“In this Life”

“In this Life”         Dec. 29, 2019    Dr. Roger Ray

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                      Martin Hägglund, This Life, p. 2

The sense of finitude – the sense of the ultimate fragility of everything we care about - is the at the heart of what I call secular faith. To have secular faith is to be devoted to a life that will end, to be dedicated to projects that can fail or break down. Ranging from the concrete (how we approach funerals) to the general (what makes a life worth living), I will show how secular faith expresses itself in the ways we mourn our loved ones, make commitments, and care about a sustainable world. I call it secular faith because it is devoted to a form of life that is bounded by time. In accordance with the meaning of the Latin word saecularis, to have secular faith is to be dedicated to persons or projects that are worldly and temporal. Secular faith is the form of faith that we all sustain in caring for someone or something that is vulnerable to loss. 

                        

The former Harvard professor and partner to Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, passed away this week. After spending some time in Leary’s experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, Alpert had a falling out with Leary. He was fired from Harvard for giving drugs to an undergraduate student so he then chose to find his high’s elsewhere, specifically, he went to India to study Hinduism. Out of that emersion in eastern faith, he renamed himself Ram Dass and returned to the United States to become a spiritual teacher and writer. 

He became very popular with the kind of people who seem to like that sort of thing, and I don’t want to unnecessarily throw shade on him, but most of what he said looked to me like word salad . . . as if, maybe, he had not entirely given up on his use of psychedelic drugs.  Some of his teachings seem to be loving, kind, and life affirming . . . not too challenging but nice, like a spoon full of honey in a cup of hot tea. As my father used to say, “Even a blind hog finds and acorn now and then.” 

But a lot of what this sort of pseudo-spirituality offers is important sounding words that don’t really mean anything. The most fundamental anxiety that has cursed human beings since we became conscious is our awareness that we are mortal. In the face of this huge issue, Alpert says, “The ego is frightened by death, because it is a part of the incarnation that ends with it. That is why we learn to identify with our soul, as the soul continues after death. For the soul, death is just another moment.”            

For saying things like this, thousands of people were willing to portray him as being some kind of spiritual savant, a Buddha if not, indeed, a Christ. But what is he talking about? What is a soul. Where is it? What is it made of? Where does it go when that “moment” of death arrives? Do only humans have souls or is it true that “all dogs go to heaven?” And why just humans and dogs?

The reason why mice are used in drug experiments is because humans and mice share 85% the same DNA. For that matter, we share 65% of the same DNA as a fruit fly. Do mice and fruit flies have souls. And if you will bear with me, it is 

also true that we share 50% of the DNA found in a banana. Do bananas have souls? What about corn, or trees, or grass?

Are Veggie Tales an animated children’s religious education series or is it, Ram Dass style, a factual documentary on the religious life of salads?

The whole schtick of these pseudo-spiritual teachers is to tell people what they want to believe and then to try to make it seem plausible. Yes, the ego fears death because it is difficult for us to image that the universe would dare to go on without us. Narcissistically, we hold onto an entirely unverified and implausible certainty that while we may have had a beginning in the backseat of a 1950’s Chevy, our essence now has no end. 

C. S. Lewis fairly cleverly works the whole journey from this world into the next in his seven-part children’s series, The Narnia Chronicles. You see attempts at making it seem believable in Robin William’s movie, “What Dreams May Come?” and great authors, no less than M. Scott Peck and Bishop John Shelby Spong have written speculative pieces about what form eternity might take. In each case, the argument seems to be especially disappointingly hollow, and, if anything, to erode the credibility of the authors. 

These are all efforts at comforting us in the face of the fear of our mortality, but does anyone really believe it? I have personally witnessed the most ardently religious people fighting against death, willing to undergo the most extreme of medical procedures to wring just a few more days of life out of their mortal coil. Western religions have all claimed to have a product to sell that is the ultimate cure for mortality and no matter how elaborately we decorate our cathedrals and our coffins, it is always a kind of whistling past the graveyard, figuratively and literally. 

I have lately been quite taken with the work of the Swedish philosopher, Martin Hägglund, who persuasively argues in his book, “This Life,” that mortality is not what takes meaning out of life but rather what gives our existence worth and purpose. 

He says, “Far from making my life meaningful, eternity would make it meaningless, since my actions would have no purpose. What I do and what I love can matter to me only because I understand myself as mortal.” I hope this is self-evident, but if life were to go on indefinitely, then nothing we say or do really matters. Saving the earth loses any meaning. Preventing deaths, whether by wars or by disease, is equally meaningless. There is always a tomorrow, and a tomorrow, and an infinite line of tomorrows, which makes today virtually worthless. 

A recent issue of the U.S. Catholic dared to ask the question, “Will heaven be boring?” And they tried to persuasively say, “no,” suggesting that we will always have work to do, eternal activity for eternal social concerns. M. Scott Peck tried to make that argument as well but to my reading, he basically described heaven as an eternal committee meeting, and I have spent most of my adult life trying to avoid committee meetings. 

Mark Twain was telling a joke when he observed that most people can barely endure an hour in church on Sunday mornings and yet they expect to joyfully sing hymns and basically be in church for all of eternity. 

But seriously, even if it were real, who could endure it? 

Hägglund says, “Instead of lamenting the absence of eternity, we should acknowledge the commitment to finite life as a condition for anything to be at stake and for anyone to lead a free life.” It is similar to the story of Midas who was so greedy for gold that he begged the gods to give him the power to turn anything he touched into gold. It is not simply that he tragically turned his daughter into gold when he thoughtlessly touched her, or that he starved to death because he could not touch food without turning it into gold. 

It is that gold has value because it is rare. If gold is abundant, it is boring and inconvenient. If you are a meat eater, and evidently, I am, sitting down to a nice steak is a real treat, but if I were to be obliged to sit down to eat a cow, that would quickly turn into torture, and when we talk about eternity, an infinity of days, it would be more than eating a cow, or a herd of cows, or even all of the cows in the world…. It would be like eating an infinity of cows. . . . the absurdity of which immediately becomes obvious, even to a guy who has an appetite like mine!

Life has meaning only because it is finite. Our mortality is what makes life precious, even sacred. Today is important because we have a limited number of todays.

Twenty years ago, I outlined a novel that I have not yet managed to write. The main character of my novel is a philosophy professor who has received a terminal cancer diagnosis. As he realizes that he only has one more semester in which to say everything he ever wanted to say, then every lecture must, of necessity, be an attempt to articulate the most important, the most profound, the most necessary things. 

I have grown old, working on other books and other things, while that novel has been waiting to be written. Now, however, as a senior citizen, I have come to the existential awareness that I am now basically living my novel. I may have more than one or two semesters left in me, but after 41 years of preaching, I realize that the number of times that I will have the opportunity to tell a gathered audience what I think is a whole lot smaller than it was when I outlined that novel. For me, for you, for all of us, our time may be longer or shorter, but it is not infinite and the brevity of life should inspire us to make every day meaningful.

Now, I do not want to be flip about this topic. I know that people invented a belief in a soul and an afterlife, not just to give people like Ram Dass an income but because belief in an afterlife is a solution to two urgent human problems . . . the fear of death and the grief that we experience about the death of others. 

Before I ever preached my first sermon as a pastor, I preached my first funeral. I was 22 years old and the U-Haul was in the driveway of the parsonage of my first church and the funeral director drove over to the parsonage and told me to put on a black suit and follow him. Since that day in 1978, I have had to help survivors cope with the grief of loss in hundreds if not more than a thousand funerals. The services attached to untimely deaths were the most painful and therefore the most memorable . . . infant deaths, car accidents, domestic murders, and suicides are all still nauseatingly with me, I can still feel every one of them, and there have been many. You don’t have to explain to me why we have needed a heaven in order to not be crushed by grief. 

Now that we are not confined to the limitations of a single congregation, because we have an internet congregation that numbers in the thousands, it is a rare week when I am not called upon by someone, from California to New York to Great Britain or Australia, to comfort them by assuring me that life goes on after death. I do not doubt that such requests motivated Bishop Spong and M. Scott Peck to write their books that held out some thin and unknowable hope . . . but if you turn to me for anything other than an honest answer, you are setting yourself up for disappointment. 

Rather than inventing an imaginary afterlife, I believe that people of faith have honest and meaningful things to do to address mortality. Let me give you a short list:

Because life is finite and therefore precious, we must expand healthcare to include everyone to stop the senseless and needless suffering and premature deaths of tens of thousands of people every year. And if you are one of those people who argue against universal health care because you have healthcare and you want to keep in place a system that either prices or outright excludes millions of others then you better hope that I am right about there not being an afterlife because you know that if there is you are going to go to hell. If you are so selfish that you are willing to preserve a system that has a casualty count in the tens of thousands just because you like what you have, then you know that you belong in hell. 

         And secondly, we need to take the profit motive out of healthcare and make the point of healthcare taking care of people’s health. Most people die of either heart disease or cancer and a growing number suffer from various forms of dementia. So, spend money on research on those things that are killing people . . . besides, we have plenty of ED pills and cosmetic surgery options already. 

And because life is sacred, we need to decriminalize drug addiction and start treating it as what it is, an illness and not a crime. 60,000 opioid overdose deaths a year and we keep building prisons? How much longer until we admit that criminalizing addiction causes addiction and treatment actually addresses the problem?

And fourth, (Moses got 10 and I’m just staking out my lane here) rather than subsidizing the crops that kill us: wheat, soy, corn, rice, and sugar cane, subsidize clean water projects and restore family farms by supporting the production of fruits and green vegetables. . . because life is precious.

And with 15,000 tot 20,000 suicides per year, if you want more life, can’t we see that we need to provide adequate mental health care so that people can see a better option than causing their own deaths?

And on a sadly related front, we must outlaw or strictly control the sale and ownership of assault rifles and handguns. More than 40,000 deaths a year now and more than 100,000 more gun shot injuries. Anyone who claims that this is acceptable because they like having guns…. You like a product that has killed a million Americans in the last generation and wounded 2.5 million and so you don’t want to give them up? You need to rewind to what I said about those who oppose universal healthcare because there is no moral justification for America’s lethal gun addiction. Hell is surely big enough to deal with the narcissistic egos of those who want to keep their guns in light of the river of blood that has been spilled.

And we have to make it possible for people to work their way out of the misery of poverty. We had serfs and lords, then we had slaves and masters, now we have the minimum wage and business owners. Surely it is time for us to pay everyone who works enough to also have a decent life. If the success of your business is dependent upon the impoverishment of your employees, then we don’t need your business. Sorry, having a classed society of serves, slaves, or the working poor is not acceptable because life is short, and it is sacred.

After drugs and guns, the largest cause of death other than illnesses is car accidents. We have made cars and road safer but only by degrees. We need safe, efficient, and non-polluting mass transit. The technology exists and the moral excuses for not building it have all expired. 

Number nine is this: through pollution and putting toxins in our food, our water, and our air we are shortening human lives and making the planet uninhabitable. Nothing short of a war time scale of a green new deal can be considered. We are literally poisoning ourselves as if we were going to live forever and that neither our bodies or our planet matters . . . that is clearly not true and it is time for us to act on what is true and get our heads out of the clouds. 

Finally, just as we managed to wipe out polio and other  plagues, we need to concentrate efforts on stemming the spread of or wiping out altogether, HIV, malaria, and other communicable lethal diseases because illness that shorten the lives of people on other continents destabilizes the world and threatens all of us. 

Now, some of you may think that I am wrong about all of this. I can only invite you to pay attention to my sermon on logical probability next month on January 26.  Between now and then, you might want to chew on Bayes Theorem a bit:

I know it seems complicated.

This may help but, spoiler alert, the bottom line is that I am probably right. Or, at least, it pleases me to think so. 

But, if what you really want from your source for spiritual insight is lies that make you feel good, you can still find Ram Dass on YouTube.

“Christmas Now and Then”

“Christmas Now and Then”   Dec. 22, 2019   Dr. Roger Ray

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Bishop John Shelby Spong:  From every angle, the facts suggest that these stories are not history. Virgin births, singing angels, and guiding stars occur only in mythology. The story of Jesus' virgin birth is no more literally true than is the story of Santa Claus.

Once we arrive at this conclusion, then we are free to search for the real meaning of these stories. They were written not to describe the details of his birth but to reveal who they believed the adult Jesus was. To Matthew, Jesus was "a God presence," a life through which the holy God could be experienced. That had been the conviction of Jewish people about other heroes, such as Moses, Samuel, Elijah, and Isaiah. But this Jesus was a more total "God presence" than any of those, Matthew asserts--and when he writes his gospel, he wants to spell that out in a typical Jewish manner. He starts with a tale of his miraculous birth.

I was a college student when the original Star Wars movie was released and this week, the nine episode series was completed with the release of “The Rise of Skywalker” featuring, ironically, the three main characters from the original movie, aged by some 43 years and in spite of the fact that one of them has been dead for three years now. 

They have all been a part of my life. I have loved them, had movie posters in my grad school office and have enjoyed them all, in spite of the fact that some were distinctly better than others. They express, as only computer-generated special effects can, the battle between good and evil with all of the values of heroism and sacrifice, and, at moments, at least hints at fairly profound theology. However, what these movies are not, is historical. Even though, in the very same movie theater where I watched the Rise of Skywalker, the day before I had watched Dark Waters, a historical documentary about the environmental pollution history of  DuPont in West Virginia, no one had to tell me that one was real and one was fictional. Side by side, in the same historical time frame, we know that literature comes in different genres. We can go to Parkersburg, West Virginia and meet some of the characters portrayed in Dark Waters who still live there and are still impacted by the chain carbon molecules that were dumped into their water and air. You cannot however, go to Skywalker Ranch, and take a flight into space on the Millennial Falcon. Even the news staff at Fox could easily tell the difference between the two . . . though I’m pretty sure that they could find some way to mess up even this illustration. 

We began this morning with a reading from one of Bishop Spong’s commentaries on the birth narratives in the New Testament but John was far from being the first person to try to state clearly that these were not historical narratives but, more along the lines of Star Wars, they are stories about the battle between good and evil, light and darkness, the good side of the Force and the dark side.

And while I do not consider myself to be an original scholar by any stretch of the imagination, I did not have to be taught that the birth narratives were fictional. In fact, I can remember raising the issue with my New Testament professor, Russ Dudrey, the same year that the first Star Wars movie was released. The overly zealous students around me were shocked when I said to Professor Dudrey, “The birth narratives in Matthew and Luke don’t even read like they were written by the author of the larger works to which they are attached. They seem to be fictional accounts that differ in character and vocabulary from the rest of the gospels.” 

But, to the students’ surprise, even in a conservative religious college, the professor nodded and acknowledged that they were not original parts of Matthew and Luke and that they were not to be read as history. This is one of the dirty little secrets that even right-wing Biblical scholars know, but are too afraid to say in public. 

The fact that Star Wars does not describe actual historical events will not keep me from seeing each episode over and over again, nor does that fact take away from the truths about character and faith portrayed in the movies. The first Christians who produced the Christmas story late in the first century or early in the second century, did not think that they were writing history. They were telling a story that made a theological point. 

However, two hundred years later, in the confusion of the era, Constantine’s mother, St. Helena, took the gospels quite literally and she went around identifying where they all took place and building churches on the alleged sites where these fictional accounts allegedly happened. Let’s be honest, Helena was a woman of great faith. Her son, Constantine, was a calculating politician who used his mother’s religion to reunite the Roman Empire. Neither of them had a clue about the actual historical circumstances surrounding the birth of Jesus. 

For that matter, whoever wrote the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke also didn’t know or they didn’t care about the historical details of Jesus’ birth. They were not news reporters or historians. They were preachers and they had a perspective they wanted to sell to their audience.

I don’t want to dwell on this too long but let me just quickly say for the uninitiated:

Of the four gospels in the New Testament, Mark and John say nothing about the birth of Jesus. Matthew and Luke each offer a fairly brief narrative in which:

The two writers agree that the parents are Joseph and Mary, the child is a male whom they named Jesus, and the birth took place in Bethlehem. After that, they agree on nothing. 

Matthew says that they live in a house, and are visited by foreign astrologers bearing gifts but that they are forced to flee from a Roman government ordered slaughter of children. The family never returns to Bethlehem and years later decided to settle in Nazareth. Luke says that the holy couple lived in Nazareth. He cooks up a story about a census that made them travel to Bethlehem where they were forced to sleep in a small barn and give birth to their child there. After the miraculous birth was heralded by angels and the child was adored by farm hands, they went back home to Nazareth. 

It is worth noting that Matthew’s version rather misogynistically gives the visions and the speaking parts to men.  Luke is more inclusive and gives major parts to the women who bore John the Baptist and Jesus, relegating the men to supportive roles which, I think all of us can agree, is appropriate to any story about giving birth. 

So, once you accept that neither Matthew nor Luke are trying to record eye-witness accounts, we are free to ask ourselves, “What was their point?” Both writers were influenced by Jewish tradition but much more by the Greek culture in which they lived. Predictably then, both accounts contain a certain amount of homage to their cultural setting. 

Because of popular beliefs at the time, the Messiah needed to have been born in Bethlehem and it was common to claim that the births of very important people like Caesars or renowned philosophers were virgin births and that the event of their birth was marked by the appearance of a new star. In ancient literature, we call these “ascriptions of praise.” They are poetic flourishes but not to be taken seriously by readers just as they were not meant to be taken literally by the original authors. 

Other elements of their stories also have historical or biblical precedent. The songs of Mary and Elizabeth harken back to the song of Hannah around the birth of Samuel. And the slaughter of the innocents reflects the murder of infants in Exodus in the time of the birth of Moses. While all of these elements have their literary genesis, you have to be careful to note that they are not chosen haphazardly. 

Consider the way that Matthew uses the common image of the appearance of a new star, and even the common religious element of men having visions to set up a narrative that challenges both the government and the state religion. Matthew doesn’t give us only a new star, but he uses that star to introduce foreign astrologers who practice a set of beliefs that were condemned by the Jews. The arrival of the holy birth was not only unknown to the government, it was unknown to the religious authorities. It is like saying that the faculty at Harvard Divinity School were clueless but the little old lady doing palm reading on the sidewalk on Harvard Square had all of the facts. 

The author of this narrative is intentionally being dismissive of both organized religion and the state and to dramatically underscore how far apart the message about Jesus was from either the state religion or the state itself, they collude together to kill Jesus in the crib before he gets a chance to grow up. Now, this slaughter of the innocents under Herod in Bethlehem leaves no historical clues, which is to say, it didn’t happen, but, it isn’t about history . . . it is about the truth.

Consider this 19^th century painting by the French artist, Leon Cogniet. Unlike many who portray such graphic biblical scenes in full bloody horror, he pulls the narrative down into the look on one horrified mother’s face, who cradles her baby and stares back at us in shock and terror, as if she is demanding an answer from us.

How could this be happening? How could the city’s elders allow this? Why would the government do this? Where is the church? Where are the good people? The powerful, the wealthy, the influential? How did the whole world go violently mad?  There is our Christmas story.

Matthew is telling us about this horror… not a single historical event, but a globally and daily experienced horror of insanity and inhumanity. Not cattle lowing and a baby lying-in sweet-smelling hay. That’s Christmas at the Battlefield Mall. But that’s not the real story

This is our Christmas. The slaughter of the innocents in Bethlehem in the first year of the common era didn’t happen. But this crap happens every day. This isn’t about one incident or one child. In 2019, our government has put 70 thousand children into detention centers . . . many permanently separated from their parents, some allowed to die lying on concrete floors from such stupid things as dehydration or the flu. Many have been put into foster care where they have been sexually molested or otherwise abused. . . all on government orders, paid for with tax payers’ money, and largely condoned by the silence of the church, synagogue, and mosque. Where are the statesmen? The wise men? Where are the pastors, prophets, senators, and corporate kings?  Matthew doesn’t tell us about an event that happened once a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away . . . he is reminding us that it happens every day. 

Luke doesn’t use the same literary images, but he tells a story with a very similar moral. The church gives us a Madonna and child that on the one hand praises eternal virginity while extoling the virtue of motherhood . . . it takes a theologian to cook up a paradox quite that crazy. But that is not the picture that Luke paints for us. He has a pregnant girl living in an occupied country under the constant fear of death, stand up and sing a song about revolution:

“He has shown strength with his arm;

He has scattered the proud in the imaginations of their hearts.

He has brought down the powerful from their thrones

And lifted up the lowly;

He has filled the hungry with good things,

And the rich he has sent empty away.” Lk 1:51-53

Honestly, the picture Luke paints is more Jedi warrior than it is teenaged virgin mother. If you are going to create a fictional female lead, a defiant revolutionary who wants to cast down evil lords and give the hungry something to eat is a much more powerful, and frankly, a more believable image than that of a teenaged virgin mother. 

I realize that this is not the Christmas sermon that will be delivered at the Vatican or the National Cathedral but, I’m being very honest here, this is the Christmas sermon you will find in the New Testament, where the god-child is born in a smelly barn in a world with a corrupt government and a nearly useless church. 

And a terrorized mother clutches her child who is about to be taken from her and asks us what we are going to do about this mad  world. 

Obviously, when I talk about a savior, I don’t mean the same thing as most religious people mean. I don’t need to be saved from hell and I don’t need to be forgiven for my lack of piety or purity. I need to be forgiven for every day that I have been complacent about the cruelty and insanity of my government and the uselessness of institutional religion. I …. We, need to quit waiting for a savior and we need to become saviors . . . so, Merry Christmas. 

“What I Learned From My Critics”

“What I Learned From My Critics”     Dec. 15, 2019    Dr. Roger Ray

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Theodore Roosevelt

“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

Just before he was inaugurated, Teddy Roosevelt was shot on his way to deliver a speech. The 50 page manuscript of his talk was folded and inside of his coat pocket. I know that you probably think that I do go on a bit long some Sundays, but I can tell you that it was only the ponderous length of his speech that saved his life that day. The bullet did penetrate the manuscript and entered his chest. He coughed a couple of times into a handkerchief and seeing no blood, concluded that the bullet had not gone into his lung, and so he delivered the talk . . . all 90 minutes of it. 

The blood stained shirt with the visible bullet hole is now a museum piece that bears testimony to his courage and rather crazy tenacity. 

A generation later, Franklin Roosevelt, just before he was inaugurated as president, survived an assassination attempt. The shooter missed Roosevelt but did wound four of the people who were around him. Roosevelt insisted upon loading the four injured people into his car and driving them to the hospital for care. He remained with them for several hours and continued to visit them during their recovery. Being the president of the United States is still one of the most dangerous jobs in the world but clearly, it becomes much more dangerous when that president is trying to lead the way in dramatic change. FDR not only suffered an assassination attempt, but his administration also survived a coop attempt when wealthy business owners tried to raise an army of veterans to overthrow our government because FDR was a Democratic socialist and the corporate world was afraid of the New Deal. 

When you think of the martyrs of the past century: Gandhi, King, Robert and John Kennedy, Oscar Romero, you realize that they were not killed simply because they were famous or because they were powerful but because they were trying to change the world for the better, to fight racism, poverty, war, and classism. 

I remember hearing M. Scott Peck say in a lecture he delivered 30 years ago in Louisville, KY, that the world is in desperate need of leaders but those who dare to stick their heads above the crowd to provide that leadership must accept that someone in the crowd will likely cut their head off for providing that leadership. 

And, of course, that doesn’t mean literal martyrdom in most cases. You think about how many times Dorothy Day was arrested protesting the arms race, and Rosa Parks was arrested for fighting racist laws, and Malala was shot in the face for going to school and  advocating for education for women. And one of my favorites, when Bree Newsome climbed the flagpole in front of the South Carolina state house in Columbia to take down the Confederate flag shortly after the shooting in the Mother Emmanuel Church. And my all-time heart-throb, Iesha Evans, who stood up to riot police in Baton Rouge during the protests against police shooting of Philando Castile. (call me Iesha)

I’ve never been arrested, though the police have been called out to a number of the protests I’ve been involved in . . . so far, I have managed to avoid being picked for police action. I have never been shot, though I have received any number of threats which, thankfully, never materialized. Still, I can’t help thinking that I have not tried hard enough, not been brave enough, not stuck my neck out far enough because people who really try to make a difference can count on fierce opposition.

I was a very young pastor when I created the proverb you have often heard me quote:

If you light a candle in a dark place, you will draw bugs. Or as the comedian, Steven Wright, put it, “For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.” I endured a lot of pretty toxic board meetings during my years in denominational ministry but one of the more memorable was when the Tsunami hit Indonesia on Dec. 26, 2004, almost instantly killing a quarter of a million people. I quickly organized a children’s concert that was performed at Hammons Hall and raised about $50,000 to send for relief that was sent through our denomination’s Week of Compassion office. At our next board meeting, a guy who had been a constant critic for a dozen years rose and asked this question, “Are you raising all of this money to pay off some financial debt you have to the denomination?” 

It is rare for me to be speechless but anything that came to mind for me to say at that moment would have been so laced with obscenities that even Lewis Black would have been covering his ears. Evidently other board members did speak to him privately and I never saw him again. 

The 18^th century English writer, Samuel Johnson, observed,       “Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expense.” People who offer little of themselves in public, people who feel that they are not being noticed, praised, admired enough, will appoint themselves to a moral Supreme Court and throw stones at people who are trying to accomplish good things and by doing so, they think that they are making themselves important by simply hurling insults, like Statler and Waldorf . . . except, of course, Statler and Waldorf were at least clever. 

I strongly suspect that most of this goes on at a subconscious level. I spoke last week at a Unitarian church in South Carolina where I have been several times before over the past several years. One of our hosts, someone who has, frankly, been a very enthusiastic fan, came up to me at the end of the service and enthusiastically exclaimed, “Oh Roger, I think you have improved so much!” I was a bit taken aback and she went on as if she were a judge at a speech contest. 

I told my traveling companion about the exchange as we were driving back to Missouri and he refused to believe that she had actually said that. As if on cue, she called at that moment and on speaker phone, repeated the same backhanded compliment. Now, on the conscious level, I’m confident that she thought that she was praising my improved homiletic skills, but what was evident to us was that she was placing herself on a pedestal from which she could hand out grades to someone who has been a published writer and public speaker for more than 40 years. It is not malevolent, just sadly lacking in self-awareness.

And while I am playing arm-chair psychologist, I want to share with you a belief that I have long held but never spoken of . . . contradicting my former spouse who always said that I had no unplublished thoughts . . . 

I reached this conclusion 20 years before researchers at George Mason University published the same. There are lots of reasons why people are shy and all of us are shy to varying degrees in certain circumstances. I can be very confident with a microphone and a spotlight but in most casual social gatherings, I’m the one hiding in the corner wondering when I can escape and go home. There are very real social anxiety disorders which deserve which deserve our empathetic understanding and accommodation. But I have also been aware that an awful lot of the anonymous hate mail that I have received through the years, when I have discovered who the author was, it is often someone who is so shy that they would never speak up in public, they would never be the liturgist in church, a Sunday School teacher, or an opinion writer for the newspaper, because, they would say, they are too shy. But what is happening in at least some cases is just this:

They know how hyper critical they are of other people and they assume that others would be just as hyper critical of them, and so they choose to never publicly air anything of themselves, choosing instead to be emotional snipers, always hiding in the brush and throwing rocks from behind a wall. 

When I had a weekly column in the local newspaper, I used to get a lot of hate mail from readers who were offended by my pleas for peace and justice. It took me many years of being wounded by these letters, what Soren Kierkegaard called, “being stomped to death by geese,” to stop reading the letters that came in with no return address and no signature. If the author knows that what they are saying is so poisonous that they will not put their own name on it, why would I be willing to drink their poison? 

Scott Peck was still right. They world is in desperate need of leaders, people who are willing to stand up for what is right, people who are willing to challenge the status quo, to put their own names on a petition, to hold a sign in public demanding change, to stand resolute in the face of the police, to climb a flag pole to remove a century old sign of racism, to speak truth to powerful and wealthy people, like Bill Cosby, or Harvey Weinstein, or Donald Trump. And the sad reality is that such courage is rarely rewarded and often punished, and sometimes arrested and imprisoned and sometimes even shot. 

She didn’t write it but she liked this poem or prayer so much that Mother Theresa kept this on the wall of her children’s home in Calcutta:

People are often unreasonable, irrational, and self-centered.  Forgive them anyway.

            If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives.  Be kind anyway.

            If you are successful, you will win some unfaithful friends and some genuine enemies.  Succeed anyway.

           If you are honest and sincere people may deceive you.  Be honest and sincere anyway.

            What you spend years creating, others could destroy overnight.  Create anyway.

            If you find serenity and happiness, some may be jealous.  Be happy anyway.

            The good you do today, will often be forgotten.  Do good anyway.

         Give the best you have, and it will never be enough.  Give your best anyway.

         In the final analysis, it is between you and God.  It was never between you and them anyway.

Your critics are not always wrong and none of us should be so lacking in humility that we are not willing to learn something from honest critics. I put about 3000 pages of original material online or in print every year and you all know that those 3000 pages contain a lot of things that are not correct. I make mistakes. But if I am even 80% on target, should I allow that 20% of failure to silence me? There are things that Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Bishop Oscar Romero said or did that I don’t agree with and that I think was wrong, but I sure am glad that they did not shy away from public leadership because they were not 100% on target. 

You are people who have passionate views. I’m begging you, don’t hide your light under a bushel. Don’t waste your time being critical of people who make mistakes, get out from behind the bushes and do something powerful, something wonderful, something risky, that expresses your own beliefs. 

One year ago, the 15-year-old Swedish student, Greta Thunberg, began a every Friday strike from school to sit in front of the Swedish parliament with her sign that said simply, “Striking for climate.” 

Now she is Time’s person of the year and possibly the most well-known climate activist in the world, proving that one person, armed only with conviction and courage, can change the world. 

I pray that none of them literally become martyrs because of all of the hate spewed in their direction but we cannot but be thankful for those who have the courage of their convictions to risk twitter onslaughts from our president or the potential of an assassin’s bullet. I am grateful for Greta, for Malala, for Emma Gonzales and David Hogg and all of those who survived the mass murder at the Stoneman Douglas High School who are fighting for sensible gun laws. 

I am so thankful for Congress members Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilana Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib, who, as members of congress are not afforded security guards even though all of them regularly receive death threats. They are not always right, and, in fact, I can name several instances in which I’m certain they have been on the wrong side of issues but I am even more convinced that their voices in Congress are incredibly important and their courage and moral leadership gives me hope for America’s future. Oh, and thank you David Hogg for representing for white guys everywhere that we can still throw up a hero now and then. 

And thank you Colin Kaepernick for sacrificing a multi-million-dollar career to kneel for #blacklivesmatter. And thank you, whoever the anonymous Whistleblower is that the Trump administration is trying to out while simultaneously putting a target on your back. And thank you Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden for becoming criminals in the eyes of the American government for telling us the truth about American war crimes and espionage. 

This is the Sunday in the year when most churches are in the midst of the Advent celebrations and they are talking about John the Baptist. I will leave it to others to preach history lessons today, I’m looking for the current day church to find its prophetic voice. Specifically, I’m looking at you. What I want for Christmas

 Is for this generation’s prophets to stop being afraid . . . stop being afraid of cowardly critics, of presidential tweets, and if you can bear it, assassin’s bullets. We have work to do. 

“After Black Friday”

“After Black Friday”     Dec. 1, 2019      Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

            

St. Augustine of Hippo “So give to the poor; I’m begging you, I’m warning you, I’m commanding you, I’m ordering you.”

During the years when I was working on my doctorate, I was a frequent retreatant at the Abby of Gethsemane, the Trappist monastery that was once home to Thomas Merton. I became a close friend to Brother Luke, who is now the choir director at Gethsemane, but in those days, he was the Guest Master. But in the late 80’s Luke was sent to direct music for a tiny Trappist Monastery outside of Charleston, SC. He was there for two years and when his “sentence” was up, he called and asked me if I could come and get him and bring him home.

I was glad to do it, though it was not a small ask. I drove the 10 hours from Louisville to Monk’s Corner, loaded Luke’s luggage from his 2-year stay, which amounted to a very small gym bag. And we took off on the return trip. By evening, I was exhausted. I had been driving for hours and hours and so I pulled into a Holiday Inn where we would have dinner and spend the night. There, in a restaurant in a Tennessee Holiday Inn, Luke and I had our first fight.

He said, with that rising intonation he uses when he is challenging your morals, “We’re not going to stay here are we?” And I said, “Yes we are. I’m going to eat a steak and a baked potato, then I’m going to take two Tylenol, and sit over there in that hot tub until my back stops hurting.”

Luke said, “You are going to put on swimming trunks and sit there in a public hot tub, with no shirt on, in front of all of these strangers . . . and their children?” And I said, “Yes, I am.”

Too which Luke replied, “Give me the keys, I’m going to sleep in the car.”  About an hour later we were checking into a $14 flop house in a neighborhood of Knoxville, TN, largely inhabited by rats and cockroaches. For a guy who had lived his entire life in the isolation of a monastery hidden deep in the woods of Kentucky, Luke slept soundly in spite of the sounds of police sirens, gun shots, and drunken fights in the parking lot. My back was killing me. Luke had taken a vow of poverty. I was surprised to learn that when on a road trip with him, I was included in that vow. 

Luke is a vegetarian, he has totally given up alcohol, and he pretty much wears the same thing every day. But, because he is very skinny and because the monastery notoriously doesn’t spend much on utilities, in the winter the temperature in the monastic house is usually in the 50’s. Luke was always cold. So, I used to give him a very thick pair of socks and gloves for Christmas every year. And you could see the wheels turning in his head when he opened the package. He would profusely thank me for the gift, but I knew that he was thinking about who might need socks and gloves more than he did. When questioned, he would say, “Well, I have three pairs of socks. Why would anyone need more than that?”

There are lots of kinds of addiction in the world. Luke had certainly struggled with alcoholism when I first knew him. But we all know many people who suffer with drug addiction, some people do have a porn or a sex addiction, but more than all of those things added together, are the people who have what we might call a “thing” addiction . . . and addiction to shopping, to having, acquiring, keeping, hoarding. 

Luke is an extreme example of living simply but I think that people like Luke can become a social mirror in which we can all examine our lives. Not many of us are cut from the kind of cloth that Luke is cut from, but Luke stands as an example of what can be done if you decide to do it.

I owned ten times as much as Luke does when I was a teenager living in a college dorm room but in the past 50 years, we have seen the closets in homes grow from a narrow space in which you might keep church shoes, work shoes, and a pair of tennis shoes, and just three or four changes of clothes, to walk-in closets that hold dozens of pairs of shoes and more clothes than we could wear in a life-time. And all around the city we see these storage unit places springing up for when people’s closets, attics, and garages are full, they can rent extra space to store more and more and more stuff. . . stuff they evidently don’t need or it wouldn’t be stored away from their own home.

All of this while Americans now have $800 billion in credit card debt, an amount that has nearly doubled in the past eight years. Ironically, the estimates of consumer spending just for Black Friday, two days ago, was about $800 billion. Obviously, it is not a one-to-one relationship, but I imagine that an awful lot of that buying on Friday was done on credit. 

Still, I am not saying these are bad people, I’m just suggesting that these are people who are probably being manipulated by marketing and I know that many of them are spending money they cannot afford to spend on things that they do not need. 

I’m not trying to be a Grinch or a Scrooge about all of this. You have heard me talking in years past about what a bunch of balloon juice our Thanksgiving myths of origins are but even though the polished-up versions of 17^th century encounters between Native Americans and Pilgrims is fake, what we actually do on Thanksgiving is fundamentally a good thing. What I like about Thanksgiving is the giving thanks part, the part about families and friends getting together and loving each other.

And I like Christmas, not the seriously insane narrative about incarnation, angels, mangers, and magi, but I like the generosity part. I’m not going to go “Church-Lady nuts” on you and compare how close the spelling of Santa is to Satan but there is something inherently evil about the credit card debt and competitive shopping hysteria associated with the holiday. I think that kids deserve to be given toys and clothes that are appropriate, recognizing that kids grow up fast and their sizes change as well as their entertainment needs. But I feel about Christmas gift giving about the same way that I feel about birthdays . . . spoil kids as much as you can but there comes a point when you need to stop expecting people to make a big fuss over your birthday . . . and that point is somewhere between 8 and 16. There is nothing more pathetic than someone over 25 who is all pouty and depressed because they didn’t get what they wanted for Christmas.

Again, I’m not trying to be a radical about this, but what if we just decide that we’re not going to be sucked into the capitalism of addictive shopping? Give love gifts to your friends if you want, I will do some of that, but just realize that almost everyone you have in your middle class circle of friends will buy the shirts, ties, and electronics that they want and that nothing you will wrap up and put under a tree will mean as much to them as an invitation to come to your home for dinner. Most of us already have too many things and none of us really have enough friends. What we really need can’t be stored in a closet and somehow, we have been tricked into believing that spending money equates to love . . . it doesn’t, check your own heart, you know that I am right.

But, again, the impulse towards generosity is something I want to applaud. And there are people all around us who do need warm socks and gloves this winter and I just think we should be generous in ways that reflect the reality of our broken economic system.

If you have never seen Ben Kingsley’s 1982 portrayal of Gandhi, I highly recommend the movie to you. There is a wonderful scene in it in which Gandhi is trying to fight the cast system in India by establishing an Ashram in which everyone was treated the same and everyone shared in every necessary job. But Gandhi’s wife, Kasturba, who had been born into a higher cast, simply could not bring herself to clean the latrines and Gandhi was insisting that they were all the same.

Gandhi argued that he took his turn in cleaning the latrines and she had no choice in the matter . . . she had to clean the latrines like everyone else did. Kasturba memorably tells him, “But everyone doesn’t even want to be as good as you are.”

And that, I submit, is a fact. Most of us are sufficiently woke to not wear furs, for example . . . we would never have animals killed to make our coats, but all of us are wearing leather shoes and what, if I may ask, is the difference? It becomes a question of how good do you think you want to be?

I told you about my friend, Brother Luke, who has chosen to live in poverty as a discipline that is good not only for his own spiritual health but for the health of the planet. I have no desire to live in a small cell, to wear a habit every day, to eat only vegetables, and to refrain from owning a car, a TV, or even a wristwatch. But I know that Luke’s life is an example that we can all consider. I will acknowledge that his choices are much more in line with the reality of our planet than mine are.

I know that eating meat is bad for the environment and that chickens, pigs, cows, and fish that are raised to be eaten have unspeakably miserable lives. Still, I cannot get over the feeling that I did not bite and claw my way to the top of the food chain to eat only salads. I’m not ready to become a vegetarian but I know that I can eat a lot less meat and a lot more fresh vegetables and that will be good for me and for the earth. I know that I probably own enough clothes to get me to Memorial Gardens and anything further that I buy is pure vanity and I really should be very conservative about that and very generous about giving coats and scarves to people who don’t live and work in a warm place. 

Many years ago, I was sharing a private conversation with the director of charity that works with the poor. And he very sincerely asked me, “Roger, how do we justify our lifestyles? Our suburban homes, our cars, our standard of living?” And I said, “I think it is a mistake to try to justify it.” We are not owed the comfort we enjoy. We cannot say that it is right for us to be securely, if not rather comfortably, housed when so many people are in dire circumstances. But none of us are quite like Gandhi or like Brother Luke. Kasturba speaks our lines for us, most of us don’t even want to be that good. 

So many Americans get defensive and say that we worked for what we have, we earned it, it is ours, and we deserve it. But, realistically, if wealth were directly related to work then the richest people in the world would be sub-Saharan women who have to carry water and firewood on their heads every day of their lives to care for their families. I feel like I work hard and I cash my paychecks with my head held high, but, I am also aware that I heat my home by changing the thermostat’s setting and I get water from any one of the 8 faucets or spickets at my house and I don’t carry anything heavier on my head than my hat. 

So, yeah, I work a lot, and I have been lucky even more. 

So, how good do you want to be? Don’t just justify how we live today to yourself; you know that isn’t the whole story, we all have room for improvement. I’m not suggesting that any one of us here might become another Gandhi or even a Brother Luke, but what are you going to buy over the next few weeks? Could you be a little less capitalist and a little more compassionate, a little less of a “thing-addict” and choose a bit more simple life? Because, you know, what we really want for Christmas won’t go into a gift bag . . . unless you know how to wrap the end of imperialist white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy.