“In This Life” July 15, 2018 Dr. Roger Ray
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“Sometimes the Bible in the hand of one man is worse than a whisky bottle in the hand of (another)... There are just some kind of men who - who're so busy worrying about the next world they've never learned to live in this one, and you can look down the street and see the results.”
We all know the story of Ann Frank, the little German girl who was forced into hiding from the Nazis in the attic of their home in Amsterdam. We know that the family and their four friends who hid with them were found and executed but the diary that Ann wrote while in hiding is a classic that few people in the west have not read.
There is one passage in that diary that strikes me as being apropos to our current situation. She wrote: “In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can’t build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery, and death. I see the world gradually being turned into a wilderness, I hear the ever approaching thunder, which will destroy us too, I can feel the sufferings of millions and yet, if I look up into the heavens, I think that it will all come right, that this cruelty too will end, and that peace and tranquility will return again.”
We are living in a time in which we have grown tired of hearing people on the news say that what Donald Trump did today was “unprecedented.” In fact, MSNBC’s news host, Stephanie Ruhle, started to fine guests on her show $1 for every time they even uttered the word, “unprecedented,” because our president’s willingness to insult our oldest and closest allies, his willingness to ignore the very serious crimes of dictators and our most dangerous foes, as well as his whole demeanor of narcissism, greed, racism, and moronic, misspelled tweets, not only embarrasses us but it gives leaders of governments around the world reason to be quite rationally afraid.
I was a kid in the 1960’s but I remember the turbulence of the Civil Rights Movement, the protests of the War in Vietnam, and the economic woes of serial recessions. I don’t want to exaggerate our current situation and say that it is the worst ever, but it is bad. It is the worst in a couple of generations and, I think it is safe to say that, Trump is the dumbest and most mentally unstable person ever to sit in the Oval office, and that includes the White House custodial staff.
But, as Ann Frank said, people are basically good, and even though this present moment is revealing some of the absolute worst aspects of our national Id, I am confident, as she was, that this is just a season in history and it will pass and our society will again find our river banks and return to sanity. Peace and tranquility will return, one day, at least for those who survive this mess.
In Scout’s world, people were polite, church going, respectable folks but when a black man was falsely accused to raping a white woman, she was forced to see her town in an entirely different light. It is difficult not to vilify people for doing bad things, evil things, horrible things, but the rational truth of it is that most people are basically good, even though they have blind spots and they make bad decisions for self-serving reasons.
I honestly don’t know who to give the credit for coming up with this observation first, but it has been said that, “A religious person will do what he or she is told to do regardless of what is right. A spiritual person will do what is right regardless of what he or she has been told.” I should add a footnote that all of us are religious sometimes, even though we strive to be spiritual.
Harper Lee was drawing a controversial sword in 1960 when she has her character, Atticus Finch, point out that religion helps some people to be better people, but it covers up the moral failings of others . . . or possibly worse, it may even provoke them to do many more evil things because they have been told that they are right.
The physicist, Steven Weinberg, said, “With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.” The goal of the progressive faith movement is not to discard our faith heritage or to despise it but to restore it to sanity. I believe that the root of all of the world’s religions is really an ethical conversation about how to be a good and compassionate person. It is only when these ethical conversations are mixed with dogma and magical thinking that they go off the rails.
If we, something like what Thomas Jefferson did, simply take a pen knife to our Bible or any other religious book, and cut out anything about stuff that is other worldly, invisible, or based purely in magical conjecture, then take a look at what you have left. Even what remains may not be moral teachings you would want to repeat in the 21stcentury but the great majority of it is.
The difference for us is that we want to be in dialogue with religious texts, we don’t just want to be obedient. Many traditional Christians such as Catholics, Lutherans, and Episcopalians, were raised on creeds and taught to memorize answers to a catechism. Those of us from more evangelical backgrounds had a lot more in common with Muslims, in that we were expected to read and memorize our holy books, but in all quarters there was a stated or implied insistence upon rote memorization and obedience.
You really can’t say that we don’t do much the same in other arenas of our lives. I cringe a little bit anytime someone calls me “Rev” or implies that I am a Christian because I don’t want to own the associations with those words, but I have the same reaction when someone says that I am a Democrat because at least half of what the democratic party has done in the past few years would embarrass Charles Darwin.
My former in-laws, true children of the south, were staunch members of the conservative Church of Christ and they were convinced that Baptists, Methodists, and even their cousins in the Christian Church were as hell bound as Muslims and Buddhists, but they felt the same way about being American, and more specifically, about being Republicans. They were as offended by learning that I had voted for Jimmy Carter as they were by my Disciples of Christ roots.
Dogma doesn’t teach us to think, it stops us from thinking. And that is as true for politics as it is for religion. I fear that it is probably also true for grammar, who is to say, after all, that “a lot” is always two words and never one, or that “y’all” is always slang and a sign of a lack of education? Well, ok, I say those things, but maybe I shouldn’t.
I am not trying to make light of our current crisis, but I am making something of a faith statement in that I believe in the basic goodness of our species and this current cloud will pass, this too shall pass. People will return to sanity. The question is how can we help them to get there a bit quicker?
I am willing to be totally over most of the literature of the self-help movement of the 70’s and 80’s but if you don’t mind me snatching one little gem from the dung heap of pop-psychology: The very popular book of the 1970’s, Dr. Eric Berne’s Games People Play, diagramed the interactions of the Id, Ego, and Super-Ego, in our relationships with one another.
Dr. Berne asked his readers to see that the parent voice in us tries to control others through shame and dogmatic statements, and the child in us tries to manipulate through willfulness, name calling, and temper tantrums, that the only way out of this is for someone to start thinking and speaking as an adult.
It is one thing to call our president a liar, and he is, but it is another to remain in an adult mode and when Trump says that Germany is entirely controlled by Russia because they get 70% of their energy from Russia, we can flatly reply, “No, Germany gets just 22% of their energy needs from Russia and that is just natural gas that they prefer to burning coal, which they have in abundant supply.” Also, Germany is adding more and more wind and solar powered energy sources so Russia has no hold on Germany at all. That is an adult response and if Trump or his supporters keep shouting “fake news” it is up to us not to fall into a child ego state and start arguing out of insults. The more Trump acts like a child, the more important it is for us to act like adults.
When he says that the USA pays for 90% of Nato’s expenses, we can correct that quite factually by just saying, actually, we only pay 22%. When we shame our Trump supporting family members and friends for having voted for a child stealing, misogynistic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, moron, then we are taking on the role of a parent and that never really helps. It may feel a bit cathartic at the moment, but it doesn’t help.
You don’t speak to their child and you don’t speak to their parent, you speak as an adult to an adult, and it may take months and dozens of exchanges but the hope is that we will have more adult conversations and less name calling and shaming.
About 25 years ago I visited a counseling client who was a patient at the Marion Center, a local mental health hospital. She had gone through a divorce and some rocky relationships and she had begun to try and manipulate everyone through attention seeking suicidal gestures that finally led to police action and a forced stay in a mental hospital. She said something to me during that visit that has stuck with me as one of the basic facts of human psychology; she said, “I have learned that if you don’t want people to treat you like you are crazy, you have to stop acting like you’re are crazy.”
Traditional expressions of Christianity, with all of its Bible studies, sacraments, guilt, and shame, has not proven effective in stemming the tide of insanity that is pouring out of the White House and the Congress and is now spreading threateningly into the Supreme Court. Every provocative tweet, every incendiary allegation, every dishonest, narcissistic statement, invites us to get down in the mud with him and his supporters, and with good reason . . . just don’t do it.
But the truth is that we have some hard work and some hard times ahead of us. I wish that all Christians could get their head out of the clouds, stop worrying about
Heaven and hell and start worrying about kids getting lead poisoning from tap water in Flint, brown kids being put into kiddy prison in Texas and Arizona, and poor people dying from lack of access to health care. I don’t mind their theological diatribes on baptism, communion, and their tediously repetitious praise hymns if only they would feed the hungry, house the homeless, care for the sick, and welcome the aliens in our midst.
You have been going to Bible studies all of your lives, and when you hear Sarah Huckabee Sanders, and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, tell you that it is biblical to take children away from their parents, you don’t need me to remind you that the Bible in their hands is as dangerous as giving the car keys to a drunk Stevie Wonder. You know better. I know that you are basically good and that, removed from your partisan invective, that there is an adult in there that is ready to return to sanity. I just want to help to be part of the solution and not part of the problem.
