Bootstraps N' Such

It ill behooves the man who is not forced to live in a ghetto to tell those who must how to transcend its limitations.

-Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited

Aside from the slightly oldish language like "ill behooves," it's easy to forget that Thurman wrote this thing 50 years ago.  Because apparently a lot of people, Republican and Democrat alike have not realistically dealt with the reality that opportunity in this country is in no way equal.  We chip away at barriers like race, sexual orientation, religious differences, and we try in fits and starts to do something about the socio-economic tragedy of our so-called land of opportunity.

There is this tendency to call every form of discrimination a phobia (homophobia, xenophobia, islamaphobia, gender-dysphoricaphobia (okay I may have made that last one up, but you get the point)).  This implies that people have neurotic fears of people who exhibit these conditions, that's what phobias are: irrational fears, perhaps even to the point of panic or being utterly disabled by that fear.  However, most phobias have some sort of trigger, and most of the common phobias are present in the general population, for instance claustrophobia, fear of small or enclosed spaces.  This is a fear that is founded in basic survival instinct, going into small places can be dangerous, i.e. caves, there can be scorpions, spiders (arachnaphobia is not just a movie) or bears and badgers, there is the danger of collapse, in other words, one might have legitimate reasons to fear small spaces, None of those actually apply to say getting an MRI, but most people find that experience somewhat unpleasant because it places them in a confined space in which they must hold still, while the thing bangs and whirs and makes various danger sounds.

Calling discriminatory or prejudiced attitudes a phobia may be correct in that it can often manifest in ways that are neurotic or irrational, but it also raises the defense mechanisms of the person you are sticking with that label.  You are essentially committing the same error that people who vilify welfare recipients or migrant workers are making, you are from your own perspective, telling someone else that their ghetto is not a place they should want to live, but you are giving them absolutely no way to get out of it, in fact, you are probably only affirming their feelings of persecution because, "who are you to tell me..."

In the sermon on the mount, Jesus encourages empathy rather than control.  His injunctions to turn the other cheek, give more than is demanded, walk an extra mile, and love your enemy, are ways out of this trap, for everyone.  They are about much more than just non-violence, they are about escape from our phobias and neuroses.  When you understand how truly difficult someone has it, you will find it harder to hate them, even if their behavior or their demeanor rubs you the wrong way.

Here is perhaps an odd example, but one that relates particularly well to the problems of racial AND economic justice: rap music.  You probably know the evolution of blues and jazz from the synthesis of African tribal music and Christian/western folk music, and how antebellum slavery and the subsequent oppression of black folk precipitated the creation of these forms that later gave birth to Rock and Roll and Rhythm and Blues.  But do you know that rap/hip hop music was born because kids living in the ghetto were too poor to own instruments?

The art of beat-box, which is making rhythms and sounds with nothing but your mouth and body, and mixing, which involved using turntables to sample and mix existing music as a dance track or a background track for a rap were innovations born out of necessity, because poor kids had neither access or encouragement to train their musical gifts in more traditional ways.

Hip Hop can be vulgar, it can be mindless and nonsensical, but in some very important ways it can also help us to walk a mile in someone else's shoes.  Artists like KRS-One and Chuck D from Public Enemy can give people living in white suburbia a sense of what it's like to live in the ghetto.  Ice Cube and Tupac Shakur can talk about life in a world of gangs and drugs, and the music is an aid to empathy.  Eminem (who is white, but grew up really poor) can tell you about what it's like to be a poor white kid from Detroit's Eight Mile trailer parks who is trying to make it as a minority in the world of rap music.  The Notorious B.I.G. can tell you what it was like to grow up in Bedford-Stuyvesant and sell drugs before "making it" in the world of entertainment.  These may be stories you don't want to hear.  They may be stories that trigger some phobias.  They may sound angry, they may use bad words, but if you want to understand the struggles they face, maybe you should listen.

There can be a lot of sifting to do, but understanding is part of what we have to do.

We need to face our fears.

We need to stop naming everyone the enemy.

We need to recover our sense of empathy and common humanity.

One of the rappers I mentioned above, Chuck D wrote this: "The minute they see me, they fear me, I'm the epitome of Public Enemy," and I don't think this is posturing as a tough guy, I think that is a lament about the fact that the world sees him as a threat: an angry black man.  I understand that, as a middle class white guy, I will never entirely understand what it's like to live in the ghetto or to be truly hemmed in by a racist system, but I believe that we can try to understand better, and at the very least stop blaming people for where they're born and criticizing them for not climbing their particular mountain of trouble the way we think they should.

Love and Death

Set me as a seal upon your heart,

As a seal upon your arm;

For love is strong as death, 

Passion fierce as the grave,

Its flashes of fire a raging flame.

-Song of Solomon 8:6

The Song of Solomon, or Song of Songs is one of those wee little books tucked away between more "important" things.  It is one of the more R-rated pieces of literature in the Bible, hiding all sorts of lusty language about breasts and loins in between Ecclesiastes and Isaiah.  It's sort of like discovering D.H. Lawrence between Nietzche and Goethe.  Yes, it's a love poem.  Yes, it is full of metaphors and pretty much impossible to read literally, and yet here is a truth that is absolutely true, so true in fact that it defies the very nature of literal readings and fundamentalism in general: "love is strong as death."

If I had to pick one phrase that summed up the narrative contained in canonical Scripture as succinctly as possible, it would be that: "Love is strong as death."  It is what is proven by God's involvement with the children of Abraham, despite all the ways they go wrong. It is what is proven by the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, it is what (I believe) will be proven about all of Creation when everything is said and done.

See also 1 Corinthians 13: "and now these three remain: faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love."  Sometimes it's hard to hold on to that truth, I mean when things go sour.  When it looks for a moment like death is going to win, when the cry that is on our hearts is "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"

I think it's a mistake to brush that moment off, I think love and death are connected in a very yin-yang sort of relationship.  After all, the reason why we love on a biological level is so that we can procreate, and the reason why we procreate is because we are not immortal, and so there is a need created by death to which love is the answer.  The mystery at the core of this is stated in 1 John: God is love.  The Creator has made everything that is because the essence of being is love.

The majority of English translations keep the equation in balance: "Love is strong as death" or "as strong as death" though a few do actually tip the balance in favor of love (CEV) for instance, but I think that's a mistake, reading a bit too much triumphalism into the text.  Which we tend to do... I tend to do... because I want it to be true.  I like love, I'm not a big fan of death, but I do recognize the part it has to play.  As I mentioned yesterday, it would seem there are times where love does not win the battle.  There are times when hatred, fear and anger get the best of us.  

The King James Version, which I will go to sometimes for translations of poetry in Scripture (but not much else) says: "Love is strong as death, jealousy as cruel as the grave."  Now, as a whole, I prefer the "passion/ fierce" reading, but I can see the balance coming out, and the relationship that gets easily twisted when we love the wrong things or love in the wrong way.

Yes, you can love wrong.  You can love selfishly, you can love in a way that is controlling and bitter.  You can love in ways that honestly have no business calling themselves love.  Love can have a bit of an identity crisis, in that it is sometimes hard to define, and it does not always stand up and shout about itself.  That job is left to poets and musicians.  That is one way you can tell that death is love's equal, it is powerful enough to walk unabashedly into the room and proclaim it's nature with no hiding or obfuscation.  Death is unapologetic and undeniable.

As Paul describes love in 1 Corinthians 13, "Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude.  It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth."

If you follow with that definition, and Jesus' call to love your neighbors and your enemies you will find that there is an awful lot of very bad behavior going on in the world today, much of it being perpetrated by people who are supposed to believe that "love is strong as death."

We get this so very wrong, especially in those moments when it's most crucial to get it right. As I look around I see people who are self-identified Christians totally failing the love test.  They are acting with hatred and fear in their hearts, they are raging against death while trying to use the vocabulary of violence and power, but those words belong to death, death defines them and gives them their true weight.

Love is strong as death, but it doesn't get to use the same weapons.  When love wins it sometimes looks like a cross.  When love wins it doesn't mean there is no tomb.  Love wins when it can take all the darkness and violence death has to deal out and still say, "I forgive, I love, I am love."

Now, Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Outrage

A few days ago four Marines and one Navy officer were killed in Chattanooga Tennessee by Mohammed Abdulazeez.  The latest in a litany of all too frequent acts of mass violence, several of which have been directed at Military bases and personnel. Make no mistake, this tragedy is no less heartbreaking than any of the others, but as a nation we know how to deal with this.  They were soldiers, we lower our flags, we honor their memories and add their names to the list of the honored dead... oh and we start looking for the revenge.
This time too, the killer's name was Mohammed, not Dylan or James, we know what that's about right?  Like Osama and Saddam, he's the same sort of problem, a terrorist that got's to be got.  The only problem is that he's not part of some huge conspiracy, he was essentially the same as Dylan Roof (Charleston), James Holmes (Aurora), or Aaron Alexis (DC Navy Yard), he was, according to what we're finding out now, a man battling depression and possibly other forms of mental illness.  He was, in fact, Muslim, but he was also American.  He was a bit perturbed by the fact that his own government treated him as a criminal because of his name and his heritage, but it is unclear whether or not he ever actually became a terrorist by the definition most of us have in our heads.
It would make sorting out this whole tragedy that much simpler if he were found to have had some connection or even coaching from some middle eastern "death to America" types.  It would be great if, for a change, he wasn't just another case of our own disturbed, violence obsessed, psyche running amok and turning an unstable and disaffected young man into a killer.  It would be "easier" for us to handle a foreign threat, than to find out once again that "the killer is calling from inside the house."
Shooting sprees have been a thing in this country for quite a while.  You had Charles Whitman in the clock tower at the university of Texas in 1966, Sylvia Seegrist at the Springfield (PA) mall in 1985, Jillian Robbins (who I was actually acquainted with) at Penn State in 1996, Ryan Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine High School, Adam Lanza at Sandy Hook Elementary, James Holmes at a movie theater in Aurora Colorado, Aaron Alexis at the DC Navy Yard, Dylan Roof at the Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, and now Mohammed Abdulazeez in Chattanooga Tennessee.
And of course there are more, those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head (though I did have to Google some of the names). With the exception of Harris and Klebold, who worked together and planned rather extensively, it was more of a psychotic break than an evil conspiracy.  You'll notice there are a lot of white men (though women do get on the list), also Alexis was black, and now we have an Arab.
The core problem is still mental illness, it can be glossed over with white supremacy, rage at the government, anger at bullies, Muslim extremism, bad break-ups, but at the end of the day it's a lot more complicated than any of those things.  It is extreme disassociation, it is a combination of hatred of others and profound self-loathing.
We can fight the war on terror from now until Jesus returns, we're not going to stop this problem.  We can eliminate Al Quaida, ISIS, and whatever pops up to replace them, but unless we come up for an absolute cure for mental illness (or at least the stew of them that lead to this sort of thing) we will never be safe.  Our best defense is not security, locking all of our doors and windows doesn't help when the killer is in the house.  Our best defense is community.  Community that cares and pays enough attention to notice when someone is going off the rails.  Community that doesn't stigmatize people who actually try to get help.  Community that holds people strongly enough so that these sorts of explosions don't happen (at least not as frequently).
I mentioned that I knew one of the people on the list: Jillian Robbins, now I don't mean I was close with her, but she did sort of move in the same crowd as me and State College is a relatively small world.  She was a waitress at the Ye Olde College Diner where you could get cheap food and bad coffee.  When I say I knew her, I mean I knew her name before she made the news and became infamous.  She seemed pretty normal, and by normal, I mean not that much more disturbed than any of my other acquaintances.
So many of "my people" had been diagnosed with some sort of mood disorder.  I'm not talking like loony bin crazy, I'm just talking counseling and prescription meds crazy.  SSRI's (Selective Seratonin Re-uptake Inhibitors) were the new thing for treating everything from severe bipolarity to the Monday blues.  And for a minute, people thought they had found the magic bullet in treating various sorts of mental illness.  Once there was a cure other than bomb-out tranquilizers like Lithium and Thorazine, or electroshock therapy, it seemed like mood disorders became sort of trendy. Depression was kind of ubiquitous, everybody was depressed, it was kind of our thing.
In the movie Reality Bites, which is so Gen-Xish that it really ought to come with a prescription for Prozac, the main characters leave the following message on their answering machine: "Hello, you have reached the winter of our discontent." It was literary (quoting Shakespeare and Steinbeck), and nihilistic and it pretty much summed up the feeling of a bunch of over-privileged and under-employed "slackers." The world we grew up in was defined by television and broken families and conspicuous consumption and Reaganomics, in other words it was like a plastic utopia that covered a really broken set of assumptions.  Kids and young people tend to see through that sort of facade, even if they can't quite sort out what is actually going on, they know that things just seem false. Our community extended only as far as the people we spent our days and nights with, and the rest of the world, including most adults, and a good number of "normal" people, just didn't understand what we were going through.
At that time, it felt like there would never be an end to the adolescent and post-adolescent malaise that gripped us.  Sometimes tragedy was the only thing that broke the monotony, we cried when Kurt Cobain committed suicide, we were wide eyed when Columbine happened or when we heard about the Rwandan Genocide, but for the most part our lives were lived in between media circuses.  The world seemed un-real and un-friendly, and what was probably worst of all it seemed like there was no hope.
This is as close as I ever got to the sort of dysphoria that can eventually lead to deciding that shooting a bunch of folks is a good idea.  I had a family and a few friends that always kept me away from that ledge.  Jillian did not, at least she didn't the day she climbed under a bush with a rifle and started picking people off.  She had disconnected and alienated most of the people who knew her, and when she broke no one knew it until it was too late.
I just don't know how you can fix that.  I know community is the answer, but it's not fool proof.  I know that, somehow or other, love is the only thing that can beat it once and for all, but most of us don't even know how to apply it or even when it's needed.  And no, as we saw with Dylan Roof, sometimes love doesn't always stop the violence.  It breaks my heart to think that there were so many chances for him to feel the love and acceptance of the people who he was about to kill, and yet... it never broke through. I think a state of being where love and community always win is actually what Jesus was talking about when he talked about the Kingdom of Heaven.  We ain't there yet.
But we can take small victories as we sit in the wake of tragedies like this, in other words, the Kingdom of Heaven can draw near to us.  Refuse to accept easy answers, repent, repent of our personal sins and of the sins of our society.  Instead of feeling righteous outrage, allow your heart to break for those who were killed.  If you are a Jesus-follower, that has to include the ones who did the killing, you know, the ones you like to name your enemy, you're supposed to forgive them.
I know, it seems crazy, but it's crazy in a way that sets you free.  It's crazy in a way that breaks this cycle of violence all to pieces.
The fact of the matter is that you may very well know someone who is inches away from being the next name on the list of mass shooters.  You can either live in fear of that, or you can do what Jesus suggested: Love them.  You don't know who they are, or what's going to break them, so you have to practice love towards everyone. Be kind, compassionate and understanding.  You don't have to fix them, you probably can't anyway, but you can be the Body of Christ.
It's not easy, but it's the way.

Words that Have Meaning

Thinking and communication lesson for today: defining the term "mutually exclusive."
I'm doing this as a public service, because lots of people seem to either not know it exists or severely misapprehend what it means.  Mutually exclusive means that two things necessarily preclude each other, they cannot overlap.  In a venn diagram mutually exclusive things are represented by two entirely separate spheres.  It is an old rhetorical trick to pretend that two things are mutually exclusive when they are not: for instance not everyone who wants to defend the confederate flag is a racist, the proof of that is that there have been black people who defend it.  However, a lot of people who proudly display the battle flag are racist, and in fact, the KKK and various other movements whose sole purpose was the oppression and intimidation of non-white people have rather enthusiastically used the flag as a symbol, therefore, despite the fact that it might be seen in another light, it's dominant message is racist.  There is a large enough overlap to make the argument that being racist and displaying the flag are mutually exclusive categories.
Example two: courage.  Caitlyn Jenner is courageous for doing what she has done in the public eye.  So are firefighters, soldiers and police.  Courage of one sort does not preclude courage of another sort.  The fact that something, which many people still understand very poorly (gender reassignment), can require courage does not somehow diminish the courage it takes to run into a gunfight or a fire to save someone's life.  While many would like to make these two things antithetical, they are not.
Example three: Abortion versus women's rights.  This is one of the single most divisive subjects of the past 50 years, and it has often been presented in tragically over-simplified rhetoric.  The fact of the matter is that choice and life are not mutually exclusive.  The lives of the unborn and the lives of their mothers cannot be declared mutually exclusive no matter how many thought gymnastics you want to do.  As a matter of fact educating and supporting women in reproductive choice is the absolute best way to reduce the number of abortions performed for non-health reasons.  I'm all for choice, and I'm also really against killing babies, and I am always looking for that wonderful place where those two things overlap.
Are there things that are mutually exclusive in the news?  Sure:
Donald Trump and sanity/good hair.
Hilary Clinton and being likeable.
Fox News and actual journalism.
Advertising and honesty.
You get the idea.

Of What Is, and What Should Never Be

For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all of creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus, our Lord.

-Romans 8: 38-39

Every day I read many things.  And I'm not going to cite them or link them here, because I don't want to pick a fight with any of them.  In fact, I will stipulate at the outset: many of these things that I read contain thoughtful commentary and helpful suggestions.  Some of them are written with passion and conviction, others just seem cynical and hopeless, some of them I agree with and some of them make my blood boil a little.  What they amount to, in this age of the interweb, is the internal dialogue of our church and our culture, and I fear that we are becoming a bit schizophrenic, and I mean that in the most clinical sense possible, because I don't want to disparage people suffering with mental illness. For a good Explanation of Schizophrenia go here.

One of the interesting things pointed out by the above article is the fact that many people with schizophrenia do not seem to be odd, until you find out what is really going on in their head, and then, if you have an ounce of compassion, you will understand why they find it hard to deal with what we call reality.

The amount of paranoia and distrust that wracks our culture is worthy of a entry in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, I know it's not a good acronym, don't be so OCD).  And it afflicts right and left alike, in fact there seems to be more time dedicated to bashing the opposition than there does to actually solving problems, and that, friends and neighbors, is a HUGE problem.

Honestly though, I don't know what to do about the fact that Ann Coulter and Rachel Maddow are probably never going to come to an understanding, so I'm going to talk to my church peeps.  Because while I cannot really appeal to the Apostle Paul on any rational secular grounds, I'm going to have to retreat to a place where the letter to Rome has some weight.  And what I'm going to say from that place is just freaking stop it already, stop with the bickering, stop with the endless prophecies of doom AND the polyanna-ish proclamations that everything's gonna be alright.  Can we please deal with reality?

Christianity ain't what it used to be, but given that what it used to be was pretty twisted, maybe that's okay.  No business strategies masquerading as evangelism are going to bring back our hegemony, and I would argue that we shouldn't actually even want it back, it was essentially like a boil on the backside of the church in the first place, it actually made us less likely to be conformed to the image of Christ, and it's actually a miracle that we ever held on to anything like the Good News through all of that.

As long as we keep taking a worldly approach we are damned.  We can make our worship new and exciting and some people will come and like it, but some people will wonder what happened to our old favorite hymns and liturgical tradition.  We can be fired up about evangelism, preaching and teaching and getting out there in the world and being involved in all sorts of do-gooding, and some people will think that's awesome and other people will think it's annoying.  We can speak up for social justice, and some people will applaud our efforts, others will call us liberal sell outs, still others will be upset because we don't go far enough.

We can focus on the young.

We can focus on the old.

We can build a new building, we can sell off the one we have, we can meet at Starbucks or in the back room of a bar.  We can have long sermons, short sermons, video, no video, we can advertise, or not.  Our website and our Facebook page might be great, not so great or non-existent.

We can try to live out or faith or live into our faith, we can be doctrinally rigid or we can bend over backwards to be inclusive, we can be biblical (whatever that happens to mean to you at the moment), we can get on our knees and pray, we can handle poisonous snakes for that matter, but...

IT

WILL

NOT

HELP.

That is the hard reality.  At this point there is no way for the Church to be all things to all people, and it's not our fault, the world is crazy, and it's making us crazy too.

We have to be sane.

The good news is that we can be.

We've done it before when things were falling apart.

We can, not because we're good enough or righteous enough or somehow immune to the insanity, but because we're rooted in the love of God in Christ.  That's what will survive, everything else is negotiable and perishable.  Be at peace with that, it's really okay.

What's not okay, and in fact, sort of insane is trying to hold on to things that don't make sense.  Trying to sync up faith in Jesus Christ with worldly empires, trying to enforce "Christian" values in a world that does not call Jesus Lord, trying to use fear to get people to obey a god that you swear, honestly, really does love them enough to condemn them to eternal torment, trying to pretend that if people don't say the right words or attend the right church, then their Creator is just going to give up on them once and for all... that stuff is pretty schizophrenic.

Remember, Paul's letters were all written to people who had already signed on for the whole Jesus is Lord experience, they were meant to encourage and build up, not convince.  He was writing to a church living in a world that, contrary to some of our silliest notions, was not less messed up than the one we currently inhabit.  And he tells them nothing can separate them from the love of God in Jesus Christ.  Two thousand years later that's still true.

The Mystery of Why

If humankind could have known God without the world,

God would never have created the world.

-Meister Eckhart

Here I go stealing from Richard Rohr's daily devotion again (I'm not the only one, almost every one gets linked to facebook by some clergy colleague of mine or other).  But I have to admit, I love the idea that Eckhart puts out there, which is essentially that creation is an act of love, it flows out of God's gracious desire to know and be known, it is not a necessity, but rather it is a way in which we are given the chance to experience God.

Is this anthropocentric?  You betcha, of course it may not just be humankind that benefits from the existence of the universe. I would absolutely subscribe to the notion that God's ability to know and be known is rather deeper and wider than we can imagine.  But what really matters to us, at this juncture in our spiritual history, is that we can and should view creation as part of the divine movement of God's Spirit as opposed to something separate and broken and even evil, which is the gnostic impulse, which has been the bugaboo of the Abrahamic faiths for a very long time.

The thing that keeps me coming back to Rohr over and over again is the way he sort of pulls me towards non-dualistic thinking, which he equates with the mystics that exist in many different faith traditions.  But I have to admit, I don't feel much affinity for the word mystic on a gut level.  I think of mystics as people who are sort of nebulous and who, while they certainly produce moments of profound truth, tend to dissolve like a fog.  Rohr presents dualistic thought as a necessary step in maturing, not something to be despised or rejected, simply grown out of, like falling in love with the wrong person or some unfortunate fashion fad.  Rohr repeatedly mentions that people in the dualistic mode of thought tend to think that mystics are nuts, which I find to be true.  Eckhart, Julian of Norwich and John of the Cross were not my favorites in Seminary, which I would say marked a high-water point for me in terms of dualistic thinking.  Now I read them with different eyes.

Oddly enough, at one point, before my religious journey really began, my faith journey took me through another sort of non-dualistic phase, where I did not judge right or wrong or black or white, or at least I thought I didn't.  But rather than leading me "further up and further in" as C.S, Lewis winsomely describes the journey, this phase led to a rather bleak landscape that more closely resembled Dante's Limbo than the light of heaven.  In the early years of my spiritually awake period, while I was working through the often rigorous motions of dualistic thought again, I judged this period as dissolute and vain.  Learning to let go of that judgment and trying to compartmentalize all my experiences in a neat, linear fashion, has been part of moving towards a more non-dual mode of thinking.  Part of that motion has been to learn to show grace and empathy towards people, including my former selves, who were trapped either in a world of judgmental dualism or a bleak shadow of mysticism that did not welcome the Holy Spirit in any form.

This is one of the wonders of God's creativity that almost buckles my knees: there are so many options and possibilities for what we can be and what we can know and what we can think.  The divine relationship of the Trinity is at the center of all of them, and is indeed the source of all of them, including the shadows that it casts.

Scripture says, "The Earth is the Lord's and all that and all that is in it, the world those who live in it;" Psalm 24:1  How seriously should we take that? How big do we want to let that get?  Dualism gives a brief nod to the cosmic implications of that verse (and sentiments like it that are rather common in Scripture if  you want to get proof texty), and then starts naming all the rules and regulations about what we should do in light of that reality.  Non-dual thinking, so it seems to me, simply sits with the reality of God's creative love and lets the knowledge sort of wash over it.  There may be an insight, there may be an inspiration, there may even be a motivation to go and do something, but the mystic does not start with the desire of results in mind, they do not demand answers to their questions, they rather let God speak what God will and listen with a holy hunger.

To some this sounds scary, to others simply too vague.  I wonder myself what practical implications it has for the church.  It simply does not lend itself to practicality, but by all the saints it does help you love God.  The Love is extravagant.  Imagine this: God has made the entire universe, in all it's vastness and mystery, for you.  You certainly don't need all that, but it's for you nonetheless.  Once you get as much of a grip on that as you possibly can, imagine also that you who have been so extravagantly loved are called to share that love with everyone and everything.

Jesus says, "All authority on heaven and on earth has been given to me." (Mt 28:18)  He understands this: the vastness of the universe and the intricacies of creation are for him, so that he might know God and be known by God.  The immediate consequence of that reality is that it needs to be shared, it needs to be taught, it needs to be spread to all nations because it is Good News.

Bubble, Bubble, Toil and Trouble

The youth had lost their sense of belonging.  They did not count; there was no center of hope for their marginal egos.  According to my friend, Hitler told them: "No one loves you - I love you; no one will give you work - I will give you work; no one wants you - I want you."  And when they saw the sunlight in his eyes they dropped their tools and followed him.

-Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited

I know how dangerous and spurious it is to bring Adolf Hitler into an argument.  I am aware of Godwin's Law, but give me a minute, because I'm not going to compare anyone to Hitler.  I am, however, going to expand on what Mr. Thurman says about the desperation of people who feel their backs are against the wall.

Who among us, particularly those of us for whom World War II is practically ancient history, hasn't wondered how in the hell a crazy bleepity-bleep like Hitler ever got to impose his particular brand of insanity on the world.  The seventh grade history explanation is: "It was the economy stupid."  The Treaty of Versailles, which ended WWI, crippled Germany and people were using wheelbarrows full of marks to buy bread.  You've heard that right?  Well just imagine if you didn't have wheelbarrows full of marks.  Imagine if you were young and/or poor.  Imagine if the world seemed to be punishing you or forgetting you in turns.  Imagine that your back really was against the wall, and then someone told you that there was someone specific to blame for that.

Hitler blended patriotism, hatred, fear and the actual desperation of the German people into a toxic concoction called the Nazi party.  He crafted a vision: the thousand year Reich, he gave them a plan involving the power of the Wehrmacht and the propaganda and thought control of the Gestapo, and he made sure that his venom always had somewhere to vent.  But don't ever forget that it started with the ability to put food on the table and make people feel like they were part of something.

Disenfranchised people feel like they have very little to lose, and everything to gain.  Keep grinding someone into the dirt long enough and they will hate you to the very core of their soul, and it doesn't even matter if you meant to oppress them in the first place.  It doesn't even matter if you knew it was happening.  Today we have Al Quaida, ISIS, Boko Haram, more white supremacist groups than you can shake a stick at, and within almost any minority community you have militant radical and/or fundamentalist factions that breathe the fumes of hatred, we even have nations (like Iran and Pakistan) that have practically adopted what Thurman refers to as a "marginal ego." Meaning that they feel left out and persecuted by someone or anyone, it doesn't really matter who or what they hate, only that they do.

Their hatred and persecuted feelings can be real or imagined.  You could be an incarcerated young man from the ghetto who felt he never had any choice but to deal drugs and join a gang, or you could be Donald Trump and feel that the world truly is hostile to billionaire white guys, honestly it doesn't matter, when Hitler tells you what you want to hear, you're going to see the sunlight in his eyes.

Humans are masters at believing what they want to believe.  I would call it almost a survival instinct: always find the threat, always feel like your back is against the wall, name that enemy and go for the throat.  It's the only way to protect what you love and value.

The path to the Dark Side.

Here's what I see America: everyone feels persecuted, marginalized and left out: black, white, brown and Native, Asian; Jew, Christian, Muslim, Atheist, Mormon, Scientologist, Jehovah's witness, Buddhist, Hindu, Wiccan, Pagan, you name it, they feel like no one gets them, and for the most part they feed on that feeling.  There's just enough vague anxiety to spread around and make it feel real, there's just enough shaming and language policing to make people nervous about actually trying to talk to each other, and God forbid you forget to "check your privilege."  Oh yeah, and there are actually really terrible and oppressive things that happen too: church shootings, police brutality, riots, and oh so much racism, anger and hatred pointed in every direction.  Sometimes it seems like this melting pot is cooking an awfully bad tasting stew.

The difference here, at least this is what I hope, is that we all feel like we belong to this thing called the United States.  We have things that hold us together, and though those things may be tested, they are made of sterner stuff than most of us can imagine.  We have an interesting couple of years coming up here, there's going to be a lot of politicking going on, listen to the voices that remind you that we're all connected, and that there is a such thing as the greater good.  Filter out the voices that encourage you to retreat into little cliques and self interest groups.  Watch the fear mongers, they are not to be trusted, even if you suspect they may be right.  In other words watch out for all the Hitlers, and I'm not pointing fingers here, because I promised I wasn't going to break Godwin's law.  Just remember that Hitler was able to be Hitler because he gave people who were desperate something to believe in.  Apparently it's too late to say, "don't be desperate," so I'll just say be careful what you believe in.