Musings

Parable of the Uncut Sapphire

(I wrote this in 1978, and rediscovered it last week in my files.  Finding it was a bit like the miner's discovery in the parable!)

There was a poor, unemployed man who was deep in debt and could no longer support his family.  So he left to go to the desert and stake a mining claim, telling his family he would return with enough money from precious stones to enable them to live comfortably.

Arriving at his claim, he set up a tent and began to dig a mine in the side of a mountain.  Every day he labored with pick and shovel and wheelbarrow, and at night he slept in his tent.  But sun and wind and cloudbursts shredded his tent.  He had no money to return to the city to buy another tent, as he had not found any gems yet, so he put his provisions into the mine and lived in it.

But the mine was too narrow and stuffy for comfort.  So, instead of digging ahead toward the band of rock where he hoped to find gems, he widened the mine and dug out rooms on the sides so that his quarters would be shielded from the dust.

Just as he was finishing work on the last room, he swung his pick against the rock and it crumbled away to reveal a sapphire as big as the palm of his hand.  Elated, he rushed to the city and sold the gem to a wealthy woman for a huge sum of money.  He paid his debts, bought a nice new house, and was able to support his family by managing his investments.  They lived simply and gave much of their wealth and volunteer time to political action for economic justice.  The miner and his family lived in contentment for the rest of their days.

The wealthy woman loved the sapphire in its rough, natural state.  She displayed it in a glass cabinet in her mansion.  But her wealthy and powerful friends objected vigorously, saying that it was too valuable not to have it cut and polished.  “It could be the world’s biggest and best,” they said.  “It already is the world’s biggest and best, just the way it is!” she answered. 

The argument bothered her.  It made her question her entire way of life, and question the real purpose of her existence.  After much searching of her soul, she decided to give most of her wealth to causes that would help poor people achieve health and self-sufficiency.  She took a few belongings and her uncut sapphire and moved to the desert.  In a spectacular spot, she found an abandoned mine which she turned into her home.  In one room in the mine she found a hole that perfectly matched the shape of the sapphire.  She placed it there and used that room for prayer and meditation, and lived in contentment for the rest of her days.

Homodoxuals and Heterodoxuals in the Church

(Lately I've seen many uses of the term "heterodoxy" in my reading about current trends in religion in America, referring to people who mix a variety of religious traditions and beliefs in their spirituality.  That got me to thinking about what its opposite would be: "homodoxy".  This struck me as an ironic twist in language, since so many "homodoxual" people oppose homosexuality, and so many "heterodoxual" people are open and affirming towards gays and lesbians.  This musing resulted from these observations.)

Homodoxuals are attracted to those of the same theological orientation.  They tend to believe that their version of orthodoxy is the only true expression of religion, and that all other faiths are inadequate at best or evil at worst.  Homodoxual Christians tend to take the Bible literally; few of them are bothered by contradictions or anachronisms in the scripture.

Heterodoxuals are attracted to people who practice religions other their own.  They practice their religion faithfully without assuming it to be the only path to God.  They find much to inform and enrich their faith from sources beyond it, and from other versions of Christianity.   They question traditional teachings of the church and are willing to live with uncertainty about doctrinal matters for the sake of the ongoing pursuit of truth.

Homodoxual and heterodoxual Christians share a devotion to their religious tradition.  Together, they follow Jesus in acts of compassion and service.  They have much in common, but there are points of conflict.   Heterodoxuals generally accept homodoxuals as fellow Christians, while homodoxuals often declare heterodoxuals to be outside the bounds of the faith.   Homodoxuals complain that heterodoxuals water down the religion by being too open to ideas and practices from outside it.   In turn, heterodoxuals find it strange when homodoxuals say they will be tormented in the afterlife if they interpret the Bible mythically and metaphorically rather than literally. 

How can these two expressions of Christianity sit side by side in the pews? 

Homodoxuals need to let God be the one to sort out who is “in” and who is “out” of the community of the saved, and learn to live with uncloseted, vocal heterodoxuals in their churches.  Let heterodoxuals be the iron against which they hone their evangelistic messages.  Let homodoxuals remember that if they are absolutely certain of the correctness of their beliefs, it should not be threatening to have some people among them who question those doctrines.

Heterodoxuals need to respect the fact that homodoxuals feel like a persecuted majority.  They may outnumber heterodoxuals in the church, but they still have an acute sense of being threatened by outside secular or religious forces.  Many homodoxuals have a powerful urge to circle their wagons in order to defend themselves and their children from corrosive alien ideas and practices.   So even as heterodoxuals keep raising questions and pressing for change in the church, they need to be gentle toward their homodoxual brothers and sisters, listening respectfully to their concerns.

Hopefully, this mutual respect will eliminate homodoxophobia and heterodoxophobia, and allow people of different understandings of our faith to enjoy the loving fellowship of the church together as full partners.

Tweets From My Subconscious

(These are random snippets I've been writing lately, on my way to and from work on the bus and subway....)

This bus is a house I am renting for 15 minutes.  So little time, so many roommates!

I want to live in a world in which directions are marked with feathers instead of arrows.

I have hiked trails through land so beautiful that now even my shoes have souls.

Question of divine grammar:  Can God be the subject of a declaratory sentence? 

A bird keeps chirping the same tune.  I keep wondering why it does that, until I wonder why I wonder.

Who breathed out the austere clouds hovering over that snow-crowned mountain hazed in heights of blue air?

I saw a large paint brush lying in a gutter on a street in Los Angeles.
This canvas isn’t finished:  I hope the artist will come back.

Surfers surf toward land,
Sunbathers face to sea. 
If waves broke toward the sea,
What fun would surfing be?

Above the beach, a rock banded with shapes and colors sticks out of a cliff banded with hues and textures, cloven by flash-flooded rivulets.  The cosmic mixer has no “off” button.

Save the Bear!

For this past academic year, I have been teaching a course in public policy at the graduate School of Social Work at the University of Southern California.  This has been an extra assignment beyond my regular role as Associate Dean of Religious Life.  It is the first time I have taught such a course, so I had much to learn in my preparation.  I also had much to learn from the insightful questions, comments, and papers of my students.  Their eagerness to make a positive difference in the world inspires me.  They remind me of the person I wanted to become, when I was their age!

The course focuses on public policies that affect issues pertinent to social work.  In my preparation, it dawned on me that I was going to be teaching the history of the United States in general and California in particular.  Virtually all the significant decisions made by our national and state governments have affected the realm of social work. 

I encountered a spiritual challenge right away, which I shared with my students.  It was hard for me to keep a positive mood in the classroom, as I recounted story after story of squandered opportunities for progress, moments when America could have created much more opportunity and much less suffering for our people.  For example, I discovered that Tom Paine, one of the most influential of the US "Founding Fathers", advocated for a universal taxpayer-funded guaranteed income in the 1790's.  This was the man who wrote "Common Sense", the tract that helped ignite the American Revolution.  Creating a "common-sense" safety net for the poor, unemployed, disabled, elderly, and young was a topic of serious public policy discussion over 200 years ago among the founders of our country.  Why are we still waiting for it?

My students wrote impassioned papers about public policy issues that affect the agencies where they are placed as interns.  They wrote about government programs that were full of promise in providing vital help to children, to disabled people, to elderly people, and to low-income families.  But due to drastic funding cuts, many of these programs have been eviscerated.  In class, we discussed the higher-level political and economic forces behind these cuts.  I was shocked by the information my students gathered.  I had no idea of the wide extent of negative impacts on needy people resulting from the state budget crisis.  As the year proceeded, it became clearer and clearer: there needs to be a new discourse about the proper role of government in serving the people.  Social and political issues must be framed in new ways, so that there will be broad support for an essential social safety net that makes for a healthy, happy society and a robust, flexible economy.

Nowhere is the need for this change more evident than here in California.  The Bear is in bad shape.  Certainly the economic downturn has played a major role, but the crisis of governance in this state is no news.  For decades, anti-government rhetoric has been pounded into our populace.  It has become self-fulfilling.  Sure enough, when you elect people who don't believe in government to run the government, they do a lousy job.  And their poor performance just reinforces the belief that politicians and government are bad!  In this state, in an effort to clean up corruption back in the Gilded Age of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the people made it easy for voters to pass laws by initiative.  The result is a massive state constitution, filled with trivial and ill-conceived policies.  The worst of these initiatives was Proposition 13 in 1979, which requires a 2/3 vote of the legislature to pass a budget or raise taxes.  This greatly diminished the ability of the legislature to do the job we elect its members to perform.  As it is now, neither political party "owns" the results of this broken budget process.  The minority Republicans are the spoilers, and the majority Democrats paint themselves as their victims.  Term limits on elected officials exacerbated the weakness and disarray of our legislative process, as inexperienced, ideologically-driven members are less willing to negotiate the bargains that are necessary to make government work.  We Californians have proven to ourselves that we cannot run the government of a huge and complex state by Athenian direct democracy.  It says "California Republic" on our flag, so let's live up to our name and restore the process of representative democracy in our state.

Who suffers the most from this gridlock?  Poor people.  Children.  Elderly and disabled people.  The folks who are the least likely to afford a lobbyist in Sacramento.  I'm proud that my church denomination supports the remarkable, dedicated, and often lonely work of the California Council of Churches, which advocates in the state capitol for the disenfranchised.  But this voice is often drowned out in the cacophony of dysfunction of our state government.

We have a moral and spiritual imperative to work for a massive overhaul of the system of governance in this state.  There are some important efforts toward this end, each of which has parts of the solution.  California Forward is pushing for modest change, advocating for majority rule on the state budget in the legislature.  There is a campaign to put an initiative on the ballot to this effect.  The Bay Area Council, a trade group in Northern California, dropped its push for a statewide constitutional convention that could effect major structural change, but the idea is still percolating.  For very good analysis of California governance issues, see the work of LA journalist Joe Mathews.

Let's call a constitutional convention, with members chosen by lottery from the voter registration rolls.  It would be risky, to say the least, but I believe it would result in something a lot better than what we have today.  Let's make initiatives easier to put on the ballot: let signatures be gathered cheaply by electronic means.  Right now, only big-money interests can afford to mount signature campaigns, an irony given that the initiative system was meant to empower the common citizen.  But let's make it harder for an initiative to pass:  require not just a majority of those who vote, but a majority of the total of registered voters.  That way, we won't clutter our constitution.  Let's end the "split roll" provision of Prop. 13 which has resulted in unfairness between commercial and residential property tax rates.

Let's get majority rule in the legislature, completely - both in passing budgets and in raising taxes.  If we think the majority party has over-reached with taxation and spending, we'll know who to blame and vote them out at election time.  Let's have open primaries, where Republicans can vote for Democrats in the primaries, and vice-versa.  Both parties hate this idea, which is destined for the ballot, but that is all the more reason to vote for it!  We'll have more moderate, less ideologically-driven politicians.  And let's have significantly longer terms for our elected officials, so that they are in office long enough to know the ropes and negotiate and get things done in Sacramento. 

Let's roll back budgeting by initiative, and let our state Assembly and Senate do their jobs.  Let's end constitutionally targeted funding for specific programs.  That way, when hard economic times like this one come around, the legislature can shift funds to preserve the most vital services.

Let's dare to resist the excessively-powerful public employee unions, and rationalize the benefits of our firefighters, police, correctional officers, and other state and local workers.  All levels of government in this state are threatened with disastrous employee benefit obligations.  Nobody else gets a guaranteed pension income anymore - why do we shower our public employees with locked-in benefits?  Let's shift to the same sorts of benefit arrangements prevailing in the private sector.  Let's end the antiquated teacher tenure system in K-12 education, and allow for merit-based pay and greater ease of hiring and firing in school districts.

This is a lot to ask, I know!  But not too much to ask.  Especially when lives are at stake, which my students at the Social Work school have proven to me is the case.  Let's get busy and Save the Bear!