Travels in America

John Steinbeck once set out on a journey across America in a custom pickup truck camper named Rocinante after Don Quixote's horse and his standard Poodle named Charlie.  Last week I set out on a less quixotic journey in my Volkswagen with my wife and two teenagers.  Still, when you travel you almost can't help but learn things, experience things and come back a little different than you were when you left.  Steinbeck's overwhelming assessment was that America was so very full of good people, but our publicity is terrible.  Travels in America with Charlie, was written in a seemingly different age, but it seems to me that America retains a very similar character.  We are better than we look, we are kinder than we sound, and we are more welcoming than you might imagine.
Our little family covered quite a bit of ground, Pennsylvania, to a little town that was our home for ten years, all the way across Ohio, Indiana, Illinois and then into Wisconsin.  We stayed in a place on the edge of a tourist destination, skirting around the water parks and amusements of the Wisconsin Dells, never actually getting very close to them.  Then we went to Chicago, the second city and seemingly ate our way through that town like a hungry caterpillar.  Finally, we spent a night in Cincinnati, an act which inspired curious consternation among all who heard of it. Then we took the scenic route home through the hills of Kentucky, the mountains of West Virginia and Virginia and back home to the tidewaters of Maryland.  In between those places were the vast miles of interstate highway, across flat lands that reminded me of the Meseta.  The sky was the landscape and the clouds were all there was to see.  But of course this was America, and so there was advertising as well.  Advertising for food, for lawyers, for God himself.  The advertising for God was striking, and unsettling, to a traveling preacher.  It sent me back with a sermon illustration at the very least, but also I think, with a bit of a prophetic vision of something that needs some fixing.
The lectionary texts for yesterday were from Isaiah 58 and Luke 13.  The Isaiah text describes the way that God's people are supposed to change the world for the better, to have their "light rise in the darkness," to be "repairers of the breach."  Luke tells the story of Jesus healing a woman on the Sabbath and invoking the predictable wrath of the religious folk because he broke the rules.  In the Gospel, the masses of people seem to have the good sense to rejoice in the healing and grace of God, it is the synagogue leader(s) who are shamed by their own hypocrisy.
Out there in America, I have seen so many little churches, who I do not doubt are doing good things, working to help their neighbors and create community and common good.  Then there are the billboards that seem to be trying to get people to be scared of God, and Hell and proclaiming judgment.  It produces a sort of cognitive dissonance that is becoming all too familiar.  It is not new, it was one of Steinbeck's major observations on his travels: America is more than what she seems.
Maybe it's just that old truism that Yeats pointed out:

The best lack all conviction;

The worst work with passionate intensity.

It's tempting to believe that, but I don't think the best lack conviction at all, they're just not interested in billboards, marketing schemes and branding.  This is why social media has become such a toxic sludge, because the good and the wise have learned to disengage from it.  On some rare occasions, a prophet arises who can use the tools for good, a Shane Claiborne or a William Barber III, masters the art of dancing on the cess pool without sinking, but it is more miracle than skill.

Too much of our public discourse has been taken forcibly by those who shout the loudest.  But America is a decent place that deserves better publicity.  We are not a nation of backward, bigoted, angry people, even if our figurehead wannabe emperor is exactly that. I'm not looking at this thing through rose tinted lenses either.  I saw the good, the bad and the ugly on our little jaunt through the Rust Belt and the Midwest and the upper south.  I saw lots of places where people still make things and I saw the new, clean, renewable technology that harnesses the wind to make us go.  I saw some really poor places and some ostentatious signs of wealth as well.  I saw signs of strip mines that had scoured the tops off of beautiful mountains, and I saw those mountains slowly turning green again.  We stayed in a neighborhood that was bustling with people who spoke Spanish and worked on a tricked out low riding van parked in the street, we smelled some really good things being cooked as we walked down the street.  They didn't seem like people who didn't belong here, they seemed like people who were the reason this country is great.  We also stayed in a neighborhood that is on that precarious turn from decay to renewal, and may either become something really vibrant or may simply gentrify.  We saw quite a bit of this country, and as glad as I am to be home, I am also rather excited to go see some more, because I need to be reminded more often that we are better than we seem on the news.

Here We are Again

Then they are again as before all suffering

and sleep deep sleep and have no glory

and their souls are white as silk,

and from the same longing both tremble

and are frightened by their heroism.

-Ranier Maria Rilke, Martyrs

When you stretch out your hands,

I will hide my eyes from you;

even though you make many prayers,

I will not listen; 

your hands are full of blood.

-Isaiah 1: 15

It's gone deeper America.  A few years ago, you may have been able to solve this problem with laws and regulations: more thorough background checks, reasonable regulations on what kinds of guns people could own, better mental healthcare. You might still try those things, but you would be like one of those medieval doctors trying to treat cancer by bleeding the patient with leeches, it might seem like the thing to do, but it's not going to cure anything.  The rot has gotten to the bone.  We have been denying our fear and hatred for too long, even the ones who preach love, we have been too easily duped into thinking that this problem of our violent hearts could be settled with rules and scraping around on the surface.

I should have known, when someone shot up an elementary school and nothing happened that it had gotten that bad.  Our laws could use some fixing, but until we change our hearts this is just going to keep going and there will be more and more martyrs to our violence and hatred.  Let's face it, the thing that motivates people to kill crowds of strangers, whether they use bombs, guns or airplanes is the idea that those strangers are their mortal enemy.  Yes, it takes a certain derangement to make the leap from a stranger to an infidel or an invader, but derangement never seems in short supply. The desperation that afflicts many who are young, poor and disenfranchised can easily be twisted to violence with some well placed propaganda, all the better if they have been raised to believe the world owes them something better than what they have. Stir the mix with a leader or leaders who confirms and legitimizes what often seems like a natural born fear of the other, and plays to the notion that they are the true victims, and the toxic cocktail is nearly complete.

Then it's just a matter of the tools for the job, which is the place where we usually take up the debate, but that's not good enough, not now.  Now is the time for lament, to rend our hearts and not our garments.  Now is the time to admit that we don't have a solution to the real problem, but not to ignore that there is a problem and what it is.  The problem is that we are taught to believe that there is not enough to go around, not enough food, not enough shelter, not enough freedom, not enough security, not enough dignity.  There is a fundamental flaw in the human heart that never trusts that there is enough, even though all our most "enlightened" teachers from Buddha to Jesus tell us that there is, in fact, enough.

The politicians, the emperors, the tyrants and the fascists will all tell us that there is not enough and we need to fight for our share.  The mystics and the holy people (if they are truly holy) will tell us that we need to cooperate because we're all connected and this fighting over "our share" is what creates all this suffering and pours innocent blood into all of our hands.  Even those of us who would "never" consider mass violence are guilty, because we believe the fundamental lie of scarcity instead of abundance and that lie prevents us from truly loving our neighbor let alone our enemy as Christ commends.  Indeed if the ones who desire to hold power do not want us to realize that true power is in being free of the fear they use to hold us in their thrall, the best thing they could do is to keep us focused on symptoms rather than the disease.  Offer us panaceas, or convince us that nothing can really change; sell us the notion of sweeping reform, or inviting us into the slow futility of incremental and shallow changes, or tell us that nothing really can be done; the grip of the principalities and powers tightens around our throat.

So what's the solution?

First of all, refuse to be afraid, and if you are afraid practice courage.  Second of all, refuse to hate, and if you are tempted to hate practice love most powerfully in that very place.  Third of all, be kind to one another, especially when you feel justified in meanness.  Each step builds on one another. I began with a poem and a prophecy, I will end with a similar pairing:

For God's sake, be done

with this jabber of "a better world."

What blasphemy! No "futuristic"

twit or child thereof ever

in embodied light will see

a better world than this. though they

foretell inevitably a worse.

Do something! Go cut the weeds

beside the oblivious road. Pick up

the cans and bottles, old tires,

and dead predictions.  No future

can be stuffed into this presence

except by being dead. The day is

clear and bright, and overhead

the sun not yet half finished

with his daily praise.

-Wendell Berry, The Future

Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean;

remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes;

cease to do evil, learn what is good;

seek justice, rescue the oppressed,

defend the orphan, plead for the widow.

Come now, let us argue it out, says the Lord;

though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be like snow;

though they are red like crimson, they shall become like wool.

If you are willing and obedient, you shall eat the good of the land;

but if you refuse and rebel,

you shall be devoured by the sword;

for the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

-Isaiah 1: 16-20

-Spoiler alert, that is the sermon text for Sunday