Tuesday, July 30, 2019

As I Go Walking That Freedom Highway

when i was quite young, probably nine or ten, my maternal grandmother gave me "the talk," a lecture that most white children of my generation who lived in the south of the usa heard at some point in their lives.  now, my "mamaw" was a kind, considerate person, in most respects a political liberal, a believer in the role of government in improving the lives of the people it served, but on one particular point she, like many, perhaps most, adults in this country held views that were inconsistent with her other ideals.  she was a racist who felt it her duty to pass her beliefs on matters of race on to her children and grandchildren.

i well remember her saying to me that, while one must always treat black people with courtesy and kindness, "colored" people were our inferiors, incapable of the same mental development as whites.  she cautioned me to always remember that when dealing with a person of color.  she and my grandfather ran a mom-and-pop grocery store on the edge of the "quarters," the area of her town where most black people lived.  most of her customers were black, and i watched her and my grandfather as they waited on them.  true to her word, she always behaved with courtesy and kindness to each one, engaging in an easy banter with them as if they were old and valued friends.  part of this was, no doubt, because her livelihood depended on them returning to her store for their groceries and paying their charge accounts at the beginning of each month, but it appeared to me that she had a genuine affection for them, many of whom had been her customers their entire lives.

later in life as i looked back on my beloved grandmother, i wondered if she really believed the words she had expressed about the inferiority of people whose only real difference from us was that their skins were darker.  like many of her peers, she was able to hold two opposing views on the matter of race simultaneously.  she would have been among the first to decry injustice against a person of color, and yet she would have insisted one could view another as a human being without believing that other to be one's equal.  this notion has become ingrained in our national psyche, making it incredibly difficult to rid ourselves of its insidious presence.  this awful inheritance of the evil of slavery colors much of our country's life and politics.  no white person here can imagine what it must be like to be black in the usa.  many of us have worked our entire lives to rid ourselves of the racist thinking that has been pervasive for so many generations, but no matter how hard we try, we still have no idea of the black experience in our nation.

i look back over my life and remember instances when i have used words fraught with racist undertones in the minds of black friends and acquaintances and puzzled over why those words were offensive.  they were perfectly innocuous to me and had a completely different meaning.  for instance, in a conversation with a person of color, i used the word "minority" in the sense of referring to the opposite of majority.  yet to her, that word was a reference to her race, and she took exception to what i said.  in her mind, i was talking about exclusion, while in my mind there was no racial connotation at all.  it was as if we were speaking different dialects of our common language.  in another instance, i remember with shame intervening in a fight between some boys from my neighborhood with other boys who were strangers to the neighborhood.  the neighborhood children were white, and their opponents were black.  as i stopped the fighting, i ordered the black children to "get out of our neighborhood."  they stopped and stared at me, before running away.  as soon as the words came out of my mouth, i realized that what i had said was racist, though it wasn't my intention.  in the minds of the boys, both black and white, i was saying that the black children didn't belong here in a "white neighborhood," that they needed to return to the "black part" of town.  that incident continues to haunt me as a reminder that no matter how hard i work to rid myself of racist thinking, those words of my grandmother from so long ago still inhabit a dark part of my mind.  any white person in this country who believes that racism has been banished from his or her mind is wrong.  it is inescapable and the ugly outpouring of it that the election of donald trump has unleashed  should convince any person that racist thinking continues to be something that we must struggle to overcome.

may we be honest with ourselves when we consider matters of race.  may we work to see all people as our equals, regardless of the color of their skins.  may we recognize our shortcomings and seek to make amends for them.  may we see that we are all human, with good and bad residing in all of us, and that the bad can only be overcome by honesty and lovingkindness.  shalom

Tuesday, July 23, 2019

When the Storms of Life Are Raging

last sunday in the church service one of the hymns described what i would call a "transactional god."  the words were based on second chronicles 7:14.  the hymn says that "if my people . . ." "then i (god) will . . . "  i suppose that the hymn was included because it was based on a scripture passage, and the thinking was "if it is in the bible, it must be true."  of course, the hymn doesn't include the context of the verse on which it was based.  in this portion of second chronicles, king solomon has just completed the construction of the temple, and god appears to him to tell him that god accepts the temple built to be the sacrificial center of worship for the people of israel.  god goes on to tells solomon that when natural calamities befall the people, they can come to the temple with humbled, repentant hearts and god will hear their prayers.  god promises that so long as solomon follows god's commands and honors god as his father david did, then he and his descendants will rule israel in perpetuity.

there is much in the passage that i find disturbing, particularly the idea that the natural disasters named in it are caused by god in retribution for the sins of the people, but the central idea of the particular verse on which the hymn is based is one that has been adopted by evangelical christians in this country to suggest that all the suffering in the usa is the result of the nation "turning away from god" by allowing such things as same-sex marriage and the separation of church and state.  their idea is that we can "make america great again" by turning by the clock to an imaginary time when all was right, everyone went to church, schools were filled with prayers and bible readings, people of color "knew their place," people of british descent controlled government and commerce, and english was the only language spoken.  all that is needed is for those of us who live here to humble our hearts, to pray, and to seek god's face, resulting in god hearing our prayers, pardoning our sins, and healing our land, so the trump crowd of evangelicals believe.

in contrast, the semon, based on luke 8: 26-39, told of jesus healing a man who was called "legion" because "many demons had entered him."  in his sermon, the minister emphasized that the man had done nothing to deserve the cure he received, and, in fact, had asked jesus to leave him alone.  when the man begged to stay with jesus, jesus told him to go tell others "how much God has done for you."  the minister pointed out that god's grace did not depend on the actions of the man but the freeing of legion from his mental illness was a gift that was entirely undeserved.  in introducing the story, the preacher pointed out that jesus had traveled across the sea of galilee to the region of the decapolis, an gentile area that would have been avoided by orthodox jews during the time of jesus, but according of matthew 4: 23-25 many of jesus' followers came from this region.  it seemed to me that the point of the sermon was to counter the "if you, then i . . ." message of the hymn that had just been sung and to insist that the religion of jesus was one of inclusion, not exclusion.

i may not believe that jesus was capable of curing a serious mental illness by speaking a sentence or that people can be possessed by demons, but i can believe in a god who loves us despite our failings, a god who cares about our suffering.  i cannot believe in a god who causes suffering to punish our shortcomings, but i can believe in a god that is present with us in our suffering, whatever the cause, and i can be a follower of a teacher who tells us about a god of love and compassion.

may we abandon belief in a god who is more about punishment and retribution.  may we not believe in a god whose actions are controlled by our own.  whatever our belief about the reality or unreality of god, may we seek to love and respect others, to include rather than exclude.  shalom.

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

In the midst of faults and failures

a few days ago, i read a post in a blog that i check in on each week.  the posts on this blog are written by various authors, all of whom have rejected belief in anything supernatural and abandoned the christian faith, some of them having served as christian ministers, some of them continuing to serve in parish ministry despite their unbelief.  i understand their points-of-view and agree with much of what they say, but the post that i write about today (the jesus nobody wants)was one that i found troubling.

in it, the writer describes a "jesus cult" and says that jesus "remains a stained-glass phantom and caricature."  his position is that christianity is a sham because of the apocalyptic emphases that we find throughout the new testament, and he includes a quote from another author who describes jesus as a "failed apocalyptic prophet," citing evidence by way of quotations from the new testament, particularly the gospels, to support this position.  later in the post, the writer says that "the gospels are all about the theologies of their authors, culminating in john’s egregiously egotistical jesus."  for me this is the key to coming to an understanding of who jesus was and what is essential in his teachings as we find them in the gospels.

to reject everything that jesus is supposed to have said because of the apocalyptic beliefs of some of his jewish followers and many other jews of his time is akin to the current mindset of many who insist that we must do away with anything that honors some of the leaders of the american revolution because they did things are offensive to us now or because those who interpreted their lives to us in writings and artworks wrote and painted images that we now find objectionable.  we have to ferret out the totality of jesus' life and teaching, just as we have to come to an understanding of a figure like washington as a human being with faults as well as virtues.  can we know whether jesus was really an apocalyptic teacher who expected that the end of time was imminent or were these beliefs imparted to him by the biographers whose writings became part of the canon?  if jesus did believe and teach that god was soon to intervene in the affairs of the world to create a new order, does that negate everything that he taught, making all of his teachings less than credible?

the blog author says that "there is no way to reconstruct the real Galilean peasant preacher—if there was one."  i'm not certain that's entirely true.  as we look at the contents of the synoptic gospels, i think that certain consistencies emerge, and those who are skilled linguists with knowledge of new-testament-era greek and those who are authorities on the culture of palestine during the period can tell us a great deal about this jewish "peasant preacher."  those of us who are less informed and who struggle to understand who jesus was and what his teachings mean to us today do well to suspend judgment about final conclusions as we seek to be disciples of the man many christians honor as their teacher.  our job is to do the best we can to examine the teachings of the jesus of the sermon on the mount and see if we can use them to make life better for ourselves and those around us.

may we weigh all the evidence as best we can.  may we never stop learning.  may we not ridicule those whose beliefs are different from ours.  may we learn to live with doubt and uncertainty.  may we be tolerant and respectful of and compassionate toward those with whom we disagree.  shalom.

Tuesday, July 9, 2019

I'll Take You Just the Way You Are

my wife and i are friends with a couple that we often make short day trips with to eat out, shop, or attend concerts.  as a rule we enjoy being with them, but sometimes the husband in the other couple is difficult to be around.  while his wife is very agreeable and easygoing, he sometimes insists on having his own way despite what the rest of us want.  as an example, we had planned a trip to see a show and were on a tight schedule with him as the driver.  along the way, he decided he was hungry and had to stop at a fast food drive-through to get something to eat.  he could see that the line was quite long, and i told him that this restaurant had slow service at their drive-through.  nevertheless, he plowed ahead and even daydreamed in line, allowing another car to go ahead of us when it was our turn.  as a result we were late for our show, had to wait for a later show, and had to rearrange all of the rest of the day.  when we finally got to see our show and left for dinner, he drove us to a restaurant other than the one at which we had all agreed to eat when planning the trip because he didn't want to eat where we had planned, though he never voiced any objection when we planned our day together.

my wife and i were quite irritated at his behavior, and his wife was miffed as well.  we ended the day without voicing our frustration to him, but we fumed over it for several days.  as i thought about what had happened after getting over my anger, i tried to understand why this friend behaves the way he does.  this incident was  typical of a pattern of behavior that he has exhibited as long as we've known him.  this man was born when his parents were older and was doted on by his mother and his sister all the time he was growing up.  his sister was thirteen years his senior and regarded him as her child more than as a younger brother and still mothers him.  his wife, who would rather avoid confrontation than assert herself, has tolerated his selfishness, though she fumes about him in private.  his treatment of others is so ingrained that i'm certain he is unaware of the pain he causes.  he can be a kind and considerate person, but his needs and desires always come first.  if we didn't enjoy his wife so much, we would avoid being with him.

yesterday his wife called and asked us over to eat dinner today.  my wife told her we'd have to get back to her because my wife didn't want to commit while she was still angry with him.  after talking it over, we decided that the relationship with his wife was more important to us than avoiding him.  so my wife called back and told her we'd love to come to dinner.  i felt badly about letting this man get under my skin so much, but with enough distance between the last incident and now, i can be a little more objective about our relationship.  i'm able to see his manipulations for what they are and deal with them in order to maintain our friendship as couples.

we're all guilty of a certain amount of selfishness and can all be insensitive to the needs and desires of others.  what is important is that we don't allow our selfishness and insensitivity to become a pattern of behavior.  we need to put ourselves in the shoes of others as much as we can and try to look at life from their perspectives.  while our emotions often get in the way of making rational decisions, it's best to hold our tongues until we can get some distance between our initial emotional reactions to a situation and can deal with our frustrations in the most intelligent and compassionate way.

may we allow ourselves the space to become calm and to consider various possibilities.  may we discipline our tongues and our minds so that we don't speak before we think.  may we forgive without excusing behavior that is harmful.  may our hearts be filled with lovingkindness and compassion rather than anger and frustration.  shalom.

Tuesday, July 2, 2019

Two Roads Diverged in a Wood

i wrote last week about what it means when i say "i have a precious human life."  the sentence that follows in the opening of my morning meditation is "may i not waste it."  this past week i've been thinking about what that means.  how does one waste a precious human life?  there are so many answers!

the key to them all, i think, is found later in my meditation when i recite the four noble truths.  understanding that suffering is common to us all and that suffering is caused by our clinging and craving leads us to a path that makes our lives worthwhile.  as we become more aware of our clinging to things that are destined to change or disappear and craving that which we do not have, our journey through this life is directed toward a more rewarding and less wasteful road.

one doesn't find happiness by chasing after it.  it is there all the time if we stop to recognize our constant pursuit of it through our clinging to those things which we think make us happy but are subject to change just as everything is and our craving things that will make us happy but only lead to more craving once we possess them.  the very process of clinging and craving, of pursing happiness, is detrimental to that thing we desire most, lasting happiness and real purpose.  letting go is how we stop wasting our lives, i think.

ending our clinging and craving is difficult, perhaps impossible.  we always wish that life were different, that loved ones didn't get sick and die, that financial problems didn't arise, that things didn't break, that harsh words were never uttered.  yet all these things inevitably happen.  they are part of the fabric of life, and no amount of wishing will cause them to cease.  but wishing these realities away won't solve the problems arising from them, the suffering they cause us.  the only solution is to face them and deal with them as intelligently and with as much compassion as we can.  in the face of our suffering, recognition that clinging to a past before suffering arose and craving a different outcome than the one that is our reality helps us to accept the suffering and learn from it.  we change our path from wasting our energies on that which cannot be or cannot be again to one of accepting what is and coming to terms with it.

may we not waste our precious human lives by clinging to that which will change despite our clinging or by craving that which cannot satisfy us.  may we let happiness come to us as we let go of our pursuit of it.  shalom.