Auld Lang Syne

The whirlwind is about to start.  It feels like that blur of stars as the Millennium Falcon enters hyperspace or the Enterprise goes to warp.  It's going to be 2013 before I get to take a breath again, and the new year is going to bring a lot of changes, so I think it would be good to take a minute to reflect on the year that was.
First, let me say this to 2012: good riddance.  I don't feel this way about every year, in fact, there are some that I would have liked to last a little longer, but by any standard that I can imagine at the moment 2012 was one of the worst years on record.  However, I will try to find some good in at least a few aspects.  First on a micro level, I enjoyed reasonably good health.  I didn't have any diseased organs removed or find out I had any new diseases (that was for 2010, the year we were supposed to make contact).  To the bad, there was more than enough earthshaking personal tragedy in our immediate context to give 2005 a run for its money (that was the year my brother Jonathan died, just to give you some idea of the scale of sadness we're talking about here).  There was a tragic accident where an Amish boy died in my neighbor's silo, followed a week later by a triple homicide where a father killed his two little girls and his estranged wife (and I had been counseling them, and the family attended the church where I'm the pastor and I had to do a triple funeral), then as the icing on June my neighbor's sister suddenly passed away at 34, leaving two little kids and a stunned family behind.  I put that all in one sentence because it happened in a three week span.  I didn't even mention another tragedy in the community involving a domestic incident where an estranged husband shot his father in law in the neck (that was bad too, and it happened one day after the triple homicide).  Pardon me if this is starting to read like some sort of cruel joke, but that's actually what it felt like.  At the end of the summer a really good man from my other congregation rolled a tractor on himself and left the world a little poorer for his absence.  Finally, after Thanksgiving we had to have our chocolate Lab, Maggie, our good friend of almost ten years, put to sleep.  Amidst all this local and personal stuff there were the national tragedies in Aurora Colorado, a mall in Oregon and an elementary school, a freaking elementary school, in Newtown Connecticut.  That's why I say to 2012: Good Riddance!
But let's not leave it at that, because that would let the darkness win.
Let's move on through this mess into something hopeful shall we?
First word: Peace.
We need some peace.  We need peace in our hearts and minds, we need peace in our families, our communities, our nation and our world.  Are earth shaking tragedies going to stop?  No, but that's precisely why we need peace.  We need peace that does not depend on external circumstances.  We need peace like an Amish man, who had just lost his 18 year old son, had when he came to console the man who had been working with him when it happened.  We need peace, like the strange inexplicable peace that I felt when I stepped into the pulpit to proclaim the resurrection behind the caskets of two dead children and their mother.   We need peace that can face the rage of the void and say: "Be Still!"
Second word: Enough.
We live in a world that never has enough.  Part of the reason why tragic things happen is because we never have enough.  Some of us honestly don't have enough, some of us are threatened every day by a sense that everything we have will be taken away.  Some of us just don't have enough time.  But, truth be told, most of us have too much and it's eating our souls.  Some people have too much because they take from others.  Some people have too much because they just can't learn to say, "no more."  But for the people with a little or a lot, enough is an important word.  It's a word we need to learn to say with more frequency, clarity and conviction.  Unless we get a grip on the concept, the reality will be that we will never have enough.
Third word: Trust.
What is happening in our world right now is a failure of trust.  Nations don't trust each other, factions and political groups don't trust each other.  Often times, families don't even trust each other.  I would say it's a failure of love, but I know thanks to Wendell Berry that "we must love where we cannot trust."  We can love someone in the abstract, but trust is a personal thing.  You either trust someone or you don't, you can't really help it very much.  Some people seem to be trusting by nature, not many, but some.  For most of us though, it's rather an uphill slog.  I've loved certain people I did not trust, but I've had a hard time trusting people that I already love.  The most tragic failure of trust is the fact that we, as a species, and even as a segment of of our species that pursues a quest for God known as religion, do not trust God.  We'll give it lip service, but when the rubber hits the road, we would rather do it ourselves than have to trust God.
If there's one over-riding good lesson that 2012 has taught me, it's trust God.  This year taught me that by putting me so close to the chaos of the void that I had no choice.  It put me so close to a situation where children were harmed that I could not, simply shrug it off and move on.  2012 has given me the faces of two little girls that are never going to grow up and have lives, which is a sadness that I will carry for a long time.  It has also forced me, as a pastor, a father and a human being, to trust that those faces and those lives are in the everlasting arms of God.  I must trust that.

May old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind.
May old acquaintance be forgot, for the sake of Auld Lang Syne.

It's Time to Consider Our Symbols

And then Jesus asked him, "What is your name?"

"My name is Legion," he replied, "for we are many."

-Mark 5:9

As a modern person, I find Jesus interaction with demons a little unnerving.  Maybe it's because I have been trained by my secular education to disregard the possibility of supernatural evil, after all don't we have enough natural evil to go around?  But when it comes to things like the shootings in Connecticut, demons all of the sudden begin to seem awfully real.  The man that Jesus confronts in the region of Gerasa, across the sea of Galilee from his usual stomping grounds, is described as living among the tombs.  People had tried restraining him with chains, but he broke them, in other words the standard practice of treatment had not worked.  Living among the tombs is a powerful image for people in pre-industrial societies. These tombs were not the sanitary, well manicured graveyards that we all automatically picture.  These were caves and cairns where bodies lay decomposing and vermin of all sorts scurried about feasting on human remains.  And the Legion drove a man to live there.

Rather than being disgusted and angry with the man who was afflicted by these demons, Jesus has compassion for him.  In many situations, like the one I experienced here in June and the one that Newtown CT is living through right now, that is difficult, if not nigh impossible, for human being who is not the embodiment of a merciful and loving God.  And the Legion would be just fine with that.  Legion was not afraid of anyone, not the people who could chain them up, not the anger of the townsfolk or the power of the secular government, but they were afraid of Jesus, because he could cast them out.

Another facet of the biblical accounts of demon possession that troubles my soul is the rather confusing dynamic that is created when we begin to consider mental illness.  There is no doubt in my mind that much of the pathology that was once labeled demon possession was in fact mental illness.  The frightening corollary of that belief is that at least some of what we now classify as mental illness may be demon possession.  

Camouflage is perhaps the devil's most cunning skill.  As Goethe's Mephistopheles said in the play Faust, "Not if the devil had them by the neck..." would most people even be aware of the grip that sin and evil has on their lives, and of course that is the great dilemma we face.  It is not a problem of classifying mental illness over and against demonic possession, it is rather a need to recognize that both are tools by which human lives are broken apart and evil lashes out at the world.

When people are trying to deal with that lashing out, we often come to an impass.  Yesterday, in the unofficial religion of most of America, the NFL, players had moments of silence, they hugged children, they put decals on their helmets, they wrote words of sympathy and remembrance for the victims on their gloves and shoes.  In short, they revealed a rather poignant example of what sets human beings apart from most other animals: the use of symbols.  Words are a rather specific kind of symbol, but as a species, we can attach symbols to just about anything.

If you have read the blogs from the last few days, you know I am rather obsessed with wrapping my mind around the large cultural forces that create an environment, where someone, even a mentally ill or demon possessed person, would direct their violence deliberately at children.  Violence of this particular sort seems new to us.  Children are far too often the victims of physical or sexual abuse.  Children are far too often the collateral damage of large scale catastrophes and violence, but this seemed to be different, because there was no motive other than simply to kill children, on a rather massive scale.  Something that holds our humanity together was seriously broken in Adam Lanza.

What circumstances produced this unholy anomaly?  "My name is Legion, for we are many."  Broken home, mental illness (and maybe demon possession), a culture of violence, access to weapons, disconnection from a stable community and God only knows what else.  The end result was catastrophic, and we want to blame someone or something.  The problem is that the devil is good at camouflage, he attacks from many angles and leaves little forensic evidence in the midst of all that carnage.

In the absence of a clear answer, perhaps it would be good to analyze our most powerful symbols as a culture, not to assign blame, but to try and understand how we got out here among the tombs of all these dead children.  The first symbol that I can't seem to get away from in all this is the gun.  A gun is a symbol of power, you could say our country would not even exist if it weren't for the invention of the firearm.  The American Revolution would not have been numerically or strategically possible without the ability for the colonials to attack the British troops from a distance.  Without guns we would still be subjects of the Crown, without guns it is very possible that democracy would not be possible.  It is quite possible that the gun is wired into our cultural DNA.  Guns give us the ability to kill from a distance.  If you are going to kill someone with a knife or a sword, it's an up close and personal kind of thing.  Guns are not dependent on physical strength and with a minimum of training they can make a five foot woman every bit as formidable as a six foot man.  After all, killing from a distance was how David slew Goliath.

This is not good or bad in any a priori sense, it just is.  Guns have real power and symbolic power.  They symbolize freedom to a people who have made freedom one of their highest virtues.  When symbolic and actual power align, things are truly dangerous, not just physically but spiritually.  Our obsession with guns is closely tied to an underlying symbol that is perhaps the most definitive symbol of American culture: the individual.

How can an individual be a symbol you ask?  Easy, you just divorce the idea of an individual from any actual living individual and invest your thinking in a concept of individuality, without ever asking the hard question (that many of our founding fathers actually spent a great deal of time thinking about), what is the responsibility of the individual to the community.  There is no doubt that if the gun is part of our DNA than individuality is practically our entire genome.  We idolize the mythology of the mountain men and the cowboy, we hold on to the image of our founding fathers as the rugged individuals that tamed a new continent, we easily forget that their greatest challenge and accomplishment was actually forming a community, a great union upon this continent or something like that.

The biggest challenge for Americans has never been how we take care of number one, but how we stay together as a society.  We easily forget that in the idolatry of personal (individual) rights.  We have to get better at the community thing if we as individuals are going to be truly free to flourish.  If our children are going to be safe in their schools and community.  It was an individual that fired those guns, but the factors and forces that put the gun in his hand and gave him the sickness to use it on children were indeed Legion.

The Day After Yesterday

You who build these altars now,

to sacrifice your children,

You must not do it anymore.

A scheme is not a vision,

and you never have been tested, by an angel or a god.

-Leonard Cohen, The Story of Isaac

Some of the shock has worn off, but I'm still pretty angry, I'm even more sad.
It's in my nature to start to try and analyze things that impact me this strongly.  I have read many articles and blogs about various aspects of the Newtown shootings.  I have heard people blame our rather poor gun control measures, which certainly seems to be a conversation that needs to happen. I have heard people blame the fact that we don't let teachers pack heat to work, which, quite frankly, is insane and is a conversation that doesn't need to happen.  Let's just say that guns are dangerous, and as such should be regulated, and those who want to own them responsibly should have no trouble doing the paperwork and paying the cost of that regulation.
What is far more interesting to me is the discussion about the zeitgeist (spirit of the age) of the culture in which we live.  There have been a few who have observed that America is rather obsessed with violence, there have been a few who have observed that the media make monsters into celebrities.  This is not a new idea, Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers is almost 20 years old.  The role of the media in this disaster is right in our face.  They're on the scene, they're frantically breaking news as fast as they can.  They engage in speculation about motive, they misidentify perpetrators, they hang on every word that already overwhelmed emergency responders and, even worse, survivors and victims families can mutter into a microphone.
Ultimately though, I can't blame the media any more than I blame drug dealers, they're just supplying the needs of the addicted.  Our culture is addicted to the next big crisis, we wait for it, we prepare for it, and yet somehow we're always surprised when it turns out to be worse and different than the kind of calamity we were anticipated.
The question is: why?  Why are we so addicted to catastrophe?
This was the first dramatic national news event that I witnessed via Twitter.  I had a moment where I felt like Neo when he first started to see the Matrix.  The Tweets gradually all focused on Newtown, they moved into a fairly synchronous expression of sadness and outrage, for about four hours.  Then the blockheads got their bearings and the people who said this happened because we banned prayer in public school started to pop up here and there.  The radical gun control people started shouting, "We told you so!"  A few hours later the anti-gun control people responded, with almost maniacal zeal that the problem was really not enough guns, because as you know, if you ban guns, only the bad guys will have them.  Sorry, I thought I really had dealt with that above.
The point is that the twitterverse moved like a living creature, it adapted, it expressed emotion and eventually it lapsed into neurosis.  This morning, things are more or less back to normal, except for hashing out the details and the occasional reaction/analysis piece.  I began to see the potential, and the danger, of the electronic social sphere that many of us, most of us under 40, inhabit.  You can see information undulate before your eyes: fact and opinion, sanity and mania, honest wrestling with issues and propaganda.  The problem is, unless you have a fairly solid intellectual, emotional and spiritual grounding in the "real" world you are fairly ill-equipped to tell the difference between the helpful and the harmful.
As I discussed yesterday, our culture seems to be living in a perpetual state of spiritual dysfunction.  Our parents (the leaders of our nation, and the experts and celebrities who become defacto leaders) are having a rough patch, they have been for a long time.  They don't communicate, they just shout at each other and they can't even pull it together long enough to have a nice Christmas dinner.  The kids (us) are starting to act out.  The most vulnerable and unbalanced wonder what they can do to get anyone's attention, apparently the answer is kill children.  It certainly gets our attention.
I can't help but think of the parallel with the old gods of paganism.  Pagans would invent a system that they thought would please their gods, it usually involved sacrifice.  You make the right sacrifice, the god is pleased, he/she gives you what you want.  The problem is that those gods tend to get progressively thirstier; at first grain and fruit is good enough, then it has to be animals, then it has to be humans (no worries there though there are always some enemies you'd rather get rid of anyway), but even that doesn't work so it's on to virgins and then eventually, you guessed it: children.  Think that's not how it works?  Read the Bible and just about any history of the collapse of Aztec and Mayan civilizations.  It's way too consistent to be coincidence.
I'm sure there were some sane, level-headed people who said, "hey wait, we can't do this to our own children."  They probably became ancillary sacrifices, just to make extra sure.  I'm going to go out on a limb and be one of those people.  We have to do better.  Our "modern," "educated," secular society is living out some very old patterns, and the only thing that can put those old gods to death is the One True God, who instead of demanding the sacrifice of children, became a child instead.
We need to get better, we need to get better at handling mental illness, we need to get better at how we treat each other from top to bottom.  Most of all, the thing we need to put to death is the idea that violence solves problems. We will never be able to protect those we love perfectly, but we can do a lot better than we're doing now.

Dysfunctional Behavior

I am really happy that 2012 is almost over.  This year has been full of tragedy, ranging from the sort of unavoidable sad things that happen every day, to things that are unspeakable and horrific.  As I watched the coverage of the shootings in Newton CT, I couldn't help but hear haunting echoes of the voices in this community about six months ago.  Here, in the beginning of June a man killed his two little girls, and his estranged wife.  I heard many of the same things that the people of Newtown are saying today: "I'm in shock," "I can't believe this could happen here!"  The hard reality we need to face is that this kind of thing does happen "here," wherever here happens to be.
One of the diseases of our culture is the dislocation that we so often feel.  We can shrug off too much tragedy, as long as it happens somewhere else.  What we need to get a grip on here is that we are part of a big family.  When violence like this takes place it diminishes all of us.  We can read about peoples lives being torn apart, we can hear about people's children dying, but until we realize that those children are our children, these tragedies are going to come.
I consider it a blessing that I knew Amanda and Sarah Beatty (the two girls who were killed here in June) and their mother Christine.  It was a blessing because they were nice people, but it was a blessing also because the tragedy that overtook them has given me an unshakable awareness of our connections as human beings.  Today, when I think about those kids in Connecticut, those kindergartners (like Sarah), I see those two little girls.  It is not a disconnected tragedy that happened two states away, I can hear the sobs of parents whose lives are forever changed.  This is not okay, it's never going to be okay.
The soul-less media machine even momentarily acts stunned.  I watched President Obama shed tears on national TV, which is interesting for two reasons.  1. I don't think I've ever seen a President cry during a press conference.  2. The media seemed positively shocked at the genuine reaction of a politician, who, by the way, happens to be a father of two school aged girls.  Why don't we expect our leaders to be human beings?  Is it because they so rarely demonstrate that reality?
Of all people Dr. Drew gave some rather bracing advice to the leaders of our country: we need to start modeling healthy relationships, because the dysfunction and divisive nature of our society is beginning to take its toll on our culture.  Amen to that.  Edwin Friedman pointed out years ago in Generation to Generation, that dysfunction will manifest symptoms within a family system, often in rather unexpected places.  The trauma of poor relationships between parents, for instance, can make children sick.  How is the zeitgeist of our age effect the most vulnerable members of our society?  Well in this case, if you buy Dr. Drew's analysis, which surprisingly, I think I do, the violence in our rhetoric and our deeds has warped folks, who are probably mentally and emotionally unstable to begin with, into monsters who will open fire on innocent people, even small children.
The dysfunction that Dr. Drew was talking about is manifest in our national conversations about many topics from marriage to economics, but it is perhaps most eerily present in the debate about gun control.  In the wake of shootings like this, a very powerful gun lobby will begin to try and shape the discourse, soon and very soon.  The conversation will degenerate into a shouting match between those who tout "bearing arms" as an inalienable right and some vague enemy of freedom that they perceive is trying to rob them of their rights.
I like guns.  I have two of them (not loaded, stored and trigger locked), they are both shotguns that were given to me by my Grandfather, when he used to take me hunting.  I don't think those guns, in and of themselves are dangerous, but I am a reasonable and stable person, who respects them as weapons and does not feel at all that they imbue me with any sort of god like power over life and death.  I do not want my nine year old son to have access to them, thus the trigger locks.  I am practicing gun control, as I think is the responsibility of any sane parent.
I also happen to believe that gun CONTROL, is a rather reasonable expectation to have our our government and law enforcement officials.  I do not see the harm in having to fill out some paperwork and wait a couple weeks, or even as long as a few months, if I would like to own a handgun.  If I am law abiding, and sane, I will be perfectly able to go through that process.  I wouldn't mind having to take a safety course similar to the one I took in order to get my hunting license.  I wouldn't mind having to demonstrate competency in the understanding and practice of safe gun handling, like I did when I got my driver's license.  I don't think anyone who is thinking about these things like a functional adult, should have a problem with such things.
We need more functional adults.  In politics, and in other sorts of leadership roles.  We have idolized adolescent fantasies long enough, it is time for us to grow up, or else our children are going to pay the price.  And when I say our children, I mean OUR children.  Amanda and Sarah Beatty were our children, those children in Connecticut were our children, yours, mine, Barack Obama's, OURS.
Don't let the insanity of the world destroy any more of OUR children.
Grow up, act like an adult, and for God's sake stop the violence, it's tearing us apart.