On my way to Yosemite I stopped for a couple of hours in Mariposa, a foothill, gold country town that serves as the “Gateway” to Yosemite via Highway 140, the all-weather highway. In one way Mariposa reminded me of the towns in the Sacramento Valley: Christianity was pretty much the only religious choice. In another way it was radically different. Whereas in the valley art on public display was hard to find, it was all over Mariposa.

The reason is not hard to find. One of nature’s monumental places is just up the road, and art and nature have been American partners since the Hudson River School. A few blogs back I dove into the pool of “nature and religion in America,” using John Muir as a springboard. Mariposa says, “Dive deeper,” down where the currents of nature, religion and art converge.

With rare exceptions the paintings and photographs hanging on the walls of Mariposa’s galleries are not obviously religious. But neither, by and large, are the paintings of the Hudson River School or the American Luminists. It’s how Yosemite monuments are painted, the style. In fact, the names Americans bestowed on some of those places pretty well make the case on their own. El Capitan is a god, a set of big rocks is a Cathedral, and trees plus islands plus cascades equal Happy Isles.

Artists of the American landscape have revised the standard version of Muir. The tertium quid between humans in a fallen world seeking redemption is not Nature alone, in and of itself, it’s Imagination at play with Nature.

The Yosemite Renaissance 2009 show is Exhibit A.

In January, on my way back from a circumnavigation of Clear Lake, I stopped in Williams and Arbuckle, Dunnigan, Zamora, and Yolo, all towns along Interstate 5 south of Williams before Woodland. In February I drove past Williams and walked the downtowns and drove the residential streets of Willows, Orland, and Corning along I-5, as well as of Colusa, about 10 miles off the Interstate. That’s most of the towns in the Sacramento Valley.

It looked as if the residents of the Valley have one religious option: Christianity. Under that tent were a variety of choices, ranging, as one would guess, from Roman Catholicism through mainline Protestantism to Pentecostal Protestantism. I saw no evidence of Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or even of the New Age, although, of course, I did not cover every street in every town. Each town had beauty salons, in fact, a large number of them, but their interest was exclusively physical. Each town had chiropracters, but they were doctors of the body only, no advertised claims for straightening the mind or the self. Each town had plenty of markets, but they just sold ordinary groceries.

In the Sacramento Valley it appeared that the domains of churches and stores hardly overlapped. Soul here, things there. This is not surprising, given Christianity’s dualism. And the imagination? Art was not out in the public. That is what surprised me the most.

Clear Lake and the Sacramento Valley are physically adjacent. Only a low mountain ridge separates the two basins. Their cultures are as separate as the New America is from the Old.

At lunch at the House of Nanking (best Chinese food I’ve eaten) on Kearny Street in San Francisco, I asked Beth Banks, the Unitarian Universalist minister in Davis, if, at any time in her life, she felt “free” to choose her religious beliefs. Was there a time when she felt unshackled from the past, when she felt she could continue to  affirm her past beliefs or move on to another set?

“Yes,” she replied, “and I didn’t feel any external constraints, from government, or the culture, or my parents.”

“OK,” I continued, “I am not so interested in what you chose to believe as I am in what factors were decisive in the process of choosing.”

“Well, it was a matter of what felt right to body and intellect.”

“That you are a UU minister means that you did not settle on one way, one religion, as the right one.”

“Yes, empathy may be the key here …

“And empathy is mind-body …”

“… I have always had such empathy for other people that it was impossible for me to believe that one of them, or one group of them, were right and the others wrong.”

Friday I drove the Pilgrim to Yosemite Valley for the opening of the 2009 Yosemite Renaissance Art Exhibit. I stayed overnight in Upper Pines Campground. The air was clear and cold, the stars many orders of magnitude brighter than in Davis. It was freaky how straight Taurus looked me in the eye while Orion strode along by his side.

On my walk from the campground to the Museum, I decided to take a short detour by the Chapel. It is all that remains of what used to be an entire village. John Muir was very much against building the chapel. According to him, Yosemite Valley was already a church, why put a dinky human-made structure inside a glorious cathedral of nature.

Christianity is a trinitarian-squared religion. There is the triangle in heaven (Father, Son, and Holy Ghost), and there is the three-membered straight line from heaven to earth. God the Father is in heaven, Humans are on Earth. This line was broken but now has been repaired by an Intermediary, Jesus the Christ or God the Son, who inhabits both heaven and earth.

Muir was a straight line trinitarian all of his life, but at some point he made a key substitution. He put Nature into the game as the Intermediary and took God the Son out. While he was not the first to make this substitution, he was the most explicit about it and got the most press. So, following Muir, we have God-Nature-Humans.

Some in the American Nature Movement went a step farther and replaced God the Father with Nature-at-Large and made Local Nature the Intermediary between Humans and Cosmos. Some claim that Muir himself also made this move.

The set of religions that come under the umbrella of New Age are in the tradition of Muir, and of Emerson and Thoreau, who preceded him and influenced him. Whether there is a historical line of descent from American Transcendentalists through Muir to the New Age, I don’t know enough to say. They are all getting their bearings from the same geometric map of the world, the one that shows how Big Nature, Local Nature, and Humans are connected.

New Agers make one additional move that does not change the map but does alter the territory. They take Local Nature and focus it down to the Human Body. The best way, they say, to harmonize with Universe is to promote bodily harmony. And so, you have Bellezza and Dr. Lesko’s Gallery.

In an antique store in the town of Clearlake on Clear Lake in Lake County, I saw an amazing thing: there in the store window, backed by a purple-flowered lamp and sitting in a ceramic planter, was a Buddhist pieta. Mary was not holding Jesus. Buddha was holding Mary.

This was doubtless an indelible sign of the growth and spread of an American hedge fund. Some Americans had begun to hedge their bets. I don’t think they thought, perhaps Christianity is wrong and Buddism right. Rather they imagined Christianity in the embrace of some more comprehensive religion, a religion symbolized by the Buddha.

Since this economic downturn began in late 2007, I have eagerly read articles on the economy in the Economist, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, and the New Yorker. As far as I can ascertain, nobody disagrees with the following statement: to get returns on your investment, you must take risks; the greater the risks the greater the potential gains and the greater the potential losses. With this axiom in mind, let’s take another look at Pascal’s wager. He said, “You take the least risk if you believe in God.” But we know that in a free market, you should always take big risks if you want big bonuses. We also know that American capitalism and American religion operate by the same fundamental rules. Therefore, I say, ” The more life-profit you seek the more you should be an atheist.” As it says in the Bible, What does it profit humans to hide their cash in a mattress and be unprepared when the accountant knocks?

Of course, of course, great loss is not something you should forget about. But since when did timidity ever stop an able-bodied American broker?

When I was in Lake County last month, I stopped at Our Lady of the Lake Roman Catholic Church near the town of Cobb on the side of Cobb Mountain. The caretaker said, “The same priest serves us and the parishioners down in Middletown. But down there they meet in a quonset hut and bring out folding chairs. Up here are pews and a steeple. We have a real church.”

The caretaker’s comment raises some profound questions. Most fundamentally, the relation between what appears to be going on and what really is going on. No one has ever put it better than Plato in his allegory of the cave. Consider the two photographs that accompany this blog. One is the church whose caretaker thought it was real. The other is of a Victory Celebration center of the Pentecostal Church of God. No pews and no steeple. The Church of God congregation meets in a home. Is, therefore, what takes place there only the appearance of religion?

Let’s take a leap–to Paul Krugman’s column in the NY Times for February 16. The first two paragraphs read as follows:

“By now everyone knows the sad tale of Bernard Madoff’s duped investors. They looked at their statements and thought they were rich. But then, one day, they discovered to their horrow that their supposed wealth was a figment of someone else’s imagination.

Unfortunately, that’s a pretty good metaphor for what happened to America as a whole in the first decade of the 21st century.”

Bernie Madoff raises no fundamental questions. We all know how humans sometimes distort appearances in order to rob. But what if the economy itself is an appearance? What if religion itself is an appearance? Bernie Madoff is easy because he can be found out. We can compare what he did to what he should have been doing. What he should have been doing is knowable. Roman Catholic congregants erected a building, put a steeple on top and pews within. In so doing were they constructing not a church but a Ponzi scheme? Or, less cosmicly put, Our Lady of the Lake is a real church but Victory Celebration is only the appearance thereof? To answer either question we would have to know what is not-knowable-by-humans this side of death, and what is perhaps not-knowable-by-humans ever. And so we are back at risk, taking a risk, based on probability, like investing in the market.

Jeannette, Beth Banks, minister of the Davis Unitarian Universalist Church, and I took Amtrak and BART into San Francisco yesterday, Friday the 13th of February. We got off BART at Powell Street and walked up Stockton following a guided walk that the SF Chronicle published. Our main destination was the Chinese Historical Society, where we intended to buy a book on the architecture of Chinatown. We turned west on Clay, but before we could get to the Historical Society I got pulled into the kind of place I look for. I saw art, chiropracty, Kung Fu, and yoga, all souped up. Almost before I could get my camera out, the artist-doctor-entrepreneur Dr. Andrew Lesko, D.C. opened the door and invited me in. He was about 50, trim, energetic, short black hair, and turtleneck sweater. He spent 20 years in a chiro-practice, then added painting and sculpture, and later yoga. He painted, in more or less realistic fashion, ballerinas, friends, himself, even color renditions of black and white photographs from the Chinese Historical Society just up the street.

Inside the store/office/studio a large muscular man jammed his leg into the small of the back of an old man and twisted his arms behind his back, to the sound of groans that said, Ah for the pleasure of pain! A man in color tried to follow step for step the b&w attired Kung Fu instructor. Paintings hung in every available space on every available wall.  The yoga instructor, Donovan Hicks, whom I didn’t meet, gave his instructions in a small room next door, which was also filled with paintings to capacity. Dr. Lesko had to get the key to the Yoga studio from another man, who was perhaps Mr. Hicks himself.

Here was exhibitable evidence that some humans practice fourfold interdependence.

Consider a building in Lakeport, California, that used to be a church and is now a hotel. A woman came out of it and said to me, “I thought you were giving me a ticket.”
“No, I am writing in my journal. I came to see what kind of church this is, and it is not.”
“I know the man who owns it. He is now renting it out as a vacation rental. There is a huge space inside.”
I thought but did not say, “I take it his name is not Jesus.” It couldn’t be, of course, because Jesus offers vacations in heavenly rooms while this man offers earthy vacations in a used-to-be church.

But maybe his name is, in effect, Jesus. When this building was a consecrated church, it did the souls of its parishioners some good. Let’s tune out the realist radio in our heads and go ahead and say, Yes, of course. Now that it is a hotel, it surely does its guests mental-physical good. If the all the human parts are interdependent, well, you see where I am going. Bluntly put, when this building was deconsecrated, did anything important change?

I say, No, it didn’t, and you say, yes, but you arrive at that conclusion because of your too-indebted-to-Blake theory. You’re no better than “the circle is perfect, so earth’s orbit must be circular,” or “God doesn’t play dice with the universe, so there is something wrong with quantum mechanics,” or “people make rational financial decisions, so the market must be efficient.”

I say, Well, you’ve got a good point. Who holds the trump card, ontology or epistemology? What do you think the odds are that you are right and I’m wrong?

Speaking of religion and business, or the soul of buying, consider two altars. One is at a Roman Catholic Mission and the other at an expresso cafe. There are differences. One has a kneeling bench, the other a table to sit at. One has an image of saints, at the other the maker of the perfect cup of expresso has to be imagined. Imaged–imagined. These differences are minimal. What’s really important, WORSHIP, is the same. My point is not what you are thinking: “What we really worship is our religion. Since Americans are consumers, commerce is our religion.” While this may be true, it’s qld, obvious stuff. No, what I am talking about indulgences. I note that the Roman Catholic Church is again selling indulgences. And drinking a latte accompanied by a scone is surely an indulgence. Humans go about business, art, and religion in a ways that hint at one, deep underlying pattern. The distinctions we make between them look like superficial cuts. Maybe underneath they are all activities of the Imagination. More evidence that Blake’s Fourfold way of seeing is 20-20 Vison.