Musings

Heartwork at the Oasis

I drove back from New Mexico recently, after a week of hiking and camping in the desert.  My pickup truck was caked with dust by the time I got home.  It reminded me of another of my annual desert sojourns years ago.  That time, I took a few days by myself to hike and camp to the oases nestled in the mountains around the Coachella Valley, hidden clefts of palms and sand from which cool water bubbles.  A day after I returned, I found a heart drawn on the dusty window of my car.  It had to have been Liz, my daughter, who was six years old at the time.  Her drawings of hearts were as distinctive as her handwriting.  They were scattered all over the house.  Her production of hearts was as profligate as her love.  At least some of her artwork - her "heartwork" – made it into the scrapbook.  Otherwise she would have left no “hard copy” from that precious period of her life.

It is a powerful urge.  Every year I feel compelled to go to the desert for a while, to refresh my familiarity with God's “hard copy”:  the naked mountains glowing in the sunrise, yucca and mormonweed and mesquite in lonesome clumps scattered across the landscape.  My body needs to witness the testament of the Almighty in the banded rock of the canyon walls, to taste the sacrament of the sage-scented air.   I return with a dusty vehicle, and I’m ready for heartwork, refreshed and ready to engage with family and community.
            
Ministry is my heartwork.   For years I did it with homeless and other very low-income people.  They know the desperate loneliness of the asphalt wasteland that passes for so much of what we call civilization.  Cast into the remotest part of our cultural desert, they are left to listen to voices howling from within, voices heard only when people are terribly alone.  At the same time, there is beauty in the desert of the homeless.  It has its verdant oases, places where love bubbles up.  Some of the most profound acts of compassion I witnessed in those years were among homeless people who comforted and cared for each other in their toughest moments.

Now my heartwork is in church, where we gather to quench an overwhelming thirst.  Even a life of relative comfort can’t mask the spiritual drought that so many of us suffer in our work and in our relationships.  It is possible to be surrounded by water and still feel completely dry.  So in church we paw at the sand, hoping that the living water of the spirit will bubble up.
            
My heartwork largely consists of listening to people share their stories.  In my office, people talk until the water begins to spring.  A good story opens an oasis in the desert.  It brings new to life to otherwise forgettable incidents and isolated thoughts that seemed dull and dusty.  Meaning, purpose, and redemption are found in events that seemed their antitheses.  A story isn't necessarily good because all goes well in it, but rather because the storyteller finds much more in the story than the sum of its parts.  Witnessing this ongoing discovery of this “good news”, otherwise known as the gospel, is the great privilege of my “heartwork”.
            
May each of us find signs of love in the dry, dusty places of our lives.  May the church be communities of people who do “heartwork” together, helping each other dig down within to open up oases of joy and compassion.

Real and Imaginary Threats

Ten Real Threats to Heterosexual Marriage

*  Indifference, complacency
*  Communication breakdowns   
*  Disputes about money
*  Trouble with ex-spouses and children from previous marriages
*  Disease or death of family members
*  Workaholism   
*  Physical or verbal abuse
*  Unemployment
*  Bankruptcy due to lack of health insurance
*  Heterosexual attractions or affairs

   Ten Imaginary Threats to Heterosexual Marriage

*  Abduction by aliens
*  Fluoridated water
*  Meteor impact
*  Deciding whether to vacation on the French vs. Italian Riviera
*  Attack by dinosaurs
*  Assault by Klingons
*  Arguing about whether to buy a white or red Ferrari
*  Invasion by body-snatchers
*  Kidnapping by trolls
*  Legalization of same-sex marriage

Dignified Indignance

“Why the Christian Right Is Wrong: A Minister’s Manifesto for Taking Back Your Faith, Your Flag, Your Future” by Robin Meyers (Jossey-Bass, 2006)

“Thy Kingdom Come: An Evangelical’s Lament” by Randall Balmer (Basic Books, 2006)

“What we need, now more than ever, are communities of dignified indignance,” says Robin Meyers. He is the pastor of just such a community: Mayflower Congregational Church in Oklahoma City, an oasis of progressive religion in a very “red” state. Mayflower the fastest-growing United Church of Christ congregation in the Oklahoma-Kansas area. In 2004, Robin gave a speech at a peace rally at the University of Oklahoma. His words challenged the morality and the purportedly Christian identity of the current leaders of this nation. Students who attended the rally asked for his notes, and they typed them into an email which they sent around the country. People forwarded the email to their friends, and Meyers received thousands of enthusiastic responses. Three copies of his speech, sent to me by different people, made their way into my in-box, and I found his words to be a succinct expression of my own sentiments.

As a consequence of this sudden notoriety, he was offered a contract to write a book that would put flesh on the bones of his speech. Using biblical images and passages, Meyers challenges, point by point, the claims and aims of the “Christian right” which have gained such traction in Washington. No, there’s nothing in traditional Christian “just war theory” that supported the invasion of Iraq. No, Jesus was not about vilifying or even “reforming” gay and lesbian people. Jesus was about extravagant welcome, not exclusion. No, there’s nothing in the Sermon on the Mount that would encourage what Meyers boldly describes as the growing fascism in America. No, it isn’t a good idea to put the Ten Commandments in courthouses. “Why are followers of Jesus not weeping and praying over the eight beatitudes or cursing the darkness of a commander in chief who taunts our enemies instead of praying for them?” asks Meyers. No, the Bible doesn’t make it moral to weaken environmental laws. The God of the Ark didn’t sanction the wholesale slaughter of endangered species. No, a “compassionate conservative” isn’t a politician who allows 45 million Americans to live without health insurance, and allows millions more to suffer with inadequate coverage.

Meyers’ book is a passionate plea for Christians to hit the streets and engage in politics for the causes of justice and peace. But he repeatedly succumbs to the temptation of mimicking the polemical style of the very people he excoriates. When he recently spoke at our church in Sausalito, California, he disclaimed any final authority about the kind of politics that Christianity or the Bible demand of us. In person, I found him to be much gentler and kinder than his book would have suggested. The book is peppered with harshly personal insults against George Bush and the leaders of the “Christian Right”, which I found to be gratuitous. And the elephant-skin design on the cover is as blatantly partisan an attack as is the title. I share Meyers’ unhappiness with many of our politicians’ actions and especially with their abuse of Christian scripture and tradition. But I aspire to an indignation that Meyers expresses with more dignity face-to-face than he does in print.

“Why the Christian Right Is Wrong” is oxygen for progressive Christians who feel dispirited by the hijacking of their faith for a retrograde political agenda. I am grateful for the energy that Meyers’ eloquence gives me as a pastor to display “tangible resistance” to the direction this country is taking. And the excesses of his rhetoric inspire me to find less incendiary and more effective language to help take back our religion, our flag, and our country.  

Balmer’s “Thy Kingdom Come” is every bit as indignant but more dignified than Meyer’s book. Balmer is a professor of religion at Barnard College, Columbia University, and a contributing editor to Christianity Today. He’s just as passionate as Meyers in his distaste for the influence of the religious right in politics today. But Balmer, a well-known evangelical himself, channels his energy into a beautifully-crafted history of the individuals and organizations that dominate this powerful movement.

Unlike other analysts, Balmer doesn’t believe that abortion and homosexuality were the matches that lit a fire under the Christian Right. For decades after their embarrassment in the Scopes “monkey trial”, biblical literalists were more or less content to remain a subculture. But the walls around their separatist domains began to crumble with a court decision in 1972 that ruled that any institution that practiced racial segregation was not tax-exempt. A related IRS decision against Bob Jones University in 1975, attacking its policy against interracial dating, resulted in a flurry of organizing to resist such perceived intrusions. Balmer believes it was racism, and the legal challenges to their isolated enclaves of their institutions, that hardened the resolve of fundamentalists and evangelicals to engage in overt political action. Abortion and homosexuality were added only later to the Christian Right’s agenda, in order to give it broader appeal. Conservative religious leaders concocted what Balmer calls the “abortion myth” by claiming that their movement began with the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973, attempting to cover-up the dirtier roots of their coalition.

With careful documentation, Balmer reveals the manipulation of evangelical institutions, the deformation of evangelical theology and biblical interpretation, and the cynical power-brokering of Christian Right leaders over a period of thirty years. His chapter on “Deconstructing Democracy” is particularly compelling. It details the organized effort of the movement to ruin the public school system. While he includes his personal views, and shares engaging stories of his testy encounters with Christian Right leaders, Balmer keeps hyperbole to a minimum. The facts themselves are appallingly fascinating.  It’s hard to put the book down, and harder yet, after reading it, to imagine sitting still and letting the Christian Right continue in its destructive trajectory without a vigorous response by progressives.