Weighing the Spirit

All one's ways may be pure in one's own eyes,

But the Lord weighs the spirit.

-Proverbs 16: 1

Weeping and gnashing of teeth. Laments rising to the heavens.  A fool who probably thinks more about the toppings on a supreme pizza than the justices of the Supreme Court gets to pick another one.  The good news is that he will probably default to a vanilla conservative like Neil Gorsuch (although Judge Judy is probably available).  The Court, even with the "protection" of Kennedy, seems to have been ruling for the wealthy and powerful and against the interests of the working people pretty consistently recently, but I'm not a lawyer and honestly that's just my opinion.

One of the things that keeps me from being a full fledged liberal (while some of you may disagree that I'm not one) is that I don't trust the government, like not even a little.  It's not that I fear some Orwellian dystopia or a "deep state" conspiracy, it's that I don't think the government is very good at things, it's filled with too many self-serving sycophants like Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi, but even deeper down than that, it has become a bureaucratic monstrosity. The problem is that some of the things the government does, really need to be done, and I don't trust private corporations to do them without robbing and raping us.  So it's a choice between bureaucracy or those two guys in Pulp Fiction who owned the Gimp, I'll take the bureaucracy thanks and I guess that makes me a liberal.

I always want the government to be better than it is though. I live right down the road from Washington D.C., I know lots of people who work for the government in one capacity or another, they are good people, and their tales of what it's like to work in the belly of the beast are not cause for hope.  Even if they're not at the point of utter frustration, which some definitely are, the feeling that I get from most of them is that they are cogs and wheels in an immense machine.  Any thought they might have of improving the system ends at the alarmingly rigid border of their job description.  Most of them have experienced some sort of "reform by attrition," which means simply not replacing people when they retire or leave and shoveling more work on those who remain.  Sometimes this works, sometimes it burns people up like cheap cigarettes.

Moving to the D.C. area has deepened my suspicion that the government has become something that "We the People," should not trust.  Part of it is just a feel, one of those things I get as an intuitive person and which grows stronger as I listen and learn about the character of an area.  I spent ten years in Western Pennsylvania, which has a feel and a character as well.  The feel and character of that place is sort of like an old grey barn on a rainy day: it's useful, but it has been used hard; it has been cared for, but only to keep it functional, not make it look pretty; it can be beautiful, but you have to see it from the perspective of someone who really cares about it.  The city up the road oozes power.  The people that live in its shadow do so in spiritual peril and sometimes physical peril as well.  Nothing about D.C. feels safe or comfortable, even if it is relatively so. Government buildings present the facades of fortresses, monuments tell the story of our greatness and our sacrifices, and it seems as though actual living people are not much welcome among them, we are tolerated and told to stay on the paths.

Sorry, I'm being a bummer.  What I meant to do is to tell you that none of this matters, and I mean that not in a nihilistic sense, but in a faithful, wisdom-founded, realistic yet hopeful sense. See, even God-fearing people have always tended to want some sort of secular empowerment.  The Israelites cried out for a king, Jesus' disciples always wanted him to be the super-hero messiah they had been taught to expect from their childhood.  People have mistaken kings and rulers for God's anointed one more times than is really helpful to count, let's just say it's a lot.  I think God is probably just amused by our tendency to do this; I mean if he kept getting angry about it, that wouldn't be spiritually healthy.  It's one of our most persistent and annoying idolatries, probably second only to worshiping money.

So in the wisdom literature of Proverbs, Solomon, who knew something of power himself, basically says if you will accept my paraphrase of the verse above: you will probably think what you're doing is right, or else you wouldn't do it, but the Lord knows why you do it and will judge it with a rather different set of criteria.  Later in his life he would write in Ecclesiastes, and again I paraphrase: life sucks then you die, mind your business and try not to be a jerk, oh and stop worrying so much. The foundation of this halcyon statement of the human predicament is the conviction that God is doing something that is bigger than nations and kingdoms and which transcends the scope of any human life, from the greatest to the least.  Jesus actually demonstrates that God is rather more interested in using the last and the least to embody his kingdom, he's not particularly interested in the wealthy or the powerful.

Psalm 2 says, "Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain?" That is a pretty good question, but they keep doing it, and I don't expect it will stop any time soon. That perspective, more than anything else, is what keeps me sane these days, just thought I would share it with you.