None Are So Blind As Those Who Refuse To See

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO  
Roger Ray, pastor
Lent 4a    March 30, 2014

John 9:1-9
As he walked along, he saw a man blind from birth. 2His disciples asked him, 'Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?' 3Jesus answered, 'Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him. 4Wemust work the works of him who sent me while it is day; night is coming when no one can work. 5As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world.' 6When he had said this, he spat on the ground and made mud with the saliva and spread the mud on the man's eyes,7saying to him, 'Go, wash in the pool of Siloam' (which means Sent). Then he went and washed and came back able to see. 8The neighbors and those who had seen him before as a beggar began to ask, 'Is this not the man who used to sit and beg?' 9Some were saying, 'It is he.' Others were saying, 'No, but it is someone like him.' He kept saying, 'I am the man.' 

I've been a fan of Jon Stewart's fake news show, The Daily Show, for more than 15 years.  His irreverent and incisive interviews have often made him a more reliable news source than most of the professional journalists on TV.  He has interviewed presidents, authors, heads of state, movie stars, religious leaders and corporate giants but I have only seen him awe-struck once and that was when he interviewed a 15 year old girl.  And there are none of his famous guests whom I would love to have a chance to personally meet more than that little Pakistani survivor of a Taliban assassination attempt, Malala Yousuf.

She was only 11 years old when she began writing a blog for the BBC about her life under the rule of the Taliban and her urgent desire for girls in her country to have access to education.  When she was 15, an assassin boarded her school bus and fired three shots right at her head.  One bullet ran along the side of her head and entered her shoulder.  Malala has undergone a number of surgeries and was hospitalized for more than four months.  The shooting has left her disfigured and she has suffered hearing loss as well as some speech problems but in little more than a year after she was shot, she was sitting in the Oval office of the White House trying to educate President Obama about terrorism.


Though a faithful Muslim herself, Malala has been a victim of Islamic extremism in a way that few human beings alive today can fully understand.  If anyone has reason to want to see an aggressive prosecution of the war on terrorism, surely it would be Malala Yousuf.

After the meeting, she told reporters, "I also expressed my concerns that drone attacks are fueling terrorism," she explained to our president, "Innocent victims are killed in these acts, and they lead to resentment among the Pakistani people. If we refocus efforts on education it will make a big impact."

Malala says that she would like to one day be the Prime Minister of Pakistan, which, I suppose, is a worthy goal since our constitution would not allow her to be elected to be the President of the United States.  But I wish.....

In the Bible, blindness is used metaphorically to represent those who can see but who refuse to see.  Modern readers can be ridiculously fact-literal about biblical stories and by reading them that way, become blind to the point themselves.  John takes a lot of precious ink and paper to recount a narrative that was too long for us to read in church today though I suspect that most of you know the story pretty well.

If John were just trying to list miracles to get readers to believe that Jesus had magical powers, he would just say, "30 years ago, Jesus cured a blind man named John Smith who lived on Main St. in Jerusalem."

John is not trying to prove that Jesus was magical, he is telling you a story about blindness.
The early part of John's gospel is full of brilliantly written metaphorical narratives starting with Jesus' conversations with Nicodemus and the Samaritan woman at the well but this one, this story in John 9, is deeply ironic because in a story crowded with bumbling disciples, gossiping neighbors, judgmental religious leaders and back stabbing family members it almost seems like the blind man in the story is the only person in Jerusalem who can see and everyone else is blind to reality.

I am convinced that what John wanted to tell us about Jesus is that Jesus was able to see this blind man as a human being in need of real help when everyone else around him saw him as an opportunity for pity, gossip, religious debate, or as a family burden or a neighborhood problem. And folks, if we are in any way followers of Jesus, we want to be able to see in this way too....because we live in a blind culture too.

Sean sometimes sings a song for us from the 1940's Broadway musical, South Pacific, called, "You Have to be Carefully Taught."

You've got to be taught To hate and fear,

You've got to be taught From year to year,

It's got to be drummed In your dear little ear

You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught to be afraid Of people whose eyes are oddly made,

And people whose skin is a diff'rent shade,

You've got to be carefully taught.

You've got to be taught before it's too late, Before you are six or seven or eight,

To hate all the people your relatives hate, You've got to be carefully taught!

Certainly Malala's parents deserve no small amount of credit for helping their daughter to see the absurdity of the prejudice against females in conservative Islam...or, more accurately, the version of Islam practiced by misogynists.... I believe that Islam is more inherently egalitarian in matters of gender than either Judaism or Christianity but there is a very backwards, fearful and prejudiced expression of conservative Islam that Muhammad would have rejected more than 500 years ago.  After all, in his house, he was the one who was illiterate and his wife was the one who had an education.  If not for her, there wouldn't be a Quran!

But like the song says, prejudices have to be taught very early to make them stick.  By the time they are teenagers, most girls in the Middle East have accepted a secondary role in society.  Just as most of us here who grew up in the segregated school system of the United States, learned to accept that the races somehow were supposed to be kept apart.

There is no logical reason why any of us who are straight ever wasted a single second of our lives, an ounce of our energy worrying about what gay people do.  Yes, we can all have an innately negative reaction to the unfamiliar and the different but by and large all prejudices are taught, carefully, and through constant repetition until we are so blind that we can no longer remember how to see.

I lift up Malala because she, at the age of 16, still struggling to recover from having been shot in the face by a crazy fanatic, sits down in the Oval Office with the first black President of the United States, a man who has lived abroad, a man who grew up without a father, a man who has suffered as the victim of racial prejudice,
....but a man who still seems to believe that sending his flying assassin robots into foreign nations and killing innocent civilians in the process of killing suspected terrorists will help to stop terrorism.

I understand that there are dangerous people in the world and that the use of drones has all kinds of advantages over launching most other more conventional forms of military attack.  But once we became capable of what seems to move away from what would be considered warfare towards what has to be seen as political assassination, then it became too easy to do without risk to American lives.  And then, when used so often and without any way of isolating a suspected terrorist from the children who are playing in the streets, the mothers who are hanging out the laundry and the men who are gathered around a pot of coffee in conversation, then blowing up a house to kill one terrorist but accepting the deaths of a dozen innocent people as being merely collateral, then guarantees that the survivors on that block have just become ready to be recruited as terrorist.

What Malala said to President Obama was what President Obama should already know, what he would already be able to see if he had not simply refused to see it before.... Killing innocent people doesn't end terrorism, it causes terrorism.  And she even offered him a workable alternative..... focus on education because education actually does deter terrorism.

She lives there, she knows.  The Taliban has no greater deterrent than the voice of this 16 year old, future Prime Minister.  Realistically, the Taliban's best recruiter is President Obama but the person who has done the most to turn Pakistani citizens against the Taliban is Malala.

I think that being a disciple of Jesus is a matter of learning how to see again.... It is about fighting the blindness of prejudice, ignorance, racism, sexism and classism.  Believing that Jesus was born of a virgin, died a substitutionary death to save our souls, that he was divine, walked on water or made blind men see is not what being a Christian is all about.... Forgive me for saying it quite so bluntly, but that stuff has to do with being rather gullible and maybe even being a tad bit slow..... but being able to see through the prejudice we have been taught.... Being able to see the oppression of the poor and the abuses of corporations that we have been taught to bow down to in the name of patriotism, democracy, freedom and the American way..... that's what it means to be a person after the heart of Jesus.

So, you want to learn how to be a better Christian?  Pay attention to this little Muslim girl.... I think she can see better than we can.

Thou Shalt Not Stand Idly By

March 23, 2014    Lent 3
Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor

Romans 5:3-5a
And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us,

A week ago our senator, Clair McCaskill, was in town to deliver a speech at Drury University in which she announced a new initiative to combat rape on college campuses.  Rape is a problem on college campuses and so, on the one hand, it is good to hear that she is against it.  But as politics goes, is there a "pro-rape" constituency?  Not withstanding some of the colossally stupid things that have been said about rape by some of our other Missouri politicians, it is actually difficult to imagine that Clair was risking a lot of political capital by going on the record as being opposed to rape.

One of my former associate ministers who took a church of her own several years ago decided that she would try and follow my lead in the media and she wrote a passionate opinion column in which she decisively announced her opposition to child abuse.  That was more than ten years ago and we have yet to see the opposing article in which someone goes on record as being in favor of child abuse.

You may think that I have made a career out of tilting at windmills, but, no one can accuse me of charging a windmill that wasn't there.

But let's get back to Claire...our senator came to town to announce her opposition to rape on college campuses a scant week after she had blocked passage of the long fought for bill sponsored by Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York.

Senator Gillibrand's bill would have removed the trial process of rape in the military from military courts where they have a backlog of over 1600 cases they have not investigated yet and many estimate that fewer than one in ten rapes are actually reported because of they horrific way these cases are handled in the military.

The case for Gillibrand's bill was bolstered just before Senator McCaskill voted against it by the news that Brig. Gen. Jeffrey A. Sinclair plead guilty to having repeatedly raped a woman under his command and threatening to murder her and her family if she told anyone.  And that news was backed up by a sexual assault charge against Lt. Col. Joseph Morse, who is the army's chief prosecutor in military sex crimes.

I think that Clare McCaskill is a smart woman and I like her politics a whole lot more than her former political opponent, Todd "Legitimate Rape" Akin. And, to be fair, I am certain that Clare is actually opposed to rape in the military, on college campuses and everywhere else...the difference is that when she had the opportunity to do something significant about it, she decided to vote with the Rand Paul's and Lindsey Graham's of the Senate to please her Ft. Leonard Wood constituency.

This banner we commissioned for our church that features the winged lion holding up a tablet that reads "Thou Shalt Not Stand Idly By."  The quote comes from Elie Wiesel's Nobel Prize acceptance speech in which he said that the Holocaust only happened because most people simply watched it happen.  Genocide can only happen if the majority of the population decides not to get involved.

I had latched onto that quote many years ago, and those of you who have been in my home have seen a ceramic relief I had made for the mantle by a different artist because it expressed the core of what I believed prophetic ministry to be and it sums up what has disappointed me about my most of my experience with my denominational heritage.

There was a period of my life when I was very connected to denominational affairs.... And when I say "affairs" sometimes that's what it was.  I became aware of allegations of sex crimes committed by the former General Minister and President of the Disciples of Christ, William Nichols.  The denomination was paying off accusers in out of court settlements and trying to hush it all up.  I insisted on notifying the police and the response from the denomination was to threaten to sue me.

I reached out to members of the clergy I knew from the west coast to the east coast and not a one of them would take a stand with me against hiding these sex crimes.  I emailed more than 6,000 members of clergy and not a one of them would get involved.  I really couldn't believe it but even after all of the Catholic priest scandals have been in the news, when it comes right down to potentially harming your own denomination, the institution where your own pension fund rests, there is not much love of principle.

Standing idly by becomes nearly sacramental.... To commanding officers who are aware of the tens of thousands of military sexual assaults....to popes, bishops and priests who hide pedophilia to solid, salt of the earth, church going folks who don't want to shine a light on injustice, or even know too much about it.... Not enough to have to get involved.

Army officers can say to elected politicians, "We do not want to be held accountable for our misconduct."  And politicians say in reply, "And we don't want to hold you responsible either."  Long after this national conspiracy to hide sex crimes in the Disciples of Christ Church, I reported two incidents of embezzling.... One at the national level and one in our Springfield office of the Ozarks Lakes Area.

Both were swept under the rug.  No criminal charges were ever filed, responsible parties made off with nearly a half a million dollars of donors' money between the two incidents.  Nothing was done.  I couldn't even get our local paper to cover the local crime... no legal charges filed, everything held in personnel files that are not subject to sunshine laws....everyone knew what happened but no one would do anything about it.

The Area Minister even kept his job.  He lives in this neighborhood just over the hill from us which is why I asked to have my name put on the sign in the front yard in large block letters so that he has to see it every morning and evening that he goes passes by.  Maybe everyone else gives silent consent, but I don't.

When we went downtown a couple of years ago to protest the anti-illegal immigrant measure being voted on by the city council, there were some of my old denominational peers out there carrying signs.  They, like we, were protesting the inherent xenophobia behind this E-Verify movement but the irony that struck me hard that day was that they refused to get involved in huge ethical matters about which they actually had a vote.... They have a say in the management of their own denomination but when the authority was handed to them to make a decision, they voted "not present."

When it comes to telling city government how they should run the city, they are ready to speak up but in their own house, they hear no evil, see no evil and will not speak out against evil.


Albert Einstein said, "Great spirits have always found violent opposition from mediocre minds. The latter cannot understand it when a [person] does not thoughtlessly submit to hereditary prejudices but honestly and courageously uses their intelligence."  If you stand up to the injustice of the world you will find that you immediately have a lot of enemies, almost every one of them, however, will reveal themselves to me mediocre, not only in intellect but in morality and in courage.

Paul wrote to the Roman church warning them that they would endure opposition... there will be suffering if you stand for anything, but if you practice, you gain endurance and that endurance will produce character and if enough people care about building character, the world will change.

But, folks, we have created a little liberal enclave for ourselves out here.  We have this progressive church where we can gather with fairly consistently like minded people and we could meet out here once a week and decry the hypocrisy of politicians, priests and the corporations that own them both but, you know, that can become just another way of standing idly by.  There is no substantive reward for holding informed, progressive thoughts if you hold them privately.

I printed on the cover of the bulletin this morning this delightful picture of a girl's soccer team all wearing traditional Muslim headscarves, the hijab.  This is not a soccer team in Bahrain or Indonesia; this is in Aurora, Colorado.

Even though the soccer association had ruled that women could wear the hijab during games, this one referee sent the only Muslim girl on the team off the field.

Now, I've seen high school friends shave their heads in solidarity with a classmate who was undergoing chemotherapy.  And that is a sacrifice and a noble gesture but it is not like there was a pro-cancer club in their school.  It is a symbolic act but their hair will grow back whether their friend survives the illness or not.

But these Colorado girls deciding to identify with a Muslim team-mate... that's a bit different to me.  I don't like the fact that Muslims ask women to cover up in ways that men do not have to.  I think it is unfair, it is sexist, it is misogynistic.

I think that it even poses some security risk for people to be able to enter banks and airports and even stores with their identities partially or entirely hidden.  I suspect that a number of these girls might feel much the same way that I do about the hijab but they put one on anyway.

They didn't wear a hijab to defend Islam.  They wore it rather than stand idly by and curse the referee who was being a jerk.  They wore it rather than putting their arm around the Muslim teammate after the game and telling her they were sorry for what happened to her.  They were not simply opinionated about injustice, they were unwilling to passively watch it.

The Holocaust would not have happened if the people of Germany, Russia, Latvia, Slovakia, the Netherlands and Poland had not let it happen.

That story we have all heard about how the Germans ordered the Jews in Denmark to wear the star of David and the next day the king of Denmark came out wearing a star himself...that didn't happen...that's a myth. We wish the people of Europe had done something like that but they didn't.

The story about the girls in Overland High School wearing the hijab to their soccer game....that happened, and it should happen more often in more places.  But you would never have the courage and self awareness to stop a holocaust if you don't practice...if you are not willing to stand up for a young girl who is being turned away from a soccer match.

Yes, I know, we can't be involved with everything that happens...we have to choose our battles.  I'm just saying, if we got in the habit of standing up for justice we probably wouldn't have to do it so often anymore.

Our government, our religious institutions, our corporations have learned to depend upon our compliance, our silence, our passive indifference and so far they have been right to do so.

Howard Zinn wrote in Failure to Quit, "Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience. Our problem is that numbers of people all over the world have obeyed the dictates of the leaders of their government and have gone to war, and millions have been killed because of this obedience. . . Our problem is that people are obedient all over the world in the face of poverty and starvation and stupidity, and war, and cruelty. Our problem is that people are obedient while the jails are full of petty thieves, and all the while the grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem."

It is a big problem that has only one solution.  You have to decide that you will no longer stand idly by.

The Origin of Sin

Lent 1     March 9, 2014
Community Christian Church
Roger Ray, pastor

Genesis 2:15-17; 3:1-7          
15The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.
16And the Lord God commanded the man, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; 17but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die."

3Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God say, 'You shall not eat from any tree in the garden'?" 2The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; 3but God said, 'You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.'" 4But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not die; 5for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
6So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. 7Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves.

Like many of the people who voted for this year's Oscar awards, I have not had a chance to see most of the movies that were nominated.  Still, I could not escape either news reports or comedian's commentary on the best actor award recipient's self-congratulatory comments.  Matthew McConaughey did manage to thank God and his parents before launching into a very uncomfortable series of explanations for why he is his own hero.

I want to believe that he is not as narcissistic as he sounded but at the very least this is a good example of why even really good actors need to have a writer to prepare their speeches for them.  The story-line of the film, as I understand it, makes a beautiful and wonderful moral point but it is not hard to be deceived into believing that it is really all about you when you see your own face up on the screen and you are receiving accolades from all of the world.
I always find it painful when news-commentators decide to run for public office.  They have come to believe, over years of looking into a camera and reading off of a teleprompter that they are no longer just reading the news, that they have become, themselves, the news.

For centuries the Catholic Church has implied that the "original sin" has something to do with sex.  That is not what the Genesis narrative suggests.

We may be annoyed when squirrels get into the bird feeder but we do not talk about sinful squirrels.  Squirrels just do what squirrels do because that is the nature of being a squirrel. We sometimes hate it when the deer wander into the yard and eat our vegetable garden, our shrubs and flowers but we do not call them sinful.  They are just doing what deer do.

Human beings, as naked apes, only talk about sin because we consider ourselves to be aware of what is right and what is wrong and even though we are aware, we still often choose to do what is wrong.  The Garden of Eden story says that the narrative of human sin began with hubris.... Arrogance... narcissism.... The desire to be equal with God.

I have often joked that were it not for the church's mastery of guilt and fear that I would not have a job.  Clearly, in the progressive church, we are not too easily manipulated by either of those old standbys of religion but I think that we have reason to slow down a bit and give it a moment's reflection.



Like most aspects of spiritual thinking, there is both the macro and the micro consideration... the personal and the social, the individual and the global perspective.

This past week, Rachel Maddow aired a special to answer the question, "Why did we invade Iraq?"  Based on recently released documents from the Bush administration, it becomes inescapably evident that our nation used the tragedy of 9-11 to attack a nation whose only provocation was that they were dragging their feet about getting their oil onto the world market.

Like many of you, I was involved in protests prior to the invasion of Iraq carrying signs that said, "No Blood for Oil."  Though we suspected that oil was the real reason for the war, if we can trust the honesty of Maddow's reporting on the newly released documents, the indefensible hubris that allowed us to justify killing off our own soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqis to keep oil prices low, now seems to be unavoidably true.

How could we not call this sin?  How is this not hubris at a national level?  Energy executives, in secret meetings with Vice-President Cheney, with the blessings of President Bush, mapped out a strategy that would use Iraqi oil to bump up the world supply even though it would mean the deaths of so many people.

Now I watch the unrest in the Ukraine with a mixture of sympathy and fear.  I am not certain that the people there have not been encouraged to sever ties with Russia and align with the west because Russia has been a major exporter of natural gas which flows through pipelines in the Ukraine.
Now that the United States finds itself awash in natural gas, we're looking to export it and that would be much more profitable if we could cut off the Russian supply of natural gas to Europe.  I don't mean to use the pulpit for a foreign policy speech.  What I'm trying to point out is that we can do things out of greed, self-interest, out of a narcissistic world view, all the while telling ourselves that we are doing something noble, praiseworthy, even courageous.

Søren Kierkegaard once said that we are objective about others but subjective in our view of ourselves when, in fact, we should be subjective about others and objective in our self-appraisal.  That is, we look across the globe and we make ourselves comfortable in portraying Vladimir Putin as and old Soviet style dictator and allowing ourselves to view our own nation as being a beacon of freedom and democracy.  What if Putin is really just defending Russia's natural gas trade and we are trying to take it from him?

Can we be objective about our own motives and allow for a bit of subjective view of the motivations of people we do not and cannot know?  That the citizens of Ukraine are in danger is a horrible thing.... But I am not certain that the natural gas market is not what is really ratcheting up the national danger of civil war.  I feel that it is important enough that we must come down off of our imperial throne of national arrogance this time before we do again what we did in Iraq.

Empire building is bad when Putin does it and, we should be able to admit, it is bad when we do it.

But this is no less true when it comes to taking an objective view of our selves on the individual level.  International politics is a complicated, mixed up can of worms but so are our own motivations.  No one is pure.  No one is without ego.  We all have mixed motivations for everything we do and if we cannot be honest about them, the mix can become quite toxic.

It is unfortunate that a great deal of the talk about sin has had to do with piety rather than actual human evil.  I hope that the progressive movement is delivering us from puritanical concerns with believing the right things, praying the right way, worshipping the right way.... I hope that we can put distance between ourselves and all of the really mentally ill obsessions with managing the sex lives of others or loathing our own bodies or natural instincts.  That stuff is really messed up.

But I earnestly hope that we will not abandon entirely an awareness of personal sin.  It is not right to hurt other people, to exploit them, take advantage of them, lie to them, rob them of either their property or their dignity.

Just as we know it would be wrong to stir up a civil war in Ukraine in order to increase our international market for natural gas, it is wrong for us to tear down another human being in order to gain status for ourselves..... or to expect them to work and still be poor.... Or to accept that the well off can have health care and that they need to quietly hurry up and die.



Without a concept of sin we may think that we can return to the unadapted animal state of innocence but do you really want to start growling at the neighbors and licking your private parts in public?  

We have eaten the forbidden fruit.  We cannot claim that we do not know the difference between right and wrong. We cannot, as individuals nor as a nation, live in the dark as if the harm we do to others can be excused because it tilts the scales in our own favor.

Wars are a human creation.  Poverty is a human creation.  Racism, sexism, nationalism are all human creations and the only thing that can prevent wars, end poverty, erase prejudice and create justice are persons who have a conscience that they are willing to use.

Love and Marriage: A Philosophical/Poetic Perspective

Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
March 2, 2014

"Commission" by Ezra Pound

Go, my songs, to the lonely and the unsatisfied,

Go also to the nerve-racked, go to the enslaved-by-convention,

Bear to them my contempt for their oppressors.

Go as a great wave of cool water,

Bear my contempt of oppressors.

Speak against unconscious oppression,

Speak against the tyranny of the unimaginative,

Speak against bonds.

Go to the bourgeoise who is dying of her ennuis,

Go to the women in suburbs.

Go to the hideously wedded,

Go to them whose failure is concealed,

Go to the unluckily mated,

Go to the bought wife,

Go to the woman entailed.

Go to those who have delicate lust,

Go to those whose delicate desires are thwarted,

Go like a blight upon the dulness of the world;

Go with your edge against this,

Strengthen the subtle cords,

Bring confidence upon the algae and the tentacles of the soul.

Go in a friendly manner,

Go with an open speech.

Be eager to find new evils and new good,

Be against all forms of oppression.

Go to those who are thickened with middle age,

To those who have lost their interest.

Go to the adolescent who are smothered in family-

Oh how hideous it is

To see three generations of one house gathered together!

It is like an old tree with shoots,

And with some branches rotted and falling.

Go out and defy opinion,

Go against this vegetable bondage of the blood.

Be against all sorts of mortmain. 

One of the most enduring characters of modern cinema is the severely obsessive compulsive writer, Melvin Udall, played by Jack Nicholson in "As Good as it Gets."  The scene in the 1997 film that gives the movie its title is when Melvin makes an unscheduled visit to see his psychiatrist. The doctor refuses to see him unless he schedules an appointment and comes at the proper time.

Forced to leave without getting his way, the frustrated writer stops in the crowded waiting room, looks around, and says to all of those people who were obviously waiting to see a therapist, and asked, "What if this is as good as it gets?"

The assumption being that anyone sitting in a psychiatrist's waiting room is somehow profoundly dissatisfied with life but they were stunned by the suggestion that, in fact, this may be as good as it gets. At what point do you compromise with the universe, pitch your tent, sit down and accept that this is as good as it gets?

A great deal of spiritual guidance teaches us that contentment comes from giving up our desires.  Buddhism's noble truths revolve around the belief that all suffering comes from unfulfilled desires and that the way out of suffering is to give up all desires, to empty ourselves of expectations.

In religion as well as in business, there is a popular proverb that says that the perfect is the enemy of the good.  Our insistence on perfection sets us up for conflict, failure and disappointment.  So there is a certain pervasive wisdom that says, "Yes, this is as good as it gets.....so quit your whining."
Scott Peck, the author of The Road Less Traveled, often said that the greatest truths are often expressed in paradox.  I just wanted to say that before you decide that I'm either hypocritical or schizophrenic.  I don't disagree with the core teachings of Buddhism.  My first book was about the spiritual disciplines of Christian monasticism in which I praise the virtue of living life very simply with our appetites under control.

But there is a paradoxical "on the other hand" side of the story.  The struggle that took Jack Nicholson's character to his psychiatrist's office in the first place was that his comfortably reclusive life as a successful writer was that he had fallen in love with his waitress at his favorite breakfast diner and everything about that was implausible, impractical and impossibly unworkable for a man who had the kind of OCD issues that he had.  He could not possibly hope to have or give someone love when he was as messed up as he was.

Now, over the years I've found a number of fairly creative ways of changing the conversation so that I could talk about Søren Kierkegaard..... this is no exception.  If there was a philosopher in the last two centuries who was more of a genius than Kierkegaard, I have no idea who that would have been.  But Kierkegaard did one really stupid thing in his life.

He was deeply and hopelessly in love Regine Olson.  Kierkegaard studied her, he learned everything about her so that he could fully understand her before he attempted to court her.  His approach worked and the two fell madly in love and were engaged to be married.

But Kierkegaard suffered from severe depression and he feared that the pain of his depression, which is what motivated his philosophical writing, would make Regine miserable in married life.  So he broke off the engagement, and moved to Berlin for a couple of years so that she could forget about him and he could forget about her.

Sadly, only half of that plan appeared to work.  Kierkegaard obsessed about Regine and wrote two pain-riddled books, Either/Or and Repetition, as he tried to work out how he could be in love and still do the work he felt called to do.  In the end, he returned to his home in Copenhagen to resume his relationship with Regine, only to discover that she had married another man.

Many years later, after both Kierkegaard and her husband had died, Regine told a magazine reporter that she had never stopped loving Kierkegaard but they were both good Danish Lutherans so the fact that they were in love with one another was never mentioned.

Many of Kierkegaard's books are simply too complex for a normal person to comprehend but his personal journal, which he never expected to be published, was almost entirely unguarded in his self expression.  It was in his journal, after the painful realization that he had placed Regine forever beyond his grasp, that he wrote:   "To cheat one's self out of love is the greatest deception of which there is no reparation in either time or in eternity."  Or to say it another way, to make a compromise with life in which you live without true love is a mistake for which there is no second chance, either in this life or in the next.

It is a sad story but a profound one.  The hardest decision Kierkegaard ever faced was the choice between his life as a philosopher or to indulge his heart in true love.  He became the most influential philosopher of modern times and yet, in his own journal, he acknowledged that he made the wrong choice.  And, in his case, he never chose again.  He didn't try to start over with someone else.  He had been in love and turned his back on it.  If I had lived in 19th century Copenhagen I might have tried to encourage him to join Match.Danish but he died in a very solitary life.

I took for our wisdom text today this little known poem by Ezra Pound that probably would have been much better known if he hadn't become more screwed up than Kierkegaard ever dreamed of being.  Odd that a seriously messed up, fascist, anti-Semite could write the most insightful love poem ever but here it is.

Line by line he piles up the crushing imagery of people who have sold themselves short, who have settled for the tepid, the mediocre, the stifling restrictions of bondage to a relationship that robs them of the opportunity of experiencing life more deeply.  Defiantly, he calls out to defy all forms of religious and social inhibition that is, he finally says, the hand of death.

Religious and social rules around love relationships are, at a certain level, necessary to encourage stable families and civil harmony but the idealistic passion of Kierkegaard's value of love and Pound's uncompromising voice also deserve a place in the conversation.


That being said, there are very few things that make me as angry as when a married person schedules a counseling appointment with me and they begin by telling me that they are "unhappy."  Because that usually implies that it is their partner's fault.  Now, there are reasons to be unhappy in marriage.... I apply the four horseman test to these conversations..... I ask, has their been violence, infidelity, child abuse or addiction..... and if not, I don't give much space to the musical beds approach to finding fulfillment.

I'm not saying that there are not other reasons, beyond violence, infidelity, child abuse or addiction to end a relationship but I am saying that happiness, meaning, real love, is not something that you find.  You either create it in cooperation with another person or it does not exist.  As the great American philosopher, W. C. Fields, advised, "If at first you don't succeed, try again.... Then quit... there is no sense making a fool out of yourself."

My frustration comes in seeing people move so quickly to compromise without ever really trying.

As a single person observing the world of married people I know, I can become deeply frustrated by people who just don't seem to be trying to make their relationship the kind of love that they know that they want.  I watch people jockeying around in families, playing power and control games.... Trying to make sure that they are not doing more than their share, that they are not being taken advantage or that they are not losing control of their partner..... all of which is like pouring poison on your own breakfast cereal.

It does take two people to make a relationship work.  It cannot be one-sided.  Still, a lot of us in the universe of single people would have loved to have had a chance at a healthy relationship, if only there was someone on the other side of the net.

I am not single because I have never had a chance to marry.  Getting married is easy enough.  But having been married unsuccessfully, I have been resolved never to settle for anything less than the potential of a partnership that could be the sort of thing that poets write about.  And I will not trade off the potential of something that is noble, and deep and powerful in order to avoid being simply alone.

And, having been a more than casual observer of the institution of marriage, I have seen how alone you can be while living in shared space.  So, when I say to those of you who are married or who live in a domestic partnership, that I believe that it is your spiritual duty to go and "make love" I am not trying to be in any way crass or even sexual.

At least in this context, to "make love" is to do the things that create the real thing.  Don't just try to endure marriage.  Don't find compromises that just keep you out of divorce court.  Don't be so self-involved that all you are doing is posturing and playing power games.

You know the path to the goal that you desire.  You know that you have to forgive.  You have to allow yourself to be vulnerable.  You have to take the initiative to start a conversation, to listen to them, make them feel safe in your affection, cherished, treasured.....
you know that you can't get to where you want to be if you insist upon carrying your resentments with you.  You can't get revenge and true love at the same time.

Is this, in fact, as good as it gets?  If not, what do you need to do to make it better, stronger, more joyful, passionate, meaningful and fulfilling?  And if you have some clue about how to do that, then, what on earth are you waiting for?