Sabbaths 1
     Shot taken on my front steps

Looking east from where I live along Mission Creek, I gaze straight into the Mission Mountains, jutting 8,000 feet above the valley floor. They remind me that the reality I clunk my way through down here in town is not all the case that is. This time of year the peaks rise dazzingly graced with winter’s snows, tempering the urgency of my mundane tasks, inviting me to pause and consider the spring gusts of warmness and the occasional sunshine.

I grew up here, with the mountains maybe the most reliable daily presence. I live just a couple miles from where novelist D’Arcy McNickle also grew up. Although that was almost a century ago, the view above has changed little in that time.

Years ago while reading his first novel, The Surrounded, I was struck by how at home I felt in the story--not in any of its particulars so much as in the psychological geography. In McNickle’s book, the young hero gets into serious trouble with civilization and he runs just a few miles east into the mountains, where he can vanish from the world the officials know and control. Reading the story was like revisiting the daydreams and fantasies I had sitting in school, looking out the window at those mountains. I’ve always been aware that civilization ends four miles east and that it’s possible to disappear into an invisible world.

Imagine the psychology of people who grew up in places where human civilization stretched away seemingly forever, where one couldn’t simply walk a couple miles to the edge of organized society and head up into the wilderness and into a primal sort of freedom. It must be easy for them to begin thinking of the government as a sort of god, the maker and breaker of dreams and the shaper of realities. It must be easy for them to be preoccupied with symbols of status and mechanisms of fame.

Staying together
     Generational succession and personal identity

The story of Chief Charlo, hanging on in the Bitterroot after many Salish had moved north to the Flathead Reservation, is poignant in a way that life is often poignant. What is sadder than to lose the homeland of one’s youth and to have the world change around one so dramatcally that one’s grandchildren speak a different language?

Of course, most of us lose the homelands of our childhood--that we can’t go home again is a common lament. And I’ve worked with many adolescents who spoke a language in many ways unrecognizable by their parents and grandparents. We live in times of ongoing cultural change, and in such times succeeding generations may come to consciousness in a narrative environment quite different from that their parents grew up in. Under such circumstances, it would be startling if they did not develop values quite different from those of their elders. Something akin to Charlo’s sadness would seem to be a common plight.

And yet, it is not necessary that the generations become estranged. The “generation gap” that so mesmerized observers during the sixties is not a fact of nature so much as a failure of culture. Thinking of education not as the transmission of information and skills in a classroom but as the way a culture is passed on, a question that becomes important is what sort of education is needed if parents and their children are to recognize each other fully enough to share the deepest meanings in life? Clearly, it will be an education that resists some kinds of change, focusing instead on continuities. As many Native American have recognized, it will be an education more concerned with culture than with information. Daniele Conversi argues that a culture that is not transmitted from one generation to the next should not be considered a culture at all:

Despite a proliferation of writings on culture, ...[it] remains one of the most difficult concepts to grasp and define in the social sciences. Already by the 1950s the US anthropologists Alfred Louis Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn were able to identify over 100 competing definitions of ‘culture’.

The rise of cultural studies as a self-standing discipline in the 1960s should have in principle contributed to clarify this conundrum, having elected it as its central topic of investigation. Unfortunately, the opposite is true. Despite its promising beginnings under the brilliant stewardship of Richard Hoggart and others (Sardar and Van Loon 1998), the disarray has progressively amplified, degenerating into conceptual chaos and turning cultural studies into one of the most confused and confusing disciplines on earth. Instead of being rigorously defined, the concept of culture has become so flexible and muddled as to include virtually every aspect and form of human behaviour. ‘Culture’ has therefore fragmented into its constituent parts, an amalgam of infinite particles now dissolving into idiosyncratic chaos. At the moment, everything can become ‘culture’ from ‘youth culture’ to ‘drug culture’, from ‘consumer culture’ to pop culture, ‘yob’ culture, hooligan culture, and, perhaps a short step from hooliganism, animals’ culture. Yet, all of these ‘cultures’ fall short of the main distinguishing criterion, inter-generational continuity. There is currently an urgent need to go back to the concept of culture in its original meaning of cultivating and hence nourishing. Culture should be linked to material, rather than biological, inheritance. In short, a sense of continuity is inseparable from culture, hence culture can only exist if it is transmitted through generations.  (Daniele Conversi, “Can Nationalism Studies and Ethnic/racial Studies Be Brought Together?” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. Volume: 30. Issue: 4. Page 815. (c) 2004

Questions of cultural continuity will be easier to discuss within families than they will be to discuss at school. It is quite proper that families and communities entertain the apostles of change who speak from the schools with the moral fervor of revolutionaries with a bit of skepticism. While it’s true that each new generation needs to creatively adopt their culture to a changing world, if the passion for change isn’t judiciously tempered by a fondness for ways and means of proven value, we risk trading our birthright for a gaggle of gadgets.

In her study of Korean Christians in Chicago, Kelly Chong found that a significant way that second generation Koreans kept their cultural identity was through

certain elements of ‘practiced culture,’ that is, values and standards of traditional Korean morality. These values, ubiquitously invoked in their discourse about their Korean identity, consist of a set of core traditional Korean Confucian values—most significantly, filial piety, respect for parents, family-centeredness, and work ethic.

Whereas non-church goers tend to speak more about “making decisions for oneself” rather than obeying parents, the young adults who attend church say they prefer the clear rules, and “traditional Korean views regarding sexual morality and gender relations.” It is more through moral values than general aspects of culture such a food and music that a “powerful sense of group consciousness and boundary is forged among the second generation.”

Those who chose to stay in the church sometimes see the individual liberty of the surrounding society as contributing to the dissolution of culture and of togetherness. One member described it thus:

There are many truths in the American society. Because of that, there is no value system. Everything and anything is permissible. So we lose common dignity, respect, and people end up getting absorbed in their own little worlds. People used to live by Christian virtues, knew definite right or wrong. Now, kids are being killed, and are killing their parents. All because the parents don’t have any values to give them. People are encouraged to be open-minded so they lose definition. Koreans have a better value system, like the way Christianity used to be.

Various scholars have noted that the strengths and vitality of contemporary evangelicalism can be attributed to its “strictness,” which confers strong social bonds and cohesion among the church members ( Kelley, D. M. 1972 . Why conservative churches are growing. New York: Harper and Row.; Iannaccone, L. R. 1994 . “Why strict churches are strong”. American Journal of Sociology 99: 11801211.). It is my contention that Christian conservatism, both through its peculiar resonance with traditional Korean values and its ability to help articulate a clear sense of group boundary and identity, is crucial to the ethnic project of the Korean church regarding the second generation. The conservative Protestant ideology of the Korean church, through its reference to the unchanging, divine laws which dictate standards of strict ethics and morality for the members of the group, has proven quite effective as a form of legitimation for strict, exclusive ethnic group identity in the secondgeneration church members. In contrast, scholars such as Steve Bruce (Bruce, S. 1983 . “Identifying conservative Protestantism”. Sociological Analysis 44: 65-69.) have remarked on the relative ineffectiveness of liberal Protestantism in generating such group cohesion. As Bruce ( 1983 :68) puts it, “The liberal insistence on reason as filter for revelation produces a variety of problems in social reproduction. In a pluralist society, denial of an objective and unchanging source of revelation invites diversity and the consequent problems of maintaining cohesion and commitment.”

“An agreed-upon and commonly held interpretation of reality is a prerequisite for social identity. It is also the constructive link with personal identity” ( Mol, H. 1976 . Identity and the sacred:A sketch for a new social-scientific theory of religion. New York: Free Press : 67).

Rotary’s 10 virtues
     Common ground between world's six major religions

To develop Empower The Family as a turnkey project for Rotary clubs worldwide, a universal message has to be crafted that transcends geography, religious, racial, political, social and similar barriers. World Peace Parents turned to the world’s six major belief systems of Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, and Judaism, seeking such a message.  Accepted by 65% to 75% of the world’s population, common virtues embraced by these six belief systems for ten, twenty, even thirty centuries approaches universal acceptance.  A founder of a belief system that has endured the test of time, as these six have, must have taught basic virtues essential for harmonious, peaceful community living.

World Peace Parents engaged graduate students at Harvard Divinity School and Brigham Young University to research ten virtues common to these six belief systems and accepted by most world cultures, religions and societies. The “Ten Virtues” selected were:  Fairness, Family, Forgiveness, Free Agency, Love, Peace, Service, Trust, Truth, and Worship.  The results of the research to date:

“The founders of the six belief systems have common teachings, with some variations, for The Ten Virtues. The research was expanded to include the question: Do these six- belief systems teach that parents have a duty to teach their children? The short answer is yes.”

Getting to know place
     The cosmos at the scale of home

I turn off the lights, open the window in my study, lean on the sill a little into the night, gazing for a long moment out at snow falling through cottonwoods along Mission Creek, and snow falling on my winter garden, now gone. Snowflakes on my cheek feel like pricks of life.

A knowledge has been handed down to me through American culture from Puritans who saw the material world related to the spiritual world in such a way that any moment correctly observed and understood contains all moments.

When, as Puritans, they encountered the New England coast, they did not see stones shaped by geologic forces over millions of years or waves rising and falling according to laws of physics that stretched backward and forward through infinity without change. They saw a stage upon which a cosmic drama of sin and redemption was enacted in every moment. They saw in all of it a provident God whose Plan of Salvation included the story of time from beginning to end, moment by moment, in unimaginably vast reaches of self-similarity.

In learning to see their own lives as types of the unfolding plan, they became skilled metaphorical thinkers, adept at seeing different points in history as revelatory of the underlying truth from which existence unfolded, so their own grand errand to the wilderness was also the Israelites’ journey through wilderness toward freedom. Every event and aspect of nature was at once itself and a remembrancer of more. History was not chronology but an intelligible order in which prophets had discerned and described both past and future. We can see only what we can see, but all of it is before us.

Later, such ones as Thoreau, Emerson, Melville and Hawthorne separated the Puritan’s metaphorical facility from faith in the God of the Bible, but the transcendence lasted for a while. Every time and place remained an instance of every other time and place.

But then, in a moment, it vanished. The cosmos was empty and dead. In “The Snow Manâ€� Wallace Stevens said that to face the meaningless arrangements and rearrangements of patterns that make up modernity, “one must have a mind of winter.” Only then can one behold “nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.”

But few have minds of winter. Many would rather find sacred paths into dialogue with the universe as living mind. The covers of best sellers are graced with images of Egyptian pyramids or South American temples or Stonehenge. People look beyond cold nothing.

They associate a sense of nothing with the meaninglessness of the spaces they have come to. What does it matter which building in which edge city reached by which highway one goes to through morning gridlock to ride the same elevator to the same hallway to the same room filled with purplish gray fabric-covered cubicles, personalized with photocopied jokes?

I think that the longing for a sense of place we hear so much about has grown from a longing for meaning. A longing for family, as a way of being understood and loved, as a way of being together, among all our grandmothers and grandfathers and all our children and grandchildren, some not yet born. A longing for a sense that all we have been and seen and known does not melt and shatter into vibrating bits.

The longing for a sense of place is, I think, a longing for the cosmos at the scale of home.

Just before I opened the window to look out through silences of falling snow, I had been reading an argument by a theoretical physicist that time is an illusion, as I watched the night, a thick swirl of heavy snowflakes catching the yellow light of the streetlights across the creek, where in the near distance I saw two cars moving, slowly as it seemed to me, through whatever night they were to encounter.

I knew that the empty spaces between protons and electrons were a million billion times larger than the particles themselves, I knew that the solidity of the birch window sill was an illusion created in part by force fields within which electrons and protons danced, and I knew that nobody knew what the forces fields were, and that the electrons themselves were made of even smaller particles, emerging from waves of a not-nothing that was prior to energy and flooding the universe with being.

My grandson toddles to my knee and tugs on my trousers. “Can I see?�

I lift him. Yes. Here a little and there a little. Yes.