Musings

The Empty Self: The Poetry of Fernando Pessoa

The Empty Self

 
“Hell and heaven are in the human mind.”
 
 Walking down a narrow, cobbled alley in Lisbon, holding Roberta’s hand, I spied a painted tile on a wall, with this quote from “F.P.”  I was intrigued.  A few days later, I saw a volume in a bookstore window in the Alfama district, with a picture of the author, Fernando Pessoa, on the front, and made the connection.  I did a bit of homework and my intrigue deepened. I ducked into another “livreria’ and bought a collection of his work in Portuguese and English. (“Forever Someone Else” – Assirio and Alvim, publishers.) 

Pessoa wrote voluminously, but was published sparsely in his lifetime.  Only years after his death did he become a celebrated figure in Portugal and beyond.  That would be more tragic except for the nature of his poetry.  He wrote this after hearing a woman sing while reaping grain in a field:  “Ah, to be you while being I! To have your glad unconsciousness and be conscious of it!...Make my soul your weightless shadow, and take me with you, away!”
 
“Pessoa” is Portuguese for “person”.  This late 19^th- early 20^th c  poet lived into the anonymous nature of his last name.  He attributed much of his work to multiple characters with distinct personas and perspectives, as a way of prying himself loose from any fixed identity. He claimed to have no self, to be no more than a locus of experience:  “I am merely the place where things are thought or felt.”  His aim was to be like a pane of glass:  “transparent to light, pattered by the rain trickling down, warmed only by the sun, and reflecting a little.”  Just to see things as they are, not as convention would name or define them.  “And who notices the moon except to admire not it but the beautiful light it radiates?”  He aimed to notice the moon: just to experience experience itself, without second or third or fourth derivatives, without metaphysically processing it into ideas. 
 
He was most assuredly not a religious person.  And it does not appear that he was familiar with the Christian contemplative tradition.  But his poems resonate deeply with the insights of the mystics of the world’s faiths. 
 
“And so there’s no advantage in giving false names to things, nor in giving them any names at all.”  In terms of current secular meditation practice, he was a practitioner of submorphic mindfulness: focusing on raw, direct experience itself, while letting go of any causes or stories or explanations for it.  Instead of feeling wind on your face, in submorphic mindfulness you let go of wind as the cause of the sensation on your skin, and just attend to the sensation itself.  “What matters is to know how to see,” he wrote: “To know how to see without thinking.  To know how to see when seeing.  And not think when seeing – Not see when thinking.”  “Things have no meaning.  Things are the only hidden meaning of things.”
 
In terms of Christian contemplative practice, his could be compared to the way of the Cloud of Unknowing, a 14^th century British text of apophatic mysticism.  You get to God by dropping words, categories, and definitions of experience into the cloud of unknowing, so that your soul can rise unburdened into communion with the divine.  “To think about God is to disobey God, since God wanted us not to know him…”  This line harmonizes with one from Simone Weil, the 20^th c French philosopher and theologian:  “Christianity (Catholic and Protestant) speaks too much about holy things.”  By not “knowing” God, by releasing all assumptions and theologies and speculations about God, we can enter into the direct experience of God.  
 
For Pessoa, God was absence of self.  As Pessoa strove to not-be, so God for him was not.  God was kenosis itself – the emptying of one’s self, so that one can directly and clearly experience the world, godfully.   I close with this poem of his, which he wrote in English:
 
Inversion
 
Here in this wilderness
            Each tree and stone fills me
            With the sadness of a great glee.
God in His altogetherness
            Is whole-part of each stone and tree.
 
An inner outward seeingness
            Makes my clear self unknown.
            (O Godfully alone!)
God in His overbeingness
            Survives His death each tree and every stone.
 
Ay, in the barkness and clodfulness
            Of tree and sand and stone
            God is only is His Own,
God in all his godfulness,
            Whose concrete soul’s each thing’s abstraction.

A statue of Pessoa in Lisbon - the book is marked "Lisboa - Pessoa"

(See more of my "musings" here...)

Abraham in the Abrahamic Faiths

 

Rocka my soul in the bosom of Abraham –
Rocka my soul in the bosom of Abraham –
Rocka my soul in the bosom of Abraham –
Oh rocka my soul –
 
According to the three Abrahamic faiths of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, Abraham has a bosom big enough to rock a world of souls.
 
It is a testament to the Christian vision of Abraham that this song was sung by black slaves in the American south.  The song is a reference to a passage in the gospel of Luke chapter 16 about a poor man named Lazarus who suffered and starved and then ended up in heaven in the bosom of Abraham, while a rich man, from whose table Lazarus had begged for crumbs, died and went to Hades and then begged Abraham to save him.  Abraham was waiting in heaven to receive his children, including his black children, the slaves who suffered in this life and hoped for satisfaction in the next.
 
The early Christians looked to Abraham as their progenitor – even if they weren’t Jewish Christians.  They remembered the words attributed to John the Baptist:  “God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham. “  (Matt 3: 9) and of Jesus, probably inserted into his mouth long after his death -  “I tell you, many will come from east and west and sit at table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven, while the sons of the kingdom will be thrown into the outer darkness; there men will weep and gnash their teeth." (Matthew 8:11-12)  In this passage, Jesus was referring to the faithfulness, what could be translated as "trust", of a Gentile, a Roman centurion.  "Truly, I say to you, not even in Israel have I found such faith,”  said Jesus, presaging (or perhaps post-saging) the opening of the church to Gentiles after his death.  We find some of the seeds of Christian anti-Semitism in these passages – hints of horrors that would follow when Christians repeatedly tried to kick Abraham’s Jewish offspring out of their father’s tent.
 
There is enough ambiguity in the story of Abraham to make his tent big enough for three religions, and plenty more.   He and Sarah were elderly people, childless, before Abraham fathered Ishmael by Sarah's servant girl, Hagar.  The Genesis story was used later to explain that Ishmael, after being sent away into the wilderness with his mother, became the father of the Arab people.  It took divine intervention for Sarah to become pregnant with Isaac, who then takes the role of the heir of Abraham.  In Islam, the story reads very differently.  Hagar is Abraham's second wife and Ishmael is the firstborn child.  The difference in the stories in the Bible and the Koran is a perfect illustration of the confusion and tension in the Bible story itself, making a lot of room for fertile imaginations to offer creative interpretations.  Why didn't God intervene earlier to make Sarah fertile, and avoid all the trouble among her, Hagar, and Abraham?  The Bible story presents us with a fractious family, a convoluted genealogy.  It presents us with the figure of Abraham as a hapless fellow, short on words but long on patience (faithfulness?).  It presents us with a story into which much could be, and has been, read.
 
Paul did just that.  Perhaps we should call him the first Christian, as he was the one who turned the followers of Jesus into members of an organized religion.  A critical step toward that end was his declaration that non-Jews could be fully integrated into the new Christian community.  He said that “if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise.”  (Gal. 3:29)  Through an elaborate allegorical stretch in his letter to the Romans, Paul made Abraham the father of all who had faith in Christ, whether they were Jews or Gentiles.  He read this idea into God’s covenant with Abraham in the book of Genesis (ch 17) to make him the father of a multitude of nations.   Paul made Abraham the faithful father of the faithful, because it was through his faith that he was blessed by God.  It was through their faith that black slaves in the American south could claim Abraham as their father.
 
Soren Kierkegaard made Abraham the hero of his existential rumination on faith, “Fear and Trembling”.  For Kierkegaard, it was Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac on the altar that defined his faithfulness, and defined faith itself.  “He who loves God without faith reflects upon himself, he who loves God believingly reflects upon God.  Upon this pinnacle stands Abraham.”  On his way up to the altar with his only son as the sacrifice, Abraham was in a state of “infinite resignation”:  “Abraham is therefore at no instant a tragic hero but something quite different, either a murderer or a believer.”  Kierkegaard’s “leap of faith”, exemplified by Abraham, was without a visible basis; it could not be accounted for by assent to a particular doctrine or by envisioning a particular outcome.  In the Christian imagination, Abraham was defined by his faithfulness.  Islam carried this understanding forward.  As the Koran (67) says, “Abraham was not a Jew nor yet a Christian; but he was true in faith….”
 
It would appear that in the gospels, Abraham was “grandfathered in” to Christian heaven.  He never knew Jesus nor is he attributed to have announced faith in him, in the sense of faith that is an assertion of belief in a particular doctrinal formula.  Somehow Abraham was given a pass around that heavenly gatekeeping question of American evangelical Christians:  “Have you accepted Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior?”  No, he didn’t, but he’s the one they believe will gather those who do into his bosom beyond the Pearly Gates.  How did he get over there?  “Faith” is the answer, but to the question “what is faith?” we have no clear answer.  And that lack of a clear answer is integral to faith itself.  Abraham transcends the ongoing tension between Christians like myself, who see faith primarily as an existential condition, and Christians who see faith as belief in doctrine.
 
God showed up to the tent of Sarah and Abraham one day, in the form of three men.  Can we take a leap and say they represented the divine presence as known by the three great tribes comprising all of humanity - the descendants of Noah's sons, Shem, Ham, and Japeth?   Can we take a further leap and say that they represented the three Abrahamic faiths?  Who knows why the One God showed up as three that day?  It was a doctrinal question that did not trouble Sarah and Abraham.  They did not ask who the men were.  They did not ask for an explanation of their appearance.  They simply acted faithfully, and offered them generous hospitality immediately.  There is room in the tent of Sarah and Abraham for everybody.  I would like to believe that there is room in Abraham’s bosom for all kinds of Christians, room in his bosom for Jews, room in his bosom for Muslims, and room in his bosom for everybody else.  For as God told Abraham in Genesis 17, he would be the father of many nations: the number of his descendants would be like the grains of sand on the beach.  A number we can never count, a number of rocking souls we can hardly imagine....
 

Common Decency: The Virtue America Needs

 

There’s already a lot of common decency in America. 

We just need a lot more of it.

And there is nothing particularly masculine, feminine, binary, non-binary, capitalist, Marxist, “woke”, or “anti-woke” about practicing common decency.    

Common decency means telling the truth, basing our voting choices and our public policy decisions on facts. Common decency means polite and respectful public discourse, refraining from insults, rants, raves, and demonization.  Common decency means putting up with bad speech in order to have the opportunity to respond with good speech.  Common decency means freedom, which means choice.  Reproductive choice, choice of books to read in the library, choice for anyone of clothes to wear, choice for anyone to wear lipstick or not, choice of religion or of no religion at all.  Common decency means doing what it actually takes to assure that the most vulnerable among us are cared for – which requires public, taxpayer funded social and health safety nets supplemented by private charities. 

Senator Josh Hawley just published a book entitled “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs”.  We can snicker about the plethora of ironies that accompany his authorship of such a book.  But it is enough to refute the title itself.  America doesn’t need “masculine virtues”.  It needs common decency.  And if all of us, male, female, and non-binary, practiced more of it, the real problems that men face in society today would evaporate.  If we had strong labor unions in this country, everyone, including men, would have a greater sense of dignity and economic security from which they would be able to make better life-choices.  The same could be said if we had enough beds in drug and alcohol rehab centers, if we had affordable prescription drugs, if we had a banking and finance system that supported low-income people instead of preying on them, and if we had a housing policy that made home ownership much more accessible to working-class people.

Hawley, born to the elite as a banker’s son and Stanford and Yale graduate, blames the elite class for the sad status of men in America today.  The “woke” elite class, that is.  But it is the “anti-woke” conservative elites like himself who need to do the soul-searching.  Hawley is blowing smoke to hide his own culpability for the crises that men – and everyone else – face in America today. 

That culpability is presented in clear detail by the sociologist Matthew Desmond in his new book, “Poverty, By America”. I’m most impressed by his insistence that ending poverty in America would be no more nor less than the exercise of common decency:  there’s nothing partisan or politically dogmatic about it.  He argues cogently that we could take today’s level of public spending for health, housing, and social safety nets, including expenditures in the form of tax breaks, and re-deploy it to end poverty in America once and for all.  We would not need to raise tax rates on anyone.  Our problem isn’t money or taxes.  It’s not a debate between “woke” and “anti-woke”, capitalism versus socialism.  It’s about current public policies that benefit the well-off – whether they’re “woke” or not – and hurt those with low incomes.  The real challenge is deciding whether or not we are committed to act out of common decency to solve problems that, in the end, hurt us all.  It’s the “trickle-up” theory.  Rich and middle-class people benefit from current policies that leave the poor behind.  But in the end, rich and middle-class people would be even better off if the poor were better off.  Men, women, and non-binaries alike.  The problems men face today, decried by Josh Hawley, would be alleviated by following Matthew Desmond’s common-sense prescriptions.

If you were tempted to buy Hawley’s book, if only out of perverse curiosity, I suggest you make the equivalent investment in Desmond’s book instead.  Just as America needs to shift its investments from ones that exacerbate poverty to ones that will end it.

Christianity, Translated for the Non-Religious

The non-religious are by far the fastest-growing religious demographic in America.  So how shall we who are progressive Christians talk about our faith with them, when the appropriate occasions arise?

Religion is the organized, communal expression of spirituality.  But spirituality can be expressed and nurtured without it.  More and more folks are figuring this out.  They are finding non-religious ways to raise their kids to become compassionate, caring human beings with a sense of deep awe and wonder and humility toward the universe and toward other people.

Progressive Christians are religious pluralists who respect the religions of others and show genuine interest in them, and recognize that other faiths may be as good for others as ours is for us.  If we’re serious about this kind of pluralism, we must include the non-religious in it.  It is certainly possible that being non-religious may be as good for non-religious folks as being Christian is for us. 

My friendships with non-religious folks have inspired me to think deeply about how to communicate progressive Christianity to curious people who know little to nothing about it.  I don’t think everybody ought to be Christian, but I do think that we Christians ought actively to offer our tradition to people who are open to it.  My first published book, “Open Christianity”, was addressed primarily to Christians looking for another way to do Christianity.  Fast forward two decades of work with college students who were “nones” or otherwise barely aware of the basics of Christianity, and I realized I needed to write a very different book that presumed nothing about the reader’s background in the faith.  “Tenderly Calling” was the result: it is Christianity for newbies.  It introduces the reader to the basics of the faith from a progressive perspective.

Now, a couple of years after publishing that book, I’m asking myself another question.  How can the essence of progressive Christianity be described in entirely non-religious language?  Without reference to Jesus or the Bible at all?  So that we can make its most basic message intelligible to people with no background in the faith.  And then, if they are willing, translate that secular message into the rich, beautiful, profound language of Christianity, inviting them to explore the progressive version of the faith. 

This challenge crystallized for me when I read these words of the 20^th c philosopher and theologian, Simone Weil:

“I must move toward an abiding conception of the divine mercy, a conception which does not change whatever event destiny may send upon me, and which can be communicated to no matter what human being.” 

She was on a quest to express the raw essence of the faith as concisely and universally as possible.  She had an outsider’s perspective on Christianity, having grown up as a non-religious, non-observant Jew. She also wrote that “Christianity (Catholic and Protestant) speaks too much about holy things.”  She wanted to express the heart of the faith as clearly and simply as possible, with little to no jargon, to make it accessible to anyone.

It is always challenging for insiders to imagine an outsider’s point of view.  Now that familiarity with Christianity can no longer be taken for granted in the Western world, we Christians are surrounded by outsiders who don’t speak our faith language.  How shall we respond?

The dominant paradigm of Christianity in America – evangelical/fundamental Protestantism – welcomes outsiders into its fold by immediately immersing them into their religious lingo and culture.  Evangelicals don’t translate their faith into secular language because they can’t.  Their belief system emanates from the tautological religious assumption that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God because the Bible says so, and thus all that is in the Bible is historically factual.  There’s just no plausible, intelligible way to express that perspective without the use of Christian terminology.

Progressive Christians usually offer a different religious starting point:  God is love.  But unlike our evangelical sisters and brothers, we are able to express our faith in purely secular terms.  The basics of our faith are natural, observable, and intelligible to anyone, whether or not one uses Christian terminology or references to describe them.  If we really believe that God is love, then we can describe the essence of our faith entirely in terms of that love, leaving out the G-word.  Not that the G-word is bad:  it is integral to the rich mytho-poetic language of our faith tradition.  But if we want to get our message across to people who either don’t relate to the G-word, or associate it with bad experiences, we need to start with purely secular language.

I believe that if we practice this kind of secular description of our religious faith, we’ll do a better job of welcoming “nones” into it.  And at the same time, we’ll go deeper in our own understanding and practice of our faith.  What is most essential in Christianity is not confined to Christianity.  Our tradition mirrors the nature of nature itself.  The narratives and rituals of the faith reflect the universal structure of the human psyche.  What is true in Christianity is not true because of Christianity.  Christianity is one of many possible expressions of an underlying essence.  When we engage in contemplative prayer, when we participate in the sacraments, we are communing with a reality that supersedes Christianity itself.

So here is my paragraph, briefly describing Christianity in purely secular terms:

Out of billions of years of the universe churning with creation and destruction, a breathtaking reality has emerged: love.  On earth, love has evolved from the bond between family members into a deeper love that is unconditional and universal.  The emergence of this love marks a profound turning point in natural history.  This love flows through deeply attentive, open, all-embracing consciousness.  This love lifts people out of selfishness and shallowness and into lives of selfless compassion, creativity, service, and activism for justice.  This love manifests in humble awe and wonder.  This love is more extraordinary and beautiful than everyday prose can describe.  It inspires poetry, music, ritual, and mythic narrative, and it brings people together in community to celebrate and practice it more fully.   

The Christian church is one such community.  Welcome to it!

Brother James: for your progressive Christian playlist...

 

“Love cannot be stagnant and will always create more…”  So sings Brother James in his tune, “I Had to Dig”.  His spiritual quest led him to dig his way out of fundamentalist Christianity, and then to excavate his own soul and the mysteries of the universe.  “And I’ll give all I have in search of freedom, live to set other prisoners free…”  There surely are other meanings to make of it, but I hear his song as an anthem for progressive Christianity.

Justin James Sinclair is a young man on a mission.  He made retreats at the St Andrew’s Abbey and New Camaldoli monasteries in California, where, to his astonishment, he discovered a strand of Christianity that no one in the evangelical churches he attended, nor at Biola University where he studied, had revealed to him before.  Above Big Sur, he sat at the feet of Cyprian Consiglio, a monk and musician with deep reverence for the contemplative traditions of the world’s religions.  Justin discovered a radically different way to understand and practice Christianity, in silent contemplative union with the Divine.  While powerfully attracted to it, he realized he was not meant for the monastic life.  So he put his musical career where his heart had arrived, taking on the stage name of Brother James.  He aims to serve souls through his music.  “I find multiple meanings in the word ‘brother’”, he says.  “The monastic, contemplative identity, but also the idea of being there for other people, like a brother.”  And he chose his middle name, James, because it is what his dad calls him... a name of sacred endearment.

His process of “deconstruction” from fundamentalist Christianity has not been without pain.  In “Witness” he alludes to the loneliness and confusion along that path:  “As you push into light and can’t step back, friends wonder why, but don’t know how to ask…”  But the song also offers brotherly comfort:  “I’ll take your hand, I’m by your side, I’m reaching out… You need to know you’re not alone…”

Brother James wants his songs to be conversation-starters.  And he wants to be part of the conversation.  “I don’t want to play in bars!” he says.  “Put me in a living room with a circle of people, and I’ll play, and then we’ll talk.”  If you want to put together such a conversation with your campus ministry, in your church, or in your living room, contact him here.  (And if you want to support his artistry, please do so at Patreon.) 

He was born with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck.  In his song, “Safety Net”, he chords that precarious moment with the time he told his parents he was leaving the version of the faith in which they had raised him.  “I need to find the truth, but I don't know how, so if I cut the cord, would you hold me like you did, if I couldn't call him Lord, would you still love me now?”

Whether or not it keeps us from breathing, all of us must cut the cord so we can follow the Spirit wind where it leads us.  Brother James, with tunes both gentle and compelling, shows us the way.

Questions for Conversation: "The Jesus Revolution"

Here are some prompts to use in church or campus ministry gatherings to discuss the recent feature film, The Jesus Revolution.  Use this review of the film by Rev Jim Burklo, PCU/ZOE’s executive director, for background. 

What emotions did you feel in watching the film?  High points, low points, inspirational moments, frustrating or confusing or anger-inducing moments?  Do you wish you had been part of the Jesus Revolution?

What do you admire about the counterculture movement of the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s?  What do you part of it do you not admire?  Does the film do justice to the reality of that era, or does it trivialize and stereotype it?

Have there been other “Jesus Revolutions” in the history of Christianity?  What caused them to happen?  How do they compare with the one depicted in this film? 

In the film, we meet Lonnie walking along a road in the country in his beard and long hair, wearing sandals and a poncho and holding a walking stick… looking a lot like we might imagine one of the desert monks of early Christianity.  Is there any resonance between the lifestyle of the hippies and that of the early monastics?

 When Lonnie and Chuck Smith first encounter each other, Lonnie says:  I kept searching and searching and I just finally got to the end of it, and there was still a void. And my people, well, they're a desperate bunch. And in desperation, man, there's power in that word. What would it take for you, Chuck Smith, to be desperate? …. How do I describe my people? They're sheep without a shepherd, chasing hard after lies, and the trouble is, your people reject them. So I ask you, Pastor, how can they believe in the One of whom they have not heard? We can only walk through doors open to us, and your church, well, that's a door that's shut.

In what ways are you desperate?  What would it take for you to be desperate?  What power is there in desperation?

Chuck Smith ended up opening the doors of his church to the Jesus People.  The Jesus People became members of evangelical churches like Chuck’s.  Against whom are those church doors shut today?

The film was funded by conservative evangelical Christian donors, likely the reason that the film left out the fact that Lonnie Frisbee was gay and likely died of AIDS.  How might Lonnie’s life have unfolded differently if we had a “Jesus Revolution” today?

The “Jesus freaks” stuck one finger in the air and chanted “One Way!”, declaring that Jesus was the only way to salvation.  What is “salvation”?  Is there only one way to reach it?

Chuck Smith and the Jesus People held their Bibles in the air in their worship services.  What is the Bible?  God’s word to humans, humans’ words about God, or something else?  How do you understand and relate to the Bible?

Lonnie was pushed out of leadership in Chuck’s church when he started doing “faith healings”.  Why did Chuck have a problem with that?  Can Christianity be a real force for emotional and physical healing, and if so, how?

Thousands of young people in that era were baptized in the ocean at Pirate’s Cove.  What did baptism appear to mean to them?  What does it mean to you?

Chuck Smith’s daughter, Janette, reflected on what his church was like before the Jesus People showed up, asking the question: “Where was the love?”  What would it mean for churches to show real love, in our time?

The Jesus Revolution of the 60’s and 70’s had a lasting impact on Christianity in America.  What part of that impact is worth preserving, and what part needs to be left behind?

What should a “Jesus Revolution” look like today? 

Welcome to the Real Jesus Revolution!

 

(See my Questions for Conversation about the film HERE - for churches and campus ministries)

 

As I watched the new feature film, The Jesus Revolution, a flood of intense memory rushed through me.  Because I lived its plot, along with a cohort of other young people in the late 60’s and early 70’s who were drawn both to the counterculture and to the message and example of Jesus. 

I lived in Santa Cruz, California, through that era.  I have vivid, warm recollections of sitting around driftwood bonfires at the beach at sundown, singing plaintive Jesus songs accompanied by guitar with other earnest, long-haired, bandanna-bound, dewy-eyed young people.  On the chrome bumper of my old station wagon I pasted a sticker that read “Jesus Is”.  For a while I went to a weekly Greek-language Bible study led by an older fellow who had attracted a living-room full of counter-culturals in beads and bells who would point their index fingers in the air to share the “One Way” (Jesus) sign with each other.  In my zeal, I started a short-lived ‘zine about the Jesus movement in my last year of high school.  For that, my fellow politically radicalized friends pegged me as a religious weirdo.  For my 18^th birthday, they sent money to a nutty character named Kirby J. Hensley, founder of the Universal Life Church - to ordain me by mail-order into the Christian ministry.  (The church was founded originally as a means of dodging the draft during the Vietnam war.)

I was attracted to the Jesus People, a movement later nicknamed “God at the Beach”, because it felt so much more authentic and emotive than the staid, boring mainline Protestant worship to which I’d been subjected as a child and teenager.  It seemed to bring together all that was good in the social and cultural change movement at the time, along with what was good in Christianity.  But it did not take me long to realize that just as quickly as the Jesus Revolution flowered in day-glow colors, it was being co-opted by fundamentalists who were definitely not cool and definitely not about social and political progress. 

And that shift is illustrated in the movie.  The evangelicals who made it as a propaganda film surely did not intend for it to display the subtext it reveals.  As soon as the Jesus Revolution merged into evangelical churches, it lost its countercultural juice.  God at the beach rapidly morphed into fundamentalism in the suburbs.

The movie starts with an old-school, uptight church in southern California – depopulated, boring.  A Jesus hippie shows up and the pastor grudgingly lets him in – and then a flood of youngsters in Birkenstocks follows.  Almost overnight, the church goes from singing Rock of Ages in tremolo to singing prototypical CCM – Christian Contemporary Music - with a rock band.   In a flash, it goes from neckties to open-collar shirts, pumps to flip-flops.  

But what didn’t change was the fundamentalism.  A different vibe, a different wardrobe, a different sound… but the same old biblical literalism, religious exclusivism, and backward social values.  There were no women leading the Jesus People in the film.  Nor does the film acknowledge that one of its protagonists, the Jesus People leader Lonnie Frisbee, was gay and apparently died of AIDS.  He was a victim of the very fundamentalism he espoused.  The scenes in the film that depict bad acid trips could have been lifted straight out of the ridiculous anti-drug movies that we were forced to watch in high school.  (As for myself, I didn’t drop LSD until I was in seminary – and the experience was profound.  It made sense of the mystical tradition of Christianity and it shaped my consciousness for the better, ever after.)

So why this film, and why now?  Because the evangelicals who funded it, freaked out by the rapid depopulation of their churches, want to see the Jesus Revolution happen again today.  But are they able to see the deep irony to which the film points?  The casual clothes worn in today’s megachurches, the come-as-you-are culture, the rock bands playing praise music, and the earnest intensity of their preachers can’t disguise the fact that the Jesus Revolution of the 60’s has degenerated into the same judgmental, decidedly non-revolutionary version of Christianity that characterized Chuck Smith’s church before Lonnie Frisbee showed up.  In the film, Chuck Smith’s daughter, reflecting back on what his church was like before Lonnie came along, asked:  “Where was the love?”  Surely the filmmakers didn’t intend for viewers to ask the same question about evangelical churches today – but they should.  Where is the love in churches that treat women as inferior to men?  And condemn same-sex relationships and marriages?  And overwhelmingly support right-wing demagogues?  In the film, one of the young Jesus People questions the movement:  “What if this is just another addiction?”  Indeed, that is what it has become.

So it’s time for another Jesus Revolution – but of a very different kind.

Today’s Jesus Revolution should once again lift up the life and example of Jesus of Nazareth as our pioneer of peace and love.  We should spread his message, and invite people into authentic Christian community.  And go much further with his love than the Jesus People of the ‘60’s took it!  It should be a revolution against consumerism, unrestrained capitalism, autocracy, and greed.  It should offer salvation from loneliness and meaninglessness.  It should support and celebrate the divine gift of diversity in all its forms, including LGBTQ+ sexuality and relationships.  It should embrace all that is good in the other religions of the world.  It should lift up the Bible as sacred myth with tremendous power for positive transformation, and revolt against reading it as historical fact or as a rule-book for living today.  It should mobilize Christians to work and serve with others in solidarity for peace and justice and racial harmony and environmental protection and health care for all and freedom from poverty.  It should show people how to experience God personally through contemplative practices.  It should keep the faith, and drop the dead dogma that gets in the way of the pure, unconditional agape love who is God.

An image in the film haunts me: that of a bearded, grinning Lonnie Frisbee walking down a country road in sun-drenched southern California, holding a walking stick and wearing a long, funky poncho. For a short time, the Jesus People unwittingly imitated a form of Christianity that their fundamentalist groomers knew nothing about.  The Jesus People cast off the trappings of so-called civilization and lived simply, focused on full immersion in divine love.  That’s just what the early monastics did.  By the time that movement started in the 4^th century, the church had become the state religion of the Roman empire, with all the attendant corruptions.  The monastics sought a simple, pure, direct experience of the faith by withdrawing to the desert to contemplate into oneness with the divine.

We’re there again.  It’s time to go to the “desert” beyond corrupted Christianity and commercialized culture, and get back to our raw spiritual roots, liberated from useless doctrines and inhumane social values.  There we can meet God face to face, and practice the love that follows.

Good news:  the real Jesus Revolution is happening right now in progressive Christian communities around the world.  Let’s take it to the streets – and to the beach – and go the distance this time!

 

Dear “musings” readers:

I would like to introduce you to a cherished friend of mine: Father Ricardo Elford.

Since 1967, Ricardo, a Redemptorist priest, has been serving migrants and native Americans on both sides of the border between Arizona and Sonora, Mexico.  He is now 85 years old, living at the Redemptorist Renewal Center outside of Tucson, and still at work, managing Clinica Amistad, a medical clinic in the barrio staffed by volunteer doctors, nurses, and practitioners serving people without insurance – most of them undocumented migrants. 

I met Ricardo in 2001, when I went to Tucson for a visit with Jim Corbett, the co-founder of the Sanctuary Movement, which smuggled Central American refugees into the US and housed them in churches and temples to protect them from death and abuse during the civil wars in those countries in the 1980’s.  Corbett was a Quaker, a cowboy, and a self-taught Hebrew scholar with a master’s degree in philosophy from Harvard.  Ricardo was deeply involved in the Sanctuary movement from its beginning, and was a close associate of Corbett’s.  Based on that work, together they wrote “The Servant Church” (Pendle Hill, 1996), which has haunted my practice of ministry ever since I first read it. “The crucial, turn-around choices posed by the gospel are about service, not rewards – service that isn’t coerced and for which there’s no pay-off.  Having discovered that communion is universal and unearned, one is free to choose.  Having chosen, however, the members of a covenant community must be able to count on one another to walk the hallowing way they profess, to act as a covenant community.”  (p 34) 

Early in Ricardo’s ministry in southern Arizona, he served as a priest to the Yaqui tribe, which has communities on both sides of the US/Mexico border.  He performed the mass in rural churches in Sonora, as well as in the Yaqui reservation near Tucson.  As enforcement of the border on the US side became more intense, he became focused on assisting migrants caught in the consequences.  Every time I visited him in Tucson, his cell phone was constantly ringing.  Ricardo was the “fixer” for migrants in various kinds of trouble:  facing deportation orders, trying to get asylum, trying to communicate with relatives across the border.  It seems as if everyone in the Tucson barrio knows him.  I walked down 4^th Avenue in Tucson with him one afternoon, and a couple of Spanish-speaking people accosted him adoringly along the way.  He has relationships with the Border Patrol, with doctors, lawyers, non-profits, and a network of trusted church members and other volunteers he can mobilize on the spot.  A woman broke her leg while crossing the desert and was apprehended by Border Patrol agents who knew they could not deport her in that condition.  They knew to call Ricardo, and in minutes, he found a family to house the woman until her leg was healed.  The Border Patrol delivered her straight from the desert to their door.

While Ricardo will be the first to rail against the inhumanity of US border policy that has generated so much of the misery his work addresses, he doesn’t let it get him down.  He is a joyous soul with an outsized smile and a ready laugh.  A progressive Christian down to his bones, he makes the Catholic church look better than perhaps it deserves! 

In America, most folks think that being a Christian is a personal preference, and that to join a church is to show up on Sunday and contribute time and money to its organization.  Ricardo demonstrates, with his life, that it means something much more.  The church is a body of people with a vocation, a calling, to serve the world beyond itself: to stand with the most vulnerable, to struggle for systemic justice, to heal and to feed and to clothe and to house those left behind by social, economic, and political structures.

My wife, Roberta, and I visited Ricardo this past week, and savored every minute with him.  His health is rather frail but his spirit is strong.  We shared and reflected together as we walked past the saguaros and chollas on the grounds of the retreat center.  What a gift to be in the presence of a person who embodies the call of the gospel, in word and deed!

Interspiritual Chants

 

These chants are ones I’ve been using for many years in progressive Christian worship, interfaith/spiritual life on campus, and many other settings in my career.   A bunch of them come from the wonderful Taize community in France, which focuses worship on chants.  I take the liberty of switching some words to be gender-inclusive, and to reflect a more progressive theology.  The words here are the ones corresponding to the videos.

 

Mira que te mira, mira que te mira, mira que te mira, mira le – (“See that you are seen” – a quote from St Teresa of Avila, 16^th c. Spanish mystic) -- LISTEN

 

Gate, gate, paragate, parasamgate, Bodhi svaha…

            (Buddhist Heart Sutra: Gone, gone, gone beyond, gone utterly beyond…) There are many versions of this.   You can sing this version more quickly if you wish:  LISTEN

 

Humble thyself in the sight of the Lord...    LISTEN

 

O God hear our prayer, O God hear our prayer...   LISTEN

 

What does the Lord require of you?    LISTEN

 

Ooh, ooh, ooh, adoramus te, Domine...  LISTEN

 

I am sending you light, to heal you, to hold you....     LISTEN

 

Jubilate Deo, omnis terra, servite Domino

            in leatitia, Allelujia, Allelujia, in  leatitita

            Allelujia, Allelujia, in  leatitia

            (Rejoice in God, all the earth

            Serve the Lord with gladness)    LISTEN

 

The river is flowing, flowing and growing...    LISTEN

 

Come and fill our hearts with your peace...     LISTEN

 

Sing allelujia to our God....    LISTEN

 

Stay with me, remain here with me, watch and pray

            Watch and pray (Taize)   LISTEN

 

One bread, one body... (great for communion/eucharist)  LISTEN

 

Prepare ye the way of the Lord....  (Godspell) LISTEN

 

Within our darkest night, you kindle the fire

                        that never dies away, never dies away  (Taize)   LISTEN

 

Bless the Lord, my soul

            And bless God's holy name

            Bless the Lord, my soul,

            Who leads me into life   (Taize)  LISTEN

 

Return again, return again... (Shlomo Carlebach)   LISTEN

 

Ubi caritas, et amor

            Ubi caritas, Deus ibi est  (Taize)

            (Where there is charity, and love, there is God)   LISTEN

 

Round and round we go

            We hold each other’s hands

            And weave our lives in a circle

            The day begins (or: is done) and the dance goes on    LISTEN

 

The will of your love, the will of your love

            Be done on earth....          LISTEN

 

Love, love, love, people this is your call

            Love your neighbor as yourself for God loves all      LISTEN

 

Seek ye first the kingdom of God

            And its righteousness, and all these things

            Shall be added unto you, allelu, alleluia...   LISTEN

 

Om nama Shiva, Om nama Shiva,

            Om nama Shiva, Shiva Om nama.... (Hindu – “I bow to Shiva”)  LISTEN   There are many versions of this.

 

May the blessings of God rest upon you

            May God’s peace abide with you

            May God’s presence illuminate your heart

            Now and forever more   (Sufi Muslim)  LISTEN

 

Oh, poverty, source of all our riches...  LISTEN

 

Nada te turbe, nada te espante

            Quien a Dios tiene, nada le falta

            Nada te turbe, nada te espante

            Solo Dios basta.....

                        (Let nothing disturb you,

                        Let nothing you dismay

                        He/she who has God lacks nothing

                        Only God suffices.... St Teresa of Avila, 16^th c Spanish mystic)  Taize    LISTEN

 

In the Lord I’ll be ever thankful,

            In our God I shall rejoice...   LISTEN

 

Oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh,

            Surrexit Christus, allelujia!

            Oooh, oooh, oooh, oooh,

            Cantate Domino, allelujia!

                        (Christ is risen, sing to the Lord!)  Taize    LISTEN

 

Spirit we adore you

                        Lay our lives before you

                        How we love you....  LISTEN

 

Praise God, the love we all may share

            Praise God, the beauty everywhere

            Praise God, the hope of good to be

            Praise God, the truth that makes us free  (Doxology)   Tune with traditional lyrics:  LISTEN

 

Now in peace O Lord

            Let thy servant go -- allelujia

            For my eyes have seen

            Your salvation – allelujia     LISTEN

 

Surely the presence of our God is in this place....   LISTEN

 

O Great Spirit

            Earth sun sky and sea

            You are inside, and all around me    LISTEN

 

Just as long as I'm in this world

                        I am the light of this world----   LISTEN

 

When I went down to the river to pray

            Studying about that good old way

            And who shall wear the robe and crown

            Good Lord, show me the way

            O sisters, come on down, come on down

            Donít you want to go down

            O brothers, come on down,

            Down to the river to pray.....    LISTEN

 

Day by day, day by day...   LISTEN

 

There is one world, one people, one fellowship...   LISTEN

 

Be not afraid, I go before you always

            Come, follow me, and I will give you rest    LISTEN

 

Our God is an awesome God....   LISTEN

 

Jesus Needs Better PR

You just can't make this stuff up.  Reality is indeed weirder than fiction.

A few days ago, I read a piece on Religion News Service by Christian Pinkston.  He decried the "cannibalism" going on among his fellow evangelical Christians who, among other squabbles, are quibbling about the details of the He Gets Us campaign - which they feel does not tell the true gospel story.  In the piece, he reveals his role as the head of the PR firm for He Gets Us.  I got curious about his background, and it didn't take long to discover that he was the Republican hacker behind the Swift Boat smear against John Kerry and the Weather Underground smear against Barack Obama.  Two of the sleaziest media stunts in recent decades.  (Read all about it here.)

I might have been the first to dig this up, but it wasn't rocket science to discover it.  And surely others would have sorted it out over time.  You can't hide this kind of thing for long. 

Christian Pinkston is the kind of Christian who has trashed Jesus' reputation by association.  I see no evidence of him getting down on his knees before God and asking forgiveness for what he did.  So what sense did it make to hire him to run a PR campaign to restore Jesus' good name?  What were these folks thinking?

Jesus needs better PR.  And since we don't have a billion dollars to squander on PR firms, it's up to us to take on the task.  It's time for progressive Christians to get busy and let the world know the Jesus we know.  Let us take advantage of the front-facing message of He Gets Us - which portrays Jesus as a pioneer of compassion.  And give people a viable alternative to the back-matter of He Gets Us, which funnels viewers into the universe of right-wing fundamentalism. 

Explore the deep and wide universe of resources for contemplative practice, study, activism, and worship at ProgressiveChristianity.org , and invite others to do the same.  (PR alert:  some self-promotion here, which you can tune out if you wish:  check out my own books and resources for individuals, families with kids, and churches here..... and introduce Jesus to curious friends by giving them my recent book, Tenderly Calling: An Invitation to the Way of Jesus.)

And more importantly, do something really, really radical:  invite people to join you in attending your local progressive Christian church.  And if they aren't nearby, send 'em the link to find the one nearest to them. 

Of course, we practice the best PR for Jesus by mirroring his compassion with our own, extending radical welcome and inclusion to all, loving even our enemies.  Because when we do so, we are his avatars - we are his ambassadors - we are his very being and personality in the here-and-now.