Musings

Book of Nature, Book of Scripture

 

In the fourteenth century, a German priest, Conrad of Megenberg, wrote “The Book of Nature” (a picture from it is above).   It was based on the assumption, shared by some theologians in that era, that God’s revelation was shown equally in nature and in scripture.  It was presumed that the two “books” were seamlessly compatible. 
 
But that was before the scientific revolution, which resulted in findings about nature that conflicted with traditional interpretations of the Bible.  After that, readers of the Book of Nature went in one direction, and readers of the Book of Scripture in quite another.
 
Until now.  Science is now revealing the neural pathways of the human experience of transcendence, the essential and universal phenomenology of religion.  And progressive Christianity is re-interpreting the Bible and the traditions of the church in a manner compatible with scientific knowledge. 

By progressive, I mean Christianity that creatively practices its rich traditions with an ongoing evolution of interpretation.  A Christianity that takes the Bible seriously because it does not have to take it literally.  A faith that reads the Bible as a collection of human documents about the quest to engage with Ultimate Reality. A Christianity that understands most of the Bible stories as myths that can induce deep spiritual transformation.  A faith that worships God as Love, not as a Guy in the Sky.  A religion that sees itself as one among others that may have more or less equal validity.  A Christianity that is focused on deeds rather than creeds, direct spiritual experience rather than rote acceptance of beliefs.
 
What is distinctive about progressive Christianity is that it can translate its essentials into secular language.  Other forms of Christianity cannot.  They presume adherence either to a literalistic interpretation of the Bible or to the a-priori authority of church teachings.   Progressive Christians lift up universal wisdom that can be expressed in either secular or religious terms.  For us, any religious idea that conflicts with the Book of Nature either should be dropped or re-imagined.  As science advances, so our religion will evolve.  We treasure our religious tradition, finding its myths, poetry, music, art and ritual to be powerfully evocative of our spiritual experience.  But we strive to be bi-lingual and bi-cultural. 

Let us read the Book of Nature and the Book of Scripture next to each other.  The Book of Nature boggles us with awe and wonder at the unfolding of the cosmos and the origin and development of life.  The Book of Scripture, and the traditions of the church, give us a mythic and poetic language to express that awe, and to practice the love that flows from it....... 

 

JIM BURKLO

Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS   

Follow me on twitter: @jtburkloSee the GUIDE to my articles and books

Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

The Mother of All Rights

 

 

If a woman is denied the right to choose for herself whether or not to complete a pregnancy, in what sense can she, or any of us, claim rights of any kind?  The right to have an abortion is the mother of all others.  Denying a woman's sovereignty over what goes on inside her body is an extreme attack not only on her freedom and God-given dignity.  It is an attack against freedom itself.  

In case anyone doubted that the minority group in control of our government is serious about outlawing abortion, current events should be convincing.  And if anyone doubted that this campaign is an effort to impose the religious beliefs of a minority onto everyone else, they need to know what the governor of Alabama said when she signed that state's draconian abortion ban:  “... this legislation stands as a powerful testament to Alabamians’ deeply held belief that every life is precious and that every life is a sacred gift from God.”  Of course every life is a sacred gift from God - but that has nothing to do with the subject of abortion rights.  And to imply that it does is to misread the Judeo-Christian tradition.  The Bible as a whole, and Jesus in particular, had nothing to say about abortion.  Fundamentalists quote scripture supporting their anti-choice views, but not one of the passages they cite has anything to do with the subject.  They are reading their beliefs into texts where they don't appear.

So if we are to preserve our freedom, including freedom of religious choice, we must rise up in defense of reproductive choice.  And we who are Christians must speak up, in the name of our faith, or the public will presume that we are anti-choice.  Here are some talking points for us:

“We speak of Esau and others in the Bible as having a birthright, not a conception-right.  After a strong religious experience we might say we’ve been ‘born again,’ but not ‘conceived again'...   ...fetus as ‘person’ or ‘human being’ has never been a settled question within Christianity nor Judaism. There are large segments of the Judeo-Christian world that, historically and currently see the embryo or fetus as potential human life, but not as fully human until birth or until some stage in fetal development well past conception.”   -- Rev. Scotty McLennan, former Dean of Religious Life, Stanford University, in his book, Jesus Was a Liberal, 2009.
 
“I was taught that it is more important to be on God’s side than to have God on your side. God’s side is mercy, love, justice and compassion. It is time… to start the conversation in the faith community that will let us pursue these with regard to reproduction and sexuality so that jubilee will come to the captives of reproductive and sexual oppression.” -- Dr Willie J. Parker, doctor who performs abortions.

If abortion is outlawed anywhere in this country, the backlash against Christians will be fierce.  We'll all be painted with one brush.  Whether before or after the fact, we Christians who support freedom will have a lot of explaining to do.  So we might as well get busy with it now.

To see what happens to religion when religion is imposed on people by the government, check out Iran, where millions of people have turned away from Islam because of its ties to the theocratic government there.  Check out what is happening in Russia, where the government uses Orthodox Christianity as a tool for its totalitarian agenda: the churches are empty.  Have a look at the legacies of European state-sponsored churches that have become little more than museums. 

Banning abortion will be bad for women.  And it will be terrible for Christianity.  So for everyone's sake, we progressive Christians must be "out", loud and clear, in support of reproductive choice.

 

 

Oil Patch Elegy

 

The sulphurous aroma of crude oil seeps out of my very identity.

My dad, my grandfather, and my great-granddaddy worked in the oil patch around the small town of Taft, California. Taft is Bakersfield without the glitter. It's been the set for many movies: it is a town frozen in time. Its fortunes have always been tied to the oil industry, going up and down like a pumpjack with the price of crude.

Taft is where the workers live. The big-shots live in fancy places, as far away from Taft as they can get. The town is a grid of dusty lots with modest houses surrounded by chain-link fences. A fair number of its structures were jury-rigged from oil field detritus: pipes and rusty corrugated iron sheets.

P.R. Coil, my grandma's dad, arrived in Taft in the 1920's, shortly after the era of monstrous gushers that blew out of pressurized oil deposits. It was still the "Wild West", with workers living in canvas tents. Crews raided each other to steal pipes, gear, and derrick beams. P.R. was a roustabout, roughneck, and carpenter. I inherited a lot of the woodworking hand tools he used to build derricks. He did hard labor in the oil fields until well into his 70's. I knew him as a taciturn, wiry old man. His sun-baked skin had the color and texture of a well-used leather wallet. As a teenager I was fascinated by his stories of Taft's early days. He lived to the age of 99.

My granddad, Ray Burklo, maintained the motors on Union Oil pumpjacks for decades. He was notorious for his acrobatic ability to single-handedly light up the "one-lung" gas engines that powered the "nodding donkeys". Arms and legs synchronized, he'd snap the governor and spin the heavy flywheel just right to get the spark to light at full compression and start the motor. One false move and the flywheel could have snapped his arm off. He had a gold front tooth, memorializing the time he was on the derrick floor when a sucker rod fell out of its hanger up in the crown-block at the top. The long, thin steel rod dropped like monster spaghetti, its end spinning wildly, taking out his tooth while barely sparing his life.

My dad, Don Burklo, spent a shorter time working in the oil patch. He spent his college summers surveying the fields, and knocking down the old wooden derricks that P.R. helped build, making way for steel pumpjacks and portable well-pulling rigs. He and his co-worker would saw a 2' piece out of one of the legs of the derrick, make a cut in the opposite leg, and then, with a sledge hammer and wedge, snap the cable on the far side of the derrick from the leg they'd cut out. Down the derrick would go in a thunder of shattering beams. Dad is 90 now, and I treasure his stories from those days more than ever.

In my teen years, I spent a week or two every summer in Taft. By then my granddad had died. P.R. would live with Grandma in the winter and spend his summers with another daughter in Ohio, away from the scorching desert heat. I'd help Grandma fix up the old place, which had been a cookhouse on the oil lease back in the early days. The bat-and-board siding of the house was so desiccated that I was convinced that the paint I spread on it every summer was all that kept the place standing. I loved taking a long run, first thing in the morning before it got too hot, out to the oil fields, breathing the mingled scents of creosote bushes and the crude oil, listening to the mournful whine of the pumpjack motors. I savored the solitude and the sweeping vistas.

Dad donated to the construction of the Taft Oilworker Monument, a bronze partial structure of a derrick with a man with a hat and overalls and a big hammer slung over his broad shoulder. At the base, there's a brick memorializing our family heritage in the oil fields.

Some folks turn up their noses at the smell of crude oil. But when I pick up a whiff, I smile. Our family contributed a lot of sweat and muscle to the industry, which was critical to the development of our country. I'm proud of it, and always will be. But my sentiments do not prevent me from wishing a speedy end to the oil business. I have especially strong respect for those who labor in the oil patches of America today.

But it is work that must stop - the sooner, the better - for the sake of the planet. May honorable people do honorable work installing solar panels and wind turbines, carrying on this legacy of labor in a clean and green fashion. As we grapple with the existential crisis of human-caused climate change, we will have a hard time making the transition away from fossil fuels if we show disrespect to the people in this industry. We must carefully craft our language to attract rather than insult the people who labor still to this day, extracting the fuels that power our vehicles and warm our houses.

We do well to remember the words of Abraham Lincoln in his second inaugural address. He interpreted the Civil War as a punishment for slavery merited by the whole country, North and South alike, and for which the whole country needed to make amends. Global warming is not the special fault of the hardy workers who pull sucker rods out of oil wells. It's the fault of every one of us who has ever used fossil fuels, whether or not we understood the consequences.

So here I amend Lincoln's 1865 address, replacing "slavery" with "global warming": “If we shall suppose that human-caused global warming is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through God’s appointed time, God now wills to remove, and that God gives catastrophe to China and America, Russia and India, the Maldives and Indonesia alike as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray that this mighty scourge of catastrophic climate change may speedily pass away. . . . With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the wounds wrought by global warming, to care for those who have borne its disastrous effects, to do all which may achieve and cherish a healthy planet for ourselves and all nations.”

With malice toward none in the fossil fuel industry, with charity for all, let us strive mightily for a clean-energy future.

 

JIM BURKLO Senior Associate Dean, Office of Religious Life, University of Southern California

Education: The Cultivation of Attention

 

"Prayer consists of attention."  Simone Weil

 

“…attention without feeling is only a report… You need empathy… rather than just

reporting. Reporting is for field guides. And they’re great. But they’re not thought

provokers… Attention is the beginning of devotion.”  Mary Oliver, interviewed by Krista Tippett, 2015

Ever tried so hard to solve a problem that you thought your head would explode? You're not alone. Sometimes our obsession to figure something out gets in the way of finding the answer.  

it gets in the way of the soul's progress, as well.

Simone Weil (pronounced "vay") was a French philosopher, Jewish by birth, and Christian by attraction, who died at the age of 34 during World War II.  While she never was baptized, and never produced any systematic works, she became a profoundly influential Christian theologian.  In her "Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View tot the Love of God", she wrote that "the development of the faculty of attention forms the real object and almost the sole interest of studies."  She used the example of a student trying to solve a geometry problem, no doubt influenced by her brother Andre, a prodigy at the subject.  Even if no progress is made with the problem itself, if the student applies concentrated attention to it, "this apparently barren effort has brought more light into the soul.  The result will one day be discovered in prayer."  Each such serious application of the attention in academic studies helps form "the habit of that attention which is the substance of prayer."

In the 2017 film, "Lady Bird", the protagonist meets with her Catholic high school teacher, a nun, to discuss a paper she has written in which she disparages her home city of Sacramento.  The nun remarks that Lady Bird must love Sacramento.  The teenager is surprised.  The nun celebrates how much detail she included in the paper.  "I guess I pay attention," Lady Bird replies.  "Don't you think maybe they are the same thing?  Love, and attention?" asks the nun.

William James, the late 19th/early 20th century psychologist and educator, wrote that “The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will… An education which would improve this faculty would be the education par excellence.”  But this attention is not of the sort that bangs itself against its object, trying to beat it into submission.  As Simone Weil put it, "most often attention is confused with a kind of muscular effort."  But "the intelligence can only be led by desire.  For there to be desire, there must be pleasure and joy in the work."

This resonates with the thesis of the widely-read 2002 musing by a Brooklyn high school math teacher, Paul Lockhart:  "A Mathematician's Lament".  Of students, he reported: "They say, 'math class is stupid and boring,' and they are right."  Because math is an art, not a bunch of formulas to memorize.  Lockhart compared most math education to "paint-by-numbers" masquerading as art education.  One must do math in order to begin to appreciate what it is.  Mathematics can be used, but fundamentally it is as "useless" as poetry and music and theater.  It is about beauty, not about its applications.  "A good problem is something you don’t know how to solve. That’s what makes it a good puzzle, and a good opportunity. A good problem does not just sit there in isolation, but serves as a springboard to other interesting questions. A triangle takes up half its box. What about a pyramid inside its three-dimensional box? Can we handle this problem in a similar way?"

George Polya, a celebrated mathematician who pioneered the field of multi-dimensional geometry, shared Lockhart's concerns about mathematics education. To contribute to better teaching methods, he wrote a  "How to Solve It" in 1944.  In it, Polya repeated this admonition: "Look at the unknown." Stop trying to solve it, at least for a while. Just look at it, sit with it.  Give it your mindful attention, but not in a "muscular" way.  Let it sink in.  Admire it!  Then compare it to other unknowns, other problems. How were those problems solved? How might those solutions apply to this problem? Polya's wisdom generalizes to all forms of problem-solving, within and beyond mathematics.

Attention is love.  God is love.  God is the attention we focus with eager joy on worthy problems in academic studies and all other human pursuits.  Simone Weil understood academic work as a spiritual discipline preparing the soul for contemplative communion with the Divine. 

 

The medieval Catholic concept of liberal education ranked all other academic disciplines below theology.  This won't work in a secular university, nor even today in one with religious roots, given the reality of religious pluralism in our globalized, secularized cultural context.  But there is a place in secular higher education for the recognition that all academic pursuits ultimately exist in the service of the cultivation of that deep, loving attention which enlivens the quest for truth.

 

JIM BURKLO

Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS   

Follow me on twitter: @jtburkloSee the GUIDE to my articles and books

Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

 

Out of Egypt: Remembering Rachel Held Evans

 

On Sunday, at Mt Hollywood Congregational Church in Los Angeles, we it a candle on the altar to remember Rachel Held Evans.  It was communion Sunday, and I was presiding.  After we served everyone the elements, I ripped a piece of bread from the loaf and set it in front of the candle.  And as I did so, I saw tears rimming the eyes of our member Ariel Quist Sprawls, 29, a public school speech-language pathologist and avid member of Rachel's "fan club".  

 

One of the meanings of the Hebrew word for Egypt, Mitzrayim, is "narrow place".  Geographically it made sense, given that to this day most Egyptians live on the long strips of land on either side of the Nile.  The escape of the people of Israel from Egypt added meaning to the term.  They fled the constraints of bondage in Egypt, setting forth on an exodus toward an unseen, open Promised Land.

 

Rachel Held Evans came of age in the Bible Belt.  She went to college at a school named for the champion of six-day creationism, William Jennings Bryan.  (Perhaps subliminally, her politics may have been shaped by the fact that Bryan was also a democratic socialist and three-time Democratic candidate for the presidency.)  A budding journalist and blogger, her writing began to reflect her doubts about the version of Christianity in which she was raised.  Her books, "Faith Unraveled", "A Year of Biblical Womanhood", and the last, "Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again", became compasses for exvangelicals, emergents, and progressive Christians finding their way out of the "narrow place" of conservative Protestantism.  

 

Rachel stayed connected to her roots, even as she embraced the much more socially liberal and theologically nuanced Episcopal tradition.  That she still spoke "evangelicalese" mattered a lot to her faithful readers.  

 

She died last Saturday at the age of 37 from complications of an infection.  The high level of mainstream press attention to her passing is its own story.  For those of us who identify as progressive Christians, it is a wake-up call to the size of the current exodus of young people from evangelical churches.  More than ever, we need to make our identity and our welcome public and explicit.  Otherwise, the exodus will assume that we follow the dominant fundamentalist paradigm - and pass us by.  We may need to change ways we do worship and music in order to welcome them more fully.  But that does not mean we have to copy Hillsong and Mosaic, with their slick production values.  She wasn't looking for "better-produced Christianity", but rather for a more authentic and progressive expression of the faith.  Some adjustment to our style may help, but what Rachel's readers seek most is compassionate, common-sense interpretation of the ancient rituals and traditions.  

 

And that's what Ariel and her husband were seeking when they showed up at Mt Hollywood Church.  There's nothing slick about us, to be sure.  Though we're populated with actors, writers, musicians, and other Hollywood creatives, our church is hardly "better-produced Christianity".  On the contrary, we're a respite from production of any kind.  We do wear flip-flops and shorts to worship, but we don't aspire to cool, curated, artisinal Christianity - old-school Southern Baptist dogma dressed in skinny jeans and expensive tee-shirts.  

 

In Rachel's writings, Ariel says "I felt like I was looking at a mirror... like Rachel, I used to derail almost every college Bible study and small group I went to with my doubts and concerns about hell and God's love... Rachel’s book helped me relive that part of my faith journey that felt so isolating. It helped me know I wasn’t crazy to have gone through it. She helped me recognize that I wasn’t alone.   Her book Inspired opened up the Bible in a new way. She helped me pry my heart back open..."

 

At our church, Ariel finds herself "moved by hymns that alter wording to encompass  God’s non-binary-ness. I am touched by hymns that broaden the idea of who my neighbor is. I find that Rachel’s books and the sermons of (progressive) pastors fill me with so much more hope, love, curiosity, and compassion than the sermons of my former churches.  I imagine a church might learn that even the rock-headed, Bible believing Christian women who seem so different from them may have doubts and worries that the progressive church can affirm. That those of us who come from evangelical backgrounds are grateful for the models of loving-kindness we find in progressive churches. That we can change our tunes about beliefs that once seemed unmovable. And that it is appreciated when the issues/ideas/beliefs we have to continue to deconstruct and reconstruct are acknowledged by the church."

 

Rachel's death has touched Ariel to the core.  "I have been reading tweets from a lot of people who personally knew her and have just been joining in the grief they are feeling. For her tiny children who lost their mother, for her husband who lost his wife. Rachel showed me that I wasn’t alone when I thought I was, she expanded my understanding of the Bible which is the most important book in my life. I feel a deep sadness as I imagine myself walking through new parts of my life realizing that I will not have her voice providing ongoing guidance, solidarity, challenging ideas, and humor...  I think that the outpouring of love and remembrance of her from the variety of communities she touched could not make it any more clear that she was living out a deep message of the Bible, that of loving her neighbors... even though she passed away much too soon, that the little time I did have with her work has changed me into a person whose life more deeply reflects my Christianity. Her words supported me on my path to the church I currently attend. And for all of those things, I am so, so grateful."

 

May the grief that Ariel and so many others feel at the passing of Rachel Held Evans awaken us, as progressive Christians, with a call to gentle, sensitive, welcoming ministry to the millions of souls in exodus from religious "narrow places" today.

 

JIM BURKLO

Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS   

Follow me on twitter: @jtburkloSee the GUIDE to my articles and books

Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

 

Universal Single-Payer Spiritual Health Assurance

Via de Cristo Church, Scottsdale, AZ

 

Some things must be universally available if we aspire to spiritual and civic virtue.  Access to decent health care, and access to the bread of life and the wine of salvation, should be available no matter where you are on the continuum of economic status, moral goodness, or religious affiliation.

 

I am privileged to have wonderful friendships and collegial relationships with many Catholic Christians.  So it grieves me when their leaders make a hash of their church's reputation.

 

Such was the case at the funeral of my mother-in-law.  She converted to the faith after her marriage to her husband, who dropped out of Jesuit seminary and went on to have 13 kids with her.  (Another way to be very Catholic.)  She was a faithful church-goer long after his death.  But at her memorial mass, one would never have known from the platitudinous words of the priest that this woman had anything to do with the parish she so faithfully attended - in a wheelchair - for years.

 

And when my dear wife, Roberta, baptized and confirmed as a Catholic, went to receive the host to show respect for her mom, the priest would not give it to her.  All he offered was a weak blessing.  The priest knew nothing about Roberta.  He could not have known that she was a lapsed Catholic.  There was nothing about her that would have suggested it.  But somehow he divined that she wasn't "eucharist-ready".  One more nail in the coffin of Catholicism for her and her 12 siblings, only one of whom still identifies with the faith. 

 

Communion isn't just for perfect moral, spiritual, or religious people.  It is for all of us flawed humans who want to draw closer, body and soul, to the Love that is God. 

 

I believe in Communion for All.  Universal Single-Payer (that would be Jesus) Spiritual Health Assurance.  Thus on several occasions I have approached the altar and received the wafer from priests in Catholic churches, though by their rules I am ineligible.  (I don't do this in Catholic parishes where folks know who I am: I don't want to cause personal offense or discomfort.)  If I am breaking their rules, that's not my problem.  It's certainly not Jesus' problem.

 

Just being male makes me less obviously unqualified to partake.  I can't be suspected of having had an abortion.  Can't be questioned about whether or not I consume birth control pills.  I am old, bald, and appear much more solemn than I really am.  Put me in the right vestments and I could pass for a Catholic priest.  So it is easy for me to do what was not for my beloved wife, who though bereft of formal religiosity is purer of heart than I.

 

Not that purity of heart should be a consideration in whether or not a person is worthy to taste the bread and wine of Christian communion.  The current president, depraved as he is, is no less worthy of the wafer than my wife.  Nor of myself. 

 

The same can be said of health care.  Its availability should be, as Peter said of God in the book of Acts, "no respecter of persons"... not based on socio-economic rank. 

 

In a word, this is the current president's plan for health care in America:  eugenics.  If you have lots of money, if you can afford to pay for health care even if you have pre-existing conditions, you must be worthy of living.  If you don't have lots of money, you must be an inferior person.  So access to good health care would be wasted on you.  You should die young so you won't pollute the gene pool. 

 

As St Paul said in Romans 3, "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God".  We're moral equals as fallen creatures.  But we are far from equals in just how far we fall.  For taking communion, for going to the doctor, this moral difference should not matter.  But for candidacy for elected office, it ought to count for a great deal. 

 

Obama mis-spoke, once - so why fuss about the current president lying?  Hillary lied a few times, so what's the big deal about the current president doing the same?  At the altar, it is - or should be - a level praying field.  Same with health care.  Relatively good people, morally middling people, and downright bad people should get to go the doctor regardless of their ability to pay, and be treated equally. 

 

But in public life, one's place on the moral continuum matters hugely.  There is no comparison between the rare non-factual utterances of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, for which they apologized, and the stupendous volume of daily blatant lies of the current president, for which he is unabashedly unapologetic.  There's no immoral equivalence.  Our current president is not just a garden-variety sinner like Barack and Hillary and most of the rest of us.  His behavior is really bad.  For his soul's sake, and for the sake of preserving our democracy, he should resign and then repent.

 

But even if he doesn't straighten out, there's still room for him at the Table of the Lord. 

 

What doesn't matter at the altar rail or in a doctor's office really should matter in a job interview.  Let's stay aware of this as we consider the future of health care in this country... and begin to consider the plethora of candidates running for the presidency. 

 

 

 

JIM BURKLO

Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS   

Follow me on twitter: @jtburkloSee the GUIDE to my articles and books

Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

Breaking Free

"I want to be free!" screamed Little Flower, as loudly as she could - which wasn't very.

All the flowers around her sighed in the breeze.  "There she goes again...."

"I want to fly!" she roared, though it sounded more like a whimper.

Little Flower twisted her petals this way and that, straining to liberate herself from her stem.  But for the life of her, she couldn't get it to budge.

The flowers around her asked, "Why would you want to get off your stem?  You'd fly, all right - fly into the wind and dry up and disappear before your time.  Why would you leave us?  We're your friends.  We'd be sad.  We'd miss you.  Life is good, Little Flower!  Let's enjoy what we have, while we have it!"

"I can't stand it!  I've got to get free from this stem!  For me, life stuck in one place is no life at all!" she insisted.

Little Cricket hopped along and asked, "What's the fuss, Little Flower?"

"I am so glad to see you!  Please, please, snip me off my stem so I can fly away!"

"Oh, Little Flower, I can't do that.  I can nibble on your leaves, but to snip you off your stem would deprive you of your life and me of my lunch.  You'd fly away, all right - and shrivel up and crumble into dust.  Your seeds come from your flower, and if I snip you off, I deprive you of your future, and me of mine."

"Oh please, please, please!  Snip me off and set me free!"

"Let me talk to my people," said Little Cricket.  "This calls for a council."

Little Cricket gathered the elders of his community and posed the question.  "Little Flower wants to be free from her stem, and wants me to snip her from it.  But of course she'd blow in the wind and dry up and that would be the end of her.  But this is her will.  The stem would of course be a tasty treat for a cricket, but it seems wrong.  What do you say?"

The council of crickets rasped their hind legs loudly as they deliberated.  Finally, their spokescricket spoke.

"We agree that it is both wrong in this particular case and wrong for both crickets and flowers in general.  For the well-being of this flower, and of all flowers, and of all crickets, snipping the flower from the stem is neither morally correct nor environmentally sustainable."

Little Cricket informed Little Flower of the decision.  She was sad.  "I fed you from my leaves, I enjoyed your chirping.  We were friends.  But you won't do me this one favor.  I'm so disappointed in you."

Little Cricket lowered his antennae in shame.  "I have to respect my cricket elders," he said.  "They are wise and have everyone's best interests in mind."

Little Flower's stamens and pistil were wet with tears.  " I want to be free, like you are.  Free to go anywhere I want, like you can!"

"But your life looks good to me, Little Flower.  You get your food from your stem, so you're never hungry.  Sure, I wander the world, but only because I'm always looking for food.  Like right now.  I have to be going!"  And he hopped away.

Little Flower was upset, but more determined than ever to find a way to free herself from her stem.

One night a mighty wind blew over the meadow.  She caught her petals in the wind and let them help her twist and turn against her stem.  All night long she struggled.  All night long the wind blasted as she turned back and forth to catch it.  Finally, at the dawn, she felt the stem weakening and breaking.  She was lifted up into the air, high above the meadow.  Her pistil had become her probiscus, and her stamens had become her antennae.  She pushed them out ahead of her petals and caught the wind and fluttered. 

"I'm free!  I'm free!  I'm free!"

Over the meadow, into the forest, up the mountain and down Little Flower flew.  Vistas she could never have imagined burst into view.  Rocky heights, tumbling waters, sweeping plains lay below her.  All day she flew, overwhelmed with joy and awe.

Until dusk, when she felt weak, and could barely move the wings that once had been petals.  Suddenly a bat swooped down.  She barely dodged it in time to avoid being eaten for dinner.  She landed on a blade of grass, but a swallow flew down and almost swallowed her.  She tried to hide in the grass, but was so weak she could hardly move at all.

 

"Over here, over here!" 

The voice was a whisper she could barely hear.

"You need food!  I will feed you!"

It was a flower.  A flower just like the kind she had been only twelve hours before. 

"Feed on my nectar!  Then you will be strong again."  Little Flower flopped over to the flower as best she could, and pressed her pistil into its center. "Wonderful!  It's so sweet!  To think that I made it, but never tasted it!"

"My friends will feed you, too.  Go feed on them until you are strong again!"

Little Flower thanked the flower from the bottom of her thorax.  She rested on a blade of grass until morning, and then flew back to the meadow where she had been born and raised. 

"Little Flower!  Little Flower!" her friends cried out when they saw her.  "Why did you leave us?" 

"I wanted to be free," she answered.  "But now I know that I need you more than ever.  Can I drink your nectar?  It was so much simpler when I had a stem and didn't need to go looking for food."

"Yes, yes, feed on our nectar.  That way, you can still be with us!"  said her neighbor flowers.

"My life is so different now," said Little Flower.  "I am glad I can fly.  But I'm just as glad that you have stems!"

"And we love our stems more than ever!" they said. 

Little Cricket hopped by and called out to her.  "Little Flower!  Can that really be you?"

"Yes, yes, it's me!" 

"I am so glad you didn't dry up and blow away in the wind!  I was so afraid I'd never again see your beautiful petals waving in the wind," he chirped. 

"Well, they are waving now, and it's hard work!  I'm hungry all the time," she answered.  "I forgive you for not snipping me off from my stem.  You did what was right.  This was something I had to do all by myself."

"I'm hungry all the time, too, Little Flower!  Now we are cousins in the insect kingdom.  So from now on, I will call you Little Butterfly." 

With their antennae, they hugged, and Little Cricket hopped as fast and as far as he could to follow her as she flew away.

 

JIM BURKLO

Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS   

Follow me on twitter: @jtburkloSee the GUIDE to my articles and books

Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

 

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