Secular Spirituality

Relics

Jun 13

UNDERSTANDING UNDERSTANDING LETTER 5

To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual
Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press:
And always will be, some of them especially
When there is distress of nations and perplexity
Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road

T.S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages”

Some memories are rigid. They’re the ones that stand out amidst the faded, often garbled recollections lurking in our mind’s recesses because of their sharpness. Their vividity. These memories, like the one I’ll tell you about now, serve as more than a simple souvenir of the past…

Dean was, at the time, a Franciscan brother who’d recently come to work at my high school (he’d soon leave “the cloth” due to his divergent views from the Roman Catholic hierarchical church and move west to minister Native American and Mexican American communities on the margins of society). At the time we met, Dean was in his mid-twenties and exuded that sort of Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society kinda vibe. After all, he was a priest who taught a course on world religions in a Catholic school.

One day in class, after weeks of discussing Buddhism and Islam and other organized religions, he told us he had a non-religious but spiritual topic to discuss. He asked, “Does anyone know what parapsychology is?” None of us had heard the term. “You know, like psychics and ghosts and stuff,” Dean exclaimed. As children of the 80s, there wasn’t a kid among us who hadn’t seen Ghostbusters. We sat up in our chairs. Intrigued.

For the next 45 minutes, Dean shared with us some of the progressive research being done around the country to explore psychic abilities, out of body experiences, and even the observation and interaction with paranormal activity. He had everyone’s rapt attention. Jaws were agape. Pupils wide.

After class I hung back to chat some more. I told Dean how this topic fascinated me and I asked if there were any books he’d recommend I read. He showed me a copy of Ghost Hunters: True Stories from the World’s Most Famous Demonologists. This book, I would come to find, was written by paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren. Ed and Lorraine rose to fame as the couple who investigated the Amityville Horror, a haunting that captured national attention in the 70s and went on to become a bestselling book and film. In later years, their lives would be further profiled in the Conjuring series of films.

My high school years took place in the fledgling, archaic times of dial-up internet and as such, getting in touch with elderly demonologists wasn’t as easy as it might be today. Dean had been engaged in a letter writing exchange with Lorraine over the past few months, getting to know them and their work a bit better. He told me he recently received an invitation to go visit the Warrens at their Connecticut home. He asked if I’d like to join.

Obviously this was many years ago, because I can’t imagine an instance today where an unsanctioned school trip with a teacher, a 17 year old student, and a handful of his weirdo friends would be allowed to drive themselves to rural Connecticut to hang out with ghost hunters. But hey, that’s the kind of thing that happened back before remote learning and Tiktok challenges. And so, a few weeks later, we loaded ourselves into our cars and off we went to see the wizards.

When we got to the Warren’s house, Lorraine greeted us at the door. She and Ed welcomed these wide-eyed teens and their priestly friend inside. After some pleasantries, Ed took a cue from Lorraine and offered to take the students to the garage (which had been converted to a makeshift museum) to see their archives and artifacts from past investigations. Dean stayed with Lorraine and talked more with her while we followed Ed.

As we ducked into the packed garage, a handful of fluorescent bulbs flickered on. A smattering of folding chairs sat in front of a pull-down projector screen where Ed took his position, as he’d likely done many times before, to share the duo’s greatest hits. I sat in the chair at the far end of the room, next to a box affixed to the wall like the kind you’d use to store a fire extinguisher. Except inside this box, there was no fire extinguisher. Instead, it had been replaced by an unsettlingly creepy Raggedy Ann doll and a thick padlock. As Ed went on to tell his stories he eventually came to speak of the unnerving ball of yarn to my right. He told us about how there was a particularly difficult entity they encountered that was not able to be dispelled in ways that he’d traditionally relied on before.

Ed was an interesting character for many reasons but one of the most salient facts I remember is that he was (to his knowledge) the only lay person to whom the Catholic Church ever relayed the rites of exorcism. In the church, the Jesuits (who Dean had studied with at Fordham) are the only priests ordained to perform an exorcism. Given the Warren’s peculiar profession, which put them in the line of paranormal fire with some regularity, the church saw fit to help them protect themselves.

He proceeded to tell us about an experience when, for the first time since he’d received the rites of exorcism, it failed to work. The particularly pesky entity he was dealing with resisted his attempts and so in order to finish the job, he performed a different ritual that was relayed to him by an Indigenous tribesman. The ritual was known as binding. Unlike exorcism, where prayer and intent seeks to dispel a malevolent spirit, binding locks it within something. In this case, the terrifying doll next to me. Fact or fiction aside, the eyes of this doll, even before I knew the story, gave me the willies. Years later, I’d reunite with this memory when the film Annabelle came out, based on this very doll.

A few hours and a handful of traumatizing stories later, we left the Warrens with some advice from Lorraine. “If you’re going to explore this world further,” she cautioned, “your interior faith in whatever you believe in must be strong and secure. Believe in whatever god you want, but believe in something greater than yourself.”

We rode off into the dark, and b-lined it to the notoriously haunted Union Cemetery, where we’d put our faith to the test at our first “ghost hunt”. It was a wild experience. Trespassing in a cemetery at 2am generally is. But it was also more than the normal “doing something you shouldn’t be doing” kind of experience. We felt strange presences. We took photos that produced inexplicable results. And in the days that were to follow, I came to realize that this experience opened the door to a deeper sense of my own spirituality.

For me, this experience and others like it that would soon follow, gave me much needed permission to accept a more mysterious and unknowable reality. It showed me that something beyond the physical world was possible and in fact probable. And it opened the road to a lifelong journey exploring new forms of connecting with higher consciousness.

Albert Einstein addresses this sort of epiphanic moment nicely when he says, “A human being is a part of the whole, called by us “Universe”, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest — a kind of optical illusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but the striving for such achievement is in itself a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security. The quest for liberation from this bondage is the only object of true religion. Not nurturing the illusion but only overcoming it gives us the attainable measure of inner peace.

For me, these ghost hunting expeditions weren’t about thrill seeking or adrenaline highs. They were about coming closer to something more grand and beatific. They were an exercise in feeling connected to lives that came before us, to acknowledging the unknowable realities beyond our grasp, and to cultivating an appreciation for the infinitesimally small flash of time we get to experience this thing called life.

In recent years this sort of thinking — non-religious, secular spirituality — has become more common. While in conservative communities organized religion’s roots still run deep, in progressives and even moderate circles throughout the US, the desire for connection, community, and even holy experiences still exists. Granted, these desires often lack a clear playbook for “how” to achieve this and are often coupled with the strong desire to avoid the construct of organized religion.

Back in 2015 two students at Harvard Divinity School published a paper entitled How We Gather. In it, the authors share their analysis of ways in which the secular are seeking spirituality through community gatherings and social experiences as a replacement to organized religion:

“Language of religion and spirituality, and especially of God, would resonate, or not resonate, with each of us differently. But community would ultimately be unsatisfying for us both if it did not encompass the spiritual dimensions of existence.”

This contemplation of the spiritual and existential nature of our existence is driving a host of groundswells in the cultural fabric. From the mainstreaming of plant medicine ceremonies (of which a larger ethical conversation could be had), to crucible events like Burning Man, to the growing ubiquity of mindfulness and meditation in the workplace, secularly spiritual communities are abundant.

And perhaps this is a great thing. Perhaps it will help us see that our similarities and want for connection are more innate and shared than our perceived otherness might imply.

But it’s not all great. At the fringes of this bell curve there are also polarized, strongly staunch mindsets at odds with each other.

In Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World, Tara Isabella Burton writes of this moment in American culture, “Taken together, these two strains of intuitonalism – pluralist bohemia and (mostly white) evangelical Christianity – have defined the last few generations of our religious landscape. In very different ways, they’ve offered adherents an intense sense of both meaning and purpose through challenging and consciously countercultural visions of the world. They offer smaller, more fragmented, but often intense communities, which see themselves not as part of a civic whole but as brave Davids rattling their sabers at the Goliath of contemporary civilization.”

Indeed, spiritual narcissism, the belief that your wisdom is more special than others, is a real thing on the rise in the US. America’s late-stage capitalism infused brains and egos are literally trying to compete with each other on whose “god” is better. These are strange times.

So where does this leave me? And where does it leave us?

In a world that loves to label and compartmentalize people I chafe at needing to check the “Religion: “None”” box on forms for the rest of my life. And I know I’m not alone. I pray daily, not in a traditional way that would be recognizable by a priest or imam, but I pray. I am in dialogue with something higher than myself. And if you want to, you can too. For me, the willingness to hold to a self-defined faith system, architected by me alone, began all those years ago with Dean, and demonologists, and a willingness to step into an unknown place with an open-mind.

This may not be your version of faith. But together in this time and place I am heartened by the fact that I, like each of you, can believe.

Take good care,

HAPPENINGS

Events, talks, workshops, retreats…

Things I’m doing and things others are doing that you might find interesting.

CALLING ALL OHIOANS
July 20th, 2022 (Virtual Event)

In a little more than a month, my friend Sister Simone Campbell and I are going to be hosting our first in a series of listening sessions with “underheard” communities around the country. The hope with this work is that we bring voices and concerns from Americans into the cultural dialogue for greater understanding and compassion. If you know any folks in the Buckeye state that you think would like to join the conversation, please drop me a line. We’d love to have them be a part of this first (virtual) gathering.

OFFICE HOURS
Thursday, June 22nd from 12-1pmET

Every two weeks I’ve got my proverbial door open for folks who’d like to chat about work, life, or pretty much anything you’d like. Come on in, the water’s fine.

OPPORTUNITIES

Talent, jobs, investments, collabs, and more…

If you or someone you know is interested in making a move or if you’d like to share a need in this section on a future letter, drop me a line. It takes a village.

Do you or someone you know want to work with the best darn researchers? The wizards at Non Fiction are hiring an ops manager to join their team and get in on the ground level as they explore the wise, weird, and wonderful parts of our world.

Boldr is the first global outsourcing firm to be certified as a B-corp. This means their working hard to create meaningful impact and dignified career paths in developing communities around the globe. They are actively on the hunt for a new head of finance and operations. If you or someone you know is interested, please feel free to get in touch and I’ll connect you to their leadership team.

Both teams have offered to pay a finders fee to anyone who refers a candidate that converts to a hire. What do you have to lose?

EPHEMERA

Cancer cures, missing journalists, nostalgia, sentient AI…

Things I’ve picked up while meandering around the internet.

It was in a small, 100-person study, but this past month Memorial Sloan Kettering released the findings from a groundbreaking study where they were able to eradicate cancer from ALL 100 participants with no negative side effects.

Journalists regularly put their lives on the line to tell the truth. This story about a missing British journalist who “disappeared” in the Brazilian Amazon is particularly troublesome. Spread the word and support journalists.

Anemoia is the word you didn’t know you needed, for the feeling you are having, about the thing you didn’t do, but still long for in your mind.

What’re ya gonna do with that old paintbrush?

This story is still developing but it’s been the one fascinating me the most of late… A Google AI researcher has claimed they’ve developed a sentient AI. The chat with the AI is posted here. Soon after it leaked, the Google employee was put on a leave of absence from the tech giant. Follow along!