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This one is for Michelle Meech, whose graduation from seminary and impending ordination as a deacon has been on my mind recently.
I am a person who loves to think about the great large sweep of things, historic trends, where humanity is headed, that sort of stuff. Because it is Lent I was recently thinking about the various ways of understanding where this strange experiment in evolution provisionally entitled Homo Sapien is going.
Some folks believe we are slowly but surely getting better and better, trending toward overcoming violence and exploitation, gaining awareness of what it takes to be good stewards of the earth, learning about how to take care of and respect one another. Such people, and there are a fair number of them, believe that one day we really will figure out how to live with each other and our planet in peace and justice. History is headed, in other words, in a definite direction; it has a real trajectory that will end in a society of peace with justice. Two of my heroes, Martin Luther King Jr. and Rene Girard both were/are convinced of this.
Other folks are equally convinced that history is not a line that leads anywhere, but a vortex that keeps us stuck in the same place, much as a stick or a leaf floating down a river sometimes gets caught in an eddy and ends up spinning around in the same little spot never quite getting out so that it can once again resume its long journey to the sea. We are caught in a web of self interest that prevents our ever building the societies we can imagine. No matter what we believe, what we hope, what we want, we are stuck with ourselves, our own violence and our own frustrated desires for a better world.
I have spent much of my life hoping that the first vision is true and fearing that the second one is. We did after all discover the wonders of splitting atoms, and as quickly as we could figured out ways to use this knowledge to light cities, cure illness, and, oh yes, blow up the world. We figured out how to grow ever increasing amounts of good food, and to distribute it quickly and efficiently, and used that wonderful knowledge to create a society that is increasingly obese, while people in other parts of the world slowly starve to death. We figured out ways to keep ourselves warm, to travel throughout the world at unprecedented speeds, to build huge cities, to light the skies at night, and in the process of creating all these wonders we have brought ourselves to the very edge of catastrophic climactic change. We have made huge advances in respecting the dignity of every human being, and of recognizing the right of people to self determination, and we looked the other way as monstrous injustices, made possible by unprecedented technological advances, have robbed millions of even the tiniest bit of respect. History as arc trending toward justice, history as eddy, swirling ever around itself. Who knows which it is?
As I was pondering all this in a recent Lenten mood it occured to me that there is a third image that might be in play here. History is neither arc nor eddy but dance. It is a dance in which fearful, self interested, worried, anxious humanity is one of the partners, and the capacious open space of life itself with all the wondrous possibilities that pure and unconditional love creates is the other. At times we flow with our partner, following her lead, learning new steps and so move into a new rhythm made possible only when we trust life itself. At times we resist, wanting to lead, control, determine, retreat even into a familiar pattern of steps that was at one time the best we could do but no longer fits. At times we fight with our partner, struggling to break off the dance altogether, fearing that if we dance any more something horrible will happen.
But we can't break off this dance; we are embraced by life and by love, caught up forever in the movement, the flow, the back and forth. Our choice is never not to dance; our choice is to follow that flow, follow the lead of our partner, or to attempt to force our partner into a different and distorted rhythm which we can only pretend to control.
And so at times we seem to be getting somewhere as a species, and at times we seem to be completely stuck. This just might be because history is neither arc nor eddy, but an endless dance whose rhythms we cannot hear, whose steps we do not know, but our partner does, and if we trust her she will teach us all to hear that tune, to find that rhythm, and to dance into life.
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With Beth having fun in Mexico, I have volunteered to lower the standards of the VTH by publishing an extra post or two. Here is a poem I just ran across that got me to considering what it takes to express our spiritual perspective.
Woulds't thou know my meaning?
Lie down in the Fire
See and taste the Flowing
Godhead through thy being;
Feel the Holy Spirit
Moving and compelling
Thee within the Flowing
Fire and light of God.
Mechthild of Magdeburg (1210-1297?)
It is short poems like this one I discovered quite recently that make me aware of how very close much of the best of modern spirituality is to that of the 13th century. In these few lines Mechthild captures, but certainly does not domesticate, an image of God as that which flows within all people. More important, by far more important, the poem reminds us that if we "wish to know the meaning" that is, I suppose, if we want any glimmer of understanding of this flowing "Fire and Light," then we need to abandon language in favor of "seeing and tasting." Not thoughts, not formulated concepts, but the whole human experience - the senses, the feelings, are the avenue to beginning to know the meaning of what it is to be suffused with the Spirit.
It reminds me of a short introductory speech to Bach's B Minor Mass I heard Friday night. In the Creed, that statement of the Church's teaching which gives so many of us such problems these days, our speaker pointed out that Bach used just two voices, singing the same notes but weaving in and out in a beautiful interplay, first one voice leading, then the other, for the part of the creed describing the relationship of the First and Second persons of the Trinity. "God from God, light from Light, True God from True God, Begotten not made. Of one Being with the Father, by whom all things were made." According to our speaker Bach was using those two voices - one constantly proceeding from the other - to illustrate the doctrinal formulation. It worked, worked way better than the creed itself, which, let us face it, uses language and concepts that no longer play very well to most people. But after hearing that music I was able to say "now I get it."
Mechthild got it too, or rather first. We don't apprehend the Spirit - whatever that word denotes or points to - with our mind and our ideas. Worked out concepts - doctrines if you will - are at best pointers. We come much closer to the deeper truth by first letting our minds go away for a while and just sitting in the images without analyzing them, but rather asking them to talk to us.
This, by the way, does not mean I am going Pentecostal. I am not. I don't trust feelings any more than I trust ideas to capture the truth of the matter - for feelings can lie just as certainly as words can. It does mean that language is a truly inadequate means of getting to the heart of the matter spiritually. And so when we want to express what our spiritual lives mean, better than trying to come up with some sort of formula is simply to point to Mechthild's poem or Bach's music and say "it means something like that, that right there." Or indeed, as we express our own lives, to point to our music, or our poetry and say that same thing. "It means something like that."
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I have made myself way too busy in the last month, and have neglected more important things. My need to check in with the VTH finally overcame the intertia of administrative stuff and has led me to write about a book I just finished. I realize this isn't necessarily the venue for book reviews, but it is a Virtual Tea House, and people talk about what they have read over tea, don't they?
Anyway, I recently finished Karen Armstrong's latest book "The Case for God." It is well worth the read. For those who don't know her, Karen was raised a Roman Catholic in England, and as a little girl she aspired to become a nun, which in due course is exactly what she did. Didn't work. Lots of reasons. She left the convent and organized religion, eventually becoming what she described as an "undifferentiated monotheist." Along the way she wrote a bunch of books and became one of the non-muslim world's greatest experts on Islam, a religion she views with great understanding and sympathy.
Her newest book, "The Case for God." makes the plea for a return to the tradition of what is called "apophatic spirituality," that way of understanding God which realizes we understand nothing much at all, which in fact finds that when we have pushed the limits of human language, and metaphor and knowledge and understanding and rationality as far as we can go, what is left is nothing but awe and wonder at the still limitless, infinite reality that stretches before us. What we know, most simply put, is that we know nothing about God, and that needs to be enough. It is a spirituality that stresses compassion, rather than comprehension, reconciliation, rather than rote, devotion, rather than dogma, and describes faith not as the ability to agree with certain propositions about the nature of God, but as the ability to trust completely in that which is beyond all understanding. It is a spirituality that is very old, and in the western world anyway, has deep roots in the Hebrew bible and the first thousand years of so of Christian spirituality.
It seems to me that this is also the natural spiritual perspective of the VTH. It isn't that we all agree, because you don't have to read very many posts to realize that we all come to this virtual place with not just with different ideas and experiences, but with different ways of framing those ideas and experiences. But I do notice that within the context of this great variety most of us have along the way given up on the notion that faith is about believing concepts, and religion is about ritual enactments. We all have concepts and rituals, and we use them to great effect, but we don't believe in them in any more; we don't believe they do any more than to point us in the direction of that ineffable presence that is everywhere, and yet beyond everywhere, that is in everything, and yet is no-thing. In reading her book I found myself rediscovering my own experience through another person's eyes, which I experienced not so much as a vindication of my own opinions, as an affirmation of the mystery of life itself.
Now Armstrong is what my good friend Ray Jeff Sprier would call a "propeller head." Her language is not technical - she is really good about writing for non-professional audiences - but it is academic; the footnotes take up a big hunk of the volume. Those seeking an exploration of the deeply affective side of life are not going to find it here. But those who feel lonely in their spirituality in this modern world of certainty about God, who want some company out on the edges where knowledge fails, and rationality collapses into paradox, will find this book richly rewarding, provided you can embrace the style in which she approaches the subject. I could embrace that style, and I am grateful for her company in my own long strange trip.
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John Cage was a 20th Century American composer whose work exhilarated, enraged and even befuddled audiences for more than half a century. His definition of music as “the organization of sound” led him to experimental constructs of all kinds, and his style influenced not only the symphonic composers of the era, but also people like Frank Zappa, and John Lennon and Yoko Ono. His most controversial work was 4’33”, a composition in three movements lasting four minutes, thirty three seconds, during which the artist would sit at a piano in utter silence, playing not a single note. Some “interpreters” would close the keyboard to signify the beginning of the piece, then open and close it again after each of the three movements.
The belief that inspired Cage to “write” 4’33” was that there is truly no such thing as utter silence. Sound, and therefore music, is all around us all the time; the world - creation itself with us in it - is an instrument constantly, eternally, producing music. The music of 4’33” was therefore what happened in the audience, the rustling of a program, the shifting in the seats, a cough here and there, perhaps even the low, nearly inaudible hum of the air conditioning or heating unit. Not the piano on stage, but the audience in their seats together with the building they are in is the instrument playing the composition. Cage’s conviction was that what is true in a concert hall for four minutes, thirty three seconds, is true everywhere; we collectively are an instrument, and we are always making music.
That is a wonderful thought; the earth is always creating sound, so the earth is always making music. You are always creating sound, so the you are always making music. When you walk down the street the sound your shoes make on the sidewalk, or your barenaked (I do consider that one word, no typo there)feet make on the grass is music. When you sit quietly in your home, meditating or just being, the sound your heart makes is music, the sound your breathing makes is music, the sound of your eyelids blinking is music. And more, because you are a music maker just by being, you are an instrument, not just the musician, but the medium the musician uses.
And together we are one great giant instrument, always, eternally making music. So the question is never, ever do we want to make music? The question is always and only what sort of music are we making, and in what way are we making it? We can make that music with F-16 fighters and M-16 rifles. We can make music that way, and quite often we do. We can also make it with different sounds, with the sound of forgiveness, of ourselves and others, with a sigh that lets go of an ancient grudge or an equally ancient grief. We can make it with a great loud shout of joy or with the sound of lips turned up in the very faintest smile.
To be makers of music - musician and instrument all at once - is not just our destiny, it is our freedom, for when we become conscious of this truth we gain the freedom to choose at least some of the music we will make. Robert Hunter, in one of his more brilliant moments of lyrical insight, wrote "You are the eyes of the world." True enough, and its music, and the instrument upon which that music is played.
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A long time ago in the midst of strife and warfare and strife caused by warfare part of a generation dared to imagine a new world of peace and harmony, and dared to believe that it could be realized not only in some supernal realm where burdened souls take refuge from intractable facts, but in this world, right here. And they wrote songs expressing this hope, and we all sang them, and in singing them we too dared to hope.
Now those same songs are being used by huge companies to convince us to buy cell phones and investment advice, automobiles and "personal data assistants," devices that didn't even exist when those songs were written. And sometime between the moment when those songs inspired us to believe in peace and the moment when those exact same songs inspired us to buy an ipod it became clear that once again we had lost; the dream would not become a reality. The hip generation started accepting VISA and MASTERCARD as the inertia of what is overcame the hope of what might be. Nothing had changed even as everything had. Even today we are going green, but as Newsweek points out in its current edition, it is only because now there might be some money to be made from it.
But this post is not a lament over lost opportunities and failed dreams. It is an early November leaves-are-gone-dark-at-4:30 tribute to the human spirit and its ability to dream and to hope even when dreams are hard to come by and hopes are faint.
For we have been imagining a better world ever since hominids developed brains big enough to notice the difference between how things are and how we wish they were, and know they could be if only we were a little different than we are. Twenty-five hundred years before John Lennon told us to "Imagine" Isaiah spoke of the "feast of rich food" God would make for all people, and of how God would "swallow up death for ever." That didn't happen either, but that is hardly the point. He evoked an image of transcendence that has continued to inspire us ever since. The Revelation to John, that strange apocalypse stuck on to the end of the Christian Bible, is in its own way another such vision. "I saw a new heaven and a new earth" the seer of Patmos wrote. Exactly so. In the midst of another time of strife his spirit would not be stifled, his hopes would not die. Much more recently Karl Marx envisioned a whole new world in which the state would wither away into a genuine workers paradise. Fortunately for him he died before seeing his dream become a nightmare.
These visions will never come to pass; they are not meant to, and so in one sense those who struggle to bring them about will always lose. The radical hope of a different world will always elude us not because bad people who understand the situation will do evil things to defeat it, but because good people who cannot transcend themselves will misunderstand the situation in their attempts to do right. But in another and deeper sense the visionaries will never lose, because they will never stop dreaming, never stop hoping, never stop singing new songs. Inspired by them we will never stop singing either; in the face of those who co-opt and bastardize the songs of life, turning them into advertisements for junk we don't need made by multi-national companies who don't care, we will not stop singing.
We are a strange species, we can see the difference between what is and what could be...if only. I don't know that any other creature can do that. It is good that no matter what happens people can't stop dreaming, can't stop hoping, can't stop singing. In that is our real salvation.
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I have this vague memory that we have discussed this on the VTH before, so stop me if you have heard this (no wait, you can't, I am blogging) but recent events here at the Cathedral in Spokane have led me to think once again about my funeral. I enjoy this by the way; it is very comforting, encouraging and even relaxing to ponder the way I want to celebrate my death. We have had a couple of really good and meaningful funerals here the past month, and I am more and more appreciating how important it is not only to reflect on our own personal mortality, but to enjoy and celebrate it, and to share it with good friends. There is nothing that is in the least morbid about it, though certain of my aquaintances disagree with me about that. On the contrary, refusing to think about being dead is not a way to enjoy life. It is rather a way to deny an ineluctable fact of life. Similarly, refusing to plan for this once-in-a-life-time opportunity doesn't just put a burden on the folks left behind, it wastes a chance to make exactly the kind of statement you want to make, and you have the added bonus of not having to deal with any negative reactions.
This is undoubtedly why by far the best funerals I have done were those planned by the people whose funeral it was. What these folks taught me is that music is really critical to a wonderful funeral. When it works best it develops a theme, it is varied, and it sounds like the person whose life and death is being celebrated. Don MacBeth, who died many years ago, did this absolutely brilliantly with his funeral, and it made the whole thing, amidst the very sadness of his death, a wonderful experience.
That is the second most important thing about a funeral, that sadness. There is a lot of sadness at most funerals, and we don't help ourselves by declaring that we want to focus only on the happy parts. On the contrary, that effort often has the ironic effect of making people feel worse; I have seen that a lot. There is a lot of value in remembering the good times, but those left behind need a chance to deal with the loss, and a place to admit it is a big and painful loss. After all, sorrow is the price of love. We don't cry over people we haven't loved; we don't mourn those we don't care about. And so for the sake of that love we need to understand that we must notice and even celebrate our sadness, celebrate our pain because these things are a valuable part of being human. When we do that kind of celebrating well we are then free to celebrate the other side of life, the joy of having known, and loved and learned from whoever is no longer here, and won't be ever again. And we have the chance as well to celebrate the fact that we really are "stardust, we are golden, we are billion year old carbon" which all by itself is a most wonderful discovery. We are going back to the garden, sooner or later.
So at my perfect funeral I want to start out with something somber and doleful, maybe even, if I am sufficiently well off, a string octet playing the second movement of Beethoven's 7th symphony. Part of it sounds very much like a funeral march. Then later as we turn toward from pain to ambiguity we all sing "Ripple" by the Grateful Dead. The image of a "ripple in still water, when there is no pebble tossed or wind to blow" captures for me at least the rather mystic quality of the randomness of creation. There is nothing like the pathos of the last line: "If I knew the way, I would take you home." But we don't know the way, at least not for others, and most often not for ourselves, so life remains an enigma for us all, even as we live it. and that is part of what makes it so beautiful. Then as the service moves more deeply into the life of faith in that transcendent dimension of existence which we can only intuit, only glimpse, but never capture, never control, comes a Vaughn Williams piece, "Come my way" with its lyrics that call out to the One who has "such a truth that ends all strife, such a life as killeth death." Finally at the end we sing "All Praise to Thee" a hymn based upon the Pauline hymn in Philippians. It ends with the single word "Alleluia." I have a couple of other things to work in as well, like "The Water is wide" and the old Cat Stevens song the chorus of which goes "Lord my body has been a good friend, but I won't need it when I reach the end." There has to be a place for a line like that.
So, thanks for reading, if you have, and have a good time planning your funeral.
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I just got back from the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, which is doubtless of little interest to lots of visitors to the VTH. But, as is my wont, I began to ponder things as I was returning home. Even in the Episcopal Church it turns out that there are at least a few people who still feel the need to pit scripture against science, that is to say there are those who really truly believe that there is some kind of battle going on in this world between the bible and what we can discover by observation, testing, retesting and confirming. And in that battle, faith means siding with what we read in the bible over against what we can see, test, retest and confirm. And that made me think.
And mostly it made me think that this is a great pity. For it wasn't always this way. In fact it wasn't this way until quite recently in our history. For most of human history religious insight followed very closely what we could observe of the world, and our ideas about the gods and how they worked emerged directly from what we knew of the universe we inhabited. It was not, for example, that the ancients discovered Apollo and so believed the sun moved across the sky. It was that they saw what appeared to be the sun moving across the sky and so came to believe in Apollo. And again, they didn't discover the river gods and then come to believe that the Nile rose and fell seasonally, they saw that the Nile rose and fell, and so came to believe in the river gods. For a very long time this was how we worked, and it made perfect sense. As a pre-scientific person you look at the world, both the exterior world and the interior world, and you develop stories, myths, legends, sagas, that help make sense of that world and the transcendent dimension of it that you can intuit but not really explain in mere prose. So religious and spiritual insight follow what we see, feel, taste, touch, experience, it follows what makes us happy and sorrowful, awestruck and bored. That is the way it was with humanity for, I don't know, from the dawn of recognizably human endeavor until five or six hundred years ago.
At that moment something went haywire and ended up making us all crazy. At some mysterious point that I can't identify the religious imagination of the western world ossified; we lost the ability to learn about God from the study of our environment and began a process of separating these stories from their very sources, our observation of the world. This was probably due to an effort to make these religious stories fit into the category of science, which was even as early as the fifteenth century beginning to make real inroads into the intellectual history of humanity, but I don't know that for sure. What is clear now is that this deracination of our myths and legends and stories and sagas was devastating to our religious imagination. So much so that by 1633 Galileo's "Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems" was condemned as heresy, he was forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest, all for the "crime" of telling us that in fact Copernicus was right, the sun is the center of the solar system, and the earth, along with the other planets, revolves around it. Imagine what might have happened if the pope had said: "Tell me more of this, this is wonderful, for it teaches us more about how God works and how wonderful is this universe." That kind of response would have been in perfect keeping with the entire intellectual and spiritual history of humanity to that point. But because in that strange moment of confusion we lost the connection between our stories and the motives that caused us to invent them, we could not see that, and so it made perfect sense to the pope to declare that heliocentrism is "false and contrary to scripture." NO IT IS NOT! Had we not gone mad we would have seen that heliocentrism could have led to new and wonderful spiritual breakthroughs, and the infant study of the world through the methods of science could have brought forth ever new insight and spurred the religious imagination of the western world in ways that we are only now beginning to recover. But the damage is done, and it has nearly destroyed the ability of religious people to talk about evolution, sexual orientation, genetic engineering, birth control and a host of other things without getting into a big fight. And the big loser in this fight is not science, but religion.
Fortunately, at least from my point of view, there are hopeful signs. Some spiritual people are once again learning from the world. The view of the universe from the Hubble telescope has left most of us utterly overwhelmed as we see star clusters larger than this galaxy spawned from giant gaseous clouds. Chaos theory and the Uncertainty Principle have begun to inspire a number of religious thinkers to the same kinds of insights reflected in scripture, and once again we are able to link stories like Job in his existential conflict to our own stunned silence at the utter unknowableness of the universe in all its fantastic vastness. This is good, it is very good. We made a big boo boo several hundred years ago, but we are beginning to recover from it. I won't live long enough to see the fullness of that recovery, but the signs that it is there are encouraging. I still lament what we did to ourselves, and I lament the damage that continues to be done because of that boo boo. But I rejoice that we are beginning to understand anew that spiritual insight grows with our knowledge of the world we inhabit, not against it.
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I just got back from Haiti, and I have decided to go with more of a "stream of conciousness" post than my usual style.
Aristide's expressed hope that Haiti could rise to the level of "Poverty with dignity" has not yet been realized. Everywhere you look there are "dwellings" that hardly deserve the name. Cinderblocks, banana fronds, discarded wood, rusted out corrugated tin are standard home building materials. Indoor plumbing is rare, which hardly matters because there is no sewer system anyway. Everything ends up in the ground water, and ground water is used for everything; washing clothes, washing people, drinking, cooking. Garbage is everywhere, for there is no real functioning system for recycling or picking up garbage.
Rural life is dominated by sharecropping. A very few people own all the arable land, and allow farmers to till the soil in exchange for half the crop. We all know what "half" is in a system like that. Half is whatever the owner of the land says it is. I didn't see starvation, but I saw a lot of hunger.
The land has trees, contrary to popular images, but the forests are completely gone. The hillsides are brown and eroded, which gives an eerie cast to what is otherwise a spectacularly beautifuly countryside.
The open air markets teemed with people selling whatever they could find. Lots of papayas, mangos, rice, beans, bananas, goat meat. The atmosphere in the markets was stifling; it was hard to move around among all the people, but I soon became completely used to the smell of human sweat, rotting vegetation, tobacco and garbage, and I realized that this is just how life smells. Wherever we went the children would stare at us with amused eyes and most of the time someone in the group would shout out "blanc" at us. Adults wouldn't do this of course, only the children. It was fun to be distinctive in that way.
The government offers no public services worthy of the name. There is electricity for a few hours a day, maybe. No medical care is offered, no health insurance for the vast majority of the people. The public schools are terrible, the streets are broken down and full of potholes. As a result the people are not optimistic, they are not happy with their lot, but they are generous, far more so than I, and determined to live as fully as possible. The lack of cynicism is remarkable, even among those we talked to who were clearly very, very poor, which is approximately 85 percent of the population. In fact they demonstrate that the human spirit really is indomitable, it cannot finally be crushed. My great hope is that one day they will have a government that is worthy of them. Thus far they haven't.
Going to church in the countryside was an adventure all by itself. The bridge was out so we had to wade the river to get there. The water was warm and not very deep, so it wasn't difficult. The bugs were. In spite of my best efforts my body ended up looking like a relief map of Nepal. The weather was tough as well. It rained hard every day about 4:00 and lasted until about 8:00. The temperature was in the 90s, and humidity was more or less 100%. This meant that the difference between sponging off each morning and not was about five minutes. I ended up bagging it altogether for the most part. So here is my advice. Do not go to Haiti during the rainy season unless you want to be a one person feeding program for the fleas, mosquitos, midges and other creatures who, after all, need to eat too. I know when I go back it will be in January.
Voodou is not a wierd and strange religion, but is simply part of the culture. It is at times ecstatic in that voodou music is designed to induce the spirits to come and bring wisdom and insight to the dancers, but except at its very fringes, where in Christianity you find snake handlers and the like, it is a celebration of the community of the living and the dead (think Communion of Saints) and its adherents are very ordinary folks. Just around the corner from our little home in Haiti there were a group of people who gathered every day in the rain, and afterwards, to play voodou music and dance and sing. There wasn't anything dangerous or threatening or wierd or strange about any of them.
It was a great trip. I am not at all convinced we can change their lives much, though we are going to try with them to improve educational opportunities in one small place. I know they have already changed mine. Life is not made good because of what we have. Life is made good because of what we are. Human dignity is not negotiable, and you can't have it stripped from you. You can only give it away, in spite of appearances to the contrary. In this country we routinely sell ours for a good paying job, a bit of power, and dab of momentary prestige. Theirs is not for sale at any price. None of this is profound, but it is true, and we all need to be reminded of it periodically. In the end I suspect very strongly that we need Haiti more than Haiti needs us.
And last. In my previous post anticipating this trip I got the song right, but the lyric wrong. It wasn't the roses after all, it was "the ribbons, ribbons, ribbons." Everywhere I went the young girls had ribbons in their hair. Not just one or two, not even three or four, but six, eight, ten ribbons bound up in their hair. Robert Hunter wrote "Faded is the crimson from the ribbons that she wore and it's strange how no one comes round anymore. I don't know, it must have been the roses, the roses or the ribbons in her long brown hair." It was the ribbons, Robert. It was the ribbons after all. That is why we could not leave her there.
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Well, I am off to Haiti next Tuesday. I don't know quite I why am going except that I am part of a cathedral that is seeking to develop an international outreach, and a couple of members have been in Haiti and really, really wanted us to get started there. Then it turned out that the people in the village we are going to really, really wanted to have the priest come, and so, there it is. In other words, in spite of how I opened this post I know exactly why I am going to Haiti, because I agreed to go along with other people's plans and needs.
I have a bunch of reasons why it is important to go to Haiti, not least of which is that the experience will really change this cathedral if, and as, we embrace it as something we feel called to do. It is also true that I have been in the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and I am a bit curious as to see what the difference is between number one and number two. I think it is considerable. I could even invent a number of other compelling reasons why it is important for me to go, all of which are true, at least more or less, but all of them come after the fact. The truth is I am going not because I want to go, or for any of the other reasons I could develop, but because I feel some need to respond positively to the expressed needs of someone else.
That happens a lot. I do a lot of things - especially at work - not because I decide to do them, not because I discover in myself a genuine desire to try something, but because I am responding to the stated needs of others.
So, is that bad?
Yeah, sometimes it is. Sometimes the need to say "yes" is not at all about a positive heart, a courageous outlook, a willingness to be imaginative and creative, but rather about very nearly the opposite of that. Sometimes saying "yes" is about being frightened, closed in, uncertain of who you are and what you are called to do. Sometimes it is about avoiding the pain of asserting your own identity as a human being, sometimes it is about just accepting the fate of being what others want/need you to be. And yes, we do get rewarded for that kind of failure. We get the response we need from others - approval - which, much as drugs do, becomes addictive and over time takes over.
But sometimes it isn't bad. Sometimes doing things just because someone else really, really wants/needs us to, moves us out of that fearful place into a new world where we really can see beyond our own need to be needed, or safe, or pain free. Sometimes we are called to recognize that the needs of others, while not more important than our own needs, are as important, and we have an obligation, at least at times, to respond to those needs regardless of whether or not we "want to" or not.
The difference between the two is subtle, but important, for it is the difference between surrendering who we truly are for the sake of someone else and asserting who we truly are for the sake of someone else. So, as always, life is ambiguous, our true motives are often hidden, especially from ourselves, and as a result we don't quite know for sure who we are or where we are going.
For sure I don't know about this one, whether it is the former or latter, and so I am left with once again with the music of Jerry Garcia, drug addict, musical genius, my favorite enneatype 9, my mentor and sage: "I don't know, maybe it was the roses. All I know is I could not leave her there." (words by Robert Hunter, music by Jerry Garcia)
I will post again when I get back and let you know what happened.
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Well, it is getting on toward that time of the year when the folks in the spiritual tradition I share begin to concentrate on death and new life. Here are a few observations for those who might be interested.
For a long time the Church in its various forms has been telling us all that the central miracle of Easter was the resuscitation of the corpse of Jesus, which has historically been identified as The Resurrection. He was dead, and then for a short time after death he resumed living as he had before. Though there were some unique aspects to the risen Jesus, like the ability to appear behind locked doors, and retaining on his body signficant unhealed wounds in his hands and side, he was on the whole restored to his previous condition of existence until, after forty days, he disappeared once and for all.
That has always seemed like an unsatisfactory miracle to me. I realize that such a thing is truly amazing, but lots of spritual traditions believe in life after death in one way or another, and I still don't know how to connect that event to the various beliefs that Christianity has embraced about the nature of God and the relationship of people to God. Beyond that, the resurrection is something that some people - both within and outside the Christian tradition accept as historical, while others - also both within and outside that same tradition - do not. Thus, there is nothing really unique or indisputable about this miracle, nor is it obviously connected to any other aspect of the tradition.
There is however an indisputable historical event connected with the death of Jesus that truly blows me away every time I ponder it for even a moment, a real miracle. Normally when the leader of a small reformist sect gets arrested on false charges and summarily executed one of two things happen. Either the movement dissolves and its partisans disappear into the social woodwork or else they swear to avenge this outrage, take up arms against those they blame, whether it be government or religious authorities, and fight. The first option happens typically because the second is seen by devotees of the fallen leader to be impossible. But when it appears that the second option is possible that is nearly always what occurs, and so violence begets violence until the insurgent force is destroyed or victorious.
Neither of those things occurred with the death of Jesus. Those who loved him most neither gave up his cause nor swore to avenge his death. Instead, imbued by his spirit they did not bow to the violence they had witnessed by running away, nor vindicate that violence as a way of life by becoming violent themselves, but rather they transcended that cycle of violence by reaching out in reconciliation and love to those who had so recently killed Jesus. It cost many of them their own lives, but that did not stop those who followed them. That, to me at least, is the central miracle of Easter, and one that connects his followers in every generation directly to his life and death. We participate in that miracle by responding to the death of Jesus the way those who first loved him responded, with works of reconciliation. In fact insofar as the first believers identified themselves as The Body of Christ, we become that same Body of Christ as we do what those who most loved Jesus did, transcend the cycle of violence that so characterizes this world by refusing either to capitulate to it or to vindicate it, but instead to do that third thing which the disciples did, seek reconciliation with those whose lives are lived within the cycle of violence, and so become their path out of that cycle, should they choose to take it. The forgiveness of God is thus changed from a theological abstraction grounded in a blood sacrifice required by an angry diety to the lived experience of real human beings who by their reconciling work convey forgiveness directly to those who most need it. The Body of Christ is likewise not some unworldly manifestation of the crucified Jesus, but rather it is exactly what St. Paul and the other earliest Christians said it is, the community of those people who have been so transformed by love that they are now able to live as the disciples of Jesus lived.
To be sure, there is nothing supernatural in this miracle, but I would insist that it is completely imbued by the Divine Spirit. Nor does it insist that we have to define resurrection as the physical resuscitation of the earthly Jesus, though people certainly could, and do. Resurrection is what happens when people die to the cycle of violence of this world and are reborn to the reconciling work that characterized those who loved Jesus. Nor does this view of the miracle of Easter require that people become Christian to be part of the Body of Christ. In this view the Body of Christ is not composed of Christians, but rather is composed of all people so transformed by the love of God that they have transcended the cycle of violence in the way Magdalene and the other disciples did. They respond to violence - whether external or internal I might add - with reconciling love rather than flight or further violence. Thus, the Body of Christ isn't about religion at all, it is about life, about the life we all share as human beings in this world, and so it speaks to one of the continuing problems of Christianity as a religion, the inescapable fact that Christianity at some point lost its contact with the central miracle of Easter and so got sucked back into the cycle of violence which the first followers of Jesus so miraculously transcended. By recognizing the real of miracle of Easter we can see how Christianity, and every world religion and institution of whatsoever kind it may be, is in constant need of that very miracle.
The dialectic of violence is that either it overwhelms all opposition and so grants a monopoly of death to one group or another, or it breeds ever greater levels of violence until that monopoly gets established. The truth of Easter, a truth that emerges not from the pages of theological speculation, but from the facts of history, is that in a moment of time that dialectic was transcended, and in that transcendence a new way of life for people was shown forth. Our choice today is exactly the same as it was 2,000 years ago, to live in the shadow of the dialectic of violence or to emerge into that new way of life shown forth in the real miracle of Easter.
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I am not much for grand theories of everything. Marx had one, Hegel had one, Freud had one, and sooner or later all of them more or less went by the boards. I am not quite up to the standards of those three, and so any grand sweeping theory I have is more or less doomed from the outset. Nevertheless, here on the Virtual Teahouse, I am going to offer yet another Grand Sweeping Theory.
Because I work in what is called a "liturgical" church, we observe various seasons; the one we are now in is Lent, a penitential time far more honored in the breach than in the observance. The first Sunday of this season is always devoted to a consideration of the temptations of Jesus. As I was considering this story for the twenty-seventh time in my preaching career something occurred to me that quickly became my new GST. There are not many temptations, there is only one temptation that comes to us in many forms. That is the temptation to reject our basic humanity and to try to become more than we really are, more than fully human. The Hebrew bible nails this one right on the head, by the way, for in the very first story that involves humans as active participants the serpent overcomes Eve's reluctance to eat the fruit by saying "Oh no, you will not die if you eat it, you will become like God, knowing good and evil." Quite remarkable. Eve's "disobedience," if that is what it is, is born of a desire to become more than human.
I think that is how it is for all of us. It is hard to be a human being; we live with a variety of limitations which include having to suffer, getting old, not knowing, feeling helpless in the face of pain in those we love, lonlieness and so forth. To embrace the true fullness of what it means to be human is to embrace all that, to accept it and to say this part of what it means to be me. Every one of us is tempted much of the time in one way or another to seek a way around all these limitations. Advertising is based upon this whole idea. Get a certain cell phone plan and quess what? You will have "No Limits." Buy a certain car and you will either be just like Tiger Woods or incredibly attractive to whomever you really want to be attractive to. Think about that ridiculous hair care ad for aging male boomers that began: "we were the generation that said we wouldn't get old, and we didn't!" No, we just bought this hair dye and once again were as hip and with it as we were when we had acne and couldn't talk to girls without blushing. This stuff is all preposterous, but it works on the same principle; most of us at one level or another don't really want embrace the true fullness of our humanity, and so we actually fall for stuff that tells us we don't have to that, that tempts us to reject our humanity and become more than fully human.
Some times the temptation speaks to our pride, as when Bernie Madoff rips off people who trusted him to the tune of fifty billion dollars because, well, the rules don't really apply to him; he is special and different. Sometimes the temptation speaks to our shame, as when we live with this more or less chronic sense of inadequacy, barely enduring ourselves because we just didn't do well enough. That sense of inadequacy can spiral into the temptation to real despair because of that gnawing sense that being me isn't good enough and there is nothing I can do about it.
Saying "Yes" to temptation in whatever form it takes is thus not about being weak or bad. It is about believing at some really deep level, a level perhaps that does not even rise to consciousness, that whatever I am is not quite enough, and therefore I need to escape what I am and become something more. I contrast this, by the way with a healthy dissatisfaction that all of us need from time to time with what we have done. If I really screw something up, say this blog, then I need to notice that and tell myself I can do better than that. That is a good thing. That is about pushing myself to fulfill my human potential, not about dissatisfaction with being human. The root temptation all of us face is not about becoming better at what we truly are, it is about wanting to escape what we truly are, become other or more than true, complete, full humans beings.
The bad news in all this is that nothing is so limiting as rejecting our limitations. People who don't love what they truly are as human beings have a hard time loving others. People who have no compassion for themselves have a hard time truly extending compassion to others. People who who don't tolerate mistakes in themselves notice mistakes in others, often to the exclusion of everyting else. Beyond that, I can't even count the number of times I haven't tried things because I was fearful either about the outcome or about how good I could be at whatever it was. The temptation to reject what we are for the sake of trying to become something more is, in my new GST, the single thing that prevents us most comprehensively from fulfilling our true potential as people. On the whole, those who have most embraced their own humanity are the ones who have come closest to fulfilling their highest and best selves.
Which brings me to Jesus. We know what the church says about him theologically. But I don't think he resisted, and even rejected temptation because he knew he was somehow participating in the divine life in a unique way. Who knows whether he had even the slightest idea about any of that. I think he resisted and even rejected temptation because he accepted his full humanity with all that humanity implied. By saying "Yes" to his own humanity he could say "No" to every temptation to reject that humanity.
The good news is that we can do that too. We don't have to live as people who don't really like being people. We can embrace what we are, fully and completely. We can say "Yes" to our own humanity, and thus become free to say "No" to the temptation to try and be something different. To do that is the first and most important step in overcoming our own demons. So now I believe, in accordance with my GST, that Lent is not a time to focus on how bad I am. (Actually I never believed that, but my rhetorical style is dialectic, so I threw that line in.) I believe that Lent is time to focus on the fullness of what it means to be a human being, and to accept that, to embrace it, to live into it as completely as ever I can right here and now. In that way I, and all of us, can do what Jesus did, say "Yes" to our humanity so that we can say "No" to every temptation to reject that humanity. For that is the road to real spiritual health, the path we are all called to walk.
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In a recent exchange of comments about another blog Beth wondered if perhaps I might compose something on the work of Douglas Adams, author of "The Complete Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," an English radio program that became a series of books, unless it was the other way around. "The Guide" is more than a bit like Dr. Who on acid, which I suspect is exactly the effect Adams desired, and therefore any attempt to make sense of these books is a clear violation of their spirit, and not to be countenanced. So, in keeping with the spirit of these books I shall violate their spirit and attempt to make sense of them, at least in one small regard.
One of the many convoluted subplots revolves around finding the answer to "life, the universe and everything." A super giant computer assigned the task began to crunch all the possibilities, and after several million years concluded its work with a definitive statement. The answer to "life, the universe and everything" turned out to be "42," a conclusion that felt, well somehow inadequate to the protagonist, an alien who took the name "Ford Prefect." The problem quickly surfaced. We now have the answer, but we do not yet have the question, and the answer is meaningless without the question. The mice, who were really running the show, suggested "How many roads must a man walk down?" as a provisional try, and that was deemed an acceptable substitute until the real question could be uncovered after several million more years using another computer (which turned out to be the planet Earth.)
Granted, the whole thing is wonderfully ridiculous, which is the point. But I couldn't help thinking, as I laughed my way through this entire story, that Adams was on to something that is actually rather important. Trying to find some sort of "ultimate meaning" in the existence of a tiny carbon based life form that somehow became sentient only in the past few million years, living on a small planet situated within a spiral arm of a galaxy that is100,000 light years across, itself located at some indeterminable point in a universe that is 13 billion years old (give or take a billion years) seems to me to be, well, about as absurd as Douglas Adams made it all seem. Long before beginning to read Adams I had given up that quest. But I am very intrigued by the notion of asking "What is the question to which life, the universe, and everything, is the answer?" I like that question, and it doesn't take an earth-sized computer to begin to play with it. Having tried a number of possibilities the question I have lit upon is this: What does God's love look like? I like this question because it evokes several different affective responses, depending upon which level of the question is being answered. At the level of the universe and the earth it feels really good. Yes, this whole giant thing, this finite but unbounded, incomprehensibly huge physical mystery in which we find ourselves is and must be exactly what God's love looks like, from the greatest black holes, to the nebulae that are themselves larger than our solar system, to the tiny flowers that bloom on high mountain meadows but one week a year, unseen by all but a few creatures - this whole great giant in its collective immensity is what God's love looks like. When I think about humanity, though, the answer becomes problematic: is this whole human enterprise with its own kind of love and hate, its creative and destructive tendencies, are we all part of what God's love looks like? Then of course it becomes truly painful when I get down to the subatomic level and ask "am I what God's love looks like?
But the answer to all of it is "yes;" all of it, including us, including you and me, is what God's love looks like. What does God's love look like? That is my question to which "life, the universe and everything" is the answer. So now, for those who want to play as well, why don't you work on this one. Turn on your giant earth-sized computer before the Vogons blow it up to make room for a galactic superhighway and begin to crunch the question. Then, if you like, post in the comments section and we can all compare notes. In the mean time, remember the words inscribed in friendly letters on the front of every copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide: "Don't Panic."
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Beth's Advent blog stimulated a really good discussion that I could not resist joining, and it inspired me to expand on my thoughts. The question that arose was how can we know what is true or absolute, and how can we separate the truly sacred texts from those that aren't. The answer I have come to over my life is that we can't know what is true or absolute, and we can't separate the "truly" sacred texts from those that aren't. The best we can say is that my texts are sacred for me and your texts are sacred for you. The insight made possible by post-modern thought is also its biggest problem and challenge, and it is simply this: there is no point within the experience of being human that allows complete objectivity. All our perspectives and actions are culturally conditioned, which is why the fact that there are 900 million Hindus in India is not a big fat coincidence. For that matter the predominance of Christianity in North America is not the result of a couple hundred million people independently weighing the evidence and deciding to be Christian. It is the result of generations of teaching, of passing on a culturally conditioned and historically weighted tradition. Christians in general reject the divine birth stories of Augustus and accept the divine birth stories of Jesus not because they know the one is mythic and the other historical but because they are Christians and not worshippers of the Roman pantheon. It is, as a matter of fact, quite remarkable to read the critiques of the New Testament birth narratives by Roman critics. They rejected these stories not because it was impossible to imagine a virgin birth; those were rather common among the greatest people of the empire. It was rather that no god would deign to be born of a peasant woman living on the perimeter of the empire. How did they know that? Well, they knew it for the same reason Christians claim it is possible for an impoverished woman to give birth to a king; because they were taught it, because it was ingrained in their culture and part of their heritage. So it feels like we all end up saying that there is no absolute truth.
I will grant this is frustrating, but it has two important ramifications that have great potential for humanizing us over time. The first is it creates the potential for us to become honest about our beliefs. It creates the possibility for us to say that we believe because we believe, not because we know, and not because we have insights or truths that no one else has access to. Over time we just might begin to understand the true circularity of our arguments for one religion over against another, and so cause us to begin to be a little less certain about our position over against those of other religious persuasions. We all believe on faith, pure and simple, and it is faith all the way down and forever. Second, and at least as important, the postmodern insight frames the manner in which we must chose the spiritual perspective through which we view ourselves, our world and God. To be sure, the destruction of certainty about my religion over against yours does not free me of the need to choose in this life. I have to choose, and indeed can't not. But the primary choice is not one religion over another, but one perspective about life and God over another. I didn't choose to be Christian rather than Hindu. That decision was made centuries before my birth. I am a Christian because I was born in the USA in 1954 rather than Mumbai or Tokyo in the same year. I have the freedom to abandon the religion of my youth, but it is the power of my very post modern conviction about truth that leads me to realize there is no point in that for me. On the other hand, I do have to make a choice about the nature of the God I worship as a Christian. Over time I have come to believe in the God who reveals true divinity by dying rather than killing, and whose power is manifested not in guns and bombs, but in unconditional love for all. I worship the God whose initials in this world are not SPQR, but INRI. I can say truthfully to any Hindu, Muslim, Jew, Christian or whatever who understands God in the same terms that we together worship the same God. But those who believe that the power of God is manifested in marching armies and falling bombs, who proclaim a God who hates and kills those he hates, well whether they are Christian or not they worship a different God than the one I worship.
I didn't get this spirituality from Jesus. I have no idea what Jesus would say about my understanding of him. I got my spirituality from the interpretation of Jesus that ultimately became the most compelling and life transforming for me. And this is the spirituality and religion by which I live my life, and through which I understand the world. My kind of Christianity declares that when I hate other people I am hating the image and likeness of God; when I make victims I am victimizing God. To live a spiritually congruent life forces me to respect the dignity of all people, even as I feel free to disagree with them, at times vehemently. And I believe this about God because I believe it, on pure unadulterated faith, not because God granted me a vision, or because my own sacred texts tell me this. It is my interpretation of my own sacred texts that tell me this, just as other people's interpretations of these same sacred texts speak to them of a God of violence.
Well, enough of this. We don't know "The Truth" and that is what makes us free. Not free to do whatever we want whenever we want to do it, but free to understand what real faith is about, and free to form a spiritual pattern that respects the dignity of other religious traditions, while remaining steeped in our own.
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This post is part of a synchroblog of Christian writers on the topic of leadership.
When I think about spiritual leadership from the perspective of the Christian tradition I find myself in an odd place. I begin with the conviction that it is not possible to construct a meaningful leadership model directly from the teachings that are attributed to Jesus. I say "attributed to" quite deliberately, because modern scholarship has convinced me that we really don't know what Jesus said, and frankly I think even the "Jesus Seminar" findings are perhaps a bit on the conservative/optimistic side. The beatitudes, for example, with their strange and paradoxical blessings, and in Luke's case, woes, don't really teach us how to lead. Rather, they describe what life looks like from the point of view of the Kingdom of heaven, not the kingdom of earth. Their purpose is to show us the radical discontinuity between God's perspective and ours, not to tell us how to govern ourselves here and now.
Similarly, when the evangelists give Jesus speeches about leadership, as when he tells the disciples that those who would lead must be "last and servant of all" this is not a discussion about how to run a business within the temporal realm. It is a statement about how different the temporal realm is from the heavenly. We prove this over and over again. It isn't that we don't want to lead that way, it isn't that we have thought about it and decided not to; it is that we can't lead that way. Even in the best of models, as soon as we identify the best servants as the leaders, we begin to treat them not as servants at all, but rather as those served, and struggle to outdo each other in being servants in order to gain power. I am a very good servant, just for example, and look what the church did to me! It made me the dean of a big cathedral, gave me a large salary and a really big house. Servant ministry? Hardly, try as we might. What is more, I colluded in this process over the course of now nearly thirty years. I was and am a willing co-conspirator in this process of subverting my status as a servant. I don't even empty my own garbage at work. I will say nothing of what we do to bishops in my tradition, for it gets really ugly there.
The president of the United States is, after all, "the servant of the people." Come on now, do "servants" get their own private 747 to fly around in? Not usually. So, again, it isn't that we don't choose to lead in the manner described in the Bible, it is that we can't lead in the manner described in the Bible. It is not that the leaders conspire to subvert that kind of leadership, it is that everyone conspires to subvert that kind of leadership. Everyone works together to make sure that the leaders have the special status and are primarily the ones served. We work very hard to set up conditions that are the exact opposite of how they are described in scripture.
Nor is this mere cynicism, because the truth that there are lots of wonderful leaders out there who give of themselves in truly wonderful ways. It is however to say that trying to construct a model of leadership from what we believe to be the sayings of Jesus points us not in the direction of how to do this, but at the truth - the often searing and painful truth - of how far away we are from the true spirit of God. Now my usual disclaimer. The uncovering of this truth does not mean I think we are rotten and evil and completely awful. It means we are lost, we are confused, and we don't quite know what we are doing. Two very different conditions to be in.
So, when I look for how to understand leadership in the church or the world, I look not to a series of sayings, but to an historical fact, the death of Jesus. Here was a person executed by the world's greatest imperial power with the possible cooperation (and I am not at all sure about that) of the region's greatest spiritual power. The very best people identified Jesus as the source of their problems, and the very best people identified him as an enemy of the state, and of God, and killed him. Oops. As a Christian who accepts the claim the church subsequently made about this man, that in and through him we see the image and presence of God, that teaches me pretty much everything I need to know about spiritual leadership. It teaches me that when in the face of social tensions that are racheting up I decide to defuse the situation by identifying an "enemy" that we must eliminate, I am doing nothing so much as scapegoating, and not addressing the real issues at all. It teaches me that when I insist that I understand the whole truth of the matter and therefore decide that those who differ must be "part of the problem, not the solution" I am participating in the dehumanizing of other people, and I myself am part of the problem, not the solution.
To be a spiritual leader to me, therefore, is to allow the death of Jesus to open my eyes to the way I work. It is to expose me to my own scapegoating and dehumanizing tendencies, and to teach me that when I do those things, no matter how noble I believe my motives to be, I am moving away from, not toward, God. As a leader it is my sacred obligation not to scapegoat, not to dehumanize, and to teach the people I am responsible for leading not to do that either.
The precise form leadership takes is very much a function of temperament of the leader and the system within which that leader operates. But every leader can be aware of the truth about who we are and how we operate collectively. Every leader can re-humanize relationships, refuse to scapegoat, and listen with genuine interest and compassion to the variety of human voices. Every leader can be sensitive to the darkness within which we all grope and struggle, and so invite the truth to illuminate the path before us all. That to me is the essence of spiritual leadership, whether that leadership be exercised in the church or civil government, an open democracy or a one party, autocratic government. As a footnote I would add this, that every spiritual tradition has within it this same truth about people, and therefore the same opportunity for that all important illumination.
This post is part of a synchroblog with other wildly diverse Christian writers. Please visit these blogs on the topic of leadership:
Jonathan Brink - Letter To The President
Adam Gonnerman - Aspiring to the Episcopate
Kai - Leadership - Is Servant Leadership a Broken Model?
Sally Coleman - In the world but not of it- servant leadership for the 21st Century Church
Alan Knox - Submission is given not taken
Joe Miller - Elders Lead a Healthy Family: The Future
Cobus van Wyngaard - Empowering leadership
Steve Hayes - Servant leadership
Geoff Matheson - Leadership
John Smulo - Australian Leadership Lessons
Helen Mildenhall - Leadership
Tyler Savage - Moral Leadership - Is it what we need?
Bryan Riley - Leading is to Listen and Obey
Susan Barnes - Give someone else a turn!
Liz Dyer - A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Polls…
Beth Patterson--Leadership: being the river
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Beth's recent blog inspired me to offer a few thoughts of my own on the connection between spirituality and politics. Here they are.
These days most of us can see the difference between religion and spirituality. Some of us, like me, believe the two can be distinguished but not completely separated, while others think they are both distinct and separate from one another. That question is for another time. For now it is enough to note that they are not the same thing. I begin in this rather tedious fashion because I need a context in which to say that while I do believe religion has no good place in politics, but rather too often exerts a pernicious influence, spirituality is another matter altogether, and ought properly to guide us as we decide how to vote both on candidates and issues.
The development of my spirituality has led me to see a genuinely tragic component in human nature. On the one hand Shakespeare was right - or rather Hamlet was - we are wonderful creatures, "noble in reason," "infinite in faculties," "in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god." And yet these faculties, reason, admirable form and movement, angelic actions and godlike apprehension do not prevent from acting in the most beastly manner when our fears, ambitions, lusts and so forth evoke our basest natures. We can see the good, we really can, but we can't quite bring it about. This is so, not because we are inherently evil, awful creatures, but because we are so mixed, so tragic. If we were truly awful we would feel no internal conflict whatsoever, but the fact that we can see a better self than we are, both individually and corporately, demonstrates that we are not just awful, but rather have this tragic dimension to us which leads us close to true greatness, true beauty but then causes us to self destruct. I got this view not just from reading Sophocles, or Shakespeare; I got it first from the Book of Common Prayer.
So, this sense I have of humanity is at the very core of my spirituality, and it dictates how I vote just about every time. I don't trust the broad public to protect minorities, to respect them as we ourselves want to be respected, and so I vote for people who will work hard to protect the rights of minorities. My politics follows my spirituality as I vote for those who will create enforceable protections. I don't trust "The Market" that idol we have been worshipping the past thirty years, to take care of all Americans. Therefore I vote for people who believe in regulating the Market, in enforcing discipline on it so that its worst excesses can be moderated. Again, my politics follows my spirituality. I do believe that peace through justice is a more durable foundation for social stability than peace through conquest, and so I vote for people who are very reluctant to use our armed forces, and who believe that cooperation with others is better than co-opting them. Yet again, my politics follows my spirituality.
My spirituality never tells me to vote for "The Christian." On the contrary, when I see people running as "Christians" I generally run the other way. My spirituality does tell me that people need restraint, that power needs to be divided and shared. I suppose that if my spirituality assured me that people could always be trusted, that they were inherently good, I might well happily vote for the most libertarian types all the time. But my spirituality doesn't tell me that. I look at the world through a different spiritual lens than that, and because of that lens I tend to vote for the people who believe in oversight, restraint and accountability.
Whether we are "religious" or not, all of us have values and convictions about the world that emerge from our spiritual perspective. Those values influence us in pretty deep and profound ways. When it comes to voting I think they ought to influence us. Look what happened when America ignored its spiritual heritage, forgot the legacy of Lincoln and his second Inagural address with its powerful spirituality, and voted for the guy they would most like to have a beer with. Twice. Let us get away from elections influenced by trite relationships and facile sloganeering, and get back to elections influenced by genuine spirituality. We will all be better off for it.
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