Going to the mountain...


This post was inspired by a discussion about athesim/theism and feminist spirituality that has been taking place in the last few days on the Women's Studies Listserv. Originally I intended to post it to the list, but it really doesn't fit with the WMST-L focus, so I have posted it here instead.

My second husband was a dyed (died?--grin)-in-the-wool atheist, born and bred in the Marxist tradition of the 1930s. His parents were card-carrying members of the Communist Party. He was raised with the view of religion that all of that implies.

He agreed to our wedding in the Quaker Meeting as a concession to me (there was no way I would be married without it), but that was the extent of his willingness to be involved with any religion, formal or informal. Quakers were ok by him because they did not condemn atheists to hell or assume atheists were immoral or amoral. But attending a Meeting other than our wedding was another story.

Despite his faith in rationalism as the route to all reliable knowledge, nonetheless, when he talked to me about what it felt like to be above timberline in the Sierra Nevada (he was a long-time backpacker and nature enthusiast), his description of the experience felt very close to the way I would describe the experience of a gathered Meeting. So I let him drag me (kicking and screaming, but still I went) on a couple of serious backpacking trips (8 days and 50 miles each, over a few 11 and 12,000 foot passes -- when I had never done anything of the sort before).

And yes, I found it to be the same experience. What I experienced in those mountains was deep and abiding sense of communion. Call it communion with God/dess. Call it communion with the universe. Or communion with the mountain/nature. I don't care what you call it. But you don't get to that experience through rationalism.

So I asked him to come to my mountain. I told him that sharing the experience of my mountain with him was just as important to me as my sharing his mountain was to him. But he stubbornly refused....at least, until after we were separated -- I suppose he started going to Meeting in an effort to win me back. But it was too late. I had moved on.

His efforts did not save the marriage. Still, long after it was over, he became a Quaker. He did ultimately come to understand that he did not have to go to the mountain in order to commune with it. He could find it, also, in a Quaker Meeting.

He would still say that he doesn't believe in a deity, so I suppose that would make him still an atheist. I think the term non-theist better describes his views, because they don't jibe with the atheism of his upbringing.

If you start from a belief that spirit infuses the physical, that distinguishing between the two is an illusion, well, then, you can be spiritual without believing in a deity. In this view, divinity is not something separate, out there. Not a being. Not an entity.

The problem is that, in English anyway, the dictionary definition assumes a distinction between body and spirit. E.g., in my online Oxford American dictionary, it says:

spirit: the nonphysical part of a person that is the seat of emotions and character; the soul: we seek a harmony between body and spirit.

So the dictionary definition demands a distinction that people who believe in the unity of body and spirit reject. This is a perfect example of how language imprisons us and shapes the reality we are able to perceive.

Instead of seeking "harmony between body and spirit," someone claiming spirituality without belief in a deity might say she seeks to experience the harmony of body/spirit that already exists in reality but is hidden from view by our senses and by our rationality.

Posted: Mon - October 10, 2005 at 11:30 PM          

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