“Dedication to Reality
and Balancing” Oct. 22,
2017
Dr Roger Ray, pastor
M. Scott Peck, (The Road Less Traveled, p.
51)
"What does a life of total dedication to the truth mean? It
means, first of all, a life of continuous and never-ending stringent
self-examination. We know the world only through our relationship to it.
Therefore, to know the world, we must not only examine it but we must
simultaneously examine the examiner . . . The life of wisdom must be a life of
contemplation combined with action.”
I personally and our church collectively owes a lot to the work
and the character of Bishop John Shelby Spong. We studied several of his books
before we first hosted the good Bishop here in Springfield and his three visits
to our church over the past few years has grown our on-line audience and given
us both encouragement and global credibility.
But my relationship with John Spong didn’t start out smoothly.
Like most pastors who received a academically credible and progressive theological
education, I had formed a pretty comfortable barrier between the books that I
read and the papers that I wrote in grad school, and what I said and taught in
my churches post grad school.
I cannot even remember who first put his 1999 book, “Why Christianity
Must Change or Die” into my hands but I know that my initial reaction was very
negative. In the pages of this important book, Spong was demanding that people
like me stop this foolish “cat and mouse game” of keeping biblical and
theological scholarship a secret from our congregations. It was time for
Christians to get honest, to become congruent between what we knew was true in
the classroom and what we said was true in the pulpit.
I kept getting mad and putting the book back on the shelf of my
study. I could not believe that there was anyway to be break down the barrier
between the superstition of religion and the honesty of theology and keep my
job. And maybe I was right, because the more I became convinced that it was
time to be honest about these things the closer I got to being fired and kicked
to the curb by my denomination.
In Scott Peck’s, The Road
Less Traveled, he describes the four tools of discipline necessary to
leading a decent life. Last week we talked about the first two: the ability to
delay gratification, and the willingness to accept responsibility for our own
lives.
This week I want to talk about the other two, which are: a
dedication to reality, and balancing. Being dedicated to reality, honesty, the
truth, seems so obvious that it doesn’t need to be said. If you can’t tell the
difference between what is real and what is imaginary, well, that is the basic
meaning of what it means to be schizophrenic, right? And yet, any minister who
has been educated at a top, secondary, or tertiary seminary in the past century
who is still talking about a literal heaven, hell, souls, angels, demons, and a
terribly judgmental father in the clouds, has already crossed the Rubicon into
an indisputably schizophrenic way of living. There is a reality they know
inside their own skulls, and a separate reality they talk about under their
steeples.
A lot of us have a map of reality that we drew up early in life
that helped us to navigate our childhood years.
That map of reality may have been crucial to their survival in a
chaotic, or dysfunctional home but when you move into adolescence and take on
the responsibility of living independently as a young adult, it becomes
necessary to make changes to that map.
Being dedicated to the truth means that you both have to
constantly examine and re-examine the world but you also have to re-examine the
examiner. You have to be willing to question your most closely held beliefs.
Anything that you are not allowed to question is probably false. If you have a
religious or political belief that cannot be question, there is probably a
reason why it can’t be questioned, and that reason is this: if you expose it to
the light of facts and reason, it will be shown to be false.
Religion can be especially vulnerable to this refusal to face
facts but in the past few years we have seen how much this also affects
politics. I continue to be stunned by the fact that we actually launched an
all-out war on Iraq based on the obviously false claims that they were somehow
involved with 9-11 and that they were harboring weapons of mass destruction.
Somehow, the Bush administration was convinced of Mark Twain’s
maxim that a lie told and stuck to is as good as the truth. And in very short
order news agencies were repeating the obviously false claims, staring at us
through the screens of our TV’s in our living rooms where a huge portion of the
population came to believe it… I guess, did they really “believe” it, as in,
they thought it was true, or did they believe it because it fit into their map
of reality that told them that we had to go kill thousands of people because
thousands of Americans had been killed by a handful of terrorists?
I rarely implied on Easter morning that Jesus had physically come
out of a tomb in Jerusalem, nor did I make inflated promises in funeral sermons
that the dearly departed was now enjoying eternal bliss in an invisible heaven,
but I spoke in a way that let my audiences believe that I believed those
things. I artfully spoke above the heads of my congregation in a way that left
me with a false sense of integrity while coddling their childish superstitions.
George W. Bush knew that Iraq wasn’t involved in 9-11 and that
they posed no existential threat to our security but they were a conveniently
disarmed foil, and how he waved off the deaths of thousands of American
soldiers in that war is still just mystifying to me.
But he was an armature compared to President Trump and his
revolving cast of White House spokespersons who use the circumlocution of
“alternative truths” to put lipstick on the pigs that are their daily series of
lies.
Now that ta reform is the policy agenda de jour, Trump keeps
saying that America is the most taxed nation in the world, which is clearly not
true. And when confronted he will say that we have the highest corporate taxes
in the world, which is also not even close to true. But he keeps saying it as
if saying it more and more emphatically will somehow make it true.
George Orwell coined the proverb that, “Truth is treason in an
empire of lies,” but now we have a president who openly discusses jailing
journalists who tell truths that he does not like or that he does not want to
have told. Telling the truth is now portrayed as treason in the United States
of America.
We have come to expect this in Russia, or North Korea, or China,
but it may now be more true here than in the worst of tyrannical dictatorships
in the modern world.
It is difficult to believe that this is happening. We are used to
politicians lying when they make campaign promises in order to get elected that
cannot be fulfilled. When Regan promised to cut taxes and simultaneously
increase military spending AND balance the budget, anyone who had ever passed
first grade math could have easily seen that this was not true and yet he was
handily elected in 1980 and by 1984 when his promises had been shown to be
false, he was re-elected by a public that had a very sketchy relationship with
reality. Of course, all the while, they were going to churches that regularly
lied to them so, in a way, they are used to it.
As Voltaire said, “Those who can convince you to believe in absurdities
can get you to commit atrocities.” One of the most important aspects of
citizenship is to refuse to believe the lies of politicians. We must demand
honesty, a devotion to the truth, and a total rejection of false propaganda.
The same can be said about religion. You can do me no greater
favor than to challenge the truth of anything you hear me say from this pulpit.
Those of you who listen to our podcasts and videos, as dangerous as this can be
to your church relationships, please, don’t be afraid to ask your priest, your
rabbi, your imam, or your pastor, “Is that really true?” “Do you really believe
what you are saying?”
I would love for pastors everywhere to be set free from the cage
of keeping what they know to themselves while feeding falsehoods to their
parish. When we are in grad school, our work is subject to peer review and it
should be no different in the pulpit.
Where we most often fail is in the discipline of dedication to
reality. I meet people all of the time who tell me that they read my columns in
the Springfield NewsLeader and most of them feel obligated to add the caveat,
“But I don’t always agree with you.” I try to be polite about it but,
seriously, what is agreement? Too often, we have equated truth with preference.
What you like, what you prefer, what you wish was true, is the single most
irrelevant thing in the world.
When someone takes me to task about the facts of an article, I
always stop to check my facts and seriously look into their objections but when
they come at me with name calling, or angry dismissal, so far as I am
concerned, they are just telling me that I hit the nail on the head.
Trumps largest failing is his narcissistic refusal to examine
himself. Thinking people already know that he is full of balloon juice. What is
sad is that he doesn’t slow down for a minute to let the fact that he is a liar
work its way down into his self-awareness.
Still, it doesn’t do us any good to sit here in judgment of our
President, or the Pope, or the Mormon Church, or Evangelicals, if we are not
willing to examine ourselves.
The last of Peck’s four tools of discipline is balance, and again,
it sounds deceptively easy. The best illustration I know for this one though
comes from the hand of Aristotle when he talked about anger in his work on
ethics. Quite prophetically, the philosopher wrote: “Anyone can become angry - that
is easy. But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the
right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way - that is not easy.”
As Scott Peck says, even
discipline must be disciplined. You can fail to have integrity if you never get
angry and you can fail to have credibility if you are always angry. Balancing
is related to the schizophrenic aspect of a dedication to reality. Peck cites
one female client who went wildly between severe isolation and careless
sexuality, unable to make good distinctions between the people to whom she does
not open her door at all and those she allows directly into her bedroom.
One of the most painful
exchanges I’ve had in recent years was with a church member who came into our
community with unbridled enthusiasm, virtually immediately pushing me up onto a
pedestal as soon as they arrived in town. Three years later there was a sudden
reversal in attitude that digressed into what looked like playground bullying.
Liberal churches all suffer
from fairly high rates of turnover. People come, get their immediate needs met
and too often just move on. Others come for a single issue and become
disillusioned when they discover that their single issue is not our only issue.
And, of course, I’ve something of a lightening rod myself and so a reasonable
person can certainly find issues with which to disagree with me.
But this woman was so eager to
find my clay feet that she just fabricated an offense. And I told her, “I never
said what you are telling people that I said.” And she replied, “Well, maybe
you didn’t but you thought it and if you thought it that is as bad as saying
it.” And I replied, “But I didn’t think it either, nor anything like it. In
fact, my thoughts are the opposite of what you are saying.” She staunchly
insisted, “I know what you think.” I tried to reason with her, “Do you know
what other people think?” “Do you actually hear the thoughts in other voices?”
I cannot say that this tactic worked well in conversation but you see how a
failing in both a dedication to the truth and in striking an appropriate
balance becomes, if not mental illness itself, at least a schizophrenic like
conduct.
In both of these dimensions of
discipline, dedication to reality and balancing, we are obligated to keep
trying to hit a moving target. Our understanding of reality needs to be
constantly re-examined, and as our understanding of reality changes we have to
restrike a new balance of beliefs and behaviors.
We say that we are on a
spiritual journey rather than that we have arrived at some religious graduation
ceremony. Our church is not what it was five years ago and certainly we are
quite different from what we envisioned ten years ago when we were planning our
first meeting.
Our original members all came
from decidedly mainstream Christian heritage and as we have closely examined
the claims of traditional Christianity, we have found the need to pack a lot of
that stuff away and consign it to history.
We have reached out to gain a
deeper understanding of other major world religions and while we find wisdom
and insight in these other traditions, we can also see that there is a good
deal of primitive superstition clinging to all world religions.
What we have come to accept,
though it isn’t always comfortable, is that there are no absolutes and we have
to personally shoulder the responsibility of being forever in transition,
looking for truths that we can no more capture than we can a beautiful morning,
or the toddler years of our children. Reality is always on the move and we are
either becoming something new or we risk becoming irrelevant fossils.
My old friend, Bishop John
Spong, was right in his original assertion:
Christianity has to change or die. What I hope we all realize is that
the same is true for us as individuals. Our faith has changed but as
progressive as we are compared to the religious landscape, the superstition of
others was never the yardstick we used to measure our own faith. We’re on our
own, accepting that we have given up false certainty in favor of honest
uncertainty, in a lifelong search for meaning, relevance, and purpose.
