“Sensible Gun Laws Save Lives”

“Sensible Gun Laws Save Lives”        March 24, 2019    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor  

click here to see the video

“We are going to make this the voting issue. We are going to take this to every election, to every state and every city. When politicians send their thoughts and prayers with no action, we say, ‘No more.’ And to those politicians supported by the NRA, that allow the continued slaughter of our children and our future, I say get your resumes ready,”David Hogg, Parkland survivor, speaking at the March for our Lives rally in Washington, DC.

It was the evening of April 20, 1999 when I landed in Rome after three flights, hours of layovers, and a mass of confusion at the train station. I hailed a cab to take me to my hotel. As soon as my driver heard my accent, he started yelling at me. 

I had, of course, not heard the news about the shooting in the high school in Columbine, Colorado. They way my driver made it sound, steering the cab through heavy traffic in downtown Rome with one hand while he looked over his shoulder and waived the free hand in the air, I had the impression that an army had descended on a high school and killed everyone there. 

In broken English sentences, punctuated with frequent announcements in Italian that Americans are stupid, “idiota,” he demanded some explanation for why Americans continue to allow this to happen. I kept trying to assure him that I was on his side of the issue but, you know, how innocent can you really be if you live here, you are a citizen here, and somehow you have allowed this to go on? It may be hard for you to remember what the world was like 20 years ago, but there was no internet and no English TV in my hotel room, so I was left to sit alone and try to interpret the Italian news reports about the shooting, piecing together that two students had killed 12 of their classmates, and a teacher, and wounded more than 20 more students, before taking their own lives. 

I had a week in Italy to contemplate the tragedy, to compose my newspaper column in which I, colorfully, expressed my own belief that my American peers really are “idiotas,” to which I received several hundred responses from my readers suggestion that I return to Italy and never come back. 

But I was younger then, and more naïve. I had already lost three church members to domestic gun violence, and I felt like Columbine would finally unite Americans in a move to enact sensible gun laws. But the next month, when there was a hearing before the House Judiciary committee in Washington, it was none other 

Darrell Scott, the father of two of the Columbine victims . . . his daughter had been killed and his son was injured . . . he spoke to the Judiciary committee and lambasted the members who had been calling for gun reform.  He insisted that the tragedy at Columbine was not the fault of lax gun laws, but the spiritual vacuum created in public schools by the banning of public prayer. 

There were, of course, parents and surviving students who disagreed with him, but Scott got the TV cameras and the wind went out of the sails of reform. In the 20 years since Columbine, there have been additions of metal detectors and armed guards and hardened entries to schools but when it comes to the guns, thoughts and prayers has been the answer from our government. 

I am sure you can anticipate the unavoidable comparison to be made between our government and the government of New Zealand which, just six days after the shooting in two mosques in Christchurch, has outlawed semiautomatic rifles, large volume ammunition clips, and the hardware necessary to alter a rifle to make it fire more rapidly. How many mass murders does it take to make a government take decisive action? Well, in New Zealand, it took one. 

We have had 50 well publicized mass murders since Columbine. Too many to even read their names within the confines of a single sermon.

But the victims have been varied and the causes diverse:

In 2007 there were 32 killed at Virginia Tech University.

We held a midnight vigil here in July of 2012 when a dozen people were murdered at a movie theater in Aurora Colorado.

Again, we dared to believe that things would finally change when, in 2012, 27 were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary in Connecticut. So many little children . . . how could we stand it any longer?

In July of 2015 we took up an offering to help the Mother Emanuel Church in Colorado to repair their historic church after their pastor and 8 other members were murdered in a racially motivated murder. I delivered the check myself while the blood of the victims was still on the floor of their sanctuary. 

The next year, a lone gunman, confused about his own sexual identity, went into a gay night-club in Orlando and killed a seemingly impossible 49 people . . . and they had armed security!

But the very next year, even that staggering number of casualties was topped when, 58 people were killed while attending a music event in Las Vegas.

The next month, 26 were killed on a Sunday morning in a little church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.

It was a year ago today when most of the members of our church were gathered in a peaceful demonstration on our town square following the February shooting at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, FL that left 17 dead. Student led demonstrations were held in Washington, DC and all over the world that day. It was the largest demonstration since the Vietnam War, . . . still, nothing has been done. It seems inescapable to conclude just what my taxi driver in Rome concluded. Americans are idiotas.

I mentioned last week that shooter in New Zealand was not a native. He is Australian but he could not carry out his evil plan in Australia because their gun laws are too restrictive for him to have gotten his hands on the hardware needed to commit this murderous crime.

It deserves to be said that the reason gun laws are so strict in Australia is because there was a mass murder at Port Arthur in 1996, in which a lone gunman killed 35 

people. In response to that single tragedy, the government not only outlawed the kind of weapon used but they launched an aggressive buy-back program and rounded up all of the similar weapons in the country. A move so unpopular in gun loving Australia that most of the politicians who voted for it were immediately voted out of office when they came up for election, but still, the law stands. 

Did they know that they would be voted out of office? The ones I have heard interviewed certainly did but, they were the kind of people who believed that they were elected to represent the best interests of the people of their country and so, they committed political suicide, but political suicide is much to be preferred to mass murder.  I suspect that New Zealand’s prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, once the dew of her current media status passes, will probably suffer a similar fate at the ballot box, but my sense is that she will not regret what she has done in the past week. 

I sort of hate saying this on camera since people all over the world learn about Missouri from our videos but during the same week when New Zealand outlawed assault rifles, our Republican led senate proposed a bill, similar to one they have passed several times in the past, which restricts any Missouri law officer from enforcing any Federal gun laws . . . any that exist now and any that may be passed in the future.

We do these sorts of things to keep Kentucky, Arkansas, Kansas, and Oklahoma from looking like the dumbest states in America. 

There are reasons for America’s resistance to change. Our political system has become very cash dependent so that the political donations of special interests can easily outweigh the wishes of the voters. There is a history of a gun culture in America that is rooted in the fact that took this continent and built our infrastructure by killing millions of Native Americans, enslaving millions of Africans, and militarily taking half of the nation from Mexico at the end of a gun. My ancestors used guns to steal land and force Africans to do the work they were too lazy to do. And for the past few generations, the unresolved crimes of murder and slavery have kept us on edge with good reason. 

But our story has corollaries in New Zealand, Australia, Canada. There have been seasons of national madness in Japan, Germany, and in other places. And there is currently domestic gun violence in Mexico, Venezuela, and South Africa, largely due to much of the same reasons we have it here. 

The problem we have to consider is that though fascist sentiments remain in Germany, and there is still racism in Japan, they saw what these sentiments led their nation to do and they have made changes to make sure that they never go down that road again. Australia saw what their gun culture led to and they changed their laws. New Zealand got just a taste of this kind of insanity and in 6 days, changed their laws. 

We have to accept that my dangerously distracted taxi driver in Rome was fundamentally right. We can’t keep blaming the NRA or the GOP or the Gun Lobby when, ultimately, in a democracy, responsibility falls to us. What, after all, is the combined force of the NRA and the GOP compared to the silence of the nearly 400,000 churches in America? 

In conclusion then I have these two points: the first is that I want to take back our democracy and the other is that I want to take back our churches.

The difference between an oligarchy and a democracy is that in an oligarchy the country is managed by a few, eight or so, special interests, while in a democracy, power resides in the popular vote. Most serious political analysts tell us that we have already evolved away from democracy and have become an oligarchy. Large corporations, and special interests, are in charge.

(https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2018/sep/26/america-oligarchy-dominated-billionaires-big-money-series)

Last year, after the Parkland massacre, NPR polled Americans and found that 75% of us favor sensible gun control legislation. That was 92% of Democrats and 59% of Republicans and 68% of independence. If we had a democracy, we would have better, more reasonable gun laws but the oligarchy that runs our government is unimpressed by the 30,000 gun deaths we have every year and they choose their own profits over the lives of Americans and over the will of Americans.

(https://www.npr.org/2018/03/02/589849342/npr-poll-after-parkland-number-of-americans-who-want-gun-restrictions-grows)

Even if you get into such a specific group as the gun owning and advocating NRA, 72% of NRA members favor background checks before guns can be purchased. 

(https://www.politifact.com/ohio/statements/2018/feb/27/tim-ryan/after-parkland-shooting-ohio-congressman-said-70-8/)

Men and women, America has to get its democracy back so that our votes matter and a majority opinion about something as important as this can become law. New Zealand got it done in 6 days. Australia got it done in 12 days. We have been awash in senseless murders for decades and we are not a nation of idiotas. We can do this.

Now, if I may be indulged a moment of personal privilege: I have been preaching and writing newspaper articles in favor of gun control for more than 30 years. An awful lot of people, both within the church and in my reading public, have told me that I have no business talking about politics, either in print or in the pulpit. And I want to drill down on that for a minute:

What is a political issue and what is an issue of morality which is the direct area of interest to the church? I have been at this for a long time and I can tell you what the difference is – when someone disagrees with what I say, it is politics, and when they agree, I’m being a prophetic preacher. 

There are websites that will carry the video of the message who have rejected columns and sermons of mine in the past when I talked about gun control. Why have they changed? Only because the issue has become popular among their constituency. It was politics when they didn’t want to alienate some of their subscribers, but it became fair game when it became an overwhelmingly popular idea.

So, as to my second point, taking back the churches, I would like to ask my sisters and brothers who are still in the Christian ministry: Do you think that they nailed Jesus to the cross because he was a moderate? Do you believe that Jesus always looked for the middle way? Do you think that Jesus shied away from controversial topics because some of his wealthy donors might be offended? 

Aren’t you the people who used to ask the rest of us, “What would Jesus do?”

Churches remain silent on difficult ethical issues out of fear of losing church members and donors. I get that. I have run off major donors on a regular basis and it directly affects our bottom line and it holds our salaries down. 

But when I look in the mirror in the morning and hold a razor in my hands, the decision about whether I am going to shave or cut my throat doesn’t take me very long. When you are afraid to speak up on a matter that is costing us more than 30,000 lives every year because some gun nut in your congregation might not agree with you, well, if I were you, I would stay away from sharp objects. 

Martin Luther King, Jr. used to say that our country needs our churches to be the headlights and not the tail lights of social change but in almost every difficult topic: gay rights, women’s rights, civil rights, the church has been in the caboose and almost never driving the locomotive. A church that cannot come out strongly in favor of sensible gun laws should seriously consider closing and allowing their building to be used for public housing, or a flea market, or something useful, like a parking lot. 

The middle of the road is for yellow stripes and dead armadillos . . . not churches. That is, of course, my opinion. It just so happens that I am right.

Augustine, Scripture, and Science

Augustine, Scripture, and Science   March 17, 2019   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

 (chapter 5 of Armstrong’s “Case for God”)

God had adapted revelation to the cultural norms of the people who had first received it. One of the Psalms, for example, clearly reflects the ancient view, long outmoded by Augustine’s time, that there was a body of water above the firmament that caused rainfall. It would be absurd, Augustine said, to interpret this literally. … whenever the literal meaning of scripture clashed with reliable scientific information, Augustine insisted, the interpreter must respect the integrity of science or he would bring scripture into disrepute.

Nicolina Newcombe is one of our longtime listeners and supporters. She lives in Hamilton, New Zealand. We talked on Friday after I learned of the shooting in two mosques in New Zealand that left 49 people immediately dead and nearly as many with serious wounds. She told me that the shooter, an Australian man who, because of strict gun laws in Australia, could not acquire and gun to carry out his evil plans near his home, so he flew over to neighboring New Zealand where gun laws are more relaxed because they have never had a mass shooting, on this scale, there and there is not much of a gun culture on the usually peaceful island nation. Nicolina told me that there had been a shooting planned at the mosque near her home in Hamilton but that the police had thwarted that plan.  Her community gathered at the mosque in Hamilton last night for a shared memorial. 

 And, as any sane nation would after such a horrible event, Prime Minister Jacinda Arden vowed that their gun laws would be immediately amended to prevent another such attack. Something that Americans remain just too jaded to do. 

We should, however, take note of how an elected official acts when they are not in the employ of the National Rifle Association and imagine a different America.

I’m glad that the American media has finally learned not to splash the name and picture of the shooter on the news, giving them, inevitably, the attention they crave. I’m glad that they didn’t publish his white supremacist manifesto because the reasons for his violent madness do not need to be repeated . . . that would be doing him a favor. 

But the journalists let us have a little peek into his skull, enough to feel sick about it. We must never acquiesce to the unnatural and unprecedented fact that terrorists of this sort name Donald Trump as their inspiration, and even someone in Australia, celebrates America’s second amendment and the insane gun laws defended in its name. It is not normal for America to have a white nationalist president. It is not normal for racism to be defended from the oval office. It is not normal, and it must not be tolerated, and it absolutely must not be repeated.

There are myriad reasons for the frictions that have resulted in mass shootings in churches, synagogues, mosques, movie theaters, elementary schools, high schools, colleges, bars, and shopping centers. Immigration frightens some people. The diminishing majority of white people scares some. Drug use, alcoholism, a lack of education, a lack of proper mental health care, economic conditions. They are all factors which, in our own country, are exacerbated by insanely lax gun laws and a dangerously stupid, racist, president. 

These past days my thoughts have been with Nicolina and the people of New Zealand, and the Muslim population there who immigrated to New Zealand to escape the violence in Syria, Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the oppression they have experienced in Iran and Saudi Arabia, only to, as Nicolina sadly observed, encounter unexpected violence in peace loving New Zealand. 

As I said, there are lots of factors: race, economics, immigration, gun laws, and such, but the elephant in the room is the influence of religion and religious prejudice and that, men and women, is our turf. We may have influence on other factors, but where religion is a factor, we have responsibility to clean up our own house.

I don’t always believe that religion is really the cause of all of the wars and conflict that are carried out in the name of religion, but, it would be absurd to suggest that it was not a huge factor but not always the real cause. As you have heard me quote H. Richard Niebuhr before:  Religion makes good people better and bad people worse.

Individual soldiers in Iran and Saudi Arabia may be very invested in the subtle differences between the Sunni and the Shi’a but the real government engines that keep the conflict stirred up are concerned with money, power, and real estate. Note that Donald Trump wanted a ban on all Muslim immigration to the USA but his first trip abroad after becoming president was to go bow and kiss the rings of wealthy Saudi rulers. 

He wants to build a wall to keep Latin Americans out of the USA but all of those people are Catholics and Pentecostals, very many are members of the Assembly of God. You would think that our local Assemblies leaders would screaming protests over this wall that is keeping their Christian sisters and brothers out of the USA . . . it sort-of makes you wonder why you have not heard a peep out of them . . . but cataloguing the hypocrisies of the Assemblies of God is way too time consuming and too emotionally exhausting for me to even get started on that project.

 There are healthy ways of being religious and there are unhealthy ways of being religious. I am convinced that the two are polar opposites. Looked at critically, there are things about Judaism, Christianity, and Islam that are just as irrational and dangerously crazy as there is about Scientology and Mormonism but we all know people who are ardent members of Scientology or Mormonism who are good people who have managed to take the best of their religion and ignore most of the crazy stuff. Well, . . ., let me dial that back a bit . . . we all know Mormons who are good people who have managed to take the best of their religion and ignore most of the crazy stuff. 

What I believe marks the read divide between healthy and unhealthy religion is critical thinking. As someone observed, we should teach our children how to think, not what to think. But indoctrination in unsubstantiated beliefs is where religion goes off the rails. Please don’t ever get tired of me reminding you of what Voltaire said: Those who can make you believe absurdities; can make you commit atrocities. 

Faith that is based on inherited beliefs that are memorized by rote and institutionalized in creeds simply trains you to believe things that are absurd. And once you learn how to believe things that are obviously and clearly just not true, then you can be persuaded to do almost anything . . . to the point that we no longer even react to being lied to.

I don’t want to give Trump too much oxygen in this sermon, but I would just ask you to consider the two years we listened to him say that he was going to build a wall all across our southern borderandMexico was going to pay for it. 

I strongly suspect that there were not a dozen people in America who believed that and yet, it is like being told that Moses divided the Red Sea, Jesus turned water into wine, and Muhammed rode a winged horse up to heaven. You don’t really believe it, but you know that you are supposed to believe it. 

Last fall, just before the November election, when Trump was saying that he was going to get a middle-class tax cut passed in November, a few journalists challenged him, pointing out that Congress wasn’t in session and wouldn’t be until 2019 . . . there was no legislation, no talk of legislation, no possibility of legislation, and he would just say, “I’ll get it done,” which, of course, he did not, but then, no one believed it anyway. 

I blame creedal religion for limbering up our society to just play along with lies. Religion should never teach people to believe in things that cannot be demonstrated to be true. We should all insist upon having an evidence-based faith.

Let me give you an example:

In the early 1990’s, when the Dalai Lama was first coming and speaking in the West, he was asked about gay rights and he very forcefully said that homosexuality was not in keeping with Buddhist tradition. That strong statement led to a much-publicized meeting he had with seven gay and lesbian people in Fremont Hotel in San Francisco. They talked with him about the medical and psychological research that supported the conviction that same sex relationships were normal, natural, and that they should not be the object of either religious or political discrimination. 

After thoughtfully considering the evidence, the Dalai Lama changed his views on the matter, saying that if two people of the same sex came together by mutual consent in a loving relationship, there is no reason to be opposed to them.

Buddhism has centuries of tradition and fairly complicated teachings, but the Dalai Lama was able, through a reasonable consideration of the evidence, to do in a few hours what decades of Catholic popes and Evangelical churches have not been able to do. Faith is not a matter of forcing yourself to believe outrageous and obviously untrue things. There is no extra credit given for being dumb enough to believe lies.

And the truth of it is, the church was not always mired in this kind of creedal and Biblical literalism. Karen Armstrong is exhaustively clear in her book, A Case for God, that history has been littered with scholars, bishops, and philosophers who were not fooled by literalism in their religious faith. 

No one had a bigger impact on scholarship prior to the modern era than Augustine of Hippo. The 4^thcentury teacher insisted that even though the Bible clearly described the earth as being flat and covered by a solid bowl that separated the waters below from the waters above, that to take that literally would bring shame on the Christian faith since it obviously was not true. In the 4^thcentury, Augustine knew that you had to interpret scripture in the light of science and not to make the church look stupid by denying science on the basis of revealed scripture. In the 4^thcentury, Augustine was saying to the conservative evangelical crowd, “Come on guys, knock it off, you are embarrassing us.” 

In the 5^thcentury, no one less than the prophet Muhammed said that Jesus wasn’t really the incarnation of God because that whole idea is ridiculous. Jesus was a great religious teacher and prophet, but no human is God. Think about it. The claim doesn’t even make sense. It is poetic language at best and not great poetry. 

I won’t bore you with a recitation of everyone who tried to make the world wake up to the difference between literally interpreting creedal religion and the poetic metaphor of trying to express our highest ideals in the crude container of language but over the years you have heard me quote major thinkers from Voltaire, to Thomas Paine, Soren Kierkegaard, Tillich, and Neihbur. We cut our teeth here when we started this church on books by Borg, Crossan, Armstrong, and Spong, all of whom have sold millions of books over the past few decades and yet, I am left to worry about the future of the progressive movement.

Even with all of this clear, rational, scholarly information available to people who have read the books, heard the lectures, watched the videos, but it seems like the evangelical world has a strangle hold on society that is so strong that people come down to this false dichotomy:   that you either accept the whole of religion on its face as being literally true or you reject it and become an atheist.

Forgive me for quoting Woody Allen, who is, obviously, a sorry excuse for a human being, but he illustrates my point for me, so we’ll give him a moment of sunlight…. In a commencement speech he delivered years ago, he sardonically concluded by saying, “More than any other time in history, we face a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

The choice is not between being an atheist or a traditional evangelical. There is 500 years of great biblical, theological, and philosophical scholarship that represents the best and highest of human thought and it offers to us a rational, progressive way into a future that allows human dignity, community, sustainability, and profound scientific and technological progress to flourish. 

Competing religious sectarianism is not the only cause of the mass murders we saw in mosques in New Zealand on Friday. But you cannot ignore the fact that religious fundamentalism, literalism, sectarianism, has fueled mass murders in churches, synagogues, and in mosques. It fuels racism. It emboldens xenophobia, misogyny and homophobia. 

The choice for church goers is not literalism or atheism but I am willing to insist that staying the same and teaching people to believe myths and magic is not a valid choice. The ancient religions we have brought from the Middle East of long ago into the 21^stcentury Western world all need to undergo a progressive reformation and they need to do it now. 

To paraphrase St. Augustine of Hippo: It is time for religious people to stop being stupid. 

Honesty and Hope

Honesty and Hope (March 10, 2019)

David Ketchum

 click here to see the video

          One of the common ways we’ve described our community of faith is that we have given up dishonest certainty in favor of honest uncertainty. Especially for those of us who came from fundamentalist religious backgrounds, there was some point in our spiritual journeys when we turned a corner and made that choice. For me, it is strange to remember the days when outrageous and outlandish claims appeared self-evident. There was no need to prove any of them; they felt obviously true. There were other claims that I accepted more unwillingly, but I accepted them nonetheless. They seemed to be required, and I was assured that there was a long history of folks that knew better than me and who had steadfastly believed in those things. When that internal world crumbled, around 2006 or so, I became resolute that I would not be duped again.

          However, that requires more diligent practice than I initially guessed. There was a whole world of outrageous claims to avoid, to be sure. And keeping up on the ongoing research dedicated to understanding the world takes more than a little commitment and time. But there was more to it than that. For as long as I could remember, I had used my dishonest certainty to cope with depressive tendencies. Embracing honest uncertainty also meant taking seriously my own mental and emotional well-being that were not possible before. That was great, but it was also hard work. Along the way, I began exploring the ways that dishonest certainty helped me cope with both traumatic experiences and the everyday complexities of life. My local church, the fellowship of dishonest certainty, had also been my main source of community, not to mention employment. Leaving that community meant losing networks, relationships, and resources. There was a lot more uncertainty to embrace than just my beliefs.

          Like all humans, I’ve experienced hardship, from health conditions to traumatic experiences to economic vulnerability to marginalization and rejection. My irrational religious beliefs, and the church that went along with them, gave me something that felt like solid ground to stand on. In my case, that didn’t make me passive. I found myself most at home among the troublemakers of Christian history, folks who stood up to injustice, embodied radical compassion, and insisted that the world could be and would be a different place. I still claim that history, and see myself as part of it, though the certainty is gone,. However, being honest about just how far that uncertainty extends into daily life is, usually, neither comfortable nor easy.

Growing Uncertainties

          “Honesty,” said the poet David Whyte, “is reached by the doorway of grief and loss. Where we cannot go in our mind, our memory, or our body is where we cannot be straight with another, our world, or our self.” He goes on to say that -

“Honesty is not the revealing of some foundational truth that gives us power over life or another or even the self, but a robust incarnation into the unknown unfolding vulnerability of existence, where we acknowledge how powerless we feel, how little we actually know, how afraid we are of not knowing and how astonished we are by the generous measure of loss that is conferred upon even the most average life.” (https://web.archive.org/web/20160415045433/http://riverbankoftruth.com:80/2013/08/18/honesty-by-david-whyte/  )      

In other words, while humans have created oppressive systems that create a boundless amount of unnecessary suffering, some amount of suffering and uncertainty is inescapable. Learning to honestly face the things that make us recoil, experiences and circumstances we feel compelled to avoid or hide, is a vital part of growing into our full humanity, “a robust incarnation” into the way things are with a grateful, kind, wisdom.

          But the recoil is real. Against our embrace of honest uncertainty is the fear of loss and the risk of false hope. There has been a very small subset of human beings, mostly in places like the United States, who have been able to believe without question in the inevitable progress and stability of the world. This has not been a safe assumption for most humans during most of history, with the only certainties offered to the masses being exclusion, coercion, and exploitation. And though it seems to be amazingly easy to forget the past uncertainties, recent years have forced more and more U.S. residents to remember. Since 2014, researchers at Chapman University in Orange, California have used an annual survey to document the ways normal folks in the USA have experienced uncertainty and fear. The topics range from government to natural disasters to personal anxieties. (https://www.chapman.edu/wilkinson/research-centers/babbie-center/survey-american-fears.aspx )

          Over these last five years, two striking trends are emerging. First, US residents are becoming more afraid. In 2016, for example, the number one fear in the nation was held in common by 60.6% of respondents, and the other top fears were held by no more than 40% of the population. In 2018, the top fear, government corruption, was shared by 73.6% of the population, and “all the top ten fears were held by more than half of Americans.” The second trend is rising anxiety due to environmental concerns. “Not a single environmental concern made the top 10 list in 2016.” In 2018, five of the top 10 were environmental issues. (https://blogs.chapman.edu/wilkinson/2018/10/16/americas-top-fears-2018/ )

           And it is no wonder. After all, “The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates an increase of 250,000 excess deaths per year between 2030 and 2050 due to the ‘well understood impacts of climate change.’” (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5984805/ ) And we already know that environmental catastrophes have a profound and negative impact on mental health. For example, researchers have documented the relationship between depression and PTSD with natural disasters, such as hurricanes. If these disasters occur more frequently, so will the resultant mental health issues. Similarly, one recent study showed that living with impacts of climate change has already resulted in “significantly worsened mental health” for those who lived in impacted regions.

“For each degree of average temperature increase, mental health worsened by a 2 percent increase in the rate of reported mental health issues. … extending their findings to the whole US population translates into nearly 2 million extra people with mental health difficulties in any given month when the weather is worse.”  (https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/experimentations/201810/how-ignore-climate-change )

          As a result, psychologists are now discussing Climate Anxiety as a way to better understand how climate change exacerbates anxiety and depression. (https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-09-21/psychologists-explain-our-climate-change-anxiety/ )  In other words, we aren’t just being pessimistic, and we aren’t making up these impacts. The same could be said of the other fears on the list, none of which are unreasonable or outrageous. On a host of urgent issues facing our society, there are sound reasons to feel concern, outrage, and even fear. And here we are, a community that has committed itself to honest uncertainty.

          In an era of Climate Anxiety and growing fear, that honesty must include our struggles to enter into that uncertainty, to acknowledge our relative powerlessness, and then resolve to keep making decisions and living life in ways that make a sustainable, just future possible. A failure to do so only makes us increasingly vulnerable to the very dishonesty that we were certain we already discarded. A failure to do so makes us increasingly vulnerable to inaction, either because we avoid the issues that feel overwhelming, or have a false optimism that everything will turn out okay. Both paths easily lead to inaction and an accommodation of injustice.

          My own preferred weakness has been despair. I’m not saying I am immune to optimism, but I can say it has never stuck. It’s become something of a truism that humanity has the technology to build just and sustainable societies right now, and has for some time, but it does not yet have the psychology for it. Our best hope is that we survive as a species long enough for our psychology, and the related structures and cultures, to catch up. I don’t think that is certain at all. And yet, I also know that if we give up, there is no chance.

So I drag my discouraged self out, again and again, to try to do the work of social change. I am not an optimist, but I have become somewhat skilled at not giving up. I am convinced, with Vaclav Havel, that “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something is worth doing no matter how it turns out.” That is a type of honest certainty that I can live with.

Adapting the PERMA Model

          I haven’t yet found a really comprehensive tool for intentionally reflecting on these issues, and western models often seem deficient to me in several key areas. Martin Seligman’s PERMA model (https://positivepsychologyprogram.com/perma-model/ ), which I’ll reflect on in just a moment, is no exception. It has too often been used prescriptively, when, if I understand correctly, it was intended as a descriptive and theoretical model. It is perhaps too focused on the individual’s psychology and doesn’t adequately include physical well-being or social systems. And it generally isn’t oriented around or inclusive enough of the experiences of oppressed and marginalized communities. (https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/cap-0000036.pdf )

          That being said, I have found it helpful as a reflective practice and a good way to help me navigate that treacherous strait between naivete and despair. It can provide a bit of a check-in, helping me notice my discouragement before it blossoms into depression. And it can be a practical action, something to do when I don’t feel like I can do something else, or don’t even know what to do.

          My reflections begin with Seligman’s fourth aspect, Meaning. For my purposes, meaning is about intention and aspiration, what inspires and keeps us going. We recognize aspiration when we notice our spirit rising, rather than sinking. For me personally, this means that, when I sit down to meditate, I begin by remembering my aspirations to experience life with curiosity, kindness, and gratitude. And then I try to carry those aspirations with me throughout the day.

          This is closely related to our vision of how society could be. Socially, my aspirations are oriented around building equality in community, dismantling oppressive systems, and establishing social relationships that are non-hierarchical, just, and kind. We spend a lot of time focusing on the things to resist, and we don’t always have a choice in the matter. We have to notice and resist oppression and environmental destruction. But Paulo Freire reminded us that we must announce the new world with as much, or even more, time, energy, and enthusiasm as we denounce the way things are. This can be difficult, especially when there is simply so much suffering, but despair is never closer at hand than when I lose touch with my intentions and aspirations.

We remind ourselves what we are fighting for, why our effort is important and beautiful, and why we cannot give up.

           This connects well with the second aspect, Engagement. If something happening in the world is feeling particularly overwhelming, it can be helpful, hopeful, and empowering to do something practical, especially in cooperation with others, that connects with our aspirations. This can be tricky, because there is only so much any one of us can do. There is an ongoing dialog between engagement and equanimity. All of us need rest, all of us need to work with our limitations, and all of us have to figure out what works for our own unique selves.

          For example, there is a steady stream of bad news when it comes to the exclusion and bigotry aimed at queer folk, such as the recent decision by the United Methodist General Conference to exclude lgbtqia+ folk from leadership positions and marriage. (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/02/united-methodists-fracture-lgbt-plan-rejected/583693/ )

While the Methodists were getting most of the news, the first anti-LGBTQ bill of 2019 in Missouri, HB927, was introduced into the House of Representatives on February 25. This bill would empower student groups on campus to use their religious beliefs as a cover to discriminate against lgbtq students. (https://legiscan.com/MO/text/HB927/id/1911562 )

          There seems to be no end to this kind of thing, and it can be overwhelming. So, in addition to supporting and participating in organizations like the ACLU, I help facilitate local transgender/nonbinary support groups. This is often both exhausting, requiring a a lot of time and a great deal of emotional and physical energy, and energizing, making a space to intentionally and lovingly accept and show care for one another. And even though the conversations and situations can be heavy, there is also joy. I know that this work isn’t going to solve everything, but it keeps me engaged, reminds me that my identity and well-being are real, important, and beautiful, no matter what terrible news might come my way.

          And Engagement like this also brings us into community, into Relationships that can sustain us. Most of you already know my stories of growing up as a queer person in southwest Missouri, overflowing with internalized oppression. Last June, a straight friend from out of town joined me here to celebrate Pridefest. And, as I was introducing him to folks and he was slowly realizing he was completely surrounded by queer folk for the first time in his life, I gradually realized just how many wonderful friendships I had in the lgbtq community. That may not sound like a big deal, but it was. When we moved back to this area in 2010, I felt increasingly isolated.

Getting involved with activities and organizations advocating for lgbtq rights and well-being, made it possible to find a larger network of friends, fellow activists, and allies than I had dreamed possible. I still remember the joy and relief of sitting in a room for the first time and realizing that all of us there were both nonbinary and on the asexual spectrum, and we didn’t have to explain anything to each other.

          There is a parallel experience for most of us when we gather together here, where we can unite around the crucial social justice issues of the day without argument. We know that black lives matter and native lives matter. We stand on the side of immigrants and refugees. We work for economic dignity and justice and insist on the value of labor, against the insatiable greed of those who hoard wealth and power. We believe that education, health care, and housing are human rights, and that our policies and communities should reflect this. We know that women’s, and lgbtq rights, are human rights. And we know that our well-being and our very survival as a planet necessitates caring for the earth, restoring ecosystems, and creating sustainable, regenerative societies. Because we share these convictions, and others like them, we can relate with each other much more freely. We are not all best friends, but I trust you more readily, and I am really happy when we get to know each other a little better.

          There’s a lot more to be said about relationships, but since I’m preaching about social rejection in April, I’ll leave it at that today. Instead, let’s focus on the role of cultivating Positive Emotion and recognizing Accomplisments. I like to think about positive emotion in terms of gratitude and goodwill. Too often, positive psychology as it has been popularly presented has fallen short when it comes to addressing issues and populations related to oppression and social justice. (https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/cap-0000036.pdf ) It is too easy to talk about positive emotion in such a way that folks feel obligated to try and create these emotions, which can feel all the more frustrating in situations of injustice. A wide range of emotions are appropriate responses to the suffering of a the world, including anger and grief. We move forward through those emotions, not by denying them.

          Yet it is also true that an emotion like anger isn’t the only emotion we feel, and, at least for me, it is not an emotion that sustains either my activism or my well-being. But when I am in touch with my aspirations, or when I engage in meaningful actions alongside people I care about, gratitude and goodwill arise quite naturally. We don’t have to force anything; we can just recognize it and enjoy those moments.

          We need the relief that comes with joy. When we are dealing with stressful, depressing circumstances, we can quite easily be carried along by our negativity bias.

And it is easy to fall into the trap of identifying only with those stressors, to the neglect of everything else. So we need to take special care to recognize and savor the times when pleasure and joy break through. We need to intentionally recognize gratitude when we feel it, and take time to enjoy and express that feeling. Similarly, when I feel the tug of despair, I pause to connect with goodwill and kindness. My actions can be an expression of love for all of us who live on planet Earth, now and in the future. Gratitude and goodwill are much better motivators for me. They energize me and, even if they don’t make me optimistic, they do make me want to go on and not give up.

          And this is true for all the ways, little and large, that bring us closer to this more sustainable, just, and caring world. When the obstacles are so large and the journey is so long, we need to really celebrate Accomplishments along the way. Back in 1984, Karl Weick pointed out that conceiving of social change on a “massive scale” could actually be counterproductive. Anticipating the problem we began with today, Weick said that -

“People often define social problems in ways that overwhelm their ability to do anything about them. … When social problems are described this way, efforts to convey their gravity disable the very resources of thought and action necessary to change them. When the magnitude of problems is scaled upward in the interest of mobilizing action, the quality of thought and action declines, because processes such as frustration, arousal, and helplessness are activated.” (http://homepages.se.edu/cvonbergen/files/2013/01/Small-Wins_Redefining-the-Scale-of-Social-Problems.pdf )

          In contrast, focusing on -

“a small win has an immediacy, tangibility, and controllability that could reverse these effects. … By itself, one small win may seem unimportant. A series of wins at small but significant tasks, however, reveals a pattern that may attract allies, deter opponents, and lower resistance to subsequent proposals.” (ibid.)

           This is how we build movements. This is how we build community. Practically speaking, this necessitates processes like strategic planning and action-reflection, which have their own skill sets. But the principle is simple: identify your goal; make a plan; break it up into small, manageable steps; celebrate even the little accomplishments; and make adjustments to keep you on track. Human psychology seems to thrive on these kinds of baby steps.

In one study of workplace moods and activities, researchers

“generated 12,000 person-days of data on moods and activities at work. The striking conclusion is that a sense of incremental progress is vastly more important to happiness than either a grand mission or financial incentives … . Small wins ‘had a surprisingly strong positive effect, and small losses a surprisingly strong negative one.’” (https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2011/sep/09/change-life-small-victories-burkeman )

          Anyone who knows the satisfaction of marking something off on a to-do list knows exactly what’s being said here. We need to be realistic, yes, and acknowledge that the small acts we do are not sufficient to change everything in the world that needs to be changed. But our realism must also include human psychology, and it is very likely that we will find our greatest motivation and encouragement to keep doing the hard work of social change when we take the time to recognize and celebrate - even, and perhaps especially, the small accomplishments.

One Another and Ourselves

          All of this is to say that, while we cannot offer guarantees, we can offer ourselves. We can refuse the easy pathways of inaction. We can even, sometimes and perhaps in small doses, honestly face the overwhelming difficulties we face as a society. And we can act. We can offer: patience as we wrestle with powerlessness, courage as we let go of ignorance, and love as we move through loss. We can face uncertainty with honesty and grace. We can stay grounded in our best aspirations, and we can live out our convictions: without guarantees, but with faithfulness to the best visions within us for communities that are wise and kind.