When Dante lost his way and descended into hell, he found himself face to face with all the human depravity that his cultivated and poetical nature had previously resisted. In this same way, when a civilization falls apart, it, too, will eventually find itself face to face with its own fractures and contradictions, with the things that, in its rise to greatness, it conveniently set aside or ignored. Prison culture is one of these. But at this moment in the United States, there are few places where our contradictions and shortcuts are more in the limelight than in the health care debate.
Obama’s recent speech reminds us that the health care debate is a moral one, says an editorial in the most recent issue of The Christian Century. “Access to health care is something that we owe one another simply because we are all human and because ‘we are all in this together.’” The article goes on to cite T.R. Reid in The Healing of America who tells us that there is one major difference between the U.S. and the countries that have provided universal coverage: those countries have concluded that health care is a human right. Finally, the editorial says, “In the culture of readical individualism, the moral argument needs to be made again and again.”
These questions are important, but it has recently struck me that they are not the essential questions. Beneath ideas of rights and community lies a far greater question. How, in the United States of America, is the worth of a human being determined? The answer is that there is no single worth, no single human condition. We are not created equal. Some humans are worth a great deal more than others. Or, as a wealthy matron remarked to her hairdresser, "If we have universal health care does that mean that a homeless man can get a heart transplant?"
If you read the literature of health and sickness, there is one consequence of illness that emerges with greater frequency than any other: health and sickness affect productivity. Therefore, for example, obesity or smoking are bad, not just because they make people sick and miserable, but because they result in lost work hours and the bad habits of some cost honest people money. (In fact, these conditions pay for themselves, if you were worried.) I could give many other examples of how productivity dominates our social dialogue, but you have read the same articles that I have and the drift is clear: in this country, a human being is considered valuable in proportion to his or her ability to generate product and profit for the economy. Workers are paid a salary in consideration of the hours they put in at their jobs, but their purpose in working is not for their own dignity, but to generate profits for the company and its shareholders. This results in a kind of double taxation: you give a large proportion of your productivity to the company and then you pay another proportion to the government. (The Republican Right channels all the rage at the government when rightly, among the working class, it should be shared between capitalism and government.) When a person in this economy gets sick and cannot produce output, his or her ability to generate profits is greatly diminished and he or she is less valuable.
But – and there is a very big but here – if sickness itself can be made profitable, all is not lost. The for-profit insurance model apparently solved this dilemma, but it did not take long to discover that some illness is more profitable than others and that some things, like chronic conditions, can actually eat up your profits. Thus to insure a pre-existing condition, in the for-profit model, is like hiring a worker that you know will cost you. It’s not a good investment. The business model says to keep costs low and profits high. When the worth of a person is measured by his or her ability to generate profit for self and others at minimum cost, it only makes sense that even in sickness, a person must remain productive.
But if there is more to being a human being than mere output, to value us in this way not only makes no sense at all, it may actually be very dangerous.
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Thursday, September 24, 2009
The Christian Myth of Hell
Ok, so I did what I said I wasn’t going to do. I complained about the current state of our national health. It’s hard not to. Jungian psychiatrist James Hillman was heard to say at a recent Bioneeers’ Conference that “the Economy is the Moloch to which we sacrifice our children.” When we begin to devour our own people for the sake of financial gain, we are truly lost. Dante tells us that when we’re that lost, the only way back out is through Hell.
Hell is not a place I particularly care to visit. Too many people I love have already been there: John West, Nadia and Vselvolod, Anna and Marina, Stella’s grandmother who spent her childhood in the woods while the Nazis hunted her like an animal.
The Christian legend of Hell tells us that Hell is forever. Hell is the sacrament of perfect stasis. In Hell, nothing ever changes. Sinners suffer in the flames of their torment for all eternity, separated forever from God. Never mind for the moment that flames are the most transformative of all elements: stasis as fire is the paradox of the Christian legend of the damned. Like all paradoxes, this legend says something about this culture's obsession with security, our rise to power and our market forces marking "the end of history." It's only another way of saying, we're above change. But to believe oneself above change is only to sink into the lowest depths of ignorance. That's Hell.
When Dante lost himself in the Dark Wood, he was so reduced that he had become his own universe, the only spot of awareness in a blind, unconscious place. A successful poet, he was trapped inside his own self-esteem. He was alone. Even as he was reduced, so was otherness reduced to a trinity of predatory beasts, panther, lion, wolf. They chased him through the inner darkness all the way to the jaws of Hell.
He did get out. But only after a harrowing journey. And not without reliving and healing all that on the Mountain of Purgatory. In another Christian legend, Jesus, too, released those imprisoned in the underworld. Both these tales contradict the official teaching. Hell isn’t really forever; it is but part of its evil to make us think it is. Another paradox is this. The beasts Dante saw as predators loped off to other forests. Only Dante was left to burn.
Dante reminds us that change is a word we humans greet with ambivalence. By midlife, which is when Dante’s adventure begins, most of us are tired of change, of growing edges, of the solicitous advice of others. We wish simply to have arrived, to be done with all that, to enjoy the summer days of household and child rearing. Change in midlife portends aging. Change threatens us with the loss of our hard won gains. It is no accident that Dante was thirty five when he lost his way.
On the other hand, in the world of politics, change is a positive word. “America needs a change!” shout the candidates. “A vote for me is a vote for change.” Knowing that change provokes both hope and fear, Barak Obama linked change with hope in his recent presidential campaign. Hope and fear are but another way of saying yin and yang, front and back. They are cut from the same cloth.
But if our political discourse, at least at its highest levels, claims to be progressive, the human person, as Dante suggests, is far more conservative. As if change in public is one thing and change in private quite another. It makes me wonder if, for all our faith in progress, we understand change at all. As a young girl during the ‘sixties, excited about riding the waves of change and believing that it was possible to build a just world, I thought change was wonderful. Growing up was exciting, full of hope and fear, at least until I crashed. More than forty years later, I see change as simply inevitable. I can no more manage change than I can manage the weather, but if I am wise, I’ll have a rain coat.
“Those who would save their lives will lose them and those who lose their lives for my sake and for the sake of the Good News will find them. What does it profit us to gain the whole world and to lose our very souls?”
Hell is not a place I particularly care to visit. Too many people I love have already been there: John West, Nadia and Vselvolod, Anna and Marina, Stella’s grandmother who spent her childhood in the woods while the Nazis hunted her like an animal.
The Christian legend of Hell tells us that Hell is forever. Hell is the sacrament of perfect stasis. In Hell, nothing ever changes. Sinners suffer in the flames of their torment for all eternity, separated forever from God. Never mind for the moment that flames are the most transformative of all elements: stasis as fire is the paradox of the Christian legend of the damned. Like all paradoxes, this legend says something about this culture's obsession with security, our rise to power and our market forces marking "the end of history." It's only another way of saying, we're above change. But to believe oneself above change is only to sink into the lowest depths of ignorance. That's Hell.
When Dante lost himself in the Dark Wood, he was so reduced that he had become his own universe, the only spot of awareness in a blind, unconscious place. A successful poet, he was trapped inside his own self-esteem. He was alone. Even as he was reduced, so was otherness reduced to a trinity of predatory beasts, panther, lion, wolf. They chased him through the inner darkness all the way to the jaws of Hell.
He did get out. But only after a harrowing journey. And not without reliving and healing all that on the Mountain of Purgatory. In another Christian legend, Jesus, too, released those imprisoned in the underworld. Both these tales contradict the official teaching. Hell isn’t really forever; it is but part of its evil to make us think it is. Another paradox is this. The beasts Dante saw as predators loped off to other forests. Only Dante was left to burn.
Dante reminds us that change is a word we humans greet with ambivalence. By midlife, which is when Dante’s adventure begins, most of us are tired of change, of growing edges, of the solicitous advice of others. We wish simply to have arrived, to be done with all that, to enjoy the summer days of household and child rearing. Change in midlife portends aging. Change threatens us with the loss of our hard won gains. It is no accident that Dante was thirty five when he lost his way.
On the other hand, in the world of politics, change is a positive word. “America needs a change!” shout the candidates. “A vote for me is a vote for change.” Knowing that change provokes both hope and fear, Barak Obama linked change with hope in his recent presidential campaign. Hope and fear are but another way of saying yin and yang, front and back. They are cut from the same cloth.
But if our political discourse, at least at its highest levels, claims to be progressive, the human person, as Dante suggests, is far more conservative. As if change in public is one thing and change in private quite another. It makes me wonder if, for all our faith in progress, we understand change at all. As a young girl during the ‘sixties, excited about riding the waves of change and believing that it was possible to build a just world, I thought change was wonderful. Growing up was exciting, full of hope and fear, at least until I crashed. More than forty years later, I see change as simply inevitable. I can no more manage change than I can manage the weather, but if I am wise, I’ll have a rain coat.
“Those who would save their lives will lose them and those who lose their lives for my sake and for the sake of the Good News will find them. What does it profit us to gain the whole world and to lose our very souls?”
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
From Your Grieving Friend
Hello, dear friends. Months have passed since my last post. I have been silent for a reason, resisting sharing my opinions of the health care debate – that we even need to debate this is a little odoriferous to me – we should have long ago joined the family of compassionate, civilized nations that offer either single payer or a hybrid public/nonprofit option. Illness should never be a weapon, although it has been used as such by Western Man for a very long time. A society that derives huge profits off the suffering of others does not sit well with my soul. It reminds me of the blankets infected with small pox that were given to our Native brothers and sisters. A preexisting condition. Which is to say, I’ve been grieving. If you’ve ever seen a dog grieve, you will know that she slinks into her corner, rests her head on her paws and falls into an observant silence.
It’s a humbling thing, this social racket. Long ago, back in the ‘sixties and early ‘seventies, the right accused my generation of being self-interested, that we were refusing to fight in Vietnam because we were cowards and wanted fun, not danger. Like all accusations in a politically polarized climate, this one had its elements of truth. In a New York Times interview with Donald Trump back in the ‘nineties, the rich man stated that he could not be bothered with Vietnam because it might interfere with his financial ambitions. “Let other people do the fighting,” he said. The conservatives in the days of the Draft saw serving ones country as an unbreakable part of the social contract. The liberals saw the war in Vietnam as unjust. These ideas are not equivalent, although they were taken to be at the time. Now history has revealed a third thread: that when a social contract is all about death, greed, murder, defoliation and drugs, when it uses people to fuel an idea – in this case protection of a capitalist way of life – the social contract itself ceases to look very good. For those who believe that we can get where we need to go if we only banish religion, let Vietnam serve as a reminder. Vietnam was a crusade and there was nothing religious about it.
Meanwhile we who are a social species withdraw into our shells and wonder why we are so unhappy.
As many of you know, I have been deeply formed by the work of C.S. Lewis. Lewis insisted that Imagination, not pragmatism, held the key to life’s most persistent and difficult questions. The children who enter Narnia leave a world of school, security and safety to encounter life’s real dangers and in facing them, become real themselves. Implicit here is the idea that our so-called “real world” may in fact be the fantasy, (and the world in which I grew up felt rather grotesquely made up). Another idea, less explicit but no less real, is that too much insulation from risk only turns people into bullies. Such was certainly Lewis’ boyhood experience. For all his being one of the most educated men of his generation, Lewis hated school. British schools were notorious for their bullies. Britain before World War I was also a superpower. Perhaps there is a correlation between bullies and superpowers, because the people I know worry about bullying quite as much as C.S. Lewis did. America is nothing if not a superpower and we spend billions each year to protect ourselves from risk. One of the unintended consequences of refusing to fight in Vietnam is that an entire generation believed it was entirely possible to insulate itself from risk, or in the case of extreme athletes and mountain climbers, to carefully control and orchestrate where risk is going to happen. In Narnia, C.S. Lewis charted a middle way. It is a very different thing, he says, to fight for what you love than to be canon fodder in some else’s army.
In the spirit of C.S. Lewis, upon whom World War I left an indelible mark, I’ve been in a conversation with myth as a way of imagining myself out of the grief I feel over what is happening to our nation. Myth has the uncanny ability to suggest that there is much more to life than the pundits are telling us. From the standpoint of myth, the fact that our real world is continuing to fracture into warring factions and reductionist views screaming slogans at one another is a very bad sign.
You know what I mean. Everyone has his own cause that must prevail over all the others. The environment will have to wait until we’ve fixed the economy. The economy cannot bear the costs of reforming and improving our health care system. We can’t worry about civil rights or torture when there’s a war on. Or – let’s score one for the mothers of my native Berkeley – fat people are really the problem and we can save humanity through diet and exercise.
During my months of silence, I have steeped myself in the stories of another age of social breakdown: the end of Roman Britain and the descent into the so-called Dark Ages. I say Dark Ages reservedly, because recent evidence, and my own readings of the time during seminary suggest that this age was anything but dark. Or if they were dark, it was the darkness of germination. “A sower went out and scattered seed,” says one of the stories they loved back then.
These early legends speak deeply to our present dilemma: what happens when very different cultures and outlooks meet? What happens when everything you’ve taken for granted falls apart? How does a brilliant tradition survive when another brilliant tradition seeks to erase it from the memory of all time?
How are we going to live?
It’s a humbling thing, this social racket. Long ago, back in the ‘sixties and early ‘seventies, the right accused my generation of being self-interested, that we were refusing to fight in Vietnam because we were cowards and wanted fun, not danger. Like all accusations in a politically polarized climate, this one had its elements of truth. In a New York Times interview with Donald Trump back in the ‘nineties, the rich man stated that he could not be bothered with Vietnam because it might interfere with his financial ambitions. “Let other people do the fighting,” he said. The conservatives in the days of the Draft saw serving ones country as an unbreakable part of the social contract. The liberals saw the war in Vietnam as unjust. These ideas are not equivalent, although they were taken to be at the time. Now history has revealed a third thread: that when a social contract is all about death, greed, murder, defoliation and drugs, when it uses people to fuel an idea – in this case protection of a capitalist way of life – the social contract itself ceases to look very good. For those who believe that we can get where we need to go if we only banish religion, let Vietnam serve as a reminder. Vietnam was a crusade and there was nothing religious about it.
Meanwhile we who are a social species withdraw into our shells and wonder why we are so unhappy.
As many of you know, I have been deeply formed by the work of C.S. Lewis. Lewis insisted that Imagination, not pragmatism, held the key to life’s most persistent and difficult questions. The children who enter Narnia leave a world of school, security and safety to encounter life’s real dangers and in facing them, become real themselves. Implicit here is the idea that our so-called “real world” may in fact be the fantasy, (and the world in which I grew up felt rather grotesquely made up). Another idea, less explicit but no less real, is that too much insulation from risk only turns people into bullies. Such was certainly Lewis’ boyhood experience. For all his being one of the most educated men of his generation, Lewis hated school. British schools were notorious for their bullies. Britain before World War I was also a superpower. Perhaps there is a correlation between bullies and superpowers, because the people I know worry about bullying quite as much as C.S. Lewis did. America is nothing if not a superpower and we spend billions each year to protect ourselves from risk. One of the unintended consequences of refusing to fight in Vietnam is that an entire generation believed it was entirely possible to insulate itself from risk, or in the case of extreme athletes and mountain climbers, to carefully control and orchestrate where risk is going to happen. In Narnia, C.S. Lewis charted a middle way. It is a very different thing, he says, to fight for what you love than to be canon fodder in some else’s army.
In the spirit of C.S. Lewis, upon whom World War I left an indelible mark, I’ve been in a conversation with myth as a way of imagining myself out of the grief I feel over what is happening to our nation. Myth has the uncanny ability to suggest that there is much more to life than the pundits are telling us. From the standpoint of myth, the fact that our real world is continuing to fracture into warring factions and reductionist views screaming slogans at one another is a very bad sign.
You know what I mean. Everyone has his own cause that must prevail over all the others. The environment will have to wait until we’ve fixed the economy. The economy cannot bear the costs of reforming and improving our health care system. We can’t worry about civil rights or torture when there’s a war on. Or – let’s score one for the mothers of my native Berkeley – fat people are really the problem and we can save humanity through diet and exercise.
During my months of silence, I have steeped myself in the stories of another age of social breakdown: the end of Roman Britain and the descent into the so-called Dark Ages. I say Dark Ages reservedly, because recent evidence, and my own readings of the time during seminary suggest that this age was anything but dark. Or if they were dark, it was the darkness of germination. “A sower went out and scattered seed,” says one of the stories they loved back then.
These early legends speak deeply to our present dilemma: what happens when very different cultures and outlooks meet? What happens when everything you’ve taken for granted falls apart? How does a brilliant tradition survive when another brilliant tradition seeks to erase it from the memory of all time?
How are we going to live?
Monday, May 25, 2009
All You Need is Love: A Sermon on the Sunday After Ascension
Holy Father, protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one.
We have come to the seventh Sunday after Easter, the Sunday after the Ascension. Jesus has been raised into heaven. Even though we’re still shouting alleluias, even though we’re still saying “Christ is risen!” it all takes on a different quality on the Sunday after the Ascension. For now it’s really over. He is risen indeed. He came back to us and then, as he said he would, he returned to his father. Jesus in the body is gone, like the landlord who departs from the vineyard and goes on a long journey, leaving us to be his voice in the world, calling us to use the talents he left with us.
Today’s Gospel is a haunting piece. It’s a text of departure, Jesus’ last words to his disciples. The hour is very near. Jesus has done the work God called him to do, and now it’s time to see whether we understood what he was about, whether we heard and saw truly what Jesus came to teach. We’re left in this world to do the work of God. Salvation is not a done deal. The evil one is real. He’s going to make an appearance very soon down in the Kidron Valley: scary evil, the kind that makes people betray their best friends: Jesus will be arrested, Peter will draw his sword, the disciples will scatter. It is haunting, knowing that this is going to happen, as Jesus says, “I guarded them.…I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one.”
As long as we are in the world, Jesus says, we must deal with evil. We cannot make it go away. Even Jesus’ death and resurrection did not make it go away. No matter how hard we try, we cannot make it go away any more than we can make the morning fog go away. I can’t fight the morning fog, or design vast programs to rid the world of fog. On foggy mornings, I put on a coat and go forth.
Jesus did not come to change the world, he came to show us how to live in it. Over time, if we practiced life as Jesus taught it, the world would change, but not all at once. Also, as the world changed, so would our understanding of what Jesus came to teach. Such is the nature of spiritual practice. It is change, but slow change. Jesus left before it was apparent he had done much of anything. He didn’t form a political party or write a set of doctrines – all that would come later, as the people left behind tried to figure out what it all meant – Jesus came simply to show us the way through human illusion so that we might see the truth and be strengthened by it. Jesus only showed us how to live in the world as it really is. Jesus came to offer a coat to a people unable to find their way in the world’s foggy morning. In this image of fog is the blindness, the deafness of people in the world, the deafness and blindness of what passes for human genius. I cannot see what I cannot see. I cannot see what I need most to see. I need help. I need a community and a practice. I need a guide to help me take the steps that need to be taken. I need Jesus. And now Jesus is ascended to the father and it is up to us to continue his work of love and healing.
Today, many Christians equate salvation with getting into heaven after you die, which can sound a lot like getting into a good college as a reward for getting good grades in high school. Because we don’t know what to do with the reality of evil in the world, with the fact that sin and death haven’t gone away, over the years, this version of salvation has been promoted: be good and you’ll get to heaven, with not much thought about what Jesus means to life on earth. Which is to say that the “world” that Jesus is saving us from is not the same as the earth. Earth is God’s. World is man’s. But since individuals are easier to manage than communities, over the past five hundred years, this image of personal salvation has replaced others. Salvation is now the supreme achievement of a life measured by individual achievement. The Reformation theologian John Calvin viewed earthly success as the outward and visible sign of my being chosen by God. The Reformation itself didn’t like the compromises of community and so replaced impure people with what they thought was pure Scripture, which soon became a private act of reading and a provoker of arguments. Slowly, over the passage of centuries, community life gave way to individual life, because the locus of the divine wasn’t in community, it was in a book, and upon me and my salvation. The mega churches understand this: they can, from the outside, resemble one stop personal salvation service stations, complete with rock bands, couples counseling, espresso bar, gym and summer cruise vacations with the Pastor. “That they may be one as we are one” can be transformed into building up the Christian team, getting people on the right side, so that they can then go out and whomp the Muslim team, or even their own opponents in the Church, on the great playing field of life. Sometimes, of course, the mega churches find God, too, and are transformed.
It serves to remind us that any successful organization stands a long way from that night in Jerusalem when Jesus was dragged away to be killed, shattering his own organization, shattering every answer that his disciples thought they had.
All this came home to me when I again watched the film “Jesus Camp” with my 8th grade religion class. If you haven’t seen the film, it revolves around youth pastor Becky Fisher who runs a really slick Evangelical meeting: children speak in tongues, weep, wash away their sins with bottled water, preach and cover their mouths with red tape as a protest against abortion. I could say a lot about it – my students certainly did – but for today, I’ll share just this one moment, because it was pivotal to my own articulation of the faith I proclaim. Near the end of the film, a liberal Christian talk show host named Mike asks Becky, “Doesn’t it bother you that you are indoctrinating those children?”
“No, Mike,” she says. “It doesn’t bother me. The Muslims are indoctrinating their children, so why shouldn’t we?”
That, of course, represents every liberal’s worst fear: a Children’s Crusade on behalf of the Republican Party.
But that was not what hit me. What hit me was the Becky Fisher herself considered building the church as an act of indoctrination. Nowhere in the whole film does she touch on Jesus’ most important word, a word which we hear in today’s Gospel, “As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth.”
Jesus is not a doctrine. I cannot indoctrinate you with him. He is the truth. I can only tell my truth and wait to hear yours.
That Jesus goes to the cross suggests that we don’t find God in our moments of radiant success, but when everything that we are is shattered by apparent failure. I say apparent, because the older I get, the less sure I am that there’s really any such thing as failure. I think failure is the world’s word, used to scare me into submission to it. What the world call failure may just be God’s way of helping me let go of what the world tells me I should want and listening to what God wants.
Which brings me to my final observation. Today’s teaching is all about letting go. Spoken at the threshold of the cross, it says that letting go is never easy – it may be the hardest thing I will ever do. It may very well look like failure. But what looks to me like failure may only be the breaking open of my heart. It may only be my illusions shattering. At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus was tempted by illusions. So also, was he tempted at the end. Judas is necessary, not because Jesus had to be betrayed, but because Judas succumbed to the temptations that Jesus refused. Judas’ story shows us the terrible unhappiness that comes when I place my own ideas of what is right above all else. Jesus’ story shows us what happens when you let your heart be broken.
Being about love, Jesus is not a “he.” Jesus is “we.” Jesus and God are one. Jesus is “we.” Jesus ascends so that instead of holding on to him, I might become him, one with God, one with you. God loves each and every one of us. The path to God is not to assert myself over and above others; it is to realize that those I call others are really inseparable from myself. If I am in conflict with them, I am also, at some level, in conflict with God. All the fights and divisions in the church today are God’s way of telling us that it is time to grow up.
How do we know how we’re doing? There’s really only one test. We know that we’re doing God’s work the more we love other people, the more we love creation, the more we love the animals, the trees, the birds, the insects, even that person across the hall who’s driving me crazy. God’s work is the work of love. Love God. Love your neighbor. Evil remains real, and love, only love is strong enough to stand up to it.
We have come to the seventh Sunday after Easter, the Sunday after the Ascension. Jesus has been raised into heaven. Even though we’re still shouting alleluias, even though we’re still saying “Christ is risen!” it all takes on a different quality on the Sunday after the Ascension. For now it’s really over. He is risen indeed. He came back to us and then, as he said he would, he returned to his father. Jesus in the body is gone, like the landlord who departs from the vineyard and goes on a long journey, leaving us to be his voice in the world, calling us to use the talents he left with us.
Today’s Gospel is a haunting piece. It’s a text of departure, Jesus’ last words to his disciples. The hour is very near. Jesus has done the work God called him to do, and now it’s time to see whether we understood what he was about, whether we heard and saw truly what Jesus came to teach. We’re left in this world to do the work of God. Salvation is not a done deal. The evil one is real. He’s going to make an appearance very soon down in the Kidron Valley: scary evil, the kind that makes people betray their best friends: Jesus will be arrested, Peter will draw his sword, the disciples will scatter. It is haunting, knowing that this is going to happen, as Jesus says, “I guarded them.…I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they do not belong to the world, just as I do not belong to the world. I am not asking you to take them out of the world, but I ask you to protect them from the evil one.”
As long as we are in the world, Jesus says, we must deal with evil. We cannot make it go away. Even Jesus’ death and resurrection did not make it go away. No matter how hard we try, we cannot make it go away any more than we can make the morning fog go away. I can’t fight the morning fog, or design vast programs to rid the world of fog. On foggy mornings, I put on a coat and go forth.
Jesus did not come to change the world, he came to show us how to live in it. Over time, if we practiced life as Jesus taught it, the world would change, but not all at once. Also, as the world changed, so would our understanding of what Jesus came to teach. Such is the nature of spiritual practice. It is change, but slow change. Jesus left before it was apparent he had done much of anything. He didn’t form a political party or write a set of doctrines – all that would come later, as the people left behind tried to figure out what it all meant – Jesus came simply to show us the way through human illusion so that we might see the truth and be strengthened by it. Jesus only showed us how to live in the world as it really is. Jesus came to offer a coat to a people unable to find their way in the world’s foggy morning. In this image of fog is the blindness, the deafness of people in the world, the deafness and blindness of what passes for human genius. I cannot see what I cannot see. I cannot see what I need most to see. I need help. I need a community and a practice. I need a guide to help me take the steps that need to be taken. I need Jesus. And now Jesus is ascended to the father and it is up to us to continue his work of love and healing.
Today, many Christians equate salvation with getting into heaven after you die, which can sound a lot like getting into a good college as a reward for getting good grades in high school. Because we don’t know what to do with the reality of evil in the world, with the fact that sin and death haven’t gone away, over the years, this version of salvation has been promoted: be good and you’ll get to heaven, with not much thought about what Jesus means to life on earth. Which is to say that the “world” that Jesus is saving us from is not the same as the earth. Earth is God’s. World is man’s. But since individuals are easier to manage than communities, over the past five hundred years, this image of personal salvation has replaced others. Salvation is now the supreme achievement of a life measured by individual achievement. The Reformation theologian John Calvin viewed earthly success as the outward and visible sign of my being chosen by God. The Reformation itself didn’t like the compromises of community and so replaced impure people with what they thought was pure Scripture, which soon became a private act of reading and a provoker of arguments. Slowly, over the passage of centuries, community life gave way to individual life, because the locus of the divine wasn’t in community, it was in a book, and upon me and my salvation. The mega churches understand this: they can, from the outside, resemble one stop personal salvation service stations, complete with rock bands, couples counseling, espresso bar, gym and summer cruise vacations with the Pastor. “That they may be one as we are one” can be transformed into building up the Christian team, getting people on the right side, so that they can then go out and whomp the Muslim team, or even their own opponents in the Church, on the great playing field of life. Sometimes, of course, the mega churches find God, too, and are transformed.
It serves to remind us that any successful organization stands a long way from that night in Jerusalem when Jesus was dragged away to be killed, shattering his own organization, shattering every answer that his disciples thought they had.
All this came home to me when I again watched the film “Jesus Camp” with my 8th grade religion class. If you haven’t seen the film, it revolves around youth pastor Becky Fisher who runs a really slick Evangelical meeting: children speak in tongues, weep, wash away their sins with bottled water, preach and cover their mouths with red tape as a protest against abortion. I could say a lot about it – my students certainly did – but for today, I’ll share just this one moment, because it was pivotal to my own articulation of the faith I proclaim. Near the end of the film, a liberal Christian talk show host named Mike asks Becky, “Doesn’t it bother you that you are indoctrinating those children?”
“No, Mike,” she says. “It doesn’t bother me. The Muslims are indoctrinating their children, so why shouldn’t we?”
That, of course, represents every liberal’s worst fear: a Children’s Crusade on behalf of the Republican Party.
But that was not what hit me. What hit me was the Becky Fisher herself considered building the church as an act of indoctrination. Nowhere in the whole film does she touch on Jesus’ most important word, a word which we hear in today’s Gospel, “As you have sent me into the world, so I have sent them into the world. And for their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified in truth.”
Jesus is not a doctrine. I cannot indoctrinate you with him. He is the truth. I can only tell my truth and wait to hear yours.
That Jesus goes to the cross suggests that we don’t find God in our moments of radiant success, but when everything that we are is shattered by apparent failure. I say apparent, because the older I get, the less sure I am that there’s really any such thing as failure. I think failure is the world’s word, used to scare me into submission to it. What the world call failure may just be God’s way of helping me let go of what the world tells me I should want and listening to what God wants.
Which brings me to my final observation. Today’s teaching is all about letting go. Spoken at the threshold of the cross, it says that letting go is never easy – it may be the hardest thing I will ever do. It may very well look like failure. But what looks to me like failure may only be the breaking open of my heart. It may only be my illusions shattering. At the beginning of his ministry, Jesus was tempted by illusions. So also, was he tempted at the end. Judas is necessary, not because Jesus had to be betrayed, but because Judas succumbed to the temptations that Jesus refused. Judas’ story shows us the terrible unhappiness that comes when I place my own ideas of what is right above all else. Jesus’ story shows us what happens when you let your heart be broken.
Being about love, Jesus is not a “he.” Jesus is “we.” Jesus and God are one. Jesus is “we.” Jesus ascends so that instead of holding on to him, I might become him, one with God, one with you. God loves each and every one of us. The path to God is not to assert myself over and above others; it is to realize that those I call others are really inseparable from myself. If I am in conflict with them, I am also, at some level, in conflict with God. All the fights and divisions in the church today are God’s way of telling us that it is time to grow up.
How do we know how we’re doing? There’s really only one test. We know that we’re doing God’s work the more we love other people, the more we love creation, the more we love the animals, the trees, the birds, the insects, even that person across the hall who’s driving me crazy. God’s work is the work of love. Love God. Love your neighbor. Evil remains real, and love, only love is strong enough to stand up to it.
Sunday, May 17, 2009
The Etiquette of Invective
"I do not judge anyone who hears my words and does not keep them, for I came not to judge the world, but to save the world." Jesus, John 12:47
I recently received an interesting, albeit far too long, note from an anonymous reader. It detailed some of the ways in which we ordinary folk have been fooled by the economic shenanigans of the outrageously wealthy. It raised some important questions about so-called philanthropy and warned of possible hard times to come. I was pleased to read it and would certainly have posted some of it were it not for one thing. The author indulged in name calling.
We're way beyond that, folks. The issues are far too important. Even the most difficult problems can be presented in a constructive manner -- indeed, constructive is just what we need at a time when so much we have taken for granted, both for good and for ill, just isn't there anymore. People may sound sure of themselves, but I'm not sure anyone knows what is happening.
My own spiritual practice has taught me that there is no sin that cannot be transformed into goodness if we can but open our hearts to the holy. Many of the folks that got us into this mess are brilliant and remembering Paul on the road to Damascus, or Milarepa, seeing the ruins of the village he had destroyed with his power, I pray not for their downfall, but for their transformation.
When I watched the film Jesus Camp with our 8th grade, we saw what a polarized nation we have become. The need to be right all the time is intellect run amok. No system has all the answers. It is time to forgive, not name call. Beneath all that rhetoric, we are more alike than we think.
The path toward truth is never paved with taunts.
I recently received an interesting, albeit far too long, note from an anonymous reader. It detailed some of the ways in which we ordinary folk have been fooled by the economic shenanigans of the outrageously wealthy. It raised some important questions about so-called philanthropy and warned of possible hard times to come. I was pleased to read it and would certainly have posted some of it were it not for one thing. The author indulged in name calling.
We're way beyond that, folks. The issues are far too important. Even the most difficult problems can be presented in a constructive manner -- indeed, constructive is just what we need at a time when so much we have taken for granted, both for good and for ill, just isn't there anymore. People may sound sure of themselves, but I'm not sure anyone knows what is happening.
My own spiritual practice has taught me that there is no sin that cannot be transformed into goodness if we can but open our hearts to the holy. Many of the folks that got us into this mess are brilliant and remembering Paul on the road to Damascus, or Milarepa, seeing the ruins of the village he had destroyed with his power, I pray not for their downfall, but for their transformation.
When I watched the film Jesus Camp with our 8th grade, we saw what a polarized nation we have become. The need to be right all the time is intellect run amok. No system has all the answers. It is time to forgive, not name call. Beneath all that rhetoric, we are more alike than we think.
The path toward truth is never paved with taunts.
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Saturday Quotes
From Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
MOYERS: Why is a myth different than a dream?
CAMPBELL: Oh because a dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society’s dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn’t, you’ve got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.
MOYERS: So if my private dreams are in accord with the public mythology, I’m more likely to live healthily in that society. But if my private dreams are out of step with the public –
CAMPBELL: you’ll be in trouble. If you’re forced to live in that system, you’ll be a neurotic.
The question that was not asked then: What if the public myth is neurotic?
Thomas Merton weighed in on this very thing in an article on the trial of Adolph Eichmann, a man diagnosed as sane, originally published in Ramparts (October 1966) and reprinted in the Essential Writings anthology:
"We can no longer assume that because a man is 'sane' he is therefore in his 'right mind.' The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is itself meaningless."...God knows, perhaps such people can be perfectly adjusted, even in hell itself."
MOYERS: Why is a myth different than a dream?
CAMPBELL: Oh because a dream is a personal experience of that deep, dark ground that is the support of our conscious lives, and a myth is the society’s dream. The myth is the public dream and the dream is the private myth. If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn’t, you’ve got an adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.
MOYERS: So if my private dreams are in accord with the public mythology, I’m more likely to live healthily in that society. But if my private dreams are out of step with the public –
CAMPBELL: you’ll be in trouble. If you’re forced to live in that system, you’ll be a neurotic.
The question that was not asked then: What if the public myth is neurotic?
Thomas Merton weighed in on this very thing in an article on the trial of Adolph Eichmann, a man diagnosed as sane, originally published in Ramparts (October 1966) and reprinted in the Essential Writings anthology:
"We can no longer assume that because a man is 'sane' he is therefore in his 'right mind.' The whole concept of sanity in a society where spiritual values have lost their meaning is itself meaningless."...God knows, perhaps such people can be perfectly adjusted, even in hell itself."
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Eagle Floods: God's Sled Dogs Rescued by Boat
Ice jammed the Yukon River near Eagle yesterday, creating the biggest flood in Eagle's history. If you have read John McPhee's Coming into the Country or follow the Yukon Quest sled dog race, you will remember Eagle. Thanks to musher Andy Bassich for a magnificent rescue.
With love from the Dog.
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