Faith Pondering

Brief Reminder

2011-11-17T11:23:00.002-05:00

I've been and continue to be too busy to blog, but this morning I received an email with a quotation attributed to Albert Einstein. I don't know if he actually said it (or many other of the famous Einstein quotes), but I think it's crucial to life and is, after all, the premise of my blogging. So, here it is:

"The important thing is not to stop questioning."
~ Albert Einstein

A Third Path

2011-08-31T11:44:00.002-04:00

This morning I read the following:

First of all, then, I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made for everyone, for kings and all who are in high positions, so that we may lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and dignity. (1Timothy 2:1-2 NRSV)

Context matters. All theology and proclamation are done within times and places of human life, which is the reason skeptics and wags have such an easy time finding apparent contradictions in the Bible. A passage such as that quoted above comes readily from a time when Christians were hoping to “lead a quiet and peaceable life” and not come under suspicion and persecution from the Roman Empire. There could be no thought as yet of Christian dominance within the political and economic spheres, and there persisted, no doubt, the belief that Christ would soon return to bring the struggles of the current age to an end so that peace, justice, and love would reign forever.

Rome, however, seems to have tended toward the attitude that “those who are not for us are against us,” and for a variety of reasons Christians became useful as scapegoats for certain emperors, especially Nero and Domitian. The biblical book of Revelation offers a view of and attitude toward the empire extremely different from those expressed in First Timothy and Romans chapter 13 when peace from the tyranny of the empire still seemed possible.

These days, in the United States, we hear continuously about political figures and Christian preachers of certain theological stripes calling for a takeover of the nation and society by Christians (those of their stripe, to be sure). In short, they want to have or pretend to have a theocracy – not just an established religion (which is forbidden by the United States Constitution) – but a religious establishment, meaning a reign of tyranny under right-wing Christianity.

Is there no third path? Must Christianity either keep quiet, offend no one, and try to lead an undisturbed life in pious seclusion or else seek dominion over the institutions of society? Where is the prophetic spirit in quietism? Where is the passion for love and justice which flows from the gospel and is the logical outpouring from Christian belief that God loves the world and all its people, has special regard for the plight of the poor and unpopular, and hates injustices?

The third path is the way of neither compliance nor dominion. It is not the duty of Christianity to undergird the aspirations and institutions of the powerful; neither is it the right of Christianity to take over and dominate the society and its institutions, destroying democracy by majority might. Christians have been sent to serve, not to control and dictate. But neither have we been sent to keep quiet so we can stay safe and comfortable while the current empires of wealth and power grind the majority of earth’s people into the dust and wreck the planet itself.

This third path is really the first one. Jesus sacrificed himself for others. The politicians abusing his name to call for Christian dominion seem eager to sacrifice others to their ambitions and ideologies. They preach contempt for any who do not fall into line behind their aspirations to power, which means they speak as the Roman Empire came to speak – as one who puts on the appearance of a lamb but speaks with the voice of a dragon (Revelation 13:11).

Christians need to resist all temptation to support calls for Christian takeover of the United States. We must not surrender democracy, which safeguards the rights of unpopular minorities, to theocracy which uses God’s name for the purposes of tyranny. We are sent to persuade, not dictate. We are called to serve, not subjugate, others. If we must sacrifice anyone, it must be ourselves and not others who stand in our road to power. Tyranny in the name of Jesus Christ is like rape in the name of love or cheating in the name of integrity.

We need to think deeply about the nature, means, and goals of the prophetic spirit and of discipleship. The end never justifies the means. Real faith seeks faithful means and leaves the outcomes to the grace of God. Christians need to rethink what it means to be Christian in societies we no longer dominate even culturally.

Survivor's Pride

2011-08-30T12:30:00.005-04:00

We’ve heard of “survivor’s guilt,” the pangs felt by people who have lived through horrors of war or natural disaster in which others, perhaps comrades, were killed. Hurricane Irene has brought us a recurrence of what I’m calling survivor’s pride, the kind that expresses itself as scorn for all the precautions and fears that preceded the storm. Survivor’s pride can be seen also in the chain emails about our wonderful childhoods in the best of all possible times when no one made us wear bike helmets or worried about where we were all day, and we shared from one coke bottle, drank from the hose, etc., etc., ad nauseam.

I’ve never been much moved by the nostalgia for the good old days when we could leave our doors unlocked and could go anywhere day or night without fear. Only by the quick thinking and immediate actions of my older sister was I spared being murdered at age four by a man trying to abduct her. No doubt, like Cedric in the Harry Potter novels, I would have been the “spare” who got killed. In what dangerous place were we? We were walking, ironically, along the top of “dead man’s hill,” on the grounds of my elementary school.

Was Hurricane Irene hyped by the television weather reporters? I would say it was, especially by the focus on the tornado warnings, but meteorologist Glenn “Hurricane” Schwartz did what I considered a fine job of putting those warnings into perspective and getting us back to the situation at hand, which was the hurricane.

Come Sunday afternoon, I was very thankful Irene had not been far worse in our area, but such thankfulness is always modified by the distress of those whose lives were disrupted or whose property was damaged or lost and, much more so, by the anguish of those who lost someone loved. That we stayed safe and did not even lose electrical power, that the church had just put a new roof on the manse in which we live, that we suffered no loss even of property – none of that eases the pain of those whose lives were changed by the hurricane. Yes, it could have been worse, much worse. For some, it was.

As we persist in our folly of cutting government spending to restore economic prosperity to the land – the economic equivalent of digging down deeper and deeper to get up out of a pit – we face the likelihood that in the future, our government will not be so well prepared to help the stricken and coordinate responses to natural disasters. Read here for Dana Milbank’s thoughts on this subject in the Washington Post.

What does survivor’s pride do for us? Does it make us feel strong? Superior? Does it feed our adolescent resistance to being told what to do for our own good? It seems quite popular these days with my Baby Boom generation as we look back and congratulate ourselves on our toughness and independence. Of course, we did take the polio vaccine (government interference?), and it is true that those who didn’t survive all those supposedly imaginary dangers of childhood are not doing chain emails from their perspective. But my sister thought fast and acted quickly. So I’m a survivor.

Are We Running the Wrong Way?

2011-05-07T09:41:00.006-04:00

Former opponents Diane Ravitch and Deborah Meier now write a blog together, both opposing No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, and the whole mess of business-driven educational "reforms" currently being inflicted upon our children and their teachers. In her latest post, Meier asks Ravitch questions about some "fact-lets" about education, and those contrasting educational reform in highly successful Finland with those in floundering America struck me as worth sharing.

Meier writes:

<< That Finland has consciously engaged in systematic reform now for less than 10 years, with amazing results. That suggests you can make rapid "revolutionary" change given ... what? A smaller geographic and more homogeneous population? For another—as you noted the other day—if a nation has a 2 percent child-poverty rate compared with the more than 20 percent we face. And I think that latter figure, Diane, is low.

The changes the Finns made, however, are exactly the opposite as those we are engaged in. Bizarrely so. Still I doubt if the presentation by Pasi Sahlberg of Finland's Ministry of Education at the Education Week conference this week converted many of the audience. Why not? What do you think?

The Finns start formal schooling later (at age 7) while we keep starting younger. They have no standardized tests; we keep adding more. They rely on teachers and local schools to design curriculum and assessment. They depend on getting teachers out of education schools and manage to recruit highly qualified teachers that way. They are 100 percent unionized. They have both a shorter instructional day and fewer school days a year. For students, that is. Teachers have lots of time, therefore, when they are "at work" for planning learning, preparing, reviewing, and meeting together and with families. >>

The blog, Bridging Differences, is here.

Delight in a Killing

2011-05-05T09:27:00.001-04:00

Have I any pleasure in the death of the wicked, says the Lord GOD,
and not rather that they should turn from their ways and live?
. . .
For I have no pleasure in the death of anyone, says the Lord GOD.
Turn, then, and live. ~Ezekiel 18:23,32 (NRSV)

I see that much is being written about celebrating the killing of the terrorist leader Osama bin Laden. The seriousness and solemn demeanor of President Barack Obama who declared justice done has been countered by the jubilation of some of our people declaring joyously that revenge has been achieved.

Throughout the history of humanity, revenge has been the unfaithful satisfaction of our pride and the manifestation of our estrangement in sin. Revenge supports the cycles of violence that terrorists seek. Osama bin Laden built his career as a terrorist upon shame’s desire to restore pride through revenge. To the extent he has succeeded in making us think as he did and take pride where he sought it in killing his enemies, he has won by re-creating us in his image and likeness. Our President has chosen a better path. No, Barack Obama is not a pacifist. He gave the order to find and kill Osama bin Laden, and that order has been fulfilled, but whatever satisfaction President Obama may have felt at the success of the mission (combined with relief that no Americans were killed), he has exhibited no jubilation, no delight in the killing.

It is one matter to be relieved that a terrorist leader is no longer at work and that the retributive form of justice has been done in his case where it seemed beyond human possibility that there was any credible hope for the better form of justice which is restorative. Osama bin Ladin was highly unlikely to have a change a heart. He was ruthless and relentless, and he certainly seems to have been thoroughly convinced of his rightness and so devoid of remorse for the lives he had taken and those he would joyfully have taken in the future had he not been stopped. His death is a relief to the world.

It is another matter to be jubilant about the killing of a human being, which is a further grief to God and to any people who once loved that person and had hopes he would grow into a far better man than he did. Osama bin Laden’s life was grievous to all who believe humanity is created in the image and likeness of God, who believe God has hopes for all of us and is grieved by what our evils do to us as well as to each other. His death ends his career in murder, for which only the fanatical who share his views can be sorry. But delight in revenge serves only to make us a little more like him and to carry on humanity's seemingly endless cycles of violence.

Does Torture Work? It Doesn't Matter

2011-05-04T12:17:00.003-04:00

Now that Osama bin Laden has been found and killed, people from the former administration of George W. Bush are claiming their methods of interrogation by torture (a word they avoid) worked and helped provide valuable information. People who know about effective interrogation are countering these claims, giving the impression that even if some valuable information was gained while water-boarding certain captives, that exception to the rule would fail to establish the value of torture because it has been demonstrated to be ineffective and other methods of interrogation produce better results.

While I’m thankful these experts in interrogation are speaking out to counter the self-defensive claims of former Bush administration people, the more profound matter is not that of effectiveness. Torture is evil, and evil cannot be justified by any claim to effectiveness. It seems we have yet to realize what we do when we command our young men and women to torture people, even the worst of our enemies. We break their souls – that is, their very selves. By “soul” I mean, not some immortal entity somehow encapsulated within mortal flesh, but the essential self of the person. In biblical and theological terms, the soul is the person in the deepest sense, the person created by God to have life that is responsive to God’s love and justice.

The person who tortures others must be broken by what s/he has done or become callous to it or come to enjoy it. Any of those three outcomes reveals a broken soul, although the first is probably the best of a horrible lot because the torturer is still able to suffer from the wrongness of what he or she is doing. Look at what happened to our own young people at Abu Ghraib. Look at how debased they became. Then, there is the horror of what torture does to its victims. Consider the Canadian man subjected to “extreme rendition” and broken by it.

A nation that makes torture a policy, an affirmed action to be carried out by its representatives in pursuit of any goal whatsoever, breaks its own national soul. Such a nation crosses over into radical evil and can no longer rightly claim any moral or other virtue for its national life.

The favorite appeal of the pro-torture people is to the ticking bomb scenario. What would you do if the only way you could prevent the bomb from exploding and killing hundreds or thousands of people was to get information from a person who was refusing to give it to you? Would you not resort to torture? The scenario is generally a ruse exploited to justify policies of torture to be put into routine practice when there is no ticking bomb whatsoever, but let’s take it seriously for a moment. Suppose one does go to the extreme in hope of saving many lives. Suppose one takes it upon himself or herself to torture the captive for the crucial information. Whether that extreme action succeeds or fails at preventing a mass killing, the person who tortures has decided the situation required the desperate move of breaking the law, in which case torture remains outside the law and the person accepts the consequences of having broken the law. If I decide the urgency of an extreme situation makes it necessary that I break so vital a law, am I not thereby deciding it is also necessary for me to accept the consequences? That’s a terrible decision to have to make, but in no way does it justify changing the law itself. The German pastor and theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer made the agonized decision to participate in the plot to assassinate Adolph Hitler, but he certainly did not lobby for worldwide acceptance of assassination as a policy.

If we decide that expediency in pursuit of our interests justifies all actions we believe might prove effective, then we have decided, consciously or unconsciously, that we matter and other people do not, that we are somehow more human than others. When that happens, we invariably sacrifice our own humanity on the altar of our egotism, and we become less human, not more.

I am thankful for the people who are countering the self-serving claims to justification for torture. We need to go further and see what torture really does to its victims, to the torturers themselves, and to the nation that decides its own security and self-interest rise above all ethical, moral, and religious standards so that it may do whatever it pleases in pursuit of whatever it decides works to its own benefit.

To torture, we first dehumanize the person who is to be our victim, but we tend to go even further and dehumanize and perhaps demonize some group to which the person belongs or is presumed to belong. In this way, we cover ourselves in case the victim of our torture turns out to be innocent; it doesn’t matter (to us) because the victim is still a member of that group we have dehumanized. So, torture becomes an extreme expression of prejudice, in which we see ourselves as the people who matter, and our will becomes the measure of good and evil, which is the biblical understanding of the condition we call sin.

Was valuable information gained by torture? It does not matter. What matters is that we move decisively to make sure torture is removed as an option in our national policies. Permanently.

By the Number

2011-02-11T09:59:00.003-05:00

The manager wants a number – just one number that will tell in an arithmetic snapshot how far along the manufacturing process is and how well it is going. So, the expediter wants that number, that single number which supposedly represents the current state of a complex manufacturing process. Don’t give me details. Don’t trouble my mind and complicate my report with a variety of factors which, understood, make the single number so absurd as to be laughable. Just give me the number. The almighty number that makes me sound as though I have control of the process and all the knowledge I need to make decisions. Never mind that those decisions may damage people’s lives as well as mislead and possibly mess up in expensive ways the very manufacturing process I am supposed to be managing or expediting. Just give me the number that gives me control without knowledge or insight.

You’ve got to be kidding! He wants all of this reduced to one number? It will tell him exactly nothing. And we have to waste our time generating that number, trying to make it at least approximate something real that he won’t understand anyway so he can then use the number we give him each week to judge everybody’s work without even knowing what it is they do? What an ignoramus!

Numbers are so wonderful. They can be plotted and displayed prettily in meetings to give the appearance of factual truth. Don’t say that plotting meaningless numbers yields meaningless graphs. Those graphs are proof. Proof of what? Proof of my authority and control over processes I don’t begin to comprehend and don’t care to. Proof of my power over people's lives. With the numbers and charts, I become a grownup He-Man: “I have the power!” That my underlings know I and my knowledge are really as cartoon-ish as the cartoon He-Man is something I work hard not to realize and will never admit. That they must still try to make the process work somehow despite my incompetent management is the truth they know but dare not speak except in whispers and curses to each other.

If the one-number to give me power and control is a sham in manufacturing, imagine how absurd it becomes in education. The complexities of design and production are nothing compared with those of leading young humans to the state of being educated enough to keep learning, growing, inventing, and benefiting society throughout their lives. And if authoritarian mismanagement can spoil a manufactured product, think of how damaging it can be to children. And it is.

Positive Negativity

2010-10-04T09:42:00.004-04:00

Prayer – Louis Untermeyer

GOD, though this life is but a wraith,
Although we know not what we use,
Although we grope with little faith,
Give me the heart to fight—and lose.

Ever insurgent let me be,
Make me more daring than devout;
From sleek contentment keep me free,
And fill me with a buoyant doubt.

Open my eyes to visions girt
With beauty, and with wonder lit—
But always let me see the dirt,
And all that spawn and die in it.

Open my ears to music; let
Me thrill with Spring's first flutes and drums—
But never let me dare forget
The bitter ballads of the slums.

From compromise and things half done,
Keep me with stern and stubborn pride;
And when at last the fight is won,
God, keep me still unsatisfied.

In an adult forum yesterday, we discussed the second stanza of this poem among other “voices” that seemed to echo both an ancient biblical time of semi-depression and the current moods of people in our society. What appealed to some in our forum was the oxymoron of “buoyant doubt.” We probably think more normally of doubt as something which weighs or drags us down, a force from which our spirits need to be lifted, and doubt can be just that, but can it not also be buoyant?

Certainly, doubt can be misused to block progress, feign sophistication, or defend against commitment. I think, however, that Untermeyer suggests positive uses of doubt and negativity.

What is our obsession with being the greatest? Why do we insist upon calling ours the greatest nation on earth rather than doing what we can to make it better, fairer, and more humbly strong and cooperative among the nations of our world? We Christians, at least some of us, seem prone to doing the same with our religion, which can make us more partisan than faithful. Maybe I have already suggested an answer to my own question. Repeatedly calling our own (our nation or our religion) the greatest makes us sound loyal without requiring deep thought, inconvenient commitment, or personal sacrifice. We can take pride in being part of the greatest without needing to shoulder adult responsibility for the human imperfections, failings, and sins of what we over praise. A friend and teacher of mine calls this phenomenon “borrowed pride.”

I hadn’t seen this poem of Untermeyer’s in many years and didn’t realize I missed it. The positive force of negativity is something we seem not to understand very well and almost to fear, but maybe we need to face that fear to discover that self-critical thoughts do not have to weaken or destroy us but can help us grow stronger as well as more honest. Mere optimism is a hollow substitute for hope and commitment to the struggle of pursuing it.

On the Other Hand

2010-10-01T10:15:00.004-04:00

As the pressure to “reform” public education has mounted, I have written and spoken against adopting a business model or factory model in which our children are the products to which value must be added, value measurable by numbers meant to translate eventually to dollars. I am saddened by the recent death of Dr. Donald Graves, an outstanding educator whose book, Testing Is Not Teaching, I continue to find inspiring and encouraging, like a voice crying out in the wilderness of dehumanization, the current desert of the human spirit. I find the billionaires-generated push toward privatization nauseating as I brace for the waves of hatred and ignorant blame coming at teachers after the release of the propaganda film, “Waiting for Superman.”

Even so, I am haunted by Jonathan Kozol’s books, Amazing Grace and The Shame of the Nation (the latter subtitled, The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America). I just saw the title of an editorial reprinted in our local newspaper from the Newark Star Ledger, “Poor kids deserve escape options too.” I haven’t read it. I assume it refers to charter schools, the bogus salvation of our children in what we call “urban” settings. Note: “urban” has become code for non-white; the white word for urban is “metropolitan.” Charter schools are, I suspect, just a step toward privatization, and my nightmare image is of school children in uniforms with a “W” on each little chest greeted at the door of their school by a senior citizen saying, “Welcome to Walton School Number 246173. Here’s your Walmart points card for coming today.”

But. I am still haunted. No, teachers cannot fix the massive societal inequalities that persist in the ghetto-ized sectors of our nation, and they will be able to help the children less and less as they are reduced to scripted puppets, trainers rather than educators. Yes, it’s terribly convenient to reduce students’ progress to a number, a score, that is supposed to tell all that needs to be known about their “progress” in learning. Correction, progress is now their “value added” as little products for consumption by businesses. The number is magic. It empowers managers to evaluate, control, punish, and reward teachers without having to know anything about teaching or about children’s learning. The number gives authority without knowledge and control without wisdom to people outside the profession and outside all that the word “profession” means.

But. I am still haunted. Sure, we are using blame inflicted upon the vulnerable and unpopular (teachers) to avoid the truth about the gross inequalities in our society. We are naming a scapegoat to avoid having to face and correct those inequalities. And we are being hypocritical. As teachers are regimented and scripted into all-teach-the-same-way-on-the-same-page puppets, how in the world are we to distinguish the more effective ones from the less so? Oh yeah, the magic number, the score, which will guarantee that the teachers of poor, shamed, disadvantaged children will always be the “bad” teachers. Then complete privatization will present itself as the only solution left, since we just can’t get good teachers in poor, urban areas. And, yes, as is true where I live and work, “urban” can be quite rural or small town, if you get the colors right.

Okay, I peeked at the editorial. It's even worse than I thought. Here's the brilliant logic: if charter schools and voucher plans are enabled to take away the best students, won't seeing they are losing their best make the public schools work harder? Maybe we should try that logic on businesses: take away their best leaders and workers so they'll do better. Maybe it's already been done with editorial writers.

But. We can’t just defend the way things are, either. I know it’s hard to remember change is needed when you’re under constant, vicious attack by rich politicians and their billionaire masters. But we can’t keep losing millions of our children to hopelessness and violence. We can’t.

Grandeur?

2010-09-29T10:00:00.002-04:00

Our age is one in which usefulness is thought to be the chief merit of nature; in which the attainment of power, the utilization of resources is taken to be the chief purpose of man in God’s creation.

On some days, I think the greatest challenge for faith is to re-humanize us. Abraham Heschel, who wrote the thoughts on our age quoted above (God in Search of Man), summons us to return to awareness of the grandeur of the world around us. If we can answer that call, maybe we can also rediscover something of the wonder within us, the wonder we are in the midst of God’s creation. But do we even know what Heschel means by grandeur? Do I?

Everything these days is “awesome!” Do we know how awe feels? In common usage, something is awesome merely by exceeding that to which we have already grown quickly accustomed. A video game becomes awesome by attaining new levels of blood and gore, a movie by spectacular special effects, an online comment by smacking down the opponent spectacularly (which may mean no more than rudely and crudely, with no special insight). It seems awesome has come to mean spectacular, and so grandeur is reduced to spectacle that surprises or startles.

In Affect-Script Psychology, the surprise-startle affect is identified by Silvan S. Tomkins as the affect system’s reset button. Think of an unexpected gunshot, even when it comes only from the starter’s pistol at a swimming meet when a swimmer has made a false start. The shot gets everyone’s immediate attention. Surprise-startle suddenly clears away all interest, fear, distress – all other affect across the board – so the person is ready to respond to a new (possibly dangerous) situation. Video games and movies have made surprise-startle their affect of choice, eliciting the, “Holy . . . !” response and clearing away all emotion or feeling without then adding anything new of either empathy or insight. Bang, bang, boom. Something pops up or jumps out at the player, triggering startle. Pow, pow, pow. The threat is destroyed, blood spatters everywhere. Then on to the next startle.

Repeatedly clearing the affect system seems to me a way of relieving sensibilities, temporarily dismissing anxieties, but also separating the gruesome from any emotion it might normally elicit from us. The overuse of surprise-startle neutralizes any empathy or even horror a human being would feel at the sight of carnage. So, blowing someone apart becomes “awesome!” Have we added a new “drug” to our medicine cabinet for avoiding our anxieties and the thoughts that feed them? Surprise-startle makes one feel neither better nor worse but only suspends emotion so one can respond quickly to the new situation, whatever it may be. There is no interest in surprise-startle, just a reset, which I suppose is the reason such video games and movies are so boring to the observer (me) who does not “get into” them enough to be startled. Missing the “Holy . . . !” moments, I find myself left with nothing but dullness.

Back to Abraham Heschel. He writes further:

The Greeks learned in order to comprehend. The Hebrews learned in order to revere. The modern man [human, person] learns in order to use. To Bacon we owe the formulation, “Knowledge is power.” This is how people are urged to study: knowledge means success. We do not know any more how to justify any value except in terms of expediency. Man is willing to define himself as a “seeker after the maximum degree of comfort for the minimum expenditure of energy.” He equates value with that which avails. He feels, acts, and thinks as if the sole purpose of the universe were to satisfy his needs. To the modern man everything seems calculable; everything reducible to a figure. He has supreme faith in statistics and abhors the idea of a mystery.

I’m glad the intent of this blog is pondering, because I am left with my questions. Is our dissatisfaction with seeing the natural world as nothing but a warehouse of resources for our use and consumption the reason cuteness appeals to so many? Do we counter the coldly utilitarian with overdoses of sentimentality – our “Aww!” moments over the cuteness of fuzzy animals? Is “Aww!” all we have left of awe?

What is it that Heschel means by grandeur? What was “wonder” before it was reduced to meaning, “I don’t know yet, but I’ll find out”? Has Googling taken the last bit of wonder out of life by putting seemingly endless information at our finger tips? Or is there something in grandeur, awe, and wonder – something much greater and more profound – to which we might try to find our way back?

Reason and Faith Together

2010-09-24T17:04:00.006-04:00

In his book, God in Search of Man, subtitled, A Philosophy of Judaism, Abraham J. Heschel includes a short sub-chapter called, “The Worship of Reason,” which I find helpful as I try to see through some of the fog of our times. People seem to choose beliefs without reason and without much felt need to understand in depth what it is they are choosing to believe, almost as though religion or some substitute for religion were a style in fashion that might change next season, but so what? I have wondered at times if some don’t see all meaning in life as fantasy and so select the fantasy that intrigues them or makes them feel good or provides a nice escape for the time being (as long as it lasts). I say these things without scorn or mockery because I think the confusion of our times should be humbling to people like me.

Christian faith is not derived from reason, by which I mean rational, careful, systematic thinking that can be tested by logical principles and explained rationally to give an account of itself to the believer or the skeptic. Christian faith is derived from revelation of God’s truth and God’s grace, from events in life and movements of the spirit and not ideas only. But Christian faith should still make sense to the believer, and should be able to account for its hopes and practices, not to prove itself to anyone, but to be for thinking beings a thinking faith that is able to give reasons for what it says and does. Why does this choice matter, and why is the other choice rejected? How does faith lead me or us to respond to the situation that confronts us with human need? Why do we see some condition of human life as an injustice, and why do we care? What gives life meaning, and what offers attractive but false meaning, and why do we call it false? These and countless other questions require us to keep thinking our faith.

As Christians, we accept God’s love and mercy in faith, but we do not simply accept teachings and doctrines on faith. We need to ask questions, re-think old verities for new situations and needs, and keep learning from life. My mother used to ask me and the other kids she taught in the church to, “Put it in your own words.” What does this part of the Bible or that teaching of the church mean to you, in your own words? She was pushing us, and sometimes her request was met by silence.

So, reason and faith work together and need each other in life. The rejection of reason by religious faith makes for unreasonable faith and often for tyranny. When believers stop thinking and just follow mindlessly and uncritically, danger ensues – for the believers, for other people, or both. On the other hand, when reason declares itself the sole measure of truth and meaning in human life, the human spirit shrivels and, ironically, reason itself becomes unreasonable. Heschel writes, “Extreme rationalism may be defined as the failure of reason to understand itself . . . .” Further he points out:

Man’s understanding of what is reasonable is subject to change. To the Roman philosophers, it did not seem reasonable to abstain from labor one day a week. Nor did it seem unreasonable to certain plantation owners to import slaves from Africa into the New World. With what stage in the development of reason should the Bible be compatible?

We live in a time when meaning is suspect, and so faith has become suspect also. We are tempted to reduce life’s meaning to merely what works at the time or even to what feels good at the moment. Some take refuge in certitude such as no human being can rightly have and so can maintain only by silencing questions, whether it is the certitude of authoritarian religion or that of fundamentalist scientism. I have a friend I have heard declare in frustration that being a “true believer” in science is the very opposite of being a scientist. Modern science provides a greatly helpful procedure for investigating the natural world and predicting what will probably happen under a certain set of conditions, but scientism makes a poor religion, bereft of meaning and hope, and potentially devoid of compassion.

Heschel concludes the sub-chapter:

Without reason faith becomes blind. Without reason we would not know how to apply the insights of faith to the concrete issues of living. The worship of reason is arrogance and betrays a lack of intelligence. The rejection of reason is cowardice and betrays a lack of faith.

Caliban

2010-09-17T10:49:00.003-04:00

Caliban in the Coal Mines

GOD, we don't like to complain;
We know that the mine is no lark.
But — there's the pools from the rain;
But — there's the cold and the dark.

God, You don't know what it is —
You, in Your well-lighted sky —
Watching the meteors whizz;
Warm, with a sun always by.

God, if You had but the moon
Stuck in Your cap for a lamp,
Even You'd tire of it soon,
Down in the dark and the damp.

Nothing but blackness above
And nothing that moves but the cars …
God, if You wish for our love,
Fling us a handful of stars!

~Louis Untermeyer

The Christian answer is that God does know what it’s like down in the dark and the damp, but the protest of the miner Caliban remains unanswered because he can’t hear answers tossed down from bright, warm places of elevated comfort and security. What Christians call the Incarnation (the Word or life-giving truth of God made human flesh and blood) means God down here with us, living in our conditions with our limitations, feelings, and pains.

If my reaction to Untermeyer’s poem with its irreverent Caliban is to take offense and argue that God has already come down into suffering and shame worse than his in the mines, then the question becomes, I think, “Why are the Calibans of this world still stuck down in the dark and the damp where they continue to make wealth for the prosperous up in the warmth and brightness?”

If we believe in the understanding, compassion, and promise of liberation represented by our doctrine of the Incarnation, don’t we need to be incarnational ourselves, also? Or can the churches stay in the warmth and the light dropping pious truisms down for Calibans to accept or be damned? Can we justify supplying the religious rationalizations for the supposed rightness of the way things are?

A just society needs to change the conditions in which many people are forced to live. Promising heaven upon death has become a convenient way to avoid challenges to prosperity and comfort not shared in life.

As “First World” Christian religion fades even here in the United States as it has already faded in Europe, can we, as the theologian Douglas John Hall hopes, accept the challenge of becoming the servant people we were meant to be from the outset? Christendom is dead. Here in America, we still hear Christians shouting angrily over our religion’s loss of the prestige and privilege it enjoyed in its cultural establishment as the unofficial American religion, but who called us to privilege and prestige? Who put us in charge of society? It was the Roman emperors Constantine and Theodosius who did that, not Jesus.

Jesus Wouldn't Do That

2010-09-08T08:54:00.006-04:00

If it happens, the sight of Christians burning copies of the Qur’an will be one ludicrous result of the Christian partisanship that corrupts Christianity into something alien to Jesus. Such actions and the hate-filled pride behind them work against Jesus Christ, inflicting disgrace upon his name and his people.

Will the Qur’an burning endanger U.S. troops and civilians? I don’t know, but I’m sure it won’t help efforts to isolate the minority of belligerent Muslims with murder on their minds from the majority of Muslims who are not terrorists and do not want to be terrorists. Video of the event could be used as propaganda to help recruit terrorists and to enrage or embitter Muslims, especially if they are tricked into generalizing the hateful act of a few American Christians into misperceptions of the feelings of many or most Americans or of valid Christian attitudes toward Islam. The people most directly and immediately harmed, however, will be those who participate in the burning. The shepherd is doing deep-down damage to his own flock.

I find it irksome that our “news” media are falling over each other to give the misguided (to put it mildly) minister his fifteen minutes of fame, as though there were really a significant story in the event. I have friends who are growing discouraged about our future because day after day we hear voices of bigotry and hatred shouting from our televisions until it seems those voices have taken over the society. What we’re hearing is not all there is out there in our land but merely what the media producers think will capture viewers and sell stuff. They, the media producers, are creating a picture of Americans as angry, misinformed malcontents shouting inanities at the world and, particularly, at the black President whose presence in the White House they can’t stand. Anger and hatred are getting the coverage, and so they seem to be the greatest realities out there. I don’t believe they are.

Yes, hard times frighten and embitter people who can’t believe their security has collapsed so suddenly (at least it feels sudden). So, they are tempted to look around for bad guys to blame, and political opportunists offer them groups of people they can easily identify as “other,” mistrust, and feel good about hating.

Worst of all is the anti-American cynicism (from Americans) that blocks recovery from the recession so people will keep suffering and that inflames hatred in the world so there will be more violence – all in hopes of winning elections and regaining power. Trying to make the nation fail to recover and its people sink deeper into misery and despair is not patriotic. Picking on vulnerable groups and demonizing a major world religion is not worthy of “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”

By now, leaders of both political parties should have condemned the idea of burning copies of the Qur’an, identified those who would do the burning as misguided people acting in a way that is un-American (as it is also un-Christian), pointed out to the nation and world that such actions do not represent America, and moved on to real needs and issues. Using the worst impulses of some Americans to increase tensions, endanger lives, distort reality, and corrupt the nation’s soul – all in the pursuit of power – is shameful.

Response to Religious Partisanship's Ugliness

2010-09-02T13:04:00.003-04:00

The National Council of Churches in Christ has responded to the proposal for a "burn the Qur'an day" and other manifestations of hatred and rage toward Muslims and Islam. You can read it here.

Planting Stones

2010-09-02T12:43:00.005-04:00

The following excerpt comes from the opening of Abraham J. Heschel’s book, God in Search of Man: a Philosophy of Judaism (published 1955), in the first section of chapter 1, called, “To Recover the Questions”:

It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than with the voice of compassion — its message becomes meaningless.

Religion is an answer to man’s ultimate questions. The moment it becomes oblivious to ultimate questions, religion becomes irrelevant, and its crisis sets in.
. . .

There are dead thoughts and there are living thoughts. A dead thought has been compared to a stone which one may plant in the soil. Nothing will come out. A living thought is like a seed. In the process of thinking, an answer without a question is devoid of life. It may enter the mind; it will not penetrate the soul. It may become a part of one’s knowledge; it will not come forth as a creative force.

These days it seems that the popular thing for religious partisans to do with stones is not plant them but throw them (burn copies of the Qur’an “for Christ”). Maybe before Christianity, for example, becomes completely the realm of the enraged partisans in their ginned up culture wars, we can hear and heed Heschel’s warning: “An answer without a question is devoid of life.”

A recent New York Times piece suggests “worshipers” are attending churches only to be soothed and entertained. Maybe so in some places, but I doubt it will help much to offer them, instead of easy assurances and feel-good stories, doctrinally correct answers to questions they are not asking and don’t care to hear raised. If we truly respect people and are not just (1) preaching pre-packaged truths at them for their unconsidered assent or (2) trying to manipulate them into mindless support for some political cause or (3) selling them snake-oil promises of blessings to take their money, then maybe we need to seek ways to elicit the deeper questions they have not dared to ask or even searched themselves to discover.

Having the answers set down, formalized, and ready to hand, we have feared questions and have defended our truths against them. The problem is that most people fear their own questions about meaning in life and death. So, when the singing stops, we have silence. Mental silence. Spiritual silence. Dead silence. Stone dead.

How do we recover the questions? How do we help people find the courage to ask them? Maybe we first need to find that courage in ourselves and start asking the questions long buried beneath accepted answers. Maybe if we recover the ability to listen to ourselves we can risk listening to others.

Be a Refuge

2010-08-16T09:56:00.006-04:00

Like fluttering birds, like scattered nestlings, so are the daughters of Moab at the fords of the Arnon. “Give counsel, grant justice; make your shade like night at the height of noon; hide the outcasts, do not betray the fugitive; let the outcasts of Moab settle among you; be a refuge to them from the destroyer.”
(Isaiah 16:2-4a NRSV)

While on vacation, I came upon this short excerpt from one of Isaiah’s oracles to the nations, in this case to the land of Moab. Relations between the two nations of Israel (Israel and Judah) and Moab were not always good, but Ruth, the great-grandmother of King David, was a woman of Moab who emigrated to Judah with her mother-in-law Naomi. Ruth, a young widow, survived at first and provided for Naomi by gleaning in the fields.

The destroyer of lands and peoples comes in various forms: an invading army, a plague or epidemic, a negative change in economic conditions, a revolution or civil war, religious persecution, destruction of land by “development” or mining or some other “harvesting” of its resources. Then, as Isaiah describes in the reading’s context, there is no more rejoicing over the harvest and sometimes no refuge anywhere. In the 1980's, thousands of people fled the slaughter in El Salvador and Guatemala to a land that did not want them (the United States) because their very presence and need for sanctuary gave testimony to the horrors of regimes our government supported for its own political and economic reasons.

Today, young adults (and some not so young) risk their lives to cross a river – not the Arnon but the Rio Grande – to flee from what to what? Why do they brave the brutality of coyotes (the human kind, not the animal) and the dangers of the desert to live in the shadows of fear in a land that offers them extremely hard work at low pay in sometimes unsafe or dehumanizing conditions? Why do they leave their families and communities to endure hardship and xenophobic hatred in a foreign land?

Mexican land reform provided plots of land for the campesinos (people of the fields, peasants). Changes in economic conditions have rendered those plots insufficient for subsistence farming, and now they may be sold to private concerns. So, the people’s land is being privatized, which moves it from serving those with little to adding more wealth to those who already have much. That’s much like what some people north of the river are trying to do to public education and Social Security: take them from the people so the wealthy can exploit them to add to their wealth.

The “destroyer” from which the poor are seeking refuge is the force of crushing economic changes.

“Give counsel, grant justice; make your shade like night at the height of noon; hide the outcasts, do not betray the fugitive; let the outcasts of (the current) Moab settle among you; be a refuge to them from the destroyer.”

Prospective Student Beware

2010-08-10T08:35:00.001-04:00

Where the body lies, there the vultures gather. To no surprise, young adults are looking for ways to enter the largely closed work force. To no surprise, con artists are looking for ways to fleece them, exaggerating prospects and hiding costs as con artists do. Change.org suggests grant money for student loans may be a lucrative mine for fraudulent tactics. Student beware. To read the article, click here.

Good Questions

2010-07-14T11:19:00.005-04:00

I started this blog with the premise that good questions can be more significant than correct answers. Early in my blogging, I discussed the matter of “frames” meaning the way we put our questions which to some extent predetermines the types of answers that can be made to fit. Clever framing can make all answers largely false; it can also make the answer which is actually closer to the truth of the situation in life sound silly, unfaithful, or even treasonous.

For example, “Do you want us (the United States or the nations of our supposed Western Civilization) just to surrender to the global Islamic plan to destroy us?” Framed that way, the question demands the answer, “No, of course not!” But the framing of the question assumes there is such a global Islamic plot (there is not), that all Muslim people think, live, and act in lockstep (they do not), and that Islamic is the one and only identity of people whose religion is Islam (it is not). The frame for the question is false, and so either a Yes or a No answer is predetermined to be misleading and potentially harmful to the individual, the nation, and the world. The falsely framed question also prevents positive steps toward alleviating the problems of terrorism and belligerent religious fundamentalism in our world.

The economist Amartya Sen (Identity and Violence) considers the problem of poorly framed questions in discussions of economic globalization and its effects on workers in poorer nations. One frequent but misleading question is, “Well, are those workers not better off than they would be without the jobs brought to them by economic globalization?” Framed that way, the question is meant to require the answer “Yes, they are better off than they would be if those jobs were taken away,” and that answer is meant to end discussion of fairness and justice.

Sen offers an analogy in family relations. A woman expresses her desire for greater equality of place, respect, and decision-making power in the family. She is told that if she doesn’t like the arrangements in the family and her “place” as a woman, she may leave and live without a family. That’s no answer but just dismissal of her legitimate request for changes that would make for greater fairness. It’s the old, “If you don’t like the food, don’t eat,” dismissal. The real question, of course, is, “How can inequalities in the family structure and dynamics be lessened?” That’s a question that opens the door to problem-solving approaches.

In the realm of global economics, it seems to be assumed that the existing arrangement set up by those with the power to set it up is the one and only arrangement possible – take it or leave it. That ultimatum, clearly, is a power play, not a realistic assessment of the actual possibilities for changes that would increase fairness. The dismissive question, “Aren’t they better off than they would be without their jobs?” presents a false either-or alternative (work or don’t) that protects those who benefit most from unfairness.

Making our questions good ones matters greatly to our prospects for solving problems. Forming good questions is the crucial skill of an educated person. But we continue to ignore that skill and settle for the “correct” answer picked from a field of prefabricated choices. We’re missing the boat.

Loyalty Oaths and Christian Identity Branding

2010-07-12T09:44:00.002-04:00

When the ministerial association in our town was struggling with the new reality of its internal diversity, one minister came up with a solution: a confession of faith to be signed by all members of the clergy who wished to join the group or continue their membership. When I, being an officer at the time, pointed out the exclusionary effect of such a loyalty oath and its violation of the association’s charter, the evangelical Christian majority left to form their own Christian association which certainly would no longer include a rabbi or a Buddhist “priest” (sensei). Neither would it include a Presbyterian unwilling (1) to sign a fundamentalist Christian confession or (2) to exclude the Jew and the Buddhist from conversation among the clergy. I was not alone in remaining with the suddenly much smaller group, and so the association split over the issue of inclusion.

People with exclusionary agendas prefer simple definitions of identity – in effect, branding. The ordained in my denomination, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), are already committed to a carefully defined relation to eleven historic confessions of Christian faith. Our promise to be led by these confessions as we seek to “lead the people of God” very carefully balances conformity with freedom – freedom, not only to dissent, but to keep growing in the faith and engaging new struggles in new times. So, on the basis of that reality alone, I would not have signed another confession to which my adherence would remain unspecified, unbalanced, and declared in a rigid and simplistic positive answer to, “Yes or no?” I would, therefore, not have signed the confession even if I had believed on its terms all the things it insisted I believe on its terms, which I did not.

But there was more going on in that choice, and there remains to this day more to consider in such matters of identity. I am a Christian. But I am not a Christian sectarian. The only people I encounter who doubt that I am a Christian are Christian sectarians. I am not at war with Jews and Buddhists. Nor with Muslims or Hindus. Nor with atheists or agnostics. Neither do I have any desire to see Christian sectarianism dominate American society. When some group on Facebook wants as many people as they can recruit to “like” being Christian for, it seems to me, the purpose of flexing the muscle of a populous Christian sectarian identity in a complex society, I decline, having no desire to reassert Christian cultural establishment in the United States. Christianity is called to be a servant, not a master.

Christian sectarian identity is a thing very different from Christian faith. In the former, we see such manifestations as Christian militia. Christian sectarian identity is what the apostle Paul called “party spirit,” where party refers to a group with a divisive political agenda, not to a celebration. Look at the history of conflicts in Lebanon, as just one example, to see the brutal ways in which Christian sectarian identity can operate.

Identity branding is one powerful way in which people are forced into a mold however poor the fit or restricted the freedom of movement. When such branding is done from the outside, it is the work of prejudice and stereotyping: “They’re all the same.” When done from the inside, by the group itself, it is an imposition of conformity and repression. Either way, it is false. It also tends to be fearful and potentially belligerent.

I hope Christians and Christian churches in the United States will learn to distinguish their faith from Christian sectarianism. I hold that hope for the sake of the churches and the nation.

More on the Bogus "Clash of Civilizations"

2010-07-07T09:07:00.003-04:00

Men who don’t already know it may find that in prison they must belong to a strictly if crudely defined group in order to survive, a prison gang. Where I live, teenage boys tell of the difficulty of saying “No” to gang membership urged upon them day after day in the high school and the neighborhood. In J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter novels, “pure blood” wizards speak contemptuously, not only of “mud-bloods” (wizards or witches with non-magical parents), but also of “blood traitors,” meaning pure bloods or half-bloods who associate with mud-bloods. I have known the feeling of being regarded as a blood traitor (race traitor, actually) and have seen the hate stares. But let me share, rather, a less intense incident from my youth.

One day when I was in college in western Pennsylvania in the 1960's, I was walking through town with an arm around each of two girls who were friends of mine (neither was my girlfriend), when an elderly man stopped on the sidewalk, stared at me in disbelief, and said aloud, “But you’re a white boy.” He seemed dazed. One of the girls was black. My response was adolescent and less than kind, which I later regretted, but clearly for the man my being white was far more significant to my identity than any sense of solidarity I might share with my college friends. It seemed he could scarcely imagine such a thing — that a white boy should be walking with one arm around a black girl.

There are always in our society people who would force upon all of us a prison or gang mentality in which our identities are determined by some characteristic that to them is all-important. Very often, that characteristic is “race,” but these days it seems increasingly frequent for it to be religion. Since the terrorist attacks upon the United States on September 11, 2001, those two over-simplifications of identity have been magnified by fear and by an aggressive, macho reaction to those attacks — not, I think, so much to the tragedy of them as to the affront to our national pride.

Amartya Sen writes of the “civilizational incarceration” desired by the champions of the notion of “the clash of civilizations” in which we are supposedly engaged (or, in their view, not engaged fervently enough), especially since the publication of Samuel Huntington’s book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. Sen points out that the civilizational clash theory depends upon (1) “a particularly ambitious version of the illusion of singularity” and (2) “the crudeness with which the world civilizations are characterized, taking them to be more homogeneous and far more insular than tends to emerge from empirical analyses of the past and present.” (Identity and Violence) What Sen calls “the illusion of singularity” works from an insistence that a person not be seen as an individual who belongs to many different groups but as a unit of one all-important group — like the prison gang.

I speak English, and English was my undergraduate major. It matters to me that I speak English. That I do not speak Spanish does not matter to my identity but serves only to prod me toward learning more Spanish so I can communicate with my neighbors and friends and so I can shed the embarrassment of being monolingual. I know my use in the previous sentence of the word “embarrassment” would infuriate some of my English-only fellow citizens, but I have learned enough of other languages to have experienced the richness they add to my understandings of life, and (frankly) my speaking English is matter of fact not a crucial point of pride in some imaginary civilizational identity.

My hope is that we will resist being incarcerated in a singular identity meant to make us angry and hostile toward people who supposedly threaten our civilization. I have no desire to join such a prison gang.

Lord Help the Sister

2010-07-06T12:06:00.007-04:00

Sunday was Independence Day in the United States, or was it Monday? However the holiday was split, the nation celebrated its declared independence from foreign rule along with its affirmation of the equality of all human beings before our Creator, even if there were a great many exceptions to the equality back in the early years of the nation’s life and even though there continue to be exceptions to equality today in this disturbing time when civil and human rights are held up to scorn by political opportunists playing upon the fear and rage inflamed predictably by our current Great Recession.

My personal celebration of the nation’s birthday included buying and beginning to read Amartya Sen’s short book, Identity and Violence: the Illusion of Destiny. Because I have been doing more writing the reading, I am only about 50 pages into the book, but Sen has already made one of his major arguments quite clear: he objects to the currently popular notion that we are engaged in a great and supremely decisive clash of civilizations. All the rage these days (underscore “rage”) is the pseudo-apocalyptic vision of an Armageddon between Western Civilization and Muslim Civilization. Supposedly the world has also a Hindu Civilization and a Buddhist Civilization. Sen argues convincingly that no such grand, simple, and overriding categories actually exist on the living planet Earth. We human beings are not segregated so neatly into civilizations.

I am in many ways, no doubt, a man of Western thought and world view, although as a lifelong student of the Bible, I also hold and identify myself with many viewpoints and attitudes that I must acknowledge as more Eastern than Western. The Bible is, after all, a collection of ancient Near Eastern writings. But I am also a Christian, specifically (since I’m talking about groups to which I “belong”) a Presbyterian Reformed Protestant Christian. I am an American, a native of New Jersey but also an erstwhile and future resident of Pennsylvania. I am white, an identity which means rather little to me. I am male, an identity I consider very basic though not terribly significant in some situations where others seem to regard it as all-important. I am heterosexually oriented, an identity I celebrate personally but see no reason to advance belligerently in the public forum. I am a son (a truth which still matters even though my parents have died), a husband, a father, a brother, an uncle, a pastor, a friend, a Democrat, a fisherman, a liberal or progressive or something of the sort much of the time, a teacher, a student, a writer, and a reluctant denizen of Facebook. Oh yeah, and a blogger.

What is my strongest identity, the one which commands my deepest and strongest loyalty? Sen points out that my answer may depend upon the present situation that raises the question of my loyalties and priorities at the time. The answer need not be absolute for every situation. Even what would seem my primary identity in terms of commitment, that of being a Christian, may not be easily seen as primary in some particular situation, especially one in which being a Christian is presumed by others to oblige me to be defensive of the privileges of being Christian in the United States and hostile or judgmental toward people of other faiths or of no religious faith at all. In such matters, I am more of a secularist that a religious sectarian, although I take the secularist position specifically because I am a Christian.

Right there comes my first quibble with Sen’s book, although I have not yet read far enough to be sure he won’t come around to my way of seeing things (a smiling emoticon would go here if I used them). He argues, persuasively, that we must make choices about how much priority to give a particular identity within the context of a specific situation in life. Granted, but I think the question is not only, “How much priority in this situation?” but also, “What kind of priority?” I would contend that it is un-Christian to demand special privileges for Christians in the United States or to seek cultural predominance for my religion. More than a few Christians would disagree with me on that point in their anger over the loss of cultural establishment for our particular religion (“Wish me a ‘Merry Christmas’ and not a damned ‘happy holiday’ or I’ll take my business elsewhere!”) And are we to assume that being an American means the same to all Americans? I contend, for example, that it is more faithful to the United States for a citizen to be critical of its actions in the world of nations than to be an America-first! nationalist. The country is served better, I believe, by citizens who care about the quality and integrity of American democratic life than by those who desire only American supremacy.

When the issue at hand is prominence or dominance, I find it also necessary to emphasize my identity as a human being over my principal commitment to being a Christian. Of course, I see such a choice of emphasis as being called for by Jesus of Nazareth, but if we’re thinking only in terms of group identities and loyalties, it might seem I am giving my humanity priority over my Christianity.

What if the demands of being a Christian and a pastor clash with those of faithfulness to my being a husband or a father? Does the faith overrule love?

Sen’s argument is that we human beings cannot be so simply divided into “civilizations” and that so to divide us makes belligerence and violence inescapable.

Way back in 1954, a movie sported an Irving Berlin song called “Sisters.” The lyrics suggest, in lighthearted style, the kind of situational prioritizing of identities and loyalties Sen commends.

Those who've seen us know that not a thing could come between us
Many men have tried to split us up, but no one can
Lord help the mister who comes between me and my sister
And Lord help the sister who comes between and my man.

The last line, of course, sets things in perspective. The questions have to include how much loyalty and of what kind a particular identity may legitimately require of us. And when does my loyalty to a larger group become a toxic extension of my own ego or an enslavement to some popular but poisonous notion of what that loyalty should be?

Restoring Our Nation's Schools

2010-05-27T22:11:00.003-04:00

This article in The Nation, "Restoring Our Schools," comes from Linda Darling-Hammond, the person many of us concerned about public education hoped would become Secretary of Education in the administration of President Barack Obama: click here.

Knowing in Wonder

2010-05-26T09:10:00.003-04:00

In his book, The Trinity and the Kingdom, theologian Jürgen Moltmann contends:

In the pragmatic thinking of the modern world, knowing something always means dominating something: ‘Knowledge is power.’ Through our scientific knowledge we acquire power over objects and can appropriate them. . . . The motive that impels modern reason to know must be described as the desire to conquer and to dominate.

For the Greek philosophers and the Fathers of the church, knowing meant something different: it meant knowing in wonder. By knowing or perceiving one participates in the life of the other. Here knowing does not transform the counterpart into the property of the knower; the knower does not appropriate what he knows. On the contrary, he is transformed through sympathy, becoming a participator in what he perceives. Knowledge confers fellowship. That is why knowing, perception, only goes as far as love, sympathy and participation reach.

Moltmann pursues the idea of knowing in wonder toward a more respectful knowledge of the mystery which is the subject of his book: the Triune God. I suggest that knowing in wonder is also the respectful way to know a person, a people, the natural world, and life itself. I’m not sure modern thinking “always” understands knowing in terms of dominating and appropriating, but I believe mastery is too much our goal and categorizing too much our method of reduction and control.

In last Sunday’s sermon, I said, “You are not a typical anything, because you are neither a type nor a thing.” People should be approached with a sense of respectful wonder. If I presume to label you as a type I understand without any need for wonder and humility before the mystery you are and will remain to me, then I do not know you at all but have substituted for you a false, straw person of my own making.

When my mother, of necessity, first took up residence in a nursing home, she and I were walking down the hallway where we encountered her newly assigned in-house physician. No sooner had I introduced her to him, then he remarked to me (as though she were not present), “Well, no mystery here.” I said nothing but thought, “You have no idea.” For him, it seemed, a degree of dementia had reduced my mother to a non-person. I doubt the physician realized he had diminished, not her, but himself.

How many times a week do we similarly diminish people by categorizing and labeling them as mere types? To what extent do we reduce learning to mastery, asking ourselves consciously or unconsciously, “What use is it?” where “it” may be a whole field of study, a living creature, a work of art, or even a person’s life? Are you no more than your usefulness to a boss or system that has gained a degree of authority over you?

I wonder, or so I say. But do I? Or do I think that I know and that knowing, I have mastered?

By the Numbers

2010-05-21T11:51:00.004-04:00

When and why did personnel departments become human resources? “Personnel” comes from person. “Human resources” sounds to me like stuff to be used, used up, and discarded as companies bring in new human stuff to be used up. I hope most companies have better understandings of HR.

In his book, The Idea of Justice, Amartya Sen points out that people like to simplify their thinking by assigning a single, supposedly definitive number to a very complex human situation. The single number enables us to pretend to be able to quantify and measure the development of human lives and societies. For example, the Gross National Product (GNP) or Gross Domestic Product (GDP) are sometimes assumed to tell the whole story of a country’s status and quality of life. Sen, a Nobel Prize winning economist, discusses how very much of a nation’s life and its quality we cannot tell from the number and how effectively the number can be used to perpetuate injustices by hiding them.

Now many in power want to measure our nation’s schools, teachers, and children by a single number or number set assigned by “the test.” Did the number go up or down, and how does any particular school’s number compare to a national average or to an arbitrary goal? What can we do to push our numbers up? Few outside the teaching profession seem to ask what the number actually represents and what it misrepresents (which is much). Instead, the number is simply treated as gold.

The desire for magic numbers is understandable. Quantification is a big step toward gaining control: administrative power over the process. And people in authority want power to control the whole process, unencumbered by professionals who know more about that process or particular phases of it. The number gives power without knowledge or understanding. Hence its appeal to authoritarian managers and politicians.

There are many negative results of number worship, too many for this blog, for example in business when the numbers come out quarterly and mean everything. In time, I believe, we will pay dearly for constantly demanding the short-term gains indicated by quarterly numbers.

Can at least some quantitative evaluations not be useful? Of course they can, when used properly and not overblown in importance or misused to intimidate and assign blame to people who lack the power and resources to control situations far more complex than uses of the numbers recognize. Knowing (and caring) how to interpret data properly and fairly is crucial.

Thankfully, people cannot be known or understood by the numbers, which at best, when used properly and responsibly, offer just clues. Sadly, when we assume we can know all we need to know about people by the numbers, we dehumanize them, ourselves, and our society. And, as with the sword, those who live by the numbers will sooner or later perish by the numbers.

Thoughts after Earth Day 2010

2010-04-24T12:34:00.004-04:00

Then God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.” So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. God blessed them, and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.”
(Genesis 1:26-28 NRSV)

Context matters. Because the Hebrew scriptures present a variety of witnesses to the steadfast love and faithfulness of Israel’s covenant God and a variety, also, of responses and reactions from different times and circumstances to the promises of that God’s love and faithfulness, we need to be very wary of modern interpretations that absolutize biblical declarations as though they had no context within human life and history, no relation to circumstances current at the time, and no elasticity in speaking God’s truth or faith’s response in ever-changing times and conditions.

The short passage quoted above from Genesis comes to us out of the time of the Jewish exile in Babylon, hence it’s similarities to (but also radical departures from) the Babylonian creation myth. The human context for such a grand view of the world’s creation is a time of deep discouragement and powerlessness. All around this hymn to the Creator swirl fears that chaos has won out over life, that the oppressive empire is all-powerful and invulnerable, and that (dare any even think it?) Babylon’s gods might be greater than the God of Israel. So, behind the thrust of this hymn is the prophetic word of hope and salvation, saying, in effect, Take heart! Your Redeemer God is also the Creator of heaven and earth (we would say of the universe). Your arms may be weak and your legs unsteady, but to your God, the sun and moon (deities to their captors) are just lamps in the heavens not worth naming, and the greatest nations are (in the prophet’s words) just a drop on the rim of the bucket not worthy of mention.

It is one thing to tell the powerless and humiliated that they were created to have dominion. They have little control over even their own lives, and our modern abilities to pollute the air we breath, the water we drink, the earth on which we live, and even the oceans that cover the majority of our planet would sound to them just plain crazy. The reality that we have bombs sufficient to split the earth itself (our home planet!) lies far beyond their worst nightmares. That humans could (or would) wipe out species for pleasure and profit would be too great an evil for them to contemplate. It is quite another matter to tell people with our modern powers of pollution and destruction to exercise dominion any way they please, just because they can.

So, the time has come for those of us who care what the Bible says to listen anew and rethink our understandings of this Genesis passage so often misused to justify our “right” to treat God’s earth and its nonhuman creatures as though we were commissioned to be, not stewards, but tyrants. The earth is not our warehouse of resources to use up. Nature is not just raw material for industry. Neither are people “human resources” to be used up and discarded. In my short time as a Boy Scout, we were taught always to leave a site where we had camped as we found it or better. Do no damage, and leave no trace.

To be created in the image of God is not to look like God or “be as gods” in the world. In the ancient world, statues of the monarch represented his lordship over his lands, reminding citizens and foes alike who it was that ruled within the boundaries of his kingdom. Human beings are, in this Genesis view, created to represent the Creator in a world that does not belong to them, to be living images of God’s care for God’s world. We are, Genesis has it, made to be stewards, care-takers of the created world. We are also to be care-givers for each other. In Genesis 4, Cain denies his own humanity when he asks of Abel whom he has murdered, “Am I my brother’s keeper (guardian)?”

More than a few ecologically minded people today regard Christianity as part of the problem and the Bible as support for human greed and arrogance, for the willful exploitation of the earth and thoughtless destruction of the natural world. While I believe they are wrong, I also know they can present considerable evidence to support their moral indictment. It’s time to rethink, with much more humility than we have been accustomed to showing (or feeling). It’s not helpful simply to dismiss some of the religiously environmental as pantheists, as though labeling them answered their accusations or silenced their protests. Certainly, we misuse our own Bible if we offer it up in support of unbridled greed and pride in acquisition. We need to listen. We need to get outside more and recover our sense of wonder. We need to hear anew and take to heart the Bible’s insistence that the world does not belong to us.

The earth is the LORD's and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it. (Psalm 24:1 NRSV)

God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good.
(Genesis 1:31a NRSV)

O LORD, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures.
(Psalm 104:24 NRSV)

About Face, Forward March

2010-04-02T13:10:00.003-04:00

Anyone who cares about public education in this country, please read this piece in the Washington Post that was written by Diane Ravitch, formerly a major supporter of No Child left behind. I could quibble about some of her specific suggestions and about the missing focus on elementary education, but the overall force of what she has written is wonderful to read, especially coming from someone who commands so much respect and has, she declares, seen education so differently in the recent past. Ravitch admits she got it wrong and we, as a nation, got it wrong, and she says what we need to do now to correct the mistake and go forward in the right direction. Don't miss this one. It's here: link to the article

Further Comment on the Blueprint for Education

2010-03-28T05:56:00.005-04:00

The Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, General Secretary of the National Council of Churches of Christ in the USA, has also submitted comment to the U.S. House of Representatives Education and Labor Committee on the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, known since 2002 as No Child Left Behind. You may find and read his comment here.

Thanks for this link to Jan Resseger at the Justice & Witness Ministries of the United Church of Christ whose Web page on the subject of the reauthorization is here. Included on the page is a link to the Blueprint itself as presented by the U.S. Department of Education.

Critique of the Blueprint for Education

2010-03-25T12:39:00.005-04:00

The United Church of Christ's Justice and Witness Ministries has issued a worthwhile paper on the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The paper has been submitted to the House Education and Labor Committee working on that reauthorization. Read it here .

Ex-offenders and Federal Voting Rights

2010-03-22T07:52:00.002-04:00

On a day when I’m already feeling happy about legislation, I’m pleased to read the New York Times editorial supporting a bill that would restore federal voting rights to ex-offenders, meaning people who have “served their time” and returned to the community. Whatever the problems may be in our criminal justice system (and they are many, particularly with regard to incarceration), the assumption is that when convicted criminals have served their sentences, the law has fulfilled its requirements as they presently exist. We want the people released from prison to integrate back into society and live responsibly, and responsible participation in society includes voting. Besides, I’ve never seen the connection between criminal conviction and voting as I might see it with, say, owning and carrying a gun. Voting does not seem to me to enhance the possibility of repeated criminal behavior.

The ban on voting does, as the editorial points out, have racist implications and, therefore, political implications, also. That’s another good reason to support the bill.

An Ancient Profile in Courage

2010-03-19T08:40:00.006-04:00

Reading about the embarrassing timidity of congressmen fearful of voting their consciences for what they believe to be the good of the American people because doing so might make them vulnerable in the next election has put me in mind of an ancient tale of courage under far harsher circumstances. At stake is not a seat in Congress but the very life of a young woman called upon to stand up for her people.

Esther is Queen of Persia, but she is also a Jew, and the king’s counselor Haman has concocted a plot to destroy the Jews in the land. Mordecai seeks to persuade Esther to intervene with the king on behalf of her people, but under the law if Esther approaches the king without being called, she will be executed, unless the king chooses to extend to her his golden scepter. In the past thirty days, the king has not called for her at all, and so her favor in his eyes seems most uncertain.

The exchange between Mordecai and young Esther is telling.

Mordecai told them to reply to Esther, “Do not think that in the king's palace you will escape any more than all the other Jews. For if you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another quarter, but you and your father's family will perish. Who knows? Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.”

Then Esther said in reply to Mordecai, “Go, gather all the Jews to be found in Susa, and hold a fast on my behalf, and neither eat nor drink for three days, night or day. I and my maids will also fast as you do. After that I will go to the king, though it is against the law; and if I perish, I perish.” (Esther 4:13-16, NRSV)

There are times in life when a person needs to hear some new Mordecai asking, “Who knows? Perhaps you have come to your present position for just such a time as this.”

I wonder how many will find the courage, not to risk their lives which are not at stake, but to risk only their seats in Congress by voting for what they privately believe is better for the American people. I look at the diagrams of potential votes, see the box for those who want the health care reform to pass but wish also to vote “No” to protect themselves, and I feel ashamed. Lives are at stake, but not theirs. Yet even small courage seems too much to ask.

“He who fights and runs away lives to fight another day.” Or maybe just to run away again. Perhaps it gets easier.

Why Should I Pay?

2010-03-17T08:56:00.003-04:00

The question is, "Why should I pay for the education of other people's children?" Here's a reply to that question, a bit lengthy for some perhaps but worth the read, from Dr. Ernest Partridge, "the online gadfly."

Education and Training

2010-03-17T08:34:00.003-04:00

It is by no means self-evident to us, the people of the United States, that human beings should be educated rather than merely trained. Many among us look suspiciously upon those who are highly educated. Note the current disparagement of college and university professors by the angry and resentful who seem convinced life should be simple and should be kept simply the way they think life used to be. In a strange twist of logic, the reply to complexity of thought became the acronym KISS, standing for Keep It Simple, Stupid. Complexity, then, has been branded a mark of stupidity, while by implication, the simpleminded is wise.

What is it to be educated? For some, it seems to be the ability to perform such feats as naming the 50 states and their capital cities or giving the dates of certain events in history regarded as important. An education in the sciences, then, is seen as the memorization of “scientific facts” rather than development of the ability to think scientifically, using the scientific approach to investigate happenings in the world around us. Education, then, would be no more than the accumulation of familiarity with the already known. Continuing education would be “keeping up” with changes and developments in the already known, because especially in the fields of science and technology, what is “known” today is constantly being expanded or replaced by new “facts.”

Is being educated not, rather, having gained the ability to think perceptively, critically, and creatively, using knowledge gained by reading, study, observation, experience, or instruction and building upon skills gained by, yes, training? Our students need to learn not only to compute and to solve mathematical problems formulated by someone else (the test makers), but also to think mathematically on their own. Is learning to read with acceptable levels of fluency and comprehension an end in itself or the means to a lifetime of reading? What good does it do a person or our society if that person learns to read but does not continue reading? Curiosity and imagination are crucial elements in education, to be enabled and encouraged rather than stifled by the insistence that, “We make the questions, and there is one and only one right answer for each.”

To be trained, I need to learn only “how to do” the prescribed task, and I need only such knowledge of facts and procedures as I require to do that task the way my trainer says is correct. Training is gained by instruction, memorization, and repetition. Questions of “why?” are unnecessary and unwelcome. Curiosity and imagination only get in the way.

Back in 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois included in his book, The Souls of Black Folk, a since-famous critique of the social and educational program of Booker T. Washington. The following sentence seems to me pertinent in our present turmoil over public education. He writes,“This is an age of unusual economic development, and Mr. Washington’s programme naturally takes an economic cast, becoming a gospel of Work and Money to such an extent as apparently almost completely to overshadow the higher aims of life.” Do we even know what DuBois is talking about in that contrast, as it might apply to our own souls or the soul of our nation, or has the “gospel of Work and Money” taken over completely? "Higher aims of life"? What are they?

Starting Point Matters

2010-02-11T06:37:00.005-05:00

I’m currently reading yet another book on Christian belief that begins where the Apostles’ Creed and Nicene Creed do: “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth.” That starting point is both reasonable and traditional, but not necessarily helpful or true to the development of actual faith. It starts us off with questions of being and power, the power to create the universe out of nothing. From there, God becomes the Maker of all things and the Ground of Being, without a word yet spoken of redemptive love or hope. We begin with argument rather than encouragement, with telling rather than caring.

As a people, the children of Israel first came to know Yahweh God when they were enslaved in Egypt and oppressed with hard labor, when they had no freedom or social status. God entered onto the stage of human history as a God of slaves, identifying with the lowest of the lowly, and manifested what we might call God-ness in deliverance from that state of hopelessness. Some nobodies in the world became God’s own people. The hopeless were given hope, the enslaved set free, the worthless (by society’s accounting) accorded great value in the eyes of the God who adopted them and committed to journeying with them through life and history.

Only later, when there came time and need to reflect, did the children of Israel begin to understand their Savior God as also their Creator, and quite possibly not until the time of the Jews’ exile in Babylon was Yahweh established in their faith as the Creator of heaven and earth or, as we would say today, of the universe. Even then, the great “Prophet of the Exile” (Isaiah, chapters 40-55) spoke of Yahweh God’s power and authority over all nations and even the stars of heaven (pictured poetically as an army obeying God’s commands) for the purpose of overcoming the exiles’ doubts about their God’s ability to deliver them anew from humiliation and bondage. The very creation narrative that opens our Bible comes from that setting of much needed encouragement to trust and hope during the time of Babylonian captivity. Biblically, God’s power is always the strength to save, to rescue, to redeem. It is love’s power, always.

Thus the biblical witness to God’s redemptive love parallels the human experience of love. The infant does not first know her parents as her procreators and the authorities she must obey; she knows them as the people who feed her, comfort her, hug her, and make with her the eye and touch contact that is the beginning of empathy and so of her development as a human person (not just a human being). She learns that these are the people who come when she cries out in distress. So, love’s first lesson is trust, not obedience. It is joy, not fear. Belonging, not guilt.

Later she will learn to obey these people, but not for the sake of obedience as such. They are raising a daughter (or son), not a slave. If things go well, trust and love will remain the context for obedience, and responsible freedom will be its goal.

Christians are servants and representatives of the God who loves and rescues slaves. That this very God is also the Creator of the universe is meant to encourage the despairing and to turn societies upside down, not to set Christianity at the top of any society to rule and maintain it from the top down, with those at the bottom just left there. The church was not called to life to have power and authority over the world’s people and so to establish a system such as Christendom. What authority the churches rightly have is only that of self-giving, redemptive love. We Christians are called to Christ and sent out into the world to be people who respond to cries of distress and care about the ones societies consider worthless except as cheap labor. We are to confront all people with God’s passion for justice and compassion for the hurt, not with our authority and power as people with some sort of divine right.

Starting point matters when we talk about God. The political start with power and the philosophical with being. We need rather to start with God’s pain and anger at the injustices done to people and with God’s response to the cries of distress, which is self-committing and self-giving redemptive love. People need to be encountered by God-ness as being with, not just being.

Animal?

2009-12-14T09:02:00.006-05:00

On Friday, December 11, 2009, The News of Cumberland County, our local paper in Bridgeton, New Jersey, ran the front page story, “Dragged behind truck, Reese is getting better,” Reese being a dog of pit bull and Doberman mix that had been horribly injured in the dragging incident still under investigation. Above the headline, however, was another: “Animal who did it still out there.” The article itself contained the same kind of statement: “The animal who did it is still driving the streets.” The rest of the article told of the wonderful work done by the SPCA to enable Reese to recover, retrain her to overcome some minor “bad manners” she had developed from poor training, and enable her to be a lovable dog fit for a new human owner and a better life.

An uplifting and helpful report was spoiled by name calling and mislabeling. A newspaper should not engage in labeling that corrupts appropriate indignation at an outrageous act into disgust with a person and, almost inevitably, with an entire group of people.

What’s wrong with this expression of outrage? Is it not natural when having learned of such a cruel and senseless deed to ask, “Which one is the animal?” Yes, it is a natural response, but not a helpful one. Reese is the animal. The perpetrator is a human being, an individual human being.

Disgust is a natural reaction built into us probably in its origins as a defense against bad food. The neuro-chemical affect known as disgust triggers a physical response that suggests vomiting or spitting out distasteful or spoiled food. Disgust as a factor in our emotional development also seems to figure prominently in the formation of prejudices against groups of people: bigotry and racism.

The philosopher and ethicist Martha C. Nussbaum has written persuasively against allowing any place for disgust in our criminal justice system because it shifts our focus from the criminal deed to the supposed nature of the accused and can seriously mislead the sentencing process. At worst, disgust can also lead to wrongful conviction of the innocent by rendering a jury blind and deaf to actual evidence because they have already fixed the accused in their minds as the disgusting thing who “did it.”

Dehumanizing the perpetrator of a crime can precipitate a whole set of unhelpful consequences. It can corrupt the judicial process. It feeds prejudices because disgust, focusing on the person rather than the deed, tends to generalize into a type of person. So, whatever ethnic identity is imagined by the reader or later portrayed in the photograph of a suspect will be generalized from “him” to “them.” Less obviously perhaps, shifting from indignation at the deed to disgust with the person and dehumanizing that person as an animal or a monster, as not really one of us, lets the rest of us off the hook.

Why do I say calling the perpetrator an animal lets the rest of us off the hook? What hook? We didn’t drag a dog until the poor creature was barely recognizable. No, we did not, and we are rightfully outraged that someone did, but that someone was a human being and therefore one of us. Neither Reese nor another of her kind would ever have done such a thing. We are the creature that can be wonderfully kind but also horribly cruel. We need to see ourselves in the perpetrator and him in ourselves for his sake and our own. Dehumanizing him puts him beyond redemption and also prevents our progress toward a better humanity in a more just and humane society. For his sake and our own, we need to acknowledge our shared humanity so we can improve it.

The unthoughtful, knee-jerk reaction to what I have written above would be, “So you’re defending that person?” No, I’m trying to refocus indignation where it belongs: on the cruel and criminal deed for which the perpetrator should be held accountable. Indignation is appropriate (heaven help us if we were not indignant over such a terrible act of cruelty). Dehumanization helps no one. Disgust feeds bigotry. And newspapers should not engage in calling people names and so encouraging public disgust with whole groups in our society.

For a thorough discussion of the subject, read Martha C. Nussbaum’s book, Hiding from Humanity.

Spiritual, Not Religious - Further Thought

2009-11-15T08:08:00.004-05:00

“She does it religiously.” Whatever “it” may be, she does it regularly rather than occasionally, and she does it faithfully with an apparent sense of commitment and purpose. This use of the word “religiously” implies a discipline.

My previous post led a friend to question whether I might have been too hard on my fellow Christians and too easy on those who reject “organized religion” in favor of a spirituality which may, for some or many, be far less than a discipline of life and mind. My friend is right, of course, that Christians have not all been smugly closed-minded and judgmental toward people who have struggled to fit into the churches without abandoning their own uniqueness and integrity. Neither are those who proclaim themselves spiritual without religion all nearly so concerned with being spiritual as with being simply not religious. I suspect, though, that the Christians who would be least offended by my call for the humility of recognizing and accepting our shared humanity would be those already least dismissive of the irreligious. Likewise, I suspect the non-religious who most seriously seek spirituality might be less easily dismissive of religion than their fellow "unbelievers" who more honestly just don’t want to be bothered with the quest for meaning in life or with the struggle for a more humane human community.

I do not, however, think the main concern should be with suspicions about the each other’s possible lack of integrity and serious-mindedness. Rather, let us look to our own houses.

In the United States, especially, Christianity is having a very hard time accepting its minority status, loss of prestige, and waning power over public opinion, morality, and custom. The churches were pleased to be the benevolent authority, but the role of servant seems less gratifying despite being the one to which Jesus has called all who would follow him. Ministers and priests used to be the men (always) with the answers, a pretentious role that made for considerable private distress and self-doubt for those who thought most deeply and cared about the people most strongly. It was a terrible burden to be the one who was supposed to be able to explain everything satisfactorily, who should be able to make sense even of the tragically unfair and the cruelly senseless. Thankfully, those who have been able to take some of the authoritarian out of Christian faith and ministerial calling have been delivered from the pretense but, of course, must now deal with grief as grief and with faith as trust rather than certitude.

Because, I think, the point of saying, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual,” is to close the door on judgment by the religious, whether and to what degree the person is serious about being spiritual, and because Jesus has told us not to pass judgment upon each other, we do better to question our own motives and commitments than to assume triviality in others. If we share the questions about life’s meaning, we will, I believe, get further together than if we declare life’s meaning known and spelled out with “take it or leave it” authority. More and more people are choosing to leave it. So, with the apostle Paul, we might do well to acknowledge with some humility that our knowledge is partial and our prophecy imperfect, that we do indeed on this side of the resurrection see life only as through a glass dimly. Then perhaps we can walk together in trust with hope, letting questions be questions and people be themselves.

Spiritual, Not Religious

2009-11-13T10:21:00.001-05:00

In the process of writing the first draft of Sunday’s sermon, I saw a little more clearly, I think, what people mean when they say, “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual.” I’ve been puzzled by their definition or understanding of “spiritual,” but that’s not the point. What I think they are saying is, “Back off, and leave me alone.” I don’t need or want your religion’s judgments upon me and my life. I don’t care what you believe, no matter how certain you have convinced yourself you are of those beliefs. I don’t need your rules or prohibitions. I can be ethical without your commandments and spiritual without your rituals. I can share life with other people, be their friend and love them, without learning your “lord-talk.” And I don’t have to tell you what being spiritual means to me, because I don’t care if I pass your entrance exam or not. Whatever you’re selling, peddle it somewhere else, and I’ll find what I need for myself, my way.

Can we who are Christians understand that we have worked quite hard to earn that rebuff? If so, maybe we can rejoin humanity and find our own anew.

Cravings

2009-11-09T10:00:00.005-05:00

Earlier this morning, I wrote a post for our church's online Bible study group which has been looking at the collection of Jesus' teachings we call the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew, chapters 5-7). Maybe I'm just being lazy, but I'm posting it also here. I've been doing some pondering of religious terms I'm not sure we understand very well inside or outside religious communities. Chief among them is the term "spiritual," but I'll come back to that another day. This morning's puzzling religious term was "righteousness." Often we use it and it's adjective, righteous, negatively to imply self-righteousness. Jesus, however, declares blessed those who hunger and thirst for it, whatever it is. Here's the post.

“Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.”

This beatitude asks me what I crave. So, what do I crave? Security? Happiness? Fame? Wealth? Power? Peace and quiet? Affection? Respect? Jesus calls the poor, the grief-stricken, and the hungry blessed because God has regard for their plight and is coming to set things right. But what is righteousness that anyone should crave it?

The biblical concept of righteousness comes from a family of related Hebrew words that have to do with relationships rather than individual piety. Hebraic thinking is relational, which makes it hard to understand for us modern, Western people who are trained to think in more individualistic terms. In Hebrew thought, righteousness is right treatment of, response to, or dealing with another person according to the relationship one actually has with that person or group. The stronger and closer the relationship, the more is involved in acting righteously toward the other person. At the minimum, righteousness is fairness. At the extreme, Jesus says, greater love has no one than to lay down his life in love for others. In society, righteousness is justice but a healing, restorative justice that rights wrongs, meets needs previously denied, and heals the wounds caused by injustices.

So, the person who hungers for righteousness craves rightness in relationships and justice in human society. But justice is a concept we often regard as an ideal. The great Jewish teacher and philosopher Abraham Joshua Heschel makes a distinction in his work, The Prophets, that I find helpful. Heschel observes that many people extol the ideal of justice but fail to respond to the particular injustices done to people. He contends we need more who take offense at the wrongs others are made to suffer, who cannot maintain their own peace of mind by ignoring the abuses and indignities inflicted upon people in society.

Following Heschel’s lead, I see those who hunger and thirst for righteousness as people who empathize with others treated unfairly and want the situations corrected. Does it bother me that I can buy goods at unjustly low prices because people are exploited in the manufacture of those goods, or do I just crave the bargain prices and content myself with taking what I can get and not thinking about the people kept out of my sight?

Jesus promises that those who crave the saving justice of God will be satisfied. They are not content to benefit from the deprivations of others. They empathize enough with the wronged to be disturbed by their plight. They are not pleased with advantage gained by putting others at disadvantage. They cannot shrug off social and economic wrongs with an, “Oh well, that’s the way it goes.” They are not mollified by percentages of wrongness in society as long it does not harm them personally or their family. While they may be happy with much in life and enjoy fun and good times, they cannot turn off their discontent with injustices that persist. Their neighbor’s plight disturbs their equilibrium.

So far, I have said nothing about righteousness toward God. Or have I?

Symbols and Tests

2009-10-15T08:47:00.003-04:00

In our adult forum last Sunday, we discussed symbols. After looking at a few frequently used Christian symbols, we turned to those we carry with us personally whether we carry them in our pockets, on our lapels or bodices, or in our minds. Our conversation was mostly light and uncritical, except when we talked about the cross and the fish, both of which retain their earlier meanings for many people of faith but, under the banner of Christendom, developed belligerent meanings and uses that put people who are not Christian on guard.

One further tendency of the symbolic also raised warning flags. From amulet to sacrament, the use of symbols always threatens to supplant the realities those symbols were meant to represent and reinforce. The outward expression of an inward truth, over time, tends to take over that truth itself and replace it. For example, a sacrifice that once expressed a contrite heart and heartfelt resolve to change one’s attitudes and behavior devolves into a ritualized quick fix for guilt substituted for genuine contrition. Then, the sacrifice actually works to prevent change, sustaining the old behavior by salving any regret it may have caused. Just perform the ritual properly, and all is well even though nothing has changed inwardly or outwardly. In that case, the sacrifice has become an enabler of the sin. The same can happen in personal life. At first, flowers represent a husband’s way of saying he is truly sorry for an inconsiderate act and the hurt it caused. Over time, however, the flowers can become an increasingly impotent and irritating attempt to appease his wife without really feeling sorry at all or intending to change anything. Then, the symbolic flowers become hateful in the wife’s eyes as an insulting substitute for the love and caring they once represented.

A symbol represents something greater than itself – a bigger truth, a commitment, a relationship, a life-guiding hope no symbol can hold but can only suggest. My wedding ring is not my marriage and cannot hold my love for my wife, my trust in her love for me, our shared hope that the love God has given us will endure and grow, and our mutual commitment to living that hope. The ring can only remind me of the greater truths it represents symbolically. Without those truths, I would have just band of gold with no value beyond the amount of money for which I could sell it. Worse, I might be left with a bitter symbol of lost love and failed hope.

Symbols are not the only things that can supplant the realities they were intended to support. Measurements can play the same destructive trick on us, especially those measurements designed to give us some partial idea of how well we are doing at something. Failure starts when we begin to accommodate a complex task involving development in human beings to some partial and invariably flawed measurement of progress. Then the measurement corrupts the process it was meant to support and enhance. The test becomes the thing. Rather than using the test to help guide and further the education of children, schools tailor the educational process to enhance scores on the test. The more the test comes to matter, the more it will corrupt the process of learning and the process of teaching.

But, you object, a test is not a symbol but serves a different purpose. That’s partly true, but what the test and the symbol have in common is their perverse ability to take over the realities they were meant to support. I do not contend that this analogy proves anything, but I make it to encourage critical thinking about (1) what education is and (2) what testing really shows. Does the religious symbol or symbolic act (sacrament, perhaps) support and enhance faith in God, or do we put our faith in the symbol and worship it? Which is truly sacred to us? Likewise, is testing done for the purpose of educating children, or is schooling done for the purpose of passing the test? Is the child the central reality, or is it the test? Which exists for the sake of the other? Which is sacred to us?

On Letting Others Frame Us

2009-09-15T07:58:00.002-04:00

Yesterday in a quickly composed e-mail message, I wrote a sentence that later struck me as potentially more helpful than I had realized. I had written the members of our church’s visioning team to encourage conversation about what it means to be a redemptive church rather than an authoritarian church. Anyone interested in that distinction and the need to frame Christianity as redemptive rather than authoritarian can read the sermon that raises the issue by clicking this link. But here’s the sentence I think worth pondering for many of us:

Never let those who put you down frame the way you see yourself.

Eight Years Later

2009-09-11T10:27:00.006-04:00

Because today is September 11, I went back and re-read the sermon I preached on September 16, 2001 in our Sunday service turned into a memorial service for the people killed in the terrorist attacks upon our nation. In the months that followed, I preached more sermons that sought to deal with the ongoing grief, anger, and issues from that awful day. Later, I put those topical 9-11 sermons together into a book with essays between them. The book, called, Why, God? has never been published but remains on my Web site.

My idea was to preserve the sermons written and preached on specific dates along with brief reflections written somewhat later but still within the context of that time in our nation's life. In light of events that followed in our national responses to the outrage and tragedy of that day, I re-read the book with sadness, but for today, I'll read only the immediate response in memoriam and maybe some others that help me remember the people we lost and those who loved them.

For any who wish to read the sermon, you'll find it here at the start of the book. Be careful, the sermon is only the first three and a half pages.

High Noon

2009-09-08T15:52:00.003-04:00

At noon today, President Barack Obama spoke to America’s school students, encouraging them to work at their own education, not only for themselves as individuals, but for the nation. We have public education because we believe all children and youths deserve opportunity to learn and become the adults education enables them to be, but also because we believe that an educated population is vital to the well-being of a liberal democracy and a forward-moving society.

I differ from President Obama in his apparent understandings of what is needed to improve public education for the nation’s children and youth. I wish he had kept Linda Darling Hammond and left Arne Duncan in Chicago. I continue to hope he will start listening to educators more than to business people and will dump No Child Left Behind with the invalid and detrimental correlation of standardized test scores with good teaching and real learning. But I also continue to believe he has the good of the nation and its children in mind, not merely the benefit of the testing/publishing companies and the entrepreneurs who want to privatize public education for their profit. I don’t yet believe he really wants to turn teachers into scripted drones and destroy the teaching profession. And I hope and pray my trust in him is not folly.

Even so, his message to middle and high school students was sound and inspiring. The pre-speech hubbub, however, was alarming as well as sickening, and I’m at a loss to explain the apparent fear and rage without suggesting racism. Are many Americans so upset at having a black president that they can’t stand it? Do they really think the only logical explanation for his victory in the election is that he somehow brainwashed large numbers of people? Is racist fear the driving force behind the “take America back” slogan? Is his presidency to them a pseudo-apocalyptic nightmare that threatens their whole world? I hope not because, if so, then worse trouble is coming from the frightened and enraged segments of our population, and politicians who seize every chance to slander Barack Obama and paint him as an alien to score political points, no matter how silly or wild the accusations (death panels, for instance), need to think hard about what they are doing to this nation they supposedly love and serve and about what horrific consequences could come from their actions. Or do they share the racist revulsion to an African-American president, even if they don’t really believe the nonsense they say about him?

Barack Obama’s speech stands on its own merits. Lower elementary school teachers will, of course, need to translate the speech for their students to hear his message at their level of language and understanding. But the idea of working hard in school and learning for their country as well as for themselves can be communicated to them and even made fun for the younger ones to learn and understand. As they can help their families at home, so they can help their country, as we all can by working together. Keep that thought. Maybe we can even provide a reasonable level of health care for all in our land, if we will work together and share the load.

Hiding Our Faces

2009-06-17T07:33:00.004-04:00

We might think that people who have lost their jobs or who have completed their formal education but have so far been unable to get jobs would seek understanding, support, and encouragement from their faith communities. We might think so, but much of the time we would be wrong.

Psychiatrist, professor, and theorist Donald L. Nathanson has provided us with “the compass of shame” which indicates the four natural but non-restorative responses to high intensities of the shame-humiliation affect: withdrawal, attack-self, avoidance, and attack-other. The first response to shame is to hide one’s face or wish to. People caught in sustained shame affect do not seek to be understood, supported, and encouraged; they seek to be rendered invisible and left alone. So, they stop attending worship services for the same kind of reasons they stay away from class reunions: they do not want to have to explain their situations or answer questions about their job searches. In our current recession, few people who have lost their jobs or have been unable so far to secure first jobs will wish to give weekly non-progress reports to even the most well-meaning and truly caring inquirers.

Shame does not make us want to be seen and understood. It does not welcome sympathy or encouragement. It wants to be hidden from sight.

When people are feeling pitiful, they interpret concern as pity and inquiry as judgment. The reason they do so is not a misunderstanding of the friendship and good intentions of others but, rather, the literal, physical re-triggering of the shame affect within their systems. The well-meaning question of how their job searches are going makes them feel the shame again, admittedly with less intensity than at the time they were being laid off from their jobs, but the feeling is the same. If we use physical pain as something of an analogy to shame, well-meaning questions probe the wound and reopen it, making it bleed a little.

So, how many times on a Sunday morning do I want my wound reopened? The obvious answer is none. But I may very well need to be with a community of people who are glad to see me and be in my presence, and I may want to turn to God in their company. There’s no need to ask about my job search; believe me, if I have gotten a new job, especially a good one in my field, I’ll tell you. In the meantime, I need to experience the truth I’m finding it hard to believe: that I am a valid, worthwhile person and friend rather than an unfortunate case. Yes, I know that in this recession, it’s not my fault (although I may still be tormenting myself with hindsight questions of “what if?” and speculations of “if only”), but feeling shame is not contingent upon deserving it. I do know it’s not my fault, but being asked about “it” triggers the affect again.

Friends and faith communities can welcome without probing the wound. They can provide a context of acceptance that says without stating it, You’re still you, the person we’re happy to see, the person we respect and need in our company. Instead of, “Are you getting any closer to finding a job?” maybe the question can be, “Hey, what do you think about this new project we’re undertaking?” Or something like, “Can you give me a hand moving these tables?” Or even, “How about those Phillies?”

More on Undeserved Shame and Its Effects

2009-06-14T19:14:00.002-04:00

Is all shame undeserved and bad for us? No, of course not. The person who is “shameless” behaves monstrously without self-restraint. But feeling shame is not contingent upon deserving it.

I will write more about the matter on this blog itself, but earlier today I preached a sermon for the service in which we recognize this year’s graduates from high school, college, graduate school, and training or certification programs, and it was impossible for me to avoid the current situation and the shame it is inflicting upon people attempting to pursue their hopes and dreams. The sermon, with end notes added for the online manuscript, may be read here.

Job Loss and Undeserved Shame

2009-06-08T09:08:00.004-04:00

May was a better month, we’re told. The good news was that last month our economy “shed” only 345,000 jobs. That number, of course, is a net figure obtained by subtracting jobs lost from jobs gained, which means that more than 345,000 people actually lost their jobs. I find the verb “shed” offensive. Dogs shed their dead hairs which have been replaced by new ones. Shedding implies dropping something no longer useful and needed. If you are one of the more than 345,000 people who lost their jobs in the better month of May, you may not appreciate the idea that the economy of the land has shed you like a dead dog hair.

Here are my questions. Why does losing one’s job feel so shameful when it’s not the person’s fault in any way but just a result of the economic recession? Why do we feel ashamed when we have done nothing to be ashamed of? We need to answer those questions so we can move on from “why?” to the practical question of “how?”: How do we deal with undeserved shame, avoiding depression, cynicism, and sustained rage? Let’s start with “why?”

Job loss triggers a certain affect in our bodies. I am using the term “affect” as in the theory of human emotions developed by Silvan S. Tomkins and furthered by Donald L. Nathanson and others. Tomkins identified nine affects, which are neuro-chemical events triggered in us by the stimuli of living. It’s our biology. Of the negative affects, perhaps the most painful and difficult is shame-humiliation. Tomkins gave the affect a hyphenated name to suggest its range of intensities.

Get this. The shame affect is triggered (in an infant, child, or adult) when either of the two positive affects (interest-excitement or enjoyment-joy) is interrupted while the person still wishes it to continue. That pretty well describes job loss, doesn’t it? You still wanted (and needed) your job, but suddenly it was taken from you. You did nothing wrong. In a state of shock (the confusion, the temporary loss of mental control, caused by a major event of shame affect), you may have heard your company’s bosses or human resources people telling you things like, “It’s nothing personal,” meaning you weren’t singled out because of who you are or what you’ve done. “You can be proud of your work here.” Yeah, sure, I’m feeling really proud right now as you’re telling me everything I was working on has been cut off and I’m out of here. A few moments ago, I belonged here, had friends and coworkers here, had projects and a future here, and suddenly I’ve become an outsider to be escorted to the door as though I were an intruder.

The shame affect causes (in infants who feel no actual shame or embarrassment yet) drooping shoulders, downcast eyes, and a lowering of the head slightly to one side. “You can walk out of here with your head held high.” Right.

As adults, we have implanted in our minds, whether or not we affirm it intellectually, the notion that people get what they deserve. It’s a lie, but we have been trained and taught to believe it. And we do believe it, at least when it comes to our own “failures.” Because of the shame affect and all the experiences we have associated with it over the years of our growing up, a job loss feels like a failure, even to the person who has not failed in any way. Suddenly, we feel as though we must apologize to our families, other people, and ourselves – even to strangers to whom we are introduced. “And what do you do?” I’m unemployed at the moment. (But, you may want to shout, even though you know not to, it wasn’t my fault!) As a society, we cling to the lie that people get what they deserve because the lie makes us feel safer, and so we attribute blame even when we know people by the hundreds of thousands are losing their jobs through no fault of their own. And what do people say of your job loss? “Oh, that’s a shame.” Aggh. There’s that word.

As a society and as individuals who must endure it, we need to learn to deal with undeserved shame. Our systems don’t help us. The system is supposed to reward hard work, good work, and dedication with some measure of success and appreciation. It doesn’t. The system demands loyalty but gives none. It says you must be a “team player,” but there is no team; it’s a fiction. In the system, you are a human resource, not a person. Realizing you are a non-person in the system you thought was a team that knew your name is, again, humiliating.

But you don’t deserve it, and that’s the truth. The system is not designed to give you a chance to prove yourself, to learn, to grow; it is designed to use you and then dispose of you. Resources get used until they are used up; then they are discarded as waste.

You are not waste. You are a person with a life, and your life matters. No, in life we do not get what we deserve. Some get wealth, pleasure, and even health they have not earned. Others get misery and pain they have not earned, either. It’s not fair.

Why do we feel shame when we have done nothing to be ashamed of? It’s natural. It’s biological. The affect is triggered inside us by the interruption of our security in belonging, doing valuable work, and getting regular paychecks (enjoyment-joy) and the interruption of our projects on the job and our personal plans and hopes for the future (interest-excitement). What had been going well is suddenly cut off and done.

There is a human tendency to think that if we feel something (especially a bad feeling), we must deserve to feel it. Wrong. What is undeserved is, indeed, undeserved. That’s not to say we did everything perfectly (not possible) and have no lessons we can learn if we choose. But learning from the experience is another step. First, let us know that undeserved shame is, truly, undeserved. I will write more about the how of dealing with undeserved shame.

Statistically Insignificant

2009-05-18T07:09:00.005-04:00

Increasingly, we find ourselves living in a data-driven world. In some simple situations, data are easy to compile and interpret. How many copies of a certain book have been sold in a certain store? The number should be easy to establish, even if some copies were lost or stolen. But how many people read this blog? I don’t know the answer to that question. The blog has three self-identified followers, but unless one posts a comment, there’s no way to know which of the three reads this post or any other. And there may be more “followers” (I can dream), because people may hide their identities by not letting themselves be listed on a blog as its followers. Besides, anybody can read this blog once or regularly without self-identifying at all.

Even so, I think it would be safe to say that as a blogger, I am statistically insignificant in the blogosphere. Although I read a few blogs frequently, I am statistically insignificant also as a reader. In fact, in this world of billions of people, I am in every way, yes, statistically insignificant. I am a datum, just one, and so it seems I can be significant only if I somehow uniquely relate in some meaningful way to many data by, say, selling a lot of books, making a lot of money, garnering a lot of votes, or getting a lot of people to pay to see or hear me do something. Or, I suppose, by being accused of a major crime, especially murder, right?

No, not exactly right. It seems the accused is significant only until convicted. The person convicted of murder returns to being just a datum, one in a field of many. In a New York Times article on the resistance of prosecutors to DNA testing for the convicted, this appeal to data struck me as particularly outrageous:

In Illinois, prosecutors have opposed a DNA test for Johnnie Lee Savory, convicted of committing a double murder when he was 14, on the grounds that a jury was convinced of his guilt without DNA and that the 175 convicts already exonerated by DNA were “statistically insignificant.”

The illogic of the first argument against DNA testing for Mr. Savory is astounding, the callousness of the second revolting. But, then, considering the many daily uses of data to dismiss the significance of one person, one life, one worker, one child, I suppose this particular instance of the gross abuse of data is (you guessed it) statistically insignificant.

From a quite different viewpoint, Talmud, Sanhedrin 37a states:

FOR THIS REASON WAS MAN CREATED ALONE, TO TEACH THEE THAT WHOSOEVER DESTROYS A SINGLE SOUL... SCRIPTURE IMPUTES [GUILT] TO HIM AS THOUGH HE HAD DESTROYED A COMPLETE WORLD; AND WHOSOEVER PRESERVES A SINGLE SOUL..., SCRIPTURE ASCRIBES [MERIT] TO HIM AS THOUGH HE HAD PRESERVED A COMPLETE WORLD.

So, I leave you, my statistically insignificant reader, to ponder the value of a datum when that one among many is a human being.

Come, Let Us Reason Together

2009-05-13T08:51:00.004-04:00

The paper is called, “Virtue out of Necessity?: Compliance, Commitment and the Improvement of Labor Conditions in Global Supply Chains,” and was written by Richard Locke, Matthew Amengual, and Akshay Mangla. Find it here. So far, I have read only the abstract which contends that compliance-oriented, voluntary programs have not significantly improved labor conditions, then says:

In contrast, this paper documents that a more commitment-oriented approach to improving labor standards co-exists, and in many of the same factories, complements the traditional compliance model. This commitment-oriented approach, based upon joint problem solving, information exchange, and the diffusion of best-practices, is often obscured by the debates over traditional compliance programs but it exists in myriad factories throughout the world and has led to sustained improvements in working conditions and labor rights at these workplaces.

Imagine that. No, seriously, imagine that; indeed, let’s all imagine it. More improvement is achieved when supposedly opposing sides recognize each other as people and sit down together to solve shared problems toward mutual satisfaction. I say “toward” mutual satisfaction because “to” might imply a lack of necessary compromises that seems to me unrealistic. Imagine such a process that enables mutual understanding so that the other party’s needs begin to fit into my own picture of possible resolutions. Effort is focused on problem-solving rather than on fear, anger, resentment, and shame. No one is demonized. No one is silenced, either. The real needs of all parties are legitimized at the table. People have a chance to see for themselves where their felt needs are really emotional reactions that dissipate as they are validated. “Well, you know, I don’t really need that after all; it’s just that I resented the way I was being portrayed, as though I were just a selfish, greedy pig.” That kind of thing. Or, “Sure, we can do that; it’s just that we were sick and tired of being treated as lazy, untrustworthy thieves with no interest in the company’s future.” That kind of thing, too.

Our habit of opposition has created some incredible assumptions (literally incredible). Farm workers are the enemies of farming. Teachers are the enemies of education. Workers are the enemies of production. Lawyers are the enemies of the law. Judges are the enemies of justice. For example, the entire history of No Child Left Behind and the so-called reform of education has treated real educators, especially elementary school teachers, as malicious dolts blocking the progress that can be driven by business people who know nothing of child development or of teaching. Sadly, the Obama administration has so far failed to change this downward progress toward the dehumanization of our children.

When I was a boy, I liked to sit at our kitchen table in the evening and listen to my father talk about his work. He was a production superintendent for a large manufacturer of building products. One evening he told me he had been cautioned not to tell other production superintendents how much his “men” (the people who worked on the production line) were making because they were the highest paid in the plant. Interestingly, his own profit sharing was also at the top. How could both be true? From him, I got my early lessons in treating people as people, listening to them, regarding them with respect, and making decisions that took into account their interests, for mutual benefit. I learned about getting along with the union by being fair and forthright. It wasn’t perfect. There could still be problems with the union, of course, but they were minimized by trust. Some workers could be unreasonable, lazy, or difficult, certainly, but mutual respect (not buddy-buddy that would undermine authority) minimized trouble by lowering the levels of negative emotion.

To my dad, his men were never tools to be used then tossed aside. He hated having to fire someone. He did it, of course, when it had to be done. One evening, he was angry and frustrated because he had had no choice but to fire a man who was a good worker with long seniority, but the man had tossed a broom over the fence as a favor to a friend. Stealing from the company left no latitude; it was automatic termination. Looking back, what I admire in my father was his upset over the matter. He actually cared. Later I would have a boss who could fire someone without blinking and throw his own son out of the house the same way. Is that judgment accurate? Maybe not. Maybe it did upset the man who simply hid his feelings. I hope so. But it’s the contrast in viewpoint and approaches that matters here, not any notion of trying to make my dad a saint (he wasn’t) or my former boss a demon (he wasn’t, either).

Back to the thesis. We get more done to mutual satisfaction and benefit when we recognize both sides as people, sit down together, listen respectfully to each other, and work on solving the actual problems that come into focus as the emotional debris is cleared away. Imagine that, please.

High Road and Low Road

2009-05-11T11:58:00.001-04:00

Recently, I participated in a forum on encouraging immigration reform (the legal issue) and more respectful and just responses to immigrants (relational issues, both personal and social). I was asked to open the forum with a brief introduction from a theological or faith perspective, which I did. Throughout the evening’s conversation, there was talk of appealing to people’s mind and hearts and, also, talk of public displays of strength and unity.

During the American Civil Rights Movement, a visiting lecturer who was engaged in the struggle told a class at Princeton Seminary that people make changes only as they become persuaded that those changes are in their self-interest. He advocated the “green power” of financial pressure, and I think he wanted us to see that not all people are moved by appeals to the mind (reason) and heart (compassion). From some, only money talks.

I think our instructor went too far by solidifying his insight into an ideological principle that whatever motivates people to change does so only by appealing to their self-interest. When students objected that some people are moved by appeals to justice and compassion, he countered that such an argument only proves that it is in their particular self-interest to see themselves as just and compassionate people. While in a pedantic way that reasoning could be maintained, it falsifies the ethical geography by leveling the terrain and turning the apparent higher road into just another self-serving low road. It’s unnecessarily cynical, respecting no differences in people’s attitudes or values and offering no redemption. It turns every appeal into a tactic, the means to an end.

We need to appeal to people’s minds and hearts if our goal is not merely to make room for a new group but to develop a better and more just society. We need to respect the people whose minds we are trying to change as well as the victims of their present intolerance and cruelty or indifference. Otherwise, we change nothing but only realign the boundaries of power and opportunity. The game remains the same.

At the same time, I think we do well to be realistic and know we cannot wait for all minds and hearts to change. Prejudices keep people from listening to reason (even sometimes from listening for the sake of their own self-interest), and bigotry’s disgust blocks compassion for those it declares disgusting. In a meeting not long ago, an otherwise compassionate woman said of the children of undocumented immigrants, “I don’t know where all this sympathy for them comes from.” It comes from our shared humanity, but she wasn’t seeing it, perhaps because of the perceived threat to her own people’s long and continuing struggle for dignity and equality, which is something we need to recognize as we talk about immigration reform and the fair treatment of migrant workers and immigrants.

So, let us continue to speak to minds and hearts, appealing to reason with people open to reason and urging compassion from those who value compassion and are not disgusted by it. But fairness and respect cannot wait until all minds are persuaded by reason and all hearts opened by compassion. So “green power” is something we need to keep in mind.

I could not help but notice that, even as people were grumbling about the increasingly frequent appearance of signs in Spanish, stores and banks put up Spanish signs in no time flat. Money was talking.

Shows of unity speak also in ways heard by politicians. A grouping of people without vote gains influence through solidarity with groups of people who do vote.

But expediency alone is perverse. We must continue to appeal to the mind and heart. Otherwise, we fall prey to the lie that the end justifies the means, and we dehumanize some people in the name of demanding human dignity for others. Yes, the reality is that some will listen only when money talks, but that does not mean we should let green power do all the talking.

Trampling the Child's Garden

2009-05-03T17:46:00.002-04:00

If you think play is a child’s business and imagination is something wonderful, please read this article by Peggy Orenstein from last Sunday’s NY Times Magazine. Then, please join the national conversation about recovering childhood for our children (yes, all of them) and making the lifelong process of learning a wondrous adventure again.

Tricked into Trust?

2009-04-30T07:53:00.002-04:00

What sort of reasoning makes people think they can trick me into trusting them? Checking my spam file this morning, I found an e-mail trying to sell me medications by presenting itself as having been sent to me by me. Wow, there’s a trust builder! Of course I’ll go right ahead and purchase meds from that source, since I’m just dying to put substances into my body if only they come from blatantly and stupidly deceptive sellers.

In the church office, we frequently get telephone calls from people pretending they are not selling something. “Ministries” they call themselves, and they’re just sharing, offering exciting opportunities, etc. Liars or, at least, deceivers I would call them. They attempt to bypass the church secretary by pretending to be colleagues of mine so they can talk at me, sensing I have asked that such calls not be put through to me because I do not wish to speak with them and so waste on vacuous sales pitches time I need for work. If our government did not already have so many major challenges to meet so we can begin to recover from the debilitating effects of the previous eight years and more, I might suggest someone should investigate the tax status of businesses catering to the religious market and calling themselves ministries.

Funny, I assume deceivers will deceive and pretenders are only pretending to be reliable. When a legitimate company calls to sell me something under the pretense of not selling but merely informing me of a better way of doing business, I back away because the call smells bad. When a communications company pretends to be making an advantageous adjustment to the church’s account when, in fact, it is enlarging its own share of our business by taking a chunk away from a competitor, I assume the deception means that neither the caller nor the company is to be trusted.

When technical support people stop talking about the problem for which I called and begin repeating obviously canned lines telling me why the problem really isn’t theirs and can’t be fixed anyway, then ask if there’s anything else they can help me with today, I know I’ve gotten the runaround and been dismissed. I’ve already had the experience of being told such a problem could not be fixed for a particular product, then fixing it myself in under ten minutes. I suppose I could have concluded I had worked a miracle, accomplishing the impossible in record time without training (what a genius!), but I drew the easier and more obvious conclusion: that I had been lied to by a support person who either did not know how to fix the problem or had been forbidden by policy even to discuss it (in that particular case, I suspected both were true).

Jesus of Nazareth warned that the person who is unfaithful in small matters will be dishonest in greater matters as well. I guess I will just have to continue to wonder what makes people think they can gain my trust by starting out with a lie. Maybe they believe that if a pitch is clever and frequently effective, it isn’t really a deception but just a good presentation of the truth – their “truth,” of course, being that the sale is the only thing that matters. The world suffers in many ways under that kind of outcome-based, self-serving truth.

The admonition to be faithful in small matters has countless applications. In my own field, ministry of the word surely means enabling the person to do and become, rather than merely selling the product or closing the deal. If so (and it is so), then such ministry must teach and empower, not just persuade and convince. It needs to seek understanding rather than unreasoned assent to prescribed truisms. It should stop selling beliefs and quick solutions and do the harder, slower work of enabling and encouraging people to seek healing and find life through faith, hope, and love.

But how, then, do we know when we’ve succeeded? How do we count our closed deals? We don’t. We must, instead, be content with striving to be faithful in small matters until such striving itself becomes a way of life, a mode of thought, a condition of the soul.

Trivializing

2009-04-28T09:05:00.008-04:00

When I was a teenager (back in the dark ages of the early 1960's), people made fun of studying “the sex life of the tsetse fly” and used it as a metaphor for anything they wished to dismiss as a waste of time and money as well as a conservative proof of the folly of federal taxation and spending and of government itself. At the time, I knew the tsetse caused sleeping sickness and so was aware of the suffering and disability it visited upon populations in Africa, but even so I failed to comprehend how foolish we sounded repeating the phrase as a dismissive joke. I was an adolescent. We made fun of things, many things. The way to conquer the seriousness of life and the earnestness of adults was to make fun. We trivialized what we did not understand. Sex was funny, authority (federal or otherwise) was funny, and even sleeping sickness could be spoofed to amuse adolescent minds. We were sophomoric.

Paul Krugman was pointedly clever yesterday about the dangers of trivializing. On his blog, he wrote:

So Bobby Jindal makes fun of “volcano monitoring”, and soon afterwards Mt. Redoubt erupts. Susan Collins makes sure that funds for pandemic protection are stripped from the stimulus bill, and the swine quickly attack.

What else did the right oppose recently? I just want enough information to take cover.

But the left can be adolescent, too. The name Jesus seems quite funny these days, especially when pronounced loudly with the “e” absurdly extended, swooping to a blunt “us” at the end, mimicking the excesses of evangelistic preachers. Sure, Christianity has brought this mockery upon itself with its television theatrics and with its belligerent outcries and bathetic laments over its waning cultural establishment in the nation, antics that caricature the faith they claim to defend. Caricaturing the caricatures makes for easy adolescent humor but fails to consider or comprehend the faith itself.

We need to listen to American political discourse for the telltale signs of adolescent trivializing. We will always need political satire; it’s one of our great American strengths and an important manifestation and guardian of our freedom. But satire works because it recognizes the seriousness of the harm being done by people with power. Trivializing for the purpose of dismissing the seriousness of that harm, mocking the victims, and protecting the powerful doing the harm is a different matter. Pointing out the silliness of people taking themselves much too seriously as they dismiss the rights or sufferings of others is helpful. Dismissing matters as serious as the current recession, the damage to the nation’s soul and the souls of its young done by sanctioning torture, or the environmental disasters our world faces is red-zone adolescent and self-serving. We need grown-ups and grown-up conversation.

Reclaiming Prophecy

2009-04-21T08:20:00.004-04:00

Despite the bizarre reinterpretations of the concept by end-time Christianity, prophecy as we find it in the Bible is an intervention, not a prediction. Yes, the great prophets of Israel evolved out of the traditions of seers and ecstatics, but they were neither, even if their prophetic utterances retained some of the elements of one or both. The massively popular end-time misinterpretation of prophecy depends upon the unbiblical notion of a secret predetermined plan (God’s) which the “prophecy” merely reveals, exposing crucial elements of the plan to the savvy reader. The lure of this fantastic misinterpretation is that it provides people ignorant of the Bible with the certitude of being “in the know.” The more insidious “advantage” end-time Christianity offers is the ability to be righteous in dismissing one’s own enemies as Christ’s enemies who have chosen (but perhaps also been predestined for) destruction. So, there would seem to be no need for concern whether they have a choice and no need for compassion, because their destruction is God’s holy plan.

Biblical prophecy is an intervention. It does not predict or reveal what must inevitably be. Rather, prophecy declares the unrecognized truth of the present situation and calls for a change of course, whether from the self-delusion of those who imagine themselves religiously and politically secure even as they exploit their neighbors or from the depression of exiles reluctant to risk hope again. The goal of prophecy is a turning. God is usually presented as eager to turn from visiting upon the people the results of their evils, if only they will turn from doing them. Likewise, in the situation of exile, God is eager to give the people a new future if only they will let their hopes rise in response to the promise.

Prophecy is by nature situational. The prophet speaks God’s word to particular people in their particular context in life and history. The contextual nature of prophecy still holds true even in its later apocalyptic forms (biblically, much of Daniel and the Newer Testament book of Revelation, as well as the mini-apocalypses in the synoptic gospels). Forget the grand design for all of history. Prophecy is a word spoken to particular people in their particular situation, as seen from God’s point of view.

Biblical prophecy is also a matter of mediation, not in the sense of reaching a compromise, but in the sense of a mediator who represents both estranged sides to each other. The true prophet primarily represents God to the people but must also represent the people to God, arguing, against God’s judgment, for understanding and compassion. The prophet must call the people to “repent” (turn), but sometimes must also call upon God to repent. Such is what God requires of the prophet. So, the true prophet cannot be cold and detached, superior in bearing to the people and unconcerned about their suffering, deserved or undeserved. The true prophet must love God and the people, both, no matter how much at odds the two may be from each other.

The end-time notion that prophecy merely pulls back the curtain and reveals God’s unchangeable scheme for history is, biblically, nonsense.

I.Q.: a number signifying what?

2009-04-18T13:47:00.008-04:00

I appreciated Nicholas Kristoff’s recent article on the malleability of I.Q., the measure of something that has something to do with intelligence, we think, maybe. What I applaud in Kristoff’s piece is his insistence that we no longer accept the notion that I.Q. is genetically determined. Hear, hear!

The following paragraph, however, has continued to disturb me since I first read it:

Professor Nisbett provides suggestions for transforming your own urchins into geniuses — praise effort more than achievement, teach delayed gratification, limit reprimands and use praise to stimulate curiosity — but focuses on how to raise America’s collective I.Q. That’s important, because while I.Q. doesn’t measure pure intellect — we’re not certain exactly what it does measure — differences do matter, and a higher I.Q. correlates to greater success in life.

Here’s the problem: “we’re not certain exactly what it does measure.” Oh? But it “correlates to greater success in life,” whatever that means and however such success is measured once we determine what it means.

Correlation is important because it enables scientists to relate circumstances that seem to go together without falling into the trap of cause and effect statements, but correlation is also easily abused. Cancer research and treatment, for example, depend upon correlations and their percentages of coincidence. The presence of calcium deposits in breast tissue may serve as a marker for Ductile Carcinoma in Situ (DCIS) since there is some level of coincidence. So, discovering new calcifications suggests to physicians that they should look more closely at the breast. But to my knowledge no one is embarking upon a campaign to reduce the incidence of calcifications as though doing so would somehow reduce the incidence of DCIS (or of invasive breast cancer).

That analogy is imperfect, I know, because calcifications are a marker, not a test for measuring the amount or level of something, but I wonder if I.Q. isn't more just a marker than we realize, that may (but therefore also, may not) correlate to the presence of academically effective intellect. I believe we do need to think long and hard about the unwarranted validity we attribute to standardized tests of every kind. Imagine an engineer picking up an instrument and saying, “I don’t know what this thing measures, but let’s use it anyway to collect measurements for data on this new project.” No, it would trouble the engineer not to know what the instrument measured because the resulting measurements would be . . . What’s that word? Oh yeah, useless.

Calcifications are an actual condition of life, the life of a breast. If their emergence correlates to a statistically increased likelihood of the presence of cancer, then physicians do well to pay attention to them. But I.Q. tests are not a condition of children’s lives; they are an imposed procedure that measures we know not what but fixes to the child a number signifying maybe something, maybe nothing. Yet, not knowing what they measure, we go right on using them and their numbers to shape and determine children’s futures.

And we try to raise them, the numbers that is. Bravo! But since we don’t know what they measure, we don’t know what we’ve raised, either, except (of course) the test scores themselves.

Teachers have assessments that measure a child’s progress in, say, learning to read. They can teach a child skills in identifying problems, formulating possible solutions, testing their formulations, learning to make predictions, and developing new understandings. They can help children learn to write more effectively as well as more confidently. They can enable children to learn to think mathematically and scientifically. Or they can work instead on raising test scores which mean, again, we know not what.

Validity is the word. We have plenty of tests that score well on reliability, meaning the same person will score roughly the same upon taking the test again and again. But validity refers to what the test actually measures and how accurately. Without validity, what good is correlation when we are talking about an imposed test, not a natural or even socially natural occurrence? Because standardized tests generate lots of data that can be graphed, analyzed, and proclaimed in Powerpoint presentations, we pretend they are gold. They give authority to people who know nothing about the actual subject, teaching for example. And we do love authority, no matter how vacuous.

Again, I applaud what Kristoff seems to be trying to do: overcome the determinism that enables us as a society to dismiss large numbers of children from our concern and educational best efforts. And if I.Q. tests were the only ones, I would not be writing this. But the masses of data generated by meaningless standardized tests are empowering people who know little or nothing about the processes of education to take charge, hamstringing and belittling our nation's teachers and threatening the education of our children.

Avoiding a Cheap and Dirty Trick

2009-03-12T13:02:00.003-04:00

This post is the last in a series of four written to serve as discussion starters for a group of university students doing an alternative spring break with the Farm Workers Support Committee here in South Jersey and in eastern Pennsylvania.

It is easy to find in the Bible exhortations to patience in times of suffering and to humility in the face of demands made by life and other people. Be long-suffering. Do not complain. Accept your limitations and the various affronts to your pride that come with living in this world as well as those which come from the world’s reactions to your conscious decisions to seek the will and way of God. Do not insist upon your own way, but do what is best for others. Be a servant.

It is one thing for me to give such advice, such encouragement to humble faith, to myself as needed. It is quite another matter for me to give it from a position of privilege and comfort to someone else being made to suffer. That’s the cheap and dirty trick we need to avoid.

God did not send Moses back down into Egypt to exhort his fellow Hebrews to be well-mannered, submissive, obedient slaves eager to please their masters as a way, supposedly, of pleasing God. Christian churches in the United States did, however, prior to our Civil War, write slave catechisms with just such messages.

The rulers of ancient Egypt did not respect Moses or his God because they regarded their social system as the will of the gods, a very convenient doctrine for those enjoying life at the top of that system. To their mind, slaves were created by the gods to be slaves and should be content with their lot, and it was a terrible sin to stir them up, as Moses did, and put notions of freedom into their heads. To the pharaoh, Moses and Aaron were just troublemakers, outside agitators. So, in a move typical of the tyrant, the pharaoh adds to the hardship of the slaves so they will blame Moses for their increased misery and reject his call to hope.

To this day, wives who have been beaten are told by some Christian ministers to endure their hardships patiently, pray more, and try to be better (more submissive) Christian women by understanding the troubles that make their husbands angry and offering them more love and support. The beatings, of course, continue, and the humiliation deepens as the women are led to think the fault is somehow theirs.

Jesus made a practice of violating the social norms of his time and place. He took upon himself the “curse” of teaching Torah to a woman. He reached out and touched a leper (the danger was seen as spiritual contagion, not just physical). He told a parable that gave a name (Lazarus) to a poor beggar but no name to a rich man (the church later righted that “indignity” by calling the rich man Dives, but Jesus leaves him nameless). He welcomed children, accepted the gratitude of women with bad reputations, taught day laborers and fishermen, and suggested that God delighted more in forgiving sinners than in listening to the self-congratulatory prayers of the pious.

Good is not achieved through evil means. We are not to take life into our own hands, doing violence in the service of some “greater good.” But neither are we to preach humility to the already shamed, submission to the beaten down, or the virtues of poverty to the poor, while we enjoy the privileges we urge them to be thankful they don’t have.

Biblically, salvation is a large concept with many varied and specific meanings within the contexts of suffering, deprivation, and shame. The word “salvation” means, of course, rescue and deliverance from trouble, and it is thought to include the idea of being led out of a tight place of confinement and restriction into a broader, more open space where body and mind can stretch and move about in freedom. The Bible does not restrict salvation to its ultimate sense of the eternal, and it certainly does not permit the promise of eternal salvation to be used as an excuse to tolerate injustice and oppression in the here and now.

From Benevolence to Mutuality

2009-03-12T08:11:00.002-04:00

This post is the third of four written for students on an alternative spring break with the Farm Workers Support Committee here in South Jersey and in eastern Pennsylvania.

In the ancient Greco-Roman world from which we draw much for our civilization and our ways of thinking, equality was not an ideal but a suspect notion often held in contempt. The great man (sic) used his prosperity to further his greatness by becoming a benefactor to the common people who were expected to be very grateful for his generosity. The benefactor gained honor and pride by demonstrating his greatness through charity.

That we still think somewhat the same way can be seen in our praise for philanthropists (literally “friends to humanity”), no matter how they gained their wealth. Churches continue in a lesser version of the philanthropic model by pooling their people’s offerings of money for benevolence, sometimes understood as the blessed giving to the less fortunate. If it made the ancient benefactor look good to give money to the poor, it may make the modern religious person feel good to give some to the unfortunate, often without contact and mostly without dialogue.

Somewhere along the line of modern church history, missionaries came to be called fraternal workers, meaning brothers and sisters working in concert with the people of the host land. New words have entered the conversation about equality, justice, and help where help is needed – words such as partnership and mutuality. Instead of benevolence, there is to be sharing. If we go to teach, we go also to learn. The goal is to remove both pride and shame from all groups, replacing them with mutual respect and appreciation.

Is mutuality just a pretense? It can be, of course, but does it have to be? Can we find a humility that is not phony and self-congratulating? Can we discover our common humanity and respect it? Jesus warns that it is very hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God. Is his warning not related to the difficulty of sharing humanity from a superior position of wealth and power? Jesus also tells his followers not to be benefactors but to be servants (Luke 22:24-27). What does he mean, and how can we who have so much (such great possessions!) learn the strong humility of mutual respect, understanding, and gratitude?

Are we benefactors or hermanos (brothers) y hermanas (sisters), compañeros (comrades) in life? Is the migrant or immigrant a lesser person in need of our charity or a respected neighbor? How do we go from theory to praxis? How do we learn humility without just trying to appear humble because the appearance of humility enhances our pride and feeling of virtue, much like the gift which the proud benefactor handed down to the common people?

An even harder but more practical question is, How do we start to reach across the barriers to mutual understanding, acceptance and respect? If those society labels superior may have consciously or unconsciously assumed that higher-than position toward others, people society labels inferior may also, consciously or unconsciously, have assumed a lower-than position, however resentfully. Change starts with a new, conscious assumption of equality on one’s own part, but mutuality has to be, well, mutual. So, how is the change of mind/heart put into effect between those labeled superior and those labeled inferior?

The Prophets on Religious Practice and Social Injustice

2009-03-11T11:55:00.004-04:00

This post is the second of four written for students on an alternative spring break with the Farm Workers Support Committee here in South Jersey and in eastern Pennsylvania.

There have always been attempts to keep concerns over social injustices separated from religious practice. The “powers that be” have always expected the prevailing religion to support their administration of power, defend their divine right to privilege, and sanctify their programs and social structures.

Israel’s prophets rejected all such notions. For them, worship was never to be separated from God’s will for justice and compassion among the people, and it was the particular responsibility laid upon rulers and people of means to right wrongs and correct injustices.

To the privileged in the north kingdom of Israel, the prophet Amos declares for God:

I hate, I despise your festivals,
and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and grain offerings,
I will not accept them;
and the offerings of well-being of your fatted animals
I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
I will not listen to the melody of your harps.
But let justice roll down like waters,
and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream. (Amos 5:21-24, NRSV)

In the south kingdom of Judah, Isaiah prophesies:

What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices? says the LORD;
I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams
and the fat of fed beasts;
I do not delight in the blood of bulls,
or of lambs, or of goats.
When you come to appear before me,
who asked this from your hand?
Trample my courts no more;
bringing offerings is futile;
incense is an abomination to me.
New moon and Sabbath and calling of convocation–
I cannot endure solemn assemblies with iniquity.
Your new moons and your appointed festivals my soul hates;
they have become a burden to me,
I am weary of bearing them.
When you stretch out your hands,
I will hide my eyes from you;
even though you make many prayers, I will not listen;
your hands are full of blood.
Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;
remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes;
cease to do evil,
learn to do good;
seek justice,
rescue the oppressed,
defend the orphan,
plead for the widow. (Isaiah 1:11-17, NRSV)

The great Jewish teacher and philosopher, Abraham Joshua Heschel, wrote in his book, The Prophets, that the world does not need more people who love justice as a concept or ideal but more people who cannot abide the specific injustices done to the vulnerable in society.

Religious devotion and unjust practices do not mix, and when they are mingled as though they went well together, God, the prophets warn, takes bitter offense and rejects the religion. God measures a society, not by its grand concepts and theories of justice, but by the injustices it perpetrates on its most vulnerable or simply tolerates “for the greater good” of order and prosperity.

The Foreigner Who Lives Among You

2009-03-11T08:49:00.005-04:00

This post is the first of four written for students on an alternative spring break with the Farm Workers Support Committee here in South Jersey and in eastern Pennsylvania.

We may be quite familiar with the command Jesus takes from chapter 19 of Leviticus, calling it the second of the two greatest commandments: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” The first he takes from chapter 6 of Deuteronomy: “You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your might.” Binding the two commands together as inseparable, Jesus confirms that love for God cannot and must not be cordoned off as a religious or spiritual matter set apart from justice, respect, and compassion within the community.

But what are the limits? Where may God’s people draw the lines of exclusion? When an authority on biblical law asks Jesus to clarify, “Who is my neighbor?” what the man is really asking is who is not his neighbor. Whom may he righteously exclude from the command to love?

Who is not our neighbor? Leviticus answers in a surprising way by including a person quite likely to be excluded: the ger (pronounced as gair), the non-citizen.

When an alien (ger) resides with you in your land, you shall not oppress the alien. The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.

Leviticus puts this command to treat the resident foreigner as a citizen and neighbor into the context of Israel’s relation to God. Fair treatment of the foreigner is not about charity; it’s about self-understanding and integrity as God’s people. For Israelites, mistreating the foreigner among them amounts to a denial of their own history with God. They were aliens (migrant workers who settled for a time) in the land of Egypt and were pressed into slavery. God’s compassion for them in their distress and God’s determination to liberate them and restore them to dignity are denied if they then turn around and mistreat people in the same position from which they were rescued. You know how it feels. So, don’t mistreat somebody else just because you now have the power to do so.

The Hebrew scriptures go on to add some specifics regarding the treatment of resident foreigners. Do not withhold their wages. Do not make them work on the Sabbath to keep the money coming in while you piously rest. Include the foreigner in your feasts of thanksgiving to God so everyone who resides in the land shares its abundance and celebrates together.

In our society, we keep our eye on the mathematical mean, the fictitious person in the middle of our range of prosperity. If this mean person is doing better than last year (right now that’s not the case), then the society is doing better.

According to the Bible, God keeps an eye on the most vulnerable, the ones most likely to be cheated, left out, or left behind. Their condition in life determines the health of the nation in God’s assessment.

Thoughts on Migrant Workers and Immigrants

2009-03-11T08:40:00.002-04:00

Shortly, I will be part of a team hosting college students on an alternative spring break under the leadership of their chaplain for an experience provided by the Farm Workers Support Committee here in South Jersey and in eastern Pennsylvania. I have volunteered to write four blog-style pieces to serve as input for their morning reflection times during their visit.

I suggested the following four topics.

1. The biblical injunctions regarding the foreigner who lives and works among you.
2. The prophetic linkage between expressions of faith (or even thankfulness) and social justice, with the prophets' rejection of worship without justice.
3. Thoughts on how faith changes demands for social justice from mere power struggles into models of potential mutuality and power sharing.
4. The cheap and dirty trick of preaching patient suffering to people being used and abused.

My next four posts will be my drafts for these reflection pieces.

Attempts to Measure the Effectiveness of Prayer

2009-02-17T09:29:00.009-05:00

The other day a friend sent me the link to an article reviewing an attempt to quantify and thereby verify or debunk the effectiveness of prayers offered by others for the healing of the sick. Personally, I find such experiments annoying, but aside from that personal reaction, I want to look at the situation.

The scientist needs to clarify what s/he is examining, and the experiment should not include reference to activity on the part of God, because God cannot be controlled. If the scientist confuses science with theology and asks the theological question, “Can God be controlled by prayer?” the theological answer is a resounding, “No!” So, let it be clear from the outset that if the experiment is set up to test the hypothesis that God can be controlled by prayer, the default answer of biblical theology is negative. The expectation, if such an experiment could be devised (the theological default answer is that it cannot), is that the experimentation would fail to show a correlation between prayers and results.

To be clear, let me interrupt myself and say I do believe in God, and part of my belief (trust) is that God is moved by our prayers and cares about us in our distresses. But prayer is not given to us as a means for controlling God or God’s power to get the results we want. That’s magic, and biblical theology considers magic antithetical to faith. “Do not put the Lord your God to the test.” Further, the Bible maintains the mystery of God and God’s freedom from any attempt by humans to control or manipulate divine power.

The paradigm comes in Exodus chapter 3 when Moses investigates the bush that appears to be burning without being consumed. The voice of God from the bush tells Moses to come no closer but to remove his sandals because he has entered upon holy ground, meaning simply that God is present there at the moment in a special way (not that the soil or the geographical location itself is holy or that God resides in one spot on earth). But, having prevented Moses from coming closer, God promises to be with Moses on the mission for which God is calling him for the sake of the people of Israel.

The experiments described in the article belong to recent attempts to quantify God’s activity in the world by setting up experiments involving religious activity. All of them I have seen reported so far involve prayer – not fasting, sacrifices of various kinds, sacraments, deeds of compassion, monetary offerings, or any other of humanity’s wide variety of religious acts. The whole idea of seeking to prove or disprove God’s activity in the world by such experiments is bogus, on two counts. It is bogus science, and it is bogus theology.

What is the hypothesis? Is it based upon somebody’s apparent theological claim, such as “prayer works”? Prayer does not work. Biblical theology insists that nothing done by human beings “works” on God. God’s intervention in human life and history is purely a matter of grace. We humans cannot perform any act to trigger it, manipulate it, or control it. God is free. Of the Spirit of God, the Christian Newer Testament says in a word play on wind/spirit (same word in Greek), “The wind blows where it will.” We do not manipulate God, we trust God. We do not wheedle God with prayer; we ask the One we trust, believing that God is both wiser and more compassionate than we are.

We believe further that all born into this world die their way out of it. As another friend of mine said some time ago, “None of us is getting out of here alive.” (Yes, I know what Paul says close to the end of what is now First Corinthians chapter 15, but Paul there is talking about the eschaton, the consummation, what many Christians call the “second coming” of Christ.) So, all hurts will not be healed, all diseases cured, all deaths prevented “until that day comes.”

The bogus experiments seek to quantify God’s responses to religious actions, as though God had no will but were merely mindless or mechanized power into which humans can tap if they know how. In the terms of my New Jersey roots, forgetaboutit. Faith is trust in the love and mercy of God, and we trust God’s love and mercy to hold on to us in life and in death. Attempts to prove or disapprove the validity of our trust in God by somehow measuring the effectiveness of our prayers are ridiculously invalid. They are as though Moses would charge the burning bush and seek to seize God by the throat and compel God to do his will – the will of the man, Moses. No way. But God does promise to be with Moses as he, reluctantly, follows God’s command to return to Egypt and demand the release of God’s children from slavery. That’s the paradigm.

Do I pray for people who are sick? Yes, every day. Do I believe God hears those prayers and cares about those for whom I am praying? Yes. Do I pray for results I know might not be granted? Yes, I do. I do not believe in editing my own prayers by calculating what I regard as likely outcomes. Like the child who freely expresses his/her desire to the parent, I say what I mean, what I want, what I hope or long for. (Praying aloud with others requires more care, but that's another subject.) And I feel no need to tack on the disclaimer, “If it be your will.” Why should I? Do I think I have the power to make God do what is not God's will? No, I am asking as honestly as I can. Beyond that, I trust God as well as I can.

So, if you’re looking for a way to manipulate God and get results, try magic. I believe you will fail, but at least you won’t be calling your efforts faith or science. If you’re looking for a way to prove or disprove the love and mercy of God, well, please don’t call your experiments faith, and don’t call them science, either. Spare us more silly experiments pretending to control and quantify variables that cannot be controlled or measured.

Faith is trust in the love and mercy of Another who commits to us but not on our terms and who, therefore, remains free.

The Core Challenge to Faith

2009-02-11T07:27:00.002-05:00

To distinguish theology from ideology, I need to start where our faith is most insistent: our belief that God loves this world and its people. We believe the Creator loves the creation and has committed to its life and well-being. Moreover, God makes covenants and remains faithful to them even when the human partners in those covenants do not. So committed is God to these covenants that God no longer accepts a future (for God’s Self) without the covenant people. These are bold assertions, and the objections to them are many. The academic objections can take care of themselves as discussion continues. The existential protests against such a gospel come from human suffering and degradation that fly in the face of our assertions that God loves the world and wills its well-being and wholeness. This coming Sunday’s sermon on just this idea, not yet written, is called, “You Couldn’t Prove It by Me.”

These conflicts between our gospel and actual human experience we must not be dismissed or rationalized by making our belief ideological. To be faithful, we must stick with both the God who loves and the people whose lives belie that claim. To walk away from either is faithless, but strange as it may sound, the greater betrayal of God is to walk away from the world and its people.

Christian faith is incarnational: that is, we encounter God’s grace, God’s faithful love and mercy, in person - in flesh and blood. Just so, we understand ourselves as sent to represent God’s grace, however feebly, in person - in our own flesh and blood relationships and dealings with other people. To be faithful, the church needs to immerse itself in the world, in the conditions of life that belie the love of God.

When theology hardens into ideology, it begins to see people’s sufferings as problems, not to solve, relieve, or even sympathize with, but to explain and thereby justify. The explanations take one of two forms: blame the victim or dismiss the suffering as either inconsequential in the grander scheme of God’s plan or somehow mysteriously beneficial. In either form, the explanation invalidates the suffering person’s complaint against life and God. Real theology does not dismiss or invalidate suffering’s protest. Ideology does.

Theology, Not Ideology

2009-02-09T08:29:00.004-05:00

Ideology makes smart people stupid. No, it doesn’t decrease the IQ or the cleverness with which the ideologue defends a position and attacks others who dissent, but it makes people think and act as though they were stupid. Here’s what I mean.

To be an ideologue is not just to hold beliefs strongly but to hold to a belief system that dictates the way reality must be, no matter what. Facts must be made to conform to the ideologue’s beliefs, even when they don’t. So, the ideologue must dismiss facts or else distort them to maintain beliefs which are held as absolute.

In his book I’m just beginning to read, The Cross in Our Context, the Canadian theologian Douglas John Hall, introduces us to the theology he develops first in the manner called via negativa, by saying what it is not. One of the things his theology of the cross is not and must not become is an ideology. Hall writes:

By ideology I mean a theoretical statement or system of interpretation that functions for its adherents as a full and sufficient credo, a source of personal authority, and an intellectually and psychologically comforting insulation from the frightening and chaotic mish-mash of daily existence. For the ideologue, whether religious or political, it is not necessary to expose oneself constantly to the ongoingness of life; one knows in advance what one is going to find in the world. (25).

“One knows in advance” what one will find in life and in other people. What a convenient blindness. One does not need to investigate with an open mind but only to find what one can use to “prove” the predetermined conclusion. All else may be discarded.

In an endnote on his description of ideology, Hall cites Dorothee Soelle in her book Political Theology: “By ideology I understand a system of propositional truths independent of the situation, a superstructure no longer relevant to praxis, to the situation, to the real questions of life.” (Hall, 234).

The way of the ideologue suppresses reality and oppresses people. It misleads with fixed authority and often defends itself cruelly. It’s unquestionable “truth” crushes realities. The emperor struts in his fine clothes until some child blurts out the truth that his highness is naked. In America, we have just lived through a time when evidence was cooked to support the foregone conclusion, when science was allowed (or doctored) to say only what supported the reigning truth, and when dissenters were regarded, not as people with other viewpoints and experiences, but as unpatriotic enemies supporting terrorists.

The line between theology and ideology is thin and frequently crossed. People of faith, therefore, need to be on guard against authoritarian judgments that deny the realities of people’s lives in this world. When the word “should” provides visions of what would be in a world of justice and compassion, it is a wonderful word because it generates hope and fosters change away from life’s present injustices and cruelties. But when the word “should” is employed to dismiss concern for people’s suffering, oppression, or exclusion, then it becomes a terrifying word out of place in theology.

This contrast of theology with ideology has countless ramifications some of which I plan to explore in succeeding posts. The overall message is a warning that not only theologians but all people of faith need to take great care that our faith-thinking does not become ideological. The world does not need any more religious or political tyrannies. God, we Christians like to say, meets us where we are in life, not where we should be (because we are not there for the meeting). So, if we have any truth to share, we need to keep that truth open life’s realities and people’s actual experiences and real conditions of existence. Otherwise our faith will operate only in the cruel dreamworld of the ideologue. Further, we need to remember what we hold as our gospel: that God’s truth is faithful love willing to give itself to suffering and shame to be redemptive. So, keeping our beliefs open to people’s sufferings and real-life conditions is not just a matter of information gathering; it must be a matter of entering into and to some degree respectfully sharing those conditions of life.

Time to Grow Up Politically

2009-01-21T08:30:00.004-05:00

On an educators’ listserv, a man from the UK made this interesting observation about our new American president’s inauguration: “Obama gave such a grown-up speech.” President Obama spoke to this concern himself, with a reference to the Bible, “Let us put aside childish things.” Yes, it is high time for us Americans to return to grown-up political conversation, without name-calling, sound bites, and cheap one-liners. We desperately need to rise above the Rovian “I’m rubber, you’re glue” foolishness of recent years in which politicians play games such as the verbal preemptive strike of accusing one’s opponent of one’s own flaws or repeating the same false accusation over and over until it sticks in the public mind. It’s time to grow up politically in the United States.

The biblical reference comes from the apostle Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, specifically from its famous “love chapter” thirteen. Although this chapter may sound like high sentiment to many, it comes rather as a high point in an angry letter to a church divided against itself. The Corinthian congregation has split itself into factions, each of which believes itself the right one, indeed righter than right can be.

Paul’s argument in what is now a chapter of his letter is simple but strong. All things human are partial, momentary, imperfect. By God’s standard of measurement, anything done without love is worth zero. No gift, no accomplishment, no virtue, not even martyrdom for the faith, has any value in God’s eyes if it lacks love. Everything in which human beings take pride is measured by God’s standard of (de-sentimentalized) love. So, while we do our best at what we do, we need to remember that it is only partial and temporary. It will all pass away, not just in time (as we know only too well), but “when the perfect comes.”

Shelley’s poem, “Ozymandias,” reminds us of a more common observation about human achievements and boasts, sic transit gloria mundi (thus passes the world’s glory), but Paul has something different, something more, to say. It is in the light of God’s perfection and so of that perfection toward which God has redirected our destiny that all our grand accomplishments are revealed as partial, momentary, and flawed. And, shockingly to Corinthians trained in Greek philosophical thought, God’s perfection is that of love. God knows no other kind.

The apostle names three exceptions to the passing away of all things human. They are not three things we human beings do or can do perfectly, but they are the three things that resonate so well with God that, even though flawed, they will not pass away with the coming of the perfect. The three are faith, hope, and love. We need to de-sentimentalize and toughen all three, but that’s another subject to ponder.

President Barack Obama’s scriptural reference in his inaugural speech seems to me more than just a Bible quote. There are too many parallels between the Corinthian situation and our own current American situation for me to dismiss his use of Paul’s letter as either mere political piety or just the grabbing of a one-line quote to borrow from a great and famous communication of the past. We too are a house divided, with our factions thinking themselves righter than right can be. We too need to look, however dimly, into the mirror and see that we remain a riddle to ourselves (the literal translation of what Paul has written about seeing in a glass darkly), and we need to know our truth is always partial, of the moment, and flawed. Then we can put aside childish things and juvenile arguments, and we can grow up.

Doubter Believer

2009-01-08T13:03:00.005-05:00

When I was a kid in our church’s youth group, one of our adult leaders played a record for us that pictured the church as a fortress under siege by the forces of Satan, and among the demonic elements attacking the true believers were battalions of doubters. I remember that one group was identified as “resurrection doubters.” Even then, by the way, I thought the record was awful and resented having to listen to it.

Biblical Christian faith is not belief that, but belief in. It is trust in the One who loves us. Faith is relational and responsive to the Other in whom we trust. Does belief in God not have beliefs about God? Of course it does, just as love for another human being has beliefs about that person and about the nature of the relationship I have with that person. I love this particular person, who . . . . After the word “who,” I may tell of things the person has done, qualities I appreciate and respect in that person, experiences we have shared, and what I currently think and feel the person means to me. What comes after “who” will change and grow as years pass and the relationship itself continues to develop. All the while, however, it will be the person I love.

Do I ever question my own love for that other person? Yes, of course. Do I ever have doubts about that person’s love for me? Yes, of course. Love reaffirms its commitment to loving in the face of those questions and doubts, and in a very real sense love needs them in order to reaffirm and strengthen its commitment to loving that person. The alternative would be love as a mere fact, untested, untried, un-conflicted, undeveloped, indeed quite dead.

Consider another analogy to faith: courage. What is the relation between courage and fear? Without fear, courage cannot exist. If I’m not afraid, I cannot be brave. I can be stupid, foolhardy, brash, heedless, insane, or just so powerful I am not threatened (in fact) by a danger that frightens other people, but I cannot be brave. Courage requires dealing with fears. No fear, no courage.

What is hope without acknowledgment of the possibility of disappointment? As the apostle Paul asks, “Who hopes for what s/he already sees?” Hope is confidence in the face of possible disappointment.

Current American Christianity has fallen in love with certitude, and certitude is not faith. Indeed, certitude is very nearly the opposite of faith. The “true believer” in certitude’s sense believes that . . . . What follows the word “that” is a list of certainties that are not certain (verifiably factual) at all but are declared certain by an authoritarian belief system. Such faith quickly becomes circular, meaning I believe these “facts” because I believe they are facts and refuse to question or doubt them in any way for any reason. Soon, I am patting myself on the back for being such a true believer, that is for having such uncompromising (and unreasoning) certitude.

Where is God in such certitude? For Christians, where is Christ in it? They are in their assigned places, captives of my system of certain beliefs. Christian fundamentalism subordinates even God to its unbiblical, literalist principles about the Bible. The Bible must not say anything that violates those principles, and God must not be or do anything that violates the restricted reading of the Bible. Faith, therefore, becomes an enforced absolutism of belief in one’s own beliefs – enforced upon science, history, other people (as judgment), the Bible itself, and even God. No doubter I.

Truly biblical faith is relational and responsive. It is faith in the One who loves us. For Christians, it is faith in the living Christ who was crucified. As Douglas John Hall writes, from the very context of the question of doubt’s relationship with faith (Bound and Free: a Theologian’s Journey), faith is a continuous decision to trust this God who loves us, and that decision becomes real and existential in the choices of trusting or not trusting God in life, day by day. Standing deliberately with Paul Tillich, Hall says the core of faith’s doubt is not intellectual but existential. Can I, will I, must I trust this God?

No fear, no courage. No acknowledgment of the possibility of disappointment, no hope. No questioning of the relationship and of my own commitment to it, no growth in love. And if I have no doubt that pushes me to question, to knock, to seek – no living faith. I have, instead, a deadly certitude circling itself.

And what if, one day, my certitude were to crack and I suddenly had to face the doubt I had so long denied access to my mind and my belief? Faith would be lost. No wonder such “true belief” sees itself as besieged in a fortress of authoritarian verities. No wonder it reacts fearfully and hostilely toward the person who asks questions or expresses doubts.

More on Blaming

2009-01-03T10:21:00.002-05:00

Under the ruse of accountability, we as a society have begun routinely substituting blaming for problem solving. Ironically, accountability then becomes our avoidance of responsibility for facing the problems, seeking real solutions, and doing our part to effect those solutions. Of course, real steps toward solving complex and serious problems are almost always partial, and they require cooperation and coordination (the sharing of responsibility). Silver bullets are rare.

In our presently disastrous realm of public education under the oppressive weight of No Child Left Behind, the first step in misleading the public was to use scare tactics to smear our public education system as a colossal failure, then keep talking about that failure as though it were indisputable fact. Anecdotal evidence of this alleged failure was easy to produce, of course, because public education is a vast and complex undertaking with countless success stories and countless tales of disappointment and even betrayal of parents’ hopes and children’s trust.

The next step was comparison based upon the quantified but extremely limited (even when not blatantly falsified) measures of standardized testing. The tests supposedly “proved” American students had fallen behind their foreign rivals. This was the Chicken Little phase in the attack.

Then came the crucial step: blaming. Who was at fault? The scapegoat of choice was the teacher, who else? It was an easy sell because nearly everyone recalls some “bad” teacher, often more than one. Was the bad teacher truly bad? What was the student’s part in the disappointing results? Those questions were irrelevant, because the blamers had tapped into the most powerful source of animosity known to the human race: shame. Who does not have memories of being shamed in childhood, and who does not have some of those memories attached to school?

Blaming teachers, however, had its pitfalls that had to be avoided. After all, one doesn’t want to antagonize that many people, their spouses, their parents, and their children. So, teachers were portrayed as naive do-gooders led astray by two sinister forces: their professors and “the union.” I once had a supervisor who blamed society’s problem squarely on professors whose fault, he said, was that they were “too smart.” It is not difficult to raise resentment in America by blaming professors. Our long history of anti-intellectualism and contempt for “brainy” people makes us easily persuaded to join in blaming them. As for blaming unions, look at the immediate responses of conservatives to the present recession, especially when it came to the automakers.

What passes for accountability has become a great way of avoiding responsibility. Who is responsible for a child’s education? Who needs to take responsibility for reversing global warming and the disastrous effects of pollution? Who needs to make fiscally responsible changes in our consumption and wasteful habits as a nation and a world? Who needs to take responsibility for the erosion of our rights and freedoms in the wake of our opportunistically exploited fear after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001? We are the answer. As Pogo put it famously years ago, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

Slavery and Torture

2009-01-01T12:44:00.003-05:00

I'm not fond of the designation "must-read," but here is one I consider a must-read for adults from the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, "The Evil Behind the Smiles." Click here.

Kristof's op-ed piece continues his passionate concern over sexual slavery around the world.

Long Island Distress

2009-01-01T11:59:00.001-05:00

Today’s New York Times editorial, “In the Cold” (on the link from the Times home page, “Long Island Pain”), draws our attention to the economic distress in an unexpected place. Two specifics stand out for me. First is the quotation of Alric Kennedy, director of community resources for the Long Island Council of Churches, “Our donors are now our clients.” Second is the observation that some construction companies are cutting their costs by skipping payroll, counting on their undocumented workers not to (dare) complain.

On one hand, there is new economic distress for people until recently in a position to help the “less fortunate,” as we call poor people. The editorial says the county’s director of housing and homeless services reported that “more overburdened homeowners and the elderly are coming forward now — often bewildered and ashamed.” On the other hand, people among our society’s most vulnerable, undocumented immigrants, are having their hours cut, often for domestic workers cut in half, and sometimes are not being paid for the work they have done.

Among my questions is, How can churches and other concerned groups, themselves with constricted resources, respond effectively to the growing and changing needs? Do we simply cut our own costs where we can do so without putting ourselves into a down-spiral, or can we find ways to reallocate funds from our own institutional needs to the rapidly emerging needs of people in distress? Since many religious bodies already run on tight budgets, maybe the more helpful question would be, Can we find ways to share – creative ways to share, for example, meals and warmth (literal, physical warmth in our buildings)? Are there others ways of sharing resources?

The Times editorial hints at one problem in identifying and responding to distress: the embarrassment of people unaccustomed to needing help. How many are ashamed to let their distress be known? Another is the fear spread through immigrant and migrant communities in response to the waves of hatred and xenophobia that have swept the country. If people are too frightened to object when they are not paid for work they have done, will they not also be afraid to trust churches and others who might be willing to help or to share?

Yes, He Smoked

2008-12-31T07:48:00.006-05:00

What is likely to be the first question asked by people who have just learned someone known to them has lung cancer? I have heard this first-response question many times in that situation: “Does s/he smoke?” Partly because my father died from throat and lung cancer and, yes, he smoked for sixty years, I have pondered the functions of blame in people’s scripts for handling life, in this case for handling bad, disturbing news that has come close to home by threatening the life of someone known to them.

The term “scripts” was used by the brilliant theorist Silvan S. Tomkins for our array of learned and practiced responses to affects such as fear, distress, shame, interest, or joy. Affects, as Tomkins uses the term, are the body’s physiological starting points for feelings, emotions, moods, and sometimes disorders, and he identified nine of them that are “hardwired” into us to be triggered by outside stimuli, such as the news that a friend or acquaintance has lung cancer. Affects may be triggered in combination and with varying intensities and durations. My question concerns the functional use of blaming as a script or set of scripts for handling unwanted affect. Further questions about blaming will look to its social and political uses, but let’s start with the personal.

What good might it do me to receive the information that the friend or acquaintance with lung cancer does or did smoke? Surely, I am not going to respond to a “yes” by declaring, “Well, then, it serves him/her right!” am I? No, but am I not trying to fit the distressing news into a category I can label, if not as “deserved,” then at least as explicable, reasonable, or appropriate in a cause-effect sort of way? I am reducing the threat to my own sense of security and well-being by assigning a reasonable explanation for the bad news that has come too close to home. I am saying it didn’t have to be that way for the person with lung cancer; someone is to blame. S/he wasn’t “chosen” at random but was “guilty” of behavior that caused the regrettable situation. To some extent, then, I feel better, safer, and more able to breathe freely once I “know” the cancer can be reasonably attributed to behavior of which I am not guilty. I have used my blaming scripts for self-defense, and to some degree that tactic has worked to preserve my comfort with life.

I reject the notion that because he had smoked, my father deserved to die from throat and lung cancer, and I would continue to reject it even if it could be proven clinically that his smoking was “the cause.” My dad also worked with asbestos, but the addition of that other possible cause neither aggravates nor mitigates my belief that people do not simply “deserve” troubles they, to some extent, bring upon themselves. Mainly, I find no solace in blaming my father for his cancer, and I know that some ten percent of the people who get lung cancer neither smoked nor had prolonged exposure to a suspect substance such as asbestos. Knowing that his life and habits almost undoubtedly contributed to my dad’s manner of death in no way lessens my sense of loss or my sense of the wrongness of his cancer.

Here is where faith figures into the matter. Cancer is natural, even if it is related to particular human behaviors or the environmental results of societal behaviors. So, what makes me speak of “the wrongness of cancer”? Every living thing in this world eventually dies from something. As a friend reminded me a while ago, “None of us is getting out of here alive.” My sense of the wrongness of human misery, even when it can be reasonably said to have been brought about by the sufferer’s own choices and actions, comes from my belief in God’s desire for human wholeness and God’s compassion for those who suffer, whether they are blameworthy or not. That “article” of my faith raises many questions and potential objections to explore. For now, I simply ask the questions of how scripted we are to use blaming to protect ourselves from other people’s distresses and of how that self-concerned blaming affects others, including the people upon whom we lay the blame.

Further, my faith insists that God’s purpose is to rescue and redeem, not to lay blame and punish. How does that primary belief change one’s outlook on human suffering and one’s responses to it?

A Vatican Paper's Effects in America

2008-12-19T06:53:00.018-05:00

As John L. Allen, Jr. reminds us in his op-ed piece in today’s New York Times, we Americans tend toward a very America-centered view of the world. Mr. Allen “is the senior correspondent for The National Catholic Reporter and the author of ‘The Rise of Benedict XVI.’”

After pointing out that most of the world’s Roman Catholics do not live in the United States, that the Vatican’s new document on bioethics, “Dignitas Personae” or “Dignity of the Person,” was begun quite some time ago and was not written to target the political situation in America or counter the incoming Obama administration, Allen suggests that in this case the Vatican might want to “think America” somewhat more.

One factor is that there are issues other than bioethics in which the Vatican and the Obama administration are in harmony, and they are major issues for the world. A second is that socially conservative Catholics, Allen says, led the opposition to Obama on issues of women’s reproductive rights and stem cell research. He writes, “In the ’08 elections, pro-life Catholics emerged as the dominant voice of the religious right.”

So, he contends, Americans would be wrong to see Dignitas Personae as an assault on Barack Obama and his administration, but also that the Vatican would be wise to see the potential effects of the document on divisive issues in the United States and moderate those effects for the sake of future cooperation with the Obama administration. The op-ed piece is here.

I think the question will be what Americans hear coming from the Roman Catholic Church in the new year and beyond. Recently I visited the Web site of an archdiocese and was struck by the prominence of the two big right-wing sexual-social issues, women’s reproductive rights and the rights of homosexuals. Is sexual social conservatism the gospel? American evangelicals are moving away from the position that it is, apparently to the chagrin of formerly influential socially conservative evangelicals. The Roman Catholic Church is far too large and diverse to be focused so narrowly, but what voices are heard prominently? What I’m asking is not simply what Catholic leaders are saying about a wide variety of issues and concerns, but what Americans are hearing most often and most loudly and so having fixed in their minds as the Catholic message.

Since I am neither Roman Catholic nor American evangelical, perhaps I could ask that question from a position of detachment, as a mere observer. But I would then be acting falsely. The question asks what people are hearing most often and most loudly from Christianity -- what sounds to them as though it must be the gospel. Even if I felt no kinship with Catholics and evangelicals (which I do), that question would be for me, also.

Into the Darkness of Dementia

2008-12-18T11:59:00.004-05:00

What follows comes from the beginning of a homily I offered in the memorial service for a friend who went through years of Alzheimer’s Disease before dying. After the service, a man who works with a local Alzheimer’s group asked if he could share it with people in that context, and so I’m taking his word that it might prove helpful to someone who knows how it feels to have a loved one or friend go into that darkness.

From the homily:
Sometimes I say at the outset of the homily for a service such as this that, before saying anything further, we need to acknowledge to God, ourselves and each other that this day hurts and is grievous. Sarah has died at the end of a very long stretch of time that hurt and was grievous. Alzheimer’s Disease is crueler and more terrible than death because it extends death, tormenting family and friends with life that is not truly life and presence that is profoundly absent right before our eyes. We can touch but not reach and speak but not be truly heard. So, let there be no guilt in feeling relief that now Sarah has died and will not be dying anymore. The Sarah we knew and loved has been gone from us for too long. We could still care, but she could not know we cared. Now, she is released from her bondage to that horrible disease, and so are you. You have been grieving; now you are free to grieve losing her without the cruel irony of seeing her there but not there, before your eyes.

When my own mother was lost in dementia, seven-and-a-half years in the [local nursing home], I often thought, as I rode up the elevator to see her, of the words from Psalm 139 I read a few minutes ago.

Where can I go from your spirit?
Or where can I flee from your presence?
. . .
If I say, “Surely the darkness shall cover me,
and the light around me become night,”
even the darkness is not dark to you;
the night is as bright as the day.

I remember telling God silently, “I am holding you to that. I can’t reach her, and she herself cannot reach and grasp what her own mind still holds but with its connections broken. But you who can see through the deepest darkness, stay with her, hold on to her, and keep her until you have her in your care alone and can restore what has been taken from her, heal her, and make her whole. I hold you to that.” More than a few times, I said the same to God as I stood or sat with Sarah, present with me but frustratingly and grievously not so.

But we are not here together today only to mourn or even just to say it is okay and fitting to let relief mix with sorrow and loss now that the long struggle is over. We are here also to give thanks to God for giving Sarah to us, for sharing her with us. The apostle Paul counsels us to “hold on to all that is good.” We cannot control or arrange all the events of our lives. We cannot make any human relationship all good, all positive. We are real people, and sometimes we hurt the very ones we love most. But we can choose what we take from life, dwell on in our thoughts, and hold in our hearts. Hold on to all that is good, keep close to you all that came from love or friendship, which is also a kind of love. Remember the wife, the mother, the sister, the friend, and let your memories of Sarah bring a smile to your face even if they also bring a tear to your eye.

For me, Sarah was friend, co-worker, and confidant . . . .

More on the Frame

2008-12-18T09:33:00.010-05:00

I see The New Republic (TNR) has accepted a conservative frame for the struggle for the life of our nation’s public schools as a contest between so-called “reformers” (the conservatives) and the so-called “establishment” (teachers who want to teach as professionals and who still believe teaching should be a matter of children’s learning). The article is called, “Why Obama Gets an "A" for Choosing Duncan.”

The deception comes from framing the struggle around “the union” which is then labeled as “the establishment.” Meanwhile, the actual conversation among teachers and administrators with knowledge of teaching and concern for it (rather than simply for management of a business or institutional survival in the current test-and-blame culture of public education) revolves around good, effective teaching that engages students in their own learning, meeting them where they are and enabling them to move forward.

One critical assumption of the TNR article awarding President-elect Barack Obama an “A” for his choice is that the high-stakes standardized tests validly measure the student’s learning and abilities. I would argue they do not. But they do provide scads of data points that can easily be used to cover up their inadequacies. So, we get impressive graphs and decisive percentile breakdowns, signifying very little but seeming to validate a gigantic hoax that will cost our children and, therefore, our society dearly.

For an introduction to a different view of children's learning and a different frame for conversation about education, see Donald Graves' brief and easily read book, Testing Is Not Teaching.

Getting the Frame Right in Education

2008-12-17T07:32:00.006-05:00

President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for Secretary of Education has heightened the fears and anxieties on the educators’ listserv I read as a silent member. The fear is that the nation’s public schools will be subjected to another wave of the test-and-blame pretense to accountability.

But the situation has been falsely framed by the people seeking to dismantle public education, and the press has accepted the false frame uncritically, thereby setting up the wrong national conversation. The false frame, put forward for example by David Brooks in the New York Times, is set up by labeling the conservatives as “reformers” and the progressives as “reactionaries.” The second step has been to misconstrue the situation as a matter of “the union.”

The teachers and administrators on the listserv almost never mention the union. Their desire is for sound educational practices. They want to be liberated from the fetters of No Child Left Behind (NCLB) which is leaving so many children behind, and they want schooling to be about the education of children. Reading First and NCLB have stifled teaching and learning, recasting teachers as drones and children as mere data points. The underlying desire of those forcing fake accountability upon the schools is to dismantle public education and privatize it into a for-profit enterprise. It’s about money and power, not children.

I wish the press would wake up and stop accepting the frames and labels spoon fed to them. The issue is between scripted instruction and real teaching, being on the prescribed page of the manual for that calendar day or engaging children in learning. It’s not about the union. The business-first forces are not reformers, and the teachers who long to teach are not reactionaries protecting their supposedly cushy positions. Press corps, please wake up. Our children are being dehumanized and left out.

Lesson in Framing

2008-12-16T09:59:00.009-05:00

Decades ago, I listened as a seminary professor discussed a famous argument between two theologians, Karl Barth and Emil Brunner. The professor told us Barth won the argument (in his famous reply, “Nein!”) even though Brunner was “right.” Brunner, he said, lost because he accepted too many of Barth’s “givens” and so let himself be trapped into Barth’s conclusions.

The trick to such effective argument is to make one’s assumptions seem like givens, even though they are really elements of the argument itself. If my opponent accepts too many of my assumptions as givens, then I have put her/him into a “can’t get there from here” situation. I have framed the issue my way.

Saturday evening it dawned anew on me that understanding the concept of framing can enable us to do more than win arguments or political campaigns. It can also help us understand people whose context for life and experiences of life’s struggles differ significantly from our own.

Where was I Saturday evening? I was in a very evangelical (in its American sense) prayer and praise service that brought together the local Salvation Army, a mostly black congregation, a mostly white evangelical congregation, a Hispanic (mostly Mexican) congregation, and one progressive Presbyterian minister (me). The service was not my style in form or content, but like the others gathered, I was there to participate not endure, to appreciate not criticize or merely tolerate, and to share in the work of constructing bridges of understanding as well as extending welcome to newcomers in our community.

The hymns sung focused almost exclusively on the power and dominion of God, and so belonged in my view to the triumphalism I thoroughly believe the churches need to escape and leave behind. The biblical model is to speak of God’s supreme power and sovereignty, not to dominate, but to encourage the weak and disheartened, enabling faith in God’s promise of deliverance and so inspiring hope and courage in people resistant to both because of their years of deprivation and disadvantage (see Isaiah, chapters 40-55). Wait a minute! Is that not the very frame of reference into which I had stepped?

Within my mainline Protestant context, the need is for humility and service. We need to learn to minister to people from a position of mutual respect instead of dictating and excluding or being benevolent from above them.

But I had stepped into a different frame, a different world of life and experience, where power and privilege were not present realities, not assumptions from which daily life could be planned and scheduled. People were singing of power they didn’t have. In their frame of reference, humility is not something put on over abundance or practiced as a virtue but a condition of life forced upon them. Los pobres (poor people) and los campesinos (field workers) do not need to surrender power and privilege. Theirs is the context Jesus spoke to when he taught. To people whose lives were framed by poverty, anonymity, and day labor, he spoke of hope, dignity, empowerment, and salvation. In our culturally established churches, we must have explained to us what Jesus means by praying, “Give us this day our daily bread,” and mostly we spiritualize it because day labor and living “from hand to mouth” are experiences outside our frame of reference. What is daily bread to people who feast so regularly they don’t even know they’re feasting?

I still don’t like triumphalism, which Martin Luther called the theology of glory in contrast with the theology of the cross, but it matters greatly where we stand in life. Telling highly vulnerable people to learn humility and service is like lecturing starving people on the spiritual benefits of fasting. Yet, I am sure the message of power, of poder as we sang it in Spanish, is not that people denied power and dignity should become as the privileged have been for too long. Rather, we need to find mutuality. After all, we don’t want to offer anyone a gospel of power and glory that diminishes the soul as it inflates the ego. But, then, we are not the ones doing the offering. We need to step down from our pretense to superiority and find mutuality.

Prayer in a Recession (revised)

2008-12-13T07:20:00.007-05:00

I’ve just finished the second draft of a sermon that makes use of a prayer attributed to Augustine of Hippo, the great Western theologian. This prayer is included in the letter from the stated clerk of our Presbyterian General Assembly, Gradye Parsons, to President-elect Barack Obama. Our stated clerk sends such a letter to each President-elect as he (so far, he) prepares for inauguration. Parsons’ letter may be read on Presbyterian News Service here:

The first time I wrote this post, I took up some arguments I have with Augustine or, perhaps more accurately, with developments from Augustine through John Calvin and on through my Reformed Tradition (including the Presbyterian churches). Arguing with Augustine is fine, but I withdrew the post because contention with a great theologian, expressed so briefly as though in passing, comes much too close for my comfort to seeming just a cheap shot, no matter how many years of wrestling lie behind it.

Besides, I want to focus on the tensions of this season in its 2008 realities. We are calling for joyous celebration of life and hope in a time of recession, a season of growing apprehension and doubt about the future. Insecurity and fear underlie all our conversations, meetings, worship services, and holiday preparations. We may tell ourselves we are among the more fortunate, but our anxiety remains. There is good that can be brought out of such a time – if it draws us out from isolation, brings us together, and turns us outward – but the possibilities for developing such good require facing our fears and doubts, not hiding them behind too-gladly proclaimed confidence. Here’s the prayer, whether it really comes from Augustine or not. If anyone can cite its source, I’d like to know.

God of life,
there are days when the burdens we carry
are heavy on our shoulders and weigh us down,
when the road seems dreary and endless,
the skies gray and threatening,
when our lives have no music in them,
and our hearts are lonely,
and our souls have lost their courage.
Flood the path with light,
turn our eyes to where the skies are full of promise;
tune our hearts to brave music;
give us the sense of comradeship
with heroes and saints of every age;
and so quicken our spirits
that we may be able to encourage
the souls of all who journey with us on the road of life,
to your honor and glory. Amen.

Judge Not?

2008-12-11T07:38:00.003-05:00

After I was ordained at the age of twenty-five, my life changed in many ways. The next day, my wife and I moved to a new town in a different state and began setting up house in what Presbyterians call a manse, right next door to a church building, and after a few days of moving furniture from three locations to that manse, I began the work of my first pastorate. I was prepared for many of the sudden changes in my life or, at least, prepared to find myself unprepared. One subtle change that felt very awkward and uncomfortable, however, was my new role as someone expected to approve or disapprove of other people’s behavior, decisions, attitudes, and opinions. People three times my age sometimes asked about my approval of this or that matter related to their own lives, their families, or the society (especially its younger members).

Who was I to grant approval? Obviously, if I could approve of something or someone, I could also disapprove of him, her, or it. I was trying to understand people and the complexity of their life issues and to be helpful (young ministers can feel a lot of pressure to be helpful, healing, and supportive beyond their actual capabilities), but I had no desire to be the approver and disapprover (the judge or critic) of people and their lives, and I felt no such entitlement. In fact, I did not approve of such a role for myself, the church, or the faith and started finding ways to reject it without shaming the people who asked me to assume it.

Here’s my question. To what extent do outsiders to Christianity see it as the self-appointed (or in its own eyes, God-appointed) judge of people, their behavior, and their lives? Turning the question around, to what extent do Christians see Christianity that way, also, and with what results?

Peace and Goodwill

2008-12-10T22:10:00.003-05:00

It’s December, and while most people around me seem much more concerned with the current recession and its effects upon people and society, there remain some who want to keep fighting the Christmas culture wars. A recent article I read on “the real meaning of Christmas” renewed the call for Christians to use their presumed majority status to impose the holiday upon the whole society, demanding that store salespeople wish everyone, “Merry Christmas,” rather than, “Happy holidays,” putting religious Christmas back into the public schools, etc. Why, the minister who wrote it demanded to know, should the majority allow the minority to restrict its freedom of religion?

Why do we think and talk this way, as if the point of being Christian were to be dominant? Why the anger?

American democracy is not simply “majority rules.” We have not only the Constitution but the Bill of Rights. A proper majority wins the vote, but a democracy also guards the rights and human dignity of minorities within it, and the majority does not have the right to take away the rights of a minority. That guardianship of rights becomes especially important with unpopular minorities.

The freedom of religion in this nation is freedom to practice one’s own faith without government interference as long as that practice doesn’t break laws protecting the public (human sacrifice is definitely out). No religion, however, is to be established, and the outcries of angry Christians in these so-called culture wars have been demands for cultural establishment. To people of other faiths or no religious faith, they seem to be saying, “You may live here as long as you don’t bother or inconvenience us, but we are the dominant group, and we’ll do as we please in public spaces and with public funding.” That’s not freedom of religion but establishment for one religion.

Angry calls for Christian cultural dominance also contort the Christian gospel itself. “And the Word (of God) became flesh and lived among us, and we have beheld his glory, the glory of the only Son come from the Father, full of grace and truth.” Where is the grace in, “Wish me ‘Merry Christmas,’ not ‘Happy holidays,’ or I’ll rant at you in front of the other customers and storm out of your store!”? Is this the way we treat people? Jesus told his followers to speak as though they themselves were the youngest present, meaning with humility and respect for others. Christians are called to minister and serve, putting themselves out for vulnerable people. And “truth” in the Bible is more like the reliability of a true friend than the certitude of a doctrinal authority.

Besides, the holidays can be hard enough on people without belligerence and bullying, and the present recession adds many fears and troubles to the usual seasonal stresses and strains. Right now, people need all the grace and truth they can get. They don’t need belligerence thrown in their faces by Christians angry over our loss of cultural privilege in our increasingly diverse society. As the apostle Paul put it, love is never arrogant or rude, and it does not insist upon its own way.