On the Brink...

Perhaps it's the tryptophan, perhaps it's just the pure saturation of "think pieces" concerning the Mike Brown/ Darren Wilson grand jury/ latest round of Ferguson protests, but I'm having a moment of sleepy hopefulness.  I know, it seems weird because: injustice, riots, broken system, dead kids, crooked prosecutors, hapless (and very white) police officer, and a whole slew of absolutely abhorrent hate-itude from both sides on the social media, but I feel like there's a moment coming here, a moment that was probably too narrowly avoided in the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict.
Call it a reckoning.
Call it the chickens coming home to roost as Malcolm X did.
But notice, please, that this is much more of a Malcolm X sort of moment than it is a Martin Luther King moment.  As much as I hope the cooler heads prevail here, as much as I hope that non-violence wins the day, I also hope the protests and the outrage over the events of the past six months don't just fade into the background.
This racial injustice issue needs to stay on our front burners.  We need to talk about this, we need to stop building walls of ignorance that allow us to write off what is happening in Ferguson and around the country as lawlessness.  Sure there are looters and people who may just be out to break some things and watch the world burn, but we need to keep perspective.  We need to recognize that these are protests at the core.
This is chemotherapy for the cancerous injustice that has once again reared it's head in our nation.  There are some pretty stiff side effects, but that doesn't mean we need to stop the treatment.  It is pretty clear to me right now that we have finally begun to notice how sick we really are.  We are looking at this whole mess and finding that the tumor is not contained as neatly as we would like.  We are seeing a couple of African American teens in a poor section of town, en route from basically robbing a convenience store, being confronted by a police officer, not because of their recent miscreant behavior, but because of basically jaywalking.  The officer is rude and forceful, the boys are belligerent and possibly violent, but the officer has a gun, and when you bring fists to a gun fight, you have made a tactical error.  Violence gets out of control quickly, and a young man is dead.  The system then springs into action, not to bring justice, but to basically exonerate the guilty, to make excuses, to explain away the dead black man in the street.
No matter whether you believe Wilson or whether you believe any of the other possible scenarios, this is a story we have seen far too often before.  The truth is never told, justice is reckoned by a system that can only be seen as unjust from the perspective of the victims.
And most of us don't know what to think.  White, wealthy America retreats into an introspective fog of privilege and "listening."  We're confused, we want someone to tell us what to do and what to think, but we're not going to challenge our police or our prosecutors, because mostly they protect us, they protect our interests, they make sure that Mike Brown and Trayvon Martin are not lurking around our neighborhoods or jaywalking down our streets or hustling our convenience stores.  We're not sure that all this anger is called for, because it's not the blood of our children on that street.
So we try to make some sort of balanced and thoughtful response, we assure the people who are suffering that we're on their side, but we probably won't do anything about it.
We probably wont use our voices and our votes to really try to fix the system, partly because we maybe don't think there's any difference between one politician, sheriff, DA or prosecutor and another.  But also because we want those people to ensure our safety, and to most of us young black men look dangerous.
You can probably tell I'm a little angry about this, but believe me I understand why it feels like it does on a pretty visceral level.  I have stood face to face with a black man, a kid I grew up with, and who had taken a very different path.  A man who had a gun when all I had was words.  A man who probably wouldn't have minded using the gun on someone.  Fortunately that day, he didn't really want to use the gun on me.  I wasn't the target, I was the mediator, but I couldn't say anything clever or thoughtful enough to convince him that violence wasn't the way.  Everything in his world told him that it was, that it was the only way to get respect.  In the end, I suspect the only thing that really kept something pretty horrible from happening that day was some long ago playground bond that a middle class white kid and a poor black kid once had.
It was what I would call a pretty intense situation, but what saved it was not anything clever I said, it was that I was able to invoke a relationship of some sort, I knew where he was coming from, I knew his brothers, I knew (sort of) where he was at the moment.  Do we train our police to understand the people they are called to protect and serve?  Or do we train them to out-violence criminals?
In the Zimmerman/Martin tragedy, I felt that the ultimate result was far from unavoidable.  As it turns out Zimmerman has proven to be a highly disturbed individual who never should have been out riding around as a vigilante.  In this case though, we are dealing with a police officer who had all sorts of training; training with a gun, training in "command presence," training in how to react to a threat.   I guess what I wonder is whether we require our police officers to get trained in empathy.  Do we train them in restraint?  Do we indoctrinate them with the spiderman doctrine: "with great power comes great responsibility?"  Do we train them at all to try and understand human nature?  Do we prepare them to enforce the law with something more powerful than a sidearm?  Do we teach them to wield their own humanity?  Or do we just hope that they'll figure that out for themselves?
In the wake of all this, there have been many anecdotal "good cop" stories, and I'm glad.  I know there are good cops out there, I know there are cops who find lost children and puppies.  I know there are cops out there who show great compassion to people having the worst day of their lives.  We need to help those cops do their thing.
We need to attack a culture that promotes "big man with a gun" syndrome.  We need to attack a culture that treats certain people as an inherent threat, and shoots first and asks questions later.  We need to increase accountability for street cops and the lawyers and judges up the ladder as well.
Want respect?  Be respectable.  Want honor?  Be honorable.
It's not actually as hard as you might think.

Do You Hear the People Sing?

I woke up this morning with this in my head.  As Michele's radio alarm came on with news about the protests across the country in the wake of the grand jury's non-indictment of Darren Wilson for the killing of Mike Brown.  I am of the opinion that protests need to happen, even though the legal waters may be muddy in this particular case, the protests need to happen because of the totality of the brokenness in the system.  But I also hear the words of Martin Luther King about the absolute necessity of non-violence, and I know that he's right in a way that I will probably never be able to grasp as a member of the privileged class, for whom violence is usually the preserver of safety, security and the status quo.
But back to Les Miserables for a moment.  Does that scene inspire the fear and hatred of white Americans?  No, we feel a stirring of the heart and the blood at such a scene of the people rising up in democratic revolution, because they're white, and because it happened a long time ago, and because history has vindicated their cause.  But we are quick to criticize those who are rising up in our cities, because they are black and because we are afraid, but lets be honest, if this escalates badly it's going to be another barricade situation and it's going to end with a lot of bloodshed, but not the blood of the people in power.  The politicians and the keepers of the system will be safely in their towers, wondering as Marie Antoinette once did, why the people aren't content to continue to suffer these injustices.
Violence will be met with greater violence.  The Doors once sang with a misguided optimism, "They got the guns but we got the numbers," but that sentiment is foolish.  Their guns (and tanks and bombs and planes) all too easily negate almost any numbers.
Non-violence is the only way, but it is a long, difficult way indeed.  It takes creativity to figure out how to create a disruption that cannot be ignored by the powers that be without doing something destructive.  It takes courage to face down armored police and snarling dogs and tear gas grenades without resorting to the same violence.  It takes an almost naive hopefulness to believe that the people who are comfortably at home and away from the struggle will actually understand and care enough about your plight to do anything other than fear you.  Most of all it takes an enormous amount of spiritual work to channel your anger, even outrage, in a direction that does not lead to violence and hatred.
That's the job. It takes more than a song.  It takes more than being willing to die in the fires of revolution, it takes being willing to live into the path of evolution, being part of the solution rather than just a more urgent problem to be solved.

Progress?

I've got a couple of different things jangling around my head this morning.  The first is the movie about flying that we went to see with the kids in the Science Center at the new High School here in Charles County.  The Science Center has one of those big spherical, planetarium style domes where they can show specially designed movies that make you feel all swoopy.  Last night's movie was about the human dream of flying and the long process by which we have come to make jets and space stations a reality.  The movie is designed around the ooh and aah factor of making you feel like you're flying, but it contains a history of human flight, it goes from DaVinci's flying machines to hot air balloons to the Wright brothers in 1903, and then things get pretty dark, WWI and the age of fighter planes and bombers.  The dream of flight becomes a nightmare of violence.  Included was a Pink Floyd-esque moment where squadrons of B-17 flying fortresses lumber across a red sky and drop bombs by the thousands and then morph into sinister computer animated ravens.  It was kind of emotionally intense, and it reminded me that, rather more often than not, our greatest achievements have a sinister underside.
After all, the first thing we did with the ability to split the atom was to blow up two Japanese cities.
It's a little tough to say whether or not we've learned our lesson.
But there is a lesson to be learned, and I think we're capable, as a species, of learning lessons.  We learned from Hiroshima and Nagasaki that nuclear warfare is a horror that none of us really want to unleash on the world.  That knowledge has been held in a precarious balance ever since, but we managed to tiptoe along the edge of the void of self destruction without falling in.  The lesson was apparently dramatic and tragic enough to keep us from ever pushing that fabled button.
But it wasn't enough to push us away from war and violence altogether.  I wonder if any event ever will be.
The second set of thoughts for the morning is about Ferguson, Missouri, and the decision by a grand jury not to indict Darren Wilson, the police officer who shot Michael Brown, for any crime.  My gut reaction to the decision was for injustice alarms to start going off at full blare.  It seems like another terrible link in our long and disgraceful past of racial discrimination.  A police officer shoots an unarmed black teenager and gets off scott free.  But there are some peculiar things about how this played out: first of all, this is a grand jury, not a trial jury, all they had to do was decide whether or not to prosecute.  Usually this takes place in fairly cursory fashion.  The grand jury listens to a recommendation from a prosecutor and weighs the evidence that tells them primarily that a crime was committed, not whether the accused is guilty or innocent.  This grand jury did not get a recommendation from the prosecutor, one way or the other, in other words the system did not tell them what they were expected to do or to say.  They did get something like 70 hours of testimony and evidence presentation, which I'm guessing is more than most grand juries usually get.  To top it off, I'm sure they knew the world was watching them, and that they had better get this right.
What they said was that Darren Wilson was operating within the parameters of his training and his experience when he shot Mike Brown, which is, I suppose, the only thing you can really expect from a police officer.
Mike Brown's father has issued a statement asking for people to refrain from looting and violence.  His hope is that his son's death will not be in vain and that the dialogue about racial justice and police conduct can continue.  Which will almost certainly not happen if the fears of the American people are played out in riots and violence.
Many people are lamenting that Darren Wilson is "getting away" with killing Mike Brown in cold blood, but I think that there is a deeper truth to be dealt with here, a truth that is perhaps better served if we don't allow Darren Wilson to become our lone scapegoat in this situation.
My thinking goes like this:

1. The grand jury indicts Wilson, an emotionally charged trial further inflames the feelings and, no matter what the result, large numbers of people feel violated.
2. As we saw with the George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin case, no one really listens to people who disagree, they just shout at each other over a wall of ignorance.
3. If Wilson was convicted, he becomes the villain.  He becomes the bad cop, who overstepped his authority, he becomes the evil exception rather than an all too representative sample of a broken system in which young black men are guilty until proven innocent.
4. If Wilson is exonerated, then we have let the system totally off the hook and the same people are still feeling like they have been let down... again.

Is this perhaps the best way that we can learn from our mistakes?  Darren Wilson has been judged by a grand jury to have acted in way that is within the parameters of his training and experience, and he shot an unarmed teenager.  If you say, "stuff happens," and move on, you're not learning, but what about if you say, "perhaps the parameters of training and experience need to change."  What if you continue to analyze and work to change the relationship that police (and the larger society) have with young black men.  What if you drop the assumption that Darren Wilson was a stone-cold racist who was just itching to kill a black kid, and work with the reality that this sort of thing is all too characteristic of the daily experience of both police officers and black men.
Obviously, I'm talking to the middle ground here, but I think the middle ground is what needs to rise up in this case and in most cases.  Our system is broken, being young, black and poor is a crime in and of itself, and our criminal justice statistics show it.  Police do treat people differently on the basis of their skin color, and it's not always because they're racist, it's because of the parameters of their training and experience.  If we say that this was an isolated incident involving one bad cop, we are exonerating the system.
If on the other hand, we accept the grand jury's judgment that Darren Wilson is, if not a good cop, a pretty standard and decidedly not bad cop, who something that has been determined to be within reason by a panel of people who heard the evidence, and we also accept that Mike Brown did not deserve to get shot dead in the street, then we have to look at the system, we have to learn a lesson.  We can't ignore it any longer.
Is this dramatic and tragic enough for us to start to have the conversation, and maybe even fix what is broken?
I certainly hope so.  I don't want Mike Brown to have died in vain either.

Howdy Pilgrim

Earlier this year, my Dad and I applied for a grant for about $11K to finance our little walk across Spain in 2015.  As per our particular gifts, we came up with a scheme that framed the adventure as a study of sorts, an analysis of pastoral ministry under the model of being a pilgrim.  It was a good idea, but not $11K good, apparently.  We didn't get the grant.
The funny thing is, I'm totally okay with that, in fact, I might even be a little relieved.  I thought about the idea of trying to hold that idea through rain and cold and sun and sore feet, and I had this sinking feeling that it was going to be more trouble than it was worth.  Sure, you say, but $11K is surely worth a good bit of trouble.  Well, I suppose it is, but I felt like it would also be a bit dishonest, it would be starting the pilgrimage from a typical place of privilege.  We would be the trust fund pilgrims, traipsing along on someone else's dime.  Worse, we would be "researchers," examining the phenomenon of a spiritual discipline, rather than practicing it ourselves.
This leads me to one of the fundamental truths I have found in my own relationship with God: God does not give you what you want (sorry Osteenites, it's just not true), but God is absolutely trustworthy in giving you what you need.  Keep in mind that sometimes you might need a bit of struggle in order to learn something, also keep in mind that death is a rather real option, and not at all as catastrophic as we sometimes think.  I'm not trying to give you the warm fuzzies about a loving grandpa-like God who every once in a while hits you up with some stern advice.  I'm talking about the ground of being, the essential force of creation, the One who knows things about us and about our universe that we couldn't imagine in our most fevered hallucination.
Pilgrimage, inasmuch as I understand the practice, is about putting yourself on a literal path, where you will be forced to accept the give and take of weather and the limitations of your own mind and body.  In my short experience of the actual practice, there is a lot of judgment and expectation to get rid of in the early going.  There is a lot of getting to know your body, and your mind, there is a lot of rather constant prayer, and there is a lot of learning to trust in the special dynamics of the Way.  You learn that people who share a goal, even when they don't share a language, are rather more accepting and acceptable.  There is a very real sense in which the road provides what you need, when you need it.  We spend so much time insulating ourselves with conveniences and insurance policies that we often miss the simple joy of being vulnerable.
I know, that sounds weird, and maybe a little dangerous, but remember this: when you love, you make yourself vulnerable.  Trusting another person is positively fraught with danger.  Trusting God is as well, and not everyone can bring themselves to do it.
Coveting that $11K was a way that my Dad and I were trying, already, to insulate ourselves from the road.  We were trying to do this thing on our terms, so that we could "sell" it to ourselves and our wives.
Maybe that wasn't the right way to go.  Maybe we need to trust the road, and trust God, a little bit more completely.

The Widening Gyre

I have questions.  I have questions for Americans.  I have special questions for American Christians.  I have extra special questions for American Christians of the Republican variety, particularly if you're one of those who is now thoroughly incensed with the President's executive order regarding our immigration policy.
First the question for Americans:  Were your ancestors here prior to 1492 CE?  Because if the answer is no, I'm guessing you probably have some idea as to when and wherefrom your family emigrated.  Your people may have been here for generations, but to the Sioux and the Iroquois and the Apache, you're still an immigrant, and believe me, to call your history with the Natives criminal is somewhat of an understatement.  Your ancestors very likely came here to escape poverty or persecution or plagues or famine, or something like that.  They came here to make a better life for themselves, and this nation of ours was founded by immigrants and refugees and people who were willing to build something in a "new" world, or at least a world that was "new" to them.
These immigrants eventually found themselves in a place where they could bring forth a great nation, with the idea in mind that this nation would be different from the ones they left.  They had the idea that it would be a place where a person could get a fair shake, no matter where they were born, or what they believed, eventually we even got around to making it okay to have different colored skin... imagine that.
It was not a coincidence that these men who had this nation idea were Christian (or at least deists who probably thought in vaguely Christian patterns).  The idea that a nation might be anything like this union they were always seeking to make more perfect, comes explicitly from a judeo-christian angle.  The idea that a nation could run without a king, goes back to Israel, the idea that a nation could transcend tribalism was rooted in the Christian practice of inclusion of Gentiles and an adoption of outsiders and strangers into the creed.  It took the Hebrew codes about how to treat strangers and outsiders a step further and actually called them brothers.
Which brings me to the question I have for American Christians: are you reading the same book as I am?  I'm not asking that in a spirit of bible-thumping, I'm aware that different interpretative methods exist, but the welcoming of the other, and honoring the inherent dignity of your fellow humans is not a small deal, it's not an obscure or debatable moral imperative, it's sort of a central idea to the whole story.  It's not so much one of the rules as it is the reason for all the rules: love God and love your neighbor, and for the love of pete stop trying to weasel out of recognizing that freaking everyone is your neighbor.  So when I hear American Christians talking about deporting families (which seems to be a big part of what Obama wants to stop), I wonder if they're maybe not getting the point of the Good Samaritan Parable.  The Samaritan, the illegal, unacceptable, the outsider of outsiders, is the neighbor, in other words: you don't get to pick and choose.  Manuel, who picks crops for sub-minimum wage, and who snuck into this country in the back of hay truck, smuggled by coyotes, is your neighbor, and you should care about justice for him, and you should pick him up out of the ditch.  Maria, who cleans motel rooms all day and then goes to work washing dishes at Denny's in the evening in order to feed her children, and who lives in fear of being deported, is your neighbor, she is not a criminal, she is not illegal.  She is a child of God who is worthy of your mercy.
I have questions for you if you are angry at our President, who is paying attention to these things, and who has tried to work within our broken and failing political process to fix these things.  People have questioned his character and his integrity, but he's acting like a pretty Christian dude at this moment.  He's not trying to dodge the dignity and the suffering of his neighbors by pretending they're not his problem.  I wish, and I think he wishes, he didn't have to do it in such one sided fashion, because I think all of us could have done better at loving our neighbors.
You may say it's more complicated than I'm making it, but that's what Pharisees always say.  What happened this week was only a small step in the direction of justice, it was just one brick taken out of the wall, it certainly does not give away the keys to the kingdom, it just picks a few people out of the ditch.
As Aaron Rodgers said to the Green Bay fans earlier this year: R-E-L-A-X.
I would add another word to that list: L-O-V-E.

Keystone Uh-Oh, Here We Go Again

The debate over the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, has been a persistent news story, albeit mostly tucked away from the headlines, for several years now.  The pipeline is an abstract idea to most.  It either represents economic progress or environmental catastrophe to people who have an opinion.  The sorts of arguments that are being made are largely hypothetical on both sides.  Advocates claim it is crucial for economic growth and energy independence, and that it would be safe as houses, and would employ construction and maintenance people across an enormous geographical area.  Opponents say that none of that is true and seem to have valid evidence to support their critique.  It has become yet another wedge issue between Republicans and Democrats, further adding to the obfuscation and abstraction of the issue at hand.
There are people, however, for whom the possible pipeline is no abstraction, these people are the ones who are going to have the thing cutting across their farms and their land, they are the ones who risk having their water poisoned by a leak (which is not the slim possibility that some make it out to be).  They might make a little money, but they risk their land and, for the most part their livelihood for the sake of some right of way fees.  Most them are not fans.
Particularly not enthusiastic are the Native American People whose reservations, which are technically sovereign nations, are being eyed up as prime real estate for the big tube.  The Rosebud Sioux staged a protest in DC on Tuesday as Congress was voting on approving the construction of the pipeline.  The vote failed for now, but it has already passed through the Republican controlled House of Representatives, and the suspicion is that it's not going to just go away when the Republican majority is seated in the Senate next year.
And thus the long and dubious history of our nation with regard to the Native American population adds another sorry chapter.  The Rosebud Sioux Nation called the approval of the measure in the House, "an act of war."  While that may sound like super-heated rhetoric to most of us on the outside looking in, let's please remember the history.  The United States only technically ended it's official policy of genocide against the Native populace in the Nixon administration.  We have basically given them the reservations they now govern and inhabit as a pitiful remittance for the fact that we took everything else away from them during our westward expansion.
You don't have to be a bleeding heart liberal to acknowledge that we have treated the Native populace of this continent with nothing short of absolute brutality and contempt.  No matter how many times you watch Dances with Wolves, you're probably not going to be able to truly appreciate how precious the little bit of their birthright we have actually left to them.
Even if I thought that the Keystone Pipeline was going to be an economic boom, as promised, and that it was going to be truly environmentally friendly, as promised, I would say it was still a bad idea if we have to step all over the sovereign rights of Native American people.  That would be much, much worse than an unfortunately named NFL franchise.
We have broken treaties too often, we have trampled their rights too often in the name of progress, we have not lived up to our own secular national ideals, let alone any sort of Christian values.
It's time for this sort of thing to stop.
I know they're small, I know they're a minority, but a history of suffering has to count for something.  The mistakes of the past are only justifiable if we learn from them.
Let's finally be better than that America.

Hallelujah

There's a blaze of light in every word,

It doesn't matter which you heard,

the holy, or the broken, Hallelujah.

-Leonard Cohen

Sometimes liking a song becomes a relationship.  For me, my love for Leonard Cohen started pretty young, much younger than most, thanks to having a Father who was into strange music.  In fact, I owe most of my acquired musical tastes to my Dad: Dylan, Cohen, Zappa, even Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band (if you know that last one, you too are into weird music).  I picked up Tom Waits in college and that pretty much rounds out my collection of artists who are sort of like scotch, coffee, dark beer or really strong horseradish, in other words you might not like them at first, but if you give them time you might just become obsessive about them.

I was already familiar with Cohen's song Hallelujah, before Shrek came out, and admit to a practically giddy response when Loudon Wainright's rendition of the song started during the decisive scene of a movie about an animated ogre.  It was one of those, "yes, now the regular world is more awesome!" sorts of moments.  Like when I discovered that Tom Waits wrote Downtown Train instead of Rod Stewart, the universe made more sense.

Hallelujah is an absolutely amazing song.  It can be sung as a fairly standard, but touching love song, as it is most commonly performed by sources as diverse as K.D. Lang, Jeff Buckley, Loudon Wainright and freaking Justin Timberlake.  In fact, it has gotten to the point where I say, "Momma, there that song again," whenever someone breaks it out for some benefit concert or an American Idol performance.  In these cases, it is mostly distilled down to three or maybe four verses.  The first two are always the same, it begins "I heard there was a secret chord, that David played and it pleased the Lord..."  And then proceeds to conflate the story of David and Bathsheba with the narrative of Sampson and Delilah, Cohen is Jewish so I'll grant him the liberty to do such things with the Hebrew texts.  The third verse sometimes, depending on the version, sometimes delves into the theology of the original song, which as recorded and published is six verses long, though I read somewhere that Cohen has written as many as 80 verses to the song, and performs various renditions here and there.  Given his skill as a songwriter, I don't doubt it.

However, truncating the song after the third verse can leave you with the notion that it's just a song about how difficult human love can be sometimes, which is true and powerful and beautiful all at the same time, don't get me wrong, but allow me to bless you non-Cohen-aphiles with the lyrics to the last three verses of the song:

There was a time when you let me know,

What's really going on below,

but now you never show that to me do you?

But remember when I moved in you?

And the holy dove was moving too?

And every breath we drew was hallelujah

Maybe there's a God above, 

but all I've really learned from love

was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you.

There's a blaze of light in every word,

it doesn't matter which you heard

the holy or the broken hallelujah

I did my best, it wasn't much

I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch

I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you

Even though it all went wrong,

I'll stand before the Lord of Song

with nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah.

Now, I get why these verses have not made it into the more popular renditions of the song, first of all six verses tend to leave a lot less time for riffing on the chorus, which can be done with large gospel choirs or gravelly folk voices alike, but also because they ask really difficult questions and make it rather clear that this song is not a song to a difficult lover, but a prayer to God.

Blurring the lines between the spiritual journey and a difficult love affair is pretty deep water indeed.  That's why Cohen is a great songwriter, because he swims there.  He swims there like the prophets and the psalmists, he swims there like Jesus in Gethsemane, he swims in the water that is terrifying and unknowable.  He swims in pain and heartache and in absolute faith.

He swims where much more polite and safe religious music never does.  It's not praise per se, but it expresses a deep love for God.  It's not clean and safe, it's holy.

There are a few songs that I cannot get away from, and this is one of them. (If you're curious, That Feel, by Tom Waits and Keith Richards is another, and Hard Rain, by Bob Dylan is another, as is Hurt by NIN or Johnny Cash, as is The Needle and the Damage Done, by Neil Young).  But I think it is telling that the popular version of the song has de-thorned the rose.  Because that's what we do in order to make things popular, we radio-edit them, take out any bad words or challenging thoughts, sometimes it's borderline ridiculous.

So have we done that with church?

Have we sanitized the Gospel for mass appeal?

Have we hidden the wrestling and the lament in order to appear to have answers?

Have we mopped up the blood on the floor so that it doesn't offend?

Maybe, in our desire to be popular, we have lost something.

Hallelujah.