An Anne Rice Christmas

Anne Rice has written about vampires for ten novels now, so readers whose passion for doomed souls remains unrelieved may balk over her recent move to higher things, spiritually speaking. I doubt that their disappointment will last long. Ms. Rice’s latest book, Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, opens up a new phase in her wildly successful literary career, one into which her large following will be the better for entering.

Christ the Lord is about Jesus of Nazareth at age 7, and most especially about --- can you believe this? --- his inner struggles at that age with a growing awareness that he might be, in the most literal sense possible, God. If the book were merely about religious delusions, there would be no particular reason for praising the chutzpah of its author for writing it. Any literary hack could put together something credible on a theme like this. But on the theme of a really, truly, genuinely divine Christ in the mentation of a child?

Even in the first century, with eye-witnesses there for the asking, only Matthew and Luke took so much as a first pass, and much later at that, at executing a plot-line like this. Paul never gave it a  thought. And it took John only fourteen verses to set up that magnificent eight-word finesse of it altogether: “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The second century produced more risk-taking explorations of the God-kid theme than the first century did, most notably in the so-called Infancy Gospel of Thomas. But all of those ventures quickly crashed and burned, as well they should have. Turning clay sparrows into live ones? Knocking off a disrespectful playmate? Better that Anne Rice had left those screwball vignettes alone and continued to make it all up as she went along.

But it would not be better had Anne Rice avoided the subject of a redemptive, incarnate God altogether. Fiction, of the quality she is more than capable of producing, is just the right venue for airing out a subject like this. It takes narrative imagination far more than it does logic to capture the idea of an identity between the universe’s creator and a man run out of town after his first sermon. God’s advent in Jesus of Nazareth is simply too big an event for either observed data or spun-out dogmas to contain.

Myth is the only way to go here, in Plato’s sense of the word: as stories that are made-up and true at the same time, rendering realities that can only be rendered when we begin thinking and feeling, aspiring and rejoicing “outside the box.” Great myths are not fantasy and falsehood masking as fact. They convey something truer than all three.

First century Christians mythologized their own growing understanding of Jesus by extending the connections they first perceived between Jesus’ resurrection and his divinity to other events in Jesus’ life, from his teachings and wonder-workings backward in time through his baptism to his infancy, birth, and finally to his very conception. The insight underlying all their efforts was that Jesus’ resurrection could attest to his unique status in God’s eyes only if Jesus possessed that very status from the very beginning. As the Gospel writers might have put it, Easter revealed what had been true, but not fully realized to be true, from the time of Jesus’ baptism (Mark), or of the angelic visits to Joseph (Matthew) and Mary (Luke), or from before anything had been created at all. (John)

What first century Christians did not do very well was draw their hearers and readers into the inner struggles of a man whose body and brain could only obscure the divine substance they came to believe had been mixed perfectly with its every cell and molecule, its every neuron and synapse. Jesus’ heroism proved easy enough for them to depict; they had at their disposal a whole literary genre to support their efforts to present him as a hero of all heroes, fearing but facing the kind of opponents that could and did destroy lesser men. But Jesus’ divinity was another kind of story altogether, one they could tell only by finally divesting its bearer of the very humanity that he was divinely chosen to bear. Thus, John eventually began telling of a Jesus who got through life with hardly any struggle at all. Others told of a Jesus who only seemed to suffer at human hands, and who really didn’t.

Happily for us, Anne Rice will have none of this. Happily for her story, her Jesus exhibits a budding identity disorder from a very early age. And happily for him, he had the best Therapist ever to help him with it.

Who’s In Charge At Your Church

Most Methodist leaders I know are still fuming at the denomination’s Judicial Council over its Decision 1032, a decision which gives pastors the sole discretion to determine a person’s fitness for membership in their congregations. It is, indeed, an astonishingly bad decision. But it is not quite as bad as the pastoral action that gave rise to it in the first place, denying membership to a gay man ostensibly because he would neither repent of his sexual orientation, nor deny its overt expression in a committed relationship.

Part of what makes 1032 potentially so destructive is the obstacle it presents to staying focused on its central issue, the meaning of church membership in the United Methodist tradition. It is all too easy to get distracted by yet more rounds of unhelpful venting about gays and the church. But unless the majority of the Council who voted for 1032 can be shown either to have slept through the hearing altogether or to have been motivated from the start by a malign intent, their otherwise off-base decision might best be regarded as pointing to more ambiguity in the Methodist Book of Discipline than many have believed. 

For example, I have worried that the Discipline may pay insufficient attention to sexual orientation in comparison with its powerful condemnations of excluding people on the basis of race, color, national origin, status, or economic condition. Taking up the issue of gays and lesbians in the context of affirming inclusiveness unambiguously would surely make for more edifying discussions at the next General Conference than those that Methodists have had to endure for quadrennia now. Surely the church can do better than rote recitation of “chastity in singleness,” a phrase crafted especially with non-straights in mind.

Does anybody really know what Methodists should mean by this Medieval-sounding phrase anyway? General Conferences continue to avoid taking responsibility for it by leaving unreconnoitered the critical term, “chastity.” Their inaction left me with little to go on a while back when an unmarried seminary student, worried about his practice of masturbation, asked me if I thought his behavior made him unchaste, and therefore unfit for the ordained ministry. It used to be that the church’s more conscientious youth wondered about even their opening gambits in parked cars on Saturday nights. Nowadays, from other teen-agers and even a former President, the view has emerged that not even oral sex should be counted against either virginity or fidelity. Can we get off the singling out of gays and lesbians and get on with clarifying what chastity means for all singles?

But back to Decision 1032. (Remember what I said about distraction?) Robin Lovin, Professor of Ethics at Southern Methodist University, got down to its real issue succinctly and well when he wrote recently: “… a member of the United Methodist Church joins the whole connection, so we have not followed some congregational traditions that give the local congregation a decisive role in determining a candidate’s readiness for membership.” (United Methodist Reporter, November 25, 2005.) What this means in specific is that a United Methodist pastor’s bishop and  “collegial guidance by the Annual Conference” have important roles to play in the discerning of anyone’s readiness for membership in the church. Both roles are undermined by Decision 1032.

One of the most powerful images that Christianity has ever offered for understanding and appreciating the identity and role of its leaders is the image of “pastor,” from poimen, shepherd. The pastor of a local congregation is like the shepherd of a flock. The qualifier is crucial. Like shepherds, pastors have both considerable responsibility for and considerable power over the members of their respective flocks. And like shepherds, pastors constantly confront the sobering reality that the responsibilities they bear often outrun the power they have to bear them effectively. However, with every analogy, this one also has its limitations.

Unlike shepherds, pastors do not suborn the fleecing of their flocks. (At least, most of them don’t.) And unlike shepherds, pastors do not fret over how to improve their flock’s gene pool. One in Christ Jesus, their members do not have to be one in race, color, nationality, gender, economic condition, social standing, mode of baptism, marital status, musical preference, commitment to tithing, doctrinal understanding, or sexual orientation as well. When pastors get confused about any of this, and the real owner of their flocks seems otherwise occupied, it is a good thing that there are other Christians higher up on the spiritual food chain to step in and help them out. And when The Book of Discipline becomes too confusing for the Judi-ciary whose job it is to interpret it, it is a good thing that there is a judi-catory available to clear things up.

A Few Prayers to the Intelligent Designer

With all due respect, I don’t know quite how to address you. Sir, madam, your excellency, or chief don’t seem quite serious enough. But I’ve been taught not to throw around the name “God” without a lot of forethought. Worse still, I’m not sure you’re the go-to person when I’m feeling an urgent need to pray. The Intelligent Design people down here are intimating that you just might be, but they seem reluctant to come right out and say so. Maybe they are too vexed by how to get our biology curricula re-written in the light of what this country calls First Amendment issues.

Nevertheless, my Lord’s own intelligent designer put out the word that it was all right to pray to Him a whole lot and that He would not be put off by what or how many times we ask of Him. (By the way, this was his servant’s pronoun, not mine, so please excuse the possible offense.) Since you still seem to be pretty involved in everything everywhere, I’m going to take a chance and petition you on a few things that some of us in these parts are struggling big time with.

Intelligent Designer: Your advocates are making it plain that you must be at the very center of every last skirmish and battle in human history, and that each and every one has had its role to play in your divine (?) governance. And yet, I am grieving over the loss of so many to what very well may be righteous causes around the world. Would you mind being a little clearer about just what the right Holy War is that we should be fighting today? Maybe it’s only me, but I really am pretty confused about who the genuine infidels are among the world’s peoples right now. Some folks are even saying that we are. Surely this cannot be true, but apparently they think otherwise. Perhaps things can proceed in a more orderly fashion if you could see your way to telling them how wrong they are.

Intelligent Designer: I’m terrified over your new design for the Avian flu virus. Yes, it must indeed be a higher purpose that you have in mind for helping these viruses infect us directly, and no longer through the mediation of other precious creatures like birds. Please know that if you do carry this plan out, I will try not to question your motives, but if you are open to negotiation on the matter, could you give us all a sign? We’re ready to talk, repent, teach creationism, or do whatever else you may have in mind, if you would be willing to hold off on this. Our anxiety over it might even provide you one of your most teachable moments. While you’re at it, you could even throw in a few words about the whys and wherefores of malaria, smallpox, polio, the AIDS virus, Huntington’s Chorea, and Tay-Sachs disease.

Intelligent Designer, I am angry with some of my brothers and sisters of the cloth who are calling down your wrath on people who don’t think their way about your Design for things. Let me get to my particular gripe right away. Are you telling me, like they are, that I really do have to give up what I thought I had learned about how you work with living species on this planet? That you leave to nature a lot of the details? I’ll tell you what really hacks me off about this, ID, and then leave you to chasten me if you think I need it. What really hacks me off is that you could be worrying about your own credibility and that, for instance, it is you who is demanding the equal classroom time in our schools and not just your misguided designing subordinates. Believing in you is scientific? Surely you jest. 

Well, Intelligent Designer, I admit that I have been going on and on with just my own stuff, failing in the process to offer you the praise and thanksgiving that I know I am supposed to offer. You do deserve more from me than this. After all, if you have indeed been hovering over human, geological, and astronomical time to keep adjusting and re-adjusting your creation as circumstances have called for, you’ve been treating us a lot better than some of the other so-called Designers that we have heard about. Frustrated over their ineptitude at getting things right the first time, they supposedly left us to stew in our own primordial soup and went on to try out other designs for other universes on other astral planes. Thanks for sticking around and seeing things through with us.

A Thousand Years With Christ

Raymond Brown, the late and much cherished New Testament scholar, once shared with me how frustrated he felt whenever he heard or read Bible teachers making too much of too little in the texts. Ruefully, he went on to illustrate his concern by referring to the bewitchment of theologians by a strange tradition which spoke about a coming thousand year reign of Christ on earth. (Revelation 20: 4-6) Later, in his one volume Introduction to the New Testament, noting that only two verses in the whole of this book mention the milennium at all, Father Brown wrote in a characteristically understated way, “there has been an enormous, indeed an extravagant growth, from small beginnings.” (p. 801)

Has there ever! From the humble musings of Justin and Tertullian in the 2nd and 3rd centuries through the pious certitudes of John Nelson Darby and the Plymouth Brethren of the early 19th to the boisterousness of Hal Lindsey and of the Left Behind novels in the late 20th, chiliastic ranting about the end-time has been the in thing for every Bible-pounding, fire-and-brimstone, viciously angry preacher and writer worth his and her share at the offering and royalty troughs. Speaking eloquently about these matters, or at least loudly, pretty much guarantees success in today’s Christian marketplace, and jihadist Muslim clerics aren’t doing so badly at it themselves.

The problem is that Revelation’s reference to the 1000 reign is so shrouded in ambiguity that it not only interferes with the cause of the book itself --- the unveiling of humankind’s future in God --- it undermines that cause altogether. For example, it has seduced people into spending embarrassing amounts of time and energy trying to figure out whether the reign starts before or after the rapture, de-forming theology into low comedy. (Who could have imagined that grown men and women would one day devote even half a breath to the merits of “pre” and “post” milennialism?) More worrisomely still, it annuls Paul’s hardest won and single most important affirmation of faith --- that we are saved by grace --- by conjuring the end-time as a time of judgment according to one’s deeds. 

As for the end-time itself, Paul remained content simply to reassure people that Christ would come again, as and when God chooses, and that it will not matter how short or how long the wait might be: living or dead, Jesus’ followers will be with him forever. (1 Thess. 4:14) During his earthly life, Jesus, too, retained a healthy scepticism about preaching the end-time with too much specificity. (Mark 13:32) To be sure, a lot of troubles do await us before we get to history’s end, but then again, what else is new?

Writing perhaps around the time of Revelation, the author of 2 Peter appears to have kept more of his wits about him than John did, even as he also struggled with the Diocletian reign of terror against the Christian community. He does not regale us with visions of Satanic legions in the heavens and underworld, or of an anti-Christ now among us, or of chained and unchained beasts whose movements in and out and up and down are governed by a thoroughly put-out God’s hastily distributed calendar of doom. Instead, he reassures believers anguishing over how long they must suffer for their convictions and commitments with the reminder that the Lord is not slow in keeping his promise, but rather that he continues to be patient with us, so that “all should come to repentance.” (3:9)

It was in this context of offering reassurance that the writer of 2 Peter drew upon his own understanding of just what a “thousand years” means in the Bible. It meant to him exactly what it meant to the Psalmist: “for in your sight a thousand years are as the passing of one day or as a watch in the night.” (Psalm 90:4) God’s time is not like our time, and when we begin to understand this, we will become more patient with the ways He is working his purposes out. Yes, the writer goes on, there will come a day of the Lord, on which day “the whole universe is to dissolve.” (3:11) Then, however, will come new heavens and a new earth (emphasis mine), “in which justice will be established.” (vs 13) Just as in John’s vision of a new Jerusalem coming down out of heaven. (Rev. 21:2)

Magnificent! And without Satanic seductions, a final battle on the plain of Megiddo, lakes of fire and sulphur, and a Doomsday Book. The Lord is near, but his calendar is set diffferently from ours. In the meantime, though, his message remains brilliantly clear: fear not.

Legacy Costs

When production and service demands were high, unions strong, and wage controls inhibiting, companies added medical and pension benefits to their compensation packages in order to attract workers. Recently, many of these same companies have begun complaining that the weight of these “legacy costs” are threatening not only their profits but their very existence. The people who generate the costs by claiming the benefits long promised them now represent onerous burdens to be shed by eliminating either the benefits themselves, the employees making use of them, or both.

Many non-unionized companies, Wal-Mart perhaps the most notorious example, deal with the burdens of legacy costs another way, by creating as few of them as possible in the first place. One important result has been the voluntary servitude naively entered into by hundreds of thousands of poorly paid and benefits deprived company “Associates.” Some may remember the scathing description of their condition that Barbara Ehrenreich conveyed in her best selling book, Nickel and Dimed.

If the major and proper goal of business is the generation of profit, then it is clearly a more ethically defensible means of attaining the goal not to offer adequate benefit packages to workers at all than to promise the packages and then not make good on the promises. But neither of these means to an otherwise approvable end comes close to meeting even the most rudimentary of ethical precepts. Let’s take up the second approach first.

We read a lot these days about the hard choices that business leaders are having to make in order to secure their respective companies in the face of uncontrollable market factors, such as rising fuel costs in the airline industry. (Apparently, the hits that many airline employees have already taken are not going to be enough; the tattered remnants of their remaining, inadequate health benefits and pensions are getting sucked into still firing jet engines even as I write.) One problem with these supposed tough choices is the difficulty of determining just what cause is served by them. Golden parachutes and stockholder satisfaction? Perhaps. Survival? Naaah. Another problem is who pays the principal costs of these choices --- basically, the working stiffs, “consulted” almost always after and not before the fact.

With respect to the other means of achieving strong profits in business, there is at least a semblance of honesty in being up front about a commitment to keep employee costs as low as possible. An obvious problem, though, is that not all employee costs are held to the same standard, and that very few business leaders are willing to acknowledge this troubling detail. Executive over-compensation has been the rule and not the exception in corporate America. A not so obvious, but no less serious problem is the unwillingness to engage in honest reflection across business and industry about what a just profit is, what profits everyone involved in the creation and delivery of goods and services --- producers, consumers, workers, managers, and investors alike.

Until this kind of really serious, really honest, and really beneficial reflection gets underway, a vignette might help keep the ethical questions and issues in proper perspective. Many years ago, I had a memorable conversation with one of my parishioners, Clara, on her front porch as we watched her husband steer his tractor into their fields for a couple more hours of work following our dinner together. “Preacher,” she said to me, “Ken wouldn’t want me to tell you this, but you need to know just what kind of man he really is.”

A decade ago, she went on, just as migrant workers were arriving to harvest their 700 acres, lightning struck the barn and started a fire which the wind quickly spread across their fields, destroying their entire crop. Realizing what the loss of the harvest would do to the workers he had been hiring for so many years, Ken went to the bank the next day and with his wife’s concurrence mortgaged enough of their land to pay the workers what they would have owed them had the crops been harvested. It took the couple years to pay off the loan, even by kicking in a portion of their savings for retirement. To the fellow farmers who challenged their sense of obligation in those unexpected circumstances, Ken replied, “Well, we made a promise, and the people we made it to had needs too.”

After I told Clara that I had learned something about what kind of a woman she was as well, I took my leave. To this present generation, she and Ken would have had a lot to say about legacy costs.

Missing The Rainbow

In Mrs. Willis’ second grade Sunday School class, the story of the Flood did not sit well with any of us. It was just too scary. Admittedly, it did accomplish at least a little of what our church seemed to hope that it would. Whenever I and my buddies were tempted to hold back something from our offerings those mornings for a treat at the candy store, the divine wrath the story had revealed to us almost always proved an effective dissuader. 

Later, however, I stopped being scared by this story, and started getting angry instead. What kind of a god is this God anyway? Somehow, I and my fellow sufferers kept missing what is in fact the story’s happy ending: “…Never again will I put the earth under a curse because of humankind, however evil their inclination may be from their youth upwards…” (Genesis 8:21)

Missing this point has played a far too important role in Jewish and Christian history from at least the time of the Exile. Helpless and hopeless following their captivity in Babylon, a lot of Jews began to write off not only their own history, but everyone else’s as well. They took perverse comfort in calculating when, where, and how a thoroughly disgusted deity would bring thoroughly disgusting people (themselves excepted, of course) to their thoroughly deserved end. Their malady proved contagious, eventually spreading out to infect Christian scriptures as well. A case in point: the thousand year prelude to divinely wrought world destruction depicted so smugly at Revelation 20:2-3.

For many Christians today, this case in point is not just one case; it is the really BIG case for telling the Flood story all over again just like too many of us heard it told by other teachers who also knew no better. The imagery is different this time: after the thousand year lock-down of Satan, everybody gets judged by their deeds (Rev. 20:13) inscribed in a book of life, and those whose accounts are deficient will be flung into a lake of fire. But the message is still the same: that graceless, morally outrageous, and yes, disgusting message of a mocking deity who will jerk the rug of salvation out from under you no sooner than he seduces you to see it as your magic carpet headed straight for the throne of grace. 

Clearly, third generation Christians had a harder time with persecution than their mentors and role models did. From his cross, Jesus asked forgiveness for all his persecutors. I think that St. Paul forgave his, too --- from upside down on his own cross. But the Johannine community of 30 years later got so peeved with theirs that instead of praying for them, they consigned them to an anti-Christ of their own devising. Its deforming of the Gospel should make you want to do with The Book of Revelation what Martin Luther and John Calvin actually did do with it --- throw it out or ignore it.

Almost. For there are also those overwhelmingly beautiful verses that speak of a New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven, with God dwelling in it and putting an end to death, mourning, crying and pain. (21:1-6) I can almost see a rainbow spanning the sky above it, as the glorious city descends to meet us here on a glorious new earth.

Oops, though, the scene changes again, and we are back to salivating over all the bad things about to happen to all those who have done so many bad things. (vs.8) One striking ingredient in this particular dispensation is the indiscriminateness of the divine fury. For instance, cowards and liars come off just as badly as murderers do. Whatever happened to God’s sense of fairness and proportion?

The doctrine of plenary inspiration that millennialists share, to the effect that all of the words of scripture together constitute the Word of God, has the virtue of preventing us from resting content reading only those biblical passages that we like. The problem with the doctrine is that it leaves us with one contradiction after another to resolve, across both Testaments. One that millennialists of the Left Behind variety have yet to resolve is between God’s gracious promise at Genesis 8:22 and John of Patmos’ petulent vision in Revelation 20.

What makes contradictions like this one so intractible is the otherwise well-meaning notion that every text of scripture must somehow be held equally authoritative for any and all situations whatever. In the whole of the scriptures there is indeed the Word of God, but not every image in every passage within the scriptures expresses that Word equally well. For an image of our future with God, I’ll take the rainbow over the lake of fire anytime.

The So-Called Problem of Natural Evil

When I was a little kid, there were two things about my parents’ life-style that especially piqued my curiosity. One was what went on between them whenever I heard them lock their bedroom door behind them. The other was what went on between them whenever they left me in the hands of a sitter, even one I liked. Their explanation of the second kind of behavior always proved more satisfying than their explanation of the first.

With respect to both, however, I have to confess that the very idea of my parents’ enjoying a life of their own which did not involve me was both irritating and insulting. What kind of parents would even consider the possibility that their world would not perpetually revolve around their son? (My sister and her world counted for absolutely nothing in my ventings of ontological outrage.)

Of course, I left all that dudgeon behind a long time ago. But then again, maybe not. I know I am not supposed to feel anything but humbled that the universe and our earth within it have been preoccupations of God for --- Carl Sagan intoned it best --- billions and billions of years, before there was any “me” at all, and that they and God will continue to have dealings with one another long after I am gone. The truth is, though, that this discovery is not just humbling; it is downright humiliating, and I think it is to all of us. Talk about being brought low. And just when we were getting used to feeling our oats at the very center of the divine pasture.

Painful as it is to have to concede, God has been, is now, and will be enjoying all kinds of  things within which we will play only a limited part, if indeed we are permitted to play any part at all. These things will include the very smallest and the very largest of which we can ever be aware, from every sub-atomic particle/wave/string/? all the back to the big bang, with DNA, microbes, natural selection, and the human spirit paid more than lip service along the way. There will be nothing wrong with any of this, just as there was nothing wrong with what our parents were up to both when they were all alone and when they were in companies of people that did not include us.

Where the “wrong” comes in these scenarios --- the “evil,” as philosophers and theologians are fond of talking about it --- is not from the natural order itself. It is from our taking issue with its very naturalness (including the naturalness of our parents’ craving both sex and friends) by demanding participation in it on our own terms. By making an issue about natural things and processes being just what they are and doing just what they do, we lose the capacity to take wonder and delight from them and become caught up instead in feelings of anxiety, frustration, and loss, particularly when we wrongly perceive nature to have gone mad. Natural evil, then, does not lie in natural things and processes themselves. They are neither good nor bad; they are just --- well, natural. When we acknowledge and respect them in their own right, irrespective of what we might otherwise want from them,  the “evil” that is too often attributed to them goes away.

Make no mistake, there still remains a lot of evil in the world. We will not find it, though, by setting up performance reviews of the Almighty’s governance of the universe. Nor will we find it by looking more closely at the created order itself. Instead, we will find it in our own perverse and willfully destructive behavior toward others, as well as in our own misguided efforts to use nature for our own purposes while treating laws of cause and effect as anachronisms we are better off repealing.

Giving up a piece of the action, whether with respect to our parents’ behavior or God’s, does not have to mean relinquishing our natural curiosity about either. Nor does it have to mean abrogating our right to wonder if they are really making good uses of their time. Too many babies, too many earthquakes, floods, and diseases can make even the most chronically annoying child’s questions too powerful to ignore. Sooner or later, though, every child has to grow up and face the question of all questions, one which is not his or hers to ask: “where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?”

Nature's Fury

The largest amount of correspondence I have ever received at one time about this column came immediately following last year's Asian tsunami. Because many who wrote me were asking the "Why?" question in a number of different ways, I chose to respond individually to them rather than in column form. But their anguish has a universal dimension to it, and I promised myself that I would wrestle with this ancient and fundamental question on a more general plane, soon. Well, soon is now. After hurricane Katrina, how could we be thinking about much else?

Of course, merely thinking about Katrina is hardly the most important issue. Much more relevant will be the compassion, presence, and effective action already in evidence, multiplied many times over. The real questions right now are the "how?" questions: how to feed the starving, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, protect the vulnerable, care for the sick, restore order, and rebuild communities, cities, wetlands, and shorelines. The larger "why?" question must be left to hover in the background until these more pressing issues are handled first. But the question does hover, and perhaps we should not wait too long after any natural disaster to confront it anew.

It has taken millenia for the human race to begin looking at the natural order the way God its creator intends, as a physical system governed by physical laws not subject to the whims of friendly and not so friendly spirits mucking around with its composition, cycles, functions, and possibilities. In our tortured climb out of a too tenaciously held ignorance, we have had to struggle incessantly with two powerful obstacles to the discovery of what nature really is and is not. One obstacle is our minds' innate disposition to think in personal terms about anything and everything in experience, whether what is thought about is personal in essence or not. "Animist" has been a good word for this disposition. In times of crisis, even the brightest among us can still look upon the world and everything in it as ensouled. Lately, we hear a lot about  "rampaging Mother Nature," even from people who should know better. But always and everywhere, nature simply does what nature is supposed to do, while we sometimes do the rampaging.

A second obstacle to respecting nature for what it (and not "she") is is our reluctance to relinquish a deep yearning for control over natural processes and outcomes. Three centuries ago, thoughtful people were celebrating modern science's disestablishment of ghosts, spooks, and occult powers in general throughout the universe and the permanent dethronement of animism in every form. As Alexander Pope would put it, Nature and nature's laws remained hidden in night; but God said, "let Newton be," and then there was light. But guess what? Animism never really goes away. And this fact should not surprise us. The only difference animism's modern form takes from its more primitive ones is that we are now the spooks fooling around with Mother Nature and getting hopped up when she will not bend to our plans for her, such as allowing us to build cities below sea level without having to give up an aversion to floods and drowning.

The eighth Psalm extols magnificently the altogether moving realization that God is "mindful" of us. It also reminds us of how our own mindfulness of nature both humbles and exalts our spirits. But then the psalmist goes on to proclaim human beings' sovereignty over all that God has made, including "everything that moves along ocean paths." (vs. 9) Not only over fish, it seems, but over storms as well. It was a good thing to clear out all the little spirits in nature, to let the physical universe be just what it is and not demand that it be something else, e.g., a lawless chaos made responsive to our every whim and fear by the intervention of spiritual powers --- benign and evil --- holding us in their thrall. The disenchantment of nature, however, did not last very long. Soon, we began turning to the one really big spirit over nature to manipulate things in just the ways people once feared and hoped that the minor spirits would do.

When we make these requests, we inevitably turn the travail of enduring crises and catastrophes into something even worse spiritually, by deluding ourselves that God is now answerable on our terms for everything that God does and does not do. Here is how it might go: So, God, why did you let Katrina run amok the way you did, anyway? What were you expecting to come out of her assault that you thought would be good for its victims? Why didn't you just cool down the Gulf of Mexico's waters, send down an inhibiting front from the North, or better yet, stop her from getting started anyway? That's what we would have done. And since you didn't do any of these things, we have issues. A credible alternative to this kind of animistic thinking is the subject of the next column.

Religious Literacy and the Public Schools

Sometimes I think we may never get the issue of religion and the schools sorted out. Years ago, it may be remembered, the Supreme Court offered us sage advice on the subject, in the form of (a) a command to cut out a lot of praying, and (b) a challenge to rachet up a lot of studying, especially of religion’s influence on history and culture. We did not take up the challenge seriously because we were too busy railing against the command.

 What makes knowledgeable educators question whether religion can really become a subject for study rather than for indoctrination is precisely the kind of curricula that religious folks like to dish out. Consider, for instance, the popular elective course developed by the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools. Some 300 school districts across almost 40 states offer this particular course, in the name of “biblical literacy.” Say what?

 The only real “literacy” this course supports is theological literacy, blatantly and unapologetically transmitted with a shockingly narrow view of divine inspiration, a mindless substituting of creationism for science, and an indiscriminate glomming onto archeology to prove the historicity of biblical texts. At best, students may come away from the course with a better knowledge of the many pretentious claims that sincere but naïve Christians make about their “Book of Books” from time to time. But they will get no help at all learning how the Bible has indeed played important roles in history, for good when it has been understood correctly, and for ill when it has not (e.g., when it has been used to defend slavery, the undervaluing of women, the divine right of kings, violence, and thought control).

 It is no wonder that especially thoughtful teachers and educational administrators in public schools and universities have expressed to me over the years that “it just isn’t worth the hassle” to introduce the subject of religion into an already crowded field of distributional, diploma, and degree requirements. And hassle there certainly will be, whenever the study of religion is given precedence over formation in religion. It will come from many quarters.

 Parents will worry that their children may be led astray from their faith foundations. Religious leaders will fret over their respective traditions not being presented as they themselves would do it (a big criticism of the NCBCPS course is that it’s too Protestant). Principals and deans will resent the inevitable conflicts and controversies because they take up too much of their time. Faculty sell-outs to secularism will fight for dear life to keep religious studies out of the schools altogether, no matter what the approach. And adding to all these flaps will be students who are hacked off that their religion course wasn’t a gut course after all.

 The best way to bring something constructive from all these hassles will be to get beyond the dubious idea that what students in this country most need is biblical and not  religious literacy. Why is this idea dubious? Because Americans now live in the most religiously pluralistic nation on earth, as part of an emerging global order too many of whose problems are lately arising from inter-religious conflicts. In this new situation, all of us need much more knowledge than we now possess of many religious traditions and not just one, in order to understand better the increasing numbers of people whose beliefs and actions are shaped by them. Hopefully, filling in the gaps will require so much of us that we will have neither time nor energy left for indoctrinating anybody into anything.

 We will get really serious about the honest study of religion in the schools until we are ready to leave the tasks of formation and indoctrination to religious rather than to publically-supported and funded institutions. Public schools in particular do not perform these tasks well anyway, so letting go of the expectation that they should is likely to prove a lot less difficult than we might think it will be. To use a favorite bible verse for a little different purpose, “the hour cometh and now is” to provide students with rigorous courses on religion which include, but are not confined to, studying the Bible.

 What it will take to make the courses rigorous is not hard to imagine: good teachers, up to date textbooks (shipped on time), carefully developed lesson plans, a super-abundance of reference materials --- all the usual stuff. But what will make the courses interesting to boot is their encouragement of both a respectfulness toward religious traditions different from one’s own, and a willingness to question even the most foundational convictions of those traditions in the search for capital T truth, called by many names, as many as there are religions seeking to understand and to live in accordance with it.

Pharmaceutical Morality

Just off the phone with your doctor, you head straight for the pharmacy to pick up a dose of the not so felicitously named “morning after” pill. (Better: “Emergency Contraceptive Pills.”) Within earshot of just about everybody in the store, you are told that your new pharmacist’s conscience prohibits him from honoring your physician’s request.

Since the morning after pill has a 72-hour window of effectiveness, at most, what do you do now? Throw a fit? Leave the store with a paper bag over your head? Call your doctor in a panic and ask him to ring up another pharmacy? Confess to your minister what you and your partner been doing all this time in secret?

This particular pharmacist’s dubious moral stance rests upon the medically disputed notion that ECPs cause the uterus to contract and expel an implanted egg after the fashion of the abortion pill Mifeprex (also known as RU 486.) What makes his position dubious is that ECPs act only to delay ovulation and fertilization, or to block the implantation of a fertilized egg in the wall of the uterus. Since, according to the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, a woman is considered pregnant only after implantation (the conceptus cannot develop and thrive without it), blocking the implantation serves only the purpose of contraception, not of abortion.

What went wrong at your pharmacy, therefore, is that on private moral grounds, your pharmacist made a medical decision (not to fill your prescription) that runs counter to prevailing medical opinion. There is nothing heroic about this action. Pharmacists have no business deciding moral issues for their customers in advance, in this case by finessing medical science altogether. Basically, they need to get out of the way while the rest of us, from both moral and medical communities, keep on talking.

So, let’s talk. One thing that does indeed make it difficult to assess whether people have a moral right to use ECPs is that we cannot be sure whether in any particular case, a feared conception has in fact occurred. Morally rather than medically speaking, preventing ovulation or fertilization is a quite different issue from that of preventing implantation of what has in fact been fertilized, but we cannot know for sure in particular cases whether it is the first or the second kind of prevention that an ingesting of the medication in question accomplishes. Does this make erring on the side of caution more defensible?

Perhaps, but this possibility leads straightaway to a second difficulty: we have no consensus in our society about when a human life (or, expressed more theologically, “ensoulment”) properly begins. By way of examples, for some it begins only with the first movement or with viability, in utero; for still others it begins only with the first breath after delivery. But if it does indeed begin with fertilization, then our misguided but conscience-driven pharmacist may still have a point. Upon this assumption, ECPs that block implantation (but not ovulation or fertilization) would indeed have lethal consequences for an actual and not merely potential human life, the view of the medical establishment to the contrary notwithstanding.

Even granting this latter assumption, however, will not dissolve the complexity of this issue. For another moral consideration is surely the circumstances under which conception may have occurred. For example, was it the outcome of a long-standing pattern of indifference to any serious thinking about the consequences of sexual behavior at all? Here, going for the ECPs would seem only to reinforce a continuing opting out of responsibility for ensuring that one’s actions bring no harm to others. One reason that sex isn’t for kids is that fooling around with it only makes for more kids, not intimacy, no matter how mature the bigger kids may think they are.

Perhaps, though, the conception --- if it occurred at all --- resulted from a single lustful act of two faithful lovers whose momentary passion swept away their usual cautions and preparations. Or from a simple forgetfulness to take THE pill. Or from a faulty condom. Or, more horrifically, from rape or incest. Do considerations like these add weight to the old adage that circumstances alter cases? I think so. If not in all cases, at least in some of them. With this qualification, though, the question still remains: from a moral perspective, are there any circumstances that might allow us to interfere with preserving human life?

Unfortunately, the pharmacist who is the subject of this meditation would like to decide all of these thorny issues for everyone by decree, and refuse access to ECPs altogether. Hopefully, instead of trying to undermine much needed dialogue on this very difficult moral issue, he and his fellow true believers will quit preaching and meddling long enough to join us in it.

Love That Outlasts Marriage

If there is anything certain about the institution of marriage today, it is surely this: for the foreseeable future, marriages will continue to be based upon couples’informed consent, and their hope for emotional satisfactions beyond the power of life’s many challenges and crises finally to undermine. These are shaky foundations, to be sure. Awesomely shaky.

After all, just how “informed” can consent be between a man and a woman caught up in a seventh heaven of rapture over one another? And just how long will it take before earthly realities threaten to bring every couples’ soaring illusions to dust? There is only one really good answer to questions like these: if the foundations of modern marriages are swaying more than a little, those of traditional marriages are verging on collapse, e.g.: parental arrangement, dowries, sex devoted only to producing offspring, men as the only breadwinners, women as the only homemakers, and legally enforced indissoluability, not to mention the verbal, emotional, and sexual abuse to which “traditional” marriages have for too long turned a blind eye and a deaf ear.

But successful marriages constructed according to the free-choice, emotional intimacy model do not have to be as vulnerable as they are often made out to be. The most successful of them, at least in my observations, are so because their participants refuse to make emotional intimacy the be-all and the end-all of the relationship, and instead recognize that the greatest satisfactions that marriage has to offer come when and because other things are taken care of first. The most important of these other things is the fulfillment of commitment.

Expressed biblically, the kind of commitment I have in mind here is a couples’ mutual commitment to build each other up, unfailingly and truthfully, as a way of honoring God in the other. It is a commitment to build each other up as persons of sacred worth, created in God’s own image as bearers of a shared calling to love and work with the well-being of all God’s creatures uppermost in mind. It is a commitment to build each other up as parents entrusted with a sacred responsibility to nurture childrens’ --- their own and all others’ --- unique gifts and responsibility for contributing to humankind’s common destiny. And it is a commitment to build each other up as the finite, fallible, vulnerable creatures who deserve all the patient care and encouragement of which they and their equally imperfect and long-suffering partners are capable.

Long ago, Aristotle put the Western world on to something with his discovery that the universal desire for happiness is best satisfied by human beings’ learning to do well what is truly worth doing. The excellence of being (virtue) that results from doing worthy things well, the philosopher went on to teach, alone makes for true happiness. By-passing the attainment of virtue in the interest of quick fixes for fear, frustration, and loneliness may yield enticing pleasures of the moment, but in the end will only make people more miserable than ever. In Christian terms, the point is that for the attainment of the greatest happiness in intimate relationships, what is most needed is the mutual cultivation of the virtue of self-giving love.

We do not have to become completely virtuous in self-emptying before we earn the right to love and cherish a special someone for life. For while we are working on the one really big thing of becoming, in Aristotle’s sense of the word, “good” enough to deserve our partners, there are all kinds of things that we can do to make ourselves at least a little more tolerable to them for the moment. They are not little things; they take a good bit of “sweating.” If you don’t think so, reflect a little on whether it has been all that easy for you to be pleasant and negotiable 24/7, or on how it has been going keeping yourself reasonably fit and attractive, broadening your interests and developing further your natural aptitudes. And by the way, how are you doing with sharing more openly your concerns, hopes, and vulnerabilities with your partner, as you listen more attentively to his or hers?

Difficulties aside, all of these things are also worth doing and doing well, right down to making the bedroom an erogenous zone, and for those who find any one of them inordinately difficult, there is abundant help available, from across backyard fences, self-help books, therapists, schools, health clubs, trainers, coaches, and even from our churches. However, Aristotle never said that achieving virtue would be easy; he only said that the reward for doing so would be monumental. And Jesus never said that learning to love sacrifically would be easy either; he only said that it would be our most direct pathway to the kingdom of God.

Marriage’s Lost Golden Age

Here is an intriguing statement about marriage from Stephanie Coontz’ new book, Marriage: A History: “It took more than 150 years to establish the love-based, male-breadwinner marriage as the dominant model in North America and Western Europe. It took less than 25 years to dismantle it.” My own pastoral work as a marriage counselor spanned just these latter 25 years, years fraught with anxiety, frustration, and confusion both for me and for a lot of my couples. From personal experience, then, I resonate to a lot of what Coontz is getting at not only in her statement itself, but in the book which lays out everything else that the statement implies.

Across those 25 years, almost before our very eyes, my counselees and I watched with mild horror (a) the dissolution of marriage as, in Coontz’ description, “the master event” of peoples’ lives, (b) the overturning by both women and men of sex-only-in-marriage as the ideal, (c) one failed research effort after another on reversing a soaring divorce rate, and finally, (d) the discovery that without a lot of support from family, friends, and faith communities, being a single parent sucks. What got to me most in the counseling I did during those years --- besides trying to find enough hours in the week for more and more troubled couples --- was the extent of the guilt that people felt over not keeping their marriages going the way they were “supposed” to go. Clinging with a ferocious nostalgia to the love-based, male-breadwinner, always-happy-children model only made their guilt feelings worse.

For some, divorce did relieve things a little. As one divorcee put it, sadly: “I guess there are a lot of people out there like me whose first time around will turn out to be just for practice.” But many of my former couples still have not moved on to anything like a better life. They cannot find that just-right person for the next time around. Or they thought they had, but their new partner turned out to be just as boring and neglectful as the last one was. Or they wound up with just more abuse. And through it all, their children have had to trade in most of their illusions about parental nurture for the harsh realities of street-learned resilience.

The really tragic thing about all this is that the very model that has contributed most to the instabilities in marriage today also contains just that understanding from which strong marriages not only can be but are still being built. If what we are really looking for most in relationships, whatever our other political and social agendas for them may be, is getting emotional needs met, then marriage is still one of our very best bets for making it happen. As one widely read writer, Mel Krantzler, kept harping at us, we have our best chance for happiness with the very partner that we may think we ought to get rid of.

There is a good bit of evidence to support Krantzler’s rants. For one thing, most reliable studies still show that the split-up rate of second marriages is higher than for first ones, and that it goes even higher for thirds. (Good studies on fourth marriages and above have nor appeared as yet.) Live-in relationships before marriage are not any more successful; most of the ones I know that made a go of it were the ones whose participants eventually followed my invitation to head to the court house for a license and then meet me at the altar.

We need to be clear that not all marriages either can or should be saved. As the title of his most widely read book, Creative Divorce, should make plain, Mel Krantzler knew this well. But what we need to appreciate is that more marriages are salvageable than the current divorce rate would indicate, within and not beyond the “emotional intimacy” model of the ideal marriage relationship. Another book that has been around a while but is still worth reading, this one by therapist Michelle Weiner Davis, shows this with considerable insight. Apropos its major convictions, the book carries the title, Divorce Busting.

I am going to try to put up, rather than shut up, about this perspective in the next column. Yes, yes --- I know. I promised earlier that this Junetide, my thoughts on marriage would span just three columns. Perhaps you will be willing to chalk up my need for a fourth to an unwillingness to stay as pessimistic about the prospects for emotionally intimate marriages as Stephanie Coontz sometimes sounds. Deal?

Revisiting “Traditional” Marriages

The call for a return to “traditional” family values comes at us from all sides these days. The problem is that it is not easy to figure out just what the call means. Apparently, it does not include standing up for parental arrangement and dowries as essential conditions for a valid marriage, even though these have been regarded as such for a very long time, and still are so regarded in many quarters of the world. Nor does it include the insistence upon the marital bond as indissoluble and forever.

This latter reticence is especially surprising. For if there is anything still left of the church’s traditional expectations for marriage, one thing is the idea that you shouldn’t be able to get out of one very easily. And yet, traditionalist Christians seem to be doing as smooth a job of leaving marriages behind as everybody else in society is these days. One telling statistic is that the divorce rate for self-styled conservative evangelicals has become just about the same as for the population as a whole.

And a good percentage of these evangelicals are getting divorced after becoming, in their words, “born again.” Once, I had in my office a middle-aged man just back from a Promise Keepers’ Rally who regaled me with a story of his recent conversion experience, following the break-up of his fourth marriage. He wanted to know whether I would be disposed to conducting the service for his fifth. “Can you believe,” he asked me, “that I used to be committed to a three-strikes-and-you’re-out philosophy of marriage?” He became agitated when I told him that, no, I couldn’t believe it and that, no, I wouldn’t  preside over another wedding for him. 

Other once widely accepted ideas about marriage also are dropping out of traditionalists’ credos. One is that marriage should endow the partners with new wealth and status, either from parental bestowal at the beginning, or from lots of children put to work tilling and managing acquired lands and businesses. Another is that real men should keep their women at home, in order to shield them from the grime and grimness of the workaday world. And still another is that they should protect their innocent partners from the sordidness of sex by “doing it” with them strictly for the sake of producing offspring, while going outside for the physical satisfactions that all hard-driving men require and deserve.  

So what does it mean, then, to call for a return to traditional values, as far as marriage is concerned? Well, in the first place, it seems to mean something like re-affirming marriage as a heterosexual and not homosexual union. Second, it seems to mean --- uh, er, any other ideas? Okay, try this on for size: it means that the man must be the head of the household and that the woman must defer to her husband in all things. About the only people I know who think this is still viable are guys whose wives won’t let them in the house after the rallies that infected them with the notion in the first place.

The fact of the matter is that, with the possible exception of the heterosexual norm, there just aren’t many traditional ideas left that most thoughtful people come back to anymore when they talk about strengthening the marriage relationship. Conservatives are as easily convinced as liberals and everyone else is that in marriage, staying excited beats getting bored, feeling good trumps doing good, and ensuring freedom pays out better than encouraging responsibility. Because these convictions have become so rock solid to so many, to just that many divorce is now as handy an option as hanging in there used to be.

As for the repudiation of gay and lesbian marriage, the issue has become prominent and important enough to deserve more attention than I can give it here. For now, I will call attention only to the intensity of feeling that the issue generates, and note that it is an intensity clearly out of proportion to what is actually at stake. If every state were to remove the bans this very night, the number of ensuing marriages would be insufficient to prop up even the flimsiest slippery slope to perdition. On the other hand, if the states continue to move in the opposite direction, civil unions for gays and lesbians almost certainly will be approved more explicitly than they now are.

And yet, the shouting matches continue. Why? Because they afford at least some of the repudiators their last real hope that they are not in fact abandoning traditional values as they demand that their own marriages feel good or else. Taking a few whacks at gays and lesbians takes the onus off of dealing death-blows to marriages that with some work and a lot of prayer might be made better, more lasting, and even holy in God’s sight.

Marriages That Outlast Love

It’s that mythical time again: June brides, wedding bells, perplexed grooms, and the promise of blissful lostness in a beloved’s arms forever. “Mythical” is surely the right word here. For one thing, people are getting married in the church pretty much anytime these days --- June, October, March, you name it. And for another, they are divorcing outside the church in just about the same numbers, no matter what the month is.

But I have been a minister for too long not to get caught up in hopeful thinking about marriage every time the month of June starts rolling in. So, “for better or for worse,” this and the next two columns are devoted to what we have come to and where we are going as a church and a society regarding support, and the lack of it, for marriage, family, and the human future.

Okay, “the human future” is a bit pretentious. A more modest approach will be to settle for thinking about marriage in the here and now, and about whether as an institution it can be made to function at least a little better than it has been functioning for quite some time. One good reason for going this route is that there is an especially trustworthy companion readily available to walk it with us.

One of my favorite historians of marriage and family life is Stephanie Coontz, currently a professor at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. For years now, every time I have needed especially wise help in putting some of my thoughts on these subjects into a more coherent order, she has seemed to be right there, with new articles and sometimes even a new book. Lo and behold, she has done it again. Her newest book is Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. It’s a keeper.

One thing that Ms. Coontz does exceptionally well in this book is to document in easy to understand ways the massive changes in our Western understanding of marriage that have taken place over roughly the past two hundred years. Most basically, she writes, the changes revolve around replacing marriages arranged for economic and political purposes with marriages chosen on the basis of mutual affection and love. Eventually, “successful” marriages would focus almost exclusively on meeting the respective spouses’ emotional needs.

And therein, I offer, lies our fundamental difficulty sustaining the institution of marriage today. “As long as love lasts,” wedlock can indeed seem nothing less than a holy relationship. But according to present understanding, when love goes, then the relationship may have to go also. Some of our present-day My-Needs-Aren’t-Getting-Met marriages end in quiet, “no-fault” divorces. Others limp along in the form of unholy deadlocks, often including abuse, that are carefully shielded by closed doors. Still others morph into Wars-of-the-Roses litigation gleefully presided over by colluding lawyers whose sense of propriety and professional responsibility went the way of their first failed bar exams. 

For at least 5,000 years, Stephanie Coontz reminds us, people got married for reasons quite other than to experience sex-charged emotional intimacy. For the latter, they typically looked outside the marriage relationship. One important thing this means is that our current biggest idea about marriage --- that it is about two and only two peoples’ endless bliss --- is an idea bucking ideological currents far stronger than Western society and our churches may be willing to acknowledge.

The biggest single problem with the emotional intimacy model is that it undermines any realistic possibility of keeping a marriage bubbling when the sexual and emotional fizz dissipates, even though keeping it intact is still crucial to the well-being of others besides the disappointed and/or orgasm-less, bored, angry couple. Of course, according to the intimacy model, there are no others whose wants and needs have any relevance, children included; only those of the frustrated spouses count. But before the modern spirit of individualism went over to the dark side, almost everybody knew better.

Without a doubt, people both back yonder and today go too far when they make parental arrangement and/or approval a necessary condition for any marriage having validity in the eyes either of church or state. But they are right on target in insisting that being head over hills in love may be the least conducive state to be in for making decisions whose consequences inevitably last a lifetime, and maybe even longer. Is it time, then, to begin putting our collective weight more heavily behind “traditional” marriage values than we have been wont to do? As the next column will try to show, the correct answer to this question should come as no surprise: yes and no.

Mixing Religion And Politics Badly

Church people usually know right away when their preacher has quit preaching and gone to meddling. Most likely, the Reverend Chan Chandler’s flock clearly saw his own descent into mischief for what it was, and acted accordingly. Pastor Chandler recently resigned the pulpit of the East Waynesville, North Carolina Baptist Church over running off church members for not supporting President Bush, conservatism, and goodness knows what else. And well the good Reverend should have resigned --- only sooner.

If the Roman Catholic Church in America were not already so desperate for priests, it might be fitting to ask that St. Paul, Minnesota priest, who recently denied communion to supporters of gay Catholics, to take the same low road out of town that Mr. Chandler had to take. On second thought, let’s ask it anyway. For one thing, it is offensive to be held captive on pew benches that are already sending congregants’ arthritis into spasms while a demagogue in the pulpit or behind the chancel rail spews out doctrinal as well as political cant in a way that permits neither honest discussion nor conscientious dissent.

If the previous examples of clergy shenanigans are not enough by way of illustrating this column’s major point, let me add another for balance. Remember the recent Presidential election controversy over priests threatening to deny communion to Candidate John Kerry and to all those other liberal-types who were supporting him? I do, but I also remember getting far more worked up over how many liberal-type Protestant preachers, who should have known better, fawned shamelessly over him during their own Sabbath services, and from their pulpits no less. Frankly, the Senator lost points with me for showing up in the first place, as does any political candidate who disrupts church gatherings whose announced purpose is the worship of God.

It bothers me a great deal to see fellow members of the cloth hunkering down tight- fistedly with rabid advocates of one political or social agenda after another, whether conservative or liberal, while showing not the slightest consideration of the possibility that there is truth on the other side of the broad, ugly ideological ditches between themselves and anybody else who might disagree with them. Nevertheless, I have to concede, as all of us must, that people do not give up their rights as citizens when they become members of the clergy, nor should they. Although I cringe a little when Jesse Jackson comes to town, I cringe even more when I hear townspeople say they would like to run him out of it.

It is one thing, however, to see your pastor on the barricades and the Internet, protesting against private Social Security accounts, abortion, trade protections, environmental assault, the filibuster, gays and lesbians, the war in Iraq, or whatever, and quite another to hear him or her tell us from the pulpit exactly what we must think and do about the issue(s) at hand. What we most need from our preachers, priests, rabbis, imams, and gurus is as honest a searching of their respective scriptures and traditions of which they are capable, and an opening of a way to them that will allow all of us to discern for ourselves the guidance they contain, and act accordingly.

What we do not need from religious leaders --- conservative, liberal, and everybody in between --- are promulgations of badly formed ideas such as those that lay strict conditions upon peoples’ access to God’s Word and Real Presence. When declamations from our pulpits serve only to silence and coerce, when Christian fellowship takes place only behind doors slammed in others’ faces, and when the communion table becomes restricted only to those arbitrarily deemed worthy, it is time to do what those Waynesville Baptists did. They reminded their pastor that his way was the highway --- for him.

Hovering quietly but threateningly in the background of ministerial malfeasances like those I have just described is the whole confused business of tax-emption for churches going about their proper work of helping and saving needy souls --- including, thankfully, our own. Wouldn’t it be a kick if the tax people all of a sudden decided to trespass on the politically incendiary terrain of determining which churches’ social involvements are genuinely religious and which are merely political? I still doubt whether anybody in the IRS can do the job better than church people can, but when I see preachers with one arm draped around a politician’s shoulders and the other leaning on a pulpit, I have to confess that for at least a tiny moment, I do begin to wonder.

Abortion

I sometimes wonder whether God quite knew what he was doing when he issued that famous invitation to his people to come and “reason together” (Isaiah 1:18). More accurately translated, the passage is a call to argue things out. Of all the invitations God has tendered us over the millennia, this may be the one with which we have had the least difficulty. Except maybe for the one to be fruitful and multiply.

Arguing, contending, debating, wrangling --- these are all things that most of us have become better at than God surely intended us to become. Back then, he was after a simple obedience to his demands for justice. He proposed the particular argument to which Isaiah referred in order to get his people to quit substituting ritualism for ethicality. By contrast, our arguments are mostly about getting people to give up their beliefs for our own, their consciences be damned. And we wonder why our disputes rarely get anywhere.

Some time ago, a rabbi friend told me about spending an especially disturbing afternoon in a local hospital with a dedicated couple in his synagogue, consoling them and helping them think through whether or not to abort their pregnancy. They had just learned that their baby would come into the world with Tay-Sachs disease (an affliction tragically common in Jewish families of Eastern European origin), and would suffer progressively retarded development, paralysis, dementia, blindness, and death by age 3 or 4. Through their prayers and their tears, my friend’s parishioners decided upon abortion, with his anguished blessing. In the weeks following, he and the couple were mercilessly denounced by others in the congregation.

Every time I have told this story in Christian settings, adding to it that I would have given my own blessing to the rabbi’s couple, I have been both roundly praised and mercilessly denounced. So pile on; I’m used to it. But if you are going to heap hot coals rather than warm hugs, at least consider the following two caveats.

The first: As the author of life, God demands the deepest respect for life --- all life --- of which we are capable. And the second: The willful taking of another life with no larger, good purpose envisioned and served cannot possibly be made consistent with everything else that we know about God’s will for human beings everywhere. About such actions as, for instance, abortion as an alternative to contraception, God has made plain that he intends to argue with us, and we can be certain in advance that we will lose.

But now comes the first problem: what about the taking of life precisely in the interest of an end that we determine to be worthy, and perhaps even noble, in circumstances that may be anything but either? Here is where too many people become too eager to assume the role of God in the “argue it out” scenario. That is, they fulminate just like they think the Almighty would, attacking anyone who disagrees with their own take on abortion with a vehemence like that of a Zeus hurling thunderbolts from Mt. Olympus, or a Yahweh flooding the earth from above the clouds. Certainly, my friend’s parishioners played God this way, but so also do a number of my other friends, who say utterly vicious things about all those “ignorant and malicious pro-lifers” that thoughtful people like themselves have to put up with.

Should all Tay-Sachs fetuses be aborted? How could we possibly know in advance? Is a particular abortion under such horrific circumstances worthy of serious consideration? Surely the answer to this question is “Yes.” As it is to the questions of aborting a pregnancy to save a mother’s life, and of abortion as a response to incestuous conception as well as to conception from rape. On these matters at least, let us spare each other any tedious sloganeering: being pro-choice does not commit one to being anti-life, and being pro-life does not require another to deny the sometimes very harsh necessities of death even in the most fervently sought “Culture of Life.”
A second problem that should better dispose us to turn down the volume on the current abortion debate arises from the profligate inconsistencies between thought and action evident throughout so much of it. Here is a pro-lifer who gets angry with delays in carrying out death sentences, and sees no reason why convicted rapists should all of a sudden have the right to DNA testing that was not available at the time they were charged. Up there is a vehement pro-choicer gently plucking a bug out of her salad, walking down three flights of stairs to release the creature into the outside air. A placard-carrying anti-abortionist is just back from hunting game with an assault rifle. A savior of the spotted owl prescribes “morning after” pills as often as he does anti-depressants.
See any problems here?

The Exaltation of John Paul II: A Motion to Table

Hopefully, the voices clamoring for advancing Pope John Paul II to the status of “The Great,” and for putting him on a fast-track to sainthood, will stay quiet enough to let the Roman Catholic hierarchy continue getting the ministry of Benedict XVI into high gear without too many distractions. For one thing, a sober look at the pontificates of Leo and Gregory, the other so-called “Greats,” should be enough by itself to cool the passions of anyone now viewing John Paul in their lights.
As for sainthood --- well, of course, this isn’t any of our business really, or likely that of anybody else now alive. No track will be fast enough for the new Pope’s own generation to appreciate. But the idea of a Saint Karol Wojtyla still may be worth a look, primarily because it can provoke us to think more deeply about what truly exemplary character and leadership should be in a world like ours, and his.

Right off the bat, though, there is a lot of downside to the idea of a St. Karol. After all, this is the leader who stayed notoriously above the scandal of pedophile priests across his church, entering the fray primarily to reward some of the very leaders who contributed most to the problem. Does resigned Cardinal Bernard Law leading Mass in Vatican City bother you as much as it does me? There is also the matter of the late Pope’s intransigence on the issue of contraception, even as many of the world’s peoples continue to overpopulate themselves, and eventually us, too, to death. Neither he nor anyone else can get a natural law out of Genesis 1:28. The invitation to be fruitful and multiply was just that: an invitation.

As American Catholics are now preaching by their practice, the notion that there is something not quite right about married couples enjoying sex together without intending to procreate is a notion that has been lingering for far too long. Getting this mob of faithful Catholics to be more circumspect in the bedroom will be something that not even former Cardinal Ratzinger can pull off.

And then there are all those celibate priests. Actually, not all priests, alas, and that is the shame of it. If it took over a thousand years to get this flawed practice cranked up as policy in the first place, and if it is now driving capable men away from the priesthood by the hundreds of thousands, then surely the time has come to let this ignoble experiment go. But the Vatican will continue to hear nothing of it.

Or of the possibility of women priests. This issue is a little more difficult, primarily because an all male priesthood seems to supported by the scriptures and not just  tradition. You have to go up against a really big bunch of people --- the Orthodox Churches included --- to get anywhere on the ordination of women. But going up against tradition, the scriptures included, as well as entrenched authority was no problem for Jesus. And for an institution that could change its mind completely on such things as  usury, slavery, and religious freedom, not to mention the Latin Mass and fish on Fridays, putting women in priestly garb should be a walk in the park.

Unfortunately, the new Pope is not much for walking this kind of walk. The Point of these four points is not to sully the memory of a truly good man, or to be catty toward his successor. (Not too catty, anyway.) It is, rather, to point to a path, already cleared, to the late Pope’s goodness itself. Some of the most devoted Catholics who have cleared this path are precisely those who have been the most frustrated by John Paul’s manifold failures to hear their concerns, e.g.: parents with more children than they can even feed, much less nurture, deans of seminaries with applicant pools a quarter of what they were forty years ago, priests with 60% fewer attendees at Mass in a single generation, and called and gifted women who have much to celebrate and no altar at which to celebrate it.

How could folks like these have left kin, country, and parishes behind in order to sleep on dirty streets for only a fleeting glimpse at enactments in which they could not possibly have participated, and all the while let tears of sadness, gratitude, and hope flow from their eyes like a ever-rolling stream? Perhaps because they saw something in the man Karol, not the saint, that can inspire a quite extraordinary faith from very ordinary people like themselves, and like us.

Two Crowds, Two Hopes, Two Deaths

On Easter afternoon, Terri Schiavo continued her journey out of this world as fanatics proclaimed with diabolical certainty the possibility of its reversal. Their shouting made a mockery of the Easter message. We must hope that somehow, deep in her own soul, Mrs. Schiavo nevertheless felt the embrace of a God who grieved more than earthly creatures ever could the body that betrayed her. Four days later, that embrace became the only one that counted.

The scene was quite different in Vatican Square, where crowds prayed and sang quietly, respectfully, and joyfully as Karol Wojtyla lay dying in his apartment above them. Repeatedly, people expressed a sense of solidarity with each other, along with profound affirmations of the rightness of things, things present and things to come. The Easter message was everywhere evident. One spokesman for the church spoke eloquently of Christ’s holding the doors of heaven open to its dying Pope.

Two very different scenes, two very different crowds. What made the difference? Certainly not the respective importance of the two dying persons. As John Paul II would have been the first to insist, in God’s sight Terri and he were equals in partaking of an infinite and sacred value, and of the same destiny. The difference lay in what their respective followers had allowed themselves to hope. Terri Schiavo’s parents, and those who egged them on, fixated only on a physical body restored to health and a long earthly life, with new brain cells and with the ravages of an eating disorder gone forever. By contrast, the Pope’s fellow believers focused on what St. Paul termed the “spiritual body,” whose physiognomy God intends us to recognize only in the kingdom to come.

Although it is likely to remain obscure to those who decry Terri Schiavo’s death as “judicial murder,” it is blindingly clear to most everyone else that, for a long time, the question of her eternal destiny has been the only really relevant question. The question of what might have been left for her in this life was asked and answered, bluntly and searingly, years ago. Asking it again, and again, and yet again was little short of obscene, as was praying for a miracle in just her particular case, with a shocking indifference to every other human being also living in a “permanent vegetative state.” What we will all remember about John Paul II is that he left this world with grace and serenity, an example for all of us to follow in the face of our own death.
br> Where might we get any kind of handle at all on what we can hope not only for Terri Schiavo, but for all whose bodies have made of their souls prisoners with no prospect of escape in this life? The celebration of Easter --- the season and not just the Sunday --- is surely a good place to look, perhaps the best place. For one of the most important things that the Easter story offers is the encouragement to let go of what we were all like when our bodies worked well and looked good. If flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, and we have it on good authority that this is in fact true, then these bodies --- however impressive they might have been once upon a time --- never were meant to go anywhere anyway.

One detail in the Fourth Gospel’s Easter narrative that has long puzzled me is the outwardly callous remark that Jesus is reported to have made to a weeping Mary Magdala at the tomb: “Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father.” (John 20:17) What compounds its unfeeling character is that a week later, Jesus went far out of his way to invite Thomas to do just this, to reassure himself of being in the presence of the Lord by probing his hands and his side. (20:27) On Easter Sunday afternoon, watching two crowds of people confront death in two very different ways, I think I finally figured out at least something of what he was talking about: don’t cling to the wrong things at the wrong times.

Martin Luther got the first part of this right: “let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also.” And the Johannine tradition got the second part right: on their respective ways to the Father, the last thing that Jesus, the Pope, and Terri Schiavo needed were faithful followers or distraught family members trying to hold them back. And neither will we.

Exorcism: Jesus-Style

Ahead, the rush-hour gridlock was easing, making the voices in her head sound even louder. They were honing in now on a single command, and repeating it over and over: kill them all. Pam steered her car to an exit lane, abandoned it, and then began running. A police car managed to block her way back onto the expressway, saving her from the on-coming traffic.

For a long time, Pam (not her real name) has been in the clutches of something that has  re-defined her identity just as insidiously as Alzheimer’s disease eventually erased her father’s own. With respect to both, I have often called to mind the description in Mark’s Gospel of that agitated, out-of-control, unapproachable man of the tombs and the hillsides, crying out day and night and beating himself incessantly. (5:2-5)

Was that ancient tomb-dweller “psychotic”? Without a doubt. More importantly, he was “possessed.” And when I am honest with myself about Pam, what I most wish for is someone, anyone, who could make her own demons leave her for good. So when I recently read Scott Peck’s latest account of performing exorcisms himself as acts both of care and of desperation, I knew exactly the kind of impulse that could lead a Christian believer to take on a loved one’s demons directly.

Jesus took the demons on all the time. For St. Mark, his exorcisms clearly played the prominent, and perhaps even the decisive role in confirming everything else that he sought to convey in his singularly focused message about the kingdom of God. For us, the trouble is that Jesus’ exorcisms often impress more than his teachings do, and make people clamor for wonder-working more than for wisdom. It is easy to forget one important truth about confronting states of possession: without Jesus, exorcism is a problematic healing strategy at best, and when it isn’t effective (only one of Scott’s two exorcisms was), what we have to rely on is love.

Once, Pam had plenty of it. She and other “out of the closet” schizophrenic members of her church received regular support by a compassionate and understanding group of laypersons who prayed regularly for them and for the therapists who treated them. These prayer partners also offered very tangible kinds of help to family members struggling daily with the otherwise crushing responsibilities of being their stricken (adult) childrens’ and siblings’ primary, and sometimes only, caregivers.

One thing Pam’s own therapist was especially grateful for was the caregivers’ ability to communicate effectively an abiding love for her especially in and through her most off-putting episodes. He told me in amazed tones that they always seemed to be able to figure out new ways not only to keep things from getting worse, but to reduce the frequency and intensity of his patient’s most florid psychotic episodes. Tragically, this support group slowly slipped away, and when Pam moved to another city in the interest of what looked to be a major career advancement, her condition deteriorated irreversibly.

Loving actions can have a remissive effect on psychosis and possession, even if only temporarily. Pam’s own episodes were crippling, but  they were also relatively infrequent. Usually, she could hold them at bay by staying on her prescribed medications and in therapy, and by her harried parents’ keeping their home environment’s emotional force field at relatively low levels of intensity. But other things in Pam’s life helped too, especially her close and compassionate circle of friends in the church, and her active participation in worship, especially at Eucharistic celebrations and through what for her was the sacrament of confession and penance.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association posits that psychotic disorders like Pam’s affect perhaps as much as one percent  of the population. Since her congregation now numbers about 4,500, it is reasonable to speculate that as many as 45 of its members may be struggling as Pam did with a kind of distress that often looks like nothing less than states of possession. At one time, the pastor personally knew of seven.Where might the others be?  
Some of them are almost surely living in protective back rooms of their families’ homes, because they cannot function on their own and because institutions that once could have helped them are no longer accessible. Others may be on the streets, in alleys and parks,  living as the detritus of a society enamored with success, wealth, and fame and contemptuous of anyone who suddenly becomes inconvenient to its “well” members’ illusory sense of well-being. These psychotic, yes, possessed men and women are the tomb-dwellers of the modern world.

If we cannot exorcise their demons, though, we do not have to leave them “crying out day and night,” alone.

Exorcism, Scott Peck-Style

If you never got around to reading Scott Peck’s 1978 book, The Road Less Traveled, be grateful that it is still in print, pick it up at the library or your favorite bookstore, and start in on it before other things distract you again. The Road … represents a brilliant psychiatrist’s take on life’s difficulties and possibilities, from the perspective of his newly aroused interests in the world of the spirit. Seven million copies of this wonderful book have been sold thus far, and it made the New York Times best seller list for over ten years.

Peck’s second book, however --- People of the Lie --- is another story. It is about evil, evil-doers, and most startling of all, an Evil One who is often involved in both. Evil? You better believe it. Evildoers? Absolutely. But Satan? Well… And a psychiatrist telling the story? That’s just too much. At least, a lot of Peck’s reviewers said so at the time. His readers felt otherwise, however. Though sales of this book came nowhere near The Road’s, the two books together were enough to keep the good doctor comfortably retired from further psychiatric practice and delightedly on the lecture circuit thereafter.

It was chapter five of People of the Lie that unnerved even some of  Peck’s most ardent admirers. This chapter is about possession and exorcism, and contains one of the book’s most significant, and from a psychiatric perspective most startling claims, to the effect that possession is a mental disorder --- now, we would say, with both narcissistic and dissociative features --- involving in addition demons, and sometimes even Satan himself/herself/itself. In that chapter and elsewhere in the book, Peck described his positioning of himself in the midst of two exorcisms as an interested observer, and hinted that a fuller exploration of the whole subject might be forthcoming in a subsequent book.

It took a while, but Peck has now made good on his implicit promise, with the release of Glimpses of the Devil: A Psychiatrist’s Personal Accounts of Possession, Exorcism, and Redemption. This book should prove even more unnerving than People of the Lie did, but it will be important to keep in mind just why it should. What is especially disturbing about it is that Peck’s re-visiting of the two exorcisms includes the shocking admission that he was not merely a participant-observer in them, as People led us to believe, but the principal exorcist himself.

On any reasonable caregiver’s definition, whether from the standpoint of the mental health professions in general or of spirituality in particular, Scott Peck’s exorcisms of more than twenty years ago look for all the world like actions performed by an unworthy practitioner who could easily have made already very bad situations even worse. I use the term “unworthy” here quite intentionally, because at the time in his life that Peck conducted these exorcisms, he was also describing himself in the very terms that should have stopped him from even thinking about making the “massive therapeutic intervention” of exorcism (his words) part of any treatment plan.

By his own account, Peck was then a “recent convert” to Christianity, who had much to learn about God, the church, the salvation process, and just about everything else Christian. And the cavalier attitude toward organized religion that he exhibited in spite of his conversion has not changed all that much. For example, in a recent interview he spoke engagingly of prayer and God’s presence in his life, but continued to insist on his “nondenominational status,” but that he might-possibly-maybe become a Roman Catholic --- if we “put a gun to his back.”

Why are these otherwise tacky observations relevant? Because Peck declaimed from the rooftops in People of the Lie that exorcism is a very serious and dangerous business, to be performed only by very knowledgeable, skilled, and gifted people, and only with the full backing of their churches behind them. When I pressed him on the matter during a colloquy we had in Dallas years ago, Scott said in no uncertain terms that his conscience dictated his caution, and that everyone else should be similarly tentative about the whole subject of demonic possession. Now, he confesses that he performed the exorcisms because he could not find anyone else to do them. I doubt seriously that he would do brain surgery for a similar reason.

It saddens me deeply to contemplate that Parkinson’s Disease may make Glimpses of the Devil the last book we will ever have from this much cherished physician, guide, and friend. Without doubt, Scott himself deserves better from life, as do all sufferers from this terrible disease. But we deserve better, too, from this immensely caring and insightful man than he most recently chose to give us. Happily, though, The Road Less Traveled is still out there, and will be for many years to come.

[The March 23 column will consider Exorcism, Jesus-Style.]

Arthur Miller: In Appreciation

For decades, theater critics have been saying that Arthur Miller’s influence as a playwright waned early in his career. You wouldn’t know it from the notices given to his recent death. I never believed those critics much anyway. And neither did anybody else within whom his literary work still gets very, very deep.

Miller first got to me three years after his Tony Award-winning play, The Crucible, opened on Broadway. 50 of us, half in college and the other half in high school, were in New York City for a six-weeks summer citizenship seminar. One of the things we did during our time together was work in smaller groups on projects to share with everyone our final week. My group chose to attempt a sincerely felt, even if not-right-for-prime-time production of that particular play.

Our decision to do The Crucible was somewhat risky for its time. You have to remember that the McCarthyites were in full bloom wackiness, that Miller was already suggesting in not very subtle ways where the House Un-American Activities Committee might transport themselves, and that the Attorney General’s people were salivating over adding more and more names to their infamous list of “suspect” Americans. Certainly, it was timely for us to offer the play for discussion. The problem was that in putting it on, we became “suspect” ourselves in certain circles. Frankly, I was kind of hoping to get on The List myself, but I didn’t quite make it. If I had, I would have been in pretty impressive company; even a Methodist bishop got on it!

Our group had neither the time, the talent, nor the production resources to stage anything but a series of excerpts from Miller’s play, tied together by an “Our Town” type stage manager (me) who wandered in and out between the scenes to smooth out transitions and offer comments about witch trials both in Salem and on the House floor. I was doing a pretty good job of being “objective” about the whole thing until near the end, when by our group’s design I entered the play itself, to take my place on the jury and scream out condemnation of the innocent protagonist. For the first time in my life, I knew what it must have been like to be on the side of Barabbas and his deluded followers.

The Crucible taught me in a way I have never forgotten what it is like to get caught up in ideologies and with mobs inflicting their ideologies on everyone else, repudiating in one swoop any regard for truth, any respect for others’ opinions, and any love for one’s fellow creatures of God. Remembering what it felt like on stage those few terrifying minutes was enough to cure me (I continue to hope and pray) of wanting to throw away rationality and empathy in the service of even the most genuinely righteous causes. As we like to say nowadays, don’t go there.

It was frightening to drive by the crowds several years ago --- around a local hospital and on a major thoroughfare’s sidewalks --- whose fanatical members were shouting obscenities at doctors and patients for whom abortion was still a Constitutionally-affirmed right. And it is irritating beyond measure being around bunches of folks in worship services, judicatory meetings, and on the streets, listening to condemnations of gays and lesbians as cancerous growths on societies world-wide and as eternally excluded from the kingdom to come. Or getting called the Great Satan by deluded followers of an Islam that The Prophet himself would not have recognized.

Karen Armstrong, a much cherished writer on world religions today, has an interesting way of putting the issue with which The Crucible forces us to deal. In a recent essay, she wrote, “The history of each faith tradition represents a ceaseless struggle between our inherent tendency to aggression and the mitigating virtue of compassion …We live in one world, and we have to learn to reach out in sympathy to people who have different opinions, at home and abroad. We need the compassionate ethic more desperately than ever before.”

In 1991, Arthur Miller was in Dallas to accept the Meadows Award for Excellence in the Arts from SMU. During a brief chat, I had an opportunity to share gratefully with him just a little of what I learned from The Crucible all those years ago. He waited patiently while I stammered it out, paused for a moment, and then said, “I can see it in your eyes.” I have called to mind many times what he said to me that night. A lot of what Arthur Miller wrote about across his anything but waned career he saw clearly in other peoples’ eyes, too.