Musings

Christianity, Incubated

Let us prepare our souls to receive the sacred myth of scripture. 

Breathe deep, keep a moment of silence; release any preconceptions you might have about the meaning of the passage, open your heart to new revelations that may arise. 

Then read aloud:

He put before them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in his field;  it is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches.”  He told them another parable: “The kingdom of heaven is like yeast that a woman took and mixed in with three measures of flour until all of it was leavened.  (Jesus, Matthew 13: 31-33, NRSV)

Read it aloud again a few times.

Let the seed of scripture sink into the soil of your soul.

Let the yeast of scripture knead its way into every fiber of your being.

Let holy mystery, enveloped by scripture, incubate within you until it transforms you as you most need to be transformed.

Christianity is a tiny, hard, round mustard seed, packed densely with scriptures, writings, doctrines, art, music, liturgies, history, and practices.  Amazing to behold.  But observing this seed, you won't necessarily see the selfless compassion and sublime wisdom that can grow from it after it is planted in the human soul.  Christianity is a pinch of smelly yeast: messy, strange, complicated - outrageous in so many ways.  But folded into the human heart, and with the right nurture and conditions, it can swell into divine goodness. 

Christianity, in and of itself, is funky.  Christianity, incubated, empties itself into new being.  Some folks wear crosses on chains around their necks to mark them as members of the Christian tribe.  There's nothing wrong with wearing the cross.  But until the cross wears us, until we incubate the myth of the crucifixion and resurrection within our souls, we're not letting the sacred story liberate us from self-absorption. 

Christianity is not a knick-knack to show off on a shelf.  It's not a special club for the cool kids.  It is a packet of seeds meant to be planted within us.  It is a packet of yeast meant to be folded into us. 

Within the mustard seed is a structure called the apical meristem, consisting of stem cells, each of which has the potential to morph into any specific cell in specific organs of the future mustard plant.  The whole Christian religion is an apical meristem.  It has no fixed meanings.  Each myth and story and hymn and liturgy and artwork within it has infinite variable potential to positively transform the human soul, if nudged and nurtured in that direction. 

Open your heart to the mustard seed.  Let it drop all the way in.  Water it with time and contemplation.

Make way in your soul for the pinch of yeast.  Warm it with open, mindful, prayerful attention.  Let it be whatever it is, on its terms.  Wait for it to do whatever it does within you.

May the delicious aroma of fresh bread rise from the sacred story planted deep within you.  May birds of the air make nests in that which sprouts from your incubated Christianity... 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Progressive Christian News Flashes

 

COSTA MESA, CALIFORNIA:  Autumn Rose did not set out to get ink for progressive Christianity.  She was invited by Fairview Community Church in Costa Mesa, CA, to read stories for children at a monthly event.  It was no big deal until loud protests began outside the church.  Autumn Rose is a drag queen, and the protesters objected to her potential influence on children.  One, at the entrance to the church parking lot, cried out:  “This driveway is an open gate to a sepulcher!”  A security team was organized to contain the disruptions.  The incidents were covered prominently in the LA Times on 9/21/19, which described the long-standing progressive orientation of the congregation, including its full affirmation and inclusion of LGBTQI people.  The pastor, Sara Halverson Cano, performs same-sex marriages in the church.

 
SOUTH BEND, INDIANA:  Mayor Pete Buttigieg is the most “out” progressive Christian running for the presidency.   Applying Christianity to politics “is going to point you in a progressive direction”, he says.  His father was, for a while, training to become a Jesuit priest. Both parents taught at the Catholic university, Notre Dame.  He is now an active member of the Episcopal Church, in which he and his husband were married.  Buttigieg regularly calls out the hypocrisy of politicians who tout their Christianity while cutting public benefits for the poor.  He said in a recent interview:  "There is something going on that is so much bigger than party politics right now. It’s a kind of stirring or, or reawakening. I try to speak about this with a certain kind of humility, because there’s been this kind of progressive dimension to religious activism for much longer than I’ve been on the scene. But it seems to be asserting itself in new ways, and it should be. Because what’s happening is I think a real affront to many of the principles that faith counsels us to uphold when we come into the public square."

WASHINGTON, DC:  Ben Carson, US Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, puts out a newsletter to his friends and supporters.  Here is the opening of a recent issue:  “Dear Carson News Reader:  There’s a terrifying term being thrown around these days, and if you’re anything like us . . .You might be scratching your head every time you hear it, wondering . . .“What the heck is a progressive Christian?”  First off . . . Don’t be fooled. It’s not someone who adheres to the true roots and beliefs of Christianity . . . Instead it’s a veiled disguise for anti-Christianity that’s rampant in Washington…” 

Thanks, Ben, for the confirmation that progressive Christianity is thriving!

 

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

This Is Our Flag

 

(It is my fervent hope that all of us who are resisting the current slide toward tyranny in America will wave the flag vigorously at every public demonstration and event we attend.  Far too few flags are visible at too many of our gatherings.  It is OUR flag.  We're the patriots.  Let's claim and wave the symbol of democracy and freedom!  Here's a hymn to the flag to share freely --)

 

(Tune:  Finlandia)

Words:  Jim Burklo

 

This is our flag, inviting every nation

To human freedom and democracy

Red, white, and blue: we sing out our devotion

In harmony from our diversity

Our creeds and tongues and points of view are many

We stand as one defending liberty

 

This is our flag: its stars and stripes are many

As we have gathered from so many lands

Into this tapestry we're sewn together

Raising our flag, and all for which it stands

Our Constitution binds us all together

Under our flag, in humble unity

 

This is our flag: it waves for all our people

Who gave their lives extending liberty

It waves for votes in free and fair elections

It welcomes migrants yearning to be free

It stands for truth, the rule of law, and justice

Long may it wave, held high by you and me!

 

The Way of Emptying

 

painting by Bardia Soltani

 

If then there is any encouragement in Christ, any consolation from love, any sharing in the Spirit, any compassion and sympathy, make my joy complete: be of the same mind, having the same love, being in full accord and of one mind.  Do nothing from selfish ambition or conceit, but in humility regard others as better than yourselves.  Let each of you look not to your own interests, but to the interests of others.  Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,

who, though he was in the form of God,
    did not regard equality with God
    as something to be exploited,
but emptied himself,
    taking the form of a slave,
    being born in human likeness.
And being found in human form, he humbled himself
    and became obedient to the point of death—
    even death on a cross.

Therefore God also highly exalted him
    and gave him the name
    that is above every name,
so that at the name of Jesus
    every knee should bend,
    in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue should confess
    that Jesus Christ is Lord,
    to the glory of God the Father.

(Philippians 2:2-11 NRSV)

 

Christians follow an empty man, and strive to become as empty as he was.

A child is at once both greedy and selfless: crying until fed, but in the next moment enraptured in ego-free awe while watching a butterfly pass by. Adults may be more subtle in their expressions of it, but the polarity remains. Humans are full of themselves. Each of us must contend with the propensity to presume that we are the center of the universe - that at the mention of my name, every knee should bow and every tongue should confess my glory.

The Psalmist captures the contradiction:

When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
    the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
    mortals^, that you care for them?

Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
    and crowned them with glory and honor.
You have given them dominion over the works of your hands;
    you have put all things under their feet…

(Psalm 8: 3-8 NRSV)

Could it be that this dichotomy in human experience, and the mythical biblical poetry that describes it, are mirrors of the structure of the cosmos? The universe once was congealed into an infinitely dense center. Then it emptied itself in every direction instantaneously. Then its contents congealed into local centers called stars and galaxies. Then planets congealed around the stars. Then on the planet earth, life-forms congealed, yielding human beings with their congealing consciousness of self and cosmos.

The cosmos may well slow and stop its expansion and congeal again into the center, and empty again, and congeal again, and empty again, out of and into infinity. Each emptying creates microcosms that can be mistaken for the whole. Each set of planets circling a sun can seem like all there is. And each locus of consciousness can fall into the same illusion.

So when a human being named Jesus emptied himself, and served others so radically and selflessly that he was emptied of life itself on a cross, a model was set before humanity, showing us how to raise our consciousness. The gospel myth of his life and death models for us the emptying way. What makes us most human is not to glorify our own small-“s” selves. What makes us most human is not to advertise our awesomeness on social media. What makes us most human is out-of-ego expression of awe, wonder, and compassion. By getting ourselves out of the center, and becoming fully other-oriented, we are crowned with glory and honor. True for Jesus, and true for us.

As the staggering natural creativity surrounding us on earth and in heaven resulted from the emptying at cosmogenesis, so all the most beautiful human creations flow from emptying our self-centeredness into other-centeredness. In following Jesus, our ontology recapitulates our phylogeny.  In walking the way of emptying, we mirror in our souls and actions the origin of the universe, and consciously participate in its evolution.

The Sacred Myth of the Gospel

 

"A reading from the sacred myth of the Gospel of Matthew (or Mark, Luke, or John)...." 

I've been introducing scripture passages this way from the pulpit for decades.  At first I was a bit nervous about speaking my mind in such an unambiguous fashion.  But when I discovered that hardly any parishioners blinked, I lost my trepidation.  (More about fearlessness from the pulpit here...)  People in churches are generally relieved to hear straight talk from the pulpit about the non-factual nature of much if not most of the Bible.  They value the Bible and the Christian tradition, and so do I, and that is what matters most to them.  They want to hear the stories and they want to explore their meaning and significance.  It turns out that hardly any of the meaning found in the Bible is dependent on whether or not its stories actually happened. 

If something in the Bible or the wider Christian tradition looks mythical, we do well to assume that this is the case.  The myth test is pretty simple.  If the details of the story fly in the face of common sense and what we know about science, then it is best not to take it literally.  But just because something didn't really happen doesn't mean it isn't true.  There is factual truth, and then there is the truth about life that can be embedded in a fanciful story.

To be sure, not all myths are equal.  Some are meaningless.  And some are even harmful, like the false narratives that motivate people to refuse to vaccinate their children.  But the mythology in Christianity is pregnant with transformative spiritual power.  Very little in the Gospels in the Christian Bible has any historical validity.  But the myths of his birth, ministry, death, and resurrection reach into the depths of our souls and energize us with love and hope.  They are made sacred by the ways they evoke the divine realm in our hearts.

Embracing the mythical nature of the Gospel, seeking the deeper truths within its non-factual narratives, letting them resonate in the inner sanctum of our consciousness: this practice of Christianity wipes away a huge swath of frustration.  We're no longer looking to the Bible for facts.  There is no more conflict between science and faith.  There is no more fear of eternal hellfire as a punishment for our inability to reconcile what we read in the Bible with our God-given good sense.  Faith becomes a fearless way of living, rather than being a lot where we park our brains while trying to believe the unbelievable. 

The Gospels are myths to live by.  We preachers will do our church members a great service by being clear and explicit about the mythical nature of the Christian Bible and tradition.  We don't need to mince words.  It just frustrates people when we dance around the topic like it is too hot to handle.  On the contrary, we need to lift up the precious value and power of our Christian myths.  It does not make any difference that Jesus did not literally walk on water.  But it makes all the difference to share the story, because it teaches us how to cross over the troubled waters of our lives. 

 

JIM BURKLO

Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG      Blog: MUSINGS       Senior Associate Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life, University of Southern California

Holding the Line

 

 

In Alexander Solzhenitsyn's epic novel of the Soviet era, "The Gulag Archipelago",  a Russian peasant ended up in a prison camp, for no reason he could discern.  The clocks were changed at the camp for daylight savings time, and the peasant was convinced that this was because the Soviet state had moved the sun. 

A Siberian chill should run down our spines, now that our President has claimed the power to move a hurricane.

Democracy is precious, in no small part because it is fragile.  And its existence became yet more tenuous when the President altered a weather forecast map with an added line, falsely including Alabama in the path of a coming hurricane.  A visual lie in support of his previous verbal fabrication. 

 

While his daily mendacity is unprecedented, I found this lie particularly disturbing.  It crosses a critical line.  The swoop on the map was so obviously a crude addition that it insulted the eyes.  And that was the point.  Its bald-faced absurdity was his message:  "Reality is whatever I declare it to be."  The rhetoric of despots everywhere can be reduced to this one sentence.  When the people give assent to it, overtly or by weary acceptance, government of the people, by the people, and for the people is lost.  And with it is lost the freedom of religion, which necessarily includes the freedom to be free of religion.

At its heart and at its best, religion is the practice of humility.  It is the disciplined recognition of an Ultimate Reality that exists independently of any particular human being.  In worshipful awe, we approach but a semblance of knowledge of this Ultimate Reality.  Good religion inspires us to question everything, including religion.  We may need to arrive at conclusions based on the best evidence before us, but in humility before the Holy One, we recognize that they are always tentative.  An election decided by a majority of voters is the imperfect but best way for a society to reach tentative conclusions about the conduct of the common life of the people.  In order to practice good religion, we must have the freedom to question what our leaders say in politics, society, and the church.  We must have the freedom to seek the truth and follow where it leads us, or we will lose our democracy and lose our faith.  Good religion is a foundation for democracy, and democracy is a foundation for the flourishing of good religion.

 

When the President says that he's thinking about staying in office longer than his lawfully permitted term, he's not just joking:  he's actively creating a constituency of people in support of that plan.  When he continues to claim that he lost the popular vote by fraud, he's actively advocating for the tyranny of a minority.  His political party is so unpopular that its existence depends on gerrymandering districts and demoralizing and disenfranchising voters.  Desecration of democracy has become the survival strategy of the Republican Party.  When the President insults reporters for spreading "fake news", he is intentionally undercutting the trust of the American people in the press, and also in the idea that there could be a source of veracity other than his his own tweeting fingertips.  Without a commonly accepted set of facts, understood to exist independently of any individual,  we will have no shared basis for evaluation of the soundness of public policies.  Then, the loudest voice will dominate.  Since the Electoral College result in 2016, the Republican rip-off of a seat on the Supreme Court, gerrymandered Congressional districts, and a bunch of Senators who represent more cows than humans, we've suffered a period of minority rule. 

But now we must resist the current slide toward permanent minority rule.

 

The fake line on the hurricane map was so ludicrous that it inspired a burst of comic creativity.  The humorous reactions - like an image of a wall consisting of hastily-drawn magic-marker lines on a picture of the Mexican border (and the map I drew, above) - might give us some emotional release and relief.  But the dark force that drew the line on the map remains in power.  The damage to democracy continues.  It's a death by a thousand tweets.

 

Politics is and always has been a messy, dirty business - far from perfect, across the spectrum of political persuasions.  But what we're witnessing is orders of magnitude worse than garden-variety political posturing that went on before 2016.  At least since Ronald Reagan declared that "government is the problem", right-wing politicians in America have been actively working to undercut democracy.  If people are convinced that government is hopelessly ineffective, then they expect it to be run badly, and they lose interest in civic participation.  When people who don't believe in government are elected to run the government, sure enough, they run it badly, which reinforces the dogma.  Religion has been sucked into this black hole.  As evangelical leaders fall into its gravitational thrall, the Christian gospel is pulled and twisted like taffy, beyond recognition.  Much of a generation of young people has thrown up its hands at the cynicism of their pastors and given up on the faith altogether.  This cycle has been playing out for decades in America.  But in the last few years, it has accelerated at a breathtaking rate. 

 

At stake are not just important public policies regarding social welfare, health care, environmental protection, and regulation of business.  Critical as they may be, they pale in significance compared to the danger to democracy itself.  The President has stirred up the worst passions of millions of people.  There is a very real threat of violent civil conflict if the President contests the outcome of the upcoming election.  Hundreds of thousands of bikers, mostly white and male, have sworn fealty to him and have appointed themselves as his defenders.  (An eerily similar biker organization stands behind Vladimir Putin in Russia.)  The President's cabinet members are purging their departments of employees who lack loyalty to him or generate facts that might pierce his force-field of falsehood.  Members of the press feel physically threatened and verbally assaulted. 

 

The President is running the government very badly indeed, and if people resign themselves to this status-quo, conditions will become ever-riper for autocracy.  Our trend-line aims directly toward the kinds of sham democracy that prevail in Russia, Turkey, and Hungary, where the heads of state have snuffed out all meaningful opposition by browbeating the press, manipulating elections, and concentrating power in the hands of oligarchic interests.  Before 2016, it would have been hyperbolic to say such a thing.  But not today.  Fox News has become Pravda.  White evangelical Christianity has become the Russian Orthodox state church, dutifully offering divine blessings on the powers-that-be.

 

Let us with one mind recognize that what the President wrote on that hurricane map is not just an occasion for mockery. The line he is drawing isn't just around Alabama.  It is a line around the entire United States of America, which he aims to take by storm and control completely.  With our vigorous civic engagement, with our practice of good religion, with our insistent voices, we must erase that line. 

 

 

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 Beauty Trap

Simone Weil

 

(a commentary on “Love of the Order of the World” from “Waiting for God” by Simone Weil - from sermons I gave at West Hollywood United Church of Christ and at Mt Hollywood UCC in Los Angeles recently)

 

Beauty is a trap.  A trap set all around me, as I walk to and from the Metro Red Line Subway station at Hollywood and Vine on my daily commute.  Huge electronic billboards depicting idealized, unrealistically beautiful people demand the attention of the little, actual humans scurrying around on the sidewalks below. 

Beauty is a trap that can oppress those who feel compelled to imitate the visual definitions of it that dominate the relentless media that barrage us through screens great and small, day and night.  It’s a trap that sucks dollars out of our credit cards for beauty products, clothes, shoes, and accessories.  It’s a trap that makes us feel incomplete and inadequate.

But there is another kind of beauty trap that is well-worth falling into.  It’s the one that is set by God.

“The soul’s natural inclination to love beauty is the trap God most frequently uses in order to win it and open it to the breath from on high,” wrote Simone Weil, a French philosopher and theologian, in the 1940’s.  “The beauty of the world is Christ’s tender smile for us coming through matter. He is really present in the universal beauty.  The love of this beauty proceeds from God dwelling in our souls and goes out to God present in the universe. It also is like a sacrament.”

Our experience of beauty often points us into the unknown.  What is beautiful often is mysterious, alluring us with the possibility of discovering the unseen behind what we see.  Beauty isn't "what you see is what you get".  It suggests that there is a story behind what we see; some kind of struggle, perhaps.  Which is why some of the loveliest things are humble, dented, used, "distressed".  And people are often most beautiful when they expose hints of their vulnerabilities, letting those marks show by being emotionally honest and naturally revealing hints of life's trials and tribulations through mannerisms and expressions.

The relationship of beauty and desire is one that torments many people.  Beauty is something that we want, but what would it mean to have it, since it is always and only in the eye of the beholder?  This reality makes futile the effort to grasp and control and own it.  The way out of this monkey-trap is to relax, give up this grasping, and realize that you are the beauty that you see, not the beauty that others see, nor the beauty you want them to see.  If you see beauty all around you, every day, in everyday things - if you look for that beauty and bask in it and enjoy it, you will become a reflection of it.  When you see and gratefully appreciate beauty, in its many and surprising forms, this is ultimately what makes you a beautiful person.... far more than any attempt you make to change the way you look.

“A beautiful thing involves no good except itself, in its totality, as it  appears to us. We are drawn toward it without knowing what to ask of it. It offers us its own existence. We do not desire anything else, we possess it, and yet we still desire something. We do not in the least know what it is… The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations. Only beyond the sky, in the country inhabited by God, are they one and the same operation. Children feel this trouble already, when they look at a cake for a long time almost regretting that it should have to be eaten and yet are unable to help eating it. It may be that vice, depravity, and crime are nearly always, or even perhaps always, in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at. Eve began it. If she caused humanity to be lost by eating the fruit, the opposite attitude, looking at the fruit without eating it, should be what is required to save it,” wrote Simone Weil.

Try this meditation on beauty:  take a strip of paper and a stick of glue.  Twist the strip once and glue the ends together into a moebius strip… and on it write these words:  “you are the beauty that you see”.  Write it so that it is one continuous stream of words:  “you are the beauty that you see you are the beauty that you see you are the beauty that you see….”  And so on.  What was once a two-sided strip of paper is now one-sided.  What was once a trap that separated you from beauty has released, and now, as you fall into God’s beauty trap, you and the beauty that you see are one.

“Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.” (Luke 12:27)  Jesus, in his Sermon on the Mount, didn’t tell people to pick the flowers.  He didn’t tell them to take pictures of the flowers.  He told them to look at them.  Period!  Salvation comes by this kind of looking, liberated from the desire that comes from, and results in, a sense of separation. 

But for this meditation, cut a flower anyway!  And scotch-tape it to a mirror.  Look in the mirror.  What do you see?  The flower?  Your face?  Both? 

Or do you see yourself looking at the flower from the other side of the mirror?

“We want to get behind beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that sends us back our own desire for goodness,” wrote Simone Weil.  “Only beauty is not the means to anything else. It alone is good in itself, but without our finding any particular good or advantage in it. It seems itself to be a promise and not a good. But it only gives itself; it never gives anything else.”

Tangier Island sits in the middle of Chesapeake Bay.  Water is steadily swallowing it up as sea level rises.  But many if not most of the residents of this tiny community deny that it is due in large measure to human-caused climate change from carbon emissions.  Belief in fundamentalist Christianity and support for Donald Trump run deep among the people there.  Directly trying to convince them of the incontrovertible science explaining the slow demise of their island has had little effect.  (Read more about the community in this in-depth article in Pacific Standard.) 

This story convinced me that a very different approach is needed to bring our country together to fight climate change.  Instead of being "preachy" and "teachy" about it, and alienating climate-change deniers further in the process, it is time to meet them where they are.  And one way to do that is to place ourselves below instead of above them, and confess that we are the cause of the problem.  Personal responsibility is key to conservatives' world-view.  Taking personal responsibility for climate change is a good first step toward them.

I can imagine sending messages like this to people in places around the US that are similarly threatened by catastrophic human-caused climate change.  If you want to be part of such a campaign, let me know..... 


Dear People of Tangier Island:
 
I write to ask your forgiveness for causing your beautiful island home to slowly wash away.  As a Christian, I make this confession before God and you, and I pledge to change my ways.
 
I am guilty of consuming too much fossil fuel energy.  These carbon emissions have built up in the atmosphere, with catastrophic effects around the world.  This human-caused climate change is a major reason for the rising sea level that is drowning your island, and I confess to my part in it.  I have burned more gasoline than I really needed to use.  I have left lights on in my house when I should not have done so.  When I have traveled by air, the burning jet fuel has put too much carbon into the atmosphere. 
 
God made this world, and Tangier Island is a precious place in it.  God expects me to take care of this world, not to pollute and destroy it.  I read about what is happening to your island, and it made the problem of human-caused climate change more real for me.   I will remember what is happening to you and your island home as I make choices about consuming energy. 
 
But due to our sinful nature, individuals like myself, acting alone, cannot be effective enough.  Only by setting external limits around ourselves can we protect God’s creation and save your island.  So I will vote for candidates for public office who will enact regulations to limit carbon emissions. 
 
Again, I am sorry for what I have done, and prayerfully  commit myself to reduce my use of fossil fuels so that this climate change crisis can be reversed and Tangier Island can stay above water.
 
Yours in Christ,
 
Jim Burklo


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

Followership

 

I walk three to seven miles every day.  On weekends, I usually find time to take a long hike in the wilderness.  On weekdays, I walk down the flanks of the Hollywood hills to the subway station in the morning, and back up to our house in the evening.  I say "hi" to the many dog-walkers I encounter along the way.  I've mused to myself that my daily hikes are "God-walks".  God holds an invisible leash attached to me, and I follow where God leads.   Understanding that I'm on a God-walk snaps me out of the small-"s" selfishness of thinking that my life is my own, that I make all my own decisions consciously, that I'm the master of my own fate and the captain of my own ship.  Surely I have a measure of choice about which directions to take.  But I am most human, and most humane, when I am humbled into awareness of my followership.

I work at an "elite" university - whatever that means, other than the fact that only 17% of undergraduate students who apply are admitted.  At such schools, leadership is not just highly valued.  It is a cultic incantation.  One sign of its worship is the number of clubs on campus: 1,000, on a campus of 45,000 students.  I know enough about the reality of these clubs to understand that the real function of many if not most of them is to enable students to put words like "president" or "chairperson" on their resumes.  Our students believe they must be leaders to get admitted, they must be leaders while they are in our university, and they must be leaders when they graduate.

But when they graduate, almost all of them are going to be followers.  They will have bosses they must follow.  They will have work-place procedures they must follow.  They will have corporate dogmas and doctrines they must follow.  It will be a while - probably a long while - before they can claim to be real leaders. 

And even leaders do a lot of following - whether they know and admit it or not.  I'm reading a devastatingly insightful book:  "Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World" by Anand Giridharadas.  Its premise:  members of the global money and power elite have created an echo chamber, tricking themselves into believing that their charitable impulses can save the world without engaging in politics or changing the system.  Thus they disempower democracy and disregard the input of the real people they purport to be helping.  These leaders follow each other into the delusion that they are the saviors of the world, but they are the same people running the systems that created the drastic income inequality and other social and environmental problems that plagued the world in the first place.  (Look here for a future "musing" on the implications of this important book....)

So we need a good culture and ethic of followership.  The institutions of our society need people humble enough to take good direction, but also insightful enough to know when they are getting bad direction.  We need smart followers who are eager to learn from those who know more than they do.  Smart followers who help their leaders get past their egos so they can accept input when the followers know more than the leaders.  We need wise followers who set their egos aside for larger causes that are right.  Wise followers who can tell the difference between leaders worthy of following and leaders who are headed over the cliff.  Sensitive followers who discern when to work behind the scenes to fix things that their leaders are dismissing, and when to blow the whistle to prevent disaster.  Sensitive followers who gently guide their leaders toward more effective leadership.  If we have better followers, better leaders will follow. 

"The greatest among you will be your servant.  All who exalt themselves will be humbled, and all who humble themselves will be exalted."  (Matthew 28: 11-12 NRSV)  The Christian faith teaches humility:  "Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God as something to be exploited, but emptied himself, taking the form of a slave..." (Philippians 2: 5-7 NRSV)  We are the humble followers of a humble carpenter/rabbi who was a humble follower of Ultimate Reality.  Christianity is wildly counter-cultural in the context of universities and corporations.  But such institutions could learn a lot from our faith.  Because out of humble followership grows humble leadership.  Spiritually-awakened followers produce spiritually-awakened servant leaders who avoid echo-chambers of catch-phrases of elitist thinking, and mix with people at every level of society.  Leaders who listen to voices other than those of their social and economic peers.  Leaders who serve the people they lead, with attentiveness and respect and support and warm curiosity.  Leaders who check in regularly with those they supervise, with humble, open interest in their points of view.  Leaders who follow their followers. 

So let our churches become schools of followership... an incalculably valuable skill that our universities don't teach.

JIM BURKLO

Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS   

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

Sr Associate Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life, University of Southern California

I Am That I Am

A palo verde tree
radiant with rising sun
glowing behind the serrated mountain:
blooming specks of yellow
tipping the green branches.

Sitting still under its shade
on a granite boulder
long enough to arrive
and to attend
to the fly that perched on my boot.

I admired its dark orange eyes,
its delicately scribed thorax,
its translucent wings:
it rubbed its forelegs together
fastidiously?

It reminded me to forget
adverbs, adjectives,
verbs, nouns,
opinions,
and time.

"I Am That I Am," answered the burning bush
in the desert
when Moses asked its name....

(Cove Trail, La Quinta, CA, 7:15 am, 6-15-19)