OK, dear reader, (and future members!), a disclosure at the outset: the title of this blog piece? Yeah, it’s a ruse. And here’s why.
We don’t really care too much about what you believe. We care more what you love.
Belief has enjoyed a long run in Western culture as a prominent, if not paramount, feature of spiritual life. Often piously exalted as the sin qua non of faith or spirituality, “belief” itself amounts to little more than some persistent thought loop, engrained habitually in your head—a kind of culturally conditioned neural pathway. “Shamanism” at the MLP, by contrast, is less a communal dogma and more a shared practice, or even devotion: a devotion to reverencing the Sacred, which here on the Grand Mesa is especially, even intoxicatingly, evident in the wild beauty of the natural world.
On second thought, however, we might care what you believe, but only if we exit the modern world altogether.
Before belief came to mean what it commonly does today—an agreement or identification with some (often dubious) intellectual proposition—the old Middle English words bileve or bileven, related to the Latin libido, had meanings along the lines of “love, loyalty, commitment; to prize, to value, to hold dear.” When “belief” first appears in the King James Bible, too, it was a translation from the Latin credo, itself related to cor do: “I give my heart.”
This credo, in fact, is itself a translation of the Greek pistis: meaning “trust; commitment; loyalty; engagement.”
So, after our etymological time-traveling, I’ll reverse my position and say that we most emphatically care what you “believe”: we care to know if you are willing to give your heart in loving, loyal, trusting, engaged commitment to the sacred depths of the land and life of the Grand Mesa. If so, bring your dreams, skills, foibles and, most of all, your faithful “pistis” to western Colorado and talk to us about membership soon!
(Thanks to writer Karen Armstrong for her inquiries into the history of “belief.”)