Flow and the God of Motion

In 1792 Robert Gray "discovered" the Columbia River. What he discovered, in a long list of discoveries at that time, was a river that was some 1200 miles long. He thought it might be the exit of the Northwest Passage, a river, or river connections that connected the East coast with the West coast. But what he found was a river that had its headwaters in southern British Columbia. It then flowed north for a few hundred miles before it turned south through what is now Washington State and then hard west along what is now the Oregon and Washington border. Its watershed covers 259,000 square miles, gathering water from the Western Rockies in British Columbia, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon and Washington. To give a comparison, this watershed produces twice the volume of the Nile River in one quarter the distance.

At the time of this discovery, it had been home to the greatest runs of wild salmon ever known. Some experts estimate the runs to have been approximately 16 million fish each spring and summer season returning to spawn in the vast network of tributaries on the Columbia. This was the largest known salmon run in the world. Once the river became known to the Europeans everything changed. It became known, not as a river, but as a resource. People started to see the potential uses within their culture and economy, and so it became known in components. It was the introduction of a new order, from an open natural system, to a closed thermodynamic system. The relational matrix of the river was an unknown. Its vast intimate interconnectedness was valueless information.

Furs were the first commodity of real value in North America. And on the Columbia River and its tributaries beaver were the prime target. These furry engineers were responsible for fostering clean water, regulating flows by building permeable dams that protected young life. By 1830 they were virtually eliminated. Records are sketchy on the effects of their demise but one can image the scale of intimate loss that the river system experienced.

A factory was soon set up in Astoria, Oregon (named after the fur industry titan, John Astor). The Hudson Bay Company also set up a factory in Vancouver, Washington . A factory was essentially an outpost where furs and other valuables were gathered. Men called factors, the forerunners of accountants, would account for what was being taken in, pay for the commodity, and arrange shipping.

The vast nurturing capacity of the river was also lost with the disappearance of the beaver. The beaver were the ones who created that great upriver womb, the quiet places where fish could spawn and the hatchlings could grow in gentle currents. And when they outgrew the porous boundaries, the beaver dams let the fish move on to the challenges of real maturity in a dynamic river.

In 324 Constantine officially discovered the river of life, Christianity. He formalized it and made it the state religion of Rome. You could say it was the first big gravity dam, the first formal division in Christianity, the first of many divisions to come. The boundaries of faith were no longer porous. Christianity moved from the homes and the streets into temples. Leaders were given salaries and celebrity. The informal was no longer sacred. Spiritual experience was displaced by religious information and ceremony.

Over sixteen hundred years later my father tried to reclaim some of the sacred informal that had been lost. One night, he lined up three of my brothers and me against a paneled wall in the kitchen, where all serious plans are hatched. We were naturally nervous as we had a host of undiscovered crimes. Plus this lining up against the wall business was new. On the kitchen table we saw the book. It was the King James Bible, leather-bound antiquarian looking with a great brass hinge that locked the book. The book was included with the furnishings when my father purchased the old farm house a few years before in northern Vermont. It appeared he was experimenting with the supernatural. "I am going to lay hands on you and bless you," announced my father. Now to an Irish Catholic altar boy this was a patently illegal act. We all knew that the business of blessing was in the domain of the Catholic clerics. Anything that had to be blessed, from a goat to Grandma, was brought to the priest and he would read a certified blessing that had been approved by the Vatican. The fact that he was following a script of incantations from a book that was written by English heretics doubled the danger. Dad mentioned something about Jacob blessing his sons. We had never heard of Jacob or his sons but being blessed was much easier to take than the prospect of a whipping. It was very simple. He stood in front of each of us, laid his hands on our head said, "I bless you in the name of the Lord," or words to that effect.

So there we were, trying to approach God without a priest. I put this blessing business in the same realm as making moonshine, illegal and potentially potent. We were tinkering with the paranormal. The possible effects of this experience were beyond my comprehension. I imagined the effects of the blessing to be strange like the queasy floating after three bottles of Schlitz beer, or like hearing distant trumpets. Stories of shepherd kids had prepared me for visions of angelic beings, or if we really got "God forgive us" lucky, an apparition of the Virgin. She might appear as Our Lady of the Kitchen or Our Lady of the King James Bible Who Appeared to the Sons of a Government Worker. A shrine would be built; there would be bus tours, and a relic shop doing a brisk business. Virgin apparitions were a big deal in my religious world. Just north of us in Sherbrook, Quebec was a big shrine to the Virgin Mary we had visited recently. It was located on a steep hill appropriately inconvenienced by hundreds of steps. My only other knowledge of spiritual experiences was the stigmata, where you received the wounds of Jesus. This was really popular with the nuns as it involved pain and from what I could gather, a miserable, lonely existence.

So this blessing could produce a moment from slight drunkenness to extreme pain or something in between, I reasoned. Then I thought it could be like a protective bubble charging up my scapula, my St. Christopher medal and all the holy cards I used as book markers in my sixth grade text books. All my little icons that could would be charged up, protecting me against danger of all sorts.

In the wake of the blessing ceremony, my father decided to have some friends over to discuss God. I don't really know his motivation but I imagine it had to do with the idea that all the stuff that was sacrosanct and holy last week, wasn't this week. He had been watching the events of Vatican II very closely and felt these ecclesiastical changes would trickle down and empower him. So during the midweek evening doldrums, some of the locals would weigh in on issues with the high clerics in Rome. These meetings took place between the narrow folds of our highly organized religion. It included laymen who grew gardens, raised their children, loved their wives and sweated out the financial details of their existence. For a few months, it became a regular thing. Soon the local priest started to show up, I guess to keep an eye on things. I remember one evening overhearing them discussing the condition of the youth, something that had apparently been disintegrating since Babylonian times. Given the circumstances, the Beatles, long hair, Elvis and LBJ, things were declining precipitously. Shortly thereafter the priest shut the meeting down. This was my first touch with the real authority of the church invading our home. I'm sure the priest was protecting his fold from the slippery slope of amateurs experiencing God without the benefit of a cleric. It would take my father 20 years to extract himself from the Catholics and exercise the freedom to make his own spiritual passage without being blocked by their artificial boundaries. For us, although at the time we didn't know it, we were preparing to move beyond Catholicism too.

Looking back it was my first crisis with religious authority. I saw the confusion of roles played out where my father tried to recoup some of his rightful spiritual responsibilities for his family from the Catholic clergy. The priest had won that battle though. My father came out of it discouraged. My brothers and I came out of it confused. But we were all headed downstream in this great turbulent river, woefully ignorant of what was ahead, with no real strength pulled along in the current of the times, moving from the certainty of orthodox belief into the turbulent world of the seeker.

In a natural river, flow is the conduit for meaning for everything in and around the river. How fast the water moves throughout its course sets in motion the life cycles of everything in the river. In North America the activity of the beaver was the prime regulator of flow in the upper reaches of the streams and rivers. In their frenetic everyday activity of cutting down trees and building dams, they were the architects of a vital river system throughout the continent. Their simple work cleaned and gentled the flowing water vital for the aquatic nurseries. With the trees and brush cleared, marshes were created that softened the edges of the forest. These marshes eased the heavy spring flows from the mountains. The beaver stabilized the upper river world and created a fertile sanctuary for the life of the river. The beaver and their dams were an integral part of the river systems throughout the whole country. But unlike man-made dams, the beaver dams were porous, and they didn't inhibit natural migration.

When the continent was being explored, the biggest discovery was not gold but fur. And the most valuable and abundant pelt was the beaver. Estimates put the beaver population at about 200 to 400 million. European fashions at this time used beaver for hats and cloaks. And it was considered a fur for the upper classes, so lower class folk could not wear beaver.

The demand for beaver was so great that by 1830 beaver had become scarce. In one of their strategies to keep out American trappers, the British Northwest Company decimated the beaver populations in the Columbia and Snake River systems. With the beaver population depleted the rivers of the Northwest changed dramatically. The spring runoffs destroyed the existing beaver dams over time, and the waters flowed faster and became more turbid. The marshes were overgrown and unable to filter the runoff as before. The beaver, who kept the rivers edge so manicured and meadow-like, were gone, and with them the edge of the river became a tangle of brush, as more sediment poured into the river.

The beaver dams were no longer there to gentle the great cycles of the rivers upstream where the young life of the river was nurtured. With more sediment in the water, the interstitial waters that are so vital to salmon eggs began to clog areas between the rocks, cutting off oxygen necessary for growth. The breeding grounds began to slowly diminish. Simply put, fewer eggs meant fewer salmon in the river. With the beaver gone the rivers had lost, to a large degree, their ability to nurture the young of the river.

The beaver's forays to the banks for trees and its building of dams connected the river properly to the land. The meadows created by the beaver created a buffer zone between the forest and the river. It made it easy for animals to have access to the river. In some sense you could see the beaver as stewards of the river. They governed the hydraulics of the river upstream and they kept the river free of debris. Without the beaver the swifter streams caused more erosion and made the river more volatile, less nurturing. This aspect was particularly important in a river with the velocity of the Columbia . The river had the steepest decline of any river in North America .

The difference between beaver dams and man-made dams were their functions. Beaver dams slowed the flow somewhat, yet allowed the inhabitants to continue on with their way of life. Man-made dams slow the flow as well, but the purpose isn't to enhance the life in the river, but to create a commodity for those off the river.

In 1928, local boosters from Wenatchee, Washington approached their legislators in Washington, DC about the idea of a dam at Grand Coulee . Ten years later the dam was built. Grand Coulee was the perfect spot for a gravity dam, as just below the surface of the riverbed was granite. The sides of the river were also granite.

This dam created a reservoir 150 miles long. It also was the end of the Coho Salmon run. These great fish would migrate almost 800 miles upstream in the most violent river in North America. They grew to sizes of 60 pounds and more. The building of the dam ended this Coho run and also buried a Yakima Indian village, effectively ending a way of life for the inhabitants.

You can take the salmon and the beaver out of the river and it will change the river ecology, but there is still a river and the possibilities of regeneration of the species still exist. But when you take power from the river, which is what the dams did, you take the life of the river. The dams disconnect the river and stop the steady flow of water from the headwaters to the ocean. It is no longer a natural artery. Water, its life blood, no longer courses freely.

Every seasonal change in the river accommodated the life in the river. When the snowmelt was at its peak in the spring, smolt in the river would move quickly through the river to the ocean, avoiding predators and saving their energy for the transition from fresh water to salt water. Millions of tons of silt would move in the enormous hydraulic force of the river, enriching the lower deltas. While moving back upstream in the spring, summer, and fall runs, the salmon would be challenged by the rapids. A tiny fraction of those fish, who five years earlier rocketed down the river, were now struggling back to renew the species. Only the very strongest would make it. But for all those that didn't, their lives weren't in vain. They would die in the upper reaches of the river and their decaying bodies would enrich, not just the river, but the whole of nature around it. Everything would benefit from the nutrients of the deep ocean. The flow connected everything. The upper reaches of the river were connected vitally with the ocean and the ocean was connected with the headwaters. Flow kept the water clean and provided an essential regenerative element for not just life, but great life.

The dam blocked the flow, creating power from life. I believe we have traded the life of the river for the power in it. It made me wonder about contemporary ideas of power within Christianity. It is a big religion in this country with roots that go nationally back to the Constitution and culturally back to the Roman Empire. It is deeply imbedded in the psyche of the people.

Our system of government, over time, has put us at an apex in history as the most powerful government in the world. We have been credited with doing great good. In war and peace alike, we have been generous with our friends and generally fair with our enemies. These Christian roots and the results of our current place, in historical terms, have us distinctly feeling that God is on our side. I believe that we are very religious yes, but truly spiritual, I wonder? Our success has been in the great aggregates, of mustering armies, monies and equipment. We have done that better than anyone in history. I wonder if Christianity is supposed to be the spiritual ballast for the greatest, most politically, economically and militarily powerful nation in history?

Looking at the river of life that we live in, it is a truly religious system which is perfectly married to a political system. Christianity was a real river of life just like the Columbia River. But now the life on the river, the flow, the volume and the velocity, are used for power and not for life. Our religious energies have become coupled with political agendas to form a powerful force. The sacrifice made to do this are the relational intricacies that confuse aggregate agendas. You can't have both; one has to give in to the other. And I believe it is the dynamic connection of people relationally, that makes for real flow in the river of life.

The potential of true spirituality can only be experienced; information alone will not suffice. The human being must experience relationship. Relationship seems to go dormant in the dull beat of routine. Our awareness dims. Religion as we know it has squeezed the spiritual intimacy from our lives and made us focus on corporate ritual. For every convenience the river has provided us in terms of power and convenience there has been a trade off in natural intimacy. There is rarely natural flow in our lives now. Everything has become regulated. Life now moves in narrow, measured stages. But in real turbulence, the flow of life, in unpredictability, in wars and calamities, when we can't control the world around us, relationships come alive. We become vital and connectible. We need look no further than the attacks on the World Trade Center . What did people talk about? Spending more time with their families, relationships being what were important to them in those moments and the immediate aftermath. It is the importance of flow in the context of the river.

There is nothing spiritually exceptional about Christianity in America , with the exception of its machinery. Like the Columbia River, our doctrinal dams and the force behind them are colossal. They capture the energies of millions of people and generate an abundance of political and economic power.

Flow morphs from true spirituality, the free-flowing moment, to rational morality, the regulated civilized existence that tries to mimic true spiritual flow. It is where God is not a God of motion, the author of that which makes the river what it is, but that of a static god who sits, rules and endorses power that moves through our political efforts. He becomes a god swayed by popular opinion. It is a hard concept to swallow, that we have been divided, and that our divisions are not less because of their place in history, their accumulated good works, or the great numbers counted in their constituency. And I doubt that the ecumenical efforts help much, other than they allow for division and give our dividedness political legitimacy.

Flow is relentless. It is part of a process that does not stop. However, mechanical systems are thermodynamic, creating tension. This means that the machinery and structures created break down over time and have to be maintained. This is called a closed system. The river, on the other hand, is an open system, continually releasing tension. Left alone it is enormously regenerative, dynamically interconnected, and self-cleansing. The flow of the river gives the river life and continuum.

Flow in life is the possibility and the value of the moments of people meeting by chance, people who are hungry and curious to see one another and to talk and be heard and to have the possibility of relationship. The mechanical thermodynamic religious system contrives and controls people's moment with God by unnaturally elevating the perceived legitimate moment with Him. The vicarious desires of people to gather and meet are seen as an abstraction of religious management, and one that needs to be controlled within the confines of its divisions.

It is well known that in most services you can predict ahead of time what will take place, at least the style and the order. The drama of the weekly ritual binds us together emotionally. Ritual mimics spiritual and relational flow. It helps orchestrate the wild invisible into a rational, controlled moment. It has to do with our concept of flow and the context of time. In ritual there is an attempt at creating the eternal, by replicating the event over and over, and also by our dread fear of the unknown. When this happens, we lose track of the reality that surrounds our real lives. We are disconnected from spiritual reality. We move down the sure and well regulated river of contemporary good, while the ancient, robust river of life is relegated into myth.

In the undammed river, the fish, the forests, the animals, and the ocean, everything reached the bountiful limits of beauty, size and reproductivity. Everything became gloriously mature. Looking at flow in the river as a benchmark for life, it seems to follow that real spiritual flow connects people to maturity - by maturing we are able to apprehend the cycles of time. There are times when the flow of life protects us and there are other times when it challenges us and purifies us, making us wise and strong. The flow of the river, in time, also represents death, and the intimacy of death, such as the salmon going upstream to spawn and then die. This provides the nutrients of decay and they are spread throughout the river. Because of the difficulty of apprehending meaning for our lives, the end result, death, has no meaning either. This is evidenced by the way we treat our elderly, and the way we have isolated the experience of death. It is rare that people die at home surrounded by friends and family. It usually happens in hospitals and/or old folks homes, after we've exhausted all efforts to prolong life. A life robbed of meaning meets death terrified.

The variations in the flow act like a clock. The clock signals moments of transition into new levels of maturity and responsibility, naturally and individually. So if we stop time spiritually and allow our lives to be ritualized, we don't really mature, we just grow physically. The dynamic signals of life are ignored and not paid attention to because we are too busy with information. We don't understand experience and intuition and the leading of God. The institutional church, for the most part, stops the great ordinary flow of spiritual life and substitutes an endless flow of information. We are told in these settings - we common men and women, in the full course of life, living, working, procreating, supporting, and loving - that we lack the necessary skills to truly live. The problems we face as people are personal problems that can only be solved by the information received in institutional settings delivered by experts.

In many ways it is like the problems the salmon face in the mechanical river system. For all their noble efforts on the regulated river, the management has done everything possible for the salmon and yet, the salmon are still in decline. The fault must lie elsewhere for this decline. Somehow we have transposed our hope to the management to restore life.

The natural river was not governed by a clock. The timing of the river gave meaning to everything in it. Like the water, the seasons flowed into one another. There were few abrupt elements in river time. Their composite of flow and seasons allowed for growth and in time, maturity for the salmon and everything else in the river. Maturity knows movement in the moment that it is designed for. Being birthed upstream in time, going downstream in time, going back upstream in time, and finally dying properly, fulfilled and complete. Likewise, it is important that we fulfill our passage in the seasons indicated by the flow.

Take the flow away and you break the heart of the river. Conception is cut off, and so there is no longer regeneration. Passage is interrupted. Meaning is robbed. Salmon can repopulate as well as the beaver, but if you steal the flow the river dies.

My father sensed the urge to extend the blessing of God toward his own sons. It was a confirmation of the fact that he was a man of God and he wanted us touched by the God he served. It was my first encounter with the battle of spiritual legitimacy, not so much the freedom of religion. It was the natural expression of a man's spiritual impulses in a season in the life of his family. It was the headwaters of faith for me and my brothers.

They say the river of life flows from the throne of God but that is in the eternal realm. For us there was something tangible where this stuff of faith began and flowed secretly through the low places, like our kitchen that evening; a place where we stuck our feet in and heard the water passing, murmuring and making soothing noises. The sounds you sleep to; sounds that drift past your ears and into your mind and connect with the manifold rhythms of the life around you.

It was a small attempt, this blessing business, but it stuck out against the years of dull routine ritual. I imagine it was a big deal to my father that night, marshaling his own ideas about the blessings of God and how they are transmitted. The ceremony, simple but profound, was over quickly. There were no visions, no trumpets, no emotional tremors and no angels. But from that time on the eight of us lived in relative peace on that farm. None of us were ever seriously hurt and we were rarely sick. Every seed that touched the soil in our garden grew. The old maple trees gave plenty of sap, and two of my youngest brothers were born there. That simple moment has never left me.

On reflection over time it has stood out as an important moment of my life. Here was a man, being a conduit for the blessing of God to his sons. It was authentic, precise and alone, in the face of all that organization, history and ceremony. It was a memorable event, to think that God would visit my father in his kitchen, breaching that great religious agency in Rome, to bless this little retinue. It was my first encounter with authentic faith without ceremony, in the headwaters of my life - the sound of flowing water.

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