Orwell in Winter

George Orwell's name has been a staple during the past eight years as the language has been twisted into a kind of magician's "sleight of hand." Orwell was a master of the word. There follows a snippett of reflection on the literary giant.

The evening's reading includes two of George Orwell's essays, "Down and Out in Paris," and "The Poor Die." They chronicle a sojourn in Paris shortly after World War I had ended. They are, at once, exotic and familiar. They pull the reader into the situation of the underclasses in postwar France, as if by the lapels. There, to find a world that is at once exotic and painfully familiar. The discovery of it is that poverty is not as awful as one might imagine. The insight is a flash of brilliance. It is simply the way of things. Sickness, on the other hand, is not so easily embraced. The hospital, invented as a refuge for the poor, became a dumping place for those who were unable to summon a physician to their homes. So sickness is poverty's younger sibling. Privation and illness are the constant companions of the poor. To Orwell, they are outrageous intruders.

But Orwellian is not the "end of the world" sort of vision. It is its polar opposite. In a curious way, he is a man of abiding faith. His loathing is a sort of hope. For these are things about which we can do something, were we to focus our attention on them. I admire his rapierlike penetration of the human condition. Like a finely tuned seismograph, he can magnify the most subtle of turnings of the soul. He can evoke in a nod of recognition the web of the human family.

The faithful one requires an Orwell, if for nothing more than a point of departure. His vivid sketche evoke what are our partners in compassion. It is a brilliant light shed on our condition. How contemporaty is the need for an Orwell. In a time when the condition of the poor approaches the great middle classes, increasing numbers of the world's citizens fall into its grip. We need to pay heed.

Reading Orwell is something to do in winter. I wonder what might have happened had his work included Christmas. Divine entry into the human condition is a natural counterpoint to his penetrating vision. Should the vivid chronicle of misery turn an eye to the redemptive power of love, Orwell's gift might have found its completion. As it is, his essays are fragments of reality.

Nonetheless, he shows the way. Would that the heart of love had the power to invite that does Orwell's practiced eye. I have seldom encountered such power to involve me in the situation of complete strangers. An Orwell essay is to literature what a stereoscope is to photography. They are provocative Advent reading.

-December 15-16, 1997

Orwell died on St. Agnes Day, 1950. Maybe it is the spirit of Agnes that inhabits his work. Who knows?

Turkey Day, 2008

National Holidays make me suspicious. It may be something Anglican in me that leads me to approach Thanksgiving and its noble Pilgrims with trepidation. An apocryphal story is told about the Bishop of South Carolina, Fitz Allison. Bishop Allison when confronted with his child dressed as a Pilgrim for the Thanksgiving Pageant is reported to have asked, "Why are you dressed like the enemy?" As a preacher, the annual Community Thanksgiving Commemoration (complete with the mayor's intonation of the presidential proclamation) gave me the creeps.

H. L. Menchen's definition of Puritanism as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy," takes me to a place I would not rather go either. The problem with Thanksgiving is not gratitude, nor is it the pursuit of happiness. My problem with thanksgiving is empire. It is the same kind of avarice that has transformed Mother's Day from a lament over wholesale destruction in our own Civil War into a Sentimental Hallmark Day. It is that greed that makes of the end of the carnage of World War I in an Armistice into a happy little "support our troops" day. Empire does that. It takes the deeply painful and transforms it into a cartoon that serves its own ends.

Nowhere have I read work as keenly sensitive to the dynamics of American Empire than the new book, The Wordy Shipmates. Sarah Vowell uses Thanksgiving themes to explore what has happened to us in these days since the winter of 1620. She does it with depth and great good humor. What fascinates me most is the intentional meeting of politics and religion in the Pilgrm narrative, manipulating both our politics and our faith. That modern day t. v. evangelists and even Roman Catholics more resemble each other than those long ago renegade protestants is quite astonishing. As the groaning Thanksgiving table invites all to eat too much, the religious fare invites all to talk too much. Vowell's explorations give some important hints about all that religious yammering on the multiplying religious channels. Television, it turns out was not the first of the genre of overheated one way communication in American history. Pious New Englanders had mastered the craft fully three centuries before t. v. showed up. So, if you like to talk back to the one way politics and religion of our day, you'll love a day spent in Vowell's company.

On the subject of Empire, in an accidental juxtaposition of texts, brought unexpected insight during this past week. I had picked up copies of two books in one trip to the library, reading one right after the other, quite by accident. The first was a recent translation into English of Agnes Humbert's well know French Diary, Resistance. In it Humbert chronicled her days in the French resistance. Then she wrote in painful detail about her imprisonment and use as slave laborer in the Third Reich. These descriptions of life in first prisons, then camps were genuinely repulsive. I had thought I would read a book about the glories of a resistance group, successfully subverting its Nazi occupiers. I had no idea that I would be slogging from prison to camp to factory in a dismal tale of unimaginable human misery and degradation. Next on the book pile was My Guantanamo Diary, the story of Mahvish Khan's quest to provide legal representation to detainees housed at Gitmo under our supervision and flag.

My mind went back to an evening with the grandfather of a young German woman of our acquaintance. Sharon and I were visiting the woman's family when it was announced that grandpa was coming over for a chat with the Americans. As we talked, it unfolded that grandpa had spent a good part of World War 2 in a prison camp stateside. I was not sure what to think. Should we ask about it? Should we change the subject. It turned out that grandpa was treated very well in American Custody. He looked back on his imprisonment with fondness, with laughter and with admiration for his captors.

Hearing Khan tell it, a lot has happened in American internment camps in the 60+ years since WW2. The change is not the sort of thing one wants to look squarely in the eye. My little experience peeking inside Nazi interrment camps and then into Gitmo did our Empire no favor. I was astonished to find, in this little informal comparison, that resistance fighters in Nazi Germany, while suffering horribly, held not a candle to the horror inflicted on Gitmo detainees in Kandujar or Abu Ghraib or in the one of many of the Empire's sites of extraordinary rendition sites.

National Holidays make me suspicious because Empire never insists on National Days of Contrition. In the Empire, it is always Easter and never Ash Wednesday. C. S. Lewis described one such haunted land as "always winter, but never Christmas." We are living there on Thanksgiving, 2008.

This holiday, maybe we can be grateful for the distraction of a Detroit Lions game. Otherwise, we could drive ourselves batty in search of the contrition that is required of us. But, please do not blather on about how those Germans did not pay attention to what was happening in the Camps. Pay attention and tell someone you are watching.

What Words Can Make Holy

Ian Stavens wrote the book, "Dictionary Days," several years back. Like Maggie Jackson's book, "Distracted," it illuminates the journey of the spirit at least as brightly as it does its subject. Three points Stavens has made speak directly to the journey of the heart.

Language is not, first of all, about sounds. It is about the spaces between the sounds. What is so disorienting about computer speech is that it has no sense of the spaces. Like a paint by number painting, all the shadings are correct, but the spaces have it wrong. Languages have spaces. The neophyte and the native speaker are distinguished by their use of the spaces. A sentence has insight in relation to the openings it leaves between words. I am thinking that the public discourse in our time is increasingly hot, conducted without spaces. We are willing to sacrifice deep communication because we are worried about being interrupted.

Some clutures have supervisors for their language. Some grammar teachers of my youth tried to do that with English. They failed. English resists hegemony. Our greatest dictionary, the Oxford Etymological Dictionary, in a descriptive document. It tells us what has happened with language. It does not tell how language should be. It may be that the agendas of the language supervisors among the French and the Spanish are responsible for the poverty of expression of their tongues. In comparison, the English language spews out word forms at a riotous rate.

As any comedian knows, words and timing go together. The great punch line is a work of words and of counting. Jack Benny used to wait for a punch line. It was there that the laughing began. Steve Martin's genius was to never get to the punch line. He left us with our own laughs.

It seems to me that theologians can learn a lot from these three approaches to language. Dead faith talks too much. Dead faith is dominated by the agendas of supervisors. Dead faith has no sense of timing. I wonder what life in a congregation might be like were we to give attention to these dynamics of language. I wonder. . .

About Getting Well

"Good experience" was my father's euphemism for a "bad job." - Joseph Epstein

Going forward, accountability is a word that will be on the lips of most of us. To be accountable is, first of all, to understand about one's life direction.

There is an illusion that accountability is about "getting even." But that is an impossible demand. When a horrid injustice is done, its effects are indelible, like a tattoo. Schemes of retribution, revenge, deterrence all lead to the same dead end, a blindness to how the mistakes of others are now become a part of us. How can we repay the years an innocent has lived on death row? How can an IED injury be completely eradicated? How can we manage our ire as trickle down economics is revealed as a hoax?

Accountability is about getting well. Some call it forgiveness. Others call it restoration, rebuilding. Rebuilding begins in remembering what is real and who is involved. These recollections are like a pebble cast into a pond. They ripple and touch all of the other drops of water there. So it is with accountability. We affect one another for good or ill. My decisions and actions impinge on those around me. And when I have acted badly, they damage others. It is the sad illusion of retribution that the offender bears the weight of a mistake. The truth is that when an accounting comes, the actor and the victim are all involved. But there is still a distinction to be made. "Some are guilty, but all are responsible," Rabbi Abraham Heschel reminds us. Rebuilding happens when the guilty new direction, even as all participate in the search for new direction. And all, victims AND perpetrators are essential to a dialogue that gets to wholeness.

Getting well in our time, then, will focus on questions like these:
+ What is needed to heal all parties involved?
+ What is needed by the harmed?
+ Who can provide the solutions?

Whether it is the so called war on terror, the indifference around hurricane Katrina, the collapse of the housing and equity markets, or the old staples of gender and race discrimination; healing is not just for the guilty. Retribution against the offender, in the end, does not bring health. (Gandhi is reputed once to have said it this way, "An eye for an eye and soon we'll all be blind.") Punishment cannot be the core question of restoration. We will need to find a way to engage the guilty in ways that bring us all into the problem solving.

If you are like me, the past decade has left you tired, depleted. As one wag puts it, "when you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging." That is a great place to start. We need to prepare to face the accountability questions in the coming months. If we can stop digging, later we will find in restoration a wonderful source of energy. But for now, just to rest is a good place to be.

The Least of These

for I was hungry and you gave me no food,
I was thirsty and you gave me nothing to drink,
I was a stranger and you did not welcome me,
naked and you did not give me clothing,
sick and in prison and you did not visit me.

I have been going door to door around neighborhoods encouraging folks to vote in the upcoming presidential election and, when asked, explaining the positions of the Obama Campaign for Change. I was assigned door to door canvassing in one of Battle Creek's affluent neighborhoods. The experience was quite an eye opener. I saw, unfolding before me, the surprising nexus of spirit and politics as clear as glass. I had expected that there might not be much enthusiasm for Barack in this very affluent neighborhood. One, after all, does not get to such affluence paying large tax bills and Barack has been painted as a "tax and spender." There was some of that. But there was a whole lot more gracious and welcoming folks of all sides of the political spectrum, grateful for one who cares enough to nourish the body politic with conversation. It is clear that grace and hospitality are not the property of one political party. A good and generous spirit is available in both.

I came across some other, rather disturbing conversations. A middle aged man railed against the distribution of "MY" wealth to the undeserving. "They ought to be left to starve," he exclaimed full of hyperbole. I was shaken by that encounter, wondering what was missing in his own life. There, poverty of spirit and brutal politics were partners. There were other stops. I came to houses that clearly were just keeping body and soul together. Shabby homes. Paint peeled on the outside. Holes in the porch shouted poverty. Inside was a free market economist. S/he worried about helping the poor while oblivious to the poverty into which s/he had fallen. "Let them make it on their own." I must say, I did not get it.


The climax of the Gospel of Matthew is in a vision of lasting things, concerns of ultimate importance. "Inasmuch as you have done it unto the least of these, you have done it unto me." The Gospel writer puts "concern for other" in the mouth of Jesus! It is the telltale sign of the faithful, or spiritual wholeness. I am left to ponder not that folks have political differences, but that those who seem to suffer most from their politics are those who are on the margin. . . the poor man who embraces the chance at ""hitting it big" or the overworked small businessman stretched to the limit and angry about it.

What comes first, the marginal lifestyle or the pinched and angry ideology? Who knows. In a great irony, it turns out that "the least of these" are those who hold the least of these in contempt, who are afraid to share what they have. Now that is the spiritual nexus of the Gospel. It was all I could do to recall that I was there to distribute political information to these tortured souls. There was a fertile field for Pastoral Care. That will be for another day and another time. For now, I bathe in the mystery of what it is to be human, grateful for its deep contradictions.

Door to door canvassing is a great way to take one's own spiritual pulse. There was that surprising generosity of the bulk of the affluent. There is hope for the "least of these." The sign in my yard this year asks, "Got hope?" Clearly there is a hunger for hope, some gracefully expressed, others in a brutal "cri de coeur."

Political and spiritual health are in such complex interrelationship. It is striking.

News from Florida

Wisdom consists partly in not pretending anymore, in discarding artifice. . . Showing off is part of ambition; but now that we are old, let us have the confidence to speak simply.
-Julian Barnes

Florida has a kind of smell, a pungent, "alive smell" of things that are always growing. It is the smell of a greenhouse. I have spent the past week in the Florida greenhouse with some 35 other retired or about to retire Episcopalians, considering what our future holds. Thanks to the forethought of the Church, most of us have adequate means to live in comfort. But we are looking at meaning. What will it mean to be among the elders of our Church and society? It would seem that the answer to that question might be quite simple. It is not. It turns out that playing an important role as a maintainer of the social/cultural fabric involves questions that face all retirees, questions of health and finances. But further, we have delved into questions of spirit and of continuing use of gifts we have developed over the years we have spent encouraging Christian congregations to grown and nourish their participants.

The substructure that supports those who have finished their gainful employment is rooted in Spirit. What sort of person am I called to become by the God who draws us into newness? How might the gifts I have used (and overused) over the past decades be translated into something helpful, even needed by those around me? In other words, "Where does my desire meet the world's needs?"

The answers are not in any one sized fits all format. The require a good deal of patient waiting, a clear sense of self and an ability to recognize in a chance encounter, an emerging vocation. One is reminded that the educated mind is not simply the one who can read and write, but one that can entertain a new idea, discern a new possibility and face limitation with humor and serenity.

A lot of what we are doing is letting go. We are loosening our grip on a role we each have worn for most of our adult life. We are finding that some of the abilities we have developed are no longer used or useful. We are preparing for life increasingly dependent on hope.

I was reminded that from God's standpoint nothing is ever lost. That may have been the most important learning of the entire 8 days. The smell of Florida is not the smell of rotting of decay. It is a greenhouse of a place, where plantings can come to fruit and to flower. Retirement may appear to be being put out to pasture. I can see that it might mean a glorious harvest. Thank God.

The Gospel Dog

But religious knowledge comes incrementally and slowly.
And religion is like any other activity.
It is not easy to do it well.
-Karen Armstrong

The wholesale pursuit of "life changing" experiences are a paradox of our time. In what is, perhaps, the most affluent nation in history, we seem hell bent of 'life change." It is a script being played out time and again in the media. It may be a measure of the "born again" staple of evangelical religion that we are so inhabited with this pursuit. "Remember whenever you're down and in, the only way is up and out," sings the lyric of Hey Look Me Over. But what of the up and outs. How do they change? It is a provocative question for our time. I want to suggest that the life changing promotions of everything from bromides and religion are so thoughtlessly applied as to have no meaning. They have become, rather than a source of inspiration, the tap root of dissatisfaction.

Bring on the dogs. The Bible, along with most of western civilization, have few kind words for our "best friend." Years back, when I looked into the status of dogs in the scriptures, I found universal disgust. Canines are panned in the pages of holy writ. If you want to deliver a put down, in biblical terms, call it a dog.

Were it not for the dog reference, I might have missed this little tale, buried in the Gospel of Matthew.

From there Jesus took a trip to Tyre and Sidon. They had hardly arrived when a Canaanite woman came down from the hills and pleaded, "Mercy, Master, Son of David! My daughter is cruelly afflicted by an evil spirit." Jesus ignored her. The disciples came and complained, "Now she's bothering us. Would you please take care of her? She's driving us crazy." Jesus refused, telling them, "I've got my hands full dealing with the lost sheep of Israel." Then the woman came back to Jesus, went to her knees, and begged. "Master, help me." He said, "It's not right to take bread out of children's mouths and throw it to dogs." She was quick: "You're right, Master, but beggar dogs do get scraps from the master's table." Jesus gave in. "Oh, woman, your faith is something else. What you want is what you get!" Right then her daughter became well.

It is a tale of encounter. The Master meets a Canaanite woman. She is not only a foreigner. She represents the seductress whose marriage to good Israelite boys threatened the early life of the community in the promised land. It is also a tale of insult. Jesus, infers the common wisdom, "she is a pagan, then she is a dog." To that point Jesus' world was one made up of two teams; the children and the dogs.

Owing to the woman's persistence another world came into view. Jesus found what he was looking for in that conversation with the forbidden pagan. Isn't that usually the way it is when we meet the enemy as a human being? Matthew signals that Jesus' mission was transformed from that of a narrow slice of the Israelite camp to a universal world embracing Gospel. Even for Jesus, religious knowledge came incrementally and slowly, built on in depth conversation with the uppity Canaanite.

Now, those with close association with canines are not surprised by this story. It is always they way it is with dogs. They do not get their good habits not from a "born again" moment, but from the persistent careful training of a master. They may learn to bite in a moment of cruelty. But they learn loyalty in a lifetime of considerate treatment. And there is no better companion than a loyal dog. They are the teachers of the lessons of loyalty and empathy.

Maybe the metaphor of dog training as life in the Spirit is what it will take to build a deep running empathy in the human family. At least in this one story, the Bible gets dogs right. I am wondering how we might apply the lessons of life training in a world that lusts after just one more experience that "changed my life."

Let a dog teach you a thing or two.

quote, quote

Because television can make so much money doing its worst, it often cannot afford to do its best. -Fred Friendly

The way we live is eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention--the building block of intimacy, wisdom and cultural progress. -Maggie Jackson

9-14, The New 9-11?

Strange travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.
-Kurt Vonnegut

Sometimes, the lectionary (a listing of public worship readings assembled over 2 decades ago) can be eerily prescient. Across the nation, church going folks will be hearing this pithy tale Jesus told, on the subject of economics. How amazingly timely! Will preachers take the opportunity to remind folks that the terrorists are not the only ones who are implicated in the figurative fall of the twin towers? Or will this become yet another appeal for parish fund raising? As Abraham Heschel reminds us, "All are guilty, some are responsible." Listen and pray for the prophetic voice in your local pulpit this week.

“The kingdom of heaven is like the owner of an estate who went out at dawn to hire workers for the vineyard. After reaching an agreement with them for the usual daily wage, the owner sent them out to the vineyard. About mid-morning, the owner came out and saw others standing around the marketplace without work, and said to them, ‘You go along to my vineyard and I will pay you whatever is fair.’ At that they left. Around noon and again in the mid-afternoon, the owner came out and did the same. Finally, going out late in the afternoon, the owner found still others standing around and said to them, ‘Why have you been standing here idle all day?’ ‘No one has hired us:’ they replied. The owner said, ‘You go to my vineyard, too.’ When evening came, the owner said to the overseer, ‘Call the workers and give them their pay, but begin with the last group and end with the first.’ When those hired late in the afternoon came up, they received a full day’s pay, and when the first group appeared they assumed they would get more. Yet they all received the same daily wage. Thereupon they complained to the owner, ‘This last group did only an hour’s work, but you’ve put them on the same basis as those who worked a full day in the scorching heat. My friends’: said the owner to those who voiced this complaint, ‘I do you no injustice. You agreed on the usual wage, didn’t you? Take your pay and go home. I intend to give this worker who was hired last the same pay as you. I’m free to do as I please with my money, aren’t I? Or are you envious because I am generous?

Apres moi, le deluge

Our capacity for justice makes democracy possible, and our capacity for injustice makes democracy necessary - Reinhold Niebuhr

It is equally illegal for rich and poor to sleep under bridges. - French Proverb

Louis XIV’s prescient words are the metaphor for our time. His reign as the King of France built the nation into an international power while simultaneously bankrupting it. Le deluge reminds us that the raw pursuit of power and influence have their costs. That seems to be the lesson of history and of recent politics.

The deluge came to mind as over 9 inches of rain fell on us over the weekend. While we live on a ridge, our front hallway was flooded, just on some of the runoff from the driveway. It was a cloudburst.

My attention soon turned to a contemporary deluge, a regieme fixated only on power and influence. It is the ultimate self defeating behavior in governance. That focus has failed to have any impact on the hurricanes, market collapses and wars of choice that have come our way. The failure of Louis XIV and of the current occupant are, at root, theological in nature. Each have rejected a balanced stewardship of the whole of a nation’s life as too complicated. They substitute simplistic power formulae in place of a solid understanding a complicated world. The Hebrew Prophets*, along with the ancient Greeks agree that our misguided aims can bring on le deluge. And the stakes continue to build. Global Climate Change will challenge our best efforts. But the ancients warned us of this sort of excess.

At bottom, we need to grasp reality “as it is” with all its complexity. It is not enough to be satisfied with our preferred formulae. A bipolar world of good and evil, simply cannot get its arms around the nuanced real life situations we face. It creates synthetic verities, truthiness as Stephen Colbert calls it. We need to pull our economy, the environment, our military forces and our politics back from the precipice.

The adage goes, “even a blind pig comes up with an acorn now and then.” Maybe we’ll get lucky this time.

*See especially the prophet Amos for a vivid description of contemporary politics.

With God's Help

Life oughta be much clearer to me than it is.
-Garrison Keillor

Many Christians, upon entry into the community of faith, make promises. In the Episcopal Church, these vows are called the Baptismal Covenant. The Covenant begins in the Apostles Creed and ends with five affirmations to which the candidate responds, "I will, with God's help." That is the perfect response, because the affirmations are challenging indeed. Among the things we vow is to "strive for justice and peace and respect the dignity of every human being." This is, for me, the most challenging, if not impossible of the promises. Not a day goes by when respect of my fellow human beings is not an issue. Sometimes, I think that we have made that vow and dwell on it so that we can notice those times when genuine respect actually appears, when consideration and true compassion are present among us.

Those who grasp the depth of this promise have been disconcerted by the imprisonment of so called detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. This is no news. Walled off from the rest of the human race by name calling and military restrictions, these prisoners have been called "the worst of the worst" by government officials. Mahvish Khan, a translator and student of the law, has written a book, My Guantanamo Diary, which pulls back the curtain of Gitmo. The not so surprising discovery of the book is that the folks at Gitmo are in most ways persons, just like me. Sure, there are those who have plotted dastardly deeds agains Americans. Many are probably prisoners of war. But 87% of the detainees came into our custody having been "turned in" for a reward. Many of these are folks "just like me" which Khan interviews. The simple act of telling the stories of these ordinary people snared in the "war on terror" may be a first step toward living out the promise "to respect the dignity of every human being."

What surprises me about the book is not that human beings are about the same everywhere. What caught me off guard was the vehemence with which folks resist that self evident idea. In the climate of fear, complicity and name calling that pervades this nation, it should come as no surprise that the last thing many might want is a human face on the so called terrorists.

I commend Ms. Khan's book to you. It would make an excellent counterpoint to the prayers and devotional reading you will be consulting during the coming Advent or Lenten Seasons. Make a note of it.

Creating Wild Men?

As I see it, the primary religious task these days is to try to think straight.

-William Sloane Coffin

Idolatry is the peculiar province of the inflexible and unimaginative. American religion has its own brand of idolatry which remains largely unexplored. Like a feeding vulture, one of the foundational issues circles around the question “How are we to live in creation?” From that question emerge idols, rooted in deep faith needs. Some, in fact most, of American Christians are deeply moved by a need to belong. A full 75% of us identify our faith by family or tribe, i.e., by denomination. We need to belong. A smaller proportion of us have the need to quest, to challenge the prevailing conditions so carefully nurtured by those who derive identity from their faith. Each of these primal needs creates its own particular theological “spin.” And when that spin becomes fixed, it quite naturally leads to consequences. In fact, each has its own particular idolatry.

Excessive focus on belonging leads to the idol of “family.” All effort is on the preservation of the family unit, perhaps the congregational unit as well. All of the conversation is about well- being and safety. But the truth about this idolatry was laid bare by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his famed Harvard Speech, where he said this: “Even biology knows that habitual extreme safety and well-being are not advantageous for a living organism. Today, well-being in the life of Western society has begun to reveal its pernicious mask.” Making families and congregations into suffocating havens is an idolatry.

So too, the focus on innovation and the search for answers leads to a kind of rootless and commitment free society. We see this in the reaction to the stifling “protestant ethic” of our culture. There are those who make a life out of resisting the common sense values of the dominant church culture. To make families and congregations laboratories of resistance is also an idolatry.

It is said of mental illness that is “doing the same, self defeating behavior again and again, expecting, this time, a different result.” We seem to be doing that in our religious shouting matches. The “Family Values” crowd and the “Wilderness Values” crowd seem to be shouting past one another. We are getting nowhere fast. Can there be another way?

Real men drill - Ellen Goodman

One neglected focus is the care and nurture of young men as they sort through their own ways of being in the world. We now have young men growing up in our world with no experience of any wildness at all. They are deeply suspicious, if not phobic about what lurks in nature. We also have young me who approach the natural world as their domain, using the tools of civilization to overwhelm, even attack the natural world. The tracks of 4 wheelers, the roar of Sea Do’s and the wanton destruction of wild places attest to omnipresence of this way of life. In July of 1994, I mused on this dilemma, writing this:

Sitting by the falls of the Ohio River, once one of nature’s mighty spectacles, now smelling of creosote, its backwaters stacked with coffee cups, tampon inserters,

six pack binders, the ever present plastic. The turd laden waters of the Ohio drift by hearty souls who angle for jackfish and the bottom feeding species. Nature, while under siege, still attracts the hunter gatherer. The call of the hunt is pursued even under the most adverse circumstances. I name this convergence the “missing husband.”

By this I mean that the model of manhood in nature is neither exploitation for the good of the family, nor is it found solely in nature for itself. Rather, manhood flourishes when it acts as husband. Husbanding is that peculiar role that both depends on natural gifts and at the same time resists their overuse. The husbanding paradigm is not of wild man protecting the family, nor is it of wild man protecting wildness. It is flexible, moving between each as it is require. In short, a husband approaches nature with judgment.

Husband is wildness with commitment, it is relationship. Building true manhood is about building commitment to the well being of the human family and to the divine root of the creation.

In wildness is the preservation of the world. -H. D. Thoreau

So what do we teach to young men in the wild? We teach mirroring and we teach creativity. Mirroring in creation is about finding within oneself the continuity between self and other. It is not a case of man against the wilderness. We have suffered at the hands of the opposition long enough. But it is about creation located in ourselves. It means finding creation in us. It means returning to the same places again and again so that a relationship can form. I have visited some wild places for over twenty years, before they began to reveal themselves to me. Watching the shifting vegetation in one spot year after, rejoicing in a new crop of wild fruit, sitting still enough to see an animal in its natural setting; these are ways of being in continuity with wildness. Creativity of heart is the compliment to continuity with wilderness. It is not enough to fall in love with the wilds. We must learn to express the wild in the culture as a whole. That means learning to do the arts in response to nature’s gifts.

Balanced men are husbands. A husband enters the wilds with love as his guide. He finds ways to be partners. It seems to me that the Church, the place of partnership, is the place peculiarly prepared to do this work. But it will mean abandoning the peculiar excesses of ego centered theologies. It will mean putting families in their place, forging paths between what is outside and what is inside and hearing the passionate voices who find in the created order the voice of the divine. Oh, that’s pantheism, you say. If our wild places are to be around for future generations, we must find a way to introduce them to our worship. A good place to start are with the wild men of holy writ, Moses and Jesus. They are our forerunners, whose work began in wild places. Part of today's theological challenge is to recover the husbanding of all creation.

Thought Starter

To be furious in religion is to be furiously irreligious.
- William Penn

What Goes Around, the Sequel

In a July 16th entry, "What Goes Around," I did my best to fathom the Anglican Communion's dilemma around human sexuality. At the Lambeth Conference, the decennial meeting of the world's Anglican bishops, the subject was gummed to death, without much success. The Conference has since adjourned.

Under the theory that it is a good thing to balance a "rant" with some good common sense, I include Giles Frazer's reflections on the Lambeth Conference. Giles provided sanctuary to Bishop Gene Robinson who was the sole bishop to be "locked out" of the meeting. He says what I wish I might have said in a saner moment. I have Tom Lippart to thank. It was he who forwarded Giles' articles to me. I hope they will illumine the events of the Lambeth Conference, now history.

Here's to you, Mr Robinson

The irony missed by Christian homophobes is that the gay US bishop is sustained by a faith you could call fundamentalist

The emails have been coming in all day. My favourite begins: "Dear sodomite supporter, you are nothing but a dirty sodomite-loving ugly stain of a man who is a disgrace to humanity." It ends "Burn in hell, Mr K." Well, thank you for that, Mr K. I have had a fair number of letters and emails from people who think like you. One suggested that I ought to be executed at Tyburn. Another graphically described the details of fisting.

My crime had been to offer the Bishop of New Hampshire a pulpit to preach the word of God. I usually have the emotional hide of a rhino, but even I was upset by the unpleasantness of the reaction, hiding my hurt in a few too many vodkas at lunchtime. How on earth does Gene Robinson cope with the disgusting abuse to which he is subjected most days – the protester who interrupted his sermon in my church on Sunday being a pretty mild example? Day after day, buckets of spiritual shit are thrown at him, sometimes by fellow bishops, and he just keeps going.

Spending some time with him over the last few days, I have discovered how he does it. He is the real deal. He is a believer. Responding to attacks that he had a "homosexual agenda", he insisted: "Here and now, in St Mary's Church, Putney, I want to reveal to you the homosexual agenda. The homosexual agenda is: Jesus." He went on to preach a fiery, almost revivalist, sermon, calling on Anglicans to take Jesus into their heart and to allow Him to cast out their fear.

What makes this person so interesting is that he has lost any sense that he is able to support himself spiritually through his own effort alone. His recognition of his "failure" to cope is precisely his strength. The theology is pure Luther: only when you recognise that you are unable to make yourself acceptable to God under your own steam can you collapse back upon God as the sole source of salvation. Later in the sermon, he described going from a meeting of the US House of Bishops to a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, and being relieved that, at this second meeting, he could at last speak about God.

Forget what you think you know about Gene Robinson – his is Gospel Christianity of a very traditional kind. This is what Christianity looks like once it has got over its obsession with respectability.

Beware of the morality of legalism

When Christian crosses the Slough of Despond, he encounters the first temptation of John Bunyan’s spiritual classic, The Pilgrim’s Progress. Christian meets the smooth and persuasive Mr Worldly Wiseman, who directs him towards a village called Morality: “there shalt thou live by honest neighbours, in credit and in good fashion.” It seems an odd sort of temptation, and perhaps it is unsurprising that Christian leaves the straight and narrow path, and settles down in Morality.

One of the most vigorous exponents of the view that morality has little to do with Christianity is the poetic genius and eccentric theologian William Blake. According to Blake, the problem with the way most people read the Bible is that they understand it as a manual for moral uprightness.

By contrast, in the Gospels, the moral law is associated with those religious teachers who first want to judge and accuse one another. Blake notes that Satan is the great accuser. For Blake: “If morality was Christianity, Socrates was the Saviour. The Gospel is Forgiveness of Sins & has no moral precepts — these belong to Plato & Seneca & Nero.”

In a remarkable new book by Christopher Rowland and Jonathan Roberts, The Bible for Sinners (SPCK, 2008), the authors take this understanding of the gospel message, and apply it to the current crisis over homosexuality. Conservatives insist that this row is all about the Bible — and they are right.

Yet too many conservatives have become so narrow in their reading of the scriptures that they miss the remarkably creative ways in which Jesus and Paul themselves read their own scriptures. Jesus and Paul did not read the scriptures literally: you could almost say that they took hermeneutic liberties in the name of the Spirit. Thus, for example, in Galatians, Paul defends the new idea of open table fellowship, of Jews and pagans eating together, even though such a practice was evidently “unscriptural”.

The Bible for Sinners argues that the Windsor report and the idea of a Covenant seek to unite Anglicans by closing down the possibilities of biblical hermeneutics, and turning gospel faith into moral uprightness. What is at stake here is so much larger than what gay people do in bedrooms: it is all about the creation of a set of rules that will systematically make gospel faith all-but-impossible for Anglicans in the 21st century.

Blake would have seen the Windsor report and its children as a form of tyranny, in which legalistic religion (the “stony law”, as he called it) triumphs over the creative religion of the Spirit. And so do I.

The Revd Dr Giles Fraser is Team Rector of Putney, in south London.

Delicious Summer Reading

I “struck it rich” with two books I found on the summer’s reading stack: Maggie Jackson’s study, "Distracted" and a collection of Bill Moyer’s speeches titled, "Moyers on Democracy." Each book has offered such depth of scope on their subjects, that I found myself jotting notes at least as much as I was reading.

First, Maggie Jackson. The subtitle, “The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age,” has an ominous cast to it. Jackson explores the junction between human pursuits and technology. When I read snippets to Sharon, her comment was, “Sounds like a book about spirituality.” Indeed, it is. For the chapters revolve around the long standing staples of the spiritual life: attention and focus, judgment and the written word, history and awareness. Jackson’s thesis is that we are losing our ability to manage our lives, an unintended consequence of the easy access of technological communication. No Luddite, her observations serve as a cautionary tale, suggesting some resources that can help us explore the wonder of the world wide web and other innovations with minimal self harm. This book is a staple of the examined life, the most consistent demand of western philosophy. As Jackson puts it, “the way we live is eroding our capacity for deep, sustained, perceptive attention—the building block of intimacy, wisdom, and cultural progress.” For any who seek to deepen these core facets of their lives, Jackson provides ample encouragement.

Then, Bill Moyers. The book is a collection of public speeches that Moyers had made in different venues over the past twelve years. His audiences are varied including the Hamilton College Class of 2006 and the cadets at West Point; mourners at funerals for William Sloane Coffin and Barbara Jordan; and groups of public policy wonks and journalists. Moyer’s pithy grasp of the human situation is engaged with passion and humor. About his life partner he says, “A man is fortunate who marries his muse.” About Texas religion, Moyers observes, “In Texas, there are more Baptists than people.” Preachers will observe the structure of these orations, as varied and attention grabbing as any orator would want. But best of all are Moyer’s passions, his diagnosis of the present mess and his wide ranging experience creates a credible pulpit from which to comment on our democracy. I came away with renewed resolve to and confidence in the notion that each human being’s lived experience is important to the health of the whole society.

Each volume, in its own way, is a source of spiritual ignition. I think I will be rereading these two volumes in the coming years. I commend them to you.

Ancient Wisdom

"An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics," Plutarch reminds us. The connection between moral and political action is ancient indeed. Hear the Tao:

The Master doesn't talk, (s)he acts.
When the work is done,
the people say,
"Amazing, we did it all by ourselves!"

What Goes Around

As I write the Bishops of the Anglican Communion gather for their decenniel Lambeth conference. These are the leaders of the world's 78 million Anglicans, of which the Episcopal Church is the U. S. representative. Folks have been deeply divided over the ordination of the Bishop of New Hampshire, the Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, a homosexual living in a partnered relationship. The howl that has come particularly from former missionary territories in Africa, the Carribbean and to some degree, South America has been as deafening as it is deafened. I want to remind folks that these intolerant and, to some degree, mean, responses may well be the fruit of a missionary strategy of the past two centuries. Two elements of that strategy are coming back to bite us. First, we were imperialists. The church went along with the methods and attitudes of the British and American empires. This led us to a faulty strategy which told the world's poorer nations, "come and be like us." Rather than listening to these worlds, we "told" them. Worse than that, we sent our second string team into the fray. The first string got all of the prestigious cures in the first world. So, we got theologies that resemble some of the worst of our own worlds thinking. So now, we have breakaway provinces who are busy exhibiting some of the most unanglican theology who hold sway in parts of the communion.

Listening is a first step for the first world. What are these folks trying to tell us? How can we hear an ecclesiology that is steeped in hierarchy and conformity? These are the same challenging questions we face in our nation with the evangelical and fundamental community. It might be good to start listening here, even as we set our sights on hearing our own brothers and sisters from across the globe. But listening is not abandonment of our own identity. It is finding common ground from which a church can be renewed. Like the exasperated grandmother said to parents of the errant child, "That kid needs a good listening to!"

I think that rebelling bishops will tell us about the failures of our world missionary strategy. Then perhaps, we might begin to make a new start. I have in mind a chapter in Ivan Illich's book, The Church Change and Development, entitled "Letter to an American Missionary." There Illich develops a missionary stance based on affirming the good sense and integrity of native forms, that seeks to live into a different way of life without constant one upping, talking too much rather than "hearing" with the deepest ear. I am not surprised that third world Anglicans cannot listen when we say that God is doing a new thing with us. Listening is not what we taught when we communicated the faith.

Think about it.

Take My Car, Please

The traffic on Michigan Highway 78 crossing in front of the house has reduced to a slow trickle, the result of burgeoning gasoline prices. It sure makes things a lot quieter here at Cousins Island. We are just beginning to see the dramatic effects of automotive expense. Everyone is talking about it. Airline travel is getting more expensive. The sale of scooters has skyrocketed 40% in the past month. Public transportation has mushroomed. Summer vacations are taking place close to home. Second homes are visited far less often, if at all. I am sure you can add your own.

The mystique of distance is fast receding as travel costs rise. Where we are going to feel these effects even more going forward. For congregations and those who nurture the spiritual life, the news is surprisingly good. The bane of American religion has been the rise of superficial, look alike membership. Churches have come to resemble clubs of like minded folk, like our neighborhoods. As costs increase, people will be be considering costs over community makeup in their job and living arrangements. It may be that one will not drive quite so far to be surrounded with like minded individuals. Mixed communities may emerge from the present crisis as some return home.

Congregations will be challenged by the increasing diversity of their membership. We will learn to recognize and value that we are in intimate communities with those with whom we disagree. Families, too, will need a broader perspective to accommodate that offending brother in law who now lives next door! Managing “close in” relationships will encourage dialogue on a level more spiritual, deeper than mere ideology. This is as much an opportunity as it will be arduous spiritual labor.

Congregations, as well, will be challenged by the down side of gas pricing. More of us will be in need of energy subsidy, food supplement. The poor will suffer. We will be challenged to dig deeply to respond to these needs.

On the whole, rising energy costs presents opportunity to those who are concerned to maintain the fabric of our communities. Maybe people of good will will benefit by worship with those who differ with them. Difference is one sign of authentic spiritual community. Maybe gas prices will deliver us from look alikeism and conformity in faith communities.

Real life is never only difficult or easy, but a more mixed picture. “Take my car, please,” has gifts to offer.

Toxic Narcissism

There is a growing undercurrent of narcissism in the United States. It has always been with us. Foreign visitors have noted its presence since Alexis de Toqueville. In general, our exalted impression of ourselves has been a strength. Sometime in the middle of the last century, professionals made a living designing ways to harness our narcissism for commercial gain. The advertising industry was born. It has been marvelously effective, too effective. Modern Americans have internalized the subtext, “it is all here for you.” Since our attacks in Afghanistan and Iraq, our self regard has taken a spiritually toxic turn.

We attended the fourth of July parade in Richland, today. It had all of the usual tractors, antique cars, fire equipment, marching bands and combines. Richland’s parade has a running commentator, blasting his message on speakers up and down the parade route. The returning theme of the commentary was that parade members were here to “keep me safe.” This is the new narcissism. It is all about my safety. This virulent strain is not safe. For the guardians of the new narcissism are not simply friendly merchants and manufacturers, but military types, people bearing weapons.

In a way, our individualism has worked well for us. It has been the source of our vital inventiveness, among other things. This new form of national narcissism promises spiritual evisceration, and worse. It bears eerie resemblance to the lethal spectacles of the Axis regimes, behind which the Holocaust lurked and against which millions fought in the last World War. The new narcissism, with its overbearing conformity of public events, in its hymnody, creeds and anthems, are creating a spiritual hollowness. "Keeping us safe," is not good for us. It may be the deepest meaning of Independence day to resist such protection.

Origins

We are far too self assured.
Truth is, in fact, approached in the darkness.
-Abraham Joshua Heschel

The Perplexity Project began over a decade ago in the Diocese of Northern Michigan as a way to explore moral and ethical issues in congregations. I recall the first meeting of this project in a church basement in St. Ignace.

The theory, as is true of the mission of that diocese, is to discover from the midst of the community of faith just what it is that the divine word might be. It starts with the particular. It starts with disciplined attention. So many efforts at ethics in the Christian context begin with “telling.” I am reminded of the comment of a wise grandfather who, when confronted with a particularly unsettled adolescent, remarked, “that boy needs a good listening to.”

We talk too much in our moral discourse. Such conversations begin at the end, the se lling of the proponent’s conclusions. Perplexity mounts a quest for the appropriate answer. We begin in listening, in the Quaker model of a Clearness Community. Such conversations are, first of all, rooted in what is happening now. Disciplined listening then leads to a more universal perspective. One begins in the place of perplexity. A fabricated ethic begins in assertion, in self assurance, in an end point. Perplexity ethics begin in that place of darkness, even embarrassment, where human beings embark on the difficult questions we face in our lives.

This blog seeks first to listen to the culture in which it swims. Then, some shapes might emerge from the listening, some things that could be said to be true. There is plenty on our minds at the moment, political and cultural streams, each of which have deep moral and ethical implications. I hope that this endeavor will have the quality of a walk in the forest, noticing what is going on, making connections.

I do not know where this listening might lead. If it is done well, we may glimpse something of the deepest reaches of our souls. So, I begin this continuation of the Perplexity Project with great expectation. And because the subject matters so deeply to each of us, I hope that these thoughts might have the quality of conversation.

A word about opinion. “Opinions are like noses, everyone has one.” What the perplexity project is about is not the formation of opinion or their expression. Rather, we look for something a good deal more focused than simply “positions and statements.” We will have arrived at moral discourse insofar as we can place aside pure opinion and begin to piece together the “divine ecology” of the way we ourselves make meaning in our lives.

Beginning

I heard this story a long time ago — of the tribal elder who was telling his grandson about the battle the old man was waging inside himself. He said, “It is between two wolves, my son. One is an evil wolf: Anger, envy, sorrow, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is the good wolf: Joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.” The boy thought this over for a minute, and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf wins?” The old Cherokee replied simply: “The one I feed.”

–As retold by Bill Moyers, National Conference for Media Reform, June 7, 2008