“We’re All Connected (but I got mine!)”

“We’re All Connected (but I got mine!)”        July 28, 2019    Dr. Roger Ray

click here to see the video

schadenfreude: pleasure derived from the misfortunes of others. This word is taken from German and literally means "harm-joy". It is the feeling of joy or pleasure when one sees another fail or suffer misfortune.

I was quite surprised by a question very casually posed to me by an old friend one day. He took a long draw on his cigarette and asked, “Why do you still do this church stuff when you don’t really believe in anything?” The question reminded me of what I really like about preaching . . . people sit quietly while I am talking and I can indulge myself in the fantasy that I am being understood. But I can’t be too hard on my friend. Most people were taught that they should be religious so 

that they could go to heaven and avoid the fires of hell. I was only ten or eleven years old when I pointed out to my parents that going to church in order to get a golden ticket on the train to glory was selfish and it just couldn’t be right . . . and they predictably told me that faith was a matter of believing and not of thinking. And, generally, it is. Even people who think their way through the ridiculous church manipulation of the heavenly carrot and the hellish stick, still go on believing that the only reason to be religious is some kind of divine fire insurance. Which is why most modern people rarely or never go to church and why most movies, plays, and novels that have a minister in the cast, portray that person as a con man, a fraud, or an idiot.

The sixteenth century founder of the Jesuit movement, St. Ignatius of Loyola, wrote the Spiritual Exercises which shaped not only a lot of modern spiritual practice but he also gave me the outline impetus for my doctoral dissertation, so this dead monk and I spent a lot of years together. But behind all of the genius of Ignatius was this familiar assumption, he writes: Man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.

This transactional approach to having a relationship with God is obviously morally and intellectually corrupt and yet most people still believe that it is the reason to be religious and I think it should be obvious that it is the worst and most reprehensible, and, frankly, the most embarrassing reason to be religious. Though that might be at least a part of why there are 8000 people down the road at 6 Flags over Jesus this morning and only 40 or 50 here . . . but I digress. 

And here is the over-arching point that I have to make today: the fundamental difference between a spiritual world view and what I may call a “selfish” world view is that spiritually we acknowledge that we are all connected . . . and to be clear, many humanists, atheists, and agnostics acknowledge this connection as well, but most of the world, the religious and the not religious, primarily approach the world as an individual in competition for resources against the rest of the world. 

You can see this dichotomy played out in both religious and secular circles. A fundamental teaching of Buddhism is that all perceptions that we are separated from one another and from the earth itself is nothing but an illusion. 

Looked at for its virtue rather than negatively, the whole spiritual transformation sought in Christian monasticism is a denial of self, possessions, and appetites, so that we can set aside ego boundaries to be existentially united with God and everyone else. 

I wrote a whole book about this 20 years ago that I am still waiting for Oprah to discover and endorse. But it is not just religious people who affirm this. Few things make me happier than listening to the autotuned voices of physicists affirming that we are all connected, just as Christian mystics and Buddhist monks have for centuries.

(Rob, can we legally import the first two minutes of this video?)

What does this mean to us, to assert that we are all connected? I think that Martin Luther King, Jr. said it very clearly:

“All this is simply to say that all life is interrelated. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality; tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. As long as there is poverty in this world, no man can be totally rich even if he has a billion dollars. As long as diseases are rampant and millions of people cannot expect to live more than twenty or thirty years, no man can be totally healthy, even if he just got a clean bill of health from the finest clinic in America. Strangely enough, I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be. You can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be.”

This issue comes up in political debates in the most disgraceful way. Whether you favor a “Medicare for all” plan, or single payer, anyone who does not favor some path towards universal coverage is saying that a system that leaves millions of people uninsured is somehow acceptable to them. They have medical coverage that they like and they don’t want to change a system that works for them, even if that means that hundreds of thousands of people die prematurely and unnecessarily. 

What kind of monster could be so callous and heartless as to suggest that people with high salaries and good jobs should get the best health care

And people who have less affluence should just die sooner and suffer more?

Who could be so devoted to a caste system in which the upper class gets great care and the lower class gets little or none, or faces the whole sewer of medical bankruptcy, payday loans, and constant fear about getting their next vial of insulin?

When the talking heads on the morning shows discuss Democratic debates, their hair catches on fire at the notion that candidates suggest that illegal immigrants within our borders would also receive health care. Well, what else? Let them die by the side of the road? 

And when you are vacationing in France, or Spain, or England, or Germany, what do you do when you get sick, when you break a tooth on your caviar spoon? You will go and receive virtually free health care because that’s what happens in civilized countries! There is a mentality in this nation that simply reels in fear that someone might get something of value at the expense of the public. 

Does Joe Scarborough believe that he earns $14 million dollars a year for interrupting intelligent people on the set of Morning Joe five mornings a week? Look, if wealth were tied to hard work, if pay was based on labor, the richest people in the world would be the women who live in sub-Saharan Africa. 

Any guess how long Joe would last if he had to carry water on his head for miles, search for fire wood, and then prepare a meal for his family? Anyone who is born white, male, and heterosexual in North America, with every possible advantage given to those who have plundered the world’s wealth for most of two centuries who then can manage to muster rage about providing healthcare to someone who happens to be within our borders when they have an accident or fall ill is so blind to reality as to be nearly unteachable. 

When I go to speak in Great Britain, I go with no worries about needing medical care there because I know that I would be given whatever I needed. My friends in England, however, have to take out a temporary health insurance policy when they come here because our country has yet to wake up to the reality that illness is not a profit-making opportunity, it is a problem to be solved by rational, reasonable people. 

We are all connected. If you recognize that you are a part of a civilization, then you don’t want to live in a giant house in a gated community while hundreds of people are homeless. 

Sure, hard work and ingenuity will always be rewarded with a better or more comfortable life, but demanding that others suffer to add to your comfort and security is obscene. 

Sadly, many people only become woke to ethical issues when it affects them personally. I have a German friend whom I get to see now and then. His sense of humor, possibly typical of Germans, often comes in the form of a very personal punch below the belt. We were having breakfast recently, just catching up on our various travels, publications, and work. I shared with him a bit about my work with young men who have been sentenced to long prison sentences after being found to possess child pornography. He shook his head and laughed, and said, “How do you always get tied up with such messes. We have a saying in Germany, ‘shit draws flies.’” However, when he learned that one of the young men is the son of a German friend of his, his view of the whole problem transformed in a second. Suddenly, he wanted to know what he could do to help the family. And I asked, “Aren’t you afraid of drawing flies?”

The real test of sincere compassion is to care about those with whom you do not have social ties. If I am generous with my daughter, that is hardly a claim of nobility. If I am generous with the child of someone I do not know, because they are in need, then I may be affirming what I have claimed about my faith in a connected spirituality. 

I want to see people of faith being concerned about the 2 million people who are incarcerated before one of your own children, neighbors, or friends is in jail. I want for all of us to be concerned about the opiod addiction crisis before someone you know dies. 

We liberals have done a lot of hand wringing over the past two years about how people continue to support Donald Trump even after all he has said and done about immigration, race, and poverty issues. But nowhere has the heartless nature of his administration been more on display than in the child separation policy at the 

border. How can anyone witness this nightmare of traumatizing 15,000 children and still support Trump?

Well, and here is why I chose the definition of schadenfreudeas my wisdom lesson today. 

There are those who have speculated that the suffering at the border, the suffering of those whose applications for asylum, for immigration, are being denied is, as they say, “the feature and not the bug” in the system. The suffering is what Trump is giving to his base who enjoy knowing that even if their salaries are going down, their jobs are being exported off-shore, their roads have pot-holes, and their kids can’t afford to go to college or even to get their teeth fixed, at least these poor brown people at the border are suffering even more. 

I’m not suggesting that this is true of everyone who continues to support Trump after all of these horrible atrocities but, you cannot deny that a certain degree of schadenfreude is a part of the formula for his success and as bad as that makes him, it sure doesn’t make me any less ashamed of the much of the voting public in America. 

I asked Rob to be our liturgist this morning because of his long work with the movement to abolish capital punishment. This week our Attorney General, Bill Barr, announced that the Federal government would end its own moratorium on capital punishment and make steps to execute some of the more than 60 federal prisoners on death row. 

Demonstrating to me, once again, that the Trump administration not only cannot do absolutely anything right, but they rather seem to be determined to dismember modern civilization, brick by brick. 

Now, I am opposed to the death penalty, even in the face of the most egregious crimes because if the criminal has been arrested and is in prison, killing them is just social revenge. If they are captured, they do not represent a danger to society so killing them isn’t justice, it is murder. But even if you cannot join me in feeling connected, even to the most guilty among us, let me remind you that our justice system is so flawed that I wouldn’t let our court system balance my checkbook, let alone rely upon them to accurately decide who is guilty and who is not.

Our justice system is so corrupt that a 18 year old kid on the autism spectrum can be sent to prison for 15 years for child porn on their laptop computer and Jeffery

Epstein can get away with trafficking young girls as sex slaves at his homes in New York, Florida, and on his private island for years while law enforcement at every level has turned and looked away and even when finally brought to trial, he received a sentence so light that it would have embarrassed the most corrupt government in the most remote of third world countries. 

Our judicial system routinely releases rich criminals and jails poor people for minor offenses and we should trust them with life and death decisions? Since DNA testing has become more available in criminal defense, dozens of death row inmates have been released . . . and there would be many more if DNA evidence existed. Fair estimates are that one in every 25 prisoners who are executed were innocent. So, how many people can the state wrongfully murder before we are all complicit in state sponsored murder? There is no reason to execute even the guilty who are already captured and are of no danger to society but to execute the innocent because we continue to accept this justice for sale court system . . . folks, this is morally intolerable.

Any sense you may have that you are not connected to the millions of people who languish in prisons, even the ones on death row, is an illusion. We are connected to the immigrant, the refugee, the convicted criminals, and the mothers who are carrying their children on their backs through civil war and gang violence to bring their babies to safety.

I want to close with a favorite preacher story, and like a lot of preacher stories, it might be entirely fictitious but since that never stopped anyone who wrote the Bible, I’m not going to let it stop me. . . if you have heard it before, don’t stop me:  

It has been said that during the dark days of the depression, the famous New York Mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, would sometimes don magistrates’ robes and sit in municipal court. 

Into a courtroom typically filled with pimps, prostitutes, and pushers, the bailiff brought in a haggard looking old woman who had been caught stealing bread from a local grocer. The woman cried and begged for mercy, explaining that her grandchildren were starving, and she only stole the bread to give them something to eat. The grocer was resolute: she had to be fined to send a message to other thieves that the same would happen to them.

It is said that La Guardia then banged his gavel and found the woman guilty and charged her a fine of $10 but even as he pronounced the fine, he was reaching into his own pocket and threw $10 on the bench to pay the fine. La Guardia then banged his gavel again and announced that everyone in the courtroom was guilty of living in a city where a grandmother has to steal bread to feed her children and he order the bailiff to collect a fine of 50 cents from everyone in the courtroom and to give the collection to the defendant. . . . a fine that a red faced, and angry grocer was also made to pay. 

Folks, we all live in a nation that is imprisoning the poor on our behalf. Our tax dollars are keeping those 15,000 kids in deplorable concentration camps at the border. Our elected government is a reflection of who we are as a nation and that is what must be changed. Immigrants are not the reason there are so many poor people in America. Race is not the cause of crime in America. The people on death row will not hurt you. I know that I should always end a sermon like this with meaningful suggestions about what we can do to change things but the first thing that needs to be said here, is that Americans must stop being afraid all of the time.

Don’t vote out of fear of criminals, immigrants, minorities, or vegetarians…. Don’t you see that they are leaving more bacon for the rest of us?

I’m glad that I have access to good health care, but I get to live in a better world if all of you do too. I am glad that I was able to feed and educate my daughter, but the world is better if your kids get to eat well and go to college too. We must reject the politics and religion that allows us to find some satisfaction, no matter how private, from the suffering of others. Sincere empathy, radical compassion, is the spiritual choice we want to make but we have to practice it every day until we don’t have to live in a city where a grandmother has to steal bread to feed her grandchildren.