Provocative Ponderings with Robert Corin Morris

The Family of Jesus and his Radical Movement

2012-01-03T21:33:00.019-05:00

Reflections for the Twelve Days of Christmas 5

....and Mary pondered all these things in her heart. (Luke 2:19)

What if we “post-critical” readers of the Bible considered that the Birth narratives might contain important historical clues about the origins of the ministry and mission of Jesus?

Granted, the stories in Matthew and Luke are heavy with symbolism and are clearly the product of careful, midrashic crafting, and contain amazingly miraculous events. That is not my concern, however. I leave all that aside for readers to consider according to their sense of God and the possible.

What interests me here is hints about the family and people they knew or encountered. Might these stories have deeper historical roots than modern sophisticates usually consider?

What I mean is this. What if Jesus were born into a family that was part of the “third force” in Second Temple Judaism, not part of the establishment of Sadducees and Pharisees who were represented in the Sanhedrin. This was the disenfranchised melange of messiah-expecting, sometimes revolutionary groups that ranged from the Dead Sea Scroll community on the one hand to the Zealots on the other. What if these stories are about a child who was considered, by that family and their co-religionists, a special lad—a ‘child of destiny’—destined for leadership? *

The first century Jewish ‘eschatological’ community

My first clue to this possibility came from pondering the verse in Luke where we’re told that the prophetess Hannah “spoke of the child to all those in Jerusalem who were waiting for the Redemption of Israel” (Luke 2:38). Who were these folks? The extensive scholarship now available about Jewish sects in this period gives a solid historical context to Luke’s comment.

Those “waiting for the Redemption” expected a wide variety of complementary and contradictory “redemptions,” all the way from a military leader like David to the descent in human form of an angelic redeemer; and there’s tantalizing new evidence that one expectation was of a ‘Great High Priest’ after the order of Melchizedek who would offer a once-for-all atonement for Israel’s sins.** The adult Jesus walked into a maze of archetypal images just waiting to be applied to him and his mission.

The stories speak of a mother who “pondered in her heart” some special identity for her son. Is that so implausible? She would hardly be the first mother in history to feel and foster in her child a sense of special identity and destiny—more especially so if she were one of those “waiting for the redemption of Israel.” Nor is it implausible that she dreamt some startling dream about the boy. After all, modern bookshelves are filled with tales of angel dreams, angel appearances, whatever one might think of such phenomena.

Jesus, errant 'wunderkind' of a movement?

If Jesus came from a family that already had a sense of being part of God’s move to turn Israel in a different direction, this would make a lot of sense of the family’s clear distress about the direction Jesus’ ministry takes. They feel he’s not exercising leadership the way they think he should, just as John the Baptist reportedly felt.

His mother is pictured bugging him to make a self-disclosing move at a clan wedding. (John 2:1-11). We’re told a whole party of “his own people” goes off to bring him back by force because they think he’s “beside himself” (Mark 3:21). And the Fourth Gospel pictures Jesus being taunted by his brothers for not declaring himself more openly. Might “they did not believe in him” be better translated “they did not trust him” (John 7:5), that is, to do things right?

Mother Mary, brother James and “the brothers” are certainly right there on the scene in the weeks after the resurrection appearances, and James puts himself forth powerfully as a major leader of the movement’s Jerusalem commune. They seem to have a stake in his movement.

Yes, the stories are patently loaded with theological symbolism, and influenced by who Jesus became and was believed to be. But Luke does claim he consulted “eyewitnesses” who had been with the movement “from the beginning” (Luke 1:1-3). ***

For my money, at least, these speculations make clearer sense of the adult Jesus’ reportedly strained relationship with his family, and demonstrate that, at age 30, he didn’t have a sudden “break” with a more normal childhood and young adulthood, but rather an evolving sense of how he might serve the God he had been told had special plans for him.

And, of course, such “speculations” have the added merit of actually hugging the shape of the Story the first generation of Christians told about the man and his birth.

_____

* In fact, just such ‘child of destiny’ scenario emerged among non-establishment spiritual types in the early 20th century in India. The noted Indian spiritual teacher Sri Aurobindo was dubbed a ‘child of destiny’ and groomed to be the Great World Teacher of the Theosophical Movement by leaders like Annie Besant. In adulthood, Aurobindo broke with his handlers and struck out on his own as a less exalted spiritual teacher.

** See Margaret Barker, The Great High Priest

*** Ancient historians were likely more interested in the facts than some modern scholars seem prepared to believe. See the chapter on ancient historiography in Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony by Richard Bauckham. See also Margaret Barker, Christmas: The Original Story**

Jesus, Yule and Life-Renewal

2011-12-31T18:26:00.008-05:00

Reflections for the 12 Days of Christmas: 4

As we unpacked our trove of Christmas ornaments and placed them, one by one, on the fresh-cut Tree, special moments and people from the past came up from memory to meet me.

This half-eggshell bird’s nest ornament was the gift of a parishioner who crafted her own ornaments as gifts each year. That dachshund in the red Volkswagen with the Christmas tree on top was one of the many annual ornament gifts my wife’s mother began to give annually to her children as they started their own homes. The tiny red bell—broken this year, alas—was “my” childhood ornament to hang on the tree even as a toddler, and had come to me through my mother from her own childhood in rural Tennessee. We have a treasury of ornaments which turn our Christmas tree into a rich tapestry of relationships and remembrances.

No Puritan simplicity desired.....

My appreciation was heightened this year by mild annoyance at a pre-Christmas blog by a Presbyterian minister proudly announcing that “as for me and my house we will abstain from Christmas.” So corrupt, he said, had its commercialization become that there would be no gifts. No Tree. No decorations. Nada. Nothing. How could he give his children gifts when other children in the world were disadvantaged? “How can he send them to school, then,” I wondered, “when so many go uneducated?” In the place of Christmas, they had put to together a “wish list” a bit like John Lennon’s famous “Imagine” when hoped for everything from the abolition of the sex slave trade to world peace.

Couldn’t he have modeled a moderate Christmas, instead? A few gifts and contributions to the causes that serve his “wish list?” Fine. It’s a free country. Do what you wish. But his righteous rant against the “festival” aspects of Christmas—and the wider Mid-Winter Yule Festival which is its seasonal context—only increased my appreciation for being part of a long and deep strand of Christianity that doesn’t shy at adorning fir trees with light and color, enjoying the figgy pudding, rum and all, and relaxing into some general good times in the dark of the year.

Not that my Calvinist dissenter is the first to decry Christmas. The Puritans abstained in pious horror from the clearly pagan roots of the midwinter festivities surrounding the alleged birthday of Jesus. And the patristic Church placed Christmas on the Winter Solstice, hard on the Roman Saturnalia, as a fast day to keep the faithful from frivolity. Only as the power of pagan religion waned (and was suppressed, to be honest) did it become safe to tolerate the blending of the natural human urge to celebrate with lights and food during the cold and dark of the year with the celebration of the Nativity.

Pagan roots, to be sure, but why not?

And a good thing, too, so far as I’m concerned. My spiritual father “was a wandering Aramean,” as the book of Deuteronomy puts it, but the spiritual mother of the mid-winter festival was a European pagan, someone devoted to the rhythms of nature and the more earthy needs of the human soul. The spiritual and psychological genius of the Church Kalendar of feasts and fasts that arose from that covertly interfaith marriage consists in keeping the prophetic witness of the Hebrew tradition in dynamic balance with the nature rooted witness of “earth-based spirituality”.

For me, that glowing Tree in my living room is not only an offering to honor the Babe who carries the “ever-greening” powers of the soul (as Hildegaard of Bingen might put it). Garnished with lights large and small, and in a multitude of creatures represented in the ornaments, it also symbolizes the cosmic Tree of Life itself, that ever-renewing miracle of the life in the universe, where the death of the first stars gives birth the elements that make up everything, including the hands that hung the decorations and the eyes that behold them.

So it’s not hard, at New Year’s, to see it is an entirely apt symbol of the life-renewal, the letting-go of the past and the leaning toward the future, that is also part of the Good News of Christmastide.

Spray Effects

2011-12-29T17:30:00.020-05:00

Reflections for the Twelve Days of Christmas 3

When Jesus said that the effect of his message would bring a sword of division between family members—and by implication, other groupings as well—he spoke truth.

The this-world effects of the movement that carried his message have, time and again, sparked just such divisions. Sometimes they have been Jesus-followers clashing with each other. The Christian witness to prophetic values has provoked social division and outright hostility to the messengers in every century. And, on occasion, total innocents have been caught in the backwash from the conflicts, or been the outright victims of those thinking they are serving God.

The Christmastide calendar plunges straight from angels and shepherds to the martyrdom of Stephen, takes a breath for the remembrance of John the “son of thunder” (who once wished fire from heaven to descend on a Samaritan village and was imprisoned in his old age), and takes up the theme of conflict again with the slaughter of the Bethlehem innocents on December 28. No breather the next day for the liturgically observant: December 29 remembers the murder of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral by henchman of King Henry II—the fall-out from a falling-out of two former bosom buddies who found themselves at loggerheads over the border between church hierarchy and the crown.

Unanticipated consequences

All these are unanticipated consequences from the life of Jesus and the movement he began. Life is like that; there is no great good that happens in this world that does not have unintended consequences, sometimes very evil ones. As a young seminary student recovering from a rigid, black-and-white, good or evil moralistic background, my moral theology professor’s observation that all actions, both good and evil, have an unpredictable “spray effect” was a true word of wisdom. I have never forgotten the lesson. It illumined baffling moments in my own life where a word or deed meant for good had gone sadly awry, and shed light on so many results of historical events, especially those undertaken in the passion of idealism.

The fervently noble, reformist intentions of Prohibition resulted in a social disaster, making the law a joke among the majority of citizens, and opening the city gates to the rise of massive organized crime. When human beings go on all-out crusades against vice and evil the cure can become as bad as the crime. Jesus himself may well have seen this, for he tells us, mysteriously, "do not resist evil" (Matthew 5:3) and reveals his m.o. is to “bind” the Devil and rob his house, not seek to destroy him completely (Matthew 12:29).

And yet, in spite of Jesus’ apparent intention for non-violent divisions, leaving judgments up to God, his life, from the beginning, had a spray effect of violence, at least as the Story is told. No angel asked permission of the Bethlehemites for the heavenly king to be born in their obscure cave-stable; yet blood ran in the streets two years later as the tyrant king sought to eliminate any threat to his power. The crowds flocking to be near the miracle-worker Jesus were so thick on one occasion people “trampled one another” (Luke 12:1). Such crowd pandemonium caused the Pharisees to accuse Jesus of being possessed by the “Lord of the flies” (Luke 11:24-25). More division.

For every action, there is a reaction; and it is not always clear that the actor’s push is purely good and the reactor’s push-back wholly evil. Values clash, and motives are seldom simple. That’s life. Even hermits have to deal with the disagreements and divisions in their own minds.

"The bestial floor"

The message of Christmas—like the message of the Hebrew Bible as a whole—is that God is willing to mix it up with the whole messy business. The underlying, overarching love, wisdom, and goodness out of which the worlds are born chooses not to be aloof the ambiguities that arise in pursuing the Good.

The birth of the Babe of Bethlehem, that “uncontrollable mystery on the bestial floor” as Yeats puts it in The Magi, manifests that the Divine is not divorced from the difficulties and ambiguities we face. And the Babe, indeed all of Scripture, promises that through all the mayhem that even the best actions and accomplishments can provoke, threads of grace are seeking to “work for good” and bring about unanticipated blessings. The Incarnation is into this mess, nothing less. Nor does the Divine seek to escape accountability for its own actions as it participates in the planetary mayhem.

A great spiritual teacher once suggested to me that one of the many sins of humanity that Jesus bore to the cross was the one caused by the spray effect of his birth—the slaughter of the Bethlehem infants.

Whatever else that might mean, I think it shows that their wounds—all wounds—become his. Which is to say the wounds of our inevitable divisions, conflicts and hatreds are carried in the heart of God, who like us, has regrets.

Divinely Human, Humanly Divine

2011-12-27T14:18:00.009-05:00

Reflections for the Twelve Days of Christmas 2

John, one of the two sons of the fisherman Zebedee—the “sons of thunder” according to Jesus—seems to have been part of the same radical, anti-establishment Judaism that propelled Stephen the deacon to his lynching death. Reportedly a follower of the fiery John Baptizer before he met Jesus, he was a passionate devotee of the dream of the Kingdom, extreme in his judgments and his loves.

The gospel traditionally attributed to him is also the most extreme and passionate of the Four, with its Qumran-like contrasts of light and darkness, good and evil, love and (though it is never named as such) hate. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the Fourth Gospel contains the most passionately exalted assertions about the nature of the man Jesus, who is seen as nothing less than the eternal Word or Wisdom of God, the divine Glory or Shekinah, “pitching its tent” among us—that is, shining from the heart of our very own fleshly nature.

Divinization of the human in pre-Christian Jewish tradition

It may very well be the case that such an exalted view of a Tzaddik, or Righteous One, is part-and-parcel of the “third force Judaism” in which John, John Baptizer and Jesus all moved, distinct from the aristocratic ruling Sadducees or the law-codifying Pharisees, rather than being an import from the Greek world, as many biblical critics have contended. In addition to the startling revelations of the Dead Sea Scrolls (whoever imagined Jewish monks, after all, or "unbloody sacrifices" of bread and wine?) more than two generations of Christian scholars have now revealed more fully the apocalyptic and mystical landscape of “inter-testamental” Judaism, in which the “divinization” of great spiritual heroes like Enoch and Melchizedek is a major theme.

The tales about both involve ascending into heaven, clothing with divine glory and enthronement in power and glory, and sometimes return to earth. Enoch himself was said to have returned to earth after his heavenly glorification, cloaking his Glory, to teach the way of righteousness (1). So also, the Jesus of the Fourth Gospel claims to have had a heavenly ascension experience during his lifetime. (John 3:12-13).

According to the newly emergent, but strong, school of ‘early Christology’ scholars, Jesus may have lived in a stream of Judaism quite ready to believe that a human being manifesting such Spirit-power in healing, preaching and moments of spiritual rapture, was nothing less than the earthly presence of a humanly divine and divinely human Light and Life (2). The Jews, unlike the Greeks, were content to assert a paradox like this, rather than trying to figure out the exact relationship between humanity and divinity, a task which led to many later, and perhaps unnecessary, theological headaches.

Beholding with the eyes of love

Which brings me back to John, traditionally believed to be the ‘disciple whom Jesus loved.’ Whatever this may mean beyond ‘his favorite,’ it surely implies some kind of affectionate relationship that opens the eyes of the lover to see the gold at the heart of the beloved in ways others may not see as clearly. Infatuation may indeed blind us to our love-objects faults, but enduring love sees into the soul. Such love is likely to include moments of ‘ordinarily transfigured’ vision when the Beloved is adored and praised—which is to say, worshipped (as in the old English form of the wedding vow: “with my body I thee worship”).

The English mystic and author Charles Williams sees such love, which can appear in deep friendships as well as enduring sexual partnerships, as humanity’s “most common experience” of the Divine Love. For the passionate and 'beloved' John, direct experiences of the earthly form of Jesus as the "tent" of Divine Glory—-the way Jesus smiled, walked and laughed as well as his mighty deeds and powerful words—-may well have been far more important proof of a divine humanity than any stories of Enoch or Melchizedek.

In Jesus’ presence, John had felt the actual embrace of the Divine Glory, “grace upon grace” (John 1:16) He was among the first to know this, but he was not the last, by any means.

____

1. When Enoch was taken into heaven God enthroned him, “set a crown upon his head in the presence of the heavenly family and called him the little lord....his body was turned into celestial fire--his flesh became flame, his veins fire, his bones glimmering coals, the light of his eyes heavenly brightness, his eyeballs torches of fire, his hair a flaring blaze, all his limbs and organs burning sparks, and his frame a consuming fire.” See Louis Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews (online at http://philologos.org).

2. Notable among the ‘early Christology’ scholars (who rattle both the cage of conventional orthodoxy and minimalist interpretations) are: Richard Bauckham, God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament; Margaret Barker, The Great Angel: A Study of Israel’s Second God; The Great High Priest: The Temple Roots of Christian Liturgy; and The Risen Lord: The Jesus of History as the Christ of Faith; Larry Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism.

First Blood

2011-12-26T21:40:00.006-05:00

Reflections for the Twelve Days of Christmas 1

The white joy of Christmas turns blood red on the First Day after Christmas as the Christian movement remembers its first martyr, Stephen the Deacon. His death at the hands of an enraged mob marks the beginning of wrestling match between the movement Jesus inaugurated with the harsh realities of history—the first, that is, since the Master’s similar death.

The brash young man—surely he was young, being so impetuous—had been chosen to handle the distribution of food among elderly, widowed women in the burgeoning Jerusalem commune created by the people of the Way of Jesus while the men of the commune’s Council—the Twelve—took care of presenting the Message.

But Stephen just couldn’t stick to his assignment and began to debate critics of the movement. One thing led to another and he found himself “speaking truth to power” in a way sure to offend — and was summarily slaughtered by a enraged mob of Judeans not happy to be dubbed, along with their ancestors, the enemies of God’s purposes.

The first blood of the movement had been shed—after the blood of the Instigator. The first blood was followed by more as “a great persecution arose” against the Commune, leading to its dispersal to smaller towns in Judea, Samaria, Galilee and beyond.

Jesus: Movement Initiator

It’s fashionable in many liberal circles to say that Jesus didn’t start a church; but one of the things I think we can be quite certain of historically is that he instigated a movement.

The Jesus movement (according to its own records) was organized enough after his death to receive thousands of new members into its charitable programs. Organized, as in ruling council, codes of conduct, ceremonial meals, financial folks, the whole ball of wax—apparently like other Second Temple era anti-establishment movements, like the Community of the Scrolls at Qumran.

It might be nice to dis-identify Jesus with his movement; indeed, it is one of the most popular themes of some liberal religious scholarship and fantasy—a Jesus free from all that the movement, a.k.a. “the church,” has become in history. Some Christians scholars are have alleged that even the Gospels don’t represent Jesus, but are full of the mis-impressions of his followers and their converts. The “real” Jesus was so much better than that terrible movement, it would seem.

A bit too convenient, this fashion; for it allows the whole idea of Jesus to float in some non-historical hyperspace, vulnerable to fashioning in the image of the beholder. As unromantic as it may seem, the institutionalization of the message of Jesus is actually part and parcel of what Christians call “incarnation” — for institutions are the bodies that ideas wear in history. The message of Jesus had to become institutionally incarnate, or it would just be a set of glittering ideals.

The Challenge of Historical Incarnation

The difficulty the Christian movement has had living into the full implications of what he said simply shows how hard it is for souped-up primates like us to see any further than our own immediate interests. The “failures of the churches” are an inevitable part of any movement that hopes to have an influence on history. Movements always need reforming, refreshing, restoring to a rooting in their original goals. Or else they’re not worth living for.

Or dying for, as so many thousands have through the centuries. The early community Stephen served had its own flaws, and would develop many more. But Stephen had been captivated by the message—Jesus’ vision of what human community could be—and for it he risked his life. In so doing he demonstrated that the lovely birth we celebrate had real-life consequences for Jesus and anyone willing to sign on to his own crazy, daring hope: that humanity might actually turn back from its foolish ways and choose love over hate, peace over war, and justice over oppression. The sort of thing that might just save us from bringing the whole planetary house down around us.

Advent and the Exile of God 4

2010-12-24T10:22:00.004-05:00

Jury-Rigging Judgment

What is to become of a culture in which more and more people feel that no one has the right to judge their actions but themselves?

Forty years ago, the great psychologist Rollo May sounded a warning about “the diminishment of the ‘conjunctive’ emotions‘ — our sense of connection with each other. A decade later, the sociologist Rollo May worried that the “language of social obligation” was being replaced by the “rhetoric of individual satisfaction.” If we lose the discourse of obligation and duty, he wondered, what will happen to our moral sensibility?

Judging ourselves?

One answer came recently in a class I co-led about Jesus and Muhammad. My Muslim colleague described the Day of Judgment as a time when each person reads the angelic record of all their deeds before the throne of God. Some participants liked this idea because it suggested to them that “we judge ourselves.” Hardly what the Imam or the Qu’ran meant—or the Bible, or the Egyptian Book of the Dead or the eastern idea of karma. There are real consequences to deeds, both here and hereafter, this ancient wisdom says, that have little regard for our own self-evaluations.

The simple truth is that rash or unwise actions usually result in very real kick-backs. Ignorant or mistaken policies, personal or political, threaten the web of personal or social relationships and we are likely to pay dearly for them. There really is a There there, outside the hot-house machinations of our own minds.

For example, judgment will delivered—already happening, I believe—for our continued pollution of the waters and our carbon-laden exacerbation of global climate change. The rising global temperatures care not a fig for the opinions of the deniers and industrial obstructionists.

Up against the real edges of the world

You don’t have to believe in a final Day of Judgment with fire and brimstone and eternal torture for the “E” students to recognize that days of judgment arrive quite regularly. Yet in more and more of our churches even the language of judgment is considered, well, “too judgmental.”

Which means that there is, indeed, a Reality that ‘judges’ us through the consequences of our actions. By jury-rigging judgment into a solely personal and private affair, we fly in the face of even the most ordinary common sense. Has our culture’s sense of individual importance and independence gone delusional?

Oh yes, I know most people realize they are accountable to the police, or their boss—even to their families. But the overarching narrative seems to be that ultimately we are accountable only to ourselves; a sort of Ultimate Libertarianism.

What does this have to do with God?

So, I ask, is this every-person-their-own-judge bit yet another part of the many non-theological reasons for the eclipse of God in so much modern experience? This habit of thinking, even wanting, only ourselves, ultimately, looking over our own shoulders to see how we’re doing?

The Babe of Bethlehem, the Christians say, was born to be our judge as well as our savior. He, it is claimed, embodies the eternal cosmic patterns that uphold life itself. Perhaps, if we look deeply enough into his eyes, we can see the whole fabric of earth and all its creatures, and our own lives as an inseparable part of it—a fabric that calls us to accountability every day.

This is the final post in the “Advent and the Eclipse of God” series. I hope to begin a “O Magnum Mysterium: God Unveiled Among Us” series during the 12 Days of Christmas.

Advent and the Eclipse of God 3

2010-12-19T20:55:00.008-05:00

Silencing Silence

For while peaceful silence enwrapped all things, Thine all-powerful word leaped from heaven, down from the royal throne... —Traditional antiphon for Christmas

Sometimes, in the midst of a 24-hour silent retreat, it’s as if I can “hear” the silence. No longer the absence of noise, the silence—especially when it’s with a group of people sharing it—begins to feel full, pregnant, on the verge of disclosing something important.

The haunting cry of a bird rises and falls, as if out of a vast silent music or one hears footsteps coming down the hall that would be missed in the midst of chatter. And inwardly, the hidden and layers of heart and soul are more likely to surface.

An avalanche of sound

Our culture has been in full flight from such silences for two or three generations now. Most pre-industial folk lived without the onslaught of constant sound. They regularly walked beaten paths to wells without bluetooth receivers in their ears; weeded crop fields without I-pods shooting music straight into their brains; spent evening after evening on the porch listening to the insect and animal sounds of the unfolding night or by the winter fire without the benefit of radio or TV.

There was more space to hear their own inner music, more time to savor the sounds of the natural world, more chances to “ponder in their heart,” like Mary, important events, meanings, hopes and dreams. More time to listen to the soul.

A good friend and colleague, who spent fourteen years training to be a Jesuit before he decided to leave the order told me recently how important the long hours of communal and solitary silence had been for his formation as a young man. “I became really aware of my inner life for the first time; my moods, my deeper ponderings.” The pre-Vatican II Jesuits “got a lot wrong, but they got the Silence right.”

The gifts of silence

Silence can startle us into awe, an awe the fear of silence keeps at bay. The college-age daughter of another friend spent months as a volunteer way out in the vast savannas of Africa. A decade ago, the remote countryside was free of our kind of noise, beyond all media, mostly beyond air lanes. The vastness of the sky, the spaciousness of the land, but most of all the silence at first intimidated her, and then drew her into its power. She found it, quite precisely, awesome. It touched the hard-wired chords in us that psychologists call the numinous, the sense of sacredness. The silence became both background and constant companion.

In the overwhelming presence of nature’s basal background silence, she found that primal human sense of being both utterly dwarfed by the vast aliveness of the world and also somewhat safely-slotted into her proper species-niche. Her busy little human mind slowed down, and her thoughts emerged from an inner silence just like the call of a bird arising.

Numinosity numbed?

So, I ask, is this naturally-arising sense of the numinous, of the presence of that which makes the heart expand in awe and wonder—of God—eclipsed by our cluttered chatter-clatter-crash-bang silence-free way of life? Music is good; conversation great; cinema enriching. But, without silence, do these pull a veil in our brains our deeper responses to the beauty of the natural world, and filter out the deeper voices of the soul?

And if divinity wished to speak, how could we possibly hear the Voice amidst the din?

This is the third in an Advent series exploring some of the cultural, non-theological reasons for the eclipse of the experience of God for so many in 'advanced' societies.

Advent and the Eclipse of God 2

2010-12-05T21:38:00.008-05:00

Banishing Soul

When I entered the furniture shop on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village that Advent afternoon, I didn’t expect to end up touching soul.

Nonetheless, as I ran my fingers along the lovingly fashioned oak armchair that had caught my eye in the window, the chair had a hint of ‘thou’ in it. I had stumbled into a store where everything I saw and touched was full of the soul of the person who made it. Like Michaelangelo evoking the statue out of the rock, the artisan had brought forth this creation from trees.

How did I know this? Ray Charles says that “soul is like electricity—but it’s a force that can light up a room.” I had just been in a shop with a mixture of machine-made and hand-crafted artifacts, and the difference between the two was like that between dullness and light. The machine-made birds and turtles and dogs were tangibly less alive than those that had been cradled and carved by human hands. They had soul.

Soul, not "a soul"

Soul is a quality of being, not some separate add-on—a dimension of reality that connects with the mysterious aliveness in what we encounter and creates a transformative encounter. This furniture touched me, enlivened me, quickened a sense of reverence for the living intelligence that crafted it and lingered in it.

So I ask: is the fact that we are so surrounded with machine-made stuff, rather than hand-crafted artifacts one of the many non-theological reasons for the eclipse of a lively sense of God in our world? Our forebears, after all, were surrounded by soul-saturated items: grandmother’s sampler on the wall, grandfather’s rocking chair in the corner, the local potter’s bowls and cups in the cupboard, mother’s hand-sewn clothes on their backs. Has the plethora of machine-made goods subtly helped to banish the subtlety of soul from our immediate environment?

Michaelangelo, a man “given as prey for burning beauty to devour” as he describes it, not only brought forth the figure out of the stone but infused the very stone with himself. Just compare the many copies of The David with the original — or rather realize that there is simply no comparison. The original is alive in an uncanny way. It has soul.

Embrace: an angle of vision

We have described aspects of the world in astonishing ways with our science, but, as Martin Buber tells us, the world can only be known by embracing it with our whole soul. This begins, he says, only by “embracing one of its beings” and sensing the ‘thou.’

Is the modernized soul starving in the midst of plenty by so much “it” and so little “thou” in its environs? And is that one of the many life-style reasons it’s hard for so many to have a sense of immediate contact with an all-pervasive Thou? The soul of the world, alive around us and in us is available to those subtle senses that know soul when we see it and are touched by it.

Is this the necessary state of mind, the required angle of embrace, in which to sense that world-embracing Aliveness so many through the ages have called “God”?

This is the second in a series of five or six Advent postings exploring some of the non-theological factors for the eclipse of God in ‘advanced’ societies, as well as presenting Christ as symbol and embodiment of deliverance from this state.

Advent and the Eclipse of God

2010-11-28T17:25:00.014-05:00

1. Exiling the Stars

Just a few weeks ago, on a crisp Maine night, I saw the vast panoply of the sky again after living for many years without the sense of awe it always inspires. Where I live, the night sky is eclipsed by the haze of urban light pollution, so that only the most intense stars are able to assert themselves.

We humans have expanded without limit. There are too many of us here; besides that, our momentous busyness needs the perpetual blare of man-made light. The night sky seems to us such a small thing to forfeit, to forget.

But that night, as if for the first time, I noted again the almost three-dimensional impression which is created by the brightest stars, which seem to stand out boldly in front of the velvet-black depths of space, so close in their sparkle it almost seems as if one might touch them.

Cosmic Awe

I didn’t choose to feel awe; it thrust itself upon me, standing out there in the chilly night, mouth literally agape at the gauzy stretch of the Milky Way as it marches across the sky. Once again, I was so small, so utterly insignificant in the vastness of the universe, but at the same moment belonged profoundly to it all—exactly what Albert Einstein called “cosmic religious feeling.”

Is it a pure coincidence that atheism is most prevalent where the full panoply of the night sky cannot be seen? Does such disbelief arise more from disenchantment with ancient dogma or from a host of non-theological factors—like the banishment of the night sky?

We are a species hard-wired for awe, and perhaps without it the soul—our deepest self—shrivels, leaving only that little segment of the brain we call “rationality” stranded, high and dry, like a small island perpetually overrun by a shopping mall. Now I don’t imagine that the night sky is some simplistic proof of the existence of God, but I do recognize that something in me goes to sleep when I don’t see the gossamer trail of the Milky Way at night.

Self-imposed Exile?

One of the traditional Advent themes is Exile: O come, o come Immanuel, and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lowly exile here. The holy Story tells us we “fell” from Paradise into an exile not only from God but from the very “face” of the creation itself. (See Genesis 2-4)

How many are the ways, I wondered, that our lifestyle itself—our distraction-saturated, muzak-charged, craving-driven lifestyle—eclipses what Gerard Manley Hopkins called the “dearest freshness deep down things” and exiles us from the astonishing thereness of a world charged with awe? Our ransom from this exile is, I suspect, as close as the night sky.

If we could but see it.

To follow: In a series of five or six Advent postings I plan to explore some of the non-theological factors for the eclipse of God in ‘advanced’ societies, as well as Christ as the symbol and embodiment of deliverance from this world-alienated state.

Doesn’t the flag belong to all of us?

2010-07-05T11:57:00.018-04:00

“I hate patriotic hymns,” one of my Facebook friends wrote after I had posted some verses from my favorite national hymn, “America the Beautiful.”

I get this kind of stuff more than I like from some of my fellow liberal and progressive colleagues, and it bothers me a lot. While I don’t start my days singing “My country ‘tis of thee” or fly the flag on a front yard flagpole, I do hang one of my three flags out on major national holidays, and my wife will tell you I can get misty-eyed singing a great many patriotic songs. I’m not ashamed to admit that I am an American patriot — a left-of-center, internationally-oriented, multi-culture-loving patriot, as ready to promote my country’s highest ideals as I am to challenge us all about its failures and mistakes.

So it bothers me a lot when somebody like this FB friend—whom I know as a Christian concerned about social justice and such things—”hates” patriotic hymns. Does she really think her sense of “all are created equal” and her desire for “liberty and justice for all” just sprang naturally into her brain out of nowhere, or is solely derived from her reading of the Bible? Or has she, like too many others, let the Right steal the Flag and all those songs?

Who flies the Flag?

To give another example: at a neighborhood block party a couple of years back, a gaggle of my fellow Democrat-voting neighbors were hashing over the coming election when our lone, and very vocal, right-wing neighbor overheard the conversation. “Well,” she huffed, “you can tell who the real patriots are in this neighborhood. Just look at who does and doesn’t show the Flag.” She stalked off, and they all harrumphed. Fly the Flag? “I wouldn’t ‘fly the Flag,’” one of them said. “I don’t like what it stands for.”

At that point I couldn’t keep silent. “Do you really mean that you’re going to let one political opinion own the American flag?”

“Well,” came the defensive response, “I don’t like that kind of patriotism.”

“So the Flag only stands for ‘that kind of patriotism‘ does it?” I countered. “I thought it stood for the nation and its values—that it belonged to all of us. Aren’t liberal values as ‘American’ as conservative ones? Do you really want the Flag and all it stands for to become the property of an increasingly mind-shackled Right?”

To my leftist-leaning neighbor’s credit, he went home, ordered a flag (even bigger than his conservative neighbor’s) and hung it proudly on his front porch. A symbolic gesture, but an important one; and, I hope, the sign of a change of heart.

A Confession

Full disclosure: I am a repentant Europhile. In my youth, I was swept up in an idealistic longing for something better than “plain-folks,” no-nonsense Midwestern and Southern roots of my family and community. Something more cultivated, cultured, civilized, more communitarian and just.....more....European (as I saw it). While I thrilled at the emergent civil rights movement, and did what I could to support it, as well as the anti-war movement that followed it, my focus was on all that was unfair, unjust and unrefined in American life. I relished the language of the Hebrew prophets as they thundered against the sins of ancient Israel, and easily translated that language into my own dark judgments about my own country.

And then one day, reading Jeremiah, my favorite Denouncer, I had an epiphany: Jeremiah was in such agony over his country because he loved it. He cared about ancient Israel and its people. He cared about the self-injury they were suffering by not living into a fuller realization of God’s call to make their land a haven of justice, compassion and peace. And I realized that as a citizen, a teacher and (by then) a priest and public leader, I could not presume to be “prophetic” if it did not come from a heart of love for the country I wanted to challenge to live up to its stated ideals.

So I renounced my “grass is greener on the other side” Europhilia and embraced my own national heritage. I re-read American history, became newly acquainted with the Founders, learned, over the years, more and more about all that is good, as well as sorrow-making, in this nation’s history. All that the Flag stands for.

Patriotism doesn't have to be prejudice

Patriotism, to me, doesn’t mean “my nation right or wrong.” It doesn't mean refusing to criticize your nation when it fails its own ideals (as in the wholesale internment of Japanese-American citizens in WWII). It doesn’t even mean “We’re number One” or “the Best.” It doesn't mean childishly looking down on others to bolster our national ego.

But we are what we are, and love of country means embracing what we are, the good as well as the bad. We are the first nation on earth to be founded, from Day One, on a national creed that aspires to treat everyone equally before the law, to be a haven of “liberty and justice for all.” We were founded, constitutionally, to allow and encourage freedom of religion and the pursuit of personal dreams and ambitions. And, again and again, leaders and movements have stretched and expanded our understanding of what the original Creed means. And that progress goes on, steps forward and back, but still persists in a gradually forward direction.

And progressives, most of all, shouldn't let patriotic loyalty be co-opted solely by the folks who think America is God's current chosen vehicle to impose our version of life on the rest of the world. The Flag, and all (well, most) of those patriotic songs belong to all U.S. citizens.

In our own day, it’s vitally important for this nation, with all its resources and values, to take its place as an important partner with other nations—one among many—in dealing with the daunting challenges facing the human race as we enter fully into what must be a truly global and planetary era. But we’ll never do that by denying the best of what we have to offer as a partner—or refusing to demand that we work toward implementing our vision of justice and fairness, most especially on our own shores.

So, no, I don’t hate patriotic songs, which belong to all of us, especially not ones that soar like this:

America! America!
God mend thine ev'ry flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law.

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam
Undimmed by human tears.

The 4th of July, with its fireworks and patriotic songs is past. Back to the task of living into the best of what it means to be Americans.

P.S. Please remember to vote for what you care about in the mid-term elections. Congressional elections matter, and patriotism is about more than songs.

The Wounded God 6: The Cloud of Glory and Jesus' Ascension

2010-05-16T21:33:00.016-04:00

That cloud—the one that “hid Jesus from their sight”—I’ve never thought that was really one of the white fleecy ones we see in the sky. Rather it was the Cloud, a cloud of Glory, like the dazzling radiance that shone from Christ when he was transfigured, becoming a cloud which enveloped the trembling eyewitnesses who were “afraid when they entered the cloud.” Such a marvelous cloud symbolizes and embodies the nearer presence of the Divine glory itself.

The Bible isn’t quite so literalistic as many folks think. Luke knows the symbol-code when he tells his tale the climactic end of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances. He knows that in the saga of Israel in the wilderness a cloud of glory settled, again and again, over and around the Tent of Meeting when Moses entered to converse with God “face to face.” As it did again when Solomon dedicated the Temple. Not that this Cloud is mere metaphor. Rather, “cloud” is an ecstatic utterance Biblical writers use for the actual feel of the divine Presence, at least in one of its aspects. Ancient Jewish storytelling even traces that Cloud back to the beginning of creation, interpreting the “mist” in Eden as Holy Wisdom, the immanent presence of God.

Entering into the Cloud

I sometimes wonder if I was touched by the outer edge of that Glory one night decades ago at a huge Pentecostal gathering in New York. The worship leaders were good at using devotional hymns and choruses to woo the huge crowd into a state of deeply felt devotion—a skilled liturgy of soul-opening, not the frenetic hype of some pentecostal worship. As we sang on, waves of ecstasy moved through the crowd like Wind was blowing through a field of wheat. Bathed in a cloud of radiant energy, there was a sense of a great Vastness opening above us and around us.

Since then that Cloud has crossed my path on more than one special occasion—at a (quite literal) mountaintop Eucharist with three hundred Episcopal college students doing Taize-like chanting, at a conference of Lutheran clergy on a week-long retreat reciting the many different names of God, in a quiet meditative prayer group which suddenly found itself plunged into the “silence of Eternity” — even at a rather secular 60s “encounter group.” The trust in that group had reached such a deep level that, with just one specially penetrating comment, a great, timeless Silence descended upon us all like a mantle, a vast cloud full of peace, joy and love.

So, when the Bible talks about that Cloud, my inner ears perk up, and I feel once more the writers were not just making things up, but trying their best to convey the feel of an encounter.

He “withdrew from them into heaven”

In those “clouds” that surrounded the groups I was in, there was not only “aroundness” but “aboveness.” The atmosphere “descended:” as if from above. That was the sensation: as if the ceiling disappeared—just as, in Scripture, God descends "from above.” And, in the story of Jesus’ exaltation to the “right hand of God,” the narrative says he went “into heaven,” and pictures the disciples “looking up.”

I know that, for the Biblical writers, this was not just a symbolic code, but science, too. The ancient world believed that the realm of God or the gods was “up,” on mountain tops, or in the highest heavens. This was not only the religious, but scientific model of the universe: seven or more rotating, crystalline spheres containing ascending realms of spiritual purity.

But I’m reluctant simply to relegate the Biblical narrative of Jesus' ascension to the realm of “ancient ideas” just because we now know that the architecture of the universe is different from the ancient science. I resist because of my experience of The Cloud, with its felt sense of vastness. And I wonder if, science to the contrary notwithstanding, there isn’t something true in the world-wide human experience of God being “above” (as well as “within” and “around”) — something that arises out of this felt sense of the world.

The "gravitational pull from above"

Since there is something so “uplifting” about that Presence, as if some magnetic energy is stretching us to our full height of soul and spirit, it’s not surprising that they think of the Source as being “up” and “above.” They symbolize It as the all-embracing sky, that cosmic Vastness which comes all the way down to the horizon and touches earth in an all-embracing circle. In her book on Christian mystical wisdom, Cynthia Bourgeault calls this felt sense of encompassing, stretching grace “a gravitational pull from above.” (The Wisdom Way of Knowing: Reclaiming an Ancient Tradition to Awaken the Heart)

In the light of all this, here’s my version of the Ascension: Each time the risen Christ appeared to his disciples, he was more and more surrounded by that atmosphere of enlivening calm, joy, and love until one day he “withdrew from them” as Luke puts it, entirely into the Cloud, into God, “ascending” finally into the heart of God, becoming a universal presence, a major bass theme in the music of God’s presence in the world. "He ascended far above all heavens that he might fill all things," as Paul puts it (Ephesians 4:10).

But, of course, human beings cannot remain forever wrapped in such clouds, “looking up” into such foretastes of the nearer presence of God. There’s work to be done, from taking out of the garbage, to raising children, to the healing, repair and building of a world continually damaged and deformed by what human beings do when they are devoid of the love that fills that Cloud.

Watercolor above: "Glad Day" by William Blake

Next week: Who gets to share in holy Spirit?

The Wounded God 5: What is this mysterious body?

2010-05-07T23:24:00.024-04:00

Why are you troubled?
And why do doubts arise
in your hearts?
Behold My hands and My feet,
that it is I Myself.
Handle Me and see, for a spirit
does not have flesh and bones
as you see I have.”
—Luke 24:38-39

What is this mysterious body that bears the reality of the risen Christ? As the stories tell it, Jesus appears but is not recognized until their “eyes are opened.” He is suddenly “in their midst” even though the doors are bolted. He can disappear in the blink of an eye, but is real enough to be touched and even make a fire and prepare breakfast. Most importantly, his presence seems at once as real as flesh while being “living breath:” The first man Adam became a living being, but last Adam became life-giving breath (1 Corinthians 15:45)

The stories bear witness to something beyond ordinary human experience, but perhaps our own experience of the body can give us some clues to the mystery of the resurrection. On the simplest physical level, bodies display astonishing abilities we take for granted: self-repair, transformation of food into vitalizing energy, complex and fine-tuned physical performance, and the bio-electrical generation of a measurable energy field.

More than just flesh....

But human beings, throughout the ages, have experienced their bodies not just as flesh and bone, but also “temples of spirit.” Bodies shine with the ineffable but unmistakable reality of presence. There are persons whose presence fills the room when their body enters, radiating joy or enthusiasm, anger or depression. And everyone knows what it feels like when someone “turns you off”, even if the body is right there in front of you. Something subtle is withdrawn.

Certain people seem filled with such bountiful energy that they lift your spirits without touching you, or can send a veritable flow of warmth like a current through your body through their hands. Others are such a deep hole of neediness they can drain you of energy just by being nearby. And most of us know what it's like to feel someone’s eyes on us, even if we have to turn around to find out who is staring at us.

We hardly have a vocabulary for these unmistakable, but subtle realities, and fall back on “as if” language: “it was as if she lit up the whole room.” Perhaps we ought to risk dropping the “as if.”

After all there are hundreds and thousands (most likely tens of thousands and more) who will swear to you they can, on occasion, see bodies shining with light, just like the holy pictures of saints with halos in many traditions. Not only that, you can attend any number of workshops around the nation that will teach you how to see these “auras” (in spite of the skepticism of the majority of folks who have never investigated the phenomenon).

Then there are the stories of the liminal dimensions of flesh from all around the world: the bodies of Hindu holy men and Christian saints which do not decay after death, emitting the faint odor of roses; the rare Tibetan Buddhist lamas (in our own times) who, when dying, seem transformed into a rainbow of light; the Indian avatars, like the 19th century saint Sri Ramakrishna, who are literally transfigured before the astonished eyes of thousands of people and shine “with the light of the noonday sun” (as we are told Jesus did on a certain mountain top).

I know a priest who saw a radiantly shining monk in Massachusetts back in the 60s. And consider the eyewitness testimony of Motovilov, a disciple of the 19th century staretz Seraphim of Sarov. "It was as if my eyes had been opened, for I saw that the face of the elder was brighter than the sun. In my heart I felt joy and peace, in my body a warmth as if it were summer, and a fragrance began to spread around us." When the disciple confessed his astonished reaction, the saint responded, "Do not fear, dear fellow. You would not even be able to see me if you yourself were not in the fullness of the Holy Spirit. Thank the Lord for His mercy toward us." (See St. Seraphim of Sarov by Valentine Zander)

Stretching our experiential boundaries

Why then (bodies being so mysterious) should we find the stories of Jesus’ transfigured and transformed Presence—so real it could be touched—incredible, as so many modern Christians do? I remember well my seminary New Testament professor making fun of St. Paul’s “baffling attempt” to explain “spiritual bodies” in 1 Corinthians 15. It was all based on “strange ancient beliefs” he found “unintelligible.” He preferred, as do most modernists, some sort of “spiritual illumination” to the vivid realism of the gospel narratives.

Having already been introduced to some of the world-wide lore about the spiritual dimensions of the flesh, I was uncomfortable with his modernist scorn 47 years ago. Today I’d suggest he follow a reading program in comparative mysticism and find a real Hindu yoga teacher who could explain to him the yoga tradition’s actual experience of the multi-layered “subtle bodies” that make up the human reality.

I had my own surprised experience of these subtle dimensions once during a three-year series of Polarity Therapy treatments—a combination of acupressure and “energy balancing.” The gentle acupressure touches set of a palpable flow of energy along the “energy meridians” described by Chinese medicine. All of a sudden I “saw” very clearly a column of intense white light running from head to foot through the center of my flesh. The experience lasted for ten minutes or more, filling my body with a sweet warmth and a kind of cleansing “breath.” "What is this?" I asked the therapist. “Oh,” she said off-handedly (using the language of her tradition's energy map) “that’s just your etheric body.”

Call it my imagination if you will. I’ll be more inclined to take you seriously after you’ve had three years of these treatments yourself, or really studied the world testimony to the higher capacities of the body.

The challenge of the stories

My faith doesn’t stand or fall on such experiences, nor on the every literal detail of the biblical Resurrection stories. I doubt they are exact videotape versions of what happened. But I do think they seek faithfully to put into narrative form an Encounter that contains, but far transcends, what we experience at the luminous edges of our fleshly existence. Jesus, whose body had already shown many subtle powers in his lifetime, had crossed a threshold into the spiritual dimensions of human existence and appeared to his beloved community in what Christians have called his "glorified body".

And the stories challenge us to wake up to the miracle of our own embodied existence, where flesh and bone already shine, at times, with the light that will be our sum and substance after we are "changed into his likeness from one degree of glory to another." (2 Corinthians 3:18)

Maybe it's something like that column of white light I saw, and believe is still there in the deeper dimensions of my own flesh—and yours.

Next week: Resurrection Now

The Wounded God 4: Was it all “finished” on the cross?

2010-04-29T19:51:00.036-04:00

They thought it was finished—and that they were finished with it: “We had hoped that he would be the one to redeem Israel.”

But he was dead, and the glorious mission seemed over. Then, through appearance and visitation, through illumination and encounter, they came to realize it had only begun. Their own involvement in the redemption of the world, that is; for it became clear this startlingly alive, transformed and enduring Presence was not going to accomplish it without their active participation: “As the Father has sent me, so send I you.” (John 20:21)

One wonders how they felt about that. The gospels, of course, present a picture of astonished joy, and surely that was the main reaction. But there are also indications of continuing uncertainty and doubt. We even find the apostles (hiding out?) in Galilee even after receiving Christ's risen “peace be with you” greeting with its commission to “remit sins.” And what are they doing? “I go a-fishing,” Simon Peter declares, and they all hit the boats. (John 21) What’s that about? Possible yearnings to go back to the familiar life they had left behind to follow him on this wild-goose-chase of Messianic hopes?

Not your ancestors' Messiah

So consider this possibility: Jesus had dismayed them by getting himself killed while they had stubbornly, against all warnings, still believed he would give them plum positions in a new government. (Mark 10:36-38) Then he surprised them by reclaiming their lives after his death. By being crucified, he had re-defined the meaning of “Messiah” in the most wrenching way: the one who was supposed to be the great Rescuer had not performed the expected rescue. Indeed, the heart of the meaning of a crucified Messiah is that God is not, primarily, a rescuer. Redemption doesn’t work that way.

Of course they had been challenged to accept this all through his ministry. According to the gospels they just refused to absorb fully what he showed them. From the beginning he made them his partners, trained them, sent them out in the power of the Spirit to share in his work. On the way to the Holy City, while they vied for those governmental positions, he asked them if they were willing to undergo his “baptism” — persistence to the kingdom vision even at the cost of life.

So now, underneath the joy and excitement, there’s maybe the final shock that, after all, the world isn’t going to be miraculously saved from its reckless and destructive ways, souls aren’t going to be brought from darkness to light, without a commitment from them that will cost them (as T.S. Eliot puts it) “nothing less than everything.”

Who wouldn’t be tempted to return to the fishing business? But there he is, a mysterious figure on the shore at dawn, asking them about their catch, and hosting yet another meal, challenging them to shoulder the task yet once again: “The works that I do you will do, and even greater works than these." (John 14:12)

The suffering of Christ is not yet complete

The resurrection challenge to them is to shoulder his task and take their place in the drama of God's own soul-and-world redemption. “As he is, so are we in the world.” (1 John 4:17)The joyful parts of this will be healing the sick and building compassionate community. The risky and possibly sorrowful parts will involve challenging the power-structures of evil in the world and their vicious kick-back, as Jesus did. The johnny-come-lately apostle Paul puts it this way: "...in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions." (Colossians 1:24)

Something "lacking in Christ's afflictions”? Paul's statement, taken at face value (and how else could we take it?), would be considered the rankest heresy in many conservative Christian circles. A wide swath of Christian teaching speaks of the “finished work of Christ upon the cross” and hymns proclaim that “Jesus did it all.” All we’ve got to do is accept Christ’s “finished work” by faith, and —behold!— forgiveness of sins, eternal life are ours.

Nonetheless, there it is, along with all Jesus’ acts of initiating his followers into his work, Paul’s bold statement that he is a “co-worker” with God (1 Corinthians 3:9) and his mystical perception that Christ dwells, quite literally, in the heart of the believer, working together with us for good in a difficult world that needs repair, rebuilding and redemption from its evil possibilities.

I don’t mean at all to deny that Cross and Resurrection are cosmically decisive events. I accept completely that Christ was "delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification" (1 Corinthians 15:3), and the whole apostolic proclamation that if we enter into the mystery of Jesus’ dying and rising our whole relationship to God is realigned. But to believe “Jesus did it all” and we just "accept it by faith" is to miss the very meaning of the wrenching re-definition of Messiah as the Crucified One, the embodiment of the Wounded-yet-persistent-God. We must make up "what is lacking....”

The resurrection challenge: participation in Christ

The name of this process is participation. God doesn’t save the world alone, and we certainly can’t do it alone. We are co-operators, synergoi as Paul puts it, literally “co-energizers.” (! Corinthians 3:9)

The “kingdom does not come by observation” (Luke 17:20) but by gradual processes like plant growth and bread rising. In Christ, God has united human nature itself with Divine nature so that the divine Spirit works “by, with, and under” human effort. The cross is sign and seal of God's perpetual entry into all human difficulty and suffering, of God's taking it all into his heart to open every circumstance to the air and light of the Spirit.

The beloved spiritual “He’s got the whole world/ in his hands,” comforting as it is, is only half true. The missing verse is “He gave the whole world/ into our hands,” as Genesis 1 so clearly tells us. Fortunately, even larger swaths of Christian thought from Patristic days onward have realized that participation is key.

Continued resistance to the challenge

But, as the New Testament seems to indicate, not everyone got the message. Some voices in the apostolic literature still imagine the Eschaton, the “restoration of all things” is just around the corner, just as some sectors of Christianity, continue to gaze longingly at the clouds, fervently expecting the return of Jesus now, in this generation, in spite of the repeated failure of the outside Rescuer to appear. Christ is the revelation and enactment of a Pattern, the sign of how grace works to bring good out of evil and work redemption even in the midst of tragedy. And that Pattern reappears again and again in lives and situations, redeeming to world.

The risen Christ, finding habitation in hearts and lives that welcome him, remains ready to take our mistakes and tragedies into his wounded hands and begins weaving them into larger patterns where healing and good emerge in ways small and large—

—if we participate lovingly and trustingly in the Pattern of the Wounded One who persists in embracing the world whole and entire: beauty, goodness, and tragic failings alike.

Graphic: Marc Chagall's White Crucifixion

Next week: The glorified Body and our flesh

The Wounded God 3: “He broke the bars of the prison”

2010-04-20T14:10:00.011-04:00

Whatever else happened to those ardent but bewildered disciples during the resurrection appearances of Jesus, the transformed Presence of the Man they had known was real to them—unmistakably familiar, palpably convincing. “We have seen the Lord,” they say. And by that they mean, among other things, that the same soul-liberating power they had experienced around him in the days of his flesh had returned in an unmistakably familiar but transformed mode.

What was this unmistakable Presence like? The stories speak of a suffusive breath of Spirit that brought joy, forgiveness, and peace to men and women wallowing in despair and self-loathing; of a series of Illuminations that broke the fetters of their limited understanding of the meaning of Jesus’ life; and of the spiritual Fire that burned away illusion and opened new doorways to the future.

“We have seen the Lord,” yes; “but now we see him—and ourselves—quite differently.” The Jesus of their past memory—and their own memory of themselves—is now set into the radiant spaciousness of God’s compassionate mind and expansive purposes. They go forth with the message that the “mind of Christ,” the all-pervasive Spirit of God, is available to all who will access it to liberate humanity from the powers of sin and death which underlie and support all the oppressive systems of this world’s life.

A Presence that "takes away the sin of the world"

“Christians believe that they can still meet this human being,” the historian Diarmaid McColloch says, in ways not unlike “the experience of the disciples....They are convinced this meeting transforms lives, as has been evident in the experience of other Christians across the centuries.” (Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years). I would add that this experience of the divine power that was in Jesus is not limited to Christians, but appears in other guises and other names. As Jesus says “I have other sheep who are not of this fold.” (John 10:16)

I’ve seen this Presence at work often. I remember sitting in an Adult Children of Alcoholics (ACOA) meeting for the first time and being amazed at the palpable atmosphere of compassion in the room as people shared a variety of frustrating experiences, painful wounds from the past, and scary challenges. As each difficult situation was shared, no one offered “helpful advice” or burbled “O poor baby.”

The receptivity of the Silence was profound. Every word and feeling was taken into a cleansing, loving, accepting atmosphere that welcomed and embraced both the words and the soul that uttered them. The sense of empathy, of interconnection deepened. Hearing so much pain was not depressing, because the spirit—and Spirit—in the room was not only healing but oddly invigorating. As I left the meeting, I realized I had been experiencing the "sin of the world" being "taken away" that the New Testament speaks of. The power of the past to hold us in its grip was being broken by sharing, confession, and welcome into a larger space that imparted a sense of connection with others, a sense that life is bigger than the wounds, and a Love that poured through, not just from, the group.

Witness from treating trauma

My brother-in-law, an M.D. with training in “Somatic Experiencing” a disciple that addresses the psychological dimensions of trauma, sees in this a parallel to his work with trauma victims. “In trauma, whether physical or psychological” David says, “too much happens too quickly. Neither psyche nor body can cope, and everything gets compacted in a dense, painful, interlocking mass. Whatever reminds you of the trauma sets this compacted mass off again. You’re stuck inside the prison of the memory, which leads to all kinds of avoidance behavior.”

What can unlock this prison? All the “sympathy” in the world won’t do it, and standard talk therapy runs the risk of simply re-traumatizing the patient by hauling up memories that he can’t cope with. David’s complementary medical method involves a form of Vipassana meditation—a way of simply being fully present to your experience, and welcoming whatever occurs or comes up from within. Through focus on relaxation, breathing, and centered focus (the ABCs of meditation), with the presence and guidance of a compassionate guide to support and reassure, bits and pieces of the traumatic memory unfold themselves at their own pace, piecemeal, without being forced. “The psyche knows how to heal itself, given breathing room, and surrounded by an atmosphere of compassionate receptivity to hear what wants to speak itself,” David says. “Eventually the ‘it-was-all-too-much-to-cope-with’ story the person is trapped in dissolves and is replaced by a new narrative connected with the rest of life. The person is no longer crippled by the deadening grip of the past.”

A Presence available throughout time and space

Now you may say, ‘Do you really mean that’s there no more to the Resurrection than that?” Not at all—though that would be quite a lot. Rather, experiences like this give me a clue to what at least one aspect of Presence of Christ must have been like for the original witnesses, for it certainly had a similar result: their entire story of Jesus and themselves, a story that had ended in failure, fear, shame and hopelessness was re-visioned and redeemed. They were "ransom, healed, restored, forgiven" and given a new energy and aim in life.

As a believer, I’m sure that the Dazzling Presence was so real it was as if they could touch the wounds in its side—the signs of Jesus’ own trauma transformed. As they ate and drank it he sat among them. But they simply stood closer to the source of the Presence that surrounded me at the ACOA meeting. It has come to me again and again kneeling at the altar rail to commune with Real Presence, and I’ve felt It in spiritual direction sessions where someone’s imprisoning past gets miraculously re-set in a new framework, and energies are released that will create a new future.

So, even though there's a lot more to Jesus' resurrection than this aspect, what I have "seen and heard and touched" of the "Word of life" (1 John 1:1) looks a lot like resurrection to me. Quite enough to bring forth yet another soul out of the tomb.

Next week: Was it really "finished" on the Cross?

The Wounded God 2: "He opened the Scriptures to them"

2010-04-13T20:47:00.004-04:00

One thing is clear from the stories of Jesus’ appearances to his followers after his death: he gave them a radical new angle on the ancient Scriptures of Israel. This new angle would radically alter their view of how the grace of God operates in the world.

The new angle was that the Crucified and Risen Man is the key to understanding the entire saga of Hebrew history, and God’s ongoing work in the world. Jesus as the messenger and embodiment of God’s Way with humans “opens” a different way of reading the Scriptures. Such a radically changed reading of sacred texts would, more and more, drive a wedge between the new Jesus movement and emergent rabbinical Judaism, rival claimants for the heritage of ancient Israel enshrined in the Hebrew Bible.

The early Christian movement was a hot-bed of inspired utterance, vision, and out-of-the-box angles of vision on the possibilities of human nature, alternative constructions of society, and the ways grace can operate. We get a glimpse of the beginning of this mystical fervor in the resurrection stories when we are told of incidents where the Risen Christ “opened the Scriptures to them” and in the book of Acts where the new insights continue, opening the movement to non-Jews and bringing Paul’s radical views into the fellowship.

Beyond the issue of "proof-texts"

At the center of all this is the reality of a Jesus who has somehow managed to pursue the disciples after his defeat. In the light of this, previously obscure verses in the Psalms and Prophets now appear clearly before the astonished eyes of the disciples as they re-read the Bible and see the Crucified One revealed in startling new ways: “It was necessary that the Christ suffer and rise again.”

We can easily misunderstand the experiences of the disciples if we reduce this all to a series of “proof texts.” Christian conservatives still hold fast to the historic list of “prophecies” which, they feel, “prove” that Jesus is indeed Israel’s promised Messiah. Other Christians, under the influence of historical-critical biblical scholarship, point out that most of these “proofs” are wrenched out of their historical context in the Hebrew Bible. And, they will point out, that to beat Jews over the head with these texts (as was the custom of the medieval Church) has led to great evils against a people trying their best to be true to the God of the Covenant.

But the debate about the power or non-power of the proof-texts misses the point. Because of what happened to Jesus, the disciples now saw the Creator of the world and the Shepherd of Israel as The Wounded God, the One patiently seeking to teach, woo, lure humankind away from its self-destructive paths, and all too often being betrayed and rejected. They saw Jesus foreshadowed in the story of Joseph, in the Exodus from Egypt, in the suffering servant of the Exile, in the mysterious pierced prophet of Zechariah. And because of this, they could never read Israel’s story, or their own, the same way.

They see that the cause of God, again and again, is crucified, dead and buried. And yet, again and again, the Divine Love returned, again and again to embrace those who had failed it, resisted it, or ignorantly misunderstood it—returned with mercy and forgiveness, to resume once again coaching, enlightening, expanding understanding, prodding to new ventures designed to further the best interests of humankind and all creation.

The paradoxical good news

This is good news for humankind, however counter-intuitive. Really good news for a species that, sometimes in spite of its best intentions—and often because of truly self-serving, ultimately destructive intentions — hasn’t yet learned how to “get it right” on so many things that we need for our survival and long term well-being. It is good news because it tells us that the creative Intelligence that broods over and within our life in the world knows how to take mistakes, failures, and tragedies in stride, continuing to work “with those who love him to bring forth good.” (Romans 8:32)

This message was a "stumbling block to Jews" because Messiah is meant to come in Triumph, and "foolishness" to non-Jews who believed that deities were removed from ordinary human suffering. But, for Christians, it remains a valid and revelatory reading of ancient Israel's holy book, though this does make all other readings invalid. (Nor does it suggest that Jews and others do not have their own insights into the pattern which Christins call "cruciform").

And it remains both stumbling block and foolishness to so many in our culture — and in the churches — who see brokenness only as "failure, stupidity (or) incompetence," as Walter Bruggemann puts it. "In such ideology there are no genuinely broken people."

Since Christian history, is about as full of disobedience, betrayal, and tragedy as ancient Hebrew history (and, for that matter, all histories) this is specifically good news for a Church all to often intent on wrapping the image of righteousness about it as a defense rather than opening its brokenness to God — and a culture that, increasingly, can only "apologize" for failure, sin, and destructiveness.

As Bruggemann puts it, The outcome....is that there can be no healing, for there has not been enough candor to permit it. In the end, such denial is not only a denial of certain specifics--it is the rejection of the entire drama of brokenness and healing, the denial that there is an incommensurate Power and Angst who comes in pathos into the brokenness, and who by coming there makes the brokenness a place of possibility...generosity, candor...and resilient hope." (The Unsettling God: The Heart of the Hebrew Bible)

The Wounded God: Meditations About Resurrection

2010-04-05T22:03:00.013-04:00

I. Did he still carry the dark of Hades in his eyes?

When he appeared to them, that startled and soul-shaken band of grieving disciples, Jesus carried the wounds of his torture with him. Whatever the reality of that transformed body was, the past had not been obliterated. So as Jesus faces his disciples, his wounds remain—and meet theirs.

The text does not speak of their wounds, which are not visible. Rather it speaks of their hesitancy in believing the surprising news, and their slow, reluctant opening to belief even when he appears to them. But surely they were wounded by their cowering as he was executed. And who knows what resentment had brooded in them against Jesus for pushing them beyond their limits into a "Test" — which they had failed? Their wounds meet his as his dark stare meets their guilty, fearful, and hopeful eyes.

He greets them with, however, not with accusations, but with “Peace be to you," and greeting meant to invite their "and with you, peace." Carrying his past and theirs, he is not imprisoned in it.

In the light of such a somber beginning to the Resurrection, the Hallelujah and Hoopla of most Easter Sunday services often seems a bit too much — as if by shouting loudly, beating drums, and blasting away on trumpets we try to reassure ourselves that death isn’t such a big deal, and evil is easily undone. "The three sad days are quickly sped" neglects the descent into the timelessness (and, historically, the perennial return) of the powers of darkness.

Descent among the dead

In Pico della Mirandola’s remarkable “Risen Christ,” Jesus seems to carry more than his physical wounds back from the grave. The somber stare of his seemingly deadened eyes speak not only of the memory of the cross, but the eyes seem dark with the shadow of Hades itself. As early Christians believed, "he descended among the dead"(1 Peter 3:18-20; 4:6).

Descents into Hades were popular in ancient literature. Just recall the sad tale of Orpheus seeking to reclaim his beloved Eurydice, or Ulysees visiting his father. Jesus was believed to be successful where Orpheus was not —but who was the “beloved” he set out to find?

Astonishingly enough, as noted in the my Holy Saturday blog, Jesus descends to give all the rebellious souls who “refused to obey” in the Great Flood the chance of a new future. He went to rescue these condemned sinners (not just the righteous saints of the Old Covenant, as medieval Christianity wanted us to believe). He went among those alienated from God, stuck in the darkness of their self-chosen alienation.

To reverse the past? Not possible. They had been in “the prison” since the Flood, living with the consequences of their resistance to their own best interests. Deeds have consequences. Apologies are weak antidotes when mistakes, or misdeeds, have taken a real toll. But he went to give them a chance for a different future—the same opportunity he had given lepers, prostitutes, tax collectors, the rich, and the poor in his lifetime. As his light went among them, they could see their past in a new light, and their long lament over the tragic mistake of refusing Noah’s message became the penitence that can lead to new life. They were, we are told, “made alive in the spirit.”

Entering the heart of alienation

How did he do this for those “in darkness and the shadow of death”? The story doesn’t tell us, but I think he entered into the heart of humanity’s own alienation from God. Souls that are large and deep can do this. They can feel, from within, the fear, bitterness, and despair of the human heart without being lost forever in the darkness.

Jesus somehow immersed himself in both the God-forsaking and the God-forsakenness—all without losing his taproot in God’s love. He had learned from his own moments of dereliction, his own moments of “testing” by the Darkness, how to find his way back to the Light. He was able to share that secret with those in the prison of alienation, remorse, and hopelessness. Given hope, their own innate, but darkened connection with God re-ignited.

Such transfigurations of past mistakes into sorrowful learning are not confined to the realm of Hades, of course. The past is always rewritten, moment by moment, by the present. The memory of betrayal can change in the light of repentance and a renewal of relationship. What had seemed the end of a relationship can be seen as a painful episode, but not the end of possibility.

And yet to “forgive and forget” seems a bit utopian. If wounds are deep enough, scar tissue always remains. The issue is how we carry it. We forgive and remember, with gratitude, that the dark past is not the prison we feared it to be. Then, and only then, can we dare utter "Alleluia."

Next week:

Reordering the past: "He opened the Scriptures to them."

God’s Dark Night of the Soul

2010-04-02T23:45:00.012-04:00

My analysis of the Passion as tragedy is inspired by the work of the great Russian-British philosopher and historian of ideas, Isaiah Berlin. For Berlin, Moral conflicts are "an intrinsic, irremovable element in human life" and constitute the tragedy of human life. It is much harder, but considerably more conducive to moral growth, to see things from this perspective, rather than our usual either/or, good guys/bad guys dichotomy. This does not mean all values are equally good, or appropriate at a given moment, or that genuine evil does not exist. Rather that we have so many loyalties it is almost impossible to honor one without risking harm to another.

Jesus is crucified on a cross made of the tragedy of conflicting interests, the clash of moral concerns each of the key players considers important for survival and well-being.

Caiaphas and his supporters want to save the Jewish pilgrims at Passover from insurrection and the ensuing Roman crack-down. Pilate is devoted, to maintaining the Pax Romana which is widely seen as bringing an era of peace to the war-torn Mediterranean (though his methods are so harsh even Rome will condemn him).The disciples want to follow Jesus, but he has now led them down a path so full of peril they are forced to consider their own lives and well-being as family men with other obligations.

And at the center of all this, the provocateur Jesus will not back down from his assertive demand for personal and national change, reorienting Israel toward the values of prophetic justice, righteousness, and compassion. As a result he is “betrayed into the hands of sinners” — those moral men upholding their particular moral concerns, albeit willing to sacrifice their moral integrity to uphold them.

Tragedy and God

We will err if we see Jesus’ willingness to enter into the growing darkness of this tragic clash apart from the whole sweep of biblical narrative—for the Scriptures might well be titled “The Tale of the Tragedies of God.” Jesus reflects and embodies, in human form, what the Divine Love has experienced again and again.

In the biblical Saga, God has been “crucified” in just such clashes again and again. The creator is betrayed by the man and the woman in the Garden, seduced by a mysterious lying snake who promises great good to humans. The highly favored Noah, the new Adam and second father of the human race, proves a disappointing role model and parent. The clan of Abraham which the divine Wisdom chooses as its pilot project in healthy community-formation proves a truly difficult bunch of learners (as do the Jesus people much later in the story — and the church's history is hardly any different).

The first king of Israel God chooses messes up almost immediately and then tries to kill his successor-designate. The beloved David, a virtual bosom-buddy, succumbs to lust, murder, favoritism and a lassitude that sets the divinely chosen Royal House off in the wrong direction. The chosen nation refuses to heed the prophets sent to avert their destruction.

More than the “tragedies of God” one might well call the Scriptures the “failures of God” — just as Jesus, God’s latest outreach to save humanity from its own ignorance, resistance and downright folly, has walked right into apparent failure.

Tragedy redeemed

Now in a Greek tragedy, just as soon as Jesus breathes his last, the deus ex machina would descend and read everyone the riot act: “You did this wrong, that was your fatal flaw, this is the way you messed up, and you, over there, you overreached destructively. Got that? Too bad about all the dead people.”

But biblical tragedy always turns out differently. After all, the Greek gods and goddess are deeply involved in bringing the tragedy about themselves. They represent precisely the conflicting values we have been considering: family, state, prophecy, religion. And at his best, the deus ex machina merely tells you what went wrong, and how it comes out of your hubris, or ignorance or malice or whatever. The God perceived by biblical people can radiate that penetrating, revealing, fault-exposing light, too; but this God does a great deal more. Tragedy is not reversed, but redeemed.

As the shepherd of Israel, “He” sets out yet once again to rescue and gather the lost sheep. As holy Wisdom, “she” not only exposes flaws, but instructs, heals, inspires and assists in rehabilitation and growth in virtue. More than that, this God, faced with repeated failure, begins more and more to take on the very suffering caused by humanity’s misdeeds—feckless and malicious alike. As Isaiah comes to see, “In all their afflictions, God was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them: in this love and pity he redeemed them, and he bore them and carried them...” (Isaiah 63:9)

Jesus as a "Man of God's own heart"

Viewed only as tragedy, Jesus goes down to defeat. But Jesus is “more than a prophet,” as he himself says. The heart and soul of his humanity “cleaves” to God so completely that he has awakened to himself “in God” and welcomed God to live “in him.” As such, he becomes the human vessel (or as the “ascension” mystics of his day called it, the “chariot”) of the divine Love, the Word or Wisdom or Expression of God in the world. Though the man in front of them is clearly human, people who welcome him easily feel themselves to be in the presence and atmosphere of God.

And, as the followers of Jesus reflect on this experience, they decide that in Jesus the Divine is able to experience what being human feels like: all the lurking fear, lust, pride, malice, all the loneliness of being cut off from the profound participation mystique of pre-human, paradisical life. God enters into the depths of the human “dark night” as well as knowing, from the inside of flesh, its capacities for good.

And so, when Jesus walks into the dark night of abandonment — by friend, follower, nation, world, and even abandonment by a felt sense of the presence of God — the Cosmic Mind that weaves the worlds is “afflicted in his affliction,” synergistically with the human soul of the Man Jesus. God in Jesus, and Jesus in God understand the tragedy in the context of compassion for human vulnerability, ignorance, fear and the viciousness that comes from all three. Jesus utters words that build on Isaiah’s insight into the relentlessness of the divine Love: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” And though he does not say it, the God Jesus reveals may even be heard saying, “I forgive, even when they know what they do.”

Forgiveness as the door to redemption

This forgiveness is not some namby-pamby willingness to put up with evil. Rather, it is a firm dedication not to give up on the Humanity Project—to stay in relationship. In human life, there is no recovery from tragedy but a forgiveness that can open the door to repentance, reconciliation, change in relationships, and reparation if necessary. Amazing, according to the Story, the forgiveness radiates out through time as Jesus is pictured entering into Hades itself, into the furthest pole of alienation from light, life, and God, to wrap the imprisoned souls in the light of compassion and love and open a way for them to come out. Even ancient tragedies like the ignorance of humankind before the Flood can be transfigured, new doors to the future opened.

In human life, tragedy happens again and again. Whistle-blowers get blackballed (I knew one who even went to jail as an accessory to the corporate crime he discovered and exposed). Children and spouses are betrayed by a parent who sacrifices them for the career meant to support the family. Religious hierarchies bury crimes secretly lest their moral credibility be publicly lessened. Adulterers do not own up to their infidelity lest it shake the trust of spouse and damage the marriage. Politicians betray some supporters to represent others. All too often, such actions eventually lead to crisis, perhaps disaster.

Still, as Archbishop Tutu says, “Without forgiveness, there is no future.” Tragedy set into the unconquerable Love of God is not obliterated, but transfigured and set in a larger atmosphere of possibility.

Whatever else the resurrection of Jesus means (and it means more than this), it is a sign of the persistence of an unconquerable Love—a love that will not let us go, even in the darkest night. A love that can lead us in that darkness, through that darkness, perhaps even beyond that darkness if we are open to it. And, if all else fails, companion us in the darkness until we fall through it into the radiant and eternal Light around and beyond it, the Light which the darkness cannot overcome.

Easter Monday:

New weekly series of blogs on the Resurrection:

#1: Carrying the darkness of Hades still in his eyes......

Dilemma or staged drama — is Pilate’s hesitancy real?

2010-04-01T23:29:00.011-04:00

Jesus stands before Pilate, and in the confrontation between them, two worlds collide. The Man from Nazareth embodies the prophetic critique of the corruptions of power, and the Roman procurator represents the most highly organized form of worldly power the world has thus far seen. In this clash of competing interests, Jesus will be scourged, flagellated, and executed in Rome’s cruelest fashion.

And yet, in the Passion narrative, the figure of Pilate is most easily read as curiously passive and weak. It would seem, and has seemed to readers through the ages, that Pilate is hounded into crucifying Jesus by the insistence of the high priest and his supporters. Surrounding this scene is an even more curiously fickle crowd, most often identified (or misidentified, as we shall see) with the same folks who hailed Jesus’ entrance to the City with “hosannahs.”

Gospel distortion of Pilate?

The problem with this picture is that we know from rather firm historical records that Pilate was so excessively cruel that the Emperor recalled him from his position for making matters worse—in particular crucifying too many people. His “iron fist” policy in the face of Jewish troublemakers was counter-productive, much as the British policy of tough crackdown on the colonial protesters in Boston in 1775 backfired badly.

In the face of the contradiction between the New Testament narrative and the Roman records, many modern biblical critics decline to give any credit to the Passion’s portrait of Pilate. They see the story as it comes to us as an obvious attempt to shift the blame for Jesus death to “the Jews” by a second generation Jesus movement in order to protest their own blamelessness with regard to sedition or disloyalty to a government scrutinizing them after the catastrophic Jewish rebellion of 66-73 C.E., Romans like Pilate, Caligula, and Nero had provoked.

It certainly seems that there is a growing desire to appear reasonably “safe” to Roman authorities in the development of the gospel tradition—and therefore to highlight the role of Caiaphas and his supporters. This was no doubt a burning necessity for a group worshipping a Man convicted of sedition, and carting around the sacred scriptures of a people who rebelled against the Empire just as the Romans were beginning to notice the Christian movement. But does that mean the character of Pilate in the Story is wholly fictionalized? Or is there a way of reading the text that can reconcile Pilate’s public show of reluctance in the Gospels with his notoriously harsh rulership tactics?

Pilate the cruel cynic?

Consider this reading that makes sense of the text, at least to me: what if the portrait of the vacillating, uncertain Pilate is based in a cynical, perhaps even sadistic tactic by the Roman governor? Pilate’s in-your-face tactics have already aroused protests to Rome—his bringing the pagan god-laden standards of the legion into the holy City, his erecting the image of the Roman eagle on an entrance to the Temple itself, and his swift and vindictive punishment for people accused of resisting Roman overlordship.

What if he has told Caiaphas that it is on the Jewish leadership to keep things in hand this Passover. After all, he keeps the high priest’s vestments for the fall Day of Atonement under lock and key in the fortress Antonia, overlooking the Temple—the vestments for the crucial New Year’s “Days of Awe” that annually allow Israel to shed the burden of the past year’s sins.

What if he has decided that he’s not going to be the “bad guy” this time and risk calling Rome’s attention to him after the recent protests? So, when the high priest, responding to Pilate’s demand that he “handle it” comes to turn this disturber of the peace over to Roman authority for sedition, Pilate plays “prove it to me,” and feigns perplexity before witnesses. What if his making the high priest plead for Jesus’ execution is a callous act of humiliation of the Jewish leader, every false statement of reluctance twisting the knife further? Then, finally, he “gives in” with a missive to Rome already in mind if needed which will say, “The local authorities convinced me this religious teacher was really dangerous. I didn’t offend them this time.”

As novel as this reading of the text may be, it reconciles the cruel Pilate we know from history and the vacillating milquetoast of the narrative. He would not be the first person with all the power concentrated in his hands to make somebody else be the fall guy for his own actions—which brings us back to Jesus and Pilate facing each other, each representing a very different approach to power.

Conflicting approaches to power

For Pilate and Rome, power is imperium—power over. For Jesus and his Way, power is power with, power for, and power to be shared, even given away. Jesus gives people power—charismatic power to disciples whom he trains in the ways of healing prayer and exorcism and personal power to people he delivers from disempowering demons and disease. For him, leadership is all about serving the needs of people so that they can become more powerful in service to God’s desires.

One has to careful here not to fall into the trap of “good Jesus/ bad Romans.” Pilate represents a particularly vicious exercise of Roman power, so much so he loses his job. Rome is not the stereotypical tyrannical villain of Hollywood epics, and the Romans certainly don’t see themselves that way. Rome has ended hundreds of years of warfare in the Mediterranean basin, cleared the sea lanes of pirates so goods can be shipped safely, built a remarkable system of international highways that facilitate travel and commerce—all part of the fabled “Pax Romana” that the majority of Mediterranean peoples found a welcome relief.

Moreover, the shift from direct Senate governance of the provinces to the growing Imperial bureaucracy and more highly organized military had ended some of the more egregious corruption of the past century, when Senators went out to be governors and plundered the provinces. While Rome will not tolerate rebellion, it has brought many blessings to the world. Rome will even allow the Jews a special dispensation not to participate in the rituals of reverence to the “genius” or “divinity” of the City and Emperor so long as they pray for the Emperor in the Temple. Jesus seems, and the early Christians surely did, give some room to “render to Caesar what is Caesar’s” — pay your taxes, obey the law, even “honor the Emperor,” as St. Paul puts it.

But, while Rome is keeping the peace, Jesus is clear that their power system is not meant by God to be center stage in human affairs. Power-over may be necessary as a outer safeguard of social order, but the God Jesus serves wants center stage to be a place where power is shared by people who lead other people. (This doesn’t imply pure democracy, of course, which never seems to have found traction in the early Christian movement, but it does mean “servant leadership,” one that empowers people to grow to full stature.)

Neither Pilate, nor Caiaphas, for that matter, is interested in Jesus’ Way—nor have most leaders been. As a recent president said, with a grin and a chuckle, “It would be a lot easier if I were dictator.” What Jesus stands for, even if Pilate had any interest in understanding it, would be, quite exactly, revolutionary. And so the charge against Jesus—that of a dangerous “revolutionary”—was, on the one hand, a cruel libel, but on the other ironically accurate.

Tomorrow:

God’s dark night of the soul

Why does each disciple wonder if he might be the Betrayer?

2010-03-31T21:27:00.009-04:00

Part 4 of Caiphas' Dilemma, a set of Holy Week reflections how the tragic dimension of the Passion narrative sheds light on the tragedy inherent in the conflict of human interests and passions.

One can hardly blame Jesus’ disciples for being confused—and more than confused. Jesus has led them a merry chase from the euphoria of his promise-laden beginning, through more than one hint that a vivid restoration of God’s intimacy with Israel is at hand into a time of perplexity and a slowly creeping dread.

As far back as the beginning of the pilgrimage journey to Jerusalem, he has muttered shocking and unbearable things about betrayal, even his death. The disciples have been headed for triumph, but Jesus seems lost in forebodings of defeat. When asked a question about possible status and rank for the disciples in the coming kingdom, his response was both enigmatic and ominous. So, we are told, even as they set out for Jerusalem “they were amazed, and as they followed, they were afraid.” (Mark 10:32)

We may well imagine that some of them hoped he might snap out of it and return to the ecstatic hopes of the Galilean days. For one bright moment the mood seemed lighter as he entered Jerusalem in a not-so-subtle proclamation of kingship by riding on “a colt, the foal of an ass” in a seemingly self-conscious reference to an ancient prophecy. The symbolic of attacking the money changers, coupled with “not allowing anyone to carry anything” (Mark 11:16) through the outer courtyard (which took a coordinated effort of many people, surely) went off without a hitch, short and sweet enough not even to risk arrest. Point made. Profaning the temple judged.

And the crowds! He has been teaching to a growing audience in the Temple courtyard each day, challenging the powers that be with his usual message of God’s love for every level of society and the necessity of returning to the core values of social justice and personal righteousness the ancient prophets first proclaimed.

Yet in the face of all this, the Man they follow has only become more morose. They are more than confused. They are, increasingly, lost in a maze (“amazed) and afraid. They have “left everything behind” — that is, left their wives and children in the care of extended families, left gainful employment, left the safety zone of ordinary life — and now he talks of some mysterious defeat that will somehow turn out all right.

Frayed Loyalty?

As he presides at what will be their final supper together, they are revealed as full of uncertainty as to how they feel about their Master. He “messes with their heads” yet again, as we might say, by the promise that they will be “the judges of Israel” in days to come. Then this curve ball: “One of you will betray me.”

Note carefully what happens next. They don’t cry out “What rascal would do this to you?” Quite the contrary, every single one of them wonders if he himself will be the betrayer: “Lord, is it I?” To me, this speaks of profound ambivalence, self-doubt, and even deeply harbored hesitancy about Jesus himself. Who is this Man who has led them to invest their lives and futures to a misson which he sees as doomed to catastrophe?

“Lord, is it I?” is a give-away sign of just how close to the edge these followers are. And Jesus forces them even further toward the edge by saying that they will all forsake him when push comes to shove later in the night. His apparently changed trajectory and their barely sustainable investment in what they thought was his cause collide.

One response to a crisis of faith such as this is, of course, denial. Peter speaks up quickly on behalf of burying the anxiety, amazement, ambivalence and doubt: “Everybody else may forsake you, but I will not.” Perhaps everyone else at the meal nodded vigorous agreement. Bearing the reality of one’s own mixed emotions, conflicting desires, and dark, dangerous thoughts is a hard skill to master.

Jesus presses further, even into this inner cauldron of ambivalence by saying to Peter (and perhaps to the rest) that “Satan has desired to sift you like wheat” — and implies that he himself has given Satan permission to test them. He offers this as a word of hope, because he anticipates that the “sifting” inherent in going through what they are about to experience with his arrest, trial and death will sort them out into stronger advocates for his cause.

Entering into “The Test”

He is “entering into the Test” himself, as he leaves the supper, travels with the disciples to an olive grove outside the City which ancient tradition believed was family property where his own ambivalences break surface in an agony of prayers. Having already decided that God is leading him toward death for mysterious purposes, Jesus falls into a wrestling match with his own passionate resistance: “If it be your will, let this cup pass from me.” Jesus prays, we are told “with loud cries” (Hebrews 5:7) to be delivered from the fate he has helped bring about (see yesterday’s blog post).

But what of Judas? A disciple’s story of this evening tells us that, during the “one of you will betray me” conversation that “the devil entered into Judas Iscariot.” Whatever this means on the existential level, it would seem to involve any ambiguity on Judas’ part resolving itself into an action plan—another prime way of escaping from ambiguity or doubt.

Was Judas disillusioned, thinking Jesus’ social or religious mission had gone astray? Was the alabaster jar with the ointment that might have “better been given to the poor” the last straw? Or did Judas expect that if he forced the issue and brought on Jesus’ arrest the crowds would rise in rebellion—or that the occasional glimpses of a “larger than life” spiritual reality would break forth from Jesus to miraculously paralyze his enemies? Was he an eschatological radical who thought the Man could summon legions of angels for the Final Battle, as the Dead Sea Scroll community believed?

As the story is told, confusion reigns in Judas’ soul, because when he sees that Jesus is, in fact, slated for execution, he repents for having “betrayed innocent blood” and kills himself in shame, sorrow, or self-loathing.

“It was night,” St. John tells us in a highly symbolic sentence as Judas leaves to summon the Temple police and Roman cohort. Night indeed, when the clash of different needs and visions — the disciples’ sincere investment in Jesus’ mission, the high priest's practical need to avert mob violence, the Roman geopolitical interest, and Jesus’ own resilient determination follow this difficult path — begins to weave the crown of thorns he will wear on the morrow.

Tomorrow:

Dilemma or staged drama—is Pilate’s hesitancy real?

Has Jesus deliberately brought his death upon himself?

2010-03-30T10:09:00.007-04:00

This, the third in a series of Holy Week meditations, explores the Passion narrative through the lens of tragedy, rather than a “good guys vs. bad guys” approach. As the week moves toward its end, the focus will become the ways in which the tragic saga of Scripture illuminates the tragic dimensions of our own world as the inescapable arena of God’s redemptive love.

Caiaphas' Dilemma, Part 3

By the time Jesus enters the holy City for Passover, he seems determined to provoke the crisis he has successfully avoided for his entire public ministry—a crisis that can only, from any wise earthly viewpoint, end in his execution.

Common Christian interpretation through the ages saw in his staging an in-your-face entrance to the City as “the Son of David” and his aggressive challenge to the Temple commerce and leadership the clear and simple unfolding of a plan Jesus has known his whole lifetime: that he was born to die for the salvation of humankind.

While having no wish to deny the redemptive power of Jesus’ living and dying as a “ransom for many,” as he puts it (which will be explored later in the week), I am hardly the only contemporary reader to find this heavily doctrinal, “pre-destined” reading of the events of Holy Week a bit too scripted-in-advance for real life. Can the text yield a different reading?

Yes, Jesus comes to Jerusalem for a final, climactic confrontation with the Temple leadership and their Roman overlords, and declares to them forthrightly, in front of a large assembly of pilgrims, that the right of rulership will be taken away from them. Yes, he brazenly allows the disciples to sing Messianic anthems in public. But did he set out, from his baptism onward, knowing it would come to this?

From joyful Messenger to "Man of Sorrows"

Certainly the Man who was embraced by the warm light and dazzling love of God at his baptism, and returned from his sojourn in the wilderness “in the power of the Spirit” launching a spectacular campaign of preaching, teaching, exorcism and healing is not presented to us as “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” He is a God-intoxicated ecstatic, a “Spirit-man” as Marcus Borg calls him, with a message of great good news. In Galilee, the God of bounteous gifts, of warning and judgment, of infinite mercy and forgiveness, invites all Israel to a wedding feast though the ministry of Jesus.

This “Galilean spring” of Jesus’ ministry, as it is remembered in the gospels, is full of hope, as well as denunciation of the religious and social forces that bar people, especially the common folk, from access to God’s bounty. The “kingdom campaign” grows, and soon Jesus is sending out companies of messengers armed with some of his own shamanistic, charismatic energy, to remote towns and villages, promising that the kingdom may, in fact, arrive in power before these emissaries have returned (Matthew 10). So the story comes down to us. This sounds like a Man who expects some success in his mission.

At midpoint, in the gospels, Jesus is portrayed as doing an about-face, suddenly ruminating about a coming death — not at all his earlier message. Did he, in his God-illumined joy, originally believe that the “lost sheep of the house of Israel” would turn toward him? Certainly his sad, or perhaps bitter, denunciations of the Galilean towns Capernaum and Chorazim (Matthew 11:23-24 and Luke 10:15) speak to a certain level of frustration!)

The gospels are written in hindsight, when the full story is known, so it’s easy enough, (especially if one mistakes Jesus‘ righteous fidelity to the God he serves for total human infallibility) to read back into the narrative something that isn’t actually there until the Transfiguration and Jesus‘ first announcement of his impending Passion (cf. Mark 8). If we refrain from such hindsight, it is hard to escape the conclusion that the growing opposition Jesus faces has forced him to reconsider his strategy, perhaps even the ultimate purposes of his mission. As it comes down to us, he turns to the Scriptures for guidance and finds there a more tragic aspect of being God’s “Servant.”

But whatever the secret of his interior life at this midpoint juncture, the disciples are certainly shocked when he seems to change plans in midstream. On the one had they are told that some of them will sit "on his right and left" in the the new world order, and on the other that the “Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinners, and die, and be raised again.”

(I know there are many scholars who would remove these sayings from the mouth of Jesus, as well as any aim to some sort of Messianic identity, but, for me, such alternate scenarios simply remove the enigma and skandalon in the story as it is told to us, giving us a Jesus who is wise, socially progressive, and massively misunderstood—someone we can live with more easily in our day than a radical visionary whose bright hopes turn dark and tragic as he seeks to follow the inner stirrings of the Spirit’s voice.)

Provoking the Confrontation

And so, as the Story goes, he goes to Jerusalem to bring on the final crisis (much like Robert E. Lee who decides that Gettysburg is the “make or break” moment to win or lose the Civil War, and spends his army extravagantly, only to go down to defeat).

For me, the parable Jesus shoves in the face of the Temple priests speaks to this interpretation powerfully. A landowner has rebellious tenants. He sends messengers to call them to account, but the messengers are killed. So he sends his own Son, reasoning that they will respect him as the direct representative of the Owner—but they kill him also. Jesus is presented here describing the arc of his mission: it begins with the hope that they will “listen to the Son,” but ends in the young man’s slaughter. Yet, somehow, out of this, God’s purposes will be accomplished, for the vineyard will be taken away from the tenants and “given to another.” (See Mark 12:1-12)

This parable has, unfortunately, borne a good deal of anti-Judaic fruit through the centuries, being understood classically as a transfer of “chosenness” from Israel to the Christian church. But such an anti-Judaic slant isn’t in the story itself. Jesus has presented himself as the representative of the kingdom of God—as the messenger and hinted-at embodiment of God’s true overlordship of Israel. Just as Samuel had declared Saul no longer God’s chosen leader, and Jeremiah had warned of the fall of Judean leadership, so Jesus tells the priestly caste their days are numbered—which, in fact, historically they will be. His denunciations of Israelite leadership are no more anti-Jewish than those of the great prophets.

What he has done, however, does seal his own fate, as well as announce theirs. He is wedded to his mission of proclaiming the kingdom, even if this is the result. He will not, perhaps cannot back down. They can see no way to yield to what seem dangerous and unpredictable demands. The clash and conflict of these competing values become the cross on which he is crucified

Tomorrow:

Why does each of the disciples wonder if he is the Betrayer?

Is Caiphas trying to save Jesus from what seems his own folly?

2010-03-29T22:32:00.011-04:00

We’re following the high priest Caiaphas, who finds himself in a precarious position, and choses to act in a way he hopes will bring desirable results for his nation. My thesis, stated yesterday, is that what we have here is a true tragedy involving the clash of seemingly legitimate, but irreconcilable, values and interests rather than a simple “good vs. evil” tale.

Caiphas' Dilemma: Part 2

In the face a rabble-rousing Prophet’s denunciations of the priestly caste to spell-bound Passover crowds in the Temple itself, Caiaphas decides to strike decisively to avert a possible insurrection and the resultant death of thousands in the crowded city. He is not just “serving his own interests” but those of the nation.

For this preemptive strike, Caiaphas became a centerpiece of almost 2,000 years of Christian invective, which, until recent decades, focused the blame for Jesus’ death on “the Jews” even though it was the Romans who put the Man of Nazareth to death, quite naturally, for “insurrection.” (Thank God, in the light of this, that the Creed says ‘he suffered under Pontius Pilate’ rather than ‘under the Jews.’)

Is the Passion narrative inherently anti-Judaic?

Many scholarly revisionists, Christian, Jewish and secularist, want to shift the blame over to the Romans entirely and leave the Jewish leadership out—in large part because of the horrific history of the Christian anti-semitism through the centuries which has used this tale as the occasion for repeated attacks against the ongoing Jewish religion and people. The early Christians, we are told, under suspicion themselves for being seditionists, don’t want the Romans to lump them with those truly insurrectionist Jews who led the nation into a disastrous rebellion against Rome three decades after Jesus’ execution. After the year 70 every good citizen blames the Jews for being disloyal, and Christians do not want to appear to be threats to Rome.

Perhaps. But, frankly, I don’t see the usefulness of constructing speculative alternatives to the New Testament’s four interlocking accounts of the Passion—even to achieve the highly desirable result of lessening anti-Judaic passions among Christians. Scholarly theories come and go. The New Testament goes on and on, being read and forming the attitudes of Christians.

I am not the only commentator who feels that the Passion narratives we have give a great deal of room for an historically-informed reading in which Caiaphas and his rump Sanhedrin take their place in the story without being turned into villainous Jewish stereotypes. My own thoughts on this subject have been decisively influenced by a magisterial 1963 book The Trial and Death of Jesus by Haim Cohn, a former justice of the Supreme Court of Israel (English edition: Ktav, 1980) as well as other sources.

According to Cohn’s careful review of Talmudic law (insofar as this can illumine 1st century practice) and Jewish custom, Caiphas may plausibly be seen as not only seeking to preserve the peace, but even to save Jesus from self-destruction. His evidence? When Caiaphas presses Jesus to say “yea or nay” to the allegation that he claims to be Messiah (“Are you the Christ, the Son of the Most High?”) and Jesus obliquely agrees, the high priest rips his garments. Tearing garments is an expression of grief for Jews, Cohn insists, not a reaction to “blasphemy.”

The Passion narrative does portray Caiaphas as also shouting “blasphemy” yes; but the ripped garments are about the death sentence he has brought upon himself by not refuting the messianic claim. Any claim to Messiahship (and, in the context of the trial, even the phrase “Son of God” is a messianic title, rather than implying divinity) is so fraught with political implications as to be, prima facie, evidence of intended sedition against the Roman Imperium.

Might Caiphas been trying originally to avert this outcome?

Did Caiaphas originally hope that Jesus would disown the Messianic buzz being put about by his followers? That he could diffuse the movement by imprisoning or flogging the leader without the dangerous spectacle of an execution? The “false” witnesses seem to actually report things Jesus has said, even though they present them as meaning something other than the gospels claim Jesus intended.

As Cohn points out, claiming intimate relationship with God, even mystical union, may be religiously suspect, even blasphemy in some circles, but is not a capital crime in Jewish law. Punishable, but not deserving of death. Jesus’ actual crime seems to be manifestly political. Cohn does not reject the gospel narratives, but does feel that they shift emphasis to “blasphemy” to downplay the legal reason for Jesus’ death which remains an inflammatory charge in the eyes of those who might accuse the nascent Christian community of the same crime.

The Israeli justice’s hypothesis is, of course, not provable, but it seems plausible enough to introduce what he might well call, as a lawyer, “reasonable doubt” in any rush to condemn Caiaphas outright.

Such reasonable doubt needs to inform Christian interpretation of the story. Caiaphas and his Sadducean allies are not “rejecting their messiah,” since the coming of Messiah is not even a part of their ancient Jewish belief, which is rooted in eras of Israelite history before such expectations. That expectation belongs to the Pharisees party, a minority group in the ruling council. For him, the one and only God is Lord Protector of Israel, and chiefly concerned about its survival, faithful to its ancestral customs, as a priestly nation. He must see the nation safely through this and every crisis, so that it can survive and thrive. In God’s own time, the Romans will leave, or grant the nation full self-governance again—without the help of fervent Galilean visionaries like the man standing so defiantly before him.

So, another Jewish messianic pretender (there are so many these days!) will die at Roman hands. He rips his garments over the impending death of another misguided Jewish patriot and invites the verdict: “He deserves to die.” (As to the scene before Pilate, and Caiaphas’ pressing the case for execution, we deal with that on Wednesday.)

By pursuing what seems the necessary, even just course, (even if Caiaphas has been fervently intent on gaining, by hook or by crook, either the capitulation of the Galilean or his admission of guilt) the high priest is pivotal in determining Jesus’ fate. But he acts in ignorance of who Jesus and his true aims ultimately are. And, in so doing, he becomes one of the “rulers of this age” who “did not understand,” as Paul puts it twenty years later, “for had known, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” (1 Corinthians 2:8)

Great evils are often committed by those who honestly believe they are pursuing the good. That is part of the tragic dimension of life this Holy Week so starkly reveals.

Tomorrow:

Has Jesus deliberately brought this upon himself?

Caiaphas, the Jewish high priest, has a genuine dilemma: He wants to save the Jewish people...

2010-03-28T23:17:00.005-04:00

....from yet another disaster and he’s got a troublesome, self-appointed prophet with a large following in the holy City during the lead-up to Passover.

I suspect few Christian preachers this week are likely to sympathize with his dilemma. More likely, he and his fellow priests will be cast, quite simply, as villains in the tale— protecting religious power, collaborating with Rome, or perhaps just elitist in their contemptuous cruelty toward populist leaders. The Passion story lends itself easily to this sort of “good guys/bad guys” reading, and I certainly preached my share of such sermons in decades past.

Reality, however, is seldom quite so bright with moral clarity, and this story is no exception. Rather, the portrayal of Jesus’ provocative entrance, parabolic rejection of the priestly leaders, arrest, trial and death is a tragedy in the proper sense, much like Greek tragedies, albeit with a biblical twist uncharacteristic of the Greeks. The tragic dimension is that the characters, each with his own virtues and faults, do not fully realize what they are doing.

Far from a simplistic story of good and evil, the Passion reveals the unsettling clash of conflicting virtues, both personal and social—virtues that cannot be fully reconciled. Jesus is caught in this clash, even provokes it, and himself participates in its ambiguities. If each party to the drama may be said to be “protecting their own interests” a fair reading must recognize that there is real value in each of those “interests,” not merely a venal self-serving. This week I intend to offer daily reflections on this tragic, even ironic, dimension of Holy Week—more provocative, I believe, that the usual good vs. evil reading.

And there’s no better place to start that Caiaphas. Jesus has been a growing problem in what was probably a “Jubilee” year, with farmers at loose ends and the Jubilee theme of liberation. And Jesus proclaims the imminent “kingdom of God” and does nothing to quell a growing buzz that he may proclaim himself Messiah. Reports have come that he has told his followers to “take up their cross” which is, in fact, a Zealot slogan, a provocative and confusion campaign motto for a man who tells the multitudes to “love their enemies.” With over a million pilgrims in and surrounding the City, the situation is fraught with peril.

Just last fall, at the festival of Sukkot, an armed insurrection had to be put down by the Roman legionnaires stationed in Jerusalem, and the Roman procurator, Pontius Pilate, is more on edge than usual. Rome is willing to leave the business of governing the Jews to the High Priest and Sanhedrin, the Jewish Senate, so long as things don’t get out of hand, and the Nazarene may well be the spark to ignite the next insurrection.

Pilate is the most brutal of the Roman procurators yet. He sees Judea as a hotbed of potential trouble for Rome, situated as it is astride major trade routes in Greater Syria, and pivotal for the defense of the Roman Empire against the Parthian Empire to the East. With the constant danger of terrorist attacks against Roman authority or non-Jewish settlers—like the sacking of the Galilean city of Sepphoris only three and a half decades before—Caiaphas knows that, for the sake of the Jewish people, he must maintain the peace.

I don’t imagine that Caiaphas is a saint, please understand. The Talmud itself contains traces of the hatred many Jews felt for the high priestly rulers and their Temple police. But neither is he the crafty villain of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” nor the sinister power-monger of Mel Gibson’s “Passion of the Christ” nor the “perfidious Jew” of history Christian anti-semitism. He’s a man in a position of responsibility for the affairs of his own people.

The heart of my argument is this: when Caiphas says (as he is reported to have done) “It is good that one man should die for the people,” this is not a cynical political ploy, but what seems to him a simple responsibility, perhaps even a noble and just one. Rather it offers a more troublesome and thought-provoking mirror in which to see the tragic inevitability of the clash of various human needs, desires, and legitimate concerns which can never be wholly harmonized.

This is a tragedy in which God is active, not merely to reveal the faults of the participants, as in the Greek theater, but, more astonishingly, to bring good in spite of, and even through, the sorrowful and calamitous events.

Other themes to be explored this week:

Was it the Jews or the Romans—and is the Passion narrative intrinsically anti-Judaic?
How did Jesus bring this upon himself?
The enigma of Jesus and Judas
Why do all the disciples say “Is it I?”
God’s dark night of the soul
Is hell the longest way to heaven?

Why don’t the moderate Christians speak out?

2010-01-20T18:54:00.008-05:00

Every time I give a public talk about Islam, I can count on this question: “Why don’t the moderate Muslims speak out? Why don’t they condemn terrorism?”

I then tell the audience that moderate Muslims have, in fact spoken out, on more than one occasion. I share with them the condemnation issued by 500 leading Muslim leaders and clerics after violence flared in the wake of the Danish cartoon controversy. I cite the overture by a large group of progressive Muslims to Christian and Jewish leaders to engage in serious discussion about how to improve relations between Islam and the West. There are more.

But, I then say, not one of these statements against terrorism—and there have been more—was covered by a prominent news stories in the leading papers, or on TV news shows. When I finish, I see the skepticism still brooding in the eyes of all too many in the audience. They have the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, CNN and NPR. Why should they believe me?

Media Selectivity

Happened again this past Sunday. Driving away, I got to musing about the “why don’t the moderates” question, and made some comparisons. Why, for example, haven’t moderate Christians spoken out against Pat Robertson’s outrageous declaration that the 7.0 earthquake is God’s punishment on Haiti for ‘making a pact with the devil.” Why don’t moderate Republicans (the few that remain) speak up and condemn the outrageous disinformation of the Right? Why don’t moderate Israelis and Palestinians speak out against the extremists in their own camp?

But of course, they all do speak out, a bit at least. I’m sure countless Sunday sermons mentioned the not-so-Reverend Mr. Robertson unfavorably, at least in passing. I know Jewish and Muslim peace activists who work together, bring peace-seeking people together, send out press releases, and do not appear in newsprint or TV news shows. Every Muslim I know is appalled by Islamic extremism.

The news narrative of our times is interested only in Islamic terrorism. We hear little about the large number of progressive Muslims seeking religious, political and social reform in the Muslim world. As a Chicago news reporter told Eboo Patel, the bright young Muslim-American creator of the Interfaith Youth Core (which brings kids of all faiths together for common social action), “good deeds like yours are not newsworthy.” And of course, in one spectacular recent incident, a “moderate” Muslim did: the father of the “Christmas underwear bomber” reported his dangerous son to the American authorities. But nobody in power listened.

In the same way, the (largely secular) media seems only interested in the more conservative and extreme forms of Christianity. Robertson gets press. The National Council of Churches does not. Creationists disturbing the peace of school boards are covered. The annual interfaith weekend celebrating the compatibility of evolution and religion, faith and science does not.

Moderates are....too moderate?

The fault, however, can’t be laid solely at the media doorstep. Moderates (who come in many styles from conservative to liberal) are, after all, moderate. Civilized, mannered, accustomed to intelligent discussion and debate rather than the street brawls more and more of society seems enchanted by in politics, reality TV, and elsewhere. We stand aghast at the outrageousness of the extremists, in word and deed.

We live in perilous times, when the “worst are full of passionate intensity” as Yeats put it long ago, and it all too often seems that the “best lack all conviction” because they issue calm and reasonable statements and hold symposia.

So, let me suggest to any of you any “moderate” peace-loving internet surfer who may read this the following: instead of stewing about “why don’t moderate Muslims speak out?” why don’t we moderates stoke up our own passion about speaking out against the extremists who give a bad name to our faith, political party, or whatever: in personal conversations, letters to the editor, wherever we can. If you’re a Christian, for example tell your kids, your Jewish friends, your agnostic neighbors how embarrassed you are that people like Robertson trash your faith. That Jesus weeps over such viciousness.

Be passionate about civil discourse. Be passionate about the value of truth and the evil of disinformation. Be passionate about the best aspects and highest ideals of your religion, political party, or moral code. Don’t be ashamed to state your values and give reasons for them out loud, courteously but with feeling. As Yeats warns us, if the “center cannot hold, things fall apart.”

Which they seem perilously close to doing.

Why don’t conservative commentators like Avatar?

2010-01-10T21:02:00.017-05:00

So far, the conservative writers on the Op-Ed page of the NYTimes are 2-0 against the 3-D blockbuster Avatar and its “left-learning” producer James Cameron. David Brooks claims the storyline is “simplistic.... offensive.... racist.... escapist,” covertly anti-American and demeaning to native cultures. Ross Douthat tells us that the film (along with past hits like The Lion King and Dancing With Wolves promotes a dangerous and delusional “gospel of pantheism” and a romantic view of primitive cultures which isn’t nearly as good for human beings as his kind of Christianity, which he tells us provides humanity with a “way out” of Nature, which is “amoral and cruel.”

The unsuspecting reader may not realize how much these sophisticated commentators reflect a much more down-and-dirty campaign by right-wing Christians to block serious criticism of the global marketplace’s environmental destructiveness. Their main talking points just happen to be that such criticism is “leftist” (and therefore essentially un-American), and “pantheistic” (essentially anti-Christian). Criticism of the “desacralization” of Nature that so characterizes modern Western culture is quickly deftly avoided by smears rather than direct response to the environmental critique.

“Simplistic,” or just too pointed for comfort?

The storyline of Avatar is certainly open to the charge of “simplistic” — bad corporate lust for resources backed by a grim military phalanx battles against earth-loving, tree-communing, dinosaur-flying natives. The dialogue is peppered with snarky barbs aimed at “quarterly profits” and “shock and awe” campaigns with clear contemporary references.

Indeed, the plot is so morally simplistic that one might be tempted to dismiss it—except for the fact that it is so sadly representative of the real moral struggle for our planet’s well-being being fought out this very day. The global climate change deniers, the heedless overfishing, the relentless habitat and species destruction, the poisoning of the water and degradation of the oceans—all in the name of “progress” (which more and more seems to equal “profit”) — all these are so morally obtuse, alas, that they already form simplistic stereotypes of themselves. Our civilization, our global market, cannot continue on this destructive path. That’s the real “bottom line.” One doesn’t need to be “leftist” (and I’m not) to agree with the critique.

"Pantheism" phobia

As to the “pantheism” charge, Douthat apparently has such Christian-Right selective vision that he gets major plot and character points of the film wrong. He imagines (incorrectly) that the Na’vi are a gentle, paradisiacal people (they’re not), that “Eywa, the All-Mother” is a deity morally indifferent and devoid of personal traits (She’s not), and that human beings are “not at home” in the midst of Nature’s “cruel rhythms” because, presumably we’re above all that, being spiritually superior to nature (huh? and exactly where did we come from, if not this world?)

So much of Douthat’s kind of Christianity (that strange marriage between Jesus and free-market capitalism) seems blissfully unaware of how profoundly unbiblical, how in service to the world-view of the modern, denatured world, it actually is. If animals are intelligent and trees en-spirited we might have to behave differently toward the world that sustains and supports us.

And the Bible says.....what?

Far from dismissing nature as merely “amoral and cruel," the Bible sees it as alive, en-spirited and indwelt by God. Cruelty is there, but cooperation and community, too (see Psalm 104). Human beings, far from being “above nature” are made out of the very elements of the planet (“dust thou art”), created right along with the land animals on that symbolic Sixth Day, made in the “image and likeness of God” in order to tend and keep the earth (Genesis 1). Not only that, the Bible reports the experiences of prophets who see nature as imbued with Divine Spirit (“heaven and earth are full of His glory” — Isaiah 6).

The whole world is caught up in what can only be described as a kind of planetary worship (“O all ye works of the Lord, bless ye the Lord ....sun and moon....ice and snow....summer and winter.... mountains and hills....green things..... whales..... fowls....beasts and cattle.... everything that hath breath..... bless the Lord” — In the Catholic edition of Daniel). Sounds a lot like the planet Pandora to me. Furthermore, this immanent presence of God in the world, God’s “glory” is described in Scripture as a feminine energy and Spirit, Holy Wisdom, “the fashioner of all things” (Wisdom 7-9) who is “at play” among human beings. How shockingly like Pandora’s deity Eywa, the All-Mother!

The earth is a) the Lord's or b) a Pantry for human beings

The purposes of industrial and post-industrial society are all-too well served by seeing Nature as a gold mine for human needs, a set of resources for Man, rather than hew to the Biblical vision of humanity as the steward of the planet, the choir director of a planetary act of worship. But if it is really true that “the earth is the Lord’s,” there might actually be moral constraints on our ways of “using resources,” as we still put it. And it might also be true that Pandora’s “living web of interconnected creatures” is an apt and biblically resonant portrayal of planet earth. If so, "sharing resources" with all the other lifeforms in the web might be a more biblical viewpoint.

Biblically, "the earth is the Lord's" in all its multi-species "fullness" (Psalm 24). If Hollywood is friendlier to Native American, Eastern and New Age spirituality than to Christianity, it may be because Douthat’s version of the faith speaks so loudly today, and is so strangely joined at the hip to a run-away marketplace that badly needs a course correction. And that, underneath it all, is most probably why Brooks and Douthat don’t like the film.

But I’m happy to say that Avatar, in spite of its moral over-simplifications, seems very much on the side of the angels to me.

So, my friend told me I had it all wrong about Michael Jackson....

2009-07-09T21:32:00.002-04:00

Instead of the sad and neurotic kid I had always seen, overwhelmed by stardom at too early and age, my twenty-something friend Endri sees Jackson as an almost prophetic world figure whose image was tarnished by false accusations and media hounding.

Of course, there's no reason both opinions can't be true. Certainly the young Jackson was astounding in his ability to captivate audiences, and the adolescent Jackson supple and creative both in his moves and his music. But even in those early music videos something made me uneasy, as Michael started appearing as a quasi-savior or demi-god. What was going on in the boy’s brain?

Early stardom—any stardom!—is perilous to psyche and soul. And this man was a world star like no other before him—the best-selling musician of the last 30 years. So, as news reports in the last two decades about the young man’s private life came out—the eating disorders, the extravagant spending, the kid-dream of a Neverland for a grown man to play in, then the allegations of child abuse—both my wife and I felt, with some compassion, that being forced by media-driven parents into his stardom had wrecked the poor kid.

Endri wasn’t about to let this impression go unchallenged. He had grown up with Michael's music and messages. While not star-struck, he had a more informed opinion about this songster's place among the modern bards, some of them actually carriers of prophetic messages the Spirit seeks to get into the world through any channel She can find. She’s not nearly as picky as the ordination committees of the denominations, who, to give them their due, have a different set of responsibilities. But then, neither Jacob nor Joseph, Jeremiah and certainly not Ezekiel would have passed the standard examination.

Which brings us back to Jackson, wounded meteor that he was. Be clear, I'm not suggesting Jackson was a saint, or even a prophet. But after a few short bursts of Endri's testimony to Michael's influence on him, and one heart-wrenching video, Earth Song, about the environmental crisis, war victims, and elephant-murder, I decided his output was worth reconsidering.

My instant Michael-education continued after the video: Had I considered what a hero he was to African-American kids,to say nothing of the white teens. And about how many of them got his social concern messages along with the highly stylized, sexy, boy-man androgyny, flashy costumes, shoes and famous moon-walk? Did I know his songs addressed world hunger, homelessness, drugs and AIDS as well as desire and denial, risk and repression? Did I know about all the money and advocacy he devoted to call attention to AIDS in Africa, when the world was still ignoring the plague? Had I ever heard of the “Heal the World” Foundation and the support of thirty-nine charities? I hadn’t.

So I did my own quick internet review of Jackson musical videos, and this is what I think I saw: increasingly, Michael appears in different guises, but with a common quasi-savior theme. Even as early as Beat It, he, or his music, brings peace in a tense multi-ethnic gang situation, and preaches interracial harmony. Over the years he becomes a kind of Orpheus, taming the beast in us, a cosmic Child, even a Savior-figure. Often he is the Androgyne, a sacred mythological figure, often shamanic, oracular. In Earth Song, Michael appears apocalyptically in a burning forest, tied to two poles in unmistakable crucifixion-stance, singing a passionate prayer to God, and to us:

Did you ever stop to notice,
All the children dead from war?
Did you ever stop to notice,
The crying Earth, the weeping shores?

Michael’s prayer resurrects forests, ends wars, raises elephants from death.

One might be tempted to dismiss these as messianic fantasies, and perhaps they were, in part. But that would be to ignore the more complex mystery of our times. Perhaps the semi-crucified songster had been overwhelmed by the archetypes he wore. Overwhelmed by earth's conflict and pain. How many of us know earth’s travail is daily there, but conveniently screen it out?

Michael, manifestly, didn’t, and prophetic messengers seldom have a happy life. Jung warns that the visionary (so also the creative person) is in danger of being “consumed” by the archetype pressing upon him or her. Did Jackson get lost in the midst of all that pressed in on him——the huge crowds of adoring fans, the pressure of world pain? He prays to God, in Hold Me:

Everyone’s Taking Control Of Me
Seems That The World’s Got A Role For Me
I’m So Confused....

These words speak not only for his confusion, but for the feelings of millions of those kids who grew up in an age when the world's increasing crisis was blared every day on TV and even taught in school.

It’s all too easy to see Jackson’s death by apparent over-mixture and overdose of prescription drugs as the sad end of a disturbed kid who never had a chance to grow up. Certainly that's what his critics (and they are legion) say. But that would, most likely, be to miss the main point: his influence on generations that are now called to deal with the problems he highlighted.

What will the fruit of his singing will be? That depends on how it awakens and moves those who heard the messages rather than, like heedless me, saw only the flaws in the messenger.

So, Sarah Palin resigned, and the Eastern press laughs in scorn...

2009-07-04T12:03:00.011-04:00

“How inept can she be? . . .And her hastily-arranged press conference—what a hoot! . . . The lady still can’t put one word in front of another without stumbling over them.”

Is the allegedly “elitist” press corps truly that deaf to the heartbeat of reactionary patriotism? So highly refined that sentence structure is what matters?

Sometimes I feel that I am destined, or doomed, to be the embodiment of the “culture wars gap” — the great distance which divides the Northeast and the liberal Coastal cities from the so-called Heartland. With deep roots in the conservative, fundamentalist South, I am a cultural refugee-convert to the Northeast, a progressive Christian in the Episcopal Church. Pretty far from a Palin supporter.

But when Gail Collins’ opines with ironic glee that “Sarah Palin has come a long way....Now (even) the prepared remarks are incoherent,” half of me smirks along with her, and the other half feels she just doesn’t get it at all. Not the way this will play to Palin’s enthusiastic base of supporters, many of whom agree with Sarah’s conviction that God has destined her to be President. (Which, by the way, is one of my nightmares. Remember, I’m a “refugee” from Sarah-Land.)

How is Collins’—and many other commentators—wrong, even if their cleverness is Oh So Right On? Let me count the ways:

Well, among the Alaskan governor’s alleged “incoherent” remarks are the following:

'Life is about choices' declared the nation’s most anti-choice politician. Sorry, Gail; right, but wrong. “Choices” equals “freedom” as in land of the free and home of the brave. Code word. Sure, Sarah supports what liberals call “anti-choice.” Sarah calls it “pro-life.” One language: two divergent vocabularies.

She babbled about her parent’s refrigerator magnet which apparently had a lot of wise advice. Gail; the magnet says “Don’t explain: Your friends don’t need it and your enemies won’t believe you anyway.” Maybe Gail doesn’t relish refrigerator magnets, or hers reflect her many travels, but out there in middle America religious and moral sentiments abide. That parental magnet speaks powerfully of the feelings of an embattled minority whose sentiments are considered “incoherent” by the cogniscenti.

Palin’s stated desire to save Alaska the "waste of millions of dollars" over alleged charges of ethical misconduct is seen as a possible get-out-of-town-quick move before another scandal breaks. Gail hopes it will be an adulterous affair—smirk, smirk. Again, she misses the code words: "government waste." Palin campaigned to make state government more “efficient and effective.” She has, in her telling of it, been hounded out of office by “politics as usual,” by “media hounding” and by “enemies.” Code words. Code words. Code words.

Code words galore:

“to build up, not to tear down” (well-known quote from the Bible);
“fruitfulness and productivity”;
“industrious, generous, patriotic people”
“determined...to take the RIGHT path...though it is UNCONVENTIONAL.”

Code words, not incoherence. Forget the sentence structure. Liberals seem to believe that clear thinking will win any struggle. Truth be told, not everybody can think all that clearly, and thinking isn’t the only form of “smart” around. As e.e. cummings said in a very different context: ....since feeling is first, whoever pays any attention to the syntax of things will never wholly kiss you....

Palin knows how to kiss. How to kiss the sore places in the psyches of people who feel America has been headed down the wrong road since the 1960s. How to kiss the fearful hearts who believe that moral “apostasy” invites the wrath of God. How to kiss the bruises of those who feel the Establishment looks on them with scorn. She’s their icon.

If those of us in Obamaland really think the threat of a serious right-wing takeover of America has disappeared, we are paying too much attention to getting our syntax right, and missing the drumbeats going strong out there in the nation’s hinter-heartland. Sarah made it big in the headlines today, the 4th of July. That was no miscalculation on her part.

She is the dream girl of an impassioned minority of Americans this very Independence Day. Gail, northeasterners, liberals, take note! And, for God’s sake, don’t laugh.

For Gail Collins' NY Times Op-Ed piece, go to: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/04/opinion/04collins.html

There's more than one way to become a Father....

2009-06-22T00:17:00.000-04:00

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
—Gerard Manley Hopkins

As I heard one person after another rise to thank their departing pastor for his time with them, all with cherishing words and some quite misty-eyed, I could feel the waves of affection for The Leader move through the room. When C. S. Lewis outlined the “four loves” — affection, friendship, eros, and charity — I’m not sure he mentions love for good leaders. Probably it’s a combination of friendship and affection, but, most certainly, it is an abiding, often pivotal factor in the affairs of human groups.

This evangelical Methodist church family wouldn’t think of calling their pastor “Father,” and the man isn’t even pushing forty yet, but he was clearly seen not only as preacher, team captain, and shepherd, but as spiritual father as well, whatever the congregant’s age. And what does age have to do with something as archetypal as fathering anyway? This special way of caring and mentoring works through uncles and teachers, coaches and drill sergeants as well as those men who father a child biologically and hang around to help raise them.

Sitting at that farewell party, I felt that my Father’s Day afternoon was already full of meaning, even before arriving at my father-in-law’s celebration, because it made so clear that there’s more than one way to be a father.

Fathering-spirit

The fathering-spirit requires only that a person be “older” in wisdom about a particular aspect of human life, and wish to share it with someone less fully formed in that wisdom with a particular kind of caring, a caring that combines encouragement and expectation with affection and acceptance. Children, boys and girls alike, who have a biological father with this care to mentor lovingly are doubly blessed: they live cheek-by-jowl with their genetic progenitor as well as living in the atmosphere of his desire that they grow strong and true into their fullest selves. Those who don’t have such a biological father with them will need to find an alternative father-love somewhere else, sooner or later, or be bereft of it.

Mothers bring their own kind of love, of course, to the enterprise, and much of it overlaps with father-love, so much so that more than one mother in human history has had to tackle both jobs with their children. But fathers themselves, biological and alternative, are still the most likely to embody this kind of love, for it consists not only of actions and attitudes, but the subtle energy of what the poet Robert Bly calls “body resonance” as well. Gender differences cannot be entirely captured by words, for we are, after all bodies too, male and female, so alike and yet so very different all at the same time.

This Father’s Day was further enriched by calls and emails from my “children," pictured above. I use quotes because my wife and I have no physical offspring (not by choice, but by circumstance. And yet I find myself, at an advancing age, richly blessed with the four kids I always wanted. Though from different genetic lines, they have come into my life for friendship and fathering. In fact, our family size may well not stop at four. Yes, the bass note of biological identity is not there, but the relationship is so affectionally real that we are in the process of adopting each other as godfather and godchildren.

I know from my own life-journey how important alternative fathering is. I wonder if any boy or girl reaches full maturing without more than one father (or, for that matter, one mother). And for men in their youth who had a father not-fully-present to the task, as mine wasn’t in spite of his best efforts, the need is greater still. Without uncle Karl, childless himself, who was always so delighted to hear what I was doing, or Peter, the Christian college worker who saw me as a spiritual son, or Howard who loved something special in me, or Guy who adopted me as a kind of godson, I don’t know what kind of man I would be. Now I get to return the favor.

"He fathers forth whose beauty is past praise..."

If the great Mystery that brought us all into being, that Reality we call “God,” actually cares that we humans grow up into our full stature as partners in the human venture, it’s little wonder so many traditions call it “Father.” Of course, humanity once knew (and needs to learn again) that this Source is also, appropriately, called “Mother” as well as many other names, Wisdom, Justice, Compassion and Love among them. Whatever the ultimate nature of the Mystery, one Name cannot possibly capture all Its ways of working to shape us toward strength and real goodness.

But “Father” is surely one of them, and there is little wisdom in the tendency of some current religious types to purge the term from our prayers land theology, even if some folks have had such a bad experience of fathering that they are allergic to the term. The task is not to throw the Father out, as is the wont of some, but bring Mother and all those other Names into real prominence in our thought and worship.

In the Episcopal church at least, there is a God-neutering brigade that would deprive us of Father and Mother both with the lackluster “Parent” or the less-than-descriptive generic “God” repeated endlessly: “God has sworn by Godself that God will not...” They are, of course, then stubbornly opposed by others who literalize the patriarchal language to the point of idolatry. The Godself avalanche in some places sometimes seems me the Liberal way to avoid breaking through to a new/old mode and saying Her as well as Him outright, right there in the liturgy, often.

OK, I understand that, granted the unjust suppression of the feminine in history, some iconoclasm may be necessary, but does no one understand (on either side) anymore the power—and limits—of metaphor anymore? Ease up guys. Let the Hundred Names of God flourish! “The kingdom (sic) of God consists not in words, but in God’s power” as Paul reminds the quarreling Corinthians.

How could I even think of discarding "Father" when, made in the image of God as I am, along with all men and women, father-love arises so strongly in me. If it's not in God, why is it arising so naturally from the ground of my being? Being blessed with these recently arrived godchildren, (to say nothing of my beloved nephews and nieces who have their own place in the scheme), I find that chambers in my heart are opening which I never knew were there. This father-love arises in body and soul as I talk to them, look at their pictures, or even think of them. I get to be proud of their growth, concerned about their problems and worried about their safety. I get to be a father, and a love long missing has now found its home in me.

And, I dare to hope, I am privileged to know something more, in my limited human way, of what the Divine love feels like when it is fathering. It is a wonder.

Has music become more real than religion for the young?

2009-06-09T23:06:00.000-04:00

The young man got more excited when I observed that “music seems to have become the real religion of a great many young people.” What I had heard him saying was that his journey into self-knowledge, soul-knowledge, was happening via music.

I was all the more interested because this seventeen year old has served as an acolyte, sung in the choir, participated in youth activities, and says he likes church. But his journey into the soul is marked chiefly by a succession of musical periods, all of it from secular sources.

It wasn’t that way when I was his age. As a teen-ager (we were “young people” in my Detroit neighborhood in the 50s), music was entertainment, not meaning—a pleasant diversion. I ask you, how much meaning-juice can you get out of “How much is that doggie in the window/ the one with the waggly tale?” or even the early Elvis: “You ain’t nothing but a hound dog...”? The path to adult identify was well laid out for us within a fairly clear, if superficial, moral and religious framework.

But things changed in the culture, and music along with, though it’s hard to tell which comes first as there arose a deep, searching synergy between them. First there was the folk music explosion, with its ballads and yearnings. Then came the early civil rights music like Peter, Paul and Mary’s rendition of “If I had a hammer/ I’d hammer out justice”) Culture changing forces were on the move, and the old path to adulthood became less formally outlined, less clear.

I remember vividly the first time, in my post-college seminary days, that I heard Bob Dylan’s “A hard rain’s gonna fall.” Being a meaning-junkie, my soul perked up its ears, and I was led into the revolutionary, self-transformative spirit of the 60s and 70s. So I haven’t been altogether surprised to hear from more than one younger person, recently, how formative music is for them as they seek a sense of identity in a largely post-Christian popular culture. I get it because for us, in our early 20s, a lot in the world suddenly went “up for grabs” and plunged us into questioning and re-defining ourselves and our world. I, at least, was a somewhat late bloomer in this search.

Still, it was different. My soul had already been significantly formed by a deep Christian rooting, a teen-age evangelical “decision for Christ,” a lot of Bible study, and a rich and meaningful experience as a growing kid in a vital Christian congregation with a thoughtful and progressive minister, for someone on the liberal edges of fundamentalism. The bards of the counter-culture period came as expansions of meanings already established, formative forces for a soul already set on a path.

The world is very different now for Christian (or Jewish, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist) kids growing up in America. The tameness of most of our congregational music, the sedateness of our liturgy, and the “nice” character of our teaching can’t hold a candle to the power of most of the music out there, where the vocals are saturated with angst of soul and frameworks of meaning. As long ago as the mid-1960s the Pied Pipers of the music industry and the alternative music scene captured the attention of a huge swath of kids. The transmission of the great cultural heritage of the West, including the sacred Story, was interrupted and dimmed by the new music-makers.

This is not in any way an “ain’t it awful” rant about kids, music or society. On the contrary, I’m intrigued about where the soul is being touched and where God may be hiding out. I’m offering an observation of what’s happening on the ground, and why so many young people, even those with a church, synagogue or mosque grounding, just don’t seem be receiving the transmission of the heritage. A rabbi I know, for example, who at the time presided over a growing and very successful synagogue, lamented to me in a surprising moment of irony, that his congregation provided a place where acculturated, suburban Jews could bring their children so that “they would have the memory of having been Jewish.”

So now I’m not only returning to the music of my youth, revisiting my late 20-something use of music as, at least, a commentary on themes established, but being taught by some contemporary youths—a high school junior and a graduating college senior in particular—something about the contemporary alternative music scene. What I’m finding people reading this blog may have known for years, but I’m finding a revelation about the state of soul of lots of younger people. A prime example for me has been discovering “Radiohead,” a British group which performs seductively beautiful music with lyrics that seem to express the confusion and despair of a culture dying and being reborn at the same time—but reborn to what? Take this for example:

We're rotten fruit/ We're damaged goods
What the hell, we've got nothing more to lose
One gust and we will probably crumble/ We're backdrifters

Or this:

Everything is broken/ Everyone is broken
You can force it but it will stay stung/ You can crush it as dry as a bone
You can walk it home straight from school/ You can kiss it, you can break all the rules
But still...Everything is broken/ Everyone is broken

What I hear in what I’m being introduced to, and this is by no means the whole of contemporary music is the underbelly of much American youth culture. There are other voices, of course, pointing in a different direction—U2 for example, or this cut from Delta Spirit:

my heart it is thumping/ the veins they've been blue
the blood thats been pumping/ still hasn't met you
the beard that I'm growing/not fully grown
the years are not coming/the way I thought they would
hoping and waiting/for something to sing
like the angels in heaven/ the bones on the street
hoping for love/ to find a new voice
the song that's needs singing/has already been sung before

These kids are from “good” homes in affluent suburbs; they are well-educated, and headed onto the American career path of success, with high hopes of “making it.” And yet this music speaks of an underlying mood full of confusion, searching, with touches of despair and whiffs of nihilism. It is a disarming revelation of the underbelly of soul for millions, I suspect.

Part of this is surely the breakdown of the transmission of the sacred meanings that have sustained Western culture for centuries. As one young man told me recently, “I’ve been fed a lot of information, and filled with questions in college, but given no framework of value or meaning by which to understand the meaning of any of it for my life.” Nor had he really gotten such a framework from his church, though I know they tried.

As another young man, now in his 30s, who is an adult convert to the religion he wasn’t touched by in his youth describes the situation:

All is broken, at least for us urban cosmopolitan youth who were raised in the deracinating circumstances of "multiculturalism" and "self-expression." the two, of course, are related, because if there are no communal horizons, if it is all hybridity and fluidity, then it is up to the self to self-discover. Hence the individualization of everything, the growing despair and disenchantment of youth, and the thriving marketplace of quick-fixes, base sentiments, and little real guidance. In the pool of the marketplace, narcissus finds only his reflection. It compels nothing, asks
nothing, does nothing.

Well, perhaps it sings us some good songs. Perhaps it speaks to us in ways we actually feel. But unlike the church, or what the church might be, it doesn't take those feelings and guide them to a higher purpose. Transformation is not the business of the market. It's the business of communal traditions. And so we have a marketplace that knows how we feel but asks nothing. And a church that has no clue how to speak to us, but asks everything.

Such a statement of the reality of a post-Christian and now post-modern situation! And I don’t have a spiffy answer about to how to transmit the sacred meanings in this situation, though I plan to follow some clues about how to sing the “song that has been sung before.” But it’s a quest people concerned with this transmission need to take. Anybody reading this is quite free to make comments. I know others are further along than I am. As I said, I’m a late bloomer.

The kid felt calling Hitler evil was too judgmental.....

2009-05-25T22:20:00.000-04:00

So, at the Harry Potter party (see May 18 blog), there was a kid who had difficulty with my calling Hitler evil. I was comparing the Dark Lord, Voldemort, to the great villains of history and this 11-year old (a Jewish boy, I think), said that calling Hitler evil was “judging him” and we didn’t have a right to do that.

Only in the suburbs.....or perhaps in academia. I managed to remain calm. I find it hard to imagine the people I know in the storefront church in Newark who put up with random violence, drug dealers preying on their kids, and so on, would find it so easy “not to judge.” Or the good citizens of Baghdad whose relatives just died in the car bomb attack. Or the survivors of the holocaust.

Mind you, I’m as allergic to judgmentalism as any other modern, right-thinking liberal. "Open mind, open heart" has been a major motif in my teaching for almost 40 years. But when a young Jewish kid has reservations about calling Hitler evil you’ve got to wonder if things haven’t gone a bit too far.

I’m surrounded by this sort of hesitation a lot: we mustn’t judge others, we must understand all and forgive all, it’s not up to us to judge, God accepts us just as we are, and so on. More and more, this seems a bit lopsided—a string of noble-sounding half-truths, ideals that ignore one half of reality.

“Judging” and making an assessment

There’s a big difference between judging as a matter of making an assessment and judgmentalism and arrogant condemnation.

The universe is actually quite good at “judging,” though we don’t usually call it that. Reality “judges” that if I step off a high cliff (unless I am Cayote in one of those Road Runner cartoons) I will be a goner. The Mississippi River “judges” that if we build our cities along its banks, they’ll get flooded from time to time. Human nature “judges” that for most people, betrayal of an important trust makes trust difficult in the future. Damage to relationships is real. Seems to be the way we’re made.

This “not judging” business seems like truly fuzzy speech. Just as “loose lips sink ships” (an old World War II slogan), fuzzy speech clouds clear thinking, not just for the brainy but for ordinary folks. Surely there’s a difference between being censorious, judgmental, and harsh in our estimation of others and the necessary business of making estimations about people and situations, and assessments of the effect of behavior on others.

“It’s not up to us to judge” is true enough if we’re talking about ultimate judgment, which is the province of God alone, “unto whom all hearts are open, and from whom no secrets are hid.” Who knows what was going on in the mind of Hitler? What demons of childhood haunted him? What brain defect warped his view of reality? What 11-year old Jewish boy taunted him in a schoolyard or on the street? Still, the death of 13 million people, and an extermination campaign against Jews, Gypsies, and Gays seems, well, a bit “evil” to me. Sure, he was “doing his own thing” superbly well, but if that’s not evil, I don’t know what is.

The Buddhists talk about right judgment, and so does Jesus: “Judge not by appearances, but judge with right judgment” (John 7:24). In order to do this, to quote an old bromide, we must “walk a mile in the other person’s moccasins.” And if we can’t, our judgments (call them assessments if that makes you more comfortable) have to be functional and provisional, not ultimate. Jesus is warning us off ultimate judgments, I must assume, when the says “Judge not that you may not be judged.” Be he himself did a good bit of judging: of character, of the way the wind was blowing, of the corruption of the unjust leaders, and so on.

Real-life example? Well, I am not to be trusted, I’m here to tell you, to deliver a message to my office if you give it to me at the end of a class or lecture. I’m likely to forget it. People have been known to stuff checks or notes into the side pocket of my briefcase in the conviction this will insure their delivery to my office staff. Not good judgment. But if you tell me a confidence, you can be sure I will respect its privacy. I can be trusted to do that. Even then, I wouldn’t want you to go beyond a functional judgment into ultimacy. Who knows what I might do if Dick Cheney kidnapped me and subjected me to waterboarding?

Accepted just as I am, yes; but then?

As to God accepting us “just as we are,” it’s a good start, but a dubious ending. I cut my teeth on singing, and believing, “just as I am, thou will receive/ wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve.” It meant a lot, and got a big assist from Paul Tillich’s “accept the fact that you are accepted.” A good start. But where do you go from there?

My wife accepts me, mostly, “just as I am,” but that didn’t stop her from demanding that I take responsibility for my repeated depressions (biochemical, it turned out), or my outbursts of intense anger (mostly a thing of the past). We both accepted each other “for better for worse” and have tried to minimize the worse. Why? The relationship goes better that way, and no “I have no right to judge you” is going to make our mistakes with each other really OK unless we seek to set them right. That takes honest, mutual disclosure of our judgments about all that hinders the growth of our love.

So, what about this? “God accepts us all, just as we are, for God is love. All are welcome, regardless who who they are or what they’ve done. But this love for us is so great it will not allow us to hide forever from the good that can to come forth more fully in us. In the circle of God’s acceptance, no one can remain forever unchanged, remain "just as they are" when they enter that forcefield of Ultimate understanding, no matter how long it may take them to realize there's more good potential in them than they know.

So what about Hitler, ultimately? That, of course, would be beyond my heavenly clearance level to judge.

Angels and Demons: Who’s telling the Story now?

2009-05-18T17:11:00.000-04:00

The kids were eager. When they walked in and saw me dressed as Dumbledore, their faces lighted up. This was going to be a party with a difference. My nephew’s belated eleventh birthday party was off to a good start. The sorting hat quickly divided them into the four Houses of Hogwart’s School and the threat of their House losing points for wiggling, shoving and loud-mouthing to lapse into happy surrender to the planned program. These kids were into that story big-time.

Since the supernatural has been largely banished from the nation’s once “mainstream” Protestant churches, it has been taken up by “Supernatural” on TV. Sci-Fi or “fantasy” fiction, popular TV, cinema—even depth psychology!—now shoulder the task of telling humanity’s age-old saga of the battle of the angels of light against and the demons of darkness. Where the appointed storytellers fail to carry on part of the Story, the Divine Storyteller finds other bards.

Liberalism and humanism, of course, have their own version of the Drama, but morphed from mythic story into abstract ideas and principles: human dignity against the deadly “isms.” Fine enough. But the “isms” always go for the masses, often with success. Nazis, Fascists and fear-mongers need something more vivid than sweet reason to compete for followers in the marketplace of ideas.

Why do the religiously sophisticated so often look down their noses at the stories of angelic encounter that drives book sales among the “ordinary” folk, Christian and non-Christian alike? The older, primal archetypal levels that still rule our dreams and emotions are hardly called forth by high-minded, left-brained concepts, leaving out the deep parts of us in which soul still stirs.

I would be considered a “liberal” in many circles (I prefer “progressive”). I prize left-brain rationality in a big way. But I think e.e. cummings had it right when he said “when souls are outlawed, minds are weak.....” — that is, hyper-rationalism undermines not only soul but real rationality too. As part of the same poem, that son of a Unitarian minister also lays his finger on what may be the source of the lack of “fire in the belly” in so much late 20th century and current liberalism:

Jehovah buried, Satan dead,
do fearers worship Much and Quick;
badness not being felt as bad
itself thinks goodness what is meek....

Meanwhile, on some popular TV shows, a rather tough-minded goodness is locked in beleaguered battle with Satan with precious little help from heaven, even though there are a lot of angels of dubious character around representing the ultimate Good Guy (or Gal, as you prefer). “Supernatural” tracks two demon-hunting brothers, Sam (name = “heard by God”) and Dean ( “deacon, servant or captain”) are chosen by enigmatic forces to stop the legendary Jewish spirit Lilith from unloosing Satan on the world to start the Apocalypse. Right out of the book of Revelation, minus Jesus.

Inspired by the writings of Neil Gaiman, author of American Gods, among other works, this post-Christian drama knows vividly the immediate power of evil, but the sense of an ultimate Good is shrouded in obscurity. The young men use Latin spells and Catholic sacramentals like holy water. There are angels on the beat.

But the heavenly realm’s goodness is dubious for Gaiman. So it’s up to the stumbling, fallible humans to try to save the world from destruction, while both sides give them difficulty. The old, old Story?

Certainly it is a version of it. Good, here human good is rooted obscurely in something super-mundane, fighting for its life against uncanny and relentless evil. Humanity against the demon. The very world at stake with little sense of God. Dean and Sam as saviors, without so much as a helping hand from the Bedrock of the Universe.

Maybe, as Bultmann claimed, “nobody who uses electricity can possibly believe in demons.” But the German New Testament scholar came to this startlingly rational conclusion as a soldier in the trenches of World War I, with mortars and mustard gas in regular use. In the midst of unimaginable human evil, in a century that will prove the wickedest (and the best) in human history, he decides Satan and the angels are outmoded symbols. Go figure.

Others, like Walter Wink, lead us back to the old language. Following the lead of civil-rights activist William Stringfellow, Wink found new power in the Bible’s ancient language of demons and angels. The “principalities and powers” describe the “bigger than all of us” quality of the soul of organizations—that mysterious synergy of people, ideas and customs that somehow influences outcomes, even when the participants don’t consciously intend these results. His blend of depth psychology, organizational analysis, liberation theology and New Testament imagery about the “powers” has played to some applause, but needs to become a permanent part of our filters of moral discernment.

A cure for a hyper-rationalism that substitutes a host of “isms” for a host of demons and an army of high principles for the battalions of angels is certainly not a return to pre-modern supernaturalism. We have more than our full quotient of fundamentalists still beating that drum. Secular or religious, however, we might well take a deeper look at what truths some supposed pre-modern images (and even superstitions) point — as Susan Howatch has done so effectively in her many novels about priests and laypeople up against real psychological and spiritual evil, blending depth psychology with ancient symbols in a very sophisticated way.

I used to joke, for example, that the life of my seminary was still controlled by a powerful 19th-century dean who built most of the buildings—that whoever the current dean was had to consult him every night by means of a golden Ouija Board. Of course, I didn’t mean it literally, and no one took it that way. But only such a parable could describe the uncanny way that the seminary drama was always the seminary drama, no matter who was cast in the roles.

Meanwhile, while our liberal churches continue their internal house-keeping wars, the Story is still told by many bards and poets to the “crowd,” the vast increasingly post-Christian audience. We are a story-telling species, and mythic tales that tell us what the unseen forces are doing gets our juices going.

Buffy, the ordinary high school girl, rises to the challenge of being the Chosen Vampire-Slayer. Clark Kent, just entering adulthood on “Smallville” (he almost realizes he loves Lois Lane, finally!) ended the season prepared to die to save the world. And the impending release of the latest film episode in the Harry Potter series leads us inexorably toward that last, final battle with the Dark Lord in which Harry will die and rise again, ending the threat of world-consuming evil.

Most everybody knows in their guts we face the End of the Age that birthed us, that civilization is in a sea-change going we know not where. Anybody who doesn’t is living in the most protected suburbs and ignoring the news completely, so caught up in money-making they neither notice nor care, or has such blind faith in the myth of Progress that they haven’t been noticing events. The lot seems to have fallen to the TV bards and science fantasy seers to tell the tale, often in disguise of Christ and Anti-Christ, of demons and angels, of the world at peril and the otherwise ordinary humans called to heroic missions and given special powers. Even Dan Brown’s dreadfully written pot-boilers (“Angels and Demons”/ “The DaVinci Code”) make razzle-dazzle movies, telling the tale of reason and tolerance in crowd-winning ways.

The writers may not believe the stories literally, but they address our fears with the ancient hopes, and they know that these mythic symbols are the best way humanity has found to describe the truly mysterious movements of good and evil. Or if they are not telling this story, they are imagining future ages past this coming time of difficulty, and painting pictures of eschatological possibilities unheard in most post-mainstream pulpits.

Perhaps they are just whistling the old tune in fear of “what is coming upon the earth,” or perhaps the Storytelling One is speaking the persistent Word through them, however blunted the full message may be. Surely the story of God’s struggle against the dark forces of the human heart should be told as vividly for our day. It needs to be told, with force, in its fullness, instead of by writers less certain of the power of Goodness, storytellers more knowledgeable about its many Names.

For whatever reason, the young are listening to the new Bards in rapt attention. The 11-year olds at my nephew’s recent Harry Potter party knew that story, chapter and verse, the way my childhood fundamentalist Sunday-School classmates knew the story of Jesus and the battle of Jericho.

What that mysterious Bardic One will make out of this cultural phenomenon remains to be seen.

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You've got to have some sympathy for God.....

2009-05-07T23:06:00.000-04:00

Poor God is getting buffeted about badly these days. To be more accurate, the most widespread stereotype about the God of western religion (Christianity, Judaism, Islam) is taking it in the neck a lot. A grand Idea, developed over centuries by the leading lights of Western philosophy—Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Maimonides, Kierkegaard, Schliermacher, Tillich....I could go on—is treated with the scorn and contempt suffered by Zeus in some of the Roman comedy, who appears as a bit of a buffoon.

But poor God has become a Poor God indeed. Tarred and feathered over being the biggest cause of prejuice and hatred (murder, genocide, sexual dysfunction...I could go on) in human history, He who was once the fount of all goodness is now for many the source of noxious fumes. You'd almost think he had become the Devil in many people's eyes, like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, the leading "Brights" of the new vanguard of evangelistic atheists.

In a way, you can't blame them, what with hateful preachers saying "God hates Gay," fanatical suicide bombers claiming (through a distorted, non-classical form of Islam) to kill in the name of the God of Abraham, and 8 years of a right-wing "Christian" American presidential administration pushing "abstinence only" programs for teens that cause more pregnancies than any other advice for teen behavior.

"Good" Religion Under-reported

The news media, of course, can't be bothered to report that religious institutions are responsible for most of the charity provided to the poor, the sick, and other people in need. The history books, mostly, don't tell young people that American Christians (and later on Jews) launched the women's suffrage movement, the abolition of slavery, supported labor union organization, virtually created and was a major force in the progressive politics of the first half of the 20th century. They don't report that religious institutions are the base of most of the volunteer work in America. Nor can Hollywood or TV find much room for positive images of clergy, who are usually Bible-toting, narrow-minded moralizers, or worse.

Having seized the headlines, fundamentalist, right-wing Christianity has come to define the brand name in the eyes of millions, especially a growing section of the next generation. Few people realize what a specifically "modern," trimmed-down, and (from the standpoint of the mainstream of classical Christianity through the ages) distorted version of a grand way of wisdom.

Counter-trends in Religion

There are counter-trends of course. Interfaith cooperation between Christians, Jews and, increasingly, Muslims is growing remarkably and rapidly. Millions of "progressive" Christians and Jews support progressive social change, and fight against racial prejudice, gay oppression, America's historic "too bad for you: work harder" stance about the poor, and many other causes liberal atheists, agnostics, and humanists support.

And progressive theologians, as they did in every age, incorporating new knowledge into ancient religious impression of a Divine ground and Source of the life of the universe. Their "God" is not your grandmother's God, and a good thing too. While respecting the wisdom of the ancestors, they see a Divine energy at the heart of evolution, growth and change in moral awareness, sexual joy, physical health, and love of the stranger and those who are different from us.

Meanwhile, trends in anthropology, studies is social evolution, brain research, cross-cultural study of mystical experience in every religion, and demonstrating that while theological explanations of God change, the actual experiences of "cosmic mind," overwhelming Love surging through creation, a compassionate awareness lurking at the depths of the human psyche, unexpected and seemingly miraculous guidance and healing, and the subtle but unmistakable feeling of being in a "Knowing Presence" persist in every age. They are erecting a new picture of religious pathways as a powerful, and mostly beneficial, bond in human societies, and major source of moral inspiration.

What's the Future of our "Secular Paradise"?

Meanwhile, the 20th century utopian fantasies of building a secular paradise on earth through capitalist progress, Fascist or Communist dictatorship, socialist and humanist progress, while they contain bright hopes for human flourishing (based, often, on ideas drawn from the Hebrew prophets) keep coming a bit of a cropper, even though they sometimes (Fascism excepted) do some good along with more evil than modern people want admit.

Some of the evil is clear: it was not Christianity that killed tens of millions in Stalin's atheist regime or Hitler's neo-pagan hell; it was not Buddhism that produced the killing fields of Cambodia. Some less highlighted, even taken for granted: the slaughter of the native populations by "enlighted, progressive" European colonialism (the missionaries often tried to save the natives); the "ethnic cleansing" that built secular Turkey and other nations; and the (inadvertent, unintended) death of millions of infants and adults in modern medicine around the world, especially in areas overpopulated and underfed because of increased hygience and lowered infant mortality rates. Not all evil is planned and intended--and every movement causes some.

Religious groups sometimes commit evil because any human institution—medicine, government, even the family—are capable of evil. Secular humanism can cause much good. It has not had time enough in human history to demonstrate it is capable of more good than the religions at their best.

Don't get me wrong: I have relatives and good friends who are humanists and/or atheists. I have nothing but admiration for their moral courage and deep human values. Nor do I despise all fundamentalists or religious conservatives. Again, I know dozens of loving fundamentalist Christians who are the lights of the world. But the question is what represents Christianity best, and what is the most socially, morally, and spiritually beneficial view of life and the universe for humanity going forward in this difficult century.

The Aims of Religion Re-assessed

"At least religion is trying for something more than local satisfactions," writes the British cultural critic Terry Eagleton in his new book "Reason, Faith and Revolution" (Yale University Press, 2009). Religions “subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself, in relation to what it takes to be its transcendent source of life.” And it is only that great subject, and the aspirations it generates, that can lead, Eagleton insists, to “a radical transformation of what we say and do.”

Not a traditional believer himself he feels that in the wisdom of the religious "radicals might discover there some valuable insights into human emancipation, in an era where the political left stands in dire need of good ideas....(T)he Jewish and Christian scriptures have much to say about some vital questions—death, suffering, love, self-dispossession, and the like—on which the left has for the most part maintained an embarrassed silence. It is time for this politically crippling shyness to come to an end." (See "God Talk" by Stanley Fish in the NY Times, May 3, 2009)

And it is time for educated, progressive Jews and Christians, especially those who represent a generous reading of the classical theological and moral tradition, to speak out boldly and vigorously to address the burning issues of our day, and to take the bull of reactionary religion by the horns and try to wrestle it to the ground. The world deserves better than what they offer, and what we have too often not offered while the foundations of culture eroded beneath us while we were coasting on the progressive hegemony of the last century.

Beginning...

2009-05-04T22:41:00.000-04:00

Welcome to this blog! Today I did what I've planned to do for a long time: start a blog. I'm moving into the next phase of my work and since I'm a writer (three books now and a lot of essays) it would come naturally, especially as my work becomes more diversified. What I'm doing now is continuing my life as an Episcopal priest in a public educational ministry, Interweave, an interfaith center for spirituality, wellness, and the common good. But more and more, I'm hip-deep in interfaith leadership work, gang violence reduction in Newark, spiritual direction, and public and political issues. So here goes. First post soon.