A HISTORY OF RELIGION IN 5 OBJECTSBringing the Spiritual to Its Senses

S. B r e n t P l a t e

B e a c o n P r e s sBoston

Beacon Press 2014

Beacon PressBoston, Massachusettswww.beacon.org

Beacon Press booksare published under the auspices ofthe Unitarian Universalist Association of Congregations.

2014 by S. Brent Plate

All rights reservedPrinted in the United States of America

17 16 15 14 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is printed on acid-free paper that meets the uncoated paper ANSI/NISO specifications for permanence as revised in 1992.

Text design by Wilsted & Taylor Publishing Services

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Plate, S. Brent. A history of religion in 5 objects : bringing the spiritual to its senses / S. Brent Plate. pages cm ISBN 978-0-8070-3311-1 (hardback) 1. Religion and culture. 2. Senses and sensationReligious aspects. 3. ReligionHistory. I. Title. II. Title: History of religion in five and a half objects. BL65.C8P52 2014 203'.7dc23 2013039786

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STONES

I had to forget my idea of nature and learn again that stone is hard and in so doing found that it is also soft. . . . I am no longer content to simply make objects; instead of placing works upon a stone, I am drawn to the stone itself. I want to explore the space within and around the stone through a touch that is a brief moment in its life. A long resting stone is not an object in the landscape but a deeply ingrained witness to time and a focus of energy for its surroundings.

Andy Goldsworthy, Stone

Stones are set, cut, clutched, chiseled, and hurled. They ride in our pockets for luck on journeys or climb into our boots, turning travels into travails. Five small ones and a sling can take down a giant, while one alone might kill two birds. They are fi ngered for protection, worn as rings and necklaces, studied for scientifi c discovery, used as a tool in capital punishment, and seen as sites of supernatural power. If all that sounds too grand, we might just put them in a box, call them our pet and sell them by the millions.*

* Originally sold in 1975, Pet Rocks made their creator, Gary Dahl, a million-aire within a few months. A new release hit the market as I was writing this book.

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Stones solicit attention, usually subtly, almost inaudibly. Among the vast number of stones, rocks, pebbles, and gravel on the planet earth and beyond, a handful are occasionally selected, unearthed, transported, and repurposed for sacred means, be-coming talismans, amulets, altars, or memorials. Stones can be manifestations of a divine force, provoking people to pilgrimage over hundreds, even thousands, of miles to bask in their pres-ence. Others are ritual objects, helping to keep ceremonies cen-tered and flowing smoothly. Some offer curative powers when touched, healing various maladies. Still others survive as mark-ers of special events from ages past, inviting people to engage memories in a present, physical form. They can mark space in the form of boundary markers, delineating mundane distances as well as precincts of sacred sites, while specially set stones symbolize microcosmic events like fertility and macrocosmic occurrences like the rhythm of the stars and planets in the sky. Reaching back through time, they are mediums for ancestors long gone. In each case, stones are objects sensed, felt with fin-gertips, seen with the eyes, and felt deeply within. Stones show us the way.

This chapter tells the story of stones large and small, ancient and recent, white and black, striated and marbled, smooth and rough that have found their way into personal and communal sacred settings, engaging the sensual human body. Somehow, in spite of their assumed nature as hard, cold, heavy, deaf, dumb, blind, and unmoving, humans have taken a shine to stones. Stones confront us with object lessons in permanence and change, protection and vulnerability, the stability of home and the instability of the journey, and ultimately, the transitions between life and death. Such ambiguities allow insights into the power of religious traditions, institutions, beliefs, and practices.

Three stones. Three faiths. Situated at the zero point of the Abrahamic, monotheistic religions known as Judaism, Chris-

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Stones 29

tation of good fortune, returning the stone the following year with interest. The ritual is based on the activities of the origi-nal shepherdess whose vision of the Virgin Mary told her to take a stone home with her. When she did, it turned to silver, thus providing sustenance for her poor family. Meanwhile in Ireland, from the time of the Protestant Reformation until today, Mass rocks have indicated hidden, outdoor spaces in which it was relatively safe to meet for Catholic Mass in a Protestant-infused society. These stones serve as ports of call and altars on which priests can conduct Mass. These stones now, well after direct threat, continue to summon people to them, and thousands of Christians every year make pilgrimage to the sites.

Stones help hold certain spaces as sacred, literally and figu-ratively weighing them down. Stones are significant in part be-cause of their relatively stable positions within space. Solomons, Jesuss, and Muhammads physical bodies have left the earth, but millennia later we can feel the same stones they felt. Like re-ligion itself, the stones lessons are situated between quests and aims, questions and answers. The pilgrim goes to the stones in hopes of healing or a new chance in life or to set distance from past events. Stones help show the way, imperceptibly urging us onward, even as they become resolutely situated at the end of the way: they are there waiting at the journeys terminus.

Perhaps it is the ubiquity of stones in human lifetheir pure pragmatic nature, their durability and simultaneous malleabil-itythat has prompted us to bestow certain stones with spiri-tual power, beyond their use as a weapon or roadside marker. As with bread, incense, crosses, and drums, the sometimes-sacred status of stones begins with the substances simplicity and per-vasiveness across cultures. This is a curious thing about sacred objects: the type of object is commonpieces of bread, sticks that burn, a rockwhile some specimens of the type are taken to be holy. Or, more specifically, the common objects become

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30 A History of Religion in 5 Objects

holy when placed within a unique time and place, and humans find power within them.

In the early twentieth century, French sociologist Emile Durkheim categorized religious life and thought as involving a series of distinctions between the sacred and the profane. While anything can be sacred, Durkheim suggests, the sanctity of a thing is due to the collective sentiment of which it is the object. This is not to say all things are sacred, but that anything can be. As with real estate, its all location, location, location. The philosopher Nelson Goodman says something similar: Stones are normally no work of art while in the driveway, but may be so when on display in an art museum. What matters is the location of an object within a particular social setting, the ways it is meaningful to groups of people for specific purposes. In many times and places around the world, groups of humans have come to collectively believe that this stone, this one right here in front of us, is given by the gods, is provided as a token, and should be set up as a centerpiece in a garden, an altar, or a device for the keeping of collective memories. While I tend to agree with the social dimensions of Durkheims analysis, objects can also gain a kind of sacred power within more individualized settings and encounters.

The top of my seven-year-old daughters dresser contains one plastic watch given to her by a favorite aunt, one Captain Jack Sparrow Lego figure, one wooden die from a board game, and a baseball-sized stone. Like any good altar, its a hodgepodge of ingredients that heeds nothing to consistency in style, material, or form. Instead, its a collection of materials brought together in a single location and unified through the intentions (however unconscious) of a collector, such as my daughter. The objects are set there, and not down in her toy box or left under the bed, because they stand out from her other toys and games. The stone in the collection was found on the beach in San Diego on the last day we vacationed there a few years ago. My daughter had been

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having a good time that day, splashing through the shallows, chasing seagulls, digging tunnels in the sand, and searching for shells and stones. At the end of the day she didnt want to leave, and it being our last day of holiday, she somehow, almost in-stinctively, had this notion that she needed to bring something with her. If she couldnt stay, then part of that environment couldmustcome along. My reasoned pleas about it being too big, too heavy, too something to fit into baggage on the air-plane back to New York amounted to little; its current situation in her room evidences its bicoastal journey.

Individuals as well as communities gather objects, place them in one location, and allow those objects to hold a significant, sacred place in their lives. Makes no difference whether these objects belong together in accord with some ancient manual of myths and rituals or aesthetic school of thought, nor has it ever mattered much. An online search for contemporary im-ages of personal altars reveals an arresting array of the ways people continue to bring objects, human-made as well as natu-rally found, into a new space, repurposing the profane for sa-cred ends. Altars reflect personal tastes, even as the social mores and cultural products of the individuals environment are pro-foundly influential. While altars can include ephemeral objects, they continually, the world over, incorporate solid substances, things that will last and remind the devotee of places and times and people long gone. And, I suspect, many who are reading this have at one time pocketed a stone and carried it from its original setting to a special shelf, desk, or table, often across great distances.

The taking of stones from certain locations may seem to be a benign activity, but it is not always. Sometimes it is theft, as a controversy in Central Australia shows. Again, location mat-ters. The iconic natural landmark called Uluru (Ayers Rock) is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and part of the Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park, which sees a half-million tourists each year. The

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rock formation itself is considered sacred by the Anangu peo-ple, who esteem it in their mythologies, and the monolith has long been a place for ritual performance. Because it is under-stood as a sacred site, full of power, tourists have made a habit of taking sand or stones from the park, illegally bringing them back home with them, hoping to garner some blessing from the place. In 1998 a German-based company even sold Uluru stones for hundreds of dollars, calling the stones children of Uluru, until a group of Anangu stated their objections and the company ceased the selling. Another report indicates that a genuine piece of Ayers Rock was advertised on eBay in 2005, with a bid starting at fifty US dollars. In the midst of these stone thefts, curious reports have emerged, as many who have taken them have complained about bad luck and misfor-tune after returning home: marriage troubles, family illnesses, even deaths. So now over the past two decades, the stones have been consistently returned by post to the Australian National Park from all over the world. Some people write accompanying letters, apologizing for taking the sacred objects. Others seem to believe that returning the rocks will reverse their bad fortune. The returned objects have become known in the park as sorry rocks.

Contrary to the sorry rocks of Uluru, the stone on display in my daughters room is just a chunk off some bulkhead. It is not beautiful, nor is it sacred by any traditional definition. But it has a heft to it; it is solid, like it can carry the weight of memories of a place and time across a continent. I should per-haps be forgiven in extending the definition of stone to include a hunk of rough, graveled concrete found on a beach and winding up on my daughters stack of drawers. Yet if gravel-concrete is made by human means, compressing various types of mined and milled rock together, rock itself is natures equivalent. All rock, whether sedimentary, igneous, or metamorphic, is formed from other types of rock, forced together by means volcanic,

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geologic, and catastrophic. As solid and unchanging as natural rock seems, it is itself in a constant state of flux.

The point is to suggest that stones are themselves on a jour-ney, even when they seem stable. They are formed, reformed, and transformed over long periods. They are washed smooth by a river through the years, while our fingertips feel erosions pol-ished results. We might even be provoked from time to time to stop and contemplate the paradoxical effects of as supple a sub-stance as water on the solid stuff of stone. Or we might gaze at a banded stone, the beauty of a rainbow of colors striped together, and be astonished by the tremendous geological forces neces-sary to press various minerals together in so permanent a way.

The stones of Jerusalem and Mecca, Uluru and my daughters dresser, each demonstrate one key aspect of the appeal of stones: the stones voyage is felt and seen by our sensual bodies. The stones journey meets the human journey, provoking memories, contemplation, a respect for the immense energies at work in the universe, all contained in a small object that can be tossed aside, skipped across the surface of still water with an ever so supple wrist, set up along the trail, used as a tool, or placed in an altar setting. As poet William Blake once famously suggested, To see a world in a grain of sand / And a heaven in a wild flower / Hold infinity in the palm of your hand / And eternity in an hour. In such sensual experiences with objects the macro-cosmic wonders of the world connect to the microcosmos that is our sensing body. The journey of one body is mirrored in the body of the other.

The Italian poet Petrarch once said, I do not know whence its origin, but I do know that innate desire to see new places and to change ones home. There is something truly pleasant, though demanding, about this curiosity for wandering through differ-ent regions. Petrarchs intuition about travel seems to have been proven correct through history, leading contemporary bi-

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Brent Rodriguez-Plate