Heroes/Heroines & Metanarratives

The other day in my wanderings I happened to finally walk inside the Boston Public Library to which I was amazed at the amount of art in there. Really, if you have not been there you should go. From the staircase adorned with lion statues dedicated to Civil War veterans while along the walls is painted grand murals done by Puvis de Chavannes of Virgil, and Homeric characters that are absolutely staggering. There are many more rooms to explore and as you ascend higher you find on the second floor a room with a mediaeval hero narrative adorning the walls, "The Quest for the Holy Grail". It's a narrative told without words, only in pictures where the viewer can piece together the story in their own way, or by knowing the Arthurian narrative. Either way the telling of it in the zoetrope broken down into several thoughtfully illustrated scenes. Where this narrative and the entrance staircase narrative collides is on the third floor where there is the Judeo-Christian mural by John Singer Sargent where you are faced with what the other art pieces evoke, a crisis of western religious faith. In each there is a presence of some supernatural being, some phenomenon of death and life, where we are led to believe that our lives are worth living, that we lend ourselves to some greater narrative and are in part, separate pieces of a collective soul. That we can do so much with our lives if we dare to notice the world and it's problems and set ourselves to the task of bringing it into a larger context.

This idea matched with the kind of religious crisis in America, where people are either too fundamental or too apathetic we lose the sense of collectiveness that has existed for thousands of years throughout human history. We lose touch with a basic human trait, that we are a community and that we are all interesting in our own ways.

As I continued wandering around thinking about how beautiful the art was and how the story was engaging I came across a quote on written on the wall but unfortunately I do not remember who said it or it exactly, but it went along the lines of coming to the library to find the heroes and heroines of our collective consciousness, and I thought that it was a marvelous way to describe what a library is and what it's function is in a society which has grown to be come more individualistic and segregated. What we have maintained as a species, as an American race is our consensus of what a hero is from fictional characters like Huck Finn or John Henry to real life heroes of Amelia Earhart and Abe Lincoln. Their stories can be found in the library, collected for the good of culture, so that we might be inspired to do something worthwhile with our lives, which perhaps is the function of religion.

I found myself enthralled with an interview in The Atlantic with author Robert Bellah about his new book Religion in Human Evolution which seemed to raise an interesting perspective on the idea of how religion has evolved and how it continues to evolve. It reminded me of a conversation I once had back in 2004 and I was talking in a dorm room with a girl about 2008 and the election and how I thought, "Wouldn't it be interesting to see a woman or an African-American run for president?" and then to see Hilary Clinton and Barak Obama in the race along with the media's favorite Alaskan. The talk was around the same time that the new Pope had been elected and how he was, supposedly going to be the last Pope in line with some prophecy. We are too consumed with prophecy and not enough on what we can do to help our fellow man. However, as time has passed since 2004 there's been a kind of new leniency with the Catholic Church, as though the were progressing with the world in a way that was in tune with the blinding fast speed of broadband internet, while other groups are working to revive some pre-Civil Rights America, some idea that going back is better than going forward.

We are not a lost generation. We can maintain some sense of what is morally right and morally wrong as a collective and perhaps if we believe that there is still some mystery left in the world, something undiscovered, some frontier that we can believe in something bigger than ourselves, which is what religion has always been, even if it is not overwhelmingly focused on an afterlife, which in no way does that even start to help us solve the problems in our world, like famine and war. Nothing is solved if all we ever thought about was where we'd go when we died. Because chances are our bodies will all end up lying somewhere without the ability to get up and dance or with eyes that cannot see the wonder of a sunrise.

As for what I took away from yesterday's lunch it was that I should be doing something good with my time and if it is by looking at some Winslow Homer illustrations that shows life in Boston at the turn of the century and how life is so similar to then as it is today if you look and notice it. That we are inhabiting this same space, working to preserve it and to innovate it with new ideas and then looking at a diorama of George Bellow's "Stag at Sharkey's" which is so primal and invigorating with pure brut and grit that it has inspired me to want to go to Cleveland, of all places, to stand near it. God, what world! And here I thought Boston was dead and it is just being born. Where Does Religion Come From? - The Atlantic