Musings

Easter Week: A New Narrative

(A cartoon from Iran, created to represent the process of recovery after a terrible earthquake.)

 

 

The profundity of Christianity is that nothing in it has but one meaning.

 

So it is with Easter Week. 

 

One of its many meanings came into clear focus for me yesterday.  I set up a couple of lectures at USC by Dr. Fred Luskin, founder of the Stanford Forgiveness Project and author of "Forgive for Good".  Fred developed an studied an efficacious system of training people to forgive.  Not for the sake of the ones forgiven, but for the measurable mental and physical health of those who forgive.  Only after forgiving for our own sake can we consider whether or not it is safe or appropriate to reconcile and restore the broken relationship.

 

The key to forgiveness, says Fred, is to re-write one's narrative of the incident that resulted in hurt or harm.  Every story we tell about our lives can be written in at least a thousand ways.  Why do we choose one way over another?  What if we re-wrote our narratives in such a way that we were no longer victims, but rather active, positive agents in re-building our lives after traumas?  He says that the adoption of such an alternative narrative is the essential moment of forgiveness.

 

It's Easter week.  How to tell the story?  Using the same elements and details, the early Christians could have come up with at least a thousand ways to tell it.  The New Testament gives us four of those options.  And then the early Christians embellished those mythical stories with further narrative interpretations.

 

One of them, upon which evangelical Protestants are fixated, says that we are all hopeless sinners, doomed by God to Hell for eternity unless we believe that God sent Jesus to be tortured to death to pay for our sins so we can be saved.  This makes us victims of a capricious supernatural divinity that created us to fail to meet his standards of behavior.  Say "yes" to these contorted beliefs and you'll be forgiven by God for being ensnared in his bizarre scheme.  Even if you say "I believe", you're still a victim when your religion effectively says to believe it or you will roast in Hell for eternity.

 

Christianity needs a new narrative based on the elements of the Easter week myths.  Here is an option:  Rabbi Jesus practiced and taught radical compassion to the people of Israel.  This threatened the authority of the Jewish elite and the Roman occupiers, so they killed him on a cross - from which he forgave them.  This unconditional love prevailed beyond his death and lived on in his followers, who regrouped and formed a new, compassionate community of faith.  In this narrative, Jesus and his followers are not victims.  Jesus was an agent of positive action, and so are we who follow him.  The transformative power of this narrative inspires us to forgive. 

 

For progressive Christians, forgiveness is not in the supernatural hands of a Guy-In-The-Sky God.  Forgiveness is up to us.  Just as it was up to Jesus whether or not to forgive the people who crucified him.  The mythic narratives of Easter week speak for our souls as we recognize our pain, loss, and disappointment, and move from being victims to becoming active agents of positive personal and social transformation.  Fred Luskin summarizes forgiveness as the release of our attachment to enforcing unenforceable rules we've constructed.  We think that our HTOTB's (How Things Ought to Be) really are the immutable laws of the universe.  But other people in fact do get to make choices, even if they hurt us.  And we get to make our own choices in the aftermath, as well.

 

Jesus' fan club in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday had to make a choice after Good Friday.  Could they forgive him for not being the Superman Savior who would drive the Romans out of their land?  Could they forgive God for allowing their beloved Rabbi to be murdered?  Could they begin to understand God as Love instead of as an omnipotent Ruler of the Cosmos?  Would they scatter and skulk and whine about the horrible things that happened that week?  Or would they get up, dust themselves off, gather together, forgive without forgetting, remember the divine Love that flowed from Jesus, and redouble their commitment to living it out as a community?

 

At Easter, progressive Christians celebrate something much more significant than a supernatural miracle.  We celebrate the decision of Jesus' followers to be the church - to stick together in the community of compassion in which we gather this and every Sunday.  That's what it means for the Christ to live within us.  That's what we mean when we repeat the ancient chant:  "Christos anesti! Alithos anesti!" -- "Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!"

 

JIM BURKLO
Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

 

 

 

Flower Wild

 

Went with the gotta go urge

On a week ending, road bending

Wheels a turning ramble

Past the malls and urban tangle

 

Mountains rumbling into view

Headtilt gaze at yonder spangle

Exit there to road the country

Spread with poppies on the bluffs

 

Spun around to car the parking

Set my boots on soily sand

Eager the feet to get aheart

Headbent bounding up the land

 

Drywash burst in flecks of color

Disorient, disoccidented

Zigs of blue and zags of purple

Aflame in gold the trail ascended

 

Flower wild, I lost my locus

As on the blooms I trained my focus

Staring at some flecks of white

Eye-soaring down a sward of orange

 

Thoughts ran faster than my feet

On land sprung out of desert sleep

Where to fit these sights in mind?

No proper placement could I find....

 

 

 

JIM BURKLO
Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

Protecting Democracy: How Now?

It is perfectly legal to destroy America's democracy.

 

And that poses a quandary for us patriots who aim to stop the person who is doing it, given that criminal charges are off the table for the moment. 

 

So many people I know are flailing and falling into despair about what is happening to the country.  Here I want to do my little part, among my friends and readers, to think, talk, and act constructively.  First, let's ponder the nature of the challenge before us.

 

The mere mention of the current president's name reinforces his power and contributes to his daily degradation of the institutions that guarantee our freedom.  Attacking him feeds his claim to be a victim, and supports the narrative of the people whose perceived victimhood he represents.  Calling him a buffoon just reinforces the sentiments of his supporters who like him because he is a buffoon.  Complaining that he is acting against the interests of the people who voted for him just underscores their belief that he's "honest".  If they were rich like he is, they, too, would act against the interests of poor people.

 

He is a place-holder for the anger, resentment, and fear of millions of people in this country.  His value to them as an emotional mirror outweighs any negative public policy consequences that they may suffer from his tenure.  So arguing with them about the factual consequences of his policies is of limited utility.  

 

Impeachment would be disastrous for the country unless there was strong bi-partisan support for it.  It is doubtful that such support would have emerged even if Mueller had determined that the President and his campaign criminally colluded with the Russians.  It is bad that the Russians influenced the election in his favor, and it is terrible that the President and his campaign cooperated with the Russians even if it was not illegal. 

 

But just as bad as criminal collusion are the perfectly legal attacks against democracy that he commits every day.  Threatening his political opponents with violence from biker gangs, condemning the press for reporting the facts about his presidency, threatening to muzzle his critics, using Fox as his own "Pravda" propaganda organ, implicitly supporting violent racists, characterizing entire populations as rapists and murderers, undercutting faith in elections: the relentlessness of these outrages has desensitized us from the damage he is doing to our democracy.  It is unacceptable, and we cannot let it become normal.

 

So what shall we do about it? 

 

1)  We should avoid using his name and refer to him only as "the current president".  We should follow the sterling example of Lucinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand, who refuses to utter the name of the murderer at the Christchurch mosque.

 

2)  We should out-flag him and the Republicans.  At every Women's March, at every progressive campaign rally, at every gathering of the resistance, there should be a sea of waving US flags.  It's our flag.  It's our country.  We are the patriots.  The flag is a powerful symbol and we need to reclaim it.

 

3)  We should out-Constitution him and his followers.  The Tea Party people made a big deal about waving copies of it. We should out-wave them.  Each of us should own, study, and brandish a pocket copy.  It's our Constitution, and we are the real defenders of it.  We're the people who support the free press, the separation of church and state, and the rule of law.

 

4)  We should out-Bible the current president and the Republicans.  There is plenty in the Judeo-Christian scriptures that supports progressive politics and cautions against our country's current slide toward tyranny.  To explore further, see my  RESISTANCE BIBLE STUDY and my book, DEEPER LOVE . 

 

5)  We should demand the current president's resignation, not his impeachment.   Our message should be simple and consistent.  It should be non-partisan and should focus on his inability to fulfill the duties of the presidency.  "With his lies, insults, and provocations to violence, he attacks the foundations of our Constitution, which he is sworn to defend.  He endangers the freedom of all Americans by degrading the institutions upon which democracy rests.  His appalling behavior has weakened the authority and tarnished the reputation of the office he holds.  So he should resign immediately."    Neither resignation nor impeachment is likely, but demanding his resignation rhetorically puts the moral burden where it belongs: on him. 

 

6)  We should campaign for the Democratic candidates who have the best chance of winning the Electoral College.  Now more than ever we must be strategic voters - not just in the general election, but in the primaries, too. 

 

 

 

JIM BURKLO
Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

Beyond Perfection

Recovering from the Christian Purity Cult

^“Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  Jesus, Matthew 5:48

Christianity appears impossible if we focus on the admonitions in the New Testament that Jesus gave his followers.  Love your enemies?  Good luck with that.  Turn the other cheek?  Ouch.  If a creditor demands your coat, give him your cloak as well?  That means you’ll be left naked.  If a man lusts after a woman who is not his wife, he’s an adulterer.  No heterosexual male can pretend to meet that standard.  And the list goes on – culminating in Jesus’ demand that we be perfect, as God is perfect.  Nobody can fully follow his marching orders.  

How do we respond to these outrageous expectations? 

Plenty of folks have given up on Christianity altogether, seeing that these demands are far too extreme to satisfy.  Others have remained in the faith, in denial about the impossibility of living up to it.  Others come up with prevaricating interpretations to suggest that Jesus didn’t really mean what he said. 

One way to account for his extreme directives is to put them in the context of his struggle with the Pharisees.  That sect of Judaism was in part a reaction to the occupation of Israel by the Roman Empire: since we can’t beat ‘em, at least let’s not be ‘em.  Let’s hunker down and preserve our cultural heritage by observing it to the max.  To the already challenging Levitical rules of diet and behavior they added yet more rules, to “fence in” the biblical law.  “Fencing” was the creation of extra rules that went beyond the existing ones, so that if you went past that fence, you’d still be obeying the rules that mattered most.  If you put a fence along the edge of a cliff, you might still slip or slide through and over the edge.  If you put another fence twenty feet short of the cliff, your chances of going over the edge go down substantially.

Pharisaic fencing resulted in a thicket of legalistic barbed wire that was impossible for common people to navigate.  Only the upper crust of Jewish society could afford to follow all these extra rules.  Jesus was a radical religious reformer who called out the Pharisees for perpetuating a system that turned regular folks into second-class spiritual citizens. 

Jesus wasn’t against fencing the Law of Moses.  He was just against the nit-picky version that the Pharisees created.  Jesus kept the fencing around the big stuff, but tore down the fencing around the little stuff.  And he put fences up around the big stuff very far from the edge of the cliff, so that nobody – not even the richest Pharisee with the most time to waste on trivial religious observances – would be able to act any holier than anybody else.  Nobody could do what Jesus demanded in his Sermon on the Mount.  Not the Pharisees, not the Sadducees, not even his own loyal followers.

The disciples panicked in the boat in the storm on the lake, while Jesus told them to have faith.  The disciples slept in the Garden of Gethsemane after Jesus begged them to stay awake with him.  Peter attacked the High Priest’s slave during Jesus’ arrest, and Jesus chided him for it.  Thomas doubted Jesus’ resurrection.  Judas’ failure needs no repeating.  If the way of Jesus was possible in his own lifetime, why did every single one of his chosen followers fail to live it?  If they all failed, why would we expect ourselves to succeed?

The evangelical Christian response to this dilemma is the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross.   Following the Law is impossible.  All of us are hopeless sinners .  (One perverse consequence of this belief played out in the last US presidential election:  most evangelicals assumed an immoral equivalence between Trump and Clinton.)  God sent his Son to die on the cross as substitution for our failure.  By believing in Jesus as the Christ and Savior, we are saved from the consequences of our sin.

But why would God set us up for such failure, and then be compelled to make Jesus to die by torture on a cross in exchange for sins we could not help but commit?  And in any case, Jesus’ death on the cross does not settle the question of how to respond to his admonitions. 

What should we do when we, or those we love, are threatened with violence?  Should we use violence in defense, or not?  Should we go ahead and break the command of Jesus to turn the other cheek, knowing that Jesus forgave us by dying on the cross?   That makes no more sense than committing adultery – physically or imaginatively – because we assume that we’ll be forgiven for it in the bye-and-bye. 

A lot of Christians suffer from deep, perpetual fear.  They’ve been told to follow Jesus, but they know they can’t do it.  They’ve been told that because of their sinfulness, Jesus had to be tormented to death: substitutionary sacrifice is a potent recipe for existential guilt.  Preachers threaten them will hell if they don’t obey the Bible’s rules, so their sense of salvation is tenuous at best.  They can never be sure that the state of their soul is secure in this life or in the next.

Other Christians live guilt-free, but impose guilt and suffering on others in Jesus’ name.  They torture the Sermon on the Mount with confabulated interpretations to suggest that Jesus supports a strong military and unfettered capitalism.  They imagine Trump as a Christian.  They turn the church into a right-wing Political Action Committee.  They triumph in their own heterosexuality by demonizing homosexuality.  They tout their Christianity as a form of tribal identity.

There is another way for us to do Christianity, taking Jesus’ commands seriously without tormenting ourselves or others for failing them.  We can be humble Christians, abstaining from self-righteousness and from wallowing in guilt for our failings.  We can go far out of our way to avoid violence in defense of ourselves and others.  But there may be times when turn-the-other-cheek options are exhausted.  We can do our best to practice real generosity in a practical, sustainable way, without feeling guilty about failing to give everything to anybody who asks for it.  We can do our best to express our sexuality in ways that are kind and gentle, avoiding any acts or attitudes that might be hurtful to partners or others, without beating ourselves up for experiencing natural attractions or fantasies.  Jesus' admonitions aim us in the direction of compassion, and what matters most is doing our best to move in that direction, both as individuals and as a society. There is a way to take Jesus' code seriously without becoming "code-ethic" absolutists.  I assume that Jesus, whether the historical person or the personage created by the early Christians, meant what he said in the Sermon on the Mount.  I don't want to explain away his hard teachings.  Instead, I want to let them stretch me as far as I can go in the direction of kindness, patience, and reverence....

 

 

JIM BURKLO
Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

 

 

 

 

 

The Tumbleweeds

(a story I tell our grandkids....)

 

“That’s how I roll!”

...hollered Tangler Tumbleweed said as she caught a breeze, bounced off a rock, spun over a mesquite tree, and left Don Coyote in the dust.

“Catch you next time!” Don howled.

“Catch me if you can!” Tangler yelled back as her voice faded in the distance.

She was in a rush to get home to her family.  They had found a nice campsite among some big boulders, sheltering them from the wind.  “My favorite!" she exclaimed with glee as she picked up the scent of dinner cooking on the fire.  Wrangler Tumbleweed, her brother, had four roasted locusts in his tendrils already.  “Hey!” said Tangler.  “Wait till we say grace!” 

“That’s right,” said Mrs. Tumbleweed, their mother.  Mr. Tumbleweed was spreading the cloth on the flat rock that served as their dinner table.  “Put your locusts on the plate first,” he told Wrangler. 

“Thanks for locusts,” said Tangler.  “Thanks for wind,” said Wrangler.  “Thanks for Wrangler,” said Mrs. Tumbleweed.  “Thanks for Tangler,” said Mr. Tumbleweed.  And their tendrils tangled as they reached for the locusts and crunched them in their prickly mouths. 

“Tomorrow we go north,” said Mrs. Tumbleweed.  “The wind forecast says we’ll get 30 miles an hour.” 

“But that’s only if we stick together,” Mr. Tumbleweed declared.  “No taking off on your own, you two!  Remember, Tangler, when you took off on your own and ended up getting stuck in a barbed wire fence?  Ay, yi, yi.  We had to wait a few days for the wind to blow the other direction so we could go back and pull you out!”

“Yeah, I remember,” said Tangler.  “Sure was boring being stuck there for so long.  A plastic bag blew in my face and I couldn't get it off.”

“Yes, and remember, Wrangler, when you went tumbling on your own and got stuck in a cholla cactus?”

“Yeah, that hurt,” said Wrangler. "I'm still picking spines out of my tendrils."

“The family that tumbles together doesn’t grumble together,” said Mr. Tumbleweed.  “So remember, in the morning, before the wind starts blowing, we are going to get ready to go north.”

The next morning, Tangler and Wrangler woke up early and played their favorite game, Tumbleweed, on their phones.  Their tendrils poked quickly all over their screens as they avoided obstacles and leaped and bounced and flew and spun for more and more points.  "56!" yelled Wrangler.  "89!" yelled Tangler.

"Okay you kids.  Enough gaming.  Time for the real thing," said Mrs. Tumbleweed. 

As they packed up their belongings tightly and folded them into the middle of their balls of tendrils, Mr. Tumbleweed spoke.

"Your mom and I have decided that today, Tangler is going to drive."

"What??!!" howled Wrangler.  "She's still too young!" 

"We've been watching her," said Mrs. Tumbleweed.  "She's got great reflexes and is really good at catching the wind.  It's time!"

Tangler's tendrils spread to reveal a smile as wide as all of Texas.

The family bunched and hunched and scrunched until they were one big ball of scratchy, curvy tendrils.  Tangler directed them onto a high spot on top of a flat rock, and waited for the morning wind. 

Don Coyote warily approached.  "That is one big tumbleweed!" he exclaimed.  "Woah, wait a minute!  Is that Tangler in there?"

"Yes!" Mr. Tumbleweed replied.  "She's driving today!  For the first time."

Don Coyote raised his snout to the sky and howled and yipped in celebration.  "Yit-yit-yit wahoooo!" 

"I still don't think she's ready," grumbled Wrangler.

"Oh don't you worry, boy," drawled Don Coyote.  "That sister of yours is ready.  You should have seen her yesterday.  I never saw a tumbleweed dance so fast around a mesquite tree in all my days.  She's ball lighting, that girl!"

They could hear it coming, whistling through the brush.  Don's ears stood straight and his snout poked into the wind.  "Here she comes!  Yaaaaa-yit-yit- yahoooooh!"

"See you when the wind blows south, Don!" hollered Tangler.  The Tumbleweeds rolled slowly at first.  Then they lifted off and rolled in the air, then lightly touched the ground and bounced back up.  Tangler steered them around creosote bushes, bounced them over dry-washes, bounded them around and over hoodoos and rockpiles, picking up speed.

"Wooo-hooo!" yelled Wrangler as the family flew over a little canyon, catching a sudden updraft that blew them to the other side....

 

 

JIM BURKLO
Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

 

Did God Want Trump to Be... Anything?

 

Did God want me to be a pastor?  Is that why I am one?

 

"I think God calls all of us to fill different roles at different times and I think that he wanted Donald Trump to become president, and that's why he's there," said Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the president's press secretary, this past Wednesday.

 

Let's set aside for now the outrageous proposition that God would choose a cruel, unrepentant habitual liar and philanderer to be the president of any country.  Not even the people of this country wanted him to be president: he lost the popular vote by 2,850,000 ballots.  Instead, let us begin by considering whether God "calls" any of us to do or be anything at all.

 

There is a deeply rooted belief in most branches of Christianity, including the progressive one from which I dangle, that some people get "called" to ministry by God.  This never made sense to me, even though I had experiences along my path to ministry that surely could fit the usual descriptions of such a "call".  I had mystical moments in my childhood.  Religion always mattered to me.  I got goosebumps in calculus class at the university when the professor described the concept of the limit, in which the function gets arbitrarily close to the curve - it reminded me of getting arbitrarily close to God in mystical prayer.  That was the moment when I decided to go to seminary.  Did God call me to ministry that day?  Or did I have an encounter with God, which then got me excited about studying theology, which then led to considering church ministry?  My attraction to God certainly had something to do with my attraction to ministry.  But a person can be just as attracted to God without feeling any urge to clerge. 

 

I take full responsibility for my career choice.  I am far too in awe of God to claim that divine intervention or preference had anything to do with it.  I think this "call to ministry" business is hubris, contrary to the religion founded by that humble man, Jesus. 

 

So having laid the whole idea of being "called by God" to rest, we can also put the words of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the amateur theologian in the White House, to bed as well.  No, God did not ordain Donald Trump to be the president of the United States.  Indeed, had he been more God-conscious, more attracted to Divine Love, Trump might well have made very different career choices.  He might have realized that he was temperamentally and intellectually unsuited for political office of any kind, and instead put his efforts into philanthropy with the vast ill-gotten gains he inherited from his father - hopefully hiring people with more qualifications than his own to distribute it properly.

 

If God is Love, God does not "call" us to this or that line of employment, but rather attracts us to make highest and best use of whatever skills and proclivities we have been given, for the benefit of other beings.  God does not call me like a boss offering me a job.  God is not a headhunter, placing people in positions based on "his" mysterious preferences.  God is the sacred compassionate relationship that happens in almost any profession when one person is truly of service to another. 

 

As a college student earning my way through school, I worked for two years as a nursing assistant in a convalescent hospital.  I was paid minimum wage for some of the most significant employment I've ever had in my life, helping elderly people through the last days of their lives and attending to them at death.  Nobody ever told me I was "called" to that occupation.  But surely it was as sacred a form of work as any I've done since. 

 

Hmmm.  Could two years of placing bedpans under patients in a nursing home do Donald Trump's soul some good?  I doubt Sarah Huckabee Sanders would ask that question...

 

 

 

 

JIM BURKLO
Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

Taste and See

 

Imagine that you memorize a book of recipes.  You quote passages from the recipes, with breathless enthusiasm, to other people - whether they care to listen or not.  You follow each recipe to the letter.  You chop and mix and bake and cook according to the instructions.  You show off the finished product, proclaiming its absolute superiority to all others.

 

But you never bother to eat the food.

 

Some kinds of Christianity are like that.  All directions, but no dinner.  Because if you actually ate the food, you might or might not like it.  There are recipes that, if faithfully followed, will produce bland, boring, unpleasant, and even nasty dishes.  Because rigidly orthodox religion worships the recipes, actually eating the results might lead to questioning them. 

 

That's why conservative Christian preachers warn against trusting your emotions when interpreting the faith.  Your subjective experiences are like taste-buds.  A bitter orthodox teaching should be obeyed on authority, and not be subject to evaluation by your God-given sensorium.  Oh no no no, don't follow your gut.  Don't follow your nose or your tongue before you even get to your gut.  Follow those megachurch pastors and big-pulpit clerics who declaim with stentorian gravitas, ordering you to consume the recipe, but not the food.

 

But I say, try out the recipes in the Bible.  Play with the ingredients in our tradition.  It's not about believing the recipes.   It's about tasting and seeing.  Don't memorize the faith and gush about how perfect it is.  Practice it.  Don't just talk about God.  Experience God in mystical contemplation.  If the results are great, consider repeating the exercise.  If you follow a religious recipe and get perfectly prepared lutefisk, which tastes like the residue left in a sink trap after a Drano treatment, consider shelving that one and trying another.  If you get okay results with a Christian recipe, but get a bright idea for improving on it, or even radically altering it, go for it.  Be playful and free-spirited.  A dash of this, a dash of that.  Don't be a slave to the details.  Experiment with the recipes of the great mystics and contemplatives of the Church over the past 2,000 years.  Poke your finger in the batter and lick it.  If it works for you, make it part of your repertoire.  Come up with your own recipes!  There's always room for innovation in the Christian kitchen.

 

My wife, Roberta, is a gifted baker.  Her signature product is Roberta's Cheesecake (pictured).  The best in the world.  Yes, there's a recipe.  But not just anybody can follow it the way she does. What brands of cream cheese and sour cream do you use?  Are they even available in your part of the country?  How does your oven heat up and cool down?  Electric?  Gas? Convection?  What pan do you use?  What size?  How thick or thin is it?  How hard do you tamp down the graham cracker crumble crust?  Exactly how much should the crust be caramelized, and just how can you tell when you have it right?  Roberta follows a recipe, but it is subject to interpretation.  Just like the Bible and the whole Christian tradition is subject to infinite variations of interpretation, each resulting in potentially significant different consequences. 

 

The recipes in Leviticus are colon-cleansers.  If you like sweet and sour, go with the ones in the Psalms.  For savory, there is the Song of Solomon.  The recipes in Jesus' Sermon on the Mount are gourmet: devilishly hard to follow, but the results are divine.  With notable exceptions, Saint Paul's aren't good for much besides weight loss. How will you know for yourself unless you get busy cooking - and eating?  The whole Christian tradition - scriptures, songs, art, liturgies, prayer practices, social witness - is a big pantry full of amazing ingredients to employ in creative cookery.  Let's get busy!

 

"O taste and see that the Lord is good..." Psalm 34: 8.  Don't take the word of some talking head for the answer.  (Not even mine.)  Cook, taste, and then see.  The proof of Christianity is in the pudding (and the cheesecake)! 

 

JIM BURKLO

 

Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

 

 

 

 

St. Mary Oliver

LA Women's March, 1-19-19

 

 

When it's over, I want to say: all my life

I was a bride married to amazement.

I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

 

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.

Tell about it.

 

To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work.

 

-- Mary Oliver

 

The function of sainthood is to facilitate our relationship with the divine.  And this was the supreme achievement of Mary Oliver as a poet.

 

As Saturn's rings are stardust concentrated by the planet's gravity, so Mary Oliver's halo was formed by her focused attraction to nature and to the human condition.  Her words drew us into her orbit.  Her poems were deep, layered, reduced to essentials.  They were heretical in the view of literary critics who could not accept that really good poetry could be so easily accessible to a popular audience.  But she was in excellent company.  Many of the mystics of Christianity and other world religions have been subjected to the same kind of accusation.

 

Not a formally religious person, she nonetheless grounded her life and work in a natural spirituality that resonated with the contemplative traditions of the world's faiths.  Her poetry had a scriptural quality, expressing universal truth in enduring language widely repeated.  Her poems are profound but simple prayers, invocations, homilies, and benedictions, read aloud at sacred moments in people's lives.  Now, after her passing, we recognize the virtual sainthood she achieved among us long ago.

 

To be canonized in the Catholic church, one must be associated with one or more miracles.  Mary Oliver passed this test.  As a child, she was awestruck by what she saw in the woods by her house in Ohio.  Mary Oliver paid attention.  Open, curious, wonder-filled, slack-jawed attention.  The kind of attention that is love.    Through careful observation of everyday phenomena in nature, the door to the miraculous was opened to her, and through her poetry, to us.  She was "married to amazement", and her readers were transubstantiated into her bridesmaids and groomsmen whose job is to stand and watch with love.

 

Some might object to giving Mary Oliver sainthood so soon after her death.  But if we're doing the work that she called us to do, then time will fall away and we will enter into eternity in this life, rapt with awe.  Mary Oliver's poems invite us into the experience of timelessness.  So in this eternal now, what would be gained by waiting to honor her saintliness?

 

By acclamation, by overwhelming consensus, let us canonize Mary Oliver.  With every reading of her poetry, we brighten her halo, and let it illuminate more of the world around us.

 

 

 

JIM BURKLO
Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

Perfecting Love

Painting by Bardia Soltani, USC undergraduate art student

 

A few weeks ago, I flew up to Portland from Los Angeles and found myself sitting next to a woman, about 45 years old, who was on her way to her first face-to-face date with a man she met online.  She needed to talk because she was nervous about the impending encounter.  I asked her questions and offered encouragement, for which she seemed very grateful.  She was a fundamentalist Christian who had never married.  "My biggest test of faith was when I was in the Peace Corps in Nepal and fell in love with a wonderful man who was a Hindu.  We were getting close to a commitment but I did not want to be "unequally yoked" to an non-Christian.  I was afraid of God so I backed away from him.  It was so hard," she confessed.  I just listened, but felt so sad for her.  Her fear-based religion shattered the love of her life.  And that fear even now dragged behind her like a useless anchor.

“God is love.”  The Bible tells us so.  Taking this short line from the first letter of John seriously results in a long list of significant consequences.  These three words are our marching orders as Christians.  They sum up the meaning and purpose of human existence.  They open a window into a more compassionate, mindful, and progressive form of the Christian faith.

If God is love, then God is something we do, rather than somebody or something we try to believe in.  If God is love, then God is a relationship, and not a Guy in the Sky or some other kind of supernatural entity.  If God is love, God is nothing to fear.  If God is love, when we really love someone - even of another religion, or of no religion at all - God is in that relationship, blessing it.  So these three words wipe away all the theological debates about science and common sense versus religion.  These three words sweep away the problem of evil, the perennial conundrum of how an all-powerful God could love people while allowing horrible things to happen to them.  If God is love, then God is not in charge of the universe.  Love is extremely powerful, but it is not directive.  Love does not force anybody to do anything, nor to force anything to do anything to anybody.  If God is love, then God is omni-attractive, not omni-potent. 

If God is love, then prayer is not about asking God for favors.  If God is love, then prayer becomes the contemplative experience of divine love.  It is the practice of love through compassionate attention to all that is.  And this is the purpose of human life.  Through billions of years of cosmic unfolding and evolution, we frail creatures have come into being for the purpose of reflecting attentive awe and wonder back at the universe.  We’re here to let our jaws drop in amazement at each other’s existence, and to be wonderstruck with loving attention toward all that exists.  When we are in this state of awe, we are doing God.  We are practicing God.  We are communing with God. 

“Perfect love casts out fear.”  If we take this line from the first letter of John seriously, it leads us to an enlightened personal and communal morality.  Border walls will not cast out fear.  A nuclear arms race will not cast out fear.  Radically restricting immigration will not cast out fear.  Keeping a gun in the house will not cast out fear.  Rubbing our hands all the time with sanitizer will not cast out fear.  What will cast out fear?  Knowing our neighbors and showing them kindness.  Welcoming strangers.  Directing open, warm curiosity toward other people and toward all beings and things, even those that at first glance may seem disturbing.  Practicing God – that is, practicing Love – attracts us to kindness and distracts us from fear.  And by practicing Love, we will make the world a lot less scary.  Because so much of what is scary in this world is the result of people trying to deal with their fears in ways that are scarier than the stuff they were scared of in the first place. 

Like the guy I know who has a big locked cabinet in his basement, full of guns.  Why does he have guns?  To protect his family from intruders, he says.  But the main reason an intruder would want to intrude would be to steal his guns, which are by far the most fungible assets in his house.  He thinks he needs guns in order to protect his guns.  Our current president wants to build and store lots more nuclear weapons in order to keep America a safe place to build and store nuclear weapons.  And he said he will build a border wall to protect Americans from brown immigrants who are only scary because he said they are scary and his supporters believed him and now they demand that he build a wall.  He has trapped himself in a feedback loop of fear.  But if we loved the folks south of the border, we’d do what we can to make their lives better so that they wouldn’t want to cross the border in the first place.  We'd show compassion to the millions of undocumented immigrants who have been living in the shadows for decades.  And we’d show compassion to those with legitimate need for asylum.  Perfect love would cast out our irrational fears and at the same time make the world happier and safer. 

Here in LA, this city full of Catholics, I've never seen anyone cross themselves when crossing a street.  But I sat next to a guy on my flight home from Portland to LA who crossed himself at takeoff and landing.  I just looked at him with all the love I could muster and hoped that it might help cast out his fear.   But then, maybe making the sign of the cross was enough to get him from fear into divine love!  Most of the stuff we’re afraid of is statistically trivial.  Being a pedestrian in Los Angeles is vastly more dangerous than air travel. 

“God is love” – it's old news that stayed good news.  But it might be frustrating news for folks who were hoping for a God who is more like Batman, vanquishing evil with superpowers.  Or for a God like Elijah’s, who rained down fire from heaven to show who was boss.  Or for a God like the one who drowned the Egyptian army when it was pursuing the people of Israel through the Red Sea.  Or the God of Aimee Semple McPherson, the megachurch evangelist in 1930’s LA who told folks to put their hands on the radio to receive miraculous healing.  Love is very powerful, to be sure, but a lot of us have been disappointed by it.  You love somebody and they don’t love you back.  Or you think somebody loves you but it turns out they really don’t.   Or you want to love somebody but their difficult behavior makes it hard to know how to love them.  And the list goes on.  Love is more than a word on a Hallmark card.  It takes time and trouble and discipline.  I teach mindfulness practice at USC, and I tell my students that mindfulness and love are the same thing.  Warm, caring, curious, open, non-judgmental attention.  I tell them that mindfulness practice is not rocket science.  It’s simple.  But it is very challenging.  It’s easy to learn what it is.  But it’s hard to actually do it consistently.  God is the love that you practice, the love that you do and share. 

If God is love, then the church is a school of love.  If God is love, then the church doesn’t need to get bogged down with theological mumbo jumbo.   The message is simple.  The practice is hard, so we should be helping each other figure out how to love best, under many different and often very difficult circumstances. 

I went to the Sunday Assembly in Hollywood a few times.  It’s a sort of church for atheists here in Hollywood.  One part of their Sunday meeting is called “Doing Our Best”, and I think our progressive churches should copy it.  They pick out one of their members to tell about how they did their best in a challenging situation.  The stories they tell are prosaic.  They sometimes don’t have happy endings, and often the stories end without a clear resolution.  But such is life, eh?  And such is love.  It’s not all flowers and balloons, cuddles and giggles.  The “Doing Our Best” stories are inspiring exactly because they aren’t heroic or extraordinary.  They lift up the deep significance of how we respond to everyday life. 

 “God is love.”  It sounds sweet, but it has serious consequences.  So we gather together in our churches, supporting each other in doing the best we can to move our community and our world away from fear and toward compassion....

 

 

JIM BURKLO
Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

The Church Confesses

 

churchconfession  by Jim Burklo

 

"I am the church, and this is my confession.  My last confession was 500 years ago.  I have oppressed women and kept them out of leadership positions.  I have oppressed gay and lesbian people.  I have judged people pointlessly for having normal sexual urges and relationships, treating sex like a disease instead of lifting it up as a precious gift from God.  I have failed to see the absurd irony of being the church of Jesus, a humble servant, while pridefully claiming that my religion is the only true faith.  I have twisted the Bible to claim that it endorses slavery, wars, greed, and cruelty.  I have resisted social and scientific progress by claiming to interpret the Bible literally, when it was never intended to be read that way.  I am sorry for these sins and for all the sins of my past life.  I commit myself to turning from the errors of my ways.  I will follow Jesus’ way of unconditional love.  I will joyfully and creatively practice my Christian tradition without claiming that it is the only way to God.  I will praise and worship God as Love, instead of as a capricious, supernatural “guy in the sky”.  I affirm the sexuality of LGBTQ people, and will celebrate their marriages.  I will honor women as equals to men in church and society.  I will work with people of other faiths, or of no faith at all, to protect the planet, promote peace and social justice, and create a heaven of kindness on earth.  More about my commitment to change at ProgressiveChristianity.org and ProgressiveChristiansUniting.org.   Amen."

 

Make your own Church Confession!  Get a model of a church.  And get an  EZSound Box with 10 inch extension play button.  Record the words above into it.  Put sound box inside or near the model of the church, with the button out front.  Use at events, coffee hour, or make your own video as a playful way to spread the message of our progressive Christian movement.

 

 

JIM BURKLO
Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California