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Rev. Jim Burklo's weekly musings on the personal and social practice of progressive Christian spirituality.

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Jim Burklo is the Senior Associate Dean of Religious and Spiritual Life at the University of Southern California. He is an ordained United Church of Christ pastor and is the author of six published books on progressive Christianity. He is an honorary advisor for ProgressiveChristianity.org and a member of the board of directors of ProgressiveChristiansUniting.org.
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« March 2019 | Main | May 2019 »

April 30, 2019

Universal Single-Payer Spiritual Health Assurance

Get over it

Via de Cristo Church, Scottsdale, AZ

 
Some things must be universally available if we aspire to spiritual and civic virtue.  Access to decent health care, and access to the bread of life and the wine of salvation, should be available no matter where you are on the continuum of economic status, moral goodness, or religious affiliation.
 
I am privileged to have wonderful friendships and collegial relationships with many Catholic Christians.  So it grieves me when their leaders make a hash of their church's reputation.
 
Such was the case at the funeral of my mother-in-law.  She converted to the faith after her marriage to her husband, who dropped out of Jesuit seminary and went on to have 13 kids with her.  (Another way to be very Catholic.)  She was a faithful church-goer long after his death.  But at her memorial mass, one would never have known from the platitudinous words of the priest that this woman had anything to do with the parish she so faithfully attended - in a wheelchair - for years.
 
And when my dear wife, Roberta, baptized and confirmed as a Catholic, went to receive the host to show respect for her mom, the priest would not give it to her.  All he offered was a weak blessing.  The priest knew nothing about Roberta.  He could not have known that she was a lapsed Catholic.  There was nothing about her that would have suggested it.  But somehow he divined that she wasn't "eucharist-ready".  One more nail in the coffin of Catholicism for her and her 12 siblings, only one of whom still identifies with the faith. 
 
Communion isn't just for perfect moral, spiritual, or religious people.  It is for all of us flawed humans who want to draw closer, body and soul, to the Love that is God. 
 
I believe in Communion for All.  Universal Single-Payer (that would be Jesus) Spiritual Health Assurance.  Thus on several occasions I have approached the altar and received the wafer from priests in Catholic churches, though by their rules I am ineligible.  (I don't do this in Catholic parishes where folks know who I am: I don't want to cause personal offense or discomfort.)  If I am breaking their rules, that's not my problem.  It's certainly not Jesus' problem.
 
Just being male makes me less obviously unqualified to partake.  I can't be suspected of having had an abortion.  Can't be questioned about whether or not I consume birth control pills.  I am old, bald, and appear much more solemn than I really am.  Put me in the right vestments and I could pass for a Catholic priest.  So it is easy for me to do what was not for my beloved wife, who though bereft of formal religiosity is purer of heart than I.
 
Not that purity of heart should be a consideration in whether or not a person is worthy to taste the bread and wine of Christian communion.  The current president, depraved as he is, is no less worthy of the wafer than my wife.  Nor of myself. 
 
The same can be said of health care.  Its availability should be, as Peter said of God in the book of Acts, "no respecter of persons"... not based on socio-economic rank. 
 
In a word, this is the current president's plan for health care in America:  eugenics.  If you have lots of money, if you can afford to pay for health care even if you have pre-existing conditions, you must be worthy of living.  If you don't have lots of money, you must be an inferior person.  So access to good health care would be wasted on you.  You should die young so you won't pollute the gene pool. 
 
As St Paul said in Romans 3, "all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God".  We're moral equals as fallen creatures.  But we are far from equals in just how far we fall.  For taking communion, for going to the doctor, this moral difference should not matter.  But for candidacy for elected office, it ought to count for a great deal. 
 
Obama mis-spoke, once - so why fuss about the current president lying?  Hillary lied a few times, so what's the big deal about the current president doing the same?  At the altar, it is - or should be - a level praying field.  Same with health care.  Relatively good people, morally middling people, and downright bad people should get to go the doctor regardless of their ability to pay, and be treated equally. 
 
But in public life, one's place on the moral continuum matters hugely.  There is no comparison between the rare non-factual utterances of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, for which they apologized, and the stupendous volume of daily blatant lies of the current president, for which he is unabashedly unapologetic.  There's no immoral equivalence.  Our current president is not just a garden-variety sinner like Barack and Hillary and most of the rest of us.  His behavior is really bad.  For his soul's sake, and for the sake of preserving our democracy, he should resign and then repent.
 
But even if he doesn't straighten out, there's still room for him at the Table of the Lord. 
 
What doesn't matter at the altar rail or in a doctor's office really should matter in a job interview.  Let's stay aware of this as we consider the future of health care in this country... and begin to consider the plethora of candidates running for the presidency. 
 
 
 
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

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April 23, 2019

Breaking Free

Bfly

"I want to be free!" screamed Little Flower, as loudly as she could - which wasn't very.

All the flowers around her sighed in the breeze.  "There she goes again...."

"I want to fly!" she roared, though it sounded more like a whimper.

Little Flower twisted her petals this way and that, straining to liberate herself from her stem.  But for the life of her, she couldn't get it to budge.

The flowers around her asked, "Why would you want to get off your stem?  You'd fly, all right - fly into the wind and dry up and disappear before your time.  Why would you leave us?  We're your friends.  We'd be sad.  We'd miss you.  Life is good, Little Flower!  Let's enjoy what we have, while we have it!"

"I can't stand it!  I've got to get free from this stem!  For me, life stuck in one place is no life at all!" she insisted.

Little Cricket hopped along and asked, "What's the fuss, Little Flower?"

"I am so glad to see you!  Please, please, snip me off my stem so I can fly away!"

"Oh, Little Flower, I can't do that.  I can nibble on your leaves, but to snip you off your stem would deprive you of your life and me of my lunch.  You'd fly away, all right - and shrivel up and crumble into dust.  Your seeds come from your flower, and if I snip you off, I deprive you of your future, and me of mine."

"Oh please, please, please!  Snip me off and set me free!"

"Let me talk to my people," said Little Cricket.  "This calls for a council."

Little Cricket gathered the elders of his community and posed the question.  "Little Flower wants to be free from her stem, and wants me to snip her from it.  But of course she'd blow in the wind and dry up and that would be the end of her.  But this is her will.  The stem would of course be a tasty treat for a cricket, but it seems wrong.  What do you say?"

The council of crickets rasped their hind legs loudly as they deliberated.  Finally, their spokescricket spoke.

"We agree that it is both wrong in this particular case and wrong for both crickets and flowers in general.  For the well-being of this flower, and of all flowers, and of all crickets, snipping the flower from the stem is neither morally correct nor environmentally sustainable."

Little Cricket informed Little Flower of the decision.  She was sad.  "I fed you from my leaves, I enjoyed your chirping.  We were friends.  But you won't do me this one favor.  I'm so disappointed in you."

Little Cricket lowered his antennae in shame.  "I have to respect my cricket elders," he said.  "They are wise and have everyone's best interests in mind."

Little Flower's stamens and pistil were wet with tears.  " I want to be free, like you are.  Free to go anywhere I want, like you can!"

"But your life looks good to me, Little Flower.  You get your food from your stem, so you're never hungry.  Sure, I wander the world, but only because I'm always looking for food.  Like right now.  I have to be going!"  And he hopped away.

Little Flower was upset, but more determined than ever to find a way to free herself from her stem.

One night a mighty wind blew over the meadow.  She caught her petals in the wind and let them help her twist and turn against her stem.  All night long she struggled.  All night long the wind blasted as she turned back and forth to catch it.  Finally, at the dawn, she felt the stem weakening and breaking.  She was lifted up into the air, high above the meadow.  Her pistil had become her probiscus, and her stamens had become her antennae.  She pushed them out ahead of her petals and caught the wind and fluttered. 

"I'm free!  I'm free!  I'm free!"

Over the meadow, into the forest, up the mountain and down Little Flower flew.  Vistas she could never have imagined burst into view.  Rocky heights, tumbling waters, sweeping plains lay below her.  All day she flew, overwhelmed with joy and awe.

Until dusk, when she felt weak, and could barely move the wings that once had been petals.  Suddenly a bat swooped down.  She barely dodged it in time to avoid being eaten for dinner.  She landed on a blade of grass, but a swallow flew down and almost swallowed her.  She tried to hide in the grass, but was so weak she could hardly move at all.

 

"Over here, over here!" 

The voice was a whisper she could barely hear.

"You need food!  I will feed you!"

It was a flower.  A flower just like the kind she had been only twelve hours before. 

"Feed on my nectar!  Then you will be strong again."  Little Flower flopped over to the flower as best she could, and pressed her pistil into its center. "Wonderful!  It's so sweet!  To think that I made it, but never tasted it!"

"My friends will feed you, too.  Go feed on them until you are strong again!"

Little Flower thanked the flower from the bottom of her thorax.  She rested on a blade of grass until morning, and then flew back to the meadow where she had been born and raised. 

"Little Flower!  Little Flower!" her friends cried out when they saw her.  "Why did you leave us?" 

"I wanted to be free," she answered.  "But now I know that I need you more than ever.  Can I drink your nectar?  It was so much simpler when I had a stem and didn't need to go looking for food."

"Yes, yes, feed on our nectar.  That way, you can still be with us!"  said her neighbor flowers.

"My life is so different now," said Little Flower.  "I am glad I can fly.  But I'm just as glad that you have stems!"

"And we love our stems more than ever!" they said. 

Little Cricket hopped by and called out to her.  "Little Flower!  Can that really be you?"

"Yes, yes, it's me!" 

"I am so glad you didn't dry up and blow away in the wind!  I was so afraid I'd never again see your beautiful petals waving in the wind," he chirped. 

"Well, they are waving now, and it's hard work!  I'm hungry all the time," she answered.  "I forgive you for not snipping me off from my stem.  You did what was right.  This was something I had to do all by myself."

"I'm hungry all the time, too, Little Flower!  Now we are cousins in the insect kingdom.  So from now on, I will call you Little Butterfly." 

With their antennae, they hugged, and Little Cricket hopped as fast and as far as he could to follow her as she flew away.

 

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

 

Posted at 11:33 AM | Permalink

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April 17, 2019

Easter Week: A New Narrative

Sewingrift
(A cartoon from Iran, created to represent the process of recovery after a terrible earthquake.)
 
 
The profundity of Christianity is that nothing in it has but one meaning.
 
So it is with Easter Week. 
 
One of its many meanings came into clear focus for me yesterday.  I set up a couple of lectures at USC by Dr. Fred Luskin, founder of the Stanford Forgiveness Project and author of "Forgive for Good".  Fred developed an studied an efficacious system of training people to forgive.  Not for the sake of the ones forgiven, but for the measurable mental and physical health of those who forgive.  Only after forgiving for our own sake can we consider whether or not it is safe or appropriate to reconcile and restore the broken relationship.
 
The key to forgiveness, says Fred, is to re-write one's narrative of the incident that resulted in hurt or harm.  Every story we tell about our lives can be written in at least a thousand ways.  Why do we choose one way over another?  What if we re-wrote our narratives in such a way that we were no longer victims, but rather active, positive agents in re-building our lives after traumas?  He says that the adoption of such an alternative narrative is the essential moment of forgiveness.
 
It's Easter week.  How to tell the story?  Using the same elements and details, the early Christians could have come up with at least a thousand ways to tell it.  The New Testament gives us four of those options.  And then the early Christians embellished those mythical stories with further narrative interpretations.
 
One of them, upon which evangelical Protestants are fixated, says that we are all hopeless sinners, doomed by God to Hell for eternity unless we believe that God sent Jesus to be tortured to death to pay for our sins so we can be saved.  This makes us victims of a capricious supernatural divinity that created us to fail to meet his standards of behavior.  Say "yes" to these contorted beliefs and you'll be forgiven by God for being ensnared in his bizarre scheme.  Even if you say "I believe", you're still a victim when your religion effectively says to believe it or you will roast in Hell for eternity.
 
Christianity needs a new narrative based on the elements of the Easter week myths.  Here is an option:  Rabbi Jesus practiced and taught radical compassion to the people of Israel.  This threatened the authority of the Jewish elite and the Roman occupiers, so they killed him on a cross - from which he forgave them.  This unconditional love prevailed beyond his death and lived on in his followers, who regrouped and formed a new, compassionate community of faith.  In this narrative, Jesus and his followers are not victims.  Jesus was an agent of positive action, and so are we who follow him.  The transformative power of this narrative inspires us to forgive. 
 
For progressive Christians, forgiveness is not in the supernatural hands of a Guy-In-The-Sky God.  Forgiveness is up to us.  Just as it was up to Jesus whether or not to forgive the people who crucified him.  The mythic narratives of Easter week speak for our souls as we recognize our pain, loss, and disappointment, and move from being victims to becoming active agents of positive personal and social transformation.  Fred Luskin summarizes forgiveness as the release of our attachment to enforcing unenforceable rules we've constructed.  We think that our HTOTB's (How Things Ought to Be) really are the immutable laws of the universe.  But other people in fact do get to make choices, even if they hurt us.  And we get to make our own choices in the aftermath, as well.
 
Jesus' fan club in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday had to make a choice after Good Friday.  Could they forgive him for not being the Superman Savior who would drive the Romans out of their land?  Could they forgive God for allowing their beloved Rabbi to be murdered?  Could they begin to understand God as Love instead of as an omnipotent Ruler of the Cosmos?  Would they scatter and skulk and whine about the horrible things that happened that week?  Or would they get up, dust themselves off, gather together, forgive without forgetting, remember the divine Love that flowed from Jesus, and redouble their commitment to living it out as a community?
 
At Easter, progressive Christians celebrate something much more significant than a supernatural miracle.  We celebrate the decision of Jesus' followers to be the church - to stick together in the community of compassion in which we gather this and every Sunday.  That's what it means for the Christ to live within us.  That's what we mean when we repeat the ancient chant:  "Christos anesti! Alithos anesti!" -- "Christ is risen!  He is risen indeed!"
 
JIM BURKLO
Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California
 

 

 

Posted at 09:41 PM | Permalink

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April 11, 2019

Flower Wild

Soledad cyn flowers 4-19
 
Went with the gotta go urge
On a week ending, road bending
Wheels a turning ramble
Past the malls and urban tangle
 
Mountains rumbling into view
Headtilt gaze at yonder spangle
Exit there to road the country
Spread with poppies on the bluffs
 
Spun around to car the parking
Set my boots on soily sand
Eager the feet to get aheart
Headbent bounding up the land
 
Drywash burst in flecks of color
Disorient, disoccidented
Zigs of blue and zags of purple
Aflame in gold the trail ascended
 
Flower wild, I lost my locus
As on the blooms I trained my focus
Staring at some flecks of white
Eye-soaring down a sward of orange
 
Thoughts ran faster than my feet
On land sprung out of desert sleep
Where to fit these sights in mind?
No proper placement could I find....
 
 
 
JIM BURKLO
Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

Posted at 08:17 PM | Permalink

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April 02, 2019

Protecting Democracy: How Now?

It is perfectly legal to destroy America's democracy.
 
And that poses a quandary for us patriots who aim to stop the person who is doing it, given that criminal charges are off the table for the moment. 
 
So many people I know are flailing and falling into despair about what is happening to the country.  Here I want to do my little part, among my friends and readers, to think, talk, and act constructively.  First, let's ponder the nature of the challenge before us.
 
The mere mention of the current president's name reinforces his power and contributes to his daily degradation of the institutions that guarantee our freedom.  Attacking him feeds his claim to be a victim, and supports the narrative of the people whose perceived victimhood he represents.  Calling him a buffoon just reinforces the sentiments of his supporters who like him because he is a buffoon.  Complaining that he is acting against the interests of the people who voted for him just underscores their belief that he's "honest".  If they were rich like he is, they, too, would act against the interests of poor people.
 
He is a place-holder for the anger, resentment, and fear of millions of people in this country.  His value to them as an emotional mirror outweighs any negative public policy consequences that they may suffer from his tenure.  So arguing with them about the factual consequences of his policies is of limited utility.  
 
Impeachment would be disastrous for the country unless there was strong bi-partisan support for it.  It is doubtful that such support would have emerged even if Mueller had determined that the President and his campaign criminally colluded with the Russians.  It is bad that the Russians influenced the election in his favor, and it is terrible that the President and his campaign cooperated with the Russians even if it was not illegal. 
 
But just as bad as criminal collusion are the perfectly legal attacks against democracy that he commits every day.  Threatening his political opponents with violence from biker gangs, condemning the press for reporting the facts about his presidency, threatening to muzzle his critics, using Fox as his own "Pravda" propaganda organ, implicitly supporting violent racists, characterizing entire populations as rapists and murderers, undercutting faith in elections: the relentlessness of these outrages has desensitized us from the damage he is doing to our democracy.  It is unacceptable, and we cannot let it become normal.
 
So what shall we do about it? 
 
1)  We should avoid using his name and refer to him only as "the current president".  We should follow the sterling example of Lucinda Ardern, Prime Minister of New Zealand, who refuses to utter the name of the murderer at the Christchurch mosque.
 
2)  We should out-flag him and the Republicans.  At every Women's March, at every progressive campaign rally, at every gathering of the resistance, there should be a sea of waving US flags.  It's our flag.  It's our country.  We are the patriots.  The flag is a powerful symbol and we need to reclaim it.
 
3)  We should out-Constitution him and his followers.  The Tea Party people made a big deal about waving copies of it. We should out-wave them.  Each of us should own, study, and brandish a pocket copy.  It's our Constitution, and we are the real defenders of it.  We're the people who support the free press, the separation of church and state, and the rule of law.
 
4)  We should out-Bible the current president and the Republicans.  There is plenty in the Judeo-Christian scriptures that supports progressive politics and cautions against our country's current slide toward tyranny.  To explore further, see my  RESISTANCE BIBLE STUDY and my book, DEEPER LOVE . 
 
5)  We should demand the current president's resignation, not his impeachment.   Our message should be simple and consistent.  It should be non-partisan and should focus on his inability to fulfill the duties of the presidency.  "With his lies, insults, and provocations to violence, he attacks the foundations of our Constitution, which he is sworn to defend.  He endangers the freedom of all Americans by degrading the institutions upon which democracy rests.  His appalling behavior has weakened the authority and tarnished the reputation of the office he holds.  So he should resign immediately."    Neither resignation nor impeachment is likely, but demanding his resignation rhetorically puts the moral burden where it belongs: on him. 
 
6)  We should campaign for the Democratic candidates who have the best chance of winning the Electoral College.  Now more than ever we must be strategic voters - not just in the general election, but in the primaries, too. 
 
 
 
JIM BURKLO
Website: MINDFULCHRISTIANITY.ORG   Weblog: MUSINGS    Follow me on twitter: @jtburklo
See the GUIDE to my articles and books
Sr Associate Dean of Religious Life, University of Southern California

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