The Bishops vs. the Girl Scouts

I read today on Yahoo! News that the U.S Conference of Catholic Bishops is launching an inquiry into the Girl Scouts. Yes, you read that correctly—the Girl Scouts. According to the AP article:

"The new inquiry will be conducted by the bishops' Committee on Laity, Marriage, Family Life and Youth. It will look into the Scouts' "possible problematic relationships with other organizations" and various "problematic" program materials, according to a letter sent by the committee chairman, Bishop Kevin Rhoades of Fort Wayne, Ind., to his fellow bishops."

It is terribly tempting and rather justifiable to make a laughingstock of this group of guys for being out of touch, fearful, patriarchal. But what would be an appropriate spiritual response?

I'd assert that this move by the bishops demonstrates a fear-based reaction to changing times and expanding minds that sounds like, "We need you to believe as we believe, or else bad things will happen." Whether they fear for themselves, the church, or the girls, can only be guessed at unless you're friends with a bishop.

The late Jesuit mystic Anthony tells a great parable about belief, in which the Devil and his friend followed a man and watched him stop and find some truth. When his friend expressed concern at the Devil's lack of response, the Devil told him "I don't have to do anything. I'm going to let him make a belief of it."

What do we make of it when our friends, children, or family members respond to something we disagree with and run with it? A child who becomes a religious zealot, a parent who joins the Tea Party, or a friend who "finds herself" using drugs: Do we react, attacking the new-found belief of our loved one? Do we judge them and entrench ourselves in our own position? Or do we roll with it, understanding that the human perspective on truth is that we are always discovering what makes sense to us, and that as we mature different things make sense to us that didn't carry much weight earlier?

Today's invitation: What is the latest thing you thought was true that you are now reconsidering? Or has it been too long since your beliefs got stirred up?

Is it such a bad thing? The rise of Atheism in America

I just saw this interesting article on Yahoo! News, explaining the rise of Atheism in America.

Per the article:

Only between 1.5 and 4 percent of Americans admit to so-called "hard atheism," the conviction that no higher power exists. But a much larger share of the American public (19 percent) spurns organized religion in favor of a nondefined skepticism about faith. This group, sometimes collectively labeled the "Nones," is growing faster than any religious faith in the U.S. About two thirds of Nones say they are former believers; 24 percent are lapsed Catholics and 29 percent once identified with other Christian denominations. David Silverman, president of American Atheists, claims these Nones as members of his tribe. "If you don't have a belief in God, you're an atheist," he said. "It doesn't matter what you call yourself."

A corollary or companion to this article might be called, "The Retreat and Decline of Theology in America." Because modern American churches—as well as the Roman Catholic Church under the leadership of its current pope—have abdicated theology as a field of expanding study, religious thought has not kept pace with the changes and growth our human species is currently experiencing. Theology, I was taught at one point during my Catholic education, is "Faith seeking understanding." On a more literal level, theology is the study of God.

Our collective human experience, especially as influenced by the free flow of information and the rise of technology, as well as existential threats to the world's population including terrorism, war, environmental degradation, resource depletion, and climate change all lead the human mind to question how "God" fits into all this, if indeed the mind in question has a current belief in God.

So how does our contemporary experience fit into our understanding of God? That's the traditional question, but it's not the best question to ask for these times. And the "atheists" have stopped asking, wisely.

Here's why: Fitting our experience into our understanding forces us to change our narrative about our experience if it contradicts what we are taught about God. If one is taught, for instance, that God disapproves of homosexuality, and that person is inclined to enjoy his or her homosexuality, then in order to gain God's approval such a person must then become disinclined to enjoy his or her own sexuality. In such a way, one's narrative about one's own experience must be altered to fit the belief.

However, spirituality (if not religion) works better when we have an experience that contradicts what we're taught, and then we examine what we're taught to see how it may in fact intersect with our own experience without contradicting it. Doing so, however, requires one's understanding of God to grow with one's understanding of the world and of one's own self. That is theology, and the study has been replaced with censorship (in Catholicism) and fundamentalism (in most of the rest of American Christianity).

So here's a call to today's churches: If you want to reduce the defection of your young, fresh, promising young people, be ready to question the understanding of your faith along with them. Your faith will deepen as a result, although your cherished beliefs may change.

Humble beauty

For about two weeks out of the whole year, this modest weeping cherry bonsai is my favorite tree of my collection.

I love cherries. I love eating them, I love looking at their blossoms. I love the lenticels (small horizontal lines) that mark the shiny bark on their trunks. I love their fall color. Now, weeping cherries are probably my least favorite cherries, because their blossoms point down instead of out. There's something a little bit sad about a weeping cherry. Kind of like someone who has a beautiful smile, but always seems to look at the ground instead of straight at you.

I was photographing this tree today and decided to get underneath the tree to have a look at the blossoms straight up. The blossoms really struck me as beautiful in a way they hadn't before. Sometimes it takes getting on your knees and looking up to see the beauty in things.

In a similar theme, I also took a photo of a wild pansy of some sort that I found growing in the middle of my lawn (there are advantages to being lax about mowing). It's not a real flashy pansy like you find on the racks in front of nurseries, hardware stores, and discount centers. This one would never sell alongside those pretty ones, but interestingly, this is a durable little plant.

Fearing that the frost and snow of winter would kill off this little seedling, I dug it up and put it in a liner pot and gave it some shelter, and it survived just fine over the winter. And then I put it in a little Japanese pot a few weeks ago, even bare-rooting it and giving it completely new soil. It's already giving me flowers.

I love this little plant as much as many of my trees. I love that it was little more than a weed growing in the middle of my lawn and given a decent pot, can shine as a metaphor of grace, toughness, and beauty. I imagine this little pansy will live for years in this little pot if this winter and a bare-rooting didn't kill it.

The notions of humility, modesty, and looking for beauty are not new spiritual concepts. But living with plants and tending my bonsai garden continues to strengthen and heighten my attention beauty. The outpouring of goodness found in the beauty of nature is inexhaustible: It's there whether we're looking or not, whether we notice or not, whether we care or not.

Walk in beauty, as the blessing goes. Look for it, get down on your knees and look every which way, and see things deeply and newly. Let the plants be your teachers.

Spiritual lesson from a bonsai in training

I started this blog out as a vehicle for my spiritual reflections, but oddly, after awhile, it turned out that most of the blogs I am interested in are centered on bonsai. (Bonsai is the art of using living plant material to make potted sculptural representations of larger trees.) Since I do lots of bonsai and it's my passion these days, I've felt more like having a bonsai blog lately than a spiritual growth type of blog.

This entry will be a little bit of both.

As I was spending some the last hours of daylight pondering my trees today, my eyes settled on a vine maple my friend Chris and I dug up off a mountain on the east side of Mt. Hood, which I recently repotted down to a shallow box, preparing the tree for its eventual home in a bonsai pot.

When I first laid eyes on this marvelous maple—some 50 years old, I reckon—with its curvy trunk, I was transfixed. We had been looking for maples all day with no luck and suddenly this one appeared and I saw its potential design immediately. Key to the design was a large branch that came off a curve in the upper third of the tree, with perfect diameter, and at a perfect angle.

During the months after I took that maple home with me, I watched that branch wither away and die even as the tree put out all kinds of healthy new growth. Turns out that branch had gotten cracked at the base sometime during the process of digging it up. Eventually I cut it off, and an ugly scar developed there, reminding me of a disappointment, of potential unrealized, of what would never be there again (unless I did some tricky grafting). I hoped a bud would sprout right next to the scar. Didn't happen. But they sprouted everywhere else!

The tree began to lose its charm for me and I almost decided to auction it off. But there has always been magic in that tree, something I hoped I could unlock.

Last weekend, two springs after that maple left its home on a mountain of lava, I took it out of the big wooden box I originally made for it, and cut off much of the root mass. There were ample fine feeder roots close to the base of the trunk, such that I could remove a large portion of the lower roots that had been with the tree for most of its life. I could now fit it in a large bonsai pot or a smaller, shallower box. I chose the latter. We slanted the tree downward about 10 degrees to make the design more dynamic.

Pondering the maple on my bench, I cut off a branch at the base of the tree that had always bothered me. Then I looked at that scar. Michael Hagedorn, my teacher, told me he doesn't really like branches coming right out of the outside of curves, which is contrary to much of the design principles you see in many of the bonsai books. In fact, another branch had sprouted just above and to the side of the scar, that would make an excellent alternative later on.

I decided to remove the scar, so I cut deeply into the wood to make a concave area that would eventually heal flush to the line of the tree without an ugly bump. No branch would ever grow there. Ever.


I applied the cut paste to help the wound heal, and pondered the tree. Suddenly the magic was back, as the line of the trunk was restored. Now I love that tree more than ever.

What does this have to do with spiritual growth?

I think sometimes we hold on to dreams from our past that didn't work out. We might hold on to certain possessions or relationships that could eventually re-sprout and work out the way we always wanted them to. But time turns those disappointments into "ugly knots" that detract from the beauty, simplicity, and magic of our lives. And perhaps to restore that magic we have to excise the scar, dig deeply into our soul, remove the infected tissue, and have "less" there than there was before.

Painful for a bit, but a good deal when you get the magic back.

As a technical note, other than the one unsightly branch at the base of the tree, I did no styling or pruning to this tree upon its re-potting. I will likely wait until May or June to work on this tree. It's usually best to leave lots of top growth on a tree upon removing lots of roots, because all those leaves will generate the sugar needed to grow lots of new roots.