Mind Matters

2007-02-28T23:53:00.000-08:00

Salem Witch Trials

From the daily posting of Garrison Keillor comes this anniversary note (1 March).

It was on this day in 1692 that the Salem Witch Trials began, as three women were charged with practicing witchcraft. At the time, the town of Salem, Massachusetts, had recently gone through an epidemic of small pox, and the Indian Wars that had gone on for years had left many of the children in the town without fathers. There had also been a power struggle between the Puritan Colony and the king of England, which left Massachusetts without a true
legal system.

It was in the middle of this difficult period that several girls began to go into convulsions, and they began accusing people in the town of having bewitched them. Some historians now believe that the witch-hunt might have been fueled by a long-running family feud in the town. The Porter family had long been growing in influence and wealth in the area, and the Putnam family had been losing influence. The girls doing most of the accusing were connected in various ways to the Putnam family, and most of the witches they accused were connected to the Porter family.

There were multiple attempts to keep the trials from getting out of control. Judges resigned in protest of the convictions. Neighbors gathered petitions in support of the accused. But in the end, 19 accused witches were hanged, 14 of them women, and three more died in jail. By the following fall, the preacher Cotton Mather was speaking out against the trials. He said, "We ought not to practice witchcraft to discover witches. It is better that 10 suspected witches should escape than one innocent person should be condemned." After the girls accused the governor's wife of being a witch, the governor stepped in and stopped the trials. It was the last time anyone was put to death for witchcraft in American history.

It is to be noted that not all condemned witches were women, no person was burned, and one man was pressed to death. The trials remain a blot on American history.

Term Limits

2006-11-17T18:08:00.000-08:00

The heading on the flyer from the insurance company startled me (as it was intended to do): "Death is inevitable, but disability is more probable." The paragraph following cleared up the matter. At any age, all ages, being disabled is more probable than dying and disability insurance (no surprise) was the recommended response..

That flyer brought to mind the smiling, young, bouncy, bubbling-with-health food proponent's face suddenly turning intensely serious and saying, "If you don't eat right, you can die." With matching solemnity, I thought, "Yes, and even if I do eat right, I will most assuredly die." Exercise and a healthy diet may lead to additional years of living and even more healthful living during those additional years, but the most healthful living cannot avoid death's inevitability.

On reflection, I began to detect, underneath so much of the faddish aspect of the exercise and healthy eating phenomenon, a pervasive, if unrecognized fear of death and the aging process which precedes it. Added to this is the rapid rise of body shaping (formerly called plastic surgery). In this fear we join people of all ages who have scrambled through magic potions and religious exercises, and now diet plans and tummy tucks, seeking to avoid or put off the inevitable.

This has caused me to reflect on my own death. My thoughts have been shaped by my father's death at the age of forty-nine. Knowing that death can come that 'early' (although the average life span at the time of the American Revolution was thirty-nine years—ten years less than my father's), I have considered each and every year after forty-nine an additional year of grace. If I were to hear tomorrow that I had a year, a month, a week to live, I would be grateful for what has been and not grumble about the loss of the unrealized years of additional life (well, perhaps there would be a few 'what ifs'). Gratitude for what has been and not regret for what will not be marks my life.

It's not just our elected politicians who resist term limits.

29 November 1999

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters

High School

2006-11-07T18:40:00.000-08:00

I slid down a bit in my seat and an imperceptible groan seeped out. I was watching the 1968 documentary High School. The scenes rapidly pulled me into my own high school days two decades earlier and my own days as a teacher and school administrator at the time the documentary was filmed. Responses from university students in the discussion which followed confirmed the 1990s with the same adult emphasis on compliance and conformity and the same student boredom.

A scene in which a teacher challenged a student to stand up to the crowd and show individual leadership and personal conviction was juxtaposed with that of another student who was berated for not fitting in and following the rules "that everyone else lives by." The administrator's patronizing and placating "we want to do the right thing" (conform to the rules is what was meant) joins the parent's comment to a counselor (with the daughter/student present), "I wish she was as smart as she is strong." These comments are part of the continuing verbal assault on the reason and self-esteem of students.

Reading the students' plainly visible feelings of suppressed boredom, apathy and anger required no perception, but why, I asked myself, was the adults' (teachers, administrators and parents) response so uniform over the decades?

Shoehorning so many human bodies into a relatively small space—for so many hours of the day and for so many days of the year—requires an enforced uniformity of students' habits and behavior. How many adults would want to endure (or could actually survive) the crowding in classes and in hallways, the patronizing and punitive attitude of teachers, the often sarcastic put-down by administrators day-after-day for nine months? (If you have ever felt that a teacher 'had it in for you,' you know how everything you do is viewed as disruptive or wrong). Such crowding and need for conformity can numb the spirit and be a continual irritant. Such wearing down of the spirit deadens teachers as well as students.

The obvious need for order and conformity in the classroom, hallways and activities conflicts with the teachers' genuine desire to see students learn. For little learning takes place in chaos and the opportunities for one student to assault another increases without discipline.

In the final scene in the documentary, a teacher reads a letter of appreciation from a former student and the teacher concludes with the statement, "This makes what we do worthwhile. We do have an effect on students' lives."

Yes, I survived and learned as a student and most of the students I taught and disciplined survived as well. In the midst of all the institutional and bureaucratic maze, most people do get taught.

Still, I wonder about those whom the schools discount and discard because they do not conform as readily as others. I wonder about those who survive by hunkering down, suppressing their feelings and squelching their spirits. And, today, I wonder about the effects of the 'police state' mentality that we now impose on students in order to protect them from guns and drugs. I wonder how much the schools themselves are the incubator for those who take out their inner rage by using the schools as the object of that rage.

In another twenty years, will a person looking at the movie High School see the same system in place. In my mind, the answer will be "Yes."

22 November 1999

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters, Education

A Daily Gift

2006-11-06T19:11:00.000-08:00

A new day. A new gift to be opened. On awakening, the shape of the hours floods my mind—the tasks to be done and the people to meet. However, the day's actual content is always something of a surprise: joys, frustrations, and disappointments creep in at unexpected points. The day does not always meet my needs, desires or expectations.

On waking, rather than being an unwilling or passive recipient of the day, I use two memorized items as a reminder of this gift. The first is from Psalm 118.

This is the day which the Lord has made
Let [me] rejoice and be glad in it.

The second is a poem from the ancient Sanskrit (c. 1200 B.C.).

Listen to the Exhortation of the dawn!
Look to this Day!
For it is Life, the very life of life.
In its brief course lie all the
Verities and Varieties of your existence:
the bliss of growth,
the glory of action,
the splendor of beauty.
For yesterday is only a dream,
And tomorrow is only a vision:
But today well lived makes
Every yesterday a dream of happiness,
And every tomorrow a vision of hope.
Look well, therefore, to this day!
Such is the Salutation of the dawn!

With several deep breaths and this unhurried and focused centering on these items, I consciously receive the special gift of a new day and carry with me the notes of gladness and exhortation turning to salutation.

Living in another country for five years made me realize that different attitudes toward time and its use are deeply embedded in each culture. For example, guilt feelings quickly unsettle me if I am "not on time" for an appointment or if I "waste time." I fidget when worship does not end "on time." I have found, though, that my fretful frown does not lead to a timely benediction. I have learned that shared friendship, love and community need relaxed and unstructured time for a common life. The Psalmist and the unknown poet in the Sanskrit keep my cultural impatience and attachment to a schedule in some balance with the disposition of my heart.

Unlike some, I never have found the daily devotional booklet with its scripture passage, brief thought for the day, and sentence prayer, useful or helpful. However, the mental image of opening the day as a gift and the repetitive use of two passages (I toss in other items, at times, as well) helps me resist some inhumane rhythms, a sense of boredom and teeth-gnashing irritation.

The gift of each new day that is opened is special whether I am conscious of it or not, but, conscious of the gift, I am able to keep alive, for myself, the "dream of happiness" and the "vision of hope."

15 November 1999

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters

Human Hormesis

2006-11-05T17:50:00.000-08:00

The salt shaker delivered a disastrously large white mound on top of my food as the top popped off. Although I did not know it at the time, I personally experienced chemical hormesis (the observation that a chemical can have a beneficial effect at a low-level exposure and an adverse effect at a high level). A minute quantity of fluoride in our drinking water helps prevent tooth decay while a large amount is deadly. Chemists' concern is that governmental regulatory agencies, in totally banning too many chemicals because of their toxicity in high doses, deprive us of their real benefits when used in small amounts.

At times, I suffer from human hormesis. There are individuals whose presence and sparkling conversation I truly enjoy, for a time. However, given longer exposure, their delightful energy, unceasingly expressed, exhausts me. Another's fascinating hobby, elbowing out any other topic makes me dream of being somewhere else. Still another's initial refreshing frankness begins to make me wonder if the person can begin a sentence without the word "I." The engaging, scintillating mental quips of another eventually turn into an exhausting conversational one-up-man-ship. Hormesis sets in when I feel my patience ebbing and my spirit flattening.

At times, I suffer from convictional hormesis. The person, newly converted to Christ, church or a social cause, has a delightful energy, an engaging excitement about a new-found truth, and a genuine desire to have me join her or him in that new passion. Homesis sets in with the increasingly insistent statements of the real blessedness that will come when I also embrace that person's new-found truth.

At times, many times, I suffer from political hormesis. My eyes light up when a politician articulates a vision for this nation. But, then the constant cant, "The American people want" (when I know that the American people always seem to want precisely what the politician wants), effectively causes my eyes to glaze over.

Alas, at times, I suffer from personal hormesis. Generally, I find myself not such a bad person to live with. Having spent a lifetime in developing certain interests and personality traits, I find the inner conversation and the outer actions interesting and worthwhile. Then I catch myself repeating old static ideas, often defensive over inconsequentialities, continuing to allow old and unresolved angers to seep 'unobtrusively' into conversations, and repeating far too often my hard-won convictions—to the detriment of admitting new realities.

I can already see the pained look on the faces of my chemist friends as I have taken their precisely-defined word and playfully transferred, and then expanded, its use to label the delightful-and-toxic aspects of my existence. Others, perhaps, will even find in this article an excess of hormesis.

1 November 1999

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters

Dogma A Go-Go!

2006-11-04T18:04:00.000-08:00

Exiting my freshman college sociology course, I knew for a certainty that human behavior—all human behavior— was determined by the environment in which a person grew up and lived. The following year a psychology course made me aware that it was not the external, but the internal human world that fully determined our personal behavior. Then, a course in social psychology made the interaction of the internal psychological and external social worlds determinative. By this time I was increasingly suspicious of such exclusive claims and dogmatic utterances so that, when the field of sociobiology opened up (evidence that our human actions and social constructs are biologically based), I added to, rather than elbowed out, knowledge derived from other fields.

Over the years, other academic disciplines and folk wisdom joined in the claim to know the absolute determinative factor for human development and action: genes, the chemicals in our brain, hormones, food (we are what we eat), and will power (you can do what you set your mind to do).

We humans seem to be pervasively and insatiably curious. From Isaac Newton's explanation of the laws of universal gravitation, to examining the cells that operate our muscles, to my own simple question as to why I react so strongly to another person's mild criticism, there is this inner compulsion to understand ourselves and the universe in which we live. What puzzles me is the accompanying need to transform one's insights—as true and as helpful as they might be—into universal prescriptions.

Although religion has always been the happy hunting ground for those who believe they have the Truth and a need to impose that Truth on others, the dogmatic frame of mind is endemic, infecting all areas of human knowledge, including science. For, science can turn into scientism—the belief that the only truth is that which has met the criteria established by science.

It seems obvious (to me anyway) that the interaction of the various fields of our knowledge gives a far better picture of Truth than any one discovery. The mental picture/understanding/image of this interaction that I now carry with me comes from a journalist who writes: "Think of biology and behavior as dancers—one leads, the other follows. But which does which, and when? They tug at each other, and in turn are pulled by the music, the fluid melody of the environment. And do we ever know—can we ever know—where we are in the dance?"

Thus, I add to all of the separate academic disciplines and folk wisdom, that expand my knowledge in quite extraordinary ways, the words of this journalist who gives the mix a vitality through the image of the dance. Instead of solitary fields, each staring straight ahead while doing their rigid two-step, truth is in the flow of the interaction of the partners and the lure of the music.

In a strange way, the same truth was discovered by one large denomination when, in the early 1960s, it conducted a massive study of its missionaries, attempting to figure out what made some spend years and years living in a different culture and why others were sent or returned home within months. The cost of finding, selecting, training and transporting missionaries made this study essential. The difference was, according to the study, the ability of a person "to tolerate ambiguity." It was the ability to maintain one's self-identity while moving with the rhythms of a different culture that meant success or failure in living overseas.

Would you care to dance?

18 October 1999

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters, Dogma

Lock 'Em Up and Throw Away the Key!

2006-11-02T19:16:00.000-08:00

Former anti-Vietnam radical Katherine Ann Porter—after spending 23 years underground—turned herself in, was convicted for taking part in a robbery in which police officer Walter Schroder was killed, and now has been released after serving six years in a Massachusetts prison. The people in Oregon who knew Porter as Alice Metzinger want her back, as a police detective said, "She was a good citizen when she lived here, and I expect she will be when she comes back." Officer Schroeder's family is less than happy with the light punishment Porter received.

Former Symbionese Liberation Army member Kathleen Soliah—after spending 24 years underground evading the charge of attempted murder (planting bombs under Los Angeles police cars)—was arrested in Minnesota. Now an actress, doctor's wife, and mother of three children, Sara Jane Olson's church proclaimed its "unconditional love," and in one week garnered $1 million for her defense. According to the community, any crimes she may have committed were "canceled out" by her good works. The Los Angeles Police Department has less charitable thoughts about Sister Soliah.

Leaning to the lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key school, even for relatively minor offenses, why are the citizens of these communities so willing to forgive these individuals convicted and under indictment for such heinous crimes?

One writer suggested that we live in a therapeutic age in which having people 'feel good' about themselves replaces 'being good.' This means that soccer-mom-and-community-volunteer Sara Jane Olson is seen to need non-judgmental support and not, as Sister Soliah, to be the victim of a cold and impersonal justice system.

However, I think a simpler explanation is also at work. It is simply that the degree of judgement we direct toward others and the punishment we seek for others' wrong actions is directly related to distance—the distance of our relationship/friendship and the distance of time and space (how long ago an infraction occurred and how far from where we live). NIMBY (not in my backyard) operates in our views of crime and punishment as well as the placement of a waste dump. For example, we only need to contrast the level of our concern for a family member groaning with a migraine headache compared to a TV news report of the wholesale laughter of a village in Rwanda in 1994.

For people who are part of Porter and Olson's present communities, there is a great distance in time and space (over two decades ago and many states away). The two women's current communities support a "They're good people now, why punish them for something that happened so long ago?" For the family of the slain police officer and for the potential victims of car bombings, the absence of close kinship/friendship holds as irrelevant the distance of time and space and leads to a greater desire for real punishment.

From the mother on TV crying out in court that her child shouldn't be executed, to Sister Helen Prejean who came to know Patrick Sonnier as a human being and thus sought to prevent him from being executed by the State of Louisiana (recorded in the book, Dead Man Walking), to Porter and Olson, we see the power of distance at work, both in the call for mercy and the call for punishment.

Justice needs to prevail in our land, but forgiveness by those directly hurt can shatter the attitude "Lock 'em up and throw away the key"-forgiveness and the empathetic thought, "What if that were my child, my friend?"

4 October 1999

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters, Justice

Alleviating Anger's Anguish

2006-10-29T18:57:00.000-08:00

As much as has been written about anger, as many sermons as have been preached and as many therapists as have been consulted, abundant anger continues to slosh around in many lives. Such residual anger inhibits personality, skews relationships, affects physical well-being and monopolizes time.

Low-level, persistent anger occurs in relational wounding, but also over institutional hurt and community injustice. Such anger does not evaporate as easily as quick, simplistic religious and therapeutic recipes would have us believe—at least I never have found that the case. Ultimately, I find that ending anger is not so much an act of will as it is winding my way through a lessening of tumbling thoughts, repetitive remembrances and rehearsing conversations. Then there comes a moment—not programmed—when I sigh and move on, leaving behind the low-level intense anguish, and often, but not always, the memory.

My response to one hurtful experience, three decades ago, set a pattern that has been helpful in working through the anger I encounter.

I covered over a hurtful situation with a smile and 'understanding.' However, six months later, unexpected anger bubbled up (erupted is a better word). Initial bewilderment gave way to externalizing and organizing the turbulent feelings by writing out my thoughts. There was an intellectual, even sensual, delight in working and re-working the words by which I was able to delineate more precisely both the situation and the feelings surrounding it. Also, it seemed that some of the anger flowed out through my fingertips onto the paper.

I then sanitized the document so that inappropriate, ineffective and aggressive language was eliminated. Next, I sent this clear rational statement to the person involved.

I still follow this process but, for those times when there is no direct outlet for anger-and this is especially true of institutional hurt and community injustice , I set myself free by creating a kind of burial service in which I go outdoors, ceremoniously burn the paper and allow my angry feelings to follow the smoke. This is of great help in lowering or eliminating the intensity of my anger.

Reading the above makes the process seem far more orderly than it actually is, but I find that this practice does go a long way toward defusing persistent turbulent emotions.

This is a front-line report from one of life's participants.

27 September 1999

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters, Anger

Air-Conditioned Politics

2006-10-26T19:36:00.000-07:00

A question I ask leaves many puzzled: "When was the last time a president was elected from a state outside the South, Texas and California?"

It was 1960 and the president elected was John F. Kennedy (Gerald Ford, of Michigan, was not elected.) During the past four decades, our elected presidents have been from the southern half of these United States. Perhaps not so surprisingly, both the current leading candidates for president also are from southern states. (Up to the Civil War, the presidency was almost equally divided between northern and southern states, but for the 92 years following Lincoln's Vice President Andrew Johnson—to Lyndon Johnson's election in 1964—only northerners were elected.)

Being out of the White House did not leave the South void of political power. The longevity of its elected senators and representatives, through seniority, garnered an extraordinary number of chairs of congressional committees. What was lacking was the ability to elect a president.

Why this political change? Lots of people chose to live in the southern half of the country. Houston became the center of the space age, and millions of new retirees moved into Florida, Texas, Arizona and California.

Why the population shift? A simplistic but reasonable answer is air conditioning. Replacing the huge airplane propeller fans on the ceiling with air conditioning brought industry and people. Living in a hot and humid climate without air conditioning is possible, as I learned living on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. But, life is lived considerably slower.

Air conditioning does for the South what heating accomplished in the north-both mitigate the disabling aspects of weather. I avoided the discomfort of a shivering Minnesota winter by moving from a heated house to a heated car, shop, office and church. Now, I avoid the exhaustion of a sweltering Texas summer by moving from one air-conditioned space to another. Real cold and real heat intrude only in the 'in-between' unheated and non-air conditioned spaces.

With the rise of the South, political debate has been reshaped. Welfare, public schools, bilingual education, human sexuality education and affirmative action are no longer untouchable givens. Creationism and Right to Life continue their vibrant militancy. Our major presidential candidates openly speak of their religious convictions. The culture of the southern rim views government as an enemy, not as a friend: less is better. (Of course, that is not as true of African-Americans who found federal intervention the key in unlocking legal segregation.) Supreme Court decisions now edge towards increasing states rights.

Air conditioning joins with television as post-World War II developments that have profoundly impacted our political life. And, my writing is no longer by the sweat on my brow.

20 September 1999

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters

Passionate People Making

2006-10-17T19:39:00.000-07:00

"Parents always sacrifice their children on the altar of their dreams."

That quote (an obvious allusion to the story of Abraham and Isaac) is imbedded in my mind. It comes from the book The Plains Across, which is the story of those who by wagon and walking trudged across the wide plains and mountains to Oregon and California during the two decades before the Civil War. It was difficult and dangerous and numerous individuals and families perished. Reflecting on the loss of human life, especially of children, the author wrote, "Parents always sacrifice their children on the altar of their dreams."

Parents today spend so much effort, time and money providing 'the best' for their children that the idea of sacrificing them to parental dreams is offensive. Yet, I am convinced, all parents sacrifice their children on the altar of their values, expectations, shortcomings and dreams.

Millard Fuller told a group of university students how he and his wife had come to the end of their marriage but prayerfully decided to make a final effort by giving away their millions and moving to Koinonia Farm, founded by Clarence Jordan as an interracial and pacifist community in Americus, Georgia. There they would seek what God had for them to do. Habitat for Humanity was the result.

Students' initial, concerned and repeated questions had to do with the Fuller children. "Yes, you have helped thousands of poor obtain affordable housing, but how could you do this to your children?" "It's fine for you and your wife to have this idea but how could you take opportunities from your children?"

Well, what about the children?

The truth is that we parents always sacrifice our children on the altar of our dreams, whether it is our dream of "getting ahead," of "being normal," or even of "doing everything for the children." Parents need to ask whether or not our dreams are worthy enough, not only for ourselves, but for the children whom we carry along on the way toward the realization those dreams.

A television ad once asked, "Parents, do you know where your children are?" Another legitimate question is, "Do our children know where we are, and is where we are a worthwhile and worthy place for our children?"

For the first fifteen years of our children's lives, parents do sacrifice their children on the altar of their dreams and, as all adults know from their own lives, those parental dreams are tightly woven into our own lives—for good and for ill. I believe the greatest gift parents can give to their children is not 'everything' but themselves alive and with a passion for life.

6 September 1999

Technorati Tags: Family, Mind Matters, Parenting

Negative Campaigning

2006-10-16T19:19:00.000-07:00

"...and as to you, sir, treacherous in private friendship . . . and a hypocrite in public life, the world will be puzzled to decide whether you are an apostate or an impostor, whether you have abandoned good principles, or whether you ever had any."

"The President is nothing more than a well-meaning baboon." I went to the White House directly after tea where I found the 'original Gorilla' about as intelligent as ever. What a specimen to be at the head of our affairs now!"

The first statement was by Tom Paine about President George Washington and the second by General George McClellan concerning his commander-in-chief, President Abraham Lincoln.

I was reminded of these quotes as we approach another election and the 'negative campaigning' that seems to be a staple of such elections. Yet, what we call negative campaigning pales in comparison to the vitriolic language of the past. In fact, what we experience is downright insipid and dull.

Our own Sam Houston said about Jeff Davis, President of the Confederacy, "Yes, I know Mr. Davis. He is as ambitious as Lucifer, cold as a snake, and what he touches will not prosper"—words that today's politician would speak about another politician at his own peril.

American political invective is such a rich lode to mine—except for the present when "good taste" overcame good name-calling. Good name-calling is not the repetitive use of profanity nor snide slander, but it delights in finding the right word and the right image to tarnish an opponent.

"His (words) leave the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea. Sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a straggling thought and bear it triumphantly a prisoner in their midst until it died of servitude and overwork."

Ouch! Somebody finally got the number of this writer?

No. It was written about President Warren Harding.

8 August 1999

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters, Politics

They All Want Money

2006-10-16T04:01:00.000-07:00

The grocery paper bag is completely full. Time to dump the envelopes on the table, sort and discard duplicates, triplicates and quadruplicates, ponder over the choices and write checks. This practice began the year after I found I had carelessly joined the same organization three times. (Fortunately, it was a group worth supporting.)

Not disgust over the seemingly never ending requests for money, but disappointment that I cannot be involved in more groups in a more significant manner, is my feeling. For my money is me: my energy, my time. Where my money goes, there go I. And I want to be where help and healing take place in this world. How else can I be present to tortured political prisoners, heal rural Hondurans, and air condition my worship space?

I have known people for whom the making and keeping of money is a dominant preoccupation, and I have known those who use their money, not for reaching out to others, but to control them. In both cases, I detect a shriveling of the spirit. I understand Jesus' frequent warnings about money and possessions.

Early on I decided that, although I might have less than I want, I will always have more than I need. That gratitude for what has been, rather than regret for what is not, was to be the dominant thrust of my life.

Still, at one time, money had an unusual power over me. I would have to drag my leaden feet and protesting mind to ask for money, even money for the church. Fortunately, abhorrence turned to discomfort which then turned to satisfaction.

Now I find myself free to ask others for contributions. After all, I am offering others the gift of joy. With less money weighing a person down, one moves through life with more freedom and grace. The other person's raised eyebrows following that declaration doesn't deter me, for I know I am right. A 'converted' checkbook is the mark of a truly converted and committed life.

Who says money can't buy happiness?

26 July1999

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Dixie Chopper Motel

2006-09-27T01:12:00.000-07:00

Another summer traipsing around the country with my wife, this year attending only two music conferences. The only real drawback of these meetings is that, in taking place on university campuses, housing is in inexpensive student dorms. Dorm rooms stripped of their school-term inhabitants, sagging mattresses, functional and indestructible furniture and standard beige walls (did I mention uncomfortable beds?) immediately rubberband me back to earlier, more primitive times in my life.

Late registration for The Hymn Society meeting at DePauw University in central Indiana found dormitories full, as well as nearby motels. A suggestion had my wife signing us up for a motel just outside of town-the Dixie Chopper Motel. Hearing that, a sense of foreboding settled over me, unrelieved in the two weeks' journey prior to arrival, and deepened when the local person at the registration desk announced that she never heard of the motel. A phone call led us to the small airport (one runway, one building) outside of town.

At the airport, approaching an 'office' building with no motel sign had us again anxiously rechecking directions. Walking in the building, though, we discovered that we had arrived at a motel above a large double hanger and a small restaurant. The solidly constructed building could serve as the community bunker during a nuclear attack, and our room was one of the largest, most luxurious and as inexpensive as we had during our trip.

Enjoying the luxury, I thought what I would have missed if I had listened to my foreboding and headed for the Holiday Inn ten miles away on the Interstate. Indeed, I began to wonder how much I had missed in life through cautionary inaction.

To answer your burning question, Dixie Chopper refers to the 'riding lawnmowers' the airport owner produces. Lawn mower, though, is a misnomer. Think of these as the Hummers of the lawncutting world, the largest cutting a six-foot swath at the rate of 7.5 acres per hour. Seeing one in action on the airport grounds, I was impressed.

So, if you find yourself in the middle of Indiana with night closing in, I have just the place for you to stay.

9 September 2006

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters

What Language Shall I Borrow?

2006-09-01T19:15:00.000-07:00

At times, I stand amazed at the casual ease with which people speak the word, 'God,' and I increasingly find the word struggling to be a part of my normal conversation.

For a religious professional—for whom the word God is one's stock in trade—this is a mighty uncomfortable place to be.

How audacious to so casually speak the word which points to, and addresses, the One who—in a way I don't understand but do believe—encompasses the whole of creation. How does one's tongue wrap itself around the billions of burning suns in unbelievably and uncomprehendibly distant space and the absolutely amazing intricate process of cells turning food into energy? Or, how does one contemplate the awesomeness of the single magnesium atom tucked away in chlorophyll turning sunlight into organic life? (In fact, the periodic table—listing the elements that make up the organic and the inorganic—is fiercely awesome.) All this confounds my intelligence and my imagination. Thus, for me to glibly speak of the author of all that (puzzled as I am as to what authorship means) amazes me.

The ancient Hebrews used the Tetragrammon YHWH for the Divine. We think that YHWH is pronounced Yahweh. Perhaps. But so holy was the name that in reading the text the word was never vocalized. Whenever the word appeared, Adonai (or Lord) was used in its place. Similarly, the Muslim mystic Jala-ud-din Rumi (1207-1273) wrote: "His name will flee, the while thou moldest thy lips for speech." American theologian Joseph Sittler, when asked how he would counsel the church if asked how to go about reforming itself or being reformed, answered, "Watch your language!" Out of simple awe I follow the markings left by all those seeking a language to speak of that Divine Spirit which both hovers over the waters of creation and our creaturely verbal re-creations. That Jesus could use such a familial term as Father both amazes and encourages me.

"What language shall I borrow," wrote the hymnist in "O Sacred Head Now Wounded." Decades at work as a minister, and I'm still seeking that language.

19 July1999

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters, Christianity, Religion

Conversational Truth

2006-08-31T19:25:00.000-07:00

I met my first fundamentalist when I was 24 (and a newly-minted minister). In order to understand this church member, I attended a week-long conference put on by two fundamentalist groups.

One talk at the conference is still vivid. A missionary of the Sudan Interior Mission spoke of the awe, the love, and the forgiveness he found in the cross of Jesus. Before my startled eyes, tears began to roll down his cheeks. My stolen sideways glance to confirm, in others, the shock I felt found instead tears in their eyes as well. That experience is still an unforgetable part of my memory bank.

Emotion so natural, so straightforward and so genuine (unlike what I see on religious television), led me to realize that TRUTH is far, far greater than my personal experience of it. Reared and educated in a rational approach to religion, I have found it easy to be critical of those whose experience expresses itself emotionally. In reality I am as cut off from their experience as they are cut off from mine.

In the intervening years, I have met a few individuals who wondrously and magnificently combined both genuine emotion and incisive reason (and far too many who exhibit little of either). For me, to gravitate toward a fuller understanding of truth, I know I have to be attentive to, and to draw on, the experiences of others.

This has led me to believe that all truth is shared truth. Since no one individual encompasses all human experience, for any one person to arrive at greater truth requires entering into a conversation with others. It is like the six blind men approaching the elephant and needing to share their differing impressions to understand the whole. Or, it is like the scientist who necessarily depends on the ideas, discoveries and apparatus of those who proceeded her, depends on colleagues, co-workers and lab assistants to critique and carry out her work, depends on peer review for funding and for journal publication, and depends on others who will validate her results through replicating her experiments. Or, it is like getting to know the fuller richness of Jesus by listening to, and entering in, the conversation that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John have about Jesus.

Even to write this Mind Matters, I have been in conversation with legions of individuals who developed the alphabet and writing and paper and standardized spelling and computers and you the reader.

12 July 1999

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters, Christianity, Religion

Funneling Knowledge

2006-08-30T19:37:00.000-07:00

He related an all-too-familiar story. After almost two decades of regular church attendance, he realized that the Bible remained an enigma. He was pushed into his discontent by some fundamentalist friends who spoke so freely and knowledgeably about the Bible, leaving him tongue-tied and on the defensive.

With some probing, he had to admit that he knew more than he gave himself credit for—numerous biblical persons and stories were embedded in his consciousness, but it was also obvious that he lacked knowledge of the coherency of the biblical story and its meaning.

In a church in the liberal tradition, eliciting a passion for verse-quoting Bible study is rare and carrying a heavily marked thick Bible is decidedly not the norm. Thus, for a liberal to engage in a discussion of the Bible on a fundamentalist's turf is a losing proposition. That's what I told my companion. But, this straightforward answer did not noticeably raise his spirit. The lunch ended with his deep unhappiness at the church (and indirectly at me) for leaving him "high and dry," concerning the Bible.

Much later, I realized that something more troubling was at work. How, I asked myself, can a committed Christian, who has for eighteen years attended worship, have avoided deep knowledge of the story and meaning of the Bible? Although the church may be faulted for its lack of explicit education, nevertheless, at some point a person has to take responsibility for her or his own learning.

This view came to me quite forcibly as I read a son's eulogy for his father, a school principal in this country and in Turkey. On hearing of his son's boredom with a social studies class, he said, "You may be getting nothing out of the class, but that's not the only reason you're there. You're also there to see that it gets something out of you. What are you contributing to your classmates and teacher?"

Schooling (not the same as education) is funneling knowledge into our brains. The teacher pours in information and expects regurgitated answers. In the process, we learn varying degrees of passive participation, sometimes accepting new knowledge and sometimes digging our heels in. We learn to make others responsible for imparting information to us, and if we don't learn, obviously it is 'their fault.'

Unlike my companion, knowing the Bible has been a life-long personal and professional need. However, when I think of my own passive participation in numerous courses, seminars and sermons I have attended over the years, I cannot claim any moral superiority.

5 July 1999

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters, Christianity, Religion, Bible

The Color of Wheat, The Color of Dawn

2006-08-28T19:06:00.000-07:00

Christians have always looked to Jesus as a human embodiment of the divine. Understanding and articulating the nature of that embodiment has taxed minds for centuries. The most widely-accepted formulation is the Nicene Creed (325 A.D.), which describes Jesus both as "God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God; begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father" and "made man, and was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate."

This Creed, created by and for the church, stands independent of my opinion of it. Yet, knowing the history of its composition, I generally find the words stultifying rather than evocative. What does draw me into deeper identification with the person and passion of Jesus is the imaginative imagery of poetry.

Recently my imagination was captured by the words of a song from Amahl and the Night Visitors. The three Magi come to the hut of a widow and her crippled son to rest on their way to find "a child the color of wheat, the color of dawn" (and Amahl's mother sings, in counterpoint, that she knows such a child [her own] "the color of wheat, the color of dawn." It was during a memorial service that these words (sung because the deceased had directed the musical at church) latched themselves onto my brain.

Apt images, like sparklers, arouse my imagination and, like fireworks, brilliantly illumine the darkness. Verbal descriptions flatten the experience.

Like a sparkler, for me, "child of wheat" conveys the earth from which wheat arises, the food that nourishes us, the broken bread around which the human and Christian communities form. Also, I find human suffering, anguish and death through the absence of that which nourishes. So, "child of wheat" conveys, in my imagination, the fullness of the human experience and the universe of which we are a part, and of which Jesus is fully a part.

Like a sparkler, "a child the color of dawn" speaks to me of the freshness of each new day, the morning light that follows night's darkness, the hope and rebirth of wonder of the human spirit. The phrase also speaks to me of the resurrections following our many deaths.

What language do we use to think and talk about the deepest realities of our lives: our convictions and our hopes, our beliefs and our actions? At the times of deep heaviness—times when we are against the wall with grief or betrayal or despair or death—how do we articulate the scouring of our spirits and the tenuously fragile tracings of hope that seem almost too good to be true? How do we speak of Jesus as the one who touches the fullness of our human experience and, yet, whose person, actions and words became a channel for our realization of the divine in us and in this world?

Never did I expect a religious revelation at a memorial service. In the midst of the darkness of the loss of a friend, I experienced "the color of dawn."

28 June 1999

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters, Christianity, Religion

Closure on Closure

2006-08-26T21:02:00.000-07:00

"Nicky didn't fade from my memory, but he did from my thoughts, as they found more everyday concerns to dwell on." I paused on reading this off-hand sentence from a light novel.

Such common sense struck me because of its contrast with the growing assumption that grief is to be "managed" by professionals so that "closure" can take place. Therapists troop in, close behind the police, in crisis situations, and grief workshops are a staple of community and church programs.

There is a natural rhythm with loss and its accompanying grief. Most merely exist through the early days and weeks. Empty days fill the first year when a person goes through the once shared events of birthdays and anniversaries. Slowly through that period, but especially later, memory remains but the sharpness lessens in both intensity and frequency. Then we begin to open up to the world. (Of course, for some individuals, inconsolable grief needs professional attention. )

This concept of "closure" truly puzzling me. How does one close out of one's life a child or a spouse, whether of five years or fifty years? Equally important questions are—should one or would one want to? Why would we want to eliminate and deny those who have been part of shaping us into the human beings we are? To my mind that is an odd desire.

More significantly, the idea of closure sweeps aside a central Christian understanding.

The Danish author Isak Dinesen (author of Out of Africa) has a short story character speak: "It is a good thing to have a great sorrow. Or should humans allow Christ to have died on the cross for the sake of our toothaches." Following the pattern of Jesus, suffering becomes enriched as we pick up the pieces of our lives and offer our pain and subsequent healing to the world." Not closure, but resurrection is the basic Christian concept surrounding death and sorrow.

This summer I met a spry eighty-seven year old widow. In her small town she became active in a widow's group that touches others who have lost a spouse. She became a 'wounded healer' and testifies to the power of resurrection.

Those who survive loss join the on-going human story. But, beyond that, we also have the power to choose how we will respond to our loss, grief and survival. Resurrection is real end of our loss and grief.

21 June 1999

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters, Christianity, Grief

Shooting Boy Scouts

2006-08-25T19:16:00.000-07:00

On his fiftieth anniversary with the Boy Scouts of America, he proudly showed me his 1946 Boy Scout Handbook. The well-thumbed pages of merit badges and camping lore preceded full-page advertisements in the back—advertisements that included Winchester rifles.

Rifles were part of my childhood and that of my friends. An open area in a nearby wooded city lot was littered with shards of empty bottles and punctured cans, the product of target practice with our .22s. Shooting within the city limits was probably illegal—but when did illegality stand in the way of fun?

Availability of guns and ownership by youth were realities in the 1940s. There were other similarities between those war years and life today.

It was a time of very little parental presence. For five years my own father was overseas at war and my mother worked long hours in a defense plant making munitions. I, along with many others in our neighborhood, were "latchkey children" (a descriptive phrase originating during World War II). It was also a time youth were immersed in violence—from deadly reminders by Gold Stars in neighbors' windows to the movies which portrayed dead soldiers' bodies strewn across the sands of beaches and the vicious cruelty of the "Japs and Huns." (Two violent images still reside in my memory from the movie honoring the fight-to-the-death defense of Wake Island.) Of a certainty, there were in-groups in school, and others of us were made to feel our out-group status. Also, never do I remember a prayer being said in school.

Yet that same mix of parental absence, violence and death in the media and society, lack of prayer in school, and availability of guns did not produce what we have today: youth deliberately shooting fellow students. Bottles and cans, yes; people, no. Why the targets have changed is something I don't fully understand.

Easy answers quickly tumble forth—blame parents, blame the availability of guns, blame violence in the media and video games, blame peer cruelty and blame the absence of God and morality from public education. In seeking reasons we ought not to take our eyes off the primary reason for the killings: the youth themselves. Whatever the causes, each is a calculating murderer.

Because all those factors were present in my childhood in the 1940s, I do not believe the above fully explain the school shootings, Still, I do believe that our society will be healthier when guns are not readily available to children and there is less violence in the media and video games. I believe that helping children to be less cruel to each other and stressing character education and morality in our schools (with or without God) is all to the good. However, to look on any of these as a quick fix is a serious mistake.

One note of hope is that we know, from an earlier very violent time, students were not killing fellow students. Still, without a quick fix and with diminished attention given to our children and culture as time passes, it may be that—like sporadic clusters of teen suicide—students shooting fellow students will continue to be a rare but sporadic occurrence in our nation.

14 June 1999

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters, Violence

Sudsy Malone's Laundry and Libations

2006-08-24T20:40:00.000-07:00

Finally, on the third very slow trip along the two blocks of shops adjoining the University of Cincinnati, we spied it: "Sudsy Malone's Laundry and Libations." We had been looking for a sign, "Laundromat," but our imaginations were not fired up and we almost missed the full bar, the bandstand and the Laundromat combination.

While the washing machines churned, I rambled along the street to see what other surprises might be in store for the 'inquiring mind.' I was not disappointed.

"Critters" was an animal shop with all the normal animals, pet paraphernalia, and food one would expect in such an establishment. What drew me to the store, though, was the sign in the window: "Piranhas 1/3 off large and small." I entered, looked around, and asked, "Why are the piranhas on sale?" It seems that the demand for piranhas, as an essential item for the well-stocked home, had waned. The fad was over. Or, perhaps, too many people at parties, on a dare, stuck a cut finger in the water.

The one store that had an active clientele for a mid-Friday morning was the tattoo and body-piercing establishment. Joining the half-dozen people in the small space for customers, I looked at the walls filled with pictures, designs and words available for the body, and then I spied the "Piercees' Bill of Rights." There were eleven items listed, including the right to have piercing done with a needle instead of a gun (which the woman behind the counter told me was too difficult to keep sterilized for body piercing). Alongside this "Piercees Bill of Rights" were the training certificate and license of the two doing the tattooing. Among the young people on the street the popularity of their work—tattoos and body piercings—was repeatedly visible: two girls and one boy with T-shirts pulled up showing each other their belly button rings.

Coincidentally, a few days later there was a TV report on 'tattoos for testimony.' Individuals are having Christian symbols and words tattooed in visible places so that others will see them and, in many cases, ask questions. (I know if I were next to a person with such tattoos, I would be curious.) One person admitted there was a generation difference on religious tattoos: youth see it as a valid witness and older people look askance. One tattooee reported that his response to a hostile, "How can you do that?" was, "As a Christian, how can you not!" I had to ask myself, "Was my grimace over body tattoos or over the visible display of religion?"

Then there was the visit to the spry eighty-seven-year-old aunt who had a beautiful baptismal gown in a case. It turned out not to be hers: "No, I wasn't baptized until I was six. My mother's two sisters didn't like the name she chose for me, and after six years, my mother gave in to their wishes."

How can anyone be bored with the days when such expressions of human imagination and life bubble all around?

7 June 1999

Fire and Ice

2006-08-20T20:30:00.000-07:00

Tucked away in odd corners of the Bible are some fascinating snippets of stories. One concerns King David in his old age. We read that David "always felt cold, even under a lot of blankets." His officials said, "Your Majesty, we will look for a young woman to take care of you. She can lie down beside you and keep you warm." (I Kings 1:3-4 tells how the story turned out.) My spouse's dour look prevents me from reading the Bible literally.

Following the Bible faithfully and meticulously at this point would most assuredly lead me into a heap of trouble. Nevertheless, I do find King David's experience tugging at the edge of my imagination: the need for each of us to keep 'warm.'

For me, fire is what I need. I need to be where I find

people alive,
ideas sparkling,
dreams hatching,
venturesomeness welcomed, and
"let's do it" the acceptable norm.

I want to be with those who affirm the third-century theologian Tertullian's view of religion and life: "The glory of God is man fully alive." There's fire there! Then there is the dying theologian whose breath had become so imperceptible that one person at the bedside said, "Feel his feet. No one has ever died with warm feet," whereupon the dying man opened his eyes, announced in a clear voice, "Ridley did!" and then breathed his last. (Nicholas Ridley was burned at the stake for his beliefs at Oxford, England, in 1555.)
Well, some forms of fire I can forego.

A frantic search for excitement, or being active for the sake of being active, drains rather than enlivens. But, being drawn into the future by new possibilities enlivens my mind and sets my feet to dancing. I know that Woody Allen is right when he says that "eighty percent of success is just showing up," but, just showing up again and again at the icy, let's-not-do-it crowd may force me to reconsider my rejection of a literalist approach to the Bible.

24 May 1999

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

God is a Verb

2006-08-18T06:01:00.000-07:00

Once, blood flowing in the streets, bodies hanging from limbs, and individuals languishing in dark and dank dungeons resulted from people holding unapproved theological opinions. No longer. Today, theology has become so dry in content and so unrelated to everyday life that even at ministers' gatherings the subject is avoided. A core reason for such avoidance came to me from a strange source—Buckminster Fuller.

Fuller wrote that God is "a verb not a noun." Precisely. As a language, static nouns and adjectives dominate the English language. with verbs trailing behind. In contrast, Hebrew and other Middle Eastern languages are verb-centered. Verbs are action. Verbs pull nouns into action, rather than visa versa

"Faith," as commonly used, is a mental and verbal affirmation, such as a 'statement of faith.' Faith, in biblical terms, is tied to actions based on convictions. One's faith is the way one moves into the future even when the future is uncertain and unknown. An entrepreneur starting a company, a couple getting married, a student off to college, and a person joining a church all are living by faith—not mental convictions but convictions in action. Each of us lives by faith every time we start the car and every time we enter into a new relationship. Religious faith is a willingness to risk moving into the future believing that God is present both in the act of moving and in the future that entices us. For example, we read that Abraham and Sarah "went out not knowing where they were going." That example of faith—a far cry from the static religious certainty that some seek and others demand—is what gets our blood moving and our feet dancing.

I am certain that my three years of graduate school gave me the ability, theologically, to run circles around Buckminster Fuller. Yet, it was this non-theologically trained person who had a far better grasp of the essential drama of theology than I did.

For God, to me, it seems
is a verb
not a noun,
proper or improper;
is the articulation
not the art
is loving
not the abstraction of love.
Yes, God is a verb,
the most active,
connoting the vast harmonic
reordering of the universe
from unleashed chaos of energy.

Buckminster Fuller built more than one home in which we humans can live.

17 May 1999

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters, Christianity, Religion

Bravo!

2006-08-07T19:01:00.000-07:00

The operatic duet soared, and my breathing was on hold as the final notes trailed off towards silence. That magical moment abruptly ended with some oaf's premature loud clapping and shouts of "Bravo." (I delight in the performance where the tenor, singing a French ballad about a husband dying as his wife and her lover were fleeing, was interrupted by a premature clapper. The performer stopped the orchestra and said gently to the offender: "The husband is still dying. Please save your applause until he is dead," and then started up the orchestra and continued.)

Premature interrupters are found all along life's path. Far too common is the person at academic lectures whose arm shoots into the air and voices an interrogative challenge before the speaker even has a chance to take a sip of water. Everyday variations are found in meetings where an individual, who has stopped listening to another's thoughts, jumps in with her or his own words just as the last syllable is spoken. Then there is the parent whose minimizes another parent's pride by immediately noting her or his own child's greater achievement.

What these premature interrupters have in common is an interest in showing off: they recognize a superb performance before others do, their erudite response excels the speaker's words, their ideas sweep aside any thoughtful consideration of the previous person's ideas, and their children have more interesting personalities, lives, and accomplishments that any other child.

Alas, what I object to in others, too often I find subtly at work in myself as well. Instead of giving my full attention to a speaker's message, I pigeonholed her ideas and miss her subtle nuances. Rather than giving full consideration to the words of the person across the table, I am mentally figuring out my verbal response to him. Impatiently, I wait for another to stop speaking so that I can jump in with my own words, turning a conversation into a verbal ping pong match.

A magical musical moment is not my only loss in life.

10 May 1999

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters

"And Now, a Word from Our Sponsors"

2006-08-01T19:07:00.000-07:00

Each evening, a vast and horrendous sea of bobbing heads fills my TV screen. This time it is Kosovo refugees flooding Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro. Hunger, exposure and disorientation are visible; rape and killings are reported.

Immersed in the human tragedy, I was picked up and instantaneously transported several thousand miles, in distance and in culture, into a vast, spotless and empty (but for one person) American kitchen where steam was still rising from rolls just taken out of the oven. The enticing aroma was so powerful that it brought the cook's mother to the door, then the family dog. Next was an advertisement for Maalox (not intended, I assume, as relief from eating the roll), then an automobile ad, and finally an absolutely delicious Burger King burger filled the screen. Next, I was whisked back to the empty stomachs and eyes of Kosovars.

The rapid juxtaposition of such misery and such plenty is common fare on TV. It is not just world news, but also TV dramas of human anguish—whether real or fictional—that are interrupted at moments of highest intensity in order for products to be advertised. These points of high intensity are chosen so that I, the viewer, will watch the announcements in order to view the continuation of the program.

I understand the economics of television programming, but I wonder what effect the repeated rapid change from involvement to disengagement, from disengagement to involvement, and back again has on me. I wonder if my outrage over the terror and pain of this world's people is diluted by the shifting focus of my attention? I wonder if I have become less sensitive to the pain of others? I fear that is the case.

I wonder if the thirty or sixty-minute wrap-up to all human problems makes me less patient with the usual long-term solutions necessary to so many human issues? Has this made me less empathetic with people because the outlook for solving their problems is so taxing and so bleak? I fear that is the case.

I also wonder if the chopped-into-pieces segments of life-real or fictional-makes me less able to give my concentrated attention to persons, situations and books. I fear that is the case.

All of this has a spiritual dimension. For, if my compassion is attenuated or is fatigued, then I am less able to respond appropriately and fully. If, as one person said, attention is the secular form of prayer, then a lack of attention will affect the contemplative part of my spiritual life.

Aristotle argues in his Poetics that tragedy allows a healthy release that purifies the emotions: a kind of emotional discharge. What if Aristotle is right? Then, pent-up emotions will get expressed in inappropriate ways.

The phone is ringing. It's time to interrupt these thoughts to tell another person that our house doesn't need siding.

3 May 1999

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

If Not Whom, Then What?

2006-07-31T19:06:00.000-07:00

It was the early 1970s and, in the very affluent Memorial area of west Houston, two parents were getting worried about their son. Although previously he had taken off for a day or two without saying where he was going, this absence had stretched into a fifth day. The police were notified, but, with the child's history and the parent's deliberate low-key concern, only perfunctory inquiries were made. With no word by the end of a week, the alarm bells of parental panic went off. Still, it was only after another full week that their son reappeared, but, not by his choice.

He had been living in a friend's back bedroom in a large rambling house in which that child's privacy was honored and never violated by 'snooping' parents. As he often ate in his room, it was easy to take food to his friend. The maid knew the friend was there but visiting friends were not that unusual. Only the increased frantic search made his friend tell the parents and authorities where he was.

I think of that when I read of blame being attributed to the parents of the two boys in Littleton, Colorado. At an age when children can mope around, when parents' questions can evoke, at times, only a begrudging grunt, and with our strong sense of privacy, it is easy for me to understand parents not wanting to interfere in their child's affairs. Indeed, so much of our family life—even with spouses—is lived in passing each other, unaware of the other's thoughts or feelings,

If not the parents, whom do we blame? A good case can be made that the reported verbal ridicule, tossed baked potatoes in the Columbine school lunchroom, and other harassment by the athletes—a 'safe' suburban form of the inner-city gang—bred a deep, burning resentment in the boys. Still, if such harassment were the cause, shootings at schools would be a weekly occurrence somewhere in this country.

If not whom, then what? Parents in a previous school shooting are now suing video game makers. A person who teaches soldiers to overcome their natural inhibition to kill others, reports that the video games replicate the techniques he uses. Yet again, with the millions using video games, why are there not more youth transferring their video game skills from images to fellow humans?

Charlton Heston, current President of the NRA, is clear about what to blame—those long "deadly" coats the boys wore (and the parents who let their children wear them). Certainly, Heston believes, the guns are not the cause. On a narrow point of argumentation he is right, but the deadly force of guns in the hands of two teenagers to kill 13 and injure 24 makes his apologetic for guns a dogmatic absurdity.

For an answer, I turn to William Golding's 1954 classic tale, Lord of the Flies. A group of English schoolboys are plane-wrecked on an unpopulated island, and the situation deteriorates as the trappings of civilization fall away. They confront not only the defects of their society but also the defects of their own nature. Although not a popular explanation, I believe there was a defect in their nature.

Even so, what is so frustrating and unnerving is that we will never know precisely why Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold made so many others the object of their inner rage. We do know the enormity of the evil.

26 April 1999

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters

How Does It Mean?

2006-07-30T19:10:00.000-07:00

I don't know who--or what--caused the shift. I don't know when it happened. I don't even remember consciously responding. But at some moment a tectonic shift took place and, ever since, I have had a radically different outlook.

As a product of this scientific culture, I prided myself on closely adhering to the standard of "Is it true?" when examining various aspects of human existence. True meant something demonstratively proven. Wishful thinking, speculation, and everything mysterious and miraculous, I labeled untrue or of questionable truth.

Of course, with that measure, much traditional religion was pushed to the periphery or simply discarded. How does one 'prove' the doctrine of the Trinity or the Biblical account of Jesus walking on water? Constructing a rational religion devoid of that which went contrary to reason was a decades-long successful effort.

A disturbing side of this paring away all not demonstrably proven resulted in a somewhat sterile religion—rational and reasonable, but devoid of that which captures one's imagination and fuels one's passion.

My tectonic shift—only recently recognized and articulated—subsumed the question, "Is it true?" to the question "How does it mean?" Rather than discounting or dismissing all non-demonstrable belief, I began to work from the premise that if something functioned in human belief and experience then it had to be taken seriously. I tried to determine the meaning of items as they relate to the human enterprise.

For example, the doctrine of original sin, stemming from Eve and Adam disobeying God in the Garden of Eden, was easily dismissed as a myth and an absurdity. But when I took seriously its persistence in Christian thought I asked, "How does it mean?" and found that it was an attempt to give some intellectual shape to a perennial human problem—the source and persistence of human evil. How do we understand the vicious destructiveness of humans (seen in the deaths of youth in Colorado or on the ground and from the air in Kosovo and Yugoslavia) or the less-than-pure motives of our own actions? Heredity and environment will explain this only so far. The doctrine of original sin (although not factually true) is functionally helpful in giving us a means to talk about the depth and persistence of human evil.

Perhaps the seeds of this personal tectonic shift came from living in Turkey. Instead of reacting to the habits and practices of the native Turks ("They don't do it the way we do it" [our way being, of course, the right way]), I began to ask how do their habits and practices function for them in the matrix of their society. Always, what was done (no matter how strange or non-sensical from my point of view) had meaning in their cultural context.

Of course, the filter of factuality has not disappeared. It is alive and well. But beyond factuality, I have found a new way to discover the life and vitality of an idea or belief by also asking, "How does it mean?"

19 April 1999

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Mind Matters are back!

2006-07-30T19:06:00.000-07:00

Sorry about the long absence—a long trip around the US, along with celebrating 50 years of marriage, militated against regular posting. Anyway, expect near-daily posting again.

Pilgrim and Puritan Women

2006-06-21T19:18:00.000-07:00

Brattle Street Church opened its doors in December 1699, much to the consternation of the other three Boston churches. A new congregation meant further division in the town. A new congregation also meant less income, since the upkeep of ministers and meetinghouses was provided by taxes. Equally disturbing were the new congregation's startling innovations, one of which was their stated intent to include not only "male communicants" in the election of ministers but "every baptized adult person who contributes to the maintenance." That meant women as well as men.

Chebacco, near Ipswich, also wanted a meetinghouse of their own. Ipswich opposed this, even passing a law that no meetinghouse be built by the men of Chebacco. No one thought of applying the ban to the women. The women got together, hired some men from outside Ipswich jurisdiction and raised their meetinghouse. Ipswich authority was furious and issued warrants for the arrest of all those who had aided the mutinous women. The courts dismissed the suit.

These delightful stories, tucked away in the history books, exist alongside the more horrific stories of Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer. It was feared that if Anne Hutchinson's freethinking spread, the English King might impose royal rule on the colony. (Also, Anne Hutchinson argued that God's grace was so all-important that good works or "the secondary externals of conventional morality" mattered little. Opponents considered her arguing against the "covenant of Good works" to be destructive of society.) After a trial in which a stubborn Hutchinson refused to compromise, she was excommunicated for heresy and sent into exile in 1636.

Quaker Mary Dyer, whose bronze statue stands on the Boston Commons, was a gentlewoman by birth and a rebel by trade. Quakers were considered dangerous subversives in 17th century England, where they were flogged and deported or hanged. Mary Dyer came to Massachusetts and was banished from Boston with a warning that she would be hanged if she returned. Within a month she did return, was banished again and, and after returning again, she was hanged in 1660.

If life in Pilgrim and Puritan New England—with its small population, brief history and common language and culture—was so contradictory and complex, how much more complicated and confusing must be an area of the world like the Balkans with its numerous ethnic populations, long-remembered histories, and multiple languages and culture.

Someone once warned us about the "terrible simplifiers"—those who would take complex issues and complex humans and categorize then into simple groupings of good and evil, right and wrong. Of course, there are issues and people whose actions are of such benefit or such harm that labels can be applied, but as with early Massachusetts, historical reality is far more complex than the terrible simplifiers make it out to be.

How often our Presidents demonize others in order to garner support for their policies. Our past President labeled Saddam Hussein as the modern Hitler; our current President labels Slobodan Milosevic as the modern Hitler. This demonizing, repetitively repeated on the media, simplifies and squeezes complex realities into a 'Demon View of History.'

Henry David Thoreau wrote, "Our life is frittered away by detail. Simplify, simplify." Simplifying is personally beneficial as a means of maintaining clarity about our lives, but the vibrancy and complexity of life is too great to fit into easy judgments and pat answers.

12 April 1999

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Twentieth Century—Death by Government

2006-06-17T21:24:00.000-07:00

Once again we see a vast human sea—this time Kosovar refugees flooding Macedonia, Albania and Montenegro. Daily TV images alert us to the unfolding horror. Seen by itself, the ethnic cleansing of Kosovo is a human aberration. On the other hand, viewed in the context of this bloody century, it seems to be a one of the lesser occurrences. The major slaughters, based on conservative estimates, have been:

Russian: Concentration/Labor Camps	1917-87	39,464,000
German: Concentration/Labor Camps	1942-45	7,000,000
German: Jewish Holocaust	1942-45	6,000,000
Russian: Intentional Famine in Ukraine	1932-33	5,000,000
China: Land Reform	1949-53	4,500,000
Russia: Collectivization	1928-35	3,133,000
Cambodia: Killing Fields	1975-79	2,000,000
China: Cultural Revolution	1964-75	1,613,000
Pakistan: Bengal-Hindu	1971	1,500,000
Young Turks: Armenians	1915-18	1,404,000
Russia: Great Purges	1936-38	1,000,000
Croatians: Serbs, Jews, Gypsies	1941-45	655,000
Indonesia: Communists, Sympathizers	1965-66	509,000
Uganda: Idi Amin's 'enemies'	1971-79	300,000
Vietnam: Boat People	1975-87	250,000
Spain: Civil War	1936-39	200,000
China: Japanese Rape of Nanking	1936-39	200,000
Rwanda: Hutu Killing Tutsi	1971-72	150,000
Indonesia: East Timor	1975-87	150,000

As I sit and take time to think about each number, my mind shuts down. It is only when I think of one solitary person after another that the numbers become tangible, and that only increases the horror. Few of the above incidents are part of our active consciousness. The recent book by Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: "The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II," brings one to light.

This record leads me to speak with humility about living in this age of marvelous progress. That progress has a grim side, since it allows governments more effective means to slaughter more people more efficiently.

No democratically elected government is in the above list. In light of that, we can add a corollary to Lord Acton's dictum: power kills and absolute power kills absolutely.

5 April 1999

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters

Leadership on the Go

2006-06-12T19:19:00.000-07:00

Today we hear the call for leaders while our current leaders from the White House and Congress on down are found wanting. Numerous books delineate the qualities of a good leader and one can even get a Ph.D. in Leadership. No question that a Ph.D. would know a lot about leadership but would he or she be a good leader?

A helpful comment stated the difference between a good leader and a good manager the former does the right thing and the latter does things right. Given our usual impatience to "get the job done," we demand managers and then complain because we don't have good leaders.

As I look back to my own long-term experience in a church (in a job that required me to be both a manager and a leader), I find that different times called for different kinds of leadership.

I entered a homogeneous church community that knew the nature of a Congregational church, had a clear sense of spirituality as mission, and were energetic achievers, I provided institutional leadership. It was a leadership for which seminary prepared me: the pastoral care of a community and maintaining a status quo organization that allowed people to express their Christian commitment. Not becoming an obstacle to members and keeping a focus were important skills.

As congregational homogeneity began to change and the turmoil of the nation's culture began to sink in, I learned instrumental leadership. I found myself thinking like a sailor, knowing that moving in a straight line toward a goal was no longer possible. I had to tack to the left, then to the right—back and forth—until eventually a goal was reached. Wind shifts, in intensity and direction, make tacking necessary. In organizations, including churches, the wind is the changing nature of the members and organizations needs and the changing nature of the culture and world around. It is ever-shifting in intensity and direction. Not all my tacking was successful and a few wrecks can be found along the way.

As the congregation changed even more, I found an inspiring leadership was called for. There was the need to re-state the vision, aspirations and values of the congregation in a contemporary form. What, in a previous decade, could just be assumed now required a new articulation.

Of course, my leadership was not that orderly and progressive. I did not anticipate each change, nor did I always gird my loins with the appropriate leadership style at the appropriate time. Sometimes I was ahead of the curve and sometimes I stumbled along, catching up. Only in retrospect does the changing pattern of leadership required become clear to me.

Personally, I also was changing as the membership and society changed. My experience of leadership (actually, I could say life) is summed up in the old German proverb, "We grow old too soon and smart too late."

Perhaps there is a set of qualities that make a good leader. Out of my own experience, I see leadership as a process, calling forth different qualities and responses at different times. This shifting pattern is widely seen in parental leadership, as both children and parents move through different stages, in the presidency as issues, crises and the president himself all change, and in companies when the necessary shift from entrepreneur to manager takes place and as the market changes.

I only wish such clarity had characterized my life. Indeed, we grow old too soon. But, then, I've already said that.

29 March 1999

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Original Sin: The Only Cheerful Doctrine

2006-06-10T19:42:00.000-07:00

The Earl of Chesterfield's "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing well" has accompanied many a child to school and into life. As a call to making the extra effort, perfecting the special project and striving toward the highest goal, much has been accomplished—far beyond many individuals' normal interest and diligence.

While true for some, for others this saying—translated into always doing one's best—has dogged their footsteps and blighted their lives.

A child comes home with straight "A's" and one "B." Parents' eyes immediately are glued on the "B" and an interrogation begins on the reasons for the 'failure.' A winning soccer team loses focus as the other team quickly scores two goals. The coach's voice rises, along with the opponent's score, and the tongue lashing lasts through the half.

Externally, the worth-doing-well-and-do-your-best stare at us in bookstores with book after book proclaiming how to cook, how to make a million, how to find real love and how to truly know God. A beaming face on the dust cover and simple descriptions and prescriptions on the pages reinforce our awareness of personal limitations and failures. These external reminders cling to our internal worth-doing-well-and-always-doing-one's-best measuring rod, and they take their toll.

The British writer G. K. Chesterton turned the Earl of Chesterfield around when he wrote: "If a thing is worth doing, it is worth doing badly."

I like that. Chesterton shifts the focus from doing something well to doing something worthwhile. Living by worth-doing-well-and-doing-one's-best, I would preach only once a month (twice a year would stretch it in some peoples' eyes). Living by "doing something worthwhile" frees me to preach weekly, even when I am not at my best.

Tracking that same thought is another of Chesterton's provocative aphorisms: the only cheerful doctrine is-original sin. Bending down, he pulls this doctrine out of the trashcan of twentieth-century Christian theology. It is a doctrine that allows us to be imperfect, indeed that tells us we cannot be perfect. If, as the Gospel states, God loves us even if we cannot be perfect, then it should be possible for us to love ourselves even though we aren't perfect. It might even free us from demanding perfection from others. Chesteron is right again. What a relief not to have to be perfect!

What a relief not to have to be perfect. We don't have to continually measure ourselves against the always-do-your-best-and-be-perfect standards.

So, the next time you see those smiling faces on the how-to-do-and-be-your-best books, pass by with a smile on your own face. Chesterson's "the only cheerful doctrine-original sin" will do it for you.

22 March 1999

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Mad About You

2006-06-09T19:01:00.000-07:00

Mad Magazine still around? Indeed. There it was on the airport newsstand. A relic? No, it had this month's date on it.

The magazine brought back past improbabilities. There was the picture of President Lyndon Johnson lifting his shirt to reporters to show his surgical scar, and Mad's editors had pasted a map of Vietnam on his belly. There was a take-off on a drug manufacture's series of advertisements: "Great Moments in Medicine." The shocked faces of the patient and relatives with the great moment being "Presenting the Bill." There was the memory of my children repeating verbatim dialogue around our supper table. There was the commentary on the Ten Commandments. "Thou shall not commit adultery" was accompanied by a picture of Elizabeth Taylor, Eddie Fisher and Richard Burton playing marital chairs during the filming of Cleopatra. Spoofs of politicians, advertising and TV programs ("Hochman's Heroes" and "M*U*S*H") undercut the pretentiousness and hypocrisy rife in our society.

I have long been of the mind that Mad Magazine was as responsible as anything or anyone for the rebellion of the sixties. Mad undercut the essential props of trust and respect on which any society or organization is built. For example, to take the Preamble of our Constitution and have each phrase with a picture (accompanying the phrase "and secure the blessings of Liberty" was the picture of hundreds of Klansmen marching down Pennsylvania Avenue with the Capital building in the background) makes one continuously aware of the discrepancy between the ideal and the reality.

A 1962 lawsuit had an Oklahoma City paper describing Mad as a magazine of "grotesque, malformed cartoon characters [which] satirizes such time-honored Americans institutions as the White House and the home." Helping Mad's satire was its willingness to take on the pretentiousness of the left as well as the right, and itself. It's masthead referred to its writers as "the usual gang of idiots" and suggested that mail-order pictures of Alfred E. Neuman be used to line birdcages or wrap fish.

On the plane, I smiled at the humor but was left dissatisfied. The magazine had contemporary subjects but a rehash cartoon style and a repetitive pattern of dialogue. With eyes closed, I found the ghosts of Mad past more entertaining and biting than the ghost of Mad present. Still, my critical eye of Mad Magazine had been well honed by...Mad Magazine.

15 March 1999

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters, Mad Magazine

Be Kind

2006-06-09T03:44:00.000-07:00

At a recent meeting of a volunteer organization, one member rose and verbally and harshly attacked another. Convinced of the person's poor judgment, such criticism was justified. But, the questioning of motives was not, nor was the verbal intensity. In quiet, away from the meeting, I wondered about that scene: why so much intensity and what did this do to the people involved?

I accept as a truism that when a person's emotions are inappropriate--too much or too little--for a situation, the person is reacting to something else in her or his life. I have also come to believe volunteer organizations (and families) bear the brunt of the frustration and anger that doesn't get expressed at work and other places.

I also, though, wonder about the psychic toll on those attacked.

Recently, I was taken aback by Tony Randall's comments to an interviewer regarding the National Actors Theatre of which he is the founder and artistic director. An acclaimed actor, who so fit the part of the fastidious and superior Felix Unger on "The Odd Couple," he responded to the interviewer's question about theater critics: "I don't read every criticism. When I'm told they're bad, I don't read them They're too upsetting to me ... I don't sleep for nights. I just can't afford to get that upset. They're very wounding. They hurt. They hurt."

That such a talented and successful person would be that affected by critics' criticism was, on reflection, not so surprising. I only need to look within myself to know how biting and long-lasting even causal or 'helpful' criticism can be. Critical comments can be massaged for days.

So very, very fragile are our egos. This is true even for confident, successful persons. In fact, it is often a fragile ego that drives a person to be successful, trying to prove by outward accomplishment what is inwardly shaky. The evidence of this is all around us in the defensiveness of other people when we criticize them and in our own immediate defensiveness when we are given advice.

The benediction at Sunday worship was often, "Be kind, remember that everyone is fighting a difficult battle." Part of 'being kind' is the need to bolster others' fragile sense of self. Part of 'being kind' is our personal struggle in the battle to keep a strong positive sense of ourselves.

8 March 1999

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Dinner with Myself

2006-06-07T21:45:00.000-07:00

It was the annual meeting banquet of an organization of which I was a newly-elected board member. The reception sparkled with gleeful laughter and much animated conversation. The evening, though, bordered on disaster.

I found myself sandwiched between two three-person conversational clusters. Each adjacent person, duty done with the perfunctory, "Hi. My name is" and "Good to have you here," quickly turned to face two others. I could hardly begrudge them their choice, contrasting their vibrant conversations with friends to what would have been, with me, the usual probing to try to find common ground. I ended my isolation and self-conscious discomfort by momentarily closing my eyes, taking three deep breaths, relaxing my body and then deciding to carry on an intelligent conversation--with myself. I chose to reflect on the subject of 'hospitality.'

As many times as I have felt the excruciating aloneness of standing by myself in the midst of others who are catching up on their lives and enjoying themselves, one would think I would have developed sufficient coping mechanisms. Still, I periodically find I continue to pay my dues to "the lonely crowd" society.

As a result, I stand in admiration and am a silent cheerleader for those individuals I observe who, in gatherings, deliberately push aside their own desire to chat with friends and seek out the shy, the timid, and the lonely, connecting them with others. Such individuals are gracious saints, possessing a trait seldom listed on a profile or in an obituary,

Hospitality also is found in those who are able to set aside their personal issues or ideas in order to make room for the conversation of another. One such gracious saint felt herself to be a very uninteresting person for, seated at a reception, she would find out much about others, but few questions would be directed to her. In reality, it was her hospitality of listening that provided others with an evening absent those long awkward conversation-less pauses.

Of course, it is the life of the party who weaves the wondrous threads of togetherness. Just as wondrous, though, are the linkages made, one-by-one, as individuals are drawn into a group.

My dinner companion turned what could have been a disastrous evening into a thought-provoking conversation on hospitality. As the evening ended, we promised to get together again sometime soon.

1 March 1999

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters

"Could've Been Worse"

2006-06-05T19:10:00.000-07:00

"Why can't you just enjoy a meal?" was my companion's comment as we left the restaurant--an unexpected criticism from an unexpected quarter. "Why, I thought the meal was just fine," was my response. "Then why are you always saying, as you just did: "Wasn't too bad," or "Could've been worse." It seemed normal to me. Still, instead of shrugging it off, I decided to adjust my language to be more positive.

Decades later, while listening to Prairie Home Companion, I realized that I had been speaking my native language: Minnesotan. The movie Fargo only confirmed it. "Wasn't too bad; could've been worse" is Minnesotan for what, in other parts of this country, is, "That was good." Unwarranted shame caused me to lose part of my ethnic heritage. (Actually, when considering the possibility of cannibalism in the long sub-zero months of snowed-in winters, things could have been worse.)

The reverse was true while teaching in Turkey. When catching a student helping another student cheat, the students not only got a "0" but a stern lecture. When it happened to my star pupil, instead of a lecture, I spoke of my disappointment and asked "Why?" His response? "I could not turn down a friend." It slowly dawned on me that although I learned to speak Turkish, I had not fully learned to speak cultural Turkish. In that culture friendship was a higher value than not cheating, the reverse of my own culture. When I did learn to speak that part of the culture of Turkey, students still received "0" for cheating, but only thirty-seven percent of the words and temperature of my previous lecture.

It is not easy to always remember, but when I have enough sense to ask "Why?" rather than just negatively respond to the words, appearance or actions of another, I find that there is usually an inherent logic operating. Discovery of that increases both my understanding and my tolerance. It keeps relationships open as well.

Given the learning that has come from this experience, I have decided to forgo the lawsuit against the person who derided my ethnicity.

22 February 1999

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters, Minnesota, Turkey

b. Oct. 14, 1894-d. Feb. 10, 1896

2006-06-03T19:01:00.000-07:00

I pushed aside the overgrown weeds covering the few forgotten graves in an out-of-the way corner of a mission school in the middle of Turkey. A small weather-beaten tombstone reads

Anna Lois
Daughter of Henry K. and Jane S. Wingate
b. Oct. 14 1894 -- d. Feb. 10, 1896
"Of such is the kingdom of heaven"

In that day's stillness and cool breeze moving the leaves sadness sweeps over me, standing as I do where a century earlier the Wingates stood, placing their small infant in the ground. They are people I never knew but whose grief I have touched through accompanying other parents to the burial site of their infant. My guess is that the infant herself, as well as the out-of-the-way burial site in Turkey, is now absent to the memory of today's generation of the family. That thought dampens my spirit even more.

For so many years of my life, death saddened me because of the grief I saw it bringing into the lives of others. But, being a person who organizes life around what is to come, not what has been or is, I move quickly away from anguishing present to anticipatory future.

Now words of the early seventeenth century English writer John Donne I oft quoted at funerals are freshly real: "No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

A lifetime of dealing with losses certainly has made me more acquiescent toward the inevitable endings I find in my living and loving. Yet, counteracting this familiarity is the weightiness of cumulative losses. I find that even the grief of parents, unknown to me, over the death of their fifteen-month-old daughter is part of that accumulation.

Increasing the heaviness of grief is the isolation dictated by our society. Very quickly we are expected to be 'normal' and the words or looks of others squelch expressions of loss in our words or mood. More subtly, even courses in grief 'management' assume a control of and a rational hurrying along of the process. How much truer is Donne for the human spirit.

For I am every dead thing,
In whom love wrought new alchemy.

I was linked to the Wingates-separated by a century-through working at the school at which they gave so much of themselves. I look up from the grave and see the school, now closed for the past forty years. Another loss.

15 February 1999

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

The Extraordinary Ordinary

2006-06-02T19:08:00.000-07:00

Stunning photographs of empty rain-drenched steps, unlit matches, and fishnets drying on a concrete sidewalk hang on the walls of the local art museum in a special exhibit of the photographer Brassaï:

I do not search out the exceptional, I avoid it. I think that everyday life and what happens is the real life. My greatest ambition is to make something new and striking out of the banal and ordinary, to show everyday life in such a way as to make it seem as though it is seen by the spectator for the first time.

The ordinary becoming the extraordinary, the common blossoming into the absolutely awesome, and worn, wet stairs shimmering with beauty is, for me, the core of my religious vision. I need no 'finger poking' into our world bringing miracles of stunning amazement and healing. The amazement and beauty that is already present when my senses are open and alert is enough:

the awesome wonder of a small child placing words together to talk about something happening in another room and out of sight.
the dormant wonder in the power of 280 horses coming to life with the turn of a key,
the wonder of trust in handing over a $20,000 automobile on the basis of a plastic card and a signature,
the wonder of forgiveness in one person welcoming another after the other has betrayed a promise or violated a confidence,
the financial wonder of money contributed and ending up as a blanket given to a homeless earthquake victim in Turkey,
the wonder of the printed word conveying, after centuries and centuries, people's recollections of the thoughts of Plato and Jesus,
the wonder of life giving life through blood and organ donation,
the wonder of a youth, born of parents' genes and maturing in the parents' home, emerging with quite different thoughts and morals,
the resurrection wonder when individuals, finding their lives coming to an end through a loved-one's death, captured by an addiction, becoming physically incapacitated, or finding a personal dream evaporating, survive and continue to affirm life.

Not only Moses hears the divine call before the burning bush in the Sinai, but each of us finds the same reality present. For as Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote:

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God.

Moses is commanded to take off his shoes to experience this amazing reality. Our shoes are the attitudes of familiarity and boredom which are discarded as we scrub our eyes and ears and other senses each day, each moment. Again and again, we find the common afire with God.

1 February 1999

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

New Words for the New Century

2006-06-01T19:07:00.000-07:00

Still fresh in my mind is the long-ago comment of a linguistically adept foreign educator who said that English was the easiest language to learn but the most difficult to master: ease revealed in its world-wide use, difficulty tangible in the sheer weight of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary. English is amazingly fluid, both in abosrbing words from other languages and in creating new words. I favor the following words seeping into our public discourse.

Blamestorming—I remember well late-night college bull sessions at which faculty and food were the subject of constant complaints. Once a teacher, I now know that faculty have their own bull sessions complaining about, for example, students. But then, youth complain about parents and parents roll their eyes in talking about their children's shenanigans. Congregants laugh about the antics of ministers and ministers rehash the foibles of parishioners. Now that we live in a litigious era, this word becomes all the more useful.
Ohnosecond—What a wonderfully descriptive word for that awful sinking feeling immediately following a stupid mistake, a inappropriate remark or a missed appointment. The word describes that moment when proposing, or clinching a deal, or confessing one's faults, or finally talking seriously wth one's adolescent or spouse that something happens to break the spell. "Oh no" then flashes through my mind.
Beepilepsy—At a lecture or in a restaurant, a beeper goes off (especially in vibrator mode), followed by a brief seizure. Or, in deep and earnest conversation, the phone rings and the other's arm automatically jerks to pick it up, interrupting speech in mid-sentence. Beepilepsy is a particularly modern disease.
Irritainment—What better word for much of each of our "trials of the century:" O. J. Simpson and William Clinton (a bit myopic since the Sacco-Vanzetti [1921] or he Lindberg kidnapping [1935] trials might, among others, have better claim). These media spectacles are annoying, but compelling to watch. Irritainment is similar to rubbing the scab of a healing cut.

Blamestorming, ohnosecond, beepilepsy, and irritainment may not make it into our everyday language, but the reside in my mind with wondrous clarity, and a delightful smile.

25 January 1999

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters, English

Tainted Money

2006-05-30T19:24:00.000-07:00

Proudly, and with a twinkle in his eye, the member told me that he had put an extra contribution in the offering plate: a tithe of the goodly sum that he had won in a superbowl pool. That remained a humorous point between us and is revived each year he asks if the church were now willing to pay him a tithe of the money he has subsequently lost. Good question. The question, though, raises the question of the morality of the church accepting money from evil or questionable sources. That is, can money be so "tainted" that the church ought not to accept it?

We do place value on the source of money: we make our child return money that the child stole. Should not we draw the same line for the church? Would we want to accept money stemming from drug dealing or fraud? When is money 'clean' and when is it 'tainted?

In 1905, Congregationalists proudly announced the arrival of an unexpected gift—$1,000,000—from John D. Rockefeller. Rockefeller, though, was also at the center of a boiling controversy about the power of the new American 'plutocrats'.

Instead of the expected thanks from church members, controversy followed, and the next year was spent fending off critics. Like bureaucrats today, the leaders denied culpability and said that they were only the passive recipients of Rockefeller's unsolicited benevolence, until it was learned that the church leaders had been pursuing Rockefeller's gift for several years.

Congregational minister Washington Gladden, minister of First Congregational Church of Columbus, Ohio, and a prolific writer (author of the hymn "O Master Let Me Walk with Thee") had written ten years earlier about "tainted money." He made it memorable when he invoked it against the Congregational leaders. The phrase lived with Rockefeller to his death.

Gladden had the conviction that money is not neutral but had a sacramental quality. When we give our money, our character is reflected in the gift. In contrast to today, Gladden wrote not only about the gift but also wrote about the giver.

Tucked away in our own church's history is a gift from gambling's winnings. The editor of the Houston Chronicle, a member, played in a regular mid-week poker game. One evening was particularly profitable, and not wanting or needing the money, he gave it to establish our Plymouth Library.

The story of the phrase "tainted money" is not just about gifts. It's about integrity.

The question of integrity is unlikely to bother the church today. As one friend said to me, "Money, like people, can be redeemed by the church," a facile rationalization we all seem willing to live with. Still, I wonder.

18 January 1999

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Creative Chaos

2006-05-29T19:02:00.000-07:00

The movie Shakespeare in Love sparkles. Its subject, the creation of Romeo and Juliet, survives a turbulent love story, shifting loyalties and rivalries among playwrights and theatres, and the mercuric personality of Shakespeare himself. Survive, though, is not the right word. 'Emerge' is. Emerging out of the swirling restlessness of Shakespeare's daily life, is a brilliant creation.

In this movie we find no winged muse whispering immortal words in Shakespeare's ear and no pages neatly stacked before him. Here we find Shakespeare embroidering on his own experiences, plagiarizing others' ideas (for example, the suggestion of another playwright turns Shakespeare's title Romeo and Ethel, The Pirate's Daughter to Romeo and Juliet), and scribbling out dialogue in bursts of creative energy after bouts of lethargy. A creative genius transmuted all this into an extraordinary play.

I found this fictionalized story so very non-fictional in its portrayal of the creative process. Even I, in my own limited and prosaic way, find that only rarely is there an idea that is totally brand new. Ideas come from a word spoken by a friend. a sentence out of a book or an everyday experience. Any of these can trigger a rapid sequence of thoughts. For example, being recently retired, I entered my nearly empty office and the strange uncomfortable feeling came over me of being in 'foreign' space. I was then rubber-banded to a divorced person's comments about entering his former home—familiar with furniture but "no longer home." Two other examples came to mind. From where does this rapid linkage of ideas and experiences come? Creativity is, I believe, unpredictable, unplanned and inherently chaotic.

Most creativity is a rearrangement of the familiar rather than bringing something brand new out of nothing. Shakespeare can take such absolutely ordinary everyday words and arrange them in this incredible order: "Now is the winter of our discontent." What a magnificent statement! Out of only twelve notes the composer continually creates fresh arrangements, so that we have Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star and Beethoven's Ninth from the same few notes.

At the end of writing Mind Matters, I often find numerous books tottering on my desk or providing an obstacle course on the floor. The word processor makes rewriting easier than Shakespeare's quill pen. Still, page after crumpled page lands near the wastebasket until words come close to saying what I want them to say in the way I want them said.

Process, not substance, is how I compare myself with the Shakespeare portrayed in the film. Like Shakespeare I might borrow a title for these Mind Matters. I could call these notes on life: "Tucker in love."

11 January 1999

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters, Creativity

"Jaws IV"

2006-05-28T18:29:00.000-07:00

It's an uncomfortable little secret known only to church historians: the frequency of religious believers being drawn into believing the end of the world is imminent. Selling all and cutting family ties, individuals gather to await the end. One person not absent from American history textbooks is William Miller who convinced many thousands that 1843 was the end. When that did not happen, the date was extended to 22 October 1844. Disappointed a second time, Miller and his adherents did not lose faith, only their willingness to predict. Millerites, or Adventists, continue today to carry on his teachings.

What I discovered is that Miller's ideas are only religious expressions of a basic human craving for apocalypticism. Take this dire prediction: "The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo famines—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death." That was Paul Ehrlich in one of his best-selling books. Place that next to the Club of Rome in 1972 stating that "We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the next decade." Today feeding double the then world's population and paying low prices at the gas pump makes Ehrlich and the Club of Rome modern day Millerites. Like the Millerites, being proved wrong only leads to other environmental scares—oil and apples, acid rain and carcinogenic chemicals, AIDS and the Ebola virus, mad cow disease and global warming.

What intrigues me is our human appetite for non-religious, as well as religious, apocalyptic scenarios, as is evidenced by movies such as Jaws, Jurassic Park and Titanic. Psychologically, peering into the open pit may be a way of tolerating our personal problems, in the same way that gossip makes one feel 'superior' to those who have moral failings.

Millerites—ancient and modern—persist, believing that being invariably wrong in the past makes them more likely to be right in the future. Jaws IV, when it appears, will point out a new crisis: not humans at risk, but sharks—because of the market for aphrodisiac shark bone.

Today, it is Washington politicians who are the most visible Millerites. Some predict the moral collapse of the country if President Clinton stays in office, while others paint a dismal portrait of a country gone mad if the President were to be found guilty by the Senate. H.L. Mencken wrote: "The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed—and hence clamorous to be led to safety—by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."

My prediction for the new year—there will continue to be plenty of gloom, with Washington taking the lead. I prefer to cheerfully say: "Happy New Year."

4 January 1999

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Retirement Thoughts

2006-05-27T19:52:00.000-07:00

Been there. Done that. Retirement, I mean.

I retired from childhood earlier than most, due to parents whose loose reins (even at my early age) and limited financial resources (due to the Depression and World War II) made the transition easy and necessary.

I retired from an overseas missionary teaching career and returned to this country. Only in my mid-thirties, this was my fifth career retirement, but by far, the most anguishing, coming after a full six months of constant stewing and fretting.

I retired from my decade-and-a-half dream of being an academic; finally finding myself, at the ripe age of thirty-nine, in a position to achieve that goal, I shelved that long-cherished dream and traveled to Houston.

I retired from being a parent. My children were ready far earlier than I was to hold the retirement party. Once held, they relinquished their opportunity to hear the fifty-fourth version of important parental lecture number sixteen. They survived, as did I.

Now, I retire from my job of twenty-eight years and the very special relationship I have had with so many. I find this to be, as the Prophet in Kahlil Gibran's book by that name said, "not a garment that I cast off this day, but a tearing of skin with my own hands."

Thinking back, I recall the other times of separation and pain, but in each case I survived, through deep gratitude for others gifts and graces and finding new tasks to draw me into the future. I depend on those remembrances in this transition to retirement, and I draw on my life-long knowledge and experience. Retirement doesn't get any easier, but having traversed the territory so often and with so much anguish of spirit, I approach this retirement with much confidence, good humor and true expectancy.

I also realize how privileged I am to live in this period of human history. The lack of some sort of retirement rite or ritual that marks all other major life stages—birth, marriage, and death—points to the recency of retirement as an expectation of us humans. Bismarck chose 65 as the retirement age because so few people got that old. Now, dying at that age is considered "so young."

Been there. Done that. Consequently, out of all my previous retirements, I find re-engagement, not retirement (literally, to draw back), to be the right word. Re-engagement with life, re-engagement with spouse and family, re-engagement with people. Re-engagement with new tasks. Dag Hammarskjold expressed it well: "For what has been, thanks. For what is to be, yes."

Thanks and Yes!

21 December 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

"Simplicity, Simplicity, Simplicity"

2006-05-26T19:09:00.000-07:00

Facing the holiday crowds and the calendar crowded with parties and special programs makes one yearn for Henry David Thoreau's solution to life: "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!" His message in Walden (which continues to sell well both in books and cassette recordings) resonates with a deep yearning within us.

In 1845, at the age of 28, Thoreau asked the question, "Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life?" His answer was to build a 10-by-15 foot cabin of boards and brick on Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. A bed, desk and books completed his simple life.

But, it was not just a simple life Thoreau was after. His venture into discovering what could be pared in order to directly experience nature and self-culture had its own utilitarian purpose: he was writing a book. His sojourn in the woods was for only 26 months, and his cabin was only a couple of miles from town. He wrote, I "had more visitors while I lived in the woods than any other period of my life." He made regular trips to town "to hear some of the gossip which is incessantly going on there," and on Saturdays his mother and sisters brought him food. All of this is hardly the isolation and simplicity so implanted in our minds.

He sold his cabin (which was on land owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson) after two years and returned to Concord. He had discovered that life was best experienced in the "partially cultivated country" of Concord itself.

Although not the pure and simple experience of our desire and imagination, nevertheless Thoreau's attempt to find simplicity—even as he commuted from his cabin to town, even as his need for conversation carried him to gather with others, and even as he was dependent on family for sustenance—does strike a chord within us. Thoreau wrote later of Concord: "Here are all the friends I ever had or shall have, and as friendly as ever. A man dwells in his native valley like an acorn in its cap." So, Walden turns out to be a message of plain living within society, instead of a call to abandon jobs and society for some hermitic existence.

The mention of a hermitic existence recalls a time sixteen hundred years ago when, already in the third century, some Christians began to decry the worldliness of the church and sought greater spiritual purity by escaping to the Egyptian desert, there to live as hermits. St. Anthony, an early Thoreau, was the most famous. Eventually, they too found the need for companionship (a word that literally means 'sharing bread'), and monasteries came into being.

Rhapsodizing about escaping the city while navigating the bumper-to-bumper rush hour traffic (and listening to Walden on tape) is the twentieth century version of a yearning found in the nineteenth and second centuries (and all other centuries) as well. Such voices help remind us of the deep yearning to not measure our lives by quantity or updated goods and accomplishments. They are a reminder also of the deep need to reflect on who and whose we are, where we are and what we are doing, what we value and what we are adding to human culture.

14 December 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Power Tends to Corrupt

2006-05-25T19:01:00.000-07:00

My luncheon companion expressed concern over his church's exceptionally talented minister and the genuine adulation of church members: "What might this be doing to him?" His concern was not unwarranted. Power over others, even if uncoerced and even if used in genuine compassion and service, places a person in perilous straits.

The British historian Lord Acton gives the reason for such peril: "Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely" (written to a bishop regarding the 1870 promulgation of the doctrine of papal infallibility).

Power is so pernicious because its corruption of good intentions is so subtle and its consequences so destructive. Obtaining a position because of talent or knowledge easily leads to a person thinking all exercises in judgement and performance are right and obviously superior to that of others. A compliment feels good, but abundant compliments easily skew one's self-judgement, making even a friendly nay-sayer easily dismissed. The protective shell around a powerful person thickens steadily—an office behind secretarial staff, additional professional staff, those attaching themselves to the coattails of a rising star, and finally security—isolating the person from others. Of Jim Bakker, it was written that he had manufactured a business with an adjustable moral compass; if the ministry did something, then it must be ethical.

Power corrupting is not limited to the leader of a country, the president of a corporation or the preacher of a multi-thousand-member church. It is evident in parents' attempt to dominate in power struggles: "You do this (only) because I tell you to," and when children are used to meet parental needs.

There is the subtle corruption that is seen even in the members of church committees. Given an important task, one's own judgement, or the judgement of the group, takes precedence over organizational consensus because others just "don't understand things the way we do."

All along the spectrum of human endeavors, Lord Acton's dictum is at work. The reason is that we humans are inveterate idol-makers, making idols of ourselves and idolizing others, an activity that infects church folk as well as national politicians.

Still, Lord Acton wrote that power tends to corrupt (only absolute power corrupts absolutely). Maintaining humility about oneself and avoiding arrogance toward others keeps corruption from slipping into automatic.

This is why those in power need our heartfelt prayers along with our accolades.

7 December 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Clinton-Starr Musings

2006-05-24T19:01:00.000-07:00

The ebb and flow of events swirling around Washington alternatively keep me appalled, angry and amused. Now, boredom. I am ready to move on in our national life, but I am left with a number of "I wonders."

I wonder who is the real Ken Starr. Is he the mean-spirited, get the president by any means wolf under sheep's clothing, or are the attacks on him a contemporary example of the centuries' long habit of killing the messenger? Shakespeare put it well in King Lear.

Yet the first bringer of unwelcome news
Hath but a losing office, and his tongue
Sounds ever after as a sullen bell,
Remember'd knolling a departing friend.

I wonder if even a handful of folk—including members of Congress and TV reporters—have actually read the Starr report and listened to the Tripp-Lewinski taped conversations in their entirety. Or, are their opinions based, as is ours, on pieces extracted by persons of undeclared political persuasion?

I wonder if the persistence of this Washington blood sport in each administration (Richard Nixon, Hamilton Jordan, Ed Meese, Neil Bush, and Bill Clinton), along with next year's budget with goodies for everyone, isn't the modern equivalent of Rome's leaders pacifying the populace with "bread and circuses." Now, with Lani Guinier balancing Robert Bork and Clinton balancing Nixon, can a truce be declared so we move on absent the bloodletting?

I wonder if, deep down, any politician wants to "get on with the real business of the nation" when doing so will require disciplined study, genuine compromises (which required civility not constant confrontation) and making oneself a target for special interests. Finger pointing rallies loyal troops against the enemy rather than against oneself. And, since we no longer have the Russians to kick around . . . .

I wonder if the pool of public-spirited citizens available for public service will shrink because of the intrusive confirmation process, and if, increasingly, we will be left with more opportunistic candidates willing to risk the process for the certain personal rewards.

I have reached the end of my space. Still, just one more. I wonder, as to whether or not we have reached the point about which the ancient Roman historian Livy wrote: "We can endure neither our evils nor their cures."

30 November 1998

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters, US politics

Loopholes

2006-05-23T20:09:00.000-07:00

The abortion debate settled into its familiar argumentative pattern. Well-honed points, reiterated over the past quarter century, continued to be passionately stated. Sitting back, my mind settled into a half-listening, half-reverie mode. Reverie took over on the Constitutional argument: was the 1972 Wade v. Roe Supreme Court decision legitimately derived from the Constitution or was this a case of judicial activism?

My mind transported me to similar debates concerning the Bible. How one interprets this primary document is at the heart of much controversy. Are we strictly bound to the literal words of the Bible, or does the Bible provide us with the broad principles that we apply to today's issues?

As the abortion debate faded further, the frequent argument between parents and children took its place alongside the Constitution and Bible. Parents use their own knowledge and experience as a kind of "basic document." Having learned from their own mistakes and being aware of both the dangers in society and the vulnerabilities of youth, they impose rules and restraints. Children exercise judicial activism.

Of other applications, I am not in doubt. For in these arguments, we find a foundational human issue: in what manner and to what extent is the past to determine our present and future? It is usually a tug of war, each side gaining and losing ground. Revolution or repression is the result of one gaining complete victory.

Familiar with the Spanish philosopher Santayana's line, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," we are not apt to ignore the past. Yet, when Lincoln at Gettysburg speaks of this country having a "new burst of freedom," we can find our hearts quickening. We all are caught between convictions shaped out of our past and new understandings necessary to create a viable present. Individually and as a society, we are pulled both ways.

Creative ways are available for wending our way through this tug on our consciousness. A rabbi, under Orthodox attack for his 'novel' interpretation of the Scripture, wrote, "God's law is perfect. If God left a loophole, there was a reason. We are allowed to use it." Not a bad way to take the present seriously in light of the past. A satisfied smile formed as I began to seek out the loopholes in the Bible (my own parental admonitions and the Constitution were to be next).

Happily, clapping ended the debate; unhappily and unfortunately, it cut short this imaginative exploration.

23 November 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Still a Burning Issue

2006-05-21T19:03:00.000-07:00

Good news! (Well, somewhat good.) The rash of black church burnings, which gained national prominence, turns out not to have been part of a grand conspiracy. Individuals in areas might band together, but they were not linked to groups in other communities. No national conspiracy but, still, smoldering ash heaps dotted the American landscape.

More white churches were torched than black. So tied up are we with race in this country that these church burnings were immediately seen as a racial issue. That focus by-passed a much deeper question: why churches, black or white?

Not only in America, but Norway also is facing a similar threat. There historic and magnificent stave churches—held together by sophisticated mortise-and-tendon joints that allow the buildings to adapt to changing winds and temperatures without the help of glue or nails—have survived for 800 years. But they have not withstood the arsonists' torch. In the past four years, twenty historic churches (41%) have been destroyed; twenty-nine remain.

The burnings in Norway are attributed to a homegrown Satanist movement that circulates the proclamation: "Kill the Christians. Burn their churches. Destroy their homes. Torture their children." So far, fortunately, there is evidence only of burnings.

Fortunate, also, is the absence of such visible inflammatory proclamations in this country. This does not mean that some of the same anti-Christian feeling (or anti-religious feeling since Jewish and Muslim places of worship are sometimes defaced) is absent. The overwhelming good will for religious life in this country covers small pockets of tight-lipped anger.

Fire was also used against Christians by their early enemies to destroy the new faith. Using, rather than rejecting, that object lesson, Christians themselves torched their enemies. (Actually, the Puritans, avoiding the mass hysteria of Europe in which thousands were burned, didn't burn witches [eighteen men and women were hanged and one man was crushed with rocks], which is of no consolation to those who died but an interesting historical footnote.)

Better buildings than people. Yet, if buildings are torched with little concern, because that is not part of a national racial conspiracy, can people be far behind? The shift from arsonists of abortion clinics to assassins of abortionists may be a thin precedent, yet unchecked violence often escalates.

The federal government studied the rash of church burnings and decided that neither a national nor regional conspiracy exists. Their work is ended. I believe there is still a burning issue.

16 November 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Guilt and Feeling Guilty

2006-05-20T19:13:00.000-07:00

It was a jolting combination.

I received an e-mail with the news that a friend had hit an elderly woman crossing the middle of a dimly-lit city street, and although not at fault and with no broken bones, he was carrying around a load of guilt. Within the hour, standing before a judge, I was watching the seemingly uncaring, dismissive and guilt-free attitude of a youth accused of murder (I say seemingly because the outer attitude may have been a way for the person to cope, as best he could, with the situation).

I was reminded of a lesson learned early in therapy training: there is a difference between guilt and a feeling of guilt. Guilt is an objective fact, the result of violating a group's rules or a communities' laws, and a person may, or may not, feel guilty about the violation. A feeling of guilt is subjective, taking residence in a person's mind, heart and gut, irrespective of whether or not the person is guilty. Police and judges deal with the former; ministers and therapists deal with the latter.

Whether I'm guilty or not, it is feelings of guilt that affect me the most. I can berate myself for the most trivial things. When analyzed, the source of such anguish is usually some foolish prohibition from my childhood or my professional training, which continues to cling to the edge of my consciousness and leaps into life when provoked. Even recognizing the insignificance or foolishness of the violated prohibition does not always eliminate the discomfort.

So burdened down were people by guilt-producing religion that at one time it seemed to be psychotherapy's task to exorcise religion from the human enterprise. Understandably, the church's response was to minimize its preaching about sin and guilt and adopt a person-affirming and positive-thinking message. Essentially today, the church is out of the guilt-producing business.

But, applicable to our times is Jesus' story of the demon who, kicked out of a person's life, roamed around homeless. Returning and finding his old dwelling clean and tidy, the demon decided to again take up residence and even invited some friends in, making the latter state worse than the former. What the church abandoned, others have picked up with great relish. Does a day go by without a mailing from a group which wants me to feel guilty about abandoning whales to human predators, the country to the religious right, the nation to the destroyers of the first amendment, babies to abortion's mass murderers, and old growth trees to environmental despoilers?

A retired fund raiser repeatedly tells me, with tongue-in-cheek I assume, that I make a mistake in not preaching hell and guilt as a method for fund raising. Given the track record of the church, I demur and leave the manufacturing of feelings of guilt to others. I have enough problems with real guilt: lack of compassion for the world's needy and absence of outrage over injustice.

9 November 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Dervish Prayer

2006-05-18T19:26:00.000-07:00

In worship, my hands, resting in my lap, automatically touch, little finger to thumb, right palm up and left palm down. Once a deliberate choice, that touching now had become habitual. Something gained, yet something lost.

This practice started after observing the Whirling Dervishes at their home in Konya, Turkey. (Whirling is actually a misnomer since it is a slow turning and the master stops any participant whose eyes lose focus.) Their act of worship began, for me, as an entertaining observation of a 'native' practice. Yet, my interest turned, along with their bodies, until I was mesmerized by the solemnity of the evening.

Turning and turning, Dervishes raise the right arm with palm upward, symbolically reaching up to the Divine and receiving the Divine blessing. The other open hand, with palm down, points to the earth, symbolically transmitting God's blessing to the world. Thus, the Dervish symbolically links the divine and the earth, symbolically a conduit for a blessing.

Seated at worship at prayer, little finger touching thumb, palm up and palm down, becomes my physical reminder of that link in worship: a time of reaching out for, and receiving, the Divine Spirit and a time to be reminded of my daily life in the world of which I am so intimately a part. Receiving and sharing that selfsame Spirit brings to mind a line from a long-forgotten poem: "Christ has no hands but our hands to do his work today."

Of course, the danger inherent in all habitual behavior is an act performed devoid of its meaning, a form without substance, except on those occasions when something jogs the mind into recalling. I work at keeping the act of little finger touching thumb, palm up and palm down, consciously deliberate.

The adoption of this modified Dervish practice caused me to reflect on other habitual actions, My automatic, and often perfunctory, handshake (which was originally a way of showing another that no knife was held to harm) is a way of touching another's life. I now try to be conscious of that touch. The hand over heart causes me to reflect on my country and how I am intertwined with it. These are shorthand ways of expressing thoughts and emotions . . . when I remember.

Indian meditative practices brought a new word to our vocabulary: mantra, the repetitive use of a sound lulling the body and mind and allowing both to enter into a different state of consciousness. That word also led me into uncovering mantras in my own Christian tradition and, then, to the mantra-like quality of other repetitive physical actions and, then, to my current mantra of touching little finger to thumb, palm up and palm down.

From Islamic and Hindu religious practices, from countries as far away as Turkey and India, I am drawn back into my own religious heritage and find richer depths to my own spirituality.

2 November 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Islam, Mind Matters, Religion

"Are You a Christian?"

2006-05-17T19:04:00.000-07:00

"How can you call yourself a Christian if you aren't outraged by this?" was the most recent of a long line of people questioning my self-chosen Christian status. Another time, the pointed challenge was: "Ahmet may be a Muslim, but he is far more of a Christian than you are" (a convoluted concept, to be sure, but my accuser's point was that I had not responded as helpfully to a situation as he thought I should have). Then there was the genuinely earnest person who just "knew" that my inability to pinpoint a time in which I was born again was God's personal call to her to make me the object of her focused compassion and directed prayers. Still another person was dumfounded after an Easter service in which I stated my belief—non-traditional—in resurrection and decided I needed to be set straight. (I sometimes wonder if I have a character trait that, like a magnet, draws so many who want to make me a convertible object).

After acknowledging the element of truth in each accusation, I end up dismissing the full criticism because I find others are really interested in making me conform to their "truths." However, on reflection, their efforts raise the intriguing issue of just what it is that makes a person a Christian. The usual criteria, I find, fits into one of the three B's: birth, belief or behavior.

Birth brings most people in this world to their religion: birth into a particular culture or into a particular family. Being 'born again' becomes a metaphor for the adult decision we call conversion. Jesus' conversation with Nicodemus is the basis for this conviction.

Belief is the primary criteria for others. Early fundamentalists have five: the verbal inerrancy of the Bible, the divinity of Jesus Christ, the Virgin Birth, a substitutionary theory of the atonement, and the physical resurrection. Modern fundamentalists make pro-life, pro-family and anti-gay the criteria. Liberal fundamentalists (not an oxymoron) draw the line in the sand with abortion, their view of separation of church and state, and being pro-gay. To not toe the fundamentalist line—either conservative or liberal—automatically makes one's religious commitment questionable.

Behavior becomes the only criteria for many. Feeding and sheltering the needy are the true marks of whether or not one is a Christian. Doing, not just talking, is the sole and true measure of a person's religious commitment.

All of the above have scriptural warrant. All have a long and honored history of individuals who followed each path. All, I take all seriously.

But, for me? I find being Christian is responding to the same call that Jesus extended to Peter and Andrew: "Come, and follow me." I find that call can get expressed in many ways, often depending on a person's temperament. I find it comforting that not being the possessor of absolute experience, absolute truth or absolute purity of action does not disqualify me from being a Christian. After all, Jesus could call Peter "Satan" and still not boot him out of camp.

26 October 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Premature Birth?

2006-05-16T20:11:00.000-07:00

His intensity was unmistakable and unavoidable. Lively questions flowed forth and new ideas were delightfully embraced. A disastrous divorce had loosened the moorings of his life, and a souring professional life had left him adrift. Out of desperation, he overcame a thirty-six year avoidance of anything religious and was now an eager seeker for something of permanence to infuse his days.

My dual role as a spiritual mid-wife and the leader of an institution did him a disservice. As our conversations progressed, his understanding of, and commitment to, Christian discipleship progressed. I then suggested he might want to formally join the church. He did, and little changed ... at first.

Slowly institutional duties elbowed out his spiritual search and, then, the institution itself became his focus. Finally, that which had saved him now weighed him down. Finding the church to be what he thought he had escaped, he moved on in his journey.

Would this process have happened anyway or did I allow him to be delivered prematurely from the nurturing womb into the cold reality of institutional life? I will never know, but a sadness still lingers in my uneasy conscience.

What happened to him early in his religious career happens to most who get actively involved in the institutional life of the church. Serving on this board and that committee, doing this task and that duty means one neglects time for one's personal spiritual search.

But this is true not only in the church. Jobs and professions, marriages and volunteer organizations all get in the way of the purpose for which they exist. All, at some point, impose their structured life instead of being the conduit for the life they promise.

Jettisoning the organization, marriage or profession is one way of responding. Another is to seize the Christian belief in resurrection—that out of the deadness of habits and structures we can find new life. The more dramatic forms of resurrection from the despair of addiction and dissolute living ought not cloud the more frequent, but just as vital, resurrections that are possible with revived relationships, with refurbished careers, with renewed hope, and with each new day.

The power of our religious faith lies not in accepting holy truth from on high nor in acquiescing to institutional busyness but in connecting our ordinary, everyday experience with the extraordinary presence of God. Jesus understood that in an amazingly profound way.

This follower is, apparently, still in a learning mode.

19 October 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

A Compulsive Sense-Maker

2006-05-14T17:28:00.000-07:00

Here I am, reading The Writing Life by Annie Dillard—just one of a large number of books by authors self-analytical about writing and the writer's life. Why are writers so self-preoccupied? After five years of writing Mind Matters (and sermons eight times longer), I am finding myself more reflective about the process of writing, even agonizing over it with a recent luncheon companion. Why, I ask myself, am I still awake at 2 a.m., after a long Sunday, trying to find the right word, instead of the almost right word, for a sentence? Why do I put myself through the discomfort of exploring mistake-laden past experiences and the personal anguish of self-exposure? What is the source of the belief that others will want to read or hear what I write? The person who said that we are pain-avoiding, pleasure-seeking animals did not know the insistent anguish of writing.

Jackson Browne spoke of his songwriting, "I've been a compulsive sense-maker." He got it right. Deep down, there is a strong need to make sense of the sometimes puzzling, sometimes chaotic, sometimes fermenting, sometimes irrational, sometimes despairing aspects of life . . . and then to write about it.

Writers are not the only compulsive sense-makers. Scientists look at patterns and anomalies in the physical world and work at making sense. The composer hears a progression of musical chords that demands resolution. The psychologist seeks to give sense to puzzling human behavior. The parent tries to place life in sense-making verbal packages to ease the child's way. The theologian bends the mind to find the sense-making behind all sense-making—that which we call God.

Actually, all humans compulsively impose understandings and order on the puzzling, chaotic, fermenting, irrational and despairing aspects of life. Senseless death strikes a young child and the words, "It was the will of God," readily slip off many tongues as a way of making sense. Unexpected and undeserved disappointment washes over us, and we resignedly say, "Well, that's the way the ball bounces" (even when we don't literally believe in purposeless fate). Each one of us needs to find, or to make sense of, the forces and relationships that affect our lives. We all are, every single one of us, compulsive sense makers. Persistently and pervasively, sense-making is in the very sinews of our existence.

Simply put, the writer expresses in words what each of us knows and does intuitively—but not so simply it turns out. As Annie Dillard delightfully describes the process: "With your two bare hands, you hold and fight a sentence's head while its tail tries to knock you down." Wrestling alligators is dangerous work.

12 October 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Writing, Religion

Lingering Emotion

2006-05-13T19:44:00.000-07:00

The movie Saving Private Ryan was over and music played as the credits rolled down the screen. As others left the theatre, I remained seated. For one thing, I enjoy reading people's names and their jobs. Names from all over this earth are part of the intriguing mosaic that is America and the plethora of jobs involved in producing a major movie keeps astounding me. More than for the names and jobs, though, I remained to momentarily live with the emotions churned up by the movie. The movies I choose to view touch deep places within me: love and death, betrayal and sacrifice, hopes enduring and despair prevailing. With the film credits ending and the ushers picking up, I finally moved myself to the foyer.

Consciously lingering with an emotion is something I am learning late in life. Much of my emotional training took place at the neighborhood pickup baseball and hockey games. The visible disgust of the other boys and the pointed words of "sissy" and "acting like a girl" (a distinction, I find, that goes back as far as Plato) meant keeping pain, tears and anger to oneself. The forward movement of the game pushed one's personal emotions to the background. I learned strong emotions were to be suppressed and denied. Later I learned to rationalize them.

Then, in the 60s and 70s, we took a pendulum swing to expressing our emotions. "Letting it all hang out" was the measure of a nonuptight person. Sensitivity groups encouraged people to remove their masks and gave permission to express whatever emotion was bubbling within, no matter how it might hurt another person. If another person was hurt, "that was their problem." Unrestrained emotions now infect sports—from professionals to parents of Little Leaguers. "Road rage" and "loss of civility" label this unrestrained emotional behavior.

Given the force and destructiveness of our passions, it is strange that we give so little thought to properly understanding and disciplining them. Differentiating and analyzing emotions is not taught alongside parsing sentences and dissecting the Civil War. We have grade levels for reading and math but not for understanding and dealing with anger. When do we—both children and adults—learn to handle our emotions as mature adults?

Does sitting in the darkened theater after the movie mean I have moved ahead a grade in my emotional development? Or, may it be that I am discovering what the English physician Henry Plotkin suggested: "Emotions are postcards from our genes telling us in a direct and nonsymbolic manner about life and death?"

5 October 1998

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters

Spurious Suspicions

2006-05-12T19:52:00.000-07:00

His inaugural address as the governor of Alabama in 1963 is now an enduring part of our history: "I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny. And I say, Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!" That same year, he stood at the door of the University of Alabama barring two blacks from registering, only backing down before a federal force.

While running for president, George Wallace was shot-an injury which severed his spinal cord. Wheelchairbound and in constant pain, he began saying that he'd "done wrong," that his racial policy was wrong. Repentance? Political expediency is what I saw.

I was wrong.

One of the two blacks almost barred that day by Wallace at the university spoke at his funeral: "Governor Wallace's true pain was that some people could not forgive him. I believe he made his peace with God. He once told me in an anguished moment, 'Whom the gods destroy they first make mad with power'." By word and action Wallace worked diligently at undoing his segregationist past.

Charles Coulson, of Watergate fame, came out of prison a bornagain Christian. Skepticism reigned. Lo and behold, two decades later, Coulson continues as head of Prison Fellowship which works for the rehabilitation (and conversion) of prisoners. He often testifies before Congress and state legislatures for humane treatment of prisoners.

Wrong again.

Of course, my skepticism is well founded.. Public 'repentances' are often used to manipulate others instead of changing oneself. (Also, it is far more difficult to accept the repentance of someone who is an opponent of one's own political and religious views.)

Wallace and Coulson, both of whom I personally did not like, showed great personal courage to change. They have found freedom from their past, while I had locked myself to their past.

Moses, David and Paul were freed from their murderous past. Isaac and Peter were able to move beyond their betrayal of others. I wonder how many people around them made their lives more difficult by being unwilling to look away from the past into a different present and future?

The risk of looking foolish by accepting a person's manipulative repentance keeps me from easy acceptance. The cost of skepticism, though, is unnecessarily burdening others' lives with their past. That cost is far too high. I need to repent.

In this, I am right.

28 September 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Perilous Giving

2006-05-11T22:59:00.000-07:00

His reluctant gratitude matched my reluctant gift. I had just helped another person who, on his way to Florida from California, had car trouble, leaving him without money for gas and food. My contribution, added to others on the way, will get him to his destination—assuming that his story is true.

His arrival, disturbing my concentration on essential work needing to be done, made me a reluctant giver. His departure made work impossible as I dealt with the turbulent feelings that had emerged. Why, I asked myself, was this encounter so unsatisfactory? Even more, why does so much of our giving and receiving—from foreign aid, to welfare, to assisting the stranger traveling through, to helping a family member or friend—sour us?

Only when I began to think of my own resistance to being 'helped' by others did I begin to understand the treacherous dynamic in giving and receiving. Simply put, I do not want to be helped. The small child still obstinately announces, "I want to do it myself!"

I am reluctant to admit to myself, much less to another person, that something is wrong or lacking in me that I can't correct, and experience tells me that along with the gift from another comes advice, disapproval or disdain. Also, being in debt to another often leads to a changed relationship. If my experience is true of others, giving and taking help is a minefield of large dimensions.

It turns out that it is the attitude and motive of the giver that is the key to healthy giving and receiving. For the giver has to overcome the natural resistance of the person being helped, even when the help is asked for, as well as the desire to deal with feelings of power or control in the relationship. Can, for example, financial help be given by parents to an adult child without 'parental advice?' The poet James Russell Lowell has a wonderful line: "the gift without the giver is bare."

Of course, the traveler could sense my unhappiness at being disturbed. Certainly, he could detect a sliver of skepticism borne in my mind from numerous other persons over the years stopping for help. Thus, his begrudging gratitude.

Genuine giving must be done with discretion and wisdom. There are a lot of frauds, scam artists, and people lazy enough to live off others. Supporting them is not a wise thing to do. But, along with the wisdom of discrimination, I need to better learn the wisdom of sensitive giving.

Still, having considered the difficulties of giving and receiving, I would rather err on the side of giving wrongly than not helping at all. Purity of heart in giving and receiving is, as in other areas of life, hard to come by.

21 September 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Foolish Consistencies

2006-05-10T19:02:00.000-07:00

Maestro Georg Solti, conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for 22 years, died two years ago this month. Solti, with that long career behind him, still would turn over the leaves of new, unmarked scores in his search for a fresh interpretation of music earlier performed. "The enemy, for a musician as for any other artists, is not this or that negative remark by an outsider, but rather laziness and self-complacency."

True for more than artists. Routine kills the inquisitive spirit, treating each similar experience as eye-glazing repetition. Routine stunts relationships, viewing the other person as a static entity. Routine stifles science, skipping over the anomalies that question accepted truths. Routine turns a minister's fifteen years experience in three different churches into five years experience three times. Routine commitment to organizations justifies all policies and actions.

A deep discomfort accompanies Solti's statement. At one time, I would begin each Sunday's bulletin with a blank sheet of paper. The structure of the service would take shape depending on the morning's theme. In this way, form would follow function. Though not always successful, when form and function were in harmony, worship came alive in a special way. The lack of time to do this week after week and the need to have such creativity complete several weeks ahead so choral music can be rehearsed has made continuing the practice unfeasible. The compromise has been to use a repetitive form but to make certain that all the elements of the worship service support and expand the theme.

Yet, not all routine is to be discounted. There is the unconscious rhythm of breathing. There is the routine of brushing one's teeth, saving time and avoiding a clutter of the mind with endless decisions of detail. There is the repetition of a mantra that allows a person to enter a different level of consciousness (the routine order of worship can be experienced as an elongated mantra). So very often I have repeated the Lord's Prayer word-for-word and not remembered saying it.

Ralph Waldo Emerson provides guidance at this point. He wrote: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." Not all consistency but a foolish consistency. The word 'foolish' is critical. Given the ease with which we unobtrusively slip into a routine of "laziness and self-complacency," one's first impulse should be to mistrust every consistency as foolish until proven otherwise.

Emerson went on to say: "With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do." Well, if Emerson says so.

14 September 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity

"Out Damned Spot, Out"

2006-05-08T17:48:00.000-07:00

"You will be sinning against history
if you allow the partisan cabal in Congress
and the jackals of the media to force you from office."

Spoken by an advisor to President to Clinton? No, spoken to President Nixon just before he resigned from office. However, we hear similar words today. Twice in my lifetime I have experienced my government paralyzed by presidential scandal.

I ask, "Why do we get in these predicaments?" Certainly today's politicians are not more pernicious. When George Washington was a politician President (instead of the "Father of Our Country") the press editorialized sonorously: "If ever a nation was debauched by a man, the American nation has been debauched by Washington." One general called him "that dark designing sordid ambitious vain proud arrogant and vindictive knave." (My, how repressed and mild is today's political invective.)

Going for the jugular in Robert Bork's, Clarence Thomas', and Lani Guinier's confirmation hearings released a highly corrosive and grim-lipped retaliatory spirit in our nation's political life. 'Borking' is now part of our language.

Especially potent, though, has been the marriage of the intensive intrusion into politicians' lives to new media realities:

What surer path is there to reporter stardom than to emulate the success of Bernstein and Woodward (a Pulitzer Prize, a book and a movie) by uncovering scandal, especially in the highest office?

Add to that the inability to keep the lid on news because of the instant transmission of news on the internet.

Finally, and most importantly, there is the insatiable need of TV to fill every non-advertising minute with news—every hour, hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month. Even minor news is repeated and repeated until it escalates into major news which again is repeatedly repeated. Sprinkle in sex and scandal and audiences and advertising revenue increase. No wonder we, the viewers, are so weary. Yet, right now, even as I write, news managers face another twenty four hours to fill, and twenty four hours after that.

I believe, though, that we are getting what we want. Are the Republicans unhappy with the stew in which Clinton has placed himself? Did we hear protests of "No more!" from Democrats during the investigations of the Nixon presidency? Really, are any of us immune from the enticement of lurid scandal and sex?

New technology, politicians' veniality, and our own venial craving for titillation all play their part. However, quoting Shakespeare, "the fault is in ourselves."

7 September 1998

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters, Media, US politics

Awe and Alarm

2006-05-07T19:17:00.000-07:00

Morning traffic has slowed considerably. Schools are now in session. Behind the turtle-slow school bus I have been reflecting on modern education—not difficult with each day's newspaper regurgitating a mantra of educational issues: decaying buildings, extravagant promises of the latest educational fad, whole language and phonic battles, drugs and guns, school vouchers, students ignorant of history...

I feel alarm but I also feel awe. Invited to attend the opening night of a high school play, I find the drama teacher sitting in front of me. "This is the students' play" is his response to my open-mouthed surprise. What then appears on stage equals the very best of amateur adult theater. Similar experiences accompany attendance at the performance of orchestras, drill teams and academic bowls. The level of performance far excels what was true of high school in my day. When the time, effort and imagination of youth are captured and then disciplined into a performance, awe springs forth.

I do feel awe but also alarm. A majority of high school students cannot locate the Civil War in time, much less know of the wrenching cost of the war in human life (over 600,000 killed in the four years of fighting between 1861 and 1865 and over a million more wounded or crippled). They are unaware of the widows and orphans scratching out an existence in a land physically and economically devastated.

Awe and alarm give way to the reluctant acknowledgement of my own disinterest in accomplishing much in high school. Manipulating the system to avoid classes (so skillfully that predicting a criminal future would have had some validity), skipping school in the fall and spring to sit and think on the high bluff overlooking the Mississippi, and working three part-time jobs consumed most after school and weekend time. Thus I made it through high school. Not very promising and, to tell the truth, outside of Lincoln, Lee, Grant and Gettysburg, I have little other school remembrance of the Civil War.

To awe, alarm and acknowledgement I decided to add appreciation to the teachers who have to teach students like me. How discouraging for teachers, day-after-day, to know that watching the clock crowds out that past era in which a president was killed, three Constitutional amendments were passed, and the meaning of the word "America" was forever changed. Only long after those teachers had disappeared from view into nursing homes and death did this former student of theirs give some thoughts of appreciation.

To my initial alliterative title of awe and alarm, I now add acknowledgement and appreciation. Having demonstrated proficiency in A's, it is now time for me to work on my B's and C's.

31 August 1998

Technorati Tags: Education, Mind Matters

Reflections on Terrorism

2006-05-06T19:14:00.000-07:00

The embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam joined the World Trade Center and the Beirut Marine barracks as terrorists' targets. Even while decrying terrorism, I find a clear logic undergirding terrorists' actions.

Terrorism is the violence of the weak; war is the violence of the strong. Each is given due honor and each is condemned, depending on which group is speaking.

Violence so very quickly moves our languid blood. Terrorism and war have an instantaneous binding power—to rally supporters.

We decry the breakdown of "law and order." But, law and order is the slogan of those in control—law being the rule of the powerful and order being that which is imposed by rulers. For example, Israel, as the powerful nation in the Middle East, is able to define law and order and thus label Palestinians as terrorists, whereas Israel's own violent actions in the name of law and order find little condemnation.

Injustice is the seedbed of anger; unrecognized and sustained injustice provokes violence. Think of the anger generated by being cut off on the freeway or having one's child not get her or his due in school. Unaddressed or sustained, such incidences can provoke inner rage and even a violent outburst. Our country was founded in terrorist's acts—unjust taxation without representation and the long list of other injustices enumerated in the Declaration of Independence.

Terrorism gives life to those engaged in it. The British writer G. K. Chesterton pointed out: "When a man has found something which he prefers to life, he then for the first time begins to live." Jesus said much the same thing. To find a purpose beyond one's own ego—like Nathan Hale or Bonhoeffer or a suicide terrorist- allows a person to come fully alive. Terrorists do what our 'heroes' do but for what we consider the wrong things.

Truly terrible are those violent actions that visit random death on innocents. Terrible, also, are lives wasted with narrow vision. Mull over with me the words of two other British writers—William Butler Yeats and George Bernard Shaw.

Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

24 August 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Statistical Imagination

2006-05-05T19:49:00.000-07:00

It took my breath away: linear bands, snaking across the page from left to right and then from right to left. Before my eyes lines became people and the loss of human life staggered me. I was reading the book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information which contained French engineer Charles Joseph Minard's 1861 graphic of the terrible fate of Napoleon's army in Russia.

The chart began with a broad tan band, representing 422,000 soldiers who marched in June 1812 from the Polish border. The band narrowed to less than half its original width as the army reached Moscow in September. Then the narrowed black band moved from right to left, displaying Napoleon's diminished retreating army arriving back in Poland in December with 10,000 men, or 2% of the original army. (One place where the thinning black band abruptly narrows to a fine line is at the Berezina River where over half the extant army was killed or captured).

That chart has changed how I read the numbers of war dead in history books. No longer do I only see numbers on a page and allow my eye to smoothly slide into subsequent narrative. I now find my imagination turning numbers into human beings, each seen as a part of a network of family and friends. Then I think, too, of those not shown: the Russians soldiers killed and the peasants slaughtered.

This statistical graphic somewhat prepared me for another graphic display a century later. It was at the Vietnam Memorial, in Washington, D.C., that I found the same overwhelming sense of war's abstraction turning into the real lives of individual human beings.

Joseph Stalin said that "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic." It took a nineteenth-century statistical graphic to break my numbing surrender to a once unimaginable magnitude.

17 August 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Family Heirlooms

2006-05-04T19:22:00.000-07:00

Picking up the album and turning the pages, she stopped at the smiling faces in bathing trunks at the beach. Her eyes lost focus, as she was lost in memories of that now-distant time when her family was all together, before her brother had died in the war and her father had followed her mother in death. She deliberately broke her reverie as she realized that time did not allow for such unstructured moments. She had taken a week off from work and family to fly in to close down her childhood home. There was so much to do—clean out the house, contract for some minor repairs, and get ready for the realtor who would place the house on the market. She was finding that she shouldn't, couldn't allow herself to remember things too deeply, because of limited time and a limited emotional reservoir.

Other photographs brought puzzlement. Some, dating back decades, were pictures of relatives whose identity she hardly remembered. There was a couple with babe in arms standing so proudly next to her father and mother, but who were they? She didn't want to toss out that family linkage, but with a limited-storage modern house, she simply did not have the room. Nor would her own children have a place in their lives for such extraneous items.

Left to the end was the closet in which her parents had stored the many toys, papers, and awards of her childhood. They, too, had the effect of dredging up so many memories of delight, and some breath-taking pensiveness of what might have been.

She completed her tasks and then flew home to re-enter her current world. Still, she could not so quickly close down her parents' lives. Continuing to drift in from the edge of her consciousness were remembrances of all the vitality, the struggling, the caring and, in the end, the decreasing focus and interest in living. All was now ended, except in her memory, and as she knew, the intensity of those remembrances would diminish as "life moves on."

Returning home, she looked around her own home and decided to spare her children all the work of sorting, keeping and tossing (mostly tossing) of the accruements of her life. So, one night after work, she opened a drawer to begin the process. The first item she picked up was a membership card from an organization she had left a decade earlier. Of no use to her, and certainly of no use to her children, still the card brought back memories of people and activities. The card was a link in her own life. She sighed, put the card back and closed the drawer.

Someday the children, she thought, will wonder why their mother kept that old thing, as they toss it into the wastebasket.

10 August 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

"The Bible Tells Me So"

2006-05-03T19:01:00.000-07:00

Wives are to submit to their husbands and homosexuals are today's designated sinners, How do we know? The Bible told us so—according to the 'Bible believers.'

For consistency, true 'Bible believers,' need to consider re-instituting slavery. Slaves populate the Old Testament. Jesus was silent on the issue of slavery. Paul exhorted Christian slaves to be obedient to their masters and advised masters to treat their slaves kindly. Nowhere, absolutely nowhere does the Bible question the institution of slavery as contrary to the will of God. Why have 'Bible-believing' Christians dropped this clear and compelling Biblical acceptance?

Four general Councils of the Church in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries approved slavery. The great Dominican Bartolome de las Casas spent much of his life defending the rights of the Indians of South America, and to protect the Indians from slavery, he suggested that African slaves be used instead. In England, eight years before our forefathers were incorporating slavery in our Constitution and at a time when the popes were still using slaves to power their galleys, former slave ship captain John Newton was penning the words to "Amazing Grace," For the first seventy years of our nation, Bible-believing preachers north and south (but especially south) quoted their Bibles to support pro-slavery sentiments.

A number of our nineteenth-century Congregational forebears read their Bibles differently. They read that Jesus welcomed the marginalized people of his day. They read of Paul opening the church to the despised non-kosher and non-circumcised Gentiles. They saw Paul's great charter-"In Christ there is no longer Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free"-breaking down the barriers humans put up against each other. Some, even dared to accept Paul's Christian charter and ordain a woman—in 1853.

Deprived of the abolitionists to attack, those stalwart nineteenth-century 'Bible-believing' preachers moved on to attack demon rum, playing cards, working on Sundays, and dancing. Deprived of victory in those areas, they then preached against evolution, sexual immorality and divorce, Again deprived of a victory, they decided to target abortion, working women and homosexuals.

Karl Barth, a great theologian of this century and a prolific writer, asked to sum up the Christian message in one sentence said: "Jesus loves me this I know for the Bible tells me so." The credible 'Bible-believers' speak of such love for themselves and for all others.

3 August 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

What's Your Lynching Story?

2006-05-02T22:38:00.000-07:00

Gary Cooper reached out and shook her hand, the very first time on television that a white reached out and touched the hand of an African-American in friendship. Her movie scenes were cut when those movies were shown in the South. Her name? Lena Horne.

Other stories are even more painful to hear. So clear in my memory is the story of the highly-decorated W.W.II black soldier who, discharged in New York, could not find a motel in which to stay as he wended his way down the highway to his South Carolina home.

Thankfully, such stories are part of our segregationist past. Or, so I hoped.

On Ted Koppel's Nightline program a group of seven African-Americans referred to the "lynching stories" they share when together. One, a judge, while waiting outside a hotel to be picked up to go to a banquet, was told by a white man to carry his bags into the hotel. On a whim the man carried the bags and then, when asked how much he was owed, said, "Twenty dollars." The shocked man gave the twenty dollars. The panel laughed, but not their eyes.

I think that we will have reached a just society when there is an end to such lynching stories. When the stories that are told are just human stories, stories that arise out of the absurd and painful things that happen to each of us because we are human and not because of color or sex or ethnicity or....

For, in reality, it is the shared pain and tragedy of our lives, the "lynching stories," that bind us in real community. That certainly is the experience of twelve-step and therapy groups. When I am with others who tell of their exploits and successes, boredom and weariness set in,. But when a person traces the trail of her or his pain and despair, failure and fatigue, I am caught in the real human story.

In the 1950s musical, "For Heaven's Sake," there was the song titled: "He Was a Flop at 33." Indeed, we Christians gather each Sunday around a lynching, a first century lynching, story that forms us into a community.

27 July 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

A Victim of the Good

2006-04-30T19:00:00.000-07:00

From known and unknown persons, the letters come. Stringing together scripture passages and personal testimony from edge-to-edge on paper, they attempt to demonstrate to me the truth. Finding excitement and meaning for their own lives, they are convinced that I need to find what they have found in order to have what they have. From those I know, who have been converted, I can only be happy for them and touched by their concern for me.

And yet...

I find myself disheartened. Shoehorned into a few carefully selected scripture verses is the vibrancy of the Bible's recording of two millennia of people's encounter with the Divine, the magnitude of another two millennia of men and women living out their friendship with Jesus, and the magnificence of the diverse ways in which Christian believers today struggle to be faithful.

A touchstone for these people are Jesus' words to Nicodemus, "Unless you are born again, you cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven." I write back that Peter and Andrew, James and John simply left their nets and followed Jesus without being "born again." That people out of their diversity in a highly diverse world may respond in diverse ways is lost in their lockstep linkage of few scriptural passages.

Although most evident in those converted religious believers, such zeal for the state of my soul also pops up in other places. The couple who went to Marriage Encounter to heal their floundering relationship became evangelists for that which 'saved' them, and they imposed their enthusiasm and their tracts on me. Then there is the person who discovered compounding of interest and is an evangelist about financial wealth and future security.

Given the fact that there are so many unhappy individuals who have no clear focus for their lives, I cannot but be pleased that something captures a person's dreams and passion. Much good can happen when dreams and passion are joined.

And yet...

Too frequently, I find conversions leaving people with a desire to squeeze the exhilarating diversity of life into the narrow confines of a newly discovered passion. Too frequently, such conversions draw lines of acceptable and unacceptable between those who have, and have not, been blessed with the truth.

Too frequently, a good pushes out the best.

20 July 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Breaching the Wall of Separation

2006-04-29T19:06:00.000-07:00

Where is the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) when we need it? Why is there nary a peep from Americans United for Separation of Church and State (AU)?

Why, if a religious leader praying at an officially sanctioned public school graduation prompts a lawsuit, should not a politician be called to account for inserting himself into the area of religion? The culprit? Trent Lott, majority leader of the Senate. The infringement? Using the word sin—"Homosexuality is a sin."

Of course, most of us would recognize that Lott's use of the word sin is not the most flagrant violation of church-state separation. But, as I was amusing myself with thoughts of this reverse breach of church-state separation, I considered the strange twist the First Amendment has taken in contemporary American life.

One niggling incident is the case of the teacher who, in the name of the separation of church and state, rejected the paper of a high school student who, asked to write about a personal hero, wrote about Jesus (the teacher's judgment was supported by the principal, the school board, and a court). Much more serious is the accusation of the violation of church-state separation hurled at Roman Catholics for proclaiming their belief about the moral evil of abortion into our political and civil life

The First Amendment clearly walls off Congress (and political authorities) from instituting an officially sanctioned religion, but says absolutely nothing against churches who speak out or attempt to influence legislation, or individual believers seeking political office. The First Amendment only establishes a one-way wall. Do we really mean to suppress those religious liberals who speak out against Congress for eliminating aid to the poor to heat their homes? Do we mean to suppress the religious right who are concerned about twisted history taught to our young?

In the 60's the 'religious left' marched against segregation laws, and in the 90's the 'religious right' demonstrates against abortion laws. Both claim, from their own religious perspective, a moral mandate to speak out against laws they consider sinful (religious folk can legitimately use that word). The First Amendment does not take away that right.

Further thought on the First Amendment led me to question even the right of government to silence churches from taking stands for political parties and specific candidates. This is done through threatening the withdrawal of tax-exempt status (which is not constitutionally protected). Religious groups, quite understandably, are reluctant to test that line of thought.

Finishing my reverie, I realized that I need to assure Trent Lott that he need not quake in fear of a law suit from me. The ACLU and AU are not returning my calls.

13 July 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Retrospective Predestination

2006-04-28T19:56:00.000-07:00

About to embark on a U.S. tour, the first in ten years, Olivia Newton John was diagnosed with breast cancer. That same day her father died of cancer. Six years later—years that included a canceled tour, a mastectomy and chemotherapy, a gold record, and a record of environmental activism—she now says, "I don't know if I thought this at the time, but later on I thought that maybe this all might have happened for a reason—so that I could share my experiences and show that, look, it could happen to me, and I got through it. So can you."

"Maybe all this happened for a reason" is a frequent comment by those who have faced their own mortality and have survived, transformed. It is even the comment of those who, in looking at their past, see a decision or event that pushed their life in an unexpected, but very fulfilling direction. Others, who suffer from a series of missteps or disasters, also speak of fate or bad karma.

That sense of life being determined by something outside one's conscious choice led to the Christian doctrine of predestination. Logically, predestination followed from the idea that, if God is all-knowing, God knows the future as well as the past and present. In non-theological language, the same view is stated by the person who, escaping a serious accident in which several others are killed, thanks God for saving her or his life, followed by, "Maybe all this happened for a reason"

What we don't hear is a person saying, "God decided that the others in the accident needed to die," although such a thought might logically follow. That logic led to a pernicious view of God called double predestination. If God predestines to salvation, then God also predestines to damnation. Those who speak so glibly about "the will of God" too frequently perpetuate this vicious slander of God. (The Church condemned this doctrine of double predestination in 849.)

I am skeptical of the view that God directly intervenes in our lives or in human history, favoring this individual or that cause. Disease, despair and death defeat too many good human beings, and evil too often triumphs.

But there are enough stories of individuals and causes enduring a crucible of fire and emerging victorious to realize something is at work in this world. So, I have come to affirm what I call 'retrospective predestination,' not the belief that we live lives predetermined by fate or God, but a belief that, in looking backwards in our lives, we do find we live in a created universe in which we can tap into a ground of benevolence, in which life has hidden surprises of connectedness to which we can respond first with astonishment and then with gratitude.

It is a world in which cancer-breaking up a family and threatening to end a career and a life-left a person saying, "I've learned to value the day. I'm grateful to be getting older. I try to keep in touch with the fact that life is a gift—that every day is a gift." Maybe all this did happen for a reason.

6 July 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

A Premillennial Dispensationalist

2006-04-27T19:18:00.000-07:00

Not I, but there are plenty around today.

The premillennial dispensationalists examine Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation with a magnifying glass in order to divine the future. Groups vainly standing on hilltops (throughout history) waiting for THE END have discredited the religious enterprise. However, since religious experience is ordinary experience understood religiously, the impulse to know the future is ever with us.

Soon, the August issue of Sports Illustrated will come out with their annual predictions of college football ratings. Last year's August issue put Penn State as the top team and Michigan as 16th. At the end of the season, Michigan was number one and Penn State was 18th. In fact, eight teams predicted to be in the top 20 in Sports Illustrated were not there at year's end. Poor prognostication will not prevent millions from again gathering in August on the hilltop with Sports Illustrated in hand to gaze into the future.

The pages of The Wall Street Journal have knowledgeable men and women predicting the future of the stock market. The editors have also introduced the Dart Throwers—individuals who throw darts at a list of stocks. It is fascinating to note how often, on the hilltop, the Dart Throwers outperform the experts.

Reading Ezekiel, some found the birth of the State of Israel to be a sign of THE END, taking place within 40 years. Since that date has come and gone and THE END did not occur, some Christians decided to give God a bit of help by financing the blowing up of the Temple of the Mount (the third holiest place of Islam) in order to have room to rebuild the Temple of Solomon. I suppose that the theory is that if God is too kind to act, then He (never She in their literature) could use a nudge to begin the terrible tribulation. If they do blow up the Temple of the Mount, I predict there will be a conflagration—created by the world Muslim community.

There is a safe way to predict the future. Jeanne Dixon sets the example. Predicting in 1963 that someone important would die—and John F. Kennedy was assassinated-her publishers now promote her prescient power.

In the style of Jeanne Dixon, I place myself on the hilltop and predict the following: this fall a major American university will win the football championship, the business cycle will repeat the past, public education will make the headlines, a popular entertainer will end tragically, and the end of religion will be announced. And, those of us still breathing will wake up to a brand new day on January 2, 2000.

Place this Mind Matters on your refrigerator door and see if these predictions are not 100% accurate. Remember—you read it first from this secular premillennial dispensationalist.

29 June 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Misplaced Concreteness

2006-04-26T20:44:00.000-07:00

"Child abuse by God needs to be eliminated." That is the proposal of one group that abhors the traditional statement: God sent His Son, Jesus, to die so that we might be saved from our sins.

Child abuse? Living through the past four decades with demythologizing and "Jesus Christ Superstar," I thought little could surprise me. I was mistaken. Child Abuse!

But, it did trigger in my mind a long forgotten conversation with a person who, because of being severely abused as a child, had a catch in the throat when God was called Father. Another person still remember someone refusing to say, "I am a child of God," and responded with "I am an adult of God."

For some, how difficult it is to use familiar religious words and images, especially when those words are attached to hurtful experiences.

The mathematician-philosopher Alfred North Whitehead diagnosed this serious, and sometimes fatal, disease of the intellect as "misplaced concreteness," That is, we make words and images the reality, identical to that to which they point.

For example, those who want to burn the American flag may be irritating, but they are not destroying the country. They are only attacking a symbol that points to our country. The Supreme Court wisely recognized this when they made flag-burning protected speech and not arson. A photograph may draw one's thoughts back to happy family days, but the loss of the picture is not the destruction of the happy family time. As important as flag and family pictures are, neither are "the real thing." King Lear made a verbal vow a measure of his three daughters' fidelity. Cordelia, refusing the verbal vow, was dismissed. His misplaced concreteness made this Shakespearean play "a tragedy."

Religion is rife with misplaced concreteness. Not just divine child abuse, but onservatives use words as a litmus test of orthodoxy, and liberals think they have rejected religion by rejecting words.

"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me" is a genuine bit of childhood wisdom that describes misplaced concreteness. Well, words actually can hurt (even traditional Christian theology) because we haven't learned that childhood lesson. One might even speak of Mind Matters as misplaced concreteness, but then, out of kindness to the author, one might not.

22 June 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Boot Camp

2006-04-25T04:15:00.000-07:00

Another newspaper article describing the difficulty of contemporary family life left me irritated and dissatisfied. The unstated assumption was that congeniality and harmony ought to be the norm. Anything less needs to be "fixed." What needs fixing is that assumption.

The family exists—willingly or not—as the training ground for people to learn how to coexist with others who are very different from themselves. The family teaches us tolerance and acceptance of humans who are as vain and stubborn, exasperating and irrational, dogmatic and irritating as we ourselves are. The family is a boot camp for the battles and the people one faces all through life.

In the family we learn not just the easy love of those with similar interests and temperaments but also non-affectionate love—the tough love of persisting in willing the best for those who are unlike ourselves. To glare in anger and with hatred at one's sibling and have a parent say, "You don't have to like each other, but you have to love each other," is a critical part of life's boot-camp training.

Most of us born and reared in multiple-children families find little in common with siblings other than parentage. Later, when parents ourselves, we stand in amazement as we find our offspring, from the same genetic sources, uniquely different and distinct. A reasonable conclusion to draw is that the value of family life is not that it is a haven of harmony but a crucible (from the Latin for "cross") of conflicting temperaments. It is not the blending and harmonizing of varying temperaments but the navigating through and negotiating of differences that makes family life a boot camp.

Parents can feel positive about their role in providing space where a child can say, "I hate you," without killing the other, and where arms are available even in such rage. "Home," wrote Robert Frost in The Death of the Hired Man, "is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in." Home is not where one suppresses feelings for an enforced harmony but the place where people grimace and disagree and fight and love each other. Home is where loving arms restrain even kicking and screaming. Home is life's boot camp.

Parents' hearts go pitter-patter, when their children at the age of 27 (or thereabouts), actually begin to like and appreciate each other. That is dessert. But, it comes only after the bread and butter, meat and potatoes (or whatever the equivalent is in this diet-conscious age) of family life sustaining and molding children through the preceding years.

15 June 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Family, Religion

Why?

2006-04-21T19:14:00.000-07:00

Another student, another school, another state, but the same tragic results. This time the student is Kipland Kinkel. The school is Thurston High in Springfield, Oregon. Two students and two parents are dead, and 22 students are wounded.

Again, we know what happened and where it happened but fail at knowing why it happened. Will we ever? Perhaps not. For one thing, given the general inability of adults, much less children, to articulate their inner lives, we are left with TV images of the uncomprehending and bewildered faces of the families and authorities, the impassive face of the killer, and the guesses of the psychologists.

I find that an even bigger obstacle to understanding is the absence of any acceptable language to talk about--"evil," for language is the way we label and understand the world of which we are a part.

When the Devil was real, Kip's action could be understood. People knew where to lay blame for such evil. But, the Devil got dismissed and then trivialized by the flippant, "The Devil made me do it." Now, bereft of the reality to which that word points, we seek other means to comprehend such incomprehensible acts.

Adding to our difficulty is our oft-repeated belief that humans are, by nature, basically good. How can a 'good' person be capable of such evil acts? We, too, seek an answer from outside ourselves. If not a Devil then a dysfunctional family, drug-impairment, genetic imbalance, or association with the wrong people. However, our psychological and sociological explanations turn thin when we look at the recent wave of school shootings.

Perhaps we never will fully understand why one child in a family will take a more destructive path than her or his brothers and sisters. Perhaps we never will totally understand why one perfect, but quiet, neighbor will kill while another perfect, but quiet, neighbor does not. Perhaps at the root of human evil there is irrationality that the ancients tried to comprehend by a Devil, and which we, without a Devil, seek in psychological, sociological and medical explanations.

In the heyday of radio, one program's opening line was: "Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows." I wish the Shadow were around today.

8 June 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

The Not So Opposite Sex

2006-04-20T19:59:00.000-07:00

1985 was the date on a four-frame cartoon found in a box of about-to-be discarded material. A man and a woman face each other and the man is saying, "This comparable worth idea is dumb—and I'll show you why!" The second frame has an apple and an orange on the table and the man is saying, "Here's an apple and here's an orange. Now—how can you compare the two?" In the third frame the woman says, "They're both fruit! They're both round! They both grow on trees! And they're both good for you." In the final frame the man says, "Uh—Let me start over again"

Human differences are fascinating—innate, cultural, religious, and self-chosen. Of course, the female-male difference is basic. Given Men Are From Mars and Women are From Venus' month-after-month best selling popularity, the awareness of differences was heightened. Research, also, is bringing to light many other differences-for example, brain structure.

Differences exist. The question is: do differences delight or divide? Do they enrich the human enterprise or do they demonstrate the superiority of one group over the other?

Unfortunately, differences are used by the powerful to give reason for their superiority and to denigrate those of "lower status." Structures of thought, action and culture created by a dominant group become the norm, reinforcing their perceived superiority. Since absurdities and anomalies abound in any human enterprise, it is easy for the non-powerful (among themselves, of course) to ridicule the powerful.

Differences will always produce some sparks, but how much better to use differences to enlarge, enrich, and enhance our understandings of the whole human enterprise. What could human life be if the emotional and mental energy of everyone was welcomed and embraced?

Now that apples and oranges, compared, have so much in common, let's begin to truly relish the differences.

1 June 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

A Less Reluctant Heir

2006-04-19T20:21:00.000-07:00

The British foreign secretary, Mr. Cook, has generated great anger in former British colonies—India and Israel, to name two. According to one commentator, his gaffes were not based on post-imperial delusions of grandeur, as some accused, but on the fact that he does not regard himself as an heir to the British empire. That is, he claims no personal connection with unsavory aspects of his country's past.

I have that same struggle.

The treatment of Native Americans was tragic, one example being the Trail of Tears during Andrew Jackson's presidency. But, because this happened so long ago, and because I see this tragedy in the context of history's unbroken chain of violence occurring whenever one group moves into the territory of another, I deny any personal responsibility. I also firmly resist and resent the effort of those who want to generate guilt in me for such sins of the past. The terrible tragedies are acknowledged, but any personal responsibility on my part is denied.

Yet, I gladly claim the Declaration of Independence as part of my history. I embrace with pride the astounding bravery and fortitude of those who set out on the trans-contintenal Oregon Trail in the 1840s as well as those in 1942 who, on Wake Island, withstood six assaults by massively superior Japanese forces before being overrun. I am pleased (prideful, actually) with the British historian, Paul Johnson, whose first two sentences in his book on this country are: "The creation of the United States of America is the greatest of all human adventures. No other national story holds such tremendous lessons, for the American people themselves and for the rest of mankind."

But, can I accept the pride without the guilt? I think not. I am an heir to my country's past—all of it—the Trail of Tears, as well as the Declaration of Independence. The whole ball of wax is this country's history, and every bit of it is an integral part of my personal story.

I had to learn as a citizen what I earlier learned personally. Acknowledging and accepting my "shadow side" was necessary to grow a healthy self. Trivializing and denying my past allowed bewildering actions and less than straight-forward relationships to slip into, and plague, my life. I view the serious strains and injustices of our national life in the same way.

Acknowledging the truth was a difficult first step. The even more difficult second step—changing behavior—came next. Acknowledging and changing is the only way we successfully become true heirs to our own, as well as our country's past.

A genuinely healing trail of tears.

25 May 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, History, Mind Matters, Religion

Nothing Much of Any Consequence

2006-04-17T19:01:00.000-07:00

Celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of Abraham Lincoln, cartoonist H. T. Webster re-created the event by depicting two Kentucky woodsmen meeting on a snow-covered wilderness path. The two exchanged news of the swearing in of the new president, James Madison. They wondered how much of Europe Napoleon would be able to conquer. Finally, they discussed the local news. One of the men mentioned that a baby had been born at Tom and Nancy Lincoln's place. And both agreed that nothing much of any consequence ever happened in their out-of-the-way corner of the world.

I find that same point of view when I ask people to talk about their own faith journey. There is a denial of a spiritual journey of any depth or significance, accompanied by some reluctance to share what little they see present.

I believe the truth is just the opposite. Every single one of us has struggled with issues and relationships, carried burdens and suffered silently, persisted with unfulfilled longings and dreams, and attempted to serve God and live out our deepest values. Every single one of us is a deep reservoir of experiences which, when acknowledged and articulated, makes us experienced travelers on the spiritual path. Every single one of us is on the cutting edge of our own journey, and we all have stories of victories gained and defeats endured (unlike Lucy who, on hearing Charlie Brown say that life has its ups and downs commented, "Not mine! Mine is up, up, up!"—unfortunately, I've actually known people like that).

In contrast to former years, I now am very cautious in sermons and conversations when I hold up models such as Albert Schweitzer and Mother Theresa, lest their extraordinary gifts lead others to discount their own experiences—nothing much of any consequence takes place here. The great, instead of being examples to emulate, easily become icons to one's own insignificance.

One of the deep pleasures I have as a minister is that I hear the human journey of others, and I am able to share my own peregrinations. Through the often expressed struggles, fears and disappointments, I find a deep integrity and nobility in the humans struggling for meaning and hope. I am often in awe of others' efforts to make sense of their lives. It is with others, in such conversations, that I feel that deep reality we call God.

For many to believe what I have written will require a conversion. But, why not? The Spirit continually tugs at us, enticing us to claim our part in the magnificent journey we all are on. Nothing is stale or secure when the Spirit is stirring-not even belief in our own inconsequence.

18 May 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Personal Convictions

2006-04-15T20:23:00.000-07:00

Her distress was evident. An encounter with a fundamentalist Christian neighbor—absolute certainty of convictions, numerous Bible quotations—left her frustratingly dissatisfied with her inability to articulate her convictions.

I was quickly drawn into her feelings, having often found myself attracted to such passion, certainty and clarity of belief and, at the same time, repelled by the accompanying dogmatism and inability to tolerate differing opinions. Out of self-protection, I began to articulate my own deep-core convictions.

Deep down, I feel I belong. I do not feel alienated from people nor from life. The angst of my early university years was fashionable not integral. I am not fighting parents and early upbringing. Often I do not like what I say and do, but such personal disappointment and disapproval do not undercut my sense of belonging nor make me wistful for another life.

Deep down, I find I am grateful. Life is a gift, and I have been grateful in whatever circumstances I have found myself—from the years of having to daily boil the open ditch drinking water which first flowed through several Turkish villages to the affluent years in Houston. Situations change, but gratitude remains.

Deep down, I know I am responsible. I cannot shake off the conviction that I betray life by a singular emphasis on myself. The ancient who wrote, "If I am not for myself, who will be? If I am only for myself, what am I?" expresses well life's balance. I am a responsible part of this natural world and the people who inhabit it.

Deep down, I find I tolerate ambiguity. The diversity of this world is endlessly fascinating: how people give shape to their personal lives, how needs get formed into institutions, and how new ideas tantalize our minds. For me, this has meant that finding and articulating my own beliefs-in order to not deny the convictions of others—was a most difficult task.

Such convictions are not the exciting variety which makes me want to buttonhole someone, but they are the solid, steady beliefs that inform my days.

11 May 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

On Learning How to Read

2006-04-13T21:18:00.000-07:00

Another conversation. A stranger who, on discovering that I am a minister, uses me to pour out a tale of woe centered on the imprisoning of his young spirit by his early church experience. While I'm listening, several thoughts chase around my head. I do listen carefully because people's stories need an attentive ear. I wonder, though, as I am listening, if this telling is part of a process of reconciliation with his past or is only one more expression of nurtured anger. The conversation also makes me extra grateful my experience of religion has been so personally enlivening. For example

I learned how to read by reading the Bible--not my abc's, but how to read inquisitively, skeptically, and critically. Instead of destroying faith, the academic study of the Bible helped me with richer understandings through questioning the text. The same tools, honed by critically reading the Bible, are used in my general reading and conversing. The Bible has made me less, not more, gullible.

Instead of a constricting influence, I have found religion keeps me in touch with the world around and pulls me out of a natural self-focused existence. Whether it be building a Habitat house, or hearing about gun control, or grieving over the slaughter in Rwanda, or considering the physical needs of earthquake victims in Turkey, I am consistently asked to consider, pray for and act in these areas. And, I am given a channel to do so.

I even attend worship when I don't have to. Entering into the rhythm of worship, and surrounded by others, I find that there is a subtle unconscious (and sometimes acutely conscious) process of examination of my relationships, my priorities and my future. Plato wrote in his Apology that "The life which is unexamined is not worth living." Without worship little examination takes place, outside of a crisis.

My careful and sympathetic listening was not reciprocated. As I briefly and straight-forwardly shared my story, his eyes told me he was not in the mood to have his angry remembrances tampered with.

I left incredibly sad for him. For in embracing a comfortable and familiar past anger, he is unable to embrace a present joy.

4 May 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

"...And There's the Rent."

2006-04-11T21:30:00.000-07:00

Why I let myself be talked into spending a pre-college summer as a student minister in the wide-open spaces of eastern Wyoming still puzzles me. Separated from all family and friends, painfully shy, and having had previously only one very brief anguish-filled speaking moment in worship, terror was an integral part of my week.

Each Sunday in a small wooden school house-no Jeffersonian wall of separation there-I took a deep breath, gripped the sides of the lectern, glued my eyes to the typed page, and without missing one single word, raced through 18 minute sermons in 10 minutes flat. Panic made me the fastest word in the West. Only long after the summer was over did I realize just how patient and tolerant, kind and accepting those church folk were. And because of them, I found that what I just knew "I never could do," I did.

That distant summer returned to mind with Lena Horne talking about her early career. "How can I sing the Blues?" (then a new musical form), she fearfully asked Count Basie while both were performing at the Cotton Club. Basie replied, "You've got two small children, and there's the rent."

I would imagine that in the lives of most of us necessity has forced us to accomplish something, or made us become someone, beyond the border of our experience and knowledge. Welling up within us has been the life power to overcome the terror of the unknown. It is for this reason verses of a poem by Theodore Roethke attach themself so powerfully to me.

I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.

I learn by going where I have to go.

Having moved through that summer of terror, I learned Roethke's truth: trust found in the overcoming or removal of fear and faith in the learning and growing process of living. Two small children and the rent for Lena Horne and my strong sense of carrying out a summer responsibility made us learn by going where we had to go. I now realize the importance of that summer. For when maturity entices me to make life safe and predictable, that summer makes me far more willing to entertain new truths and experiences.

Cabeza de Vaca, tossed by the sea on the Texas sands in the early 16th century was the first European to traverse this vast territory as he was passed from one Indian tribe to another. He concluded his account: "They (the tribes) wanted us to heal, but we said we had no education and no certification to be doctors. On being threatened with death, we became healers. We are more than we thought we were."

Indeed we all are.

27 April 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

For Your Own Good

2006-04-10T20:11:00.000-07:00

"Your mother and I don't want you sneaking around smoking, so if you're going to smoke, smoke, but don't hide it." That fatherly permission/command came when I was in the fifth grade! Today it would merit a call to Children's Protective Services. Then, it was just two parents, both smokers, doing the best they knew to help their child navigate life. As a result, there was no rebellion and no need to smoke.

If my parents' permissiveness was a bit nontraditional, the current campaign against smoking is straight out of the 19th century. When our (Texas) Attorney General states, apparently in all seriousness, that "history will record the modern-day tobacco industry alongside the worst of civilization's evil empires" and a book reviewer in the New York Times tells us that tobacco firms are "the most criminal, disgusting, sadistic, degenerate group of people on the face of the earth," I can hear echoes of Carrie Nation's tirades on demon rum and see clearly her ax smashing barrels while the whiskey ran into the thirsty earth. Today's anti-smoking crusade is the left's take on the right's call to return to the old morality.

George Orwell, in observing the practices of Communism, warned us in the 1940s about the danger of the political use of language to redefine reality. Smoking is now defined by some as "a pediatric disease" and a "public health menace," to which one medical professor commented, "Formerly, the state, drunk with religion, persecuted people with bad religious habits; today, drunk with medicine, it persecutes people with bad medical habits." Redefined is President Franklin Roosevelt, whose new statue in Washington speaks without his signature piece: a long cigarette holder. Another interesting change in language is the substitution of kill for die, as the shift from "Smokers die of lung cancer" to "Smoking kills."

Well, so do Big Macs and ice cream (the fat), and motorcycles (16 times more fatal than driving a car). With a little imagination, there is little that we couldn't define as a public health menace (actually, even life itself) and, for the good of individuals, make illegal.

I am not an apologist for tobacco. I like meetings in which the air is not blue with smoke, motel rooms that smell fresh, and restaurants in which I am not enveloped in smell and smoke. Not a smoker, cigarette's disappearance from store shelves would not bother me a bit. With a knowledge of past religious crusades, though, I am always leery when people want to control the private thoughts or behavior of others, even unhealthy behavior. Hard fought individual liberties ought not be relinquished in a puff of smoke.

And, once cigarettes are out of the way, who knows. The moral/medical police will most certainly refocus their for-your-own-good eye on other unhealthy evils. Perhaps Carrie Nation redux!

20 April 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

"Why Kill Our Children"

2006-04-08T21:55:00.000-07:00

The latest tragic and sad deaths on the schoolyard in Jonesboro, Arkansas,following similar killings in two other states, deeply trouble us. And well they should. Neither our laws nor our sensibilities can make room for two boys opening fire on their schoolmates.

Responses are predictable: keep guns away from kids (editorialists), prevent school violence (Clinton), research possible violation of federal laws (Reno). Another response is: change laws to make children adults at an earlier age so they can be executed at an earlier age. Already, some states have started down that path.

The government and editorialists have redoubled their rhetorical resolve and can feel good about having done their duty on their way to rhetorically addressing the next social issue. But questions do remain in my mind.

What is happening to our boys? In all these three cases boys have done the murders. Violence is still largely a male activity. If we don't address that (and not with more drugs to subdue them), I fear we will struggle bewilderedly with more incidents in schoolyards and on street corners.

Do we adults even like youth? In 1995, North Carolina's adult legislators passed a law requiring all drivers under 21 to be arrested if they had ingested any alcohol or drugs, no matter how little (not holding adults to the same stringent standard). Adult television and newspaper reporters write news stories (48 and 40 percent respectively) involving children and youth in crime and violence. "If children don't see themselves as dead, arrested, hurt, or hunted, they see themselves as problems," said one astute observer. Adults are the ones who make and distribute alcohol, drugs and TV violence. Even the current adult rhetoric about saving children from cigarettes is punitive and political.

Still, external factors can explain only so much. What is needed is an inner moral sense that weighs the immediate against something immutably right, and, then, follows the higher calling. That will require adults to articulate (and live) higher values. Adult toleration of current adult political behavior is not encouraging.

One culinary answer to our problem was given by Jonathan Swift (author of Gulliver's Travels) in a 1728 essay, "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People in Ireland from being a Burden to their Parents or Country and for Making them Beneficial to the Public." Many propose a swifter answer: lower the age for capital punishment.

13 April 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

"The Low, Vast Murmur of Life"

2006-04-05T19:15:00.000-07:00

The conversation was not unique. Still, for the person involved, it was anguishing. Trying to comprehend the tragic and senseless death of a friend, the person found the religion and morality she had been taught a flimsy structure collapsing under her. The props removed, the abyss of bitterness and cynicism was clutching her.

Certainly not unique for, to a greater or lesser extent, this is the story of each of us. Growing up, our parents and society attempt to provide us with a secure world, protecting us from hurts, tragedy and moral ambiguities. The stories we are told reward virtue and give genuine effort success. Religious knowledge and pious platitudes make us comfy in a neat, well-ordered universe. We delight in the simple idealism in a child's eyes and are genuinely sad to see wary calculation replace it.

At the moment, I did what I could: commiserate with her on the miserable and tragic world of which we are a part. Later--as the raw anger subsided and a moral lassitude began to set in—I could talk about the lives of those who raged at the night of death and still affirmed life, the absolute need to reject corrosive cynicism and, as an adult, affirm faith, hope and love, and the deeper, adult meanings, of the Bible stories learned in Sunday school.

I also shared my own thoughts which are expressed well by the writer D. H. Lawrence who, in a 1907 letter to the Reverend Robert Reid Lawrence, wrote:

I believe that people are converted when first they hear the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling their hitherto unconscious selves. I believe that people are born first unto themselves—for the happy developing of themselves, while the world is a nursery, and the pretty things are to be snatched for, and pleasant things tasted; some people seem to exist thus right to the end. But most are born again on entering adulthood; they are born to humanity, to a consciousness of all the laughing, and the never-ending murmur of pain and sorrow that comes from the terrible multitudes of brothers and sisters. Then, it appears to me, people gradually formulate their religion, be it what it may. A person has no religion who has not slowly and painfully gathered one together, adding to it, shaping it; and one's religion is never complete and final but must always be undergoing modification.

As children, we learn the stories that have come out of adults who have struggled with their own tragedies and demons. When we "hear the low, vast murmur of life, of human life, troubling [our] hitherto unconscious selves" and find our own tragedies and demons, then we begin the shaping of our own religious understanding.

Now, I could only silently bless her on her way.

6 April 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

"WWJD"

2006-04-04T19:02:00.000-07:00

I suddenly 'rubberbanded' to the late 1940s. The colorful wrist bands being worn by teens with "WWJD" woven into the material were not the call letters of a new radio station. WWJD stands for:

What Would Jesus Do?

a question to be asked when working through a moral quandary.

The question comes from the book, In His Footsteps (written by Frank Sheldon a Congregational minister). The story concerns a newspaper editor who begins to take his Christian discipleship seriously by asking, "What would Jesus do?" In his paper, news began to reflect less the media maxim, "If it bleeds, it leads," and more the positive, helpful things taking place in people's lives. The WWJD question led the editor into some personally difficult, socially unpopular and financially threatening decisions.

Of course, the bracelets are a current fad and, being faddish, after this brief prominence, they will pass from the scene. Also, the WWJD question is far too simplistic and superficial for many of the major moral dilemmas we encounter. How, for example, does the question help us address the cultural issues of abortion and human cloning without leading to the current political and social cliches or prejudices already on our tongues? We hear this so often in the stock phrases of the preacher's, "The Bible says," and the politician's, "The American people want").

Still, the question, tied to the earnestness of my youth, was a straightforward ethical standard. It had me thinking more about Jesus as a person and his teachings. Today, the question breaks through many of my hardened opinions that I pass off as principles. As a conscious way of being a disciple of Jesus, the question clearly is superior to the usual, daily unthinking, non-attentiveness which often attends my discipleship.

With the genuine desire to emulate Jesus by discerning what he said and did and to translate that to one's present life is a good first stage for Christian decision-making. It doesn't replace the more complex and sophisticated analysis necessary for the ambiguous moral issues which we face, but it is amazing how often this question confronts a far too comfortable and smug acceptance of things as they are.

An Old Testament prophet once wrote, "And a little child shall lead them." I never thought it might mean one's own early self.

30 March 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Proposition 227

2006-04-01T19:29:00.000-08:00

I remember signing up for French as a high school sophomore. The textbooks had not arrived so we were learning by speaking. Not being able to connect the sounds to written words, I was lost. After two weeks I made, for me, a fateful decision. I transferred into a world history class. I still don't know French (even have an aversion to learning it), but world history began my fascination with learning.

How students are to learn a foreign language—English—is the subject of a state-wide proposition to be voted on in California. Should bilingual education be eliminated? Strong and persuasive voices can be heard on both sides. Being a bellwether state, their decision will affect education in the rest of the country.

Calexico, a border town of 22,000, has all the makings for social and educational disaster (high gang activity, drug and alcohol abuse, 25% unemployment and average family income of $12,000), yet its innovative bilingual policies send 93% of its recent high school graduates to college. On the other side, some deeply involved in bilingual education have horror stories of students locked into Spanish and not learning English. Also, they ask, if bilingual education is the answer to language learning, why only Spanish? Why not bilingual education for the other non-English speaking students (100+ non-English languages spoken in homes).

Thus, bilingual education joins other controversies in today's education: phonics vs. whole word, home schooling vs. public schooling vs. parochial and private schooling, and, from a few decades back, open vs. traditional classrooms. Enough successes and failures of each proposal exist to keep controversy alive.

The basic flaw, it seems to me, is that all students cannot be shoehorned into one system of learning. We now know that some students learn better aurally and some visually. Some students learn best in a highly structured environment, others in an atmosphere of being able to explore. Rote learning pulls some along, whereas experimental leaning entices others. I have no doubt that some children, as some adults, learn best by immersion in a second language, which others learn best with their primary language as a reference point for the new.

The simple answer to these educational controversies is, I believe, is to provide more taxes for more educational options and for relaxed control over classroom teachers. Neither is likely to happen with taxpayers grousing and administrators increasingly administrating. As a result, the dire results of public education will continue to populate the news and editorial pages of our newspapers.

I was saved by an option in tenth grade. The option to not learn English is unavailable to students today, except to drop out of school. Finding multiple ways to keep the dropping-out option from being exercised is within our reach but currently is outside our will.

23 March 1998

A Dismal Cheer

2006-03-31T08:30:00.000-08:00

Ancient wisdom from the East tells of a man who, seeking help for depression and for knowledge of life's meaning, sought out a famous guru living high on a nearly inaccessible mountain. For his efforts no advice was received, but for each misery-laden complaint, the guru responded with, "Yes, I've been there too," and then shared from his own history. The seeker, angry that he had so little for his long trek, nevertheless was heard whistling as he returned home.

That story came to mind as the result of a request for some 'inspirational' Bible verses to help another in the difficult days she was facing. I gladly compiled a list of upbeat and affirmative passages.

Later, I thought about the passages I turn to when needing some support. In low periods of a sagging spirit, it is not the inspirational, but what many would consider 'the downer' passages, which feed my soul.

Loneliness becomes bearable, not in the promise "You will fill my heart" of Psalm 22, but in its previous plaintive cry, "My God, my God, why have you deserted me? I cry out day and night, but you don't answer." Spending time with the writer who walked "through the valley of the shadow of death" in Psalm 23 is of more comfort than the affirmation, "my cup runneth over." Reading out loud the weary and sonorous words of Ecclesiastes — "Vanity of vanities. All is vanity," or as another translation puts it, "Nothing makes sense! Everything is nonsense." — resonates with my own spirit. The more 'positive' verses are expressions for sunny days.

Rather than dismal words increasing depression, I find in the shared experiences and feelings of others a strangely wrought, and deeply felt knowledge of 'human companionship.' The 17th century John Ray who wrote, "Misery loves company," understood this well and is a spiritual kin.

But, not for all people. Some need a star to pull them out of their troubles. Others a dismal cheer.

16 March 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

"Six Impossible Things - Before Breakfast"

2006-03-29T06:03:00.000-08:00

"I can get around on the freeways but, not being the same as back home, it takes more energy. Likewise, navigating the aisles at the local supermarket. But the real energy grabber is making friends. To make five good friends I have to get to know fifty people. Do you know how much energy and time that takes?" So spoke with an Ohioan who moved to Houston to be with his grandchildren.

Reflecting on his complaint has made me wonder if, perhaps, it isn't change itself that is so disturbing to people as it is the anticipated drain of energy that change brings into our lives. We can feel weary just from thinking about our participation in an upcoming event.

Running, not walking, seems to be a natural state of the very young. Youths' muscles will twitch involuntarily on a Friday night with nothing to do. With age, though, any night of no activity receives a heartfelt sigh of relief, and any change of physical routine or shift in mental conviction can be an energy drain and is thus to be avoided.

It may be that the reason why some people — young or old — are so able to keep minds open to fresh ideas and bodies available for new adventures is a conscious, or unconscious, acceptance of one's energy depletion and the need for its replacement. A walk outdoors, listening to the waves on the beach, sewing, reading a novel, taking a nap or swimming are just some ways for energy replacement. The one place where there is no energy expended and none replaced is the place we all seem to want to avoid. So, finding a way to encourage and participate in change is a way of maintaining life.

If you really want to know you are fully alive, follow the queen who, in talking with Alice (in Lewis Carroll's "Through the Looking Glass", said: "When I was your age, I always did it (believed impossible things) for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

Now, after that, a nap.

9 March 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

"A Translator is a Traitor"

2006-03-28T05:03:00.000-08:00

"I disagree with you," and I ask, "About what?" I'm usually still puzzled after the person has described the disagreement, and I have to ask for further specificity. When I finally pinpoint the source of the other's disagreement, I often find that I am now the one in disagreement with that person's understanding.

No doubt, my own dullness of thought and fuzziness of expression leads to some confusion and dissent, but there is also misunderstanding existing in the ear of the hearer and the eye of the beholder. We all constantly respond to others, and to situations, through our own experience. A word that I find neutral is, for another, loaded with anguish. To an idea that I consider destructive or demonic, another responds with a shrug of the shoulder.

In scholarly circles the Italian expression, "Traduttore traditore," literally means "a translator is a traitor," and it implies that it is impossible to translate without misrepresenting the author.

That is true at every level. The artist on canvas or in musical composition or in words on a page struggles to translate a mental concept into physical form, and the physical form, to some extent, always betrays the idea. Then, if the physical form is communicated thorough a conductor, an interpreter or a translator, that person adds her or his own experience to the original creation. Finally, the physical expression takes another mutation in the mind of the observer.

The French philosopher Jacques Maritain once expressed his dissatisfaction with many of his books translated into English because "the translators who knew French did not know philosophy, and those who knew philosophy did not know French." Which leaves us with the possibility that a discussion in an American classroom on Maritain's philosophy might be passionate but miss the point.

These somewhat abstract comments take on bone and flesh in every marriage, family, social and work setting where "communication is the problem." Because we make the common assumption that the other is "just like us," we miss the clues leading to misunderstanding. I think that the only way I could fully understand another is to place myself in suspended animation and make myself totally present to the other, trying to understand the perspective from which the other is speaking. Lacking that, I stumble along.

Actually, I don't feel too pessimistic about our ability to translate the thoughts and feelings of others, as long we understand there will always be some static and distortion in the process.

And, that gives you absolute permission to tell me, "I disagree with you."

2 March 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Evolutionary Christianity

2006-03-27T06:18:00.000-08:00

I heard Michael Dowd speak about 'the big story' which begins with the big bang and continues to the present. This is an exciting way to view the total evolutionry story within which the human search for meaning takes place. If you want to learn more go to Evolutionary Christianity.

Practice, Practice, Practice

2006-03-27T05:01:00.000-08:00

On my way out of town for a summer job before starting college, I purchased a portable typewriter and a book, "Typing in 24 Hours" by Samuel S. Pepe. That summer I taught myself typing, a subject that I avoided in high school. Each pair of the forty-eight pages contained a different set of finger exercises. With diligent practice, I not only taught myself to type, I also taught myself to type mistakes that continue with me to this day. Mistakes that were far more serious before spell check arrived.

As a consequence, I consider the old proverb "Practice makes perfect" to be a half-truth. If one starts to learn something the wrong way (which is often the easiest way), more practice only ingrains a bad habit. It is more difficult to get it right later.

What brought to mind that long-ago experience was a recent conversation with a youth on the subject of religion. It was a straight-forward conversation, absent many of the hurdles of resistant attitudes built on bad youthful experiences that adults bring to such a conversation. Entering into a serious religious conversation with an adult frequently means encountering faulty conclusions about religion solidly imbedded in near impenetrable concrete. I believe it is easier to take a child from ignorance to knowledge that an adult from error to knowledge.

The same seems to be true of our emotional life and our relations with others. Psychological defenses developed to protect our timorous youthful egos carried into our adult lives become an impediment to learning more about ourselves. Verbal tricks used to get our way while young become, in our later years, skillful ways of manipulating others.

Once such patterns are ingrained, we then continue to do things the old way because it is easier "to go with the flow." We also make up reasons to justify our unwillingness to change, reasons that are fully logical and absolutely convincing, that is, until we find our relationships disintegrating, our professional progress stagnating, and our spiritual search stalling. Then, we may be driven to stop and maybe even change. But, after childhood, such change is difficult and often painful.

There is the old story about a stranger in New York, carrying a violin case, who stops an elderly woman and asks how to get to Carnegie Hall. Glancing at him and then at his violin case, she replies, "Practice, practice, practice." But, repeating is not learning; it is developing a habit, a habit that makes us its slave.

Now I wonder, who's the master: the fingers that reach for the chocolate to sustain me through these Mind Matters, or my will to keep my fingers on the keys? No, not next week, but next year I've determined to show my fingers who's boss.

16 February 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Truth, Quadrilaterally Speaking

2006-03-25T06:30:00.000-08:00

I wonder if the early church really knew how subversive of itself it really was? Emulating a highly authoritarian Roman Empire, it formed clear lines of religious authority. Establishing rigid beliefs, it hounded or expelled heretics. Adding to its authoritarian system and inflexible beliefs, it established an official body of books which we call the New Testament. Unknowingly, the latter item made the carefully constructed structure vulnerable.

When the Church included four stories of Jesus-Matthew, Mark, Luke and John-it was saying that the story of Jesus was so large that one voice could not give it full expression, that four individuals telling their story from different points of view, even with contradictions, was the best way to get at the truth of Jesus. What they unwittingly declared was that important truths come not from one authoritative voice but out of the conversations that take place among humans.

For example, at the time of death, if I want to get at the truth of a person's life, I must listen to family members, coworkers, friends and my own experience of that person. (Even so, a sense of incompleteness is always present since all of us have within a private place to which no one is allowed entry.)

In addition to the conversational approach to truth, the quadrilateral nature of that conversation impresses me. For example, I find that Christian truth comes as I consciously carry on a conversation among Scripture, Tradition, Personal Experience and Insight/Inspiration. Each has an importance in itself, but together they give a wellrounded sense of truth and leaving out any one voice skews my thinking.

I view our government in quadrilateral terms. There is, of course, Congress, the President, and the Supreme Court. Added to this is the People. As Mr. Dooley wrote in 1900, "No matter whether th' constitution follows th' flag or not, th' supreme coort follows th' illiction returns." Each is independent of the other, yet all are dependent on each other,

Keeping the quadrilateral in mind, I use it to avoid the debate of us vs. them and the tripartite conversation characterized by: I am a person of convictions; you are stubborn; he/she is pigheaded. The quadrilateral keeps me seeking for the opinion that is too often missing or unexpressed in important conversations.

"Love is a Many Splendored Thing" declared the once popular song. Truth also.

9 February 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

A Personal Saint

2006-03-23T05:07:00.000-08:00

She was not people's favorite person, although her husband was. She was very blunt and 'pushy.' He was less direct and more compassionate. He died several years ago, she quite recently. Her death caused me to stop and to remember, to reconsider and (surprisingly) to ressurect her true importance.

Although seeming to work in tandem, with him in the lead, they interacted with me and with others as a balanced team. It was easier to be drawn to the good-natured one. But, he was effective because of her and she because of him.

Their house became a home, a hangout for young people throughout their years and in various places. Warmth, joy and acceptance were present. Yet, it was also a place where one was prodded, pushed and challenged to be and do and think beyond what one thought oneself capable. The prodding and pushing and challenging could not long be resented nor resisted because it was done in an accepting and loving 'home.' That combination had an extraordinary effect on so many--I being one. They were known as Mom and Pop Sheldon, a self-chosen designation readily accepted by the large number of youth for whom they provided open space.

Their openness to others came out of their personal tragedy. They had one child, a retarded daughter. Instead of being embittered or turning inward, they turned their energy outward and made others part of their family. The energy they did put into their daughter--for example, teaching her to ride a bike which she "never would be able to do," according to the doctors--established a pattern with the young people gathered around them. They prodded us to expand beyond what professionals, parents and we ourselves thought we could do. From them I learned the power of the cross: that out of suffering and death (the death of the dream of having a 'normal' family) others are richly blessed.

Those men and women whose extraordinary lives exemplified Jesus have been designated, by the church, as saints. Noted only by ourselves are our own private saints: individuals who, by what they said or did or were, drew us into an orbit of living which was more than that of which we thought ourselves capable.

This is my tribute--unfortunately, too small and too late--to a person who, along with her husband, has a prominent place in my list of saints.

2 February 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

"10"

2006-03-21T08:12:00.000-08:00

Alabama Judge Roy Moore is standing firm. "A rare display of conviction and courage," said one religious leader, and 88 percent of Alabamians agree. Another judge is threatening him with contempt of court. The issue? Judge Moore posted the Ten Commandments in his courtroom, defying anyone to take it down.

I thought, "Absolutely brilliant! What a way to subvert America's court system," although I think the good judge has just the opposite in mind.

How will the God-fearing judge rule on a defense attorney's objection to proscribed court procedure by pointing out that the judge's insistence on those procedures violates the first commandment, "You shall have no other gods before me?"

Given its place of honor, I wonder if the judge will require all lawyers to sign an oath testifying to their sexual fidelity in order to practice in that court. After all, "Thou shall not commit adultery" is now on the wall, and it would be highly inappropriate for officers of the court to be in violation of the commandment. Reflecting on his decision, this crusading judge may even lead the charge to bring lawyers in conformity with other professions by making sexual relations with a client a matter of disbarment.

Also, when the punishment phase of a murder trial is before the court and the District Attorney pleads for the death penalty, the defense attorney needs only to direct the jury's eyes to the guiding principle of the court hanging on the wall: "Thou shalt not kill." What a boon to the anti-capital punishment crowd.

The Alabama judge will have an opportunity to have the pre-Civil War South rise once again as his decisions reflect the tenth commandment's acceptance of slavery.

Is this what the good judge had in mind? Obviously not. He was posting an icon to the past-a past which existed before all the church-state separation folk, ACLUers and liberals began eroding morality and subverting traditional values. The Ten Commandments are not posted to be followed, only deliberately and defiantly posted.

My former seminary professor stated that "Tradition is the living faith of the dead; traditionalism is the dead faith of the living." The good judge, and his cheering supporters, illustrate well the distinction.

26 January 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

"Did You Hear the One About the Lawyer Who...?"

2006-03-20T05:01:00.000-08:00

I went from being amused to being appalled. I discovered on the world wide web a site that contained only lawyer jokes—an abundant supply. What caused the shift was a certain ugly and deprecatory tone in so much of the humor. I know of no other group in our society, highly-sensitized as it is to group disparagement, that is so regularly and casually maligned.

Such feeling is not new. Shakespeare in King Henry VI has the line, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers." (I know one lawyer who has this quote neatly framed and prominently place on his office wall. He says it relaxes clients.)

I first thought that so much latent anger against lawyers was due to their involvement in people's lives at ugly times. But, then, I thought that physicians also enter people's lives at hurtful times and receive neither the same volume nor intensity nor disparagement.

Such approbation comes, I believe, because of our ambivalence about the law itself. We humans became civilized when we began to live under the rule of law, when we overcome the need to personally obtain vengeance. Practically, though, our personal encounter of the law makes us see more of the law's deficiencies than its ideals.

The law increasingly creeps into our lives. Tax simplification passed by Congress a number of years ago increased the need for accountants. The fear of terrorism as the result of the explosion of the PanAm flight off New York (actually a mechanical failure), increases the rules around airport security. And so it goes and goes.

Even the lawyers with whom I speak find themselves unhappy with the meshwork of legalism that complicates and constricts lives, hindering rather than facilitating the original goal of the law which is equity. As one person put it, "[law's] history is a sad study in steadily lowered standards, manipulation and mastery by the strong against the weak, the cunning against the simple, and parasites against producers."

If unchecked, the Lone Rangers and Dirty Harrys that we applaud in the movies will increasing fill our home screens at places other than Ruby Ridge and Waco and Oklahoma City. The problem is that we have to pass more laws to overcome the ill-effect of the multitudinous laws we currently have. More laws to create less legal intrusiveness!

And lawyers stand at the center of all this.

19 January 1998

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters, Lawyers, Religion

A Conserving Church in the Liberal Tradition

2006-03-18T05:01:00.000-08:00

"A Christian church in the liberal tradition"--my suggestion as a way of publicly describing our church--was met with polite frowns (frowns because of genuine disagreement, polite to keep from telling me I was out of my cotton-pickin' mind). Liberal, from the comments following, has become one of those nasty words, not to be uttered in polite company. Its demise was evident in the presidential election in which one candidate accused the other of being a "liberal card-carrying member of the ACLU," and the other candidate made no response.

Off-handedly separating people into opposing camps of liberal or conservative, it seems to me, is very damaging to both public discourse and the Christian community.

Liberal means liberating--more freedom, more openness, more flexibility, more humaneness, more willingness to change. Conservative means conserving--preserving what is best and most valuable from the past, a decent respect for tradition, a reluctance to change except when change is called for. In this sense, I am proud to be a liberal call me a conservative as well.

Yet, as Lord Acton, of "power corrupts" fame, also wrote: "Every institution tends to fail by an excess of its own basic principle." Such excesses are the very reason for the denigration of liberal (and will, as time goes on, lead to a similar denigration of the word conservative).

Worse yet, the lack of a word to describe the openness of a community to varying points of view--because it has a higher calling, or its calling is to be on open community--is a thing to be mourned. What word do we have to talk about a Christian community where loyalty to the 'right' position on an interpretation of the Bible or abortion or welfare reform or the substitutionary atonement of Jesus is not the measure and test of one's Christian commitment?

On reflection, I think that "A Christian Church in the Liberal Tradition" is not the way to describe First Congregational. "A Conserving Church in the Liberal Tradition" is more accurate. An oxymoron? Not at all. It is a statement that, in the midst of our natural conserving tendencies as a religious institution, we provide space where those conserving tendencies can be challenged and changed--in the church, in society and even in our own selves. And all this is done in a community where radical commitment of discipleship to Jesus makes us able to disagree without denigrating each other, where we are raised above particular partisan politics and policies which characterize our political life to the common search-whatever our policies and politics-for a humane, participatory and just future.

Sign me up.

12 January 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Relief for Sick & Disabled Seamen

2006-03-17T05:01:00.000-08:00

The year was 1798. The nation's fifth Congress passed, and John Adams, our second President signed, "An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen." This compassionate act provided sailors with proper hospital and medical care for bodily injury on ship and shore, benefits the sailors paid for out of their own pockets at the rate of twenty cents a month. The first Marine Hospitals were built in the seacoast towns of Boston, Norfolk and New Orleans.

Almost a century later, in 1870, with the Act still on the books, Marine hospitals were going up in places not known for their prime anchorage, places like Paducah, Kentucky, and Napoleon, Arkansas. According to then Wisconsin Senator Thomas Howe, the reason was not hard to find: "a favorite way of starting a town in the West, if it was anywhere on a stream or on a goodsized puddle, was to get an appropriation for a Marine hospital."

I find this story of great comfort when encountering individuals and groups who tenaciously resist change. Church organizations, I thought a bit myopically, were especially pernicious. Not so. Conversations with others lead me to believe that it is a human trait infecting every institution.

A recent conversation let me know of the resistance of workers to the imposed 'new' programs sweeping through corporate America. Because the hierarchical structure allows such programs to be imposed, loyalty to company and commitment to job plummets. Good and loyal employees' eyes often show deep betrayal.

Living in a culture that affirms change, why is change so disruptive and emotionally wrenching? An insight came from an experienced consultant: "People welcome change; they resist attempts to change them."

"An Act for the Relief of Sick and Disabled Seamen"—persisting far beyond its original intent—is a humorous 'bookmark' in my mind that eases the maddening frustration I feel when people refuse to engage in constructive and necessary change.

5 January 1998

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

What War?

2006-03-16T05:33:00.000-08:00

Columbus passionately arguing for a round earth before Queen Isabella's 'flatearthers' commission headed by the Archbishop of Granada is one of the dramatic events of history. Dramatic, but untrue. At that time, everyone believed in a round earth. The real argument was, given the great size of the earth's circumference, whether Columbus could reach India with the amount of supplies needed to feed the sailors. Was the risk worth the expenditure of the Queen's money. Columbus' critics questioned his 'cooked' figures (and they were 'cooked') to make the earth smaller and thus passage to India appear more possible.

This imagined conflict fueled the war between the assumed progressive forces of modern scientific thought and the regressive dogmatism of a religious establishment. According to Steven Jay Gould, the paleontologist at Harvard University and noted defender of the theory of evolution, the war between science and religion only started between 1880 and 1889 with the publishing of two books, both of which created the flatearth myth: History of the War Between Religion and Science and A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom. (Elevated, to prove the authors' point, were two minimally significant characters who had made a flat earth a matter of religious belief.)

This biased view of Western history has helped perpetuate the idea of religion and science, two great forces of our lives, covering different major areas of the human enterprise, being at each other's throats. This has unfairly dichotomized our world and led to conflict rather than cooperation in dealing with great issues. To my mind, the real enemy is not the beliefs of religion nor the findings of science but irrationality and dogmatism in either field.

In our century, a madeup incident on the PolishGerman border unleashed the German Blitzkrieg, and the fabricated attack on an American ship in the Gulf of Tonkin gave this country the excuse to bomb North Vietnam. Although there is no body count in the fabricated 'war between science and religion,' casualties exist and erroneous attitudes still shape people's attitudes and behavior.

"God cannot alter the past but historians can," wrote Samuel Butler. It's time for all of us to alter the past to conform to reality, thus creating a new present and future. In the coming days, we can follow that polemical antiwar slogan of the Vietnam era: "What if they gave a war and nobody came."

29 December 1997

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion, Science

A Christmas Story

2006-03-15T06:13:00.000-08:00

A new word was added to my vocabulary: septuplets (so unusual a word is it that my spell check wanted to turn it into sextuplets). Along with others, I was rooting for the McCaugheys' babies, and the parents' genuine delight mirrored my own. I was delighted, that is, until--

I began to consider the toll on the lives of the parents taking care of seven babies. Just the number of diapers per day/week/month is staggering. And, during the school years, what about the evening hours needed to help with homework? And, then, there is the cost-dresses, tuxes, flowers-for prom night. Will community help, so forthcoming now, continue with homework?

I began to reconsider when a reproductive counselor stated that this was not a success but a failure of technology. She said that the intent of reproductive technology is to enable a couple to conceive a child, not multiple children, especially on such a massive scale. Also, with male sperm count dropping and women's increasing difficulty getting pregnant, I wonder if the impressive technological ability of the Iowa Methodist Medical center team that safely delivered and then sustained the septuplets is now playing catch-up with the problems technology is causing.

I began to groan as I heard about a black couple in Washington, D.C., who gave birth to sextuplets (an exceedingly rare occurrence) and got little media attention and few offers of community help.

Then I wondered if we have another case of "affluenza," the disease of wanting more and more and refusing to accept any material and physical boundaries.

Still, I thought, it is Christmas, that time of the year which is, as we often say, for children-and for adults who enjoy, even briefly, viewing the world through the anticipation and wonder of children. The McCaugheys' now have seven pairs of eyes through which to see the wonder of the starfilled sky, and seven minds which will come to know the 'hopes and fears of all the years,' and seven individual human journeys to trace. And, to its credit, the multibillion dollar, infertilitytreatment industry does its part to provide the McCaugheys, and others, with their dream of having a child, or children, of their own.

Someone in that small Iowa town took a paintbrush, put a big "X" through its 3400 on its population sign and, in a large red scrawl wrote-3407. Right on!

22 December 1997

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Christmas, Mind Matters, Religion

No Longer Plaster Saints

2006-03-14T07:51:00.000-08:00

No longer are Joseph and Mary plaster saints. That change took place because of the race back to the city park in northern Italy to find our young daughter, whom we had inadvertently left behind. Two vans with two families and seven kids floating in and out of each in ever-changing combinations made it easy for a child to get lost. That situation also makes it easy for me to understand how, in a caravan of families returning to Nazareth following a visit to Jerusalem, Mary and Joseph did not realize their twelve year old son was missing. I now shared with them that heart-pounding anxiety and fear-laden premonition while speedily returning to find one's missing child. Our daughter was missing for a half hour, their son for three days. Mary is recorded as saying, "All generations will call me blessed," but for Protestants, who cling so tightly to the Bible as the "very Word of God," Mary's assertion was never really followed. Not so for Roman Catholics. The Madonna is central both to devotion and to theology (her bodily assumption into heaven was made dogma in 1950, and it was then assumed that it was only a matter of time until she became co-redeemer [along with Jesus] of the human race). But since we humans often define ourselves over against our 'enemies,' we Protestants seldom mentioned Joseph and Mary, except in Christmas carols.
I began to read their story in light of the travails common to us humans: an out-of-wedlock pregnancy; a man willing to overlook the scandal and adopt the child; living with the threat of the infant's death and the reality of his early adult death; bringing disgrace on the family by his making a public spectacle of himself; and that awful, fearsome anguish of a child lost. Flesh and blood, anguish and yearning replaced the plaster.
What connects us humans, at the deepest level, is not our talents and successes, but our needs and failures. Hearing a person tell of the latest accomplishment of a child, competency on the golf course, professional prowess, or good deeds leaves the listener defensive or hostile.
But to sit with another and to mutually share anxieties and failures builds the bridges of our common humanity. For that reason, 12-step programs and group therapy are so effective. For that reason, we need people with whom we can take off our masks and begin to meet each other as individuals. For that reason, I now honor Joseph and Mary who, in the midst of life's travails, endured, and helped give the world a God we address in family terms.

15 December 1997

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Religion

Reflections on Starry Night

2006-03-08T21:20:00.000-08:00

I was incredibly envious. Words effortlessly and smoothly flowed from his mouth, and in full complete sentences. A theological student preaching at a small rural church, he would prepare his sermons during the fifty-minute Sunday morning drive. As I struggled to add word to word in some semblance of coherency, his ability both fascinated me and frustrated me. Shakespeare well expressed my plight:

Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope.
With what I most enjoy contented least.

Before becoming too mired in despondency, I chanced upon the Psalmist who also confessed to "almost stumbling and falling" with jealously. He was saved by "seeing their end." It caused me to look more carefully at my classmate, and I saw his gift leading to an effortless glibness, keeping him from further developing his obvious talents. I could picture him in thirty years still saying much the same things, still in a smooth impeccable manner.
As a result, seldom am I envious of others. The troubles and struggles of others seldom make their gifts and benefits worth having.
Seldom, but not totally. Each time I see Vincent van Gogh's Starry Night I envy his ability to scrub my eyeballs and make the world come alive in a new way. I can no longer look at the clear night sky as pinpoints of cold light. Rather, the night sky is a swirl of color vibrant with life. (Sorely tested would be my honesty if alone in a room with Starry Night and a clear avenue of escape.)
I could wish that I had the ability with words that van Gogh had with brush and paint-to bring to eyes and minds the total freshness of the tired tried-and-true so that once again its many facets glittered, like a flawless diamond. But the end for van Gogh was death by his own hand at the age of 37 and self-mutilation before that. His end keeps me from envying his exuberance, desiring but not envying.
Still ....

8 December 1997

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters, Religion

17 Minutes

2006-03-05T18:35:00.000-08:00

It took the jury only 17 minutes to come to a unanimous verdict of guilty of murder in the first-degree. Seventeen minutes, that is, the second time around. The first trial ended with a hung jury after four long days of deliberation. The trial concerned the murder of Gil Epstein, a 27-year old Ft. Bend County assistant district attorney. The one hold out in the first jury apparently announced that it was unfair to the accused for wealthy Jews to have the funds to offer a reward for the arrest and conviction of Epstein's killer.
This story connected in my mind with a recent conversation I had with a Jewish professional uncertain of the outcome of a lawsuit. Convinced the suit has no justification, less convinced is he of a favorable verdict since the jury might view him as a financially well off Jew.
Then, I had a conversation with a woman who had been sexually abused by a minister. The church and ecclesiastical authorities both refused to take the woman's charges seriously and began to blame her, even initiating a reprisal.
The video, "The Color of Fear," moved from receiving my sporadic glances to full attention as I watched a number of men, representative of the diversity of today's society, sit in a circle and talk about race, about inclusion and exclusion. Taking place over several days, strong, honest and sorrowful emotions surfaced, painful stories were told, harsh words spewed forth and deep yearnings were haltingly articulated, tears flowed, and at the end a community of hugs had formed. It was, for me, a deeply moving experience.
All this within a 30-day period. A small slice of the struggles men and women have around the issues of race and sex in society.
How wearying it is to continually be wary, never knowing, even in seemingly safe surroundings, when one will be booby trapped by a derogatory word, hurtful humor, an aggressive act, or corporate dismissal. We may have come a long way (and for those who histories go back decades, we have), but measured against individuals' everyday realities, we have a long road ahead.
Looking back, passing laws to outlaw the more blatant forms of discriminatory behavior will turn out to be the easy part. Increased sensitivity to our own hurtful words and actions, and showing intolerance for those same words and actions from others, is the far, far more difficult road yet ahead.

1 December 1997

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters, Religion

The Once & Future Faith

2006-03-05T05:58:00.000-08:00

Text: 2 Kings 5:1-20, Contemporary English Version (CEV), Copyright © 1995 by American Bible Society

This story provides Jesus with one of the two examples he uses in his sermon at Nazareth, turning his friendly hometown folk into a lynching mob [Luke 4:16–30, 27].

Naaman was the commander of the Syrian army. The LORD had helped him and his troops defeat their enemies, so the king of Syria respected Naaman very much. Naaman was a brave soldier, but he had leprosy. One day while the Syrian troops were raiding Israel, they captured a girl, and she became a servant of Naaman's wife. Some time later the girl said, "If your husband Naaman would go to the prophet in Samaria, he would be cured of his leprosy."
When Naaman told the king what the girl had said, the king replied, "Go ahead! I will give you a letter to take to the king of Israel."
Naaman left and took along seven hundred fifty pounds of silver, one hundred fifty pounds of gold, and ten new outfits. He also carried the letter to the king of Israel. It said, "I am sending my servant Naaman to you. Would you cure him of his leprosy?"
When the king of Israel read the letter, he tore his clothes in fear and shouted, "That Syrian king believes I can cure this man of leprosy! Does he think I'm God with power over life and death? He must be trying to pick a fight with me."
As soon as Elisha the prophet heard what had happened, he sent the Israelite king this message: "Why are you so afraid? Send the man to me, so that he will know there is a prophet in Israel." Naaman left with his horses and chariots and stopped at the door of Elisha's house. Elisha sent someone outside to say to him, "Go wash seven times in the Jordan River. Then you'll be completely cured."
But Naaman stormed off, grumbling, "Why couldn't he come out and talk to me? I thought for sure he would stand in front of me and pray to the LORD his God, then wave his hand over my skin and cure me. What about the Abana River or the Pharpar River? Those rivers in Damascus are just as good as any river in Israel. I could have washed in them and been cured." His servants went over to him and said, "Sir, if the prophet had told you to do something difficult, you would have done it. So why don't you do what he said? Go wash and be cured."
Naaman walked down to the Jordan; he waded out into the water and stooped down in it seven times, just as Elisha had told him. Right away, he was cured, and his skin became as smooth as a child's.
Naaman and his officials went back to Elisha. Naaman stood in front of him and announced, "Now I know that the God of Israel is the only God in the whole world. Sir, would you please accept a gift from me?"
"I am a servant of the living LORD," Elisha answered, "and I swear that I will not take anything from you."
Naaman kept begging, but Elisha kept refusing. Finally Naaman said, "If you won't accept a gift, then please let me take home as much soil as two mules can pull in a wagon. Sir, from now on I will offer sacrifices only to the LORD.

Sermon

After being cured of a disfiguring and wasting skin disease, Naaman then asks the Prophet Elisha for all the dirt that two mules could haul home to Damascus, a journey of about 130 miles. That seems about as nutty as one can get, even when we know why he did it. Naaman wants to take the dirt home, spread it out, and on that dirt worship the God who had healed him, the God of prophet of Israel.

His action is based on the ancient belief that a god belongs to the land/territory of the people who worship that god, and if you want to worship a particular god, you have to do so on the soil of that god.

This idea of a localized god pops up throughout the Bible.
• When Jacob goes across the River Jordan, gets outside his tribal land, he has his dream, wakes up, and is surprised, “Behold, the Lord God is in this place, and I knew it not” (Genesis 28:16).
• The author of the story of Jonah has Jonah digging in his heels at being ordered to go to Nineveh, the capital city of the enemy, by taking off to sea. Petulant, Jonah finds God down there, even in the belly of the large fish/‘whale’ (Jonah 2:10).
• The Samaritan woman wants to discuss with Jesus the issue of where God is really and truly worshipped—on the ground of Jerusalem or on the ground of Samaria. Jesus response is that true worship is not tied to a specific piece of land; rather it is done “in spirit and in truth” (John 4:20).

That strange belief of ‘deity’ tied to the land is alive and well today.
• Take that wonderful story of the Grinch who stole Christmas. The Grinch thought that if he could take away all the clutter (dirt) of Christmas——the ribbons, decorations, trees, presents, and even the cookies and milk left for Santa——then there would be no Christmas. But, after he had taken everything away and as he peered down from his perch in the mountains admiring his handiwork, he heard people singing. He found that the spirit of Christmas was bigger than all the paraphernalia, all the dirt.
• Listen to Osama Ben Laden as he describes why he is on a jihad against the United States: the United States, this ‘Christian country,’ has troops and all their paraphernalia on the soil of his country, Saudi Arabia and, therefore, a foreign God now resides in the holy land of Allah.
• Even our own President ends his speeches with “God bless America,” not “God bless America, and God bless all people in all places.”

So, what initially seems such a strange request, in actuality, is not so strange after all. In fact, I would guess that all of us here today have a piece of Naaman inside us, in that we find ourselves more centered spiritually in certain places, with certain friends, while reading special books (perhaps the Bible), or going far outside the city to look up and view the Milky Way.

I.

However, some people go beyond having a generalized spirituality. Some people follow in Naaman’s shoes, pulling soil from the past and setting up a permanent shrine, stating that God is to be worshipped in this place and in this way and in no other. Christians who do this are called Fundamentalists. They are called Literalists. And the shrine they set up is—the Bible and the five fundamental beliefs. The Bible and certain beliefs serve as a litmus test for determining whether or not one is a ‘true’ Christian.

A Presbyterian church, close to where I live, has as its statement of purpose:

___________ Church enthusiastically affirms that the entire Bible is inspired, without error, and the ultimate authority for everything we believe and practice.

In a less formal way, Literalists and Fundamentalists are those who will prove any point by saying, “The Bible says.”
The Bible says abortion is wrong.
The Bible is against same–sex marriage.
The Bible says wives should be subservient to their husbands.
As long as the Bible says it, there is no further argument.

(Parenthetically, we do know that whatever the Literalists and Fundamentalists may say, they actually don’t believe the Bible is literally true. For example, how many one–eyed TV preachers or members of fundamentalist churches do you see? I have not seen one in the 50 to 60 Houston churches I have attended in the last six years. Yet, Jesus said, quite plainly

I tell you that anyone who looks at another lustfully has already committed adultery in her or his heart. If your right eye causes you to sin, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell [Matthew 5:27–30].

When I bring that verse up to the Literalists, they immediately say that Jesus didn’t literally mean that one should pluck out one’s eye. Jesus was speaking figuratively. Of course he was, and that is the point. The important concepts and truths of the Bible are figurative, metaphorical, and I would say, even the ones that they view as literal.)

Fundamentalism/Literalism is a spanking–new form of Christianity, being just one hundred years old. There are nineteen hundred years of church history that existed before they camped on a narrow plot of ground and cast their suspicious eyes on all those who do not conform to their views.

The Literalists and Fundamentalists have shrink–wrapped the magnificent Christian faith into five beliefs, beliefs that a person must literally accept. They are:
1. the inerrancy of the Bible,
2. the virgin birth of Jesus,
3. the divinity of Jesus Christ,
4. the blood atonement of Jesus,
5. and the physical resurrection and coming again of Christ.
They have extracted, from the rich and fertile ground of the church’s 2000 years, a few clumps of dirt, a couple of mules’ burden of earth, and have said that believing in and worshipping these things, on this little patch of ground, is absolutely essential if one is to be a Christian.

It is incredible that the God who created the billions of swirling galaxies in the incredibly unimaginable distances of space is shoehorned, is shrink wrapped into a human creation, a printed book. (Of course, once God is so localized then God is easy to manipulate.)

I don’t have time to deal with all five of the Fundamentalist points, but let me speak to just one, the virgin birth. Today, if someone asks me whether or not I believe in the virgin birth of Jesus, I say, “Of course I do. I believe in the virgin birth of Jesus in the same way I believe that President George W. Bush was born with a silver–spoon in his mouth.” Now, people don’t ask me whether the spoon was sterling or sliver plate because we all know that the silver spoon birth is a metaphor. That image of a silver spoon points to the fact that Bush was born to privilege and power, which is true. In the same way, in the first centuries, the virgin birth pointed to the extra special qualities of a person, qualities that could not be understood solely from the parents of the person or from her or his social setting. “Can anything good come out of Nazareth?” was asked of Jesus. The obvious answer is ‘No.’ Yet, this awesomely significant person came along. How to explain it? Metaphorically, he was born with a divine touch. He was virgin born.

But there was more to the virgin birth than just attempting to explain human greatness. There was another person at that time who was also born of a virgin. He died when Jesus was about 18 years old. His name was Caesar Augustus, the great Emperor of Rome. After his death in 14 C.E., the people the Roman Empire worshipped Augustus as a god. One aspect of his being god was that he was virgin born. Now, no one believed that to be literally true of Augustus. His virgin birth was a way of saying that he was an absolutely remarkable man. There was something in him that seemed ‘extra’ human. Nor did people literally believe that Jesus was virgin born. What the early Christian community was saying to the people of the Roman world of that time was that in Jesus we have another person who was extra–ordinary. In fact, he is the real Lord, the real ruler, and the one who says that peace will come through justice and not through conquest.

Virgin birth and resurrection are metaphors, and were understood as such in the first century of the church.

Back in junior high, we learned that language could be used in different ways. There is factual language and there is figurative language, the language of metaphor and simile. I can say to my wife that she is beautiful. That is a fact. Or, I can say, using words of the Scottish poet Robert Burns, “My love is like a red, red rose.” That is a metaphor, a figure of speech, and a way of saying something important about her.

In the delivery room, when I first held my daughter and saw her perfectly formed little finger—time stood still. Well, that’s not literally true, it is not factual. The second hand on the wall clock in the delivery room did not stop. But you know precisely what happened to me. I was caught up in awe. That is metaphor, a figure of speech.

Much of the language of the Bible is of that metaphorical character. Yet, the Literalists and Fundamentalists, extracting from the rich stories and tradition and enshrining a few literal beliefs, have pitched their tent on too narrow patch of ground.

II.

Another reality that is left out of the narrow patch of land on which the Literalists and Fundamentalists practice their religion is the history of the Bible and the Nicene Creed.

In our time, that which is held to be absolutely essential to Christian thought and life is the Bible. In most of the Christian Church (Roman Catholic, Orthodox and Anglican), the Nicene Creed is also held as essential. What few are aware of today is that the Bible and the Creed, as we know them, were not——NOT——available to Christians for 400 years. It took Christians 400 years to settle on the final compilation of the twenty-seven books in the New Testament and to establish the Nicene Creed.

Four hundred years! Do you know how long four hundred years actually is? To get an idea, place yourself fourteen years into the future. The year is 2020. Now go backward four hundred years: 2020—1920—1820—1720—1620. You find yourself landing with the Pilgrims at Plymouth. One hundred and fifty five years after the Pilgrims’ landing, we have the Declaration of Independence. Eighty-five years after that we are at the Civil War. Another seventy–six years and we are entering World War II. Add another seventy-five years, and we are back at the year we started, 2020. Even after four hundred years, it still took many decades longer for both the twenty-seven books of the New Testament and the Nicene Creed to be accepted by the larger Christian community.

What can we conclude from this? One conclusion is that if the Bible and Creed are so absolutely important, then for four hundred years there were no Christians. Also, around the year 400, a truly miraculous virgin birth took place—biblical Christianity appeared. Given the dogmatic importance that the Literalists and Fundamentalists place on the Bible and on certain statements of belief, how could there be any Christians? Of course, to wipe out four centuries of Christians because they did not believe and do the things Literalists and Fundamentalists believe are essential is ridiculous.

A second conclusion from this knowledge, and the correct one I believe, is that for four hundred years there was a great diversity of literature and ways of following Jesus. That is, there was a bubbling, fermenting diversity in the ways that Christians understood Jesus and what it meant to be a Christian. Christians had such holy books as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Philip. They had such holy books as the Shepherd of Hermas and the Didache. From the historical research on that period, we know this to be true.

Knowing this makes me very suspicious when a person wants to nail down a truth by saying that ‘the Bible says’ or that to be a Christian one has to believe in a literal virgin birth. This is not to say that what the Bible says is unimportant; however, we cannot make it the ‘be all and end all’ of Christian belief and practice and be true to our forebears.

III.

There is another downside to the Naaman–practice of Literalists and Fundamentalists. In reality, they have scratched out so much of the Bible that they claim to honor. For example, where do we hear from them about the prophetic vision of justice? Oh, they quote verses about wives obeying their husbands and they pontificate on same–sex relationships, but where is their prophetic call for justice in the community?

… let justice roll down as waters,
and righteousness as a mighty stream.
– Amos 5:24

He has told you, O man, what is good; 

And what does the LORD require of you
But to do justice, to love kindness,
And to walk humbly with your God?
– Micah 6:8

In a similar manner, in the twenty–fifth chapter of Matthew, Jesus is reputed to have said that the criteria for judging one’s accession to the heavenly realm and avoiding the everlasting fires of hell prepared for the devil and angels is NOT a literal belief in the Bible and a iron–clad acceptance of a set of ‘fundamental’ beliefs. Rather, the judgment is on feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, welcoming the stranger, clothing the naked, visiting the sick and those in jail.

The ‘whole’ Bible escapes those who Literalists and Fundamentalists who self–righteously sit on their little plot of ground.

Conclusion

I titled this sermon, “The Once and Future Faith.” As is quite obvious, I believe that the future of our faith is rooted in the same attitude as what I see in the ‘once’ church, the community of early Christians that encompassed diversity of ideas and actions. I firmly believe that the future of this church, of the Christian church, is in moving away from the limited vision of a literalistic and fundamentalist reading of the Bible and belief. We are told to love God with our entire mind, but how can the heart worship what the mind finds absurd?

There are an increasing number of brave Christian souls who are saying: we have left the old territory of literalistic and fundamentalist religion and have entered a new land, and we no longer need to keep old understandings in order to worship God and to follow Jesus. They are saying that we have entered the twenty–first century with a new awareness of the world, of ourselves, of Jesus and of God. Part of this new awareness certainly comes through the discoveries of the social and natural sciences, but it also comes from the amazing new insights of scholars who study early Christianity. When we combine the two—discoveries of the nature of early Christianity and the amazing discoveries of the contemporary sciences—we find following Jesus enlivened in a new way.

Finally, I do need to add this word. In my remarks, I have taken the Literalists and Fundamentalists to task. I have a deep and abiding disagreement with them, and I think they have cast a pall on the Christian religion. However, this disagreement does not lead to a disparagement of them. Because they differ from me, I do not ‘mentally’ read them out of the Christian church. I keep in mind that old sermon illustration that when one points a finger at another, there are three fingers pointing back at oneself. Also, I make the direction of my mind and heart the words of the poet Edwin Markham:

He drew a circle that shut me out—
Heretic, rebel, a thing to flout.
But love and I had the wit to win;
We drew a circle that took him in!

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Mind Matters, Fundamentalism, Religion, Sermons

The Wave of the Future

2006-03-03T20:03:00.000-08:00

"I believe that this new technology is destined to revolutionize our educational system, and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks." True?
Remember the paperless office? The digital revolution spelled the end to forest despoliation. Yet, copy machines now inundate us with "Just in case, make extra copies for...."
Then there was the enticing promise of leisure time. A 35, and even a 30, hour work week was within our reach. Tell that to the dual-career family weary from its extra-hours' work day.
A flurry of flyers promise new programs to freshen and renew church life. A friend's wisdom subdues the engendered hope: "All planning degenerates into work." Always!
How can we know if such promises or predictions are true? How could we have known if the music critic who dismissed Beethoven's importance for the future of music was correct or not when he wrote: "Beethoven always sounds to me like the upsetting of a bag of nails, with here and there an also dropped hammer?" Or, what about the predictions of the latest religious prophet?
Moses has a clear answer for us. In some final advice to the ancient Israelites, he says, "You may be asking yourselves, 'How can we tell if a prophet's message really comes from the Lord?'" The answer, Moses says, is simple: if it happens, then it comes from God. If not, it doesn't (Deuteronomy 18:21-22). Eminently reasonable advice for us when listening to those with less authority than God.
It appears we're on our own to judge and act accordingly. The above promise about the end of textbooks was made not with contemporary DVD (Digital Video Disks) in mind but in 1922 by Thomas Edison and his belief in the effect his inventions would have. Three quarters of a century later, students and books are still married.

24 November 1997

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters, Religion, Technology

Thinking about Thinking

2006-03-02T19:07:00.000-08:00

An out-of-the-way quote of Abraham Lincoln tugs at my mind as my eye scans several to-do lists: "We must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves." I wonder at the strange attraction, almost addiction, to a busy schedule and my disinclination to take the time to think.

Of course, an active schedule does mean that much gets accomplished, and the items not crossed off show there is always more to be done. Still, the need to have an overly-full schedule leads me to believe that there is also a sense of self-worth in the busyness. Turning Descartes on his head, "I am busy, therefore I am."

Reflecting on Lincoln's words leads me to believe that too much of what I do is a routine repetition of the past. It was once said of a minister who stayed at each church five years and then would move on: "He had five years experience four times." Busyness, crowding out thinking anew, means that there is little incentive for acting anew.

Acting anew is vitally important. Without it, I find that my actions, attuned to past tasks, are not always appropriate to changed circumstances. For example, surface similarities of the desire for personal independence and a driver's license lulled me into assuming that today's youth are like those in the past, whereas, their deeper desires, needs and moods are really quite different. Some reflection might have helped me respond earlier to the change. A once exciting pattern developed around a church rite has become routine and has lost some of its freshness. Thinking about the consequences of the turmoil a friend went through could have made me responsive to him earlier than I was.

My busyness is more than a passion; it is an excuse. Thinking, and thinking hard, is excruciating. Pain-avoidance is a natural biological trait, especially when pleasure-seeking can be obtained from a busy schedule.

Now that we soon will be at the gateway to a new year with its mandatory resolutions, I am adding this reminder to my to-do list: "Abraham Lincoln: disenthrall, think, act." And, when I complete the many other items on the list, I will certainly make certain that Lincoln gets on the next to-do list.

17 November 1997

Technorati Tags: Mind Matters, Religion