On the Way to the Way

Sitting in Reagan National Airport waiting for my flight, it struck me: I was finally leaving.
I was leaving a lot more than just my family, my church, my office, my home; I was leaving behind the world as I know it.  I was going to enter the ancient world of pilgrimage, I was going to become a Peregrino on the Camino de Santiago de Compostela.  I didn't yet know what that meant, but I was struck by the rather harsh juxtaposition of travelling to Spain via air.  If walking is the most ancient and basic form of travel, flight is the most decidedly modern.  You have to go through security and customs, you have to learn all sorts of little "inside" rules, you watch everyone who is about to be crammed into a (not large enough) metal tube and ascend into the wild blue yonder, try to carve out their little space and not get involved with one another.
It was interesting to me, the most technological "advanced" mode of travel available felt... well... dehumanizing.
Maybe I've just read too much Huxley, but I couldn't help but feel that the whole thing was more than a little dystopian.  Here we are, a species that has mastered mechanical flight, and yet we're so afraid of each other.  I'm not just talking about being afraid of the lunatics who turn their underwear into bombs either.  That kind of fear is rampant enough, you feel it's effect when you have to take off your shoes and present your neat little three ounce bottles of shampoo and such in a ziploc bag.  I'm talking about the people in the boarding areas and the people you will be sitting thigh to thigh with for hours, we barely talk to each other or even make eye contact.
I'm an introvert by nature, so normally that's fine with me, but as I was on my way to the Camino, I was starting to notice things about our world that are just a little off.  Maybe it's these things that are "a little off" that it is so important to leave behind.  At any rate, the paradigm of modernity and detachment was beginning to wear thin, like too little butter over too much toast.  I wanted someone to say something, to do something that proved we were human.  I knew, if nothing else the next 8 days were going to force me into a screaming match with my humanity, my physical limitations, my spiritual resources, my ability to find and experience beauty and grace, but here I was, doing everything I could to keep that sort of experience at bay: reading my kindle, looking at my phone, checking the gate again and again, things that helped me hold on to the illusion that I was somehow still a part of the modern world, but even in that moment I could feel the ancient power of the Camino starting to rip that out of my grasp.

Camino Bound

I'm sitting in my office for the last time before I take off for Spain.  It will be ten days and thousands of miles before I'm back here.  In the intervening time, I will walk an ancient path, in the company of Pilgrims, and visit a sacred place where they claim to have the bones of Jesus' brother, the Apostle James.
As you might imagine I'm pretty stoked, but their is also a bit of nervousness.  There's a lot of travel that is not on foot and therefore, not in my control.  Planes and trains, TSA and customs, hotels, and waiting areas. Plus there is all the stuff I'm leaving behind: Michele, Jack, Cate and Zeke, my comfortable bed, my daily routines.  For the next 10 days my life is going to be focused on a journey, and I feel a little like Bilbo Baggins, who really didn't want to leave the comfort of Bag-End, but I know that what awaits me is worth the ride.
What awaits, in addition to lots and lots of walking and a fair amount of less pleasant modes of transit, will be a clarification of what is really important.  I'm quite sure that three days from now, when my feet finally find the Camino de Santiago, the spiritual journey will already be well under way.  In fact it has already begun.
The process of packing and preparing has been eye opening.  There is so much that I probably would take if I wasn't walking, but the prospect of carrying EVERYTHING on your back, clarifies the difference between want and need quite well.
I'm clinging to a couple modern conveniences, mainly for airports and flights, but I'm going to unplug when my feet are on the ground.  I'm going to break the habit of looking obsessively at my iphone every five minutes or so, I'm going to stop trying to "keep up" with everything in the world, and just pay attention to the way under my feet.  I'm not going to listen to anything, but the sounds of the world and the voices of my fellow pilgrims, I'm going to discard the little bubble of isolation that we spend so much time carefully maintaining, and be open to new places, people, and a journey that will lead me there and back again.
The next time I write this blog, I suspect, I will have some new things to talk about.
I may be a rather different person.
Here we go.

Peculiar Laws

If a man beats his male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies as a result, he must be punished, but he is not to be punished if the slave gets up after a day or two, since the slave is his property.

-Exodus 21: 20-21

So, yesterday I recommended that you read the rather extensive and peculiar collection of laws in Exodus and Leviticus.  Just out of curiosity, I went and started giving them a look, because I often find that I am challenged in my approach to Scripture when I start to wrestle with exactly what things like the above passage are supposed to do for us.
Not that it means anything in a scholarly analysis, but Exodus 20 is in fact the very core of the laws of Moses, the Decalogue (aka 10 commandments).  So the above injunction is not tucked away somewhere in the midst of miscellaneous laws it's right up next to the big boys.
There is something about this passage that I find rather troubling, but it's not the law itself.  See, I understand the historical context of this law.  I get that, in comparison to most of it's contemporary social codes, it's unusually humane.  It was considered an "inalienable right" of slave owners in most ancient cultures to abuse, rape and murder slaves more or less at will.  The Israelite legal code offered at least some limits on what was acceptable.  Slavery was simply a fact of life, and human society as a whole was several thousand years away from even beginning to have an inkling that owning people as property was, in fact, a rather abominable practice.  So hey, golf clap for the Chosen People, you're at least a little less savage than your neighbors.
What is really troubling to me is that many people, even now, insist on approaching Scripture as an infallible communication of God's will for humanity.  If you do not adjust the literal reading of Scripture to account for an entirely different set of mores and values, what do you have?
A mandate from God to own slaves?
Divine sanction of beating said slaves within an inch of their lives?
What this comes down to is a challenge to how we interpret Scripture.  Many people want to use Scripture as a tool to challenge the teaching of evolution in biology class, or to deny women equality in leadership within the church, or to claim that the earth is only 6000 years old.  All of which, in my humble opinion, are rather tragic misuses of the Holy text.
Which is a point that bears emphasis: the text is indeed Holy.  The laws are sacred, the rules are important, and I believe that God really is trying to call us to be better than we are.
God knows how to work with us in baby steps.  If we are barely out of the stone age and slavery is as ubiquitous as McDonald's, it would be of no avail to say: thou shalt not own slaves.  The only thing to do is to try and inspire the law givers to implement the most basic human rights for those who are unfortunate enough to be slaves (it's more than the shocking number of people who are enslaved today probably get).
So what does this mean for us?
It means that we ought to continue to take steps...
It means that the law, as a reflection of what God wants for humanity, should always challenge us to treat others better than the rules of our culture might otherwise demand. If our culture has abolished slavery as an institution, we shouldn't be satisfied with the bare minimum.  We ought to do everything in our power to resist other forms of enslavement and oppression and work for true justice.  You know, "love your neighbor as yourself..." someone really rather amazing said that, and it finally got included in the sequel to the Torah.
As people who follow that rather amazing someone, it is unbecoming when we fall back into strict legalism.  One of his most famous speeches challenges us repeatedly with the formula: "the law says ... but I say to you..."
I often find myself frustrated, disturbed or downright offended by some of the laws and how callous and merciless they seem, and then I remember that Jesus had some of the same issues.  That makes me feel better... and I no longer want to beat anyone with a rod.
That's why I like being a Christian.

All the News that's Disturbing Enough to Print

I don't often engage in the "What is the world coming to?" dialogue.  As a Pastor, I often have people try to bring me along for that ride, but I just don't find it particularly edifying, so I usually just mumble vague assent that indeed the latest "turn for the worse" really is shocking/horrifying/destestable, etc. etc. etc.
I'm not being dishonest.  The news really is undoubtedly grim.  There are really terrible things that happen each and every day.  Case in point: three women, abducted as teens and young adults, held captive by three men for almost ten years.  Ten years in which horrific, unthinkable things probably happened to them while they were mere yards away from neighbors who were going about their daily lives with no knowledge that those three young ladies were having nearly a decade of their lives brutally stolen from them.
Case in point: a teenager punches a soccer referee in the head for showing him a yellow card.  The referee was a 40-something father who was just trying to help out with rec-league soccer, he collapsed, went into a coma and died a week later... Because some hothead thought a game was more important than the most basic rules of civilization.
Case in point: some twisted guy up in Massachusetts, had plans to kidnap, rape and eat (that's right, cannibalize) children in a fully equipped dungeon in the basement of his suburban home.
Those are just things I saw today, headlined on my phone and stories on the TV news having lunch at Joe's house of noodles.

I would tell you that these sorts of events are harbingers of the doom of our civilization...
I would tell you that these sorts of things should cause you to lose faith in humanity...

But I'm not going to tell you any such thing.
Reality check: these sorts of terrible things have been happening for a very long time.  Seriously, read Exodus and Leviticus sometime, all those laws in there were made because someone had gone off the rails, and the leaders of God's chosen people felt they needed to clarify.  There are laws about how much you're allowed to beat your slaves and who and what you're allowed to have sex with, there are lots of laws about what to eat and how you should respond to someone who has a sore on their face.  There was a lot of time spent, putting a bit of a finer point on the broad precepts of the law, because apparently the people needed that to happen.
I'm not the first one to observe that the very way our news is reported tends to skew our perception of reality towards the macabre.  What gets reported is the horrific, the sensational, the prurient and the ridiculous.  Death, destruction and chaos; enough to fill the 24 hour news cycle.  Watch it long enough and you will surely come to the conclusion that our world has indeed gone to Hell in a bucket.

They don't report that several nurses were caring for elderly patients at the hospital with kindness and good humor.  I had to see that for myself.
They don't report that the waitress at the noodle house tried to understand one of our group's special dietary needs (gluten intolerance) enough to tell her that she would probably be okay to have a bowl of Pho.
They don't report any of the thousand-million nice, decent, ordinary, kind things that people do for one another without even thinking about it, every single day on this salubrious blue-green orb.
Even with all the malice and badness that goes on under the sun, the goodness could bury it in a second, but it very rarely gets on the news other than in the occasional puff-piece. In fact, the very term puff-piece belies our attitude about the good in the world: it doesn't matter.  The "real" news is the horror, the tragedy, and the trauma.  What we "need" to hear about are the sick, twisted and perverted, not the good, generous and kind.

I don't expect that the news is going to change very much.
So that leaves it on our shoulders.
We must be safe, but not afraid.
We must be vigilant, but not paranoid.
We must learn to work for the good, and not accept the bad as the status quo, because it's not.
The only way that is going to work is for us to see clearly that in the battle between good and evil: good is winning by an overwhelming margin, or we wouldn't be here.  Ghandi once said about loosing faith in humanity because of the evil of a few, "A few drops of filthy water does not make the ocean unclean, humanity is an ocean."
Today, or any day, when you are faced with what seems like a lot of filth and muck, just work on making your drop, as full of goodness, kindness, justice, mercy and love as you can.

Considering Necessity

I'm a couple of weeks out from making a pilgrimage on the Camino De Santiago over in Spain.  My mind has been occupied largely with the fairly mundane reality of what to pack.  As with most backpacking adventures, weight and bulk are of primary importance.  Since the trip involves an adventure with international air travel, careful consideration of my cargo is even more crucial.  I'm trying to get my mind around taking only what I really need for a week of walking, which I think is functioning as a rather bracing spiritual discipline in and of itself.  My penchant for gadgetry has been fulfilled with a few basics: a neat little camping towel, a solar charger/battery pack for my phone, new boots, some lightweight clothes, etc. But as I really consider what I want to carry for 120 km, I'm finding that the list is rather short.
Sometimes it is necessary to simplify.
But most of us won't really simplify unless it's absolutely necessary.
This journey is a small part of a larger journey for me.  I've been getting in shape by walking: I've been managing my blood sugar, losing weight, generally feeling better about myself because I can walk up hill without huffing and puffing.  I'm not really worried about the physical challenge of the Camino, though I'm sure that I'm probably underestimating the difficulty of walking between 6-8 hours a day.  What I'm really mulling over right now is the spiritual challenge of letting go.  Right now, I am having trouble imagining the trip beyond the logistics, beyond the rather daunting discomfort of an 8 hour flight, beyond the packing lists and travel arrangements.
I really want to get to the place where my feet are on the Camino, underneath the big blue Spanish sky.
I know plans are necessary to get to that point.
I know that careful consideration of what I take will lighten the load on my shoulders.
What I really hope to leave behind on this trip is a lot of the baggage I'm carrying around in my head and in my heart, because I really don't need that.

Reality Bites

Reality is like that Lego that your kids left in the middle of the hallway: you might wish that your children were more responsible, you might wish you didn't have to go pee at 2:00 AM, you might wish that you weren't barefoot, but when you step on the Lego, all those wishes come to naught.  I have had several conversations recently about how we can sometimes get so caught up wishing things were different that we become utterly unable to make positive changes in how things are.  Often the first step in overcoming a crisis is breaking out of the mental inertia that wants to insist that everything is fine and dandy.  Thus, most of  us live life in some form of denial, because reality is rather unpleasant.
When a crisis presents itself, you have two choices: stay the course, or make a change.  Sometimes, especially if you happen to be British, staying the course is the way to go.  Other times, and this is more or less the American way, it's time to come up with some new solution.  Neither one of these approaches is foolproof, and the relative merits of either approach is largely dependent on the reality of the crisis.
In either instance, the effectiveness of your response will depend greatly on how accurately you have assessed the reality.  Scientific types would lead you to believe that this is simply a matter of gathering data and "crunching the numbers."  Because they have this illusion that their particular sort of data collection and information synthesis is "objective," meaning without the bias and imperfection of more subjective forms of judgment.
This would be wonderful if it were true, however, the reality is that, earthquakes, hurricanes and catastrophic meteor collisions aside, most of our profound crises are human in origin.  And humans are a tangled mess of emotions, beliefs, psychoses, neuroses and general messiness.  We are decidedly subjective snarls of prejudice and false assumptions, of which are largely unaware.  Failure to adequately compensate for this reality is exceedingly hazardous.
While it is important to try and grasp reality with all the tools available to you, it is important to remember that you will never be able to grasp total reality.  It is tempting to think that somehow you could access the power of seeing things completely, but you never will.  Thus it is always possible that we will step on that Lego in the middle of the night, unless we get rid of our lousy, sloppy children and all their infernal toys.
Life is messy, but it is life.

Freedom in Anxiety

One could call man's freedom "freedom in anxiety" or "anxious freedom."

-Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology II

Every once in a while I get an itch to get into some nice, dense theology.  It's usually inspired by something particular: today it is anxiety.  There are obvious acute anxieties: illnesses, death, major life transitions, conflicts within the congregation and a fairly long list of other anxiety producing events.  However, there is another sort of anxiety that generally afflicts us on an existential level, that rarely gets any airtime outside of theological/philosophical discussions.  Tillich notes that, "through Soren Kierkegaard," the Danish word Angst, "has become a central concept of existentialism."

However, I think that angst, has become something that we generally associate with adolescent alienation more than an actual "grown up" struggle.  This is a rather keen example of how overusing a word can warp it's actual meaning.  What Tillich describes, and what Kierkegaard was always going on about is the essential nature of our being as "fallen" creatures.  We have been given awareness of infinity and yet are confronted with our finitude: "(God) has set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end." (Eccl. 3: 11)

Thousands of years before Kierkegaard or Tillich, Quoheleth knew angst, he defined and described "anxious freedom."  What the "wise" have always known is that this condition is a result of our estrangement from God.  That is what led me to Tillich this afternoon, estrangement, his favorite word for our "fallen" condition.  It's a much better word than separation.

If I were to say that my wife and I are separated, meaning that I am at my office and she is at our home, unless I supplied the context, people would assume that we were in fact estranged and in the process of getting a divorce.

Estrangement is a spiritual condition.

It is a spiritual condition that produces anxiety.

Separation can be the physical manifestation of a spiritual condition, it can be a way to attempt to resolve the anxiety created by estrangement.

The problem that we face is, depending on your theological perspective, you cannot actually separate from God, because God is the essence of all that is, God is being itself.  If you separate from the essence of all that is you become nothing.

Fortunately for us, God gives us the freedom to be estranged without having our state of being absorbed into the void.  Our awareness of that estrangement is the thing that keeps us in that rather tenuous balance between complete oneness with God and being lost in nothingness.

Kierkegaard and Tillich alike recognize how precarious our situation really is.  Tillich cautions us against hubris, which he defines as "elevation of self," rather than simple "pride."  Hubris, is the fatal flaw in many general systems of thought devised by brilliant humans, because of our "greatness" we are in danger of building spurious platforms that put us (or so we think) on equal footing with God.  Hubris is what allows us to brazenly declare that God is dead, or that God does not exist, or that we have no need of God any longer.  All attitudes which primarily serve to deepen our estrangement from God and increase our anxiety.

Oddly enough, hyper-theologizing can cause the same effect, when we think "too much" about God our anxiety can go into overdrive.  When we focus on the obvious symptoms of our estrangement, which we call sin, we can become anxious that God's wrath is certainly about to strike down upon us.

Take another look at the Gospels and notice how many times Jesus told people not to be worried, not to be afraid, to lay their burdens down and trust in God.  It's all over the place.  He was trying to help people deal with the anxiety that estrangement produces.

Rather than taking away our freedom, Christ gives us a way to deal with the angst created by our estrangement: a liberal application of mercy and grace, a demonstration that God's love can conquer our seemingly intractable existential dilemma.