In my last post, I compared saying the Nicene Creed to stepping on unsteady stones across a creek, stepping here and not there, meaning this and not that in an effort not to end up with wet feet and an unsayable creed. One of the tippiest stones for me is the word believe, which for a long time I understood as a sort of thought bubble in the brain in which the creed could be said and remain unspotted from the world. Upon this rock I now place a salamander.

A story in Monday’s Austin American Statesman reported on the multimillion-dollar battle being waged in two Central Texas counties over who will protect the Georgetown salamander and its cousin, the Salado salamander: local authorities or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. It’s a story that I suspect will cause some eye rolling among developers, conservationists, scientists, laymen, liberals, and conservatives alike. But here’s the thing: these embryo-like creatures, which live in caves and springs in declining numbers, are bellwethers of water quality for the region. Their skin is so thin their beating hearts are visible, and they absorb any toxins in the water directly into their bodies. Their declining numbers in the face of new development in both counties can be attributed and weighed and argued, but the last word is that our well-being and theirs are inextricably entangled. No one in the story seems to be arguing about that.

On my tippy rock, next to the salamander, I now place a book, The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, by David Abram, a philosopher, cultural ecologist, and sleight-of-hand magician. This beautiful work is in part about learning to locate ourselves outside ourselves in order, quite literally, to understand ourselves: we cannot separate what we stand on—the Earth in all its history and destiny—from who we are and how we know it. Without this understanding, we cease to know anything, or indeed to be fully human. Yes, yes—I’m off the rock and in the creek. But Abram writes about these contorted philosophical topics with a lyric and embodied clarity, eschewing abstract language. His topic—how we know what we know—has become a signpost on this uneven path toward believing.

As a philosopher, Abram is a phenomenologist, someone who studies human consciousness, particularly as it focuses on direct experience. How do we know that we know something? Descartes famously sought certainty as the baseline for knowledge. When you experienced something through your senses, how could you be sure you weren’t dreaming or mad? What could you stand on to say anything with certainty? Descartes found certainty inside his mind—he thought, therefore he was—and effectively drew a line in the sand between the subjective, autonomous mind and the objective, inert world of things. Descartes was no atheist; he acknowledged that without God there could be no confidence in the reality of the external world. But Descartes’s pronouncement released God to become an idea, cloven from creation, while the primacy of scientific method and mathematical truth became almost inescapable over the next centuries. After Descartes, anyone saying “I believe” more likely believed in a second-tier proposition as it stacked up against scientific rationalism, one that was merely subjective and consequently of little use in the real, objective worlds of science, commerce, and politics.

Abram rejects this split between what we know and how we know it, and he does it by taking us out of our Cartesian heads and back into our sensing bodies. Despite the power and information that the scientific revolution has brought us, we cannot separate our daily lives—even those spent in laboratories—from the ambiguous, pre-conceptual ground of sensory experience. Writes Abram, “The fluid realm of direct experience has come to be seen as a secondary, derivative dimension, a mere consequence of events unfolding in the ‘realer’ world of quantifiable and measurable scientific ‘facts’,” facts which descend from some impersonal, objective dimension like putti from heaven. Abram does not question the accomplishments of science and technology. He does, however, want to uncover how a blinkered commitment to their processes has left us blind to the subjective, sensuous, sentient life of bodies—all bodies, animal, vegetable, mineral—and the great breathing body of the Earth. To be deaf to the lively ancient and ongoing conversations of the Earth is to be cut off from our own humanity because the perceiver and the perceived are made of the same stuff.

So imagine that you’re sitting outside, watching your cat stalk a lizard climbing a sunflower as a blue jay heckles from a nearby tree. Where is all this happening? Inside your mind? There’s a reliable solidity to this tableau, no matter what Descartes says. Or is it happening “out there,” with no participation from you, the observer? Abram points to another place, what he and other philosophers call the life-world, the world we don’t pay much attention to: the one where the kitchen radio is on and the mail is being delivered and the dogs are sniffing something foul and widgets are being made. This is a collective rather than private space, ever shifting and open-ended and containing the unceasing activity of its innumerable inhabitants. The point of entry into this life-world is the sentient body of each inhabitant. When I watch the cat-drama, perception doesn’t happen just in me or just in the participants; rather, it occurs in the crucible of this communal space, belonging to it and not its individual participants. In this view, the air is no longer empty but bursting with relationship. Nor does perception occur without the literal ground we stand on, which from its depths shapes the life-world in which we dwell. When we elevate ourselves into some objective realm of fact, we’re unable to participate in or even hear the ongoing conversations with the created world that ensure our own full humanity.

Back to my unsteady rock, on which I now place a small gong. Knowing even less about gong design than I do about philosophy, I imagine it looking something like an atom, its dense nuclear heart the place the clapper hits, its reverberations spreading outward, gaining power. I put it on the rock to remind myself of one of the images that first drew me to take seriously the possibility of a Christian life. In A Testament of Devotion Thomas R. Kelly, a mid-twentieth-century Quaker mystic, writes of his own faith journey not as an ascent toward belief but as a descent into the Light:

There is a way of ordering our mental life on more than one level at once. On one level we may be thinking, discussing, seeing, calculating, meeting all the demands of external affairs. But deep within, behind the scenes, at a profound level, we may also be in prayer and adoration, song and worship and a gentle receptiveness to divine breathings…. Between the two levels is fruitful interplay, but ever the accent must be on the deeper level, where the soul ever dwells in the presence of the Holy One. For the religious man [sic] is bringing all affairs of the first level down into the Light….

Kelly does not leave the Earth behind in his God-ordered life but digs deeper into it, perhaps alluding to the literal fire that burns at its center. Wikipedia tells me that the Earth’s hyper-hot inner core, which was liquid for its first couple of billion of years, has been solid for the second couple of billion, although it is surrounded by the turbulent viscosity of the equally hot outer core. When I say—or preferably sing—the creed, I imagine voices sinking into the light beneath the Earth’s skin, mingling with the wild subsonic frequencies sounding at the core, and then reverberating back into our haunted air and beyond, audible to those listening for them.

So I believe. And when I say “I” I also must say we since “I” can’t be entirely separated from the Body extending through time and space that says it. We believe in the disagreeing fellowship around the necessary salamander, whose name, Eurycea naufragia, means “remnant,” and thus sneaks a prophetic note into the conversation. We believe in God’s love for creation, so profound that the Body of God can never be disengaged from it. We believe that when humanity separates itself from the Body of God, it ceases to be fully human and commits atrocities both willfully and ignorantly. We believe in the gravity of all created things, whose resonance pulls them down toward the singing Light and which carries its cadences back to the surface.

Sometimes it takes me a long time to get across that creek, what with trying not to step on salamanders, knock over gongs, and such.

What we’re reading
Heather: Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Martin: Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

Last Sunday we attended a dharma teaching at Green Gulch Farm, on the western flanks of Mount Tamalpais, above Muir Beach. It was the kind of morning for which this part of California is famous: foggy and cool with sudden glittering glimpses of ocean or mountain that as quickly disappear back into the magician’s hand. After scurrying down the eucalyptus-buttressed driveway, we arrived at the temple late and at the wrong door. The temple was packed and listening to the robed priest read a children’s story to perhaps twenty well-behaved but wiggly children. Once the children were sent off to their own separate programing, the priest began his teaching in earnest, an hour-long disquisition on the relationship between labor (it was Labor Day weekend, after all) and Zen practice. He read two poems by W. B. Yeats, one by Patrick Kavanagh, and referenced Shakespeare and Northrop Frye. I would bet that his radio is usually set on the local NPR station, and that he was looking forward, as I was, to reading the Sunday New York Times that afternoon.

When Martin and I got to the Times-reading phase of our own Sunday liturgy, I read a beautiful essay in the book review entitled “Articles of Faith” by Dara Horn, in which she muses on the easy confluence of contemporary Jewish fiction, even if it’s overtly non-religious, with ancient questions of faith. She contrasts this Jewish feast with the slim pickings on the post-Christian literary table: “Whither the Flannery O’Connors of yesteryear? Marilynne Robinson can’t do this all by herself!” Because Judaism is a faith based on the concept of preserving memory, she asserts a peculiar affinity between Judaism and fiction-writing, “a mystical and irrational belief in a type of memory no neurologist would recognize, a phenomenon both uncanny and eternal,” a conviction that “time can be stopped, that somewhere, whether on our notebooks… or our spirits, everything is perfectly preserved and recorded, ready to return to life.” The essay ends with a call to listen to and create the stories that give a deep anchorage in history and a shapely hope to our personal and communal lives, even as the anchorage has made clear the murderous powers in which we swim.

All right, I thought, I guess I’m Buddhist and Jewish today. Does that mean I’m not a Christian? Oh, dear. And on a Sunday.

Being in California, particularly in Point Reyes Station, leaves me a little disoriented, especially since I come from a state that has ignored virtually every vote I’ve cast in the past twenty years. Martin and I are in like-minded company here: virtually every voice loudly proclaims with gusto the gospel of sustainable and local. We’ve driven north to Bodega Bay and south to Mill Valley and in fifty miles passed not one fast-food joint. Cattle are vital to the local economy and yet are grazed and raised humanely on federal lands. Signs supporting the Marin Agricultural Land Trust—which protects about half of Marin County’s agricultural land from development—appear in almost every eatery with monotonous, almost sinister, regularity: could you end up in Tomales Bay wearing sustainably produced, free-trade cement shoes if you try to run a restaurant without supporting MALT?

Could I as easily be a Buddhist or a Jew as a Christian? A northern Californian as a Texan? The answer is probably yes, but I’m not. At some point in asserting an identity, in describing your part in the created order—something most Americans and maybe most post-Enlightenment people feel compelled to do—some sifting is necessary: this and not that. So I’m wondering why or how I’m a Christian. (Figuring out why or how I’m a Texan is probably too complicated an issue to tackle here.) The Nicene Creed seems as good a place to start as any. It’s quite possible that the mere mention of those words—Nicene Creed—will start the sifting process in some readers: here’s my stop! It certainly would have stopped me twenty years ago.

I used to hate the creed, and I hated it even before I started going to church. How could you not hate something that required you to believe a dozen impossible things before breakfast? And not just impossible but downright unethical and sometimes just plain silly? The bit about the Spirit proceeding from the Father and the Son always makes me think about opening a collapsible telescope. When we first started going to church, not so many years ago, saying the creed could ruin the whole service for me by starting an avalanche of arguments in my head that must have been audible at least to the people sitting next to me.

After years of saying and hating it, I began to say it with a few grudging assents. I was eventually surprised that immediately after the agitating “Father Almighty,” God’s next attribute was surprisingly democratic: maker. I’ve known lots of makers: hat-makers, bread-makers, policy-makers, cheese-makers (this is the home of Cowgirl Creamery, after all), and homemakers. Okay, I could say “maker.” I came to appreciate that creation included things both seen and unseen. Whether I believed it or not, I loved the effect of the introduction to Jesus: “eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one being with the Father.” I didn’t know what it meant (still don’t), but it was like entering a dense fog with a deep gong sounding, and it was followed by the bright iambic rhythm of “through him all things were made.” Okay. I could say that.

I can now say almost all of the creed, even the Father Almighty part. I’ve had a father. I’m married to a father. I’m the mother of someone I hope will be a father some day. I know a lot of fathers and with all my heart I believe—credo—in the power and tenderness and explosive energy that seems to be bundled with fatherhood and that is, at least in a post-Jungian world, no longer the exclusive domain of men. I can also say what kind of fatherhood I don’t believe in, to which I emphatically do not give my heart. Nor do I imagine that calling God “Father” can possibly limit what I understand God to be, what the prophets and saints imagined and imagine and will imagine God to be. If in a moment of Christmas amazement I address the infant Jesus as “Sweet Potato,” as I have addressed each of my children, I don’t really expect a creedal formula to arise, but I glimpse the power that binds God and creation. I can say that with all my heart.

It’s taken some time to sift through these things, to say this and not that. I remember a discussion at the Seton Cove in Austin when Patty Speier, the director, listened to a bunch of us talk about which tenets of the creed we thought we could toss out while still calling ourselves Christian. (One older woman in the group, Roman Catholic from long before her birth, listened to our passionate discussion with quiet amusement.) God the Father, of course, was thrown out immediately. Only son—on the trash heap. (No one had any objection to sitting in the reverberant fog of God from God, Light from Light, etc.) Virgin birth—are you kidding? Finally Patty asked us what we couldn’t throw out and stunned us into silence. I eventually answered that question by writing my own creed, which I have to change nearly every time I go back to it. I don’t actually say it, but it helps guide my steps when I pick my way across the capital-C Creed, showing me where to balance—here and not there—on the rocks that are tippy. It goes something like this:

I believe in one living God,
author, judge, faithful lover,
unseen, usually unheard.

I believe in Jesus Christ, the flowering vine,
who was born in danger of Mary
and unexpectedly loved by Joseph;
who walked in beauty through a world
rent by greed and grief;
who healed and mourned, who taught and raged;
who sang the old songs and spoke nonsense, sometimes;
who called hidden truths to the surface;
who forced a crisis in those who met him.
He died in agony—deserted, betrayed, true.
He rose and bloomed somehow, beckoning
everyone in time and space to join him.
And most of all I believe in the Spirit, who binds
with luminous swaddling the Creator, the Beckoner,
and all that is, has been, will be.

I believe they are the source of all just anger, all quiet courage,
all patient love, all improbable forgiveness.
I believe this mostly at night, in poems and music,
and when I don’t think too hard.
I believe this whenever friends and strangers gather for a meal.
I believe this as I can, which is sometimes not at all,
but I know I must believe or wither.

My identity as a Christian (and perhaps as a Texan) has taken—and continues to take—a series of unexpected turns. Many of the paths on which I have found myself peter out, but some of them allow me to move ahead. Since Martin and I are in this beautiful place to hike, I can’t help but imagine this process as walking in a wild place with a map that is useful in a general sort of way—you know what direction you’re headed in, where significant landmarks are in relation to each other—but less helpful when it comes to the specifics of navigation. The trail becomes fainter the farther you go, more like a deer trail, and suddenly you find yourself walking in high shrubs or reeds or thick understory. Several paths, equally well trodden, present themselves to you. You take one, puffing through the scratchy gorse, wishing you’d worn long pants, and swatting at mosquitoes. The trail becomes available only to those walkers with four feet. You swear and head back, hoping you’re actually on the main trail. You are, but it divides again, and all of a sudden the trail is nothing but thick impassable mud. You hear running water and know from the map that the trail is supposed to be near a creek. So you take off through the chaparral or whatever this damn stuff is and tear your shorts on a branch in an annoyingly conspicuous place. You feel sure that a trail will appear somewhere if you just get a little higher up. And all of a sudden, your partner now muttering unattractive observations about your sense of direction, you glimpse the quiet shining lake. You’re still not sure where the trail is, but the lake is right there.

What We’re Reading
Heather: Dave Eggers, A Hologram for the King
Martin: Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership