Just can't get enough of that wonderful stuff

And so what comes next?  What happened in my life of mediocre atheism?  The first thing to explain is probably the fact that in addition to being a mediocre atheist I was not a terribly consistent one.  I could really not decide if I was an atheist, an agnostic or a warmed over deist.  As stated earlier the main loadstar in all of this was not being Christian.  An odd thing that I found myself doing to keep up my non-Christian fervor was watching bad televangelists.  There was one in particular whom I think was named Joel (but maybe they are all named Joel).  He would sell what appeared to be handkerchiefs that he had prayed over, or sweated on or muffled a sneeze into (I can’t really remember) and with a significant gift to his ministry he would send you one of them.  I never order one and was pretty sure my dad wouldn’t have thought it was funny if it showed up on my credit card statement.  

Speaking of my parents they did something wonderful in this stage of my life – they left me alone.  Not in the sense that they ignored me (even though I probably deserved it at times) but rather they let me think through my issues by myself, neither haranguing me nor harassing me about my new found lack of faith.  It’s hard to describe this without quoting Sting who was quoting a cliché (if clichés can be quoted) when he talked about setting something free if we love them.  I obviously cannot say how things would have turned out if my parents had acted like this tedious girl I went to high school with, who “evangelized” to me most of my senior year in English class culminating in drawing a giant cross in my yearbook surrounded by the types of saying that you find in Christian Book Store wall-hangings.  I think I may have stayed an atheist a year or two longer just to spite her (which I assume is probably going to add some time to purgatory for me). 

To drift into a slightly different topic for a minute I have sometimes pondered just how much bad evangelism has done for the world of atheism.  There seems to be something about repelling being stronger than attraction.  And this is why I said my parents were so wonderful in this because they simply let me know what they believed through living it.  Not giving me banal slogans or pointing out the error of my ways, they simply went on being Christian and let me figure it out for never wavering from who they were. 

Interestingly, or maybe not so interestingly my life in the atheism lane looked a lot like it did in the Christian lane, just with a little more smugness and condescension thrown in.  There is always something satisfying for humans to believe themselves smarter and cleverer than everyone around them. I tended to do this but like I said I was not really all that different.  My moral compass was basically Judeo-Christian whether or not I actually adhered to it.[1]  I think for the most part I still adhered to what you to the sense of right and wrong on which I was raised.  In other words I did not believe that there was something spiritual in violence like the Vikings or that I needed to sacrifice virgins to make sure that the sun rose in the morning.  My behavior was not wonderful but the moral structure on which I came to understand as a Christian pretty much hung around.  All which seems fairly typical.  The professional atheist class tends to want to be thought of as good and decent people and they pretty much let good and decent be defined in the ways the Judeo Christian tradition has thought about it.  Kind of how the non-religious still go Christmas shopping and decorate their lawns with inflatable snowmen.  They may tell you they celebrate the secular part of Christmas but I am not sure they can be separated that neatly.  It does however make me wonder what an atheism would look like if it became completely unmoored from this tradition. 

So I graduated High School and went off to a Jesuit College, which is kind of the Roman Catholic version of being an atheist (I’m joking).  Most of the kids were Roman and many tried to go to mass.  I am sure that there were good and devout kids there who lived lives different from mine, but most of my friends did pretty much the same things I did just with a few religious trappings thrown in.  That is the strange thing is how you can be a non-Christian and go to a school comprised largely of kids who had spent their entire life in Roman Catholic schooling and not see much difference in the day to day operation of your life and your interaction with other people.  My atheism was a bit novel but not a whole lot more novel than being part Armenian or being a Formula 1 fan – not something you encounter every day but nothing that would provide any fodder for a zany, fish out of water made for TV movie.  A few people challenged it but not terribly enthusiastically, and there were no real attempts at conversion.  It may have been to the Catholic audience that being an atheist or being a protestant were largely seen as the same thing.  I did actually go to mass once and promptly stuck out like the latent Protestant I was.  Someone invited me and I thought I should go and be polite.  The problem was I grew up understanding that if you went to church you wore at least a sport coat and tie.  So I hurriedly put on a coat and tie only to find out that not only do Catholics not wear a tie to church they seem to dress like they are going out to see if they can unclog the septic system or tar their roof.  I don’t think I ever went back.  

In years since I have talked to militant Catholics who can’t fathom that I went to a Catholic school and didn’t come out the other end as a Catholic.  The thinking seems to be almost like that of Origin and his doctrine of universal salvation.  That over time the tractor beam like pull of the Catholic Church would be too much for me to me to resist and I would ultimately find myself basking in the glories that only Rome could provide.  That did not happen although my atheistic militancy (or at least the attention seeking part of it) did seem to subside a little.

I think the main reason I found nothing attractive in Roman Catholicism was a class I took on the history of religion.  It sounded interesting and was supposed to be a sort of survey of the religious instincts of humanity and how they were fulfilled across the years and across cultures, but unfortunately it was some false advertising.  The course was taught by a sort of Zen-Jesuit who probably smoked too much pot in the 70’s.  Part of the class’s requirement was to show up in the mission church on campus at 7:00 am every morning and practice Zen meditation somewhere near the high altar.  We were to sit in some sort of yoga position and I’m not really sure what after that.  My butt fell asleep after ten minutes or so of this and decided that since I was also pledging a Fraternity at the time a class with fewer early morning requirements might be a better fit.  Even looking back now I am not sure what the point of this was.  I assume the professor maybe had a Reses Peanut Butter Cup like epiphany and thought that by dropping Buddhism into Catholicism something magical would happen.  And maybe if I had stuck around for more than a few weeks I might have obtained some deep insights into the world but probably not.  At least not any deeper than the ones I obtained sitting around my fraternity house contemplating how long it would have taken Bugs Bunny to open all the little boxes that were contained in the million box.  If that’s not the sound of one Jesuit clapping I don’t know what is. 

I will finish with one last observation about my non-believing years which has to do with politics.  Put rather briefly while I was an atheist/agnostic I was also pretty sure that I was a communist/socialist.  I, of course, realize that these two phenomenon are not always linked but for me they were.  I was sold on the whole opiate of the masses business.  It was all one big conspiracy as far as I was concerned.  I think in many ways my longing for centralization of the means of production also made me think that this was how everything really worked.  There were powerful forces at work and those powerful forces could make the masses do what they wanted them to do, like Don Corleone explaining to Michael about the big shots pulling the strings.  In many ways it made atheism much easier because it did not force me to try and understand it as an organic phenomenon.  It answered the question of where did religion come from (from evil exploiters of the proletariat) and why did people believe it (because the same evil exploiters made them).  It was a very nice and self-contained system.  The masters of industry wanted to take everyone’s stuff but needed to provide a way to blind others of what they were actually doing so they cooked up religion, which told people to be content with what they had and thereby stay anesthetized from the truly villainous things going on around them.  I think it was Peter Robinson who said that the 19th century allowed for atheism because Darwin told people were they came from, Freud told them why they felt guilty and Marx told them where they were going.  You could certainly argue that this was simply replacing one religion with another and in many ways I think that is what I did.  I had something of a secular religion.  A religion that had rules, a tremendous amount of judgment and a paradise.  Well the paradise bit may be a bit far flung if you spent much time in Eastern Europe during this time, but nonetheless it did make promises. 

That is the thing with us, we never really stop being religious we may just do it with a different god, a god that society does not recognize as such so we can pretend that we are atheists.  So when I say I was an atheist this probably is not really true.  I had rejected the God of the Bible, but lots of people who are not atheists have done this, just ask the Buddhists.  In the Acts of the Apostles, St. Paul says this to the Greeks, “Athenians, I see how extremely religious you are in every way.  For as I went through the city and looked carefully at the objects of your worship, I found among them an altar with the inscription, ‘To an unknown god.’ What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.”  In this passage Paul makes a distinction that I am not sure we are capable of making today.  He observes the religious nature of the Greeks even though they do not worship Jesus as the Messiah.  Most of those who are atheist today would define it in terms of not believing in God or a higher power and if pushed a whole lot to explain what they mean by their definition of God or a higher power it would look very similar to the God of the Bible.  An atheist would not tell you that they are an atheist because they don’t believe in Odin or Valhalla or the happy hunting ground.  Most of their atheism would be defined in terms of not being Christian.  And this may be the confusing thing when I said I was an atheist because really I had simply rejected the faith I was brought up in.  But that seems to be the definition of atheist today because people don’t quite understand what religion is.  It is sort of like a not very bright girl I went to high school with who told us that she was liberal because she didn’t have any conservative clothes.  While this may be part of being liberal it certainly doesn’t make the whole argument.  Not being Christian does not necessarily make someone an atheist. 

Never having been someone besides myself I cannot speak to how others feel.  Maybe there are things about which I am curious to which others pay no attention, but I think I am on fairly safe ground when I say a question that has preoccupied humanity for some time has been why.  As in why are we here.  The answer is pretty easy in the short term.  I am here because of my parents, but the question is bigger than that.  It ultimately gets back to the question of why is there anything at all, be it a rock or Shields and Yarnell.  Science in many ways has grown more self-satisfied these days but it offers no answer to this question.  The big bang posits….well a big bang.  But it does not say how the thing that went bang got there in the first place.  Some have tried but it generally amounts to little more than kicking the can a little further down the road.  To my mind when you ask the question of why anything exists at all the answer must involve something putting it there.  Or to quote Maria von Trapp in The Sound of Music, “Nothing comes from nothing, nothing ever could.”  This is a way we end up thinking ourselves towards an end.  And it is not irrational to label this end a god or gods.  The Deists labeled this god the unmoved mover.  Something permanent moved to make what we call the universe.  I don’t hate this argument, but I am not positive that it is air-tight.  You can certainly get to the stage of saying that something had to bring forth the stuff that is here without necessarily concluding that this thing has to be a god.  You can also punt on the answer by saying something to the effect that we don’t know yet.  That is we are using God or the gods as a space holder for our lack of knowledge, something like Helios and his sun-chariot.  And this is a valid argument to an extent.  History is filled with examples of people inserting gods into the system when they do not understand something.   The question with this however is whether or not the question is even a scientific one.  Science tends to be associated with what is and so to ask why it is may not be a place where it would offer much in the terms of a worthwhile answer. 

And while I hope this little divergence was not too dull, I do bring it for a reason and that reason is because the question of “why” has been one that floats through my brain in various times and places and, in my case, is at least part of the story for my return to religion in general.  I don’t want to dwell too long on how I came back to being a Christian partly because it’s not terribly coherent.  Again having never been someone else (that would be a different religion) I tend to be a bit skeptical when people give one reason for something happening.  That is because in my experience when I have changed, moving from one understanding to another, there has never been one thing that caused it.  And so I will briefly recount the events that made me reassess who I was and what I believed.  And, first and foremost, why it never satisfactorily answered why.  That is why some of my journey in the world of unbelief was spent as a Deist because of the fact that they at least took this question seriously.  They fall down in some other aspects of being a fully formed religion, but they at least saw it as a question worth posing.  And so this never completely went away and I never found much satisfaction in the answers that were provided in atheism or agnosticism.  Scientists may assure us that they will eventually figure it out, but if I didn’t have faith in God, I’m not really sure it makes logical sense to have faith in Bill Nye.  And this lack of satisfaction really became apparent when I was reading some Jacques Derrida in a Literary Criticism class.  I had heard of him and from what I knew he seemed to be a sort of guru who would lead me to the promised land of what exactly I can’t remember, but it was going to be awesome. 

I want to do my best in this to not reduce Derrida to a straw man.  That is I don’t want to paint a caricature of him that I can then easily dismantle.  So let me try to explain briefly what it was that I read and what it was that he seems to have wished to convey.  The word that we tend to associate with Derrida is deconstructionism, which he sort of took from Heidegger (who went to my Alma Mater Freiburg University, but was also a Nazi).  Derrida was not a Nazi, but more of a Marxist and had better hair than Heidegger.  Some have said that you can’t even really define deconstructionism, but let me try.  The basics are that language is pre-loaded with certain information that it has acquired over time and may not be conveying in a pure way what was originally intended.  You can think of it like a boat hull gradually being covered with barnacles.  So if 400 years ago someone said, “You have to be crazy if you think I’m going to pay that much for this lute.” We in interpreting it would have a whole lot of baggage tied to these words that came in the intervening 400 years that we cannot truly understand what the original speaker meant to convey.  The idea then is basically to strip all of this away so that we can arrive at the true meaning.  I have not read Derrida extensively but in what I have read it seems he spends a lot more time talking about doing this than he does in actually doing it, kind of how Hans and Franz never actually did any exercise.  My issue however was not the dearth of any actual deconstructualizing (if that is a real word), it was that it seemed the whole system broke down on the fact that I was reading this in translation.  Think of all the layers that were added on by my not only reading this many years after it was written but reading it in translation where a translator made any host of decisions about how to convey Derrida’s original meaning.   So it seemed that what Derrida was pointing out, was not on terribly sound footing because how could I trust that I was receiving the information that he intended for me to receive in the first place.  It seemed like a monster that ate itself. 

And I guess upon realizing this it got me realizing that nothing was on that sure of footing.  In other words the sort of deep intellectual purity that atheists demanded of religion was not even really there in their own systems of thought.  If Derrida was supposed to be the pinnacle of non-religious thought (which many would debate, but in my mind at the time he was) how could he have all, if not more of the problems I had left Christianity over?  And it was not an Archimedes in the bath like moment.  I was not given clarity as to where I should be going, but it seemed to indicate that it would not be in the world of French deconstructionalism.  I guess if I am going to be self referential this would be my sort of summer camp moment.  A place where I knew something was wrong, but not yet sure what right looked like.  So let’s get on with it and look at some other markers in my not so triumphant return to the faith. 

[1] There has been much written to try and create a secular moral structure, that is a moral foundation that is not dependent on God or the gods.  Much of it tends to be circular in its reasoning like the atheists who decided to plaster “be good for goodness sake” on the side of buses during the Christmas season.  They really punted on defining “good” and were probably hoping that the rest of the world had some unexamined Judeo Christians definitions of good allowing them to make some sense out of such a pronouncement.   

More than you ever wanted to know...

In our day and age we hear (or at least used to hear) much about post modernism and how through it we have come to see the idea that truth as being a relative thing.  The sort of catch all summary that gets toted about is “what is true for you is not true for me.”  I am oversimplifying to some extent but here is the quick origin story of postmodernism and how it got summarized in such a phrase.  If modernism posited a human mind that could neutrally observe the world around it with no bias or interpretation, post-modernism overcorrected and decided not only was the mind not neutral but that reality was malleable as well.  In other words, not only do we perceive things differently but also these perceptions themselves are reality, meaning we can have different realities.  This concept has naturally come under fire by many, especially by those in what you might call the conservative religious world, because if God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow there is not a lot of room for different truths about God’s nature.  In other words my God and your God are the same at a very fundamental level.  Or if you would like it in more Wile E. Coyote terms smashing into a cliff because you have tied yourself to a rocket is not fun no matter who you are (which is not a terrible argument by the way).  And while I am very sympathetic to many of the arguments against postmodernism there is something to the idea that we all see the world a little differently.  I have trouble fathoming that there are people who actually enjoyed the movie Legends of the Fall (which seemed to be an overly long and overly serious study of men’s hair and its proper grooming).  And it is not just matters of taste where people will see the world differently; two people can interpret an individual’s tone of voice or body language differently or draw much different conclusions from certain actions or events.  So with that overly long introduction and pseudo intellectual overview of postmodernism let me try to bring this back to what I originally set out to do, which is describe my decent into atheism.   And please remember the word my.  In other words the reasons I will go through are what made me not believe for a season (as you are supposed to say these days).  I am not saying that any of these things are right, true or even logical, but simply what went on inside the head of a teenager in northwest Fresno in the 1980’s.  And so here it goes….

Growing up I often felt that there was something wrong with my faith because I tended not to experience God in the way that children, at least children in the 1970’s and 80’s were supposed to experience it.  There seemed to be something of a basket of activities that you were supposed to have and feelings towards the things in that basket that I simply did not experience.  I did not like summer camp.  I didn’t like any Christian song involving a guitar and I don’t think that I was ever “on fire” for the Lord (which always sounded to me more like something you might pick up in an Iranian brothel).  In high school I did not enjoy the hip youth minister that my church hired (he even sang in a band that played in bars) and I was thoroughly confused by what exactly was meant by or what I should feel if I accepted Jesus into my heart.  Most of my experience of events that were geared towards youth was like going to one of those silent raves, that may or may not still be trendy, except I felt like I was going without the headphones.  Everyone around me seemed to hear music that I simply did not hear. 

For most of my childhood I just sort of took people’s word for it and pretended that I was grooving along to the techno pop or whatever it was the young kids were enjoying in those days.  Before my mid teenage years I would have thought of myself as a Christian and had an adequate faith for someone my age.  And to be quite honest even though I did not feel much in the way that I was supposed to feel it was not something that I dwelled on.  I just kind of went along with things.  The only event from this time that I remember having a deep impression on me was when our Sunday School teacher decided it would be a good idea to take a bunch of fifth graders through the minor prophet Amos.  The book was really weird and scared me but I am glad that she did it.  It was a glimpse into the parts of the Bible that they usually shielded from kids.  No one was building an arky arky rather a splenetic vinedresser was fed up with people’s lack of obedience to God.  All of which brings up a point that requires much more thought and examination than I am going to give it here, which has to do with how Christianity is presented to kids.  Sometimes the way we bring children into the faith feels like what they do in cults, that is they only tell you the weird stuff after you have left your family and are living in a school bus in Driggs, Idaho making macramé light ropes.  When we wait to share these strange things I think it can lead to problems in faith.  Kids are not stupid and if you hide stuff from them it can make them think that there are nefarious reasons for you keeping things from them.  But as I said this is a topic for a different day. 

When people have asked me how I left the faith it is not a simple answer.  There was not one event but a series of small things.  In many ways the best way I have been able to think about it is that it was like the tide going out.  You don’t really notice it happening until a moment where you simply realize your faith is no longer there.  The only explicit thing that I do remember was the night I decided to stop praying.  It was in Monterey, California of all places my senior year of high school and I decided that I was being hypocritical by continuing to pray.  I sort of hedged my bets by telling God that I didn’t think I believed in him anymore and so I was signing off or whatever you call it when you stop praying because you no longer believe.  I would imagine that there is a Finnish word for it.  The idea of signing off is sort of funny because I am not sure whom I thought I was talking to.  And so while my most vivid memory is the end there were some moments that I do remember as markers in this decline of faith. 

I had briefly mentioned summer camp and it is probably worth expanding on a bit.  There was a camp run by the local Presbytery that was integral part of the church my family attended, and to most of the Presbyterian churches in the area.  The camp was located roughly halfway between Fresno and Yosemite Valley at an elevation of around 5,000 feet.  Most every kid of the camp going age who went to my church participated in the summer camp, in some capacity, but not all at the same time.  There were a number of camps offered and so there was a fairly good chance that you would get there and not know anyone, which happened to me a few times. Prior to going I was very excited.  My brother who is four years older than me started (four years before me, imagine that) and from what I heard it sounded like a yabba dabba doo time.  And so in the summer before fourth grade, I was old enough to go and set off.  The camp for my age cohort was for some reason Robin Hood themed.  I am still not sure if Robin Hood is an appropriate person for Christian’s to emulate, I mean who put him in charge of deciding income distribution for Nottingham?  Certainly caring for the poor is Christian but the means by which he acquired the goods which he gave to the poor seems to be at best a little morally grey.  Whatever the case I went off and generally enjoyed it, but the enjoyment was not in what you might call a spiritual way.  I enjoyed probably the way someone might enjoy a secular camp – I liked the games and we got to build a small boat for a race.  I did eat too much beef jerky one night and threw up, but I threw up a lot as a kid so this was not very unique.

I spent two more years at this Robin Hood themed camp and continued to enjoy it.  Again my experience was not spiritual but pleasant enough.  This pleasantness all changed the next year when I graduated to the Junior High camp.  The lack of spiritual enlightenment continued but the secular fun ceased as well and I found myself surrounded by frightening kids who seemed to have overactive pituitary glands and a propensity to violence.  One of these frightening kids was obsessed with Ozzy Osbourne which I found very disconcerting mainly because his interest in Ozzy seemed to be fueled by his belief that there was something of the occult in Ozzy’s antics.  That is Ozzy was kind of a poor man’s Beelzebub in his telling.  It was interesting that while I did not get a sense of the presence of God I did get a sense of the presence of something not of God.  Ozzy was not the tottering bumbling grandfather that we know today and to my young mind seemed like someone who, in the words of St. John loved the darkness more than the light.  So I spent the week slightly on edge wondering if I would wake up and find this kid trying to remove my pancreas to sacrifice to Odin or carving a pentagram into my head to ensure that there would be a bountiful harvest of einkorn.  In addition the week I was there it rained limiting the outdoor fun.  I am not sure if there is a straight line from any of this but for the first time that I can recall in my life I had real feelings of depression.  I didn’t want to be there and looked forward to going home. 

This feeling would become much worse my next year at camp, where the depression was some of the most severe I have ever experienced, before or since.  I felt totally alone and at that time and place at camp the world felt devoid of any meaning.  There was no joy and I had to force myself to think about future events to try and shake myself out of this feeling of nothingness.  Today I would probably have dubbed this an existential crisis and maybe that is as good of explanation as any.  I could not locate the source of it.  There were certainly other people around and they were not terrible people but I could not muster any worthwhile interactions with them.  It might have been easier had they simply not been there.  If my loneliness was the result of an actual lack of people but instead I was surrounded by people and yet felt no contact and no meaning.  I remember on numerous occasions during our “free time” I broke the rules and wondered away from the campsite hoping to find or see something that would cure the hopelessness that I was experiencing.  Now and then even to this day I will have a nightmare where I feel like I did that week.  It may have been a dark night of the soul, but if it was I failed because I did not emerge with any great new spiritual depth.

I gave camp one more try or an event sponsored by the camp.  It was a bike trip in the Lake Tahoe area.  The biking was nice and it was not terribly depressing.  However our “spiritual” leader was a warmed over Bolshevik who conflated his politics with the Gospel.  He may have been one of the most self-satisfied individuals that I have ever met, whether this was compensating for some terrible insecurities or whether he truly believed in his own awesomeness I am not qualified to say.  Whatever the case, it was probably not what someone coming off two horrific camping experiences needed at least in terms of spiritual renewal.  Besides he really liked Huey Lewis and the News.  It’s hard to think of a worse combination.  I mean if you are going to be a tiresome pinko at least play The Internationale that would at least get you in the mood to liquidate some Kulaks, but Huey Lewis, they seem like a band that Uncle Jessie would have belonged to on Full House.  I am not sure which circle of hell has this as a soundtrack, but I am sure that there is one.  So anyway my last major exposure to Christianity in a camp setting was this guy and the Christianity he presented was not terribly attractive unless you think politics is the highest order of the universe.

So it was not then that I lost my faith.  What my faith was at this point in time it is sort of difficult to remember.  I would suspect that it was like a lot of people who go to church sometimes – I had a vague awareness that this was something I should have, but really nothing deeper.  This was not really helped by the fact that shortly hereafter my church decided it was time to bring in Craig, the cool, hip youth group director.  He had a mullet, which was somehow awesome at this point in the 80’s and he even played in a band.  I don’t think there was anything uniquely wrong with him, but he was more the byproduct of a system that emphasized youth as an end unto itself, meaning that someone thought it was a good idea to bring in young hip college students who also happened to be Christian.  Most of his problems stemmed from the fact that he had no training and not much in the way of knowledge when it came to Christianity.  The last I heard he was still living in Fresno and doing some sort of sales job and was not an active Christian.  Which seems to be a fitting conclusion.  He would do odd things like approach you and tell you that he had heard that you were at a party where beer was served.  The funny thing is that when he did this I had not been at any such party.  Later when I was actually going to parties where beer was served he went silent.  For someone like me who was hopped up on self-satisfaction and believed that I was deeply intellectual there could not have been a much worse choice.  Craig did not know a whole lot and so most objections I voiced he didn’t have an answer for.  This is not to say that there were not answers, its just that he was hired for his hipness and date on his birth certificate, not his knowledge of the faith once delivered.  And I should probably pause for a moment and point out that he may have had an impossible task with me, I was a self-satisfied teenager and he could have been Justin Martyr and I may have ended up just the same. 

By the time Craig entered my life I was beginning to have doubts about the faith that were more overt than any I had previously had.  I don’t think any were terribly profound or original, just the usual store bought atheism that products of the Oxbridge seem to espouse.  Like those who come out of this milieu much of my objections were probably just pride  which manifested itself in a belief that really smart people were not Christian.  And I saw myself as really smart, why I am not quite so sure.  I have sometimes speculated as to whether or not I would have lost my faith if my youth minister had been better educated, if he could have answered my questions.  Frankly I don’t know.  My youthful hubris may have overwhelmed even the most patient and informed individual.  Whatever the case I can say he was not helpful and did nothing to slow my slide into atheism. 

Like the Gnostics and their uneven relationship to the created order I was never really sure what to do about being atheist.  Was I supposed to be free like some Rousseauean natural man, unimpeded by society and all its rules or was I some quasi Nietzschean superman who had seen through the superstitions of others and was now to rule over these silly earthlings.  Whatever the case I didn’t really pull off either.  I was a mediocre atheist, just like I had been a mediocre Christian.  I felt a little less guilty about some of my behavior, but not a whole lot.  My latent Calvinism still whispered in my ear, occasionally telling me of my total depravity.  I have to say that I didn’t think about atheism too much as a thing in and of itself, but mainly thought of it in terms of not being a Christian.  And I have to say that I am not alone in this.  I have found that most atheists who put a whole lot of energy into their atheism often act on it in terms of opposing that which is Christian or some other religion. 

If you want an example and since we have been talking about mullets the professional atheist Bill Maher made an entire movie about how dumb religion is.  Which he is allowed to do, but it just seems that atheism does not have much substance to it, which is probably baked into the pie by its very nature.  It would seem that once you have decided you believe in nothing beyond yourself the topics of conversation sort of end there – “hey you don’t believe in anything either -- awesome.”  I will continue this discussion in a bit about my life in the world of atheism but want to simply point out that much of our intellectual energy these days follows atheism or at least the way I practiced atheism by finding its energy not in what it supports but what it opposes and naturally I think this is a very bad thing. 

Feel the Beat from the Tambourine

I have decided that over the next several blog posts I am going to write something of a spiritual autobiography.  I do this with no delusions that it will be Augustine’s Confessions Part II (Electric Boogaloo).  It will simply be my attempt to explain how I came to be where I am and what came before. The only reason I do this is because I was asked the other day how it was that I went from being an atheist to being a Christian and the best I could say at that moment was that I found atheism to be rather boring, which it is but you could say that of a whole host of things – the pasta section at the grocery store, the Salt Lake City Airport and most musical groups from Scandinavia.  And so I guess what follows will be my attempt to articulate my faith in terms more profound than what a thirteen year old says when they have been in the car too long.

            Also before going on I should clarify that I am not attempting to write an apology, that is a justification for the Christian faith.  This is not meant to be targeted at the unbeliever.  The main reason for this is my somewhat skeptical view of the viability of arguing or persuading someone into the faith.  This skepticism comes partly from a rather subjective criteria about the number of people I have seen who have come to the faith through argument, which is to say none.  In other words I have never heard the conversion story in which someone said they did not believe until their friend argued with them for hours on end at which point they were baptized and started exclusively listening exclusively to those Christian stations that are at the lower end of the FM dial.  Just to add a little more anecdotal fuel to this fire, the other day I was talking with someone who was a non-Christian.  They repeatedly told me that no Christian writings existed until more than fifty years after the crucifixion.  I told him that this was not quite true that 1stThessalonians was probably written less than 20 years after the crucifixion.  I then asked what it mattered and if next week we found a Christian document that was written twenty minutes after the crucifixion would it change anything. He said that it did not really matter and that it would not change his mind.  People tend to not be Christian for a whole host of reasons and those reasons can be somewhat fluid.  This is not to pick on non-Christians, because I think we all do this in any number of beliefs.  If I asked you why you loved your spouse, one day you might tell me its because of their compassionate nature while another day it might be because of how they are with the kids.  Which sort of gets me to my second point.  

            The other reason I am not a big proponent of arguments for the Faith has to do with my skepticism about logic and reason being the best ways to convey the Faith.  This is not to say that I am against reason and logic, it is simply that as I have grown older I have come to realize that much of our life is not governed by logic and reason and this is not necessarily bad.  A whole host of horrible and repugnant actions might actually be logical – killing off old people or the mentally ill just for a few quick examples.  I will develop this theme more as we go on, but for the time being just want to establish that what follows is not geared towards persuasion and will not be something of an airtight argument for the faith once delivered.  Additionally there will not be a tremendous amount of time spent on fleshing out what is the faith once delivered.  This is not meant to be a theological text which defends or celebrates one position over the other.  For clarity in what I mean by the faith it is probably simplest to say that it is the faith as expressed in the Nicene Creed.  

             And finally what follows is personal, it is not prescriptive.  I am not suggesting that my path is the right one or wrong one, but simply stating how things happened and how I cam to be where I am.  Hopefully you will find some admirable parts but certainly there will be some things that are not great.  Which, not to excuse myself, but is rather a fairly good summary of humanity in general – we are good except when we aren’t.    

St. Columba, Marie Kondo and Nitrogen Based Fertilizers

When I was in college I became very pleased about the fact that I was Scottish.  Much of this was probably just a reaction to being amongst a lot of Irish Catholics and my innate desire to be difficult.  And so it is probably fortunate that in my Scottish pride period I was unaware of St. Columba, the saint whom we remembered a few days back, because he was the Irish saint who brought Christianity to Scotland.  Which on some level makes the Scots beholden to the Irish, something we never want to be.  It’s like the t-shirt I once saw which said, “Everyone is a little Irish on St. Patrick’s Day except the Scottish, we’re still Scottish.”  But as much as it grieves me I do have to give an Irishman some credit or “shout out” as the young kids say.

            St. Columba was born on December 7, 521 (1420 years before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, so that wasn’t his fault).  He was born in the northern part of Ireland at a place called Gartan.  He was a pretty big deal even in his time, so unlike many of the older saints we know a fair amount about his life, although some of it may be more legend than fact.  With that in mind let me give you my favorite version of his story, which may contain a few of those unsubstantiated facts.  It goes like this: Sometime around his 40th birthday in 562 or 563 Columba, an Irish Abbot, started a war in Ireland, which made a lot of people upset with him.  So in a fit of pique he decided to leave Ireland and then traveled by boat until he could no longer see Ireland, which put him on the island of Iona.  It was from here that he would go into Scotland to start converting the native Picts to Christianity.  And while in Scotland he also killed the Loch Ness Monster.  Well the outline of that story is definitely true.  Columba did leave Ireland and sail to Iona where he set up a missionary outpost.  He converted many of the Picts, who worshiped pagan gods at the time.  One of his great successes was the conversion of the Pictish king, Bride son of Meilochon.  And for the 1500 years or so since he did his work Scotland has been Christian.  But here is a bit of sad news about Scotland.  A 2011 survey found that only 54% of the population identified as Christian – which is still a majority but a rather small one (or wee one if you want to be all Scottish about it).  And I am guessing that that percentage has shrunk in the intervening years.  We should of course celebrate Columba but also ponder how it is that Christianity was able to conquer paganism, endure through the middle ages and Black Death but is in retreat to the current culture.  And we should also ponder what is the solution?  Do we need to once again launch missionaries to re-conquer lands lost to the rising tide of secularism?  And if we did would those people even care, or would they be too busy binge watching Marie Kondo on Netflix to even notice?

            I was listening to a discussion the other day about the role of technology versus ideas in terms of changing culture.  The person I was listening to argued that we tend to look at things like what kids learn in school or what is on television as the items which steer a culture and it is true to a certain extent.  But he said, for example, the automobile had more influence on teenage promiscuity than any philosophy espoused by Hugh Hefner or Alfred Kinsey.  I bring this up not to say we should not be espousing proper and ethical ways to live but merely to point out that we may not exactly be sure what we are countering.  In the time of Columba the equation was fairly straightforward.  You had pagan people who worshiped pagan gods.  To change this you had to convince them that the gods they were worshiping were not real gods and you then introduced them to the one true God as found in Jesus Christ.  All that you were really doing was moving the direction of their worship to something else.  But what are we exactly countering today?  Are we countering a society that rejects God as a myth?  Well there is certainly some of this.  There is obviously the professional atheist class like Richard Dawkins or Bill Maher.  But a lot of people who don’t believe do not have the evangelistic fervor of these two; they just kind of don’t care.  There are others who are not necessarily opposed to religion and belief and would even say that they are Christian but just can’t really be bothered.  These are the types who insist on getting their children baptized and then don’t appear in church again until the baptized kid gets married.  There are also those who don’t even really think about it.  And so in all of this how can we be like Columba?  How can we show a world that does not even know that it needs God, that there is more to this life?  I wish I had an easy solution, but I think it is going to take time to figure out.

            I was listening to historian Rachel Laudan discuss food the other day and how this is really the first time in human history that much of the world has too much food.  So as a result we as humanity have not really figured out what to do with this abundance, resulting in such things as the obesity epidemic.  You have a species that for most of history has dealt with scarcity now trying to adapt to plenty and no one quite knows what to do.  I wonder if that same sort of phenomenon is going on in our world, that is the world of religion. 

There is an old argument, generally put forth by atheists that essentially posits that what belief in something higher was only there to explain the things that we cannot explain or control.  And as we have come to understand more and more, especially in the last two hundred years or so, the need for God to explain the unexplainable has disappeared.  For example, you used to pray for a good harvest, but with innovations in seed quality and fertilizers good harvests are more guaranteed.  But I would argue that like with food people have not figured out where they need God when all of their physical needs are seemingly satisfied. Fat, dumb and happy has blotted out the longing for God in some.  But I think much like creating a new relationship with food much of our society will need to find new relationship with God; understanding God not just as someone to help you on a math test, but rather to fill in all of the broken areas of our world.  You do not have to look far to see all of the problems in our society.  You also don’t have to look far to see all of the bad ways that people are trying to fix those problems.  I mean, the heroin epidemic is happening among rich kids in the suburbs.  We live in a hurting society that has tried everything except God to heal itself and we need to model and invite people into a relationship with God.  For as another great saint said, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you."

The coming years are going to require new ways of explaining God to a people who think that they understand Him.  Great saints like Columba figured out ways to evangelize in their contexts and we will need to do the same. 

If You've a Date in Constantinople

Now and then I will randomly come across something of which I knew nothing about or at least had forgotten about.  For example, the other day I picked up a book off our shelves and stared reading a summary of Boethius’ work known as The Consolation of Philosophy.  Boethius lived from around 477 to 524 in the area Roman Empire and what was left of it in the west.  He came from an important family and was a philosopher and worked as a sort of high-level bureaucrat.  One of the things that he worked on was improving the relationship between the two big churches of the day, the one based in Rome and the other based in Constantinople.  Somewhere in this process Boethius was accused of treason and was sentenced to death.  It was while waiting in prison that he wrote The Consolation of Philosophy. 

The book is basically a conversation between himself and Lady Philosophy.  They talk about a number of things but the one that struck me was a conversation about luck.  The quick version is that Lady Philosophy says that how well or how poorly you do in life can often come down to chance – you may be up one day and down the next.  Now certainly we can have debates on this, the person whose favorite activity is to randomly run across the freeway, may be inviting a little more bad luck on themselves.  But I do think there is something of chance in life.  You do not get to pick your parents, your amount of intelligence or where you are born.  Things that can all greatly influence how your life will turn out.  Just think of the differences between being born in South Korea versus being born in North Korea, but back to Boethius. 

The conversation continues and Lady Philosophy makes the point that because circumstances can be so fickle they are not good things on which to base your happiness.  She says instead that you must base your happiness on something more solid, something that will be the same tomorrow as it is today (which should sound a lot like God).  Interestingly in this book Boethius does not mention God in a way that points directly to God as Christians understand God, even though he was a Christian.  That is not to say that the God he points to is a God who is un-Christian, but is probably more comparable to God as described by Plato, a God of pure goodness.  And so the argument is basically that we must not base our happiness on things temporal but things eternal. 

And the thing is most of us know this.  Most of us know that the things of this world are not stable – “The grass withers and the flowers fade” as Isaiah tells us.  But we continue to put our trust in those things that are ephemeral.  We believe that if we could just have a little more money, or a few weeks vacation then we would be happy.  But when those things come they do not provide lasting happiness.  I read about a study, which looked at people who had won the lottery and they found something very interesting.  Six months after a person had won the lottery they were less happy than the day before they won the lottery.  How many people have you known or you may be one of those people who have thought that if you could just win the lottery than all would be taken care of.  That our lives would be perfect.  But because money is ultimately not transcendent it will ultimately disappoint.  So today I would say let’s remember what Boethius and Lady Philosophy remind us of, that happiness needs to come from some place deeper. 

All the King's Horses

At the end of William Butler Yeats poem Among School Children he asks the question, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?”  The question ponders whether there is a difference between what we do and what we are.  In dancing it seems these two cannot be separated for there is no dance without the dancer and no dancer without the dance.  And so to rephrase it for the Christian, can we be Christian without doing Christian things?

On some level this is the old debate between faith and works.  Can we be faithful Christians without doing Christian works or put in reverse can we do Christian works without being Christian?   We seem to live in a world that approves of many Christian sentiments, showing mercy for the poor, loving one another and so on but is not so enamored with actually being Christian.  In fact, many see Christianity as an impediment to living out a moral life.  Christians in many circles are seen as bigoted and hateful.  With the implication being that we must separate the Christian from Christian actions. 

And while I am the first to admit that we Christians have been pretty bad advertisements for Christianity, I don’t think that we can separate belief from action.  Is it nice that people want to do good and moral things?  Yes certainly it is, but I am skeptical that it can be maintained, when it is not infused with the power of God.  When you pull behavior out of the context of God it becomes about a decision that we make.  We decide that actions are right, but what happens when we change our mind?  We are fairly fickle creatures who can be like Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Caroll’s, Through the Looking Glass when he said, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."  But, of course, such an understanding makes for a very confusing and disjointed world.

I am not saying that non Christians cannot act in God’s will or that Christians always do act in accordance with God’s will, but simply that they have their fullest expression when they are united.  And my larger point today is not to look at those who are not Christian, but to those who are and ask that we be more like Yeats’ dancer and dance, that when people see us they see Christians in thought, word and deed. 

I was told there would be no math

John answered, “Master, we saw a man casting out demons in your name, and we forbade him, because he does not follow with us.”  But Jesus said to him, “Do not forbid him; for he that is not against you is for you.” (Luke 9:49-50)

Sometimes I take odd comfort in snippets like this from the Gospel because I realize that I am not the first to try and thwart God’s will because it does not fit in with how I think things should work.  I thought about this because this morning I was reading a secular article about the need to be grateful.  And sadly I have to say that my first reaction was to think, “Oh now you realize what we Christian’s have been saying all along.”  But here is the thing, outside of the rather obvious fact that Christian’s do not frequently model a life of gratitude, I lament that sometimes we act like the Pharisees castigating Jesus for healing on the Sabbath.  We act like life is a sporting event believing that when something good happens to the other team it is bad for us.

But let’s return to this article on gratitude.  Yes maybe the author was late to the party and maybe he is not even sure why he is at the party in the first place, but just like Jesus tells us that he who is not against is for us.  In one of C.S. Lewis’s books (I think it is Mere Christianity) he has an interesting discussion about those from other religions or faith backgrounds as the young kids say today.  The tendency among certain Christians is to think that non-Christians are wrong.  Other Christians make an opposite error and say that non-Christians are really the same as us but simply use a different vocabulary or way of looking at the world.  But there is a third way to think about those whose beliefs are different from our own.  Lewis explains it in terms of math.  He says that if 2+2=4 then to say 2+2=5 is wrong, but it is not as wrong as saying 2+2=73,248 or that it equals purple.  There are degrees of being wrong and even those who are “wrong” may be much right or very close to being right on many things.

Now please do not think that I am suggesting that it does not really matter what you believe.  Rather what I am suggesting is the same thing that Jesus does; celebrate when people stumble onto some truth whether or not they come from the appropriate background or that they have correct beliefs top to bottom.  If there are secular articles being written about being grateful this is good news.  In fact if you want to be a little devious about it we could argue that someone with a grateful heart is someone who will be more likely to endorse the Gospel message.  But even without being devious, grateful people are much more enjoyable to be around.  The more Christ like behaviors that people engage in the better, be it casting out demons or being thankful for what they have. 

Our prayer should be to keep ourselves from thwarting God’s will. 

Yelling at the TV

            At a previous parish I had a woman who spent most of her life in a tizzy – worried about this thing or that which, in her mind, threatened to tear the very fabric of the universe.  At least in her telling it did.  Anyway one day she came into my office exercised about whatever was the crisis de jour – it may have involved light bulbs but my memory is a little fuzzy.  Finally, after listening to her go on and on I said, “Alice, you are going to have to realize that there are a lot of things about which I have no opinion.”  I do not bring this up to show the Zen like state with which I navigate this terrestrial ball, because there are any number of small insignificant things about which I can overreact to.  I instead bring this up as more of an ideal because I think we live in a day and age where people have too many opinions about way too many things with the ultimate result being that we live in times of almost constant agitation. 

            There was an article in the Wall Street Journal this past week about the rise of the picky eater.  That is kids who refuse to eat vast swaths of the food chain.  An interesting thing that it pointed out is that picky eating as “a thing” is a relatively new phenomenon.  In doing some research the author noted that one of the first mentions was in 1930 in an address to the American Pediatric Society.  This address noted that picky eaters were only found in well-off homes and not from places like orphanages, where they ate anything set in front of them.  This bit of data would seem to suggest that as food got more plentiful and choices increased so did the instinct to reject food.  I wonder in our day of mass communication if perhaps something similar has happened.  That is children when given more variety of foods to consume become more opinionated about their food.  Are we who are given so many varieties about information to consume, choosing to have very strong opinions on things that previously may have passed unnoticed?  In other words if someone were a jerk in Ho-Ho-Cus, New Jersey 150 years ago odds are I probably would not hear about, whereas today it might make the front page of the New York Times or at least be plastered all over social media.  This forces me to have an opinion which most likely will be at odds with someone else’s opinion.

            I was at the gym the other day and watching one of those home shows where a young couple is seeking to find their dream home.  I have to say that I was slightly shocked by just how many opinions this young couple had on the type of house that they had to have, down to the types and location of the toilet.  But the funny things was at the end of the program they ended up getting a house that lacked many of the things that were so important at the beginning.  But the house they chose was very aesthetically pleasing.  What does this say about opinions and reality?  We say we want something, will demand it and then find we are happier with something that differs from our stated opinion?  Does this mean that our judgments of the world may not only be less important than we thought but may not in fact reflect how we actually feel or want to live?

            It seems that the more opinions we have the more miserable we can be, because something is always going to be wrong.  Christianity while not necessarily opposing free will and free choice concedes that God is the only one who is capable of always having the right opinion about everything.  That is why much has been written about submitting our will to God’s perfect will.  And while this may seem like losing our freedom it may free us from the slavery of our own ill informed opinions, the ones that constantly tell us that something is not right, and instead allows for us to live within God’s peace and God’s perfect will.  It is quite counter-cultural to take an information sabbatical but it might make us and the world a better place. 

            When I was in college a friend of mine was a very passionate sports fan and would often spend times in front of the TV yelling very specific instructions to those playing whatever game.  A friend of mine one day said, “You do realize that nothing you say here has any effect on what they do there.”  It seems our society is trapped in a permanent state of yelling at the television believing that we are somehow changing things for the better when in truth we are just making this world a more disagreeable place.       

Black Holes and Finance

I am currently reading a book called Einstein’s Monsters by the astronomer Chris Impey.  The book is ostensibly about black holes but the author deliberately chose not to have that be his title (although it is in the subtitle) because of the baggage that the term carries in our day and age, where people use black hole to define something with the characteristic of a bottomless pit.  Anyway this hesitancy about using a correct term got me to thinking not about black holes but words that carry baggage and convey things that we may not really wish to convey. 

When I was in high school and early college my religious views ranged somewhere between solipsism and a sort of narcissistic home brewed religion.  I had of course been raised in a Christian household but turned on that.  In order to maintain my views I had a strong need to define Christianity in a way to make it easily refutable.  To do this I often watched late night evangelists; the guys in shiny suits who promised for a donation of $50 to send you a handkerchief that they had prayed over.  It was a pretty easy Christianity to dismiss, full of hucksterism and shallowness.  To keep my comfortable and smug worldview I needed to define any competition in very unthreatening ways.  It worked for a while but eventually I found myself embracing Christianity and being ordained. 

There is an old mantra in finance, which says I will loan you any amount of money you want as long as I get to define the terms.  The idea being that by defining terms we can make the act of giving away money advantageous for us – it is the basic principle of credit card companies.  I bring all of this up to the question of how do we define terms about others and how do they define terms about us?  Meaning do we relate to people as they actually are or do we relate to them in ways that are convenient for us?  I would argue that we deal more and more with people in ways that we want to define them rather than as they actually are.  Like the famous statement wrongly attributed to Mark Twain, “When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much he had learned in seven years.”

With the rise of the Internet it has probably become easier to define who others are largely because we can always find a person or group who look at the world in the same way that we do.  As a result we can have our self-defined terms reinforced and begin to believe that there are no other opinions about which to be concerned.  And this is really too bad, this sort of self-selection that technology has allowed to happen. 

I had an uncle who was retired Air Force and staunchly right wing.  When he was older he moved into a retirement home and one of his best friends was a retired college professor who was staunchly left wing.  They, of course, debated and made fun of each other but they also liked and respected each other.  They realized that underneath their opinions there was something deeper, something that they really enjoyed.

When we define others we can miss the more important things.  If we define someone by their views on how healthcare is distributed how much in taxes should be collected we can miss that like us, they are also created in the image of God.  May we as Christians look first to the image of God and all things that unite and not the things that separate, be they real or imagined. 

Democritus and Heraclitus

            Something with which I struggle mightily is negativity.  I used to be very proud of my cynicism, it was very much part of who I was as a person.  In some senses I believed that it made me deep or mysterious or some such thing.  I never wanted to be a sort of brooding upper middle class kid clad in all black listening to industrial music, I just wanted to do the deeply Scottish thing of being reasonably unimpressed with most everything that I encountered.   Most of my friends would probably tell you that this made me a real pain, but it is who I was and is still certainly part of me.  But since we always find our own annoying habits endearing I want to spend a moment contemplating what role skepticism or even cynicism play for the Christian.  Is it taboo or can it be helpful? 

This may not surprise you but in my opinion there certainly seems to be room for cynicism and not just because I like it but because the Bible’s narrative of humanity seems to be if not cynical at least a little skeptical about humanity’s abilities.  By the third chapter of Genesis we learn that we are fallen sinners who have nothing in us that can save us.  That is not a message that you would get from your average Disney Princess movie and certainly there does not seem to be a lot of material there by which to usher in the age of Aquarius.  Yet at the same time hope is one of the great virtues found in the Christian.  And so it would seem that the sweet spot for humanity would be to have a realistic view of ourselves while at the same time hoping for something better.

            In the Gospel of Matthew before the crucifixion there is a sort of odd verse spoken by Jesus where he states, “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as thou wilt.”  This line can be somewhat confusing if we take it to mean that Jesus was not really all that enthused about dying for our sins (but really who could blame him).  But there is another way of interpreting the cup.  If we take the cup to be what humanity is about to do to Jesus then Jesus could be asking God if just for once humanity would take a better path; if they stopped acting in the way that they have since Adam and Eve first sewed fig leaves together.  Jesus was hoping that humanity could change and not need a Saviour.  There it is both a resignation to human nature and the hope for a change for the better.  And that seems to be the place we need to be.

            There is an Arabic saying which is sometimes ascribed to Mohamed which says, “Trust in God, but tie your camel.”  This seems to be the balance that we need to strike.  We need to see that God has called us to something greater and more beautiful and more wonderful, but we also need to have realistic expectations of how the world works. 

            It seems there are two opposite mistakes that we can make in this world.  We can think too highly of humanity believing it to be capable of things that for which it has never shown and sadly when taken to an extreme we see the tragic effects of this in places like Jonestown or Pol Pot’s Cambodia where the ultimate realization that the crooked timber of humanity is disappointing created the belief that it must be eliminated.  The other side descends into such cynicism that we see those truly good things which come from God as being some how malicious and wicked.  This is what Jesus referenced in Mark’s Gospel when he said, “Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the sons of men, and whatever blasphemies they utter; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin.”  The unforgivable sin is attributing the works of God to Satan. 

            The French philosopher Michel de Montaigne said when describing two early Greek philosophers, “Democritus and Heraclitus were two philosophers, of whom the first, finding the condition of man vain and ridiculous, never went out in public but with a mocking and laughing face; whereas Heraclitus, having pity and compassion on this same condition of ours, wore a face perpetually sad, and eyes filled with tears.”  There may be days where we laugh at the condition of humanity and other days when we cry about it, but we never must lose sight of the fact that God can work through us to do wonderful things. 

Outrage, Elections and Apollo 12

            In the years before I went off to seminary, I had a job that allowed me a lot of free time.  Partly this was because my boss was incredibly disorganized, so you either had nothing to do or everything to do.  So in these frequent times in which there was nothing to do I mainly looked at stuff on the Internet.  Generally speaking my Internet use was not benign in nature instead I interacted like an outrage junkie in search of my next hit.  What I mean by this is that I largely went searching for things that would make me mad and allow for me to get upset.  Some of the outrage was about the Episcopal Church (at that time I was in the Diocese of the San Joaquin where anger at the Episcopal Church was an integral part of our spirituality) but I did not stop there.  I was outraged by letters to the editor, the religion section of The Fresno Beeand people who did not think that the Steelers were awesome.  Mainly though, I was outraged at politics – some at the State level (I mean Arnold Schwarzenegger was governor) but my usual focus was on the national level. I kept myself in a self-inflicted tizzy for much of the time.  And then I went off to seminary and it all stopped.  I would be lying if I said my outrage abated because I had a David like experience where a Nathaniel doppelganger told me that I was that man.  My outrage abated largely because I did not have the free time to search for things about which to be outraged.  It was sort of like going into rehab, the thing that caused the problem was largely removed.  It was a while before I even noticed that it had happened and then I noticed something else. My life did not change.  The grocery stores still had food, my dentist still told me that I should really floss and I still did not find soccer to be very interesting.  There was no real connection between my outrage at this or that person, event or philosophy and how I lived my day to day life.  And this was the beginning of something of a very obvious revelation for me. The people or things I encounter on a day to day basis not only continued to function without my outrage but they also were the things that have the most influence on me and I on them.  

            I bring this up today because we have just finished an election cycle that many have touted as the most important in a generation.  I do not have an electrified election cycle importance measurer so I cannot attest to the validity of such claims, but I do have to say that my life looked no different the Tuesday of election day as it did on the following Wednesday.  My local community was just the same.  Those who wanted us to get worked up for the election promised that if the wrong party were elected we would be either journeying down the path of a Maoist Great Leap Forward or preparing for Kristallnacht II (this time with twice the Kristall).  But none of that happened.  The federal government will continue to spend money that it does not have and everyone will continue to be mad at the other side (even those whose side won).  

            But here is the thing that I would ask us to think about which has to do with where our energies can be of most use.  As I said at the beginning I used to spend tremendous amounts of time and energy being upset with people who most likely did not know that I existed.  What if I had spent that time and energy doing something that might actually make a difference to myself and others.  What if I had visited my grandmother, volunteered at a shelter or weeded my garden.  Certainly none of these things sound as grandiose as saving the country from eminent destruction, but they are things that I can actually do and things that will make a very small difference.  

            I remember years ago hearing one of the Apollo astronauts speak (I cannot remember who it was, maybe Pete Conrad). In talking he recounted an incident he had had as he was preparing to go to the moon.  He was finishing up doing something on the Apollo rocket and he ran into an engineer who had designed one small part, I believe it was a switch. The man asked him how that switch was working.  Conrad (if that is who it was) responded that it worked great.  Afterward he said that he remembered thinking that this whole Apollo project was not going to fail because of the hard work that everyone put into even the smallest piece of the lunar rocket.  Think about it the Apollo 12 rocket weighed 101,127 pounds and was 363 feet tall, a switch pales in comparison to the sum of the whole.  But it was thousands of people making thousands of tiny things that gave us the whole.  The Apollo project worked because everyone did their part.  I think that is what we need to get back to, doing our small seemingly insignificant part. We have tried where all we do is worry and cajole about the big things and I don’t think it has worked all that well.  Maybe it is time to get back to the small things that we can do something about - the things that in total make the larger much better.  It may be counter intuitive but the more we focus on the small, the better we will make that which is large.  

Reactions (good and bad)

            One of my favorite lines from The Sound of Musichappens after Captain von Trapp has listed off to Maria all of the governesses that they have had for his children. Maria after hearing the number asks the reasonable question of what is wrong with the children.  The Captain replies, “Nothing is wrong with the children, only the governesses.”  It touches on the age-old theme of locating all of our problems outside of ourselves. The Captain’s children are fine; it’s all the governesses’ problem.  The originator of this line of reasoning is of course Adam in the Book of Genesis. If you recall, when God asks him if he has eaten from the tree of which he was commanded not to eat, he replies, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.”  Adam’s problems were not of his doing; they originated from somewhere else.  In fact, Adam is bold enough to make it all God’s fault.

            I thought about all of this today after reading a rather moving article in the Wall Street Journal by Lou Weiss, a Pittsburgh carpet salesman and a Jew, who knew five of the eleven individuals who were murdered in Pittsburgh at the Tree of Life Synagogue.  In it he stated something so refreshing and opposite of how our world seems to work these days saying, “The best way to honor the people who were murdered would be to emulate their decency and goodness.”  When a tragedy of this magnitude strikes we are so used to using the events as a way to get mad at some group we do not like. We rail that this would not have happened if others were more like us and agreed with all of our views.  But I have to say that Mr. Weiss seems the wiser and more grace filled one, for it seems far better to take the tragic events as a way for us to be better.  We cannot fix the past, but we can make today better.

            Lashing out at others is quite easy and generally asks nothing difficult from us – they are wrong we are right.  But emulating decency and goodness takes some effort and some self-reflection.  Yes, there are certainly evil and bad things in this world, but the evil that we have the best chance of fixing is that which exists within us.

            I realize some people will object to my notion that we all have evil in us, but I absolutely do mean it.  Just because we have not gone on a shooting rampage does not make us pure and clean.  Just because we can find someone who acts worse than we do does not mean that all of our actions are pure and noble.  

            We have been trying Adam’s method for a very long time, where our reaction to anything wrong with ourselves or the world in general is to point to another person or group whom we think has sinned even more.  That is we like to create cosmic scales of justice wherein our sins are light as a feather when compared to the heinousness of others.  But what if we tried a different tact?  What if we did not take evil actions as a way to justify ourselves or point our anger at our perceived enemies, but rather took it as an opportunity to look into ourselves and ask how can we get better, how can we grow more into the image of God?   How can we emulate decency and goodness?

            I am not capable of fixing all of the problems in the world, but I am, with God’s help, able to gradually change myself to be more Christ-like.  

Putin and Such

            Now and then I come across items or subcultures that I did not know existed and, after discovering them, kind of wished that it had stayed that way.  The most recent of these discoveries is that Vladimir Putin puts out a yearly calendar, which naturally enough gives you twelve months of pictures of the Russian potentate.  In the 2019 edition, one picture is of him petting a leopard while in another he is working out.  There is also a subgenre in this collection of photos of him shirtless – in one he is holding a fish and in another he is taking a dip in a frozen lake under the watchful eye of three Orthodox priests, who incidentally are holding icons.  For a moment it made me ponder what I would do if there were a demand for a 12 months of Phil calendar.  And all I really concluded was that it would definitely feature marmots.  But here is the point I really want to make and it is one about humanity in general and that has to do with the inverse relationship between our perceptions of us being awesome and the reality of that awesomeness.  I am not privy to the inner workings of Vladimir Putin’s brain but I assume at some point when he was posing shirtless with a fish he thought, “Look on my Siberian Sturgeon, ye Mighty, and despair!” or some such sentiment. But for any of you that have had the unfortunate experience of seeing the photo I am guessing that this was not the first thought that entered your head.   Mine was, “For the love of God put a shirt on, maybe two just to be safe.”

            And while making fun of Vladimir Putin is something God encourages us to do (I am kidding so please don’t write me letters) I think many of our problems and indeed the world’s problems happen when we are doing things that seem really great at the time.  There was a very minor singer years ago, who may still be around for all I know, but in one of her songs she stated something to the effect that she had never done anything that she did not think was right at the time. Now when I was eighteen, I found this lyric deep and exciting and I wholeheartedly agreed with them, using the refrain to inflate my own view of myself.   I was a moral giant because I thought I was doing the right thing at the time.  But as I grew older I realized that this was not really a brilliant insight and was in fact something that Ted Bundy or Pol Pot could have just of easily have said. Most of the stupid things that I have done in my life I did think were pretty sweet at the time.  Some of these things were harmless enough like fashion choices I made in the 70’s involving satin but others caused real damage to individuals.  The question that we all need to work on discerning is when are we doing things that are glorifying to God and enhancing of humanity and when are we just being idiots. Or as David St. Hubbins reminds us - it's such a fine line between stupid and clever.  

            And this is a rather obvious point, but one I think we all need reminding is that while our conscience has the imprint of God upon it; it is also subject to corruptibility and self-justification. Stalin’s ruthless secret police chief Lavrentiy Beria, once bragged that he could prove criminal conduct on anyone stating, “Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.”  While I am not comparing anyone to that standard I think in many ways when we want something we are susceptible to coming up with the justification for our behaviors afterwards.  We do what we feel like and then shoehorn in some moral justification after the fact.  Because of this we need an outside set of criteria.  We often need a group of trusted friends or spiritual guides who help cut through the cesspool of our self-justification.  In many ways this is harder in our day and age because of the Internet.  In an Internet infused world it is pretty easy to find an online community that agrees with whatever we do.  And so all I really want to remind people of today is that when left to our own devices or when surrounded by a bunch of sycophants it is rather easy to put out our own cringe inducing versions of 365 days of Putin (figuratively and not literally). But we are obviously called to something higher, something eternal and not fleeting; something that ultimately is beautiful, wonderful and pure.  

Welcome

            Across the years a number of people have suggested that I write a blog.  Having said this I don’t want anyone to think that there has been a groundswell, by “a number” I mean 15, maybe 20 if I were using a very liberal interpretation of the term “suggested.”  However, in my defense, this is more people than have suggested that I take up dowsing (finding water with a divining stick) or design a city of the future (like Brasilia and we all know how that turned out).  So with such tepid encouragement I have decided to launch into the heavily chummed waters of the blogosphere (or whatever it is that the young kids are calling it these days).  

            Since this is already a bit on the self-indulgent side I might as well continue on my solipsistic path and explain what the theme or telos of this blog is going to be.  And put rather succinctly the answer to that is that I do not know.  What that means is that it will be about things that I find of interest, which I hope are of interest to other people.  With that said I do want to be careful and not have it be one of those blogs whose main theme is about how stupid everyone else is, which seems to be the theme of not just blogs but so much of our interactions these days - like the episode of the Simpsons where the morning DJ’s are threatened to be replaced by the automated DJ 3000 which replicated the standard morning DJ repertoire by saying things like, “Looks like those clowns in congress did it again.” My hope is to try and elevate our conversation a bit and to at bear minimum portray those with whom I disagree with respect.  And to be quite confessional this is not something that comes naturally to me, but something I think is quite necessary.  

            When I was in seminary I had a professor who would assign us the task of going out to a church (not of our own denomination) and write a critique of what we experienced.  The nastier the critique was the better grade you got.  I remember thinking that while this all came quite natural to me it was not something that needed to be reinforced in my being, after all I had spent four years in a fraternity.  And so my hope for this blog is basically to be like the stated goal of the Fat Albert cartoon series (before the recent Bill Cosby unpleasantness) and that is my hope is to “[Come] at you with music and fun, and if you're not careful, you might learn something before it's done.”

            And so with all of that rambling out of the way I want to take a moment and discuss noise and why a fear of adding to the noise is one of the things that kept me from doing this for such a long time.  My favorite example of what I mean by noise comes from the gas station.  Many of us are old enough to remember a time when the powers that be entrusted us to pump our gas without music being piped in. When I was 16, despite my youth and naïveté, I could still successfully fill up my gas tank without the soothing intonations of adult contemporary star James Taylor (or some such person).  Now if this were not enough the more updated gas stations actually have televisions in the gas pump that sometimes have exclusively produced content (that is what I believe you are supposed to call it). Which I guess means there are people whose job it is to find out what sort of television content will make us more likely to fill your tank all the way or perhaps go inside for a bag of Funyuns. My point in all of this is to reflect on the question of why we have so much noise and why are we so terrified of silence?

            Certainly we could blame the companies, but companies tend to do things because they believe they are responding to an unfulfilled desire in the market.  Generally speaking when I am not at a gas station or some other such institution that provides unrequested entertainment I see people looking at their phones, which as best I know is a completely voluntary activity. So again what are we worried about? Why do we find being alone with our thoughts something that cannot be allowed?  Has a society built on consumerism made us believe that even our thoughts can be outsourced? I realize that I have already brought up the Simpsons and I should have a limit, but it reminds of the time that Homer was in the hospital and saw the guy on a respirator and concluded that breathing was for suckers.  Are we in danger of outsourcing our thoughts by never allowing enough time and quiet for them to actually exist?  All of that said I want to be quite careful about adding to the noise, that is things that distract us from having any actual moments for reflection.

                        This may come off a little weasely but I do not fully know the answer to this.  It is true that at no time in history have we purposefully and had so much distraction thrust upon us and do we know the consequences of so much distraction?  So with that I look forward to go blogging with you and hope to make this worthy of your time.