November 30, 2005

Pigeonhole

One of the neatest tricks we human beings are up to is our rarely ever questioned practice of parceling out life into pigeonholes and then creating the ornithologists to go with them. The docs do the body. The shrinks do the mind. The therapists do the feelings. And the parsons get whatever’s left over. We keep this up, as a geology prof of mine once said, and we soon know more and more about less and less until we know all there is to know about nothing.

Of course, somebody’s always trying to pull it all together as a whole, as if, maybe, we really are one person, connected, and what is even more, one global people, connected. So far, that idea doesn’t work so well even if old Paul did his best to convince us that eyes don’t walk any better than feet see.

One reason it doesn’t is that keeping us divvied up seems to make life so much more manageable (read manipulatable). Make the spiritual one of those pigeonholes, then equate it with religion, then claim that the inestimably wise notion of the separation of church and state means that religion, hence God, is a private, not a public matter and pretty soon, you’re in charge, but you’ve sure got a mess on your hands.

Whatever the religion, we are spiritual beings, and all the rest of us, the above-the-surface part that shows and thinks and feels is there to give the spirit some kind of handle on things. Start taking all that apart, and the mess is only compounded.

Take sex, one of the more graphic ways not only to make the connection, but to keep the connection going. It’s no wonder it gets a lot of market play in matters human and social, and, as fear replaces awe, a lot of strange behavior and rules build up around it.

Then, as if to simplify things further, one of the neatest spin-offs is to equate spirituality with religion. Religion, of course, being such a personal and private matter and there being the truly wise and generally misunderstood doctrine of the separation church and state at hand, it’s only too convenient and, of course “logical” just to throw religion — and religion’s God — out the window as irrelevant in matters political and moral. This, of course, removes one’s private God from public affairs altogether. “One nation under God”? Which one? No wonder folk get their flag in a twist.

How we can exegete the Judaeo-Christian tradition which has had so much to do with the great American political experiment and come up with such a crazy quilt is more than just passing strange, it’s stupid. But it’s mighty handy for them as wants to fool the masses. That public God of Jesus and the prophets and all their troublesome morality about justice and the poor and the environment and war? Where’s the pigeonhole?

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