Musings

A Child Shall Lead

Roberta and I will be traveling in Peru from 5/23 – 6/6, to visit her son, Nick, who is in the Peace Corps serving in a little Quechua-speaking village called Chetilla in the northern mountains. I’ll give you a report on our return! Many of you have included Nick in your prayers since he left for Peru, and he appreciates your “good vibes”. He’s got another year to go, and we are grateful we get to visit him in the middle of his commitment. We can’t wait to go and sit with him on the log in front of his one-room house, and listen to what he has discovered.

From our conversations with him by phone and email (when he visits the nearest city where there are connections), we can tell that he isn’t quite the same guy to whom we gave a tearful send-off a year ago. Clearly, this experience has raised his self-confidence and emotional maturity, to say nothing of his growth in linguistic skills and understanding of the world’s complexities. He’s become a true citizen of the planet, and we look forward to learning from him. (Which you can do directly: Nick Maran -- [email protected].)

In Isaiah chapter 11, the prophet has a vision of peace and harmony: “...a little child shall lead them,” he wrote. This passage was grafted into the Christmas tradition. Wise men from the East came to seek inspiration from Jesus when he was an infant. The rabbis in the temple in Jerusalem engaged in scholarly discourse with Jesus when he was but twelve years old. In the past week, I’ve absorbed wisdom of various kinds from my daughter, step-daughter, and step-son. Our children are leading and teaching us, inspiring us to be bold, to be honest, to see things differently, to explore things we never thought about on our own. And they’re inspiring us to travel to places we’d otherwise never see!

I started to think of kids as my teachers when I began doing youth ministry. At retreats and camps, I’d get to spend hours with youngsters, just listening to them and hanging out. And when I paid attention, I would discover their profound insights, their keen observations – things that many adults seemed to miss. Fact is, we adults can be educated and experienced into ignorance! Sometimes, what we call “learning” is just the installation of mental filters that keep out ideas or experiences that don’t fit certain commonly-held assumptions. Young people haven’t installed all those filters yet, so more experiences can “get through” to them and fascinate them. There are a lot of ways to imagine Jesus. You can imagine him as the pale fellow with the long beard, or the agonized figure on the cross, or the radiant entity of the resurrection. Right now I’m imagining him as a twelve-year-old boy, skinny and a bit awkward. The cord around his cloak isn’t quite straight, and his skull-cap is askew on his head. But there he is, hanging out with the rabbis in the temple, and after a while of conversing with him, they give up their condescension toward him. They realize that this kid is a rabbi, a teacher of the Jewish law, like them. He’s got the gift. He may not have nearly the base of experience that they have, but he’s the real thing, nonetheless. He proposes and argues fine interpretive points of the Jewish scriptures, and the other rabbis listen admiringly. “A child shall lead them,” said their scriptures -- and there he was.

Our faith inspires us to allow ourselves to be led by children – ours or others. To be led by people who are a lot younger and less experienced than we are. Jesus died at age 33, approximately. In this era, that’s young. There’s hardly a Catholic cardinal who is less than twice that age. I’m two decades older than Jesus ever lived to be, and yet I still turn to him for guidance in times of trouble, for inspiration in living out the law of love that he preached.

So after sitting at his feet for two weeks, I’ll report to you on any wisdom I glean from my 24-year-old stepson. Till then, may the 12-year-old Jesus guide and teach us all!

Hubris and Humility

(This "musing" combines some postings I made as one of the "hosts" for the Rockridge Institute's "Spiritual Progressives" online conference this week.  Rockridge is George Lakoff's "think tank", focusing on new ways to "frame" social issues.  See more at:

http://forum.rockridgeinstitute.org/?q=node/4200#comment-1841)

There has been a continuous thread of spiritual humility in the Bible and in the Jewish and Christian religions, recognizing that God is beyond our comprehension, no matter how much or little we experience of the divine reality.  It seems to me that religious and political conservatives are a lot less humble in their claims about the identity, nature, and wishes of God. Religious and political progressive folks are much more hesitant to declare who/what God ultimately is, and what he/she/?/it expects from us.  We're in awe of the God of the burning bush, who answers in the koan "I AM" when we ask God's identity, leaving us in wondering amazement and a permanent state of seeking and questioning and exploring and doubting our assumptions about the divine.  The theology of hubris declares on the bumpersticker that "God said it, I believe it, that settles it".  The theology of humility is embodied in Jesus’ statement that “the greatest among you shall be your servant.”  It's harder to be faithful when you put your faith in a mystery, but then, is faith supposed to be easy? 

The good news is that not even religious conservatives have a lot of respect for hypocrisy and puffed-up pride.  And that is the inevitable consequence of claiming to see God in full, which Jesus himself said was impossible.  Is God still God if he/she/it can't change his/her/its mind?  and contradict the Bible and religious doctrines that conservatives are so certain to be absolute and final?  Mystical faith stays open to the possibility of progressive change, further revelation. 

The core of humility in the Judeo-Christian tradition is a powerful antidote to the excesses of the religious right.  When we respond to Bible-quoting politicians, we have plenty of humble pie to serve them – straight out of the same scriptures they claim as God's final Word.

Humble religion doesn't focus on its walls, but rather on the openings in its structures. We know we don't know enough, and never will. So we keep our doors and windows open to inspirations that enter from beyond our community of faith, and step outside the confines of our faith to work alongside others who aren't Christians.

Humble Christians can't claim that our way is the only right way to God. Other spiritual or secular paths may be as right for others as ours appears to be for us. Humble Christians embrace others who want to join us in the challenge of living the Christian life. But we don't feel qualified to judge others who aren't, or don't want to be, on our path. Instead, we are concerned with actually living out the faith and embodying its values, knowing how incredibly hard it is to do so.

It is humility that makes us willing to work together with non-religious people for the common good. We know we don't have all the answers, and we know we don't have all the skills or energy we need to build the "beloved community" that the Christ inspires us to seek for all people, Christians and non-Christians alike. Humility leads us beyond our doctrines and orthodoxies and sectarian groups. At the same time, our spiritual humility, insofar as we are able practice it, is what attracts people to our faith. Our most powerful "evangelism" tool is our willingness to set aside any prideful claim to the ultimate truth, and to work for the benefit of the larger public, as equals with people of very different religious or cultural backgrounds.

This is very different than the strategic alliances that prideful Christians employ to seek their social goals. Christian Zionists fund fundamentalist Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories, and the state of Israel welcomes the support of these American fundamentalists who are absolutely certain that the return of Jesus will be hastened if the people of Israel are fully "restored" to their biblically-defined borders. But this alliance is a means only to an end - literally, THE end! Christian Zionists want all Jews to become Christians, believing that if they don't, they'll roast in hell for eternity. Christian Zionists don't think of their Jewish partners as equals, but rather as potential religious proselytes who currently practice an inferior and misguided faith.  This hubris-based Christianity also manifests itself in strategic alliances between evangelicals and Catholics, to work for the end of abortion rights and the right to die with dignity. Many evangelicals, who pridefully call Catholicism a false church, will close ranks with the Pope on certain issues. But meanwhile, they actively attempt to steal the Pope's "sheep", trying to convert Catholics to "Christianity" as they narrowly define it.

These alliances reveal the essential weakness of the religious right in this country. Hubris always plants the seeds of its own destruction. Prideful Christians tend to form brittle and temporary alliances with people who don't share their rigid, self-assured beliefs. Humility recognizes God's ineffable, incomprehensible nature, and the inability of human beings to fully understand God's nature and will. Humility leads to flexibility, openness, and a spirit of equality. We're all equal in our imperfection, Christians and non-Christians alike. As a result of this awareness, humble Christians are capable of a deeper and more flexible kind of cooperation with non-Christians, and even with prideful Christians.

But of course, in the act of making these distinctions, I tempt myself with the very thing I condemn! I am as convicted of pride as anyone I accuse of it. I've been both a pride-based and a humility-based Christian. I stumble along the way of Jesus, praying for God to remind me, in the words of St. Paul, that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" ... especially those of us who aspire to true humility....

The American system of government exhibits an important paradox. On the one hand, the Constitution represented the very pinnacle of human achievement and dignity when it was written. On the other, at the root of the Constitution was its writers' conviction that human beings are hopelessly and permanently flawed and corruptible, and that as such, a system of checks and balances is needed to prevent government from succumbing to excesses of greed and pride and hunger for power among politicians. This deep mistrust of human nature had sources in the Judeo-Christian traditions, which at their best have always emphasized the fallibility and frailty of human beings and the necessity of humility before God. Without this humility, written into our Constitution, we would not be living in a free country today.

Talking Trees

Yesterday, as I walked up a sidewalk in Berkeley, I heard a tree talk. A soft, high-pitched, plaintive voice came from its mouth. I stood and listened.

After a while, a little finch poked its beak out of the hole in the trunk of the sycamore, and then flew out. Its babies were still inside, blending their sounds into one sweet supplication.

I was taught in English class to avoid “pathetic fallacy”, the temptation to write human characteristics into non-human things. But really, the tree did talk. I was there, and I heard it.

As I stood there, listening, I mused that while the tree’s voice was that of birds inside a hole in its trunk, that didn’t mean the tree didn’t have a voice. There had once been a branch at that spot on the trunk: it fell or was cut off, and the wound festered with rot until a hole formed – an ideal habitat for finches to make a nest of little strands of grass and twigs. How different was my voice, really? My body is an ecosystem of diverse cells with very different shapes and functions. One set of cells found my voicebox to be an ideal habitat. Those cells formed a perfect nest of strands in my larynx, from which they issue a voice. They are as at home in my throat as the finches are in that sycamore trunk.

What I call my “self” is a congregation of billions of living beings, not one of which has any idea that they are part of me. Each cell is “nesting” among the others, relating symbiotically.

I serve a church community, and see myself clearly as part of its ecology of interdependence. Together our sounds blend into one voice that floats out the opened arched doors of our sanctuary on Sunday mornings. Because this wooden structure is our habitat for worship, it’s another example of trees that talk.

But I am only barely aware that I’m a constituent of another vastly larger entity called the human race. I add a tiny tone to a much larger voice, and I hardly know what it speaks, little more than those tiny baby finches could have known how their sounds would be synthesized into the voice of a tree.

But perhaps by listening to a talking sycamore, I might be trained to hear the voice of the human mega-being of which I am a micro-member. What are we saying? And is it what we really want to be saying?

But better yet, listening at the mouth of a tree, I might for a fleeting moment hear from it the voice of the One in whose throat all humanity is but one miniscule vibration, hardly louder than the peeping of baby finches in the springtime….