Nine Eleven no, No, NO!

Each year, as September 11th approaches, the air is filled with a kind of horrid nostalgia. It makes us all into self involved little automatons. Particularly idiotic are the suggestions that we build some sort of 9-11 Shrine or declare a National Holiday of it. The prospect makes me shudder. Here is why.

Some celebrations of national events ennoble and uplift participants. They bring us all into one space, one nation. Like the headlines on 9-11 itself, we gloried in "We are all Americans now." Other celebrations are like the organ recitals of the aged. What is otherwise to be an expected glitch of the flesh (say a slipped disc or a rectal lesion, a dimming eyesight or the inability to hear well) is dwelt on until it becomes a major identifying force. 9-11 would be one such debilitation. The celebration would take what is otherwise peripheral and make of it an obsession, an orgy of the put upon self. We do not need to magnify 9-11, letting it exert full force on us. We are quite injured enough already.

Theologians call the ennobling rituals, symbols and the demeaning ones, diabols. Symbols bring integrity and wholeness. Diabolical rites make of us petty and smaller than we might otherwise find ourselves to be. Several features of a proposed 9-11 holiday make it a sure fire diabol.

First, we are in the habit of thinking that we are different than everyone else on the globe. None of us will ever forget where we were on the morning of September 11, 2001, as scheduled airliners plunged first into the World Trade Center towers in New York, then into the Pentagon in Washington D.C. and finally into a barren field in rural Pennsylvania. The day is memorable. But it is not notable. Here is why. What made it seem consequential was the sheer surprise of it. We want to magnify the sheer number of souls lost. But held up next to the annual carnage on the nation's highways, the death toll was rather small (by a factor of 10). And if we measure death against the war deaths we ourselve have inflicted on others, say in Dresden or Hiroshima, the death toll of 9-11 is minuscule, by as much as a factor of several hundred. Terror did happen to us, but not in near the volume we ourselves allow. Such a holiday would only underscore our gross exaggeration of our self importance or worse, our overreaction in 2 full scale, ill advised and long duration wars. We do not want to spend too much time dwelling on that, I would not think.

Further, such a celebration is vulnerable to the worst of our patriarchal excess. We probably need a holiday to celebrate public servants, the police and fire personnel who, like troopers, put their lives in danger on behalf of others. It happened to be true in those days, that those who responded to the tragedy were men, family men most of them. We grieve their loss. We look for heroes. It is but an opening to relish in a confusing past of a man's world. Today, those who respond to our public tragedies may be family men, but they are also women, gays and lesbians. The temptation is to use the responders of that one holiday to imprint a generation with patriarchy. There is at least as much danger in a gay couple trying to live "out" with integrity. Single mothers who face overstacked odds have a bravery worthy of the 9-11 first responders. We have quite enough trouble trying to get our Boy Scouts to face the world as it is, a world made up of men, women, gays and straights. No need to pile on yet another stack of fraternal orders to confuse, or worse, to derail the progress we are making.

In the end, we need for a holy balance. We came to 9-11, 2001 in near total ignorance of any other holy group on the planet, save for the occasional Jew. The "we're number one" crowd looks for a chance to spread the deception of the US as a so called Christian Nation, in contrast to the terrorists we so easily identify with Islam. Jews, Baha'is, Hindus, Muslims, animists and a host of other persuasions have shared this planet with the righteous for a long time. They threaten to share it for a good long time to come. We are not well served by fooling ourselves into thinking that 9-11 was the opening volley in some holy war or other. We would do well to try to find out the righteousness of others on the holy days that we already have available. (Ramadan, anyone?)

We have managed to twist a goodly number of national holidays to the service of our meanest desires. I see no reason to drag gender and faith into the mix. We might better take the time we might have celebrated 9-11 to figure out how we are going to get meaningful holy days back from the ones we have already lost to a variety of interests. Veteran's Day or Pearl Harbor Day or Memorial Day or Armed Forces Day or Thanksgiving or Independence Day or Mother's Day, each has departed from its original shape so profoundly that it is but a diabolical wart on the nation's hide. Only the insanely curious can tell you what gave rise to these holidays in the first place! They have been co-opted by special interests. We would do well to get them back.

We simply do not need another day to dwell on ourselves with such magnificent obsession. So use September 11th as a day to get at what you usually do on such a day! But please, no holiday.

Oops!

Some thoughts while mowing the lawn. . .

The apparent failure of the Diocese of Northern Michigan to secure consents to its Bishop Elect, Kevin Thew Forrester has elicited a spirited, if superficial, response. While I have written publicly on the matter before I wanted to reflect on something of the meaning of the failure. So here goes.

It seems to me that the key question revolves around the tension between orthodoxy and innovation. At a time when the unthinkable is happening to us as a nation: Our largest corporation is bankrupt and evaporating; banks and brokers are falling; medical care is increasingly inaccessible; we continue to fight in far away lands with a bare grasp of the significance of some of these wars; the list is long. One needs to ask, how will the church respond? Shall we take a sectarian approach, circle the wagons and end the discussion? Shall we utter the last words of a dying church, "We never did it that way before?" (A perception that is entirely manufactured, by the way. Nothing Kevin proposes has not been done before.) I think that is what Kevin's repudiation represents. Now that comes at a cost, one that our future generations will bear. We already see what happens when congregations are divided and embrace the status quo option. I hope that this is not the first whisper of a church following the way of General Motors.

It is clear to me that if we are to be the church in the coming decades we will do so as we are able to build bridges to innovation. We will face the hard questions around a calcified system of authorization, a shrinking from R and D in congregational life and the near loss of mission focus. Northern Michigan has been on the forefront of each. Time and again, in human relations, prison ministry, environmental leadership, canonical reform, ministry development, this little community has produced astonishing results. Elsewhere, the church displays an dismaying lack of vigor.

By the witholding of consents, we will effectively bar a strong voice from the table in the House of Bishops. . . a seat which Jim Kelsey held with distinction. When we are entering into a corporate and congregational environment, the likes of which we have not seen in my lifetime, retreat into the answers of the past will not do. Some exploration will be required. If Kevin's modest innovations set folks hair afire, I cannot see how we will muster the umph to look our problems squarely in the eye.

For now, we seem to have set our course in the matter. I am distressed that we are leaving ourselves so vulnerable to coming events that are as inevitable as they will be crushing. I so wish we would not dig up the shoots of new life, naming them as weeds.

Evolutionary THEORY

There is a form of sleight of hand that happens when Intelligent Designers and Creationists discuss the THEORY of Evolution. They say theory, with a particular meaning in mind (an iffy proposition) and then they wheel the spotlight across the stage onto Evolution. Presumably they want to show us why it is such an iffy idea. Scientists have been driven batty trying to make evolution appear bigger than it is, when they might give attention to the cynical use of the word theory. Theory can mean a guess. Certainly that is true about Creationist Theory. Theory can also mean a construct into which unconnected facts find a home. More than that, they find a home whose address you can verify. Intelligent Design, Creationism leads to a predetermined address, like masturbation. But it is not fruitful to explain interrelations of things. It has no scientific offspring! Evolution is a kind of springboard from which an entire branch of applied science is launched. Advances in ecological theory, in genetics and in the treatment of disease may be seen as important examples of applied evolutionary theory.

It appears that the stakes are quite clear in the Evolution Debate. It is all about theory. One definition leads to buttress the truth claims of an increasingly shrill (and shrinking) segment of the population. Another definition leads to advancement and the improvement of the quality of life of the globe's inhabitants. Now, you make the call. What kind of theory is Evolution?

Work in Progress

I have begun work on a series of essays on the subject of fidelity. The basic thesis is that of Hebrews 11:1, "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." What has mystified me is the "true believer" form of conviction that makes rigid affirmation as if it is a destination. "I believe." But faith, in my limited experience, is a point of departure. "I believe, so."
It may be that the reason that American Protestantism, and now Catholicism is so pugnacious and sterile is that there is a willingness to arrive at conviction, but not at dialogue. It seems to me that the route through the bankruptcy of our present faith climate is somehow tied up with the recovery of mystery at the heart of faith. So, I will be pursuing the mystery at the heart of seven lifegiving capacities (with which I hope to supplant the seven deadly sins.) Here is a preliminary agenda of essay titles

The Mystery of the Person
in the flesh
in nature
in conversation

The Mystery of a People
as strangers
as understanding
as pilgrims

Where Mystery is met
at table

The aim will be to reframe the way we do our faith from a problem/solution frame that is the prevailing frame used in our culture to a mystery/capacity frame, one that searches for openings onto divine life in the context of our humanity.

Brand Name Faith

Gone are the faith conversations of my youth. Back then, we were all Christians. The questions were about "what brand?" Lots of jokes revolved around church denominations. Brand religion still hangs on among the less acquainted, who speak "church" to religious functionaries. The language is about being baptized Methodist or wed by the priest (shorthand for Roman Catholic). But in public conversation, brands are nearly dead. More accurately, Christian has become one of the brands among Hindu, Baha'i, Muslim, Hebrew, etc.

At a recent family reunion, one of my nieces took me aside. She asked me to explain to her the bewildering variety of Christians about which she had heard. What makes a Baptist different from a Methodist, from an Episcopalian was her line of inquiry. I was enormously uneasy about this. It offered no avenue into the heart of faith. Faith as brand ignores the questions of the heart. It concentrates instead on superficialities, church attire. Much later it dawned on me that she was asking about brands. What a wonderful reflective moment we might have shared, had we thought a bit about the purposes and effects of a brand name culture.

Since then, I have been looking at branding as a feature in itself. Brands began as a sign of ownership. Early on, they are about possession. One brands a property. My cow, My beer, My buggywhip were the sine qua non of branding. Only later, when mass communication appeared a brand identified me. It is no longer my beer, but it is me! I not only use Budweiser, I am Budweiser. This shift produced great profits for those who held the trusted brands. (Naomi Klein, the Canadian writer has done a wonderful job of tracing the history of branding in her book, Logo, so I won't repeat her efforts here.) What bridges the transition from "brand as owning" to "brand as identity" is the intense focus on me, my and mine. Branding is the source of the cultural habit that everything "it is all about me."

As branding matured in the television age, it became a way to squeeze out the competition. Folks would pay more and seek out a brand simply because they knew they could trust it. The seamy side of the story comes when this trust shifts to identity. Then a brand becomes a bludgeon with which to club the competition. Branding narrows the market choices. It also narrows the human identity. Of course, political operatives soon discovered that same power. Parties, policies and candidates began to become part of the brand. Ad man H. R. Haldeman pioneered this approach in Richard Nixon's White House. It was he who branded Nixon the candidate of the Silent Majority, a dubious demographic. To one degree or another political campaigns in the mass media have been about brands. (eg Morning In America, Where's the Beef?) Fatally, they also came be be about a synthetic reality.

As I noted above, branding is no stranger to American Christianity. We have been branding from the very beginning. Some say that the population of the colonies rested on the free exercise of brands. (as long as they were Christian) Of late, Christian brand competition have become so complex that folks have begun to check out. Worse yet, it has created a bumper sticker shorthand and identity religion. Happily the superficial language of "faith as brand" is beginning to lose its grip on the public mind. That is a good thing.

Branding in religions is about creating division, limiting competition and finally market domination. By no stretch of imagination can any of these be the core mission of any faith. They are not virtues. As brands are now showing themselves to be a diversions in the commercial and political realm, religious brands are faltering too. Amid the rubble, hucksters of brand speak about the "rebranding" of failing products and ideologies. But the public sees the emperor walking around without naked. At last some sanity.

But we will still need information about products, politics and faith. George Barna, the guru of the religious focus group, recently noted, "Faith is increasingly viral rather than pedagogical."* The adage of faith, that it is caught not taught, may open a way to a new conversation on the subject. (I say may, because branding has made the public intolerant of conversation in sentences longer than sound bites.)

But this opening has breathed new life into our congregations We now can offer frameworks, skeletons, within which a search receive and interpret their faith can thrive. I can hardly wait to replace the "medical model" of faith (something you have to do that makes you better) to faith as collaboration. Such a shift holds great promise not only for the faith communities, but also for all who live around those who practice faith. At the very least, we can use a little respite from all the alternate realities that religious marketers have piled upon us in recent decades.




*www.barna.org/barna-update/article/12-faithspirituality/15-christianity-is-no-longer-americans-default-faith

Taking Out the Trash

"Garbage in; garbage out." This warning to computer users is also a warning to theologians. Has God withdrawn favor from the American experiment?

In recent disasters, the implicit theology is implicated. The so called "war on terror" and the collapse of the global economy have deep and hidden theological roots. While these are complex phenomena, to begin on theological examination cannot happen too soon. Atop the list of offenders is the laser like focus on the personal over the collective. Theological discourse is popularly understood to be "all about me." This, in part, explains the explosive growth and recent sagging of evangelical congregations. There is a direct connection to the biases of the consumer culture. "Have it your way," Burger King exclaimed and the churches promptly produced a theology to match. There was a time when the "success gospel" was the butt of jokes. No more.

The focus on God and me is now the dominant arena for God talk in the west. "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so," the evangelical gospel proclaims. Economic policy is shaped by what is good for me. The "war on terror" is waged to keep me safe. It is all so personal, shaped by my Savior, my religion, my wants. First person singular.

Does theological discourse ever talk in the first person plural, about us? In fact, the biblical root of the judeo christian forms of faith admits to very little in the way of personal focus. It is written largely in the context of we. So, in the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth he spoke of the divine life as we. The texts continue to address our dilemma, our culture, our society. In the context of we, the biblical text conveys some very different lessons than it does in the first person singular.

What might we be doing now, were we to consider that the good news was a collective sort of thing? I think that lessons about folks fending for themselves would be the central concern of congregations. We would bear our appropriate responsibility with the "least of these." Church membership would be understood as a shared enterprise, rather than just a personal choice. We might be more focused on mission than personal transformation. We would be much more careful about dividing the world into we and them. The experience one has in congregation as a part of something larger, introduces the futility of personal conformity. When our theology is no longer absorbed in "what will happen to me," we are able to mobilize the variety of us. We will also be able to see that the drawing lines of division is no simple matter. As a friend noted, "in the church, there is no them." The complex concern of the Gospel cannot be summoned by the sort of hats we wear. It is far deeper than that.

The garbage in the theological system is that "it is all about me." We will begin to clean up the theological and cultural mess when theologians can clarify that "its all about us." Perhaps then, and only then, can the theological disciplines begin to shed light on the dilemmas we face as a nation and as a culture.

It it time to take out the theological garbage.

Time It Was

My brother Michael and I have been talking about the old days. "Old when you gain as much pleasure from memory as from prospect," an old friend once told me. (He also said, "Old is when physicians become impotent.") I am not one who subscribes to Old in religion as an unquestioned virtue, as in "Gimme That Old Time Religion." But there is something to be said about having a firm grasp on the journey. Michael and I had a seminal conversation last Sunday evening as we remembered the year 1969. The first astronauts landed on the moon in July of that year. Woodstock happened. For me, a peraonsl event involved the March on Washington, when hundreds of thousands expressed themselves against the war in Vietnam. I shudder when I think back on those days, when one generation was willing to sacrifice the manhood of another, seemingly without question. It turns out that Michael and I we had both come to that march by different routes. We did not know the other was there. We marched.

I recall the trip from Northern Lower Michigan to Washington D.C. in Joe Sobel's battered Mercedes Benz. The car was a rolling wreck. Six of us packed on its bench seats. The car had no functioning brakes. As we motored east across the mountains, I can recall being terrified for the entire trip, so terrified that my digestive tract punished me for days to come. We made it there and back, by the grace of God. But the car became a metaphor for me of that moment in our national life. The nation careened ahead with no brakes. Vietnam did, in fact had crashed our armed services. The consequences of the crash still haunt us in the vaunted "all volunteer military."

Each age follows on the foundation of another. When the Greeks translated the Jesus stories, they did so in the familiar Greek. There, the word for time is rendered by two words, chronos and kairos. Chronos attends to marking the passage of time. It is the consciousness of the clock. Listening to the Naval Observatory's exact treatment of time in seconds, minutes, hours and days is the mesmerising sound of chronos. Each tick has its own sameness, but over the short wave it had a peculiar texture. Chronos is hypnotic. When Jesus spoke about time, "the time is fulfilled, the Kingdom of God is at hand," the word is kairos. This is a notion that time is like a vessel, as it fills up with events. This time is shaped by events. Old men talk about kairos. And by the time you reach my age, the impact of events on character becomes ever clearer. We were of a generation on a fools errand, a careening Mercedes, condemned to great suffering among the compliant and among the resistant. Some sacrificed their lives. Others watched as our brothers fell to their deaths. I am still amazed how this shared tragedy created an enmity within a generation. How could that have happened?

1969 was the year that imprinted a generation with conflict. We continue to live the tension between mistaken official world and the truth of our own consciences. The Bush administration's fantasy government is the direct heir to the Vietnam fantasy. When I see the sign, Support our Troops, my visceral response is suspicion. "Support Our Troops lacks context. It is meant only to line up sides in a bitter conflict. Support our troops in Abu Ghraib? Of course not. Support Our Troops is but an introductory phrase. It requires completion. Support our troops, bring them home. The machinery of death rolls on the wheels of Support Our Troops. The focus never seems to wander to those who bear the weight of responsibility.

Truth is that way. It is chronos. It must be talked about and requires stories. How might we learn the empathy that can help us to understand one another? How can we look at Vietnam in wasy that reflect what actually happened to us?

We are again writing the story of a nation at war. How badly we want it to have a happy ending. Yet we pay no attention to the way we have set out to create it. The world tells us that we are again officially misguided. But we are far from any awareness of that ourselves. This is no surprise to Vietnam era folks. But it seems slow to dawn on the body politic.

The time is fulfilled. I do not regret the marches and the Days of Rage. Many will trivialize the resistance born of official treachery. They will speak of hippies and free love and Haight Ashbury. But that will miss the point. The kairos that still shapes us must be understood if we are to avert future Iraq catastrophes. When will we understand that we are together in a car with no brakes. Decades ago over 50,000 of us paid with their lives. Again, a generation is being winnowed with maiming and death. And for what? That is why it is essential that old men talk.

Can the Dream be Silenced?

I am old enough to remember the delivery of the "I Have a Dream" Speech at the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, 1963. I am also old enough to recall the backlash from that speech. In those days, Martin Luther King, jr's name was whispered as a rabble rouser, a troublemaker. And while his speeches were broadcast, they spoke of change to come. That change was, at first, mightily resisted. Happily, on this day before Barack Obama is made our President, we can see progress in the fulfillment of that dream.

The Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire invoked God's blessing upon the Inauguration Celebration, last evening. His speech was blacked out, by mistake some say. Whether or not it was an intentional oversight remains to be seen. But that it was not broadcast to the nation is an ugly fact of life. Already, the whispering voices of fear and hate can be heard in the background. (to the eternal shame of the community the leading voices are those of Christians) The whispers seem to have carried the day. It is all very unpleasant.

But the prophets remind us that change is coming. Christians in particular are called to resist legalized mistreatment and to speak out against vigilante violence. Will the dreams of gays and lesbians; bisexuals and transgendered citizens be silenced? If history is any guide, we will look back upon Bishop Robinson's muted prayers straining hard to recall the hate that so permeated this moment. Even as we are being urged to "see ourselves in one another," let us include the nation's GLBT citizens in that invitation.

Clearly, we have a ways to go along the gender road, before we can be said to have arrived. "Now is the time," Martin told us in his dream. "Now is the time" for our GLBT sisters and brothers.

A Prayer for the Nation and Our Next President, Barack Obama

By The Rt. Rev. V. Gene Robinson, Episcopal Bishop of New Hampshire

Opening Inaugural Event
Lincoln Memorial, Washington, DC
January 18, 2009

Welcome to Washington! The fun is about to begin, but first, please join me in pausing for a moment, to ask God’s blessing upon our nation and our next president.

O God of our many understandings, we pray that you will…

Bless us with tears – for a world in which over a billion people exist on less than a dollar a day, where young women from many lands are beaten and raped for wanting an education, and thousands die daily from malnutrition, malaria, and AIDS.

Bless us with anger – at discrimination, at home and abroad, against refugees and immigrants, women, people of color, gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.

Bless us with discomfort – at the easy, simplistic “answers” we’ve preferred to hear from our politicians, instead of the truth, about ourselves and the world, which we need to face if we are going to rise to the challenges of the future.

Bless us with patience – and the knowledge that none of what ails us will be “fixed” anytime soon, and the understanding that our new president is a human being, not a messiah.

Bless us with humility – open to understanding that our own needs must always be balanced with those of the world.

Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance – replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences, and an understanding that in our diversity, we are stronger.

Bless us with compassion and generosity – remembering that every religion’s God judges us by the way we care for the most vulnerable in the human community, whether across town or across the world.

And God, we give you thanks for your child Barack, as he assumes the office of President of the United States.

Give him wisdom beyond his years, and inspire him with Lincoln’s reconciling leadership style, President Kennedy’s ability to enlist our best efforts, and Dr. King’s dream of a nation for ALL the people.

Give him a quiet heart, for our Ship of State needs a steady, calm captain in these times.

Give him stirring words, for we will need to be inspired and motivated to make the personal and common sacrifices necessary to facing the challenges ahead.

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.

Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

Give him the strength to find family time and privacy, and help him remember that even though he is president, a father only gets one shot at his daughters’ childhoods.

And please, God, keep him safe. We know we ask too much of our presidents, and we’re asking FAR too much of this one. We know the risk he and his wife are taking for all of us, and we implore you, O good and great God, to keep him safe. Hold him in the palm of your hand – that he might do the work we have called him to do, that he might find joy in this impossible calling, and that in the end, he might lead us as a nation to a place of integrity, prosperity and peace.

AMEN.