Musings

Carrying On

Now, we can’t put shampoo in our carry-on luggage when we fly.  Nor can we put a bottle of water in our carry-on, either.  Nor perfume.  Nor after-shave. 

Nor can we carry on protection from bombs or mayhem on airplanes, trains, or anywhere else.  The US military, strongest in the world, armed with the most, and the most ingenious, weapons on the planet, can’t protect us from a handful of determined people with mass-murderous intent and some box-cutters or nail polish remover and peroxide.

The likelihood of horrific terrorist incidents grows with each passing day.  Airport security is an oxymoron, even at the highest state of alert.  An open society, dependent on a torrent of commerce and travel and communication, cannot possibly interdict all the clever, persistent plotting of mass killers.

Yet we must carry on anyway.  Otherwise, the terrorists get what they want, whether or not a lot of people die.  We must carry on, or our souls will be held hostage to fear.

We must carry on with freedom, even though it’s risky to defend the rule of law, to defend checks and balances against government power.  We must carry on with pluralism, even though some people want to hijack religion and sow sectarian hatred.  We must carry on with compassion, even though these are times that tempt us toward revenge. 

We must carry on with a desire to understand deeply the motivations of those who want to destroy us.  We must carry on with curiosity, with a genuine desire to comprehend points of view that seem utterly strange to us.  We must carry on with empathy, even toward those who seem most repugnant.  We must work harder to find common ground, to create means of dialogue, to give people all over the world more reasons to cooperate despite their differences.

We must carry on with faithful living, behaving as if life will go on, as if creativity will prevail, as if kindness will continue no matter what befalls us.  We must be prepared spiritually for a long period of horrible events that will test our souls.  We must train ourselves to be patient and forbearing, to resist the powerful urge to mimic the behavior of the people who aim to ruin us.  We must show them a better way by our actions and attitudes, our words and deeds.  They claim moral superiority with their willingness to die for causes they deem noble.  We must occupy a yet higher moral ground, one to which they might aspire and thus turn from their bloody aims.

Tens of them will kill thousands of us.  Thousands of them may kill millions of us. We’ll want to even the score, even if most of our victims would turn out to be innocent civilians.  That would only recruit more people for the terrorists, and that is exactly what they want.  So we must exercise an almost unimaginable restraint if we are to prevail in the long term.  We must be willing to endure terrible losses without reacting in an ultimately counterproductive manner. We must be bigger, we must be better, than the rage we will feel each time these awful events occur.  We cannot survive this challenge unless we create a far more spiritually advanced society than the one we live in today.  Yes, we need a strong military and good police forces.  But it is not a mere platitude to say that our best defenses will be purity of heart, clarity of conscience, and refinement of compassion.  We must create a more just and caring society that is more worthy of preserving.

No matter what happens, we must carry on with joy, with reverence, with friendship, with community, with family, with creativity and with scientific advance.  We must invest our hearts and our substance in things that will last longer than the long, painful struggle that lies ahead of us.  Our nation and world is likely to suffer incidents of dreadful destruction in the near future.  But we are called to carry on as if civilization is going to improve and flourish in the long term, because that is the only way it ever will.

Complicated Simplicity

In recent years, I've done a lot of reading about the religious history of America. It is a fascinating subject, because so many remarkable innovations in Christianity have been spawned on our shores.  Consider the Mormons, the Seventh-Day Adventists, the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Christian Scientists -- to say nothing of the American manifestation of the Presbyterians and the Congregationalists.  Despite the complexity of American Christian traditions, there are common themes that I notice.  Foremost is the very American urge to return to what people define as the "original" church: what they presume to be the raw, uncut, unadulterated essence of Christian faith.  But in this typically American effort to boil things down to the fundamentals (is this why we spell it "color" and the British spell it "colour"?), Christianity has become adulterated even further.  This is evidenced by the elaborate beliefs of many uniquely American churches.  To get back to the fundamentals took a lot of explaining, and then the explanations became sacred.  When people started questioning the sacred explanations, the whole process of seeking the fundamentals started over again.  This cycle continues to this day in our country.  Europeans shake their heads at us in wonderment, boggled at the endless ferment and mutation in American religion.

It is sobering to read this history and see my own place in it.  I, too, am on a quest to get down to the basics of Christian faith and abandon many of the unhelpful accretions to Jesus' simple message of love for God and neighbor.  I had to write a whole book, after all, to explain how simple Christianity really is! 

I'm on the executive council of The Center for Progressive Christianity.  A few years ago, at a meeting of our council, we got into a discussion of whether or not to revise the 8 points of our Welcome Statement, which is a description of the progressive Christian movement.  Somebody said "No, we can't do that!  People count on those 8 points staying the same!"  But all of us, the speaker included, started laughing at the prospect that our group, dedicated as it is to opening the church to people who can't deal with dogma, would develop a fixed set of doctrines of its own.  The temptation to repeat history was strong.

This very American urge to boil religion down to the basics is a good thing, as long as we remember what can go wrong with it.   Christian faith really is simple -- it's about not much more than loving God and loving neighbor with heart, soul, mind and body.  In my church, we've been reading the Sermon on the Mount in our Wednesday night Bible study.  We see that it's simple, but not easy.  It's difficult to love God when bad things happen to good people.  It's hard to love difficult neighbors, and even harder to love the basically good but sometimes impossible members of our families.  It's hard to extend the concept of "neighbor" to people on the other side of the world, but more than ever, we are called to this challenge on our "globalized" planet.   The practice of Christianity is plenty difficult. There's no need to make it harder with complicated theology and bewildering, illogical beliefs.

So may history be our guide in keeping religion simple, so we can focus on the worthy challenge of living faithfully.

Is the Bible Fit for Kids?

I went to a Sunday School teachers’ convention over two decades ago.   It was a dull affair except for one workshop which I attended, entitled “How to Teach the Bible to Kids”.  The leader came into the room with a stack of musty old illustrated Bible story books.  He opened up one of the books, with its florid pictures of muscle-bound Philistines, heavily-bearded, grimacing patriarchs, and heavy-robed women kneeling in agonized supplication.  He then read aloud some of the most gruesome and salacious of the Bible’s stories, showing the pictures to the horrified Sunday School teachers.   

The workshop leader then closed the book and declared, “Kids love this stuff!”  He went on.  “Throw out that namby-pamby denominational curricula for Sunday School, and go to a thrift store and buy an old Bible story book and read it to your kids.  They won’t let you stop reading it to them.  They’ll be riveted.  They see violence on TV. It’s in the Bible, too.  They know somebody in their family or among their friends who has been molested or abused.  Stories of incest are also in the Bible.  They play computer games with action figures who perform amazing feats with miraculous powers, and that’s all in the Bible, as well.  The difference is that there’s more to the story, there’s redemption in the Bible, that is lacking in the mayhem on television and in the movies.”

His message stayed with me.  Just because kids discover that Samson slaughtered a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass (a fresh jawbone, the book of Judges would have us know), that doesn’t mean they will go and do the same.  Let kids see the many ways that the Bible describes the human and divine condition.  Let them see God described as a hoary, jealous tyrant sitting on a throne on the other side of the sky, and also let them see God described as the mystical ground of being and unconditional love.  Let them learn from the negative example of deceitful King David and oversexed King Solomon, as they also discover the wisdom of the Proverbs and the compassion of the Christ.  Let them reflect on life in full as they read the Bible in full, including both the sickening and the sublime.  I’m not in favor of emphasizing all the disgusting parts of the Bible.  But I do think a certain amount of exposure to it is not only okay, but a good thing for kids.

When my daughter was little, she loved it when I read illustrated Bible stories to her.  With trepidation I read her the story of the crucifixion when she was about 4 years old.  I told her that some folks were mad at Jesus because he helped people that they didn’t want him to help, so they killed him, and it was a terrible thing.  She was transfixed by the picture of Jesus on the cross.  I continued reading and flipping the pages, but Liz kept saying, “Jesus on the wood!  Jesus on the wood!” because she wanted me to flip back to that picture so she could look at it some more.  She was equally impressed by our visit to the old Spanish mission at Santa Clara when she was about 5 years old.  Inside, she stared for a long time, her mouth hanging open, as she faced the big statue of the beaten, bleeding Christ on the cross.  I wanted to whisk her away from it, but then I realized that something important was happening inside of her.  She needed to process that image of the tortured Christ in her soul, and begin to come to terms with the suffering and death that touches all of our lives.

Recently, during the “time with children” in our church’s worship service, I put our big, heavy pulpit Bible on the floor and gathered the kids around it.  I asked them, “What were your first words, when you were little?”  (My favorite answer:  “Mommy’s tired!”)  I then said that the Bible was a lot like little toddlers who learn how to talk with just a few simple words, and then as they get older they learn how to talk in bigger and more complicated words.  The Bible starts out talking about God as if he was a man who ruled the world like an old-fashioned king.  Then later on in the Bible, people grow in faith and begin to understand God as love that lives in our hearts.  After flipping through the pages of that big Bible, from start to finish, I flipped imaginary pages past the book of Revelation, illustrating that the Bible isn’t the end of the story of our growth in love, and that our children can add new and better chapters to it.

(For a list of Bible passages - none of them gory or gross! -  that I  recommend for children, see:  www.sausalitopresbyterian.com/spc/go/youth/byheart)

(To see a letter that reflects my deep concerns about the war in Lebanon, see www.pcu-la.org .  I've sent the President and my senators and congresswoman letters asking for an immediate cease-fire.  I hope you'll join me in speaking out about this terrible escalation of the violence in the Middle East.)