Christmas Truth

One Advent Sunday morning, standing in a crowded narthex while the early worship service was letting out, I could not help overhearing an interchange between two fellow parishioners about the Sunday School class they had just attended:

What a downer! Here we were, primed and ready for Christmas, and our teacher suddenly decides to tell us that the Christmas story is just that --- only a story. That’ll make a nice conversation around the lunch table today! I sure hope the kids are getting a different version of things.

(Laughing) What can you expect from a religion professor?

This Christmas thing is really a pretty big deal for me. Did you know that I was baby Jesus in our church’s Christmas pageant when I was two months old? It took! I’ve been hooked on it ever since.

I’ve never been in one, but I’m just as hooked on pageants as you are. I get a lot out of seeing not only real live people up there on the stage, but people I know. They all make Jesus’ humanness so vivid to me.

When I was in that manger, I guess it didn’t matter a whole lot whether my Mom was a virgin or not.

Maybe it didn’t matter to the shepherds and the wise men either.

This brief conversation reminded me powerfully that what Christmas pageants do best is to keep the focus more on the baby and less on his mother. They prepare viewers to discover the Lord’s divinity by contemplating his weakness rather than his power, his dependence rather than his sovereignty, his entering into rather than his rising above the human condition, the flesh he became as well as the Logos he was. Certainly, the story of Mary’s conception and birth played an important role in shaping a particular but by no means universal understanding of Jesus’ divinity as present from the very beginning of his life as well as after the resurrection. Paradoxically, though --- and this is what I heard my two friends getting at that morning --- his divine nature is sometimes most evident in his acts of emptying himself of it. (Philippians 2:6-8)

Clearly, there is far more to the affirmation that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary than the description of occurrences on the plane of ordinary human history. At best, what the affirmation says can only hint at what it intends to mean. The faith that still gives rise to it is a faith that, when logic’s limits are reached, willingly relinquishes clarity for the sake of honoring mystery, in particular, the literally indescribable mystery that God Godself dwelt and dwells among us. It is the very transcendence of its subject (a unique Son of God) to its language (a humanly constructed proposal for others’ assent) that has made the doctrine of the virgin conception and birth so vulnerable to overly imaginative as well as overly literal renderings that sacrifice both historical accuracy and intellectual credibility.

All Christian beliefs convey more than the mere declarations of fact that are also embedded in them. Indisputably, for example, Jesus experienced terrible pain at the end of his life “under Pontius Pilate.” This fact is beyond reasonable dispute. That Jesus is “God’s only Son,” however, can neither be established nor disconfirmed by objective historical investigation of facts alone; this is a quite extra-ordinary “fact” that only faith can finally determine. Jesus’ name becomes Emmanuel only in the decision to allow ourselves to experience God’s presence in and through him.

The particular assertion that has been the subject of this column and the preceding one is that Jesus was conceived in a woman named Mary, an assertion in which is embedded at once a confession of faith in her virginity and in Jesus’ divine humanness. It is the confession, and not the assertion, that makes the difference to faith. Faith, and not fact, is what points to the ultimate ground of all existence, to the reason why there is anything at all and not just God, to the delight that the Creator takes in all the works of his hands, and to that love alone which binds and knits all things together. What the Christian tradition says about the meaning of Jesus’ conception has always transcended whatever facts the belief itself struggles to assert. Overly literal descriptions inevitably get in the way of those genuine encounters with God, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit that are finally expressible, in St. Paul’s words, more by sighs than by words.
　
　

"Behold, a virgin shall conceive..."

This is the time of the year when I get asked most often, and not only by people outside the church, whether Christians still have to believe that Jesus came into the world by supernatural means. Put another way, the question is whether belief in the virgin conception of Jesus (virgin birth is not the same issue) remains a core belief for the Christian faith. One column will not quite answer both questions satisfactorily, but maybe this one and the next together will serve as at least a beginning.

In my view at least, the biggest problem about belief in the virgin conception is the physicalism that attaches to it. Taken literally, it is about impregnation without human sperm and a delivery without a broken hymen, and all of a sudden a divine mystery reduces to an enigma of biology. This hardly gets at the true meaning of the belief itself, whose primary purpose was to affirm both the greatness of God’s love and the specialness of Jesus’ humanity. The virgin conception in its barest literal form plays an important role in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, but not elsewhere in the New Testament. If Paul’s single reference to Jesus’ birth, at Galatians 4:4 (“... born of a woman…”), is any indication, the emphasis for many if not for most of the earliest Christians fell not so much on Jesus’ divine origin as on his very human one. The distinctive fact may have been simply that, in contrast with the mother of Isaac in the Old Testament, Jesus’ mother was very young and not very old.

For Matthew and Luke, of course, the emphasis is not on the human, but on the divine origin of the Nazarene, and the (different) traditions upon which their testimony rests must be taken seriously. Both writers drew freely upon varied efforts of early Jewish Christians to present the details of Jesus’ life against the background of ancient prophecies about a coming Deliverer of Israel from all her enemies. Typically, these efforts sought to demonstrate Jesus’ Messianic identity by showing how everything he said and did and everything that happened to him fulfilled exactly what had been prophesied through the centuries about what God’s chosen Messiah would be like. Appearing in at least some of these demonstrative arguments was the idea that Jesus fulfilled the Messianic prophecies through the manner of his conception and birth. Especially important for this purpose was the prophecy of First Isaiah, at 7:14: “ Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.” (KJV)

Revered as this passage is in Christian circles, however, it cannot bear the weight that Matthew and to a lesser extent, Luke (in chapter one but not chapter two), placed upon it originally. Of the many scriptural passages that shaped the Messianic expectations of the Jewish people from the Exile in Babylon to the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem, Isaiah 7:14 was one of the least relied upon. In spite of the hold that this particular prophesy has had on Christian sensibility and belief, Messianic prophecy in Old Testament times showed little if any anticipation that the Messiah would be one who comes into the world through a supernatural conception.

As a whole, then, the apostolic tradition contains strong challenges to the view that the doctrine of the virgin conception expresses a core belief for all Christians, the assent to which is somehow essential for faith today. It also calls into question the view that the doctrine’s primary purpose is to assert as fact a supernatural conception of a human being under the conditions of time and history. Contrary to the standard Christian interpretations of Isaiah 7:14, the Hebrew text of this passage speaks of a young woman (alma), and not a virgin (betula), who would give birth to a Deliverer (who in First Isaiah turned out not to be the Messiah at all). It is true that, as biblical scholars who keep their textual analyses separate from their dogmatic convictions remind us, in one Greek translation of the passage a hundred years before Jesus’ birth (the Septuagint), the mother of the coming Messiah is referred to explicitly as a virgin (parthenos). However, later Greek translations of this passage do not repeat the practice; instead they use neanis, the Greek equivalent of the Hebrew alma.

That belief in Jesus’ virgin conception is difficult to maintain as a core belief, however, in no way entails that the belief lacks meaning and truth. It does suggest, though, that what meaning and truth the belief does contain --- considerable, in my judgment --- is more likely to be discovered when our language breaks free from the bonds of literalism and ascends on the wings of symbolism to realms of glory beyond the capacity of both facts and logic ever fully to encompass.

Forgiving Our Enemies: The Fort Hood Shootings

Throughout the Gospels, there are many sayings and teachings ascribed to Jesus whose authenticity Biblical scholars have been questioning for a long time. Take, for example, his alleged statement in Matthew that he had not come to change anything about the Law (5:18). It is difficult to reconcile this statement with what all of the Gospels together present about his ministry as a whole. By means of it, Jesus changed the understanding of righteousness under the Law quite a lot.

About the authenticity of another teaching attributed to him, however, there can be no reasonable doubt. It has to do with the necessity of being forgiving. Both Matthew and Luke introduce the theme in their respective versions of the Lord’s Prayer, coupling a petition to be forgiven of our own wrongdoing with a commitment to forgive others who wrong us. (Matthew 6:12; Luke 11:4.) Matthew muddies the water somewhat by adding the warning that unless we forgive others, God will not forgive us (vs.14), which flies in the face of the gospel message of God’s unconditional grace, mercy, and forgiveness. But this tangent need not distract us from the central point: if we are ever to love people the way God intends for us to love them, we are going to have to let go a lot of our sense of being owed by them for the offenses and the harm they do us both accidentally and deliberately.

It is not difficult to forgive someone who wrongs us without meaning to do so. A quick counting to ten before reacting is usually enough to activate the right thought that it is the intent that finally counts. But, if Matthew can be relied upon at another point, in The Sermon on the Mount, Jesus did not leave things at that. At 5:44, he is quoted as saying, “Love your enemies and pray for your persecutors…” Here, the stakes are raised exponentially for the God-humanity relationship. We are to forgive not only those who wrong us inadvertently, but also those who wrong us maliciously. Even Major Nidal Hasan?

This vastly more demanding summons from God is not difficult to understand or accept. It is, however, vastly more difficult to carry out in practice. Most conscientious Christians with whom I have discussed it over the years have the same response to it: a question, not of whether we should do it, but how? The story of Hasan’s despicable actions at Fort Hood can only intensify the sense of the impossibility of fulfilling Jesus’ command; even with God, not all things may be possible after all. But then again…

One of the best answers I know to the question of how to love the unloveable revolves around the word “compassion”: feeling-with, by striving for a level of understanding of another’s mean-spiritedness that shrinks at least somewhat the degree of genuine differences between them and us. This need not lead to the obscene speculation that most anyone might, under the right circumstances, do what Major Hasan did. Rather, it leads to the sobering observation that those who do good are often influenced by factors beyond their control as much as those who do evil.
In Hasan’s case, the brainwashing inflicted by a mindless branch of Islam exposed a vulnerability to uncontrollable rage that a properly managed psychiatric training program should have caught and treated very early in Hasan’s residency years at Walter Reed. Did the flagrant irresponsibility of Hasan’s supervisors contribute directly to Hasan’s evil acts? Probably not. Does it, however, narrow the gap between the respective characters of the supervisors and Hasan? Probably more than just a little.

As far as it goes, urging the development of compassion in the service of becoming more forgiving is sound advice. The obstacle it must overcome, though, is daunting: a sense of confusion bordering on anger toward God for continuing to permit genuine evil in the first place. Why, many ask, does God not doing something to interdict everywhere the emergence of a character so depraved as Nidal Hasan’s? The Christian answer to this question is at once profoundly confounding and uplifting. The confounding part is: no one knows. The uplifting part is an invitation to consider another kind of question altogether: in the midst of the world’s genuine evils, for what goods may we be genuinely thankful? If forgiveness is a means to becoming more loving, and compassion is a means to becoming more forgiving, then thanksgiving is surely a means to becoming more compassionate. No truly thoughtful person can rest content never putting questions to God. But neither can he or she become whole without giving thanks to God, too.
　
　

Another 3:16 To Ponder

It still catches my eye when football fans evangelize from the stands by holding up placards that read JOHN 3:16! This was my favorite of all the Bible verses I had to memorize growing up. It contained just about everything that my nowhere near Christian mind could then manage to comprehend of the Christian message. At least, the first half of the verse did. The idea that God came to earth out of love captured my imagination so completely that I never paid much attention to its accompanying reminder of what awaits those who do not believe that he did. By way of reminder, they will all "perish." It made no sense to me then, and it makes no sense to me now, to conjoin a threat of everlasting punishment with a proclamation about a God of Love. So, my John 3:16 has had to remain 3:16a, and not 3:16b.

There is another chapter three, verse sixteen passage in the Bible that I also had to learn once upon a time, this one from Second Timothy. It was and still is the conversation-stopper of all conversation-stoppers about the attitude that Christians are supposed to take toward the Bible. In the much favored rendering of the King James Bible, 2 Timothy 3:16 reads this way: "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness…" It takes the next verse to complete the sentence, but this is the part that has created so much trouble in the church. To the generations following Timothy’s, right down to our own, it clearly implies that the Bible, alone among all the world's other books, was written by God. All of the Bible --- every last book, chapter, and verse in it from Genesis to Revelation, and not just our favorite parts of it --- was given by God to make us perfect in his sight. The reference to inspired scripture in 2 Timothy 3:16, then, is to that book on our coffee tables and in our church pews as the one and only book that anyone is ever to look to for answers about anything truly important in life.

But whoever wrote and first received 2 Timothy (both are subjects of considerable debate among New Testament scholars today) could not possibly have meant by the KJV’s "All scripture" what preachers and Sunday School teachers kept insisting they meant, the Old and New Testaments as a whole. In the first place, many of the books included in what would only much later become the latter --- at least three of the four Gospels, the letters attributed to Peter and John, the books of Hebrews and Revelation --- were not even written yet. And secondly, the Jewish community had not yet made up its mind about its own Bible; thus, there was no Christian Old Testament around either. What, then, does "All" (better: "every") scripture mean in 2 Timothy? Almost certainly, the reference is to the "sacred writings" known to the letter's recipients from childhood (3:15), that is, most or all of the books that by the end of the century would become the Jewish canon, and only those books.

It is hard to believe, however, that the author of 2 Timothy would have rested the early church's ability to discern truth from error solely on Jewish writings. He must have had Christian materials available to him as well: surely at least some of the genuine letters of Paul, perhaps a collection or two of Jesus' sayings, and most probably a coherent narrative --- or narratives --- of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection, to name just a few. Nevertheless, for whatever reason, he chose not to group these materials under his category of "inspired scripture." Later on, they would come to be so designated, but not here. These considerations make 2 Timothy 3:16 irritatingly complicated. It is still unclear just where for him the church's most "profitable" writings were to be found among those that were beginning to circulate under distinctively Christian auspices.

The fact of the matter is that the early church was far less locked in than we are to the notion of a single, normative body of scriptures within which and within which alone God reveals Godself. And so, dropping the Bible on a podium or desk with a loud and dramatic flourish, as if it were a weapon designed to strike fear in the hearts of all doubters and dissenters, exhibits only a seriously deformed faith. Turning its pages slowly, deliberatively, and searchingly is better. Particularly if in the process we remain open to God’s speaking to us in unanticipated ways through unexpected passages.

Conservatizing The Bible

All translations of the Bible are influenced by theological assumptions and convictions that sometimes obscure rather than illuminate earlier meanings. For example, the Latin word for sacrament was no way to render the Greek word for mystery, and our understanding of both the sacraments and the mysteries of the faith have suffered as a result. Or, a gender neutral translation of the Bible, such as the New Revised Standard translation’s marketers purport it to be, runs roughshod over the understanding of masculinity, feminity, and divinity that the supposedly shameless patriarchal renderings from the past are falsely believed to obscure. For most readers, though, theological intrusions into the translation process are too difficult to detect to be offensive.

Not so, however, with another kind of translation effort that is going on today, with perfectly straight faces on the part of its promoters. It goes by the name of the Conservative Bible Project, and the envisioned outcome is a complete fix of the Bible by clearing up imprecisions both in the original languages and in the English language, as a way of eliminating so-called biases that from the beginning have tilted the biblical message left-ward. There is nothing subtle about this project. It is designed to be not just mildly offensive, but painfully offensive as well, to liberals who allegedly have been about the business of highjacking Jesus to their cause from the beginning.

Methodologically, the Conservative Bible Project is preposterous on the very face of it. The commitment to eliminate every vestige of liberalism from the Bible means that the translators must already claim to know in advance how to render every particular passage, no matter what the plain meaning of the passage itself (a principle supposedly sacrosanct to all true conservatives) may be. An example: Luke 23:34, Jesus’ petition to God from the cross to forgive his crucifiers because they do not know what they are doing. Apparently, the Conservative Bible Project will take this passage out, partly because it appears in none of the other Passion Narratives and therefore may not reflect Jesus’ own words. This in itself might be a justifiable move, so long as the principle that informs it is applied everywhere else. However, we would then lose five of the other seven last words, not to mention Jesus’ bread of life sermon and a bunch of other good stuff besides. But the key consideration for the people running this project is that Luke 23:34 is --- are you ready for this? --- a favorite passage of liberals, because it shows Jesus in a liberal light. Good God Almighty, save us. I offer this as a petition and not as a curse.

To be more liberal-minded toward the Conservative Bible Project, though, something which all conservatives most surely deserve --- whether they want to admit it or not --- liberals sometimes take a back alley assault approach to the scriptures too. Even though I continue to admire what Thomas Jefferson tried to do by re-writing the Bible for the Age of Enlightenment, I also find his presumptuousness in undertaking it little short of appalling, and many of the results of his efforts disappointing and irritating. And as for the Jesus Seminar’s recent efforts to produce a Fifth Gospel by taking votes on what from the other four and the Gospel of Thomas ought to go into it, well --- be still, my soul might be another petition worth sending up.

There is certainly nothing new about taking liberties with organizing the ancient texts of Scripture. By the 140’s, the messing around had already begun, with the Marcionite faction in the Roman church proposing an early version of the Christian canon in terms of parts of Paul’s letters and of the Gospel of Luke, and nothing else. Because the God of the Jews was an evil God, or at least a very weak one, Marcion appears to have believed, not only did Jewish scriptures have to go, but with them every Christian book that in any way depended upon them, and every passage even in Paul and Luke that made Jesus out to be a faithful Jew (which, in fact, he was). What remained from Marcion's peculiar paring down was a very short Bible, a God of love and not of justice, a wholly spiritual and not physical Christ, a denunciation of physicality itself as evil, and an ascetism that could make even a Desert Father beg for relief.

It is hard to see how a conservatizing of the Bible is going to help very much in overcoming the suppposed negative effects that liberalizing the Bible has had in the life of the church. More helpful still would be an approach that allows the holy and gracious God of the Bible to be holier than the Bible itself is and more gracious than doctrinaire theologies will ever be.

Conversion, Conviction, And Conscience

Soon after my high school conversion experience, my born-again Christian friends began hinting that the big event may not have been the real deal. I could report no stroke-like symptoms, bright lights, or angelic choruses, not even a basso profundo voice from above the clouds. I did not need to be helped to my feet after it was all over, or anyone to tell me what had happened or what it meant. I knew all by myself what had happened: a sudden massive energy surge went all through me, accompanied by an indescribable joy. And I had no hesitation expressing what it was telling me: "There is a God," I silently said to myself.

In comparison with the Jesus knocking at the door, slain in the Spirit, and tongues-speaking experiences my friends were having at the time, my own brief encounter with the Maker of Heaven and Earth had to have lacked a lot in their eyes. For me, however, it had all the quality of a one time only watershed occurrence, which is exactly what succeeding decades have proved it to be. The feeling of divine power and love that overwhelmed me in that single, momentary experience had a completeness about it that would only have suffered in the repeating. The process of reflecting upon it, however, has been on-going.

Most Christians who claim to have had a conversion experience seem remarkably consistent in their accounts of what the experience led to: a new or deeper relationship with Jesus, an unshakeable conviction about his identity as the Son of God, and a way of life intentionally even if imperfectly patterned after his. My own experience led me to someone and to something else, to the Source of the universe's matter, energy, and order, and to a life of passionate and continuing inquiry into the relationship between this Source and the God of Jesus Christ. At the time, there were enough Christians exerting a positive influence upon me to make me yearn to accept Jesus' heavenly Father as my own. And though I gladly joined my hands with theirs, I knew that before I could ever join my heart as well, I would have to discover in my own way whether the God I genuinely believed I had experienced could possibly have been Jesus' as well.
Some of my concerns were science-and-reason based; for example, I could not see any need for a God to explain the origin of the universe as a whole. Others sprang from a sense of moral outrage over things people kept telling me that their God relished doing, such as making a sacrificial lamb of Isaac and Jesus, and taking away any chance of salvation for people unfortunate enough to have been born before the latter's coming into the world.

These days, there is another reason for my continuing to struggle with conversion experiences of every sort. It is that these experiences are claimed to have a unique, unrepeatable character about them that by definition disqualifies them as solid evidence for the existence of anything other than of their experiencers. To count as genuine evidence for anything, an experience must be accessible to everyone and not only to a specially favored few. There are enough consistent patterns and predictable sequences observable in, around, and beyond us to make it reasonable to believe in a transcendent designer in, even if not of, the universe. But there is nothing in this kind of evidence that permits inferences to the more specific things about the divine nature in which faith is especially interested, e.g., that the designer is triune, or that he rewards the righteous and punishes sinners everywhere.

These are the kinds of logical considerations that keep generating questions which my conscience will not allow me to avoid for very long. Applied specifically to the vital center of my own conversion experience --- an in-pouring of pure, unbounded, glorious energy --- they still make me wonder about my jumping so quickly to the conclusion I did about what really was in that energy cloud surrounding me at that climactic moment. I judged it to be a "who" and not merely a "what." I have never recanted this judgment, but I soon realized that nothing in the experience upon which it was based itself necessitated any mention Christianity’s God at all.

Most especially, there was nothing in the particular idea of God that I brought to mind in my exclamation that even remotely corresponded to the Cosmic Accountant, Atonement-demanding, My Son or No One kind of God that people in the church continue to talk about as the only kind of God there is. In matters of faith, conscience has its own role to play over conviction, and even over conversion. To be sure, conviction not energized by conversion reduces to dogmatism. But conversion not tempered by reason equates with fanaticism.
　
　
　

Revisiting The Ninth Commandment

Our many failures across the country this past summer to reason together about matters of social importance surely reached their nadir with a Congressman’s not easily forgotten “You lie!” shout to the President of the United States. Under the circumstances, the President’s response seemed appropriate enough --- “that’s not true” --- but also a little lame. Perhaps we can help him out --- the President, that is; the Congressman and his supporters seem beyond help --- with some reflection about the Bible’s own take on name-calling.

The sweet-spirited teacher of my unruly third grade Sunday School class somehow managed, in spite of all our efforts to thwart her, to get three ideas across to us about the Ten Commandments. The first was that God expects things of us. The second was that God tells us what he expects very clearly. And the third was that doing what God expects makes things better for everybody. These ideas still carry a lot of weight with me. To be sure, there are details about the handing down of the Ten Commandments that I still find irksome. For one, Moses' God was too jealously self-protective for my liking. And he seemed to be quite unrealistic about the whole business of coveting. Surely the feeling is understandable, even if the behavior is not. But about honoring our oaths and our parents, not killing people, being faithful to our spouses, not grabbing for what does not belong to us --- who could find fault? Or with not bearing false witness against our neighbors?

With most people who take this latter commandment seriously, I have paid relatively little attention to its earliest context, ancient Israel's legal procedure and its rules for giving testimony in courts of elders. Instead, I have broadened its context to encompass everyday relationships in general. The ninth commandment is not only a prohibition against lying for the purpose of bringing harm to others in a judicial proceeding. It is a mandate to attribute to people, on every occasion, only those things that we know to be true about them. The corollary is that there is no justification for deliberately saying something about another, whether thinkingly or unthinkingly, that we know or should know to be false, harmful, or both.

Elsewhere in the Bible, though, there is a somewhat troubling variant on this commandment. In a collection of teachings that Matthew made into a sermon on or at the foot of a mountain, Jesus says that whoever calls another a "fool" deserves hell-fire. (Matthew 5:22) It is embarrassing to have to admit that I have called people a lot worse things than this. But I have long thought the price for doing it would be relatively low. Basically, it takes the form of others' verbal pay-backs, tit for tat, absorbed without a lot of griping. In these admittedly not so nice games, we usually get about as much as we give, and it has not occurred to me very often that the price for my own defamations might and should be steeper.

But then again, Jesus sometimes seems to be doing with malice of forethought the very thing that he is supposed to have warned everyone else not to do. In these particular verses, the scribes and the Pharisees have irritated him (again), and the Master flat-out decks them. He calls them "blind guides," "whitewashed tombs," "vipers," and yes, even "blind fools.” Here, I think, Exodus and Deuteronomy have it all over Matthew 23: when it is a question of name-calling, sticking with the ninth commandment is the better way to fight the temptation to engage in verbal assault.

If we are to believe another of Matthew's characterizations of Jesus, that he came to make no changes in the Law at all, the real issue for Jesus could not have been just name-calling. It had to have been the refusal of people to obey the spirit more than the letter of the commandment by justifying their verbal aggression with evidence and reasons that are open to others' scrutiny. One way to look at all of the Gospels is precisely for the evidence that Jesus supplied in abundance for the claims he made against the religious establishment of his day.

It does not seem likely, therefore, that there are eternal consequences awaiting someone merely for calling our President a liar, or for calling another among God’s people a fool. But if we are going to continue to mouth off without taking the right kind of responsibility for our verbal leavings, then there may be at least an earthly variety hell to pay, from Someone who has better evidence for just about everything he requires of us than any of us will ever come up with for not doing it.

Sin, Health, And The Sin Of Not Reforming Health Care

As serious as were the consequences of “original” sin --- toilsome work for Adam, painful childbirth for Eve, and eventually, death for both (but not on “the very day” they sinned) --- one thing that apparently neither of our First Parents had to suffer as punishment for it was bad health. It did not take long, however, for the idea to get going among their descendents that everybody else’s diseases, infirmities, and foreshortened lives (threescore years and ten does not begin to match the patriarchs’ longevity) were in some way God’s retaliation for their own sins. No matter that particular ailments were hard to match up with particular sins; it was the general theory that counted.

One would think that by now, for Christians at least, connecting ill health with sin would have no credibility whatever. Jesus himself roundly repudiated doing it. (See, for instance, John 9:1-2) Part of what went into his repudiation still makes good sense. Many saintly people get one ailment after another, while many rotten people seem never to lose a day’s dishonest work. Further, if by divine decree sin impedes health, its forgiveness should make people physically well immediately, and the refusal to honor God as a forgiving God should make evil-doers as sick as they can get without becoming downright dead.

Jesus’s refusal to look upon ill health as a by-product of sin is not without difficulties, however. The passage cited above goes on to make a theological point that, with all due respect to the Johannine school of the first century, squares all too well with at least one part of the message that it is the aim of its whole Gospel to communicate. In this particular case, of a man who was born blind, Jesus is quoted as saying that his blindness had nothing to do with his parents’ sinning, but rather with a decision on the part of God to demonstrate His power by curing him. There is more than just this one text in the New Testament supporting the notion that God must have his reasons for making people sick or infirm, but this one may be the most offensively stated of them all. John the Baptist seems to have been content to proclaim his own decrease that Jesus might increase, but no one else should entertain even the possibility that a God of love would ever inflict an infirmity on one of his creatures in order to aggrandize His own need to be a Curegiver. We can leave that kind of thinking to charlatan faith-healers.

It is important to disconnect our ideas about illness from our ideas about sin and divine purposing. By doing so, we can align ourselves the right way with responsible medical science, whose proper aim is to attack illness on the purely physical grounds upon which it should be attacked. And also, we can align ourselves the right way with responsible Christian witnessing to sin’s forgiveness more than to its ubiquity. God does indeed work in mysterious ways, but not by sticking it to one person whose sins happen to tick him off more than does another’s, and not by making the infliction of misery an essential component of the abundant life His Son has promised us.

And now, the point of all this for health care reform. The only credible explanation for this country’s dilly-dallying a half century and more over getting this done has to be that deep-down, there must still be lingering the notion that people who get sick deserve it and that alleviating their distress somehow would disrupt the divine economy of salvation. Still clinging to this lingering notion is the perfectly awful idea --- its Calvinist roots notwithstanding --- that it is meet and right for wealthier people to have easier access to health care because their worldly success is itself a sign of divine election.

People who suffer from this demented thinking also see the very real connection between poverty and ill health as even more evidence of God’s coming down on the side of the more successful among us. “The least of these” should get what they deserve. And if they are “illegals” besides, they should just be made to go away. In more down home theological language, the outlook here is that God clearly wants a few people more than he wants others to have all of life’s goodies, and that as a consequence and by his grace he enables his chosen to secure their benefits without any more than token struggles, while everybody else grabs, usually unsuccessfully, for whatever little may be left. It is sad to contemplate that this kind of a God is even more petty than we are.

Toward A Faith Perspective On Health Care Reform

Riotous town hall meetings on the reforming of health care are finally ebbing, and Congressional debate on the subject can gear up again aided by the usual and quieter back alley lobbying and back room dealing. Right now, I am wondering whether faith communities across this country will glean enough from their own traditions to make a significant difference, and quickly, to a discussion that cannot be allowed to fail. From the standpoint of Christianity, the gleaning process may prove to be harder than we might expect.

If we think about health care reform the way we believe we ought to think about every other moral and social issue, by looking first to Jesus, we must face from the outset some major difficulties with translating his own orientation to life under God into terms that can be meaningful in our own. Remember, by way of example, that he never married. (I am singularly unimpressed with feminist theologies and popular recent novels to the contrary). And so, he never settled down with children of his own that he had to worry about. Further, he appears not to have shown much concern for the physical or emotional well-being of his own aging parents --- early in his ministry he got pretty testy with his mother, and his earthly father got dropped out of the picture altogether. He never struggled with finding and keeping a paying job, with meeting a payroll, or with covering employee benefits. He owned no property, left no estate, and eventually fobbed off on others even the expense of burying him.

The Gospels are pretty clear --- or at least the first three of them are --- about why his life took this shape: Jesus felt called to devote himself to announcing the imminent breaking in of a Kingdom not of this world. To the consternation of liberation theologians of all stripes, Jesus' sense of his calling forces us to consider the possibility that long-term planning for an earthly future may have no real importance at all in the Divine scheme of things, except perhaps to distract us from connecting with our true home in the Beyond. In the light of these considerations, can it still be said that by keeping our eye on Jesus we can find our way to a healthful solution to the problem of ensuring adequate health care in our society?

I think so. Consider, for example, a very early Christological hymn which impressed St. Paul enough to include it in his letter to the congregation at Philippi: "...he humbled himself, and was obedient, even to the point of death, death on a cross..." (Philippians 2:8) What really gets to me in this passage is its reference to Jesus' refusing to lay claim to his equality with God, for the purpose of making himself a servant of others. (The Greek word actually translates as "slave.")

There is hardly any of this spirit of humility to be found in most of what now passes for serious discussion about health care across, in Rush Limbaugh's pompous blathering, "the fruited plain." Instead, a snarky spirit of self-serving sinks most of the discussions, an I-have-to-get-mine attitude accompanied by a mean-spirited suspiciousness that some undeserving soul will somehow manage to sneak into an ER somewhere and siphon off resources for which he or she will not be required to pay. Caring for the strangers in our midst? Forget about it. Health care is a pay as you go proposition for the legally ensconced, guys and gals, and if you shouldn't be here in the first place and you can't come up with your fair share of its cost, no one else should ever feel obligated to do it for you. Isn't this just the kind of sinful attitude for which Jesus committed himself to die?

One of the most important things I have learned over the course of my life in the church is that early Christian communities made the inroads they did not just because of the Roman roads that turned the Empire's urban centers into mission fields, and not just because of the power of the earliest apostles' preaching and teaching to overcome pagan mythology. What also counted was the overwhelming compassion that flowed from the hearts of those who fully grasped the significance of a loving God's sending his beloved son to show the way toward a new life of mutual love by and for all, especially to those in need, and especially by the sacrifices of people willing to meeting those needs in his son's name. Caring especially for the widows and orphans, for whom no one else then cared, was a good place to start. Just as caring for the "aliens" among us would be today.

Guns and Nukes

On the face of it, it seems reasonable to insist on having the first at our personal disposal and the second at our government’s. The argument goes like this: There are bad people on our streets and untrustworthy foreign powers beyond our borders who want to do us harm and who have at their disposal, respectively, both means of doing it. And so, it is our personal and societal right and obligation to protect ourselves and other non-aggressive people and nations by possessing weapons in sufficient number and magnitude to prevail in any conceivable showdown with the forces of evil anywhere.

The facts presumed in this line of reasoning are hard to dispute. As are the normative claims about protecting ourselves and the innocent. What murks up the thinking, though, is our tendency to believe ourselves always to be truly innocent, and to assume that more equates with better when it comes to accumulating weapons for the purpose of keeping ourselves safe. From the standpoint of the Christian faith, the first belief is highly dubious: remember all that we once learned about the universality of sin? From the standpoint of theories about self-defense, the second belief is highly dangerous as well: remember all that we have learned lately about terrorism?

Typically accompanying the rationalization of seeking and acquiring more and more weapons, ostensibly for self-protection and never from aggressive intent, is the interdiction of any analysis of how human beings keep getting themselves into the situations that call for them (answer: from self-centeredness), and of with whom the blame most truly rests (answer: us as much as them). Admittedly, there is more to be said for this interdiction with respect to gun control than to nuclear disarmament and non-proliferation agreements.

For all practical purposes, reigning in restrictions on the purchase of guns for personal use is now a lost cause in this country. Too many manufacturers have created too many of them. Too many criminals have more of them than any democratic system of laws and law enforcement can control. And too many people oppose even the barest tinkering with their freedom to buy and use any piece they want.

Whatever we may discover, therefore, by continuing to search out the whys of our addiction to guns will not help very much to vanquish it. Basically, our society has decided to live with the dangers of giving just about everyone an opportunity to get a hand on a gun (or both hands on more than one). And though it is difficult to understand why some folks think they need so many of them, violence on our streets is very real and a gun-toting citizenry might yet prove to be an important adjunct to a well-armed police force.

Nuclear proliferation, however, is a different story. Efforts to reduce the present number of nuclear weapons across the globe, to stop further production of them, and to keep tabs on existing arsenals make every bit of sense, no matter how many obstacles to their success must be faced and overcome at every step of the way. The major world powers have made huge progress on all this in recent decades and the progress is likely to continue, at least if so-called rogue nations can be prevented from getting in the way.

Nevertheless, it is still terrifying to contemplate the consequences of firing off even a few of the estimated 10,000 nuclear warheads that are currently operational around the globe. Maybe the predictions of nuclear winter are unfounded; they most certainly are more difficult to defend than I once thought they were. But from any mutual setting off of nukes we would still be dealing with an aftermath far more destructive than that of fights between even armed to the teeth street gang members in our cities.

The recent decision of the United States Supreme Court on the right to bear arms pretty well cinches it for gun lovers in this country. We have that right, the Court said, as individuals and not just as militia members. (For the life of me, however, I cannot see this implied in the language of the Second Amendment.) With respect to guns, then, we may no longer be able to press the question of how many is too many. But nothing prevents the international community from working for a nuclear weapons-free world. Indeed, we have the right and the responsibility to proclaim in the name of the Prince of Peace that very, very few are still far too many. Hiroshima and Nagasaki proved that once and for all. It is disturbing testimony to the depth of human sinfulness that we still have as many of them around as we do.

The God Particle

There is a passage in The Book of Colossians that in my mind nicely links the Christology of early church teaching with the cosmology of recent scientific speculation: “In (Christ) everything in heaven and on earth was created, not only things visible but also the invisible order of thrones, sovereignties, authorities, and powers: the whole universe has been created through him and for him. And he exists before everything, and all things are held together in him.” (1:16-17, NEB). Right now, it is the cosmology rather than the Christology of this passage that intrigues me. What has re-ignited my interest in the idea of a substance holding everything in the universe together is what I am learning about the Higgs boson—named for the scientist who first dreamed it up—and why some people cannot seem to avoid the temptation to call it the “God particle.”

The physics of bosons eludes my comprehension about as much as does the physics of leptons and quarks, all teenier by many orders of magnitude than the electrons, protons, and neutrons into which they come together and around which I can still get a small part of my rapidly aging mind. However, I do think I still have enough functioning neurons and synapses to grasp why particle physicists are positing the existence of at least one kind of boson to account for other particles in the universe having mass and coming together to form every-thing else. And why we expend time, money, and effort to build particle accelerators that will crash enough protons and anti-protons into one another with enough speed to set off enough fireworks to enable our seeing this elusive particle in all its glory. Or to determine once and for all that there is no such particle.

I only wish I could have gotten closer to this research myself than the fates allowed. In the early 1990’s I was doing some work for the Provost of Southern Methodist University that included helping coordinate the development of a new physics department with the world-class people who at the time were building a supercollider in, of all places, Waxahachee, Texas. Just when things were moving along impressively enough to guarantee US supremacy in particle physics research for a generation, Congress got cold feet and killed the whole project. As a result, the axis of the research shifted to Switzerland, and our country ended up helping to subsidize the building of the Large Hadron Collider just outside Geneva. Ironically, in the time it will take to repair a recent break-down with the LHC, physicists at the much smaller but no less venerable Fermilab near Chicago just may complete the search for the Higgs boson all on their own.

It is fascinating to contemplate the greatest particle physicists of our time repeatedly colliding with one another in a frantic effort to be the first to explain how, as one scientist friend found a way of putting it to me, atoms “congeal” into matter after the Big Bang. When I first began struggling to grasp the nature of elements, molecules, and atoms, the notion of a “Big Bang” was still generating more big yawns—and even big laughs—than big ideas. The prevailing wisdom was that things were made up of atoms and whatever sub-atomic particles there were, and that all of them had been here together, forever. Religious types like me were struggling against getting closed out of the cosmological action altogether, but about all we had to draw on was the very difficult to grasp idea that all the stuff of the universe was created out of—are you ready for this?—nothing, absolutely nothing at all. In short, we were trying to squeeze in a place for God the Creator.

But now comes the God particle discussion, grounded in the certitude that atoms and their components have not in fact been around forever, and focusing intently not on what happened before the Big Bang and how, but on what’s keeping the furniture of the universe now in place from disintegrating before our very eyes (if, indeed the process saves our eyes for last so that we can view the final collapse). The God particle is not a that- from- which- everything- else- material- comes, but rather a that- which- holds- together- everything- which- has- already- come. The writer of Colossians could not leave it at that with respect to Christ; he had to bring in the the idea of Him as agent of the universe’s creation as well. But what the writer also left us is a very present God in times of chaos, whose nature may be less to originate and more to bind, hold, and sustain.

If the search for the Higgs boson is any indication, people are now taking such an idea to their comfort just as much in science as they always have in religion.

Finding Answers To Hard Questions About Faith: A New Book For You

For a couple of years, it was possible from this website to access a book-length collection of short studies that I wrote under the title: Explorations in Faith and Belief. During the time that this material was up and running, I received a number of e-mails from readers that I found gratifying and challenging, and that encouraged me specifically to refine and focus the material around a better defined and more consistently carried out theme. With the technical help of Ms. Chris Guldi, who created and who has managed this website from its beginning over seven years ago, I have re-fashioned some of the original essays and a lot of new material into a very different kind of book that I hope you will find interesting and helpful.

If you will look on the right side of this page, you will see a link to this just finished book, whose title I have reproduced above. There are several ways for you to make it your own. The first is by reading it online, and/or downloading parts or all of it to your computer, from which you may then read, reproduce, and distribute it free of charge. (I keep having to remind myself, though, that printing downloaded material does not come cheap, at least as long as I continue to rely on desktop printers that drink ink as fast as I drink bottled water.)

If you would like this material to have and to hold in more traditional book form, Chris has made this possible, too. A CreateSpace paperback edition is now available through a direct link that she has provided. And soon, Kindle owners can order it directly for download through Amazon. (Needless to say, I never could have figured out how to provide these options on my own.) Together, these access points have drawn my writing completely into Cyberspace, where some readers have waggishly suggested my thinking has been for a long time.

The organization of Explorations … came about originally as a response to readers of Howe About who had been either intrigued, put off, or both by my opinions and who wanted to know more about the theological method and principles that inform them. Several correspondents wondered whether my approach to theology can be defended as an adequate way of representing the Christian message in the present-day, and if so, how? Their questions were legitimate and important, and Explorations sought to answer them respectfully and as completely as I could. One response to my efforts that especially caught my interest came in the form of a question that has occupied my attention ever since: How can we use these discussions of theological fine points in everyday conversations with everyday people about their very personal struggles with faith?

It did not take me long to realize that this question has been at the heart of my pastoral and academic ministry across a professional lifetime, and that I may have developed a perspective on it that is worth sharing with more than just my own students, parishioners, counselees, and fellow church members. The perspective is anchored in the fundamental conviction that when we are struggling with faith-issues, what we need most is to be surrounded by fellow believers and strugglers who listen well, who can resist the temptation to impose their own opinions on us, and who encourage us to seek answers to our questions that are acceptably Christian but at the same time congruent with the dictates of our own conscience. A major corollary of this conviction is that the process by which we arrive at answers is as important as the answers to which the process leads us.

One hope that I have for this book is that all of its readers will find in it resources for nurturing their own spiritual growth. A second is that those who are engaged in the ministry of listening and guiding will find in it some very practical help for working with people whose life-issues are being made more complicated by their faith-issues. Thirdly, I hope that this book will add an important and needed dimension to my previous books on lay shepherding, and to the lay Christians who continue to read and use them in their own congregations. And finally, I hope that I will hear from you about how to make my on-going thinking about the book’s subject a more helpful account of how struggling with questions about faith is also a witness of faith.

A Couple Of Biblical Texts In Context

I would like to think that it is a sign of maturing in faith and not just aging into crankiness that some of my favorite passages in the Bible have begun to trouble me as much as they comfort me. Two examples, both from my very favorite Gospel, should suffice to illustrate at least some of my --- and, I believe, our --- troubles. Since modern translations do not help very much to alleviate the difficulties, I will quote both passages in familiar King James language.

The first is John 3:16 --- “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.“ What is comforting and relevant about this verse is its picture of the scope of God’s love. Although the world of which it speaks is smaller than the world to which today’s astrophysical and ecological interests and passions stretch, it is still large enough to encompass the whole of the human world that St. Paul once characterized as groaning in travail, awaiting relief and release. (Romans 8:21-3) God’s love is for all, not some. It is not the limited, conditional love of one among many tribal deities, but the pure, unbounded love of the one and only Lord of all Life.

Well, not quite. As the Lord giveth in the first part of this verse, he taketh away in the second. All who are not “in” the Son (the mysticism here is an important theme running through the whole of this Gospel) will be cut off from the source and scene of eternal life. If we were Jewish Christians in the late first century of the second milennium, just kicked out of the synagogue for insisting that Jesus is the long-expected Messiah, we might want to take this verse to heart, give up our longing for an irretrievably lost fellowship with our still Jewish friends and family members, and rev up our participation in the Christian koinonia. But we are not of that time and situation. We are Christians in an increasingly interdependent and religiously pluralistic world of a new millennium altogether, who can no longer afford to allow the good news of John 3:16a to be swallowed up by the very bad and irrelevant news of 3:16b.

The second passage of this little exercise is John 14:6 --- “…I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” Here, too, there is something comforting and relevant to be gleaned. At least, I have found it so ever since I began struggling in late adolescence with how to be a faithful Christian in addition to being a new church member. I got what God was all about; what I did not get was how to translate my understanding of God into a better way of personal living than I had managed to come up with on my own. The Ten Commandments helped some, although the jealous God of whom they spoke was not the God I had come to know. “Look to Jesus,” a lot of my friends kept telling me. And that helped more.

It was the first part of John 14:6 that first showed me what I would find by looking in earnest, even though the exclusivity implied by the “The” of the passage seemed more than just a little extreme. As for the second part of the verse, I could only close my eyes and shake my head in consternation. Jesus had become worth listening to not because I saw him as my only path to God, but because the God who had already come to me along his own path was the same God who came to Jesus too, much more powerfully.

Every now and then, I get to wondering about just what might befall us in the life of faith were the original manuscripts of biblical books ever to turn up somewhere. At present and for the most part at least, we have every reason to suppose that they were copied accurately and faithfully. But… One speculation I have is that in that Johannine School of editors back yonder, there might have been a dyslexic guy who inadvertently reversed the original phrasing of 14:6b and whose reversal got picked up and incorporated into all the versions of the Fourth Gospel that subsequently made it out of the School. Consider this possibility for the original statement: “no man cometh unto me, but by the Father.”

Or unto the Buddha, or to Muhammad, or… As speculation, of course, this line of thought is clearly over the top. As theology, though? Now that is another story.

A Kind Of Closeness Not To Worry About

The cold drizzle that enveloped all of us during the burial service abated somewhat, and two brothers hung back to reminisce a little more about their father before turning to the many friends of the family who were maintaining their distance respectfully. Silently praying for the last time over the casket, I could not help overhearing the brothers’ speaking gently and lovingly, but also regretfully, about their parents. “I don’t know what Mom’s going to do now,” one said, “ it’s like he’s been torn right out of her.” His brother responded: “Their marriage was a terminal case of the same-old-same-old, and it died a long time ago.”

I never got a chance to talk to my parishioner’s sons about their brief interchange that day; they left for the airport before I could get to them, and I did not see them again before leaving the church the next year for a new pastoral appointment. But I have thought about them every time I bring to mind the parents of whom they spoke. Millie and Sam (not their real names) had the longest surviving marriage in the congregation at the time, and I still have a vivid memory of manning the punch bowl at their 62nd anniversary, and of being startled by two things they said to me that day. “It still scares me how much alike we are, preacher,” Sam said, “sometimes it’s so boring around her I almost go crazy.” Millie’s comment echoed Sam’s uncannily: “I’m ashamed to admit this, but Sam has never done anything different about anything in his life, and there are times when I think I’m just gonna kill him!” It helped that during each broadside, Sam and Millie were smilingly holding out their punch cups for a refill.

I was privileged to serve Millie and Sam’s small rural church long enough to learn a good bit about its views and values on a lot of things, and particularly on the subject of “suitable” marriage partners. For this community the ideal couple was a compatible couple, and the compatible couple was a couple alike in upbringing, economic status, interests, and temperament. Perhaps most importantly of all, compatibility was predicated on the mutual expectation that personal interests as a couple, save perhaps for brief interludes behind locked bedroom doors, would be subordinated to the interests and needs of their own children and their respective extended families.

In relationships like Millie’s and Sam’s, questions that haunt couples so impressively today seem only rarely to be thought of at all, e.g.: How can we continue to grow as individuals and still be a couple?; How can we make times just for ourselves, away from bosses, kids, in-laws, neighbors, and friends, and still be a family?; How can we get more and more pleasure out of more and better sex with our spouse, without greater familiarity breeding even more contempt? I came to know Millie and Sam well enough to know that while they were not utterly ignorant about questions like these, they did not take them seriously enough to think they were worth working out answers to in their own marriage. Compatibility and commitment were supposed to be enough. And for them, they were. What this couple thought every marriage should be about they also strongly believed had survived in their own. What their sons thought marriage should be about they may have strongly believed either had never been a part of or had long since died in their parents‘.

Most couples’ counselors I know tell me that they have more experience dealing with problems in opposites-attract relationships than they do in like-meets-like ones. And more than a few admit that when they do meet up with the latter kind of couple, their instinct is to try to find ways to help each member tap into the opposite side of his and her respective nature, in the hopes of spicing things up a bit. This seems to me a matter of torquing clients in the direction of the therapist’s own comfort level more than it is a matter of meeting clients on their own ground. If the strategy works, of course, there will be even more opportunities for clients to continue working on their relationships, this time for the sake of correcting the problems that oppositeness rather than sameness tends to create.

What Millie and Sam still get me to thinking about is the patience and good humor that can make a marriage work when the marriage itself is not the be-all and end-all of a couple’s coupling. I did not see their own relationship the way that one of their sons appeared to have seen it. It never would have died of boredom. But it just might have been killed from tinkering.

Loving And Cherishing Our Opposites

June has long since lost its status as the magic month for weddings --- people get married just about anytime anymore --- but I have been around long enough as an officiant to keep turning my thoughts especially at this time of the year to our society’s fantasies and hopes for marriage. And so, as I have during several previous Junes through these columns, I am focusing again on couples and on some of the things that give their lives together both problems and promise. This time around, I have especially in mind “opposites attract” kinds of relationships. In the next column, I’ll turn to “we‘re just alike” ones.

During my early years of doing and teaching pre-marital and marital counseling, one axiom about couples relationships kept getting itself confirmed in session after session with guys and gals from every kind of upbringing, no matter of what age, economic status, race, previous relationships, or just about anything else besides. The axiom was this: the most exciting and at the same time most difficult to manage couples’ relationships are those in which people marry their opposites. What makes opposite characteristics so attractive, one line of thinking posits, is the promise of completeness that they arouse in those attracted by them.

According to this widely respected Jungian way of looking at the matter, with a little help from John Sanford, the psychological traits we lack in ourselves are precisely the ones that we unconsciously strive to make up for by seeking out someone else who has them in abundance. (Analogously, perhaps, to consciously seeking out someone with a bigger and better investment portfolio than we can put together on on our own.) My own view tends to focus less on the yearning aspect of opposites-attract relationships and more on the quality of avoidance that so many such relationships exhibit: by looking for attractive character traits especially intensely in others, we all too easily evade the responsibility for cultivating at least some of them in ourselves.

In my experience, couples whose temperaments are close to the opposite ends of the spectrum inevitably must learn to deal well with two very large problems, at least if their relationships are going to remain attractive enough to survive the many temptations that present-day society hurls at all married folk constantly. One problem is the innate (yes, it’s a matter of nature far more than it is of nurture) wish and urge to re-make one’s partner in one’s own image. Instead of gratefully celebrating their differences --- e.g., introversion/extraversion, decisiveness/cautiousness, vision-orientedness/data-orientedness, idealism/practicality --- as complementary gifts and graces that can enhance the range and depth of their intimacy, they struggle to obliterate them in the other out of the wrong-headed notion that by so doing their mounting, temperament-driven conflicts will lessen.

A typical expression of this insidious process is one partner’s resentment of just how “exciting” things seem to have to be in the marriage (a little would have gone a long way), and the other’s that he/she wasn’t prepared for just how “stable” the other partner has turned out to be. As the initial excitement of the relationship turns into exhaustion for one partner, and as stability evokes a paralyzing sense of boredom in the other, each becomes increasingly a bearer to the other of problems more than of promise. The heart-felt, mutual commitment to love and to cherish with which the relationship began devolves into a gearing-up to suffer and to blame.

The other problem with which opposites-have-attracted couples must deal is the innate (there’s that word again, and in this context it is a crucial one) tendency on the part of each partner to accentuate the expression of his or her distinctive character traits to the point that they become, in their one-sidedness and inflexibility, something closer to character faults. “This is the way I am,” one husband summarily told his wife in my office one day; “I guess you’ll just have to learn to live with it.” His wife readily conceded the first part of the declaration, but she rejected the second and called a divorce lawyer. Mediation helped, but only when it took a theological turn. A very wise, seminary-trained mediator helped the husband in this case to grasp a profound spiritual truth, that when there is too much of an otherwise good thing, bad consequences can follow. A virtue run amok, in this particular case a husband’s passion for predictability, sometimes can become a vice, with vicious effects on intimacy.

Later on, when things began to settle down in their relationship, the young wife confronted constructively her own temperamentalism, first in the form of a hard-wired craving for spontaneity, on the basis of which she receives accolade after accolade for being the life of everyone’s party. What I especially remember her saying to her husband, as their work with me moved toward a happy --- and lasting --- ending, was that the self-righteousness that she allowed her husband’s criticisms to evoke in her needed to be replaced with greater humility --- and a little less spontaneity along the way.

As we will see next time, “just alike” relationships are not as different from “opposites attract” ones as we may be inclined to believe.

Encouraging One Another In The Faith

People who are struggling with questions about faith deserve answers that reflect both the best in the Christian tradition and the best that their own reasoned judgment can bring to life's challenges in the here and now. In general, the most helpful answers are discovered for oneself, with the encouragement of others. Nevertheless, earnest questions about the Christian faith are frequently met with exhortations and pronouncements which allow little room for exploring why a particular question is of concern to the particular person asking it, and almost no encouragement to discover more than just one way of answering it.

A life-long Episcopalian, distraught over the possibility that her diocese may break from the denomination over the issue of homosexuality, is told: You just have to trust that our leaders are telling us what God is telling them, that we have to disaffiliate. A father of two severely troubled teen-agers, painfully second-guessing his decision to divorce their mother, is comforted with the proclamation: You don't have to worry about your sin if you trust in the Lord; he already paid the price for it in full on the cross. A staunchly pro-life advocate, still in shock over an unexpected pregnancy at age 44, is advised by her Catholicism-bashing good friend: Abortion is your decision and yours alone to make.

All three of these sincerely-intended affirmations are more than passably Christian. And any of them might be true and right for any struggling believer at one time or another. But whether they and other affirmations like them are helpful in the particular circumstances that give rise to them in the first place can only be known by patient and respectful listening, waiting, asking questions, and then listening and waiting some more. This is a process which resists giving answers and instead encourages people to begin composing the answers that will make the most Christian sense to them on their own terms.

Listening and asking questions along the way is both extremely difficult and immensely rewarding, especially when people are struggling to express hard questions about their personal faith. Essentially, though, it is no different from listening to people as they struggle to cope with any other life-issue. It is just as hard, but no harder, and it threatens just as readily but not more so to dissolve into doing too much of other peoples' work for them rather than supporting them in their doing the work themselves. The idea of racing in with quick fixes, whether of unresolved grief or unresolved doubt and everything in between, is a very seductive idea, particularly in its hinting that there is wisdom to impart and accolades to garner by the Imparters. By contrast, the idea of keeping in the background and congratulating people for solving their problems on their own seems, well, un-rewarding.

About this approach, though, one pastor I know raised an important question: But isn't it the responsibility of a Christian to answer someone’s faith-question the way the gospel answers it? To me, this listening approach says that whatever a care receiver says, no matter how theologically off base it is, is okay. "Kill the infidels," for instance. That's ok?

No, killing infidels is not ok, anymore than denying medical treatment to poor people, or worshipping nature goddesses, or accepting only men as church leaders, or deeming the universe to be the creation of an evil deity are ok. None of these is ok, because the gospel, properly understood, makes it impossible to say otherwise. This pastor is very wise and very right --- up to a point. Where he is not right is in his assumption that this very same gospel must be understood at all times and everywhere the same way, and that there is only one thing that the gospel has to say to people in every kind of situation and to every kind of question about its meaning and its truth.

Even so, however, the pastor is still right in his assumption that though we can question and disagree about what the gospel means for different times, places, and circumstances, we are still raising questions and disagreeing about how to interpret the gospel. That is, our questions and disagreements are about what is and is not God's own "good news" for us, and not about mere opinions floating in the air, alighting on people willy-nilly, no one of which demonstrably better than any other. Our listening to people who are feeling "whirled around by every fresh gust of teaching" (Ephesians 4:14) is a listening for what the God of the Christian gospel is in fact doing in their lives while storms of questioning and doubting rage. We bear the storms with them encouragingly, in the sense of lending a little of our own courage for the struggle to live a life worthy of just that God's incomprehensible mercy toward and faith in us.

A Mainstream Denomination's Struggle For Inclusiveness

In many respects, the United Methodist Church’s internal debates about gays and lesbians reflects uncannily the shape and scope of American society’s own ambivalence about homosexuality and about homosexuals in general. For Methodism’s mission, this is not a good thing. It is difficult to be an effective witness to God in God’s world when one is too much a part of, rather than a solution to, the world’s problems. Even so, it is precisely because the United Methodist Church mirrors so clearly our society’s current struggles with so many important issues affecting the human future that its in-house rhetoric and actions are worth a second look outside as well as inside Methodism.

This summer, the Annual Conferences of the denomination will be voting on a constitutional amendment approved by its General Conference a year ago whose subject is, among other things, inclusiveness. One behind the scenes issue the amendment addresses is whether pastors can refuse to accept a person for membership in a congregation on the basis of that person’s being gay. It is a worthy attempt to fix a problem created earlier by the denomination’s Judicial Council, some of whose members had to have been somnambulant when they interpreted the church’s constitution as giving pastors this right.

Basically, the amendment takes away this so-called right. But its language goes far beyond merely prohibiting the exclusion of people on the basis of their sexual orientation. It purports more fundamentally, and eloquently, to acknowledge that “all persons are of sacred worth and that we are in ministry to all.” Then it goes on to say that all persons shall be eligible to attend worship services, participate in programs, receive the sacraments, and be admitted to membership. The amendment clearly envisions an open and welcoming church, in the light of a theology that emphasizes the wideness and grandeur of God’s mercy. And this is a good thing. There are too many forces at work in more than just Christianity today trying desperately to shrink God and God’s grace down to their own pitiful measure.

Unhappily, it is the behind the scenes issues that are making controversial a declaration that on its own merits should be evoking unanimous shouts of “Sophia” from everyone who will be voting on it. Besides those previously mentioned, another has to do with the exercise of “spiritual discretion” in determining peoples’ “readiness” for church membership. Taking this out of the hands of pastors, the argument goes, will lead to an anything-walks-through-this-joint pattern of congregational life at precisely the time when high expectation churches are supposedly growing and low expectation ones are not. But this amendment in no way implies an abrogation of pastors’ responsibility to help people discern their calling to Christian discipleship. It only insists that the judgment of a person’s “readiness” for church membership cannot be on the basis of race, economic status, gender, or sexual orientation. Unrepentant eco-terrorists, pedophiles, serial adulterers, drug-pushers, atheists, and blasphemers against the Holy Spirit can still be held for questioning, hopefully before and not after being received into membership.

A more serious issue, and one that I hope will be given even more attention on the far side of this amendment’s final ratification, has to do with the force that it will carry in relation to other parts of the United Methodist Church’s Book of Discipline. For instance, will it annul the current and near sacrosanct distinction between affirming homosexual persons as bearing the divine image and condemning their practices? I certainly hope so. There is no credible moral theology or philosophical theory of ethics that provides any warrant whatsoever for distinguishing personhood from acts in the way that this obfuscating distinction does. Condemning the latter amounts to condemning the former, and the proposed new statement on inclusiveness should bring about a timely end to both.

There are a lot of things that both homosexuals and heterosexuals do and can do that by any account renders them dubious representatives of the people of God about God’s mission in the world. But if I read the Decalogue and Jesus’ pithy summary of it correctly, having the former rather than the latter orientation is not one of them. If it is just the Decalogue that is taken into account, it would seem that we should be going after divorced persons long before we start messing with homosexual ones. But if we let Jesus into the picture, it would seem that we should be pulling in extra chairs around the Supper table so that members of both groups will be ensured a place. Come unto him, all ye that are heavy laden, and he will give all, and not just some, rest.

The Trouble With Fundamentalism

Deeply embedded in current debates about how to present the Christian message with integrity is a clenched-teeth holding to a central core of beliefs as an indispensable sign of saving faith. For all practical purposes, Fundamentalists in all of the major world religions have declared a holy war on the questioning of vesting control of religious institutions and even whole societies in anyone except those who hold the “right” beliefs.

Beyond question, beliefs do have indispensable roles to play in the life of faith. They clarify who or what it is that should be the object of our ultimate trust and loyalty. They set out the grounds for confidence that a religion’s basic message is true. And especially for Christians, they offer vital summaries of what the Christian story as a whole is most importantly about. But beliefs are not the whole of faith. Trusting in God and loving all of God’s creatures as God loves them matter too --- even more than does either clinging to or repudiating inadequately understood doctrines, dogmas, and creeds.

The biggest problem with most forms of Fundamentalism is their overly restrictive view of the language and the logic of beliefs themselves. In specific, the so-called “Fundamentals” of faith tend to be misconstrued as factual statements which only the truly ignorant could possibly deny. On the surface, core Christian beliefs do look very much like assertions of fact whose truth can be confirmed by data and close reasoning available to everyone. Certainly, more conservative Christians look upon beliefs this way. According to their way of seeing the matter, the beliefs that we must affirm as conditions of our salvation constitute the full, literal truth (e.g., a cosmos created in six days) about a transcendent order of things that directly influences the course of events, both throughout the physical universe and in human history on our own planet.

The primary problem with this way of looking at core Christian beliefs is its narrowness. Beliefs serve several functions besides description alone. For instance, affirming that Jesus Christ was conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of the virgin Mary has always had far more to do with doxology than with gynecology. It is more a way of honoring God’s greatness and Jesus’ uniqueness than it is of chronicling yet another surprising occurrence that happened sometime back and someplace out there, determinable “objectively.”

Three mornings a week my first year in seminary, routine and ritual became one: a favorite course, chapel, and then chats over coffee in the “Common Room.” One brief chat that had an especially powerful impact on me followed a chapel service in which I happened to be sitting next to the professor of my morning class. Across several weeks, he had been lecturing on the difficulties of getting behind biblical books to the history underlying them and in the process raised questions about the meaning and authoritativeness of the Christian tradition that many of us had not thought about previously. The impact of his lectures was profound, and often disturbing.

Side by side at the appropriate moment my professor and I both stood with our fellow worshippers and said the Nicene Creed out loud. It struck me while we were doing this that in spite of all the questions this man of faith obviously had about this very Creed, when he confessed it himself, he clearly meant what he was saying. As we walked together to coffee hour following the service, I asked him how he could recite the Creed so forcefully in spite of the questions he raised about it in class.

"Ever since I became an American citizen," he said to me, "one of my greatest joys has been reciting the Pledge of Allegiance to the flag. Affirming a creed is like that. This, too, is a declaration of loyalty --- in this latter case, to the church. Not, of course, in the sense of 'my church, right or wrong,' but in the sense of letting members of a group know that you‘re one of them." I still like this analogy. The beliefs that we share as Christians call us not so much to a body of fact as they do to a solidarity with a community of faith whose reason for being is to serve the cause of Christ in the world. Assenting to beliefs is a way of sealing one’s commitment not only to God, but to all of God’s people at work on behalf of God’s creation everywhere. There is indeed an objective order of things to which the core beliefs of faith intend to point. But at the heart of those beliefs is not the distillation of facts, but the confrontation with mystery.

The Resurrection Of Jesus Christ

The Christian story, as I learned about it growing up, is a story about a good man who was badly treated and eventually killed, but who was raised from the dead by God to show us his true identity as the way to, and the truth about, eternal life. The more I learned of the story in later years, even by doing a theology degree or three to learn it, the harder it got to come up with other ways of putting it. And the harder it also became to answer the myriad questions it puts to our ordinary understanding of how things work, in this world and the next.

One question is made inescapable by the Johannine tradition that presents Jesus as the gateway to heaven rather than, as in Mark and Matthew in particular, the proclaimer of a message about God’s coming kingdom on earth. John 14:6 quotes Jesus saying something that seems very out of character, that no one comes to God except by him. While these attributed words may have been comforting to Jewish Christians kicked out of their synagogues late in the first century, they are very troublesome in a 21st century global context.

Believe in Jesus as the gateway --- the only gateway --- to God’s sheepfold, and lo and behold, you’re through the gate. Don’t believe it, and the gate will close before you and remain closed forever. The major problem with this way of thinking is that it is grace-less. It makes getting into heaven a matter of saying and doing the right things, not a matter of God’s saying and doing good things to and for us that we not only do not deserve but can never deserve.

Another question about the Easter story stems from the way it tries to link Jesus’ resurrection with our own. Because he lives, it is said, we too shall live. It is the “because” in this affirmation that gives me pause. No reasonable person doubts the universality of the human hope to survive physical death, either individually or in a larger fellowship or both. And plenty of reasonable people have believed for a very long time that life in a world beyond this one is something not only worth counting on, but even a certainty that we can indeed count on. There should be no surprise, then, that Jesus could make it off a cross alive. Or that the crosses each of us has to bear in this life can be overcome in the next. The real surprise comes with the assertion that our making it to the next life is somehow dependent upon the fact that only Jesus made it.
“In” Christ, it is taught, resides our eternal destiny. The “in” here gives me as much trouble as the “because” just did. It cannot be that we climb into Christ merely by choosing to believe in him. If we are “in” him, it must be because we somehow have already been gathered into him, but the mysticism of all this begins to run riot very quickly. Except that it reminds us of who the Gatherer truly is, with whom we have most truly to deal. When all are safely gathered in, and when the whole of creation cries the Alleluia that has no end, it will be God and God alone who is glorified.

And finally, there is the question of the resurrection of the body. Not even Paul, the greatest Christian debater of the first century on this question, left things quite the way that many people seem to believe he did, with a conversation-stopping either-or to the Corinthians on the order of accept Jesus’ bodily resurrection (“seen” by 500+) or die forever in your unbelief. “Bodily” resurrection? You mean, like my going-to-flab, arteries-hardening, adrenaline-surging, one-thing-after-another-going-wrong body? Or like the body of a friend who was down to flesh and bones at the time of his death from a demonically rampaging cancer? Or like the mangled bodies of a family broadsided at an intersection by a drunken driver who ran a stop sign? No, Paul wrote, not like these. Whatever the spiritual” body is that we will inherit, it will be less like the flesh that Jesus became and more like the Life and the Light that he once was. It will be a body so gloriously changed as to be beyond the power of all our language to express.

The Christian story, as I am thinking about it this Eastertide, is the story of a good man who believed in an even better God, a God whose pure, unbounded Love hallows all things and transforms everything that is less than good in them into something that is good beyond all our thinking and imagining, in worlds without end.

Keeping The Faith When Questions Outweigh Answers

Lately, several people have asked me about books to read in their struggles with questions about faith. Together, we have been looking into a number of recent writings on the subject. And I have been thinking a good bit all over again about how the Christian tradition articulates not only what those beliefs are that Christians are supposed to uphold, but the reasons for our believing that they are true at all times and everywhere.

One thing I have discovered in the process is that there is still a considerable number of books out there on dealing with questions of faith that are very well put together and deserving of serious attention --- e.g., William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3rd edition, Crossroads, 2008; Kenneth R. Sample, Without a Doubt: Answering the 20 Toughest Faith Questions, Baker, 2004; Ted Loder, Loaves, Fishes, and Leftovers: Sharing Faith's Deepest Questions, Augsburg, 2005. Another is that these popular writers, along with more theologically sophisticated ones such as James Gustafson (An Examined Faith: The Grace of Self-Doubt, Fortress, 2003) and Peter Berger (Questions of Faith: A Skeptical Approach, Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), take a very different approach to their subject than I have come to do.

All of them adopt the classic stance of apologetic theology, which is for a teacher or theologian to define questions of faith in a way that is too often abstracted from particular individuals' expressions of them in their own concrete struggles, and then to give their own scripturally-defended and logically-argued, but generic answers to them. There is nothing inherently wrong with this approach. I myself like it and think I have done pretty well with it in my own ministry. But I also think that it leaves much to be desired.

A defense-of-the-faith approach to peoples' questions and doubts is necessarily teacher/theologian centered, not student/inquirer centered. It wrongly puts the respective caregiver in the position of an expert (especially when he or she has looked up the answer to a faith question in a book or books) on matters of a particular believer’s faith and practice, to whom it is then presumed that people in a faith quandry should look instead of trying to discover the answers themselves. But when we are struggling with questions and doubts about faith we need, most of all, to be listened to, respected, and encouraged to seek the answers that make the most sense to us, on our own terms. Meeting this need is much more difficult than spouting off answers, even good answers, to another’s faith questions and then summarily moving on to other topics on the answerer's own terms.

An illustration: One evening on our way back from Laity Week, a popular event sponsored by my seminary, a well read member of our church brought up what he deemed "a bizarre exchange" that took place in the course he was taking. Seemingly out of the blue, a man in his group threw out the question, Do you think people who don't go to church can get to heaven? Irritated by the interruption, the teacher of the course pounded out a Latin formula on the chalkboard (this was a very old classroom), translated it as “There is no salvation outside the church.,” and then treated the class to a tedious exposition of Cyprian of Carthage, ostensibly the formula's originator.

What especially interested my friend was not so much the abruptness of the instructor's reply or the the smugness of the elaboration, offensive as both were. It was the absence of any attempt, as he put it, to find out where the man who asked the question was coming from. At one of the class session's breaks, he and several others tracked the man down to try to find out just this, and got quite an earful for their efforts: The guy told us that his mother died the previous week and that all of her family members, himself included, were worried that she would be cut off by God because she had cut herself off from the church. Maybe knowing that would have changed the teacher's whole approach to the man's question. I'd like to think so, anyway.

There was much wisdom to be celebrated in that classroom that day, but not only from the instructor’s side of the lecturn. Theology does indeed have as one of its responsibilities figuring out the central core of Christian beliefs, especially in and for rapidly changing and challenging circumstances. But just what answers these beliefs have to offer cannot possibly be grasped until we plumb the depths of the questions to which people are seeking answers. Or in my friend’s words, until we know where our fellow strugglers are coming from.

IVF And The Right To Life

In vitro fertilization has long been a controversial issue for our society, except for couples who want children and for whom IVF is either their best or only option. It violates the (in my judgment, debatable) teachings of more than one religious tradition. Its failure can leave crushing disappointment and hopelessness in its wake. Its high cost creates pressure for quick success, and tempts physicians to increase the odds for such by transferring a larger rather than smaller number of embryos to the uterus in a particular cycle. And it sometimes forces medically necessary but ethically disturbing considerations later in a pregnancy about aborting one or more fetuses for the sake of the others’ and/or the mother’s health.

Of all the most recent discussions of these issues, surely the most volatile is the one set off by thenow infamous clinic whose doctors transferred six embryos into a California woman who had already proved her fertility six times over and who subsequently gave birth to octuplets from the transfer. (Two of the six implanted embryos subsequently split into identical twins.) Hopefully, the needs of the innocent newborn in this fiasco will not soon be forgotten in the rush to judgment on their mother and on the physicians and clinic staff members who aided and abetted what surely is egregious medical malpractice.

In the meantime, the rest of us might make good use of our reflection time to weigh some of the complicated moral issues that surround, sometimes oppressively, the practice of IVF. The situation begins with a couple unable to conceive a child by what is supposedly God’s own preferred way of doing it, and suffering no small amount of anguish over the all too evident absence of divine intervention to make their love-making “fruitful.” Into the situation enters an angelic host with medical degrees, offering a technological solution to their spiritual problem. For some observers, the only relevant moral issue is whether the couple will muster the courage to say “No” to the proposed intervention. For others, it is whether the couple will have enough hope to say “Bring it on,” with the more embryos successfully transmitted the better. Those who take either position will probably be more comfortable logging off of this website now, for in fact we have only begun to approach what is at stake morally with respect to the recent Nadya Suleman controversy.

Given a typical picture of multiple miscarriages and limited financial resources, most couples who make use of IVF would not be content with the transfer of a single embryo. (Currently, less than 10% of IVF procedures involve such.) Prevailing guidelines in the medical profession seem more reasonable, permitting in “usual” circumstances the transfer of up to two embryos to a uterus in any cycle. Transferring more increases the risks of neonatal deaths and of developmental disabilities over the survivors’ ensuing lifetimes. The problems begin when these guidelines are overlooked, along with the fact that transferred embryos many times yield twins (in a third of cases or more), or even triplets or more (between 4 and 5%). From both a medical and an ethical standpoint, is further intervention in these latter instances necessary?

Responsible physicians answer in the affirmative, at least in the sense that having the option to intervene medically is a necessary condition of responsible medical practice. What kind of intervention in specific? Basically, “selective reduction” of the multiples: in essence, abortion, on the basis of genetic testing, of observations via sonograms up to three months into the pregnancy, and sometimes of the parents’ gender preference.

Responsible ethicists have to weigh in on answering this question with other considerations in mind, also. One is the distressing possibility of selective reduction’s serving the purpose of engineering “designer babies” rather than just healthy ones. Another is having to wait a relatively long time in the pregnancy to learn enough about the relative chances of survival and thriving of each of the “higher-order multiples.” At three months, a fetus encounters us as much more like an actual human being than an embryo does at three days. But the right to life extends to all the embryos, and it is the very existence of them all that may be at risk precisely because “all” encompasses such an unhealthily large number.

One thing that seems clear from the Suleman case is that too many physicians out there are playing fast and loose with their Hippocratic oath to do no harm. Transferring fewer embryos at the outset of an IVF procedure will go a long way toward allowing couples to be fruitful and multiply responsibly, and toward freeing the rest of us from moral dilemmas that might be avoided in the first place.

Talking About Faith

Along with everything else that we are facing in these troubled times, many people are also struggling with unanswered questions about faith. Some turn to spiritual guides who offer only the kind of answers that discourage further exploration. Others, myself included, believe that a healthy respect for questions and doubts is what makes for a trustworthy guide on matters of faith.

There is nothing inherently wrong with providing well thought out answers to any number of faith-questions, as long as it serves the purpose of clearing up relatively minor matters --- e.g., whether any of Jesus' followers saw his crucifixion directly (yes) --- for the sake of focusing more intently on major ones --- e.g., whether it would make a difference to faith if his bodily remains were someday discovered in a previously unknown burial chamber (perhaps, perhaps not). With respect to the latter kind of question in particular, the Christian tradition represents a wider range of opinion than most believers may realize. Because this is so, helping people with questions about its beliefs and practices should be less a matter of giving definitive answers (e.g.: If you are the Christian you say you are, then you will believe/do…) than of encouraging attention to as many possibilities for interpretation as possible.

Not every believer, it must be said, understands the Christian faith this way. Some have told me in no uncertain words, for example, that there can be no uncertainty for a true Christian. A questioning spirit is an unfaithful spirit, of which one must repent. A less extreme version of this point of view insists that questions about the faith of the church should be referred immediately to religious authorities who alone can provide timely, credible, and approved answers to them. I respect the integrity with which many clergy and lay colleagues in ministry have defended this way of looking at things. Nevertheless, I must continue to disagree with them. As does a very good friend of mine, who puts his own objection to their outlook this way: God gave us minds, and he expects us to use them. To this wonderfully pithy statement I have only one thing to add: when we put our minds to the task of resolving our own questions and doubts about faith, it helps to have a caring Christian friend or pastor who knows how to listen, how to encourage us in our struggle, and how to refrain from imposing answers that could get in the way of our finding our own.

One very able faith-guide I know agonized over how to help a single mother of two think through whether she could in good conscience abort a fetus conceived as a result of rape. Because her upbringing included the teaching that human life begins at conception, this young woman had all of a sudden and through no fault of her own found herself without options and desperately looking to her caregiver for some. The question she asked, and the informed answer her caregiver gave her, opened up new possibilities for deeper exploration: Hasn't the church has always taught that human life begins at conception? The historically accurate answer to this question is "no." Her caregiver knew it, and immediately gave it, with the aim of encouraging her care receiver to look at her concern from every angle. After weighing all the options, she chose to carry her baby to term, even though she knew that her decision would have enormous impact on her life and the lives of the children she already had. Her caregiver put the outcome in what for me is exactly the right perspective: It's not what she decided to do that matters the most; truthfully, I would have made a different decision than she did. What matters is that as a Christian she realized that she needed to make a choice consistent with everything else that she believed.

Listening, encouraging, and holding back from sharing one's own convictions too soon and/or too confidently do not come naturally. Even trained professionals, the clergy included, sometimes forget that in fulfilling their respective callings to apply their knowledge skillfully for others' benefit, they can overwhelm people with answers to questions that their hearers are not really asking, and in terms that their hearers cannot really understand. Even though they do not come naturally, however, these skills can and do come with learning and practice. As does the passion to help people find answers to questions about their faith, or their lack of it, that their own life situations and circumstances compel them to ask.

You know, I ought to write a book about this someday. But wait: I just did. More from it later.