Syria... here we go again. Apparently the word quagmire has not had enough use in the last decade. And the US of A is poised to pin on the tin star of world's sheriff once again and go riding to the rescue. And we probably should, because chemical weapons are nasty and even the war mongers of the 20th century pretty much agreed we shouldn't use them, except for things like Agent Orange, which wasn't technically a weapon because Monsanto said it wasn't, but I digress.
The thing that's so darn frustrating about all this is that we've been on this ride, pretty much constantly, for over 12 years. It goes like this: there's a bad guy, or group of bad guys, and when I say bad, I mean bad, I don't mean objectively good or even ambivalent, but just bad from an American perspective, I mean bad in the sense that the people who look like them and share their geography and culture also think they're bad: the Taliban/Al Qaeda, Saddam Hussein/ actually not Al Quaeda, and now Bashar Assad / about three dozen rebel groups that may or may not be worse than Al Quaeda.
We've been sort of crossing our fingers and hoping that Syria would play out like Egypt or even Libya, where the people would overthrow their own dictator, but it's not working out. On top of that Egypt, Libya and especially Iraq have taught us that power vacuums don't always get filled by the good guys, maybe they've even taught us that there really aren't any good guys, or perhaps rather that power, especially the kind of power that is generally associated with the Middle East and North Africa, is rather adept at corrupting people. Actually, I don't really know what we've learned from the whole mess and I guess that's sort of the problem.
We haven't learned that we can't fix what's wrong in the Middle East with bombs and troops. There's a whole sub-branch of ethics that deals with something called Just War theory, which accepts the reality that violence is sometimes necessary, but prescribes rather narrow and specific parameters that define when that sometimes is now. A summary of the rules is as follows (From Biblical Ethics and Social Change, S.C. Mott):
1.The cause must be just.
2. It is the last resort.
3. Force is used by a lawful public authority
4. There is a reasonable hope of victory
5. There is a due proportion between the good that may probably be accomplished and the probable evil effect.
6. The action/war is rightly conducted through the use of right means.
These rules require quite a bit of unpacking and thought to fully wrap your mind around them, however, you don't have to go very deep to see that most of our modern conflicts have violated one, and most often several, of the "rules" of just war theory. Numbers 5 and 6 are particularly troublesome, as most definitions of "right means" abhor the massive collateral damage that is inevitable in large scale aerial bombing. Sometimes the definition of "right means" is wrongly brought into conflict with the cost-benefit analysis that is required by number five. Five is not meant to abnegate the responsibilities of six, it is a different consideration entirely. "Probable evil effect," is mostly thought of in terms of the casualties of war, in terms of injuries and deaths among combatants and the destruction of property. The death of a soldier is one thing, the death of an innocent child is another ethical category altogether. People had started to examine these premises concerning warfare well before the death of women, children and other bystanders became in any sense "inevitable," and it is that inevitability in modern warfare that perhaps gives the final blow to the idea that war can be justified.
Another reality we have not grasped is that, even if our cause is just, even if we fulfill the requirements and act with complete honor and adhere to the codes of battle, the people we have just "rescued" will probably not be in the slightest bit happy to see us. There is deep anti-American sentiment in that part of the world, largely thanks to the fact that we have been meddling in their business for decades with rather blatant self interest and not always the best or wisest tactics. We are rather ill suited to play the sheriff in other words, because the townspeople hate us. It's like when the crooked cattle baron has bought off the law and the sheriff's in his pocket. Well, it's not too hard to change cattle for oil, and the old west for the Middle East in this little metaphor, and it's not too hard to see that we might very well be a villain, even if we have the right intentions.
Evil works that way sometimes... actually it pretty much works that way all the time.
Friday, August 30, 2013
Thursday, August 29, 2013
Whys and Wherefores
The old saying goes: sometimes it's hard to see the forest for the trees, but it's also true that you can see the forest and forget that it's a complex system of living creatures that includes individual trees, animals, fungi, and thousands of different sorts of micro-organisms, all contributing to the "big picture." In the ongoing dialogue that I have been tracking on the interwebs, some people have come around to asking a rather poignant question: do we need church?
While it may trigger some immediate negative responses among those who have found real value in a religious community, the question is valid all the same, and I think we, who are invested and intend to continue to invest in church, would do well to give some consideration. Why do we need church? Most of us trees in the forest will immediately leap to talking about spiritual matters, how our faith gives shape and meaning to our lives, but we will begin to equivocate when it comes to offering some justification of the physical institution of the church. We feel a little guilty about our big fancy buildings and paid staff, we feel a little more guilty about our bureaucracies and hierarchies, we are downright sullen when it comes to considering all the ways that the actual human form of the body of Christ so often fails to glorify it's head.
And yet, somehow, in God's ineffable nature, there is no plan B.
Jesus did not say to his disciples: "try your best, but if this doesn't work out we'll go back to the drawing board." In fact, it is a reality of the covenant with Noah, symbolized by a rainbow after the flood that God is done going back to the drawing board. In the Incarnation, which is at the center of Christianity, God has committed to a plan of action that is rather foolproof, meaning that human brokenness and sin can no longer mess it up.
We would do well to remember that, as we consider whether there is a place in the current world for religion, and the institutional expressions of humanity's quest for God. Each tree in the forest might feel as though it has no need to be connected to the larger ecosystem, but that feeling is not a reality. Feeling independent and disconnected only proves that the individual does not understand their place in the ecosystem. They may think that they do not need the other trees, they may think they can stand alone, but they are forgetting the millions of microbes that break down nutrients to be used by their roots, they are forgetting their ancestry that planted the seeds, they are forgetting the birds and critters that might have played a part in their existence.
I have read several individual, therefore consumer-based, analyses of the question: do we need church (or religion in general)? What I have not seen is a "ecological" analysis of the question. Of course, I cannot begin to offer an "objective" framework, because I believe that the forest has a specific purpose, and is designed rather elegantly and graciously to be something particular, and moreover that the One who is behind that plan and purpose, has built in to the creations an inherent drive to seek the Creator.
Many religions seek a higher reality, but the specifically Christian understanding of God, tells us that that higher reality is also seeking us. In fact, the God who reaches out offering to be understood by creation is a rather important theological assumption.
Anyone who has engaged in a journey of faith will be aware that God certainly does not extend handfuls of easy answers, and I think searching for philosopher's stones and holy grails is a rather pagan pursuit at it's core. The place of theology and religion is not in finding one secret, but in appreciating the mysteries and the wonders that exist everywhere (which is why the perceived conflict between science and faith is a stupid thing, but that's for another day). Pantheists sometimes come very near to the truth, but they misapprehend the mechanics. God is present in everything, but not everything is God. The fingerprints of the creator are in the soil and the roots as well as the leaves and the branches, and the breath of God moves over the face of the deep, but the understanding and appreciation of that fact has been left to humans.
And that's why we need the church, because to start from ground zero, imperfect and self centered as we are, we would never begin to appreciate the deep mysteries of God's revelation. The traditions of the church, even though they may seem stodgy, antiquated and sometimes misguided, are like the textbooks that tell us of the discoveries made by those before us. Just like a high school chemistry student is not required to re-discover Bohr's law or Planck's constant in order to apprehend their effect on reality, so we are able to stand on the shoulders of giants and learn more and new things about God, year after year, century after century.
It is certainly valid to ask questions. Deconstruct away, but be a responsible forester, and don't just slash and burn, you may lose something valuable and irreplaceable. Do you understand the collective "spiritual ecosystem" well enough to be sure that we just don't need God? Or that we should just stop looking? Or that worship of something greater than ourselves is not important?
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
Paradigm Shifts
Sometimes it's good to know you're not alone. People who are suffering through hard times often need to know that there is someone else there with them. Sometimes, as in the case of a lot of country and blues songs, just hearing a ballad about someone else having problems can soothe your angst. Germans call it schadenfreude: rejoicing at the misfortune of others, I love Germans they've got words for just about every twisted impulse of the human soul.
Thus it is with some glee that I observe other large institutions having the same sorts of problems adapting to the world as the church. Especially, since one of the institutions is one of the biggest idols of the modern age: television.
Recently, a dispute between Time Warner and CBS caused certain cable systems to black out CBS's coverage of the US Open Golf Tournament. Oh the tragedy! Just imagine all those traumatized golf fans having to miss out on the drama... or they could just go on the interwebs and follow/watch there. Which brings me to the subject of paradigm shifts. There have been a lot of them over the centuries: hunter-gatherer to agrarian, agrarian to industrial, analog to digital etc. However those shifts seem to be happening faster these days, and we barely have time to amass a decent collection of DVD's before Blue Ray comes along and sends us into a new binge of consumerism.
Big, ponderous institutions like the church, and TV networks, have some trouble adapting to changes that come on quickly. Some have credited the invention of the printing press with starting the protestant reformation; the Roman Catholic Church, by virtue of being the only ones with access to expensive, hand copied Bibles, had virtually cornered the market on the Word of God, then Gutenberg's little stampy thing gave certain industrious folk the ability to mass produce the whole thing and then distribute it to every Tom, Dick and Harry who could read. Then it started to get translated into other languages by ne'er do wells like Erasmus and Martin Luther, and people seemed to like it. They liked to read all these stories they had heard so much about, but it created a certain problem for the Church, because apparently they had grown attached to doing a bunch of things that weren't in the book.
This oversimplifies the situation quite a bit, but it illustrates the danger of ignoring or underestimating paradigm shifts: there comes a point when a lot of people will see behind the curtain and realize that they don't have to buy your nonsense any more. Oligopolies like Time Warner do not like it when people knock over their sandcastles and they will go so far as to lobby for actual laws that protect their hegemony. There are many such laws that "protect" those poor, vulnerable, global media conglomerates from all those nasty people who want to take their stuff away.
Funny thing about the interwebs though; they were more or less started by people who didn't much care for rules. Contrary to popular belief, notorious stuffy white guy Al Gore did not invent the internet. It was rather a collective of scruffy nerds who would rather spend hours on things called BBS's arguing about whether Han shot first or playing D&D with people in Turkey, or chatting with people they thought were girls, but were probably not. When the digital infrastructure improved to the point where it could handle graphics and sound, pornography took over and pretty much ensures that the interweb will always be a thing.
Meanwhile, in the "real" world, other people started discovering the non-pornographic potential of the internet. Amazon, Facebook (which is really just a BBS updated and used by a bajillion people), and Google have become forces of nature. The free exchange of so much data eventually gave people the idea that they could just share stuff, and thus get things for free. Napster was the first big fish in that pond and it wasn't too long before someone, namely the heavy metal band Metallica, started crying foul.
Now, as a child of the punk/heavy metal era, and as someone who once owned an astonishing collection of copied cassette tapes, piracy is sort of a way of life. When I went to a Metallica concert in high school, part of the appeal was that they were dark and bad and angry, to have them all of the sudden become spokesman for the recording industry and start whining about how these nasty file sharing villains causing them to have to sleep on smaller piles of cash, I was a bit disappointed. Napster was like shangri la to a music loving twenty something with no money and a high speed internet connection.
I understand that artists are entitled to make a living, rather than just giving their stuff away, but the regulation of file sharing just basically gave big media conglomerates a way to get their fingers in more pies. I really don't think that it did any good for the struggling musicians out busting their butts to make a living. It did, however, mean that Lars Ulrich got even richer and Time Warner (there that man again) got even more richer.
At this point you're probably wondering how I got from Gutenberg and the reformation to Napster and Metallica via computer nerds and porn, see how disorienting paradigm shifts can be?
Imagine then, if you're an institution that has experienced major success in an old paradigm, whether we're talking about the RC church in the middle ages or Time Warner in more recent years. All of the sudden it seems like people are increasingly suspicious of your motives, when all you want to do is keep them out of hell/ offer them quality family entertainment, which are pretty much moral equivalents.
Alright, let me take my tongue out of my cheek now, because I could really go on being sarcastic about the corporatocracy for quite a while. What I want to say about all this is that everything changes, except human nature. No matter how awesome our technology gets, someone is always going to figure out how to get insanely rich off of the next new thing. Unless we get to a point where we cross the Star Trek line, where humanity finally decides to get it's act together, scrap the whole use of currency and pool our resources to start building awesome spaceships, we will always have to deal with the old gods and idols making a ruckus about the new gods and idols moving into their turf.
Actually, that's rather more amusing than watching Tiger Woods lose another major isn't it?
Thus it is with some glee that I observe other large institutions having the same sorts of problems adapting to the world as the church. Especially, since one of the institutions is one of the biggest idols of the modern age: television.
Recently, a dispute between Time Warner and CBS caused certain cable systems to black out CBS's coverage of the US Open Golf Tournament. Oh the tragedy! Just imagine all those traumatized golf fans having to miss out on the drama... or they could just go on the interwebs and follow/watch there. Which brings me to the subject of paradigm shifts. There have been a lot of them over the centuries: hunter-gatherer to agrarian, agrarian to industrial, analog to digital etc. However those shifts seem to be happening faster these days, and we barely have time to amass a decent collection of DVD's before Blue Ray comes along and sends us into a new binge of consumerism.
Big, ponderous institutions like the church, and TV networks, have some trouble adapting to changes that come on quickly. Some have credited the invention of the printing press with starting the protestant reformation; the Roman Catholic Church, by virtue of being the only ones with access to expensive, hand copied Bibles, had virtually cornered the market on the Word of God, then Gutenberg's little stampy thing gave certain industrious folk the ability to mass produce the whole thing and then distribute it to every Tom, Dick and Harry who could read. Then it started to get translated into other languages by ne'er do wells like Erasmus and Martin Luther, and people seemed to like it. They liked to read all these stories they had heard so much about, but it created a certain problem for the Church, because apparently they had grown attached to doing a bunch of things that weren't in the book.
This oversimplifies the situation quite a bit, but it illustrates the danger of ignoring or underestimating paradigm shifts: there comes a point when a lot of people will see behind the curtain and realize that they don't have to buy your nonsense any more. Oligopolies like Time Warner do not like it when people knock over their sandcastles and they will go so far as to lobby for actual laws that protect their hegemony. There are many such laws that "protect" those poor, vulnerable, global media conglomerates from all those nasty people who want to take their stuff away.
Funny thing about the interwebs though; they were more or less started by people who didn't much care for rules. Contrary to popular belief, notorious stuffy white guy Al Gore did not invent the internet. It was rather a collective of scruffy nerds who would rather spend hours on things called BBS's arguing about whether Han shot first or playing D&D with people in Turkey, or chatting with people they thought were girls, but were probably not. When the digital infrastructure improved to the point where it could handle graphics and sound, pornography took over and pretty much ensures that the interweb will always be a thing.
Meanwhile, in the "real" world, other people started discovering the non-pornographic potential of the internet. Amazon, Facebook (which is really just a BBS updated and used by a bajillion people), and Google have become forces of nature. The free exchange of so much data eventually gave people the idea that they could just share stuff, and thus get things for free. Napster was the first big fish in that pond and it wasn't too long before someone, namely the heavy metal band Metallica, started crying foul.
Now, as a child of the punk/heavy metal era, and as someone who once owned an astonishing collection of copied cassette tapes, piracy is sort of a way of life. When I went to a Metallica concert in high school, part of the appeal was that they were dark and bad and angry, to have them all of the sudden become spokesman for the recording industry and start whining about how these nasty file sharing villains causing them to have to sleep on smaller piles of cash, I was a bit disappointed. Napster was like shangri la to a music loving twenty something with no money and a high speed internet connection.
I understand that artists are entitled to make a living, rather than just giving their stuff away, but the regulation of file sharing just basically gave big media conglomerates a way to get their fingers in more pies. I really don't think that it did any good for the struggling musicians out busting their butts to make a living. It did, however, mean that Lars Ulrich got even richer and Time Warner (there that man again) got even more richer.
At this point you're probably wondering how I got from Gutenberg and the reformation to Napster and Metallica via computer nerds and porn, see how disorienting paradigm shifts can be?
Imagine then, if you're an institution that has experienced major success in an old paradigm, whether we're talking about the RC church in the middle ages or Time Warner in more recent years. All of the sudden it seems like people are increasingly suspicious of your motives, when all you want to do is keep them out of hell/ offer them quality family entertainment, which are pretty much moral equivalents.
Alright, let me take my tongue out of my cheek now, because I could really go on being sarcastic about the corporatocracy for quite a while. What I want to say about all this is that everything changes, except human nature. No matter how awesome our technology gets, someone is always going to figure out how to get insanely rich off of the next new thing. Unless we get to a point where we cross the Star Trek line, where humanity finally decides to get it's act together, scrap the whole use of currency and pool our resources to start building awesome spaceships, we will always have to deal with the old gods and idols making a ruckus about the new gods and idols moving into their turf.
Actually, that's rather more amusing than watching Tiger Woods lose another major isn't it?
Thursday, August 22, 2013
The Love Supreme
And now, these three remain: faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love.
-1 Corinthians 13:13
I had a funeral this morning, I've got a wedding on Saturday and I've got a sermon on Sunday, and all three of them center somehow or other around love. That could not be a coincidence, even if there was such a thing. The wedding is pretty obvious, even if you're not using 1 Corinthians 13, you are still going to end up talking about love some way or another, but the other two came rather as a surprise. As I was talking about the resurrection, the thought occurred to me: why do we have to go through this? If we're really, truly destined for eternity, why bother with the whole mortality angle in the first place? Ecclesiastes 3: 11 says: "God has put eternity in the hearts of men, yet they cannot fathom what God has done from the beginning to the end." Quoheleth looks at the whole idea of eternity as a sort of cruel joke, a "burden" that God has placed on our hearts. Indeed our awareness of time and mortality does prescribe some limits to our lives and our ambitions.
Can you imagine if we had limitless time? Some fiction writers have spooled out the consequences for us, and usually it's not a pretty picture. That's why Paul says: "The mortal cannot inherit immortality..." The two things just don't jive; a temporary body, subject to age and decay would be rather a curse if there was no way out. I'm pretty sure I don't want to hang around this place forever, but I do have this craving, this sense of wanting to be somewhere, to be something, and that's eternity in my heart.
But eternity is not good in any a priori sense. For eternity to be heavenly and not hellish, love is required. Love that forgives sin, love that conquers death, love that makes the journey and even eternity worthwhile. Love is the reason God said, "let there be light," and it is also the reason why there is darkness. It is the reason that we care deeply for one another and the reason why we hurt so much when people we care about go away.
It's easy to get our wires crossed when it comes to God. Judging by behavior, you might think that the primary goal of people trying to know God is so that they can somehow get into the eternal party, but that's getting it all wrong. The reason we should get to know God is because of love, because of God's love for us, because of the fact that if we orient ourselves towards loving God, everything else falls into place rather more pleasantly. Faith and hope, which both make life more bearable and meaningful, are really just feeder streams to the river of divine love.
You can't force it, you can't grab a hold of it, it is something inherent in the fiber of the universe, it's what we're made for.
Love makes eternity bearable.
Love sparks our beginnings.
Love binds our lives together.
Love greets us at our end.
Love is for weddings, funerals and random Sundays. John says to the early church, "God is love," and that is really all you need. All you need is love, dah dah dah da dah.
Monday, August 19, 2013
Journeys
If it's worth the going,
It's worth the ride...
-Tom Waits, A Little Rain
The really interesting thing is that it has absolutely nothing to do with the destination, it's the journey for which I yearn. I can still remember vividly the sights, sounds and smells of the Cathedral of St. James in Santiago, I'm not dreaming about getting there, I'm dreaming about being on the way there. I'm dreaming about the singularity of purpose that pilgrimage entails. I'm dreaming about the human pace and limitations of walking that I extolled in my previous post. I'm dreaming about little chapels and wayside crosses and thousands of yellow arrows and scallop shells. I'm dreaming about the hardening of a body and the softening of a soul, wearing out boots and renewing my spirit.
When I got back from Spain at the end of May, I sort of figured that I would be processing and summarizing things for a few months. I didn't really count on feeling this pull to go back, like there is unfinished business. I partially blame my Dad, he's even more wound up than me, but it's not just his enthusiasm rubbing off on me. It's the nature of pilgrimage. We met an older man from Australia on the train platform headed back to Madrid, he had just finished the Portuguese Camino, and he had done the French Camino two years before that and he was already planning another trip two years from now, which means I might run into him again. The point is that this happens to a lot of people, they go once and it's just not enough, it gets in their blood like it has gotten into mine.
It's an infection, but it's not bad, it feels healthy, it feels like life has a direction.
It makes me wish I had discovered this twenty years ago.
It makes me want to tell people about it.
It's in danger of making me the sort of annoying proponent of an idea that you would dread getting stuck with in a corner at a party. It's rather fortunate for everyone that I'm as much of an introvert as I am, which predisposes me not to corner people at parties, or rather, not to go to parties in the first place.
It has reminded me of the feeling that I had when I first came to real, adult faith in Jesus Christ, and I think that is perhaps the biggest pull of the whole thing. As a discipline, it is a physical analog for a spiritual experience, and thus it becomes a sacred journey.
I feel like it has become, and should continue to be, a part of my life. A reminder that life is a journey, for me a journey towards God, along the path of Christian discipleship. It's worth the sacrifice and the discipline, the struggles and the climbs, but not just because of the destination. That's a theological truth that I had been sensing since Seminary and has finally been driven home with the sledgehammer of pilgrimage: the life of faith is not just about the destination it's about the journey.
I am increasingly saddened by the sort of approach to faith, all too prevalent in modern Christianity, which emphasizes the destination, not because it's wrong, or because I don't believe in Heaven and eternal life, but because it's just not all there is, because eternity starts now. Our journey towards God is the most important movement of our existence, why wait until you die to start?
Thursday, August 15, 2013
Walking
A couple of years ago my doctor told me I had diabetes. It wasn't out of control, I wasn't really having many symptoms and, as it turns out, I have been able to control it by watching my carbohydrate intake and walking, a lot of walking. My relationship with walking had a rough start, it was the middle of the summer, it was stinking hot, I put on my mp3 player and went up onto the old railroad bed above my house with my dog and I started walking, and sweating, and trudging up hills and waddling down, and counting the steps until I was done and could sit down. After a few days I noticed that the steps were getting easier, the hills getting less traumatic, the time spent seeming more pleasant. After a month, I could jog a little, but not too much because I want to stay on speaking terms with my knees. After a year, I started to seek out hills rather than avoiding them. After two years, I went on a pilgrimage to Santiago and walked 75 miles in four days, God willing, after two more years I'm going to go back and walk over 500 miles, and maybe a few years after that I'm going to walk it again, I don't know.
But I do know that I love walking, and not just because I have to, not just because it has saved me from insulin injections and gotten me into smaller pants. I love it for the thing itself. I love having my feet on the ground and having to pay attention to the weather and the ground under my feet. I love the pace, where you can notice things around you and talk to people with you. I haven't put my mp3 player on in months, I listen to the birds, or my wife, or my kids.
On a beautiful day like today, I think I could just walk forever. In fact, that's one of things that draws me to things like the Camino de Santiago or the Appalachian Trail, the idea that all you have to do, all day, every day, is just walk. Maybe that seems like work to some, maybe it seems like torture to others, but to me it seems like shangri-la.
As much as I like my cars, as much as I "need" my cars, I also have this little voice that sings a delightful song of what the world would be like without them. I don't mean just that I didn't have one, rather I mean that no one did, that the entire nature of our society was changed back to a world that was governed by the distance one could reasonably walk. Where pleasant footpaths replaced crowded bands of asphalt and you actually had to talk to your neighbors as you went about your business.
Maybe I've just been immersed in too much Tolkien, but I seriously wonder whether all this range and so-called freedom we enjoy in the world of the automobile is honestly making people happier and healthier. I think of Huxley's dystopian vision of A Brave New World, quite a bit. In the end it seems he was much more correct than Orwell about exactly how things were going to go awry: medication, entertainment and mechanization, have become our oppressors rather than a totalitarian state and endless war. For Ford's sake, he even used the inventor of the mass produced automobile to replace God, it's just eerie.
Walking is an act of rebellion against the machine. It reminds me, if only for a short time each day, what human beings are made for, how we're supposed to move through the world, how we're supposed to pay attention to things rather than just whiz right by them.
I started walking because it is good for my body.
I keep walking because it is good for my soul.
But I do know that I love walking, and not just because I have to, not just because it has saved me from insulin injections and gotten me into smaller pants. I love it for the thing itself. I love having my feet on the ground and having to pay attention to the weather and the ground under my feet. I love the pace, where you can notice things around you and talk to people with you. I haven't put my mp3 player on in months, I listen to the birds, or my wife, or my kids.
On a beautiful day like today, I think I could just walk forever. In fact, that's one of things that draws me to things like the Camino de Santiago or the Appalachian Trail, the idea that all you have to do, all day, every day, is just walk. Maybe that seems like work to some, maybe it seems like torture to others, but to me it seems like shangri-la.
As much as I like my cars, as much as I "need" my cars, I also have this little voice that sings a delightful song of what the world would be like without them. I don't mean just that I didn't have one, rather I mean that no one did, that the entire nature of our society was changed back to a world that was governed by the distance one could reasonably walk. Where pleasant footpaths replaced crowded bands of asphalt and you actually had to talk to your neighbors as you went about your business.
Maybe I've just been immersed in too much Tolkien, but I seriously wonder whether all this range and so-called freedom we enjoy in the world of the automobile is honestly making people happier and healthier. I think of Huxley's dystopian vision of A Brave New World, quite a bit. In the end it seems he was much more correct than Orwell about exactly how things were going to go awry: medication, entertainment and mechanization, have become our oppressors rather than a totalitarian state and endless war. For Ford's sake, he even used the inventor of the mass produced automobile to replace God, it's just eerie.
Walking is an act of rebellion against the machine. It reminds me, if only for a short time each day, what human beings are made for, how we're supposed to move through the world, how we're supposed to pay attention to things rather than just whiz right by them.
I started walking because it is good for my body.
I keep walking because it is good for my soul.
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Fear and Loathing in Government
I am not a hard person to please. I feel like I have an appreciation for people who try their best and make a sincere effort. When my kids bring me an object of self-created art, I do not critique their form (sometimes their spelling, but only for didactic purposes), I accept, appreciate and value what they have done. As a Pastor, when someone has an idea, a talent or a passion for some project, I usually say "go for it," and I consciously avoid trying to micromanage them out of the picture. I am pretty easy-going, by no means a perfectionist and I generally appreciate the grace that abounds when people bring different talents to the table.
That being said, if my children were in the United States Congress I would send them to bed without dinner (not something I have ever done to Jack or Cate by the way). No one ever said democracy was an easy thing, and so I don't expect miracles, but a reasonable expectation might be to actually do something (like pass a budget so that important programs don't get hamstrung). If Congress was the Session (the local governing board of a Presbyterian church) of a congregation where I was the pastor we would be going on a retreat so that we could learn to act like grown-ups.
I'm no political expert, CNN isn't calling me up asking for my opinion on much of anything, but from a distance I recognize a system that is gridlocked by fear and loathing. Right now, the balance of power is such that idealogues on both sides of the aisle can basically hold the whole assembly hostage. That is a sign of institutional disease, a cancer of the system. The framers of our Constitution created a system of checks and balances so that something as easily manipulated as a simple majority could get very little accomplished. Which is a good idea when the "ideal" society you envision is basically a confederation of wealthy, land-owning, white men. In that case you all understand each other and can usually come to mutually agreeable compromises.
As of right now, the rich, white guys are still in charge, but they're scared, because the nation they are trying to govern is rather different than the homogeneous agrarian society that produced our esteemed Constitution. Frightened people generally do one of two things: fight or flight. Congress is not going to run away, because they're too rich and too powerful, so they're going to fight. Who are they going to fight? Each other? Maybe a little, but they've sort of got an understanding among themselves, they're all in the club and they have a vested interest in the gravy train not stopping or even slowing down.
Corporations and rich folk line their pockets come election time, and so they're not going to want to go after the CEO's at JP Morgan unless they absolutely have no choice (which consequently tells you how really bad things have gotten).
No they're not going to go after their fellow rich, white guys. They're going to basically use the poor and the middle class and the aliens in our midst as the battleground, and they're going to make sure that we sustain the most collateral damage. They're going to assuage their fear by stoking ours, they're going to promise us that they know how we can join their club, but they're going to take away any real chance that we can do it.
The Prophet Isaiah says this: "Woe to you who add house to house, and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land." And that's not actually an isolated sentiment, it's a rather large theme in the Hebrew Scriptures and in Jesus' teaching: if you take everything for yourself and don't leave enough for the weaker, more vulnerable people in your world, God is not going to be happy with you.
I don't often talk about who God is going to be angry with, but I'm pretty sure he's going to be angry with people who were immensely successful and didn't use their blessings for the good of the world. I'm pretty sure God will not be smiling on those who gain wealth, power and influence and then begin stepping on those they should be treating as neighbors.
What then should we say about people who were elected "democratically," who refuse to think about the best interest of the "common man?"
What should we say about those we have trusted with the duty of leading our society, who then refuse to make the simple decisions and implement the most common sense measures to improve our nation?
I suppose, in the final analysis, what should we say about a nation of people who re-elect them year after year?
That being said, if my children were in the United States Congress I would send them to bed without dinner (not something I have ever done to Jack or Cate by the way). No one ever said democracy was an easy thing, and so I don't expect miracles, but a reasonable expectation might be to actually do something (like pass a budget so that important programs don't get hamstrung). If Congress was the Session (the local governing board of a Presbyterian church) of a congregation where I was the pastor we would be going on a retreat so that we could learn to act like grown-ups.
I'm no political expert, CNN isn't calling me up asking for my opinion on much of anything, but from a distance I recognize a system that is gridlocked by fear and loathing. Right now, the balance of power is such that idealogues on both sides of the aisle can basically hold the whole assembly hostage. That is a sign of institutional disease, a cancer of the system. The framers of our Constitution created a system of checks and balances so that something as easily manipulated as a simple majority could get very little accomplished. Which is a good idea when the "ideal" society you envision is basically a confederation of wealthy, land-owning, white men. In that case you all understand each other and can usually come to mutually agreeable compromises.
As of right now, the rich, white guys are still in charge, but they're scared, because the nation they are trying to govern is rather different than the homogeneous agrarian society that produced our esteemed Constitution. Frightened people generally do one of two things: fight or flight. Congress is not going to run away, because they're too rich and too powerful, so they're going to fight. Who are they going to fight? Each other? Maybe a little, but they've sort of got an understanding among themselves, they're all in the club and they have a vested interest in the gravy train not stopping or even slowing down.
Corporations and rich folk line their pockets come election time, and so they're not going to want to go after the CEO's at JP Morgan unless they absolutely have no choice (which consequently tells you how really bad things have gotten).
No they're not going to go after their fellow rich, white guys. They're going to basically use the poor and the middle class and the aliens in our midst as the battleground, and they're going to make sure that we sustain the most collateral damage. They're going to assuage their fear by stoking ours, they're going to promise us that they know how we can join their club, but they're going to take away any real chance that we can do it.
The Prophet Isaiah says this: "Woe to you who add house to house, and join field to field till no space is left and you live alone in the land." And that's not actually an isolated sentiment, it's a rather large theme in the Hebrew Scriptures and in Jesus' teaching: if you take everything for yourself and don't leave enough for the weaker, more vulnerable people in your world, God is not going to be happy with you.
I don't often talk about who God is going to be angry with, but I'm pretty sure he's going to be angry with people who were immensely successful and didn't use their blessings for the good of the world. I'm pretty sure God will not be smiling on those who gain wealth, power and influence and then begin stepping on those they should be treating as neighbors.
What then should we say about people who were elected "democratically," who refuse to think about the best interest of the "common man?"
What should we say about those we have trusted with the duty of leading our society, who then refuse to make the simple decisions and implement the most common sense measures to improve our nation?
I suppose, in the final analysis, what should we say about a nation of people who re-elect them year after year?
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