NFL Religion & Stadia

It's probably a good thing the Vikings stadium will emerge on the edge of downtown.

While a family of four has to shell out a newborn king's ransom to attend an NFL service, imagine the cross to bear if they had to schlepp their hybrid to a soul-crushing suburb like Arden Hills.

I have come to accept that the new stadium will rise from the Metrodome rubble, but why in the name of shady real estate moguls did the Wilfs sign off on an HKS design that looks like a suburban mega-church?

This migratory-bird-killing glass clad pimple is already an oozing carbuncle on the cheek of Minneapolis.

"What is proposed is like a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much-loved and elegant friend."
— Prince Charles on a 1984 planned extension to the National Gallery.

But I suppose its fitting that NFL stadia are designed in the image of hideous mega-churches.

It seems the NFL is the new religion. Indeed the NFL is the rebound religion for those floundering flocks repelled and disgusted by some other reality-suspending paradigm they've outgrown.

Scandal-ridden as they are, the beloved Vikings are incrementally less scandalous than the morally bankrupt, financially challenged Archdiocese of St. Paul and Minneapolis.

We shall build our monument of faith and ye shall come. Thus spoketh the brethren of the Vikings front office.

In fall 2016 well-heeled Minnesotans will turn to the helmeted gods of the NFL to suspend reality for a few hours each Sunday and to worship a prolate spheroid pigskin even if its not inflated to the full 12.5 to 13.5 psi.

Mythology and the Psyche

 Joseph Campbell wrote in The Power of Myth:

“All religions are true, but none are literal.”

I am unsure what Campbell meant by the religions being true. I suspect he meant that religious beliefs are better understood in the context of understanding and appreciating the genesis of mythologies.

From Tlaloc the Aztec god of rain, fertility, and water, to the Ojibwa belief that the northern lights are an expression of the god Nanabozho's lasting love,

myths are an expression of humanity in all its existential hopes and fears.

Knowing a few of the myths of ancient cultures, and having begun to appreciate the cosmology of ancient peoples, has helped me place contemporary religious dogma into historic and psychological perspective.

Stories that endure to be woven into the fabric of cultural mythologies, however absurd in light of what we know from reasoned thought, the fossil record, and reproducible experiment and observation, have much to say about the totality of the human mind, conscious and unconscious.

All humans share the same doubts and fears. All humans feel the weight of mortality.

I suspect multiple versions of an existential narrative are as old as humanity. From that perspective, religious dogma seems slightly less appalling.

Mazel Tov, Incense & Burning Sage

Mazel tov!

Years ago I was a guest at a wedding at Temple Israel in Minneapolis. I saw the groom crush a glass with his right foot, and then I heard myself join the other guests shouting "Mazel tov!" It was a moving expression of humanity.

I remember the mysterious sweetness of burning incense from Sunday mornings as a boy attending mass at Our Lady of Peace in New Providence. I recall being mesmerized by the wafts of smoke emanating from a thurible swung around the altar. It was high theater meant to acknowledge the mystery.

In Boulder this past winter I joined the lighting of a bundle of sage as my family members gathered around a backyard fire pit flame that engulfed the boxes that once contained the remains of beloved ancestors. We talked about the Japanese ritual of passing around the disintegrated bones of the deceased with chopsticks. We invented our ceremony. The burning of the bundle of sage was extemporaneous. Our actions were heartfelt and as grounded as a sod house on the prairie. It never struck me that others might find it odd.

Burning sage.

Religiously speaking, I am filled with wonder. I am baffled by the endless mysteries. I revel in considering the questions, but have no answers.

I find dogma in all religions to be toxic. But I understand that religion is born from deep yearning - the same deep yearning I share with the rest of humanity.

I appreciate the beauty of ritual. I acknowledge the capacity of ritual to connect us with our humanness. But I denounce the small-minded tendency to presume my rituals, the ones I practice, are more meaningful, or less absurd, than the next person's rituals.

No more meaningful. No more absurd.

Listening to friends at a social gathering deride the rituals of an unconventional wedding was disappointing. I know little of the rituals of this particular religion, but as they were described, it struck me that what others felt comfortable snickering about, I would have likely experienced as heart-felt, joyful, or profound.

Open-mindedness is a discipline that requires practice. The catty snickering over someone else’s marital rites reminded me that to practice open-mindedness is not unlike the discipline of daily exercise. It reminded me to support people making connections through the sometimes awkward practice of ritual. And it reminded me to approach the rituals enjoyed by others with beginner's mind.

Will Catholicism Implode on Hatred?

A talking head for the Twin Cities archdiocese said Catholics should expect to be denied holy communion if they're wearing rainbow buttons or ribbons in of support gays and lesbians. WTF?

How can Catholicism remain relevant to anyone when its leaders are ignorant, bigoted, sexually-repressed psychopaths?

Can the Catholic church survive its own venomous animosity toward its homosexual brethren?

Believe those who seek the truth. Doubt those who find it.
~Derek Sivers

Archdiocese: Communion too sacred to be used as protest

by Madeleine Baran, MPR

October 6, 2010

St. Paul, Minn. — A spokesman for the Twin Cities archdiocese said Tuesday that Catholics should expect to be denied communion if they are wearing rainbow buttons or ribbons at church to support gays and lesbians.

Full article

If the threat of clergy playing pocket pool with altar boys doesn't repel Catholics, surely this small-minded animus directed from the archdiocese toward the rainbow wing of "god's" children will.

Shoreline of Wonder

Mythologist Joseph Campbell (1904 – 1987) said all great myths, all ancient and archetypal stories, have to be re-generated with each passing generation.

Journalist Bill Moyers mused to Star Wars creator George Lucas, "You are taking these old stories and putting them into the most modern of idioms, the cinema." Moyers asked Lucas

Are you conscious of doing that? Or are you just setting out to make a good action-movie adventure?

Lucas said

With Star Wars I consciously set about to re-create myths and the classic mythological motifs.

Myths and religions react to (and are born from) the same reality. Myths and religions convey the same messages. Stories differ across cultures and across time because different languages were needed and because the stories emanated from different contextual paradigms.

Yet when distilled, these stories express the same hopes and fears about how one lives in this world.

So we have these unmistakable commonalities - archetypal stories - that cross-cut time and cross-cut cultures. This might be explained if we could follow a red thread to a common source - a single god or creator.

Or these commonalities might have evolved from an independent aggregation of existential thought by diverse peoples bridging time and cultures.


Common myths emerge from common human experience. Common myths address thoughts and existential fears from the same human psyche connected with a transcendent reality.

This is my bias, but it can't be proved.

Religious icons are a curious expression of this. It is also curious that cultures pray to and appeal to these objects - objects that, somewhat ironically, were carved, cast, or painted by human hands.

Today's most ubiquitous religious icon is the double-door refrigerator. Don't laugh. The contemporary refrigerator has the gravitas of a travertine marble statue in a Renaissance cathedral. The ice box is like an alabaster figurine overlooking the tranquil nave where the fearful and spiritually unfulfilled worship, pray to, and beseech a higher power -- in our case the higher power is a TV set, but you get the point.

Our refrigerators are often festooned with pithy existential quotes on magnets. I found a quote on a refrigerator magnet on a revolving display rack at St. Paul Corner Drug that said

As the island of knowledge grows, so does the shoreline of wonder

I have been unable to attribute this quote to an author, but I did find a variation where the word wonder is replaced with the unknown. (All of the world's philosophy majors must have ended up with low-paying gigs word-smithing refrigerator magnets or penning up the life-cycle lamentations schlubs like you and I can't conjure up for a sympathy card).

I like the shoreline of wonder quote because, among other reasons, I have considered the concept of measuring the circumference of an island (or a lake), then marveling at the notion that the length goes to infinity as one measures in finer and finer detail (e.g., the molecular level). By extension, the island of knowledge and the shoreline of wonder are both infinite (depending on the scale of the topological assessment and one's point of view).

Many of us - most notably me - find hollow comfort in apparent truisms like this. Truisms on refrigerator magnets have become part of the mythology that brings comfort to our shared existence.

It's crazy, it's absurd, but it's that shoreline of wonder that keeps me bounding out of bed each morning. Depending on how you look at it, life can be addictive.