Scenes of Grief And Signs Of Healing

Modern psychology describes the early stages of grieving, in Sigmund Freud's classic phrase, as a "painful dejection" best coped with in three stages. We face up to the fact of loss, however shattering the loss may be. We consign the once here and now relationship to a special place in our memories. And finally, we invest ourselves in other relationships and causes. At each stage, it helps to have caring people present who accept us in whatever stage of letting-go we may or may not be, and who offer us realistic assurance that things will get better.

Along with this widely accepted perspective on grief, there is another that may be especially important at this holiday season, when economic recession and the wrenching losses it is imposing are making ordinary grieving even more difficult. It is the perspective of faith. My thoughts about it are shaped by a few more experiences I had at the Grief Recovery Gathering about which I wrote last time. The first was with Cap. (Again, no real names are used in the vignettes.) He summed up well the kind of feelings many were experiencing that afternoon: Sometimes it still feels like it did those awful days after Jimmy died in the storm, when I told God I'd never trust him again, but being around all of these good people makes me realize just how far I've come and that the pain really is getting better. I think I'm almost ready to let God back into my life.

Not everyone, however, found in this particular gathering the solace and encouragement that Cap did. For Brenda, it activated memories of her most intense grief rather than the relief she experienced from it. A debilitating illness in her late 20's had put an end to Brenda's promising career, destroying not only her mobility but her dreams. Both the ease and the optimism with which reunion group members moved around to greet each other were, as she put it, like salt poured into wounds. Nevertheless, Brenda went on to say, I keep coming because I want to be here, and to keep on hoping that both my body and my mind are going to stop hurting so much.

Tom had still a different reaction to the celebratory tone of the gatherings. It was the hugs that got to him the most: These folks are connecting with each other so beautifully, he told me, but I'm still feeling sorry for myself for feeling so alone. She was my whole world. I don't know if I'll ever be able to reach out to anyone again, even in the way that just friends do.

What can we say, from the perspective of faith, about these three fellow strugglers? About Cap, whose son drowned during Hurricane Katrina, we can say a word of thanks that he is beginning to understand that God is not a Zeus-like, capricious storm-gatherer. Rather, God is the Holy One who seeks in love to make us holy in His glorious presence. And God does this through all circumstances, good and bad.

As for Brenda, we can say a word of thanks for her courage. She still feared that there may be nothing ahead for her except debilitation, dependency, and an early death. But she is facing the prospect by looking deeply into the faces of others struggling with losses not as great as hers, but gaining courage in the process. At one time, she was her church's organist, and so her next words should not have surprised me. They were from the fourth verse of the magnificent hymn, "For All the Saints." Then, she quoted, "steals on the ear the distant triumph song."

Finally, there was Tom, still holding himself back from those who care about him. One of his grown children summed up his blocked grief work especially well. As Tom summarized it, Junior really jumped all over me yesterday because he thinks I'm not being fair with either my family or my friends. They want the old Tom back, he said, not the Tom who acts like he doesn't care about them anymore and isn't holding up his end of anything. Tom's son put his finger on the central issue at stake. Love is not supposed to die, even when the people we love do. Tom got the message. The last thing he said to me that afternoon was that it was time for him to start opening himself to others again, no matter how much he missed his wife.

This Christmas season, a lot of people who are grieving the loss of a job, a home, or a secure future, on top of the loss of a loved one, are finding it especially hard to rejoice about very much. Except those who know from the depths of their souls that there are good things that do last forever. And that the greatest among them is love --- their own, ours, and God's, in Christ. Venite adoramus.

God Rest You Worried Gentlefolk

The Sunday afternoon was sunny and delightfully cool, the Fall leaves were gorgeous, and the refreshments kept coming as the room kept filling. Happy greetings, broad smiles, hugs, and mounting chatter said it all: for those who had felt deep sorrow, there were now times of joy and a readiness to celebrate new life. To this particular gathering, everyone who had ever participated in a grief recovery group at the sponsoring church was invited, and a large number came.

Just east of the food table, I struck up a conversation with a man I will call Sam, who was having difficulty getting into the festive mood, having only recently lost a daughter to cancer. Right now, Sam told me, it feels like I'm almost unhinged. Our exchange remained free of interruptions long enough for him to say more about what the hinges in his life were and how he felt them to be coming apart. I have found Sam's analogy very helpful not only to understanding what happens in the grieving process, but to getting through it, especially in these times. With a recession upon us, the question of how to celebrate Christmas is already more intense than usual, and for people who are suffering a significant loss --- whether of a loved one, an income, a secure retirement, health, or hope --- it can be overwhelming.

As I talked more with Sam that day, what kept coming to mind was the Latin word for hinge, cardo, and with it an association to "cardinal," not in the sense of the beautiful bird that makes frequent appearances in our back yard, but in the sense of the cardinal "virtues." From Plato and Aristotle all the way through Saints Ambrose, Augustine and Aquinas, human life at its best has been consistently characterized as a state of completeness (or, "perfection") and as a process of achieving it (as in "be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect" [Mt. 5:48]). Whether as the state or the process, completeness comes from bringing everything that makes us the human beings we are --- specifically our impulses and desires, our will, and our reason --- into an inner harmony and peace. Our accomplishing this "hinges" on developing certain dispositions or habits, which to the ancients meant virtues or excellences of character.

Four dispositions in particular came to be viewed as the hinges upon which completeness of life turns: moderating our cravings; maintaining courage and being reasonable in the face of fear and the temptation to impulsive actions; and treating people fairly --- giving everyone his and her due. For the ancients, these four dispositions --- temperance, courage, wisdom, and justice --- became the cardinal ("hinge") virtues upon which all other virtues such as honesty, fidelity, service, and leadership turn.

Sam's feeling of becoming unhinged revolved around his inability to stop himself from binge drinking; fifteen years of sobriety collapsed overnight in the pain of losing his daughter. Immediately after Sam spoke of feeling unhinged by his binges, he went on to say that it was as if he were losing a vital part of himself. And he was right. From the perspective of striving to develop the cardinal virtues, controlling our appetites and our impulses --- that is, exercising moderation from a tempered spirit --- is a defining characteristic of being human. What Sam discovered is that grieving a significant loss can weaken one or more of the habits which are necessary to our becoming whole.

Most certainly, grief is a feeling of painful dejection. But it is also a sense of a faltering of the best that is in us. And in our grieving, we both need and deserve from others not only their acceptance and encouragment, but also their gentle reminders of who we are at our virtuous best --- temperate, courageous, thoughtful, and fair-minded --- and of the importance that becoming that person again holds to both our well-being and to our integrity.

There may be no better time to work on strengthening the cardinal virtues within us than the present moment, which threatens to unhinge us altogether, whether we are in grief or not. Legitimately angry over what greedy and unscrupulous people on Wall Street have done to us, and seduced by the cajoling of economists to spend ourselves out of the downturn, we can all too easily throw moderation and practical reasoning to the winds in a desperate attempt to drive out the sadness seeping down the walls of our households by extravagances we cannot afford and fantasies we cannot sustain. We can lose courage to take the message of Advent at face value and fail to trust that in the Lord's presence we do not have to be afraid of anything, ever again. And we can deceive ourselves that having less this season somehow absolves us from seeing to it that those who have still less receive even more.

Grieving Our Way Through The Holidays

The Monday before Thanksgiving several years ago, I made pastoral calls on two parish families whom I knew to be grieving painful losses. The two households could not have been more different. In one, the dining room table was already set for the feast to come, and on the chair at its head stood a large picture of the grandfather whose funeral I conducted the previous year. Other family pictures that included him were prominently displayed throughout the living room, den, and kitchen as well. This year, we're going to remember a lot, talk a lot, and laugh a lot about Pop, his son told me with a lilt in his voice.

In the other home I visited that afternoon, there were no signs of Thanksgiving preparations at all. The rooms were conspicuously devoid of any reminders that a much beloved wife and mother had once lived there. Her husband told me that that she would have wanted the family just to get on with their lives and not dwell on her. It's helped to do just that, he said, or we'd all be stuck in the past the way my mother-in-law is. His plan was to eat Thanksgiving dinner with his teen-age daughters at the local cafeteria. I made a mental note to myself to think more about whether the two approaches to the coming Thanksgiving Day that I saw in both homes that afternoon were more the cause or the effect of how each family was doing with their grieving. The best I could come up with at the time was that it was a little of both.

Recently I came across a research-oriented study on grief by two therapists in Colorado, Steve and Connirae Andreas, that helped confirm my own developing intuition back then that maintaining an active relationship with someone we have lost by means of stimulating and enjoying our memories of them is a very good thing. It works better than what may seem to be a more heroic approach of putting that person out of our minds as soon as possible and moving on. It was this latter approach that the second family I described had embarked upon, with the "help" of well-meaning friends, and it did not seem to me to be coming off very well. The Andreas have an insightful way of putting the point of this paragraph, in terms of keeping our deceased loved ones' presence "comfortably inside" us.

One thing that still bothers me about some of the so-called "classic" literature on grief and grief recovery is its taking too much liberty with what the ancient Preacher of the Old Testament teaches us about the "seasons" of life. There is a time to mourn, he wrote, and then there is a time to dance. (Ecclesiastes 3:4) He did not, however, tell us how much time we are allowed for the transition, contrary to the views of many mental health professionals who suggest not too subtly that letting heavy grieving go on for too long ---much longer than a year seems to be what "too long" means --- will put us into unnecessarily "complicated bereavement." In my experience, grief-work takes as long as it takes, and it tends to go better when we activate good memories of the one(s) we have lost rather than when we seal off easy access to those memories.

Most grieving people with whom I talk and work who either cannot get beyond its initial, intense stage, or who try to get over it by deadening themselves to feelings altogether, tell me with unnerving consistency that they feel they are required to disconnect altogether from the one(s) they have lost, that it is too heart wrenching to do it, and that they are somehow not measuring up to what is expected of them. I try to remind them as best I can that we are created to seek, love, and cherish close relationships, not to sever them entirely, even ones that may not be altogether good for us. Basically, disconnecting from them is something that God takes care of for us; we do not need to work very hard at doing it ourselves. Why? Because people we love die, physically. Our grief-work begins by accepting this God-ordained fact and by holding in our hearts and minds, that is, through memory, those we love whose lives are now being lived out elsewhere.

A lot of people are grieving a lot of things these days, more things than usual. I have been thinking a lot about their grieving, and my own, enough to warrant a couple more attempts in the next two columns to deal with how all of us might better face the holidays that are upon us in a time of loss and in the midst of national crisis.

A Puppy, A Pastor, And A President

Given what lies ahead for our next President, it was something of a relief that the Obama family shared a lighter moment with us that involved reconciling conflicting ideas about the next canine occupant of the White House. I loved the way the President-elect summed up the dilemma: finding a mutt who won't bring about allergic reactions. It got me to thinking about another dilemma facing the next First Family: selecting their next pastor.

Whatever one may think of the Obamas' former pastor and of their too lengthy association with him, removing oneself from the caring environment of a formerly trusted community of faith is a wrenching experience that is only made worse by not finding a new church home within a reasonable period of time. I cannot imagine how hard it must have been for this family to face a decision like this in the midst of the most upending period of their lives. It might have been made a little easier by the pastor himself. From my vantage point, he disregarded rather flagrantly the aspiring family's well being in pursuing his own prophetic agenda at the expense of taking a more pastoral role in the situation in which he and his church suddenly found themselves. In a sense, Barack Obama did not leave his church; his church and their pastor left him. Even so, the Obamas' decision, both necessary and right, left them without a church home and, until recently at least, without either the time or the opportunity to search for one.

One hope that I continue to harbor from the Jeremiah Wright controversy is that religious people all across the land can see in it an opportunity to do some serious thinking about both the agonizing challenges and soaring possibilities that surround the ministry of every truly faithful and effective pastor, priest, rabbi, and imam today. For openers, we need to reflect deeply on the awesome scope of pastoral responsibility itself. Pastors are servants of God's message, God's people, and God's kingdom together, not of one to the exclusion of the other.

At any given moment, it may seem that fulfilling any one of these responsibilities requires setting aside the other or others. Illustration: one clergyperson happens upon the scene of a traffic accident and finds himself cradling a drunken driver who has just wiped out a whole family by running a red light, and who is desperately crying out for him to pray for his soul. Or: another discovers that key leaders of her church's soup kitchen ministry are members of the local KKK. Or: still another struggles with pressures from the congregation and the community to give the pulpit over to politicians at election time.

Another thing worth reflecting on is how leaders of congregations, in witnessing faithfully to God's work in the world, can ensure that irritated reactions will not elevate to some combination of panic, rage, and withdrawal. The Bible speaks often of those who are shepherds of others' souls bearing an awesome responsibility to comfort as well as afflict people. As far as I can make out, the balm of Gilead was never intended to be only an allergen. Hopefully, the Obamas' next pastor will be as free of the latter as their new puppy will be.

Wondering and worrying about the Obamas' ecclesial uprootedness lately, I have let my thoughts drift back to Jeremiah Wright's frighteningly effective but otherwise preposterous posturing across many years in dangerously charged political atmospheres. And to similarly odious experiences listening to other princes of the pulpit pound the fear of everlasting damnation into people, while still others sweetly seduce their enraptured constituency to pony up just a little more for the Lord and rest assured of prosperity as their fitting reward. Guys and now gals like these do tend to capture and hold peoples' interest. But ministers are not supposed to be entertainers, and by the world's standards the salvation process can even border on the boring. Get up early, say a few words of thanksgiving to God, help the neighbors, say a few more words of thanks, find some more neighbors who need help, say even more words of thanks, turn the light out, and drop off to sleep eager to begin the process all over again. If the President-elect and his family succeed in finding a bunch of people like this to be around, they can count themselves richly blessed.

I have an idea about what the pastor of such an undistinguished congregation might look like: "no beauty, no majesty to catch our eyes, no grace to attract us to him." (Isaiah 53:2) Pretty much of a mutt, actually. Good hunting, dear ones.

Alan Greenspan's "Mistake": Some Theological Reflections

It may be a long time before we hear another Federal Reserve Board Chairman admit the kind of mistake that Alan Greenspan did recently. Typically, gurus neither admit mistakes nor concede even the possibility of making one. There has been no bigger guru around than former chairman Greenspan these past few years, so his very public confession is a big deal, and he deserves a lot of credit for being a mensch about it.

Not to kick a man who has already taken himself down, I do think that "mistake" is not quite the right word for what this good man is talking about. A fundamental and global error in thinking may be more like it. But no matter: confession is the first step toward being forgiven. The second is learning something from the experience of both, which is what this column is all about.

Alan Greenspan's admission is edifying because it immediately transcends economic theory, even though it is expressed in explicitly economic categories. Certainly it has to do with ignoring the fatal flaws of what George Soros has called "market fundamentalism," a dogma roughly approximate in status to Papal Decrees, to the effect that markets work better for the heavy hitters to the extent that they are unregulated and for the great unwashed to the extent that heavy hitters' capital gains trickle down to them. But what Mr. Greenspan has let us in on about this dogma points straightaway to its deepest problem, a naïve misunderstanding of what human beings --- all of us --- are really like. Mr. Soros elaborates on this point in philosophical terms. I think the issue at stake is even better thought through as an exercise in theological anthropology, viz. with reference to what the Christian tradition has wisely said about "fallen" human nature.

What apparently upset Greenspan the most about the economic catastrophe that has befallen us is the failure of leaders in the financial sector to pursue their self-interests in an enlightened, rational manner, as they were supposed to do. Instead, they allowed greed to overwhelm their common sense, thereby infecting the whole system that is designed to run on the basis of rational deliberation with impulsive, self-serving behaviors run amok. The "mistake" the former Chairman says he made was his failure to notice signs of infection early enough to innoculate the system with just enough virus-destroying regulation to restore it to health. Sadly, however, the mistake is much bigger than just this.

And it has been with us for some time, from at least the first publication of Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, in 1776 no less. In his own right, this Scottish moral philosopher ("economics" had not been invented yet) offered something of a Declaration of Independence on his own, defending the pursuit of wealth unfettered by external powers, save that of the marketplace's own "iron hand," as not only a good but a trustworthy thing, given human beings' innate proclivity to temper the pursuit of self-interest by disinterested, rational considerations. Ironically, in the same year David Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, which dealt a death blow to the idea of a Providential Presider over human cupidity, were published posthumously as Hume himself had provided for.

200 hundred years later, the exercise of rational control over the pursuit of self-interest was rapidly going by the wayside in our own country. In the 1980's, one of the biggest market manipulators of all, Ivan Boesky, summed it up well: Greed is right. Michael Douglas' Academy Award creation, Gordon Gekko, preferred putting it as greed is good. So much for rationally-driven self-correction, either of a global economy or an individual's character.

Fellow coveters, forgive me for hyping this next sentence with caps that I usually work hard to avoid; ordinarily they remind me too much of the mindless OMG of computer-speak. But here it is: Greed IS NOT right, and it IS NOT good. It is a sin, and a deadly one at that, no matter what word may be substituted for it (envy and lust come to mind immediately). It corrupts human inclinations, character, and institutions quickly, and like compulsions and addictions in general it cannot be brought under control without the "iron hand" of regulations and regulated regulators, and without the hope that help will be available from an Almighty and Merciful hand with a grip on us that is infinitely stronger than our own.

The fact of the matter is that human beings are in general very far from being the rationally self-interested beings that Alan Greenspan apparently supposed us to be. We are much more like the Laban and Jacob of Genesis 31:49, kept at peace only by a contract which includes a petition to the Almighty to watch between them while they are apart from one another, because they cannot trust one another to do the watching themselves.

Bedmates: Marital and Political

In theological circles, a debate has been going on for some time about how to read the early chapters of Genesis on the marriage relationship. Tradition infers from them that a woman is intended to be her man's helper. Feminism does not take the ribbing in stride; women are mens' partners, and men are womens' partners, whether God said so or not. Hierarchy and subordination should not enter the picture at all. Early in the debate, good academic that I am, I lined up on both sides. The feminists are right, I believe, and Genesis, properly understood, agrees with them. Role differentiation? You betcha. Imposed upon partners without either their input or their consent? Heck no.

Applying this consideration to a present day issue necessitates getting down, dirty and, as if it did not come to the same thing, political for a minute. If the four women at the top of the campaign ladder and the one man I will get to shortly are any indication, this issue is no more settled in our society than it is in our churches. Governor Palin's gee whizzes are the campaign equivalent of elbowing her struggling-to-keep-up, so-called partner almost off the platform altogether, which may be one of the reasons she seems to have been carefully positioned behind and off center to him. By contrast, Mrs. McCain on the platform looks for all the world like the Stepford Wife that all too many men in this country still secretly wish their own wives were. At least she came out of her trance long enough to join the protests against sending our sons and daughters into battle without the proper equipment. In my reading of Genesis, though, it is the Governor who looks more like Eve. Hopefully, Mrs. McCain is more adept at pillow talk than common decency allows her to reveal.

To all outward appearances, Mrs. Biden seems the quintessential helpmate who is thoroughly her own person in the role and who is enjoying herself just as thoroughly as the genuine person she is. Somehow, I find it hard to imagine that Mrs. Obama will be content to remain quietly in the background and let her husband figure out all on his own how to get the tracks rebuilt off of which our country has been hurled. I can't help thinking that her pillow talk would run along the same lines as Mrs. Clinton's might have, softly but reinforced by a stick under her pillow big enough to propel her conversation partner to the floor with a flick of the wrist. The main idea that I hope will carry over into the next paragraph is that in a marital partnership with a President, both sexual and presidential matters should get expressed in the bedroom, not in the conference room, not in the Senate, and not on the campaign trail.

And with this idea aloft, it is time to turn to Alaska's self-proclaimed "chief dude," Todd Palin. For all of the Palins' conservative Christian background, Mr. Palin seems extraordinarily caught up in the feminist ideal of marital partnership rather than marital helpmate, even to the point of telling people what's what in the ways that the Alaska electorate thought only their governor should be doing. At least, this is what is coming out of the recently released investigative report on the real Governor Palin's not so seemly arm twisting. (To be fair, though, we could wonder why either of them would have had to buttonhole so many officials to get a hearing for their complaints about a very suspicious-acting former relative by marriage.)

It is difficult to imagine any female executive in business, industry, or the professions today who would even think of permitting their own Big Dudes unfettered access to their places of business, their offices, and their staff. And for all of my theological affinity with fellow Christians who believe that God intends spouses to be equal partners in keeping their marriages strong, in Todd Palin's case I'm all for hierarchy, subordination, and following respectfully behind the currently more powerful one in the relationship. It is wonderful to contemplate the bliss this delightful couple may continue to enjoy in begetting together. It is not so wonderful to contemplate the power they might acquire in governing the country together.

What is especially refreshing about the four women we are getting to know as a result of the current Presidential campaign is the comfort they and their spouses seem to have with the roles they have chosen to play in their own marriages. They make the possibility of settling once and for all what Genesis says about husbands and wives just a little more remote. Which may be what God has had in mind all along.

The Bailout And The Economics Of Apocalypse

As a rule of thumb, when times turn bad imagination turns psychotic and people run for cover that is no longer there. Apocalyptic thinking overwhelms careful analysis of options remaining, decisions beckoning, and outcomes possible. Futuring collapses into catastrophizing, and the wisdom of the many is denigrated by the posturing of the few, who demand unquestioning acceptance of their prophecies of what is to come for everyone except an especially privileged cadre of those willing to get themselves in touch and tune with the elemental Force(s) of the universe.

One of the most interesting things that happened in the recent messing around with ostensibly collapsing financial markets in this country and abroad was how quickly financiers and economists morphed into theologians. "Disaster, "meltdown" and even "global catastrophe" became the scare words. All of a sudden, it would seem, God had decided to shift the playing field of Armageddon from the Plain of Jezreel to the island of Manhattan, with Wall Street the newly designated romping ground for the Beast from the Abyss. The mountains about to fall on everyone, the prophetic messengers are still crying, are mountains of debt, and their crumbling will bury everyone, the profligate and the frugal, the law-flouting and the law-obeying, the goods-consuming and the goods-producing alike.

As all really impressive apocalypticists do, these guys (we did not hear much from competent female economists, and Nancy Pelosi doesn't count) moved swiftly and seductively to their flash finishes, their pretentious pronouncements of a way --- the only way --- to stave off the End, this time, of global prosperity as the formerly prosperous (that is, they and most everyone else but us) have known it. But then, the apocalyptic thinking took a turn that not even John of Patmos could have envisioned. It is not toward the time-honored way of repentance, of greed, for an obvious example; this, it would appear, is a way for only the economically simple-minded. The far more complicated way, especially of Messrs. Paulson and Bernanke, seems to be a way of repenting of repenting itself. If I understand the implications of their proposals --- and whether anyone does at this moment is unclear --- a lot of money will be made available to those whose previous investment mistakes are what fired up the Dragon in the first place, so that many of these same institutions will be able to go out and make these same mistakes again.

What mistakes? From the standpoint of MBA courses at least, the really sleazy ones appear to be so subtle and complex that it will take experts a long time to figure out how anyone managed to make them at all, not to mention making them work. Even so, it should not be beyond these experts to get their work done in time to put a stop to all the economic slicing and dicing for good. Overarching the wheeling and dealing, though, is the really fundamental issue, and it is not an issue of economics.

At the risk of oversimplification at a time when apocalypticists are calling for still more obfuscation, I wonder if the issue might not be put this way: John and/or Jane Doe want to borrow money to buy a place or maybe even a business of their own. By any reasonable standard of assessing ability to pay, neither or both can marshall the resources to pay the money back. No problem. Potential lenders size up whether either or both have the moxie to appear to be willing and able to pay it back, and on the basis of appearance rather than reality set John and/or Jane up with a mortgage, take commissions off the top, and skip town (otherwise known as pursuing other opportunities). To jump into the theological about this for just a moment, what adds flavor to the scenario is the image of a Miltonic Satan, whispering in the ears of John and/or Jane, "You can afford it; you deserve it," and in the ears of their benefactors, "You can get away with it."

For the Johns and Janes who need no prompting to make and get stuck with financial commitments they have no right to make, and for the devilish financial advisors who make an unjustifiable profit assuring their Does how right they are in their narcissism, a dose of economic hellfire and brimstone just might be the thing to bring them to their senses. Although Dante may have made us recoil at the idea of it, Purgation is not always a bad thing. But the Doe clan is a very large clan in our society today, and it includes truly innocent victims of a truly devilish system which deforms a sound theology of money (gain, save, give) into a Deceiver-inspired one (gain, spend, steal). Putting the minions of the Deceiver in charge of making the system work that they have already shown to be deserving of collapse may be a credible way of ensuring peoples' deposits, but it is hardly the way to ensure their economic future against unjust suffering.

Community Mental Health: A Forgotten Initiative

Lately, I have been conjuring with a way to settle once and for all the question of which Presidential candidate is the most committed to bringing about "real" change, that is, change that will really matter to real people and not just to Washington-minded bureaucrats. My idea was inspired by a re-reading of Matthew 25:31-46, Jesus' words about feeding the hungry, quenching peoples' thirst, being hospitable, providing clothing to the naked, caring for the sick, and visiting the imprisoned --- and his startling idea that we can expect to see him especially in the faces of the least of all of these. The body blow is delivered at vs. 45: "…anything you failed to do for one of these, however insignificant, you failed to do for me." (REB) As the most powerful nation on earth, and by our own grandiose declaration the most generous, our country has not done well with most of this little homily, except in sporadic crises. I am not the only one worried about what Jesus may make of our systemic failure some day.

A particularly distressing example of making ourselves the goats and not the sheep of God's Kingdom is our unwillingness to bring about real change in caring for the mentally ill. If there are any doubts about how far down on the food chain many of these folks are, following a few off-medication, homeless schizophrenics around a street or two downtown will dissolve those doubts in less than an hour. What makes the short-changing of the mentally ill especially noxious is that not all that long ago, we had in place at the Federal level just what would have made lasting change possible, the Community Mental Health Act, signed into law in 1963 by President John F. Kennedy. It called for building mental health centers all over the country, mostly in low-income communities, that would provide access to comprehensive treatment to to all who needed it, especially those previously warehoused in state mental hospitals. A linchpin of this approach was the empowerment of clients and communities.

During the 1980's not only the vision but the legislation died, with the systematic, federally-initiated tearing down of its own nation-wide network of by then adequately funded and staffed clinics. On the basis of "less government" ideology --- as laughable then as it is today --- money was transferred in significantly diminished amounts to the states in the form of block grants. The all too predictable result has been rising expectations met by demoralizing fiscal restraints, increased caseloads, stifling regulations, and a general falling-off in the quality and accessibility of mental health care. There is little evidence to date that our current Presidential candidates have thought very much about this desperate situation, and even less that they and their running mates have had even a single anxious moment pondering what the indifference of Christians --- all four of them included --- is doing to Jesus.

From one vantage point, of course, these failures are beyond even the possibility of correction, primarily because this country no longer has the financial resources needed to complete the job. In a word, we are broke. Not dead broke yet, but just wait. Like too many consumers with too much charged on their credit cards, government --- whether Republican or Democrat --- has run up its own (that is, our) tab too, and no politician now seems willing to say the one politically-incorrect word that would begin to fix the problem: priorities. They, like we, are more content to keep bandying about the more familiar but no longer helpful ones, such as lower taxes, less government, military hegemony, family values, entitlements, trickle down economics, and most importantly of all, consumption as the vital center of the good life. But "priorities" is the one word most in need of amplification, and the one priority most in need of an upward advance on our lists is making a decent life possible for those in our society who are least able to make it possible on their own. Rethinking the uses and misuses of accumulation can still make it happen.

So my idea for the morning is that the Presidential candidate who makes the first move to talk about this priority deserves the accolade of being considered the more serious about making a real difference and bringing about real change in society. I plan to keep on listening for the first hint from either candidate --- or from his running mate, for that matter --- that caring for those mentally ill who are least able to care for themselves matters, and matters greatly, to him/her. Without getting too weird, Fundamentalistic, or Swift-Boaty about it, I think that Jesus will be listening, too.

The Money That Buys Happiness

About the time that this year's Presidential Campaign reaches its peak intensity, many Finance Committees will be launching their churches' Stewardship Campaigns for the purpose of underwriting 2009 budgets. In megachurches at least, the slickness of the latter is likely to match and even exceed the flimflamness of the former. Hopefully, in spite of all the political and theological hype to come, we will also get exposed to some really good ideas both about rebuilding America and about what God wants us to do with money.

With respect to the second kind of green stuff, it will be hard to find anything better than John Wesley's never tiresome sermon on the subject. For Americans at least, Wesley's political judgments are best forgotten, but his three points about the uses of money (gain and save all you can, in order to give all you can) are worthy of everyone's remembering. And it will be a truly great season of fundraising if there is not even a passing reference to the idea that prosperity is a sign of God's special blessing on those who give a bunch. Getting one's name on a piece of church property or on a program in the line item budget should be reward enough. In religion, even if not in politics, access to Power and Favor should not have to be bought.

Contrary to what most of us were taught growing up, though, there may be a sense in which money can buy at least a measure of happiness in this life, even if it cannot ensure salvation in the next. Recently, a group of researchers from the University of British Columbia and Harvard Business School teamed up on three small studies designed to see if there might be some measureable relationship between spending habits and happiness. In one study, participants rated their general happiness and then gave information on how much of their earnings they spent on themselves and on others each year. Not surprisingly, the higher earners in this study were happier. But: so were those who spent higher percentages of their earnings on others, whether the earnings themselves were large or small. Now we may be getting somewhere.

A second study had to do with the relationship between happiness and how bonus money was spent. No matter what the size of their bonuses, participants in this particular study who gave higher percentages of them to others after receiving them seemed happier than those who kept more of the money for themselves. Finally, and to me more than a little reminiscent of Jesus' parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30), the researchers gave another group of participants different quantities of money which had to be spent by the end of the day. At random, half were assigned the task of buying something for themselves with it, and the other half of either buying something for others or donating the money to charity. People in the second group reported feeling happier than did people in the first. Whether they had been given a larger or a smaller amount of money in the first place made no difference in their respective reactions.

Most social science research that depends on participants' unverifiable self-reporting are open to questions and other interpretations. For example, it is always difficult to get a true before-and-after measure of the differences that specific actions do and do not make to people's feelings and affective states. And with respect to these three studies in particular, it is not clear to me whether the researchers really have "happiness" right or not. They seem to have in mind something like a pleasureable experience related to very specific actions in the here and now, whereas true happiness, whether defined by Aristotle or Jesus, has more to do with a general sense of well-being across large chunks of a lifetime. Nonetheless, I like these little studies and I am glad I came across them.

They have served to remind me of two important things about Christian living. The first is that what we are doing with our money can be a very powerful symbol of what we are and are not doing with our lives. As Wesley put it, God wants all and not just a portion of us, and because that is so, we have to find ways of making all of our money matters matter to the expression of our love for God. The second thing is that it is in losing ourselves that we find ourselves, in the embrace of a self-emptying God. And in losing ourselves for the sake of others, we find true happiness. Scientific method may not get us all the way to this understanding of things. But life in the Spirit can, and does.

Christian Broadcasting And The Fairness Doctrine

Over twenty years ago, the Federal Communications Commission deep-sixed a policy on its books which required message-oriented broadcasters to make air time available to people with opposing viewpoints. As much of an irritant as it was, it never amounted to a lot as policy. For one thing, it did not carry the full force of law. For another, it provided less than the equal time that its own "fairness" principle seemed to demand. And finally, with the expansion of broadcasting outlets, more opportunities for communicating diverse opinions weakened interest in enforcing the thing at all. I guess this is why I will never get my chance to try and demonstrate to all and sundry, on his own program, why Rush Limbaugh should never have called himself a Doctor of Democracy.

Lately, a number of Christian broadcasters around the country have been voicing concern over the possibility that the FCC's long departed Fairness Doctrine may soon be resuscitated, to the detriment of their efforts to evangelize people in Jesus' name with a take no prisoners approach to anyone and everyone whose relationship or non-relationship with the Deity is mediated by someone or something else. (Fairness requires me to acknowledge that I may not be playing entirely fair at the moment with this wing of Christendom.) Imagine, they cry: here we are, marshalling all the resources at our command to put across with every convincing argument we can that there is only one way to heaven, ours, and some disgruntled bunch of non-believers (that is, everybody who disagrees with us) is going to put in for equal time to stick it to God's only Son all over again.

It is true that Christian broadcasters as a group have considerable power to influence social policies in this country. For instance, immigration reform may have stalled out in Congress because they inspired enough voters to rise up against the only reasonable approach to it, a comprehensive one. And so, it is also true that people who vehemently disagree with their typically archly-conservative take on the gospel message, or for that matter with purveying the gospel message in any form, might be open to consider making it more difficult for them to practice their profession under the guise of exercising their calling. At first glance, reinstating the Fairness Doctrine might be one way to go about it.

It may have been that first glance that lay behind House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's recent saber-rattling support of reviving the so-called Fairness Doctrine. But surely it was only that. Ms. Pelosi is too able a legislator not to glance longer and much more intently at the First Amendment. Personally, I think that most Christian Broadcasting represents a not so thrilling return to the days of yesteryear, when Catholics and Protestants were always at each others' throats, Protestants were always at each others' exegeses, all of them were always at their constituents' wallets, and genuine inquirers were at the point of giving up on religion altogether. Nevertheless, I think Christian broadcasters have as much right to pollute our radios, televisions, fancy cell phones, and computers as house-flippers, hip-hoppers, game show hosts, and self-indulgent political commentators do, and as much right as I have to recommend to all and sundry that we would all be better off just saying "No" to the whole gaggle of programs. Respect for religious freedom runs deep in this society, and if push should in fact come to shove over bringing the Fairness Doctrine back in broadcasting, the most likely scenario is that our passion to protect this freedom will trump it.

In a word, and the word is "incredible," the paranoia among at least some Christian broadcasters over the return of the Fairness Doctrine is full of it. But so is the view that in order to be counted as a true believer, one must think only in black and white, either-or, our-way-is-the-only-way terms and that those for whom truth is often to be found in the gray areas in between the extremes must be deemed instruments of Satan. Well, ok: go to it, guys. And I promise to stand with you in opposition to any policy aimed at giving me "equal time" to rebut you. But while I take my own sweet time trying to correct your seriously misguided theology, forgive me if I choose not to provide you any space at all in this blog for you to respond. E-mail me directly instead, and our disputes can be just between us. Perhaps we might begin with your telling me just why you think your understanding of faith escapes contamination from the sinfulness that you ascribe to all the rest of us.

The Serenity Prayer

Who would have thought that people could get out of sorts over the authorship of a prayer? Particularly a prayer as magnificent as this one: "God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other." But out of sorts some are, ironically over who should get the credit for an eloquent composition about serenity.

In all likelihood this is currently the best known prayer in the English language, with the obvious exception of the Lord's Prayer. Reinhold Niebuhr, a much appreciated Protestant moral theologian of the last century, was long thought to have composed it, sometime during the Second World War. Lately, his authorship has been cast into doubt by discoveries from new databases suggesting that the prayer was already in circulation --- with slightly different phrasings and from very different sources --- as early as 1936.

Although Niebuhr frequently referred to himself as the prayer's author, he also was open to the possibility that he simply assimilated its basic ideas from earlier, forgotten sources. However, Niebuhr's daughter, Elisabeth Sifton, is more protective of her father's authorship; in fact, she wrote a whole book about the prayer as embracing the vital center of his thought. (The Serenity Prayer: Faith and Politics in Times of Peace and War). In subsequent interviews, she has tended to get a little testy with her questioners.

I hope that this "controversy" resists going anywhere. The prayer stands on its own, whoever its author may have been, and with all due respect to Ms. Sifton, Niebuhr's reputation has hardly anything to do with his uses of it. The goings-on, however, have gotten me thinking again about some of the many things that I have learned from reading and listening to Reinhold Niebuhr, this time with the Serenity Prayer in mind. One thing that Ms. Sifton is surely right about is that the context for this prayer and for her father's writings was something very different from "the prevailing self-congratulatory cheeriness" of twentieth-century American Protestantism.

The sad truth is that this attitude is still the norm in most American organizations today, from the proliferation of restaurant franchises all the way to the construction of taller and taller skyscrapers and church steeples. More is better, and there is no reason why people everywhere should not be enjoying still more. The Kingdom of God in America, to borrow a reference from Reinhold Niebuhr's brother, Richard, is still a kingdom primarily for the up-beat, for whom only growth should count, only profit should matter, and only optimists should flourish. It is a kingdom whose truly faithful members, in the phrasing of one University president for whom I once worked, never retreat (he hated the idea of pre-school year "Retreats") but only advance. They never flinch from grabbing greater market share, other churches' members, and other countries' resources and even their sovereignty. They never waver in their conviction that in the eyes of God, the good life is there for the taking and that every day, in every way, the world should be getting better and better.

For Reinhold Niebuhr, serenity, courage, and wisdom are anything but there for the taking. All three are threatened with compromise from moment to moment by the self-centeredness of a culture that has become even more narcissistic than it was when Christopher Lasch first diagnosed it with this term, and by the co-opting of social organizations and governments for purely selfish purposes by people --- religious people included --- who are absolutely certain that divine and natural laws are cooperating fully with their every venture. From this perspective, serenity means only satiation; courage means only aggression; and wisdom means only calculatedness.

If Niebuhr did not in fact pen the Serenity Prayer, it would still be true to say that no one understood better than he did why it has to begin the way it does. It is a petition to God to grant to us, not because we deserve them, but because God is gracious and merciful, virtues that we do not in fact have and can never develop wholly on our own. Left to our own devices, we are more likely to seek serenity from a bottle, courage from Swift-Boating super-patriots, and wisdom from anyone and everyone who never disagrees with us about anything. As Niebuhr knew only too well, it is by grace alone that we have any real hope of seeing these virtues as God does, and developing them in ourselves as God wants.

Getting To Heaven In More Ways Than One

There was a time during my years on a theology school's faculty when I began to wonder whether seminaries were becoming the place to go for healing from the abuses that sick churches heap upon their members in the interest of saving souls from hell. A number of my students told me very disturbing things about growing up in the church, and were worried whether they would ever fully recover from it. The fictional (I hope) Prophetic Mission Church of Jonah, Indiana, which Haven Kimmel described in her Faulkneresque novel, The Used World, reminds me a lot of what they shared with me.

Prophetic Mission was one of those sealed off from the world churches which evoke bewilderment, anguish, and even horror: no associations with outsiders, no movies, TV, dancing, alcohol, travel, sex except --- and you are somehow just supposed to "know" how to get into it then ---, obey the (male) elders, discipline the wayward, ostracize those when discipline fails. In short, spare no threats or punishments in the service of a loving Jesus. And also: treat Catholics as members of a demonic sect, and get washed in the blood of the Lamb in preparation for the coming world-wide, angel-sent slaughter of Jews, Lutherans, Episcopalians, Muslims, Hindus, Unitarians, Mormons, and all the members of Peace and Pentecostal churches as well. Rebekah Shook, one of the three heroines of Kimmel's novel, left this church around her 23rd birthday, and her life was never the same. It was worse. At least until the happy ending of the book.

The Prophetic Mission Church proclaimed with vengeance one and only one way to salvation, its own. Just as Christianity has and does, sometimes with the violence that Rebekah's elders at least had the decency to leave to their badly calumnied God, and not to themselves. I have never been able to appreciate deforming the message that God is Love into a summons to go out into the highways and byways and compel non-believers ("infidels" is the word trumped up by Christianity; Muslims later on borrowed it for their own purposes) to come in by any means necessary, conversion by conquest the especially favored one. If John's Gospel did indeed get Jesus' words right, to the effect that no one comes to the Father except by him, the Way that Jesus taught to the Father was nevertheless a very different one than it has often been understood to be. Jesus' way is the way of leaving the judging of others to God, and the way of grace-filled, uncompromising, unconditional loving and serving, especially of people who do not love us and who do not serve anybody but themselves.

So what does all this have to with anything anyway? Well, this: we have recently learned, again from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, that around 70% of this country's adults no longer see religion in the terms of the elders of Rebekah Shook's cast-off Prophetic Mission Church. More specifically, a lot of Americans are no longer convinced that there is one and only way to God, or salvation, or heaven. The hard data that yields this finding warrants closer scrutiny, of course, and will get it in the months and possibly years to come. But from what I have studied of the Pew survey so far, one especially important finding is that acknowledging other ways of being religious does not seem to diminish confidence in one's own. It only indicates a greater humility about the capacity of any one religion or religious group to discern the mind and will of God. If this finding proves out, it will give the lie to a treasured assumption of One Way types, that even considering the possibility that there might be truth in a very different religious outlook from yours can only weaken your own personal faith.

I have little doubt that people who still hold to the view that the pearly gates are at the end of only one road will be distressed by this survey and the conclusions that are being drawn from it. Hopefully, in their distress, they will find a way to avoid what became common early in Christian history, the following up of very personal and institutional confessions of faith with very public demands that hearers agree with them or face being rejected not only by the community of faith, but by God as well. It is not what Christianity asks people to believe that can make life miserable for people. It is what Christianity demands that they deny. Loving Jesus more does not have to mean loving less those who do not know enough about him to love him at all.

Coming To Faith (2)

Most Christians I knew when I was a teen-ager talked and acted like they had all read Horace Bushnell's Christian Nurture together. They were comfortable with their faith, saw to it that their children had opportunities to learn the same things that they themselves learned in Sunday School, and worked hard to make their churches places to which everyone in their families would want to come. It puzzled me that they so rarely asked questions or entertained doubts about any of their beliefs. Even so, I envied them. Those days, I was trying to find a way back into the church that did not involve altar calls, second baptisms, and the crucifixion of intellectual integrity. In the South Florida version of the Bible Belt in which I was raised, histrionics like these made up the only alternative I knew to just growing up in the church and not making a big deal of it.

Friends who, in Bushnell's classic phrasing, never knew themselves not to be Christian, seemed to have had it a lot easier than I did. To me, their version of the Christian life looked just plain cozy, a balm in Gilead for my doubt-sick soul. About all the faith-based worrying that I could pick up from them was whether Jesus might see what they were doing in their parked cars on Saturday nights after the football games. Coming to faith on other peoples' terms, though, whether of the elders in their congregations or of the tent preachers in the parks downtown, simply was not an option for me at the time, and it is not an option for a lot of people now.

Sometimes I think that if these were our only ways to come to faith --- the evangelical way, and what I previously called the nurture-ist one --- then the first is surely less preferable than the second. Decisions for faith made in the heat of hell-fire-and-damnation preaching, or of a powerful conversion experience wrought by the Holy Spirit alone, impressive as they may be initially, are nevertheless notorious for their lack of staying power. More reliable are affirmations elicited at the right time and in the right ways from family members' subtle and even not so subtle pressuring, or from not wanting to be left out when everybody else in the group is kneeling at the chancel rail for confirmation, or from wanting to get in on all the good stuff that big churches in particular now offer in abundance. The rise of mega-churches, with the bigger-is-better mentality of the people who build them, make even more attractive the model of always-been/always-will-be-Christian. Womb to tomb nurture is the idea, wrapped around edifices, programs, and comparatively little outreach, except the kind that seeks only to connect more and more people to the edifices and the programs.


But nurture-ists leave no more room than evangelicals do for people to come to faith on the basis of a carefully thought out decision. The fact of the matter is that they are not very comfortable with decision-making at all, except perhaps at the time of baptism, in churches practicing believers' baptism, or of confirmation, if infant baptism is the norm. That anyone should have to make a decision, anguished or perfunctory, about believing in God at any other time is a sign less of opportunity and more of a break-down in the church's ministry of nurture. Ideally, people should not have to think about things like this at all. Evangelicals, by contrast, give every appearance of emphasizing coming to faith by way of decision, But in their case, appearances are deceiving. For evangelicals, the only decision that people should have to make about coming to faith is a decision whose terms are wholly defined in advance: come to their version of faith, or have no faith at all.

Neither approach that I have been describing fully addresses what today's spiritually hungry most need and deserve: a faith they can call their own, which embodies their most considered reflections about life, the world, God, and getting ready for what is to come, on earth and in heaven. There is no way to come to faith like this except by learning about and facing squarely as many alternatives to it as human beings have proved themselves capable of generating at all times and everywhere, and considering at every step of the way the possibility that one or more of these alternatives --- mythological, philosophical, religious, ethical --- may make more sense, for a while at least, than Christianity does. Faith worth holding onto is faith built upon respectful deliberation about alternatives to it, and not upon fearful refusal to acknowledge that there are any alternatives worthy of "good" Christians' respect and deliberation at all.

Coming To Faith (1)

My first week in Divinity School, I fell in love with its chapel-dominated residential quadrangle. On the southwestern corner of the quad sat a residential building, my own, named after the nineteenth-century American pastor and theologian, Horace Bushnell. It soon occurred to me that a proper respect for my surroundings should include gaining at least a minimal understanding of Bushnell's legacy, so I headed off to the library, picked out one of his writings pretty much at random, and started reading. It was Bushnell's classic study on Christian nurture (1847), and it affected me so much that I could not put it down until I had finished it.

The most important idea I took away from the book was that faith, developed gradually in a caring community of faith, can be just as much to God's glory as faith evoked in a single instant under the influence especially of revivalist preaching. I admit to having approached Bushnell's book with a bias already formed in his direction. Where I had come from, even though the shouting, stomping, and sweating forms of revivalism were somewhat looked down upon, the essence of revivalism still prevailed, as it does today in most forms of Christian evangelicalism: a personal, deeply affecting experience of Jesus Christ as one's personal Savior and Lord, openly acknowledged, is taken for granted as the only true entrance into the life of faith, and church folk who cannot claim such an experience are behind-in-the-race Christians whose reaching the goal line is still in doubt. As dusty as Bushnell's book was when I pulled it off its shelf, it was still like a breath of the freshest Connecticut air to me at the time.

Some of the problems I had with revivalism, and have now with evangelicalism, I know are rather petty in the grand scheme of things. Classical church music counts for little in this sphere of Christendom, but I should probably get over being such a curmudgeon about it. And as for all the uplifted hands and eyes business, I could simply stop looking when the cameras put the innocent so embarrassingly on display. But my other problems with this way of coming to faith are not so easily minimized. Appreciation of the fullness of Christian history --- especially the bad stuff that should never be repeated, but is --- counts for even less than the music I like, and serious probing of the scriptures counts for almost nothing at all. I concede that more than just lip service is paid by most evangelicals to the idea that conversion is only the beginning and not the culmination of faith. Even so, recounting, massaging, and laying on others what is in fact a very personal, private experience all too often seems the end in itself.

But Bushnell's understanding of the Christian life has its own problems --- although bad musical taste is not typically one of them --- and they are at least as serious as those with which revivalists/evangelicalists should be dealing. Properly dispensed, Bushnell argued, Christian nurture should leave people with a feeling that there has never been a time when they were not fully the Christian people they now are. Instead of being almost-Christians awaiting the next revivalist to scare them into commitments with nightmare-inducing apocalyptic fulminations, believers deserve to feel that they are always-Christians, formed in the image of their Master without ever having to think too much about it, and certainly without having to endure too many of those awful dark nights of the soul. (Actually, for nurture-ists, if I may call them that, even one such night is one too many.)

The obvious problem here is that, if Bushnell's idea is taken at face value, no Christian would ever have to decide for himself or herself to be Christian at all. Faith would become only affiliative in character, that is, a faith that "we" and "they" hold rather than a faith that "I" hold, for whatever reason "I" choose to hold it, whether on the basis of a conversion experience, thinking things out for myself, or whatever. On the matter of coming to a personally owned faith, the evangelicals are right: holding to someone else's beliefs is not enough. Beliefs must become one's own, for one's own reasons.

Where the evangelicals go wrong, though, is over their rejection of the importance of having one's own reasons for coming to faith. For them, only some reasons count --- theirs. Where, more specifically, the nurture-ists go wrong, and how proponents of both views can at last begin to get things right, is the subject of the next column.

A Postmortem On Pulpit Malfeasance

Many good things have come from this year's Presidential Primaries. Especially among the Democrats, younger voters got involved early and stayed involved, even if by themselves they could not determine the outcome. At the same time, among the Republicans, early concerns about the winner's age were finally trumped by perceptions of his competence. Now, there are real issues and very divergent perspectives on America's future to be debated, and many special interests along racial, ethnic, gender, age, and economic lines to be reconciled. A likely high voter turn-out in November (assuming in particular that the Democratic Party does not self-destruct before then) should provide just the kind of referendum that politicians typically wait for before actually doing something for the country instead of pandering to their own supporters.

Everyone I know has his and her list of not-so-good things that have come from this same political process. Not surprisingly, no two lists are identical. I would like to think, however, that there is at least one item that all share in common: the utterly disgraceful performances of three pulpiteers in particular, so mind-numbingly reprehensible as to occasion formal statements of dissociation by Senators Obama and McCain. Obama seemed especially cursed by preacher types. Apparently, Jeremiah Wright's black liberationist racism was not enough to turn him completely off, but Michael Pfleger's contemptible one-upsmanship from Wright's former pulpit finally did in the presumptive nominee's well-intentioned, and otherwise admirable, spirit of tolerance and church loyalty. What disturbs me especially about both flaps in Trinity Church is how many dudgeon-filled members may still be there after the Obamas found it necessary to leave the place. (Did you watch the reactions from the pews to Father Pfleger's spiritually obscene performance?)

And then there is Reverend John Hagee, for a time a bane of Senator McCain's existence. In this part of the country, at least, Hagee is well known to thoughtful Christians as one of the least thoughtful around, but also as one of the most effective, especially in rallying large numbers of similarly logic-challenged fundamentalists, creationists, Zionists, apocalypticists, and Catholic-haters from all walks of Christendom. Somehow, the Senator's staff failed to prevent him from expressing a naïve over-appreciativeness of Hagee's support early in the campaign, but finally discovered the handwriting on the wall and helped to extricate the former Episcopalian from what might have been fall-out on an order of magnitude equal to Obama's.

Floating serenely above these controversies was the almost indomitable Hillary Clinton, whose Methodism has never earned her the credit she deserves for trying to live her life in accordance with it. She, too, however, is not above using Sunday Services and pulpits to her own ends, and in this respect she was just as vulnerable as her opponents in both political parties were. Who knows what unseemly associations presently undiscovered might have eventually made the news had she gone on to be the Democratic Party's nominee? (Although the Methodist pulpiteers I know that she knows are pretty trustworthy, even admirable pastors. You know who you are, so take a quiet bow before you leave your offices today.)

As this campaign continues, Barack Obama and John McCain should share openly the ways that their faith and their faith-pilgrimages have informed and are informing how they think (in contrast with what they think) about the issues with which our society must deal in the years ahead. Hopefully, though, they will do the sharing in places other than Christian pulpits, unless their schedules can somehow be engineered to allow them to show up at the same church on the same Sunday morning and have at it, with God and not fawning preachers or frenzied parishioners as their judge. Politically active preachers easily forget that their parishioners, for the most part, constitute captive audiences of people too polite to give them the what-for they deserve when they conscript their pulpits for purposes of ideological wrangling and then dismiss arbitrarily all and sundry whose views differ in the slightest degree from their own.

God's great gift of freedom to every human being is powerfully manifested whenever people who are called to the ministry of preaching and interpretation use their own gift responsibly, especially by helping those to whom they minister understand better the complexities of the human condition, of societal change, and the difficulties of making progress on anything without encouraging and respecting the opinions of everyone who will be affected by anyone's decisions. I am thankful that the irresponsible behavior of three preachers who should know better raised as many hackles as it did. Maybe the reactions will remind other preachers who aim to speak God's truth rather than political ideology to speak that truth gracefully, intelligently, and with love.

Coming To Faith The Hard Way

For some time, Donald Haynes has been writing interesting and challenging columns for the United Methodist Reporter, a high quality denominational newspaper. In a recent piece, he details what he believes has gone wrong with the denomination's efforts to transmit its theological heritage effectively to its members. One assertion in particular is a real eye-poker, to the effect that emphasis on the development of character through "rational enlightenment" has been substituted for emphasis on the making of disciples through openness to the Holy Spirit. With respect especially to the nurturing of children in the church, conversion has been replaced by confirmation.

In this season of Confirmation Sundays in many churches, I have been thinking a lot about this remark. One of my own most memorable experiences of how confirmation can go wrong, in Dr. Haynes' sense, involved a family's surprise turn-up at the chancel rail during a worship service one Sunday morning. They came with with their 12-year-old daughter, whom I had received into membership the previous week with her Confirmation Class. As the family made its way with great dignity down the center aisle during the second hymn, a staff member raced in from the side to thrust a bowl of water into my hands and explain quickly that the parents had forgotten to mention before confirmation training began that their daughter had never been baptized, and that they had just revealed this fact as the rest of us were proceeding into the sanctuary with the choir.

It did not seem to me to be a big deal at the moment to shift into the baptismal liturgy and bring this newest church member's initiation experience to conclusion, even if in reverse order. But to our quickly intensifying consternation, the deal was big to her, although not in the way any of us could have expected. She --- I will call her Betsy --- looked at her parents with anguish, asked plaintively what she was doing up there, fidgeted when her mother reminded her that "we've been all through this," and then, with a little prodding from her dad, smiled sweetly as she answered the questions I asked her and as she let me drip water on her head.

After the service that morning, I tracked down Betsy in the Fellowship Hall to see if she would share with me what had been going on with her earlier. She told me that she had known that she was the only member of her Confirmation Class who had not been baptized, but that she saw no reason why this should get in the way of getting signed up for church membership with all of her peers. "After all,'' she said, "I got all my homework right." For a moment, I wondered if there might be any way to declare a baptism null and void.

But baptism is not the real issue here; conversion is. Not in the sense that Dr. Haynes uses the latter term. He seems to mean by it a personal experience of some sort, as a prerequisite to living the Christian life with some sense of accountability, and that encouraging it should be made something like a linchpin of the discipling process. I am not sure about this, and I will not accept his attribution "liberal" for not being sure about it. What I am sure about is that the Christian gospel does both speak of and call for conversion in the sense of a conscious decision to turn one's attitude, decision-making, behavior, and relationships in a direction imitative of Jesus', and that without conversion in this sense, we have at best only the outward form of faith, without the inner substance. Betsy finished confirmation training, as did her classmates, un-converted in this latter sense. And it was almost inevitable that she and they would do so, for the reason that Dr. Haynes cites: teaching people about things --- some of them even religious --- has become an easier way to bring and keep them in the church than praying for them to be converted.

I cannot agree with Donald Haynes that modern Christian education is the great spoiler of preaching enthusiastically for conversion and of learning truly about sin and grace. But I cannot agree with modern educational approaches that make Christian learning too easy, either. Censoring the Old Testament, apocalypticizing the Lord Jesus, and deifying the dogmas, by way of examples, make genuine conversion all the more difficult. The lonesome valley that leads to faith is one that each must travel alone, in part by asking all the questions we can think of along the way, and hoping sometimes against hope that there will be an educator or two turning up every now and then who knows the importance of not making the struggle too easy for us.

One More Time Around On Homosexuality

Recently, the United Methodist Church's General Conference reaffirmed the denomination's long-standing position that homosexual practice is "incompatible" with Christian teaching. In the minds of many, the harshness of this position can still be offset by holding to a distinction between personhood, orientation, and practice, and confining the condemnation (it amounts to just that, a condemnation) to the latter. But a conceptual distinction like this yields at best only a trembling foundation upon which to base the denomination's teaching on homosexuality.

The trembling must have been pretty evident throughout the most recent deliberations. What came to the Conference for action was the majority recommendation of a legislative committee to replace the traditional statement about incompatibility with a more irenic one acknowledging that faithful people disagree about homosexuality and that all together still seek a "faithful witness" on the matter. Eventually, roughly five delegates out of every nine agreed that there was no disagreement among the faithful on the matter, and then went on to reject the majority report of the committee and to vote to retain the current statement in The Book of Discipline. About four out of every nine agreed that there was in fact disagreement on the matter, and agreed to disagree with the majority who voted against the majority report, by voting for the majority report. (Are you getting all this? Not every delegate did.) So much for the search, together, for a faithful witness, until perhaps at yet the next General Conference, four years down the road.

Hopefully, whether "United" or not, Methodists will not wait this long. For there are a number of things to keep thinking about as a result of this recently concluded gathering. For one, I at least was pleasantly surprised at the extent of support for the recommendation to get rid of the incompatibility reference in the denomination's present statement on homosexuality. It suggests that a respectable majority of the next generation of General Conference delegates may be ready to acknowledge honestly the fact that there is disagreement, and a lot of it, among conscientious Christians everywhere on the issue of homosexuality. In light of this fact, any church's blanket declaration of its incompatibility with Christian teachings is premature, arrogant, and un-Christianly alienating.

Two other things happened in the midst of this latest debate that especially caught my eye. One was the very influential speech of Eddie Fox, the World Methodist Council's director of world evangelism and as fine a candidate for Protestant sainthood as I know. But even saints run amok theologically sometimes, just like the rest of us do even more often. On the issue of homosexuality, I have to part company with this much admired colleague in ministry. Eddie sees it as a violation of an "order of creation" which he believes Jesus enunciated at Matthew 19:4-6, going back to Genesis' account of God's creation of men and women and of the marriage relationship.

Dear friend in Christ, I know you take this whole passage as from the Master himself, but for the life of me I myself cannot reconcile it with Mark 10, according to which this same Jesus provided no escape clause from marriage of any sort, not even for adultery (contrast Matthew 19:9). I am not nit-picking here, my brother. These differences simply mean that we cannot settle big issues about human sexuality without a lot more work on understanding biblical passages, especially those in conflict with one another, contextually as well as normatively. And then, of course, there is the frequently overlooked fact that arguments from "the order of creation" can be and have been put to outrageous uses that include the justification of slavery, the oppression of women, and the prohibition of abortion, all the way to the refusal of blood transfusions for a severely injured child.

The second thing that caught my eye about the General Conference debate on homosexuality was its relatively tortured quality, compared to the ease with which another issue of human sexuality --- transgender identity --- slid by with almost no public attention at all. Remember reading about the United Methodist pastor who "transitioned" from female to male, and retained his pastoral appointment in the process? A lot of people were salivating over the prospect of the Conference's taking action that would have removed this (man) from the ordained ministry. I think the delegates are owed a round of applause for not doing so. The "order of nature" is obviously a lot more complicated than most people like to think it is, and it is especially complicated when the value judgments we make about sexual identity and sexual preference are at stake. One woman achieves the first by embracing her masculine side within herself. Another achieves it by embracing her feminine side within a same-sex relationship. To God, what's the difference?

Getting In The Mood For Pentecost: Some Thoughts On The Gift Of Interpretation

Paul's letters make embarrassingly clear that all was anything but well a lot of the time in some of his congregations. To his frequent dismay, power struggles often trumped sacrificial actions, posturing overwhelmed humility, and a worn-out legalism kept drowning out his message that all things were becoming new. As if all of this were not enough, God's own Spirit may have been making matters even worse, by sending to Paul's people a whole range of spiritual gifts that they promptly misused to stir up even more trouble among the faithful.

From his own account at least, one gift of the Spirit proved especially divisive, the gift of "tongues." Admittedly, it is hard to know just what Paul did and did not have in mind when he wrote on the subject. Sometimes, he referred to tongue-speaking as unintelligible sounds; at other times his references were to a language, but one whose meaning is either unknown by anyone, or known only to angels. His big point, though, seems clear enough: speaking in tongues can convey what God wants his people to understand, but if and only if what is spoken is subjected to interpretation, by those with the gift, also from the Spirit, to do so.

The problem, though, is that Paul did not tell us how someone with the gift of interpretation is to go about taking allegedly divinely inspired utterances that no one but the utterer understands initially and then transforming them into a message from God for all, including the tongue-speaker. And his not doing so leaves us with a number of questions to puzzle over. For instance, is the interpretation of something said in tongues directly inspired by God's Spirit in the same way that the tongue-speaking itself is said to be, or does the interpreter have both the freedom and responsibility to bring the meaning to light on his or her own terms? Paul, wisely it seems to me, seemed to think the latter.

But following him on this point leads to another question: if a particular act of interpretation, even if divinely inspired, is also a human and not merely a divine act, how do those of us who listen to it attain any kind of certainty that the interpretation really does say what God intended the tongue-speaking to say in the first place? Or: how can we know for sure that the interpreter is not merely substituting his or her own ideas for God's original ones? Do we need still another interpreter to help us sort out the work of the first one? And what about the tongue-speaker himself or herself? Must he or she concur with a particular interpretation for the rest of us to accept that interpretation as the right one? Given the very great difference that Paul seems to have had in mind between tongue-speaking and the interpretation of it, I even wonder whether a tongue-speaker could ever be in a position to understand, much less assess, anyone's interpretation of what he or she had just said.

What especially interests me about the gift of interpretation is the wide range of similarities there seem to be between its exercise on tongue-speaking and the interpretation of all kinds of other human expressions of meaning. It is as if God is continuing to bestow the gift of interpretation, in ways beyond mere human comprehending to be sure, but upon very human seekers after meaning and truth in and beyond the Bible everywhere. Could it be that the gift of interpretation is a gift that makes it possible for people in every generation to trust that throughout all of human experience, the most fundamental truth of all, the truth of saving grace, is always accessible?

Not long ago, I meandered through a stunning exhibition of paintings by a Mexican Surrealist painter, Enrique Chaverria. My knowledge of Jungian archetypes, incomplete to be sure, helped me to get at least some of his meaning, in a few of his paintings at least, but without input from the exhibit's director and without scanning quite a lot of literature about Echavarria, what I would have ended up with would have been my own eisegesis (reading-into, rather than reading-out-of) of what the painter was trying to say. And I would have missed out on the altogether more exciting process of discovering meaning alongside of other very human creatures like myself. Interpretation, whether of tongues, or of our dreams, our Bibles, and even of our preacher's most God-inspired sermons --- is in the final analysis a communal venture, and that is what makes it so interesting.

The Conservative/Liberal Divide: Narrowing?

For more years than I like to remember, conservatives and liberals in the church have been going at each other with toxic combinations of calumny, caricature, and contempt, pitting true believers against thoughtful ones, rejecting theology for ideology, and making a mockery of oneness in Christ and fools of themselves in the bargain. If God had had any idea that "reasoning together" (Isaiah 1:18 --- better: "arguing it out") would lead to such spirit-numbing impasses, I doubt that he would have ever issued the invitation in the first place. Taking him up on it in the ways that we have seemed most wont to do has made for some very ugly disputes that cannot fail to turn off a lot of genuine inquirers into the faith, and to make them wonder whether they might be better off for now and maybe forever in somebody else's sheepfolds.

Could it be that these rancorous and decidedly unenlightening debates might, finally, be taking a turn or two toward light instead of heat? They just might be. Consider, for instance, how difficult it has been for religious extremists on either side of this ideological divide to get even an initial, much less a sustained hearing in the current political debate for positions that until recently have kept their constituencies frothing at the mouth.

Instead of the same-old-same-old conservative fulminations against gay sex, abortions, illegal immigrants, and estate taxes, we are getting serious and credible rhetoric protesting environmental pollution, genocide, world hunger, and inadequate health care. And instead of the not-so-old but not-very-helpful liberal ranting against a racist America, the greedy wealthy, free trade, and security at the expense of freedom, we are getting serious and credible rhetoric on --- you guessed it --- eliminating pollution, genocide, world hunger, and disease. It is almost as if it has crossed the minds of our most dug-in conservatives and liberals that working with each other just might get us further after all than will their continuing to challenge each other's rationality, morality, and maternal lineage.

There are at least some signs on the horizon that a similar process of crossing enemy lines may be underway in our churches. One is that the generations-old, much respected, but thoroughly indefensible dichotomy between getting our souls right with God and meeting our neighbors' needs on his behalf may be softening more than a little. Many conservative Christians have been out-doing even more liberal ones for quite some time now on well-doing for others, not the least reason for which, I think, is that more liberals than in a long time have been about the also proper business of seeking a personal relationship with Christ in fellowship with others whom Christ has already found.

Another sign is a growing willingness to recalibrate the thermostats on hot issues, so that we can touch their buttons without getting burned so badly. A good example is the discussion on abortion in Adam Hamilton's admirable new book, Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White. Hamilton, founding pastor of one of the largest United Methodist churches on the planet, argues that while abortion still should be viewed as a remedy of last resort, it is on some occasions the only reasonable remedy, and that there is no justification for removing it either by statute or by social or ecclesial condemnation. What is significant about this argument is that it comes from an extraordinarily competent pastor who is arguably one of Christian conservatism's most eloquent voices.

At the other end of the theological spectrum, the recent Jeremiah Wright flap also proves instructive. Barack Obama's political fortunes aside, the reaction to the revelation of Rev. Wright's pulpit wrong-headedness from most Christian liberals with whom I have talked offers a good bit of hope that the radical, throw Momma from the train brand of liberal Christianity may finally be sliding over the edge itself, and good riddance. I take it as a good sign that very capable African-American pastors chose to offer only perspective on, rather than agreement with, the good Reverend as their own response to his blatant and long espoused racism.

Of course, a book and a few tapes do not a cultural trend make. But behind Adam Hamilton's latest contribution there are also new efforts stirring among editors to seek out for publication less polemical and more unifying discussions of healing a polarized church and society, just as there are sermons being preached every Sunday in a new mode of bridging racial, ethnic, and gender conflicts exacerbated for decades by mean-spirited pastoring, groundless theology, and overzealous axe-grinders everywhere. Let the new genre of books and sermons abound.

Getting It Right On Bible Courses In Schools

If a recent decision of the State Board of Education in Texas is any indication, there are a lot of ways not to get this right. After approving "broad guidelines" for an elective course on the Bible in high schools, the Board apparently then found itself flummoxed by the Texas Legislature's initial mandate that left unspecified whether all school districts will or will not be required to offer the course in the first place. Both bodies are leaving this question for the State's Attorney General to answer. In the meantime, the Board of Education is delaying proposing specific curriculum requirements and content standards for the recommended course until the A.G. answers it.

Where might we begin sorting through a mess like this? With a state legislature's malfeasance in passing yet another law with easily spotted bugs in it? With an Attorney General forced to muck around with issues that properly should have been decided by educators, not educational administrators and not school bureaucrats, in the first place? With a School Board bogged down because of an unwillingness to take fully into account what freedom of religion does and does not imply for the teaching of religion in our schools? For now, I'll settle for a few thoughts on the latter.

My first thought is that it is a good thing for high school students to have an opportunity to study the Bible's impact on history, literature, and culture, in a separate course devoted to just this subject. My second is that it is not a good thing to offer a Bible course in any context that even remotely resembles a devotional or a proselytizing one, particularly of the sort revered by Bible-massaging evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants who believe to the depths of their souls that its pages "containeth all things necessary for salvation," and that only they, of all the sacred scriptures of all the world's religions, does this. My third thought is that Bible courses that incorporate my first thought are likely to be good courses, and that Bible courses that do not incorporate my second thought are not.

And so it bothers me some that the Texas Board of Education has not yet seen fit to be very explicit about what sort of Bible course it will be that their kids and grandkids will be letting themselves in for. One of the most popular around the country these days, put together by a National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools, has already been analyzed and found wanting by a number of religious studies scholars whom I know and respect, and if I may be bold to say so, my own reaction to its voluminous materials is even more negative than some of theirs. Those for whom this course appears to be lacking in solid scholarship can make a good case for looking elsewhere.

Devotional, proselytizing approaches to Bible study may be acceptable in churches (even though I think they still make for largely irrelevant Christian education), but they have no place in public education, lower, higher, or anywhere in between. And until the Texas Board comes out and says this in no uncertain terms, I hope that school districts will find a way to hold back all the God fearing, frothing at the mouth, washed in the blood Christians in their communities who can't wait to have at all the impressionable young infidels in their midst. The intention of the Texas Legislature in 2007 seems clearly to have been in the direction of asking for a course that focuses on the contributions the Bible has made to human culture, not a course that indoctrinates. It might have helped had the potential contribution been defined bi-modally, that is, in the direction of emphasizing just as strongly the contributions that culture has made to the formation and the transmission of the Bible. But at the very least, the Legislature has made possible a rigorous study of the Bible in secondary schools, in contrast with an inappropriate invasion of them by religious zealots who should be focusing more on their day jobs. Hopefully, the Board of Education will quickly head off any prospect of the latter.

In the final analysis, though, what the world needs now is not just a spreading of Scriptural Christianity across the land(s), but also a new openness to how the Lord and Giver of Life is already embodied in human nature generally and is manifest wherever men and women devote themselves sacrifically to seeking and finding what is truly Holy. Hey, legislators and school board members: how about a little more attention to the religious experience and the religions of all humankind, and not just Christians'?

The Churning Of Religious Affiliation

Recently, the highly respected Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released a well-researched study on religious affiliation in America. Its findings yield an interesting mix of confirmation, surprise, and questions for further reflection. In the first place, the study confirms a prevailing opinion of researchers that a large majority of Americans identify themselves as religious, but not always in the form of institutional --- or, in Protestant Christian terms, "denominational" --- loyalty. In my words and not Pew's, we seem to be able to move on rather easily, without much anxiety or guilt, from the religious affiliation or non-affiliation of our childhood, to make our own affiliative choices in adulthood. Second, the Pew report offers further confirmation of two other well-established beliefs. One is that mainline Protestantist denominations continue to decline, while non-denominational Protestant groups continue to grow. The other is that the single fastest growing religious category of people in America is the category of "unaffiliated."

One surprise from the Pew study is that religious affiliation may be even more fluid than previously supposed. Not only do we feel a lot of freedom to move our affiliations around, whenever we choose; we actually do move them around, and in large numbers. 40% of Baptists and Lutherans have done so, as have more than 50% of Methodists, Presbyterians, and Pentecostals. Another surprise is that being raised without a religious affiliation does not seem to have the negative effect across peoples' life-span that religious leaders often assert that it does. Apparently, over half of those with this so-called deficit in childhood have made their way into a religious affiliation as adults. Finally, although defections among American Catholics have been written about for years, I at least am somewhat surprised at the extent of the disaffiliation, at least as the Pew report computes it --- upwards of 7.5%.

Possibly, this latter finding is better regarded as a confirmation finding, of the "I knew it all along" sort. Certainly, there are reasons not to be surprised by Catholics' leaving their parishes in droves --- authoritarianism, sexism, pedophile priests, to mention the more florid ones. But I still have some doubts about the stats. As does the Pew report itself, which acknowledges the possibility of a significant undercounting of currently affiliated Catholics, for one thing because of its researchers' difficulties reaching Hispanic, illegal immigrants currently in the country. If most of these folks are Catholic, as may be presumed, then the percentage slide of Catholics in America that the Pew study posits may not in fact be as steep. There will be those, of course, for whom this is a non-issue. People who are here illegally, I can hear them saying no matter how hard I try to shut my ears, have neither a religion nor a personhood worth counting for anything.

The previous paragraph opens out on the fact that the Pew Forum study raises important questions to think about with regard both to its accuracy in general and to the meaning of the trends it does seem to confirm clearly. With regard to the former question, and by way of further example, people who believe that this country has always been and always should be Christian can breath a sigh of relief that the Pew statistics yield at least a superficial level of support for their perspective; roughly 80% of Americans are still identifying themselves as Christians. But to me it is curious that this research has turned up no significant increases in the number of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and Hindus in the population, even though many noted writers about religion in America --- Harvard's Diana Eck comes to mind immediately --- have been touting significant increases at least in the latter three groups for some time.

And with respect to the question about further implications, I for one was struck by Pew's finding that fully a third of marriages in this country are between spouses who at least say that they belong to different religious groups. I wonder just how "different" these differences are, whether or not they are mattering very much, and if they are, how these couples are dealing with them, if they are dealing with them at all. It will take more than just a poll or a questionnaire to secure meaningful answers to these questions. But it is "the bottom line" of this report that is likely to generate the most reflection in the weeks to come, the so-called churning of religious affiliation that is emerging as a major feature of American religious life. Is the trend --- if it is indeed a trend --- something to bemoan or to celebrate? My first reading of the Pew Forum report inclines me toward the latter.

Toward A Christian Perspective On Globalization

One thing that church history makes plain is the ease with which Christianity's original and relatively simple message, about God's love for all and our obligation to be loving to all in his name, can be deformed into an impenetrably thick system of rationalizations for channeling that love only to some, beginning most typically with the system's perpetuators. Old arrangements, based upon ideas of special covenants conveying special privileges, get quickly re-established, and any remnant of a sense of solidarity with every other human being on the planet becomes overwhelmed by demands to hunker down in one's own family, tribe, nation, and especially, sect --- at least, for as long as neither gets in the way of individual members' enjoying all the purely personal blessings they falsely believe to be their divinely bestowed entitlements. For churches and other religions infected with such ideology, global thinking reduces to little more than strategizing for conquest, held captive by worldly values incapable of articulating a vision beyond that of competitiveness, aggression, and letting the best interests of most of the world's peoples go unmet by default.

Christianity is saying less than it should be saying these days about so many of the crucial issues affecting human life on a global scale --- the scale that at least for the immediate future is our only meaningful point of reference. By way of illustrations: the current East-West conflict, between a long-disrespected Islamic culture and a long self-posturing Christianized and democratized one, is becoming something to be dealt with only in the form of battles to be won, not differences to be reconciled. The problem of climate change is being dumbed down to little more than intermittent anguish over declining seaside property values on the part of potential owners more than willing to profit from what has brought about some of the most telling changes in the first place. The decimation of species across the planet continues to fuel mostly fruitless debates between people not green enough to change their own life-styles all that much and people too floridly green to consider any strategies other than violence as the way toward redeeming the environment. Mass migrations from a combination of genocidal political policies, erosion of economic opportunities, and hopes for a better life in general are being greeted more as intrusions than with welcomes, with the tragic consequence that humankind --- once referred to as God's people --- remains mired in the very state of alien-ation to which the Gospel message is supposed to offer a corrective.

And then there is the global economy, the world that one of my favorite columnists, Thomas Friedman, eloquently assures us is no longer flat, and in which it is no longer profitable to act like flatlanders. "Profitable" is the key word here. The value added to human life by means of the present cobbled together system of economic globalization is value measured primarily by the profits the system generates --- to those who have and exercise power in and over it. The system exhibits decidedly less concern about the countless numbers of powerless workers and families affected by it, except perhaps by pausing occasionally to remind everyone that, as if by some mysterious and transcendent force of nature, goodies generated at the top will inevitably trickle all the way down to the bottom, and always in proportion to genuine need and worthy expectation. Yeah, sure.

One big reason why Christianity's voice in matters like these is at best halting and at worst non-existent is that too many of the churches representing it are too preoccupied with too many churchy things, and getting them done the right way, e.g.: building bigger and more impressive housing with which to tempt away more and more of other churches' members; enveloping people of all ages into entertaining and sometimes even spiritual programs, from womb to tomb; transmitting beliefs and moral precepts with such persuasiveness that no one need suffer even a momentary impulse to question anything; and ensuring that no door will ever be darkened by anyone unworthy to associate with the general membership. The amount of energy committed to ventures like these, 24/7, is truly awesome, to such an extent that it almost takes on the appearance of petty grousing to wonder whether our churches are prepared to help all that much in dealing with the really important, global matters of concern to everyone everywhere. Hopefully, in the wondering comes the message all over again: God's desire is that all shall be saved, and that salvation includes nothing less than peace, justice, and community for everyone in this life as well as the next.