Animism, embodiment, faith

Genghis Khan, his sacred mountain, and me

I was reading a book about Temujen — Genghis Khan (Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford,  Crown)  — and, yeah, a quite amazing tale of a guy who had a genius interlocking vision of an ethic of tribal honor souped up with a sort of modular governance/management structure, coupled with a simple but effective doctrine of cavalry tactics that he aimed outward at the more “civilized” agrarian and urban people to the east, west, and south of what is now Mongolia. His method of governance by conquest lived, economically, on the plunder and tribute from subject nations or, you know, feudal units, and ran aground when the loot ran out a couple of generations down the road. All very interesting, and made me want to write about many of the ideas expressed there (Be on the lookout for my C-Suite self-helper ”Modular Management the Genghis Khan Way: Guiding Your Horde to Conquest.”). 

But. What really got me fired up about the book was Temujen’s animistic religion. From the little the book said about it (and I’m relying solely on the book here) apparently the Mongolians believed that the sky is infinite, eternal, generative; sort of the “ground of being” idea of Western theology, but more personified. The sky created the earth, and the features of the earth are alive, at least spiritually, and are to be prayed and sacrificed to and worshiped, to be sought for guidance on decisions, at least large ones. Temujen had a special spiritual relationship with the Burkhan Khaldun, a mountain where three rivers had their source. Early in his time leading a tribal band, he needed to make a decision about the direction, literal and figurative, to take them in. One river lead to the mountainous woodlands to the north in Siberia where the band would become forest hunters; one led to the steppes to the south where they could lead the traditional Mongolian life as herders; one led to the east where the traditional Mongolian aristocracy had their power, and the urban/feudal wealth that would fuel the conquests that led to Temujen uniting the Mongolian tribes for his and his descendants’ rampage across Eurasia.  The mountain told him to follow the river that led to the east, and the rest is a goodly chunk of the significant history of China, Russia, Turkey, and India, and points between and further on.

I had been doing some thinking about some of these ontological questions; I’m in recovery from alcohol addiction, I have a degenerative spinal condition that gives me chronic pain and caused nerve damage in my left hand that it’s taking some time to improve and get used to. I am learning to move past the dissociative mental habits and prescription and self medications that I used to use to cope with pain, with depression, and the effects of trauma and grieving. That’s leading to a feeling of “me” being more in my body, not separate from an unruly and cruel burden. I feel the pain more, but I control it more through mindfulness, which is helping me be more in touch with my body instead of more alienated and dissociated from it.

My mom and my wife Marta combined on my Christmas present this year, a recumbent exercise bike, which has also sparked a rediscovery of my body. For many years I was a runner and mountain bike rider. Even when I smoked cigarettes and began the long and painful slide into a state of alcoholic brokenness, I ran, I biked, I rode horses. When I began to feel the extreme pain of nerves being crushed as my vertebrae lost their cushioning cartilage, my doctors all said, no running, no off-road bicycling, and especially no horses. “You could be paralyzed if you fall off.”

And being more in touch with my body has made me more aware of my surroundings, as I feel more fully the inputs of my senses.

All of which is to say that reading about an animistic theology at the same time I’m coming back into my body has put me even more firmly on the path of trading my contemplative Christian faith for a more nature-based syncretism. There is a thread in the Christian Church writ large that uses nature as a “lens” through which God can be viewed; Thomas Aquinas professed a natural theology, as did St. Francis. Anglicans, perhaps through ancient Celtic Christian views, perhaps because they found Scripture less essential as Modernism took hold, have a strong natural theology as well (viz the grand hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful for a homely example).

Raimondo Panikkar’s “Radical Trinity” of Divinity outside of time/space (God the Father) Sacred humanity in time/space (Christ), Sacred Creation (time/space itself) imbued with Divinity (Holy Spirit) gives a Christian framework to consider this, as does the Merton/Rohr/McClaren loose movement known as the “New” Contemplatives. Christian theology encompasses a “panentheism,” in which the Divine is present everywhere, in everything  in Creation, filling reality with Godself. In this paradigm, humanity is emphatically part of Creation, and therefore is also imbued with Divinity, an article of faith in the theology of many thinkers over the milennia. St. Paul in Acts 17 quotes, approvingly, Epiminides, a pre-Stoic philosopher, saying, “For in [God] we live and move and have our being,”  and also in Acts 17, from Aratus, a Stoic, “For we are indeed his offspring,” as in “Child of God.” And, the original prophet of one of the most influential Christian movements of Modernity, George Fox of Quaker fame, said “There is that of God in every[one].” Even more contemporary, Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker and a still-vibrant strain of lay Catholic social justice and Corporal Mercy action, wrote that when you look into the face of someone who is struggling in our cruel, inhuman government/economic system, you are looking into the face of Christ.

When I first returned to (Episcopal) church a few years back, I was, very gently, interrogated by the rector and a deacon about why I was in their church, and what I believed. I quoted Fox, and they were like, “Yeah, that does it for us. Welcome!”

In practice, this new-but-old stream of faith for me has meant mostly a sense of belonging in this Universe that I had lacked for decades. Looking outward, I try to be with Creation in every moment, which sounds hard and kind of New Age, but is really pretty simple. When I first came back to church, I had many experiences of Divinity that were emotionally overwhelming and vital; God was suddenly, vibrantly, unmistakably Here, where I was, not There, where I was not. After a decade of practicing contemplative prayer, these experiences kind of run together, and I am aware on some level always that I am One with Everything. As I walk especially, but also when my attention is not narrowly focused on something else (work, Station 19, The Dresden Files), I consciously take in what I sense as Divine; every God-indwelling leaf and tree and bird and bug and house and car and squirrel and person … It seems a little odd to look at a car as Divine, but the people who worked to make the car - who mined the ore, stamped the parts, designed the engine, attached the bumper, applied the decal - they are Divine - part of Christ for Panikkar, holders of a little God-flame for Fox, participants in the Source and Ground of existence to Greek Stoics and a post-Jewish theologian - and so, even if it is a stretch for me to consider that any particular car on its own is Divine, the car is imbued with their Divinity.

There are these tiny bluish-purple flowers that grow in any inhospitable spot around here in Germantown Philadelphia. I see them every spring in cracks in stone walls, in brick walls that need repointing, in the stone outcroppings of a bluff in an urban park down the street. They give the lie to the parable of the sower, for they thrive on stony ground. I saw them growing once on a pile of garbage in an alley in my neighborhood, and had a moment of Oneness that stays with me. My sisters, those humble, beautiful flowers, graced my brother, that holy pile of the most humble of God-graced existence, and that day, and every day since, I carry a lesson with me about what is sacred, and what we can and should worship, and why. Everything, that’s what is sacred, and everything is what we can and should worship. Not in an idolatrous way, replacing Divinity (he says, tucking a fig leaf around a metric ton of heresy), but in appreciation of the Divine in everything, even a tiny, tenacious flower, even a pile of garbage.

And this is what struck me about Temujen. His sacred mountain, his holy, generative sky, his water and clouds and stones and trees, those are mine as well. I have felt the call to mission in the sunlight falling on a million dewdrops, each its own rainbow; I have felt the souls of ancient trees whispering that they love me and their joy when I loved them back; I have seen the rising sun through the wing of a bat and have known in that eyeblink moment that we are siblings, that bat, that star, me, Children of a benevolent, joyful, loving Divinity.

I have loved church. I have wept both giving and receiving the Sacrament, and felt connected to all who have had and will have taken the Sacrament before me and to come. I have felt Divinity perfusing the beauty of hymns and anthems. I still get a shiver at certain phrases - to walk in his will and delight in his ways, cleanse the thoughts of our hearts, go forth in peace to love and serve the lord. But the Church as it stands - has stood from about 15 minutes after Pentecost - is the servant of empire, the wellspring of hatred and genocide, the current beard of homophobia and misogyny, the handmaid of U.S. slavery and its comforter and collaborator after slavery’s defeat. The best that any denomination in the U.S. can say about its treatment of LBGTQ+ folks is that it stopped openly discriminating against them almost 40 years ago. Ask a gay priest what “openly” hides.

But, what if we take the good parts, the good stories, from the wreckage of the church and add them to hearts that are open to contemplating the spirit of a river or a mountain when faced with a significant life choice? What if we encompass tiny sister Flower and humble brother Garbage in “the least of these, my siblings”?