.” In the repeated encounter with set liturgy we come to know ourselves more deeply.
Anyway. You had to figure I’d have thoughts about this one. :)
Thanks for commenting. That’s all very interesting, especially the etymology. The Jewish posture of passionate engagement verging at times on a wrestling match has always struck me as a good counter-balance to the inescapable awe at the encounter. But I was thinking here mainly of the sort of relationships people in hunter-gatherer societies tend to have with a guardian spirit, FWIW.