Musings

Before You Know It...

 

Before you know it, your kid's childhood is over and she's gone off to college.

Before you know it, your vacation is over and it's time to go back to work.

Before you know it, the storm has passed and the sky is clear.

Before you know it, way too much of your life has gone by... without you knowing it.

 

So let us know each moment as it happens.

Let us savor the goodness of the present,

And attend to the aches of the moment, as well.

May our attention catch up to our fleeting thoughts

So that we can admire and investigate them;

May we listen to those we love, lingering on their words,

Without our minds racing ahead to respond with our own...

 

"Be still and know that I am God."  (Psalm 46:10)

Be still and know that I am...

Be still and know....

Be still...

Be....


(The "be still" section here is not original!  I don't know who created it, but I've been using it in leading worship for many years.)

Our Abraham: Remembering John Shelby Spong

June 16, 1931 – September 12, 2021

“Abraham breathed his last and died in a good old age, an old man and full of years, and was gathered to his people.” Genesis 25:8, NRSV

Our Abraham is now gathered to his people.  Fully and finally gathered into blessed memory of us all in the global progressive Christian movement.  And gathered to folks far beyond our circle.  Because, to put it in his own words, John Shelby Spong “lived fully and loved wastefully”, spilling out his compassion beyond boundaries of creed and culture. 

A good idea doesn’t catch fire among people on its own.  It ignites in the popular imagination after being embodied and expressed by a charismatic individual in the right place and time.  For progressive Christianity, that fire-starter was John Shelby Spong.  When an erudite Episcopal bishop in a clerical collar, preaching in an elegant voice, declared that Jesus did not literally rise from the dead, the media amplified it and lit a conflagration of theological controversy.  The only accomplishment of his detractors – and there were very many – was to amplify his voice even more. 

Bishop Spong’s timing was perfect.  In America, the unholy matrimony of fundamentalist and evangelical Christianity with right-wing politics was fully consummated.  Christianity had become equated with opposition to science, common sense, and social progress.  Mainline, moderate Christianity had been culturally sidelined, and was in rapid numerical decline.  Along came a tall, kindly bishop with impeccable credentials, saying things that outraged conservative Christians.  Things that other Christians, until he spoke, were afraid to say themselves.  People were looking for a real alternative to the dominant evangelical paradigm of Christianity.  He defined it.

His firm but genteel manner of responding to his critics added to his gravitas.  His dues as a serious, practicing Christian were fully paid long before he entered the public spotlight.  He made it very awkward for those who accused him of heresy to deny his faithfulness.

His timing was right in another way.  Just as he became a media phenomenon, and partly because of it, a new movement was born.  In the 1990’s his Episcopal colleague, Rev. Jim Adams, founded what is now known as ProgressiveChristianity.org.  It became the organizational vehicle to propel John Shelby Spong’s understanding of the faith into expression and action worldwide.  It gave a name, an identity, to what Jack Spong was preaching and teaching:  progressive Christianity.  And by making this identity public, churches were able to attract people who were seeking this form of the faith.

Jack Spong was a mentor to us all in the progressive Christian movement.  His generosity of spirit – and that of his wife and partner, Christine – nurtured generations of progressive Christian leaders.  I am grateful for their active encouragement in getting my books into print.  And we’re all grateful for the legacy they created in Progressing Spirit, the theological journal of ProgressiveChristianity.org.  May we ever and always “gather him to his people” by carrying his commitments forward!

On Being Observant

 

You've heard the phrase: "observant" Christian, or "observant" Jew, or "observant" Muslim.

Does it mean that if you're observant, you keep kosher, or you eat fish on Fridays, or you pray five times a day, or you go to mass regularly?  Is it about performing the expected rituals of religion?

Or does being observant actually have something to do with observing?

Jesus told us to "consider the lilies".  He told us to love our neighbors as ourselves... which surely begins with paying attention to our inner experience, to know what is really going on in our hearts and minds.  And paying attention to our neighbors, to see what they need and how we can help.

It turns out that the rituals of my religion help me with this kind of observance.  In worship, by gazing at the cross I observe the human condition of suffering:  I see how I contribute to it, how I can help relieve it, and how I can commiserate with others who suffer.  By receiving the elements of communion, I observe in awe as the whole Universe manifests itself in a little sip of wine and a little bite of bread.  Our pastor's sermons direct us toward things that we need to observe, so that we can keep our priorities straight from one Sunday until the next. 

I want to be a Christian who is observant of the impact I have on the environment, so that I will minimize the damage I do to it.  I want to be a Christian who is observant of the everyday wonders of nature, observant of the joy in children's faces, observant of the pain that people experience - near and far - and of what I can do about it.  I want to be a Christian who goes through the ritual motions of my religion so that they will guide my soul away from selfishness and toward service to others. 

I want to be not only an observant Christian, but a Christian who observes - with whole-hearted attention...
 

 

When Will We Ever Learn?

For the sake of Mary and Clay, for the sake of war victims and refugees past and present, let us Americans begin to learn from our country's  military interventions.

Mary is #11 of 13 children born to Hmong refugees from Laos who escaped the aftermath of the American war in Indochina.  She was a star student in the public policy course I taught at the USC school of social work.  Mary impressed me immediately with her energy, ambition, and work ethic.  Now she's a clinical social worker in a Bay Area hospital in California. 

Mary posted a heartfelt plea on Facebook for Americans to be sensitive to the plight of the refugees coming out of Afghanistan after the US pullout.  I reached out to her and we had a long Zoom conversation.  The debacle in Kabul opened up the intergenerational wounds in her life and the lives of her family members, long after the pullout of the US from Indochina.  The Hmong people lived in the mountains of Laos and became allies of the US against the Communist forces there.  When the war ended, they were extremely vulnerable to the vengeance of the Pathet Lao forces.  Many Hmong people came to the United States as refugees - with no English, having never flown on an airplane, never used a toilet or other modern conveniences, never learned to read or write.  Their ancient culture, with its rituals focused on ancestors and spirits, felt utterly out of place in America.  Mary spoke of the overwhelming adjustments that her parents and family members had to make in order to find their way in the United States.  Mary feels the second-hand trauma of her mother's tears in the airport when they arrived in the US, when it took many hours to find their American refugee sponsors.  How could they pass on their language and culture to their children while allowing them to acculturate?  Would the spirits find them when they performed their sacred rites so far away from their ancestral home?  Mary and her siblings had to serve as translators and helpers for their parents, taking on adult responsibilities while their peers at school got to be "just kids". 

Mary shed tears on our Zoom call as she felt her way into the plight of the refugees trying to escape Kabul.  "There was no planning to prevent this humanitarian crisis.  This new diaspora will be an exact mirror of what happened in Southeast Asia.  There will be long-term effects, multi-generational grief at losing collective identity as a people, losing the status they had at home.  Their religion, language, and culture are intertwined:  what will they keep, what will they lose, in a new country?  There will be ripple effects into future generations..." 

It makes Mary's soul ache to watch that wrenching tragedy spool out again today.  After another long occupation, another calamitous exit results in thousands of at-risk people desperate to escape a country that no longer affords them a home. 

I am hardly an expert on foreign affairs.  I do not have access to the level of information that our country's intelligence agencies gather.  But as a citizen who took a college course in Middle Eastern history, and continues to read good books and follow reputable sources of journalism, two decades ago I was able to predict the general outcome of the American interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

And I find that very disturbing.  If a regular bloke like myself can figure it out, why can't the people running the military and the government?  It appears that hubris is the evil twin to power.  That if your favorite tool is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.  That if you are in charge, you start to assume you are smarter than the rest of us.  That since America is so great (again), surely other countries will welcome us to shape them in our own image. 

When Kabul fell to the Taliban, I had a hunch to make contact with my friend Clay, a fellow member of Mt Hollywood Church in Los Angeles.  A few years ago he did an active duty tour as a Navy reservist in Afghanistan.  He told us that he spent his months there with his hand cocked and ready to draw the pistol on his hip at every moment.  He was training Afghan soldiers, and there had been incidents in which members of the Afghan forces had shot and killed US trainers.  Just another hint that maybe we weren't so welcome there after all.  Our whole church breathed a huge sigh of relief when he made it home in one piece.

Every American ought to be grateful that Clay was willing to serve our country.  He's a big, strapping guy with a heart of gold - tough and also kind and sensitive.  But the fall of Kabul gut-punched him.  I texted him:  "I feel that you are having feelings."  Oh did he ever.  We got on the phone and he poured out his heart.  "I just want to go into the bedroom and get under the covers and hide." 

Just writing his words makes me cry. 

In high school, I and my male peers faced the prospect of being drafted into fighting in the war in Vietnam.  Funny how having your life threatened has a way of concentrating the mind.  In those days, we had "teach-ins" as part of the anti-war movement... the public educating the public about the history of Indochina and the US intervention there.  Also at the time, I was on my school's speech and debate team, and one year the national debate topic was about Vietnam.  So we went up to the nearby university library and studied the history behind the US intervention there.  And we discovered that it didn't make any sense. 

This time around, there was no military draft, so a lot fewer minds were concentrated on the history of Iraq and Afghanistan.  But a cursory exploration of it would have revealed the futility of the American "nation-building" agenda in those countries, both of which were geographical abominations created by British imperialists.  Their boundaries did not match the ethnic and tribal realities on the ground.  The initial euphoria of ridding Iraq of Saddam Hussein and Afghanistan of the Taliban was extremely unlikely to translate into happy endings - and certainly not through foreign occupation... as evidenced by the Soviet invasion in the 1980's.  (See this eerily familiar video accompanying a song in Russian about the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan.) 

We must honor our soldiers who served there by recognizing the space they created for the expansion of human rights, particularly women's rights, in that country for two decades.  We must honor their intention to keep America safe from the 9/11 terrorists who used Afghanistan as their base.  Our soldiers are not responsible for the unwise decisions of the generals and the politicians who sent them there.  And we must honor the people of Afghanistan who bravely fought the Taliban and worked hard to build their country better.  Despite the current calamity, their toil and trouble was not completely in vain.  It is not their fault that their government, and ours, failed them. 

When will we ever learn?  It is time to get serious about studying current events and the history that has led up to them.  So that we don't make the mistakes we made in Afghanistan - and Iraq and Central America and Vietnam - ever again.  And if we think Afghanistan is messy, any day now our country is going to have to reckon with whether or not we are really willing to keep our promise to defend Taiwan, which is threatened imminently with invasion by China.  The American people are not at all prepared for the potentially disastrous consequences of US involvement there.

It's time for our progressive churches to hold "teach-ins" for our members - and invite our neighbors to join us.  We need to learn from veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, from historians, and from journalists who have covered the conflicts.  We're the right folks to host these conversations in our communities.  Let's talk together about how to make these "teach-ins" happen --
 

Simone Weil and the P.E.V.

 

"Over 2,000 years ago, there was a wandering teacher in Israel named Jesus.  In his deeds and in his words, he led people to love not only their families and friends, but to love strangers and even enemies -- and to love love itself.  His followers practiced and repeated his message after his death and formed communities which spread and grew around the world."

That's my summary of the Plain English Version of the New Testament and of the Christian religion.  There is a way to deliver the Christian message without Christian jargon.

My latest book, Tenderly Calling: An Invitation to the Way of Jesus, is animated by the same motivation: to translate the faith into everyday language, so that beginners, as well as Christians cultivating "beginner's mind", can access it directly and begin to live it out.

After reading "Gravity and Grace" by the French philospher/theologian Simone Weil, I'm inspired to go farther with this project.

Simone Weill lived for only 34 years, through the upheavals of World War II and the tumult that preceded it.  She was a Jewish by heritage, a philosphical prodigy at the Sorbonne and a radical leftist who then found herself attracted powerfully by Catholic Christianity.  Though she never was baptized, her writings, most of which only came into print after her death, distinguish her as an important theologian of Christianity.  In Luke 9:58, Jesus said: “Foxes have holes, and birds of the air have nests; but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.”  That was Simone Weil: an "insider" by virtue of her deep practice of Christian contemplation, but an "outsider" with noplace that felt right to lay her head inside the Christian fold.

Years ago, I became her devotee after reading "Waiting for God", a collection of her essays.  How I failed to read "Gravity and Grace" sooner, I can't explain - but I'm very grateful I got around to it.  (Thanks to "musings" reader Greta Van Damme for leading me to it!)

Simone Weil was painfully lacking in social graces, though her intentions were graceful.  She exasperated her family and friends even as they recognized her inner saintliness.  Her way of writing was as unvarnished as her personality.  What some writers would say in two pages she would strip down to a sentence crystal-clear in plain prose, yet so dense that it needed to be soaked in water overnight before it could be consumed.  Even then, the reader needs to go over it again and again to let it metabolize in the mind and soul. 

Here I offer but a subset of the many, many passages I highlighted in my copy of her book.  They amount to a Plain English Version of Christianity (translated from French), with my commentary added:

The extreme greatness of Christianity lies in the fact that it does not seek a supernatural remedy for suffering, but a supernatural use for it. 

Christianity (Catholic and Protestant) speaks too much about holy things. 

Simone Weil was enthralled by the Catholic mass in her early encounter with the faith.  The Christian gospel, with its embodiment in the eucharist, spoke to and for her soul.  For her, there was a core of truth in the faith that had been clouded by the theological and institutional trappings of the church.  Her work was to clear that fog of doctrine and jargon and go to the heart of the Christian message, in word and deed.

Attachment is a manufacturer of illusions and whoever wants reality ought to be detached. 
 
The imagination is continually at work filling up all the fissures through which grace might pass.
 
There is absolutely no other free act which is given to us to accomplish, only the destruction of the “I”. 
 
I am all.  But this particular “I” is God.  And it is not an “I”. 

We have to be nothing in order to be in our right place in the whole. 

To be proud is to forget that one is God…. 

Humility is the refusal to live outside of God.  It is the queen of virtues. 

May I disappear in order that those things that I see may become perfect in their beauty from the very fact that they are no longer things that I see.

The mysteries of faith are degraded if they are made into an object of affirmation and negation, when in reality they should be an object of contemplation. 

A case of contradictories which are true.  God exists.  God does not.

“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”  There we have the real proof that Chrsitianity is something divine. 

“In the desert of the East..” We have to be in a desert.  For he whom we love is absent. 

Simone Weil saw clearly that Christianity is rooted in paradoxes which are intrinsic to the human condition.  Living selfishly seems like it would lead to happiness, but it leads to frustration.  Living selflessly sounds like the opposite of fulfillment, but is really the only way to get there.   We would like to believe in a benevolent, all-powerful God - but it is only by forsaking any such conception or description of God that we can enter into the divine presence - which takes the form of an absence.  But this divine void is at the same time filled with the whole universe.  We want to be seen - but in order for us to see, our egos must disappear.  Sitting with these contradictions, accepting their reality, was the heart of faith for Simone Weil.  She had no use for flowery theologies that attempted to explain them away or gloss them over.  For her, facing these conundrums squarely was the essence of contemplation.

We imagine kinds of food, but the hunger itself is real; we have to fasten onto the hunger. 

Catholic communion.  God did not only make himself flesh for us once, every day he makes himself matter in order to give himself to man and to be consumed by him.  Reciprocally, by fatigue, affliction, and death, man is made matter and is consumed by God.  How can we refuse this reciprocity?

We must become nothing, we must go down to the vegetative level; it is then that God becomes bread.

The Eucharist should not then be an object of belief for the part of me which apprehends facts.  That is where Protestantism is true.  But this presence of Christ in the Host is not a symbol, for a symbol is the combination of an abstraction and an image, it is something which human intelligence can represent to itself, it is not supernatural.  There the Catholics are right… 

For Simone Weil, the eucharist was both a sign and that to which the sign referred, a sign of a reciprocal relationship between human beings and Ultimate Reality, and the essence of the relationship itself.  She offered a corrective both for Protestants, who in the Reformation began to view the eucharist as symbolic, and for Catholics, who see it as the literal body and blood of Christ.  I believe this is central to the progressive Christian project:  to embody our faith through the sacrament of communion.  To experience directly the real presence of the divine in the bread and in the wine.  To make it a body-trip again, and not just a theological head-trip.

For Weil, the dialectic in the relationship of humanity with God was demonstrated directly in the mass.   Yet she never took the bread and wine herself.  We might call her relationship to the eucharist something like Catholic "adoration of the blessed sacrament", in which the consecrated host, enclosed in a "tabernacle" box on the church altar, is contemplated visually and spiritually by the faithful between masses.  In an essay on beauty, she wrote:  The beautiful is that which we desire without wishing to eat it.  We desire that it should be...   Eternal beatitude is a state where to look is to eat." 
 
It is necessary to uproot oneself.  To cut down the tree and make of it a cross, and then to carry it every day….  We must be rooted in the absence of a place.  86

Whoever takes up the sword shall perish by the sword.  And whoever does not take up the sword (or lets it go) shall perish on the cross.
 
Adam and Eve sought for divinity in vital energy.  A tree, fruit.  But it is prepared for us on dead wood, geometrically squared, where a corpse is hanging.  We must look for the secret of our kinship with God in our mortality.
 
I have to be like God, but God crucified. 

We are the crucifixion of God. 

God gives himself to men either as powerful or as perfect – it is for them to choose. 
 
The cross as a balance and as a lever.  A going down, the condition of rising up.  Heaven coming down to earth raises earth to heaven.  A lever.  We lower when we want to lift.
 
…the intersection of the world and that which is not the world.  The cross is this intersection.

The point of contact between a circle and a straight line (a tangent).  This is the presence of the higher order in the lower under the form of what is infinitely minute.  Christ is the point of tangency between humanity and God.

Simone Weil's brother was a prodigy in geometry, which shaped her perception of the cross.  It was for her a geometry of paradox:  a lever bringing heaven to earth and earth to heaven.  The intersection of the divine and the earthly.  Like progressive Christians today, her focus in contemplating the cross was not substitutionary sacrifice - not the theology of Jesus dying for our sins - but rather the cross as the sign and the reality of the human and divine experience of suffering.  Her interpretation of the cross resonates with that of Carl Jung in his "Answer to Job", a mythical, depth-psychological depiction of the gospel story of the crucifixion as God's restitution for the suffering he inflicted unjustly on Job:  "Suffering: superiority of man over God.  The Incarnation was necessary so that this superiority should not be scandalous."  There is no way around suffering.  There is only the way through it, beginning with staring at it, as it is.

Our consent is necessary in order that he may perceive his own creation through us. 

God who is no other thing than love has not created anything other than love.
 
I can easily imagine that he loves that perspective of creation which can only be seen from the point where I am.
 
We must try to love without imagining.  To love the appearance in its nakedness without interpretation.  What love then is truly God. 

Like progressive Christians today, Simone Weil saw God as love.  Not just warm, fuzzy, romantic, or familial love.  Rather as agape love, which embraces all beings and things - and all experiences, including suffering.  Communion with the divine was, for her, manifested in attention:

Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.  It presupposes faith and love.  Absolutely unmixed attention is prayer.
 
Extreme attention is what constitutes the creative faculty in man and the only extreme attention is religious.
 
The wrong way of seeking.  The attention fixed on a problem… We must not want to find…. To draw back before the object we are pursuing.  Only an indirect method is effective.

Joy is the overflowing consciousness of reality.

By attending to reality, we attend our way to God.  Attention = prayer = love = God. 

And how to live out that love in our lives?  Simone Weil's spirituality flowed seamlessly into a mysticism of ethics:

We should do only those righteous actions which we cannot stop ourselves from doing, which we are unable not to do, but, through well-directed attention, we should always keep on increasing the number of those which we are unable not to do.
 
All absolutely pure goodness completely eludes the will.
 
In general, the expression “for God” is a bad one.  God ought not to be put in the dative.  We should not go to our neighbor for the sake of God, but we should be impelled toward our neighbor by God, as the arrow is driven toward its target by the archer.  To be only an intermediary between the uncultivated ground and the plowed field, between the data of a problem and the solution, between the blank page and the poem, between the starving beggar and the beggar who has been fed.
 
We must act as becomes a slave while contemplating with love…
 
We experience good only by doing it.
 
One does not fall into good.

Her aim was to be so suffused in God that she would have no choice about what actions to take or refrain from taking.  By disciplined abandonment of the ego, by living out St Paul's words - "it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me", ethical action would flow naturally - or, as she might have put it, supernaturally.

I must move toward an abiding conception of the divine mercy, a conception which does not change whatever event destiny may send upon me, and which can be communicated to no matter what human being.  

This sentence from "Gravity and Grace" expressed Simone Weil's personal manifesto:  to reduce the Christian religion down to its bones, and express its universal truths in ways "which can be communicated to no matter what human being".  And, I daresay, that is the mission of progressive Christianity today.  To express - and to live out - the P.E.V. - the Plain English Version of the faith.
 

Votivator: NO on CA Governor Recall: Paffrath for Backup

Sept 14 is a big day in California - a special election which will cost the state a quarter billion dollars to put before voters the question of whether or not to recall a governor for whom there is no basis for his removal.

I'm voting NO.  Gavin Newsom is doing a fine job and he deserves to finish out the term for which he was elected.  Moreover, not one of the dozens of candidates running to replace him has the capability, credentials, or sensible policy proposals to lead a state with the 9th largest economy in the world.

Certainly not Kevin Paffrath, for whom I will nonetheless cast my vote as the replacement candidate if Newsom is recalled.  He has no experience in governance and many of his policy proposals are downright wacky.

But he's a Democrat and he is the front-runner among all of the replacement candidates - ahead of the Trumper Republican front-runner, Larry Elder. 

The NO campaign tells us to just vote NO and ignore the second half of the question - who should replace Newsom if he were to be recalled.  I get the logic of this message... it's so much simpler than having to think about who should be the backup Democratic candidate.

But alas, we must think about it - because the polls suggest a very close election on September 14.  And we really cannot afford for any of the Republicans to win.

So I'm pinching my nose and voting for a 29 year old dilettante who could not govern his way out of a paper bag - because he is a Democrat and he's less obnoxious than any of his Republican opponents, all of whom he has a real chance of besting if the recall prevails.  That would be mud in the eyes of the Trumpers who instigated this charade.

Voting for Paffrath just makes me all the more adamant about voting NO on this recall ballot that should never have been put before us in the first place.  We need an amendment to the state constitution stipulating that if a governor is recalled, the lieutenant governor would take his or her place.  For the foreseeable future, that would mean a Democrat replacing a Democrat - which surely would deprive the Republicans of any fun in mounting recall campaigns going forward. 

This election hinges on voter turnout, which is expected to be low - which is the only hope that Republicans hold for ever winning a statewide office these days.  So let's get votivated!  and votivate others to do the same....

Good Questions (can change the world!)

The Quakers are small in number.  There are but a few hundred thousand of them in the United States.  Worshiping in silence goes a long way toward maintaining their low profile in the public eye. 

Early in their history, the Quakers chose to ask questions instead of making grand pronouncements.  They called them “queries.”  Their regional assemblies would carefully refine these queries and pose them to the membership of their local Meeting Houses.  They would keep asking themselves these queries until, by consensus, they determined that it was time to ask different questions.  The queries addressed topics of personal spiritual practice, the conduct of silent Meetings, and social and moral issues.  The queries lit a fire in the consciences of individual Quakers and of the Society of Friends as a whole. 
 
What would happen if other faithful people began to ask questions instead of arguing with answers they don’t like?  What would happen if we followed St. Paul’s advice and stopped returning evil for evil?  What would happen if we asked serious questions instead of behaving defensively in response to religious or political bombast? 
 
I believe that asking good questions can change the world.  In my role as a university chaplain, I've led many field trips and events that put students in contact with policy makers and officials.  Their sincere, intelligent questions often embarrassed people in power, challenging them to rise to a new level of accountability.  When students ask questions, instead of making proclamations, people in positions of power take them seriously, and are sometimes disturbed enough by the questions to seek new perspectives.  I took a group of USC students to meet the notorious Joe Arpaio, who at the time was the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona.  He claimed to be the toughest cop in America, threatening undocumented immigrants, running a jail with a tent compound outdoors in 120 degree heat, issuing pink underwear to prisoners, and feeding them green bologna for lunch.  My students very respectfully asked him questions, and he, seemingly flattered by the attention he was getting, bloviated for hours.  My students didn't let up.  They politely asked harder and harder questions - ones that flustered him.  Yet their demeanor gave him no opening to react negatively.  Who knows what impact my students had on him?  I told them that if anybody could have opened his heart and mind, it would have been them. 

I've been asked some questions that changed my life.  When my wife and I were going through a rocky patch in our marriage years ago, our therapist asked me this question:  "So Jim, who are your role models?"  I quickly answered with a list of my heroes, including John Woolman (a Quaker), Gandhi, and Martin Luther King.  "And what were their marriages like?" the therapist asked, staring me straight in the eye.  I was busted.  Noble as my role models were in the public sphere, not a one of them was an exemplary husband.  Our therapist didn't give me a prescription of how to change.  But his question got through to me, and set me on a new path of healing in my relationship with my wife.

I have used the "motivational interviewing" method in helping people make behavior changes.  It is a way of asking a series of questions that validate the person as a choice-maker, even if their choices look problematic.  The interviewer starts with this kind of question:  "What are the benefits to you of using cocaine?" And after respectfully listening to the answer, asks:  "And what are the downsides?"  The structure of the questions is intended to create uncomfortable cognitive dissonance that moves the person to exercise his or her choice-making power to resolve. 

How can we use the same approach to ask questions in the realm of public policy?  What questions could change the world for the better?  Which ones transform bitter division into shared inquiry with those who take the “other side” on important issues?  What kinds of questions invite the calmest, most constructive conversations?

 

Thanks to "musings" reader Ric Shafer for passing this along to me:

  QUERIES TOWARD A MORE PEACEFUL LIFE
from the American Friends Service Committee


A pillar of the Quaker faith, a query is an invitation to examine one's deepest values, and to consider how to live one's faith in the world.  Queries have no right or wrong answers, but they can open one's heart to new insights when considered in quiet contemplation. 

Here are 12 queries, perhaps one for each of the coming months.  Or, you might just choose to reflect on one of these that speaks to you. 

• How can I nurture the seeds of peace within myself, my community, and the world? 

• How can I increase my understanding of nonviolence and use it in all my interactions? 

• How do I help others—colleagues, program participants, supporters—recognize and use their gifts? 

• In what ways do I work to change society so that everyone has equal opportunities? 

• How can I speak up and take action in a loving way when I see and hear injustices? 

• How well do I bring my inner life and outer life into wholeness? 

• How can I listen with an open mind to others' experiences? 

• How do I help ensure a safe space for diverse voices and opinions in the communities where I participate and serve? 

• How can I work to settle disputes with love and sensitivity for all involved?

• How can I be more thoughtful about what I need and what I acquire? 

• Do I know when to say no to work I cannot adequately attend to? 

• In what ways do my interactions with other people reflect my beliefs and values? 

Blessing of Smart Phones

 

With a gathering:  "Lift up your smart phones!"  With an individual:  "Hold out your smart phone!"  (celebrant puts hands around it and around the hand of the owner of the phone)

"Let us take a moment of silence to be prayerfully mindful of the role this device plays in our lives..... (several seconds)....  Source of needed information, means of communicating personally and professionally, platform for our education, provider of entertainment, and so much more.  We are grateful for this marvel of human ingenuity, for connecting us as one human family around the globe as never before.  And we take time now to be mindful of its power over our lives.  We contemplate which uses are of benefit, and which are obsessions that do not serve us or others well.   In what ways have we become slaves to its beeps and flashes?  Do we have the discipline to turn it off for extended periods in order to have more face-to-face interaction?  Do its social media posts seduce us into unhealthy comparisons of our lives with those of others, and into the commodification of our identities?  Or do we use it to maintain deep relationships, ask sincere questions, and stay close to people we know and trust?  On it, do we seek out reputable news sources, or do we just believe whatever it feeds us?  Do we let it amplify our prejudices, or do we use it as a tool for critical thinking?   Do we passively accept the preferences of the corporations behind this device and its applications, or do we claim control of our digital footprints as engaged citizens?  Prayerfully, let us lift up our intentions to make wise use of our smart phones, and ask daily for inner guidance about when to turn them on and when to turn them off.  Amen!"

 

The Digital Mennonite

Shane Cole is a tanned, athletic young man from Vail, Colorado, studying at the University of Southern California, living with his fraternity brothers near campus.   

An unlikely digital Mennonite if there ever was one.

I grew up in a small town in Ohio neighbored by Mennonite farmers.  Their Christian Anabaptist faith tradition puts them on a spectrum of simple living that ranges between the horse-and-buggy Amish over to urban Mennonite congregations.  We called our local adherents of this tradition “black-bumper Mennonites”.  The men wore overalls and the women had their hair buns in white caps.  But they bought fancy power equipment for their farms and brand-new passenger vans for their families.  Upon purchase, anything shiny on their vehicles was painted black, as a display of modesty.  Such was their chosen spot on the simplicity scale, their answer to the perennial Amish-Mennonite question:  “Will this new thing help our community to flourish, or will it cause our community harm?”  For Mennonites, communal harmony matters more than mere personal convenience.
 
Shane started asking that question about smartphones and social media when he was in high school.  The closer he looked at his use of this technology, the more disturbed he became about its intrusion into his life and the lives of people around him.  He trashed Facebook, Instagram, and even Snapchat.  He bought a LightPhone, a stripped-down unit for texting and calling.  “We need to de-colonize our minds!” he exclaims.  
 
Shane is not a Mennonite.  But in my recent chat with him, I anointed him a “digital Mennonite”.  A kind of black-bumper Mennonite.  Not on the Amish end of the spectrum:  he still owns a smart phone and a computer.  I gave him this appellation because he asks the same question that Mennonites ask.
 
Shane is amazed by the ways his life has lifted up since he stopped looking down at a screen all the time.  He immerses himself in nature, working with SC Outfitters, the campus group for outdoor adventure.  He reads books – lots that are not even assigned to him in class.  There is more space and time for him to devote to real relationships.
 
“The social media companies have commodified our attention,” he says.  Getting it back means looking up, looking within, being mindful of that constant physical urge to check our smart phones.  It means taking a break from devices long enough to be mindful of everything else.  Shane sees liberation from social media as the most recent front in the long struggle for freedom from oppressive social systems.  
 
Shane is forming a student club to take action on the need for “digital de-tox” on campus and beyond.  Our office is lending support.  “I want us to empower students to take control of their use of social media.”
 
Were he inclined to do so, I’m sure Shane Cole would have no trouble presenting himself as living the perfect Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat life.  But he’s opted out of that part of cyberspace.  And he’s not missing it at all.

 

On Being a Patriot...

A big US flag flutters in the breeze right now in front of our house in Ojai.  This 4th of July weekend, Roberta and I enjoyed waving smaller ones at our town's parade.

It included the usual small-town spectacles:  vintage cars festooned in red, white, and blue, floats assembled by schools and civic clubs, etc.  Then there were "only-in-Ojai" entries, like the herd of brush-clearing goats that marched with remarkable poise down the main street, and the Hindu-temple juggernaut with huge ropes pulled by bhaktis of the local Hare Krishna community.  On its side were the words to the chant:  "Hare Krishna, Hare Hare...."

And on the back of the juggernaut was a huge American flag. 

When I saw it, my eyes welled with patriotic zeal. 

As they did when each of four different "equipos de caballeros" rode their prancing horses accompanied by brass bands.  Hispanic women, men, and children, many in US flag-themed garb, proudly rode their beautifully groomed steeds down the street, pausing to display remarkable horsemanship skills. 

I love being a citizen of this country where Hindu Americans and Mexican Americans and Euro Americans and the rest of us love being citizens of this country, enriching it with our diverse spiritual and cultural heritages - which become the heritage of us all as we march down Main Street on the Fourth of July. 

That's what makes America exceptional.  Not that we're better than other nations, or ought to have special privileges.  We're exceptional because of the sheer quantity and quality of our cultural and ethnic and religious diversity.  We're exceptional because of our unique history.  Because we started out in 1776 with an idea emulated by people around the globe.  Even when we failed to emulate it ourselves, it is an idea that, over and over and over again, impels us to reckon with our failures.

We're exceptional without needing to claim exceptionalism.  A nation without needing to be nationalistic.  We're patriots without demanding patriotism from each other. 

Lately, menacing mobs have descended on local school board meetings demanding an end to teaching something that isn't even being taught.  The histrionics aren't about "critical race theory" itself, which few of the right-wing protesters comprehend in the first place.  They are using it as a red herring to deny the existence of systemic racism in this country, claiming that those who recognize its reality must believe that America is a bad country.  This brouhaha is a manifestation of the long-term right-wing agenda to privatize and individualize all the systemic problems in this country, so they can be swept under the rug and ignored.

But sweeping stuff under the rug is not the American way.  We're not, and never have been, a racist country.  We are a nation with a history of racist individuals and institutions - a history that spills into the present.  And we're a nation that has reckoned, and is reckoning with vigor today, with that history.  And that history, and present efforts to rectify it, must be taught in the schools if we are to have educated and empowered citizens who can make our country greater and greater.

For this current mass movement to right the wrongs that continue to be inflicted on people of color in this country by social, economic, and political institutions, let us wave the American flag with pride.  We're a great nation partly because we are recognizing and meaningfully addressing systemic racism.  I want the children of this country to know about the problem, and to appreciate the heroic efforts being made to fix it today. 

What makes America great is not sanitized propaganda about ourselves.  What makes us great is that we are a nation of hundreds of millions of fantastically eclectic humans who don't just march proudly down the main street in red, white, and blue on the Fourth of July, but give the flag meaning by making our union ever more perfect.