One of the things that the Camino does for you is it forces you out of your protective shell. It doesn't take long to start noticing all the things that we use every day to insulate us from, well, just about everything. Weather is usually the first thing you notice: sun, rain, wind, heat, cold, you notice and appreciate shade or a slight lessening of a stiff wind. In a car, an office, or a home, you only notice the most severe climate disturbances, when you're out in it, small things really make a difference.
The next thing you tend to feel is the loss of privacy and personal space. Especially since you spend most of your day out in the open with only the most voluntary human interactions, the crowds (and attending smells) can be a bit of a shock. But the physical proximity and shared spaces are not really the biggest challenge, it's the emotional strain of trying to live in that community without freaking out at someone.
Ultimately the biggest challenge is fear, specifically the fear that comes from not being in control of things. On the one hand, you have great autonomy, you choose your distance and your speed, you choose where you stay and where you eat, you have no one to answer to but yourself and for a few days you think, "this is great!" And then you realize that something is missing.
It took me a while to figure out what was missing, but here's what I think it is: relationship. And it's not so much just that you're lacking company, because there's plenty of that, but rather you are lacking trust of the people around you.
Here I'll just start speaking for myself, because I don't really know if this is true for all pilgrims, but for the first week or so, I still had my old habits of sizing people up and sorting them into categories: tourist, hippie, speed freak (referring to people who seemed driven to treat the Camino like a triathalon, not amphetamine users), etc. My physical vulnerability was about all I could handle and I wasn't really able to be open (vulnerable) to the other pilgrims.
At some point, I remember realizing that I was living in fear, I was walking fearfully, I had some sort of anxiety about every hill, every meal, about every bed, every person I met, about every little need, and every challenge, and it was going to crush me. I put the fear down, and it was the most important burden I could have unloaded.
Don't get me wrong, it still popped up from time to time, but I knew its face now and I would not let it climb back into my backpack, which was heavy enough.
This is when people started to come along side of Dad and I, people we liked (and a few we didn't care for very much), but all people with whom I (and I think we) chose to be open. I'm not exactly sure when the hugging started, but among a certain core group of people, it became a habit pretty quickly. Just in case you're wondering what the big deal is, you need to know that hugging a Peregrino is not something to be done lightly, we were not always clean and smelling our best.
It required a conscious decision to let go of my hangups.
But I'm glad I did.
I began to think of all the ways in which fear dominates our lives, and how all the armor and insulation that we work so hard to procure and keep in place, actually makes that fear worse. Sure if you shield yourself with things, money, guns, walls, fences, titles, security details, even an army, you might think you're more secure, but you are also more afraid.
Here's a funny thing: about two weeks into the walk, I realized I had stopped fearing things that I thought were simply existential fears, not only did I stop fearing people, I was learning new things about welcoming whoever came along. There were people that were easy to welcome, like Rodrigo, a Spaniard from Valencia, who had this wonderful smile, and infectious joy about him. Rodrigo was hugger from about the second time you met him, if he had seen you before you were an old friend. But there were people who I didn't take to quite so quickly and had to learn that they too were part of my tribe. I guess I learned first hand what Jesus was talking about when he told us it's really no great shakes to love the people that love you (and who you find likable).
Brene Brown has made some great points about vulnerability as a key to happiness (watch it here) and my experience bears that out. What troubles me a great deal about coming back to the world is the many ways that we let fear run us, and the ways in which we minimize, numb and try in vain to ignore, negate and deny our vulnerability. It kind of stings when I feel myself getting pulled back into fear.
I know it doesn't seem to make sense, but I am thinking that perhaps vulnerability may be more than a key to happiness and "whole heartedness," but it may also be an antidote to the fear and anxiety that grips us as individuals and twists and deforms all of humanity.
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
Re-invention
We went to see Nils Lofgren at the Birchmere last night. Nils is one of those rock'n'roll lifers, guitarist, keyboard player, harpist, and now, apparently, tap dancer. He has played with Neil Young and most famously as a member of Springsteen's E-Street Band, but he has also had a long solo career where he scratches his own songwriting itch. One of the last numbers of the evening had him don tap shoes and thump out a rhythm with his feet and huge silver baton like you might see a drum major use at a college football game, while playing a harp with one hand, quickly switching to his Fender Stratocaster to wail out a solo and then back to the tap dancing, baton, harp routine. He is 63 years old, did I mention that?
What this leads me to think about this morning is re-invention. Almost all really great musicians do it. David Bowie does it every ten minutes, U2 has done it several times over the course of their career, the most notable being between The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, with a rather interesting detour called Rattle and Hum. Dylan made the switch from acoustic folk to electric guitars with Highway 61, prompting a bunch of "folk purists" to call him Judas. Zappa experimented so relentlessly that he pretty much lost all of the non-musical-genius audience.
You can go too far, you can make mistakes (I'm looking at you Zooropa), you can impress critics accidentally, or make something you really think is great but critics think is mud, the point is you should always try to keep things fresh. I think musicians do it so they don't get bored. Lofgren has been touring, more or less constantly for 46 years. I'd probably think, "Hey, how about tap dancing" at some point too.
Which is more or less a problem for church (hey, you knew I was going to go there at some point), because we have this idea that we're rooted in tradition and we are part of something that is not just about passing fads and trends. This is true, and important, but we use that rooted-ness as an excuse to ignore pressing realities and it traps our thinking in "look-back" mode.
Music is a good example, for instance rock'n'roll owes a debt to blues and jazz and folk and even classical music, it did not occur in a vacuum or disconnected from what came before, yet it is undeniably something new. Musicians like Dylan and Bowie manage to hold on to a certain number of fans through changes. Sure there will be people who think anything but Blowin' in the Wind, and Space Oddity just aren't up to scratch, but then again those one trick ponies would have been dead horses a long time ago.
Ultimately the innovators are the ones who last. Pearl Jam is still around and making music, they still have many passionate fans. Most of the bands who imitated them are pretty much relegated to the county fair circuit. There just aren't that many rabid Collective Soul fans out there now, even though I just heard one of their songs on XM this morning.
I wonder, what are the "one hit wonders" of the Church? You know the things that worked well for a minute but didn't really launch anything lasting. Sure we have had our Highway 61 moments, like the Reformation. We have had our bizarre experiments run amok, like dispensational eschatology. We have had our prophetic, punk rock movements, but what really lasts, perhaps the only thing that really lasts are those moments when we get something that no one else really does. When we boldly proclaim a God who is about love and mercy instead of wrath, when we actually try and do the things that Jesus did, and we constantly find new ways to do it, no one could really get bored.
Sure there will always be some moron in the back yelling, "Play Freebird!" Because that's what they want, because it's familiar and that guitar solo is awesome, but we need to learn to just ignore that guy, he's probably drunk.
What this leads me to think about this morning is re-invention. Almost all really great musicians do it. David Bowie does it every ten minutes, U2 has done it several times over the course of their career, the most notable being between The Joshua Tree and Achtung Baby, with a rather interesting detour called Rattle and Hum. Dylan made the switch from acoustic folk to electric guitars with Highway 61, prompting a bunch of "folk purists" to call him Judas. Zappa experimented so relentlessly that he pretty much lost all of the non-musical-genius audience.
You can go too far, you can make mistakes (I'm looking at you Zooropa), you can impress critics accidentally, or make something you really think is great but critics think is mud, the point is you should always try to keep things fresh. I think musicians do it so they don't get bored. Lofgren has been touring, more or less constantly for 46 years. I'd probably think, "Hey, how about tap dancing" at some point too.
Which is more or less a problem for church (hey, you knew I was going to go there at some point), because we have this idea that we're rooted in tradition and we are part of something that is not just about passing fads and trends. This is true, and important, but we use that rooted-ness as an excuse to ignore pressing realities and it traps our thinking in "look-back" mode.
Music is a good example, for instance rock'n'roll owes a debt to blues and jazz and folk and even classical music, it did not occur in a vacuum or disconnected from what came before, yet it is undeniably something new. Musicians like Dylan and Bowie manage to hold on to a certain number of fans through changes. Sure there will be people who think anything but Blowin' in the Wind, and Space Oddity just aren't up to scratch, but then again those one trick ponies would have been dead horses a long time ago.
Ultimately the innovators are the ones who last. Pearl Jam is still around and making music, they still have many passionate fans. Most of the bands who imitated them are pretty much relegated to the county fair circuit. There just aren't that many rabid Collective Soul fans out there now, even though I just heard one of their songs on XM this morning.
I wonder, what are the "one hit wonders" of the Church? You know the things that worked well for a minute but didn't really launch anything lasting. Sure we have had our Highway 61 moments, like the Reformation. We have had our bizarre experiments run amok, like dispensational eschatology. We have had our prophetic, punk rock movements, but what really lasts, perhaps the only thing that really lasts are those moments when we get something that no one else really does. When we boldly proclaim a God who is about love and mercy instead of wrath, when we actually try and do the things that Jesus did, and we constantly find new ways to do it, no one could really get bored.
Sure there will always be some moron in the back yelling, "Play Freebird!" Because that's what they want, because it's familiar and that guitar solo is awesome, but we need to learn to just ignore that guy, he's probably drunk.
Monday, June 8, 2015
O Troubler of my Soul
I have been wrestling a bit lately with the nature of greed and its relationship to violence and the role that fear seems to play in most of our defensive postures. So this morning I read this. Once again Richard Rohr has said essentially what I have wanted to hear for a while, but I have this one little problem: reality.
Don't get me wrong, I believe that what St. Francis (and recently the Pope who took the same name) are saying about acquisitiveness and greed leading to violence and oppression are absolutely true. Sin tends to beget bigger sin. What I mean is that there are things I am not willing to just give up, and things I would fight to keep. I lean towards pacifism, but I suspect that if my family were threatened I would not have the courage of that conviction, and I would be perfectly willing to cut throats in defense of my wife and children. The glorification of violence in our culture makes me nervous, but try to hurt my kids and I will totally go all Rambo.
It's idolatry, I know. I will make no bones about it. I said last week that I hope I would have the courage to die for my faith, but that I refused to kill for it. Well, I'm pretty sure I would kill for my kids, I just hope it never comes up.
I know that I am like the rich young ruler who Jesus tells to sell all that he has and follow, but he can't because he's too attached to things. And the man who asks to be able to bury his father before he goes, I get it, I am guilty of being attached to things, to security, to the illusion that I am in control enough to be the protector of those I love.
Here's what I want to say about all of this though: as much as I admit to a sinful attachment to my wife and kids, as much as I admit that my principles of loving my enemies and praying for my persecutors would go right out the window if they came after my family, I think we need to start drawing different lines in the sand. We have taken self defense too far and we have crossed so many ethical lines that it's hard to imagine that it all started with the simple and righteous desire to protect our children. How do you get from defending your family to dropping nuclear bombs and the policy of mutually assured destruction? It's utter madness. Somewhere along the line we started fighting to protect ideologies not people, people were only the abstract foundation of our will to power.
We believed that there is a reachable point where we can be so strong that no one can threaten us any more. That is the ultimate delusion of empire, and it is megalomania. You fear losing something precious, you fight off the "enemies" to make sure it's safe, you find that in the process you obtain more stuff that also needs to be protected. It is how tyrants are born and how the most wealthy people are also the most worried about money. It starts with the simple, human, desire to protect what you love and it ends with wanting to rule the world. We need to learn to put the brakes on that mad spiral.
How? Well the path of descent that Rohr talks about is a model, but understand that most of us are not St. Francis, or even Pope Francis. Jesus, and all scripture quite frankly, challenge us to put our trust in God and stop trying to protect our stuff on our own. At the same time, despite what the prosperity Gospel might tell you, God doesn't give us guarantees that our stuff is going to be safe. Children die, things are destroyed, and as we learn in Job, it's not because of anything like Karma or works righteousness, it's just the way things are.
We are never going to be strong enough to change that.
In fact, most of our efforts to change that only result in more children dying and more things being destroyed.
I would suggest that this is a deep truth in so much of Jesus' teaching: violence will not solve anything, in fact, it will succeed only in making things darker and filled with greater horrors. We will not be able to experience the Kingdom of God until we learn this.
Don't get me wrong, I believe that what St. Francis (and recently the Pope who took the same name) are saying about acquisitiveness and greed leading to violence and oppression are absolutely true. Sin tends to beget bigger sin. What I mean is that there are things I am not willing to just give up, and things I would fight to keep. I lean towards pacifism, but I suspect that if my family were threatened I would not have the courage of that conviction, and I would be perfectly willing to cut throats in defense of my wife and children. The glorification of violence in our culture makes me nervous, but try to hurt my kids and I will totally go all Rambo.
It's idolatry, I know. I will make no bones about it. I said last week that I hope I would have the courage to die for my faith, but that I refused to kill for it. Well, I'm pretty sure I would kill for my kids, I just hope it never comes up.
I know that I am like the rich young ruler who Jesus tells to sell all that he has and follow, but he can't because he's too attached to things. And the man who asks to be able to bury his father before he goes, I get it, I am guilty of being attached to things, to security, to the illusion that I am in control enough to be the protector of those I love.
Here's what I want to say about all of this though: as much as I admit to a sinful attachment to my wife and kids, as much as I admit that my principles of loving my enemies and praying for my persecutors would go right out the window if they came after my family, I think we need to start drawing different lines in the sand. We have taken self defense too far and we have crossed so many ethical lines that it's hard to imagine that it all started with the simple and righteous desire to protect our children. How do you get from defending your family to dropping nuclear bombs and the policy of mutually assured destruction? It's utter madness. Somewhere along the line we started fighting to protect ideologies not people, people were only the abstract foundation of our will to power.
We believed that there is a reachable point where we can be so strong that no one can threaten us any more. That is the ultimate delusion of empire, and it is megalomania. You fear losing something precious, you fight off the "enemies" to make sure it's safe, you find that in the process you obtain more stuff that also needs to be protected. It is how tyrants are born and how the most wealthy people are also the most worried about money. It starts with the simple, human, desire to protect what you love and it ends with wanting to rule the world. We need to learn to put the brakes on that mad spiral.
How? Well the path of descent that Rohr talks about is a model, but understand that most of us are not St. Francis, or even Pope Francis. Jesus, and all scripture quite frankly, challenge us to put our trust in God and stop trying to protect our stuff on our own. At the same time, despite what the prosperity Gospel might tell you, God doesn't give us guarantees that our stuff is going to be safe. Children die, things are destroyed, and as we learn in Job, it's not because of anything like Karma or works righteousness, it's just the way things are.
We are never going to be strong enough to change that.
In fact, most of our efforts to change that only result in more children dying and more things being destroyed.
I would suggest that this is a deep truth in so much of Jesus' teaching: violence will not solve anything, in fact, it will succeed only in making things darker and filled with greater horrors. We will not be able to experience the Kingdom of God until we learn this.
Thursday, June 4, 2015
The Kingdom Belongs to Such as These
My kid's school, Walter J. Mitchell Elementary, are the Bulldogs, and so they have a behavioral reinforcement program called Bark. You get Barks for barking good behavior, for being kind and generous and helpful, for doing something that is above and beyond basic expectations. At the end of the year they have a carnival where kids can "spend" their Barks. Even big old fifth graders get pretty excited about earning and redeeming their Barks. This morning, Jack and Cate were talking about the impending carnival and Cate said that one of her friends didn't have any Barks, so the class "was nice" to her and let her earn all twelve of some extra credit Barks. They didn't give her some of their Barks, they just let her take an opportunity to earn some for herself, because fourth graders recognize income inequality when they see it.
And this is obviously merit based, everyone had an equal opportunity to earn Barks, and most kids had many that they earned by doing good things. But someone did not have any, and fourth graders know that's an injustice, even if the field was level, even if she really didn't earn any, they knew she deserved a chance to get in on the fun. Michele said, "Hey, that's Socialism!"
And I said, "Right, and it works!" But technically we're both wrong, it's not Socialism, it's just basic human decency. Socialism or Communism would be where the kids formed a collective and decided what sort of things would earn Barks and also how many Barks would be given out to each person as long as they played their assigned role in the collective. This wasn't that, this was good old charity, but not just alms to the poor, rather an opportunity for someone who had been left out to get back in.
So here's where a nice story about my kids starts to get a little hot and prophetic. I hear all the time about the evils of welfare and public assistance, not about how it's inefficient and how it doesn't do enough for the people who desperately need it, but about how it's a blight on our society and creates a nation of takers and drains the middle class of much needed income. I hear this from good people. From Christian people, who have, or should have read Matthew 25 at some point.
People, we need to learn from fourth graders.
Let's talk numbers for just a second. Depending on who you talk to, and what lens you use to look at the budget, entitlement programs do, in fact take up a lot of the federal budget, however, when you look at what those entitlement programs are... well the picture changes. Most of what sometimes gets lumped in with "welfare" is actually Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the percentage of total spending that goes to public assistance programs is around 9 percent, and only a fraction of that is actually doled out to people who collect welfare. The next time someone tells you something like: "my tax dollars are going to support people who just won't work." Refer them to this handy little thing, an itemized tax receipt generator that will tell them exactly how much of their taxes go to what.
Let's talk about the average income tax liability of around $11000 per year. That's decidedly middle class, probably a homeowner, most likely dual income family for people with normal jobs. There are two separate line items that we can add up to get a picture of how much "the takers" are actually costing the average family: temporary assistance for needy families under the unemployment and labor category (welfare), in this case the bill comes to a whopping $70.29, or what my family of four usually spends to go out to a fairly nice restaurant. Second, under the food and agriculture section, we find the SNAP program, food stamps, which costs us $329.03... out of $11,000. $400 per year for the part of the safety net that is constantly demonized by folks as sucking the life out of the American Dream.
Yes, when you look at the total amount spent on entitlements, it's a bit staggering, but listen up middle class Americans, don't buy the mythology that the rich dudes are trying to sell you, most of those entitlements are in your best interest, and have nothing to do with "welfare queens" and people who refuse to work. Most of the poor people, particularly those who qualify for SNAP and other programs like it, work pretty freaking hard. I happen to know one rather well. The myth is that "those" people are taking our "hard earned" money and living high on the hog, but it just isn't so. First of all, they're not taking that much of our money in the first place, second of all most of what they do get is in the form of bare necessities, food, clothing, housing and utilities. Maybe some of them do make bad decisions about how and what to spend, but you need to know that being poor is expensive, and difficult, and believe me, it's a rare anomaly of a person who says, "yeah, this is good enough for me (and my kids)."
Want to know who is really sucking the life out of the American Dream?
Don't tell the fourth grade, they already think grown-ups are stupid.
And this is obviously merit based, everyone had an equal opportunity to earn Barks, and most kids had many that they earned by doing good things. But someone did not have any, and fourth graders know that's an injustice, even if the field was level, even if she really didn't earn any, they knew she deserved a chance to get in on the fun. Michele said, "Hey, that's Socialism!"
And I said, "Right, and it works!" But technically we're both wrong, it's not Socialism, it's just basic human decency. Socialism or Communism would be where the kids formed a collective and decided what sort of things would earn Barks and also how many Barks would be given out to each person as long as they played their assigned role in the collective. This wasn't that, this was good old charity, but not just alms to the poor, rather an opportunity for someone who had been left out to get back in.
So here's where a nice story about my kids starts to get a little hot and prophetic. I hear all the time about the evils of welfare and public assistance, not about how it's inefficient and how it doesn't do enough for the people who desperately need it, but about how it's a blight on our society and creates a nation of takers and drains the middle class of much needed income. I hear this from good people. From Christian people, who have, or should have read Matthew 25 at some point.
People, we need to learn from fourth graders.
Let's talk numbers for just a second. Depending on who you talk to, and what lens you use to look at the budget, entitlement programs do, in fact take up a lot of the federal budget, however, when you look at what those entitlement programs are... well the picture changes. Most of what sometimes gets lumped in with "welfare" is actually Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, the percentage of total spending that goes to public assistance programs is around 9 percent, and only a fraction of that is actually doled out to people who collect welfare. The next time someone tells you something like: "my tax dollars are going to support people who just won't work." Refer them to this handy little thing, an itemized tax receipt generator that will tell them exactly how much of their taxes go to what.
Let's talk about the average income tax liability of around $11000 per year. That's decidedly middle class, probably a homeowner, most likely dual income family for people with normal jobs. There are two separate line items that we can add up to get a picture of how much "the takers" are actually costing the average family: temporary assistance for needy families under the unemployment and labor category (welfare), in this case the bill comes to a whopping $70.29, or what my family of four usually spends to go out to a fairly nice restaurant. Second, under the food and agriculture section, we find the SNAP program, food stamps, which costs us $329.03... out of $11,000. $400 per year for the part of the safety net that is constantly demonized by folks as sucking the life out of the American Dream.
Yes, when you look at the total amount spent on entitlements, it's a bit staggering, but listen up middle class Americans, don't buy the mythology that the rich dudes are trying to sell you, most of those entitlements are in your best interest, and have nothing to do with "welfare queens" and people who refuse to work. Most of the poor people, particularly those who qualify for SNAP and other programs like it, work pretty freaking hard. I happen to know one rather well. The myth is that "those" people are taking our "hard earned" money and living high on the hog, but it just isn't so. First of all, they're not taking that much of our money in the first place, second of all most of what they do get is in the form of bare necessities, food, clothing, housing and utilities. Maybe some of them do make bad decisions about how and what to spend, but you need to know that being poor is expensive, and difficult, and believe me, it's a rare anomaly of a person who says, "yeah, this is good enough for me (and my kids)."
Want to know who is really sucking the life out of the American Dream?
Don't tell the fourth grade, they already think grown-ups are stupid.
Wednesday, June 3, 2015
Is There Some Quota?
My daughter now shares a name (complete with peculiar spelling: Caitlyn) with the most famous transgender person in the world. Over the past few days the interweb has been bristling with the Vanity Fair cover featuring Caitlyn Jenner, who was formerly Bruce Jenner. I'm going to leave the theological implications of transgender people alone for the moment (maybe forever, because I'm sure I'm not qualified to speak about them), and talk about the reaction.
For the most part, I feel like our society has been less mean-spirited about this particular thing than one might have expected. There are trolls to be sure, but for the most part people have sort of noted how courageous it is for her to have gone through this process in the public eye. Bruce Jenner was a fairly common face in my childhood, being a successful Olympic athlete, to this day probably one of just a handful of track and field people that I would recognize on the street (at least before the changes). Lately he was more infamous as part of the Kardashian side show than any thing else, but fame and infamy have sort of blended together in the internet age. Now Caitlyn Jenner has become something altogether different. She is a sign of a very significant shift in society with regards to LGBT people. She is not a pioneer, but she is a figurehead, a recognizable public example of something that is shrouded in pain, shame and misunderstanding.
No matter what your opinion about transgender people is, you have to acknowledge that this moment is significant. But it is still fraught with fear and misunderstanding for many.
One of the more common ones, is a basic logical fallacy called false equivocation. People put up angry or semi-angry posts about some really brave person, usually a soldier or a firefighter, and say that they should be honored by society more so than Caitlyn Jenner. But that assumes that we don't honor the courage of soldiers and such, but we do, maybe not as much as they deserve, but we do that all the time, we have days off and parades and fireworks. Up until now though, we have done very little for people who are transgender, in fact, we mostly do rather the opposite.
Except for a few unfortunate incidents in the Vietnam era, our veterans and soldiers are treated with respect and honor. We could certainly do more in terms of tangible support, but I certainly don't feel that they're disrespected by the masses, except maybe in the deluded minds of paranoid patriots. The pacifists I know do not despise soldiers, even if they do object to the very concept of violence and war. Which is an important standard to apply in this case too.
Even if you don't understand what makes someone transgender, even if the whole idea gives you a little bit of the shivers, that shouldn't stop you from respecting the courage of a human being who had to face the conviction that they were trapped in the wrong body, and do it in the public eye.
That courage does not detract from the courage of a Marine wounded in combat or a cop who stopped a crime in progress or a firefighter who rescued a baby from a burning building. They are all in fact brave. I'm always in favor of paying attention to those moments when human beings live up to our potential instead of down to the lowest common denominator. Let's honor people who do brave things, period.
I think that, in a society that values freedom, it should do all those people who sacrifice for that freedom proud to see our society living up to our own standards of tolerance and understanding, because we're not always so good at that.
Tuesday, June 2, 2015
The Many Faced God
For several years now I have been watching the HBO series Game of Thrones, which is set in a medieval world of knights, kings, queens, dragons and monsters. It is also a world with many competing religions. Until recently, the religious aspect only showed up very briefly in tangential comments about those who kept to the "old gods," or those who put their faith in "the seven" and lately an interesting and cult of "the faceless men" has taken an important role in the character arc of Arya Stark. The faceless men are servants of "the many faced god." As is the case with most of the religions in the show, this cult bears only a passing resemblance to the religions of our world, but it is notable because along with whatever sorcery based religion is represented by the Red Woman who has Stannis Baratheon in her thrall, it appears to be monotheistic.
I am working my way through the novels and I notice that these sorts of things are discussed in more detail there, so I may be able to learn more from them than from the show, but I find the idea of the many faced god rather fascinating, because it mirrors a rather ubiquitous assumption about faith in the modern/postmodern world: pluralism. Not necessarily the belief that there are many gods, but rather the belief that many different faiths provide some pathway to whatever the truth of God actually is. That truth remains largely a mystery, out of necessity, and possibly for our own protection.
Let me say that, while I no longer see pluralism as a "dirty word," I do understand that it has several very real limitations. However, in light of the general trajectory of world events, I wonder if maybe pluralism is the only approach to our very real differences that is going to keep us from destroying one another in a massive conflagration that will probably have grim religious elements.
I am not going to say that all religions are equally valid in understanding the nature of God, which would be dishonest. What I would like to encourage is that followers of Jesus Christ, ought to be a little more circumspect and compassionate in their approach to those who hold to a different set of beliefs. In short, I think we need to stop labeling others, sometimes even other Christians, heretics and infidel.
The Children of Abraham have some rather large logs in our eyes when it comes to going on the warpath against the very people we're supposed to be a blessing to and for. Muslims blame and hate Jews and Christians for the fact that they inhabit parts of the world that are backwards and impoverished. Jews and Christians, while we have largely managed to make nice with each other since the end of WWII, still sort of mistrust one another (a lot of water under that bridge) and are united by an often justified fear of radical Islam. Atheists think we're all benighted fools laboring under a dark superstition, and agnostics, well they mostly don't know what to think, that's why they're agnostic.
And I just used more religious stereotypes than I'm really comfortable with, and I wonder if you noticed.
Categorical classification helps us understand our narrative. Whether it's race, creed, or what football team you root for, the world becomes easier to deal with if you clump people together. If you're left out there to deal with everyone as an individual it gets sort of difficult to do certain things, like wage war. War doesn't make any sense if you think about the individual people you are fighting, if you see them as human beings with hopes and dreams, with families and homes, only a sociopath or a psychopath would be okay with mass killing. We must group them by ideology and by some categorical principal: the king or nation they swear allegiance to, the god they follow, where and how they were born, and even their social status. We have to see them as other and lesser in order to truly rationalize killing them. What we do is essentially make them faceless people, and that in turn allows us to see them as evil.
Pluralism, for all it's faults, pushes back against that wave
Better theologians than me have pointed out that until we learn to see God in other people we will never truly know God. In fact, one of the earliest challenges of the church was learning to love each other as God has loved us. The first letter of John says it this way: "Those who say, 'I love God," and hate their brothers or sisters are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen." (1 John 4:20, NRSV)
Many people will try to explain that away by saying that brothers and sisters refers to people in the church. Fine. How is that working out? Let me know when you've perfected it, and then we need to go talk to some other people you're supposed to love. I'm pretty sure, thanks to the parable of the Good Samaritan, that we're probably not supposed to be that narrow with our love.
I suppose, if you take a certain view of salvation and such, that the most loving thing you can do for anyone is to get them to accept Christ by any means necessary. I might agree, except for the rather stubborn reality that Jesus definitely did not see it as his job to convince, convict or coerce anyone into believing him.
What Jesus does is present the good news that the kingdom of heaven is near and begins to flesh out the implications of that good news. What strikes me about his methods is that he rarely tries to scare people. Oh, he gets a little stern with the religious authorities who are a stumbling block, he warns people to be careful of the little ones, but most of his public teachings are about what the kingdom is like, in terms that pretty much everyone is able to understand.
He is much more pluralistic in his approach than any Jew of his era had a right to be. In large part, this is what drew the ire of the establishment: his wanton crossing of political, social, racial and religious lines. Samaritans, tax collectors, prostitutes, even (gulp) Romans, are all recorded in the Gospels as people who heard, believed and were touched by Jesus' ministry. And that's going cheese off the fundamentalists and puritans no matter what.
How are you ever going to keep your message pure and theologically correct if you're that indiscriminate about who you tell and who you touch and who you eat with?
Jesus was not wishy-washy or bland in his proclamations and teachings, but he was compassionate and loving to people whom society had deemed unworthy. The prospect of using fear and manipulation to bring people into the fold was and is utter nonsense. You're not bringing them to Jesus, you're not showing them the way and the truth and the life, you're herding them into another sheepfold altogether, and so I guess that makes you a bandit.
Jesus was astonishingly patient with individuals and rather intolerant of principalities and powers. He could call the Pharisees a brood of vipers, but sit and teach Nicodemus patiently and lovingly. He understood that pluralism is necessary for individuals to come to God. Each person is unique and God must have many faces in order to be in a good and loving relationship with so many different individuals. But, as a very old prayer reminded him: "God is One." Don't try to unravel that mystery, let it be precisely that, a mystery.
I believe that Jesus is the way to the Father, I believe in the Trinity and the Incarnation, but because I do, I will try my best to follow Jesus, that means being a part of the Good News, not a continuing link in the violent and hateful bad news. I hope that if it came down to it, I would have the courage to die for my faith, but since Jesus is the author of that faith I can't see any way to justify killing in his name. We need to stop that. Yes, I think it would make God happy if all people of all faiths stopped killing in God's name. I think our crucified Lord calls us to go first.
I am working my way through the novels and I notice that these sorts of things are discussed in more detail there, so I may be able to learn more from them than from the show, but I find the idea of the many faced god rather fascinating, because it mirrors a rather ubiquitous assumption about faith in the modern/postmodern world: pluralism. Not necessarily the belief that there are many gods, but rather the belief that many different faiths provide some pathway to whatever the truth of God actually is. That truth remains largely a mystery, out of necessity, and possibly for our own protection.
Let me say that, while I no longer see pluralism as a "dirty word," I do understand that it has several very real limitations. However, in light of the general trajectory of world events, I wonder if maybe pluralism is the only approach to our very real differences that is going to keep us from destroying one another in a massive conflagration that will probably have grim religious elements.
I am not going to say that all religions are equally valid in understanding the nature of God, which would be dishonest. What I would like to encourage is that followers of Jesus Christ, ought to be a little more circumspect and compassionate in their approach to those who hold to a different set of beliefs. In short, I think we need to stop labeling others, sometimes even other Christians, heretics and infidel.
The Children of Abraham have some rather large logs in our eyes when it comes to going on the warpath against the very people we're supposed to be a blessing to and for. Muslims blame and hate Jews and Christians for the fact that they inhabit parts of the world that are backwards and impoverished. Jews and Christians, while we have largely managed to make nice with each other since the end of WWII, still sort of mistrust one another (a lot of water under that bridge) and are united by an often justified fear of radical Islam. Atheists think we're all benighted fools laboring under a dark superstition, and agnostics, well they mostly don't know what to think, that's why they're agnostic.
And I just used more religious stereotypes than I'm really comfortable with, and I wonder if you noticed.
Categorical classification helps us understand our narrative. Whether it's race, creed, or what football team you root for, the world becomes easier to deal with if you clump people together. If you're left out there to deal with everyone as an individual it gets sort of difficult to do certain things, like wage war. War doesn't make any sense if you think about the individual people you are fighting, if you see them as human beings with hopes and dreams, with families and homes, only a sociopath or a psychopath would be okay with mass killing. We must group them by ideology and by some categorical principal: the king or nation they swear allegiance to, the god they follow, where and how they were born, and even their social status. We have to see them as other and lesser in order to truly rationalize killing them. What we do is essentially make them faceless people, and that in turn allows us to see them as evil.
Pluralism, for all it's faults, pushes back against that wave
Better theologians than me have pointed out that until we learn to see God in other people we will never truly know God. In fact, one of the earliest challenges of the church was learning to love each other as God has loved us. The first letter of John says it this way: "Those who say, 'I love God," and hate their brothers or sisters are liars; for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love God whom they have not seen." (1 John 4:20, NRSV)
Many people will try to explain that away by saying that brothers and sisters refers to people in the church. Fine. How is that working out? Let me know when you've perfected it, and then we need to go talk to some other people you're supposed to love. I'm pretty sure, thanks to the parable of the Good Samaritan, that we're probably not supposed to be that narrow with our love.
I suppose, if you take a certain view of salvation and such, that the most loving thing you can do for anyone is to get them to accept Christ by any means necessary. I might agree, except for the rather stubborn reality that Jesus definitely did not see it as his job to convince, convict or coerce anyone into believing him.
What Jesus does is present the good news that the kingdom of heaven is near and begins to flesh out the implications of that good news. What strikes me about his methods is that he rarely tries to scare people. Oh, he gets a little stern with the religious authorities who are a stumbling block, he warns people to be careful of the little ones, but most of his public teachings are about what the kingdom is like, in terms that pretty much everyone is able to understand.
He is much more pluralistic in his approach than any Jew of his era had a right to be. In large part, this is what drew the ire of the establishment: his wanton crossing of political, social, racial and religious lines. Samaritans, tax collectors, prostitutes, even (gulp) Romans, are all recorded in the Gospels as people who heard, believed and were touched by Jesus' ministry. And that's going cheese off the fundamentalists and puritans no matter what.
How are you ever going to keep your message pure and theologically correct if you're that indiscriminate about who you tell and who you touch and who you eat with?
Jesus was not wishy-washy or bland in his proclamations and teachings, but he was compassionate and loving to people whom society had deemed unworthy. The prospect of using fear and manipulation to bring people into the fold was and is utter nonsense. You're not bringing them to Jesus, you're not showing them the way and the truth and the life, you're herding them into another sheepfold altogether, and so I guess that makes you a bandit.
Jesus was astonishingly patient with individuals and rather intolerant of principalities and powers. He could call the Pharisees a brood of vipers, but sit and teach Nicodemus patiently and lovingly. He understood that pluralism is necessary for individuals to come to God. Each person is unique and God must have many faces in order to be in a good and loving relationship with so many different individuals. But, as a very old prayer reminded him: "God is One." Don't try to unravel that mystery, let it be precisely that, a mystery.
I believe that Jesus is the way to the Father, I believe in the Trinity and the Incarnation, but because I do, I will try my best to follow Jesus, that means being a part of the Good News, not a continuing link in the violent and hateful bad news. I hope that if it came down to it, I would have the courage to die for my faith, but since Jesus is the author of that faith I can't see any way to justify killing in his name. We need to stop that. Yes, I think it would make God happy if all people of all faiths stopped killing in God's name. I think our crucified Lord calls us to go first.
Monday, June 1, 2015
Through the Fear
Just as faith is not faith without doubt, so courage is not really courage without fear. In the first few days of the Camino, undoubtedly while I was struggling up a hill, and feeling rather like my body was going to quit on me, I had the thought that I could just quit. I could call it off, let my physical weakness get the best of me and just go home. I could have done that, but I didn't. As my body got stronger though I came to see that the impulse to quit was not actually very much about physical weakness, it was quite simply about fear, specifically fear of failure.
Somewhere in my mind there is this (probably unhealthy) idea that my body is not really that important. I have never been an athlete, or a physical specimen, my self worth has always derived more from what I could do with my mind (and perhaps even my spirit) than what I could do with my body. My forays into the world of physical excellence have been short lived and never really that excellent. I've been overweight and asthmatic for most of my life, and I realized on the side of that hill that I had always let that give me an excuse for giving up. I had never done anything physically impressive, and at the very least the Camino was going to be that: physically impressive.
I have mentioned all of this before, but it bears repeating, because you need to know that I was not particularly afraid of failing physically. The fear was that I might fail spiritually. My resolve might break, I might not be able to finish this trip because of what was going on in my head and heart rather than because of my legs and lungs. If my body let me down it would just be the latest in a rather long litany of failures and flops, but if I simply lost my nerve? Well that would be unacceptable.
Edwin Friedman, author of the seminal family systems work Generation to Generation, was working on a book called Failure of Nerve, when he passed away. The book (finished by his son and others) in it's best sections examines the way systems fail because of fear, primarily the fear that leaders have, but acknowledging that leaders are technically and really figureheads for the dysfunction of a system. Energy is contagious, if a system is anxious it will seek and most likely find leaders who reflect that anxiety. If a system is bold and generative, it will probably also find bold and generative leaders. And leaders can change systems for better or worse, and systems (and this I think is rather the more powerful force, but I suppose I'm biased) can change leaders for better or worse.
In church terms, one has several roles to fill in leadership: prophet and priest, (some try king, but that should probably be left to God). Prophet is the role that notices the wrong and addresses the struggles, prophets can either "afflict the comfortable, or comfort the afflicted," but they never simply accept the status quo. The priestly function, however, is not into rocking the boat. The priest is inherently invested in keeping things smooth and steady. Let the traditions that give us roots hold us steady, let the rituals and practices of our faith anchor us in the storm of life.
You might read these descriptions and think I am expressing a preference for one or the other, depending on your personal resonance, but I assure you, I fully recognize the necessity of both roles. The problem that exists is that neither role is immune from the anxiety of the system, and both can become perverse as a result of that anxiety. "Fear is the mind killer," says a fictional mantra from Frank Herbert's Dune. Indeed fear kills the faculty of rational thought, but it also squashes vision, it also shortens the perspective to consider only the most immediate concerns. Fear seeks out enemies and threats, and if it finds none, it will invent them, real and imaginary.
The prophet cannot speak truly, nor can the priest serve truly, when the system is overrun with fear. So how can one change the system? If it is already fearful and anxious, how does one change it? It is bigger than you are.
The first step is vision, having a idea that gives you a destination and some guiding principles.
Then you need to figure out your needs: knowledge, skills, and perhaps most importantly helpers and supporters. You need others who will go with you, because you will never change an anxious and fearful system by yourself.
You need to understand that failure is an option: your knowledge can be incomplete, your skills inadequate and your helpers and supporters inconstant, but your nerve cannot fail. Learn from your failures, adjust your plans, find new helpers, whatever you need to do, but do not let your courage fail, do not let the fear get the better of you.
That said, flexibility and empathy are important characteristics. Seek to understand your enemies, pray for those who persecute you and you will find this leads to an ability to bend but not break. I know, this sounds weird even to people who have spent time wrestling with Jesus' teachings on the subject. And it sounds especially troubling when you feel like your in a "fight or flight" confrontation, because fear is almost always winning the battle.
Mercy, forgiveness and grace are most often where the rubber hits the road and where the nerve most often fails us. It's self defense. It's the only sensible thing to do for the good of the whole. These are sentiments that are often attached to acts of violence. I won't judge their validity in the secular world, but in the community of God's people they ring awfully hollow.
Somewhere in my mind there is this (probably unhealthy) idea that my body is not really that important. I have never been an athlete, or a physical specimen, my self worth has always derived more from what I could do with my mind (and perhaps even my spirit) than what I could do with my body. My forays into the world of physical excellence have been short lived and never really that excellent. I've been overweight and asthmatic for most of my life, and I realized on the side of that hill that I had always let that give me an excuse for giving up. I had never done anything physically impressive, and at the very least the Camino was going to be that: physically impressive.
I have mentioned all of this before, but it bears repeating, because you need to know that I was not particularly afraid of failing physically. The fear was that I might fail spiritually. My resolve might break, I might not be able to finish this trip because of what was going on in my head and heart rather than because of my legs and lungs. If my body let me down it would just be the latest in a rather long litany of failures and flops, but if I simply lost my nerve? Well that would be unacceptable.
Edwin Friedman, author of the seminal family systems work Generation to Generation, was working on a book called Failure of Nerve, when he passed away. The book (finished by his son and others) in it's best sections examines the way systems fail because of fear, primarily the fear that leaders have, but acknowledging that leaders are technically and really figureheads for the dysfunction of a system. Energy is contagious, if a system is anxious it will seek and most likely find leaders who reflect that anxiety. If a system is bold and generative, it will probably also find bold and generative leaders. And leaders can change systems for better or worse, and systems (and this I think is rather the more powerful force, but I suppose I'm biased) can change leaders for better or worse.
In church terms, one has several roles to fill in leadership: prophet and priest, (some try king, but that should probably be left to God). Prophet is the role that notices the wrong and addresses the struggles, prophets can either "afflict the comfortable, or comfort the afflicted," but they never simply accept the status quo. The priestly function, however, is not into rocking the boat. The priest is inherently invested in keeping things smooth and steady. Let the traditions that give us roots hold us steady, let the rituals and practices of our faith anchor us in the storm of life.
You might read these descriptions and think I am expressing a preference for one or the other, depending on your personal resonance, but I assure you, I fully recognize the necessity of both roles. The problem that exists is that neither role is immune from the anxiety of the system, and both can become perverse as a result of that anxiety. "Fear is the mind killer," says a fictional mantra from Frank Herbert's Dune. Indeed fear kills the faculty of rational thought, but it also squashes vision, it also shortens the perspective to consider only the most immediate concerns. Fear seeks out enemies and threats, and if it finds none, it will invent them, real and imaginary.
The prophet cannot speak truly, nor can the priest serve truly, when the system is overrun with fear. So how can one change the system? If it is already fearful and anxious, how does one change it? It is bigger than you are.
The first step is vision, having a idea that gives you a destination and some guiding principles.
Then you need to figure out your needs: knowledge, skills, and perhaps most importantly helpers and supporters. You need others who will go with you, because you will never change an anxious and fearful system by yourself.
You need to understand that failure is an option: your knowledge can be incomplete, your skills inadequate and your helpers and supporters inconstant, but your nerve cannot fail. Learn from your failures, adjust your plans, find new helpers, whatever you need to do, but do not let your courage fail, do not let the fear get the better of you.
That said, flexibility and empathy are important characteristics. Seek to understand your enemies, pray for those who persecute you and you will find this leads to an ability to bend but not break. I know, this sounds weird even to people who have spent time wrestling with Jesus' teachings on the subject. And it sounds especially troubling when you feel like your in a "fight or flight" confrontation, because fear is almost always winning the battle.
Mercy, forgiveness and grace are most often where the rubber hits the road and where the nerve most often fails us. It's self defense. It's the only sensible thing to do for the good of the whole. These are sentiments that are often attached to acts of violence. I won't judge their validity in the secular world, but in the community of God's people they ring awfully hollow.
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