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.