The Least I Could Do

This is not about me.  I volunteered yesterday to help conduct the annual Point in Time survey in Charles County Maryland.  I am new to PIT, I had some idea of what to expect, I had gone to the training session to learn about how to conduct ourselves and how to fill out the forms, but as I drove over to Lifestyles of Maryland, I was given a reminder by the Spirit of one of my Camino lessons: let the way be the way, don't try to be in control, don't worry about who you will go with, don't worry about what you'll take, just go.  I say this as a disclaimer, lest you think this is some sort of do-gooder story about someone being all holy (read self righteous) and charitable (in the sympathetic crusading sort of a way).  I was not in charge of this, I was not doing anything except mostly riding around in a truck with a few people who had marginally more experience than I with PIT.
Background: the Point in Time survey is an annual survey conducted during late January to try and capture a snapshot of the number of un-sheltered, and under-sheltered people in an area.  The data gathered is used by various government agencies to determine funding, and by groups like Lifestyles of Maryland to try and focus their efforts to alleviate the symptoms of poverty in the community.  In more densely populated areas, this involves identifying people experiencing homelessness, visiting camps and community centers and even some restaurants and such where un-sheltered people spend time.  I volunteered because I saw it as a step in addressing the systemic problem of poverty, by doing something with what I have to give: time.
When I arrived at Lifestyles, I was told that I was assigned to the zone one team, which is an area known as Nanjemoy.  This meant that I was going into the boonies.  Everyone seemed sort of apologetic, and kept asking me, "Are you okay going to Nanjemoy?"  I understood their concern, I was new to this, and I know the reputation Nanjemoy has locally.  If you were to employ a medieval map maker to draw Charles County, he might label Nanjemoy with; "Here there be Dragons."  I was not really apprehensive in the least, partly because I have been in many worse places, partially abandoned housing projects in North Philly, HUD renovation sites in West Philly (you know, where the Fresh Prince had to leave), not to mention the rural places that were home to the marginal sorts of characters my parents took us to visit in Southwest Pennsylvania and Northern Arkansas.  I have seen tar paper shacks and old run down farms with thousands of mangy cats and dogs roaming wild, and from a young age known and even been impressed by the character of those, who by choice and necessity, live on the margins of the world.
But Nanjemoy, as with those other marginal places, is not a place you would be able to access without some connection and guidance.  And I think that's what people were worried about, it's not danger, it is simply that the community is isolated and closed to outsiders.  We were blessed with a local guide, a young woman who volunteers her time at the community center, and she was our key.  She knew where the people who had the need were.  She knew the trailers and homes that had no water or electricity, she knew where the families with lots of little kids were, she knew where to find the people we were looking for, and without her we would have been lost and ineffective, even though we had a truckload of blankets and drinking water, emergency food, hats and gloves, hygiene supplies and even gift cards to give out.  Our charity would not have been able to make it into these little rural enclaves, where it was sorely needed, without a relationship.  The way provided that relationship.
For those of you who have never seen rural poverty up close and personal, let me paint you a picture: you pull into a muddy lane and drive back into the woods.  In January, after a snowstorm, mud and slush can be knee deep.  Trailers and shacks appear, clustered together, often with highly suspicious looking electrical hookups.  There are varied sorts of junk around in the yards, bikes, engines, old grills, kids toys, tanks, buckets, drums, and any number of other cast off looking detritus.  At first, you might think it's a mess, it's a hoard, it's a lack of concern about surroundings, then you consider that there is no working vehicle and that a trash truck probably has never come out that lane, so trash tends to get burned or stay where it is.  You also notice that a lot of the "junk" is actually in the process of being used for something or other often re-purposed or otherwise repaired in ways that would probably make MacGyver proud.  The trailers and shacks are usually in a state of disrepair, but often it is because of infirmity or inability to pay for supplies, repairs are made to be functional, not pretty.  There are a fair number of animals about, and in the late afternoon and evening, a fair number of children too.
This is what it means to be under-sheltered, which is actually a much more massive and invisible problem across this nation than people sleeping on park benches.  We had drinking water, some people had been living without running water for years, because they lack the money and know how to replace a well pump.  The people that did have running water often said they didn't like to drink it because it was brown or yellow and had a funny taste, and they have no idea or inclination what to do about that.  We gave out jugs of bottled drinking water almost everywhere we went, and people were very grateful, for clean, clear water. I often thought of what has happened in Flint Michigan, and wonder at the tragedy of people living in this country without access to clean water. That is a failure of epic proportions.
Were there instances where maybe people were just taking the handout, even if they didn't need it? Probably.  Were they always forthcoming about some of the more sensitive questions on the survey about HIV, substance abuse and domestic violence?  Probably not.  Were there times when a big screen TV took up half the living space in a trailer with a sagging floor and no running water?  Yes.  None of that means that this level of poverty is acceptable, for the young or the old.  At least two men asked us if there was any way we could help them find a job, for which all we had was a phone number and the hope that they would seek and find.  This life of poverty is hard work, hauling water, cutting firewood, just trying to get in and out of these little enclaves.  This is not a lazy person's existence, most everyone looked older than they actually were because of the wear and tear of living this way. There were a lot of 40 year old grandmothers, which tells me that the grip of poverty goes back generations.
After a couple of visits I began to feel like Santa Claus (I was wearing a big red coat), because I was handing out basic things like toothpaste and socks, things that had been gathered and packed by other volunteers, and donated by other people.  Doing this was lifting my soul, the road had risen to meet me, and my blind and dumb following of my nose had led me to a place of joy and gratitude.  By the end of the day, I knew I had received more than I had given.  I woke up this morning knowing that I needed to share now with whatever number of you who read this blog, what I have been given.  I want to share the opportunity that I had to see people who are either despised or invisible to the world of power and success and economics.
I gave them small things that cost me nothing except about 10 hours of my time.  Today, I give them what more I have: seeing them, sharing their dignity and their grace and their request for help.  If you have privilege, and comfort and wealth, open your eyes and your heart to the least of these.  It is the least you can do.

In the Shadows

Over the past few days I have been on social media entirely too much.  Apparently so were a lot of others.  Snowzilla trapping all of us in our homes has led to more sharing of stick figures we should be like and pandas playing in the snow than is really probably healthy.  But in the midst of basically seeing a meme phenomenon run the life span from, "hey that's funny," to "stop it already," (referring to the stick figures you should be like) and being periodically over-cuted by a panda being a panda (seriously they are the cutest non-otter animal in the freaking world) I noticed something that had sort of been gnawing at me for a while.
As with many things it calls to mind an episode of Doctor Who, called Silence in the Library, where the adversary is a species called the Vashta Narada, a microscopic creatures that function very much like piranha, except they move in shadows instead of water.  They are present throughout the universe, living in forests, consuming dead flesh, they are driven by the need to hunt and consume, like ravenous bacteria that develop a sort of swarm consciousness.  Mostly they are diffuse, like ants or bees going about their business, but in the library (made up of books, which are made up of paper, which are made from trees) the Vashta Narada have become aggressive and deadly.
It is the concentration that makes them deadly.  They are present everywhere and account for the nearly universal uneasiness that one feels when alone in a shadowy place, and the equally widespread idea that darkness equals danger.  You see them out the corner of your eye, the flecks of dust in a sunbeam, they are not in every shadow, but they can be in any shadow, and they devour the flesh off of your bones.
Which leads me to the feeling I have had quite a lot recently, like a shadow that sort of moves unexpectedly and gives you an uneasy feeling.  We have a problem simply hearing each other's struggles, let alone being empathetic.  The first illustration is what I wrote about yesterday, the way that people seem to always want to negate the experience that we had here in the mid atlantic region with the blizzard.  Yes, other parts of the country regularly experience much worse weather than we had this weekend, and sometimes, they do manage to soldier on without shutting everything down for three days, but we don't.  The shadow was veiled as humor, but I began to see so much of it that I started to think maybe it wasn't just a shadow.  I know to people in Buffalo, 20 inches of snow is a minor thing, but to people in Maryland, it is not.  Here it produces anxiety and inconvenience, if not danger.
This was the trivial illustration that got me thinking about more serious matters of negation.  Negation is when you ignore or downplay the suffering of others by basically saying, "it could be worse."  When we do this about a weather event, it's a chuckle, when we do this about racism, sexism, and prejudices and injustices of all shapes and sizes, it's not freaking funny anymore.
The internet is a veritable forest of shadows within which negation may exist and swarm.  Victims of police brutality are negated because they may have been less than model citizens. Refugees are negated because they're not our problem, they might be dangerous, and we have enough problems of our own.  Poverty, and the poor are negated because they ought to be better at living this American dream and just work harder to get ahead.  LGBT people are negated because their lifestyle is not and probably never will be normative. Muslims (and Jews for that matter) are negated because their beliefs are not in line with the dominant system in this nation.  The fact that Christians can be negated in predominantly Muslim countries is used as a justification for at least some of this negation.
We even negate any reflection that might lead to changing this pattern to simple pragmatism: "that's just the way it is."
But negation is the road to constructing an enemy, and a tool in the dehumanization of the other.  And it is a deep and difficult part of our human nature to avoid altogether.  Consider Mark 7: 24-30.  Jesus himself encounters a Gentile woman, whose daughter has an unclean spirit.  She begs Jesus for help and for reasons that are actually fairly common and acceptable to a Jew of his era, he begins to negate her suffering, basically calling her a dog.  She catches him, and he repents of his negation and heals her daughter.  Christians tell this story in their Gospels, they don't hide it, they shouldn't try to explain it away, because it shows how truly exceptional our Lord really is.  Most of us would have doubled down on our own negation of that woman.
The reason the Gospel writers tell these sorts of stories about Jesus is because our faith is predicated on discipleship: following.  We are supposed to be like Jesus, not just admire him.  If Jesus seems less admirable for calling the Syrophoenician woman a dog, he is more worthy to be followed when he recognizes the shadow he was feeding and turns to the light.  I would much rather follow a leader who is willing to recognize the danger of the shadows than one who ignores the damage they can do.
Consider the danger of the shadow the next time you're tempted to name someone an enemy or negate their experience and their perspective.  Watch what is happening in your heart when you decide it is okay if human beings suffer as long as they are not too close to you.
It's pretty surely not good stuff.

After the Storm

Snowed in, but okay,

Lights, food, and heat, all we need.

Plow is on the way.

That's a haiku, and yes, I have too much time on my hands.  We have just ridden out the storm that is being called snowzilla by the residents of the mid atlantic region.  We didn't lose power, we had no damage to anything, kids have been playing in the snow and we have had plenty of time together.  We are lucky, and I thought it would be a good moment to mention that before I start poking fun at all the absurdities of human behavior.

To the grumps and the cranks.  Those of you who don't want to see pictures of snow on facebook and hear all of our drama, just don't look.  This is a big deal in this area, and no Erie and Buffalo, we don't want to hear about how well you handle snow, and how this "Blizzard," is like a daily occurrence where you are, you live in the lake effect zone, which means you experience a ridiculous amount of snow, good for you, go play hockey or something.  Here in Maryland they aren't quite as prepared to deal with this sort of thing, you know why?  Because we don't have to, except once every three or four years.  All things considered that's pretty much a selling point of living in this area: we don't experience catastrophic levels of precipitation very often.  And don't bother chiming in with your super sub zero temperatures Wisconsin and Minnesota, also things we would rather not have the honor of living with.

The reason why so much of the population of this country lives in the area between DC and Boston is because, on the balance we have it pretty good.  We have seasons, and yes, winter is one of those seasons.  It gets hot in the summer and cold in the winter, leaves change and snow happens, when we remember to stop freaking out about things, we're pretty much okay with that.  It is a great comfort to know that people can learn to adapt to extreme climates, it speaks well of our future, given that we're in the process of jiggering our climate all up, which means more stuff like this happening.  But dude, don't negate my experience just because you live on Hoth.  My two wheel drive is every bit as stuck as my 4x4 would have been in Western PA.  Oh, yeah, I almost forgot that I lived in a place where driving a Jeep wasn't just a fashion statement, for 13 years as a matter of fact, add the four and half I spent in State College, and you've got a pretty good stretch of living with this sort of nonsense.

So maybe I don't freak out quite as bad as some of the rest of the folk down here, but let me tell you, community counts for a lot of how well you handle this junk.  In Plumville we knew three or four people who had tractors and plows, and we both drove four wheel drive cars.  We never got snowed in there, because we had help, and because we knew we were going to have to deal with snow, here maybe not so much.  We've been here three years and this the first time we've gotten a snow that we honestly can't really dig ourselves out of in about an hour, and we probably shouldn't be out cruising around now anyway, the roads are not clear, because the state and county government has about the same attitudes toward this sort of event as most of the residents: it doesn't happen that often so just deal with being a little inconvenienced when it does rather than spending the money on material, personnel and equipment that say Rochester NY needs to spend.

For the most part, a lot of our ruckus about this is mostly fun and games, we're on an uncontrollable holiday, everything is cancelled, kids are home, parents have to cook actual food and we have to stop running, which is another novelty for folks in this part of the world.  In addition to being wusses about snow, we are also super busy and don't get four days of down time hardly ever, unless we're on vacation and then we probably make all sorts of plans, and basically busy ourselves up with "getting away from it all."  Sometimes we need an act of God to get us to slow the heck down.

So I'm thankful for these past few days, and I'm waiting on that plow.

An Unspoken Sermon

As you may know this weekend is pretty much a white out in the Mid Atlantic region.  Church is cancelled, but hey, here's a sermon anyway.  It is based on Luke 4: 14-30, and could have been delivered next week, but I'm really sort of itching to get on to 1 Corinthians 13, plus, who knows what would happen if I thought about this thing for another week, it would probably be totally different anyway.  So here goes, the blogified version.
The first thing that struck me about Luke's tale of Jesus returning to the old hometown is that his version is a bit different than Matthew or Mark's version.  For one thing, it's longer (duh, Luke almost always is), but it also presents a different slant on what annoys the Nazarenes and how annoyed they are about it.  In Matthew and Mark, they just don't buy that this Jesus, whom they watched grow up, is actually the Messiah.  Their speaking line (in Mark 6), "Isn't this the carpenter the son of Mary..." they talk about how they know his brothers and his sisters and how he can't possibly be anything special.  And it pretty much ends there, Jesus can't do anything except heal a few sick people (not really too shabby, but not up to his standards I guess).  In Luke, however, their first response to Jesus claiming to be the Messiah is sort of positive, "All spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.  They said, 'Is not this Joseph's son?'"
So far so good, I suppose.  It's not the only time Luke gives us a little more information about a story.  Here's where it gets weird though: Jesus keeps talking.  This admiration seems to actually make him a little angry, he starts pushing buttons: "surely you will say to me, 'doctor, cure yourself...'"
He then proceeds to tell them a bunch of stories from the Hebrew Scriptures about times when God decided that the Jews just weren't getting the message, so God went to Gentiles and healed them and provided for them and basically fiddlesticks to all of you horse's rear ends for being so thick.
Except apparently what he did was not exactly that polite, so that the people who had been oohing and aahing over him a minute ago were now lynching mad.  Again this is a bit of information peculiar to Luke's account, and I suppose you could explain it by taking into account that Luke's community was probably the most Gentile oriented of the three synoptic gospels.  Especially when you consider that Luke probably wrote much of the book of the Acts of the Apostles as well which told the story of how this Hebrew story became the faith narrative of so many Gentiles.  He could just be telling us a tale that backs up his premise that perhaps the message of the Gospel is truly best understood as an evolutionary step that moves beyond the Law of Moses and the structures and rituals of Judaism.
But I think that allows us to sort of feel too superior, like we're the ones that get it and those poor benighted Nazarenes were just too slow to catch on.  No, I think Luke's account gives us more nuance to deal with than that.  Think about it for a second, they're not being stubborn or surly like in Matthew and Mark, they first think he's just the bees knees. They're okay with him being the Messiah, the fulfillment of Scripture and all that.  They're all right with him making the claim.  They don't like it when he challenges them to actually see what that might mean, specifically that God's plan is going beyond what they expected.
Grumpy cynicism, in Matthew and Mark, comes from simply not having the faith to believe that Jesus is the one.  Murderous rage, in Luke, comes from the idea that the Messiah may not be their own special savior.  It is not the claim that he is the fulfillment of the prophecy that enrages the Nazarenes, it is the suggestion that they might be missing the point, despite their declarations of faith.
How true is this of American Christianity in the twenty-first century?  It seems to me that we accept demagogues rather too easily as long as they tell us what we like to hear.  We will enthusiastically consume preaching and writing that tells us of the certainty of our salvation, and how Christ is for us, and how God intends to prosper us, or make our nation great, but what do we do with a word that tells us that God might be bigger than our particular field of vision had previously surmised.
It may be a bit of a morbid fascination on my part, but I am indeed fascinated to see that line get crossed within the American church, where does God's plan get too big for our comfort zone.  Where does his love simply become too audacious? Where does the challenge of the Gospel cross the line from being "gracious words," to inciting rage?  I have some ideas and observations, but on this snowy weekend, I'll let you fill in those blanks for yourself.

The Old Rugged Cross

Thank you, you crazy, beautiful humans.  Amidst all of the terrible things that happen, in the middle of the entire European continent being thrown into turmoil by the flight of refugees.  In the midst of rising xenophobia and the noticeable clenching of those whose status quo seems threatened, there is is this guy who started collecting driftwood and making crosses.  At first he just did it for the refugees.  He made crosses from the shipwrecked boats that had brought them across the Mediterranean and where they had suffered.  He gave them to Christians and Muslims alike, and everyone understood the meaning, because everyone had suffered.
Eventually other people noticed that what the carpenter Tuccio was doing was just too beautiful for words.  A church in Milan wanted 150, Pope Francis wanted one, the British Museum wanted one.  One of the curators of the Museum said the cross they now display:

Regularly brings tears to the eyes of those who come to the museum.  It's not because the thing itself is extraordinarily beautiful, it is because the story it connects us to is so very powerful, and painful, and full of suffering, and full of grace.
Tuccio said he was moved to make the crosses because the wood that was washing up on the beaches near his home in Lampedusa Italy was clearly soaked in suffering.  He started doing these little crosses as a gesture of hope and kindness to those who were arriving on his shores.  He was later enlisted by the Pope and a church in Milan to make crosses in remembrance of a specific shipwreck of refugees from Eritrea in November.
If you think that Christianity is dying, you should probably reconsider the evidence.
The church has some problems to be sure, but the message of the cross seems to be alive and well in the world. The notion of God's presence with us in our suffering and the transformation of suffering into victory is all around us.
Even when it makes the news, it gets stuck in human interest stories.
Even when it picks up hundreds of people off the ash heap of the world and gives them hope, it still takes some digging to get to hear it.
I guess it just proves again that the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are passing away.
After all, what does some raggedy old wood really have to say about all this tragedy that's going on in the world?
For those who are in Christ, it says all we need, to have hope and to have life.

Fearful Symmetry

Dumbledore: "After all this time Severus?"

Snape: "Always."

Ever have one of those weeks?

Now I know that David Bowie and Alan Rickman are not exactly the most universally liked sorts of guys.  Some of you may even be wondering why I'm getting so worked up about this, but this is what happens when you let art touch your life.  Rickman passed away today, at age 69, after a battle with cancer.  The announcement reads almost exactly the same for David Bowie earlier this week.

Karl Jung sometimes toyed around with a thing he called synchronicity, which is when seemingly unrelated things are somehow meaningful.  It's not a particularly scientifically verifiable phenomenon and it is deeply rooted in the ability of the human psyche to make connections.  It's also an amazing album by the Police and if Sting drops dead next week, I'm going to freak out. (Sting is only 64 and not battling cancer that I know of, but sometimes rules get broken).

Alan Rickman has been famous for playing bad guys.  He was Hans Gruber in Die Hard, and the Sheriff of Nottingham in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, and of course Severus Snape, in all of the Harry Potter movies.  Snape was apparently the role he was absolutely born to play, a dark and brooding character who plays the heel for most of the series, but is secretly motivated by an aching love that essentially transforms every thing about him from darkness into light.  If watching the scene above doesn't bring tears, you probably need to check for your soul, because I think you lost it somewhere.

Rickman has been, pretty much since Robin Hood, one of the actors I would look for in movie cast lists to decide if I wanted to see the movie. According to IMDB he was credited in 44 movies and 19 TV shows, and some of them you may not have ever seen, but he had a prolific career for someone who didn't start acting until he was 42.  He did characters, especially bad guys, so well he was a danger of stealing the show.  He certainly would have in Robin Hood, if it wasn't for the fact that most people just remember Kevin Costner's behind and a Bryan Adams song from that movie.  He has been the voice of God (the Metatron) in Dogma, he has been the clinically depressed robot, Marvin, in A Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy, he has even been Ronald Reagan in The Butler. Let's just say Alan had some range.

But actors and artists pass away every day, death happens.  I guess I'm just eulogizing here because this guy was special to me. Even his voice in a movie was like hearing from an old friend. He was just so good at being bad, that you kind of knew he had to be a really nice person in the real world (he was by most accounts including Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) who basically spent his childhood working with Rickman).

He taught us all, (I guess Rowling gets some credit too) about the redemptive power of love, and the world certainly needs more of that.

The sky is less grand as it shuts down over less worth in the population.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature

When Facts Cease to Matter

It was State of the Union time again last night.  I was out having fun while President Obama stood in Congress and talked to the people he is about one year away from getting to put in his rear-view mirror forever.  No more elections, no more vetoes, he has nothing left to lose, and he spoke as diplomat and a man of integrity.  I read the entire transcript today, and of all the things he said this was what impressed me most:

But democracy does require a basic bond of trust between its citizens. It doesn't work if we think the people who disagree with us are motivated by malice, or that our political opponents are unpatriotic. Democracy grinds to a halt without a willingness to compromise; or when even basic facts are contested, and we listen only to those who agree with us.

After seven years of having his integrity and his character constantly questioned, he has the grace and insight, the diplomatic self-restraint to give his opponents quarter they never offered him.  If you are one of the people who have called our President names and bought the paranoid delusion that he is somehow out to destroy this nation of ours, that should sting a little.
I don't know how many times he has to prove his critics wrong, either with incremental and compromise laden solutions like the Affordable Care Act, or with executive orders on gun control that are simply enforcing common sense. I don't know how many statistics he needs to present: lower unemployment, 18 million formerly uninsured people now with medical coverage, and my personal favorite: Zero new land wars in Asia.
Which leads me to the almost perfect illustration that was playing itself out across the globe at almost the same moment: two navy patrol boats in the Persian Gulf are picked up in waters that are claimed by Iran.  It is a fairly consistently observable phenomenon that anything involving Iran gives hawkish types howling rage seizures.  However, over the past year, partially in the course of ironing out the nuclear disarmament deal, and partially in response to Daesh, the US State Department has been slowly and tediously trying to establish a relationship of trust with Iran.  This does not somehow mean that we, all of the sudden, are best buds.  This does not mean that when a couple of our sailors are picked up by the Iranian Coast Guard and detained that it's not a big deal.  But the Republicans jumped up and started to warmonger almost immediately: "They're testing us," "Obama is weak," "They think they can play us now," "See, they've got our kids!"
John Kerry called Iran on the phone, and as of the this morning the sailors are home safe and sound.  The facts are no more glamorous than that time your car broke down and your Dad had to come pick you up from some strangers house.  The nuclear deal can still go through, and we prove once again that talking with a phone instead of a rifle is a good thing to try.
My question is why are we so impatient with the facts these days?
When something we don't like, for instance the ACA, hits a road block, like it did in the first couple months of roll out, why do we declare it an abject failure and hold on to that opinion through nearly two years of success? Why do we look at relatively small holes in a plan and scrap the whole plan instead of just fixing the holes?
The only answer I can come up with is that ideology has become more important than data.  It is a pretty old and well attested human attribute, back in ancient times, when stuff went wrong people blamed gremlins or witches or malevolent deities instead of looking for the actual reason.  It is always easier to blame an enemy than look within yourself, even if you have to invent an enemy.
I go through this personally quite a bit, trying not to constantly see evil in those I don't agree with.  The only real antidote I have found is facts.  If I can find supportable evidence, then maybe I can see truth in something that challenges my assumptions.
So much of the criticism I hear and have heard about President Obama has had very little to do with the facts that I see. People tell me that the ACA is a disaster, but my wife (who I'm obviously biased towards) tells me from first hand experience that most people are immensely relieved, some to the point of tears of joy, to finally have access to healthcare.  I also know that the plan, as now structured, could be better, maybe much better, but what I see in Congress is an unwillingness to work out those things.  I hear that Obama is weakening our nation, but I see evidence (i.e. the Iran situation) that we are actually regaining our diplomatic integrity due to the fact that we're not playing Sheriff Shoot-em-up in some Middle Eastern version of a Spaghetti Western.  I hear that our economy is trashed, but I know that it's better off than it was in 2008 by almost every quantifiable measurement.
The truth is that nothing is perfect, but that is not Obama's fault.  When I weigh the totality of the evidence there are many ways I wish he had done more, but I can't fault him for what he actually was able to do given the level of irrational obstructionism he had to face.
Despite all that, I still "feel" better about where we are and where we're heading than I did in 2008.  Maybe I'm naive, only time will tell.

Why the Refugees are Running

Listening to the BBC news on the radio in the morning on my way to work is getting kind of dangerous.  You hear about things like this and it pretty much sours the rest of the morning, if not the day.  What particularly grabbed my attention this morning was an interview with one of the men in Madaya, whose family had just received an aid shipment of rice, beans and noodles.  The reporter asked him, "how much of the aid ends up in the hands of the men with guns?"  The man said something like, "There aren't that many rebels or armed people in this town, if they want to fight they go into the countryside.  We're all civilians here starving."
To tell you the truth, that kind of shook up my understanding of these towns being "under siege."  See to me, being under siege is something that happens when one military force is trying to root out another military force from a town or a stronghold.  I don't doubt that sieges of this sort are brutal, terrible things, one of the many frightful incidents of collateral damage that disqualify most modern warfare from being regarded as a "just war."  But this idea that government troops are simply sequestering entire civilian populations and depriving them of food and freedom of movement, basically creating concentration camps, and there are few if any actual combatants in these towns, and that's pretty obviously against international law and also against the basic law of humanity.
When Hitler was running Auschwitz and Birkenau, the common excuse was that no one knew what was happening (I personally don't buy it).  Well, we know what is happening here, we have pictures:

I can't help but notice that those kids look pretty much the same as the kids in my kid's schools.  What are they doing? Making bandages out of old bed sheets, because the town they live in has run out of medical supplies.  Those boys should be playing soccer and learning to read, but they're probably going to bed hungry and wondering if they're ever going to get to live a normal life.
Forget all religious questions of ethics and political perspectives: we are failing at humanity.
And no, before you even say it, bombs and Navy Seals are not the answer, that is just going to produce a more horrific picture of children with bandages.
This is the world we have made for ourselves in our greed and our self interest.
This is the inheritance we give to our children if they live long enough.
A world where we see these pictures and do nothing.

The good news, I suppose, is that the trucks of food and medicine have gotten through to Madaya and other places.  The bad news is that those trucks are going to be empty all too soon, and it is uncertain whether the insanity of violent men will let more through.
It's times like this that I am ashamed to be a grown up.

Farewell, My Duke

Cause love's such an old fashioned word

and love dares you to care

for the people on the edge of night.

And love dares you to change your way

of caring about ourselves.

This is our last dance.

This is ourselves.

Under Pressure.

-David Bowie and Queen, Under Pressure

David Robert Jones once upon a time changed his name to avoid being confused with another certain Davy Jones (of the Monkees, one can see how that confusion would not be desired by a musician/artist).  He adopted the surname Bowie from the legend of the American frontier and big knife dude Jim Bowie.  Bowie kept that name for the rest of his life, but pretty much everything else about him was open to interpretation.  Bowie, in the course of his career, was a many faced man.  He was Ziggy Stardust, the ultra-glam rock star; he was the Thin White Duke, he was the Goblin King, and Pontius Pilate, he was an alien, and a Space Oddity.

David Bowie has written and performed songs you love, and probably a few that you hate.  He participated in one of the best collaborations between rock legends: Under Pressure, with Queen.  And he has participated in one of the worst: Dancin' In the Streets, with Mick Jagger.  One of his most famous songs is called Changes, and the collection of most of his greatest hits and the album that most casual Bowie fans own is Changesbowie.

I have heard him called a chameleon, a changeling, a shapeshifter, and I suppose he is, but if you think he changed in order to be in tune with the times, you are mostly wrong.  The fact of the matter is that David Bowie was almost always a little bit ahead of the times.  He was willing to experiment with the new thing coming before the masses were ready for it, and so he sometimes alienated the masses.  The Art Rock, Velvet Underground crowd, who were all into "Ground control to Major Tom," were a little taken aback by the spiked hair and spandex (so much spandex) of Ziggy Stardust.  If you got used to Ziggy playing guitar, don't get too comfy, because the Thin White Duke, eyepatch and all is going to drop some funk on you.  By the time the 1980s hit no one knew what to expect out of Bowie and then they were all like, "hey wait, isn't that Bowie playing the Goblin king in a movie with muppets? (and what is up with those pants?)"

There were always two kinds of Bowie fans: the ones who like a few songs and the ones who actually get the big picture of what he was up to.

When I was in college Bowie went on tour with Nine Inch Nails, in support of a new album, which again was testing the limits of what people expected from a now nearly 50 year old Bowie.  The album du jour was called Outside and was a work done with Brian Eno formerly of Roxy Music, and a collaborator from Bowie's Berlin phase (during which Bowie shared an apartment with Iggy Pop, if you ever live with Iggy Pop, or even have Iggy Pop stay at your house, you are a special kind of cool).

Some friends and I went to see that tour at the Starlake Ampitheater outside of Pittsburgh.  We were some of the few people at that show who fully expected David Bowie to be the showstopper that he was.  Most of the crowd were not aware of Bowie's talent as a trendsetter.  He was not there as the elder statesman of electronica riding the coattails of Trent Reznor (The Downward Spiral was one of the biggest selling albums of the early nineties).  As it turns out, Bowie does dark and angsty as well as anyone, and he seemed like he had more right to it that twentysomething Trent.  Reznor himself was such a total Bowie fanboy that he unintentionally plagiarized the melody of a Bowie song.  Listen to Bowie's Crystal Japan and NIN's A Warm Place, sometime back to back (Reznor totally admits the infraction, and says it was an unconscious mistake, Bowie is cool with it, Bowie is always cool.)

Bowie blew us out of the water, and I forever gained a new appreciation of the man as a once in a generation artist (not just musician).  This morning, since I learned of Bowie's passing, I have been thinking a lot about what exactly it is that makes me feel like there is a break in the mortal coil.  What is it about this otherworldly artist and human being that we have so desperately needed since the late 1960s?  It think it is his ability to play and represent the outsider, the strange person on the edge of the night.  Bowie was indeed an actor, he could take on a role or an identity and show it to the world in such a way that we saw something crucial about our humanity, he gave those with ears to hear a perspective on being that outsider.  He was able to lampoon the fame and tragedy of the rock star in Ziggy Stardust, he was eminently believable as the Goblin King Jareth.  He helps us, he helped me at least, love what is strange and outside.

For someone who took his name from such a macho character, Bowie was not afraid to play around with gender roles, or wear make-up and high heels.  Even someone as envelope pushing as Prince, has to bow and admit that Bowie did the high heeled boot thing first.  Bowie could show a strange and awkward adolescent, in no uncertain terms, you're not the strangest duck on the pond.  I'm stranger than you and I'm a rock star, and an actor, and I married a supermodel, but most importantly I have a voice and something to show the world.  You do too, you little moppet.

Bowie is like a hero whose superpower is the ability to be weird, and cool, and amazing all at the same time.  The world is now less for his absence.

And these children that you spit on,

As they try to change their world,

Are immune to your consultation,

They're quite aware of what they're going through.

-Bowie, Changes

Follow Up

As I wrote about last month there is one of those internal Christendom sorts of disputes happening at Wheaton College.  As of today the board of the college is moving to dismiss Professor Hawkins for her statements about the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob being a common thread between Judaism, Christianity and Islam, which I believe is a rather obvious statement of biblical fact.  It is not, as I see it, an equivocation of the three religions, or a denial of the doctrine of the Trinity, or even a particularly controversial postulate.  It would have been controversial for her to say that Mohammed's revelation in the Koran somehow stood above the Gospel of Jesus Christ as authoritative Scripture, she didn't say that.  It would have been un-orthodox for her to proclaim that Jesus and Mohammed were simply equal prophets in revealing God to the world, but she didn't say that either.  By the way, that is what Muslims believe, and they venerate Mohammed because, by virtue of coming later, is able to include, incorporate and even further the teachings of Jesus (you might also note that Mormons essentially add Joseph Smith to the list, with his own special little book).
Despite being increasingly liberal on political issues, I still very much consider myself to be a proponent of orthodox Christian theology.  I particularly bound myself, in taking vows of ordination in the Presbyterian Church (USA), to that denominations Book of Confessions which includes:

• The Apostles Creed
• The Nicene Creed
• The Scots Confession
• The Heidelberg Catechism
• The Second Helvetic Confession
• The Westminster Confession of Faith
• The shorter and longer Catechisms
• The Theological Declaration of Barmen
• The Confession of 1967
• The Brief Statement of Faith
• and coming soon The Belhar Confession

In doing this I am fully aware of the fact that many of the statements contained in these creeds will be judged differently by people of different ages and cultures.  I am aware that some of the statements have become worn and outdated. What I love about them though is that certain things remain timeless. Take for instance this line in the Scots Confession: "We dare not receive or admit any interpretation which is contrary to any principal point of our faith, or to any plain text of Scripture, or to the rule of love."  Some might argue that the crucial phrase in that line is the "plain text of Scripture," but I would and do argue that it is the "rule of love." Others might disagree about what "principal points of faith" actually are. There certainly is room to debate, perhaps even what truly constitutes the "rule of love." However, as people who honor creeds and history, we must hold all three criteria dear to our hearts and minds as we seek to follow Jesus.  To reject any of them is to do violence to them all, and before we start kicking people out of our club, we ought to weigh whether we have met the burdens of living as people of good news.
If you read Ms. Hawkins letter to the board you will see written proof that she affirms statements that are wholly in line with Trinitarian orthodoxy as defined by the Nicene Creed.  In fact much of the very language Wheaton uses in their own Creed is lifted rather directly from the Nicene Creed.
History lesson: the Council of Nicea was convened in 325 CE in order to address the nature of Jesus Christ.  The primary disputants were Arius, a priest from Alexandria, and Alexander, the Bishop of Alexandria, along with his assistant and successor Athanasius.  Arius had come up with the idea that Jesus had been created by God the Father at some point, and while he was totally amaze-balls was not essentially one with the father.  The council of Nicea wrangled rather strenuously over one little Greek letter: iota.  Ever hear the expression, "it doesn't even make an iota of difference"?  Well in this case an iota was the difference between orthodoxy and heresy.  The central argument was over whether to use the word homoousia or homoiousia. The prefix homo, as you probably know, denotes sameness: homogeneous, homosexual etc.  The word ousia means essence or substance.  The addition of the iota to the prefix changes "same" to "like."  Arius was okay saying that Jesus was similar to God, or like God, but he didn't want to go all the way to saying that Jesus was God incarnate.  In other words, Arius was not on board with the Trinity.
If you're a little bemused at this point, you need to know that this is pretty much day one of Christian theology, not everyone has a stomach for it.  But Larycia Hawkins, judging from her letter, has a pretty good grasp on it.  The development of Christian theology is an amazing thing.  You should know that even though Arius is now one of the most "famous" heretics of all time, he actually managed to become super special friends with Constantine, our first Christian Roman Emperor.  After being anathematized by the Council of Nicea, he actually went on to enjoy a rather comfortable career in the empire, while the "winners" of the debate actually failed rather miserably to shape the emerging Christendom into anything actually very Jesus-like.  The world has been the worse for that failure.
What is happening at Wheaton right now is a betrayal of the very best of our tradition.  It is not a rejection of heresy, it is a squelching of diverse opinions and voices within the stream of orthodoxy.  We are at our worst when we cannot hear other voices, because it should be clear that God has rather stubbornly chosen to speak through other people.  I would say we need to open our ears to hear on a  more regular basis, if you can't bring yourself to hear Jewish and Muslim voices, or even Hindu and Buddhist voices, at least try listening to some Christians who think a little differently than you.  Wheaton refers to itself as evangelical, which means they are about "good news," does anything about this seem like good news to you?

Red Herring

You've probably all seen it by now in some form or another.  Our President yesterday gave an emotional speech about the gun control measures he is introducing by executive order.  Over the past  year or so I have been impressed with Barack Obama, if not as a politician, as a human being.  The tears he shed yesterday seemed to me not to be a sign of weakness but a sign of the utter frustration the most powerful man in the world must feel at having to resort to these admittedly under-powered gestures in response to the absurdity of our nation's idolatry of firearms.
I don't know what the solution to our violence problem is, but I am learning to recognize idols when I see them, and Moloch be at his terrible work here.  The responses from those who generally, and sometimes with venom, oppose our current democratically elected chief executive, are mostly rhetorical and logical fallacies.  Here are a few:

1. False equivalence one: Obama is upset about the children killed at Sandy Hook, what about the children killed in drone strikes and as a result of our wars.  First, the two things are different, and should be prevented in different ways.  Second, who says he's not upset about those things? That is just not what he was talking about yesterday.
2. False equivalence two: Obama is upset about children killed at Sandy Hook, what about all the abortions?  Again, not the same thing a complicated and often heartbreaking reality of our culture, but not the same thing, not caused by the same problem, not soluble by the same sort of solution, not what was being addressed yesterday.
3. False equivalence/Red Herring: Obama wants better background checks on gun purchases but not on Syrian refugees.  The refugee application process takes nearly two years.  I would be fully in favor of making people who want to buy certain types of firearms go through the same sort of vetting.
4. Ad hominem one: Obama is a wuss for crying.  About dead children and students and people in movie theaters?  I guess I'm a wuss too, because I cry about that stuff... a lot.
5. Ad hominem two: Obama faked that display of emotion, no actually that's a thing that I saw posted, that's about where we are with the dialogue.

Are you proud of these illogical and frankly detestable arguments?  I'm not, and the fact of the matter is, I could have listed worse things if I wanted to dive deeper into the right-wing psychosis about our President.  I've talked about guns and violence and such here before, and you may have noticed that I do not think there is a magic bullet solution to this problem.  I'm not really an expert in the legal or legislative remedies to this problem, but I do know a little something about idols.  As a preacher it is one of my jobs to unmask idolatry when I find it and here is a big one for us right here, right now: we think violence solves problems, we think power makes us safe.  That is an idol, a false god, a premise that does not stand the test of empirical or spiritual evaluation.  It's certainly not our only one, but it's the one I'm talking about, so the rest will have to wait for another day.

There is a global test of our ability to transcend the tribalism and fear that looms on the horizon.  You may have missed it, what with all the stuff about cowboy terrorists and tearful gun control, but earlier this week Saudi Arabia, one our biggest buds in the Middle East, for some reason chose now to execute a Shiite Cleric by the name of Nimr Baquir al Nimr.

In case you're not down with the Islamic religious-political situation, you need to know that there are two major sects of Islam, the majority are Sunni, they trace their allegiance to following the Sunnah, the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed.  You probably know our good buddies in Daesh are Sunni, as is Al Quaeda and the Taliban, but they follow a particular mutation of Sunni Islam that we call Wahabism, which emphasizes the sort of manifest destiny of Islam (their kind of Islam) to rule the world in the name of Allah.

The Shia, or Shiites, emphasize their Islamic tradition through a succession of rulers called Ayatollahs, the first of which was Ali, a cousin and son in law of Mohammed himself.  These Ayatollahs have been the source of further interpretations of the Sunnah, some of which Sunni consider to be heretical.  Of all the Middle Eastern nations Iran is the most dominantly Shia, and their influence spreads through the crescent of area to the east that terminates in Syria and Lebanon.

In Saudi Arabia the Shia are a small minority (10-15%) and as you might imagine are sometimes not tolerated well by their Sunni neighbors, particularly in cases like that of Sheikh Nimr who was speaking out against the oppression of the Shia in Saudi Arabia.

Going back to my High School Comparative World Cultures class, we Americans tend to like to harbor the fallacy of a false dilemma when it comes to Islam, we like to name "good guys" and "bad guys, and try to figure this mess out in nice neat black and white terms.  When Ayatollah Khomeni was running the Shia sect, the Shia were the "bad" guys and Saddam Hussein (Sunni) in Iraq was our boy.  It was confusing when that relationship went south, but we never did really trust Iran in the whole deal.  Recently, in response to Daesh, and in the nuclear agreement, Iran has moderated it's approach to relations with the US and the West in general.

This is good news to everyone, except the Sunni, primarily seated in the wealthy and powerful Saudi empire. Tension has been building, and one way to see the execution of a prominent Shia cleric in Saudi Arabia is as a poke in the eye to their old antagonists in Iran.

It is unlikely,  given the history between these two nations and between these two sects, that there is going to be an all out war, but Middle Eastern culture and Islamic thinking are not above some bloody proxy wars. They're also no stranger to manipulating the jingoistic character of the west.  It would not be the first time that we played attack dog for the Saudi Sheikhs.

My feeling is that the Saudis have been pretty happy to have us buying their oil and hating on Iran for the past 40 years. Terrorists and wealthy sultans alike have seen our idol and they know how to goad us into a fight, but we don't have to let them.

Here's an equivalence that I do not think is false: our military and the Glock in your nightstand. Both make you feel safer, but both are actually very dangerous, and quite vulnerable to falling into the wrong hands.  The person who buys a gun for self defense imagines that when "bad guys" attack they will be ready to spring into Chuck Norris mode and pop a cap in whatever ne'er do well has decided to invade their space.  Real life data shows that is false.  We think that we can use our highly advanced, well trained and generally just super awesome military to ride into complicated scenarios like Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria and regulate all the nasty bogeymen.  Real life history shows that that is false. Daesh is basically a four year old who just got a hold of the handgun, everyone now agrees that he should not have it, but there are a few people who are rather more content to sit back and let us be the ones that try to take it away from him.

Questionable logic, given how we handle our guns, sorry couldn't resist one last fallacy, they are kind of fun.

Isms, Ideologies and Idiocy

Las ideologias se inventaron para que puede opinar el que no piensa.

Ideologies were invented so that men who do not think can give an opinion.

-Aphorism #1219, Don Colacho

We're only five days into January of 2016 and already I'm tired of politics and of the nonsense going on in this country all around.  Don't misunderstand me, I love the United States and what we stand for: liberty and justice for all and such, but we have our problems.  Right now our problem is that we're not thinking things through very clearly or consistently, we are buying into ideologies rather than truly addressing ideas.  For instance, how is it that right now there is a group of armed ranchers are occupying a federal facility and spouting all sorts of hatred towards the President and our very own elected government, and the conservative voice is saying: "they're just protesting what they see as an infringement of their rights to bear arms and make a living, they're protesting the fact that a couple of ranchers got in some trouble because a fire they set to clear some grazing land got out of control."  But those same voices were awfully quick to condemn the lawlessness that broke out in Ferguson and Baltimore over the DEATH of young black men at the hands of police.

Why are white people allowed to be armed and treasonous in their protest over land rights and black people are not allowed to be angry in the streets of their own neighborhoods over the death of their children?

This position has not been thoroughly thought through, you're just approving what your gang does and disproving what is done by the "others."

I'm not just going to pile on the right wing though, because this stuff happens among Democrats as well, albeit in somewhat less dramatic terms.  Let's look at the economic debate about income inequality and economic justice. If you look at the positions of the candidates Bernie Sanders is trotting out some good old democratic socialism.  Not at all unlike the sort of thing that Republican Teddy Roosevelt did as a trust buster and Democrat Franklin Roosevelt did with the New Deal.  In actuality Sanders positions are not so much new and radical as they are old and well, frankly conservative, as in hearkening back to things that have worked to ameliorate similar categories of trouble in the past.

Sanders looks super liberal on economic policies because he is contrasted ideologically against a Republican party that is trying to "conserve" the ideology of the Reagan administration, rather than the policies of Eisenhower that helped the middle class grow and restrained oligarchical economic structures.

I have been thinking a lot about how and why Sanders appeals to me so much more than Clinton.  Even if I choose not to indulge in the darker fantasies of the right concerning the Clinton machine and their trail of bodies and abused people, I can't help but notice that Hillary probably really isn't going to change very much that needs changing.  She is going to run into the same stonewall that Obama has been beating his head against, and maybe even worse.  Obama has been the victim of some really despicable and blatantly racist slander, but I get the feeling from some of the anti-Hillary venom that I hear from right-leaning folks that we ain't seen nothing yet.

She makes a certain vocal segment of our population want to spit hot fire, and it is not because of her policies, because her policies are more or less Democratic Party boiler plate.  I have not heard one innovative idea from her, or anything that would differentiate her from a moderate Reaganite Republican (if such a creature even exists any more).

This is where I am, as I try to think my way through this election cycle: I don't really like all of what anyone says, even Bernie.  I like Bernie lots and lots on his domestic economic policy stuff, why? Simple self interest, because I am, and forever more will be, stuck in the middle class.  I have no illusion or expectation of ever rising into the ranks of having real money.  It's my choice, and I really am okay with it, but it frustrates me that so many of my fellow middle class folk are willing to support candidates who intend to continue to favor the top 10% and corporations with their policy decisions, who will do nothing to truly address the crushing burdens of healthcare and absurd levels of educational debt, and the general rigging of the allegedly democratic system in favor of those who already have the wealth and power.

Give me a candidate who speaks strongly against the things that destroy our ability to live good and productive lives as part of a free society and I will vote for him or her, regardless of whether they are Republican, Democrat or Independent.  Give me a candidate who has a vision to actually make the country of ours a more just society, I will practically cheer for them, most of all just give me someone who appears to have actually thought through the things they're offering and what they might actually be able to do... I might just be able to get through this next year.