Sitting on the Curb Together

Late last week I was at Daybreak on my regular Thursday walkaround. The place closes down at 11 to allow staff an hour lunch, so a number of people collect out back, smoking, napping in the sun, sitting and relaxing. This happens every weekday but I go there on Thursdays.

The volunteer coordinator calls it my "social day" because what I do is wander around in back and ask people how they are. Most times they answer in the affirmative and I might sit with them to catch up on stuff. But when they say "Not so good," I make a point of sitting or squatting with them to hear their story. 

That's all I do, listen to their stories. I'm not a social worker or RN or therapist, I don't have access to any resources and my knowledge of what's available, even a year after moving here, is woefully inadequate. But I can listen and I'm aware from my own time on the road that this is often something not available to lonely people; someone who will uncritically and calmly sit with them and listen to what's going on. I can't solve any of their issues and they're aware of that, but I can make them a little less lonely.

In seminary, this ministry was emphasized to me by the story of Job and his friends. While it's true they try to explain away his mistreatment by God by placing the blame on him, what they do before that is

set out from their homes and met together by agreement to go and sympathize with him and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they could hardly recognize him; they began to weep aloud, and they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads. Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him, because they saw how great his suffering was.

This is the critical part of ministry for me, that rather than immediately setting out to interpret his suffering, his friends sit with him and share his misery. For a week and silently. That is truly sharing in someone's grief.

I don't try to put myself in the shoes of Job's friends because they are convinced of their own righteousness and eventually give in to judgement. But I do accept the wisdom of their first actions, to sit on the ground and be with the one who is suffering.

So this past Thursday I noticed one of my regulars sitting on the curb away from the property and drinking a beer. She looked unhappy, so when I could I wandered over and sat down, said I was glad to see her and asked how she was. 

Her issue was nothing new to her, it's a problem she's been trying to solve since January, and I'd heard it before at length. But I didn't say anything about that, I just listened. After she finished her beer she stood up to go inside and we walked over together. She said, "Thanks for sitting there with me." I said, "That's what I do, it's about all I'm good at." 

That's when she said something that floored me. At first I was unsure I'd understood her and asked "What?" She turned around and looked me full in the face and said, enunciating every word, "You keep people from ending their lives."

I don't know if she meant overall people who do that or just me, although I'm certain in that moment she meant just me. It pierced me. That is, I believe, the closest I'll ever come to a personal divine message.

 

Plant the Sapling First

I've been reading this book, The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet's Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India by Rodger Kamenetz, for about a week. I've been looking forward to doing so since I saw it, what, 25 years ago, as I was stocking copies in the Religions-Judaism section in Barnes and Noble. I had somehow thought of it all these years as an exploration of Kamenetz' own experiences in India, but he was actually operating as a journalist traveling with a Jewish delegation meeting with the Dalai Lama. Doesn't matter, it's a good book. 

It's in his position as the outsider, secular Jew traveling with rabbis and their coterie, that he raises fascinating and difficult questions about both Judaism and religion. The Dalai Lama had requested, after a visit to the US, to meet with Jews who might commiserate with him regarding being a part of a diaspora, recognizing  the reality of Tibetan spiritual homelessness. There are many good segments but this one comes during the presentation by Rabbi Yitz Greenberg, the Orthodox representative, who takes the Dalai Lama through the early history of Jewish diaspora. 

[The] Babylonian story offers...hope. But I knew why Yitz chose instead to make a parallel with events surrounding the Roman destruction. The Tibetans might well be facing a long exile. And not far from his mind was also the Holocaust and the theological questions it raises...How can Jews affirm faith in God and his covenant with the chosen people after Auschwitz? The question is settled for most secular and liberal Jews--they can't. Obviously such a position is unacceptable to an Orthodox Jew...In contemporary Orthdox Jewish theology, Rabbi Greenberg's own substantial contribution has been the concept of the "voluntary covenant." According to [sociologist Arnold] Eisen, "The word 'voluntary' is crucial...It emphasizes that the initiative--now, more than ever--is on the human side rather than on God's. It suggests that we will be faithful, we will uphold the covenant, even if God in the Holocaust did not." 

Here, I would add a massive exclamation point to the text if I could. This is radical Orthodoxy as I understand it. 

[Rabbi] Greenberg told the Dalai Lama that the covenant is "the most seminal idea" in Judaism. The covenant that began with Abraham has not been abrogated--even at Auschwitz. Instead..."The creator God seeds the universe with life. Humanity can become a partner with the divine in making the world better or perfect." 

What has changed is the human role in the partnership. And that happened, not in recent times, but "about nineteen hundred years ago, halfway in the history of the religion. The Jewish people in Judea were conquered by the Romans and their Temple destroyed by the Roman  empire. It was devastating." 

...In the first century, many interpreted the Roman destruction as abandonment by God, the end of the covenant. "And since the whole Jewish idea of covenant is that the world can be made better, this would be such a victory for evil that many Jew simply gave up. They assimilated and joined the very dynamic culture around them, Hellenism. Another large groups, the Zealots, put all of their energy to recapturing and rebuilding the Temple..."

The Romans not only destroyed Jerusalem, they renamed the capital and drove her people into exile. More than one million Jews died at that time...But Judaism did not die..."There was one great rabbi of the time, Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai. The Talmud says, when the Romans had Jerusalem surrounded and were about to destroy it, he was able to break through to the Roman emperor and was given one wish. He said, 'Give me Yavneh and its scholars. I want to set up an academy there.'" There he told his students that they would outlast the exile by teaching, interpreting, and preserving the tradition.

"Yochanan ben Zakkai basically said, 'If we don't have our Temple, but we have our learning, our texts--our Bible with us, we have the power by learning to create the equivalent of the Temple. It's a portable homeland.' 

"It's not enough to preserve...[As] partners in the covenant, fallible humans have the authority to add new insights, so that their activity was the equivalent of a renewal of the covenant. Their courage to renew preserved the past."

[Yitz said the first-century rabbis] did not choose to believe that God had abandoned them, and they insisted that the Torah was still fully binding and valid. They interpreted God's nonintervention with the Roman destruction as a sign that, henceforth, in history, the human partner in covenant must take more responsibility for the outcome...God was no longer going to step in and do the miracles for his human partners.

...The memory of the Temple was never lost--but it was turned into literature...More--the magical side of religion, especially the yearning for a messiah--was subdued, if not basically suppressed, by the rabbinic sages. And this became a dominant cautionary note in rabbinic thought for centuries to come, extended not just to messianism but to mysticism in general...Reason became the keynote of Jewish religion, and though some of the rabbinic sages were themselves mystical practitioners, the Talmud certainly expresses strong caution against too much interest in mystical topics.

Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai had had good reason for such caution. He had seen that excessive messianic faith had led the Zealots to challenge Rome, only to bring destruction on all of Israel. His is quoted in the Talmud as saying, "If you holding a sapling in your hand, and someone tell you the Messiah has come, plant the sapling first, then go looking for the Messiah." 

They Are Who They Are

In the past few months, no fewer than three Facebook friends have come out as transgendered. I want to clarify they didn't come out to only me. All three did so unreservedly on their pages, telling everyone who cared (and even those who didn't). 

Did they do so because it's become something trendy? No, of course not. In fact, if anything, doing so puts them and the people they love  at risk, even if it's "only" verbally by people hiding behind their anonymity. 

I've had many Facebook friends who are trans~ for years. Some are former students, some school friends, several are friends I've socialized with for years. In all instances, I can genuinely say I hadn't a clue they were trans~ until they came out, their closeted lives were so well-guarded I never saw inside.

And that, I think, is why this gives me hope. Because in this period when hate and willful misunderstanding of people's identity has become a political football bandied about in legislative chambers and school board meetings as if there aren't real, live people involved, and as a group are being held up to ridicule, stereotype, and blame, as individuals they have opened the closet themselves, letting the rest of us see them as they are. Opening themselves not only to the surprise and of their friends but to the blows, sometimes real blows, of strangers or acquaintances who can't imagine a world beyond their own noses, or whose imagination provides them with fear of such a world, in order to live their lives, as my old friend Roger used to say, "in their authenticity." 

It is such a big but such a small thing to declare "this is who I am," whether intentionally or not echoing God's statement to Moses, "I am who I am." When even the Baptists recognize God is genderless, can the rest of us accept any less of one another? No, we shouldn't. This is what points up the whole mishigas of states and courts decrying help for the people looking for guidance and giving them punishment as the bellowing of dinosaurs drowning in the mud. This is what gives me hope. 

Just One of Us

There's a debate between Stephen Fry and Gay Byrne on Irish tv in which Byrne askes Fry what he would say to God if he arrived at the gates of Heaven. “I’d say: ‘Bone cancer in children? What’s that about?'" Now Fry, as a roundhouse humanist who doesn't play around, continues, demanding of God "'How dare you! How dare you create a world where there is such misery that is not our fault. It’s not right. It’s utterly, utterly evil. Why should I respect a capricious, mean-minded, stupid God who creates a world which is so full of injustice and pain?’ That’s what I’d say.”

It's a good question, and as any religious student knows, it's the basis for the study of theodicy, the fact that there is evil in the world and how do we respond to God's role in it. If God is an omnipotent force for good, why do so many good people receive punishment in this life, while so many bad people flourish?

There are, of course, all kinds of answers relying on an afterlife and one's soul, but putting those aside, to say "It's part of God's plan" just doesn't cut it. It shouldn't, because by letting God off the hook, we let ourselves off as well. As an old adage goes, "I dreamt I asked God, Why is there suffering? And God said, I was just about to ask you."

Earlier this week while I was walking, I was singing "One of Us", a Joan Osborne tune I especially like because of the inclusion suggested by it. And there's a wonderful lyric that says, "What would you ask [God] if you had just one question?"

I'm not as pugnacious as Fry, so I'd leave out his How dare you! But my question would be almost word for word: Why do children die painfully from disease?

God's answer, I would hope, would be "I don't know." Which both horrifies and relieves me. Horrifying, because while I've long cast off notions of an all-powerful God, there is enough left in me to say, You mean, no one's in charge?

But my relief would manifest more powerfully. I believe that nothing is outside or not God, and that includes cancer and pain and horrible death. I don't accept the bumper sticker theology "God is good all the time," because God can't be. No one who has read the Bible and paid attention to the annihilation, murder on a whim, child-head-bashing, enforced slavery, and straight out genocide its writers attribute to God, can. My relief would stem from the idea that terrible death is not a part of God's outline, that it doesn't mean God has some ending in mind that requires, for instance, that babies die alone when left in the forest by desperate families hoping to reach a better life. Cancer and hunger and rot and mental illness are not evil. They simply are. To look at them any other way is to accept that God is a cruel son of a bitch who has stacked the deck against us. While I don't believe God is good all the time, I also don't believe God is evil. By answering "I don't know" (assuming God did; I don't have a secret conversation to share), God accepts there are some things even outside God's understanding. Far from meaning there is something greater than God, this is my understanding of God's Mystery. 

There's a lovely meme attributed to Adi Da Samraj running around Buddhist circles that says, "Relax, nothing's under control." I'm all right with that and I like to think God, for all the mystery, is too. 

Eulogies

 

MUTTERED, NOT EXPECTING
TO BE HEARD

I write more eulogies than any-

Thing else these days, he said,

Adjusting his collar the better

To rest comfortably under his double chin.

If God is not dead, he’s on an extended sabbatical.

Bunga uber alles

For a writer, the curse of living in interesting times is that so much happens, and on a daily, sometimes hourly, schedule that by the time you've given the event or statement any thought, something else has happened or been said, rending moot the previous consideration. This might be the contemporary condition: Too much happening all at once. Time condensed into only the "now," but not the now of zen, the NOW! of hype.

This is prelude to the observation that the current (February, although as a subscriber, I saw it and could have read it in late December) issue of Sojourners magazine offers the pertinent question, "Is This a [Dietrich] Bonhoeffer Moment?" The titular article, by Lori Brandt Hale and Reggie L. Williams, identifies such a moment as "living in a time and place in which 'the huge masquerade of evil has thrown all ethical concepts into confusion' and in which evil appears in the 'form of light, good deeds, historical necessity, [and] social justice.' [Bonhoeffer lived] in a time that required a radical form of ethical discernment, attuned to concrete reality, historical urgency, and the desperate cries of help from victims of the state." [Quotes are from Bonhoeffer's writings.]

This is a question that is uniquely church-related, its context coming from the experience of German Christianity identifying itself with and pledging fealty to the National Socialists, and especially to the person of Adolf Hitler. Taking a page from David Gushee's Righteous Gentiles of the Holocaust, they identify perpetrators (in context, the Nazis), bystanders (Christian churches, especially the Catholic hierarchy), and resisters (Bonhoeffer's Confessing Church). In our contemporary state, the corollary would be Donald Trump and his supporters, the Christian churches who provide a home to much of his base, and those of us who take to the streets, write warnings, argue with the others (and I would even include the Black Bloc and Antifa).

Wisely, the authors leave it to individual readers to come to their own conclusions, although the two followup essays, by Wesley Granberg-Michaelson and Victoria J. Barnett, suggest the most common answer will be a resounding "Yes!" And I agree, in the sense that this moment asks of us to take on the question of why God became human (not so humans would become divine but so we would become more truly human; this is similar to Abraham Heschel's God who is in search of humanity, itself similar to the old rabbinic suggestion God created people so God could experience what it means to live and die. I also agree that we live at a time when it's incumbent on us to identify and label evil as it rises in the world, to point to racism or abuse of the poor and say, That isn't just. That isn't how we're meant to treat one another

But in the first analysis, the suggestion that Trump and his fellows are like the Nazis, I disagree (and to their credit I think the authors do also). Trump is less Adolf Hitler and more Silvio Berlusconi, less "Deutschland uber alles" and more "Bunga bunga." For one, there are much fewer supporters of Trump than are often credited (only 30% of the US electorate supports him at any given time, a number smaller than the number who believe in ghosts, and they aren't given a say in governance). There is also the sheer absurdity of his misbehavior; more often than not we're left to ask one another, Did he just say that? Let's be honest, while many of his policies hurt others, even I would have a hard time connecting a strong line between what he says and anyone's death. Perhaps most importantly, we live in a time when information is readily available and there is no paucity of real news reporting on his hypocrisies, lies, misdirection, blatant cronyism and self-promotion. While Fox News might want it otherwise, the Truth is Out There for anyone who wants to read it.

While the election of the cult of personality that is Trumpery is a stain on our nation we should neither be allowed to forget or to whitewash, it has a finite shelf-life, one which its adherents, in their display of panic, are recognizing and trying like mad to pretend they were never really a part of. In that, it is exactly like Nazism.

She

It's fitting I write this post now, the weekend we observe Veteran's Day and nearly a week after the incredible wins by members of the transgender community to important local and state offices.

I was driving between patients when I received an email that we had a new admission to hospice. Nothing struck as different until I saw both that she was nearing the active phase of dying (yes, there is such a thing and it is different from the state we are normally in), and that, while a cousin was her Power of Attorney for Health, there was otherwise no family involvement. It's true some people prefer to die alone but everyone should have the option of dying with someone who cares.

I had a conference call and another patient scheduled for the afternoon, but as the other chaplain covering that area was conducting a funeral, I offered to reschedule the patient. The hospital was 90 minutes from my area, so I listened to my call while driving; my other patient was eager to reschedule as she was feeling ill.

Over the course of the call I found the new admission was transgender, probably the reason for lack of family involvement, and was dying from pneumonia and was MRSA positive. This means gowning and gloves both for our protection and other patients. She was still in the ICU when I arrived and was unresponsive until I sat beside her and touched her arm, at which point she jolted awake. She was bony and angular and her clavicle stood out above her hospital gown.

I explained who I was, touching my ID so she could read if she couldn't understand. She motioned for a wipeboard near her. She couldn't speak any longer. She asked if I could speak up. I said of course. I asked if she was afraid and she didn't respond or look my way, so I asked if she'd like to hold my hand. In response she put her large bony hand in my gloved one, which I then covered with my other hand.

That was the only time I was to see her conscious. She drifted off to sleep a few minutes later and I held hands with her until she twitched hers away. A short while later the nurses came to move her to another room, outside the ICU, and she fidgeted several times in what seemed discomfort rather than pain. I made plans with my family fellow chaplain to relieve me at 9.

Imagine then my surprise when a small woman walked into the room room and said hello. She turned out to be a friend of the patient who was called by the cousin. She had driven from work in Stevens Point, about an hour west, to sit with her for the night. I got her up to speed, contacted the rest of my team, and headed home.

The next morning I called her friend, with whom I'd exchanged numbers, and found her friend had lived through the night. But she hadn't regained consciousness and wasn't likely to. I arranged to relieve her at 1. But when I arrived she had been replaced by another friend who had brought with her a local minister. He agreed to provide a memorial for her. I offered to continue to sit with her but they wanted to remain beside her another few hours.

I sat in the hallway and made phone calls and emails. Eventually they left for food and some rest. I sat holding my patient's hand. I had found things about her in the meantime, that she had been dishonorably discharged from the Navy, she had served during Desert Storm, and had prized the jacket she retained. She had been married and divorced twice, and had done something that put her beyond the love of her siblings and children. There would be no sudden appearance by family.

When I sat with her this last time I told her she was surrounded by people who love her enough to be with her. There might be an afterlife and there might not. But there was nothing she could have done to put her beyond the love of what she might join after her death, God, The Eternal, the universe, whatever it might be. She was as worthy of love as anyone.

Her friend and the pastor returned at six and I made ready to go. Before leaving I held her hands again and repeated her worthiness. She squirmed a little, perhaps saying goodbye. I left while they sang to her. A few hours later I received an email that she had died with her friend at her side.

This is why I do what I do.

God doesn't play favorites

If it's true, as Albert Einstein famously observed, that "God does not play dice with the universe"--and I would submit, so far as we can agree on what "God," "play," "dice," and "universe" means, that he was right--then it follows God does not play favorites either. That runs contrary to how we'd like to think it, that America is a chosen land, Americans are a chosen people, and American religious people like to think they are specifically, so far as this is the generation out of the millions and billions of previous generations, that will experience the Rapture, the End of Days, the Second Coming, the Tribulation, the Final Revelation, however we want to think of it, that they are the final, most glorious, most sunk in depravity and thus held highest by God. But it isn't so.

Neither the United States, or Christians, or American Christians--indeed, or Americans or Twenty-First Century peoples or Jews or converted Jews or Muslims or, well, or anyone you'd like to name--none of these are chosen or favorites. When it comes to natural disasters, we all drown or are dashed against rocks and trees exactly the same. When it comes to man-made disasters, we all crumble after being hit by bullets or have our organs ruptured from being trampled exactly the same. The only difference lies in that some of us experience this and some of us don't. But the ones who don't really have no cause to proclaim themselves somehow better than the ones who do, because when it's all said and done, no matter how it comes, death is something we all experience.

So does it mean anything when a middle-aged white man opts to take out whatever frustrations or psychoses or hatreds he may have by shooting at least 550 people, outright killing nearly 60 of them, with whatever combination of semiautomatic guns he could collect and spitting bullets like watermelon seeds into a crowd composed of, mostly, other white middle-aged Americans enjoying a type of music endemic to America while having its roots in African and Celtic sounds? It doesn't. And it does. 

When I say it doesn't matter I mean it doesn't matter that it happened in Las Vegas, Nevada, any more than when it happens in Myanmar or the Democratic Republic of Congo. It often seems as if massacres, the purposeful slaughter of large groups of people by other groups or individuals, is the default setting for humankind. That fact should give us pause.

But when I say it does matter what I mean is that any slaughter of people is reprehensible, and I suspect to God it is all populicide, the killing of people.

It matters too because in Las Vegas, Nevada, unlike in Myanmar or DRC where there are often great, sudden outbursts of violence, often by the authorities, there is no excuse for it happening.

This isn't another anti-gun or anti-weapon or even anti-Second Amendment diatribe. We've all heard those and we fall on one side or the other often depending on our use or non-use of those same weapons. What it is is an observation. As others have pointed out, Americans decided gun control was a non-issue when we decided (and we did decide, make no mistake, we decided as firmly as if we'd fired the shots ourselves) that 20 grade school children were a tolerable sacrifice to have greater access to guns than at any peaceful time in history. We will bury our dead, we will cry and lament over them, and then we will pretend to be shocked when it happens again, bigger, louder, with greater loss of life and perhaps with our own children or parents or cousins or friends among the dead. We will go on as if we have no more determination than the dice in Einstein's quote.

A little Friday morning reading

I've enjoyed Neil Gaiman's writing for years, and I'm interested in trying to binge-watch the new series American Gods after it's gotten good and going. (I've tried several times to binge-watch shows--The Man in the High Castle, Penny Dreadful, Dark Matter--but I couldn't watch any past the first season; they always disappointed.) Anyhow, I really liked American Gods my first reading and intend to reread it before watching the shows as I don't remember many details (and the trailers remind me I've forgotten more than I'd thought), and I want to get in on this binge-watching thing that everyone, including my wife, has been doing.

I've been reading much about how several TV shows now are especially relevent as they give insights into Life Under Trumpism, and especially American Gods and The Handmaid's Tale. But for the Gaiman book, I read a very good interview in which he says the following:

I have this mad theory about American elections. There is a reality-TV quality to them, in that they tend to go to what people think would probably be the most interesting story. “Who’s more interesting? Who’s a better story? Bob Dole or Bill Clinton? Let’s go for Clinton, it’ll be more interesting!” And there is that point where you’re going, “Okay, so is it Hillary, who still feels kind of like a rerun? Or is it Trump?” Even articulating that as a theory means that people are going to mishear what I’ve said. It will turn into a clickbait headline and people will be going, “You said that Trump was a better story!” No. I think Trump is an out-of-his-depth idiot. Who is possibly criminal. And certainly incompetent. I think that, actually, having a sane and functional right wing is a good thing. Having what we’ve got right now is a bad thing.

When the novel was written, it was written about America as a country of immigrants, of people who either came here of their own free will, or escaped here, or were brought here against their will. And what that meant — talking about the religious traditions and talking about the cultural traditions and talking about what that became. And having a lead character who was racially — and in all other ways — a melting pot. That, when I wrote the novel, didn’t seem to me to be particularly problematic, difficult, or even praiseworthy! Things that I did not think were praiseworthy or sensible included writing about indentured servants and transportation. Writing about the slave trade. Writing about a gay, Muslim salesman encountering a genie who drives a cab in New York.

I wasn’t doing it for the credit. I was doing it because it all feels right if you’re talking about America. Suddenly, Trump came in and now I’m reading articles in Vanity Fair about, “This is the most political stuff you’ve ever seen.” Well, I guess that’s all true, but it’s not like we sat down and went, We are the opposition. We simply started telling our fucking story and then the world changed. It would be like telling a pro-Jewish story in Berlin in the 1930s, and suddenly you’re looking around going, “We’re apparently doing something big and important.”

 Oddly, this theory of his comforts me, as the idea that we love a good, juicy story is a lot more appealing than that we like chaos and incomepetence. It's certainly played out at times in American electoral history (although it's important to remember we never had Presidents Bryant or Long), and if it's true it suggests that, like all the other times, most of us will get through it. Of course, some of us won't. And it's for those the rest of us must act up.

To recognize the fragility in each of us

In my last post I made reference to a developing story out of Oklahoma, that of Ron Robinson, a UU minister outside Tulsa. I say "developing" because there have been no reports since his initial arrest on March 30, and I can't imagine there haven't been additional developments.

I don't know him or heard of him, but friends of mine have either been mentored by him or worked with him on projects. His past accomplishments are impressive: co-founder of a UU congregation, university professor, youth pastor, ordained minister, director of a local foundation and its food pantry. Would that all of us had this sort of spirit.

Almost hidden in that list is a damning title: youth pastor. Because Ron Robinson has been arrested on "federal charges for distribution or receipt of child pornography and possession of and access with intent to view child pornography." Hence my certainty there have been more developments since his arrest. 

Now, I'm not going to talk about his guilt or innocence because aside from the stuff noted above, I don't know anything about it. But I've seen enough Law & Order: SVU episodes to know that there is a high bar for prosecutors to meet to start a potentially costly federal case while the air is full of states and the government crying austerity. So I'm presuming at least some guilt. 

I don't have any experience or insight to bring to Robinson's case. What I have mostly is a couple questions. Why do so many people later charged with child endangerment of any kind seek positions in the clergy? And what is the UU response to it happening in our denomination?

That clerical malfeasance includes sexual abuse of kids isn't new. Like teachers, foster parents, police, social workers, every position that has some measure of authority over them, there are many, many examples among religious leaders of every faith of taking advantage of children in some way. And while prosecution of these cases may be new, it's certain that the practice is very old, in some faiths may even be codified. (This link is included, not for its authority, but for its examples from multiple faiths.) But some practices continue now. Not only, of course, in Catholicism, but among  Protestant groups, among Jews, Hindus, Buddhists even among Animists. 

Religious leaders are perhaps most susceptible to the delusion that their position of power is a role assigned by God and that, if they want something, God must want it too. I don't think it's putting too fine a point on it that, while I'm sure few contemporary religious abusers would put this in such a straightforward way, what it often comes down to is they feel authorized, by their position and respect and the tendency of congregations and individuals to defer to them, to rationalize their abusive behavior (or in the case of child porn, their viewing someone else getting away with it) as being something they have the imprimatur of the group to do (or in the case of viewers, the thrill of watching someone else do it). You feel a powerful tingle when you get away with something you know you shouldn't do; I've felt that with theft. 

So we know it happens. What do UUs do when it happens among us?

The first thing, obviously, is to remove the abuser from that position, and that was done. As I understand the news, Robinson was brought to the cops' attention by his use of a website they were monitoring, but I like to think anyone who caught wind of his behavior among his congregation would have reported him. I don't know if I would have talked with him first. 

But I think the attitude displayed by friends and co-workers of Robinson, The UU Missional Cohort, is one we should mimic. They remain dismayed, they grieve. And they gather and weep and recognize the fragility in each of us. They assert that "Missio Dei—The Mission of God—even for those of us who quibble about the definition of 'God,' is bigger than any one person, or movement, or religion...The mission of oneness, that we are here to serve each other, to create a Beloved Community that is nothing less than a heaven on earth...We believe in a larger truth—that we are here to abet and witness to the wonder of existence, that we are here to serve each other and to realize Shalom—that each and every one of us is a minister, a servant of that creative, sustaining and transformative power." That Shalom, that Beloved Community, is, must be inclusive even of people like Ron Robinson. 

Whether we recognize the Ron Robinson in ourselves or in others, my time teaching in prisons taught me that he is our brother, our dad, our cousin, our friend. He's transgressed the law of the tribe and he'll be punished for it. If hell is separation from God, then a part of that is separation from your tribe. But once he has served his sentence, we must let him, and others like him, back in. With watching, with certain agreements, with monitoring; but if he will do that then we have to do that. We are a justice-seeking people, and it is just to accept one another's deep criminal flaws and behave, not as if those flaws don't matter, but because criminally flawed is still human. 

“We Wail, Whether or Not Anyone is Listening”

This is my sermon from two Sundays ago. I was asked to speak on "justice" and ended up taking my text from the Tanakh to illustrate the idea that justice is best served by the people crying out for it in the face of its absence. What I took as my original question while writing it was "What is it we want? And does it matter? 

“We Wail, Whether or Not Anyone is Listening”

            Here’s a joke for you from the Tanakh. It starts, like most jokes do, with God just walking around and thinking about things, and as God reflects God decides, “There’s this city on Earth that has really got me POed. They’ve insulted me by refusing to show mercy and hospitality, the few things I’ve told people to do, and I’ve just got to set an example. I’m gonna blow this city, smack it down into the soil, rub my hand around until there’s no trace of anything or anyone left. That’ll show the rest of them: Don’t screw with me.”

            Naturally, God being God, God can’t just do this but has to tell someone first. There’s this guy nearby God’s been having occasional conversations with and tells him, “Hey, there’s this city over there and the populace have gotten on my nerves. I’m going to rub them out, literally. Just wanted you to know.”

Now this guy, he’s been paying attention to what God’s told him and how God’s behaved in the past and, ignoring the question whether the city actually is wicked or not, says, “Listen, I don’t want to tell you your business, but what kind of god punishes the righteous with the wicked?  What if there are fifty good people in that city?  Would you ignore the city’s slights for fifty good people?”  God allows as he would.  Guy says, “Oh, but it could be some of them woke up in a bad mood this morning, didn’t have their coffee.  How about forty-five?”  God agrees and guy says, “I wouldn’t presume to tell you what righteousness is but what if some of those good people are having a hard time and I can only locate forty.  Will you accept forty?”  God says, “Okay, forty works for me.”

This guy, he’s on a roll, he says, “Hey, forty people that’s a lot of people, and it’s not like you’re gonna give me forever to find them. And maybe they aren’t feeling so righteous when I find them, y’know, kid’s got failing grades, wife burned the manna. How’s thirty?” God, who by this time is thinking actually destroying a whole city, that’s a big, time-consuming, difficult process, we’re talking environmental impact statements, hazardous waste material, agrees. “Sure, thirty’s fine. I like thirty.” But this guy, God may have made people, but this guy knows people, he says, “Oh, hey, now I think about it, it’s nearly harvest, most of the good people, they aren’t gonna be in city limits, they’re gonna be out in the fields harvesting, reaping, bringing in the sheaves, the whole lot. So maybe twenty is a better number.” By now, God’s not really paying attention, playing a couple hands of  solitaire. “Yeah, no problem, twenty.”

But this guy, he says, “I got it! Listen, what you want is a minyon. Ten righteous people. I find ten righteous, good-hearted people, you’ll ignore what this city’s done?” God’s got the guy on hold by this point, talking with other cultures, God puts him back on, says finally, “Look, you get me ten righteous, just people in that city, I’ll be such a sweet God, hosannas left and right, you won’t even know me. Their grandchildren will be drinking milk and honey straight from the bottle. Ten is my final offer.”

Of course, if you’ve recognized that the guy I’m talking about is Abraham and the city is Gomorrah of “Sodom and” fame, then you know the punchline is a killer. Abraham can’t even find ten just people and God obliterates Gomorrah and in the process we get Lot and his daughters repopulating the plateau, a pillar of salt, and a whole bunch of stuff we’d rather not get into.

Now keep in mind, a lot of writing at this time, it’s got to do double, triple duty, so jokes are going to have a cautionary air to them too as well as parting some kind of metaphysical truth. Here’s another knee-slapper from the Older Testament with which you may also be familiar. There were these two, well, for want of a better term, let’s call them “beings,” God and the Adversary, arguing about a guy who is very devout, name of Job. God’s boasting of Job’s fealty and the Adversary calls God on it, saying, “Of course he worships you. You give him everything. He’s got land, family, prosperity, a secure future. Without that he’d drop a dime on you before you could blink.” God says, “You wanna bet?” So the Adversary removes all those benefits: he kills Job’s family, his crops fail, his livestock develops brucellosis, his slaves run away, creditors take away all his savings, and Job himself gets boils, pustules all over his body.

There’s a lot more to the story, of course, and it’s a good story. But I want to focus on what happens next. Three of Job’s friends, hearing of his misfortunes, his misery, go to visit him. In the story you may remember, after Job himself breaks his silence, they presume to lecture him on what he may or may not have done to anger God.

But an incredible and often overlooked event happens first. These three friends, when they see Job, can barely recognize him, he’s so changed. The Job writer relates that, on recognizing him, “they raised their voices and wept aloud; they tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads. ¹³ They sat with him on the ground seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great.”

They wail. They tear their clothes. They comingle the dust of the earth with their flesh and hair, perhaps reminding themselves of the state they will eventually return to. And they sit on the ground with their friend for as long as he does. Quietly. Respectfully. Silently. They treat his punishment, which the Job writer tells us is what they think it to be, as their own. They take on the worst their friend has suffered as if they had suffered it. Not in an intellectual way. They shred their own clothing and get into the dust with him to suffer with him.

Job and his friends cry out after those seven days and God, miracle of miracles, responds. But our experience, when everything we have worked for, bled for, some of us have died for, crashes around us and we call out for God, our experience is likelier to be similar to the Psalmist’s, who begins the famous lament of Psalm 22, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” We wail at the injustice of it all and there is no answer. No response. There is, at best, silence from the heavens or the depths of our souls or wherever we may be seeking an answer. We wail, and we receive a suggestion that no one is listening.

Where is God? Where is justice?

We fetishize justice in this country, even dressing it up as a woman holding scales and a sword and wearing a blindfold, the suggestion being that she makes no distinction between the people who come to her for judgement. And that’s a wonderful ideal. We know it’s not what happens. We know that too often the blindfold faces one way for one person and another for another person. We know that in this country there are certain crimes for which you won’t be stopped or arrested if you’re white. We know that in this country if you’re wealthy you can afford a lawyer who will help you avoid punishment for whatever crime you have committed. We know that in this country if you’re rich enough, your crime isn’t even called a crime, but a downturn in the market.

Where is God? Where is justice?

Scholar Mel Leaman reminds us that “lament doesn’t guarantee God’s benevolent response,” but what if there is nothing in response? No storm, no earthquake, no mighty wind or even soft whisper. There is nothing. We look on the works in the first month of this presidential administration and, noting the breaking up of families, the fear in the eyes of people who may be next, we ask, Where is justice? Where is God? In response, nothing.

How do we interpret the absence of God when we seek justice?

The first thing we must do is to determine for ourselves what it is that we want. When we march in the streets or letters we call out for change and justice, but what is it we want? If it’s true, as Martin Luther King, Jr, asserted that the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, what is it we mean by justice? And by “we” I mean us, the people of here and now, this generation of American citizens and people who would be citizens and people who want justice to roll on like a river and righteousness like a never-ending stream. What do we want when we say we want justice? Do we want a return to something good, like the previous administration, which had flaws but we felt someone somewhere listened to us, we felt our leader understood that people demand justice, understood which way the blindfold faced, and what it took to secure our national character? Or do we want something better, a land of milk and honey, a place in the sun, a world where we are judged not by the color of our skin but the content of our character?

As Naim Stifan Ateek, a Palestinian Christian, reminds us, “Power is very closely linked with justice, so much so that the one may be easily confused with the other. This is illustrated daily by the frequent claims of the powerful…that their power is justly gained and used to support justice.” It’s true that the current presidential administration won enough electoral votes to put Donald Trump into office. But a month on we find that win is simply not enough. How often do we hear his boast that it was a record electoral victory, that the opposition may have had millions more popular votes, but that’s because those votes were cast by “illegals,” that the number of people at his Inauguration was exponentially higher than the number of spectators at Barak Obama’s Inauguration or the number of people who came out the day after to take part in the Women’s March? These specious claims are easily refuted and have been multiple times, but he continues to insist on them because power must not only be legitimate, power must somehow be more popular than the opposition. This is what lends it the pretense to justice.

Hannah Arendt, whose Eichmann in Jerusalem will be on bookshelves and nightstands for the next four years, reminds us that what she called the banality of evil lies in its actions are uniformly “a textbook case of bad faith, of lying self-deception combined with outrageous stupidity…[as well as] the case of the eternally unrepentant criminal…who cannot afford to face reality because his crime has become part and parcel of it…”

Justice, like the famous explanation of pornography by Justice Potter Stewart, is something that, even if we can’t define it, we know when we see it.  It is something too, I think, we recognize best by its absence.  Like oxygen, we might appreciate it best when we don’t have it.

So what is it we want when we say we want justice? I don’t know. Isn’t that lame, I give you the question, I tell you it’s important, it’s what we have to answer first, and I don’t have an answer. Do we want a return or something new? Maybe that’s something for the We generation I mentioned earlier to determine. But I do have a suggestion for what we do in the absence of an answer.

We wail. We wail, whether or not anyone is listening.

Professor Leaman reminds us, too, that “God’s people frequently forget how to live like God’s children.” Like any children, God’s children need occasional reminding that there is a better world that they’re growing up into and they had better get their business straight if they want a better world for everyone. The difference between a Noah and an Abraham, for instance, is that Noah, for all his strengths, accepted God’s determination to destroy humanity. Not once, in the story we have of him, is it suggested he maybe tried to get God to save another family besides his own. He was, in contemporary terms, the perfect right-leaning scold: The rest of you will drown but me and mine will get by.

Abraham, like Job, argued with God and he did so not for himself or his family. He has no kin we’re told of in Gomorrah. On behalf of a comparative handful of people he called for justice. He told God, You are punishing an entire community for the misdeeds of a few people and that is simply not right. It is not just.

Do we dare, like Abraham, to get angry at God? For God’s silence? For God’s inattention? You don’t get angry with someone you don’t care about. You ignore her, you avoid her, you cut her out of your life. But anger suggests you want something in that person to change. Dutch psychologist Nico Frijda reminds us, “Anger implies hope and that fighting is meaningful.”

Now I’m not talking just pissed-off, fly off the handle, how could you leave the water running for three hours kind of anger. That is just uncontrolled egotism, the kind that makes you sit up at three in the morning tweeting your fury at an otherwise resting world. I’m talking about righteous anger, the kind that hits you like a slap, that challenges you to think not only of yourself but of others. It is, like Abraham, to challenge God of behalf of creation, to remind power of its better self, and that if it can’t reconcile its actions with that better self, then it had better step down.

Too often, the one is mistaken for the other. How many times have you been told, Get over it. Your candidate lost, accept it. Give him a chance, will you. The way you feel now is the way we felt for eight years.

We aren’t lamenting the loss of our team in the playoffs, no matter how close the score, no matter how exciting the overtime. What we are lamenting is the codification of prejudice against our neighbors, a barring of our cousins, our lovers, even of ourselves, as if who we are, who we love, what we believe, where we come from, somehow lessens this society, this country we love.

We must get down in the ashes and dust with them, our cousins, our lovers, our neighbors. Maybe literally. We must join them and wail at the injustice they suffer. Our wail and our witness are our most powerful weapons. “Even in the absence of God, silence cannot be our last word.” As always, “We are the people we have been waiting for.” Abraham and Job stood before the Almighty and demanded an explanation. Can we do any less against this administration? 

258 candles-days 30-22

When I was much younger I stayed in an apartment where there were often people sleeping on the couch, on the floor, in chairs. We found one drunk guy curled around the toilet. We weren't always drunk or stoned there, but it helped. We called it "The Home for Wayward Transients."

I'm reminded of that place when I read this story about volunteers who collect and repair and display discarded deities. It's a belief in many Asian nations that a business or families prosperity is improved by the presence of shrines and icons to the local gods or to the family's faith. I've made a game for myself of stepping into Asian stores and finding the shrine. (Hint: It's often near the door.) This is no different than the Christian practice of votives; indeed, it's no different than most Christian practices. What's a cross or a crucifix but an icon? But individuals feel drawn to the ceramic and cheap plastic and plaster deities enough to care for them, not out of a religious duty, but because destroying them "goes against the conscience." This is heartening and a sign that there is such a thing as an interior sense of reverence. 

258 candles-day 121

When I was younger I saw a movie on the noon TV broadcast in Boston, where I was living, that's stayed with me all these years. It was called The Next Voice You Hear and starred James Whitmore and Nancy Davis (soon to be Reagan). It wasn't a particularly good movie, just one of those you'd probably call "quiet" and "unassuming." Despite its plot, that one evening God starts speaking on the radio, it didn't have a really big message.

Anyway, this is what I thought of today when someone drew my attention to a video by Rabbi David Aaron, Hearing the Voice of God. The 1950 Next Voice didn't have or couldn't use the language that Aaron has but the message, at least as I remember it, is similar: God doesn't speak to us but speaks through us. This is, I think, as profound a message as anything can be, and needs to be remembered as we slog through the rest of this election.

258 candles-day 101

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: Mazel tov. A recognition, sooner than I would have expected, and from a group I would not have suspected understood, that b'tzelem Elohim ("made in God's divine image") means just what it says. 

god is brittany maynard

There aren't many completers of suicide who get their pictures on People magazine, let alone getting them on it before they commit it. Brittany Maynard, who at least one commentator has referred to as giving "physician-assisted suicide a very public, and in her case, young (29) and attractive face," has achieved that, however. But we shouldn't hold against her either her attraction, her publicity savvy, nor even her lack of outward signs of the brain cancer that would kill her more slowly but as surely as whatever method she used to complete her decision.

As ever, I'm conflicted about this decision. As with all personal, life-changing ones made by others, it really isn't up to me to even have much of an opinion on it, but in my head there is more than enough death to go around. We don't need to add ourselves to the ever-growing heap.

But some of us feel like we do, and we make those decisions, I accept, without rancor, clear-headed, perhaps even without the expectation of the incredible vacuum our decision will make in the lives of our loved ones (and even those we are certain don't love us) left behind. Yes, some of us do this almost like life is an afterthought. But most don't. I don't believe for a moment Brittany Maynard's decision was either haphazard or born in anger. It struck her, and most of those around her, as rational and maybe inevitable.

I've said before that no matter how bad things have been in my life, I haven't thought of ending it (at least since my teens when, like everyone else, hormones raged through my body like the Russian Army advancing on Moscow). But just because it isn't an answer (or even a question) for me doesn't mean it shouldn't be either of those for others. I respect that most people who approach this decision do so with a clear and sober head and with an understanding of what effect their act will have on the community surrounding them. People may ask, "Where's god in all this?" as if the decision in question is made secretively, out of god's sight. My answer is that it's god making the decision, rightly and wrongly.

Perhaps that's the key: that, like Maynard, people don't make the decision in the quiet desperation of their own minds but in full view and with the feedback of their loving community. Their community may be composed of people (like me) whose job it is to dissuade them from the act, but that doesn't make our response to them any less loving. It's true what Donne writes, that no man is an island. But it's equally true that no one lives in a vacuum.

Read more here: http://www.kentucky.com/2014/11/10/3530333/physician-assisted-suicide-debate.html?sp=/99/349/#storylink=cpy

everything is everything

This is the mashup I did for yesterday's chapel service. The kids on my "bad boys" locked unit, all of whom have at least misdemeanors and gang connections, asked me last week to begin regular chapels again, saying they missed the opportunity to be in god's presence. Well, how can I deny them that?

 

god is fred phelps

"No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind..."

This quote, from John Donne's Meditation 27, has become so ubiquitous to have lost much of its impact. But like many phrases and concepts of the Christian Bible, it manages to retain an impact and a truth beyond its simplicity.

 

I mourn Fred Phelps as I mourned Adam and Nancy Lanza and Lou Reed and my friends and children I've never met and my mother and my pets and animals that were only with me a short time. I mourn equally the death of ideas and cultures and languages, of whole populations of insects and birds and mammals and fish wiped out before we ever had an opportunity to know of them, of civil discourse and sitting silently before answering and owning up to what one has said. But I mourn Fred Phelps and the others differently than those because they are a part of my experience of the world and I think I'd be the worse for not having known them.

 

In my theology, god (small "g" for the same reason we don't capitalize "People") is everything that makes up our experience, including the way we treat one another, the thoughts we have and act on, the toast we have for breakfast and selecting the bread and toasting and smothering it with butter as well as where the bread and the toaster parts and the cows and grass and water that make up the butter came from. This idea that god is a verb, simply is the way everyone and everything behaves, is something I picked up from born-again writer Anne Lamott. But it didn't originate with her. It was probably Jewish mysticism as exemplified in the Kabbalah that came up with the idea. In the contemporary world this is called pantheism, and I'm comfortable being called a pantheist.

 

Physicists have calculated that exactly the same amount of matter resides in the universe today as did moments after the Big Bang, and if that is the case then nothing ever goes away, it simply changes form. Fred Phelps qua Fred Phelps is on his way to becoming another series of atoms in another form. (Whether the new form acheives sentience, as in reincarnation, is another matter.) I have looked in vain for a cartoon memorializing his death by showing Jesus explaining to him, "Look, it says right there in Mark, I hate figs!" because I think that would be a funny way to eulogize him. But as Adam Weinstein points out, Phelps and his Westboro family, despite whatever else we might say about them, are at least consistent in their reading of the Bible (and I ought to mention my unique thrill at seeing the theological Calvinist acronym TULIP used on the Gawker website). Christians, Calvinists, Evangelicals, and Fundamentalists might not like to claim him, but the truth is the Westboro Church has as much right to claim themselves part of the fold as anyone else.

 

I mourn the death of Fred Phelps, then, as a fellow part of god, for the good he did in his life, for his role as a man, as a lover, as a father, and as a leader. It's sad that his legacy will be a rank hatred of people and ideas his theology couldn't prepare him to accept, and it's sad that for some people that will be reason to, if not celebrate, then dismiss his death. But life, like everything else we do, has consequences, and this is his.

johnny thunders died for your sins!

I'll be upfront and say that I'm jealous of this essay from the Orange County Weekly, both in its writing and its subject. I would prefer to be known as the punk pastor.

Having said that, I will admit the writing, by Nate Jackson, is done well. He allows enough of Joe Furey's (great name, that, for a punk) conflicted nature and the conflicts of interest between who he preaches to and the theology he preaches from to speak for itself. Furey is another in that line of preachers who have found a personal savior and want to make others aware that this same salvation can be theirs too. I can't fault anyone for wanting to spread the good news, as it were.

The story I would like to hear, however, is that of his wife, Therese. She has stayed with him nearly full-time from his early days as a catastrophically bad drug runner to his new days in the collar, raising three kids, often without help from him, and losing the eldest, her son, to an overdose. Her trust in life giving her what she needed and her ability to rise each morning is worth listening to and it's unfortunate that this isn't her story.

Which isn't to say Furey's story isn't interesting or worth telling. But it's another in a long spate, reaching back to Augustine, of libertines tamed by the Word and who make their life's work the spreading of that Word to the people they used to be. I can't complain about that, either, in that it's exactly what I want and hope to accomplish. As he comes across in the essay and in the single video I could find, he sounds like an amiable, avuncular, kind presence, and there's a lot to commend about that.

But what I'm uncomfortable with is the theology behind Furey's sermons. It's one that accepts what the Bible says as the end to all things, that there is a good and a bad and that if you would be one of God's People, you must change from one to the other. I don't credit that. It strikes me the Jesus of the Bible didn't seek out the homeless and addicts of his time because he wanted them to change in order to hear his teaching but because they were the ones most willing to hear and credit it. You were encouraged to change--"Go and sin no more"--but actual change didn't come from no longer drinking or hooking. Actual change was harder to accomplish (Matthew 19:22-4). Some people, of course, want to stop drinking or come off the road and they should be encouraged. But others don't. And they shouldn't be discouraged.

If there is a Good News to the messages of Jesus and Buddha and other teachers, it's that people  already have dignity, are of "God's People," through the virtue of being alive. They should be accepted as they are, unconditionally. End of message.