Lava, Pele, and Namaste
We went to Hawaii recently. While we were there we drove three hours to see Kilauea, one of three active volcanoes on the island and the only one that is currently busy spewing lava through a vent in her side. Dusk found us huddled with other visitors at a spot where there road dead ended because lava had flowed over it on its relentless path to the sea. A portable shelter was there, which had been moved many times in 2000 when the lava flow kept spreading southward. We stood there gnawing sandwiches, binoculars glued to our eyes as the sun fell and the glow rose on the side of the mountain, revealing three red pots overflowing and spilling down the slope high above us on the left flank of Pu ‘u ‘O ‘o. This ecological image was especially moving coming off of Lent – I couldn’t help but spin artistic analogies between this creator-god volcano bleeding from her side and my creator-God bleeding from his. When we had had our fill of wonder, we walked home like New Age pilgrims returning from some late night revelry at Stonehenge, swinging darkened flashlights from our wrists. You see, the stars lay so thickly across the sky and spread across the horizons curve all the way to the water’s distant edge. The moon’s thin crescent glowed from the bottom of her curved form. Flashlights were redundant. We were connected with something there. A truth many cultures have struggled to name. A power. A beauty. We felt it together, and no one wrestled to win a contest of names.
The volcano is pretty quiet right now, but for years the big crater was a boiling sea of lava that caused writers like Mark Twain to write moving paragraphs about gazing down into the depths of hell. Well-healed tourists would actually climb down into the crater and spend six or eight hours just watching liquefied pre-formed earth churn, spout, and spatter around them. The locals who wrote our tour book went on quiet poetically about how amazing it is to see the lava flow when it is slipping off the side of the mountain and into the sea. (Something Pele wasn’t offering to us when we were there.) They talked about how viewers would stand along the uneven turf and whisper to their children that they were watching the earth be born. Watching the creative power of God. Genesis continued.
I feel like that is happening in me these days – in emerging church, in my missional community (language fails here). I feel like my mind/spirit/ being is a crater full of lava. …
Things are surging around, bubbling, exploding, and sinking down again before they can be fully seen or grasped. It seems so preposterous to say it, but I feel the creative power of God moving in her body – I feel new ground being formed in the kingdom. Sometime I call what we are engaged in a “New Reformation.” Other times it feels less like re-forming and more like whole new pieces of earth. Brand new ground. Its awe inspiring, and frightening, and I’m not always sure we should scramble down into the crater to watch.
“For instance,” you say? For instance, my head feels like it is cracking open as I come to realize how deeply my western, modern, Christian-cultural bias has influenced my view of scripture. Maybe it’s because I am too easily influenced by fiction and read The Red Tent twice. Maybe it is because my religiousness keeps bumping up against my real life, and I realize I my theology can’t look people in the eyes—that it’s really hard, maybe impossible, to express love and condemnation at the same time. Maybe it’s just because I moved out of the conservative evangelical bubble I’ve lived in all my life and suddenly realized that all these “lost” people have really very satisfactory lives – sometimes lives that are more holistic, more God-like than my own. Whatever it is (or the combination thereof) I feel like I “get” something now that I never understood before. Something my friend the Episcopalian spiritual director had a bead on. Something the students at VST threw at me in articles and debates. (Which I hid from in shyness and fear.) I’m looking at all the things that the conservative evangelical church lives about God, and all the ways that the neo-pagan pluralistic society around me unintentionally lives about God, and I’m kind of wondering, if you stacked it all up on a pair of scales, which way would it tip?
I keep thinking about the ancient Hawaiians and their stories of Pele. Eden heard more stories about Pele the two weeks that we were in Hawaii than she did about Jesus, that’s for sure. And she loved them – made me repeated them again and again until she could tell them to Catie as the rode patiently around the island in the back seat of our rental care. In each of the stories Pele was vengeful and capricious and quick to make assumptions. Usually the problem was about a boy and a sister or cousin or neighborhood girl who had stolen the boy away from her. She was not a goddess I would like to worship. But at the same time the Hawaiians were looking at this power – this earth creating fire from the side of their mother, death-spitting life-forming power – and they were trying to find a story that interconnected with their story. They were looking at an unavoidable truth and trying to name it. Is my story that different? And why, when my spiritual ancestors arrived on these islands did they have to destroy this other “trying to name truth” story? Why couldn’t they have celebrated the bits that coincided? Why couldn’t we have danced together in the overlap? An amazing power exists that can both create and destroy. Let’s worship it together. In the words of my yoga instructor, “The light in me greets the light in you.”
What would happen if Christians said, “The light in me greets the light in you”?
I want to learn how to do that. Even if it means letting go of precious cultural norms. Even if it means not getting to be on the dominate team any more. Even if it means taking risks, making mistakes, explaining difficult things to my children.
The light in me greets the light in you. Namaste. Shalom. Aloha.
Great post! Makes me want to re-read “the Celtic Way of Evangelism” again!
Reading your post, I was reminded of a time as a teenager when I was spending Christmas Eve in a children’s ward of a hospital, with a bunch of other teenagers, playing songs and reading stories to kids who were trapped in the hospital over Christmas. Kids in traction, on dialysis, in the burn unit.
I was the only Christian in the group, and it wasn’t even my idea in the first place. My own conservative evangelical church had their doctrine all nice and tidy, but you rarely (if ever) saw people of any age going to hospitals to visit people they didn’t know, to bring some cheer on Christmas Eve. My friends — some “liberal” Christian, some New Age, most undecided — were “doin’ the stuff” that the smug doctrinally-pure weren’t.
This was just one of the many things that, in the early 80’s, started me thinking long and hard about what being a Christian really means.
If there’s anything I’d like to add to the “post-whatever” vocabulary of Christians, I would include:
Post-hype (especially among us charismatic types)
Post-smug (doctrinal ducks in a row doesn’t automatically mean that Rev. 2:1-7 may not still apply to us)
Post-insular (you don’t need evangelism programs or crusades — go make friends with your neighbours; buy them the first beer)
Post-trendy (let’s just get real, drop all the pomo jargon and conferences, and get on with life as Jesus’ followers)
End of preaching/rant…
P.S. The light in me greets the light in you!
P.S.S. One of the friends who went to that hospital with me once told me that he knew the moment he met me that I was a follower of Jesus. How? I asked.
“Because your aura is golden. Jesus Freaks have a different aura about them.”
The light in me was apparent to him, as well.
I guess I just want to make one postscript here. This entry is really about me, and how much is changing in me…how much conviction there is going on in _my_ soul…and what a big shift is required when real repentence occurs within me. Now, this cannot be divorced from my experience with the conservative evangelical church, which I am both the product of (having been raised in it) and a shaper of (having a been a leader in it.) But I think, for the most part, what’s churning in me these days is less about what the “church” needs to do and more about what _I_ need to do. Of course, I am the Dorothy of a group heading to Oz, so I do shape the church as well. But my group is small and my influence is limited so this feels more like a personal journey than an institutional one. Which, frankly, is a lot less onerous.
Not sure why I felt led to add that…but there it is.
I also wish we were more open to “dancing in the overlap.”
Having said that, I’m also concerned about the stories, the myths, that form a society. Walter Wink suggests that much of the West is formed by a story, brought to us through TV and films, based on the myth of redemptive violence, which is contrary to the biblical myth. He uses the myths of Babylon as an example;
“In this myth, creation is an act of violence. Marduk murders and dismembers Tiamat, and from her cadaver creates the world. As the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur observes, order is established by means of disorder. Chaos (symbolized by Tiamat) is prior to order (represented by Marduk, high god of Babylon). Evil precedes good. The gods themselves are violent.
The Biblical myth in Genesis 1 is diametrically opposed to all this. The Bible portrays a good God who creates a good creation. Chaos does not resist order. Good is prior to evil. Neither evil nor violence is a part of the creation, but enter later, as a result of the first couple’s sin and the connivance of the serpent (Gen. 3). A basically good reality is thus corrupted by free decisions reached by creatures. In this far more complex and subtle explanation of the origins of things, violence emerges for the first time as a problem requiring a solution.”
More here:
http://frjakestopstheworld.blogspot.com/2004_02_01_frjakestopstheworld_archive.html#107725445293019700
Namaste.
Rachelle, discovered your blog thru theooze and have been reading and thinking and enjoying being challenged by your thought. I, too, come from an evangelical/conservative/charismatic background and recognize that my view is tinted by those glasses.
Reading your thoughts on other cultures’ thoughts and what light might be in them, the first thing that pops in my mind is Jesus’ discourse from the mount where he says that if the light that is in you is darkness, how great is that darkness. In your opinion, is that just my glasses speaking or is this comment of Jesus not related? Another question I have is, if there is some light of truth in the beliefs of other cultures, is that light salvific and if not, how do we relate the truth that is salvific in a way that is unoffensive or is the truth to be offensive? I am all about doing away with all that is form and shadow in our church and being real about Jesus in worship and life. I think the task of theology and the church is to take the truth and make it contemporary. Just some of my thoughts.
Hi Rachelle,
Lovely post. I’m feeling that the ground is a little unsteady under my feet these days too and there’s plenty of stuff bubbling to the surface. Keep processing. I know it isn’t easy. Let love drive out fear.
Peace,
Karen
P.S. I liked The Red Tent too.