A Thought

Christians and I agree about one thing: They don't want to convert to my religion, and I don't want them to convert to my religion. I want them to keep to theirs. It suits them.

How I Do Religion

I don't usually discuss religion in my columns, even though I have very strong opinions on the subject. A blatant religious slant would cloud my political agenda. The exceptions: When religion gets in the news (think Huckabee or Ken Hutcherson) or when I know that what I say won't be recognized as religion by 99.9% of my readers, so what the hell. For example, how many people would recognize that my muse Cindy Holly is actually a religious image to me?

Very few would, in part because most people don't do religion that way.

Which gets to, "Why talk about it here?" Well, 1) this is my personal blog, which I have distanced from Real Change (the blog-of-less-distance is Adventures in Bloggery) and 2) most people don't do religion my way. It occurs to me that people might be interested in how I do religion, sort of like how when people want to know how frogs have sex. It doesn't mean they want to have sex the frog way. It's just a curiosity.

So I want to start a new category of post, consisting of posts that talk about how I do religion.

The first thing that needs to be said about it is that I have a religion of one. There is no one, not even Anitra, who shares this religion. It's a religion that presupposes some concepts rarely encountered in the mainstream traditions of Abramaic religions. It has no name, other than "how I do religion", because I don't do religion the religion-naming way (naming a thing tends to freeze that thing, and a religion is the last thing you want to freeze.)

Since it's a religion of one, I am sole prophet, mystic, shaman, priest, and don't forget layman. Of those I try to be layman most of the time, because I see that as my highest calling.

My religious teachings to myself are full of nonsense and contradiction. I am proud of this. I consider contradiction a sign that I'm covering all bases, and you can't know where sense lies until you've stepped in its opposite, because it's dark out here.

I do religion the sweet-and-sour way. Sense and nonsense together, and sense against sense, contradictory sense with sense. Humor and seriousness together, humor with and against humor, humor with and against seriousness, seriousness with and against seriousness.

To be continued...

Michael Howell, Part II

After we stopped playing chess I still met Michael most every night. He never stopped begging for a rematch but we managed to stay cordial and he even began to introduce me to his other friends as a "brilliant mathematician with a DOCTORATE, even" who FINALLY managed to beat him in chess ONCE. This became a theme of our friendship, such as it was. My academic past was proof that he had smart friends.

In 1987 I quit cab driving, so our encounters at Ralph's came to an end. There were a couple of years that I didn't see him. I got on welfare & was living in the U District when I became homeless again. Then I lived north of the city limits for a year.

Finally I returned to the U District, renting a room at 16th NE & NE 50th, two blocks from the U. One Sunday I stopped at the NE 50th Burger King for a snack and I found Michael there with other friends of his. I found out that they were waiting there for the time to head over to Blessed Sacrament for its Sunday free meal.

Michael, it turns out, never paid for food. In fact, if he could help it, he never paid for anything. Over time I came to really admire this aspect of Michael Howell. For example, he got a cheap voicemail account. This was back when voicemail services were just becoming available. His cost less than ten dollars a month. A phone would have cost him 8 more, but instead he checked his voicemail every day on Nordstrom's complimentary customer phone.

For a few months I met with Michael and his friends every Sunday. It was a social hour for me that was a relief from the dismal apartment house I lived in.

But gradually Michael's attitudes wore me down. It was the repeated diatribes against Asians that were too much.

To Michael, all Asians were "gooks". Japanese, Koreans, Chinese, Filipinos, it didn't matter. You'd think, to hear him talk about it, that he'd been horribly traumatized by the Vietnam War and he had generalized from the Viet Cong to all Asians. That would be wrong. He'd in fact been in Vietnam, but it was just briefly and he admitted he was a shop clerk at a secure post the whole time and the war didn't affect him. When I asked him why he hated the Vietnamese he always turned it around to events which happened to his brother.

It simply made no sense. OK, so his brother was shot at by some Vietnamese. How do you get from, "A Vietnamese man who was waging war with our country shot my brother" to "[Insert random Asian ethnicity here] are evil and should all be dead?"

I don't know how anyone could even get across a room with logic like that, much less from the Viet Cong to the Korean Peninsula.

It gets worse. It gets comically worse. Michael was a confirmed atheist. He didn't call himself that, he called himself "completely nonreligious." He pushed Ayn Rand's Objectivism on me, saying "it's all the philosophy you need." He scoffed at people who were religious.

But then he heard that Rev. Moon's Unification Church was offering a deal whereby new converts could sign up for special training in Korea. They would get a free suit, Michael said, and meals and expenses. He said it sounded great to him. He would pretend that he was a convert, go to Korea, take their money and their free suit and then laugh at them and return to America with extra money and a suit.

[Left: "Nice suit," thinks Michael. "I'd like a suit like that."]

When he first proposed this idea, I was sure he was joking. But sadly, he wasn't. He really believed it was a clever way to take advantage of stupid "religionists". He could profit from their stupidity. Not only that, he would be taking advantage of Asians.

I told him that his Ayn Rand-inspired "irreligionism" was itself a religion. He had a fit almost as bad as the one he had when I beat him at chess.

That was around the end of 1989. I avoided him for the next two years.

Cindy Holly, Muse of Other

I was infused with some Hawaiian Kahiko and Huna (traditional Hawaiian religion and mysticism) before I knew anything at all about Christianity. Then I was bombarded with Christianity, of two kinds: Episcopalianism, overtly, and Southern Baptism, covertly. The result of this input and a whole lot of agonizing is what I am. I am religious. In some way. But I have no name for my religion. And, my religion is worlds away from any of the religions I see practiced around me.

One dictionary definition of "paganism" is any religion that's not a form of Judaism, Christianity, or Islam, or a religion formed out of or in reaction to any of those religions. So, for example, a "Satanist" whose concept of Satan was based on the Biblical Satan could not be considered a pagan by that definition, because his religion would be a reaction to one of those three Abrahamic religions. But another person who called himself a Satanist, whose idea of Satan was based on a pre-Christian Celtic God, say, would be a pagan. Also, a traditional Hindu, or Buddhist, Taoist, or Confucianist, or combination thereof, would be pagan.

So in my 30s, when I finally realized that the Kahiko was more or less winning my soul, I tried calling myself pagan.

That didn't work out. Trouble was, other people who called themselves pagan read too much into it. Turns out, most self-described pagans aren't going by the above dictionary definition. They mostly have in mind European traditions, or (Continental) Native American. The dashed expectations became a big bother.

It wouldn't do to just retreat into calling myself Kahiko either. Kahiko really means Old Ways, and I was only educated in the Old Ways of Hawaii for less than a year as a two and three year old. I learned enough to keep Christianity from claiming me, but not enough for me to claim Kahiko as mine.

So the state of affairs I am reduced to is this: I have a religion that is unique in the world. It has no name. It is informed by an infusion of Kahiko, plus everything else I've absorbed since that was compatible with that infusion.

My religion isn't based on faith in any super-human person. It's based on poetry, drama, comedy, and art, respect of knowing and not knowing. I imagine a vast multitude of subjective realities, realized in human minds, many more than there are humans to house them, and by imagining them I make them as real as they need to be, for the purposes of my religion, a religion which I impose upon my reality, whether or not it likes it. My impositions are all powered by imagination, which is the real mana, the water of life. I know from personal experience that this mana can give rise to subjective realities independent of me, because I ho'omana: At first, mana goes where I dream it to go, then it goes wherever.

One of these independent impositions is very special to me. I have referred to her as Cindy Holly, not-her-real-name, Muse of Other, Muse of Few Words, Ageless, Timeless, Eternal, Beauty, currently brunette.

In fact, I say not-her-real-name, because her real name would be the name of THE Goddess, and I don't speak that.

But I can be a little more specific. She drives my feeble soul. She knows where the key to my existence is kept. I don't really mind when she visits me in my dreams and turns me into a horse. Her eyes never close. She gazes on life and death equally, and dances to the beat of both simultaneously.

Cindy Holly is her comic aspect. She is that powerful, that she has a comic aspect. Very few serious Gods or Goddesses can pull that off.