Driftless Spirituality

I love the downtown coffee shops in La Crosse. They make great places for laptop working while also getting a sense of this community. At the coffee shops, I’ve encountered everything from a communist philosophizer to an Appalachian Trail lover to ex-inmates to Muslims to Evangelicals to atheists to college students.

Right now, I’m at the Root Note. In this coffee shop on Fourth Street, you can see a tree trunk, sliced in half longways, with the two mirror images then set against each other to form an archway in front of a stage. The tree comes from Driftless Farm, where architect Roald Gundersen does all kinds of creative work using unmilled trees, and the archway is a tribute to this place’s efforts to support local producers.

You can also find at the Root Note right now a photography display by a local teacher from his travelings in Ethiopia. One of my favorites is a luscious, green hill covered in grasses and trees titled, simply, “African Landscape.” Beneath it is this cutting quote attributed to Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa:

“When the missionaries came to Africa they had the Bible and we had the land. They said, ‘Let us pray.’ We closed our eyes. When we opened them, we had the Bible and they had the land.”

Oooch. That’s something to ponder.

In so many arenas, paradox and contradiction are the hallmarks of the spiritual journey. A person might come to opposing answers to the same question at different points in life, and both answers might nourish the soul. The young man realizes he needs to leave the bars to go to the mountain to find God, but then as an old man he realizes he needs to return to people, and so goes back to the bars.

Or take religious imagery.

In some religions or in some eras or in some minds, religious imagery is considered a distraction from the inner life (i.e. the command heard in some Buddhist circles, “If you see the Buddha, kill him” meaning “It’s not about the Buddha, it’s about you.”). In other religions or eras or minds, religious imagery is an aid (i.e. the statue of the Virgin Mary in the backyard where my grandparents used to live or the much more grand images of Mary at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe in La Crosse).

I go back and forth. Sometimes I want my prayer stripped of all distractions except raw reality. At other times, I love the way imagery draws out a sense of the sacred during the days.

This Advent, I’ve found myself praying with images.

Here, a statue of Mary bows her head. The greenery in her back comes from nearby Hixon Forest, where my fiance and I gathered pine branches on the first day of snow this year. You’ll also notice a blue tika mark on her forehead. When I visited my fiance in Nepal last year, I encountered stones, trees, temples, statues and people all marked with the tika powder to remind us of holiness.

Three experiences are combining to make me feel especially gloomy about our country and our world these days.

1) I’ve been reading “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism,” a disturbing book about the collusion between corporations, the CIA and the U.S. government to intentionally reak havoc on peoples and economies around the world, from Chile to Russia to Iraq. Read more here:
(http://www.naomiklein.org/shock-doctrine)

2) I recently finished “Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee,” the 1970 classic that tells the story of the genocide our nation was founded on.

3) Obama’s expansion of the war in Afghanistan.

So the other day, I was sharing some of my bleak feelings with a friend, who suggested I visit the website of the Center for Whole Communities for a bit of inspiration.

And inspiration it is!

Here is their mission:
“Center for Whole Communities creates a more just, balanced and healthy world by exploring, honoring, and deepening the connections among land, people and community. We are activists in a new land movement that integrates conservation, health, justice, spirit and relationship.”

But you’ll get a better taste of their work if you surf around their website:
http://www.wholecommunities.org/index.shtml

I’ve found the writings of Peter Forbes there to be especially powerful.

The website reminds me that while global politics and violence can make me feel powerless, focusing energy with the grassroots people in my community and around the world is empowering.

Viva la grassroots people!

Hi again.

So I walked outside last night to go to a Circles of Support meeting (read previous post for more on that) and encountered something majestic in the sky. The moon, nearly full, was surrounded by a pool of white light, and around the edge of that pool was a halo colored rainbow (or is that rainbow-colored halo?).

It looked like this…

Especially as this was the second night of Advent, and I have been spending prayer considering pregnancy and wombs, I found Sister Moon’s adornments to be particularly affective on my spirit.

In other news, I am so excited to report that a kind reader left a comment! I am trying to approve the comment via the administrative page of this blog, but have run into a snafu. So while I’m working that out so that it appears under the “Finding the Sacred…” post below, I’d like to excitedly present the reader’s comment here so that others may be inspired by it as I was:

“Hey Joe,

“Your blog of Sept 6: “Does anybody really read these things?” Answer is yes. Unfortunately, we first have to find them. Thanks to the FSC Newsletter I now have a new Bookmark on my browser.

“The title is a head-spinner. Because of the unlimited diversity to be found in the Driftless Region my opportunities to recognize a common connection with the Earth, in fact, with the evolving Universe are infinite. The topography, the seasons, the vegetation, the wildlife [including Homo sapiens] all function to draw me toward a new consciousness in which the distinction between the spiritual and the physical worlds, as they have been defined, grows dimmer. I am grateful that you have begun this journey on a path to who-knows-where. But I plan to be walking along with a mind open to new perspectives, challenges and confusions. Go for it, Joe!”

Thank you, James. I will!

And finally, after being away more than a month, I am glad to finish a second blog entry for the second day in a row. Happiness!

I just looked at my last post and realized (cringe) that I haven’t posted for a month and a half. Sheesh! So although I made it out of the gates with this blog, it seems my horse got distracted (sorry for the mixed metaphor). I’ll try to be better!

My distraction has not really been a distraction, but focusing a lot of energy into continuing the work of launching a re-entry program for people getting out of jail.

The name of the program is Circles of Support, based on a model in Madison and elsewhere in the country. In a nutshell, the program connects five community volunteers with a man or woman who has recently been incarcerated. The group meets weekly for six months, providing the released inmate, a.k.a. the core member, with practical help with things like finding housing and finding a job. But as important as the practical support is the process of people being present with each other as one moves through the challenging — often heart-breaking — process of transitioning from jail or prison back to the community.

The mission of our program is this: The La Crosse Circles of Support program seeks to reintegrate men and women into the community as they transition out of incarceration, to offer these men and women a path toward health and stability, and to foster transformative relationships between all circle members.

The work has been a collaboration between local social service agencies, community volunteers and the Franciscan Spirituality Center via the sponsorship of AMOS, an interfaith coalition of local congregations working for justice. We launched the program in June with two pilot Circles.

So anyway, in early November we finished training 17 volunteers here at the Franciscan Spirituality Center, and I’ve been spending much of my time finding core members and facilitating the three new Circles of Support.

We will be looking for more volunteers in the future, so if anyone out there in the blogosphere (who lives in the Coulee Region I suppose) is interested, come talk to me at the Center.

And if anyone is still out there checking this blog, keep checking it! I’ll get the hang of this sooner or later.

As we explore Driftless Spirituality, many of my wanderings will grow from my experiences at the Franciscan Spirituality Center in La Crosse, Wisconsin.  I’ve worked here 15 months, and we are an interfaith retreat center dedicated to anyone seeking wholeness.

Two weeks ago, I hosted my first retreat here, which was a food retreat. If you’re wandering what that is, so did I up until Oct. 2 and 3.

It looks something like this…

Basically, part of my job here is to explore how the Franciscan Spirituality Center can connect with the local sustainability movement, and to help us understand what our role as a spirituality center is in that movement.

So for starters, since we are situated in the organic bread basket of America, with some of the highest rates of organic farmers per capita than anywhere in the United States, holding a food retreat seemed to make sense.

It ended up working like this: On Friday night, 13 of us told our stories about times we had experienced food as sacred, and what role food played in our lives.  And then Rhonda Funmaker, a Bear clan member of the Ho Chunk, came to cook and share the wisdom of her people’s understanding of food and earth. I continue to ponder much of what she said, including this: As we face water shortages, it is strange when states and people begin to hoard and secure water for themselves. In her understanding, when something like this happens, we should be giving the water to others to make sure everyone has enough.

On Saturday, we headed here.

Green galore!

If you thought a farm was endless rows of corn and soybeans, think again! Pictured above, Driftless Farm is a beautiful setting where a young family is working to steward the land through farming and sustainable architecture.

Amelia Baxter, who has a background working on justice issues through urban agriculture in Chicago, helped us understand our broken food system and ways we can empower ourselves and our communities to return to a way of eating that nourishes us — body and soul.

And nourish us she did!

These little suckers…

…not only look like heaven, but taste like it, too. Among a variety of delicious lunch items was a butter infused with this nasturcia flower.

Two of my favorite parts of the day:

1) A Kool-Aid and Wonder bread Eucharist, through which we experienced what it is like to seek the sacred through less-than-nutritious bread and drink.

2) Eating half an apple from Peru and half an apple from La Crescent, Minn., and contemplating what we knew about these places and how that influenced our experience of the apple.

FIRST ANSWER
Who knows? Hopefully we’ll have a better answer as this blog develops. But for now…

LONG-WINDED SECOND ANSWER
Those of us living in this region of the world know it as the Driftless Region. It’s called “Driftless” because during the ice ages, the glaciers didn’t flow over this part of the continent. Instead of a bunch of land worn flat by ancient glaciers like the rest of the Midwest, then, we live in rolling hills and bluffs that rise up from the Mississippi River. I grew up in the flatlands of Illinois and Missouri, and so when I came here in the winter of 2006, the beauty of the swollen land here mesmerized me.

While in cities, a sense of place is often based on streets, neighborhoods and downtowns, the sense of place here, at least in part, relates to the actual shape of the earth and the story of how it got that way. And so as you spend time in the driftless landscape, you’ll begin to find the word “Driftless” in various titles here, like Driftless Folk School (www.driftlessfolkschool.org), Driftless Writers (www.driftlesswriters.com), Driftless the book (http://www.amazon.com/Driftless-David-Rhodes/dp/1571310592), and a couple of Driftless Farms.

Still, what does “Driftless Spirituality” describe? What is unique about the spirituality of this region? How do you describe a spirituality that grows out of this land? How is our encounter with the sacred unique from other places? I’d like to leave those as questions for pondering and exploring through this blog.

For now, then, let’s just look at the meaning of the two words.

“Driftless” doesn’t appear as an entry at dictionary.com, but it does appear as a synonym for “random,” as do these words: accidental, aimless, designless, unplanned, irregular.

“Spirituality” is a problematic word. Dictionary.com defines it as “incorporeal or immaterial in nature.” Does that mean material things, like our bodies or the earth, are not spiritual? The word unfortunately divides the world into spiritual things (like meditation, worship or beauty) and non-spiritual things (like whatever mundane task you’re tired of performing).

For those who see all of reality as manifesting something more than the material world, who see the sacred as the deepest aspect of physical things, and who believe that even washing dishes is an opportunity for liberation, then “spirituality” does not quite say what we want it to say.

But as a journalism professor used to preach to our class, you’ve got to go with what you’ve got. And what we’ve got is spirituality.

And so, with all of that, we’ve got a blog title: “Driftless Spirituality.”

So like I was saying in that last post…

I’ve been living part-time at Liberation Park this past spring and summer. (Read more about the budding Buddhist center here www.liberationpark.org.) A couple weeks ago, Santikaro, Adrianne (my fiancé) and I were chatting in the shed after the sun set over our cabin-building for the day.

During that chat, we were talking about all of the creative ways people in this region of southwestern Wisconsin, southeastern Minnesota and northern Iowa are trying to live sustainably on the land. I hope to tell more about these people as this blog develops, but during this conversation, someone began talking about how this creative, land-based movement is inherently spiritual, how whether it is the guy living in the mud hut, the couple developing a sustainable architecture business, the permaculture people or others, this loose movement of people all seem to have a depth to their motivations that we can call “spiritual” – even if they might not.

It was at some point in this conversation that Santikaro said the phrase, “Driftless Spirituality,” and I asked him if I could use it for this blog title.

I began this blog with the working title “Local Spirit.” I liked “local” because the word names what is central to the environmental movement, that being a need to care for the local earth with local food systems, local economies that depend on local labor, local monetary and bartering systems, local media and local anything else you can think of (Bill McKibben lays this all out in a clear and thought-provoking book, “Deep Economy.”)

We will not protect the earth unless we love her, and we will not love her by saving the earth somewhere else, but by relating to her in our own backyards.

“Local Spirit,” then, expanded this local worldview to our religions and to the need to encounter the sacred through the earth where we live.

Vine Deloria Jr. inspired me to this thought in his book, “God is Red: A Native View of Religion,” which I think is worth quoting at length.

First, Deloria quotes Chief Luther Standing Bear of the Sioux tribe:

“The white man does not understand America. He is too far removed from its formative processes. The roots of the tree of his life have not yet grasped the rock and soil. The white man is still troubled by primitive fears; he still has in his consciousness the perils of this frontier continent, some of its fastnesses not yet having yielded to his questioning footsteps and inquiring eyes. He shudders still with the memory of the loss of his forefathers upon its scorching deserts and forbidding mountaintops. The man from Europe is still a foreigner and an alien. And he still hates the man who questioned his oath across the continent.

“But in the Indian the spirit of the land is still vested; it will be until other men are able to divine and meet its rhythm. Men must be born and reborn to belong. Their bodies must be formed of the dust of their forefathers’ bones.”

Deloria then writes:

“The patriotism of the American conservative may be said to be an expression of the effort to become indigenous. Certainly many Americans chafe at the idea that only Indians should be called ‘Native Americans,’ and they argue, quite properly, that anyone born in the United States is a native American. But their allegiance is to democracy, a powerful idea, but it has no relationship to the earth upon which we walk and the plants and animals that give us sustenance.”

And finally, in a chapter on the origin of religion, he writes:

“Religions must not be simple expressions of ethical and moral codes as we have been taught. They must be more complicated manifestations of the living earth itself and this aspect of religion is something that American Indians of all the peoples on earth represented.”

So before this blog went live, “Local Spirit” seemed like the right gate through which to enter the magical world of blogging. While it was vague enough to allow us to wander where we will, the title said enough to give us some direction as we journey through the landscape of religion and spirituality from the vantage point of the Franciscan Spirituality Center in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

But then one night I was sitting with some friends in a shed on a hill covered with Queen Anne’s Lace and surrounded by woods…

Is that a good cliffhanger? Can you cliffhang a blog? Anyway, I’ll get to why I changed the title later. Time for a much-needed haircut.

Much like humanity, technology appears in the world as a blessed and broken thing.

The airplane takes us across the earth in a day, and China becomes our neighbor in a new way. The airplane takes us across the earth in a day, and we can easily live half a world away from our families.

The cell phone allows us to talk to anyone anywhere anytime, which frees and traps us.

Computers have made communication, research and design easier. But like television, the computer’s siren song draws us to the glow of the screen so that we spend more time away from the sky and the soil.

This is all to say that I begin this blog with curiosity and trepidation.

Or like my friends at Driftless Farm and Whole Tree Architecture (whom the Franciscan Spirituality Center is beginning to collaborate with) started an e-mail the other day: “Much to our dismay and amusement, we are blogging.” (find their “Log Blog” here:
http://wholetreesarchitecture.com/communitysupportedforestry)

My hesitation is wrapped up with questions like these: Is blogging just an ego-trip? Is it just one more distraction that will keep me in front of a computer? Does anybody really read these things, or will I just be out here talking to myself in the blogoverse?

On the other hand, reader – if you are indeed out there and I haven’t repelled you with my skepticism – I do approach this blog with the hope that is has some value.

But more on that later.

I’ve been pounding on this computer for two straight hours and need to go take a walk outside.