Shame

No multimedia today, just words, one word really: shame. If you watch Game of Thrones, you will have a distinct visual image to go with this word, but it's an image I will not put on this page, because it's R-rated.  There is a scene where Cersei Lannister is compelled to make a walk of penitence from the Sept of Baelor to the Red Keep through the streets of King's Landing. Her hair has been cut off, her clothes taken and she must walk through the crowd of people who hate her and throw filth at her, while a Septa (a nun-like character) rings a bell and shouts, "Shame."
If you don't watch the show, you need to know that Cersei is not a good person, she is conniving and power-hungry and really someone that you generally hope gets what's coming to her.  Except, somehow, when this happens to her, I actually did not feel any sense of justice.  It's weird really, because the whole sequence didn't really change Cersei for the better. In fact, if anything, it made her harder and more spiteful than ever.  But for a moment I did actually feel bad for her, maybe because the visuals were so striking, but also because, I think, shame is such a deep, dark human emotion, that there is very little in a fictional tale or in reality that can make you detach from it, unless you are an actual sociopath.
Most of us have at least one powerful experience of Shame in our lives, some folks practically live there, and all of us pretty regularly experience Shame's nicer little sister, Embarrassment, on a pretty regular basis.  This, I think, is the reason it becomes such a powerful motivator in our behavior, and for the most part, does not really need explanation. Shame is the shadow of pride, the more proud of something you are the greater your shame will be should that pride fall.  For instance, I feel no shame when I lose a footrace, because I  have never been fast, I do not aspire to be fleet of foot, and the fact of the matter is that life requires very little actual running of me.  If someone is faster than me it is not a source of shame, because I have not pride about that particular aspect.  However, if I am proven to be ignorant of something I feel I should know: shame.  If I am negligent in my duties in life: shame.
Which brings me to the point, the thing that I think we should all feel some shame about in the world today: kindness.  Not entirely abandoning the Sci-fi theme from yesterday there was a sequence in the Christmas episode of Doctor Who, where the Doctor is about to regenerate and he is trying to give advice to the next iteration of himself.  If I were able to do such a thing, I would like to give myself and pretty much anybody who cares to listen the same advice:

Always try to be nice, but never, ever fail to be kind.

It's writing like of that sort that I really hope the new folks taking over the Doctor Who franchise manage to hold on to.  You don't always have to be nice, sometimes you can't, you're cranky, you're afraid, you're just plain tired, maybe someone just doesn't deserve niceness, but they always deserve kindness.  That is what I think explained the strange incongruity of emotions I felt about Cersei's walk of shame, it wasn't kind.  She didn't really deserve nice, she really is a pretty unrepentant character, but the blatant imposition of shame seemed too far, and in the end, it proved more dangerous than kindness would have been.
I worry that, in many areas of life, religion perhaps most of all, we have been too free with the shame.  We shame people for being poor, we shame people for how they look, we shame people for what they do to make a living, we shame people for their personal sins, we shame people for simply being human. We shame people and we claim that we're doing it, "for their own good."
I have seen people with a veneer of nice, impose shame like that bell ringing Septa and those filth flinging peasants.  You can be "nice" and use shame as a weapon, but you cannot be kind and do so.  Kindness recognizes that shame will happen without assistance in most cases, and when it does offers a hand of solidarity or, better yet, a glimmer of grace.
I would like very much to live in a world where I am ashamed of fewer things, and that involves working to make things different.  I don't want to be ashamed of the way my culture treats people like things, so I will act in a way that affirms human dignity.  I don't want to be ashamed of the way my church fails to be Christlike, so I will work every day to be more loving and forgiving.  I don't want to be ashamed by failing to be kind, especially on those days when I just can't muster nice.  I know most often, my kindness fails when I think something is unjust, and on those occasions when I am correct about the injustice, I need to search earnestly for the way to apply kindness to that injustice.
Not always an easy mark to hit, but one worth trying for.

New Years Eve

I've never been much for New Year's resolutions.  I don't really have the willpower for them, and I know it. I do sort of like to look back on the past year and try to learn something or other though. This past year seems like it has contained its share of hard lessons, the first of which is:

And carry a towel if you really want to be sure of preparedness. This time last year, I had a major case of the fear about what 2017 might hold.  This year, while I'm not at all happy about the state of things, I guess the unknown and the things you can make up for yourself to worry about are always mostly worse than what actually goes down. Worrying about the future is one of the most futile ways to occupy your time and it is pretty much a total drain on your emotional reserves.  We all do it, and I don't know anyone who feels like it is a good way to live.  Bad stuff is going to happen, and pretending that it won't will not help at all, but when it does you're going to need all your resources (towels included) to deal with it adequately.
This time last year, I was hoping against hope that a good friend of mine would be able to beat cancer.  He didn't, and I needed to figure out how to deal with that reality.  This time last year, I thought maybe Trump would get us into a war of some sort. He didn't, in fact most of the most dire fears I had about what was going to happen to us as a nation have not materialized. I'm still regularly embarrassed by what he says and dismayed by what he does, but I have decided that I really need to settle down and deal with the reality of the situation rather than what I think might happen because of the decisions made by people I have absolutely no control over.  In other words, I need to heed the words of a wise teacher:

Fear is the path to the Dark Side.

Fear leads to anger, Anger leads to hate,

Hate leads to suffering.

Since I appear to be rolling with a sci-fi themed New Years, how could I leave out the Bene-Gessarit litany against fear:

I must not fear,

Fear is the mind killer.

Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration.

I will face my fear,

I will permit it to pass over me,

and through me.

And when it has gone past I will turn my inner eye to see its path.

Where the fear has gone, there will be nothing.

Only I will remain.

None of this is really a resolution, just things that I have needed to learn, or re-learn.  I'm putting them down, with pictures, so that some time I can remember what it was I probably shouldn't have forgotten.

Now for something actually important

I just realized that I haven't even written anything about The Last Jedi, I have been so busy with all kinds of serious grown up stuff that I neglected something really important: YODA.  Sorry, before you read any further, if you haven't seen the movie (SPOILER ALERT), I'm going to talk about stuff that happens in the movie that will really be better if you just experience first hand.
So last things first, I understand why some people are upset with this movie. There has been the usual interweb backlash against this thing or that thing and I agree there are some things about the movie that could have been done better, or more specifically, not done at all.  BIG THING that should not have been done: Princess Leia force gliding her way through the icy vacuum of space to basically spend most of the movie in a med-stasis tube.  We all know Carrie Fisher is a glowing force ghost in real life, so why not make her exit the film world too?  She died not long after filming wrapped, they could have given Leia a dignified exit and worked the rest of the story some other way, it would have made so much sense and would have avoided what is probably going to be an off screen death or worse a CGI death.  I'm pretty sure Carrie would have chosen to go out with a blast if they were able to ask her.
Second, less big thing that maybe shouldn't have been done: the entire Finn story line until the reunion with Rey, which was really touching. There is only one reason why Finn and Rose needed to go try and find the master hacker on the casino world, which they don't do and only end up finding a guy who betrays them to the First Order, and that is to introduce DJ, the character played by Benicio Del Toro, who is part and parcel of setting up the whole moral punch of the movie.  DJ gives Finn repeated lessons about how there are no "good guys" and that the galaxy far far away is every bit as morally ambivalent as our own.  I think they could have worked that into the plot without what amounts to a rather lengthy chase on cat-horse things and some scenes that look like Vegas crashed into Mos Eisley.
The third thing that really could have not happened, at least according to my daughter, is that Kylo Ren really didn't need to be as naked as he was in that one scene, but hey that's just a 12 year old's aesthetic critique.
What was done well was a connection with the themes that really made episodes IV through VI great.  People have critiqued the fact that The Force Awakens was essentially a total rip off of A New Hope and it was, but in a good way that is trying to advance the story past Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker.  In the second movie of this trilogy, Episode VIII, we have the connections being made to Return of the Jedi: the conversations between Ghost Yoda and Luke, the conversations between Grumpy Luke and Rey, the conversations between Kylo and Rey, they are all offering us evolution of the plot line about balance in the force.  There is enough sameness in the sequence of events to really see how The Last Jedi essentially leaves us at the same spot, story-wise that VI left us.  Snoke, as it turned out, was a giant skeletal red herring, which bummed out a lot of Geeks who had spent considerable time and effort inventing theories about his identity.  But Kylo managed to dispatch his Sith master a lot more cleanly than Vader did with Palpatine.  Kylo Ren evolved in this movie from whiny little punk to pretty serious bad guy in a way that makes me optimistic for where they're going with this arc.
By the end of The Force Awakens, I was quite frankly glad that Rey managed to slice Kylo up, so I didn't have to hear any more about his daddy issues.  By the end of The Last Jedi, I am so ready to see more Kylo.  Also, Rey is no longer the wide-eyed, over-matched orphan kid, and she is a character that is not at all governed by her origin story, which I think is a great direction to head with this.  The prequel trilogy gave me more than a stomachful of ancient prophecies about the chosen one and fulfilling destiny.  I'm liking that this movie basically established a good breaking point from all that sort of stuff and leaves Rey and Kylo, Finn, Poe and Rose free to tell a good story going forward.
The Yoda sighting proves that they will be credibly able to bring Luke and Yoda back at certain opportune moments to provide guidance from beyond.
Near the beginning of the movie, when Rey is trying to convince Luke that the rebellion needs him, he says something like, "what do you expect me to do, charge to the rescue swinging a laser sword?" I was personally glad that he didn't take up that challenge, it provides credibility to his character and honestly sets up what he actually did do in the end.  Honestly, I was afraid that they were going to turn these new movies into nostalgic retirement tours for the original cast, despite the fact that I knew Hamill, Ford and Fisher really didn't want to do it that way.  The new characters give me hope and a sense that they might take this thing in a direction that won't be so dead locked in to a known conclusion.  After all, wasn't it the big secret, that Vader was Anakin, that made Empire Strikes Back  the best of the movies?  I was personally glad that Rey's lineage is not apparently going to be the central plot point of these movies.  Do something new! No we can have new secrets and things to find out.
All of the homage points and scene parallels provide strong enough contacts with what was, we get it, but I'm 43 years old now, my son is older than I was when I started with these movies, I'm really hoping we can grow up a little at this point.

The Angry States of America

There is a lot of anger going around right now.  I felt it this morning when I read the front page description in the Washington Post of the self congratulations that took place on the White House lawn yesterday. The way that a bunch of politicians were now kissing up to Trump and calling him an exceptional leader because they got their "dream" of tax reform through the legislature without doing anything that could be remotely called legislating, well it kind of made me throw up in my mouth a little.
I generally agree with this George Will Column from this morning (please note for the record that George Will is a fairly conservative chap), that the tax bill is not really of such terrible significance, and that it is rife with flawed assumptions and that its hasty passage is an egregious violation of the principles of our government.  But it is not the end of the world, it is simply Washington D.C. showing us, fairly clearly, where its priorities are: with the corporations.  By all accounts corporations are the only real and permanent winners in this deal.  That seems to be the only thing that experts from all over seem to agree on.  The reality that corporations run the world is not new, or surprising to anyone who has bothered to pay attention.
What makes me nauseous is the smug pretense of politicians who think we're buying their propaganda.  They're not on our side, none of them, they just proved that beyond a shadow of a doubt, and they think a couple thousand bucks a year is enough to buy us off.  Maybe it is, we've all got a price, and mostly it is lower than we would like to imagine.
Those stuffed suits up the road are missing something fairly critical in our world right now: we are a bunch of angry folks.  The Democrats ignored it to their peril for the past eight years and hung on to a vision of hope and change.  They talked about national unity and rising to the challenges that face us, and it got them booted from their majority in congress and left them hanging on to Barack Obama as their only hope.  But their hope came with a term limit.  The GOP, rather than ignoring the anger, decided (foolishly methinks) to try and harness it and ride it into power.  The Tea Party was the early incarnation, and Trump is also a symptom.  Many people voted for Trump as thumb in the eye of the establishment on both sides of the aisle, he is a repudiation of both the Clinton machine and the Old Guard of the GOP.  Naive people felt like D.C. would pull him in and make him be presidential and responsible.  His Twitter feed demonstrates that is a false doctrine.  This tax plan, if not for its content then certainly for its process, is a Golem of hasty and incompetent legislation.  It is what you get when you are just trying to appease the reptilian brains of your donor class, and the monstrous ego of Donald J Trump, who really needed to start winning something.
It will not do what they think it will do, and people know it, and it's making the anger worse.  We are just so very angry at things, and I wish I didn't have to include myself in this diagnosis, because I know it's unhealthy.  I preached a sermon last Sunday to a handful of people at our early service (it was Cantata week) where I talked about the three I's that are symptoms of our problems.  I was talking about the church, but as the week has gone on I think this applies to our society on a broader scale.  The I's are: Irritability, Irrationality and Irrelevance.  They are linked together and one feeds into the others.  In the church the I of Irrelevance is probably a little more clear than in the world in general, but it has to do with the fact that we just aren't what we used to be, we are being out-competed by other stuff.  The Church used to be the center of most communities, it wielded significant authority and formed the core of the social structure, not so much anymore. We now sort of get the leftovers after all the other stuff is taken care of, and that makes us irritable, because we used to occupy such a high station.  I think that the anger of people in this country is motivated by similar feelings related to the loss of high station, the particular thing they feel they have lost may differ from person to person, because there are a lot of privileges on the list that we are losing: whiteness, maleness, "christianity," heterosexuality, cis-gender identity, middle class, working class, traditional family structure, educational status, professional esteem, and the list really goes on and on.  I'm not criticizing people for feeling angst about losing these privileges, losing things makes you irritable, even if it's just misplacing your car keys, I just feel like maybe we are in danger of harming ourselves and others, in other words we have become irrational. That's what happens a lot when people have anger at things that are far beyond their control. But technically, and maybe it is only technically, this stuff should not be beyond our control, we have been given the gift of living in a democratic republic, where we have a voice, maybe it's time to stop shouting in futility and actually do something.
We really need to get serious about taking our Democracy back from these oligarchs that have gotten a hold of it, and I'm talking about on both sides of the aisle.  Maybe it's even time to break the two party stranglehold.  Most other advanced nations have more than two viable parties, maybe we need to shoot the donkey and the elephant and move on. Hysteria is not going to help, party loyalty definitely isn't going to help.  We need to start channeling our anger into something besides impotent rage at the man like a bunch of high school seniors giving the finger to their principle on the last day of school.  That's going to mean looking beyond the self-involvement and self-interest that adolescents are so very good at.  We're going to have to recover the nature of politics as the practice of serving the people, all the people, not just your constituencies or your donors.  I know it's a big job, but if we don't do it anger is going to eat us alive.

Of Containers

Wherever I have moved about among all the people of Israel, 

did I ever speak a word with any of the tribal leaders of Israel, 

whom I commanded to shepherd my people Israel, saying,

 "Why have you not built me a house of cedar?"

-2 Samuel 7: 7

This is from one of the Revised Common Lectionary readings for this Sunday.  It will probably be like the chubby kid when sides are picked for dodge ball and not get chosen.  I'm certainly not going to turn aside from Angels and Shepherds and Mary pondering things in her heart to preach about Nathan and David having a bad idea.  That's why I have this blog right?

For those of you not familiar with the context of this story, David has the bright idea, after he is all settled in his nice palace, to actually build a temple for God, where they will keep the Ark of the Covenant (yes that Ark of the Covenant from the Indiana Jones movie) and where all the people can come and visit the courts of the Most High God.  David tells Nathan and Nathan thinks it's a super cool idea too, so they're about to go through with it, when God comes to Nathan in a dream and says essentially, "Boy, you two done lost your minds!" 

See, God never asked for a temple, he never really even needed a tent, people tend to feel better about their relationship with God if they have nice buildings where they can meet up.  Temples and tabernacles are like that coffee shop on Friends, where you can be sure that someone will be there.  If you think about it though, it's a silly idea at best, that God would somehow be that localized of a phenomenon.  It's also highly derivative of pagan practices where shrines were built and deities had tremendously specific powers, desires and locations.  The second scroll of Samuel records this story of David and Nathan having their minds changed, but it goes on to allow for the Temple anyway, just it has to be Solomon that builds the thing.  It's one of those places where the Bible is definitely shown to be very much a human document that reflects the understanding of a specific people who were very much culturally and geographically bound to their own way of seeing and understanding God.

A lot of the Hebrew Scriptures work under the presupposition that trying to contain God is a foolhardy enterprise.  From one of the oldest texts, Job, we find God speaking out of a whirlwind and challenging Job to man up and defend the idea that God should somehow justify God's actions to a regular mortal person. Job, confronted with the presence of God, realizes the arrogance of his presumption and repents in dust and ashes.  Moses deals with the reality that the presence of God often makes his life very, very difficult, likewise Elijah and most of the Prophets.  One of the most fundamental mistakes of human beings in these stories, from Abraham, to Moses, to David and pretty much everyone else is to try and make God in your own image, rather than the other way around.

God resists that impulse with the fire of thousand suns.

It doesn't matter how good and beautiful your container is, God will not fit inside of it.  Which is why I always get this sort of strange feeling around this time of year, like I'm a man without a country.  I can't really abide the sweet, sentimental visions of the Christmas story.  Partly because I'm well aware of the darkness that surrounds the light. The world that Jesus was born into was a hard place and his life was vulnerable and in danger before he was even born.  Herod, Caesar, even the respectability of Joseph and Mary's families, are all threats to Jesus ever even drawing breath.

But there is another reason as well, and that reason has to do with the very stories themselves.  It sort of starts with the fact that the Gospels of Mark and John don't really even talk about Jesus' birth at all, and it is at least partly informed by our remarkable talent for idolatry.  These stories open up the truth of the incarnation to attacks from those whose hermeneutics and epistemology seem aimed at proving the Christ to be just another mythological creation or a theological mirage.  There is something about the nature of these stories that is dangerous to us.  You can read all sorts of analyses that "prove" that these birth narratives are really just ripping off the cult of Mithras or something along those lines.  When I read this sort of thing, I understand why God told David and Nathan to cease and desist.  The container will not hold.

What I have come to realize though is that the stories are not the problem, it is our tendency to want them to be rigid and ironclad historical accounts that is the problem.  The birth of Jesus stories, like the Creation accounts in Genesis are really touching and beautiful things, full of mystery and wonder, full of human fragility and God's majesty intimately connected, one to the other.  Embracing this mystery and letting God be free to be wherever God is, rather than trying to lock God up in your special little temple, is the essence of the story.  Jesus is born in an unexpected place, to people who aren't important in any worldly sense.

It is actually our authoritarian and idolatrous impulses that create the very slippery slope that many folks decry.  The argument goes that if you start to pick and choose what parts of the Scripture you believe, sooner or later you won't believe any of it.  I would say that it is rather important to go beyond simply believing or disbelieving and actually get into a living relationship with Scripture.  The people who are least able to actually do this are people who insist on everything fitting neatly inside the lines of what they think they know. Life is messy.  Human life is profoundly messy.

At the end of Luke 2, after the good Doctor has given us all the stories about shepherds and angels and then told us about Simeon and Anna with their visions and oracles, then told of the time that the boy Jesus gave his parents a terrible fright by disappearing only to turn up the temple, in other words, most of the material that we know and celebrate during Advent and Christmas, and which is not well corroborated by history or even other Gospels, it says that "His Mother (Mary) treasured all of these things in her heart."

Some seize on that to mean that Mary was actually the source for Luke's accounts, and that very well might be, but it seems to me that the more important thing about these stories is that they are valued and loved (treasured) for all their mystery and their messiness.  Don't make that old mistake over and over again.  God does not need you to build him walls of cedar or anything else. The Scripture tells us that the goal is for the dwelling place of God to be with us and us with him, Jesus shows us how possible that is, it's a shame that we so easily forget it and try to build the stupid temple anyway.

Comparison

I am enough of a cynic to generally distrust a lot of what I hear and read.  Part of what has been so distressing over the past year or so has been the way that truth has been utterly beggared in our common discourse. I am not naive enough to believe there was ever a time when politicians did not lie or distort the truth, and I understand that reasonable people can sincerely disagree as to what the truth is, but I have to say, when I read this piece in the NY Times this morning I was surprised.
That Donald Trump is perhaps a pathological liar does not surprise me, the sheer scope of it was what was shocking. Politicians all play fast and loose with the truth, even ones you admire don't always tell it like it is.  Fact checking and the virtual verbatim record of who says what has been in full effect for nearly a decade, thus the journalists behind this article have solid ground for comparing Trump and Obama.  You probably know that I am an admirer of Barack Obama, and you probably also know that I am deeply ashamed of the fact that Donald Trump sits in the oval office.  But, even as a fan of Obama, I knew there were times where he must have deliberately lied or where he spun things in a way that was politically expedient.  I get that, there's no way you get elected to a public office without learning to play politics and there must be a certain amount of moral equivocation and flexibility that comes with holding public office.  I assume that all politicians lie to us, but I also observe that this lying is sort of in the same vein as the lies of advertisers and marketers, it's salesmanship, it's part of the game; caveat emptor. What Trump is doing goes so far beyond the pale that we may have trouble keeping our grounding in the safe territory of sanity and reason.
I recommend reading the Times piece in it's entirety and noticing, especially that they have actually been rather kind to DJT, they have not counted a lot of the salesman type lies that he has told, they forgive him imprecise use of numbers, and things that are simply misleading rather than outright falsehoods.  That latter category is where a lot of politicians and advertisers make their living after all.  But after reading the whole thing, do this, go back and find the side by side column of Obama's lies and falsehoods, committed over the course of a whole eight years, next to Trump's first year.  You don't even have to read them all.  Just scroll down and notice how far you have to scroll after the Obama side has gone blank.
Trump voters have told me that they like him because he "tells it like it is." This is a pretty solid piece of journalism that indicates that assumption is not, in fact, true, or anything like true.  I knew it was bad, I just didn't know it was this bad.  Also worthy of note, is the observation that both Obama, and George W. Bush, when they did tell lies or falsehoods, which were revealed as such, modified their later speech to stop telling those lies.  Trump just keeps repeating demonstrably false ideas, again they were kind and did not include repetitive prevarication.
The mendacity of our current President actually makes me nostalgic for the George W. Bush years, at least he eventually admitted that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Trump would be bragging about how many they found.
Look, I understand if your political perspective is different from mine.  I get that we might disagree about the effectiveness of corporate tax cuts, or the relative merits of single payer healthcare, or even what sorts of gun control measures ought to be instituted, but there is a fundamental attack that is not just about our political system or the liberal/conservative tug of war, it is about our connection to the truth.  In a monarchy or a dictatorship, truth is what the leader says it is, but in a democracy truth needs to be a more sacred ideal.  Our democracy particularly has been built with safeguards against tyranny, even tyranny by a duly constituted majority, certainly against tyranny by a despot.  The truth, self evident truths you might say, are the foundation of our whole system.
To support someone who despises the truth so thoroughly, even if you agree with some or all of his agenda, is utilitarian ethics of the basest sort.  The Dems made that deal with Bill Clinton and it has hamstrung them for nearly 20 years.  One of the Ten Commandments is, "Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor," which is perhaps a bit more nuanced than "Thou shalt not lie."  But Trump has actually managed to transgress bountifully upon both sides of that semantic division. Not only that but he has sucked a good number of other people right into the bog of eternal stench along with him.
Everyone crosses the border into untruth from time to time, but Trump, unlike most of us, seems to have decided to set up shop and probably has plans to build a golf resort there sometime soon.

Sanity

Alabama, you've got the weight on your shoulders that's breaking your back,

Your Cadillac, has got a wheel in the ditch, and a wheel on the track.

-Neil Young, Alabama

I've heard Mr. Young sing about her,

I've heard old Neil put her down.

But I hope Neil Young will remember,

A southern man don't need him around anyhow.

-Lynyrd Skynyrd, Sweet Home Alabama

Yesterday, the people of Alabama had a choice.  Were they going to be the people that Neil Young criticized, or were they going to be the people that Lynyrd Skynyrd defended.  Honestly I'll take Neil Young over Skynyrd just about any day, but this morning I'm feeling pretty glad that Skynyrd's Sweet Home Alabama showed up at the polls yesterday.  I understand that this does not mean that Alabama is suddenly going to go blue.  Doug Jones is the only Democrat to win in Alabama in decades, and he may be the only one to win for decades to come.  The election that just ended was more about people saying no to Roy Moore than it was about them saying yes to Jones.  In that way it is sort of similar to the way that last year's race was about people saying no to Hillary Clinton and all that she represents than it was about people really being in love with Trump.

That is where we are at this moment though, we are shaping up into a nation of what one of my Western PA friends called "Aginners," people who were "agin this, and agin that." "Agin," in Appalachia speak means against.  Neil Young's critique of Alabama and the South in general was based on his observation of deep seeded racism and white resentment (because apparently those things didn't appear last year).  While Neil was not unsympathetic: 

Oh, oh Alabama, can I see you and shake your hand?

Make friends down in Alabama,

I'm from a new land, I come to you and,

See all this ruin, what are you doing?

He was decidedly negative in tone. Skynyrd, by comparison, was perhaps naively sentimental about their Sweet Home, they knew something about the character of their homeland that Neil never would.  What they knew was that the idea of Alabama was sacred to people who live there.  While the rest of the country uses Alabama as a punchline to their jokes about rednecks and backwardness, Alabama holds on to its skies so blue and its government true.

I'm hoping that some day soon we will all be able to start being proud of our Sweet Home instead of just constantly having to cry out like banjos playing through the broken glass windows.  I think where we are as a nation is that we do have a wheel in the ditch and a wheel on the track.  Stopping Roy Moore, who was such a conglomeration of negative stereotypes about the south that he would have been unbelievable as a fictional character in novel, was crucial to keeping a wheel on the track, especially for Republicans.

Losing one seat now, is nothing compared to the carnage that would have happened in all those northern rust belt states that brought us President Trump, if Democrats could have put clips of him waving his little pocket pistol and talking about antebellum slavery as the good old days.  Whether or not the GOP takes this defeat as the actual gift that it is and tries to end their nosedive into absurdity remains to be seen, but the common sense and decorum of the Alabamian people has given them a few more months to give it a shot.

Democrats on the other hand, shouldn't get too swell headed about all of this.  Doug Jones is not exactly a paradigm they should follow, but he does demonstrate some necessary truths about politics in the age of social media.  First of all, don't try to be a strict party platform candidate.  Jones toed the party line on civil rights and reproductive choice, but he is also a gun owner and a rule of law former prosecutor.  If the Dems want to compete in red states they're going to need to get a little more Sweet Home Alabama and a lot less New York City elite.  And second of all, the thing Doug Jones did better than a lot of Democrats (especially Hillary Clinton) is avoid self inflicted wounds.  He observed that Roy Moore was growing increasingly unpopular for just being Roy Moore, and he stood back and let it happen.  He didn't so much attack as he simply stood up and said we can do better than that, he didn't dwell on the negative problems of his state, he sung about skies so blue, which honestly is what everyone wants to hear about their sweet homes.

It's easy to get sucked into the swamp of negativity that dominates in politics, because that swamp is about real stuff, important issues, critical policies.  As much as pundits want to shovel the blame for that negativity at the door of Donald Trump, honestly, he didn't make it up.  He makes plenty of of stuff up, but the way that he seized upon the zeitgeist of middle America and the deep south should not be written off as fiction. People are tired of "Aginners," and my hope is that we are beginning to see through the facades of both left and right.  Alabama doesn't have a great reputation for leading in a positive direction, but they may be the first state to give us, as a country, the sanity that we so desperately need.  You might even see this moment as turning of the tide of tribal politics (I think you know where I'm going with this, Lord help me).  If Roy Moore was that stinking, rotting bottom detritus that we had to see at the low ebb, so be it.  Let's hope the tide keeps rolling in.  Roll Tide (I'm very sorry for that, I just couldn't resist).

Inconceivable

Fezzini: "Inconceivable!"

Montoya: "You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means."

-The Princess Bride

If you only know Wallace Shawn from My Dinner with Andre, I'm so sorry.  If you only know Mandy Patinkin from Criminal Minds, well shame on you.  Rob Reiner's masterwork The Princess Bride is so very necessary for a lot of reasons. Shawn's portrayal of Fezzini, a self styled mastermind who is never quite as smart as he thinks he is, and Patinkin's Inigo Montoya, revenge obsessed, oft besotted master swordsman, not to mention Andre the Giant as Fezzig, rhyme loving strongman, give us so many memorable moments in the movie's first act.  Outside of Yoda's Star Wars dialogue, there is probably not much in the world of cinema that can be both very serious and seriously funny at the same time.

Fezzini's repetition of the word inconceivable is a running gag.  As mastermind and his two thugs execute a kidnapping that is supposed to go off without a hitch, they are pursued by the Man in Black who turns out to be the hero of the film.  Fezzini has built in several fail-safe features in his plan, and none of them turn out to be actually fail-safe.  Each time they do actually fail, he says, "Inconceivable!" Finally Inigo says that famous line, "You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means."

Misapprehension of what words mean is a rampant problem among humans in general, it can lead to everything from a simple misunderstanding to an actual war.  Lately,  have noticed that the political world, where words have been notoriously abused and misused pretty much forever, has been using words to start trying to break apart something that most of us are going to really regret losing if they succeed.

I know budgets and tax codes can be confusing.  I often feel a little like Fezzig and Inigo when the Fezzinis of the world get going on their wonky explanations of thing, but there a few things that I have noticed over the years that are sort of unavoidable truths about our government.  The first is that it is conceptually a lot easier to figure out where the money goes than you might have been led to believe.  There are just three wedges of the pie chart that make up almost 75% of federal spending (both mandatory and discretionary): 

That big blue wedge that is labeled "Health" is essentially Medicare and Medicaid.  To be honest, the numbers that are entailed by even the little wedges can be mind boggling to ordinary folk but the big picture tells you that if we're going to make a major impact on our government spending something is going to have to happen to the big three.  No politician in their right mind will ever recommend cutting defense spending, the closest they ever come is to maybe try and go after wasteful uses of that 16% of the spending, like the billions of dollars poured into a notoriously disastrous fighter plane in an era when the military themselves say the last thing they need is more fighter planes, or the fact that we buy thousands of tanks that we do not need because the manufacture of said tanks is good for enough representative's home districts.

For a while now, certain conservative types have been talking about the need to reform "entitlements" and end the "Welfare State." Both of these words might resonate strongly in the minds of folks who are "tired of footing the bill for people who don't want to work for a living."  As wrongheaded and frankly cruel as the whole "welfare queen," narratives were, there are a good number of people who believed and still thoroughly hold to that idea, that the bulk of our budget problem is people gaming the system, when in fact there is no such reality.  "The Welfare State," is in fact the blue and the red wedges together.

If you know anything about Social Security, you will know that it has it's own way of collecting money.  In years when I was poor enough to have no income tax liability, I still had to pay into the SS system.  It was actually kind of a shock the first year I was employed as a minister, I did my tax return on my fairly modest starting salary, and momentarily I thought I was going to get a $5000 refund, because we just had a child before the end of 2003 and thus had very little income tax liability.  Then I found out that I also have to fill out a schedule SE because Social Security considers clergy self employed, so basically, I watched $5K evaporate from my dreams to pay for Social Security.

This is the reality for almost all of the working class and most of the middle class: Social Security is always going to get theirs.  The hope is though, that when you retire, you will live long enough to get some return on that investment.  Social Security is not, in fact, welfare, it is something you pay for when you're young so that you will have some form of income when you are old.  It's not exactly a savings account though, and the Gubmint has a way of playing shenanigans with this huge chunk of cash.  They have done things that ought not to have been done, like borrowing money from it and floating bonds against it and kicking the can of fiscal responsibility down the road.

Remember this is money that you have paid out of probably every paycheck of your adult life, and it is supposed to be there for you when you age out of the working population or are put out by some disability.  If some political genius starts trying to sell you entitlement reform that includes robbing you of social security, I suggest throwing them off the cliffs of insanity before they lead you any further along in this farce.

I get that we can have disagreements about what the government should and should not do, and I am honestly not always of the opinion that the government should be bigger and more intrusive into our lives, but the thing about SSI is that most of us have already paid quite a lot into the upfront cost of it, with the good faith expectation that it was an investment in our future and in the interest of our nation.  To violate that expectation is not, by definition, reform, it is robbery.

Of Empires

We are about a week away from the latest installment of the Star Wars saga.  Over the past several years this occurrence has helped me remember the excitement of Christmas, in a purely non-spiritual sense.  I mean the waiting for something that I really wanted part, not the birth of Jesus part.  Sometimes I am jazzed about what comes about in a galaxy far far away, other times... well let's just say by the time Obi Wan left Anakin smoldering by the lava river of Mustafar I was pretty much in favor of that whiny little ingrate turning into the Darth Vader that was both cool and terrifying to 10 year old me.  If you don't know what any of that means, bear with me a second, because this isn't primarily about Star Wars, and I'm going to get on with it.
The thing that I think makes Star Wars stories compelling is not the Force, or Lightsabers, definitely not the Jedi, it probably isn't even Han Solo and Chewbacca, it is the presence of the Empire, or in the latest installations the First Order.  The narrative of the Galactic Empire gives real zing to the stories, because it connects them to real stuff in a way that Ewoks definitely do not.  Say what you want about the prequels, but seeing a fictional account of people choosing security over freedom and making deals with Dark Lords to secure power, rings pretty real in 21st century America.
Because let's face it, at the moment we're the only thing that honestly passes for an Empire on our planet, which given the absence of hyper-drives is pretty much what we're stuck with for now. People other than myself have undertaken the thought experiment (a fun thing to do with fictional narratives) of putting the Star Wars shoe on the other foot.  What if Luke Skywalker is a terrorist?  Because blowing up a space station (two actually) with thousands of people on board, only two of which appear patently evil is a pretty terrorist thing to do.  Did you ever wonder who those Stormtroopers were under the helmets?  Did they have families?  Were they clones? Or, even if they were clones, is it really ethical to create sentient beings for the sole purpose of war?  What about all the non-combat personnel that must have inhabited those enormous mechanical planets?
You get the idea, as Obi Wan Kenobi said, "many of the truths we cling to depend largely on our point of view."  I have been thinking a lot lately about how the rest of the people on our planet are looking at the good old U.S.A. lately.  And, no, it's not just because of Trump, I actually think I first started this during the Clinton administration, and did it quite a bit during the G.W. Bush years as we kept tearing off into new wars every six months or so.  Even during the Obama years, where I was proud of having a grown up president, and finally breaking the white guy monopoly on the chief executive, I had questions about our use of drones and the ethics of being able to kill so terribly efficiently with no skin in the game, it seemed awfully like the kind of thing the sinister Trade Federation did with its droid army.
It's a peculiar place for our country to be honestly.  After all we have this foundation story of a rag-tag group of colonists who rebelled against the great and glorious British Empire.  Who would have known that two hundred years later we would be acting as a defacto colonial power with our military apparatus in every corner of the globe and our economic and cultural influence dominant even where we don't have guns and bombs.  We also have the threat of a planet killing arsenal of nuclear weapons at our disposal. It seems sort of false to pretend like we are the underdog in any fight at the moment, but that doesn't stop us from trying.  We may have a serious challenger in China, but I sort of doubt that they would ever try and assume the role of world policeman, even if they do dethrone our economic hegemony.
Empires never manage to be entirely benevolent to those they rule.  In non-fictional worlds though, they are rarely as monolithic and sinister as we try and make them.  Nuances in the behavior of Empires though rarely matter to those on the receiving end of their inevitable brutality.  I don't reckon that the people Rome habitually crucified really had much appreciation for their roads and aqueducts or their experiment with democracy.  Likewise, I doubt an Afghani who had to bury a couple children in pieces thanks to our bombs, will really much appreciate our high ideals of liberty and justice for all.
The scariest parts of Star Wars, are those places where the Sith start to make sense, because then I realize how seductive the Dark Side can really be.  It scares me when I buy the justifications of our Empire hook line and sinker, without trying to comprehend the human cost of our power and might. I don't want to do that, because I am trying to follow a man who rejected the lure of empire and power to an extreme degree.  I want to follow the example of grace and peace rather than violence and power.  So I ask myself, since I'm pretty surely part of the Empire, what does it mean to work for the rebellion from within?  What sort of stand breaks the cycles of violence?  What force needs to be used to resist the dominion that we have a hard time even acknowledging we have?

A Toddler with a Hammer

Now if there's one thing we do worse than any other nation,

it is try and manage someone else's affairs.

-Will Rogers

Jerusalem.  Everybody knows it's the capitol of Israel, except for the fact that it probably shouldn't be, for an awful heap of reasons.  The Trump today took another one of his signature dumps in the middle of our collective living room carpet by declaring that we would recognize Jerusalem, instead of Tel Aviv (a perfectly good capitol city city) as the capitol of the nation state of Israel.  I do not doubt that this is the sort of thing that the Donald does to appease a lot of those "evangelicals" who mysteriously support his serial fornication, outright mendacity and shameful braggadocio. See there's this sort of nut-job fringe among the fundamentalist types that subscribes to Zionism, not because they really love the Jewish people or the State of Israel, but because they believe that, somehow someway, the on-going catastrophe that is happening in the Middle East is going to lead to an apocalyptic final struggle between God and the Devil and Jesus is going to come back.

Historically speaking there is a plain in northern Israel near the town of Meggido that, if you look at the lay of the land, is kind of a good spot to stage an all out slobberknocker of a battle for all the marbles, I mean at least if you're fighting with chariots and ranks of spear wielding Philistines.  The place is called Har Meggido, which you can see might be rather conveniently morphed into Armageddon.  If we had only had the good sense to follow the advice of several early church fathers and left the Apocalypse of John out of the canon of the Bible, we might never have noticed that the decisive battle between good and evil is "supposed" to take place in that fragile little finger of land that God promised to Abraham and his descendants.  But because we left all that stuff in there, because we just love riders of the apocalypse and great whores and seven headed dragons (generally dragons improve just about any story), we now have a bunch of people who want to take it literally.  That happens when you let any story sit around long enough.

So now we have a very real problem, the world's two biggest religions and one of the world's most determined ethnic groups now consider Jerusalem to be sacred.  Christians consider Jerusalem sacred because of the Jewishness of Jesus and the fact that he was killed (and resurrected) there.  Muslims have the Dome of the Rock there, which while it's not exactly Mecca is still pretty important to them.  And the Jews, well it is after all David's city, since he kicked out the Jebusites fair and square.  But the thing is, the Jewish claim is only partly about religion, sure they have the temple mount and the western wall and all that, but to conflate political Zionism with religious Judaism does a disservice to Judaism as a faith and I think also to Jewish people as a whole.

Anyway Jerusalem is more complicated than any of us really comprehend, least of all Donald J. Trump, but he gets his advice from sinister types like Mike Pence who is definitely the kind of millennialist nut-job who wants it all to go boom so Jesus can finally take the wheel.  As you probably can guess I do not subscribe to that point of view, but today I'm going to pray for Jerusalem particularly, because we may have just thrown a match on a some gunpowder.

Learning from Mistakes

The only thing that is smarter than learning from your own mistakes is learning from the ones others make before you.  The advancement of society depends upon it. Over the past several years the GOP has steadfastly exploited a mistake made over two decades ago by their opposition.  But exploiting that failure in others is a different tool than learning from it.  The mistake I'm talking about is none other than William Jefferson Clinton.  The Democratic party, after two terms of Reagan and one term of George Bush the elder, after watching Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis FAIL to win the hearts and minds of the American people, saw Slick Willy with his Saxophone and his teflon coating as a renaissance of the JFK era.  I remember this because it was the first election in which I was old enough to vote.
People who paid attention knew that Billy-boy had some baggage, Paula Jones and Jennifer Flowers were out there, and Whitewater. But he seemed so perfect a totem for the ascendancy of the Baby Boomers, finally taking the reigns from the "Greatest Generation."  Sure he didn't have the military background the GHW Bush had, but he could be the Democratic version of Ronald Reagan if not the second coming of JFK.  So the Democrats, who had pretty much given up on the religious right and the moral majority ever voting blue again, decided to hitch their wagons to a man they knew had moral failings, but who had political gifts.  They sold whatever conscience they had in order to win.
I'm not talking political ideals here at all, I'm talking personalities, because I am beginning to suspect that, in the years I have been voting, it is personality and not ideology that wins these things.
Caveat Emptor: The Democrats got 16 years of not being able to pretend to have a moral bone in their body, ceding the high ground on any question of principle to an opposition who honestly had no better right to claim it than they did.  I thought that perhaps the Obama Presidency, eight years of what now seems a blissful, scandal free administration led by a man that reasonable people were almost forced to admire for his composure and decorum if not his policy, might finally lift the Dems out of the moral dumpster fire of Mr. "I did not have sex with that woman."
Then they ran Hillary, who for all her qualifications is still, for some reason, a Clinton.  I thought that maybe, despite all good sense, perhaps the Republicans were actually moral enough to reject Trump, con man extraordinaire, and they probably would have been against almost anyone else besides a Clinton.  I know, people try to say it was more complicated than that, maybe it was the fact that she was a woman, maybe it was Comey, maybe it was Benghazi, the emails, whatever, but most of the people I know who voted for Trump did it with their noses held and voted against Clinton.
People remember things longer than we generally acknowledge and having the President of the United States of America make a mockery of your whole system (moral, legal and ethical) stings pretty bad. So what better way to take revenge on the Clinton machine than by electing a Republican version of him over his wife.  I really do think that Trump is a lot like Bill Clinton, with the added frosting of political incompetence and borderline mental stability.  Both of them probably deserve to be impeached at some point (Bill survived his, Trump might too).
The thing is though, while we are paying attention to the orange haired ignoramus, political stuff is happening that's going to really hurt our country.  We are ceding our nation to oligarchs and plutocrats and engaging in the worst sort of identity politics.  Charles Grassley and Orrin Hatch, both long term fixtures in the US Congress made statements over the past several days that absolutely personify the worst stereotypes of heartless right-wing snobbery. This sort of blatant, haughty, disdain for poor and working class people reveals that the GOP doesn't fully understand the populist sentiment that inflicted Trump upon them (and us).  The fact that Trump is about as populist as Andrew Carnegie is irrelevant, the people who voted for him did so out of a very populist sentiment and it is not one of the better angels of populism either.  The reason why Donald J Trump still holds an approval rating even in the 30s is because he continues to be inflammatory. And what a lot of people wanted from Trump was to simply have him break stuff. I think we need to understand that a good portion of Trump voters would like Mitch McConnell and Orrin Hatch to get hoisted by their own petard as much as they would enjoy Chuck Shumer and Nancy Pelosi getting tarred and feathered. Because large numbers of people simply hate Washington D.C. and assume that all politicians are crooked, bottom-feeders, and they have ample reason for that; Bill Clinton was the head hyena, and as we are finding out now, he had quite a pack of fellow predatory scavengers.
Bill Clinton had his famous, "it's the economy stupid" line about how he was managing to remain popular despite scandals.  The current day administration ought to know though that their plutocratic policies are going to be like gasoline on a fire of outrage if they don't work. If the people who believe in what the Trump sold them wake up to find that they have actually been betrayed into the hands of robber barons, they are not going to be happy with you, and thanks to the interweb, your Mr. Burns imitations are now out there, so that everyone can witness your own little "let them eat cake moment." One commentator referred to it as "riding a hungry tiger," good luck when the tiger notices that you are moist and delicious.
I can't say I'm happy about the prospect of things going sideways and south, schadenfreude only goes so far, I live in this country too.

Unsettling Dialogue (part 3)

We have been wrong to believe that competition invariably results in the triumph of the best.

Divided, body and soul, man and woman, producer and consumer, nature and technology, city and country are thrown into competition with one another. And none of these competitions is ever resolved in the triumph of one competitor, but only in the exhaustion of both.

For our healing we have on our side one great force: the power of Creation, 

with good care, with kindly use, to heal itself.

-Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

What if I told you that the most important Biblical concept outside of: Love God, Love each other, is that we ought to live within boundaries; would you believe me?  I know it sounds heretical to various sorts of people; people who believe that God is like a super-blessing machine that just wants to give you everything you ever wanted; also people who believe that God wants us to keep on filling the earth and subduing it, and even people who believe that God is cheering us on past every obstacle we face in the world.  What if I told you that God is a big fan of limits and boundaries and absolutely a fan of the word "enough?" And it's not because God is a big cosmic killjoy either, it's because God knows, better than any of us ever will, how Creation works.

In the past week certain clergy from around the country have been protesting what the GOP is calling "Tax Reform" with the tag #2000verses, which of course means 2000 verses of Scripture.  What the 2000 verses refer to are verses from Genesis to Revelation that exhort us to care for the poor.  There is a remarkable amount of material that is founded on a simple idea that was put out in the laws of Leviticus 19: 9-10:

When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap to the very edges of your field, or gather the gleanings of your harvest.  You shall not strip your vineyard bare, or gather the fallen grapes from your vineyard; you shall leave them for the poor and the alien; I am the Lord your God.

This section of Leviticus has lots of fun rules in it, some of which we absolutely disregard, and some of which we like to hold on to in a highly selective manner, but the thing about how you treat others that is defined here rises up out of the random commandments about types of cloth, haircuts and tattoos and gets enshrined in the words of the Psalms, the Prophets and Jesus the Christ.  What is being reflected in the Law is the Creation concept of margins.  Margins are the "solution" that Berry offers up to many of the woes that afflict us, and I have to say I rather strongly agree.  Giving yourself and your neighbors room to breath, and some cushion from calamity.  Living within a set of boundaries where you are not constantly "up against it," isn't that what many of us would define as happiness?
Most of us live our lives in search of that goal, to have enough, to have a home, and a certain number of material things, to have a job that gives us access to those material things but also allows us some "free time." This is not a modern materialist invention, but rather the goal of human endeavor from the beginning of time, even back in the early days of hunter gatherer human society, before books, and even before agriculture, humans took time to paint things in caves and carve things into rocks, these were not necessary endeavors, they were "marginal" activities, things done in the extra space and time life provided.
Tribal societies, where life could be decidedly brutish and short, developed traditions of storytelling that were as important to their identity as passing on practical knowledge about how to hunt and make tools. I think it is fair to say that a fulfilling human life must be about more than just survival.  Margins provide us with that capability, and in a complete understanding of the Scriptures you will notice that margins are supposed to be for everyone, not just the lucky few.  Whether it is the legal codes about gleanings, or prophecies of woe to those who allow their greed to afflict the world, or Jesus telling Martha that Mary did the right thing by just sitting and listening instead of being busily efficient, margins are a big deal in the Word.
If your theology doesn't deal with margins and if your ethical practice idolizes efficiency over compassion, you are not living according to the Word.  Notice too, that these laws were not just challenges for individuals, they were codified into a set of practices that were meant to shape a community.  The prophets are pretty clear that the king was supposed to play by these rules as well as the common shepherds, thus when we shape our societies, it would behoove us to consider margins, not maximum efficiency.
This is a fatal flaw in unmitigated capitalism.  As Wendell says, this endless competition leaves us all exhausted eventually.  We have wisdom that tells us this is not a good thing and it goes back a very long way, but even more recently in the very Constitution that so many who rabidly endorse capitalism practically treat as holy canon, we find the following at the very top of the page:

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity, do ordain and establish this constitution for the United States of America.

You can read that and focus on liberty that allows you to look out for number one if you want, but I think the framers of that document, flawed though they may have been, had a higher goal in mind: Commonweal, it's an old word, but it's a word that I think we need to come around to once again.  This is about more than just tax reform, but it is reflected in the self-admitted goal of the direction the GOP has been moving us: market driven, lean government, less taxes, less regulations and ultimately fewer margins, survival of the fittest, the ultimate dream of capitalism, and a brutal way of being a human society.
Friedrich Nietzsche, not exactly a man known for his sunny sentimentality even recognizes that human life needs to rise above this sort of nihilism:

Imagine being like nature, wasteful beyond measure, indifferent beyond measure, without mercy and justice, fertile and desolate and uncertain at the same time; imagine indifference itself as a power, how could you live according to this indifference? Living, is that not precisely wanting to be different? 

Margins are human way of dealing with nature's wastefulness and her indifference. We use margins, in our spiritual lives, in our communities and in our use of the natural world in order to be healthy.  We need margins so that we have some shock absorption when we run into a limit. In the story of the Garden of Eden, God prescribes a limit for Adam and Eve, which they promptly violate.  It was only one limit and they could not live within it, which sets up a rather epic scale for this whole debate.  There were no marginal trees in Eden, only good and evil, and we proved ourselves incapable of dealing with that sort of hard boundary.
If we do not leave ourselves margins we will always be cast out of the garden. Margins have always been a good idea for promoting commonweal. They provide for people on the margins for sure, but they also insulate us all from the precarious uncertainty and indifference of nature.  We are all better off with margins than without them.

 

Unsettling Dialogue (part 2)

If a consumer begins to think and act in consideration of his responsibilities, 

then he vastly increases his capacities as a person.

-Wendell Berry, The Unsettling of America

We like to talk a lot about our rights. We have constitutional amendments that we define as the Bill of Rights.  There are organizations and groups that are devoted to defending the rights of certain groups of people, or certain rights of all people.  We sometimes argue about what is and is not a right, and consensus on that subject is by no means easy to come by.  Mr. Wendell lifts up a rather important counterbalance to rights: responsibility.  I hear a lot about people claiming their rights, as citizens, as parents, as consumers, but mostly what you see with regard to responsibility is rather the opposite.

There is a good reason for this: 

It may be that when one hands one's responsibilities to an organization, one becomes by that divestiture irresponsible.  It may be that responsibility is intransigently a personal matter - that a responsibility can be fulfilled or failed, but cannot be got rid of.

Groups and communities can help you with your rights, inalienable and otherwise, but with regard to living up to your responsibilities, you are by definition on your own.  This is a bugaboo of modern politics: people confuse rights and responsibilities and do not adequately recognize the intricate and intimate connection of the two.  When people complain that their rights have been violated, one of the exploitative responses is to point out that they somehow failed their responsibility.  We see this rather brutally played out in the criminal justice system where incarceration rates are abysmally out of balance with regard to black folks.  When you point out that injustice, an inevitable response is, well "they" are criminals, meaning people who have broken faith with the laws and responsibilities of citizenship. The drastic failure of responsibility in criminal behavior is the excuse for many people to never examine the systemic inequality that leads to a statistically observable injustice. Politicians of a certain bent will say that anyone who points to the flaw is "soft" or "weak on crime," but in doing so they are failing their responsibility as public servants, which is to provide for the common good. The common good, in my mind would mean a just society from bottom to top. Injustice at any level compromises the common good. Inversely, if a criminal blames the system for his bad behavior, he is also failing his responsibility to be a law abiding citizen.  The web of responsibility is complicated, the idea of rights is simple by comparison, so it's easier to shout about.
Many people would rather relinquish their rights than assume full responsibility, we would rather be safe than free.  Those who covet power are not ashamed to exploit this weakness, and Berry points out that this is not just a slogan of revolutionaries and dissidents, it applies to our habits as consumers:

People whose governing habit is the relinquishment of power, competence and responsibility, and whose characteristic suffering is the anxiety of futility, make excellent spenders. They are the ideal consumers. By inducing in them little panics of boredom, powerlessness, sexual failure, mortality, paranoia, they can be made to buy (or vote for) virtually anything that is "attractively packaged." The advertising industry is founded upon this principle.

Have we become a people that could be described that way?  I think so, more than I would like to admit personally.  Consumption can absolutely be a drug used to numb the anxiety of existence. When I buy something I want I feel good, when I buy something I have convinced myself I need, I feel even better.  I can be convinced by politicians that if I vote for them they will do the things I agree with and want for my country, even though they have been proven liars for far too long.  I think that we even apply a consumer mindset to our spiritual lives and worshiping communities.  Churches have, all too often used the tools of advertising and the exploitative mindset to take power away from people and put it in the hands of a hierarchy or a cult of personality.  It does not serve us well in the long run, because Christ, our center was in fact a paradigm of responsibility, not just for himself, but for other people.  He revealed the moral rules of the law to be founded upon a broader, communal standard: "love one another."
The exploitative consumer is incapable of loving anything other than their own appetites.  Love is reduced to lust, industriousness and ingenuity are reduced to greed, noble ambition is reduced to power grabbing.  What is the way out?

What has not been often said, because it did not need to be said until fairly recent times, is that the responsible consumer must also be in some way a producer. Out of his own resources and skills, he must be equal to some of his own needs.

This is, I think, why I feel so good after I go out and cut up a dead tree and split the logs for firewood, rather than just going down to the store and buying a bundle of firewood for $5.  The fire feels warmer, I swear it does.  This is why I feel proud any time I can take something old and fix it or, re-purpose some bit of junk I have laying around.  This is why I am sort of in love with the idea of hunting, even if I'm a bit troubled by killing, the idea of providing something to eat from the wild and connecting with the food chain.  It's why I like to garden, even if I put way more money (and time) into it than it's actually worth.  It's why I bother with a compost bin where I slowly try and create good humus from peels and grounds.
Don't get me wrong, I'm still a fairly inveterate consumer. I have not grasped my own responsibility firm enough to go off the grid and live as a hunter gatherer.  I still use Amazon.com as a drug to break me out of a funk.  That's why I'm calling this a dialogue, because it's not one sided, it goes back and forth between what I would like to be and what I am.

Unsettling Dialogue

If you have read this thing for a while, you know that I am a fan of Wendell Berry.  I like his poetry best, I think it rises to the level of prophetic speech at times.  I enjoy reading about the fictional denizens of Port William in books like Hannah Coulter and Jayber Crow.  It is his non-fiction, in the form of books and essays of cultural and (I think) spiritual critique that let you see the clear thought and bracing wisdom behind the poems and the stories.  I had a doctor's appointment today and my doc is notoriously behind schedule so I brought a book, which just happened to be Berry's Unsettling of America.  I like to bring books I've already read to waiting places, because I can absorb the distractions better if I kind of know what I'm reading already.
Unsettling was first published in 1977, and Berry, in the preface says that time is the enemy of a critique such as the one he was putting out there.  The world of agriculture (which is the subject of the book at least on the surface) was in flux and he was trying to see larger trends that might prove to be timely.  What he actually managed to capture in much of the book is a rather timeless analysis of human culture.  Sure some of his more nitty gritty criticisms of certain policies and practices and the occasional person are a little out-dated, but the premise that what afflicts our most basic industry (the production of food) is really a canary in a coal mine for larger cultural issues, was spot on, and I would say prophetic.
I talk about this book a lot, some of you may have heard me extolling its virtues, but as I waited for my medical specialist to tell me what the various numbers revealed by blood tests and such mean for my overall health, I was reminded again of how prescient Mr. Berry actually was by the following paragraph, remember first published 40 years ago, when Jimmy Carter was President.  Berry was working on a different way of seeing the differences between people and even within individual psyches, other than liberal/conservative, democrat/republican, capitalist/communist.  He did not break entirely out of the mindset of dualism, but he did offer one of the better dichotomous classifications I have read recently: Exploitative versus Nurturing.  We all have a little of both in us and some people are more dominated by one or the other, but the two attitudes are clearly at odds with one another, and in this case it is fairly clear to see that one is more prone to immorality than the other.  Anyway here's what he says about the exploitive (sic) mindset:

The first principle of the exploitive mind is to divide and conquer.  And surely there has never been a people more ominously and painfully divided as we are - both against each other and within ourselves.  Once the revolution of exploitation is under way, statesmanship and craftsmanship are gradually replaced by salesmanship (the craft of persuading people to buy what they do not need and do not want for more than it is worth) Its stock in trade in politics is to sell despotism and avarice as freedom and democracy.  In business it sells sham and frustration as luxury and satisfaction.  The "constantly expanding market" first opened in the New World by fur traders is still expanding - no longer so much by expansions of territory or population, but by the calculated outdating, outmoding, and degradation of goods by the hysterical self-dissatisfaction of consumers that is indigenous to an exploitative economy.

I almost dropped my book.  This has been going on for my entire life, in fact, Berry makes the argument that it is not some sort of late modern mutation, but rather a fundamental characteristic of the American (New World) mindset. We now have politicians who are primarily salesmen and the Clintonian maxim that "it's the economy stupid," has become canonical to the point where we don't even flinch when new and more draconian forms of exploitation show their faces.
As we speak, we have a salesman/conman (depending on your opinion) for President, people are drooling over $1000 iPhones that they really don't need, and up the road in D.C. they are working on a tax plan that is going to achieve the exploiter's wet dream of corporate tax cuts at the expense of regular people, at the expense of exploding the national debt (which for 8 years of the Obama Presidency was like the black plague, but which now seems like just the cost of doing business).
Tell me how a Kentucky farmer saw this so clearly when I was three years old.  Why didn't anyone listen to him?
That's enough for now, my doc told me my blood pressure was high, so I need to relax.  But I'm going to come back with more Unsettling, it's just too important to stop there.

Pressing Questions

You abandon the commandments of God and hold to human traditions.

-Jesus of Nazareth, Mark 7:8

Misery loves company, or so the saying goes.  I'm not so sure that I'm glad to hear about other religions being in the same boat as American Christianity at the moment, but there was this in the New York Times today.  For all you TL;DR people out there, it talks about how conservative, religious Muslims, having finally obtained power in Turkey after years of oppression, are now worse than their secular predecessors in terms of corruption and immoral use of power.  I have to say I found myself transposing what he was talking about to Christianity and America a little too easily.  The question of the headline is "Does Religion Make People Moral?"  And I have to tell you that until fairly recently I would have said that it definitely does, but lately I'm not so sure.

The decidedly moral questions that we must answer as a society: how do we create a just system of governance? How do we participate in a truly equitable economy? How do we protect those who are vulnerable in our midst? Are in many cases being answered immorally by self-identified religious people.  I'm not talking about differences of opinion here either, you could argue (and many do) that a corporate tax cut will create economic growth and a rising tide lifts all boats.  You could also argue (as I happen to believe) that supply side/trickle down economics is a failed doctrine that has led us to a place where it is demonstrably more difficult for successive generations to achieve upward mobility.  Neither one of these positions is necessarily morally right, but the fact that people go hungry and homeless, while others have more than they could ever need is a moral failing of our society.  You could argue about who is worse: Bill Clinton or Roy Moore, but the fact that our society has protected sexual predators based on utilitarian principles is a moral failure.

Religion, as the article points out, does not seem to create a morality that is immune to the corrupting influence of power.  And while trickle down economics is a crock, the trickle down effect of immorality is no joke. People who were notably and righteously aghast at Billy Clinton diddling an intern less than half his age, say outright that Roy Moore doing the same thing to a sixteen year old girl is somehow different, because it happened way back, because he will help appoint conservative Supreme Court justices, because he will hold on to the GOP majority in the Senate, because he will "Stand for God," yeah I'm calling shenanigans on that last one, but the other ones are pretty thin as well. The immorality of the people at the top seeps down to pollute and stain the people at the bottom, money seems to flow up hill in our world, but crap still rolls down hill.

Donald J. Trump's megalomania convinces a bunch of church-going grandmas who live by a code that says name-calling and bragging are bad manners, end up voting for a man who has made name calling and bragging into a personal brand. Why? Because he is on "their side," whatever that happens to mean.  It reminds me of how much I hated Terrell Owens until he played for the Eagles (that didn't end well and it's a possibility that Trump might go out the same way).

The really sad thing is that, while the people who have been claiming the moral high ground for quite some time have been revealed as a brood of vipers, there really isn't anyone with the credibility to take their place.  Democrats? Yeah, not so much, thanks Franken and Conyers.  We might have been able to actually put Clinton in the past if it wasn't for your handsy ways. Is it the church? Probably not, as the article in the Times makes clear, religious people aren't actually much more moral than anyone else when you dangle power in front of them.

As with a lot of things, this is a systemic failure, and thus it is hard to even figure out how to fix. We have been letting our moral structure erode for an awful long time. Besides that, I think it is spurious to think that we can simply reconstruct the "good old days" and end up with a truly moral society.  Remember that a lot of the things that are symptoms of our moral decay: greed, licentiousness, hubris, have been around for a really long time.  We needed advancements in women's rights to see how pervasive sexual harassment had become.  We needed the aristocracy to collapse and a sense of equality to arise before we could come to any sense that perhaps the benefits of society should be shared more evenly (work in progress).  We needed a sense of human dignity to arise before we could even realistically raise questions about prejudice and racism.

Moral codes must adapt to these sorts of changes.  It was, once upon a time, morally acceptable to own slaves, it no longer is.  Maybe in the future exploitation of the poor and working class will be seen with the same derision.  It would seem that maybe these powerful men who have taken liberties with women thought that such behavior was morally acceptable, they are finding that assumption to be a mistake.

It's hard to say if our moral codes will ever advance to the point where we can move beyond the greed and consumption of capitalism (communism does not seem to have worked out).  It's hard to see how we will ever be moral enough to resist the corruption of power.  Maybe the moral crisis of the moment will eventually lead to growth of some sort (I'm hopeful because that is generally how growth happens in a spiritual sense).

The distinction that Aykol makes between self-education and self glorification is a useful one in this regard, because I do feel that my Christian faith has shaped my moral awareness, but I had to move past a place where it made me feel like a privileged member of an in group and towards a place where it challenged me to take up my cross and follow.  I believe that religion has within it the raw materials for moral formation, but those things are not always put together in a way that leads to growth.

It occurs to me that power is perhaps the most destructive force to moral formation.  I have mentioned power and corruption several times in the course of this blog, and I know that it's not a new connection.  But I see in American Christianity at the moment, the same thing that has reared it's ugly head throughout history.  The desire to be in charge is antithetical to submission to God's will.  You cannot serve two masters.  You cannot serve God and Mammon, you cannot serve Christ and your own ego.  Serving the masters of greed, pride, power and violence will necessarily lead into immoral behavior and ultimately to destruction.  My feeling is that if your religion doesn't lead to morality, you're probably doing it wrong, and that appears to be true across the spectrum of faith traditions.  We're more alike than we want to admit.

Helter Skelter

When you get to the bottom you go back to the top of the slide,

then you stop, and you turn, and you go for a ride,

Then you get to the bottom and you see me again.

-Helter Skelter, The Beatles

Charlie Manson is dead.  He was 83 years old and had been in prison since before I was born. He is the face of evil personified to a lot of people, and yet also an object of morbid fascination. Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers, examines the world that Manson essentially embodies: celebrity killers, antiheroes and the ultimate flaw of postmodernity.  In the movie, fictional psychopath Mickey Knox is asked by an interviewer about other serial killers and mass murderers, none of which he has much respect for, until you get to Manson, at the mention of Manson, Mickey is impressed and refers to him as "The King," in the same sort of way that rock and rollers might reverence Elvis Aaron Presley.

I'm not exactly sure what it is about Manson that attracts our collective curiosity.  I mean, there are far more terrifying people out there, most of the serial killers that gained some kind of notoriety were objectively more terrifying.  Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, all sorts of men who killed for killing's sake. But Manson had this vision, and he was able to twist others into doing his bidding.  He was able to combine the skills of a Pimp, a cult leader and an apocalyptic preacher all into one deadly package.

If it sounds like I admire Charles Manson, I certainly do not. His obituary reads like a litany of all the ways our society can fail horribly.  He was born into a bad situation, he grew up in a disconnected and brutal world where he never had the basic security that most of us take for granted.  When you read even a sketch of his life story, it's easy to see why he became a psychopath.  What I find interesting about Manson is how well he reflects the dysfunction of postmodern America, he is essentially an incarnation of everything that can go wrong with us.

His life story is a tale of marginalization and brutalization.  He was a criminal before he formed "The Family," and it wasn't by accident that he called his little cult "The Family."  It would seem that he never had much of a family in the real world, his childhood was a train wreck, his marriages ended in divorce. The conventional way of being a family totally failed for him, so why not try something different.  Let's get the young, disenfranchised youth of suburbia and offer them something that seems like it has meaning.  Let's give them a worldview that has a purpose, even if that purpose is askew and not at all connected with reality.  It doesn't need to be, it just needs to be something that makes them feel important and included.

Let's wrap up our little vision in stuff that people already find cool, like Beatles lyrics and random stuff from the book of Revelation.  Let's prey on people's racism and prejudice, and let's convince them that our little family has something important to do.  It's pretty much the same thing that ISIS does, without the Beatles songs.

This is what I think made Manson so unnerving to so many: they could almost see how he did it.  They could look at those girls who had fallen under his spell, and see their daughters.  They could see kids who were dealing with the aftermath of a rather violent deconstruction period.  Their nation could not be trusted, their faith had never been nurtured in the first place, they had been weaned from the nuclear family on to cold gruel of materialist consumerism, and they were longing for something to feel a part of, Charlie Manson gave them something.

The thing that I am thinking today, as Manson has died at a fairly ripe old age, is how we didn't really learn our lesson about the danger he poses.  We eventually learned to laugh him off, he was this crazy little guy with a swastika carved into his forehead, still protesting his innocence and granting the occasional insane, ranting interview.  It would be easy for people of my generation to completely forget the brutality that he unleashed. We still need to teach our kids to resist the "sales" pitch from people who would prey on their boredom and disaffection, who would offer them a community, which even if it is soaked in blood, seems better than no community at all.

What still terrifies me about Charlie Manson, even now that he's gone, is the fact that someone like him could very easily happen again, and we still wouldn't have any idea what to do about it.

What Matters

You are the salt of the earth;

But if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?

It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled underfoot.

-Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 5:13 (from the Sermon on the Mount)

This has been one of those meaningful but difficult days that following Jesus sometimes throws at you, or at least it should.  The first thing on my agenda was the usual Friday walk with the dog around the lake.  I wasn't sure I was going to fit it in, because this Friday was going to be anything but a day off as per usual. I knew I needed it though, like Jesus needed to go off by himself and pray sometimes.

The next thing on my agenda was conducting a funeral for a two month old baby boy, who I was supposed to baptize last Sunday.  I know, I'm sorry, that's kind of a gut punch and I didn't give you much warning.  It feels that way to me too.  His name was Keith Takha Akaragwe, the son of one of the Cameroonian families that have recently become a part of our congregation.  He was healthy and happy and then last Saturday night his mother put him to bed, in the usual way.  An hour later she went to check on him and he was in distress, paramedics came, the hospital tried, but his fragile little life could not be saved. And so instead of celebrating a baptism with all the usual joy, we have spent the week mourning.

In my nearly fifteen years of ordained ministry, this is the first time I have had to do a memorial for a baby.  If it weren't for one dramatic outlier (involving children being killed by their father), this would have been the most difficult one to date.  The large majority of people I have had to memorialize had at least had a fighting chance at life.  When older people die there is a certain way you can deal with it, you can remember funny things about them, you can make a well timed joke (yes at funerals). I think the trick is to memorialize them the way they were and not the way sappy bereavement cards do it. You tread a very fine line along edge of irreverence, it cuts the through the maudlin feelings and brings reality in as sort of bracing balm against despair.

You have no room, and no material to work with in the case of a two month old baby.  Reality doesn't need to be brought in, it is raging and in your face.  It is a wailing mother watching them put a tiny little casket in the ground, it is songs of lament sung in a tongue you don't understand but somehow you know every word they say.  I have never felt so ill-equipped to offer comfort in my life.

This is where my intellectual ability and even my theological perspective fails me.  This is where I fall back on the basics, the understanding of the sacraments as actions of God's grace, the familiar words of Psalm 23, the Lord's Prayer, the simple affirmation that, no matter what, we are in God's hands.  It is not elegant or well thought out, sometimes it seems naive, but I don't know how else to stand in front of a tiny little casket and try to construct some sort of meaning that isn't pure brutality.

The faith of that moment is pure salt, it has to be built into the spiritual chemistry of my heart, because I can't fake my way through it, I can't come up with enough eloquence to somehow say that two months on this earth is enough.  It is the one funeral I have ever done where I didn't even think about using Ecclesiastes 3, because damn it, there should never be a time for tiny little caskets.

Then it was done, tetelestai, and I had more to do.

The afternoon was spent cooking chili for the nearly forty people who are experiencing homelessness, who are being given a home in our church this week.  The program is called Safe Nights, and tonight I was part of the dinner team, and now I'm spending the night here at church in case a circuit breaker trips or they need some help with something related to the building.  I spent the afternoon dealing with spices, salt, pepper, chili, adobo, paprika, a little of this, a little of that, making a pot of chili that was decidedly larger than what I normally make.  One of the young men in the Safe Nights program told me, "that chili was on point!" So I did it right.  I wish I had the same assurance about this morning.

Normally, I sit here in my office on my night watch during Safe Nights feeling pretty good about what we're up to as a church.  And I suppose there's a little of that, but this year there are so many little ones here, and a larger than average number of grown ups.  We barely have enough room for all of them in the inn, and that reminds me of the fact that charity does not adequately make up for lack of justice.  There are a few of these folks that we see year after year, the regulars, they know the routine, they are pretty settled into the homeless routine, that's one thing.  As Jesus said, "we will always have the poor," yes I suppose that is true, there are some people who will always find themselves at the margins of society, and that is why we we always need to act charitably towards "the least of these."  Good and fine, we can run Safe Nights from now until the second coming if we have to, but we are seeing a growing number of people in this program, who, if the system were fair and just, would be able to make it on their own.  There are people here who have jobs, people who, with a bit of a boost, would be able to become actual assets to their communities rather than having to sleep on cots in crowded church basements.

After we fed the crowd, I withdrew to my office and got around to reading the paper, in which I found this opinion piece the New York Times, by David Brooks.  I commend the whole thing to your attention, but I would like to share the following:

Freedom without covenant becomes selfishness. And that's what we see at the top of society, in our politics and the financial crisis.  Freedom without connection becomes alienation.  And that's what we see at the bottom of society - frayed communities, broken families, opiate addiction.

His main point is that for people to live and thrive in a free society they must be formed into people who can handle freedom.  This is a solid biblical principal.  The Israelites wandered in the wilderness for forty years, not because they were lost in a relatively small area, but because they were not ready to inherit the promised land.  The slave mind had to die out and the free mind had to rise in order for them to be ready.  Jesus' disciples were a case study in incompetence and blindness until they were trained, commissioned and empowered by the Holy Spirit.
What I did this morning was a product of years of formation and walking in faith, and I know that it is, in its turn, only one more step in the journey. As is every pot of chili I make for Safe Nights or each outstretched hand I take.  What I hope I am growing into is a person who can enter into the joy of my God in all circumstances, in other words, someone who is ready for the freedom that comes in and only in union with Christ.
It breaks my heart that sometimes it takes a tiny casket to remind me of that reality, that in life, and in death, the only truth is in Jesus the Christ, if we lose that we lose our saltiness and we're good for nothing.