Last Things

Everyone remembers the Dream.  Everyone remembers the vision of black and white children playing together, and growing up judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin.  Everyone remembers Martin Luther King Jr. as a crusader for racial reconciliation and civil rights.  That aspect of his life and work is most likely the reason why my kids have a day off from school today.
However, in the time leading up to his assassination, Martin was actually engaged in work that he had come to see as a broader systemic injustice.  The struggle for racial equality was not over by any stretch of the imagination, but as segregation began to crumble, a deeper problem was uncovered, a problem that has always afflicted humanity, and which is at the core of our most insoluble problems: economic injustice.
King's had begun organizing the Poor People's Campaign at the Southern Christian Leaders Conference, shortly before his murder.  He was in Memphis to support striking sanitation workers.  His focus had shifted in a way that called him to dig deeper into the black heart of an unjust system.
The suspicious and peculiar life of James Earl Ray, the man convicted of King's murder, has now largely become the stuff of conspiracy theories and nonsense, but there is a peculiar reality that rears it's head time and time again in human history.  It was true of Jesus of Nazareth, and it was true of MLK: the world will tolerate you challenging abstract ideas like freedom and equality, it will listen with great intensity to talk of a Kingdom of Heaven or a Dream of a bright future, but if you turn on the money you're going to get yourself got.
People venerate the Dream, they celebrate equality and freedom, but they forget that the night before he was assassinated, King said this:

• "That is where we are today. And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn't done, and in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed."

It is connected to race, no doubt, but it's not just about race.  I'm guessing that not all of the sanitation workers in Memphis were African American.  I know that they were all poor, and I know that they had no power as individuals to effect basic changes in their lives.  But when they organize, when they draw attention and gather support, they can challenge systemic injustice.
As much of a giant as King was, he had learned the lesson well: one voice, no matter how eloquent, cannot speak so well that things change.  Even his masterful I Have a Dream speech was made famous, and powerful, by the thousands of people gathered in Washington DC to hear it.
Since then though the work had become more difficult, the big crowds and wave of sentiment faded away as Martin began to challenge the sinister taint of greed that leaves its residue on so much of human society.
Today, we have made significant progress in the area of racial equality (still not perfect, but with every generation, you can see children growing more color blind).  We have made very little, if any progress, in our struggle for economic justice.  In fact, we may have gone backwards.  Unions have been broken and vilified.  They have, in some cases, been nothing but a symbol of greed and corruption, contributing to the degradation of the workers every bit as much as the old robber barons.  In other cases, they have been rendered impotent by the resistance and/or adaptation of the rich and powerful.
But the need for organization still exists, the need for solidarity still exists, the need to struggle against the injustice and human tragedy that is poverty still exists.  So in honor of the things that Martin was working for in his last days, here are some things I think we ought to be working for in our nation:

1. A living wage, this goes beyond just raising the minimum wage, it encompasses reforming a lot of how we operate as a nation.  A living wage is essentially exactly what it says, a system in which a person performs a function, which is beneficial to society, and is rewarded by having a place to live and food to eat, and beyond that, access to education, healthcare and some opportunity to care for a family and generally enjoy life.
2. Reform the restrictive and increasingly prohibitive costs of higher education.  Again, this is a systemic justice issue.  If you are born into a "comfortable" socio-economic class, you will have no problem accessing the benefits of our educational system. If you are born poor, you will be able to access the system only by great (some would say exceptional) effort.  In a world where a high school education is increasingly not sufficient to pursue a lucrative career, and the financial burdens of a bachelor's or even a technical degree saddle people with almost unmanageable debt, the system is rigged to favor those who are already well off.
3. Reform our criminal justice system.  This is a huge black eye on our nation.  We incarcerate more people by far than any other nation in the world.  To add to the injustice, those incarcerated are disproportionately African American.  This has many factors, but primary among them is the "war on drugs" which has primarily been waged among the urban poor.  Couple this with the fact that money gives those who find themselves on the wrong side of the law, better access to attorneys and legal defense, and you have an epidemic of incarceration.

These are big problems and broad categories, but they are a start at addressing the unjust systems in which we are all involved, and in which we are all complicit. 
Martin said: "Let us develop a kind of dangerous unselfishness."  And he proceeded to use the parable of the Good Samaritan as an example of that dangerous unselfishness.  Can you envision a world where people acted out of "dangerous unselfishness" instead of self interest?
That's a dream indeed, one that needs to come true.

Pursuing Wisdom

Once upon a time wisdom was something people coveted and admired.  Once upon a time there was thought to be a way to gauge what was wise and what was not.  People once stood in awe of King Solomon because of his wisdom in settling a seemingly intractable dispute between two prostitutes over a baby.  He famously suggested that the baby be cut in two and each one given a half.  The wisdom in this gruesome suggestion is that the "true mother" of the boy would rather give him away than watch him cut in two.  (It is really even wiser because even if the woman who objected wasn't the real mother, she was still more fit to raise the child than a woman who would watch a baby be cut in half.)  Wisdom like that can help you find your way through some messy stuff.
Here are a few brief suggestions on pursuing wisdom in a more modern context:
1. If you listen to propaganda, you will end up thinking the world is worse than it is.
2. If you fail to account for human sinfulness, you will end up thinking the world is better than it is.
3.  If you only listen to people who agree with you, you will most likely end up wrong together.
4. If being right is always the most important thing, you will probably be alone quite a bit.
5. Wisdom is not only knowing what is right, but how much being right matters in any given situation.
6. Always assume there's a lot that you don't know.
7. Always remember that perspective matters, a lot.
8. Keep in mind that truth very rarely shouts.
9. Wisdom is vindicated by her deeds,

Okay, so I stole number nine, but that leads me to:
10. Standing on the shoulders of giants is a good way to see clearly, just never think you are the giant.

The Best (and Worst) of What We Are

It's fairly obvious to me that people need God or gods, inasmuch as religious activity has always been central to human society in one form or another.  Even Atheists, if you pay attention closely enough, deify something, be it logic or simply the human spirit.  We are inherently religious creatures, meaning that one of our most primal activities after procuring the necessities of life, is to search for God, gods, meaning and purpose.  So the question is not do we need God?  It is do we need the Church, defined specifically for my purposes as the institutional expression of faith in Jesus of Nazareth as the Incarnation of the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
I will stipulate that there are many "churches," out there that do not share this identity and I suspect that they probably would do well to wrestle with the same question, but that is really up to them, I have no standing to speak for any other religion or worldview.  I also cannot really honestly say any of this applies to Christianity as a global religion, it is more or less a consideration for Western, industrialized, educated and mostly comfortable people.  In short, the people for whom the Gospel has always been a bit of hair in the soup.  There is no way around it: life has worked out okay for most of us, we were lucky enough to be born in a time and place where life is as good as it has ever been for any group of people ever.
Do we have things to complain about?  You bet.
Are we living in a utopia?  Not yet.
But we're also not dying in droves from some unknown plague that seems like the very wrath of God.  Most of us aren't living in soul crushing poverty (even if a truly just economic system is still just a pipe dream).  We don't live in fear of a barbarian horde or a foreign empire suddenly appearing on the horizon to rape and pillage (though some seem to be willing to reach out and stretch for that fear).
In short, life is good enough that we don't particularly need the God that Jesus tells us about.  The God who is good news to the poor, and the blind, and the lame, and the prisoners, we're actually doing just fine on our own.  Or at least we can convince ourselves that we are.
One of the few reliable historical facts about Jesus of Nazareth is that he was a threat to the status quo.  We know this because his challenge to the way things were and to the power structures of his world, were precisely the things that brought about his execution.  If you "believe" nothing else about Jesus, you can trust that he was an agent of change, a stirrer of the pot, a rabblerouser and a revolutionary.
The Church that claims a mystical union with Christ, has not always embraced the fundamental challenge of Jesus' life and teachings, instead we have embraced the varied cultural moral paradigms which surround us and, each in our turn, have claimed that Jesus would agree with us.
The problem is that, in the course of time, those cultural moral paradigms change, leaving an institution that had so skillfully woven those standards into it's dogma, holding a bag full of stuff that nobody wants anymore.  In times of change people want stability and so the last stand of the institutional church is simply giving people the familiar and the time tested, which is basically where the Western Church stands right now.
People have begun to migrate to other forms of church that seem less infected by the status quo.  They call themselves Emergent, progressive or they don't call themselves anything at all, preferring to shun labels and shed what they can of the "old" institution.  These movements appropriate whatever they feel the "best" of the traditions of the church happen to be, and try to jettison the rest.  I admit, that sort of selective iconoclasm is attractive.  On days when institutional maintenance seems tiresome or tedious; like when the furnace goes down (that happened this week during the cold snap) or when there is trouble in the congregation (and there's almost always some sort of ripple going on), the idea of just getting together at a coffeehouse or a brewpub to talk about Jesus without all the baggage really seems like a great idea.
It's attractive because you can see that it's probably what Jesus would have actually done in our current cultural setting.  His life and ministry had that wandering itinerant sort of character to it.  But it is also a fact that without the institution of the Church, for all it's warts and flaws, none of us modern and postmodern folk would have any idea about who Jesus of Nazareth was.  If we had not established the traditions and the institutions of the Church, Jesus would have been lost in the sands of time.  It's easy to forget that, in world where you can access the whole of Scripture through scores of websites and can find Bibles almost anywhere you go.  It's easy to look at the excesses of the church and forget that, for instance, at the precise moment when we were at our crusading, inquisitioning worst, we had just managed to keep the light of reason and learning burning through the dark ages, by carefully protecting it and, in many ways hiding it, behind thick abbey walls.
History is complicated, and this moment in history is no less so, and so I would offer a few prayers for where and who we are at this moment.  For the believers that run ahead and embrace the new thing, I pray that your youthful exuberance will not run you onto the rocks.  For the reserved adherents to the traditions, I pray that you may take a break from protecting the light long enough to look at it every once in a while.  For all of us, I pray that we would remember that the Church is more than a building or a set of bylaws, but it also sometimes needs those things.  For those who are frightened by uncertainty, I pray for peace.  For those who are frustrated by the logjams, I pray for patience.  For the Church, which has continued a three year ministry for two thousand more, I give thanks.  For all the work that still needs to be done for the kingdom of heaven to draw near, I pray for strength.

Scientific-ishness

It is very cold today.  That is a statement of relative fact.  While folks in Fairbanks or Winnipeg would probably scoff at our 7 degree temperature as being practically picnic weather, for us here in Southern Maryland, it is cold.
Now for the narrative: Jack had a doctor's appointment at 8:20 AM, therefore I did not  have time for my morning cup of coffee.  After I dropped him off at school I swung by Wawa and got coffee, waiting in line at Wawa to pay for my coffee, a very small, but interesting conversation occurred, mostly between the cashier and a person who was apparently a regular customer, but also involving me.  It was about how cold it is this morning, and almost inevitably, about global warming.
The man made some comment about how the weather today pretty much proves that global warming is a falsehood, because, you know, one cold day pretty much invalidates years of climate data.  The Wawa cashier was more circumspect, she mentioned all those researchers that had been sailing the waters of the Arctic ocean for years, saying that the ice caps really were melting.
Not really wishing to get into a protracted debate on the matter before I had consumed the 24 ounces of caffeinated goodness that I was purchasing for $1.69, and really not wanting to get into a scientific discussion anywhere in the vicinity of a Wawa, I simply said, "I guess they're not melting really fast today," and took my leave.
Some people will tell you that science and religion are in competition with one another, but that is not true at all, in fact, that little exchange in Wawa illustrated for me that science and religion face the same principle problem: human sin.  Sin could be defined broadly as a willful ignorance of and/or disobedience to an ultimate reality, which in the case of religion is usually called God or gods, and which in science is called data.  Notice: Science's ultimate reality is not truth, it is just data, truth is sometimes revealed by the data, but not always.  If you want to know what truth is, you're going to have to find God, somehow or other and that makes what you're doing religion, not science.  What a lot of people think of when they hear the word science, is actually a religion, a religion that "believes" that somewhere out there the truth can be known and measured and reported and tested and those tests can be replicated.  Strict adherence to science is every bit as rigorous as the spiritual disciplines practiced by the monastic traditions in most major religions.  You find genuine scientists often speak with great humility about the limits of their knowledge.
You hear the phrase, "I'm spiritual but not religious" quite a bit these days.  And for those of us who are actual and unapologetic religious folk, it rubs us the wrong way.  I'm not going to try and tackle that attitude here, but I was actually moved to sympathy for actual scientists this morning, because I realized that most of the world misapprehends their work in much the same way as it misapprehends mine.  The mass of humanity likes to appropriate bits and pieces of scientific data that happen to endorse their worldview.
If something challenges say the sacred right to indiscriminately consume fossil fuels, well then the scientists must be lying.  To which the scientists, at least 90% of them, say passionately, "we can't lie, we're just collecting data!"  To which the "laypeople" retort, "Yeah, but we know that data can be manipulated and we've got some scientists who think you're wrong."  The debate between ignorance and exploration goes on for some time.  You can collect years and years of data.  But all those temperature readings and statistical analysis of long term trends and tracking the relative frequency of severe weather patterns, it's all really quite boring.  People tend to just glaze over.
Then there is one really cold day in January.
And in a lot of people's mind that solves it.
And the poor cashier at Wawa has no data to back up her vision of all those brave scientists in the Arctic trying to measure the receding icecaps and save the polar bears while they're at it.
No matter how well the scientists make their case, there will always be those who choose not to "believe."
Welcome to the club science!
This is what it's like!
You can spend, say two thousand years, developing your truth (in our case it's called theology), and the majority of people aren't going to give a hoot.  Unless you can convince them that catastrophe (in our case Hell) is going to happen, they're not going to listen to you, and these days that's not even working so great.  So, you know, if people won't come to church once a week to keep their eternal souls out of torment, I'm guessing they're not going to moderate their driving habits in order to save some penguins, but hey good luck with that.
I guess what I'm saying Science, is that we really shouldn't be enemies, we're ultimately fighting the same fight, and us religious types have been at it longer.
Don't sell out, keep your faith, collect the data, keep crunching those numbers and interpreting away, some of us are listening.
We religious types, at least the ones who don't think you're instruments of the Devil, will be praying for you.

The Things that Break

I miss the comfort of being sad. -Nirvana

It's Monday, it's raining, and I've got a case of the blahs.  Some Pastor types take Monday as a day off, but I would never do that, because most Mondays I'm not sure I would get out of bed if I didn't have responsibilities.  My general experience of Monday is slightly different than the majority of folks, due to my Sunday-centered work cycle.  I may not have the "back to the grind after two blissful days of freedom" malaise to work through, but I do have the feeling of being rather emptied out, and that "here we go again" hamster wheel feeling is every bit as present for me as it is for "normal" office worker types.
So on Mondays, my thoughts tend to run a bit more on the Eeyore end of the emotional spectrum (for anyone who is utterly lost by children's book references, Eeyore is the stuffed donkey from Winnie the Pooh stories, he's a bit gloomy).  But this rainy Monday feeling is not the end of the world, it's not a sign of depression or some sort of psychological imbalance, it's just a part of being human.
Maybe it's just the way I'm wired, but I think our cultural emphasis on happiness is a bit twisted.  No one really likes to feel gloomy all the time, in fact, if you feel that way all the time you may be clinically depressed, get help.  But I also don't think that it's a realistic or healthy expectation to always feel "good," whatever that means.
A lot of people's big question for God is why there is so much hurt in the world, why so many bad things are allowed to happen.  It's a good question, it's an old question, and it's a question that no one can really answer adequately.  So don't expect answers in what I'm about to say, these aren't explanations, only observations:
1. A gloomy background accentuates the beauty of the details.  I grew up in Chester County and a museum near us had an exhibit of Andrew Wyeth paintings.  It was one of my first experiences of art.  I remember thinking, about how gray all of his pictures were, almost every day was cloudy or rainy.  As we walked around the exhibit I started to notice how the details of the painting started to grip me and tell stories, and become more alive.  I still like Wyeth.
2. Broken things can be beautiful.  Anyone who has ever wandered around an old ruin or even had the eye to appreciate the sad beauty of abandoned places, will recognize this.  It's not just things either, people who are broken can often do the most beautiful things, and I'm not just talking about Van Gogh-esque tortured artist types.  Suffering has a way of cutting through the surface junk and exposing the beauty that is at the core of our humanity.  True honesty and grace are often found in hospital rooms, like flowers growing through concrete.
3. Tragedy brings out the best in us.  It seems strange to me that tragedy is what most often inspires human beings to great acts of compassion and altruism.  Prosperity makes us lazy and selfish, while trouble and disaster inspire us to be true helpers.  I think maybe because something out of the ordinary shakes our careful little cages and reminds us that life is precarious and precious, and maybe, just maybe, looking out for number one is not the most important thing.

I could probably keep going on this list, but even though it's still Monday, and now it's snowing, I'm feeling like the sky seems a little lighter.

Carry That Weight

I've been dreaming about backpacks.  It's not really as mysterious or strange as it sounds.  I recently ordered an Osprey Aether 70, for those of you not obsessed with backpacking gear, it's a very fancy, and expensive, internal frame backpack.  I got word that the extra large harness and hip belt, which I need for my extra large personage, are back ordered and that I will have to wait for about a month until my brand new, fancy ticket to adventure arrives in the mail.  So, I've been dreaming about backpacks.
I've also been dreaming about what I'm going to do with that backpack.  I'm going to take Jack on the Appalachian Trail through the Shenandoah this spring, I'm going to walk the Camino de Santiago in Spain with my Dad next spring (all 500 miles this time).  I'm investing a bit of money in this pack, and waiting not so patiently, because I want it to fit right, I want it to be a good tool for carrying weight.  I have done my research and looked around and I have faith that this is going to be the best backpack for me.
Funny thing though, I know I'm going to hate it at some point.  It's just the nature of baggage, even the baggage you need.  I'm going to look at that pack, in all it's high tech, ergonomic design, and absolutely wish that I never had to pick it up ever again.  It doesn't matter how well it does it's job, it doesn't matter how carefully I have planned the load, packed the load, or how well conditioned I am to carry it, at some point I'm going to resent it.
Churches can be like that too.
Community is a very necessary thing for folks on a spiritual journey (which in one way or another is all of us).  You can't go it alone, if you do, you'll end up lost and starving.  But sometimes communities are baggage, no matter how good they are, sometimes they feel like a burden.  They are baggage that you can't live without though, they hold your shelter, your clothes, your food, the tools you need to survive in a wilderness.  As much as you think you'd just like to walk without it for a while, when night falls or you get hungry, you're going to wish you hadn't left it behind.

New Years Revolution

Say what you want about making change manageable, you know, baby steps.  Sometimes that just doesn't work.  I guess I'm too cynical and have too little willpower, but I have never really been one for making resolutions.  Trying to change little things about your life based on an arbitrary date is futile.
Once upon a time I quit smoking.  I did it pretty much cold turkey, I did it because I was in love, I did it because I wanted something more than I wanted a cigarette.  I don't remember the date, I don't technically remember making the decision, I just didn't smoke anymore.  It wasn't a resolution, it was a revolution, I simply became a non-smoker, over the course of time my body has reinforced that identity.  I used to be able to smoke now and then, but lately, after almost 15 years of non-smoking, too much tobacco smoke gives me a wicked headache, like it used to when I was a kid.
I'm not trying to brag, like I admit above, I have very little willpower.  I actually tried to quit several times, via "cutting down" or "tapering off."  I would make little bargains with myself, compromising with the enemy, and it never seemed to work.  What finally worked was flipping the switch.  If you want to know how it goes when I give myself wiggle room ask me about my relationship with food.
I have been trying to have a similar revolution with food for years, but unfortunately you can't quit food altogether, because of the whole death thing.  Partial revolutions are never quite as easy.
Spiritually speaking, I had an easy revolution from agnosticism to faith, but in the walk of faith it's all partial revolutions.  Sin is a lot more like food than cigarettes.  Most of us are a lot more vulnerable to twisted relationships with good things than we are to simple vices, which is I guess why idolatry is always such a lurking problem.  What is idolatry but a gluttonous desire for the sorts of feelings that one normally gets from God! (that might be worth revisiting another time)
I always think that the reason people started making New Years resolutions is because they feel like such gluttons after Christmas that a little austerity seems like a welcome change.  I know, on the rare occasions when I have made them, they almost always had to do with diet and/or exercise.
When I was on the Camino de Santiago last spring I experienced what I think a healthy relationship with food ought to be.  Now, let it be known that I was burning upwards of 6000 calories a day by backpacking, so it was virtually impossible to overeat, but what I found was that, as long as I was engaged in something I wasn't hungry.  There were times when my body told me I needed to eat, but it wasn't in the form of hunger, it was in the form of weakness, it was literally my muscles saying, "Hey we need some carbs down here."
My stomach was largely left out of the equation, I never got that growly bad feeling in my gutttywuts.
When I'm sitting around watching TV, burning almost no calories, I often feel like I "need" to eat, when actually, what I need to do is something other than eat, or watch TV.
I think the thing to learn here is that trying to change some behaviors, particularly gluttonous behaviors, is better served by replacing them with something healthy.  In the case of cigarettes it was a healthy relationship with a woman who eventually became my wife.  In the case of food, I have found that simply walking can replace the boredom that is that core of so much of my really unhealthy consumption.
I guess it's sort of like the political theory about power vacuums, if you take away one power you had better replace it with another or else chaos ensues.
In instances of true and positive change it is almost always a revolution not a resolution, because something bad was replaced by something good.  It's not deprivation it's replacement.  Keep that in mind when you plan your New Year's revolution.